The Map of Romantic Kissing (and a critique) Rasmus Bååth with Andrey Anikin

This map shows the presence of romantic-sexual kissing in different cultures around the world, using the data from Jankowiak et al. (2015).

A critique

I’m not an anthropologist, but… there are some things I find strange in the dataset presented in Jankowiak et al. (2015) that I thought I would point out. Note that I’m not at all claiming that the main conclusion of the paper does not hold up, that is, that the romantic–sexual kiss is not a human universal. But the romantic–sexual kiss is perhaps not so un-universal as you might think it is after having read the paper. Here are two things I found strange:

The sample of the cultures included is a bit strange. That’s fine, but as the paper does not list what cultures were included one might come away with the impression that a representative sample of the worlds cultures was used. Being a European I can say that this is at least not the case for Europe where only the following cultures were included: British, Saami, Albanians, Bosnian Muslim, Croats, Greeks, Montenegrins, Serbs, Basque, and Imperial Rome (!). So no French kisses nor Italian smooches, but for some reason we get Imperial Rome… The original dataset included three levels: “Kissing: Yes”, Kissing: No" and Kissing: Unknown“, but what was originally coded as”Kissing: Unknown" became “Kissing: No” in the paper. You can view which cultures was labeled as “Kissing: Unknown” by clicking “Original data” in the map above. This recoding might be fine if it “Kissing: Unknown” probably means that kissing is rare in that culture. However, when looking at the European cultures I don’t think that is really the case. There were three cultures in Europe that were listed as “Kissing: Unknown” in the dataset but then presented as non-kissers in the paper. These were the Serbs, Montenegrins and Albanians, and I’m pretty sure that these cultures do have romantic kissing (even though I don’t have any first hand evidence of this…), especially since their closest neighbors, the Bosnians and the Croats are labeled as romantic kissers. If I’m wrong and romantic kissing really is rare in the cultures of Serbs, Montenegrins and Albanians, do let me know in the comments below!

So the fact that (1) the sample of cultures seems a bit strange and that (2) some cultures labeled as non-kissers actually do kiss (at least I believe so) means that the percentages presented in the paper should be taken with a grain of salt. These percentages were also widely reported in the press, for example in the Washington post:

In Asia, 73 percent enjoyed romantic kissing; in Europe, 70 percent; and in North America, 55 percent. No smoochers were found in Central America."

At least for Europe the figure should probably be closer to 100 percent… Or from my local Swedish newspaper:

It turns out that only 46 percent of the cultures engaged in kissing. (translated from Swedish: Det visade sig att endast 46 procent av kulturerna ägnade sig åt kyssar.)

In Jankowiak et al. (2015) it is stated that:

Based on these results, we find the frequent citation in the literature that more than 90 percent of cultures kiss, particularly when referring to a romantic–sexual context, to be arbitrary and factually incorrect.

Sure, but the figure of 46% you’ve now let loose in the not-always-checking-the-sources-twice world of common knowledge is likely also a bit off… (BTW, did you know that people only use 10% of their brains?)