Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters: From Dating, Shopping, and Praying to Going to War and Becoming a Billionaire–Two Evolutionary Psychologists Explain Why We Do What We Do (20 page)

The quid pro quo and similar types of harassment are manifestations of men's greater desire for short-term casual sex than women's, and their willingness to use any available means to achieve their goal. While feminists often claim that sexual harassment is “not about sex but about power,”
³⁶
Browne astutely points out that it is both; it is about men using power to get sex. “To say that it is only about power makes no more sense than saying that bank robbery is only about guns, not about money.”
³⁷

The male-female differences in the desire for short-term casual sex are exacerbated by another male-female difference in evolved psychological mechanisms: the woman's desire to understate her sexual desire in a particular man and to engage in “token resistance.”
³⁸
In one study,
³⁹
nearly 40 percent of undergraduate women admitted to saying no to sexual advances from a man even though they actually wanted to have sex with him. More than a third of these cases where the women initially said no eventually resulted in consensual sex. As the late behavior geneticist Linda Mealey eloquently puts it: “That females are selected to be coy will mean that sometimes saying ‘no' really does mean ‘try a little harder.'”
⁴⁰
Of course, women sometimes do mean no when they say no, but this isn't always the case.

Hostile Environment: When Men Are Equal-Opportunity Harassers

Browne explains the incidence of sexual harassment cases of the second variety (hostile environment) as a result of the sex differences in what men and women perceive as “overly sexual” or “hostile.” While the courts in the United States often employ the standard of a fictitious “reasonable person” to determine whether a given workplace constitutes a hostile environment, Browne points out that there is no such thing as a “reasonable person”; there is only a reasonable man and a reasonable woman. What a reasonable man and a reasonable woman perceive to be a hostile environment may be entirely different. Browne questions the exclusive focus on the alleged victim's perspective.

While many women legitimately complain that they have been subjected to abusive, intimidating, and degrading treatment by their male colleagues and employers, Browne points out that long before women entered the labor force, men subjected
each other
to such abusive, intimidating, and degrading treatment. Abuse, intimidation, and degradation are all part of men's unfortunate repertoire of tactics employed in competitive situations. In other words, men are
not
harassing women in this fashion because they are treating women differently from men (which is the definition of discrimination under which sexual harassment legally falls), but the exact opposite: men harass women precisely because they are
not
discriminating between men and women.

Because of all the media attention and the soaring costs of litigation, most American firms and universities now have sexual harassment policies that categorically prohibit any sexual relations between and among their employees. Browne makes a sharp observation in this connection. Although sexual harassment surveys typically ask whether the respondent has ever been subjected to unwanted sexual advances in the workplace, they seldom, if ever, ask whether she has been subjected to
welcome
sexual advances. The answer must commonly be in the affirmative, since a large number of workers find their romantic partners at work.
⁴¹

Men's and women's behavior that sometimes results in charges of sexual harassment is most often simply part of the normal repertoire of human mating strategies. They work well most of the time (as when a large number of men and women find satisfactory long-term and short-term mates in their workplace) but occasionally result in miscommunication and misunderstanding due to the evolved differences between the sexes, which is then given the label of sexual harassment. (See “He Said, She Said: Why Do Men and Women Perceive the Same Situation Differently?” in chapter 3.) While it might deter some legitimately abusive behavior, the current sexual harassment policy commonly practiced in many American organizations, which categorically prohibits any sexual relations between employees, is therefore likely to be
detrimental to women's sexual interests as much as men's
, because such prohibition eliminates
welcome
sexual attention and advances along with the unwelcome.

THE EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION AND CONFLICT

The topics we explore in our last substantive chapter—those concerning religion and group conflict—are the least explored areas of application for evolutionary psychology, probably because these are most remote from the immediate concerns with sex and mating. The connection between sex and religion is not as obvious as the connection between sex and marriage, for example. However, there is a connection. There have been a small number of important studies in the area of religion and group conflict from the evolutionary psychological perspective, and they shed new and often surprising light, providing novel answers to old questions.

There have been two seemingly contradictory findings in the area of conflict between groups: racism is innate, but race is not. More accurately,
ethnocentrism
(the tendency to value one's own group and correspondingly to devalue other groups) is an evolved innate tendency that all humans have. If you have read this far in this book, you should know why by now. We are designed to promote our own reproductive fitness and spread our genes. There is no place for universal love of all people in cold Darwinian logic. So contrary to what social scientists and hippies alike proclaim, we
don't
learn to be a racist through parental socialization; we learn
not
to be one.

Even though the tendency to favor “ingroup” members at the cost of “outgroup” members is innate (although we can overcome it through socialization and conscious effort), what counts as “ingroup” and “outgroup” is not. In particular, a very ingenious experiment
¹
has shown that we can erase racial categories that we normally use under the right circumstances. This makes perfect sense, in retrospect, when you remember that our ancestors evolved in a mostly racially homogeneous environment. Encountering people of different races on a daily basis is a very recent phenomenon in human evolutionary history, so there could not be innate categories for different races in our brain, as there are for age and sex.

We will get to the topic of group conflict shortly. But first we start with religion and where it came from in the first place….

Q. Where Does Religion Come From?

It may be tempting to believe that religion
^[2]
is an adaptation (or, in our language, an evolved psychological mechanism) designed by evolution by natural and sexual selection, since there are genetic and biological bases of religion. All human societies practice religion (making it one of the cultural universals);
³
whether one is religious or not, especially in adulthood, is largely genetically determined;
⁴
and certain parts of the brain are involved in religious thoughts and experiences.
⁵
However, this explanation of religion as an adaptation runs into one significant problem: What is the adaptive problem that religion is designed to solve? Do religious people live longer or have greater reproductive success?
^[6]
So far, no one has been able to point to an adaptive problem that religion is designed to solve.
⁷

As a result, many recent evolutionary psychological theories on the origins of religious beliefs share the view that religion is not an adaptation in itself but a
byproduct
of other adaptations. In other words, these theories contend that religion itself did not evolve to solve an adaptive problem so that religious people can live longer and reproduce more successfully, but instead emerged as a byproduct of adaptations that evolved to solve unrelated adaptive problems.

These theories,
⁸
in part or in whole, go as follows: When our ancestors faced some ambiguous situation, such as rustling noises nearby at night or a large fruit falling from a tree branch and hitting them on the head, they could attribute them to impersonal, inanimate, unintentional forces (such as wind blowing gently to make the rustling noises among the bushes and leaves, the mature fruit falling by its own weight from the branch by the force of gravity and hitting them on the head purely by coincidence) or to personal, animate, intentional forces (a predator sneaking up on them to attack, an enemy hiding in the tree branches and throwing fruit at their head). The question is, which is it?

Two Different Ways to Get It Wrong

Given that the situation is inherently ambiguous and could be caused by either intentional or unintentional forces, our ancestors could have made one of two possible errors. They could have attributed the events to intentional forces when they in fact were caused by unintentional forces (in other words, they could have committed the error of false-positive), or they could have attributed the events to unintentional forces when they in fact were caused by intentional forces (they could have committed the error of false-negative).
^[9]
The consequences of false-positive errors were that our ancestors became unnecessarily paranoid and looked for predators and enemies where there were none. The consequences of false-negative errors were that our ancestors were attacked and killed by the predator or the enemy when they least expected an attack. The consequences of committing false-negative errors are much more seriously detrimental to survival and reproductive success than the consequences of committing false-positive errors, and thus evolution should favor psychological mechanisms that predispose their carriers to over-infer intentions and agency behind potentially harmless phenomena caused by inanimate objects. Evolutionarily speaking, it's good to be paranoid, because it might save your life.
¹⁰

Different theorists call this innate human tendency to commit false-positive errors rather than false-negative errors (and as a consequence be a bit paranoid) “animistic bias”
¹¹
or “the agency-detector mechanism.”
¹²
These theorists argue that the evolutionary origins of religious beliefs in supernatural forces come from such an innate bias to commit false-positive errors rather than false-negative errors. The human brain, according to them, is biased to perceive intentional forces behind a wide range of natural physical phenomena, because the costs of committing false-negative errors are much greater than the costs of committing false-positive errors. It predisposes us to see the hand of God at work behind natural, physical phenomena whose exact causes are unknown.
^[13]

Some readers may recognize this argument as a variant of “Pascal's wager.” The seventeenth-century French philosopher Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) argued that given that one cannot know for sure if God exists, it is nonetheless rational to believe in God. If one does not believe in God when He indeed exists (false-negative error), one must spend eternity in hell and damnation, whereas if one believes in God when he actually does not exist (false-positive error), one only wastes a minimal amount of time and effort spent on religious ser vices. The cost of committing the false-negative error is much greater than the cost of committing the false-positive error. Hence, one should rationally believe in God.

In Church and on the Dance Floor

More interestingly, if you have read “He Said, She Said: Why Do Men and Women Perceive the Same Situation Differently?” in chapter 3, you may see a clear parallel between the evolutionary psychological explanations of the origins of religious beliefs and Haselton and Buss's error management theory,
¹⁴
as does Haselton herself.
^[15]
The intriguing suggestion here is that we may believe in God and the supernatural for the same reasons that men over-infer women's sexual interest in them while women underinfer men's sexual interest in them. Both religious beliefs and sexual miscommunication are consequences of the human brain designed for efficient error management, to minimize the total costs (rather than the total numbers) of committing false-positive and false-negative errors. We may believe in God for the same reason that women have to keep slapping men to set them straight or that sexual harassment is so rampant.

Q. Why Are Women More Religious Than Men?

Apart from the practice of religion itself, there is something else about religion that is culturally universal. Women in virtually every society are more religious than men.

A worldwide survey asked more than one hundred thousand people from seventy different countries and regions the following two questions: “Do you believe in God” and “In de pen dent of whether you go to church or not, would you say you are a religious person, not a religious person, or a convinced atheist?” By these measures, with only a couple of minor exceptions,
^[16]
women in all nations and regions are more religious than men.

The sex differences in religiosity are greater in some countries (Russia) than in others (US). It is present in societies with very high levels of religiosity (Ghana, Poland, Nigeria) and in those with very low levels of religiosity (China, Japan, Estonia). It is present in all six populated continents, regardless of the particular religion involved (Catholicism in Italy and Spain, Protestantism in Germany and Sweden, Russian Orthodox in Russia and Belarus, Islam in Turkey and Azerbaijan, Shintoism in Japan, indigenous religions in Ghana, and even official atheism in China). Women are more religious than men in virtually every society surveyed. Nor is this a contemporary phenomenon. Historical records show that the sex differences in religiosity existed throughout history.
¹⁷

Why is this? Why are women more religious than men in virtually all cultures and throughout history? What explains the universal sex difference in religiosity?

As with all other sex differences, the Standard Social Science Model offers a blanket explanation of “gender socialization.” Social scientists in the Standard Social Science Model tradition contend that women are socialized to be nurturing and submissive, qualities that make religious acceptance and commitment more likely.
¹⁸
Similarly, they argue that the role of the mother subsumes religiousness, since it involves such activities as teaching the children morality and caring for the physical and spiritual welfare of other family members.
¹⁹
Some even argue that women are more religious than men because they do not traditionally work outside the home and therefore have more free time to pursue and practice religion.
²⁰

Unfortunately for the Standard Social Science Model, however, it turns out that there is not much empirical support for these explanations for the sex difference in religiosity. Women are more religious than men both in traditional societies, where women receive strict gender socialization, and in modern societies, where women are not subject to such strict gender socialization;
²¹
the experience of child rearing appears unrelated to a woman's religiosity;
²²
career women are just as religious as house wives, and both are far more religious than men.
²³
The preponderance of empirical evidence is therefore contrary to the Standard Social Science Model explanation for the sex difference in religiosity in terms of gender socialization.

Another Case of Risk Management

The sex difference in religiosity directly follows from the evolutionary psychological theory of the origins of religious beliefs (see “Where Does Religion Come From?” above) and the sex difference in risk taking (see “Why Are Almost All Violent Criminals Men?” in chapter 6). You'll recall that the evolutionary origins of religiosity are in risk management; it is less risky to over-infer agency and hence be susceptible to religious beliefs. It is an error-management strategy to minimize the total costs of errors by predisposing the human brain to commit more false-positive errors than false-negative errors when the former has less costly consequences than the latter.
²⁴
You'll recall, too, that women are inherently more risk-averse than men, both because women benefit far less from taking risks (given that there is a limit to how many children women can have and that all women are more or less guaranteed to have some children in their lifetime)
²⁵
and because their offspring suffer if women are risk-seeking.
²⁶
If men are more risk-seeking than women, and if religion is an evolutionary means to minimize risk, then it naturally follows that women are more religious than men.