Sex, Murder, and the Meaning of Life (6 page)

Despite those differences, I was struck by the unexpected similarity, by the fact that women's likelihood of having had a homicidal fantasy was so close to men's. I had expected that women would be much less likely to have homicidal fantasies. Consider the data on actual homicides, where the sex discrepancies are whopping. Every year in the United States, men commit approximately 90 percent of the murders. And that discrepancy is in no way peculiar to the United States. When Martin Daly and Margo Wilson reviewed data from other societies and from other periods in history, they found this same wide gender gap all around the world and throughout history. They found that homicides were overwhelmingly a male affair in modern Canada, Australia, and Scotland; in Miami during the 1920s; and in Birmingham, Alabama, during the 1940s. The same is true for remote tribal groups such as the Tzeltal Mayans. And Daly and Wilson were able to dig up data on homicides that had been perpetrated between the years 1296 and 1398 in Oxford, England. Again, when medieval Brits killed medieval Brits, it was overwhelmingly men wielding the swords and axes.

There are at least three possible explanations for the fact that women are less likely to act on their homicidal fantasies. First, female fantasies tend to be more fleeting than those of males; 65 percent of women who experienced homicidal fantasies said that they only lasted for seconds or minutes, but men were more likely to report that their fantasies lasted for hours, days, or even weeks. Men's fantasies were also more likely to involve devilish details and were more likely to engage the men's planning capacities. Consider the following fantasy reported by one guy:

Women's fantasies were less detailed and were often as simple as “I just wanted his car to run off a cliff.” It takes more than such fleeting ill wishes for someone to end up dead.

A second possible explanation of the fantasy-reality sex gap is that females have stronger inhibitions that block their violent impulses. Aggression researchers Kaj Björkqvist, Kirsti Lagerspetz, and Ari Kaukiainen explain some of the sex differences in adolescents' violent behavior in terms of what they call the “effect/danger ratio”—or the person's assessment of the likely beneficial effect of aggressiveness, balanced against the likely dangers. So, for example, when my KO punch temporarily halted my stepfather's drunken rage, my brother and I were petrified that he would come gunning for us, and in fact we hid out for several days afterward. This ratio of dangers to benefits is generally even more unfavorable for a woman aggressing against a man (the most common target of women's homicidal fantasies).
Throughout most of human evolutionary history, a woman aggressing against a man could face severe danger if the man retaliated. Before the advent of the gun, the average male could probably fend off most attacks from a female and was likely to strike back in anger if he had been wounded. It would thus have been adaptive for females to quickly inhibit extremely violent impulses. Indeed, Daly and Wilson note that the typical woman who kills her husband or boyfriend most often does so defensively—to protect herself against an abusive man who she fears will someday murder her if she does not strike first.

The third possible explanation for the sex difference in actual homicides is linked to a surprising motive for much violent behavior: the tendency to act aggressively to impress others. This motive is rare in women but prominent in men, and the proclivity to show off their violent tendencies may explain why men are more willing to translate homicidal thoughts into actions.

Consider the famous incident in which Al Capone invited Albert Anselmi, John Scalise, and Joseph Giunta to a banquet in their honor. After wining and dining his three fellow mobsters, Capone reputedly had his henchmen tie them to their chairs. He then picked up a baseball bat, and in front of the other dinner guests, personally proceeded to beat each of the three men to death. As the most powerful man in Chicago, with politicians and police officers as well as hordes of other mobsters on his payroll, Capone usually had his underlings do the dirty work. Why, then, would he commit a triple murder right in front of a room full of witnesses?

The answer is that Capone had learned that the three were plotting against him, hoping to advance their own careers. As a powerful mafioso, he was expected to punish such disloyalty with death.
In this case, he hoped not only to eliminate these potential competitors but also to send a powerful message to his other business colleagues.

The stakes were high in Capone's world during the days of Prohibition—a life-and-death game for control of Chicago's multimillion-dollar alcohol-running territories—but the sad truth is that men will fight to the death even when the stakes are considerably lower. In his classic study of homicides in Philadelphia, Marvin Wolfgang categorized 37 percent of the causes as “trivial altercations” over relatively petty issues, such as an insult, a curse, or one person bumping into another. As one Dallas homicide detective put it:

It is not that women are not sensitive to social put-downs; they are. But only men are driven to kill over them. And they do it with surprising frequency. In fact, Wolfgang found that trivial altercations were the most common motives for men's murders—more important than disputes over money, property, or infidelity. Why kill over such small stakes? After an extensive examination of police reports of homicides, Wilson and Daly suggested that the stakes were actually not trivial at all. Instead, the trigger for extreme violence is not the content of what one man says to another, but how he says it and what that tone implies. When one man openly insults another in public, regardless of the trigger for the insult, the insulted man's status is being challenged. And when a man loses status in the eyes of other men, Wilson and Daly argued, his ability to attract women also takes a hit.

The link between a man's status and his value on the mating market connects to two of the most important principles in evolutionary biology: sexual selection and differential parental investment. According to the principle of
differential parental investment
, when one sex (usually the female) invests more in the offspring, members of that sex will be more careful about mating. As a consequence, members of the other sex (usually the male) will need to compete to be chosen. Consistent with this principle, human females, because they can become pregnant, have more to lose from a rash mating decision. Hence women tend to take more care in choosing the men with whom they mate. The process through which males are chosen is known as
sexual selection
. To win the attentions of selective females, male animals can do one of several things. They can display positive characteristics, as when a peacock displays his extravagant tail. They can find and control a resourcerich territory. Or they can beat out the competition directly—by fighting their way to the top of the local dominance hierarchy. Whether the game is defending a territory or winning a place at the top of the hierarchy, it helps to be larger and more aggressive.

And this process can indeed work in the other direction. Consider a group of interesting little shorebirds called phalaropes. In the phalaropes' case, males are the ones who brood and rear the chicks, and so they are choosy about the females with whom they will mate. As expected from the general principles of sexual selection, the male phalaropes are small and drab, and the females, who do the courting, are larger and more aggressive.

So phalaropes are the exception that proves the rule: The sex that invests more in the offspring is choosier about mating, and the other sex will compete to be chosen. In this equation, aggression is a by-product of that competition. Returning to the sex difference in homicides, it is human females who tend to invest more in the offspring, so males need to compete to be chosen. Sometimes the competition becomes deadly.

Male aggressiveness is not a constant: It ebbs and flows according to several factors. For example, in many species, it increases just before the mating season, when territories and females are being contested. In humans, boys boost their dominance displays after they hit puberty, when successful competitiveness, such as being a star athlete, translates into popularity with the opposite sex. And men are most dangerous in their late teens and twenties, when their testosterone levels are highest and when they are competing most vigorously for mates. On the other side, when a man gets married, his testosterone level drops, and when his wife has a child, it drops again. There is less need to show off, and more need to stay out of potentially deadly competitions over which song is playing on the jukebox at the local bar.

Even for men who are fully on the market, violence is an expensive and dangerous route to respect—and one that, other things being equal, men would typically do well to avoid. In fact, they do generally avoid it. It is only when other paths to status are blocked that men resort to violent and antisocial behavior, as psychologists Jim Dabbs and David Rowe argued, with a great deal of evidence to back up their arguments. Rich men, even those with high testosterone levels, do not typically go around getting into fistfights. They can win more respect by making clever investments or perfecting their golf swings. Compare my friend Steve Lowry from the upper-middle-class suburbs in Ohio, who had never been in a fistfight, to the belligerent (and often bloody-nosed) hooligans I grew up with in New York. Lowry was a master of philosophical argumentation and could stand above the other middle-class guys by showing off his knowledge of Søren Kierkegaard. In my neighborhood, using the word “existentialism” in a sentence would have been less likely to elicit respect than the question “What are you, a fuckin' faggot?” So the urge to compete need
not lead to violence, but depending upon the environment, upon the person's other traits, and upon his or her current life situation, it can.

Vlad Griskevicius and I decided to investigate how aggressive competitiveness might rise and fall as a function of a man's desire for status or mating. Vlad is an imposingly large and socially dominant guy who was born in the Soviet Union and spent his teenage years in urban Los Angeles. Along the way, he learned something about aggressing to impress, as well as about evolutionary theory. Vlad likes to tell a story about the way basketball player Charles Barkley responded when some local wise guy threw a glass of ice water on him in a discotheque. Barkley picked up his harasser and threw him through a plate-glass window. As he was being led out in handcuffs by the police, a reporter reputedly asked Barkley if he regretted his actions. Barkley replied, “I only regret that we were on the first floor.” Along with Josh Tybur, Steve Gangestad, Elaine Perea, and Jenessa Shapiro, we set out to experimentally examine how those transient motivational states might alter people's responses to insults.

To begin, we surveyed college students about their actual life experiences with public insults and with violence. Apparently, there are plenty of people hurling public insults out there. We found that 75 percent of both men and women had had at least one experience in which another person insulted them to their face in a public setting. How they responded to those insults varied: Some people simply walked away; some responded with indirect aggression, such as bad-mouthing their aggressor to others or spreading a bit of nasty gossip; and some responded directly and aggressively, taking a swing or yelling at their insulter. Of the various options, men most often responded with direct aggression, whereas for women, indirect aggression was the most common response.

In a follow-up laboratory study, we confronted our subjects with three scenarios, designed to manipulate their motivations. One set of subjects imagined being on the last day of a vacation on a tropical island
and locking eyes with someone very attractive. As the story unfolds, they become more and more entranced with this person's company, and after a romantic dinner, a moonlit walk on the beach, and increasingly intimate brushes with one another's fingertips, the two end up passionately kissing one another. We had the second set of subjects imagine arriving for the first day at a new job with a prestigious company, where they meet two other people who have also just been hired. Their new boss informs them that after six months, one will be fired and one will get a big promotion. Finally, we had subjects in the control condition imagine neither love nor status but, rather, envision a scenario in which they had searched for, and ultimately found, a missing wallet.

After priming the different motives, we asked all the subjects to imagine the same scenario: that they were at a party and that a classmate they knew spilled a drink on them and failed to apologize. Their choices were to (1) hit the person, (2) insult the person to his or her face, (3) push the person, or (4) get in the person's face (all forms of direct aggression); or to (5) talk behind the person's back, (6) tell a friend an embarrassing secret they have heard about the person, (7) try to exclude the person from a social group, or (8) make up a lie about the person (the latter four being forms of indirect aggression).

Whether or not a person preferred to act aggressively depended on his or her motivational state and on whether or not he or she was a she or a he. For men, thinking about status increased their desire to hit, push, or get in their insulter's face—“You talkin' to me?” Thinking about courtship and romance, on the other hand, slightly suppressed men's inclinations to attack. For women, neither of the motives increased their desire to fight directly over an insult. However, both status and mating motivations did increase women's desire to retaliate indirectly.