Sex, Murder, and the Meaning of Life (7 page)

However, in certain circumstances romantic motivation can make men more violent. In the first experiment, students had imagined
themselves at a party where members of both sexes would be present. In another experiment, we had some of the subjects imagine instead that the audience to the insult was composed entirely of the members of their own sex. When men imagined being insulted in front of other guys, both romantic and competitive motives inspired them to want to act aggressively.

So the bottom line of this series of studies is this: Either status or mating motives can lead men to want to be directly aggressive. But men seem to realize that violence itself is not sexy to women. Hence, a man in a mating frame of mind is inclined to behave himself in front of women but to be especially prone to show off his aggressive reactions if the audience is made up of other men. To the question about why men fight in bars even when there are no women to impress, the answer is that the show is in fact for the other guys—it is a gambit to hold onto one's position in the male dominance hierarchy, not to win love directly. Indeed, in many other species, the males arrive at the mating area several weeks before the females and do all their headbanging before the females arrive. The females do not need to see the fight. They merely want to know who won.

The research I just described presumes a fundamental connection between aggression and reproduction. A reasonable person might protest, “When I got into a fight with that guy in the bar, it had nothing to do with any desire to reproduce; it was solely because the guy insulted me!” This objection is quite reasonable on one level; our conscious minds process what is going on in the immediate environment and may be completely unaware of any connections between our reactions and their underlying evolutionary roots. The disconnect has been a problem for biologists as well as for laypersons. Indeed, opposing groups of biologists talked past one another for years, having
heated arguments about the causes of animal behavior, without realizing that the other side was working at a different
level of analysis
. The famous paleontologist and science writer Stephen Jay Gould often missed this point, posing false “alternatives” to evolutionary explanations, and as a consequence he did not endear himself to many evolutionary biologists. To appreciate the importance of distinguishing different levels of analysis, consider the question of why mammalian mothers nurse their offspring. This question can be answered at several different levels of analysis:

Sometimes there is an obvious connection among the different levels of analysis. In the case of nursing, for example, it is easy to see the links among the infant suckling, the development of breasts, being a mammal, and the functional benefits of providing nutrition to the young. But the connections among the four levels of analysis are not always so clear. Consider the question of why birds migrate each year. Here is a proximate explanation: Birds migrate because days are getting shorter—the immediate cue that triggers migration. But the functional reason birds migrate has nothing at all to do with the length of days, per se. Instead, they migrate because the locations of the best food and the best mating sites change with the seasons. Birds do not need to be aware of the indirect connections among day length, seasons, survival, and mating. In fact, it is a safe bet that most animals, including humans, are completely unaware of most of those sorts of connections. This is another point that confuses critics of evolutionary psychology. When someone says, “I have sex because it feels good, and I do my best to avoid having children; it has nothing to do with any motivation to propagate my genes,” they are absolutely right at the proximate level (what is going on in their heads in response to events in their environment) but dead wrong at the level of evolutionary function. Throughout this book, we will be talking a lot about the links between evolutionary function and proximate influences, so it is important to understand the distinction between different levels of analysis.

The evolutionary influences on behaviors are not directly available to consciousness, whether for migrating birds or for humans acting aggressively to impress other humans. But it is also important to appreciate that many proximate influences on our behavior are not available to consciousness either. For example, evolutionary researchers have been discovering a number of connections between hormone levels and social behaviors of various sorts. Unless you are an endocrinologist, you probably have no mental representation whatsoever
of your hormones (though you may experience feeling excited, fearful, or sexually aroused, which are downstream effects of those hormones). Likewise for feelings of anger, which are linked to hormones that start flowing in situations in which it would have benefited our ancestors to act aggressively. But when you are angry, you do not think, “I am experiencing a surge of testosterone and noradrenaline, and I believe that, in the interest of enhancing my reproductive success, it would be wise to yell at this person who is challenging my status.” Instead, you are thinking, “This jerk is one seriously irritating and disrespectful asshole!”

Although women commit fewer assaults and homicides than men, it would be a mistake to conclude that all human females are harmless St. Theresa–like little flowers. There is the occasional Lizzie Borden in the mix. Indeed, the “mere” 10 percent of American homicides perpetrated by women still adds up to several thousand per year. In a review of the literature on this topic, evolutionary psychologist Anne Campbell summarized the conditions under which women will kill as “stayin' alive”—women may act violently if their own survival, or that of their offspring, is threatened.

Consider one particularly vivid historical example. In 1789, France was in chaos, gripped by a severe economic recession and widespread famine. While poor women and their children were starving, they heard rumors that their queen—a young Austrian named Marie Antoinette—was continuing to throw away the state's money on banquets, jewels, and other extravagant luxuries. One day, an angry crowd of women began marching from Paris to the royal palace at Versailles, the crowd growing larger as other women joined them along the way. By the time they arrived at the palace, there were several thousand women, wielding axes, bayonets, and pikes and crying out for bread.
When no bread appeared, they began chanting for Marie Antoinette's head. Although the women were unsuccessful at finding the queen, they did find one of her bodyguards and decapitated him. In modern times, poverty is still linked to violence in women as well as in men. In areas with high numbers of people on unemployment and welfare, and during times of acute resource shortage, women are more likely to commit violent crimes.

In an experiment designed to investigate the triggers of female violence, we asked another group of students to imagine the following scenario: You've just graduated from college and the country is entering a recession. After spending months looking for work and exhausting all your savings, you can't count on any more financial support from your friends or family. Finally, you land a job at a large company. But you discover that to keep this job, you will have to compete with two other women (or men, if you are a man). As in the status-competition story, one of you will be fired and another will have a shot at a big bonus. Thinking about losing their jobs and facing high debt was the one motivational factor that produced a substantial boost in women's inclinations to approve of direct aggression. Interestingly, a similar pattern is found among chimpanzees: Anthropologist Martin Muller found that when scarce resources or feeding territories are at stake, females chimps begin to act like the normally more aggressive males.

So under some circumstances, females will switch from their preferred strategy of indirect aggression to a directly aggressive strategy. The circumstance most likely to trigger that shift is a severe economic threat. Incidentally, although Lizzie Borden was never actually convicted of the brutal murder of her father and stepmother, one aspect of her story fits with the general story of female direct aggression. Before the murder, Lizzie and her sister, both spinsters living in their father's house and dependent on his economic support, had been having bitter arguments with the old man over his plan to divide up his valuable
properties before he died, including giving away a house to relatives of their stepmother.

I mentioned earlier that the majority of men in our survey had had at least one homicidal fantasy about a total stranger. At first glance, this is an odd phenomenon; hand-to-hand combat with a total stranger can be dangerous, and even if that anonymous fellow is an especially rude driver, he probably does not qualify for a death penalty. What makes it most puzzling is that it is hard to see the benefits of expressing one's road rage toward a rude stranger on the highway, where even the audience is composed of strangers.

One possible explanation is that strange men are automatically categorized as especially threatening. When my older son Dave was a boy, he would have nightmares about unknown men chasing him. Little Davey's nightmares about dangerous male strangers were right in line with systematic data on children's dreams collected by Michael Schredl of the Mannheim Mental Health Institute's Sleep Laboratory. Schredl found that over 50 percent of the human aggressors in boy's dreams were unfamiliar men. By contrast, none of the boys had nightmares about unfamiliar women.

So “bad guys” are usually guys, and they are often unfamiliar. In a related line of research with Vaughn Becker, Dylan Smith and I asked students either to “think of an angry face” or “think of a happy face.” When people were asked to think of a happy face, the majority envisioned a woman, and it was typically a woman they knew. When they thought of an
angry
face, though, 75 percent of our participants spontaneously thought of a man. Most interestingly, that man was typically not someone they knew—so they were calling to mind not a real person with whom they had had an actual conflict but an ominous Jungian prototype—the angry strange man.

The people most likely to compete with you for status, to annoy you on an everyday basis, to bully you, or to otherwise make your life miserable are much more likely to be people you know. So why do people waste energy on feelings of antipathy toward total strangers, and why do men occasionally end up dead or in prison when they express those negative feelings toward a fellow they would otherwise never see again? In the next chapter, I will describe how that mystery can be solved by understanding the evolutionary psychology of prejudice.

F
or some of my hipper friends, 1969 was the summer of peace, love, and Woodstock. For me, though, it was the summer of learning to sing “John Jacob Jingleheimer Smith” along with a crowd of screaming five-year-olds. It was also the summer of lessons in silly human prejudices.

I had landed a job as a camp counselor at a summer camp for the children of upper-middle-class Long Islanders. The pay was terrible, and the kids were loud and spoiled, but for a college guy, the benefit package included some perks—most importantly, many of the other counselors were college females of the healthy outdoorsy type. Within a short while, I began dating one of my coworkers, a very pleasant and attractive dark-haired young woman.

Although she seemed to like me well enough, my new romantic interest never wanted me to pick her up at her house. The reason was that her grandparents, devout Jews who lived with her family, would have been mortified at her dating a goy. I had grown up in a neighborhood where non-Catholics were minorities, so I was more amused than offended by their reaction (her grandparents had lived
through the Nazi years, so their distrust of Gentiles could be easily forgiven). But I was offended at my own mother's negative reaction when I brought this lovely girl into our house. My mother had been raised Catholic, schooled by the same nuns who had instructed me to “Love thy neighbor.” Mom had not been to Mass for over a decade, since divorcing my shiftless Mick of a father and marrying a Protestant, so I didn't expect her to be narrow-minded. And the fact that she was a mildly liberal Democrat who had worked on John F. Kennedy's campaign also led me to expect tolerance from her. But she commented disapprovingly, “Douglas, I can't believe you're dating a Jewish girl!”

I spared the Jewish grandparents and my erstwhile Catholic mom some grief, because I started dating another one of my coworkers, a strawberry blonde whose last name was Wilhelmson.