How Many Friends Does One Person Need? (18 page)

But there is a worrying difference between then and now. The agricultural revolution relied on old technology, the kind that every farmer worth his salt knew by instinct. New developments in science today depend on much more sophisticated kinds of knowledge. And the worrying point here is that the number of new discoveries per decade has been declining steadily for most of the last century. That’s not too surprising: each new discovery becomes harder to win because it depends on much more complex technology, and ever deeper knowledge. The frontiers of knowledge are just becoming harder to mine, as well as being vastly more expensive.

But perhaps our real problem is that Malthus’s ghost is still hovering over our shoulders. He was not wrong: it was merely that science bought us time. In the end, it is not that we are using more and more fossil fuel each decade, or carelessly dumping wastes and surpluses, but that there are just more and more of us every year wanting to do these things. It has sometimes been claimed, for example, that traditional hunter-gatherer societies were (and still largely are) natural conservationists. Unfortunately, the evidence doesn’t actually support that claim. The reason traditional peoples seem to be good
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conservationists is simply that there are never enough of them in one place to do serious damage to their environment, no matter how badly they treat it. The rise of cities has a lot to answer for, and we would do well to learn this lesson rather faster than we have been inclined to do so far. We really do need to get the world’s population growth seriously into reverse.
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Evolutionary psychologists sometimes caricature us as having ‘Stone Age minds in a space-age universe’. To the extent that our minds are the product of our brains, and brains do not evolve very quickly, the ways we think and react to life’s experiences inevitably reflect adaptations to circumstances long past – life as we lived it between five hundred thousand and, well, let’s be generous and say ten thousand years ago when modern humans first invented agriculture and changed both their lifestyle and their environment by living in villages. The obvious implication, not lost on some evolutionary psychologists, is that we can expect much of our behaviour to be deeply out of kilter with the circumstances we find ourselves in now. In fact, maladapted, not to put too fine a gloss on it. In other words, in the vastly different circumstances of today –different because of the radical changes that culture has imposed on modern life and the environments we live in – we respond as though we were still on the plains of Africa, hunting wild game and spearing our enemies from over the hill. We respond by instinct rather than judgement. You don’t believe me? Well, let me give you some examples.
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It is a curious fact that, out of all the job interviews I have ever had, the only two occasions on which I was actually offered the job were when I had deliberately gone out beforehand and bought a new suit. Surprising? Not at all, you might say: isn’t life all about packaging? Well, of course, but we’re talking about real jobs here – convincing a select group of experts is surely different from pulling the wool over the eyes of the average Joe Public.

Well, maybe not. Arnold Schumacher, of the University of Hamburg, became intrigued by the fact that successful people are often perceived as being taller than they really are. Remember how surprised you were when you finally met the queen and found out how much shorter she is than you had imagined? Schumacher put the matter to the test by measuring the heights of people at different levels of achievement.

He found that, in professions as diverse as business management, nursing and trades like carpentry, those who had achieved higher status were indeed significantly taller than those who occupied the lower rungs of the professional ladder, even when differences in age were taken into account. For example, in a sample of German business executives, senior managers were on average five centimetres taller than staff in more lowly positions, and this was true for men and women separately, irrespective of their class background and educational achievement.

Not only were successful individuals actually taller than their less successful colleagues, but success was perceived as being associated with a whole constellation of positive attributes. When Schumacher asked a sample of young
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adults what characteristics they associated with successful individuals, they consistently rated social and professional success with such attributes as tallness, strength, confidence, energy, cool-headedness and resilience.

Which brings me back to clothes, because our Victorian forebears always maintained that ‘clothes make the man’. It seems that they were not so far off the mark here, because, in the US, Elizabeth Hill at Tulane University and Elaine Nocks and Lucinda Gardner at Furman University have been able to demonstrate that people’s attractiveness is significantly affected by the clothes they are wearing. In tests, the same person wearing designer outfits and expensive jewellery was perceived as being of higher status and more attractive than when he or she was wearing more conventional clothes.

But why should appearance play so important a role in places where rational decisions are supposed to be the overriding concern? Well, it might have to do with the fact that we are constantly searching for cues that identify successful people. After all, anyone who can afford to buy smart new clothes can’t have done too badly. Remember Salvador Dalí? Even as a penniless young painter, he insisted on living a lifestyle of flamboyant and conspicuous opulence far beyond his means: everyone thought he was doing extremely well because he was obviously attracting many wealthy clients, so they all came to him to commission paintings too. Success, you see, breeds success.

But why height? Why should successful people actually be taller than unsuccessful ones? Are tall people really that much better or is it that tall people inevitably over-awe us so we expect them to be better? And, come to think of it, doesn’t that bias things heavily against women
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when they are competing against men? Well, I’m not entirely convinced that the rules don’t change when the two sexes are in competition. But if they are, it may just mean that you have to dress better than everyone else to get the Nobel Prize.

OK... so Obama won the 2008 US presidential election. All that hard work on the campaign trail, and the several billion dollars spent by the various hopefuls over the year that the campaign lasted. It all paid off. We got the best man for the job thanks to the fierce winnowing effect of the democratic election process. A Darwinian triumph of selection for the best man.

Well, you might think so, but I’m not so convinced. Of course, it was something deeply embedded in our psyche and behaviour, honed by Darwinian evolutionary process over hundreds of thousands of years. But not quite in the way you might have imagined. In my view, science could have saved them all a lot of time and unnecessary money, at least in the endgame. McCain was set to lose come what may – and that wasn’t just the Palin Effect.

In fact, the evidence was there all along, had the various campaign teams simply taken the trouble to ask the scientists. Obama was bound to win on two very simple grounds: he was the taller of the two candidates (the taller candidate has won three times more US presidential elections than the shorter candidate since 1900), and he had the more symmetrical face.

What on earth has facial symmetry got to do with it? And what’s facial symmetry anyway?
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Well, symmetry is simply being symmetrical, each half of the face being a mirror image of the other. It turns out that producing a nice balanced, symmetrical body is not as easy as one might imagine. Given all the vicissitudes of life – from illness to injury to starvation – during the long haul of development from conception to final adulthood, our genes have a hard time trying to build our bodies the way they were meant to be. It turns out that one of the markers of top-quality genes is how well they can cope with all these insults and still produce a symmetrical body. Facial symmetry (along with the symmetry of everything from breasts to fingers, foot length to ear lobes) is thus a rough and ready index of the quality of your genes – where by ‘quality’ is meant no more than the genes’ ability to do their job and produce a functional body. It turns out that symmetry correlates with how well one does lots of things in life, but quite the most extraordinary and disturbing is that it seems to be a very good predictor of which candidate will win an election.

Tony Little and Craig Roberts, both then at Liverpool University, discovered that our voting patterns aren’t always so carefully thought out as we imagine in our much vaunted democracies. Principles and plans are pitched against each other in the hustings, but it seems that’s really just a smokescreen for the candidates to show off their bodies.

Little and Roberts first asked a large sample of people to choose which of two faces they would prefer to run their country. The eight pairs of faces were based on the actual winners and losers of the previous two national elections from the UK (Blair/Hague, Blair/Major), the USA (Bush/Kerry, Bush/Gore), Australia (Howard/Latham and
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Howard/Beazley) and New Zealand (Clark/Shipley). Being just a wee bit canny, they did not show the actual faces, but instead showed the same, neutral face manipulated using fancy shape-changing software to have more or fewer of each of the two candidates’ key facial features. These manipulated faces don’t look like the originals, but they have their core physical features, such as lip and nose shapes, eye lines, cheek shapes and dozens of other barely noticeable traits. They produced two such faces, one based on the winners and the other based on the losers.

The outcome? Well, subjects chose the winning face nearly sixty per cent of the time, and the losing face only about forty per cent. More striking still, when they plotted the relative preference for one face over the other in the eight elections against the actual votes cast for that candidate or their party, they found a very good fit. Indeed, if preference was plotted against the actual number of seats won by each candidate’s party, the fit was even better. So when they came to predict the May 2005 UK election, the experimental results based on the face preferences suggested that Labour (Blair) should win fifty-three per cent of the votes and fifty-seven per cent of the seats. In fact, on the day, Labour gained fifty-two per cent of the votes cast for the two major parties (Labour and the Tories) and sixty-four per cent of the seats won. That’s pretty impressive.

But surely the voters must be taking note of all the promises and policies that the candidates and their parties make? Well, it seems not, for these results gel rather well with the remarkable fact that of all the US presidential elections since George Washington ascended the American throne where we have height data for the two
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candidates, the winner has been the taller in seventy-one per cent. Stature is another trait that appeals to us, and has many unexpected everyday consequences. There have been several studies in recent years showing that, statistically speaking, men’s (but, it seems, not women’s!) salaries are correlated with how tall they are. In fact, in the UK, your salary increases by about one per cent for every centimetre that you are taller than the average height for the population.

But I digress... because in a second experiment, Little and Roberts added a novel twist to their original experiment. They took the 2004 Bush–Kerry contest and asked a different set of subjects to say not just which face they preferred to run their country, but which they would prefer during time of war and which during time of peace. As before, they used a neutral face manipulated to have more or fewer Bush or Kerry’s features.

The startling results were that the Bush-like face won hands down in the time-of-war condition (preferred by seventy-four per cent), but Kerry was the clear favourite in the time-of-peace condition (gaining sixty-one per cent of votes). Subjects were also asked to assess the two faces for various traits. ‘Bush’ was seen as being more mascu-line and dominant, whereas the ‘Kerry’ face was seen as being more attractive, forgiving, likeable and intelligent.

Which, you might say, is good news for Kerry. The bad news, it seems, was that he chose to run at just the wrong time, while the Iraq War was still in the forefront of the public’s consciousness. Had he held off and waited until the following election (which Obama won), he might have done better. Was there perhaps a word of warning here for Hillary Clinton? Her naturally more feminine face
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might have stood her in good stead had the election been in the middle of a long period of peace. But, alas, the troops were still in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the rest, as they say, is consigned to the dustbin of history. Better luck on her choice of timing next time?

Of course, you might want to cite Abraham Lincoln as an obvious counter-example to the symmetry story. Poor boy, he got kicked in the face by a horse as a child, and grew up to have the most asymmetric face of any US president ever. Recent laser analyses of two plaster casts of his death mask reveal that the left side of his face was much smaller and thinner-boned than the right, hence his iconically craggy looks. Many people noted at the time that his left eye was inclined to drift, a further sign of a left-sided weakness. And it didn’t seem to do him any harm in the political races of his day, did it?

Well, yes and no. There is one big difference between elections in Lincoln’s day and those today: an image-based media. Photography was only just coming into its own at that time, and the best that most people got to see of their candidates was an artist’s impression in a newspaper. It was not until well after the American Civil War (1861–5) that photographs became common in newspapers. Besides, Lincoln famously neither campaigned nor gave interviews during his presidential campaigns, but allowed his Republican Party election team to do it all for him. Very wise, you might think.