risky business

I've really enjoyed my general education classes at uni. I've been lucky enough to choose classes that have been interesting changes to what I usually study, taught by pleasant, dedicated people. The one I'm doing this session is no exception, though it is a bit different... you'd expect that from a subject titled The Psychobiology of Sex, Love and Attraction. The subject deals with stuff not unlike what I was going on about in this post. The lectures have dealt with a lot more than facial symmetry though... I don't think I really wanted to know why female cats howl so much when they mate...

I've never formally studied psychology before, and having done half of this subject, it's not too difficult to see why it isn't considered a "hard science". A lot of what has been talked about sounds plausible, but seems to remain highly subject to interpretation. Still, what we've been learning about definitely does have its place if approached in the right manner, and besides, it's a lot of fun.

Some of the students have been a little... odd, which I guess could be expected from such a class. Last week, our lecturer was talking about some of the factors that influence male attractiveness. Apparently, one of these factors is fearlessness, and he asked us what fictional male characters are considered attractive. A girl yelled out Superman, which I thought was quite funny... then someone called out James Bond, which was the answer that he was looking for. One or two seconds later, after that point had been settled, an Asian guy decided to be fearless and called out "Tom Cruise!", which was met with stunned silence, followed by the sound of people trying to contain laughter. A few minutes later, the lecturer was talking about traits that could possibly be looked at as genuine indicators of a good genetic make-up in males. He started off by mentioning things like symmetry and height, when the same guy in the audience decided to call out "dancing!". Oops.

I've got an assignment due for the subject this week. We had to find a newspaper or magazine article that does not explicitly deal with issues regarding sex, love or attraction, but we had to interpret the article using principles discussed in the lectures to show that it really is all about these things. I found an article that talked about the disturbingly high levels of risky behavior being shown in North American car advertisements. The assignment had to be a maximum of one page in length, so I had to be extremely concise with my writing (something I'm not particularly good at...), and hence couldn't really justify most of what I wrote. Still, I thought the assignment was fun to do (and might be somewhat interesting to read?), even if the conclusions that I drew may be a little hard to accept. Here's the last third of it:

Sexual selection is the mechanism proposed by Charles Darwin to account for traits that would seem to reduce survival but increase mating success. An example can be found in the trait of "fearlessness", which has been observed to increase mating success in non-human species such as Trinidadian guppies. It has been found that male Trinidadian guppies will intentionally approach predators, and the closer the male guppy gets to the predator, the more mating success it has (when other factors that may lead to mating success are held constant). It has also been found that this tendency to approach predators does not occur when female guppies are not present. To explain such behavior in terms of sexual selection, it may be useful to consider Zahavi’s handicap principle. This principle suggests that when choosing mates, females will only assess traits that are honest indicators of male fitness. The displays of "fearlessness" in male guppies would provide for one such honest indication of fitness, as only the fit guppies will be able to avoid being killed by their high risk behavior.

In a similar manner, the trait of fearlessness could also be envisaged to provide an honest indication of male fitness in the human species, and hence is a factor in determining mating success via the mechanism of sexual selection. Evolutionary psychology suggests these sorts of evolutionary pressures have helped shape the functioning of our minds. By taking an evolutionary psychological approach, one could reach the conclusion that in general young males should indeed show a tendency towards displaying high-risk behavior, stemming from a desire to attract mates. As it is this tendency towards risk taking that is being utilized by North American car advertisers, this would suggest that the issues being raised in the article in question ultimately stem from factors relating to sex and attraction.