235. Evolution, Sex & Desire | David Buss

[0] Welcome to episode 235 of the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.

[1] I'm Michaela Peterson, currently backstage in Colorado Springs.

[2] In this episode, Dr. David Buss and Dad discussed David's groundbreaking work in the field of evolutionary psychology.

[3] Dr. David Buss is a professor of psychology at the University of Texas in Austin, and he's also taught at Harvard.

[4] He's considered the world's leading expert on human mating strategies and is one of the first.

[5] founders of the field of evolutionary psychology.

[6] His books include the evolution of desire, strategies of human mating, the dangerous passion, why jealousy is as necessary as love and sex, why women have sex, and the murderer next door, why the mind is designed to kill.

[7] They delved into topics like women's mating preferences, dominance hierarchies, manifestations of aggression in men and women, what makes us attractive, emotional regulation, and how it relates to status, the dark triad of personality, inherent inequality, and a lot more.

[8] As always, if you're tired of hearing me read ads, visit jordanb peterson .supercast .com to sign up for the ad -free version of the podcast plus other perks.

[9] It works on all major platforms and it's just $10 a month.

[10] Again, that's only at Jordan v. Peterson .supercast .com.

[11] I hope you enjoy this episode.

[12] Hello, everybody.

[13] I'm very pleased today to have, as my guest, Dr. David Buss, who's been a real influence on my thinking.

[14] I think perhaps more than any other living psychologist I respect and have learned from what he's done.

[15] David Buss is a professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin.

[16] He previously taught at Harvard and at the University of Michigan.

[17] He is considered the world's leading scientific expert on strategies of human mating of all the interesting things and is one of the founders of the field of evolutionary psychology.

[18] His many books include the evolution of desire, strategies of human mating, evolutionary psychology, the new science of the mind, the dangerous passion, why jealousy is as necessary as love and sex, the murderer next door, why the mind is designed to kill, and why women have sex, which you'd think.

[19] would definitely be a bestseller.

[20] His new book, When Men Behave Badly, the Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment and Assault was published in 2021, and it uncovers the evolutionary roots of conflict between the sexes.

[21] Dr. Buss has more than 300 scientific publications, just to give those of you who are listening, some sense of what that means, you can get a PhD from a pretty top -rated research institution in psychology with three publications, a thesis made of three publications, and so to have 300 publications is, in some sense, the equivalent of 100 PhDs.

[22] So that's worth thinking about for a while.

[23] In 2019, he was cited as one of the 50 most influential living psychologists in the world.

[24] So I'm very pleased that you agreed to talk with me today about these contentious topics, and I would like to restate what I said earlier, which is your work has been very influential as far as I'm concerned.

[25] I've really liked reading everything you've done for the last 20 years.

[26] I haven't read all of it, but I've read lots of it.

[27] Well, thank you.

[28] It's my pleasure to be talking to you.

[29] I've been reading your work for some time and I've been looking forward to this conversation for a long time.

[30] So maybe you could start by telling everyone telling me, why did you get interested in evolutionary psychology per se?

[31] How did that come about and win?

[32] Because you were one of the founders of this field, which is a burgeoning field and an important one, tying psychology to evolutionary biology, a crucial thing to do.

[33] Yes.

[34] So, well, basically, when I started my academic career, there was no such thing as evolutionary psychology.

[35] And I was trained in personality psychology at UC Berkeley.

[36] But what I was interested in, and the reason that I got into personality psychology was I was interested in, human nature.

[37] You know, what motivates people?

[38] What are the goals towards which people aspire and seek?

[39] What gets people out of bed in the morning?

[40] What makes people tick?

[41] You know, what is human nature made of?

[42] And when I got into the field of personality, I went through all the standard theories, Freud, Jung, Kelly, Maslow, you know, you know the list.

[43] And all or many seem to have some intuitive appeal, but none seem to be grounded in a foundation, in a solid scientific foundation.

[44] And that's really what ultimately led me to evolutionary theory, that is, to try to identify what are the causal processes that created human nature, whatever that nature may be.

[45] Even the more biologically oriented psychologists, the behaviorists, for example, like Skinner, the people who studied rats and who did that so careful.

[46] because that's a great tradition and it really led to the emergence of neuroscience.

[47] There was not a lot of evolutionary thinking there because underlying that behaviorist ethos was the idea that human beings were something like a blank slate and that almost everything we did was learned.

[48] Yes, yeah, indeed.

[49] And Skinner actually overlapped a bit with him at Harvard.

[50] He was, so I was able to actually have a couple of conversations with him.

[51] And he believed that what evolution had created was simply, a couple of domain general learning mechanisms, classical conditioning, operant conditioning were the ones that he focused on, and he built this whole theory about that, but essentially what to equip humans and rats or pigeons with this blank slate, domain general learning mechanisms, and then all subsequent action is based on contingencies of reinforcement.

[52] And so, you know, but I think even then, even when I was in graduate school, that view struck me as really problematic.

[53] For one thing, sex differences, I mean, emerge very early in life, you know, rough and tumble play by age three or so emerges consistently early in development.

[54] Sense of humor.

[55] Sense of humor.

[56] And these things are cross -cultural universal.

[57] And so the notion that all of our nature consists just of the contingencies of reinforcement during our lifespan struck me as problematic.

[58] And so really that search for a solid scientific foundation for a theory of human nature is what led me to evolutionary theory.

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

[60] And at the time that I started, there were almost no empirical tests.

[61] And if you know anything about the kind of Berkeley, Minnesota, tradition.

[62] A lot of my mentors were in Minnesota.

[63] There's a very strong empirical tradition.

[64] And so as a psychologist trained in an empirical tradition, you have to test these things.

[65] And what I realize is that there were almost no empirical tests of these evolutionary hypotheses.

[66] And so that's what led me to that.

[67] And some of the most obvious ones were mating.

[68] So as a sexually reproducing species, everything has to go through mating.

[69] And so if humans don't have pretty interesting and complex psychological adaptations for mating, then we're kind of out of business.

[70] So, I mean, survival and mating.

[71] But if you're sexually reproducing species, you have to go through the bottleneck of mating.

[72] You know, and that is it's not a simple process.

[73] Of course, if you're asexual, you know, you don't have to go searching for a mate, but sexually reproducing species, you have to select a mate, you have to attract a mate.

[74] In our species, you have to be mutually selected by that mate.

[75] And then in our species, of course, we have long -term mating, parameda mating, which is extremely rare in the mammalian world, the male and king.

[76] We have something like 5 ,000 species plus of mammals, and only something like 3 to 5 % have anything resembling parameded long -term mating.

[77] But humans do have it.

[78] It's part, and that's part of our nature.

[79] Now, as we get into mating strategies, one of the things that I argue is that long -term mating is not the only mating strategy within the human menu of mating strategies.

[80] And we have long -term pairbond, but we also have short -term mating, casual sex hookups, as they're now called on college campuses.

[81] We have some infidelity rates.

[82] So that's kind of a mixed mating strategy, one long -term mate, some short -term sex partners on the side.

[83] And then we also do serial mating.

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

[85] And then very, very rarely do you have a polyandrous mating system less than 1 % where it's one woman, multiple men.

[86] So anyway.

[87] And do you know, do you have any sense of what conditions give rise to that rare exception, that polyandrus system, since it's so uncommon?

[88] How is it that it sustains itself?

[89] And why isn't that a challenge to the notion of central monogamy, let's say?

[90] Yes.

[91] Well, the conditions under which it occurs are typically where one man cannot support a whole family.

[92] So if there's a large field and one man can't support.

[93] support a wife and children, then it will be two men.

[94] So the polyandrous mating is almost entirely brothers, and that genetic relatedness helps to ease what normally would be a pretty intense, jealous reaction to someone else sharing a sex partner, someone else having sex with your wife.

[95] So why isn't it sufficient to say, like the sort of more modern blank slate theorists might, that patriarchy is a sufficient explanation for the difference in mating strategies across the sexes and that the reason that polyandria is so uncommon is because women are dominated by men everywhere and that's arbitrary and expression of power.

[96] It has nothing to do with our central biological tendency.

[97] Okay, that's a really interesting question and I have a couple of different thoughts on it.

[98] First of all, the question, the first question is like, what does one mean by patriarchy.

[99] And if you get into it, and I've asked people who invoke those sort of explanations, well, what do you mean by patriarchy?

[100] And usually that causes them to stumble and mumble around.

[101] And they just know, well, patriarchy is though it's self -explanatory.

[102] Well, it's not self -explanatory because if you break it down analytically, you can identify different components.

[103] So is it the case that men worldwide tend to have more resources, more economic resources than women on average?

[104] Well, the answer is yes, but then even if you take that component of what's called patriarchy, you can ask the question, well, how did it come to pass that across all cultures or nearly all cultures, men on average have more resources.

[105] Well, as one biological anthropologist, I think this was herb devour at Harvard, he said men are one long breeding experiment run by women.

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

[107] And so that sets up a co -evolutionary process whereby those men who were chosen as mates tended to be motivated and have the ability and willingness to acquire resources.

[108] So let me ask you about that specifically.

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

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

[111] Yeah, great question.

[112] And I'm not aware of any studies that have done that directly.

[113] See, I think that, and this is, I want to talk to you in relationship to the dark triad issue, which we'll get into, it seems to me that women use markers of status, partly as indicators of available resources, because those are useful.

[114] But I don't think women are that uncanny, let's say.

[115] It's too simple.

[116] I think they use the presence of resources as a proxy for the personality and cognitive traits, let's say, including physical health, that would enable a man even stripped of his current set of resources to be highly likely to acquire them in the future and maybe current resources are a good proxy for that yeah i think it yeah so one issue is that cash economies are relatively recent in our in our human history i think maybe seven to 10 000 years old or so uh and so there you know so we are able to stockpile economic resources in a way that was is evolutionarily unprecedented due to cash economies but I think that you're absolutely right that what women tend to look for, and this shows up even in my studies as well, is the characteristics that are statistically reliably correlated with resource acquisition, which will be things like intelligence, social status, dependability, athletic prowess, you know, is this guy a good hunter?

[117] You know, so you go to a culture like the Aceh of Paraguay, and, you know, basically what leads to high status in men is hunting skills.

[118] That's like the big main effect there.

[119] And so I think even things like, you know, that I know you've talked about this and you measure them as some of the big five characteristics, even things like emotional stability and conscientiousness, which we know is linked with.

[120] hard work and industriousness and achievement in modern work context, likely was true ancestrally as well.

[121] You know, so women didn't want a guy who's going to be sitting around in the hammock all day smoking whatever the local, you know, weed or hallucinogen is, you know, she's going to want a guy who has the motivation to get out there and hunt and bring back the bacon, so Yeah, and the hunting thing is really interesting when you think about also how much we've abstracted ourselves out of our basic biological niche in some sense, you know, because hunting and getting to the point and hitting the target and aiming right and being specific with words and all of that, that kind of goal -oriented action, those are all very tightly related as far as I can tell psychologically.

[122] And so, and then you said something quite early interesting earlier as well that we didn't comment on you talked about men as a breathing experiment run by women and and this ties into another reason why evolutionary psychology is so important is because we're unbelievably highly sexually selected and that has to do with women's choosiness and so maybe maybe we could we could start our discussion of sexual differences and mating strategy with that so first of all what's the evidence that suggests that women are in fact, choosier when it comes to sexual partners than men, and how much choosier are they?

[123] Okay, okay.

[124] Great question.

[125] Well, so maybe first we could just define for listeners what sexual selection theory is.

[126] Because most people, when they think about evolution, they think of survival of the fittest and that sort of nature, reting tooth and clock.

[127] Yes, and a kind of randomness, too, which, you know, that's kind of implicit in the natural selection theory, whereas sexual selection is anything but random.

[128] Yeah, absolutely.

[129] So sexual selection, so sexual selection.

[130] So if natural selection, this is oversimplified, but is the evolution of adaptations due to their survival advantage or the survival advantage that accrued to the possessors, so things like fear of snakes, fear of heights, spiders, darkness, strangers, and so forth, food preferences, things that led the better survival.

[131] Sexual selection deals with the evolution of qualities that lead to mating success.

[132] And Darwin identified two causal processes.

[133] by which mating success could occur.

[134] One is same -sex competition or intrastual competition.

[135] And the logic there is that whatever, he thought about it in terms of contest competition where there was a physical battle like two stags locking horns in combat with the victor gaining sexual access to the female loser ambling off with a broken antler dejected with low self -esteem and probably needing some psychotherapy.

[136] But the logic was whatever.

[137] qualities led to success in these same -sex battles, whether it be athleticism, strength, agility, cunning, or whatever, those qualities get got passed on in greater numbers due to the sexual access that the victors accrued.

[138] Qualities associated losing basically bit the evolutionary dust.

[139] The second component, so that's introssexual competition, which actually the logic is more general than Darwin and vision.

[140] So like in our species, as we were alluding to, we often compete for position and status hierarchies.

[141] And so we can engage in introssexual competition without engaging in this physical battle or contest competition, although I think that the contest competition was also part of human evolutionary history with males.

[142] The other component process is basically what Darwin called female choice.

[143] And the logic there is that whatever qualities, if there's some consensus about the qualities that are desired, that men possessing the desired qualities have a mating advantage.

[144] They have preferentially chosen.

[145] Those lacking the desired qualities basically become in -cells or involuntarily solid, but they get shunned, banished, or ignored.

[146] Now, the twist on that, and so I think sexual selection is by far a more interesting process and definitely has occurred with respect to humans.

[147] But the twist there is that we have mutual mate choice, at least when it comes to long -term mating, especially when it comes to long -term mating.

[148] And that gets to the issue of Trivers' theory of parental investment, where he said, he asked the question, well, which sex does the choosing, which sex does the competing?

[149] And his answer was the sex that invest more in offspring tends to be choosier.

[150] sex that invest less tends to be more competitive for access to those desirable members of the opposite sex.

[151] But in long -term mating, now we know from our reproductive biology that women have that nine -month pregnancy, which is obligatory.

[152] So women can't say, look, I'm really busy with my career.

[153] I really only want to put in three months.

[154] It's just part of our reproductive biology to produce one child.

[155] And men can produce that same child through one act of sex.

[156] So women are at least in, when it comes to sex, the choosier sex, the higher investing sex, in part because the costs of making a bad mating decision are much more severe for women than for men.

[157] Man and woman hook up, have sex for one night in the morning.

[158] They both realize, oh, this is a mistake.

[159] I shouldn't have done that.

[160] Well, if the woman gets pregnant, then she might be pregnant with a guy who is not going to invest in her offspring, A guy perhaps is someone that has poor genetic material.

[161] It does not have a robust immune system, et cetera.

[162] So anyway, so that's a long -winded answer to your question about sexual selection.

[163] Go ahead, please.

[164] I was just going to say that you asked about the evidence for females being choosier, and they are choosier primarily in the context of casual sex.

[165] or short -term sex.

[166] So that's where you find the big sex differences.

[167] And so one of the classic, and there's a ton of evidence for this, this is a sex difference that I capture in the book under the category of desire for sexual variety.

[168] So men have a much greater desire for meaning a variety of sex partners than women do.

[169] And so the choosing this comes in on, I'll just give you one experiment.

[170] This is a classic study done by Elaine Halfield and Russell Clark, where they had male and female Confederates, which for listeners are members of the experimental team.

[171] It doesn't mean people from the South United States.

[172] But they had male and female confederates simply walk up to members of the opposite sex on a college campus and say, hi, I've been noticing you around campus lately.

[173] I find you very attractive.

[174] Would you, and they asked them one of three questions, would you?

[175] you go on a date with me tonight?

[176] Would you come back to my apartment with me?

[177] Would you have sex with me?

[178] And it was between groups designs.

[179] They simply recorded the percentage of individuals who agreed to these three different requests.

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

[181] Most women need a little more information about the guy before they're willing to have sex.

[182] Of the men approach, also about 50 by the female Confederate, about 50 % agreed to go out on the date, 69 % agreed to go back to her apartment, and 75 % agreed to have sex with her.

[183] And so if you talk about choosiness, are you willing to have sex with a total stranger who you've met for 30 seconds, women unwilling to, and in general, men very willing to.

[184] And this is a study that's been replicated now in several European studies.

[185] Very difficult to do this, as you might imagine, to get this by the IRBs or ethics committees in the United States anyway.

[186] I assume it's similar in Canada.

[187] Or worse.

[188] But yeah, the kinds of studies who we really want to do are more difficult to do nowadays.

[189] But it's been replicated in several Western European countries.

[190] And you can get women off of the zero percent, you can get a few percent of the women saying, yes, if the guy's really, really charming, you know, if he's Brad Pitt or, or I don't know what the modern equivalence, Ryan Gosling, or perhaps a famous rock star.

[191] So, but that's one of the illustration of the answer to your question about, well, what is the evidence for female choosiness?

[192] Now, the interesting thing, here's, I'll give you one more.

[193] So there are studies.

[194] that ask, what is the minimum percentile of intelligence that you would accept in a potential partner?

[195] And we explain percentiles to people so they understand 99th percentile, first percentile, 50th and so forth.

[196] And basically for things like a marriage partner, men and women are roughly equal.

[197] They both are very exact.

[198] And they say what they want, like say, 65th to 70th percentile in intelligence, where the sex difference comes up is just a sex partner, a pure sex partner with no investment.

[199] Women still maintain, they still want, let's say, 60th or 60 plus percentile in intelligence, whereas men drop to embarrassing levels.

[200] It doesn't really, it becomes irrelevant.

[201] The 30th, 40th percentile men go, you know, if she can mumble a little bit, that's fine, or even not.

[202] So, um, That's another indication of female choosiness, that as they maintain greater choosiness when it comes to short -term sex and are simply less comfortable with having sex with total strangers or casual sex, and here's, I'll give you one more now that I'm rambling on, and then I'll get to some other interesting issues.

[203] This is an item on the sociosexuality inventory that colleagues do.

[204] Steve Yangstead and Jeff Simpson developed a long time ago.

[205] But one of the items is, that's an attitude item.

[206] And it says, sex without love is okay.

[207] Do you agree with that or disagree with that?

[208] And there you get a large sex difference.

[209] So in the seven point scale, where four is the midpoint, men average about 5 .5.

[210] So they say, yeah, sex without love, yeah, that's okay.

[211] Women are about 3 .5.

[212] They're below that midpoint.

[213] So another indication of this sex difference in choosing this.

[214] Do you know if that's modulated by Big Five treat agreeableness?

[215] Oh, that's a great question.

[216] I haven't seen any studies that linked that.

[217] Okay.

[218] Big Five to that item or the sociosexuality inventory in general.

[219] Yeah, well, you'd wonder why if compassion and empathy might be one of the things driving that and the value that's placed on that as a consequence of being higher, low, and agreeableness.

[220] And that would fit into some degree with the dark triad work that, because the primary difference there is we'll talk about the dark triad in a minute is that the dark triad types are low and agreeable to centrally.

[221] It's not the only thing, but that's central.

[222] Yes.

[223] And that's where there's a big, there's a big sex difference.

[224] And so I want to ask you a terminological question.

[225] Sure.

[226] Okay, so I'm sorry, just, sorry to interrupt, but I just thought we, we should say a few more words about your question about patriarchy.

[227] Yes.

[228] Because I thought that was a really interesting question, and there's some interesting complexities associated with that.

[229] And so what I started with is that, you know, you have to break it down into analytically into precisely what causal process you're invoking.

[230] And usually when people invoke it, it's like this mysterious causal force in the ether that somehow comes down and infects people's minds, and they don't get into the question of, well, what are the causal origins of what you're calling patriarchy, you know?

[231] And to get to that, you have to get to things like female mate preferences and the co -evolution of those mate preferences with male mating strategies.

[232] You know, and the part of male mating strategies is to prioritize resource acquisition and clawing their way up the status hierarchy and, you know, selling their grandmother to get ahead.

[233] And studies of this gets to another sex difference that women tend to allocate their time, energy, and investment across a wider array of, you know, what we call adaptive problems.

[234] So, you know, women more than men, invest in kin.

[235] even if they're married, they invest more in their in -laws, in their friendships, et cetera.

[236] And men, on average, tend to be more monomaniacal about getting ahead.

[237] So you could say the most effective long -term strategy for smashing the patriarchy is for women to select low -ranking mates to sleep with.

[238] Yes.

[239] I should get in lots of trouble for that.

[240] Well, if women change their mate preferences so that they didn't care about it, status and resources and those qualities.

[241] And you iterated that over enough generations.

[242] Yeah, it would ultimately change male behavior.

[243] So, okay, I have a terminological issue that was raised to me by one of my graduate students, a very, very intelligent man and very careful thinker.

[244] I had faster graduate students, but I don't think I had any who would worry a problem absolutely to death as much as he would.

[245] got to the he was an engineer and is an engineer and he would really get to the bottom of things like you did with the patriarch at least to some degree he told me once i started speaking more public he said stop using the term dominance hierarchy or status hierarchy there's a political supposition nested inside there that's not helpful how about competence hierarchy and i thought oh that's real interesting okay so so that's one issue now i have another question that's teamed with that that I want to run by you with regards to sexual selection.

[246] So we can say that it's the actions of female selection that have shaped men to a large degree because of the choosiness of women.

[247] But I want to run a counterposition by you.

[248] So imagine a football team in a small American town.

[249] You know, it's kind of an archetypal issue.

[250] And the whole town is celebrating the football team, and the football team is ranked in terms of competence.

[251] And the football team wins a game, and all the guys lift the quarterback up on their shoulders because he was the hero of the game and they march him out of the stadium.

[252] And so he sleeps with the cheerleaders.

[253] And I would say he was elected by the men to sleep with them.

[254] Because if it's not competition, like I don't, I think the idea that it's competition exactly isn't, it's not exactly right.

[255] And terminology really matters.

[256] It's like, because men will organize themselves into groups.

[257] and those who become elevated in status don't do it by dominating.

[258] You know, my student said, well, you don't get people to wear a choke collar and a chain.

[259] It's not dominance.

[260] And so, yeah.

[261] So, well, that's, I'm so glad that you asked that because we just, the whole subject of status hierarchies and dominance hierarchics is something that we are studying now in my lab.

[262] And we just published a paper that confirms precisely the point that you're making, where we looked at basically whether status is determined by dominance, which in the literature is sometimes defined as cost infliction.

[263] So you have the ability and willingness to inflict costs and beat up your rivals or confer benefits, which gets to your point about competence.

[264] And what we found is that in our study, this is with Patrick Durkey, a current graduate student of mine who actually just passed his dissertation defense yesterday.

[265] So congratulations, shout out to Patrick, is that what we found is that it is conferring benefits, that is the ability and willingness to confer benefits that led to high status.

[266] Okay, so I'm going to stop just for one sec, because I want to add something with regard to our discussion of the patriarchy, because one of the unspoken suppositions of the idea of the patriarchy is that part of the reason that it's bad is because it's dominance and oppression that leads to the formation of these hierarchies and that's a central claim but this gets to the a real alternative to that which and so what do you mean by benefit exactly in that context so so well these are are conferring benefits on either individuals or the group that you're part of and so the example that you used of the quarterback who you know scored the winning touchdown or led the team to victory, he's conferring a large benefit on the coalition of which he's a part.

[267] And so, and we evolved as coalitional species.

[268] But the benefits are many in number.

[269] I mean, they could be, you know, meat from the hunt, providing not just to your family, but also to the group.

[270] In small group living, they often shared the spoils of the hunt, providing physical protection so having the ability bravery so the physical ability the athleticism but also the courage to offer protection for a potential mate or for members of your coalitions there are many many different types of benefits i read recently that among smaller groups that are dependent on hunting that in the male groups where hunting takes place one of the most common characteristics of the hunters with more prowess is they're willing to be self -sacrificing in their food choice after they kill something.

[271] And so the men are, have status conferred on them, well, they were successful hunters, but if they can be successful hunters and give someone else who was there a bigger share than they get, even though they did the hunting, that's a way of moving up in status.

[272] And that kind of behavior is very common in men's groups in small societies around the world.

[273] The opposite of narcissism, interestingly enough.

[274] Yeah, yeah, no, that's right.

[275] And that's why, you know, our study of we had 240 things that could either increase or decrease your status.

[276] And one of them was precisely that generosity with resources.

[277] So you can have all the resources in the world, but if you're stingy and don't share them with your group, then you're not going to be rising in status.

[278] But I just add one interesting curly cue to your point about this, and that's the Aceh that I mentioned earlier.

[279] Tim Hill is the bioanthropologist who's studied the Aceh in the greatest deed.

[280] He's lived with them on and off for 25 years or so.

[281] And what he said, so in the Aceh hunting skill, they also share their resources.

[282] So the hunt, the large game animal goes to a central distributor.

[283] Okay, but, and here's the interesting curly cue, sometimes the head hunter will slice off a prime piece of meat and have a friend or emissary give it to his affair partner before returning to the home base.

[284] And so good hunters tend to have more sex partners in the Aceh, and I suspect in many hunter -gather groups.

[285] Right, and that would be a specific exception that would be of sexual benefit to that hunter outside the general sexual benefit that generosity would give him as a consequence of being of high status among his cohort.

[286] Yeah, absolutely.

[287] And one of the things that's kind of building on your point about this issue of generosity with resources is that people form groups.

[288] And often there's competition, between groups for having members that are, in this case, good hunters or who contribute, you know, above and beyond to the group welfare.

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

[290] And that's one of the interesting things about, you know, this gets into human history is, you know, once group, you know, there's the, the, the, fissioning of groups.

[291] Once they get to a certain point, they often say, look, I'm not sufficiently appreciated in this group.

[292] I'm going to take my allies and form my own group.

[293] So I was also thinking about this in terms of, let's say, reciprocity.

[294] So imagine that we're in a small hunting group.

[295] We don't have refrigeration, so we're not going to be able to store meat with any great degree of reliability.

[296] So you might say, well, what's the best way to store meat?

[297] And I would say, you should store meat in your status among the hunting group, right?

[298] So if you're generous and you share, and then that invokes reciprocity from other hunters in your group who also have prowess, then you've stored future meat in the potential for them to generate resources in the future, and that's reciprocity dependent.

[299] And so that's also a way that that kind of long -term honesty could also be selected for in these status, so -called status hierarchies.

[300] Competence hierarchies is better.

[301] And so my student, he said, there's a subterranean Marxism in the terminology.

[302] If it's status hierarchy, dominance hierarchy, implies that it's oppression that's building the hierarchies.

[303] And that's something really worthy of note, that, that objection.

[304] Yeah.

[305] So, so, well, let me, let me come back to that in just one second.

[306] And I think it actually was, I just recently saw your interview with Steve Pinker and Jonathan Haidt.

[307] And Steve Pinker is, you know, I think a wonderful thinker.

[308] And the way he phrased it is that hunters store meat, not in the refrigerator, but they store meat in the bodies of other people.

[309] So it's kind of an interesting way to think about that of how we engage in that reciprocity.

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

[311] Okay.

[312] And from an evolutionary perspective, that can't occur because men are primarily in competition with other men, not with other women.

[313] and also each of us, each individual, has alliances with some members of our own sex, some rivalries with members of our own sex, but also alliances with some members of the opposite sex.

[314] So every man has, for example, a mother, sometimes a daughter, a sister, an aunt, a niece, and similarly, every woman has a brother, a father, you know, et cetera.

[315] And so the notion that men are somehow united as a group with a woman.

[316] the goal of oppressing women as a group, it just can't occur from an evolutionary perspective.

[317] And so, and this is why I think an evolutionary perspective lends some conceptual clarity to some of these vaguer notions that people don't tend to think about when they invoke terms like patriarchy.

[318] But I agree with you on the point of oppression that when we talk about status hierarchies, we don't mean oppression.

[319] What we did is what Patrick Durkey and I did in our studies, basically is we pitted the dominance explanation or some people have invoked a dual pathways.

[320] Some people say there's two ways to get ahead.

[321] You can inflict costs or you can confer benefits.

[322] And we tested that and then what's called a competence model.

[323] So there is a theory of status that's basing competence, but it's basically benefit conferral.

[324] And we found evidence in favor of the competence model and the benefit control.

[325] inferral model, but almost no evidence for the cost -inflicking model.

[326] Indeed, what we found is that although sometimes people have the ability and willingness to inflict costs, you have to be more differentiated even about that.

[327] So, for example, we've been talking about coalitions to some degree, and people punish free riders, for example, or cheaters with their coalitions.

[328] Yeah, yeah, they punish them.

[329] So that's, I think.

[330] infliction of cost.

[331] Yeah, it's an infliction of cost, but it's for the larger group, for the larger coalition.

[332] And so that's why this notion that you could, or even like if you take extreme cases, like as I'm sure you're familiar with, like in some nation, some people kill to get to the top of the hierarchy.

[333] So Big Daddy Amin, and I can't remember which country was maybe Zimbabwe or Zaire I can't remember, basically was a thug who killed.

[334] up his way to the top, but you can't get to the top through this cost -infliction strategy unless you're also conferring benefits.

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

[336] That was the Ediamin, Uganda?

[337] Yes, yes, Uganda.

[338] Thank you.

[339] Yes.

[340] Yeah, Ediamen.

[341] Okay, so, so, hey, this experiment, so here's another thing that could be pitted in that competition.

[342] So imagine you had people who, men who could confer benefit and who were incapable of inflicting cost and men who could confer benefit, but were capable of inflicting cost.

[343] I think you'd see winners on that side because of that free rider problem.

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

[345] And I would say that they're using them as insufficient markers for the ability to or the acquisition of status.

[346] And narcissists capitalize on that, right?

[347] Because a narcissist looks confident.

[348] And lots of confident people are competent.

[349] But some confident people aren't competent, but they can fool you.

[350] And then I think the other explanation is that if you had to choose between a benefit conferer who could punish free riders and one who couldn't you should pick the former one who could one who could one who could deal with free riders who could and would had the capability to and so yes you see you see this sort of thing I really like the Disney movie Beauty and the Beast I think it I think they got it right and so there's Gaston in that movie and he's a narcissist but he's he has physical prowess like he can't understand why he's not the guy, but he's narcissistic.

[351] And then there's the beast who's a beast, but he's tameable.

[352] And so he can be a benefit confer, and he has the capacity to inflict cost.

[353] Yes.

[354] Yeah.

[355] And the two are often correlated in nature.

[356] So like, for example, if you have physical prowess or athletic ability, then you have both the ability to confer benefits in the form of, say, protection or hunting skills, but also, the ability to inflict costs by, you know.

[357] Okay, so let's talk about the dark triad then in relationship to agreeableness because the dark, do you want to just tell everybody what the dark triad is first so that we're all on the same page?

[358] Yeah, so the dark triad, I think this was originally named by one of your Canadian psychology colleagues, Del Paula, so the UBC.

[359] And the dark triad originally was three triad, but it's narcissism, machiavellianism, and psychopathy.

[360] So where narcissism is typically marked by a sense of grandiosity, a sense of entitlement, they think they're the most intelligent, the smartest, the most attractive, the most charming, the most skilled, etc. were in the words of one of my former graduate students, they think they're hot, but they're not.

[361] And I think there's a way in which people do have the ability to assess whether that high self -esteem is warranted or not, because we have even words in our language for things like arrogant, that kind of connote someone who thinks that they're, are more beautiful or more intelligent or more capable than they actually are.

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

[363] Machiavellianism, I mean, that stems from the prints of, I can't remember how many hundreds of years ago that was written, but it's basically people who pursue an exploitative social strategy.

[364] So they can, they are, when we're talking about reciprocity earlier, they will fain reciprocity, fain being good reciprocators, but then they will cheat.

[365] And so these are the liars, the cheaters.

[366] So if the patriarchy was based on exploitative power, then dark triad personality traits would be adaptively and practically useful and desirable if that was the case.

[367] Yeah, if that was the case.

[368] Yes, okay.

[369] Now, and that gets complicated because one of the things your research has indicated is that there is a manner in which women are attracted to people who manifest dark triad traits.

[370] Yeah, I would say, I would add the qualifier that it tends to be younger women.

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

[372] Okay, so here's a hypothesis.

[373] It's not that easy to distinguish the willingness to use casual power and control from competence when you're not very experienced.

[374] And so the dark triad types can feign, feign status -related competence, and they can ensnare naive women.

[375] Yes.

[376] Yeah, that's right.

[377] They also have some qualities that women genuinely do desire.

[378] So they tend to, like the narcissists, tend to put themselves at the center of attention.

[379] And one of the things we know about status hierarchies is that the attention structure is very important.

[380] That is, the high status people tend to be those to whom the most people pay the most attention.

[381] And so women are drawn.

[382] One anecdote, a female colleague of mine, very intelligent evolutionary psychologist, went to a conference and found herself very attracted to the organizer of the conference.

[383] And then six months later, she encountered him, and he was just a normal attendee at the conference.

[384] And she didn't find him very attractive.

[385] She wondered, what was I thinking?

[386] But what it was is he was at the center of the attention structure.

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

[388] And so that's precisely why we compete for attention.

[389] It's also an extremely valuable resource.

[390] Absolutely.

[391] I mean, a valuable and limited resource.

[392] It's finite.

[393] And so really at every moment of time, we're making decisions about what to allocate our attention to.

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

[395] And they gazed much longer at the high status individuals in the photographs.

[396] And then you think about that too.

[397] There's something really interesting about that because imagine that that compulsion to attend to what acquired status or let's say competent status is accompanied in human beings by a profound instinct to imitate.

[398] Right.

[399] That's right.

[400] Because, I mean, we are social learners.

[401] And one of the things that we try to do is to emulate those who have qualities that are associated with status.

[402] You know, and that gets into, you know, and those vary from group to group and subgroup to subgroup.

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

[404] I mean, Paris Hilton was like famous for being famous.

[405] And so she got a lot of attention, but there's no real benefit there.

[406] But, you know, we have like, if you're, if you play video games, for example, which, which I don't happen to, but there's status hierarchies within those, you know, the most skilled video game player, the most skilled football player, rugby player, tennis player.

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

[408] And so one of the solutions to status inequalities, diverse games of competence, as diverse arrange as possible.

[409] Yeah, and that's, I mean, and that's definitely a good thing.

[410] Because, I mean, if there was just one status hierarchy, then that means, I mean, status is inherently a relative, gauge by relative metric, you know, so if you're the number one, no one else can be the number one.

[411] But, you know, if you can be the best scholar, the best writer, the best world of warcraft, player, the best tennis player, these multiple status arcies gives more people, give more people the opportunity to gain in status.

[412] Another argument against the patriarchy as a unitary idea, right?

[413] Well, which patriarchy do you mean?

[414] Do you mean like the evil coalition of plumbers, which is a joke I've made before?

[415] It's like, you know, that's power.

[416] Is it?

[417] Plumbers, really?

[418] No, they're not organized in terms of their success by which plumber is the meanest and the toughest.

[419] It's, that's not how it works at all.

[420] Right.

[421] No, no. Yeah, absolutely.

[422] And I mean, that gets into the issue of, uh, uh, there, there are large pools of men who are at the bottom with status hierarchy and, um, who, uh, who, who, who don't have the qualities that, that women desire.

[423] And so are they really oppressing, uh, women?

[424] There's this interesting, uh, cap, There's an interesting photo that I think got captioned, but it's two very elegant women with designer handbags, and they're walking by a guy who's like fixing the tar and the street.

[425] He's a street worker fixing the tar.

[426] And as they walk by this guy who's groveling on the ground, they say, stop oppressing me. Right.

[427] So anyway.

[428] Right, right.

[429] Well, I wanted to talk to you a bit more about the dark triad issue, too, because there's a mystery in it.

[430] I think it's one that corrupts psychology to some degree, research psychology.

[431] Oh, yes.

[432] Oh, so we didn't mention the third one.

[433] Oh, yes.

[434] The third element of the dark heart, which is psychopathy.

[435] And you probably have a deeper understanding of psychopathy than I do.

[436] But one of the hallmarks is a lack of empathy that most normal humans have an empathy circuit that we feel compassion if someone gets hurt or if a pet gets injured.

[437] or as a child falls down and skins a knee, we feel a sense of compassion for the suffering of other people, but psychopaths don't.

[438] It's like they might laugh if someone gets hurt.

[439] And so that empathy circuit seems to be severed.

[440] And also one of the hallmarks seems to be that they're not responsive to punishment, that they're more oriented toward reward.

[441] And so punishing doesn't tend to change their behavior.

[442] It isn't all.

[443] obvious that they have an empathy for their future selves.

[444] Oh.

[445] So punishments like, well, you know, part of the reason that you react to punishments is because you don't want your future self to be punished again, but you have to care about that before that works.

[446] Right.

[447] Right.

[448] Yeah.

[449] That gets the issue of steepness, steepness of future discounting.

[450] Yes, exactly.

[451] Yeah.

[452] They grab for all the gusto right now and don't think about the future.

[453] consequences.

[454] So, so one of the things that, one of the big five personality traits that the dark triad is most associated with is agreeableness, low agreeableness.

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

[456] Right.

[457] Reliably, it's about half a standard deviation.

[458] It's one of the biggest six differences and it's associated with compassion and politeness in the work we've done anyways and so that's empathy at least to some degree now the question is what is the ethical utility of lower agreeableness right because you'd think well it would interfere possibly with sharing right because if you're more compassion and more compassionate more empathic you're going to feel the hunger of other people and you'd be more motivated to care for them let's say but it's also possible that that low agreeableness has something to do with well perhaps hunting prowess that might be part of it but it also might be part of the solution to the free rider problem and so women are in a conundrum with agreeableness right because they need a mate who's agreeable enough so they can bond with them and that will care for their children and it cares in general but they need someone who's disagreeable enough so that they're capable let's say of dealing with free riders and right so it's a one way of saying that is uh agreeable with respect to them, but the potential for being disagreeable with respect to those others when they need to be punished or they need to ward off an attacker.

[459] Right.

[460] And you can see that that's a real tight line to walk down.

[461] You know, and part of what constrains agreeableness, let's say from a temperamental perspective, so if you're low in agreeableness, let's say, well, you're less empathic, you're more competitive, you're rougher, tougher, you know, what would you say, at least with regards to you, the the compassion you show to others.

[462] And so what helps modulate that?

[463] Well, some of that would be conscientiousness.

[464] And so in the dark triad types, you see low conscientiousness as well.

[465] You know, really low agreeable, high conscientious types are quite interesting.

[466] Because you can trust them because they'll do their duty, but they're very blunt and direct and harsh.

[467] And that can be helpful as well because they'll tell you unpleasant truths, even if they hurt your feelings.

[468] So there's some utility in that.

[469] So you can imagine that agreeableness can be modified, let's say by conscientiousness, and that takes the psychopathy edge off it, because low agreeableness and low conscientiousness, that's a rough combination.

[470] Yes.

[471] And so, yeah, yeah, yeah, because there's nothing constraining it.

[472] And so women are attracted to some degree to the lower agreeable types, and I think that accounts for the bad boy paradox that you described, at least in part.

[473] And maybe it takes further experience and wisdom on the part of judicious, women to see where they can get the disagreeableness that's necessary, but it has to be hemmed in by something like, well, conscientiousness.

[474] Yeah, other personality traits like conscientiousness.

[475] I mean, one other reason that I think that women are attracted to the dark triad, at least the younger women, is that they're often risk takers.

[476] So they will do things like motorcycle jumping or ski jumping.

[477] or take physical risks, speeding in their cars.

[478] And so the kind of daredevil mentality, and at least younger women find that exciting.

[479] I wonder if they confuse that with trait openness, right?

[480] Because the open types are going to experiment.

[481] They're going to try lots of different things.

[482] And that daredevil, you know, I don't care, might be not easily distinguished from the capacity to engage in creative problems.

[483] solving pursuits, you know, and perhaps with courage as well.

[484] Yeah, yeah.

[485] So I think courage and also one of the, you know, that people who take risks often in fact have the ability to afford those risks, if you will.

[486] So for example, you know, doing some dangerous athletic feed, if you're not an athletic person, you're going to fail at that.

[487] And so in some sense, some of these daredevil behaviors, I think, are kind of cues that you have the ability to afford to take those risks.

[488] But these guys, these high dark triad guys are absolutely disastrous as long -term mates.

[489] So they might be exciting for sure.

[490] I mean, that's why I think that women, as they mature, stop being attracted to these guys, especially if they're looking for a long -term mate.

[491] because these are guys, the dark tribe, they're more likely to cheat.

[492] They're more likely to seduce and abandon.

[493] They're more likely to engage in deceptive mating tactics.

[494] And so they tend to be big trouble when it comes to long -term mating.

[495] Yeah, well, it also looks like they value themselves greatly.

[496] And, you know, sometimes people value themselves greatly.

[497] And so they have high mate desirability in your terminology or maybe some little corruption of your terminology.

[498] And again, I think the dark triad guys mimic that.

[499] It's like, I'm so good I can afford to, you know, distribute my sexual prowess wherever I see fit.

[500] And there's some, some of that happens as men rise in competence hierarchies as well.

[501] Well, it happens with women when they rise in their higher.

[502] How do you understand, here's a question I'd really like to hear you answer.

[503] How do you distinguish between female and male hierarchies?

[504] hierarchies for sexual selection.

[505] Because there are obviously women that are more desirable to men.

[506] So where are the big sex differences there?

[507] I know that women will mate across and up competence hierarchies and men will mate across and down, roughly speaking.

[508] But there are other differences.

[509] Yeah, yeah.

[510] So we recently published a study on 14 different cultures on the sex differences and similarities.

[511] And indeed, there are differences.

[512] even things like physical attractiveness, it increases both male and female status, but it increases female status more than male status.

[513] Why?

[514] Well, what we argue is that, and this is one thing my 37 culture study showed, is that men place a greater priority on physical attractiveness, physical appearance, good looks, and it's not an arbitrary social construction.

[515] It's basically an evolved preference for fertility cues.

[516] Those men who made it with infertile women failed to become ancestors.

[517] And so we're all descendants of...

[518] I have to ask you this, too.

[519] Here's something I really got in trouble for.

[520] So I was doing an interview with NBC reporter.

[521] I don't remember who it was, but he didn't like me at all.

[522] So he was trying to catch me out on all sorts of things.

[523] And we talked about makeup in the workplace.

[524] And I said that women use makeup to enhance their sexual attractiveness.

[525] And man, you wouldn't believe the flack I got.

[526] for that.

[527] And I said, well, the reddening of the lips, for example, and the rouging of the cheeks is not only a signal to mimic youth and fertility, but it's likely associated with mimicry of ripe fruit because our visual system evolved to detect ripe fruit.

[528] And if you look through any advertising, like any magazine, women's magazines in particular, the association between makeup and fruit is there in the imagery all the time.

[529] And the flavor as well, for that matter.

[530] So did I say something that I shouldn't have said.

[531] Am I wrong about that in some important way?

[532] No, you're not wrong about it, but I know what you mean.

[533] I've got some flag for that as well.

[534] And one thing that, you know, on this finding that men prioritize physical attractiveness and that physical attractiveness is not just this arbitrary social construction, but in fact, underlying it is a set of cues to youth and cues to health and hence cues to fertility.

[535] this is a very upsetting notion to some people.

[536] And so I was actually, even before I published the 37 culture study, I gave a talk on it to a sociology department when I was at Michigan.

[537] And a professor, female professor came up to me afterwards and said that I shouldn't publish the findings.

[538] And I said, well, why not?

[539] Because I, you know, to me, empirical findings are empirical findings, you know.

[540] But she said that women had it hard enough in competing with each other on physical appearance without being told that men have this evolved preference for it.

[541] And so the standard social science model is more comfortable for people to believe, oh, it's just arbitrary and infinitely changeable.

[542] And you go to any different culture and they value a whole different set of things.

[543] And the notion that we have evolved preferences for fertility cues is anathema.

[544] to some people.

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

[546] I mean, I reviewed the IQ literature for about 20 years trying to get to the bottom of it.

[547] And it's very distressing to realize how wide the human differential is in cognitive ability.

[548] It's really quite a staggering thing to understand how broad that gap is and how much pain that causes, especially at the lower end of the distribution.

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

[550] It's like there's a real harshness to that, but it's the harshness.

[551] I think it's the harshness of life.

[552] And actually understanding that makes it less harsh insofar as understanding is useful.

[553] Yeah.

[554] Yeah.

[555] No, I would agree with that.

[556] And, you know, I mean, I've stumbled across a lot of findings in my research and we'll get to the issue of conflict between the sexes that I find personally distressing, you know, that I wish didn't exist, but they do.

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

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

[559] So we have no biological nature, which means we're, it means we're infinitely amenable to social utopian schemes that are designed to turn us into a particular vision of human, and there's great danger in that, too.

[560] So that's the other side of the coin.

[561] There's danger everywhere.

[562] Yeah, well, what I would say is, yeah, the implicit in those notions is that humans are passive, passive vehicles rather than active strategists that can be easily manipulated by whatever and that's not a very that's not a very flattering view of humans so no and it's justified some rather wide -scale social engineering attempts in the last hundred years yeah yeah so so it is a real danger it's not it's and then that that doesn't take away anything from the fact that there are such thing there is such thing as unpleasant fact yeah so and it's it's reasonable to be cognizant of that.

[563] So you were going to talk a little bit about, let's talk about violence, say, between men and women.

[564] One of the things I was struck by in your chapter on violence, the way it opened, people, I studied aggression for a long time in little kids, in elementary school, children, adolescents, all the way up, developmental origins of aggression with Richard Tromblay in Montreal.

[565] And so I'm very interested in that.

[566] And I'm very interested in that.

[567] I think often that psychologists have things backwards when we approach questions.

[568] You know, so for example, we often try to explain anxiety instead of explaining its control, which is way harder to do.

[569] Because, like, of course you're anxious.

[570] That's bloody obvious.

[571] Why aren't you terrified out of your skull all the time is the question?

[572] And I think it's the same with aggression.

[573] It's often treated as if aggression itself is something that needs to be explained, whereas for me, the mystery is, well, no, aggression, not, of course.

[574] The mystery is how we control it.

[575] That's the mystery.

[576] Yeah.

[577] And so.

[578] Yeah.

[579] Well, and we do.

[580] I mean, it's, you know, aggression is selectively deployed, you know, and is very context -specific.

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

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

[583] And so that's a form of aggression.

[584] Yeah, reputation savaging.

[585] Yes, yeah, derogation of competitors.

[586] so but but but it but all these forms of aggression are typically deployed very selectively you know it's not like we don't wake up in the morning go out and beat someone up you know even those who engage in physical aggression it's often someone has humiliated them in public for example or or challenged their their status and but that's one of the or they've perceived that however incorrectly yes yeah so one of the things that I studied is a homicidal ideation, you know, and I looked at, you know, have you ever had a homicidal thought?

[587] Have you ever thought about killing someone?

[588] And basically, I mean, the majority of people have thought about it.

[589] And even though if they haven't, they'll say something like, when I posed this question just informally at, say, a party, people say, oh, no, I've never thought about killing someone.

[590] But then the conversation will proceed, and then they'll say, actually there was this one time when someone humiliated me in front of the whole group and I just had this thought about killing him.

[591] And so fortunately, most homicidal thoughts don't get translated in a homicidal deeds.

[592] Otherwise, we'd be living in a very chaotic society.

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

[594] Well, okay, so let me run something by you in relationship to emotional regulation and status.

[595] Tell me what you think about this.

[596] So the terror management theorist types tend to think that our cognitive beliefs inhibit our anxiety.

[597] And they drill that all the way down to anxiety of death, taking a page from Freud.

[598] And that's Becker's book, basically.

[599] And there's a whole field of psychology that's worked on that.

[600] I think it's, I don't think it's right.

[601] I think it's more indirect.

[602] So imagine this.

[603] Imagine that the degree to which your negative emotion is regulated is dependent on serotonic, serotonergic output fundamentally.

[604] So as your serotonin levels rise, you're more emotionally stable.

[605] So you feel less anxiety, despair, the whole panoply of negative emotions, which are pretty tightly clumped together.

[606] And so then you might say, well, your emotion, emotional regulation is dependent on your status.

[607] And I think there's truth in that.

[608] Now, let's say I do, we're at an academic conference and I stand up and I ask you a question and it's a mean question, but you can't answer it.

[609] So your status is devalued.

[610] But here's what I've actually done.

[611] It's not exactly that I've devalued your status.

[612] What I've done is undermine the claim that you have a valid claim on that position.

[613] Yeah.

[614] Right?

[615] And then that That's going to disregulate you because if that's true, then while you've been shown to be an imposter, let's say, or at least a threat is there, and then that would take you out of that hierarchy, and your negative emotion would rise.

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

[617] Yes.

[618] And so, right.

[619] And you know, you know, the people at the bottom of a hierarchy are much more likely to die from all cause mortality.

[620] Right.

[621] This is not nothing.

[622] Right.

[623] Including getting killed.

[624] Yes, including that.

[625] Yeah.

[626] So to threaten that, and then you say, well, that invokes homicidal ideation quite rapidly, it's like, well, if you're interfering with the with the person's claim on a position that actually does regulate their negative emotion, as well as actually protect them from death, not just death anxiety, it's no wonder that you evoke a counter response, which would be a blunt form of reestablishing something like competence.

[627] Yes.

[628] Yeah.

[629] No, I think that that's right.

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

[631] You know, my argument would be, well, people actually have to solve problems of survival and reproduction.

[632] You know, Yes, the problem of death is worse than the problem of death anxiety.

[633] Yes.

[634] Now, death anxiety is bad, you know, make no, and I like Beckard's book, but fundamentally, no. Yeah, the logic doesn't work.

[635] But I published a short commentary on terror management some time ago, and with the terror management, people just ignored it.

[636] I mean, I was.

[637] So what did you say?

[638] Oh, well, I basically said, you know, argued that they were proposing.

[639] all these psychological adaptations simply to keep the thought and anxiety associated with death at bay.

[640] And from an evolutionary perspective, although they purport to ground it in an evolutionary perspective, it's not really an evolutionary perspective, because you have to tie an adaptive solution to some element that is tributary to survival or reproduction, you know, and not simply adaptation solely to deal with internal psychological states, except if those internal psychological states get translated into things that lead to survival and reproduction or have over the course of human evolutionary history.

[641] Yeah, or interfered with it.

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

[643] But that still doesn't interfere with the fact that a lot of the structures that we built to deal with death anxiety actually stop us from dying.

[644] They're not mere defenses.

[645] They're not mere ego defenses, although sometimes they can also be that.

[646] And so and also the other problem with Becker and the terror management theorists, it's sort of related to the patriarchy problem, I would say, is that Becker didn't read Jung, by the way, even though he wrote a book on the psychology, religion, and he said in the intro that it was unnecessary to read Jung, which was exactly wrong, given what he was doing.

[647] But Becker basically posited that we had to create fabrications to defend ourselves against negative emotion.

[648] That's the essential message of that book.

[649] And what that means in some sense is that the whole corpus of human endeavor is an attempt to escape from the realization of mortality.

[650] And I think, well, wait a sec. No, we're also escaping from mortality.

[651] It's not just the thoughts of it.

[652] And it isn't obvious to me at all.

[653] And I think almost all of clinical psychology would suggest that this is true, is that falsification as a defense is actually counterproductive in the final analysis.

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

[655] death anxiety.

[656] That's actually counterproductive.

[657] Yeah.

[658] So.

[659] Yeah, there's a, it reminded me of Woody Allen quote.

[660] And Woody Allen's very, I guess he's sort of been canceled and is out of favor.

[661] But he had this one quote where people said, well, you know, you will achieve immortality through your work.

[662] And he said, I don't want to achieve immortality through my work.

[663] I want to achieve immortality through not dying.

[664] That's a very good line.

[665] It's a very good line.

[666] And yeah, very germane to the problem.

[667] So you said that you had.

[668] uncovered things that deeply disturbed you in your research as well, ethically, I would say.

[669] And so can you touch on some of that?

[670] Well, yeah.

[671] I mean, so, well, one is, well, one pertains to some of the sex differences that we've already been talking about.

[672] So just as men place a greater value on physical attractiveness than women in their main selection, women place a greater value on a man's status and resources.

[673] And so you could say, well, you know, men view women as sex.

[674] objects, but women view men as success objects, you know.

[675] And so they're both, you know, forms of objectification, if you will, although I don't really like that term.

[676] And so I remember giving a lecture at once, and I was describing these findings, and it was like, I think, a freshman guy on the front row.

[677] He was, he got really upset by this.

[678] And he said, you mean, you mean I have to, have to achieve at work in order to be attractive to women?

[679] I said, well, I mean, I guess it's not strictly necessary, but if you want to improve your chances, yeah.

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

[681] So that's one set of things.

[682] Another, though, has to do...

[683] Well, it's also, what's interesting about that, too, if you don't mind me saying so, is that the evolutionary psychological argument actually indicates more deeply the intractability and danger of that problem, right?

[684] Because the problem of being at the bottom is so deep that we shouldn't rush to solve it with, you know, surface -level solutions that aren't going to work.

[685] So you see, for example, very frequently people think, well, hierarchy is a Western construct, it's dependent on capitalism.

[686] It's like, wait a second.

[687] If you want to solve the problem of poverty and exclusion and oppression, and you start that by equating something as profound and deep as hierarchy with capitalism, you're not going anywhere because you have no idea how big this problem is.

[688] It's way bigger than capitalism.

[689] Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.

[690] I mean, status hierarchies, I mean, as you've written about, are evolutionarily ancient.

[691] Yeah, and so you think I'm okay.

[692] I mean, I took a lot of flack for all that, you know, my comparison with lobsters, say, which, you know, because antidepressants work on lobsters, which is something I think is absolutely phenomenal.

[693] And it pertains to the serotonin argument, right?

[694] It's so widely distributed all the way down the phylogenetic chain that serotonin even regulates negative emotion in lobsters.

[695] This is old, you know, and lots of people objected, well, why do you pick lobsters?

[696] And it's, you know, as if I was overstating the biological conclusions.

[697] What do you think about this?

[698] Yeah, well, you know, status hierarchies are pretty ubiquitous.

[699] And I guess what I would say is that they, I mean, you didn't have to pick lobsters, but you could have picked chimpanzees or any number of other species and still have been essentially correct.

[700] Or even non -social birds.

[701] Like even birds that don't have troops and strictly a hierarchy, they have a positional hierarchy in terms of territory.

[702] And the ones that have the best nesting sites are much more likely to mate and survive.

[703] So even in many animals that don't have a hierarchy specifically, it's still there implicitly.

[704] That's right.

[705] That's right.

[706] And this gets to one of the other, I guess the broader implicit, uncomfortable truths is that we value different people differently.

[707] So, and that this, of course, applies in the mating domain of mate value.

[708] Some are higher, some are low.

[709] And that's mostly what I've focused on.

[710] But it also applies to friendship value, coalitional value, that we value different individuals differently based on their competence, based on their benefit conferring ability and willingness.

[711] And people find this uncomfortable.

[712] They, you know, we're, and this is one of the, I think, conceptual confusions of this, like, All people are created equal.

[713] Well, you know, there are different meanings of that.

[714] One is equal in terms of rights, you know, which they should be, equal in terms of opportunities.

[715] Equal before the law.

[716] Equal in terms of their natural rights.

[717] Right, right, which is, I think, the correct usage of that.

[718] But are they actually equal in value in what other people value?

[719] Well, I've always asked people, like, who hit me with us, like, do you sleep with everyone?

[720] No, oh, you're selective, are you?

[721] Well, isn't that oppression, exclusion, and judgment?

[722] At the most fundamental level?

[723] And is that something you really want to sacrifice?

[724] Yeah, and yeah, and the answer is no. And I remember this is...

[725] The answer is only rude people ask questions like that.

[726] Well, or, you know, or confused, you know, who haven't really thought through these issues.

[727] No, I meant the rude person was me asking that question.

[728] Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[729] Well, well, but I mean, hey, we're in the business of asking hard questions.

[730] I don't think they're rude.

[731] No, I don't think they are either.

[732] They're just pointed.

[733] It's like, wait, you exclude sexually.

[734] There is no more dramatic form of exclusion than that.

[735] Yes, that's right.

[736] That's why people object to evolutionary psychology.

[737] It's like, it is a brutalness about it, especially in female choosing us.

[738] And not that men are any better because, of course, they do.

[739] the same thing in different ways.

[740] But it really is brutal.

[741] And to be rejected by someone that you're attracted to, that's no joke.

[742] That's a rough dagger.

[743] Yeah, absolutely.

[744] And of course, breakups are among the most traumatic experiences that people go through.

[745] You know, the dissolution of a marriage, for example, you know, these cause people to spiral into depression, alcohol abuse, et cetera.

[746] So, but, yeah, it's...

[747] So let's let, can we talk about differences in, those differences in aggression again, you know, because as you said, men are more likely to use physical aggression.

[748] And by the way, there is good data.

[749] You may know this already, but Tromblay's group in particular looked at this.

[750] If you take two -year -olds, boys and girls, and you group them together, two -year -olds are the most aggressive of any age group that you can group together kidding, kicking, the two -year -olds will do more of it.

[751] But most two -year -olds don't, and almost all the small minority that do are male.

[752] So it's there at two.

[753] Now, almost all of them get socialized by the age of four.

[754] And so they come to inhibit that aggression that's, they're probably low inagreableness.

[755] That would be my guess.

[756] And some of them are probably high and negative emotions, so they're more reactive, you know, more volatile, but most of them are socialized by the age of four.

[757] But their research groups show that if they aren't socialized by the age of four, then it's permanent.

[758] So that's where the career criminal types come from.

[759] But they tend to desist around the age of 28 drops off for some reason that isn't well understood yet.

[760] Yeah, well, I guess, yeah, 28.

[761] Well, you know, I mean, it seems like at least in adulthood, when physical aggression, if you chart it by age and sex, it's basically when males, even though they do exhibit it early on, as you mentioned, when they enter reproductive competition, the physical aggression goes way up.

[762] Oh, oh, in the same data sets.

[763] So what happens with these long -term aggressive boys?

[764] So they're more aggressive than the rest of the boys, except the boys catch up on average when puberty hits for a few years and then they go down.

[765] Yeah, to your point.

[766] Yeah, reproductive competition.

[767] and two other colleagues of yours up in Canada, Martin Daly and Margaret Wilson, have shown these age and sex distributions.

[768] And I mean, it's really stark...

[769] And the exacerbation of that by inequality.

[770] Yes, that's right.

[771] That's right, which is another issue, you know, the magnitude of inequality and inequality leveling.

[772] You know, Richard Rangham has an interesting idea that one of the ways, like it gets back to the issue of the origins of monogamy, that in humans, and this is to a lesser degree the case in chimps, I think, but it's certainly true in humans that an alpha male can be deposed by two lower -ranking males, two or three you can gang up.

[773] And his view is that if someone gets to the top and is a cost -inflicked male, he didn't quite phrase it this way, then people gang up and kill, you know.

[774] Right, another argument against totalitarian brutality as the basis of the patriarchy.

[775] It actually doesn't work.

[776] Yeah.

[777] Right.

[778] And for that reason, yeah, I actually talked to Rangam about exactly that.

[779] Oh, okay.

[780] Those mechanisms are already there.

[781] And so, Gresh, a lot of these strategies that you outlined in your book as alternatives in some sense to monogamy, to stable monogamy, I would say there's there's something like suboptimal solutions on a fitness landscape, right?

[782] They're better than they're better than the alternative possibly, which would be like zero success whatsoever, but they're nowhere near as good as the optimal solution, which is something like generous monogamy, something like that perhaps.

[783] Is that, is that naive or reasonable, do you think?

[784] Well, I don't know.

[785] I mean, I tend to, I have a little bit of an internal conflict.

[786] on that issue because I sort of as a scientist, I feel like I have to be non -judgmental with respect to if there are multiple eval mating strategies, which I think there are.

[787] I try to be non -judgmental about that.

[788] But from my own personal ethical viewpoint, I think monogamy is a great solution.

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

[790] And so, like, long -term monogamy might be something like the best strategy, all things considered.

[791] Now, sometimes all things aren't considered, and you have to do what you have to do, let's say.

[792] You know, divorce would fit into that and so forth.

[793] But that doesn't mean that that optimality that we, have potentially a moral intuition for isn't pointing to something that is in fact, well, I would say at least in potential, evolved as well as socially constructed.

[794] Yeah.

[795] So I guess what I would say is that the key question is optimal for whom.

[796] So, and this is where you get into some conflict between group harmony and individual benefits.

[797] So in polygynous societies, as we were talking about earlier, let's say you have one man has four wives, that means three men have no wives.

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

[799] Well, yeah, but he also might be more prone.

[800] And we know the polygamous societies, they tend to be more violent.

[801] The younger men tend to be more violent.

[802] So I would say that, right, he's on the, he's on top, but, but, you know, a knife in the back takes out the strongest man. And that's a real problem in human beings, because even if it is physical prowess that puts you up at the top, which is something that, like a real dominating chimp might manage, you know, knives pretty much equalize the playing field or clubs or anything like that.

[803] Yeah, yeah.

[804] And I think we have these kind of hierarchy leveling adaptations.

[805] And if you go across cultures, they even have phrases for us.

[806] Like in Australia, they have them, they call it the tall poppies.

[807] And people like to cut down tall poppies.

[808] Or in Japan, they say the nail that sticks out gets pounded down.

[809] And so there's this, in personality psychology, I don't know if you remember the, like, R .B. Kattel even had a concept, Raymond Kutel had a concept called coercion toward the biosocial norm, where you said that people, like to cut down people who are too dominant so that the meat will inherit the earth.

[810] So it's not quite right, but it's a way I think we do have these.

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

[812] And I think part of that tall poppy cutting down is an attempt to eradicate the detrimental effects of undue narcissism.

[813] It's not so much actual competence.

[814] It's, it's, and I know that if you're competent and you are at the top, there may be some danger to you because given that you're more the center of attention, you're also more the center of negative attention.

[815] So that, that is a danger.

[816] But I suspect that a lot of those mechanisms more directed toward the dark triad types and control of their, unweening arrogance.

[817] Right, exactly.

[818] If they're inflicting costs rather than conferring benefits or monopolizing resources rather than sharing them with other members of the group, you know, those are going to be hierarchy levelers.

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

[820] Mm -hmm.

[821] Mm -hmm.

[822] Yeah, well, and it's a tough problem to solve, right?

[823] It's a really hard problem to solve, and I think the evolutionary psychologists have made this even more evident, as we referred to earlier.

[824] Like, the differences that are driving these inequalities are very, very deep, and it's very difficult to figure out how you might deal with them socially.

[825] Even on the conservative end of the spectrum, I think it's worth noting that excess inequality breeds violence among young men.

[826] That's worth noting.

[827] It's like, well, you let the inequality get too out of hand, you're going to destabilize the whole society.

[828] And then unless you want to live in a gated community, let's say, and the gates can easily turn into walls, and then that's indistinguishable from a prison, that's not really a very good idea.

[829] And so how to shovel resources down the hierarchy in some way that's, what would you say, that's not counterproductive, that's a problem that we're all constantly struggling with.

[830] Yes.

[831] Yeah, indeed.

[832] And and I think it's even, I mean, you had mentioned intelligence research and here's, I'd like to get your thoughts on this is that one of the things that we know is that there's strong assortative mating for intelligence.

[833] You know, and part of that might be due to the educational system that is, you know, you meet, people go to college or higher degrees and you tend to mate with people with whom you're in close proximity, but we know the assortative mating coefficients for intelligence is about 0 .45.

[834] It's one of the highest assortative mating coefficients.

[835] Right.

[836] So that's the tendency for people to marry people who are like them in some manner.

[837] Yeah.

[838] Yeah.

[839] So that means the high intelligence are mating with the highs and the lows with lows.

[840] But one of the consequences of that, to the degree that intelligence is heritable, and it is partly heritable, that creates in the next generation and increase in variance in intelligence of the offspring generation.

[841] And so if you iterate it, generation after generation, you're actually getting more and more variance on this socially valued dimension, which will increase to the degree that intelligence is linked with things like resource acquisition or status of payment, then you're going to create an increase in inequality as a well that's that's i would say you know i think that's probably what's happened to us you know i'm here let me run something wild by you and you tell me what you think of this i've done various interpretations of the stories in genesis the story of adam and eve in particular and it's eve that makes adam self -conscious in that story and that's that's put forth as a as a what would you say uh a world shattering event it's associated with with the emergence of morality, that's knowledge of good and evil, and it's associated with the knowledge of death.

[842] So you get enough cognitive development driven by sexual selection, you become self -conscious, aware of your own mortality.

[843] That's the first thing, and that's our cataclysm.

[844] No other creatures ever dealt with that.

[845] And then having become aware of your own mortality and your vulnerability, you know the difference between good and evil, because now you understand what would hurt something like you.

[846] Like you actually understand it, unlike a lion who's just eating a gazelle, And then you can use that.

[847] And so, and then in that story, well, in some sense, it's blamed on Eve.

[848] But the selection pressure that you described in association with the choosiness of women, I think it's, I don't see how it can be denied that that was a prime mover of our cognitive transformation away from the chimpanzee line.

[849] Sexual selection that drove that, I think.

[850] Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think that's right.

[851] I mean, I mean, because there's, you know, we didn't get this.

[852] big brain from learning how to pick berries a little bit better, whatever.

[853] I mean, these survival problems don't really get you there.

[854] Well, and you need a runaway process, right?

[855] And the assortative mating issue that you described would be a contributor to that runaway process, because this cortical evolution happened very rapidly.

[856] Yes.

[857] Right.

[858] So rapidly that women's bodies are barely adapted to our babies, right?

[859] Wider hips, they wouldn't be able to run.

[860] Right.

[861] Bigger head, it wouldn't pass through the birth canal.

[862] And women bodies are compromised to some degree by the necessity of giving birth.

[863] And then babies are born when they're still unbelievably helpless, because if they were any bigger than that, their heads would be too big.

[864] Plus, they're crushable, their heads.

[865] I mean, it took a lot of gerrymandering to make that runaway selection process biologically viable.

[866] Yeah, yeah.

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

[868] So this is, evolution is ongoing here in this process.

[869] So maybe we can close with one thing, unless you have something else you'd really like to discuss.

[870] I would like to discuss a little bit more about why men and women have different strategies of aggression.

[871] Yeah.

[872] So, yeah.

[873] Well, and also, well, I mean, I guess we'll have to, there are many interesting things that I would love to talk about associated with my new book on conflict between the sexes.

[874] And we've touched on a few, but I'd love to talk more about those.

[875] But, you know, I think that, you know, male and female status hierarchies are.

[876] I mean, there's some similarities but there's so fundamentally different and I don't know if you've ever had this experience, Jordan, but the way I describe it, I find, and I think most men find male hierarchies to be fairly transparent.

[877] That is, we can sort of observe them, they're clear, there's not a big mystery, but female...

[878] Well, we also tend, I would say, we also tend to exclude males that aren't transparent like that.

[879] Yeah, okay.

[880] He's too much trouble.

[881] Right.

[882] So no, no, I want to know exactly where I stand with you.

[883] And we're going to sort that out right now.

[884] Right, right.

[885] And they do sort it out.

[886] But with women, the way I feel, you know, those movies where there's like these bank robbers and they're breaking into a bank, but the bank has these infrared detectors.

[887] And so they have to put on special goggles so that they can see the red lines and avoid tripping the alarm.

[888] I feel like that with respect to female hierarchies.

[889] like I don't have the goggles to see it because I'll go like go to a party or something and then leave and a woman will say something like, did you hear what that bitch said?

[890] And I was like right there and I didn't hear anything, but there's this kind of underlying meta message that women pick up on with respect to other women that I don't, I don't feel like I understand.

[891] Do you know if there's any studies indicating whether men or women are better at detail?

[892] who's in a relationship with who?

[893] I don't know of any studies on that, but I would hazard a guess that women are better at it than men.

[894] I mean, is that your intuition as well?

[895] Yes, yes, definitely, definitely.

[896] I mean, I've watched my wife do that on several occasions.

[897] Those two people are together.

[898] It's like, no, they're not.

[899] They're married to other people.

[900] Well, it turns out, yeah, they are.

[901] She can pick it up in way.

[902] Well, and we know that women are better at decoding, nonverbal behavior than men.

[903] And that's probably partly because they have to be more attentive to it because it's more dangerous for them if they're not.

[904] And they have to pick up the cues of their nonverbal infants.

[905] Right, exactly.

[906] So I think this would get to the issue of mind reading abilities, ability to infer the psychological states of other humans.

[907] And I think that at least in many domains, women are better at that.

[908] You want to think that's associated with trade, agreeableness, that would be fun to find out if that's actually a function of trait agreeableness because that would imagine that some of that understanding is actually embodiment.

[909] So if I'm empathic, I'm better at mirroring your emotions in my body and then I can pick up what you're feeling by referring to what I'm feeling.

[910] That's what we do when we go to a movie, right?

[911] Because we vicariously live the emotions in the movie.

[912] But it stands to reason that there's variability.

[913] And I suspect it's agreeableness because that's empathy and likely maternal caregiving.

[914] Yeah.

[915] Yeah.

[916] So that's, I mean, that's a really interesting question.

[917] I'm not aware of studies that have systematically looked at that.

[918] Individual differences.

[919] Yeah, well, the psychologists are loath to associate agreeableness with maternality, right?

[920] Because we're loath to make any claims in the current political climate that any of these dimensions might be associated with something like, you know, the fundamental difference between the sexes, even though there are huge sex differences in agreeableness.

[921] And they get bigger, any get bigger.

[922] Eilitarian societies, which is really quite something.

[923] Right, right.

[924] Contrary to the standard social science, social role theories that it predicted that...

[925] Yeah, not just contrary, but like...

[926] Well, I would say death blow, but it's not exactly right, because some differences do decline as egalitarianism increases.

[927] So, you know, it's complicated like everything else.

[928] So male aggression again, well, we have...

[929] We're bigger.

[930] We're taller.

[931] We have more upper body strength.

[932] So women aren't going to engage in physical combat with men, not past puberty.

[933] And, you know, they develop that increase in trait -negative emotionality at puberty.

[934] It's not there in child.

[935] Oh, really?

[936] Okay.

[937] And it's permanent.

[938] No, it's permanent once it's instantiated, once the puberal changes take place.

[939] And so, and I, here's a something, here's a question I have for you.

[940] I really want to ask you this.

[941] Okay.

[942] What do you think of the theory that, so women are higher in trait -negative emotion.

[943] Right.

[944] And they're higher in agreeableness.

[945] So here's a theory.

[946] Women's personalities are adapted for the mother infant diet, not for their, not for them.

[947] That the fundamental unit is the diet and their temperament is adjusted for that.

[948] That's why they're more fearful.

[949] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[950] No, I think that that's got to be right.

[951] I mean, you know, women over evolutionary history have been the primary caretakers of the infants, at least for the first few years of life.

[952] the mothers and their female kin, the allop parents, as they're called.

[953] And so I think that that's exactly right.

[954] They have to be the cost of failing to detect danger, for example, affect not just them, but also the survival of their infant.

[955] And so I think that, you know, maternal bond to the infant has got to be at least one of the contributing factors to that sex difference in negative emotionality.

[956] Also, also, the world is a more dangerous place for a mother and infant than just for a mother, because the infant is so vulnerable.

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

[958] Right, which is interesting to bring it back full circle is one reason why women value a man's ability and willingness to offer protection.

[959] for her and her children so highly in a mate.

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

[961] Yeah, and it's also not all that self -evident that that physical capacity to protect has been ameliorated to an overwhelming degree in the modern environment.

[962] It's still plenty dangerous.

[963] Yeah, it's still plenty dangerous.

[964] It might not be so much as it was.

[965] Yeah, yeah, less so than it was.

[966] I mean, I think Steve Pinker has documented that pretty successfully, and, you know, that there's been a general decline, and I know this from studying homicide, there's been over the last 400 years of decline in homicide rates, broadly speaking, although there's, interestingly, there's been a spike in homicide rates due to the pandemic.

[967] or within the pandemic so and I have some speculations about that but but you know I think you know there's so many other topics that we could talk about and I hope we will get a chance to at some point yeah I would really like to we scratched the surface today but yeah so I would very much I'm going to talk to Bob Trivers next week as it turns out so I'm very much looking so this is a really good preparation for that as well so yeah I really your work is mental lot to me. And it's helped explain a lot to me. And so I thank you very much for that and for the courage to do it, to pursue it.

[968] And in the face of, you know, substantive opposition to what you're finding.

[969] You know, you've discovered something true when you're a social scientist when you're not very happy about what you discovered.

[970] Yeah.

[971] Yeah.

[972] Yeah.

[973] That's true.

[974] Well, I have just to end on the positive note, I've also studied love and the evolutionary psychology of love.

[975] And so, I mean, is one of the gets back to your point about good and evil.

[976] And I think humans have evolved adaptations to commit horrors on other people, but also adaptations to be altruistic and benefit conferring on other individuals.

[977] And so, well, Scott, Scott Barry Kaufman has tried to psychometrically outline a light triad.

[978] Yes.

[979] Yeah.

[980] So I think we all have these capacities within us.

[981] And so and the more we learn, the more we can create environments that kind of suppress the darker, more evil side of human nature and bring out the more benefit -conferring side.

[982] Well, it would be fun to do another discussion on something like the evolution of benevolence, you know, something that's really positive like that.

[983] Yes.

[984] So, yeah.

[985] Okay, well, good.

[986] Let's do that.

[987] Okay.

[988] Thank you.

[989] Well, it's been fun talking to you.

[990] And, boy, there is so much more to talk about.

[991] Yeah, I know.

[992] well, that's, that's, what would you say?

[993] That's, that's what you realize whenever you have a really good conversation.

[994] Yeah.

[995] So I appreciate it very much.

[996] And, and, uh, I do hope we, we talk again in the relatively near future.

[997] Okay.

[998] So, I do too.

[999] Well, thank you.

[1000] Thank you so much.

[1001] And best of luck with your, uh, conversation with Bob Trivers.

[1002] He's, he's a fascinating guy.

[1003] So I'm sure you will have a very interesting conversation.

[1004] Yeah.

[1005] I'm looking forward to talking to him about self -deception.

[1006] That's something I thought about for a very long time.

[1007] Yeah.

[1008] And hopefully tried to stop practicing.

[1009] So if you find the keys, let me know.

[1010] All right.

[1011] All right.

[1012] Thank you very much.

[1013] And good luck with your book.

[1014] And so that's this.

[1015] This is part of one of the books we were talking about today.

[1016] Why, when men behave badly, and that's certainly not all it's about.

[1017] And thanks very much for talking to me today.

[1018] Okay.

[1019] Thank you, Gordon.

[1020] It's been a delight.