Considering human nature from the standpoint of evolutionary psychology, the author of the book comes to the conclusion that behind the civil facade is a rather wild insides and that people are much more like howling hyenas and screaming baboons than we used to think, with all their homicidal tendencies and sexual fantasies. And the irrational behavior of people is actually deeply rational, including racial prejudice, a tendency to one-day parking and excessive consumption. The author reveals the true nature of social problems, international conflicts and global markets, striking the reader with vivid metaphors and non-standard life examples and giving new answers to the most important questions of modern reality.
For a man bursting out of slushy and chilly winter New York, the Arizona campus was heaven on earth. At every opportunity, I tried to communicate with other psychology students. We gathered in the main alley, admired the blue sky, enjoyed the good weather, and discussed what we had read on psychology for the week. We interrupted our scientific discussions every fifty-five minutes for a short break. And at these moments it became simply impossible to look at my classmates, and even more so to conduct a discussion with them on the topic of philosophical differences between behaviorism and phenomenology.
As crowds of students came out for a fifteen-minute break between classes – to walk along the alley. As a twenty-four-year-old, the picture also seemed attractive to me, because most of the students were very, very pretty, beautifully built and dressed as if they were going to a casting by Sports Illustrated for the swimwear section. It was difficult, looking at them, not to groan and groan. It seemed to me then that the average student at the University of Arizona was prettier than all the girls I had met before.
But then the crowd thinned, and something strange began to happen. During the break, when hundreds of students came out of the classrooms, it seemed that most of them were just photo models, but when there were a few dozen of them left, it seemed that they were the most ordinary students. Where are the stunning beauties?
I began to look for possible explanations for the fact of their “disappearance”. Maybe they all sit around in lectures or in the library, and simpletons skip classes and hang out along the main alley of the campus? But such an explanation seemed unlikely. Then I began to think that something else was happening and that my friends and I were biased in evaluating the beauty of students at the University of Arizona. I reasoned this way: when there is a large crowd in front of a man’s eyes, he snatches the most beautiful woman out of it. When this woman leaves, he examines the next two or three hundred people and selects the next beauty from them, which may be statistically unrepresentative, but nonetheless incredibly attractive. But when the stream thinns, I thought, and becomes a thin stream, you begin to consider each person separately and your consciousness chooses something in between, and does it less biased. The new mental structure is this: the average person in a small group looks exactly like the average person. This explanation seemed to me better, but assumptions remain assumptions. It took two decades and sophisticated equipment before I could test my idea.
However, regardless of my cognitive bias, I was confident that the University of Arizona had more beautiful women than New York. Therefore, I was somewhat surprised by the words of my neighbor Dave: “There are no truly beautiful women at the University of Arizona.” Dave, like me, recently moved to Arizona from New York, so our views on what an average-looking woman looks like were not significantly different. By the way, his exaggerated requirements did not mean at all that there was a line of photo models at his door. He was a guy with a rather ordinary appearance and often complained that he had no one to ask out on a weekend. Why was he so picky? One explanation I got when he threw a party at his home and I got the opportunity to see the furnishings of his apartment:
Sneak glances and forgotten faces
Fast forward thirty years. The year is 2002 on the calendar. My research team just received a grant from the government that allowed us to acquire an amazing science toy – the latest eye movement recorder. It is impossible to read thoughts with its help, but, in any case, it allows you to better understand what kind of “cinema” is spinning in a person’s mind. For cognitive psychology, it is quite obvious that a person’s attention is selective, and unless you are in a dark, soundproof room and are packed from head to toe in cotton wool, then you will not be able to pay attention to everything in your immediate vicinity. If you tried to do this, you would not be able to cope with the excess of impressions. Even now, as I sit at the table, there are hundreds of objects in my field of vision. To my leftglasses, wallet, cell phone, coffee cup, Greg Mortenson’s Three Cups of Tea paperback, checkbook, stapler, empty plastic bag, photo of my son Liam in the dentist chair, stack of dusty CDs. Above the computer screen is Webster’s Dictionary, Roger’s Thesaurus, the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, and several different reference books. On the right is a sharpener, a printer, a round container half full of CDs for recording, a mouse (Microsoft version), a mouse pad, a bundle of wires. Below the screen– a stack of cards by which I can drink free coffee in the Gold Bar Espresso and eat ice cream in the Sweet Angel, two passes to the Phoenix fitness center and two human hands typing these words on the keyboard (and on it hundreds of buttons, many with multiple symbols like @, FN, ~, ALT, `,>, & and%). This is only part of what is directly in front of me, and if I turn my head, I will see that there are hundreds of other objects in the room. No wonder I can never find the keys!
Now imagine a student who sits on the steps of the university, and crowds pass in front of him: hundreds of people dressed in shorts, T-shirts, shoes of different colors; some are tall, others are short, some with long curly red hair, others with dark straight hair, some in a baseball cap, with sparkling earrings in their ears; there is a tattoo, there is a badge with a political slogan. What happens if this observer tries to pay attention to every detail: what are the people passing by, how do they move, what do they say? It would be too much for him. He couldn’t do it, even if he tried. As William James noted about a hundred years ago, the world is a “booming and buzzing confusion” that can only be sustained through our ability to ignore everything that happens in it.
But our device makes it possible to see what particularly attracted the attention of our student in the crowd passing by. In our laboratory experiment, we tried to set a problem that is more convenient for control. Our students will not watch the rumbling and buzzing chaotic crowd on campus, but a tiny group of six to ten people who will appear in front of them for a while, after which they will be replaced by the next small group. The students are then asked if they have identified any particular person from the flashed. Even though we reduced the crowd to the size of a small group, slowed down the action of the real world, the subjects could hardly remember who they saw. However, there were individuals who were easier to remember than others.
The men watching the pseudo-crowd lingered at beautiful women twice as long as at women of ordinary appearance. Then, looking at the photographs, the men pointed almost unmistakably to the faces of the beautiful women they saw. As for the male faces in the crowd, their gaze did not linger for a long time – it did not matter if it was someone like George Clooney or some John or Tom. And later, men were not very good at isolating the faces of handsome men in photographs. The findings fit perfectly into our hypothesis of attention and memory: the more attention we pay to someone or something, the more likely we are after some time to remember this person or object. However, it is interesting that women did not confirm our assumption.
The women participating in our experiment, like men, looked at beautiful women for a longer time, and then quite well determined which beauties they saw and which they did not see. However, unlike men, they very selectively noted handsome men like George Clooney who flashed in the crowd. This part of the experiment does not cause surprise, it was strange what happened after: the women could not remember those handsome men they looked at for so long. This was unexpected, given that there is usually a direct link between attention and memory – the longer you look at someone, the better you remember that person.
In a later study with Vaughn Becker, John Mayner, and Steve Guerin, we asked subjects to play a game called Concentration (also called a memory game). In our version of the game, the participants in the experiment had to find and combine two faces from a large number of faces. Everyone remembered well where the pretty women were. Sometimes we changed the usual rules of the game and presented the subjects with all the faces at the same time for a few seconds before asking them to indicate a pair. At the same time, during the first show, women immediately remembered handsome men, which indicates that they first of all tend to pay attention to men with interesting looks. However, in the course of the experiment, we noticed that gradually the interest in handsome men weakens and completely disappears. Interesting men, although they attract the attention of women,
This study reinforced my belief that bias in men can lead to overestimating the ratio of beautiful women to women of average appearance in a crowd. This finding was supported by another study I did with Becker and Mayner, and which was subsequently joined by my colleague Steve Neuberg and our students Andy Delton, Brian Hofer, and Chris Wilbur. In this study, we showed subjects photographs of groups of women or men. Some of the photographs depicted beautiful people, others with an ordinary appearance (as the participants in another experiment evaluated them). Our subjects could look at these photographs under one of two conditions: in one case, they could look at the group portrait for four seconds, in the other, they could look at it for longer, or they could look at faces one after the other. A quick glance at the whole group turned out to be analogous to trying to look at the entire crowd of students strolling along the main alley of the University of Arizona during the break – too many faces to evaluate individually. When the subjects were asked to look at a photograph more closely or to look at a photograph of a specific person, it was akin to a situation, as if we were watching a thin stream of students going to recess: the observer’s consciousness has enough time to get a complete picture of the characters.
When we put our subjects’ attention to some stresses, we found, as I had assumed several decades ago, that men tend to overestimate the number of beautiful women (although women’s assessment of beautiful men remained neutral). Women also overestimated the number of beautiful women in a rapidly changing crowd, but they did not overestimate the number of beautiful men. Taken together, our findings on beautiful women lead to a simple conclusion: they are attracting global attention and monopolizing top-down cognitive processes. The conclusion about handsome men is different: they attract the attention of women, but are not deposited in their minds; handsome men are quickly washed out of the flow of information processing. This difference corresponds to the difference in reproductive strategies specific to women and men. Women are more selective and less interested in casual relationships with unfamiliar men. I will talk about the reasons for these differences in subsequent chapters. For now, let’s get back to my buddy Dave and his walls, which were covered with posters from Playboy magazine.
Contrast effect: why is it wrong to glue walls with Playboy photos?
The thought processes of men, under normal conditions, are associated with the creation of an imaginary world where only women live, like Holly Berry, Kate Hudson, Jennifer Lopez and Beyonce. On the one hand, perhaps, men see in such an abundance of beauties the positive side of the overpopulation of the Earth. Women also tend to believe that there are more beautiful women than beautiful men, but they do not see anything good in this.
Research I have done with Sarah Gutierrez suggests that overdosing on the beautiful can have negative effects on both men and women, although the effects are different.
Around the same time a friend of mine, who was covering the walls with pictures of top models from Playboy, said that there are not many pretty girls at the University of Arizona, I took a course on “Feelings and Perceptions.” Perceptual researchers love to reveal illusions of consciousness and errors in judgment, one of the most striking manifestations of which is the so-called contrast effect. You can experience this effect yourself with three buckets of water. Fill the bucket on your left with ice cold water and the bucket on your right with hot (but not boiling water). The water in the middle bucket should be at room temperature. Place your left hand in a bucket of ice water and your right hand in a bucket of hot water for one minute. Then remove your hands and place them in a medium bucket of room temperature water.
What happens is somewhat of a two-way cognitive dissonance. Your brain receives two conflicting messages: the neurons in your left hand will tell your brain that the water is hot, and the neurons in your right hand will tell you that the same water is cold. According to the theory proposed in 1947 by Harry Helson, we make psychophysical decisions by comparing any new form of stimulation with our adaptive level – the expectation of what is considered normal at the level of perception, based on our past experiences, especially recent ones. What is perceived as hot or cold, heavy or light, salty or sweet depends to a large extent on our recent experience.
I suggested that sensory adaptation processes could be applied to the assessment of beauty, and decided to test this idea with Sarah Gutierrez, who at that time was a graduate student and showed great promise, and then became my colleague and co-author of a number of research papers in this direction. In the first study, Sarah and I asked subjects to rate an average-looking woman after being introduced to several other women. Half of the subjects were to rate this woman after seeing several unusually beautiful women; the other half were asked to give an assessment after seeing women of ordinary appearance. As in the case when the body is exposed to completely different temperatures, the preliminary influence on the perception from the outside influenced the assessment of what is average appearance.
In another study I did with Laurie Goldberg, Gutierrez and I tried to establish whether these same processes influence the value of people we know and love (or know and would like to date). The research topic was collective standards of aesthetic evaluation. We told the participants that there was a debate about what was highly artistic and what was tasteless. Therefore, we needed the opinion of randomly selected subjects.
Subjects in the control group first rated the artistic merit of abstract paintings such as Joseph Albers’ Recognition of the Square. Men in the experimental group were shown photos on the inside inserts of Playboy and Penthouse magazines, and women were shown pictures of beautiful naked men from Playgirl. After all the participants looked at the paintings or photographs, we asked them to rate their feelings towards their partner or partner. And again, it is necessary to preface the story with the fact that psychologists disagree whether the relationship with a partner is the reason that as a result of these relationships people discover new aesthetic sensations or not. To test which side is right, we told the subjects that we need to know how deep their relationship with partners is. It turned out that their answers were conditioned by whether they had seen photographs from erotic magazines before or not. Once again, we are faced with an interesting difference between men and women. Men who were shown such photographs rated their feelings for partners lower, while women were more difficult to break with explicit pictures of men.
In general, we can say that when people see beautiful women, their adaptation level of what they consider to be beautiful changes. A side effect of constantly seeing pictures of beauties for guys like my neighbor Dave is that he won’t be attracted to real women he might date because his brain is adapted to the pictures he sees as normal. If young men often look at photos of top models, it undermines their feelings for the real flesh and blood women with whom their lives are connected.
Does this mean that women’s love is stronger? The fact that women are not influenced by looking at handsome men on the pages of magazines and that this does not affect their feelings for partners may be further evidence in favor of the widespread belief that men are fools. But, as our colleague Norbert Schwartz suggests, while women do not compare their partners to the muscular handsome men in magazines, they can compare them to high-ranking men, and this comparison is in favor of the latter.
To test this hypothesis, Steve Neuberg, Christine Circus, Jacques Crowns, and I asked students to evaluate several individuals’ files – we told them that this was part of a new program being created at the University of Arizona to help single visiting students find potential partners. If you are a man and if you were a participant in this experiment, then you would be asked to look at the dossiers of several women with pre-selected photographs. Some were very beautiful, others unremarkable. The women participating in the experiment were asked to look at photographs of handsome men or ordinary guys. In addition to the pictures, the subjects were given the opportunity to see the ratings of each depicted person. Half the time they were indoctrinated that the team of psychologists evaluated certain people in the photographs, rated “high” according to the criterion “dominance / desire to win” as active and energetic, with clearly expressed leadership qualities. In the second half of the time, the subjects were shown photographs of those whom psychologists rated as submissive and obedient, without leadership qualities. After the participants in the experiment read the dossier, they were asked questions about their personal relationships and, to make the process more entertaining, were offered, if they had the opportunity and interest, to enroll in the program “Singles at the University of Arizona.”
How would you react to this proposal? The answer depends on whether you are a man or a woman. As in our previous study, we found that the beauty of other women undermines men’s loyalty to their partners. Men began to talk about their relationships with women with less trepidation after being shown several pictures of beautiful and alluring ladies, supposedly “on the dating market.” Women, on the other hand, at the sight of photographs of handsome men did not change their attitude towards their partner. But if you’re a woman, don’t ask. If a woman sees in front of her men who are socially leaders, then this can also negatively affect her attitude towards her partner, as happens with men who see beautiful women.
How we look against the background of starlets and tycoons
Does our vision of ourselves change when we see beautiful women or successful men in front of us? In a study conducted by Sarah Gutierrez, Jennifer Parch, and I, we again asked subjects to look at the dossiers of people who we explained had signed up for the University of Arizona Singles program. But in this case, we invited the participants to study the files of people of the same gender as them.
Each dossier contained the person’s name, interests and hobbies, and it also noted the “most important achievement”. We have prepared two versions of each dossier. In each, the same interests and hobbies were noted, but the difference was that in one dossier a person rated himself high in terms of social dominance, and in the other – low. For example, here is what someone Karl Powers writes about himself in a dossier in which he highly values his leadership qualities:
It seems to me that I have many friends, because people trust me, and I like to communicate with them. I like to plan something new for myself and for my friends. I work five days a week, and on other days I teach children to jump on a trampoline. I enjoy communicating with people, and I am often appointed as a group leader, and then I have to take responsibility. I like being a leader, I can do it easily, and in this capacity I meet many people. I am told that I easily manage to give instructions to others. I was genuinely delighted when I was elected editor of the University of Washington newspaper before I moved on to study at the University of Arizona. I have already published two short articles in Runners World. Both are about the qualities required to achieve perfection. What I am talking about, I try to put into practice,
And in the dossier, where the assessment of leadership qualities is low, Karl appears already by no means such an active and purposeful person, but rather soft and flexible:
It seems to me that I have many friends, because people trust me, and I like to communicate with them. I am usually ready to go with my friends wherever they call. I try to go to the gym often, and on other days I help train kids to jump on the trampoline. I enjoy spending time with companies, but I don’t really like running errands or helping to do any work. I don’t like to lead. I’m not very good at it and makes it difficult to meet new people. But when I am entrusted with something, I try to fulfill the task. I was delighted when, before moving to the University of Arizona, I was named the most executive employee of the student newspaper published at the University of Washington. I started writing two short articles that I would like to get published in some magazine. Both of them are about the qualities that a person needs in order to to be in harmony with yourself. I try to translate my ideals into reality, and, probably, this helps me to be satisfied with myself.
Some participants were asked to study eight dossiers of high self-esteemed leadership qualities, designed to give the impression that there are many successful and energetic people of the same sex. Eight less impressive dossiers of individuals with low self-esteem were offered to other participants for review. The female participants were offered the same dossiers, but they changed their male names to female ones (that is, instead of Karl Puers, there was some Amy Powers). Each dossier had a photograph so that in some cases the subjects could see eight very attractive faces of the same sex, and in others eight unremarkable faces of potential competitors.
If the subjects saw photographs of very attractive outwardly and very socially successful people of the same sex as them, then this did not affect their self-esteem of how attractive and socially dominant they themselves were. But this influenced their ideas of how others would evaluate them. And this was different from what we found when people evaluated their partners: men, against the background of socially dominant men, began to perceive themselves as less desirable candidates for husbands, and women who compared themselves to beautiful women began to evaluate their chances of marriage lower.
Now think and tell me if everything will do you good
So, our research suggests that if you are a man and if you see a large number of beautiful women, then this can negatively affect your feelings for your partner. And if you are a woman and there are too many successful men in front of your eyes, this can also negatively affect feelings for your partner. But it seems that in the modern world, young stars and financial tycoons are walking around everywhere. Hollywood market-oriented products (from Gone With the Wind and Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire to Mad Men) show us a world of beauties and rich people, not the public you regularly see in local supermarket. Moreover, there are so many of these beauties and rich people in films and TV shows that this negatively affects your partner. And possibly on you.
Open a popular magazine, turn on the TV or go to the cinema – and you will find yourself in the world of beautiful women and wealthy impressive men. Our research shows that unless you live in Hollywood, your innocent attempts to entertain yourself while contemplating the world of beauty and wealth fade ordinary people in real life in your eyes and undermine your self-confidence. Maybe you should write to your senator and demand that a special law be passed so that the media show us not only beautiful and rich, but also an equal number of not outstanding people? Or is it even better to demand that we be shown unattractive losers in magazines, in cinemas and on television? Then, turning on the TV, we will feel much more confident, and our feelings for loved ones will not cool down. But this is possible as long as
Why are they so attracted to us? My guess is this: our minds are designed in such a way as to look for beautiful, strong and lucky people, since our ancestors either chose a pair of local beauties or tough guys for themselves, or competed to win such a partner. Of course, our ancestors lived without television, movies and photographs and before their eyes there were only real people, and the mechanisms of consciousness of our ancestors did the work that needed to be done. Now these mechanisms are overloaded. In a sense, the imagery that Hollywood and Madison Avenue feeds us * is akin to the taste of Ben & Jerry ice cream **. Tasty additives and visual imagery invade the mechanisms of consciousness that have been adapted for the survival and reproduction of offspring in a completely different world.
* Street in New York where major advertising agencies are located.
** This company produces ice cream with a variety of fillings.
What should mere mortals do? Are we defenseless against the inevitable evolution, which the mechanisms of consciousness have undergone without our knowledge? Not certainly in that way. Those who understand the dangers of fatty foods and too much sugar can keep track of what and how much they eat. Those who understand the danger of an overabundance of what the media feed us, stop indiscriminately swallowing “Playboy”, “People”, “Sex and the City” or “Dancing with the Stars.” After doing all this research, I stopped buying Playboy and almost never turn on the television. As a result, I have more time to ride a bike or read books (and without pictures, well, except perhaps the books of Dr. Seuss, which I read to my youngest son). Whether I became happier from this or not – I don’t know, but, in any case, I’m not trying to compare myself with Donald Trump *,
