Modern Wisdom - #665 - Cory Clark - 5 Forbidden Topics That Psychology Won’t Discuss

Episode Date: August 10, 2023

Cory Clark is an Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, a social psychologist and an author. Academia is supposed to be a bastion of intellectual purity where curiosity and the truth reign supreme. But what happens when the findings of research start to become inconvenient? What happens when conclusions may be scientifically accurate, but politically incorrect? Expect to learn what happens when you conduct a study on self-censorship in academic psychology and get reported for it, whether pervasive misogyny is actually a myth, why there is such an apparent anti-female bias, how women have fundamentally changed the culture of academia, whether men are psychologically different because of the patriarchy, which two areas of psychology are the most hated by academia and much more... Sponsors: Get 20% discount & free shipping on your Lawnmower 4.0 at https://manscaped.com/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and more from AG1 at https://drinkag1.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 20% OFF with our code MODERNWISDOM at https://calderalab.com/modernwisdom to unlock your youthful glow and be ready for summer with Caldera + Lab!  Extra Stuff: Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the show. My guest today is Corey Clark. She's an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania, a social psychologist, and an author. academia is supposed to be a bastion of intellectual purity, where curiosity and truth reign supreme. But what happens when the findings of research start to become inconvenient? What happens when conclusions may be scientifically accurate, but politically incorrect? Expect to learn what happens when you conduct a study on self-sensorship

in academic psychology and get reported for it. Whether pervasive misogyny is actually a myth, why there is such an apparent anti-female bias, how women have fundamentally changed the culture of academia, whether men are psychologically different because of the patriarchy, which two areas of psychology are the most hated by academics, and much more. Had a real difficult time titling this episode because it goes absolutely everywhere. Cory is very interesting in this study that she has done on self-sanship

amongst every psychology professor in the United States got invited to do it, is so interesting and so telling. And the two topics that come up as the most cancelable and the most despicable are two that I talk about all the time on this podcast. I'm not really too sure what that says about me. Anyway, loads and loads of interesting stuff today. I really, really hope that you enjoyed this one. In other news, this episode is brought to you by Manscaped. The lawnmower 4.0 is the greatest ball and body hair tremor ever created. If you or the man in your life is a little bit too hairy, this is the solution for you.

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I have claimed that it is. Yeah, I think I don't want to say it was necessarily always a myth. Just before we got in here, I was talking about how I was treated in Cairo. Yeah, tell a story. Oh, I was just at the airport and I was getting onto an elevator. I was there first. I hit the button. I started to step on and these two guys walk up and they're like, no, no.

And they waved to me to get off. And then I got off and they got on and they went up and I just take the next one. So that kind of thing exists in places in the world still in 2023. But in the US, you're not getting much of that anymore and in fact you're getting quite a bit of the opposite. So I wrote this paper, I think this is a sequel at article, I think? Yeah, yeah. Year two ago, that reviewed a lot of the recent research on looking at gender biases and psychology. And a lot of the time you see exactly the opposite. So people are biased in favor of women

across a lot of different means. They often treat women better than men. They like women better than they like men. Women get punished less than men for the same things. When there's a scientific finding that portrays men better than women, people are biased against it in relation to scientific evidence that portrays women better than men. So people want women to be better than men. And so this idea that society is sexist against women, and we have to be vigilant about potential harm to women,

I think potentially actually stems from the very fact that we care so much more about women than we do about men. And when we discover these biases against men, no one really cares, and they don't make the headlines. So yeah, I would say it is largely a myth in modern Western societies, yes. Is it really possible to answer this question about whether society is more biased against men than women? That's a good question and I would say probably no, like practically, it would be really hard to measure all of the different contexts where people potentially could be biased. So like some scholars have looked at potential bias against women in academia and they see,

for example, it's possible students are slightly biased against women and they're teaching evaluations, although hard to know because a lot of these are real evaluations, so it could just be that the women are in as nice teachers. I don't know. So people have tried to like look at which domains do people of a bias against women or against men. It would be hard to look at everything all at once and say which direction. But one thing that's been happening that I've seen across a few papers now, including one of my own papers that's coming out, is that a lot of these biases actually used to favor men, like for example,

and hiring for male stereotypical jobs. It really was the case that people used to be discriminating against women in those jobs. And a lot of these things seem to have flipped around 2009. So a lot of the biases that used to favor men, now favor women. And a lot of the biases that always favor women, still favor women.

So I do think, I don't know if we can say, on whole, who gets treated, worse relative to the other gender. But certainly, it seems to be the trajectory that biases are increasingly in favoring women and then people just don't seem to care as much about that as when they seem to go against women. There was that Steve Stewart William study about fake articles favoring women or men and

people's judgments of it, right? Mm-hmm. Yeah, they had one on, I think it was men or women lie more maybe and then they did men or women are more intelligent or men Women are better drawers. I think they're like three domains and Yeah, they always found that when that when the evidence said that women have a worse quality than men people like this is sexist This is bad research, but when women are portrayed as better people Yeah, it's even pretty good. And I was the same as when it was equal, right? So women are better and men and women are equal was seen

as a similar level, I think. So I have studies where I've looked at something very similar that I have struggled to publish for like seven years where we did that. We had men or I think we did it with intelligence. Men are women are equally intelligent. Women are more intelligent than men or men are more intelligent than women. And people like the men and women are equally intelligent or women are more intelligent than men more than they like men or more intelligent than women. So that's the one that really irritates people.

Yeah. Why do you think this is the case? Like, why is it? Well, actually first, no. Why do you think this is the case? Why is it... Well, actually first, no. Why do mainstream narratives focus so much on the possibility of anti-female biases if it seems pretty robust that men even have an anti-men bias, like the call is coming from inside the house with regards to some of the sort of anti-male sentiments? Yeah, so like both men and women will show this pro-female bias. It is larger for females usually, but men too have these pre-pro women bias. What was your question? Why do mainstream narratives focus on it so much?

Oh, yeah, I think it's potentially just because we care more about... Okay, so there are two things going on, I think it's potentially just because we care more. But so, okay, so there are two things going on, I think. And one, I think, has been sort of forwarded as the explanation, but I think it might be a little bit simplistic. So just the idea that men and women have more like value essentially, from an evolutionary perspective, if you have 100 women and one men, one man, one man,

you could have 100 babies. But if you have one more man, one man, one man. You could have 100 babies, but if you have one woman, I'm very happy, man. I'm very happy, man. If you have one woman and 100 men, you're gonna have one, you know, you have a very disgusting woman. Yeah, exactly.

So women are the sort of limited resource, and so scholars have argued, and it seems to be very plausible that we care more about harm to women because they are essentially setting the limit on our success as a species. So that's one piece of it. The reason that I don't think that's necessarily all of it is what we briefly touched on at the start of this conversation, which is that you do see these big cross-cultural differences, and you do see these big differences over time. So if I were to run this study where I say like men are smarter than women or women are

smarter than men in like 1920, what I see the same thing, I highly doubt it. So I don't think that's all of it. I think that's part of it. And then on top of it, we have this sort of cultural narrative that women have been disadvantaged for X amount of time. And that is a huge problem. And now the corrective measures have gone so far that they've fully reversed things. And a lot of the time men are being disadvantaged for the sake of women.

So I think those are both what's happening. So you see that in society. When you get any of these effects, we're like, look, people are sexist against women. Everyone loves it. You know, it goes viral. It's covered by the New York Times. I don't think anybody will be, well, I don't want to say anybody, but I don't know if Steve's due, Steve Stewart Williams findings are going to make it to the front page of the New York Times. I guess we'll see. Are you, are you familiar with Gamma Bias? Have you learned about this? I don't know. No, I don't think so. So So this is Dr. John Barry from the Center for Male Psychology.

This is a concept that he at least has popularized. I don't know whether he was the one that came up with it. And it basically talks about how, especially in popular news media articles, if the article is pro women, then they will sex the headline. If it's anti-men, then it will sex the headline, but if it's the reverse, it will be gender neutral. So basically, the successes of women and the failings of men

both end up getting. So, like, white male shooter would be put as the headline for something, or like, female CEO would be put as the headline for something, but the reverse isn't necessarily true. It seems to be less true, and this causes a skew in the way that people see the world. You know, more people are spending time inside rather than outside now, which means that their genuine day-to-day experience of the world is limited. So most of them live their life vicariously through the news stories that they read and the social media that they follow, which means that this very much is shaping our experience of the world. I think Q1 2023 saw the highest ever number of female CEOs in history happen. It was

over a third of all CEOs were women, remembering that this isn't just like finally women have got the opportunity to do this. This is like, finally, we have found enough women that want to become CEO for all that it sounds great and like 50, 50 rappers. The reality on the ground probably sucks a lot more dick than you think. But you also found, looking at this issue, psychology academics also have this bias too. ecology academics also have this bias too. Jedi? Yeah, it was, wasn't it that people have like a stronger desire to sense a science that disfavours women? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So that's in my, right, yeah, where I surveyed psychology professor's book first, I interviewed them. And I asked them, you this was this was from forever ago This was I think you must have found the teaser that maybe got you onto this track originally because this was way before you started This study unless you were doing that study like two or three years ago when you wrote that Kuala Tartke I probably what or I possibly was yeah was that my own researcher was at someone else's research I'm not sure I what you had was that my own researcher was at someone else's research. I'm not sure. What you had was an inclination, I think,

that both the way that the general public and the way that the people doing the science that the general public sees, everybody is kind of aware of this. Like, you know, both men and women seem to have a pro female bias when it comes to the way they interpret stuff. That boundary doesn't stop outside of academics and academia that seeps into academia too, the difference being that academia is upstream of

these realizations. So there are academics who are concerned about that. Okay, so we've like danced around what's going on, what is your explanation for why this is happening, not why mainstream media focuses on it, like why is it the case that this is the interpretation? That the interpretation is that the world is sexist against women? Yeah. Yeah. Motivated reasoning. I don't know. There are a couple of things. I mean, one is just what I've mentioned before is that we do have this greater concern for women.

There's this cultural shift. And part of that cultural shift is driven by the fact that women now, as you mentioned, under like, they're more in positions of power. And so their interests, the interests of women have more power in institutions. They probably, I mean, if women are taking over the media, they're taking over science,

they're taking over all of these positions, and they're particularly concerned about their own interests. They're gonna focus on that, even as the problem disappears over time. But as you said, there's also this actual, I think, sincere, but incorrect belief about the problem. So in this paper that we should have hopefully getting accepted any day now, we had academics

and everyday people estimate discrimination against men and women in hiring contexts in these audit studies where you're randomly sending in job applications to real jobs with like a female or a male name. And as I said, we see this flip around 2009 where all of a sudden, even for male stereotypical jobs, the biases favor women. They've always favored women for female stereotypical jobs. But among everyday people and academics alike, everyone assumes it's the opposite.

They assume that there's this huge bias against women and hiring for male stereotypical jobs. So they think like they look at just the under representation of women and STEM and say, well, there can be only one explanation. Obviously, we're discriminating against women and STEM. And it's not, maybe women don't want to go into STEM. Maybe they like other things more. So there's that tendency to see if there's a disparity. And we know that historically, women have been discriminated against.

That must be the best and the only explanation, in fact. And so it's this combination of who's in power. So those people's interests are like starting to have a greater impact on public narratives in the media and academia. But also I just think there's this misperception about what's actually happening. That maybe it's driven by what you say what the media are covering. Maybe it's willful ignorance. I don't know. I think that definitely a part of it is there's no associated social renown or goodwill for anybody

that starts really applauding men doing well as CEOs. There's no victimhood card carrying points available for somebody that decides to do that, because fuck you, this is no surprise to anybody. Like, you know, even taking it from a straight up structural perspective, headlines that are counter-insuitive or at least sound counter-insuitive are the ones that are the most interesting. So why are we going to report on a news story that most people already thought was happening? So you kind of have this public conceptual inertia that most people think the world is one particular way. That means that when stories appear that

confirm the worldview that they thought they had, they get brushed under the rug. Why should we be bothered about celebrating the number of men becoming CEOs or guys doing whatever, whatever, because this is the way it's always been, because they don't know that there may be some shift in the other direction which would make now the intuitive counter-intuitive again. So it's almost like there's a mismatch between what's actually happening and what the press is releasing and what the public believes. But you know, and this is not to castigate women. It's not like women are choosing to make this like misandr, I don't think almost any women are choosing. Yeah, well, what do you think? I can see why some women would maybe have this sort of misandr, or desire to be, to continue

to cast a gate man. You had this quote, a Google Scholar search for misogyny yielded 114,000 results, whereas a search for misandr, yielded 114,000 results, whereas a search for misundered yielded only 2340. So, people are not studying or really concerned about anti-male bias, especially from women. And it's the same as the, like, can black people be racist? Question. It's like, no, of course they can't. Like, racism is power plus privilege, given that women are the ones who have been out of power for so long There is no way that they could be like I bet that if you did on street interviews

I used to have eight people saying like can women be sexist that it would yield very very similar results. I think that's probably There's actually an even better Google result that I think I didn't find until after I wrote that paper, but I Google image Men are stronger than women, which is just empirically correct on average. And not even on average. It's like, it's just right, almost exclusively. Yeah. Barely, barely an overlap.

But of the like 41st images that popped up on the screen, I think like one of them was, yes, confirming that. And then there were two neutral and all the rest, right, images of men being stronger than men. So women running faster than men, women raising a man over her head. And so even when you Google this fact, run or stronger than women everyone's like no Well, there was a football game that happened a couple of weeks ago in the UK I can't remember the team, but they got like the B squad of some fourth division

Oh, yeah, British team to play I think the US women's team and they beat them I want to say like 12 nil or 14 nil in the space of 25 minutes. And then the best presentation, I think, of speed and power, the disparity between men and women is the women's 100 meter record. So the women's 100 meter record that hasn't been beaten in, I want to say, 20 or 30 years is held by like 100 or 200 under 18 males, like high school level males hit that female number. But that's because of socialization as we all know. But yeah, there have been a couple cases where they try to get these professional female athletes to play, yeah, like low tier men's teams and... Doesn't go well. ...simperial.

Does it go well? It's a little embarrassing. Yeah, it does not go well. If you were to do, if there was a... It's not embarrassing, like, necessarily, but it is just because we're in denial of this reality for whatever reason. If you were to do a game of a liar detection or turning over cards on a table and having to remember the position of them all.

If that had happened to become a globally recognized sport for some reason, women would wipe the floor with men. We would be like, this is completely unfair. We can't have a mixed co-ed team of this because for some reason, all of the top players happen to be women because they- Are we better at that game? I do not.

I thought it called local memorization, or local specialization, or something like that. I've heard that, but I didn't know it translated to that game, but I guess that makes sense. That's the only thing that I can think of that's like a modern equivalent of it. Either that or losing your keys in the kitchen, that every guy loses the keys,

but every woman knows exactly where they are. But if the guy then went to throw the keys to the woman, like she's not catching them. You can be like looking at an object and be like, where's my ex? Yeah, precisely correct. Precisely correct. Okay, so we've kind of got a bit of a story going on here.

We've set up this disparity between what people think is happening in the world and what might actually be happening in some anti-female, anti-male, pro-male, anti-female bias. There's also moving into higher education, a lot more women who also moving into higher education, a lot more women who are going into higher education, not only as students, but also as academics too. How has this changed academic culture?

Yeah, so if you look at the trajectories of women in academia, if you look for men and women, if you look at men, I think it actually goes ever so slightly up, but for women, it's like huge. They were a very, very small minority decades ago, not even all that long ago, but in the past few years, women are dominating at the undergraduate level, way more women than men. They're more women in graduate school, and now they're actually more women who are faculty as well. So you went from an institution that was run almost entirely by men and the people in the institution were almost all men too because the students were men too. And now it's a majority of women. And I think, I don't want to say it's the only cause. I don't think it is the only cause. But I do think it is probably a primary contributor

to a lot of the cultural shifts that have been happening in the past 10 years because they all prioritize the values of women. So if you look at stuff, for example, people wanting to do these trigger warnings when they're teaching topics in class, if you look at the cases of scholars getting attacked or fired or harassed on social media for studying potentially controversial topics, those are sky-racketing.

If you look at these editorial changes in academic journals, which maybe some of your listeners won't be familiar with, but there have been some of the most prominent, or most prestigious journals in all of science of the Nature, Spring, or Family of Journals that have put out a series of editorials over these past few years, saying that they would not publish and potentially would retract science

that has like potential to, I think one of the phrasing was undermine the dignity of human social groups, whatever that means. And so it's all of these like harm concerns and these concerns about protecting vulnerable people that are starting to interfere with a process that at least at one point was supposed to be, well we're're going to pursue the truth, you know, if it hurts some people's feelings, you know, that's so be it. That's not what we're concerned with. We're concerned with, you know, finding out what is empirically

correct about the world and sharing that information with our students. And so if you look at all each and the growing, the bloated DEI, what do you call it? Initiative. Initiative divisions, whatever they have at these universities. All of these things are, they all kind of concerned the things that women would be worried about. And so you're getting this exact pattern happening at the same time women are essentially taking over academia.

And now they're probably holding more positions of power. They're the editors at these journals. They're the presidents of the professional societies. They're the administration. It's kind of like exactly what you would expect if you changed the gender composition of academia and people are so perplexed by it, but it seems like a pretty simple, straightforward solution. I'm not saying that's the only thing. Maybe social media has something to do with it. Scientists are directly interacting with the public, so maybe the public gets pissed about a scientific finding where it's 15 years ago,

they probably didn't even know we had academic journals. So that could be part of it. But yeah, I think changing the composition, the gender composition of academia, I think pretty much has inevitable consequences that are gonna prioritize the interests of women, which are to protect the vulnerable from harm and they're also way more egalitarian.

So they want everyone to kind of have the same outcomes whereas men are more hierarchical, they're more comfortable with like, some people are gonna be better at things than other people and those people are gonna get Benefits for that. I've known women who you know, I know a lot of women in academia and a lot of them are like pained By the process of grading like they don't want to give anyone a D Which I get like it's not fun want to be, which I get, like it's not fun, failing a student. But that's kind of part of the process. If you just give everyone a nae, it sort of loses its meaning.

But that's painful to women to not have everyone be thriving equally all the time. Can you explain for the people who are uninitiated, can you explain the driver evolutionarily about why women have this more egalitarian, more sort of cloak and dagger behind closed doors approach to things and the opposite for men. Yeah, so women, essentially women were having children and raising them to be successful adults that have children of their own, whereas men were often working in coalitions to protect the group. So men are used to creating coalitions, figuring out who's a good leader, who's good at what, giving that person status to make sure the group works really well together.

So they're very comfortable with the fact that some men are going to rise to the top because that benefits the whole group. If we have a strong leader, we all live. Women were not participating in that so much. They were being protected by the men, and their primary job was to care for offspring and keep offspring alive. So they have this concern for things that are vulnerable and they wanna protect them and help them.

have this concern for things that are vulnerable and they want to protect them and help them. Yeah, I think it's actually sort of an interesting discussion about like, is it that men are hierarchical or women egalitarian? Because it might just be that the egalitarian thing could have been the default but men are the ones that had to change because they had to coordinate and cooperate in this way. Oh, yeah. Who's the application? Who's the news? I don't know. So like, I think that explanation, it's almost like the absence of women participating in that potentially made them more egalitarian, but it also could have been because they're

sharing resources with other women and helping other women take care of their children too, where you wouldn't necessarily need. They tend to be in small groups, prefer a few close friends rather than being in this huge group of people that's really coordinated and trying to outcompete other groups. Joyce Benenson has done so much good work on this, where she looked at, is it female basketball teams? And I think male opposition, male opponents on a basketball court show more goodwill physically to each other than female compatriots. So like the enemies on the men's teams,

they show more love to each other than the same team, the same team members for women. And tell me if I'm wrong here, I'm pretty sure that another contributing reason is that women physically are more fragile, which means that getting, becoming the enemy of anybody has high consequences. You are physically less capable of defending yourself, plus you eventually have dependence on you, children, and so on and so forth. So the externality of you dying, like, man dies, not good, but like, you know, things can continue because he's

being gawed by a fucking mammoth or something. A woman gets too high above her station, she pisses off the wrong other woman, and that woman poisons her in a sleep or takes a child away from her or does something else to cause her to lower down in status Which means that women seem to hide their own successes. I think this is is born out of the way that girls in school talk about Achieving a grades and b grades and c grades that they're much more disparaging of their own achievements

They will underplay their own achievements a lot more. It's the same thing of, if a girl thinks that her results are going to be viewed by other people, she's much more likely to downplay her successes, whereas if she thinks that they're going to be kept private, they'll be a little bit more accurate or full of themselves in their assessments.

So that's another sort of contributing factor too. I wasn't aware of that last one, but yeah, there are pretty consistent gender differences where like men have more self-esteem than women, women tend to underestimate how well they're doing at things and men tend to overestimate how well they're doing. Fuck yeah, in a body. Well, how beneficial is it?

And yeah, as you said, I mean, I don't even necessarily think it's just women on women, women are vulnerable around men, too. And so I think that there's more pressure to be a conformist when you're a woman, because as you said, you don't want to piss anyone off, because you're not particularly strong. And so if someone attacks you, there's a good chance you're going to get injured or die, whereas men are more capable of, you know, defending themselves. and they're completely capable of defending themselves against almost all women.

So their enemies are cut in half, or rather the threats are cut in half, as it were. So yeah, there are a lot of these correlated gender differences that if you look at them on their own, the differences don't appear huge when it comes to personality. But the fact that you get them across all of these different kinds of things like the egalitarianism and the harm concern that I think the pressure to be to conform to your social group, when all of those things are correlated, you end up with these pretty big differences. And then we see these differences in the priorities of men and women. So among psychology professors, men are more supportive of pursuit of truth as like the purpose of science than women are. They're more supportive of academic

freedom than women are. Whereas women think we need to be balancing these things with moral concerns and harm concerns. So you get these, you know, evolved gender differences between men and women, their personality, and then you change the gender composition of an institution, and it can fundamentally change the goal of what that institution's trying to accomplish in the case of science, like truth, so long as it doesn't cause any mean stereotypes to be spread about it. I've got some of my favorite stats that you found during your research. 56% of men said that colleges should not protect students from offensive ideas. 64% of women said that they should. 50% of men said colleges should not disinvite speakers if students threaten violent protest.

67% of women said that they should. 58% of men opposed a confidential reporting system at colleges, which students could use, to report offensive comments. 54% of women supported it. 63% of men thought controversial news stories in student newspapers should not need administrators approval before publication. 51% of women thought that they should. And it just continues down whether it's about willingness to report male counterparts for dismissal campaigns. 71% of men reported that protecting free speech is more important than promoting an inclusive society. 60% of women said that promoting an inclusive society is more important than

protecting free speech. All the way down. Then you summarise it really, really nicely here. Put simply, men are relatively more interested in advancing what is empirically correct, and women are relatively more interested in advancing what is morally desirable. Yeah, what I love about all of those numbers too is because they so clearly show what happens when you change the majority representation in an institution because in all of those cases, it's the majority of men hold view A and the majority of women hold view B. So whichever group has more people, they're going to be the ones whose priorities went. We can call it like the the academic ratio hypothesis. Yeah, we could. And I mean,

I haven't actually gotten much pushback on it, which I really thought I would at one point. And I think part of the reason I haven't gotten as much pushback as I would expect for such a claim, oops, last me a bit, is because women actually think that it's good that they're like that, right? So to people who think academic freedom is obviously this really important thing, and obviously science should be pursuing truth, we look at these statistics and we're like, well shit. Like this is really bad. Women are potentially causing problems in science and academia, but when women see these statistics, they're like, finally, like we're saving it. We're making it a safe place for everyone and we're making sure that science does good. It doesn't do harm. And there's another paper that

looked at this, like the priorities of scientists, men are they have this sort of like basic interest in understanding the world and like figuring out what's true and figuring out how things work. Whereas women do science because they want to cause good in the world. So their motivation is, I want to know the truth, but I only want to know the truth

if it's going to help me help other people. Which means that any truth that doesn't help me help other people, and especially any truth that potentially could harm other people is not valuable, and we should not be pursuing it in science and academia. Which is, you know, very fundamentally different from what I think a lot of people thought we were doing for a long time with science. The thing that I tried to get out earlier on before you side-swiped me with your misogyny was that I don't want this to come across like women haven't got their heads on straight, men you should treat them like they haven't got to clue what they're talking about. The point is if you were convinced of these viewpoints, you would be convinced

of them too. Like for the most part, people are supporting things that they believe. Now, they might believe them erroneously. It might be motivated reasoning. It might be because of societal pressure. It might be because they want to morally grandstand and look like they're really cool and important and empathetic and all this stuff. All of these reasons contribute. But like if I convince you that two plus two equals four, you can't unconvince yourself of something that you're convinced of up until the point at which you are unconvinced, at which point you have a new set of views, right? So it's like if you felt this way, if you had this biological predisposition, plus this sort of cultural imposition on you from all the girlfriends that you've spent time with, and

the same for men too, like for the women in academia, who say, I can't believe that men don't care about harms and blah, blah, blah. It's like the reason that they're convinced is because they're convinced. And being able to hold to conflicting viewpoints in your mind at one time is really important. Like look, women can hold this view and to them,

it is the truth. Men can hold this view and to them, it is the truth, right? Like it's a case of trying to bridge that divide, I think, to help people understand, okay, from first principles, what are we trying to achieve? Right. With academia. Like, what's the goal here? What are we actually trying to get ourselves to ward? And I do think that it would lean more toward the male side of this. It's going to be toward the men. It's going to be truth. But do you just say one thing that I thought it was like, how do you just like, why? Like how do you justify why science should be pursuing truth?

Is it just a is it just itself a good or is there a reason that we care about the truth? Are we should pursue truth? To me, the goal of science would be to accurately represent what is going on in the world. And why is that good? Why is that better than... Because that can inform decisions moving forward accurately. If you do it based on some predisposition, some sort of predetermination or some motivated reasoning, you're going to encounter a situation in which the world doesn't reflect what your

research has supposedly shown or what missed research would have shown, because you haven't been trying to represent what the world is. But why is that bad? Because you're going to end up with massive errors. You're going to end up with people predicting things that don't come true or not predicting things that do come true that could have been discovered had the research been done. But why do you, why are errors bad? Why are errors bad?

I guess that's a good question, because downstream, downstream from errors, you would end up with a world that isn't able, or you would end up with a society and a civilization that isn't able to accurately perceive what is going on. That to me just seems like, what is science? If science isn't understanding what's happening in the world, and downstream from that, being able to accurately make predictions, I don't understand what we're doing here.

Like, why don't we just write fiction, if that's it? I was trying to lead you down a path and you didn't take the bait. Okay, bait me. What should I have said? Well, where I was gonna try to get, like, I've seen myself do, I'm a person who thinks science should be pursuing truth,

person foremost, and I don't think other moral concerns should interfere with that, unless they're like catastrophic and definitely gonna happen. But I find myself justifying that with consequences, which is if we don't have the truth, we're going to waste all this time on these bullshit interventions that aren't going to accomplish

anything, they're not going to deliver on their promises, you know, they might actually cause harm to people. And so I'm like bringing in the harm element to justify why we should be pursuing the truth. But it sounds like you think truth is maybe just like in itself a good which I would like to argue that but I'm like well where does that value come from? Is it just like that's just something humans think because truth is tends to be useful and so we've come to sort of worship the truth. But when I try to justify it I go prevent

harm. And then I'm doing the same thing. Which is oddly what there what a lot of people are trying to do, but you're they're going through a less secuative route. They're just saying okay we won't ever talk about anything that could harm somebody and you're like that's the first order effect. The second order effect might be that they end up being harmed because the thing that you've researched or not researched is the thing that could have protected them from the harm in the end. Yeah, I think I was really, really poorly talking about the implications on stream. Oh, sorry, I'll be too. But it is interesting, because I assume you know of that L-Shubbley paper on the female mentors that got the officers' practice. It was like two, three summers ago, maybe right around now. You know, three summers ago, maybe right around now,

you know, during that summer, for a summer of COVID, when everyone was going crazy. This young female scholar published this paper with a couple of colleagues, and they found that that female mentees of female mentors had less impactful careers later down their careers than male mentees that were mentored by male mentors. So essentially this male male combo of mentor mentee led to more successful outcomes than this female female. So people hated that obviously because it makes women look like they're not good mentors or something or women aren't cooperating well together. And they retracted the paper and this is one of the and there was all of this talk about how this is going to harm women in science and it's going to cause all these like negative consequences.

And what ended up happening is like the journal was like we're going gonna launch initiatives to help women in science, blah, blah, blah, blah. So if anything, it was like helpful to women that this paper got published. But then on the other side of it, I'm thinking, no scholar, let's imagine this effect is real, which I don't think we have a good reason to doubt it. No one like really criticized finding they criticize like the operationalizations and stuff. Let's assume it's a true effect.

Well, no scholar in the right mind is ever going to try to study it and figure out why did we, why did this happen? Which means we'll never try to solve a problem because we don't acknowledge that the problem exists in the first place if there is a problem. And so, yeah, like these concerns about harms to women in science, they definitely have potential to actually cause harm to women in science because we're ignoring potential disparity that potentially could be fixed by something. And we'll just never look for the thing that could fix it.

Two studies that come to mind for me there, one being about women with female bosses reporting lower levels of job satisfaction. And then a second one that looked at male academics being more reticent to collaborate with female academics post me to. Yeah. Yeah. Fuck you. I mean. Yeah, that's another thing is like, it's hard to anticipate what the consequences of any one thing are going to be of any one scientific finding or any one social movement, you know? So like even if you think you're avoiding harm, you might also be creating harm and truth has taken a hit, you know? So like, these aren't questions that are being studied empirically. These are just assumptions people have. People just assume this is going to be bad. But they don't bother to actually figure out if it's going to be bad. And if it is going to be bad, is that the only way it's going to be bad

or is it going to be bad? If you suppress the science? Like my big concern is, I'm like, people shouldn't trust science anymore. Like there's so much political bullshit going on that even if we thought it was for the right reasons, for whatever progressive values scholars care about, if they're successfully pursuing those, well, they have undermined the institution of science and no one trusts us anymore because we look like a bunch of political hacks and it's true. I don't even think we can deny that that's what's happening. So, I mean, some people try to, but you can look at our shitty track record if you look at the replication crisis and all of the contradictions just being pumped out into the world day after day, it's a sad state of affairs.

I think there's a really lovely framing. Generally, for a lot of things that are going on within media that are pushing purposefully obfuscated truths or like outright lying about certain things that downstream from that there are second third fourth order effects that people aren't aware of that can be more harmful than an uncomfortable tasting medicine with a spoon of sugar to take it down type thing. I remember the Chelsea connobley article from the New York Times, maternal instinct is a myth that men created. the journal instinct is a myth that men created. It's like, okay, that's sure, that's an opinion, I suppose. It was backed up by some really shitty, like, very... Is it like they created it so that they wouldn't have to do parenting?

Is that... To keep women under the thumb, I think, to keep, sort of, as domestic prostitutes might have been one of the lines that was used. But my point being that, like, okay, so maybe that is comforting to women who are, from a particular cohort, the, you know, the women who are doing these things. But it's very damaging to women who have them at an instinct.

And now they think, oh, right, I've been fucking rubbed by the patriarchy and being marionetted by like, fucking Andrew Tate and Dan Bilzerian have got a hold of like what it is, like the way that I show up in the world. So the actual real world, harm of being trying to be overly sympathetic or empathetic towards disadvantaged groups. Yeah, I think it's a really, really nice framing that harm in the immediate avoiding immediate harm can cause much worse harm down the road and And doing that also destroys truth and also kind of wrecks the entire scientific process. But what do you say to the people who would push back and say, men and women are psychologically different because of patriarchy and social expectations and stuff?

We just need to nudge those, change those in some way. Yeah, I mean, some people try to claim that it's all environmental or cultural, and some people try to claim that, you know, there aren't even men and women in the first place, because it's just humans or something. Yeah, I think some of the most compelling data there are that when you look in more egalitarian countries, you often see that actually these gender differences get bigger. And so when men and women are given more freedom to flourish and pursue what they want to pursue, you can see even bigger, women, a lot of, and this is related to what you were just saying,

a lot of women really being a mom and staying home and taking care of their kids is the most meaningful thing to them. And then you get these scholarly career women who look down on them and shame them for making that choice. But when women have a partner who can support them because they're getting paid enough, they've got their healthcare needs taken care of, they're more likely to choose to stay home and be a mom. And it's in some of these really poor countries or countries where women are treated really terribly, where the women are like going into STEM

at really high rates, you know. So if it, if, if, if it were going to, if it were caused by these like really destructive social expectations that aimed to hold women down, I think we would see that places like Sweden and stuff, women are becoming engineers at the same rate as men, but that's just not the case. And there's evidence that it's precisely the opposite of that when women get to choose. They choose things that women would be interested in doing

because they evolved to be good at those things. It's really important for them. There's an interesting lesson I learned from Mary Harrington, where the especially women at the top, the ones who create the culture of feminism in particular, don't have the interests of the women at the bottom in mind. So she used the example of reducing chivalry. I, I don't need to be protected by a man. I don't need him to hold the door open for me. I don't need him to pull my chair out. I don't need him to pay for the first date, et cetera, et cetera.

Like, you know, this is the egalitarian. It's a, again, you're holding up your morally grandstanding for a disadvantaged group. And you're almost presuming that hoping that they can take care of themselves, you're reducing dependency. But what those women at the top, the bourgeois sort of feminist believers don't realize is that there are women at the bottom for whom their partner might not have had, might have grown up in a single parent household, might have been abused by a father.

Like they could do with understanding protecting women, which is really what opening the door and pulling the chair out is about. It's like treating them in a more, a less robust way is upstream from don't hit your wife. Right? Just a little. Yeah, but the point of women is something that require protecting and providing for is something that can be dispensed where they're if you are part of some like high-forleading class, but necessarily doesn't work down at the bottom. And it feels a little bit the same as what you're talking about here. There was this really, really great study that Alexander Datesykes just put out. I'm going to bring him on to talk about in a couple of weeks. 55% of single men haven't approached a woman in the last year. 77% of women say that they were approached more, but that is in the 18 to 30 age bracket.

At 41 plus, the trend flips and 55% of women said that they didn't want to be approached. Question being, who is writing all of the op-eds saying men stop approaching women? It's the women that are in that age bracket. The old way, yeah, yeah. So it's in there. Are you saying, so it's the older women who are saying stop approaching women and it's the women that are in that age bracket. The old way, yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's in there, are you saying, so it's the older women who are saying stop approaching women and it's the women

who aren't getting approached. And so they're like taking out the competition, stop hitting out the 20 year olds. They're the sexual women, the sexual competition is showing ladies, and they're the one liking the outfit. I wonder that a lot with them. So one finding we see is that there was,

I asked a question of psychology professors, like should professors be fired for having sex with their students? And you see that men are more likely to say no. And women are like, yeah, they should be fired. And it's like, okay, on the one hand, like maybe women are looking out for their own interests. They don't, you know,

or maybe they're looking out for young women. They're like, don't want women being harassed by these older professors. But also, maybe these older professors are like, we don't want our mating pool hooking up with this 24-year-old grad students. So it's hard to tease these things apart. But yeah, a lot of the time there's this, and I'm sort of torn. Like, I think there's probably some validity to both perspectives. Like, on the one hand, women do have, especially women who are older and who have kids,

they have these like maternal instincts and these desire to protect young people. At the same time, young women are also often their competitors for mates. So, you know, if you can prevent the 45-year-old professor and their department, your 40-year-old female professor and your single, you don't want him dating the 28-year-old grad student, you know. Yeah, there's two examples that I think about. One is a billburbit where he says, the reason that girls on average that women are more body positive is because they want their fat friends to not get skinny. So it's an intersectional competition all over again.

I know you're beautiful as you are. Lose a toe you fat bitch. Like that's his, that's this bit that he does about this like diabetic woman. And then I saw a study that suggested women are more, they slutshame more or they're more disparaging of like, relaxed sexual standards if they have sons. And the most sons that they have, the more that that increases. Hmm. They're more disparaging of relax structures for a manner for women, if they have a chance, for women. I thought that was I'm not sure. I just thought that was really interesting. I need to say you might want the girls to be because then

your son can have a lot of kids if the women are just handing it out. I wonder whether if you did do that, the man is going to need to work harder to try and hold on to his partner. He's basically got a less secure mate. That's true. That's true. So like a woman who wouldn't necessarily be a good mom and help take care of the grand kids, yeah, that's an interesting perspective. I find the whole, like I often wonder why society doesn't slouch men more often because

it seems like it would be really important to control male sexual behavior because They can do so much damage like as we were saying a woman can only have a handful of babies in her lifetime a men can father hundreds of children And not take care of any of them at least like I've now you know depending where you live You have to pay some pretty steep child support, but that wasn't always the case and so I find it quite perplexing If there's anyone who studies this topic you should bring them on because I'm really curious to you. But you'll put your brochines hat on and explain why you think there's this disparity in slut-shaming.

It could be because slut-shaming is mainly happening for women against other women and men don't care that much about other men's sexual behavior because they're only going to monopolize a woman for like 10 minutes or whatever. So it might be that it's really, and it might be that men only sluts shame women a little bit because women do, but women sluts shame them more. So it could just be a female intersectional competition thing. But I also think women could such aim men, but maybe they don't

because men don't care about being such aimed. So there's no point. I don't want people about all of the women that I'm sleeping with. Okay, so pre-selection, the fact that a man who is designed by multiple women is seen as desirable on average by more women, to the reason why guys should have photos on their Tinder profile with them with other women, because it shows that you're not like a total basement dwell. Some women think I'm cool. Exactly, exactly.

I'm not totally repulsive to women. And because of that, if a woman does start trying to call out a man's sexual exploits, because it is probably positive expected value on his status, it's a pointless thing. Like, if you think about what... Do you only make some look better? Yeah, exactly. But think about the insults that get thrown around on the internet. The first one from any woman or man to a woman is slut, and the first one from any man or woman to a man is cook or soy boy or in

cell, right? So it's disparaging a lack of sexual chastity on one side and a lack of sexual experience on the other because those are the most valuable things that they have to offer. So yeah, that's really interesting. But it is, it's strange to me that we haven't somehow as a society managed to make it an insult to a man to call him a manhore, but we have it. Because I really do think like, I'm like one or two percent Mongolian, which I think must mean that Genghis Khan was my great, great, great, great friend. He raped everybody in like the whole world. Like why wouldn't we want to handle Genghis Khan?

we want to handle the gangus. Oh right. No, sorry. Discourage someone from monopolizing that much of the the meeting pool. But you wouldn't exist. If that was the case, you wouldn't. I guess I wouldn't. I guess I wouldn't. So thank God. Yeah, this is the oddest type of euthanasia desire that I've ever heard in my entire life. I wanted my genetic line to have ended 50 generations ago, please. I guess a lot of us wouldn't be here. What percentage of us are related? I'm insane percentage of people. Half. Wasn't the point you might know this, I don't know whether it's your field of expertise. Wasn't the point where there was like 8,000 homo sapiens left on the planet and we were all in Indonesia or some shit. We've gone through, I don't know all the specifics of it,

but we have gone through some points where things were getting a little precarious and bounced back, apparently, so that's good. It's a little bottleneck at some point. It's just maybe good for all the people who are paranoid about AI killing us all. At least a few hundred of us can survive. Maybe we'll fight the road over. It's a few hundred that's sufficiently sociosexual. If you pick like the 200 least

sociosexual people here, everyone's just going to go and whittle myself something out of this tree and die on my own. We want it to be like a bunch of elderly people. That would do us no good. Yeah. That would not be good. Evolutionary psychology, one of your areas of expertise, one of my areas of obsession. Why do you think it is that evolutionary psychology is so detested? Yeah, so this is the talk I gave in HBS. And it was definitely not something that I was trying to discover.

My purpose was to know why people hate evolutionary psychology or behavioral genetics, which is the other one that people hate. But pretty much all of the controversial conclusions in psychology The ones that will get you in trouble. They all kind of come from evolutionary psychology and behavioral genetics and it's because people dislike conclusions that regard group differences, so gender differences or race differences specifically. And they especially don't like those conclusions if they're supported by

an evolutionary explanation or a behavioral genetic explanation. And those two kind of go hand in hand because evolution works on our genes. So I keep warping out on my earbuds. So when it comes to the kinds of conclusions that are going to really irritate people, people are gonna tend to be in evolutionary psychology and behavioral genetics, and the kind they're really gonna love are gonna be in like social psychology.

So it's all these, every group differences caused by discrimination. Every group differences is caused by like cultural expectations of people. Men and women are no different if it weren't for the fact that we make girls wear pink and make them take ballet class. Whereas evolutionary psychologists are like, no, there are very good reasons to expect that men and women would be evolved about different bodies, which they do have, and different brains,

which they do have that lead lead to general personality differences. And then people specifically, or especially hate these differences if, as we were talking about, the start of this conversation, if the differences favor men over women, or if they favor specifically white people over black people. So if there's anything where white people

are outperforming black people, or men are outperforming women, and then you provide an evolutionary or genetic explanation for that, those are the kinds of things I didn't get you fired. They're going to get your paper retracted. And people are going to call you all kinds of names. So yeah, evolutionary psychology is kind of screwed, I think, especially as things move toward this, let's be careful and avoid the potentially harmful topics as women take over academia, you would think that people are going to become more accepting of evolutionary psychology because they kind of have been for a little while, but we might be at a turning point and it might actually become.

Oh, it could regret. Mm-hmm. I think it's actually quite likely to. Wouldn't that be a shame if there's been all of this time spent with behavioral genetics and evolutionary psychology kind of dispensing some of the slime that maybe it had accumulated or was thrown at it and slowly over time. If you want to avoid the replication crisis, you place one tree or an evolutionary psychology in behavioral genetics. That's so true, yeah.

The two places that haven't been slammed by. And the place you don't want to be is social psychology. Yeah, the least reliable of all of the different psychology disciplines has been the one, which is currently the most on the rise, the one that is politically, emotionally the most upheld in order to be able to support.

It's very, very backward, but it would be a shame if we've done all of that work. You know, you and your field have done all of this work to get it to the stage where it's regarded in relatively neutral light for a, what did we call it? The academic, the academic, this academic sex ratio hypothesis, what the fuck did we call it? Yeah, gender ratio, gender ratio hypothesis, what the fuck did you do? Yeah, gender ratio, gender ratio hypothesis, whatever. Yeah. So you tried to work this out. You tried to do a study about taboos and censorship.

And for this, you tried to recruit every psychology professor in the US. At the top 130 institutions, yeah. I tried. I only got like 10 or 11% of them, but so it was like about 500 people. Quite a lot. Yeah, quite a lot. And we see these, my favorite one. So after I interviewed, I interviewed around 40 or so and asked them like, what are the most controversial

conclusions and that's how I discovered? It's these types of conclusions with these differences. And if they have evolved, people really don't like those conclusions. But then I asked a follow-up sample of these like around 500 people. Their views about these conclusions. And one of them is that men and women evolved different psychological characteristics. And a finding we see across all of the conclusions, but this one is the most entertaining,

is that men are pretty sure that that conclusion is true, and women are like very on the fence about it. So the mean for women is closer to the midpoint, whereas men are sort of clustered toward the top of the scale. And so we see across all controversial conclusions that men think they're more likely to be empirically correct, whereas women are more likely to think that they're false. And then we see that the people who think that they're true are self-sensoring more, which inevitably means that what we hear publicly about controversial conclusions is systematically distorted.

And the impression is that these bad controversial conclusions are false and they're fringe and no one believes they're true. People believe they're true. It's just they won't talk about it out loud. So it really distorts the perception of scientific consensus anytime you get like one of these one of these conclusions that put to has potential to get you in trouble. And then we looked at like all these kinds of things. For example, And then we looked at like all these kinds of things. For example, I asked professors, imagine a scholar who forwards an evolutionary

genetic explanation for a group difference that favors men over women or white people over black people. What should happen to a scholar who would forward such a conclusion? And across the board, we see gender differences here, whereas female psychology professors are more likely to support ostracizing them, calling them racist or sexist or bigoted,

shaming them on social media, not publishing their work even if it has merit, not hiring them even if they meet typical standards. And so women, like their moral concerns, will make them, which is sort of strange. So I think men might be slightly more punitive than women in general, but in this particular context, women are more punitive across the board toward their peers who, for controversial conclusions or conclusions that they don't like, because they perceive them as potentially morally bad.

So yeah, I'm quite worried for the future of science, at least the version of it that I thought was what we were doing. But it just might completely transform into something quite different. Maybe that'll be good. I don't know. Have you got any idea how supporting or not supporting groups are, if you were to give a behavioral genetics or evolutionary psychology explanation for racial or sex differences between groups that favored women or favored minorities?

So I didn't ask that one because it was not, so actually it was specifically mentioned as not controversial. So when I interviewed the first round of psychology professors, they were like, well, it's only controversial if the conclusion favors men over women is only controversial for favors white people over black people. And so it's really this like particular kind. It's. It's conclusions that have potential to portray groups that are perceived as vulnerable or disadvantaged. If you portray them more negatively than the group that is perceived as powerful or vanish,

it was essentially white men. So you can publish things about white men being bad at something, but you can't publish things about other groups. Would they be happy with that being a behavioral genetic, so evolution, new psychology explanation, do you can't publish things about other groups. Would they be happy with that being a behavioral genetics or evolutionary psychology explanation? Do you think? Yeah, that's a good question. I reckon they wouldn't. I reckon they wouldn't for the reason that that opens the door to a different piece of research. The easiest way to do this is to de-legitimize all of behavioral genetics and

all of evolutionary psychology.'t blanche because downstream, like, the presumption is that this has been used previously in a various way or this could be used in a politically inconvenient way, even if it's real. So if we just say that this is off the table, I would guess that on average you're going to find that basic behavioral genetic and evolutionary psychology explanations, even if they do favor underrepresented groups Going to be pushed away. I think those would be less less controversial, but I think you're right that they still would be somewhat controversial because people would fear the

legitimizing the The approach to the question. Yeah So for example, some people seem to not like that, you know, if you look at the NBA in the United States, that's overwhelmingly African Americans playing in the NBA in the United States. They're vastly disproportionately represented. And so, some people said, well, you know, because of different evolutionary pressures, a group in different, you know, evolved in different environments.

This caused different body structures. And so you provide an evolutionary explanation, while black men are better at basketball than white men on average. And there is some resistance to that. And I think it's because of the implication that there are differences, right? And that it makes sense that there would be differences given that different populations evolved in different climates. So, yeah, I think it would be less controversial, but it still would be controversial, especially

for people who are like sort of savvy and know, like, well, if I commit to this, what else am I potentially committing to? So, yeah. Okay, so you found there was four of these most taboo conclusions that you found. Many women have different psychological characteristics because of evolution. Biological sex is a binary for the majority of people. The tendency to engage in sexually coercive behaviour likely evolved because it conferred some evolutionary advantages on men who engaged in such behaviour.

And and gender biases are not the most important drivers of the underrepresentation of women in STEM fields. Like those, that's like, that's all headlines that I've read for the last two years fall into one of those buckets. Those are four of the 10. There are other ones related to race as well, and then there are other ones related to politics. So just even the idea that psychology discriminates against conservatives. Some people mentioned, or the idea that academia, you know, if it doesn't discriminate against black people, what does that say? So sorry, that's, that's an interesting one. I didn't know about the conservative side.

But what's interesting there is that conservatives aren't an underrepresented group. No, they are. Oh, they are in psychology, not in the world. Yes, but that's the point, right? So in the world, it's not like it's not like conservatives are some aligned group that have needed to be upheld morally. So that one, to me, screams much more about motivated reasoning that if you poll academics on average, especially now, modern academia, they're leaning pretty hard left. So that's just like outgroup tribal

bias. Yeah, people have been debating that when some people say that it's just conservatives aren't good at science, or they just don't like science. But there have been other studies like in bar and lammers and they like academics will straight up say that they would discriminate against conservatives and hiring and talking bites and things like that. So there's good reason to believe people are just discriminating against conservatives. Scott Galaway taught me,

maybe it's a third or 50% of Democrat parents fear that their child will marry a Republican. third or 50% of Democrat parents fear that their child will marry a Republican. Yeah, the Ingrid outgrew hatred with the political thing is really huge. And people just admit it, they don't even feel ashamed, right? If you track political bias against racism, like people are way more politically racist than they are racially racist by a huge I take by lots of lots of multiples. Yeah, it's true. It's true. And and yet we don't care as much about that one for some reason. What's the interesting thing there is that your politics tell me a lot more about you than your race, right? They tell me more about your world, at least how you show up

in the world, probably than your race. It's the same reason in the UK that, again, people are more prejudiced against those with different accents than those with different skin colors. This is a study that was done that was really interesting. And quite rightly, like somebody walks into a room that is of a different race to you, but speaks in a similar accent, you have an awful lot more in common with that person than someone who walks into the room with the same skin color as you, but a different accent. Because especially, especially in the UK and I learned this from someone who was British, the UK's got such a rigid class system and accent denotes an awful lot of that class.

So I can tell is somebody from an area that's similar to me or different than me. So we played this game. I went to a retreat a couple of weeks ago in LA and there was one other British guy there and we were talking about like a similar sort of thing. And this guy had like, it's quite a nice, it's Ed from like, he's a YouTuber. And he's got a nice British accent.

I think he grew up in the Cotswolds, which is like quite a fancy sort of countryside place. And the guys are like, what accent. I think he grew up in the Cotswolds, which is quite a fancy sort of countryside place. And the guys are like, what class do you think he is? Like tell me what you know about him, just based on the way he speaks. I hadn't met this guy before, and I was able to pin him down to pretty much the region he was in, the class that he grew up in.

I knew that he went to private school. I knew that he was university educated. I knew this, this, this, and this, just from the way that he spoke. So again, with this, like, you're, there are many things that are more informative about who somebody is than this in color. And yet, that was originally 50 years ago, one of the goals of the sort of racial justice movement to try and get us to the stage, where skin color kind of was dispensed and moved to the side. And now it's been put front and centre again. And as despite the fact that it is not a particularly reliable signal of lots and lots of things

about the way that people show up in the world. Yeah, it is interesting. We appear to have gone like a little bit like there are even some people advocating for like racial segregation on both sides like well on both sides like some I think it was NYU is considering having all black dorms which is one thing but then there was another one where this group of white people were like no black people can attend this meeting about racism because they've had to put up with our shit too much as it is and like we can't some jack them to us. And you're like what? You do realize how this sounds. Yeah, it is strange. I loved in England for two years and I was very surprised by how front and center

class is there in a way that it's not so much. Like when people describe people, they often will like, oh, they're very posh or whatever. And like in the US, it would be really off putting to be like, oh, they're like super rich and they have a great house. You know, like you wouldn't say that. Yeah, I don't think you would. Yeah, the, that's, that's, but I think it might be because you guys don't have as much racial diversity. So this is like more of a defining thing for you guys. Not many black people.

Lots of Indian people, lots of Pakistani people, like some Chinese people, but not we just don't have that same sort of split. I remember this was a little while ago now that they were trying to do graduation ceremonies and they timetable the graduation ceremonies. It's like, this is the Hispanic ceremony and this is the black ceremony and this is the white ceremony. Yeah, yeah, yeah, some, I don't know high school or something. Have you seen Ryan Long, he's a Canadian comedian, and he did a famous video about three years ago that was racists and danti-racists

and we're on everything. And him and his friend Danny wore the same t-shirt. And it was like, we believe that the most important thing is your skin color. Yes. And they'll have high five. They go, we believe that black children and white children should not be educated together. Yes. They keep on agreeing on shit.

So good. Yeah. I did see that. That was really funny. And it is strange that it's slightly accurate, at least in some groups of people, yeah. Unfortunately. OK, so going back to your study,

there's one where you tried to get every fucking psychology professor in all of the US. What did the professors say about how to handle potentially harmful conclusions? Yeah, so that one, so I've been talking about these gender differences, but I should say like if I look across all of my data, mostly people do support academic freedom, and mostly people are against taking these moral concerns into consideration when deciding whether to publish something. So I had a question,

how certain, yeah, how certain should it be that a finding is going to cause harm before it was suppressed? And I think the most common response was we should never suppress scientific findings. And then there was like a little bit for like high tears, like there should be evidence that the only way to prevent the harm is to suppress the finding. And you get almost nobody down at the bottom, which is like something like there should be, it should seem like it could cause harm or something like that. And the reason to me that is semi puzzling is because those nature springer guidelines I was talking about earlier, that very much seems to be their threshold. Their threshold seems to be like,

if it seems like it could cause harm, then we will reject or retract papers. But almost no psychology professors think that that is the appropriate place to draw the line, like a few people in my whole entire sample. And so that makes me wonder, like how is it that the perception of where the field is going and what people want is actually what the extremists want. And is it that the extremists

are like trying to get these positions of power to influence policy, which seems quite possible to me, like if you're really motivated, maybe you're like, I'll do that job, even though I don't think being an editor would be all that much fun. But you've got a lot of power. Is that happening? Or is it disproportionate representation in terms of just how loud they are online? Yes, so that's another thing is I think that because we have this relationship with self-sensorship, it's the people who support academic freedom in pursuit of truth and who think controversial conclusions might be true and we should publish them. Those are the ones who are self-sensoring and it's the ones who are really concerned about the harms and think that, you know, we should be firing people and retracting papers.

They're very willing to say what they think out loud and on social media. So I think there's just this distortion of what people want because so many of us are too scared to say anything. And it allows people who are in this vocal minority and that's a small minority, small minority. They can make these bold policy changes and not that many people will put up a fight, a few people have complained, but a lot of people who disagree with them aren't saying anything. They're staying out of it because they're scared because they don't want to be the next one with the target on their back. What's the implication of this? Like we've got this milieu of hypersensitivity.

Oh, yeah. No, you don't. So, I'd like to speak for a million. I'd like to speak for a million. I'd like to speak for a million. I've always wanted to drop that into it, but I just never had that. Watch me in front of you.

No, no, no. Yeah, like you said, there's this ambient background, we are concerned about these kinds of harms to pretty reliably robust areas of research that are being, you know, thrown to the side and maligned. What's the, yeah, what are the implications of this? Or what did you, after having conducted the study and then looked at the data and realized, holy fuck, what's going on? Like, what did it make you reflect on? And what did it make you think? Well, part of my motivation for running this study

in the first place was just because I had the strong suspicion that this was exactly what was happening. Because I, because I'm sort of like, I'll talk openly about these issues, at least more openly than a lot of people will. Most people will. People will come to me and like complain to me about stuff, but they don't say anything

out loud. So I know all of these people who don't like the way things are headed, they think these new policy changes that are prioritizing harms, over science, are bullshit, and they won't say it to each other, but they'll say it to me. And that's like, you're a safe space for bigotry. That's what I'm saying. I understand. I understand. Let's make that the clip of a video.

Safe space for bigotry, Corey Clark, PhD. Thank you. So I knew all of these people were afraid, but I was like, I actually am kind of curious. What is the true majority perspective? Or rather, like how off am I in relation to other people? And then once I saw the results, I was like, wow, that's even more than I expected. I didn't realize like this many people were this against what's

happening. Like we had a question, this was my favorite question, I think, on the whole survey, which was how much contempt versus admiration and respect you have toward professors who start petitions or social media campaigns to attract papers for moral reasons. And on a zero to 100 scale, zero being maximum contempt to 100 maximum admiration respect, the modal response was zero.

So like, people really hate these people. And I wouldn't know it from hanging out on Twitter. Like, a lot of them are signing the petitions and they're certainly not like shaming the people. I mean, some people are, but most people aren't. Most people are just staying quiet or even participating. So I was quite surprised at how one direction.

How would Lee. Yeah, how cowardly. How cowardly everyone's being. But what I think is potentially interesting about that is it suggests there's a lot of preference falsification going on, which is I think Timur Khrur on, I'm probably pronouncing my name wrong, his concept. But what's that explain that?

So preference falsification is essentially when people publicly are saying that they believe or support something that they don't actually truly believe or support. And when you't actually truly believe or support. And when you have that, when you have all these people essentially lying to protect themselves, protect their jobs or their reputations or whatever, you create a situation that's really precarious because if people get information and specifically it's that they think their views are the minority and so they don't say anything. If those people find out that their views aren't the minority, that their views are actually

the majority, all of a sudden they might be more willing to speak out. So I do think it creates this possibility that if I ever get this paper published, we'll see. Then suddenly all of these psychology professors are going to be like, oh, a lot of people feel the way I feel. Maybe it's OK for me to say this thing at this faculty meeting. Maybe it's OK for me to say this thing on Twitter or at the business meetings at these professional conferences. Because a lot more people are on their side than they previously thought.

So yes, people are being cowardly. And that irritates me a little bit because sometimes I feel like people will thank me for staying stuff. And I'm like, well, you say, like don't free ride on my, you know, reputational risk taking. But at the same time, those people potentially under the right circumstances could get a little bit more courage and speak up. And things actually could change quite rapidly if they did. I don't know if that will happen.

Again, I have these conflicting views where I'm like, am I an optimist or am a pessimist? I'm an optimist because I think so many people are lying essentially about what they think is best for science. And if I could give them courage and speak up and they all spoke up at once, then that could have a huge impact. On the other hand, because we see all these gender differences and women are taking over academia, the numbers are only going to be shifting that way for the foreseeable future. There's no hope, I think, at this point or no reason to believe anyway, that things are going to be shifting, back toward male, males aren't even going to undergrad that much anymore. So the pool of potential men that could become professors

is getting smaller, smaller by the day. So what's that called about demography as destiny? It's like university intake as destiny. You're not going to create male professors out of a non-male undergraduate pool. And especially because in the fields that are dominated by women, people aren't particularly concerned about getting more men in. Whereas in the fields that are dominated by men, like some of the hard stem fields and then like philosophy, they're desperately trying to get more women. So there's all the social pressures are still pulling that way. So, you know, the male academic is going to be a rare breed in maybe like 20 years.

Good for the sex ratio hypothesis. I'm telling you. I'm going to get intense. You're going to be swimming in it. So the two main takeaways from the presentation that I watched you give it at Palm Springs a couple of months ago, should scholars be completely free to pursue research questions without fear of institutional punishment for their conclusions. 60% of women said it's complicated.

60% of men said yes. And if pursuit of truth and social equity goals appear to come into conflict, which should scientists prioritize, 50% of women said it's complicated and 70% of men said yes. Those are the two ones that stood out for me. Yeah, that's, again, it's the same thing.

It's these majorities, right? Like, whichever group is in the majority is going to get their thing. I mean, so one thing is women won't say, well, for the most part, women don't say social equity should take priority over truth or you know scholars should be punished, but they say it's complicated which just indicates that they have this like trade-off that they think they're making between, well, yeah, we want truth a lot of the time but not in these cases, not in the when when results potentially could But not in these cases, not in the when when results potentially could

Cause harm to a group or could spread I mean one concern that a lot of people have is just spread negative stereotypes. It's like How bad is that? Is the spreading of a negative stereotype like if there are no actual consequences like do we know for sure that spreading negative stereotypes causes people to do horrible things to other people. Is it okay if people have slightly negative stereotypes? The magnitude of the harm we're talking about, it's not like gain of function research. If we do this, we might kill all of the humans or research on nuclear warheads or something like if we do this we might blow up the world. It's like we might like make some people have slightly more negative attitudes towards

certain people. It's just the the magnitude of the harm that's being considered to me feels to me feels, minuscule, like potentially not even harmful in the first place like, like give me something concrete, you know, and give me some proof, show me like that, publishing this paper that, you know, men mentor male students better than women

mentor female students, like show me the harm there there wasn't any and also incorporate the downstream consequences of not accurately identifying it didn't you say that you got reported for doing this I did I did I did I For story done So I did a study I got IRB approval you always have to get IRB approval. So that's just, and there was a consent form. People knew what I was asking. I said I'm asking about the most controversial conclusions in psychology that were nominated by your peers in this other survey. And one of the, so my IRB emailed me and they're like, we received a complaint from one of your participants. You don't have to do anything, you didn't do anything wrong,

you did have IRB approval, but we are obligated to share the complaint, this anonymous complaint with you. And she said, and I'm assuming it's a she, I don't know for sure. You slipped up, you slipped up, you've been in the subject. Fucking big hit.

And this is based on accurate base rates. But she said that the questions were jarring to her. And then she thought they would be even more jarring to underrepresented groups in psychology and that this was not my first offense. Serial biggest. I've got some enemies out there. but fortunately I followed the procedure, so she didn't get to shut me down, but she tried to.

Well, what's really fascinating there? And I think this, I've been trying to weave together a single thread between all the stuff that we've gone through today, which I think is, it's a single narrative, right? Everything that we've spoken about,, um, gamma bias or, or as you called it, the lack of prescience of, of, um, patriarchal misogyny, then this, change in academia, skewing toward women and the downstream implications. And then finally, what this means that the academics, how it's influencing academic research itself to, the single thread between it all

and it really gets shown up in that potential ladies concern is a supposed sort of parochialness and concern for underrepresented groups. It's almost like everybody is shadow boxing against an imaginary hegemon. Like, do you know what I mean? It's like, it's not for me. I am okay with this, probably.

What I'm doing is I am going to step out and I'm going to be the benevolent sort of counterweight against this thing that I presume. So it is, it's a very overbearing, very sort of fri- The journalistic, but it's a very overbearing, very sort of frialistic, but it's maternalistic view, but it's not caring, right? It's not the firm sort of mother. It's the overbearing hypersympathetic helicopter, snowplough parent mother. But yeah, it's really seeing people, especially disadvantaged groups,

in just such a unrobust fragile way. And if you actually think about it, that's really, really like fucking prejudice to go, you know, these poor black people, they can't, yeah, they're not gonna, these poor women, these poor minorities, these poor gaze, they're not gonna be able to handle this. Like, don't handle it. Yeah, they're not going to be these poor women, these poor minorities, these poor gaze, they're not going to be able to handle this. Like, don't you worry, allow me white, 48 year old woman

who hasn't left academia in three decades, allow me to step in. You don't know what's right for you. You don't know what should be done. I, I will be your savior. Like, I tend to see that the people who are the most forceful on the other side of things, the ones who are trying to take these harm concerns more

seriously and fuse academia with all these moral values, they do, and this is not based on my research, although possibly I could look at it, I should do that. But it seems to be driven by progressive white women who grew up like wealthy. They grew up, they were very well off, they never suffered in their life. And well, I shouldn't say that,

I don't know what their personal backstory is, but it sees upper and middle class, white, highly educated progressive women. And they, yeah, they think they're protecting other people. It's not about them. It's about these other vulnerable groups. And it is, it is quite strange. So there are a couple papers that actually look at very similar things. Like, for example, they're these papers that find that progressives essentially like talk down to black people. They present less self-confidence when they're talking to black people, whereas conservatives will treat black and white people more similarly.

There's this other paper that was looking at, I think it was looking at what jokes are funny or offensive or something. You see that conservatives are like, make fun of everyone, they're all funny, we're all targets of these things, whereas progressives are like, can't make fun of minority groups. Make fun of everyone else, but don't make fun of them. And it is like, depending on your perspective,

you can view this as like pretty infantilizing, right? It's essentially implying that these people are so weak that they can't handle the same kind of, you know, I don't want to call it abuse, but like poking fun that other people can or that they can't handle, like getting criticism or whatever it is, it does look a little bit like precisely what we were trying to avoid. At one point, we thought we were working toward, well, let's try to treat people equally.

And now it's like, no, we have to treat certain people better than other people because they can't handle what other people are getting. Yeah, so I personally find it a little bit off-putting, but I assume some people think that that is the kind thing to do. We need to come up with a name for it. It's like fake sympathy or fake virtue, because it's not, it seems to me to be primarily done to make the person bestowing the virtue look good not to have genuine impact. Because if it was built to have genuine impact,

you would just look at what is the impact of this thing. You would look at the consequences or the implications of doing this thing. Oh, well, you know, the first order harm is X, but the second order and third order harms are 10 and 100 X. So we need to actually do things in this way. Maybe it's a prioritization of like immediate emotions in a world where people's opinions and beliefs

are more important than like real world's arms and facts. Yeah, exactly. That might be a little bit more. Oh, who is, oh, this is a friend of mine, Maya Grasso. She's telling me about a paper. I was just at a conference in Poland. And she has this really interesting finding where she finds that, and I forget

how she measured it, but it was men are the protector of external harm or physical harm, and women are the protectors of internal harm. So like men will step up when they see someone else suffering physical damage, whereas women are particularly compelled to stand up to protect someone who is suffering psychological or emotional damage. Which is really, I think, kind of profound in what we see to be happening is, in fact, it's almost happening at the expense of potential physical harms, as women are so protecting of people's feelings that they don't necessarily seem to consider all of these other as you're saying, second order, third order, what are the real things that

can actually happen in the world? Because there's this deep concern with people's like psychological well-being. Yeah, forget where I was going with that. I've got my current world view when it comes to self-improvement. Marries exactly with this, I think, which is that male self-improvement sees the person as mutable and the world as immutable. So you need to be the best person possible and you need to accept the rules and the environment that you're in. It's in contrast to female self-im self improvement, which sees the person is immutable and the world is mutable.

So women are taught to accept yourself and try and change these support structures and the society that you're in, which is just fundamentally patronizing, right? It's that you see this in Mulan, the two versions of Mulan, I like it like we get Disney reference. When Mulan was first done,

the protagonist is a smaller girl who needs to be smarter and work harder and do all of this is the animated version like 20 years ago. She needs to do all of these things to be able to compensate for her size and because she works really, really hard and is innovative, she can use her lack of size to her advantage and she's quicker and trained and she overcomes challenges and her age, she's brilliant. Contrast that with the most recent version of Milan where this protagonist doesn't have to do anything, she is patronized by all of the men that are there. She's naturally better than all of the men. She doesn't have to overcome any challenges.

She's got this like magical feminine, estrogen, or whatever that allows her to be more talented than all of the men and all of the men are blundering and patronizing and blah, blah. And that is the, it tracks the trajectory. The same with that. Did you watch the... The first one is probably directed by a man and the second one was probably directed by a woman.

You think? I don't know. I'm throwing out a hypothesis. Mulan, director. Or would be a writer. Would it be a writer? Would it be the writer or the black part? Who has more power?

Oh my God, directed by Nikki Caro. If N.A. N.I. Nikki Caro is that... It's a woman. New Zealand film director. It's a fucking woman. Was the first one a man? Let me see. Let me see.

Yes, directed by Barry Cook and Tony Bancroff, the 99-day version. Thus, it has been proved. Wow. Wow, that's accurate and terrifying. Yeah, well, they've got different priorities and this is going to reveal itself and kind of whatever they do. It's really sort of interesting. I should be making predictions about other disciplines. You really should. Just FYI Mulan, the 2020 film, the budget was 200 million and the box office was 70 million. So that's a heavy, heavy price, 130 million to uphold women's fragility.

That's so funny. But look, so here's a perfect example of that, right? Because of some of the evolutionary psychology underpinnings and the research that you've done, you have been able to accurately predict what's going on in the world. That is a useful skill to be able to have. Had we have not been able to learn about some of the predispositions that men and women have, you wouldn't have been so accurate. What we're doing is we're expediting our progress

towards something which is useful. Basically, you're like a clairvoyance of on. We should try and have more of you. Cory Clark, ladies and gentlemen, Cory, I love your work. I think that all the stuff you're doing is fascinating. What should people expect next? What are you working on now that you can talk about? because we see that everyone hates when institutions get politicized, even people who share the values of the institution, so like liberals don't want science which leans left to be politicized. So that's fun. I'm trying to get adversarial collaborations popularized in science, trying to get scientists to work with their enemies.

Another one where there's been a gender difference. I have, most men I've approach have said yes and most women I've approached have said no and I think it's because women are more averse to like interpersonal conflict and so there but but maybe if they become a norm than women will and also I'm trying to be like they're not as scary as you think they are because they're really not they tend to go really well. So those are yeah those are two things. I don't know. Why should people go? They want to check out more of the things that you do. Read your stuff. Why should I?

I have a website, corijclark.com. I'm on Twitter and Instagram. I'm hard cori, which was a pun that no one gets. I got it. You got it. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Maybe people don't know my name's Corey, so that's probably a really key component to have. Yeah. Perhaps. Look, I really appreciate you. Thank you very much for it. Thanks for having me on. This was a lot of fun. you