What's the evolutionary advantage of shyness

October 23, 2005 8:53 AM

What is the evolutionary advantage of shyness, particularly in early girls' adolescence?

As the father of two young girls whose parents are both shy, I am concerned about how they will fare when they get to the 11-15 year-old stage with all the peer pressure and social pressures they're certain to encounter. I started wondering why it's such a common trait across cultures. Maybe understanding it can help to mitigate its effects when the time comes.

So, how has being shy helped in evolutionary terms?

posted by ykjay to Human Relations (30 answers total)

I started wondering why it's such a common trait across cultures

Is it really?
posted by meehawl at 8:55 AM on October 23, 2005

Isn't shyness just a manifestation of danger avoidance, only in a social context? There's nothing particularily damaging about shyness, and from a biological perspective, I'd bet that shyness is probably an overall advantage.
posted by loquax at 9:06 AM on October 23, 2005

I guess as it's more common among girls (at least that's what my social conditioning tells me) that girls are less likely to get killed and have kids if they are shy. A girl would loose in a fight against a man in most situations, so if they just act all shy they will either get ignored, or end up pregnant.
posted by alexst at 9:23 AM on October 23, 2005

are you sure your supposition is sensible

The original statement presupposes that "shyness" is an inherent trait universally located within a specific gender and phase of life. The framing then invokes evolutionary exegisis, probably based on genetic determinism, to explore the implications of this universality. The argument is thus framed as a tautology.

I'd think that "shyness" has to do more with a differential presentation of face within a culture, probably aligned with the exercise of power. I see no evidence that adolescent boys are necessarily less shy than adolescent girls. I think ti has a lot to do with the ratio of males to females within a culture, the relations between private and public spaces occupied by both, and the dynamic of the class and economic hierarchies operating within the cultures.

If the expression of "shyness" can be quantified as a deference to another actor within a social setting, then I think I see patterns of "shyness" expressed throughout development and mediated through power relationships. I suppose an extreme example would be the mandated deference of slaves or bondsmen to their masters. Within lower SES, highly structured work environments, I think you see a version of this the relations between workers and line management.

Most obviously in contemporary developed cultures, I see that the excretory functions of the body are often deployed as a way of producing "shyness" within adults as a form of social conditioning. Beig forced to ask permission of a supervisor to relieve an aching bladder or colon is a cheap, effective way of re-enacting "shyness" throughout the work day.
posted by meehawl at 9:34 AM on October 23, 2005 [1 favorite]

I see no evidence that adolescent boys are necessarily less shy than adolescent girls.

Men are a threat to anything smaller than them. So boys would likely evolve a similar trait.

Remember that not evolutionary traits are genetic. Society can evolve such traits as well in the form of social conditioning.
posted by alexst at 9:38 AM on October 23, 2005

Maybe they were just less likely to fight off the alpha males. (Sorry.)
posted by callmejay at 10:40 AM on October 23, 2005

meehawl: I wouldn't say he made a tautological argument, he just stated his anecdotal observation and asked a further question based on that. No attempt was made to argue for it.
posted by abcde at 10:58 AM on October 23, 2005

Why do girls get shy? Because our culture teaches them to act shy as a response to embarassment. Teenage boys are just as easy to embarass, but they're taught to respond differently: by getting defensive or fighting or projecting their shame onto other people.

The real question is, "Why are teenagers easier to embarass than adults or children?" Maybe you could argue that getting embarassed during puberty is an adaptive trait?

(Actually, that's a serious suggestion. Shame reinforces social norms, and around puberty you have to learn a whole new set of social norms: who not to attack, who not to sleep with, how not to raise children. A social species that didn't get embarassed a lot during puberty would have a whole lot of badly-behaved adults running around and messing up the pack structure.)
posted by nebulawindphone at 10:59 AM on October 23, 2005

(In other words, that was obviously pedantic and mean. And it's true because it's obvious.)
posted by abcde at 11:03 AM on October 23, 2005

Has anyone else noticed that when anyone asks a sociological question on AskMe usually half the responses are snide denials of the asker's Imperialist assumptions?
posted by abcde at 11:22 AM on October 23, 2005

I would contend that shyness is no barrier to reproduction over evolutionary time scales. Thus, it is not selected against.
posted by smackfu at 11:37 AM on October 23, 2005

Well, ok. Just spinning pure BS, one can argue from that shyness is a strategy of cultivating a few strong ties as opposed to many weak ties*. If those ties involve quid pro quo exchanges of time, energy, and gifts, shyness can be a way to avoid being over-committed (at the cost of fewer novel opportunities.)

In many evolutionary dynamics, there tends to be an equilibrium where one type of strategy is better under a certain set of conditions, and another strategy is better under a different set of conditions. The result tends to be that both strategies persist in a population because selective pressure oscillates between the two.

* (Not to say that cultivation of strong ties is incompatible with cultivation of weak ties. Just trying to describe the overall strategy.)
posted by KirkJobSluder at 11:39 AM on October 23, 2005

Don't a lot of guys find shyness in adolescent girls extremely sexually attractive? Isn't this the premise of all schoolgirl porn? Or all Japanese porn, for that matter?
posted by breath at 12:10 PM on October 23, 2005

Your question is more about what to do when your shy daughters get a bit older and the peer pressure increases, right?

I was quite shy when I was young. This probably had a lot to do wtih the fact that I was made fun of a lot in elementary school, so I learned to expect that people would dislike me and that I should keep quiet. I don't know if this is the case for your daughters or not.

I think I probably had less peer pressure because I was shy. Frankly, I just didn't interact with that many people. I didn't go to parties, I didn't hang out with the rebellious kids. This wasn't solely due to my shyness (see also: religion) but it was a factor. All in all, if you want your daughters to be able to resist peer pressure, then teach them that what they think is important and not to let other people make decisions for them. Shyness doesn't automatically make someone a push-over.

A lot of my male friends in high school were also quite shy and at the bottom of the social heap, so I'm not sure that gender is your defining factor here.
posted by heatherann at 12:31 PM on October 23, 2005

There is the thing about lack of confidence being safe - you avoid getting into confrontations that could lead to violence.

Something that comes to mind is that shy girls might have been attractive to males that want a commited relationship, as they're less likely to be pregnant with someone else's child. And having two commited parents increases offsprings chances.
posted by lunkfish at 12:56 PM on October 23, 2005

Has anyone else noticed that when anyone asks a sociological question on AskMe usually half the responses are snide denials of the asker's Imperialist assumptions?


I see nothing that has to do with imperialism. I do see a question based on a very cursory idea of what evolution is and does, and on the assumption that evolutionary psychology has been widely accepted as a valid field of study, which it hasn't.

If that aspect had been left out, and the asker had simply asked what the effects of adolescent shyness might be and how he could best support his daughters, this conversation would have taken a completely different turn.
posted by Miko at 1:16 PM on October 23, 2005

This confuses me on so many levels.

I am concerned about how they will fare when they get to the 11-15 year-old stage with all the peer pressure and social pressures they're certain to encounter.

How old are they now? How can you guarantee that they will be shy during puberty? As for peer/social pressure, I would worry less about the possibility of them being shy and more about who their friends are. If their friends are doing "bad" things, there's a good chance they are too - at this age the pack mentality is huge. Like heatherann said, if they are shy they might be less likely to run with the wild crowd.

I started wondering why it's such a common trait across cultures.

The trait of young girls being shy? I'm not trying to argue the basis of your question, but I've worked in middle schools and many of the girls are not shy...some of them are very aggressive. I think times have changed lately...there is less of the expectation for girls this age to be all meek and submissive.

I'm sorry I can't really answer the evolutionary basis part of your question...but girls (and boys) going through puberty are just...weird. Awkward. Often easily embarrassed. I personally think all of this is just part of the whole process, and part of forming one's identity.
posted by jetskiaccidents at 1:20 PM on October 23, 2005

Even if there is a genetic basis for shyness, just because it exists doesn't, of itself, imply that shyness confers an evolutionary advantage. It does imply that it doesn't confer sufficient disadvantage to prevent its bearers from reproducing (a little over-facile -- having offspring that survive long enough to reproduce is relevant, too, especially with how totally dependent immature humans are.)

Evolution doesn't exist for anyone's benefit. It's just something that happens. It's a passing on of genetic traits just good enough for their bearers to reproduce in the environments of the past, and, like the prospectuses say, past performance is no guarantee of future results.

And I'd be very surprised if science ever determines a straigtforward gene for shyness. A genetic predisposition that, in combination with environmental factors beginning in the womb, leads to shyness, maybe. But one which trumps all enviromental factors? I doubt it (same with other complex human behaviors.)
posted by Zed_Lopez at 1:36 PM on October 23, 2005

The first and most fundamental question here does seem to be about whether or not the word "shyness" really does identify something that shows up in cultures around the world in similar biological circumstances (gender and age, according to ykjay) despite the differences between those cultures. It's obvious that showing that something is universal is a bare minimum requirement for making it a candidate for this kind of explanation - even if there are conditions on its development, as in the differences in social context that must make a difference to whether people develop traits like physical aggressiveness.

It's easy to make up stories about how a certain trait could be advantageous in evolution (see the posts of lunkfish, KirkJobSluder and nebulawindphone in this thread for examples), which is one of the reasons why "evolutionary psychology" has exploded over the past while. The evidence for actual universality of the traits that these kinds of explanations are supposed to explain is in general very thin, maybe partly because it's actually pretty difficult to establish criteria for identifying psychological/behavioral traits, and partly because even if you can gathering on their prevalence in different societies can be very hard or impossible, not to mention expensive and extremely time-consuming. And why do such boring, complicated work when you can just invite a few American undergrads into your lab to manifest the universal behavioral traits of humanity, sit at your desk making up stories, and then write a bunch of bestselling books where you explain that popular stereotypes are true and scientifically proven?

Simon Blackburn gives a very good account of some of the main problems with evolutionary psychology in his review of Stephen Pinker's The Blank Slate, published in The New Republic. In a more scholarly and empirical vein, the philosopher David Buller recently published an interesting critique [pdf] of some of the flagship cases of supposed evolutionary behavioral adaptation in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences.
posted by paul! at 2:01 PM on October 23, 2005

No attempt was made to argue for it

Perhaps "argument" is a sub-optimal phrase. For "argument", substitute "thesis".

Framing a question within a specific discourse and then presenting a question based on these presumptions is a thesis.
posted by meehawl at 2:08 PM on October 23, 2005

It's obvious that showing that something is universal is a bare minimum requirement for making it a candidate for this kind of explanation - even if there are conditions on its development, as in the differences in social context that must make a difference to whether people develop traits like physical aggressiveness.

To be more explicit on this point: one of Blackburn's arguments about evolutionary psychology involves basically just pointing out, as a number of people in this thread have, that the development of traits like shyness will ultimately depend on culture. The argument highlights a major weakness in the twin studies that are so often used as evidence in evolutionary psychology: the systematic confusion between showing that a trait is "heritable" and showing that it's genetic. This argument is worth quoting at length:

Actually, there is a whole lot more to worry about with twins studies. Their results are expressed in terms of the heritability of properties, or proportion of variance supposed due to genetic factors. There is already a worry, since by the time of birth the twins’ genes have been expressing themselves in identical environment for nine months, and the time of separation and its extent are confounding factors (many “separated” twins are brought up within the extended family). The results of this research have included such gems as the heritability of milk and soda intake (high) or of fruit juice and diet soda (not so high). What is not usually stressed, and not stressed here, is that any measure of heritability is highly contextual. In a world of clones, the heritability of properties is zero; in a world of absolute sameness of environment, it goes to 100%. That is, if iron is put in a uniform environment, differences of rust are 100% due to difference of composition, but if identical samples of iron are put in a variety of environments, differences of rust are 100% due to environment. Heritability has also little or nothing to do with the malleability of the trait in question. In Swedish twins studies, heritability estimates for regular tobacco use was given as three times as great for men as for women, but for women it also ranged from zero to sixty percent in three different age cohorts, presumably because of changing cultural pressures on female smoking. Pinker is either not aware of the health warnings attached to this kind of research, or suppresses mention of them.

posted by paul! at 2:10 PM on October 23, 2005

...the development of traits like shyness will ultimately depend on culture.

Replace "culture" here with "environment."
posted by paul! at 2:13 PM on October 23, 2005

the development of traits like shyness will ultimately depend on culture environment.

Sorry, last one: not to declare in advance that shyness is "cultural." Just to point out that it (and the biological and psychological traits involved in it) can vary enormously between contexts for non-genetic reasons, and that generally little or no evidence is available that this kind of variation doesn't occur for any behavioral trait beyond the most general ones, like people getting hungry or wanting to have sex.
posted by paul! at 2:18 PM on October 23, 2005

Best answer: What is the evolutionary advantage of shyness . . . I started wondering why it's such a common trait across cultures. Maybe understanding it can help to mitigate its effects when the time comes.

ykjay,

The researcher you want to look into is Harvard's Jerome Kagan, the world's leading psychologist of temperament. Over the last 30 years, Kagan has done some remarkable work on human temperament, demonstrating its presence at birth and stability across the life-span. Temperament is a description of infant reactivity, or ease and intensity of emotional arousal. Infant testing reveals 60% falling into two polar behavioral profiles: inhibited and uninhibited. These dimensions are characterized by opposite extremes of motor activity, emotional changeability and irritability in infancy which correspond to level of shyness and fearfulness in childhood, social anxiety in adolescence and are related to the personality profiles that most closely approximate introversion and extroversion in adulthood. Kagan’s book, The Long Shadow of Temperament, describes the results of his longitudinal study of 500 infants that began twenty years ago in 1986 – while most inhibited and uninhibited children floated to the balanced average temperament in adulthood (he prefers to define the profiles as discrete categories instead of as points on a continuum like intelligence researchers), only 5% switched places. Meaning less than 5% of inhibited infants become uninhibited adults and vice versa.

In an ealier book Galen's Prophecy, Kagan briefly discusses some animal research speaking to the question of the evolutionary significance of such genes:

Although it is not always necessary to ask the evolutionary question regarding the adaptiveness of every stable trait, the presence of high and low fearful members in all mammalian species suggests that both styles must have adaptive features in order to survive over generations. The animal -- or child -- who is cautious to discrepancy is less likely to risk harm by impulsively approaching an unfamiliar object. On the other hand, the bold individual is more likely to gain resources that are limited. Steven Suomi, of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, reports that some fearful rhesus living on the small island of Cayo Santiago are liable to starvation because they wait until the other animals have had their turn at the food stores placed daily by research staff; on some occasions all the food is gone when the bolder animals leave. On the other hand, some of the fearless animals die of wounds incurred in attacking a stronger animal. Thus, the advantages associated with each temperament are balanced by disadvantages in a different context. There are no free lunches.

p. 264

As for your daughters, I wouldn't worry too much, as there is no evidence that they will live any less happy or productive lives. :)
posted by Jason Malloy at 6:17 PM on October 23, 2005

Good answer, Jason. When I first started my post I was planning on just generally pointing out that it would be good if somebody who knew a literature with good evidence about this issue posted on it, and I just went off on a rant instead. :p
posted by paul! at 6:34 PM on October 23, 2005

Response by poster: Thanks, Jason. An excellent response, with great backup.

jay
posted by ykjay at 7:44 PM on October 23, 2005

paul!: It's easy to make up stories about how a certain trait could be advantageous in evolution (see the posts of lunkfish, KirkJobSluder and nebulawindphone in this thread for examples), which is one of the reasons why "evolutionary psychology" has exploded over the past while.

Well, I'm frequently a critic of evolutionary psychology for many of the reasons that you bring up, which I thought was clear from the opening to my post. The Blackburn piece is quite interesting, but I don't think it goes quite far enough in pointing out that Pinker's attacks on Watson and Skinner are irresponsible straw men.

What I was bringing up was that many of the Ev. Psych. "just so stories" tend to focus on praising one trait, while ignoring the fact that many traits within populations tend to oscillate depending on environmental factors. Basic theories of the evolution of animal behavior suggest that complex and changing environments tend to result in a range of behaviors and temperments within a population.

Developmental psychology has frequently been comfortable with theories that accomodate both nature and nurture, with a popular theory that children tend to self-select and manipulate their environments (including their parents). A major problem I see with Ev. Psych is that just like the "blank slate" model it critiques, it overly-simplifies the complex systems involved. I'm rather fond of Anne Fausto-Sterling's layered model myself.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 8:43 PM on October 23, 2005

As it turns out, there is serious scientific controversy about Kagan's recent work and conclusions on this issue. This controversy is very relevant to your question, ykjay. From the review of The Long Shadow of Temperament in Science by psychologist Paul Costa Jr.:

The evidence presented in The Long Shadow of Temperament suggests that infant temperament is a poor predictor of temperament in puberty. In part, these findings may be due to the authors' choice to focus on discrete types, which are statistically and conceptually problematic. Stronger results have come from researchers such as Avshalom Caspi and colleagues (2), who conceive of temperament in terms of continuously distributed personality traits. They see moderate continuity from age 3 to age 26, and extensive research shows that personality traits are impressively stable from adulthood through extreme old age (3). (italics mine)

And (skipping back up to the meatier part of that review):

Kagan and Snidman note that with one exception (the enhanced startle response) the biological data are "in modest accord with the expected outcomes for children who had been high- or low-reactive infants." But there are several troubling inconsistencies in their account. For example, in summarizing their behavioral assessments they comment that "about 1 in 3 high-reactives (22 of 67 children) and 1 in 2 low-reactives (46 of 92 children) had developed social behaviors that were predictable from their infant temperaments. Only 8 high-reactives and 13 low-reactives developed a profile seriously inconsistent with expectations." Seen another way, these data show that two-thirds of the high-reactives do not develop into the inhibited type, and half of the low-reactives do not remain uninhibited. In another example, the authors speculate that the uninhibited profile was better preserved because "family and friends encourage sociability rather than shyness, and American children would rather be sociable than shy." Overgeneralization aside, such environmental sculpting of the sociable disposition is hard to reconcile with their finding that for children evaluated at 4, 7, and 11 years, 61 percent of the high-reactives were always subdued and 33 percent of the low-reactives were always spontaneous.

Furthermore, it's important to recognize that even if, unlike the reviewer for Science, you accept Kagan's arguments, his conclusion is that early temperament is an influence on later character, not that it decides everything in advance. What Kagan says he shows is that a small proportion of people who start out shy remain shy, while the vast majority stop being shy; and that those who start out really shy generally don't join the category of the extremely extroverted later on.

And once again, as far I've been able to work out, Kagan's great longitudinal study on this issue is monocultural. This may not be concretely too interesting to you, ykjay, but it's vital for justifying claims that behavioral data reflect limitations imposed by genetics. A burden that seems not to be being met here any more than elsewhere (although I would be very interested to read about any data on issues like this gathered in different societies).

You have to wonder: who are the people who switch from one extreme to the other? Why do they switch? Could it happen to more people given different circumstances? Very hard to get answers to questions like these; also not too professionally rewarding in academia, and specifically science, to ask questions that are overly hard to get answers to.
posted by paul! at 3:13 AM on October 24, 2005

One book I come back to again and again is Irvin Goffman's The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Couple that with Norbert Elias's musings on the cultural evolution of manners as an adaptive trait for high-population density, increasingly urban cultures, you begin to see how hard it is to predict the phenotypical results of a genetic propensity to "high activity", possibly arising from a myriad of regulatory and repressor mutations revolving around genes connected with dopamine and epinephrine production. At certain historical moments within a culture, fully venting the effects of an excitable metabolism may be adaptive, at others maladaptive. Could it be that there are two or more forms of shyness, one that results from the effort involved to actively restrain an excitable metabolism from presenting a naked face, the other from a simple downregulation of stimulatory metabolic chemicals.

The question of how long human cultures have been affecting genetic evolution is an interesting one. Although the vast majority of human culture seems to have begin with the Holocene, there are isolated examples of artifacts and crafts dating back several hundred KYears. These artifacts were not produced in isolation from a culture capable of supporting and appreciating them. The question of whether human culture has exercised a systemic effect on human genetic traits, or is an entirely random forcing, is a question for another day.
posted by meehawl at 9:52 AM on October 24, 2005

I am the father of a two-year-old girl who is fearlessly gregarious, especially with older boys. Shyness in an adolescent girl is nothing to fear!
posted by Eothele at 2:51 PM on October 28, 2005