Speaker 1: Welcome to the Psychology Podcast, where we give you insights
Speaker 1: into the mind, brained behavior and creativity. I'm doctor Scott
Speaker 1: Barry 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: to live in. Hopefully we'll also provide a glimpse into
Speaker 1: human possibility. Thanks for listening and enjoy the podcast. Just
Speaker 1: a quick note that today's episode is going to be
Speaker 1: a rerun. The next season of the Psychology Podcast will
Speaker 1: begin later this year. I haven't taken any break in
Speaker 1: five years of doing this podcast, so I thought it
Speaker 1: was about time to take a step back and think
Speaker 1: about how it can make us a better experience for
Speaker 1: you all. Until then, enjoy these episodes from our archives.
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 scientific papers. Doctor Peterson is also author of two books,
Speaker 1: Maps of Meaning, The Architecture of Belief and Twelve Rules
Speaker 1: for Life, An Antidote to Chaos, which is a number
Speaker 1: 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 ladent inhibition,
Speaker 1: and you had done some work on that and had
Speaker 1: found this really interesting link between leane inhibition and the
Speaker 1: personality trade openness to experience. And then you did this,
Speaker 1: you know, you did that with Shelley Carson, and then
Speaker 1: you did this work looking at to creative achievement. So
Speaker 1: you can talk a little about what is leane in
Speaker 1: amibition and how is it related to creativity. Well, a
Speaker 1: lot of what we learn, you know, you might think
Speaker 1: that you learn what things mean, and there is some
Speaker 1: truth in that, but it's more accurate in many ways,
Speaker 1: to reverse that, Like reversing so many things in psychology
Speaker 1: is useful. It's not that useful to try to figure
Speaker 1: out why people get addicted. For example, it's very useful
Speaker 1: to figure out why some people, well most people aren't
Speaker 1: addicted all the time. It's not that difficult to figure
Speaker 1: out why people are afraid. What's hard is to understand
Speaker 1: why people aren't afraid all the time. So a lot
Speaker 1: of things in psychology we get backwards and we tend
Speaker 1: to think that we learn the meaning of things, but
Speaker 1: that's not exactly true. It's more reasonable to point out
Speaker 1: that we learn that things are irrelevant. They start out
Speaker 1: meaningful and we learn that they're irrelevant. And the reason
Speaker 1: for that is that when you first encounter something, you
Speaker 1: don't want to assume that it's irrelevant, mostly because it
Speaker 1: 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 everything,
Speaker 1: So learned irrelevance is unbelievably important, and latent inhibition is
Speaker 1: in some sense a way of measuring how fast someone
Speaker 1: can make something irrelevant through learning. So imagine that something
Speaker 1: 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 goh painting of irises, 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 latent inhibition, and so
Speaker 1: did people high in the personality trade openness. I love
Speaker 1: that I should say that Hans Isaac got their first
Speaker 1: curse his soul. He got everywhere he did good personality,
Speaker 1: I mean, William James, Williamjays got everywhere first, but he
Speaker 1: in terms of personality I 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
Speaker 1: Oxideah right, So he was. He was one of the
Speaker 1: first experimenters with hallucinogens fundamentally, and he wrote hippie poetry
Speaker 1: on nitrous oxide, noting what was likely something like the
Speaker 1: stripping away of latent inhibition as a consequence of hallucinogenic use.
Speaker 1: So yeah, it's another and all the eldest. Huxley, of
Speaker 1: course too, believed that the hallucinogens in particular cleaned the
Speaker 1: doors of perception using William Blake's terminology, so that it
Speaker 1: was possible to see everything as if you were seeing
Speaker 1: it for the first time. There's some forms of brain
Speaker 1: damage that can produce that too, So anyways, that yeah,
Speaker 1: so we tested it, and well, it turned out that
Speaker 1: Layton inhibition does look like low latent inhibition looks like
Speaker 1: it's importantly related to creativity and to trade openness. You know.
Speaker 1: Abraham Maslow, he talked about newness of appreciation as one
Speaker 1: of the main characteristics of self actualizing people, and I
Speaker 1: think that that can be linked to Laten inhibition. I'm
Speaker 1: sure you would agree it was. You just described, you know,
Speaker 1: kind of everything is you, kind of there's a wonder
Speaker 1: to the world. There's a wonder, everything is kind of
Speaker 1: fresh again. Yeah. The cost is likely something like cognitive overload,
Speaker 1: like one of the things that Shelley Carson and I
Speaker 1: were trying to investigate when we studied the high openness
Speaker 1: people at Harvard, the high openness students, which was a
Speaker 1: very good place to study that was that it looks
Speaker 1: like in order to handle the excess sensory input of
Speaker 1: low late and inhibition, it's really useful to have very
Speaker 1: high well probably high IQ but and high working memory.
Speaker 1: Those two concepts are quite overlapping, so it's difficult to
Speaker 1: distinguish between them, but it seems probable that if you're
Speaker 1: prone to be overwhelmed by sensory information, that you need
Speaker 1: the cognitive capacity to handle that and also perhaps the
Speaker 1: and we don't know about this yet, but the personality
Speaker 1: ability to sort through that critically so you don't end
Speaker 1: up overwhelmed. So the shared vulnerability model of your student,
Speaker 1: Shelley Carson, is very relevant here, right, And I don't
Speaker 1: know do you know about I haven't kept up so
Speaker 1: well in the last couple of years with the recent
Speaker 1: work detailing out the shared vulnerability model. Shelley and I
Speaker 1: wrote a joint series of articles for the Canadian Journal
Speaker 1: of Psychiatry on shared vulnerability between openness and predisposition to schizophrenia.
Speaker 1: I mean that's always lurking in the background when you
Speaker 1: talk about creativity, right, the share the overlap with manic
Speaker 1: depressive disorder and potentially with schizophrenia. I don't think that's
Speaker 1: ever been sorted out properly. I've written a couple of
Speaker 1: papers in the past five years on the genetics of
Speaker 1: psychosis and its overlap with creativity, which is a fascinating
Speaker 1: you know, there's a lot of recent research on the
Speaker 1: genetics of this stuff and showing this overlap, and it
Speaker 1: seems to be particularly associated with this openness that things
Speaker 1: relate to open and things relate to the default networks.
Speaker 1: I think the discovery of the default mode network in
Speaker 1: recent years has really allowed us to understand this. So
Speaker 1: my colleagues and I published a paper recently showing a
Speaker 1: link between the efficiency of the default mode network and
Speaker 1: the personality trade openness 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 network, so as a measure
Speaker 1: of 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 increased connectivity within
Speaker 1: the default network was associated with okay, and what did
Speaker 1: increased connectivity signify? What do you think the functional significance
Speaker 1: of that is, Well, I think efficiency in the sense
Speaker 1: of quicker information flow between the three major sub hubs
Speaker 1: of the default mode network is the three sub networks
Speaker 1: the default mode network involve the meaning making. Meaning making
Speaker 1: 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. I mean, then there's the
Speaker 1: mental simulation part, being able to imagine the future. That's
Speaker 1: why I've called this network like the imagination network to
Speaker 1: be sexier about it, because I think default mode is
Speaker 1: like it connotes that it's kind of a passive network
Speaker 1: when it's actually a really active network, you know what
Speaker 1: I mean, Like, it's not like a Yeah, it does
Speaker 1: sound like a 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 verge sure of something really integrated Jordan, because like
Speaker 1: you know, you wrote that paper with Rachel Gratio point
Speaker 1: A and Colin you mapped out the whole terrain. I
Speaker 1: love that because we've been building off that. You could
Speaker 1: send you a paper where we had a synthesis of
Speaker 1: the whole literature. We have this hierarchical model of the
Speaker 1: cognitive exploration to mean where you have like cognitive expiration
Speaker 1: at the top, and then you have openness and then intellect,
Speaker 1: which is the paper. You know, we showed openness into
Speaker 1: like differentially predict, crave, achieve. But then under that you
Speaker 1: find all sorts of facets which which are negatively correlated
Speaker 1: with each other, even though one step higher in the
Speaker 1: hierarchy they're positively correlated. Right, Well, it seems to be
Speaker 1: going on there, right, is that there are these breed
Speaker 1: of humans that can take these contradictory modes of thought
Speaker 1: within themselves. You know, most people, the general population, of
Speaker 1: all these sorts of dichotomies. You're either selfish or you're
Speaker 1: not selfish. You're either compassionate or you're not you're either.
Speaker 1: But it seems like credit people are amazing and able
Speaker 1: to like harness these conrad seemingly contradictory modes of being,
Speaker 1: and well, you know, I suspect it's probably a process
Speaker 1: of neotony. You know, I think that the creative people
Speaker 1: stay immature. I love that. Yeah, yeah, well, I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, there's a proclivity and evolution for creatures to
Speaker 1: evolve towards their neotonous form. Yeah. So, and it looks
Speaker 1: to me like the creative types are they're sustaining that
Speaker 1: plasticity they have as really early children. Maybe they're permanently
Speaker 1: locked to some degree into that pretend play mode that's
Speaker 1: so characteristic of children between the age of four and say,
Speaker 1: well maybe eleven something like that. Well, it's good to
Speaker 1: have both those things operating, you know, because often you
Speaker 1: talk to people this is really characteristic of people who
Speaker 1: are sort of on the new age end of the spectrum.
Speaker 1: Carl Jung said something interesting once about how people think.
Speaker 1: He said, for most people, a thought appears in their
Speaker 1: mind and they just accept it uncritically. So that's the thinking,
Speaker 1: But that's not really thinking. That would be more associated
Speaker 1: perhaps with what you described as activation of this imagination network.
Speaker 1: But it's a lot more difficult to have the thoughts
Speaker 1: appear and then to take them apart, and I think
Speaker 1: it would be really worthwhile to analyze the role of Well,
Speaker 1: we know IQ is important in that obviously, because IQ
Speaker 1: just enables you to handle a larger number of variables. Hey,
Speaker 1: did you find out if that increased connectivity that you
Speaker 1: were describing was positively associated with IQ? Okay, I'm so
Speaker 1: glad to ask that, because I was going to tell
Speaker 1: you about the follow up paper. And by the way,
Speaker 1: I want to be totally fair to my collaborators. This
Speaker 1: was led by Roger Beattie. I ran something with Martin
Speaker 1: Selgum in the last four years that pen called the
Speaker 1: Imagination Institute, and as part of that we put out
Speaker 1: a huge grant for people to do research. So we
Speaker 1: funded some of this research and I was a co
Speaker 1: author in some of these papers, but Roger Beattie did
Speaker 1: a lot of this work. Now, with that out of
Speaker 1: the way, the follow up paper showed that increased connectivity
Speaker 1: between the executive network and the default mode network was
Speaker 1: essential for creative thinking. So openness to experience is not
Speaker 1: equivalent to creative thinking, right, So that if the kind
Speaker 1: of one step is to show there's a link between
Speaker 1: the imagination network and open us. But really real novel
Speaker 1: and meaningful creative cognition seem to require that both the
Speaker 1: default mode network and executive network executive tension and the
Speaker 1: salience network. Actually, the salience network is an interesting network.
Speaker 1: We could talk about the interaction between those two networks
Speaker 1: were essential for the cognition to be novel and meaningful.
Speaker 1: It's fascinating because most people in the general population, it's
Speaker 1: anti correlated. Some of these networks are anti correlated, like
Speaker 1: most people. For most people, it's like as soon as
Speaker 1: you focus on the outside world, you shut up your
Speaker 1: imagination or when you go imagine. Yeah, but creative people
Speaker 1: are really goot creative. They're like a good at keeping
Speaker 1: on call. Oh that's really interesting. Yeah, that really is
Speaker 1: interesting because Shelley and I, back when we were doing
Speaker 1: the Creative Achievement Questionnaire research, we kind of thought that
Speaker 1: one of the things that might characterize creative people is
Speaker 1: that ability to switch back and forth between openness and
Speaker 1: critical thinking was under voluntary control. It's interesting to think
Speaker 1: the extent to which is undervoluntary control. I wonder how
Speaker 1: we could study that, Like we just know that this
Speaker 1: is what the brain networks are doing They're toggling back
Speaker 1: and forth, but could we ask could we do reports?
Speaker 1: It's almost the sense that, like creative people, as soon
Speaker 1: as you ask them to think about it, if they're
Speaker 1: in the flow state, then suddenly it evaporates. You know,
Speaker 1: it's like, yeah, well it's hard to tell how much. Okay,
Speaker 1: so well, And of course defining voluntary scientifically is not
Speaker 1: a straightforward thing, but it'd be interesting to see if
Speaker 1: people do think about that as voluntary, and if it's
Speaker 1: a skill as well, if it's something that people can
Speaker 1: learn to develop, because you can, to some degree teach
Speaker 1: people critical thinking, like you could teach them to look
Speaker 1: at an idea and break it apart and analyze it.
Speaker 1: So all that remains to be determined, I guess. So
Speaker 1: let's move on to some other topics. You did this
Speaker 1: really interesting study that you know, I wrote about Inside
Speaker 1: of America with Christine Brophy on the personality of put Yeah.
Speaker 1: We found we were looking, well, two things we wanted
Speaker 1: to establish. The first is we wanted to establish if
Speaker 1: there was a coherent group of political beliefs and attitudes
Speaker 1: let's say that you could bring under the rubric of
Speaker 1: political correctness. You know, because of course, you know that
Speaker 1: just because a concept pops up in the popular literature,
Speaker 1: let's say, or often even in the psychological literature, that
Speaker 1: doesn't mean that the concept has any basis. In fact,
Speaker 1: what we did was we did a standard psychometric investigation,
Speaker 1: and so we oversampled the politically correct attitude domain. We
Speaker 1: had a bunch of people come up with questions that
Speaker 1: seemed to be indicative of what people were describing when
Speaker 1: they discussed political correctness in the media, and we put
Speaker 1: together I think four hundred questions and had a very
Speaker 1: large number of people answer all of them, and then
Speaker 1: subjected the question the answers to a factor analysis and
Speaker 1: came up with a coherent, two factors solution to political correctness.
Speaker 1: One that looked like it was associated with what you
Speaker 1: might describe as the radical left, the interventionist radical left,
Speaker 1: and the other that was more associated with i would say,
Speaker 1: just left leaning liberalism. And then looked at the personality
Speaker 1: predictors and personality and cognitive predictors of both of those
Speaker 1: they weren't that highly correlated. Interestingly enough, I mean that
Speaker 1: was partly because we used an extraction technique that decreased
Speaker 1: the correlations. But you could extract out two quite separate
Speaker 1: sets of political belief and yeah, trade agreeableness was a
Speaker 1: good predictor, which was quite interesting because it hadn't showed
Speaker 1: up that power trade agreeableness and being female as well,
Speaker 1: which was also quite interesting. I mean, we're in a
Speaker 1: situation now where it isn't obvious how men and women
Speaker 1: are going to cooperate politically, because it does look like
Speaker 1: our differences are intrinsic differences in personality and interest might
Speaker 1: divide us quite radically politically, and so God only knows
Speaker 1: how that's going to play out on the political realm. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's really interesting think about. And I've trying 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: bfas that you co created with Colin but and so
Speaker 1: in that paper, where Colin looked at the gender differences
Speaker 1: in the different Big ten Compassion did have the largest
Speaker 1: 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 saything 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 should. Like,
Speaker 1: there's two things that were not trained well I think
Speaker 1: in its social scientists. Is one is consideration of the tails,
Speaker 1: because the tails have disproportionate impact on behavior you're in
Speaker 1: on political and economic outcomes. And then the other is
Speaker 1: the preto distribution problem, because most of us are taught
Speaker 1: that almost everything is normally distributed, and that actually turns
Speaker 1: out there's a lot of important exceptions to that, including
Speaker 1: creative achievement. It's not normally distributed at all. It's a
Speaker 1: standard brito distributing. Yeah, relatively small differences at the average level,
Speaker 1: and then walloping differences at the extreme. And then it's
Speaker 1: 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 two to five. Yeah, yeah, yeah, So okay,
Speaker 1: so let's say one in fifty. Maybe it's one in
Speaker 1: twenty five, but whatever, it's something like that five of
Speaker 1: the population. So let's say to be an engineer, Well,
Speaker 1: you have to have a high IQ and you have
Speaker 1: to be conscientious. But then you have to be interested
Speaker 1: in things. But you don't have to be just a
Speaker 1: little bit interested in things. You have to be really
Speaker 1: interested in things. And even if the average difference between
Speaker 1: men and women is only one standard deviation, which is
Speaker 1: still comparatively large, that could mean that virtually everybody who's
Speaker 1: really interested in things ends up being male. And that's
Speaker 1: exactly what you see. You see about a fifteen to
Speaker 1: one preponderance of male engineers versus female engineers. And you know,
Speaker 1: you might say, well, that's sociocultural and can be aliorated,
Speaker 1: but the evidence doesn't support that at all because those
Speaker 1: differences maximize in the Scandinavian countries. Can you mind if
Speaker 1: I halt you there? Because you think really interesting? Okay?
Speaker 1: And by the way, I want to thank you for
Speaker 1: I've watched like one hundred of your videos to prepare
Speaker 1: for this interview, so like, even if I don't away
Speaker 1: a group you, it helps clarify what in the hell
Speaker 1: I actually believe, So thank you for being so authentic
Speaker 1: in your opinions. I totally believe in quality of opportunity, right,
Speaker 1: And it seems like what really irks you is when
Speaker 1: people call for equality of outcome. That that's really where
Speaker 1: what you're infuriate is a better way, because I know
Speaker 1: how dangerous it is. It's unbelievably dangerous. People have no
Speaker 1: idea what they're messing with when they mess with equality
Speaker 1: of outcome. Well, and then to have a nuanced discussion
Speaker 1: about it, let's say, because that's what we should do.
Speaker 1: It's like, Okay, the data indicate more and more strongly
Speaker 1: that there are significant differences between men and women and
Speaker 1: a variety of dimensions, and more importantly, that those differences
Speaker 1: expand as cultures become more egalitarian. Okay, so then that
Speaker 1: opens up an avenue of political questions. It's like the
Speaker 1: first political question would be the first observation should be
Speaker 1: we better accept that as fact, because it actually seems
Speaker 1: to be grounded in very serious science. And the scientists
Speaker 1: who discovered this were by in the opposite direction. It
Speaker 1: wasn't what they were happy to find. No one expected it. Okay,
Speaker 1: but let's take it at face value just for the
Speaker 1: sake of argument, and say, all right, now this opens
Speaker 1: up a minefield of political questions. The first is, so,
Speaker 1: for example, let me take a pro diversity stance just
Speaker 1: for a minute, even though it hurts my heart to
Speaker 1: do so. So it looks like if we allowed naturalistic
Speaker 1: sorting to take place merely as a consequence of people's
Speaker 1: express choices, that all of the elementary school teachers would
Speaker 1: end up being women a lot. Yeah, well, so it's
Speaker 1: going to be there, and it already is the vast
Speaker 1: majority of them. But if the sorting continues unabated, that's
Speaker 1: likely to increase that increasingly it is what it is,
Speaker 1: but we don't know what to do about that from
Speaker 1: a sociopolitical perspective. Now, you know, hypothetically we could enforce
Speaker 1: equity of outcome equality of outcome, but it would be
Speaker 1: extremely costly, it would require a tyrannical effort on the
Speaker 1: part of the government, and there would be all sorts
Speaker 1: of unintended negative consequences. Now, those might be consequences that
Speaker 1: we're willing to bear, but we don't want to move
Speaker 1: into this under the presupposition that the differences that we're
Speaker 1: trying to eradicate are only socio cultural in nature, because
Speaker 1: clearly they're not. And you'd hope that we would get
Speaker 1: to the point where we could actually have an intelligent
Speaker 1: discussion about we don't know what to do about this,
Speaker 1: say that's the thing, but you need a proposal what
Speaker 1: to do about it. In one of your videos that
Speaker 1: I wanted to talk to about because you actually made
Speaker 1: a concrete In one of the videos that I watched,
Speaker 1: you made a very specific argument. You said, I think
Speaker 1: that we should eliminate poverty, that we should eliminate unnecessary suffering,
Speaker 1: you know, give everyone a relative sort of baseline of income.
Speaker 1: But then after that as the next stage, we should
Speaker 1: sort of allow the free market to sort of like
Speaker 1: allow people to then express you still stand by that
Speaker 1: way you said that video about their function of the state. Well,
Speaker 1: I don't know, because it's so complicated, Like, I don't
Speaker 1: I certainly don't think that we should runs headlong into
Speaker 1: the provision of a universal basic income because the probability
Speaker 1: that that will have radically unintended consequences is unbelievably high.
Speaker 1: So I think one of the things that would probably do,
Speaker 1: especially among unemployed hopeless people, is increase their access to
Speaker 1: drugs like oxycontinent opiates. See. The problem with the left
Speaker 1: wing view of improving economic equality is the left wingers
Speaker 1: are so obsessed with the economic side of inequality that
Speaker 1: they don't 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 the 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 was at a political
Speaker 1: convention in Canada about five years go. You know, I've
Speaker 1: done work on what are called like, I've done work
Speaker 1: on giftedness. I've don work on because of the learning disabilities.
Speaker 1: Trying to the equality of opportunity is what I'm fighting for.
Speaker 1: That's what I'm flighting and in terms of aligning it
Speaker 1: with the science as well. You know, it's a beautiful
Speaker 1: thing for me when they're not a post. When there's
Speaker 1: the truth and the helping someone are you know, the
Speaker 1: 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 optity 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 that
Speaker 1: is a fundamental question, I mean, million dollar question one
Speaker 1: of Yeah. Well, one of the things the state does
Speaker 1: quite effectively is invest in universally accessible infrastructure. So everybody
Speaker 1: benefits from safe, clean streets, right, everybody benefits from an
Speaker 1: active cultural meal. You Like, a city like Montreal is
Speaker 1: a really good example that is extraordinarily culturally active. There's
Speaker 1: festivals going on there all the time, and a lot
Speaker 1: of them are outside, a lot of them are free
Speaker 1: everyone benefits from that. Education is a good, hypothetically a
Speaker 1: good place for the state to invest with regards to
Speaker 1: equality of opportunity, although it disproportionately benefits people who are
Speaker 1: on the upper end of the cognitive distribution. It's hard
Speaker 1: to escape from that. A. So that's a hard fier topic.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, that's for sure. Back to the intrinsic difference
Speaker 1: issue is like, we don't really know what the political
Speaker 1: impact is of the fact that men and women seem
Speaker 1: highly likely to sort themselves out into different occupations if
Speaker 1: we just allow them free choice, because no one has
Speaker 1: thought that. No one thought that was what was going
Speaker 1: to happen, you know. And the bloody radical leftists are
Speaker 1: fighting this like mad because they insist that all these
Speaker 1: differences are sociocultural. But the problem is, it doesn't look
Speaker 1: like they are. Like all these politics and fractions, right,
Speaker 1: individual difference is what is what fascinates me. People are
Speaker 1: complex systems. Every one of us is a complex system
Speaker 1: of lots of personality, traits, motivations, et cetera. And you know,
Speaker 1: there are people who score and compassion regardless of whether
Speaker 1: you're male or female. A lot of I score high
Speaker 1: inqussions I heard you say you score high on compassion
Speaker 1: in one of your videos, you know, when you went
Speaker 1: through the beefast. So it's not like we're saying, like,
Speaker 1: you know, you have to be female to be compassion.
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 agreeableness, 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. But
Speaker 1: most of them look like we couldn't know there was
Speaker 1: an additional effective. There was an additional effect sex. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Did you look at the befast, Did you look at
Speaker 1: politeness versus compassion? Yes, we did, but I can't it's
Speaker 1: been a while since I reviewed the paper and I
Speaker 1: can't bring it to mind. Okay, I think it was
Speaker 1: driven mostly by compassion if I remember correctly. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: it makes sense, you know, because I think that what's
Speaker 1: happening on the end of the spectrum, let's say, where
Speaker 1: political views are driven by compassion, is if compassion is
Speaker 1: primarily a dimension that's there to facilitate intense relationships between
Speaker 1: individuals and their dependence, which kind of looks to me
Speaker 1: like what compassion does is that so you know, you
Speaker 1: have compassion for an infant, or you have compassion for
Speaker 1: someone who's elderly and unwell. If you're a very compassionate person,
Speaker 1: it's very easy to take the side of the downtrodden
Speaker 1: and to look for a perpetrator or cause, and lots
Speaker 1: of time that's extremely useful. Right, if you're taking care
Speaker 1: of an infant and the infant is in distress, the
Speaker 1: first thing you should be doing is scanning the environment
Speaker 1: for the cause and eliminating it. One unanswered question is, well,
Speaker 1: what happens when you scale up that personality attribute and
Speaker 1: it starts to operate politically. See here's the thought for you.
Speaker 1: Tell me what you think about this. Yeah, I think
Speaker 1: that we have two traits that orient us in the
Speaker 1: social world. I think agreeableness orients us in small groups
Speaker 1: and conscientiousness orients us in large impersonal groups. And that
Speaker 1: the switch point, the point where you transition from an
Speaker 1: agreeable viewpoint to a conscientious viewpoint is is indeterminate. Way
Speaker 1: Is there sex difference on consciousness or males? High? And yeah,
Speaker 1: a bit. No, women are a little more orderly and
Speaker 1: men are a little more industrious industrial. Well, yeah, I
Speaker 1: was gonna ask industrious in particular because Roy Balmeister made
Speaker 1: a similar you could link that to Roy Balmeischer's argument
Speaker 1: and what are men good for? I think that's the
Speaker 1: title of the book. He argues that that's the major
Speaker 1: sex difference. That it's not that like men or women
Speaker 1: are better than each other. It's that, like, there have
Speaker 1: been different motivations in terms of how we want to
Speaker 1: help people, and a lot of men have tended throughout
Speaker 1: course of history to wanting to help, you know, like
Speaker 1: huge social networks, have huge social networks. And I wonder
Speaker 1: if that's a difference in exactly what you're saying between Well,
Speaker 1: I think it might be. I think it might be. Well, look,
Speaker 1: human beings are strange. First of all, there's no animals
Speaker 1: for conscientiousness. Yeah, Oh, was that right? I've never seen one.
Speaker 1: Oh that's so interesting, you know, it's funny I was
Speaker 1: trying with Colin the other day. He said that they
Speaker 1: just found a correlation between the salience network and conscientiousness,
Speaker 1: and that's not really well evolved in other animals. That's
Speaker 1: that's just interesting. So look, if you think about it
Speaker 1: this way, if you think that, imagine that there's a
Speaker 1: human niche that distinguishes us from animals. And I mean,
Speaker 1: obviously there is, but I mean that one of the
Speaker 1: distinguishing elements is that we can produce groups whose size
Speaker 1: exceeds that of our primate cognitive capacity. So, you know,
Speaker 1: I think it's Dunbar's work indicates that with human beings,
Speaker 1: our tribes tend to fractionate when they exceed about a
Speaker 1: group of about two hundred. But obviously we can produce
Speaker 1: groups that are much much larger than that that are functional.
Speaker 1: But what that means is that those groups have to
Speaker 1: operate on principles that are outside of the networks that
Speaker 1: other primates would use to organize themselves socially. And I
Speaker 1: think that's where conscientiousness kicks in well. And if you
Speaker 1: look at what predicts performance in bureaucracies, it's conscientiousness. It's
Speaker 1: not agreeableness. In fact, agreeableness is slightly correlated negatively with
Speaker 1: managerial performance, and so I think once a group exceeds
Speaker 1: the size where it's familiar, then you have to use
Speaker 1: a different ethical system to cope with it, and that's conscientiousness.
Speaker 1: And I think one of the problems with what's happening
Speaker 1: to us politically right now is that we're trying to
Speaker 1: implement agreeableness as a political trait, and I don't think
Speaker 1: it functions well in large groups. I hear that argument.
Speaker 1: I think sometimes some of the things that you are
Speaker 1: perceiving as relevant to the agreeables, to me, it might
Speaker 1: be actually something different. And let me elaborate what I mean.
Speaker 1: So I've done some research. 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: So I constructed a reliable and valid scale of pathological altruism,
Speaker 1: and it is negatively correlated with agreeableness and compassion. We're
Speaker 1: not talking about it's in that domain. What did you
Speaker 1: find were the defining characteristics of pathological altruism? Okay, so
Speaker 1: we looked at grandiose narcissism versus vulnerable narcissism. I am
Speaker 1: so fascinated with that distinction. I don't think vulnerable narcism
Speaker 1: has got as much attention in the literature. We found
Speaker 1: aboutero point six point seven correlation between pathological altruism and
Speaker 1: vulnerable narcissism. Okay, okay. Vulnerable narcissism is this They called
Speaker 1: it the psycholano. It's called a closet narcisism, where it's like,
Speaker 1: you have these grandiose fantasies inside and you have entitlement,
Speaker 1: so you score score sky high on entitlement. However, you
Speaker 1: don't present yourself that way. You present yourself as really vulnerable.
Speaker 1: So we find that the grandiose narsism vulnavaris, they score
Speaker 1: just as high on the Grandiose Fantasies questionnaire and entitlement subscripe.
Speaker 1: What differentiates them is trait neuroticism. That's the thing that
Speaker 1: conferentstrates them. So, whereas grandiose narisism is court with much
Speaker 1: lower neuroticism, vulnerable narcism almost perfect correlated with high neuroticism,
Speaker 1: almost perfectly correlated. Oh, how correlated One of my collaborators
Speaker 1: who on that paper, he wrote another paper with the
Speaker 1: title Vold Narcissism is mostly just neuroticism. We're talking about
Speaker 1: if you do a structural model, we're talking literally almost
Speaker 1: perfect correated. The only thing that additional variance that's explained
Speaker 1: is some antagonism, like I said, entitlement for instances. So
Speaker 1: it's a subset of highly neurotic people who also have
Speaker 1: developed a sense of entitlement, entitlement and as sort of
Speaker 1: interpersonal antagonism towards others. So we're not talking about Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's man, you guys are really onto something there. Oh great, great, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I really think so. I mean, the question is whether
Speaker 1: or not you're just fleshing out neuroticism with those sorts
Speaker 1: of correlations, or whether you've got a subset of people
Speaker 1: in there who have taken neuroticism to the next step.
Speaker 1: I don't think it's synonymous with neuroticism because most people
Speaker 1: who present themselves with high neurosism to the therapists, as
Speaker 1: you know, they are depressed, not like they have this
Speaker 1: grandiose fantasies and entitlement. Early developmental experience. It seems to
Speaker 1: be a really interesting moderator we found. We found that
Speaker 1: those who were told that they're worthless in childhood or
Speaker 1: that were actually in some sense did experience some sort
Speaker 1: of trauma in their childhood that seems to actually correlate
Speaker 1: with later on. And I think that, you know, from
Speaker 1: a clinician perspective, you know, we want to help these
Speaker 1: individuals integrate healthily in a society, and I think maybe
Speaker 1: that's where your responsibility argument comes into play. Well. The
Speaker 1: union idea behind that was that those grandiose fantasies were compensations, right,
Speaker 1: and that within them there was the seeds in some
Speaker 1: sense of a developmenttal pathway. So if someone is oppressed
Speaker 1: and put down continually and they developed 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 came 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 rationale. Ye,
Speaker 1: Well the problem with those fantasies, Well, the problem with
Speaker 1: those fantasies is that they're not decomposed. So like, if
Speaker 1: you're dealing with someone that someone clinically and they have
Speaker 1: these fantasies, then you might think about them as a
Speaker 1: starting place for how they could modify their life. So
Speaker 1: the fantasy is saying, you know, the fantasy is serving
Speaker 1: as a counterpart to the painful reality. The painful reality
Speaker 1: is downtrodden neuroticism. The fantasy is as far on the
Speaker 1: other end of the scale as like it balances the
Speaker 1: pathology by putting something on the other end of the
Speaker 1: scale that's equally far away. Then you have to help
Speaker 1: the person take a critical look at the fantasy and
Speaker 1: start to make it a reality instead of just a fantasy,
Speaker 1: and to lay out a strategic plan for doing that
Speaker 1: exactly exactly, you know, I mean, look, we were all human,
Speaker 1: Like I personally went through a stage. I think when
Speaker 1: I was in my early twenties, I was so insecure,
Speaker 1: like I wanted to be like academic. I wanted to
Speaker 1: like that was my way of proving that I was
Speaker 1: smart and that wasn't healthy, you know, and like I gues,
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
Speaker 1: hired me. I was a special education as a kid
Speaker 1: because I did an auditory disability, but when I was
Speaker 1: really young, at one point, I just took one hundred
Speaker 1: percent responsibility for that situation. Okay, so you took the
Speaker 1: right route out of that 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 of instead
Speaker 1: of 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 you're practice. You're in
Speaker 1: practice over twenty years or la. 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 comp andory fantasy. Right. No,
Speaker 1: we say, well, lay out how your life could be improved.
Speaker 1: Then imagine what your life would be like if all
Speaker 1: those improvements took place. But we don't stop with that.
Speaker 1: Then we say, okay, now subject that to some critical analysis,
Speaker 1: decompose it, make it into a strategic plan, break it
Speaker 1: down into things you would do day by day and
Speaker 1: week by week so they can become realizable 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 quinol complications of these findings, and
Speaker 1: you know we talked about like missing. I'd like to
Speaker 1: see it. Roy Baumer 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 here talks in there because he wants to get
Speaker 1: a full understand 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 well, look at the situation you just describe, 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 walt 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: Good talking with you, Good talking to you. Thanks for
Speaker 1: your time, and let me know when this goes up
Speaker 1: and I'll tweet it in all of that sounds good.
Speaker 1: Have a good day. Okay, okay, I see ya. Thanks
Speaker 1: for listening to the Psychology Podcast. I hope you enjoyed
Speaker 1: this episode. If you'd like to react in some way
Speaker 1: to something you heard, I encourage you to join in
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