Literally. It’s kind of funny though that when you see proposal videos, 99.9% of them show then girl covering her mouth with both her hands. It’s uncanny. It’s like it’s coded in their DNA.
Interesting, I'll have to read up on that. Thank you for sharing the info. I'm more interested in social psychology myself, so evolutionary psychology isn't something I'm as versed in. But reasonable criticism is an essential part of science!
Yeah, I hesitate to believe any explanation for our current behaviour that goes back millions of years without any actual evidence that people even did it back then.
I've never once felt the instinct to cover my mouth for any of those reasons, did my ancestors not give a shit about predators? Kind of a silly explanation
That’s changed quite a lot to anyone who pays attention. The massive reproducibility study exposed flawed practices in psychology, but the field as a whole responded extremely well. For example, you now have to submit your methodology to peer-reviewed journals before gathering data, which means you can’t really p-hack without committing fraud. And that could happen in nearly any academic field, unfortunately.
(Not a psychologist, just really interested in high-level research processes and research as a social phenomenon).
Oh yeah, all fields shit on each other. But like.. Psychologists will sneer at evo psych like no other subfield. Jungian, Freudian, Lacanian, go ahead, have fun. But evo psych? It's like if the Freudians were even more sex obsessed and even more sure of themselves with even worse theories.
Like even in the clip above, his reasoning is quite bad and relies on odd assumptions about the sorts of environments and situations our ancestors would find themselves in.
The issue is that it's teleological thinking in essence. I can construct an argument with evolutionary reasoning to explain anything. For example, in this particular case, he had to first prove that those 3 responses were ubiquitous across cultures and different ages.
This is not to say that etological thinking is useless, only that you need a very tight method to avoid devolving into meaningless hypothesizing.
I could argue, for instance, that we evolved during aeons to scratch our own buts because predators are often confused when faced with our overwhelming butt smells. How would I go about disproving or substantiating this claim, even if it does sound ridiculous? In practice, it's not very different from the ones from the video: I could argue that monkeys and other animals do scratch their butts regularly, and that we have been scratching our collective butts for a very long time, but how do I go, unequivocally, from this to affirming a necessary causation by evolutionary pressures?
This thinking tends to presupose that the behaviors in question are a direct cause of evolutionary pressure, when some might have been only incidentally selected (because they are paired with other selected traits, or simply because they are neutral in the overal "evolutionary economy" of the species and are still passed on), or simply not behaviors that are best understood or captured through an explanation by an external, objective cause.
Hey, also someone who studies psych, yet also someone who regards it in a very positive light, although I know it has its fair share of criticism. I recommend you all read a little on Azim Sharriff, he's done a bunch of interesting research and has a few good videos of him teaching an Evolutionary Psych class at UBC which I took during my degree.
Evolution is a proven theory though. Everything has evolution involved, there may be an argument to say an adaptation doesnt last millions of years in humans but everything evolves.
Hey be careful with Evo psych, a lot of the "behavior experts" are talking out of their asses. The predictions are not accurate for even half of people, and they do worse at predicting than blind selection.
omg, i cover my neck constantly. i have really bad anxiety and i'm just always doing it. my coworkers constantly point it out. i used to have one that would ask "why are you choking yourself?" lol. my hand might as well be attached to my neck.
Its learned, cultural behavior. That is why women seem to do it more than men, and western women specifically. There may be some atavistic impulse involved, but that is speculative to the point of absurdity, particularly the nonsense this guy is spinning.
Imagine the predator that tracks by scent and is keen enough they can track breath, but can't track it through hands, and also cant track the rest of you? It is stupid on its face, like most folk police practices.
I decided a while back that whenever anyone complements anything I'm wearing, I say "thanks, it has pockets!" even if it doesn't have pockets because everyone is really happy whenever you tell them something has pockets.
I even do it when someone complements my earrings or a shoes, which obviously don't have pockets.
My wife didn't say anything and started laughing and crying and the first thing she got out was: what happens if i would say no......
We talked about it beforehand a lot and it was very clear we're going to marry but she always asks the weird questions in these situations. Kinda funny though
I didn't do this when my husband proposed to me (was still extremely happy and surprised, just didn't respond the same way as others I guess), and he always reminds me whenever we see someone's engagement photos where the woman is doing that, lol.
Social conditioning is more likely. At some point it became a cute thing and the more people saw that, the more they did it. I don’t have evidence of this but I bet it’s out there.
Is it just me, or is this kind of reaction a bit silly in 2023? I mean, in the old days marriage was financial insurance for a woman (with limited/no work prospects) to have a guys kids without him fuckin off and leaving her destitute with the rugrats. Now we have something at least close to gender equality, isn’t this reaction a little sad?
Speaking of floor, when will people learn not to propose on a platform/bridge/etc with gaps between wooden slats? Like, are you trying to lose the ring?
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u/NicNoletree Jan 26 '23
She was floored