In this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, I sit down with evolutionary biologist and psychologist Dr. Dave Goldstein to talk about his work on evolutionary theory and the evolution of the human species. We talk about how he became interested in evolutionary theory, how he got into psychology, and why he thinks Darwin's theory of sexual selection is one of the most important theories in human history. We also talk about some of his favorite movies and TV shows, and how he came up with the name of his new book, Darwin's Theory of Sexual Selection, which is now a best-selling book and best-seller. And, of course, we talk about everything else. This episode was recorded in Austin, Texas, at a dinner hosted by Jordan Peterson, who is a great friend of mine and a good friend of Joe's. I really enjoyed our conversation, and I think you will too. If you're a fan of the show, you'll love this episode. It's a must-listen, and if you're interested in learning more about evolution, you should definitely check it out! I'm sure you'll agree that it's a great listen. I hope you'll like it! Thanks to my guest, Dave Goldstein, for coming on the show and for being kind enough to share it with us. -Jon and I hope that you enjoy it with your friends and family and friends! Jon and I have a great time at Joe Rogans' dinner! --Jon's Note: If you like it, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts and tell us what you think of it's quality and value it's great! Thank you, Jon and Jon's advice is really helps us out. -- Thank you! --Jon and Jon is a very cool guy, Jon would really appreciate it! -- -- -Jon's new book is out! -- Tom's new podcast is out now! -- Jon's new album is out in paperback and we're looking forward to seeing you in the next episode of his podcast, too! - Thank you for listening to it? -- -- and I'll see you soon, Jon's review it on the podcast, Tom's review of it on Amazon Prime Day -- it's out on Tuesday, too? Thanks Jon's tweet -- also -- I'll send it out on Monday, July 15th, 6/27th, 8/28th, 7/8th, 9/9th, and so on
00:01:22.000As a psychologist, first of all, why was that so appealing to you?
00:01:26.000Why did you choose that as a field of study?
00:01:28.000Yeah, well, it wasn't a field of study when I did choose it, and it wasn't like I had a plan going in, but A little bit of backstory on this is I'm a psychologist by training, so trained at UC Berkeley,
00:01:46.000And there was nothing of this sort going on there or no research.
00:01:50.000But I started reading because I have fairly broad interest.
00:01:54.000I started reading in different areas like evolutionary biology.
00:01:57.000And I was reading in evolutionary biology, I came across these amazing theories of evolution like Hamilton's theory of inclusive fitness, Trevor's theory of parental investment, of course, Darwin's theory of sexual selection.
00:02:11.000That's really the one that blew me away, Darwin's theory of sexual selection.
00:02:16.000And then I realized, man, these theories have so much applicability to humans, but nobody is studying them.
00:02:24.000And they lead to, at least the then theories, lead to some pretty clear predictions that could be tested.
00:02:31.000And so I was trained as an empirical scientist where, you know, you take the hypotheses, generate predictions, do the studies, and if the studies, if the empirical findings support The predictions, then you say, okay, this looks promising.
00:05:02.000And he also noticed other phenomena, sexual dimorphism, differences in the size, shape, morphology of males and females of the same species.
00:05:12.000And the reason this troubled him was because he thought, well, both sexes face the same survival problems, right?
00:05:50.000Say 10%, 11% taller than women, but things like upper body strength, it's like monumentally powerful sex differences there.
00:06:00.000And so all this is a long-winded way of saying that in response to these anomalies, you know, things like the brilliant plumage of peacocks, The elaborate bird song and so forth, and the sex differences, he came up with the theory of sexual selection.
00:06:17.000And sexual selection deals not with the evolution of characteristics that lead to survival, Advantage, but rather those characteristics that lead to a mating advantage.
00:06:28.000And he identified two causal pathways.
00:06:41.000So he identified two causal pathways, which are still the pillars of sexual selection theory, by which mating advantage could occur.
00:06:50.000Okay, one is Intrasexual competition or same-sex competition, so battles.
00:06:56.000The stereotype is two stags locking horns in combat and the victor gains sexual access to the female.
00:07:04.000A loser ambles off with a broken antler, dejected, suffering low self-esteem and needing psychotherapy for some of my clinical psychology colleagues, mate value rehabilitation therapy or something like that.
00:07:19.000And so the logic was very simple but very clear.
00:07:22.000And that is that qualities that led to success in these same-sex battles, what biologists call contest competition, Those got passed on in greater numbers because of the sexual access that the victors gained.
00:07:36.000Quality associated with losing the competition basically bit the evolutionary dust.
00:07:42.000And the logic of that Intrasexual competition is actually more general.
00:07:48.000So what I've described is what's called contest competition, where there's a little physical battle, but it's more general in that, for example, with humans, we sometimes do contest competition.
00:08:00.000In fact, there's somewhat of a long evolutionary history of males doing these physical contests in warfare and sometimes within groups.
00:08:12.000And for competing for status, status gives you a mating advantage, but we don't necessarily have to fight.
00:08:20.000So I always say, like, I teach at University of Texas and all the time, and I've previously taught at University of Michigan, Harvard University, Berkeley.
00:08:30.000In all my years in academia, I've never walked across campus and one time seen two guys duking it out, You know, in public, surrounded by a ring of females who are watching to see who's going to be the winner and then having sex with the winner.
00:10:02.000It's not typically a dominant preference.
00:10:06.000But if they did, then over time you'd see an increase in the frequency of redheadedness in the population because those with red hair would have a mating advantage.
00:10:18.000Those lacking red hair would be, you know, kind of banished or do less well on the mating market.
00:10:25.000And so, again, you can see evolution, which simply means change over time, either due to qualities that lead to success in same-sex battles or due to possessing qualities that are valued by the opposite sex.
00:10:41.000Okay, so let's talk about peacocks then.
00:10:45.000What could possibly have caused a peacock to develop that insane plumage and how would that be preferential and why would that be preferential to the opposite sex?
00:10:59.000And it basically – we know that it is preferred by the opposite sex.
00:11:05.000So the more brilliant the plumage – The more luminescent the plumage, the more females like it.
00:11:14.000And there are a couple of different hypotheses that have been put forward to explain it.
00:11:19.000We don't know totally the answer to it, but one is that it has to do with parasite load.
00:11:24.000So parasites decrease The luminescence of the plumage.
00:11:30.000So a peacock that had a high parasite low would be less healthy.
00:11:34.000And so one hypothesis is that females are cueing into a health cue.
00:11:41.000Another hypothesis was put forward by an Israeli biologist named Zahavi called the handicap hypothesis.
00:11:51.000And the idea there is that the peacocks are saying I am so big and strong and fit that I can carry around this massive structure and still survive and still thrive.
00:12:57.000So women, for example, spend nine times more money on cosmetic enhancements, makeup and so forth compared to men.
00:13:09.000In who does the choosing, who does the competing was so pronounced that Darwin even called the preferential mate choice component female choice simply because he observed that it seemed to be the females who were more choosy about who they mated with and the males were more indiscriminate.
00:13:27.000They would basically mate with almost any female who would have them.
00:13:32.000But what's interesting is when we get to humans, we find that both components of sexual selection apply to both sexes.
00:13:41.000So that is, in our species, both males compete with other males for access to females and females compete with other females for access to desirable males.
00:13:53.000And both men and women have preferential mate choice.
00:13:56.000And I know this for a fact, not just from the empirical studies, but in my undergraduate courses, I have a couple hundred students, and I ask, how many males, how many of you guys have no preferences, and we just mate with any female no matter what?
00:14:13.000And typically there's like one smart-ass guy at the back of the room who raises his hand, but men have strong preferences.
00:14:20.000They differ in some ways from the preferences of women.
00:14:24.000And there is the very important issue of whether you're going for a short-term mate, you know, a one-night stand, a casual sex partner, or a hookup, as they call it on college campuses, or you're going for a long-term, committed, pair-bonded partner because the qualities that people prefer differ dramatically.
00:14:44.000So bottom line here is both components of sexual selection operate Within both sexes.
00:14:52.000So like when you're talking about the difference gene like what someone's attracted to for a one-night hookup versus what someone's attracted to in a relationship, that has to do with the whole concept of having the opportunity to spread your genes without any commitment,
00:15:57.000You know, and so we're not conscious of the Underlying logic that drove the evolution of these attractions in this case.
00:16:05.000But your question also raises the interesting issue of males versus females.
00:16:14.000So when this gets to a fundamental sex difference in our reproductive biology, which is referred to as, it's kind of a clunky phrase, but obligatory parental investment.
00:16:27.000So in other words, what is the minimum obligatory parental investment that a man versus a woman has to put in to produce one child?
00:16:38.000And for men, the minimum, the absolute bare minimum is one act of sex, and that can result in a child.
00:16:45.000For women, the minimum is that nine months of pregnancy, which is huge.
00:16:52.000And so this has actually been called the Darwinian paradox or the Darwinian puzzle, is that we know that given that asymmetry in investment, we know that It has been beneficial in the currency of reproductive success for men to have sex with a variety of women.
00:17:25.000Estimates vary, but say somewhere between, say, 20 and 35, 40% of women have affairs, even if they're in a committed long-term relationship.
00:17:34.000Interesting issue, well, what do they get out of it?
00:17:36.000They don't increase their direct reproductive success and never could have.
00:17:42.000Unless their partner happened to be infertile, The most they can have is basically one kid a year.
00:17:49.000And so adding additional sex partners doesn't do anything for their reproductive success.
00:17:56.000And there have been, you know, maybe four or five leading hypotheses about why women do it.
00:18:03.000And this is one area where I've changed my mind on Pretty dramatically.
00:18:10.000So early on, a former student of mine, Marty Hazleton, who's now a professor at UCLA and other friends and colleagues like Steve Gangestead and Randy Thornhill, put forward this idea that the reason that women do it is that they're pursuing a dual mating strategy.
00:18:28.000That is, they're trying to get investment from one guy, like the good dads, But good genes from another guy.
00:18:38.000Is there any research done on what type of mate a woman is likely to cheat on?
00:18:50.000So there's been some, and it's not conclusive, but basically the only way this could work, and I have to back up just a second on that, we know that affairs are very costly for women.
00:20:53.000And her affair partner in terms of the quality of his genes.
00:20:57.000And so what these good genes dual mating strategy theorists propose is that there are certain markers of good genetic quality.
00:21:06.000They hypothesized masculine features, and there's a logic behind that.
00:21:13.000They hypothesize symmetrical features, so we are a bilaterally symmetrical species, so normal development, you know, our hands, our arms, our legs grow, you know, more or less symmetrically, but there are things that cause deviations from symmetry,
00:21:29.000so mutations, so genetic mutations can cause deviations, diseases can cause asymmetries, and environmental insults in a variety of ways, and so What the good genes theorists argue is that if the male is very symmetrical,
00:21:48.000then that's a marker that he's not experienced a history of disease or environmental insults or a high mutation load or has what they call a developmental system that's very kind of impervious to these insults.
00:22:05.000So even though they've suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, they still maintain that symmetry.
00:22:11.000Well, I think there are problems with that.
00:22:44.000So what they did is, how did they test this?
00:22:46.000What they looked at is, do women change their preferences when they're ovulating?
00:22:52.000So because it's only in that narrow window of ovulation that she's going to be getting the good genes.
00:22:57.000So what they looked at is women's normal mate preferences, and they tracked them over the ovulation cycle, and do they change to prefer more masculine, more symmetrical features when they're ovulating How did they gather this data?
00:23:26.000Well, it's very difficult and time-consuming data, but, you know, it started out with crude methods such as estimating the woman's time of ovulation through a backward counting method.
00:23:39.000Right, but I mean, how do they get people to even become a part of a study where they admit that they have cheated on their husbands?
00:23:45.000Oh, well, so that's a different question.
00:23:49.000These studies just looked at changes in mate preferences.
00:23:53.000Right, but you're talking about affairs.
00:23:55.000It's not just changes in mate preferences.
00:23:57.000It's a decision to have intercourse with someone other than your husband.
00:25:23.000So yeah, he would be a perfect example.
00:25:25.000Highly masculine features, you know, the...
00:25:29.000Square jaw, heavy brow ridges, you know, a good shoulder to hip ratio.
00:25:37.000So, you know, typically masculine features.
00:25:41.000And so they would look at, do women rate the photos of these masculine and symmetrical guys more attractive when they're ovulating than when they're not ovulating?
00:25:57.000The bottom line, so there's some conceptual problems with that of, you know, does symmetry and masculinity, why are these the sole features that mark good genes?
00:26:10.000Because there are also a lot of things that have moderate heritability.
00:26:14.000It's one of the things we know from the heritability studies.
00:26:18.000A zillion things show moderate heritability.
00:26:24.000So one is the failures to replicate those studies.
00:26:27.000So the larger scale studies failed to find those preference shifts at ovulation.
00:26:33.000But when I started to look at the literature about women who were having affairs, And the reasons that they're having affairs and the nature of the affairs, there are things that cropped up like this.
00:26:50.000One study found 79% of women Fell in love with or became emotionally involved with her affair partner.
00:26:58.000And to me, this is exactly the opposite of what you'd want if you're trying to pursue that dual mating strategy idea.
00:27:07.000You want to get the good genes and then forget about the guy so as not to jeopardize your investment from the regular partner.
00:27:18.000And so it's really a design feature that's counter to that notion.
00:27:25.000But it seems to me that you're pursuing this as if it's a logical endeavor that's based on trying to achieve an outcome.
00:27:31.000And I think it's far more likely you're dealing with mental illness, alcohol, emotional imbalance, extreme desire for attention, narcissism, which leads people to seek out exorbitant amounts of attention from other people.
00:27:50.000Like, you have to take that into account, don't you?
00:27:52.000Yeah, yeah, okay, so it's a fair point, and those things aren't necessarily inconsistent if you ask, like, who has affairs, and what are their personality characteristics?
00:28:04.000Okay, but affairs happen in all cultures, or virtually all cultures, unless the women are extremely cloistered, as they are in some cultures, where they're like, they cannot leave the home without a male bodyguard.
00:28:31.000And so a competing hypothesis about why, and this is the one I'm currently putting my money on if there's a horse race, is what I call the mate switching hypothesis.
00:28:45.000And this is the notion that women who are in relationships, where the relationship is going south, perhaps the partner starts out looking promising but has failed to live up to his promise.
00:29:01.000Perhaps he becomes an alcoholic or a drug addict or loses his job or starts abusing her, starts beating her up.
00:29:14.000That women use affairs as a mate-switching device either to divest herself of her regular partner and or to trade up in the mating market to someone who's more desirable or to make it easier to transition back into the mating market on the notion,
00:29:34.000on the assumption that she'll be able to find someone more desirable out there.
00:29:44.000At least a fair amount of circumstantial evidence that supports the mate switching hypothesis, like the one I just mentioned.
00:29:52.000Women, with 79% of women becoming emotionally involved or falling in love with their partner, this suggests, you know, it's not just, oh, I'm seeking transient attention.
00:30:04.000As you mentioned, some women might do it for that, of course.
00:30:08.000But it suggests that they're forming a long-term attachment to this other guy rather than the regular partner.
00:30:19.000And this may seem like super, super obvious.
00:30:23.000Is that women who are unhappy with their regular relationship, either sexually unhappy or generally unhappy with their overall relationship, they're more likely to have affairs.
00:30:36.000Now this seems like the most obvious thing in the world, right?
00:30:39.000Tell me something I don't, your grandmother couldn't tell you.
00:30:42.000You're unhappy in the relationship, you're more likely to have an affair.
00:30:45.000But it turns out the same is not true for men.
00:30:48.000That is, there are at least some studies that show that if you compare men who have affairs with men who don't, there's no difference in how happy they are with the relationship.
00:30:58.000And that's why you can have men, and just to bring up, I don't know, movie star examples, like, this is an older one, but Hugh Grant was involved with Elizabeth Hurley.
00:31:09.000I don't know if you remember that one.
00:31:12.000And he's like having sex with a prostitute in L.A., Why is he cheating with Elizabeth Hurley?
00:31:23.000Now, in his case, in that case, the male motivation for affairs differs on average substantially from the female motivation.
00:31:33.000And that is that men are I have this tremendous desire for sexual variety, meaning a variety of sex partners.
00:31:41.000Men tend to have a higher sex drive in general, on average, And so they try to satisfy.
00:31:49.000So even men who are involved with or married to classically beautiful, beautiful women sometimes have affairs where people are very puzzled by this.
00:31:59.000But that desire for sexual variety is what drives most men into affairs.
00:32:05.000And so there's a dramatic sex difference in why men have affairs with sex.
00:32:10.000Desire for sexual variety pushing most men into it.
00:32:14.000You know, it's like, I think it was Chris Rock said, you know, men are only as faithful as their opportunity.
00:32:20.000You get a low-cost opportunity, a lot of men act on it.
00:32:23.000You know, if you're like an academic, you're away at a conference, you're in a different town, you know, some fall into bed with someone else.
00:32:33.000One night stand, a brief affair, and that's that.
00:32:59.000And so one of the ways to do that is to introduce new partners to just sabotage their original relationship.
00:33:06.000So even if it's not someone that they would seek a long-term relationship with other than their partner, they would have sex with that person just to sort of poison the water of whatever committed relationship they have and that would aid in them getting out of it.
00:33:43.000But there's people that have severe mental illnesses, right?
00:33:48.000I think a lot of people that are very promiscuous, there's some sort of a lack of attention in their development cycle as they were young, like maybe lack of male attention that's leading them to desire constant and consistent male attention.
00:34:07.000There are, in fact, personality characteristics and developmental characteristics that are correlated with who's more likely to have an affair.
00:34:27.000Also, and actually Jordan Peterson mentioned this on his podcast with you, the dark triad traits of narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy.
00:34:38.000I don't think that really plays into infidelity so much.
00:34:41.000But the dark triad is a good predictor of who, both males and females, which ones are likely to have affairs.
00:34:51.000But there's a big sex difference there because men tend to be much higher on these dark triad traits than women.
00:34:58.000And so it's a smaller minority of women who are inclined in that direction.
00:35:05.000Now, why are men more inclined towards those traits?
00:35:10.000Does that have to do with some sort of survival strategy?
00:35:14.000Does it have to do with a success strategy that would lead to more mating?
00:35:21.000Psychopathy or narcissism or not even courage, but if somehow or another those behavior traits are rewarded by success because you have this ability to do things that other people might find reprehensible or immoral or,
00:35:41.000Yeah, and what I would say is you have to break it down by each of those dark triad traits because I think each one has a somewhat different origin.
00:35:52.000So with respect to psychopathy, Psychopathy, these are – one of the hallmarks is a lack of empathy.
00:36:00.000And so these are very bad dudes and where they pursue an exploitative strategy where they feign cooperation.
00:36:49.000And that's why I think my hypothesis is that there's been an increase in psychopathy over the last 10,000 years as people started living in towns and cities and as migration became more common where you could move from place to place without incurring that reputational damage.
00:37:08.000Because people, you know, you fuck people over Word gets around.
00:37:13.000And then people might ostracize you from the group or kill you or whatever.
00:37:18.000Or if the victims were members of your family or your friends, you'd incur a lot of costs associated with that strategy.
00:37:25.000But in the modern environment, you can get away with that strategy much more easily.
00:37:30.000I mean, we are being preyed upon by people online from in different continents that we never even encounter that are high on these psychopathic traits.
00:37:49.000And this is one of the questions I get asked a lot is, why are women attracted to bad boys?
00:37:54.000You know, guys who seem like they're Assholes who don't respect them, you know, etc.
00:38:00.000But there are reasons and one is they exhibit a lot of confidence and confidence people often interpret as a cue to status.
00:38:12.000Why would you be confident if you didn't have something to back up your confidence?
00:38:17.000Those high on narcissism also like to be the center of attention.
00:38:21.000And as humans, we use the attention structure as a cue to status.
00:38:26.000That is, the high-status people are the ones to whom the most people pay the most attention.
00:38:33.000And so if someone's paying a lot of attention and nurses put themselves, you know, at the center of the party, at the center of attention, and so women interpret, oh, that's a status cue.
00:38:43.000And so the confidence and status are known.
00:38:48.000We know that these are attractive to women.
00:38:50.000But over time, with experience, women become less and less attracted to these bad boy characteristics.
00:38:59.000It is primarily young, relatively inexperienced women who are drawn to these guys.
00:39:25.000This actually came originally from the book The Prince, which is one of these classic books where There's an advisor to the prince who's advising him on all these, you know, kind of underground strategies to manipulate other people and manipulate and maintaining power and so forth.
00:39:45.000And these highly manipulative people, well, sometimes they rise to the top.
00:39:52.000Sometimes they maneuver themselves by out-competing others and they become CEOs or whatever.
00:40:01.000It kind of depends on the environment.
00:40:04.000High Machiavellians tend to thrive more in a kind of free-for-all environment where there aren't very strict rules of engagement.
00:40:16.000So probably more difficult to do it, say, in the military where they're very regimented, very rule-oriented people.
00:40:25.000High Mac people, as they're called, they wouldn't thrive in those environments typically.
00:40:30.000But more free-floating environment, maybe...
00:41:15.000This is one of the sex differences and people don't like it, but it's a universal that women value financial resources and even more important, the qualities that lead to financial resources over time.
00:41:48.000So like, I don't know, if you're an undergraduate at UT, a woman might find a pre-med student to be very attractive, not because he has a thick pocketbook now, but because he's going to be a doctor, he's going to make a lot of money down the line.
00:42:16.000Yeah, because by the time you hit 30, 40, 50, if you're still kind of trying to figure out what you want to do with your life, probably not a good sign on that dimension.
00:42:26.000How difficult is it with you with this lifetime of research and this field of study that you've chosen To exist in this world where there's this denial, this current world,
00:42:42.000where there's a denial of the differences between males and females.
00:42:46.000When you're a guy who studied this long-standing history of the variabilities and like Yeah, yeah.
00:42:56.000It's almost like a denial of all your work.
00:43:02.000Well, it is kind of odd, and it's in some ways something I never really expected because— I don't think anybody expected it.
00:43:11.000Yeah, and as an empirical scientist, I always—and this is maybe my naivete—is I thought, well, you do the studies.
00:43:19.000And one of the hallmarks of our science is you want to see independent replication of the results.
00:43:27.000And if you're claiming a sex difference, say, in mate preferences or mating strategies, you want to see it replicated by other researchers and And you also want to see it cross-culturally.
00:43:38.000So does it occur in Venezuela, in China, in Swahili, in all cultures?
00:44:03.000When I published these, no one's going to believe that they're evolved sex differences, you know, because it's just Americans are weird and, you know, who knows.
00:44:12.000So that's why I did 37 different cultures until I got enough evidence that convinced me that my findings were real and that the sex differences were universal.
00:44:22.000And so I thought, well, it's really people will look at the data and say, okay, we're supposed to be oriented toward the science, and if the data are there and solid and independently replicated and show up cross-culturally and also show up through different methods that don't share the same methodological problems,
00:44:43.000then surely everyone will just go, well, okay, we believe them.
00:44:47.000But to my astonishment, some of them have been challenged.
00:44:53.000We live in this odd time where there's a denial of sex differences.
00:45:00.000But not only do they exist, evolutionary theory provides a very powerful meta-theory that can explain where and why they exist and the domains in which they exist and the domains in which they don't exist.
00:45:28.000We're all members of the same species.
00:45:30.000But the evolutionary meta-theory, which is just a fancy term for theory of theories, is simply that we expect to see similarity in male and female psychology in all domains where they face the same or similar problems.
00:45:46.000You know, like dealing with Darwinian hostile forces of nature that I mentioned earlier.
00:45:51.000It's only in domains where they face different adaptive problems, as we call them, or adaptive challenges, that we expect to see sex differences.
00:46:00.000Well, as it turns out, these domains fall very heavily in the mating and sexuality domain for reasons that, well, I mentioned, alluded to one earlier, but You start as a kind of a ground level truth.
00:46:15.000There are sex differences in our reproductive biology.
00:46:19.000So fertilization occurs internally within women, not within men.
00:46:25.000This creates a problem for men in this parlance, an adaptive problem known as the problem of paternity uncertainty.
00:46:35.000So in other words, no woman on earth is ever, to my knowledge, given birth, and as the baby is coming out of her body, look down and wonder, gee, is this kid really mine?
00:46:56.000Some cultures use the phrase, mama's baby, papa's maybe, to kind of capture that asymmetry.
00:47:04.000And we actually know there are estimates of the rates of paternity uncertainty because we have the genetic data, the molecular genetic data to do that now.
00:47:15.000And they, of course, vary from culture to culture.
00:47:18.000But what this means is this is an example of...
00:47:22.000of a feature of our reproductive biology, a sex difference in our reproductive biology, that has created a problem, in this case a sexually asymmetrical problem, problem for men, not for women, such that if a man devoted,
00:47:38.000say, two decades of his resources in an offspring, in the mistaken belief that it was his own, When, in fact, it was a rival's offspring, well, he's actually benefiting the rival's reproductive success at a tremendous cost to his own.
00:47:56.000And so solving this paternity uncertainty problem is so critical and so dramatic that it accounts for why long-term, high-investing males are so rare in the mammalian kingdom.
00:48:18.000Ballpark of 5,000-plus species of mammals, only somewhere around 3% or 4% have anything resembling a long-term pair-bonded strategy, and even fewer where males invest.
00:48:31.000So even our closest primate relative, the chimpanzee, with whom we share more than 98% of our DNA, The males don't do anything.
00:48:42.000They have sex with the female when she's ovulating.
00:48:45.000She has these bright red genital swellings and they're very interested in her at that time.
00:48:51.000And then after that, they just ignore the females and they don't do much, if anything, for the infants or the offspring.
00:48:58.000Whereas our species, we have huge Male parental investment, where not all the time, of course, we have deadbeat dads and men who don't do anything, but a lot of men do invest tremendous resources in feeding their kids,
00:49:15.000protecting their kids, socializing their kids, paying for them to go off to school, making sure that they develop the right skills, etc.
00:49:25.000We're an extraordinary species in that sense, but we couldn't do that unless men But up until genetic testing,
00:49:41.000up until this ability to find out by taking a sample from the child whether or not the child actually is yours, it was just based on looking at the child.
00:50:20.000So, the emotion of jealousy, for example, is one of these emotions.
00:50:26.000And I'd be very curious about your thoughts on that because I know in a previous podcast, I think you talked, I can't remember if you talked about jealousy or envy as being a very negative emotion, which they are.
00:50:54.000So men have evolved this emotion of jealousy which motivates mate guarding.
00:51:02.000Which involves an array of behaviors from – I've identified 19 clusters that range from vigilance to violence where men want to monitor their partners if they're investing.
00:51:19.000They want to see, watch their interactions with other men very carefully, see potential signs of flirtation.
00:51:27.000And then in extreme, in modern environment, they hack into their computers and cell phones or put tracking devices on them and so forth.
00:51:39.000All the way up through things like ramping up the benefits they bestow on the woman.
00:51:45.000So, well, if she's maybe looking at other men, maybe I better ramp up my investment in her and show her that I'm really the guy she wants to stay with.
00:51:55.000All the way up to really horrible things like abuse.
00:51:59.000Where if there's the threat of infidelity or defection from the relationship, some men beat up their partners.
00:52:09.000And infidelity or suspicion of infidelity or suspicion that the woman is thinking about leaving, these are the triggers of the more violent people.
00:52:20.000Male tactics and the kind of uncomfortable, I want to say truth of the matter, uncomfortable, I'll call it a hypothesis though, which is going to sound horrible, but this abuse is sometimes functional in the sense that It is designed to dissuade the woman from an infidelity and from leaving the relationship.
00:52:47.000And one of the mechanisms by which it works is, A, the threat.
00:52:53.000If you leave me, I will track you down to the ends of the earth and kill you in extreme cases.
00:53:00.000But if you leave me, I will, you know, inflict a lot of costs on you because they don't use that kind of language.
00:53:06.000But the other way that it works is psychologically, where it lowers the woman's self-esteem.
00:53:12.000So no woman feels good about herself if her husband's beat her up.
00:53:19.000And self-esteem is partly a monitoring device that monitors your mate value.
00:53:27.000That is how desirable you are on the mating market.
00:53:30.000And so if you feel bad about yourself, then a woman might think, well, no one else is going to like me, and so I better stick with this guy even though he's abusive.
00:53:41.000Because I'm never going to find anyone else.
00:53:43.000And he claims that he loves me and he's apologetic about it and says he's never going to do it again.
00:53:48.000But of course, as we know, abuse tends to escalate over time.
00:54:06.000One is that by the time it occurs, so it often starts as verbal abuse.
00:54:13.000So with the guy putting the woman down or insulting her appearance, and then what we found in our studies of couples is that it can sometimes escalate.
00:54:25.000The verbal abuse predicts it escalating to physical abuse, and that could start very mild.
00:54:57.000Really, this is a tangent on a tangent, which is totally fine.
00:55:03.000But I think one of the things that happens, and this is also a speculation, is that...
00:55:11.000Older men sometimes snap up younger women before they have sufficient experience to understand their own mate value, their own desirability on the mating market.
00:55:23.000And then so they get in a relationship with this older guy who's convinced her that he's the world's greatest guy.
00:55:34.000But then over time she starts to realize her mate value and A mate value discrepancy, that is, that she can do better on the mating market than the guy that she's with.
00:55:49.000A classic example, this is an old example, but you might remember this.
00:55:57.000So there was this guy, this evolved Playboy magazine, but there was this guy, Paul Snyder.
00:56:35.000She started an affair with him and got very serious about that relationship.
00:56:39.000But meanwhile, this guy, Paul Snyder, who was psychopathic, he was the example of the dark triad guys.
00:56:47.000You know, he was kind of left in the dust.
00:56:50.000Part of the reason is that he kind of snapped her up when she was super young before she had a good understanding of her desirability on the mating market.
00:57:01.000So anyway, I wanted to close the loop before I forget my digression on the digression.
00:57:11.000But that tangent, the reason why you went on it is because you were talking about violence and abuse.
00:58:57.000So the notion is that when you have these fundamental sex differences in our reproductive biology, it would be astonishing and defy all logic and defy everything that we know about the way evolution by selection works.
00:59:12.000If there were not corresponding sex differences in our psychology, in our behavior, and in our mating strategies.
00:59:21.000And what we do find is that it is precisely in those domains where we see these large psychological sex differences, psychological, behavioral, and strategic sex differences.
00:59:34.000And so it's not a theory that men are from Mars and women are from Venus.
00:59:45.000So men's and women's taste preferences tend to be very similar to each other.
00:59:50.000You know, we both like things that are high in sugar, fat, salt and protein, the sugar being, you know, ripe fruit ancestrally.
00:59:59.000But when do their taste preferences change?
01:00:02.000They change suddenly when a woman becomes pregnant.
01:00:06.000And all of a sudden, she has two problems that she's never faced before and that men never face.
01:00:11.000One is she's eating for two rather than one, but the other is she has to avoid ingesting what are called teratogenic substances, that is, toxins, That in minute quantities are not dangerous to the adult woman or man,
01:00:28.000but can, if they pass the placental barrier, can be dangerous to the fetus.
01:00:34.000And so even things like all of a sudden they don't want to eat broccoli.
01:00:38.000Well, broccoli turns out to contain these minute toxins that could be damaging to the fetus.
01:00:46.000And same with other things like coffee and other sorts of things.
01:00:51.000And so people attribute women's taste preferences.
01:00:54.000They say she wants pickles and ice cream and she's kind of just become wacky because she's pregnant.
01:00:58.000But there's actually a logic to the shift in taste preferences.
01:01:03.000And so the point is that her taste preferences diverge from those of men's when she's facing this different suite of adaptive problems that no man has ever faced.
01:01:14.000And then after that, after the breastfeeding, her taste preferences return to be very similar to those of men.
01:01:20.000And so where we expect to see the sex differences, as I said, fall very heavily in the mating and sexuality domain.
01:01:29.000But that domain, just to finish that long-winded sentence, and I apologize for monologuing about this, but that domain is much larger than most people think.
01:01:42.000And that is because mating is related to so many other things.
01:01:53.000It's related to kinship, like family relations.
01:01:58.000And you think, how in the world is it related to family relations?
01:02:02.000Parents have a very strong interest in the mating lives of their offspring, but especially the mating lives and sex lives of their daughters.
01:02:12.000So we've developed what I call, with my former students, the daughter-guarding hypothesis, where, and this is true in all cultures, Parents are more restrictive about their daughter's sexuality and mating.
01:02:28.000They want to meet the guy she's going out with.
01:02:31.000They impose stronger curfews on their daughters compared to their sons.
01:02:36.000They allow the sons more freedom, more latitude.
01:02:41.000They engage in this daughter-guarding behavior.
01:02:46.000And part of the reason for that is that women are an extraordinarily valuable reproductive resource.
01:03:12.000And I apologize for oversimplifying in that way, but the daughter getting pregnant, yes, at the wrong time with the wrong guy.
01:03:24.000Well, at the wrong time, specifically, when they're young, right?
01:03:28.000When you're imposing curfews, you're assuming that this is not an adult, right?
01:03:33.000So you don't want your child to get pregnant, so you're imposing curfews and keeping an eye on them also because you understand men.
01:03:41.000So you understand, like, the more they're around men, the later it is at night, or males, I should say, the more chance they have of running into trouble.
01:04:02.000And so what this does is it kind of highlights what we call the difference between proximate explanations and ultimate explanations.
01:04:13.000So there's the psychology That's driving this, which is exactly as you describe, and there's the evolutionary forces that have created that psychology.
01:05:36.000Yeah, bartering and alliance formation.
01:05:39.000And they're much more valuable in that sense than they are for sons.
01:05:45.000Here's something that I really wanted to talk to you about today because I think it's a new thing in the world and it is social media and social media's effect on relationships and the way people are marketing themselves because you know I have seen friends that have these relationships with people that they Their significant other
01:06:16.000has an Instagram page, for example, where every single pose is sexually suggestive.
01:06:24.000They're in a committed relationship, but every single pose is them of their ass, their butt in the air, their arched back, they're covered in sweat.
01:06:52.000Very clear signal that you're available and that you are You're you're looking for a romantic partner In fact, you're horny and you're you're ready and you're willing and there's not even anybody there with you, right?
01:07:08.000Which is kind of wild What I would imagine that would put a tremendous strain on a committed relationship If you are committed to someone, and then you're like, well, let me see what my wife is up to.
01:07:21.000And you go to her Instagram page, like, Jesus Christ, woman.
01:07:24.000Like, where every day, she's essentially throwing the bat signal up for more men.
01:07:53.000There's some sort of a lack of attention, a fundamental lack of attention in the development cycle that's led them to desire an exorbitant amount of male attention as they get older.
01:08:07.000It's almost like their cycle was interrupted as they were young.
01:08:15.000Whether their father wasn't around, Or their father was abusive, either physically or sexually, like whatever it is that's causing them to desire an exorbitant amount of male attention.
01:08:58.000So they're making way more than they've ever made in their life doing this.
01:09:03.000But yet they're in a committed relationship with the man.
01:09:06.000And so the man has to deal with the fact that not only is his woman out there, like, on display, but she's signaling that she's desiring better mates.
01:09:45.000You feel confident in a stable relationship?
01:09:49.000There's anxious attached, which is you're always worried your partner is going to leave you or cheat on you, or maybe you have a history of partners leaving you or cheating on you.
01:10:00.000And then there's what's called ambivalent attachment style, where there are people, both men and women, who they don't really...
01:10:10.000Want an intimate romantic relationship.
01:10:14.000If someone gets too close, they kind of push them away.
01:10:19.000And in studies of infidelity, the securely attached have the lowest rates of infidelity, and my guess probably the lowest rates of these Instagram posts or OnlyFans vocations.
01:10:35.000And then the second Is the anxious attached, but the most is in terms of infidelity rate is the avoidant attachment style.
01:10:47.000And so women with that avoidant attachment style are also likely to be high on narcissism and probably engage in that behavior.
01:11:23.000Of the other person and of intimacy, psychological intimacy with that other person.
01:11:29.000And so these are, you know, women who are more likely to engage in short-term mating and more likely to have affairs if they're in a long-term maidship.
01:11:42.000Now, has there been studies done on those type of people?
01:11:45.000Is that because those women have experienced abusive relationships in the past?
01:12:01.000Yeah, it's a good question and we don't know.
01:13:00.000If your parents were never around or they weren't reliable or they were shitty to you, yeah.
01:13:05.000The reason I just want to add a note of...
01:13:10.000An asterisk by that is that, yeah, there is a correlation.
01:13:14.000They do find a correlation between the infant attachment style and the later adult attachment style.
01:13:19.000But parents are also contributing genes as well as environment.
01:13:24.000And so it might be that the parents who themselves are kind of inconsistent, not there for the kids or whatever, and are off maybe having affairs on their own or whatever, transmit Genes to their children that dispose them toward those styles as well as an environment.
01:13:45.000And so studies haven't been done to try to disentangle the genetic effects versus these parental effects on attachment style.
01:13:58.000If you were going to study social media and its impact on dating strategies, one of the things that would be really fascinating is the amount of options.
01:14:12.000Like, if you're a single person today and you have an Instagram page where you're trying to present yourself as an attractive mate, One of the weirder things today is manipulation, right?
01:14:25.000Like, people are using filters, and they're using these deceptive tactics that change the shape of their body, change the shape of their face, the tone of their skin.
01:14:36.000I mean, it's really pretty extraordinary when you see what can be done with these filters.
01:14:41.000And so there's that, which is to signal to others that they're more attractive than they actually are physically.
01:14:50.000Then there's, you know, virtue signaling in the form of what they write in their posts, you know, whether they're proclaiming their support for climate change or Black Lives Matter or whatever.
01:15:05.000They're trying to put themselves into a moral high ground position.
01:15:10.000And then there's the sexually suggestive poses that go along with that.
01:15:14.000And hilariously enough, oftentimes you have all three of those things combined.
01:15:19.000Like they're trying to go for the coup de bras.
01:15:22.000They're in their underwear with their butt up in the air talking about social issues while they're using a filter.
01:15:33.000Just this platform, whichever one you're talking about, whether it's TikTok or Instagram or whatever, these platforms are fertile breeding grounds for all sorts of pathologies.
01:15:50.000Narcissism, sociopathy, all sorts of bizarre behavioral characteristics that are encouraged by these social media applications and the impact that it has on people.
01:16:04.000Oftentimes, I'll just randomly scroll through my search feed...
01:16:30.000Like, working at the post office has ever gotten 4 million Instagrams.
01:16:35.000But if you have a nice butt and you work out a lot and you take pictures of yourself, you can get 4 million followers.
01:16:42.000And so then you have direct messages from who knows how many thousands of men who are trying to hook up with this person and link up with them.
01:17:13.000I mean, I think that, I mean, the question you raise is really a big and important question.
01:17:21.000And to put it in an evolutionary context is, ancestrally, you would have been exposed To maybe a few dozen potential mates in your lifetime.
01:17:36.000There was very limited geographic mobility.
01:17:38.000You couldn't say, I'm going to up and move to a different town.
01:17:41.000You were basically limited by how far you could walk.
01:17:45.000So we were exposed to very, very few people.
01:17:48.000And so now in this weird modern environment, we have, as you mentioned, Instagram only fans, online dating apps, pornography is another one, which is massively consumed heavily by men.
01:18:04.000And so these inputs into our mating psychology, we don't know fully what they are at this point.
01:18:13.000There hasn't been long enough and we don't know, there haven't been enough studies.
01:18:17.000But there have been some studies that show, for example, that men who are exposed repeatedly to images like the ones you describe on Instagram, repeatedly exposed to images of attractive and sexually attractive women,
01:18:34.000Decrease their commitment to their regular partner if they're in a regular mateship.
01:18:39.000And so it actually has the effect of undermining long-term committed relationships.
01:18:46.000It also, I think, gives people the illusion that Sometimes it's called, you know, if you talk about single people, it's called decision paralysis, where, you know, like they show this in stores like where they,
01:19:02.000if you present six jams and say you taste six jams and people go, oh, I like this one, they buy a jar of jam.
01:19:09.000You present 24 samples of jams, people go, I can't decide, I'm not going to buy anything.
01:19:14.000And I think a similar thing is happening in the mating domain is where people see these Thousands or millions of potential mates out there or think that there are potential mates out there.
01:19:26.000And I think it's caused a decrease in committed relationships.
01:19:32.000And we know – I can't definitively trace it to that, but we know – Very certainly that there has been a diminution of relationships, romantic relationships, marriage, offspring production,
01:19:49.000where a lot of people are sitting in front of their screen getting presumably some of their needs met through these online forums rather than in real life.
01:20:02.000And I think that these are likely to have fairly detrimental and possibly catastrophic effects long term.
01:20:12.000You know, because even things like, you know, from a male perspective, What it means if you're spending all your time in front of a computer screen looking at Instagram photos of women with butts in the air or pornography, you're not out there interacting with real women in real life,
01:20:30.000and so you're not developing the kinds of social skills you need to attract a real woman in real life.
01:20:38.000And then also, I think the other thing that this creates is different forms of anxiety.
01:20:45.000So we know, for example, that a lot of the men suffer from dating anxiety.
01:20:50.000You know, that is, they fear rejection, and so they don't want to approach women.
01:20:55.000So it actually is the narcissists and the psychopaths who don't fear any rejection.
01:21:12.000And then furthermore, even, and this is a speculation, but...
01:21:16.000Watching porn I think can have a detrimental effect on both women and men in the following sense of is that we are a species that engages in social comparison.
01:21:28.000It's one of the things that we do and I guess maybe when you were talking about envy earlier of envy of other people's accomplishments, that's one facet of that.
01:21:38.000We compare ourselves to others and It's a human nature kind of thing.
01:21:43.000How well am I doing compared to my neighbor or whatever?
01:21:50.000But if people are comparing themselves to what they're seeing on porn, then from a woman's perspective, she thinks, well, men are expecting me to be a sexual acrobat in real life.
01:23:02.000Eight inches compared to the average guy.
01:23:05.000So guys, you can imagine, looking at this, say, well, I'm going to feel inadequate, you know, compared to this guy.
01:23:13.000And maybe women expect this kind of performance and this level of genital size and are going to be intimidated.
01:23:23.000And so I think that's going to create What I would call sexual anxiety.
01:23:28.000So even if they can overcome the dating anxiety, they might have anxiety about turning the dating relationship into a sexual encounter where they might feel, due to watching porn, sexually inadequate or unsure of their abilities.
01:23:43.000And so these things we know, anxiety tends to cause people to avoid the things that they're anxious about, which of course is the worst thing that you can do.
01:23:53.000I mean, we know One of the most effective therapies for anxiety problems is cognitive behavior therapy and causes people both to psychologically reframe the issue but also expose themselves to the things they're afraid of.
01:24:09.000If you have snake phobia, the best way to conquer that is you do the successive approximations and then you get to the point where you actually can handle the snake and you don't feel fear.
01:24:21.000And these specific types of anxiety, they're very curable.
01:24:26.000I mean, there are some things that we can't cure, like schizophrenia.
01:24:30.000We can deal with symptoms, but we can't cure them.
01:24:34.000But the specific anxieties, they've had very good success.
01:24:39.000But the worst thing you can do is avoid the things you're afraid of.
01:24:42.000And so I think that these media exposures like Instagram and pornography and even online dating sites where the similar forms of deception, you mentioned, you know, the...
01:24:54.000The filters and the images that are presented that are totally unrepresentative of what the person looks like, they occur rampantly on online dating sites as well.
01:25:05.000The other thing about online dating sites, and I've often thought about this with single people, is the amount of options that you have.
01:25:15.000It's so extraordinary that it's probably very difficult to get to truly know someone And just get to know them as an individual because you're constantly fielding all of these requests from other people.
01:25:28.000And so if someone just annoys you even slightly, you're like, ugh, on to the next.
01:25:33.000And you're just swiping back and forth and trying to find someone else.
01:25:37.000On one hand, I would say it's better because you have more options.
01:25:44.000So there's the potential of finding that one person who really is A perfect mate for you.
01:25:50.000But on the other hand, the idea that you would just abandon someone at the slightest bad joke or the slightest weird tick, weird thing to do, oh, this guy's not for me.
01:26:05.000I have 1,400 requests coming in on my dating app.
01:26:09.000Why would I spend some time with this guy?
01:26:12.000You know, who only makes X amount of money when this guy makes twice as much and this guy looks like he's taller and this guy has a better car and this guy, look at his house.
01:26:22.000This guy's standing in front of his driveway of this gorgeous house.
01:26:26.000That kind of stuff is so unusual for a human being who's a single person in the dating world To have this kind of data, this kind of input,
01:26:41.000and this kind of stimuli coming your way.
01:26:43.000There's really never been anything like that.
01:26:46.000I am very curious, as a father of daughters and as a man who grew up without the internet, I can't imagine what it's like for someone to try to navigate this world because no one's done it before.
01:27:03.000It's not like anyone successfully become an Instagram hoe and then went on to raise families and showed you it has zero impact on the happiness of my relationship.
01:27:15.000There's never been anybody like you before.
01:27:18.000There's never been a person who has 7 million Instagram followers just because they have a nice ass.
01:27:39.000And it's what evolutionists would call a mismatch.
01:27:42.000There's this phenomenal mismatch between ancestral and modern environments that, as you point out, I think has...
01:27:50.000Some positive effects, like, you know, now you can meet someone, maybe there's someone, we live in Austin, Texas, but maybe there's someone in San Antonio or Dallas or whatever that would be the perfect mate for us.
01:28:02.000And then we have that accessible now where we wouldn't in the past.
01:28:06.000But at the same time, then, it produces this decision paralysis and the psychological stance that, you know, there's always someone a little bit better out there.
01:28:17.000Which is why when people ask me for advice, and I'm not actually, I'm basically a research psychologist, so I'm not primarily in the advice-giving business, but I say, meet the person in real life.
01:28:29.000Don't stop DMing or messaging them week after week after week, because you have to meet the person in real life before you really know.
01:28:40.000And you have to meet them, I would imagine, more than one time before their act gets tired.
01:28:47.000Well, yeah, not only that, many of the qualities that are critical for long-term mating success, you can't assess in one snapshot, you know, like that.
01:29:03.000You know, are they moody or are they resilient?
01:29:07.000Many of these things require exposure over a long period of time and usually in different situations.
01:29:14.000That's why one other random piece of advice which everyone should take with a grain of salt is I sometimes encourage people, if they're getting serious about someone, to go on vacation.
01:29:26.000Like go to a foreign country where they don't know anybody, where maybe even they don't speak the language, And so they're kind of forced to experience some stresses, some ambiguity, some novelty, and then you can get a better gauge of how the person responds to the stress and to the novelty,
01:29:47.000as opposed to if you're just always in a meeting at Cafe Medici.
01:30:20.000I mean, Guatemala, as you probably know, there's like extreme economic inequality there, and it's...
01:30:29.000As a consequence I think produce some high crime rates and people have you know zero money and they're kind of forced into Great place to test out a new relationship.
01:30:50.000That's one thing women select on is not only the physical qualities, is he going to be a good protector, but also is he psychologically, does he have courage and Right.
01:31:26.000There's a lot of weird cultural influences on the denial of these basic premises that you're discussing about why women are attracted to certain men and men are attracted to certain women.
01:31:39.000That's what's disturbing to me is this sort of wholesale acceptance of this denial where we're We're deciding that there is no difference and that these differences are cultural.
01:31:58.000These differences are purely brought upon by the patriarchal society to try to suppress Members of the opposite sex.
01:32:13.000And even patriarchy is an interesting one that I've written about in my most recent book.
01:32:24.000Where it's kind of bizarre because – and people won't like this either.
01:32:30.000So talking about scientifically uncomfortable truths.
01:32:34.000So one is that if you ask the question, historically it has been true that men have – more than women – tended to control resources and power.
01:32:45.000And that's been true of most cultures throughout history as far as we know.
01:32:53.000Well, if you go back to sexual selection theory that we were talking about earlier, part of the causal chain boils down to women's mate preferences.
01:33:03.000So women preferentially select men who have the ability and willingness to acquire and control resources.
01:33:12.000And so that in turn selects for men who have the motivation To do precisely those things.
01:33:19.000And so, if you ask the question, what is the origin of this thing we call patriarchy, which is usually invoked when you say, what do you mean by patriarchy?
01:33:27.000You go, I don't know, everyone knows what it means.
01:33:31.000So, one aspect of it is resource control.
01:33:35.000But of course, there are other aspects of it.
01:33:38.000And so it may be disturbing to some to recognize that women's mate preferences are part of the causal chain that led to an outcome that they don't like in the current time.
01:33:51.000But to your point, you know, I mean, I'm a scientist.
01:34:04.000Abhorrent the infusion of ideology into the science.
01:34:10.000And this is indeed happening, as you allude to, it's happening more and more.
01:34:19.000I'm hoping that there will be a swing back in the other direction when people will say, hey, look, no, wait, let's keep ideology out of this.
01:34:27.000Because it doesn't have a belonging in science.
01:34:31.000Isn't that a recent thing, the injection of ideology into science?
01:34:40.000I think it's always existed in American psychology to some degree, in American social science anyway, which is, you know… What examples have existed before this era?
01:34:52.000Well, and this may not exactly fall in ideology, but… I'm sure.
01:34:57.000Have you had Steve Pinker on your show?
01:35:03.000I've been friends with him for many, many years.
01:35:06.000And his book, The Blank Slate, lays all this out.
01:35:11.000I'll tell you a story kind of about The Blank Slate when I was in graduate school.
01:35:16.000So when I was in graduate school, I had multiple mentors, which is a good thing, something I always recommend to my students.
01:35:23.000But one of these mentors was a woman who her theory is that the reason that you see any sex differences at all when you see them is because socialization.
01:35:35.000So parents dress girls in pink, they dress boys in blue, and that's why you see sex differences.
01:35:41.000They give boys Tonka trucks and baseball bats and they give girls Barbie dolls.
01:35:46.000And she even published in the top journals.
01:35:50.000There was a science documentary literally called The Pinks and the Blues that kind of captures that whole thing.
01:35:56.000And I was skeptical as a graduate student.
01:36:26.000And that's sort of the implicit notion of the blank slate is that humans are just these passive absorbers of whatever happened they happen to be exposed to.
01:36:36.000And so weirdly, I had this mentor who believed in the blank slate and that there were no evolved sex differences, no fundamental cross-culturally universal evolved sex differences.
01:36:47.000And then, you know, here I am many years later Studying precisely that, evolved sex differences, and I would say that The science denialism and the ideological denialism will become increasingly difficult because as you undoubtedly know,
01:37:08.000Joe, there's been a, you know, what's called the replication crisis in the social sciences and also in medicine as well, you know, where people, you know, the payoffs are, you know, you publish high-impact surprising findings and sometimes they don't replicate.
01:37:26.000And so the sex differences that we've been talking about, sex differences in mate preferences, in desire for sexual variety, etc., in motivations for having affairs, these are among the largest,
01:37:42.000most replicable findings in the whole field of psychology.
01:37:47.000You know, most For those of your listeners who are statistically inclined, most effect sizes in psychology are very, very small.
01:37:56.000There's an effect, but it just barely reaches statistical significance and translates into a D statistic of 0.3, 0.25.
01:38:07.000The sex differences that we're talking about are large.
01:38:11.000I can show you a graph You don't even have to run the statistics to see, yes, there's something fundamentally wrong.
01:39:40.000And deviation from those narratives sometimes comes at some peril.
01:39:46.000Yes, very serious social consequences.
01:39:48.000But Joe, let me just give an example of how misguided that ideological stance is for women.
01:39:57.000And this is something I also talk about in my most recent book, sexual harassment.
01:40:03.000So sexual harassment laws are written in a gender-neutral manner of what's called the reasonable person standard.
01:40:16.000The notion is, you know, would a reasonable person view this pattern of conduct, like, say, making lewd jokes, commenting on someone's physical appearance, asking them out in the workplace, making sexual innuendos,
01:41:04.000Okay, and the reason that's important is because there is no generic reasonable person.
01:41:10.000And so we know that in terms of sexual harassment, about 90% of the victims are women, of legitimate sexual harassment are women, and the 10% that are not, they're typically harassed by men.
01:41:25.000So that is, males are the primary perpetrators of sexual harassment, women are the primary victims.
01:41:31.000So when you're saying the 10%, you're talking about a male sexually harassing another male.
01:42:08.000Yeah, or that's that desire for sexual variety, which has negative consequences.
01:42:15.000But so then you go, though, so to the judge and the jury.
01:42:21.000If the judge and jury are composed of reasonable men, The outcome is going to be very different than if they're composed of reasonable women.
01:42:33.000And so this is an example of where adopting a generic reasonable person standard, which implicitly denies that there exist any sex differences, that harms women.
01:42:52.000So if you have a jury of your peers, but your peers happen to only be male, and they're judging whether or not you've been sexually harassed, they might be inclined to deny it.
01:43:05.000This is an extreme case and not representative, but there was a while back a Texas politician that said, if a woman's going to be raped and it's inevitable, she might as well just lie back and enjoy it.
01:43:28.000But now, of course, he got a lot of flack for that.
01:43:30.000But what's astonishing is it also reveals to me this fundamental gap between male and female population.
01:43:39.000Sexual psychology where men don't understand.
01:43:44.000They know that women differ, but they don't sufficiently recalibrate for how different they are.
01:43:52.000And so I think this is actually a generic problem that my lab is focusing on now.
01:43:58.000Some of my graduate students like Will Costello and Becca Hanel and Paola Baca were looking at what we call cross-sex mind reading.
01:44:10.000It's a fascinating area where we are all – you, Joe, me – we're all stuck in the interior of our own psychology.
01:44:19.000That's actually – Russell Brand mentioned this.
01:44:21.000That's all the experience that he has.
01:44:23.000And so when we're trying to figure out what's going on in the minds of someone else, we have to make inferences.
01:44:29.000Now, if those inferences, if we consult, well, how would I feel if I were in that situation?
01:44:35.000Well, maybe that's a good starting point if you're making inferences about your own sex.
01:44:42.000But if you're making inferences about the opposite sex, you're going to be miscalibrated if you use your own intuitions about your own psychology as a basis for that inference.
01:44:53.000And so we know, based on my work and other people's work, that there are indeed systematic biases where men and women are both miscalibrated about what's going on in the other sex's mind.
01:45:08.000This is one of the ways to reduce what you alluded to as this kind of There's an adversarial conflict between the sexes where some women are slamming all men as part of the patriarchy and then there are some men who are slamming all women in misogynistic elements of the manosphere and there's this kind of adversarial stance between the sexes and I think one solution to bridging that is having
01:45:38.000deeper scientific knowledge about really that there are these fundamental sex differences in our mating and sexual psychology and that if you understand those, you'll be in a better position to interact with members of the opposite sex and you won't make so many of these errors.
01:45:55.000Interestingly, one way to do that is if you have daughters and sons.
01:46:27.000You have to train them to have discipline and to...
01:46:32.000Understand testosterone and understand their urges and not react violently and understand your frontal lobe doesn't fully form until you're 25 years old.
01:46:41.000You're going to make some shitty decisions.
01:47:06.000But I want to get back to this because this is what I think is so important.
01:47:09.000I don't see a path with today's current cultural climate Where people are going to accept the scientific differences between the sexes.
01:47:20.000Because it's moving in a general direction of denial of that.
01:47:24.000And not just denial of it in terms of their mating strategies, but also their physical capabilities, which is leading to transgender athletes competing as biological women or competing against biological women.
01:47:40.000That's a part of this ideology, which is a willful ignorance of the actual basic biological differences between men and women.
01:47:52.000The psychological differences between men and women and the biological differences between men and women.
01:47:57.000And there's a celebrating of ignoring those things.
01:48:00.000Not just ignoring those things but of deciding to believe a set of ideas that has no basis in science or fact and in fact can be refuted by science and facts.
01:48:17.000I guess my hope is that this is a transient phase and that this infusion of that ideology into sex difference denialism will eventually collapse.
01:48:38.000And I think one way in which it might collapse is with the sort of work that I'm trying to do Which is in part showing how the sex difference denialism harms women.
01:48:50.000So an example, you don't even have to go to psychology to do that.
01:48:56.000And when they introduced Ambien, the generic zolpidem, In the medical field, they typically tested these drugs, they don't so much anymore, on men, and they assumed the same thing applies to women.
01:49:12.000And so with Ambien, they were giving exactly the same doses that were appropriate for men to women, and it turns out women are much more sensitive, even correcting for body size, body weight, To Ambien.
01:49:25.000And so it resulted in negative medical outcomes as a consequence of assuming that sexes were identical.
01:49:32.000And same is happening with some other drugs like clonazepam.
01:49:41.000Because a lot of people are espousing this ideology, I think, because they think...
01:49:48.000That any difference, if you find any sex difference, it's going to be used against women, against denying women or discriminating against women.
01:49:56.000I think that's part of what's motivating or animating the ideology.
01:50:01.000Well, why do you think there's that inclination?
01:50:07.000I think part of it has been historical.
01:50:09.000So we've seen – and this has been a fascinating cultural change in our lifetimes where it used to be you go back 30 years and males were dominant in – Almost all fields.
01:50:25.000Among undergraduates, there were more males than females, doctors, lawyers, etc.
01:50:31.000And so there was this view that women were discriminated against and so there was a big movement to open the doors to the workplace and to higher education for women.
01:50:42.000Now what we've seen, and this is really remarkable, is a reversal when it comes to education and increasingly income.
01:50:52.000So, for example, at University of Texas here in Austin, there's a sex ratio imbalance at the undergraduate level.
01:50:59.000It's about 54% women and about 46% men, which may not seem like a huge difference, but it's actually a profound difference when it comes to the mating market.
01:51:12.000And this is happening not just in the United States.
01:51:14.000It's happening in all of Western Europe, as well as South Korea, Japan, etc.
01:51:30.000Well, we know women, personality-wise, are more conscientious than men.
01:51:35.000Men are more likely, they go in through the K through 12 schools.
01:51:39.000Men are more likely to have ADD. They're less likely to be able to sit still and attend to the school or whatever.
01:51:46.000And so these girls get better grades going up.
01:51:50.000And so they're better qualified to get into the elite colleges.
01:51:54.000And so you have more women represented in these colleges and universities.
01:51:59.000And then maybe combined with the sex difference in things like online gaming, where many more males than females get addicted to online gaming and that sort of thing.
01:52:15.000And then online pornography is another one, which I think might have this effect of kind of sapping men's lives.
01:52:24.000Motivation to meet women in real life.
01:52:26.000I think it might sort of take the sexual edge off, possibly.
01:52:32.000Getting back to your issue about all this modern technology that our brains are being bombarded with in the modern environment.
01:52:42.000But we're seeing this true reversal in the educational domain.
01:53:05.000Yeah, he's a wonderful guy, and we've become friends, and our interests turn out to coincide very well, and he's an excellent communicator of science.
01:53:15.000I don't know if you've seen his podcast.
01:53:22.000But anyway, he and I were writing a book on this, and we're at the early stages of it, but we're trying to identify What these big problems are that are occurring in the mating domain.
01:53:32.000And one is that women are getting more educated.
01:53:37.000And as they get educated, they advance to the higher degrees.
01:53:44.000And so they're transitioning toward the latter end of their fertile window.
01:53:48.000And this is another key sex difference Yeah.
01:54:13.000One of the things that I talked to Chris about that I'd love to hear your perspective on is the effect that birth control pills have on women and reproduction and their reproductive strategy and the way it affects how they are attracted to specifically different kinds of men.
01:54:40.000So there's some work that shows that some of it done by Sarah Hill, by the way, a professor at Texas Christian University, a former student of mine, and she's superb.
01:54:51.000She's written a book called Your Brain on Birth Control, which I recommend.
01:54:55.000She would be cool to have on your podcast.
01:54:57.000Yeah, I'd love to talk to her about that.
01:54:59.000That, to me, is a very strange aspect of our society, that we're introducing these endogenous hormones to millions of women on a regular basis, and it's affecting their choices.
01:55:12.000And there's some evidence for that, that women who, let's say, get married or make that commitment decision when they're on birth control and then get off it, all of a sudden find themselves unhappy with their regular relationship.
01:55:27.000As I said, I want to see this work replicated a bit more before I believe it.
01:55:32.000But I think there's clearly something there.
01:55:35.000And Sarah Hill would be the perfect person to talk to about that.
01:55:39.000That's another example of how we're introducing these evolutionarily novel technologies into our system and we don't really know what the collateral effects are.
01:55:53.000When you're talking about the effects of birth control on the choices that you make in a relationship, and that the women, when they get off birth control, that they're no longer interested in their current mate, like,
01:56:08.000what are the characteristics that lead them to be dissatisfied when they get off birth control, that allowed them, when they're on birth control, to be attracted to that person?
01:56:19.000Yeah, I wish I could answer that question, but it's...
01:56:22.000It's been a while since I've read Sarah's book, and so I would defer to her on that.
01:56:31.000But it is one of many things that people have to deal with, particularly women have to deal with, right?
01:56:39.000There was one that they were developing, but it radically reduced testosterone, which I think is going to be very unattractive to men.
01:56:45.000And I have a suspicion that most men are not going to want to take that.
01:56:50.000But the birth control pill for women has had a...
01:56:53.000Very bizarre change in the way women see men or attracted to men, the type of men they're attracted to when they're on that.
01:57:01.000Right, and there's some evidence that these hormonal contraceptives can also influence, in a negative way, sexual desire and orgasmic ability.
01:57:12.000So, again, perhaps collateral damage that no one anticipated.
01:57:19.000Do you think that the differences in the sexes, is that the area of your work that has had the most pushback because of this ideological argument that people have that there is no difference and it's all cultural?
01:58:04.000And You know, your daughters, they're females.
01:58:08.000We're going to put them in a different role.
01:58:09.000And that all sex differences are a product of these, quote, role assignments.
01:58:15.000You know, which is, I think, turned out to be, I think, I guess, it's inherently a blank slate kind of theory that has been pretty soundly refuted.
01:58:29.000By, again, another former student of mine, apologize for keep mentioning former students, but this is David Schmidt, who's at Brunel University, and he's done massive cross-cultural studies and finds that these sex differences are, in fact, larger issues.
01:58:48.000So you go to Norway and Sweden, Denmark, Finland, where there's an even more explicit sort of gender neutral and no sex difference ideology and finds that the sex differences are larger there than in the countries that are supposedly more Gender inegalitarian.
01:59:09.000And so it flatly contradicts the social rule theory because it says, no, you eliminate these – you create gender equality in the culture and the sex differences will disappear.
01:59:33.000It might be, and this is speculation, it might be that in where you have greater freedom for each sex to do what they're naturally inclined to do, then the sex differences emerge more strongly than the natural sex differences.
01:59:52.000No one's really pinned down the why they get larger.
01:59:55.000And so when this argument is presented to people like that woman who believes that these behavior characteristics are just because of roles that you're assigned, how does she respond to that?
02:00:08.000She hasn't so far as far as I'm aware to these data.
02:00:12.000These are data that have come in the last five years or so.
02:00:15.000And they keep, you know, study after study after study.
02:00:18.000And if it was just one study, you could say, okay, I'm going to ignore that.
02:00:21.000But now there's a whole raft of studies that show exactly the same thing.
02:00:25.000So my guess is that the history of science, when it's written, will not look kindly on that.
02:00:32.000But, you know, maybe you've heard this.
02:01:53.000I would imagine that if you're talking about...
02:01:57.000That they would want to find out what is true, what is provable and what should be taught.
02:02:04.000And in this circumstance, I would imagine they would be challenged By their peers and they would say your work is bullshit.
02:02:12.000Like what you're doing is muddying the water and making it far more difficult for people like us who are actually looking at the data objectively and trying to come to a conclusion that's beneficial for our understanding of human beings.
02:02:26.000What you're doing is grifting and we can't have that.
02:02:30.000So that's a great point and I think there are a couple Answers to that and I'll just mention two elements that I think are contributing to that bad outcome.
02:02:41.000One is that These people, and the woman I just mentioned, they're self-replicating.
02:02:48.000So they produce students who then get jobs and espouse the same theories that they do.
02:02:57.000But I think there's even a deeper answer to your question, and that is that I don't think we evolved to be dispassionate scientists who just look at the data and A judge and then change our minds accordingly.
02:03:12.000I think we evolved, and there are some people like Dan Sperber and others who argue this, I think, persuasively, that we evolved to be persuaders.
02:03:22.000We evolved to influence other people, to be manipulators, if you will, and then to use a more negative term on it.
02:03:34.000And that it's almost you have to Get outside of your own psychology to be a dispassionate scientist and say, okay, look, I'm willing to – I'm going to look at the facts and I like to think and maybe I'm self-delusional that I'm one of these people.
02:03:55.000And as I mentioned, I mentioned one that I have changed my mind, which is that dual mating good genes hypothesis where I used to, you know, talk about it.
02:04:04.000This is why women have affairs and the data don't support it now in my view.
02:04:11.000But I think that it requires getting out of our own psychology and And maybe even changing the reward structure, you know, and that's going to be very,
02:04:28.000So, in other words, rewarding people for being willing to accept data that contradicts, you know, their ideology.
02:04:38.000And so, you know, normally, I mean, that's why I think, you know, science is a good, it's a method.
02:04:45.000And it's not a perfect method, but it's a good method in the sense that it's supposed to be self-correcting.
02:04:51.000So if, Joe, you have a theory that proposes X and I have a theory that proposes Y, then other people will get into the fray and independent researchers will do research and then they will discover,
02:05:07.000you know, do the data support Joe or David's theory?
02:05:11.000And And then so there's a self-correcting nature to the science, ideally.
02:05:18.000But that ideal is rarely achieved and it's especially difficult to achieve when it comes to talking about humans.
02:05:28.000If you're talking about Quarks or muons or some details of chemistry or something, people are able to be more dispassionate.
02:05:40.000Also, if you're talking about other species, if you're talking about peacocks, people are willing to be, okay, I can objectively look at peacocks and try to figure out what's going on.
02:05:49.000But when it comes to humans, all bets are off on that.
02:06:22.000Positive, negative, interesting, fascinating, disturbing characteristics of males and females.
02:06:28.000And I think this is very important to study and understand.
02:06:32.000When that hits the wall of ideology and then all of a sudden you're no longer allowed to look at those things because they are sexist.
02:06:43.000Or because they are misogynistic or because they have been labeled in a very certain way and that looking at things and framing things through the eyes of science and just using data becomes problematic and that these people are actually academics who are promoting this idea and that they,
02:08:44.000Well, it's because you're not a grifter.
02:08:46.000But unfortunately, academics encourages grifting in a way that you don't have to exist in the real world.
02:08:56.000And you go from being a student at a university to eventually teaching at a university.
02:09:03.000And you will spend no time In the real world outside of that and then your very existence and everything that you get from validation from your peers and your students,
02:09:19.000it's all based on this grift that you have been taught and are now teaching.
02:09:26.000And that you will argue against empirical reality.
02:09:32.000You will argue against science and data because it does not support your grift and that grift is being supported by a university.
02:09:58.000Yeah, there are some universities, University of Chicago, MIT, there are some universities that are starting to push back against this ideology and get back to the business.
02:10:19.000Reinstating the standardized testing, like SATs and GREs.
02:10:26.000So many universities throughout the country, and this happened very recently, eliminated them.
02:10:32.000And one of the problems with eliminating them is that you cut off one of the primary paths by which lower socioeconomic kids Can advance because you have like kids who grew up in lower SAS groups in poverty and slums or whatever.
02:11:34.000There are at least some signs that there is pushback against this ideology, but maybe I'm being, you know, too rose-colored glasses and maybe I'm overly optimistic about it.
02:11:46.000I like to think that reality kind of has a tether on people's belief systems in the long run, even if they're distorted by the ideology in the short run.
02:11:58.000Well, I tend to think that this The sort of ideology that you're seeing from kids today, it's very infectious and seems like it's a bit of a mind virus.
02:12:11.000And it's something that if you don't espouse to these ideas, if you don't agree with these ideas, you're ostracized from the community.
02:12:21.000And in academic circles, in universities, and with a lot of young people that are trying to establish themselves as being a person of moral high ground, who is doing the right thing, is on the right side of history.
02:12:34.000Like, this is a very compelling narrative that people are going along with.
02:12:39.000And it has to do with gender identity, it has to do with politics, it has to do with their thoughts on the climate change crisis.
02:12:47.000There's so many different factors that are all tied in.
02:12:50.000To this one very specific and very aggressive ideology.
02:12:55.000And I don't see any pushback against it.
02:13:58.000And I went to my chair and I said, look, there's been this ideological shift of sex difference denial.
02:14:04.000I said, but as a professor, I am obligated to teach the science.
02:14:09.000And I said, I'm not going to deviate from that.
02:14:12.000I'm going to be teaching about Sex, biological sex, which has a very clear definition, having to do with size of the gametes, size of the sex cells, where males are the ones with the small ones, females are the ones with the large ones.
02:14:24.000It's one of the true binaries in nature, if you will, from a biological standpoint.
02:14:31.000It's different from identity and gender identity.
02:14:34.000And I said, I'm going to be teaching about this, and I'm going to be teaching about sex differences that exist and that the science supported.
02:14:41.000And I said, but I'm not going to do it.
02:14:43.000Unless I know I have your backing and the backing of the Dean.
02:14:48.000And he assured me, the chair of my department, which I give him great credit for, he assured me that absolutely, because I said, look, the odds of me teaching this stuff, which I've been doing for many years now, the odds of me teaching this stuff and not getting any complaints is about zero,
02:15:05.000given I'm teaching multiple hundreds of people.
02:15:08.000So he said, look, if we get, you know, two, three percent, or, you know, a dozen complaints, or half a dozen, whatever, he said he's totally fine with that, and he's Supports my adherence to the science, you know, without the infusion of ideology.
02:15:22.000So I felt comforted by that, but I wanted to get that assurance, and it may be a reflection of how much the ideology has infected universities that I felt, for the first time in my career, compelled to go to him and say, look, I want your backing on this,
02:15:39.000otherwise I'm not going to teach it, you know, and I can teach something else.
02:15:45.000That is interesting when you consider how long you've been teaching.
02:16:01.000Right, and that's what I thought universities were supposed to be about.
02:16:04.000Not only facts, but the free exchange of ideas.
02:16:09.000That there aren't ideas that can't be discussed openly and rationally.
02:16:18.000I thought that's what universities were all about.
02:16:20.000Have you had notable exchanges with students where they confronted you and did not believe that what you're saying was true or should be taught?
02:16:49.000But, you know, I'm pretty careful in what I teach.
02:16:53.000And I'm pretty careful also to label...
02:17:09.000Well, it's so unfortunate there is pushback against it because all this data and all this science is really fascinating.
02:17:16.000It's so interesting to see because, you know, of course we like to think of ourselves as something different than animals.
02:17:23.000We like to think of ourselves as a higher, more evolved being.
02:17:26.000But when you see the evolutionary influences and the reasons why people who are male tend to do this and females tend to do that and the differences in their mating strategies,
02:18:00.000But, you know, on the positive side, and maybe this is my overly optimistic nature, I mean, I do feel blessed in a certain way that, you know, I get to do this for a living.
02:18:10.000I get to study these fascinating topics for a living and to teach them and to...
02:18:17.000I developed my program of research in this domain and there are, throughout history, very few societies that could support people who were able to do this.
02:18:27.000But I think it's so important because the things that I'm studying are so central because we are a sexually reproducing species.
02:18:35.000And what that means is everything we do has to ultimately go through this We're the bottleneck of sex and reproduction.
02:18:45.000Not that reproduction is necessarily a goal or a conscious goal that we have, but we are the end results of a long and unbroken chain of ancestors, each of whom succeeded In the mating game.
02:18:59.000They succeeded in selecting a fertile partner, in attracting that fertile partner, in being reciprocally chosen by that partner, in having successful sex with that partner, and since we're a high parental investment species, typically investing heavily in the offspring so that they survive.
02:19:17.000And as descendants of this chain of successful ancestors, we are the beneficiaries.
02:19:24.000We've inherited the adaptations that led to their success.
02:19:28.000And to me, it's a fascinating scientific endeavor to try to uncover those dimensions of human nature that are absolutely critical.
02:20:04.000You know, even if you decide I'm going to opt out of the mating market and be single for the rest of my life, I mean, mating affects everybody.
02:20:12.000Now, you've written so many different books on mating.
02:20:16.000The Dangerous Passion, Why Jealousy is as Necessary as Love and Sex.
02:20:22.000Yes, that one focuses on jealousy and infidelity.
02:20:26.000Well, yeah, for the reason that I mentioned before of paternity uncertainty, that unless men or ancestors were able to solve that problem, or at least...
02:20:38.000To solve it to a reasonable degree, we wouldn't have the mating system we would have, which is, you know, we have a long-term, pair-bonded, high-investment mating strategy.
02:20:49.000That strategy would not exist if that problem had not been solved, and jealousy has been a key to solving that.
02:22:18.000Yeah, and women as well as men have it.
02:22:20.000Now, men have to solve the paternity uncertainty problem, but women have to solve the problem of mate retention that is keeping a guy...
02:22:30.000Investing in her and her children over the long term as opposed to him deciding I'm going to do mate switching and go off with thy neighbor's wife.
02:22:50.000That's why I call it the dangerous passion, the title of the book.
02:22:55.000And it's psychologically unpleasant, but it's kind of analogous to pain, physical pain.
02:23:00.000Physical pain is extremely unpleasant to experience, but without it, we would expose our bodies to damaging situations.
02:23:11.000We keep putting our hand on the hot stove or getting stabbed by sharp objects, etc.
02:23:17.000And so painful emotions are not necessarily maladaptive emotions.
02:23:23.000And I would put jealousy as one of those.
02:23:27.000That's why it's interesting when you just think about all the things that motivate people and all the various ticks and weird aspects of our psychology that it's really all these systems that have evolved over time to ensure reproductive success and ensure a good collection of resources and that you can provide and you stay safe.
02:23:55.000We just think of it as being a person.
02:23:57.000But when you break it down to the core elements and the motivations for these things and the evolutionary advantages of these things, it's so interesting to think of us as almost like a piece of code.
02:24:35.000We not just are deeply in denial, but we also find other people who agree with that denial so that we can form off these little echo chambers and argue against the data.
02:24:49.000Well, I think part of that – we haven't talked about this dimension, but part of it is I think we're a coalitional species.
02:24:58.000That is, we want tribes and we want our tribes to predominate or dominate.
02:25:07.000We want our tribes to increase in number.
02:25:10.000That's why people are always trying to recruit people to their tribe.
02:25:13.000Which is often, or at least sometimes, an ideologically based tribe.
02:25:20.000And that's why I say that we're coalitional animals designed to influence and manipulate and persuade others more than we are dispassionate scientists.
02:25:34.000Now, I think that there are some features of our psychology that are scientific.
02:25:39.000Like if you were oblivious, if you failed to keep track of You know, where the berries were blooming or where the game was available for hunting, I mean, you would have been in bad shape.
02:25:51.000You know, there is a reality out there that we had to keep track of.
02:25:55.000But with these social manipulations, I don't know, for some reason it can become untethered from reality.
02:26:04.000Yeah, that is – well, I guess it's just we don't want to admit the reality sometimes for whatever reason because if it doesn't align with whatever belief system you have,
02:26:19.000whatever view you have of yourself, whatever this – I mean just – Just in terms of physical equality, it doesn't align.
02:26:28.000The reality of life is that it's not necessarily that fair.
02:26:33.000There's some people that have a much better genetic role of the dice than you, and there's some people that are born into an extraordinary circumstance, and there's some people that are very feminine, and there's some people that are very masculine.
02:26:45.000And the idea that this is sort of like even playing field is just preposterous.
02:26:53.000You know, in the history of science, there has been a denial of the science in many fields.
02:26:59.000So even like, you know, as you know, the notion that the earth was the center of the universe, that the earth was flat, you know, there have been these kind of mistaken views that people clung to.
02:27:12.000But as I said, when it comes to humans and our psychology, there's somehow that gets ramped up exponentially.
02:27:27.000So I published an article actually talking a little bit about the influence of coalitional psychology on affecting people's scientific beliefs.
02:27:38.000Because I did a study of psychologists.
02:27:41.000This is with someone you also had on a while back, Bill von Hippel.
02:27:47.000He's down in Australia now, but he and I published this article where we studied about 400 social psychologists as part of an elite psychology organization.
02:27:57.000And we asked them, like, what if we discovered that Men were better at X than women, like say better at spatial rotation ability.
02:28:07.000Or what if we discovered that women were better than men?
02:28:10.000And people wrote that they were comfortable, much more comfortable when women were superior to men.
02:28:19.000And even gave kind of contradictory statements and said – and even self-reflective some of them said like I find it odd that I find The notion that women are superior to men, say, at verbal ability, much more comfortable than that the men are superior to women at spatial rotation ability.
02:28:36.000And this seems odd in my own psychology.
02:28:39.000So they were having themselves trouble kind of reconciling.
02:28:44.000But also we asked them questions like, well, would it be...
02:28:48.000Good or bad if it turned out that there were sex differences in domains X, Y, or Z. And a lot of them said, well, it would really be bad.
02:28:56.000It would be horrible for humanity if somehow these sex differences turned out to exist.
02:29:09.000And I can see if I want to give people the benefit of the doubt, historically there was discrimination against women.
02:29:20.000And I know this because I've been friends with many women in academia.
02:29:24.000And early on in my career, I had a good friend who – she was at the same career stage as me.
02:29:28.000We were both assistant professors at Harvard.
02:29:31.000And then she went on to another job and I went on to another job.
02:29:34.000And she said that – she told me this story about her.
02:29:38.000The chair of her department told her, look, I'm giving you a lower pay raise than a guy who's equally qualified in the department because he has a family and they're on a single – You know, income, whereas you have a husband who also works,
02:29:54.000and so I'm giving you a lower pay raise.
02:29:55.000Well, that's discrimination based on sex.
02:29:58.000She should not be discriminated against salaries.
02:30:01.000And so there has been at least some history of discrimination against women on grounds like that and beliefs that women were inferior to men in certain domains.
02:30:15.000And so I think part of the motivation for the sex difference denial is that history.
02:30:21.000And I think getting back to the pushback notion, I think that there are younger women, and I see this, who are pushing back against this notion.
02:30:30.000They're saying, well, yeah, this is the view.
02:30:32.000This is our mothers and grandmothers experience this, but we're not experiencing this kind of discrimination.
02:30:37.000So those battles no longer need to be fought.
02:32:02.000So mating is, you can run, but you can't hide from mating.
02:32:06.000It affects just about everything that humans do.
02:32:09.000And if I thank you for mentioning my books, Joe, if I were to alert your listeners to one, I would say the first one to start with would be The Evolution of Desire, because that gives a broad overview of human mating strategies.
02:32:22.000Strategies of Human Mating, David M. Buss, it's available.
02:32:33.000I didn't do it because, I don't know, I don't think my voice is that good.
02:32:36.000They gave me the option to, but when I listened to some professional readers, I thought, actually, they're doing a better job than I am, so I ceded that to them.
02:32:47.000But those books are available, and it's really fun to talk to, and I really appreciate what you're doing, because I think, especially in this confusing day and age, It's very important to hear the actual science and the actual data behind these things.