The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - What Constitutes Interesting Scientific Research？ (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_675)

00:00:00.000 So whether you are a scientist yourself or you're a graduate student or an undergrad who's interested in science or just a lay person interested in science, you really want to be listening to this because it's really important to not only learn how to think like a scientist and how to apply the scientific method, but it's really important to learn how to conduct interesting research.

00:00:26.120 And this is not something that is often taught, let's say when you're pursuing your PhD, you're taught methodological rigor, you're taught how to conduct a literature review, you're taught how to apply the scientific method, propose the research questions, posit some hypotheses, develop the data collection procedure to test the hypotheses, collect the data, analyze the data through some research.

00:00:56.120 data analytic procedures, some statistical inferencing, and then arrive at a conclusion, offer some practical theoretical implications, some future research streams, and then voila, you've written a paper or you've, you know, written your doctoral dissertation.

00:01:12.220 And that's all great. Of course, we want to teach people how to do good science, but how do you teach people how to do interesting science?

00:01:18.940 Now, this is something that I've been railing against for much of my career because I very quickly learned that most academic research is astoundingly boring.

00:01:33.340 Astoundingly boring, not because there aren't many, many interesting things to study, but it's because people end up being focused on the wrong things.

00:01:43.360 So they, they sacrifice interestingness for rigor.

00:01:49.940 But of course, these are not mutually exclusive metrics, right?

00:01:53.200 You could be very rigorous, both in terms of the internal and external validity of your research, while also being interesting.

00:02:01.720 And I don't mean to, by the way, imply that interesting means that it has to be something that is covered on the six o'clock news, that it has to be sexy, and therefore somehow, you know, flippant research.

00:02:14.680 Not at all.

00:02:15.720 You can say some unbelievably powerful things about the human condition, if we're now we're talking about research in the human context, that are, you go, wow, this is interesting.

00:02:27.880 I mean, that's, that's one of the reasons I love the behavioral sciences, right?

00:02:31.780 Why I love consumer psychology and evolutionary psychology.

00:02:35.180 There are so many fascinating things that we can study, but people end up being stuck in designing very rigorous experiments or developing mathematical models that are really tight. 0.97

00:02:47.220 But then the ultimate question is just pure bullshit.

00:02:50.100 And I, it kind of came back to the forefront of my mind, because I just returned, I was in Miami, I was attending the Academy of Marketing Science Conference, which was this year being held in Miami. 0.99

00:03:01.840 And so as I was going to the various sessions, I couldn't help but, you know, think that which I thought in so many other academic conferences, which is, boy, this is some bullshit research. 0.83

00:03:16.340 And again, I don't mean that as a, it's not an arrogant statement. 0.91

00:03:19.920 It's not, I'm not trying to be elitist.

00:03:21.980 Again, the researchers who are presenting their work, in most cases, you know, are, are, are doing the science, but they're not doing interesting science.

00:03:31.660 Okay, so let's, how do we decide what constitutes interesting?

00:03:34.680 Isn't it, you know, in the eye of the beholder?

00:03:36.860 Isn't it subjective?

00:03:37.740 Well, I mean, to some extent, yes, but there are some ways by which we can create a taxonomy or a framework for saying, you know, all other things equal, this research question is likely to bear more interesting fruits than this research question.

00:03:55.920 Let me start by giving some examples of what I would consider interesting research in psychology in general.

00:04:05.700 And then later, I'm going to give specific examples within evolutionary psychology.

00:04:10.180 This is a list that I had first.

00:04:13.320 Well, I'll come back to the list in a second.

00:04:15.040 So whenever I teach any, any course, whether it be at the undergraduate, the MBA, the master's of science or PhD level, I often will revert back to arguably the three greatest experiments ever conducted in psychology.

00:04:30.940 Number one, many of you have heard, of course, the obedience to roles experiment, the Zimbardo experiments at Stanford, where Zimbardo took, Philip Zimbardo took a bunch of undergrads and randomly made half of them be corrections officers, the other half be prisoners, and then watched their behaviors unfold.

00:04:56.300 And then he had to stop the experiment on ethical grounds because those who were imbued with the role of being corrections officers internalized that role and became quite sadistic towards their fellow undergraduate students who were playing the role of prisoners.

00:05:13.140 And so that was interesting in that you saw what happens to people when they are adhering to certain role expectations.

00:05:23.000 But that study, notwithstanding how famous it was, is not as interesting, if you'd like, as, of course, the Stanley Milgram experiments.

00:05:35.080 And there, for those of you who may remember, this is where Stanley Milgram devised an experimental design to try to address that which he had often heard regarding some of the Nazis and German soldiers who said,

00:05:54.600 hey, hey, I was just obeying, you know, I was just obeying orders, you know, I'm not a bad guy, I'm not an evil guy.

00:06:03.100 And so he wanted to actually test, can you get people to do horrible things simply because they are put in a situation where they're going to, you know, there's going to be pressure on them to conform to that authority.

00:06:19.680 And so he devised an experimental paradigm whereby he brought in two people to the lab.

00:06:29.920 One of them was, quote, randomly determined to be the teacher.

00:06:36.200 The other one was the student.

00:06:38.200 But I say, quote, randomly because the teacher, it was the actual subject.

00:06:43.980 The student was actually a confederate, meaning it's a person who is pretending to be a subject or a participant, but really they're in on the experiment.

00:06:55.180 And so he would put them in separate rooms and say, oh, you know, I'm trying to gauge how well people learn as a function of, you know, being punished.

00:07:06.160 So there's a schedule of reinforcement cause people to learn better or something to that effect.

00:07:12.660 And so the teacher is going to read a bunch of paired associates to the student, young man, blue car, big house, right?

00:07:22.840 So these are paired associates.

00:07:24.620 And the teacher asks the student who's in another room, please memorize these paired associates.

00:07:32.320 And then when you go back and you say, you know, young, the student's supposed to say man.

00:07:37.240 If he doesn't say the right correlate, you know, paired associate, then he is zapped with an electric volt.

00:07:46.040 And of course, unbeknownst to the actual teacher, there is no voltage that's being assigned, but he doesn't know that.

00:07:53.060 And so on the other hand, you, on the other side, you hear the, the, the student sort of screaming, ow, this hurts and so on.

00:07:59.900 And, and these, these voltages become increasingly stronger, you know, to, to point where it says, you know, danger, do not administer that, you know, this will cause death.

00:08:11.340 And just to get to the punchline, many people, well, more than what you might have otherwise imagined, end up zapping a, a fellow human being to the point of causing them great harm, if not death.

00:08:27.020 Because every time they would look and turn and say, hey, should I go on the, the, you know, the person in the white lab coat say, you know, hey, you've agreed to participate in this experiment.

00:08:36.020 Just do it, follow the instructions. And so the point was to show that people could really be put in, in, in situations where they violate what they would have thought otherwise is their, you know, moral compass.

00:08:48.500 Because, and of course, this is not to justify the Nazis and the German soldiers in World War II.

00:08:54.080 Now, the reason why this was incredible is because when you went ahead and asked clinical psychologists and psychiatrists, hey, how many people do you think would be psychopathic enough to actually administer

00:09:05.780 enough voltage to kill someone? I don't remember the exact numbers, but I think it was something in the order of, you know, one in a thousand.

00:09:13.720 And it turns out that an astonishingly greater number than that were, were able to be coerced into doing these awful things unbeknownst to them.

00:09:25.580 So that was surprising. It was like, wow, this, and, and by the way,

00:09:29.520 the psychologists were so incredulous regarding the results that they said, bullshit, you're, you're, you know, 0.99

00:09:37.540 no way Milgram, you're making this stuff up. And so that's why he ended up taping the experiments. 0.97

00:09:43.540 And so you can actually go and watch these tapes experiment. Usually you don't necessarily have to

00:09:48.900 tape these experiments if, if, if it's not relevant for the data analysis, but here in a sense, it was,

00:09:54.520 you know, a dear diary. It was laying witness to the fact that, no, look, these are really things that are

00:10:00.580 happening. So it allowed us to see something that we thought, you know, most humans would not do. And

00:10:07.040 therefore it was surprising. Therefore it was interesting. And again, here I'm giving you anecdotal

00:10:12.560 evidence of interesting research. I will talk about a formal way by which we can establish what

00:10:18.820 constitutes interesting research. And then arguably the one that even, that even impresses me more than

00:10:26.240 the Milgram experiment is one that some of you may have heard me talk about before the Solomon

00:10:30.560 Ash conformity experiment. This is where, and again, for those of you who know it, forgive me, bear with 0.97

00:10:36.460 me, but this is where, but by the way, people who are requesting to, to speak your requests are going

00:10:43.740 to go unheeded because, uh, in these general sessions, I just, uh, lecture. And then if you want,

00:10:50.840 if you wish to ask questions either directly to me or via, oftentimes I take written questions and you

00:10:57.080 have to subscribe to my content. No, that's not because I'm Jewish and, you know, Jews, Jew trying 0.80

00:11:03.400 to make money. It's because that's one of the, uh, exclusive benefits that I offer people as do many

00:11:10.740 other content creators for people to subscribe to exclusive content, right? So if you wish to

00:11:15.980 interact with me and so on, then please subscribe for my content. It's in the order of a latte per

00:11:22.840 month. Okay. So, and you certainly get a lot more worth than a latte and subscribing to the content. So

00:11:28.860 there's no point asking to, to, for speaking privileges here, because I'm just going to be lecturing.

00:11:35.000 So the, the Solomon-Ash experiment, think of it this way. There are three lines of very different 0.82

00:11:41.720 lengths. So a lines, A, B, C, and then next to it, you know, but separate, there's another line X.

00:11:50.000 Now X, let's say is the same length as line B. And it's clear, like there's absolutely no way unless you

00:11:57.460 were, you know, absolutely blind that you wouldn't be able to tell that line X is the same length as line

00:12:04.220 B. But the point is to see whether if you get a bunch of people to give the wrong answer, when you

00:12:11.360 ask the question, which of lines A, B, and C are the same as line X. So if I bring in eight people

00:12:17.300 into the lab and I put the first seven, they're confederates, meaning they're fake subjects, but 0.52

00:12:22.540 the eighth subject doesn't know this. So the first person, when you ask them which of lines A, B, or C

00:12:28.060 is the same length as line X, the correct answer is B. But then person, the first person says,

00:12:34.040 oh, it's A. And A is like, you know, five times longer than X. So it's no way that you can say

00:12:41.340 that. He says A. The second person says A. The third person says A. The fourth person says A. So as

00:12:48.320 you can see, there is this weight of conformity that's being built on the shoulders of the last

00:12:55.180 person. And then the point is to see whether that person will conform. In other words, will they go

00:13:00.440 against their lying eyes for a stimulus that is completely clear? There's no way you can get

00:13:08.460 this wrong, right? I mean, literally, so that's what makes it so powerful, the experiment, because

00:13:13.400 the real world has grayness. The real world has fuzziness. There's nothing fuzzy about this. Line B

00:13:20.860 is the same length as line X. And line A and C are very, very different length. And yet,

00:13:29.540 when you get to person 8, even if one person had conformed, that would be surprising. And yet,

00:13:36.380 many more than one person conform, demonstrating the unbelievable power of group conformity in shaping

00:13:45.080 our behavior. So I talk about this when I then discuss many consumer behavior contexts that are

00:13:51.840 shaped by conformity. Take, for example, the fashion industry. The fashion industry is just one big

00:13:57.340 cyclical orgiastic conformity experiment. Okay, everybody, today you all wear blue. Okay, assholes,

00:14:04.620 no more blue. That's out. You wear green. And we all nod along and follow the fashionistas, 1.00

00:14:11.520 right? So the power of that experiment is it demonstrated in an incredibly elegant and simple

00:14:18.080 design, something that is incredibly powerful and interesting about the human condition, which is

00:14:25.080 you can get people to follow suit and conform even in context where it should be impossible for you to

00:14:33.240 be giving the wrong answer. That's interesting. That's powerful. It didn't take a fancy convoluted

00:14:40.440 experimental design. It didn't take fancy mathematical modeling. It didn't take fancy, you know,

00:14:49.420 procedural convoluted designs. Very simple, elegant experiment demonstrating something universal

00:14:57.920 and powerful and therefore interesting. Okay. So now we come to, so how do we, how can we determine

00:15:06.820 what's interesting? What if I find dolphin mating behavior interesting, whereas you find, you know,

00:15:13.060 the evolution of a particular plant morphology to be interesting? How, you know, you're, you're a botanist

00:15:22.320 and you're interested in plants and I'm a, you know, marine biologist and I'm interested in dolphin mating

00:15:27.620 behavior. How are we to judge whether my work is interesting or yours? And as I said, yes, there are

00:15:34.800 individual idiosyncratic personal differences, but there should be a way by which we can talk about

00:15:40.880 all other things considered, things that are interesting or not. Most academics could not give

00:15:46.380 a damn whether their research is interesting. As a matter of fact, they take great pride in the fact

00:15:51.200 that, you know, they don't look at such vulgar things. They do rigorous research. No, that that's

00:15:57.740 bullshit. When I sat down at many of those academic conference meetings, as I did now this past week 0.99

00:16:07.100 in Miami, I was seriously considering whether I should inject Ebola both in my eyes and ears so

00:16:14.560 that I could be protected from some of the quote research that I was seeing. Now, again, it's not

00:16:20.000 because the people who are doing the research are dumb. They're not. They're very good methodologists. 0.96

00:16:25.560 They know how to apply the scientific method to test something, but what they're testing is

00:16:31.140 completely useless. So, I'm going to come in a second to the paper in question that I wanted to

00:16:38.000 talk about today in terms of how do you establish that something is interesting. But first, I wanted to

00:16:43.220 read to you a part of a review that I had written. So, for those of you who don't know, the way

00:16:52.000 academic research is judged is that it goes out to a journal, okay, let's suppose, you know, journal of

00:17:00.920 consumer psychology. So, if I want to send a paper to that journal, I send it to the editor. The editor

00:17:07.660 will decide who are the reviewers that are most likely to be well-suited to review this paper, and 0.96

00:17:14.380 then it will go out for review, and then the results come back, you know, either reject this paper, it sucks, 0.56

00:17:23.880 accept it, or please resubmit, but please implement these major revisions, please resubmit, but implement

00:17:32.320 these minor revisions, or accept as is. Now, for most papers, it'll go through multiple rounds of back and

00:17:38.560 forth, until at one point it gets to, okay, this paper is ready to be accepted. And so, as an academic,

00:17:45.100 as a professor, one of the professional, if you like, obligations that are part of your job as an

00:17:53.080 academic is to serve as a reviewer for various journals. And so, I've reviewed, you know, innumerable

00:18:01.220 papers. I do it a lot less these days, because at this stage of my career, you know, my time is taken

00:18:06.900 by other things, and I've already done my, I've put in my time for 30 years, but probably the, not

00:18:14.760 probably, the singular most common feedback that I gave a paper when I was reviewing it is basically

00:18:24.640 that it wasn't interesting, okay? Of course, that's not the only problem. Sometimes there are, you know,

00:18:30.880 data analytic problems, data collection problems, there are internal validity problems, the,

00:18:36.560 the, the, the research design was not well developed, the, the hypotheses were not good. I mean, there's

00:18:42.600 a million reasons why a paper can go wrong, and I'll talk a bit more about that. But the fundamental

00:18:46.740 one is you would read a paper, at least for me, I would say, this, this sucks. I mean, of course, I 0.96

00:18:52.400 didn't put it in those words. So, I'm going to read you first, I'm going to read you a, a, an actual

00:18:58.480 part of a review that I had written. So, here we go. So, perhaps the first criterion that any scholar

00:19:05.460 should pose when embarking on a new research project is how interesting the expected findings

00:19:11.080 are likely to be. While it is clear that not every research project will be earth-shattering,

00:19:17.080 one of the first metrics that should be used in evaluating study is how novel and non-trivial

00:19:22.240 the findings will prove to be. Regrettably, the current paper fails in delivering on these crucial

00:19:28.640 epistemological metrics. Obtaining significant effects is insufficient in judging the intellectual

00:19:35.700 contributions of a study. The directional relationships in the LISRL model, LISRL model is a

00:19:42.260 type of causal model, you know, where you're, you're, you're, you're showing which variables

00:19:48.040 cause which other variables in a, in a, in a, in a path analysis. So, the directional relationships

00:19:55.440 in the LISRL model are largely self-evident. Statistical and methodological rigor do not

00:20:01.960 compensate for results that are minimally surprising. If one were to sample 1,000 lay people and ask them

00:20:09.300 to predict the directional relationships obtained in the current study, I suspect that most, if not

00:20:15.900 all, will provide the correct predictions, i.e. those reported in the structural model. If the authors

00:20:23.080 are unfamiliar with the classic philosophy of science paper by Davis 1971, I highly recommend

00:20:30.220 that they read it. It should provide them with powerful guidelines in judging what might constitute

00:20:35.740 interesting research worthy of their intellectual efforts. So, this was a part of a review that I

00:20:42.000 had written for a paper, but that, that exact, you know, what I just read to you is something that

00:20:47.520 I've written probably for a hundred different papers through all my career. So, now what is this paper

00:20:53.820 by Davis 1971? So, this is a paper that I always assign to my doctoral students and at times to my master's

00:21:05.040 students because it is a brilliant paper that tries to find a method or a framework or a set of criteria

00:21:15.480 that allows us to say, you know, if it, if a paper passes one or more of these criteria,

00:21:22.460 then at least it looks like it's going to be an interesting paper. The general structure, so he

00:21:30.700 proposes, Davis, who was a sociologist, he's passed away. Let me first read you the, the reference

00:21:37.680 because if any of you want to track it, it's actually a paper that I had recommended for my,

00:21:45.120 to my subscribers, uh, probably a month or two ago. I often will, uh, recommend classic academic

00:21:53.420 papers or I make book recommendations to my subscribers. So, that's one of the things that

00:21:57.620 you can get in terms of exclusive content if you subscribe to my, to my content. But let me now

00:22:04.260 mention the paper. It's by Murray S. Davis. It's a 1971 paper. It's published in the philosophy of

00:22:12.160 the social sciences. Uh, it starts on page 309. Uh, it's titled, that's interesting exclamation point

00:22:21.560 towards a phenomenon, phenomenology of sociology and a sociology of phenomenology. Basically what he's

00:22:29.740 doing there in the, that's interesting exclamation point paper, he's saying, well, how do we go about

00:22:34.960 establishing something that's interesting? So, let me read you, uh, the summary of the paper and maybe

00:22:40.900 the first paragraph and then I will drill down what some of these criteria are. So, this is from the

00:22:47.080 paper, chapter, uh, page 309. Question. How do theories which are generally considered interesting

00:22:55.160 differ from theories which are generally considered non-interesting? Answer. Interesting theories are

00:23:02.100 those which deny certain assumptions of their audience, while non-interesting theories are those

00:23:08.120 which affirm certain assumptions of their audience. This answer was arrived at through the examination of

00:23:14.740 a number of famous social and especially sociological theories. That examination also generated

00:23:21.300 a systematic index of the variety of propositional forms which interesting and non-interesting theories

00:23:28.100 may take. The fertility of this approach suggested a new field be established called the sociology of

00:23:35.400 the interesting, which is intended to supplement the sociology of knowledge. This new field will be

00:23:42.040 phenomenologically oriented in so far as it will focus on the movement of the audience's mind from one

00:23:49.620 accepted theory to another. It will be sociologically oriented in so far as it will focus on the

00:23:55.940 dissimilar baseline theories of the various sociological categories which compose the audience.

00:24:01.660 In addition to its value in interpreting the social impact of theories, the sociology of the

00:24:07.580 interesting can contribute to our understanding of both the common sense and scientific perspectives on

00:24:13.320 reality. So, just to kind of summarize, what he's basically saying there is, can we come up with a

00:24:18.640 framework that allows us to establish in a meaningful academic way how we can measure what constitutes

00:24:27.360 interesting scientific research. So, let me just read you the first paragraph of the paper after that

00:24:36.740 summary and then I'll describe some of the 12 criteria that he proposed. So, it has long been

00:24:43.960 thought that a theorist that a theorist is considered great because his theories are true, but this is

00:24:50.020 false. A theorist is considered great not because his theories are true, but because they are

00:24:56.280 interesting. Those who carefully and exhaustively verify trivial theories are soon forgotten, whereas those

00:25:05.080 who cursorily and expediently verify interesting theories are long remembered. In fact, the truth of a theory

00:25:13.780 has very little to do with its impact for a theory can continue to be found interesting even though its

00:25:20.340 truth is disputed, even refuted. So, there you go. What he's saying is that even if your theory is wrong, the fact

00:25:28.300 that it triggers a sense of that's interesting, well, you know, you're doing good research. So, what are some of the

00:25:37.540 criteria that he talks about? So, let me just mention these. He basically, I mean, I'm not going to go

00:25:44.500 through all 12 criteria, but it's basically we thought that A causes B, but it turns out that B causes A.

00:25:53.720 We thought that A and B are correlated. It turns out that A and B are not at all correlated. We thought that

00:26:01.900 the phenomenon was, you know, singularly caused by a single factor. It turns out to be multifactorial. So,

00:26:09.260 as you can see, it's always we thought that it was X, but it turns out that it's not X. Now, of course,

00:26:17.260 you can quibble with this. You could say, well, it can't only be that interesting research is surprising

00:26:24.880 research, and it isn't, right? That's why I'm saying this is not the end-all taxonomy for judging

00:26:30.420 interesting research, but it has to make you go, hmm, wow, I didn't know that. That's cool,

00:26:36.020 right? So, let me give you an example. I often use this, and by the way, at the Academy of Marketing

00:26:41.820 Science Conference that I was at this past week in Miami, I made it my express purpose to sit down

00:26:49.820 with young doctoral students and, you know, young assistant professors to chat rather than the

00:26:55.160 obnoxious older know-it-all professors, precisely because I was trying to hopefully

00:26:59.700 impart some of, you know, my experience onto them, and frankly, we had some really nice

00:27:05.380 conversation because they're all looking for what should they study in their doctoral dissertation

00:27:09.740 and so on. And so, I was trying to explain to them some of the stuff that I'm talking to you about

00:27:13.400 here. Well, life is short, right? Let me give you an example. You could do an incredibly

00:27:23.240 rigorous study. By the way, the example I'm giving is literally one that was done, where you use some

00:27:32.960 fancy statistical procedures. You could, you know, it's full of very fancy Greek letters and

00:27:39.800 mathematical symbols and incredibly complicated design, and yet the final result is customers who

00:27:48.720 are more satisfied at this particular establishment are more likely to return to the establishment. 0.99

00:27:57.400 Holy shit! Move aside Darwin, move aside Newton, move aside Kepler, you're a bullshitter Galileo, 0.99

00:28:08.900 we've got real science going on here. A customer who is more satisfied at a restaurant is more likely

00:28:16.540 to return to the restaurant. I mean, who could have thought of such a brilliant finding, right? Now, note,

00:28:23.080 the way that that was established was very rigorous. It was very scientifically valid. It had the

00:28:31.400 methodological rigor, the literature review was thorough, you know, it passed all of those metric, those 0.99

00:28:39.660 procedural metrics, but the bottom line is bullshit. Who gives a shit? Who didn't know this? 1.00

00:28:45.880 Who didn't know that more satisfied customers are more likely to return? If anything, it would be

00:28:52.520 the opposite that would be interesting. No, satisfaction at a store does not predict your return behavior,

00:29:01.100 your return patronage. That would be surprising, okay? So, one of the things I tell people is do

00:29:08.420 meaningful research. I mean, by the way, this applies in any field, but imagine in a field in the

00:29:14.820 behavioral sciences, in consumer behavior, right? Much of our human nature manifests itself in the

00:29:21.940 consumatory context. That's why I love studying, you know, the consuming instinct, the biological roots

00:29:27.820 of consumption. But there are so many cool things to study, okay? So, let me give you some examples of

00:29:33.360 things that I've studied that, if you forgive me, I would consider to be quite interesting. How about

00:29:38.520 this one? The effects of conspicuous consumption on men's testosterone levels, right? So, we had,

00:29:47.120 we meaning myself and a former graduate student of mine, we actually had men drive a fancy Porsche.

00:29:53.860 We rented out a Porsche or drive a beaten up old sedan in two environments, either in downtown Montreal on

00:30:02.900 the weekend where everybody can see you driving those cars, or in a semi-deserted highway where

00:30:08.220 there isn't an audience effect. And we measured salivary assays before and after the driving

00:30:13.940 conditions. And what we, of course, found that, you know, the endocrinological system blows up,

00:30:21.640 responds very clearly in ways that you would expect from animal behavior. When two, let's say, males fight,

00:30:29.320 the winner has a rise in testosterone, the loser has a drop in testosterone. You see that even,

00:30:34.960 say, in sports. The winning team has a rise in testosterone, the losing team has a drop in

00:30:39.640 testosterone. You even see that amongst the fans of those teams who have a vicarious response of

00:30:46.100 testosterone. That's interesting, right? Because, you know, you're showing why sports consumption is so

00:30:54.680 immersive, because the fans end up being as vested, endocrinologically speaking, as the actual

00:31:02.480 athletes themselves, right? It was life or death for us when Lionel Messi was playing the World Cup

00:31:08.960 final. And as I've explained on Joe Rogan's show, why? Who cares? Lionel Messi doesn't care if I win or

00:31:17.380 lose, yet somehow I was completely vested. We were all completely vested in Argentina winning the World Cup.

00:31:24.160 in a cosmically just manner, right? So, I've done research looking at how the menstrual cycle

00:31:32.000 affects women's consumatory behaviors. Do they dress more sexually when they're ovulating? 0.98

00:31:38.300 Does their food-related behaviors change when they're ovulating? This is not the typical thing

00:31:43.100 that people would say, oh yeah, of course, I knew that. I know that women are more likely to wear

00:31:46.520 stilettos when they are ovulating, right? So, it's interesting. It's not expected. You're taking

00:31:52.740 research that has been applied across other mammalian species and demonstrating that the

00:31:58.140 female consumer in the human context engages in the same homologous behaviors. Okay? I've done 0.96

00:32:04.760 research looking at how birth order effects manifest themselves in a marketing-related context. Birth

00:32:11.740 order effects is, you know, what is your birth order? Are you the first born, the second born,

00:32:17.140 the last born? And there's great research from Frank Soloway showing that there are some really

00:32:23.440 interesting Darwinian reasons why birth order effects exist in the way that they do. And so,

00:32:30.060 I took those principles and I applied them with one of my former doctoral students to the consumer

00:32:35.520 context. And it was very, very surprising and innovative research. I won't go through all of my research.

00:32:42.120 I mean, I've studied, you know, Darwinian exploration of suicide and economic conditions. I've explored

00:32:49.340 Munchausen syndrome by proxy from a Darwinian perspective, a paper that I published in a

00:32:54.560 medical journal back in 2010. It's my work on Munchausen syndrome by proxy that led me to then propose

00:33:02.520 the collective malady of collective Munchausen and collective Munchausen by proxy in my book,

00:33:09.460 the parasitic mind, right? This is not standard stuff that you would see from a business school

00:33:15.080 professor, right? Because I wanted to follow interesting, exciting problems. If you forgive me

00:33:22.640 for, you know, tooting my own horn for a moment, because I mean, I'm doing it because I'm talking

00:33:27.220 about interesting research. The reason why I can have the platform that I have, the fact that I can go on

00:33:35.000 very, very popular shows and discuss, you know, my academic research and the academic research of

00:33:42.120 other people is precisely because I am well calibrated to understand what people are interested

00:33:49.760 in. And so it's not as though I only do research that is sexy that I could talk about on the Megyn Kelly

00:33:56.420 show, but I am well calibrated to say, wait a minute, life is short. There are a lot of really

00:34:02.160 interesting problems and mysteries to solve. Let's not waste time on myopic bullshit. Let's tackle big 0.99

00:34:08.640 problems. And then people respond to that, right? Be a big thinker, be a synthetic thinker. So let me

00:34:15.400 give you examples of what I would, so this is, I gave you a few examples from my own research, but let me

00:34:20.380 give you examples of other people's research that I would consider to be interesting. Okay.

00:34:26.560 Some of you may have heard me talk about this. These are the studies that I'm about to mention

00:34:32.240 are not my own studies, but they are from evolutionary minded researchers. So for example,

00:34:37.980 there's this great work on Darwinian gastronomy. Darwinian gastronomy is looking at culinary

00:34:45.920 traditions from an evolutionary perspective. So Paul Sherman and some of his colleagues, Paul Sherman is a

00:34:52.960 neuroscientist from my alma mater at Cornell, wanted to look at why is it that some culinary traditions

00:35:01.580 are more likely to be spicy while others are less spicy? You know, why is Mexican food spicy,

00:35:07.060 but Swedish food is bland? Now, if you're a cultural anthropologist or a cultural psychologist,

00:35:11.860 you would simply revel in saying, oh yeah, Mexican food is more spicy than Swedish food. Good night,

00:35:19.960 everyone. It ends there. But the more interesting question is to ask the Darwinian why. Is there a

00:35:28.280 causative explanation that can explain the distribution of spice use around the globe? And the answer turns

00:35:38.780 out to be a resounding yes. It's based on something called the antimicrobial hypothesis, which basically says

00:35:46.900 that culinary traditions, which is a cultural form, evolve to be of a particular form to solve biological

00:35:57.640 problems. So in the context of spice use, spices have an antimicrobial property. They help against foodborne

00:36:06.900 pathogens, right? And therefore, in cultures where the ambient temperature is higher, therefore,

00:36:15.720 there's a greater proliferation of food pathogens. There's a greater density of food pathogens. You

00:36:21.840 need to find some cultural adaptation to attenuate that problem. How do you do that? Well, there's many

00:36:27.520 ways you could do it. You could engage in greater use of spice. You could have more vegetable-based foods

00:36:35.600 than animal protein foods because that will have a greater amount. The latter will have greater amount

00:36:40.760 of foodborne pathogens. You could use pickling. You could use salting. You could use smoking of food. All of

00:36:49.060 these cultural adaptations solve a biological problem. That's interesting! When I lecture about

00:36:59.000 this, you could see that you could hear the pin drop in the room. I'm not saying obvious bullshit. People 0.99

00:37:05.340 say, wow, that's interesting. Now I get why Malaysian food and Mexican food are spicier than 1.00

00:37:13.080 Scottish and Swedish food. I never thought that it could be linked in this biologically meaningful way.

00:37:20.860 Okay, let me give you another example. When a baby is born, most family members are likely to state

00:37:29.560 that the baby looks like the father and more so when it's the family members stemming from the mother's

00:37:36.600 family. Now, why is that? In the human context, we are a bi-parental species, right? Meaning that men and

00:37:45.000 women invest heavily in their children. Of course, women more than men, but as mammalian species go,

00:37:52.000 human beings, human dads are super dads. We really do invest quite heavily in our children. Therefore,

00:38:00.020 it doesn't make evolutionary sense for our male ancestors to not have cared whether their women

00:38:06.200 go around behind their backs because then it's an evolutionary dead end. You're spending all of your

00:38:12.060 time investing in little Matteo who turns out to be looking a lot more like your sexy Italian gardener.

00:38:20.060 That's not a good thing. I don't want to be spending 18 years investing in Matteo if he's not mine.

00:38:25.680 Therefore, in an environment where we didn't have DNA paternity testing, you evolve the cultural norm

00:38:32.480 of when the baby comes out, you end up saying, oh my god, he looks exactly like you, Tony. 0.95

00:38:38.960 Even though objectively speaking, that's pure shite because objectively, the morphological features of 0.87

00:38:46.460 the newborn have not yet sufficiently developed so that you are able to say that that baby looks like 0.98

00:38:52.680 the father. And yet people say it, and much more so when they're from the mother's side from the

00:38:58.600 family. Why? Because the mother's side of the family wants to convince Tony, don't worry, our daughter

00:39:05.020 did not cheat on you. Stick around with her. He looks exactly like yours. And I often have joked,

00:39:11.220 although it's a real story, that I always say I should have really been worried about my wife

00:39:16.340 because when we had our first child, when my wife was pregnant with our first child, our daughter,

00:39:22.740 and we had put up the ultrasound image, you know, when you get that first trimester ultrasound,

00:39:28.880 you put it on the fridge. Well, that image of whatever that ultrasound is, it could look like a COVID

00:39:36.040 virus. It could look like a reptile. It could look like an alien. Yet my mother-in-law came over and

00:39:41.380 looked at it and said, oh my god, the baby looks exactly like you, dad. In utero. Right? So a blob

00:39:48.500 apparently looked exactly like me. Now, why did she say that? Well, because subconsciously to her,

00:39:55.380 she was compelled to assuage my paternity uncertainty, which makes me think, why was my mother-in-law 0.95

00:40:02.080 so concerned about making sure that her daughter had not cheated on me? Yes, I'm joking in this part.

00:40:08.200 The children, luckily for me, do look like a mix of my wife and me. But in any case, that is

00:40:16.560 an interesting finding. I've never shared that finding and people said, oh yeah, come on, we all knew that.

00:40:26.400 On the contrary, people say, oh wow, wow, that's so interesting. That's, wow, you know what, I

00:40:31.260 remember that's what happened with our, yeah, you're right. Wow, that's, what an, okay, that's the beauty

00:40:36.720 of, by the way, evolutionary psychology. Because it allows us to decode these very complex human

00:40:46.700 behaviors through a beautifully coherent parsimonious lens, which is called the evolutionary lens.

00:40:54.700 Let me just mention maybe two more I'll do. Here's one. Environmental stressors and the onset

00:41:02.840 of menachsh. Menachsh, or in English you say menarche, is the onset of the menses for a young

00:41:09.440 girl, meaning the first time that she has her menstrual cycle. Well, some little girls will get 1.00

00:41:14.960 it at 10, some will get it at 14. Well, it turns out that there is an environmental stressor

00:41:20.740 that can move girls to either have their menarche earlier or later. And one that is very, very

00:41:30.000 powerful in predicting that is whether there is father present or father absent. And it turns out

00:41:38.760 the guru of this research is someone that I know well, Bruce Ellis, an evolutionary psychologist.

00:41:44.360 He used to be at University of Arizona, actually, where I had given this talk that I'm, I'm looking

00:41:49.780 at the slides now back in 2008. He's now at, I think, University of Utah. So he's looked at father

00:41:55.580 absence and the onset of menarche. And it turns out that if there is a father absent, little girls

00:42:02.920 have their periods earlier. One argument being that when you don't no longer have that male presence,

00:42:09.320 you want to enter the reproductive window earlier in your life trajectory. Well, hmm, that's interesting.

00:42:15.720 You wouldn't have thought that. That's surprising. That's quite revolutionary. You wouldn't have

00:42:21.420 thought to link a reality from the makeup of a family, in this case, whether a father is present or

00:42:28.980 not, and a physiological response, like when a girl gets her menstrual cycle. That's interesting.

00:42:38.360 You're linking an environmental stressor to a physiological reality, an evolved physiological

00:42:47.780 reality. Okay. One more, let me do. This is from Thornhill and Gengistad, both of whom I know well.

00:42:55.860 Thornhill has even been on my show, Randy Thornhill. They did an amazing study about, I can't remember

00:43:04.780 what year, which year it was, maybe 15, 20 years ago, where I think maybe 1997. I can't remember

00:43:10.100 what it was, where they showed that women. Okay. Well, let me, let me set it up. So let's say you

00:43:16.800 bring in a bunch of men to the lab. You ask them to wear a t-shirt. Okay. So that it becomes imbued

00:43:22.080 with their smell. Then they take off that t-shirt. Then you put those t-shirts in a plastic bag

00:43:28.000 and you ask women to then come into the lab and rate how pleasant the smell of each of those t-shirts 0.95

00:43:40.620 is. And it turns out that the one that on average women find to be the most pleasant smelling

00:43:47.760 turns out to be also the guy who is the most symmetric, physically symmetric. So I often, when I tell

00:43:56.860 my students, I say the nose, nose, meaning that here, what this is what I call, by the way, in some of

00:44:03.880 my papers, I talked about sensorial convergence. What does that mean? That means two different senses

00:44:10.080 senses are converging on, you know, individual B as being the superior genetic stock. Whether I smell

00:44:20.940 him, I'm also effectively identifying the guy who is the most symmetric guy, which makes evolutionary

00:44:28.400 sense because if a guy is the top dog when it comes to his phenotype, then whether I smell him, touch him,

00:44:35.180 hear him, look at him, it should converge to the same guy. If I decide that the top guy is A, if I smell him,

00:44:48.240 but the top guy is B, if I hear him, but the top guy is C, if I see him, then I would be stuck. Who do I pick?

00:44:57.560 But as you might expect, if you are of the highest phenotypic quality, then there should be what I call

00:45:03.180 sensorial convergence. That's interesting. That's not something you could have expected. You could

00:45:08.280 imagine how all of those studies that I just mentioned to you are a lot more powerful and

00:45:13.420 interesting than if a consumer really likes a restaurant, he's more likely to return to that

00:45:18.480 restaurant, okay? Notice, I'm not saying that marketing as an academic discipline is not interesting,

00:45:25.640 right? I'm not saying that consumer psychology is not interesting or any less scientific. Nothing

00:45:30.500 could be further from the truth, but precisely because it is, it has the capacity to be so

00:45:36.340 interesting. Let's not waste time doing incredibly rigorous research that's otherwise pure shite when 0.93

00:45:42.840 it comes to being interesting, okay? That's the important point. So, there you have it, folks. 0.96

00:45:50.060 You know, the reason why I, you know, I was just excited to do this today is, well, I guess, as I said,

00:45:59.040 it's because I just came back from an academic conference, but it's because I love academia. I love

00:46:05.000 research. So, it's not, this is not an attack on research, but we, you know, human beings or any

00:46:13.840 biological agent faces trade-offs, faces costs and benefits, faces opportunity costs. If you spend

00:46:21.260 three, four years doing incredibly rigorous research to demonstrate that customers who are happy with a

00:46:27.000 restaurant are more likely to return to the restaurant, you've, you've, you've wasted hundreds

00:46:34.300 of thousands of taxpayer money. You've wasted your valuable time. You've wasted opportunity costs because

00:46:39.820 you could have studied all sorts of other interesting things. So, I think it is absolutely

00:46:46.060 imperative that all graduate students, as they're being trained to become future scientists, are taught

00:46:55.000 what I am offering in this X spaces, which is always at the forefront of your thinking, you should be

00:47:04.620 saying, never mind whether it's rigorous research, because we, it, it's expected that you have to be

00:47:10.820 doing rigorous research. Are you doing meaningful, impactful, novel, interesting research? And I, I

00:47:21.140 venture to say, regrettably, that most academics will spend their merrily career not caring about that,

00:47:27.860 and that is regrettable. So, there you have it, folks. I have posted earlier today a thread for

00:47:37.920 subscribers where I ask them, hey, you've got till, I can't remember what time I said, like 9 p.m. today

00:47:43.620 to, to write questions there. And as long as you get in those questions before 9 p.m., then I will either

00:47:51.140 today or tomorrow respond to your written questions. So, if you wish to ask me any questions as relating

00:47:59.000 to today's session, please don't go there and ask me questions about the Israel-Gaza situation. Not that I

00:48:05.540 don't want to answer those questions, but I like to, you know, restrict a given session to the, the theme

00:48:11.700 that we're covering that day. So, if you have any questions about the topic that I discussed today, you'd like

00:48:17.820 to ask me it and have a response from me, please consider subscribing to my exclusive content.

00:48:23.540 I will be posting this chat eventually, both on my YouTube channel, my podcast, and also posting it

00:48:34.260 directly on X. So, thank you all for coming. Happy, well, I don't know if we should say happy

00:48:42.480 Memorial Day, but rather let us take a moment and honor those who've fought and lost their lives

00:48:50.600 precisely so we can have the freedom to engage in the types of dialogues that we're doing now.

00:48:58.840 Don't take for granted these freedoms and liberties. Most of human history has not been defined by the

00:49:06.540 free societies that we currently live in, but are losing at an astonishing rate. Get involved.

00:49:14.320 Your voice matters. Vote properly when it comes to elections. Vote based on issues. And let us hope

00:49:24.040 that we can protect not only the scientific ethos that has made our societies enlightened, but that allows

00:49:32.360 us to pursue truth and freedom unencumbered by all sorts of authoritarian ideologies.

00:49:40.880 Take care, everybody, and I'll talk to you soon. Thank you for joining me. Cheers.

The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - May 28, 2024

What Constitutes Interesting Scientific Research？ (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_675)

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