Modern Wisdom - #292 - Rob Henderson - Signalling: Why You Do The Things You Do

Episode Date: March 8, 2021

Rob Henderson is a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge and a US Air Force Veteran. Signalling is something everyone is doing all of the time. We are constantly leaking information about ourselves and our motives, but most of that information is involuntary. Expect to learn why signalling and status are intrinsically linked, how a standing next to a Lexus can increase a man's attractiveness, why putting 20 expensive pens on your desk is a smart idea, why young men play loud music out of their car and much more... Sponsors: Get 20% discount on the highest quality CBD Products from Pure Sport at https://puresportcbd.com/modernwisdom (use code: MW20) Get 83% discount & 3 months free from Surfshark VPN at https://surfshark.deals/MODERNWISDOM (use code MODERNWISDOM) Extra Stuff: Follow Rob on Twitter - https://twitter.com/robkhenderson Check out Rob's Website - https://robkhenderson.com  Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello friends, welcome back. My guest today is Rob Henderson, US Air Force veteran and a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge, we're talking about signaling why you do the things you do. Signaling is something that almost everyone is doing all of the time. We're constantly leaking information about ourselves and our motives, but most of that information is involuntary. So today, expect to learn why signaling and status are intrinsically linked, how standing next to a Lexus can increase a man's attractiveness, why putting 20 expensive pens on your desk is a smart idea,

why young men play loud music out of their car, and much more. Honestly, I could talk about evolutionary psychology and social psychology for years. It's so interesting looking at why our motives are the way they are, what are the underlying principles that are guiding our behaviour, and then just looking at how ridiculous we are as animals, thinking that we're in control of the stuff that we do and that we understand our own motives. It's great. This conversation with Rob is absolutely awesome.

But for now, it's time for the wise and wonderful Rob Henderson. Is everyone signaling all of the time? Well, yes, everyone is signaling all of the time, but people don't necessarily know they're signaling, and they're not necessarily consciously signaling all of the time, but however We are sending information about ourselves at all times, which is sort of the classic academic definition of signaling What how how would you define it someone's new to the topic what signaling? Well signaling is basically we're constantly leaking information about ourselves From the way we talk the way we dress the kinds of that we do, the activities that we choose to engage in. Signals are information that other people sort of pick up based on what they see and what kind of information

they're referring from our behaviors and so forth. But the interesting thing about that is not all of the signals. In fact, probably most of the signals, in fact, probably most of the signals are unconscious. Right. Yeah, I think that, well, this is basically born out by the academic research, is that this is not something that we are, you know, sort of sitting down and, you know, calculating and deliberating, how am I going to send information about myself? What kind of information do I want to send? And even when we do do those things, we're often not even aware of the information that we are sending. So for example, if I want to buy like a fancy car, I'm not thinking to myself, like, oh, this is really going to impress my friends, and it's going to give me a hot partner, and it's going to make me look great to my coworkers or something.

Often it's just like, this car makes me feel good. And so I want to buy this car. But as a lot of evolutionary psychology research indicates, we don't do things just because they feel good. That feeling good has to have some kind of social pay off, some kind of evolutionary benefit. If you reach that far enough, why that feeling good is actually something that we feel that is so positive. Is there a golden rule of signaling?

Is it like just why you do what you do might not really be why you do it? Ah, the golden rule of signaling. I mean, well, I mean, the first would be sort of related to your first question, I think which is that the golden rule is that we're always signaling and that there's no escaping the signaling game. I noticed sometimes when I talk about signaling with people, I think like, well, I don't do that. That's silly. This sounds like people trying to impress each other or whatever. I'm not into that. But even by saying that, you're communicating something about

yourself. So there's no sort of escaping that signaling game. If I tell you, I don't care what people think about me, you have learned something about me. I have emitted a signal and now you're one of those guys who don't care. Okay, you're that kind of guy, right? So there's no escaping that. Do you have a sort of rule about signaling? No, no, no, man, just that increasingly I realize how tiny the sliver of my motivations are that I get to see, and that the vast majority of the stuff that my body and my mind are doing is just completely on autopilot. And I'm just, I'm like cargo. I'm just a long, I'm just a long for the ride. I'm not passenger. I can't even order nuts off the air hostess. I definitely can't drive the plane. I'm just

like, I'm the suitcases in the back. You know, I've heard someone I can't remember. This was a psychologist who described it as a like, you know, when you're walking through like a video game arcade and there's like the racing games and the car is driving and you'll see like a little kid get into the seat and he didn't put any coins in. He's just sitting there pretending to drive the car. The analogy I heard was that like that's our life. We are in that driver's seat playing with that steering wheel thinking we're driving the car, then now do you heard was that like, that's our life. We are in that driver's seat, playing with that steering wheel, thinking we're driving the car,

but we are not. Something else is going on and we're just sort of along for the ride like you're saying. What are some of the examples of how people might signal or some of the favorite examples that you've seen recently where it would be quite surprising? Well, one that I just read, so this was an old study from like the late 1950s in the U.S.

These old behavioral psychologists, you know, the organizational psychologists. But anyway, they found that these executives in this office somehow it became a game to see like, you know, who could have a fancy pen on their desk. So at first they found that like, oh, you know, each one of these executives has one pen on their desk, this sort of fancy expensive fountain pen or something. And then this psychologist came back a few days later and one of the individuals had put two pens on their desk and then by the next day all of them had two pens. And then they kept doing this eventually, every executive had multiple fancy fountain pens on their desk. And I would bet that if you sat down with the, I'm gonna ask, why do you keep collecting these pens?

They're not gonna say, I'm trying to keep up with the other guys, I wanna show that I can afford these pens too. They just sort of feel this pressure of like, oh, well, if I only have one and that guy has five, people are gonna look at me and that makes me feel uncomfortable. There are some other interesting examples of this from research in mating and evolutionary

psychology. For example, if you show women images of the same man next to a typical sedan, like a four-door, kind of a sedan, like a mosque, there's something, and ask how attractive he is versus the same man next to a luxury, like a Lexus or something, and ask how attractive he is versus the same man next to a luxury on him, like a Lexus or something, and ask how attractive he is. It's the same guy, same clothes, same everything, just the car next to them is different.

The guy next to the Lexus is rated as much more attractive. And men on some level are aware of this, and this is why so many guys are obsessed with buying fancy cars cars upgrades, taking pictures of them. I have friends who are into this. You know, they take Instagram, you know, look at what I did to my car, look at how shiny my rims are or whatever.

So that is actually a key motivator for signaling is to impress romantic partners as well as other kind of people. Is that upgrading of the car? Is that an Asian thing? Is that because you got lots of Asian friends? Well, I actually don't have that many Asian friends. It's not like too fast, too furious down in Cambridge, is it not? It's not like that here. The guy I'm thinking of, he's actually an American, he's a white guy, America is really in the cars. But yeah, I mean, yeah, I'm sure this is probably,

at least in developed countries, advanced economies, I would be very surprised if, for example, men cared less about their cars than women. I bet it's always the young guys who care much more about how their cars look and how fast they are and how they work. So what's the signal with that in evolutionary psychology speak? Is it resource acquisition? Is it conspicuous consumption? Yeah, well, okay, so conspicuous consumption, that comes from economics, which is, so,

I mean, this is actually a really neat example of like whatever, like, parsimony across the sciences of biology and economics, both sort of converged on the same idea of what are called the honest signals or costly signals. So what a guy is communicating when they can afford that expensive fancy car, you know, they're basically saying, you know, I have a job, I am resourceful, I am conscientious because I can take care of this. And often luxury cars do take more maintenance and upkeep and care compared to a more downgraded less luxurious car.

So that's definitely one component of this inspection. So showing your economic position and the sort of analogous idea in biology sort of costly signaling idea or the handicap principle some people call it. The sort of what the example of this would be the peacocks tail. I'm sure many of your listeners have heard about this idea from evolution of biology. Only a healthy bird can produce such incredible and beautiful plumage. That tail does not help that peacocks survive. In fact, it does very much the opposite. It actually puts them at danger.

If that peacock displays this tail, it alerts predators to its position. If it tries to fly away, that tail is going to weigh it down. But when that peacock shows its tail to the female peacock is trying to attract, it's showing that, like, look, I'm so healthy and so robust and strong that I can afford to lug this thing around. And therefore, you should mate with me and we'll have some offspring with some quality

genes too. There's another animal that does this too. I think it's a gazelle. Some kind of animal similar to that in Africa, and they do what's called starting. And what this is is if they sense that a predator is nearby, like a lion or something, they'll start jumping. Well, immediately start jumping into the air. These are mostly the male gazelle.

They'll start jumping, and then the research is called starting. And what they're doing, the researchers believe that what they're doing is showing the predators that I am very strong, very muscular. This is how high I can jump into the air. If you try to chase me, you're not going to catch me.

Just relax. Go for one of those other guys who, when they stop, they're not jumping as high as me. Often they'll do this as well when there are female gazelles around. This is to impress them to show that. like, look how high I'm jumping. There's a predator right there. I'm drawing their attention and I don't care. This is how impressive I am. And, you know, I'm sure we can think of some similar examples with guys too.

Sometimes I think young guys do this with like playing very loud music out of their cars. I'm sorry. What do you think the signal of that is? like playing very loud music out of their cars. I answered a draw. What do you think, what do you think the signal of that is? Rob, pivot your camera a little bit so that you're in the middle for me, dude. You keep on shifting around. Yeah, what do you think's the signal of that? Like, listen to my shite music.

Well, I think what it is, especially like late at night when there's a lot of drunk people around and so on, sometimes I think like, are they just drawing the attention of either unsavory people who would wanna like tell them to shut up or start a fight with them, or if they're trying to draw the attention of the police? I mean, it's not usually a good idea in those kinds of situations,

late at night, a lot of drinking going on, and who knows what else. It suddenly start blaring loud music out of your car. And again, I don't think it's this con, I don't think a guy's in that car, like let me show off how I run or whatever. I think it's just like- You're some budding evolutionary psychologists

driving around with Neons under their car and a bass box in the back. There we go. Yeah, yeah, I mean, this is that totally exactly. I've never seen any research on that. around with Neons under their car and a baseballs in the back. There we go. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this is, that's totally stuck. I've never seen any research on that.

But sometimes I think that a lot of the stuff, I mean, even when I was a young guy doing dumb things, I don't think that is conscious in any way. A lot of it is extremely risky. But that riskiness is, you know, it's attractive. I've seen research along these lines on skateboarders. So, researchers did visit a skating park. And what they found was that, you know, they'd sort of interview these young male skateboarders.

And sort of look at how risky the tricks or the moves they were doing were in the skating park and what they found was that when they sent a young male research assistant to interview them. They measured how risky the activities they were doing compared to when they sent a young female research assistant to interview them. And when it was a young woman these young male skateboarders were taking much more risks and incurred more injuries, and they were sort of, you know, way you could think of the set-stopping or something, right? Like they were trying to show off to the young female versus the guy who maybe they don't care that much about impressing. But sometimes guys do care about impressing other guys and we can talk about that too. Yeah, the fascinating thing I think about signaling is running back from what the action is and trying to infer what all of the different branches are.

So it's kind of like a reverse tree. I guess it's like roots. So it's like you have one thing that happens and then you try and pull back from there. So you've got the guy that always wants to get in a fight on a night out. Like what's that guy signaling? That guy's signaling. I have so much excess fitness and I'm so robust that I am able to have what is a really dangerous altercation with someone,

drunk with a hard floor, with other people around, maybe taking on multiple men. And we spoke about this last time that you were on where if anyone has ever watched two guys about to fight outside of a nightclub, the first thing that they'll do every single time is circle each other. And that's precisely what you see when you watch lions or tigers or at stags, you know, about to circle each other and maybe they'll push, which is gauging each other's strength. And so much, every time that you send me journal articles or articles to

read and stuff like that, I feel less and less removed from the animal kingdom. That's the most gracious way that I can put it. Interesting. Yeah, yeah, I mean, I get that too. I've even seen, like, a long use lines about guys circling each other. There's an author, Rory Miller, I think, his name. He wrote a book called Meditations on Violins and he worked in law enforcement for a long time and he calls this the monkey dance. You know, to go that, you know, are we animals or are we human? Well, he calls this the monkey dance, which is when two guys, he has like a, like, a, whatever, like the sequence that he sees that just like you're describing, where at first they'll sort of,

like, verbally threaten each other. What are you looking at, man? You've got a problem, that kind of thing. And then they'll start to sort of, you do the chest bump, and then they'll do the shoving match. And then at a point it'll escalate into a sort of roundhouse punch with a dominant hand and then the other guy tackles and you know inevitably this is usually how it goes right and one of the things that he points out is that this almost always happens with one almost always young men

and two it's they do it with each other, right? So young men are not going to engage in the monkey dance with a female at a nightclub. I guess I have seen like world star videos or something, occasionally some weird stuff happens. But overwhelmingly, it's too young guys. Usually aren't trying to fight women.

They're usually not trying to fight people who are much, much older, or much, much younger. They're not trying to do the monkey dance with little kids, right? They're usually, same age, roughly the same size. Yeah, I mean, very few are going to try to do the monkey dance with like one of the massive balancers or something. And I find that to be particularly interesting too that we sort of, at least in that instance, you know, they want to find someone who's roughly on the same position and who, it's sort of a question whether they could beat them, right?

And that is sort of what you'll get that maximal signaling value. Is that where the friction occurs, the fact that you are within reaching distance of each other in terms of whatever hierarchy you see it to be? Yeah, I think that probably plays some role. There was a sociologist, Roger Gould, who wrote this book, Collision of Will's, where he actually, I mean his whole book is about that specific question, about like when is conflict most likely to arise between individuals? And you know, he reviews a bunch of research cross-culturally within sociology, anthropology, and so on, where he finds that

within sociology, anthropology, and so on, where he finds that, like, basically, the equality of status actually increases the likelihood of conflict, or the absence of methods to establish social position. So a simple example he gives is sort of the norms around age. Typically, we try to defer to our elders. Elders usually have higher positions in the society, and so we defer to them. But then he says, imagine a workplace scenario where the boss is actually this sort of hot shot,

this young upstart, and his subordinate, or her employee, is an older guy, an older person. In that case, you can imagine more conflict than if the boss was the older person and the young person was the support in it. There are other instances of this as well, where essentially if people aren't sure, who is supposed to be the top person here, how is this hierarchy going to be settled, then conflict is more likely.

I've also been reading this book by Diego Ambeda, Coads of the Underworld about criminals. He documents research in prisons and finds that when prisoners don't know each other, fights are way more likely to break out than when prisoners have been around each other for a long time. He pauses that this is because they're actually trying to gain information from one another. They're trying to elicit those signals. When you have a new guy in the prison, they're actually trying to gain information from one another. They're trying to elicit those signals. When you have a new guy in the prison,

they immediately want to size him up, see what he's made out of. If he gets into a conflict with another prisoner, all the other prisoners will surround and say, fight, fight, fight, like they want to know what's this guy made of. But if they've all been around each other for a long time, number one, a fight is less likely to break out

because they already know what the pecking order is. And number two, if a fight does break out, they fight is less likely to break out because they already know what the pecking order is. And number two, if a fight does break out, they're actually more likely to break it up and encourage it because they already know. Like, they're not going to gain any signaling information. We don't need to create a problem in our little prison community. So let's just, you know, let's not get into this. Let's just break this up. I think I heard you on a podcast talking about schools or foster homes being something similar

to that. When you get a group of sort schools or foster homes being something similar to that. When you get a group of sort of young kids together, they want to size each other up and see what they're made of. But once that's established, it doesn't really matter so much. I also read in one of the articles you sent me that we are less hierarchical than other primates. Is that right? Well, yeah, in a sensitive, so there's a lot of debate about this in anthropology and

basically what it looks like is, according to Christopher Bayne and other anthropologists, if you look at the ways that hunter-gatherer communities are structured, there's actually not a firm hierarchy. They do have sort of like, you know, what they're sometimes called like big men, or like sort of like elders or something, who sort of make the decisions. And these are in like, you know, hunter-gatherer, orger communities in South America or Africa or Papua New Guinea. And they also believe that this was probably the case in early hunter gatherer or cultures as well, you know, hundreds of thousands, years ago, tens of thousands, years ago. They, that hunter gatherers don't like strut hierarchies and they actually will downplay

their own skill. So if there's a hunter, this particularly talented, if they sort of managed to take out a large animal. The others around them, around this talented hunter, will sort of make fun of how he threw his spear, or how he runs, or his appearance, because they don't want him to basically get a big head. They don't want him to sort of feel arrogant or cocky. And this hunter will go along with it and say like, cah-ha, you guys are right, like yeah, and they'll sort of play that role of being very humble and sort of downplaying their own skills. And this maintains social harmony within those communities.

They themselves may not necessarily put it this way, but it sort of suppresses envy. They don't want anyone to be too much higher than anyone else. Yeah, interestingly, a country gather is going to be more monogamous. They don't like if one male basically takes up all the women and they try to evenly distribute that as well in terms of like romantic relationships. It wasn't until later, historically speaking, after the rise of agriculture, when people could stay in one place and accumulate wealth and resources that tyrants could emerge and standing armies and so on.

And then you could have kings with heroms of thousands of women or something. But if you're an amatic hunter-gatherer, you can't really accumulate resources and you can't really sort of take out your male competitors. If they all gang up against you and you can't have multiple lives. Yeah, I suppose that's one of the reasons for Dunbar's number being around about that. It doesn't, once you get to sufficiently large, if you try and splinter off to form some sort of a person moat, you know, like a roving gang of hunter gatherer mobs around you, singing the loud music at night with the Neons on. Like, if you try and do that, if you try and do that, you just splinter off into a new group. And it requires a critical mass of people to actually be able to get that

one person who was the best hunter but decided not to be humble. If he was a dick and if he was quite sure he would, someone would just take him out after night, a member of his family would take him out to the woods and kill him and then you would move on with your life. So yeah, it requires that that number of people i suppose in the structure as well in the culture and the excess resources and all of that stuff so oddly oddly us maturing as a civilization is one of the ways that we've become less civilized almost

uh yeah well yeah i guess when you think about think about civilization in terms of like, oh, agriculture and establishing settled communities and so on, yeah, I mean, we did sort of stray from that egalitarian culture of, you know, that sort of gun bar number of that small group. The gun bar number for listeners is basically this idea that human beings have this upper cognitive capacity for how many people they can basically stay on personal terms with, stay familiar with. And this is because hunter gatherers bands usually comprise about 150 people and then modern research sort of supports this idea. If you look at the number of on average number of Christmas cards people send out the number of people

They regularly stay in contact with on social media. You know you might have a thousand Facebook friends But you really only sort of regularly say in contact with maybe 100 to 300 of them and sort of converges around 150 And yeah, that's that's a very interesting idea that I mean to go back to your earlier point about the sort of taking out the arrogant, problematic male, there was a recent book by the Harvard anthropologist, I think he's an anthropologist, Richard Rangham, the goodness paradox, and that whole book is about this idea of basically capital punishment, domesticated humans.

So he could go as a self-domestication, where essentially early humans once they sort of created these hundred-gatherer bands, and there would be, if there was like a sort of person who was creating a lot of problems, who maybe didn't care that much, what others thought about him, who would hog up the resources,

who would try to steal another person's life or whatever. The sort of lower, you know, or maybe the more humble males say would basically organize and plot and take this guy out. Usually through the use of like extended weapons that would put themselves at risk of with spears or something like that, they would take them out, or bows and arrows. And so this was basically over time, after many iterations of this, who are the humans that survive that sort of filtration mechanism, people who are social anxious, who care, what others think about them, who are very alert to disapproval, who don't

want to ruffle people's feathers, who want to get along with the group because that feeling was adaptive 50,000 years ago. If you, if suddenly, you know, the 150 members of your community gave you a look that made you think that there was something wrong with you, that was an indicator that you may not be there for much longer. The implications are now so grave of you moving around the state of hierarchy. I suppose I've got this TEDx talk coming up and the nerves are pretty palpable even though it's only three weeks away or still three weeks away. And I think it's quite common people say that one of the most uncomfortable scary things people have to do is public speaking.

And that's supposedly an artifact of our time as hunter gatherers as well, right? Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, there's research on, for example, cortisol responses. Cortisol is a hormone associated with stress. Researchers have measured the level of cortisol in sort of like lab settings, they'll bring participants in and have them do stressful tasks. For example, the aspect is to do like mental arithmetic or solving some difficult crossword puzzles, and then they'll take us alive as sample and measure the amount of cortisol they release. So they'll take that measure, and then they'll have other participants

do other kinds of stressful tasks like deliver speech in front of a large crowd or a recording, like a video recording of themselves that they believe will be seen by some important person, these sort of socially stressful tasks. And researchers have found that in those more socially stressful tasks, cortisol levels are three times higher than in the non-social stressful tasks. So if you're sort of doing something difficult, but you know no one's going to see, no one's

going to care, you'll feel a little stress. But if you know people are going to be judging you, that's much more risky, much more stressful. Yeah, that's, I can't remember the specific of this research, but Naomi Eisenberger, she's a neuroscientist, she basically posited something that if you experience disapproval from your social circle, and this might be related to like,

delivering a speech where you're afraid that they may disapprove of you. The reason why your heartbeat increases and your blood vessels can certain so on is because your body is preparing an anticipation of either a physical attack or exile. And so that is, you know, this is not, this is just sort of a speculation, but I find that to be quite interesting and shows like what's that stake in those moments, right? So you're saying if I do too bad of a TEDx talk, I'm gonna have to leave Newcastle. Yes, they will exile you.

So I'm gonna be chased out of there with a spear. Man, I've got almost an endless number of examples that reinforce that point that you just brought up there. First one, I've done two reality TV shows. One of them, the first stage involved a live audience of 400 people, the second one, and went out to maybe a couple of million. The second one was over three in a bit weeks, probably accumulated tens of millions of viewers across that time, but was just done with

the people that were on the show and no audience. First show, despite the fact that it quantifiably objectively reached far fewer people's eyes because they weren't there, in front of me because they were on the other side of a camera and then the other side of a TV screen didn't matter. Another one, I think I told you this before, is was riding a moped in Bali. I came off the moped because I was paying 50 pounds a day for a moped like a dick. And I came off when I pulled the brakes, hit the floor, the two guys that I was with came over. The first thing that I felt ahead of fear for my personal safety worries about the fact I was leaving

half of my skin on this Balinese course road, the fact that there was still traffic moving back and forth because it's barley and the psychopaths, the first thing that I felt was like shame and embarrassment, ahead of physical risk, I felt social embarrassment. That was how high on my list of priorities it was. Yeah, well, I mean, our social image is critical. There, along these lines, there's been some of some interesting reasons in the last five years or so,

basically comparing social pain with physical pain. And what neurosciences have basically found is that they are overlapping neural regions. They occupy sort of the same real estate in our brain. When you experience social pain, the same part of your brain activates is to enter your single-lit cortex. And so basically, if you are experiencing social exclusion

or some kind of like damage to your image or status, it sort of feels similar to actual physical pain. And what's more interesting, I find, is that when researchers have as participants to basically say, like, think back to a time. So the first day, they were crew participants who have experienced some major physical or social painful event, and they asked them, you know, how much pain did you feel at that time when you got into that car accident or broke that bone and they asked them, how much pain did you feel when you went through that breakup or when you found out your friend betrayed

you or whatever socially painful thing it was? There's actually no difference when they ask them how painful it was. They say both of those things, whether it's betrayal or breaking a bone, they both feel the same, but then when they ask those participants to reimagine it, like imagine that you're back there again, now how much pain do you feel? They actually remember the socially painful event to be more painful than the physically painful one, and they've also found that oftentimes people have difficulty in trying to recollect physical pain. It's hard. If you broke the bone and you're trying to think back, what did that actually feel like?

It's actually quite difficult for many people, but almost everyone can remember what that tough breakup feels like. Or what it was like to be excluded from a group you wanted to join or something. That feeling sort of vanes with us over time and endures more certain the physical pain. Why do you think that is? Yeah, yeah, it's an interesting question. I mean, one thing is perhaps because physical pain is so almost instinctually aversive that you don't need to remember it.

There's nothing to learn from it. Exactly. You already know that that's whatever it is, like jumping in front of a car is a bad idea. You already know that. Whereas I almost think that like maybe because the social parts of ourselves and our brains and our psychology, it's more of a sort of evolutionarily recent and so we still have to sort of learn the hard way, so to speak, that if you get embarrassed or say something wrong, make a social

faux pas, you want that pain to live on so that you remember, oh don't do that bad thing again, don't do that, say that dumb word again or whatever happens to be. But that's just speculation. Dude, I think that you're right. I wonder as well whether being hurt, you know, seriously, if you broke a bone, probably up until 10,000 years ago, 5,000 years ago, you were dead. If you break your arm, you break your leg, you're probably dead. There's probably nothing to learn. How would the person that learns from breaking the bone or not learns from breaking the bone have ever been competed in or out of the gene pool because that person probably just dies. I don't know whether it would have had a chance to interact.

Interesting. Yeah, I mean, I don't know enough about what those early, like human, uh, clans and tribes were like, probably if you were a young person, you might be able to survive some of those kinds of injuries, but it would be, I mean, it's nothing like today. I mean, it would be like, you know, very risky. Yeah. Uh, but that makes a lot of sense, actually. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, is the goal of signaling usually status, then? Is that why people are doing it? They want to somehow move up in terms of status. Right. Well, I mean, so that's definitely one goal. Social status itself is usually, at least more recently, it's been sort of divided into two kinds of pathways. So there's

two paths at the top I've already described as, so there's dominance. So one path to obtaining status is dominance. So this path to obtaining status is dominance. So this is basically the ability to impose physical costs on someone. So someone like Joseph Stalin or something like that is, he's high status, right? But he's high status because of his dominant, his ability to hurt you. Whereas the other pathway is prestige. So this is another component of status. And this is basically someone's someone sort of respect and admiration, like how much respect and admiration others have

for them. So someone like Stephen Hawking, right? Like Stephen Hawking is not dominant. You're probably not afraid Stephen Hawking is going to impose an ephysical cost on you, but you respect his intellect and his ability to communicate science or whatever. And so those are sort of two distinct pathways. Another way I've heard this describe is that dominance is, you know, that kind of status is what people can do to you, whereas prestige status is what people can do for you. And so you would want to make a relationship, build relationships and associations with those prestigious individuals and almost want to avoid

the dominant ones. I think it sort of depends on your society and the incentive structure and so on, but at least, I think in the modern West, people are much more preoccupied with signaling prestige. They want to be admired, they want to be respected. And in fact, there's a lot of interesting research indicating that when you ask people what's associated with well-being and how good people feel and living a comfortable life and so on, and people will usually point

to socioeconomic status, how much money you have, maybe the kind of job you work and so on, but actually social status, socio-metrics status, which is respect and admiration for your peers, that is a much stronger relationship with well-being and self-esteem than socioeconomic status. So, basically, you can have all this money, but you may not feel that great if you're not alike, if people around you don't like, if you don't have many friends, if you do have, maybe you have doubts about how much respect they have for you. And so signaling a key component of it is to basically build relationships with people, friendships, associates, and of course, romantic partners. I've seen people ask this question about, you know, because a lot of people sort of read, you know, sort of pops, like psychology books about evolution, like psychology, and they'll

say like, okay, so we know that men want to do these cool, impressive things because they want to impress women. But then why do women want to do these things? Like why do women want to become lawyers and drive nice cars and wear fancy clothes and so too? Well, the thing is like, the thing is, it's not just about me. It's also about our associates and our friends and our community. You want to obtain the best friends you can and sort of build the highest quality relationships you can with the most interesting people. And it's not just men who want to do that, women want to do that too.

It seems to me that dominance rather than prestige, dominance is quite obvious. It's probably more uncouth and look down on, generally by society. You know, if you're imposing your will on someone else, and that's how you're raising yourself up, people are happy it's seeing someone raise themselves up through their own talents.

They're far less happy it's seeing someone raise themselves up by dragging other people down. It seems like culturally and legislatively, dominance state of seeking has been restricted, whereas prestige state of seeking has been restricted, whereas prestige state of seeking has been enabled. That makes sense to me. Yeah, I guess it would depend on, you know, again, like sort of being a center of structure

and sort of culturally, I would imagine somewhere in like a prison for example, dominance goes much further than prestige. Or in like organized collect the mafia, right at the situation that's the example. It's where the laws have been removed. I see. I think that you're correct. What's some state of seeking behaviors that people might not realize they're doing? that they're doing. Right, well, so it depends on, you know, even prestige itself is sort of difficult to pin down, you know, what makes someone prestigious. Well, for one, education, right, like people tend to want to show off how smart they are,

and how clever they are, or Whitty, which basically indicates that this person can probably be a problem solver or someone who, you know, basically I can rely on to solve problems or to be having interesting conversations or whatever it happens to be. So how do we sort of signal our smarts in the modern age? Well, I think literally one of them is education, right? Higher education, getting good grades, going to college, those kinds of things. Jeffrey Miller has written at length about this in one of his books.

I think it's, it was his second, this book spent, I think it was, where he basically says that like, you know, people are spending, at least this is in the US context, people are spending that sums of money to go to college, right? Like, I don't know what it is now, if you want to get a degree from Harvard $200,000 or something like that, and Miller posits that a huge reason for why people are doing this isn't for the education because you can just go on YouTube and watch like super high quality lectures from the best scholars in the world for free.

You can listen to podcasts or whatever, all the information is out there and it's available. So why would people spend 50 to $200,000 to get that piece of paper and that basically serves as a guarantee of like a minimal level of competence. There's no way for me to look at you and basically learn how clever you are if you've watched a bunch of YouTube videos.

But if you can put on your CV and show me that you earned a diploma from this university, I know a little something about you and you might be willing to pay Ten to thousands of dollars to prove that to me And then this of course will open the open more economic opportunities for you to get a job and then earn more money and so earning money of course Signals resourcefulness and and a little bit of confidence as well. So that's an interesting question actually. What are the characteristics we want to show other people? And I definitely think one of them is arts. What is the difficult to fake element of all of this?

Right. Yeah, so biologists have this thing between what they call a cheap talk or sort of cheap signals, which are things that anyone can do. I think in the past, in the mid-20th century, it used to actually be a little bit more difficult to obtain a high school diploma. Fewer people could actually go in the first place because oftentimes kids would have to work or whatever And then once that became sort of the norm that everyone graduates from high school today that That credential doesn't have the same signal in power So now I try to impress you with my high school diploma today. You may not be so surprised

So now I have to do something extra go above and beyond and sort of Paying that more, honest signal, the costly signal, all of going to college. So both somehow acquiring the money to go to college and then completing the degree signals, all of the qualities I had just mentioned. And this, I think this brings us to something about signaling

that's important to remember, which is that it's not like signaling is not like like it's not deception, it's not faking. I think people sometimes get these ideas mixed up and they think like, oh, he's just signaling. So that means he's not really doing the thing. But actually signaling is signaling wouldn't work if it was completely all deception, right? It has to communicate some real information, otherwise it wouldn't survive as a system. And for the most part, only people who have the underlying quality can afford to produce the signal just like with the peacock, right?

The peacock, only the healthy peacock can grow those feathers. So we call that a signal, but this is not to say that that tail isn't real or something. I suppose that the equivalent using the education analogy would be someone can sound as smart or as dumb as you want during a short transaction, but it's only the person that's gone through five years of university that has the piece of paper. Does this quote from Robin Hanson, which I loved, and it says that if we are built to hide ugly motives and substitute pretty ones, we should suspect that our actual motives are uglier than we think. I think that that's like a Hanson's razor that we can use. So the razor would be what that whatever you think your motive is, it's probably worse than that. Yes, precisely, precisely correct.

So I was talking to Diana Fleischmann recently and she was talking about how she has so little faith in herself. This is a woman who is balls deep in all of the Eve's psych work. And she just never, she has zero faith in herself. She just sees herself as this myriad of competing, very unactualized sort of totally complex and mostly conflicting ideas floating around in ahead. And she just doesn't believe anything that she's got going on. She said that she feels like an alien who's been put into a human's body,

said this on the episode. She feels like an alien who's been put into a human's body. And at some point in the future, she's going to have to report back to the aliens about what it was like. And I suppose what she's at, because she's quite willing to mindfulness as well. And I suppose what she's at, because she's quite very into mindfulness as well. And I think what she's talking about there is the fact that

when you are very conscious of the texture of your own mind and where the motivations are coming from, or could be coming from, for why you act the way that you act, you actually do end up living the observer life rather than the behavior life, because you're constantly meta questioning very meta cognizant about why did I do that thing? Why does this feel? Isn't it interesting that I feel anxious? I will, I can feel it in my neck. I've got the mindfulness, I've got the justification from evolutionary psychology about why anxiety feels that way.

I can see the sociocultural reason of why it's occurred because of this situation. And yeah, it actually probably makes it very difficult oddly to be present. All the mindfulness probably takes you out of the present. She's so fascinated at what's going on up top. That's, yeah, that is super interesting. Yeah, that sounds like very much like an evolutionary, like all of this perspective, and then

how they sort of live on their own heads in that way. Yeah, I mean, that makes sense to me though, that like the more you learn about the inner workings of your own mind and your psychology and how all of these things interact. The more you might start to maybe second-guess yourself, second-guess your motives, why did I use that tone of voice with that person? Why do I feel this? I think one example of this is, I've heard this from other people too, like in the fitness realm where if you're trying to get in really good shape, at first it's actually pretty easy, like that first sort of few weeks, it's actually pretty easy to sort of lose the weight and build yourself up or whatever.

But then at a certain point, like people sort of hit that plateau and number one it sort of becomes harder to maybe lose the weight or make that incremental strength gain. And sort of you start to lose motivation. You start to both the motivation causes you to have the plateau, but then the plateau also causes you to lose motivation. And I think part of what's going on there is basically your body recognizes that something is changing, right? Like homeostasis has been disrupted.

You've lost a bunch of fat or whatever. Your fat cells are shrinking. Somebody's going on in your body. And then it just hits the alarm button. And it's like, let's take his energy away. Like, let's take his motivation away. Let's make him hungry. Like, let's sort of make him not care as much.

Like, you know, whatever the smells will be sort of more apparent and powerful. You walk past that bakery. Like, suddenly, your body is working against you so that you're not making your next fitness goal. And that to me makes a lot of sense that like something so physical, you push your body, you know, your body doesn't know that you're just trying to lose a few pounds, right? Like it thinks you're starving.

And so it's like, what are you doing? Like suddenly it transforms your psychology. And I think this might be sort of, yeah, maybe like a similar example to what maybe Diana was talking about. We're just in a battle against ourselves, aren't we? And this goes back to what I said at the very beginning about us being cargo on the ship, you just along for the ride. There was this cool thing that you sent about the cycle of conspicuous leisure, conspicuous

consumption, conspicuous non-conformity, and then conspicuous authenticity that we have now. It was basically talking about what is the state of seeking behavior that people are going through. So, early in the 1900s, conspicuous leather, conspicuous leather, people are going really expensive shoes. Conspicuous leisure, people are going away on a holiday, conspicuous consumption, people are buying expensive cars, conspicuous non-conformity, counter-culture revolution,

60s, 70s, it's just peace man. And then the final one, which is the most painful one, I think, conspicuous authenticity, which is where people are open about their, in a concerns about their fears, about their goals, about their dreams, and think about what we're talking so much in popular media at the moment,

like Jordan Peterson, like it's all about personal growth, accepting your demons, facing the tyranny head on. Do you know what I mean? That is conspicuous authenticity. It's a state of seeking behavior. It shows, look, I am, this is how trustworthy I am. This is how much you can have faith in me.

I wouldn't, I'm so virtuous that I can be completely open and honest with you and I'm still going to be OK. Yeah, I mean, there is a sort of costly signal link component to that, right? Where like if you are revealing your vulnerabilities and insecurities, you know, trying to be maximally authentic, I think, you know, and again, it's unconscious, but I think part of that is that you're sort of communicating that like, I am in a position where I can sort of show you my weaknesses and I'll still be okay, right?

Like I'm so sort of, you know, in such a comfortable position, I'm so secure with myself that I can do that. Whereas, yeah, I could imagine that in other environments, revealing your weaknesses is probably a very bad idea. So I could have, yeah, maybe if a society reaches a level of comfort, then the way to sort of distinguish yourself in that comfortable reality is to sort of reveal your revolver abilities, which actually reminds me if we want to get into this is the counter-signalling idea. There are signals and then there's counter signals, right?

Which is, and more evidence, I suppose, that there's no escape in the signal in game. So, you know, signals are basically what we've been talking about this more, communicating information about yourself. Counter signals are basically trying to do the reverse of what the signals are trying to do, to distinguish yourself from them,

and thereby raising your own status in some way. So, a simple example of this, so there's a research for example on, I think this is PhD dissertations, and what the researchers found was that at lower ranking universities in the US, the linguistic complexity of the dissertations was higher. Sort of the lower, whatever, like the lower rank of the school is a less prestigious the schools, the more the students were trying to, say, impress the reader with how fancy the jargon is

or whatever. Whereas at the higher ranking universities, the linguistic complexity was actually lower. And the idea here is that, you know, I'm already at this great university. I don't need to impress anyone with my language. You already know that I'm smart, right? Like that's sort of the idea. So they're sort of counter-signalling, I don't need to use the jar I did, and because I'm already so great. They've done this too with professors, and they find that professors at lower rank universities are more

likely to insist on their title. I'm a doctor so-and-so, I'm a professor so-and-so. They put it on their syllabus, they put it on their voicemail, on their door, whatever, and at the higher ranking universities, they're less likely to insist on the title, oftentimes they just say, call me by my first name. On their syllabus and their voice notes, so on, on their email signatures, they all often just put their name. And the thinking here is sort of similar. If you're at a lower ranking university,

you want to sort of remind everyone, like, okay, maybe I'm at this lower rank school, but I'm still a professor, I'm a still a doctor, or whatever. And the higher ranking university can counter signal againstignal against that. But it's not just in academia. I think this works in multiple different ways.

How you dress, for example, I think there's a reason why people in tech will wear a hoodie to work. That's counter-signal. The red sneaker effect is the name for this. It's the mental model that was found done at conventions for business leaders and they managed to quantify how formally people were dressed and there was an inverse correlation between the how formal dress someone was in and their net worth and the red sneaker of hell and that from Rory Siddland. That is interesting.

I suppose the interesting thing about state of seeking behavior is that as soon as it looks overtly state of seeking the whole house of cards tumbles. Well, yeah, I don't think anyone would necessarily like think of it in that way, but I think that once this window becomes too ubiquitous to where no longer communicates distinctive information, that's when something has to change and people will shift away from it. So I would say that we don't respect behavior that's done mainly to gain status though, right? Like if someone looks like they're just doing it to look good, they're just a flash a flash prick. Yeah,'s, yeah, okay, I get what you're saying.

And yeah, we don't like that. I mean, it seems like too smart, me, brown nosing, or whatever, where I'm thinking about like job interviews, for example, like often the interviewer will say, why do you want this job? And if the person just says like, any money, or like, you know, I'm trying to get this job to impress my friends, or whatever it happens to be. If they use this very base level, like I'm just trying to increase my social or economic status in some way, no, they are asking you to impress me. What can you tell me that will sort of show me that you're not a status-thinking person?

How can you show me that you care about status without saying that you care about status? Which in itself is actually sort of a test of competence in a way. Yeah, how much can you kid me into believing that? How, what about envy? How's envy related to status? Yeah, well, yeah, so I think envy is one of the, so I've once heard envy described as like the only, so among the seven that we've seen, envy is the only one that people won't brag about. I don't know if this is true, but I deadly sins envy is the only one that people won't brag about.

I don't know if this is true, but I don't even know the other ones, but like gluttony or lust. Like these are things that people will maybe mess up to, but I don't know how many people are willing to brag or openly communicate the envy they feel for others. But yeah, essentially envy is this feeling that like someone else is rising above you in some way and you feel a little bit bad about it. And oftentimes, if you have the chance, it sabotage them. There's this research. I know that William Vaughip will, you

write about this in his book. Basically what they did was they had, they brought in groups like pairs, pairs of people into the lab and had to play a game. So in some instances it was two friends. They bring two friends in. So at first one of the friends would be playing this game and the other friend would have the chance to sort of share clues to help them win the game.

What the researchers did was they rigged the game so that the first person who's playing the game, they rigged every time so that that person always gets negative feedback. They're like, oh, you really did poorly at this sort of verbal puzzle task. And then they have them switch. And then same thing, the friend is playing the game. The one who was just told they didn't do very well is now the one sharing clues. And what they found, so they did it with pairs of friends and they did it with pairs of strangers. And what they found was that when it was pairs of friends, the friend who had been the person I have been told they did poorly,

it was more helpful to their friend than people were to strangers. But they were only more helpful if they were told that the task was trivial. If they were told that this is a task of, that is an accurate measure of verbal intelligence, then they were actually less helpful to the friend than they were to the stranger. They were actually trying to kind of sabotage you to think about their friend after they realized like, oh, maybe I'm not very smart. I don't want my friend to think that she is much, much smarter than me, so maybe I'll be careful with what clues that I share. And they were more likely to do this with their friend and with the stranger, which gets at this idea of, you know, we tend to feel envy more for people who we think of as roughly

on the same level as us. It's pretty rare that someone feels a ton of envy for someone who's just so far above them that like it's just not realistic, right? Like an ordinary person isn't gonna look at, I don't know, George Clooney and feel kind of envy when they see him make another movie or something, but they might feel a little bit of envy

if they find out that their coworker just got a promotion or someone in their field just wants to pursue just a word or something. And what they were researchers found is that people will experience what's called Chaudin Freud, which is pleasure at the suffering of others, the literal translation of it, but they feel Chaudin Freud the most when they see someone experience and misfortune who's similar to themselves. And so when you have people sort of learn about someone,

read about someone who's kind of similar to you, but doing just a little bit better, and then suddenly something bad happens to them, and people feel that little burst of joy, relative to someone who's just not really in your social circle, not really in your sort of your Dunbar number or something. There's so far outside of your sphere, something that happens to them, you don't really feel as much about what happens to them.

You don't feel as much pleasure at least. Why do you think that's the... Well, some people have speculated this is sort of you to sort of mating competition. I think there's a reason why you know, we kind of feel more shot and poised for people who are the same gender as us. If something, you know, a woman experiences misfortune, guys, or you know, they're less likely to feel happy about that, but if it's a guy who experiences misfortune, I'm like, you know, good, now I'm glad he's, you know, now I'm a little bit higher than him now. And so some researchers speculate, oh, this is because, you know,

if someone is roughly on your level, they are a sexual competitor, or maybe a competitor for friends, for allies. And so it might feel good to see them sort of slip up a little bit. And yeah, I mean, it's, I guess this is one of those sort of dark motives, the Hanson's razor kind of thing of like, yeah, it's tough. It's tough to, to acknowledge and accept that this is a part of our nature.

But I think maybe acknowledging it helps us to, you know, maybe mitigate it a little bit. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. That, to me, seems to play out so much more, especially over the last couple of years. And I asked a question on my Instagram that I got a lot of answers to, but none of them were that satisfying, so I'm going to pass the question down to you. And it was around why people converge on dislike groups a lot more tightly knit than on things that they like. So for instance, if you were to go on a Reddit and you were to have a look at Dave Rubens subreddit, it's been hijacked by people who really hate Dave Ruben.

It is so much more patriotic for hating Dave Rubin than anyone that liked Dave Rubin has ever been. If you go on to the fighter and the kid, it's exactly the same. Brian, Colin and Brandon Schobb, it's just there's memes, they've got inner culture, they've got inner workings. Dude, it is savage. It's so bad. And it's a lot of people I'm going to guess are probably across the both. Or they've just, both of the groups have arrived at the same sort of talking cadence separately. Why do you think it is that people find negativity so cohesive as something to bind together around? Again, as just a final example, There are certain YouTube channels out there. Phillyon is one of them. Greg, you said, is another more plates more dates, Derek is another.

They do these natty or not videos where they call out people. They basically get suggested, is this fitness model on gear or not? Almost always, there's an open-ended well he might be, or like he probably is, or this seems unrealistic. There is no equivalent on the positive side of that. There is no, isn't this guy in such great condition channel? There isn't an equivalent of that. There isn't an equivalent of the people that love Dave Rubin. Is it to do with people not wanting to just look like simps on the internet or is it something more ingrained?

Why do we bind together around mutual distaste so closely? Yeah, yeah, that's a great question. So in related, related idea from political psychology research. What researchers have recently found is that, so at least until relatively recently, if you measure people's attitudes towards, this is in the US context, Democrats and Republicans, how much they like their own party versus dislike the other party,

people tended to have more love for their party than hate for the out party. Up until roughly 2012, that was the case. And then starting in 2012, their hate for the out party, right? Like up until roughly 2012, that was the case. And then starting in 2012, their hate for the out party is much higher than they would love for their own party. So if you're a Democrat, it's not so much that you like Democrats. It's just you really hate Republicans and vice versa, right? And this has been growing.

So 2016, it grew more and then 2020 just continues. So suddenly, we're uniting more around this like of the out party than our own in-party in terms of politics, which I think is sort of getting at what you're saying here, but it's just why it's just, yeah, who really, it's a tough, I think one thing that comes to mind is, well, Roy Dommister just has a book, he came out I think last year with you before, something like the power of bad or something, which is basically like if you look at a lot of psychology research, there's this negativity bias

that the bad stands out stronger than the good. You're more likely to remember for bad things, sort of walk your attention onto negative information. It's likely to stay with you. There's even research on social media information, it's like, let's say with you, there's even research on social media for what kinds of posts get shared and retweeted, and overwhelmingly. So like the top 15 words that basically, each one of these words that you put in your tweet increases the likelihood of getting retweeted by 20%.

And overwhelmingly, there are words like attack, blame, bad, kill, destroy, hate. And there's like, at a 15 words, there's like three nice ones. It's like, you know, care or something. But even care can be used in a negative context like who cares, right? And so I think this gets at something about maybe our psychology that like, if something is bad, it just like activates our emotions more. And I don't know, there is something about like wanting to tear someone down that just feels satisfying when you're doing it with others.

Yeah, so that's part of it. The next step is why does that bind people together? Why do they find a commonality around this mutual? Is it as simple as in-group out-group tribalism? Yeah, I think that, well, so if that, that thing that they're uniting around is clearly an enemy, it can be perceived as a threat, then, you know, we can all sort of agree that like, okay, maybe we have some quibbles about the principles of our own community, but we can all definitely agree that what that person is doing is wrong on. There's no arguing, it just feels good. Like, just agreement can be uncomfortable,

but you know, agreement is nice. And if we can all sort of collectively agree that that's something bad, then I think there is a sort of, there's a bonding experience there. There's even, you know, some researchers, I think Pascal Boyer, he has suggested, so he has looked at my, mine's in the society and he suggested that it's actually advantageous to exaggerate.

So if you perceive someone as a threat, it's in your best interest to exaggerate their misdeeds. Number one, because if you want allies, you want to convince them. You want them to be on the same page emotionally as you. And so if they said something and used a word or whatever, and you think it's bad, if other people don't think it's bad, you have to really sort of convince them that, well, if they say this, this is putting our lives at risk. It's putting our safety at risk or our community

or these communities that we care about. And so it's in their best interest to magnify every single potential interpretation into something that's horrible. One because it wins you allies. And then number two is if you want to know who's truly your ally, who's really on your team, broadcasting those misheads and then seeing how people react to it will let you know, who's on my team and who's not on my team. And so if I say, this person said bad thing and it puts us all at risk and out of 10 people,

seven of them are on my side but three of them are well, I'm not so sure that was so bad. Now you know, oh, those are the three people. Those can be next that we can all unite around, right? Like those are the next people that Those can be next that we can all unite around, right? Like those are the next people could be on the chopping board. I wonder if part of it is game theoretical. I wonder if some of it is to do with the fact that if you're seeking agreement with people about a thing, there are multiple different ways that they might not arrive at how you think that thing is good. Whereas if you're seeking agreement, oh sorry, if you're seeking

agreement about thing being bad versus if you're seeking agreement about thing being good, the agreement about someone that you don't like might be easier to arrive at because it's far more simple to just, I hate that person than we like this. But oh, yeah, but do you also like this about it? Do you also like this about it? I wonder whether the negativity bias shows up in the fact that it's just simpler and it's easier to signal that you are part of the same team by doing it in that sort of a way. Yeah, that makes sense to me. I mean, you also maybe don't have to provide as many justifications.

If you hate something and you can say, you know, X, Y, it's just, I think it's easier to justify why you hate something versus if you like something, then you have to put an argument for why it's good. Yeah, it might be harder. Liking things, yeah, maybe it just doesn't have the same emotional punch. I've seen a research. So this was a liking Stanford where they basically looked at how people

choose to, or how people do bond over shared liking of things, how much they like something and what the thing happens to be and what they find is that basically if two people learn that one another likes a popular band and then you ask them, how your favorite ability ratings are with each other, it's okay, whatever. They like the same band as me. If it's like the Rolling Stones, if it's a popular band, but if it's an obscure band, then very few people have heard of the band and their favorite ability ratings are much higher.

Like, oh my God, you know that band too? Like, wow, that's crazy. And so, I think liking is just more nuance. It's harder, there's more complications with it. Whereas hate, right? Like, you know, if you can collectively agree that you hate someone, like, that's just easy, right? And yeah, yeah, it's tough.

I think it's a pretty dark, dark ass, I call you that year. Yeah. A reason I think, I spend far more time than I can't admit thinking about Dave Rubin and Brendan Shaw's subreddits. It's just, you will go and have a look at the man there, an absolute dumpster fire of like really, if they weren't so funny, it wouldn't be as bad, but there's like some really quite innovative humor on there. And what I was trying to work out, what I was trying to work out was what the common thread

between Dave and Brendan is that people had a problem with. Part of it is visibility. It's the fact that these guys have managed to get themselves to a sufficiently high social status that people are like actually f**k this guy. But the common thread and the term that kind of underlies it is grifter. So what they're concerned about is someone being unreliable. I think that's the underlying term of it. There are these montages of Joe Rogan saying a thing and then Brandon Shawb agreeing with him.

Have you seen these? I have not. Dude, they go on for like 10s of minutes of Joe will say, you know, he's the baddest guy in the planet and Brandon will go, oh, the baddest, you know he's the baddest guy in the planet and Brandon will go oh the baddest you know totally the baddest and it's just endless medallys of this and I think what people are potentially trying to highlight there is this person is untrustworthy they're prepared to compromise what they believe in service of someone who is slightly higher status than them. So Brendan always kind of, he's, they've got that younger

brother older brother kind of relationship thing going on with Rogan Rogan says something he reflects it back to him. You have Dave Rubin as well who gets accused of having pivoted from one particular viewpoint to another particular viewpoint when that political movement seemed to be like more on trend, he then attaches himself to Jordan Peterson, he then attaches himself to the IDW. Like, none of these things, I don't have a particularly strong opinion I've never met, Brenn and Shorban have spoken to Dave Ruben for 55 minutes. I don't know if that's the case, but I think that that's the signal that people are trying to identify. And one of the things that I've realized, and this is a really

interesting part of having a conversations watched is, if I don't disagree with people sufficiently frequently on this show, you get a slippery slope of people just, even if that I could have a thousand guests and I could agree with every single thing that they said by pure chance without compromising my values or being a simp. But people on the internet are so simp conscious, they're so like grift aware that they're just ready on 10 to hooks to go go this guy appears to not be Not be pushing back you didn't push back enough Well, what if I did what if I agreed like what am I gonna push back against what if I agree?

But there is a very hyper aware Gryft sense grift radar that people have on the internet Yeah, I mean I think maybe part of that is, okay, so there's research on basically how people tend to obtain sort of status in social groups. And one way that people do it is through displaying competence and another way people do it is through ingratiation, sort of displaying warmth or friendliness and that's actually the strategy that people tend to use when they're trying to get people to like them in social groups and in fact displaying too much confidence gets people to

dislike them. They're trying to advertise their abilities but if they're sort of getting along with people agreeing, nodding friendly, sort of smiling a lot, this is a strategy that people use to gain status and it tends to work. I've seen a research on MBA students, for example, the ones that obtain the most status in like their sort of group projects or whatever are the people who are the most friendly, who share the most knowledge, who are basically doing nice things. But I think that the media, like social media, and the internet, it does weird things, like, to those, if you're just trying to be nice and friendly

to someone and learn what they have to say, what they have to think, that is a perfectly natural way to communicate with someone. But then when you have thousands or hundreds of thousands of people watching, I think some percentage of them are going to be like, he's ingratiating himself too much, he's not sort of pushing back, like you're saying. I think they are sensitive to people who are, who they believe to be like seeking status. Yeah, dude, do you know what they don't approve of?

Do you know what I think it might be that I've just, I've just considered there? The guys who criticize regularly on YouTube channels, coffee zilla, for instance, and guys like Philly on and Greg do certain, Derek from more plates, more dates, they very rarely get mocked. Maybe what they're signaling is I am so competent, I am so high status that I never need to

ingratiate myself with anyone and I can still rise up through the dominance hierarchy. Interesting. Yeah, I think there's something to that. It may also depend on your audience. I don't know what their audience is or whatever, but I think maybe it could depend on who you're drawing, who you're attracting. I think something else might, you know, it's complicated of course, but I think one thing might also be people may just be simply experiencing envy. I noticed that you mentioned, so there's the Brian guy, right?

That's, he's a target of these people to attack, but not Joe himself. I mean, I know Joe is good to, he share a hate on the internet, Rogan, but it's not, I guess it's not the same. And one, this is, you know, just really speculative, but I could imagine one reason is because people might like, sort of think that Brian is more closer to their level. Right? Like they could imagine. So is the easy target.

Yeah, like I could imagine hanging out with Joe, being his younger brother, being in that position, but they couldn't necessarily imagine being Joe Rogan himself. Rubin, yeah, maybe. I mean, I'm a big fan of it. I've watched some of his videos and whatever, but maybe they just think that he's not impressive enough

to be sufficiently beyond them. Yeah. That could be as well. Both of those guys, both Brendan and Dave, do kind of play second string to a frontman that is, you know, your Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro or your Joe Rogan, Brian Callan. Yeah, that's fucking, that's interesting, man. What do you think, what about COVID-19? How's that affected or changed the way that people get status?

Yeah, well, yeah, this has been interesting. I think it's been, I've heard multiple people describe a lockdown as being like a boon for introverts, right? Like, I mean, so I just attended an academic conference this past weekend and, you know, I talked to some people in my department of office, like if you'd read other graduate students and they were like, the introverts were like, oh, that was awesome because like, you could just send some little message to the web app and the presentations were all through

like Zoom and if you wanted to like network it was just through these little chat rooms or whatever and then like maybe you can set up a Skype meeting or something later but the extroverts in my department were like how was awful like I didn't get to talk to anyone like I didn't get to you know meet up with people there was no like you no impromptu coffee or drinks after. Like usually this conference is in person and you can sort of schmooze a little bit. But online you're sort of more limited, more constrained. And I think for introverts, this is creating some opportunities.

Yeah, it's also harder in some ways, I think for extroverts, right? Like they can't get out as much. But I don't know if also seen some conflicting research as well that extroverts are actually handling lockdowns better, the introverts. Some people speculate that extroverts are still being extroverted just on the internet. They're still using Zoom and meetings and FaceTime and whatever to say in contact with people, whereas introverts are, you know, they're not forced to be social anymore, which, of They're still using Zoom and meetings and FaceTime and whatever to say in contact with people

whereas introverts are, you know, they're not forced to be social anymore, which of course they might think that that's great and nice, but oftentimes, you know, they may not be aware of how much they need that social interactions to stay healthy, right? I mean, in fact, there's actually research on this on like authenticity to go back to the earlier point about authenticity that people tend to feel more authentic. Regardless of their actual personality, just, you know, just, uh, dispositions, they feel more authentic after they have behaved in a more extraverted fashion. Uh, and so if you, if you think about, you know, you might think that people feel more authentic when they behave

in line with who they are, but actually they feel authentic when they behave in line with who they want to be, which is usually someone who's friendly, outgoing, extroverted. That's sort of the cultural ideal. They've narrowed the domain of how you can gain status has been narrowed though, right? Like the example of the very commanding boss who can just own the boardroom because of the way that he walks in and the suit that he wears and the car that he pulls up in outside and the way he smells and the watch he's got on and his body language. You know, that's all being reduced down to a little screen that he takes up a pixelated version of.

So, if I was a more ambitious graduate student, one idea that I had was to basically try to figure out how people detect status cues in Webcam, Zoom, Skype environments, right? So like, I'm looking at you, I look in your room, I sort of, you know, see all of these cues, you know, you're emitting, you know, even you yourself, you know, it's not you, it's your belongings, there's also an emits signals as well, how people sort of encode those and what they, what they learn about people, what they, you know, how accurate those perceptions are, how much they're aligned with reality. I think that would be fascinating, because like you're saying, in the past, it was the boss in the office. And maybe they're walking a certain way, and they have the car

or whatever. But to some degree, there is this level playing field, because you're all in the same building, doing the same stuff, adhering to the same dress code. But when you're working from home, I've heard a lot of companies have sort of, softened the dress code a little bit, maybe working different hours or whatever,

and you can sort of see what's behind people, what's, where they're choose to work, what's behind them and so on. And I wonder if people are looking at their co-workers differently now, even if it's not, there's no embarrassing moments with the catwalking virus. I mean, even if it's just during your room, do you view your co-workers differently now. You know, even if it's not there's no embarrassing moments with the catwalking virus. I mean, even if it's just during a room, you view your co-worker differently now, based on what you see behind them, have they elevated themselves in your mind,

or maybe lowered themselves a bit. But yeah, I think that it's definitely constrained and created both opportunities and obstacles to gain status, but I don't know, I don't know about you now, but I've been posting more on social media and like trying to like, I don't know, have more of these kinds of conversations and so on and I don't know, it hasn't been a terrible year for me. No, not for me either. I was saying the other day over the last year or 80 months or so, I've developed and you're one of them.

Butties who I can ring without organizing, like I don't book it in on the calendar, I just ring and see if they're free. And if they are, I have a conversation for like two hours and then put the phone down. Like we did this maybe about a month ago or so, just rang, ended up chewing each of the zez off. I'm reading to you from books,'re like off on a walk and cooking around the foam for ages. So there's certain elements I think that have really helped us to connect. Have you heard about the Zoom boom of lockdown face? Do you know about this? I have no idea what that is. So there has been a significant increase in cosmetic surgeries

from the neck and above. And it's because people are looking at themselves on Zoom all day, and they're realizing that they're particularly unhappy with the way that they look. So plastic surgeons are noting a Zoom boom. That's, yeah, I mean, that makes a lot of sense, honestly. Yeah, I mean, people are pretty hard on themselves in terms of their appearance. I've actually seen some interesting research on this. People assess their own appearance and other people

to more so women tend to be harder on their own appearance than more objective unbiased observers. So that makes sense if you're looking at your own image and you're hard on yourself that you would feel that. And yeah, I mean, this brings to mind some interesting research about like self-receptions. I mean, oftentimes we only look at each other, you know, ourselves rather in the mirror in the morning or something, maybe in the bathroom walking past. But now we're looking at our own base all day long. And the research sort of shows how do people view themselves,

and they've basically taken people's pictures and either sort of show them the real picture or a picture they sort of modified to be, I think, 20% more attractive. And I can't remember exactly how they did this, but basically a more attractive version of the same face. And if you ask people, we take a photo of you, one of these is the actual photo, which one is it? People overwhelmingly choose the 20% more attractive face.

And now, I guess we can't really pull ourselves in that way because you're looking at the real face, not the 20% more sort of psychological image we carry around with ourselves all day. Yeah, I mean, I think that that research is, yeah, I mean, in Bon Hipples book, he actually talks about this about how, you know, we don't like candid photos of ourselves, not because our friends are bad photographers, but because that's what we actually look like.

We tend to look at, you know, the images of ourselves we see the most are like that professional, portrait photo, the one with the lighting just right and the filters and this and that, and we see that, and that's how we think of ourselves. But actually the candid photo is who you really are, and now we're seeing that candid photo. Yeah, that's, yeah, I didn think about that. That's, that's rough. The photo from the side where the hairline's wonky and you can see that you actually missed a little bit when you were shaving earlier on today. And yeah, man, it's a wonderful confidence levels have declined since, since all this. Yeah. I don't know.

One of the most fun mental model effect that I learned last year was how you can get laid more easily by going out with a guy who looks similar but slightly more ugly than you. So you're basically utilizing the anchoring bias. But the problem is, if me and you go out together, no one's confusing me for you. So you're basically utilizing the anchoring bias, but the problem is, if me and you go out together, no one's confusing me for you. It's a different ethnicity, different sort of look. What you need to find is a slightly more ugly, shorter, fatter Asian, or I need to go out and find a guy who looks a little bit like me, but like, you know, a bit more of a wonky nose and, you know, a bit of a slump, maybe he's got maybe a bit slumpy. And that, because what people see is they anchor you against someone that looks similar to you, but when you're anchoring

too completely, I can't compare an iPhone to the price of a jet, but I can compare an iPhone to the price of a Samsung. And, um, yeah, that, that anchoring effect was something that I read about last year, which was hilarious. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, when I hear that, I think about like sort of positional status, like, you know, an economic, so called positional goods, you know, social status is, is, it's not absolute right, it's relative. It's not.

You know, you're not ranked on some objective scale with the entire world. You're mostly ranked with the people who are just around you. I know economists have done research, simple versions of this where they ask people, would you rather make $60,000 a year, but everyone at your firm of the same rank makes 50 versus making 80, but everyone else around makes 90. People choose the first option. They're making absolutely less, but you know, they're higher than everyone around them. I once, you know, along this sort of relative status line, I heard this. This is a, I think this is a Jewish folklore story. There's a man who is walking along the beach

and he sees a lamp. He rubs it and then there's a genie and yet, he says to him, you know, I will grant you whatever wish you want, but I will give your neighbor twice as much as whatever I give you. And the man stops and he thinks and he asks the genie, I want you to pluck one of my eyes out. And so the idea here is that people will actually incur damage to themselves at costs if it will bring the closest person to them on that same level, lower than themselves. I heard there was an Irish variation of this where the guy asked the genie, he says,

I want you to beat me half the death. And I think this sort of captures that intuition of like, it's not something that we're not ranked on this scale that we can very neatly say that like, oh,, it's not something that, you know, we're not ranked on this scale that we can very, very neatly say that like, oh, more of this is always good. Sometimes more of something isn't always good if everyone around you is getting even more of that thing, right? I offer you, you know, 10 IQ points, that might sound great, but if I'm going to give everyone else 20, now you're actually, you know, absolutely smart of a relatively little bit of art and it's

hard, right? Man, we were going to do, we were going to do another one, but we're just going to have to do it in future. This has been far too fun. People want to check out your awesome newsletter or your fantastic Twitter, where should they go? Yeah, the website is just robk Henderson dot com letter K, and then Twitter saying robkhenderson. The most underrated follow on Twitter in 2021.

I said it to you the other day, man. I really, really appreciate you coming on. We've got so much to go through. We've got all stuff to do with cultural evolution and co-illitional instincts. We're going to do another episode soon, but we'll leave this one here. Thank you so much for coming on man. Yeah thank you Chris.