by Pawel Motyl
Not many people can boast such a spectacular professional career as the Frenchman Dominique Strauss-Kahn. Born to a wealthy family (his father was a successful lawyer), he received an excellent education and, most importantly, graduated from one of the best business schools in the world, the absolute number one in France, the École des hautes études commerciales de Paris, commonly known as the HEC. HEC graduates are said to be doomed to succeed, and so it was in the case of Strauss-Kahn, who went on to defend his PhD at the Sorbonne. Strauss-Kahn first became a university lecturer in Nanterre; later, as a member of the Socialist Party, he was delegated to the National Assembly Committee on Finances, becoming its chairman. This position, despite later political vicissitudes, led to the key moment in his career: in 1997, when Lionel Jospin announced his cabinet, Strauss-Kahn received one of the most important posts, Minister for the Economy, Finance, and Industry. Strauss-Kahn served Lionel Jospin well, radically reducing the budget deficit and preparing France to enter the Eurozone.
Basking in his success, Strauss-Kahn became one of the leading figures in the Socialist Party, and as a result was among the potential candidates for the presidential elections of 2007. The right-wing L’Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (UMP), up against the socialists, backed Nicolas Sarkozy; the Socialist Party couldn’t make up its mind between the leader of the Poitou-Charentes region, Ségolène Royal, ex-PM Laurent Fabius, and Strauss-Kahn. Ultimately, Royal was selected to stand, and Dominique Strauss-Kahn had to be satisfied with second place.
On the evening of May 6, 2007, it became clear that the right was going to win the second round of the elections, taking over 53 percent of the vote. Dominique Strauss-Kahn was bitter, as he felt that he’d had a far better chance of beating Nicolas Sarkozy than Ségolène Royal, whom—he believed—François Hollande, the head of the Socialist Party, had nominated in error. The defeat didn’t trouble him for long, though, as only a few weeks later he became the number one candidate to become managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), one of the most important and powerful posts in the world economy. You might be interested to learn that Strauss-Kahn’s candidacy was supported particularly strongly by his erstwhile political rival, Nicolas Sarkozy. After Marek Belka, a former Polish prime minister, withdrew from the battle for the post, Strauss-Kahn was practically guaranteed victory, and so it turned out—on September 28, 2007, with the support of EU member states, the USA, and China, the French candidate was formally nominated as head of the IMF. In France, it was open knowledge that this success was just a staging post on the road to an easier presidential battle planned for 2012.
Dominique Strauss-Kahn, then, had it all. He had a fantastic career behind him, even better prospects for the future, a lot of money (the basic remuneration from the IMF was over $500,000, tax-free per annum) and shares, and last but not least, a devoted and supportive wife, the journalist Anne Sinclair, whom he married in 1991. A small blip came in the form of the investigation conducted in 2008 by an internal IMF commission into Strauss-Kahn’s alleged affair with a subordinate, the Hungarian economist Piroska Nagy. The IMF board ultimately decided that Strauss-Kahn’s behavior was “regrettable” and “reflected a serious error of judgment,” but cleared him of abusing his position, not finding any evidence of sexual harassment in the affair. Strauss-Kahn publicly expressed his regret over the affair, but Nagy was forced to leave the organization.
It turned out, though, that the events of 2008 were just a prelude, an opening act. The real performance began with a bang three years later, on May 14, 2011. That day, the media reported that the IMF’s managing director had been arrested by New York police at JFK airport minutes before boarding a plane bound for Paris. The cause of his arrest was even more shocking. Apparently, thirty-two-year-old Nafissatou Diallo, from Guinea, who worked as a maid at the Sofitel hotel, had accused the head of the IMF of attempted rape, which she alleged had taken place the day before in the apartment Strauss-Kahn had been staying in.
In the following days, the events were reported by media worldwide, and Strauss-Kahn was forced to resign in the face of public outrage. The trial in a New York courtroom was also followed in forensic detail. The case ultimately ended with an out-of-court settlement (neither side revealed how much the maid received), and prosecutors dropped the case. On August 23, 2011, the court ruled that oral sex had taken place, as confirmed by DNA testing, and that it had been consensual, and Strauss-Kahn was cleared of the charges. Although, as in 2008, the politician publicly apologized, he wasn’t reinstated, and he lost his wife, too: Anne Sinclair divorced him following the events.
What led a man with the world at his feet to behave so irrationally as to risk his marriage and career? If Dominique Strauss-Kahn could turn back time and find himself once more in the hotel apartment, would he do the same? Would he make the same decision? Is it even possible, in such situations, to talk about MAKING a decision?
Of course, it was neither the first, nor the last such case. A similar scandal had played out in 1996 in the rooms of the White House and involved someone holding higher office even than Strauss-Kahn—the President of the United States, Bill Clinton. His affair with the twenty-two-year-old intern Monica Lewinsky almost led to his impeachment. Was it really the president who was calling the shots in this case?
Perhaps the legendary Eldrick “Tiger” Woods, whose romance with Rachel Uchitel in 2009 ended not only Woods’s marriage to Elin Nordegren but also several of his marketing contracts (sponsorship deals with, among others, AT&T, General Motors, TAG Heuer, and Accenture were terminated), would be able to enlighten us on the topic. Was sex with Uchitel a conscious decision made by the sportsman, preceded by rational analysis and risk assessment?
A similar hurricane of sexual misdemeanor swept away the career of the renowned Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein at the end of 2017. While rumors had abounded within the profession for years regarding the magnate’s practices (remember Seth MacFarlane’s apparent joke at the Oscars in 2013?), it wasn’t until a series of articles were published by the New York Times and the New Yorker that Pandora’s box flew open. Over eighty women accused Weinstein of sexual harassment. The producer tried to defend himself, claiming all the incidents were consensual, but to no avail: the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences removed him from its list of members, he was forced to leave The Weinstein Company, and the relentless wave of outrage initiated the #MeToo movement in social media, which fought back against not only sexual harassment, but also its being swept under the carpet.
What happened to Weinstein, Strauss-Kahn, Clinton, and Woods (and millions of other men who were fortunate enough that the mass media weren’t interested in their cases) is a phenomenon as old as time—after all, folk wisdom tells us that the brain is not the only organ that men think with. However, so as not to rely exclusively on the vagaries of folk wisdom, we shall turn to a more serious source. The influence of sexual desire on decision-making has been researched thoroughly, including by a professor of behavioral economy at Duke University, Dan Ariely. Ariely asked himself three simple questions: Would a sexually aroused man make different decisions to those he would make while not aroused? How does libido influence our opinions and preferences? Can our sex drive to some degree eliminate rational thinking?
Ariely conducted an experiment (which, by the way, generated a deal of controversy) with male students from the University of California, Berkeley. The young men were informed that the research would take place in two phases, and they would be asked to answer a series of questions about their preferences and sexual behaviors. In both phases, they were to answer the questions individually, while alone at home. Prior to starting the first round of questions, Ariely asked the subjects—before they began to answer—to imagine that they were in a state of sexual excitement. Note that it was about imagining that condition as realistically as possible, only imagining it.
Sometime after the answers were submitted, the secon
d stage of the research was conducted. The students gave answers to the exact same set of questions as in the first round, but this time Ariely asked them, before they started to fill out the questionnaire, not to imagine anything, but to actually become sexually aroused. Pornographic magazines (hmm, I wonder if they were purchased out of the research grant, as it would make it one of the more interesting expenses financed by the university!) were on hand to help them with this.
As you might have guessed, the research confirmed what folk wisdom has long told us—the answers given in each phase were significantly different from each other. Influenced by their libido, the vast majority of the subjects were more open to taking greater risks (e.g., having unprotected sex) or engaging in unusual sexual behavior. In some cases, the percentage differences in their answers varied by several dozen, to even several hundred percent! For instance, in the first round (unstimulated), to the question, “Can you imagine having sex with a fifty-year-old woman?” 28 percent of the students responded positively. In the second round, while sexually stimulated, the number of students prepared to take such a step doubled (55 percent). Even more striking was the difference in the case of another version of the same question, concerning a sixty-year-old woman. While “cold,” barely 7 percent of those tested said they would do so, whereas while masturbating, that number rose to 23 percent, and so by 229 percent. In the second round, there were also more subjects willing to agree to a threesome involving another man (the question: “If an attractive woman proposed a threesome involving another man, would you agree?” got 19 percent and 34 percent positive responses respectively), and things looked the same in the case of anal sex (the question: “Would anal sex arouse you?” got 46 percent and 77 percent positive responses respectively). Ariely observed similar differences in the case of each of the dozens of questions the students were asked.
The situation began to look far more sinister when it came to the analysis of another group of questions concerning hypothetical behavior on a date. Ariely wanted to test whether, when aroused, the proportion of subjects ready to engage in unethical, even illegal actions would increase. Here, too, the number of people expressing their readiness to behave in such a manner went way up.
For example, in the first round, only 30 percent of the students answered the question, “Would you tell a woman that you loved her if you thought it would increase your chances of going to bed with her?” positively. Under the influence of sexual stimulation, over 50 percent of those tested were prepared to do so. Even more unpleasant is the conclusion that can be drawn from the following question: “Would you try to try to initiate sexual intercourse even after a woman has said ‘no’?” In the first stage, 20 percent of the students said “yes”; in the second, it rose to 45 percent. However, things actually get disturbing with the question, “Would you slip a woman a narcotic if it increased your chances of going to bed with her?” In round one, only 5 percent of the students would consider such an act. It was enough to simply masturbate, and so turn on the sexual drive, for that figure to rise to 26 percent. 1
The worst thing about all this is that at the moment of our making the decision, we’re convinced we’re making the right choice, and that we’re doing the right thing. This, by the by, is the mechanism behind “moral hangovers,” which are nothing more than the consequence of returning from stage two to stage one and looking anew at the decisions that we made and, alas, implemented.
Sexual drive is a terrible advisor. Unfortunately, though, it’s incredibly difficult to counteract, as it resides in the most primitive recesses of our brains, the parts responsible for encouraging us to reproduce and ensure the survival of the species. 2 For the last couple of decades, scientists have had access to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) using MRI scanners, a fascinating tool that enables us to understand a little better how our brains work. While almost 3 pounds is less than 2 percent of the total body mass of an adult human, the brain is one of our most vital organs; it is both the foundation of and the driving force behind civilizational, social, and technological advance. Despite this, we know surprisingly little about how it works, mainly because it is the most complex object we have yet encountered in the entire universe. The average brain consists of several hundred billion glial cells and—more importantly—about a hundred billion neurons, each of which creates about ten thousand synaptic connections, building an unimaginably intricate pathway for the flow of electrical impulses. Thanks to MRI scans, we’re able to capture this activity in specific regions of the brain under the influence of specific stimuli received by the senses. So, in recent years, there has been a lot of research conducted in which people are placed in MRI scanners and perform various tasks; thanks to this research, scientists can identify the areas of the brain responsible for dealing with specific stimuli, and as a result, better understand, for example, how specific emotions are triggered.
It should come as no surprise then to learn that sexual drive has also been tested in this way. Serge Stoléru of the French Institute of Health and Medical Research and Jérôme Redouté of CERMEP conducted research with young men who watched three six-minute-long films while in an MRI scanner. 3 The first was essentially neutral, the second was a comedy, intended to arouse positive emotions, and the third included a heavy dose of erotica. The research enabled the identification of five regions of the brain that “light up” in response to sexual impulses: the lower temporal gyrus (dealing with visual stimuli), the right side of the orbitofrontal cortex (emotions and motivation), the cingulate cortex (the allocortex, responsible for basic physiological reactions), the right insula (initiating specific responses such as increasing heart rate or stimulating an erection), and the right caudate nucleus (influences emotions and possibly whether sexual activity follows sexual arousal). The activity in each of these regions increased under the influence of the images depicted in the third film, and of course, the subject had no way of controlling the activity. It’s no accident that sexual drive is governed by the most ancient areas of our brains, which makes us incapable of eliminating them from our decision-making processes. I don’t know if this is any consolation to Weinstein, Strauss-Kahn, Clinton, or Woods (it certainly makes no difference to their wives), but they fell victim to one of the most powerful forces Nature can throw at us, one that destroys the ability to consider and assess a situation rationally—sexual drive.
Just how much our actions are dominated by the activity of these five regions can be shown by another simple experiment: a group of male subjects was shown a series of photos of models and asked to pick the most attractive ones. The trick was that some of the photos had been Photoshopped to give the models... slightly dilated pupils. Those were precisely the photos the subjects identified as the most attractive, though they had no idea why; none of them consciously recognized that the pupils were larger. Yet, the oldest parts of their brains reacted instantly—there, evolution had encoded that dilated pupils connote female sexual arousal, and immediately prompted the subjects on what decision to make.
It’s worth raising one further question about the inconvenient influence the libido exerts over behavior and decision-making: Why am I writing only about men? The answer is simple: It affects men to a massively greater degree than it does women. This has also been shown scientifically, by, for example, Dr. Stephan Hamann, of Emory University in Atlanta. As in the earlier experiments, Hamann used MRI technology. Twenty-eight young men and women looked at two types of photos. The first group of photos showed people of the opposite sex, selected so that they contained no erotic element; these were the most neutral photos the scientists were able to find. The second group of photos were unambiguously erotic and showed lone men, lone women, and heterosexual couples. The subjects were asked to assess their levels of sexual arousal while at the same time the researchers observed the activity in the key regions of their brains. As you may imagine, the men reacted neurologically far stronger than the women. Interestingly, this even happe
ned when the women’s self-assessments of their levels of sexual arousal exceeded those of the men. In other words, even if the women thought they were more influenced by libido than the men, in terms of the observed levels of brain activity, the men were more affected. Sadly, the results of these tests in laboratory conditions were disturbingly similar to actual police observations: men commit sexual assault around fifty times more than women.
That’s not all, though. Just like libido, both positive and negative emotions created in the brain influence our ability to rationally assess a situation and make the right choice.
I think we’ve come far enough now in this book for me to tell you openly and honestly: you’re a bunch of ignoramuses who haven’t got a clue how to make decisions.
Whoa there, cowboy! I hope you haven’t hurled this book against the wall, even if you had a momentary desire to do so. Stop. Think about your emotions when you read that—what did you feel? Disbelief, surprise, irritation, anger? If I managed to rile you, what did you want to do in that split second? Burn the book? Demand your money back? Find the author and strangle him?
If any of those emotions made a guest appearance, it means that your amygdala leaped into action and you were affected by something that Daniel Goleman (who popularized the concept of emotional intelligence) called an “amygdala hijack.” Amygdala hijack occurs when we react in a way we later assess as having been excessive. This phenomenon has been described in purely neurological terms by US scientist Joseph LeDoux. He demonstrated that in certain circumstances, a brain signal travels directly from the thalamus to the amygdala, bypassing the part of the brain responsible for rational thinking. The amygdala then activates something called the HPA axis (the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis), which together with the sympathetic nervous system puts us into fight-or-flight mode. So, if the impulse gets from the thalamus to the amygdala faster than to the neocortex, we experience a primitive reaction bereft of analysis or rational thought. The neocortex is only activated later, leading to... another moral hangover and embarrassment that we got carried away by our emotions. 4
