by Sam Sommers
As expected, women were more selective than men. Females reported lower levels of romantic desire than did males. Women also identified fewer prospective mates as people they’d like to see again.
But an interesting thing happened when the researchers made a minor tweak to the context of these interactions. In a second set of speed-dating events, they had the men and women swap roles. So now the men remained seated and the women rotated around the room—a simple modification, but one that stood regular dating protocol on its head. Instead of the women sitting still while male suitors paraded through, now the men remained stationary as women approached them. Of course, the “dates” themselves were still the same: four-minute conversations after which both parties were asked for their impressions. But from a strictly structural standpoint, this was traditional dating in reverse.
And you know what? Men and women also reversed roles when it came to selectivity. In this bizarro dating world, women reported more chemistry with their partners than did men. Compared to men, women now identified more prospective mates that they hoped to see again.
None of this fits with an evolutionary explanation. If you buy into the idea that men are less selective because for generations and generations they have thrived in the role of aggressive love hunters, then a minor alteration to a 2009 speed-dating event in Illinois should be of little consequence. Who sits and who rotates should be but an irrelevant blip on the radar overwhelmed by the force of naturally selected predisposition. Instead, this change to the situation was enough to make men come off as downright picky.
The study suggests the intriguing possibility that the apparent gender difference in mate selectivity owes less to evolution or biology than to the established dating paradigm in most societies. Women’s more stringent standards for love don’t necessarily result from a briefer reproductive window but also reflect the fact that they’re the ones who are typically approached during courtship. Being approached means being in control. It means feeling desirable and in demand. It means having options.
Remember a few years ago, back when banks still loaned money to regular people? There were several websites that advertised an ability to present home buyers with multiple mortgage offers. The idea was that when banks compete for your affection, you win. Well, relationships are a lot like home loans these days, right down to the astronomically high rates of default.
So even some of our most deeply held convictions about love and gender are shaky at best. Yes, women are more selective than men, but those tables can be turned. The reputed gender difference in sexual jealousy doesn’t fare much better—upon closer analysis, women are just as upset as men by the idea of sexual infidelity.16 It’s just that when you ask women about their partner sleeping around, they figure it could be a strictly physical fling. Men, on the other hand, assume that their girlfriend’s having sex with someone else indicates an emotional attachment as well, and double cheating is worse than single cheating. That’s not evolution talking. That’s just simple arithmetic.
LESSONS OF LOVE
My wife isn’t a big fan of this chapter. In fact, she doesn’t like it at all when I frame attraction in terms of mundane context or talk about love in economic terms. It just isn’t how we like to think of our most intimate feelings and relationships. “I love how familiar you are” doesn’t sell many Valentine’s Day cards. And few people are as honest as the friend of mine who once justified staying in a lukewarm relationship by explaining that her boyfriend had installed a photo of himself as her computer start-up screen and it seemed like a big hassle to figure out how to change it.
But by no means is the message of this chapter that love is trivial. Quite the opposite, in fact. The emotional bond provided by close relationships is so important that some psychologists refer to it as a human need, just a notch below survival basics like food, water, and shelter. Loneliness isn’t some abnormal condition confined to a small number of Miss Havishams and Eleanor Rigbys—it’s a common experience that serves as your body’s way of sounding the alert that important needs are going unfulfilled. So loneliness keeps us from thinking as clearly as usual. It renders us more likely to get sick (and to stay sick longer). It’s even contagious, passing from one member of a social circle to the next like a viral infection or mildly amusing YouTube link. 17
Indeed, the need to bond with others governs much of our social repertoire, becoming only that much more urgent when circumstances turn stressful. Tell research participants they’ll be receiving electric shocks and they’d much rather sit with others anticipating the same fate than wait alone.18 Learn of an ongoing natural (or unnatural) disaster, and you feel the immediate impulse to call someone to commiserate, even if you both wind up just holding the phone silently as the storm rages or towers fall on TV.
Our connections to others are anything but trivial. It is precisely because they’re so important that we spend so much of our time dwelling on relationships—both platonic and romantic. This is also why it’s actually a good thing that attraction is subject to the whims of circumstance and ordinary situations. If love really depended on a perfect match of personalities—if romantic happiness hinged on discovering the needle of a soul mate hidden in the haystack of society—imagine how miserable most of us would be most of the time.
Our flexibility when it comes to love is actually a blessing. Think about it: time and time again, people find each other—and happiness—in places statistically unlikely to include any sort of preordained soul mate. The rural town, the small college, the arranged marriage, the travel-restricted marching band. That prosaic factors like proximity, familiarity, and reciprocity shape attraction is what allows love to flourish almost anywhere. Context greases the skids for the start of many relationships, but this hardly renders such attachments any less meaningful or exhilarating once they emerge.
In other words, this chapter is actually chock full of good news. Your newfound expertise with the context dependence of love means you can stop worrying about the elusive identity of your Mr. or Mrs. Right. There are potential Rights all around you, circumstances permitting. While I won’t go so far as to tell you to forget about face/butt/ wit altogether in your hunt for romantic happiness, I would suggest that pursuits of the heart require you to spend at least as much time pondering the situations that produce attraction as you do ruminating on the ideal characteristics of the perfect mate.
This chapter’s exploration of how context impacts attraction offers some concrete suggestions regarding the search for love. Like making yourself as visible as possible. Familiarity and mere exposure are keys to attraction: the more people with whom you cross paths, the more likely you are to strike up a relationship. Lazy Sunday morning and you want to relax with coffee and the crossword? Fine, but force yourself to sit on the couch at Starbucks instead of in your living room. Want to learn a new skill or broaden your horizons? Great, but sign up for a cooking class, don’t settle for the Food Network and a how-to website.
Remember the importance of physical space as well. The apartment across from the stairs, the dorm room next to the common area, the cubicle near the coffeemaker, the office by the front entrance . . . none of these are ideal selections if your goal is quiet time to yourself. But locations like these can increase your odds of making social connections of all types, if that’s what you’re in the market for.
When it comes to romantic relationships in particular, keep in mind that some locales are simply more fertile ground for such feelings to develop. Looking to meet someone new? I hear Vancouver is lovely this time of year. But if frequent trips to the Great White North aren’t in your budget, try the gym, a sports rec league, or a dance class. Planning a first date? Dinner and a movie is the safe bet, but consider something that involves some sort of physical exertion—or at the very least, choose a good comedy or thriller to capitalize on potential transfer of arousal.
This chapter also offers lessons regarding other misconceptions of love. Women aren’t inevitably and in
tractably pickier than men. It’s just that conventional dating norms push them in that direction. If you’re a woman whose friends tell you that your standards are too high, force yourself to be the approacher instead of the approachee once in a while. You just might start to see opportunities where you never did before.
If you’re a straight man suffering from a higher-than-tolerable rate of rejection, do whatever it takes to get out of the rut of obligatory male approach. Get fixed up by a friend. Place a personal ad instead of responding to one. Bribe your local speed-dating organizer to let you stay in your seat while the women rotate around.
For that matter, you can also cast aside many of the old, gendered excuses for poor relationship behavior: “They just can’t help themselves.” “That’s how guys are wired.” “It’s just boys being boys.” These so-called truisms only hold true if you let them. They’re just exaggerations based on WYSIWYG. When it comes to justifying relationship missteps or infidelities, lines like these are only a smidgen more persuasive than “I swear, honey, I wasn’t up to anything—I was just out late working on my short game with Tiger.”
And so it is that even for questions of the heart, situations matter. But this conclusion is no cause for alarm—no reason for the die-hard romantic to lose faith. Just because love is context-dependent doesn’t make it less magical or fulfilling. To the contrary, it’s a glass-half-full proposition, this notion that we’re able to find romance in even the most mundane of circumstances. The very idea speaks to the profound capacity we have for connecting with our fellow man and woman. That we can find love at the drop of a hat or the sway of a bridge is just one of the many marvels of daily life.
That said, there’s another side to this coin—the uglier aspect of human nature. There also exists a darker yin to the yang of love, if you will. As readily as we form new bonds with others, so do we exhibit a proclivity for animus and prejudice. Indeed, the broad continuum of human capacity spans liking as well as dislike, love as well as hate. And as with so many of our daily tendencies, it takes only weak nudges of circumstance to goad us into this us-versus-them mentality, as our final chapter details.
7.
HATE
WAITERS WHO TRY TO MEMORIZE MY ORDER INSTEAD OF writing it down. Moviegoers who sit directly in front of me when there are plenty of other open seats. Inappropriate quotation mark usage (that’s right, I’m talking to you, Pet Supplies “Plus”—that’s neither a direct quotation nor a double entendre). Grocery shoppers who insist on paying by personal check. Squirrels.
Each of the above has a spot on my top ten list of pet peeves. But number one, without a doubt, has to be people who charge into elevators or subway cars, head down, without waiting to see if anyone is getting off. In my book, this is a felony. I’m pretty sure that only the technological limitations of fourteenth-century Italy prevented Dante from reserving a special level of hell for such miscreants—somewhere, I can only assume, between the carnal sinners and the gluttons.
My disproportionately strong feelings on this count are what led to such conflicted emotions after a recent elevator altercation. I was going up, on my way to a doctor’s appointment. As the doors opened and I began to exit, a middle-aged man in a suit that was too big and a rush that was even bigger charged right in, as if entering a Moscow bread store hours after the fall of the Iron Curtain. I had to turn sideways to avoid a collision. Clearly, this guy had vaulted to Public Enemy Number One status.
But a funny thing happened next. My tormenter did a double take, made a U-turn, and followed me right back out of the elevator, all the while managing to keep perfectly balanced the multiple boxes stacked on the cart he was wheeling behind him. He pointed a chubby finger at my chest and asked, “Did you go there?”
After a pause to figure out that he was referring to the college name on my T-shirt, I answered yes.
“Me, too,” he exclaimed. “When did you graduate?”
So began a ten-minute conversation that I wasn’t thrilled to be having given my desire to get to my destination on time. However, my fellow alum proved to be a pleasant enough fellow, and it’s always enjoyable to reminisce about familiar people and places from your past. When we parted ways with a firm handshake, I continued on my way in relatively good spirits.
And that’s when it hit me.
I had let my guard down. I pardoned my newfound acquaintance for his grievous offense simply because of the common link of our alma mater. Without this connection, I never would have left the interaction in a positive mood, much less with a vaguely favorable impression. Our common group affiliation was enough to prompt me to view this man in a different light, sufficient to get me to overlook behavior that was morally reprehensible if not borderline criminal.
That’s the power of “us.”
Sharing group membership dramatically affects how we perceive and interact with others. Whether it’s a common school, hometown, religious affiliation, or favorite sports team, we’re far more generous in how we see fellow members of our own in-groups. And we’re much less forgiving of the out-groups.
TAKE RACE, FOR INSTANCE.
I recognize that this isn’t the easiest of discussion topics. In fact, my own research indicates that many of us bend over backward to avoid the issue altogether. But the difference in how we see in-group and out-group members is particularly striking when it comes to race.
As just one example, consider the sobering data regarding death penalty administration in the United States. Two decades ago, University of Iowa law school professor David Baldus analyzed over two thousand murder trials in the state of Georgia.1 There’s a tremendous amount of discretion inherent to capital trials. First, prosecutors must decide whether or not to pursue the death penalty. Then juries render a verdict, which, if guilty, requires a final determination of whether death is warranted.
Of the cases Baldus examined, 3 percent of those involving a white defendant accused of killing a black victim ended with a death sentence. Among black defendants with a black victim, a similarly low rate—just over 1 percent—were sentenced to death.
The numbers looked very different when the victim was white, however. Among white defendants accused of killing a white victim, 8 percent were sentenced to die. For black defendants with a white victim, the rate climbed all the way to 21 percent. These percentages tell the unambiguous story that defendants convicted of murdering white victims are much more likely to receive the death penalty, especially when they themselves are black.
Such disparities persist even after using statistical controls to account for nonracial differences among cases, like heinousness of the crime and caliber of the defendant’s lawyer. And they aren’t confined to a particular state or time period, either. Years later, Baldus examined death penalty cases in Philadelphia and came to similar conclusions.2 In fact, when a separate set of researchers explored the same Philadelphia trials, they found an additional form of racial bias: in cases with white victims, the more “prototypically” African American a defendant was—the darker his skin, the broader his nose, the thicker his lips—the more likely the jury was to have sentenced him to death.3
Clearly, race matters, even when it comes to life-and-death decisions. But why? Ask Americans if they discriminate by race and the vast majority will tell you no. They’ll tell you this honestly and in good faith, as most of us genuinely believe that we’re fair-minded, openhearted people.
This confidence in ourselves derives in large part from the fact that when we do ponder the idea of bias, we think about it in terms of Crash. You know, the 2005 movie in which each character takes a turn suffering and then dishing out blatant racial indignities? So the Persian store owner thinks his Hispanic locksmith is a gangbanger, but then when he goes to the gun shop, he gets called an Arab terrorist. The black customer service rep is belittled by the white caller, and then she later yells at an Asian driver to learn English. And on and on.
Crash depicts a world in which racial bias is cut-and-dried. It�
��s all about hate—discrimination is overt, unambiguous, and the result of malicious intent. In other words, Crash portrays the WYSIWYG take on racism: bad people with bad attitudes create racial disparity.
There are problems, though, with Crash (and I don’t just mean a hard-to-swallow screenplay in which a motorist is abused by a Los Angeles police officer one night and then, the next afternoon, is rescued from a burning car in a different part of the city by . . . the very same officer). My biggest reservation about the film is that its take on racism is, for the most part, too neat, too easy. Sure, overt prejudice still exists. But the movie barely touches on the more subtle and covert forms of bias that are pervasive today.
Do prosecutors push for the death penalty for black defendants because they’re virulent bigots? Are jurors more likely to return a sentence of death when the victim is white because of deep-seated, race-based hostility? Perhaps. But these sound an awful lot like the “bad apple” explanations for negative behavior examined a few chapters ago.
Of course, the appeal of these conclusions is that they’re less threatening than the alternative possibility that even the most egalitarian among us falls victim to the influence of stereotypes. Or that we tend to feel more comfortable around others of similar background. Or that under certain circumstances, almost all of us are more likely to think in us-versus-them terms.
It’s more reassuring to think of discrimination as being all about hate—as the result of bad people with bad attitudes. And this is the very reason I balk when anyone suggests that since I study racism, I should show Crash in my classes. I don’t. And I won’t. I know all too well how the students will respond. They’ll be comforted by the idea that hey, at least I don’t do anything as bad as those people. They’ll stop at the conclusion that racism simply means the overt display of hostility or antagonism.
