Death… It's A Living

In a previous post, I began to make the argument that the brain has preferences, that it wants to process certain stimuli and would rather not have to work hard processing other stimuli. Although in most ways we are our brains, and our brains are us, it is nevertheless (more) appropriate to frame these desires as our brains’ and not as ours because cognitive processing is unconscious. We do it, yes, but we are also wholly unaware of this process. Rather, we are only aware of the results of this cognitive process. We know that we hear a train or see our partners’ faces but only after our sensory neurons have received information from the external environment, and the unconscious portion of our brain has informed us (i.e., the conscious portion of our brain) of the results of its analysis.

But perhaps I’m even giving the brain too much credit because it’s not really in charge either. It’s our genes. They are the ones who seek immortality through constant replication in our bodies and in the bodies of our offspring. They are the ones ultimately directing our preferences away from the things that could kill them (and us, but it’s definitely not us they care about) and toward the things that will enhance their chance of continued replication.

It’s also our genes, not us, that have been evolving. An individual doesn’t (literally) evolve; it develops. A species evolves, and it typically does so slowly, across deep time. Likely since the first single-celled organisms appeared 4.5 billion years ago, DNA has changed and adjusted to create, activate, and deactivate genes that have enabled the living organisms that it inhabits to adapt to their environments. As I’ve written quite a few times by now, the simplest behavioral adaptations are those that avoid harmful stimuli and that approach non-harmful stimuli.

Adaptations to Avoid vs. Approach

Species likely evolved to avoid harmful stimuli via a trial-and-error process. Although I’ve been anthropomorphizing genes to make a point, the genes themselves are not conscious, nor do that have a meta-knowledge of all of the things that could harm their chances of reproduction. So, they hedge their bets. That is to say that there is a significant amount of diversity even within one species. Some genes will lead to behaviors that turn out to be good fits for the environment, and others will lead to behaviors that are not. If a gene—or more likely, a cluster of interacting genes—increase the possibility that an individual will be more explorative than most of its conspecifics, it might pay off in terms of a greater number of resources for that individual and their kin. However, it might also cause that individual to be more likely to become lost or separated from their tribe, which is most certainly not a payoff. If you are reading this now, you (and I) are far more likely to be related to cavepeople who had “the good genes”—those that were adaptive and kept us alive. Those with the bad genes, well, they aren’t with our species anymore.

Learning to approach non-harmful stimuli isn’t quite as straightforward. Just because a stimulus is non-threatening, does not mean it guarantees genetic reproduction. Sure, that non-threatening stimuli might be a juicy buffalo steak or an attractive and willing sexual partner. But it could also be a rock.

Therefore, while certain fears are likely to be programmed into our species (e.g., it is common to be weary of snakes, spiders, heights, and enclosed spaces, among others), we must learn as individuals what is an opportunity for genetic replication and what is merely just there. Think about it this way: We’ve evolved to prefer foods that are high in sugar and fats because those food provide energy. For those of us in developed nations, this can be a problem because there is almost no shortage of foods that are high in sugar and fat—much to the chagrin of our hearts and waistlines. Furthermore, we’ve evolved to dislike bitter foods likely because most naturally occurring poisons (think arsenic and cyanide) have a bitter taste. But food is not binary. Even within the category of apples, some are sweet and some are less so. Most of the time, you can’t tell whether something new is delicious until you taste it.

So, while it makes sense that our species would have evolved to avoid certain stimuli that most certainly could kill us, it makes less sense for our genes to have invested energy in determining what are the best apples or the best poultry, or even the best mating partners. With regard to the things that are unlikely to immediately kill us, good enough will do.

Instead, our species (and many others) developed a preference for a broad class of stimuli. Specifically, we prefer what is familiar. Familiarity typically signals safety for us and our genes. After all, familiarity comes with prior experience, and that prior experience tells us this apple/steak/dog/person did not kill us before, so the odds say that it won’t kill us in the future. And while there are obvious exceptions when familiarity and safety are not aligned—perhaps most obviously in the case of abusive relationships—we’ve evolved to always favor the odds that familiarity is best. In fact, the more familiar, the better in most cases.

How does this relate to beauty? Because there is a direct relationship between beauty and familiarity. Before I can adequately make that case, however, let me first argue the simpler connection between familiarity and liking.

You might be aware of the saying “familiarity breeds contempt”. File that with “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” and “opposites attract” as maxims for which there is very little support (i.e., as exceptions to the rules). It is true that something (or more likely someone) can become too familiar. But in these cases, it’s not really familiarity that’s the problem. When divorces become acrimonious, the problem is not that the couple has become too familiar. The problem is usually that the couple were never particularly good at communicating, and all of those traits and habits that one (or both) found annoying but thought didn’t matter when they first got together… well, it turns out they did matter, and the couple was just fooling themselves.

Divorces are terrible examples for anything because they are complex and (I would assume) like an ugly snowflake in that no two are the same. Let us take a much simpler stimulus: kanji (the logographic Chinese characters used in Japanese writing). That’s the stimuli that Robert Zajonc used over 50 years ago when he made an extremely simple but important discovery. First, he collected a (mostly) random sample of individuals with no ability to identify or recognize kanji. He then had these participants evaluate their liking of each kanji shown. As one would expect, people neither especially liked nor disliked any of the characters. (As someone who has performed similar research asking participants to use a 1-7 scale to rate the likeability of black dots randomly placed on a white background, most participants will not stray from ratings of 3 or 4. Other participants, roughly a quarter in my case, will look confused by the task, despite its simplicity. “Why would I like any of these?” asked one in particular.) Zajonc did not expect his participants to like (or dislike) any of the kanji shown. At least, not upon their first presentation. Participants were then shown even more kanji: some of which were repeats, having been presented in a prior trial, and some of which were novel and wholly unfamiliar. The question was whether presentation itself would increase the likeability of a neutral stimulus. In fact, it did. And since this initial study, hundreds of studies in this vein have confirmed what has come to be known as the “mere exposure effect”. Objective familiarity increases liking.

Liking and attractiveness are different but related constructs, that probably goes without much explanation. However, familiarity and attractiveness are also related and without the need for explicit (mere) exposure. In a coming post, I’ll argue that familiarity is a key component of beauty detection, even in cases where a person sees a beautiful person for the first time. How could familiarity possibility matter in the case of an unfamiliar face? More on that later.

-The Plague Doctor