Beauty and the Beasts: The Sight of a Pretty Woman Can Make Men Crave War

[n2doc]

By Rebecca Coffey | June 25, 2011

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 wheth er military weaponry and parapherna lia 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.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=beauty-and-the-beasts

[JNelson6563]

1. I hope we continue evolving soon

Before we go extinct.

[Tesha]

10. This *IS* an evolutionary adaptation. (NT)

[GKirk]

2. So that could have been titled...

Beauty and the Breasts. :)

[xchrom]

3. interesting. nt

[cali]

4. No,warfareis not driven by the opportunity to impregnate.

that might be a small piece but I think history demonstrates that it's not the driving force by any means.

[Honeycombe8]

5. Interesting. But waging modern war is different from gang warfare, which is what...

I think that article most closely relates to. A group of guys walking down the street, in a gang, decide to go "wilding," for instance...at the heart of that is the opportunity to beat up weaker guys (thumping of the chest chimp stuff), AND rape or assault or humiliate women (more thumping of the chest stuff).

Modern warfare is very different. It's business suits sitting in a room discussing, at arm's length, whether to send OTHER people to a far away place to wage war on the suits' behalf. The warfarers don't actually fight the war. I think modern warfare, and even age-old warfare waged by suits & commanders from headquarters, is more about money (aka loot or bounty).

[A HERETIC I AM]

11. War has ALWAYS been about either greed or ego...

and almost all conflicts can be boiled down to one of those two.

Religious wars are simply ego driven; "Your god is better than mine? Oh yeah? I'll invade your country and kill your people."

[zazen]

6. so why do homosexual/homoerotic men want war? eg, Alexander the Great?

[Honeycombe8]

14. Loot/bounty. Alex probably had sex with women, too, don't you think?

If he did, then raping women would've been a perk. Or maybe he was content to just have his men do that, while he counted the loot.

[mainer]

7. "The face that launched 1000 ships" not so farfetched after all

So now women have to wear burqas to get the men to stop acting stupid?

[BeFree]

8. Good point

Instinctively, the study does correlate with personal experience. Men are dogs. Ruff!!

[canoeist52]

9. Explains the whole concept of football cheerleaders, huh?

[treestar]

12. Good so all we have to do is outlaw makeup and plastic surgery

Maybe lock some of the prettier women out of sight.

:rofl:

[BOG PERSON]

13. this is retrograde stuff

a starting point for a decent understanding of war is clausewitz's maxim that war is a continuation of politics by other (i.e. violent) means.

[lunatica]

15. We've heard exactly zero stories about rape in Afghanistan and Iraq by soldiers

Against Iraqi women. So our modern wars simply don't support that theory at all.

[ImNotTed]

16. We haven't HEARD...

[lunatica]

18. ?

[bemildred]

20. I believe he is suggesting that our news media might choose to overlook that sort of thing. nt

[Matariki]

19. Huh?! Except for that 14 year old girl that was raped and killed, along with her family

Oh and the, what is it - one third?, of female soldiers sexually assaulted.

Oh yeah, and Abu Gharaib,

http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/story?id=3977702&page=1
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=103844570
http://www.aztlan.net/iraqi_women_raped.htm

You know, you don't get to just make up facts.

[Matariki]

21. warning

- that third link is very disturbing.

[lunatica]

23. I stand corrected

You're right.

[lunatica]

24. I stand corrected

But maybe it isn't war that causes such behavior. Rapists are in all walks of life.

By the way, I'm against war.

[Matariki]

25. I would imagine that war causes all sorts of lawless behavior

That the insanity of it must strongly effect people. But yeah, what you said is also true. Sadly.

[Mojorabbit]

26. There were reports of rape in the prisons

and there was the group of men who raped the young teenage girl. We have the company(halliburton? I can't remember tonight which contractor it was) where females were raped. We had reports of female service members raped.

[bemildred]

17. So lust makes you stupid? Gee, who knew? nt

[mzteris]

22. wasn't there some correlation

between skirt length and how the stock market and/or economy was doing from some decades past?

[underpants]

27. We call that Fox News --the blondes

they moved the desk away and provided news readers with long legs, blonde hair, and heels

Old white guys could get away with watching it as "news" and get the message of the day drilled into their heads.


or as Annie Savoy said: "a guy'll listen to anything if he thinks it's foreplay"