Human nature in mind

Abstract

A Mind of Her Own: The Evolutionary Psychology of Womenby Anne Campbell, Oxford University Press, 2002. £21.99 (393 pages) ISBN 0 19 850498 5A Mind of Her Own is a well-organized, well-written, up-to-date textbook on evolutionary psychology, which stands out from the pack in its refreshingly feminist perspective and its particularly good treatment of women and crime. The feminism is similar to that in work by writers such as Barbara Smuts, Patricia Gowaty, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy and (in his emphasis on female mate choice) Geoffrey Miller. Although Campbell is polite to social-constructionist schools of feminism and summarizes their various approaches lucidly, she highlights the misunderstandings and misconceptions involved in their rejection of – and worse, lack of engagement with – evolutionary psychology.Campbell is especially interesting when she discusses violence and crime among women (she has in the past conducted extensive research on female gang members). She maintains that current criminological theories about female crime are ‘a mess’ (p. 201). Social scientists are confused about answers, in part because they often address different questions (e.g. the extent and causes of gender differences, as opposed to the factors that make some women but not others commit crime); but also because of a feminist ideology that frequently treats female criminals as victims but at times makes heroes of them on the grounds that they are acting in opposition to male oppression. Even more confusingly, some theorists invoke feminist epistemology to rule out even the possibility of explanation, replacing it with interpretive description.Campbell provides order by situating theory and data in an evolutionary framework. Thus, crime is a way of seeking resources and the need for such resources is gender neutral. Yes, control theory is correct in its finding that women are more tightly controlled than men, but this has to do with evolutionary theories of males seeking control over female sexuality rather than with crime. Similarly, power differentials between the sexes are not causes of gender differences in criminal behavior despite claims that they are. Rather, the well-documented male tendency towards risk-taking, reflecting as it does sex differences in the variance of reproductive success, explains much of gender difference in criminal behavior. Intriguingly and controversially, Campbell repeatedly argues that the major sex differences in aggression involve not differences in the impetus to aggress but in the greater strength of the female's inhibitory response.The chief weakness of Campbell's text is one that is shared by much of experimental psychology (in the opinion of this social–cultural anthropologist reviewer): Campbell gives almost as much weight to studies done in a single society – our own – as she does to those involving careful cross-cultural research. But if evolutionary psychology is the study of human nature then it cannot be based primarily on research conducted in the most exotic of human societies: industrial society, with its mind-numbingly vast scale and its strict age-grading of young people, is surely atypical in the span of human evolution and history. Moreover, because our species is specialized for particular cultural niches, resulting in considerable cross-cultural variability in behavior, findings based primarily on only a few societies might be encouraging but never definitive or even adequate. Cross-cultural research – what there is of it – does indeed tend to support the claims of evolutionary psychology, but for the present it would be wise to distinguish between research findings that have already received such support from hypotheses tested in only one or two closely related societies, and those that haven't.This caveat notwithstanding, I will have no hesitation in using A Mind of Her Own in my own senior undergraduate course on ‘Human Nature’, and I suspect that here we have the textbook for which many of us have been looking.