The Social Animal (3 page)

And of course breasts exist in the form they do precisely to arouse this reaction. There is no other reason human breasts should be so much larger than the breasts of other primates. Apes are flat-chested. Larger human breasts do not produce more milk than smaller ones. They serve no nutritional purpose, but they do serve as signaling devices and set off primitive light shows in the male brain. Men consistently rate women with attractive bodies and unattractive faces more highly than women with attractive faces and unattractive bodies. Nature does not go in for art for art’s sake, but it does produce art.

Julia had a much more muted reaction upon seeing her eventual life mate. This is not because she was unimpressed by the indisputable hotness of the man in front of her. Women are sexually attracted to men with larger pupils. Women everywhere prefer men who have symmetrical features and are slightly older, taller, and stronger than they are. By these and other measures, Harold’s future father passed the test.

It’s just that she was, by nature and upbringing, guarded and slow to trust. She, like 89 percent of all people, did not believe in love at first sight. Moreover, she was compelled to care less about looks than her future husband was. Women, in general, are less visually aroused than men, a trait that has nearly cut the market for pornography in half.

That’s because while Pleistocene men could pick their mates on the basis of fertility cues they could discern at a glance, Pleistocene women faced a more vexing problem. Human babies require years to become self-sufficient, and a single woman in a prehistoric environment could not gather enough calories to provide for a family. She was compelled to choose a man not only for insemination, but for companionship and continued support. And to this day, when a woman sets her eyes upon a potential mate, her time frame is different from his.

That’s why men will leap into bed more quickly than women. Various research teams have conducted a simple study. They pay an attractive woman to go up to college men and ask them to sleep with her. Seventy-five percent of men say yes to this proposition, in study after study. Then they have an attractive man approach college women with the same offer. Zero percent say yes.

Women have good reasons to be careful. While most men are fertile, there is wide variation among the hairier sex when it comes to stability. Men are much more likely to have drug and alcohol addictions. They are much more likely to murder than women, and much, much more likely to abandon their children. There are more lemons in the male population than in the female population, and women have found that it pays to trade off a few points in the first-impression department in exchange for reliability and social intelligence down the road.

So while Rob was looking at cleavage, Julia was looking for signs of trustworthiness. She didn’t need to do this consciously—thousands of years of genetics and culture had honed her trusting sensor.

Marion Eals and Irwin Silverman of York University have conducted studies that suggest women are on average 60 to 70 percent more proficient than men at remembering details from a scene and the locations of objects placed in a room. Over the past few years, Julia had used her powers of observation to discard entire categories of men as potential partners, and some of her choices were idiosyncratic. She rejected men who wore Burberry, because she couldn’t see herself looking at the same damn pattern on scarves and raincoats for the rest of her life. Somehow she was able to discern poor spellers just by looking at them, and they made her heart wither. She viewed fragranced men the way Churchill viewed the Germans—they were either at your feet or at your throat. She would have nothing to do with men who wore sports-related jewelry because her boyfriend should not love Derek Jeter more than her. And though there had recently been a fad for men who can cook, she was unwilling to have a serious relationship with anybody who could dice better than she could or who would surprise her with smugly unpretentious Gruyère grilled cheese sandwiches as a makeup present after a fight. It was simply too manipulative.

She looked furtively at Rob as he approached across the sidewalk. Janine Willis and Alexander Todorov of Princeton have found that people can make snap judgments about a person’s trustworthiness, competence, aggressiveness and likability within the first tenth of a second. These sorts of first glimpses are astonishingly accurate in predicting how people will feel about each other months later. People rarely revise their first impression, they just become more confident that they are right. In other research, Todorov gave his subjects microsecond glimpses of the faces of competing politicians. His research subjects could predict, with 70 percent accuracy, who would win the election between the two candidates.

Using her own powers of instant evaluation, Julia noticed Rob was good-looking, but he was not one of those men who are so good-looking that they don’t need to be interesting. While Rob was mentally undressing her, she was mentally dressing him. At the moment, he was wearing brown corduroy slacks, which did credit to Western civilization, and a deep purplish/maroonish pullover, so that altogether he looked like an elegant eggplant. He had firm but not ferretlike cheeks, suggesting he would age well and some day become the most handsome man in his continuing-care retirement facility.

He was tall, and since one study estimated that each inch of height corresponds to $6,000 of annual salary in contemporary America, that matters. He also radiated a sort of inner calm, which would make him infuriating to argue with. He seemed, to her quick judging eye, to be one of those creatures blessed by fate, who has no deep calluses running through his psyche, no wounds to cover or be wary of.

But just as the positive judgments began to pile up, Julia’s frame of mind flipped. Julia knew that one of her least-attractive features was that she had a hypercritical inner smart-ass. She’d be enjoying the company of some normal guy, and suddenly she would begin with the scrutiny. Before it was over, she was Dorothy Parker and the guy was a pool of metaphorical blood on the floor.

Julia’s inner smart-ass noticed that Rob was one of those guys who believes nobody really cares if your shoes are shined. His fingernails were uneven. Moreover, he was a bachelor. Julia distrusted bachelors as somehow unserious, and since she would never date a married man, this cut down the pool of men she could uncritically fall in love with.

John Tierney of
The New York Times
has argued that many single people are afflicted with a “Flaw-O-Matic,” an internal device that instantly spots shortcomings in a potential mate. A man might be handsome and brilliant, Tierney observes, but he gets cast in the discard pile because he has dirty elbows. A woman may be partner in a big law firm, but she’s vetoed as a long-term mate because she mispronounces “Goethe.”

Julia had good reason to partake in what scientists call the “men are pigs” bias. Women tend to approach social situations with an unconscious decision-making structure that assumes men are primarily interested in casual sex and nothing more. They’re like overly sensitive smoke detectors, willing to be falsely alarmed because it’s safer to err on the side of caution than to trust too willingly. Men, on the other hand, have the opposite error bias. They imagine there is sexual interest when none exists.

Julia went through cycles of hope and mistrust in just a few blinks of the eye. The tide of opinion, sadly, was running against Rob. Her inner smart-ass was going wild. But then, fortunately, he walked up and said hello.

As destiny would have it, Rob and Julia were meant for each other. Despite what you’ve heard about opposites attracting, people usually fall in love with people like themselves. As Helen Fisher wrote in a chapter of
The New Psychology of Love
, “Most men and women fall in love with individuals of the same ethnic, social, religious, educational and economic background, those of similar physical attractiveness, a comparable intelligence, similar attitudes, expectations, values, interests, and those with similar social and communication skills.” There’s even some evidence that people tend to pick partners with noses of similar breadth to their own and eyes about the same distance apart.

One of the by-products of this pattern is that people tend to unwittingly pick partners who have lived near them for at least parts of their lives. A study in the 1950s found that 54 percent of the couples who applied for marriage licenses in Columbus, Ohio, lived within sixteen blocks of each other when they started going out, and 37 percent lived within five blocks of each other. In college, people are much more likely to go out with people who have dorm rooms on the same hallway or the same courtyard. Familiarity breeds trust.

Rob and Julia quickly discovered they had a lot in common. They had the same Edward Hopper poster on their walls. They had been at the same ski resort at the same time and had similar political views. They discovered they both loved
Roman Holiday
, had the same opinions about the characters in
The Breakfast Club
, and shared the same misimpression that it was a sign of sophistication to talk about how much you loved Eames chairs and the art of Mondrian.

Furthermore, they both affected discerning connoisseurship over extremely prosaic things such as hamburgers and iced tea. They both exaggerated their popularity while reminiscing about high school. They had hung out at the same bars and had seen the same rock bands on the same tours. It was like laying down a series of puzzle pieces that astoundingly matched. People generally overestimate how distinct their own lives are, so the commonalities seemed to them like a series of miracles. The coincidences gave their relationship an aura of destiny fulfilled.

Without realizing it, they were also measuring each other’s intellectual compatibility. As Geoffrey Miller notes in
The Mating Mind
, people tend to choose spouses of similar intelligence, and the easiest way to measure someone else’s intelligence is through their vocabulary. People with an 80 IQ will know words such as “fabric,” “enormous,” and “conceal” but not words such as “sentence,” “consume,” and “commerce.” People with 90 IQs will know the latter three words, but probably not “designate,” “ponder,” or “reluctant.” So people who are getting to know each other subconsciously measure to see if their vocabularies mesh, and they adapt to the other person’s level.

The server stopped by their table, and they ordered drinks and then lunch. It is an elemental fact of life that we get to choose what we will order, but we do not get to choose what we like. Preferences are formed below the level of awareness, and it so happened that Rob loved cabernet but disliked merlot. Unfortunately, Julia ordered a glass of the former, so Rob had to select a glass of the latter, just to appear different. The food at their lunch was terrible, but the meal was wondrous. Rob had never actually been to this restaurant, but had selected it on the advice of their mutual friend, who was highly confident about his own judgments. It turned out to be one of those restaurants with ungraspable salads. Julia, anticipating this, had chosen an appetizer that could be easily forked and a main dish that didn’t require cutlery expertise. But Rob had selected a salad, which sounded good on the menu, composed of splaying green tentacles that could not be shoved into his mouth without brushing salad dressing three inches on either side of his cheeks. In some retro-nostalgia for 1990s tall cuisine, his entrée was a three-story steak, potato, and onion concoction that looked like the Devils Tower from
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
. Getting a biteful was like chipping off a geological stratum from Mount Rushmore.

But none of it mattered, because Rob and Julia clicked. Over the main course, Julia described her personal history—her upbringing, her collegiate interests in communications, her work as a publicist and its frustrations, and her vision for the PR firm she would someday start, using viral marketing.

Julia leaned in toward Rob as she explained her mission in life. She took rapid-fire sips of water, chewing incredibly fast, like a chipmunk, so she could keep on talking. Her energy was infectious. “This could be huge!” she enthused. “This could change everything!”

Ninety percent of emotional communication is nonverbal. Gestures are an unconscious language that we use to express not only our feelings but to constitute them. By making a gesture, people help produce an internal state. Rob and Julia licked their lips, leaned forward in their chairs, glanced at each other out of the corners of their eyes, and performed all the other tricks of unconscious choreography that people do while flirting. Unawares, Julia did the head cant women do to signal arousal, a slight tilt of the head that exposed her neck. She’d be appalled if she could see her supposedly tough-as-nails self in the mirror at this moment, because there she was like any Marilyn Monroe wannabe—doing the hair flip, raising her arms to adjust her hair, and heaving her chest up into view.

Julia hadn’t yet realized how much she enjoyed talking to Rob. But the waitress noticed the feverish warmth on their faces, and was pleased, since men on a first date are the biggest tippers of all. Only days later did the importance of the meal sink in. Decades hence, Julia would remember the smallest detail of this lunch, and not only the fact that her husband-to-be ate all the bread in the breadbasket.

And through it all the conversation flowed.

Words are the fuel of courtship. Other species win their mates through a series of escalating dances, but humans use conversation. Geoffrey Miller notes that most adults have a vocabulary of about sixty thousand words. To build that vocabulary, children must learn ten to twenty words a day between the ages of eighteen months and eighteen years. And yet the most frequent one hundred words account for 60 percent of all conversations. The most common four thousand words account for 98 percent of conversations. Why do humans bother knowing those extra fifty-six thousand words?