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UCSB Study Links Strength and Beauty to Anger, Pro-War Attitudes
August 4, 2009
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Click for downloadable imageAaron Sell
Click for downloadable imageLeda Cosmides
Click for downloadable imageJohn Tooby
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(Santa Barbara, Calif.) –– Anthropologists, psychologists, and other
experts in human behavior have long recognized anger as a universal
emotion. Evident in humans across all cultures, and in babies as young
as 6 months old, anger is demonstrated by certain facial expressions
and changes in physical demeanor. Until now, however, the exact
function of anger –– the advantage that led to its evolution –– has
remained mysterious. A
new study by scientists at UC Santa Barbara provides evidence that
anger serves as a nonconscious bargaining system, triggered when
someone places too little weight on one's welfare. The researchers'
findings are published online this week in the Proceedings of the
National Academy of Science. The study, titled "Formidability and the
Logic of Human Anger," was co-authored by Aaron Sell, a postdoctoral
fellow at UCSB's Center for Evolutionary Psychology, along with the
center's co-directors, John Tooby, professor of anthropology, and Leda
Cosmides, professor of psychology. The anger system implicitly
guides the angered person to take steps that are designed to motivate
the offender to treat the angry person better. The two bargaining tools
humans have at their disposal are the ability to confer benefits and
the ability to inflict costs. Angry expressions and behavior signal a
threat –– implicit or otherwise –– to withhold future benefits or to
inflict costs. These incentives pressure the other individual into
giving the angry person's welfare a higher priority. The theory
that anger evolved for bargaining predicts individual differences in
anger-proneness, the authors point out. Using anger to renegotiate how
one is treated will be more effective if one has more bargaining power,
and this will be a function of one's ability to inflict costs or confer
benefits. Stronger men, for example, are better able to harm others in
a fight, giving them social leverage during our evolutionary history.
That should also be the case now, if our minds are designed to respond
to this ancestral selection pressure. As predicted, the study showed
that men with greater upper body strength feel entitled to better
treatment, anger more easily and frequently, and prevail more often in
conflicts of interest. Attractive women should also have social
leverage, by virtue of their ability to confer benefits. The study
found that women who see themselves as more attractive behave as
stronger men do: They also feel entitled to better treatment, anger
more easily, and have more success resolving conflicts in their favor. One
of the study's more intriguing findings concerns attitudes toward the
use of force. "Not surprisingly, stronger men more strongly endorse the
use of force as an effective way to settle personal disputes. However,
this relationship could have been learned by payoffs," said Sell.
"Because of this, we wanted to show that the system is not designed to
be rational in the modern world, but rather was designed to operate in
the much smaller social world of our ancestors." Tooby added: "In
that world, with conflicts among a handful of men, a man's individual
strength was relevant to whether his coalition would win. If our minds
are calibrated to the ancestral world, then stronger men should more
strongly favor the use of military force to settle conflicts, compared
to weaker men. That is what we find. Muscle mass shapes our political
opinions." Cosmides emphasizes how strange a finding this is,
according to conventional theories. "An American man's upper body
strength has no rational relationship to the efficacy of the American
military and its deployment overseas. Yet stronger men favor the use of
military force more than weaker men do." The authors say that they
designed the study in the run up to the war in Iraq, when they noticed
that people would draw opposing conclusions from the same facts. "That
raised the possibility that individuals are responding to the same
facts differently. At least part of that response involves muscles,"
said Sell. At the center of the study is the recalibrational
theory of anger, which proposes that the function of anger is to
recalibrate how much weight others put on the angry individual's
welfare compared to their own. "The fact that anger is connected to
violence is widely known," said Sell. Tooby added "What is not widely
grasped is that anger evolved to play a central role in cooperative
relationships as well." This research is part of a larger project
on the evolved design of motivational systems that Tooby and Cosmides
created, for which Cosmides won the National Institutes of Health
Director's Pioneer Award in 2005.
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