Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to the Psychology Podcast with doctor Scott
Speaker 1: Barry Kaufman, where we give you insights into the mind, brain, behavior,
Speaker 1: and creativity. Each episode will feature a new guest who
Speaker 1: will stimulate your mind and give you a greater understanding
Speaker 1: of yourself, others, and the world we live in. Hopefully
Speaker 1: we'll also provide a glimpse into human possibility. Thanks for
Speaker 1: listening and enjoy the podcast. Today we have the great
Speaker 1: Glenn gear on the show. I'm really excited to introduce Glen.
Speaker 1: Glenn is a longtime friend and mentor, I would say,
Speaker 1: and officially he's the professor and chair of the Psychology department,
Speaker 1: as well as director of the Evolutionary Studies Program at
Speaker 1: the State University of New York and New Poulse. What
Speaker 1: else can I say about Glenn since I feel like
Speaker 1: this is the first interview. Glenn is a great guitarist
Speaker 1: in the band Questionable Authorities, which we'll put up a
Speaker 1: link on YouTube for and he also his life motto
Speaker 1: is life is short, play hard. Welcome Glenn, Awesome, Thank
Speaker 1: you so much, Scott. It's great to be here. Yeah,
Speaker 1: what a life motto. You know. I'm all about the
Speaker 1: value of play, right, absolutely. Have you personally looked at
Speaker 1: the evolutionary basis of play it though, I've run into
Speaker 1: some of the stuff on that in Peter Gray's work.
Speaker 1: You know, he studies education from an evolutionary perspective, and
Speaker 1: that's a huge focus of what he says our ancestors
Speaker 1: really were all about, particularly during childhood, you know, and
Speaker 1: that distinction between play and schooling and education really isn't
Speaker 1: so distinct when you look at how these things play
Speaker 1: out in pre Western eyes, the more natural kinds of societies. Yeah. No,
Speaker 1: I absolutely love that research. So your the trajectory of
Speaker 1: your career is very interesting. You didn't necessarily start out
Speaker 1: as an evolutionary psychologist. You did work on social psychology
Speaker 1: with Jack Mayer, is that right? Yeah? And personality even
Speaker 1: personality yeah. Yeah. So what I really like and I
Speaker 1: think something that we connected our mutual interest in trying
Speaker 1: to like reconcile individual differences with more universal adaptations. Would
Speaker 1: you say that's been kind of a major theme of
Speaker 1: your research or if not, you know, what are some
Speaker 1: other major themes? Yeah? I mean, I think that's absolutely right.
Speaker 1: You know, one of the great things about studying human
Speaker 1: psychology is that we can study human universals. So there's
Speaker 1: lots of things that people around the globe all do
Speaker 1: you know, we're bipedal, we stand, we're designed to walk.
Speaker 1: We have altricial children or offspring need a lot of attention.
Speaker 1: So we like babies, and we have nurturing kinds of tendencies.
Speaker 1: There's certain foods that people tend to like. There's certain
Speaker 1: foods that people tend to despise. There's lots there's emotions
Speaker 1: that people recognize regardless of who's expressing them or what
Speaker 1: culture the person is from that who's expressing them. So
Speaker 1: there's lots of things that are universal about the human animal.
Speaker 1: And that's great. We're animals, right, you didn't get the memo?
Speaker 1: Oh shoot yeah, check your inbox. I thought we're above that. Nope, nope,
Speaker 1: all animals are different than I'd argue that none is
Speaker 1: above any of the others that are all just adapted
Speaker 1: in their wrong way. Oh wow, that's so cool. So
Speaker 1: like it's not like we're above turtles. Absolutely not. Man,
Speaker 1: that's so cool. I love that. And then even within
Speaker 1: then the implication is even within humans, where we shouldn't
Speaker 1: like act as though like any of us are above
Speaker 1: anyone else, absolutely, man. I mean from the evolutionary perspective,
Speaker 1: you know, all life comes from the same origins. You know,
Speaker 1: the origin story from the evolutionary perspective, i'd say, is
Speaker 1: just as as powerful and soulful and interesting as what
Speaker 1: you might find in any religion. You know, this idea
Speaker 1: that all organisms are highly interrelated to one another, all
Speaker 1: come from a common ancestor, and there's you know, all
Speaker 1: the great biological research points to the fact that all
Speaker 1: life comes from a common ancestor. There's genetic overlap, not
Speaker 1: only obviously between humans, but between humans and other primates,
Speaker 1: but even between humans and grasshoppers and insects. There are
Speaker 1: certain specific genetic elements that are identical in humans, as
Speaker 1: you tend to find, and in lots of other kinds
Speaker 1: of life forms. So you know, it's a grand view.
Speaker 1: You know. Darwin had this phrase, there's grandeur in this
Speaker 1: view of life, and I absolutely agree with that perspective. Yeah,
Speaker 1: me too. I really do think there's wonder. There's wonder
Speaker 1: in the world itself, even without going beyond it. So yeah,
Speaker 1: your research spans so many and integrates so many different
Speaker 1: threads trying to think of priorities. What to start with first?
Speaker 1: Perhaps the best thing to start with is this area
Speaker 1: of the mutual interest something called have you heard of
Speaker 1: mating intelligence? I think I've heard of that one. Scott
Speaker 1: so Glenn Gare coined the phrase mating intelligence, right, and
Speaker 1: when did you do that? In two thousand and five?
Speaker 1: About two thousand and five. Yeah, I'd love to talk
Speaker 1: a little bit about the history of the construct of
Speaker 1: the idea. I'd be great. So when I was a
Speaker 1: graduate student at the University of New Hampshire back in
Speaker 1: the day, studying social psychology, I was working with Jack Mayer,
Speaker 1: who's the person who coined the term emotional intelligence and
Speaker 1: conducted a whole bunch of research on emotional abilities that
Speaker 1: people all have to some degree, that people vary on
Speaker 1: from one another as well. When he caused this emotional intelligence,
Speaker 1: and so I did research on that. I was very
Speaker 1: fortunate to be working with him. I also worked with
Speaker 1: Becky Warner, who was a social psychologist studying lots of
Speaker 1: different things, but particularly the nature of intimate relationships. So
Speaker 1: I was fascinated by understanding the interpersonal or the intrapersonal
Speaker 1: processes like emotional processes that we bring to relationships and
Speaker 1: just the nature of how people form relationships. This is
Speaker 1: kind of the interface of what we might call personality
Speaker 1: psychology and social psychology to some extent. Yeah, Glenn, you
Speaker 1: also integrated Freud things psychoanalytics stuff in one of your papers.
Speaker 1: What my papers did? That was my dissertation. I actually
Speaker 1: loved that paper. Yeah, thank you, Scutts. Can you talk
Speaker 1: a little bit about that paper in particular for sure dissertation?
Speaker 1: And I'll tell you that actually that got me interested
Speaker 1: in the evolutionary perspective in working on that particular paper.
Speaker 1: So there's this idea, you know, when you're doing your
Speaker 1: dissertation in grad school, depending on your advisor and your situation,
Speaker 1: you can really study something that seems interesting to you
Speaker 1: or any question that really hasn't been fully addressed by
Speaker 1: prior researchers. So someone studying relationships, I was interested in
Speaker 1: this question of the extent to which people's parents influence
Speaker 1: their partner choice. Right, So there's a sort of old
Speaker 1: voiding an idea of you know, you end up marrying
Speaker 1: someone who's just like your opposite sex parent. Is there
Speaker 1: any validity to this? And so it was pretty straightforward question.
Speaker 1: I looked at the literature to see has anyone really
Speaker 1: study that in a systematic kind of way, and it
Speaker 1: hadn't really been studied in a very systematic We collected
Speaker 1: a bunch of data from people that were early in relationships,
Speaker 1: people in their twenty is a high proportion of them,
Speaker 1: where people who were engaged to be married, for instance,
Speaker 1: We asked them to fill out a whole battery of
Speaker 1: personality measures to describe themselves their parents, their same sex parents,
Speaker 1: their opposite sex parent, their romantic partner, and their ideal
Speaker 1: romantic partner, and we essentially ran a whole bunch of
Speaker 1: advanceistics to sort of see where was their overlap and
Speaker 1: where was there not. We also had their actual opposite
Speaker 1: sex parent fill out their own measures, so we had
Speaker 1: that data, and then we had the parents of the
Speaker 1: opposite sex parent or of the romantic partner fill out
Speaker 1: their own data as well as much as we could. Wait.
Speaker 1: So not the grandparent correct, Okay, not the parent of
Speaker 1: the parent. Not the parent of the parent, right, because
Speaker 1: that'd be weird if it went all the way back
Speaker 1: to like we it's like we don't marry our parents,
Speaker 1: but we actually marry our grandparents. That would be awesome.
Speaker 1: So what we married some of the looks like you
Speaker 1: should say, right, right. So what we found essentially was
Speaker 1: that people perceived similarity when it's not really there. So
Speaker 1: that was kind of interesting. Wow, there was a lot
Speaker 1: more perceived similarity between people's partners and their parents than
Speaker 1: there was actual similarity. And people's ideal romantic partners were
Speaker 1: actually very similar to their perceptions of their parents, So
Speaker 1: very strong idealization bias going on. Is there a confound
Speaker 1: here in terms of we know, a sort of meeting,
Speaker 1: we tend to be attracted people who are similar to us,
Speaker 1: and genetically we're similar to our parents. Is there a
Speaker 1: confound there and that like maybe what is we're really
Speaker 1: just you know, we're attracted to like there's like an
Speaker 1: overlap of things that are similar between us and our parents.
Speaker 1: And it's a really good point. Gosh, I haven't thought
Speaker 1: in this detail about my dissert decades, but I'll tell
Speaker 1: you we thought carefully about that. And the fact what
Speaker 1: we did was we did what are called maybe there
Speaker 1: were hierarchical regression analyzes somethingwhere we partialed out self report
Speaker 1: ratings for exactly that purpose to see if the perceives
Speaker 1: smilarity between parents and partners was still there controlling for
Speaker 1: perceptions of the self and generally speaking, we did find that.
Speaker 1: So it's a good question and the effect sort of
Speaker 1: was still there. Wow. So the short answers that we
Speaker 1: we do tend to is just marry people who are
Speaker 1: married in a relationships subset were married, a subset were
Speaker 1: college students and dating relationships. And then this was the
Speaker 1: fun part. We went to a bridal convention no way, Yeah,
Speaker 1: to collect data. So I was I was engaged to
Speaker 1: my beautiful wife Kathy at the time, and so we
Speaker 1: were kind of doing double dipping by going to this
Speaker 1: bridle convention in Manister, Hampshire and what is a bridal
Speaker 1: convention by the way, man alive. I have a lot
Speaker 1: of ideas, but dude, you don't ever want to go
Speaker 1: to one of these. I mean it's like like a
Speaker 1: man imagine like this is like a giant convention center
Speaker 1: and then there's like a whole thing about It's like
Speaker 1: the dresses. You know, this is the dress you got
Speaker 1: to get, and then there's the cake person and it's
Speaker 1: the kind of thing. Well, at least this is my experience.
Speaker 1: You're kind of like, all right, and you wanted to
Speaker 1: sort of keep on going, but maybe your fiance wanted
Speaker 1: to sort of stop and look over things in a
Speaker 1: lot of detail. So it was a little bit interesting,
Speaker 1: but we had a good time. And I you know,
Speaker 1: I got to approach people as a doctoral student at
Speaker 1: the University of New Hampshire saying please fill out my survey.
Speaker 1: And we got some data from those folks as well,
Speaker 1: and so what do you find from them? The same thing?
Speaker 1: Pretty much? Yeah, pretty much the it kind of we went.
Speaker 1: We worked so hard to get the data from that
Speaker 1: particular sample and they were no different That sample didn't
Speaker 1: behave any any differently. Wow. So the punchline is we
Speaker 1: do there is an effecture more so than we realize. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: because of course we want to evolutionary expect me to
Speaker 1: go and downplay that, right, we don't, you know, because
Speaker 1: there's not evolutionary value in marrying your actual mother, right.
Speaker 1: So yeah, so interesting. Okay, So I know you weren't
Speaker 1: expecting to go all the way back there. Has it
Speaker 1: literally been decades, like multiple decades. I finished that my
Speaker 1: degree in ninety seven. I think that got published in
Speaker 1: two thousand and so you do the math man. We
Speaker 1: are getting older, Glenn. Yeah, holy count. Okay, so we
Speaker 1: can go move forward a little bit. So you moved on.
Speaker 1: So that was your disstation work. And then at what
Speaker 1: point did you like discover maybe Darwin or like, like
Speaker 1: when we were you doing when you start come in
Speaker 1: contact with the devilsh psychology principle? Sure, yeah, I'd be
Speaker 1: glad to talk about that. So I was a college
Speaker 1: student at the University of Connecticut back in the day.
Speaker 1: That was also decades ago. Oh wow, so we're even
Speaker 1: going before school. Yeah, this is ancient. Well was your
Speaker 1: major psychology? And like a lot of students, I thought
Speaker 1: I was going to be a therapist because I thought
Speaker 1: psychologists and therapists were synonymous, which, by the way, is
Speaker 1: what almost all incoming psychology students in college think. And
Speaker 1: I had a very it was a very strong undergraduate program.
Speaker 1: I had a great experience. I found out that there's
Speaker 1: a big scientific part to psychology and that's the part
Speaker 1: that I really fell in love with and wanted to pursue.
Speaker 1: And at some point I had a class called animal
Speaker 1: behavior with a guy named Benjamin Sachs, renowned rat behavioral researcher,
Speaker 1: and this class killed it for me. Man, there was
Speaker 1: no other class I had which had this effect. He
Speaker 1: started the class by describing basic evolutionary principles, which hadn't
Speaker 1: even been touched in any of my other psychology classes.
Speaker 1: And it was pretty straightforward. I mean, I like math,
Speaker 1: and I like to think reasonably logically, and so I
Speaker 1: kind of liked, you know, evolutionary principles and evolutionary theory
Speaker 1: makes sense, and so he kind of describes that. And
Speaker 1: then the next thing he does, he has some grad
Speaker 1: students will in a cage with these rats, and there's
Speaker 1: a male rat and a female rat, and he says,
Speaker 1: this is the very beginning of class. He just says,
Speaker 1: get a piece of paper and a pencil and just
Speaker 1: write down observations. So, okay, so there I am twenty
Speaker 1: one years old or whatever, I mean, a bunch of
Speaker 1: other kids and we're looking at it and they're having
Speaker 1: mating related behaviors right for like a half hour, and
Speaker 1: you know, this is class. This is what we're doing.
Speaker 1: The male much bigger than the female. The female tries
Speaker 1: very hard to resist the male. She puts up her claws.
Speaker 1: So why do rats have claws like that? Essentially, tries
Speaker 1: to scratch him in the face and tries to keep
Speaker 1: him off. Why didn't female humans evolve calls? Maybe they did? Oh, interesting, right,
Speaker 1: So we just take notes to so many interesting things
Speaker 1: involved in that set of behaviors and then we describe
Speaker 1: them to the professor and what the point of this was?
Speaker 1: He said, okay, and he wrote down on the board
Speaker 1: all the specific things that we had observed, and he
Speaker 1: described how every last bit of it could be understood
Speaker 1: from an evolutionary perspective. For instance, why are males bigger
Speaker 1: than females. Well, if the females are constantly fighting the
Speaker 1: males off, and this, mind you, is when they've been
Speaker 1: given a shot so that they are at their body
Speaker 1: is essentially mimicking peak estris. So even at that point
Speaker 1: she is fighting off the male as hard as she can,
Speaker 1: the larger males are going to be more likely to
Speaker 1: be able to copulates. It's among rats, so why are
Speaker 1: the male rats so aggressive? The females are fending off
Speaker 1: the males, So here's the adaptation. So for females to
Speaker 1: fend off males like that, and then the males what
Speaker 1: they end up doing is leading to an evolutionary process
Speaker 1: that leads to larger males because the smaller males would
Speaker 1: not succeed and would not successfully reproduce, So across generations,
Speaker 1: this is going to lead to relatively large males. So
Speaker 1: this is what we'd call sexual dimorphism in this particular case,
Speaker 1: males being larger than females, and it was sort of
Speaker 1: one aspect of their mating behavior after another after another.
Speaker 1: He describes from an evolutionary perspective, and I was like,
Speaker 1: this is just fantastic. It made so much sense. A
Speaker 1: few years later, at the University of New Hampshire studying
Speaker 1: emotional intelligence and relationships in the PhD program studying human behavior,
Speaker 1: and a guy named David Buss comes to visit. David
Speaker 1: Buss is a renowned evolutionary psychologist, so he's very tall.
Speaker 1: He's giant rights in all respects. So David comes and
Speaker 1: he gives a talk at UNH. He had just written
Speaker 1: a book that came out, The Evolution of Desire, and
Speaker 1: he talked about human relationship behavior the same way that
Speaker 1: Benjamin Sachs had talked about the rats. In that class
Speaker 1: I had taken a few years earlier as an undercap,
Speaker 1: and I was like, man, this makes so much sense,
Speaker 1: you know. So I sort of kept that confluence of
Speaker 1: ideas in mind, and as I became a professor of
Speaker 1: my own writ and did my own research, I really
Speaker 1: sort of became very interested in continuing research that looked
Speaker 1: at human relationships and other aspects of human behavior from
Speaker 1: the evolutionary perspective. And then why did you coin meeting
Speaker 1: intelligence and then tell me what mating intelligence is? Sure,
Speaker 1: so years later I was doing I'm really passionate about research.
Speaker 1: I've done a lot of research. I tend to bring
Speaker 1: students into my research as collaborators, which is one of
Speaker 1: the things that's made about my job and other people.
Speaker 1: You embraced me. Yeah, really, I'll always be appreciative of that.
Speaker 1: I'll never forget. Yeah, And in fact, I definitely want
Speaker 1: to talk about how you came in to the some point.
Speaker 1: But you know, so early on, when I was at
Speaker 1: here at Sunny Newpal's, I was doing a bunch of research,
Speaker 1: working with a bunch of students. We were studying various
Speaker 1: aspects of human mating from an evolutionary perspective, and at
Speaker 1: some point I realized that what Jack Mayer had done
Speaker 1: with emotional intelligence needed to be done for the concept
Speaker 1: of mating. So in mating psychology to that point, it
Speaker 1: was a little bit unclear if there was any mating
Speaker 1: psychology of individual differences. Right, So when you would read
Speaker 1: the stuff by people like David Buss, who, by the way,
Speaker 1: I have the utmost respect for, you would primarily focus
Speaker 1: on things that were human universals, so things that people
Speaker 1: like inmates. Generally speaking, people appreciate kindness and love in mates,
Speaker 1: generally speaking. Females appreciate things like markers of status and
Speaker 1: resource acquisition. Generally speaking, man appreciate markers of fertility, health,
Speaker 1: and beauty. And you know, this has led this research,
Speaker 1: and this idea has led to a landslide of research.
Speaker 1: But at some point it occurred to me there wasn't
Speaker 1: any taking into account the fact that maybe some people
Speaker 1: are better at some of these things than our others,
Speaker 1: which is kind of the idea of like emotional intelligence,
Speaker 1: kind of said, you know, people have emotional skills, but
Speaker 1: some people have extra special emotional skills. It occurred to me,
Speaker 1: why don't we look at the same thing with mating,
Speaker 1: with the idea that everyone has mating psychology, but some
Speaker 1: people might be particularly good at specialized domains psychology. Yes, anyway,
Speaker 1: you had this insight. This was the insight. Man. Wow,
Speaker 1: I just fascinated. Where are these incidents come from? Is
Speaker 1: it's sort of like all these different things you were
Speaker 1: exposed to all these years, and then like it just
Speaker 1: subconsciously like connects. You're like you're wetting the bathtub or
Speaker 1: something and then well, Rica, I'll tell you I wasn't
Speaker 1: in the bathtub. But thing I think you know about me,
Speaker 1: Scott is I'm a long distance runner and for years,
Speaker 1: ever since maybe the mid nineties, I've run typically five
Speaker 1: four or five times a week. I've run eight marathons,
Speaker 1: and I just once I started being a long distance runner,
Speaker 1: I just you know, it's something that I feel like
Speaker 1: I absolutely have to do. And I do remember I
Speaker 1: was on a morning run. It was in the winter,
Speaker 1: it was cold. I was with my dog Murphy at
Speaker 1: the time. I've never heard the story before. This is
Speaker 1: really exciting. You've never told this before. I've never told
Speaker 1: this story, and it was I remember it was like
Speaker 1: a five or six mile run that I was on
Speaker 1: and by the time I came back the whole time,
Speaker 1: I think that's what I do when when I'm out running,
Speaker 1: you know, I kind of think and I integrate and
Speaker 1: I come up with ideas and think about solutions to problems.
Speaker 1: And I came back to the house one day, I
Speaker 1: took my dog inside and I sat down at the
Speaker 1: computer and I sat mating intelligence. And I remember I
Speaker 1: came up with a research project that I do market
Speaker 1: I came up with the idea for a book and
Speaker 1: started work on an edited proposing an edited volume. Were
Speaker 1: you planning on doing that with the Jeffrey Miller at
Speaker 1: that time or did that No, So I'll tell you, yeah,
Speaker 1: so I did. I remember I came home and I
Speaker 1: had like, I was like, this is it, man, I'm
Speaker 1: going to make research on this and I'm going to
Speaker 1: work with my students and come up with a whole
Speaker 1: whole set of ideas. I'm going to do a book
Speaker 1: on this that has different scholars and edited book is
Speaker 1: one where you edit the book, but different experts in
Speaker 1: the field right chapters for the book. And I remember,
Speaker 1: I think I woke up my wife Kathy at the time,
Speaker 1: and I was like, Kat, I got this idea. You're
Speaker 1: going to love it. I had this idea about meeting
Speaker 1: intelligence exactly. So and I'd say, so, you know, as
Speaker 1: a professor, that's the most amazing job in the world.
Speaker 1: I came into my office that day, I found some
Speaker 1: of my best students and I said, here's what we're doing,
Speaker 1: you know, and we just sat down and we just
Speaker 1: started designing these research studies. And we've probably published ten
Speaker 1: studies on this topic since that time. Yeah, I remember
Speaker 1: you had already, like when I came into contact with you,
Speaker 1: you had worked on this large scale study on like
Speaker 1: error management theory, if I remember correctly, right right, right,
Speaker 1: all that. Yeah, I mean I think that was a
Speaker 1: great study. But this is the part where Scott enters,
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, so this is where like two thousand and
Speaker 1: five now or something was two thousand and five, jeez,
Speaker 1: and you came up with the theory. Wait what year
Speaker 1: was this like running thing? Oh? I think that might
Speaker 1: have been two either two thousand and four or two
Speaker 1: thousand and five. I'm not this, sir Rika moment, right,
Speaker 1: because I when I came into the picture, I had
Speaker 1: heard about this edited volume that you were playing together
Speaker 1: from Mark Mark Brackett was one of the contributors, and
Speaker 1: I was like, this sounds like the coolest things and
Speaker 1: slight spread. Oh my god. So from my perspective, this
Speaker 1: was great because I remember one day I was in
Speaker 1: my office and I get this email from some kids
Speaker 1: Scott Barry Kaufman. I don't know this person is, and
Speaker 1: it was a very well put together email and it
Speaker 1: was maybe about three paragraphs. We haven't saved at all. Oh,
Speaker 1: I'm sure I do. I'm sure I haven't said some
Speaker 1: you know. I read it and I was like, oh
Speaker 1: my god, this guy's like me. I mean it had
Speaker 1: this like you know, he had no problem reaching out
Speaker 1: to someone he never met before. He had no problem saying,
Speaker 1: here's a great idea, I'd love to work with you
Speaker 1: on it. Here's who I am, Here's what I could
Speaker 1: bring to it. And I got to tell you, Scott Man,
Speaker 1: that was it. That was so effective. I read that
Speaker 1: and I'm like, then, I look, I'm like this kids again,
Speaker 1: his PhD at Yale and psychology. There's really nothing higher
Speaker 1: than that. This guy must have what it takes. So
Speaker 1: I replied back, I think very shortly after, probably like
Speaker 1: within the hour, and I was like two minutes I said,
Speaker 1: So I'm like, I didn't say let's talk. I was like,
Speaker 1: let's do this. I didn't belete it. I couldn't belete it,
Speaker 1: you know, because every now and then you can tell
Speaker 1: by someone's communication. I'm like, this is someone I could
Speaker 1: work with for sure. So I remember you're at Yale,
Speaker 1: so I'm at in the Hudson Valley. We're about two
Speaker 1: hours apart. I said, well, why don't we meet in Danbury,
Speaker 1: which is a town in Connecticut in the middle. And
Speaker 1: I remember, I think I was watching my daughter, Megan
Speaker 1: at the time. She was in kindergarten, so I came
Speaker 1: along to the meeting. I think brought Meg remember she
Speaker 1: had her kindergarten homework. Seriously, oh my god, I remember
Speaker 1: you had done so much research on how to publish
Speaker 1: a book. Because I don't know if your reader's out
Speaker 1: there know this about you or not, but before you
Speaker 1: became an expert at publishing awesome books, you thought very
Speaker 1: hard about how I'll tell them my secrets. That's a
Speaker 1: good point, it man, And that was and it was exactly.
Speaker 1: You had done all the research that there was no
Speaker 1: way I was going to have time to do. And
Speaker 1: I'm like, this is such a good match. Yah. Scott
Speaker 1: had done all this research on how to publish a book,
Speaker 1: and I had this great idea or this idea that
Speaker 1: Scott and I thought was great, and we started collaborating
Speaker 1: at that point. So at that point I asked Scott
Speaker 1: to contribute a chapter to my edited book, which I
Speaker 1: ultimately brought Jeffrey Miller on as co editor. So that
Speaker 1: pacific moment was Jeffrey not officially a co ownitor of
Speaker 1: the book. Not at that particular point. I would say
Speaker 1: about let's say the project went from about two two
Speaker 1: thousand and four it was published, and I think two
Speaker 1: thousand and eight, by the way, that's how long these
Speaker 1: projects take. Yeah, I mean you've joined on about two
Speaker 1: thousand and six, about midway. Well, our book just came
Speaker 1: out in twenty thirteen, right, thirteen, right right in this
Speaker 1: meeting in Danbury in two thousand and five was step one. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: I just was so excited that you responded and wanted
Speaker 1: to pursue this. So what happened is that we worked
Speaker 1: on a popular version of the book separate from your
Speaker 1: I just want to get credit separate from your edited book, right,
Speaker 1: And so your edited book, I think has made quite
Speaker 1: a contribution to the field of you know, a lot
Speaker 1: of people cite a lot of people. A lot of
Speaker 1: articles from there are really good. You have probably Marine
Speaker 1: Solvent's one of her last. It was her published work.
Speaker 1: It was actually her last. In fact, she and I
Speaker 1: so I don't know if people know who Marino Sullivan was,
Speaker 1: but she was one of the greats. She was one
Speaker 1: of the great social psychologists. And when we met her,
Speaker 1: she was a little bit older, and she had published
Speaker 1: with Paul and maybe dozens of articles on the social
Speaker 1: psychology of emotion and deception. She was it, I mean,
Speaker 1: Marino Sullivan was it. And she became very interested in
Speaker 1: how all the things she had studied her career related
Speaker 1: to the mating process near the end of her career,
Speaker 1: so she contributed a terrific chapter to our book, and
Speaker 1: she and I got along great. We had plans to
Speaker 1: do some studies together, actually, but she passed away prematurely
Speaker 1: soon after that book. But yeah, so that book was
Speaker 1: it was a really fun project. It has some very
Speaker 1: interesting contributions. It's very scholarly. I mean, one of the
Speaker 1: only criticisms I tend to hear of it is that
Speaker 1: it's written across the chapters at are pretty high level.
Speaker 1: But that's you know, the point of that kind of book.
Speaker 1: And then so that was Mating Intelligence, published in two
Speaker 1: thousand and eight. And then so Scott and me we
Speaker 1: probably do a whole podcast on the history of our
Speaker 1: book together. But you know, we eventually published it with
Speaker 1: Oxford University Press, which we were so pumped about. And
Speaker 1: if the first one's Mating Intelligence, then this book had
Speaker 1: to be idol Mating Intelligence Unleashed. And I gotta say, man,
Speaker 1: that's been that was your idea, the unleashed part in
Speaker 1: In fact, the publisher at some point said, that's kind
Speaker 1: Do you really want the word unleash in there? Remember
Speaker 1: my answers got like, well, hell yeah or something like that.
Speaker 1: It's saying, well, I'll tell you that a lot of
Speaker 1: people find it really funny when I when I mentioned like,
Speaker 1: I'll say, like, I was in class the other day
Speaker 1: and I was, you know, because I'm teaching a class
Speaker 1: positive psychology, and I was like, you know, and there's
Speaker 1: a book that relates to some of the stuff I'm
Speaker 1: talking about. It's called Meeting Intelligence. And I said Unleashed
Speaker 1: and they found it really funny. Yeah, yeah, No, it's
Speaker 1: a great book title. It's a great book. If I
Speaker 1: don't say so myself. Right, So for the rest of
Speaker 1: this podcast, I know that a lot of people, a
Speaker 1: lot of listeners are probably at this point like, Okay,
Speaker 1: I really don't care about you guys, Like what is me? Like?
Speaker 1: How can I use make intelligence in my own life
Speaker 1: to achieve my own mating goals? Not everyone? Maybe their
Speaker 1: goals are not just get laid. Maybe it's to have
Speaker 1: us God forbid, a meaningful relationship with someone that lasts
Speaker 1: a long time and makes you feel both both fulfilled. Right,
Speaker 1: made intelligence construct is Do you think it's relevant to
Speaker 1: all these different levels of analysis? Gon? Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: outcomes or goals. I think I think it definitely does.
Speaker 1: And I think that our book, even though it was
Speaker 1: designed as sort of a popular book and had kind
Speaker 1: of a witty title, one of the comments I get
Speaker 1: on our book is that it is chock full of
Speaker 1: data and chock full of research. So it's a pretty
Speaker 1: intense book. Actually it gets at every I don't know
Speaker 1: about every aspect of the mating domain, but it's very
Speaker 1: I think it's pretty comprehensive. Yeah, And I think that
Speaker 1: gets at the idea for sure. We have many references.
Speaker 1: Do we have in the New York Post reporter. We
Speaker 1: had a thousand references in there, he says, the py
Speaker 1: reviewed version of the game or something, or the New
Speaker 1: York Times. Right, yeah, I think that's a confident. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So it's pretty income intense. But I think you know,
Speaker 1: what it comes down to is if you think about
Speaker 1: mating intelligence defined, and that was really how we started
Speaker 1: the book. As the set of cognitive processes that bear
Speaker 1: on the mating domain. You got a big canvas to
Speaker 1: work with, you know, because you have all the things
Speaker 1: related to presenting yourself in a mating context, how can
Speaker 1: I attract a mate? All the things related to finding
Speaker 1: a good mate, which is a major issue from an
Speaker 1: evolutionary perspective, because if you're finding someone that you're going
Speaker 1: to ultimately reproduce with having that person help with the
Speaker 1: process and having offspring that are themselves able to effectively
Speaker 1: reproduce as evolutionarily critical. There's a lot of deception the
Speaker 1: mating domain. Right. Oh, it turns out, Scott, there's research
Speaker 1: others see each other tons of it, you know, And
Speaker 1: so that's the whole thing too, Like there's a lot
Speaker 1: of research on people deceived in specific kinds of ways.
Speaker 1: So males tend to overemphasize their money, their assets, their status.
Speaker 1: There's a great study by another collaborator of ours, Dan Krueger,
Speaker 1: where he looked at credit card usage and by the way,
Speaker 1: don't overrun your credit cards. There's a little lesson for
Speaker 1: the young males out there, but young men are most
Speaker 1: likely of different demographic groups to overrun their credit cards
Speaker 1: and run into debt. But what you do when you
Speaker 1: run into debt like that is you can present yourself
Speaker 1: as having more than you actually have. Right, so you
Speaker 1: can drive a nicer car than you can really afford,
Speaker 1: you can have nicer clothes than you can actually afford,
Speaker 1: and these things might be signals that show you have
Speaker 1: a lot of resources. So there's something very deceptive about that,
Speaker 1: you know. But this kind of like it, kind of
Speaker 1: likes it paints the portrait as though, like women are superficial.
Speaker 1: Well do you think they're sitting at aculcost level they
Speaker 1: really care about things like that? I think I wouldn't
Speaker 1: necessarily put it that way. I think what I'd say
Speaker 1: is that across evolutionary time, women who ended up with
Speaker 1: men who had high access to resources were more successful
Speaker 1: than other women. So there's kind of like an adaptation there.
Speaker 1: There's got to be an adaptation there. Very strong universal
Speaker 1: and femail desires and may are that women tend to
Speaker 1: care about the ability to acquire resources and the ability
Speaker 1: to demonstrate that one has resources. And this has been
Speaker 1: shown cross culture. Yeah, so David Boston and David Schmidt
Speaker 1: in particular have done extensive cross cultural studies documenting that.
Speaker 1: So I'd say that if men over demonstrate sort of
Speaker 1: deceive how much they have, that sort of is playing
Speaker 1: into the sea ball tendency of females to sort of
Speaker 1: seek out markers of high resources. And maybe it'd be
Speaker 1: helpful to the listener to distinguish between distal and proximal causes.
Speaker 1: I find this is just over and over again a
Speaker 1: common point of contention for people who have criticism of
Speaker 1: the evlutionary psychology approach. So probably is good to just
Speaker 1: like get that out of there right now. Sure, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think that's a really important point. Knock get that
Speaker 1: out of there, get that out there, sorr out there. So, Yeah,
Speaker 1: anytime you have any behavior, there's always multiple causes of
Speaker 1: the behavior. One of the biggest mistakes I tend to
Speaker 1: among students and often even among academics, is when you
Speaker 1: hear someone argue this is the cause of the behavior,
Speaker 1: and this is not. In fact, every behavior has multiple causes,
Speaker 1: and sometimes causes exist at different levels. So if we
Speaker 1: think about, for instance, why do the female rats try
Speaker 1: to fend off the males during the mating process? Right, Well,
Speaker 1: on one hand, the male coming toward her is an
Speaker 1: immediate stimulus that brings about this chain of behavior, So
Speaker 1: that's an immediat or what we might call approximate cause
Speaker 1: of the behavior. Additionally, there are hormones and physiological processes
Speaker 1: that underlie that behavior as well. But from an ultimate perspective,
Speaker 1: we can also say, well, why did this ultimately evolve,
Speaker 1: which is often the same as asking what is adaptive
Speaker 1: about this behavior? How did it help the ancestors of
Speaker 1: this animal survive, animal reproduce? Right, so not necessarily adaptive
Speaker 1: to today? Correct? Okay, right, that's such a point of confusion.
Speaker 1: I think that people, I think you're absolutely right. So
Speaker 1: we need to realize that a lot of times when
Speaker 1: evolutionary psychologists use the word adaptive, they are talking about
Speaker 1: something that would have helped our ancestors survive and reproduce.
Speaker 1: Under ancestral conditions. So there's all these like things in
Speaker 1: our current environment that we didn't have in our The
Speaker 1: credit cards didn't exist. I don't think it makes the cavemen,
Speaker 1: but we have these things that kind of like activate
Speaker 1: some like deep seated drives and instincts in modern day forms.
Speaker 1: Is that okay way to put it? Yeah? I think
Speaker 1: that's a good way to put it. And there's things
Speaker 1: now that did not exist under anccestral conditions that might
Speaker 1: be what we call evolutionary mismatches, right, So cavemen right
Speaker 1: to put it sort of simply, cave men were not
Speaker 1: able to if they had only thirty rocks. They were
Speaker 1: going to have a hard time showing someone that they
Speaker 1: had fifty rocks, right, because you know, they couldn't do that.
Speaker 1: But nowadays, if someone only has a salary of twenty
Speaker 1: thousand dollars but has some you know, some powerful credit cards,
Speaker 1: they can show themselves as someone who has a salary
Speaker 1: that's much higher than that. So we're able due to
Speaker 1: modern technologies which mismatch the technologies that our ancestors had.
Speaker 1: People can deceive themselves in mating relevant ways, in ways
Speaker 1: that are not really evolutionarily natural. This is expanded or
Speaker 1: compounded by modern technologies, so things like Tender and okay,
Speaker 1: Cupid and things like that. When people are using electronic
Speaker 1: media to engage in the mating domain, suddenly everything's different. Right,
Speaker 1: So you can totally edit your picture, you can edit
Speaker 1: your profile, you can write and rewrite things you can
Speaker 1: edit under ancestral conditions or even fifteen twenty years ago,
Speaker 1: when you just met someone in a mating relevant context,
Speaker 1: you look like what you look like, and you said
Speaker 1: what you said. You know. So there's a lot of
Speaker 1: ways that modern technology. I'm not saying that they're bad,
Speaker 1: but i am saying that in a lot of ways
Speaker 1: they mismatch the kinds of conditions that existed under ancestral times.
Speaker 1: And I'll tell you probably one of the most intriguing
Speaker 1: examples of this has to do with women's cosmetics. So males,
Speaker 1: for various reasons, males, and how do you know how
Speaker 1: do you know about women's cosmetics? Oh, my wife gets
Speaker 1: cosmopolit magazine. Okay, right, but interesting when you think about cosmetics,
Speaker 1: cosmetics is an enormous industry. The average woman has been
Speaker 1: in this country, I think spend several hundred dollars a
Speaker 1: month or some crazy amount on this stuff. The industry
Speaker 1: itself is billions and billions of dollars. What is the
Speaker 1: cosmetic industry? Right? So, what women do is with lipstick
Speaker 1: and anti wrinkle cream and hair coloring, they're presenting themselves
Speaker 1: physically in a way essentially that makes them look younger
Speaker 1: to match male's desires for relatively younger No. I mean
Speaker 1: it's to really look young for an adult. So if
Speaker 1: they're eighty, it like, I make you look like forty
Speaker 1: sort of thing. I think it's really good cosmetics that
Speaker 1: could do that. So when you look at it, when
Speaker 1: you see what are women buying, it tells a very
Speaker 1: clear story. Right, lipstick makes lips look relatively full and robust.
Speaker 1: If you look at the lips of a relatively old woman, right,
Speaker 1: thin wrinkle cream you don't ever see get more wrinkle
Speaker 1: wrinkle cream. It's always a bit of your wrinkle wrinkle
Speaker 1: cream to match the skin. That's more typical of women
Speaker 1: that are more likely to be in their fertile Oh,
Speaker 1: so there it is. There it is. It's the fertile thing. Okay, gotcha.
Speaker 1: When you go to the hair coloring aisle, you see
Speaker 1: stuff to make the hair look blonde, red brown. You
Speaker 1: don't tend to see a lot of gray hair color
Speaker 1: as an exact But that's interesting because gray among males
Speaker 1: is considered A lot of felos find that very Well,
Speaker 1: what's the difference there, right, Yeah, Well, well, males have
Speaker 1: a very different situation because for females there's menopause. So
Speaker 1: females have a very discrete window in which they can reproduce,
Speaker 1: whereas males And it's kind of akey to think about,
Speaker 1: but males can effectively reproduce essentially into their old age, right.
Speaker 1: And then so because of that, it's there's less pressures
Speaker 1: on women to be particularly attracted to younger men as
Speaker 1: there are pressures on men to be attracted relatively younger women. Okay, Okay,
Speaker 1: So all this stuff we're telling about, that's one aspect
Speaker 1: of meeting intelligence. I think that a key function, a
Speaker 1: key feature, I should say, of meeting intelligence is all
Speaker 1: these non physical aspects of humans that make us immensely
Speaker 1: sex scene attractive to each other. We differ from a
Speaker 1: ragutang's I think we say this in our book. We
Speaker 1: differ from our ragut tanks and turtles in that they
Speaker 1: can't like sing love ballads to each other. Some birds can,
Speaker 1: but they can't really like write complex pros or do
Speaker 1: all sorts of things that are also attractive. Could you
Speaker 1: speak to some of the non physical aspects of meting
Speaker 1: intelligence that are attractive, and then what could people do
Speaker 1: to increase that aspect of them? Yeah? Absolutely so. One
Speaker 1: of the things about human mating intelligence is that there's
Speaker 1: an awful lot of cognitive processes that are mating relevant,
Speaker 1: but that are indirectly mating relevant. The person who really
Speaker 1: uncovered this idea and elaborated on it was Jeffrey Miller
Speaker 1: at the University of New Mexico who came up with
Speaker 1: a really groundbreaking idea regarding sexual selection and humans related
Speaker 1: to the evolution of human creativity and intelligence. We essentially
Speaker 1: argued that each species has its own processes by which
Speaker 1: individuals will attract members of the opposite sex. A lot
Speaker 1: of times these are incredibly species specific. Right, So, peacocks,
Speaker 1: the female looks for the bright the big bright tail. Right.
Speaker 1: If you and I walked around in Philadelphia with a
Speaker 1: big bright tail, I don't know if we'd get a
Speaker 1: lot of females looking at us. Right. Humans use behavior
Speaker 1: and markers of creativity and markers of intelligence to attract
Speaker 1: members of the opposite sex. So courtship includes an awful
Speaker 1: lot of displays of creativity. That's why. So if you
Speaker 1: think about, like a lot of humans write poetry. Yeah,
Speaker 1: poetry is not adaptive. It's not going to help save
Speaker 1: you from a saber tooth tiger attack, but it might
Speaker 1: help you find a me. So if something is not
Speaker 1: helpful from a survival perspective, but it's still a species typical,
Speaker 1: then it might be beneficial from a reproductive perspective. And
Speaker 1: all of the kinds of creativity that seem uniquely human
Speaker 1: but that don't seem to have a lot of immediate
Speaker 1: survival value may well be explicable in terms of them
Speaker 1: being sort of mechanisms of courtship and mechanisms of attempts
Speaker 1: to attract mates. That's really good, Glen. I'm trying to
Speaker 1: think of other of like I want to get like
Speaker 1: if we can we get in to like really specific
Speaker 1: things like humor, like creativity, like even god formid intelligence.
Speaker 1: Do these things how do they play out like on
Speaker 1: a in our not evolutionary like in our day to
Speaker 1: day you know lives, You know how can we use
Speaker 1: these things to attract people? Are they? Are they attractive?
Speaker 1: First of all? Like, is creativity attractive? Yeah? I mean
Speaker 1: these things definitely are. So there's a great study that
Speaker 1: Jeffrey Miller conducted with some of his students in New
Speaker 1: Mexico a while back, where they simply told their participants.
Speaker 1: There was a couple of rounds of participants and they
Speaker 1: told them the Martians are coming to Albuquerque. Here's pencil
Speaker 1: and paper dry. And what they found was that there
Speaker 1: was extraordinary variability in the quality of these strongs. They
Speaker 1: gave them a discreet amount of time, maybe ten minutes.
Speaker 1: Some of these drawings were incredibly good. Some of them
Speaker 1: were medium. A lot of them are medium. Of them
Speaker 1: looked like a four year old. Well, how much did
Speaker 1: they control for artistic ability versus you know, creative generation? Right,
Speaker 1: I don't know. I'm not sure how these were rated.
Speaker 1: I think they were partly ultimately rated in addition to
Speaker 1: how high quality they were from the raiders, this is
Speaker 1: another group of participants rated them. I think they also
Speaker 1: rated them in terms of how attractive they thought this
Speaker 1: person was, you know. And it was simple enough that
Speaker 1: people that drew stuff that was rated as higher quality
Speaker 1: were rated as probably more attractive. Probably the most clear
Speaker 1: cut study along these lines. I guess there's a couple
Speaker 1: but ones conducted by Dan Nettle, who was in England,
Speaker 1: who studied mating relevant out wait, wait, did you tell
Speaker 1: us what the results were of the Miller study that
Speaker 1: the targets who drew the relatively high quality were rated
Speaker 1: as more attractive or more attractive? Where do people see
Speaker 1: their facial features at all? It was just don't think
Speaker 1: they did. I think it was just a shot in
Speaker 1: the dark, and pretty similar to Dan Nettle's research, which
Speaker 1: is more in the field actual He studied actual poets,
Speaker 1: so this idea that poetry might have evolved because it
Speaker 1: is courtship relevant. What he argued was, then that probably
Speaker 1: means if you look at a bunch of male poets,
Speaker 1: the ones who are good poets are probably more likely
Speaker 1: to have more mating partners. And this is exactly what
Speaker 1: he found. So there's definitely some research from different threads,
Speaker 1: different researchers, different aspects of creativity showing that there do
Speaker 1: seem to be some attractiveness relevant outcomes associated with high
Speaker 1: quality products of creativity. What about humor, Yeah, definitely the
Speaker 1: same with humor. In fact, I know someone who wrote
Speaker 1: a great book chapter on that's who, that's ater. Why
Speaker 1: could you say, like, why are some of these forms
Speaker 1: of creativity attractive? Evolutionary humor is good because humor signals.
Speaker 1: You can signal a lot of things. So in attracting
Speaker 1: a mate, you're trying to present a lot of different
Speaker 1: things about yourself. You want to present yourself as smart,
Speaker 1: you want to present yourself as kind, you want to
Speaker 1: present yourself as emotionally stable, you want to present yourself
Speaker 1: as socially smart, socially sensitive, and through humor you can
Speaker 1: actually do an awful lot of that. So you know,
Speaker 1: people have studied various kinds of humor, and there's definitely
Speaker 1: different different kinds of humor. So some people have are
Speaker 1: really good at mean humor. What's called me mean humor?
Speaker 1: That's what I'm calling. Oh okay, I for a second,
Speaker 1: you're saying meme, right, so other deprecating humor, right, something
Speaker 1: that sort of puts other people down. Okay, Yeah, some
Speaker 1: people are good at that, right. There's something kind of
Speaker 1: funny about when people do that, but there's something kind
Speaker 1: of hurtful about that as well. There's also self deprecating humor, right,
Speaker 1: which might be just as fun, but it also has
Speaker 1: a signal of I'm not out to hurt other people.
Speaker 1: I'm not out to bring other people down. So the
Speaker 1: kind of humor that people use can be a very
Speaker 1: big signal about what kind of person that person is
Speaker 1: in a more general sense, and your effectiveness in using
Speaker 1: humor is also a really important signal as well. And
Speaker 1: there's interactions there with social status. Those in high social
Speaker 1: status who self deprecating humor are considered very attractive, right right,
Speaker 1: and those low social status whose self deprecating humor are
Speaker 1: considered very unattractive, right right? Is that right? Am? I? Right? Yeah?
Speaker 1: I think that's the finding. And high status people who
Speaker 1: use other deprecating put other people down, that's not considered
Speaker 1: very attractive either. So that's kind of goes against this
Speaker 1: myth of the alpha male. You know, maybe could talk
Speaker 1: about this alpha beta distinction. What does the meaning intelligence
Speaker 1: perspective bring to the table in terms of this idea
Speaker 1: do nice guys finish life? Yeah? So, I mean this
Speaker 1: is a part of our book that I think was
Speaker 1: really well elaborated in a chapter that you took the
Speaker 1: lead on the mating intelligence idea really focuses very much
Speaker 1: on individual differences in the nature of mating. Right, you
Speaker 1: think about male mating strategies. You know, some guys are jerks, right,
Speaker 1: and then we all know people that like, Oh, I
Speaker 1: can't believe that guy has all these women that like him.
Speaker 1: You know, everyone knows he's a jerk. How could this be? Yeah, right,
Speaker 1: So we kind of have that phenomenon, And then we
Speaker 1: also wonder, you know, oh, this guy is such a
Speaker 1: nice guy. Too bad, he'll never get a girlfriend because
Speaker 1: he's too nice, you know. So this is like another
Speaker 1: sort of stereotype that we might have. So when you
Speaker 1: actually look at the data, when you look at and
Speaker 1: there's tons of research on this particular question, it turns
Speaker 1: out that it's much more complex than that, and that
Speaker 1: depending on the situation, a guy who's giving off other
Speaker 1: deprecating kinds of signals, right, we might call this guy
Speaker 1: a jerk, or we might use other words for someone
Speaker 1: like that might be attractive to some women under some conditions,
Speaker 1: you know, over demonstrating dominance, well, dominant, it's good to
Speaker 1: be with someone who's dominant because that person might dominate
Speaker 1: others in a social situation or in SoC circles. But
Speaker 1: there's cost associated with that as well. That person might
Speaker 1: flip costs on you, that person might be overly dominant
Speaker 1: on yourself. And then if there's someone who's like, you know,
Speaker 1: quote too nice, well there's also great things about that. Right,
Speaker 1: This is someone who's who's not gonna hurt others in
Speaker 1: the social circle, not hurt hurt you. So there ends
Speaker 1: up being sort of costs and benefits to either of
Speaker 1: these very simple social strategies, right, And I think one
Speaker 1: of the things, and you could elaborate a little bit
Speaker 1: on this, Scott, but one of the things that the
Speaker 1: analysis essentially found was that men who have high status
Speaker 1: but that bring other people in and don't put others
Speaker 1: down and sort of try to build consensus, people that
Speaker 1: are very good at that. Those are really people that
Speaker 1: are much more attractive than someone who's high status but
Speaker 1: puts other people down. Right, Yeah, I think that's absolutely right.
Speaker 1: It seems like one of the most attractive combinations, or
Speaker 1: the package is compassion and assertiveness right together as a package,
Speaker 1: seems to be much much more attractive than dominance. You know,
Speaker 1: dominance being that aggressive kind of dominance when like you said,
Speaker 1: you know, they could be used against the partner, and
Speaker 1: partner showly doesn't want that, right, So it's almost like
Speaker 1: like leadership is very sexy and doing good in the
Speaker 1: world and giving your value set to the world. But
Speaker 1: if you're doing it to like dominate others, to just win, win, win,
Speaker 1: maybe outside the sports competition, that's not considered as attractive.
Speaker 1: But yeah, obviously sports is considered very attractive, right, Yeah.
Speaker 1: But then even in sports, though, I mean, there's sports
Speaker 1: figures that we like more than others, that's right, That's right.
Speaker 1: Like there's some really gracious winners, and there are some
Speaker 1: some athletes like when he was on the court, you know,
Speaker 1: Michael Jordan just had an air about him like he
Speaker 1: was he was awesome. He was awome, you know. But
Speaker 1: he wasn't no offense to Dennis Rodman. But he wasn't
Speaker 1: Dennis Rodman. You know, he wasn't making a mockery of things.
Speaker 1: He wasn't putting other people down, you know. So so
Speaker 1: even though it's even even in sports where the entire
Speaker 1: goals to just just to win, you know, we still
Speaker 1: see variability in people, in people that are leaders and
Speaker 1: that have the respect of sort of everyone for good
Speaker 1: reasons versus not so much. Absolutely absolutely good. I'm really
Speaker 1: glad we got you have to talk about that topic today.
Speaker 1: So is there any other aspect of being intelligence? You know,
Speaker 1: we have time, I think for one more components to
Speaker 1: bring in. Either mating mechanism, which is one part of
Speaker 1: being intelligence, are called meeting mechanisms. There are things that
Speaker 1: are kind of universal, right, and things that we use
Speaker 1: like strategies we use to attract people, or the other
Speaker 1: end is mating displays, things that there's individual differences in
Speaker 1: that we you know, things we talked about humor, creativity,
Speaker 1: the analogy of the Peacock's tale. Are there any mechanisms
Speaker 1: or displays you wanted to talk about for the rest
Speaker 1: of this podcast? Sure. I think one thing that we
Speaker 1: really focused on in the book that I think is
Speaker 1: a great takeaway message has to do with what we
Speaker 1: call life history strategy, which is a parallel concept with
Speaker 1: mating intelligence, something that I think relates very strongly to
Speaker 1: mating intelligence. Life history strategy is essentially the differential tendency
Speaker 1: to live life as if you expect a relatively long,
Speaker 1: safe life, And for technical reasons, we call these people
Speaker 1: high k so people that are high K expect a long,
Speaker 1: safe life and a safe environment, or people that are
Speaker 1: low key, which essentially corresponds to people who, for good reasons,
Speaker 1: often expect their lives to be relatively short, expect their
Speaker 1: environments to be relatively unsafe. And someone who's high end
Speaker 1: mating intelligence is pretty good at calibrating their life history strategy.
Speaker 1: Good thing about people in our society. You know, this
Speaker 1: wouldn't be everyone by any means, but we're pretty fortunate.
Speaker 1: In fact, i'd argue that we're extremely fortunate. I live
Speaker 1: five miles from here. I'm going to go home later.
Speaker 1: I got my small nuclear family. We're going to sit
Speaker 1: around by the fire. You know, no one's going to
Speaker 1: come in and attack us. We got two dogs. Even
Speaker 1: if they did, you know, the dogs would help out.
Speaker 1: We have an incredibly safe life. Tomorrow, I'm going to
Speaker 1: go to work, hang out in the office. Nothing terrible
Speaker 1: is going to happen here. And you know, same thing.
Speaker 1: So this is the environmental context for relatively high K strategy, right,
Speaker 1: And so I know, Scott, you have a similar Like
Speaker 1: most people listening to this podcast, would probably fit into
Speaker 1: an environmental situation that's relatively high K. Well, the adaptive
Speaker 1: I wouldn't Philadelphia, Glenn, I don't know about that. I
Speaker 1: guess it depends which part right, But I mean and
Speaker 1: not everyone does. But when you live in an environment,
Speaker 1: in a background and have an upbringing that's a relatively
Speaker 1: high K kind of upbringing, the best mating strategy ends
Speaker 1: up being one that is conducive to few offspring that
Speaker 1: are taking care of very well. In our society, this
Speaker 1: usually corresponds to monogamy, monogamous situation, and this is usually
Speaker 1: in a high K environment, a really optimal kind of
Speaker 1: mating strategy. So there's lots of different mating strategies, but
Speaker 1: this idea that males should be, you know, out for
Speaker 1: short term gains, that females should be on the lookout
Speaker 1: for that and only out for long term gains. Once
Speaker 1: you get into the world of high K everyone benefits
Speaker 1: from relatively long term mating strategies. And that's true for
Speaker 1: both males and females. And that's something that we discuss
Speaker 1: I think quite a bit in the book, and I
Speaker 1: think it's useful for at least the kinds of lives
Speaker 1: that we're fortunate to live. I think it's a very
Speaker 1: useful perspective, so useful, and you know, and relate to
Speaker 1: that is the fact that there's so many similarities. Probably,
Speaker 1: I think we argue in a book there are more
Speaker 1: similarities between men and women, and there are differences, even
Speaker 1: though we can focus on those, some researchers exclusively focus
Speaker 1: on those differences. Doesn't mean that there are more differences
Speaker 1: than similarities. Yeah, absolutely, I mean it's so easy for
Speaker 1: the mind to see differences, right, So, like if you
Speaker 1: go into your office in the morning and there's let's say,
Speaker 1: like there's a stapler in the middle of the one
Speaker 1: table that you know wasn't there before, right, I mean,
Speaker 1: that's how our mind works automatically, Like whoa the staple there?
Speaker 1: That's different? You know who put that there? What's going on?
Speaker 1: You know when you step back, your office is ninety
Speaker 1: nine percent exactly what it looked like before. So our
Speaker 1: mind is sort of prone towards seeing differences. The same
Speaker 1: thing happens when we look at males and females, right,
Speaker 1: So instead of there's definitely differences between males and females
Speaker 1: physically and behaviorally, but those things stand out so much
Speaker 1: because the mind is so prone to seeing differences. When
Speaker 1: you step back the overlap, the behavioral psychological overlap between
Speaker 1: males and females is shows much more similarity than differences.
Speaker 1: And I think that's particularly true in high k stable,
Speaker 1: fortunate kinds of environments, like the kinds that we tend
Speaker 1: to experience. Now. Yeah, and so it really looks like
Speaker 1: where the differences between that it's become most exaggerated is
Speaker 1: when it comes to the short term mating demean for
Speaker 1: biological read for real biological reasons and differences in investment
Speaker 1: require to have a whole baby come to terms. So
Speaker 1: that seems to be the demean short to the short
Speaker 1: terms short fling world seems to be where these differences
Speaker 1: are exaggerated. Is that rightly? I thin David Busses made
Speaker 1: that point before. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean there's a
Speaker 1: whole plurality of mating strategies that are available to two people,
Speaker 1: and situations constrain them, you know, quite a bit, you know.
Speaker 1: But there are male specific and female specific mating strategies
Speaker 1: that people tend to find, and short term mating strategies.
Speaker 1: I mean, there are some classic short term male strategies
Speaker 1: and some classic short term female strategies as well, and
Speaker 1: I think that we tend to see those and those
Speaker 1: are of interest. But I think there's a lot more
Speaker 1: to human mating than just short term male female difference,
Speaker 1: so I hope so yeah, So when we talk about
Speaker 1: long term mating, you know, both males and females. You know, love, peace,
Speaker 1: you know not war is important, you know, passion, commitment,
Speaker 1: all these other things come into play. All these things
Speaker 1: make us who we are today as humans over the
Speaker 1: course of thousands and thousand years of evolution. Absolutely, Glenn,
Speaker 1: thank you so much for taking your time. I know
Speaker 1: you're very busy. Director of the Luci Studies program ahead
Speaker 1: of the Department. Thank you so much, and also for
Speaker 1: just being just a great friend and mentor of mine.
Speaker 1: Hey man, anytime, Scott, It's always fun talking to you,
Speaker 1: my man. Thanks for listening to The Psychology Podcast with
Speaker 1: Doctor Scott Barry Kaufman. I hope you found this episode
Speaker 1: just to stop provoking and interesting as I did. If
Speaker 1: you'd like to read the show notes for this episode,
Speaker 1: or here are past episodes, you can go to the
Speaker 1: Psychology Podcast dot com.