Evolutionary Psychology Informs the Social Sciences and the Denial of Science (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_835)
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Summary
Gad Saad is a professor at Concordia University in Montreal and on leave at Northwood University. He holds a chair in behavioral consumption at the Molson School of Business, and is the author of a number of books, including The Consuming Instinct: What Juicy Burgers, Ferraris, Pornography, and Gift Giving Reveal About Human Nature? and The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense. In this episode, we talk about why the business school is resistant to evolutionary psychology, and why psychology departments are resistant to it.
Transcript
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You're listening to the Unsiloed Podcast with Greg LeBlanc, produced by UniversityFM.
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Unsiloed is a series of interdisciplinary conversations that inspire new ways of thinking
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about our world. So wherever you are, enjoy today's episode, and here's your host, Greg LeBlanc.
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Welcome to Unsiloed. This is Greg LeBlanc, and I'm here today with Gad Saad, who is a professor
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both at Concordia University in Montreal and also on leave visiting Northwood University.
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And your position at Concordia, it's a little interesting. I mean, you were, I guess you're
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at the Molson School of Business, but you have a chair in behavioral consumption. I bet you're
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the only person on the planet that has that title, right? Well, the official title is, by the way,
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I no longer hold it. I held it for 10 years, from 2008 to 2018. The official title was Concordia
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University Research Chair in Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences and Darwinian Consumption.
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Darwinian Consumption, right? And also the author of a couple of books. I have two of them with me
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here. This one, The Consuming Instinct, What Juicy Burgers, Ferraris, Pornography, and Gift-Giving
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Reveal About Human Nature? And I think this is preceded by a more academic book on Darwinian
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Consumption. And then I guess it was in 2019 when you released this one, The Parasitic Mind,
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How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense. And you have another book that just came out last
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year, which unfortunately I didn't get to. I'll ask you some questions about, on happiness. And I'm
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guessing that one is flying off the shelf because everybody seems to want happiness. So first of all,
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welcome, God. It's great to be with you. Thank you. I know that we've been going back and forth for
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a while to make this happen. So I'm glad to finally be on your show. Thank you for having me.
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Well, look, I mean, you mentioned a story in, I think it was in The Parasitic Mind,
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when you talked about how you went and gave two talks at University of Michigan, same talk actually,
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to two different audiences. One was psychology and one was in the business school. And the talk
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was really about how you can use evolutionary biology and psychology to understand consumer
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behavior. And you said that in the psychology department, you got a warm reception. Everybody
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was asking you interesting scientific questions. And then when you went to the business school,
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you encountered a lot of resistance and people were not receptive to your ideas and very dismissive.
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And I think that if I were to make a prediction and you were to make a prediction, and I think
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David Buss in the introduction to your book made a prediction, we would have predicted that fast forward
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10 years or so, the business schools would be more like the psychology departments and we all would
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have been more open to these ideas. But I think strangely enough, we've actually seen the opposite
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in that business schools continue to be resistant to these ideas. And now psychology departments
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are resistant to these ideas. And this just seems particularly strange because going back,
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I don't know, 100 years ago, was it Dub Shansky who said, nothing in biology makes sense except in the
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light of evolution. I mean, I've always thought nothing in the social sciences makes sense except in the
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light of evolution. And I remember it was 25 years ago, I started teaching a course in biology and
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economics. And it seemed relatively uncontroversial and kind of exciting and new at the time.
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But now I don't even think I could offer a course like that, even though I smuggled the material in
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most of my courses on behavioral finance and economics and so forth. So how do we explain this
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trend? It seems, well, first of all, we'll talk about the uses of evolutionary biology, but we can start
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by just saying, are you surprised by the kind of lack of adoption of these fairly obvious insights?
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Well, I am surprised in that, frankly, it was my first exposure to what parasitized minds would
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look like. So, and I think offline, before we started, you said that pretty much your evolution
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psychology work leading up to parasitic mind kind of captures the trajectory of your career. That is
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exactly right. Because when I first finished my PhD and I was starting my first professorship,
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the goal was to Darwinize the business school. The idea being that you can't study anything involving
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any creature, let alone human beings, let alone human beings in a business setting, whilst pretending
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that the biological forces that shape our behavior are somehow non-existent when we put on our consumer
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hat or our employer hat or our employee hat or our decision-making hat, how could it be that every
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other species on earth, you would never dream of studying it void of its philogenetic history,
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but human beings, yeah, of course, we're only a culture animal. So that was, in a sense, my first
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exposure to how supposedly perfectly reasonable and educated people called professors, in most cases,
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social scientists, in many cases, housed in business schools, could completely have parasitic
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pensions. So in that sense, I had sort of a sense of epistemological indignation. How could you be
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such morons? Like, what could be controversial about the fact that hormones should affect our
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behaviors? Who wouldn't know that? Who wouldn't agree to that? So the next question would be, well,
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why is it that there is such an animus that social scientists, although in many cases, even natural
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scientists will exhibit towards evolutionary psychology? And I say natural scientists because you take
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for example, someone like Richard Lewington and Stephen Jay Gould at Harvard, they were professional
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evolutionists. So it's not as though you needed to convince them that evolution was a veridical theory
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to explain speciation. But once you try to apply evolution to the study of this one species called
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human beings, well, then you're a quack, you're a Nazi, you're so on. And so in their case, it's because
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they were Marxist. So therefore, their ideological commitment did not allow them to afford the
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possibility that evolution could have shaped the human mind. So that was, if you'd like, a marriage
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that I just gave you between my evolutionary psychology work and then eventually writing
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the parasitic mind. Maybe I can mention just a few of the reasons why people have such animus
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towards evolutionary psychology, which exactly purports that evolutionary psychology and evolutionary
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biology should be applicable to every species, but that it transcends, human beings transcend those
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forces. Or it might explain why we have opposable thumbs, but surely don't use evolution to explain
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everything that's above the neck. Okay. In some cases, people could be a bit more flexible in saying,
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well, it explains very primal urges, why I want to eat a juicy burger, but it surely can't explain
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higher order reasoning. What do you mean? Where do you think our cognition comes from?
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And so even though I'm completely used to, at this point, facing all the animus, it still surprises
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me because to me it should be banal and trivially obvious that, of course, evolutionary psychology
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Well, look, I mean, there are two dimensions of resistance to it. One is just simply that folks
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like economists, they're just not interested in getting into the black box. So they'll just say,
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look, here are the preferences. Let's take preferences as given and going into final
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causes. Let's just box that off, partition that, leave that to other people. And we're just going
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to focus on the decision-making, you know, we'll measure a demand curve and there it is. And let's
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not worry about it. Okay. That's one form of resistance. Then the other form of resistance is
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let's crack into the black box, but let's only use certain types of explanations or models. I mean,
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I think the first one is less important now. I think we've come around to the idea that
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Yeah. So I'll address both of those causes. Table for a second, the first one, the economist
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one. There are additional forms of animus to evolutionary theory in general and evolutionary
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psychology in particular. So some people who succumb to sort of the fallacy of biological
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determinism think that if you somehow offer an evolutionary based explanation for something,
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then you are just a passive executor of your genetic imperatives. Whereas of course, we know
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that it's a complete interaction. Even genes are turned on or off as a function of environmental
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input. Other people hate evolutionary theory because they think that a whole bunch of really
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nasty folks have misused it. The Nazis, eugenicists, British social class, elitists in the 19th century.
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And therefore, let's create a new worldview where biology ceases to matter because then hopefully
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we can all sing Kumbaya and so on. And so there's a whole range of reasons. And I've only given you
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three or four, but there's many more that explains that sort of visceral animus. But to your first point
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regarding the economist there, I think the important distinction to make is the distinction between
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proximate explanations and ultimate explanations. Most, not just economists, most scientists of
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any ilk in any discipline operate at the proximate level, which is understanding the how and the what of a
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mechanism. Most Nobel Prizes are won in the proximate world. There's nothing wrong with that. The ultimate
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explanation is not ultimate in a superior sense. By the way, you mentioned earlier, the animus I face at the
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University of Michigan. One of the sources of the animus, amongst many others, was when I used the
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term ultimate as if I'm sort of epistemologically superior. I am giving you the ultimate explanation.
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That's not at all what it means. It means ultimate in the unfolding of the causal chain all the way to
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the ultimate Darwinian why. So if, for example, I tell you pregnancy sickness, women experiences since
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time immemorial. It occurs in a very predictable way. It happens exactly during the period of organogenesis
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in the first trimester where the organs are forming in utero. And there is a million proximate
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questions I can ask. If I were an OBGYN, how does the fluctuation of a woman's hormones affect the
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severity of her symptoms? Look, I use the word how or I could say what are particular smells that might
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trigger pregnancy sickness? That's a what question. The ultimate Darwinian question is why has that mechanism
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evolved? And the answer is a beautiful one. It's because it protects women during that very important
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period from potentially ingesting teratogens, foodborne pathogens that could wreak havoc during organogenesis on
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the forming organs in utero. Now, it turns out from a practical perspective, if you go see your OBGYN because you're
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having these really unpleasant symptoms, he or she will give you a pill to try to reduce those symptoms. That is the
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perfectly incorrect thing to do from an evolutionary perspective. But because more pregnancy sickness symptoms
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results in a better outcome, there's less likelihood of miscarriage, better outcome of the child being born
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healthy, precisely because those unpleasant symptoms are an insurance protection mechanism. And so understanding any
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phenomenon at both levels of analyses, at the proximate and ultimate, offers you the possibility
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of fully understanding something. Economists, not only do they not care in what's happening inside the black
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box, as you said, even if they cared about what's happening in the black box, they would only care about
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it at the proximate level. So there's a wide range of interesting explanations that they are foregoing by not
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understanding that other level. So for someone who's trying to make decisions, why do we care about the
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ultimate level? I mean, if I'm just interested in prediction, presumably I can just look at the
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empirical data and, you know, look at variation and back out the predictions of what works and what
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doesn't work. So why would, say, a marketer be interested in understanding these underlying causes?
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No, I got that. And I specifically try to address that when I'm teaching, say, MBAs, who many of them
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may not be there for intrinsic reasons. I just want to learn. But every syllable, how can I monetize
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what you're saying, professor? And so I've got to give them the practical implications. A good marketer
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is one that is wedded to a solid understanding of human nature. So even if the marketer does not
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describe themselves as an evolutionary psychologist, by virtue of themselves being a walking Darwinian
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being, their marketing solutions will either be all other things equal effective or not, if they are
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wedded to an understanding of human nature. Now that sounds all sort of unclear. So let me give a concrete
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example. If you want to understand female sexuality and female mate preferences, there is one consumatory
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product that you absolutely have to study, and it's called romance novels. Because romance novels
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are almost exclusively read by women around the world. And the romance novel always has a male
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protagonist. That male protagonist borders, if you are using an AI system for plagiarism detection,
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it would be bordering on every single romance novel ever having been written, having plagiarized from
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some original romance novel because it's the exact same guy. The guy is tall. The guy has a royal title.
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He's also a neurosurgeon. He also is very feckless in his risk-taking. He cannot be tamed except by the
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love of this one woman. He also wrestles alligators on his six-pack and comes out victorious. I just
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described every single romance novel. Now there was a company, I can't remember the details, but that
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apparently was trying to create a new romance novel line. This is marketing, right? It's creation
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of a new product. And because they wanted to eradicate the toxic masculinity, because they wanted
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to create a new line of new male that women should be fantasizing about. Now that's coming, linking it
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to parasitic mind, it's coming from a parasitic idea called social constructivism. Everything is due to
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social construction. We are born tabula rasa. And then it's socialization that makes me prefer the types
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of women I'm attracted to, or makes women prefer the types of guys they're attracted to. It's Hollywood
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images. It's Elle magazine. It's Beyonce videos. Of course, it's the exact opposite mechanism. Hollywood
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images exist in their form because they cater to evolved pensions, okay? So this particular group of
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marketers at this particular company had the wrong impression of human psychology, whereby they've had the
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audacity to say, I will teach you what types of male you wish to fantasize over because you're
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born tabula rasa. Well, it didn't go too well for them because women were didn't say, you know what?
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Yes. If you tell me that I should be attracted to pear shaped guys who have nasal voices and cry while
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sucking their thumbs because they're so sensitive while watching Bridget Jones diary, that was fair enough.
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Then that's what I will be attracted to. They said, no, sorry, that's not what I'm attracted to.
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And so that gives you a good example of a marketer who decides that based on their understanding of
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the human mind, they will create product lines. If it's not wanted to evolution psychology, it will
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fail. But look, I mean, marketers know this stuff, even if they don't know why they know the what,
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I mean, they've been doing this for decades. If you walk into a casino, there'll be a scantily clad
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woman dealing the cards. And this is not by accident. They figured it out. They know it works.
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They'll tell you sex sells, et cetera. They might not know anything about Darwinian evolution,
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but they seem to have figured it out. I mean, do market forces ultimately lead to effective
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discovery of these insights? I mean, what can we add when we bring in the theory?
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I said at the start that a good marketer is one who by virtue of them being a Darwinian being
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already comes equipped with that knowledge. But there is a countervailing force and that is
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ideological capture, right? Hence parasitic mind, right? If you get other marketers who are parasitized
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with ideas that are contrary to human nature, then maybe it becomes valuable to read the parasitic mind
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and take Professor Saad's course. Because we know that certainly within the ecosystem of the
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university campus, it is now questionable whether we know exactly what is male or female. We knew
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until about 15 minutes ago, the 117 billion people who had existed on earth were able to completely
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navigate through the conundrum of what it is to be male or female. But now we no longer know,
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as the latest addition to the US Supreme Court explained to us, she's not a biologist. How could she
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know what is a woman? So you're right that most people come into the world and navigate the world
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with certainly a folk understanding of Darwinian principles. But that doesn't mean that there
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aren't unique insights that are gleaned from understanding those things. Let me give you a
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specific example. My first exposure to evolutionary psychology, Greg, was in my first semester as a
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doctoral student when I took a course in advanced social psychology with Professor Dennis Regan.
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And about halfway through the semester, he signed the book called Homicide.
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Daly and Wilson. Daly and Wilson, look at you. Regrettably, Professor Wilson has passed away,
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but I think Martin Daly is still kicking out. I'm not sure how productive he is these days. They were
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a husband and wife team at McMaster University back then. I met them both at HBS back in like,
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I don't know, late 90s or something. Oh, okay. Well, I mean, Daly and Wilson in their book,
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Homicide discuss a wide range of patterns of criminality spanning across cultures and time
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periods, but that can very, very elegantly and parsimoniously explain these phenomena.
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So let's take one example, child abuse. And maybe you already know where I'm going with this,
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or maybe, but you do. Okay. Most people absolutely can't guess it. So when I tell people,
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can you please tell me what do you think is the number one predictor of child abuse? And people
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offer all sorts of explanations that some of them, there is a causal link, but whatever they come
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up with, and they never come up with the right answer is a hundred fold lesser than the most
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important factor, which is if there is a step parent in the home. Now, surely that has huge
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applicability in the sense that if I am a social scientist trying to develop ultimately downstream
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some public policy, knowing that singular factor has more predictive ability than all of the other
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factors that social scientists have come up with combined, there has to be some practical
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applicability beyond just, oh, it's an interesting scientific phenomenon. So again, rooting your
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understanding of human nature and subsequently the actionable outcomes of that knowledge has to be
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rooted in a correct understanding of human nature. Well, I mean, it seems like so many of the
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challenges that we're encountering in academia stem from one of the most basic fallacies that goes
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all the way back to Hume, which is the failure to distinguish between the positive and the normative.
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I mean, we had a colleague who was teaching marketing, who was basically fired for his job for
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discussing segmentation by on gender lines. Now, look, you don't need to think it's a good thing
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or a bad thing. Maybe you want to ban it. Maybe you want to regulate it. That's a completely separate
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question as to whether or not you get lift when you engage in the practice. So, I mean, are we
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essentially foreclosing these conversations simply because we don't like the, what we might imagine to
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be some normative implications or because we just want to jump to the normative intent that we have?
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I mean, is that one of the key fallacies? Yeah. So, related to what you're saying,
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remember earlier I said there's a whole range of factors that causes the animus. So, I'm going to
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mention one now that is not identical, but certainly linked to what you're saying about the difference
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between normative and so on or naturalistic fallacy and so on. Oftentimes, when you use evolutionary
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theory to explain what are reprehensible behaviors, child abuse, domestic violence, infidelity in a
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marriage, infanticide, people immediately interpret that as justification for that reprehensible act.
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And therefore, oh, so you're saying that here's the reason why people cheat on each other. So you're
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saying it's okay because you have a scientific explanation. Oh, so you're giving a justification
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for why child abuse happens because it's separate, which of course has the same level of intellectual
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acuity then as saying, if I'm an oncologist and I explain cancer, that means I'm justifying it. I'm
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pro-cancer. I want to justify its existence. It's silly. But now, there is a deeper reason why people
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hate evolutionary theory. I think it's because in many cases, it attacks people's most foundational
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ideological commitment. So if I'm a radical feminist, I hate evolutionary theory because
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you're arguing that there are innate sex differences due to sexual dimorphism. I don't like that. If I'm
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a postmodernist, I hate evolutionary psychology because it certainly purports that there are human
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universals as part of our shared biological heritage. Whereas in postmodernism, there are
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no universal truths other than the one universal truth that there are no universal truths. If I am
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religiously minded, I don't like evolutionary theory because are you saying that all of the exquisite
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design and nature is not due to my preferred God, but it's due to some randomness? So for a wide
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variety of reasons, people agree on why evolutionary theory is truly a dangerous idea. Now, on the one hand,
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it's very frustrating for me because it doesn't matter how well I do my job in trying to convince
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people of the veracity of evolutionary theory and evolutionary psychology. There is a new generation
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of imbeciles that come up and that I have to now fight an ever ending tsunami of the exact same
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counter arguments. But on the other hand, what's exciting about it is that I never have a dull day.
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In other words, there's almost nothing that I could ever say to anybody, whether they love what I'm
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saying or hate what I'm saying, where it goes unnoticed and people go yawn. I'm in the thick of things,
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I'm discussing ideas. So in that sense, I've made the right career choice, I suppose.
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Well, this book, The Parasitic Mind, I mean, I think the title is a bit deceptive because when you
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turn your eyes to academia or to the scientific community and what ideas percolate to the top and
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which ones have trouble, and obviously it's not just the scientific community, but the broader
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community, you actually offer up a couple of different theories. I mean, one is this idea of
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parasitism. But there are other ones that would suggest these ideas are not parasitical,
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but rather functional in some ways. So whether it's with respect to signaling one's loyalty to
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a group, which is clearly functional, similar to the way religion operates. You also talk about the
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sneaky fucker strategy and so forth. So I mean, why did you focus on the title,
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just the parasitic hypothesis rather than the symbiotic or functional hypothesis?
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So as I was trying to come up with a very strong metaphor for why it is that human minds can be
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haplessly led to the abyss of infinite lunacy, I started scouring. One of the things you do as an
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evolutionist is you often will look at other species to draw homologies or analogies in the
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behavior. So for example, if you're trying to demonstrate the sex specificity of toy preferences,
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you might demonstrate that vervet monkeys, rhesus monkeys, and chimpanzees exhibit the exact same
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sex specificity of toy preferences, suggesting that it's probably not due to social construction.
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Okay. So in my case, I started scouring the literature and I came across the parasitology
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literature, but parasitology simply discusses host parasite interactions, but the location of where the
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parasitism takes place doesn't have to be at the brain, right? So a tapeworm parasitizes your intestinal
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tract. Now, neuroparasitology is when the parasite looks to end up in the host's brain
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altering its circuitry to then suit its benefit, usually its reproductive benefits. So for example,
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a wood cricket, it negatively impacts the fitness of the host.
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It does. I mean, to the point of killing it, right? So, and hence, that's why I started using
00:24:52.240
the word of, it leads you to the abyss of infinite lunacy because you are literally jumping into the
00:24:57.760
abyss of infinite lunacy when some women have nine inch penises and letting in immigrants who are avowed to
00:25:05.440
destroying your culture is perfectly fine because you're a kind and empathetic human being. So it
00:25:09.920
not only literally could mean your death or the death of your civilization, but it certainly leads
00:25:15.840
to the death of common sense, of reality, of logic, of science, of anything epistemological.
00:25:21.920
So, but just to finish the point about wood cricket, the wood cricket abhors water,
00:25:25.920
wants nothing to do with water. When it is parasitized by a hair worm, the hair worm needs
00:25:30.240
the wood cricket to jump into water so that it can complete its reproductive cycle in water.
00:25:36.320
And guess what the wood cricket does when it is parasitized? It jumps and commits suicide
00:25:40.160
to the service of the parasite. And so that was my eureka moment. Aha, it's not memetic. So I'm
00:25:46.720
very careful in the book, if you remember or notice, I said, yes, I recognize how some people might think,
00:25:52.080
oh, but isn't this just a meme? A meme doesn't have inherently a valence attached to it. A meme could be
00:25:58.640
positive, it could be neutral, or it could be negative. But a neuro parasite has no benefit
00:26:05.760
to the hapless wood cricket, right? So it's queers for Palestine. How could that be? I mean, that's,
00:26:11.840
by the way, there's a class of people. And of course, I can say it because I'm Jewish. I hate
00:26:16.480
that game, by the way, where only black people can say the N word and only Jews can say certain. No,
00:26:21.920
anybody should be able to say anything. But in any case, I call them wood cricket Jews. Wood cricket
00:26:27.280
Jews are Jews who are the first to line up to condemn Jews, to condemn Israel, to be pro Hamas,
00:26:35.440
to be pro Gaza. They are so much more enlightened than people who operate in the earthly reality
00:26:42.080
that the rest of us rubes operate. They transcend that. Therefore, they are queers for Palestine,
00:26:47.840
they are Jews for Hamas. So yeah, there's a real strategic reason why I picked the neuro
00:26:53.840
parasitological framework. But look, the existence of these parasites is, it impacts the fitness of the
00:27:01.280
host community, but it also impacts the relative fitness of the individual host.
00:27:05.920
But there are other explanations which you allude to, like sexual selection, which as a whole,
00:27:11.040
there's a huge deadweight loss for the species. But for each of the individuals, it makes sense for them
00:27:17.840
to play that game. So, you know, I teach a course on behavioral finance and we walk through all these
00:27:23.440
things, hyperbolic discounting and framing and positional pursuit of status and so forth.
00:27:29.120
And all those things are deemed irrational by economists. But when you view them through a
00:27:35.120
biological lens, they make perfect sense. They're ecologically and biologically rational. So
00:27:39.680
couldn't the social justice nonsense that you're referring to, I mean, couldn't this
00:27:45.680
be individually rational for people to engage in?
00:27:49.280
So there may be individual fitness maximizing reasons why someone adopts some of this parasitic
00:27:57.760
stuff. And as you alluded to earlier, and maybe some of the people may not have understood the
00:28:02.880
term that you use. So sneaky fucker is a term that was introduced in the seventies in the zoological
00:28:07.600
literature. The fancy term is kleptogummy, the stealing of mating opportunities. But sneaky
00:28:15.920
And it's frequency dependent. So it only works if you are in a minority or there's a certain
00:28:23.200
Exactly. But just to explain it in the animal kingdom, you may have two phenotypes of a male.
00:28:28.640
There's kind of a prototypical dominant male with the classic secondary characteristics of masculine
00:28:36.160
phenotype. But then you have another type of male that mimics how a female would look like. And so
00:28:42.000
the dominant male sees the sneaky fucker, thinks it's a female, lets him through, and then he
00:28:47.680
surreptitiously then engages in some copulatory acts while the dominant male thinks that he just
00:28:52.880
let in another female in, right? And so I take that principle, which by the way, to my earlier point
00:28:57.360
about scouring the animal kingdom literature, I wouldn't have been able to come up with that link
00:29:02.320
if I hadn't wedded myself to the animal literature. That's what's important about comparative psychology,
00:29:07.760
studying the psychology and behavioral patterns of other species. And so that's when I had my
00:29:13.760
eureka moment, right? I didn't come up with the term sneaky fucker, but I came up with the concept of
00:29:19.520
male feminists as sneaky fuckers, right? And so the idea there is I'm so sensitive. I cry when I put gas
00:29:26.800
into my car because I know that the evil juice is resulted from the raping of Mother Earth. I really
00:29:32.960
care about being vegan. I wear a foulard because I'm very, very sensitive. And hopefully by you having
00:29:38.720
me around, I mean, to a female, then I appear as though I'm not threatening and maybe that would
00:29:43.840
let you put down your guard. I mean, not for me to sexually assault you, but to fall in your good
00:29:48.720
graces. And so it's one of a multiplicity of strategies that men can use to try to get close
00:29:54.160
to women. And so to your point, in that singular case, me adopting that strategy has fitness maximizing.
00:30:02.240
But certainly there are no fitness maximizing benefits to this thing called science via the
00:30:11.440
adoption of postmodernism, because has postmodernism advanced anything of any value in science? No.
00:30:21.280
Have we built better bridges? No. Have we solved cancer better? No. Have we developed better
00:30:27.200
applied econometric models to study consumer choice? No. It's a nihilistic thing. It's
00:30:32.480
intellectual terrorism. So I suppose whether it's fitness maximizing or not depends on who is the
00:30:39.360
unit of analysis. But certainly on the epistemological level, it's pure shite, as we say.
00:30:46.080
Well, but another way to look at it is as a form of new religion. Religion didn't do much for the
00:30:51.600
advancement of science, but it has plenty of other functional purposes, one could say. And so, I mean,
00:30:58.960
as a young scientist myself, I was exposed to popper and falsifiability criteria. I mean,
00:31:04.720
this seemed to be an integral part of our education as grad students in most disciplines.
00:31:09.760
Why is it that we continue to see people in academia who are at relatively high status universities who
00:31:20.080
don't seem to be familiar with Popperian falsification and have sort of, I mean, do people just sort of have
00:31:27.040
a blind spot? I mean, because so many of the things that you describe, they seem to be immune to any kind
00:31:34.880
of falsification. Yeah, so true. I agree with you that there should be required reading for all
00:31:39.440
sorts of reasons. I would say, even if you're not a behavioral scientist or psychologist type,
00:31:45.360
the Fisk and Campbell 1959 paper on multi-trade, multi-method matrix is a must. Another one that I
00:31:54.560
would say is a must would be the 1971 paper by Davis titled, that's interesting exclamation point,
00:32:03.520
where he gives 12 criteria by which you could judge whether research is interesting. I mean,
00:32:10.000
it's one thing for research to have internal and external validity. And most reviewers on academic
00:32:15.440
journals will judge, did you control the right things? Did you tease out that it was due to this
00:32:20.960
effect? Was the literature review adequate? Was the theoretical foundation appropriate? Did you use
00:32:26.320
the right data analytic procedures? Okay, all that is important, of course, crucially important. But the
00:32:32.400
final finding, do we care about it? Was it interesting? Is there any value to that? And I would argue,
00:32:38.400
Greg, probably 70% of the time that I ever reviewed an academic paper, I've been now a professor 31 years,
00:32:45.280
so that's a lot of papers. Probably, I could have taken the same cut and paste sentence where I say,
00:32:52.400
great job on methodological rigor, blah, blah, blah, but who gives a shit about this finding? So you
00:32:57.600
found basically, that customers who were satisfied with an establishment were more likely to return to
00:33:04.080
this establishment? Holy shit, who could have ever imagined this? Who could have known this? But you
00:33:08.640
used LISRL modeling and pathway that used moderation media, so it walked like a duck,
00:33:14.320
it quacked like a duck, it sounded sciencey, therefore it must have been sciencey. And in that
00:33:19.280
sense, it was methodologically rigorous, but on a completely unimportant point. All this long-winded
00:33:24.320
thing to say is that I support your point about, you know, Popperian falsification and so on, and too
00:33:28.880
many academics don't know any of this sort of philosophy of science stuff. But I want to explain what makes
00:33:35.600
those parasitic ideas so alluring, because that kind of ties a couple of the threads that you've
00:33:41.120
been asking about. Right, this is, I think, this new discipline of, I guess, I don't know,
00:33:47.520
memetic parasitology. I mean, I think we actually ought to have a subfield in our psychology department.
00:33:55.440
I love it, I love it. Epidemiology of mind pathogens.
00:34:00.240
I agree. But in any case, as I was writing The Parasitic Mind, I needed to make sure to at least
00:34:06.640
cover, but why? How could anybody believe this? Like, what causes you to actually, I mean,
00:34:13.520
you're not literally lobotomized, what could be alluring about this? And so here was the explanation,
00:34:19.920
and I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on it. So I argue that each of these parasitic ideas
00:34:26.880
starts off from a noble place. And let me give you a concrete example. Equity feminism is great,
00:34:33.280
it says there should be no institutional barriers in terms of how you treat men and women. And so
00:34:39.280
based on that metric, then most reasonable people say, yeah, sign me up, I'm an equity feminist.
00:34:44.880
Then radical feminists come along and say, well, that's not enough. In order for us to squash the
00:34:50.480
existing sexist patriarchy, we have to promulgate the idea that men and women are indistinguishable.
00:34:56.800
So in the service of what started off as a noble goal, right, which is eradicate real sexism if it
00:35:03.280
exists, if we have to murder and rape truth in the service of that noble goal, so be it. So and that's
00:35:09.680
how I then get into this distinction between deontological versus consequentialist ethics.
00:35:15.600
Because certain principles, freedom of speech, presumption of innocence, freedom of inquiry,
00:35:21.520
defense of truth, have to be deontological. The second that you say, I believe, but you say,
00:35:27.920
but you're an asshole, okay? There is no but. There is no but, right? Because then you fall into,
00:35:34.400
I believe in presumption of innocence, but not for Brett Kavanaugh, because in his case,
00:35:39.840
it's too important, the job that he's going to have. I believe in freedom of speech,
00:35:43.920
but not for Donald Trump when he was kicked off Twitter. It doesn't apply to him. I believe in
00:35:48.560
journalistic integrity, but not when it came to shutting down the Hunter Biden story and so on.
00:35:55.120
So no, it has to be deontological. So each of these parasitic ideas actually starts from a noble place.
00:36:02.960
And in the service of that really laudable noble goal, if we have to rape truth, so be it. So
00:36:09.600
transgender activism is exactly that. I went in front of the Canadian Senate in 2017. I mean,
00:36:15.120
literally, you could go listen to it. I predicted everything that's happened, okay? And I don't,
00:36:18.880
I'm not saying this to pat myself on the back. It's just because you could clearly see what was
00:36:23.280
coming down the pipeline. I said, look, I support the right of all people to live free of bigotry.
00:36:28.800
So based on that metric, count me as a very socially liberal person. I'm pro-trans. On the other hand,
00:36:35.120
if you ask me to murder and rape truth in the service of making a small minority live out their
00:36:42.880
personhood better than a few, no. So I can walk and chew gum at the same time. I believe that
00:36:49.760
transgender people should be free of bigotry, but no, men cannot menstruate. So I think that
00:36:55.760
is a broad explanation for why all of these parasitic ideas are so alluring.
00:37:00.720
But look, as someone who is schooled as an economist, we get utilitarianism through osmosis.
00:37:07.200
And so from a utilitarian perspective, ideas, in fact, they can cause pleasure, pain. And so
00:37:14.400
it makes perfect sense that you might want to distribute falsehoods if it increases, you know,
00:37:20.720
welfare makes perfect sense. But I think you're suggesting that there's some kind of
00:37:25.600
triggers like self-deception that kicks in. I mean, because you can imagine a world where people
00:37:32.000
are like, well, of course, we all know that men and women are different, but we're going to say
00:37:36.800
that they're not because we know that this will advance our goals. I think the number of people who
00:37:41.920
do that is actually vanishingly small. I think that most of the people who say these things,
00:37:47.520
they believe them. They just cannot believe something that is going to undermine their desire to advance
00:37:54.640
the utilitarian goal that they have in mind. Why is that necessary? I mean, he wrote this book before
00:38:00.720
the COVID epidemic, and there was a lot of discussion during the COVID epidemic about whether
00:38:06.160
as a public health official, you should tell the truth or say the thing which is going to yield the
00:38:12.400
desired result. And I think long term, you could see that there's been some negative consequences
00:38:18.080
for embracing the utilitarian view. But I think that, you know, the issue is real. Why is it that
00:38:23.760
so few people can embrace the kind of cynical view? So I hope that what I'm going to answer in either
00:38:30.560
in a direct or bleak way addresses your question. It's difficult to tell, and I've struggled with this
00:38:36.240
question myself, how many of the parasitized people in the deepest recesses of their mind, when they put
00:38:43.120
their head on the pillow, know that they're full of shit versus truly have internalized it to your
00:38:48.720
traverse self-deception argument. And we can debate here what that number would be. I do think, for
00:38:55.200
example, and I do mention that in the parasitic mind, that the French postmodernists, I absolutely
00:39:01.520
believe that they knew that they were full of shit. I don't believe that Lacan and Derrida and so on
00:39:08.000
said all those things thinking, gee, no. Actually, to our earlier point about sexual selection,
00:39:13.600
I think that there is great power in me appearing up on top of the podium at Princeton
00:39:19.120
with a bunch of really looking in awe at me, beautiful young students, and I start espousing
00:39:25.520
gibberish. And then I look around, I say, people are taking this seriously and actually think I'm a prophet.
00:39:31.520
Let's ride this baby all the way to the bank. And so I think, and by the way, Michel Foucault said that
00:39:36.960
to John Searle, and I mentioned that exact interaction, that there's an element of full
00:39:41.440
profundity bullshit that is part of the game. So notwithstanding what percentage of people truly
00:39:47.600
have internalized the parasitic ideas versus simply signal it, we can debate that. I think,
00:39:53.600
to the more general question, the parasitic mind is a book on what happens to our cognitive system when
00:39:59.840
it is parasitized. But that's why my next book is Suicidal Empathy, which is what happens to our
00:40:06.480
emotional system when it is parasitized. You need the one-two punch to completely zombify me,
00:40:12.960
because I am a thinking and feeling animal. So what happens to the people who say,
00:40:19.840
you can't, because you mentioned COVID, who say, you can't go say goodbye to your dying
00:40:26.000
grandmother because COVID is too important, but don't you worry about going with 100,000 people on
00:40:32.000
top of each other at the BLM rally. As a matter of fact, a thousand of us really important public
00:40:36.880
health officials have signed the document that settled science. It won't spread through 100,000
00:40:41.840
people, but don't you dare say goodbye to grandma. It can't be that there isn't some kind of
00:40:47.120
zombification that's taking place there. Now, in that case, I would argue, I mean, there is a
00:40:52.000
cognitive parasitic element, but there is certainly a suicidal empathy element, which is,
00:40:57.840
is it okay if I just get into the explanation of suicidal empathy? Because it's going to hopefully
00:41:01.600
tie the whole thing together. I might have to have you back when that book comes out, though.
00:41:05.280
Absolutely. I will commit right now on the record to coming back. But anyways, empathy is a wonderful
00:41:11.920
emotion that there are very clear evolutionary reasons for why it has evolved. We are a social
00:41:17.040
species. Being able to certainly the cognitive element of empathy, having theory of mind is important.
00:41:23.520
Affective empathy is also important. So there are very, very clear evolutionary arguments for why
00:41:28.320
we would have evolved that. But as Aristotle explained to us 2,500 years ago, everything in
00:41:33.200
the right amount at the right place, right time, and so on. So what happens to empathy when it misfires,
00:41:38.480
that's the whole point of the book, is akin to what happens with OCD. So OCD is the environmental
00:41:47.360
threat scanning mechanism goes haywire. It makes perfect sense if I meet you at a cafe, you say,
00:41:53.440
hey God, how you doing? And you sneeze in your hand, and then you come out to shake my hand,
00:41:57.600
that when you're not looking because I don't want to offend you, I go to the bathroom and I wash my
00:42:01.440
hands because it looks like Greg has got a bad flu and I don't want to catch it. But if I spend the
00:42:06.400
next eight hours locked into a repetitive behavior, cleaning my hands, and as the skin is falling off,
00:42:13.360
and I can't get to my work and I'm fired, well, now that becomes OCD. So what started off as a
00:42:18.880
perfectly adaptive mechanism, when it misfires, in this case, it's hyperactive, it becomes maladaptive,
00:42:25.120
it becomes a psychiatric dysfunction. Exact same principle I argue for empathy. Empathy is great
00:42:31.760
when it is within the proper regulated zones, and it is targeting the right people. But if for whatever
00:42:39.360
reason MS-13 gang member become more worthy of my empathy than American vets, then we have a problem.
00:42:48.320
If it becomes incredibly important for me to be astoundingly empathetic towards one religion called
00:42:55.360
Islam to the detriment of everyone else, we have a bad case of suicidal empathy. So what I argue in the
00:43:01.520
book is that much of the disasters that we are seeing both in domestic policy and foreign policy,
00:43:08.800
at least when it comes from the progressive politicians, stems from dysregulated empathy.
00:43:13.520
Right. Well, I look forward to that. But I mean, another thing that you allude to is this solidarity
00:43:18.720
that one gets from belonging to a community that shares the same religious faith, I suppose you
00:43:25.920
could call it. And so it seems like if you're a researcher or an academic, at some point there's
00:43:30.880
going to be a tension between your group affiliation and your desire to signal to your group that you
00:43:37.840
are a loyal member of that group and your pursuit of truth. And, you know, religious people, I think
00:43:42.640
traditionally we've had enough centuries of religion and science coexisting that with traditional
00:43:47.680
religions, I've met plenty of very, very religious scientists who have the ability to sort of just
00:43:54.800
put in a box their religion and do like fantastic scientific research. Is it perhaps that this new
00:44:01.600
religion is just so fresh that we haven't, they haven't figured out how to put it in its box yet?
00:44:07.360
I mean, it is, of course, there are many elements of the parasitic ideological rapture that is akin to
00:44:13.840
your point of a secular religion, right? They are revealed truths that are impervious to falsification,
00:44:19.360
right? I mean, I mean, literally. So they are very, very clear epistemological analogies that you could
00:44:25.520
draw from a religion and these quasi kind of woke parasitic religions. So to that point, you're exactly
00:44:32.160
right. You can be a Christian geologist, but the claim that the world was created 4,000 years ago,
00:44:37.520
that particular piece of your Christian faith, you've deleted that, you know, that part you've
00:44:42.400
deleted. Actually, I call that cafeteria religion, right? You go to the buffet of cafeteria and you
00:44:49.280
pick the ones that you think are, that's exactly what happens, for example, with a lot of Islamic
00:44:54.240
people that I chat with, right? We say, oh, but it's not true. Well, no, no, it is true what I'm telling
00:44:58.960
you about codified canonical Jew hatred. You choose to ignore that part, right? There isn't a form of
00:45:06.000
Judaism that I practice whereby eating shrimp and pork is okay. I don't practice light Judaism.
00:45:13.760
I simply ignore the parts, culinarily speaking, that I don't wish. But Judaism is Judaism. It
00:45:20.080
exists independently of what my practice in cafeteria Judaism is. So that you're exactly right.
00:45:25.760
But your earlier point about how you're part of a group and you have your identity and you
00:45:30.160
don't necessarily want to speak out of this identity. Of course, scientists suffer from that.
00:45:34.240
But Solomon Ash experiment already explained that to us, right? I always tell my students when we come
00:45:40.720
into class, you know, there's a couple of classic experiments that are perfect to discuss for several
00:45:47.520
reasons. One of which is that you don't have to have convoluted experimental designs in order to prove
00:45:55.520
something that is unbelievably profound about the human spirit. So the Solomon Ash experiment is
00:46:01.200
very simple. I won't get into all the details, but you show people three lines of varying length,
00:46:06.720
but that it's so clear how different they are that a legally blind person could tell. And then you show
00:46:14.000
another line that is the same length as one of those three other ones. So that it should be absolutely
00:46:19.440
clear that it's line B. That's the same as line X. But what you want to do in the experiment is you
00:46:25.600
want to see what happens to people if they are presented with other people that are giving the
00:46:31.360
wrong answer. Will they acquiesce to what clearly is a wrong answer? Their lying eyes are deceiving them.
00:46:37.520
Or will they look and say, are you insane that you're giving a wrong answer? Why are you a moron?
00:46:42.640
And of course, the brilliance of Solomon Ash experiment is that a disheartening number of
00:46:48.400
people. I mean, if it were one person, you wouldn't believe it, but that's a lot more than
00:46:52.800
one person. They just nod their head and give the exact same wrong answer, knowing full well that
00:46:58.960
can't be the right answer. But there's nothing scarier than me standing out in the group. And it's
00:47:04.560
literally, I mean, when you ask people, what is your biggest fear? People are more afraid of public
00:47:10.080
speaking than death. That's literally true, right? So it's not the natural reflex for most people to
00:47:17.680
defend truth if it will ostracize me from the group. And to your point about finding the fitness
00:47:24.160
maximization, there are clear evolutionary reasons why I should stick in the group, right? By the way,
00:47:29.840
there's a great book, which I'm almost starting to feel upset that I'm giving it so much free
00:47:35.120
publicity. I should be getting royalties from their book. The book is called The Enigma of Reason.
00:47:44.160
Ah, it's fantastic. It's also in the business of selling his books too.
00:47:48.400
Exactly. And so what Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber argued is that the faculty of reasoning
00:47:54.400
in humans did not evolve to seek some objective truth, but rather it evolved to win arguments,
00:48:02.960
right? I loved Elon Musk, but now he's no longer on my team. It doesn't matter if he now
00:48:08.800
cures cancer. He's a bad Nazi. And so now the reason why I wanted to put that in chapter seven
00:48:16.000
of the parasitic mind is because I wanted to be fully honest in the difficulty of seeking truth.
00:48:22.880
Here I am offering you in chapter seven, an epistemological tool for seeking truth,
00:48:28.640
but I'm also telling you that the problem with my mind vaccine is that most people go,
00:48:33.840
la la la, I don't want to hear it. I'm not having your mind vaccine. And so that becomes a challenge.
00:48:39.280
How can I get you to change your opinion if I know that there is probably nothing I'm going to say
00:48:44.240
that's going to move you one millimeter off your anchored position?
00:48:47.920
Well, look, last question in your book, in the parasitic mind, you spend a lot of time talking
00:48:53.280
about the parasites that are most common in academia. And I think you have a lot of critics
00:49:00.400
on Twitter. I'm not a big Twitter guy or X guy, but I know you are huge on social media. And a lot
00:49:06.640
of people have criticized you for offering up an unbalanced approach. Now I'm probably one of the few
00:49:12.960
people at UC Berkeley that actually has friends who voted for Trump. And I can say that the mind
00:49:20.000
parasites, they don't discriminate. They are equally represented on both sides. Do you anticipate
00:49:26.240
maybe looking into the mind parasites of that other side, or is there enough research being done by so
00:49:33.600
many of our academic colleagues that you don't need to do that? No, that's a great question. I actually
00:49:39.040
addressed that very early in the book, where I exactly predicted that could be a concern. And
00:49:45.600
with full transparency, I said, look, it is clear that the capacity to be parasitized transcends time
00:49:52.080
periods, transcends cultures, transcends political aisles. I will be focusing on specific set of parasitic
00:49:59.600
ideas that emanate from academia. And as it so happens, since academia is astonishingly leftist,
00:50:09.040
those parasitic ideas happen to be originating. Their genesis is from the left. That doesn't mean
00:50:16.080
that people on the right can't be parasitized. And I give a specific example of what I just said
00:50:21.760
from evolutionary theory. So resistance to evolution is much more likely to come from the right.
00:50:28.640
Right. Resistance to evolutionary psychology is much more likely to come to the left. That exactly
00:50:36.000
proves the point that you are asking. But in the same way that you don't go see diabetes physician
00:50:43.200
and say, wait a second, are you saying that melanoma is not important, diabetes doctor? He looks at you
00:50:50.320
and says, you're a moron. Yes, it is important, but I specialize in diabetes. So the fact that I specialize
00:50:57.600
in parasitic ideas of the left because I am a man of academia where all the left rules doesn't mean
00:51:04.640
that people on the right can't be abject morons also. Well, we will at some point have a general
00:51:10.960
science of mind virus epidemiology and you'll be a part of that group. So maybe since you've agreed to
00:51:19.280
come back another time, we can talk about particularly what business schools can do and what
00:51:24.480
people in academia can do to help resist infection. And so until then, thank you so much, God, for
00:51:31.920
joining me. I really appreciate it. And we'll talk again soon. Thank you so much. I really enjoyed it.
00:51:36.800
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00:51:43.840
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00:52:04.160
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