You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself (16 page)

This sort of behavior is common across the animal kingdom. Anything that directly affects your survival can become a superstimulus if exaggerated enough. Birds can become confused by eggs from other, parasitic birds who hijack their nests. The eggs look like theirs, but are much bigger, so they sit atop them even though they belong to another. There are orchids that have powerful scents like a female wasp’s or a bee queen’s, and males mate with the flower, getting covered in pollen in the process. Back when people lived in the wild, where high-calorie food was scarce, your ancestors developed an intense desire to gobble up as much animal fat as they could when they were lucky enough to find it. Now you can’t stop eating french fries and cheeseburgers.

If you associate something with survival, but find an example of that thing that is more perfect than anything your ancestors could have ever dreamed of—it will overstimulate you.

When it comes to mate selection, the genders are usually divided into two camps. One has to carry the offspring and reproduce less often; the other can reproduce many times over without much risk. In this scenario, supernormal releasers either exaggerate the fertility and health of the egg carriers, or the status and resources of the sperm carriers.

For human ladies, a tux on a man who owns a private jet and three homes in Italy creates a powerful set of supernormal releasers. Most women wouldn’t hook up with a man who looks like the Crypt Keeper, but if he owns a publishing empire or a fortune equivalent to the gross domestic product of a European nation, some will. For human guys, symmetry, big breasts, wide hips, narrow waists, lustrous hair, and voluptuous lips add up to a powerful supernormal releaser. Most men wouldn’t have sex with a plastic corpse, but the strength of RealDoll sales over the years shows some will. Both of these examples are the human equivalent of those sexy beer bottles.

Psychologist David Buss has spent his career studying the preferences of men and women when it comes to selecting a mate both for short-term flings and long-term relationships. In his book
The Evolution of Desire,
he points to one crucial aspect which seems to be held above all others when men are making a snap judgment about physical attraction—the hip-to-waist ratio. In many studies around the world, no matter what cultural significance is placed on body type, a ratio in which the waist is about 70 percent the width of the hips is always preferred. According to Buss, a hip-to-waist ratio of .67 to .80 correlates to health, reproductive and otherwise. Women with this ratio truly are healthier, and this is something men know unconsciously. Psychologist Devendra Singh’s 1993 study of
Playboy
centerfolds showed although the women in the magazine had become thinner over the years, their average hip-to-waist ratio remained a constant .70.

The strange thing about this natural tendency for men to prefer small waists and big hips is how a superstimulus with physically impossible features produces even more attraction. Psychologist Kerri Johnson’s research into hip-to-waist ratios in 2005 showed both men and women used this metric to determine the gender of silhouettes. Her eye-tracking computer programs clearly showed both sexes first looked at the face and then moved around the hip area to see the telltale signs of gender. Her research also showed when men were asked to rate attractiveness they were drawn to a .70 waist. But they were drawn to waists of .60 and .50 even more. A waist this small would make it impossible for a woman to bear children. So the superstimuli weren’t telling the man this was an incredibly fertile and healthy woman; they were just a shortcut, a heuristic. Men’s brains were telling them small waists and big hips were good. Since waists so small the woman wouldn’t be able to bear children were unlikely in nature, there was no adjustment built into the heuristic to not be attracted to super-tiny waists.

Johnson also had men and women walk on a treadmill and told half of the subjects she was measuring their efficiency. She told the other half she was measuring how sexually attractive they were. When told they were being judged for sexiness, the women unconsciously swooshed their hips from side to side, which made it appear to observers as if their hip-to-waist ratio had magically been reduced. This is how superstimuli boggle your mind. Your mental shortcuts aren’t prepared to deal with exaggerations. Barbie dolls, anime characters, and ancient fertility statues are impossible versions of women, but both sexes unconsciously know about the magic of the hip-to-waist ratio and the power of superstimuli.

Men are easy to manipulate thanks to having fewer metrics by which they judge potential mates, and thus advertising has long been preying on their tendencies. Women will buy products in an attempt to become the impossible goal. Men will buy products in an attempt to mate with the impossible goal. Sexy and sexist advertising can kill two birds with one stone. Advertisers use genetic freaks with abnormal symmetry, lit by professionals, altered by makeup artists, and finished off with Photoshop until they are nothing more than realistic cartoons—just like a RealDoll.

For women, a superstimulus has to have more than just a rocking body and a good hip-to-waist ratio. Women have more to lose when they make a bad decision, so they have evolved a more complex and particular set of metrics by which potential mates are judged. David Buss says those include, but are not limited to, economic capacity, social status, ambition, stability, intelligence, commitment, and height. Any one of these guides for reproductive success in both a short-term or long-term mate can become a superstimulus, but for a man to be a supernormal releaser he would need to possess several. A tall, rich doctor who is both kind and faithful is far more attractive than a short waiter who lives with his parents and is quick to anger, no matter how sculpted his chest is.

Don’t leave this subject thinking you are above all of this. Even if you don’t act on your impulses, you still feel them. Eventually, something will overtake you, even if it’s as small as a sandwich with two pieces of fried chicken for a bun instead of bread. A study at Rutgers University in 2003 showed the average size of what most Americans considered a fair portion of food had increased significantly in twenty years. A glass of orange juice is now 40 percent larger. A bowl of cornflakes is 20 percent bigger. Plates in restaurants have grown by 25 percent in size. The influence of superstimuli has changed what people think is a generous helping, but no one noticed until recently.

Remember, you take mental shortcuts whenever possible to determine when something is awesome. When a stimulus goes from good to great, it does not mean it truly is better than the normal version. If the normal version is something that had to be created, had to be fabricated into something illusory, there is a good chance you’ll have to fight your natural tendencies to be overwhelmed by superstimuli. Australian jewel beetles are doomed to lust for beer bottles in garbage heaps because they can’t overcome their desires. You can.

Suppose I offered you the chance to earn some fast cash just by picking red jelly beans out of a bowl.

I give you two options, a giant bowl with hundreds of red beans mixed in with hundreds of others, or a small bowl containing fifty mixed beans with a higher ratio of red beans than the larger bowl. The bowls are even labeled with your odds of winning. The big one says 7 percent; the small one says 10 percent. Each time you pull out a red one, I’ll give you $1. Which bowl do you pick?

In a 1994 study Veronika Denes-Raj and Seymour Epstein published in the
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
they discovered that people picked the big bowl over the little bowl, even though the red ratio was higher in the smaller bowl. When asked why, they said they just felt like their chances were better because there were more red beans in the big bowl despite knowing the true odds were against them.

The tendency to make poor decisions and ignore odds in favor of your gut feelings is called the affect heuristic. It is always getting between you and your best interests, and it starts when you make a snap judgment about something new.

The first time you meet someone, billions of microthoughts ricochet through the chemical and electrical conduits in your cranium. You begin making judgments about the person’s character before you realize it. You may notice a handshake that is strong and vigorous, that the person’s posture is forward and sturdy, that his or her smile is perfect and warm. You take all these features and multiply them by how the person is dressed, divide by the way the person smells, and factor age into a huge equation that forms a first impression in your unconscious. This person is good. Let’s get to know this person.

What if you meet someone who keeps making racist remarks, has a swastika tattooed on one wrist, and smells like mushroom gravy? Before you can turn your emotions into thoughts, you are increasing the distance between you and that person’s funk.

Common sense says first impressions fade as you get to know someone, but first impressions matter more than you realize. Research shows the first impression you have about a person, or anything else, tends to linger. A study in 1997 by Wilkielman, Zajonc, and Shwartz created first impressions in subjects with images of smiles and frowns. The people in the study saw a photo of either a happy or a sad face flash briefly on a screen and then were shown an unfamiliar Chinese character and asked to say whether or not they liked it. People tended to say they liked the characters that followed the smiles over the ones that followed frowns, but later on when they saw the same characters with the expressions preceding them reversed, they didn’t change their answers. Their first impression remained.

You boil down your initial judgment of just about everything in life to “this is good” or “this is bad” and then put the burden of proof on future experience to show you otherwise. You might like someone early on but learn of severe faults over time. You wait for your first impression to be chiseled away instead of promptly changing your opinion of that person’s character. Maybe the person dresses well and waxes poetic on the virtues of good hygiene but gets touchy-feely and hits on every person of the opposite sex who’s around for more than four minutes. Maybe the person beats his or her children but spends weekends at a nursing home teaching the elderly how to use computers. How much evidence would you need to move a new acquaintance from one category to the other?

The affect heuristic is one way you rapidly come to a conclusion about new information. You use it to drop data into two broad categories—good and bad—and then you choose to avoid or seek out what you have judged. The affect heuristic is the Holy Grail of cognitive biases in advertising and politics. When you can associate your product or candidate with positive things or your competitors and opponents with negative things, you win. If you build up enough associations, your product can become eponymous with the category it occupies. Facial tissues become Kleenex. Pain medicine becomes Aspirin. Bandages become Band-Aids.

There is debate among psychologists on just how powerful and trustworthy snap decisions are, but there is no doubt they play a large role in who you are and how you interpret your senses. When first impressions linger and influence how you feel about second, third, and fourth impressions, you are being befuddled by the affect heuristic.

Much of the machinery of the mind takes place behind closed doors in corridors of the unconscious, and these ruminations are part of a give-and-take with the conscious mind. Psychologists sometimes divide the mind into parts that correspond with the evolution of the brain. This is an oversimplification, but it is useful to see in the various parts the story of how your brain evolved from the simple versions carried around by insects and fish. It helps to make sense of how the mind is formed if you see the brain layered like an archaeological dig that is stratified with the oldest artifacts underneath the more recent. The oldest parts lie mostly in the hind-brain. These structures, among others, are concerned with your survival and help regulate all those things you don’t have to think about, like breathing and balancing on one foot. The mid-brain structures were shaped by your primate ancestors and grant you emotions and social awareness. The top layer, the most recently evolved, reasons and calculates. The frontal lobes and neocortex act as executive offices of the mind, taking suggestions from all other structures and formulating plans of action.

Your rational, mathematical, reasonable, and methodical mind is slow and plodding. It takes notes and uses tools. Your irrational, emotional, instinctive mind is lightning-fast. When you decide to change your own oil, or install a new dishwasher, you depend on processing, on instructions and measurements, but less on emotions. You depend on snap judgments, on feelings that can’t be described with equations, when you decide where to go to lunch or what movie to rent. The conscious mind is still making choices, but the unconscious mind is providing feelings and influence. A great deal of your life is contemplated by the emotional brain, which means in social situations and matters of life and death your thoughts and behaviors are inspired by automatic and unconscious triggers, suggestions from a shadowy place that is difficult to access and explain. There are many books on the topic, but for our purposes just keep in mind how powerful an influence your mood is on the decision-making regions of your mind. You can see the mind as divided into automatic, emotional, and rational spheres of thought. Let’s reduce this to two, the conscious you and the unconscious you.

Unconscious-you has a lot in common with mice. A mouse eats about 15 percent of its body weight in food every day. A 180-pound man would have to eat more than a pound of food an hour to match such a cranked-up metabolism. These tiny, frenetic creatures are curious but cautious, and like any animal in the wild, mice base most of their behavior on the tug-of-war between risk and reward. Since a mouse needs to eat all the time, it is constantly faced with situations where it must weigh the danger of foraging against its hunger for calories. The mouse has a primitive brain, so it can’t base its choices on reason, on a careful analysis of economic benefits versus systemic losses. It feels its way through life with the rodent equivalent of intuition. When it faces a novel situation, it decides whether or not to proceed without using the same kind of logic you are able to summon. Otherwise, mousetraps would be useless. Go back far enough and you share a common ancestor with the mouse, and those unconscious abilities to recognize risk and reward evolved into the versions you and the mouse both still use. The recognition of risk isn’t something you determine with imaginary spreadsheets and slide rules of the mind. While blueprints and diagrams require careful planning, identifying risk comes from the gut, or, more accurately, it comes from the emotion-generating structures in your brain. A simple assessment of a situation as either good or bad kept your ancestors out of the mouths of predators and away from the business end of a spear most of the time, but when the problem is too complicated—like a mousetrap to a foraging rodent—you can really screw things up.