This detailed, well-researched post that got me banned from r/ShitLiberalsSay

Hey guys. First, let me say that I'm super glad this sub exists! Contemporary leftist culture is currently plagued by fauxgressives. Virtually all self-proclaimed "leftists" buy into some fauxgressive hype or another, particularly when it comes to issues concerning women, sexuality, and gender. This sub is a nice breath of fresh air and a much-needed backlash against the dominant narrative in leftist communities regarding the "patriarchy" and similar topics. I hope it stays up!

This post was made in response to a screenshot of rabid racist Stefan Molyneaux listing ways in which women are privileged over men. Their reason for my ban was "no brocialism":

This issue is one where I, regrettably, depart from my fellow "leftists." To give some background, I am a POC anarcho-communist, and a fervent egalitarian. Since I was a child, I've had a deep, seething hatred of social inequality. Now, I'm pursuing a degree in cultural psychology in the hopes of joining other critical psychologists to "challenge assumptions, values, and practices within mainstream psychology that help maintain an unjust and unsatisfying status quo" (Critical Psychology, p. 18), in order to make crucial changes in the field. I utterly despise conservatism, and the oppression it creates and upholds, with a passion and am in no way sympathetic or partial to conservative ideals. Let me also note that I have no idea who this Stefan Molyneux is.

As no one provided any elaborate refutation of the points raised in this tweet, it's obvious that the general assumption or consensus here is that these points are wrong. The top comment here merely states that the point relating to the "dating market" expresses a lot, without explaining what this means. Its child comments jubilate at frustration experienced due to "inceldom," which a cultural rather than individualistic (victim blaming) analysis reveals is resultant of sociocultural and political-economic factors that are beyond anyone's control as individuals (and which are incidentally responsible for all life outcomes). Such treatment, of course, of people who suffer due to the powerful social forces that shape all our lives is unabashedly antithetical to the leftist ethic, which eschews individualistic accounts of human society and behavior in favor of the sociological perspective, denounces macro factors that create social inequalities, and aims to unite with those harmed by these factors and ease their suffering. This treatment is characteristic of the behavior exhibited by conservatives, who celebrate social inequality, serve to maintain it, and harbor disdain for the oppressed. Thus, the ineluctable conclusion is that people who express these sentiments are not leftists. At the very least, these sentiments themselves are undoubtedly conservative.

Another string of comments raised the point that people in powerful positions (e.g., CEOs, politicians, bankers, military, police) are overwhelmingly men. This, however, is a red herring. As I explain in this post:

feminists often use indicators of patriarchy that are irrelevant to the common person (e.g. there being more men in the highest paid positions).

Clearly, since upward mobility has become increasingly difficult over the past couple of decades, the issue of male domination of top-paying positions is more a class than a gender issue, at least as it pertains to ordinary people. For us commoners, the obstacle to these positions is a matter of class, not gender. So, it is not indicative of a patriarchal culture in common society. (bold in original)

It is an error to assume that, just because the upper class exhibits patriarchal features, this must mean the middle and lower classes (common society) exhibit these same features. Clearly, it's possible for different groups to exhibit different features; they don't necessarily share all of the same features. That groups have distinctive features is what distinguishes them as separate groups. This is a very simple, commonsensical point that everyone can agree on.

The fact of the matter is that, in common society, women actually do outrank men in many of the indicators that were, in former times, used to indicate their subordination. As sociologist Arlie Russel Hochschild observes in "Male Trouble," a review of The Boy Crisis: Why Our Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do About It, Healing from Hate: How Young Men Get Into—and Out of—Violent Extremism, and White American Youth: My Descent into America’s Most Violent Hate Movement—and How I Got Out:

boys far more often fail in school, are diagnosed with ADHD (and take medication for it, which carries a risk of depression later in life), play video games, become overweight, lack a driver’s license, get addicted to alcohol or opioids, become mass shooters, commit other felonies, go to prison, and die of drug overdose or suicide.

In 1970, 58 percent of undergraduates in four-year colleges and universities were male; by 2014, that had fallen to 43 percent.

Women earn more doctoral degrees than men and are now a majority of those entering medical and law schools.

Young single women are two and a half times more likely than single men to buy their own homes; single men more often live with parents.

In high school, boys receive 70 percent of Ds and Fs, are more likely than girls to be suspended, and are less likely to graduate or be chosen as class valedictorian (70 percent of whom are girls).

boys are less likely to enjoy school or think grades are important.

Boys born to mothers with lower education and income got lower grades, relative to their sisters

a shrinking proportion of men are earning BAs, even though more jobs than ever require a college degree

Among men between twenty-five and thirty-four, 30 percent now have a BA or more, while 38 percent of women in that age range do.

between 1970 and 2010, the percentage of adult men in a job or looking for work dropped from 80 to 70 while that of adult women rose from 43 to 58.

Powerful social and economic shifts, the impact of which remains unacknowledged, have “a lot more to do with [male] unhappiness (bold added)

never before have American men earned a declining proportion of BAs, while BAs lead to better wages

Clearly, the evidence demonstrating that, since about 1970 (when neoliberal economics began to gain powerful influence) women have been increasingly outperforming men in areas including mental health, obesity, drug/alcohol abuse, crime, suicide, education, financial independence, and work, is overwhelming. That is, it is undeniable. To deny, or even trivialize these issues is cruel. Hochschild's article recapitulates my point that sociocultural and political-economic factors account for this blatant social inequality. Again, the unavoidable conclusion here is that those who choose to deny, ignore, or trivialize these issues, or who mock those who bring them up, are not leftists. It is totally against the leftist ethic to have such a cavalier, or even disdainful attitude toward issues of social inequality. This is the hallmark of conservatism.

A tangential issue brought up in this comment string was that of the importance of sexual fulfillment compared to positions of power (e.g., president, senator), which was yet another red herring. First, just because mostly men hold these positions does not mean that they will favor and promote policies or actions that privilege men and oppress women. Politicians' policies with respect to privileging men at the expense of women are not a function of gender/sex. Instead, they're a function of political leanings. It is conservatives, regardless of gender, who promote policies that privilege men and oppress women; conversely, it is progressives, also regardless of gender, who promote more egalitarian policies. As gender is irrelevant to how power is used vis-a-vis policies affecting men and women, this issue is a non-point.

Second, due to our sex-crazed society, sexual fulfillment is, in fact, very important. As psychology professors David G. Meyers and Jean M. Twenge point out in Social Psychology (13E): "Even sexual activity is subject to social comparison. Adults who have sex are more often happier—you might have guessed that!" (p. 30). Meyers and Twenge reveal the important point that it isn't merely sex per se that matters, but also the social aspect of what having sex entails. Once more, to not only show such a lack of concern for the macro cultural factors that lead some people to become more sexually fulfilled than others, but to mock those who raise this issue, is antithetical to leftism, which deeply values social equality. In my humble opinion, people who do this are not leftist.

Above, I've demonstrated numerous ways in which the behavior of people in this thread, which as I noted reflects the general consensus here, does not at all reflect leftist values and instead is blatantly characteristic of the conservative ethos. Now, I'd like to highlight the ways in which modern feminism, while seeming to advocate for women's equality and liberation, actually has neoliberal underpinnings and serves to oppress them. In his brilliant work, Neoliberal Psychology, cultural psychologist Carl Ratner summarizes in a subsection titled "Neoliberalism is a Sexually Transmitted Disease: Hook-up Sex" the various ways in which female sexual activity in neoliberal society recapitulates neoliberal rather than egalitarian, liberatory, genuinely feminist values. As he explains, "the forms of behavior into [women's] personal, sexual encounters" include:

Estrangement—hook-ups reproduced economic estrangement. Boys and girls eschew personal intimacy and dependency, just as economic players eschew close personal ties to prepare for market interactions, fluctuations, and competitions. The point of market exchange is to sell and purchase the product as efficiently as possible. The hookup is impersonal from the start. The subjects are merely repositories of a product—sex—which is to be exchanged as efficiently as possible, without personal entanglements. Girls prepare to have sex with anonymous partners who are stand-ins for random consumers that producers attract on the economic market. Girls grind on boys whom they do not even see, and they use signs from their onlooking friends to decide whether to continue the grind or dispose of him for another anonymous consumer.

Volatility/precarity/temporality of social relations.

instrumentalism—using people for one's self-gain.

Egocentrism—fulfulling one's own desires while not considering the other's.

Commoditization—of one's self and body, and others' selves and bodies, to raise their exchange value on the interpersonal marketplace of status.

Branding. Selves and bodies are packaged and marketed in terms of their superficial appearance just as consumer products are. Consumerist branding permeates the sexual relation.

Material success of accumulating material products is more important than personal relations. This neoliberal economics is recapitulated in hook-up sex in the form of accumulating the number of physical, impersonal, sexual conquests. Conspicuous consumption of sex.

The need for rapid, frequent, hedonic, sensational, superficial sex leads to quick satiation of this need and equally quick rearousal. Continuous, multiple, superficial experiences replace a few, deeply satisfying experiences. Deep, psycho-sexual relationships come to feel heavy, complicated, demanding, and time-consuming. . . .

Success is defined as social status that is derived from attractive products, not from personal attributes of individuals. The narratives of girls and boys about their parties emphasize the selection of partners who are attractive to one's friends and thereby elevate one's social status, even when one does not like the partner. This recapitulates the social status that dominates consumerism of brand name consumer products. Opinions of others define success more than one's own fulfillment does.

Entrepreneurial ideology of success, independence, and strength/power. Hook-up girls accept the neoliberal entrepreneurial ideology of a free, autonomous, self-reliant, self-serving, self-defining, uninvolved, unrestrained, uncompromising, self-protective, emotionless, realistic, non-romantic businesswoman as emancipatory and powerful and successful. These behavioral/psychological attributes that are packaged in the entrepreneurial construct (by its founders in the Pelerin Society), are consumed by admirers of the ideal. This is neoliberal feminism that is promoted by neoliberals (Miller and Plencer 2018; Rottenberg 2013; Prügl 2014; Ferguson 2017; Pruchniewska 2018). (pp. 168-169, bold added)

Ratner's meticulous cultural, ethnographic analysis here demonstrates how the dominant sexual culture in our society does, in fact, (not-so-coincidentally) reflect and resemble our neoliberal political economy. In other words, it is akin to a market. Thus, any derisive comments in this thread about how some compare our society's sexual culture to a market are wholly invalid and without merit. These people are simply denying and mystifying empirically verified social reality. Unfortunately, this neoliberal feminism noted by Ratner is another example of conservative co-optation of leftist values. I would urge all of you to have the wisdom, and especially maturity to recognize which values promoted as "feminist" truly do serve the interests of women rather than neoliberlism.

That's all I have to say as of now about this. Again, I'm an anarcho-communist and die-hard egalitarian. The mere sight of any sort of social inequality infuriates me. I have no idea who Stefan Molyneux is, but from what I've read about him in this thread he seems like a horrible person. Regardless, the points I raised above remain valid. It is my hope that whoever reads this post does so with an open, patient mind. These issues are important. The truth is paramount and trumps any ideological or social commitments. As I've shown, the apparent consensus here in this sub is simply false. It needs to be critically reexamined.

[–]Oncefa2left-wing male advocate 6 points7 points8 points 6 years ago (1 child) | Copy Link

[–]DIES-_-IRAE 12 points13 points14 points 6 years ago (0 children) | Copy Link

[–]Strikester101 5 points6 points7 points 6 years ago (1 child) | Copy Link

[–]WorldController[S] 5 points6 points7 points 6 years ago (0 children) | Copy Link

[–]Sewblon 4 points5 points6 points 6 years ago (20 children) | Copy Link

Interesting analyses. But there is something important that I cannot endorse. The idea that "culture" is an independent variable in human behavior. Culture really can't be observed except in the thing that it is supposed to affect, human behavior. So it doesn't really allow us to differentiate the cause from the effect. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13000740-the-myth-of-culture You have the same problem with "society."

Like here from "The Sociological Perspective."

The basic insight of sociology is that human behavior is shaped by the groups to which people belong and by the social interaction that takes place within those groups. We are who we are and we behave the way we do because we happen to live in a particular society at a particular point in space and time. People tend to accept their social world unquestioningly, as something "natural." But the sociological perspective enables us to see society as a temporary social product, created by human beings and capable of being changed by them as well.

If we both are shaped by our society and create our society, then which is the chicken and which is the egg?

Because of these problems with differentiating cause from effect, and because Economics is what I studied in school, I am more sympathetic to the "Rational Actor" perspective from economics, where everyone does the best they can, given their constraints. So you still don't blame the individual, you just need to differentiate the things that the individual cannot control that shape their behavior "the constraints." From the behavior that you are trying to explain.

[–]WorldController[S] 2 points3 points4 points 6 years ago (19 children) | Copy Link

The idea that "culture" is an independent variable in human behavior.

This is not the view of Ratner or other cultural psychologists. Rather than culture independently interacting with psychology to produce specific behaviors, the relationship here is actually dialectical. Notes Stanford cultural scientist and psychologist Alana Connor in "Cultural Psychology: Studying More Than the ‘Exotic Other’":

One implication of the cyclical, transactional relationship between cultures and psyches is that culture is not an independent variable. Culture may predict, but it does not “cause.” A second implication is that neither cultures nor psychologies exist independent of each other. (bold added)

Culture really can't be observed except in the thing that it is supposed to affect, human behavior.

That's not true. According to Ratner, culture consists of three macro factors: Institutions, concepts, and artifacts. Artifacts (e.g., architecture, electronics, eating/writing utensils, vehicles) are an example of cultural elements that are ontologically distinct from behavior per se.

it doesn't really allow us to differentiate the cause from the effect.

This is because culture and psychology are essentially the same thing, as Ratner demonstrates in Macro Cultural Psychology: A Political Philosophy of Mind, which I summarize here:

In it, he fleshes out his novel theory of psychology, which states that psychology and culture are two sides of the same coin (similarly to how matter and energy are two different forms of the same thing), with psychology representing the subjective side, and culture essentially being objectified psychology. According to his theory, human psychology is rooted in macro cultural factors, of which there are three: Cultural institutions, cultural concepts, and cultural artifacts. Rather than being biologically determined, the specific form and content of psychology (even disturbed psychology) derives its features from these factors, and also serves to support them.

Culture and psychology dialectically interact in much the same way as constituent parts of other complex systems do, including biological processes such as growth and homeostasis. The specific features of any organism relating to these processes depends on the complex, dynamic relationship between all the factors involved. They cannot be adequately described or explained as a linear, independent VS dependent variable relationship.

As Ratner notes in "The Cultural Psychology of Oppression and Liberation," "Cross-cultural psychologists have proven that all psychological phenomena vary in different cultures." Psychological traits including self-concept, emotions, motivation, sexuality, and even color perception all exhibit vast cultural variability. That human psychology is fundamentally and thoroughly cultural (and has identity with culture) is undeniable.

If you're asking the question from an evolutionary perspective, this concern is immaterial to whether, today, in individual people, culture has temporal primacy. This question is easily answered: Clearly, individuals are born into pre-existing cultures, meaning that culture evidently precedes psychology. However, just like diet can impact growth rates and blood sugar homeostasis, individuals can modify their cultures.

The answer to the evolutionary concern here is similar to that relating to the chicken and the egg—just like a proto-chicken laid the first chicken egg, from which the first chicken hatched, some form of proto-culture preceded culture up to the point in evolutionary time when our biology gave rise to the capacity to acquire, form, and support genuine culture.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13000740-the-myth-of-culture

I am familiar with Barber. While I respect some of his work, including his Psychology Today article "Why Low Status Hurts," I'm not impressed with his arguments in The Myth of Culture. First, he relies on the straw man that cultural scientists believe culture mechanistically determines specific psychobehavioral outcomes. On the contrary, most academics in this field are not rigid cultural determinists. In Not in Our Genes: Biology, Ideology, and Human Nature, one of the most notable critical works addressing biological determinism, Harvard evolutionary biologist RC Lewontin, Cambridge neuroscientist Steven Rose, and the late Harvard psychologist Leon Kamin emphatically oppose cultural determinism throughout:

There is no mystical and unbridgeable gulf between the forces that shape human society and those that shape the societies of other organisms; biology is indeed relevant to the human condition, although the form and extent of its relevance is far less obvious than the pretensions of biological determinism imply. The antithesis often presented as an opposition to biological determinism is that biology stops at birth, and from then on culture supervenes. This antithesis is a type of cultural determinism we would reject, for the cultural determinists identify narrow (and exclusive) causal chains in society which are in their own way reductionist as well. (p. 10, bold added)

When biological determinists discuss their critics, they tend to label them as "radical environmentalists," that is, they oppose biological determinism by arguing that it is possible to divorce an understanding of the human condition and of human differences entirely from biology. There are indeed schools of thought that have argued in this way. We are not among them. (p. 75)

Behavior modification begins with a culturally determinist theory; in practice—at least in the experiences of those it treats, whatever the declared intentions of its advocates—it is hard to see where it may be distinguished from the most explicit of biological determinist therapeutic programs. Both are essentially "victim-blaming," locating the problem inside the individual . . . .

. . . Both [biological and cultural] determinisms are reductionist, as we explained earlier, and are related to the opposite sides of the same coin. (p. 177)

A corollary of extreme cultural determinism is that individuals ought to reflect accurately their family circumstances and their social class in their own behavior. We ought to be able to predict the actions of persons from their social histories. Since it is evident that we cannot make such predictions, at least in many cases, naive cultural determinism is clearly wrong. (pp. 266-267, bold added)

Barber's charge that cultural scientists advocate this variety of cultural determinism is clearly false.

Second, he appears to be merely arguing semantics with his criticism of the term "culture" (which he incorrectly describes as a "vague" concept) and his insistence that we instead understand behavior in terms of social learning. Indeed, the specific concepts and mechanisms involved in any kind of social learning derive their features from culture. Social learning is, in fact, a cultural process. So, his position here has little merit.

Finally, his call for a naturalistic theory of society should be a huge red flag for any leftist. Historically, naturalistic accounts of human society/behavior have served the ideological function of bolstering ruling class power. Examples include ancient Egyptians' belief that their pharaohs were literal "god-kings," feudal kings' insistence on rule via "divine right" and "God's grace," and Nazi Germany's classification of Jews as subhuman vermin. Biological determinism is merely a modern iteration of this same phenomenon. As Lewontin et al. remark in Not in Our Genes: "Biological determinist ideas are part of the attempt to preserve the inequalities of our society and to shape human nature in [the ruling class'] own image" (p. 15). All naturalistic social theories fulfill this ethnocentric, conservative function, which is why as leftists we should summarily reject them and regard them with the utmost suspicion and keen skepticism.

[–]WorldController[S] 1 point2 points3 points 6 years ago (5 children) | Copy Link

To the extent that economic theoretical orientations (of which there are plenty) justify capitalism or inequality in general, they are similarly ideological and should be dismissed as such.

As for the "rational actor" concept, this flies in the face of the available evidence, which shows that people are given to all sorts of irrational beliefs and behaviors. Actually, whatever "logic" people employ in their thinking is thoroughly cultural, in that it makes use of cultural concepts and styles of reasoning, perceiving, and remembering to arrive at familiar conclusions. Additionally, the "rational actor" concept is highly abstract and illuminates nothing about concrete psychological traits, their specific features, or their function.

[–]Sewblon 0 points1 point2 points 6 years ago (4 children) | Copy Link

I have seen serious scholars on the far right reject the rational actor paradigm and use it to argue for more capitalism and less democracy. https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691138732/the-myth-of-the-rational-voter So just reflexively jumping on the rational actor paradigm might not help you fight for equality.

I suspect that that is because we are judging human reason by the wrong bar. Human reason is not for accurately describing the world. It is for making and raising more humans. Much of the apparently irrational behavior that we observe actually serves the actor's own reproductive needs. Dr. Kendrick wrote something good about this for Psychology Today that blew up 10 years ago. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/sex-murder-and-the-meaning-life/201004/atheistic-liberals-are-smarter-funny-reason

[–]WorldController[S] 0 points1 point2 points 6 years ago* (3 children) | Copy Link

My comment there was more a response to your apparent tendency to think in terms of Western economic theory. Again, economics, like biological determinism, is largely ideological. Because of this, you should take caution when analyzing human behavior on its terms.

You are again overextrapolating here with a false abstraction. Just because specific irrational religious beliefs function as a "mating strategy" in our society, in which monogamy is institutionalized in the form of marriage, does not mean that irrational beliefs, as a whole, necessarily fulfill this same function in all societies, even polyamorous ones.

One glaring problem I noticed with this article is the idea that individual humans have biologically determined "reproductive needs." This idea is baseless. The desire to enjoy the carnal pleasures of sex is distinct from the desire to procreate. The former is as "natural" as the desire to engage in any other sensually pleasurable activity (e.g., eating, having a warm bath, getting a massage); just like there are no genes that code for preferences for these specific activities, there is no evidence that specific psychosexual traits have some particular, consistent genetic basis. Additionally, the latter is thoroughly cultural. In fact, it could not possibly have existed before humans discovered the connection between coitus and reproduction, some 10,000 years ago. This means it, too, is not a genetically determined "need."

The article has a logically valid point if we accept its assumptions that monogamy and the desire to procreate are "natural" and biologically determined. However, since these assumptions are false, its argument is unsound.

[–]Sewblon 0 points1 point2 points 6 years ago (2 children) | Copy Link

I assume that by "ideological" you mean "unscientific." I can't agree with that assessment. economics employs the same methods as the other observational sciences.

Irrational beliefs can fulfill functions besides furthering monogamy or facilitating some other mating strategy, or they can even serve no function, and be the incidental by-product of something else. I just think that the irrational beliefs that are specific to religion serve some purpose related to inclusive fitness, or else they wouldn't be so prominent.

One glaring problem I noticed with this article is the idea that individual humans have biologically determined "reproductive needs." This idea is baseless.

Your reproductive needs don't necessarily need to be biologically determined, they could be economically determined, and the logic of the argument would remain unchanged.

[–]WorldController[S] 0 points1 point2 points 6 years ago (1 child) | Copy Link

I assume that by "ideological" you mean "unscientific."

Not exactly. In Marxism, the term "ideology" has a very specific meaning. The authors of Critical Psychology: An Introduction (Second Edition) define it aptly: "the set of ideas inculcated by dominant sectors of society to justify elite power and the society's established institutions" (p. 18). Any belief system that functions to support the ruling class is ideological, according to this usage, even if it's spuriously scientific.

economics employs the same methods as the other observational sciences.

Biological determinism also employs certain scientific, or quasi-scientific methods. Indeed, many historical biological determinist methods which were contemporaneously considered "scientific" (e.g., phrenology, eugenics) are now widely regarded as pseudoscientific. Moreover, it isn't merely research methods that are potentially unscientific, but also data analysis.

Given that even Nobel laureates in the field of economics have lambasted its abysmal predictive power, characterizing it as a legitimate science, especially in light of its ideological tendencies, is a bit generous.

This is quite the departure from your earlier claim that "much of the apparently irrational behavior that we observe actually serves the actor's own reproductive needs." Whereas before you made a sweeping generalization about the function of irrational beliefs, now you're stating that it is irrational religious beliefs, specifically, that fulfill this function.

Not only have you not linked any particular irrational religious beliefs with inclusive fitness, but you've failed to consider how monogamy actually hinders fitness (in that it restricts the number of viable partners and in so doing also limits population genetic variation) and, as leftists recognize, how religion has mostly political origins as an effective means of social control.

If the "need" to procreate is rooted in economic factors, why are you linking it to biological processes such as inclusive fitness?

[–]Sewblon 0 points1 point2 points 6 years ago* (0 children) | Copy Link

I didn't know that. Thank you. But how is it relevant? What have I said that furthers the dominance of societal elites?

True, but the methods of data collection and analysis that economics employs are considered scientific by present day standards. So, the fact that biological determinism is now considered unscientific, isn't relevant to whether economics should be considered unscientific.

That article is behind a paywall. So I don't know that Krugman is actually talking about. However, I know of one way that we can actually asses the scientific validity of social sciences in comparison to each other: replication rates. Economics fails to replicate about 1/3 of its studies in top-tier journals. Psychology, by most measures, fails to replicate half or more of its findings in top-tier journals. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis#Psychology_replication_rates So, economics does have problems, it failed to predict the great recession. But it seems to be doing better than Psychology. So, you can't reject the validity of economics without also rejecting the validity of Psychology. As for economics' ideological tendencies, I suspect that I see what you mean: its theories tend to shore up markets and liberal democracy as the best systems. However, Psychology also has a tendency to shore up current institutions and elite dominance: Sometimes they label political dissidents as mentally ill, like they did in the Soviet Union. So, you can't condemn economics for its ideological tendencies and give Psychology a free pass.

Good point. I haven't really seen any scientists discuss irrational beliefs from the perspective of inclusive fitness besides with religion. So I can't really speak to the functionality of irrational beliefs outside of religion.

There are two ways that religion can increase inclusive fitness through irrational beliefs: 1. It can indirectly increase inclusive fitness by serving as a means of costly signalling, like with the belief that God is one being, but also 3 beings. So, the holders of those beliefs have a way to sort outsiders from insiders that facilitates cooperation among insiders. Or, it can increase inclusive fitness directly, like the belief in a divine injunction to be fruitful and multiply. Its true that monogamy can reduce inclusive fitness sometimes. Otherwise, polygamous species like elephant seals would not exist. But for humans, monogamy usually enhances inclusive fitness. Human children take a long time to raise to maturity. So, it helps inclusive fitness if the father sticks around to help. The easiest way to make that happen, is with monogamy, because males generally don't have time to raise multiple children from multiple wives and still contribute in a meaningful way. As for religion as a means of social control. I do see the logic in that: Religion usually supports traditional elites. But at the same time, that is not the account that I have heard of religion's origins from historians or scholars of religion. They usually attribute it to the need to deal with death or make sense of dreams. Anyway, even if religion is nothing but a means of social control, what bearing would that have on this discussion exactly?

economic factors have direct bearing on things that affect inclusive fitness, like the ability to acquire food and shelter and attract mates. Economists actually have studied whether children are normal goods or not, i.e., whether fertility is positively correlated with income. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4507829/ Fertility directly bears on inclusive fitness. So, its easy to make the connection between economic factors and inclusive fitness.

[–]Sewblon 0 points1 point2 points 6 years ago (6 children) | Copy Link

This is not the view of Ratner or other cultural psychologists. Rather than culture independently interacting with psychology to produce specific behaviors, the relationship here is actually

dialectical

I have heard of dialectics. But I don't quite grasp what you mean by that term. Can you give me an example of culture and psychology having such a relationship?

Prediction is one species of causation.https://faculty.washington.edu/lynnhank/Mayr2.pdf So I assume that what Connor meant is that culture cannot be said to explain things. In that case, her position and Barber's position are not that far apart. Barber's criticism of culture is that it attempts to explain human behavior, with human behavior itself. X is obviously predictive of X. But X cannot be said to explain X. So Barber agrees that culture cannot be said to explain human behavior or psychology, precisely because they cannot be differentiated from on another ontologically. So it sounds like the real disagreement between Barber and the cultural psychologists is whether true independent variables being established in human behavior is both possible and desirable.

Lets see if I can re-construct this argument: Psychology cannot exist without thought. That would be a contradiction in terms. Thought cannot exist without specific content. Humans are social animals. So the content of our thoughts is at some level determined by our social context, or culture in other words. But that seems to imply that social context is temporally and logically prior to thought. That doesn't exactly work because institutions and concepts don't exist outside of our thoughts. We can act like they exist, but that requires us to have them in our thoughts first. Further, then it isn't clear in what sense our psychology "supports" that culture or social context.

But independent VS dependent variable relationships do exist in biology. Like in photosynthesis. The dependent variable is the production of carbohydrates in plants. The independent variables are the amount of nutrients in the soil and the sunlight to which the plant is exposed.

If human psychology and human culture are not truly different things at all, then that is trivial. Of course everything that exists varies with itself. But if they are truly different things. Then I have misunderstood you completely.

Good point. Everyone who is now alive was born into an existing culture. So culture did come first for all practical purposes. But how do you square the idea that individuals can modify their culture with this position:

[–]WorldController[S] 0 points1 point2 points 6 years ago* (5 children) | Copy Link

Can you give me an example of culture and psychology having such a relationship?

An example would be Westerners' distinctively individualistic self-concepts. Western culture inculcates individualistic (as opposed to collectivistic) mentality, and this in turn generates behaviors that support the macro cultural factor of Western hyperindividualism. Defining oneself in terms of personal attributes and prioritizing personal goals over collective concerns serves to reinforce and legitimate this cultural factor, further perpetuating individualistic thinking.

Remember that cultures are systems consisting of the three macro factors of institutions, concepts, and artifacts. Just like blood sugar homeostasis is not reducible to individual sugar molecules, culture is more than mere individual human behaviors. Instead, culture is a coherent, integrated, dynamic system that generates particular features and, like all other systems, also requires certain input from constituent elements in order to sustain its coherence. Individual people are themselves elements of cultural systems, and their psychology and behavior serve as input that supports or otherwise affects a culture's stability.

In Macro Cultural Psychology, Ratner goes into detail about the dialectical relationship between culture and psychology:

Macro cultural psychology regards psychological and cultural phenomena as integrated within a system. The systemic relationship enables culture and psychology to reciprocally form each other with maximal power and fullness. It makes each a part of the other and saturated with the other. . . .

. . .

Systemic philosophy emphasizes the following points:

A system consists of elements that are interdependent and overlapping (interpenetrating).

. . .

Each element is itself a complex dialectical subsystem. For instance, culture as a dialectical system may be depicted as in Figure 1.2.

Psychology is also a complex dialectical subsystem; it may be depicted as in Figure 1.3.

The intertwining of elements makes them congruent with one another.

The qualities of each extend through the others to form a blend that evens out inconsistencies. There is not a juxtaposition of inconsistent atoms as is true for atomistic philosophy. That is only possible if each element remains independent of the others and retains its own identity. Overlapping, interpenetrating elements in a system pressure one another to adjust. It is like introducing a new member into a family—a process of mutual adjustment of roles takes place and results in a grand symbiosis.

. . .

A dialectical system is not an interaction of disparate, discrete elements.

A coherent, unified system is not a sequence of separate, independent, juxtaposed elements that "interact." Interaction implies separate, independent elements that each contribute some "variance" or influence to others. The elements, or variables, are joined by a "+" that adds their separate, different contributions together. The most disparate, antagonistic factors are simply thrown together with a +, with little sense of how their antagonism could be resolved to jointly produce behavior. Interactionism opposes the internal blending and merging of phenomena in dialectical systems.

. . .

While elements come to blend together in a symbiosis, they also retain qualitative distinctness.

This is why they influence one another; if they lost their distinctness, they could not do so. In other words, while psychology is cultural, it is a particular kind of cultural element that is different from others such as artifacts. An emotion is not a spoon, although it is formed by artifacts such as eating utensils, and although a spoon may be invested with emotional significance (e.g., if it is a treasured heirloom or disgustingly dirty).

Distinctiveness and interplay among different elements coexist within the overall unity of a system.

Within the dialectical system of elements, certain one(s) are more dominant than others.

The fact that elements are intertwined and reciprocally constitute one another does not mean they do so equally. . . .

. . .

Each element carries, embodies, incarnates, crystallizes, expresses, and represents the system of other elements, dominated by the central ones.

Biology is laden with the system of cultural, biological, and personal elements. This is depicted in Figure 1.4.

Figure 1.4 recasts Figure 1.1 from the position of biology.

Figure 1.5 depicts psychology as embodying and expressing culture, biology, and personal experience. It reorganizes Figure 1.1 from the position of psychology.

Figure 1.5 can be expanded to show the detailed relationship between psychology and culture, yielding Figure 1.6.

Psychology expresses and reinforces the cultural system. It is an element of the cultural system that goes into constructing and maintaining it. It is necessary for the system because a cultural system requires a corresponding psychology that animates cultural behavior. Psychology is also necessary for the individual to participate and succeed in the system. Individuals require, and strive for, particular emotions, reasoning, perception, motivation, and self-concept to participate and succeed in the system. . . . (pp. 53-60)

So I assume that what Connor meant is that culture cannot be said to explain things. In that case, her position and Barber's position are not that far apart. Barber's criticism of culture is that it attempts to explain human behavior, with human behavior itself. X is obviously predictive of X. But X cannot be said to explain X.

You seem to be conflating culture as an abstract explanatory construct with culture per se (as in concrete institutions, concepts, and artifacts). Here, Connor is getting at the fact that while culture establishes the parameters of behavior, allowing us to make general predictions, it does not independently generate specific outcomes in a mechanistic fashion that can be reliably and accurately deduced in all cases via practical means. Recall that an independent variable is one that causes another variable but is not in turn affected by that second variable. Her point is that this does not characterize the nature of culture's role in psychology. (Connor is not saying that culture as a theoretical construct lacks explanatory power. I am unsure why you feel she implied this.)

Barber's criticism is faulty because it fails to distinguish cultures as coherent systems from individual human behaviors, which by themselves are mere cultural elements. Cultural systems no more equal human behaviors than blood sugar homeostasis equals sugar molecules. The idea of systems is that they are more than there mere sum of their parts.

So Barber agrees that culture cannot be said to explain human behavior or psychology, precisely because they cannot be differentiated from on another ontologically.

They most certainly can be differentiated. Human behaviors are an element (subset) of cultural systems. Elements and systems, of course, are ontologically distinct.

So it sounds like the real disagreement between Barber and the cultural psychologists is whether true independent variables being established in human behavior is both possible and desirable.

Throughout my studies, I have never heard this concern voiced by cultural psychologists. The cultural psychological literature appears to mainly describe the actual, observed relationship between culture and psychology rather than speculate about how the relationship could theoretically manifest in other ways.

Lets see if I can re-construct this argument: Psychology cannot exist without thought. That would be a contradiction in terms. Thought cannot exist without specific content. Humans are social animals. So the content of our thoughts is at some level determined by our social context, or culture in other words.

Yes, the specific, concrete features of cognitive factors take on cultural forms.

But that seems to imply that social context is temporally and logically prior to thought.

I'm not sure what you mean by culture being "logically" (as opposed to temporally) prior to thought, but yes, in individuals social context precedes incipient psychology.

That doesn't exactly work because institutions and concepts don't exist outside of our thoughts.

This is untrue. Again, artifacts are an example of cultural factors that are distinct from psychological phenomena. Institutions themselves do not only exist as thoughts but are also objectified in artifacts including wedding dresses, courthouses, uniforms, currency, traffic signs, church buildings, college campuses, etc. Moreover, they are also apparent in behaviors that reinforce and legitimate them, as I explained above. These artifacts and behaviors provide an environment that inculcates particular ways of thinking and behaving that exist prior to newcomers' inclusion into the system.

[–]WorldController[S] 0 points1 point2 points 6 years ago* (2 children) | Copy Link

We can act like they exist, but that requires us to have them in our thoughts first.

According to your logic, contemporary American English, which, like all language varieties, is sociohistorically unique, must exist in people's heads prior to its institutionalization. This stance is incoherent, namely because the vast sociohistorical variability of language, which undergoes morphological transformation over too short a time to be attributable to biological evolution, points to the ineluctable conclusion that specific varieties lack some particular, genetic basis, a claim that is corollary to the idea that these varieties exist "in our thoughts first." Further, if this language variety were present in people's heads prior to their inclusion into the cultural system, it would already be de facto institutionalized. This flies in the face of what researchers have learned about language, which they describe as a process of acquisition; evidently, language varieties are learned.

The same applies to all other institutions and concepts. They are acquired via enculturation and socialization processes. As cultural anthropologists maintain, concrete cultural factors are not genetically determined or innate.

Further, then it isn't clear in what sense our psychology "supports" that culture or social context.

As I explained above, all cultural factors, including psychology, have some sort of impact on the coherence of cultural systems. Generally speaking, these factors work in service of cultural stability, but political progressivism and deviance are also common in all cultures.

This seems like a red herring fallacy. That simple IV/DV relationships exist in biology does not negate the fact that complex, dialectical relationships also exist.

Again, human psychology is an element of cultural systems. These systems consist of a variety of elements (all subsumed under the macro categories of institutions, concepts, and artifacts) joined in a coherent, integrated whole. Just like sugar molecules are integral to but not identical with blood sugar homeostasis, psychology is thoroughly cultural but is not the same thing as culture itself.

[–]Sewblon 0 points1 point2 points 6 years ago* (1 child) | Copy Link

You seem to think that culture and genetics are our only options for explaining variances in human behavior and cognition. That is not the case. Geography can actually cause variance in human behavior and cognition. For example, societies that are closer to the equator are more likely to practice polygamy, because more abundant food sources allow women to have and raise children without the exclusive support of a husband. Demography can also affect human behavior and cognition. Societies with a surplus of marriage aged women tend to be more violent and less happy. Societies with a surplus of marriage aged men tend to be more socially conservative. (Barber). Once you realize that there are options for explaining variance in human behavior besides culture and genetics, you don't need to conclude that language is genetic to conclude that it needs to exist in our minds before it is institutionalized, because there ways for variance in language to emerge besides genetics and culture. Claiming that language emerges and evolves culturally is pointless. Culture cannot be transmuted without language. A culture that cannot be transmuted cannot exist at all. So saying that language comes from culture is incoherent.

I never meant to imply that institutions were genetically determined. No one believes that except for committed racists.

I am not confused about function. I am confused about mechanism. In other words, the question is not what psychology does to culture. The question is how it does it.

That is fair, its possible for IV/DV relationships to exist, and for non-linear dialectical relationships to exist in the same field.

But here, it still isn't clear, at least not to me, what differentiates psychology from culture. Also, in what sense is the whole cultural system "coherent"? Most cultures include individuals who embrace mutually contradictory ideologies and express open animosity towards each other. So its hard to see in what sense they are coherent.

[–]WorldController[S] 0 points1 point2 points 6 years ago (0 children) | Copy Link

You seem to think that culture and genetics are our only options for explaining variances in human behavior and cognition.

I don't, nor do I see how this is indicated by the post you quoted.

Environment, biology, and agency are the three macro factors responsible for producing behaviors. While environment includes culture, it is not reducible to it; I never suggested otherwise.

Demography can also affect human behavior and cognition. Societies with a surplus of marriage aged women tend to be more violent and less happy. Societies with a surplus of marriage aged men tend to be more socially conservative. (Barber).

I'm not sure why you're dissociating demography from culture in this way, especially given the demographic factor you mention. Marriage, of course, is a cultural institution; customs that delineate appropriate age ranges for marriage are likewise cultural. Other demographic factors, such as nationality, race, and socioeconomic status (SES), are cultural as well.

Once you realize that there are options for explaining variance in human behavior besides culture and genetics, you don't need to conclude that language is genetic to conclude that it needs to exist in our minds before it is institutionalized, because there ways for variance in language to emerge besides genetics and culture.

The idea that non-cultural environmental factors such as geography have some direct, significant influence on the structure and particularities of human languages is absurd, especially given their historical fluidity.

Culture cannot be transmuted without language.

This is untrue. Culture can also be transmuted via non-linguistic behaviors and artifacts. Cultural change is not always stimulated orally or via written works.

saying that language comes from culture is incoherent.

Language is, in fact, a cultural factor. It consists of a variety of semiotic symbols that derive their specific features from culture. These symbols are, of course, transmitted linguistically via speech or written works.

There is nothing incoherent about this description of language, which is not contested by linguists or other academics. I'm not sure why you're having trouble fathoming how a cultural factor could come from culture. This should be self-evident.

But you're now positing that they are determined by non-cultural environmental factors, which is equally implausible. Even if such factors could account for stable, enduring institutions or behavioral traits, they cannot explain culture's highly dynamic nature, which is its characteristic feature.

Then look into the research that has investigated enculturation and socialization, which thoroughly expounds on the minute details involved. If you're more interested in how these processes generate behavior at the neurological level, then study neuropsychology.

it still isn't clear, at least not to me, what differentiates psychology from culture.

I explained that psychology is a cultural element rather than a cultural system. Are you confused about the distinction between systems and elements?

Also, in what sense is the whole cultural system "coherent"?

A system is coherent when its elements are connected via common features and processes. For example, people in the US speak English, have individualistic self-concepts, and instill values (such as competition) in their children that are conducive to cultural success. Conversely, those in traditional Asian societies speak some Asian language variety, have more collectivistic self-concepts, and instill values that emphasize group cooperation over personal ambition. These systems are coherent in that they sustain the interconnectedness of their distinctive, separate features.

Most cultures include individuals who embrace mutually contradictory ideologies and express open animosity towards each other.

As I said, progressivism and deviance are common in all (not just most) cultures. However, progressives do not decry absolutely every element in their society, such as its language and subsistence patterns; they do not reject society in toto. Instead, they are typically focused on particular problems, while accepting the wider society. Similarly, deviants usually violate only certain norms and readily conform to others.

The same dynamic is seen in biological systems. Despite being subject to any number of superficial perturbations (e.g., acne concentrated in the facial area, bluish fingertips in cold temperatures, pathogenic inflammation), organisms nevertheless comprise a coherent, systemic whole.

(Connor is not saying that culture as a theoretical construct lacks explanatory power. I am unsure why you feel she implied this.)

It was that line "culture predicts but does not cause behavior." I thought that by "cause" she meant "explain."

Here, Connor is getting at the fact that while culture establishes the parameters of behavior, allowing us to make general predictions, it does not independently generate specific outcomes in a mechanistic fashion that can be reliably and accurately deduced in all cases via practical means.

I think that what Barber is getting at is that the latter, mechanistic generation of specific outcomes could be achieved someday, but only by abandoning the concept of "culture."

I think that Barber's argument is the conception of culture as a system in which individual human behaviors are elements of that system. But they can still affect and modify each other, is really a form of circular reasoning.

Ok that is true. human beings are distinct from the atoms that make us up.

By logically prior, I meant that it seems to make conceiving of thought coherently without culture impossible.

Its true that artifacts exist independently of psychological phenomena. But I am having a hard time seeing how institutions can exist without first existing in someone's mind. The artifacts of ancient Egypt endure. But the institutions do not, because no one now lives who believes in those institutions and acts accordingly.

This part I really don't understand.

She was simply restating her view that culture doesn't independently cause behavior, which does not imply that the former lacks explanatory power.

It is silly to presume that a cultural psychologist would hold that her field is scientifically unviable from an explanatory standpoint.

Given that, as I noted, virtually all psychobehavioral traits exhibit culturally-specific features, any method of apprehending the true nature of psychology that denies or otherwise fails to account for its cultural origins and variety would be decidedly unscientific. Such methods would be akin to attempting to elucidate the properties of air while denying that it's a material substance comprised of atoms. Clearly, it's not possible to accurately understand some phenomenon if you deny its fundamental features.

The idea that the concept of "culture" is what impedes psychology's predictive power is therefore asinine. Instead, the source of the difficulty involved in accurately predicting psychobehavioral outcomes via practical methods is the exceedingly convoluted nature of psychology itself, which developmental psychologist Urie Bronfenbrenner notes in his systems theory is the product of a complex interplay between a variety of influences. To make such predictions, not only would it be necessary to conduct extended interviews on individuals and all the people who make up their micro- and mesosystems (e.g., family, friends, teachers), but one would also have to an expert on their macrosystem's history and use this knowledge to forecast future events. The former is an infeasible undertaking, whereas the latter is completely unrealistic. Not even historians have any sort of track record for predicting the future.

Moreover, consider that heritability estimates, which are the gold standard line of biological determinist evidence, are wholly lacking in predictive power. As I report here:

heritability estimates have failed to demonstrate predictive power. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's entry on heritability:

. . . [behavior geneticists] Matthews & Turkheimer (forthcoming) argue that the missing heritability problem is much more severe and prospective dissolutions are out of sight. Their analysis tracks the historical introduction of missing heritability by Maher, who commented on a broader challenge facing behavioral geneticists in the ongoing effort to explain, understand, and accurately predict the overwhelming complex relationships between genetic differences and complex behavioral differences, such as schizophrenia, depression, and intelligence. Matthews & Turkheimer offer a tripartite characterization of the problem, which treats the numerical gap between traditional and SNP heritability as just one quantitative and independent leg of a multi-faceted problem. On their view, the remaining two legs of the problem regard prediction (the challenge of accurately predicting complex behavioral phenotype from molecular genotype) and mechanism (the challenge of elucidating meaningful causal-mechanical stories that link molecular genetic differences to complex behavioral differences). Although most behavioral geneticists, as well as Bourrat and Liu, focus their efforts on the numerical gap between alternative methods of estimating heritability, Matthews and Turkheimer emphasize the fact that resolving the statistical problem will not advance prediction nor explanation of the heritability of human behavior. (bold and italics added)

While the culture model strongly predicts a variety of psychobehavioral outcomes (including IQ vis-à-vis socioeconomic status and race), there isn't a single longitudinal study in which researchers accurately predicted specific outcomes with heritability data alone.

Your position here is not only asinine, but it flies in the face of the available evidence. While the cultural model isn't perfect, it's only limited by practical considerations and has far superior predictive power to the biologistic alternative.

But they can still affect and modify each other, is really a form of circular reasoning.

Circular reasoning is a logical fallacy where one both assumes and concludes some claim sans any supporting evidence. What claim are you saying is simultaneously assumed and concluded by this description of dialectical systems?

Keep in mind that, in logic, arguments consist of three components: Premise, evidence, and conclusion. Please formulate in proper logical format what you feel is circular about the idea that systemic elements affect/modify one another.

I'm still throwing my hands up here. I don't know what you mean.

Its true that artifacts exist independently of psychological phenomena. But I am having a hard time seeing how institutions can exist without first existing in someone's mind.

You are expressing incredulity as to how historical circumstances could possibly precede any one individual's birth. Given that it's self-evident that people are born into particular circumstances with their own history, I suspect you're being disingenuous here.

The artifacts of ancient Egypt endure. But the institutions do not

These artifacts were produced by and are evidence of institutions that pre-existed individuals born into them. That these institutions no longer exist is immaterial and does not negate this.

Cultural psychologists are not particularly concerned with the possibility or "desirability" of independent variables relating to human behavior. Instead, they simply recognize that, given the dialectical relationship between culture and psychology, neither independently influences the other. While they are fully aware that a variety of variables, such as drug consumption, independently influence behavior, they know culture is not one of them.

[–]Sewblon 0 points1 point2 points 6 years ago (5 children) | Copy Link

which a cultural rather than individualistic (victim blaming) analysis reveals is resultant of sociocultural and political-economic factors that are beyond anyone's control as individuals (and which are incidentally responsible for all life outcomes).

If sociocultural and political economic factors determine all life-outcomes, then what tools remain to individuals to modify their cultures? Supposing that individuals can modify their cultures, doesn't that just collapse back into putting the responsibility on the individual? i.e. victim blaming? In other words, I am having a hard time seeing how all life outcomes being determined by factors beyond anyone's control as individuals leaves any room for individual agency.

Behavior modification begins with a culturally determinist theory; in practice—at least in the experiences of those it treats, whatever the declared intentions of its advocates—it is hard to see where it may be distinguished from the most explicit of biological determinist therapeutic programs. Both are essentially "victim-blaming," locating the problem inside the individual

That is actually the problem I have with the concept of "hegemonic masculinity" or "toxic masculinity" Whether you ascribe the causes to the person's biology, or to their socialization, you are still locating the problem at the level of the individual, and still "victim blaming" In other words, if men are having problems because other men made them that way, then how did those other men get that way?

A corollary of extreme cultural determinism is that individuals ought to reflect accurately their family circumstances and their social class in their own behavior. We ought to be able to predict the actions of persons from their social histories. Since it is evident that we cannot make such predictions, at least in many cases, naive cultural determinism is clearly wrong. (pp. 266-267, bold added)

That all sounds reasonable. But how do you square that with "individual life-outcomes are determined entirely by socio-cultural and political-economic factors"? That quote you cited from "Not In Our Genes." sounds like an argument for free-will, or at least an argument for an individualist approach to psychology. Your position in the original post sounds like an argument for cultural-political-economic hard determinism. You believe that human behavior is perfectly predictable from external circumstances, or you don't. You can't have it both ways.

What he seemed to be arguing, at least to me, is that human behavior is better understood through maximizing inclusive fitness rather than following culture. For example, he argued that polygamy is a product of a shortage of marriageable men, not patriarchy. So saying that he is just arguing semantics is not entirely true.

When it came to the aspect of work like this that people recognize as political most often, that of biological differences between races or sexes, or lack thereof. Barber punted. He said "They may exist. They may not exist. But even if they do exist, they are too small and too variable across space and time to matter." So I am not convinced that he was writing this with a conservative agenda. But I am convinced that he is a coward when it comes to what the implications of this theories may or may not be. So I would charge him with cowardice rather than pushing a hidden agenda. But more importantly, the concept of "culture" has also been used historically to blame marginalized groups for their own problems, like when conservatives blame lack of black achievement on black culture. Or when religious reactionaries blame modern problems on the secularization of the culture. So it isn't clear that the cultural paradigm is unworthy of suspicion from a leftist perspective.

[–]WorldController[S] 0 points1 point2 points 6 years ago* (4 children) | Copy Link

If sociocultural and political economic factors determine all life-outcomes, then what tools remain to individuals to modify their cultures? Supposing that individuals can modify their cultures, doesn't that just collapse back into putting the responsibility on the individual? i.e. victim blaming?

You are relying on a strictly proximal cause analysis, which inevitably results in victim blaming. Clearly, if we give causative primacy to immediate factors here (such as individuals themselves), this means these factors must necessarily be at fault. Basically, this standpoint asserts that, since individuals exist, they are to blame for their life outcomes, which cannot be attributable to external factors. This argument is flawed because the mere fact that individuals exist as independent entities does not necessitate that their outcomes are wholly determined by internal factors. Theoretically, it could be that these outcomes are instead generated by environmental factors; there is nothing about being an independent entity that logically precludes this.

Rather than proximal causes, a more appropriate level of analysis would focus on ultimate causes of behavior. Sure, individuals think and behave in certain ways. But why do they think in particular ways, and not others? For instance, is it an individual's "fault" that they were brought up in the US and acquired American English, learned Western styles of color perception, and adopted the Western individualistic self-concept? Of course not. Just because they were active participants in the activities that imparted these traits to them does not mean they are ultimately responsible for acquiring them. Instead, the ultimate responsibility lies in the cultural system itself. But for that system, these traits would not exist in any people at all.

Keep in mind that, not unlike geological systems, cultural systems, while relatively stable in the short term, are constantly in flux and exhibit dramatic change over time. That cultural systems change and that individuals participate in this change is undeniable. In these systems, the processes that either effect changes or function to preserve the status quo are called "politics." All cultural elements have varying degrees (as well as kinds) of political influence. Generally speaking, significant cultural change requires political organization, meaning that individuals themselves, as isolated elements, lack the power to effect such change.

Political groups may use any number of tools, including sociocultural factors, to modify their cultures. Your question here seems to imply that, if life outcomes are socioculturally determined, this means that people cannot use sociocultural means to exert an influence on culture. If you are in fact implying this, please elaborate.

In other words, I am having a hard time seeing how all life outcomes being determined by factors beyond anyone's control as individuals leaves any room for individual agency.

"individual agency" is really just cultural agency. Says Ratner in Macro Cultural Psychology:

The fact that we actively and teleologically use cultural psychological phenomena as mediational means to achieve cultural ends means that we are cultural agents. "Mediational means" really refers to a process of enculturation whereby people actively participate in their own enculturation by actively using and taking over cultural factors as their own mechanisms of behavior. . . .

. . .

Acculturation of psychology does not only emanate from the cultural side, from cultural leaders who seek to promulgate cultural factors. Individuals participate in their own socialization. We actively seek to become socialized in the mores of the culture (Ratner, 2006a, pp. 102-103). Idiosyncratic psychology would doom us to a noncultural existence where we could not communicate or coordinate with others, receive their support and stimulation, or participate in cultural activities.

Agency is not a private, personal attribute that seeks personal expression; it is cultural in the sense of striving to acquire cultural competencies. Agency is the subjective side of socialization that complements objective pressures from macro cultural factors. (p. 183, bold added)

Humans are a highly social species. Since psychology is thoroughly cultural, virtually all our behaviors have some kind of underlying, socially meaningful logic. Indeed, human behaviors do not make any sense when considered apart from their social context. This accounts for culture shock, itself a product of ethnocentrism, which makes foreign behaviors seem utterly bizarre and alien to us. This response results from an inability to regard unfamiliar behaviors on their own, distinctive, socially constructed (cultural) terms. It demonstrates how human behavior, as well as individuals' anticipation and perception of others' behavior, is fundamentally cultural.

I neglected to provide the rest of the above quote from Not in Our Genes that mentions behavioral modification. I think it should put things in proper context:

Both are essentially "victim-blaming," locating the problem inside the individual, who must be tailored to fit the social order that he or she so evidently mismatches at present. Both are the reverse of that slogan of 1968: "Do not adjust your mind; the fault is in reality." (p. 177, bold added)

What makes behavioral modification a form of victim blaming is that it ideologically misrepresents individuals and their dysfunctional behavioral responses as the problem rather than the cultural system that generates their dysfunction. Behavioral modification seeks to "fix" deviant behavior so that it is more in line with social mores. (Incidentally, this is an example of systemic attempts to preserve cultural coherence.)

Again, you are relying on a proximal cause analysis here. Ascribing life outcomes to environmental factors only seems like victim blaming if you assume internal factors have causal primacy. You have not justified your assumption that individuals, out of logical necessity, must be meaningfully responsible for their outcomes. Your argument, that since individuals exist and make decisions they are responsible for how they turn out, just begs the question: What's responsible for them making these decisions in the first place?

I personally believe that toxic masculinity exists and have no problem with the construct. It is something I've observed in men and which I've found unpleasant throughout my life. Simply noting that it exists is not "victim blaming," any more than observing how American English is the dominant language variety in the US means you're "blaming" Americans for acquiring it. Just like macro cultural factors explain the latter's prevalence, the former is similarly a product of such factors, meaning individual men are not ultimately at fault.

Just because life outcomes are generated by particular sociocultural and political-economic factors does not mean individual life outcomes can be predicted with complete accuracy and reliability via practical means. This is all Lewontin et al. are saying: Since "in many cases" human behavior is inconsistent with predictions made from a broad understanding of a person's milieu, such a naive cultural determinism is false. This is not to say, however, that a thoroughly detailed case study probing into all of the specific environmental factors that an individual has been exposed to cannot yield more accurate predictions. What accounts for any failures in such predictions isn't genetic factors, but rather unacknowledged environmental influences, as well as faulty analyses of how all factors considered interact to produce specific behaviors.

Cultural systems, at all levels, are highly heterogeneous. It is this feature rather than genetics that accounts for the vast behavioral diversity observed even in particular milieu. As I explain here in reference to psychopathy:

To answer your question a bit more directly, the reason that psychopathic traits are expressed differently among individuals is simply that every person's life experience is unique. As developmental psychologist Urie Bronfenbrenner notes in his systems theory, psychobehavioral outcomes are resultant of a complex interplay between a variety of factors presented by the micro-, meso-, and macrosystems that constitute one's milieu. Each person occupies a particular social position that affects their level of exposure to the cultural factors that generate these traits, as well as the manner in which these factors are perceived and processed. Basically, the vast heterogeneity of complex cultural systems accounts for their considerable diversity of psychobehavioral outcomes, including psychopathy.

What makes individual outcomes difficult to accurately predict is the extreme and nuanced complexity of interactions between all of the environmental influences involved. This does not so much speak against the environmentalist position as it does against particular methodologies.

Keep in mind that the naive cultural determinism noted by Lewontin et al., which holds that broad factors such as social class and family circumstances should be able to support accurate predictions for all sorts of psychobehavioral outcomes in all individuals, is distinct from the idea that both specific and broad (micro-, meso-, and macrosystemic) factors account for these outcomes.

What he seemed to be arguing, at least to me, is that human behavior is better understood through maximizing inclusive fitness rather than following culture. For example, he argued that polygamy is a product of a shortage of marriageable men, not patriarchy.

First, this is an example of a fallacy Ratner refers to in Macro Cultural Psychology as "false abstraction", which is a form of overextrapolation:

One error social scientists make is to misconstrue concrete features as more general and abstract than they actually are. They make it appear that a particular form of education—for example, American, urban, middle-class schooling—represents education in general, or that romantic love is love in general, or that American elections constitute or define "democracy" and that all democracy involves American-style elections, or that commerce is capitalistic commerce. This is the essence of ethnocentrism or one-dimensional thinking. It makes it seem that the particular is universal. It reduces the potential to the actual (Ratner, 1991, Chapter 3). (p. 234, bold added)

This is the same kind of faulty reasoning conservatives use to denounce communism. According to them, since certain concrete examples of communism failed in the past, this means that all future attempts to transition into communism must necessarily fail. This is erroneous because failures in particular concrete instances of some abstraction do not speak to failures in the abstraction per se. For instance, just because some particular school fails to educate its students well does not mean schooling, as a whole, is doomed to failure. All it means is that this school failed for reasons specific to it that do not apply to schooling as a whole.

Here, Barber is drawing the similarly erroneous conclusion that, just because these particular concrete examples of polygamy (by which I think you specifically mean polygyny) are due to a lack of marriageable men, making it a function of "inclusive fitness," this means all human behavior can be explained in terms of this abstraction. Just like it's fallacious to claim that particular failed communist transition states represent the essence of communism, the notion that these specific forms of polygyny noted by Barber define polygyny as a whole, meaning that all polygyny (and by extension all human behavior) must be a function of inclusive fitness, is illogical.

Second, his apparent assumption here that what qualifies as a "marriageable man" lacks cultural origins flies in the face of the available evidence. As cultural anthropologists observe, beauty standards are highly sociohistorically variable, meaning that perceptions of beauty lack some particular, consistent genetic basis. Even if polygyny can in some cases be described as maximizing inclusive fitness, this does not mean that the specific forms that it takes in the societies referenced by Barber are genetically determined, or that any other actual or potential forms for that matter (including those that do not contribute to inclusive fitness) must be similarly determined. Clearly, since the beauty standards that determine the qualities of a "marriageable man" in these societies are cultural, their particular form of polygyny, which is a consequence of these standards, must be cultural as well.

Finally, the above text in bold is a false dichotomy. It could very well be that polygyny in these societies is rooted in other sociocultural and political-economic factors besides patriarchy. In fact, according to cultural anthropologists, not only does this happen to be the case, but the characterization of polygyny as sexist exploitation is Western ethnocentric claptrap. Reports Palomar College Professor Emeritus of Anthropology Dennis O'Neil:

When most people think of polygamy, they assume that it is a pattern in which a number of women share the same husband. This relatively common form of polygamy is known as polygyny. . . .

Polygyny is most common today in Moslem nations, among cattle herding societies of East Africa, and in the remnants of the old kingdoms of West Africa. The rationale for a man to have more than one wife is usually a combination of more sexual partners, more children, and, above all, increased social prestige. However, the European belief that polygyny is nothing more than the exploitation of women and that wives in a polygynous household are weak is somewhat of an ethnocentric projection that does not fit the reality in all societies.

Among the Turkana of Kenya, for instance, a wife generally considers it an economic advantage for her family to have additional co-wives since the women help each other in doing domestic chores and in caring for their animals. The co-wives may also help their husband find a new bride. They interview young women with a goal of finding one who will be compatible with them and hard working. Their husband usually must have their approval before going ahead with the wedding. For him, an additional wife also has disadvantages. The co-wives may get together, gang-up on him, and force him to do things that he does not want to do. However, he achieves a higher social status by having more wives. (bold in original, italics added)

As is evident from the above, social and economic considerations are paramount when it comes to typical forms of polygyny. Nowhere does "inclusive fitness" enter in as as a consideration. To the extent that polygyny maximizes inclusive fitness, this effect is entirely incidental.

So saying that he is just arguing semantics is not entirely true.

He seems to have some issue with the term "culture" and a personal preference for "social learning," which again is a cultural process. Such a preference for a particular descriptive term in favor of one that you have some personal beef with is the essence of arguing semantics. It's wholly unscientific, which is why his position here lacks merit.

So I am not convinced that he was writing this with a conservative agenda.

His personal motives notwithstanding, naturalistic theories of human society and behavior all serve this same ideological function. Ratner touches on this issue as well in Macro Cultural Psychology:

A fantastic variety of ideological strategies have been developed to obscure, deny, and marginalize concrete society and psychology. These strategies largely consist of denying the four qualitative distinctions I mentioned at the beginning of Chapter 2: the distinction between animal and human social life-psychology, the distinction between infantile and adult social life-behavior, the distinction between primitive people's social life-psychology and that of modern people, and the distinction between biological determinism of precultural behavior and biological potentiating of cultural behavior. Collapsing, or leveling, these distinctions ultimately serves to minimize the cultural formation of human psychology by reducing it to noncultural mechanisms found in animals and infants. Leveling qualitative distinctions obscures concrete culture and concrete psychology. These strategies have become institutionalized as valid, objective, normative ways of thinking about society and psychology. They are widely used by social scientists who do not necessarily have the politically conservative outlook that fomented the strategies. However, the strategies have the same conservative function and effect when used by anyone. A scholar's self-proclaimed politics do not counteract the conservative politics that are built into social science theories and methodologies. What one does is more important than what one professes. (pp. 232-233, bold added)

This is akin to how racism, according to social scientists, refers to any speech or behavior that bolsters white privilege, regardless of intent. Personal intent and political function are not the same thing.

Naturalistic theories amount to what is known in Marxist philosophy as "reification." According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on the topic:

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Ecological systems theory

Ecological systems theory (also called development in context or human ecology theory) was developed by Urie Bronfenbrenner. It offers a framework through which community psychologists examine individuals' relationships within communities and the wider society. The theory is also commonly referred to as the ecological/systems framework. It identifies five environmental systems with which an individual interacts.

Polygyny

Polygyny (; from Neoclassical Greek πολυγυνία from πολύ- poly- "many", and γυνή gyne "woman" or "wife") is the most common and accepted form of polygamy, entailing the marriage of a man with several women. Polyandry is another form of polygamy in which women practice having two or more husbands. Most countries which permit polygyny are Muslim-majority countries.

In some countries where polygamy is illegal but polygyny is still a cultural norm, and sometimes even in countries where polygamy is legal, men sometimes have one or more mistresses.

Reification (Marxism)

In Marxism, reification (German: Verdinglichung, literally: 'making into a thing') is the process by which social relations are perceived as inherent attributes of the people involved in them, or attributes of some product of the relation, such as a traded commodity.

This implies that objects are transformed into subjects and subjects are turned into objects, with the result that subjects are rendered passive or determined, while objects are rendered as the active, determining factor. Hypostatization refers to an effect of reification which results from supposing that whatever can be named, or conceived abstractly, must actually exist, an ontological and epistemological fallacy.

The concept is related to, but distinct from, Marx's theories of alienation and commodity fetishism.

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In a section of Capital titled “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof”, Karl Marx argues that certain social categories that might appear natural are in fact the products of social and economic relations among people. A commodity, such as gold or coal or corn, has some natural properties, as well as some properties that are obviously attached to them by people. A commodity’s value is, according to Marx, a product of the labor it takes to produce it. The social character of individual labor, though, is hidden (Marx 1867). It might seem that a bushel of corn, as a component of our economic system, is a product of a farmer working the land. But Marx argues that commodities can only be understood in terms of social structures as a whole.

Marx also argues that the sources of these structures are neither intellectual nor psychological. Instead, the ideological features of a society are determined by the material relations among people in that society, including technologies, systems of production, and relations of power.

Marx himself is largely interested in describing these structures and the interactions among them. The discussion of commodities is a rare instance of an ontological claim by Marx. Subsequent philosophers, however, put claims of the constructedness of social entities at the center of social critique. Lukács 1923 argues that capitalism extensively “reifies” social entities—that is, it turns phenomena that arise from an oppressive economic system into features of the world that we regard as natural. Members of the Frankfurt School, especially Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, build on Lukács to argue not just that the social world becomes “second nature” to us, but that the reification itself is part of the maintenance of the reified system. That is, our current social order is maintained, at least in part, by the causal effects of our treating social entities and categories as if they were natural (Adorno & Horkheimer 1947, Adorno 1966).

Uncovering social categories becomes a centerpiece of subsequent social criticism. If oppressive structures are to be dismantled, the social nature of the everyday world first needs to be revealed. The work of the Frankfurt School in particular influenced contemporary feminist and race theory (see section 5.4). (bold added)

This is consistent with Ratner's discussion of the topic in Cultural Psychology and Qualitative Methodology: Theoretical and Empirical Considerations:

In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels (1845/1964, p. 37) stated that, "If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-processes as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-processes." Marx pursued this analysis in his analysis of reification. He said that the tendency to reify human activities—to miscontrue them as inhuman, natural, fixed processes and products—is rooted in the exchange of commodities. In commercial exchange, the value of products is primary. Humans are defined in terms of the value of the products they exchange. Even the laborer himself is measured as a value. When humans are regarded as bearers of value they are interchangeable with things, and the human element is obscured. The exchange of values appears to take on a life of its own independent of humans. Reifying human phenomena as autonomous, natural things is therefore caused by the nature of bourgeois economic activity (Rubin, 1928/1972). (pp. 107-108, bold added)

Remember, all elements in cultural systems have some particular kind and degree of political influence. Indeed, the biological determinist mindset is thoroughly ethnocentric (read: conservative) and functions to preserve social inequality. It is a form of Marxian false consciousness. Buying into it as a leftist is no less naive than accepting Nazi eugenics as a plausible, scientifically valid construct.

But more importantly, the concept of "culture" has also been used historically to blame marginalized groups for their own problems, like when conservatives blame lack of black achievement on black culture. Or when religious reactionaries blame modern problems on the secularization of the culture.

Certain subcultures do, in fact, fail to inculcate the proper habitus necessary to succeed in the wider society. For instance, parental socioeconomic status (SES) is one of the strongest predictors of IQ. Low-SES environments contain a variety of stressors that hinder cognitive growth and have a deleterious effect on working memory, which limits minimizes educational and occupational success. As I've stated, all psychobehavioral outcomes are ultimately rooted in particular sociocultural and political-economic factors.

The problem with cultural racists is that, while they recognize that cultural factors of some kind are responsible for blacks' failures, they fail to connect blacks' situation to broader factors and instead resort to blaming blacks themselves (another form of victim blaming). For instance, not only are many blacks raised in poverty (a political-economic factor), but they suffer from social stress by virtue of their subaltern racial status, which is a product of institutionalized racism (a sociocultural factor). These factors combine to produce a subculture that is relatively powerless to inculcate in its members the kind of habitus that is conducive to cultural success. If it were not for the stressors of SES inequality and racism, the black community would not be faced with this problem.

You are again conflating culture in the abstract with concrete culture. Cultural racists attribute blacks' failures to their concrete culture; they do not rely on a general, abstract theory of culture to specifically explain these failures. The same applies to religious zealots' complaints about secular culture. They are not lambasting culture as a whole, or culture as a descriptive construct, nor do they take issue with concrete religious culture, or with culture as an abstract model for their religion. Rather, they are strictly and exclusively at odds with contemporary, concrete cultural secularization, because they see this specific form of culture as an insult and a threat to their own culture.

So it isn't clear that the cultural paradigm is unworthy of suspicion from a leftist perspective.

The cultural paradigm is what all leftist theorists rely on. It is also the consensus among social scientists. Again, broadly speaking this paradigm merely asserts that cultures are coherent, integrated, dynamic systems consisting of institutions, concepts, and artifacts. Why do you feel this model gives leftists cause for suspicion?

The irony here is that, while you appear to oppose reactionary politics, your promulgation of biological determinism is about as reactionary as can be. Again, naturalistic theories of human society/behavior have existed since ancient times as an ideological justification for ruling class power. Your efforts here are contributing to politics that seek to revert to ancient mechanisms of social control.

Habitus (sociology)

Habitus () is ingrained habits, skills and dispositions. It is the way that individuals perceive the social world around them and react to it. These dispositions are usually shared by people with similar backgrounds (such as social class, religion, nationality, ethnicity, education and profession). The habitus is acquired through imitation (mimesis) and is the reality that individuals are socialized, which includes their individual experience and opportunities.

Cultural racism

Cultural racism, sometimes called neo-racism, new racism, or differentialist racism, is a concept that has been applied to prejudices and discrimination based on cultural differences between ethnic or racial groups. This includes the idea that some cultures are superior to others, and that various cultures are fundamentally incompatible and should not co-exist in the same society or state. In this it differs from biological or scientific racism, meaning prejudices and discrimination rooted in perceived biological differences between ethnic or racial groups.

The concept of cultural racism was developed in the 1980s and 1990s by West European scholars such as Martin Barker, Étienne Balibar, and Pierre-André Taguieff who were influenced by American critical race theory.

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Girls go through puberty earlier, and therefore have slightly greater maturity throughout the majority of their education.

This does not follow. Puberty is merely a physiological process whereby the capacity to reproduce develops. Please provide evidence that it generates specific psychobehavioral traits.

The rest of your evidence, being merely correlational, does not support your claim that biological factors are implicated here. In order to determine whether some variable (x) causes another variable (y), y causes x, both are caused by some third variable (z), or the relation between the two is merely incidental, experiments are necessary. This is a basic principle of research. In order to support your claim, you must provide some kind of experimental evidence. Natural experiments and other longitudinal studies will suffice.

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Correlation does not imply causation

In statistics, the phrase "correlation does not imply causation" refers to the inability to legitimately deduce a cause-and-effect relationship between two variables solely on the basis of an observed association or correlation between them. The idea that "correlation implies causation" is an example of a questionable-cause logical fallacy, in which two events occurring together are taken to have established a cause-and-effect relationship. This fallacy is also known by the Latin phrase cum hoc ergo propter hoc ("with this, therefore because of this"). This differs from the fallacy known as post hoc ergo propter hoc ("after this, therefore because of this"), in which an event following another is seen as a necessary consequence of the former event.

Natural experiment

A natural experiment is an empirical study in which individuals (or clusters of individuals) are exposed to the experimental and control conditions that are determined by nature or by other factors outside the control of the investigators. The process governing the exposures arguably resembles random assignment. Thus, natural experiments are observational studies and are not controlled in the traditional sense of a randomized experiment. Natural experiments are most useful when there has been a clearly defined exposure involving a well defined subpopulation (and the absence of exposure in a similar subpopulation) such that changes in outcomes may be plausibly attributed to the exposure.

Longitudinal study

A longitudinal study (or longitudinal survey, or panel study) is a research design that involves repeated observations of the same variables (e.g., people) over short or long periods of time (i.e., uses longitudinal data). It is often a type of observational study, although they can also be structured as longitudinal randomized experiments.Longitudinal studies are often used in social-personality and clinical psychology, to study rapid fluctuations in behaviors, thoughts, and emotions from moment to moment or day to day; in developmental psychology, to study developmental trends across the life span; and in sociology, to study life events throughout lifetimes or generations; and in consumer research and political polling to study consumer trends. The reason for this is that, unlike cross-sectional studies, in which different individuals with the same characteristics are compared, longitudinal studies track the same people, and so the differences observed in those people are less likely to be the result of cultural differences across generations. Longitudinal studies thus make observing changes more accurate and are applied in various other fields.

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Given that there is no reliable scientific evidence that specific psychobehavioral outcomes have some particular, consistent genetic basis and that, as Ratner reports in "The Cultural Psychology of Liberation," "[c]ross-cultural psychologists have proven that all psychological phenomena vary in different cultures," we can safely conclude that these outcomes are instead rooted in certain sociocultural and political-economic factors, which is consistent with Hochschild's analysis above.

Indeed, biological determinism, which holds that psychobehavioral traits are innate, is mere bourgeois ideology. As Harvard evolutionary biologist RC Lewontin, Cambridge neuroscientist Steven Rose, and the late Harvard psychologist Leon Kamin remark in Not in Our Genes: Biology, Ideology, and Human Nature: "Biological determinist ideas are part of the attempt to preserve the inequalities of our society and to shape human nature in [the ruling class'] own image" (p. 15). Being leftists, we shouldn't pay any serious mind to these ideas and instead regard them with keen, critical skepticism.

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Posting an article from 1979 and a book from 1984 isn't super convincing.

This is chronological snobbery, which is a logical fallacy. By this logic, we have grounds to reject Newton's laws of motion, Darwin's theory of evolution, and Einstein's theory of relativity, simply because they were formulated a long time ago. Clearly, a work's date of publication has no bearing on its veracity.

Even the strongest evo-psych proponent doesn't believe in biological determinism as you've defined it. The emphasis for at least the last couple decades has been on biological and social interactions.

It's not only evolutionary psychologists who maintain that specific psychobehavioral outcomes have some particular, consistent genetic basis. Mainstream psychology as a whole promotes the "genetic predisposition" hypothesis, which is the idea that specific sets of genes make particular traits more or less likely to manifest in response to experience. However, as I stated, there is no reliable scientific evidence for this.

And, I mean, when you can literally administer testosterone to someone and observe statistically-significant effects on their behavior 40 minutes later, it's kind of hard to argue that biology is irrelevant.

First, this is a straw man, which is a logical fallacy. I did not claim or suggest that biology is irrelevant or does not affect behavior. Indeed, human biology is obviously necessary for the acquisition of complex, cultural behavioral traits, a capacity lacking in all other species. However, when it comes to specific forms of these traits, there is no reliable evidence that they are somehow generated or even "influenced" by a particular, consistent set of genes.

Second, the behavioral effects of psychoactive compounds (including drugs, alcohol, and hormones) are very general and context-dependent. Hormones do not consistently produce specific effects in all people irrespective of context. This is in line with the above study's findings, whose participants were fully aware of the possibility of being dosed with testosterone (what psychologists refer to as "priming") and whose controls experienced placebo effects. Other studies have found similar results, showing that it isn't testosterone per se that accounts for traditionally "masculine" traits like aggression in humans but rather culturally derived cognitive mediations that generate this behavior.

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Title	This detailed, well-researched post that got me banned from r/ShitLiberalsSay
Author	WorldController
Upvotes	29
Comments	49
Date	February 28, 2020 9:42 PM UTC (6 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates/comments/fb26dm/this_detailed_wellresearched_post_that_got_me/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates/this-detailed-well-researched-post-that-got-me.1063946 https://theredarchive.com/post/1063946

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