Sex, Murder, and the Meaning of Life Read Online Free Page A

shaken by good-looking women regardless of their social status? Why are people raised by a stepfather more likely to have fantasized about killing the old man than are people raised by a natural father? In later chapters, I will talk about how this research on simple selfish biases is connected to much broader questions about economics, religion, and society. Is fundamentalist religiosity actually a mating strategy? Can we better understand why people buy Porsches by understanding why peacocks flash their tail feathers? Sometimes mundane, sometimes shocking, our work has always been aimed at answering the biggest questions of our time: questions about what makes human beings tick. In the final chapters, I will describe how these biases, though selfish and irrational at one level, are actually deeply rational at another. And I will describe how simple biases inside individual’s
selfish heads combine to create complex and ordered patterns at the societal level. Finally, I will consider how an understanding of those simple selfish biases might offer us some insights about how to live a more caring and connected life.
    We’ll begin in the gutter, though, exploring how our very natural love for loveliness can make us miserable in surprising ways.

Chapter 2
    WHY PLAYBOY IS BAD FOR YOUR MENTAL MECHANISMS
    T o a refugee from the ice and slush of New York’s winters, the sunsoaked campus of Arizona State University (ASU) was paradise found. At every opportunity, I would join several other young male psychology students on the main mall, where we would enjoy the blue skies and balmy weather while discussing the week’s readings. But any semblance of meaningful conversation was disrupted for a brief interval every fifty-five minutes, when it became impossible to maintain eye contact with my fellow students, much less engage in a focused discussion of the philosophical distinctions between behaviorism and phenomenology.
    The mental disruption was caused by the throng of undergraduate students parading by during the fifteen-minute break between classes. What made the break especially distracting for the twenty-four-year-old me was this: A great many of the people in that crowd of students were beautiful and athletic young women dressed as if they were on their way to audition for the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. It was a physiological challenge not to gasp. I remember thinking that the average woman at ASU was better looking than most of the people I had known growing up.

    But as the mob thinned out, something funny happened. When classes were changing and there were several hundred people zipping by every few seconds, the crowd had seemed to be mostly fashion models, but when the flow of humans slowed to a mere dozen per minute, there seemed to be many more average-looking folks attending ASU. What happened to all the stunning women after classes started?
    I began to consider various possible explanations of the disappearing beauties: Maybe the beautiful women attended lectures more faithfully or rushed right to the library, whereas average-looking people cut classes and spent more time drifting aimlessly around the campus mall. But that did not seem likely. Instead, I began to suspect that something else was going on, that perhaps my friends and I had been biasing our estimates of the beauty ratio at ASU. I speculated as follows: When a man’s eyes scan a large crowd, they will fixate on the most physically attractive woman. When she passes, he scans the next two or three hundred people, and his eye shifts to the next beauty, who, although statistically unrepresentative, is nevertheless irresistibly eye-catching. But when the river of people shrinks to a small stream, I reckoned, you look at every individual and the mind computes a less biased average. The new mental calculation is that the average person in the smaller crowd looks just like that: an average person. That seemed to me like a better