Sex, Murder, and the Meaning of Life (3 page)

My undoing started just a few days before my graduate comprehensive examinations, at which time my learned committee members would ask me to demonstrate encyclopedic knowledge of the research and theory in the field of social psychology. I should therefore have been diligently studying the results of classic experiments testing Leon Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance, Fritz Heider's theory of attitudes and cognitive balance, or Kurt Lewin's theory of group dynamics. But whenever I have a daunting amount of work to do, I suddenly develop an intense interest in anything unrelated to the task at hand. It was in this self-handicapping spirit that I drifted into the campus bookstore to browse around. My eye was drawn to a book called
Primate Behavior and the Emergence of Human Culture
by the anthropologist Jane Lancaster. This particular volume seemed comfortably outside the domain of experimental social psychology, so in my work-avoidance mode, I felt compelled to buy it, take it home, and read it through that very afternoon.

Lancaster's book had, as I'd expected, very little to do with the questions my social psychology professors were to ask me during my comprehensive exams. But it had everything to do with the questions they should have asked. The field of social psychology was, and is, concerned with many of the things people worry about every day: romantic love, aggression, prejudice, persuasion, and obedience to authority. Despite the breadth of topics, the scope of theory in the field was rather narrow at the time. When I entered the graduate program at Arizona State University, two of my professors had
independently, and rather proudly, informed me that social psychology was a “minitheory” discipline. And sure enough, my reading of texts in the field had revealed a scattered disarray of unconnected, miniature theories, each designed to explain just a small facet of social behavior: One addressed frustration-induced aggression. Another dealt with interpersonal attraction between people with similar attitudes. Still another tried to explain responses to one-sided versus two-sided arguments. And there were many, many more such theories, mostly distinguished by their lack of connection to one another.

Social psychologists at the time prided themselves on being not only theoretically constricted but empirically narrow as well—studying anorexically thin slices of thought and behavior. Like other experimentally oriented psychologists back then, social psychologists in 1975 self-consciously rejected the study of stable “traits” as causes of behavior and focused instead on how a person's ongoing thoughts and behaviors responded to changes in his or her immediate situation. What was meant by a person's “situation” was limited to what could be captured within the half hour that a typical psychology experiment lasts. There were reasons for these strictures: Experimental studies were designed to maximize control, and theoretical restraint was supposed to cut down on rampant speculation about unobservable events inside the head or body. But to a curious young student interested in the roots of human behavior, those constraints seemed like the compulsions of the drunk who had lost his keys in a dark alley but was carefully searching for them under the streetlamp, where the light was better.

In this context, I took an almost guilty delight in glimpsing the very broad theoretical perspective suggested in Lancaster's book. It was the intellectual equivalent of what I had felt when I stumbled across an erotic magazine as a young boy in Catholic school: Here is something they probably do not want me looking at, but it sure is
hard to resist. Instead of a narrow focus on the way very specific artificial laboratory situations alter very specific aspects of social behavior in the members of our particular culture, Lancaster's evolutionary perspective offered the tantalizing suggestion that we ought to erase the lines between psychology, biology, and anthropology and instead consider how all these vast subjects might fit together.

Exhilarated by the profound implications of this approach, I began raving about Lancaster's book to anyone who would listen. Some of my fellow graduate students and my faculty advisers just gave me an uncomfortable smile, as if I were earnestly explaining why I had just joined a cult. But Ed Sadalla, a new assistant professor who had recently joined the faculty, nodded knowingly. Sadalla had not seen Lancaster's book, but he had recently picked up another volume,
Sociobiology
. Sadalla suggested that
Sociobiology
, which had been written by Harvard entomologist E. O. Wilson, and which dealt mostly with the behavior of ants, lions, and other nonhuman animals, offered a treasure chest of untested hypotheses about human behavior.

In fact, Sadalla already had a hypothesis about social dominance to test. As part of a process that Charles Darwin had called sexual selection, females in many animal species carefully choose the males they mate with, whereas males tend to be less selective. This, in many cases, means that females choose the most socially dominant males, and Sadalla was interested in seeing whether women's interest in men was likewise influenced by their social dominance. I will discuss these ideas in detail later. For now, I will simply say that Sadalla and I, along with Beth Vershure, ran a series of studies suggesting that, leaders of a new cult or no, the primatologist Jane Lancaster and the entomologist E. O. Wilson were on to something, and it was something with powerful implications for human psychology.

Not everyone agreed. Although our findings on dominance and attractiveness were clear and reliable, it took us over a decade to get them published. Unbeknownst to us at the time, the armies of political
correctness were poised to sweep through academia with the combined energies of Mao Zedong's cultural revolutionaries and George Orwell's
1984
antisex crusaders. Sadalla, Vershure, and I thought we were simply applying evolutionary concepts elucidated in animals to humans, but when we tried to publish our findings, we learned we were really committing thought crimes. As one critical reviewer of our first submitted paper put it, “As a feminist and a scholar, I feel duty-bound to protect the unwary journal readership from this type of inherently sexist thinking.” So dangerous were our findings that even other research scientists should be protected from them! It seems I really had been reading intellectual pornography, and Sister Katherine Mary had found me out.

The academic tumult surrounding sociobiology, epitomized by the vicious attacks on E. O. Wilson, the author of
Sociobiology
, is by now fairly well-worn academic gossip. To a young researcher experiencing it firsthand, it was a very personal battle, and it drew me into a war of ideas that would change the face of modern science. In the end, the academic controversy was often illuminating, as challenges encourage new research. And it was often fun, sometimes in ways almost embarrassing to admit. The opponents of evolutionary psychology, some of them distinguished professors at major universities, have often been so arrogant in their dismissals that they've made us look good when the actual data pronounce them wrong. In retrospect, 1975 may not have been the apocalypse for the world of traditional social science—there are still holdouts who refuse to accept that the last thirty-five years have happened—but it certainly was Darwin's second coming, and the consequences continue to unfold.

Oscar Wilde, although he had never heard of evolutionary psychology, did write the perfect slogan for the discipline: “We are all in
the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” Part of the reason evolutionary psychologists have often upset proper academics is that we have had an inclination to root around in the gutters. A few years back, when I told my colleague David Funder that I was doing a study of homicidal fantasies, he simply rolled his eyes. Funder observed that the
modus operandi
for an evolutionary psychologist seemed to be this: Choose a topic that is normally avoided in polite conversation and shine a spotlight on it. When I thought about it, I realized this was not a completely unfair assessment. But we do not pick such topics just because they are what sells in the tabloids. Instead, we study unsavory topics (as well as nicer ones) because these are the issues with which humans the world over concern themselves—who's sleeping with whom, who might stab me in the back, who might hurt my kids, and on and on. Why do so many people read the tabloids and gossip magazines like
People
and
Us
, anyway? Because they have better book reviews than the
New York Times
, or because they have rumors about which powerful man is cheating on his wife and sleeping with which Hollywood ingenue? And why have people the world over shelled out billions of hardearned dollars a year and stood in long lines to see movies like
Gone with the Wind, Titanic
,
Braveheart,
and
Avatar
? I would venture to guess it is not because those movies illustrate the finer points of cinematography, but because they present vivid conflicts between the bad guys (them) and the good guys (us), brave and heroic men involved in love affairs with beautiful young women, and other topics humans have always gossiped about.

There is more to the field than just engaging topics, however. Evolutionary psychologists are also searching for an integrated conceptual paradigm to unite the social sciences with the biological sciences. Indeed, part of what irks traditional academics is the field's apparent grandiosity—we claim that the evolutionary perspective can integrate psychology, economics, political science, biology, and
anthropology, and we also insist that the perspective has profound implications for applied disciplines such as law, medicine, business, and education. And we go even further, claiming that these issues have important implications, not just for academics but for everyone—from your relatives in rural Wisconsin to the members of the UN Security Council. If there is any hope of changing the world for the better, from reducing family violence to reversing overpopulation and international conflict, economists, educators, and political leaders will need to base their interventions on a sound understanding of what people are really like, not on some fairy-tale version of what we would like them to be.

The next few chapters will focus on the research my colleagues and I have conducted on simple, selfish biases, exploring topics such as sexual attraction, aggression, and prejudice. We have considered questions such as: Why are old men attracted to much younger women? Why are older women not drawn to young men in the same way? Why does a woman's commitment to her partner drop after seeing a powerful executive, regardless of whether he is good-looking or not, whereas a man's commitment is shaken by good-looking women regardless of their social status? Why are people raised by a stepfather more likely to have fantasized about killing the old man than are people raised by a natural father? In later chapters, I will talk about how this research on simple selfish biases is connected to much broader questions about economics, religion, and society. Is fundamentalist religiosity actually a mating strategy? Can we better understand why people buy Porsches by understanding why peacocks flash their tail feathers? Sometimes mundane, sometimes shocking, our work has always been aimed at answering the biggest questions of our time: questions about what makes human beings tick. In the final chapters, I will describe how these biases, though selfish and irrational at one level, are actually deeply rational at another. And I will describe how simple biases inside individual's
selfish heads combine to create complex and ordered patterns at the societal level. Finally, I will consider how an understanding of those simple selfish biases might offer us some insights about how to live a more caring and connected life.

We'll begin in the gutter, though, exploring how our very natural love for loveliness can make us miserable in surprising ways.

T
o a refugee from the ice and slush of New York's winters, the sunsoaked campus of Arizona State University (ASU) was paradise found. At every opportunity, I would join several other young male psychology students on the main mall, where we would enjoy the blue skies and balmy weather while discussing the week's readings. But any semblance of meaningful conversation was disrupted for a brief interval every fifty-five minutes, when it became impossible to maintain eye contact with my fellow students, much less engage in a focused discussion of the philosophical distinctions between behaviorism and phenomenology.

The mental disruption was caused by the throng of undergraduate students parading by during the fifteen-minute break between classes. What made the break especially distracting for the twenty-four-year-old me was this: A great many of the people in that crowd of students were beautiful and athletic young women dressed as if they were on their way to audition for the
Sports Illustrated
swimsuit issue. It was a physiological challenge not to gasp. I remember thinking that the average woman at ASU was better looking than most of the people I had known growing up.

But as the mob thinned out, something funny happened. When classes were changing and there were several hundred people zipping by every few seconds, the crowd had seemed to be mostly fashion models, but when the flow of humans slowed to a mere dozen per minute, there seemed to be many more average-looking folks attending ASU. What happened to all the stunning women after classes started?

I began to consider various possible explanations of the disappearing beauties: Maybe the beautiful women attended lectures more faithfully or rushed right to the library, whereas average-looking people cut classes and spent more time drifting aimlessly around the campus mall. But that did not seem likely. Instead, I began to suspect that something else was going on, that perhaps my friends and I had been biasing our estimates of the beauty ratio at ASU. I speculated as follows: When a man's eyes scan a large crowd, they will fixate on the most physically attractive woman. When she passes, he scans the next two or three hundred people, and his eye shifts to the next beauty, who, although statistically unrepresentative, is nevertheless irresistibly eye-catching. But when the river of people shrinks to a small stream, I reckoned, you look at every individual and the mind computes a less biased average. The new mental calculation is that the average person in the smaller crowd looks just like that: an average person. That seemed to me like a better explanation, but hypotheses are a dime a dozen, and it would take two decades and some sophisticated experimental equipment before I was able to test the idea.