Modern Wisdom - #552 - Dr Kevin Dutton - Understanding The Wisdom Of Psychopaths

Episode Date: November 14, 2022

Dr Kevin Dutton is a psychologist, author, and elite performance consultant whose research focuses on persuasion and social influence, psychopathic personality and elite cognition. Psychopaths get a bad rap. Perhaps understandably. They have a branding problem to say the least. But there are some personality traits like emotional control, focus, drive and single-mindedness that elite performers can model off of psychopaths to improve their effectiveness. Expect to learn how psychopathy exists at all, why teams kicking second in a penalty shootout have a 30% greater chance of missing, why psychopath pilots in world war 2 didn't make it home even though they won their fights, how different accents can be more prejudiced against than different races, why splitting the world into categories creates a foundation for huge biases to occur and much more... Sponsors: Get 7 days free access and 25% discount from Blinkist at https://blinkist.com/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get 20% discount on House Of Macadamias’ nuts at https://houseofmacadamias.com/modernwisdom (use code MW20) Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours at https://www.drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Buy Kevin's Book - https://amzn.to/3fmAm9A Check out Kevin's website - https://www.drkevindutton.com/  Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello everybody, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Dr Kevin Dutton. He's a psychologist, author and elite performance consultant whose research focuses on psychopathic personality and elite cognition. Psychopaths get a bad rap, perhaps understandably. They have a branding problem to say the least, but there are some personality traits like emotional control, focus, drive and single mindedness that elite performers can model off to improve their effectiveness every day.

Expect to learn how psychopathy exists at all, why teams kicking second in a penalty shootout have a 30% greater chance of missing, why psychopath pilots in World War 2 didn't make it home even though they won their fights. How different accents can be more prejudiced against than different races, why splitting the world into categories creates a foundation for huge biases to occur. And much more. Don't forget, you might be listening, but not subscribed, and you're going to miss episodes when they go up. If you do that, you don't want to.

The next few weeks have got some of the biggest guests I've ever had on the show. So go to the follow button in the middle on Spotify or on Apple Podcasts as a plus in the top right hand corner. It really does support the show and it makes me very happy indeed and it ensures that you're not going to miss those episodes. Thank you. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Dr Kevin Dutton. Kevin Dutton, welcome at the show. Cheers Chris, thanks for having me mate, Aua. And well thank you.

How do you describe what you do for work? What is your area of expertise if there is one? Well I'm a psychologist at number one. I'm talking to you from down undermate in Adelaide, whereas 830 in the morning at the moment, so bright and early, and I'm professor of the public understanding of psychology at the University of Adelaide. So that is Australia's first professor of such a thing. So Australia's first professor of the public and understanding of psychology, which basically means that I bring psychology to the general public.

So psychology is a very broad church. It's got loads of subdisciplines and different areas of study, everything from forensic to social, to developmental, to educational to sport, all those kinds of things. And so what my job is down here is to collate the best of that kind of information and make it accessible to the general public. So that's what I do for a living. That's my

day job. My area expertise, as most people will probably recognize me for, is psychopaths. As most people will probably recognize me for is psychopaths. So many years ago, about 10 years ago, now I wrote a book called The Wisdom of Psychopaths, which became very controversial. And it still, I think, the only book that suggests that psychopaths aren't all bad, that actually, we have this stereotype of psychopaths being rapist and serial killers and what have you, but actually if you were to look inside the realms of special forces, for example,

you would also find people who were high on what I call the psychopathic spectrum. So when I wrote wisdom of psychopaths, as I say, became a controversial book, it became quite well-known. And it was on the basis of that, really, that I suppose, you know, if you can say this kind of thing, I kind of made my name in psychology. So you would be the current Australian equivalent

in psychology of brain cocks for physics in the years? Oh, well, listen, don't put me down like that, mate. Don't you dare. in equivalent in psychology of brain cocks for physics in the years. Oh, well, listen, don't put me down like that, mate. Don't you dare, don't you dare put me down like that. What did it know? Actually, Brian's over here doing a big tour at a moment. Yeah. He's doing a great big tour.

Yeah, I mean, listen, I'd go with that. Yeah, at the moment, obviously not doing a big stadium shows like Brian, but one can only hope. Okay. Yeah, no, absolutely, mate. Talk to me about the adaptive explanation for how psychopathy exists. Why would it be that evolution creates humans that have that particular mix of traits? Well, it's true, isn't it? I think first of all, it's probably a good idea to define what a

psychopath actually is, Chris, because there's a lot of misnomeness about psychopaths, mate. And so it might help you listen to just get a kind of a brief description what they are. I mean, it's true, isn't it? When most people hear the word psychopath, they instantly think of, you know, on the silver screen, serial killers like Hannibal Lecter, and in real life, serial killers like Ted Bundy. But actually when psychologists like myself talk about psychopaths, mate, we're actually referring to a distinct subset of individuals with a specific constellation of personality traits, such as ruthlessness, fearlessness, mental toughness, self-confidence, cornstunder pressure, emotional detachment, focus, charm, charisma, and of course those trademark deficits in conscience and empathy that you hear so much about. Now, none of those

traits is necessarily a problem in itself, Chris. In fact, all of them gild up at the right levels and deployed within the right context can actually prove rather useful. Okay, the key here, as I've always said, lies in context and level. So imagine, for instance, a personality mixing desk, probably the best way of thinking about it, on which those traits are just outlined, comprise the kind of hodgepodge of knobs and sliders. Okay, twiddle them up and down in various combinations, and you arrive at two conclusions, all right. The first one is that there is no objectively correct setting at which those dials might be positioned, but rather it will invariably depend on a cot on context on the particular set of circumstances.

You might happen to find yourself in. The second, and this comes back to answering your question, the second is there exists certain jobs or professions, for example, that by their very definition might demonstrate what we might call precision engineered psychopathy, that might by their very nature,

have those dials turned up a little bit higher than you might find in everyday life. So, give you a couple of examples. Imagine you've got the skill set to be a top surgeon, all right? But you lack the ability to emotionally disengage from the people that you're operating on. We're not going to cut it. Oh, it's quite literally, in fact, you're not going to cut it. Sorry, mate, I didn't mean that. But imagine you've got the financial and strategic smarts to be a top business person, but the lack the ability to fire someone if they're under performing, that ruthlessness to let someone go,

or the coolness under pressure to ride out of storm, or the sheer balls necessary to take a calculated risk when appropriate. Again, you're not going to make it right here. Maggie, you've got the ability to be a top lawyer, but the ULAC that almost pathological self-confidence, that almost narcissism to be the center of attention in the middle of a packed courtroom. Now those characteristics, those traits that I've just outlined for you there, ruthlessness, fearlessness, self-confidence, emotional detachment and coolness under pressure comprise five core characteristics of the psychopathic personality. Now, would you say they were dysfunctional in those contexts? I certainly wouldn't and I've written books on that and papers on that. So to answer your question, now we've defined psychopathy and given you examples in everyday life. If we go back to say the days of our ancient evolutionary forefathers, you know, a couple of million years ago, when we were living in small groups on the East African savannas, you could imagine that there

were certain characteristics such as the aggression, the ability to take risks, the ability to be predatoryal in terms of hunting. You can see how, and also the ability to tell lies actually, to infiltrate other groups, maybe to get information out of them. You can see how these kinds of characteristics which are beneficial in the modern era actually might have evolved in era's long gone. So the kind of as I say, the James Bond profile, the ruthless, fearless, remorseless character, actually that we see today does have its uses, not just in special forces and the agency, them

are five or six of those kinds of things, but in every job like surgery, in business, for example. But also they would have been selected for many years ago for the reasons that I just outlined. So even though, raider or infiltrator of other tribe wasn't an occupation, it was a role. It was a role that needed filling, and because that needed filling, it was adaptive across an entire group. For certain members of that group, probably not too many, because if you had 150 person tribe

and all of them were side-guards, there would be way too much chaos, but I'm gonna guess that the amount of psychopaths that we have proportionately at the moment would be the amount on average that was effective to keep a group moving forward. You've absolutely nailed it there. Chris, in fact, there's a branch of psychology

and information science. If you were to draw the Venn diagrams between psychology and information science and decision making, you've got an area that we call game theory, you might have heard of it. And when game theory is model the incidents, the prevalence of psychopathy, psychopathic personalities within the general public, which is roughly about 1% of people

are psychopaths, what we would regard as diagnosed psychopaths, then game theory when you look at the game theory models, they actually bear that out in the computer algorithms as well. So you're absolutely right, You can't have a society which is all psychopaths because it wouldn't be a society. That's the first thing. It's interesting, it's interesting parallel is with the Vikings many years ago. They had a group of, well, I suppose you could call them

very early special forces soldiers, called the Berserkers, is where we get the word Berserk from. And the Vikings were pretty fierce enough, but the Berserkers took it to an absolute extreme. So they were almost like the special forces when the Vikings, and they fought with an absolute trance-like frenzy, and obviously contributed to the Vikings

fierce and reputation down the years. The problem with the Bithurkers was they were fantastic in wartime but they were absolutely terrible in peacetime because they were constantly looking for fights, probably a bit like your days in the Newcastle nightclubs may actually. I think there was some Bithurkers in the Bithurkers on the street, some localtual wagon. Definitely some Viking DNA floating around. Talk to me. When it comes to psychopaths,

one of the interesting things, they're confidence and the pressure, the ability to deal with that stuff, what was that study that looked at penalty takers trying to win versus penalty takers trying not to lose or trying to catch up on the score sheet? Yeah, it's very interesting that. So there was a study which looked at what people,

and obviously England, we've got the world cup coming up next month, God, say, don't ask me about that mate. But yeah, there was a study done which looked who was most likely to score penalties in a penalty shootout. And most people watching a penalty shootout. And you know, most people watching a penalty shootout would think that the pressure is equally high on everybody. But actually, when you look and you you kind of analyse it, there's different pressures depending on whether you are taking a penalty to

keep your team in the competition or whether you are taking a penalty to put your team through. or whether you are taking a penalty to put your team through. So if you're taking a penalty to put your team through, the pressure is actually less than the pressure on you if you're taking a penalty to keep your team in, because our brains have evolved a bias towards loss, rather than reward. If you think back to our evolutionary history, if you face with a rustling the bushes and you make a wrong decision and you think, oh, well, that's nothing, then it can come out of

the bush and eat you pretty quickly. It might not be the breeze. It might be a saber-toothed tiger. So actually, our brains have evolved a bias towards loss a version. We don't want to make a mistake. We don't want to have a situation where we are complacent and where we mistake something which is eventually going to eat us. So which is going to lose us our lives. So those kinds of evolutionary biases that evolved many years ago are still with us today in football stames when it comes to penalty shootouts. So if you're taking a penalty, which if you miss is going to put your team out, that loss is really weighing

on your mind way more than if you know you're going to score and you're going to put your team through. The stakes, at least the way the brain computes it, Chris, are much higher if you're taking a penalty to stay in. Do you know what the relative percentage is on? I think it's something like off the top of my head, mate. I think it's something like 62% of people score when you're taking a penalty to keep your team in. And I think it's roughly about 90% score when it's taking penalty to put your team through. So it's something like that. It's something like 1690. So it's still the majority of people score,

but when you're putting it when you're taking penalty to put your team through, why more people score? I suppose although if you're talking about England, mate, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, maybe that study, maybe that study doesn't want, wasn't done in England. Yeah, it's just never. Yeah. What that means is when you're doing a normal penalty shootout, let's say that you're into the knockout stages of a competition and you get to the end. There is a huge advantage. There is a 30% advantage to the team that gets to take the penalties first. Let's say that each team continues to score. It's four-four with the final two penalties to go. If team one misses and team two scores, team one is out, but team one never faces the situation, game theoretically, of that 30% disparity between the success or failure at concern. So there is a huge, I mean, that's the most important way more important

than which NG get who gets to kick off first. The most important thing, perhaps in an entire competition, is who gets to take the penalties first? It's literally who wins the toss. You're absolutely right. That, that, that, what we call in psychology, interacts, you know, the who wins that toss interacts with, you know, your ability to actually score. Penalty shootouts are very interesting. There's a lot of, with your ability to actually score penalty shootouts are very interesting. There's a lot of, you can almost have a degree in penalty shootouts. You can almost set up an entire degree course in it.

There's loads and loads of different ways of penalty shootout can go wrong. How things prey on the mind. The best thing to do in a penalty shootout is, well, first of all, to practice them, which England are now doing, that's the first thing, Chris. The second thing is to make your mind up and just go for it. So, literally, a lot of penalties are missed, not in the run-up, which people think is often the case, but actually, the penalty is often missed when you put the ball down. If you imagine a

player, if you put the ball down and then you turn around and you walk away from the ball to a point where you're going to begin your run up. And that point in that, when you put the ball down and you turn away and you begin the walk to your run up, that is when it goes wrong most of the time because that's all of a sudden when last minute doubts or changes of mind can creep in, all that kind of noise that usually disrupts the clarity of thought, that can creep in, and you can change your mind at the last minute. Without you even knowing you're going to do it. So the way around that is to absolutely decide from the word go, no matter what happens, it's top,

left, bottom, right, or what have you. From a psychological point of view, that's the best way of winning a penalty shootout. To be absolutely confident, to be absolutely certain. I also heard that nine out of 10 deaths on Everest happen on the way down. And you had some similar story about fight-apilots in World War II, maybe. It was super successful in a dog fight, but then not so good afterward. Absolutely right. Well, yes, that's true. Summit in World War II, some of the greatest fighter pilots,

who were absolutely brilliant in aerial combat, ruthless and fearless, lost their lives on the journey home, because such was their laser-like focus to winning the dog fights at all costs, that they took their minds off the fuel gauges. And that's a typical psychopathic characteristic, might I say. So, you know, if you, it's really interesting actually, I've, I know quite a few fighter pilots

through various contacts I'll have in the military, and there's, there's a kind of an old joke that you can tell a fire pilot within about a minute of talking to them because they'll tell you they are. And it's, it's actually very true. And they've got a license to do that because just as James Bond has a license to kill, I think we all have various licenses to do something. You don't get a fight apart without ego, okay? In order to be top-gun, you've got to have a bit of an ego, Chris, and I think people who do that kind of job are licensed to have that that kind of ego. And they're also pretty, they might be very nice men, but they're also pretty ruthless, pretty fearless and very cool under pressure. Now, what you pretty, they might be very nice men, but they're also pretty ruthless,

pretty fearless and very cool under pressure. Now what you find, as I was saying, going back to what you're saying in the olden days during the Second World War, that ruthless and fearlessness sometimes would result in tunnel vision, where the pilots were so intent on winning dogfights at all costs that actually they took their minds off the fuel gauges and of course ran out of fuel on the way home and paid the penalty obviously. So yeah, absolutely right. So there's a balance to be struckmate. There's a balance to be struck between, you know, getting the job done and plan a percentage game. You've got this quote from your new book which says,

what makes the optimal number of categories for anything is usually a trade-off between practicality and precision? Yeah. What do you mean by that? Why did evolution give creatures the ability to categorize at all? Well, if you think about it, Chris, everything out there is on a continuum. So you could have gender, sexual orientation, race, skin colour, colours of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Everything out there is grey. And in order to make sense of reality, in order to work out how its multitude of different elements relate to and interact with each other, we need to dissect its amorphous unstructured content into smaller, sharper, self-contained, bite-sized units. In order to make sense of reality this continuum, we need to construct for ourselves the illusion of a checkerboard surface along which we can move sense and reason like rational thinking chest pieces in an orderly predictable predictable and rule based fashion. Otherwise, everything and anything would mean anything and everything.

We've got to have categories in the world. It was really funny, actually, only yesterday, I was sitting in the Adelaide over having a bit of lunch and there was a, not far from where I live, and a groundsman was out cutting the grass. And he was mowing it, you know, like, you know, groundsman cut the grass, they cut patterns and he was going up and down,

down, down, down and then he was going across and across and across. And it struck me as a real metaphor for life mate because actually, you know, reality out there is just one big C agree, big one big C agree grass. But our brains kind of think the way lawnmowers cut, they think in far straight lines. And as a result of the grass cutting, he had kind of, he'd basically turned the sea of green grass into a lattice of lime and emerald, as you know. And that's very much the way our brains dissect and cut up reality. We must have categories in the world in order to make sense of it, in order to survive. I mean, give an example. If you didn't have past and fail in exams, what would be the point of having exams? Okay, now, I know this is an unfair one, but what's the point of having speed limits?

Well, otherwise, everyone's going to be driving as fast or as slow as they want. Now, if you're done doing 34, I think it's a 10%, isn't it? So rule, so if you're done doing 34 and in a 30 mile an hour zone, technically you can get away with 33. If you're done doing 34, it might seem really unfair, one mile an hour over the limit, but okay, so what are you going to do about that? Well, okay, what about making 37? Well, okay, what if you're doing 36?

What if you're making 36 and you're done 37? Again, you're going to think it as unfair. So we have to be able to draw lines in this multitude of continual that are out there, Chris, in order to make sense of reality and in order to to make sense of the relationships between different parts of it. Now, to go back to your question, our brains evolved what I call a categorization instinct for that reason, in order to make sense of reality, in order to make it more predictable, in order to enable us to behave rationally and in order to simplify things, okay? Great quote, one of my favorite quotes of all time by now, Galagon is brother Liam, sums it all up. And he said that Liam is a man with a

fault in a world of soup. And I think, I think we're all men, we're women. We're born with faults in a world of soup, mate. We have, we live in this kind of liquid amorphous structure. And our brains have kind of got this kind of black and white way of trying to capture it and it doesn't work. And that's where a lot of the problems arise in in everyday life because we we we're born with these binary black and white brains that we evolved many years ago and yet technological advancement has produced the world which is far more complex than the world in which our ancestors grew up in. So where it gets interesting, I think, is when other needs, apart from simplicity and functionality,

start taking over from the original needs for categorization. Now, I think a great example of this, now I'm not digging anyone out here by the way, I think a great example of this occurred a few years ago on a budget airline where you know when you're on an airline, you get the duty free trolley coming down, selling perfumes and what have you. What a duty free trolley kind of start coming down the aisle and one of the passengers on the plane took exception to the fact that the perfumes were

divided up into male and female. And they thought that was very last century. And they wrote a letter of complaint to the airline saying, look, this is surely can do better than that. This is pandering to the binary, gender kind of stuff. Actually, these should all be put in the same drawer and they shouldn't be differentials made between male and female. Actually, the airline, I believe acquiesced to that. That's very interesting. You're objecting to male female categories on the basis of identity. And yet, if you think about what that means,

it absolutely decreases the functionality of selling perfumes on a plane. Because if you're not a perfume efficient, I don't know whether it's given, whatever is a male or a female perfume. Somebody asked, they could be buying a present for their wife or their husband or whatever. So if you've got them all in the same drawer, you're kind of doubling your search time in a sense, because you're rabbling around trying to find wherever it is. Imagine you've got one drawer on another. It's easy to find it.

Imagine if we had all of our clothing stores, where instead of there being a men's floor and a woman's floor, they were all just mixed together. And you couldn't work out, actually, is this a guy's pair of jeans or is this a girl's pair of jeans? Need to have to sort through twice as much. Right, well, in order to get through that. Yeah, well, I put it in.

So what you're talking about is that we have a environment now with far more complexity than we were used to. When we try and apply our pattern identification thinking and to try to categorise things that sometimes gets hijacked. Absolutely right. That's exactly, you've known it with the clothing analogy and even better one than, well, actually the perfume analogy, I'm sure they would be people that would be pushing for something like that. But that is where we evolved the categorization instinct to simplify the world.

And we've got to be careful in the current day and age that original categorization instinct for those original reasons isn't hijacked by other needs that may well be important, but actually don't simplify the world at all and make it much more complex and then make it far more difficult to make decisions for the benefit of most people. So that's a great example of this is the color spectrum. That's what most people will understand. So when you look at a rainbow crystal, you stand away from it. You see seven primary colors.

You see red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. However, the closer you get to a spectrum, the less clear and apparent those seven primary colors become. And actually, when you get right up close to say red and orange, it's very, very difficult, in fact, impossible to tell the colours apart when you look on the border. When does red fade into orange, when does orange fade into yellow? It's actually impossible because there's infinite gradations. So why do we perceive seven colours? Well, we perceive seven colours at a distance because our brains have made a decision for us over millions of years of evolutionary history that actually sevens

about the optimal number of colors that we need to see in order to get by. All right, we don't need to see four million shades of red. So waste the time, mate. So we can get by with seven colors. Our brains are kind of the okay, that's about right. So there you go. Now, incidentally, of course, that's just Western cultures, there are some cultures, such as the Beringmo in Papua New Guinea, that don't see a difference between blue and green. Actually, it's called Nol, blue and green are the same color to them.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, oh yeah, mate, yeah. So, I mean, so that we're talking here from of Western, you know, you're in America, I'm in Australia, we're both from the UK. We're talking about our own perspective, but actually there, you know, seven primary colors, there are some cultures in around the world, you only see four or five. So, for example, I mean, a very good friend of mine, a colleague, two colleagues, Jules Davidoff and Debbie Robes and give them a bit of a plug, have done lots of studies with tribes in Papua New Guinea and also the Himbatribe down in Namibia, Northern Namibia in Africa.

And they've looked at, you know, if you present various color swatches, you know, Lodil Olc Julux color swatches, if you present 20 shades of green to say a Bering mode, I think it's a Bering mode, Trives person who's papi and you guinea, they will and they're also very very slightly different, they will be able to pinpoint those minute differences between those 20 shades of green. If you were to show us, me and you, those 20 shades of green, we're probably looking to go, can't tell the difference at all. However, if you were to then put a green swatch next to a blue swatch, me and you could tell the difference very easily, but the Beringmo probably wouldn't be able to do it. Very interesting. That's how the brain works, mate.

Okay, so what happens if people categorize too narrowly? If people get into this categorization across their entire life, this has something to do with hoarders, I think. That's right. Yeah, so studies have been done looking at hoarders. And if you categorize too narrowly, so most of us would, you know, if you think of say like a washing up liquid bottle, we would be able to say, okay, one washing up liquid bottle, who cares? You know, there's other washing up liquid bottles, which, you know, they're all the same pretty much, you know, we can do with one. They're all in the same category pretty much, we can do that,

you know, one will do us. Horders, look at it the other way. Horders are unable to see the commonalities between say a particular object or entity like a washing up bottle. Every single one is different and has its own unique kind of features. And so if you start thinking like that, it's very difficult to throw one away or throw nine if you got to any of them. It's difficult to throw 19 of them away and just keep the one because actually they're not the same thing as you and I might see it, they're all got their own individual idiosyncratic features about them. And so when we think about hoarders, there's a lot of other things going on, well, as

well. But if you think about hoarders as being, oh, you know, they're just mad or crazy or filthy or whatever, actually as usual, when you look at the psychology behind it, the brain works in very mysterious ways. And I call, in my book, I call, a hoarding, a categorization disorder, because it's, we're just seeing categories of objects in a different way to us. Whereas we look at, say, I don't know, a newspaper, as being, okay, there's loads of different

newspapers, loads of different editions. We don't need 5,000 newspaper or whatever, or child up in bundles. They see it very differently. Each one has got its own individual properties and so each one must therefore be preserved. And that's why it's very, very difficult for orders to throw stuff away. Incidentally, the reverse of that is, you might know this, that there are some world leaders who simplify their war droves because they realize that every decision that we make even a very simple one like when we get up in the morning, what am I going to wear this morning is a drain on the brain's battery.

And sometimes those decisions can, especially in terms of what you wear. I mean, I know people that actually, you know, and I'm speaking on behalf of a friend, by the way, who actually really, you know, sometimes take a very long time to decide what they're going to wear anymore. So Barack Obama, for instance, that's why he pretty much always wore a dark blue or navy suit, and a white, a blue shirt, and and a very plain tie because he didn't have to decide what he was going to wear in the morning. It was pretty much a uniform and that's

actually the psychology of uniforms as well. You don't have to waste time deciding on abstract entities like what am I going to wear, what am I going to wear, what am I going to appear, it's done for you. And so that ability to make decisions automatically rather than, you know, who are trying to appeal to what image or vibe are trying to give off all these kind of category selections we're making our brains is taken away from us because making decisions based on categories can often be a real drain, as I say, on our cognitive batteries. Talk to me about the relationship between cognitive complexity and cognitive closure, because there's this frinkle, brunswick study thing

that I thought was absolutely fascinating. What's that? Yeah, well, cognitive closure, we all differ. We're all on a spectrum, and we all differ on the amount of information that we need to make decisions. Now, that's not linked to intelligence, Chris, okay? So I know very intelligent people that just differ in their ability in the amount of information they need to feel comfortable to make a decision. So sometimes we get people that, and we all know them,

we need to chew over every single aspect of a problem. They can never get enough information in order to make a decision. And they go on and on and on, trying to work out what the various aspects are and how they relate to each other. Sometimes they'll need very, very simple decisions. Those people have what we call a very high need for cognitive complexity. And then we get people who have a low need for cognitive complexity,

who are able to just see a couple of bits of information say, okay, more of a gut instinct, that's all I need. And to add a little bit of complexity to that situation, we differ in terms of our needs for cognitive complexity in various aspects of our life. So for example, I kind of tend to need quite a bit of information to make decisions. I'm allowed, I'm licensed to do that, I'm a buff in our my academic mate.

However, when I go into a restaurant, I'm like a new restaurant, I don't know, I'm lightning fast at looking at a menu and making up my mind what I want to eat. Now don't ask me how that works mate, I have no idea, but I'm very, very good at going to a restaurant saying okay, that'll do. So within a restaurant situation, a new restaurant situation, ordering the dinner, I have a low need for cognitive complexity, but there are other aspects where I need a high need for cognitive complexity. And that's linked to what we call cognitive closure. In other words, our ability to bring the shutters down on a decision.

Okay, look, that's it. I've made the decision on this. I'm happy with that. So, high need for cognitive closure is related to cognitive complexity, but not the same thing. High need for cognitive closure is how comfortable we are at keeping something going

rather than just wanting a need to get it over where that decision is done. Now, of course, won't go into too much of all this, but you've got a two by two grid here, haven't you? You've got people that have a high need and a low need for cognitive complexity, and then you've got people with a high and a low need for cognitive closure.

And when you start going nuts, is when you've got a really high need for cognitive complexity. In other words, you need lots of information to make a decision, but you've also got really high need for cognitive complexity. In other words, you need lots of information to make a decision, but you've also got a high need for cognitive closure. In other words, you might want all the information, but blind me, you really want to shut something down quickly. The two kind of relates,

so high need for complexity, high need to get it over with. Actually, that's when you start going nuts. Now, interestingly, there have been studies done, looking at high needs for cognitive complexity. And actually, again, not to go into too much detail about it, but extremists and fundamentalists of most persuasions have low need for cognitive complexity and a high need for cognitive closure.

In other words, they don't really need too much information to make their minds up and they're very happy making their minds up sharpish. So when you get, and of course it's not quite as simple as that, there's other socio-cultural factors going on with fundamentalism and extremism, but generally speaking, if you look at the cognitive profile, if you've got a low need for cognitive complexity, in other words, you don't really need too much information to make your mind up and a high need for cognitive closure, you like to get things over with, you're kind of veering into extremism category there, territory there, rather.

It makes a lot of sense that that person will be very easily hijacked. They want an answer to why this particular incident occurred. Somebody meets their threshold, which happens to be incredibly low. They attach their sense of self-worth to it, and then you're off to the races with ideology and all of the protectionist strategies that we create around ourselves. We attach ourselves to groups and so on and so forth. So I have to presume that the inbuilt desire for categorization has some relationship with tribalism. Oh, for sure.

Absolutely right. And these days it's very interesting, Chris, when we look at what's happening on the web-mate, social media and the internet. There's actually a phrase, which has done the, doing the rounds, started a couple of years ago, almost in like the post-truth, kind of stuff, which reached his peak with Trump, called tribal epistemology.

It's a long old word. Tribal epistemology is basically, well, nothing's true anymore, objectively speaking, but it's true for your group or tribe, and therefore, because it's true for your group or tribe, it's real. And that's very, very interesting because then we start getting into all kinds of smoke and mirrors and truth chambers and echo chambers on the web as well. But yes, you're absolutely right. Group norms, group morais, group, the idea of stories and anecdotes which swirl around a group to keep groups together

and over the centuries and over the years become fused in truth. And as a result of that, these kinds of things, the brain has evolved a propensity to distrust information coming from other groups and to place perhaps too much trust and validity in the information which is a currency in your own group. Because obviously you've got something in common with those people in your group, you've got a common goal, you've got a common background. And of course, if any con man will tell you, people are way more likely to believe you, if you are one of them, then if you're an outsider.

Didn't you spend a bunch of time with con man? Didn't you do a ton of research with them? What happened there? I did. Now, it's my first book actually, Flipnosis. It started with my old man, mate. I grew up in London. My dad, you remember only fools and horses, don't you? Well, my dad was like Delboy. I mean, even look like Delboy. I always make a joke, he gives self-saving agreement with the Taliban mate. He could sell anything or anybody in the old man. And he was a psychopath. He wasn't a violent man. He was ruthless. He was fearless. He was shameless.

I never once saw him embarrassed. And he could do things that most normal people would find psychologically impossible. And it was pretty much him that got me started, even as a young lad, into psychology. And he was a calm man. So that was my roots basically. And I mean, I'll give you an example. I mean, I always remember one time, I must have been about 10 or 11. We got older, a loader, geyser helping on the stall and he got older, a loader, diaries, calendar diaries, you know. And they were very different to the usual kinds of stuff that we got our hands on because they were actually good. They were actually nice these diaries. They were leather, they were in bust, they were slimline, and there was a very good reason for that.

Anyway, I always remember one Saturday afternoon on the stall, we knocked out about 300 of these. They went to our hot cakes and after about a couple of hours, we got back to the flat and remember, I'm only about 10, 11. I couldn't resist, I sent a data, I said, yeah, I said, those diaries went to our hot cakes and they were nice, weren't they? They were leathering, but they were thin. And he goes, oh, yes, they were thin, weren't they? They were leathering, but they were thin. And he goes, oh, yes, they're neighbor thin, all right?

There's a reason for that. I said, well, what was that? And he said, eight pool was missing. And I'm not joking, Chris. He gets one out of draw, mate. January, February, March, May. I said, yeah, you remember my money, Chan? I said, we've just sold our way,

on of these, Dad, I said, what we're gonna do? I'll never forget it, Chris. He said, nothing for now,, but come March 31st. Make sure you pack your swimming trunks. He was off the Torre Malinus for six weeks. That was a kind of geezer. He was. So when I eventually kind of psychology, I was obviously very interested in how people were good at persuasion, like my old man. And eventually after I got my PhD in all that, I wrote a book on persuasion. Because I was interested to see whether there were limits to persuasion. Could, if you had enough skill, would you be able to persuade anybody to do anything, or were there limits on persuasion? And I've got, I mean, I've given you another example of me old man, I've given you an example. Again, young kid helped him on the stool.

It took me out to an Indian restaurant up in Brick Lane, the East Ender London that night. And just as he's about to pay the bill, and this is crucial, Chris. I'll never forget it. Just about a church pay the bill. He turns around and we see, if there's one thing I want you to remember in life, son,

it's this, persu, ain't about getting people to do what they don't want to do. It's about giving people a reason to do what they do want to do. Very, very if you're a salesperson who's trying to get someone to do something, bear that in mind. Okay, push against an open door. And he says, watch and learn. So with that, giving example, what he done, he took his spoon and he tinkled it against his glass, right? He's tire-restrauntful silent, told you in a psychopathony, gets to his feet. And he says, right, I'd just like to thank everyone for coming.

Now, I know that some of you have come just around the corner, some of you have come from a little bit further afield, but I want you to know that you're all very welcome. It's very much appreciated. Oh, there's a party across the road in the King's Arms, which will be hosting a little drinks reception later tonight. There, you're all welcome to pop along. At which point, you start to clap, right? Which point, your entire restaurant starts to clap, don't it? So picture the scene, Chris, all of a sudden, we've got a restaurant full of people, never seen us before, never seen each other before, all applauding politely because none of them want to be seen as a gay crash into the party, right? That was a genius of it. Well, anyway, as we leave them, remember, I'm only about nine or ten, I can't resist it. So,

I said, dear, dad, I said, I mean, we're not really going to the pub, are we? And he puts his arm around me, Chris. And I'll never forget it. He says, cool, snot, sump. But let me cheer you something. That lot in the restaurant are my mate Malcolm. He's just taken over his landlord and make a few quits at night. Now, can you imagine the kind of balls that you would need to even think about pulling a stunt like that, but that's the kind of thing he did. So having grown up with me old man, always in the back of my mind was, can anyone persuade anyone to do anything or are they limits? So I had contacts at the time, various branches of the police.

So they used to be a show called Hustle on BBC Years Again. I remember it, not the real hustle, but the one with Adrian Leicester, which was a group of long-con artists who were psychological geniuses. So I had access to a couple of guys like that, few guys like that. And I spent about a bit of half a year hanging out and looking at what they did. And I wanted to know basically, mate, who knew more about persuasion. Me who was the boffin, who'd learned it at the books,

or them who were the evil geniuses of persuasion who derived it all from first principles living on their wits on the street. And I would say it was pretty much a draw. I knew all the technical terms. They knew how to do it. And the bottom line, because I'm sure people aren't going to run off and buy flip-noses. Well, you never know. The bottom line is, if look, there's a lot of science on persuasion and influence, but it boils down to this. If you can get someone to like you,

and if you can frame what you want, so that it appeals to the other person's self-interest and not your own, you're pretty much there. Because no one's gonna do something for someone they don't like, and we're all gonna do something that benefits ourselves. So if you can frame something, so it's in someone's self-interest and also get them to like you then pretty much your home and ride. Okay now give a great example of self-

interest. One of my favorite stories in persuasion, I think it was Baron Delphon many years ago, is Lord Lou Gray's brother, TV mogul. And he is on the great vine that there's a young man who's looking for a job. This young guy pops into his office one day, true story this. And he says, I'm looking for a job. And Delphan says, right, here on the great vine that you're a genius persuader.

So I've got a little challenge for you. See that water jug? And he puts his water jug on the desk in front of me. He says, see this water jug here, just like they said, I want you to sell it to me, right? It's a nightmare situation, right? So the young bloke thinks about it for a minute, and then undaunted he gets to his feet and he wanders over the corner of the room and he picks up the waste paper basket, carries it over to Delphonse desk,

empties the contents of the waste paper basket out on the desk in front of him. So there's, I don't know, all kinds of bits of paper on there, whatever, whatever. get out on the desk in front of him. So there's, I don't know, all kinds of bits of paper on there, whatever, whatever. And he takes Delphonse Cigar lighter, takes the water jugger weight, puts it out of his reach, and sets light to the pile of rubbish in front of it with a cigar light, and he says to Delphonse, right, how much are you going to give me for it? As is basically his office is about to burst into flames, That is how you persuade someone to buy a water jug, son. All right. You basically, what you do is you reframe the situation. So that all of a sudden, it's really in their self-interest to buy it off you. So you can't change the value of the water

jug objectively, but by manipulating the context, you can change it subjectively. So the bottom line of Flipnosis, hanging out with all of them, con artists, if you want to persuade someone to do something, basically get them to like it, which is why humor is very important. If you can make someone laugh, it's very important. I think it was, I think it was Victor Borgia, the Argentinian playwright, who said that humor is the

shortest distance between two people, laughter is the shortest distance between two people. laughter is the shortest distance between two people. And make them laugh, get them to like you, frame it in their self-interest. And you've got an ingredients for persuasion. Draw the line for me between that persuasion and supercategories, and how supercategories can be so persuasive, I think there was some very useful, innovative

language that was used around the Brexit marketing campaign as well. What's going on there? Yeah, well, right and wrong us and them are basically categories, supercategories, which have evolved through many, many years of evolution. So going back to our prehistoric ancestors on the savannahs of East Africa, they were living in small groups. So us and them is basically that in group bias that I was talking to you about, okay? So we have a bias to favor members of our own group against bias, against basically discriminating and favoring members of an out group, okay?

Right versus wrong, basically the moral instinct evolved to keep groups together. And we kind of touched on that a little bit earlier. So if you don't have a sense of right and wrong, then you are more likely just to act out of a complete and utter self-interest rather than the good of the group. So if you don't, once you've got the us and then categorization established in your brain, you kind of need a moral categorization between right and wrong, otherwise that group wouldn't stick together. And the third super category to go with us and them right and wrong is fight or flight.

So basically that is, you know, the ability to either move towards a stimulus in your environment or to move away from it. So, can I eat it? Or is it going to eat me? So, fight or flight, right or wrong, us and them. Evolved it, not quite in that order, evolved, fight, flight, us, them, right wrong, obviously, okay? And they're all survival, what I call super categories. There's three super categories that our brains have evolved through millions of years of evolution. Now, if you can use persuasion, if you can set your language up to tap into those three super categories

that our brains have evolved long ago, then whether you're right or whether you're wrong, Chris, you're gonna get people sit're wrong, Chris, you're going to get people sit up and take interest, mate. So if you think about the Brexit argument, as you rightly pointed out, fight or flight. Okay, you think about the language that was used in the early days by Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, by the exit lobby. Look, are we going to stand up to these European bureaucrats? Are we going to let them roll all over us? Fight or flight language, right? Us and them. What about these crazy edicts and decrees that are coming over from Brussels, you know,

about bananas being too spending or whatever? What are we going to do about this? Are we going to just acquiesce to this right or wrong? Is it right to allow Europe to dictate to us rules in our own country? You can see through the rhetoric, fight, flight, us them right wrong. If you can frame your language, so that presses those ancient supercatalty buttons in our brains. Again, as I say, whether you're right or whether you're wrong, you're going to get people to sit up and take notice. That's what Trump did, by the way, in America. Probably going to come, it's no surprise. Make America great again, fight or fly it.

We're going to fight against immigrants. We're going to build a wall between the USA and Mexico. That's the us and them again, right and wrong. Okay, you've got them all there in Trump's rhetoric. And it's very funny when I was going back to Flipnosis. Chris, I interviewed a top QC in London. And I once asked him, I said, what makes a great barrister? What makes a great QC? I wasn't interested in the difference between what makes a bad one and a good one. That's not interesting. The interest is in most things. What's the difference between good and great?

And he was a pupil master in his London chambers. A pupil master basically means that that's where people with lower degrees, the cream of the cream from London, Oxford and Cambridge go to study to learn their trade. You've got these various chambers around London. It's a little bit like teaching hospitals for law, basically, yeah. And he said, well, look, he said, you know, obviously I'll get the cream and a crop coming to me. He said from all the top universities. He said, so, you know, the fact that I've got brilliant minds, the fact that they have our idetic photographic memories for facts and figures, the fact that they are able to get the heads around the

details of a case really, really quickly is entry level. He said that's entry level, they're all like that. And he said, but the one difference between the people that really become great and forge a stellar career for themselves in advocacy and people who are good, is something you can't teach. And he said, it's the ability to tell a story. He said, that is a God-given talent that if you have that natural ability alongside

the other characteristics I've told you, he said, that kind of separates out the great from the good, the weak from the from the chaff and I'll never forget it Chris coming back to what I was saying. He said information travels around the brain like electricity around the circuit. It takes the path of least resistance. So, Kevin said, if you and I are up against each other in a court of law, and you can assemble the facts of the case so that it goes around the minds of the jury quicker than I've assembled the facts of the case, you're going to win. No matter whether that's right or wrong, you're going to win, because basically it goes around the minds of the jury quicker than my set of facts, or the way I've arranged them. So it's very similar

to the supercategories. What you've got to remember, Chris, the bottom line here is that our brains conflate simplicity for truth. The simpler that I can make it for you to do something, the more likely you are going to do it. And there's a number of different ways we've already kind of talked about that you can do that. But you're not going to do something for me, mate, if I make it difficult for you.

It's just, a lot of persuasion is common sense. So, you know, as I say, it's get someone to like you, make it simple, make it in their own self-interest, your halfway there, where you're more than halfway there, you're 85% there. We see this online as well, so a lot of content creators, some of the ones that are the most well-followed,

the most popular are the ones that have got the most fluent speech, because fluency is used as a proxy for truthfulness, and I think a big part of that is simplicity that people are able to understand what they are saying, because the friction between their brain and their mouth is as unencumbered as it's possible to be. The language that's being used is as precise as possible,

it's no more words, it's no fewer words, it's no more complex, it's exactly where it needs to be. And that is, I mean, all of this stuff that you've brought up, the weaponizing of in-group out-group bias, this is something else that we see, like the world weaponizing of in-group out-group bias, this is something else that we see, like the world that I exist in is an online content creation, right? So, I'm always very cautious whenever I see a community of people, whether it be online

or elsewhere, that appears to be bound together not over the mutual love of an in-group, but over the mutual hatred of an out-group. You see this with the social justice movement online, which seems to be very fragilely held together by pointing at other heretics, people that aren't a part of them. Well, okay, what you're telling me there is that all you need to do is find someone that is currently a part of the in-group that can be pointed out as part of the out-group and now they're shaved off the outside. This is the ever-increasing purity spiral, right?

Evermore distilled and concentrated off the outside. This is the ever-increasing purity spiral, right? Ever more distilled and concentrated into the middle. And yeah, I mean, I had a look at this. I love that, by the way. I love that purey spot. That's a great phrase. Purey spot. Apparently it's actually a thing. I've just made that up. But, no, no, it exists online. And I learned about the difference in prejudice between race and accent. Have you heard about this? Oh, yeah. Yeah, going to a bit more detail, I'll probably have,

but, John. So one of my friends, William Costello, evolutionary psychologist out here in Austin, UT, he was explaining the fact that there is a greater prejudice against people of the same race with a different accent than people of a different race with the same accent. And the explanation for this is pretty simple that evolutionarily, ancestrally, it would have been very unlikely for us to encounter somebody of a different race, but very likely for us to encounter someone who had a slightly different dialect or a slightly different accent. And what that means is that you have very interesting crossing prejudices and counteracting

prejudices. For instance, if you were to see an Arab man that walked into the room, but then started speaking like somebody that was from the south end of London or whatever it might be, if you have someone someone whose race and accent do not line up, for instance, I mean, everybody can think about this. If you were to see somebody walk into the room that is of a different race to you,

but speaks with the same accent, you would immediately think, well, we have an awful lot in common. You forget about the fact that they're of a different race, but then you flip that round. Okay, let's have somebody walk into the room who is of the same race as you, but has an entirely different sort of accent.

There is immediately a big distance, and I just thought that that totally blew my mind. Okay, you're telling me that there is more prejudice against people with different accents than people of different races. Just totally telling that. And it makes perfect sense. The way you've explained it in William Costello.

Absolute nailed it right on the head there. The thing I would add to that is I was talking to, probably shouldn't mention who it is. I was talking to one of the UK's top impressionists the other day. And interestingly, we were talking about impressionism as an art form and as a form of humor. And he said that he had come across people actually who had pointed the finger at impressionists as cultural appropriators, which is a very interesting argument. Now, whereas I don't buy it, whereas I think we have an innate fascination for different

voices coming out of the same person. It's very incongruity. The incongruity principle is very powerful in all kinds of things. It's why we're so fascinated with serial killers, for example, because they appear on the outside to be very normal. But of course, they've got these horrendous, ultra-regos raging behind the scenes. If you have different voices coming out of the same person, then there is a real fascination with that.

So we're fascinated by impersonators and impressionists. But actually, there's been recent lobby saying, well, actually, if you're doing different accents or taking people off, then why is that not cultural appropriation? Let's not go down that road, mate, because that's another two hours we could sit there talking about that one. But it's a good one to throw out there. But interestingly, it's very, when you look at when you talk to someone, and again, this is something that this guy, this impersonator, this impressionist, who'll talk to do, delved into.

And I'm sure you do it. I certainly do it. If you really like someone, sometimes without knowing it, you end up talking a little bit like them when you're in conversation with someone. You might adopt a little bit of their speech patterns, might not be their accent, sometimes it is in extreme cases, but you might unconsciously mirror the tone or the speed at which or the tempo at which they're speaking. So the voice of somebody is something that we find it very difficult not to empathize with.

So that's where William Cousello was coming from there. That's another reason, an empathy reason, when we hear voices, it's one of those things that is a marker of how we gain an impression of someone. And we're very, very susceptible to sound coming out of people's of lips and how they sound. Let me throw some broad signs at you. Is it the case that accents get locked in and are less likely to change as you grow up but are more likely to change if you are younger? Let's say that you spend the first seven years of your life in Ireland and then you move to America or whatever. You're going to end up with pretty much just

an American accent. And if you maybe make the move at sort of 13 or 14, you're going to end up with sort of an Irish American accent after maybe 10 years. Would that be adaptive in case case, and casterly, you ended up merging with another tribe, perhaps being taken over by another tribe, and it would be in your interests to align yourself in terms of your accent with the accent of the new tribe that you have joined, because that is going to be one of the key determinants in not making you an outsider. Yeah, I mean, do you know what Chris, you should, I don't know if you've ever studied psychology, might be, you should definitely give it a go. I mean, I'd know what Chris, I don't know if you've ever studied psychology, maybe you should definitely give it a go. I mean, I'd never heard that before.

I never thought of that before. I think it's an absolutely cool theory. And I can see that there's, I can instantly pull out the hat, a lot of evidence to back that up. Absolutely, the ability, and you know, I'm going to do a study actually, because no one's really looked at it what makes people why some of us really good at changing our accents and why some of us not

so good what makes great impression is great impression is there's all kinds of different things there's the flexibility of the vocal tract for example so there's all going to be all kinds of individual differences in this but yeah the ability to change your accent and to blend in would indeed confer an evolutionary advantage going forward. Absolutely. Going back to your point about simplicity, which is related to this, there was a study on how our brains conflate simplicity was truth. There was a study on how our brains can flate simplicity with truth. There was a wonderful study done a few years ago which looked at menus in restaurants. And two groups, I'm going for the top of my head now. So two groups of participants were given exactly the same menus except for one crucial

difference. One of the menus was printed in a very difficult to read typeface, a fancy one, and the other half of the menus was printed in a very simple, easy to read typeface. One half of the participants got the easy to read menu, the other half of the participants got the difficult to read menu. The menus were exactly the same. Once they'd read the menus, they would then ask, how easy do you think the recipe would be to cook? Not read, but cook it. What do you think they found?

Well, you've got their ahead of me already, haven't you? Those people that were given the menus in the tricky type faces thought it would be way more difficult to cook than those people that were given it in the simple type faces and moreover, were way more likely, way less likely to say that they'd actually give it a go. So, more of the story for restrioters out there, because I'm sure it would be the same in how food tastes. In fact, I think studies might have been done.

I couldn't swear to it. I think studies have been done on that. The exact are the same dish printed in a simple type face. I think, if I'm right, be saying, I think stuff that's been done on this actually taste better, or rated as tasting better anyway, than exactly the same dish that you've ordered in a tricky typeface in a restaurant.

So there's a physiological example of how simplicity interferes with our literal, without physical perception. I could have seen that going either way. I could have seen it that people would have presumed that the more difficult typeface, the more difficult dish to cook would perhaps be of a... More intricate. Yeah, worthy of a higher price point. A few other tips I've learned from Rory Sutherland

from Ogilvy about the... Oh, I know, Rory. He's a legend. He's coming on in a couple of weeks again. Oh, he's a good boy. You better tell him to leave his vipa home. If that guy... He'll have two. I don't know whether you've seen him on podcasts,

but he has two. He switches between them, but yeah, he's like a chimney. He's a good lab. Couple of things restauranters should do if you're a budding restauranter. First thing, take the currency denomination off your menu. It seems that if you just have the numbers, rather than the currency denomination,

people forget about the fact that they're spending money. Another thing, use anchoring bias, so have some very nice expensive platter first up on the page when you people land on it. That should be up there. Now, the final one, I don't think this was used with restaurants, but I could imagine a way that you might be able to work it into either the menu or the advertising.

And this is a rory thing. We actually use this in nightclub promo. If you involve the viewer in the completion of an advert, they have, you get a lot more attentional time. So, for instance, if you were to ask a question, this is happened a bunch, like who should be the next prime minister of the UK, and then it could be R underscore SHI, right? And like you already can complete it yourself, but the fact that's obviously

like an absolutely lame example that the UK government very well may end up. No, I know what you mean, yeah, yeah. And involving the reader of an advert in the active completion of it and the participation of experiencing it has way, way, way more attentional input from them. And I'm imagining that if you had a way of constructing the menu, maybe like the dish of the day could be up on a board, but if you themed it appropriately, that yeah, the dish of the day is something you almost have to do a little bit of working out for yourself or whatever it might be, I can imagine that that would probably be pretty effective at drawing people in. Another great point Chris, also that's how Constructor Own Pizza's work mate in Pizza restaurants. So sometimes you go in, you can order the spicy hot one, you can order the margarita, but then there's an option which says, well, you know, create your own. So you're absolutely right. This is a technique which has been known

to salespeople for many years. Not so much in what you're saying, you know, creating your own pizza has been done for years. The idea of creating a special menu board is pretty cool actually. has been done for years. The idea of creating a special menu board is pretty cool, actually. That's very good. I like that. I'm getting a bit suspicious about you, may I think you study more psychology, you're letting on. But it's called in sales, it's called foot in the door and it's a similar technique. So if you evolve someone in the decision, you're way more likely to get a closure. So here's the deal, right? Imagine you go to a department store or a shop and you're looking at a shirt or a pair of trousers or pair of shoes or whatever. And the person, the salesperson will say, try it on, sir. And you go, okay, you are way more

likely to buy that object once you've tried it on than if you haven't tried it on. Because you've spent, we have our brains like to remain consistent. So the way our brains will then work Chris, is they will say, you've taken the trouble to try this on. You've, there's obviously something about it you like, okay? Otherwise, you wouldn't have taken the trouble to tie it on. If you spent two or three minutes in the changing room, the cubicle,

looking at yourself in a mirror thing and you're like, no, no, no, no, no, yeah, maybe. If it's a 50-50, you're going to come out and think, I spent three bloody minutes trying that on. Well, I'm going to get something at a coming end of this shop. So you might, well, buy that, if you win any doubt, it's 50-50. Or you might go looking for something else in the shop. So again, if you can involve someone in something, if you can get them to make this as the key word, mate, if you can get them to make a commitment, that's the key, then whether that's in advertising, whether it's in relationships, whether it's in sales, same technique, you're way more

likely to get a result. Just coming back to one more thing you said there about in groups and out groups before I forget it. One of the things when we get online, you were talking about your online thing, and I've studied online quite a bit. It's a fantastic laboratory of social psychology. You find that when you get situations where never has our identity, Chris, in any era in history,

depended so much on what we are seen or perceived to say or believe. That's what social media has done. It's a massive, petri dish, it's a massive prism of belief and we're all in the public arena. And so when you're in a situation where you are arguing in a public forum, it becomes almost like a surrogate court of law.

And so we don't think like scientists, we think like lawyers. We don't try to get at the truth, and we're all guilty of this. We don't try to get at the truth, Chris. We try to win the bloody argument, mate. And that's what happens on social media. That's why you get people becoming more and more entrenched.

One of the reasons why you say you get groups that are knitted together purely through hatred of an out group, rather than any shared sense of value that they might have. And what you then get is groups that become vacant, become vacuous and very toxic, mate. That's the psychology behind that. I've got a friend, Gwinder Bogle, who has been on the show a bunch of times, he's phenomenal and everyone needs to go and check out his sub stack. This is a quote from him. The rise of social media is the primary form of social interaction changed the way that we judge

people. We once used to judge people mostly based on their deeds, but in the age of social interaction changed the way that we judge people. We once used to judge people mostly based on their deeds, but in the age of social media, we judge people mostly based on their words and opinions, because that's really all we see of them. Since we're defined by our opinions, there is a pressure to have an opinion on everything. Problem is, people generally don't have the time or the will to research everything they're expected to have an opinion on, so they copy the opinions of others. And the result is that there is precious few original thinkers out there. The culture war is largely two armies of NPCs being ventriloquized by a handful of actual thinkers. Wonderful. Well, I couldn't have put it better myself, mate. And also, you can add to that.

We were talking, you brought up earlier, the need for complexity and the need for closure. You look at the vehicles on which social media operate. You've got very short attention spans. You've got so much information out there. How do you get someone's attention in the information jungle? Well, you make something simple. You make something extreme.

There's no room for nuance on any platform really. And so what your friend was just saying is absolutely true, but that's also compounded by the fact that actually things are simplified beyond measures that they should be simplified. And so yeah, absolutely right, you've got that, what you were talking about that purity spiral or impurity spiral, maybe might be a better. Correct. Yeah. The complexity of the truth is inconvenient for both sides, I think. That's absolutely right.

Yeah. Definitely. Dude, let's wind this one up. I really appreciate you today. I think you worked fantastic. Where should people go if they want to keep up to date with the things that you do online? If you want to follow me on us to chase Chris, by the way, it was absolutely wonderful, mate. Really enjoy chatting with you. Thanks for having me on. My social media handles Twitter and Instagram, I'm too old with TikTok, mate, is at the real Dr. DR Kev. So DR for

Dr. At the real Dr. Kev, you'll find me on there. And if you want to check out some of the books, Wisdom of Psychopaths, probably the one that started all over all going. A couple of books I wrote with Andy McNabb, if you want to become a little bit more assertive and successful, you might want to check out the good psychopaths guide to success, which I wrote with Andy McNabb, the SS soldier, who is a psychopath psychopath by the way. Dev, I appreciate you. Thank you. Chris, cheers mate.

Wonderful. Yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah. you