Arachnophobia in women “explained” by evo psych

This article from the BBC makes the claim that women are innately afraid of spiders and snakes because such creatures posed threats to their offspring in prehistoric times.

Is this a feminist issue? Well, the interpretation of data in the study seems like some pretty misogynistic conjecture to me. In the study, 11-month-old infants were shown pictures of human faces (happy or fearful) paired with pictures of spiders. The girls’ reaction was to look longer at the happy face, while the boys divided their time equally.

The article reads:

The researchers concluded that the young girls were confused as to why someone would be happy to be twinned with a spider, and were quick to associate pictures of arachnids with fear.

The boys, it seems, remained totally indifferent emotionally.

This strikes me as wild extrapolation. First of all, there is no mention of the girls displaying emotional distress, just a longer look. Off the cuff I can come up with an alternate explanation: the girls could be responding to the happy face without consideration of the spider at all. One could just as easily make the conjecture that the infant girls are already being primed to respond more to human emotion than infant boys.

Furthermore, these infants are all nearly a year old. That is more than enough time for them to pick up on the social cues of their parents. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I seem to recall a study being done to show that infant girls tend to be more closely guarded and attended when they are upset than infant boys. It follows, then, that they could have observed their parents exhibiting more distress about potential threats than infant boys would have noticed.

A study done with year-old infants, producing such ambiguous results, does not seem nearly sufficient to draw the conclusions this article attempts to sell. Unfortunately, the average reader is likely to take it at face value, because picking it apart takes a modicum of effort. This is science reporting, after all – and all I have to offer on that subject is this comic .