Sex, Murder, and the Meaning of Life (18 page)

Was it because men are better at expressing anger whereas women are better at expressing happiness? To address this question, Vaughn Becker made up some artificial people, using a program called Poser that creates lifelike human faces. The program allows the user to choose the extent to which a face is sex-typed, so Vaughn could make faces that ranged from completely androgynous to highly masculine or highly feminine. Vaughn was also able to give the face any degree of emotional expression. Even for these computer-generated faces, our subjects' judgments were still quicker and more accurate in recognizing anger on a male face and happiness on a female face. Vaughn also found something else fascinating: If he took a completely androgynous face and made it look just a little bit angry, people overwhelmingly judged it as a man. If he took the same androgynous face and made it look slightly happy, people judged it to be a woman.

We explained the results, especially the rapid detection of angry men, in evolutionary terms: Emotion researchers since Darwin have thought about emotional expressions as a coevolved pairing of mechanisms to transmit and receive emotional cues. An angry expression communicates threat and can be a warning that helps two people avoid a direct bloody confrontation, but it only works if the receiver's brain recognizes it. Why would it be functional to recognize a man's anger more rapidly than a woman's? Because men are more potentially violent, so we do not want to miss an angry expression on a
man's face. Why would it be adaptive for men to communicate their anger accurately? Men are more likely to be involved in conflict with one another, and their ability to communicate anger could influence their position in the dominance hierarchy (which for men more than for women can translate into reproductive success).

When we submitted the results for publication, a couple of the reviewers were unconvinced, arguing that learned sex roles could explain the effect. We needed to tease apart the competing coevolutionary and sex-role explanations, which can be tough, because the two kinds of influence often work hand in hand. In this case, however, computer software came in quite handy for making the distinction. We again used the Poser program to generate completely androgynous faces. But now we took those sexless faces and put them on bodies bearing sex-role accoutrements. The faces were identical, but the male body had a thicker neck and broader shoulders and was adorned in a suit and tie; the female body was adorned in a dress. In another variation, we did not add any cultural cues, but simply tweaked the facial features to make them more masculine (thicker eyebrow ridge and larger jaw) or feminine (rounder brow ridge and smaller jaw).

When we put the androgynous face on a male body wearing a suit and tie, it was in fact judged to be a man. If the sex-role explanation were correct, then, and there is a learned mental association between male and anger, the person judged to be a man should also have been judged as more angry. But he was not. When we gave the androgynous face a man's eyebrow ridge, on the other hand, the face was judged as only slightly more masculine but much angrier than the purely androgynous face. This pattern of results supports the idea that what makes a man's face look more angry is its morphological structure—that naturally prominent brow—not the fact that people simply associate masculinity with anger. In other words, men's faces are constructed to better communicate anger, and our brains are constructed to quickly spot anger in a man.

An angry face grabs your attention because it is particularly relevant to your night watchman subself—you do not want to be caught sleeping if there is a potential threat to your life and limb. Other subselves are attentive to different social signals. The swinging single subself is tuned to attractive members of the opposite sex. But these subselves are not equally strong in all people. Some people are happily monogamous, for example, and do not spend much time scanning for new mating opportunities. So in other research we conducted with Lesley Duncan and Mark Schaller's team, we decided to measure how sexual pursuit interacted with attention. For this research, we used what is called the “change detection” method. Subjects in this experiment looked at eight faces on the screen and we asked them to press a computer key whenever one of them changed. Sometimes an eye or a nose on one face would repeatedly disappear and reappear on the screen. Those changes happened fast, with the normal and distorted versions flipping back and forth several times a second. A disappearing nose would seem easy to spot, but it can be surprisingly invisible unless you are paying attention to the particular face as it changes. We found that people were more likely to notice a change in a physically attractive member of the opposite sex, but there were two important qualifications. First, this selective attention effect was only found among men. Second, the effect was found specifically among men who adopted a nonmonogamous, “unrestricted” approach to dating. These are the men whose swinging single subself never goes to sleep.

Reminiscence can take two forms. Sometimes when we reminisce, we think about things that actually happened, like that three-way kiss or the painful call from my mother. But sometimes we think instead about alternative realities, about what it might have been like if we
had walked up a different life path at some time in the past. Indeed, sometimes we remember more about the imagined alternative than we do about events that actually happened.

As a younger man, I had a passionate crush on a beautiful but reticent young woman. One afternoon, though, she seemed ready to overcome her reluctance and started leading me back to her bedroom. But as I thought about my current girlfriend, I decided to pass up the opportunity. Nevertheless, I still wonder what would have happened if I had stayed. Would it have turned into a pleasant memory of a short and passionate affair, or would it have completely disrupted my life?

Many of my male friends have a counterfactual reminiscence very much like that one—of a time they almost got to sleep with a woman they found highly attractive. I wondered whether women have similar reminiscences.

On a sabbatical many years later, I had a conversation with Neal Roese, who was then a professor at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. Neal is probably the world's foremost expert on counterfactual reminiscences—musings people have about choices they did not make and about how things might have been if they had chosen differently. He and I had independently started wondering about possible sex differences in these counterfactual thoughts.

Previous researchers had not found many interesting sex differences in counterfactual thinking, but as Neal and I talked it became clear that researchers might have been asking the question the wrong way. Earlier studies had focused on people's counterfactual thoughts about possible achievements (“If only I had studied harder or made that home run,” for example) and had not probed much into counterfactual musings about relationships. Working with Neal's colleagues Ginger Pennington, Jill Coleman, and Maria Janicki and with my colleague Norm Li, we took a more focused look at people's counterfactual thinking in the romantic domain. Across several studies, we asked participants to think about
either their past romantic relationships, their academic achievements, their friendships, or their relationships with their parents. As they thought about these different relationships, we asked them to consider the question, “Is there something you wish you had done differently?”

When it came to their parents and to their school careers, both men and women had about twice as many regrets over inactions, things they should have done but did not, than over actions, things they actually did but wished they had not. When it came to romantic relationships, though, men and women were very different. Women were much more likely than men to have regrets over things they had done (getting involved with that self-centered bastard despite Mom's warnings, for example). The vast majority of men's regrets over relationships, on the other hand, were about actions they did not take (a time they did
not
get more intimately involved with some desired damsel).

From an evolutionary perspective, this makes a lot of sense: Men incline a bit more toward promiscuity, and women to careful choice. When women make a bad romantic choice, they remember. And perhaps by remembering, they will do a better job of avoiding those mistakes in the future.

In the first chapter, I promised a journey from the gutter to the stars. After that, we had a whirlwind tour of the gutter, stopping for scenic overlooks down on sex, murder, and racial prejudice. We saw how gaping over
Playboy
centerfolds, though based in very natural inclinations, could wreak havoc on the landscape of our relationships in the modern media-heavy world. We drove into the darker mental neighborhood of homicidal fantasies, getting a few glimpses of natural inclinations that send some of our neighbors on unwanted side trips to emergency rooms and prison cells. And then we descended deeper
into the jungle of human nature, taking a gander at the different areas of prejudice.

In Chapters 6, 7, and 8, we have shifted our gaze up into our own minds. We have seen that what is in there is not a blank slate and not a blueprint but a coloring book, with some guidelines drawn before birth and some spaces awaiting the artistic inputs of life experience. And we have seen that there is not just one executive self inside our heads but sets of sometimes segregated subselves, each designed to perform different essential tasks, such as watching out for bad guys from other neighborhoods, getting along with our neighbors, and taking care of our families. Those different subselves come on line at different phases of our life's journey, and they take turns in the driver's seat, depending on the threats and opportunities in the current landscape.

In the next few chapters, we will move away from the individual's perspective and take an increasingly aerial view. We will now begin looking at how those simple selfish biases inside our heads connect us to other people, influencing conformity to social norms, socially motivated consumer decisions, and even our decisions to go to church. In the last chapters, we will move still higher, gazing down to see how these earthbound local motivations interconnect with economics and the emergence of societal order.

A
s a four-year-old, my younger son couldn't have cared a whit about what we paid for his toys. New or used? No matter. Free? Fine. One day, he and I cut up an old cardboard box and some construction paper to make a rickety tunnel for his toy cars. Cost of materials: maybe twelve cents. He couldn't have been more euphoric if I'd dropped a couple of hundred bucks on the latest fancy kid's gizmo at FAO Schwartz. But I know his obliviousness to market value won't last. When I was about his age, I would happily accompany my mother into a place called John's Bargain Store, hoping she might find some goodie for me. By the time I was eight, though, I adamantly refused to even enter this lowly discount emporium, and I can vividly remember one tantrum that no doubt humiliated her right in the middle of the Steinway Street shopping crowd. I'm sure Mom was imagining the onlookers thinking, “Oh, my goodness, Gracie, Irene's forcing her poor little boy to shop in that dumpy little thrift store!”

Materialistic karma came back to haunt me when my older son was approaching his teens and would throw a similar tantrum at the mere suggestion that he might choose a pair of athletic shoes costing
less than $120 (and that was back in the 1980s, when my income was a lot lower and a dollar was worth a lot more than it is today). The classic parental lament was that in a few months, the same shoes could be bought on sale for $20. But when I tried to steer my son to last season's model, he would point out that they were no longer “cool.” Michael Jordan, and all of America's youth, had moved on to a slightly different model whose apparent coolness was lost on parents but blatantly obvious to young boys.

Of course, adults become more economically rational, don't they? My friend Ed Sadalla, the professor who first showed me a copy of Wilson's
Sociobiology
in 1975, told me a story about a friend of his who lives in Pacific Palisades, a swell Los Angeles neighborhood flanked by Malibu and Santa Monica. Ed's buddy was in the market for a new set of wheels and wanted Ed's opinion about a particular model of Lexus. Ed is a good person to ask such a question. He has driven some classy automobiles in his time, including a Porsche and a classic Volvo sports car. Ed opined that the Lexus in question was in fact a very well made vehicle, but he suggested his friend consider another car that was virtually the same machine but would save his pal several thousand dollars. The only real difference was that the alternative would bear the brand name “Toyota” instead of “Lexus.” According to Ed, his friend wrinkled his nose slightly and said, “Oh no, I could never do that!”

Was Ed's friend just being taken for a ride by the Lexus label? If we calculate the value of both cars from the perspective of
Consumer Reports
, it is clearly less rational to buy the Lexus. Of all the pertinent features—acceleration, braking, comfort and convenience, fuel economy, reliability, interior comfort, and safety features—the Toyota Camry scored lower on only one: the sticker price. And given that
mechanics charge more to work on luxury cars, the Lexus would have another disadvantage: It would cost more to maintain in the future.

But economic utility involves more than just value for a dollar. Economists define utility as expected future satisfaction. As Thorstein Veblen noted over a century ago, some people gain a great deal of satisfaction from displaying their wealth. Indeed, if you want to advertise your affluence, a certain amount of wasteful frivolity in your spending patterns is quite useful—it indicates you have money to burn.
Consumer Reports
has a category, “Best Buy,” that we usually think of as a good thing. But from the perspective of Veblen and of Sadalla's friend in Pacific Palisades, economic frugality could, ironically, reduce a car's value—counting as a liability for those who want to conspicuously burn their money.