Speaker 1: Welcome to the Psychology Podcast, where we give you insights
Speaker 1: into the mind, brain, behavior and creativity. I'm doctor Scott
Speaker 1: Barr Kaufman, and in each episode I have a conversation
Speaker 1: with a guest who will stimulate your mind and give
Speaker 1: you a greater understanding of yourself, others, and the world
Speaker 1: we live in. Thanks for listening and enjoy the podcast.
Speaker 1: Today we have doctor Jordan Peterson on the podcast. Doctor
Speaker 1: Peterson is a psychologist who has taught mythology to lawyers,
Speaker 1: doctors and business people, consulted for the un Secretary General,
Speaker 1: helped his clinical clients manage depression, obsessive compulsive disorder, anxiety,
Speaker 1: and schizophrenia, served as an advisor as senior partners of
Speaker 1: major Canadian law firms, and lectured extensively in North America
Speaker 1: and Europe with his students and colleagues at Harvard and
Speaker 1: the University of Toronto. Doctor Peterson has published over one
Speaker 1: hundred sig scientific papers. Doctor Peterson is also author of
Speaker 1: two books, Maps of Meaning, The Architecture of Belief and
Speaker 1: Twelve Rules for Life, An Antidote to Chaos, which is
Speaker 1: a number one bestseller. Jordan, great to chat with you today. Hey,
Speaker 1: Thanks for the invitation. Yeah, as we were saying just
Speaker 1: backchannel before we started, it's nice to finally like see
Speaker 1: you and talk to you. We've been in touch for
Speaker 1: a while, and publish the paper on creativity. And I
Speaker 1: should give even further context which I never gave you
Speaker 1: when we were actually collaborating, which is, as I was
Speaker 1: working on my dissertation, I drew a lot on your work.
Speaker 1: I drew a lot on your work on creativity and personality,
Speaker 1: and I thought there'd be no better place than to
Speaker 1: start with our discussion than some of that seminal work
Speaker 1: you have done on creativity. And one concept that really
Speaker 1: fascinated me in grad school was the idea of latent
Speaker 1: inhibition and you had done some work on that and
Speaker 1: had found this really interesting link between late and in in
Speaker 1: amibition and the personality trade, openness to experience. And then
Speaker 1: you did this, you know, you did that with Shelley Carson,
Speaker 1: and then you did this work linking at to creative achievement.
Speaker 1: I thought you could talk a little about what is
Speaker 1: late in amibition and how how is it related to creativity. Well,
Speaker 1: a lot of what we learn, you know, you might
Speaker 1: think that you learn what things mean, and there is
Speaker 1: some truth in that, but it's more accurate in many
Speaker 1: ways to reverse that, Like reversing so many things in
Speaker 1: psychology is useful. It's not that useful to try to
Speaker 1: figure out why people get addicted. For example, it's very
Speaker 1: useful to figure out why some people, but most people
Speaker 1: aren't addicted all the time. It's not that difficult to
Speaker 1: figure out why people are afraid. What's hard is to
Speaker 1: understand why people aren't afraid all the time. So a
Speaker 1: lot of things in psychology we get backwards, and we
Speaker 1: tend to think that we learn the meaning of things,
Speaker 1: but that's not exactly true. It's more reasonable to point
Speaker 1: out that we learn that things are irrelevant. They start
Speaker 1: out meaningful and we learn that they're irrelevant. And the
Speaker 1: reason for that is that when you first encounter something,
Speaker 1: you don't want to assume that it's irrelevant, mostly because
Speaker 1: it might be dangerous, partly also because it might be useful.
Speaker 1: But most of the things that we encounter prove to
Speaker 1: neither be dangerous nor useful, and so that we can
Speaker 1: safely put them aside with all the other things that
Speaker 1: we don't attend to, and we don't attend to almost
Speaker 1: everything so learned. Irrelevance is unbelievably important, and latent inhibition
Speaker 1: is in some sense a way of measuring how fast
Speaker 1: someone can make something irrelevant through learning. So imagine that
Speaker 1: something surprises you and you have a big response to it,
Speaker 1: but nothing comes of it, and then the next time
Speaker 1: it pops up it doesn't surprise you at all. That's
Speaker 1: basically learning through latent inhibition. Now, one of the things
Speaker 1: we started to contemplate, this was back twenty years ago
Speaker 1: with my student Shelley Carson and Daniel Higgins, was the
Speaker 1: role that artists play in revivifying perception. So if you
Speaker 1: look at a van Gold painting of viruses, for example,
Speaker 1: or sunflowers, very famous paintings, as if the artist makes
Speaker 1: you recall how those remarkable phenomena manifest themselves, so that
Speaker 1: you can see them as if you're seeing them again
Speaker 1: for the first time. And what we thought was that
Speaker 1: perhaps what the artist was doing was stripping away your
Speaker 1: latent inhibition so that you could see things the way
Speaker 1: you saw them the first time, in all their splendor
Speaker 1: and glory before you packed them away conceptually as irrelevant.
Speaker 1: And so we tested that with creative people and found
Speaker 1: that creative people did have lower laytent inhibition, and so
Speaker 1: did people high in the personality trade openness. I love that.
Speaker 1: I should say that Hans Isaac got their first curse
Speaker 1: his soul. He got everywhere he did the personality I mean,
Speaker 1: William James. William James got everywhere first, but he in
Speaker 1: terms of personality, isa think got there first. Yeah, well, William,
Speaker 1: what's funny. I guess in some sense William James even
Speaker 1: got there before Isaac because he played around with nitrous oxide, right,
Speaker 1: So he was one of the first experimenters with hallucinogens fundamentally,
Speaker 1: and he wrote hippie poetry on nitrous oxide, noting what
Speaker 1: was likely something like the stripping away of latent inhibition
Speaker 1: as a consequence of hallucinogenic use. So yeah, it's another
Speaker 1: and all the eldest Huxley, of course too, believe that
Speaker 1: the hallucinogens in particular cleaned the doors of perception, using
Speaker 1: William Blake's terminology, so that it was possible to see
Speaker 1: everything as if you were seeing it for the first time.
Speaker 1: There's some forms of brain damage that can produce that too,
Speaker 1: So anyways, that yeah, so we tested it and well
Speaker 1: it turned out that latent inhibition does look like low
Speaker 1: latent inhibition looks like it's importantly related to creativity and
Speaker 1: to trade openness. You know. Abraham Maslow, he talked about
Speaker 1: newness of appreciation as one of the main characteristics of
Speaker 1: self actualizing people, and I think that that can be
Speaker 1: linked to leane inhibition. I'm sure you would agree it was.
Speaker 1: You just described, you know, kind of everything is you,
Speaker 1: kind of there's a wonder to the world. There's a wonder,
Speaker 1: everything is kind of fresh again. Yeah, the cost is
Speaker 1: likely something like cognitive overload. Like one of the things
Speaker 1: that Shelley Carson and I were trying to investigate when
Speaker 1: we studied the high openness pieceeople at Harvard the High
Speaker 1: Openness Students, which was a very good place to study that,
Speaker 1: was that it looks like, in order to handle the
Speaker 1: excess sensory input of low late and inhibition, it's really
Speaker 1: useful to have very high well probably high IQ but
Speaker 1: and high working memory. Those two concepts are quite overlapping,
Speaker 1: so it's difficult to distinguish between them, but it seems
Speaker 1: probable that if you're prone to be overwhelmed by sensory information,
Speaker 1: that you need the cognitive capacity to handle that, and
Speaker 1: also perhaps the and we don't know about this yet,
Speaker 1: but the personality ability to sort through that critically so
Speaker 1: you don't end up overwhelmed. So the shared vulnerability model
Speaker 1: of your student, Shelley Carson, is very relevant here, right,
Speaker 1: And I don't know do you know about I haven't
Speaker 1: kept up so well in the last couple of years
Speaker 1: with the recent work detailing out the shared vulnerability model.
Speaker 1: Shelley and I wrote a joint series of articles for
Speaker 1: the Canadian Journal of Psychiatry on shared vulnerability between openness
Speaker 1: and predisposition to schizophrenia. Yeah. I mean that's always lurking
Speaker 1: in the background when you talk about creativity, right, the
Speaker 1: share the overlap with manic depressive disorder and potentially with schizophrenia.
Speaker 1: I don't think that's ever been sorted out properly. I've
Speaker 1: written a couple of papers in the past five years
Speaker 1: on the genetics of psychosis and its overlap with creativity,
Speaker 1: which is a fascinating you know, there's there's a lot
Speaker 1: of recent research on the genetics of this stuff and
Speaker 1: showing this overlap, and it seems to be particularly associated
Speaker 1: with this openness that things relate to open and things
Speaker 1: relate to the default networks. I think the discovery of
Speaker 1: the default mode network in recent years has really allowed
Speaker 1: us to understand this. So my colleagues and I published
Speaker 1: a paper recently showing a direct link between the efficiency
Speaker 1: of the default mode network and the personality trade openness
Speaker 1: to experience. So a little bit yeah, yeah, sure, yeah,
Speaker 1: so we can now link, we can link, you know,
Speaker 1: the brain structure and network dynamics. Okay, So we used
Speaker 1: a network approach to look at the connectivity of the
Speaker 1: default network and actually analyze individual differences in the connectivity
Speaker 1: between people within the default networks as a measure of
Speaker 1: your efficiency within that particular brain network as a start,
Speaker 1: and that was correlated with the opens to experience demean
Speaker 1: But then, so what does that mean in increased connectivity
Speaker 1: within the default network which associated with okay, and what
Speaker 1: did increased connectivity signify? What do you think the functional
Speaker 1: significance of that is? Well, I think efficiency in the
Speaker 1: sense of quicker information flow between the three major sub
Speaker 1: hubs of the default mode network is the three sub
Speaker 1: networks the default mode network involve the meaning making. Meaning
Speaker 1: making seems to be huge part of this network. You know,
Speaker 1: the construction of self. People who get kind of this
Speaker 1: network knocked out, they don't even know who they are anymore.
Speaker 1: And I find that fascinating. And then there's the mental
Speaker 1: simulation part, being able to imagine the future. That's why
Speaker 1: I've called this network like the imagination network to be
Speaker 1: sexier about it, because I think default mode is like
Speaker 1: it connotes that it's kind of a passive network when
Speaker 1: it's actually a really active network, you know what I mean,
Speaker 1: Like it's not like a Yeah, it does sound like it.
Speaker 1: The default does make it sound like it's passive. Hey,
Speaker 1: did you see the work done with psilocybin showing radical
Speaker 1: increase in brain connectivity under the influence of psilocyber Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I love that. And I think that like we're on
Speaker 1: the verture of something really integrated, Jordan, because like you know,
Speaker 1: you wrote that paper with Rachel Gracio point A and
Speaker 1: Colin you mapped out the whole terrain. I love that
Speaker 1: because we've been building off that. I could send you
Speaker 1: a paper where we had a synthesis of the whole literature.
Speaker 1: We have this hierarchical model of the cognitive exploration demean
Speaker 1: where you have like cognit expiration at the top, and
Speaker 1: then you have openness and then intellect, which is the paper.
Speaker 1: You know, we showed openness into like differentially predict creative achievement.
Speaker 1: But then under that you find all sorts of facts
Speaker 1: which contradiction, which are negatively correlated with each other, even
Speaker 1: though one step higher in the hierarchy they're positively correlated. Right, Well,
Speaker 1: it seems to be going on there, right, is that
Speaker 1: there are these breed of humans that can take these
Speaker 1: contradictory modes of thought within themselves. You know, most people,
Speaker 1: the general population of all these sorts of echotomies. You're
Speaker 1: either selfish or you're not selfish. You're either compassionate or
Speaker 1: you're not. You're either. But it seems like credit are
Speaker 1: amazing and able to like harness these seemingly contradictory modes
Speaker 1: of being. And well, you know, I suspect it's probably
Speaker 1: a process of neotany. You know, I think that the
Speaker 1: creative people stay immature. I love that. Yeah, yeah, well,
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, there's a proclivity and evolution for
Speaker 1: creatures to evolve towards their neotanous form. Yeah. So, and
Speaker 1: it looks to me like the creative types are they're
Speaker 1: sustaining that plasticity they have as really early children. Maybe
Speaker 1: they're permanently locked to some degree into that pretend play
Speaker 1: mode that's so characteristic of children between the age of
Speaker 1: four and say, well maybe eleven something like that. Well,
Speaker 1: it's good to have both those things operating, you know,
Speaker 1: because often you talk to people this is really characteristic
Speaker 1: of people who are sort of on the new age
Speaker 1: end of the spectrum. Carl Jung said something interesting once
Speaker 1: about how people think. He said, for most people, a
Speaker 1: thought appears in their mind and they just accept it uncritically.
Speaker 1: So that's the thinking. And but that's not really thinking.
Speaker 1: That would be more associated perhaps with what you described
Speaker 1: as activation of this imagination network. But it's a lot
Speaker 1: more difficult to have the thoughts appear and then to
Speaker 1: take them apart. And I think it would be really
Speaker 1: worthwhile to analyze the role of Well, we know IQ
Speaker 1: is important in that obviously, because IQ just enables you
Speaker 1: to handle a larger number of variables. Hey, did you
Speaker 1: find out if that increased connectivity that you were describing
Speaker 1: was positively associated with IQ? Okay, I'm so glad to
Speaker 1: ask that, because I was going to tell you about
Speaker 1: the follow up paper. And by the way, this I
Speaker 1: want to be totally fair to my collaborators. This was
Speaker 1: led by Roger Beatty. I ran something with Martin Selgum
Speaker 1: in the last four years that Penn called the Imagination Institute,
Speaker 1: and as part of that we put out a huge
Speaker 1: grant for people to do research. So we funded some
Speaker 1: of this research and I was a co author in
Speaker 1: some of these papers, but Roger Beatty did a lot
Speaker 1: of this work. Now with that out of the way,
Speaker 1: the follow up paper showed that increased connectivity between the
Speaker 1: executive network and the default mode network was essential for
Speaker 1: creative thinking. So openess experience is not equivalent to creative thinking, right,
Speaker 1: So that the kind of one step is to show
Speaker 1: there's a link between the imagination network and openness. But really,
Speaker 1: real novel and meaningful creative cognition seem to require that
Speaker 1: both the default mode network and executive network, executive tension
Speaker 1: and the salience network. Actually the salience network is an
Speaker 1: interesting network. We could talk about the interaction between those
Speaker 1: three networks were essential for the cognition to be novel
Speaker 1: and meaningful. It's fascinating because most people in the general
Speaker 1: population it's anti correlated. Some of these networks are anti
Speaker 1: correlated like most people. For most people, it's like as
Speaker 1: soon as you focus on the outside world, you shut
Speaker 1: up your imagination or when you go imagine. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: creative people are really goot creative. They're like a good
Speaker 1: at keeping on call. That's yeah. That really is interesting
Speaker 1: because Shelley and I, back when we were doing the
Speaker 1: Creative Achievement Questionnaire research, we kind of thought that one
Speaker 1: of the things that might characterize creating people is that
Speaker 1: ability to switch back and forth between openness and critical
Speaker 1: thinking was under voluntary control. It's interesting to think the
Speaker 1: extent of which is undervoluntary control. I wonder how we
Speaker 1: could study that, Like we just know that this is
Speaker 1: what the brain networks are doing, they're toggling back and forth.
Speaker 1: But could we ask could we do reports. It's almost
Speaker 1: the sense that like creative people, as soon as you
Speaker 1: ask them to think about it, if they're in the
Speaker 1: flow state, then suddenly it evaporates. You know. It's like, yeah, well,
Speaker 1: it's it's hard to tell how much. Okay, so well,
Speaker 1: of course, defining voluntary scientifically is not a straightforward thing,
Speaker 1: but it'd be interesting to see if people do think
Speaker 1: about that as voluntary, and if it's a skill as well,
Speaker 1: if it's something that people can learn to develop, because
Speaker 1: you can to some degree teach people critical thinking, like
Speaker 1: you can teach them to look at an idea and
Speaker 1: break it apart and analyze it. So all that remains
Speaker 1: to be determined, I guess. So let's move on to
Speaker 1: some other topics. You did this really interesting study that
Speaker 1: you know I wrote about Inside of America with Christine
Speaker 1: Brophy on the personality of put. Yeah. We found we
Speaker 1: were looking, well, two things we wanted to establish. The
Speaker 1: first is we wanted to establish if there was a
Speaker 1: coherent group of political beliefs and attitudes let's say, that
Speaker 1: you could bring under the rubric of political correctness. You know,
Speaker 1: because of course you know that just because a concept
Speaker 1: pops up in the popular literature, let's say, or often
Speaker 1: even in the psychological literature, that doesn't mean that the
Speaker 1: concept has any basis. In fact, what we did was
Speaker 1: we did a standard psychometric investigation, and so we oversampled
Speaker 1: the politically correct attitude domain. We had a bunch of
Speaker 1: people come up with questions that seemed to be indicative
Speaker 1: of what people were describing when they discussed political correctness
Speaker 1: in the media, and we put together I think four
Speaker 1: hundred questions and had a very large number of people
Speaker 1: answer all of them, and then subjected the question the
Speaker 1: answers to a factor analysis and came up with a coherent,
Speaker 1: two factors solution to political correctness. One that looked like
Speaker 1: it was associated with what you might describe as the
Speaker 1: radical left, the interventionist radical left, and the other that
Speaker 1: was more associated with I would say, just left leaning liberalism.
Speaker 1: And then looked at the personality predictors and personality and
Speaker 1: cognitive predictors of of both of those. They weren't that
Speaker 1: highly correlated, interestingly enough. I mean that was partly because
Speaker 1: we used an extraction technique that decreased the correlations, but
Speaker 1: you could extract out two quite separate sets of political
Speaker 1: belief and yeah, trade agreeableness was a good predictor, which
Speaker 1: was quite interesting because it hadn't showed up that power
Speaker 1: trade agreeableness and being female as well, which was also
Speaker 1: quite interesting. I mean, we're in a situation now where
Speaker 1: it isn't obvious how men and women are going to
Speaker 1: cooperate politically, because it does look like our differences our
Speaker 1: intrinsic differences in personality and interest might divide us quite
Speaker 1: radically politically, and so God only knows how that's going
Speaker 1: to play out on the political realm. Yeah, it's a
Speaker 1: really interesting think about it. And I've try to like
Speaker 1: wrap my head around the real practical applications when I
Speaker 1: look at the data and then try to like, and
Speaker 1: I like to hear your thoughts on what you think
Speaker 1: the percentage of this could really be impactful. So, like,
Speaker 1: I looked at a figure the other day of the
Speaker 1: overlap of the distribution and compassion and there is in
Speaker 1: the general population we're not talking about, like it's a
Speaker 1: totally different plant. You know, seventy percent overlap in the
Speaker 1: b fast that you have co created with Colin, And
Speaker 1: so in that paper where Colin looked at the gender
Speaker 1: differences in the different Big ten capassion did have the
Speaker 1: largest gender difference. But if you look at the actual graph,
Speaker 1: you know, you see like seventy percent, and of course
Speaker 1: that doesn't saying about at the extremes, Well that's the problem,
Speaker 1: you know, Well, this is something that people really don't understand,
Speaker 1: and social scientists don't understand it well either, Although we
Speaker 1: should like there's two things that were not trained well,
Speaker 1: I think in its social scientists. Is one is consideration
Speaker 1: of the tails, because the tails have disproportionate impact on
Speaker 1: behavior and on political and economic outcomes. And then now
Speaker 1: there is the preto distribution problem, because most of us
Speaker 1: are taught that almost everything is normally distributed, and that
Speaker 1: actually turns out there's a lot of important exceptions to that,
Speaker 1: including creative achievement. It's not normally distributed at all. It's
Speaker 1: a standard prito distributed. Yeah, relatively small differences at the
Speaker 1: average level, and then walloping differences at the extreme. And
Speaker 1: then it's the difference is at the extreme that determined behavior. So,
Speaker 1: for example, you know, there's good evidence that the difference
Speaker 1: between men and women with regards to interest in people
Speaker 1: versus things is about one standard deviation, which is the
Speaker 1: largest psychometric difference between the genders that's been reported as
Speaker 1: far as I know. And so then you think, well, okay,
Speaker 1: it still means that men and women overlap to a
Speaker 1: large degree. But if you look at what determines someone's decision,
Speaker 1: for example, to go into a field like engineering, you
Speaker 1: probably have to be I wouldn't think what percentage of
Speaker 1: the population are engineers. I bet it's no more than
Speaker 1: two percent take five yeah, yeah, yeah, So okay, so
Speaker 1: let's say one in fifty. Maybe it's one in twenty five,
Speaker 1: but whatever, it's something like that five of the population.
Speaker 1: So let's say to be an engineer, well, you have
Speaker 1: to have a high IQ and you have to be conscientious.
Speaker 1: But then you have to be interested in things. But
Speaker 1: you don't have to be just a little bit interested
Speaker 1: in things. You have to be really interested in things.
Speaker 1: And if the average difference between men and women is
Speaker 1: only one standard deviation, which is still comparatively large, that
Speaker 1: could mean that virtually everybody who's really interested in things
Speaker 1: ends up being male. And that's exactly what you see.
Speaker 1: You see about a fifteen to one preponderance of male
Speaker 1: engineers versus female engineers. And you know, you might say, well,
Speaker 1: that's sociocultural and can be aliorated, but the evidence doesn't
Speaker 1: support that at all, because those differences maximize in the
Speaker 1: Scandinavian countries. Can you mind if I hal you there,
Speaker 1: because you just think really interesting? Okay, And by the way,
Speaker 1: I want to thank you for I've watched like one
Speaker 1: hundred of your videos to prepare for this interview. So like,
Speaker 1: even if I don't always agree with you, it helps
Speaker 1: clarify what in the hell I actually believe, So thank
Speaker 1: you for being so authentic in your opinions. I totally
Speaker 1: believe in quality of opportunity, right, And it seems like
Speaker 1: what really irks you is when people call for equality
Speaker 1: of outcome, that that's really where you're infuriate. Is a
Speaker 1: better way because I know how dangerous it is. It's
Speaker 1: unbelievably dangerous. People have no idea what they're messing with
Speaker 1: when they mess with the equality of outcome. Well, and
Speaker 1: then to have a nuanced discussion about it, let's say,
Speaker 1: because that's what we should do. It's like, Okay, the
Speaker 1: data indicate more and more strongly that there are significant
Speaker 1: differences between men and women and a variety of dimensions,
Speaker 1: and more importantly that those differences expand as cultures become
Speaker 1: more egalitarian. Okay, So then that opens up an avenue
Speaker 1: of political questions. It's like the first political question would
Speaker 1: be the first observation should be we better accept that
Speaker 1: as fact because it actually seems to be grounded in
Speaker 1: very serious science, and the scientists who discovered this were
Speaker 1: biased in the opposite direction. It wasn't what they were
Speaker 1: happy to find, No one expected it. Okay, but let's
Speaker 1: take it at face value, just for the sake of argument,
Speaker 1: and say, all right, now this opens up a minefield
Speaker 1: of political questions. The first is, so, for example, let
Speaker 1: me take a pro diversity stance just for a minute,
Speaker 1: even though it hurts my heart to do so. So
Speaker 1: it looks like if we allowed naturalistic sorting to take
Speaker 1: place merely as a consequence of people's express choices, that
Speaker 1: all of the elementary school teachers would end up being
Speaker 1: women a lot. Yeah, well, so it's going to be there,
Speaker 1: and it already is the vast majority of them. But
Speaker 1: if the sorting continues unabated, that's likely to increase that increasingly.
Speaker 1: It is what it is, but we don't know what
Speaker 1: to do about that from a sociopolitical perspective. Now, you know,
Speaker 1: hypothetically we could enforce equity of outcome equality of outcome,
Speaker 1: but it would be extremely costly, it would require a
Speaker 1: tyrannical effort on the part of the government, and there
Speaker 1: would be all sorts of unintended negative consequences. Now, those
Speaker 1: might be consequences that we're willing to bear. But we
Speaker 1: don't want to move into this under the presupposition that
Speaker 1: the differences that we're trying to eradicate are only sociocultural
Speaker 1: in nature, because clearly they're not. And you'd hope that
Speaker 1: we would get to the point where we could actually
Speaker 1: have an intelligent discussion about we don't know what to
Speaker 1: do about this, say, that's the thing, but you need
Speaker 1: a proposal what to do about it. In one of
Speaker 1: your videos that I wanted to talk to about because
Speaker 1: you actually made a concrete in one of the videos
Speaker 1: that I watched, you made a very specific argument. You said,
Speaker 1: I think that we should eliminate poverty, that we should
Speaker 1: eliminate unnecessary suffering, you know, give everyone a relative sort
Speaker 1: of baseline of income. But then after that, as the
Speaker 1: next stage, we should sort of allow the free market
Speaker 1: to sort of like allow people to then express You
Speaker 1: still stand by that way, You said that video about
Speaker 1: their function of the state, Well, I don't know, because
Speaker 1: it's so complicated, Like I don't I certainly don't think
Speaker 1: that we should rush headlong into the provision of a
Speaker 1: universal basic income because the probability that that will have
Speaker 1: radically unintended consequences is unbelievably high. So I think one
Speaker 1: of the things that would probably do, especially among unemployed
Speaker 1: hopeless people, is increase their access to drugs like oxycontinent
Speaker 1: opions see. The problem with the left wing view of
Speaker 1: improve moving economic equality is the left wingers are so
Speaker 1: obsessed with the economic side of inequality that they don't
Speaker 1: pay enough attention to the cultural side of inequality. So,
Speaker 1: if you're down at the bottom of the economic pyramid,
Speaker 1: the fact that you don't have enough money is a
Speaker 1: big problem, but it's only one of many serious problems
Speaker 1: you have. And I would say an equally serious problem
Speaker 1: is that you don't have anything productive, engaging and meaningful
Speaker 1: to do with your time. And the problem with that
Speaker 1: is that you know, I don't know if you know
Speaker 1: this or not, but it's pretty easy to get rats
Speaker 1: that are isolated in a cage singly to be addicted
Speaker 1: to cocaine. You can do it very rapidly, But it's
Speaker 1: almost impossible to get rats in a naturalistic environment addicted
Speaker 1: to cocaine. That's really interesting, it is. Yeah, well, there
Speaker 1: was there were ethologists slash behaviorists that studied rats in
Speaker 1: their natural environment, and they're quite a bit different than
Speaker 1: the genetically modified, three quarter body weight, starved single lab
Speaker 1: rat existing alone in a cage. Rats are social creatures,
Speaker 1: you know, So you think, well, yeah, yeah, Well if
Speaker 1: you were sitting alone in prison, yeah, and somebody and
Speaker 1: offered you endless access to cocaine, It's like the probability
Speaker 1: that you'd take it is extremely high, but if you
Speaker 1: have something better to do, then it's low. The problem
Speaker 1: we're going to have to deal with is more like
Speaker 1: the provision of meaningful activity to people who are being
Speaker 1: displaced by large scale socioeconomic transformations. And that's not a
Speaker 1: matter of merely redistributing income. Do you know the video
Speaker 1: I'm talking about where you talk about the function of
Speaker 1: the state, Yeah, I think. I think I was at
Speaker 1: a political convention in Canada about five years ago. You know,
Speaker 1: I've done work on what it called like, I've done
Speaker 1: work on giftedness. I've ben work on because of learning disabilities.
Speaker 1: Trying to the equality of opportunity is what I'm fighting for.
Speaker 1: That's what I'm flaighting and in terms of aligning it
Speaker 1: with the science as well, you know, like it's a
Speaker 1: beautiful thing for me when they're not a post, when
Speaker 1: there's the truth and the helping someone are you know,
Speaker 1: the same thing. You know, that's a beautiful thing, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: So this is an interesting question, is like what could
Speaker 1: the function of the state optly be to help to
Speaker 1: make sure that there's a quality of individual expression. I
Speaker 1: guess that's what we're talking about here. Well, that's written.
Speaker 1: That is a fundamental question, I mean million dollar Yeah. Well,
Speaker 1: one of the things the state does quite effectively is
Speaker 1: invest in universally accessible infrastructure. So everybody benefits from safe,
Speaker 1: clean streets, right, everybody benefits from an active cultural meal U.
Speaker 1: Like a city like Montreal is a really good example
Speaker 1: that is extraordinarily culturally active. There's festivals going on there
Speaker 1: all the time, and a lot of them are outside,
Speaker 1: a lot of them are free. Everyone benefits from that.
Speaker 1: Education is a good, hypothetically a good place for the
Speaker 1: state to invest with regards to equality of opportunity, although
Speaker 1: it disproportionately benefits people who are on the upper end
Speaker 1: of the cognitive distribution. It's hard to escape from that.
Speaker 1: A So that's a whole fier topic. Oh yeah, that's
Speaker 1: for sure. Back to the intrinsic difference issue is like
Speaker 1: we don't really know what the political impact act is
Speaker 1: of the fact that men and women seem highly likely
Speaker 1: to sort themselves out into different occupations if we just
Speaker 1: allow them free choice, because no one has thought that.
Speaker 1: No one thought that was what was going to happen,
Speaker 1: you know. And the bloody radical leftists are fighting this
Speaker 1: like mad because they insist that all these differences are
Speaker 1: socio cultural. But the problem is, it doesn't look like
Speaker 1: they are, like all these politics and fractions, right, individual
Speaker 1: difference is what is what fascinates me. People are complex systems.
Speaker 1: Every one of us is a complex system of lots
Speaker 1: of personality, traits, motivations, et cetera. And you know, there
Speaker 1: are people who score high in compassion regardless of whether
Speaker 1: you're male or female. A lot of I score high
Speaker 1: in compassion. I heard you say you score high on
Speaker 1: compassion in one of your videos, you know, when you
Speaker 1: went through the bfas. So it's not like we're saying, like,
Speaker 1: you know, you have to be female to be compassioned.
Speaker 1: It's funny. With the politically correct research we did, we
Speaker 1: did find that a lot of the predictive power, a
Speaker 1: lot of what was predicting affiliation with politically correct standpoint
Speaker 1: was trait agreeable to, but being female was an additional predictor.
Speaker 1: And that was really strange because most of the time,
Speaker 1: and I'm sure this is the case with the literature
Speaker 1: that you've investigated as well, most of the time, if
Speaker 1: you look at sex differences in a particular outcome, you
Speaker 1: can get rid of them by controlling for temperament. Most
Speaker 1: of them look like we couldn't know there was an
Speaker 1: additional effective, there was an additional effect sex. Yeah. Did
Speaker 1: you look at the beefest? Did you look at politeness
Speaker 1: versus compassion? Yes, we did, but I can't It's been
Speaker 1: a while since I reviewed the paper, and I can't
Speaker 1: bring it to mind. I think it was driven mostly
Speaker 1: by compassion if I remember correctly. Yeah, And it makes sense,
Speaker 1: you know, because I think that what's happening on the
Speaker 1: end of the spectrum, let's say, where political views are
Speaker 1: driven by compassion, is if compassion is primarily a dimension
Speaker 1: that's there to facilitate intense relationships between individuals and their dependence,
Speaker 1: which kind of looks to me like what compassion does
Speaker 1: is that so you know, you have compassion for an infant,
Speaker 1: or you have compassion for someone who's elderly and unwell.
Speaker 1: If you're a very compassionate person. It's very easy to
Speaker 1: take the side of the downtrodden and to look for
Speaker 1: a perpetrator or cause, and lots of time that's extremely useful. Right,
Speaker 1: If you're taking care of an infant and the infant
Speaker 1: is in distress, the first thing you should be doing
Speaker 1: is scanning the environment for the cause and eliminating it.
Speaker 1: One unanswered question is, well, what happens when you scale
Speaker 1: up that personality attribute and it starts to operate politically.
Speaker 1: See here's the thought for you. Tell me what you
Speaker 1: think about this. Yeah, I think that we have two
Speaker 1: traits that orient us in the social world. I think
Speaker 1: agreeableness orients us in small groups and conscientiousness orients us
Speaker 1: in large, impersonal groups. And that the switch point, the
Speaker 1: point where you transition from an agreeable viewpoint to a
Speaker 1: conscientious viewpoint, is indeterminate. Way. Is there sex difference on
Speaker 1: consciousness or males higher? And yeah, it's a bit. No.
Speaker 1: Women are a little more orderly and men are a
Speaker 1: little industrious. Industrial. Well, yeah, I was gonna ask industrious
Speaker 1: in particular because Roy Balmeister made a similar you could
Speaker 1: link that to Roy Balmeischer's argument and what are men
Speaker 1: good for? I think that's the title of the book.
Speaker 1: He argues that that's the major sex difference, that it's
Speaker 1: not that like men or women are better than each other.
Speaker 1: It's that like there have been different motivations in terms
Speaker 1: of how we want to help people, and a lot
Speaker 1: of men have tended throughout course of history to wanting
Speaker 1: to help, you know, like huge social networks, have huge
Speaker 1: social networks. And I wonder if that's a difference in
Speaker 1: exactly what you're saying between well, I think it might be.
Speaker 1: I think it might be. Well, look, human beings are strange.
Speaker 1: First of all, there's no animals water for conscientiousness. Yeah,
Speaker 1: oh was that right? I've never seen one. Oh that's
Speaker 1: so interesting. You know, it's funny. I was trying with
Speaker 1: Colin the other day. He said that they just found
Speaker 1: a correlation between the salience network and conscientiousness, and that's
Speaker 1: not really well evolved in other animals. That's that's just interesting.
Speaker 1: So look, if you think about it this way, if
Speaker 1: you think that, imagine that there's a human niche that's
Speaker 1: distinguished as for animals. And I mean obviously there is,
Speaker 1: but I mean that one of the distinguishing elements is
Speaker 1: that we can produce groups whose size exceeds that of
Speaker 1: our primate cognitive capacity. So, you know, I think it's
Speaker 1: Dunbar's work indicates that with human beings, our tribes tend
Speaker 1: to fractionate when they exceed about a group of about
Speaker 1: two hundred. But obviously we can produce groups that are
Speaker 1: much much larger than that that are functional. But what
Speaker 1: that means is that those groups have to operate on
Speaker 1: principles that are outside of the networks that other primates
Speaker 1: would use to organize themselves socially. And I think that's
Speaker 1: where conscientiousness kicks in well. And if you look at
Speaker 1: what predicts performance in bureaucracies, it's conscientiousness. It's not agreeableness.
Speaker 1: In fact, agreeableness is slightly correlated negatively with managerial performance,
Speaker 1: and so I think once a group exceeds the size
Speaker 1: where it's familiar, then you have to use a different
Speaker 1: ethical system to cope with it, and that's conscientiousness. I
Speaker 1: think one of the problems with what's happening to us
Speaker 1: politically right now is that we're trying to implement agreeableness
Speaker 1: as a political trait, and I don't think it functions
Speaker 1: well in large groups. I hear that argument. I think
Speaker 1: sometimes some of the things that you are perceiving as
Speaker 1: relevant to the agreeableness. To me, it might be actually
Speaker 1: something different. And let me elaborate what I mean. So,
Speaker 1: I've done some research late. I realized that there's no
Speaker 1: scale of pathological altruism. It's a construct that Barbara Oakley
Speaker 1: has written about. But I wanted to do systematic research
Speaker 1: on this. I think this is relevant to this conversation. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and so I constructed a reliable and valid scale of
Speaker 1: pathological altruism. And it is negatively correlated with agreeableness and compassion.
Speaker 1: We're not talking about it's in that domain. What did
Speaker 1: you find were the defining characteristics of pathological altruism? Okay,
Speaker 1: So we looked at grandiose narcissism versus vulnerable narcissism. I
Speaker 1: am so fascinated with that distinction. I don't think vulnerable
Speaker 1: narcism has got as much attention in the literature. We
Speaker 1: found aboutero point six point seven correlation between pathological altroids
Speaker 1: and vulnerable narcissism. Oka And Okay, vulnerable narcissism is this
Speaker 1: They called it the psycholano It's called a closet narcisism,
Speaker 1: where it's like you have these grandiose fantasies inside and
Speaker 1: you have entitlement, so you score score sky high on entitlement. However,
Speaker 1: you don't present yourself that way. You present yourself as
Speaker 1: really vulnerable. So we find that the grandiose narsis vulnevaris.
Speaker 1: They score just as high on the Grandiose Fantasies questionnaire
Speaker 1: and entitlement subscripe. What differentiates them is trait neuroticism. That's
Speaker 1: the thing that differentstrates them. So whereas graandios narisism is
Speaker 1: cort with much lower neuroticism, vulnerable narsism almost perfectly correlated
Speaker 1: with high neuroticism. Almost perfectly correlated. Oh, how correlated. One
Speaker 1: of my collaborators who on that paper, he wrote another
Speaker 1: paper with the title Vultan Narcissism is mostly just neuroticism.
Speaker 1: We're talking about if you do a structural model, we're
Speaker 1: talking literally almost perfectly correlated. The only thing that additional
Speaker 1: variance that's explained is some antagonism. Like I said, entitlement
Speaker 1: for instance. It's so it's a subset of highly new
Speaker 1: erotic people who also have developed a sense of entitlement,
Speaker 1: entitlement and a sort of interpersonal antagonism towards others. So
Speaker 1: we're not talking about yeah, that's man, you guys are
Speaker 1: really onto something there. Oh great, great, yeah, yeah, I
Speaker 1: alreally think so. I mean, the question is whether or
Speaker 1: not you're just fleshing out neuroticism with those sorts of correlations,
Speaker 1: or whether you've got a subset of people in there
Speaker 1: who have taken neuroticism to the next step. I don't
Speaker 1: think it's synonymous with neuroticism, because most people who present
Speaker 1: themselves with high neurosism to the therapists, as you know,
Speaker 1: they are depressed, not like they have this grandiose fantasies
Speaker 1: and entitlement early developmental experience. It seems to be a
Speaker 1: really interesting moderator we found. We found that those who
Speaker 1: were told that they're worthless in childhood or that were
Speaker 1: actually in some sense did experience some sort of trauma
Speaker 1: in their childhood that seems to actually correlate with later on.
Speaker 1: And I think that, you know, from a clinician perspective,
Speaker 1: you know, we want to help these individuals integrate healthily
Speaker 1: in a society. And I think maybe that's where your
Speaker 1: responsibility argument comes into play. Well, the union idea behind
Speaker 1: that was that those grandie those fantasies were compensations, right,
Speaker 1: and that within them there is the seeds in some
Speaker 1: sense of a developmenttal pathway. So if someone is oppressed
Speaker 1: and put down continually and they develop compensatory fantasies, the
Speaker 1: fantasies are you can think about them as the manifestation
Speaker 1: of that imagination network trying to lay out an alternative
Speaker 1: mode of being. But then those fantasies have to be
Speaker 1: subject to critical analysis so they don't become dwelling places
Speaker 1: or reasons for bitterness in relationship to the world. We
Speaker 1: just can't full circle in the sense that in a
Speaker 1: ways it's like the start of this discussion, you know,
Speaker 1: like this interplay, dynamic interplay between imagination and then rationality
Speaker 1: and well, the problem with those fantasies, well, the problem
Speaker 1: with those fantasies is that they're not decomposed. So like,
Speaker 1: if you're dealing with someone clinically and they have these fantasies,
Speaker 1: then you might think about them as a starting place
Speaker 1: for how they could modify their life. So the fantasy
Speaker 1: is saying, you know, the fantasy is serving as a
Speaker 1: counterpart to the painful reality. The painful reality is downtrodden neuroticism.
Speaker 1: The fantasy is as far on the other end of
Speaker 1: the scale as like it balances the pathology by putting
Speaker 1: something on the other end of the scale that's equally
Speaker 1: far away. But then you have to help the person
Speaker 1: take a critical look at the fantasy and start to
Speaker 1: make it a reality instead of just a fantasy, and
Speaker 1: to lay out a strategic plan for doing that exactly exactly,
Speaker 1: you know. I mean, look, we were all human, Like
Speaker 1: I personally went through a stage. I think when I
Speaker 1: was in my early twenties, I was so insecure, like
Speaker 1: I wanted to be like academic acad I wanted to
Speaker 1: like that was my way of proving that I was smart,
Speaker 1: and that wasn't healthy, you know, And like I get it,
Speaker 1: but I also get, you know, the value of when
Speaker 1: I really decided to take some of these grandiose fantasies
Speaker 1: I had of like being academy, and I say, well, look,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm going to just take it out of
Speaker 1: my head and I'm going to like work really freaking hard.
Speaker 1: I mean, I was in special education as a kid,
Speaker 1: because I did an auditory disability. Yeah, but when I
Speaker 1: was really young, at one point, I just took one
Speaker 1: hundred percent responsibility for that situation. Okay, so you took
Speaker 1: the right route out of that. Those fantasies, like you
Speaker 1: can think of those fantasies as part of the attempt
Speaker 1: by the mechanism that generates creativity to lay out a
Speaker 1: pathway forward. The problem is is when people dwell in
Speaker 1: the fantasies and dwell on the fantasies instead instead of
Speaker 1: breaking them down into a strategic plan and realizing them,
Speaker 1: which is what a good therapist should help someone with. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: I'm sure you've done that in your practice. You're in
Speaker 1: practice over twenty years or yeah, yeah, I'm sure. Yeah. Well,
Speaker 1: that's also what happens with our Future Authoring program, because
Speaker 1: what we really ask people to do in the Future
Speaker 1: Authoring Program is to generate a compensatory fantasy. No, we say, well,
Speaker 1: lay out how your life could be improved. Then imagine
Speaker 1: what your life would be like if all those improvements
Speaker 1: took place. But we don't stop with that. Then we say, okay,
Speaker 1: now subject that to some critical analysis, decompose it, make
Speaker 1: it into a strategic plan, break it down into things
Speaker 1: you would do day by day and week by week
Speaker 1: so they can become real liable in the world. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean that's so sensible, right, I mean it's like,
Speaker 1: by the way this paper and I get sent to you,
Speaker 1: it's actually under a review right now. We have a
Speaker 1: whole section on the quinal complications of these findings, and
Speaker 1: you know we talked about like missings. I'd like to
Speaker 1: see it. Roy Baumo is sort of a really interesting
Speaker 1: book on I think it's the best sort of real
Speaker 1: honest assessment of evil. Have you read it Evil Inside
Speaker 1: Human Violence and Cruelty? No, I haven't read it yet. No. Now,
Speaker 1: something he talks in there because he wants to get
Speaker 1: a full understanding of all the causal forces of what
Speaker 1: we call evil. And something in there he talks about
Speaker 1: is he makes it so clear that responsibility is not
Speaker 1: the same as culpability, Like responsibility not the same thing
Speaker 1: as believed. Well, look at the situation you just described, Like,
Speaker 1: let's say that you are high in neuroticism and you
Speaker 1: were subject to bullying of a real sort and trauma
Speaker 1: when you were a kid. Well, it's not like you're
Speaker 1: culpable for that correct, but correct you need to take
Speaker 1: responsibility for it, because well, who else is going to right?
Speaker 1: You know, as a scientist, if we want to truly,
Speaker 1: truly understand a phenomenon, we need to understand all of
Speaker 1: the causal factors, and we need to do that as
Speaker 1: objectively as possible. That's not saying that we're not allowed
Speaker 1: to have compassion, Like I have immense compassion. I want
Speaker 1: to make the world a better place. I know you
Speaker 1: want to make the world a better place as well.
Speaker 1: But I think I can like kind of separate those
Speaker 1: things at different times and then try to kind of
Speaker 1: thoughtfully think through how we can integrate this. Yeah, I'd
Speaker 1: like to see the paper. I'm very interested in what
Speaker 1: you're doing. I'd like to see both of them, the
Speaker 1: one on the default network and also the one on
Speaker 1: vulnerable narcissism. I really do think that's associated with the
Speaker 1: sorts of things that I've been talking about relationship to
Speaker 1: the school shooters, for example, because they develop Grandio's compensatory
Speaker 1: fantasies and then act them out in the most pathological way.
Speaker 1: So good talking with you, good talking to Thanks your time,
Speaker 1: and let me know when this goes up And I'll
Speaker 1: tweet it in all of that sounds good. Have a
Speaker 1: good day, Okay, okay, I see ya bye. Thanks for
Speaker 1: listening to the Psychology Podcast. I hope you enjoyed this episode.
Speaker 1: If you like to react in some way to something
Speaker 1: you heard, I encourage you to join in the discussion
Speaker 1: at the Psychology podcast dot com. That's the Psychology podcast
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