Sex, Murder, and the Meaning of Life (19 page)

In fact, compared to many other automobiles, the Lexus hardly registers on the wasteful consumption scale. Consider the Porsche Carrera GT. That particular vehicle has very little cargo capacity, only two seats, and a ten-cylinder engine that gets terrible gas mileage and is frightfully expensive to repair. The manufacturer's list price is $440,000, not counting the $14,800 dealer prep charge and the $5,000 delivery charge. And that seems modest compared to the $643,330 sticker price on the twelve-cylinder Enzo Ferrari.

Is conspicuous consumption a symptom of a decadent and overly materialist capitalist society, as critics often claim? Probably not. In his classic
Theory of the Leisure Class
, Veblen documented instances of conspicuous consumption from Iceland to Japan. On the Trobriand Islands, the chiefs give away valuable jewelry to demonstrate their greatness. On New Guinea, the big men compete with one another to give away the largest number of their highly valued pigs. Among traditional native tribes in the Pacific Northwest, such as the Kwakiutl, the headman occasionally throws a potlatch ceremony, in which he systematically gives his most valued possessions to other people and may even end the ceremony by burning down his own house. And
history is rich with even more notorious examples of conspicuous consumption, as preserved in the golden thrones, elaborate artworks, and giant pyramids of the Egyptian pharaohs, the immense palaces and ornate gold jewelry of the Incan potentates, and the extravagant and ostentatious palaces of the Indian maharajas.

Modern-day researchers in the field of consumer behavior often point their fingers at the big bad guy of twentieth-century social science—American culture—as the alleged perpetrator of conspicuous consumption. But as a small minority of consumer researchers are beginning to point out, conspicuous consumption is yet another human behavior whose roots can be found only by looking more deeply, examining not only the parallels between modern Americans and people in other societies but also our links with animals who have never turned on a TV or watched a movie.

In developing his theory of evolution by natural selection, Darwin was troubled by a different kind of conspicuous display—the beautiful and attention-grabbing plumage on birds such as peacocks. The peacock's tail is enigmatic in at least two ways. First, the bird has to invest a lot of energy to build his ostentatious tail, meaning he has to spend a lot of extra time searching for food. Second, the bird, which is native to India and Sri Lanka, is hunted by tigers, cheetahs, lions, hyenas, and wild dogs, all eager to turn a large and tasty bird into dinner. And then there is the dread
Homo sapiens
, who hunts down the remaining wild peacocks for their tasty meat and colorful feathers. To all his predators, the peacock's display is analogous to wearing a neon sign that says, “Eat here!”

If evolutionary forces favored features that promoted survival and reproduction, how could any animal evolve a characteristic that increases its odds of dying young? An important clue comes from a
statement by a wildlife official from the Indian Punjab, who said, “It is the easiest to kill a male peacock during the mating season, when it dances around in the open and can be easily targeted.” So the peacock shows off his brilliant display only during the mating season. And if you have ever seen a mixed-sex crowd of peafowl, you know that the brilliant display is only found on one sex—the male. Peahens are colored to better blend with their surroundings and have a tail built for speed rather than show. So the male is showing off to attract mates.

Peacocks are uniquely beautiful, but the species is hardly alone in having show-offy males. That mockingbird singing outside your window all night long (possibly attracting the attention of hungry cats) is a male. The bighorn sheep in Rocky Mountain National Park hurling itself headfirst at full speed against another bighorn—male. The Siamese fighting fish flaunting its colorful fins and ever ready for a brutal altercation—also a male. It is not that females never show off, for reasons I will discuss below, but showing off is like homicide: There is a small chance that the perpetrator is the maid, but any aspiring Sherlock Holmes would fingerprint the butler first.

To explain how traits like the peacock's tail could evolve, Darwin invoked the concept of sexual selection, which we have already encountered in our discussion of aggression in Chapter 3. Although evolution is often mistakenly dubbed “survival of the fittest,” the name of the game in evolution is not survival but reproduction. To be fit in an evolutionary sense, an animal needs to survive long enough to reproduce. But survival without reproduction does not enhance fitness. A celibate life, no matter how long, does not contribute genes to future generations. On the other hand, an animal that lives fast, attracts mates, and has offspring is an evolutionary success story even if it dies young.

Sexual selection comes in two flavors. Some traits (such as a peacock's tail) enhance an animal's fitness by attracting members of the opposite sex. Other traits (like antlers or horns) may enhance fitness
via an indirect route: by helping the animal compete with members of its own sex.

Why is it that males have these showy and costly accoutrements more often than females? The answer links back to another concept I discussed in Chapter 3, differential parental investment. Recall that whenever one animal makes a relatively higher investment in the offspring, that animal tends to be relatively choosy about mating. Females have an intrinsically high investment because they produce eggs and, in the case of mammals, carry the growing young inside their bodies and later nurse them. Males can, in theory and often in practice, make a very small direct investment in the offspring—the energy it takes to produce sperm. Hence, females are more likely to be choosy about mating, and males are more likely to show off.

In the first chapter, I briefly mentioned the first research Ed Sadalla and I conducted with Beth Vershure to test the applicability of sexual selection to human beings. Although biologists since Darwin's day had collected numerous examples of sex differences in dominance and had linked the difference to female preference for dominant males, no one had ever asked whether the same phenomenon applied to human beings. So we conducted an experiment designed to examine this possibility.

We brought college students into the lab and showed them videotapes of two different members of the opposite sex. One of the people they saw moved in a manner designed to convey submissiveness. The other used the nonverbal signals of social dominance. For example, a woman would watch a video in which a man enters an expansive office in which another man is seated behind a large desk. In the submissive condition, the man entering the office sat near the door, far away from the man behind the big desk. During the conversation that
ensued, the visitor held his body in a rigid position with his head partially bowed, clutching a sheaf of papers and frequently looking down at the floor. In the high-dominance condition, a different man would strut into the same office, pull his chair right up to the desk, and move his hands and body in a relaxed manner, all the time leaning in close to the man behind the desk. Male subjects saw an identical pair of videos, except that the actors were women.

We told subjects that we were testing their abilities as amateur personality psychologists, their aptitude for judging someone's personality with only a small amount of information to go on. We told them that each person entering the office had been given an extensive series of psychological interviews and tests and that their job was to guess what the person was “really like,” based on observing the person's behavior in a silent video. So each subject rated both the dominant- and submissive-acting targets on a number of personality traits, such as “dominant vs. nondominant,” “feminine vs. masculine,” and “warm vs. cold.” We were in fact most interested in what they had to say about how sexually attractive each person was.

The results were clear for women judging men: When the target acted dominant rather than submissive, our female judges rated him as more sexually attractive and desirable. How did men react when a woman acted dominant? According to one theory popular at the time, which claimed that women avoid acting dominant because they fear it will make them unattractive and masculine, acting dominant should have hurt. But whether the woman was dominant or submissive actually made no difference to her attractiveness. In three other studies, we used different methods to make the target appear dominant (being a tennis player who dominated opponents, or being rated by a team of psychologists as powerful, commanding, and masterful). In each case, we replicated the original pattern. Dominance never had an effect on a woman's attractiveness, but it reliably made a man significantly sexier to women.

Since that time, other researchers have found similar effects for other forms of social dominance. For example, John Marshall Townsend and Gary Levy found that high-status clothing boosted a man's attractiveness, so that an unattractive man wearing a nice suit and a Rolex watch was more desirable to women than a handsomer guy dressed as a Burger King employee. Men judging women, on the other hand, preferred the good-looking woman, regardless of whether she was dressed up to impress or dressed down to serve French fries.

Filling out the story, anthropologists have collected data from other societies and other time periods showing that around the world and throughout history, high-status men have had access to more wives (in polygynous societies) and more attractive wives and extramarital partners (in officially monogamous societies).

A male can stand out by being physically dominant over other males, like an alpha chimpanzee, or he can demonstrate his superior qualities to females in other ways, peacock style.

Jill Sundie, now a marketing professor at the University of Texas, was a graduate student of mine who discovered evolutionary psychology after studying economics. Jill suspected that the pursuit of money—and the visible spending of it—has something in common with a peacock growing an elaborate tail. We explored those commonalities in a series of studies with Vlad Griskevicius, Josh Tybur, Kathleen Vohs, and Dan Beal.

In one study, we asked students at two different universities to think of a time when they had witnessed someone engaging in conspicuous consumption. The majority of students thought of a man—buying a flashy car or picking up an oversized group tab at a restaurant, for example. Is this because men simply have more money to consume things in general, as one of Jill's reviewers confidently suggested
when she submitted the findings to a marketing journal? Not quite. When we later asked a similar group of people to think of the person they knew who most liked to shop, the majority nominated a woman. So people perceive women as liking to spend money, but men as liking to throw it around in conspicuous ways.

Following the peacock analogy, we suspected that men's conspicuous consumption was a form of showing off linked to mating. To examine this possibility, we ran several other experiments. In one, we asked participants to imagine they had just received an unexpected windfall of $5,000. How much of the money would they spend on purchases that might convey their newfound wealth, such as a new watch, a new cell phone, or a nice vacation to Europe? Before asking them how they would spend the money, we put some of the subjects in a mating frame of mind by asking them to imagine an ideal first date with someone they found highly attractive. Others looked at photos of buildings.

Romantic motivation had a different effect on men than on women. Men in a romantic frame of mind chose to spend more of their newfound $5,000 on conspicuous purchases (but not to spend more on inconspicuous purchases, such as tissues, cold medicines, or kitchen supplies). Women's spending was unaffected by feelings of romance.

It is not that women are oblivious to the influences of romantic motivation. In another series of studies with Bob Cialdini and Geoffrey Miller, we asked men and women not about spending but about volunteering to help out with a local charity (working at a homeless shelter, for example, or teaching underprivileged children to read). Romantic motivation did not affect men's charitable inclinations, but it did boost women's tendency to want to help others. In several other studies, we replicated the same finding: Romance made women more inclined to help other people out. The only time romantic motives led men to act more altruistically was when the help could make them
look like a hero (jumping into icy water to save a stranger who had fallen from a boat in a storm, for example, or distracting a grizzly bear who is attacking a stranger).

Pablo Picasso produced 147,800 works of art in his life, more than any other artist in recorded history. And he did not just knock off the same painting over and over; he kept recreating himself, with different styles in his Blue Period, his Rose Period, his Cubist Period, and his Surrealist Period. When art historians looked at Picasso's life, they noticed something else going on: Each of his new creative periods was accompanied by a new mistress. His latest paramour was always a younger woman who, like the beautiful Dora Marr, served as an inspiring muse for Picasso's new style. And Picasso was not unique in this regard; historian Francine Prose observed that many historically creative figures, including Salvador Dalí, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Dante Alighieri, were also inspired by muses of their own.

Evolutionary theorists have offered several possible hypotheses about the origins of creativity. Most have presumed that creative intelligence assisted in survival (for example, a creative mind could create a novel way to catch a fish or shake fruit out of a tree). Steven Pinker suggested instead that creative abilities are simply by-products of other cognitive capacities. But in his book
The Mating Mind
, Geoffrey Miller argued that these hypotheses failed to explain the sheer amount of time and effort people devote to creative exploits that produce no tangible benefits (such as writing poems, composing music, or painting pictures), meanwhile ignoring tasks that could directly produce food or other immediately useful goodies.