Our Psychological Biases
We evolved to survive and flourish in the world we happen to live in. But during the course of our lifetimes, we also learn to deal in the world we experience. Be it because of nature, nurture, or some complex relationship between the two, our minds have little tricks they use to help us get by.
Some people are generally critical of these tricks and tend to call them “biases.” Others see them in a more favorable light and tend to call them “heuristics,” which roughly translates as a rule that should usually be followed. Everyone can agree that these tricks work best in environments resembling that of our evolutionary history.1 Problems can occur when these biases, evolved in one environment, are used in other environments, such the one you’re in when choosing a health insurance plan.
Whether biases/heuristics are good or bad, artists and marketers use many of these tricks to win us over. I’ll describe some of these biases and their effects.
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How do you know how likely something is to happen? Or how common something is? Before we had statistics and systematic counting to help us, we used what we saw in our environment as a guide. We still do. Seeing something again and again makes us think it is common and probable. We estimate how often we’ve seen it, in general, by how easily it is brought to memory or, in the language of cognitive psychology, how “available” it is. This is the essence of the availability heuristic. We base our ideas of how probable or common something is on how easily it is brought to memory. This tends to work pretty well when we are only using our sensory perception as input, that is, reasoning about what we directly experience. The trouble starts with communication—when we reason about what we are told, read, and see on video.
We can recall not only things we’ve actually seen, but also reports of what other people have seen—or their reports of other reports. As described in previous chapters, we have good evolutionary reasons to believe the stories that people tell us. Today, we have global communication and we can hear about things happening all over the world. Not only do we read about what’s happening, but we also see what’s happening with television and Internet news. Where we might have evolved some built-in filters for lie detection, video recording has been around for such a short time we can’t possibly have evolved an innate lie filter for it. The result is that we, or most of our minds anyway, believe what we see and even think it’s happening right before our eyes—even if it’s just an Internet video. The effect of the availability heuristic combined with mass media communication is profound: we get a skewed vision of what the world is like from the news.
For example, women in their forties vastly overestimate their chances of getting breast cancer, and this overestimation correlates with news reports about breast cancer.2 This is consistent with the availability heuristic. A study by sociologists Lisa Kort Butler and Kelly Sittner Hartshorn found that watching crime coverage in local TV news makes people more likely to think the local crime rate is increasing.3 What most of us know of crime, pollution, and other world problems comes from news. The problem with most news is that it is in competition with other news. This provides an incentive to show compelling stories. This is taken for granted in our society, but its negative effects are underappreciated. If we are prone to find stories and statements that involve hopeful or scary things, novelty, and human drama more compelling, then the news media have an incentive to provide stories that feature these attributes, rather than the more realistic or important things that might be less compelling.
The problem is made worse because news is not only in competition with other news, but with other media that seek only to entertain. That is, you could read a novel or read the news. You could watch a movie or play a computer game instead of watching the news. If you have to present a news story that successfully competes with a team of dramatic writers, you’d better make it as engaging as you can, or you lose the ratings or newspaper sales that keep your organization in the black.
One of the biggest problems with news is evident in its very name: “news.” It is an information source focused on things that have happened recently. There is a good psychological reason for this: we habituate to things and lose interest in patterns we feel we already understand. The news media did a good job of reporting the dangers of drunk driving during the 1980s. But by the 1990s people had gotten tired of hearing about it. Trying to find a new angle on traffic death, the media jumped on the idea of road rage, which is a rare phenomenon but boasts compelling features that make it newsworthy, including playing to our fears and the fact that it was a novel concept. Media dropped the problem of drunk driving. It was no longer news. It’s not that the problem of drunk driving had gone away—far from it. The news just needed a new fear to monger, regardless of how important it was.4 It deemphasizes the routine and the constant, and brings irregularities to our attention. Understanding of how things typically are is key to understanding our world. But to a great extent news tells us things that are anomalous, which we then perceive as common and probable.
Another feature of our memory makes us very easy to scare: memories are easier to recall if they are emotionally charged, sexual, or violent. Because it’s easier to recall violent and frightening stories, we end up thinking they represent common or probable events.
Sex and violence sell stories, be they in the news, in fiction, or in between. The availability heuristic makes us think the portrayed events are common, which makes us think they’re important, which fuels our desire to know about them, which causes a feedback loop into the media. The availability cascade recycles these ideas, making these events seem normal and the ideas the media gives us to explain them seem acceptable. Finally, the cycle peters out when people are habituated to them, whereupon the media grasps for a new terror for us to worry over.
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In line with the metaphor theory mentioned in a chapter 4, it seems that certain colors have particular meanings to us. Although some have speculated that our color associations are evolved, others have shown evidence that our emotional responses to colors are based on associations we draw with things we like and dislike in our environments. But because we all live in similar environments (night is dark, etc.), we have learned cross-cultural similarities in our color associations.
The difference between lightness and darkness is the most fundamental color sensitivity human beings have. Pioneering work by anthropologist Brent Berlin and linguist Paul Kay found that cultures differ in what colors they have words for. Some cultures have only two color words, most have more. But all cultures with color words have words for light and dark.5 Cultures with two color words use one word for all light colors and another for all the dark. Why should lightness and darkness have such a universal importance? Because in most real-world visual scenes, this grey-scale contrast contains the most important information.
Darkness is scary because we can’t put our most powerful sense, vision, to good use outwitting predators and competitors.6 Darkness is universally associated with fear and evil, explaining why we have phrases like black-hearted and why villains are usually portrayed as wearing black in fiction. Psychological research by Brian Meier supports this.7 People associate lighter-colored pills with calm, medium-brightness pills with love and excitement, and darker pills with failure and poor health. A study by business researcher Anat Lechner found this to be true across countries.8 In general, people prefer brighter versions of colors to darker ones. Exceptions exist, of course. In Beijing opera, a black face is good and a white one represents craftiness and cunning.9 But these exceptions are rare.
Indeed, it isn’t just black that is associated with evil and white with goodness—if you present any color in a brighter form, people have more positive associations with it. Another reason we might associate black with evil is that we are more likely to do bad things when it’s dark. Research by psychologist Chen-Bo Zhong showed that even wearing sunglasses increases antisocial behavior.10 The reason? We feel less likely to be seen.
Black seems to remind us of sin and our ancient fear of contagion and dirtiness. One experiment by psychologists Gary Sherman and Gerald Clore had people look at words presented in either black or white, and were instructed to say the word aloud. Some of the words expressed notions of immorality, such as greed, and some of the words were the “moral” words, such as honesty. People were faster at saying the bad words in black and the good words in white. This all happened too quickly to be deliberate. This effect was even stronger for people who were preoccupied with purity and pollution and for people who showed an affinity for personal cleaning products, such as hand soap and toothpaste. Interestingly, for people with an affinity for cleaning products that are nonpersonal, such as window cleaner, it was not stronger.11
This theory fits with the general law of contagion I alluded to in chapter 5, which holds that objects and people that come into contact with each other can transfer properties. Although there are beliefs in positive contagion, the negative contagion effect is stronger.12 This has had unfortunate cultural ramifications. Texts associated with the American Jim Crow laws and with the apartheid system in South Africa have many references to contagion, concerned as they are with the pollution of the white essence.
It is disturbing to think that our tendency to associate darkness with immorality and filth contributes to the widespread racism against peoples of color. Perhaps knowledge of this tendency can be a step toward its elimination.
I have seen no evidence to link seasonal affective disorder (SAD) to our associations with black and darkness. Indeed, some research suggests that the common notion that weather influences happiness is not true at all.13 It is intriguing that winter, presumably because of the relative dearth of bright light (exposure to bright light is a treatment for SAD), seems to generate depression in some people. Even if it does not, our associations with darkness and sadness might perpetuate the belief that it does. Even if something doesn’t need explaining, because it doesn’t exist, the widespread belief needs explaining. Another interesting angle on associating darkness with sadness is that depressed persons perceive the world as being greyer. A study by research psychiatrist Ledger Tebartz van Elst found that they are unable to distinguish the contrast levels between black and white as easily as nondepressed people.14 They perceive a world with less color saturation. Perhaps it’s not that grey days cause depression, but that depression causes days to appear grey.
Berlin and Kay found that after light and dark, red is the most common color term, cross-linguistically. That is, if a language only has three color terms, those colors will be white, black, and red (which usually covers browns and oranges). Interestingly, in child development, infants can detect darkness levels first, and then reds, before being able to distinguish other colors. Even infants prefer focal colors, such as red, to peripheral colors, such as magenta. People who lose color vision due to brain damage lose red last and recover it first. Of all the colors, red evokes the strongest emotional reactions.15 For all these reasons, I conjecture that black, white, and red are the most powerful colors in art.
If blackness means fear and evil, and white means goodness, what does red mean? First, it seems to carry a meaning of violence, danger, dominance, and aggression. Of course blood is red. Red coloration has been associated with dominance and aggression in a number of animals (humans included) and this effect appears to be innate. Angry people are better at perceiving it. Male mandrills (the largest species of monkey) use red faces, rumps, and genitalia as status symbols, communicating fighting ability. This redness is physiologically related to testosterone and aggression levels. When males face off, the paler (less red) male usually stands down. In an experiment with humans, volunteers were shown different colored circles and were asked to indicate which would be “most likely to win a physical competition” and which circle looked “most dominant.” Red won. Soccer goalies perceive red-shirted opponents to be better players, but this might be because teams who regularly wear red uniforms actually win more often! There’s a similar effect of uniform color in fighting sports. It could be because it makes you play better, but could also be because seeing red makes your opponents play worse. Wearing red might make people better athletes (at least in competitive sports), but it turns out referees award more points to people for simply wearing red.16
Second, red appears to carry a meaning of sexuality and passion. Men find women wearing red more attractive, will sit closer to them, and ask them more intimate questions. Women also find men wearing red to be more attractive, but not more likable or agreeable—it is because they are perceived to be of higher status. Red is associated with excitement and heat17 (longer wavelengths are perceived as warm, shorter as cool), which are a part of both sex and violence.
Seeing the color red can affect our cognitive abilities. In one experiment by psychologist Markus Maier, volunteers were asked to carry out a five-minute IQ test. They were assigned a bogus “participant number,” written in either red or black, on the corner of the test paper. Volunteers whose numbers were written in red scored consistently lower on the tests. The students were also given different colored folders and then were asked to choose their preferred level of difficulty for an IQ test. Students given red folders tended to choose easier tests. Seeing a flash of red made people worse at solving anagrams. Seeing more neutral colors did not. You make more mistakes performing cognitive tasks in a red room than in a blue one. However, exposure to red during a task does not always produce worse results. Red enhances performance on detail-orientated tasks, whereas blue improves the results of creative tasks.18 It could be that the violence association with red increases focus, which is known to be beneficial for well-formed problems and bad for creativity.
Red is used to signify wrath, passion, and violence in the arts, and Isaiah 1:18 features the line “Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be white as snow.”
If a language has four colors, it will have black, white, red, and either green or yellow. Languages with five colors will have the other, and languages with six will have those and blue.
Studies have not found associated cross-cultural emotional reactions as reliably for green, yellow, and blue as they have for black, white, and red. It could be that these meanings are dominated by culture. However, since most of the studies done are in America and Canada and still fail to find reliability, it could be that this culture does not have strong meanings for these colors independent of context. But there is evidence that the color green appears to make people more creative, and the presence of vegetation (which is mostly green) increases creativity and reduces crime.19
Currently in our culture we associate pink with girls and blue with boys. It wasn’t always this way. We associate blue with peacefulness. In our culture, blue used to be considered a female color. One can look at the outfits of Disney princesses to see when this was true (Cinderella, Alice, Snow White). Eventually the culture came to associate girls with pink and boys with blue. There is evidence, however, that cross-culturally (Chinese and American) baby girls prefer colors more toward the red end of the spectrum and baby boys prefer the bluer ones. These tests are run on infants young enough that, scientists assume, the children could not have been affected by culture yet.
Although there have been studies that show that a certain shade of pink makes prisoners more calm, this is not a robust finding.20
A wall with a fresh coat of blue paint can be attractive, but there is little in this world more riveting than seeing an incredibly beautiful person. We tend to focus on what makes us different—she likes beards, he likes redheads—so it’s easy to forget that the basics of attractiveness are cross-cultural and probably have evolutionary underpinnings.
Reproduction and survival are the two strongest forces in evolution, no matter what niche an organism occupies in an ecosystem. This means that every living thing has built-in, genetically coded properties that encourage reproduction and survival. Such strong forces affect what we find compelling.
Most human reproduction requires sexual intercourse. As such, we are terribly interested in sex. Studies by psychologist Jens Förster have shown that thinking about sex, or even being reminded of sex, makes you less creative and better at analytical problems (recall that the color red, which is associated with sex, has the same effect). Thinking about love has the opposite effect. The theory is that love makes you think more globally and sex makes you focus locally.21
There are many factors that influence sexual attraction, but the most oft-studied factor is physical beauty. Though there are cultural differences in what we find physically attractive, there are interesting cross-cultural trends that are predicted by evolutionary psychological ideas. Many of our preferences for physical appearance have evolutionary origins, which affect who we are attracted to, in real life, on film, and in paintings. Beauty is riveting. Even people with no culture at all—newborn infants—have a preference for what are agreed to be attractive faces, as was found in a study by psychologist Judith Langlois.22 We can fairly accurately judge the attractiveness of people even when we see their faces for as little as 13 milliseconds. This is so fast that it doesn’t even register consciously. But when people are shown faces this fast and are then asked to guess at how attractive the face was, they are surprisingly accurate. This is amazing, considering they don’t even remember seeing anything! The evolutionary theory is that we will have a tendency to find attractive those people who exhibit traits that will maximize our “reproductive success.” Reproductive success is having kids, who have kids, and so on. It’s getting your genes successfully into future generations.
The popular conception of attractiveness is that men tend to focus on the physical beauty of women and women are attracted to the social status of men. A widely accepted idea is that women and men look for different things in mates due to biological differences in parental investment in children: women are interested in men who will stick around and can care for their offspring and men are interested in women who will give birth to healthy kids. But it’s not just men who say they value women for beauty: women do too. Women claim to value other women for their beauty and men value other men for their status, as suggested by psychology studies that found that both men and women pay more attention to men who display social dominance and women who display physical attractiveness.23
This looks fairly obvious if one looks at the media created to titillate men and women: pornography versus romance novels and “chick films.” Pornography tends to be very graphic and sexual. The characters lack interesting relationships. Aside from the differences of the genders of the characters, gay pornography is much more similar to straight pornography than it is to what women (be they lesbian or straight) expose themselves to in order to get turned on. Romances catered to women focus on falling in love rather than sex, for the most part.24
But isn’t this the situation only in our culture? No. It’s not just our culture in which men report being concerned with physical beauty and women report being concerned with status; a large study by psychologist Todd Shackelford found it to be generally true in over three dozen cultures.25
But people’s old brains know what they want even if their new brains do not. Although the evolutionary story of why men and women should differ in what they are attracted to makes sense—in that studies seem to show that women and men differ in what they report to be important—in one experiment these differences disappeared when psychologists Paul Eastwick and Eli Finkel observed whom people are actually attracted to. In this study of speed dating men and women showed no gender differences in how they weighed physical attractiveness, personality, and earning potential in the people they said they actually wanted to meet. In that same study, there was no significant correlation between what individuals said they were attracted to and what they actually were attracted to. People will report what they believe to be plausible predictions of what they will find attractive, but, shockingly, they are inaccurate.26 As usual, our new brains are making guesses—often wrong—about the preferences of our old brain.
One way to interpret these data is as follows: men and women find physical looks equally important; these preferences are biological; and finally men and women report differently because of cultural influences. There are two problems with this interpretation. First, the gender differences in reporting are cross-cultural. Why would we find differences in reporting in over thirteen different cultures? Most cultures are patriarchal, but why should a patriarchal culture be more inclined to promote the idea that attractive women are beautiful and attractive men are wealthy? It does not seem to benefit men all that much, in that in many cultures across the world there are many poor, good-looking guys who would benefit from a cultural idea that women like attractive men rather than the few rich, powerful ones. The second problem is that it assumes that culture is more likely to affect our deliberative processing than our intuitive processing. But something so ingrained in culture as this would presumably affect even our intuitive ideas of what is attractive. As far as I can tell, this dissociation between reporting and actual attraction is still unexplained.
What do people find attractive? In this section I will focus on physical attractiveness, because that’s what most of the research addresses. There’s a lot of research in this field and it’s growing rapidly; I will summarize the findings to date. (I’m going to talk a lot about men and women, and when I do I’m referring to heterosexual men and women. Unfortunately, there is relatively little scientific study of gay men and even less research on the psychology of bisexuals and lesbians, a scientific deficiency I hope will be remedied in the future.)
I can be deeply engaged in conversation with someone in a coffee shop, but if a beautiful woman walks by, I can be so distracted that I stop talking for a second or two. Even though it is embarrassing, it is very hard to keep from doing. My new brain cares about the conversation. My new brain knows I’m happily married. My old brain doesn’t care about any of that—can’t you see that a beautiful woman just walked by? What’s going on here? Recall the old brain/new brain distinction. No matter what a (heterosexual) man is trying to work on, if there’s a beautiful woman around, his old brain will be preoccupied with figuring out how to impress her, distracting him from the task at hand.
Sexual desire is a powerful motivator, and lustful thoughts make our entire brain buzz with activity. A study by psychologist Johan Karremans showed that just talking to a woman makes men (on average) dumber, as measured on a subsequent cognitive test, particularly if the man is attracted to her. This was true whether or not the man was in a relationship. The harder they tried to make a good impression, the dumber they got, because trying to attract a woman requires significant cognitive resources. Women only suffer in the analogous situation if they particularly want to impress the man in question.27
So what makes someone attractive? Some of the first findings showed that average faces were more attractive than nonaverage faces. It was theorized that this was because averageness was some kind of predictor of genetic fitness. It might be that average-looking people are perceived to be healthier, although its correlation to actual health is rather weak.28
It has also been found that people prefer roughly symmetrical faces, but people are also pretty good at detecting who’s good looking just by looking at one half of their face. The waist-to-hip ratio of women seems to predict fecundity and possibly health, but according to a study by psychologists Jason Weeden and John Sabini, there appears to be no relationship between health and attractiveness in men.29 Perhaps men’s attractiveness failing to indicate anything else about him explains why women’s ratings for the attractiveness of men vary more than men’s ratings for the attractiveness of women—they’re not correlated with anything important. As far as I can tell, we just don’t know why women are attracted to certain men’s looks.
High testosterone levels make the human male face look more masculine, which correlates well with perceived and actual social dominance, and testosterone levels in men predict rates of divorce, infidelity, and violence.30 Women tend to find masculine faces sexier. Why then isn’t there an arms race for higher testosterone in men? Why hasn’t testosterone just gotten higher and higher over the course of evolutionary history? It turns out that testosterone interferes with proper immune-system functioning, making it a very costly hormone to have in abundance.31 This means that if a man has a great deal of testosterone he must be tough enough in other ways to survive having a bit of a compromised immune system. In other words, the look that high testosterone generates is an indicator of good genes.32
Women are interested in more than good genes. They also tend to look for men who are going to be good parents. Unfortunately, it’s tough to have it both ways. Experiments by psychologist Daniel Kruger have shown that women have judged photos of men with more masculine faces as having poorer parenting skills and more aggression, and men with more feminine faces to be better with parenting skills and to be more supportive and diligent.33 As a result, females tend to have a conditional mating strategy, by which they respond to more masculine faces and dominant men when looking for short-term relationships when fertile or when cheating (which is called “extra-pair copulation” in the scientific literature). For long-term relationships, women prefer more feminine faces (signaling good parenting skills). Three to four percent of babies born to couples involved extra-pair copulation on the part of the mother. That means that three out of every hundred fathers are cuckolded! Given other studies about women’s preferences for long- and short-term partners, it could be that some women want to be impregnated by a more masculine guy but have their children raised by the more feminine guy. There is some interesting counterevidence: the theory predicts that women looking for sperm donors would prefer masculine faces, because the sperm donor is not expected to help raise the child. Mysteriously, this is not so.34
Tallness, too, is interpreted as a major signal of social dominance by both men and women. This is probably true for nonhuman animals as well. Low-ranking individuals in many species with dominance hierarchies (such as chickens and dogs) behave similarly, that is, to appear small and nonthreatening.35 An experiment by psychologists Brian Meier and Sarah Dionne showed the surprising finding that our association of the upper part of the visual field with social power means that women find pictures of men more attractive when they are near the top of the computer screen! The same study found that men find pictures of women more attractive if they are at the bottom of the screen. This suggests that men have a slight preference for women with less power. Indeed, studies show that men prefer women with low socioeconomic status.36
Men, too, are sensitive to masculine faces. They were shown to prefer the less masculine looking guys to accompany their girlfriends on a trip. Both men and women preferred photos of less masculine looking men to date their daughters, presumably because parents are looking to match their daughters with mates with long-term potential in mind. Nobody has studied which men parents would choose for their daughters for one-night stands. I can only imagine the looks the parents would give the experimenters in such a study.
This is not to say that there are no individual differences, even between people in the same culture. In support of biologist William Hamilton’s selfish gene theory,37 people tend to be attracted to other people with whom they share physical characteristics that appear to have nothing to do with survival or reproductive fitness. There are mild but significant correlations (the correlation is 0.2; a perfect correlation would be 1.0) for physical-trait similarities between married partners, such as the breadth of the nose, length of earlobe, wrist measurements, the distance between the eyes, and lung volume. The length of the middle finger correlates to a surprising degree of 0.61. That’s high. Physical similarity in general even predicts marital success.38
This suggests that the mate choice we strive for is, at an unconscious level, an attempt to get someone with genes most similar to ours. However, there is a limit to this striving too, because when genes are too similar, as in the case of our close relatives, there is a high chance of birth defects. The Westermarck effect is our built-in way to avoid incest: we are usually not sexually attracted to anyone we interact with between birth and age six. This explains the curious fact that people who grow up on communes together tend not to marry each other. If people are around each other when they’re really young, their minds assume that they’re related and prevent sexual attraction from developing.39
A study by psychologist Devendra Singh showed that men are attracted to a particular waist-to-hip ratio (0.70) in women. This means a narrow waist and wider hips. The average woman has a ratio of about 0.83. Why do people prefer it to be 0.70? A low waist-to-hip ratio predicts fecundity and general intelligence in women and social intelligence even more strongly. Women with a low waist-to-hip ratio tend to produce smarter children.40
In general, a preference for a narrow waist seems to be a cultural constant and abdominal obesity, as measured by waist size, predicts decreased estrogen, reduced fertility, and risk for diseases. We find evidence of this in the literature of India and China and in descriptions of feminine beauty in British literature from as early as the sixteenth century. Although the ratio preference appears to be cross-cultural, there are cultural differences in weight preferences for women. Poor people tend to prefer heavier women and affluent cultures tend to prefer thinner women. In fact, a fascinating study by psychologists Leif Nelson and Evan Morrison found that men even tend to prefer heavier women when they are hungry!41
If we were baboons, our female pinup models would sport big pink butts. But human females are rare among animals in that it isn’t clear by looking at them whether they are ovulating. Of course, from an evolutionary perspective it is to the males’ advantage to be able to figure out when ovulation is occurring. And indeed, males can sometimes detect ovulation, albeit unconsciously. Men should find ovulating women more attractive, and we’d predict that they’d work harder to impress them. A study by psychologist Geoffrey Miller found that strippers working during their peak fertility periods made an average of $70 per hour in tips, versus $35 when menstruating and $50 in between. How is this communicated? It could be subtle differences in scent, facial structure, waist-to-hip ratio, or how the women move. On fertile days, women’s voices go up in pitch, their breasts become more symmetrical, and their waist-to-hip ratio is accentuated.
Birth control pills prevent pregnancy by tricking the body into thinking it’s pregnant already, and men seem to be able to tell. Being on the pill reduced lap dancers’ tips as well, making $37 per hour, with no peak, versus $53 on average for lap dancers not on the pill.42
A person’s natural body smell also contributes to attractiveness, and that could be because our smell is affected by the nature of our immune systems. Since we are subconsciously looking for complementary immune systems in a mate, any potential children resulting will have a well-balanced immune system. Some scientists say that combining differing genetic blueprints for immune systems turns out to be more effective than mixing similar ones. Couples with similar immune systems are more likely to cheat on each other. Couples with similar immune systems miscarry more often. It’s been theorized that this is nature’s way of cutting its losses early for an offspring that won’t make it anyway. There’s a famous “smelly T-shirt study,” by biologist Claus Wedekind, in which men were asked to wear T-shirts for a few days. Then women were brought in to sniff the shirts and rate how much they liked the smell (they never met the men). The women tended to like the smell of the T-shirts worn by men with complementary (that is, different) immune systems. In a smelly T-shirt study of their own, men found the T-shirts of ovulating women more attractive.43 Let’s hope smelly T-shirts have introduced a new scientific paradigm that will continue to facilitate more scientific breakthroughs.
The birth control pill switches women’s preferences in terms of smell: when on the pill, they like men with similar immune systems. This is bad news for women who fall in love while on the pill. When they go off the pill to try to get pregnant, they sometimes find themselves less attracted to their husbands. The theory behind this is that impregnated women want to be around kin, who have similar immune systems.44
There are serious real-world ramifications of perceptions of beauty. Economists Daniel Hamermesh and Jeff Biddle found that being unattractive costs both men and women about 9 percent in their hourly earnings. We tend to like attractive people more. But there are downsides to being attractive, too. Doctors tend to think that attractive people are healthier and in less pain, leading to inappropriate diagnoses or treatments. Attractive women, it turns out, should not include their photo on a résumé or job website. It has been found that it makes no difference to men, but if a woman is making a hiring decision, the picture will hurt her chances. This is, presumably, due to the competitive nature women have with regard, specifically, to attractiveness.
We perceive attractive people as being more intelligent. However the importance of looks for perceptions of intelligence drops significantly when the person we’re evaluating starts talking. Behavior is a much more important cue, particularly verbal ability.45
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Much of this book has been about how we are the same. No matter what culture a person comes from, there are near-universal preferences for certain kinds of art, products, and ideas. However, to say that the commonalities we share account for all of what resonates with us would be a gross overstatement. Culture is a powerful force and much of the variety we see in beliefs and in art is a result of cultural forces.
Music and dance scholar Alan Lomax has an interesting theory of how culture affects native dance forms (as opposed to more recently invented dance forms, such as ballet). He holds that the typical motions done for work in a culture are reflected in the complexity of the movements made in dance. For example, cultures that have no metal and must chip away at wood with other pieces of wood tend to have dances dominated by movement of limbs and the body in one dimension, such as repetitive up and down motions. Cultures that have metal use swinging motions to do work, and their dances reflect this complexity with two-dimensional motions, etc. Lomax has his critics, however, who claim that his “choreometrics” is pseudoscience and that his evidence is spotty.46
Artistic folk knowledge has been supported by empirical studies that don’t focus on art at all. In one experiment, people were asked which direction they would associate with a particular verb. People were remarkably consistent. Verbs in general seem to have directions associated with them, as found in a landmark study by psychologist Daniel Richardson.47 When presented with a choice of directions (up, down, left, right) people are surprisingly consistent when asked to associate them with specific verbs. Respect is up, denigration is down, due to the “upward motion is good” metaphor I’ve mentioned before.
If you read books on how to direct plays you will find advice that “good” motion is left to right in the visual field. Films display this sensibility as well. In The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy is almost always moving left to right on the screen. In the Matrix series of films, every time the protagonist, Neo, is getting into a fight, he moves from the left and his enemy runs at him from another direction. The left-to-right motion influences Western views of sporting events as well. A study by psychologist Anne Maas found that sportscasters considered goals scored left to right in the visual field to be stronger, faster, and more beautiful. The same result was found, with smaller effects, for violence in fight scenes. Soccer referees call more fouls when players are moving left to right as opposed to right to left.48 It turns out that this effect has to do with the direction of writing. In English, the subject is before the object, and on paper on the left. If you ask people in Western culture to draw a circle pushing a square, they will put the circle on the left. Arabs, who write right to left, do the opposite.49
When watching sports, many people believe in the “hot hand,” the belief that when an athlete is doing well, he or she is “hot” and will continue to do well. We think we see streaks in good (and bad) performance. Although this might be true at times, most of the time these trends are illusory, according to a study by psychologist Amos Tversky.50 We overperceive them. Our perception of these sequences of scoring is an example of the clustering illusion. Psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer asks why people should have the clustering illusion as well as the gambler’s fallacy, which is basically the opposite prediction: that when flipping a coin, a string of heads, for example, increases the likelihood of a tail. People think that the coin is somehow “due” for a tail, or that a roulette wheel is due for a black after a string of reds.51
My suggestion for the reason for this difference is that that we expect living things to behave systematically and predictably and we expect “random” events in the world to reflect our ideas about what’s random. Since a human being is making shots on the basketball court, we use the clustering illusion to infer a hot hand, whereas we get the opposite with the coin flip. This prediction could be tested in an experimental setting, asking people to reveal either the hot hand bias or the gambler’s fallacy in how they predict the outcomes of random processes that either do or do not have a human being involved. Slot machines, though they are an example of gambling, are subject to the hot hand fallacy not the gambler’s fallacy. People don’t stay with a machine that’s losing. My guess is that people view the machine as an agent making choices rather than as an inanimate object like a die or a deck of cards.
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I’ve talked about how people are all similar because of how our species has evolved and how groups of people can be different because of their cultures. People differ in what they find riveting at an individual level too, not only because of people’s individual histories but also because of personalities.
The stereotypes we associate with who likes what kind of music tend to be pretty accurate. People seem to prefer art that matches their personalities. People who like rock are more likely to be artistic and anxious and not very conservative or friendly. People who like classical tend to be friendly, emotionally stable, and conscientious. In a study of people between the ages of 17 and 40 psychologists Peter Rentfrow and Samuel Gosling found that people are pretty good at guessing personality traits from what kind of music they like.52
Extroverts tend to like horror and stimulation that includes sensational elements, such as action and bright colors. They tend to be sensation seekers and are drawn to media with elements like miracles and war. Most people are drawn to pleasant stimuli, but sensation seekers even seek unpleasant novelty. They also tend to like people, so they’re attracted to concerts and music with vocals.
A study by psychologists Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic and Adrian Furnham found that people who are more intellectual, have higher IQs, and are more open to new experiences tend to appreciate music in a more cerebral way, focusing on complexity, and that they listen with a critical ear. The more neurotic and introverted and less conscientious use music more for emotional regulation, like for a pick-me-up after a hard day.53
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As people get more training and familiarity with the arts, they tend to focus on more formal aspects of art—things such as spatial
composition—to determine preferences. Untrained people tend to prefer realistic scenes and scenes depicting subject matter that they like.54
In chapter 1, I noted that paintings and photographs tended to feature human beings. In this chapter, I have shown why people might prefer to look at attractive people. We want to see images of people we find attractive because a part of our minds thinks they are really there and have a chance to maximize our reproductive fitness. It is kind of sad to think of a teenage boy’s old brain reacting as though having a poster of a swimsuit model on his wall actually is giving him a chance to reproduce with her, but I believe that this is exactly what is going on.
This idea makes some interesting and sometimes conflicting predictions. As with everything in psychology, these generalizations will not be true for all individuals. People have the option to surround themselves with images of men or women, attractive or not, and of high social status, roughly equal status, or low social status. What do people actually do?
We can make a prediction based on the relative social status hypothesis I mentioned earlier. On the one hand, observers might be happy to see lower status people, as they remind them of their own relatively high social status. On the other hand, unless observers have a close personal relationship with the observed lower-status people (e.g., their children), they won’t have a lot of interest in attending to them and therefore will not want to see their pictures on a daily basis. The hypothesis predicts that people will feel compelled to attend to people of slightly lower status. However, the rivalry can create anxiety, so observers will probably not choose to surround themselves with images of lower-status people, for the same reason that even if we enjoy horror movies, we don’t decorate our houses with horrific imagery. I know several hard-core horror fans and none would put a big picture of a monster eating someone’s head in their living room. When people observe others of equal status, the hypothesis predicts that they will only have images of friends. Rivals will not be on the walls because of the anxiety produced by seeing them. The hypothesis predicts that observers will not want to observe those with slightly higher status, because seeing them will cause aggression. However, the hypothesis predicts that if the observed are of much higher status, and are perceived as heroes or role models, seeing them could be inspiring. Many girls only have pictures of models and other women on their walls. I conjecture that this is akin to boys having pictures of their sports stars on their walls—they are role models to aspire to.
What do the data show? There are no data, to my knowledge, so for now I can only rely on my anecdotal observations. When people decorate their walls with images of people (those that are not explained by sexual attraction), they put up primarily photos and paintings of unknown persons, family members, or famous people. I realize that covers about everybody, so allow me to explain each one.
I predict that nobody has pictures of people they don’t know unless they find them sexually attractive or find the picture of some aesthetic value—in contrast with a picture of a loved one, which need not have any aesthetic value. An example of a picture of an unknown person might be a photograph of a nude model, taken in black and white, or a pretty painting of some unidentifiable person standing in a beach scene. We don’t seem to have nonartistic, nonerotic photos (akin to snapshots) of people we don’t recognize.
We care about and love family members, and seeing their pictures gives us joy. More specifically, we will only display images of those family members whom we care about and love. Some of these will be of lower status, such as children, and some of higher, such as parents (until a certain point, at which parents are reduced to a lower social status, at least in Western culture).
Although it is less common for adults (in Western culture) to display paintings and photos of famous people on their walls, teenagers do it often. The depicted people are either sexually attractive, displayed in an aesthetically pleasing way, or are role models, such as famous sports figures, actresses, etc.
Ultimately, we choose to surround ourselves with pictures of people for the same basic reason we surround ourselves with any pictures: because they make us feel good in some way. They make us feel affection (e.g., pictures of grandchildren), titillation (e.g., pictures of hunky guys or swimsuit models), inspiration (e.g., posters of sports stars and fashion models), or give us a pure aesthetic experience (e.g., prints of the Mona Lisa).
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Beauty can be partially explained by relatively simple evolved perceptual principles. But to understand the origin and our attraction to some of the stranger beliefs in this world, we need to look at how the mind can go wrong. For example, people can experience strange visions in the middle of the night. These visions can often be explained by sleep paralysis, an example of parasomnia, which is an often horrifying experience during sleep in which the victim is paralyzed, but fully cognizant of his or her surroundings. Vivid auditory and visual hallucinations, a feeling of pressure on the chest or of choking, and the conviction that an intruder is present often accompany sleep paralysis. Sleep paralysis happens to people in every culture. What is culturally specific is the interpretation of it. I’ll mention only a few. In China, it’s called “ghost pressure,” in Japan it’s thought to be a devil called a kanashibari stepping on the person’s chest, and in Newfoundland, South Carolina, and Georgia, they call it the old hag. In the West Indies, it is Kokma, a baby ghost who jumps on sleepers’ chests and attempts to strangle them. Similar ideas are found in Hungary and Indonesia. Beliefs surrounding sleep paralysis were so strong for the Hmong people that many of them died while experiencing it. In European history, the legend of the incubus and succubus demons involves one of them (usually) lying on top of the sleeper to copulate with them.
When undergoing sleep paralysis, the half-awake mind interprets the feeling of terror according to whatever cultural ideas fit best. This idea is similar to the attributionist theory in religion studies, which holds that many religious beliefs are interpretations of natural psychological experiences. If you’ve heard of the kanashibari, you might experience one when sleep paralysis gets you.
Contemporary Western victims of sleep paralysis tend to interpret it as an alien abduction. Often the tales of an alien abduction experience involve paralysis while in bed as the aliens enter the room. Most people who claim to have seen aliens admitted to being in the state between sleep and wakefulness when they did. The look of the classic abducting alien, the grey, was invented for a 1975 NBC movie The UFO Incident.55 This image somehow became popular, with the result that now people in contemporary Western culture often interpret sleep paralysis as involving greys, often within the typical abduction narrative. This is an example of the bias called the availability cascade—in which ideas gain plausibility simply by being replicated in the media again and again—at work. People see pictures of greys, watch movies about them, and hear that other people claim to have been abducted. When they experience sleep paralysis themselves, their minds flesh it out with the story they’ve heard over and over.
This might explain why they see greys when experiencing sleep paralysis, but how did the greys become so prominent in the popular consciousness to begin with? I don’t think it has to do with chance, but rather our perception of intelligence. In many ways, the greys represent a caricature of high intelligence, in the same way that Jessica Rabbit is a caricature of sexual female beauty.
These aliens supposedly have big eyes, large heads, small mouths, no noses, delicate fingers, and hairless bodies. These characteristics might seem arbitrary, but consider hypothetical aliens with the opposite characteristics: small eyes, small heads, huge mouths, big noses, fat fingers, and hairy bodies. Who would believe that such a stupid looking creature could possibly be super-intelligent (as the technologically advanced aliens presumably would be). The idea is laughable.
My student Meaghan McManus ran a study in which we presented people with computer-generated pictures of aliens and asked them to rate how intelligent the aliens in the pictures looked. Results showed that taller aliens were perceived as more intelligent than shorter aliens. Aliens with larger noses were perceived as less intelligent than aliens with smaller noses. Contrary to our prediction, eye size did not affect how the alien was perceived. Aliens who were tall and who had large eyes and small noses were rated as more intelligent than aliens who were short and who had small eyes and large noses.56
The point is that our concept of what these aliens look like, for the most part, corresponds to our ideas of what looks intelligent and what does not. It’s the peak shift effect again, which happens when there is an exaggerated response to an exaggerated stimulus. Why are those particular features considered marks of intelligence?
My answer is that the greys look a bit like very young humans. For this answer to make sense, we need to explore the concept of neoteny.
In primates, the intelligence of a species is inversely proportional to how much their appearance changes from childhood to adulthood. For example, a study by biologist Mehmet Somel found that humans, the most intelligent primates, look much more like human babies than other primate adults look like their young counterparts.57 In fact, baby primates of many kinds look rather more like human babies than those adult primates look like human adults. When an adult looks a lot like the juveniles, scientists call the resemblance neoteny or pedomorphy. Learning ability is greater for the young. Perhaps the gradual increase in neoteny over the course of human evolution has increased our intelligence. Humans who develop faster than normal tend to have decreased cognitive abilities, and, as I mentioned in chapter 4, individuals who are less precocious at first end up being more intelligent later on. This suggests that making a primate species more neotenous might make them more intelligent.
It could be that the cause of neoteny, in mammals anyway, is the result of slowed development, as in the case of domesticated animals. Slowed development brings about a host of attributes to an organism. A beautiful example of this is the long-running silver fox breeding experiment being carried out in Siberia. By allowing only the foxes that willingly approach people to breed and disallowing the foxes that avoid people, the experimenters selected only for tameness. The surprising result is that, over the years, the tame foxes had other traits too that were not selected for, such as floppy ears, shorter legs, curly tails, shorter snouts, smaller skulls, and more juvenile faces.58 They actually appear more like dogs. Humans might have bred dogs that resemble wolf puppies.
One theory of how this happened to humans, suggested by biologist Mehmet Somel, is that we domesticated ourselves.59 As society grew more civilized, we wanted tamer people who were less prone to violence. We selected for them in a few ways. The most aggressive die because they get into deadly fights, but also because they are killed by other members of the culture as punishment. This effect tends to kill off 10 percent of the adult male population in contemporary hunter-gatherer societies.60 You can imagine how rapidly a group could become nonviolent if the most violent 10 percent get killed every generation. The less aggressive people also might have been selected for sexually—mating with a killing machine makes less sense in a civilized society and more sense in a chaotic one. The result of these selective pressures might have been, just as in the case of the Siberian foxes, a slowing of development.61 This theory suggests that slowed development accounts for our less violent behavior (relative to our ancestors), the way we look (more like human babies), and our increased intelligence.62
So how does neoteny explain why the greys look so intelligent? Greys look even more baby-like than humans! Just like babies, they are small, hairless (bald men appear more intelligent than men with hair63), have big eyes, and have a large head (relative to body size). I suggest that the apparent human neoteny of aliens is one example of what makes the whole idea of intelligent aliens compelling. Earlier I mentioned that greys might look like mothers as infants see them, and that this primal imagery might contribute to our finding them interesting. The fact that they also look like babies might contribute to their plausibility as intelligent beings.
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A lot of this book is about how people believe nonscientific things for bad reasons. However, in the Western world, people tend to have a favorable view of science. In particular, they see mechanical explanations as having a certain authority that abstract explanations lack.
Cognitive neuroscientist Deena Skolnick Weisberg has shown, for example, that simply displaying neuroscience information when giving psychological explanations makes people more likely to accept those explanations, even if the information is not relevant to the explanation. The brain image, or whatever, gives the impression of hard, well-executed science.64 Unfortunately, such tactics can be used in the courtroom. People tend to have a mystical idea of how the mind works and, consciously or not, see the brain as a somewhat unrelated entity. Showing a jury a picture of a brain might make them hold the suspect less responsible for an action. It’s the “my brain made me do it” defense. If people are given a brain-based explanation for why someone did something, they assume that the person had no choice in the matter. In fact, all human choice is the result of some brain function. Whether or not people were in control of themselves has to do with more considerations than simply being able to find a responsible brain area or not.
We also seem to have a bias toward thinking that big, important events are caused by big, important things. This tendency was found in an experiment by psychologist Roy Spina.65 It encourages the unwarranted belief in conspiracy theories when the generally accepted cause is judged to be too small and simple to be believable. For example, AIDS has had a devastating effect on many countries. The medically accepted story is that HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, jumped from nonhuman primates to humans. Its spread throughout humanity and the terrible cost of the disease leaves people in want of some kind of meaning to it all, some reason. Why would such a thing happen? Some look to divine intervention for meaning, and say that it is God’s way of punishing gays and drug users.
Similarly, the attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001 appear to have been carried out by a small group of people. On the face of it, Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone when killing John F. Kennedy. These events, which had a great impact on the psyche of the American people, leave people in want of bigger, more complicated explanations. Conspiracy theories arise to fill this need. I am not claiming here that any particular conspiracy theories are false, only that, like many of the psychological effects described in this book, the fact that we have biases to believe in them means we should use extra caution when evaluating them.
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People in the Western world have a psychological bias in favor of what they consider to be natural things, as opposed to manufactured or artificial things, particularly in terms of food or medicine. One study found that 58 percent of people preferred a remedy described as “natural,” and when told that the medication was chemically identical to the nonnatural one, only 18 percent of them adjusted their answer.66 When a food or medicine causes some bad effect, people have weaker feelings of regret and anger when it is natural than when it is synthetic. People also believe natural remedies are more effective, even with the same objective positive outcome. One study found that whether a medicine actually worked was of secondary importance to whether or not it was natural.
Why might this be? One reason might be that we tend to see in the news reports about bad side effects of artificial creations and that these are somehow more memorable. However, the news probably reports these items because they are more compelling, so this explanation has an element of circularity to it. Of course, a small bias in favor of naturalness can spiral out of control with the media. Although the reasoning is circular, so is the effect in the real world. It’s a confirmation-bias feedback loop.
The real question is why we prefer natural things in the first place, in spite of the myriad natural dangers we all know about. After all, snake venom, poison berries, and hemlock are perfectly natural too. One possible factor is that artificial things are newer.
We seem to have a bias that makes us think that the longer something is in existence, the more valuable it is. This has been found for artistic works as well as for belief systems. In one study by psychologist Scott Eidelman people had more favorable views of acupuncture depending on how long they were told the belief system has been in place.67 Perhaps this is based on the idea that the idea would not have lasted very long if it wasn’t any good. This has bad ramifications for science-based medicine, which, as medical belief systems go, is relatively new.
It has been argued that we like “authentic” items more than copies because we perceive them to possess some special essence. Although looking at a photo or forgery of the Mona Lisa gives you much of the same perceptual experience as seeing the original, there is something about the knowledge that you’re looking at the original that makes a difference. It somehow makes the experience more authentic, and authenticity is important to people. Perhaps it is in part due to the contamination biases we have. Leonardo da Vinci touched the actual Mona Lisa, not the poster sold at the college bookstore. I have a friend who can’t go to art museums because she cannot resist reaching out and touching the paintings. One of the frustrating things about rocks from our moon is that scientists often have a hard time distinguishing them from the rocks in the parking lot outside of their laboratories. Would you rather have a rock from the moon or a rock from earth, even if there was no detectable chemical difference between them? If you are like most people, you would rather have the moon rock. There’s a real importance placed on the authenticity of an object. Psychologists Bruce Hood and Paul Bloom found that even young children have this preference, preferring an object that was supposedly owned by a queen than a perfectly similar object owned by a commoner.68
Authenticity in a work of art is also important because people value a work of art more if they perceive that the artist has put effort into it. This would help explain why people prefer original works of art to reproductions and forgeries. It takes less effort to copy someone else.
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Another interesting psychological bias people have is the “just world” phenomenon, which is the tendency people have to blame victims, based on the assumption that the world is a just place. The (largely subconscious) reasoning goes as follows: the world is a just place; some inexplicable tragedy befell an apparently innocent person; therefore, there must be something that person did to deserve it. The just world effect can make one look for reasons—a rape victim was “asking for it,” for example. A study by psychologist Laurent Begue showed that people who did not give to a beggar were more likely to believe in a just world than those who did not, presumably because they thought the panhandler got what he or she deserved.69 Fiction often portrays a just world, and studies show that the more people watch television, the stronger their just world bias is.70
One of the attractive things about many religions is that they promote the just world belief. It’s sometimes all too apparent that, in the world we see day today, terrible things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people. This is disturbing. A belief system that promotes a view of the world in which everyone gets what they deserve can be pretty attractive. Religions step in to make us feel better about injustices. Indeed, people who are religious are less interested in any kind of wealth redistribution, perhaps because they believe the poor deserve to be poor.71 Christian mythology tells of an afterlife in which the good are rewarded and the wicked are punished. In Hinduism and some sects of Buddhism, the good and bad you do in one life leads to a better or worse reincarnation in the next.
The belief in an afterlife is extraordinarily common, in spite of the fact that there is no scientific evidence for it. Psychologists have a fancy term for belief in an afterlife, psychological continuity.
Why is the belief in the afterlife so common? One reason is that it’s kind of impossible to actually imagine what it’s like to be dead. As far as science can tell, it’s similar to a dreamless sleep, there’s no consciousness and, well, no experience at all. It’s not like anything to be dead. As cognitive scientist Jesse Bering points out, when we are dead, we won’t even know it.72
Bering ran a study in which he asked people about the psychological states of dead people.73 Most gave answers indicating that they were engaging in psychological continuity reasoning, and most reported that they believed in an afterlife. But surprisingly 23 percent of those who didn’t believe in an afterlife answered questions in a way that revealed that they thought the dead had emotions, and another 35 percent had psychological continuity for knowledge, such as believing, remembering, and knowing.
Children have lots of psychological continuity reasoning and it tends to lessen with age, suggesting that it’s innate, not cultural (if these beliefs were caused by culture and religion, you’d think that more exposure to culture, over time, would make the beliefs stronger, not weaker). This is on average; kids in Catholic schools were found to hold onto it longer. Luckily, it’s not all innate. Wording things scientifically makes people less likely to think with psychological continuity, at least as indicated by what they say.74
Person permanence is a useful assumption in everyday life, but evolution might not have equipped us with being able to shut it off for people who are recently dead. Although people have no trouble understanding that bodies die, there is not much evolutionary pressure to get people to believe that minds die. So people go on thinking that minds continue to exist after death.
But if many people believe that humans survive their own deaths, then why is the death of a loved one so painful? One reason might be that even though we might believe in life after death, the communication channel with the dead is problematic at best. We might think we see signs from the deceased encoded in natural events, but it’s not the same as sharing laughs and talking about your day in a normal conversation. So even if we think they continue to exist in some way, we still miss them.
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We like to think that our tastes in the arts and the religious views we endorse are products of our character. But like our biology, the psychological biases we evolved to help us navigate our world and the cultures we grow up in are a hodgepodge of shortcuts and cultural idiosyncrasies that help determine that very character. The world puts limits on what these shortcuts can be, which constrains the human world of art, ideas, and religion. We like to focus on the differences between different cultures—their arts, their religions—but our underlying psychology requires them to occupy a rather restricted space of possibilities.