Commenter Tggp links to a criticism of science journalist Sharon Begley by science journalist Matthew Hutson. I learned of this dispute after reporting that Begley had received the American Statistical Association’s Excellence in Statistical Reporting Award, a completely undeserved honor, if Hutson is to believed.

The two journalists have somewhat similar profiles: Begley was science editor at Newsweek (she’s now at Reuters) and author of “Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain: How a New Science Reveals Our Extraordinary Potential to Transform Ourselves,” and Hutson was news editor at Psychology Today and wrote the similarly self-helpy-titled, “The 7 Laws of Magical Thinking: How Irrational Beliefs Keep Us Happy, Healthy, and Sane.”

Hutson writes:

Psychological Science recently published a fascinating new study on jealousy. I was interested to read Newsweek’s 1300-word article covering the research by their science editor, Sharon Begley. But part-way through the article, I thought, Huh, that’s not what I recall the study saying.

Here’s the background: Men are more jealous than women about sexual infidelity, and women are more jealous than men about emotional infidelity. Many scientists believe human evolution shaped this behavior. The idea is that men fear cuckoldry–they don’t want to get stuck raising other men’s genetic offspring—so it’s a big deal if their woman sleeps around. Women fear abandonment–if the father of their children leaves, they lose protection and resources—so they don’t want their man falling for someone else. . . .

The new paper [by Kenneth Levy and Kristen Kelly] reports a factor that explains some of the sex differences in jealousy: attachment style. People who are dismissive of relationships are more threatened by sexual infidelity than other people are (sex matters more to them than intimacy), and on average men are more dismissive of relationships than women.

Because early childhood experiences often influence attachment style, Begley writes: “Conclusion: Mars-Venus differences in jealousy are the result of attachment style and not of our caveman genes.” And: “It has nothing to do with caveman DNA.”

But here’s what the researchers wrote: “Sex and attachment style were significant predictors of jealousy individually; in addition, each variable was a significant predictor when the effects of the other variable were accounted for, which indicates that the two variables had independent main effects…”

I followed the links and clicked over to Begley’s article, which indeed had the misleading subhead, “Gender differences in what makes us jealous has nothing to do with ‘caveman DNA.'” Begley continues:

An intriguing new study suggests that the gender gap in jealousy may be the result of something that is not at all hard-wired: the different ways boys and girls are raised. . . .

According to “attachment theory,” how you are raised leaves a lasting impression on how trusting you are in intimate relationships. . . . people whose parents were warm and loving and reliable sources of emotional support tend to be “securely” attached, forming successful adult relationships that are not marred by excessive clinginess or jealousy. But people whose parents were distant or cold tend to be “avoidant”: they are either dismissive of close relationships (and therefore prefer autonomy to commitment, and are often promiscuous) or afraid of them. . . .

[Levy and Kelly] hypothesized that people who are dismissive of relationships would be more distressed by sexual than emotional infidelity. . . . As they will report in a study to be published in the February issue of the journal Psychological Science, securely attached people were, as predicted, much more upset about emotional infidelity than sexual infidelity: 77 percent said they are much more likely to find emotional infidelity more upsetting than sexual infidelity. That held for men as well as women—no sex difference. They also found that men and women who are fearful of relationships are more upset by emotional infidelity; again, no sex difference. Only men and women who are dismissive of relationships, the scientists found, are more upset by sexual straying than by a mate’s finding his or her soul mate in someone else. Because “more men than women are dismissive of relationships, and because such people are concerned more about sexual infidelity,” they write, “what looks like a gender difference is in fact an attachment effect”—that is, a product of how people feel about forming close relationships. Conclusion: Mars-Venus differences in jealousy are the result of attachment style and not of our caveman genes.

That captures the general impression of what Levy and Kelly wrote:

We hypothesized that attachment‐style differences may help to explain both between‐ and within‐sex differences in jealousy. As hypothesized, dismissing avoidant participants reported more jealousy regarding sexual than emotional infidelity . . . and secure participants, including secure men, reported more jealousy regarding emotional than sexual infidelity . . . Although between‐sex differences in jealousy clearly exist, the within‐sex differences suggest the existence of additional processes beyond those proposed by the parental‐investment model. . . .

I can understand Hutson’s frustration. Begley oversimplified Levy and Kelly’s research article in a direction consistent with her previously-expressed attitudes. I can’t really fault Hutson for unloading on Begley. But it looks to me that in this case she was going with the main message of the article and downplaying the subtleties. She also made the mistake of describing a non-statistically-significant difference as zero, and Levy and Kelly made the mistake of controlling for an intermediate outcome in causal inference.

P.S. I followed the links to learn what I could about Begley and Hutson. As noted above, they have written similarly-titled books. But Hutson is also an occasional blogger; he’s written on rap:

Rapping is very meta. A lot of rapping is about how good you are at rapping. Or about how successful and wealthy you are–thanks to being good at rapping.

Sometimes you think rappers might be rapping about something other than rapping . . . But it’s all just a metaphor for rapping. . . .

He also wrote on his experiences taking drugs—he says he first took Ritalin in first grade:

After much experimentation with various molecules and dosages and life situations, I’ve made peace with my drug dependence, and now when pondering a prescription refill or an individual pill in my hand, instead of asking which me is the real me—chemically modified or au natural—I ask which me I prefer.

I admire his openness; I suppose someone who will reveal so much about himself won’t be shy about criticizing others.