Blog 2

Fertility and race perception predict voter preference for Barack Obama

Carlos David Navarrete, Melissa M. McDonald, Michael L. Mott,

Joseph Cesario, Robert Sapolsky

      After the monumental 2008 American presidential election, scientists were given an unique opportunity to study the effects that a relatively young, black American candidate would cause on the American consciousness, both during and after the election he subsequently won. The purpose of this particular study was threefold. First, to study the effects of the menstrual cycle on a woman's willingness to vote for Obama under the assumption he would perceived as an attractive, powerful man. In other words, an desirable mate and father for her children. Second, to explore whether as these cycling women would see Obama as more of a “dangerous agent” due to “extending [the] logic” that because black men are stereotyped as dangerous they would be negatively appraised as women approached ovulation, thus decreasing a woman's willingness to vote for him. Finally, the third purpose was to see how these two factors (race perception and the mate desirability during the menstrual cycle) would work when introduced to the third factor: political beliefs.

      They studied two groups of women, a sample of exclusively white women aged 18-22 for the first study and 186 white women and 38 black women for the second. The first study had the women meet many eligibility requirements (did not use oral contraceptives, willing to state voting preference, etc) and they then completed an online survey to measure social attitudes, personality, and who they wished to vote for. Their menstrual cycles were then inferred and their voting preference was then studied from September to election date. The second study was done online by survey, participants were asked questions about social attitudes, image, demographic items, and who they would be voting for in the election. In this study there was also a skin colour perception facet where participants were given a range of colours and asked which one was closest to Obama's skin colour, ranging from dark (1) to light (10). 

      Their results showed that woman’s preference for Obama was consistent with which stage of the menstrual cycle they were in. In both studies, as the risk of conception rose, so did support for Obama. The second studied also showed that this support was also connected to how participants viewed his skin colour. The lighter they believed his skin to be, the greater the increase in support with conception risk increase. When they perceived him as darker, the opposite results were found. These results were amplified when women were conservatives, which was what was expected due to the fact that liberal women would vote for Obama no matter what.

      There are several methodological flaws in this survey, the most obvious being the number of people who participated in these studies. Drawing conclusions for an entire species based on results found from 62 white women from Michigan State University is not only poor science, it's dangerous. Furthermore, there is only one study that is used to justify that ovulating women find black men a threat, and that study was carried out by the author of this paper, Navarrete (Navarrete et al., 2009). Once again this paper draws its conclusions based on the results found from 77 white women from Michigan State University, a very specific slice of the female population. The two papers were also published around the same time, the supporting paper was published in June of 2009 and this paper's initial receipt being submitted October 7^th, 2009. With the close publications of these two papers and the probable difficulty of finding women who were willing to participate in such a personal survey, it's possible that the same women who participated in the first study, which found that women have a race bias across the menstrual cycle, also participated in the study with Obama, thus making the results even more questionable. Furthermore, they were not controlling for extraneous variables. All of these studies were done at the same time, perhaps these sways were due to the news, statistics they had heard, or speeches by himself or McCain.

     Finally, one statement that is particularly troubling is that “...our findings raise the question of whether Barack Obama's success as a politician may in part be due to the possibility that, at a nonconscious yet operative level of cognitive processing, most American voters may not consider him to be black.” Obama is black. He considers himself black. The election and media focused on how important and historical this election was because he was black. American voters consider him to be black. I think what these authors were trying to say is that Obama is not a stereotype, “A dangerous agent”. To attribute Obama's success to him not being perceived as black is ridiculous and even insulting. Even if these results do hold up under more extensive and larger testing, I don't think it's fair to assume that these biases or preferences would actually affect actual voting behaviour.

      This research attempts to contribute to our knowledge about female preferences with respect to ovulation. They find support for all of their hypotheses which were constructed with respect to the theory that females avoid men they perceive of risks at times they are likely to conceive. However, with such small research numbers it's hard to draw any definite conclusions. There are some interesting aspects to this paper, but it is hardly anything new and the attempted application to the election seems shaky and tenuous.

References:

Navarrete, C. D., Fessler, D. M. T., Santos Fleischman, D., & Geyer, J. (2009). Race bias tracks conception risk across the menstrual cycle. Psychological Science, 20(6), 661–665.

Navarrete, C. D., McDonald, M.M.., Mott, M.L., Cesario, J., Sapolsky, R. (2010). Fertility and race  perception predict voter preference for Barack Obama. Evolution and Human Behaviour, 31(6), 394-399.