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Authors: Douglas T. Kenrick
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over his plan to divide up his valuable
properties before he died, including giving away a house to relatives of their stepmother.
Why Do Men Fantasize About Killing Strangers?
I mentioned earlier that the majority of men in our survey had had at least one homicidal fantasy about a total stranger. At first glance, this is an odd phenomenon; hand-to-hand combat with a total stranger can be dangerous, and even if that anonymous fellow is an especially rude driver, he probably does not qualify for a death penalty. What makes it most puzzling is that it is hard to see the benefits of expressing oneâs road rage toward a rude stranger on the highway, where even the audience is composed of strangers.
One possible explanation is that strange men are automatically categorized as especially threatening. When my older son Dave was a boy, he would have nightmares about unknown men chasing him. Little Daveyâs nightmares about dangerous male strangers were right in line with systematic data on childrenâs dreams collected by Michael Schredl of the Mannheim Mental Health Instituteâs Sleep Laboratory. Schredl found that over 50 percent of the human aggressors in boyâs dreams were unfamiliar men. By contrast, none of the boys had nightmares about unfamiliar women.
So âbad guysâ are usually guys, and they are often unfamiliar. In a related line of research with Vaughn Becker, Dylan Smith and I asked students either to âthink of an angry faceâ or âthink of a happy face.â When people were asked to think of a happy face, the majority envisioned a woman, and it was typically a woman they knew. When they thought of an angry face, though, 75 percent of our participants spontaneously thought of a man. Most interestingly, that man was typically not someone they knewâso they were calling to mind not a real person with whom they had had an actual conflict but an ominous Jungian prototypeâthe angry strange man.
The people most likely to compete with you for status, to annoy you on an everyday basis, to bully you, or to otherwise make your life miserable are much more likely to be people you know. So why do people waste energy on feelings of antipathy toward total strangers, and why do men occasionally end up dead or in prison when they express those negative feelings toward a fellow they would otherwise never see again? In the next chapter, I will describe how that mystery can be solved by understanding the evolutionary psychology of prejudice.
Chapter 4
OUTGROUP HATRED IN THE BLINK OF AN EYE
F or some of my hipper friends, 1969 was the summer of peace, love, and Woodstock. For me, though, it was the summer of learning to sing âJohn Jacob Jingleheimer Smithâ along with a crowd of screaming five-year-olds. It was also the summer of lessons in silly human prejudices.
I had landed a job as a camp counselor at a summer camp for the children of upper-middle-class Long Islanders. The pay was terrible, and the kids were loud and spoiled, but for a college guy, the benefit package included some perksâmost importantly, many of the other counselors were college females of the healthy outdoorsy type. Within a short while, I began dating one of my coworkers, a very pleasant and attractive dark-haired young woman.
Although she seemed to like me well enough, my new romantic interest never wanted me to pick her up at her house. The reason was that her grandparents, devout Jews who lived with her family, would have been mortified at her dating a goy. I had grown up in a neighborhood where non-Catholics were minorities, so I was more amused than offended by their reaction (her grandparents had lived
through the Nazi years, so their distrust of Gentiles could be easily forgiven). But I was offended at my own motherâs negative reaction when I brought this lovely girl into our house. My mother had been raised Catholic, schooled by the same nuns who had instructed me to âLove
properties before he died, including giving away a house to relatives of their stepmother.
Why Do Men Fantasize About Killing Strangers?
I mentioned earlier that the majority of men in our survey had had at least one homicidal fantasy about a total stranger. At first glance, this is an odd phenomenon; hand-to-hand combat with a total stranger can be dangerous, and even if that anonymous fellow is an especially rude driver, he probably does not qualify for a death penalty. What makes it most puzzling is that it is hard to see the benefits of expressing oneâs road rage toward a rude stranger on the highway, where even the audience is composed of strangers.
One possible explanation is that strange men are automatically categorized as especially threatening. When my older son Dave was a boy, he would have nightmares about unknown men chasing him. Little Daveyâs nightmares about dangerous male strangers were right in line with systematic data on childrenâs dreams collected by Michael Schredl of the Mannheim Mental Health Instituteâs Sleep Laboratory. Schredl found that over 50 percent of the human aggressors in boyâs dreams were unfamiliar men. By contrast, none of the boys had nightmares about unfamiliar women.
So âbad guysâ are usually guys, and they are often unfamiliar. In a related line of research with Vaughn Becker, Dylan Smith and I asked students either to âthink of an angry faceâ or âthink of a happy face.â When people were asked to think of a happy face, the majority envisioned a woman, and it was typically a woman they knew. When they thought of an angry face, though, 75 percent of our participants spontaneously thought of a man. Most interestingly, that man was typically not someone they knewâso they were calling to mind not a real person with whom they had had an actual conflict but an ominous Jungian prototypeâthe angry strange man.
The people most likely to compete with you for status, to annoy you on an everyday basis, to bully you, or to otherwise make your life miserable are much more likely to be people you know. So why do people waste energy on feelings of antipathy toward total strangers, and why do men occasionally end up dead or in prison when they express those negative feelings toward a fellow they would otherwise never see again? In the next chapter, I will describe how that mystery can be solved by understanding the evolutionary psychology of prejudice.
Chapter 4
OUTGROUP HATRED IN THE BLINK OF AN EYE
F or some of my hipper friends, 1969 was the summer of peace, love, and Woodstock. For me, though, it was the summer of learning to sing âJohn Jacob Jingleheimer Smithâ along with a crowd of screaming five-year-olds. It was also the summer of lessons in silly human prejudices.
I had landed a job as a camp counselor at a summer camp for the children of upper-middle-class Long Islanders. The pay was terrible, and the kids were loud and spoiled, but for a college guy, the benefit package included some perksâmost importantly, many of the other counselors were college females of the healthy outdoorsy type. Within a short while, I began dating one of my coworkers, a very pleasant and attractive dark-haired young woman.
Although she seemed to like me well enough, my new romantic interest never wanted me to pick her up at her house. The reason was that her grandparents, devout Jews who lived with her family, would have been mortified at her dating a goy. I had grown up in a neighborhood where non-Catholics were minorities, so I was more amused than offended by their reaction (her grandparents had lived
through the Nazi years, so their distrust of Gentiles could be easily forgiven). But I was offended at my own motherâs negative reaction when I brought this lovely girl into our house. My mother had been raised Catholic, schooled by the same nuns who had instructed me to âLove
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