The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 270. Deception and Psychopathy | Robert Trivers

Episode Date: July 14, 2022

Robert Trivers is an American evolutionary biologist and sociobiologist. He proposed the theory of Reciprocal Altruism, in a paper that he published in 1971, linked below. Trivers was awarded the 2007 Crafoord Prize in Biosciences for analysis and contributions to the theory of social evolution, conflict, and cooperation.In this episode, Robert Trivers and I talk about reciprocal altruism, deception and self-deception as adaptive strategies, genuine victims and reducing vulnerability, and much more.—Links—Read Robert Trivers' Paper: https://roberttrivers.com/Publications_files/Trivers%201971.pdfRead Robert Trivers' books: https://roberttrivers.com/Books.htmlRead Robert Trivers' Other Publications: https://roberttrivers.com/Publications.htmlFollow Robert Trivers on Twitter: https://twitter.com/triversrobert—Chapters—[0:00] Intro[1:50] Reciprocal Altruism[9:41] Why Focus On Morality Issues?[12:34] Reciprocal Altruism and Society[16:35] Robert Trivers' First Paper and Initial Research[19:13] Competition and Cooperation[20:22] Deception and Self-Deception[22:57] Cues of Deception[23:41] Robert Trivers' Loss of Short Term Memory[25:05] An Example of Passive Self-Deception[33:41] The Complexity of Confrontation[35:48] The Danger of Undermining a Core Belief[37:51] How Depressive Thinking Cascades[39:00] Thoughts on Suicide and Prison[43:43] Crafting a Deception[47:20] There Is No Decent Place to Stand in a Massacre[48:16] Genuine Victims and Reducing Vulnerability[52:24] Distinguishing Competence from Power[56:11] Self-Deception as an Adaptive Strategy[58:47] Is there an Optimal Strategy?[59:56] Female Selection[1:03:27] Mimicry as a Form of Deception[1:11:06] Defining a Narcissist[1:12:55] Psychopathy in the General Population[1:18:45] Rivers' Thoughts on Donald Trump[1:29:08] Nepotism and Psychopathy[1:32:24] The Biological Evolution of Homosexuality[1:37:27] Homophobia and Homosexual Arousal[1:39:06] Defining a Narcissist, Revisited[1:41:10] Manic Excitability[1:45:29] Closing Comments #roberttrivers #reciprocalaltruism #biology #jordanpeterson #evolutionarybiology #deception// SUPPORT THIS CHANNEL //Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/jordanbpeterson.co...Donations: https://jordanbpeterson.com/donate// COURSES //Discovering Personality: https://jordanbpeterson.com/personalitySelf Authoring Suite: https://selfauthoring.comUnderstand Myself (personality test): https://understandmyself.com// BOOKS //Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life: https://jordanbpeterson.com/Beyond-Order12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos: https://jordanbpeterson.com/12-rules-...Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief: https://jordanbpeterson.com/maps-of-m...// LINKS //Website: https://jordanbpeterson.comEvents: https://jordanbpeterson.com/eventsBlog: https://jordanbpeterson.com/blogPodcast: https://jordanbpeterson.com/podcast// SOCIAL //Twitter: https://twitter.com/jordanbpetersonInstagram: https://instagram.com/jordan.b.petersonFacebook: https://facebook.com/drjordanpetersonTelegram: https://t.me/DrJordanPetersonAll socials: https://linktr.ee/drjordanbpeterson #JordanPeterson #JordanBPeterson #DrJordanPeterson #DrJordanBPeterson #DailyWirePlus #Psychology #Biology #RobertTrivers #EvolutionaryBiology #Deception #SelfDeception

Welcome to episode 270 of the Jordan B. Peterson Podcast. I'm Michaela Peterson. In this episode, Dad spoke with the American evolutionary biologist Robert Trevers. In 1971, Trevers proposed the theory known as reciprocal altruism, which is perhaps his most well-known theory in a paper he published. Since that time, he's published numerous articles essays and books. He was awarded the 2007 Crawford Prize in Biosciences for his analysis and contributions to the theory of social evolution, conflict, and cooperation. Among his contributions is his explanation of self-deception as an adaptive evolutionary strategy, which is the focus of some of this episode, which is fun.

Robert and Dad also talked about genuine victims and reducing vulnerability, reciprocal altruism, the danger of undermining a core belief and more. Thank you for listening and enjoy the episode. Hello everyone, I'm pleased today to have with me Dr. Robert Trivers. Dr. Trivers is an evolutionary biologist who concentrates on social theory based on natural selection and on evolutionary genetics. These happen to be the backbones of all biology. His early work focused on reciprocal altruism,

which we will talk about in some detail today, the evolution of sex differences in all species, the sex ratio at birth, parent offspring conflict, kinship and sex ratio and social insects, and the theory outlining the nature of self-deception, and its operation in the service of deceit, which in itself can of deceit, which in itself can confer, however, temporarily, certain advantages.

He then devoted 15 years of his life with Austin Bert to reviewing the vast topic of selfish genetic elements in all species, except bacteria and viruses. These are genes that do not benefit the individual with the genes, but spread because they have a within-ind individual selective advantage. In 2011, he published a popular book, Deceit and Self Deception, fooling yourself the better to fool others, published in the US as the folly of fools.

It's been translated into 11 languages, including Korean, Chinese, and Taiwanese, and is widely regarded as a definitive treatment of the subject. In 2015, he published a personal memoir, Wild Life, Adventures of an Evolutionary Biologist, translated into Spanish and Polish. A side note, Dr. Trivers also served as the undergraduate advisor to Dr. Heather Heng and Dr. Brett Weinstein,

who are both well-known to the audience that frequents these dialogues. Welcome, Dr. Trivers. It's very good of you to agree to talk with me today. Thank you, sir. So I thought my pleasure. I thought we'd start with reciprocal altruism. There'll be lots of people who are listening and watching that don't know what that means. And it's a crucial idea. And so I'd like you to outline, well, first to define it and then to outline your thoughts

about it, if you would. Well, W.D. Hamilton, who I always regarded as the only greater social theorist, have a loose day social theorist and myself, had already laid out in 1964 in detail the argument for altruistic behavior, so called, altruistic is something that lowers your own reproductive success called fitness, but I never liked the term fitness because it had connotations that could get in a way of your understanding,

whereas reproductive success directly described what we're talking about, the number of surviving all you left. So an altruistic act is one which lowers your production of surviving offspring and raises the production of surviving offspring of the recipient of your altruism. Now, if you're related, then the gene or genes involved may enjoy a net benefit. So, indeed, you're related to your children, typically, by a half, and yet you invest in them, as a key vehicle to your reproductive success. But Hamilton extended the system laterally. So nephews and nieces might not be direct descendants of yours, but still, you could be related to them by a quarter, let's say, in which case the benefit would have to be greater than four times

of cost for the behavior to be selected. So, that was the first step. Now it occurred to me, and that was when I started becoming a biologist in 1967. I took a year as a special student at Harvard to make up for the complete lack of an undergraduate education biology and was then accepted into graduate school. In any case, I thought it was obvious that there was a second kind of altruism in which I did something nice for you. And at a certain point in the future,

you did something nice back to me. So it was reciprocal. And as long as benefits were greater than cost, which one assumes they would be, otherwise you wouldn't be selected under any regime for them, then there could be a net benefit of this transfer. The problem with reciprocal outtours and was what happens with a so-called cheater that is the system automatically selects for someone that receives the benefit, but doesn't bother reciprocating. Well, if they don't reciprocate at all, you cut off any future

altruism toward them. And so each active failure on their part results in a source of altruism being cut off. So the more interesting phenomena is where you cheat that is you give back less than you've got, but you're still giving back a benefit. So they still receive a benefit. They just don't receive the benefit that they called if the system was the egalitarian and fair, and those words fair and just and so on, I felt actually emerged from reciprocal altruism precisely because they evaluated the costs in Flicked Adverses of Benefits received. So you had several cheaters which reciprocated to a degree and enough so that you

enjoyed an advent of it but not as much as you'd call deserved and so that you enjoyed an event that but not as much as you could deserve and so that was a dynamic reciprocal altruism was the cheater detector detection of the cheater. So it wasn't so difficult, but was in so difficult, but how to interact with the individual. So as to change his behavior, that was an interesting problem. So a colleague, I think a graduate student at Harvard had happened to write a paper reviewing the emotions associated with altruistic behavior. He didn't have any particular theoretical orientation or evolutionary, But he reviewed the subject. And I remember going to him, I took a class on morality, something like that, specifically, in order to learn enough about human behavior related reciprocity to flesh out my paper. But there, the first class I saw that the graduate student who was a teaching assistant had already written a paper class. So I went to him and asked if I could

sit and read his paper, let's say in his office, and take notes. And he said, hell, I'll give you a copy. And I thought, oh my God, that's an act of alchemy that I can surely benefit from. And so he gave me a copy. I promptly dropped out of the course and actually molded the second half by E.D. the content of my paper in the different categories, we're just drawn straight out of his work and reorganize a bit so as to fit the logic I was pushing. I hope that's not too complicated or too much detail. No, no, no, it's exactly right there.

So why concentrate specifically on reciprocal altruism? I mean, obviously tied up in that is cooperation, mutual benefit. And then also you discuss the problem of cheating and cheating deception or detecting cheating. And deception, of course, is a way of making cheating difficult to detect. And so you're focusing your biological inquiry on what we would into it as moral issues, moral issue associated with cooperation, moral issue associated with deviation from that cooperation. Is that a reasonable way of looking at what you're what you've been doing?

Well, what I did when you say what I've been doing, I actually did write a paper called Waschipical Autos in 30 years later and tried to bring this subject up to date. But in general, I didn't do that on any of my papers. That is, I wrote it paper and that was it. I wrote a paper on Parent Offspring conflict. I don't think I've ever written a second one. I wrote a paper on haplode deployty in the evolution of social insects, where I took a tinship theory, Hamilton's tinship theory, and applied it rigorously to the unusual situation of ant speeds and wasps, where males are only having one set of chromosomes, they're employed, and females have two, they're diploid, and that leads to unusual

degrees relatedness. Indeed, it's the only case in nature other than Identical twinning where you're more related to someone other than your own offspring namely Full sisters in a half-low-difitoid System you're related to them by three-quarters But you're only related to your brothers by one quarter. So it can't so Zauz to give you half and that's how people thought about it for a couple of years but it's obvious to me that you don't average them if one is three quarters and the others a quarter, then it's selected to invest much more heavily

in those that you're related by three quarters and much less in those that are related to by one quarter. How do you envision the relationship between reciprocal altruism and the structures of society and the moral structures that guide society. I mean, I would almost be thinking off the top of my head. It's been quite some time since I've thought about it. You mentioned in your introduction that I peeled off 15 years of my life or whatever it was to master self-leg genetic elements That's selection Below the level of the individual Hamilton was conscious of it

But it was Austin birds my coauthor, who was the first to see really deeply into the literature and start to reorganize it. So the entire subject of genetics, evolutionary evolutionary genetics was reorganized around the concept of selfish genes and the conflict they have with others, both between closely related individuals and within individuals. So now you're asking me the relationship between reciprocal altruism and sort of society-wide phenomenon and so on. And I can't boil it down to a simple argument. Yep. In 2002, which was the select papers of Robert Tribery, not to collect it because it wasn't worth everything, just to select it. But I did something unique, generally for selected or expected papers, people would write a short introduction to how they happen to write to paper and then you would get to paper

and then there would be a short introduction for your next paper and then the paper. What I added was what you're asking for, which is I would write a short introduction, then the paper, then there would be a short section on progress since then since the paper is published. That was often fairly brief. And I can't remember what I said about reciprocal altruism now. I would have to go get the book to check it out. But I'm afraid I don't have, I'm afraid I can't reason for you. At the level you would like in terms of reciprocal altruism and societal organization and so on. I think it's obvious that societies are not, I mean, they may be partly based on kinship, but only partly and often much more on patterns of cooperation

that evolve or are generated and sustain themselves. Why would you stress cooperation as a basis for social organizations say rather than competition or Kinship for that matter Well, I mean, I mean it's partly just you know What was available at the time when I wrote on reciprocal outfreshing if you want to If you want to bring it all the way back to the evolution of reciprocal altruism, which was my first paper published. And indeed Harvard broke their usual rule, and they allowed me, I just had a thesis that consists of three chapters.

One was reciprocal altruism. The other was parental investment, sexual selection. Then Harvard had a rule that you had to have at least one chapter that was empirical. And that meant lab work, which I had no intention whatsoever of doing. I knew nothing about labs and I had no ability there. Or field work. Well, now field work is much more congenial,

especially if you're interested in social behavior, social theory. So watching baboons, which I did with Erdogor in Kenyan, Tanzania back in 72, or going to Haiti and Jamaica with my advisor, Ernest Williams, who was the expert on tree climbing lizards. So, in fact, I did my third chapter on the green lizard, the largest of the enolus tree climbing lizards, there are seven species, well, there's really eight in Jamaica. So I had to go back down to Jamaica at regular intervals. I would come back to Harvard and work for three months during the semester,

teaching, and so on. And you'd get a month between semesters and I would fly it down to Jamaica. And that set up a lifelong bond between me and Jamaica, where I've lived, at least 20 years of my life, married onto the island or stole a woman off the island is another Jamaican expression and have four children by her. Dr. Trivers, how did you get interested in deception and how did you get interested in deception and then in self-deception and the relationship between the two? Let me step back one second, sir. You asked about competition versus cooperation.

Yes. I mean, you competition even applies between different cooperative enterprises. They cooperate within their entity, but they compete with other similar, lead structured entities, so to maximize their reproductive success. Now, competition was well known. I mean, it was the basis of life where we're out there competing all the time. Cooperation was a messuggler problem, which you had to figure out what the competitive natural selection advantage was. So now you just asked about the seat and self deception, but sir, I'm afraid, I blame it on 78 years of mentation, if you will.

I do know that by 76, in other words, reciprocal altruism was 71, parental investment was 72, trivers and willard, which was an interesting theory about tending to produce sons under these conditions and then daughters under these conditions. So for example, if you look at a human hierarchy, people at the top ends tend to produce sons with higher frequency, but people at the bottom end tend to produce daughters at higher frequency. Well, every child has a mother and a father, so we know that the aggregate reproductive success of females must equal the aggregate reproductive success of males. So, if high-class males are doing better, then it makes sense that lower class women are doing better.

So it's the balance out the equation. And so they get some advantage of these men, IE, they made with them. Now, I wrote, I wrote it forward or something like that, for some book in 1975 or 1976, and I'm not creating a slip my brain, but I slipped in the theory of deceit and self deception there. There were just two sentences in there. Something about deception is obviously favorite, but the best way to hide it from others is, first of all, to hide it from yourself. And then you don't give off any of the cues that are associated with deception.

Incidentally, I have paid attention to the literature on cues, and it's very interesting to me that the most general cue for deception is a slight raise in your picture, your voice. That seems to be all but universal. So if you can listen carefully enough to hear when someone's voice rises a bit, they're more likely to be practicing deception. So, I practiced as a clinician for a long time and as a research psychologist. I was very interested in how people deceived themselves and the kinds of psychopathologies that emerged. So here's a hypothesis.

Let me ask you what you think of it. What I noticed often was that when people received information that contradicted one of their explicit beliefs, the information often manifested itself emotionally. And so imagine that a husband comes home with lipstick on his collar, and the wife sees that and becomes agitated as a consequence. But then refuses to think through what the implications of that might be. And so the self-deception isn't one fully thought out proposition versus another. It's a fully thought out set of propositions, say about marital stability, or at least partially thought out versus an emotional cue of uncertain

significance that has to be unpacked with difficulty. And avoidance of that is tantamount, at least to some form of self-deception. How does that strike? Well, I get lost in your argument there. Go back to your example. It's lipstick on his collar. Right. And now she has a vision in her mind of, let's say, marital stability and harmony.

And it's pretty fleshed out But now all she's got that contradicts that is one piece of visual evidence and an emotion Which would might be anger anxiety and so forth and She can hold on to her pre-existing belief with no work In order to transform that belief she's going to have to do a tremendous amount of exploration and investigation. And so you can just not do that. What is her preexisting quote, belief here?

I'm getting lost already. It might be a fantasy of marital harmony. Okay, so she has a fantasy of marital harmony. She has a piece of evidence that's inconsistent with marital harmony. Now what? Well, there's a very large potential range of meanings of that piece of evidence. And so for her to transform that into something differentiated enough to alter her fantasy would take a tremendous amount of effort.

And so she can just not do that. And that's passive self-deception, which I think is the most common- passive self-deception. Yes, you know something's up. You know there's an elephant under the carpet, but you decide not to look. So I'm getting confused now. You've already seen it. You've seen lipstick there. So you've seen evidence that suggests that he's in a semi-intimate relationship with another woman, at least to the point of kissing her

or being kissed by her. Now I'm confused with what you're saying. She's put a lot of time and effort into the theory of her marriage that she already holds. So it's the idea that that marriage is stable and loving, let's say, is a predicate for many of her memories. It's a presumption for many of her current activities, and it's the basis for her future plan. And so to investigate that means that she would have to go through all the work of modifying all those representations. It's not like the evidence contains that

modification. It's just an error message. It's hard to unpack an error message. What's the error message? Well, the error message would be the lipstick and then the negative emotion that goes with its with its visual apprehension. What's the error? The error is that the presumption of her fantasy that her marriage is stable and loving and let's say also monogamous. So that's an error you're saying. And now she's got a message that she's in error. So now what's the right, but that's all she has. That's the problem, right? And all she has is a message that she's in error. It doesn't contain much other information. And it's going to be extremely hard for her to reconstruct all that theorizing she's done based on the erroneous assumption of monogamy. And so it's easiest just not to do it.

Yes, and then what's the cost of her not doing it? Well, I would say the immediate cost is virtually nothing. And that's another advantage. But the long-term cost is that she's building a future reality based on a mis presumption. And so she can't, she may make errors, for example, about her financial security going into the future, or even the presence of her partner. And that's a huge potential cost.

She's going to underestimate, for example, the danger of divorce or of him will leaving. In order to avoid facing the in the... Yes, well, and I think this idea maps on to your hypothesis that at times the right hemisphere and the left hemisphere can be delivering contradictory messages. So, if the left is linguistic and generates up detailed propositional arguments, let's say, that get held with some certainty and the right emotionally signals error, then there's a tremendous amount of work that has to be done in order to unpack that error and remake all those propositional presumptions. It's really hard. That's what I don't understand in your argument. I don't understand why it is a huge amount of work where she's got to unpack a whole endless series of assumptions or arguments just

because it is one thing. All right, let's go back to the situation. We know that the guy is involved with at least one other woman. And we know that it's, you know, he's kind of the concealant, as would be natural, so as to not result in marital conflict. Now, he messes up. It seems to me, I mean, she has a simple decision that she confront him over it and say, Joe, what the hell is this or confront him whatever way she wants to?

Okay. So imagine the complexity of that confrontation. And this is the sort of thing that I saw a lot in my clinical practice. So because he lied about that, she no longer knows whether anything he's told her or anything he's done is true or real. It because he's violated this basic presupposition of trust and so part of the reason she's going to have a major emotional reaction to that is that She now doesn't know whether she can trust anything about him and

May have to re-evaluate all her perceptions of him even those that are part of the past Yeah, go ahead. So what? of him, even those that are part of the past. Yeah, go ahead. So what? Well, so there's a tremendous amount of work associated with that. You know, and part of what our certainties do, as far as I can tell, is inhibit anxiety and doubt, almost by definition. And so now, if you've discovered that you can't trust someone because they violated a fundamental presumption, then every

every part of the way you look at the world that's predicated on that trust has now become unstable. Well now that that is such a strong statement. You say everything that is associated with that violation of trust is now subject to re-evaluation and so forth and so on. That's, I don't know, you know, your, the foundation of your argumentation towards me and I respected, is it your have clinical experience dealing with people who come to you and talk to you about these kinds of things. So you know, I think that's a good objection. And so let me, let me propose something in relationship to that, because I think that's a crucial objection that you made. So one of the things that I wrestled with formulating when I was thinking about self-deception,

was the relationship of one belief to another. So imagine that, and this is something you could object to, imagine that some beliefs are more fundamental than others, and that fundamentalness, or is a reflection of how many other beliefs depend on that belief. It's like a definition of fundamental. It's a hierarchy. And so some beliefs are trivial because almost nothing depends on them, but other beliefs are absolutely fundamental because everything

that you're doing depends on their validity. And so, energy thing. Well, depending on how deep the belief is, eating dinner, come on, brother. Well, okay, but fair enough, good objection. But, you know, if you deal with someone who's profoundly depressed, because they've something that was crucial to them was devastated, they will often have a tremendous amount of difficulty doing even those basic things. That's true brother

I I grant you that people can suffer to the point where they got a problem eating They've got a problem digesting. I mean the actual digestive system maybe Inder to altered I mean, the actual digestive system may be hindered or altered by the kind of mental stress or mentation that's going on. Let me give you an example of that with depression. Go ahead. So this is often what, okay, this is often what happens with people who are very depressed. Let's say they have a minor argument with their son, someone they love, just a minor argument. And then they think, well, I acted really badly in that argument.

I really hurt my son's feelings. Only a terrible person would hurt someone's feelings. Only a terrible person would hurt someone's feelings. I must be a terrible person. I'm a terrible person now and I'm going to be a terrible person in the future, and there's nothing that can be done about it. And that's the sort of thinking that leads to suicide. And you can see the person going down the hierarchy of their beliefs, right, from the little argument, which is nothing, all the way down to something that is so basic to their self-concept, that if it's challenged,

they want to die. That happens a lot in real depression, real severe depression. That happens continually. It's almost like the hallmark of the illness. Well, that's interesting. I have been thinking about depression, you know, personally. I was presenting that conception of depression, you know, that cascade of doubt that I outlined as an illustration of what people are motivated to avoid when they practice self-deception. They don't want to start unraveling because they don't know where the unraveling will end. So they're afraid of that. And that's partly why they won't investigate. Yes, I, I, you know, off the top of my head, I would agree with that kind of argument that they don't want to pursue reality very far when it's easier to flip, flip part of it and be unconscious or try to become unconscious of the

flippier making. Now, in your book on self-deception, you outlined some of the social costs of self-deception, say in relationship to warfare, and talked about the way that the biases that we have to perhaps reject contradictory information can produce catastrophic consequences, say, at the policy level, said, for example, that leaders and the people that they purport to lead are often extremely over optimistic at the beginning of a war and also have a Proclivity to derogate and minimize the strength of their enemy and you link up. So when you did your work on self-deception Did you draw any ethical conclusions from it?

I mean, as an evolutionary biologist, you see it as a strategy, in a sense. But it's a strategy that has a lot of costs. Initially, I was very much down on both deception and self-deception. I was very much biased towards the truth and honesty. Then, I think when I saw the degree to which deception was advantageous. You mentioned in the book having lots of examples from other animals of deceptive behavior and even morphology. And then self deception deception I was against, you know, doubly, if you will, because you're deceiving yourself. So you're both a victim and a victimizer, as I imagined it. Then I came to kind of relax about both of them. I saw situations in which deception is something I would practice consciously, you know.

But again, it might have to be a fairly serious situation in which you would have to construct a serious lie to get out of it. And I know there have been situations in my life, not too, too long ago, where I've spent a lot of time constructing a deception that gives off the minimal amount of cues so that it's hard to detect, if you will. When I walked my clients through situations where they had to construct deceptions to avoid, let's say, some serious consequence or maybe to gain some serious advantage, which often backfired in the long run. One of the things that seemed useful to do was to trace back into their story,

the events that led to the necessity of the deception. There's a Canadian songwriter who wrote a line that struck me in this regard, he said, there is no decent place to stand in a massacre. And my response would be, well, you should unpack the actions that led you to be there to begin with, right? Because sometimes there's no good way out of something, but there might have been a good way of not having it arise in the first place. There's no decent place to stand in a massacre. Does that include evictives? Well, that's a good question, isn't it? If you've been a victim, let's say, you've been a victim and genuine victim, I saw this in my clinical practice a lot as well. Despite the genuineness of your victimization, it still might be useful asking yourself if you did anything that you could change that increased the probability of that victimization. Increase the probability that it did happen.

Yes, that you were victimized. You know, you might say, for example, you might want to address your vulnerabilities. You know, so here, let me give you an example, okay? Imagine that you, I had clients like this. They were women who had been in sequential abusive relationships. Imagine that you, I had clients like this. They were women who had been in sequential abusive relationships. Yes. Okay, so they were victims and often of extremely violent and sometimes psychopathic men.

Yes. And what, but what I would help them do because I couldn't deal with the psychopathic men, they weren't there, was to unpack elements of their actions and assumptions that might have increased the probability that they would enter into those relationships. I can remember cases, though not in much detail now, where I noticed a particular woman who seemed to go from abusive relationship to abusive relationship. So she was sometimes flea abusive and abusive relationship literally by changing the city she lived in. This is in the US. But then what was so striking to me was, I would visit her or see her. She was not an intimate friend of mine, but a close friend,

if you will, or potentially close friend. And I would see, by God, she's gone and found somebody else that's abusive in this new situation. So she's drawn to them in some way, or at least she's not averse to them. You know, she doesn't have a guard up and she may indeed be attracted to some element of them that is associated with them being abusive. I'm sure given your critical practice, you must have examples of this kind of stuff. Here's something to think about in that regard. Often times, women who find themselves in those situations aren't sophisticated enough for one reason or another to distinguish between power, aggression, and competence. And so when they see someone acting aggressively, they infer competence. Uh-huh. So part of unpacking that would be to help them distinguish between those two, to know

that there is a distinction between the raw expression of power and competence. Well, there's another reason. I had no idea that that confusion was involved in the behavioral problem we're talking about. But certain Jesus Christ is a difference between competence and abuse. Okay, well, let me, I was speaking with an evolutionary psychologist, David Busch. Yes. Just yesterday. And David Busch has looked at the relationship between dark triad behavior. So that's narcissism, Machiavellianism, and aggression. I might have the third one wrong, but that's basically it. Now, younger women, younger inexperienced women are much more likely to be attracted to dark triad guys.

And that's partly as far as I can tell, because they haven't had the experience to distinguish between narcissism, let's say, and success and the confidence that comes with success. And that's an example of that inability to distinguish between aggression and competence. Now, the aggression might be necessary to deal with free writers and cheaters. So you're saying, are you that somebody's aggressive men might be attractive to women precisely because they would be hard on the malevolent types you're talking about?

Yes, exactly, exactly that. The capacity for male aggression is necessary and it's part of what makes men attractive to women. You can see that in their fantasies. So the most common forms of pornographic fiction that women read feature surgeons, pirates, vampires, billionaires, and unfortunately I can't remember the other one, but they're men who have, you could say power, but that's not it. I don't remember the other one, but they're men who have, you could say power, but that's not it. I don't believe that.

I believe it's something like competence and the ability to use aggression when necessary. And then the narcissistic men, they're parasitizing that in some sense. They're mimicking that. And that's why they're attractive to inexperienced women. plausible sure. When I see the political arguments that take place now, now. The accusation that the male hierarchy is a, let's say, oppressive patriarchy, right? An exploitative structure. What I see in that is partially this inability to distinguish between

power and competence and also to understand when aggressive action is necessary and desirable. And that seems related to the free writer problem. Yes, I hear you. No objections to that. And none so far. All right, so let me go back to the idea of belief dependencies. So, you know, we all say that some things are more important to us than others. We hold them more dear. So, It, the integrity of those core beliefs, I think, is related directly to the inhibition of negative emotion. Inhibition of what? Of negative emotion, anxiety, particularly in doubt. So the beliefs that are more important to us are beliefs that other beliefs depend on, and when they're threatened, it's very emotionally destabilizing. And very

hard on us from a physical perspective as well. Because when our core beliefs are disrupted, we don't know what to do, and therefore we have to prepare to do everything. That's the emergency response, right? That's fight or flight, I suppose, but it's very physiologically costly. And so I think sometimes people engage in self-deception so that they don't have to undermine their core beliefs and and disregulate themselves like that. That seems plausible to me, sir. The unfortunate problem seems to be that the long-term consequences of that are often not good. You ignore a profound danger at your peril.

It saves you from the psychophysiological exhaustion in the present, but if the problem is really there, things unravel really badly in the future. Yes. So, we could say that self-deception has its advantages, even as an adaptive strategy. And I think the idea that it can serve deception as a handmaiden, say, is a powerful idea, but it doesn't look like it's an optimal strategy. And so one of the things I wanted to ask you is, is there justification and evolutionary biology for, you know, you said strategies compete, right? for, you know, you said strategies compete, right? And so does that mean that there is an optimal strategy that

that we approximate, that we that we have an intuition of even? God, I would tend to doubt that there's an optimal one. First of all, if there were an optimal strategy, why isn't everybody adapting it, adapting it? Well, you may answer me by saying, well, it's adaptive, but not in all situations. Fine, but if it's always adaptive in these situations, you would expect them to get matched up together fairly quickly over time, wouldn't you? That's a good objection. It's a tough one, right?

I mean, you've also talked about runaway sexual selection. Okay, so this is an answer to the problem you just posed possibly. I mean, one thing that does seem to have been selected for, that operates across a very wide range of contexts, at least in human beings, is something like general intelligence. You know, and the cortical expansion that produced that, and that's been selected by women. So, I would say, as a domain general, there's a domain general ability that might have been selected that worked in most situations and that was more intelligence at least with humans. That doesn't address the ethical issue exactly. And you said it was mostly being selected by women, female choice.

Well, they're choosier. Yes, and they're, they're socially brighter. And they're also, they are also less likely to agree that a low intelligence sexual partner would be acceptable. According to, um, David Bus, the evolutionary psychologist I was speaking with just yesterday. So they are women do appear to be exerting more selection pressure on general cognitive ability. But I also wonder if there's not an ethical equivalent to that that's something like, well, the capacity

for reciprocal altruism. So what's your, what are you then saying that females are positive, selective, forced for reciprocal altruism? I'm on. Well, yeah, well, that's not as strong an argument as the one first, let's say, intelligence. It's harder to define the central element of reciprocal altruism than the central element of intelligence. It's harder technically.

But you know, there is an idea in evolutionary biology, sort of implicit implicit that women select men who are higher as high as they can manage in the status hierarchy. And that hierarchy is constructed as a consequence of the exercise of power. And I think that's wrong and dangerous that idea. I don't think those hierarchies, the male hierarchies that influence female selection are based on power. I think they're based on something more like competence. And I think it's associated with this capacity for reciprocal altruism, because you want them, if you're a woman, you want a man who's productive, but also generous. Certainly, I don't have anything to say against what you just said.

I don't know what David Busch was arguing. Well, I would say something similar. I mean, your book on deception and self deception is very interesting because you point out in many, many ways how deception can confer at least a temporary advantage, but often a more permanent advantage. And so it makes making the case that, let's say, something like honesty is selected for much more difficult. But I also wonder if there's a utility in differentiating between deception and mimicry in animals. No, terminologically. But I don't understand

why mimicry is not an example of deception. Let's say we're talking about moths or butterflies and predators birds. So you will have some butterflies that are perfectly tasty to birds, but there are a couple of that are not that have a poison that they ingest when they're caterpillars, which they retain in adulthood so that they're distasteful and poisonous. So then they attract so to speak mimics because now if you're related species so you're similar in appearance already, but you don't happen to have the poison, then you evolve to be to resemble that species more and more in order

to gain the benefit that they have from having the poison. So the predator makes the assumption that you've got the poison because you look exactly like the species that has a poison. And then they've done work, but I, you know, as long as it's disappeared from my memory, they've done work on a relative frequency of the two kinds. And there are situations in which the mimic can be, you know, five or ten times as frequent as a model as they're called, and they're gaining a benefit, and they're inflicting a marginal cost on the model. There are other situations in which as they rise in number, the mimic, they inflict a cause on the model because

now birds snap the model, of course they spit it out, but that doesn't help the model. That just means the bird doesn't swallow the poison. You could make a similar case for narcissists. Imagine that the model is someone competent and confident and maybe assertive because of that and productive and generous, but the mimic just mimics the confidence and assertiveness. And then there is a cost inflicted on the model because if there are enough narcissistic mimics, then the existence of the model starts to become doubtful. You're absolutely right. And there's a rich literature on that.

And I used to study it very carefully because I was interested in the interaction between deception and detection of deception. And of course, it tosses in self-deception to bypass the initial problem. Did I tell you about the fact that the sewers have a slightly higher pitch to their voice? Yes, you mentioned that. That's very interesting. Very, very, very pen-roll. Do you know anything about the physiological mechanisms? Is that a stress response?

Or did anybody study why that is? It's stress due to fear of detection. Okay. That's believed to cause you to to contract your your belly when you're making a sound and so it rises in pitch. As a side note, an interesting story from your book, you talked about one species of butterfly that could lay five different kinds of eggs to mimic five different kinds of poisonous butterfly species. Right. So, let's talk about mimicry for a minute and deception, because it's such they're so tightly interwoven. Human beings are very imitative, and so someone growing up can choose to mimic a particular model, let's say, and that model might be

someone competent or it might be someone narcissistic, and so you could mimic competence and become competent or you could mimic narcissism and become narcissistic. And that's partly why I think maybe there's a useful distinction to be made between mimicry and deception. I mean, not in the cases you raised with the butterflies, but in the human case, because there are psychological mechanisms involved, the problem becomes a lot thornier What's the definition of a narcissist? You can define it by personality So narcissists tend to be

extroverted lot of positive emotion and A lot of positive emotion and disagreeable. So very little empathy and more likely to be aggressive. So that is a masculine pattern to some degree because men are more extroverted than women, especially in assertiveness and they're less agreeable than women. It's the extremes, though, when you get the extremes there, you have something like temperamental narcissism. And then if they're low in conscientiousness, that's even worse, because then, well, they're

neither productive nor dutiful nor honest, none of those. And maybe that's psychopathy, maybe. It's not clear. And then you could think about it socially, is that a narcissist is someone who assumes his or her status is higher than those around them would claim. There's a very important literature on psychopaths because I found, it was transformative when I read these papers. They were written by Canadian mathematicians

and there was a psychopathic scale. were written by Canadian mathematicians. And there was a psychopathic scale that someone had invented. Robert Hare, I believe, invented the scale. Well, psychopaths, there are violent psychopaths, and they are, of of course a considerable danger, but they are outnumbered by non-violent psychopaths. And their definition, I think, has to do with lack of empathy, lack of feeling for others, a non-violent psychopath, according to the Canadian literature. They studied...

Was it the propagation of exploitative psychopathic behavior in populations where there was no punishment for free riders? The reason is because I was thinking that, oh, CROAP! Was that the name of the people? No, you were mentioning someone else in Canada, right? Yep, hair developed the scale, but he didn't do the work you're speaking of. Okay, CROAP. So let me hit the document now. I believe the paper you're referring to is nepotistic patterns of violence, psychopathy, evidence

for adaptation, whether crope at all also did the hell to the 1% to 3% frequency in a population. There, the notion was that the psychopath is held in a frequency dependent equilibrium. In other words, it doesn't go down to zero because when there's only 1% that's a psychopath, they're positively selected compared to the general population. However, when they reach 3% frequency, they're already bumping up against the upper boundary. So they're selected. You could also imagine that when their frequency declines in a given population, that people are much less alert

to the possibility of psychopathy. And so then the deceptions that they engage in are less likely to be detected and they spring back into existence. Well, yes, but remember that that's automatically true about these psychopaths because they're held between a 1 to 3% frequency, which is low. As I mentioned in that just a little paragraph there, in other words, when you're a psychopath, you're always appearing. And the percentage is only one to three percent, whereas the population itself is only experiencing a psychopath once every several generations. So selection

is bound to be weaker on the detectors of psychopaths, although the fact that it doesn't rise above a 3% frequency, does suggest that at that frequency, there's two damn many of them, and so people start paying attention. The fact that you just laid out too, that even when psychopaths are relatively successful in a population, they don't exceed 3%. Also indicates that that psychopathic exploitation, which might be regarded as the purest expression of arbitrary selfish power, is actually not a very good strategy. Well, I'd rather I'd rather be the part of the 97% that wasn't a psychopath. I just found the the whole

argument of cropped very powerful because these psychopaths sure acted as if they'd been under selection because they they favored their relatives. Yeah, I didn't know that about psychopaths. I didn't know that see because well, psychologists when they're talking about psychopaths, they tend to generally assume that there's zero social relatedness governing their behavior. The fact that they favor kin is extremely interesting. I wasn't aware of that. Yes, indeed. And classically, you know, psychopath is like a as a negative trait. You and I aren't psychopaths. We have the positive trait.

It's just like any other thing where there's a negative trait that's held at a low frequency or it's at a low frequency, but basically it's being forced down to zero. But what this literature said was for these psychopaths, it's not being forced down to zero. If it gets down to one, it's being bounced back up. It probably isolates between five and a half or something like that. But when it gets in frequent enough, it's definitely beneficial enough to stay in the population. Well, it could well be that effectiveness at low frequency. The effectiveness is dependent on the low frequency. So you might wonder what

happens to societies where the psychopath's incidents exceed say 5%. Do you suppose those societies get exceptionally punitive? What do you suppose happens to knock down the psychopath percentage. That's a good question, my friend, and I don't have any answer off the top of my head. So this paper that you cited, one of the conclusions is that in light of Wakefield's 1992 Definition of Mental Disorder, evidence that psychopathy retains nepotistic design features is at odds with psychopathy being a mental disorder. Given that a diagnosis of mental disorder tends to be positively associated with the victimization

of genealogical kin. It's not the case with Clubs' work. Absolutely not. And you see a figure after figure with different related in its categories and showing, but there's a psychopaths are treating them better. Oh, right. How much they score on a psychopathic scale. So the higher they score on a psychopathic scale, the more they are biased towards relatives.

Yeah, that's really something. That's really remarkable. I didn't know that. That is a huge finding. And I can see why it showed it, it, it showed up on your radar. Yes. And it's also a very interesting definition of mental disorder that you can tell if someone suffers from a mental disorder because they victimize genealogical kin. Yes, that's what that's not the only criteria obviously, but but it's an interesting criteria for a definition. Yes, and it's not true of psychopaths. They don't victimize.

Do you suppose that the exacerbation of nepotism is actually part of a psychopathic strategy? Do you think you could go that far? Well, this paper has made me wonder about the relationship between nepotism as a phenomenon and psychopathy per se. So do you suppose that if psychopaths are more likely to be nepotistic, is the reverse true? Are radical nepotists more likely to be psychopathic? A radical nepotist like that, that I, that I don't know. What do you think the best evolutionary theories have to say about the persistence of homosexuality,

especially among men? One of the most interesting subjects have to do with the repression of homosexual tendencies. And it applies especially to Jamaica because Jamaica is violently against homosexuals, they're murdered, and they have to hide and so on. But anyway, what was I going to say about homosexuality? Evolutionary theory. Yeah. So there was a, there was an excellent paper published in Georgia, the state of Georgia in the US. You documented that in your book. I know the study, I believe, it's,

they gave them a homophobia scale and then measured their penile erectile response to homosexual pornography and found that those who were most homophobic according to the scale showed a significant increase in erectile function during exposure to the homosexual pornography quite distinct from those who were less homophobic. Yes, and what they did was to they showed them six six-minute films and the first was on a man and a woman making love. was on a man and a woman making love. And then they graphed the penile growth in the homophobic and non-homophobic.

And they were statistically identical. Then they showed them a six minute movie of two women making love. And it started taking off like a man and a woman, but for a certain reason, it sort of leveled off. Again, there was no difference between the two categories of men. Now the third one was the interesting one.

That's where they showed them six minutes of two men getting it on. And the non-homophobic men showed a small and statistically insignificant increase in penis size. So in other words, they didn't respond at all statistically. Whereas the homophobic man started and then they climbed and they kept climbing and they got two thirds of the way up to the level at which they responded to two women. And yet they denied any homosexual tendencies. These were all men that rated themselves as never had a homosexual experience, never had a homosexual fantasy, and never even had a homosexual thought or so they said. So that was a fascinating result. That's H.E. Adams, I believe, is homophobia associated with homosexual arousal? Probably

it is. Are you aware of that paper? Only since I think I've heard of the paper before, but I re-acquainted myself with it when I was reading through your book today. Right. Don't know if it's being replicated, but perhaps I don't know. I don't know that. No, I, well, I don't know that being replicated, but you know, again, I'm The stage in life where I'm not keeping up with with new work. Well, I really enjoyed talking to you and I really benefited from your work and scientifically and practically and I appreciate very much the fact that you talk to me today. All right, Jordan, if there's nothing else, it's a pleasure talking to you and

God bless you and keep you. Thank you very much, sir. Very nice talking with you.