Two friends of mine, whom I’ll call Art and Judy Smith, had gone through a difficult time in their marriage, and after both had had extramarital affairs, they separated. Recently, however, they had come back together, in part because the separation had been hard on their children. Now Art and Judy were working to repair their damaged relationship, and both had promised not to resume their infidelities. Still, the legacy of suspicion remained.
Art phoned home one morning while he was out of town on a business trip. A man’s deep voice answered the phone. Art’s throat choked instantly as his mind groped for an explanation. (Did I dial the wrong number? What is a man doing there?) Not knowing what to say, Art blurted out, Is Mrs. Smith at home? The man answered matter-of-factly, She’s upstairs getting dressed.
In a flash, rage swept over Art. He screamed inwardly to himself, She’s back to her affairs! Now some bastard stays overnight in my bed! He even answers the phone! Art had visions of rushing home, killing his wife’s lover, and smashing Judy’s head into the wall. Still hardly able to believe his ears, he stammered into the phone, Who -- is -- this?
The voice at the other end cracked, rose from the baritone range to a soprano, and answered, Daddy, don’t you recognize me? It was Art’s 14-year-old son, whose voice was changing. Art gasped again, in a mixture of hysterical relief and sobbing.
Art’s account of that phone call reminded me of how even we humans, the only rational animal species, still live in the irrational thrall of animal-like behavioral programs. A mere one-octave change in pitch of a voice uttering half-a-dozen banal syllables converted the speaker’s image in Art’s mind from threatening rival to unthreatening child, and Art’s mood from murderous rage to paternal love. Other equally trivial cues spell the difference between our images of young and old, ugly and attractive, intimidating and weak. Art’s story illustrates the power of what zoologists term a signal: a cue that can be recognized quickly, and that may itself be insignificant, but that has come to denote an important biological attribute, such as sex, age, aggression, or relationship. Signals are essential to animal communication, the process by which one animal alters the probability of another animal’s behaving in a way that may benefit one or both. Small signals, which in themselves require little energy (like pronouncing a few syllables), may release behaviors requiring a lot of energy (risking one’s own life in an attempt to kill another).
