The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 235. Evolution, Sex & Desire | David Buss

Episode Date: March 16, 2022

This episode was recorded on October 26, 2021.As an alternative for those who would rather listen ad-free, sign up for a premium subscription to receive the following:• All JBP Podcast episodes ad-free• Monthly Ask-Me-Anything episodes (and the ability to ask questions)• Presale access to events• Premium, detailed show notes for future episodesSign up here: https://jordanbpeterson.supercast.com/Dr. David Buss and I discuss his groundbreaking work in evolutionary psychology. Our conversation forays into human mating practices & strategies, female preferences, dominance hierarchies, (fe)male aggression, emotional regulation & status, the dark triad (narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy), inherent inequality, and much more.Dr. David Buss is a professor of psychology at the University of Texas who has also taught at Harvard and the University of Michigan. He is considered the world’s leading expert on human mating strategies and is one of the founders of the field of evolutionary psychology.His books include The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating, Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind, The Dangerous Passion: Why Jealousy is as Necessary as Love and Sex, The Murderer Next Door: Why the Mind Is Designed to Kill, and Why Women Have Sex.Get Dr. Buss’ latest book, When Men Behave Badly: The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment, and Assault:https://amazon.com/When-Men-Behave-Badly-Harassment/dp/B08ZT82RH6/ref=sr_1_2?qid=1642690863&refinements=p_27%3ADavid+Buss&s=books&sr=1-2& previous works: https://amazon.com/Books-David-Buss/s?rh=n%3A283155%2Cp_27%3ADavid+BussFollow Dr. Buss on Twitter: https://twitter.com/profdavidbuss______________Chapters______________[00:00] Intro[02:09] Career Background[06:50] Human Mating Strategies[09:18] Patriarchy & Mating[10:52] Female Preferences & Resource Acquisition[14:54] Sexual Selection Theory: An Overview[25:23] Patriarchy: Origins[27:36] (Dominance) Hierarchies[40:20] Women & the Dark Triad (Narcissism, Machiavelianism, & Psychopathy)[57:59] Attention & (Fe)male Selection[01:04:24] Violence[01:07:47] Emotional Regulation & Status[01:13:59] Disturbing Ethical Conclusions[01:20:25] (Fe)male Aggression[01:23:29] Monogamy & Violence[01:28:30] Inequality[01:33:40] Why Strategies Differ[01:42:45] Outro#Evolution #Hierarchies #Patriarchy #Violence #Gender #Monogamy

Welcome to episode 235 of the Jordan B. Peterson podcast. I'm Michaela Peterson currently backstage in Colorado Springs. In this episode, Dr. David bus and dad discuss David's groundbreaking work in the field of evolutionary psychology. Dr. David bus is a professor of psychology at the University of Texas in Austin and he's also taught at Harvard. He's considered the world's leading expert on human mating strategies, and is one of the founders of the field

of evolutionary psychology. His books include the evolution of desire, strategies of human mating, the dangerous passion, why jealousy is as necessary as love and sex, why women have sex, And the murderer next door, why the mind is designed to kill. They delved into topics like women's mating preferences, dominance hierarchies, manifestations of aggression in men and women, what makes us attractive, emotional regulation and how it relates to status. The dark triad of personality inherent inequality

and a lot more. As always, if you're tired of hearing me read ads, visit jordanbpederson.supercast.com to sign up for the ad free version of the podcast plus other perks. It works on all major platforms and it's just $10 a month. Again, that's only at JordanVPeterson.supercast.com. I hope you enjoy this episode. Hello, everybody. I'm very pleased today to have, as my guest, Dr. David Busch, who's been real influence on my thinking, I think perhaps more than any other living psychologist I respect and have learned from what he's done. David Busch is a professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. He previously taught at Harvard and at the University of Michigan. He is considered the world's leading scientific expert on strategies of human mating of all the interesting things. And is one of the

founders of the field of evolutionary psychology. His many books include the evolution of desire, strategies of human mating, evolutionary psychology, the new science of the mind, the dangerous passion, why jealousy is as necessary as love and sex, the murderer next door, why the mind is designed to kill, and why women have sex, which you think would definitely be a best seller. His new book, When men behave badly, the hidden Behave Badly, The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, harassment and assault was published in 2021,

and it uncovers the evolutionary roots of conflict between the sexes. Dr. Boss has more than 300 scientific publications, and just to give those of you who are listening, some sense of what that means, you can get a PhD from a pretty top-rated research institution in psychology with three publications, a thesis made of three publications, and so to have 300 publications is, in some sense, the equivalent of 100 PhDs.

So that's worth thinking about for a while. In 2019, he was cited as one of the 50 most influential living psychologists in the world. So I'm very pleased that you agreed to talk with me today about these contentious topics. And I would like to restate what I said earlier, which is your work has been very influential. As far as I'm concerned, I've really liked reading everything you've done for the last 20 years. I haven't read all of it, but I've read lots of it. So, well, thank you. That's my pleasure to be talking to you. I've been reading your work for some time and I've been looking forward to this conversation for a long time. So, maybe you could start by telling everyone, telling me, why did you get interested in evolutionary psychology per se?

How did that come about in wind? Because you were one of the founders of this field, which is a burgeoning field, and an important one, tying psychology to evolutionary biology, a crucial thing to do. Yes. So, well, basically, when I started my academic career, there was no such thing as a evolutionary psychology. And I was trained in personality psychology at UC Berkeley. But what I was interested in and the reason that I got into personality psychology was I was interested in human nature. You know, what motivates people? What are the goals towards which people aspire and seek? What gets people out of bed in the morning?

What makes people tick? bed in the morning? What makes people tick? What is human nature made up? And when I got into the field of personality, I went through all the standard of theories, Freud, Jung, Kelly, Mazda, you know, the list. And all, or many, seem to have some intuitive appeal, but none seem to be grounded in a foundation,

in a solid scientific foundation. And that's really what ultimately led me to evolutionary theory that is to try to identify what are the causal processes that created human nature, whatever that nature may be. You know, even the more biologically oriented psychologists, the behaviorists, for example, like Skinner, the people who studied rats and who did that so carefully, because that's a great tradition

and really led to the emergence of neuroscience. There was not a lot of evolutionary thinking there because underlying that behaviorist ethos was the idea that human beings were something like a blank slate and that almost everything we did was learned. Yes, indeed. And Skinner actually overlapped a bit with him, F. Harvard. He was, for some reason, I was able to actually simply a couple of domain general learning mechanisms, classical conditioning, operant conditioning, where the ones that he focused on, and he built this whole theory about that, but essentially what to equip humans and rats or pigeons with this blank slate domain general learning mechanisms, and then all subsequent action is based on contingencies of reinforcement. But I think even then, even when I was in graduate school, that view struck me as

really problematic. For one thing, sex differences, I mean, emerge very very early in life, you know, rough and tumble play by age three or so emerges consistently early in development and sense of humor, sense of humor, and these things are cross-cultural, the universal. And so the notion that all of our nature consists just of the contingencies of reinforcement during our lifespan struck me as problematic. And so really that's search for a solid scientific foundation for a theory of human nature is what led me to evolutionary theory. reading people like trivers, dawn simons, George C. Williams, of course, W.D. Hamill, some of the great evolutionary biologists of the last century led me to the view that I could actually test some evolutionary hypotheses in humans. And at the time, or what, that I started, there were almost no empirical tests. And, you know, if you know anything about the kind of Berkeley

Minnesota tradition, a lot of my mentors were Minnesota, there was a very strong empirical tradition. And so as a psychologist trained in an empirical tradition, you have to test these things. And what I realized is that there were almost no empirical tests of these evolutionary hypotheses. And so that's what led me to that. And some of the most obvious ones were mating.

So as a sectionally reproducing species, everything has to go through mating. And so if humans don't have a pretty interesting and complex psychological adaptations for mating, then we're kind of out of business. So I mean survival and mating. But if you're sexually reproducing species, you have to go through the bottleneck of mating. You know, and that it's not a simple process. Of course, if you're asexual, you know, you don't have to go searching

for a mate, but sexually reproducing species, you have to select a mate, you have to attract a mate, you in our species, you have to be mutually selected by that mate. And then in our species, of course, we have long-term mating, parabondamating, which is extremely rare in the mammalian world. Maleon king, we have something like 5,000 species, plus mammals, and only something like three to five percent have anything resembling parabonded long-term mating.

The humans do have it. It's part of our nature. Now as we get into mating strategies, one of the things that I argue is that long-term mating is not the only mating strategy within the human menu of mating strategies. We have long-term parabonded, but we we have long-term pair of underbook. We also have short-term mating casual sex hookups, as they're now called on college campuses. We have some infidelity rates.

So that's kind of a mixed mating strategy. One long-term mate, some short-term sex partners on the side. And then we also do serial mating. And then if you look across cultures, we have in Western cultures a presumptively monogamous mating system, but some cultures have polygamous mating systems.

One man multiple wives, some restricted to four, some don't have any restrictions. And then very, very rarely do you have a polyanderous mating system less than 1% where it's one woman multiple men. And do you know, do you have any sense of what conditions give rise to that rare exception, that polyandrous system, since it's so uncommon? How is it that it sustains itself? And why isn't that a challenge to the notion of central monogamy, let's say? Yes, well, the conditions under which it occurs are typically where one man cannot support a whole family. So if there's a large field and one man can't support a wife and children, then it will be two men.

So the polyanderous mating is almost entirely brothers. And that genetic relatedness helps to ease what normally would be a pretty intense jealous reaction to someone else sharing a sex partner, someone else having sex with your wife. But it's a way why isn't it sufficient to say, like the more modern blanks like theorists might, that patriarchy is a sufficient explanation

for the difference in mating strategies across the sexes and that the reason that polyandria is so uncommon is because women are dominated by men everywhere. And that's arbitrary and a expression of power. It has nothing to do with our central biological tendency. Okay, that's a really interesting question and I have a couple of different thoughts on it.

First of all, the question is like, what does one mean by patriarchy? And if you get into it and I've asked people who invoke those kinds of explanations, well, what do you mean by patriarchy? And usually that causes them to stumble and mumble around well. And they just know what patriarchy is, though, it's self-explanatory. What's not self-explanatory?

Because if you break it down analytically, you can identify different components. So is it the case that men worldwide tend to have more resources, more economic resources than women on average? Well, the answer is yes, but then even if you take that component of what's called patriarchy, you can ask the question, well, how did it come to pass that across all cultures or nearly all cultures,

men on average have more resources? Well, as one biological anthropologist, I think this was herb devoured, Harvard, he said, man, or one long breeding experiment run by women. And basically, one of the things that, one of my first studies, the 37 culture study documented is that women have a universal preference for men with resources.

And so that sets up a co-evolutionary process whereby those men who were chosen as mates tended to be motivated and have the ability and willingness to acquire resources and share. So let me ask you about that specifically. This is a question that I tried to address experimentally at one point, but I couldn't get the experiments organized properly to test this specific hypothesis. Do you know of any research pitting female mate choice in relationship to man against men

who have resources versus men who show the traits that allow them to acquire, acquire resources, pitting those directly against one another? Yeah, great question. And I'm not aware of any studies that have done that directly. See, I think that, and this is I want to talk to you about this in relationship to the dark triad issue,

which we'll get into. It seems to me that women use markers of status, partly as indicators of available resources because those are useful. But I don't think women are that uncanny, let's say. It's too simple. I think they use the presence of resources as a proxy for the personality and cognitive traits, let's say, including physical health, that would enable a man even stripped of his current set of resources to be highly likely to acquire them in the future.

And maybe current resources are a good proxy for that. Yeah, I think it, yeah, so one issue is that cash economies are relatively recent in our human history. I think maybe seven to 10,000 years old or so. And so we are able to stockpile economic resources in a way that is evolutionarily unprecedented due to cash economies. But I think that you're absolutely right that what women tend to look for, and this shows up even in my studies as well, is the characteristics that are statistically

reliably correlated with resource acquisition, which will be things like intelligence, social status, dependability, athletic prowess. You know, is this guy a good hunter? So you go to culture like the Ache of Paraguay, and you know, basically what leads to high status in men is hunting skills. That's like the big main effect there. And so I think even things like, I know you've talked about this and you measure them as some of the big five characteristics, even things like emotional stability and conscientiousness, which we know is linked with hard work and industriousness and achievement in modern work context. Likely was true, and sensually as well. So women didn't want a guy who's going to be sitting

around in the hammock all day, smoking whatever the local weed or hallucinogen is, you know, she's gonna want a guy who has the motivation to get out there and and and bring back the bacon so to speak. Yeah, and the hunting thing is really interesting when you think about also how much we've abstracted ourselves out of our basic biological niche in some sense, you know, because hunting and getting to the point and hitting the target and aiming right and being specific with words and all of that, that kind of goal-oriented action, those are all very tightly related as far as I can tell, psychologically. And so, and then you said something quite early, interesting earlier as well, that we didn't

comment on. You talked about men as a breeding experiment run by women. And this ties into another reason why evolutionary psychology is so important is because we're unbelievably highly sexually selected. And that has to do with women's choosingness. And so maybe we could start our discussion of sexual differences in mating strategy with that. So first of all, what's the evidence that suggests that women are, in fact, choosier when it comes to sexual partners than men? And how much choosier are they?

Okay. Okay. Great question. Well, so maybe first we could just define for listeners what sexual selection theory is. Because most people, when they think about evolution, they think of survival of the fittest and that sort of nature-reping tooth and cloth. Yes. And a kind of a randomness too, which, you know, that it of survival of the fittest and that sort of nature-reducing tooth and claw. Yes, and a kind of a randomness too, which, you know, that it's kind of implicit in the

natural selection theory, where sexual selection is anything but random. Yeah, absolutely. So, sexual selection, so if natural selection, this is oversimplified, but is the evolution of adaptations due to their survival advantage, or their survival advantage that accrued to the possessors. So things like fear of snakes, fear of heights, spiders, darkness strangers, and so forth, food preferences, things that led the better survival. Sexual selection deals with the evolution of qualities that lead to mating success.

And Darwin identified two causal processes by which mating success could occur. One is same-sex competition or an intrast sexual competition. And the logic there is that whatever, he thought about it in terms of contest competition, where there was a physical battle like two stags locking horns in combat

with the Victor- sexual access to the female loser ambling off with a broken antler, dejected with low self-esteem and probably needing some psychotherapy. But the logic was, whatever qualities led to success in these same-saxed battles, whether it be athleticism, strength, agility, cunning, or whatever, those qualities to get pet passed on in greater numbers due to the sexual access that the victors accrue. Quality associated with losing basically bit the evolutionary dust. The second component, so that's intersectional competition, which actually the logic is

more general than Darwin and Vision, so like in our species, as we were alluding to, we often compete for position and status hierarchies. And so we can engage in intersexual competition without engaging in this physical battle or contest competition. Although I think that the contest competition was also part of human evolutionary history with males. The other component process is basically what Darwin called female choice.

The logic there is that whatever qualities, if there's some consensus about the qualities that are desired, that men possessing the desired qualities have a mating advantage. They have preferentially chosen. Those lacking the desired qualities basically become in cells or involuntarily cell, but they get shunned, banished, or ignored. Now, the twist on that, and I think sexual selection is by far a more interesting process and definitely has occurred with respect to humans, but the twist there is that we have mutual mate choice, at least when it comes to long-term mating, especially I should say, especially when it comes to long-term mating.

And that gets to the issue of Trevor's theory of parental investment, where he said that he asked the question, well, which sex does the choosing, which sex does the competing? And his answer was the sex that invests more in offspring tends to be chooseier sex that invests less tends to be more competitive for access to those desirable members of the opposite sex. But in long term mating, now we know from our reproductive biology

that women have that nine month pregnancy, which is obligatory. So women can't say, look, I'm really busy with my career. I really only want to put in three months. It's just part of our reproductive biology to produce one child and men can produce that same child through one act of sex. And so women are at least in when it comes to sex, the chewsier sex, the higher investing sex, in part because the costs of making a bad mating decision are much more severe for women than for

men. Man and woman hook up have sex for one night in the morning. They both re-lose out. This is a mistake. I shouldn't have done that. Well, if the woman gets pregnant, then she might be pregnant with a guy who is not going to invest in her offspring. A guy perhaps is someone that has a poor genetic material. It does not have a robust immune system, etc. So, so anyway, so that's that's a long one to answer to your question about sexual selection. So that's a long-winded answer to your question about sexual selection. Good. Go ahead, please. Go ahead.

Oh, I was just going to say that you asked about the evidence for females being chooseier and they are chooseier primarily in the context of casual sex or short-term sex. So that's where you find the big sex differences. And so one of the classic and there's a ton of evidence for this. This is a sex difference that I capture in the book under the category of desire for sexual variety. So men have a much greater desire for meaning of variety of sex partners than women do. And so the choosing this comes in on,

I'll just give you one experiment. This is a classic study done by Elaine Halffield and Russell Clark, where they had male and female confederates, which for listeners are members of the experimental team. It doesn't mean people from the South United States. But they had a male and female confederate simply walk up to members of the opposite sex on a college campus and say, hi, I've been noticing you around campus lately.

I find you very attractive. Would you, and they asked them one of three questions, would you go on a date with me tonight, would you come back to my apartment with me, would you have sex with me? And it was a between groups designs. They simply recorded the percentage of individuals who agreed to these three different requests.

And of the women about half, about a little over 50% agreed to go out on the date with the guy. A 6% agreed to go back to his apartment. A 0% agreed to have sex with him. Most women need a little more information about the guy before they're willing to have sex. Of the men approach, also about 50 by the female confederate, about 50% agreed to go out on the date, 69% agreed to go back to her apartment, and 75% agreed to have sex

with her. And so if you talk about cheosiness, are you willing to have sex with a total stranger who you've met for 30 seconds? Women unwilling to and in general, men very willing to. And this is a study that's been replicated now in several European studies. Very difficult to do this as you might imagine to get this by the IRBs or ethics committees in in the United States anyway. I assume it's similar in Canada. Or worse. Or worse, but yeah, yeah, the kinds of studies who we really wanna do are more difficult to do nowadays,

but it's been replicated in several Western European countries. And you can get women off of the zero percent. You can get a few percent of the women saying, yes, if the guy's really, really charming. You know, if he's a Brad Pitt or, or I don't know what the modern equivalent is, Ryan Gosling was one of the, you know, or perhaps a famous rock star.

So, but that's one illustration of, the answer to your question about, well, what is the evidence for female choosing us? The interesting thing here's, I'll give you one more. So there are studies that ask, what is the minimum percentile of intelligence that you would accept in a potential partner? So and you know, we explain percentiles to people so they understand 99 percentile, first

percentile, first percentile, 50th and so forth. And basically for things like a marriage partner, men and women are roughly equal. They both are very exact. And they say what they want, like say 65th to 70th percentile intelligence, where the sex difference comes up is just a sex partner, a pure sex partner with no investment. Women still maintain, they still want, let's say, 60th or 60 plus percentile in intelligence where as men drop to embarrassing levels, that doesn't really, it becomes irrelevant.

The 30th, 40th percentile men go, I wish she can mumble a little bit, that's fine, or even not. So that's another indication of female choosingness that is they maintain greater choosingness when it comes to short term sex and are simply less comfortable with having sex with total strangers or casual sex. Here's one more and now that I'm rambling on and then I know it gets at some other interesting issues.

This is an item on the socioeconomic and the inventory that colleagues CB Angostead and Jeff Simpson developed a long time ago. But one of the items is that's an attitude item it says, sex without love is okay. Do you agree with that or disagree with that? And there you get a large sex difference. So in the seven point scale, where four is the midpoint, men average about 5.5. So they say, yeah, sex without love, yeah, that's okay. Women are about 3.5. okay, they're below that midpoint. So another indication of this sex difference in choosing this. Do you know if that's modulated by big 5 tree degree ableness?

Oh, that's a great question. I haven't seen any studies that length that. Okay. Big 5 to that item were the associosexuality inventory in general. Yeah, well, you'd wonder why if compassion and empathy might be one of the things driving that and the value that's placed on that as a consequence of being higher low and agreeable.

So that would fit into some degree with the dark triad work because the primary difference there is we'll talk about the dark triad in a minute is that the dark triad types are low and agreeable to centrally. It's not the only thing, but that's central. And that's where there's a big there's a big sex difference. And so I want to ask you a terminological question. Sure. Okay. So I'm sorry. Sorry to interrupt, but I just thought we should say a few more words about your question about patriarchy. Yes.

Because I thought that was a really interesting question and there's some interesting complexities associated with that. And so what I started with is that, you know, you have to break it down into, analytically into precisely what causal process you're invoking. And usually when people invoked,

it's like this mysterious causal force in the ether that somehow comes down and infects people's minds. And they don't get into the question of, well, what are the causal origins of what you're calling patriarchy, you know? And to get to that, you have to get to things like female mate preferences and the co-evolution of those mate preferences with male mating strategies, you know, and part of male mating strategies is to prioritize resource acquisition and clawing their way up the status hierarchy and selling their grandmother to get ahead. And studies of this gets to another sex difference that women tend to allocate their time, energy and investment across a wider array of what we call adaptive problems.

So women, more than men, invest in Kim, even if they're married, they invest more in their in-laws, in their friendships, etc. And men on average tend to be more monomonical by getting hit. So, you could say the most effective long-term strategy for smashing the patriarchy is for women to select low-ranking mates to sleep with. Yes. So if you'd get a lot of trouble for that. Well, if women change their mate preferences so that they didn't care about status and resources

and those qualities, and you iterated that over enough generations, yeah, it would ultimately change male behavior. So, okay, I have a terminological issue that was raised to me by one of my graduate students, very, very intelligent man, and very careful thinker. I had faster graduate students, but I don't think I had any who would worry

a problem absolutely to death as much as he would. He always got to, he was an engineer and, is an engineer and he would really get to the bottom of things like you did with the Patriarchy, at least to some degree. He told me, once I started speaking more publicly, he said, stop using the term dominant hierarchy, or status hierarchy.

There's, there's a political supposition nested inside there that's not helpful. How about competence hierarchy? And I thoughted inside there that's not helpful. How about competence hierarchy? And I thought, oh, that's real interesting. Okay, so that's one issue. Now, I have another question that's teamed with that that I wanna run by you with regards to sexual selection. So we could say that it's the actions of female selection

that have shaped men to a large degree because of the choosingness of women But I want to run our counter position by you You know, so imagine a football team in a small American town, you know, it's kind of an archetypal issue and The whole town is celebrating the football team and the football team is ranked in terms of competence and The football team wins a game and all the guys lift the quarterback up on their shoulders because he was the hero of the game and they march him out of the stadium. And so he sleeps with the cheerleaders. And I would say he was elected by the men to sleep with them. Because if it's not competent, like I don't, I think the idea

that it's competition exactly isn't, it's not exactly right, and terminology really matters, it's like, because men will organize themselves into groups, and those who become elevated in status, don't do it by dominating. My student said, well, you don't get people to wear a choke collar and a chain, it's not dominance. And so, yeah. So, well, that's, I'm so glad that you asked that because we just

did it, the whole subject of status hierarchies and dominance hierarchies is something that we are studying now in my lab. And we just published a paper that confirms precisely the point that you're making where we we looked at basically whether status is determined by dominance, which in the literature is sometimes defined as cost and friction. So, you have a very good idea. And willing to inflate cost and beat up your rivals, or confer benefits, which gets to your point about competence. And what we found is that in our study, this is with Patrick Durkey, a current graduate student,

mine actually just passed his dissertation defense yesterday. So congratulations, shout out to Patrick, is that what we found is that it is conferring benefits, that is the ability and willingness to confer benefits that led to high status. Okay, so I'm going to stop just for one sec, because I want to add something with regard to our discussion of the patriarchy, because one of the unspoken suppositions of the idea of the patriarchy

is that part of the reason that it's bad is because it's dominance and oppression that leads to the formation of these hierarchies. And that's a central claim, but this gets to a real alternative to that, which, and so what do you mean by benefit exactly in that context? So, well, these are conferring benefits on either individuals or the group that you're part of. And so the example that you used of the quarterback, who scored the winning touchdown or led the team to victory, he's conferring a large benefit on the coalition of which he's a part. And so, and we evolved as coalition species.

But the benefits are many in number. I mean, they could be, you know, meet from the hunt, providing not just to your family, but also to the group. And small group living, they often shared the spoils of the hunt, providing physical protection. So having the ability, bravery, so the physical ability, the athleticism, but also the courage to offer protection for a potential mate or for members of your coalition.

There are many, many different types of benefits. I read recently that among smaller groups that are dependent on hunting, that in the male groups where hunting takes place, one of the most common characteristics of the hunters with more prowess is they're willing to be self-sacrificing in their food choice after they kill something. And so the men have status conferred on them, well, they were successful hunters, but if they can be successful hunters and give someone else who was there a bigger share than they get, even though they did the hunting, that's a way of moving up in status. And that kind of behavior is very common in men's groups

in small societies around the world. The opposite of narcissism, interestingly enough. Yeah, yeah, no, that's right. And that's why in our study, we had 240 things that could either increase or decrease your status. And one of them was precisely that generosity with resources. So you can have all the resources in the world, but if you're stingy and don't share them

with your group, then you're not gonna be rising in status. But I just had one interesting curly cue to your point about this. And that's the archacha that I mentioned earlier, Tim Hill is the bioenterologist who's studied the Acha in the greatest details. He's lived with them on for 25 years or so. And what he said, so in the Acha hunting skill,

they also share their resources. So the hunt, the large game animal goes to a central distributor, K, but, and here's the interesting curly cube. Sometimes the head hunter will slice off a prime piece of meat and have a friend or emissary give it to his a fair partner before returning to the home base. And so good hunters tend to have more sex partners in the Ache

and I suspect in many hunter gathered groups. Right, and that would be a specific exception that would be of sexual benefit to that hunter outside the general sexual benefit that generosity would give him as a consequence of being of high status among the among his cohort. Yeah, absolutely. And one of the things that's kind of building on your point about this general issue of general state resources is that people form groups. So and often there's competition between groups for having members that are, in this case, good hunters, or who contribute above and beyond to the group welfare. And so if a hunter feels like he,

if someone has a top hunter, and he feels like he's not sufficiently appreciated by the group, he can go to another group or form another group. And that's one of the interesting things about, you know, this gets into human history is, you know, once group, you know, there's the, the fissioning of groups once they get to a certain point they often say, look, I'm, I'm not sufficiently appreciated in this group. I'm going to take my allies and form my own group.

So I was also thinking about this in terms of, let's say reciprocity. So imagine that we're in a small hunting group, we don't have refrigeration, so we're not going to be able to store meat with any great degree of reliability. So you might say, well, what's the best way to store meat? And I would say you should store meat

in your status among the hunting group. Right? So if you're generous and you share, and then that evokes rates of reciprocity from other hunters in your group who also have prowess, then you've stored future meat in the potential for them to generate resources in the future. And that's reciprocity dependent. And so that's also a way that that that kind of long-term honesty could also be selected for in these status, so-called status hierarchies. Competence hierarchies is better.

And so my student, he said there's a subterranean Marxism in the terminology. If status hierarchy dominates hierarchy implies that it's oppression that's building the hierarchies. And that's something really worthy of note, that objection. Yeah. So, let me come back to that in just one second. I think it actually was, I just recently saw your interview with Steve Pinker and Jonathan Hyatt. And Steve Pinker is, you know, I think a wonderful thinker. And the way he phrased it is that Hunter's store meat, not in the refrigerator, but they store meat in the bodies of other people.

So it's kind of an interesting way to think about that, of how we engage in that reciprocity. So with respect to the oppression issue, here's what I would add to this is that one of the implicit assumptions of people who invoke patriarchy as an explanation is that they assume that men are somehow united in their interests as a group, you know, pressing women as a group. Okay, and from an evolutionary perspective, that can't occur because men are primarily

competition with other men, not with other women. And also each of us, each individual has alliances with some members of our own sex, some rivalries with members of our own sex, but also alliances with some members of the opposite sex. So every man has, for example, a mother, sometimes a daughter, a sister, an aunt, a niece, and similarly, every woman has a brother or a father, you know, etc. And so, and so the notion that men are somehow united as a group with a goal about pressing women as

a group, it just can't occur from an evolutionary perspective. This is why I think an evolutionary perspective lends some conceptual clarity to some of these vaguer notions that people don't tend to think about when they invoke terms like patriarchy. But I agree with you on the point of oppression, that when we talk about status hierarchies, we don't mean oppression. What we did is what Patrick Dirkian and I did in our studies, basically, as we pitted the dominance explanation, or some people have invoked a dual pathways.

They had some people say there's two ways to get ahead. You can be in flip costs or you can confer benefits. And we tested that, and then what's called a competence model. So there is a theory of status that's that's based in competence, but it's basically benefit, conferral. And we found evidence in favor of the competence model and the benefit conferral model, but almost no evidence for the cost and flipping model. Indeed, what we found is that,

although sometimes people have the ability and willingness to inflict costs, you have to be more differentiated even about that. So, for example, we've been talking about coalitions to some degree, and people punish free riders, for example, or cheaters with coalitions. Yeah, yeah, they punish them.

So that's a friction of cost. Yeah, it's an affliction of cost, but it's for the larger group, for the larger coalition. And so that's why this notion that you could, or even like if you take extreme cases like, as I'm sure you're familiar with, like in some nation, some people kill to get to the top of the hierarchy.

So big daddy I mean, and I can't remember which country it was, it may be Zimbabwe or Zaiyara, I can't remember. Basically, it was a thug who killed his way to the top, but you can't get to the top through this cost and flicking, friction strategy unless you're also conferring benefits. And so even he, even though he was a thug and continued in his kind of reign of terror, he had a large coalition of under him that all the benefits went to.

That was Edie Menn, you got him? You got him? Yes, yes, you got him. Thank you. Yes was EDM in Uganda. Yes, yes, yes, you can. Thank you. Yes, yeah, EDM in. Okay, so, so hate this experiment. So here's another thing that could be pitted in that competition. So imagine you had people who, man who could confer benefit and who were incapable of inflicting, inflicting cost and men who could confer benefit, but were capable of inflicting cost. I think you'd see winners on that side

because of that free rider problem. And so, and that ties into what we'll discuss in relationship to the dark triad, because there's some mystery about why women seem to be attracted to these so-called dark triad traits. And I would say that they're using them as insufficient markers for the ability to or the acquisition of status. And narcissists capitalize on that, right?

Because a narcissist looks confident. And lots of confident people are competent. But some confident people aren't competent, but they can fool you. And then I think the other explanation is that if you had to choose between a benefit conferr, who could punish free writers and one who couldn't, you should pick the former. One who could, one who could, who could deal with free writers, who could and would have the capability to.

And so you see, you see this sort of thing, I really like the Disney movie Beauty and the Beast. I think they got it right. And there's Gaston in that movie. And he's a narcissist. But he has physical prowess. Like he can't understand why he's not the guy. But he's narcissistic. And then there's the beast who's a beast.

But he's timable. And so he can be a benefit confer, and he has the capacity to inflict cost. Yes, yeah. And the two are often correlated in nature. So like for example, if you have physical prowess or athletic ability, then you have both the ability to confer benefits in the form of say protection

or hunting skills, but also the ability to confer benefits in the form of, say, protection or hunting skills, but also the ability to inflict costs by, you know. Okay, so let's talk about the dark triad, then in relationship to agreeableness, because the dark, do you want to just tell everybody what the dark triad is first, so that we're all on the same page? Yeah, so the dark triad, I think this was originally named by one of your Canadian psychology colleagues, Del Paula. So the UBC. And the dark triad originally was three triad, but it's narcissism, macchivalinism and psychopathy. So where narcissism is typically marked by a sense of grandiosity, a sense of entitlement,

they think they're the most intelligent, the smartest, the most attractive, the most charming, the most skilled, et cetera, were in the words of one of my former graduate students, they think they're hot, but they're not. So, and I think there's a way in which people do have the ability to assess whether that high self-esteem is warranted or not, because we have even words in our language for things like arrogant, that kind of connotation, someone who thinks that they're more beautiful and more intelligent and more capable than they actually are. So that's narcissism, but the entitlement is, I think, a critical component of narcissism

where they feel, I'm so great, I deserve a larger share of the pie, including the sexual pie, when we get to the issue of sexual conflict and sexual coercion. Macchi-evalentism, I mean, that stems from the the the the the prince of I can't remember how many hundreds of years ago that was written, but it's basically people who pursue an exploitative social strategy. So they can, they are, when we were talking about reciprocity earlier, they will feign reciprocity, feign being good reciprocators, but then they will cheat. And so these are the liars, the cheaters.

Right. So if the patriarchy was based on exploitative power, then dark triad personality traits would be adoptively and practically useful and desirable. If that was the case. Yeah, if that was the case. Yes. Yes. Okay. Now, and that's and gets complicated because one of the things you research has indicated is that there is a manner in which women are attracted to people who manifest dark triad traits. Yeah, I would say, I would add the qualifier that it tends to be younger women. So teenagers or women in their early 20s, women as they mature and get more experience on the

mating market tend to be less attracted to these dark triad characters. Okay, so here's a hypothesis. It's not that easy to distinguish the willingness to use casual power and control from competence, when you're not very experienced. And so the dark triad types can fainstatus related competence and they can ensnare naive women. Yes, that's right. They also have some qualities that women genuinely do desire. So they tend to, like the nurses, tend to put themselves at the center of attention. And one of the things we know about status hierarchies is that the attention structure is very important. That is the high status people tend to be those to whom the most people pay the most attention. And so women are drawn. I

won an anecdote of a female colleague of mine, very intelligent evolutionary psychologist, went to a conference and found herself very attracted to the organizer of the conference. And then six months later, she encountered him and he was just a normal attendee at the conference. And she didn't find him very attractive. She wanted, what was I thinking? But what it was is he was at the center of the attention structure. Well, the attention structures, an unbelievably reliable indicator of what's valuable, because we don't devote our visual attentive resources to anything that isn't of singular value in the environment. And so that's why we get precisely why we compete for attention. It's also an extremely valuable resource.

Absolutely. I mean, a valuable and limited resource. It's finite. And so really at every moment in time, we're making decisions about what to allocate our attention to. I read a funny study once you might be aware of this where monkeys, I think they were green monkeys, but I'm not sure.

We're shown photographs of other members of their troop, and they gazed much longer at the high status individuals in the photographs. So, and then you think about that too, there's something really interesting about that because imagine that that compulsion to attend to what acquired status or let's say competent status is accompanied in human beings by a profound instinct to imitate. Right, that's right. Because I mean, we are social learners And one of the things that we try to do is to emulate those who have qualities that are associated with status.

And that gets into, and those vary from group to group and subgroup to subgroup. And in the modern environment, we have this kind of a weird situation of proliferation of status hierarchies, where you can be the, I don't know, the top social influencer where the only thing you have going for you is, I don't

know, a line of makeup or something like that, or nothing at all. And Paris Hilton was like famous for being famous. And so she got a lot of attention, but there was no real benefit there. But, you know, we have like a, if you like, if you play video games, for example, which I don't happen to, but there are status hierarchies within notes. The most skilled video game player, the most skilled football player, rugby player, tennis player.

Yeah, well, it's a good thing that we can create all these competence hierarchies. Because what it means is that diverse talents have the opportunity to acquire the status that might also alternatively entice them to violence, let's say, because that is associated with status inequality. And so one of the solutions to status inequalities diverse games of competence has diverse ranges possible. Yeah, and that's definitely a good thing,

because if there was just one status hierarchy, then that means, I mean, status is inherently a relative, gauge by relative metric, you know? So if you're the number one, no one else can be the number one. But if you can be the best scholar, the best writer, the best world of work craft player, the best tennis player, these multiple status arcies give more people the opportunity to gain in status.

It's another argument to get the patriarchy as a unitary idea. Well, which patriarchy do you unitary idea right? Well which patriarchy do you mean? Do you mean like the evil coalition of plumbers which is a joke I've made before? You know that's power. Is it plumbers really? No they're not organized in terms of their success by which plumbers the meanest and the toughest. That's not how it works at all. Right. No, no, yeah, absolutely. And I mean, that gets into the issue of, there are large fools of men who were at the bottom

with status hierarchy and who don't have the qualities that women desire. And so are they really oppressing women? There's this interesting cap, there's an interesting photo that I think got captioned but it's two very elegant women with designer handbags and they're walking by a guy who's like fixing the tar and the street, he's a street worker fixing the tar and as they walk by this guy who's goviling on the ground, they say, stop oppressing me. Right.

So, anyway. Right, right. Well, I wanted to talk to you a bit more about the dark triad issue too, because there's a mystery in it and I think it's one that corrupts psychology to some degree research psychology. Oh, yes. Oh, okay. So we didn't mention the third one. Oh, yes.

The third element of the dark eye, which is psychopathy. And you probably have a deeper understanding of psychopathy than I do. But one of the hallmarks is a lack of empathy that is most normal humans have an empathy circuit that we feel compassion if someone gets hurt or if a pet gets injured or a child falls down and skins an A, we feel a sense of compassion for the suffering of other people, but psychopaths don't. It's like they might laugh if someone gets hurt

and so that empathy circuit seems to be severed. And also, one of the hallmarks seems to be that they're not responsive to punishment, that they're more oriented toward reward and so punishment doesn't tend to change their behavior. It isn't obvious that they have an empathy for their future selves. Right, so punishments like, well, you know, part of the reason that you react to punishments is because you don't want your future self to be punished again, but you have to care about that before that works. Right.

Yeah, that gets the issue of steepness, steepness of future discounting. That's exactly. Yeah. They grab for all the gusto right now and don't think about the future consequences. So one of the things that one of the big five personality traits that the dark triad is most associated with is agreeableness, low agreeableness. And I do think that research psychologists and psychologists in general have a kind of ethical bias in relationship to the agreeableist dimension. And of course women are higher in trade agreeableness than men.

Reliably, it's about half a standard deviation. It's one of the biggest six differences, and it's associated with compassion and politeness in the work we've done anyways. So that's empathy, at least least to some degree. Now the question is, what is the ethical utility of lower agreeableness, right? Because you think what would interfere possibly with sharing, right? Because if you're more compassionate,

and more compassionate, more empathic, you're gonna feel the hunger of other people, and you'd be more motivated to care for them, let's say. But it's also possible that that low agreeableness has something to do with, well, perhaps hunting prowess, that might be part of it, but it also might be part of the solution to the free rider problem. And so women are in a conundrum with agreeableness, right? Because they need a mate who's agreeable enough so they can bond with them and it will care for their children and it cares in general, but they need someone who's disagreeable enough so that they're capable, let's say, of dealing with free riders. Right. So, the one way of saying that is agreeable

with respect to them, but the potential for being disagreeable with respect to those others when they need to be punished for. They need to work off an attacker. Right, and you can see that that's a real tight line to walk down. And part of what constrains agreeableness, let's say, from a temperamental perspective. So if you're low in agreeableness, let's say,

well, you're less empathic, you're more competitive, you're rougher, blunter, tougher. You know, what would you say, at least with regards to the at the compassion you showed others. And so what helps modulate that? Well, some of that would be conscientiousness. And so in the dark triad types, you see low conscientiousness as well. You know, really low agreeable high conscientious types are quite interesting because you can trust them because they'll do their duty,

but they're very blunt and direct and harsh. And that can be helpful as well, because they'll tell you unpleasant truths, even if they hurt your feelings. So, there's some utility in that. So you can imagine that agreeableness can be modified, let's say, by conscientiousness. So that takes the psychopathy edge off it, because low agreeableness and low conscientiousness, that's a rough combination. Yes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because there's nothing constraining it. And so women are attracted to some degree to the lower agreeable types. And I think that accounts for the bad boy paradox that you described at least in part. And maybe it takes further experience and wisdom on the part of judicious women

to see where they can get the disagreeableness that's necessary, but it has to be hemmed in by something like, well, conscientiousness. Yeah, other personality traits like conscientiousness. Yeah, I mean, one other reason that I think that women are attracted to the dark triad, at least the younger women is,

that they're often risk takers, so they will do things like motorcycle jumping or ski jumping or take physical risk, speeding in their cars or and so the kind of daredevil mentality, at least younger women find that exciting. But I wonder if they confused that with trade openness, right? Because the open types are going to experiment. They're going to try lots of different things. And that daredevil, you know, I don't care, might be easily not easily distinguished from the capacity to engage in creative problem solving pursuits,

and perhaps with courage as well. Yeah, so I think courage and also one of the people who take risks often in fact have the ability to afford those risks if you will. So for example, doing some dangerous athletic feed, if you're not an athletic person, you're going to fail at that. And so in some sense, some of these daredevil behaviors, I think, are kind of cues that you have the ability to afford to take those risks. But these guys, these high dark

tried guys are absolutely disastrous as long-term mates. So that they might be exciting for sure. I mean that's why I think that women as they mature, stop being attracted to these guys, especially if they're looking for a long-term mate because these are guys, the dark thread, they're more likely to cheat. They're more likely to seduce an abandon. They're more likely to engage in deceptive mating tactics. And so they tend to be big trouble when it comes to long term mating.

Yeah, well, it also looks like they value themselves greatly. And sometimes people value themselves greatly. And sometimes people value themselves greatly. And so they have high mate desirability in your terminology or maybe some little corruption of your terminology. And again, I think the dark triad guys mimic that. It's like, I'm so good I can afford to, you know, distribute my sexual prowess wherever I see fit. And there's some of that happens as men

rising competence hierarchies as well. Well, yes. And there's some of that happens as men rising competence hierarchies as well. Well, yes, and it happens with women when they rise in their hire. How do you understand? Here's a question I'd really like to hear you answer. How do you distinguish between female and male hierarchies for sexual selection? Because there are obviously women that are more desirable to men. So where are the big sex differences there? I know that women will mate across and up confidence hierarchies, and men will mate across and down roughly speaking.

But there are other differences. Yeah, yeah. So we recently published a study on 14 different cultures on the sex differences and similarities, and indeed there are differences. So even things like physical attractiveness, it increases both male and female status, but it increases female status more than male status. Why, well, what we argue is that, and this is one thing my 37 culture studies showed, is that men

place a greater priority on physical attract and physical appearance, good looks. And it's not an arbitrary social construction. It's basically an evolved preference for fertility cues, those who, men who, made it within within fertile women failed to become ancestors. And so we're all descendants of... I have to ask you this too. Here's something I really got in trouble for.

So I was doing an interview with NBC reporter, I don't remember who it was, but he didn't like me at all. So he was trying to catch me out and all sorts of things. We talked about makeup in the workplace. And I said that women use makeup to enhance their sexual attractiveness. And man, you wouldn't believe the flock I got for that. And I said, well, the reddening of the lips, for example, and the rouging of the cheeks, is not only a signal to mimic youth and fertility, but it's likely associated with mimicry of

ripe fruit because our visual system evolved to detect ripe fruit And if you look through any advertising like any magazine women's magazines in particular the association between makeup and fruit Is there in the imagery all the time? so and the flavor as well for that matter so Did I say something that I shouldn't have said am I wrong about that? I'm in a way. You're not wrong about it, but I know what you mean. I've got some flack for that as well. I mean, one thing that, you know, on this finding that men prioritize physical attractiveness and that physical attractiveness is not just this arbitrary social construction, but in

fact, underlying it is a set of cues to youth and cues to health and hence cues to fertility. This is a very upsetting notion to some people. And so I was actually, even before I published 37 Culture Study, I gave a talk on a two sociology department when I was at Michigan, and a professor, female professor came up to me afterwards and said that I shouldn't publish the findings. And I said, well, why not? Because to me, empirical findings are empirical findings. But she said that women had it hard enough

without in competing with each other on physical appearance without being told that men have this evolved preference for it. You know, it's over the standard social science model. It's more comfortable for people to believe, oh, it's just arbitrary and infinitely changeable. You know, and you go to, you know, any different culture and they value a whole different set of things. And the notion that there,

that we have evolved preferences for fertility cues is an atom up to some people. But you can understand it to some degree because a lot of the truths that psychologists have stumbled over, let's say, are actually quite painful. I mean, I reviewed the IQ literature for about 20 years trying to get to the bottom of it.

And it's very distressing to realize how wide the human differential is in cognitive ability. It's really quite a staggering thing to understand how broad that gap is and how much pain that causes, especially at the lower end of the distribution, and the fact that men are stringently selected for, let's say, the capacity to acquire position in a competence hierarchy, and women are brutally punished in terms of their sexual attractiveness for not manifesting signs of fertility and youth. It's like there's a real harshness to that, but it's the harshness, I think it's the harshness

of life. And actually, understanding that makes it less harsh in so far as understanding is useful. Yeah, yeah. No, I would agree with that. And, you know, I mean, I've stumbled across a lot of findings in my research and we'll get to the issue of conflict between the sexes that I find personally distressing, you know, that I wish didn't exist, but they do. And so I feel exists, but they do. And so I feel similarly that we're better off confronting our nature and the empirical reality,

including sex differences in that nature, rather than just pretending that these features don't exist. Well, we also should be very cognizant of the fact that the counter claim, which is that, well, there are no biological, what, you see structures underlying our perception, sexual perception, and otherwise end counter claim, which is that, well, there are no biological, what do you say, structures underlying our perception, sexual perception, and otherwise end our cognition. So we have no biological nature, which means we're, it means we're infinitely amenable to social

utopian schemes that are designed to turn us into a particular vision of human. And there's great danger in that too. So that's the other side of the human. There's danger everywhere. Yeah, what I would say is, yeah, the implicit in those notions is that humans are passive vehicles rather than active strategists that can be easily manipulated by whatever. And that's not a very flattering view of humans. No, and it's justified some rather wide-scale social engineering attempts in the last 100 years. So it is a real danger. It's not, it's, and then that doesn't take away anything from the fact that there are

such things, there is such thing as unpleasant fact. Yeah. And it's reasonable to be cognizant of that. So, you are going to talk a little bit about, let's talk about violence, say, between men and women. One of the things I was struck by in your chapter on violence, the way it opened, people, I studied aggression for a long time in little kids in elementary school, children, adolescents,

all the way up, developmental origins of aggression with Richard Tromblay and Montreal. And so I'm very interested in that. And I think often that psychologists have things backwards when we approach questions. So for example, we often try to explain anxiety instead of explaining its control, which is way harder to do. Because, of course, you're anxious.

That's bloody obvious. Why aren't you terrified out of your skull all the time? Is the question. And I think it's the same with aggression. It's often treated as if aggression itself is something that needs to be explained. Whereas for me, the mystery is, well, no, aggression, not, of course.

Mystery is how we control it. That's the mystery. Yeah, and so, yeah, well, and we do. I mean, it's, know aggression is selective. We Deployed you know, and is very context specific and I mean it gets back to I mean it depends on I don't know whether you were Whether you studied physical aggression, but you were asking earlier about differences between male and female hierarchies And one of the things that is well documented is that while men are higher in physical aggression, including all of the homicide, women engage in social aggression, or what sometimes

called relational aggression, where they shun someone or exclude someone or sluts shame another woman. And so that's a form of aggression. Yeah, reputation savaging. Yes, yeah, derogation of competitors. So, but all these forms of aggression are typically deployed very selectively. It's not like we don't wake up in the morning, go out and beat someone up.

Even those who engage in physical aggression, it's often someone has humiliated them in up, you know, even those who engage in physical aggression, it's often someone has humiliated them in public, for example, or challenged their status. But that's one of the things they've perceived that, however incorrectly. Yes. Yeah. So one of the things that I studied is homicidal ideation, and I looked at, have you ever had a homicidal thought? Have you ever thought about killing someone? And basically, I mean, the majority of people have

thought about it, and even though if they haven't, they'll say something like, when I pose this question just informally at say a party, people say, oh no, I've never thought about it, tell me someone. But then the conversation will proceed, and then they'll say, actually, people say, oh no, I've never thought about killing someone. But then the conversation will proceed and then they'll say, actually, there was this one time when someone humiliated me in front of the whole group and I just had this thought about killing him. And so, fortunately, most homicidal thoughts don't get translated in a homicidal deeds. Otherwise, we'd be living

in a very chaotic society. But one of the things that we found in that research was that being humiliated in public in the eyes of the pure group, meaning you're going to lose your status, was a key trigger of this homicidal ideation. Well, okay, so let me run something by you in relationship to emotional regulation and status. Tell me what you think about this. So the terror management theorist types tend to think that our cognitive beliefs inhibit our anxiety, and that they drill that all the way down to anxiety of death, taking a page

from Freud. And that's Becker's book, basically, and there's a whole field of psychology that's worked on that. I think it's, I don't think it's right. I think it's more indirect. So imagine this. Imagine that the degree to which your negative emotion is regulated is dependent on serotonergic output fundamentally. So as your serotonin levels rise, you're more emotionally stable. So you feel less anxiety, despair, the whole panoply of negative emotions, which are pretty tightly clumped together.

And so then you might say, well, your emotional regulation is dependent on your status. And I think there's truth in that. Now, let's say I do we're at an academic conference and I stand up and I ask you a question. And it's a mean question question but you can't answer it so your status is devalued. But here's what I've actually done. It's not exactly that I've devalued your status. What I've done is undermine the claim that you have a valid claim on that position. Right? And then that's going to dysregulate you because if that's true, then while you've been shown to be an imposter, let's say, and or at least the threat is there, and then

that would take you out of that hierarchy and your negative emotion would rise. And then the reason it would arise is because if you are removed from that hierarchy, now you're alienated and isolated, everything has become way more dangerous. And so, right, and you know, the people at the bottom of a hierarchy are much less, much more likely to die from all cause mortality. This is not nothing. This is curing, getting killed. Yes, including that.

So to threaten that, and then you say, well, that invokes homicidal ideation quite rapidly. It's like, well, if you're interfering with the person's claim on a position that actually does regulate their negative emotion, as well as actually protect them from death, not just death anxiety. It's no wonder that you evoke a counter response, which would be a blunt form of reestablishing something like competence. Yes.

Yeah. No, I think that's right. And I share your views of the terror management notion, that we evolved all these mechanisms, all these adaptations simply to keep the fear of death at bay and anxiety associated with that at bay. My argument would be, well, people actually have to solve problems of survival and reproduction? Yes, the problem of death is worse than the problem of death anxiety. Yes, now death

anxiety is bad, and I like Becker's book, but fundamentally, no. The logic doesn't work, but I published a short commentary on terror management some time ago and with the terror management people just ignored it. I mean, I was, so what did you say? Oh, I basically said, you know, argued that they were proposing all these psychological adaptations simply to keep the thought and anxiety associated with death at bay. And from an evolutionary perspective, although they purport to grounded it in an evolutionary perspective, it's not really an evolutionary perspective, because you have to tie an adaptive

solution to some element that is tributary to survival or reproduction, you know, and not simply adaptation is solely to deal with internal psychological states, except if those internal psychological states get translated into things that lead to survival and reproduction, or have over the course of human evolutionary history. Yeah, or interfered with it. I mean, I guess I have some respect for that line of theorizing because the fact that human beings are self-conscious and other creatures aren't does mean that our anxieties of a different I'd say qualitative type than other animals' anxiety. But that still doesn't interfere with the fact that a lot of the structures that we built to deal with death anxiety actually stop us from dying. They're not mere defenses.

They're not mere ego defenses, although sometimes they can also be that. And so, and also, the other problem with Becker and the terror management theorist is sort of related to the patriarchy problem, I would say, is that Becker didn't read Jung, by the way, even though he wrote a book on the psychology religion, and he said in the intro that it was

unnecessary to read you, which was exactly wrong, given what he was doing. But Becker basically posited that we had to create fabrications to defend ourselves against negative emotion. That's the essential message of that book. And what that means in some sense is that the whole purpose of human endeavor is an attempt to escape from the realization of mortality. And I think, well, wait a sec, no. We're also escaping from mortality. Yes, right. It's not just the thoughts of it. And it isn't obvious to me at all.

And I think almost all of clinical psychology would suggest that this is true, is that falsification as a defense is actually counterproductive in the final analysis. And most of the great clinical theorists, Rogers, say, perhaps in some sense, foremost among them, but perhaps not, insisted that it was the truth that set you free, not the web of defenses that you had erected by necessity to deal with your neurotic death anxiety. That's actually counterproductive.

Yeah. directed by necessity to deal with your neurotic death anxiety. That's actually counterproductive. Yeah, so. Yeah, there's a reminder of of Woody Allen quote. And Woody Allen's very, I guess he's sort of been canceled and is out of favor, but he had this one quote where people said, well, you know, you will achieve immortality through your work. And he said that he said, I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve immortality through not dying.

Yeah. Yeah. That's a very good line. It's a very good line. And yeah, very germane to the problem. Yeah. So you said that you had uncovered things that deeply disturbed you in your research as well, ethically, I would say.

And so, so can you touch on some of that? Well, well, yeah. I mean, so one is, well, one pertains to some of the sex differences that we've already been talking about. So just as men place a greater value on physical attractiveness than women in their male selection, women place a greater value on a man's status and resources. And so you could say, well, men view women as sex objects, but women view men as success objects.

And so they're both forms of objectification, if you will, although I don't really like that term. And so I remember giving a lecture once and I was describing these findings. And it was like, I think a freshman guy in the front row, he got really upset by this. And he said, you mean I have to achieve at work in order to be attractive to women?

I said, well, I mean, I guess it's not strictly necessary, but if you want to improve your chances, yeah. So it's just as it's harder for people who are at the bottom end of the things that people value, you were mentioning intelligence earlier, but if you're at the bottom end of the attractiveness or success or status or resources, it's not a very pleasant position to be in. So that's one set of things. Another though. Well, it's also the what's interesting about that too, if you don't mind me saying so, is that the evolutionary psychological argument actually indicates more deeply the interactability and danger of that problem, right? Because the problem of being at the bottom is so deep that we shouldn't rush to solve it with surface-level

solutions that aren't going to work. So you see, for example, very frequently people think, well, hierarchy is a Western construct. It's dependent on capitalism. It's like, wait a second. If you want to solve the problem of poverty and exclusion and oppression, and you start that by equating something as profound and deep as hierarchy with capitalism, you're not going anywhere because you have no idea

how big this problem is. It's way bigger than capitalism. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I also, I mean status hierarchies, I mean, as you've written about our evolutionarily ancient. And so you think I'm okay. I mean, I took a lot of flack for all that. My comparison with lobsters say, which because antidepressants work on lobsters,

which is something I think is absolutely phenomenal. And it pertains to the serotonin argument, right? It's so widely distributed all the way down the phylogenetic chain that serotonin even regulates negative emotion in lobsters. This is old. You know, and lots of people objected while wide you pick lobsters.

And as if I was overstating the biological conclusions, what do you think about this? Yeah, well, you know, status hierarchies are pretty ubiquitous. And I guess what I would say is that they, I mean, you didn't have to pick lobsters, but you could have picked chimpanzees or any number of other species and still been essentially cruel. So even non-social birds,

like even birds that don't have troops and strictly a hierarchy, they have a positional hierarchy in terms of territory. And the ones that have the best nesting sites are much more likely to mate and survive. So even in many animals that don't have a hierarchy, specifically, it's still there implicitly.

That's right. That's right. And this gets to one of the other, I guess, the broader implicit, uncomfortable truths is that we value different people differently. And this of course applies in the mating domain of mate value, some are hired, some are low. And that's mostly what I've focused on, but it also applies to friendship value, coalitional value, that we value different individuals differently based on their components, based on their benefit, conferring ability and willingness. And people

find this uncomfortable. They, you know, we were in this is one of the, I think, conceptual confusions of this, like all people are created equal. Well, you know, there are different meanings of that. One is equal in terms of rights, you know, which they should be equal in terms of that. One is equal in terms of rights, which they should be, equal in terms of opportunities. Equal before the law, equal in terms of their natural rights. Right, right. Which is, I think, the correct usage of that. But are they actually equal in value, in what other people value? Well, I've always asked people who hit me with that. Like, do you sleep with everyone? No, you're selective, are you?

Well, isn't that oppression, exclusion and judgment? At the most fundamental level, and is that something you really want to sacrifice? Yeah, and the answer is no. And how do you know that? The answer is only rude to rude people ask questions like that. Well, or confused, who haven't really thought through these issues. No, I meant the rude person was me asking the question.

Yeah, yeah. Well, well, but I mean, hey, we're in the business of asking hard questions. I don't think they're rude. No, I don't think they are either. They're just, they're just pointed. It's like, wait, you exclude sexually, there is no more dramatic form of exclusion than that. Yes. That's right. Um, well, that's why people object to evolutionary psychology. It's like, it is, it is a brutalness about it, especially in female choosing us. And not that men are any better because, of course, they do the same thing in different ways.

But it really is brutal. And to be rejected by someone that you're attracted to, that's no joke. That's a rough day. Yeah, absolutely. And, of course, breakups are among the most traumatic experiences that people go through. The dissolution of a marriage, for example, you know, these these cause people to spiral into depression, alcohol abuse, etc. So, but yeah, it's so let's let's let's can we talk about differences in those differences in aggression again, you know,

because as you said, men are more likely to use physical aggression. And by the way, there is good data. You may know this already, but, um, um, Tromblase group in particular looked at this. If you take two-year-olds, boys and girls, and you group them together, two-year-olds are the most aggressive of any age group that you can group together. Kidding, kicking, biting, the two-year-olds will do more of it. But most two-year-olds don't, and almost all the small minority that do are male. So it's there at two. Now, almost all of them get socialized by the age of four, and so they come to inhibit that aggression that's, they're probably low in agreeomeness.

That would be my guess. And some of them are probably high and negative emotions, so they're more reactive, you know, more volatile. But most of them are socialized by the age of four. But their research groups show that if they aren't socialized by the age of four, then it's permanent. So that's where the career criminal types come from. But they tend to resist around the age of 28. It drops off for some reason that isn't well understood yet. Yeah. Well, I guess, yeah, 28.

Well, you know, I mean, it seems like at least in adulthood, when physical aggression, if you chart it by age and sex, it's basically when males, even though they do exhibit it early on, as you mentioned, when they enter reproductive competition, the physical aggression goes way out. Oh, in the same data set. So what happens with these long-term aggressive boys? So they're more aggressive than the rest of the boys, except the boys catch up on average when puberty hits for a few years and then they go down.

Yeah, so they have to report. Yeah, reproductive competition and two other colleagues of yours up in Canada, Martin Daly and Mark Wilson have shown these age and sex distributions. And I mean, it's really stark. And the exacerbation of that by inequality? Yes, that's right. That's right. And which is another issue,

you know, the magnitude of inequality and inequality leveling. You know, Richard Rangham has an interesting idea that one of the ways that gets back to the issue of the origins of monogamy that in humans, and this is to a lesser degree, the case in chimps, I think, but it's certainly true in humans that an alpha male can be deposed by too low or ranking males, two or three who can gang up. And his view is that if someone gets to the top and is a cost and flick

and male, he didn't quite phrase it this way, then people gang up and kill. Right, another argument against totalitarian brutality like Mayo, he didn't quite phrase it this way, then people gang up and chill. You know, or else. Right, another argument against totalitarian brutality as the basis of the patriarchy. It actually doesn't work. Yeah. Right, and for that reason, yeah, I talked, I actually talked to Rangam about exactly that.

So those mechanisms are already there. And so, a question, a lot of these strategies that you outlined in your book as alternatives in some sense to monogamy, to stable monogamy, there are, I would say there's something like sub-optimal solutions on a fitness landscape, right? They're better than, they're better than the alternative, possibly, which would be like zero success whatsoever, but they're nowhere near as good as the optimal solution, which is something like generous monogamy, something like that perhaps.

Is that naive or reasonable, do you think? Well, I don't know. I mean, I tend to have a little bit of an internal conflict on that issue because I sort of as a scientist, I feel like I have to be non-judgmental with respect to if there are multiple evolved mating strategies, which I think there are, I try to be non-judgmental about that, but from my own personal ethical viewpoint, I think monogamy is a great solution. I mean, among other things.

Well, you think it might be possible to rank order to some degree scientifically to keep it in line with, like, let's call it ethical intuitions, assuming they're just not artificial constructions, because it could be that partial, like I said, partial solutions are better than none, but they're nowhere near as good as an optimized solution. And so, like long-term monogamy might be something like the best strategy, all things considered. Now sometimes all things aren't considered and you have to do what you have to do, let's

say. You know, divorce would fit into that and so forth. But that doesn't mean that that optimality that we have potentially a moral intuition for isn't pointing to something that is in fact, well, I would say at least in potential evolved as well as socially constructed. Yeah, so I guess what I would say is that the key question is optimal for whom. So, in this, of course, in a conflict between sort of group harmony and individual benefits. So in polygene societies, as we were talking about earlier, let's say you have one man has four wives,

that means three men have no wives. So having the four wives from a purely reproductive standpoint might be optimal for that individual male, but it's of course sub-opimal, disastrously sub-opimal for the three males who have zero mates. Well, but he also might be more prone. We know the polygons societies, they tend to be more violent.

The younger men tend to be more violent. So I would say that he's on top, but a knife in the back takes out the strongest man. And that's a real problem in human beings, because even if it is physical prowess that puts you up at the top, which is something that a real dominating chimp might manage, knives pretty much equalize the playing field or clubs or anything like that. Yeah. And I think we have these kind of hierarchy leveling adaptations. And if you go across cultures, they even have phrases for us.

Like in Australia, they call it the tall poppies. And people like to cut down tall poppies. Or in Japan, they say the nail that sticks out, it's pounded down. So there's this, and personality psychology, I don't know if you remember the, like RB Kutel, even had a concept, Raymond Kutel had a concept called coercion toward the bio-social norm, where he said people like to cut down people who are too dominant so that the

meat will inherit the earth. So it's not quite right, but it's a way I think we do have these. Well, I also think that cutting down, that's an interesting thing as well, because one of the things that groups of men do, I think this is something relatively unique to men, I might be wrong, is that when they're in groups, they often throw denigrating barbs at one another to watch the emotional reaction. And I think part of that tall, poppy cutting down is an attempt to eradicate the detrimental effects of undue narcissism. It's not so much actual competence. It's, it's, and I know that if you're competent and you're at the top, there

may be some danger to you because given that you're more of the center of attention, you're also more of the center of negative attention. So that, that is a danger. But I suspect that a lot of those mechanisms were directed toward the dark triad types and control of their unwining arrogance. Right, exactly. If they're inflicting costs rather than conferring benefits or monopolizing resources rather than sharing them with other members of the group, those are gonna be hierarchy levelers. I mean, even in some sense, the in modern, weird modern environments, the tax code that imposes a higher tax rate

on people who make more money is kind of a form of hierarchy level. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Yeah, well, it's a tough problem to solve. It's a really hard problem to solve. And I think the evolutionary psychologists have made this even more evident as we referred to earlier. The differences that are driving these inequalities

are very, very deep. And it's very difficult to figure out how you might deal with them socially. Even on the conservative end of this spectrum, I think it's worth noting that excess inequality breeds violence among young men. That's worth noting. It's like, well, you let the inequality get too out of hand. You're going to destabilize the whole society. And then unless you want to live in a

gated community, let's say, and the gates can easily turn into walls. And then that's indistinguishable from a prison. That's not really a very good idea. And so how does shovel resources down the hierarchy in some way that's, what would you say, that's not counterproductive? That's a problem that we're all constantly struggling with. Yes, indeed. And I think it's even, I mean, you had mentioned intelligence research and here's, I'd like to get your thoughts on this, is that one of the things that we know is that there's strong assortative mating for intelligence. And a part of that might be due to the educational system that is, you know, you meet people go to college or higher degrees, and you tend to mate with people with whom you're in close proximity.

But we know the assortment of mating coefficients for intelligence is about 0.45. If it's one of the highest assortment of mating coefficients. Right, so that's the tendency for people to marry people who are like them in some manner. Yeah, so that means the high intelligence of the mating of the highs and the lows with lows, but one of the consequences of that, to the degree that intelligence is terrible and it is partly heritable, that creates in the next generation an increase in variance in intelligence of the offspring generation. And so if you iterated And so if you iterate it, generation after generation, you're actually getting more and more variance on this socially valued dimension,

which will increase to the degree that intelligence is linked with things like resource acquisition or status attainment, then you're going to create an increase in inequality as a balance. Well, that's, I would say, you know, I think that's probably what's happened to us. You know, I'm here, let me run something wild by you and you tell me what you think of this.

I've done various interpretations of the stories in Genesis, the story of Adam and Eve in particular, and it's Eve that makes Adam self-conscious in that story. And that's, that's put forth as a, as a, what would you say, a world-shattering event. It's associated with the emergence of morality. That's knowledge of good and evil. And it's associated with the knowledge of death. To get enough cognitive development driven by sexual selection, you become self-conscious. Aware of your own mortality, that's the first thing, and that's our cataclysm. No other creatures ever dealt with that. And then having become aware of your own mortality and your vulnerability, you know the difference between good and evil because now you understand

what would hurt something like you. Like you actually understand it, unlike a lion who's just eating a gazelle. And then you can use that. And so, and then in that story, well, in some sense, it's blamed on Eve, but the selection pressure that you described in association with the choosingness of women, I think it's, I don't see how it can be denied that that was a prime mover of our cognitive transformation away from the chimpanzee line. Sexual selection that drove that, I think.

Yeah, yeah, I think that's right. I mean, because there's, you know, we didn't get this big brain from learning how to pick barriers a little bit better or whatever. I mean, it's a survival problems don't really get you there. Well, and you need a runaway process, right? And the assertive mating issue that you described would be a contributor

to that runaway process because this cortical evolution happened very rapidly, right? So rapidly that women's bodies are barely adapted to our babies, right? Wider hips, they wouldn't be able to run, right? Bigger head, it wouldn't pass through the birth canal, and women's bodies are compromised to some degree by the necessity of giving birth. And then babies are born new when they're still unbelievably helpless because if they're any bigger than that, their heads would be too big plus they're crushable their heads. I mean, it took a lot of gerrymandering to make that runaway selection process biologically viable. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, one interesting thing about that is also is with the advent of C sections where babies are you know, they basically cut the mother open to take the baby out rather than through the birth canal is probably creating a modern selection pressure for larger and larger heads selection pressure for larger and larger heads as a result. So, so this is evolution is ongoing here in this process. So maybe we can close with one thing, unless you have something else you'd really like to discuss. I would like to discuss a little bit more about why men and women have different strategies of aggression? Yeah, okay. So yeah, and also, well, I mean, I guess we'll have to,

there are many interesting things that I would love to talk about associated with my new book on conflict between the sexism. We've touched on a few, but I'd love to talk more about those. But I think that male and female status hierarchies are, I mean, there's some similarities, but they're so fundamentally different. And I don't know if you've ever had this experienced during, but the way I describe it, I find, and I think most men find, male hierarchies to be fairly transparent. That is, we can sort of observe them. They're clear.

There's not a big mystery. But for me, we also tend to exclude males that aren't transparent like that. Yeah. So I can use too much trouble, right? So no, no, I want to know exactly where I stand with you. And we're going to sort that out right now. Right.

And they do sort of that. But with women, the way I feel those movies where there was like these bank robbers and they're breaking into a bank, but the bank has these infrared detectors. So they have to put on special goggles so that they can see the red lines and avoid tripping the alarm. I feel like that with respect to female hierarchies.

Like I don't have the goggles to see it because I'll go to a party or something and then leave and a woman will say something like, did you hear what that bitch said? And I was like right there and I didn't hear anything, but there's this kind of underlying meta message that women pick up on with respect to other women that I don't, I don't, I don't feel like I understand. But do you, do you know if there's any studies indicating

whether men or, or women are better at detecting who's in a relationship with who? I don't know if any studies on that, but I would hazard a guess that women are better at it than men. I mean, is that you're into a issue? Yes, yes, definitely, definitely. I mean, I've watched my wife do that on several occasions. Those two people are together. No, they're not. They're married to other people.

Well, it turns out, yeah, they are. She can pick it up in way. Well, and we know that women are better at decoding nonverbal behavior than men. And that's probably partly because they have to be more attentive to it, because it's more dangerous for them if they're not. And they have to pick up the cues of their nonverbal infants. Right. Exactly. So I think it's, I think that this would get to the issue of mind reading abilities, ability to infer these psychological states of other humans.

And I think that at least in many domains, women are better at that. You want to think that's associated with trait agreeableness? That would be fun to find out if that's actually a function of trait agreeableness. Because that would imagine that some of that understanding is actually embodiment. So if I'm empathic, I'm better at mirroring your emotions in my body, and then I can pick up what you're feeling by referring to what I'm feeling. That's what we do when we go to a movie, right?

Because we, for carries, we live the emotions in the movie. But it stands to reason that there's variability. And I suspect it's agreeableness because that's empathy and likely maternal caregiving. Yeah. Yeah, so that's, I mean because that's empathy and likely maternal caregiving. Yeah, yeah. So that's, I mean, that's a really interesting question. I don't, I'm not aware of studies

that have systematically looked at that individual. Yeah, well, the psychologists are loath to associate agreeableness with maternality, right? Because we're loath to make any claims in the current political climate that any of these dimensions might be associated with something like the fundamental difference between the sexes, even though there are huge sex differences

in the greediness, and they get bigger in egalitarian societies, which is really quite something. Right, right. Contrary to the standard social science, social wall theories that it predicted that, you know, you know. Not just contrary, but like, well, I would say death blow, but it's not exactly right,

because some differences do decline as egalitarianism increases. So, you know, it's complicated like everything else. So, male aggression again, well, we're bigger, we're taller, we have more upper body strengths. So women aren't gonna engage in physical combat with men, not past puberty. They develop that increase in trait and negative emotionality at puberty. It's not there in child.

And it's permanent. No, it's permanent once it's instantiated, once the puberty will change, it'll take place. And so, and I, here's a, something, here's a question I have for you. I really want to ask you this. What do you think of the theory that, so women are hired and trait negative emotion,

and they're higher in agreeableness? So here's a theory. Women's personalities are adapted for the mother infant diet, not for their, not for them. Oh, that the fundamental unit is the diet and their temperament is adjusted for that. That's why they're more fearful. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I think that that's got to be right.

I mean, you know, the women over evolutionary history have been the primary caretakers of the infants, at least for the first few years of life. The mothers and their female kin, the alloparents, as they're called. And so I think that that's exactly right. They have to be the costs of failing to detect danger, for example, affect not just them, but also the survival of their infant.

And so I think that maternal bond to the infant has got to be at least one of the contributing factors to that sex difference in negative or multi-analytic. Well, also, also the world is a more dangerous place for a mother and infant than just for a mother. Because the infant is so vulnerable and also the mother is hindered in her adaptive ability by the presence of the infant to a substantial degree, especially when, well, in societies where the infant is being carried virtually all the time. Right. Which is interesting to bring it back full circle is one reason why women value a man's

ability and willingness to offer protection for her and her children so highly in a mate. And so you think that well in the modern environment, you know, physical protection is not that important, but women continue to value those traits, as well as things like courage and bravery, a villain, the willingness to actually use that in the service of protecting her.

Yeah, it's all it's it's also not self-evident that that physical capacity to protect has been emeliorated to an overwhelming degree in the modern environment. It's still plenty dangerous. Yeah, it's still plenty dangerous, but it might not be so much as it was. Yeah, yeah, less than it was. I mean, I think Steve Pinker is documented that pretty successfully and you know that there's been a general decline and I know this from studying homicide. There's been over the last 400 years of decline in homicide rates broadly speaking, although interestingly there's been a spike in homicide

rates due to the pandemic or within the pandemic. So and I have some speculations about that, but, you know, I think, you know, there's so many other topics that we could talk about, and I hope we will get a chance to at some point. Yeah, I would really like to, that we scratched the surface today, but. Yeah. So, I would very much, I'm gonna talk to Bob Trivers next week,

as it turns out, so very much looking, so this is a really good preparation for that as well. So I really, your work has meant a lot to me and it's helped explain a lot to me. And so I thank you very much for that and for the courage to do it, to pursue it. And in the face of, you know, a substantive opposition to what you're finding. You know, you've discovered something true when you're a social scientist, when you're not very happy about what you discovered. Yeah, that's true. Well, I have just to end on the positive note, I've also studied love and the evolutionary psychology of love. And so, I mean, it's one of the gets back to your point about gluten

evil. And I think humans have evolved adaptations to commit horrors on other people, but also adaptations to be altruistic and benefit-confirming on other individuals. And so... Well, Scott, Scott Barry Kaufman has tried to psychomatically outline a light triad. Yes, yeah.

So I think we all have these capacities within us. And so, and the more we learn, the more we can create environments that kind of suppress the darker, more evil side of human nature and bring out the more benefit-conferring side. Well, it would be fun to do another discussion on something like the evolution of benevolence, you know, something that's really positive like that. Yes. So yeah, okay, well, good, let's do that. Okay. Thank you. Well, it's been fun talking to you. And there is so much more to talk about. Yeah, I know. Well, that's what would you say? That's what you realize whenever you have a really good conversation. Yeah. So I appreciate it very much. And I do hope we talk again in the relatively near future.

Okay. So I do too. Well, thank you. Thank you so much. And best of luck with your conversation with Bob Trevers. He's a fascinating guy. So I'm sure you will have a very interesting conversation. Yeah.

I'm looking forward to talking to him about self deception. That's something I thought about for a very long time. Yeah. And hopefully try to stop practicing. So if you find the keys, let me know. All right. All right. Thank you very much.

And good luck with your book. And so that's this. This is part of one of the books we were talking about today. Why when men behave badly? And that's certainly not all it's about. And thanks very much for talking to me today. Okay, thank you, Gordon. It's been a delight. you