Sex, Murder, and the Meaning of Life: A Psychologist Investigates How Evolution, Cognition, and Complexity are Revolutionizing our View of Human Nature by Douglas T. Kenrick

Author:Douglas T. Kenrick [Kenrick, Douglas T.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780465023424
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2011-04-26T03:00:00+00:00

The Evolved Computer Inside Your Head

Imagine you are on the subway with a man sitting across from you. You may not notice whether he is wearing a plaid jacket, but if he is making an angry face in your direction, a flashing red light will go off in your brain in less than a second.

What the mind chooses to prioritize is a question at the interface of cognitive science and evolutionary psychology. Along with my colleagues Vaughn Becker, Steve Neuberg, and Mark Schaller and a team of crack graduate students and former students, I have been doing a lot of research at the interface of these two fields.

In fact, I have already talked about some of this research. As we saw in Chapter 4, our own motivations, such as fear or amorous emotions, can lead us to project completely different meanings onto identical facial expressions. Thus, frightened people saw anger and amorous people saw sexual receptivity in the same neutral faces. And in Chapter 2 we saw that women—although they will spend time looking at good-looking men—do not remember them very well later, whereas men looking at attractive women do remember them. We think that sex difference in memory is linked to men’s and women’s different mating strategies: A man can in theory reap more reproductive profits and pay lower costs from having a relationship with an attractive stranger; a woman needs to make an informed decision. Perhaps staring at a handsome stranger increases the odds he will introduce himself. But if he does not, a woman is not likely to chase after him or even to waste cognitive resources thinking about him.

The essential point—which will be borne out as we look at more of the work that my colleagues and I have done—is that in order to understand how and what the human mind computes, one must place it in an evolutionary, ecological context. If we want to know why the mind works in a certain way, we must ask how and in what circumstances it would be beneficial to do so. Our brains seem to allocate resources in ways designed to best promote survival and reproduction.

In the rest of the chapter, I will describe a few of our interesting findings.

In one experiment, we gave our subjects a very easy task: They had to look at a face on a computer screen and press the “A” key if the person shown was angry and hit the “H” key if that person was happy. The task was especially easy because all the faces were wearing very clear emotional expressions (either contorted with anger or wide-eyed and smiling). And our subjects were very good at it, hitting the correct key almost every time, and doing so in less than a second. But some of the decisions were even easier than others. If the face on the screen was a man, people almost never made a mistake when he was angry. But when he was smiling, they made mistakes almost 10 percent of the time, even as they took longer to make a choice.

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