Sex, Murder, and the Meaning of Life (4 page)

Regardless of any bias inherent in my cognitive estimates, though, I was fairly sure that there were more beautiful women at Arizona State than in New York. Hence I was a bit dumbfounded when my neighbor Dave observed, “There are no truly good-looking women at ASU.” Dave, like me, was a recent immigrant from New York, so it did not seem likely that he and I had arrived in Arizona with grossly different expectations about what an average-looking human female
should look like. And Dave's higher standard did not seem to be caused by any unique need to shoo fashion models away from his door. He was a fairly regular-looking guy, often lamenting his lack of a date for the next weekend. Why was Dave so picky? I got one possible clue when he had a party at his house and I caught a glimpse of his interior-decoration plan: Dave had wallpapered his apartment bedroom with
Playboy
centerfolds.

Fast-forward thirty years. It is 2002, and my research team has just received a big government grant enabling us to purchase a delightful scientific toy: a state-of-the-art eye-tracker. An eye-tracker does not allow us to read someone's mind, but it certainly gives us a better idea of what movie is playing in there. A truism of cognitive psychology is that attention is selective—that is, unless you are in a dark, soundproofed room with your body wrapped in cotton balls, you cannot possibly pay attention to everything in your immediate environment; you would just be overwhelmed if you tried. Even sitting here quietly at my desk, I have hundreds of things in my field of view:
to the left
, glasses, a wallet, a cell phone, a coffee cup, a paperback copy of Greg Mortenson's
Three Cups of Tea
, a checkbook, a stapler, an empty plastic bag, a sideways photo of my son Liam in a dentist's chair, a pile of dust-covered zip-disks;
above the screen
,
Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary
, the
Random House Roget's Thesaurus
, the
Oxford Dictionary of Quotations
, and a few other assorted reference books;
to the right
, a pencil sharpener, a printer, a cylindrical container half-full of recordable CDs, a mouse (the Microsoft version), a mouse pad, and a jumble of wires;
just below the screen
, a pile of punch cards entitling me to free coffee at Gold Bar Espresso, free gelato at Angel Sweet, two passes to the Phoenix rock gym, and two human hands typing these words on a keyboard (itself composed of over a hundred keys, many
emblazoned with multiple symbols, such as @, FN, ~, ALT, ‘, >, &, and %). That is just a partial list of what is right in front of me, and if I turn my head I notice hundreds of other objects cluttering the room. No wonder I can never find my keys!

Now imagine a student sitting on a crowded campus, with a much wider field of view, lots of people passing by in different directions, wearing a variety of colors of shirts, shorts, and shoes, some tall, some short, some with long curly red hair, some with short straight black hair, some wearing hats, various kinds of bright earrings flashing, tattoos here, political buttons there. What if this overwhelmed observer tried to pay attention to every person walking by and to everything each passerby was wearing and to all their hand-movements and to all their conversations? He or she simply could not do it, even for a few seconds. As William James observed over a century ago, the world is a “booming, buzzing confusion,” made tolerable only by our capacity to ignore almost everything out there.

But our eye-tracker lets us zoom in to see exactly what, in a passing crowd of people, would catch our subjects' eye. In our laboratory experiments, we made the task a bit more manageable than if we had just sent the subjects out to the booming, buzzing confusion of the campus mall. The student observer saw only a tiny crowd of six or ten faces, frozen in his or her visual field for a short while before the next small crowd came along. Later we asked the students to identify whether or not they had seen a particular face. Even after viewing these scaled-down, slow-motion versions of real crowds, subjects were not very good at recalling whom they did or did not see. But there were some people who were easier to remember than others.

Men looking at our simulated crowds lingered almost twice as long on beautiful women as on average-looking women. When we showed them groups of photos later, the men were especially accurate at saying whether they did or did not see a particular pretty woman. When it comes to crowds of men, on the other hand, men did not gaze any
longer at the George Clooney types than at the Joe Schmoes. And later on, guys were not especially good at picking handsome men out of a lineup. These findings all fit well with a traditional assumption about attention and memory: The more you attend to someone or something, the more likely you are to remember that person or thing later. But women violated that assumption in an interesting way.

The female subjects in our study, like the male ones, spent more time looking at beautiful women, and they were also good at remembering whether or not they had seen a particular female beauty before. Unlike men, though, they looked selectively at the handsome George Clooney types when presented with a crowd of men. That part was not too surprising, but what happened later was: Women were unable to remember those good-looking guys they had been staring at. This was unexpected, given that there is usually a simple linear connection between attention and memory—the more you look at someone, the more you remember them.

In later research conducted with Vaughn Becker, Jon Maner, and Steve Guerin, we asked people to play a version of the game Concentration (aka the Memory Game). In our version of the game, research participants have to uncover and match pairs of faces from a large array. Everyone was good at remembering the location of good-looking women. Sometimes we changed the normal rules of the game, though, and flashed up all the faces very briefly before asking subjects to make their matches. If we did that, women matched handsome men on the first test trial, again suggesting that good-looking guys catch women's eyes. But over trials, the advantage for good-looking men disappeared completely. Handsome men, although they grab women's attention, seem to be ejected from downstream mental processing.

This research seemed to corroborate my suspicion that men's biased attentional processes might mislead them into overestimating the ratio of attractive to average-looking women in crowds. This conclusion was
directly supported by other research I conducted with Becker and Maner, now joined by my colleague Steve Neuberg and our students Andy Delton, Brian Hofer, and Chris Wilbur. In that research, we showed crowds of either women or men to our subjects. Some of the photos were of good-looking people, and others were average-looking folks (as judged by the participants in another study). Our research subjects looked at these crowds under one of two sets of conditions: Sometimes, they saw the group of faces all at once for only four seconds. At other times, they got to look at the crowd for a longer period, or they saw each face one at a time. The brief all-at-once exposure was analogous to standing on the ASU mall while classes are changing—there were too many faces to process them all. The longer exposures and the one-at-a-time presentations were more like watching the smaller trickle of people walking by between classes: They gave the mind sufficient time to reckon with the full sample.

When we strained our subjects' attentional capacities, we found exactly what I had suspected several decades before: Men overestimated the number of beautiful women (though their estimates of handsome men were unaffected). Female subjects also overestimated the frequency of gorgeous women in the rapidly presented crowds, but they did not overestimate the frequency of handsome men. The whole body of findings points to a simple conclusion about beautiful women: They capture everyone's attention and monopolize downstream cognitive processes. The conclusion about handsome men is different: They grab women's eyes but do not hold their minds; good-looking guys quickly get washed out of the stream of mental processing. This discrepancy is consistent with men's and women's different mating strategies; women are more selective and less interested in casual affairs with strangers. I will discuss the reasons for those differences in later chapters. But for now let's return to my friend Dave's
Playboy
wallpapering project.

Men's default mental processes create an imaginary world with an overabundance of women who look like Halle Berry, Kate Hudson, Jennifer Lopez, and Beyoncé Knowles. On the one hand, men could take this as a beneficial side effect of overpopulation: The ensuing cognitive overload skews the world in a more beautiful direction. For women, who also mentally overestimate the number of beautiful women but not of handsome men, it is hard to see that same bright side. Other research, which I conducted with Sara Gutierres, suggests that an overdose of beauty might have ill effects for both sexes, albeit different ones for women than for men.

Around the time my
Playboy-
wallpapering friend denounced the attractiveness of ASU's female population, I was taking a course called Sensation and Perception. Perception researchers love to uncover mental illusions and errors of judgment, and one of the most robust of these is a phenomenon called the contrast effect. You can demonstrate a contrast effect on yourself by lining up three buckets full of water. Fill the one on the left with ice water and the one on the right with hot water (not so hot you cannot put your hand in, though). The water in the middle bucket should be at room temperature. Dunk your left hand in the ice water and your right in the hot water for a minute or so. Then take them both out and plunge them into the room-temperature water. What happens is a bit of bilateral mental dissonance. Your brain will receive conflicting messages: The neurons originating in the left hand will tell your brain that the water is hot, whereas the right hand neurons will signal that the same water is cold. According to a theory developed in 1947 by Harry Helson, we make psychophysical judgments by comparing any new form of stimulation to our adaptation level—an expectation of what is perceptually normal, based on our past experiences, especially the recent past. What
registers as hot or cold, heavy or light, salty or sweet, depends to a large extent on what you have recently been exposed to.

I suspected that sensory adaptation processes might apply to judgments of beauty, and I set out to test the idea, working with Sara Gutierres, who was at the time a highly motivated undergraduate student but who later became my colleague and coauthor on a number of studies related to this idea. In our first study, Sara and I asked people to judge an average-looking woman after being exposed to one of two series of other women. Half the participants judged the target woman after seeing a series of unusually beautiful women; the other half judged her after seeing a series of average-looking women. As in the case of exposure to extremes of water temperature, exposure to extremes of physical appearance affected people's judgments of what was average. As we had predicted, an average-looking woman was judged significantly uglier than normal if the subjects had just been gazing at a series of beauties.

In a later study with Laurie Goldberg, Gutierres and I tried to identify whether these same processes affect judgments of people we know and love (or know and might choose to date). The cover story for that study was that we were conducting research on “community standards of aesthetic judgment.” We told participants that there was an ongoing controversy about what was artistic and what was in poor taste, so we wanted to get some opinions from a random sample of students.

Subjects in the control group first judged the artistic merit of abstract paintings such as Josef Albers's
Homage to the Square
. The men in the experimental group saw centerfolds from
Playboy
and
Penthouse
; the women saw handsome naked men from
Playgirl
. After they had looked at either paintings or centerfolds, we asked our participants to rate their feelings about their current relationship partners. Again, there was a cover story—that psychologists were divided on whether being in a relationship opened people up to new aesthetic
experiences or made them less open to novelty. To test which side was right, we told them, we needed to know about the extent to which our participants were in committed relationships. It turns out that their reported level of commitment depended on whether they had seen centerfolds. Again, we found an interesting sex difference: Men who had viewed the centerfolds rated themselves as less in love with their partners; women's judgments of their partners were not so easily swayed.

Generally speaking, then, exposure to beautiful women changes people's adaptation level for what they consider beautiful. The harmful side effect for guys like my neighbor Dave is this: Real women, the kind he could have dated, do not look as attractive once the mind has been calibrated to assume that centerfolds are normal. And for guys in relationships, exposure to beautiful photos undermines their feelings about the real flesh-and-blood women with whom their lives are actually intertwined.

Are women just more deeply in love? That women did not suffer the same ill effect—that handsome centerfold men did not undermine women's feelings about their partners—could be just more evidence for the well-supported hypothesis that men are jerks. But it is possible, as our colleague Norbert Schwarz suggested, that although women do not compare their mates to muscular male models, they might instead contrast them unfavorably to men who have high status.

To test this possibility, Steve Neuberg, Kristin Zierk, Jacquie Krones, and I asked students to evaluate several singles' profiles that were, we told them, part of a new program ASU was setting up to help lonely new students from out of town connect with potential relationship partners. If you were a man in this experiment, you would have seen several profiles of women, with photographs preselected to be highly beautiful or average looking. A woman in the experiment would have seen either a bunch of handsome men or average-looking
men. Alongside the pictures, you would also see personality ratings. Half the time, you would be led to believe that a team of psychologists had rated the people you saw as generally high in “dominance/ ascendance”—go-getters who had scored high or very high on leadership potential. The other half of the time, you would see people rated by the psychologists as submissive, follower types who were low on leadership potential. After seeing the profiles, we would ask you some questions about your own relationship history, and to make it a bit more engaging, we would inform you that if you were available and interested, you would be given a chance to sign up for the “Singles at ASU” program.