Sex, Murder, and the Meaning of Life (17 page)

In Maslow's view, the “primitive” physiological needs, such as hunger, recede into the background in healthy growth-oriented adults. But is that really so? Think about hunger. Even relatively contented, well-connected, high-status people often devote a great deal of attention, conscious thought, and conversation to selecting, preparing, and presenting food. My wife has a Ph.D. and does research for a
living, but her favorite reading material includes the recipes in
Cook's Illustrated
magazine. In fact, several of my most self-actualized friends say that they look forward to retirement not simply as a time to read and think more, but also as a time to spend more time cooking enjoyable meals.

The same holds for the later-developing needs, such as the need to belong. Adults, even attractive and well-connected college students, remain exquisitely sensitive to social acceptance and social rejection, and when they experience social isolation, the pain is registered by the same physiological mechanisms used to register physical pain. Research since Maslow's time supports a view that later-developed motivations
build upon rather than replace
earlier ones.

So although earlier-developing needs do have to time-share with the ones that come later, they do not disappear in healthy, well-functioning adults. Instead, as depicted in the overlapping triangles in the new pyramid, they remain in the background to respond as relevant threats and opportunities arise. This directly links up to the most proximate level of analysis—the way different goals are calibrated to what is currently going on outside in the world.

Maslow's tendency to downplay the environment was linked to a bias in the humanistic movement that his writings helped spawn. Humanistic psychologists sometimes adopted an almost solipsistic emphasis on personal phenomenology: Don't like your perceptions of the world, just change your thoughts. On one level, it sounds nice to contemplate your own belly button, think your own thoughts, and do your own thing. But it is ultimately not the way people are wired; we're just not that self-centered. And it is not actually a higher plane of existence to be disconnected from the people around us. Indeed, adults who do not pay any attention to other people's needs may be manifesting more pathology than self-realization.

As I discussed in Chapter 6, we are all multiple personalities, and each of our subselves is driven by a different motivational subsystem.
Which one of our subselves comes to the surface depends on what is going on in our current situation. When we are in the dark, we feel especially vulnerable to harm from strangers. As a consequence, our night watchman subself takes charge, and we are, as discussed in Chapter 4, more likely to perceive a man from an ethnic outgroup as aggressive and untrustworthy. In the next chapter, we will see how our different subselves warp our minds in very different ways depending on who is around and what is on our motivational agenda.

A
lthough it was over thirty years ago, I remember my mother's exact words as she spoke to me over the phone: “Douglas, if you're standing, sit down. I have some very bad news for you.” The news was about my little brother James, and it was very bad indeed. James was dead, crushed by the wheels of a train on the Long Island Rail Road. Although I have no memory of what I was doing before she called or what I had been doing any time earlier that week or that month, I do remember exactly where I was standing when I got the call: staring at a yellow wall in my little kitchen in Bozeman. And I even remember how the room was lit by the afternoon sunlight filtering in from the outside porch.

For this painful moment in my life, I have what social psychologists Roger Brown and James Kulik called a “flashbulb memory.” Most Americans have a flashbulb memory of the moment they heard about the planes crashing into New York's World Trade Center—a precise picture in their heads of where they were and what was happening when they got the news. In trying to dredge up my own flashbulb memories, I uncovered a couple of unpleasant mental photographs in which something socially embarrassing happened to me. Although you might find it amusing to hear about the time I got plastered drunk at a conference and made a spectacle of myself, I must
plead the Holden Caulfield defense: I don't want to talk about it, if you want the truth. As I kept searching my memory banks, though, I discovered that not all my flashbulb memories are negative. Indeed, some are rather delightful. I remember the precise setting and lighting conditions in the beautiful side canyon of Sedona's Oak Creek where I experienced a three-way kiss with two very attractive women. I might enjoy talking about what happened next, but in this case, you probably do not want to hear about it, and they probably do not want me to give any more details.

As I continued dredging my mind for flashbulb memories, though, I noticed some surprising blank spaces on the tapes. For example, I vividly recollect a pretty young blonde woman who smiled pleasantly at me as we boarded the same plane several decades ago. I remember exactly what she looked like, the color of her hair, and how she was dressed. I also remember thinking I might introduce myself to her, until I read the message on her shirt: “If you ain't riding a Harley, you ain't shit.”

I had no doubt what category my dinky little Japanese car put me in, so I decided not to chat her up. Good thing, too, because I also vividly recollect the guy who picked her up at the airport when we landed: He was well over six feet tall, a solid 250 pounds, and adorned in a black leather jacket and black boots. He had numerous thick silver chains hanging from his black jeans, alongside what appeared to be a gun holster and a large knife. I also have another mental picture of the same pair of black-leather lovebirds. Later that same day I was nearly run over as the big fellow, with the young blonde hanging affectionately onto his back, raced his motorcycle right up the main pedestrian walkway on the Montana State University campus. Here is the blank part of the tape: Although I have a clear memory of his ominous size and black clothing, I have no recollection whatsoever of his face. In my memory he is in the same faceless category as Darth Vader. Nor do I remember the color or
model of the motorcycle that sped up the pedestrian pathway, though I'm betting it was a Harley.

Besides the many blank spaces in my memory, there are some places where what is filled in cannot be true. I realize this every time I have a conversation with my ex-wife about something that happened when we were both in our twenties: Her version is often completely different from mine, and sometimes she has actual evidence to suggest that the version seared into my memory has been edited, usually in a way that makes me look better.

In this chapter, I am going to talk about some research on how the human mind crunches information about our experiences with other people. On any given day, you may pass hundreds or thousands of people on the streets, in restaurants, supermarkets, churches, athletic clubs, or public restrooms—or on the pedestrian pathways of a college campus. Some of those people talk to you, overloading your mental capacities with still more information—about who said what to whom, when, where, and why. As they talk, these various people adopt different postures and diverse tones of voice. Sometimes they are telling you facts, sometimes they are kidding, and sometimes you think they may be lying. Some of them are wearing flashy colors, some are dressed conservatively, some have on black leather jackets, and some have messages written on their T-shirts. Some bear the aroma of a pleasant perfume; some reek of alcohol, tobacco, or motorcycle grease.

Most of the daily zillion bits of social information go in one ear (or eye or nostril) and out the other. But some people, and some of the things they say or do, sear themselves deeply into our memories, so deeply that we remember the specific details of certain social interactions decades later.

Why do we remember some people and some social situations and forget others? And why are some of our memories hopelessly distorted? Cognitive psychology is the branch of the field that deals with these questions. The field of cognitive psychology developed hand in hand with the field of computer science. In fact, computers were developed by researchers at the interface of psychology, philosophy, and mathematics—folks who wanted to build machines that could think like humans. So it's no surprise that when psychologists think about how the mind works, we often use computers as a metaphor, envisioning our brains as information-processing machines.

One way to think about mental information processing is to imagine a series of progressively finer-meshed filters. At the first stage, an array of sensory mechanisms (for detecting temperature, volume, or color) feed a broad stream of information into the brain's attentional filters. Our brains choose only a small portion of that information for conscious attention. That information is “encoded” or categorized (for example, Is this particular combination of sounds and shapes a dog barking, or a man yelling?). At the next level, only a small percentage of the information we encode makes the cut to get stored in our long-term memory banks. If that information is extremely important, such as the information that someone is attracted to us or that someone we know has died, it will get privileged processing, and may even become one of our flashbulb memories. But many of the things that make it past the first filter do not make it into long-term memory (the names of most of the people we are introduced to at a party, for example).

Cognitive psychologists began with the assumption that information processing is information processing is information processing. On this view, categorizing a string of letters as “cat” and not “cot” involves the same mental processes as categorizing an arrangement of
facial features as anger and not happiness. There is parsimony in assuming that the brain processes all information in more or less the same way and that those processes are more or less the same as those used by a computer. But as I discussed in Chapter 6, a theory can be too parsimonious, and research on domain-specific processing now suggests that the brain crunches different kinds of information in qualitatively different ways.

The philosopher David Hume famously said that reason is the “slave of the passions.” Given what we now know about modularity, I would modify that slightly. We have not just one central reasoner inside our heads but several. Which details we notice and remember and which ones we distort depends on what is most functionally relevant to the subself currently in control. Although we have only one motivational subself in the cockpit of consciousness at any moment, the others have their radar systems running in the background. When the swinging single subself is at the controls, we may be thinking about an attractive person who just passed on the street and remembering a pleasant date with someone who looked like his or her cousin. But if a group of scary-looking teenage hoodlums with angry smirks walk onto the scene, the night watchman takes the pilot's seat, and we may begin looking for ways to avoid crossing their path and remembering the police officer who passed a few steps back.

Imagine you are on the subway with a man sitting across from you. You may not notice whether he is wearing a plaid jacket, but if he is making an angry face in your direction, a flashing red light will go off in your brain in less than a second.

What the mind chooses to prioritize is a question at the interface of cognitive science and evolutionary psychology. Along with my colleagues Vaughn Becker, Steve Neuberg, and Mark Schaller and a team
of crack graduate students and former students, I have been doing a lot of research at the interface of these two fields.

In fact, I have already talked about some of this research. As we saw in Chapter 4, our own motivations, such as fear or amorous emotions, can lead us to project completely different meanings onto identical facial expressions. Thus, frightened people saw anger and amorous people saw sexual receptivity in the same neutral faces. And in Chapter 2 we saw that women—although they will spend time looking at good-looking men—do not remember them very well later, whereas men looking at attractive women do remember them. We think that sex difference in memory is linked to men's and women's different mating strategies: A man can in theory reap more reproductive profits and pay lower costs from having a relationship with an attractive stranger; a woman needs to make an informed decision. Perhaps staring at a handsome stranger increases the odds he will introduce himself. But if he does not, a woman is not likely to chase after him or even to waste cognitive resources thinking about him.

The essential point—which will be borne out as we look at more of the work that my colleagues and I have done—is that in order to understand how and what the human mind computes, one must place it in an evolutionary, ecological context. If we want to know why the mind works in a certain way, we must ask how and in what circumstances it would be beneficial to do so. Our brains seem to allocate resources in ways designed to best promote survival and reproduction.

In the rest of the chapter, I will describe a few of our interesting findings.

In one experiment, we gave our subjects a very easy task: They had to look at a face on a computer screen and press the “A” key if the person shown was angry and hit the “H” key if that person was happy. The task was especially easy because all the faces were wearing very clear emotional expressions (either contorted with anger or wide-eyed and smiling). And our subjects were very good at it, hitting
the correct key almost every time, and doing so in less than a second. But some of the decisions were even easier than others. If the face on the screen was a man, people almost never made a mistake when he was angry. But when he was smiling, they made mistakes almost 10 percent of the time, even as they took longer to make a choice. If the face on the screen was a woman, on the other hand, the results were reversed: People were faster and more accurate in recognizing happiness on a woman's face.