Generous Lust

It depends.

They are mistaken in the most insidious sense if they thought they wanted these things for righteous and altruistic reasons. Their brains will spend all processing power channeling their human drives into more socially acceptable activities. They will become confused when their routine stops feeling rewarding. They are the reason there is such a thing as a market for dust-ruffles and “gyms” with the word ‘spa’ in their marquee. This is the “work hard to play hard” crowd and they are narcissistic to the core. If some of them seem like great people it’s due to accident or religion.

But some never quite drink the Kool-Aid. The charade is like a hobby and they find an outlet to do their real work. But they play the game because, let’s face it, ascetic hermits do not get laid.

To the extent that it is sensible to ascribe values and intentions to our genes, what our genes want is very simple: to spam the environment with as many copies of themselves as possible. One possible strategy for doing so is create a conscious agent who has the same values and rationally determines the best way to achieve them. In practice, however, evolution has given rise to a kludge. Human genes produce conscious agents which have a set of values which are not identical to the genes’ values. By acting in accordance with their own values, humans usually promote the ends sought by their genes.

So, to answer your question, the people in the experiment were not at all mistaken about what they wanted. They may or may not have been aware of the evolutionary process which gave rise to their desires, but in either case their desires are no less genuine.

If anyone wants to insist on using some definition of “desires” whereby the subjects are deceiving themselves as to what they want, I’d like to point out the consequences of such an idiosyncratic definition. If the subjects who claimed to want to help are deceiving themselves, then surely someone who claims to not want to produce offspring must be deeply delusional about their own desires. But that view is mistaken. It really is possible to not want children, and a definition of “desires” which denies this is just plain silly.

I don’t doubt this plays a role in motives — but women who have found a mate often continue or advance further in their public service roles — especially in upper class circles. Women are generally more social and empathic beings then men — this obviously also plays a role in their motives, actions, ,and how they express their worth to society. Although mating strategy is probably part of it — I’m going to go with multi-factorial, with my guesstimate of mating probably only explaining less than 20% of overall variation.

I agree that priming helps find a connection between actions and words — but just because a primed pathway exists, doesn’t mean it explains all or most of the variance in day to day activities.

Sometimes I think people who are in evolutionary pscyh think God is optimizing the brain to be perfectly Darwinian. Evolution is very messy, not always optimal, and takes advantage of the software/hardware at hand to try and improve performance in some task necessary for reproduction.

Do you really find this disturbing? I’m not sure they were or are significantly mistaken about their desires. Our desires, near term, are fickle and I believe most people would agree that that’s true about themselves. Priming, as a general phenomena, isn’t so unknown; we have numerous words in English for specific examples:

• Inspired
• Humiliated
• Excited
• Sobered

Don’t priming effects typically vanish when subjects are informed of the effect? [Priming ‘priming’ is an apparently effective self-antidote.] Still, I’m more convinced now that early language was primarily or significantly devoted to manipulating each other’s behavior.

I thought the whole point of terminal values vs instrumental values was that we’re not conscious of the relationship between the values we have been imbued with and their effect on fitness. We don’t want to spend a bunch of money because we’re conscious of signaling fitness to potential mates, we just know that we get a hit of brain chemicals when we do.

Though I might be inclined to agree that we are biologically motivated to engage in activities that we believe will propagate our genes (showing off), I am doubtful of the idea that HOW we choose to engage in this propagation is determined by our sex. I feel that too often the word “sex” was being used at times when “gender” would have been more appropriate. There are certainly women who manage to scratch through socialization just enough to care about seeming attainable through “conspicuous luxury.” There are certainly also men who sell themselves through “public … helping.” I know nothing of the original data, but even if it doesn’t reflect this to a considerable degree, it would be irresponsible to claim that our methods are biologically determined by our sex from the sheer fact that the opposite can certainly be observed at times. That’s one of the bigger problems with making bold determinations from rounded data. There needs to be more room for its granularity (or lack thereof) to be discussed.

@Hopefully Anonymouse,

I don’t see much tension. Indeed it seems to be very similar to men’s behavior. Sure there is a sense in which every guy would ‘prefer’ to be married to Angelina Jolie or another world famous model/actress but it’s only the very weak counterfactual sense that if they’d been invited to Hollywood parties and been hit on by movie stars during their teen/early adult years they would have most probably taken that option instead of pursuing the kind of girl they did/are hooking up with.

Going for broke and refusing all but the very best potential mates regardless of your own pulling power isn’t a very good genetic strategy. Much better to cut your chances of getting with a super model by a tenth or even a hundredth if that bumps up your chances of landing the slightly more fit mate in your league. In particular once you realize certain mates our out of your league it will be advantageous to signal to those who are that you’re willing to make long term commitments to raising offspring with them instead of trading up first chance you get. The obvious way for this to happen is to evolve the ability to genuienly feel strong sexual attraction and strong devotion to your best plausible option.

In other words men and women are evolved to find mates in their own league attractive even if that’s pretty far down on the desirability scale. Women find project boys attractive because they look like an evolutionary fire sale. Since her competitors don’t see the boy’s potential the girl has a good chance or landing him even though mating with him offers more benefits than most of the guys in her league.

—

I realize I’m not giving you a theory. I’m just suggesting why this doesn’t seem problematic to me.

The primed men were also willing (or at least said they were willing) to act heroically as well as spend—but only if the action suggested was life-threatening.

I wonder if for the same reasons it works the other way too – being in such situations when potential mates are watching increases arousal. I’m thinking of a certain study by Dutton and Aron (1974)…

In the study, an attractive woman approached men while they were walking across the Capilano River Bridge in British Columbia. Only those without a female companion were approached. The woman asked the men to make up a brief story for a project she was doing on creativity. The Capilano River Bridge sways precariously more than 200 feet above rapids and rocks. The female interviewer made the same request of other men crossing a much safer, lower bridge. The men on the Capilano River Bridge told more sex-ually oriented stories and rated the female interviewer more attractive than did men on the lower, less frightening bridge.