The Art of Manliness - April 04, 2014


Episode #32： Is There Anything Good About Men With Roy Baumeister

Topics
women's interests in science fields societies give rewards and punishments differently
Hosted by
Brett McKay
Mentioned
Roy Baumeister Larry Summers Michael Arrington
Episode #10： Man Stories with Carlos Infante #63： Spartan Up With Joe DeSena

Episode Stats


Length

23 minutes

Words per minute

171.48

Word count

3,984

Sentence count

226

Harmful content

Misogyny

44

sentences flagged

Toxicity

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

27

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Dr. Roy Baumeister is a psychology professor at Florida State University, where he focuses on the area of social psychology. In his new book, "Is There Anything Good About Men?" he discusses why men have for millennia held higher positions in society than women.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
00:00:21.040 Depending on how you look at things, us men either have it really made or we got the raw
00:00:25.300 end in life. Most heads of state, CEOs, and famous inventors have happened to be men and for
00:00:30.960 millennia men have enjoyed higher economic and social status than women. Yet at the same time,
00:00:36.920 men are the primary occupants in prisons, they make up 93% of all deaths on the job,
00:00:42.180 and an overwhelming majority of homeless people are men. Why the extremes? Well our guest today
00:00:48.620 has recently written a book where he answers that question. His name is Dr. Roy Baumeister
00:00:52.740 and his book is called Is There Anything Good About Men? Dr. Baumeister is a professor of
00:00:58.720 psychology at Florida State University where he focuses on the area of social psychology
00:01:03.620 and he's authored over 500 publications and has written or co-written over 30 books.
00:01:09.840 Okay Professor Baumeister, one of the biggest issues you tackle in your book,
00:01:14.440 Is There Anything Good About Men?, is why men have for millennia held higher positions in society 0.57
00:01:20.320 than women. And I think we've all heard different explanations for this throughout the past decades,
00:01:25.660 but what conclusion did you come to in your book?
00:01:29.440 Well, Brett, I was trying to take a fresh look at things without saying that one gender is gooder 0.83
00:01:34.560 or is better than the other, things like that. The answer for most of history of why men were in
00:01:40.400 charge is that men were better than women and that's the way it was supposed to be or the way it would 0.95
00:01:44.700 inevitably be. More recently we rebelled against this and then the feminist movement brought up 1.00
00:01:49.360 another explanation, said it was because evil men conspired to oppress women and push them down.
00:01:55.280 But I don't think there's much evidence for either of those explanations, either that men are
00:01:59.180 superior overall or that men are evil conspirators oppressing women. Instead, I look at the origins in the
00:02:05.980 social relations in the way men and women relate to other men and women. Essentially, men form,
00:02:13.120 women rather, specialize in close intimate relationships, whereas men tend to favor larger 0.86
00:02:20.700 networks of more shallow relationships. And it just so happens that culture, which involves large
00:02:27.860 systems of sharing information across groups and multiple roles complementing each other, things like
00:02:33.320 that culture emerges better with the large network than the small network. And so back when men and 0.53
00:02:40.000 women had separate spheres, I think the male network created more progress in the sense of gradually 1.00
00:02:46.400 producing these things through the shared knowledge. And we're talking about literature, science,
00:02:51.780 technology, or government, political, economic systems, and so on. And so essentially wealth,
00:02:58.640 knowledge, and power were created in the men's sphere. And it wasn't true that women were pushed
00:03:05.500 down, as the feminists would have it. Rather, if anything, women were lifted somewhat by the men's 1.00
00:03:13.040 progress, but not as fast. And the discrepancy increased because, again, wealth, knowledge, and power
00:03:19.220 essentially created in the men's sphere. And again, not because men are better or superior or anything
00:03:25.320 like that. It's just because of the kind of social relationships that men create, these larger
00:03:30.420 networks of shallow relationships, that works better for creating the engines of growth like
00:03:37.540 this. Yeah, one of the interesting examples you gave of women tending to prefer one-to-one
00:03:43.760 relationships and men prefer any kind of shallow, large relationships was, I thought was very interesting,
00:03:49.500 stood out to me, was that men are more likely to pick a fight with a random stranger in a
00:03:55.300 bar. A woman would never do that, but a woman is more likely to start a fight with her spouse or 1.00
00:04:00.440 her partner that she lives, you know, in close contact with. Yes, if you look at the, people are
00:04:06.600 aggressive toward people whose opinions they care about, and so on. And if you look within the family,
00:04:12.360 I mean, statistically, it's very close to equal. Technically, if you want to really tally it up,
00:04:16.680 women are slightly more aggressive and violent in the family than men, although they don't do as much 1.00
00:04:22.260 damage since they're hit quite as hard and things like that. In terms of violence between husbands
00:04:28.000 and wives, women do more than men. That's been well established now through plenty of investigations. 0.97
00:04:35.500 Women do more child abuse also, but they spend so much time with children, it's hard to untangle. 1.00
00:04:40.820 But out among the broader sphere of strangers, women don't do it. The chances, say, of a woman going out 0.99
00:04:47.380 to the shopping mall and ending up in a knife fight with another woman that she's never met are minuscule.
00:04:53.260 But to a certain number of men, probably every day, some men end up in fights and injurious or deadly
00:04:59.640 with people they hadn't met before, because men care about their position more in the larger group.
00:05:05.440 And the parallel results are found with helping, too. The early psychology of helping research
00:05:10.780 consistently concluded, just as men were more aggressive, that men were also more helpful than
00:05:15.220 others. But they always studied stranger interactions, who will stop and help a stranger
00:05:19.840 or come to a stranger's aid in an emergency or something like that. So men are looking at
00:05:25.960 this larger sphere there. If you look, again, in the family, in the network of close relationships,
00:05:30.700 women are plenty helpful, if anything, more helpful than men in terms of taking care of family members 0.99
00:05:36.980 or sick relatives, in-laws, and so on. So women are plenty helpful. It's just a narrower focus 1.00
00:05:44.340 of their strongest motivations. Women mainly care about the ones they have, the close, 1.00
00:05:49.440 strong relationships. It's why the relationships researchers tell couples, well, the husband,
00:05:53.560 you should listen to your wife. She's probably the expert on close relationships, more likely than 0.89
00:05:57.560 the man. But in terms of building, again, large networks of the shallower relationships,
00:06:02.960 that's something men do much more than women. We see in starting businesses as well. Women start 1.00
00:06:07.240 more businesses than men in the United States today, but mainly small businesses. If you look
00:06:12.620 at businesses that employ a few people or make enough to live on it, so on, then men start more 0.96
00:06:18.100 of these. So everyone can start them, but the men are more interested in building it up into a giant 1.00
00:06:24.580 concern or an empire.
00:06:26.340 Well, you mentioned in the beginning that when you wrote this book, you want to take a fresh
00:06:30.560 approach. You didn't want to say that one gender is better than the other. And you actually, in your
00:06:37.760 book, you talk about how studies have shown that men and women are pretty much equally capable of
00:06:44.160 in a lot of areas, in the sciences, in the math. I mean, a man might be, on the average, do perform
00:06:50.580 better in math and sciences, but the difference is so negligible that there really isn't much of a
00:06:54.780 difference. And you argue that the difference maker is not capability, but motivation. That men
00:07:01.580 are more motivated to excel in business sphere, in larger society than women are. So why do men have 0.96
00:07:10.600 this motivation and women don't? 1.00
00:07:13.660 Well, why they have the motivation is hard to say. My guess is there's something that's just
00:07:21.340 just genetic. A lot of women, I know many fine women scientists, but they're more interested in 1.00
00:07:27.420 living things. One, I was talking to her the other day, and she says she and her husband are both
00:07:31.220 scientists, and they're interested in everything. But when it comes to science on inanimate objects,
00:07:36.860 you know, study of things, she just loses interest. She says, she calls it the dead world and says,
00:07:41.680 I leave the dead world to him. Life and living things just seem to capture women's interests more and 1.00
00:07:48.700 more interested in people. I mean, we've seen in the last 30, 40 years, a huge influx of women into 1.00
00:07:55.680 the upper ranks of researchers and professors and everything, but not equally in all fields. And
00:08:02.100 it's not that the fields aren't receptive. It's just that women are much less interested in some.
00:08:06.780 Larry Summers was president of Harvard and made some remarks about being attacked at one point,
00:08:13.820 how come there's so few women physics professors at Harvard. And he said, I got into a lot of trouble 0.75
00:08:20.480 for suggesting there might be ability differences. Well, the average man and the average women have 0.68
00:08:25.600 about equal ability. There are more men at both extremes, both the genius and the retarded. So in 0.99
00:08:32.740 him suggesting there might be more men at the super high level, that's probably true, probably for
00:08:37.860 biological reasons, just as the same as there are more men and women at the super retarded, very low 0.99
00:08:44.160 intelligence level. And nature just seems to gamble a little bit more with the male than with the 0.83
00:08:49.900 female. But even those differences are not so huge as to a comfort. I think that the bigger difference is
00:08:57.000 that women are capable of doing just fine in these fields. They're just not as interested in it. 1.00
00:09:01.740 Several scholars have spent decades studying this, tracking the kids through school and so forth.
00:09:08.280 And it's not that the girls sign up for math and science classes and flunk out. No, that's not true
00:09:13.060 at all. If they have electives, they don't sign up. They'll take biology rather than physics if they
00:09:19.600 have the choice. And so the study of things, who are the engineers, the technologists, the people who
00:09:27.200 build things and so on. It's much more men than women. And that's, I think, reflects interest and
00:09:34.540 desire. And I think that the point of putting it out that it's a matter of motivation, interest,
00:09:38.980 desire rather than ability, that's an important and very positive message because it means there's
00:09:43.540 no basis for discriminating. If we thought that, say, men were really inherently better at these
00:09:49.760 things than women, then an employer might say, you get an application from a woman, say, well, maybe I 1.00
00:09:54.080 don't want to hire her because she's a woman. She's probably not as good at it. But no, I'm saying 1.00
00:09:58.640 at least the abilities are basically equal. The differences that show up in the world are mainly
00:10:03.960 because of what people like and want to do. And so if a woman's wanting to do something, you can 1.00
00:10:09.340 assume that she's probably just as qualified as the man or just as capable as the man. There's not
00:10:14.460 likely to be any deficit in the ability to use their job. So let people do what they want. And
00:10:19.660 we shouldn't try to, you know, force people into or out of fields that they're not interested in
00:10:25.840 simply to match some arbitrary notion of social engineering.
00:10:30.540 And it's interesting you brought up the Larry Summers thing. Just last week, or after I finished
00:10:35.120 your book, I was reading a popular tech blog on the web called TechCrunch. And the author,
00:10:41.840 Michael Arrington, he's really big in the tech world. And he gets a lot of complaints from people
00:10:47.580 that they don't, that he doesn't feature enough women startups, or whenever he has these big 1.00
00:10:51.820 conferences, he doesn't have enough women speakers about, you know, or when featuring women startups 0.53
00:10:57.640 that are started by women. And he said, it's not that we're not trying. He says, we just can't find
00:11:02.080 them. And he made the point that, you know, we look, we scour, but a lot of women just aren't
00:11:07.860 interested in that. So it's hard to find women to speak or to feature them, which I thought was kind 0.95
00:11:12.960 of interesting, kind of serendipitous that I read this article right after I read your book.
00:11:16.000 Yes, I suspect that he's quite right about that. And in fact, I would guess that a woman startup
00:11:22.700 technology company would get more attention than a man would, or would be more likely to be covered
00:11:26.860 there. Because there are all these efforts to, well, let's, let's make sure to encourage women as much 0.64
00:11:33.040 as they can. You know, if the interest is not there, it isn't likely to happen. It's not, it doesn't seem
00:11:39.640 that it's because of barriers that are keeping women out or anything like that. 0.98
00:11:43.220 We're going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show.
00:11:48.920 So is this motivation in men and women, is it innate or is it that's something that the culture
00:11:55.460 teaches? For example, you know, someone would hear this. Okay. So men and women are just as capable.
00:12:00.980 Women just lack the motivation. Perhaps we should encourage women more and young girls to go into 1.00
00:12:06.740 the science. So that's something that they are, you know, they'd like to do. I mean, is it, can you
00:12:11.420 change that or is it just, is this something innate and what's going on there?
00:12:15.600 Okay. Well, there are several different things. If it's innate, that does not mean it can't be
00:12:19.280 changed. Nature usually sets some tendencies and culture can either build on them, which it usually
00:12:25.120 does, ignore them and leave them as they are, or it can try to counteract them. We've, in general,
00:12:31.240 in our society, I think we are trying to counteract it. So our cultural effort is to shrink
00:12:37.320 the differences between men and women, whereas through most of history, it's, it is just taken
00:12:44.320 it as they are and then tried to build on them. It used to be what might be somewhat in different
00:12:50.520 inclinations between boys and girls became completely different life paths and neither could 0.80
00:12:55.100 do what the other wanted. And now we are trying very hard to encourage and pressure and probably
00:13:01.580 men to get more involved in the traditional female activities of raising children, things like 0.87
00:13:06.440 that and trying to get women into science and technology and everything. But getting back 1.00
00:13:11.700 to your question of whether it's innate, we don't know the answer to that. The people
00:13:16.720 who have studied it seem repeatedly to come to the conclusion that it looks like it's innate.
00:13:22.780 It certainly starts very early. Like I said, the people who, say the women who do go into
00:13:28.340 these science classes in college, they don't usually report that, oh, they didn't want me
00:13:32.840 there or they were pressuring me out. Often they report that they were received very positive
00:13:37.360 encouraging treatment. It doesn't seem like they're being prevented there. Now, I don't
00:13:43.580 know for sure if somehow they're getting a message early in childhood that is altering patterns
00:13:49.640 of motivation. And that's hard to know and hard to rule out. But it seems the way we've
00:13:55.740 been policing all the materials for children for a couple decades now, it seems very unlikely
00:14:01.760 that there are strong messages discouraging girls from going into things. I can't really
00:14:08.560 answer the question of whether it's innate. You know, which class you take in college and
00:14:15.460 what you choose to do with your career is not determined by your genes, but genes may start
00:14:20.400 you on a path and may make some things more rewarding to you. And then you seek out experiences
00:14:26.160 and things will snowball along the way. So it is possible. Certainly we could pressure
00:14:32.160 all men to leave science and then only allowed, only gave science jobs to women and forced women 0.99
00:14:39.120 to take them while we would have more women doing science. Whether they would be happy and 1.00
00:14:43.660 whether they would be as good at it and successful at it and find it as rewarding as men do, well,
00:14:50.160 probably not given that people are being forced to do something. So just it's kind of up in the air,
00:14:54.960 really, there's no conclusion. Many of us have daughters and we would like to see them go into science. And I think we encourage them all their lives in every way we can. And we certainly don't see them getting the message from elsewhere that they shouldn't go into science.
00:15:08.960 But still they seem, in many respects, not to want to do that or eventually they find something else that seems more interesting to them.
00:15:18.960 And of course, science is a big category and there are a lot of sciences that study living things and, well, the social sciences study people. And there are plenty of women in those and many having outstanding careers.
00:15:30.960 But for an interest in things and in small bits of non-living reality, they don't seem in general to capture the female imagination as much as the male.
00:15:42.960 All right. Well, so you argue in your book as well that there's a dark underbelly to the success or the, I guess, the enjoyment of status that men have, have had for the most part in the economic and social world.
00:15:56.960 But there's also, you know, so there's this dark underbelly and that men are also seen as expendable by culture. Can you explain how culture exploits men in a negative fashion?
00:16:06.960 Yes. Well, that was one of the themes, one of the things that got started me on it is, well, I think the feminist critique of society said, look up at the top and said, well, look at the president and the Congress and the CEOs of chief executives and the powerful rich people around the world.
00:16:26.960 And they're more men than women. And they thought, okay, well, it must be great to be a man. Society is set up to favor men. But a social scientist has to look at both sides.
00:16:34.960 If you look down at the bottom, you see mostly men, too. You see who's in prison, who's homeless, who's dead on the job, who's sent off to die in battle.
00:16:46.960 Men are there, too. Latest statistic, deaths on the job in the United States, 93% men. So men are just doing many more dangerous jobs than women. 0.97
00:16:58.960 And this is not unique to the United States. This is true pretty much all over the world. Societies tend to give bigger rewards and bigger punishments to males.
00:17:12.960 There seem to be a lot of jobs in a culture, a lot of positions that are more high risk, high reward. And so it's a matter of would you take the risk for the higher reward?
00:17:24.960 Certainly, jobs that have the possibility of getting you killed have to pay a little extra, because otherwise, who would take such a job as compared to another job?
00:17:34.960 That's one of the things that contributes to difference in salaries between men and women. Men will do more of these dangerous jobs. 1.00
00:17:40.960 Now, society tends to shield women from doing these risky things that will get them killed or have their lives wasted or seriously injured in other ways. 1.00
00:17:52.960 Probably for rather simple biological reasons. Throughout most of history, most cultures, most societies were competing against others.
00:18:02.960 And your very survival depended on being strong enough to stand up to your neighbors.
00:18:07.960 And, well, the larger the group, the more successful you're going to be, losing population and having too few of you to last or to maintain a competitive advantage.
00:18:21.960 That was fatal to a society. And it's true. There's no question. Look at almost all societies in the history of the world. They've encouraged their people to have more children. 0.96
00:18:33.960 More children are simply seen as better. They're better for the economy. They're better for the health of the society and so forth.
00:18:42.960 But the number of children you have depends on the number of women you have. 1.00
00:18:46.960 And that's a simple fact of biology. Most women have at least one child and it's hard for a woman to have more than about a dozen. 1.00
00:18:54.960 Whereas a single man certainly can have hundreds of children. There are reports of men having over a thousand children.
00:19:00.960 So if you lose a whole bunch of your men, say you have a big war and half of your men are killed, well, the next generation can still be full size.
00:19:11.960 But if you lose half your women, your next generation is going to be significantly smaller in size. 0.65
00:19:17.960 So for maintaining population and this increasing population, which again has been the goal of most societies, most cultures, most religions in the history of the world, not all, but most and certainly most successful ones,
00:19:30.960 you want to make sure that most of your women stay alive, are able to reach adulthood and bear children. 0.81
00:19:38.960 Whereas, again, one man can go from woman to woman and have lots of different children in the same year, whereas a woman who goes from man to man still can only have about one child per year. 0.85
00:19:50.960 So I think that's one reason. Another reason that society looks at men as expendable goes with the kind of social networks and groups that men create.
00:20:00.960 The larger groups, people are replaceable in them. So if you look at a corporation or a military unit or an orchestra or whatever, a sports team, everyone in it gets replaced over time.
00:20:15.960 But look at these small relationships in a family. You can't really replace a child's mother.
00:20:21.960 You can get another woman to do some of the work, but it's really a different family if the mother dies and another woman is brought in and so on.
00:20:29.960 So women are cultivated by their style of social relations to understanding themselves as valuable and precious and men more to see themselves as expendable.
00:20:42.960 Turning to how society exploits men. It will, again, assign men to dangerous jobs, attract men into things with exploration where a dozen people might go exploring and half of them get killed and some come back with nothing.
00:21:02.960 But one or two every so often come back and have found something really wonderful and that's something that will enrich the group.
00:21:09.960 Well, then society gives those men a lot of rewards. But again, we're not looking or not attending to all the other men who lost out and maybe lost their lives in doing that.
00:21:24.960 The same with fighting in battle. Somebody has to fight in battle against the enemies.
00:21:30.960 These days, given the technology, certainly you don't need to be strong and husty or have the big shoulders or the few biological differences in physical powers between the strength.
00:21:43.960 But still, there's a sense of wanting to protect women from that and that somehow men are more expendable.
00:21:52.960 Even on the Titanic, it was interesting to notice. I mean, there was a case where a ship was going down and, well, there were thousands of people aboard.
00:22:02.960 And there weren't enough seats in the lifeboats. And they gave them to the women. The men, you might have thought, well, patriarchy should count for something and the rich and successful men. 0.95
00:22:15.960 But the rich and powerful men on there actually had a lower survival rate than the poorest level of women. 0.96
00:22:22.960 You know, all your wealth and power didn't do any good even for saving your life. Under those circumstances, it was better to be a woman. 1.00
00:22:31.960 Again, I think women and children, the society, our society, pretty much every society sees women and children as somehow more precious and more valuable than men.
00:22:42.960 That's the phrase, even women and children were killed, which one still sees in the news every month or so.
00:22:51.960 What that means is that, well, maybe it's bad if men are killed, but it's worse if women and children are killed because women and children are more valuable than men.
00:22:59.960 Join us next time for part two of our interview with Dr. Roy Baumeister as we discuss his book, Is There Anything Good About Men?
00:23:10.960 Until next time, stay manly.