The Believing Brain - Michael Shermer [39]
What women prefer in men is just as real and natural, of course: women are attracted to men who are taller than them, with narrow waists and broad shoulders, lean and muscular builds, symmetrical faces and clear complexions, and strong jaws and chins. These are all characteristics related to a good balance of testosterone and other hormones, and they serve as proxies for genetic health in terms of selecting a mate with whom to have children. Because sexuality is so much more visually attended to by men, however, pornography as a supernormal stimulus is almost entirely a guy thing. Porn for women—actually the title of a parody in which fully clothed men are performing domestic chores (“I just vacuumed the whole house!”)—is mainly found in soap operas, chick flicks, and especially romance novels in which the plot concerns the heroine “finding and capturing the heart of the one right man,” wrote Barrett. “Sex may be explicit, implied, or not destined to occur until after a proposal of marriage, which constitutes the end of the book.”20
There are many other forms of preprogrammed patternicities in supernormal stimuli. There is, for example, our natural “territorial imperative,” in which we have a strong desire to protect what is ours, especially literal territory in the form of land, community, and nation. This, too, has been usurped by modernity. As Barrett notes, there is “a compelling instinct to provide for one’s offspring; this is practically synonymous with whose genes will survive.” In the modern world, however, territory has taken on supernormal dimensions. “Now the powerful and rich can direct these instincts at supernormal family estates, trust funds that endure for generations, and, in the case of monarchies, permanent rulership for the family.”21
Most territorial animals resolve land disputes with threat gestures, vocal cries, and—if worse comes to worst—a brief physical attack in which someone may actually get pushed, shoved, or even bitten. In fact, in laboratory “eye gaze” experiments, primatologists triggered male rhesus monkeys to make threatening gestures and displays, and even aggressive motions toward them, by simply staring at the monkeys with an open mouth. Once again returning to the SS-IRM-FAP system, the closed eyelid and open mouth serve as a sign stimulus to set off an innate releasing mechanism of anger and thereby release the fixed action pattern of aggression or reciprocal threat display. In this research we also find direct evidence for the IRM in single-cell recording from the brain stem of monkeys, in which there is a significant increase in neuronal activity when the experimenter stares at the monkey; the breaking of the gaze decreases neuronal activity, along with aggressive responses.22
Patternicity and Control
Patternicities do not occur randomly but are instead related to the context and environment of the organism, to what extent it believes that it is in control of its environment. Psychologists call this locus of control. People who rate high on internal locus of control tend to believe that they make things happen and that they are in control of their circumstances, whereas people who score high on external locus of control tend to think that circumstances are beyond their control and that things just happen to them.23 The thinking here is that having a high internal locus of control leads you to be more confident in your personal judgment, more skeptical of outside authorities and sources of information, and have a lower tendency to conform to external influences. In fact, people who consider