by Jesse James
Individuals ‘hop on the bandwagon’ as more and more people come to believe in something. In the ancestral environment, prior to textbooks, television, radio and newspapers, we derived almost everything we knew about the world from the actions of others. If all the men in our tribe went out hunting, it made more sense to hunt than to make strawberry pie. If everyone in your village prayed to the God of Rain during harvest season, you would not win any friends by laughing at their Rain Dance. In fact, your head might end up on a spike. If most women found a certain man attractive, then other females could not ignore that valuable information. This tendency to unthinkingly emulate the actions and beliefs of others explains why women like famous people.
If everyone finds a certain movie star attractive, can you risk not finding him attractive? This is not a case of chicken or egg. Famous people are attractive because they are famous, not the other way around.
Rock stars, movie stars and professional athletes enjoy enormous sexual success, even more so than wealthy (but not so famous) businessmen. Fame is apparently an even greater aphrodisiac than wealth.
Mate-copying explains why women have sex with movie stars or famous athletes. Females in many different species use the mate choices of others as a basis for their own mating decisions. They prefer males who have been ‘pre-approved’ by other females. In a human study, evolutionary psychologist and renowned sex researcher David Buss found the same effect among humans.
Buss and his team showed women various pictures of men either standing alone or surrounded by other females. Women found the men surrounded by other women to be more attractive than the men standing alone. Curiously, when researchers posed this same experiment for men, they noticed the opposite effect; men found solitary women more attractive.158
Remember Fisher’s Sexy Son? Females benefit by mating with males who are highly desired by other females because they will bear sexy sons who are also desired by other females. Who can afford to step off the evolutionary treadmill?
Peter Dinklage may not be hot. But the fact that millions of people admire him every week makes him hotter than the average midget. Several feet hotter, apparently.
Chapter 9
Are All The Good Men Taken or Are All The Taken Men Good?
‘I shouldn’t know you again if we DID meet, ‘ Humpty dumpty replied in a discontented tone, giving her one of his fingers to shake; ‘you’re so exactly like other people.’
- Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass
Imagine living in a world devoid of the internet, youtube, Google, and CNN (or even Fox News!). Without mass media and books, one’s sole source of information and behavioral cues was other people.
Over millions of years, we learned to emulate the behavior of others. During the ancestral environment, absent magazines splashed with pictures of supermodels and movie stars, a child’s options for behavioral imitation were limited to his peers, his family and the older members of the tribe. Children might seek out old men as oracles for occasional tidbits of wisdom about life, but they have little motivation to emulate their habits and behavior. A child gains even less by copying his parents. Humans are, after all, just another species of ape, and young apes eventually strike out on their own, establishing a territory for themselves. Conflict often arises between teenagers and their parents as young adults begin carving their own unique niches in the world, while parents try to impose their own values and beliefs on them. Did you fight with your parents when you were a teenager? I sure did. And I wanted to be ‘my own man.’ Children seldom emulate the behavior of their parents. Despite the impeccable fashion sense of their illustrious father, none of Larry King’s five kids ever wore a pair of suspenders to school.
Young people emulate other young people. Throughout our childhood, teenage years, and into young adulthood, humans copy the behavioral patterns of their peers. Following evolutionary logic, children compete in the mating market against their friends and colleagues, not against their parents or village elders. Yet there is a catch. Young people only emulate peers who are similar to themselves in terms of proximity, culture, socioeconomic background and ethnicity. An upscale caucasian boy growing up in Boston gains little by copying the behavior of an Indian boy struggling to survive in the slums of New Delhi. Competing on vastly different playing fields, neither child benefits from emulating the other. Children and young adults achieve a competitive advantage over their peers by copying the behavior of others from the same culture.
Columbia University psychologists devised a neat experiment to test their hypothesis that we only copy people who appear similar to ourselves. In the ‘lost wallet experiment,’ researchers placed wallets on the ground in various locations throughout midtown Manhattan. Each wallet contained $2.00 in cash, a $26.30 check and information providing the name and address of the wallet’s owner. Having grown up in Brooklyn, I can tell you from personal experience that nothing good happens to a wallet left on the street anywhere in New York City. You might as well flush it down the toilet or launch it into outer space.
Each wallet included a letter making it clear that the wallet had been lost twice; first by the original owner, then by a good Samaritan who had found it earlier, intending to mail it to the owner. In the letter, the caring citizen (really a tricky psychologist) wrote that the chance to help someone else made him feel good about himself. Anyone who found one of these ‘lost wallets’ would realize that the good Samaritan had himself lost the wallet on the way to the post office, as each wallet was enclosed in an envelope addressed to the purported owner. The million-dollar question was how many people would return the wallet after finding it on the street in Manhattan. To make things more interesting, researchers enclosed two different types of letters from the original finder. In one letter, the original finder spoke perfect English and seemed like a regular Yankee. The alternate letter was written in broken English and its author identified himself as a foreigner new to America. Would the New Yorkers who found the wallet be more likely to return it to the owner if the original finder was more like themselves?
Amazingly, seventy percent of the wallets were returned when they included the letter from an obvious local. Only thirty-three percent were sent back when the letter was from a foreigner. Personally, I was surprised that anyone returned a wallet found on the street in New York City. Such is the power of social proof.
People observe the behaviors and choices of their peers, copying their actions independently of their own information signals. Known as the ‘information cascade,’ this phenomenon leads to a chain reaction of conformity, whereby choices, values, trends, fads and preferences propagate solely by virtue of their popularity, rather than any intrinsic value.
Each time you make a decision – whether to buy Nike or Reebok shoes, wear tight or baggy jeans, watch the new Hollywood blockbuster or an obscure foreign film – you consider two disparate sources of information. One is your own judgment, independent of the rest of the world, based on your previous life’s experiences, your intuition, and your rational thought. Other people’s choices represent the second source of information. It often makes practical sense to base your decisions on the popular course of action. Young people, who have not accumulated much wisdom during their short lives, tend to favor the choice of the masses – especially their peers – over their own fallible reasoning powers. Evolution wired humans to distrust their own opinions in favor of the herd.
According to the ‘bandwagon effect,’ the probability of any individual adopting a certain fad or trend increases with the proportion of the population having already adopted it. Simply put, humans consider popularity a priori evidence of a good bet. The bandwagon effect accounts for trends such as ‘Linsanity’ or ‘Kony 2012’ going viral. Women loved bell-bottoms in the 1960s when Marilyn Monroe popularized them in Hollywood movies. Bell-bottoms offer few practical benefits; they don’t keep you dry in the rain, they don’t last longer than regular pants, and they can hardly be considered innately attractiv
e. You might even trip over them, falling flat on your face – definitely not sexy. Why would a young woman growing up in the 1960s choose bell-bottoms over regular jeans? Simply because everyone else was choosing bell-bottoms. As more and more women used information gleaned from their peers, rather than their own faculties of reason, the bandwagon effect gained momentum. Useless as they were, bell-bottoms became all the rage. Cool people wore them; pariahs did not.
Two mathematicians sit in a bathtub. One mathematician asks the other mathematician to pass him the soap. The second mathematician replies, ‘No soap, radio!’ I tell this joke at all my speaking engagements. The audience cracks up – everyone thinks it’s hilarious.
Read it again please if you didn’t get the joke.
If you found it funnier the second time, then you were influenced simply by the suggestion that others find it funny, a phenomenon known as ‘groupthink.’ These ‘No Soap, Radio’ jokes use a punchline that is fundamentally not funny – the jokes typically make no sense. Yet when confederates laugh at the supposed humor, the target laughs too. Apparently we base our estimation of humor not on how funny something actually is, but on how funny other people think it is. Most sitcoms on TV exhibit very little humor, but canned laughter helps viewers hear the comedy in an otherwise drab production.
Laboratory experiments shed some light on the human tendency to follow the herd. In one famous experiment, psychologist Solomon Asch of Swarthmore College invited students to participate in a ‘vision test.’ He placed each participant into a group of 6 ‘confederates,’ who were really working for the professor with complete knowledge of the experiment. The participant, of course, thought the other members of his group were fellow students rather than conspirators. Professor Asch showed each group a card with a line on it, followed by another card with 3 lines on it labeled a, b and c. He then asked members of the group to identify which line on the second card matched the line on the first card in length. The answers were obvious. In the first two trials both the participants and the confederates gave the correct answer. Then things heated up. During the third trial, confederates were instructed to give the wrong answer. Since the ‘real’ participant answered last or next to last, he tended to base his decision on the answers given by those before him. Amazingly, the real participant answered incorrectly 75% of the time when the confederates provided an incorrect answer, compared to answering correctly 99% of the time when confederates provided the right answer. So there you have it – conformity laid bare in all its naked glory. The Solomon Asch experiment demonstrates that people follow the herd, independent of their own rational thought. No soap, radio.159
Conformity plays a deep role in the psychology of seduction. In many species, females choose males that are popular with other females. Take guppies, for example. Fish are not very smart, and the guppy species is hardly made up of Einsteins, even by fish standards. Only a few millimeters in width, the guppy brain nevertheless appears capable of applying social proof to mating choice. Female guppies face the same kind of dilemma that female human beings encounter every night on the Hollywood strip; how to choose between two men. In the guppy world, some males appear drab, while others display bright colors. Females typically prefer the colorful male. Things get interesting when scientists plop another female into the water. If she happens to choose the drab male, then the original female will often change her preference to mimic her competitor. Suddenly, drab is sexy. And this is no fish story.160
Human studies reveal the same effect. Appearing in the presence of a beautiful woman increases a man’s sex appeal. In a recent experiment, researchers Jessica Yorzinski and Michael Platt invited thirty men and thirty women to rate pictures of potential mates. The pictures showed either a single man or woman, or a man and woman together.
In one of these ‘couple’s pictures,’ the male model was paired with a highly attractive female. In another, he was matched with a moderately attractive woman. And in the third picture, scientists paired him with an unattractive woman.
Researchers were curious whether women rated men paired with beautiful women as more desirable than men matched with less attractive females. The psychologists used an ‘eye tracker’ to accumulate data on where participants who viewed the pictures directed their gaze. Were women looking at the man in the photo, or were they more focused on the woman he was with?
If you followed our little foray into social psychology above, then the results of this experiment should come as no surprise. Females found pictures of men posing with attractive women much more attractive than men posing with unattractive women. Keep in mind that women rated the same man in each photo – the only difference was the woman he was with! The same male, when shown next to an attractive woman, appeared more sexually desirable than when he appeared alone or with a less attractive female. Based on results from the ‘eye tracker,’ Yorzinski and Platt also found that women spent more time looking at a man when he was pictured next to a very attractive woman. The researchers explain their results:
‘We found that proxy mating decisions made by people were strongly influenced by the attractiveness of partners depicted with potential mates. Specifically, men and women were more likely to express interest in a long-term relationship with a potential mate when that mate was paired with an attractive partner [ …] We found that men and women differed slightly in their mate-choice copying behavior. Women showed an overall greater reliance on the decisions of same-sex partners than did men, although both were influenced by partner attractiveness. This pattern was especially prominent when the attractiveness of the same-sex partner was low: women were less interested in engaging in a long-term relationship with the mate while men’s interest in the mate was not different from their initial evaluations. Because females are generally more selective in their choice of mates compared to men (due to differential parental investment) they may be more skeptical of mates paired with unattractive partners while males may have a high baseline interest in all potential mates.’161
If simply appearing in the presence of an attractive woman increases a man’s sex appeal, you should not be surprised to learn that a woman judges a man even more attractive when he is seen as overtly ‘desirable’ by other females. Benedict Jones at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland showed 28 men and 28 women pairs of male faces, asking them to rate their attractiveness. When subjects viewed a third photo in which a female was either smiling at one of the men or not, women rated the same male face suddenly more attractive when the woman was smiling at him in the photo. Researchers conclude that ‘For female participants, observing other women smiling at male faces increased the strength of their preferences for these male faces, while observing other women with a relatively negative expression looking at male faces tended to decrease the strength of their preferences for those male faces.’162
Remember the bandwagon effect? The same principles of social proof and conformity apply to mate selection. The theory of mate-copying explains why women consider male movie-stars, famous athletes and musicians attractive. Apart from their obvious status and wealth, famous people are attractive simply because other women – especially groupies - find them irresistible. Crowds of young girls fawn over Justin Bieber, proudly calling themselves ‘Beliebers.’ What girl is so confident of her own capability for rational thought that she can afford to ignore the choice of millions of her peers?
Mate-copying makes good evolutionary sense. According to Fisher’s ‘sexy son’ theory of sexual selection, females benefit by mating with men who are viewed as highly desirable by other females because they will produce sons who will, in turn, be attractive to females. ‘Round and ‘round we go; where we stop, nobody knows.
We have already seen the ‘evolutionary treadmill’ at work in the context of the peacock’s tail, an ornament serving no useful purpose beyond its sex appeal. Popularity is its own reward. Any female who bucks the trend and picks a lonely male will likely produce sons who inherit his father’s inability to attract
women. Loneliness begets loneliness.
If I were an animal, I’d be easy to poach; I eat at the same restaurant every single day. When I was in my 20s, I had a heart-pounding crush on a vivacious redhead at my local breakfast diner. By most standards of attractiveness, including height, symmetry, muscular build, and personality, I am a fairly attractive guy. I’m also a big tipper. But this one disconcertingly-beautiful waitress refused to even glance in my direction when I strutted through the front door wearing a freshly-pressed Armani suit. It was like I didn’t exist; she looked right through me. I tried every psychological trick in my (rather extensive) playbook, but I simply couldn’t break through her wall of resistance. For over six months I fought a war of attrition, but all the armies in Normandy couldn’t crack this woman’s Maginot Line. Frustrated, I gave up – and stopped eating at that particular grease-pit.
A few months later I returned to the diner accompanied by my new girlfriend. Attractive, young, and more interested in my wavy brown hair than the runny eggs Florentine on her plate, she provided the ‘social proof’ to increase my attractiveness. Suddenly I noticed the sexy waitress tossing suggestive glances in my direction, something she had never done before. When I went back the next day – alone – she sat down with me, introduced herself, and said ‘if you weren’t already taken, I would be all yours.’ Whoah. Wait just a minute! I wasn’t spending any extra hours at the gym and my status or wealth certainly had not changed. I was exactly, precisely, the same guy she ignored like a leper just a few months before. But now I was forbidden fruit, the object of some other pretty girl’s attention. Seeing me with an attractive woman triggered some little script in this waitress’s brain – some sequential firing of neurons – which caused her to perceive me as tremendously sexier. Cheep, cheep.