https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=vt90JwDHh-Y
Ready? Okay. So, you know how I’ve been telling you guys about the hierarchical model, you know, where there are motor actions on the bottom, and then higher order abstract conceptions at the top, so you can be a good person if you’re a good parent, you know, if you know how to take care of your children, if you can keep your house orderly and productive, if you can make dinner, if you can set a table, and so on, all the way, decomposed all the way down to motor actions, right? So it brings you from the level of abstract to the level of concrete. Okay, so now think about this. So keep that in your mind first. Now the second thing you want to keep in your mind is the kind of models that we were talking about a little bit last week. So they’re the expectancy models that were derived from Vinogradova and Sokolov and so forth, and really, you know, finalized in some sense by Gray. What those models say fundamentally is that if you’re moving towards a target, a consumatory target, which would be specified by hypothalamic or other underlying motivational systems, or some combination of those, sometimes it can be a higher order goal, then anything that occurs while you’re proceeding towards that goal that indicates that you’re going to get it or move closer to it produces positive emotion, okay? And that’s mediated by the hypothalamic exploratory positive affect circuit that runs through the nucleus accumbens, and it basically runs on dopamine. Okay, so that’s positive emotion, roughly speaking. It’s positive emotion in relationship to incentive reward. What happens if you attain the goal, which is the consumatory reward, is it satisfies you. And that’s also a form of reward, but it’s not associated with as much positive emotion. It’s more associated with the lack of necessity to do that anymore, you know, so you’re done with that, and that can be satisfying, and it does seem to be mediated by serotonin, which is basically a satiating agent among its other properties. Okay, so that’s on the positive emotion end of things. Briefly, an incentive reward is also equivalent to a conditioned reward in classical behavior theory. So that’s actually something you should probably know, but I’ll talk about it a bit more, because you kind of need to know how behaviorist theory developed across time, because behaviorist theory has been incredibly, and still is, incredibly influential in neuroscience, especially in the real neuroscience, which is almost always done with animals. So that’s on the positive emotion end. Now let’s go to the negative emotion end. So now you’re proceeding towards a goal, and something gets in your way. You’re walking across the carpet to go to work, and you step on a dog bone, you know, and that’s maybe a little painful, but we’ll keep that apart from this discussion for a moment. It constitutes an impediment to your progress forward. Or maybe your kid left a piece of furniture in the hallway. That’s a better example. So it’s a bit of an obstacle, and when you look at that, then that’s going to produce negative emotion, and the negative emotion is because there’s an obstacle in your path. Now you might say, how much negative emotion should you experience when you encounter an obstacle? And that’s something that I don’t remember if I assigned you guys the entropy paper that I wrote with Jacob Hirsch and Raymond Marr, but anyways, we took a long time to figure out how you might calibrate how upset you should get when something negative happens. And what we realized fundamentally was that it was proportional to the place in the hierarchy where your goals were disrupted. So if you just have to make a minor course correction by walking around, the amount of upset you should get is basically proportional to the amount of extra energy that you have to expend correcting your course. And so a minor obstacle is just going to produce a little bit of arousal and stress, whereas if you go out to try to start your car and it won’t start, well then that’s going to make you more upset, experience more negative emotion. And if you read that the business you work in has just collapsed because the CEO was a crook and now it’s bankrupt, that’s going to cause you even more distress. The distress, roughly speaking, should be proportional to the level of the hierarchy in your expectancy network or desire network, more accurately, that’s disrupted by the occurrence. Okay? So that makes sense. It’s solid. And then, you know, then there’s the special case of things you don’t know about. You know, so, and often when something gets in your way, the problem with what gets in your way is you actually can’t compute how much time and energy it’s going to take you to fix it. And so it’s very hard to calibrate how much negative emotion you’re going to feel under those circumstances, right? Like for example, how anxious should you get if your car quits working? Well the answer to that is you don’t know. And because maybe it’ll never work again, you know, and then it would depend on, well, you know, do you have enough money to replace it? And how much trouble will you run into, practically speaking, if you use that money to replace it? And then it might also depend on your baseline levels of neuroticism. Because what a neuroticism is, it’s the negative emotion factor in the big five. What neuroticism is, it’s a role of the genetic dice, which says that your body should output X amount of physiological energy or preparation for energy in response to X amount of disruption. And X varies, right? So imagine that you’re calibrated for a dangerous environment. So on average, the evolutionary dice has designed your genetic system so that you’re much more reactive to anomalous or punishing things, anomalous or threatening things more accurately, punishing as well. Than the typical person might be. Now you might say, well, is that right? Is that wrong? Is there something wrong with that? It’s like there’s nothing wrong with that at all. If it turns out that on average, the environment tends to be much more dangerous than the typical human environment. You know, now it may be kind of rough on you, especially if you have a nervous system that’s high in neuroticism, when you’re actually not at that much risk, roughly speaking, then there’d be a mismatch between the genetic role of the dice and the average safety of the environment. And modern environments are pretty safe, so we all worry about being anxious, which is funny because we’re anxious about being anxious. The reason we can afford to be anxious about being anxious is because we actually don’t experience that many punishments compared to what we might have experienced 120 years ago when the average daily income in corrected dollars for people in North America was under a dollar a day. You know, that was hard. So anyways, your neuroticism is one of the things that helps determine how much upset you should experience per unit of uncertainty or threat. Another thing is your status among other people. So you might think, well, what else should determine how anxious you get when something you don’t want happens? And you might say, well, your competence. And your competence, roughly speaking, should be how good on average are you compared to other people at dealing with problems when they arise? And so competence is actually one of the more, what would you say, cognitive elements of what you might call self-esteem. You know, if it turns out that you’re pretty good at problem solving or it turns out that you actually have a very wide network of social resources, which basically boils down to the same thing, right? It doesn’t really matter if you can solve a problem if you know someone who can solve the problem. So social network and intrinsic computational resources are comparable phenomena. And if you turn out to be a good problem solver, then on average you should be less upset when something is upsetting than someone who isn’t a good problem solver. Okay. So that makes sense, I presume. Now here’s something I’ve been thinking about for a long time. And there’s a lot of debate about this in the relevant literature. The terror management people, for example, they claim that people get anxious because they’re afraid of death. You know, at a psychological level, it’s lurking at the back of their minds all the time. It’s an existential problem. And I suppose that’s because death is one of those threats that threatens you right at the very top of your hierarchy, right? Dead person and dead person don’t go well together. So death threatens the entire hierarchy. And so it’s very anxiety provoking. That seems quite reasonable as a proposition. Now the other thing that happens in the terror management theories, which are variants of the Freudian theories, is that there’s a further claim made, which is that belief systems protect you against death anxiety. Now this is a complicated claim. Partly it is extracted from Freud’s observation that religious systems are protective against death anxiety. He actually thought they were neurotic protections against death anxiety. So it was sort of like a primitive faith in the ability of the father, roughly speaking, to solve the problem and protect you. So he thought it was a projection of the infantile world onto the broader world. And it’s powerful critique. I think sometimes it’s true. And the death anxiety people, the terror management people, who basically developed their theories from a book by the books called The Denial of Death. I’ll remember the author in a moment. Anyways it doesn’t matter. The theory was broadened out to propose that your belief systems as such provided you with that protection. And then there was a bit of a variation of that theory, which was your vision of yourself as an illusory climber up, value hierarchy, also protected you. Now exactly how it protected you was never really explained. And I’m not taking issue with Becker, Ernest Becker, who wrote the book. Becker’s a smart guy. It’s a great book. It’s dangerously wrong. But it’s a great book. Well lots of great books. You know, they’re wrong in an extraordinarily interesting way. And that can make them a great book. I think Becker’s wrong because he assumes that everything we do to cope with death anxiety is actually an illusion. And I think that’s a terrible thing, terrible idea. It’s an extraordinarily dangerous idea. And I also don’t believe it’s true. For reasons I’ll talk to you about later. Anyways, you can sort of see that. So then we can lay that on top of the expectation theory in some sense, right? Because basically what the expectancy theory people do, like Gray, is they assume, okay, novelty itself is both threatening and incentive rewarding. So it’s threatening because God only knows what might happen to you if you run into something novel. It has an incentive reward element because if you dig around in the novelty, you never know what sort of treasure you might bring to the surface. And so people have an ambivalent relationship with novelty. And I think you can actually understand how that ambivalent relationship works if you think about the hierarchy again. So here’s the rough proposition. If an anomaly emerges at the lowest level, the highest resolution level, then it’s sort of interesting. You know, so a baby might be playing with a fork and find out that the fork makes a tingling noise when he hits it on the table. Now that doesn’t terrify the baby. It’s funny though, you know, you see babies on YouTube now go absolutely, they get absolutely terrified if their mother sneezes or sometimes if she laughs, you know. So anyways, but whatever. If the baby sort of mastered a fork, then the fact that it makes a tingling noise is going to make him curious and that’s an incentive reward phenomena more than frightened. You know, it’s going to depend to some degree on the baby’s level of neuroticism. And it might also depend on how close the baby is to the mother because it actually turns out that maternal proximity modulates the expression of negative emotion in children. And touch really does that, by the way, which is quite cool. And that’s direct physiology. Touch is calming and it’s also analgesic, which is quite cool. So it quells pain. So okay, so anyways, the baby is, you know, making this tingling noise and he finds that quite interesting because it never happened before. And so he’s curious enough about it to replicate it, to do it again, and he’s under the control of his psychomotor approach systems and they mediate exploration as well as positive emotion. But you know, if a great big dog comes bounding in, well, the dog has teeth and it’s big and it, you know, maybe it’s got a deep bark and all that, so it’s associated with unexpected movement, power, and predatory features like, you know, lots of babies, let’s say toddlers, will run and hide behind their mother. That’s a little bit more novelty than they can really tolerate. And so you might think that whether you find something positive or negative when it’s anomalous depends on how high up in the hierarchy the threat apparently exists. Okay, now here’s another corollary. Let’s assume that before you build your map of the world, which you could think about as a map of expectancy, or you could think about as a map of desire, or of how to fulfill think about it as a map of how to organize your body and your thoughts in the world so that when you express that in the world, the world delivers you what it wants. And I think that’s the most accurate terminology. Okay, the idea there is that as you build up and differentiate this map, you bring the anomaly under control, because you reduce it from God only knows what it is, to something you can either use or ignore, and that regulates your nervous system chronically. So the a priori phenomena is novelty, and that would be equivalent to the phenomenologist’s thing that shines forth. Same idea, completely different derivation. And then you build a model that inhibits it, and the rule is the model inhibits it if, when you act out the model, it delivers what you want it to deliver, which is kind of a form of pragmatism from a philosophical perspective. So we understand that. So then the next proposition is that model inhibits anxiety. Okay? Now you can see that that idea is akin to the idea that your culture inhibits death anxiety, although I would say it’s a more delineated model, and it explains it better. One of the problems with the death anxiety idea is that, first of all, your culture is not in your head. Right? Where’s your culture? And your beliefs? It’s around you. Yeah, yeah. So a big part of the culture, the culture is the fact that you’re all sitting there, you know, basically clones of each other, doing exactly the same thing in this room at exactly the same time. That’s the damn culture. And it means that you can all ignore each other and concentrate on something else. And so the culture is all, like it’s the floor beneath your feet, it’s the ceiling over your head, it’s the car you drive to work, it’s the traffic light system that pretty much everybody attends to. So in some sense, the culture is actually the match between the technologies and webs of comprehension that the individuals use in the world and the world. It’s the match. It’s not the phenomena itself. And it’s certainly not only what you believe in your head, which is a little too much on the psychoanalytic end. It doesn’t take into account the pragmatics of culture, which are the things we act out and the technological phenomena that exist and the whole web of game-like structures those are all embedded in. So that would be a Peugeotian idea, right? All this stuff’s organized in very much high order games. But as long as it works, the way you think will work in the world, so that keeps your anxiety under control, because there’s no mismatch, but even better, not only are you not afraid of death at every moment, but you actually don’t die. Which is even better than not being afraid of death, right? Because you’re not freezing to death in here and there’s no insurrection and the probability that you’re going to get run over on the way home is pretty damn low as long as you follow the rules. We should never remember that culture is not only represented in the interior space, it’s not only beliefs, it’s actions, and we should also remember very, very carefully that it’s distributed in the world. Okay, so back to the match-mismatch idea. So you’ve got this map of what effects your behaviors are going to have in the world when you implement them. Sometimes that match works, in which case you’re pretty happy, because that’s an incentive reward. You’re moving towards your goal and it’s happening. Not only that, and this is a secondary thing that the behaviorists could never get a handle on because they didn’t use hierarchical representations in this way, one of the advantages, imagine that you’re trying to pick someone up and it’s going pretty well. Well there’s two sources of reward there. One is it’s going pretty well. The second is you’re the sort of person who, in this situation, can implement a strategy that’s going well. So not only is it a signal that you’re making progress, it’s a signal that the structure that you’re using to guide your actions and your perceptions while you’re making progress is working. So it validates the whole damn theory, and that will echo through your entire hierarchy of presupposition. It’s especially true. I used a mating scenario because those are particularly relevant to self-esteem, let’s say, which is a word that no one should ever be allowed to use, but it’s a word that we’ll use in this situation nonetheless. And it’s hard to tell exactly what’s being reinforced or rewarded. Reward is feeling good. Reinforcement is how the structures that you’re using to perceive and approach, what you’re perceiving and approaching, are asked to grow. So most of the time, if something happens that’s rewarding, what that means is the structures that you have been using to bring about that outcome are actually told to grow a bit, get stronger. And dopamine seems to do that, as well as making you feel good. And sometimes I wonder, it’s not exactly this, because you can separate reward and reinforcement. But sometimes I wonder if the goodness of feeling isn’t associated with the thriving and flourishing of neural tissue. It’s like it’s an invitation to grow instead of die, because if you’re being punished and threatened all the time, then the systems that are leading you to be in those situations do get extinguished fundamentally. They get starved of what gives them life, and they wither away or are inhibited. I don’t think that’s very pleasant. Okay. So, you got your map, and you got the world, and you’re acting out this map, and hopefully the match between your map and the world is such that the map matches the world. And if it doesn’t, you get an anomaly. And then the anomaly can be of different sizes, proportionate to the hierarchy, and then your emotional response is proportionate to where the anomaly seems to rest in the hierarchy as well, subject to your own neuroticism, say, and your own competence, which we can think of as somewhat separate phenomena. Okay, so then you can say, the reason that people don’t like other people who are foreigners, say, or different ethnicity, or who have different belief systems, is because they appear to challenge the integrity of that map. And so, because their belief systems and the way they act, first of all, aren’t very well mapped by the map, so you don’t know what the hell those people are up to, you know, and the differences may be much smaller than you think, but what do you know? You don’t know. Plus, if their belief systems come with them, which they will, that has an indeterminate effect on the structure, the map, and it also has an indeterminate effect on your position within the map. And so then those theories, and part of that is a theory that I developed in the book called Maps of Meaning, that theory proposes, at least in part, that the reason that people cling to their belief systems the way they do is because if their belief systems are disrupted at a high level, low resolution level, just at the level of action, or weigh the hell up the hierarchy in terms of the definition of the good or what constitutes a redeemed person or something like that, then that brings out tremendous disruption. And then you’d expect two phenomena from that. You’d expect that people would be afraid, say, of foreigners or of strange ideas, but also that they’d be kind of interested in them. And I think generally our interactions with people who aren’t like us, generally, or we think aren’t like us, whatever, take place at a level where it’s more curiosity than fear. I mean, that would be almost the definition of a sustainable, tolerant society, right? Everything around you is functioning well enough so that if someone comes along who’s different in belief or action, you’re not going to assume they’re a fatal threat to the integrity of your hierarchy and fall apart because of terror and curiosity, mostly terror. Okay, so now you can vary that theory a bit, and you can say, wait a minute, maybe it’s not just anxiety that gets disinhibited when your belief systems are destructured to some degree. Maybe it’s more primordial. Maybe what happens is that it’s more akin to the generalized stress response, which seems to be a more primordial and global reaction to threat or anomaly. And the generalized stress response basically occurs or seems to occur when the hippocampus, so the hippocampus, the map seems to be associated with the hippocampus in some way. Now the hippocampus is also the part of the brain that takes what you’re observing and transforms it, shows short-term attention, and transforms it into medium to long-term memory. So first of all, the hippocampus keeps track of what it is that you’re seeing, and then it stores it there for a while, and then later it integrates it into the generalized map. And so then the hippocampus seems to sort of stay at the nexus of the map, which is likely represented cortically to a large degree, and what’s actually going on in the world. So for example, Gray’s hypothesis, roughly speaking, is you’re watching what goes on in the world, and the map is telling you what’s supposed to happen, and then when something else happens, the hippocampus detects that, that’s a mismatch, and then somehow it makes you afraid. Now here’s how it seems to make you afraid. This I don’t think was really laid out well until Vinogradova discovered it when she was really old. I mean, she was doing most of her work in the early 60s, but she laid this out, I think it was in the early 2000s. What she showed was that, okay, so you have this part in the bottom of your nervous system, way the hell down there, called the reticular activating system, and it’s old. And it’s the thing upon which your sleep-wake cycles depend. So add your consciousness. If your reticular activating system is down, it’s like you’re unplugged. So if you have a car accident, it’s way back here. If you have a car accident and your head twists enough to shear off the neural projections from the reticular activating system, you’re in a permanent and irreversible coma. That’s pretty interesting, eh, because it means your consciousness depends on something that’s not new, like your, you know, relatively new, like your cortical cap, but something that’s so damn old that it was there before your whole brain. So that’s pretty weird. Anyways, what Vinogradova proposed was that the hippocampus, if the hippocampus decides that what’s going on roughly matches what you expect or what you want, which is more accurate, then it tells the reticular activating system not to be in a panic. And then the reticular activating system, controlled, we’re going to assume it’s on all the time, except when it’s told to be off. The hippocampus says, you can more or less stay off right now because everything’s going according to plan. And then all of a sudden, poof, things don’t go according to plan. The hippocampus tells the reticular, releases the reticular activating system from inhibition, and then the reticular activating system wakes up all your subcortical circuits. And that’s stress. And so wake up would mean get afraid, but it would also mean prepare to get the hell out of there, so prepare to panic. And then it might also mean ready other motivational systems just in case they might be useful. And then that also means shut off your immune system because who the hell cares about that if you’re being chased by a tiger and pull all the sugar out of your blood because you bloody well are going to need the energy. So it’s an emergency preparedness state. So then you could say that when you encounter an anomaly, what happens is that your body emergency preparation state and the magnitude of that is proportional to your perception of where the threat, of what level the threat corresponds to in your map. Okay, got it? Does that make sense? Okay, so there’s something wrong with that theory. And that’s very annoying because it’s a really good theory and people have been coming at it from all sorts of angles and it sort of matches the phenomenological ideas. It actually matches Heidegger’s thinking quite nicely. And that, it was derived as far as I can tell, virtually independently of Heidegger. And it goes along well with the neuroscience of anxiety and motivation in general. It’s a vicious theory. But here’s a problem. So for a long time people debated about who the hell was authoritarian. You know, because you could say after the Second World War, most people assumed that all the damn authoritarians were on the right wing, right? They were the fascists. And so you could say that’s an exaggeration of conservatism. Yeah, you know, that seems kind of reasonable. But then people pointed out later, well yeah, but let’s not forget about the radical left-wingers because by the time they become communist dictators, they seem pretty damn oppressive and intolerant too. All right, so I would say we don’t understand what happens when political systems get too far in any direction. But there are models which are in development that basically indicate that, imagine this is agreeableness and this is disagreeableness. You can think about them as a continuum. But let’s not do that. Let’s twist them so they form a circle. And then we’ll say, well, how agreeable should you be? Well if you’re this agreeable and this disagreeable, things are going pretty well for you. That’s a nice place to be. But if you’re this agreeable, well then you turn into Freud’s devouring mother. You’re so damn easy to get along with that it’s okay. You just do everything for your child, absolutely everything forever, and by doing that you undermine their capabilities and they remain locked in the eatable situation. So that’s like too much mercy and pity. Or you could be like the tyrannical father, like the Crumb Brothers father, who was like completely disagreeable and extraordinarily punitive. But the thing is it ends up in the same place. They both end up in a variation of hell. And so these models seem to promote the idea that if you run any virtue too far, it turns into a vice and all the vices have more common with each other than they do with anything else. So bad things are lumped together more because they’re bad than they are by what variant of bad they happen to be. And we kind of know that because when we developed the Big Five, when people developed the Big Five, because it wasn’t me, they threw out all the evaluative words. That was the idea. They threw out all the evaluative words, like good and evil disappeared. So anything that seemed to have a moral overtone was arbitrarily thrown out. Now there’s actually some statistical reasons for that, and the statistical reason is if you just leave the good, you know, the adjectives that represent someone as good or the adjectives that represent someone as evil, if you leave those in the damn analysis, then you get one whopping factor, which is something like good versus evil. And that’s not that helpful, maybe. Anyway, so you throw all those things out so they don’t distort your analysis, and then that’s when you get the five factors revealing themselves. But if you throw the pejorative items back in, then you get this whopping single dimension. Now one of the things you should think about that, especially those of you who are going to be researchers, is the fact that the evaluative words were thrown out of the Big Five adjective pool before the Big Five were derived makes the correlation between the Big Five factors and psychopathology much weaker than it would otherwise be. Because with psychopathology, a lot of it can’t be described without roughly good versus evil. It depends on the psychopathological condition, but if you’re describing like murderous pedophilia, you know, it’s hard to use adjectives that aren’t loading pretty hard on the negative end of the adjective distribution. And that’s the case with most personality disorders, you know, because there seems to be an element of misbehavior in many of them. And so the Big Five isn’t correlated all that strongly with most measures of, say, personality disorders, but that’s partly because all the words that would correlate were thrown out before the analysis was done. And so that’s something you really need to know. Okay, so back one step, because I said that there’s a problem with the theory that I presented to you. Here’s the problem. We’re going to assume for the time being that the easiest place to localize authoritarianism is on the right-hand end of the spectrum. Okay, so we’re going to think about fascism, roughly speaking. And I think that totalitarian governments tend towards fascism whether they’re left or right-wing. But how to sort that out hasn’t been established yet. We don’t exactly know what makes left-wing authoritarians like right-wing authoritarians. Something does, but we don’t know. So I’m going to ignore that for a moment. And I’m going to concentrate on the right-wing side of the spectrum, the conservative side of the spectrum. Now, we know some things about conservatives. They don’t like foreigners that much. They’re pretty tradition-heavy. They tend to frown on non-normal forms of sexual interaction, or even on many normal forms of sexual interaction. They may not even be that happy about fun. So you could think the conservative is basically trying to stabilize society so that there isn’t a lot that’s unpredictable that’s going to go on, or that’s going to go on in the future. And so they’re trying to maintain stability. And you can give them some credit for that because it’s the match between your expectations and the way the world lays itself out that basically inhibit your stress response. So stability, man, it’s something you probably can’t appreciate until you’ve had its complete absence. Well, the liberals, their position is, yeah, yeah, stability. The problem is stability gets old unless you keep updating it. So you can’t clamp too hard down on change because if you do, then the system gets stale and outdated, and the stability goes away anyway. So you’ve got to allow some change and some exploration and some growth. And then the battle is between the people who want stability and the people who want change, and neither of them is right. It’s the argument that’s right. Right? They’ve got to keep arguing about it because whether we should be more stable or more plastic, roughly speaking, depends on the context and the time. And so that’s something to think about too because a lot of you are going, most of you are left-wingers because you’re open. You’re open and that’s a very big marker of the proclivity towards left-wing thinking. And so you’re all going to be thinking that the left-wingers are right. It’s a primitive attitude if you’re scientific because really what seems to happen is that both attitudes are right and they’re both adapted to slightly different evolutionary conditions. So they’re variants of the damn big five, those political beliefs. So liberal people are high in openness and low in conscientiousness, whereas right-wing people are low in openness and high in conscientiousness. And there’s implications to that. One implication is liberals start the companies, for example. But conservatives run them. So artists settle territory and make real estate values rise. They’re very open people. But then the conservatives swoop in and monetize it, which is kind of hard on the artists. But my point is that there’s a dynamic between these two positions that has to be maintained dynamically in order for the system to survive because you need to stabilize the damn thing so it doesn’t fall apart. But you have to keep it adapted to continual change. And the only way you can figure out how much of that should be done on either side is to keep talking to the people that you don’t like. Because it’s the only way to figure it out. So some people pull this way and some people pull the other way. And we hope that the middle of the pulling basically matches the line of optimal progression. So that’s a much better way of thinking about democracy. Okay, now, so back to the problem. Now, the problem is, if you take this damn model and you think about conservatives, you’re going to think those people should be higher in neuroticism. Like if their defining characteristic is inability to tolerate anomaly, or one of their defining characteristics, then you’d think, well, they should be more timid on average. They should have more depression. They should be more anxious. They should have more negative emotion in general. So you’d think you’d see some reflection of that in neuroticism. But you don’t. At all. In fact, liberals seem to be a little more neurotic than conservatives. And in fact, the most neurotic people seem to be male liberals. So you think, well, maybe you could salvage the old theory because you could say, well, the damn conservatives are so protected by their ideology that they mask their underlying neuroticism so well that it actually reverses. But if your stupid theory can predict the reverse of what it should predict, then it’s not a very good theory. And so you could do that, but you’re pushing your luck at that point. It’s better to think, hmm, something’s screwy here. Something’s not right, even though it’s also conservatives score higher in well-being, in measures of well-being, which is basically extroversion minus neuroticism, something like that, with maybe a bit of conscientiousness thrown in. And their conscientious behavior does tend to make their life turn out more stably across time. So they’re less likely, conscientious people, for example, are less likely to get divorced. So it’s hard to reconcile the fact that those damn conservatives keep insisting that they’re not neurotic with the theories that predict, well, they have to be because the reason they’re so rigid, especially if you crank their beliefs over to the right, is because they’re afraid of foreigners and new ideas and all the sorts of things that right-wingers are hypothetically afraid of. But they’re not. And they actually seem to be, like I said, they report that they’re happier. You could say, well, it’s naive happiness and all that, but you can’t say those things after you make the finding, because you’re explaining it away. You have to predict the damn thing. You can’t backfill your theory later. Now, however, conservatives are higher in conscientiousness. So you think, so what? What the hell does that have to do with emotional regulation? You know, and you could say, well, their lives are more stable, so the external manifestations of the society that they encompass themselves in are more stable, so there’s not as much anomaly. Okay, that’s possible. However, now, and that’s possible, and it may be even part of it. About seven years ago, I did some work with one of my students, Colin DeYoung. He did a lot of this. I had recognized by that time that the big five needed to be psychometrically differentiated, or maybe more than it was, because at that point, the stage was basically there were the big five, usually measured by an instrument called the NEO, or the NEO-PI, or the NEO-PI supervised. You got your five factors, and then each of them were broken down into what they called facets, so they were subsections of each trait. But the problem with the damn facets is they weren’t empirically derived. You know, the factors were derived from factor analysis, just more or less arbitrary statistics, or at least objective statistics. But then the facets were like a guess, and we thought, well, you know, you can’t rely on statistical reasoning to formulate the major part of the theory, and then just guess at the higher resolution details. So Colin factor analyzed a data set called the IPIP, which is the international pool of … that’s item pool in international … IPIP. I don’t remember what it stands for. A guy named Lou Goldberg put it up online, and he was one of the founders of the big five theory, the adjective form of the big five theory. So Colin factor analyzed that very carefully, and what he found in a differentiated factor analysis was that you could take each of the big five, and you could break them, weirdly enough, into two. So each of the big five had two. So extraversion had enthusiasm and assertiveness, and then neuroticism had withdrawal and volatility, and actually there’s some evidence showing that those actually have different neurological underpinnings. It’s quite cool. Agreeableness factors out into politeness and compassion, and liberals are higher on compassion, that’s the bleeding heart liberal, and conservatives are higher on politeness. So if you mangle the two together, you don’t get any difference in agreeableness between the political dimensions. But if you separate them, then the liberals are compassionate and the conservatives are polite, and we think that politeness may be the more conforming end of agreeableness. Alright, then openness, this is a good one. Roughly speaking, openness seems to fragment into openness to experience and intellect. And openness to experience predicts whether you’re going to take the humanities versus the sciences, and it’s the factor that’s most strongly associated with artistic creativity and aesthetic sensibility and philosophical ideation and entrepreneurial ability, because entrepreneurs load with the bloody artists, which is pretty hard on your basic conservative capitalists, right, because they’d rather it wasn’t that way. But it does turn out that that’s how it works out. And then conscientiousness fragments into industriousness, which we do not understand at all, really. We just have no idea what that trait is. Why do people work hard towards their goals? We can’t find a single bloody laboratory task that industrious people do better than non-industrious people, despite the fact that industriousness is an excellent predictor of long-term life outcomes. It’s like, what the hell, you know? We can’t boil that down to a task in the lab. We’ve had people do things like count N’s, M’s, and U’s in many, many sentences, eh? It’s like, count the U’s. Jesus, you’d think that that would be something that an industrious conservative could get right into, you know? But no, there’s no effect whatsoever. We can find some things that industrious and conscientious people do worse. So we have lab tasks where they do worse. It’s like, that’s something. But anyways, it’s a great mystery, and I’ve been trying to crack that for like six years with no success at all. We keep getting industrious people to do things, and they seem just as useless as non-industrious people, even though we know that’s not true. It’s a very good predictor of academic grades, by the way, conscientiousness, and I’m sure it’s the industrious component. It’s just about as powerful as IQ. Oh yeah, openness. Creativity and IQ. Intellect is roughly IQ, except the intellect measure of it’s kind of bad. Because if I ask you how smart you are on a scale from one to seven, you’ll tell me, and that will correlate with your IQ, but the IQ measure is way more accurate than how smart you think you are. So that’s a cool division. That’s a very useful division. Okay, but on the conscientious end, we’ve got orderliness and industrious. Now it turns out that the conservatives are more orderly than the liberals. Not more industrious. Now you think, hmm, that’s kind of cool, because one of the things you might say about the Germans, for example, is that they are orderly. And you could certainly say that about Hitler, because he was damn orderly. And orderly people, we know conscientiousness is associated with anti-immigration attitudes and a moral stance against non-normative forms of sexual behavior. But conscientious people also wash their hands more, and their standards of hygiene are better, and they are healthier. So that’s kind of interesting. That’s an unsettling link, because there’s these positive things that are associated with orderliness that are obviously positive, but then there’s these other things that seem to be associated with stigmatism and what? You know, strong in-group, out-group divisions and derogation of the out-group and all the things that you might see going extraordinarily pathologically in something like genocidal fascism, for example. Now when I was starting to sort this out, I was reading Hitler’s spontaneous talks at the dinner table, which were recorded over about a three-year period, and one of the things I came to realize was that he didn’t really seem afraid of Jews and gypsies. He seemed disgusted by them and contemptuous of them, which is not the same thing, because disgust, it doesn’t load on neuroticism, or not very much. It loads on orderliness. And so that was a weird surprise, because we thought all the damn negative emotions clumped together in neuroticism, and that was that end of problem. But disgust, which hadn’t been studied very much, loads on orderliness. So then we thought, aha, we’ve got the biological basis of half of conscientiousness. The biological basis is disgust sensitivity. That hasn’t been published yet. Okay, so I was thinking about that, and then Hitler washed his hands a lot. He bathed four times a day, and he was also a real worshiper of willpower. And orderly people have strong willpower. One of the things about anorexic people, you know, they’re often, anorexics are kind of strange because they tend to be like high-achieving women, fundamentally. They’re usually smart, and they’re usually very, very dedicated and industrious, but the other thing is they’re orderly. And so what seems to happen with the, I told you this before, with the anorexics is the disgust system goes off the wires and it’s too much. It happens with obsessive-compulsive disorder too, which is usually classified as an anxiety disorder, but really doesn’t seem to be one. Maybe it’s also an anxiety disorder, but mostly what people with OCD hate is to be contaminated. So I had an OCD client once who, she had lost her husband and her children and everything, and she was in the hospital, and she’d actually gone so far as to build like a pseudo airlock on her house so that her children and her husband would have to decontaminate themselves before they entered the house, you know, so, and that was too much for her marriage to sustain. And whenever she was walking down the hall at the hospital and the guys, the janitors walked by, she’d flatten herself up against the wall, you know, and then she’d run off and wash her hands. And if you’re really, OCD is really out of control, you wash your hands till the skin is raw, basically, or until you run out of soap, which, try running out of soap when you’re using a bar of soap. You have to wash your hands a lot, or you shower until you run out of hot water. You can’t stop. And so you’re never clean enough. And I was doing exposure therapy with her, which, you know, means you have to sort of make the person make contact with what they don’t want to make contact with, and you do it stepwise, like you just don’t throw them into a garbage can, you know. You have to get them to agree to what degree they’re willing to expose themselves, and so this is what I could get her to do. If I took a garbage can that was new, and I took a garbage bag that was new, and I put them over there, and I gave her a pool cue, she would touch the new garbage can with the new garbage bag with the pool cue. That was the best she could do. And even then, like I was talking to her, perfectly normal-appearing person, you know, in many respects, touch, whack, like she’s going to that sink, and she’s going to wash her hands right now. And you’re supposed to do response prevention, which is, well, you don’t get to wash your hands. And so that turns out to be a very awkward thing to do in the middle of a psychiatric ward, because I was standing there in the door, trying not to let her get to the bathroom, and she was wanting to get to the bathroom, so all the other psychiatric patients came up and, you know, they started accusing me of basically being an authoritarian and interfering with her rights. And so, well, it’s a weird thing, eh, because, you know, was I? She’d given me permission five minutes before when she was in a normal state of mind, and now she was retracting it. So who the hell did I have a contract with? And the answer is her now, because you can’t sell yourself into slavery, roughly speaking. You don’t have that right. So maybe I was interfering with her rights, you know. It’s a tricky thing, because, well, she was hospitalized, so obviously something had gone wrong, but, well, anyways, you get the picture. So it gives you an example of how powerful contamination concern can be. Okay. Now, then there was a paper published in PLOS One a while back, looking at the prevalence of infectious diseases in countries around the world and then in provinces within countries, and then they measured authoritarian attitudes using an authoritarian attitude scale, logically enough. What they found was the higher the prevalence of infectious diseases in the geographical locale, the more authoritarian people were locally in their individual political attitudes. And the correlation wasn’t point two, which is the general correlation between a personality trait and some phenomena, point two. Point three, if you’re really lucky. Point five, if it’s IQ, and that’s the best you ever get, was like point seven. It’s like, wow, that’s unbelievable. There’s something to do with contamination and infection transmission. And so then I was thinking, this is really annoying, because this whole expectation theory, it’s beautiful. It works at a neurological level, it works at a neuropsychological level, you can understand it pharmacologically, it makes conceptual sense, you can see that it unites theories that were derived from all sorts of different places. It has all the classic elements of a beautiful theory, and it’s wrong. And so then I thought, all right, what the hell? It’s orderliness and disgust. What is going on there? And the sticking point was, I could understand how your brain could calculate how upset it should get when you hit an anomaly by referring to this hierarchy. That took me a long time to figure that out, like 10 years probably to map that out. I thought, okay, and then how neurotic you are and how high in esteem you’re held by the people around you, that’s fine. But then, what does disgust do about that? Because disgust doesn’t seem to undo your damn belief system. You can encounter something disgusting, and you may be revolted by it, it’s a very, very physiological sensation, right? Maybe you’ll even throw up if it’s bad enough, and maybe you’ll be shocked to the point where you’re damn near traumatized. And that’s disgust-related trauma, which we don’t really understand. But you’re not going to give up your damn beliefs, not most of the time. It doesn’t seem to represent a direct challenge to the validity of your Islam faith or Islamic faith or something like that. So what the hell is going on? So then I was talking to one of my graduate students this morning. We’re trying to sort this out. And I was thinking, okay, what would happen? What is an experiment we’re thinking about running? So you tell me what you think about this. We thought we would take people of a different range of appearance, from really not so beautiful to quite attractive, and different races and different ethnicities. And then we would announce the ethnicity. You know, Jewish, bang, we’d show them a picture. Black, show them a picture. Caucasian, bang, show them a picture. And the pictures would vary in attractiveness. But then what we were going to do is we were going to morph them with snakes and rats. So then you, because you can take a morphing program, right? And I could make you like 10% snake or 10% rat. You’ve seen that in movies all the time. And so then the question would be, would you be more likely, A, to see an unattractive person as a rat or a snake? And B, would you be more likely to see a person who isn’t a member of your ethnic and racial group as a rat or a snake? Aha. Now that’s interesting, because the thing to do with rats and snakes is get rid of them. Right? And that’s a problem. And then we thought we would also measure how orderly people were to see if that mediated the degree to which they were willing to perceive, you know, implicit perception fundamentally, whether this person was rat-like or snake-like. We’ve got some other experiments that are of the same sort devised. So I think that’s a great experiment. I’m really curious. And then we’d have people rate them. It’s like, how afraid are you of this person? How happy does this person make you? You know, how contemptuous are you of this person? How disgusted are you by this person? You know, a whole emotional response scale. And hopefully what we would find is the orderly people were more contemptuous and disgusted, but not more afraid by the morphed faces. And they would be more likely to categorize them as rat and snake-like, especially if they were from a different ethnic group or race. So it’s a scary experiment, but it would allow us to distinguish between fear and contempt. And then I was thinking, well, still, why the hell do you care? Why is the disgust thing so important? What the hell does it have to do with you? And then I was remembering, maybe, I don’t know, maybe this game doesn’t even exist anymore because the world has changed. But I bet it does. When I was a little kid, in like grade one, we used to play this game in school. And the game was, I think on the Simpsons they call it cooties, but we called it fleas. And so we’d play this at recess, and some person would have fleas, and then they would chase you around, and they touched you, and then you had fleas, and everyone ran around from you. The game often starts, sometimes it was just spontaneous, but often the game could take a vicious twist, and one of the lower status kids in the room would get accused of having fleas, and that just wouldn’t be just a game. That would be a source of taunting and exclusion. So how many of you can remember games like that? Okay, okay, good, good. So that shows all this political correctness hasn’t done a goddamn thing to how children behave. You know, and actually that’s a relief to me. So okay, so then you think, what the hell’s going on there? And the first thing that’s going out is that the kids are playing out the idea of contamination. Right? So let’s say you’re contemptible and disgusting, you know. So maybe you have syphilis because you’re, what do you call, you’re dissolute and debauched, and you know, it’s gone to the final stage and it’s just horrific. So anybody who’s going to look at you is going to have a reaction like this. They’re, you know, they’re going to want to look away. Okay, so then I was thinking, what happens if you touch someone like that? No, no, no, think about it. Now think about it for a minute. Well first of all, in a place where there’s lots of infectious diseases, what happens is then you die. So that’s not a good thing, you know, or if you’re near anything corrupt, like a carcass that has been rotting, you don’t get to eat it because then you die. You’ve got to be sensitive to disgust because otherwise you’ll run into contamination and the contamination will kill you. The question is how contagious is contamination? And I think that’s the issue. So now you put yourself in this position. So you’re on a dating site and you find someone, and this might even be more powerful initially for women than for men, because I don’t know if you know this, but women rank 85% of men as below average in attractiveness. Now men get their revenge, don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to make a case that women are more demented when it comes to men than men are when it comes to women, it’s just they’re demented in different ways. So then you think, it’s interesting because I’ve watched my daughter go through Tinder, you know, it’s sort of painful, it’s like, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, and you know, she kind of thinks it’s funny, and I suppose it is, but it’s cruel as hell, if all these poor weasley guys, they’re just getting sorted into the, you should not be in the damn mating pool pile. Right, right, and that’s a fundamental judgment, you should not be in the mating pool. Like if you’re off on a genocidal spree, that’s exactly what you’re trying to do, you’re trying to prevent that. So you know, I’m not saying my daughter’s got genocidal tendencies, although she probably does because she is human, by the way. So, alright, so now, let’s say that you’ve categorized some person in there as, you know, you’re not going to respond to their damn email, and you know, you put them down as a one out of ten, you know, so, no, no, and then someone says, you have to go out with that person, you have to ask that person out, and then you think, well, how are you going to react to that, that idea? Well, the first thing is, I think you’re going to be angry at the person who’s going to force you to do that, it’s going to be anger. And then the second thing is, how are you going to feel when you bring that person into public with you, around your friends, okay? How are you going to feel? And the answer to that is, you’re going to feel disgusted and ashamed. The reason for that is because it’s contaminating, it’s catching. And so then that puts the damn theories together, and this is why. If I force you to go out with someone that’s low status, and we’ll say low attractiveness, we’ll put the whole package together. Low attractiveness, low socioeconomic status, no real hope for the future, and really unlikable. You can put all those sorts of things together, and you’re going to think, no way. And then you bring that person out on a date with all your friends, and they think, what the hell is up with you? And so maybe you’re an eight, roughly speaking, and then you get to go visit five land for a while. Okay, now, what happens to you? Now this is where it gets tricky. So we know that you, like the lobster, have a counter way down in the bottom of your brain that’s really, really old. It’s precognitive, it’s even preemotional. It’s way down there at like reticular activating level. And what it does is scan the world to figure out where you are in the hierarchy. And it actually matters because if you’re low, then you die, or you’re stressed, or your children die, and everything’s worrisome to you because you’re barely clinging on to the edge of existence, and you only take impulsive pleasures because that’s the longest span that you can count on having pleasures over, and it’s rough at the bottom. And you get low status mates if you get any at all, and it’s not good. So you actually do not want to be there, and there’s a reason for that. Whereas at the top, it’s like, yes, you get preferential access to everything, everything. So it’s better to be there, and you can say what you want about egalitarianism, and there’s lots of arguments to be held on both sides, but given a choice, you will go up rather than down. So let’s say you associate with someone who’s contaminated, and it knocks your status down. Now how does it do that? Well, it might do it a variety of ways. You feel bad about yourself, so that would be low self-esteem. That means the part of your brain that’s evaluating you as a high status competent being is now doubtful about whether you actually fit that description, and then there’s all your peers because they’re judging you like mad, and what they’re basically doing is status evaluation. Are you like a lowly crumb brother who’s absolutely outside the mating hierarchy completely, or are you like Mr. Vampire Billionaire who’s the dominant vampire billionaire who’s at the pinnacle of generic female literary pornography? So that’s basically the hierarchy. So the problem is that if you take a dominance hit, your serotonin levels fall, and what that does is increase your negative emotion and decrease your positive emotion and increase the probability that when anything anomalous occurs that you’re going to have a generalized stress response. So that’s the connection between the damn theories. If you’re associated with the disgusting, your status falls, and that’s what destabilizes the belief hierarchy. on belief. And that puts the problem in a completely different light in many ways. It’s like, what the hell are you supposed to do about that exactly? Because it looks like there’s no denying the fact that the top of the dominance hierarchy is a better place. Oh, I’ve got to put one more twist in that. So the terror management theories and their light basically say that it’s your belief system that stabilizes your emotions. And then I varied that a bit and said, well, wait a minute, it’s your expectation desire hierarchy and the match between that and the world that stabilizes your emotions. And that’s partly because it does, because you’re not freezing to death or overheated or starving, but also because you can sit in a room like this with all the other conformists and feel like no one’s going to stand up screaming and become murderous, which is a really good thing. So but here’s a twist. The twist would be the degree to which the expectancy desire map regulates your emotions and your general response, your general stress response, is proportionate to your position in the dominance hierarchy. So it’s modulated by the degree of success that you have. And that’s an important codicil, because it means the integrity of your theory about the world works better as well as that theory of the world is in fact working well for you, which means you’re near the top of the dominance hierarchy. And then it really regulates your emotions as it should, because the environment is less dangerous for you. It’s not psychological, man. If you’re high in the dominance hierarchy, even in Canada, and you have someone who’s sick in your family, they get to see the doctor a long time before someone who has a low IQ and no social connections. And it’s not just corruption. There’s an element of that, who you know. It’s just successful, conscientious people who are open. They have access to all sorts of strategies and plans and ways of figuring things out that people who are at the bottom of the dominance hierarchy, they just can’t even muster. Plus, they’re way more likely to be taken seriously when they go see a doctor, because they’re articulate. So it’s a big deal. Okay, so then we’re saying the degree to which your theory protects you from the world, your theory and its incarnation in the actual world, is proportional to where you are in the dominance hierarchy. And so what that means is that if you ever associate with anything or anyone that lowers your status, you forfeit the protection of your socio-cultural confines. And the best way to do that is to associate yourself with someone who is disgusting or contemptible. Now the next problem, so I think I was thrilled about that this morning, I tell you, because I’ve been trying to figure this out for like six years. I was thinking, how the hell do these things tie together? And I think, I don’t think that’s absolutely right, but I think it’s pushing towards something that’s right. But then the problem that comes out of that is, what do you do about it? You know, it’s a real bind, isn’t it? Because you’re just not going to get rid of the damn hierarchies. It’s not even clear that you should, partly because you can be cynical like a postmodernist and you can say, well, hierarchies are just based on power, which is such a stupid theory that it’s just painful. Some hierarchies are based on power, but a lot of them are based on competence, right? In a functioning society, it’s like, who do you want to do your brain surgery? You know, do you want to have the person who really knows how to do brain surgery, or do you want some person who’s just, you know, sort of, they’re doing it as an amateur in the back alley? You know, so you’re going to assume that there’s a bloody hierarchy and that it’s based on competence and that you’re going to peel from the top. And so they’re going to be more powerful, obviously, because they’re at the top of the hierarchy, but you’re going to be pretty damn thrilled about that when you’re looking for competence, which you often are. And to think about all that as power, it’s like, you know, really, like live in the world. Some of it’s power, but lots of it isn’t. So if it’s our proclivity to arrange ourselves in dominance hierarchies and our dislike of associating anything that looks contaminated in a disgusting sort of way, and the reason that that’ll lower our visible status in our own eyes and in the eyes of other people, how the hell do you get people to be tolerant? And the thing is, you’re not tolerant. And for all the talk about egalitarianism, I can tell you, the egalitarian thing to do is to date the next person who asks you. And you’re not going to do that. And no bloody wonder. So that’s a big, and you can talk around that all you want, but you know, we know, if you’re going to be a biologist about this sort of thing, which is useful, I don’t think you should only view people through biological lenses because our biological lenses aren’t very sophisticated. But, you know, it’s pretty damn hard to argue with the idea that you’re concerned, roughly speaking, with two things. And one is whether or not you survive, and the other is whether or not your progenies survive and thrive. You know, and you can just boil that down to the desire to have healthy, competent, beautiful, attractive, successful children. It’s like, is that a vice or a virtue? If you can’t make that egalitarian, like good luck with the rest of it, it’s like smoke and mirrors as far as I can tell, you might be able to alleviate suffering at the bottom of the dominance hierarchy, although even that’s much more difficult than you’d think. Because you know, if you pump resources from the top to the bottom, what happens is the resources fly right up to the top again. You know, it’s almost, it’s like pumping water uphill. It’s a bad analogy because it’s backwards. You’re fighting against a very, very powerful tendency for resources to aggregate themselves in single locations. And I’ll talk to you a lot about that when we get to intelligence because it’s like a bloody natural law. It’s really hard to fight against. And it’s like that inequality is characteristic of all societies, even egalitarian societies. It’s really hard to get rid of it. And you’re not going to get rid of it in the sexual world. That’s for sure. So, you know, I thought about, and we’ve talked a lot about in this class in the sections on phenomenology and existentialism, you know, this idea that there’s something redemptive about living in truth, you know, and that that seems to protect people against the worst elements of rigid and judgmental dominance hierarchies. And I think disgust can even get more out of hand when you get arrogant and superior, you know, and you’re looking down on the contemptible from a high place of narcissism. And so maybe part of living in truth helps you not fall prey to that, what, narcissistic judgmental tendency, and that’ll keep some of this under control. But how to deal with the underlying problem of disgust sensitivity? What are you going to be? Not orderly? That’s not helpful, you know. Now, you know, one thing that you might think about is that compassion, which is part of agreeableness, might moderate the judgmental tendency of orderliness. They’re not opposites, right, because they’re on different dimensions. And that’s kind of one of the liberal ideas. Even though liberals are mostly high in openness and low in orderliness, they’re also higher in compassion than conservatives. You know, and the conservatives and liberals debate a lot about the role of compassion, as the conservatives think, you’re just being a needable mother, you know, and the liberals think, well, you’re just being a totalitarian father. And both of those things can and are true. But it seems to me that there’s something about compassion that might serve at least to some degree as an antidote for the pathological elements of orderliness, which include, by the way, conservatives, especially the orderly ones, are also much more judgmental. So if you present to them someone who’s committed a moral crime, like careless prostitution, say, they will – and you ask them how long that person should be in prison, then the orderly person will say that they should be in prison longer than the person who’s disorderly. You know, and so then I guess the question is, can compassion mediate that without it falling into like the hellish Freudian needable pit? Well, anyways, that’s about as far as I’ve got with that. So I thought I’d tell you that because I think it’s worth knowing and because I was too excited about it not to. So we’ll see you on Thursday.