Scientific American - Why Men Like Petraeus Risk It All to Cheat

The idea that men cheat because of an evolutionary drive to reproduce is a pile of shite created to avoid dealing with the real issues - self-absorption, lust, lack of empathy, relationship issues, lack of integrity, loneliness, and on and on. But it is NOT about reproduction.

Why Men Like Petraeus Risk It All to Cheat

The risk of destroying a career is nothing compared with the evolutionary drive to reproduce

By Stephanie Pappas and LiveScience

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Image: U.S. Army

An admitted affair has crumbled the career of CIA Director David Petraeus, prompting the evergreen question: Why do people with so much to lose risk it all for sex?

In the last few years alone, several public figures, from former Rep. Anthony Weiner to action star and former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, have admitted to straying from their marital vows. In Petraeus' case, a miscalculation of risk may have contributed to the decision to cheat, psychologists say.

"People tend to underestimate how quickly small risks mount up" because of repeated exposure to those risks, said Baruch Fischhoff, a professor of social and decision science at Carnegie Mellon University. "You do something once and you get away with it — certain things you're probably going to get away with — but you keep doing them often enough, eventually the risk gets pretty high."

Even so, men can become blind to risk at the sight of an attractive woman, and from an evolutionary perspective, cheating can be a positive mechanism for ensuring gene survival, regardless of risk, scientists say.
 
Military affairs
Petraeus, a retired four-star general, resigned his post as CIA Director on Friday (Nov. 9), admitting to an affair with Paula Broadwell, his biographer. Twenty years the general's junior, Broadwell had close access to Petraeus for several years, but their affair reportedly did not start until after he left the military in 2011.

A West Point graduate, Broadwell is a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army Reserves. She reportedly bonded with Petraeus over physical activity, going on runs with him and remaining a close confidant after Petraeus' military career ended.

That time together likely contributed to the intimacy between Petraeus and Broadwell, said Frank Farley, a Temple University psychologist, just as many people begin affairs after getting close in the workplace.

Petraeus is not the first high-ranking military man to have an affair, said Farley, who is also a past president of the American Psychological Association. Famously gruff World War II general George Patton had an affair with his wife's step-niece. General Douglas MacArthur had a mistress named Isabel Rosario Cooper, whom he met in the Philippines.

And General Dwight D. Eisenhower, later president, may have had an affair with his World War II chauffer, Kay Summersby, according to the woman's memoirs and some suggestive letters left behind after both parties died.

"The nation should not be surprised at Petraeus having an affair," Farley told LiveScience.

Leaders like Petraeus tend to be bold risk-takers, Farley said, a personality trait that is very helpful when leading soldiers into battle. The same trait may make these leaders more likely to take risks in their personal lives, as well. [10 Easy Paths to Self Destruction]

Broadwell may have some of the same risk-taking traits as the former director. In a January interview with The Charlotte Observer, Broadwell, who is also married, called herself and her husband "adventure junkies."
 
Risk versus reward
Still, Petraeus' 38-year marriage and his career were at stake in his decision to pursue an affair. Extramarital liaisons are especially risky for CIA employees with access to classified information, because an affair can leave the person open to blackmail.

There are also concerns that Broadwell could have gotten classified information from Petraeus. For example, in a speech in Denver in October, Broadwell brought up details about the U.S. Consulate attack in Benghazi that may not have been public knowledge, according to The Daily Beast.

With risks like that on the line, could an extramarital affair be worth it? As it turns out, men may become blind to risk when an attractive woman enters the picture. One 2008 study found that men who played blackjack after seeing beautiful female faces took more risks than men who played the game after seeing unattractive faces.

This was true if the men were highly motivated in seeking new sexual partners. The blackjack risks seemed calculated to impress potential mates, study researcher Michael Baker, now a professor at Eastern Carolina University, told LiveScience. [The Sex Quiz: Myths, Taboos & Bizarre Facts]

More germane to high-profile affairs, Baker said, the risk of losing one's career or reputation is nothing compared with the evolutionary drive to reproduce. In that sense, while embarking on an affair may seem dumb, it actually shows something called "mating intelligence."

"These individuals have these very high-status, high-power positions, and the whole idea behind why people might be motivated to get these positions is because it gives them better access to resources that could be used to increase their reproductive success and attract more mates," Baker said.

Until the last few decades, extramarital affairs wouldn't have put a crimp in the careers of high-profile men, Baker said. It's only recently that men have been subject to the consequences of infidelity. And, of course, monogamy is often a lofty ideal.

"The human race has had thousands of years of problems with monogamy," Farley said. "The problems have not been resolved."

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Stress turns men into risk-takers, while women play it safe

This is a rare opinion for me, but I tend to see this as an evolutionary holdover from our distant past (which is probably is stronger in guys who grow up playing sports). Men were the members of the tribe who fought other tribes, who hunted animals that could sometimes kill them, and who sometimes had to fight other men for sexual access. This requires acting in the moment without a lot of deliberation.

In essence, men are taking more risks because they are operating in a gut-level pre-conscious mode, and at this level the prefrontal cortex is not engaged, so there is little or no consideration of possible negative outcomes. This was essential 10,00 years ago - not so much now.

The women, on the other hand, seem to be deliberating, which allows them to consider outcomes, making them much less likely to take risks. From an evolutionary perspective, women needed to be deliberative about choosing fathers for their children, as well as playing the interpersonal politics of tribal life. It would seem women have maintained these skills over the centuries - and while men have always had that capability, it was not until we became less nomadic with the rise of agriculture that men became more deliberative. It's interesting that men still retain this tendency under stress to take more risks.

Here is the abstract:

Risk and Reward Are Processed Differently in Decisions Made Under Stress

Mara Mather and
Nichole R. Lighthall

Abstract

Years of research have shown that stress influences cognition. Most of this research has focused on how stress affects memory and the hippocampus. However, stress also affects other regions involved in cognitive and emotional processing, including the prefrontal cortex, striatum, and insula. New research examining the impact of stress on decision processes reveals two consistent findings. First, acute stress enhances selection of previously rewarding outcomes but impairs avoidance of previously negative outcomes, possibly due to stress-induced changes in dopamine in reward-processing brain regions. Second, stress amplifies gender differences in strategies used during risky decisions, as males take more risk and females take less risk under stress. These gender differences in behavior are associated with differences in activity in the insula and dorsal striatum, brain regions involved in computing risk and preparing to take action.

The full article is behind a paywall, so it's not available. Here is a pretty lame summary from the Toronto Star.

Stress turns men into risk-takers, while women play it safe

Published On Thu Mar 01 2012 | Debra Black

Stress increases the differences in how men and women think about risk, according to a newly published article in Current Directions in Psychological Science.

The article reviewed a number of previous studies that looked at how stress affects people when they’re making a decision. It seems that stress affects the way people assess risk and reward.

When it comes to stress and gender there are some surprising differences, said Mara Mather, a professor of gerontology and psychology at the University of Southern California who co-wrote the paper with Nichole R. Lighthall, a PhD student in her lab.

According to Mather, when men are under stress they are willing to take more risks and make decisions at a much faster pace than women. When women are under stress they tend to take fewer risks, choose more conservatively and take much longer to decide.

These differences were most surprising for Mather. “We almost never see gender differences in our lab, but these gender differences were really striking.…In these studies we found males and females didn’t differ in laboratory tasks when they weren’t under stress. But when they were under stress they diverged.”

“Researchers originally thought about decision-making as something that is rational and cold and logical,” she said, pointing to the kinds of decision-making tools people use like a list of pros and cons.

“But it turns out emotion plays a pretty huge role in our decision making process.”

Mather and Lighthall also found in their overview that while under stress people pay more attention to the upside of a possible outcome. For example when people are put under stress — by holding their hand in ice water for a few minutes — they pay attention to positive information and discount negative feedback, Mather explained.

This means that if someone is trying to make a decision — about changing jobs for example — and is feeling stressed by it, he or she might weigh an increase in salary over a bad commute when deciding whether to take the new job, she said.

What’s really interesting to Mather is how this all relates to previous research on drug addiction and how people who were under stress found it harder to avoid consuming a drug and this often lead to relapsing.

“One thing suggested by this body of work is that under stress things that are more rewarding like having a cigarette or having a drink have more of a pull. They are even more attractive than when not under stress.”

Just why this is the case remains unclear. But Mather suggests it may have something to do with dopamine, which plays an important role in the reward circuitry of the brain. Under stress it increases.

“It’s very interesting because it indicates there is some kind of amplification in these reward processes that make reward substances feel even more rewarding,” she said.