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Show a man a picture of an attractive woman, and he might play riskier blackjack. With a real-life pretty woman watching, he might cross traffic against a red light. Such exhibitions of agility and bravado are the behavioral equivalent in humans of physical attributes such as antlers and horns in animals. “Mate with me,” they signal to women. “I can brave danger to defend you and the children.”
So says Lei Chang, a psychologist at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. With colleagues there and at China’s Hebei University, Chang wondered whether military weaponry and paraphernalia hold the same seductive value as antlers, horns and risky behavior, allowing warriors to best nonwarriors in the competition for mates. The researchers also speculated about war itself. When raping and pillaging, armies resemble chimps on intergroup sex raids. Might warfare actually be driven by the opportunity it offers males to impregnate females, willing and not willing?
To begin to address such questions, Chang showed men pictures of women and tested for statistically significant effects of those pictures on men’s attitudes about war and on their cognitive processes related to war. As he and his colleagues describe in the online March 23 Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, they asked the men to rate their agreement with war-supporting statements. Men’s responses demonstrated a positive, significant statistical correlation between seeing photographs of attractive faces and endorsing war-supporting statements. This correlation was not demonstrated for photographs of unattractive women’s faces, and the researchers found no statistically significant effect on women of pictures of either attractive or unattractive men in any measure related to war.
Chang and his colleagues suggest that any warring-mating relation in men is probably an evolutionary holdover from pre–Homo sapiens days, which explains why raping and pillaging are, unfortunately, alive and well.
This article was originally published with the title Beauty and the Beasts.
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15 Comments
Add CommentThis might have some bearing on the tendency to dehumanize members of the other groups (commies, krauts, gooks, etc.) as a means of justifying one's attitudes/actions.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSuch studies are so important, and equally important is for people to not poo poo them and to not confuse them with justifications for these social evils.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPutting a price on beauty gives you a very rich wrinkle. Putting a price on intrinsic value gives you an extension for life's dealings.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWomen ... NOTHING but trouble! Make love through war, indeed.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAttractive and unattractive women? That's beauty in the eye of the beholder, and I've been told that the female athletes that I consider attractive are seen by most other men as ugly.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWomen? Alas, they're more interested in fat wallets than fit men.
Ms. Rebecca Coffey says: "Rape and pillage are alive and well". I don't agree with this statement, the persistence of a connection between the desire to mate and violence just means that women do prefer men able to protect them and feed their offspring. It's known that mankind's Y chromosome, that rules the male traits, stabilized some 50'000 years ago. Women, when choosing whom they reproduced with were the ones that fixed this chromosome and its linked traits. The fast spread of such traits as tolerance to milk in adulthood, fair skin and hairless skin, that offer an advantage from the point view of food energy use and economy, speaks in favor of a relaxed mating behaviour among our female ancestry. Primitive tribes, such as the ones we can see today in the Amazon,don't use raping as a mating way, and probably pillage is not usual, just when groups felt their food was scarce, they engaged in fighting with their neighbours; this was the origin of political power and of armies, as some more complex societies had the need to protect its members from attacks of others still relying on razzias as a way of life.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt is true that this phenomenon has been observed throughout history by such diverse elements as Herodotus and CNN. But isn't there a scientific name for the resulting developments from conquest for the sake of impressing pretty girls? Oh, yeah, I think they call it "civilization as we know it."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt is true that this phenomenon has been observed throughout history by such diverse elements as Herodotus and CNN. But isn't there a scientific name for the resulting developments from conquest for the sake of impressing pretty girls? Oh, yeah, I think they call it "civilization as we know it."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Women are more interested in fat wallets than fit men?"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSeriouly? Perhaps you should get out more.
Excerpt from 'What is the Primary Fundamental Right?'
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"War is usually a crude and out-moded method to increase trade outside of the free markets and often causes a trade imbalance with one side doing much better than the other. Those who push for war are usually those elites who have products for sale that are suited for war or possibly they think their profits are in danger from a foreign power or they simply want to spread their politics and their religion. Or in the case of the military, their sperm.
It is interesting that victorious soldiers pass on their country's genetic information using 'rape' after first dispensing with their weaker male opponents. Therefore it isn't surprising that the head of the erect penis looks like a soldier's helmet and is called just that. This could be why many women find men in uniform sexually attractive, an innate knowledge of the soldiers purpose, to kill, impregnate, and provide for usually through pillage.
In times past soldiers shared the booty and often settled down to farm the captured land with their captured wives, who were usually kept pregnant. This probably ensured continued subjugation of the defeated and the establishment of a new colony.
The transfer of genetic code into new gene pools is possibly the prime objective of war with each soldier an invading phallus, dying to find a receptive egg. Today it is easier just to go on holiday, tourism is a great way to trade and meet new partners and nobody has to die unless they catch a nasty disease either from 'DDT free' mosquitoes or from not using prophylactic lemon juice."
http://www.primaryfundamentalright.org/index.php?pageName=pfrWhatIs
The sight of an attractive women inspires men to make war? NONSENSE!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAll wars are economic in nature: I learned that in the 8th grade: one of the few things I learned there that remains patently true to this day. They are disguised as religious or territorial or many other causes, but the real underlying cause is economics. Take that to the bank.
The sight of an attractive woman arouses many emotions, but war is not one of them; at least not political, real, physical war.
The behaviour of the Russians in Berlin when they captured the city during World War Two seems to have been wholesale rape and pillage.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHumans haven't advanced much since the Trojan War.
What about woman,who sacrifices all her life for particular man..I had seen many women who abandoned their children, big property of husband,and ruined their life for lover.There is no logic why man attracted to particular woman and woman to particular man.Every man search other part of his self as well as woman search other part of her soul,When they find out they are sacrifices their life.Romeo and Juliet, Layla and majanu and thousand other love stories are telling us what is pure love.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNot to forget:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe Trojan War was triggered by the kidnapping of a pretty woman known by the name of Helen of Troy- who achieved immortality as the owner of 'The face that launched a thousand ships'!
One might call it the 'Cherchez-la-Femme Fatale' Syndrome.
Mssrs Darwin & Freud have a lot to answer for.
Of course there is a warring-mating relationship! Haven't you read about the face "that launched a thousand ships"? But does this relationship really ..."explain why raping and pillaging are, unfortunately, alive and well"? Not in my unscientific non peer reviewed opininon. The fact is that "civilization", in the words of one famous song writer, has always been nothing but a "fleeting illusion, to be pursued but never attained". Doubt me? Ask Strauss-Khan.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this.