Sex, Murder, and the Meaning of Life (12 page)

I have suggested that we instead replace the blank slate with a view of the mind as a coloring book. A coloring book, like a jukebox, also paints an image of inner structure (the predrawn lines that suggest a giraffe rather than a zebra or a rocket ship) interacting with environmental inputs (the young artist wielding the crayons). But the coloring book metaphor has a few other advantages. For one, a coloring book leaves more room for flexible and potentially unpredicted outcomes—one child might choose to color his giraffe purple and green instead of tan and brown. At the same time, a coloring book paradoxically allows
for more built-in constraints alongside its flexibility. More than the buttons on a jukebox, the predrawn outlines in a coloring book strongly solicit particular inputs from the environment (most children coloring a giraffe will be inspired to search for tan, brown, and yellow rather than purple, blue, and green). So, although a coloring book can, in one sense, be colored in an infinite number of ways, in another sense it is not really completely “passive” because the outlines strongly suggest particular palettes of inputs to be used on the different pages.

The coloring book metaphor does not pretend to be an actual representation of the human brain, but it does provides a straightforward contrast to the blank slate, conceptually extending this old and powerful metaphor to help us better visualize how mind and culture interact. Indeed, the coloring book actually incorporates the old metaphor, but it inspires us to think about the mind as having some built-in outlines as well as a great deal of blank space to be filled by environmental inputs.

An additional advantage of the coloring book metaphor is that, unlike a blank slate, a coloring book includes not just one page, but many. Just as there are different patterns of predrawn lines on different pages of a coloring book (tigers on one page, zebras on another, and giraffes on a third), so there are probably different constraints involved in solving the different developmental problems and opportunities involved in getting along, getting the bad guys, getting ahead, and getting the girl (or guy). In fact, as I will describe in the next chapter, another profound insight about the mind has arisen from the concordance of modern evolutionary psychology and neuroscience. Although it feels natural to think of our minds as unitary, it now appears that there are lots of different people running around inside our heads, alternative selves with very different, and sometimes incompatible, ideas about what to do next.

I
n the summer of 1992, I traveled through Europe with my delightful son Dave, my close friend Rich Keefe, his fun-loving son Richie, and my good-humored second wife Melanie. Before we left, I had imagined a script for our travelogue that was
The Sound of Music
meets
Cinema Paradiso
: Ahh, intimate friends, drinking Belgian beer on the market square in Leuven, eating French baguettes by the Seine in Paris, biking beneath the snow-covered Swiss Alps, enjoying bubbly vino and fresh pasta on the quaint piazzas of Padova, Italy—it seemed hard to imagine a more joyous adventure.

But in fact, by the time we arrived in Paris at the end of the first week, it was closer to
National Lampoon's European Vacation
meets
Lord of the Flies
. The two teenage boys had teamed up against the adults, registering a steady stream of complaints about our various failings, including what they perceived as an authoritarian reluctance to buy them McDonald's hamburgers while forcing them to eat weirdly flavored French crap. And in such small portions! Between bouts of complaining, the lads were inclined to sleep till noon most days, so my wife took to leaving for museums on her own in the late morning (often in a huff). When we arrived in Paris, the rooms Rich had booked were gone. Hotels were packed, so we were forced to stand in a very long line in a very hot and crowded train station
trying desperately to make alternative accommodations, speaking over the phone in broken French (understanding very little of the responses except “Non”), and trying to guard our luggage and wallets against the abundant local thieves (several of whom were arrested right before our eyes). We finally squeezed into a couple of overpriced, undersized, and underventilated rooms in a run-down hotel with a grumpy fellow at the desk, who acted as if it was a great burden to even hand us our room keys.

During our short stay in the ever-welcoming Eiffel city, my threshold for annoyance grew so low that I growled at a clerk in a bakery, “We should have left you bastards to the Germans!” This embarrassed my friend Rich, who got to be tainted by association when I stormed out of her shop. The bakerwoman's offense was that she had been disdainfully snotty, and although Rich pointed out that this was hardly grounds for resurrecting the Gestapo, her one slight was, in the context of an otherwise unpleasant string of experiences, enough to inspire me to wish ill fortune on her and all her fellow Gauls.

It was not just the snobby French who were getting on my nerves. Rich and I began to bicker over what should have been trivial matters—where to eat breakfast or what kind of bread to buy for lunch. During the third week, after we arrived in the otherwise charming northern Italian town of Padova, Rich and I spent one evening screaming at one another over a profoundly important issue: whose turn it was to wash the dishes in the (crowded and hot) apartment we were borrowing.

My son Dave was barely into his teens, and although he had previously been as easygoing a youngster as could be imagined, he chose this trip to try out for the role of stereotypical disaffected teenager. Dave spent most of one day walking half a block behind my wife and me, rolling his eyes skyward every time I spoke to him, communicating sheer disgust at any association with his grumpy old man. Demonstrating
my mastery of adolescent psychology, I snapped at him, “It cost me $1,000 to buy your plane ticket; you could at least try to enjoy yourself!” His quick reply: “You shouldn't have wasted so much money. I'd be enjoying myself a lot more if I was back home playing basketball with my friends!”

After the nightmare European vacation, it seemed for a while as if my decades-long friendship with Rich might have been permanently damaged. And the trip aroused a level of annoyance between my second wife and me that had never existed before, a feeling that might well have contributed to our eventual divorce. But even though I viewed my son as one of the chief engineers on the Eurail Pass to hell, it did not put a dent in my feelings for Dave. In fact, after the dysfunctional larger group splintered, Dave and I spent the final week bicycling happily through northern Germany, glad to be spending time alone together (with the faint sounds of “Edelweiss” playing in the background on the movie sound track).

The very different consequences these unpleasant experiences had on my feelings toward my son, my best friend, my wife, and the anonymous French clerk are relevant to an important point made by evolutionary psychologists: The human brain does not use the same set of rules to make decisions about different people in our lives. Indeed, it may even be a mistake to talk about “the brain” as if it were one organ, somehow encompassing our tightly unified self. Instead, it makes more sense to imagine that each of us has a loose confederacy of subselves inside our head, each controlled by a different combination of neural hardware and software.

For most of the twentieth century, psychologists and other social scientists would have regarded what I just said as blasphemous—a willful violation of one of the cherished values of science. According to the much-revered criterion of parsimony, a scientific theory should strive to explain natural phenomena using as few assumptions as possible. Several highly influential twentieth-century theories promised
to explain all human social life using a very small number of assumptions indeed—only one.

One of the admirably parsimonious theories in the field of psychology is something called the reinforcement-affect model. That theory assumes that people are motivated by one very simple goal—the desire to feel good—which inspires us to like people we associate with good feelings and to dislike people we associate with bad feelings. Love and hatred are the ends of this simple continuum, and whether we feel one way or the other about a person is happenstance, owing merely to what else was going on when we met him or her.

The reinforcement-affect principle had been invoked to explain a broad range of research findings: why we come to like other people who just happen to be around when we hear good news, why we like people who agree with our attitudes, and even why we are drawn toward people who are physically attractive. Good tidings, agreement, and beauty all make us feel good, and those good feelings rub off on anyone who happens to be around at the time.

The reinforcement-affect model is directly based on the simple laws of conditioning: Just as Ivan Pavlov's dogs came to associate a bell with food, so we condition good feelings to anyone who is around when something nice happens.

How do you get from simple conditioned reflexes like salivation in dogs to something seemingly more complicated, like love in humans? For this, the behaviorists made a distinction between primary and secondary drives. Primary drives include biological cravings like hunger and thirst, and secondary drives are desires for something that was previously associated with the satisfaction of a primary drive (if the friendly waitress at your favorite restaurant hails from Alabama, for example, you might develop a habit of drooling every time you
hear a drawl). On this view, championed by B. F. Skinner, the desire for status or for love is not built in at the factory but is added on, and all the complexities of human life depend on two very simple forms of learning: classical and operant conditioning. During much of my graduate-school career, I was a fan of this elegantly simple viewpoint, which I found especially appealing because the rules of classical and operant conditioning applied in the same way to many kinds of learning across many species.

The reinforcement-affect model is a domain-general model—one that attempts to explain all behavior using a simple and parsimonious rule, in this case, “Do it if it feels good.” But parsimony is not the only criterion for evaluating a scientific theory. A theory also has to do a good job of making distinctions when distinctions are necessary. For instance, several studies, including some I had done myself, had found that we like people more when we meet them under unpleasant circumstances, provided they are in the same boat and are not causing the unpleasant feelings. And sometimes the very same experience, such as seeing someone beautiful or handsome, can make one person feel good and make another person feel bad.

For example, Dan Montello, Sara Gutierres, Melanie Trost, and I did a study in which we asked people to look at a series of very attractive people and then report their mood. On the simple notion that it feels good to look at physically attractive people, that experience should have made our subjects feel good. For some of our participants, the last person they saw in the series was much less attractive than the others. Again, if attractiveness translates into positive feelings, the less attractive person should have brought people's mood down. In fact, sometimes it worked just like that: Looking at very attractive people in fact lifted people's moods, and seeing an average-looking person at the end of the series of good-lookers was a buzz-killer. But this was only true when the good-looking people were members of the opposite sex. On the other hand, seeing a
stream of good-looking people of one's own sex can make the viewer feel somewhat crappy, and an average-looking person at the end of the series is a mood-lifter.

So to say that physical attractiveness is a “reinforcer” is not quite specific enough. This highlights a big problem with simple reinforcement models—they do not specify in advance which kinds of experiences are likely to be rewarding and which are likely to be punishing. Skinnerian behaviorists traditionally liked to define reward and punishment empirically: Something is a reward if an organism will work to get it and a punishment if an organism will work to avoid it. But this buys parsimony at the cost of circularity.

There is another interesting feature of our mood-attractiveness experiment, and it highlights a second critical problem with simple domain-general models of behavior. Even though an average-looking person at the end of a series of perfect 10s has opposite effects on men's and women's moods (depending on the sex of the people they see), both sexes made similarly negative judgments of those average-looking folks. That is, although an average-looking female makes women feel good when she breaks up a stream of fashion models, the good mood does not generalize to their ratings of the average-looking woman's attractiveness. Instead, the regular Jane is judged as plainer than if she had been seen on her own (without the prelude of beauties). In other words, the perceptual contrast effect happens similarly whether you are looking at members of your own sex or the opposite sex, and it is not connected to whether your mood goes up or down when you see the average person.

This disconnect between mood and judgment suggests that emotional reactions to other people and perceptual judgments of those same people are being calculated by two separate mechanisms in the brain. This directly contradicts the domain-general assumptions of the reinforcement-affect model. In other words, the one-principle theory, though parsimonious, is too simple.

There is another very influential domain-general theory of human relationships. Social psychologists call it economic-exchange theory, and it is a simple extension of what economists call utility theory, or the theory of rational man. According to this approach, rather than being like Pavlov's dogs, we are more calculating and rational in approaching our relationships. On this model, all human beings think about relationships in the same way that stockbrokers think about financial transactions—we buy in when it looks as if we will make a profit and sell if it looks as if we will take a loss. Whether we are thinking about friends, relatives, lovers, coworkers, or strangers, the general assumption is that we seek to optimize the ratio of costs to benefits. I'll talk about the economic view of man in more detail in Chapter 11, “Deep Rationality and Evolutionary Economics.” For now I'll just point out that, as in the case of reinforcement-affect theory, economic theories have traditionally failed to address why the same outcome (a request for a kiss, for lunch, or for help writing a report) may sometimes be welcomed as a benefit and sometimes be regarded instead as a cost, depending on who is asking.