https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=eEi2Ky3E76k
The thing that we need to remember is that the process of evolution by selection didn’t wire us to be happy or satisfied or any, it’s like it has designed us to survive and to reproduce. And part of that means that we’re going to feel kind of terrible some of the time. And part of women’s design, you know, sort of the design of our psychology is such that it does, it’s like a smoke detector. It’s tuned to picking up on even subtle cues of possible danger just because the potential costs associated with what would happen if that danger is real is much greater for women for a lot of different reasons, some of which you’ve touched upon. I mean, there’s one, is that women are mothers. So it’s like, you hear like you’re eating for two, you’re feeling danger for two. You’re having to protect yourself and your offspring. You’re more physically vulnerable because, of course, you’re physically, you know, women are smaller and have less upper body strength. Sexual vulnerability, for the reasons you talked about, you know, unfortunately, sexual violence has been something that’s been present as long as we’ve been around. And it certainly is something we see in all species. With choosy females, you’ll have males who want to override that choice. And so there’s a lot of reasons that women need. – Manipulation, too. It’s not merely that women are overpowered physically, it’s that they’re also susceptible to very devious manipulation on the part of Machiavellian and psychopathic men. And they need to be alert to that form of deception as a threat as well. – Right, yes, and even also with other females. And the reason for this is that, you know, when you think about the cost, for a woman, if she’s duped, so let’s just talk about sexual deception, right? If a woman is duped, she could end up pregnant. There’s a nine-month investment there, right? And if you look especially at historical, you know, types of populations like modern hunter-gatherer groups, if you have a woman who doesn’t have a father investing in the child, the risk of infant mortality is like 80%. I mean, it’s very high. And the risk of death during childbirth even is very high. So women are putting their lives at risk every time they get pregnant. And then to get pregnant and have a really high-risk infant that’s not getting invested in, she’s not getting… – And their reputation, too. Yeah, and their reputation. I mean, there’s so many costs to that. And the costs just aren’t that, you know, it’s not symmetrical for men. The costs of those things aren’t the same. And so our brains are wired to be differently sensitive to those kinds of cues because the consequences are so much more dire if you have a female body compared to if you have a male body. – Do you know, is there a literature on… OK. Tell me if I got this wrong. OK. All right, so we talked about the different reproductive strategies, say, of mosquitoes and human beings. Mosquitoes have like a zero-investment strategy, have a million offspring. All of them die but like one, but that’s OK because that’s replacement, whereas human beings, it’s unbelievably heavy investment. And then you look within human beings, women invest more than men. Then you could look within men and you could say, there are men who invest less and men who invest more. OK, so the men who invest less, they’re the short-term mater types. Now, I’ve been looking into the personality predictors of short-term mating strategies, and they’re not that positive. So the personality theorists who’ve been investigating the so-called dark tetrad, which is a group of, you might say, undesirable descriptors, psychopathy, narcissism, Machiavellianism, which is manipulativeness, and sadism, because they had to add that to it, those traits are much more pronounced among men and women, but particularly among men who adopt a short-term mating strategy. And so now, so one of the things I’m wondering about is, it’s related to that, so that men who adopt that short-term mating strategy, they love them and leave them, right? There’s no, let’s say, there’s little post-coital regret, there’s no guilt or shame associated with short-term mating opportunities. Do you know if there’s a literature detailing the difference in response to short-term mating episodes between men and women? Are women more likely to evince regret in the aftermath of short-term mating episodes, one-night stands? Oh, yeah, absolutely. There’s a rich literature in sexual regret, and exactly as you would expect, when you look at what people regret sexually, women regret more these short-term mating opportunities that they participated in. Men more often regret those that they didn’t participate in. So men often… Missed opportunities. So men’s sexual regret tends to sort of cluster around things that they wish they would have taken advantage of and they did not, whereas women’s tends to cluster more, and I really wish I wouldn’t have had sex with that idiot. Right, right. Now, do you know, is there a personality literature that’s looked at individual differences in post-short-term sex regret? So are the women less likely to show regret, also more likely to have dark tetrad personality traits? There’s got to be predictors of regret. Right now, you’d expect neuroticism would be one, because that would just predict negative emotion in general. I suspect agreeableness is another predictor, is that the women who are more agreeable, compassionate, polite, more inclined to care-take and bond, so I would suspect that it’s the more feminine women who are more likely to show post-coital regret. I suspect the same thing would be true of men. I bet you the more feminine men are more likely to manifest that pattern of regret. Yeah, that’s really interesting. Yeah, so I think with women, a lot of it, so in the personality literature, and I’m aware of this, I’d only known that there was a dark triad. Yeah, no, it’s expanded. It had to add sadism. That’s real fun, eh? Yeah, I know. Positive delight in the suffering of others. Yeah, wow, wow. I wonder if he’s got a brother. That’s just a terrible, terrible quality. That’s for sure. No, so I’m not terrible. I’m familiar with that, but when I think about things, I tend to think about, just because personality isn’t really my area, it’s more of the evolutionary area, I tend to think about the, my prediction would be, from an evolutionary perspective, would be that we would see women experiencing more sexual regret when the costs are higher. So what are the costs associated with having made that decision that you made? So whether it’s reputational costs. So for example, a woman who has more to lose reputationally from having capitalized on that short-term mating strategy, I think that she would experience stronger sexual regret. I bet you could predict that by looking at the relative … So imagine there’s a continuum of men with regards to the socioeconomic status markers of their potential as providers. I suspect that this might seem obvious, but it would be nice to see it demonstrated, the larger the gap between the woman and the man in terms of status, Yes. the more regret. Yes, no, I would think so. Because she sold herself short, and the risk of that is too high.