Incest, Smelling T-Shirts, and Dimes (Part One)

A few weeks back, I had a conversation with a friend about the facts that make some of us like or dislike other people. She is of the opinion that these facts are open to inspection by the self. In other words, according to her, we are able to correctly identify those reasons that make us like or dislike another person. This is a commonsensical opinion that, at first, makes much sense. Think about it. Let us say that you loathe someone. If my friend’s stance is correct, you are able to tell and correctly identify the reasons why you loathe that person. Is not that obvious?  Even though I believe we can sometimes exercise this capacity, we cannot take it for granted.

Consider the following cases:

Case 1. Incest. Julie and Mark are brother and sister. They are travelling together in France on summer vacation from college. One night they are staying alone in a cabin near the beach. They decide that it would be interesting and fun if they tried making love. At the very least it would be a new experience for each of them. Julie was already taking birth control pills, but Mark uses a condom too, just to be safe. They both enjoy making love, but they decide not to do it again. They keep that night as a special secret, which makes them feel even closer to each other. What do you think about that? Was it OK for them to make love? (Haidt, 2001, p. 814).

Now consider a highly popular hypothetical scenario in the social sciences.

Case 2. The Trolley Problem.  

The point of both cases, and what makes them highly interesting, is that subjects cannot give reasons to justify what they feel and think. In both scenarios, the majority of people feel it is wrong for the two brothers to have sex or for the person to push the fat guy off the bridge onto the rail tracks. However, people cannot justify their judgements; they cannot go beyond their feelings that something wrong has been done. People try to rationalize their feelings, but these rationalizations are posterior to their feelings. For instance, in Case 1 people say that it is risky for two brothers to have sex, as Julie can get pregnant. If you highlight that this did not happen, people do not quit their judgements that it was wrong what they did, despite their incapacity to call upon the reasons on which their judgment rest. Those reasons are just inaccessible to them and not the cause of their feelings but a consequence of them. But the inaccessibility of our own minds does not stop here.

Case 3. Halo Effect.  I’ll ask you to do the following. Imagine that by a stroke of luck you happen to unmask a dangerous criminal, a mass-murderer or serial killer. This person has killed and dismembered many people and now the time has come when he has to face justice. You are in court looking at him. As a mental exercise, try to imagine as vividly as possible how this person looks like. Focus on his face. Take your time… Now, let me ask you something a bit unusual. If you had to rate this person’s attractiveness from 1 to 10, how much will he score? If you are like most people, when you imagine this criminal you pictured in your mind an ugly person (just as a side note, we have come up with a way to analyze the attractiveness of a person. You can download any Golden Ratio app on your smartphone to check how attractive your face is according to science). Why? The reason is that we are victims of a mental bias known as the Halo Effect. We have a lot of trouble dissociating our attractiveness judgments from other judgements. For us, picturing a pretty young woman committing a hideous, gruesome, crime is simply hard. 

In a study conducted in the early 1970s, Karen Dion, Ellen Berscheid and Elaine Walster found that attractive people are judged in a more favourable way along a wide range of dimensions. We assume that physically attractive persons have nicer personalities than less attractive ones. We even get to the point of believing that these persons will be more successful in life and that they will be happier. Looks, in other words, go a long way in our thinking (Dion et al., 1972). Looks are so powerful that not even the criminal justice system is immune to its charms. Research has shown that the more attractive a criminal, the more lenient the sentence received (and this is true even for serious offences, such as sexual harassment) (Castellow et al., 1990).  Here is a nice overview of the Halo Effect.

Finally, consider the following experiments: 

Case 4. The Phone Booth Study. In 1972, Alice Isen and Paula Levin designed the following scenario in order to measure the impact of good mood on helping behavior. They intentionally left a dime in a payphone’s coin return and checked if subjects who found the dime were willing to help a woman (a study’s confederate) who “accidentally” dropped some documents in their path. The effect was dramatical: people who found the dime were 22 times more likely to help than those who did not.

Case 5. T-shirt smelling. In the mid-1990s a study was conducted where female participants were asked to smell some guys’ sweat t-shirts (Wedekind et al., 1995). Then, these women rated how attracted they felt by the odor. It turned out that women were more attracted to men that had a gene complex called human leukocyte antigen (HLA) very dissimilar to their own. The reason is that offspring from a couple with very dissimilar HLA develops alleles that can protect against a wider variety of pathogens. In layman’s terms, kids from such a couple will be better protected against disease.

There is a common thread unifying cases 3 to5: in all of them our behavior is caused by factors that escape our conscious awareness in the sense that it is highly unlikely they will appear in a self-report of a subject trying to explain his behavior. In fact, suggesting to some people that their behavior could be the result of some of these factors can sound offensive. Imagine what would it happen if you said to a jury that his verdict is influenced by how attractive the defendant is; or to a girl that she picked a guy partly because of the smell of his sweating. You are likely to encounter a negative reaction from these people: “how dare you!”. The thing is that we take ourselves very seriously and, as a result, we want to dignify our actions and construct them as the result of a rational deliberation process (especially in cases where these actions are highly important). Juries’ sentences are only based on how serious an offence is, relevant laws, and regulations and aggravating and mitigating factors. And a woman picks a lifelong partner based on a carefully crafted model that includes social, psychological, and physical factors. Well, maybe not; at least, not always. Should marketers worry about all of this? In Part II of this post I’ll argue that they should.

References

CASTELLOW, W., WUENSCH, K. & MOORE, C. 1990. Effects of Physical Attractiveness of the Plaintiff and Defendant in Sexual Harassment Judgements. Journal of Social Behavior and Personality, 5, 547.

DION, K., BERSCHEID, E. & WALSTER, E. 1972. What is beautiful is good. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 24, 285-290.

HAIDT, J. (2001). The emotional dog and its rational tail: A social intuitionist approach to moral judgment. Psychological Review, 108, 814–834.

WEDEKIND, C., SEEBECK, T., BETTENS, F. & PAEPKE, A. J. 1995. MHC-Dependent Mate Preferences in Humans. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 260, 245-249.