Psychology Today Blogs - Quirky Little Things

The Sneaky F*cker Theory (and Other Gay Ideas)

Jesse Bering, Ph.D. — Thu, 15 May 2008 05:53:36 -0700

In my last post, I invited you to submit your questions to me about any aspect of human behaviour that you'd like to know more about but hadn't the time, energy, or know-how to track down the answers. Quite a few of you responded, on topics ranging from the best treatment for spider phobias to whether "evil" people are self-aware. There were many interesting questions for me to choose from, but because several questions dealt with one particular topic - the natural foundations of homosexuality - I've decided to focus here on that issue. I should say first, though, that this is an enormously complex topic with a vast literature behind it, so I'll just pick out what I think are some of the more interesting empirical facts. And by the way, think of this not so much as a "pro-gay" post but more an "anti-stupid" post.

I'm certainly not the only evolutionary-minded psychologist who happens to be gay, but some people find it surprising that a homosexual male would be sympathetic to a theoretical framework that seems to suggest he's a biological anomaly. One needn't a very deep understanding of Darwinian concepts to get the gist of the irony: at the heart of natural selection theory is genetic replication, and the best way to promulgate one's genes is to engage in reproductive sex, something that people of my ilk often consider to be rather, well, icky. Yet, as we'll see, genetic replication can occur by means other than direct reproduction. I've a slew of straight biological relatives who share my genetic material, and their reproductive success is my reproductive success.

But let's back up a bit. First, one reader ("ill") asked me to address whether LGBT people (this acronym always reminds me of a sandwich) are born this way or whether they make a conscious/unconscious decision to be so. This is a very important question because oftentimes it's embedded in moralistic debates, which in turn serve to inform policy. It's also a question that's especially prone to the naturalistic fallacy, a logico-deductive reasoning error that erroneously implies that what is natural is good. The argument goes something like this: If people choose to be gay, they're choosing to go against nature, therefore being gay is wrong. Never mind the fact that occasional homosexual activities occur in more animal species than not and are in fact perfectly compatible with nature, but by this logic, brushing our teeth and wearing deodorant are also morally wrong because they're both unnatural deeds. Yet, strangely enough, neither the religious right nor puerile homophobes seem to be as focused on these flagrant offences of the natural olfactory order.

But for those who still insist on subscribing to the naturalistic fallacy, what you're basically telling us is that, if you really wanted to, you could choose to get an erection by watching another man (well, at least a good-looking man) get naked. You just choose not to, is that it? On that note, here are some scientific tidbits about homophobia:

• A study by Henry Adams and his colleagues at the University of Georgia showed that, on a penile plethysmograph measure, aggressively homophobic men tend to get sexually aroused by explicit gay male pornography.

• According to Vanderbilt psychologist Bunmi Olatunji and his colleagues, homophobia is a misnomer, given that aversion to gays does not represent an actual phobia, but is rather driven primarily by disgust and irrational contagion beliefs.

• Similarly, Cornell researcher David Pizarro (who has his own blog column here at PT, incidentally) further revealed in a recent study that individuals who have a low-disgust sensitivity threshold (that is, they're easily grossed out) are more likely to hold both conservative attitudes and to be averse to gays.

• Based on survey studies, evolutionary psychologist Gordon Gallup has argued that homophobic reactions are rooted to people's folk theory that children "learn" to be gay by being exposed to gay adults. Thus, because parents have a vested genetic interest in the reproductive status of their biological offspring, homophobia is exacerbated whenever gay people have contact with children.

It's never been clear to me why, even if it were true that being gay came down to personal choice, it would be any less OK than if it were completely biologically determined. In fact, this isn't likely to put me on good terms with the ACLU, but there's some reason to believe that not all gay people are "born" gay. And that's simply this: there are many examples where one identical twin is homosexual and the other isn't. If it were as straightforward as a genetic cause, identical twins (who, if it hasn't registered yet, are genetically identical) would be perfectly concordant on this trait. So, although there is indeed a strong component of heritability for sexual orientation - identical twins do have a moderately significant rate of concordance for homosexuality, it's just not perfectly concordant - obviously it can't simply be boiled down to a "gay gene."

Does this mean it's a choice after all? Hardly. Just like any complex trait, homosexuality is almost certainly a matter of having a genetic predisposition to turn out gay, but requiring a specific developmental milieu to be expressed phenotypically. (Nancy Segal, are you out there somewhere in the PT blogosphere?)

Some of the most important environmental variables identified by researchers as being correlated with homosexuality are factors in the prenatal environment, which is a topic that another reader ("Leah") asked me to discuss. Remember that development doesn't just start on your birthday, but before you ever shimmied into this world through you mom's birth canal you had nine months of the prenatal environment to shape and influence your brain.

When it comes to homosexual orientation, several findings have indicated a reasonably strong prenatal effect. First, the more older biological brothers (but not stepbrothers) a boy has, the more likely it is that he will be gay. This fraternal birth order effect is explained by the maternal immune hypothesis: some mothers appear to become progressively immunised against male-specific antigens by each succeeding male foetus. This maternal immunisation, in turn, means that her anti-male antibodies increasingly interfere with the sexual differentiation of each succeeding male foetus's brain. (Recall that the "default" gender in prenatal development is female.) Interestingly, recent findings indicate that the fraternal birth order effect occurs only for right-handed males.

Prenatal hormonal effects also appear to leave specific "signatures" on physical development. One of the best bio-demographic makers of sexual orientation is the length of the index finger relative to the ring finger (otherwise known as the 2D:4D effect). How's this for a gaydar heuristic? Straight men and lesbians most often have shorter index fingers than ring fingers. This is proposed to be the product of high prenatal testosterone. But for gay men, just like straight women, this digit ratio difference is smaller, and sometimes even reversed. This reverse 2D:4D trend tends to be more pronounced the more effeminate the gay man, and interestingly also predicts preference for receptive anal intercourse (in other words, the longer a gay man's index finger and the shorter his ring finger, the more likely he is to be a "bottom").

Let me wrap up by mentioning a few of the very creative theories that scholars have come up with to explain homosexuality from an evolutionary perspective, which is something "Phil" wanted me to discuss. Remember, being gay seems to fly in the face of natural selection theory, and one might expect nature to have aggressively selected against any genetic substrate that lent itself to such a blatantly anti-reproductive trait. I can't possibly cover all of the vicissitudes of these evolutionary theories, nor address all of them, but I'll summarise the central points. By the way, virtually all theories in this area focus on male homosexuality; lesbianism has been almost completely ignored by evolutionary theorists.

As evolutionary psychologist David Buss has said, homosexuality is a "genuine evolutionary puzzle," so take your pick among these possible solutions (or come up with your own):

• E.O. Wilson's kin altruism theory states that homosexuality was a rare but functional alternative to traditional routes of increasing inclusive fitness because gay people in the ancestral past, who weren't burdened with their own kids, helped to raise, care for, and provide resources to their other genetic relatives, such as nieces and nephews. (This one doesn't quite gel, especially when you consider that a gay person's resources are usually funneled to their same-sex partners. Also, for most people, being gay doesn't exactly endear you to your relatives.)

• Evolutionary psychologist Frank Muscarella's alliance formation theory proposes that, in the ancestral past, homoerotic behaviours by young men with high status older men would have been an effective strategy for climbing up the social ladder. (Think Ancient Greece, or maybe Mark Foley?)

• John Maynard Smith is often credited with what is colloquially called the "sneaky f*cker theory," which argues that gay men in the ancestral past had unique access to the reproductive niche because females let their guards down around them and other males didn't view them as sexual competitors. (I rather like this one: remember, we're not infertile, we're just gay. Although in my case, it'd take a lot of gin to work.)

Ask Dr. Jesse

Jesse Bering, Ph.D. — Thu, 08 May 2008 05:04:08 -0700

Forget about Dr. Phil. Ask Dr. Jesse!

What have you always wanted to know about human behaviour, but have been too afraid to ask (or too lazy to look up)? In this blog post, I thought I'd try something different: you tell me what I should write about. Go on, it's anonymous!

Think of it as an advice column sans the fact that I'm not a middle-aged, know-it-all shrew telling you to get your act together. In keeping with my "quirky little things" theme, and given that I'm an academic psychologist with a penchant for sleuthing out obscure facts from an oftentimes confusing, jargon-filled literature, ask me something based on your own experiences in being human and I'll tell you what the research out there has to say about it. Who cares about opinions? I'll give you the empirical facts.

I'm trying to sharpen my generalist skills, so it can be anything ... anything. I'd say keep it clean, but that wouldn't be any fun now would it? But for editorial reasons, do try to keep it, well, at least delicately worded.

Here's how it'll work: I'll leave this post up for one week (that's until Thursday, May 15), cross my fingers that I get some interesting responses, and then choose my favourite question. My next post will be devoted entirely to answering this question. Ask as many questions as you'd like, just be sure to post them separately. And here's my built-in escape clause: If I don't get any questions, or they're all duds, I'll simply nix this little experiment.

Use your real name, or a pseudonym, or no name at all. So, what are you waiting for?

It's Your Birthday Too?! No Way!!

Jesse Bering, Ph.D. — Wed, 07 May 2008 04:15:05 -0700

If you really want to be a scoundrel and use your psychological know-how to persuade a stranger to do something they wouldn't otherwise do, here's a little trick of the trade: convince them that you share the same birthday.

In his last post, PT blogger Stephen Diamond posted birthday salutations to the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud. Yesterday, May 6, was also my birthday, and if I'm being perfectly honest, I must say that in the past I've probably been more sympathetic to Freudian claims by virtue of this coincidental tidbit. That was at least until I read that there was some question as to Freud's actual date of birth. Some say in fact that it's March 6, not May 6.

The story goes something like this: in 1968, a researcher was surprised to discover that records from Freiburg, Moravia, the town where Freud was born, indicated Freud's birth date as being March 6. It remains unclear as to whether this discrepancy between the date celebrated as his birthday and that which is noted in the town's register is a simple clerical error or, as at least one scholar suggests, belies a more scandalous affair. Freudian historiographer Marie Balmary has argued that, despite what even Freud himself thought to be true, March 6 is in fact Freud's real birthday. Balmary alleges that Freud's parents adopted the phoney May 6 date to hide the fact that Freud's mother, Amalie, was already pregnant when she married his father Jakob.

Perhaps we'll never know whether Freud's birthday was secretly marred by premarital lust, but ever since learning that Sigmund and I may have less in common than I thought, I've detected in myself a subtly less congenial reaction to Freudian-like arguments. We scientists pride ourselves on being objective; and if I'm being perfectly objective, I must note this delicate shift in my ability to judge Freud fairly. (I also tend to cut Robespierre, another May 6er, more slack than I ought to for his role in The Great Terror within France. I'm sure he was just misunderstood!)

Apparently, I'm only human. In a 2004 research study in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, scientists from Santa Clara University led a group of female undergraduate students to believe that they shared the same birthday with a "confederate" participant in the same study (that is, this other participant was actually in on the experiment).

The procedure was pretty straightforward. Each participant was asked to complete a bogus questionnaire collecting random demographic information. The confederate was seated adjacent to the participant and was also allegedly completing this form, but in fact she took this opportunity to surreptitiously glance at the participant's birthday. The experimenter then collected the questionnaires and verbally asked the confederate her date of birth, first, and next did the same for the participant. Those participants randomly assigned to the control condition heard the confederate say a different birthday, whereas those assigned to the experimental condition were led to believe that the confederate shared their own birthday. What a coincidence!

As part of the cover story, participants were then asked to separately complete a brief personality test, the results of which weren't of any theoretical interest for the study. The real experimental manipulations occurred once the participants thought the study was over. While the participant was in the hallway leaving the laboratory and walking alongside the confederate, the confederate pulled out a stack of papers and said this:

"I wonder if you could read this eight-page essay for me and give me one page of written feedback on whether my arguments are persuasive and why?"

If that weren't presumptuous enough, the confederate added that she needed this by the next day. As you might have guessed, the researchers discovered that significantly more people from the shared birthday condition (62%) agreed to this outrageous request from a stranger than did those from the different birthday condition (34%). The authors concluded that "the participants reacted to the confederate [in the experimental] condition in a heuristic fashion and, instead of considering the costs and benefits of agreeing to the request, responded as if interacting with a friend."

It's OK, Sigmund, be you bastard conceived out of wedlock or not, you're still one of my moral heroes. Just not as much as before I found out you might be two months older than I once thought.

A Death in Zakopane

Jesse Bering, Ph.D. — Fri, 02 May 2008 06:32:19 -0700

I study death for a living -- sort of, at least I study how people think about death -- but I'll be the first to admit that I haven't seen a lot of dead people firsthand. One of the fortunately few exceptions to this was during a recent vacation to Zakopane, Poland, where I saw a man die right before my eyes from a heart attack. (The picture of the Carpathian Mountains in the distance was snapped just before this happened, so this is what he probably saw as his consciousness fizzled out.)

For many different reasons, I find death to be intellectually challenging, more so than we're generally aware. For starters, and despite what we tend to say, I'm not convinced we fully appreciate the fact that we're no more special or entitled to life as were all those people decomposing under our feet at this very moment. In some difficult-to-articulate sense, it's almost as if the dead are another species. I found it fascinating that once the Zakopane man's lids were closed, for instance, the ambient social scene returned almost instantaneously to normal, with people munching happily on popcorn and lining up to buy tickets for the tram. "Well, that's him," people seemed to be saying. "But he's different from me."

Only one study that I'm aware of has directly targeted this issue. Another PT blogger, Timothy Pychyl, has already mentioned the work of terror management theory, so I'll skip its basic premises. But in one particular terror management study, participants were asked to rate their self-perceived degree of similarity with some target character. At first, many participants saw considerable overlap between their own identities and the traits of this character, but then something interesting happened. When informed that the character was sick and dying, participants felt they'd less in common with this person after all.

This finding reminds me of something I once read in the very sobering Holocaust-based memoir This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen by Tadeusz Borowski. The author, a prisoner at Auschwitz himself, noted how hundreds of people at a time were corralled so easily by just two or three armed guards into the gas chambers, even when they likely knew the terrible purpose of these nondescript buildings. Sure, some people, perhaps many, would have been shot and killed if they'd revolted, but it was all but a certainty that they were about to die anyway. "[H]ope," writes Borowski, "makes people go without a murmur to the gas chambers, keeps them from risking a revolt, paralyses them into numb activity."

It's almost as if we each secretly believe that we're special, privileged, likely to be rescued from death no matter how grim things look. After all, death is what happens to those other people. Well, here are a few of these other people.

Adam's Limp Wrist

Jesse Bering, Ph.D. — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 03:19:38 -0700

Look closely at the very moment of creation in Michelangelo's The Creation of Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and you'll notice that Adam's rather limp wrist bears a striking resemblance to the human hand in the image below:

The photograph is from a 1994 article written by Daniel J. Povinelli and D. Richard Davis and published in the Journal of Comparative Psychology. What it's vividly illustrating is the difference between the relaxed postures of the human hand versus that of our closet living relative, the chimpanzee. In particular, the authors are calling your attention to how the resting state of the index finger in the human hand, but not the chimpanzee hand, is differentially extended from the other fingers. (Go on, try it yourself, no one's watching.)

According to the authors, this subtle anatomical difference, which occurred sometime after the two species last shared a common ancestor 5-7 million years ago, is at least partially responsible for the fact that pointing with one's index finger is so culturally ubiquitous.

The argument goes something like this. When young infants begin reaching for objects just out of their range, adults are most likely to respond to these reaching attempts and retrieve the item for the baby when the index finger is more prominently extended. Over time, this dynamic between the child and adult serves to further "pull out" the index finger so that it becomes a genuine pointing gesture.

Pointing is in fact more sophisticated than it looks, and there are several varieties. Typically, before 18-24 months of age, pointing is used to manipulate others' behaviours only -- if a baby drops its toy on the ground and points to it while looking at you, he's basically saying "well, what are you waiting for, give it to me!" This is called imperative pointing since it's more or less a demand. But once the child begins to conceptualise others as conversational partners who have minds that hold information, pointing becomes declarative. The 18-24 month old now uses pointing to say, "hey, look at that over there!" because he or she recognizes that you're not aware of whatever it is (the neighbour's cat in the bushes, the exorbitantly large man eating a snow cone at the park, the hot air balloon floating above the car dealership, whatever) and wants to share this interesting information with you.

Indexical pointing is no small cognitive feat; this thing we do with our hands every day belies a very substantial evolutionary achievement in human psychology. The next time you're out for a walk with your dog, for example, see what happens when you point with your index finger to something across the street. Chances are, he won't get it. There could be a hottie poodle over there wearing a sausage bikini and lounging on a fire hydrant, but he'll just stare at your finger thinking, "Yeah, and???"

(Yes, I'm aware of these findings reporting that dogs can comprehend communicative intentions in their masters' indexical points. But I'm still a skeptic, and not the only one. Who would've thought pointing would be so contentious a topic in the research world? In any event, it sounds like a good homework assignment to do with your own dog, and then report back to us about what happens.)

Name and Shame

Jesse Bering, Ph.D. — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 10:20:26 -0700

Have you ever noticed the pervasiveness of the "name and shame" strategy for promoting good behavior? It's usually a very effective one. The local county governance where I live, for example, currently has on the table a measure to publicly out dog owners who fail to pick up after their pets, presumably by publishing their names in the paper (granted, driving 5 mph over the speed limit here is also scandalous enough to get you in the paper).

I'll confess I'm a bit more attentive these days to my dogs' bowel movements and better-armed with baggies. But leaving aside for the moment the outrageous amount of time and red-faced passion that the council has spent deliberating on this issue, it's always been fascinating to me how emotionally compelled we as a species are to scream it from the rooftops whenever someone's been caught being naughty or when we think we've been wronged in some way.

Some of the most popular sites on the Internet, for example, trade in just this sort of angry, sardonic social fusillade (e.g., bitterwaitress.com, ratemyprofessors.com, juicycampus.com) and the ammo is all the more deadly in the online world because posters can avenge themselves behind the mantle of anonymity. We see the "name and shame" tactic in the real world everyday, too. Whereas transgressors used to be broadcast by the stocks or subjected to the Hester Prynn treatment, today it's public sex offender registries, the Better Business Bureau, or restaurateurs prominently displaying bounced checks next to their cash registers.

There's a lot of very promising evolutionary-based research happening in the field of reputation management right now, and this work helps us to understand both why we're so itchy to gossip about others when they've cheated or hurt us, and also why we're so preoccupied with what others think and know about us. (Sure, sure, you say you don't care what other people think about you. But c'mon, you're only kidding yourself.)

Let me give two quick plugs to the first-rate work of two of my amazingly talented graduate students working in this area. One of them, Gordon Ingram, has just completed a significant "ethnographic" analysis of tattle-tale behaviour in Northern Irish preschools and daycares. Tattle-tale in children is something of a developmental precursor to gossip, it seems. Gordon found a lot of very interesting things in this study. But one of the most interesting is the fact that "tootling" (telling others positive things about another child) virtually never happens whereas tattling (reporting transgressions) is natural and hard to suppress.

Another PhD student, Jared Piazza, has just published experimental research findings in the journal Evolution & Human Behavior demonstrating that when participants believe that their money-divvying behaviors (say, whether you should give another participant £3 vs £6 when you've been randomly chosen as the distributor of £10 between you), they're more generous when they believe that their decisions will be publicly discussed with yet another person. In other words, in this study the threat of negative gossip motivated pro-social behaviour, a finding clearly generalizable to non-laboratory behaviours.

Maybe it's not always true, but I'd wager that most of us are usually selfless only for selfish reasons. Sometimes we're aware of this consciously, but other times we're completely oblivious to the fact that the real reason we play by the rules is only that we don't want others to talk trash about us.

(Written trainbound Cambridge via London-Stansted. Here's an action shot of this post in motion.)

The Lavatory as Laboratory (Or, Is That A Stopwatch in Your Pocket or Are You Just Happy to See Me?)

Jesse Bering, Ph.D. — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 05:19:57 -0700

OK, so I've got some quirky bathroom issues I'm not terribly proud of. But in the self-disclosing, sharing spirit of Psychology Today, here goes.

Prior to using the toilet, for example, I turn on the sink faucet full-blast -- not to facilitate flow, mind you, but to pre-emptively drown out my own inadvertent sounds for the sake of those on the other side of the door. I know, I know, it's not the most eco-friendly solution to an aural unpleasantry, but it's the most inconspicuous tactic I've come up with for buffering bowels and stifling splashes and streams.

Yet when it comes to public restrooms, I can't think of anything more uncomfortable than standing there with my fly open quiet as a church mouse with a bladder stone. Under these conditions, I actually want the other people in the room to hear what I'm up to; curiously, silence seems to speak volumes at a urinal stall. "Don't worry about me," it seems to say. "I'm just enjoying the view." (As a gay man, I can honestly say that's something that's never even crossed my mind, as I'm more worried that's what you're thinking than actually thinking it myself.)

I suspect I suffer from a mild case of paruresis, otherwise known as "shy bladder syndrome" (or pee-shy, bashful bladder and a variety of other cute monikers). The condition is defined by the Maryland-based International Paruresis Association as affecting "people who find it difficult or impossible to urinate in the presence of others, either in their own home or in public facilities. Also, difficulty under the stress of time pressure, when being observed, when others are close by and might hear them, or when travelling on moving vehicles."

It's an inconvenience I've personally learned to live with and find somewhat humorous, but you're not likely to wet your pants with laughter over the dead serious book, The Shy Bladder Syndrome: Your Step-By-Step Guide to Overcoming Paruresis by Steven Soifer, Ph.D., LGSW and colleagues.

But back to toilet humor. In a classic 1976 article published in the prestigious Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, authors R. Dennis Middlemist, Eric Knowles, and Charles Matter report the results of their (in)famous lavatory study on the role of social arousal in public urination behavior. It's the type of study that instructors often use as an example to flush out (this is too easy) the slippery subject of research ethics in experimental psychology.

Students tend to have very strong feelings about whether it was ethical or not. Why? Here's how it went. For their research setting, the researchers used a public restroom at a state university directly across from a busy classroom. The main investigator, holding two stopwatches, was staked out in a bathroom stall adjacent to the leftmost of three wall urinals. One stopwatch measured the onset of micturation (urinary flow) made by an unsuspecting urinal urinator while the other measured duration of micturation. A second investigator played the role of a casual urinator (in social psychology parlance, this person is called a "confederate"). Thus, there were three conditions in the study, where the confederate was strategically positioned either: (1) at the far right urinal and separated from the participant by one urinal; (2) at the middle urinal and therefore standing next to the participant, or; (3) absent from the restroom altogether. The setup was rigged so that a "BROKEN: IN REPAIR" sign as well as a mop and bucket placed under the appropriate urinals steered the participant to the leftmost urinal in all three conditions.

The logic of the study was as follows: "At the onset of micturation, the detrusor muscles of the bladder contract, increasing intravesical pressure and forcing urine out of the bladder. At the same time, the two sphincters of the urethra relax, particularly the external sphincter, allowing urine to flow. Social stressors appear to affect both these mechanisms of micturation." In other words, if invasion of personal space underlies paruresis, then the results from the study should indicate that the nearer the confederate stands to the participant, the longer it should take for the participant to begin urinating and the briefer the flow.

The authors' intentions were to use auditory cues (i.e., splash) to capture the dependent measures, but they quickly realized that this wasn't the most reliable measure since some people were aiming at the ceramic basin and the sounds couldn't be made out. So, what else could they do? Here's what: "The observer [the guy in the stall] used a periscopic prism imbedded in a stack of books lying on the floor of the toilet stall. An 11-inch (28-cm) space between the floor and the wall of the toilet stall provided a view, through the periscope, of the user's lower torso and made possible direct visual sightings of the stream of urine."

From my reading of the study, it doesn't appear as though the participants were ever debriefed (told about the study), and none of them, according to the authors, thought anything out of the ordinary. If it makes you feel any better, the authors also assure us that the observer couldn't see the participant's face.

Now, don't pee yourself, I'm getting to the results. As predicted, when urinating next to the confederate, the micturation delay was significantly greater (8.4 sec) than when the participant was separated by one urinal (6.2 sec) or when (ostensibly) alone (4.9). The duration of micturation also supported the authors' hypotheses, with the participants urinating, on average, for a briefer period in the close condition (17.4 sec) than in either the far condition (23.4 sec) or alone condition (24.8 sec).

I'll end by asking you the same question I'd ask my students. What do you think? Was the study ethical or unethical? Did the ends -- possibly helping to inform applied paruresis research -- justify the means? Were there any other, preferably less invasive than eyeballing strange men's genitalia, ways of getting at this research question?

You Ain't as Pretty as You Think You Are

Jesse Bering, Ph.D. — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 12:21:12 -0700

New findings suggest that you're probably not as good-looking as you think you are. (But I'm sure you've got a good personality.) I went through a rather awkward adolescent period, and most of this awkwardness was concentrated on the top of my head.

In the eighth grade, for example, I proudly sported a "rat's tail" buzz cut, which resembled something like an inside-out mullet with long wisps of Sun-In bleached hair down to my shoulders.

In my junior year of high school, my friend Todd, whose father was a professional barber, convinced me to let him cut my hair over the bathroom sink. What's the worst that could happen, I thought, his father's a barber, right? By the end of the evening, my hair looked like it'd been cut by, well, exactly the person who'd cut it: an untrained, overly eager sixteen-year-old with a pair of sheers. So, being a man of extremes, I took a Bic razor to it instead.

But this Right Said Fred look (in keeping with the early 90s context of the story) garnered too many unwelcome glares and comparisons to Mr. Clean, not to mention that my conservative Jewish grandmother couldn't bear to look at me, so my overcompensated solution was to simply let it grow, and grow, and grow. By the time I graduated from high school, I don't know what I had on my head, but looking at pictures now it appears as though it was either about to give live birth or fly off at any moment.

I won't belabour this any longer than I have to, so I'll leave out my excessive hairspray phase, my aesthetically notched left eyebrow, and my Vanilla Ice ‘do. The thing is, I must have actually believed I looked pretty good, because I remember being genuinely surprised when an irate teenage girl, who I'd apparently really annoyed, went right for the jugular and called me "ugly" during a lunchtime squabble. I'd never been exactly pleased with my appearance, but ugly, really? Me?

In fact, findings from a new study by Nicholas Epley and Erin Whitchurch suggest that most people unconsciously over-inflate their own physical appearance. In a well-controlled series of experiments soon to be published in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Epley and Whitchurch took photos of undergraduate students with a neutral facial expression, invited these same students back to the laboratory 2-4 weeks later, and simply asked them to identify their actual face out of an assortment of eleven possible images. But here's the really clever part. These other images were in fact the actual face morphed to varying degrees with either an extremely attractive gender-matched composite face or unattractive targets suffering from craniofacial syndrome.

The results? On a variety of different measures, the participants were significantly more likely to choose a more attractive morphed face as being their actual face than even their actual face! The authors conclude, "It is perhaps of little wonder, then, that people so rarely seem to like the photographs taken of themselves. The image captured by the camera lens just doesn't match up to the image captured in the mind's eye."

But the real tragedy of the story is that just when I've got a handle on hairstyles, my hairline has decided to retire into the background. Oh, well, there are worse things than being ugly.

Meet the Does

Jesse Bering, Ph.D. — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 03:06:03 -0700

Anyone who knows me will tell you that I'm a slightly obsessive-compulsive person. That's not necessarily a bad thing, particularly in my line of work (academia) where it's good to really clamp down onto a complicated research problem. But occasionally, I stumble onto something rather tangential that just sucks my attention in, such as the The Doe Network, and before you know it I've spent the last three hours reading about some dead guy sitting on a row of bleachers in Sacramento, or a woman discovered floating in a Texas lake wearing a black teddy and blue jogging pants with white stripes (what was she thinking?), or a skeleton in overalls still leaning against a tree, the same spot where he'd been bitten by a poisonous snake at least a year before.

I suppose I just find it absolutely astounding that so many people could live and die as if they never lived at all. Or, at least, without cultivating even a meaningful enough relationship with one other living person who's willing to say, "Well I'll be! Is that where he's been for these past twelve months? Really? You say under that tree this whole time? Heh, that's just like Mike, good ol' Mike, Mr. Lazy Bones!" Most of the files in the Doe Network are cold cases -- corpses, skeletons, skulls long ago cross-checked and double cross-checked with missing persons reports. Granted, many of these folks were presumably homeless, expiring on park benches, empty train cars, or in abandoned buildings, but certainly not all. Some were in fact quite coiffed and well-dressed, healthy, in the prime of their lives, wearing expensive jewellery and a mouthful of costly dental work ... just no ID.

It all strikes me as perfectly reminiscent of a quote by Thomas de Quincy in his Confessions of an English Opium Eater, "All men come into this world alone," he writes, "all men leave it alone." In fact, when you really think about, we live our entire lives entirely alone. It may well enough be obvious that others are like us in having experiential, subjective selves. But, at the moment, the closest that even the brightest scientist can come to "proving" to you that another person experiences mental states is by pointing out on a computer screen the vibrant flares of colorful light emitted by this other person's brain during an fMRI scan. The idea that other people have minds may therefore rank alongside the theory of gravity and the theory of evolution by natural selection in terms of empirical support and plausibility, but because it concerns an unobservable construct it's no more than a theory nonetheless.

In a recent article published in Review of General Psychology titled "Why Hell is Other People: Distinctively Human Psychological Suffering", I describe how, by dint of an unfortunate series of evolutionary events, human beings uniquely suffer from what I've termed representational loneliness. Representational loneliness occurs when the awareness of other minds comes into conflict with the awareness that the self can never be understood in its totality because it can never be directly experienced by anyone else. Unlike other forms of loneliness, it is exacerbated by the presence of others.

Comparative psychology is certainly a contentious field, but over the past two decades, there's been mounting evidence to show that we are the only species on the planet that can think about what others are thinking. Now, that may sound like a good thing, and it can certainly be, but it also came at an emotional cost for our species. For one thing, it means that among all other animals, we're uniquely preoccupied with what others are thinking about us. Sure, you can say you don't care what other people think about you, and there are certainly robust individual differences in this regard, but the truth is most people care, usually very much, about what others think and know about them. Human beings can suffer immensely when perceived negative aspects of their identity -- moral offences, questionable intentions, embarrassing foibles, physical defects -- are publicly revealed or are on the verge of exposure. Consider that human suicide appears unique in that we are the only species for which social-evaluative appraisals contribute to self-destructive behaviours of this kind.

Another good source on this topic is an article titled "Society of Selves" by Nicholas Humphrey, in which he quotes Yeats as saying that, "...the tragedy of sexual intercourse is the perpetual virginity of the soul." In other words, even when we're as subjectively close to another person as nature will allow, other minds are still insufferably just out of reach.

When I think about the Does, I can't help but wonder whether many of these people preferred to be alone than to be misunderstood.

"Explanation as Orgasm," Says Leading Researcher

Jesse Bering, Ph.D. — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 03:24:37 -0700

In my last post I talked about Piaget's early research on children's causal reasoning. Much work has been done, of course, since Piaget's day. Based on her work with preverbal infants and young children, for example, developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik has argued that human beings possess something like an innate explanatory drive, motivating us to actively test out hypotheses concerning causal relations in the natural world.

Even if our theories are plain wrong, she suggests, we derive a distinct phenomenological feeling of explanatory pleasure (the "aha!" or "Eureka!" moments) whenever we're personally satisfied that that we've solved some cognitively irksome problem. Gopnik even goes so far as to claim that explanation does for human reasoning as sexual orgasm does for reproductive behavior, in that, in both cases, we're highly motivated to engage in that which feels good for the occasional adaptive benefits conferred. In the case of explanation, she says, understanding the natural world in veridical terms enabled our ancestors to better explain and to predict events, thus facilitating their adaptive decision-making. In fact, scientists who are intrinsically motivated to solve their complicated research problems, says Gopnik, are like big children, perpetually chasing after the explanatory highs so endemic to a curious childhood.

Comparative findings from studies with chimpanzees and young children seem to support Gopnik's general position that human beings are uniquely endowed with an innate explanatory drive. In one particularly informative study, cognitive scientists Daniel Povinelli and Sarah Dunphy-Lelii presented a group of laboratory chimpanzees and preschool-aged children with a simple task in which individuals from both species -- tested separately, of course -- were trained to place a pair of L-shaped blocks upright on a platform in order to receive a small reward (vanilla wafers and stickers, respectively).

Both species easily mastered this very basic motor demand. On a few carefully placed ‘probe' trials, however, one of the blocks was surreptitiously replaced with a differentially weighted sham block that was perceptually identical to the other but, rather cleverly, rigged so that it couldn't stand upright on the platform. Whereas the chimpanzees became obviously frustrated by this unexpected event, they merely perseverated in their efforts to correctly orient the sham block upright, trying over and over again until eventually being shooed out of the laboratory. The preschoolers, in stark contrast, immediately picked up the fallen sham block, visually inspected it, felt around its edges, shook it, and so on, all in search of a causal explanation.

The question is, is this innate explanatory drive a blessing or a curse?