Sex, Murder, and the Meaning of Life

Sex, Murder, And The Meaning Of Life

In 1975, the world was about to end. The Jehovah’s Witnesses had predicted Armageddon, and signs of cataclysmic change were everywhere. The North Vietnamese army drove the last American soldiers out of Saigon, Indira Gandhi suspended civil liberties in India, and the Provisional Irish Republican Army bombed the London Hilton. In the United States, members of a militant radical group who called themselves the Weathermen were bombing banks, corporation headquarters, and the State Department. A former U.S. attorney general and several leading White House officials were being hauled off to prison. There were two attempts to assassinate President Gerald Ford within seventeen days, one by a disciple of mass murderer Charles Manson. Elvis Presley, the only real king most Americans have ever recognized, was on a fast track to self-destruction. Oblivious to the coming end of the world and to the sound of falling kings and world leaders, unconcerned young people strutted lasciviously in polyester disco outfits to the sounds of KC and the Sunshine Band’s “Get Down Tonight.”

I was a bit out of touch with all that chaos, because I spent the best part of that momentous year nestled away in either the library or the psychology lab. But like a movie character who whistles heedlessly as a five-eyed space alien sneaks up behind him, I was about to be enveloped by ominous forces. The field of psychology was, along with the rest of the social sciences, about to be revolutionized—to have its foundational assumptions dynamited out from under it. Indeed, although the material world ultimately survived 1975, the conceptual world of the traditional social sciences did not. Unbeknownst to me, I was about to fall in with a band of radical scientific insurgents.

My undoing started just a few days before my graduate comprehensive examinations, at which time my learned committee members would ask me to demonstrate encyclopedic knowledge of the research and theory in the field of social psychology. I should therefore have been diligently studying the results of classic experiments testing Leon Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance, Fritz Heider’s theory of attitudes and cognitive balance, or Kurt Lewin’s theory of group dynamics. But whenever I have a daunting amount of work to do, I suddenly develop an intense interest in anything unrelated to the task at hand. It was in this self-handicapping spirit that I drifted into the campus bookstore to browse around. My eye was drawn to a book called Primate Behavior and the Emergence of Human Culture by the anthropologist Jane Lancaster.

Excerpted from Sex, Murder, and the Meaning of Life: A Psychologist Investigates How Evolution, Cognition, and Complexity are Revolutionizing our View of Human Nature by Douglas T. Kenrick.  Available from Basic Books, a member of The Perseus Books Group.  Copyright © 2011.