Modern Wisdom - #553 - Dr Jaimie Krems - The Evolutionary Psychology Of Friendship

Episode Date: November 17, 2022

Dr Jaimie Krems is an Assistant Professor at Oklahoma State University and a social psychologist whose research explores human social cognition, emotions, and behaviour. Evolution has shaped the way that men and women make and break friendships. It's made us into life-saving, caring, aggressive, jealous, friend-guarding, backbiting, gossiping animals, but why is it that male and female friendships are so different, plus a ton of other fascinating insights. Expect to learn why a woman's body shape is so important to her attractiveness, why venting is a manipulative social strategy, how men with dad bods are literally perceived as better dads, why women who have casual sex are seen as having lower self-esteem even though there's no data to back it up, how a pro-life stance on abortion might be less virtuous than people first think and much more... Sponsors: Get £150 discount on Eight Sleep products at https://eightsleep.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 20% discount & free shipping on your Lawnmower 4.0 at https://www.manscaped.com/ (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and Free Shipping from Athletic Greens at https://athleticgreens.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Check out Jaimie's website - https://www.kremslab.com/  Follow Jaimie on Twitter - https://twitter.com/JaimieKrems  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. Jamie Crems. She's an assistant professor at Oklahoma State University and a social psychologist who's research explores human social cognition, emotions and behavior. Evolution has shaped the way that men and women make and break friendships. It's made us into life-saving, caring, aggressive, jealous, friend-guarding, back-biting, gossiping animals. But why is it that male and female friendships are so different? Plus, a ton of other fascinating

insights. Expect to learn why a woman's body shape is so important to her attractiveness, why venting is a manipulative social strategy, how men with dad-bods are literally perceived as better dads, why women who have casual sex are seen as having lower self-esteem, even though there's no data to back it up, how a pro-life stance on abortion might be less virtuous than people first think. And much more. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome... Jamie Crams. Jamie Cran's, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me.

How do male and female friendships differ? Oh, God, how much time do you have? Okay, so we're not going to start with the easiest stuff. Structurally they differ in terms of the, so males typically form these less emotionally close looser but multi-male friendship groups. Females tend to form really emotionally intense and close, diatic relationships, so female female relationships. That's one of the biggest ways that they differ because it has all kinds of implications

for what happens when those friendships break up. Female friendships tend to be shorter lived and more fragile than these more robust, multi-male friendship groups. It has implications for the acrimonious end. Women share much more intimate details with one another and this information can be ammunition that friends can use against each other when this friendship breaks up. intimate details with one another. And this information can be ammunition that friends can use against each other when this friendship breaks up.

They also spend so much time together. So when the friendship does break up, there can be huge grief at that. And I could go on and on talking for about four hours about it. But those are some of the ways. Why would it be adaptive for women to have fewer friends

with deeper connection versus men having a broader friend group? Yeah, we don't know. It's one of the, it's honestly we don't, and I'll probably say that a ton. So we do have really great evidence from non-human primate work, Susan Perry's lab at UCLA, Joan Silk, who is at ASU, and that

works suggest that among non-human primate females, so capuchins, baboons, having just a few close female friends can increase the female's own longevity and the health and longevity of her offspring. So it does seem like there are strong links between a female friendship and female fitness. There are some indication that perhaps in humans as well. So Stacey Rookis' work, perhaps in humans as well, female friendship is also fitness enhancing. Our friends do a lot of good things for us. But why that would be different among females versus males? That's a really great question and in humans, yeah, you don't know.

Would it be a potential case that with alloparenting, the shared parenting of your child amongst usually family members, but then sometimes super close friends as well. The cost of choosing a wrong friend to look after your child is so great that the threshold for you to call them a good friend needs to be higher than for men. If you're going to go and try and take down some mammoth that you're almost certainly going to fail at doing, you don't mind who it is that you go with, right? Like, you know, one-third of you going to die over the next week, then cool, like me whoever you want. But if you're going to put your child into the hands of somebody else, that, to me,

would suggest, okay, well, I need to make sure that I have a greater threshold for friendship than the guy that just wants to throw us at things and talk shit. Yeah, so there's sort of a greater confluence of benefits among men, among women, maybe not so much. So that's one of the answers or possible answers is the importance of alloparenting. Another one is this idea that our women, we birth offspring and somehow we're closer to our friends because our female friends hijack this hormonal physiological mental system.

That's probably not the case, but that's one explanation. Another one that might hold some water, the people like Tony Reynolds and the late and great Ann Campbell have been proponents of is this idea that there's a long history in humans of patralocality, which means that males stay in their natal group and females often leave the natal group and end up in their male partners group with a bunch of co-wives, potentially. And so if that's the case, then females are potentially going to be designed to form kin-like relationships with people who aren't kin, whereas males have that sort

of buffer of what we call lowercase R relatedness. So if they help each other, they sort of help themselves, because they're genetically related, it boosts their inclusive fitness. For women, if they help each other, they sort of help themselves, because they're genetically related, it boosts their inclusive fitness. For women, if they help the other women in their social group, maybe their co-wives, they're not related necessarily. And so, they're not going to get that just boost to inclusive fitness. Maybe there's something going on that predisposes women to form these kin-like relationships to make other women more invested in them

and then maybe more invested in helping them in their offspring. Because stuff like infanticide and even homicide is attempted between women within the harem of whatever guy they're with. When it comes to what men want from men that their friends with and what women want from women that their friends with, how do they differ? Yeah, so my colleague Kylowilliams who's a professor at Hamilton College has this really great paper and evolution and human behavior on sex differences and friend preferences. Men seem to prefer the sort of collitional support, social support. Women want more emotional support. They also tend to want more time and energy put into the relationship. Men also tend to

prefer these sort of what are sometimes called shoulder to shoulder relationships. So okay, maybe we'll talk. I don't care if we talk. I don't need to talk to you, but I want to do stuff together. Women, it's more face to face. I need to hash out everything that just happened because that bitch looked at me funny. Did you see in Friends by Robin Dunbar, there was a study done on the angle that men stand facing each other and the women stand facing each other. Did you see this? No, I read that book too. I sent it to my parents because I'm in it. He was my old advisor. He's the coolest. He is a legit legend. Yes, he was on the show a couple of weeks ago. So, in it, he said that and this is so fast and I can't unsee this. This is one of those things that you can't unsee. Next time that you go to a party, look at the angle that men are standing talking to each other. It's almost always going to be

slightly open. So they're going to be about 120 degrees with the average angle that was found. And the argument for this that was put forward is that the only real time that men would stand face to face is if they were about to fight. Like that's quite a confrontational this front-on eye-to-eye thing. And I'd notice it in myself with my friends. I noticed it in people when I go into parties. And yet you see girls. And girls are totally happy to be completely front-on to each other. So yeah, that's confrontational undertone. Physical confrontational undertone is super interesting. and a tone, physical, confrontational, and a tone is super interesting. That's, it reminds me so, if men are going to stand at an angle to sort of, um, defray the possible cue that, oh, oh, I'm going to attack you, um, there's some work that suggests

that maybe the reason that women share all of these secrets and share these sort of evaluative information. I might tell you who I really hate or how I really feel about someone or a phenomenon is to say, okay, you have some ammo on me. I'm a friend, I'm a friendly, you can trust me. And it does seem to work. So if I share social information with you, particularly information that's sensitive, or even if I just self-dis social information with you, particularly information that's sensitive,

or even if I just self-disclosed to you, you're more likely to trust me, like me, and feel close to me. It's part of why we think that venting works so well among women to manipulate alliances. Right. So venting is different to just saying, I really don't like that girl over there because of something. That feels, is that too, obviously sort of Machiavellian that it's an outright takedown of somebody else?

If it's couched in this sort of frustrated, agitated language, that, oh, you know, I just need to tell you, I gotta tell you about this thing, and she's such a bitch, and I hate her shoes, and I hate her hair and she whatever whatever. Is that what's the difference between venting and just outright like being abusive to somebody behind her back? Yeah, so I would say that a good example of venting is like, I'm just so frustrated Chris,

I don't know what to do. I mean, she's just canceled on me again and I have a a really hard time, and I don't, I just don't know how to handle this. So, what we think is going on is that it's not that venting is any less macchi-evellian, although it might actually help ventors to not be conscious that they're trying to harm a target, the person they're venting about. It's that compared to more overt competitor derogation saying like, oh, she can't tell them me again versus she sucks so hard, she's so selfish, I hate her. That allows you to harm the target just as much. So you harm the reputation just as much in the eyes of the person that you're talking to, as if you said she sucks

and she's horrible. But unlike if you say she sucks and she's horrible, but unlike if you say she's suctioned and she's horrible, you don't look bad. Your reputation is buffered. How much they like you is buffered. It's really just this form of venting that really makes them makes the person you're talking to like the target less, but still like you just as much. By playing a agitated victim in one form or another, it doesn't make you look like someone that's actually sly. Because obviously one of the things, as someone that was a club promoted for a long time, I saw this, that a big insight you learn about people that often talk behind people's backs if you pay attention is that you shouldn't trust them to not talk behind your back.

They're not just doing it for them, they're doing it for everybody, for the most part, but venting circumvent that defense mechanism a little bit because it makes us think, oh, well, you know, as long as because I'm a good person, I'm not going to agitate Jamie to the point where she's going to say that I've canceled on her again because I'm not the sort of person that cancels. So I guess the venting is a little bit more surreptitious with the way that it delivers it. Yeah, so I think there are two things going on there and one is exactly what you're saying, right? So people think that venting of a ventures

have much lower intention to harm the targets, and they think the derogators have high intention to harm the targets. And as soon as you manipulate that, then you manipulate all sorts of downstream effects from venting. So if you think that I want to harm the target, say I, that were actually secret rivals or something,

then my venting isn't gonna be effective in making you think the target sucks, and my venting isn't gonna be effective in making you think that I'm not aggressive and I'm not manipulative. Another thing that's going on is that, so I subscribe to these models of friendship whereby people have sort of friend rankings. And so I might say all kinds of negative awful things and break

all sorts of people's trust to my best friend. I'll tell her what everyone says. But if I'm doing that to her, she might infer sort of as a cue if I'm saying, well, Chris said this and I shouldn't say it out loud, but Chris said this. She might think, oh, well, Jamie values me more than Jamie values Chris. And that could just sort of bolster where she thinks I put her in my friend network. And this is Kila Williams and she really is the top in my friend network and I really do tell her everything. I don't know why people don't assume that. When it comes to getting other people to buy into you as a friend, understanding that you're giving them privileged information that in the wrong hands would be ruinous. That seems like a smart, a costly way to show that you are of good faith.

Like if you're going to say, I'd need to tell you about my chronic flatulence. It's been replaying me for a long time. I can't really talk to anybody else about it. In the wrong hands, you know, that would be bad, bad info. I can't really talk to anybody else about it in the wrong hands, you know, that would be bad info. What are there any more nuances there with regards to how people open up with that privileged information? Does it relate at all to venting in one way or another? So I do think that venting shares and comments and features with that sort of self-disclosure, right? And to the extent that venting does and can be a form of self-disclosure, right? And to the extent that venting does and can be a form of self-disclosure, like, oh, I just really can't stand this person,

then maybe venting, um, enjoy some of the same functionality as self-disclosure, like making you think I like you better, or making you think that I'm really trustworthy. Um, I would say too that the, the ammo, the information, so I mean, ideally, I don't have chronic flatulence and it can't be smelled, right? But something that's secret that is really hard to assess, that's the reputational damage that's really, really intense. And it might be, so among women, for example, chastity is a big thing. Males really prefer fidelity and

chastity and female mates on average, this hat, et cetera, et cetera. If a woman gains a reputation as being unfaithful or sexually promiscuous, that's a really hard reputation to do away with, right? You can't show everybody how little sex you're having. Exactly. Exactly. But if a guy gets a reputation like, oh, you're a bum and you have no job or, you know, you have no income and he comes along with, you know, a Rolex and a lamb, my husband really loves the Effing Marciolago, which is whatever. He comes along in a you know, a Rolex and a lamb of my husband really loves the effing Marciolago, which is whatever. He comes along in a Marciolago, which means he probably

has a small penis, but it also might mean that he has a lot of money. And so you can refute that reputational attack pretty easily as with most of the reputational attacks on men, but a lot of the dimensions that women are valued for, reputationally, they're harder to review. That's interesting. So, the currency that women can manipulate within a friendship group in terms of what is most valued by other women and specifically by men that are looking at those women as potential mates is harder to falsify and is easier to manipulate because for the guys it is more

easy to show. He's weaker than me, poorer than me, shorter than me, whatever, whatever. It's like, look, it's all, it's relatively at all on display. Whereas, yes, the sort of sociosexual elements of women's nature are hidden much more open to manipulation. Absolutely. Many of the things that women value one another for is friends, trustworthyness and loyalty, those things are really difficult to assess. In fact, everyone, male, female, etc. has an incentive to make everyone else think that, so I have an incentive to make you all think that I'm loyal to all of you and that you're all my best friends, because if I make you think that I'm your best friend. You're going to value me more, take my side against more other people,

give me more finite support than you would over somebody that you think is just your third best friend, say. I remember reading something about the common types of insults that are lodged at women and at men. And at women, it was accusations around chastity and sexual promiscuity. At men, it was questions around manhood, dominance, and stuff like that. So I'm guessing that this just is completely in line with what we've spoken about so far. Absolutely. There's some really cool work by Anne Campbell again. She studied girl gangs.

And you don't see that phenomenon in women the way that you do in men. Even throughout history, Amazon's great myth but women have not banded together the way that men have to engage in collisional warfare. We just don't see that. Although, you know, again, great, great myth. What we see instead is that there is still even in these gangs, this reputational integration, this aggression that's verbal, but when we do see women fight, it's often over accusations of being sexually promiscuous. So it's the reputational denocuperation that actually leads to the physical altercation. Interesting. What role does attractiveness play in terms of impacting a woman's role with in-friendship groups ability to make friends fragility as she climbs up the social hierarchy

and stuff like that? Yeah, so one of the things that we thought, and there are some data that suggests that attractive women actually evoke or attract more aggression from other women. And that might be the case because the more attractive a woman is, particularly as a mating competitor, the more rivalrous, or the worse a competitor she is for you. If she's really good looking, she can get what she wants better than you can get what you want if you're another woman. But what we're finding my grad student,

Laurie and Mary and I are really breaking down what it is that makes women threats computationally. And what we're finding is maybe not that surprising in light of some work by people like David Bus and Aaron Selle. It suggests that for women, attractiveness is really important. Men value attractiveness in women as a cue to potential status and fertility and all of these good things.

And attractive women end up getting all sorts of goodies. People want to be their friends, people want to give them things, they end up getting bigger salaries than less attractive women. And so they're kind of formidable. They end up having a lot of power that they could withhold, or a lot of goodies that they can withhold from you. So it turns out that that's actually much more complicated when it comes to attractiveness because people want to be their friends, even though they're also potentially really dangerous rivals on the mating market.

If a woman's just promiscuous, then it's easy. She doesn't really possess any positive affordances for me. I can just say fuck her and a grass against her. Okay. I was going to ask, why is it the case that guys like to be around other guys that are successful? They have this sort of trickle-down effect of casting a broad shadow of their resources and their success? Well, what's the difference there?

Yeah, so women end up facing this bind that men don't. Guys love being around other successful guys, and they're even actually pretty big fans of being friends with guys that can outcompete them on all sorts of things. Yeah, you've possibly even disposed to having friends that are further up the hierarchy than you. Exactly, exactly. You want them to be better than you at stuff,

and it doesn't threaten you, it doesn't bother you. That's great. And even when little boys are talking, they'll say, like, my dad's car is a rocket ship. Oh, my dad's car is a bigger rocket ship. Whereas little girls end up doing very much sort of these weird strategic gymnastics to not stand out. And God forbid, never seem like they're striving or being superior because among girls and women, if you're the person that says,

well, mine's even better, mine's even bigger, you're going to be excluded. And so women end up facing this bind of having to compete to get what they want, but they can't necessarily lean on some other women to do that because while competing, while striving, they end up being the kind of person that gets kicked out of the friendship group. Why is it that makes sense? Yeah, it does. I'm trying to work out the difference between men and women of why the women seem to have

a more zero some mentality when it comes to their friendships than the men do. Yeah, so I don't think we have a good explanation. We have a lot of good data that suggests, so Joyce Peninson's incredible work, that men are more cooperative with one another. They can handle more conflict with one another. They reconcile after conflict more with one another than women do. And with my grad student, Crystal Duarte, we have some data that suggests that it's not that women completely disfavor competitiveness in their female friends.

They can handle competitiveness in female friends. They just don't want their female friends to be competitive toward them. So if you're competitive toward your rival, or even if you're competitive toward the woman I don't like, awesome, good for you, kick that bitch's ass. But don't be competitive toward me, whereas guys are okay with that, they can handle that. The best explanation that I think we have really does come from Joyce Benenson's sort of overview of the cost and benefits of cooperating and competing in primate societies. So, males have this ability to do that. And so for males, any one ally might be simply more valuable. And so, yeah, we might hate each other and maybe, you know, I want to kill you. But at the end of the day, if my group is bigger than this other group, even if I want to kill this other guy in my group, he has more benefits to me alive than dead.

in my group, he has more benefits to me, alive than dead. Friend guarding and mate guarding, to me, seemed like two very similar dynamics, the fact that I learned this from David Bus, that mate guarding, if you have a partner that you feel is starting to slip away from you, you move into a cost-inflicting strategy where you try and bring down their mate value, you do things like make sure that you check their text, you make them feel more insecure, it can come up with things like gaslighting, with men it often results in even domestic violence, where they can start to inflict physical costs.

This is a manifestation of someone being concerned that their partner is going to go and leave them for someone else. And then I found out from you that there is the exact same thing for friends and that's friend guarding. Yeah, yeah, so friend guarding can look really similar to make guarding. It's just your guarding a friend instead of a mate. Um, the sort of things that make a mate poacher more scary to you are going to be different than things that make a friend poacher scary.

Um, and so we started to investigate some of that. But I think for me at least the coolest difference that we're seeing is that people are not that are not just absolutely necessarily predisposed to hate people who guard them. So if I guarded my friend, there are some instances in which my friend might actually like that and use that as a cue that I really value her. And it's probably the same case in romantic relationships except much of the research, although if you look

at like 1950s women's magazines, it's different. But much of the research says that we just hate jealous people. We don't want our partners to be jealous, full stop. And that's not entirely true for our mates or for our friends. And I think that's really apparent among friends. If I say to my best friend, like, you're spending a lot of time with this other person and I love our friendship and I don't want to lose it, that is a cue of how much I value my friend and our friendship and my best friend might

love that and increase how much he values me. I suppose outward displays of jealousy are the costly signals that we were talking about before. It's also opening up a degree of vulnerability from you. I guess one of the sort of common dynamics that people talk about, avoiding in relationships, is coming across to needy. That coming across to needy is something that is a bit of a turn off for people and it can cause many attachment styles to turn and run. So is there something similar when it comes to friendships? Like what's the

delicate balance between jealousy, too little, the right amount and not enough? Yeah, that's such a great question. I was talking about gratitude and the sort of the way you have to calibrate gratitude and you can't give too big a present or too small a present recently. And I think the issue is you just have to hit the sweet spot. So if I tell my friend, you know, hang out with anyone, tell anyone anything. I don't care who you're spending your time with. I don't need you or need to talk to you. That's a signal that I don't value her as much as I should. And yet, if I tell her, you know, if you leave me, I will slit my wrists and die like

Franky pentangely. That's probably not the best thing either. So what I think we have to do are these sort of meta-representations of, okay, where does my best friend value me? How much does she value me? Okay, she values me to 10. I need to do behaviors at around a 10. Because if I do behaviors at an 11, too much pentangely land bad.

If I do them at a 1, she's going to think I don't love her. She's going to go to somebody that does value her the way she deserves to be valued. So what we think is that these things are about calibration. What we know is very little. I mean, we really know very little here. I suppose this, the jealousy and the concern must be one of the reasons why people are sometimes hesitant to, I know that I was like this. I was an only child, so I grew up not really understanding how social still don't sort of social groups and networks and friendships and stuff work, but I always remember being very hesitant about introducing a friend from one friendship group to a friend from another friendship group in case they started liking each other more than each of them individually liked me, and then they would become friends and then I would be left out.

Yeah, people hate that. Women hate that more than men, but I'm also an only child, so good for us. Look at us go, parents. So I do think that people are aware of that, especially women. So women report greater friendship jealousy over the potential loss of a best friend and a close friend, although males report potentially greater friendship jealousy at the loss of an acquaintance. Again, maybe just because any one ally is more beneficial for me. So I do think people are really sensitive to this, but our culture, as long as said, well, jealousy is this horrible vice, you're a bad person. In fact, even researchers have said, if you feel jealous, it's related to low self-esteem, other personal deficits.

Oh, my favorite is that if you feel jealousy in a friendship, it's because you just are non-normally developing or you haven't matured enough to realize that no one relationship can fulfill all your needs. So even researchers are shitting on this emotion that people have felt across cultures, across errors, and probably even non-human animals feel. So what we can say there is we can ask them, do you feel jealous, but we can say they exhibit behavior pretty consistent with jealousy.

Like when? What animals are proxy jealous? Oh man, so chimps do it, horses do it, so female mustangs in Spain will bite and kick the friend poacher. They sort of have female best friends. They'll do that. Cowl, stew it, dolphins do it, and lions do it. It does seem to be a social animal phenomenon. So I think we actually, if we knew to look for it, we'd probably see it in

even more social species. And what you're saying is all of the researchers or many of the researchers are shitting on this emotion, which has to be adaptive. It's so broadly found in the animal kingdom and so ubiquitous throughout all of humans. Like, it's here for a reason. It has to be signaling us, this is something that you need to pay attention to. Yeah, exactly. If it's so and solely maladaptive, selection would have gotten rid of it. But it's probably not so and solely maladaptive. Rather, it does some benefit for us.

Probably in our view, pretty similar to Basan jealousy, it serves an adaptive function or a function tributary to reproductive fitness that says, hey, don't lose this person that you value. So for friendship jealousy, we sort of think it's a combination of two things. I'm going to feel more jealousy, the more that I value the friend that I stand to lose. So a best friend versus a rando. And I'm going to feel more jealousy, the more threat or replacement threat that this other person stands to pose, the poacher.

So, if the poacher is spending a lot of time with my friend, I might feel some jealousy. Okay, maybe my friend likes them better. But, if my friend definitely prefers me to that person, so if my friend has a plus one to, I'm trying to think of a concert I'd actually want to go to. That's really hard right now. A metric concert, because I'm an aging hipster. My friend has a plus one to a metric concert, and I can go, but their new friend also wants to go.

Well, if my friend takes me, then I know she prefers me over her new friend, and even if she spends 40 hours with a week with her new friend, I'm not as threatened because I know she prefers me over her new friend and even if she spends 40 hours with a week with her new friend, I'm not as threatened because I know she prefers me. Okay, you looked at the differences between interpretations of women's body size and women's body shape. What did you learn about that? So I mean, I don't think this is going to be shocking for any man who has looked at women or for any woman who has cared what she looks like, but to the best my knowledge, it's

the first empirical study to show that fat stigma is sensitive not only to how big a woman's body is, but also where her fat is on her body. And so, two women who are the same exact height, the same exact weight and the same BMI. If a woman carries her fat in her gut versus in her hips and thighs, the woman who carries her fat in her gut is going to be stigmatized much more. People have much less favorable views of her. What do you mean when you say stigmatized? So, they feel less warm toward her. They probably be more likely to discriminate against her in all sorts of ways. And we also have some data that we haven't published yet about the

stereotypes they hold about her. So, they have more negative beliefs about her that she's lazier, that she's less attractive, that she's less intelligent. Okay. Why would it be the case that fat in the gut versus fat in the hips would have that effect? Yeah. So, I mean, Steve, Galen and Lasek have really exploded the idea that waist to hip ratio, which is, so if you're waste is small and your hips are big, you can think of a beautiful statue. I'm trying not to say Kim Kardashian, but Kim Kardashian. I can't believe I've

said Kim Kardashian on something scientific, but whatever, it's fine. So small waste, big hips and thighs, good for her. That probably doesn't signal fertility. It probably signals though future reproductive value, so the ability to have more children in the future. What do you mean? What's the difference between those two things? So fertility would be, can I have kids right now? So we often think about fertility in relation to ovulation, which is even more immediate,

that four to six day window of when sex can lead to pregnancy. But it's very likely more signal of youth in particular, this waste to hip ratio. And so, and we do have some data consistent with that. People think that the more fat goes in the gut or around the waist, the larger the waist gets, the older the target is, particularly for women. And so, if we see that a woman has this waist hip ratio, she might be healthier, she might have potentially more useful genes for us.

I don't know if I buy that, but very likely a woman who has such a waist hip ratio was likely to be younger and have higher future reproductive value, whereas a woman who has fat in her gut that's the fat that's typically related to the things we associate with the negative outcomes linked to obesity. So obesity doesn't call us these things necessarily but things like type two diabetes and heart disease gut fat is what's really related to that more than just fat period which is awesome because my ass is huge

I remember reading I The internet does now I remember reading a Bunch of a bunch of different things that was showing try tribal women and This like really insane sized bum. And one of the arguments that was put forward there is that having a huge ass offsets the weight of a child in front of the spine during child bearing

that you actually have a different way that the spine is loaded that may be able to make it easier. Another one was that wider hips create a physical cue of a broader birth canal, which maybe would reduce complications during childbirth. But I did see a study about maybe three months ago that said there is no correlation in fertility, like genuine fertility between the ways to hip ratio in women. So it's one of those things where I'm like, why do we like it? I'm trying to work out why men like it.

And it does seem like it's the same as whatever, like good, smooth skin or something. It's just a cue of youthfulness that maybe we've managed to kid ourselves into. Oh, it's something to do with the birth canal. It's something to do with the way that women can stand up when they've got a child. Yeah, we can come up with a lot of really silly or bad evolutionary takes. And my God, we have as a field.

But that said, I mean, I think the way that science should work is sort of throw it all against the wall and test it. And for me, at least that I would put my stock in whatever lasek and gallin have to say, they're sort of the last word on this stuff for me. And so what we know is that across cultures there does seem to be something going on, right? This is the shape we find most attractive. So something is happening. It's happening across cultures. It's happening largely across eras. And whatever it is seems to be something that

attracts men to women. Okay, most of those things that attract men to women are related to fertility, are related to fertility, maybe for kind of the youth, that kind of thing. This is probably one of those things. And I sort of buy the idea that it's this future reproductive potential. But it doesn't mean it's not these other the stereotype idea. And there is something going on with the spine

that makes women more and less attractive during pregnancy. I think David Lewis has some stuff on that and how stiletto heels change the shape of the spine and the bum. So, these things are possible. But if you wanted the final answer on it, don't go to me, go to Lassick and Gollum. How does body size interpretations differ from women to men? Do you mean that women view themselves as bigger or are you? If you have a woman, if you have a woman that is other size and if you have a man that is also other size, what are the sort of interpretations about the guy?

If you have a fat guy, what do people think about him? Because we know what they think about a woman. Yeah, so for women, it's generally never that favorable, although I will say that, so we have to create totally new figures because for our stimuli, because no figures existed that increased in size to obesity, that actually varied shape. And once you do allow shape to vary, people are more favorable of the figure,

the female figure who is obese, but has that hourglass shape, compared to a figure who is overweight and has her fat and her gut. So their size actually is trumped by shape. For guys, shape also matters, although it's really much less clear in our data. What it seems to be is that sort of male typical gut fat can relate to perceptions of being a good dad. So that dad bod phenomenon, and Mitch Brown has some stuff on this.

Hang on, you're telling me that a guy that has a dad bod good is perceived as being a better father than a guy that doesn't have that. It's possible. So Mitch Brown has some stuff on that and our data would support that view. This is the kind of thing where the effect is small. In social psychology, we're often talking about small effects. This effect is small, but it's pretty consistent. People might think that my guess is, okay, so you have one calorie, you can't spend it twice, you can spend it on mating effort or you can spend it on parenting effort. If you are a really hot

dude, you can spend it on mating effort and do really well. If you're a dad bought dude, not to say that they're not hot, plenty of people loved Ben Affleck when he looked like that, I guess, although that tattoo is hideous, but whatever. So if you have a more dad bot, people might assume that you're more likely to spend your calorie on parenting effort because you can't get as much out of it. Oh my god. Okay. So because because a guy who has a dad bod, presumably has more mating opportunity doors closed to him, any potential energy that he does get in is

more likely to be spent on his child and on his family, because he he simply has less options to do it in terms of frittering away in the bedroom. I mean, I don't know if this is something that Mitch Brown has already done. It's entirely possible, but that's the sort of mechanistic account, the perception that he's more likely to spend his time and energy on parenting and maybe less so on mating.

That's what I'd go with. But of course, that could all be completely wrong. And that's half of what we do in science is learn how wrong we are. So that is absolutely hilarious. Okay, so you spoke about high heels on women there. I want to talk about the psychology of women's wardrobes because I know that this is something else

that you looked at. What is going on with women's wardrobes, because I know that this is something else that you looked at. What is going on with women's wardrobes? Why do they dress the way that they do? I mean, there is a huge answer to that, and we've studied the sliver of it. And I think I should say here that so much of the stuff, so women's clothing seems like the sort of

a femoral silly little topic. And even I agree with that. Although I love clothes and if Phoebe Filo is listening send me everything you got. But it's really fascinating phenomenon. If you couch it and sort of situate it in the world of these signals. So feathers on birds. You couch it and sort of situate it in the world of these signals. So feathers on birds, these physical signals that tell other people about you. And the dimension that's different with humans is that we get to pick and choose.

So peacock doesn't really get to choose how long and beautiful and luscious tail is. But for women, we do get to pick and choose these signals and they can mean a lot. And what we found is that particularly when women are new to a group, they're going to meet other women, they're more likely to dress modestly so as to not be excluded or attacked by other women that they're meeting. Why would it be the case that dressing nonmodestly would cause them to be excluded or attacked? And so Tracy Vienko has this beautiful study where she had a Confederate young woman who was probably in college and up in Canada with her. And this Confederate was dressed in one of two ways when she went

into a room to talk to two female friends. One way she's wearing khakis and a blue crew neck t-shirt and she goes into the room to talk to the two friends and the two friends are very pleasant to her. She also has a ponytail. In the other one, her hair's all like, blah, blah, voomy, she's wearing a low-cut, pink V-neck thing and a push-up bra. She's dressed very sort of racy. And when that, so it's the same woman, just dressed differently, she goes into that room. Tracy Vienko has beautiful lists of what happened to that woman when she went into the room.

She got called a bitch. She got death stairs. You did she get called a bitch by? Two of the participants. So two female friends that were in there, they were chatting. Hang on, there were friends of the person that was coming in. Oh no, the two friends were friends with each other. No, no, they're two friends with each other. Right.

And so this person comes into the room and it's just like, oh, can I take your surveys now? Or, you know, I'm trying to, to something really, really vicious beyond your eyes. They knew that they were being studied. They did. They didn't know that they were being studied for this. Ah, and they still called her a bitch.

Yeah. Right. Ah, okay. So this is the classic. You're doing a study and the bit that the study is actually about is upon your entry or exit from the study, which is the fake thing. Like the questioner that we're getting you to fill out has got fuck all to do with what we're actually asking you about. It's exactly. The old man dropped his pencils. how quickly do you walk down the corridor at the end of the of the thing like all of that shit. Yes, but I think Tracy's study would replicate yes. Right, okay. So what's going on there?

Yeah, so I think women are using especially this promiscuity cue or cues to whether or not a woman is making herself seem sexually available as to the benefits and costs that this woman stands to pose. So if another woman is in the vicinity and she is making her reproductive resources really widely available by being promiscuous or just advertising that she is open for sex. Other women don't like that. Other women view that as potentially threatening, which there are multiple reasons for that we can go into if you'd like, but women

don't like it. They even women who themselves are promiscuous don't want other promiscuous women as friends. What are the reasons for it? Why is it that women have got this concern? Yeah, so the predominant reason in the literature tends to be about mating competition. So she's going to take the guy that I want or she's going to take the guy that I want, or she's going to take the guy that I have. And if she takes the guy that I have, and I'm a woman, well, I've invested a lot. I've aged during the time that I've invested, so perhaps I have less power on the meeting market. And if I have a child, that child really benefits from the man's resources,

which he's now going to potentially divert her. really benefits from the man's resources, which he's now going to potentially divert her. So those are the predominant explanations. I think what's missing from that is this notion that if another woman makes, so you think of it like a market, like a sort of biological market. And if men are trading resources for reproductive access and a

cis-hat mating market, if women are voluntarily accepting fewer resources for access to their reproduction, and another woman's doing that, it lowers the value of my resource on the market too. And so I think that's an explanation that we need to look at. So if she's pardoned the crude language, if she's giving it away for free, it lowers the price that I can charge for it. I got destroyed on Instagram for putting up a video of me speaking to Jeffrey Miller explaining the game theory of slut shaming

So I put it up and it was exactly this right? It's like that slut shaming is a price enforcement mechanism It ensures that no one woman is able to drop the price of sex for all women below a price that most women want to pay and By slut shaming what you do is you enforce more restrictive sexual norms and a sexual price that raises that back up restrictive sexual norms and a sexual price that raises that backup the number of people that were particularly unhappy with me. It mostly came from women, perhaps unsurprisingly. Have you seen any data that suggests that most slut-shaming comes from women rather than men? I don't know of anything that suggests, obviously there's all of the stuff on the double standard, but that's about the targets being women rather than men. I don't know of anything that women themselves are more likely to do it.

I can't say anecdotally, you know, somebody that also studies this stuff. I have gotten, so there are people from the sort of even more feminist wing of my life that would say that I'm doing a disservice to women by talking about the, what I would consider the beautiful strategic nature of their aggression. And then other people say, yeah, look, they are evil, manipulative sluts. So I get it, I do get it. And I think we can talk about this stuff in a way that really honors how beautiful and strategic women can be. It's no surprise that men can do this. We should also elucidate the gorgeous viciousness that women can visit on each other. And I don't know why we think of that as somehow worse.

Well, it triggers a lot of people, right? There is a real sort of elegance to the samurai blade that women's intersexual competition wields. And but it also quite rightly, to the people who don't want mask off female manipulation to be shown anywhere, that women are sort of to be seen as this protected class that never do anything wrong.

It's bad to them. And then to the side that want to say see, they are the manipulative slits that we've said that they were all along. They also kind of don't want to see it and they use it as a cudgel to beat the other people. So the comments on that post got pretty spicy. It hasn't gone up on YouTube yet,

but I'm looking forward to seeing what happens when that goes on as well. Oh God, I'm not. It's gonna be awful. It's pretty, don't worry about it. How do you know that the intrasexual changes that women make with their wardrobe aren't just outfit choices that women are dressing for men with. Like, how do you control for the male influence

on outfits? I mean, the really simple answer is you do an experiment and you tell women you're going to hang out with only other women to night. And then you let them draw an outfit that they would wear and you measure the number of squares where skin is showing versus not. For real, we did that. You could also do, so there's this paper doll set that Stephanie Northover put together and it's women in different outfits sort of illustrated and a different set of people said this outfit is modest, this outfit is really not modest.

And you just say, hey, women, you're going to hang out with only other women. What outfit do you want to wear? And then we see how modest that outfit is or on average. What we can't do, because it in an experiment or probably also in real life, it's really a weird setup is say, OK, you're only going to hang out with other women. You're going to hang out in a mixed sex group. Or you're going to only hang out with other men.

You're going to be the only lady there. That gets into sort of a promising young woman territory at the end of the movie and nobody wants to study that, or maybe some people do, not me. Yes, so is there any, is there any data to suggest that men see women who are showing more flesh as more sexually available? My point being here that you could have a case of cross-sex mind reading gone bad. I don't think that that is the case.

I think that I see a girl walking down the street who's got a habit on or whatever. And I consider her to be someone who is less sexually promiscuous than someone that's wearing a bikini, but it could have been the case that women were seeing other women that wear fewer clothes as being more sexually promiscuous and trying to attract more mates, but men wouldn't have paid that much attention to it. Yeah, I mean, that's one of the things that there must be a study on that, although I've said that multiple times and went into the literature and it turns out there's not.

I don't think that that is a particular instance of cross-sex mind-reading gone wrong. I will say, so I don't know if you've had Candace Blake on yet, but my question is... Coming on toward the end of this year, I'm excited. Yes, she's amazing. And she has some really cool work on the sort of benefits of beautification, women's self- beautification when it's not just for men. So it's entirely possible, but it probably here,

we're going to start getting into the real nuances of things. So am I putting on a push-up bra just for me? Maybe less so than I'm putting on my particular favorite shirt, even if it looks skimpy just for me. But Candace will answer that far better than I can. I think that women get it right when they read other women's outfits. Right. And I guess there is a balancing act going on here that women are playing, especially if

they're a woman that's trying to find a mate, because they want to give off cues of sexual availability, of reproductive fitness, of being attractive to men. But if they overcook that, they're going to end up being completely ostracized by the, or more likely to be ostracized and treated aggressively by women that are in their friend groups. So there is this sort of game balance that's being played here.

Absolutely. And so what I, again, I think that this is just evidence of women being really strategic and flexible. Women know what other women view as not okay gloating. And women flexibly decide what to wear based on the context and how at risk for other women's aggression they are. So if I'm more attractive, I'm more at risk for other women's aggression potentially and I'm especially likely to wear modest clothing when I'm new to a group. I'm just meeting people.

I don't have friends. I'm a greatest risk for incurring aggression. And additionally, when I'm new to the group versus not, if I'm about to go meet my friends, I can wear whatever I want to meet my friends. I'm not at high risk for aggression. And so women understand this about other women's minds. It's not some massive calculation. It's something that we do quickly and simply, but it's also beautiful, strategic thinking. And I think that that's lovely. It seems to me that there is a line to be drawn between the strategies that women deploy when it comes to their wardrobe choice and their opinions on abortion and on being pro-choice or pro-life, their intracexual competition.

And you did an interesting article that I read about attitudes to abortion as a mating strategy rather than being about sanctity of life. Do you take us through that? Yeah, so this is with Marty Hazelton at UCLA, who is just a killer scientist. And a lot of it rehashes work from a her student, David Pinsoff, who's bad ass as hell, created cards against humanity. And folks like Jason Weedon and Rob Cruz-Ban,

so credit where credit is due, but the gist of it is that people naturally vary in their sexual strategies. Some people are really committed, they want to get married early to one partner, have a lot of kids, invest really heavily in those kids, and then there are some other people on the other end of the same spectrum who prefer to sort of play the field for longer and have more sex with more different people. So there's this natural variation. And what's pretty interesting is that the people who are committed sexual strategists

are and can understandably be threatened by the uncommitted strategist. So if I'm a woman who got married very early, I'm raising four kids. I've sort of can't economically support myself. My partner is the breadwinner, and he leaves me for this woman who is advertising her wares. I'm in a pretty big hole. That's pretty awful. Likewise, if I'm a man who's investing so much in my kids, but I've been cuckolded and they're not my kids because this promiscuous gentleman came over and they're his kids. Well, that's not great either.

So these committed strategists benefit by preventing the less committed strategists from pursuing their preferred strategy by being uncommitted, having more sex with more different people. by preventing the less committed strategists from pursuing their preferred strategy by being uncommitted, having more sex with more different people. If they can decrease the atmosphere of casual sex or low-cost casual sex, then they benefit.

So, do that make sense so far? Yeah, of course. Okay, awesome. Okay, so once you realize that, then you start to, you can problematize, I love when people say these words, you can problematize things like, okay, so why do people oppose abortion?

It's actually kind of a really fascinating question to think about why I should give any shits whatsoever about somebody who's not related to me, who might not even be in my state, what they're doing with their fetus or their family. It doesn't affect my fitness, so why should I care? And then I think the explanation is that people vary on sexual strategies, and if they're pursuing casual sex or other people in my environment, even if I'm not related to them, et cetera, et cetera, are freely pursuing casual sex, and I'm a committed strategist,

that can screw me up. And so committed sexual strategists stand to benefit by decreasing the ability of other people to have sexual freedoms. And if that's the case, then we should expect these casual, these committed strategists to do all sorts of things like oppose abortion, because when abortion is legal and free and available and safe, more women are likely to be okay with having casual sex. They should oppose birth control, because when birth control is available, well, there's more casual sex.

And it turns out they also oppose some of these other things like marriage equality, which they associate gay men with promiscuity, and they oppose recreational drugs, because they associate Molly and Marijuana with promiscuity. And this is statistically significant. There's a more prevalence of this in couples that are married, if they've got kids, if they've been together longer, how does that relate? So usually what we'll do is ask people, there are different ways to ask it, but what's your sexual strategy? So you don't have to be married, you don't have to have kids, but

these things do all go together. There's some really cool work by Nick Kerry and Damian Murray and colleagues that says that, so you know that that old chestnut that people just get more conservative as they age. Yeah, that's probably not true. Rather than just getting older and becoming more conservative, it seems like that effect completely washes out when you control for a number of children. So if people have kids and have more kids, they become more socially conservative. And again, the idea is that the sort of deep strategy that socially conservative cultures or groups or situations make my investment in my kids safer better for me.

Why would it not be the case that the people who oppose abortion are not just morally opposed to all of the moral arguments that you would see around abortion? Why is that not sufficient justification to why is that not sufficient justification to wash out all of this stuff to do with sexual competition for partners? Yeah, I mean, it could be some people might genuinely believe that these fetuses are babies and they don't want babies to be murdered. With my colleague Jordan Moon, we have some data to suggest that that's probably not the case. So, if I am a person who thinks that abortion is murder, I should want to prevent abortion. So, the more I think it's murder, the more I should want to prevent it.

Okay. So, we ask people how much they think abortion is murder, for example, and we randomly assigned them to read about one of three hypothetical bills. All of the bills would cost the same amount of money, and all of the bills would save the same amount of lives. But in one condition, the bills prevented abortions and saved fetal lives by punishing women for having abortions. That's the only condition where we also see, okay, if we're going to punish women for having abortions,

that's to decrease the availability of abortions and to decrease women's engagement and casual sex. So that would be good for the committed strategist. The other two conditions were we're going to save fetal lives by letting their B-sex ed and birth control, which should decrease the need for abortions and therefore save the same amount of lives. And the other one is something that people often you probably heard this talked about. We're going to save the same amount of lives, but they're newborns. So we're gonna save the same amount of lives,

but they're newborns. So we're gonna give critical care and provisioning to newborns and save their lives. They die without this care and provisioning. So if I think that abortion is murder, and I'm just about saving lives, then the more that I'm about saving lives, the more I think abortion is murder,

the more I should support all three of these. And that's not even close to what we find. So the more that I think abortion is murder, the more that I want to punish women for having abortions. But we actually see slight negative slopes for the other two. The more that I believe abortion is murder and want to save innocent lives, the less that I'm willing to support a bill that would give critical care and provisioning to media infants. So that probably suggests that what they're saying is driving their behavior, is not driving their behavior, which is not surprising, that happens for plenty of people. How do you know that that's not just retributive justice that they feel should be duly done against someone that has transgressed some moral boundary? So it's possible that,

you know, they feel like they should punish women because these women are transgressing. But if they're saying that it's not about punishing women, it's about saving lives, But if they're saying that it's not about punishing women, it's about saving lives, then they should probably want to save lives, even if they don't get to punish women for having abortions while doing it. And that's just not what we see in the data. And some other data, oh, sorry, just that I was thinking about the fact that what you've tried to do there with the three different bills is have the same number of human lives, baby human lives,

saved or protected, and what you've controlled for is whether or not the mothers are disincentivized from having casual sex as openly. Yeah, so that's only the one condition that disincentivizes casual sex. The other two save the same amount of lives. So it's the same amount of justice, so to speak, but they don't feel the same toward those. So I mean, there are plenty of things going on and there are probably some people that really do believe that this is just their moral obligation.

I don't know those people. I wouldn't want to be interested in knowing those people. They're probably really boring people, but very nice people. I think that it's interesting to consider why we have the motivations that we do. Are my stated preferences and my revealed preferences? Like, are they actually what I say that they are and how blind am I to that? I think that the abortion debate, a lot of the language, it's surprising to me to find that out because so much of the language is around the morality of it, some sort of ethical line in the sand that should not be crossed, so on and so forth. That, to me, feels like... But I mean, he was going to put the hand up and say, actually, what I'm trying to do

is restrict sexual norms so that all of the other women and men. But I suppose there must be an equivalent for this as well. Didn't you find out that, is it men invest more money in their children, in like in fathering their children, like sexually restricted men spend more money on their kids? So I didn't do that. If that is out there, that's probably Nick Currie and colleagues would be my guess. And I wouldn't be surprised if that's true. I do think that that's true, but I think exactly what you're saying. So I can say it's a moral goal, moral imperative.

And that's a much more convincing argument for me to say than saying, I just want to further my sexual strategy, these free love new age hippies be damned, right? And it also requires, so for that latter thing to happen, I just wanna further my sexual strategy. It probably requires they have a PhD in psychology and have been studying this and realize that there's this notion of reproductive morality,

or reproductive religiosity. And that, things like sexual strategy lead to religion, rather than religion, leading to sexual strategy. Ooh, what do you mean that? So, I mean, it's obviously, we haven't, you know, randomly assigned people to conditions here, but it does seem like the things that religions want serve people who have committed sexual strategies.

So have one mate, have one mate early and best, really heavily in that person, stay together forever and don't get divorced or you'll go to hell. So all of those things that religions often support are restricted strategy benefits. And if that's the case, then you might very well imagine people who have restricted strategies would be attracted to religion. And so it could be that not totally dissimilar to venting, saying, well, this is a religious thing.

This is a moral imperative is cover for people who just really want to pursue their own fitness interests at the cost of other people. Of course, nobody's saying they realize this, right? They don't have access to this knowledge. It's not being done consciously. They're not just trying to screw any other people, trying to screw no one. So I couldn't help it. I couldn't help it. But yeah, some of the data do seem to suggest that as people enter periods of being more sexually restricted, they're more likely to adhere to religion. And when they leave those periods, they're more likely to leave religion

to think about going to college. Right. So religiosity increases when you're in a committed relationship and decreases if you get out of it. Yeah, yeah, I mean, there are some pretty cool data to suggest that the arrow doesn't just go one way from religion telling you what sexual strategy to have, but people who have a certain sexual strategy get attracted to religion. Because it benefits the strategy that they have. How should people deal with the discomfort of hearing that you would say their view on abortion or their sense of connection between themselves and their religion could be their evolutionary programming coming out in a, how do you say, the press secretary of their mind giving them a very culpable excuse.

Like how should they deal with that? Because that's something that's like incredibly uncomfortable to hear. Yeah, I mean, what isn't these days? I don't know. I'm not the most sensitive person, Chris. So I would just say, second up. I really, there's probably a nicer way to put it. I don't have a capacity or bandwidth or natural disposition to figure out what the heck the nice way is. So, suck it up. Yeah. Do you not find, as you learn more about your evolutionary predisposition, though, and the different motivations that are coming out in your behavior, have you not found yourself

in sort of an uncanny valley of feeling like you're just at the mercy of whatever genes were given to you from a three billion year like evolutionary unbroken stream. I mean, would I love to remake the world in an image where everybody thought like Lizzo was the hottest bitch ever, which many people do and she really probably is. Yeah, I mean, I would love that. That would benefit me because she and I are shaped very similarly for anyone who can't see what I look like. So that would be awesome, but that's just not the world that we live in. And I think understanding reality is great. And I think acknowledging the fact that we have a lot of personal choices that we can

make that aren't necessarily making us slaves to some innate programming, our behavior is hugely flexible. I think we have to realize that too. So I don't think we're just, you know, sort of these lovely program robots that just say, you know, she's hot, I must mate. I think there's a lot more to us than that, and the messiness and the complexity, and that part is what I love about humans. Very few of them, but the ones I like. Talk to me about the relationship between casual sex and self-esteem, because I know that you've done a ton of work on this as well. Yeah, so I mean, this is one of those things where I don't know why people haven't gone after this effect before, but we knew in media books, films, the...

Have you seen arrested development? No. It's an amazing show. It's hilarious and ridiculous, but in the show they have a sort of cheeky analog of the Girls Gone Wild video series, and it's called Girls with Low Self-esteem. And so we have this, it's so prevalent, the idea that women who have casual sex must have low self-esteem. It's so prevalent in society that it can be a punchline on a popular TV series or largely on popular TV series, but nevertheless, it was funny.

And so what we did was simply investigate this and see if it was the case for men as well. And what we find is in America, people think that women, but not men who have casual sex, must have low self esteem. And you know, self esteem can be hugely important for oneself, but perceptions of other people's self-esteem are perhaps even more important. So if I perceive you to have low self-esteem, I'm less likely to want to be your friend. I'm less likely to ask you for a date. I'm less likely to hire you for a job, and I'm less likely to vote you into political office.

So this isn't just, you know, oh, whoa, is this poor sad little woman that has low self esteem? These have real serious economic and social consequences. How are you defining self esteem? What does it mean? So feeling good about yourself. Very simple, classic definition, a sense of respect for yourself. Okay, why is there a presumption that casual sex, somebody that has lots of casual sex, would be low in self-esteem? So that women have casual sex. So there's this presumption for women. We see it repeatedly, part of it, not all of it, but part of it seems to be that people presume that women who do have casual sex

are sort of making the best of a bad job. So they presume that women would ideally prefer to have one long term mate who loves them and they love and that's that. And so women who have casual sex are sort of just tossed into doing this. They have to do it to get by or they have to do it because they're trying to find a partner. So that's part of the thinking underlying it, but I say part because even when we tell our participants, this woman is having casual sex and she fucking

loves it. She is so happy doing this. She doesn't want to be tied down. She doesn't want this other stuff. They still believe that she has lower self-esteem than a woman who has committed sex, um, so one partner, and is unhappy pursuing it. So this is a really robust phenomenon. We couldn't make it go away. Hopefully other researchers continue down this line and can figure out

how to do that. But would the assumption not be because it is easier for women to get sex and it is for men to get sex and that there is a presumed preference for women to get into a long-term committed relationship. So by her having sex, that is her feeling some sort of void inside that she can't fill with a long-term and agamist partner. And that might be it. They think that, yes, it's easier for women to have sex. And so women might have an easier time attracting a mate than a man does. I'm sure you and Wilk Estello can talk about this

in the in-self phenomenon or maybe the femme self phenomenon all day. But even so, when that woman is having casual sex and just enjoying it, she's assuring the strategy that people assume that she has. Even when we say, well, she's enjoying it, people don't believe that she's enjoying it. And that really might be the sort of deep logic of presuming that women are less likely to enjoy or seek out more partners and more variety. Why do you think that men and why do you think that women would hold that view about other women?

Probably the same thing. So I don't think that men and women differ in their perceptions and stereotypes there. I think the sort of meta-thinking for both is the same that, well, she just can't get what she'd really like, which is a single partner. Why would it not be the case that women would want to lower the perceived self-esteem of the other woman in order to make her less of a, you've already said, less likely to be asked out on a date, less likely to be friends, that woman would be more of a sexual potential sexual rival. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to lower her perceived self-esteem in, like this cartel,

this unspoken cartel between everybody on the planet to do that. But I couldn't see why there would be the same motivation for men to do that. Yeah, so I should clarify that what we're looking at here are the stereotypes and not the reality. So women and men perceive women who have casual sex to have lower self-esteem. The reality isn't that. What's amazing is that so our same participants, males and females,

who report holding the stereotype that women who have casual sex have low self-esteem, are participants who hold the stereotype, report their sexual behavior, and they report their own self-esteem. And in the participants who hold the stereotype, there is no consistent relationship between their sexual behavior and their self-esteem. So if there is any real world relationship between men's or women's sexual behavior in

self-esteem, it's probably complicated. Somebody like, I'm probably going to butcher her name, but Zana Vrungalova would suggest that if you want to have casual sex and you're having casual sex, then you'd have high self-esteem. And that makes sense for a sort of nice evolutionary perspective on self-esteem as a sociometer telling you how well you're doing in the world. So, I want the same. So, Mark Leary has this really great idea that self-esteem is really just our sort of cute ourselves of how well we're doing. So, it's an aggregate of, do I have good friends?

Do people support me? Am I getting the sex that I want? All right, I feel pretty good about myself. So I'm pursuing the adaptive goals that I have and I'm doing pretty well. And low self esteem would be, I'm not pursuing these goals, and I'm not doing very well.

And so a sociometer perspective would suggest them that if I want to have casual sex and I'm having casual sex, then yes, I should feel pretty great because I'm doing what I want to be doing. Interesting. And people didn't use the theory of mind that they had about themselves. You said that when you studied the participants that held those stereotypes, they didn't have any correlation between their sexual strategy and their level of self-esteem, but they hadn't decided to use the own theory of mind of their own experience to extrapolate out to other people. Exactly.

That's what's so wild about it. It exists. It's persistent. It's robust, and it's fucking wrong. It's kind of wild. Yeah, there does have to be something else going on. All right, well, what have you got coming up next? Like what's on the research docket for you soon?

Dude, I live in Oklahoma, so all I do is research. We could talk about what I have next for a long time. Hopefully it'll be going with Philadelphia. Bye, you guys. Bye. So one of the things that I'm really excited about is sort of understanding how the mind aggregates and calculates what it means to be a good friend. So what we're hoping to do across 30 nations

or 30 locations, including small-scale societies by collaborating with anthropologists and industrialized societies collaborating with other people at other universities, is to explore what we think makes a good friend. And we're gonna do a really simple experiment that I kind of love. So, okay, who's a better friend in your opinion, Chris?

A friend who helps you and helps somebody you don't like or a friend who helps you and doesn't help somebody you don't like. In fact, I should say, who's a more helpful friend? Okay, so the more helpful friend would be the first one, the better friend, the petty child in me says the second one. So and that's the sort of objective as view, right, that you're taking, which is a person who helps two people is twice as helpful as a person who helps just one.

And there's a view, so most work in social psych just focuses on the two people in the friendship, not the ways that other people can bear on the two people in the friendship. And so on that view, however my friend behaves toward me, that should be all that I care about. So if they help me, they're 100 out of 100 on helpful. If they don't help me, they're 100 out of 100 on helpful. If they don't help me,

they're zero out of zero. And our view is that people do think of the world in terms of how is my friend going to radiate positive effects on me, both directly by helping me, but also indirectly by fucking my enemies or at least not helping them. And so what we predicted and find is that at least in the US, people view friends as super helpful when they help me, but not my enemy. They view them as much less helpful if they help both of us, which is basically saying, I view objectively more helpful friends as less helpful.

And they view friends as very unhelpful, obviously, if they only help my enemy and not me. That's fascinating. Fingers crossed, we do it across cultures and find something pretty interesting. It's possible that all sorts of culture and ecology could be affecting people's inputs to this, but I think the overall effect is going to be robust. And I do think it starts to tell us that when we say somebody is nice, we mean they're nice to us. And when we say somebody is a glorious monster,

we mean they're a glorious monster for us. Yes, yeah. I wonder whether there'll be a sex ratio hypothesis of the number of enemies versus friends that you have in the local environment. If you were surrounded by more enemies than you were friends, the relative amount of investment that your friends gave you would be more or less valuable. Yeah, so there's some really cool stuff on relational mobility, so how able we are to get in new friendships and leave old friendships. And so you can imagine that in a similar way, if we sort

of have to be friends with our enemies, there are different costs and benefits of how our friends then treat those enemies. Maybe ideally. If you were in an environment where you were overrun by enemies, you would have to collaborate with them at some point. So perhaps you were in an environment where you were overrun by enemies, you would have to collaborate with them at some point. So perhaps you would perhaps you would be prepared to put up with more shallow displays of friendship from your friends and then maybe there would be a change in terms of the amount of venting that you would do behind the scenes in order to make sure that oh, we're actually still I know that you're kind of pretending to be friends with them, but it's like it's still really us

that are the proper friends on the other side of that. Yeah, it is so interesting that the knobs and dials and faders that you think about with regards to people's friendships, what they do for other people, their level of disclosure within their own friends, their level of personal vulnerability, what it is that they tell them how much venting they do, how much sabotage they do with other people. Like when you add all of personal vulnerability, what it is that they tell them how much venting they do, how much sabotage they do with other people. When you add all of this together,

it's not surprising that friendships are such complicated things to try and manage. Yes, we don't talk about that nearly enough. You had Dunbaron. He said that having friends is the next best thing for your health behind quitting smoking, right? And lacking friends, this is some whole lunch stat work, is equivalent at least being lonely to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. So maybe we should pay as much attention to our friendships as we do about, you know, where our genitals go. I increasingly now, and it's like, whatever, 550 episodes into the show, every single happiness researcher that I bring on, Laura Van der Kam, Cassie Holmes, like whoever it is that I speak to

that has dedicated their entire life to studying happiness, it's almost boring to ask, like you know what are the habits of the most happy people that you've studied and they got all world, you know, they've got good relationships. The first thing always comes up, they've got good relationships.

And then downstream from that, maybe it's to do with a sense of belonging to a community, friendships again, maybe it's religiosity and that they have like people that are religious seem to live longer. Wow, that's a sense of community again. Like they, you know, they play team sports. What the fuck's that? Like all of these things like so many of the things just come back to having friendships and having a community. So, yeah, the reason I think that friendship gets a bit of a bad rap in the personal development slash applied pop psychology, like the not progressives, like advanced stuff, this sort of low level stuff. I think the reason for it is that it's very difficult to optimize for. I think that the current world of personal self development sees the individual as sovereign and it's very difficult to sell somebody a course or sell somebody a book where the answer

isn't something that you can go away and do yourself. So it seems like a much more wiggly line between where you are and the outcome that you want to get. Now, if you were to write a book about how to make friends as an adult, like the outcome would be an externality of you following whatever the strategy is that's in the book. But if you're to write a book about happiness, it's like these are the things that you should do for happiness. And you go, okay, friends are really important. You're right. Well, there's 10 books there.

Now I need a 10 book volume on how friendship works and what to do and who all that sort of stuff. I just think that on the internet in personal development, in personal growth generally, there is a huge blind spot. Like, friendship is spoken of as a big thing that needs to be looked after and then never really applied. And I think it's just because it's it's hard to do. I mean a lot of people don't realize how hard it is. And so if you think about we say friendship like do friendship, but friendship is an umbrella term for about 60 different challenges, right? So you have to figure out what you want in a friend, find friends, attract friends, make friends, keep friends, and then you do lose friends and you have to deal with losing friends. So you have to navigate all of these challenges to simply have these medium to long term communal bonds.

And none of them are necessarily easy. We've mostly studied them in terms of what I need to do to make that friend like me, but we haven't thought about the fact that the challenge, so we've cast these challenges as diatic challenges. But we haven't thought about the fact that, okay, we've evolved in these small, densely interconnected groups, where my friends inevitably and frequently interact with people who aren't me, and these interactions that my friend has with other people, they're

going to affect my friend, they're going to affect my friendship, and they're going to affect ultimately me and the benefits that I get out of the thing. And so if we're thinking about only diatic challenges, we're not even recognizing the true, rich complexity, and the fact that friendships also have super-diadic challenges. And that's part of what my work will hopefully address, but we just don't talk about it. We don't realize it. Only in the last two, three years have I looked at... So you're going to know exactly my political leanings

as I tell you, the New York Times and the Atlantic. I read them a lot, and only recently, they have come out with papers like, okay, friendship is hard. Thank you. Mother is, new mothers especially have a hard time making friends. Well, yes, and we should probably look into that

if social support helps women's infants live. But have we? No. Oh, it's hard to make friends in your 30s. It's hard to make friends when you move. It's hard to keep friends. We should try and be better friends. And it's like, no shit, people. Sorry, I get really excited about this. I'm gonna, you know, do a little woo-sa and calm down. But friendship is hard, and I don't think it has to be that hard. We have really good theories of friendship that can tell you what to do to get people to invest in you and have a stake in your continued welfare. And if they do, then you get those benefits

of quitting smoking. That's the book to write. That's the book that we need. Jamie. Yeah, just get me out of teaching and I'll do it. Fantastic. Let's bring this one home. Jamie Crems, ladies and gentlemen, if people want to check out the stuff that you do online, where should they go? that you do online, where should they go? Yes, cremeslab.com, KREMESMARY, S.S. and Sam, or they can Google me and go to my Twitter or hopefully find me at a Phillies game when they win the World Series. Thanks for having me.

Thank you. Oh, my friends, my friends, my friends