Sex, Murder, and the Meaning of Life (5 page)

How would you have responded? The answer depends on whether you are a man or a woman. As in the earlier study, we found that beauty undermined men's commitment to their partners. Men rated themselves as least committed to their partners after they had just seen a series of beautiful and submissive women who were presumably available and on the market. Seeing a series of handsome men, on the other hand, did not substantially influence women's commitment. But if you are a woman, do not start feeling smug just yet. Seeing a series of socially dominant men undermined women's commitment, just as seeing attractive women had done to men's.

Does seeing beautiful women or successful men change how we feel about ourselves? In a follow-up study, Sara Gutierres, Jennifer Partch, and I again exposed people to profiles of other folks who, we told them, had signed up for the “Singles at ASU” program. In this study, though, we had the subjects look at profiles of people of their own sex.

Each profile included a name, a short list of hobbies and interests, and the person's “most notable accomplishment.” There were two versions of each profile, depicting similar interests and activities but varying
in whether the person described himself or herself as high or low in social dominance. For example, here is what “Carl Powers” had to say about himself in the high-dominance condition:

In the low-dominance condition, Carl was not such a go-getter, but instead was rather meek:

Some people saw eight high-dominance profiles, designed to give the impression that there were a lot of successful and hard-driving members of their own sex out there competing with them for mates. Others saw eight low-dominance profiles, suggesting a less imposing set of competitors. Women saw identical profiles, except with female names (e.g., “Amy Powers” instead of “Carl Powers”). Each profile had a photograph attached, so that some subjects saw eight highly attractive members of their own sex, whereas others saw eight average-looking potential competitors.

Looking at highly attractive or highly successful members of their own sex did not change people's self-ratings of how attractive or socially dominant they thought they were. But it did change their guesses about how they would be rated by other people. And the changes were flipped from those we found in people's ratings of their own mates: Men who had been bombarded with socially dominant men felt that they themselves were less desirable as marriage partners; women who had been bombarded with physically attractive women downgraded their own marriage prospects.

So our research suggested that if you are a man, exposing yourself to too much beauty can undermine your feelings about your partner; if you are a woman, on the other hand, exposing yourself to too many go-getters can chip away at your commitment. But in the modern world, starlets and moguls seem to be everywhere. In Hollywood's market-driven attempt to give the people what they want, movies and
television shows (from
Gone with the Wind
to
Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire?
and
Mad Men
) tend to be populated with more beautiful young women and rich powerful men than you will ever see at the local shopping mall. To the extent that you expose yourself to movies and television, then, it might be bad for your partner. And probably for you, too.

Open up a popular magazine, turn on your television set, or go out to the movie theater, and you will enter a world full of beautiful women and powerful men. Our research suggests that unless you already live in Hollywood, your innocent attempts to entertain yourself may be making the people in your real life pale in comparison and may be undercutting your own confidence. Should you write your senator and lobby for legislation demanding equal media representation for your average-looking average-accomplishing neighbors? Or better yet, why not demand that the media be filled with grossly unattractive and unaccomplished losers? Then, when we turned on our television sets, we would get to feel better about ourselves and our romantic partners—until, of course, we discovered the black market of beautiful-jet-setter videos that would spring up to fill the void.

Why are we so attracted to these images? My guess is this: Our minds are designed to look for the beautiful and the powerful because our ancestors either picked the local beauties and bigwigs as mates or competed with them to get mates. It paid to be aware of the opportunities and threats out there. Of course, our ancestors lived in worlds without television sets, movies, or photographs, so they only saw real people, and their mental mechanisms did the jobs they were supposed to do. Now those mechanisms are overwhelmed. In a sense, the images from Hollywood and Madison Avenue are analogous to the flavors of Ben & Jerry's ice creams. The tasty flavors and images tap into mechanisms that were designed to promote survival and reproduction in a much different world. Consume too much, though, and it may be harmful to your health.

So what's a mortal to do? Are we helpless in the face of our evolved mechanisms, which may lead us astray without our conscious awareness? Not completely. People who understand the dangers of overabundant fats and sugars can control their diets. People who understand the dangers of an overabundant diet of mass-media images can stop gorging on
Playboy
,
People
,
Sex and the City
, or
Dancing with the Stars
. After doing all this research, I do not buy
Playboy
, and I almost never turn on a television set. As a consequence, I have more time to go out for a bike ride or to read a book (the kind without pictures, unless I'm reading Dr. Seuss to my younger son). Whether I'm happier, I don't know, but at least I'm not comparing my successes to Donald Trump's or my wife to the airbrushed charms of Miss February.

In this chapter, we have considered one potential cost of not understanding our natural inclinations, of not seeing how our visual affinity for beauty can, like our natural taste for ice cream, have insidious effects over the long haul. Now let us shift our attention to something much more immediately dangerous—natural inclinations that, if given free rein, could very quickly land us in prison (as almost happened in my own case) or in the morgue.

S
teve Lowry was one of the fellows who used to sit around with me on the ASU mall discussing philosophical issues and overdosing on beauty. At first glance, Steve and I appeared rather similar; we were both tall, long-haired, bell-bottomed white male graduate students in clinical psychology, we both loved to play the guitar, and we both enjoyed discussing topics like phenomenology and existentialism late into the night. But we actually came from radically different cultural backgrounds. Steve had grown up in an upper-middle-class suburb in Ohio and claimed he had never been in a fistfight in his life. Having grown up in a New York neighborhood with more than its fair share of lower-class Irish and Italian hooligans, I had a hard time believing him. There were periods during my childhood when I had a fight every day. And I was surrounded by people who were quite a bit tougher than me and had a father in prison and plenty of friends and relatives who would eventually end up there as well.

My stepfather Bob had middle-class aspirations, and I can thank him for getting me out of Queens and away from a crowd of ruffians. But Bob had been raised in the same neighborhood, so even after we moved out to the land of Ozzie and Harriet, his idea of parental advice still involved the occasional punch in the jaw. Bob was a proud member of the National Rifle Association and had a
gun rack hanging prominently in the kitchen; when he got drunk, he would lose his otherwise pleasant disposition and threaten to shoot my brother and me if we tried to intervene in one of his battles with our mother. (She also had a taste for liquor, as well as a special knack for egging Bob on.)

One evening my stepfather was especially out of control and came at me with fists flying, shouting threats against my life. In a scene from the movies, I managed to land the best punch of my pugilistic career—a square hit on his jaw that sent him flying across the room, where he fell unconscious on the floor. My brother looked at me, pointed to the guns Bob had just been threatening us with, and asked, “Should we kill him?” I actually had to think about it for a minute before I said, without complete resolve, “Nah, we'd better not.”

So with this background, I was no stranger to thoughts of homicide. Indeed, when my colleague Norbert Schwarz expressed doubt at my assumption that everyone had homicidal fantasies, I thought he was putting me on. When I surveyed the other colleagues with whom Norbert and I were eating lunch, though, they were split: Some claimed they'd never had a homicidal fantasy, but the others accused them of denial. For experimental psychologists, this kind of disagreement means there is an interesting hypothesis waiting to be tested. So I decided to do a more systematic investigation, working with my graduate student Virgil Sheets, another midwestern boy, but one who hailed from a rougher town than Steve Lowry's.

A few days after the debate with my colleagues, I gave a lecture on aggression. During the class, I asked my students to fill out a brief questionnaire about their own violent fantasies. To overcome the normal tendency to hide antisocial inclinations, I explained that even normal
people occasionally have angry and violent thoughts about others, which might range from thoughts about “telling someone off” or hitting someone to thoughts about killing another person. I then asked the students to describe a recent time they had had thoughts about killing someone or, if they had never had such thoughts, to tell us about the most violent thoughts they had had.

Over the next year, Virgil Sheets and I asked these questions of 760 ASU students. The results were clear: The majority of those smiling, well-adjusted, all-American students were willing to admit to having had homicidal fantasies. In fact, 76 percent of the men reported such fantasies, firmly in line with my more pessimistic expectations. I was somewhat surprised, however, to find that 62 percent of the so-called gentler sex had also contemplated murder at least once.

Is there something especially violent about students in Arizona? Probably not. When David Buss and Josh Duntley later surveyed a sample of students at the University of Texas, they found similarly high percentages of men (79 percent) and women (58 percent) admitting to homicidal fantasies. However high these numbers might seem, my guess is that they underestimate how many normal people have homicidal fantasies. Social psychologists have found time and again that people are motivated to say what they think is most socially desirable and that we all tend to be selectively forgetful of evidence that we are not good little girls and boys. As in the case of Alfred Kinsey's famous data on self-reports of masturbation, it is probably safe to assume that the actual incidence of homicidal fantasies is at least as high as what people are willing to publicly admit.

Whom do people think about killing? Both sexes were inclined to target men; 85 percent of men's fantasies and 65 percent of women's involved killing a man. This part was not too surprising, given actual homicide statistics, which show men much more likely
to be homicide victims. There were several interesting sex differences in the homicidal fantasies, though. We found that 59 percent of men (as compared to 33 percent of women) had fantasized about killing a total stranger. Indeed, for 33 percent of men (as compared to 10 percent of women), their most recent homicidal fantasies involved a stranger. Women outnumbered men only in the category of fantasies about romantic partners: Among women, 27 percent, as compared to 7 percent of the men, reported that their most recent fantasy was about a romantic partner. This was due not so much to the fact that men were innocent of ever contemplating extreme relationship violence—they are not—as to the fact that men have more frequent fantasies about killing people in other categories. And of course, women's relationship partners are men, who seem to inspire more homicidal fantasies in everyone they meet.