Ten Politically Incorrect Truths About Human Nature

Psychology Today lists ten truths the PC set don’t like to discuss:

Human nature is one of those things that everybody talks about but no one can define precisely. Every time we fall in love, fight with our spouse, get upset about the influx of immigrants into our country, or go to church, we are, in part, behaving as a human animal with our own unique evolved nature—human nature.

This means two things. First, our thoughts, feelings, and behavior are produced not only by our individual experiences and environment in our own lifetime but also by what happened to our ancestors millions of years ago. Second, our thoughts, feelings, and behavior are shared, to a large extent, by all men or women, despite seemingly large cultural differences.

Human behavior is a product both of our innate human nature and of our individual experience and environment. In this article, however, we emphasize biological influences on human behavior, because most social scientists explain human behavior as if evolution stops at the neck and as if our behavior is a product almost entirely of environment and socialization. In contrast, evolutionary psychologists see human nature as a collection of psychological adaptations that often operate beneath conscious thinking to solve problems of survival and reproduction by predisposing us to think or feel in certain ways. Our preference for sweets and fats is an evolved psychological mechanism. We do not consciously choose to like sweets and fats; they just taste good to us.

The implications of some of the ideas in this article may seem immoral, contrary to our ideals, or offensive. We state them because they are true, supported by documented scientific evidence. Like it or not, human nature is simply not politically correct.

Here they are, the ten politically incorrect truths:

1. Men like blond bombshells (and women want to look like them).

2. Humans are naturally polygamous.

3. Most women benefit from polygyny, while most men benefit from monogamy.

4. Most suicide bombers are Muslim.

5. Having sons reduces the likelihood of divorce.

6. Beautiful people have more daughters.

7. What Bill Gates and Paul McCartney have in common with criminals (PT cites a shared sweet spot on the “age-crime curve” associated w/ risk-taking behavior).

8. The midlife crisis is a myth—sort of.

9. It’s natural for politicians to risk everything for an affair (but only if they’re male).

10. Men sexually harass women because they are not sexist.

Tthe point of reading articles like these is to assume that what PT says is true. What’s interesting isn’t so much which “truths” PT chose, but rather the explanations.

Defending the first argument (gentlemen prefer blondes), PT says in about five different ways that men prefer some biological empiricism. It’s not about blonde or not blonde, but the argument centers around the idea that men want to be able to find some objective benchmark and then check future data against that benchmark to keep track of their mate (breast height, hair color).

Again, in the argument for which genders benefit from which relationship plurality (women from polygyny, men from monogamy), PT suggests that people have some instinct as to their competitiveness (the rule varies for “extremely desirable women”). Societal norms may follow tradition or some basic presumed benefit for the species, but PT is saying that inasmuch as things like divorce rates change the relationship ratio (1:1 or 1:2, over a lifetime), it’s because we figure out how we can best benefit from our competitiveness, desirability, attention span, etc.

The “truths” themselves weren’t that provocative or, arguably, logically sound.  But some of the explanations offer interesting observations (or at least theories) about human behavior.

Transaction and Parasites

Comedienne Margaret Cho opened my eyes to modern “transactional relationships” in her early-2000’s show “I’m the One that I Want.”  Cho glibly compares being in a live-in relationship to being a “very cheap prostitute“—a series of trades to get everyone’s chores finished.  (I think the full clip is here.)

The first time I explored the idea of relationships as transactional was at the tender age of 15 when I read Atlas Shrugged. Objectivism requires tangible returns for each and every action. When I learned more about Rand’s personal life—a lonely existence fraught with infidelity and hypocrisy—I dropped her philosophy as impossible or, at the very least, miserable.

As I get older and meet people seasoned with various sets of bitter herbs, I wonder whether Margaret Cho and Rand are right.  But what an unhappy approach! Whatever happened to gallantry, courtship, and love?

I understand the “transaction” mentality. I’ve long considered the question “Do you believe relationships are inherently transactional?” among those critical life-defining questions each person must answer for herself. Though I emphatically reject a transactional lifestyle, I’m always interested to redefine the terms, or indeed, to learn more about what people mean when they answer that life question in the affirmative.

For the record, my take on the “transaction” question falls somewhat into my “optimist” paradigm: Be good, and goodness will come back. I embraced the idea of “karma” (the idea that life is a series of opposite but equal actions and reactions) fully three years ago while walking my roommate’s dogs. She kept three dogs in her posh townhouse, and we always took two out on leashes and let Winston the standard poodle run to do his thing in private. I opened the door to let Winston out, following barefoot like a redneck behind with the two leashed smaller dogs.

After about two blocks I heard someone angrily calling for Winston and ready to confront me. I was in no mood to deal with angry neighbors—they weren’t even my dogs!—so I pretended I didn’t hear and rounded the corner to walk back on the grass. No doubt the neighbor had caught Winston doing his business on her lawn, and as she chased me home Winston bounded by towards our porch. I took one more step, and *splat*—landed, barefoot, in precisely the business that angry neighbor wanted to prevent.

And that, kiddos, is how I learned to be respectful to my neighbors and to pick up my dog’s crap even if it wasn’t necessarily my job. I’d much rather believe in interpersonal “interest”—being nice and hoping it will come back in droves, even if the return isn’t imminent or certain—than promote a meager dollar-for-dollar (or barren quid pro quo) emotional trade.

All of that said, I liked The Atlantic blog’s look at dogs as transactional parasites. My parents brought a puppy home for my brother and me when I was about two years old, ostensibly to teach us responsibility and kindness. Robert Wright’s take below suggests another excuse for young families to keep a pet; namely to teach kids not to pull even tempting puppy tails, and to love simply for the joy of love, rather than expecting some requisite toll in return:

Apparently we don’t have to worry about Jonah Goldberg writing a book called “Canine Fascism.” Turns out he loves dogs—and indeed approaches liberal levels of sappiness in talking about them. I love dogs too (especially Frazier). But I must take issue with Jonah’s formulation of a question that, he says, is now raging in philosophy-of-dog circles: Are dogs “social parasites” or do they “actually love you”? Putting the question this way suggests that Jonah may be confused about doggy love—and, indeed, about person love. I’m here to help!

With all due respect for the intelligence of Jonah’s dog, I doubt he/she is consciously choosing to be a parasite. Then again, you may say, neither is a tapeworm—but it’s still a parasite. Exactly my point! Parasites can be parasites without any awareness of the fact. Parasitism is a behavioral relationship—profiting at the expense of the host–not a state of mind. So in principle Jonah’s dog (in contrast, by the way, to the average liberal) could be feeling deep love for Jonah even while harming him.

In fact, in principle the love felt by the dog could be something evolution built into dogs as a way to aid in the parasitization of people. After all, any good Darwinian would expect animals to feel love when it is in their interest (or, strictly speaking, the interest of their genes) to feel love—regardless of whether it is in the interest of the animal being loved.

I suspect the historical relationship between dogs and humans has been mutualistic, not parasitic; humans have probably been pragmatic in choosing what kinds of dogs to associate with during dog-human co-evolution, thus keeping wantonly exploitative tendencies out of the canine gene pool. (If anything, the parasitism has probably worked in the other direction.)

And as for the question of whether, evolutionary history aside, the average dog is now parasitic upon its owner: Well, these days we own dogs mainly for the joy they bring us, not to warn us about wild animals. So the question is simple: Does your dog bring you more joy than pain? With Frazier that’s a no-brainer (unlike Frazier himself, I hasten to add!). I’ll let Jonah speak for his dog.

And as for the implications of this Darwinian view of love for human-on-human affection: Well, it turns out I don’t have time to get into that. But that’s probably just as well. The last thing I want to plant in the mind of Jonah or any other married person is the idea that their spouse could feel love for them yet be exploiting them. Best not to think about it.

Self Prometeuse

Use the phrase “imposter syndrome” around any gaggle of professional women—especially conservative women who pull a Palin and venture out of the house even while their babies sleep inside—and watch them swoon, helpless.  This study confirms: More women than men underestimate their performance on the job.

Three times more women than men underestimate their performances compared with their coworkers’:

Women handicap themselves on the job by chronically underrating their standing with bosses and co-workers, says a new studyslated for presentation next month to theAcademy of Management’s annual meeting. When asked to predict how they were rated by managers, direct reports and peers, women were significantly poorer at predicting others’ ratings than men, says the study of 251 managers by Scott Taylor of the University of New Mexico.

A lack of self-confidence isn’t the problem. The women surveyed thought highly of themselves compared with men in the study. But the females simply believed others regarded them as far less competent than they actually did, on a wide range of social and emotional skills related to leadership, according to the study. The ratings encompassed a wide range of attributes, from communication and conflict management to trustworthiness and teamwork.

There are some differences across the intelligence curves between women and men—women have higher IQ’s on average across most of the curve, but men are better represented at the long end of both the “low” and “high” tails—but the disparate salary clearly comes from differences in self promotion.

Where is the line between aggressive Ann Coulter-esque self-aggrandizement and waiting pitifully for recognition to just . . . foment, without taking it for ourselves like our male colleagues do?

An often-wise man I know grades females with potential on a multi-factor scale. We get up to ten points in each of three categories: Smart, Sexy, and Sassy. There’s a minimum for “dateable” girls, and presumably the scale maxes out at “Wise Latina.” In DC—or perhaps “DC” is just a stand-in for “since I started observing”—I notice that most women score very high in two categories, while stumbling on the respective third, which varies by woman. (I’ll leave it to my critics to determine which are my strong suits and which my strengths.)

What’s interesting about the scale isn’t the factoring; it’s that it only measures myriad femininity. A woman who self-promotes might be deemed “sassy,” but, practically speaking, attitude will do more to reinforce than to crack a glass ceiling. “Sassiness” is the diminutive term for what in men we simply call “confidence.” Even a perfect score across the smart-sexy-sassy test achieves only one fantastic woman getting paid Lilly Ledbetter rates.

Self promotion has nothing to do with femininity; the two are practically mutually exclusive. It doesn’t fit into those attractive feminine categories to which all women constructively aspire even before hearing their male friends’ assessments. Indeed, self promotion requires slicing away from those feminine wiles in favor of embracing a bit of testosterone.

Tonight I saw La Bohème at Wolftrap. The opera was as lovely as the first time I saw it, my first opera ever, in Prague. At this iteration I was struck by the scene when Mimi cries because her shoes hurt her feet. Rodolfo flies into frenzied concern for Mimi’s feet. But Mimi croons: My shoes are too tight—take these shoes off—buy me new shoes!

Mimi is using the wiles available to her to get from point A to point B. She knows that Rodolfo will react viscerally to her words.  Mimi can’t afford shoes that fit and convincing Rodolfo that he should buy her new ones is as good as any a method of fixing her feet. Rodolfo loves Mimi and becomes helplessly enmeshed in her pain. He can’t give her what she needs—shoes that fit!—but he can do the next best thing: feel very bad about it.

Meanwhile, Rodolfo ignores Mimi completely. Her words have been so effective that he cannot shake his chivalrous desire to “fix” her. He finds himself totally unable to process her actual requests, but in theory he tries to help.

Can there be a more perfect illustration of workplace dynamics?  This is almost too-perfectly analagous to the dynamic at least in the right-leaning-ideological workplaces I know, where few women work among a vast majority of male colleagues? Women fall back on what we know: My colleagues respond when I wear this shirt, but I feel frumpy in that one. We know that we can employ the same “visceral message” method Puccini ascribed to us through Mimi. We know that aggressive, self-promoting women get castigated and are not welcome around the figurative water cooler. Self promotion is simply very far removed from the cooperative communication women learn, and it feels unnatural to “put it out there” so severely, and against such resistance.

The Mimi method—embracing the three S-factors—can be effective. But this method is a feminine method in a male workplace. All things feminine are fantastic in the “dating” sphere. They are not, however, professional tools—or at least they shouldn’t be the best-honed tools in that arsenal. This feminine method can be effective, but it’s simply not the currency traded as legal tender in this jurisdiction. Whether or not one method is better than the other, one translates and the other does not.

When I write about feminism I know I often seem to be grappling with cognitive dissonance. In fact, I’m pretty thrilled with my choices thus far. It’s just so interesting to consider this giant lifelong game of Red Rover. Because of my politics and profession, I happen to find myself playing frequently on the “boys” side. I don’t mind the differences between their style and mine; I just like to look ahead to the pitfalls and prepare accordingly.

America: Five Percent Sociopath

I learned today that five percent of Americans are born sociopaths, up from 2% ten years ago.

Sociopath, n.

One who is affected with a personality disorder marked by antisocial behavior.

Someone whose social behavior is extremely abnormal. Sociopaths are interested only in their personal needs and desires, without concern for the effects of their behavior on others.

Sociopathy defines some myriad mental disorders, including psychopathy, antisocial personality disorder, and dissocial personality disorder.  Psychopathy is a statistically significant lack of inhibition (“uninhibited gratification”), especially in criminal, sexual, or aggressive impulses.  Antisocial personality disorder means disregard—and often gratuitous violation of—the rights and interests of others.  Dissocial personality disorder rules out “conduct disorders” (like the gratuitous sexual disinhibition characteristic of antisocial personalities), and includes only that callous lack of concern for other people’s interests.

All of this is in turn different from Asperger’s disease.  Asperger’s is fairly common in incentive-focused curriculum like economics, which focuses only on the “rational man” and his response to behavioral cues.  Whereas the sociopathies (all three terms above are used interchangeably with “sociopath,” and the percent of sociopaths in society is much higher when you account for those other terms sometimes excluded from the first figure) describe a failure to translate cues from one’s peers, rather than a failure to perceive cues.

One in twenty is affected with one sociopathy or another.  I imagine that in big, neurotic cities (and big, neurotic professions) there’s some higher number than the population at large.  Even at the 5% rate, that means that approximately five people in each first year law school survey class would willingly go to inhuman means to succeed.  The number seems surprising at first, but put into perspective, I have no problem believing it.

I’ll write more about this later—I’m fascinated by psychology, and considered being a psychologist until I started working at a bar and realized that it’s impossible to help someone until he helps himself—but I wanted to share those numbers and descriptions.

More fascinating was the definition of “sociopathy” I originally heard.  When I heard that above statistic (incorrectly relayed to me as “one in five”), the inclusive, expansive definition that messenger conveyed was that sociopaths are those who “don’t have any real emotions, but just exist between incentives and behavioral corrections,” i.e., they don’t actually feel anything, they just pick a goal and then memorize the steps they’ll need to take to achieve that goal and go through those motions.

I had to check myself at that.  I’m pretty sure I feel real emotions, but who knows?  Sometimes I absolutely lose sight of what I “feel” (who the hell knows whether she’s in love, empirically?  It’s not an objective emotional, a scientifically disproveable state!).  Sometimes other people seem so certain.  But then . . . is it possible that those are the people who have a goal (get married by 35), and then rote-perform the steps necessary to achieve that goal?

This post may sound cheesy—another woman blogging about her emotions!—but it’s fascinating to question how certainty differs across a spectrum.  How we perceive feelings, how we achieve goals, etc.

More on this later.

Fantastic Piece on Zora Neale Hurston

From National Review:

She was not perfect, in matters big or little. Her three marriages (each to a younger man) all seemed to end before they started; she lied constantly about her age; she committed one act of plagiarism (not discovered until after her death); she smoked unfiltered cigarettes, and eventually weighed over 200 pounds.

Her most remarkable quirk was that she was not just interested in voodoo — she was, after all, an anthropologist and folklorist — but apparently actually believed in it. An intelligent, stable, generally level-headed woman who actually took this stuff seriously: baffling. Ayn Rand, when she first met William F. Buckley Jr., declared, “You are too intelligent to believe in God”; a silly statement, but wasn’t Zora Neale Hurston too intelligent to believe in voodoo? Go figure.

So why am I smitten with her? She was, for starters, a serious writer: She would leave Manhattan, rent a small house somewhere in Florida, or somewhere in the out-of-the-way south, sometimes literally in the woods, and for months would do nothing but write. For someone of her station at that time, this was beyond unusual. As Boyd observes, she “had been making her living solely as a writer for two decades by the autumn of 1933. But Hurston, it seemed, was the only black woman in the country still trying to do so ….”

. . .

Hurston had the right attitude, and even if one thinks it was not the right attitude then, it is most definitely the right attitude now. She was not afraid to denounce white prejudice, did so in no uncertain terms, and demanded to know why, if whites were superior, they were afraid to compete with blacks. “She would not allow white oppression to define or distort her life,” however, and she “resolved to stay the course and focus on the positive, as was her way.” Now more than ever, while it is fine to look at the injustices of the past, one should not — as John McWhorter recently warned — stare. If Hurston, who lived in the Jim Crow South, concluded that one should not let bigotry define one’s existence, how much truer is that now? Hurston was even skeptical of whether the integration mandated by Brown v. Board of Education was necessary for black advancement — a position that was controversial then and appears bizarre today — so it is hard to imagine that she would have much patience with the current institutionalization of lowered standards for African Americans in order to achieve “diversity.”

The Power of Subtraction

Recently I posted a piece from a women’s magazine on The Power of Negative Thinking, i.e., how to avoid immense pressure from positivity and just go with the flow.

Today I read this piece on the power of “negative” thinking.  While the first article discusses keeping away from positive demands on one’s emotions, the latter recommends “subtracting” from your psychological default to understand the importance each piece plays.  Appreciating your sight, for example, requires imaging what it would be like being blind.

I find all this fresh attention to negativity fascinating.  We have become a Type A culture, where it’s not enough to make yourself and your spouse happy.  I can’t help thinking of the Angelina Jolie model: to *truly* make a difference, the neurotic attitude doesn’t stop at making yourself and your spouse happy, if you can afford to spread happiness to the third world through adoption, and donations, and birthing in remote African hospitals.

It’s refreshing to think that psychologists are starting to look to stopping as the next step forward.  Doing something isn’t always the right thing.  It makes more sense to pay attention to your psychological cues—if putting positive pressure on yourself to feel happy doesn’t do it, then stop.

There’s something similarly negative about playing the “what if” game: What if I’d gone to a different college; what if I were blind.  Rather than demanding some positive step forward, the “subtraction” method takes a contemplative step backwards.  It considers reality, but how it may (or may not) have been had something fallen differently into place.

I like this negative model.  It considers change without placing pressure on some protagonist to effect it.  I like the idea of removing neuroticism from the equation and allowing oneself to stop, consider, and incorporate that contemplation into decisions moving forward.