Evolution, Sex & Desire ｜ David Buss ｜ EP 235 (n9wzSpz7gKE)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=n9wzSpz7gKE

A lot of the truths that psychologists have stumbled over, let’s say, are actually quite painful. I mean, I reviewed the IQ literature for about 20 years trying to get to the bottom of it, and it’s very distressing to realize how wide the human differential is in cognitive ability. 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. 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 in youth. It’s like there’s a real harshness to that, but it’s the harshness, I think it’s the harshness of life, and actually understanding that makes it less harsh insofar as understanding is useful. Yeah, yeah. No, I would agree with that. And 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, that I wish didn’t exist, but they do. And so I feel similarly that 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. Hello, everybody. I’m very pleased today to have as my guest, Dr. David Buss, who’s been a real influence on my thinking, I think, perhaps more than any other living psychologist I respect and have learned from what he’s done. David Buss is a professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. He previously taught at Harvard and at the University of Michigan. 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. 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 would definitely be a best seller. 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. Dr. Buss has more than 300 scientific publications and 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. So that’s worth thinking about for a while. In 2019 he was cited as one of the 50 most influential living psychologists in the world. 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. I’ve really liked reading everything you’ve done for the last 20 years. I haven’t read all of it but I’ve read lots of it. Well thank you, that’s my pleasure to be talking to you. I’ve been reading your work for some time and have been looking forward to this conversation for a long time. So maybe you could start by telling everyone, telling me why did you get interested in evolutionary psychology per se? How did that come about and when? 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. Yes, so well basically when I started my academic career there was no such thing as evolutionary psychology. I was trained in personality psychology at UC Berkeley but what I was interested in and the reason that I got into personality psychology was I was interested in human nature. What motivates people? What are the goals towards which people aspire and seek? What gets people out of bed in the morning? What makes people tick? What is human nature made of? And when I got into the field of personality, I went through all the standard theories, Freud, Jung, Kelly, Maslow, you know the list and all or many seem to have some intuitive appeal but none seem to be grounded in a foundation, in a solid scientific foundation 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. Even the more biologically oriented psychologists, the behaviorists for example, like Skinner, the people who studied rats and who did that so carefully because that’s a great tradition and really led to the emergence of neuroscience. 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. Yes, indeed and Skinner, believe he actually overlapped a bit with him at Harvard. He was so I was able to actually have a couple conversations with him 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. I think even then, even when I was in graduate school, that view struck me as really problematic. For one thing, sex differences emerge very early in life. Rough and tumble play by age three or so emerges consistently early in development and sense of humor, sense of humor and these things are cross-culturally universal. The notion that all of our nature consists just of the contingencies of reinforcement during our lifespan struck me as problematic. Really that search for a solid scientific foundation for a theory of human nature is what led me to evolutionary theory. 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 and at the time that I started there were almost no empirical tests and if you know anything about the Berkeley Minnesota tradition, a lot of my mentors were Minnesota, there’s a very strong empirical tradition and so as a psychologist trained in an empirical tradition, you have to test these things and what I realized is that there were almost no empirical tests of these evolutionary hypotheses and so that’s what led me to that and some of the most obvious ones were mating. So as a sexually reproducing species, everything has to go through mating and so if humans don’t have pretty interesting and complex psychological adaptations for mating, then we’re kind of out of business. So I mean survival and mating but if you’re sexually reproducing species, you have to go through the bottleneck of mating and that it’s not a simple process. Of course, if you’re asexual, 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. In our species, you have to be mutually selected by that mate and then in our species, of course, we have long-term mating, pair-bonded mating, which is extremely rare in the mammalian world. In the male and male and king, we have something like 5,000 species plus of mammals and only something like 3 to 5 percent have anything resembling pair-bonded long-term mating but humans do have it and that’s part of our nature. 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 and we have long-term pair-bonded but we also have short-term mating, casual sex hookups as they’re now called on college campuses. We have some infidelity rates, so that’s kind of a mixed mating strategy, one long-term mate, some short-term sex partners on the side and then we also do serial mating. 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 and then very very rarely do you have a polyandrous mating system, less than one percent where it’s one woman multiple men. So anyway. Do you have any sense of what conditions give rise to that rare exception, that polyandrous system, since it’s so uncommon? How is it that it sustains itself and why isn’t that a challenge to the notion of a central monogamy, let’s say? Yes, well the conditions under which it occurs are typically where one man cannot support a whole family. So if there’s a large field and one man can’t support a wife and children, then it will be two men. 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. So why isn’t it sufficient to say, like the 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 polyandry is so uncommon is because women are dominated by men everywhere and that’s arbitrary and an expression of power. It has nothing to do with our central biological tendency. Okay, that’s a really interesting question and I have a couple of different thoughts on it. First of all, the first question is like what does one mean by patriarchy? And if you get into it and I’ve asked people who invoke those sort of explanations, well what do you mean by patriarchy? And usually that causes them to stumble and mumble around, well and they just know, well patriarchy is though it’s self-explanatory. Well it’s not self-explanatory because if you break it down analytically, you can identify different components. So is it the case that men worldwide tend to have more resources, more economic resources than women on average? 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? Well as one biological anthropologist, I think this was Irv DeVore at Harvard, he said men are one long breeding experiment run by women. And you know basically one of the things that on my first studies, the 37 culture study documented is that women have a universal preference for men with resources. 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 and share. So let me ask you about that specifically. 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. 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? Yeah great question and I’m not aware of any studies that have done that directly. See I think that and this is I want to talk to you about this 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, but I don’t think women are that uncanny let’s say. It’s too simple. 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 human history. I think maybe seven to ten thousand years old or so 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 is it 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, is this guy a good hunter? So you go to a culture like the Ache of Paraguay and basically what leads to high status in men is hunting skills. That’s like the big main effect there and so I think even things like 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 hard work and industriousness and achievement in modern work context likely was true ancestrally as well 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 bring back the bacon so to speak. 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 that kind of goal oriented action those are all very tightly related as far as I could tell psychologically 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 breeding 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? Okay okay great question well so maybe first we could just define for listeners what sexual selection theory is because most people when they think about evolution they think of survival of the fittest and that sort of nature reddening tooth and claw kind of thing. Yes and a kind of a randomness too which you know that it’s kind of implicit in the natural selection theory where sexual selection is anything but random. Yeah absolutely so sexual selection so if natural selection this is over simplified 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 to better survival sexual selection deals with the evolution of qualities that lead to mating success and Darwin identified two causal processes by which mating success could occur one is same-sex competition or intrasexual competition 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 but the logic was whatever qualities led to success in these same-sex battles whether it be athleticism strength agility cunning or whatever those qualities get passed on in greater numbers due to the sexual access that the victors accrue qualities associated losing basically bit the evolutionary dust the second component so that’s intrasexual competition which actually the logic is more general than Darwin envisioned so like in our species as we were alluding to we often compete for position and status hierarchies and so we we can engage in intrasexual 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 with males the other component process is basically what darvin called female choice 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 they get preferentially chosen those lacking the desired qualities basically become incels or involuntarily so but they get shun banished or ignored now the the twist on that and so i think sexual selection is is by far a more interesting process and definitely has occurred with respect to humans but the twist there is that we have mutual mate choice at least when it comes to long-term mating especially i should say especially when it comes to long-term mating and 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 and he his answer was the sex that invests more in offspring tends to be choosier sex that invests less tends to be more competitive for access to those desirable members of the opposite sex but in long-term mating now we know from our reproductive biology that women have that nine month pregnancy which is obligatory so women can’t say look i’m i’m really busy with my career i really only want to put in three months it’s it’s just part of our reproductive biology and to produce one child and men can produce that same child through one act of sex and so 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 man and woman hook up have sex for one night in the morning they both realize oh this is a mistake i shouldn’t have done that 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 a poor genetic material it does not have a robust immune system etc so so anyway so that’s uh that’s a long-winded answer to your question about sexual selection go ahead please go ahead oh i was just going to say that the you asked about the evidence for females being choosier and they are choosier primarily in the context of casual sex or short-term sex so that’s where you find the big sex differences and so one of the classic uh and there’s a ton of evidence for this this is a sex difference that that i capture in the book under the category of desire for sexual variety so men have a much greater desire for meaning a variety of sex partners uh then then women do and so the choosiness comes in on i’ll just give you one experiment this is a classic study done by elaine halffield and russell clark where they had male and female confederates which uh for listeners are members of the experimental team it doesn’t mean people from the south united states uh there uh 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 i find you very attractive would you and they asked them one of three questions would you go on a date with me tonight would you come back to my apartment with me would you have sex with me and it was a between groups design so they simply recorded the percentage of individuals who agreed to these three different requests and of the women about half about little over 50 agreed to go out on a date with the guy uh six percent agreed to go back to his apartment zero percent agreed to have sex with him most women need a little more information uh about the guy before they’re willing to have sex 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 and so if you talk about choosiness um are you willing to have sex with a total stranger who you’ve met for 30 seconds uh women unwilling to and in general uh men very willing to and this is a study that’s been replicated now in several european studies very difficult to do this as you might imagine to get this by the irbs or ethics committees in in the united states anyway um i assume it’s similar in canada or worse or so but yeah yeah the kinds of studies we really want to do are more difficult to do nowadays but it’s been replicated in in uh several western europe european countries 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 a brad pitt or or i don’t know what the modern equivalent is ryan gossling or one of the uh you know or or perhaps a famous rock star so um so but that’s one illustration of uh the answer to your question about well what is the evidence for female choosiness now the interesting thing here’s i’ll give you one more so there are studies that ask what is the minimum percentile of intelligence that you would accept in a potential partner so and you and you know we explain percentiles to people so they understand 99th percentile first percentile 50th and so forth and um and basically for things like a marriage partner uh men and women are roughly equal they both are very exact they say what they want like say 65th 70th percentile in intelligence uh where the sex difference comes up is just a sex partner a pure sex partner with no investment uh women still maintain they still want let’s say 60th or 60 plus percentile in intelligence whereas men drop you know to embarrassing levels that doesn’t really it becomes irrelevant if 35th 40th percentile men go you know if she can mumble a little bit that’s fine or even not so that’s another indication of female choosiness that that is they maintain greater choosiness when it comes to short-term sex and um and are simply less comfortable with having sex with total strangers or casual sex and uh here’s i’ll give you one more now that i’m rambling on and then i’ll get to some other uh interesting issues is uh this is an item on the socio-sexuality inventory that colleagues uh steve gangestad and jeff simpson developed a long time ago but one of the items is that’s an attitude item and it says sex without love is okay do you agree with that or disagree with that and there you get a large sex difference so in the seven point scale where four is the midpoint uh men average about 5.5 so they say yeah sex without love yeah that’s okay uh women are about 3.5 okay they’re below the uh that midpoint it’s another indication um of this sex difference in in choosiness do you know if that’s modulated by big five trait agreeableness oh that’s a great question i i haven’t seen any studies that link that okay uh big five to to that item or the socio-sexuality inventory in general 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 high or low in agreeableness 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 in agreeableness centrally it’s not the only thing but that’s central yes and that’s where there’s a big there’s a big sex difference and so i want to ask you a terminological question sure okay so i i’m sorry just sorry to interrupt but i just uh thought we we should say a few more words about your question about patriarchy yes um uh because i thought that was a really interesting question and there’s some interesting complexities associated with that and so what i what i started with is that um you know you have to break it down into analytically into precisely what causal process you’re invoking 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 uh and uh 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 you know and and 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 uh and and studies of this gets to another sex difference that women tend to allocate their time energy and investment across a wider array of uh you know what we call adaptive problems so you know women more than men invest in kin uh even if they’re married they invest more in their in-laws uh in their friendships uh etc and men on average tend to be more monomaniacal by getting ahead so so you could say you could say the most effective long-term strategy for smashing the patriarchy is for women to select low ranking mates to sleep with yes so if you i should get lots of trouble for that well well if women changed their mate preferences so that they didn’t care about status and resources and uh those are those qualities and you iterated that over enough generations yeah it would it would ultimately change male behavior so okay let i have a terminological issue that that was raised to me by one of my graduate students uh very very intelligent man um and very careful thinker uh 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 he always got to 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 in public he said stop using the term dominance hierarchy or status hierarchy there’s others 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 okay teamed with that that i want to run by you with regards to sexual selection 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 but i want to run a counter position by you you know so imagine a football team in a small american town you know it’s kind of an archetypal issue and the whole town is celebrating the football team and the football team is ranked in terms of competence 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 the uh the stadium and so he sleeps with the cheerleaders and i would say he was elected by the men to sleep with them because if it’s not competent like i don’t i think the idea that it’s competition exactly isn’t it’s not exactly right and terminology really matters it’s like because men will organize themselves into groups and those who become elevated in status don’t do it by dominating you know my students said well you don’t get people to wear a choke collar and a chain it’s not dominance and so yeah so so so well that’s i’m so glad that you asked that because uh we just did it the the whole subject of status hierarchies and dominance hierarchies is something that we are studying now in my lab and we just published a paper that confirms precisely the point that you’re making where we looked at um uh basically whether status is determined by dominance which we uh which in the literature is sometimes defined as cost infliction so you have the ability and willingness to inflict costs and you know beat up you know your rivals or confer benefits which gets to your point about competence um and what we found is that in our study this is with patrick derp derkey a current graduate student of mine who actually just passed his dissertation defense yesterday so congratulations shout out to patrick uh 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 okay so 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 conferring benefits on either individuals or the group that you’re part of and so the example that 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 and so and we evolved as coalitional species but the benefits are are many in number i mean they could be you know meat from the hunt providing not just to your family but also to the group in small group living they often shared the spoils of the hunt providing physical protection so having the ability bravery so the physical physical ability the athleticism but also the courage to offer protection for a potential mate or for members of your coalitions but 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 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 and that kind of behavior is very common in men’s groups in small societies around the world yes the opposite of narcissism interestingly enough yeah yeah no that that’s right and that’s why you know our study of we had 240 things that could either increase or decrease your status and one of them was precisely that generosity with resources so you can have all the resources in the world but if you’re stingy and don’t share them with with your group then you’re not going to be rising in status but but i just had one one interesting curly cue to your point about this and that’s the ache that i mentioned earlier tim hill is the bioanthropologist who’s studied the ache in the greatest dts live with them on and off for 25 years or so and what he said so niacce hunting skill they also share their resources so the hunt the large game animal goes to a central distributor okay but and here’s the interesting curly cube 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 and and so good hunters tend to have more sex partners in in the ache and i suspect in many hunter gather groups right and that would be 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 the among his uh his cohort yeah absolutely and and one of the things that’s kind of building on your point about this generous issue generosity with resources is that um uh people form groups so 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 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 and that’s one of the interesting things about you know this gets into human history is um you know once group you know there’s the the fissioning of groups once they get to a certain point they often say look i’m i’m not sufficiently appreciated in this group i’m going to take my allies and form my own group so i was also thinking about this in terms of uh let’s say reciprocity so imagine that uh we’re in a small hunting group we don’t have refrigeration so we’re not going to be able to store meat with any great degree of of of uh reliability so you might say well what’s the best way to store meat and i would say you should store meat in your status among the hunting group right so if you’re generous and you share and then that evoke invokes recept 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 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 competence hierarchies is better and so my student he said there’s a there’s a uh subterranean marxism in the terminology if status hierarchy dominance hierarchy implies that it’s oppression that’s building the hierarchies and that’s that’s something really worthy of note that that that objection yeah so so well let me let me let me come back to that in just one second but um i think it actually was uh i i just recently saw your interview with steve pinker uh and and jonathan height and steve pinker is uh you know i think a wonderful uh thinker and the way he phrased it is that hunters store meat uh not in the refrigerator but they store meat in the bodies of other people so it’s kind of an interesting way to to think about that of how we engage in that reciprocity so um with respect to the oppression issue here’s 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 okay and from an evolutionary perspective that can’t occur because men are primarily in competition with other men uh not with other women 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 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 etc and so and so the notion that men are somehow united and as a group with a goal of oppressing women as a group it just can’t occur uh from an evolutionary perspective 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 so but i agree with you on the point of oppression that when we talk about status hierarchies we don’t mean oppression what we did is what patrick durkey and i did in our studies basically is we pitted the the dominance explanation or some people have invoked a dual pathways they some people say there’s two ways to get ahead you can inflict costs or you can confer benefits and we tested that and then what’s called a competence model so there is a theory of status that’s that’s basing competence but it’s basically benefit conferral and we found evidence in favor of the competence model and the benefit conferral model but almost no evidence for the cost inflicting model indeed what we found is that although sometimes people have the ability and willingness to inflict cost you have to be more differentiated even about that so for example we took we’ve been talking about coalitions to some degree and people punish free riders for example or or or cheaters with yeah yeah yeah yeah they punish them so that’s an infliction of cost yeah it’s an infliction of cost but it’s for the the larger group for the larger coalition and so and so that’s why this notion that you could or even like if you take extreme cases like as as i’m sure you’re familiar with like in some nation some people kill to get to the top of the hierarchy so big daddy i mean uh and i can’t remember which country it was maybe zimbabwe i hear i can’t remember uh basically was it was a thug who killed his way to the top but you can’t get to the top through this cost and flicking flicking strategy unless you’re also conferring benefits 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 that was the edam in uganda uganda yes yes yes yes yeah idiot man okay so so hey this experiment so here’s another thing that could be pitted in that competition so imagine you had people who men who could confer benefit and who were incapable of inflicting inflicting cost and men who could confer benefit but were capable of inflicting cost i think you’d see winners on that side because of that free rider problem and so and that ties into our what we’ll discuss in relationship to the dark triad because because there’s some mystery about why women seem to be attracted to these so-called dark triad traits and i would say that they’re using them as insufficient markers for the ability to or the acquisition of status so and narcissists capitalize on that right because a narcissist looks confident and lots of confident people are competent but some confident people aren’t competent but they can fool you and then i think the other explanation is that if you had to choose between a benefit conferrer who could punish free riders and one who couldn’t you should pick the former oh one one who could one who could 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 and then there’s the beast who’s a beast but he’s tameable and so he he can be a benefit confer and he has the capacity to inflict cost yes yeah and and the two are often correlated in nature so like for example if you have physical prowess or athletic ability then you have both the ability to confer benefits you know in the form of say protection or hunting skills but also the ability to inflict costs by you know okay so let’s talk about the dark triad and 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 yeah so so the dark triad um i think this was originally named by uh one of your canadian psychology colleagues del paula so the ubc and the dark triad originally was uh three triad but it’s narcissism machiavellianism and psychopathy 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 uh were in the words of one of my former graduate students they think they’re hot but they’re not uh so uh and i think i think there’s a way in which um people do have the ability to assess whether that uh high self-esteem is uh warranted or not you know because we have even words in our language for things like arrogant you know that kind of uh connote someone who is uh thinks that they’re more beautiful and more intelligent and more capable than they actually are so that’s narcissism but the entitlement is i think a critical component of narcissism where they feel i 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 uh machiavellianism i mean that stems from the the the prince of i can’t remember how many hundreds of years ago that was written but um it’s basically people who pursue an exploitative social strategy so they can they they are when we were talking about reciprocity earlier they will feign reciprocity feign being good reciprocators but then they will they will cheat and so these are the the liars the cheaters so if the 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 yeah if that if that was the case yes yes okay now and that gets complicated because one of the things your research has indicated is that there there is a manner in which women are attracted to people who manifest dark triad traits yeah i would say i would add the qualifier that it tends to be younger women so teenagers or women in their early 20s uh women as they mature and get more experience on the mating market tend to be less attracted to these dark triad characters okay so here’s a here’s a hypothesis it’s not that easy to distinguish the willingness to use casual power and and control from competence when you’re not very experienced and so the dark triad types can feign feign status related competence and they can ensnare naive women yes yeah that that’s right they they also have some qualities that women genuinely do desire so the they tend to like the narcissists tend to put themselves at the center of attention and one of the things we know about status hierarchies is that uh the attention structure is very important that is the high status people tend to be those to whom the most people pay them the most attention and so women are drawn i i one anecdote a female colleague of mine very intelligent evolutionary psychologist said went to a conference and found herself very attracted to the organizer of the conference and then six months later she he she encountered him and he was just a normal attendee at the conference and she didn’t find him very attractive she went what was i thinking but what it was is he was he was at the center of the attention structure well the and the 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 and so that’s why we get precisely why we compete for attention it’s also an extremely valuable resource absolutely so i mean a valuable and limited resource it’s finite and so really at every moment in time we’re making decisions about yes to allocate our attention to 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 and they gazed much longer at the high status individuals in the photographs yeah so and you know and then you think about that too there’s there’s something really interesting about that because imagine that that compulsion to attend to what acquired status or let’s say competence status is accompanied in human beings by a profound instinct to imitate right that’s right because um i mean we are we are social learners and one of the things that we try to do is to emulate those who have qualities that are associated with status you know and and that that gets into you know and those those vary from group to group and subgroup to subgroup 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 line of makeup or something like that or nothing at all i mean paris hilton was like famous for being famous and so she got a lot of attention but there is no no no real benefit there but you know we have like uh you can if you’re if you play video games for example which which i don’t happen to but uh there’s status hierarchies within those you know the most skilled video game player the most skilled football player rugby player tennis player 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 else alternatively entice them to violence let’s say because that is associated with status inequality and so one of the solutions to status in inequalities diverse games of competence as diverse range as possible yeah and and that’s i mean and that’s definitely a good thing uh because i mean if if there was just one status hierarchy then that means um i mean status is inherently a relative uh engaged by relative metric you know so and if you’re the number one no one else can be the number one uh but you know if you can be the best uh scholar the best writer the best uh world of warcraft player the best tennis player these multiple status hierarchies gives more people give more people the opportunity to to gain in status it’s another another argument against the patriarchy as a unitary idea right well which patriarchy do you mean do you mean like the evil coalition of plumbers which is a joke i’ve made before it’s like you know that’s power is it plumbers really no they’re not organized in terms of their success by which plumber is the meanest and the toughest it’s that’s not how it works at all right no no yeah absolutely and and i mean that that gets into the the issue of uh there there are large pools of men who were at the bottom of status hierarchy and um who uh who who don’t have the qualities that that women desire and so are they really oppressing uh women 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 the tar in the street he’s a street worker fixing the tar and as they walk by this guy who’s gobbling on the ground they they say stop oppressing me right so anyway right right well i wanted to talk to you a bit more about the dark triad issue too because there’s a mystery in it and i think it’s one that corrupts psychology to some degree research psychology oh yes okay oh just so we didn’t mention the third one oh yes the third element of the dark triad which is psychopathy uh and and you probably have a deeper understanding of psychopathy than than i do but um one of the hallmarks is a lack of empathy that is most normal humans have an empathy circuit that we we feel compassion if someone gets hurt or if a pet gets injured or a child falls down and skins a knee we feel a sense of compassion for the suffering of other people but psychopaths don’t it’s like they might laugh uh if someone gets hurt and and so that empathy circuit seems to be severed uh and also one of the hallmarks seems to be that they’re um not responsive to punishment that they’re more oriented toward reward reward and so punishing doesn’t tend to change their behavior it isn’t it isn’t obvious that they have an empathy for their future selves right 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 right right yeah that gets to the issue of steepness the steepness of future discounting yes exactly exactly yeah they grab for all the gusto right now and don’t think about the future consequences so so one of the things that one of the big five personality traits that that dark triad is most associated with is agreeableness low agreeableness and that’s and i do think that research psychologists and psychologists in general have a kind of ethical bias in relationship to the agreeable dimension you know and and it it and of course women are higher in trade agreeableness than men right reliably it’s about half a standard deviation it’s one of the biggest sex differences and it’s associated with compassion and politeness in 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 think well it would interfere possibly with sharing right because if you’re more compassionate more compassionate more empathic you’re going to feel the hunger of other people and you’d be more motivated to 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 yeah so one way of saying that is 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 right and you can see that that’s a real tight line to walk down 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 blunter tougher you know and what would you say at least with regards to the other compassion you show to others and so what what helps modulate that well some of that would be conscientiousness and so in the dark triad types you see low conscientiousness as well you know really low agreeable high conscientious types are quite interesting because you can trust them because they’ll do their duty but they’re very blunt and direct and harsh and that can be helpful as well because they’ll tell you unpleasant truths even if they hurt your feelings so there’s some utility in that so you can imagine that agreeableness can be modified let’s say by conscientiousness so that and that takes the the psychopathy edge off it because low agreeableness and low conscientiousness that’s that’s a rough combination yes and so yeah yeah yeah because there’s nothing constraining it 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 and maybe it takes further experience and 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 yeah other personality traits like conscientiousness yeah 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 so they will do things like motorcycle jumping or or ski jumping or take physical risks speeding in their their cars or and so the kind of daredevil mentality and women at least younger women find that exciting but i wonder if they can i wonder if they confuse that with trait openness right because the open types are going to experiment they’re going to try lots of different things and that that daredevil you know i don’t care might be easily not easily distinguished from the capacity to engage in creative problem solving pursuits you know and and perhaps with courage as well yeah yeah so i think i think courage and also one of the you know that people who take risks often in in fact have the ability to afford those risks uh if if you will so for example you know doing some dangerous athletic feat if you’re not an athletic person you’re going to fail at that 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 but but these guys these high dark triad guys are absolutely disastrous as long-term mates so that they might be exciting for sure i mean that’s why i think that women as they mature uh stop being attracted to these guys especially if they’re looking for a long-term mate because these are guys they’re the dark triad they’re more likely to cheat they’re more likely to seduce and abandon them they’re more likely to engage in deceptive um mating tactics uh and so and so they tend to be big trouble when it comes to long-term mating yeah well it also looks like they value themselves greatly and you know sometimes people value themselves greatly and so they have high mate desirability in in your in your terminology or maybe some little corruption of your terminology and again i think the dark triad guys mimic that it’s like i’m so good i can afford to you know distribute my sexual prowess wherever i see fit and there’s some some of that happens as men rise in competence hierarchies as well well yes and it happens with women when they rise in their car how do you understand here’s a here’s a question i’d really like to hear you uh answer how do you distinguish between female and male hierarchies for sexual selection because all there are obviously women that are more desirable to men so what where where are the big sex differences there i know that men women will mate across and up competence hierarchies and men will mate across and down roughly speaking but there are other differences yeah yeah there so so we recently published a study on uh 14 different cultures on the sex differences and similarities uh and indeed there are differences so even things like physical attractiveness uh it it increases both male and female status but it increases female status more than male status uh why well what we argue is that um and this is one thing my 37 culture studies showed is that men place a greater priority on physical attractiveness physical appearance good looks um and it’s not an arbitrary social construction it’s um it’s basically an evolved preference for fertility cues um those who men who mated within fertile women failed to become ancestors and so who are all descendants of i have to ask you this too here’s something i really got in trouble for so i was doing an interview with nbc reporter i don’t remember who it was but he didn’t like me at all so he was trying to catch me out and all sorts of things and we talked about makeup in the workplace and i said that women use makeup to enhance their sexual attractiveness and man you wouldn’t believe the flak i got for that and i said well the 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 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 so and the flavor as well for that matter so did i say something that i shouldn’t have said am i wrong about that in some important way no you’re not wrong about it but um but i know what you mean i’ve got some flak for that as well and i mean one thing that um 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 this is a very upsetting notion to some people and so i was actually even before i published the 37 culture study a i gave a talk on it to a sociology department when i was at michigan and a professor female professor came up to me afterwards and said that i shouldn’t publish the findings and i said well why not because i you know to me empirical findings are empirical findings you know but she said that women had it hard enough without in competing with each other on physical appearance without being told that men have this evolved preference for it you know and so the you know the standard social science model is more comfortable for people to believe oh it’s just arbitrary and infinitely changeable you know and you go to you know any different culture and they value a whole different set of things and the notion that there that we have evolved preferences for fertility cues is uh anathema to some people yeah 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 i mean i reviewed the iq literature for about 20 years trying to get to the bottom of it and it’s very distressing to realize how wide the human differential is in cognitive ability it’s 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 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 it’s like there’s a real harshness to that but it’s the harshness i think it’s the harshness of life and actually understanding that makes it less harsh in so far as understanding is useful yeah yeah no i i would agree with that and you know i mean i’ve stumbled across a lot of findings in my research and and we’ll get to the issue of conflict between the sexes that that i find personally distressing you know that i wish didn’t exist but they do 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 well we also should be very cognizant of the fact that the counterclaim which is that well there are no biological uh what what do you see structures underlying our perception sexual perception and otherwise and our cognition 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 so that’s the other side of there’s danger everywhere yeah well what i would say is yeah the yeah implicit in those notions is that humans are um passive passive vehicles rather than active strategists that can be easily manipulated by whatever uh and that’s not a very um that’s not a very flattering view of humans uh so um 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 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 so so you were going to talk a little bit about um uh let’s talk about violence say between men and women 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 in little kids in uh in in elementary school children adolescents all the way up developmental origins of aggression with with Richard Tremblay in montreal and so i’m very interested in that and i i think often that psychologists have things backwards when we approach questions you know so for example we often try to explain anxiety instead of explaining its control which is way harder to do because like of course you’re anxious that’s bloody obvious why aren’t you terrified out of your skull all the time is the question and i think it’s the same with aggression it’s we 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 the mystery is how we control it that’s the mystery yeah and so yeah well and and and we do i mean it’s um you know aggression is selectively deployed you know and is very context specific and i mean it gets back to i mean it depends on i don’t know whether you were um whether you studied physical aggression but you were asking earlier about differences between male and female hierarchies and one of the things that is well documented is that while men are higher in physical aggression um included all up to homicide women um engage in uh social aggression or what’s sometimes called relational aggression where they they they shun someone or exclude someone or slut shame another woman and so that’s a form of aggression yeah reputation savaging yes yeah derogation of competitors um 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 um or or challenged their their status and but uh it’s one of the or they’ve perceived that however incorrectly yes yeah so one of the things that i studied is um a homicidal ideation you know and i looked at um you know have you ever had a homicidal thought have you ever thought about killing someone and basically i mean the majority of people have thought about it uh and even even though if they haven’t they’ll say something like when i pose this question just informally at say a party people say oh no i’ve never thought about killing someone uh 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 them and so fortunately most homicidal thoughts don’t get translated in a homicidal deeds otherwise we’d be living in a very chaotic society but um but one of the things that we found in that research was that being humiliated in 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 well okay so let me run something by you in relationship to emotional regulation and status tell me what you think about this so the terror management theorist types tend to think that our cognitive beliefs inhibit our anxiety and they drill that all the way down to anxiety of death taking a page from freud and that’s becker’s book basically and there’s a whole field of psychology that’s worked on that i think it’s i don’t think it’s right i think it’s more indirect so imagine this imagine that the degree to which your negative emotion is regulated is dependent on serotonin serotonin output fundamentally so as your serotonin levels rise you’re more emotionally stable so you feel less anxiety despair the whole panoply of negative emotions which are pretty tightly clumped together and so then you might say well your emotion emotional regulation is dependent on your status and i think there’s truth in that 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 so your status is devalued but here’s what i’ve actually done it’s not exactly that i’ve devalued your status what i’ve done is undermined the claim that you have a valid claim on that position yeah right and then that’s going to dysregulate you because if that’s true then well you’ve been shown to be an imposter let’s say and or at least a threat is there and then that would take you out of that hierarchy and your negative emotion would rise 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 yes and so right and you know you know that people at the bottom of a hierarchy are much less much more likely to die from all cause mortality this is not nothing right this is crucial getting killed yes including that yeah so 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 re-establishing something like competence yes yeah no i think that that’s right and i share your um your your views of the terror management notion you know that that we evolved all these mechanisms all these adaptations simply to keep the fear of death at bay and anxiety associated with that abate you know my argument would be well people actually have to solve problems of survival and reproduction you know yes the problem of death is worse than the problem of death anxiety yes now death anxiety is bad you know make no and i like beckard’s book but fundamentally yeah no yeah the logic doesn’t doesn’t work um but uh i published a a short commentary on terror management some time ago and uh it was the terror management people just ignored it i mean i was so what did you say oh i basically said you know argued that um they were proposing all these psychological adaptations simply to keep the thought and anxiety associated with death at bay and uh from an evolutionary perspective although they purport to grounded it in an evolutionary perspective it’s not really an evolutionary perspective because you have to tie uh an adaptive solution to some element that is tributary to survival or reproduction you know and and not simply adaptations 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 yeah or interfered with it i mean i guess i 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 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 they’re not mere defenses they’re not ego mirror ego defenses although sometimes they can also be that 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 becker didn’t read young 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 you which was exactly wrong given what he was doing but becker basically posited that we had to create fabrications to defend ourselves against negative emotion that’s the essential message of that book and what that means in some senses that the whole corpus of human endeavor is an attempt to escape from the realization of mortality and i think well wait a sec no we’re also escaping from mortality yes right it’s not just the thoughts of it and and and it isn’t obvious to me at all 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 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 death anxiety that’s actually counterproductive yeah so yeah there’s a reminded me of a of a witty allen quote and witty allen’s very uh i guess he’s sort of been canceled and is out of favor but he had this one quote where people said well you know you know you will achieve immortality through your your work and he said that he said i don’t want to achieve immortality through my work i want to achieve immortality through not dying yeah that’s a very good line it’s a very good line and yeah very germane to the problem yeah so you said that you had uncovered things that deeply disturbed you in your research as well ethically i would say and so so can you touch on some of that well uh well yeah i mean so well one is uh well one pertains to some of the sex differences that we’ve already been talking about so just as men place a greater value on physical attractiveness than women in their male selection women place a greater value on a man’s status and resources and so you could say well you know men view women as sex objects but women view men as success objects you know and so they’re both you know forms of objectification if you will although i don’t really like that like that term uh and so um i remember giving a lecture once and i was describing these findings and and uh it was like i think a freshman guy in the front row he was he got really upset by this and he said you mean you mean i have to have to achieve at at work in order to be attractive to women i said well i mean i guess it’s not strictly necessary but if you want to improve your chances so yeah so uh so uh you know it’s just as it’s harder for people who are at the bottom end of the things that people value um you were mentioning intelligence earlier but if you’re at the bottom end of attractiveness or or success or status or resources it’s not a very pleasant position to be in so that that’s one set of things another though well it’s also the the 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 because it that 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 so you see for example very frequently people think well hierarchy is a western construct it’s dependent on capitalism it’s like wait a second 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 it’s way bigger than capitalism yeah yeah yeah absolutely i mean status hierarchies i mean as you’ve written about are evolutionarily ancient uh and yeah and so you think i’m okay like i mean i took a lot of flak 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 and it it pertains to the serotonin argument right it’s it’s so widely distributed all the way down the phylogenetic chain that serotonin even regulates negative emotion in lobsters this is old you know and lots of people objected well why do you pick lobsters and it’s you know as if i was overstating the biological conclusions what do you think about this yeah well you know status hierarchies are are pretty ubiquitous uh and i guess what i would say is that they i mean you didn’t have to pick lobsters but you you could have picked chimpanzees or any number of other species and and still been essentially correct even non-social birds like even birds that don’t have troops and strictly a hierarchy they have a positional hierarchy in terms of territory and the ones that have the best nesting sites are much more likely to mate and survive so even in many animals that don’t have a hierarchy specifically it’s still there implicitly that’s right that’s right and and this is this gets to one of the other i guess the the broader implicit uncomfortable truths is that we value different people differently so and and that this of course applies in the mating domain of mate value some are high and some are low and that’s mostly what i’ve focused on 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 and people find this uncomfortable they you know we we’re and this is one of the i think conceptual confusions of this like all people are created equal well you know there are different meanings of that one is equal in terms of rights you know which they should be equal in terms of opportunities equal before the law equal in terms of their natural rights right right which that which is i think the correct usage of that but are they actually equal in value in what other people value and the well i’ve always asked people like who who hit me with us like do you sleep with everyone no oh you’re selective are you well isn’t that oppression exclusion and judgment at the most fundamental level and is that something you really want to sacrifice yeah and yeah and the the answer is no and and the answer is only rude people ask questions like that well or you know or confused you know who haven’t really thought through these issues no i meant the rude person was me asking oh yeah yeah yeah well well but i mean hey we’re in the business of asking hard questions i don’t think they’re they’re rude no i don’t think they are either they’re just they’re just pointed it’s like wait you exclude sexually there is no more dramatic form of exclusion than that yes that’s right well that’s why people object to evolutionary psychology it’s like it is it is a brutleness about it especially in female choosiness and not not that men are any better because of course they do the same thing in different ways but it really is brutal and to be rejected by someone that you’re attracted to that’s no joke that’s that’s a rough dagger yeah absolutely and and and of course the breakups are among the most traumatic experiences that people go through you know the dissolution of a marriage for example um you know these these cause people to spiral into depression uh alcohol abuse etc uh so um but um yeah it’s so let’s let’s 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 and by the way uh there is good data you may know this already but um tromblase group in particular looked at this 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 hitting kicking biting the two-year-olds will do more of it but most two-year-olds don’t and almost all the small minority that do are male so it’s there at two now almost all of them get socialized by the age of four and so they come to inhibit that aggression that’s they’re probably low in agreeableness that would be my guess and some of them are probably high and negative emotion so they’re more reactive you know more volatile but most of them are socialized by the age of four but their research group showed that if they aren’t socialized by the age of four then it’s permanent so that’s where the career criminal types come from and but they they tend to they tend to desist around the age of 28 it drops off for some reason that isn’t well understood yet yeah well i guess yeah 28 uh um 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 oh oh in in the same data set so what happens with these long-term aggressive boys 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 yeah so to your point yeah reproductive competition and um to to other colleagues of of yourself in canada martin daly and margaret wilson have shown these age and sex distributions and i mean it’s really stark and the exacerbation of that by inequality yes that’s right that’s right which is another issue uh you know the magnitude of inequality and and um uh inequality leveling you know richard rangham has a as an interesting idea that one of the ways that gets back to the issue of the origins of monogamy that in in humans and this is to a lesser degree the case in chimps i think but it’s certainly true in humans that uh an alpha male can be deposed by uh two lower ranking males two or three gang up and his view is if someone gets to the top and is a cost-inflicted male he didn’t quite phrase it this way then then people gang up and kill you know right another argument against against totalitarian brutality as the basis of the patriarchy it actually doesn’t work yeah right and for that reason yeah i talked i actually talked to rangham about about exactly that so that’s those mechanisms are already there and so aggression a lot of these strategies that you outlined in your book as alternatives in some sense to monogamy to stable monogamy there i would say there’s there’s something like suboptimal solutions on a fitness landscape right 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 is that is that naive or reasonable do you think well i don’t know i mean i i tend to um i i have a little bit of an internal conflict 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 evolved mating strategies which i think there are um i i try to be non-judgmental about that but from a you know my own personal um ethical viewpoint i think monogamy it is a great solution um i mean among other things you think it might be it might be possible to rank or the 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 like i said partial solutions are better than none but they’re nowhere near as good as an optimized solution and so like long-term monogamy might be something like the best strategy all things considered now sometimes all things aren’t considered and and you have to do what you have to do let’s say you know divorce would fit into that and so forth but that doesn’t mean that that optimality that we have a potentially a moral intuition for isn’t pointing to something that that is in fact well i would say at least in potential evolved as well as socially constructed yeah so so i guess what i would say is that um the key question is optimal for whom so so and this is where you get into some time conflict between sort of group harmony and individual uh benefits so 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 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 for the three males who have zero mates well yeah but he also might be more prone and we know the polygynous societies they tend to be more violent the younger men tend to be more violent so i would say that right he’s on on top but 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 leads 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 so yeah yeah and i think we have these kind of uh hierarchy leveling adaptations and and if you go across cultures they even have phrases for us like in australia they have them they call it um the tall poppies and people like to cut down tall poppies or in japan they say the the nail that sticks out gets pounded down and so there’s this uh and personality psychology i don’t know if you remember the um like rb cattell even had a concept uh raven cattell had a concept called coercion toward the biosocial norm where he said people like to cut down people who are too dominant so that the meat will inherit the earth so it’s not quite right but it’s a way i think we do have these i also i also think that that that cutting down that’s an interesting thing as well because one of the things that groups of men do i i that i and i think this is something relatively unique to men i might be wrong is that when they’re in groups they often throw uh denigrating barbs at one another to watch the emotional reaction and i think part of that tall poppy cutting down is an attempt to eradicate the detrimental effects of undue narcissism it’s not so much actual competence 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 so that that is a danger but i suspect that a lot of those mechanisms were directed toward the dark triad types and control of their unweaning arrogance right right exactly if they’re if they’re uh inflicting costs rather than conferring benefits or monopolizing resources rather than sharing them with other members of the group you know that those are going to be hierarchy hierarchy levelers i mean even in some sense the in modern weird modern environments the uh tax code that imposes a higher tax rate on people who make more money is kind of a form of hierarchy level yeah well and it’s it’s a tough problem to solve right 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 like the differences that are driving these these inequalities are very very deep and they’re it’s very difficult to figure out how you might deal with them socially even on the conservative end of the spectrum i think it’s worth noting that excess inequality breeds violence among young men that’s worth noting it’s like well you let the inequality get too out of hand you’re going to destabilize the whole society 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 and so how to shovel resources down the hierarchy in some way that’s what would you say that’s not counterproductive that’s that’s a problem that we’re all constantly struggling with yes yeah indeed and um and i think it’s even i mean you had mentioned intelligence research and and here’s i’d like to get your thoughts on this uh is that one of the things that we know is that there’s strong assorted mating for intelligence uh 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 um but um but we know the assorted mating coefficients for intelligence is about 0.45 it’s one of the highest assorted mating coefficients right so that’s the tendency for people to marry people who are like them in certain some manner yeah yeah so that means the the high intelligent or mating of the highs and lows with lows 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 an increase in um uh variance in intelligence of the offspring generation and so if you iterate it generation after generation you’re actually getting uh 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 attainment then you’re going to create an increase in inequality as 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 a world shattering event it’s associated with the emergence of morality that’s knowledge of good and evil and it’s associated with the knowledge of death so you get enough cognitive development driven by sexual selection you become self-conscious aware of your own mortality that’s the first thing and that’s our cataclysm no other creatures ever dealt with that 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 like you actually understand it unlike a lion who’s just eating a gazelle and then you can use that and so and then in in that story well in some sense it’s blamed on eve but the the selection pressure that you described in association with the choosiness of women i think is i don’t see how it can be denied that that was a prime mover of our cognitive transformation away from the chimpanzee line sexual selection that drove that i think yeah yeah i think i think that’s right i mean i mean because there’s you know um we didn’t get this um big brain from learning how to pick berries a little bit better whatever i mean it’s a these survival problems don’t really get you there well and you need a runaway process right and the assortative mating issue that you described would be a contributor to that runaway process because this cortical evolution happened very rapidly yes right so rapidly that women’s bodies are barely adapted to our babies right wider hips they wouldn’t be able to run right bigger head it wouldn’t pass through the birth canal and women bodies are compromised to some degree by the necessity of giving birth and then babies are born new when they’re still unbelievably helpless because if they were any bigger than that their heads would be too big plus they’re crushable their heads i mean it took a lot of gerrymandering to make that that runaway selection process biologically viable yeah yeah well one interesting thing about that is also is um uh with uh the advent of c sections uh where babies are uh you know they basically cut the mother open to take the baby out rather than through the the birth canal uh is probably creating a modern selection pressure for larger and larger heads um as a result so so this is uh evolution is ongoing here in this process so maybe we can close with one thing unless you have something else you’d really like to discuss i would like to discuss a little bit more about why men and women have different strategies of aggression yeah okay uh so yeah well and and also well i mean i guess we’ll have to there are many interesting things that i would love to talk about uh associated with the with with my new book on conflict between the sexes and we’ve touched on on a few but i’d love to talk more about those but you know i think that you know male and female status hierarchies are are uh i mean there’s some similarities but they’re some so fundamentally different and i don’t know if you’ve ever had this experience jordan but um the way i describe it i find and i think most men find male hierarchies to be fairly transparent that is we can sort of observe them they’re clear um there’s not a big mystery but well we also tend i would say we also tend to exclude males that aren’t transparent like that yeah it’s like he’s too much trouble right so no no i want to know exactly where i stand with you and we’re going to sort that out right now right right and and they do sort it out but but with women um the way i feel you know those movies where uh there’s like these uh a bank bank robbers and they’re breaking into a bank but the bank has these infrared uh detectors and so they have to put on special goggles so that they can see the red lines and avoid tripping the the alarm i feel like that with respect to female hierarchies 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 and and i was like right there and i didn’t hear anything but there’s this kind of underlying um meta message that women pick up on with respect to other women that i don’t i don’t i don’t feel like i understand but do you do you know if there’s any studies indicating whether men or or women are better at detecting who’s in a relationship with who i don’t know of any studies on that but i would hazard a guess that women are better at it than men i mean is what is that your intuition yes yes definitely definitely i mean i’ve watched my wife do that on several occasions those two people are are together no they’re not they’re married to other people oh it turns out yeah they they are she can pick it up in way well and we know that women are better at decoding non-verbal behavior than men yeah 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 and they have to pick up the cues of their non-verbal infants and right exactly so i think it’s i think that this would get to the issue of um mind reading abilities ability to infer the psychological states of other humans and i think that that at least in many domains women are better at that you know you want to think that’s associated with trait 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 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 that’s what we do when we go to a movie right because we vicariously live the emotions in the movie but it stands to reason that there’s variability and i suspect it’s agreeableness because that’s empathy and and likely maternal caregiving yeah yeah so that’s i mean that’s a really interesting question i i’m not aware of studies that have systematically looked at that uh individual yeah well the psychologists are loathed to associate agreeableness with maternality right because we’re loathed 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 and they get bigger in egalitarian societies which is really quite something right right contrary to the standard social science social role theories uh that it predicted that yeah not just contrary but like well i would say death blow but it’s not exactly right because some differences do decline as egalitarianism increases so right you know it’s complicated like everything else so male aggression again well we have we’re bigger we’re taller we have more upper body strength so women aren’t going to engage in physical combat with men not past puberty and you know they develop that increase in trait negative emotionality at puberty it’s not there in child really okay and it’s permanent no it’s permanent once it’s instantiated once once the pubertal changes take place and so and i here’s a something here’s a question i have for you i really want to ask you this what do you think of the theory that so women are higher in trait negative emotion right and they’re higher in agreeableness so here’s a theory women’s personalities are adapted for the mother infant dyad not for their not for them that the fundamental unit is the dyad and and their temperament is adjusted for that that’s why they’re more fearful yeah yeah no i think that that’s got to be right i mean you know that women over evolutionary history have been the primary caretakers of the infants at least for the first few years of life the mothers and their female the aloe parents as they’re called and so i think that that’s exactly right they have to be the the cost of failing to detect danger for example affect not just them but also the survival of their infant and so i think that you know maternal bond to the infant is has got to be at least one of the contributing factors to that sex difference in negative emotionality 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 and also the mother is hindered in her adaptive ability by the presence of the infant to a substantial degree especially when while in societies where the infant is being carried virtually all the time right which is which is interesting to bring it back full circle is one reason why women value a man’s ability and willingness to offer protection for her and her children so highly in a mate and so you’d 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 yeah and it’s all it’s 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 it’s still plenty dangerous yeah it’s still plenty dangerous but might not be so much as it was yeah yeah less so than it was i mean i think steve pinker has documented that pretty successfully and uh 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 or within the pandemic so and i have some speculations about that but um but you know i i think you know there’s so many other topics that we could talk about 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 has meant a lot to me and it’s helped explain a lot to me and and so um i thank you very much for that and for the courage to to do it to pursue it and in the face of you know substantive opposition to what you’re finding you know you know you’ve discovered something true when you’re a social scientist when you’re not very happy about what you discovered yeah yeah yeah that’s true well i have i have just on to end on a positive note i’ve also studied love and the evolutionary psychology of love and so i mean it’s one of the gets back to your point about good and evil and i i think humans have evolved adaptations to commit horrors on other people but also adaptations to be altruistic and benefit conferring on other individuals and so yeah well scott scott barry kaufman has tried to psychometrically outline a light triad yes yeah yeah so i think we we all have these um capacities within us and so and and the more we learn the more we can create environments that kind of suppress the the the darker more evil side of human nature and bring out the more benefit conferring well it would be fun to do another discussion on on something like the evolution of benevolence you know something that’s really positive like that yes so yeah okay well good let’s do that okay so thank you well it’s been fun talking to you and uh boy there is so much more to talk about yeah i know well that’s that that’s what would you say that’s that’s what you realize whenever you have a really good conversation yeah so i appreciate it very much and and uh i i do hope we talk again in the relatively near future okay so i do too well thank you thank you so much and best of luck with your uh conversation with bob trivers he’s he’s a fascinating guy so i’m sure you will have a very interesting conversation yeah i’m looking forward to talking to you about self-deception that’s something i thought about for a very long time so and hopefully tried to stop practicing so if you find the keys let me know all right all right thank you very much and good luck with your book and so that’s this this is part of one of the books we were talking about today why when men behave badly and that’s certainly not all it’s about and thanks very much for talking to me today okay thank you gordon it’s been a delight you