Modern Wisdom - #643 - Michael Kasumovic - Are Violent Video Games Actually That Harmful?

Episode Date: June 19, 2023

Michael Kasumovic is a professor of evolutionary biology at University of New South Wales, a researcher and an author. The influence of violent video games on human psychology has been contested for years. Does virtual violence translate to real world harm? Should we be worried about our friends and kids who play them? And just what makes these games so compelling? Expect to learn the evolutionary theory of why winners tend to win more and losers tend to lose more, whether video games skills translate to the real world, why status-seeking people are more interested in playing violent video games, whether men can grow beards for protection from punches, why men with high testosterone have superior immune systems, why women who play violent video games have higher self-esteem and much more... Sponsors: Get 10% discount on all Gymshark’s products at https://bit.ly/sharkwisdom (use code: MW10) Get 10% discount on Marek Health’s comprehensive blood panels at https://marekhealth.com/modernwisdom (use code: MODERNWISDOM) Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and more from Athletic Greens at https://drinkag1.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Check out Michael's website - https://www.michaelkasumovic.com/ Follow Michael on Twitter https://twitter.com/mkasumovic 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 friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Michael Kasumovic. He's a professor of evolutionary biology at the University of New South Wales, a researcher, and an author. The influence of violent video games on human psychology has been contested for years. Does virtual violence translate to real-world harm? Should we be worried about our friends and kids who play them, and just what makes these games so compelling.

Expect to learn the evolutionary theory of why winners tend to win more and loses tend to lose more, whether video game skills translate to the real world, why state-to-seeking people are more interested in playing violent video games, whether men can grow beards for protection from punches, why men with high testosterone have superior immune systems, why women who play violent video games have higher self-esteem, and much more. Saying that this conversation is just about violent video games, undersells it so much, Michael's stuff is phenomenal. He's so interesting, and the number of studies that this guy has been involved in are just beyond fascinating

This is classic straight up pure uncut modern wisdom stuff human nature and biases and psychological insights It's so good. You're really really gonna love this one and I hope that you take tons away from it If you do hit the subscribe button come on If you're listening you might not have hit subscribe away from it. Please, I thank you. In other news, this episode is brought to you by Jim Shark. Whether you're a bodybuilder, a yogi, beginning at the gym or an ultra runner, whether you're looking for the best shorts to run your 5k marathon in or the most comfy sweats to do brunch with your friends, Jim Shark is the place to go. I'm absolutely in love with their studio shorts.

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Head to drinkag1.com slash modern wisdom to get a year's free supply of vitamin D, five free travel packs, free pots, shakers, and that 90 day money back guarantee that's drinkag1.com slash modern wisdom. But now ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Michael Kasumovic. Why do people play violent video games? What's their motivation? That is an age old question since video games really came out, isn't it?

You know, they're fun, first off, let's be honest. They're a really good time and people love playing them. But that's not really enough of an answer. It's, it seems like there's more than that just driving us. And, you know, my research and the research of my colleagues Tom Denson for example we believe that it's a search for status. Video games really allow you to test your metal against others and they allow you to see how well you stand up to other folks and as a consequence it allows you to see how you stack up and where you sit in a hierarchy. So we're arguing that it really

allows you to get a better understanding of yourself and where you sit in a hierarchy. So we're arguing that it really allows you to get a better understanding of yourself to where you sit in between others. Why the violence? Yeah. Well, if we look through a human history, you know, there's not a lot of kindness or as much kind as going on as there is kind of aggression in violence. And if we look at all animals, almost all animals have some kind of social hierarchy. And individuals on the top of that hierarchy

have extra or gain more benefits than other individuals lower in that hierarchy. And violence is a way to kind of keep that order in that hierarchy. And it actually, a hierarchy works really well because we are able to understand where we sit. And when we know where we sit, we actually don't have to compete against one another and we don't have to be violent against one another.

It's when that hierarchy is kind of removed. Do we find that there's disorder and individuals within that system need to figure out where they sit and that's when more aggression usually happens. So we have this kind of interesting system in video games where individuals play games to have fun, but also can compete against one another, can kind of see where they stand against one another, and that allows everyone to constantly keep changing and testing where they sit in that hierarchy. So we see a lot of kind of an attraction to violent video games because of that.

I had a researcher called Tony Volk on the show recently, and he did some stuff around bullying. One of the interesting insights that he gave me was that bullies need to bully somebody who could be conceivably within a similar status hierarchy, because if it's a 12 year old bullying a five year old, what's the status here? Or the same thing, if it's a fight between two guys

in the street, but one of them's got a baseball bat and the other just has his hands, that also isn't a particularly reliable measure of status, because you don't have two people. It's why there's no status associated with some young guy punching an old lady. Like, there's no competition for hierarchy when it comes to that and presumably one of the things that you get with games. And this is interesting, thinking about games like Fortnite and Call of Duty Warzone, what they've done is the only real upgrades you get, I guess

was on slightly different, but the only real upgrades that you get especially on Fortnite are artificial aesthetic ones. So you're not getting anything that gives anybody an advantage in the game. Every single game of Battle Royale on Fortnite, the playing field is completely flat and it is how good are you from the beginning to the end best man wins a woman. Really, a person, exactly, absolutely. And that is key, isn't it? Because if you have an advantage, then there's a problem. It's really hard to say what caused you to win or to lose.

Oh, well, you know, I lost that game because that person, you know, spent a lot of money to be able to get those upgrades. So of course, I was going to lose. And that's a really interesting question as well because winning and losing, we no have effects in a lot of different animals. And we are starting to see that same kind of research being done on humans, which is really neat. You have this loser effect, where if you lose, you're more likely to lose in another game

in a future game that you play. If you win, you're more likely to win in a future game that you end up playing. But if those odds are stacked against you, does that winner effect have the same effect, or that loser effect have that same effect on your perception of yourself and how you behave in a future match? For example, if I'm playing someone like we talked about in Warzone, and they have a much better gun than I do But we're equal in all other parts. I'm gonna end up losing and when I end up losing I'll say to myself Well, I didn't lose because I'm really terrible at this game I lost because that person had an advantage

So it's unlikely that that's going to have that same kind of effect on my self perception of my own ability as a real loss where we're equals. So absolutely, you know, fighting within your status or closer to your status likely has a much bigger effect. But there's actually very, very little research done on that kind of stuff which is kind of interesting, so it's an open playing field. So if we look at a lot of non-human animal research, that's where we've done a lot of research on what happens to losers after they lose and what happens to winners after they win.

And in those systems, we see a really neat kind of pattern where it's not necessarily adjusting things as far as we can tell. It seems to be some kind of internal response. For example, let's imagine two crickets fighting for some space where they're going to call for some females to try and attract some females and make the film. You'll have males fight pretty aggressively for that space. If that fight escalates to something that's really physical where they have to be really aggressive with one another and there's a chance of them hurting one another, then what happens is that the winner ends up... It's almost as if he feels better about himself, but that's a very human way of thinking about it.

But comes out of that fight, and if you match that individual with another male, the same size and same traits, they end up out competing that male. They have a better chance of winning than if they fought them for the first time. And it's vice versa for the loser. The loser will go into another fight and if you match them for the same size and the same weight and all those traits, they're more likely to lose that fight than that second fight after they win, after they lost. So it's not necessarily, it seems as if something's going on in terms. So in a lot of systems we've looked at physiology, maybe there's some hormonal changes, what's going on, and that's shifting how individuals perceive themselves. But there's no real

clear kind of pattern across the animal kingdom. And when you look at it in humans, it's even more complex. So we've not figured that out at all, and there's still a lot of research to keep looking into. It's so strange when the Matthew principle and power laws end up appearing in nature as well. You wonder, you know, there's during Peterson's stand-up straight with your shoulders back thing about the lobsters and serotonin and like that. But especially when it comes to a computer game, I don't know.

You don't think that it's quite as limited by, let's say that there's some sort of hormone cascade that stops people's muscles from being able to deploy power in the same way if you're a loser, right? Or you are beaten in a fight, so you spend the next couple of weeks further down the status hierarchy, which means that your malnourishing undefared and depressed,

which means that the next fight that you get into, but you're iterating so quickly in video games that you're almost controlling for the physical changes. So it makes me think that at least in humans, a lot of it has to be about self-perception and about the story that we're telling ourselves. I think so too, because if you think about, when you're talking about physiological or hormonal shifts

that are happening within our body, and you mentioned that if we go down the status hierarchy, then we're gonna experience less interaction, less food, potentially become more depressed, that's really, really costly. If that was built into our system, you could see that being selected out from an evolutionary perspective really quickly, because that's really bad. If you can't survive after losing, well, then it's going to be hard

for you to find a mate and have your genes continue on for the population. You would end up producing or selecting for a population of people who were immune to losses. That's exactly it. So it doesn't seem like it's that simple. And I do agree with you, because I do think, person, that it is something about self-perception. And this is a really hard thing to test in non-human animals,

which is why I've moved to humans to kind of explore this question. But it's also really hard to to test in non-human animals, which is why I've moved to humans to kind of explore this question. But it's also really hard to look at in humans, especially in the video games that we currently play, because game designers do something really interesting, right? They kind of balance wins and losses for you. Because if you keep winning and you realize I'm really good at this game, then all of a sudden you don't really want to play anymore anymore because that challenge is kind of gone. Same thing, if you end up losing a bunch of matches over and over again, you end up not

wanting to play because you realize you're not very good and it's no longer any fun. So designers are balancing that. When you first start playing a game, they match you to people who are of your level. You know, if you win something, they might match you with someone more difficult. Where you end up losing. So you end up going down that self-proceed hierarchy. But then you, they match you with someone who's a little bit worse than you, and you end up winning. So they're balancing those wins and losses for you. So you're always kind of in that sweet spot, and you're always wanting to kind of play more's why it's really hard to use current video games to explore these outcomes, because it's not just what's happening to us.

The system is uncontrolled by the game design, so it's really hard to tease those aspects apart. You also looked at demographic status-related and mating-related correlates to playing video games, right? Yes, so I've always been fascinated with this kind of outcomes. I never expected you know our desire to want to attract mates or to interact with the opposite sex or potential sexual partners as a driver to want to play video games, But it really predicts it really well consistent. And that's for both men and women. Individuals who have a stronger drive to find mates are more likely to want to play violent video games and to

play them more often. Which is, I never would have thought it actually would have worked out if it didn't keep showing up constantly in our studies. Why? What's going on? Yeah. So, if we go back to the idea of a hierarchy, again, individuals up in that hierarchy have access to more mates. You have access to more potential partners.

You have access to more resources and individuals who are Wanting access to those things want to keep getting up in that hierarchy sort driven to kind of Play more violent video games because once again that gives you that feedback of where you stand within that social system If you keep winning and you're doing really well Then you know your or your proceed yourself as a better individual, even if that is just in video games, it kind of reflects your self-perception of your own ability and other aspects. So, what does it say that the people who are most status-seeking in the virtual world, pursue a particular thing which actually leads to relatively few successes of status in the real world. It seems to me, if you are looking to be successful,

as sociosecually, winning a fortnight is not the most direct route to go down. So it seems almost like this desire for status and esteem and prestige in the eyes of the opposite sex and your own sex has been hijacked in a way which doesn't actually realize many of the gains that you should do. Is that fair? It is. If we think about what you just said,

the virtual world and the real world, that line's blurring very, very, you know, the virtual world and the real world, that line's blurring very very quickly. You know, what is the virtual world? Now, what is the real world? And if we look to our evolutionary history, this virtual world never existed. So our systems evolved the response of the real world. And just like you said, developers are able to kind of hijack that whole system. And we seem to not be able to tell the difference between how a Win occurs in the virtual world and the real world Those are both very satisfying kinds of things and allow us to kind of change our self perception of ourselves in response to that win or loss

Oh, so I understand what you meant about the lines being blurred Individuals who play these video games are struggling to distinguish between successes in the virtual world and successes in the real world. I wouldn't say that you're able to cash in status from being good at video games as effectively in the real world. Now, I would be interested to see if you looked at people who have more followers on media platforms who post more frequently, who use items in their captions and in tweets and stuff more frequently, I would guess that you will find basically

the same effect going on, but that is complete brochines. Well, that's an interesting one as well, right? Because you're self-selecting for a group of individuals who are doing really, really well. We're not only status seeking, but they're doing really, really well in that environment and are really high and not higher. So possibly, but it's hard to tease apart kind of what's going on. But if we go back to just something you said just before that, I don't think necessarily

that it's a concern that these virtual skills transfer into the real world. I don't think our minds kind of think in that kind of a way, even though there are some studies showing that performance in certain video games actually does translate into greater performance in the real world in a work context. Like when you're playing games like SimCity and managing games, you're actually seem to be much better at managing projects and doing work and a team in the real world. So interestingly enough, some of those skills do translate.

But I don't necessarily think that someone who's playing Warzone a lot and they're killing it in that game and they step out and go man. I am just so incredible They realize that those skills don't translate to anything real But they still feel really good about themselves and if we know about trying to gain friends and trying to gain mates We know confidence is a really strong thing. And if that interaction online improves your confidence, your self-confidence, that is going to translate to some real world kind of benefits. Do you have any evidence for that? There isn't much right now because this is a kind of a new way of thinking. I would be as a look at that. I would be so fascinated

to see if that works. So I'm currently of the opinion that the almost the opposite thing happens. So it's my belief that screens, video games, and porn are sedating men out of their state of seeking, team bonding, and reproductive fitness behavior behavior that they're given a titrated dose, right? Just a tiny, tiny little amount, the uncanny volvers as they're called by Diana Fliesman. And what this is doing is it's causing young male syndrome, which we should have seen, given the amount of matelessness and sexlessness and loneliness that young men, particularly are suffering with at the moment, that's the reason that young male syndrome hasn't kicked in, that men are being sedated out of

these behaviors by this. But what you're suggesting, if this is true, is that confidence and status that's derived in the virtual world would cause people to believe that more readily in the real world. Now, what would be surprising, the reason that that would be surprising to me, is that we're seeing people retreat from real world behaviors that would have been predicted, had they have found success in the virtual world and it crossed over, more and more we're seeing people silo themselves off just into an online world

that doesn't come back across. Now, this could be due to something that isn't just state as hierarchies, you know, fucking about. This could be the generalized addictive nature of these tools. It could be the comfort crisis or convenience, the fact that the couch is just way more comfortable. But yeah, what's your thoughts on that? Melodization hypothesis, all of this stuff I've just thrown at you. Yeah, those ideas have been around and I listened to them a lot and they seem like really simple answers

to me to a very, very complex problem. I don't think it's that simple and I don't think it's any of one of those things that are causing individuals to kind of behave in that way. Let me explain what. First off, as a scientist, one thing I learned really early in my career is everything is really complex. Way too complex to actually simplify in these single or one

or two or even three different kind of factors. Second, earlier we talked about this idea that individuals who are more interested in sex and finding partners are more driven to play violent video games because they're more driven for status, right? Interestingly what else explains this behavior or what else is correlated with this behavior of playing violent video games if your is your own self perception of your own make value. If you perceive yourself as a high-quality mate,

you end up playing more violent video games. Then we started manipulating that. Could we actually change an individual self-perception of themselves and what do they do afterwards? So, what we did is we took a bunch of individuals and we ended up letting them play different video games. Some were violent and some were not violent and we ended up letting them play different video games. Somewhere Violet and somewhere Non-Violet and we looked at their performance in those games. Individuals in the Non-Violet games, they didn't change their self-perception of their own ability and performance and that didn't seem to affect their own self-perception of their mate value. But individuals who performed really badly in the violent video game saw themselves as worse off. That's horrible. Exactly. They actually decrease their own self perception of

their main value, which I think is fascinating that a video game can actually do that to someone. And you didn't see this in non-violent video games? That's correct. It was mediated less. violent video games. That's correct. It was mediated less. We didn't even see it. Wow. So to recap, violent video games are able to contribute to self-perceived mate value. Non-violent video games are not able to elicit the same effect. However, this could be, how much of this could be a selection effect that the people who want to play video games are the type of people whose status and self perception of mate value would be impacted by playing that right. Okay. I absolutely. And that, and you can see how complex that can be. And then now it could, if you take it to the next step, there are individuals who prefer certain styles of games. What happens when you match that style of game with that individual's personality? Do we see more of our lesson effect? So you can see all of a sudden things are stacking up to make things really, really complex.

But there's another little addition to the story of a paper that we're actually writing up. So I'll give you a little bit, kind of some early news on how things are looking on this and something will probably be submitted very soon. What we did is we took a few undergraduates, both men and women at our university, and we asked them to come in, and we told them we're working on a dating study. We were really interested to see what young people are looking for in potential partners. Would you like to help us with the study? And they inevitably do. And then we did this kind of a neat experiment

where we had a TV in front of them and we said we're going to allow you to talk to someone just virtually, because we're looking at online dating. And we wanna see how you interact with that individual and that individual is gonna meet somebody else and then they're gonna choose a potential coffee date with one of you. So at the to meet somebody else and then they're going to choose a Potential coffee date with one of you. So at the end of the day what we're doing is we're doing we're allowing individuals to compete for a potential mate and they win or lose that opportunity

So with that individual that's on screen that they're talking. That's actually recording So it's never going to happen. They're never going to meet somebody That's actually a recording. So it's never going to happen. They're never going to meet somebody. But that individual is attractive and fun and bubbly, and they want to end up dating that individual. Then what we do is we provide them with an envelope that says, yes or no, that they ended up getting that coffee to it. And we didn't know what result they received.

So that was completely randomized for us. The fun thing comes to what we asked them to do after that. So they were given that envelope, they opened it, and they were given that coffee date, either they were not given that coffee date. And then we asked them, thank you so much for being part of this study. If you don't mind, we just need to kind of finish things up. But we're actually starting a new study in a few weeks. And this is actually going to be exploring

about video games and what video games people like to play. We have six games here, and we're trying to figure out if these are good games that we should show, folks, can you let us know which one you'd like to play? And then you have an opportunity to play it and test it out for us. Three of those games were violent video games and three of them were not violent video games And I have a feeling you know where this might be going

The individuals that ended up are men that ended up losing that coffee date or more likely to want to play a violent video game Well individuals that won that coffee date were more likely or less likely to play a violent video game, while individuals that won that coffee date were more likely, were less likely to play a violent video. So after that competitive mate loss, individuals shifted their preference of what they wanted to do. And our argument was they ended up wanting to, the losers wanted to play more violent video games because it allows them that opportunity to regain that status that they ended up losing in that sexual interaction.

So interesting, man. That's fun, isn't it? It's so much fun to be able to see how people interact in that kind of a system. And that's why I think video games are so powerful in a way that we can explore some really interesting questions. And I don't think they've been using the best kinds of ways. Dude, I mean, let's say that you managed to get a research partnership with Fortnite or with Warzone.

I know. And you would be able to do things that have a front-facing camera to detect micro expressions on people's faces. You'd be able to look at what's reaction, what happens to reaction time, and then you could get some, you know, chemist or some biology, biology dude to come in and have a look at what the hormones do, how is reaction time mediated, what about eye pattern movement? Is there more lateral or up down eye pattern movement, what does that suggest about someone's brain state? Yeah, I mean, we, you know, you could

get an awful lot, absolutely. An awful lot of information. Just to round out the video games discussion, when you give people the opportunity of choosing these different games, and you're saying people who are more preoccupied that are more concerned with status specifically mate seeking as one of those, what is the personality trait that you think is driving that?

Is it social sexuality? Is it externalizing behavior? Is it extraversion? What is it? To be honest, I'm not sure if there's a single trait. I don't think it maps to the big five that well. Also, I think it varies in an individual's lifetime. I think there's definitely feedback

in our own personal experiences that potentially influence those outcomes. That changes our personal, that it changes our outcomes, that changes our likelihood to be even sort of wasted. It's a seed-like mechanism. Yeah, so again, I don't think it's that simple that we can just go ahead and say, you know, extroverted individuals are more likely to play these games.

They're more likely to get that, that hit of what they need, that self perceived increase and make value. You know, they see them higher in the hierarchy and they behave that way. So if we hit those individuals, we get better understanding of what's going on. I think it's a lot more complex, but I do think we can start using video games and that feedback individuals gain from video games to better understand why certain people continually are drawn to that and become addicted to video games as we know it. Okay.

Other question from earlier, you gave people the opportunity to choose between violent and non-violent video games. Have you got any suggestion? Is there any evidence that suggests that people who are more preoccupied with status, full stop, play video games more? Not that you get a bucket of gamers and then gamers move within that does it make them more likely to pay video games full stop. I do think that is a status seeking individual who are more driven to play violent video games because what we do end up seeing as well as a very strong age effect we know that. that our desire for sex kind of decreases over time as we age. As that happens, we are less interested in gaining status because we just don't need it as much any longer because we're not trying to achieve

those hierarchical kind of goals. So I do strongly believe that individuals who are more status seeking are going to end up wanting to play more violent video games. And as a result, you end up getting that feedback. So there may actually be something in those individuals who do become addicted are thinking is, and this is something that still needs to be tested, are thinking is that it's individuals who aren't getting that satisfaction with their own status that are constantly being driven to want to go play violent video games.

And that is that bizarre feedback that keeps getting people into violent video games when they should stop. Isn't it strange that the cohort of people that we think about, when we think about compulsive high high-hour, violent video games users, would be, you know, your mum's basement in cell retreat from society guy, but these people, it seems, are more preoccupied with sex and status, and they're more preoccupied with gaining prestige in the eyes of the people around them. And I wonder whether what we're seeing, you know, the last 10 years or so, we have seen

the prevalence of some misogynistic echo chambers online of guys who spend an awful lot of time on the internet, very, very carefully nitpicking and breaking down what's happening within the dating market, why women perhaps don't care about them, I would guess if you were to look at some of the black pill and in-cell forums that a lot of those guys would be very heavy violent video game users. This is, you know, you're talking to one of my favorite studies that I've ever written, you know, why are individuals behaving in kind of sexist, aggressive ways to women online? This is a study I did a while back and with a colleague, Jeff Kuznikov. And if you give me a second to tell that story, I'd love to tell it. Yeah, Jeff is, Jeff did an incredible PhD where he ended up playing about 500 games of Halo back in the

day when it was really, really popular. And I told this story and everyone was like, oh man, I wish I could do that for a PhD. And it was incredible what he did. With those 500 games, a third of them he played as himself with a male voice that he would just press buttons to respond to individuals in game. And that would say different phrases to colleagues, to teammates, right, because you can't speak to your points. So it's important to say that these are all teammates. He played another third of those games where he didn't talk at all. And another third of those games where he didn't talk at all and another third of those games where

he used a female voice. When he pressed those buttons, a female voice would, you know, comment on anything that's going on in the game. So you have these two treatments in a control. And what you end up doing is he ended up playing the game really, really well because he was actually quite good at Halo at that time or he played it kind of half-hazardly where he didn't try as hard. And he found that he got a lot more negative comments to himself from his teammates when he used a female voice, significantly more. And this goes back to that whole sexist kind of perception. What's going on there? Why are men being aggressive for his woman? I read this paper and I said, Jack, these are incredible data. Have you ever looked at what, who is saying those negative comments?

Because if you look at your positive comments, men and women are gay, your male and female voice treatments are getting the same number of positive comments as well. So it's just that men are more aggressive towards women. Before you go into the next bit where you got involved? How much did his performance mediate, whether he was playing well or badly, you said that he would either be lack of days of his full successful? How did that mediate people's responses to the male and female voice? A little bit, but not nearly as much as the treatments. So the factors that affected the kinds of comments he received were largely explained by the treatment, much more

than his own performance, the treatment, the male voice or the female voice. Right, okay, cool. So that explained, but within that, was there was there any difference for how we play very little, very little, almost nothing. Right, because I would have thought, you know, let's say, just spitballing, I would have maybe assumed that a very competent male player would have caused some I. And jealousy. But we also know that men's intracexual bonding is very heavily based around coalitional warfare. So if you've got some guy that's an absolute killer on your team, maybe some people will be jealous But I would guess that a lot of the guys would defer to the prestige Definitely and and it's and it goes back to that whole conversation We had about a hierarchy. We want to know

Where we sit because where we when we don't know where we sit in a hierarchy It's actually very very stressful because individuals lower in the hierarchy Know there's gonna be competition for that alpha position or the top few positions. And it's a, you have to tip to all round and it's really stressful. Even for the individuals in the top three, for example, we're fighting for that hierarchy. We know that it's, that's, it's also very stressful because you have to keep competing. We know that because we've seen that research done in a lot of primates and it's, it comes out really, really nicely. So when higher keys are disrupted, it's actually bad for everybody, including alpha and all the rounds. So it's, would it be bad for, let's say, uh, chimp 15 to 20 to

be fighting for status, chimp one to three, as similarly, it even goes back up the chain as well. Absolutely, because if you imagine those top three males in that kind of a situation, they want to know who's first, and they're fighting it, right? Let's say that top three, let's say that one to 15's locked in,

and then bottom end, let's say the pecky boy is completely secure, but there is some turbulence toward the bottom. Does that still cause cascades up and down? No, not at all. At that point, it's not really the bottom, the bottom rungs of the individuals that are determining what's going up on top. That contact, those contests happening between the bottom individuals aren't as aggressive

and aren't as important. Right. However, I'm going to guess that if one in three are huge and competing, that 50 to 20 are still downstream. Ah, so let me give you. Absolutely, because you don't want to get in the way of an aggressive male. Understood.

Let me give you this. So you'll be familiar and we'll get back to the video in a second. You'll be familiar with that famous graph that some Manusphere creators use to explain hypogemia and it basically explains how the top guy can date, you could imagine you've got from top to bottom, number one to 10, going down on both sides, both men and women, the top guy can date number one all the way down to number 10. The guy from number five, can date from number five down to number 10 and then from 10

can go across. Tony Volk at Bullying Researcher that I explained to you about from the other week. What he's seeing works is it isn't bullying if you end up competing with somebody who is higher in status than you, that's just straight up aggression, right? Bullying has to be done to somebody that's in lower status. So if you can imagine the same sort of diagram that I'm talking about here with the one to ten, you basically have a bullying range and the higher your status, the more people you can bully, the lower your status, the fewer people you can bully. And what you're saying here is that the higher up the status of the person or the group who are competing for status, the larger the downstream implications are. So let's say that, you know,

number 10 and 11 and 12 are competing. I would guess that maybe 15 and 20 do get a little bit of cascade down from that. Yeah. One, two, and three, don't. Yes, you'll definitely see that kind of an effect. You'll see that cascading kind of happen. But it's also when you're getting back to that bullying comment that you made, those few individuals on the top, they don't need to bully. This individual is really low down because they're on top. There's no benefit to be gained for them to do that.

It's the individuals in the middle of the hierarchy who are likely bullying individuals lower than them because they have some status to be gained above them. If you're number one, you're not going to bully number 15. You gain nothing. But if you're number 10, you want to bully 15. Because if you don't, there's a potential for that individual to rise up. You might be 14 and then 14 might be 13 and get the 5. And that's not right.

Okay, so video games, you find out that this guy has played 400 games. He's split it up to three buckets, one's female, one's male, one's no voice at all. And you've said, wow, this is fantastic. Did you look at who was giving you these comments? What, how do you get involved in this study? So Jeff said, I'd love to, but I'm just moving universities, I got a new faculty position and I just don't have the time.

I said, well, can we work on this together? Because I think this is what you've done is absolutely fascinating. And I think we could look into what's going on and see who's behaving in that kind of way. So he agreed and it was super kind to share his data. We transcribed everything, what everybody said. And because Halo at the end of every match, you actually have a status screen at the end, right? You know where you sit, how well you perform,

how many kills you got, how many deaths you got, and your performance relative to others, right? We all love that screen, because we love seeing our killed death ratio, right? So we take a snap of that, and we can see how well everybody did. Now what we can start looking at is who said what, to who and how well they did in the game. So we have a measure of status.

And now we can see how an individual status affected what they said to Jeff when he played as a male character or a female character. And remember, there were all men that were playing, there were no women playing at that time. And what we find is that men who were playing against Jeff and outperformed Jeff as a male were kind to him. They lots of positive comments. Men who didn't perform as well as Jeff, so Jeff outperformed them as a male, fewer positive comments, but still very few negative comments.

And that kind of makes sense. That gets back down to what we just talked about, Chris, where men who are lower in the order don't want to be aggressive to someone who is better than them. Because there's a hierarchy there. There's a chance that that could turn out really badly for you. And even if it's a video game and digitally and virtually online, you're not going to interact

with this individual in the real world. But we still behave in that way because that's how our systems have been selected for to work. This is just a new because that's how our systems have been selected for to work. This is just a new environment that's happening. And of course, when you're top, there's no need for you to be aggressive and mean to people below. So you're more supportive because you want to help those people out. So that's what was happening when Jeff played as a male voice. It's completely different when you look at how Jeff played when it was a female.

So when Jeff played when he was a female, what happened is that men that outperformed him were very positive and supportive, which is really great to hear. Again, they're not losing any status by being supportive to somebody who is not as good as them. But it's the men who perform worse than Jeff when he used a female voice that were very, very aggressive. And there's a beautiful correlation between an individual's level and their performance in the game, the number of kills they got in the game, they're killed at that ratio and how aggressive they were. Individuals that were of lower status and perform more poorly were more aggressive to Jeff as a woman than they were to when Jeff

was a male. Why? It goes back to exactly what we were just talking about in this higher. If you are a level 15 male in this game and there's a woman coming up and she's out performing you. Not only is she better than you, meaning that she's a higher status than you are, she is also knocking you down the total pool. And if we think about what that means for a man is, now I'm lower status than I used to be, I've lost to a woman and I have fewer potential mating choices in that environment. It's exactly what you just said. And the best way to make sure that women don't compete in that kind of an environment is to

make them not want to compete. And how do you make them not want to compete? You be very aggressive towards them and you use sexist slurs because you know that hurts the most. I've been thinking for a long time about some of the challenges of women's over achievement in education and employment. And the fact that we've basically flattened the playing field for maybe even not, maybe even skewed it slightly toward women in that it's mostly knowledge work, it's a brain based, not a bronze based economy, conscientiousness, you know, the ability to just sit in a seat and not have ADHD and all the rest of it. It is an advantage. I wonder

whether you're seeing an increase in male to female adversarial communication because women are now playing in the state's hierarchy that previously would have been siloed off just for men. And you have two things going on, which you hinted at before. First one is, in the overall hierarchy of status, there are this many hundred people, thousand people in the game, in the company, whatever. You've been slotted down one, generalized status anxiety, right, is the first thing. But the second part is hypochemy, which is if you can get that specific female herself and drag her down a little bit, perhaps there's a chance that she might date you. Because if there is too big of a disparity

in make-value or status, there's no way that that woman's going to look at you. And if you can manage to get your status to stand on the shoulders of the insults that you've thrown at her, perhaps she'll see you as a potentially viable mate. What do you think about that? What do you think about how the flattened playing field for employment and education could maybe be tied in with what you've learned from video games? You know, absolutely. If you think about how the world has changed in the last, you know, 100 years, for example, we've seen a huge shift in what determined status. We've seen a huge shift in the traits

that are associated with individuals are forming well in a certain environment. And that's especially when you're talking about, like you said, working in companies, things that don't require physical strength and traits. If we look at historic evolutionarily speaking, if we look past tens of thousands of years, we know largely that men and women did have certain roles, but it's not even as important a what men did and what women did. Generally, there was a female hierarchy and there was a male hierarchy and individuals competed within that hierarchy. Correct. It was intersectional, not intersectional competition. That's

exactly it, right? It's all happening within and you're competing against the same sex and it's kind of straightforward. And that's largely because whatever society you're competing against the same sex and it's kind of straightforward. And that's largely because whatever society you're in, the society is the side of this is what men do, this is what women do. Sometimes there's overlap but very little. Whatever that decision is. What you've just said is this flattening is this idea that now men and women are able to compete against one another because they're trying to attain the same things. They're trying to attain the same jobs. They're trying to attain the same status, same house, same car, same everything.

So now all of a sudden, men and women are competing for the same things. And that's problematic from an evolutionary perspective because that's not the kind of environment that we generally grew up in and that's not that our system has been selected for in an evolutionary context and be able to deal with this kind of stuff. So when men see women competing in this field, it's bizarre best way to make sure is by negging them, right? You make them feel bad about themselves and you feel better. And then it allows you to gain status and allows you to potentially a more mating opportunities open up for you. But I think what needs to kind of happen now is a cultural shift. We have to start understanding that that world where those higher keys were separate from men and women are gone.

They no longer exist. They're never coming back. Nor should they, because in this world that we live in now, those separate higher keys are irrelevance. They don't matter anymore. We're working together for the same things. So what has to happen is a shift in how men think. It's not, why is it bad to lose to a woman? It doesn't matter. It's nothing to do with strength anymore. It's nothing to do with physical endurance or differences in our physical bodies or hormonal changes or physiology. Those aren't limiting factors anymore. It doesn't matter how strong you are.

That doesn't determine how good you are at warzone. It's your reaction point. It's how quickly you can process information. And men and women do that equally. There's no difference in that. So all of a sudden, we have a level playing field in that kind of a world for men and women. And women are starting to thrive in it. If we look at some of my research, women who play more violent video games have a better self-reception of themselves. So they are responding in a similar way to men in response to the desire for status. So we actually have less fewer differences between us than we think, and we're really ready to admit.

So getting back, I think the idea is that we have to change that cultural shift of what it's like to lose to a woman. It's not bad to lose to a woman. You're losing to someone who is better than you. And if you want to be better, then you just got to try harder. How much of that do you think is culture? I don't disagree. I don't disagree that it would be a good idea for status hierarchies to be able to be gender-nonspecific, that it doesn't matter whether you lose to a guy or a girl, but I think it would be naive to presume that this is all just culture and that men can think the way out of this. We can't re-program men's status hierarch very, this is back of the brain shit, right? Mm-hmm.

So, I don't think that that would be the case, but yeah, how much of this do you think is just straight up culture and how much of this do you think is coming from elsewhere? I don't think you can separate culture from what's going on. You know, culture is a strong part of what it is to be human. You can't just take that out and say, this is how humans behave, this is the things are, let's ignore culture of what it is to be human. You can't just take that out and say, this is how humans behave, this is how things are, let's ignore culture and what's going on. Culture is part of us and it determines who we are. It also evolves over time. So culture is changing. We are changing. There is selection,

evolution happening now as we speak. So these are all these things are intertwined. And you say, we can't think our way out of this. It's true, we can't think our way out of this. But I think we also have to shift the way we think. There are rules that we've made as a side of it. We said, these things are unacceptable. And we've all decided this kind of way, so we shouldn't behave in those kind of unacceptable ways. I think you know as a side we have to

start realizing that it's not losing to a woman, it's losing to a person and status is no longer determined by simply competing intrasexually. We now are, we've opened the playing field and we've shifted how our culture works, that's shifted how selection functions, that shifted how we behave, and yes, there are those back of the brainstem kind of behaviors, but we're also human. We are also able to think quite logically and we have to start using that ability to be able to understand what's going on. I think stepping into mediate the really sort of negative pathological manifestations of that behavior is good, but I also, you know, I sympathize with sympathize.

I understand why guys who are struggling within status and are going in a highly competitive, you study yourself, you know, even You studied yourself, even 50 years ago. Even 50 years ago, how long have women been in the workplace properly? 50 years, maybe something like that. They've only been in university, they've only been in university for about 30 years, that's when they got to about 20, 25. So it's very, very novel for the guys that are out there. Absolutely. Going back to the language and the analysis that you did of that, the successful males speaking to the females within the video game, were they more or less complementary than when they were speaking to the man?

So we didn't see any differences there and it would be hard to tease apart. So, we didn't see any differences there and it would be hard to tease apart. It's hard to tease that apart simply because we didn't get enough individuals repeat playing. So we can't see how they behave in both of those environments. And there was enough sample size. And there's too much individual variation between players to be able to say, oh, this is the equivalent player across whatever. Okay, I understand.

So, you know, getting to that way of thinking that you're talking about, I'm really, really interested in what happens to those high-staylist males when they're playing really well, and they lose. How do they behave, and they lose to a woman, how do they behave then? Well, there's one of two ways that could behave, right? They could be very confident in their own status, and when they lose to a woman, they could say, brilliant, well done, I know how good I am, you did really, really well, no problem. So they could still behave in that way

because they are high status males. Or they could be these high status males that have lost a woman at that stage and now see themselves sliding down that hierarchy and they could become a more aggressive and the only reason they didn't is because they happen to out compete that woman. So we haven't teased those two things apart and I don't know how those high status males would behave in a situation where they lost a woman. And I know that's an interesting kind of question that needs to be answered.

I'm also interested to just find out whether they are more benevolent to a same sex or an alter sex because I've seen some really interesting research around the usefulness and protective nature of benevolent sexism. The benevolent sexism is actually psychologically very healthy. It's a predictor of men being more effective protective providers, that they have better

view, that women are happier working for these sorts of men. They're happy being in a relationship with these sorts of men. An excessive denial of sex differences seems to be at the detriment of both sexes. Absolutely. The benevolence sexism thing, I'd be interested there. What about any other domains that you, you know, you're so excited by this video game, so you know, is fascinating to see lower status males, derogating females that outcompete them within a single status hierarchy with relatively flat competences or opportunities at least. You must have kept your eyes peeled for other domains that you saw a similar effect in.

Have you observed anything? Have you found anything there? You see really similar kinds of results in the field of computer science, in the field of surgeons, so in medical science, and also in business. It's that same kind of response and that same kind of behavior. And that study cited quite a lot in those fields. It's in studies where they've actually looked at how individuals in high status in business or medicine behave towards women who are lower status. And you see very, very similar kinds of behavior. So it does seem to kind of translate into other worlds as well. You also did something to do with playing violent video games and subjective fighting ability and perceptions of men's toughness and facial recognition and

sense. What was what was all of that? Yeah, so you know another way of thinking about violent video games is they allow us to practice. They allow us to practice certain skills that could be beneficial in some kind of hierarchical encounter. If we think about a violent video games, there's really low cost to playing. If you lose, it's no big deal. Not like compared to a physical fight. If you lose in a physical fight, you're likely going to be damaged and hurt.

And that's a very, very bad thing for you. But in video games, it's okay if you lose, it's not the end of the world. So it's almost like it's a way of training to see how well you can perform and see if you can up your status. At the same time, it could be a way for us to gain signals of what makes a good competitor, so we can make better decisions when we go into that competition.

Like if I could, for example, get a better understanding of when I'm interacting with someone, how likely they are to fight that, how like, when are they going to be most aggressive? And I can see those little signals in that potential opponent. That's to my advantage, right? Because then I know how far to push somebody, I know whether I could potentially take someone,

and those are all good things. So we wanted to see if any of those kinds of behaviors gained from playing video games could potentially spill over to the real world and how we assess our opponents or individuals. And what we ended up. And the way we did that, maybe I should explain a little bit more there, is we let them play a game, a violent game,

or a nonviolent game. And then we put them through a small number of tests where we look at how well can you discriminate emotions, how well can you potentially discriminate whether an opponent is better or worse than you. And what we ended up finding was that individuals who played that violent video game were less adept at noticing someone's shift towards anger, which we found really, really interesting. And this is kind of opposite to what you'd think. It seems that playing that violent video game pumped individuals up to such an extent that they're worse off at being able

to tell when someone is angry at them. And you would think that's really, really bad, because that could potentially lead to more aggression, which could potentially be due to getting hurt and getting hurt is never a good thing. getting hurt is never a good thing. Why? Why would it be the case that someone who has spent all of that time working out whether they're about to be attacked by this enemy comes retarded when it's time to actually work out whether or not someone's going to attack them? I don't know. It's crazy, isn't it? Because you

wouldn't expect that. But that's what we see happening. And the only thing that we can think of, because this starts diving into the realm of physiology, what's going on in there in your system, what's changed, is other testosterone spikes, are we seeing some kind of a shift in our bodies functioning, that's changing our ability to distinguish how we perceive our opponents? Something's happening there, but it's not something simple. It does seem to be something in the physiological realm,

which is not something that we've been able to explore yet. Could it be a look at me, Bro Science, in your study? I love it, let's do it. Could it be something to do with a desensitizing to aggression? It may well be. If we think of ourselves in society, sensitizing to aggression. It may well be. If we think of ourselves in society, I was a good friend of mine.

Rob Brooks has this great analogy. If you're sitting in a crowd of people, you're very unlikely to throw a water bottle at somebody who's saying terrible things on stage in some kind of a protest, for example. Because you're not that kind of person, you don't want to hurt anybody. But if someone else throws a water bottle first, does that change? You're likely to do that?

How do if there's a second or third or a tenth? Now all of a sudden, well other people are doing it. Maybe I should kind of join in. So it does seem to kind of, there's a shift in what you perceive as acceptable behavior. And it does seem that our previous kinds of interactions are in some way coloring what we're doing in the future. Whether that is a physiological thing or whether that is a self-perception thing, it's tough to say. I think definitely self-perception has

something to do with it. I don't know the relative importance to something underlying physiological and that's kind of what we're missing for that puzzle. What about the subjective fighting ability and the perceptions of toughness as well? How was that mediated? Yeah, individuals who, you know know played those violent video games did see themselves as tougher and we did another study to kind of push that and see what exactly is going on there and in that same kind of a way that I talked earlier about how men responded to losing or winning that coffee date. We did a very similar study where we were told individuals, you're going to compete physically

in a bunch of physical challenges against another opponent, and that opponent is either stronger or tougher, or weaker than you. And we found that individuals who were more likely to compete against that tougher individual were more likely to want to play a violent video game. So it does seem that these opportunities to become aggressive,

even in a virtual world, and it's often used to practice aggression and dominance in a virtual world, is spilling over to real world behaviors and our desire to kind of, how we see our opponents. And that real world is then filtering back into the virtual world and shifting how we want, what we want to do in that virtual world and the games that we want to play in that. So there is definitely that feedback in that virtual

in real world, just like we talked about earlier. That delineation is becoming smaller and smaller. Why do you think it is that our own self perception world, just like we talked about earlier, that delineation is becoming smaller and smaller. Why do you think it is that our own self perception, our own sense of self, is so heavily impacted by the local, social environment, even if that environment is virtual? Why would that be adaptive? If you think about the environment that we used to live in, they're very different than we live in now.

They were small local villages, communities. We knew everybody. We would want to be in a hierarchy there. There was a level of status, just like we see in our animals. So we lived in small communities. So this is a system that's evolved through millennia of that type of an environment. And now all of a sudden, all bets are off.

You're no longer competing against 50 or 100 people that lived in your small village. You're not competing against hundreds of thousands of people online. You're competing in a global market. And that seems overwhelming at times and it doesn't help that are evolved systems aren't selected to compete in that kind of a world. That's why I think our interactions in the social environment online through things like Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat and all those things have such a huge effect on us,

because we normally had those kinds of interactions on a very small local scale where we knew everybody. But all of a sudden, this is a global scale where we don't know everyone. And that person's getting more likes than I am, and I want more likes, that's not fair. And it's a very weird kind of competition where these companies have drawn out all these

evolved kinds of behaviors that we have and put them in a completely different context and take them back to Java. Going back to the combat thing that you were talking about earlier on, do Beards provide an advantage during combat? That is always a fascinating thing because in the literature, there's been so many arguments for why beards exist. And you and I are both bearded men. And I was just...

I'm growing this beautiful handlebar guy at the moment. The people that are just listening, I look like a Miami cop from the 17th. And if you look at mine, I'm starting to go gray everywhere but this handlebar. I am. We look like we fuck both of us look like fuck. I'll take it. I'll take it. But in the literature, yeah, in the literature is a funny thing.

Men are trying to explain why beards exist. And they start talking about, you know, they're more attractive. They hide your jawline to make you look like a more testosterone male. And the most interesting one that a colleague of mine found, Barnaby Dixon, was this idea that beards are really good. Because if you got hit in the face Beards could potentially act as a

Just kind of support your face a little bit and maybe you fist slides off and you don't get that hit as hard In the way they're insulating your face from that full-on hit that you would get And if you think about that, if you've ever found something that's beer like this isn't going to insulate against anything. Let's be honest, this tiny little beard, if I get hit in the face, I'm going down the top right. The best that you can hope for is mild irritation, like a rash on the knuckles of the person that's hit you, yeah. But this is this is huge in a literature and there's lots of people talking about it and Barnaby's like this is enough. There's got to literature. And there's lots of people talking about it. And Barnaby's like, this is enough.

There's got to be a way to answer this question. So we looked at a bunch of UFC fighters. And if you notice UFC fighters change their facial hair all the time. Sometimes they're bearded, sometimes they're not, sometimes they have a mustache, sometimes they have a goatee, have all kinds of beard shapes. So you can actually score their beard

shapes from one to five based on nothing to mustache, to a goatee, to a full beard, to a heavy beard, you know, score all that, then you can look at their wins and losses against individuals that do or don't have beards. Not only that, you can look at their likelihood of getting knocked out. And you would think if beards are good at insulating a punch, individuals with bigger beards would be knocked out less. And they're not. It just doesn't happen. So I know.

So everyone out there, if you're growing it, your your beer to make sure you're insulated from a good hit This this mustache was my prophylactic against someone trying to assault me in the street actually that was First off is because I wanted to look like I fuck in the second thing was that I wanted to Knock it knock it knocked out. So I've definitely seen Some evidence that suggests men who have beards are perceived as more masculine, perceived as more dominance, perceived that they would be more likely to win in a fight. The same thing goes for lower vocal pitch,

the same thing goes for greater brow ridge, for people that are smaller, et cetera, et cetera, more muscle mass shoulder to waist ratio. So even though beards may not provide any physical protection in a fight or in a contest, which has already been pre-agreed that it's going to happen, as a deterrent, I imagine that it must be effective.

And that's a very different thing again, right? And just like you said at the beginning, what you said, it changes our self-perception. That seems to be a recurring thing we keep coming back to. And my research keeps coming back to as well. If you put in a bunch of men in a room, they are really quickly able to figure out a general hierarchy of where everybody sits. It's fascinating kind of stuff. They jump into a room, they don't know anybody, and they generally get a feel for where they

sit in that hierarchy of individuals in that room. Amazing. Somehow, our self-perception and our experience of unproceiving others who are of similar traits gives us the ability to understand where we sit. And like I said, that's a great thing because that reduces our likelihood for that physical confrontation. Physical confrontations are bad. They're horrible. Like I said earlier, you're going to get injured. If you get seriously injured, there's the possibility that you won't be able

to attract a mate. So, all across all animals, what we end up seeing is these really kind of, these contests that follow a very strict set of rules. Let's look at each other, let's determine what's going on. You display, I display, we take turns, we figure out who's better. If we're still not sure after displaying, then we escalate that display and maybe start physically touching. If we still can't figure it out, only then do we actually get into a physical confrontation.

So basically, the justification here is most of the weaponry that humans and every other animal has is used as a deterrent. The goal of the weaponry is not actually for fighting. It is, you don't want to do this because the risks for both sides, even if you do have the bigger weaponry, are still pretty high. Absolutely. But you have to develop that weaponry because if you don't, you're at a huge disadvantage. Precisely.

And it has to be a costly signal, right? It can't be something that's easily faked or else. That's exactly it. You're just going to test it. Exactly. Yeah. You use the word in one of your studies contest competition. I learned about this months ago.

And I can't remember the distinction between contest competition and some of the other different types of competition. Can you just give me a primer on that again? Oh, man, I'm not funny. You can give me that. Okay. So yeah, so what do you mean by contest competition? You... So there's definitely differences between contest and competition and competition. Is that what you mean? But I haven't heard of it. Let me see why. We may have to cut this out. I'm not sure. Give me one second. Let me see. I think I speak to about this.

David Puts. David Puts. Oh, yeah. Okay. Was here I spoke to about this. Okay. What was I talking to David Puts about? Male and male aggression has driven a lot of the sexual dimorphism that we see between men and women.

The traits have been developed to be effective at dominance and aggression. Right. okay. So I think this is to do with female mate choice looking at, basically allowing females to select guys off the top and contest competition would be a different form of their selection. I see what you mean. Yeah, Sorry. David Hutz speaking about the masculinity thing. David Hutz told me this story. This really funny story from when I think he was a grad student who stood in line at a checkout, some super. These two guys talking behind him and he

couldn't believe how low the voices were. They sounded like that chocolate rain kid from 2006. And they couldn't believe how low the voices were. They sounded like that chocolate rain kid from right 2006. And they couldn't believe how low the voices were. And he turned around and he saw that it was a really attractive girl in between him and them. And that got him onto the men modulate their voice based on whether there are women around them, if you have a, if you have men looking to cross the road and women are present, the distance between the car and them is way shorter than they would be prepared to accept if there was no women present, what was the other one that he told me about? So there was the the lowering of the voice, Oh, that was the other thing that your vocal pitch basically act in deference to the status

or the potential threat of another male that's with you. So men will tend to actually raise their vocal pitch when they're talking to a man of much higher status and they will lower their vocal pitch when they're talking to a man who's of equivalent status, usually because if you raise your voice up a little bit and you kind of talk like this, I'm no threat, you don't need to worry, please don't smash me into the ground. I am absolutely. That's what you're going to know. Absolutely. Yeah, precisely. I thought that we were of similar status.

Another study, another study that you did that I thought was great was about basketball players. Male and female basketball players. Tell me about that. Yes. So there, you know, we talked a lot about male and female performance. In these worlds where we're talking about physical performance, men largely outcompete women. And it makes sense, right? If you're gonna put a man and a woman,

the average man and average woman in a hundred meter race, the man's gonna end up beating the woman. And that's simply because of differences in musk literature, differences in bone structure, physiology, and all the other line of us. I just have a lot of psychology, right? You know, when you look at ball throwing sports, like three year olds have got seven times more

throwing accuracy, male to female, you know, like you've been around for three years, this isn't socialized, you haven't hit puberty, yet driven by androgens in the womb, but it's also driven by protein folding in the brain. And what is it, children that are 10 years old, you can detect with a 90% accuracy, whether it's a male or a female just from the brain scan. So, you know, this is just, I know that I've derailed

the question I literally asked. No, that's okay. This for me is the most compelling, the most compelling talking point to push back against trans, M to F female, male to female athletes going into female sports. And it's because all of the conversation that people usually get caught up in is to do with how much bone density do you lose if you've been at the estrogen for a year. And oh, you know, look at the power output differential

and blah, blah, blah, and people that, oh, but the structure and the size of the hands, there's differences in the length of the forearm, that makes it better for growing. And all of this stuff to me is structure and the size of the hands, there's differences in the length of the forearm that makes it better for the growing. And all of this stuff to me is icing on the top of the cake that is what is the mental capacity of the athlete that I'm looking at? What are they actually good at? And David Geary, you feel me, David?

Yes, yes. Yeah, so David did this great study, he at least told me about a great study where some university researcher used a tennis ball machine to fire tennis balls at his students. And instead of catching, the students were actually trying to dodge the tennis balls. And this is that spatial rotation thing again, but it was mediated for catching. And the males were able to apparently dodge the tennis or whatever the basketballs are something relatively easily. And the female students less so. Apparently it's quite an old, quite an old study. I imagine that you wouldn't get away with slaring tennis balls at your level. I was going to say the same thing. I couldn't imagine

getting the ethics to be able to do and study it like that. But my point being, and this is for every person that gets into a discussion about, should we have M to F trans athletes in support, I think that the most compelling argument by far is that there's different fundamental psychological capabilities. If you wanted to have M to F male to sorry female to male athletes in a sport that was to detect lying or that was to remember cards that have been turned

over on a table and to have to match them, it's unfair. Local memorization, cues of emotion and stuff like being able to detect lying, women are going to wipe the floor with the average man and elite women will wipe the floor with almost any man. So I think all of that stuff makes sense, but that's my current sort of contribution to that discussion. Now, when someone says, okay, so what's the solution here? What do we do with trans athletes in sport? I think that's a really, really difficult conversation.

And I feel bad for people who not only are going through a challenging gender identity, but then also want to play the sport that they love and give them terms of pleasure. And I'm saying a number of people are saying, well, you can't do it that way, but you also can't stay in the one that you're in. That's challenging.

However, I think that there is sufficient evidence to suggest like let's treat allowing them to go into whichever gender category they now identify as with a good bit of caution. Yeah, there is. If we look at, when we often think about men and women, we think about them like this, right? This is where men are, this is where women are, but the reality of there's distributions across both of those things, right? There's gonna be variation around the meaning.

If we talk about means, yes, men and women are different. But if we look at those distributions, they overlap quite dramatically. So even if we're talking about things like memory or competitive ability and we're thinking about transports, where is this individual that's transitioning from FM or M2F, where do they sit in that distribution? They may already sit in more of a male distribution

in certain traits if they're transitioning from F to M or vice versa. We do know that both men and women demonstrate traits of the opposite sex, and these are huge spectrums. One of the problems that you have within sports, though, I think, is that a lot of the not only extremes, but also the e-drivers we talking about hand grip strength. There's no crossover, upper body strength, there's a crossover. It's two side revisions. And I think that the same goes broadly for like some of the psychological, especially when you roll them out into sweets. If you take a usual trait, conscientious, then let's roll agreeableness on top and let's roll this on top and let's roll that on top and you can go

I'm getting more complex. This is a signature of a man. Yeah, okay. Okay. I'm doing it. Absolutely. You you you did a study looking at basketball players. What did you learn? Yeah, so we wanted to see how individual performance changed over time. You know, can imagine that individuals When they're younger, they're great, you know, you've got a they're great. You've got a lot of energy, you've got a lot of strength, you haven't sedest as much. So you just haven't aged as much. So your body just isn't breaking down as much. And what you find is that's generally the case in male basketball players. If you look at their performance in various skills over their lifetime, what you end up seeing

is that men generally hit a peak. I can't remember exactly when that peak is at this point, but they hit a peak and then they start senescing and start performing more poorly. Which is what you see in a lot of non-human animals as well. They hit this peak and then you start aging and you just not able to attract as many mates or be able to protect your parrots and you longer, you know, red deer and elephants seals are really great examples of that. You're a king at some

point where you have all the ladies and then after that there's just somebody who will compete to you and you just don't do as well. So we did the same thing in female basketball players because, you know, the nice thing about the NBA and the WNBA, you have a lot of data for a large number of years and you can start looking at how individuals are actually performing. What we end up seeing in women is they don't actually hit that peak. They don't seem to senesce in their performance like men do. Now, there's caveats in our data.

Of course, the WNBA hasn't been around for as long as the NBA quite yet. So, it's hard to tell if we start seeing the same amount of data as in the NBA, could we see those differences? And, secondarily, the WNBA doesn't have as many teams. That means that women aren't playing as many games. So their bodies aren't under as much stress potentially, because they're not playing as many games and traveling as much.

So maybe we don't end up seeing that peak because women aren't pushed to their limits, like men are in these really, these in the NBA where they're playing a lot more games. And that may be true. Nonetheless, it's quite interesting that men are hitting their performance peak at some point and then senes and women generally doubt. And it can keep performing from much longer until they retire and choose to stop playing. Without trying to account for some of the ways structurally that this could be explained in a way, why?

What is your hypothesis for? Yeah. testosterone is damaging. So it could be physiological in that sense where, you know, we're selecting for aggressive, strong men, weighing the NBA, and these men likely have higher testosterone levels. As a consequence, at some point, that starts breaking things down in their bodies, and has that negative effect, where we just start seducing. And our bodies just can't repair themselves, as well, to keep functioning in that really great way

in that necessary way. Women don't have as much testosterone as a consequence. Maybe things aren't breaking down as quickly or as strongly for women so we don't see that happening in female performance over time. So that's a possible idea as well, but of, that needs testing. So that would be the mechanism. What's the adaptive reason? Well, you know, not everything has to be adaptive. You know, I think I'm going to believe I'm going to put forward a theory that I think that this is, but I'll let you.

What a theory that I think that this is, but I'll let you. Okay, so we know that men want to be in a hierarchy. If there's an advantage to having testosterone to ensure that you're hired in a hierarchy, that's going to be selected for. We know that once, if we look at the average lifespan of a male, that's increased a lot over time. We're a lot older now, and we're living a lot longer now than we did in 10,000 years ago, for example. And that's for a number of different reasons. If there's selection for testosterone to be able to improve individual performance,

and then we hit our peak at about 40, and then we start senescing, I'd like to think it's a little bit later than that because I'm older, but anyway, hitting 40 and then we start senescing. 10,000 years ago, we weren't living to 40. Right, so there was no benefit to be able to select for late life benefits. As a consequence, that's like you would have been very strong to maximize performance to the age of 40 And that means you're doing really well after that it doesn't matter because you're either gonna be dead And you're definitely not gonna be reproducing and you're definitely gonna be out competed by somebody else

So it's a ralda. You're essentially dead at that point reproducibly speaking because you're not gonna get a chance to mate with anybody That's changed obviously now, right? Where individuals are living for much longer, but that system that's been selected for still exists. And as a consequence, we senesse at that age, at that point, because that's the system that we've evolved to have, and that's just how we work.

Well, you have spoiled my theory, because that's what I was going to say. Yeah, it just seems to make sense. The burn bright accumulates state loads as much as possible, 17, 18, 19 years old, you're some prehistoric killer, everybody thinks you did the shit, run around and pregnant, hope to stick about for 10, 12 years so that you can do a bit of hair bonding and protect the the one woman that you've got and you three years or whatever and then they'll be fine, you know, they'll be fine. So whereas for women, you know, grandmother hypothesis for men opposed exists. hypothesis for why men oppose exists. Women and also women on average live longer than men. Like just even now women live on average live longer than them. Absolutely.

And this is not why it will be contributed to, but the risky behavior thing is only going to be a partial contributor to this. It's just that women's longevity seems to be more effective than men's. So yeah, I think that's an interesting one. That's an interesting way to think about why men sort of burn everything a little bit brighter and a little bit quicker. And yeah, you know, downstream from that, you're going to have some physiological impact. Let's say that you have a hundred units across your lifetime of athletic ability to deploy, men are able to squeeze more of that out. They're sealing from which they can draw is going to be higher than women's because it is in their interests to try and accumulate

that status to accumulate that and then do the reproduction thing. But the mums need to stick and then need to then become grandmothers and then need to become aunties and then need to become sisters and so on. One of the other things, considering the changing modern landscape for dating online, how that's changed the way that people go about things as well, didn't you do a paper that looked at mate guarding the modern world and how mate guarding had been

Adjusted didn't want you involved in something to do with that. I was not but that sounds really interesting Your name's down. Your name's down on something if you look at Google scholar closely enough Uh-oh Which paper do you know the title of the paper by chance? No, I'll have to pull it up But I mean you you'll do. Oh my god. Look, face it. Your H index is going up through the roof.

I think the other one that I saw seemed an awful lot like, um, fuck, who's that? Who's that Australian researcher, the blonde lady that you did your, you've done this like, and this Blake. Thank god. Yes. Who's that Australian researcher, the blonde lady that you did your, you've done this like? Candace Blake. Thank God. Yes. Dude, I've had so many female eavescike researchers on the show over the last 12 months.

I basically, everybody is just blended into one very interesting episode. So Candace did some interesting stuff that looked at how economic inequality predicted sexual objectification, like the post-execence selfies, and you did something that looked at national income inequality predicting women's preference for masculinized faces. Yes. What's that?

Why is it better than health? Explain that to me. Yeah, that was an interesting study that I was part of. And I was lucky to be part of it. So a paper came out and said, on a global kind of scale, they looked at, you know, can we start looking at, how masculine men look?

And can we correlate that to the amount of disease within that social environment. And the idea here is that individuals have more testosterone in an environment where you're more likely to get sick are showing off good genes because testosterone is damaging. It's a costly trait. And if you're pumping resources into creating testosterone and creating large jaw lines and the signals that are associated with increased testosterone, that means you must be so good

that because you're also able to survive an environment that has a lot of disease. And then wow, you must be a high quality male because you can do all those things. So you must have really, really great genes. And that's a wonderful idea. And that idea is lived in the non-human animal literature for a really, really long time. And we talked about it a lot until we realized that it doesn't work. There are much more proximate explanations for what's going on.

And those proximate explanations explain things much better than these underlying genetic potential explanations. Explain them. Yeah, so if you think about, for example, if there are you and I and a bunch of other males in an environment, we're competing for females, and we have big jaws and traits that... Good moustaches. Good moustaches, thank you very much, and be very, thank you, I appreciate that. Then those are all signals to potential mates.

And if we're in an environment, and those signals potentially show off our good underlying genes, that we have very strong genes, and that's really great. The problem with that is, if females end up mating with us, yes, they'll get our good genes, but at only 50% of those genes, they may not be the right genes because of how DNA works and all that. And we don't know how those genes are actually going to interact with others. So there are potential benefits.

There's no doubt to that. But if you and I have a lot of money and we have a provider safe environment, and we have a lot of access to a lot of resources, that's a direct benefit that females gained from mating with us, because they have access to that immediately. And that immediate benefit outweighs

that potential genetic benefit, because that's more a long term, and isn't as clear-cut. So what we did in that study is we said, all right, yeah, sure, that could be a potential explanation, but we feel that there is a simpler, more immediate explanation. And that's just the fact that in those environments that have a lot of disease around, where there is potential for social unrest, there's a benefit to being around males who are bigger and stronger because they can potentially

protect you from that. So it has nothing to do with the genes that they harbor. It's just the fact that, well, if you hang with me, I'll make sure nothing bad happens to you and you'll get all the resources you need. And that's immediate. That happens now without having to reproduce. And that's a stronger benefit that women can gain immediately. And that's why that has such a stronger effect. That's fascinating, man. Very, very interesting. It's cool stuff.

But it's the inequality thing. Yeah, it's like, am I missing something there? No, I don't, you know, it's, again, it's tied to our culture. And that's why I say that you can't separate those kinds of things. In those countries where there's more social unrest and there's more disease, they're likely not as developed. They don't have the medicine, they don't have the resources, the populations may be higher. The risks are greater. And that's part of the environment. Not to do with lack of development, right?

It's to do with inequality specifically, or at least that's what it says here. So let me, I'm gonna put my bro-signing hat on again. Yeah, yeah, go for it. And this is from Candice Blake's stuff. And what she said, her justification was, in areas that have high income inequality, women post more sexy selfies, they do more sexual objectification, blah, blah, blah. Her reason for that was that when you are in an area of high

economic inequality as a female, you are able to see both how high you can rise and how low you can fall. And what it gives you is this explanation, this example of, I don't want to go there. I can't go here, I don't want to go there. What are the tools in my arsenal that can allow me to get up this ladder that I can attract a higher value mate? And everything can be great. So a study that looks at income inequality predicting

women's preference for masculine ized faces would suggest to me that they presume downstream from the masculineized face is a greater protector provider who is more likely to get them away from the life that they've been exposed to because it's not just exposure to the high flying life, it's also exposure to the underclass life that they want to try and avoid. And I think it's both the motivation to run away from something you want and the desire to run toward something that would be desirable,

run away from something that you don't want, sorry, and run towards something that's desirable. Yep, absolutely. It is the inequality. And that inequality is often tied very, very strongly to sex. Men and women, if we look at different societies and we look at the gender inequality index, we see that varies quite a lot around the world. And yes, I would agree that in that environment where there are more

risks, there are likely more gender inequality and women will behave in a way that maximizes their likelihood for fitness. So I'm wondering, it was just national income inequality, but was that, but was that income inequality between the sexes or income inequality between most wealthy and least wealthy? Between the sexes. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It makes all of the sense. Yeah.

Right, I throw my entire the last five minutes of what I've just spoken about. Not all, I helped us get to this point this point. So go throw that away at all. Right. Yeah, we needed, no, we, I, of course, yeah, yeah, yeah, of course it would be that if you as a woman are less capable of earning your own way, you are more aligned on the man, the masterly-nised face of the man is a predictor of protector provider. Therefore, find the right, right. I mean, that's, that's that's actually relatively straightforward. It is, but it's, fine. I mean, that's, that's actually relatively straightforward. It is, but it's really interesting. And it's great that you say it's relatively straightforward

because I totally agree, but it's interesting that people went, the first explanation was, it must be good genes. They must be those high quality genes that those women won in that environment to be able to get them out of there. And again, that's not direct. When that direct benefit of having access

to that individual and the status that they hold is much stronger. Well, you say direct, but what you're doing is you're looking at someone's face and presuming from their face how much money they own. So I mean, it's like relatively direct compared to Eugene's hypothesis and sexy sun, but it's not that, it's like relatively direct compared to good gene type offices and sexy sun, but it's not that, it's still relatively convoluted.

It's just that we don't see code, right? We just see matrix. We see the actual simulation. Look, Mike, let's bring this one home mate. This has been really, really fantastic. Good. Fascinating. I had a blast.

You do. Good. Where should people go if they want to keep up to date with the things that you do? Why should they head on the internet? Well, you know, we're I'm doing some fun stuff now. If I can I'd like to mention that I started a company a few years ago and the company has actually gotten a little bit larger It's called our Ludo and we create games that help people explore More about the natural world and we've created games that help people understand how individuals behave towards one another.

So these are all little mobile games and apps that individuals can download, teachers can use to teach in class, and you collect data really, really quickly. The key is it allows students to do the stuff that we just talked about over the last hour or so. And you can start exploring data, start understanding the human world, a little bit better, start to understand our own brains and our minds a lot better. Because I think what needs to change, like we talked about a little bit, is our environments change so dramatically over the last 100 years.

That our culture has as well. And that intersection between those two things is still coming to a head so we can better understand how we should kind of be behaving in society and towards one another. And I think people can get a better understanding when they start reading more, when they start interacting and engaging, collecting data, running experiments, seeing individual behaviors, because then you start getting to understand a lot more about how our bodies behave, bodies and brains behave automatically. Because some of the stuff that you talked about about Candace's research and our research and what I think is most fascinating is all this stuff is happening automatically.

It's not like in Candace's study, for example, that girls are thinking, well, I know that I'm in a really kind of lower economic area and I see that women over there and that lower economic area are showing more skin, I'm going to do the same because they seem to be successful. It's just automatically happening. That's the key. And if we start understanding what's automatic, what's not, when it is, when it isn't, we can get a better understanding of ourselves and our society. And I think we'd start to really get a you know, start answering all those societal problems that we have because we're being a lot more honest with one another. Where should people go if they want to check out more of that? And check out the website, our ludo.com, and all our games are free to download, and you can

play them. Yeah, get in touch with me there, and I'd love to help teachers teach the next generation of kids to better understand themselves and the world around them. Hell yeah, Mike, I appreciate you. Thank you. Yeah, absolutely. Pleasure. Thank you so much, Chris. I had an awesome fun.