‘Within evolutionary psychology, you get a more mixed bag of political orientations’

What's your Swansea story?

I do have a story to tell, but I'm not sure whether it would be seen as a nice story or not. I'm Welsh born and bred: I grew up in Cardiff, went to Cardiff University, did a PhD here at Swansea University and now in Swansea I stay.

A lot of that was for practical reasons. I'm from a working-class family, first generation to go to university. I did my PhD self-funded, working in retail for 13 years to do it. Then someone took a chance on me and I haven't looked back. But actually my experience, in my area of evolutionary psychology, has been quite isolating.

They didn't do evolutionary psychology in Cardiff; didn't really do it here, just my supervisor, Steve Stewart-Williams at the time. I had no peers here. No one else studying it, no one really to talk to about it. This was a department full of behaviourists – the natural 'arch enemy' of the evolutionary psychologist! They believe everything is learned, and evolutionary psychology is saying some of our cognitive framework comes as standard, some of the assumptions about reality come as standard.

It's only in recent years that I've gone from being someone that no one really knows at all to being on papers and rubbing shoulders with some of the biggest names in my field at international conferences. So, my experience was originally quite subdued and lonely, and it has exploded out from South Wales, it's a lot more colourful, and involves more people, although there's still quite a dearth of evolutionary perspectives here.

So you feel you've had to do things on your own?

Yes. I did a podcast recently on men's mental health, and I also recently trained as a counsellor. And one of the things that really stuck with me, which for many years wouldn't go away, was this sense that I hadn't done stuff properly. I hadn't done a postdoc in three different countries before getting the lectureship. It felt like having to fight every step of the way, to catch up, to get recognition, to be embedded in the ways that other people take for granted. There's still that sense that there's a straight arrow path that people follow, but not a lot of people do actually.

That's one of the main things I've learned from hearing the career stories of psychologists over the years… very few have followed that traditional route. You mentioned solitude, and maybe people not seeing that from the outside or appreciating that part of your journey. Without wanting to get too 'amateur psychology', would that help you to identify with the 'incel' populations you started researching?

I suppose it does, in a way. I was never an incel and didn't hold those misogynistic views, but this idea of feeling a bit lonely, hiding away in a corner of the internet where people swap memes and stuff, that is something that I know.

An interesting thing to know about me, I guess, is that I'm not left-wing. Politically, I'm centre, slightly right. In the 'ivory tower', I'm far right, because I say things like 'maybe people have responsibility over their actions'. That poses all sorts of problems in and of itself, but where it intersects with the incel research is that a lot of that research is done from a political place. A lot of it in the States comes with a feminist lens, almost knowing the conclusion, starting out from a position of 'incel = bad'.

Now, you can't generalise an entire group of people: there are going to be some really terrible ones in there, and some not so terrible. But the narrative from the States is that incels are white right-wing men with no education and no job, no prospects. Yet our research takes an explicit politically neutral stance, set out in a mission statement, and they get on board with this. They don't give us the same level of scepticism as they do other academics.

We've just done the biggest incel study in the world. We've found they're ethnically diverse. The majority of them have some sort of job or university education. Overall, as a group, they're actually slightly left-leaning politically. But then we're also able to show the ones who have the real misogynistic beliefs, the ones who are saying that, 'yes, violence in the name of incel causes is OK', they're the ones who are extremely right wing, or have high dark triad characteristics, or struggle very much with autism, or poor mental health. We can see that the dangerous ones fall into a pattern.

So, we're challenging the narrative about who these guys are, and the fact that I'm quite politically centrist has been useful in approaching this issue.

I think it's important you're willing to be open about that. I've talked about it quite a lot in terms of our coverage in The Psychologist. And when some people suggest we should have more 'right-wing' topics, evolutionary psychology can be raised as an example.

Yes, until you go to the conferences. I tend to find within evolutionary psychology, you get a lot more open-mindedness, and you get a more mixed bag of political orientations. And I think people take that normal distribution and compare it to the skewed distribution in academia as a whole. 

And fairly undeniably, there is a liberal bias in academia, psychology and science. I've talked with Jon Haidt in the past about the 'Heterodox Academy', and the idea that our thinking can only be stronger if it is more politically diverse.

Absolutely. And I think there is something about the evolutionary mindset. Classically, with right-wing thinking the responsibility lies with the individual; left-wing, the responsibility lies with society. Some of the tenets of evolution are that life is cruel, and full of awful things, but individuals who have best adapted to their environment are the ones who have thrived and gone on to pass on their genes. So couple that with a gene-centric view or an individual view, rather than the group and seeing everything as environmental, I can see how people think that lends itself to a more right-wing view.

I guess the next step is from responsibility to compassion. Beyond the party politics, at the root of it seems to be whether it is important to be compassionate to other people or not. Sure, life is cruel, bad things happen. But that can lead down the road of 'look out for number one', or 'be compassionate and help others'.

That's the real beef, I think… evolutionary psychologists are descriptive, not prescriptive. So it's not 'the world's a terrible place, good, so it should be', it's not about justifying that, it's about accepting that as part of reality, and then we move on and do what we want with it.

But it is ironic that you should mention compassion, because I think of Paul Gilbert with compassion focus therapy, which is, of course, an evolutionary psychological approach to therapy. There's definitely a space for compassion among evolutionary psychologists.

It's good to talk about this stuff. The other thing we get as a magazine is 'keep politics out of it'. But I believe 'the political' is woven through everything that we do, as a magazine, as the BPS, as psychologists. Science is a political endeavour. But for me, it's whether it needs to become party political and divisive, or whether it's more about trying to get at those underlying values and characteristics.

I personally think we should minimise politics as much as possible. A lot of money that comes into universities is public money, and we should not be using that public money, which comes from people with diverse views, to further one particular subset of views. I don't think that's on, and in a lot of cases, it's not needed.

In terms of the Welsh context, remember that Swansea hasn't voted anything other than Labour since the Second World War and there are a lot Socialist groups here. The political climate here is very different to elsewhere in the world. Election time, red signs everywhere. In other parts of the country, say Cornwall, it's the opposite. It's blue. I think that can have an impact even on how comfortable people are discussing various things, and whether that diversity of ideas penetrates through into the ivory tower.

Are people in your department aware that you would view your political stance as quite different?

No, I don't tend to talk about it, apart from a small number of people I'm close to.

Why are you telling me then?

Must be something about your face! I think people would probably infer it from my posts on Twitter and stuff like that.

My bread and butter is sex differences, and it's a particularly tough climate around that in university. 

From what I've seen of how you talk about sex differences, you're at least taking it on from a simplistic view that men are just aiming for short-term sexual encounters and women are choosy because they got to live with the consequences long term?

I would like to think that my discourse around sex differences tends to be a bit softer and a little bit more nuanced. I take the time to talk about the typicals, about the exceptions. But the example you gave is a very congruent conversation around the risks of casual sex because the risks for men and women are different.

In January, I'm expecting my first child, a boy. Going through that process alongside my partner has made me realise it really isn't a controversial thing to say that it's very hard for women to be pregnant and that they can benefit from having a supportive husband, and a supportive wider family. But equally, men are looking for long-term partners too. Humans are unique, right?

We have two different mating systems, short-term and long-term. We're still predominantly long-term maters, but we have both of those systems, which is remarkable. Not many animals have that, especially mammals. Chimps have one mating system – promiscuity. Gorillas have one mating system – having a harem. We have a close committed pair bond, and we have the ability to have short-term relationships on the side of that, with distinct psychologies that accompany both. People overlook how remarkable that is to have in a species. 

And the 1990s and 2000s evolutionary psychology, would you say that was 'just so' stories focused largely on just one of those mating systems?

There are 'just so stories' in evolution psychology… there's some crap. But no more crap in any other areas. Most of the common criticisms levied at evolutionary psychology, such as not having hypotheses that are tested, the moment you scratch beneath the surface, they're grounded in nothing. There's loads of formal hypothesis testing, and we're also very good at recognising hypothesis testing as a loop, rather than just one top-down approach. 

Actually, the group of people in my life who use 'just so' stories more than any other group are behaviourists. They will do these very tightly controlled studies in the lab, and they're great. Sometimes they're a pleasure to read. But outside of the lab, everything is learned. Everything is a 'just so' story around conditioning. So, perhaps you got Starbucks coffee today because at some point in your life, you somehow got Starbucks branding reinforced. I can't tell you when, I can't tell you how, but you did. 

This interview is going to be an interesting contrast with another I've just done…

I mean, I've retrained in therapy, and through that, I have learned the value of behaviourism to modify behaviour, absolutely. But I was a PhD student studying evolution in a department full of behaviourists. At the time, Swansea was almost a behaviourist hub of Europe. I had to defend myself. So I've read all of classic Skinner, stuff like that. And even Skinner understood that a lot of our cognitive architecture cannot possibly be devised through trial and error. We have native ideas around things like gravity, a whole bunch of our psychological adaptations can't possibly be learned.

I always like showing the students the study of human neonatal social perception [Connellan et al., 2000]. The boys look at a mobile more than the girls, the girls are more interested in the face. These babies are like 37 hours old. How young do these babies need to be before you realise that this isn't conditioned?

Behaviourism to me almost feels like that God of the Gaps argument – 'if we don't fully understand this yet, it must be conditioning'. And of course, when you sit behaviourists down and have a formal conversation, they'll say it's not nature or nurture, it's an interaction, of course, we can't condition a pigeon using music as a reward, it has to be food. But the moment you get them in a private setting, the moment you have a conversation about teaching, it's all learned. It's pure standard social science model every time.

I guess some psychologists see behaviourism as simple parsimonious explanations, and I think you would probably think the same way about evolution. Yes, complex because of the huge timescales, but basically a beautiful and simple explanation.

Absolutely. I remember reading Skinner and thinking 'these are just different timelines'. One is within a lifetime, and one is between lifetimes. The idea of having a parsimonious mechanism that explains that behaviour – totally on board with that. But it's not always just two mechanisms.

Take the area of priming research. What would be the adaptive value of an organism reading about old people, and then walking slowly? The evolutionary psychologist would say we have particular mechanisms that have evolved to take in certain inputs and to give certain outputs.

If you were to take the sex ratio and put someone in a position where there are loads of men around and not many women, that is important information to know, for mate selection, and competition. It's a variable about the environment that you should pay attention to. Show people that information, it changes their mating behaviour. Now, people label that as a prime, but that's a completely different thing to a prime normally, or this 'connectoplasm' that Steven Pinker refers to – if a node lights up then stuff that's related to it lights up. That's not how the mind works.

So the main difference for me is that the behaviourist is trying to boil things down to as few mechanisms as possible, and the evolutionary psychologist is saying we have certain psychological mechanisms that pay attention to certain things. That's what I think is really going on, and that's what I think they miss.

I'm interested in your work on how evolutionary psychology findings are perceived.

This is some of the stuff I'm doing with Steve. If you've got a finding that paints men in a positive light, in terms of sex difference, people hate that. Both men and women hate that. If it's the other way around, they're more neutral. But it's not only that, they are then likely to make all sorts of judgments about the research. People will straightaway say the research is flawed, it's dangerous, it shouldn't be funded or get ethical approval… all of these sweeping judgments just because of which sex seems to benefit from the research. We call it the G-PROF theory, greater protectiveness of females.

If you are interested in getting a firm, real true understanding about what's going on in the world, that is very problematic. It means that we're only ever going to get an understanding of sex differences if they are in a direction that is, quote-unquote, politically palatable. 

I wonder to what extent it's about thinking that science in general just shouldn't be about looking for superiority and who's 'better'? Maybe there's a fine line when it comes to investigating difference, but to me finding superiority feels very 10-20 years ago.

I do see your point, but there is a general defensiveness around looking at sex differences full stop, aside from superiority. And travesties happen by assuming that men and women are the same – look at medication development and dosages, for example. But if one sex has a particular aptitude for something, it becomes relevant for a lot of social issues.

If women are better than men at something – and obviously, we're talking on average, overlapping distributions – and then we also find that a profession that uses that trait is overwhelmingly dominated by women, should that then be surprising? It is useful to know, rather than just pointing to gaps in things and concluding that it's down to sexism, without knowing anything about the mechanisms by which that came to pass. 

I suppose it's also the difference, like you said earlier, between being descriptive and being prescriptive. But is it just too much of a cop-out as a scientist to say 'I'm just being descriptive, what people do with the findings is their outlook'?

Is that a burden just specific to sex difference researchers and evolutionary psychologists? I don't think so. All research can be taken out of context.

In fact, among the evolutionary psychologists that I know, I think a lot of them take more care and attention to make sure that they're explaining things in a nuanced way.

The incel community is a good example of that. They cherry-pick evidence from social psychology, personal relationships, and evolutionary psychology, to support their worldview. And they twist it around when they do it. So some of my colleagues and I almost feel a responsibility to try and clear all this up. But no matter what you do, people will find a way of twisting it, the black and white in the grey, to use it in a negative way. I see it happen to our stuff, but I also see it happen to related domains as well.