Seven Deadly Sentiments

In our confessional culture, it is socially acceptable—even fashionable—to disclose your sexual predilections, your husband’s problem with painkillers, your penchant for high colonics. Our hypertherapeutic society lets it all hang out. But plenty of feelings remain in the closet. In the privacy of our own heads, we cringe with dread when we meet someone in a wheelchair, wish our aged relatives would hurry up and die, smirk over our friends’ bad taste and think babies are ugly and annoying. Meanwhile, we assure ourselves—and one another—that we’re really very nice people. Evolutionary psychology holds that these shameful feelings are hardwired—strategies that led to success on the Pleistocene savanna. If that’s so, then why are they so hard to admit to? “Given that these emotions are shaped by natural selection and are innate, or at least pretty deep, why do we expend so much effort in denying them?” asks Dylan Evans, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Bath in the United Kingdom.