The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 235. Evolution, Sex & Desire ｜ David Buss

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00:00:51.040 Welcome to episode 235 of the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.

00:00:59.060 I'm Mikayla Peterson, currently backstage in Colorado Springs.

00:01:03.560 In this episode, Dr. David Buss and Dad discuss David's groundbreaking work in the field of evolutionary psychology.

00:01:12.020 Dr. David Buss is a professor of psychology at the University of Texas in Austin, and he's also taught at Harvard.

00:01:18.560 He's considered the world's leading expert on human mating strategies, and is one of the founders of the field of evolutionary psychology.

00:01:27.120 His books include The Evolution of Desire, Strategies of Human Mating, The Dangerous Passion, Why Jealousy is as Necessary as Love and Sex,

00:01:37.160 Why Women Have Sex, and The Murderer Next Door, Why the Mind is Designed to Kill. 1.00

00:01:43.780 They delved into topics like women's mating preferences, dominance hierarchies, manifestations of aggression in men and women, 0.96

00:01:52.680 what makes us attractive, emotional regulation and how it relates to status, the dark triad of personality, inherent inequality, and a lot more.

00:02:01.640 As always, if you're tired of hearing me read ads, visit jordanbpeterson.supercast.com to sign up for the ad-free version of the podcast, plus other perks.

00:02:13.940 It works on all major platforms, and it's just $10 a month.

00:02:17.340 Again, that's only at jordanbpeterson.supercast.com.

00:02:20.900 I hope you enjoy this episode.

00:02:22.260 Hello, everybody.

00:02:42.420 I'm very pleased today to have as my guest Dr. David Buss, who's been a real influence on my thinking, I think perhaps more than any other living psychologist I respect and have learned from what he's done.

00:02:56.200 David Buss is a professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin.

00:03:00.520 He previously taught at Harvard and at the University of Michigan.

00:03:03.680 He's considered the world's leading scientific expert on strategies of human mating, of all the interesting things, and is one of the founders of the field of evolutionary psychology.

00:03:14.960 His many books include The Evolution of Desire, Strategies of Human Mating, Evolutionary Psychology, The New Science of the Mind, The Dangerous Passion,

00:03:24.640 Why Jealousy is as Necessary as Love and Sex, The Murderer Next Door, Why the Mind is Designed to Kill, and Why Women Have Sex. 1.00

00:03:33.680 Which you'd think would definitely be a bestseller.

00:03:36.500 His new book, When Men Behave Badly, The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment and Assault, was published in 2021, and it uncovers the evolutionary roots of conflict between the sexes.

00:03:49.760 Dr. Buss has more than 300 scientific publications, and just to give those of you who are listening some sense of what that means,

00:03:57.280 you can get a PhD from a pretty top-rated research institution in psychology with three publications, a thesis made of three publications,

00:04:07.200 and so to have 300 publications is in some sense the equivalent of 100 PhDs.

00:04:12.360 So that's worth thinking about for a while.

00:04:15.460 In 2019, he was cited as one of the 50 most influential living psychologists in the world.

00:04:20.940 So I'm very pleased that you agreed to talk with me today about these contentious topics,

00:04:26.060 and I would like to restate what I said earlier, which is your work has been very influential.

00:04:33.440 As far as I'm concerned, I've really liked reading everything you've done for the last 20 years.

00:04:38.140 I haven't read all of it, but I've read lots of it.

00:04:40.520 Well, thank you.

00:04:42.160 It's my pleasure to be talking to you.

00:04:45.000 I've been reading your work for some time and have been looking forward to this conversation for a long time.

00:04:51.560 So maybe you could start by telling everyone, telling me,

00:04:55.920 why did you get interested in evolutionary psychology per se?

00:04:59.720 How did that come about and when?

00:05:01.100 Because you were one of the founders of this field, which is a burgeoning field and an important one,

00:05:05.900 tying psychology to evolutionary biology, a crucial thing to do.

00:05:10.800 Yes.

00:05:11.060 So, well, basically, when I started my academic career, there was no such thing as evolutionary psychology.

00:05:18.380 And I was trained in personality psychology at UC Berkeley.

00:05:23.940 But what I was interested in, and the reason that I got into personality psychology,

00:05:27.740 was I was interested in human nature.

00:05:31.360 You know, what motivates people?

00:05:33.460 What are the goals towards which people aspire and seek?

00:05:37.100 What gets people out of bed in the morning?

00:05:38.780 What makes people tick?

00:05:39.800 You know, what is human nature made of?

00:05:42.820 And when I got into the field of personality, I went through all the standard theories,

00:05:49.220 Freud, Jung, Kelly, Maslow, you know, you know, the list.

00:05:54.360 And all or many seem to have some intuitive appeal, but none seem to be grounded in a foundation,

00:06:03.520 in a solid scientific foundation.

00:06:05.720 And that's really what ultimately led me to evolutionary theory, that is to try to identify what are the causal processes that created human nature,

00:06:15.340 whatever that nature may be.

00:06:17.000 Yeah, well, even the more biologically oriented psychologists, the behaviorists, for example, like Skinner, the people who studied rats,

00:06:27.120 and who did that so carefully, because that's a great tradition, and it really led to the emergence of neuroscience.

00:06:32.300 There was not a lot of evolutionary thinking there, because underlying that behaviorist ethos was the idea that human beings were something like a blank slate,

00:06:39.680 and that almost everything we did was learned.

00:06:42.620 Yes, yeah, indeed.

00:06:44.300 And Skinner, I believe he actually overlapped a bit with him at Harvard.

00:06:49.940 So I was able to actually have a couple conversations with him.

00:06:52.620 And he believed that what evolution had created was simply a couple of domain general learning mechanisms.

00:07:01.960 Classical conditioning, operant conditioning were the ones that he focused on, and he built this whole theory about that.

00:07:07.920 But essentially what to equip humans and rats or pigeons with this blank slate, domain general learning mechanisms,

00:07:16.760 and then all subsequent action is based on contingencies of reinforcement.

00:07:22.680 And so, you know, but I think even then, even when I was in graduate school, that view struck me as really problematic.

00:07:32.380 For one thing, sex differences, I mean, emerge very early in life.

00:07:37.540 You know, rough and tumble play by age three or so emerges consistently early in development.

00:07:44.600 Sense of humor?

00:07:45.480 Sense of humor, sense of humor.

00:07:47.380 And these things are cross-culturally universal.

00:07:51.020 And so the notion that all of our nature consists just of the contingencies of reinforcement during our lifespan struck me as problematic.

00:08:03.100 And so really that search for a solid scientific foundation for a theory of human nature is what led me to evolutionary theory.

00:08:10.780 And then, of course, reading people like Trivers, Don Simons, George C. Williams, of course, W.D. Hamilton, some of the great evolutionary biologists of the last century led me to the view that I could actually test some evolutionary hypotheses in humans.

00:08:31.840 And at the time that I started, there were almost no empirical tests.

00:08:36.240 And, you know, if you know anything about the kind of Berkeley, Minnesota tradition, a lot of my mentors were in Minnesota, there's a very strong empirical tradition.

00:08:45.900 And so as a psychologist trained in an empirical tradition, you have to test these things.

00:08:50.900 And what I realized is that there were almost no empirical tests of these evolutionary hypotheses.

00:08:57.080 And so that's what led me to that.

00:08:59.760 And some of the most obvious ones were mating.

00:09:02.820 So as a sexually reproducing species, everything has to go through mating.

00:09:07.060 And so if humans don't have pretty interesting and complex psychological adaptations for mating, then we're kind of out of business.

00:09:17.280 So, I mean, survival and mating.

00:09:19.240 But if you're sexually reproducing species, you have to go through the bottleneck of mating.

00:09:23.860 You know, and that is it's not a simple process.

00:09:26.540 Of course, if you're asexual, you know, you don't have to go searching for a mate.

00:09:31.820 But sexually reproducing species, you have to select a mate.

00:09:35.600 You have to attract a mate.

00:09:37.500 In our species, you have to be mutually selected by that mate.

00:09:42.060 And then in our species, of course, we have long-term mating, pair-bonda mating, which is extremely rare in the mammalian world.

00:09:50.460 The male and king, we have something like 5,000 species plus of mammals, and only something like 3% to 5% have anything resembling pair-bonded long-term mating.

00:10:01.760 But humans do have it.

00:10:03.500 It's part, and that's part of our nature.

00:10:07.040 Now, as we get into mating strategies, one of the things that I argue is that long-term mating is not the only mating strategy within the human menu of mating strategies.

00:10:17.340 And we have long-term pair-bonded, but we also have short-term mating, casual sex hookups, as they're now called on college campuses.

00:10:26.100 We have some infidelity rates.

00:10:28.940 So that's kind of a mixed mating strategy, one long-term mate, some short-term sex partners on the side.

00:10:37.160 And then we also do serial mating. 0.76

00:10:39.340 And then if you look across cultures, we have, in Western cultures, a presumptively monogamous mating system, but some cultures have polygynous mating systems, one man, multiple wives, some restricted to four, some don't have any restrictions.

00:10:54.220 And then very, very rarely do you have a polyandrous mating system, less than 1%, where it's one woman, multiple men.

00:11:03.880 So anyway.

00:11:04.520 And do you have any sense of what conditions give rise to that rare exception, that polyandrous system, since it's so uncommon?

00:11:12.280 How is it that it sustains itself?

00:11:14.120 And why isn't that a challenge to the notion of central monogamy, let's say? 0.94

00:11:19.740 Yes, well, the conditions under which it occurs are typically where one man cannot support a whole family.

00:11:29.900 So if there's a large field and one man can't support a wife and children, then it will be two men. 0.64

00:11:39.180 So the polyandrous mating is almost entirely brothers.

00:11:42.200 And that genetic relatedness helps to ease what normally would be a pretty intense, jealous reaction to someone else sharing a sex partner, someone else having sex with your wife.

00:11:57.420 And so why isn't it sufficient to say, like the sort of more modern blank slate theorists might, that patriarchy is a sufficient explanation for the difference in mating strategies across the sexes?

00:12:11.140 And that the reason that polyandry is so uncommon is because women are dominated by men everywhere. 0.53

00:12:17.080 And that's arbitrary and expression of power.

00:12:20.520 It has nothing to do with our central biological tendency.

00:12:23.060 Okay, that's a really interesting question, and I have a couple of different thoughts on it.

00:12:29.080 First of all, the first question is like, what does one mean by patriarchy?

00:12:33.580 And if you get into it, and I've asked people who invoke those sort of explanations, well, what do you mean by patriarchy?

00:12:41.620 And usually that causes them to stumble and mumble around, and they just know, well, patriarchy is though it's self-explanatory.

00:12:47.820 Well, it's not self-explanatory, because if you break it down analytically, you can identify different components.

00:12:55.440 So is it the case that men worldwide tend to have more resources, more economic resources than women on average?

00:13:02.860 Well, the answer is yes.

00:13:04.860 But then even if you take that component of what's called patriarchy, you can ask the question, well, how did it come to pass that across all cultures or nearly all cultures, men on average have more resources?

00:13:16.780 Well, as one biological anthropologist, I think this was Herb DeVore at Harvard, he said men are one long breeding experiment run by women.

00:13:27.140 And, you know, basically one of the things that one of my first studies, the 37 culture study documented, is that women have a universal preference for men with resources.

00:13:38.400 And so that sets up a co-evolutionary process, whereby those men who were chosen as mates tended to be motivated and have the ability and willingness to acquire resources and share.

00:13:51.800 So let me ask you about that specifically.

00:13:54.420 This is a question that I tried to address experimentally at one point, but I couldn't get the experiments organized properly to test this specific hypothesis.

00:14:03.020 Do you know of any research pitting female mate choice in relationship to men against men who have resources versus men who show the traits that allow them to acquire resources, pitting those directly against one another?

00:14:18.100 Yeah, great question. And I'm not aware of any studies that have done that directly.

00:14:23.280 See, I think that and this is I want to talk to you about this in relationship to the dark triad issue, which we'll get into.

00:14:28.480 It seems to me that women use markers of status partly as indicators of available resources because those are useful. 0.97

00:14:36.440 But I don't think women are that uncanny, let's say it's too simple.

00:14:42.880 I think they use the presence of resources as a proxy for the personality and cognitive traits, let's say, including physical health,

00:14:50.380 that would enable a man even stripped of his current set of resources to be highly likely to acquire them in the future.

00:14:57.600 And maybe current resources are a good proxy for that.

00:15:01.140 Yeah, I think it. Yeah.

00:15:02.840 So one issue is that cash economies are relatively recent in our in our human history.

00:15:10.420 I think maybe seven to ten thousand years old or so.

00:15:14.100 And so there you know, so we are able to stockpile economic resources in a way that was is evolutionarily unprecedented due to cash economies.

00:15:24.940 But I think that you're absolutely right that what women tend to look for and this is shows up even in my studies as well is the characteristics that are statistically reliably correlated with resource acquisition,

00:15:38.420 which will be things like intelligence, social status, dependability, athletic prowess.

00:15:47.900 You know, is this guy a good hunter?

00:15:49.420 You know, so you go to a culture like the Aceh of Paraguay and, you know, basically what leads to high status in men is hunting skills.

00:15:59.820 That's like the big main of main effect there.

00:16:03.580 And so and so I think even things like, you know, that I know you've talked about this and you you measure them as some of the big five characteristics,

00:16:13.860 even things like emotional stability and conscientiousness, which we know is linked with hard work and industriousness and achievement in in modern work context likely was true ancestrally as well.

00:16:27.920 You know, so women didn't want a guy who's going to be sitting around in the hammock all day smoking whatever the local, you know, weed or hallucinogen is.

00:16:36.740 You know, she's going to want a guy who has the motivation to get out there and hunt and bring back the bacon, so to speak. 1.00

00:16:45.000 Yeah. And the hunting thing is really interesting when you think about also how much we've abstracted ourselves out of our basic biological niche in some sense, you know,

00:16:54.840 because hunting and getting to the point and hitting the target and aiming right and being specific with words and all of that,

00:17:02.580 that that that kind of goal oriented action, those are all very tightly related as far as I can tell psychologically.

00:17:08.240 And so and then you said something quite early, interesting earlier as well that we didn't comment on.

00:17:15.060 You talked about men as a breeding experiment run by women. 0.95

00:17:18.980 And and this ties into another reason why evolutionary psychology is so important is because we're unbelievably highly sexually selected.

00:17:27.860 And that has to do with women's choosiness. And so maybe maybe we could we could start our discussion of sexual differences and mating strategy with that. 0.99

00:17:36.720 So, first of all, what's the evidence that suggests that women are, in fact, choosier when it comes to sexual partners than men and how much choosier are they? 0.86

00:17:44.760 OK, OK. OK, great question. Well, so maybe first we could just define for listeners what sexual selection theory is,

00:17:52.960 because most people, when they think about evolution, they think of survival of the fittest and that sort of nature rubbing tooth and claw.

00:17:59.980 Yes. And a kind of a randomness, too, which, you know, that it's kind of implicit in the natural selection theory,

00:18:05.220 where sexual selection is anything but random.

00:18:07.820 Yeah, absolutely. So so sexual selection. So if if natural selection, this is oversimplified,

00:18:14.960 but is the evolution of adaptations due to their survival advantage or the survival advantage that accrued to the possessors.

00:18:23.500 So things like fear of snakes, fear of heights, spiders, darkness, strangers and so forth, food preferences,

00:18:30.000 things that led to better survival. Sexual selection deals with the evolution of qualities that lead to mating success.

00:18:36.640 And Darwin identified two causal processes by which mating success could occur.

00:18:42.900 One is same sex competition or intrasexual competition.

00:18:47.120 And the logic there is that whatever he thought about it in terms of contest competition, 0.61

00:18:52.760 where there was a physical battle like two stags locking horns in combat with the victor gaining sexual access to the female loser, 0.93

00:19:01.020 ambling off with a broken antler, dejected with low self-esteem and probably needing some psychotherapy.

00:19:07.280 But the logic was whatever qualities led to success in these same sex battles, whether it be athleticism, strength, agility, cunning or whatever,

00:19:19.420 those qualities get passed on in greater numbers due to the sexual access that the victors accrued.

00:19:25.580 Qualities associated with losing basically bit the evolutionary dust.

00:19:28.860 The second component, so that's intrasexual competition, which actually the logic is more general than Darwin envisioned.

00:19:36.200 So like in our species, as we were alluding to, we often compete for position and status hierarchies.

00:19:43.880 And so we can engage in intrasexual competition without engaging in this physical battle or contest competition.

00:19:52.100 Although I think that the contest competition was also part of human evolutionary history with males.

00:19:58.840 The other component process is basically what Darwin called female choice. 1.00

00:20:05.060 And the logic there is that whatever qualities, if there's some consensus about the qualities that are desired,

00:20:11.340 that men possessing the desired qualities have a mating advantage.

00:20:15.460 They get preferentially chosen.

00:20:16.940 Those lacking the desired qualities basically become incels or involuntarily celibate.

00:20:22.720 They get shunned, banished or ignored.

00:20:26.300 Now, the twist on that, and so I think sexual selection is by far a more interesting process and definitely has occurred with respect to humans.

00:20:37.140 But the twist there is that we have mutual mate choice, at least when it comes to long-term mating,

00:20:43.580 especially, I should say, especially when it comes to long-term mating.

00:20:46.120 And that gets to the issue of Trevor's theory of parental investment, where he said, he asked the question,

00:20:53.760 well, which sex does the choosing, which sex does the competing?

00:20:57.940 And his answer was the sex that invests more in offspring tends to be choosier. 0.76

00:21:04.500 Sex that invests less tends to be more competitive for access to those desirable members of the opposite sex. 0.54

00:21:10.640 But in long-term mating, now we know from our reproductive biology that women have that nine-month pregnancy, 0.98

00:21:18.220 which is obligatory.

00:21:19.560 So women can't say, look, I'm really busy with my career.

00:21:22.840 I really only want to put in three months.

00:21:24.840 It's just part of our reproductive biology to produce one child. 1.00

00:21:29.100 And men can produce that same child through one act of sex. 0.96

00:21:32.820 And so women are, at least when it comes to sex, the choosier sex, the higher investing sex, 1.00

00:21:41.680 in part because the costs of making a bad mating decision are much more severe for women than for men. 0.99

00:21:49.400 Men and women hook up, have sex for one night in the morning. 0.54

00:21:52.780 And they both realize, oh, this is a mistake.

00:21:55.280 I shouldn't have done that.

00:21:56.820 Well, if the woman gets pregnant, then she might be pregnant with a guy who is not going to invest in her offspring. 0.96

00:22:03.760 A guy perhaps is someone that has poor genetic material.

00:22:09.500 It does not have a robust immune system, et cetera.

00:22:13.000 So anyway, so that's a long-winded answer to your question about sexual selection.

00:22:19.800 Go ahead, please.

00:22:21.140 Go ahead.

00:22:21.360 I was just going to say that you asked about the evidence for females being choosier, 1.00

00:22:28.540 and they are choosier primarily in the context of casual sex or short-term sex.

00:22:34.920 So that's where you find the big sex differences.

00:22:36.820 And so one of the classic, and there's a ton of evidence for this.

00:22:41.520 This is a sex difference that I capture in the book under the category of desire for sexual variety.

00:22:48.760 So men have a much greater desire for meaning a variety of sex partners than women do. 0.63

00:22:56.440 And so the choosiness comes in on, I'll just give you one experiment.

00:23:01.160 This is a classic study done by Elaine Halffield and Russell Clark, where they had male and female confederates, which for listeners are members of the experimental team.

00:23:12.740 It doesn't mean people from the South United States, but they had male and female confederates simply walk up to members of the opposite sex on a college campus and say, 1.00

00:23:23.500 Hi, I've been noticing you around campus lately.

00:23:26.740 I find you very attractive.

00:23:28.380 Would you, and they asked them one of three questions, would you go on a date with me tonight?

00:23:32.900 Would you come back to my apartment with me? 1.00

00:23:35.180 Would you have sex with me? 0.99

00:23:36.700 And it was a between groups design. 0.77

00:23:38.120 So they simply recorded the percentage of individuals who agreed to these three different requests.

00:23:42.740 And of the women, about half, about a little over 50% agreed to go out on a date with the guy, 6% agreed to go back to his apartment, 0% agreed to have sex with him.

00:23:54.820 Most women need a little more information about the guy before they're willing to have sex. 1.00

00:24:00.660 Of the men approach, also about 50, by the female confederate, about 50% agreed to go out on the date, 69% agreed to go back to her apartment, and 75% agreed to have sex with her.

00:24:12.200 And so if you talk about choosiness, are you willing to have sex with a total stranger who you've met for 30 seconds, women unwilling to, and in general, men very willing to?

00:24:26.900 And this is a study that's been replicated now in several European studies.

00:24:30.320 Very difficult to do this, as you might imagine, to get this by the IRBs or ethics committees in the United States anyway.

00:24:37.720 I assume it's similar in Canada.

00:24:40.400 Or worse.

00:24:40.780 Or worse, but, you know, the kinds of studies we really want to do are more difficult to do nowadays.

00:24:47.180 But it's been replicated in several Western European countries.

00:24:53.120 And you can get women off of the 0%. 0.90

00:24:56.160 You can get a few percent of the women saying yes if the guy's really, really charming.

00:25:01.500 You know, if he's Brad Pitt or I don't know what the modern equivalent is, Ryan Gosling or one of the, you know, or perhaps a famous rock star.

00:25:11.460 So, but that's one illustration of the answer to your question about, well, what is the evidence for female choosiness? 0.97

00:25:20.560 And the interesting thing, here's, I'll give you one more.

00:25:23.100 So, there are studies that ask, what is the minimum percentile of intelligence that you would accept in a potential partner?

00:25:32.420 So, and, you know, we explain percentiles to people so they understand 99th percentile, first percentile, 50th and so forth.

00:25:40.480 And, and basically for things like a marriage partner, men and women are roughly equal.

00:25:47.660 They both are very exact and they say what they want, like say 65th and 70th percentile in intelligence.

00:25:53.540 Where the sex difference comes up is just a sex partner, a pure sex partner with no investment.

00:26:00.860 Women still maintain, they still want, let's say 60th or 60th plus percentile in intelligence, whereas men drop, you know, to embarrassing levels. 0.93

00:26:10.840 That doesn't really, it becomes irrelevant.

00:26:12.940 The 35th, 40th percentile men go, you know, if she can mumble a little bit, that's fine or even not.

00:26:18.960 So, that's another indication of female choosiness, that is they maintain greater choosiness when it comes to short-term sex and are simply less comfortable with having sex with total strangers or casual sex. 1.00

00:26:37.280 And here's, I'll give you one more now that I'm rambling on and then I'll get to some other interesting issues.

00:26:43.740 This is, this is an item on the sociosexuality inventory that colleagues, Steve Gangestad and Jeff Simpson developed a long time ago.

00:26:53.660 But one of the items is, that's an attitude item.

00:26:56.580 And it says, sex without love is okay.

00:26:59.820 Do you agree with that or disagree with that?

00:27:02.380 And there you get a large sex difference.

00:27:04.660 So, in the seven point scale where four is the midpoint, men average about 5.5.

00:27:10.940 So, they say, yeah, sex without love, yeah, that's okay.

00:27:14.560 Women are about 3.5. 0.99

00:27:17.060 Okay, they're below that midpoint.

00:27:19.560 It's another indication of this sex difference in choosiness. 1.00

00:27:23.940 Do you know if that's modulated by big five trait agreeableness?

00:27:28.760 Oh, that's a great question.

00:27:30.280 I haven't seen any studies that link that.

00:27:33.960 Okay.

00:27:34.580 Big five to that item or the sociosexuality inventory in general.

00:27:40.040 Yeah, well, you'd wonder why, if compassion and empathy might be one of the things driving that and the value that's placed on that as a consequence of being high or low in agreeableness.

00:27:49.380 And that would fit in to some degree with the dark triad work that, because the primary difference there is, we'll talk about the dark triad in a minute, is that the dark triad types are low in agreeableness centrally.

00:27:59.980 It's not the only thing, but that's central.

00:28:02.240 Yes.

00:28:03.180 And that's where there's a big, there's a big sex difference.

00:28:05.680 And so I want to ask you a terminological question.

00:28:09.460 Sure.

00:28:09.700 Okay, so I'm sorry to interrupt, but I just thought we should say a few more words about your question about patriarchy.

00:28:20.020 Yes.

00:28:20.500 Because I thought that was a really interesting question, and there's some interesting complexities associated with that.

00:28:27.980 And so what I started with is that, you know, you have to break it down analytically into precisely what causal process you're invoking.

00:28:37.760 And usually when people invoke it, it's like this mysterious causal force in the ether that somehow comes down and infects people's minds.

00:28:47.660 And they don't get into the question of, well, what are the causal origins of what you're calling patriarchy?

00:28:54.920 You know, and to get to that, you have to get to things like female mate preferences and the co-evolution of those mate preferences with male mating strategies.

00:29:06.600 You know, and part of male mating strategies is to prioritize resource acquisition and clawing their way up the status hierarchy and, you know, selling their grandmother to get ahead. 0.94

00:29:22.960 And studies of, this gets to another sex difference, that women tend to allocate their time, energy, and investment across a wider array of, you know, what we call adaptive problems. 0.98

00:29:35.040 So, you know, women more than men invest in kin. 1.00

00:29:39.980 Even if they're married, they invest more in their in-laws, in their friendships, et cetera.

00:29:46.520 And men, on average, tend to be more monomaniacal by getting ahead.

00:29:51.660 So you could say the most effective long-term strategy for smashing the patriarchy is for women to select low-ranking mates to sleep with. 1.00

00:30:00.680 Yes.

00:30:01.120 I should get in lots of trouble for that.

00:30:04.240 Well, if women changed their mate preferences so that they didn't care about status and resources and those qualities, and you iterated that over enough generations, yeah, it would ultimately change male behavior.

00:30:18.800 So, okay, let, I have a terminological issue that, that was raised to me by one of my graduate students, a very, very intelligent man, and very careful thinker.

00:30:31.100 I had faster graduate students, but I don't think I had any who would worry a problem absolutely to death as much as he would.

00:30:38.420 He always got to the, he was an engineer and is an engineer, and he would really get to the bottom of things, like you did with the patriarchy, at least to some degree.

00:30:46.080 He told me, once I started speaking more public, he said, stop using the term dominance hierarchy or status hierarchy.

00:30:53.880 There's a, there's a political supposition nested inside there that's not helpful.

00:30:58.500 How about competence hierarchy?

00:31:00.540 And I thought, oh, that's real interesting.

00:31:04.000 Okay, so, so that's one issue.

00:31:05.640 Now, I have another question that's teamed with that, that I want to run by you, with regards to sexual selection.

00:31:12.620 So we can say that it's the actions of female selection that have shaped men to a large degree because of the choosiness of women. 1.00

00:31:19.640 But I want to run a counter position by you, you know, so imagine a football team in a small American town, you know, it's kind of an archetypal issue.

00:31:29.060 And the whole town is celebrating the football team and the football team is ranked in terms of competence.

00:31:34.960 And the football team wins a game and all the guys lift the quarterback up on their shoulders because he was the hero of the game.

00:31:41.140 And they march him out of the, the, uh, the, uh, stadium.

00:31:45.540 And so he sleeps with the cheerleaders.

00:31:48.780 And I would say he was elected by the men to sleep with them because if it's not competent, like, I don't, I think the idea that it's competition exactly.

00:31:59.120 Isn't it's not exactly right.

00:32:01.200 And terminology really matters.

00:32:02.800 It's like, because men will organize themselves into groups and those who become elevated in status, don't do it by dominating.

00:32:11.140 You know, my students said, well, you don't get people to wear a choke collar and a chain.

00:32:16.080 It's not dominance.

00:32:17.540 And so, yeah, so, so, so, so, well, that's, uh, I'm so glad that you asked that because, uh, we just did this, the whole subject of status hierarchies and dominance hierarchies, something that we are studying now in my lab.

00:32:30.020 And we just published a paper that confirms precisely the point that you're making where we looked at, um, uh, basically whether status is determined by dominance, which we, uh, which in the literature is sometimes defined as cost infliction.

00:32:47.460 So you have the ability and willingness to inflict costs and, you know, beat up, you know, your rivals or confer benefits, which gets to your point about competence.

00:32:57.700 Um, and what we found is that in our study, this is with Patrick Durkee, a current graduate student of mine who actually just passed his dissertation defense yesterday.

00:33:08.220 So, uh, congratulations, shout out to Patrick, uh, is that what we found is that it is conferring benefits.

00:33:15.360 That is the ability and willingness to confer benefits that led to high status.

00:33:20.940 Okay. So, so I'm going to stop just for one sec, cause I want to add something with regard to our discussion of the patriarchy, because one of the unspoken suppositions of the idea of the patriarchy is that part of the reason that it's bad is because it's dominance and oppression that leads to the formation of these hierarchies.

00:33:40.340 And that's a central claim, but this gets to the, uh, a real alternative to that, which, and so what do you mean by benefit exactly in that context?

00:33:48.920 So, so, so, well, these are, are, um, conferring benefits on either individuals or the group that you're part of.

00:33:57.320 And so the example that you used of the quarterback who, you know, scored the winning touchdown or led the team to victory, he's conferring a large benefit on the coalition of which he's a part.

00:34:08.280 Uh, and so, and we evolved as coalitional species, but the benefits are, are many in number.

00:34:14.180 I mean, they could be, you know, meat from the hunt providing, not just to your family, but also to the group and small group living.

00:34:21.980 They often shared the, uh, spoils of the hunt, um, providing physical protection.

00:34:28.200 Uh, so having the ability, bravery.

00:34:31.080 So the physical, uh, physical ability, the athleticism, but also the courage to offer protection for a potential mate or for members of your coalitions.

00:34:42.220 So there are many, many different types of benefits.

00:34:44.360 I read recently that among, uh, smaller groups that are dependent on hunting, that in the male groups where hunting takes place, one of the most common characteristics of the hunters with more prowess is they're willing to be self-sacrificing in their food choice after they kill something.

00:35:03.900 And so the men are, have status conferred on them.

00:35:07.760 Well, they were successful hunters, but if they can be successful hunters and give someone else who was there a bigger share than they get, even though they did the hunting, that's a way of moving up in status.

00:35:18.840 And that kind of behavior is very common in men's groups in small societies around the world.

00:35:23.740 Yes.

00:35:24.260 The opposite of narcissism, interestingly enough.

00:35:27.180 Yeah, yeah, no, that, that's right.

00:35:29.040 And that's why, you know, our study of, we had, uh, 240 things that could either increase or decrease your status.

00:35:36.080 Uh, and one of them was precisely that generosity with resources.

00:35:39.880 So you can have all the resources in the world, but if you're stingy and don't share them with, uh, with your group, then you're not going to be rising in status.

00:35:48.660 Uh, but, um, but I just had one, one, um, interesting curly cue to your point about this.

00:35:55.860 Uh, and, and that's, uh, the Aceh that I mentioned earlier, Tim Hill is the, uh, bioanthropologist who's studied the Aceh in the greatest detail.

00:36:05.360 He's lived, lived with them on and off for 25 years or so.

00:36:08.160 And what he, uh, so, so in the Aceh hunting skill, uh, they also share their resources.

00:36:15.360 So the hunt, the large game animal goes to a central distributor.

00:36:19.600 Okay, but, and here's the interesting curly cue. 0.71

00:36:23.000 Sometimes the head hunter will, uh, slice off a prime piece of meat and have a friend or emissary give it to his affair partner before returning to the home base.

00:36:35.400 Uh, and, and so good hunters tend to have more sex partners in, in the Aceh and I suspect in many hunter gather groups.

00:36:44.960 Right, and that would be, that would be a specific exception that would be of sexual benefit to that hunter outside the general sexual benefit that generosity would give him as a consequence of being of high status among the, among his, uh, his cohort.

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00:39:44.100 Yeah, absolutely.

00:39:48.100 And one of the things that's kind of building on your point about this issue of generosity with resources is that people form groups.

00:40:00.780 So, and often there's competition between groups for having members that are, in this case, good hunters or who contribute, you know, above and beyond to the group welfare.

00:40:14.500 And so, if a hunter feels like he, if someone is a top hunter and he feels like he's not sufficiently appreciated by the group, he can go to another group or form another group.

00:40:25.280 And that's one of the interesting things about, you know, this gets into human history is, you know, once group, you know, there's the fissioning of groups.

00:40:34.700 Once they get to a certain point, they often say, look, I'm not sufficiently appreciated in this group.

00:40:40.080 I'm going to take my allies and form my own group.

00:40:43.060 So, I was also thinking about this in terms of, let's say, reciprocity.

00:40:48.720 So, imagine that we're in a small hunting group, we don't have refrigeration, so we're not going to be able to store meat with any great degree of reliability.

00:40:58.320 So, you might say, well, what's the best way to store meat?

00:41:01.740 And I would say, you should store meat in your status among the hunting group, right?

00:41:07.660 So, if you're generous and you share, and then that invokes reciprocity from other hunters in your group who also have prowess, then you've stored future meat in the potential for them to generate resources in the future.

00:41:22.520 And that's reciprocity dependent.

00:41:24.060 And so, that's also a way that that kind of long-term honesty could also be selected for in these status, so-called status hierarchies.

00:41:33.760 Competence hierarchies is better.

00:41:36.000 And so, my student, he said, there's a subterranean Marxism in the terminology.

00:41:43.060 If it's status hierarchy, dominance hierarchy, implies that it's oppression that's building the hierarchies.

00:41:47.680 And that's something really worthy of note, that objection.

00:41:51.840 Yeah.

00:41:52.400 So, let me come back to that in just one second.

00:41:55.600 I think it actually was, I just recently saw your interview with Steve Pinker and Jonathan Haidt.

00:42:03.740 And Steve Pinker is, you know, I think a wonderful thinker.

00:42:08.180 And the way he phrased it is that hunters store meat, not in the refrigerator, but they store meat in the bodies of other people.

00:42:16.360 So, it's kind of an interesting way to think about that, of how we engage in that reciprocity.

00:42:23.340 So, with respect to the oppression issue, here's what I would add to this, is that one of the implicit assumptions of people who invoke patriarchy as an explanation is that they assume that men are somehow united in their interests as a group in oppressing women as a group.

00:42:43.980 Okay. And from an evolutionary perspective, that can't occur because men are primarily in competition with other men, not with other women.

00:42:54.040 And also, each of us, each individual has alliances with some members of our own sex, some rivalries with members of our own sex, but also alliances with some members of the opposite sex.

00:43:07.060 So, every man has, for example, a mother, sometimes a daughter, a sister, an aunt, a niece.

00:43:14.340 And similarly, every woman has a brother, a father, you know, etc.

00:43:18.380 And so, the notion that men are somehow united as a group with a goal of oppressing women as a group, it just can't occur from an evolutionary perspective.

00:43:28.940 And this is why I think an evolutionary perspective lends some conceptual clarity to some of these vaguer notions that people don't tend to think about when they invoke terms like patriarchy.

00:43:41.580 So, but I agree with you on the point of oppression, that when we talk about status hierarchies, we don't mean oppression.

00:43:48.140 What we did is, what Patrick Durkee and I did in our studies, basically, is we pitted the dominance explanation, or some people have invoked a dual pathways.

00:43:58.380 Some people say there's two ways to get ahead.

00:44:00.740 You can inflict costs or you can confer benefits.

00:44:03.840 And we tested that, and then what's called a competence model.

00:44:09.940 So, there is a theory of status that's basing competence, but it's basically benefit conferral.

00:44:15.360 And we found evidence in favor of the competence model and the benefit conferral model, but almost no evidence for the cost-inflicting model.

00:44:24.840 Indeed, what we found is that, although sometimes people have the ability and willingness to inflict costs, you have to be more differentiated even about that.

00:44:37.240 So, for example, we've been talking about coalitions to some degree, and people punish free riders, for example, or cheaters within coalitions.

00:44:48.640 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:44:49.120 They punish them.

00:44:50.020 So, that's an infliction of cost.

00:44:51.460 Yeah, it's an infliction of cost, but it's for the larger group, for the larger coalition.

00:44:57.660 And so, that's why this notion that you could – or even, like, if you take extreme cases, like, as I'm sure you're familiar with, like, in some nations, some people kill to get to the top of the hierarchy.

00:45:10.080 So, big daddy, I mean, and I can't remember which country, it was maybe Zimbabwe or Zaire, I can't remember, basically was a thug who killed his way to the top, but you can't get to the top through this cost-infliction strategy unless you're also conferring benefits.

00:45:30.000 And so, even he, even though he was a thug and continued his kind of reign of terror, he had a large coalition under him that all the benefits went to.

00:45:43.320 That was Idi Amin, Uganda? 0.56

00:45:46.080 Yes, yes, Uganda, thank you.

00:45:48.000 Yes, yeah, Idi Amin.

00:45:48.940 Okay, so, this experiment, so, here's another thing that could be pitted in that competition.

00:45:55.500 So, imagine you had people who – men who could confer benefit and who were incapable of inflicting cost, and men who could confer benefit but were capable of inflicting cost.

00:46:05.780 I think you'd see winners on that side because of that free rider problem.

00:46:10.280 And so, and that ties into what we'll discuss in relationship to the dark triad because there's some mystery about why women seem to be attracted to these so-called dark triad traits.

00:46:23.900 And I would say that they're using them as insufficient markers for the ability to or the acquisition of status.

00:46:32.600 So, and narcissists capitalize on that, right?

00:46:35.320 Because a narcissist looks confident, and lots of confident people are competent, but some confident people aren't competent, but they can fool you.

00:46:45.720 And then, I think the other explanation is that if you had to choose between a benefit conferrer who could punish free riders and one who couldn't, you should pick the former.

00:46:54.680 One who could deal with free riders, who could and would, had the capability to.

00:47:04.360 And so, you see this sort of thing.

00:47:06.900 I really like the Disney movie Beauty and the Beast.

00:47:10.000 I think they got it right.

00:47:11.760 And so, there's Gaston in that movie, and he's a narcissist, but he has physical prowess.

00:47:17.700 Like, he can't understand why he's not the guy, but he's narcissistic.

00:47:21.520 And then, there's the beast, who's a beast, but he's tameable.

00:47:25.420 And so, he can be a benefit conferrer, and he has the capacity to inflict cost.

00:47:31.060 Yes.

00:47:31.600 Yeah.

00:47:32.160 And the two are often correlated in nature.

00:47:35.800 So, like, for example, if you have physical prowess or athletic ability, then you have both the ability to confer benefits, you know, in the form of, say, protection or hunting skills, but also the ability to inflict cost by, you know.

00:47:51.300 Okay.

00:47:51.760 So, let's talk about the dark triad, then, in relationship to agreeableness.

00:47:55.340 Because, do you want to just tell everybody what the dark triad is first, so that we're all on the same page? 0.98

00:48:00.700 Yeah.

00:48:01.580 So, the dark triad, I think this was originally named by one of your Canadian psychology colleagues, Del Paula, so the UBC.

00:48:13.220 And the dark triad originally was a three triad, but it's narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy.

00:48:22.880 So, where narcissism is typically marked by a sense of grandiosity, a sense of entitlement, they think they're the most intelligent, the smartest, the most attractive, the most charming, the most skilled, et cetera.

00:48:43.040 In the words of one of my former graduate students, they think they're hot, but they're not.

00:48:47.960 So, and I think there's a way in which people do have the ability to assess whether that high self-esteem is warranted or not, you know, because we have even words in our language for things like arrogant, you know, that kind of con out someone who thinks that they're more beautiful or more intelligent or more capable than they actually are.

00:49:16.380 So, that's narcissism, but the entitlement is, I think, a critical component of narcissism, where they feel, I'm so great, I deserve a larger share of the pie, including the sexual pie, when we get to the issue of sexual conflict and sexual coercion.

00:49:32.780 Machiavellianism, I mean, that stems from the prince of, I can't remember how many hundreds of years ago that was written, but it's basically people who pursue an exploitative social strategy.

00:49:46.620 So, they can, they are, when we were talking about reciprocity earlier, they will feign reciprocity, feign being good reciprocators, but then they will cheat.

00:49:59.500 And so, these are the liars, the cheaters.

00:50:03.360 So, if the patriarchy was based on exploitative power, then dark triad personality traits would be adaptively and practically useful and desirable, if that was the case.

00:50:13.940 Yeah, if that, if that was the case.

00:50:16.160 Yes, yes, okay, now, and that gets complicated, because one of the things your research has indicated is that there is a manner in which women are attracted to people who manifest dark triad traits.

00:50:27.580 Yeah, I would say, I would add the qualifier that it tends to be younger women. 1.00

00:50:34.000 So, teenagers or women in their early 20s, women, as they mature and get more experience on the mating market, tend to be less attracted to these dark triad characters.

00:50:45.840 Okay, so, here's a hypothesis.

00:50:48.560 It's not that easy to distinguish the willingness to use casual power and control from competence when you're not very experienced.

00:50:58.960 And so, the dark triad types can feign status-related competence, and they can ensnare naive women. 0.99

00:51:06.060 Yes, yeah, that's right.

00:51:08.220 They also have some qualities that women genuinely do desire.

00:51:14.060 So, they tend to, like the narcissist, tend to put themselves at the center of attention.

00:51:19.480 And one of the things we know about status hierarchies is that the attention structure is very important.

00:51:25.820 That is, the high-status people tend to be those to whom the most people pay the most attention.

00:51:30.600 And so, women are drawn. 0.69

00:51:33.100 One anecdote, a female colleague of mine, very intelligent evolutionary psychologist, went to a conference and found herself very attracted to the organizer of the conference.

00:51:45.560 And then six months later, she encountered him, and he was just a normal attendee at the conference, and she didn't find him very attractive.

00:51:53.340 She wondered, what was I thinking?

00:51:54.740 But what it was, is he was at the center of the attention structure.

00:51:58.660 Well, the attention structure is an unbelievably reliable indicator of what's valuable, because we don't devote our visual attentive resources to anything that isn't of singular value in the environment.

00:52:09.700 And so, that's precisely why we compete for attention. 0.86

00:52:14.040 It's also an extremely valuable resource.

00:52:16.680 Absolutely.

00:52:17.100 I mean, a valuable and limited resource.

00:52:20.340 It's finite.

00:52:21.140 And so, really, at every moment in time, we're making decisions about what to allocate our attention to.

00:52:27.080 I read a funny study once, you might be aware of this, where monkeys, I think they were green monkeys, but I'm not sure, were shown photographs of other members of their troop.

00:52:37.440 And they gazed much longer at the high-status individuals in the photographs.

00:52:42.580 Yeah.

00:52:42.700 So, and, you know, and then you think about that, too.

00:52:45.560 There's something really interesting about that, because imagine that that compulsion to attend to what acquired status, or let's say competent status, is accompanied in human beings by a profound instinct to imitate.

00:52:58.960 Right.

00:52:59.340 That's right.

00:52:59.760 Because, I mean, we are social learners, and one of the things that we try to do is to emulate those who have qualities that are associated with status, you know, and that gets into, you know, and those vary from group to group and subgroup to subgroup.

00:53:19.020 And in the modern environment, we have this kind of a weird situation of a proliferation of status hierarchies, you know, where you can be the, I don't know, the top social influencer, where the only thing you have going for you is, I don't know, a line of makeup or something like that, or nothing at all.

00:53:36.280 I mean, Paris Hilton was, like, famous for being famous, and so she got a lot of attention, but there was no real benefit there.

00:53:44.900 But, you know, we have, like, if you play video games, for example, which I don't happen to, but there's status hierarchies within those.

00:53:53.580 You know, the most skilled video game player, the most skilled football player, rugby player, tennis player.

00:53:59.740 Yeah, well, it's a good thing, you know, that we can create all these competence hierarchies, because what it means is that diverse talents have the opportunity to acquire the status that might also alternatively entice them to violence, let's say, because that is associated with status inequality.

00:54:17.040 And so one of the solutions to status inequality is diverse games of competence, as diverse a range as possible.

00:54:24.140 Yeah, and that's, I mean, and that's definitely a good thing.

00:54:29.560 Because, I mean, if there was just one status hierarchy, then that means, I mean, status is inherently a relative, gauged by relative metric, you know, so if you're the number one, no one else can be the number one.

00:54:45.180 But, you know, if you can be the best scholar, the best writer, the best world of Warcraft player, the best tennis player, these multiple status hierarchies give more people the opportunity to gain in status.

00:55:01.540 Another argument against the patriarchy as a unitary idea, right?

00:55:06.220 Well, which patriarchy do you mean?

00:55:07.820 Do you mean, like, the evil coalition of plumbers, which is a joke I've made before?

00:55:12.600 It's like, you know, that's power, is it plumbers?

00:55:16.220 Really?

00:55:16.960 No, they're not organized in terms of their success by which plumber is the meanest and the toughest.

00:55:22.960 It's, that's not how it works at all.

00:55:25.240 Right.

00:55:25.840 No, no.

00:55:26.400 Yeah, absolutely.

00:55:27.200 And, I mean, that gets into the issue of, there are large pools of men who are at the bottom of the status hierarchy.

00:55:36.380 And who, who, who don't have the qualities that, that women desire. 0.97

00:55:43.720 And so are they really oppressing women?

00:55:46.900 There's this interesting, there's this interesting photo that I think got captioned, but it's two very elegant women with designer handbags. 0.79

00:55:57.620 And they're walking by a guy who's, like, fixing the tar in the street.

00:56:02.760 He's a street worker fixing the tar.

00:56:05.100 And as they walk by this guy who's groveling on the ground, they say, stop oppressing me.

00:56:11.080 Right.

00:56:11.560 So, anyway.

00:56:13.460 Right, right.

00:56:14.460 Well, I wanted to talk to you a bit more about the dark triad issue, too, because there's a mystery in it.

00:56:19.800 And I think it's one that corrupts psychology to some degree.

00:56:22.380 Research psychology.

00:56:23.680 Oh, yes.

00:56:23.920 Okay, so we didn't mention the third one, which is the third element of the dark triad, which is psychopathy.

00:56:31.120 And you probably have a deeper understanding of psychopathy than I do.

00:56:36.720 But one of the hallmarks is a lack of empathy.

00:56:41.840 That is, most normal humans have an empathy circuit that we feel compassion if someone gets hurt or if a pet gets injured or a child falls down and skins a knee.

00:56:52.840 We feel a sense of compassion for the suffering of other people.

00:56:57.040 But psychopaths don't.

00:56:58.380 It's like they might laugh if someone gets hurt.

00:57:02.020 And so that empathy circuit seems to be severed.

00:57:05.840 And also, one of the hallmarks seems to be that they're not responsive to punishment, that they're more oriented toward reward.

00:57:15.840 And so punishing them doesn't tend to change their behavior.

00:57:18.140 It isn't obvious that they have an empathy for their future selves.

00:57:24.640 Right.

00:57:25.260 So punishments like, well, you know, part of the reason that you react to punishments is because you don't want your future self to be punished again.

00:57:34.040 But you have to care about that before that works.

00:57:37.440 Right.

00:57:37.740 Right.

00:57:38.040 Yeah.

00:57:38.160 That gets to the issue of steepness, steepness of future discounting.

00:57:43.200 Yes, exactly.

00:57:44.000 Exactly.

00:57:44.420 Yeah.

00:57:45.740 They grab for all the gusto right now and don't think about the future consequences.

00:57:51.500 So one of the things that one of the big five personality traits that the dark triad is most associated with is agreeableness, low agreeableness.

00:57:59.660 And that's and I do think that research psychologists and psychologists in general have a kind of ethical bias in relationship to the agreeableness dimension, you know, and and it and of course, women are higher in trade agreeableness than men.

00:58:15.480 Right.

00:58:16.120 Reliably.

00:58:16.700 It's about half a standard deviation.

00:58:18.160 It's one of the biggest sex differences.

00:58:19.400 And it's associated with compassion and politeness in the work we've done anyways.

00:58:24.300 And so that's empathy, at least to some degree.

00:58:26.880 Now, the question is, what is the ethical utility of lower agreeableness?

00:58:32.760 Right.

00:58:32.980 Because you'd think, well, it would interfere possibly with sharing.

00:58:37.500 Right.

00:58:37.940 Because if you're more compassionate, more compassionate, more empathic, you're going to feel the hunger of other people and you'd be more motivated to to care for them, let's say.

00:58:46.520 But it's also possible that that low agreeableness has something to do with, well, perhaps hunting prowess.

00:58:53.160 That might be part of it.

00:58:54.180 But it also might be part of the solution to the free rider problem.

00:58:57.880 And so women are in a conundrum with agreeableness, right? 1.00

00:59:01.100 Because they need a mate who's agreeable enough so they can bond with them and that will care for their children and that cares in general. 1.00

00:59:06.540 But they need someone who's disagreeable enough so that they're capable, let's say, of dealing with free riders.

00:59:13.660 Right.

00:59:13.840 So one way of saying that is agreeable with respect to them, but the potential for being disagreeable with respect to those others when they need to be punished or they need to ward off an attacker.

00:59:28.400 Right.

00:59:28.740 And you can see that that's a real tight line to walk down.

00:59:32.920 You know, and part of what constrains agreeableness, let's say, from a temperamental perspective.

00:59:37.200 So if you're low in agreeableness, let's say, well, you're less empathic, you're more competitive, you're rougher, blunter, tougher, you know, what would you say, at least with regards to the compassion you show to others.

00:59:48.920 And so what what helps modulate that?

00:59:51.680 Well, some of that would be conscientiousness.

00:59:53.380 And so in the dark triad types, you see low conscientiousness as well. 0.98

00:59:57.120 You know, really low agreeable, high conscientious types are quite interesting because you can trust them because they'll do their duty.

01:00:03.700 But they're very blunt and direct and harsh.

01:00:06.040 And that can be helpful as well, because they'll tell you unpleasant truths, even if they hurt your feelings.

01:00:10.820 So there's some utility in that.

01:00:12.660 So you can imagine that agreeableness can be modified, let's say, by conscientiousness.

01:00:17.900 So that and that takes the the psychopathy edge off it, because low agreeableness and low conscientiousness, that's that's a rough combination.

01:00:27.020 Yes.

01:00:27.720 And so, yeah, yeah, yeah, because there's nothing constraining it.

01:00:31.020 And so women are attracted to some degree to the lower agreeable types. 0.95

01:00:35.760 And I think that accounts for the bad boy paradox that you described, at least in part.

01:00:39.980 And maybe it takes further experience and wisdom on the part of judicious women to see where they can get the disagreeableness that's necessary. 1.00

01:00:49.300 But it has to be hemmed in by something like, well, conscientiousness.

01:00:53.220 Yeah.

01:00:53.780 Other personality traits like conscientiousness.

01:00:56.260 I mean, one other reason that I think that women are attracted to the dark triad, at least the younger women, is that they're often risk takers. 0.93

01:01:08.240 So they will do things like motorcycle jumping or ski jumping or take physical risks, speeding in their cars or and so the kind of daredevil mentality and women, at least younger women find that exciting.

01:01:27.260 But I wonder if I wonder if they confuse that with trait openness, right, because the open types are going to experiment.

01:01:34.900 They're going to try lots of different things.

01:01:36.620 And that that daredevil, you know, I don't care might be easily not easily distinguished from the capacity to engage in creative problem solving pursuits, you know, and perhaps with courage as well.

01:01:49.200 Yeah, yeah. So I think I think courage and also one of the you know, that people who take risks often in in fact have the ability to afford those risks, if you will.

01:02:05.060 So, for example, you know, doing some dangerous athletic feat, if you're not an athletic person, you're going to fail at that.

01:02:13.260 And so in some sense, some of these daredevil behaviors, I think, are kind of cues that you have the ability to afford to take those risks.

01:02:26.380 But but these guys, these high dark triad guys are absolutely disastrous as long term mates. 1.00

01:02:31.500 So that they might be exciting for sure.

01:02:34.660 I mean, that's why I think that women, as they mature, stop being attracted to these guys, especially if they're looking for a long term mate, because these are guys, they're the dark triad. 0.97

01:02:45.440 They're more likely to cheat.

01:02:47.040 They're more likely to seduce and abandon. 0.90

01:02:50.180 They're more likely to engage in deceptive mating tactics. 1.00

01:02:54.960 And so and so they tend to be big trouble when it comes to long term mating. 0.97

01:02:59.340 Yeah, well, it also looks like they value themselves greatly.

01:03:03.920 And, you know, sometimes people value themselves greatly.

01:03:07.580 And so they have high mate desirability in your in your terminology or maybe some little corruption of your terminology.

01:03:14.060 And again, I think the dark triad guys mimic that. 0.99

01:03:17.300 It's like I'm so good I can afford to, you know, distribute my sexual prowess wherever I see fit.

01:03:23.620 And there's some some of that happens as men rise in competence hierarchies as well.

01:03:28.560 Well, yes, it happens with women when they rise in their heart. 1.00

01:03:32.100 How do you understand?

01:03:33.360 Here's a here's a question I'd really like to hear you answer.

01:03:37.160 How do you distinguish between female and male hierarchies for sexual selection?

01:03:45.220 Because there are obviously women that are more desirable to men. 1.00

01:03:48.040 So where are where are the big sex differences there?

01:03:51.880 I know that men women will mate across and up competence hierarchies and men will mate across and down, roughly speaking.

01:03:59.920 But there are other differences.

01:04:02.280 Yeah. Yeah.

01:04:02.780 So so we recently published a study on 14 different cultures on the sex differences and similarities.

01:04:10.840 And indeed, there are differences.

01:04:12.860 So even things like physical attractiveness, it it increases both male and female status, but it increases female status more than male status. 0.54

01:04:23.520 Why?

01:04:24.380 Well, what we argue is that this is one thing my 37 culture studies showed is that men place a greater priority on physical attractiveness, physical appearance, good looks.

01:04:34.000 Um, and it's not an arbitrary social construction.

01:04:38.060 It's, um, it's basically an evolved preference for fertility cues.

01:04:43.160 Um, those who men who made it with infertile women failed to become ancestors. 0.68

01:04:48.240 And so we're all descendants of, I have to ask you this too.

01:04:52.360 Here's something I really got in trouble for.

01:04:55.000 So I was doing an interview with NBC reporter.

01:04:59.240 I don't remember who it was, but he didn't like me at all.

01:05:01.180 So he was trying to catch me out and all sorts of things.

01:05:03.300 And we talked about makeup in the workplace.

01:05:06.660 And I said that women use makeup to enhance their sexual attractiveness. 1.00

01:05:11.540 And man, you wouldn't believe the flack I got for that.

01:05:13.540 And I said, well, the reddening of the lips, for example, and the rouging of the cheeks is not only a signal to mimic youth and fertility,

01:05:21.560 but it's likely associated with mimicry of ripe fruit because our visual system evolved to detect ripe fruit.

01:05:31.180 And in the appearance magazines in particular, the association between makeup and fruit is there in the imagery all the time.

01:05:37.880 So, and the flavor as well for that matter.

01:05:40.540 So did I say something that I shouldn't have said?

01:05:44.040 Am I wrong about that in some important way?

01:05:46.140 No, you're not wrong about it, but, um, but I know what you mean.

01:05:49.380 I've gotten some flack for that as well.

01:05:51.120 I mean, one thing that, um, you know, on this finding that men prioritize physical attractiveness and that physical attractiveness is not just this arbitrary social construction,

01:06:02.960 but in fact, um, underlying it is a set of cues to youth and cues to health and hence cues to fertility.

01:06:11.100 Uh, this is a very upsetting notion to some people.

01:06:14.500 And so I was actually, even before I published the 37 culture study, a, uh, I gave a talk on it to a sociology department when I was at Michigan.

01:06:22.600 Um, and a professor, female professor came up to me afterwards and said that I shouldn't publish the findings.

01:06:29.580 And I said, well, why not?

01:06:31.540 Cause I, you know, to me, empirical findings are empirical findings, you know?

01:06:36.000 Uh, but she said that, that women had it hard enough without, um, in competing with each other on physical appearance, without being told that men have this evolved preference for it, you know?

01:06:47.760 And so the, you know, the standard social science model is more comfortable for people to believe, oh, it's just arbitrary and infinitely changeable, you know?

01:06:56.180 And you go to, you know, any different culture and they value a whole different set of things.

01:07:00.160 And the notion that there, that we have evolved preferences for fertility cues is, uh, anathema to some people.

01:07:06.800 Well, you can understand it to some degree because a lot of these, a lot of the truths that psychologists have stumbled over, let's say, are actually quite painful.

01:07:15.700 I mean, I reviewed the IQ literature for about 20 years trying to get to the bottom of it.

01:07:20.300 And it's very distressing to realize how wide the human differential is in cognitive ability.

01:07:29.000 It's, it's really quite a staggering thing to understand how broad that gap is and how much pain that causes, especially at the lower end of the distribution.

01:07:38.480 And the fact that men are stringently selected for, let's say, the capacity to acquire a position in a competence hierarchy and women are brutally punished in terms of their sexual attractiveness for not manifesting signs of fertility and youth.

01:07:53.520 It's, it's like, it's like, there's a real harshness to that, but it's the harshness.

01:07:56.960 I think it's the harshness of life and actually understanding that makes it less harsh insofar as understanding is useful.

01:08:04.500 Yeah. Yeah. No, I would agree with that. And, you know, I mean, I've stumbled across a lot of findings in my research and and we'll get to the issue of conflict between the sexes that that I find personally distressing, you know, that I wish didn't exist, but they do. 0.99

01:08:23.400 And so I feel similarly that, you know, we're better off confronting our nature and the empirical reality, including sex differences in that nature, rather than just pretending that these features don't exist.

01:08:37.800 Well, we also should be very cognizant of the fact that the counterclaim, which is that, well, there are no biological what you see structures underlying our perception, sexual perception and otherwise and our cognition.

01:08:51.600 So we have no biological nature, which means we're it means we're infinitely amenable to social utopian schemes that are designed to turn us into a particular vision of human.

01:09:05.620 And there's great danger in that, too. So that's the other side of the coin. There's danger everywhere.

01:09:11.080 Yeah. Well, what I would say is, yeah, the implicit in those notions is that humans are passive, passive vehicles rather than active strategists that can be easily manipulated by whatever.

01:09:27.760 And that's not a very that's not a very that's not a very flattering view of humans.

01:09:33.980 So. No, and it's justified some rather wide scale social engineering attempts in the last hundred years.

01:09:41.140 Yeah. Yeah. So so it is a real danger.

01:09:44.280 It's not it's and then that that doesn't take away anything from the fact that there are such thing.

01:09:49.960 There is such thing as unpleasant fact. Yeah. So and it's it's reasonable to be cognizant of that.

01:09:56.380 So so you were going to talk a little bit about let's talk about violence, say, between men and women.

01:10:04.880 One of the things I was struck by in your chapter on violence, the way it opened people.

01:10:09.700 I studied aggression for a long time in in little kids, in in elementary school, children, adolescents, all the way up developmental origins of aggression with with Richard Tremblay in Montreal.

01:10:22.220 And so I'm very interested in that. And I think often that psychologists have things backwards when we approach questions, you know.

01:10:30.320 So, for example, we often try to explain anxiety instead of explaining its control, which is way harder to do, because like, of course, you're anxious.

01:10:38.800 That's bloody obvious. Why aren't you terrified out of your skull all the time is the question.

01:10:43.080 And I think it's the same with aggression. It's we it's often treated as if aggression itself is something that needs to be explained.

01:10:50.060 Whereas for me, the mystery is, well, no, aggression, not of course.

01:10:56.140 The mystery is how we control it. That's the mystery.

01:11:00.320 Yeah. And so, yeah, well, and and and we do. I mean, it's, you know, aggression is selectively deployed, you know, and is very context specific.

01:11:12.700 And I mean, it gets back to I mean, it depends on I don't know whether you were whether you studied physical aggression, but you were asking earlier about differences between male and female hierarchies.

01:11:24.320 And one of the things that is well documented is that while men are higher in physical aggression, including all the way up to homicide, women engage in social aggression or what's sometimes called relational aggression, where they they shun someone or exclude someone or slut shame another woman. 0.71

01:11:45.060 And so that's a form of aggression.

01:11:46.940 Yeah. Reputation savaging.

01:11:48.960 Yes. Yeah. Derogation of competitors.

01:11:52.020 So but but but but it but all these forms of aggression are typically deployed very selectively.

01:11:59.640 You know, it's not like we don't wake up in the morning, go out and beat someone up.

01:12:02.640 You know, even those who engage in physical aggression, it's often someone has humiliated them in public, for example, or or challenge their their status.

01:12:13.960 And but that's one of the things they've perceived that, however, incorrectly.

01:12:18.640 Yes. Yeah. So one of the things that I studied is homicidal ideation.

01:12:24.200 You know, and I looked at, you know, have you ever had a homicidal thought?

01:12:28.540 Have you ever thought about killing someone?

01:12:30.880 And basically, I mean, the majority of people have thought about it.

01:12:35.980 And even even though if they haven't, they'll say something like when I pose this question just informally at, say, a party, people say, oh, no, I've never thought about killing someone.

01:12:45.180 But then the conversation will proceed. And then they'll say, actually, there was this one time when someone humiliated me in front of the whole group and I just had this thought about killing them.

01:12:56.520 And so fortunately, most homicidal thoughts don't get translated in a homicidal deeds.

01:13:01.640 Otherwise, we'd be living in a very chaotic society.

01:13:04.920 But but one of the things that we found in that research was that being humiliated in in public, in the eyes of the peer group, meaning you're going to lose your status, was a key trigger of this homicidal ideation.

01:13:20.200 Well, OK, so let me run something by you in relationship to emotional regulation and status.

01:13:26.740 Tell me what you think about this.

01:13:28.500 So the terror management theorist types tend to think that our cognitive beliefs inhibit our anxiety.

01:13:34.920 And they drill that all the way down to anxiety of death, taking a page from Freud.

01:13:39.000 And that's Becker's book, basically.

01:13:40.780 And there's a whole field of psychology that's worked on that.

01:13:43.860 I think it's I don't think it's right.

01:13:46.720 I think it's more indirect.

01:13:48.020 So imagine this.

01:13:49.920 Imagine that the degree to which your negative emotion is regulated is dependent on serotonic serotonergic output fundamentally.

01:14:01.140 So as your serotonin levels rise, you're more emotionally stable.

01:14:05.300 So you feel less anxiety, despair, the whole panoply of negative emotions, which are pretty tightly clumped together.

01:14:11.200 And so then you might say, well, your emotion, emotional regulation is dependent on your status.

01:14:16.980 And I think there's truth in that.

01:14:18.600 Now, let's say I do.

01:14:20.260 We're at an academic conference and I stand up and I ask you a question and it's a mean question, but you can't answer it.

01:14:26.880 So your status is devalued.

01:14:28.820 But here's what I've actually done.

01:14:30.460 It's not exactly that I've devalued your status.

01:14:33.300 What I've done is undermined the claim that you have a valid claim on that position.

01:14:41.000 Yeah.

01:14:42.180 Right.

01:14:42.580 And then that's going to dysregulate you because if that's true, then while you've been shown to be an imposter, let's say, and or at least a threat is there.

01:14:51.180 And then that would take you out of that hierarchy and your negative emotion would rise.

01:14:55.240 And then the reason it would rise is because if you are removed from that hierarchy and now you're alienated and isolated, everything has become way more dangerous.

01:15:05.760 Yes.

01:15:06.360 And so, right.

01:15:07.440 And, you know, you know, the people at the bottom of a hierarchy are much less, much more likely to die from all cause mortality.

01:15:14.640 Right.

01:15:14.880 This is not nothing.

01:15:16.280 Right. 0.97

01:15:16.600 Including getting killed. 0.99

01:15:19.200 Yes. 0.83

01:15:19.480 Including that.

01:15:20.640 Yeah.

01:15:20.820 So, so to threaten that, and then you say, well, that invokes homicidal ideation quite rapidly.

01:15:26.300 It's like, well, if you're interfering with the, with the person's claim on a position that actually does regulate their negative emotion, as well as actually protect them from death, not just death anxiety.

01:15:38.280 It's no wonder that you evoke a counter response, which would be a blunt form of reestablishing something like competence.

01:15:45.820 Yes.

01:15:46.220 Yeah.

01:15:46.400 No, I think that that's right.

01:15:47.700 And I share your, your, your views of the terror management notion, you know, that, that we evolved all these mechanisms, all these adaptations simply to keep the fear of death at bay and anxiety associated with that at bay.

01:16:02.180 You know, my argument would be, well, people actually have to solve problems of survival and reproduction.

01:16:08.500 You know, yes.

01:16:09.520 The problem of death is worse than the problem of death anxiety.

01:16:13.140 Yes.

01:16:13.720 Now, death anxiety is bad, you know, make no, and I like Beckert's book, but fundamentally.

01:16:18.860 Yeah.

01:16:19.260 No.

01:16:19.980 Yeah.

01:16:20.160 The logic doesn't, doesn't work.

01:16:22.300 Um, but, uh, I published a, a short, uh, commentary on terror management some time ago.

01:16:28.980 And, uh, uh, with the terror management people just ignored it.

01:16:32.840 I mean, I was, so what did you say?

01:16:34.960 Oh, I basically said, you know, argued that, um, they were proposing all these psychological adaptations simply to keep the thought and anxiety associated with death at bay.

01:16:45.780 And, uh, from an evolutionary perspective, although they purport to ground it in an evolutionary perspective, it's not really an evolutionary perspective because you have to tie, uh, an adaptive solution to some element that is tributary to survival or reproduction, you know, and, and not simply adaptations solely to deal with internal psychological states.

01:17:12.220 Except if those internal psychological states get translated into things that lead to survival and reproduction or have over the course of human evolutionary history.

01:17:21.560 Yeah.

01:17:21.580 Or interfered with it.

01:17:22.720 I mean, I guess I have some respect for that line of theorizing because the fact that human beings are self-conscious and other creatures aren't does mean that our anxiety is of a different, I'd say, qualitative type than other animals anxiety.

01:17:37.080 But, you know, that still doesn't interfere with the fact that a lot of the structures that we built to deal with death anxiety actually stop us from dying.

01:17:45.460 Right.

01:17:45.580 They're not mere defenses.

01:17:47.000 They're not ego, mere ego defenses, although sometimes they can also be that.

01:17:51.180 And so, and also the other problem with Becker and the terror management theorists, it's sort of related to the patriarchy problem, I would say, is that Becker, Becker didn't read Jung, by the way, even though he wrote a book on the psychology of religion.

01:18:04.720 And he said in the intro that it was unnecessary to read Jung, which was exactly wrong given what he was doing.

01:18:10.340 But Becker basically posited that we had to create fabrications to defend ourselves against negative emotion.

01:18:18.420 That's the essential message of that book.

01:18:20.520 And what that means in some sense is that the whole corpus of human endeavor is an attempt to escape from the realization of mortality.

01:18:29.660 And I think, well, wait a sec.

01:18:32.020 No, we're also escaping from mortality.

01:18:35.780 Yes.

01:18:36.380 Right.

01:18:36.500 It's not just the thoughts of it.

01:18:37.840 And it isn't obvious to me at all, and I think almost all of clinical psychology would suggest that this is true, is that falsification as a defense is actually counterproductive in the final analysis.

01:18:49.560 And most of the great clinical theorists, Rogers say, perhaps in some sense foremost among them, but perhaps not, insisted that it was the truth that set you free, not the web of defenses that you had erected by necessity to deal with your neurotic death anxiety.

01:19:04.600 That's actually counterproductive.

01:19:06.400 Yeah.

01:19:06.840 So, yeah, there's a, it reminded me of a, of a Woody Allen quote and Woody Allen's very, uh, I guess he's sort of been canceled and is out of favor, but he had this one quote where people said, well, you know, um, you know, you will achieve immortality through your, your work.

01:19:21.280 And he said, uh, he said, I don't want to achieve immortality through my work.

01:19:24.960 I want to achieve immortality through not dying.

01:19:27.520 Yeah.

01:19:28.260 That was a very good line.

01:19:29.460 It's a very good line.

01:19:30.280 And yeah, very germane to the problem.

01:19:31.920 So you said that you had uncovered things that deeply disturbed you in your research as well, ethically, I would say.

01:19:39.260 And so, so can you touch on some of that?

01:19:42.000 Well, uh, well, yeah.

01:19:43.280 I mean, so, well, one is, uh, well, one pertains to some of the sex differences that we've already been talking about.

01:19:51.000 So just as men place a greater value on physical attractiveness than women in their main selection, women place a greater value on a man's status and resources.

01:19:59.920 And so you could say, well, you know, men view women as sex objects, but women view men as success objects, you know?

01:20:07.600 And so they're both, you know, forms of objectification, if you will, although I don't, I don't really like that, like that term.

01:20:14.840 Uh, and so, um, I remember giving a lecture once and I was describing these findings and, and, uh, it was like, I think a freshman guy in the front row.

01:20:24.040 He was getting, he got really upset by this.

01:20:26.140 And he said, you mean, you mean I have to, have to achieve at, at, at work in order to be attractive to women?

01:20:34.660 Uh, I said, well, I mean, I guess it's not strictly necessary, but if you want to improve your chances, um, yeah.

01:20:40.980 Yeah. So, uh, so, uh, you know, it, it, it's just as it's harder for people who are at the bottom end of the things that people value, um, and you were mentioning intelligence earlier, but if you're at the bottom end of attractiveness or, or success or status or resources, it's not a very pleasant position to be in.

01:21:02.900 So that, so that's one set of things. Another though, well, it's also the, the, what's interesting about that too, if you don't mind me saying so is that the evolutionary psychological argument actually indicates more deeply the intractability and danger of that problem, right?

01:21:19.960 Because it, that the problem of being at the bottom is so deep that we shouldn't rush to solve it with, you know, surface level solutions that aren't going to work.

01:21:28.820 So you see, for example, very frequently people think, well, hierarchy is a Western construct. It's dependent on capitalism.

01:21:37.500 It's like, wait a second. If you want to solve the problem of poverty and exclusion and oppression, and you start that by equating something as profound and deep as hierarchy with capitalism, you're not going anywhere because you have no idea how big this problem is. It's way bigger than capitalism.

01:21:56.760 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, status hierarchies, I mean, as you've written about are evolutionarily ancient, uh, and yeah.

01:22:05.720 And so you think I'm okay. It's like, I mean, I took a lot of flack for all that, you know, my comparison with lobsters say, which, you know, because antidepressants work on lobsters, which is something I think is absolutely phenomenal.

01:22:16.760 And it, it pertains to the serotonin argument, right? It's, it's so widely distributed all the way down the phylogenetic chain that serotonin even regulates negative emotion in lobsters.

01:22:28.620 This is old, you know, and lots of people objected, well, why do you pick lobsters? And it's, you know, as if I was overstating the biological conclusions, what do you think about this?

01:22:38.660 Yeah. Well, you know, status hierarchies are, are pretty ubiquitous. Uh, and I guess what I would say is that they, I mean, you didn't have to pick lobsters, but you, you could have picked chimpanzees or any number of other species and, and still been essentially correct.

01:22:56.460 So even non-social birds, like even birds that don't have troops and a strictly a hierarchy, they have a positional hierarchy in terms of territory and, and the ones that have the best nesting sites are more, much more likely to mate and survive.

01:23:09.540 So even in many animals that don't have a hierarchy specifically, it's still there implicitly.

01:23:14.800 That's right. That's right. And, and, and this is, this gets to one of the other, I guess, the, uh, the broader implicit uncomfortable truths is that we value different people differently.

01:23:28.280 So, and, and that this of course applies in the mating domain of mate value, some are higher and some are low. Uh, and that's mostly what I've focused on, but it also applies to friendship value,

01:23:40.120 coalitional value, that we value different individuals differently, uh, based on their competence, based on their benefit, conferring ability and willingness.

01:23:50.060 Uh, and people find this uncomfortable. They, you know, we, we're in, this is one of the, I think, conceptual confusions of this, like, uh, all people are created equal.

01:24:00.280 Well, you know, there are different meanings of that. One is, uh, equal in terms of rights, you know, which they should be equal in terms of opportunities.

01:24:08.760 Equal before the law, equal in terms of their natural rights.

01:24:13.460 Right. Right. Which, which is, I think the correct usage of that, but are they actually equal in value in what other people value?

01:24:22.800 And the answer is.

01:24:23.240 Well, I've always asked people like who, who hit me with that. It's like, do you sleep with everyone?

01:24:28.620 No. Oh, you're selective. Are you? Well, isn't that oppression, exclusion, exclusion, and judgment at the most fundamental level?

01:24:36.440 And is that something you really want to sacrifice?

01:24:38.900 Yeah. And yeah. And the, the answer is no. And, and, uh, I remember the answer is only rude. People ask questions like that.

01:24:46.400 Well, or, you know, uh, or, or confused, you know, who haven't really thought through these issues.

01:24:53.140 No, I meant the rude person was me asking that question.

01:24:56.180 Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, well, well, but I mean, Hey, we're in the business of asking hard questions. I don't think they're rude. They're rude.

01:25:04.060 Um, no, I don't think they are either. They're just, they're just pointed. It's like, wait, you exclude sexually. There is no more dramatic form of exclusion than that.

01:25:14.180 Yes, that's right. Um, well, that's why people object to evolutionary psychology. It's like, it is, it is a brutalness about it, especially in female choosiness. 1.00

01:25:24.240 And not, not that men are any better because of course they do the same thing in different ways, but it really is brutal. And to be rejected by someone that you're attracted to, that's no joke. That's, that's a rough dagger.

01:25:36.560 Yeah, absolutely. And, and, and of course, breakups are among the most traumatic experiences that people go through. You know, the dissolution of a marriage, for example, um, you know, these, these cause people to spiral into depression, uh, alcohol abuse, et cetera.

01:25:53.240 Uh, so, um, but, um, yeah, it's, uh,

01:25:58.840 So let's let, can we talk about differences in those differences in aggression again? You know, because as you said, men are more likely to use physical aggression. And by the way, uh, there is good data. You may know this already, but, um, Trombley's group in particular looked at this. If you take two-year-olds, boys and girls, and you group them together,

01:26:19.560 two-year-olds are the most aggressive of any age group that you can group together, kidding, kicking, biting. The two-year-olds will do more of it, but most two-year-olds don't. And almost all the small minority that do are male.

01:26:34.060 So it's there at two. Now, almost all of them get socialized by the age of four. And so they come to inhibit that aggression. That's, they're probably low in agreeableness. That would be my guess.

01:26:45.060 And some of them are probably high in negative emotion. So they're more reactive, you know, more volatile, but most of them are socialized by the age of four.

01:26:52.360 But their research group showed that if they aren't socialized by the age of four, then it's permanent.

01:26:59.340 So that's where the career criminal types come from. And, but they, they, they tend to re they tend to desist around the age of 28. It drops off for some reason that isn't well understood yet.

01:27:10.180 Yeah. Well, I guess, yeah. 28. Well, you know, I mean, it seems like it, at least in adulthood, when physical aggression, if you chart it by age and sex, it's basically when males, even though they do exhibit it early on, as you mentioned, when they enter reproductive competition, the physical aggression goes way up.

01:27:31.000 Oh, and in the same data set. So what happens with these long term aggressive boys? So they're more aggressive than the rest of the boys, except the boys catch up on average, when puberty hits for a few years, and then they go down. Yeah, so they enter reproductive, yeah, reproductive competition. And to other colleagues of yours up in Canada, Martin Daly and Margaret Wilson, have shown these age and sex distributions. And I mean, it's really stark.

01:27:57.580 And the exacerbation of that by inequality.

01:28:01.000 Yes, that's right. That's right. And which is another, another issue, you know, the magnitude of inequality and, and inequality leveling, you know, Richard Wrangham has a as an interesting idea that one of the ways that gets back to the issue of the origins of monogamy, that in humans, and this is, to a lesser degree, the case in chimps, I think, but it's certainly true in humans that

01:28:29.800 an alpha male can be deposed by two lower ranking males, two or three gang up. And his view is that if someone gets to the top and is a cost inflicted male, he didn't quite phrase it this way, then, then people gang up and kill, you know,

01:28:46.320 Right. Another argument against, against totalitarian brutality as the basis of the patriarchy. It actually doesn't work. Yeah, right. And for that reason, yeah, I talked, I actually talked to Wrangham about, about exactly that.

01:28:58.080 So those mechanisms are already there. And so aggression, a lot of these strategies that you outlined in your book as alternatives, in some sense, to monogamy, to stable monogamy, there, I would say there's, there's something like suboptimal solutions on a fitness landscape, right?

01:29:16.240 They're better than, they're better than the alternative, possibly, which would be like zero success whatsoever, but they're nowhere near as good as the optimal solution, which is something like generous monogamy, something like that, perhaps. Is that, is that naive or reasonable, do you think?

01:29:31.580 Well, I don't know. I mean, I, I tend to, I have a little bit of an internal conflict on that issue, because I sort of, as a scientist, I feel like I have to be nonjudgmental with respect to, if there are multiple evolving strategies, which I think there are, I try to be nonjudgmental about that.

01:29:53.920 But from a, you know, my own personal, ethical viewpoint, I think monogamy is a great solution. I mean, among other things.

01:30:03.540 Well, you think, you think it might be, it might be possible to rank or to the, to some degree, scientifically, to keep it in line with, like, let's call it ethical intuitions, assuming they're just not artificial constructions, because it could be that partial, like, like I said, partial solutions are better than none, but they're nowhere near as good as an optimized solution.

01:30:22.000 And so, like, long-term monogamy might be something like the best strategy, all things considered.

01:30:29.880 Now, sometimes all things aren't considered, and you have to do what you have to do, let's say.

01:30:34.300 You know, divorce would fit into that and so forth, but that doesn't mean that that optimality that we have potentially a moral intuition for isn't pointing to something that is, in fact, well, I would say, at least in potential, evolved as well as socially constructed.

01:30:49.160 Yeah, so, so, so I guess what I would say is that the key question is optimal for whom.

01:30:57.220 So, so, and this is where you get into some conflict between sort of group harmony and individual benefits.

01:31:06.560 So, so in polygynous societies, as we were talking about earlier, let's say you have one man has four wives, that means three men have no wives.

01:31:14.780 So having the four wives from a purely reproductive standpoint might be optimal for that individual male, but it's, of course, suboptimal, disastrously suboptimal for the, for the three males who have zero mates.

01:31:27.940 Well, yeah, but he also might be more prone, and we know the polygynous societies, they tend to be more violent, the younger men tend to be more violent.

01:31:35.900 So I would say that, right, he's on the, he's on top, but, but, but, you know, a knife in the back takes out the strongest man.

01:31:44.660 And that's a real problem in human beings, because even if it is physical prowess that leads, that puts you up at the top, which is something that a, like a real dominating chimp might manage, you know, knives pretty much equalize the playing field or clubs or anything like that. 0.99

01:31:59.640 Yeah, yeah.

01:32:00.220 Yeah, and I think, and I think we have these kind of hierarchy leveling adaptations, and, and if you go across cultures, they even have phrases for us, like in Australia, they have them, they call it the tall poppies, and people like to cut down tall poppies, or in Japan, they say the, the, the nail that sticks out gets pounded down.

01:32:21.060 And so there's this, and in personality psychology, I don't know if you remember the, like R.B. Cattell even had a concept, Raymond Cattell had a concept called coercion toward the biosocial norm, where he said that people like to cut down people who are too dominant, so that the meat will inherit the earth.

01:32:40.720 So it's not quite right, but it's, I think we do have these.

01:32:44.360 I also, I also think that, that, that cutting down, that's an interesting thing as well, because one of the things that groups of men do, I, I, that I, and I think this is something relatively unique to men, I might be wrong, is that when they're in groups, they often throw denigrating barbs at one another to watch the emotional reaction.

01:33:03.680 And I think part of that tall poppy cutting down is an attempt to eradicate the detrimental effects of undue narcissism.

01:33:11.780 It's not so much actual competence, it's, it's, and I know that if you're competent and you're at the top, there may be some danger to you, because given that you're more the center of attention, you're also more the center of negative attention.

01:33:24.500 So that, that is a danger, but I suspect that a lot of those mechanisms were directed toward the dark triad types and control of their unweaning arrogance. 1.00

01:33:32.820 Right, exactly. If they're, if they're inflicting costs rather than conferring benefits or monopolizing resources rather than sharing them with other members of the group, you know, that those are going to be hierarchy, hierarchy levelers.

01:33:47.640 I mean, even in some sense, the, in modern, weird, modern environments, the tax code that imposes a higher tax rate on people who make more money is kind of a form of hierarchy level.

01:34:00.080 Mm hmm. Yeah, well, it's, it's a tough problem to solve, right? It's a really hard problem to solve. And I think the evolutionary psychologists have made this even more evident, as we referred to earlier, like the differences that are driving these, these inequalities are very, very deep.

01:34:18.380 And they're, it's very difficult to figure out how you might deal with them socially, even on the conservative end of the spectrum. I think it's worth noting that excess inequality breeds violence among young men.

01:34:29.320 Yeah. That's worth noting. It's like, well, you let the inequality get too out of hand, you're going to destabilize the whole society. And then unless you want to live in a gated community, let's say, and the gates can easily turn into walls, and then that's indistinguishable from a prison.

01:34:44.540 That's not really a very good idea. And so how to shovel resources down the hierarchy in some way that's, what would you say that's not counterproductive. That's, that's a problem that we're all constantly struggling with.

01:34:58.520 Yes. Yeah, indeed. And, and I think it's even, I mean, you had mentioned intelligence research, and here's, I'd like to get your thoughts on this, is that one of the things that we know is that there's strong assorted mating for intelligence, you know, and part of that might be due to the educational system that is, you know, you meet, people go to college or higher degrees, and you tend to mate with people with whom you're in close proximity.

01:35:25.780 But, but, but we know the assorted mating coefficients for intelligence is about 0.45. It's one of the highest assorted mating coefficients, right? So that's the tendency for people to marry people who are like them in some manner.

01:35:40.120 Yeah, yeah. So that means the high intelligence are mating with the highs and lows with lows. But one of the consequences of that, to the degree that intelligence is heritable, and it is partly heritable, that creates in the next generation an increase in variance in intelligence of the offspring generation.

01:36:00.940 And so if you iterate it, generation after generation, you're actually getting more and more variance on this socially valued dimension, which will increase to the degree that intelligence is linked with things like resource acquisition or status attainment, then you're going to create an increase in inequality.

01:36:23.340 Well, that's, that's, that's, I would say, you know, I think that's probably what's happened to us, you know, I'm here, let me run something wild by you and you tell me what you think of this.

01:36:33.500 I've done various interpretations of the stories in Genesis, the story of Adam and Eve in particular, and it's Eve that makes Adam self conscious in that story.

01:36:42.660 And that's, and that's, that's put forth as a, as a, what would you say, a world shattering event.

01:36:50.080 It's associated with the emergence of morality, that's knowledge of good and evil.

01:36:53.980 And it's associated with the knowledge of death.

01:36:57.260 To get enough cognitive development driven by sexual selection, you become self conscious, aware of your own mortality.

01:37:03.680 That's the first thing. And that's our cataclysm.

01:37:06.060 No other creatures ever dealt with that.

01:37:07.760 And then having become aware of your own mortality and your vulnerability, you know, the difference between good and evil, because now you understand what would hurt something like you, like you actually understand it.

01:37:19.180 Unlike a lion who's just eating a gazelle, and then you can use that.

01:37:24.020 And so, and then in, in that story, while in some sense it's blamed on Eve, but the, the selection pressure that you described in association with the choosiness of women, I think is,

01:37:34.200 I don't see how it can be denied that that was a prime mover of our cognitive transformation away from the chimpanzee line.

01:37:42.740 Sexual selection that drove that, I think.

01:37:44.920 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think, I think that's right. I mean, I mean, because there's, you know, we didn't get this big brain from learning how to pick berries a little bit better or whatever.

01:37:56.640 I mean, it's a, these survival problems don't really get you there.

01:38:00.080 Well, and you need a runaway process, right? And the assortative mating issue that you described would be a contributor to that runaway process, because this cortical evolution happened very rapidly.

01:38:10.620 Yes.

01:38:10.960 Right. So rapidly that women's bodies are barely adapted to our babies, right? Wider hips, they wouldn't be able to run. 1.00

01:38:18.080 Right.

01:38:18.400 Right. Bigger head, it wouldn't pass through the birth canal. 1.00

01:38:20.980 And women's bodies are compromised to some degree by the necessity of giving birth. 1.00

01:38:25.780 Yes.

01:38:25.900 And then babies are born when they're still unbelievably helpless, because if they were any bigger than that, their heads would be too big.

01:38:32.620 Right.

01:38:32.900 Plus they're crushable, their heads. I mean, it took a lot of gerrymandering to make that, that runaway selection process biologically viable.

01:38:42.520 Yeah. Yeah. Well, one interesting thing about that is also is with the advent of C-sections where babies are, you know, they basically cut the mother open to take the baby out rather than through the birth canal is probably creating a modern selection pressure for larger and larger heads as a result.

01:39:07.880 So, so this is, uh, evolution is ongoing here in this process.

01:39:14.020 So maybe we can close with one thing, unless you have something else you'd really like to discuss.

01:39:19.320 I would like to discuss a little bit more about why men and women have different strategies of aggression.

01:39:26.820 Yeah. Okay. Uh, so yeah, well, and, and also, well, I mean, I guess we'll have to, there are many interesting things that I would love to talk about, uh, associated with the, with, with my new book on conflict between the sexes.

01:39:37.780 And we've touched on, on a few, but, uh, I'd love to talk more about those, but, um, you know, I think that, you know, male and female status hierarchies are, are, uh, I mean, there's some similarities, but there's some, so fundamentally different.

01:39:53.260 And I don't know if you've ever had this experience during, but, um, the way I describe it, I find, and I think most men find male hierarchies to be fairly transparent.

01:40:04.960 That is, we can sort of observe them. They're clear. Um, there's not a big mystery, but we also tend, I would say, we also tend to exclude males that aren't transparent like that.

01:40:17.520 Yeah. It's like, he's too much trouble. Right. So no, no, I want to know exactly where I stand with you. And we're going to sort that out right now.

01:40:23.060 Right. Right. And, and they do sort it out, but, but with women, um, the way I feel, you know, those movies where, uh, there's like these, uh, a bank, a bank robbers, and they're breaking into a bank, but the bank has these infrared, uh, detectors. 0.99

01:40:37.920 And so they have to put on special goggles so that they can see the red lines and avoid tripping the, the alarm. I feel like that with respect to female hierarchies, like I don't have the goggles to see it because I'll go to like, go to a party or something and then leave. 0.85

01:40:52.720 And a woman will say something like, did, did you hear what that bitch said? And, and I was like right there and I didn't hear anything, but there's this kind of underlying, um, meta message that women pick up on with respect to other women. 1.00

01:41:07.920 That I don't, I don't, I don't feel like I understand, but do you, do you know if there's any studies indicating whether men or, or women are better at detecting who's in a relationship with who?

01:41:20.220 I don't know of any studies on that, but I would hazard a guess that women are better at it than men. I mean, is what, is that your intuition?

01:41:30.280 Yes, yes, definitely. Definitely. I mean, I've watched my wife do that on several occasions. Those two people are, are, are together. No, they're not.

01:41:37.580 They're married to other people. Oh, it turns out. Yeah, they, they are. She can pick it up in way. Well, and we know that women are better at decoding nonverbal behavior than men. 0.97

01:41:48.780 Yeah. And that's probably partly because they have to be more attentive to it because it's more dangerous for them if they're not. And they have to pick up the cues of their nonverbal infants.

01:41:57.860 Right, exactly. So I think it's, I think that this would get to the issue of mind reading abilities, ability to infer the psychological states of other humans.

01:42:08.960 And I think that, that at least on, in many domains, women are better at that. Um, you know, 1.00

01:42:15.160 You want to think that's associated with trait agreeableness. That would be fun to find out if that's actually a function of trait agreeableness, because that would imagine that some of that understanding is actually embodiment.

01:42:25.420 So if I'm empathic, I'm better at mirroring your emotions in my body. And then I can pick up what you're feeling by referring to what I'm feeling. That's what we do when we go to a movie, right? Cause we vicariously live the emotions in the movie, but it stands to reason that there's variability.

01:42:41.100 And I suspect it's agreeableness because that's empathy and likely maternal caregiving.

01:42:46.400 Yeah. Yeah. So that's, I mean, that's a really interesting question. I, I don't, I'm not aware of studies that have systematically looked at that, uh, individual.

01:42:55.240 Yeah. Well, the psychologists are loath to associate agreeableness with maternality, right? Because we're loath to make any claims in the current political climate that any of these dimensions might be associated with something like, you know, the fundamental difference between the sexes,

01:43:10.520 even though there are huge sex differences in agreeableness and they get bigger in egalitarian societies, which is really quite something.

01:43:18.420 Right. Right. Contrary to the standard social science, social rule theories, uh, that it predicted that, you know, not just contrary, but like, well, I would say death blow, but it's not exactly right. Cause some differences do decline as egalitarianism increases.

01:43:35.300 So, you know, it's complicated like everything else. So male aggression again, well, we have, we're bigger, we're taller, we have more upper body strength.

01:43:45.320 Yeah. So women aren't going to engage in physical combat with men, not past puberty. And, you know, they develop that increase in trait negative emotionality at puberty. It's not there in childhood. 0.92

01:43:56.920 Oh, really? Okay. And it's permanent. No, it's permanent. Once it's instantiated, once, once the pubertal changes take place. And so, and I, here's a something, here's a question I have for you. I really want to ask you this.

01:44:08.820 Okay. What do you think of the theory that, so women are higher in trait negative emotion, right? And they're higher in agreeableness. So here's a theory.

01:44:17.160 Okay. Women's personalities are adapted for the mother infant dyad, not for their, not for them. 1.00

01:44:26.840 Oh, the fundamental unit is the dyad and their temperament is adjusted for that. That's why they're more fearful. 1.00

01:44:32.380 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, I think that that's gotta be right. I mean, you know, the women over evolutionary history have been the primary caretakers of the infants, at least for the first few years of life, 0.96

01:44:43.540 by the mothers and their female kin, the alloparents, as they're called. And so I think that that's exactly right. They have to be, the cost of failing to detect danger, for example, affect not just them, but also the survival of their infant.

01:45:01.220 And so I think that, you know, maternal bond to the infant is, has gotta be at least one of the contributing factors to that sex difference in negative emotionality.

01:45:10.860 Also, also the world is a more dangerous place for a mother and infant than just for a mother, because the infant is so vulnerable.

01:45:19.080 And also the mother is hindered in her adaptive ability by the presence of the infant to a substantial degree, especially when, well, in societies where the infant is being carried virtually all the time.

01:45:30.380 Right. Which is, which is interesting to bring it back full circle is one reason why women value a man's ability and willingness to offer protection for her and her children so highly in a, in a mate. 0.83

01:45:45.000 And so you would think that, well, in the modern environment, you know, physical protection is not that important, but women continue to value those traits, um, as well as things like courage and bravery, a willingness to actually use that in the service of protecting her.

01:46:02.320 Yeah. And it's all, it's, it's, it's, it's also not all that self-evident that that physical capacity to protect has been ameliorated to an overwhelming degree in the modern environment. It's still plenty dangerous.

01:46:16.220 Yeah. It's still plenty dangerous, but, but, but, but it might not be so much as it was.

01:46:20.080 Yeah. Yeah. Less so than it was. I mean, I think Steve Pinker has documented that pretty successfully and, uh, you know, that there's been a general decline. And I know this from studying homicide. There's been over the last 400 years of decline in homicide rates. Um, broadly speaking, although there's interestingly, there's been a spike in homicide rates due to the pandemic, uh, or, or within the pandemic. Um, so, and I have some speculations about that, but, um, but, you know, I, I think, you know,

01:46:49.640 there's so many other topics that we could talk about, and I hope we will get a chance to at some point.

01:46:55.560 Yeah. I would really like to, we, we scratched the surface today, but, um, so I would very much, I'm going to talk to Bob Trivers next week, as it turns out. So I'm very much looking at it. So this is a really good preparation for that as well. So I really, your work has meant a lot to me and, uh, it's, it's helped explain a lot to me. And, and so, um, I thank you very much for that and for the courage to, to do it, to pursue it.

01:47:19.380 And in the face of, you know, substantive opposition to what you're finding, you know, you know, you've discovered something true when you're a social scientist, when you're not very happy about what you discovered.

01:47:28.860 Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's true. Well, I have, I have just on, uh, to end on a positive note, I've also studied love and the evolutionary psychology of love. And so, um, I mean, it's one of the, gets back to your point about good and evil.

01:47:43.740 And I, I think humans have evolved adaptations to commit horrors on other people, but also adaptations to be altruistic and benefit conferring on other individuals.

01:47:55.480 And so, yeah, well, Scott, Scott, Barry Kaufman has tried to psychometrically outline a light triad.

01:48:01.680 Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So, but I think we, we all have these, um, capacities within us.

01:48:07.620 And so, and, and, and the more we learn, the more we can create environments that kind of suppress the, the, the darker, more evil, uh, side of human nature and bring out the more benefit conferring side.

01:48:20.320 Yeah. Well, it would be fun to do another discussion on, on something like the evolution of benevolence, you know, something that's really positive like that.

01:48:28.420 Yes. So, yeah. Okay. Well, good. Let's do that.

01:48:32.060 Okay. So thank you. Well, it's been fun talking to you and, uh, there is so much more to talk about.

01:48:38.820 Yeah, I know. Well, that's, that's, what would you say? That's, that's what you realize whenever you have a really good conversation.

01:48:44.820 Yeah. So I appreciate it very much. And, and, uh, I, I do hope we, we talk again in the relatively near future.

01:48:51.540 Okay. So I do too. Well, thank you. Thank you so much. And best of luck with your, uh, conversation with Bob Trivers. He's, he's a fascinating guy. So I'm sure you will have a very interesting conversation.

01:49:01.460 Yeah. I'm looking forward to talking to him about self-deception. That's something I thought about for a very long time. So, and hopefully tried to stop practicing.

01:49:09.140 So if you find the keys, let me know.

01:49:13.700 All right. All right. Thank you very much. And good luck with your book. And so that's this, this is part of one of the books we were talking about today. Why, when men behave badly, and that's certainly not all it's about. And thanks very much for talking to me today.

01:49:27.160 Okay. Thank you, Gordon. It's been a delight.

01:49:39.140 Thank you.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - March 16, 2022

235. Evolution, Sex & Desire ｜ David Buss

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