Speaker 1: Welcome to the Psychology Podcast, where we give you insights
Speaker 1: into the mind, brain, behavior and creativity. I'm doctor Scott
Speaker 1: Barry Kaufman, and in each episode I have a conversation
Speaker 1: with a guest. He 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 today.
Speaker 1: It's a great honor to have David Slolan Wilson and
Speaker 1: Stephen Hayes on the podcast. David Sloan Wilson is President
Speaker 1: of the Evolution Institute and a Sunny Distinguished Professor of
Speaker 1: Biology and Anthropology at Binghamton University. Sloan Wilson applies evolutionary
Speaker 1: theory to all aspects of humanity in addition to the
Speaker 1: biological world. His books include Darwin's Cathedral, Evolution for Everyone,
Speaker 1: The Neighborhood Project, and Does Altruism Exist? Hayes is Foundation
Speaker 1: Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of
Speaker 1: Nevada Reno. An author of forty four books and over
Speaker 1: six hundred scientific articles, his career has focused on an
Speaker 1: analysis of the nature of human language and cognition, and
Speaker 1: the application of this to the understanding and alleviation of
Speaker 1: human suffering and the promotion of human prosperity. Hayes has
Speaker 1: received several awards, including the Impact of Science on Application
Speaker 1: Award from the Society for the Advancement of Behavior Analysis
Speaker 1: and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association for Behavioral
Speaker 1: and Cognitive Therapies ABCT. For SURE, together, they edited the
Speaker 1: recent book Evolution and Contextual Behavioral Science and Integrated Framework
Speaker 1: for Understanding, predicting, and Influencing Human behavior. David and Stephen,
Speaker 1: what a great honor to have you both on the
Speaker 1: podcast today. Thank you very much. That's fun to be here.
Speaker 1: Looking forward to it. Yeah, I'm very much looking forward too.
Speaker 1: I was just going to say, this is definitely one
Speaker 1: of the longest intros I've ever done in this podcast,
Speaker 1: because there's two of you, and you're both like legendary
Speaker 1: and have a long bio teach of you. But you know,
Speaker 1: I think it does put into context a little bit.
Speaker 1: You're both of your unique flavors, so to speak. And
Speaker 1: then it'll be really cool to talk today about, you know,
Speaker 1: how you both got together and decided to do this
Speaker 1: great grand synthesis and integration of different things. So along
Speaker 1: those lines, let me start by could each of you
Speaker 1: kind of talk a little bit about your own perspective,
Speaker 1: like that you primarily focused on in your career. We
Speaker 1: could start with Steve, how did you go first? Okay, well,
Speaker 1: I'm a you know, I have a background and behave analysis.
Speaker 1: I'm a clinical psychologist, but basic work, animal work even
Speaker 1: But what I took from that was this kind of
Speaker 1: radical functionalism, interested in context and and it kind of
Speaker 1: a multi dimensional way. I wrote about evolutionary topics actually
Speaker 1: with some regularity, but not with in hindsight much sophistication.
Speaker 1: I kind of have in my career try to fill
Speaker 1: what I saw as holes in the behavioral tradition. And
Speaker 1: the two biggest holes were you really have to deal
Speaker 1: with language incognition. Something different is happening that we're doing
Speaker 1: right now compared to what the bird is doing outside
Speaker 1: the window. If you just compare it over two hundred years,
Speaker 1: five hundred thousand years, it's very very obvious that there's
Speaker 1: something in language and cognition that is perhaps not unique,
Speaker 1: but it is at least so characteristic that acquires a
Speaker 1: special analysis. And the other is one that's frustrating for
Speaker 1: the scnarian wing, which is they tried to do it
Speaker 1: and failed of trying to find a way to put
Speaker 1: a selection within the lifetime of the individual, both by
Speaker 1: direct contingencies reinforcement. I'm beginning to really think also by
Speaker 1: contingencies of meaning, by the meaning systems that are afforded
Speaker 1: by symbolic learning, to put that into the larger fabric
Speaker 1: of evolutionary thought. And so our book is titled Contextual
Speaker 1: Behavioral Sciences, not so much to mean a specific group,
Speaker 1: but more the behavioral scientists to think in this functional, contextual, multidimensional, longitudinal,
Speaker 1: selective way. And I've just been overjoyed to over the
Speaker 1: last ten years or so. It's been a while now David,
Speaker 1: hasn't it been to find David as a colleague and
Speaker 1: to somebody who's, you know, really committed to exploring that
Speaker 1: unexplored territory of the interface between the traditional evolutionary thinking
Speaker 1: as it embraces an extended synthesis and a behavioral science
Speaker 1: wing that has been interested in that but needed a
Speaker 1: lot of education and still does in the larger field
Speaker 1: of evolutionary thought. Seeing that Wing as a partner. Great,
Speaker 1: and then what is evolutionary science? And it's interesting called
Speaker 1: evolutionary science, you know, instead of like evolutionary psychology. Is
Speaker 1: there a difference between the is one of larger umbrella? Sure? Yeah, absolutely,
Speaker 1: Evolutionary science covers everything, all living processes. I was trained
Speaker 1: as an evolutionary biologist, started artworking with non humans, and
Speaker 1: then sort of add humans to my toolkit. I got
Speaker 1: my PhD in nineteen seventy five, which was the same
Speaker 1: year that the other Wilson, Edward oh Wilson, published socio Biology,
Speaker 1: and of course the idea that you could have a
Speaker 1: single theory that applies to all social species, including humans,
Speaker 1: was what he introduced and which was outrageous at the time,
Speaker 1: created so much controversy. But me just getting my PhD,
Speaker 1: then that was just an exciting prospect. So you could
Speaker 1: call me the first post sociobiology generation. And as I
Speaker 1: matured as a scientist, I thought more and more about
Speaker 1: humans and meaning systems and language, and a lot of
Speaker 1: it was centered on multi level selection, which is what
Speaker 1: I'm best known for. The idea that adaptations evolved at
Speaker 1: the group level, or even the ecosystem level. If special
Speaker 1: conditions are are mad and so the idea that evolution
Speaker 1: needs to expand beyond the biological sciences to include all
Speaker 1: things human includes psychology plus more, it includes all of
Speaker 1: the human related disciplines. When I landed at Binghamton University,
Speaker 1: I created the first campus wide evolutionary studies program called EVOS,
Speaker 1: and then after building that on campus, I thought, gosh,
Speaker 1: let's use our community as like a field site as
Speaker 1: an evolutionary ecologist would understand the term, and I was
Speaker 1: especially interested in studying altruism and pro sociality in the
Speaker 1: context of everyday life. So I boldly announced the Binghamton
Speaker 1: Neighborhood Project started to do this kind of work. I
Speaker 1: remember I was there. I was there in the audience
Speaker 1: when you announced it at NEEPS two thousand and six. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there you go, Yeah, and with quite a bit of hubrisfs.
Speaker 1: And soon enough I was discovered by people who were
Speaker 1: already doing this kind of work in the applied sciences,
Speaker 1: and especially Tony Biglin, who is a prevention scientist and
Speaker 1: was prevention science. It's a term that not many people
Speaker 1: have heard, but it is one of the contextual behavioral sciences.
Speaker 1: And to make a long story short, It was Tony
Speaker 1: who introduced me to Steve, and then we started to
Speaker 1: work together, and I began to see that what Tony
Speaker 1: was doing at a population level, and what Steve was
Speaker 1: doing largely at an individual level but also extending into groups.
Speaker 1: And a third person, Dennis Embry, was doing in an
Speaker 1: entrepreneurial way. He's a scientific entrepreneur, was applied cultural evolution.
Speaker 1: I see that these guys were really good at actually
Speaker 1: making positive change happen in the real world at a
Speaker 1: variety of scale. So they were doing basically what I
Speaker 1: aspire to do. And yet our respective disciplines were all
Speaker 1: different from each other and different from evolutionary psychology. We
Speaker 1: can segue now to evolutionary psychology and actually just signal,
Speaker 1: and we can spend more time on it during this interview,
Speaker 1: very complicated and in retrospect, crazy history academic psychology, in
Speaker 1: which behaviorism first was dominant as the most scientific approach
Speaker 1: to psychology, but then was deposed by the so called
Speaker 1: cognitive revolution, and then evolutionary psychology emerged as a critique
Speaker 1: of the cognitive revolution. The idea that the mind is
Speaker 1: not a sle computer but many special purpose computers, the
Speaker 1: idea of massive modularity and evolutionary psychology, actually both cognitive
Speaker 1: psychology and evolutionary psychology. Rejecting behaviorism as part of the
Speaker 1: so called standard social science model is something that was
Speaker 1: somehow fundamentally wrong. And here I am an evolutionist working
Speaker 1: with Steve Hayes, who is part of the Scinarian tradition,
Speaker 1: although he's also gone beyond it. And so we have
Speaker 1: this profound lack of integration and I hate to say
Speaker 1: it self described evolutionary psychology playing a role in the
Speaker 1: lack of integration. So these are some of the things
Speaker 1: that we need to discuss in what our book represents.
Speaker 1: I think the way I think of it is it's
Speaker 1: evolutionary psychology done right. Oh nice. It actually does justice
Speaker 1: to the to the modularity concept, does justice to it,
Speaker 1: but also does justice to the emmenense open ended aspects
Speaker 1: of human nature, both at the individual level, the individual's
Speaker 1: capacity for open ended change and also the cultural capacity
Speaker 1: through open ended change. If you can't acknowledge that, then
Speaker 1: you don't understand our species. I like that, Steve, you
Speaker 1: said that Skinner thought of himself as an evolutionary psychologist.
Speaker 1: Is that right? He did? And for some time, I
Speaker 1: mean the last sentence he wrote the night before he died,
Speaker 1: which was to finish an article coming out of an
Speaker 1: award he won for the American Psychological Association, said that
Speaker 1: he predicted that variation and selection would be important to
Speaker 1: the future of applied work in his area, and he
Speaker 1: wasn't sure that they'd be called psychologists, but he was
Speaker 1: sure that evolution was important. I mean, and then he
Speaker 1: dies the next morning, and it's kind of a symbolic
Speaker 1: expression of what he was trying to do, but also
Speaker 1: the frustration of the inability to make that happen, because
Speaker 1: it isn't even just that it wasn't picked up. The
Speaker 1: behavioral folks were outright rejected, and this link between contingencies
Speaker 1: of reinforcement and a cultural evolution on the one hand
Speaker 1: and a genetic evolution on the other was outright rejected
Speaker 1: and really even laughed at as a loose metaphor that
Speaker 1: had nothing to do with how variation selection actually worked
Speaker 1: in these other dimensions. And what gives the light to
Speaker 1: that is a multidimensionality and multi level thinking. And when
Speaker 1: you add those back in and then you say, well,
Speaker 1: wait a minute, you know where did these cultural variations
Speaker 1: come from? They had to start somewhere, and you know,
Speaker 1: they start often. You can see it in the places
Speaker 1: we've actually looked at it. You know, this particular animal
Speaker 1: did this particular thing, and then through social learning processes
Speaker 1: are protected through the troop, and now you have this evolutionarything.
Speaker 1: And then you start seeing well, then, but look what happens.
Speaker 1: I mean, the just the Japanese snow monkeys so called,
Speaker 1: that have been followed now for many decades. You know,
Speaker 1: the fact that out there washing their potatoes in the
Speaker 1: first in the streams, but then actually in the ocean
Speaker 1: and salting them there. And now they're starting to catch
Speaker 1: fish and they're actually changing you know, their diet, which
Speaker 1: is changing some of their you know, group practices around
Speaker 1: things having to do with mating choice. And it's like,
Speaker 1: you know, you see right in front of you the
Speaker 1: kind of you know, the extended version of the moths
Speaker 1: changing or coloring when the when coal is no longer
Speaker 1: burned in England, et cetera. Evolution has fast enough that
Speaker 1: you can see that you have to account for variation
Speaker 1: selection within lifet on the individual. Now you add in
Speaker 1: epigenetic processes and other things like that, and we're now
Speaker 1: able to do some of these things literally in minutes.
Speaker 1: I mean, you can sit somebody down for fifteen minutes
Speaker 1: and keep track of how many of their genes are
Speaker 1: reliably turned on or off. There's a nice little piece
Speaker 1: with fifteen minutes meditation and affecting something like three percent
Speaker 1: of your genes in a reliable way. How long we're
Speaker 1: doing that work. But you know that the cells or
Speaker 1: systems that are just organized to turn environment and behavior
Speaker 1: into biology. So where is an environment and behavior not
Speaker 1: just in population biology and some of these things, but
Speaker 1: in the grit and grain. Well, I think it's in psychology.
Speaker 1: And so I tip my hat to the evolutionary psychologists
Speaker 1: in the sense of insisting that the most important theory
Speaker 1: in all the life sciences be given adequate attention and
Speaker 1: due weight inside psychology. That's the right move, and I
Speaker 1: think they can be forgiven for not knowing how to
Speaker 1: do that and kind of taking the obvious step forward
Speaker 1: to say, well, what just happened in the Paleolithic period,
Speaker 1: for example, that might have set us up to do
Speaker 1: this or that that's important. It actually doesn't get wiped away.
Speaker 1: I mean some of the more integrative ideas is massive
Speaker 1: modularity still have a role. There's still pieces where that's true.
Speaker 1: But we get to as we said it in the book,
Speaker 1: you know, everyone was wrong and now it's time for
Speaker 1: us all to work together. And I'm part of what
Speaker 1: I'm sort of stunned by is how much needs to
Speaker 1: be done, and with all disrespect, typing my hat towards
Speaker 1: the far more prestigious area of the two that are
Speaker 1: coming together, evolutionary theory itself needs to really take a
Speaker 1: step back and then another run up the hill, because
Speaker 1: even people who are promoting an extended evolutionary synthesis will
Speaker 1: still leave various and selection within the lifetime the individual
Speaker 1: off the table, and you just can't do it. You
Speaker 1: cannot do it and create a care hairent account. It's
Speaker 1: hard to do. But the other part is you can't
Speaker 1: do it and then still have an applied discipline, and
Speaker 1: evolutionary science needs to be an applied discipline. In part,
Speaker 1: it doesn't make sense to develop these high precision, high
Speaker 1: scope principles and then leave them laning on the floor.
Speaker 1: So this partnership is not just about you know, being
Speaker 1: recognized finally in a way that's very firm about the
Speaker 1: importance of behavioral science to the larger picture. It's also
Speaker 1: what then happens synergistically when you bring these islands and
Speaker 1: the academic archipelago together and it turns out that they
Speaker 1: change each other's thinking mutually. And we're still part of
Speaker 1: that roller coaster ride, David and I are, and not
Speaker 1: just us. There's a much larger group, are you know,
Speaker 1: walking down this yellow brick road, and we're finding all
Speaker 1: kinds of interesting things there that I think are going
Speaker 1: to have a profound impact on the field as that
Speaker 1: played out a much larger group of colleagues. Wow, do
Speaker 1: you want respond to that? Well, yeah, let me just
Speaker 1: add to it. Of course, Steve and I talk a lot,
Speaker 1: and we're really on the same page. So there's nothing
Speaker 1: to disagree with there, only some things to elaborate upon,
Speaker 1: and a sense of history academic I think is very important.
Speaker 1: One thing that happened to have evolutionary thought was that
Speaker 1: it became highly gene centric during the twentieth century, as
Speaker 1: if the only kind of inheritance is genetic inheritance. Now
Speaker 1: that's being avers. We have great books such as Evolution
Speaker 1: and Four Dimensions by Tablanca and Lamb is an iconic
Speaker 1: book for basically going back to basics and defining evolution
Speaker 1: in terms of heredity, not just genes. This is known
Speaker 1: as the extended evolutionary synthesis. And then a metaphor not
Speaker 1: a metaphor, but an analogy that Stephen Iestress, which I
Speaker 1: think is enormously helpful for integrating evolutionary psychology and behaviorism,
Speaker 1: is the immune system. Now, the immune system is something
Speaker 1: we understand very well, and it was said to have
Speaker 1: an adaptive and an innate component. The innate component is
Speaker 1: densely modular. We inherit it and it does not change
Speaker 1: during our lifetime. It is something that evolved by genetic
Speaker 1: evolution and is triggered by environmental circumstances. Just as the
Speaker 1: evolutionary psychologists love to point out, the adaptive component of
Speaker 1: the immune system is highly evolutionary. That's the ability of
Speaker 1: antibodies to vary and for those that successfully behind antigens
Speaker 1: to ramped up. So that's an evolutionary process that takes
Speaker 1: place during the lifetime of the organism. It is also
Speaker 1: densely modular. If you look at the mechanisms, it's not
Speaker 1: by a happy accident that there's one hundred million different
Speaker 1: antibodies and mechanisms promote the ones that are salooned. So
Speaker 1: the whole thing is densely modular but also amazingly open ended.
Speaker 1: Why can't we say the same thing about the human
Speaker 1: behavioral system the human behavioral system because it offends me
Speaker 1: when you say that. That's why I don't think, how
Speaker 1: dare you reduce me to put to put to adoption? Well,
Speaker 1: but it's not. It's not a reduction when you I
Speaker 1: know I'm talking component. Yes, yes, I do, Yes, I do.
Speaker 1: And I also think that it's very persuasive to make
Speaker 1: that comparison. So there is some additions to what Steve
Speaker 1: was saying. I think that the evolutionary psychology done right
Speaker 1: acknowledges both in a nate and adaptive component, and that's
Speaker 1: the integration that we need between evolutionary psychology and the
Speaker 1: scinarian wing. Steve mentioned Skinner's dying words, but you don't
Speaker 1: have to wait that long. He wrote an iconic paper
Speaker 1: in nineteen eighty one titled Selection by Consequences publishing Science Magazine.
Speaker 1: Might be his best known work, and it's just as
Speaker 1: clear as a bell. Anyone who reads just the abstract
Speaker 1: of that paper is that he was more or less
Speaker 1: envisioning what today we think of as cultural evolution, which
Speaker 1: begins with the individual as an evolving system. This also
Speaker 1: goes back to the Baldwin effect and the Baldwin effect.
Speaker 1: The idea that learning leads genetic evolution, that learning is
Speaker 1: the leading edge of genetic evolution, was proposed all the
Speaker 1: way back in the beginning of the twentieth century, but
Speaker 1: it has been this orphan concept all these years, did
Speaker 1: not play an important goal in eat modern synthesis, and
Speaker 1: only now is coming into its own. Are we really
Speaker 1: beginning to comprehend what it means for first individual pay
Speaker 1: real flexibility, and second cultural evolution to be the leading
Speaker 1: edge of genetic evolution. And that's where Duel A. Hardan's
Speaker 1: theory and all of these things are heading. And it
Speaker 1: has enormous practical applications. I mean, once you really take
Speaker 1: this on board, the idea that we can use it
Speaker 1: to manage positive change in real world settings, both at
Speaker 1: the individual level and the population level, becomes just self evident.
Speaker 1: And our book is is I would like to think
Speaker 1: an important step in those practical applications. Wow, wonderful, wonderful,
Speaker 1: and you both if I'm a geegat a second wrote
Speaker 1: about this in your BBS article Evolving the Future. You
Speaker 1: talked about that metaphor of the mileage that you can
Speaker 1: get out of thinking about the behaval system like the
Speaker 1: immune system. So that was a cool paper, you know,
Speaker 1: the way BBS works as you get a lot of
Speaker 1: people responding and were there any particular responses to your
Speaker 1: argument that you want to point out as well, that's
Speaker 1: a fair point. That was a good point, you know,
Speaker 1: and it changed your thinking about it. I like to
Speaker 1: think of the BBS article as our first milestone that
Speaker 1: after we had been working almost six or eight years
Speaker 1: together Tony, Dennis, Steve and myself, then we wrote that
Speaker 1: article and the and then this book is the second milestone.
Speaker 1: When I think back over the commentaries, it's not that
Speaker 1: I've read them recently, but what I see is mostly acceptivity,
Speaker 1: as I recall, and the main thing is is that
Speaker 1: progress on these fronts. I think academic culture is so
Speaker 1: slow that progress gets mentioned, gets measured in decades when
Speaker 1: it needs to get measured in years, and so I
Speaker 1: think there's a problem of catalysis. I think that in
Speaker 1: order to get things to change more more quickly, so
Speaker 1: I'm thinking that those commentarries that was twenty fourteen, now
Speaker 1: it's twenty eighteen. Four years went by, and how much
Speaker 1: has happened then? Then not enough? So we really need
Speaker 1: to think in terms of years, not decades, for both
Speaker 1: cultural academic cultural change, and cultural change in real world settings.
Speaker 1: You know, the commentaries were I think startlingly supportive in
Speaker 1: the sense of, you know, appreciating the effort, and it
Speaker 1: wasn't waved away. I think something has changed because you know,
Speaker 1: there were very dismissive things that happened in these early efforts,
Speaker 1: but the ground work has been laid by all these
Speaker 1: different wings in their own way doing their slow but
Speaker 1: careful academic development. And the ones that were a little
Speaker 1: challenging but were not because it was like, oh I
Speaker 1: didn't thought of that, but were the ones where you
Speaker 1: really or being challenged to put it into the context
Speaker 1: of an extended synthesis. And so we talked a little
Speaker 1: more about tim bergens of four questions for example, in
Speaker 1: the response to the commentaries, is trying to see that
Speaker 1: trying to help people see that what we're trying to
Speaker 1: do is put this into a well rounded evolutionary synthesis.
Speaker 1: But you know, as that happens. This is the part
Speaker 1: where you begin to see change happening in all directions.
Speaker 1: There's double headed arrows everywhere. You know. What I see,
Speaker 1: as this has played out in my own thinking, is
Speaker 1: much more of an appreciation of the dynamical system like
Speaker 1: quality of the life of an individual, the life of
Speaker 1: a couple or a group, the life of a community,
Speaker 1: and human life as part of all of life, as
Speaker 1: part of you know, this almost planetary scale way of thinking,
Speaker 1: it keeps going up. You can't think just in once
Speaker 1: you get into multi dimensional, multi level, you can't just
Speaker 1: take a piece of it and say I'm focused just
Speaker 1: on this, whatever it is, and then fail to understand
Speaker 1: as you do that that what you're doing bears on
Speaker 1: the larger picture. And so I'll pick one that David
Speaker 1: and I haven't really talked about it at all, but
Speaker 1: I mentioned to them an impact that these years together
Speaker 1: have had on me. You know, I'm writing now about
Speaker 1: processes of change in psychotherapy. I find myself writing essentially
Speaker 1: this multi level, multi dimensional way of thinking about process
Speaker 1: of change in psychotherapy that is, you know, really stretches
Speaker 1: my ability even to think about how to study it
Speaker 1: because I find myself having to learn things like how
Speaker 1: to do a complex network analysis and dynamical systems analyses
Speaker 1: and things that I don't think most researchers in psychotherapy do.
Speaker 1: I mean, they're doing randomized trials, which is fine, but
Speaker 1: it's so cledgy. It's so and then their process accounts
Speaker 1: or you know, things like mediational analyses, these very limited
Speaker 1: one headed arrows. If they're a system, they're a really
Speaker 1: crude system. It's all linear and all goes in one direction.
Speaker 1: Nothing's recursive, nothing interacts, it's not multi dimensionally to have
Speaker 1: one or two things that you say, this is why
Speaker 1: the therapy works. What nonsense, of course, says that you're
Speaker 1: going to have to build in. I can see the
Speaker 1: I'm coming when people are actually literally doing things in psychotherapy,
Speaker 1: like doing oral swabs, looking at what happens with up
Speaker 1: and down regulation of genes through genetic processes. But that's
Speaker 1: just that not just appreciating that levels of analysis, but
Speaker 1: appreciating the multidimensional and dynamic nature of it. That's much
Speaker 1: more like how you would in fact analyze, let's say
Speaker 1: that the functioning human immune system than it is like,
Speaker 1: you know, just getting a blue ribbon for the evidence
Speaker 1: based therapy. I mean what we you know, the behavioral
Speaker 1: with a small bee. The human behavioral sciences really need
Speaker 1: to up their sophistication about the multidimensional and multi level
Speaker 1: nature of the questions that they're asking across time and
Speaker 1: so that these kind of crude one time boom and
Speaker 1: it's in our measurement system. Psychometrics is wrong in my opinion,
Speaker 1: It doesn't stand up to an evolutionary view. Group designs
Speaker 1: are wrong. You are just so crude as an instrument.
Speaker 1: Our process designs and methods are wrong. I said to
Speaker 1: my lab last Friday, David I said, here's the effect
Speaker 1: of more than ten years of David Sloan Wilson. I
Speaker 1: think ninety eight percent of the research for doing in
Speaker 1: psychology is wrong. Wow, wait a minute, hold on, hold on,
Speaker 1: because that's what you touched on them. He touched on
Speaker 1: my field there. So why is psychometric which instruments in
Speaker 1: particular right? They're all wrong with the Big five is wrong.
Speaker 1: Let's takedown psychometrics. I come out of that tradition. Alan
Speaker 1: Edwards is my grandfather, Okay, my intelectual grandfather A. R. Gilliland,
Speaker 1: who is at just Chicago School and had the first
Speaker 1: measure of it, intelligence and infants is my great grandfather.
Speaker 1: So I come out of the psychometric lineage. John Cone
Speaker 1: was my mentor and a psychometrician, and try to bring
Speaker 1: classic psychometric concepts in behavioral assessment. I think with a
Speaker 1: net negative Frankly the wonderful man. But I don't think
Speaker 1: it was a good idea because what psychometrics does is
Speaker 1: it says we're going to look at consistency by looking
Speaker 1: across items and people at a given point of time,
Speaker 1: and that's our fundamental unit, not within individuals across time.
Speaker 1: And you know Ktel's had his p techniques. He knew
Speaker 1: he was doing it. He had a little matrix there,
Speaker 1: and you know when they fought about factor analysis, they
Speaker 1: fought over this, should we look at the clustering within
Speaker 1: individuals across time or should we look at clustering across
Speaker 1: items and people at a given point in time? And
Speaker 1: that other view one which is a huge mistake. You
Speaker 1: wouldn't go out think about this. You wouldn't go out
Speaker 1: into a natural environment and watch the behavior of a troop,
Speaker 1: let's say, and then say, you know, I'm really not
Speaker 1: interested in that animal, animal, animal, animal, I'm interested in
Speaker 1: the average. I'm interested in the average of the truth.
Speaker 1: You know, that basic move which is deep inside psychometrics. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it fails. Is that there's a set of assumptions that
Speaker 1: are required to do that called argotic assumptions that the
Speaker 1: mathematicians in nineteen thirty four are worked out and showed
Speaker 1: in physics by the way, that that only works. That
Speaker 1: the larger superset is a good measure of a process
Speaker 1: only works under a set of assumptions which cannot be
Speaker 1: applied to individuals across time. As soon as you have
Speaker 1: a trend, because you'd have to assume that every animal
Speaker 1: is showing the same trend and sequence of how these
Speaker 1: different processes come together, that's nonsense. Of course that's not true.
Speaker 1: So you end up with an average that reflects often
Speaker 1: no one. But when you like assess, like the intervention
Speaker 1: effectiveness of an act intervention, you know you have to
Speaker 1: have measures to actually you need a measure something, right,
Speaker 1: the measures we're demanded. Even APA try to put it
Speaker 1: in the ethics that you genuflect the psychometrics. But I
Speaker 1: think that psychometrics is going down. I don't think it's time. Well,
Speaker 1: one kind I mean one kind of I mean one
Speaker 1: kind of psychometrics might be going down, but not all kinds.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's well measure that's what you mean by psychometrics,
Speaker 1: if you mean classical psychometrics. The reason is it's the
Speaker 1: wrong level of analysis in my opinion, for characterizing processes
Speaker 1: of change and measuring. So if you went back and
Speaker 1: you do let's say, ecological momentary assessment, you high density
Speaker 1: measurement like you would do naturally. If you're out in
Speaker 1: the field doing a biological study and you look to
Speaker 1: see what are the trends for the organisms you're looking
Speaker 1: at one at a time, and then collected, you can
Speaker 1: look at the group level. That's not what I'm saying.
Speaker 1: It doesn't have to be at the individual level, but
Speaker 1: it has to be respectful of the actual data spread
Speaker 1: across time. There's a different way of looking at quality
Speaker 1: of assessment than the way that we have come of
Speaker 1: view with essentially a latent variable that you're modeling. There's
Speaker 1: nothing you don't need the latent variable. This is a
Speaker 1: longer conversation. It probably takes it right. There is an
Speaker 1: evolutionary Definitely, we're definitely, we're definitely, we're definitely dwelling down here.
Speaker 1: I hope your audience is keeping up with those people. Oh,
Speaker 1: they love that. I think they love this kind of nerdiness.
Speaker 1: But I do want to refocus us after it. But
Speaker 1: I feel like I would feel guilty if I didn't
Speaker 1: respond to what you just said real quick though, I
Speaker 1: would feel guilty. So I do feel like there are
Speaker 1: a session, there is a greater awareness, and I feel
Speaker 1: like people like Will Fleeson and there are a bunch
Speaker 1: of researchers that are really interested in that within person
Speaker 1: variation level of analysis. And I'm totally with you that
Speaker 1: level analysis has been neglected for a lot of the
Speaker 1: field of personality psychology. Okay, I just wanted to say that,
Speaker 1: But let's move on and then maybe I'll get you
Speaker 1: back on something. We can have a whole chat just
Speaker 1: about psychometrics. That could be fun. So, Steve, how come
Speaker 1: when the first time you encountered David's work you came
Speaker 1: home and you cried? Yeah, or David has had to
Speaker 1: hear the story through every time, but I sort of
Speaker 1: swore I'm not going to subject him to it again.
Speaker 1: And here now you've you've made it happen. But you know,
Speaker 1: the longest shore have to answer it. Well, it would
Speaker 1: be like a person if I'm sure I can, I
Speaker 1: can listen to it one more time. You know, It's
Speaker 1: like a person out in a desert wandering around who suddenly,
Speaker 1: you know, found an ice chest with the with the
Speaker 1: diet coke and it or something. I mean, you know,
Speaker 1: it would be fair to say that some of the
Speaker 1: evolutionary thinking that in the gene centric era was really
Speaker 1: not friendly to the idea of variation selection in a
Speaker 1: lifetime the individual and as being important number one. But
Speaker 1: number two is, you know, there is kind of a David.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry to say it this way, but some of
Speaker 1: the evolutionists are mean. I mean I go to their
Speaker 1: websites and stuff, and I say, how do you do it?
Speaker 1: I mean, goll Lee, you know, they these not down,
Speaker 1: drag out fight you know, Stephen J. Gould, you know,
Speaker 1: and Dawkins and you know, and some of this it's
Speaker 1: no holds barred. It's like in order to watch cage
Speaker 1: fighting or something acts acade of a cage fighting. Well,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm like, suddenly, well and most evolutionists literally
Speaker 1: I had literally had laughed in my face. I mean
Speaker 1: I went to UCSD, I tell this story. And I'm
Speaker 1: giving a talk this is twenty five years ago to
Speaker 1: the behavioral geneticist. For some reason they asked me to
Speaker 1: do it, and and the students are there, and I'm saying,
Speaker 1: you know, it is always a gene environment interaction. Always
Speaker 1: it's you might as well say one hundred percent of
Speaker 1: the variants if you add in you know, just the
Speaker 1: right time frame. And the students literally laughed out loud
Speaker 1: in my face in a talk. What Yeah, because if
Speaker 1: you do classic behavioral genetics with G and E G
Speaker 1: TIMEZ with this, never interacts. Yeah, never interacts works. But
Speaker 1: of course, I mean you can say things like there's
Speaker 1: no interaction with skin color and what. And it's because
Speaker 1: wherever you go, if you're the blackest of the black person,
Speaker 1: prejudice is there. It doesn't matter if you're raised together
Speaker 1: or raised apart. I mean, idea that this isn't well.
Speaker 1: And then you show if you take something. My classic
Speaker 1: example is physical attractiveness. It's the most powerful demographic variable,
Speaker 1: even more than gender and race. But we've done the studies.
Speaker 1: If you do a randomized trial, you know with repair,
Speaker 1: you know, with plastic surgery, in almost every area where
Speaker 1: physical attractiveness looks like it's genetic. If you do it
Speaker 1: through classic things, all of the stuff identical twins, hello,
Speaker 1: they're more likely to look similar is called genetic because
Speaker 1: all of this social variance that comes from you you're
Speaker 1: ugly and you're pretty, which is huge. It's called genetic
Speaker 1: because it's a genetic input to a consistent social system.
Speaker 1: But when you step out of it and you say, well,
Speaker 1: let's do a randomized trial plastic surgery, it turns out
Speaker 1: all those effects go away, so they can't be genetic.
Speaker 1: And that the way that people mean it, and you know,
Speaker 1: good behavioral geneticist. Well, if you get them in the
Speaker 1: corner and you fight for half an hour and you say,
Speaker 1: they'll always admit this is true. They always say yeah,
Speaker 1: but it's not very plausible. It's not very important because
Speaker 1: and they forget that like some of the early work
Speaker 1: they didn't even keep track of fraternal twins whether or
Speaker 1: not they're the same gender. In the early work, they
Speaker 1: didn't even keep track of male female female versus male
Speaker 1: male versus male female. And so I'm getting a little
Speaker 1: excited here, but it's great. No, I feel like we
Speaker 1: need to do another podcast chat don't behavioral genetics. Now
Speaker 1: I'm realizing as well. But do you want to find
Speaker 1: somebody with this level of sophistication who is saying something
Speaker 1: very different about the behavioral folks and who stop and say, well,
Speaker 1: wait a minute, that kind of fits my way of
Speaker 1: It was enough to make me weep in the same
Speaker 1: way that a thirsty person would weep to find a
Speaker 1: glass of ice water. David is very special in general,
Speaker 1: but also within the field of evolutionary psychology. So I
Speaker 1: can totally see, you know, the resonance that you had.
Speaker 1: I can resonate with that resonance that you had. You know,
Speaker 1: I do have some criticisms of what has been dubbed
Speaker 1: by what's his name, He calls it pop evolutionary psychology.
Speaker 1: Who dubs it that? What's his name, David Buller? David Buller, yeah, David, Yeah,
Speaker 1: So he refers to pop evolutionary psychology, and I think
Speaker 1: there is something there that there are some really misguided
Speaker 1: kind of theories within within the field. I mean, obviously
Speaker 1: the whole field of evolutionary psychology is not perfect, right,
Speaker 1: So how would you distinguish yourself, your perspective from the
Speaker 1: sort of pop idea of you know, we only evolved
Speaker 1: these models in this certain timeframe, that we're not still
Speaker 1: evolving that all these other kinds of chrisms that he
Speaker 1: kind of raises about about what he calls pop evolutionary psychology, Well, okay,
Speaker 1: so there's more than one thing that needs to be said.
Speaker 1: David Buller's book was a great book, by the way,
Speaker 1: but I could acknowledge that without trashing evolutionary psychology. And
Speaker 1: I think that the accusation that evolutionary psychology is bad
Speaker 1: science is itself bad commentary. And you know, I'm always
Speaker 1: reminded social Darwinism, I mean, evolutionary thought has suffered under
Speaker 1: the labeled majority of label of social Darwinism for a
Speaker 1: whole century. That's a load of shit too. That's a
Speaker 1: real bogey man. And we have to be vigilant against
Speaker 1: the sort of bogey man dismissals of what often ends
Speaker 1: up being just perfectly fine science. I mean, give me
Speaker 1: a break. These are articles that make it through the
Speaker 1: peer review system. They appear in fine journals, and so
Speaker 1: why would you call that junk science when they're actually
Speaker 1: part of the peer of view system. David Schmidt, who's
Speaker 1: another evolutionary psychologist that I admire. He has a wonderful
Speaker 1: article in this view of life on The article is
Speaker 1: titled yes but in fact. So the idea is that says, oh,
Speaker 1: yes but some critique, But when more studies are done,
Speaker 1: it's oh yes bot and there's nothing but a series
Speaker 1: of yes butts in order to maintain this position that
Speaker 1: there's something junkie about evolutionary psychology. So in evolutionary psychology,
Speaker 1: there's a very very important baby in the bath water.
Speaker 1: And what David Buller was doing was I think he
Speaker 1: was separating the baby in the bath water. And what
Speaker 1: we need to do is we need to recognize that
Speaker 1: most important schools have thought have a baby in addition
Speaker 1: to them bathwater. The idea that some important school of
Speaker 1: thought would arise and smart people would develop it and
Speaker 1: so on, and there'd be no baby whatsoever. Yeah, there's
Speaker 1: an evolutionist named aj Kin. He was an ecological geneticist
Speaker 1: way back, and he has this quote that I have
Speaker 1: on my door, which is only the shallowest mind can
Speaker 1: believe that in a great controversy, one side is mere falling.
Speaker 1: So as we talk with each other, let's look for
Speaker 1: the baby and aggregate the babies and go out the badwaters.
Speaker 1: It's good. So why don't we, in the remaining time
Speaker 1: we have here in this conversation then focus on some
Speaker 1: of these really great ideas in this volume that you
Speaker 1: two edited, because I think that these are examples of
Speaker 1: good science, of a good application of your perspectives. We
Speaker 1: can start with I like Duckworth's chapter, So Renee Duckworth.
Speaker 1: She put forward this metaphor, the skeleton metaphor. You know
Speaker 1: that in order to be flexible, we need a skeleton,
Speaker 1: but a skeleton is inflexible, and so inflexibly go hand
Speaker 1: in hand. That's that's the most wonderful thing to say
Speaker 1: that in the book. And isn't that isn't that a
Speaker 1: wonderful the position of ideas, It's really wonderful, and it's
Speaker 1: dovetails with your immune system analogy as well. Can we
Speaker 1: talk about our chapter reconciling the tension between behavioral change
Speaker 1: and stability. I'm really interested in this tension within my
Speaker 1: own field of personality psychology because at the highest level
Speaker 1: of the personality structure, we have plasticity and we have stability.
Speaker 1: Those are the big two that lie above the Big five.
Speaker 1: And you know, if we have too much stability, then
Speaker 1: we're not going to change and grow. But if we're
Speaker 1: always exploring growing, we lose a sense of like who
Speaker 1: we are, and you know, things can get very anxiety
Speaker 1: written fast. So I was wondering if you coul talk
Speaker 1: a little about how you're both protective before we do that,
Speaker 1: let me just say, for the benefit of your audience,
Speaker 1: the structure of the book is an innovative structure. What
Speaker 1: we did was we picked a number of major topics
Speaker 1: and for each of those topics, we commissioned authors from
Speaker 1: contextual behavioral science and authors from evolutionary science to at
Speaker 1: separate chapter, and then we had them read each other's
Speaker 1: chapters and they have a dialogue which was moderated by
Speaker 1: other Stephen myself, and then those dialogues appeared along with
Speaker 1: the two chapters that repeated for a number of different topics.
Speaker 1: So I think that makes it a quite original and
Speaker 1: its organization and a lot of fun to read, basically
Speaker 1: because you're here first one side, then the other than
Speaker 1: the conversation. So now let's proceed to Rene's Oh yeah, agreed, Jack,
Speaker 1: very innovative. And you also say in your book that
Speaker 1: you didn't tell the authors what to write, and so
Speaker 1: all these kind of linkages and things just organically came together.
Speaker 1: So I wanted to raise that point as well. We
Speaker 1: did it essentially as a kind of a grand task
Speaker 1: because we didn't know this could have really gone badly.
Speaker 1: As we say, here's a topic, very general topic. You
Speaker 1: write about it the way you want to write about
Speaker 1: from here, and by golly, these things overlap. Not in
Speaker 1: a way that me too is but actually there's a
Speaker 1: dynamic kind of thing. You could see both sides. And
Speaker 1: you know this quote that David was talking about of
Speaker 1: really coming into this, I heard I was criticizing being
Speaker 1: mean and that I was talking about the psychometrician and
Speaker 1: favor geneticis a kind of a mean way. But it
Speaker 1: wasn't that that's wrong. It's just that there's additional ways
Speaker 1: to look at it. And you know, I think what
Speaker 1: was neat about the skeletal metaphors that reminds you of
Speaker 1: this combination very much like the immune system example, and
Speaker 1: in different context, you take something like a concept that's
Speaker 1: very close to my heart, let's say psychological flexibility defined
Speaker 1: as emotional, cognitive openness, attentional flexibility, connection with your values.
Speaker 1: It depends on how you measure it. But you can
Speaker 1: find things like emergency first responders, for example, who are
Speaker 1: who engage in emotionally suppressive behavior while they're you know, triaging,
Speaker 1: people who are you know, have massive energies in front
Speaker 1: of them. And doesn't that make sense? I mean, would
Speaker 1: you want your first responder to be crying while they're
Speaker 1: trying to you know, pick who might be saved with
Speaker 1: a big auto accident, I'd say no. Go Now, working
Speaker 1: with them as individuals, I want them to go home
Speaker 1: and have an area to put their emotions that were
Speaker 1: there of horror and whatever. But in the situation, I
Speaker 1: want them to have that kind of intentional flexibility. It
Speaker 1: might even look like suppression. It might have looked like rigidity.
Speaker 1: One of the things I worry about, however, and this
Speaker 1: will get me over into personality psychology and that earlier
Speaker 1: ran very easily is in order to detect the differences
Speaker 1: and importance of it, you have to look within the
Speaker 1: units you're looking at across time and situation, and in
Speaker 1: a way the worth methodology that really fits that, and
Speaker 1: so the whole idea of personality. Let's say you know,
Speaker 1: it looks like a rigid structure when you go across
Speaker 1: at one time, Big five, et cetera. Some of that's
Speaker 1: built into our language systems. That's remember where Big five
Speaker 1: came from. We don't have time for that story, but
Speaker 1: you know it well and how much committed it was
Speaker 1: to language structures and even English in the way it
Speaker 1: was originally developed. But when you do that, there's a
Speaker 1: guy named Molinar at Penn State who's done that looking
Speaker 1: within individual cross time a whole bunch of people, and
Speaker 1: often you don't see those consistencies. You don't see people
Speaker 1: who have, you know, this Big five attribute this personality
Speaker 1: in all situations behaving that way, or maybe even in
Speaker 1: most situations and times. So in order to really balance
Speaker 1: flexibility and structure, we've got to look at function, context
Speaker 1: and longitudinal development. And that's inside evolutionary thinking with EVO
Speaker 1: DEVO and you know some of the things where we
Speaker 1: really need to do that also in the behavioral science way.
Speaker 1: But the point is well taken that it's not all flexibility,
Speaker 1: it's not all structure. It's both the manically across time
Speaker 1: to fit context. Well, that is what's distinctive about contextual
Speaker 1: behavioral science exactly, is it focuses so much on the context,
Speaker 1: and I think one personality psychologist that got it right
Speaker 1: was Walter Mischel. I believe I'm saying correctly and an
Speaker 1: evolutionary terms, what he was saying is is that what
Speaker 1: people have by way of temperament or personality that's unchanging
Speaker 1: relatively unchanging, is a norm of reaction. And the norm
Speaker 1: of reaction basically specifies different phenotypes for different contexts. So
Speaker 1: the idea of an individual as a norm of reaction
Speaker 1: I think captures a stable element and a flexible element,
Speaker 1: a little bit like the skeleton as being needed for
Speaker 1: a movement. Did you see the debates between Walter Michelle
Speaker 1: and by the way he passed away recently and seymour Epstein,
Speaker 1: those kind of calastic debates in the seventies on what
Speaker 1: that personality has a general component or a specific component.
Speaker 1: Then they quick reconciled it anyway. I found that really stimulating,
Speaker 1: those core debates, and I think seymour Epstein really was
Speaker 1: thinking about it, probably even in a better way than Walter. Well,
Speaker 1: I think we have more to go on that. I
Speaker 1: think as we get into a more fine grain, multi dimension,
Speaker 1: multi level examination, we're going to have to go back
Speaker 1: and look at some of these classic concepts, and I
Speaker 1: see it over and over again, some things that we've
Speaker 1: settled that they're structural. I'll give one that is actually
Speaker 1: very dangerous for the evolutionists, and it touches the behaviorist
Speaker 1: because Dickerenstein was even involved with it is the you know,
Speaker 1: the Bell curve kind of thing around the issue of intelligence.
Speaker 1: And I am not at all convinced that we know
Speaker 1: which parts are fixed and stable. We're back to the
Speaker 1: same kind of thing having to do with behavior genetics
Speaker 1: I was talking about before, And because you can create
Speaker 1: extraordinary environments, and when extraordinary environments can be created in
Speaker 1: many different ways, and so you should never ever say
Speaker 1: this is it, because you don't know if you don't
Speaker 1: know the range of things. So if you take let's
Speaker 1: say the uh, you know, the fixed patterns that are
Speaker 1: there in you know, the characterological traits that are shown
Speaker 1: maybe even at birth of a particular individual, Yes, but
Speaker 1: under extraordinary circumstances those can be different. And so you
Speaker 1: look at things you know, like you know, twin studies
Speaker 1: with schizophrenia or something, and you say, okay, well this
Speaker 1: person developed schizophrenia. This one didn't there are identical twins. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but look at what happened to this person, and you
Speaker 1: begin to dive into, for example, the kind of life
Speaker 1: trajectories that can take a tendency of predisposition and turn
Speaker 1: it into a full kind of behavioral phenotype. I think
Speaker 1: we have to do the same thing with intelligence. I
Speaker 1: think we've gotten way too into only looking at the
Speaker 1: level of the collective and the behavior analysts over here.
Speaker 1: I mean, just say a little bit of chest something,
Speaker 1: you know, we no four or is it five ranimized trials,
Speaker 1: so we can go in and with fluid intelligence the
Speaker 1: part that doesn't, you know, move. We're moving these things
Speaker 1: by five, six, eight nine, depending on the study points,
Speaker 1: and people don't yet believe it. And I'm not yet
Speaker 1: ready to let my hair on fire, and I don't
Speaker 1: have any anyway, but I'm beginning to think. You know,
Speaker 1: the way they're doing it is by pushing fluency of
Speaker 1: relational learning, you know, the stuff coming out of relational
Speaker 1: frame theory, which is a very weird thing to do.
Speaker 1: Nobody's going to do that in education. You know, if
Speaker 1: I were you and you were me, what would I
Speaker 1: have if they were yesterday and yesterdayday, and I were
Speaker 1: you and you were me, what would I have? And
Speaker 1: you're never going to do that in a normal academic classroom.
Speaker 1: It looks nuts, But if you understand the unit, you
Speaker 1: can create extraordinary environments that maybe maybe I'm not declaring
Speaker 1: when I'm just saying, and it possible, and there are
Speaker 1: some studies there, so this isn't crazy. So how much
Speaker 1: is the skeleton, how much is the soft tissue? Let's
Speaker 1: find out. And I think we're going to be one
Speaker 1: of my favorite examples of what was taken to be
Speaker 1: a not quite a difference. It's the marshmallow test. And
Speaker 1: so the marshmallow test is supposed to be something that
Speaker 1: if the kid fails the marshmallow tests and that predicts
Speaker 1: life outcomes. Said, that study hasn't replicated recently. Well, the
Speaker 1: study I'm thinking of, and I don't remember the author,
Speaker 1: but what they did was they basically they built Yes,
Speaker 1: I think, so go ahead. No, No, this is more recent.
Speaker 1: So it's a woman at the University of Rochester and
Speaker 1: what she observed in the field and an inner city
Speaker 1: neighborhood was a little girl was sitting on the on
Speaker 1: the stairs and someone gave her an ice cream cone,
Speaker 1: and before she got a first leg, someone else took
Speaker 1: away the ice cream cone, and so she had a
Speaker 1: ha moment, and she did a set of experiments in
Speaker 1: which she would do the marshmallow test, but in one
Speaker 1: condition she would build up trust with the little person
Speaker 1: that established a trusting relationship versus not after you're first
Speaker 1: establishing a trusting relationship. Then the same kids that would
Speaker 1: fail the marshmallow passed it with ease. So what was
Speaker 1: stable was the trusting nature of their social environment. That's
Speaker 1: what didn't change. It wasn't their lack of flexibility as
Speaker 1: as an individual. There's a good example. I think of
Speaker 1: something that's environmental which is misinterpreted as something which is
Speaker 1: a stable property of the individual. And you'd a great
Speaker 1: jump in because it's such a good point. I mean,
Speaker 1: even the skeleton example, the Evo Devo folks, if you
Speaker 1: have some early, early injury to your skeletal structure, you
Speaker 1: can often end up with a modification that allows you
Speaker 1: to work perfectly well, such an injury to your hip.
Speaker 1: I mean, some of the Evo Devo work with the
Speaker 1: animals are set up so that they can adjust to injury,
Speaker 1: even to what's structural and consistent in such a way
Speaker 1: as to adjust to that and find a way to
Speaker 1: a four legged animal. Let's say I've had a severe
Speaker 1: injury to function pretty well with one limb that's injured.
Speaker 1: And it's a metaphor for the fact of what point
Speaker 1: I was trying to make, which is that if you
Speaker 1: think in a nynamical system way, a multi dimensional, multi level,
Speaker 1: you should never turned it into tinker toys or billiard blocks.
Speaker 1: It's never a cartoon. And that doesn't mean everything is
Speaker 1: modifiable within the lifetime the individual doesn't mean that. But
Speaker 1: the you know, evolutionary science is the science of change
Speaker 1: and stability emerging in the context of change. So it's
Speaker 1: a dialectic and you never should sort of draw a
Speaker 1: circle and say this is in this camp. No, it
Speaker 1: may be able to move. And when you start thinking
Speaker 1: now with application, you know, I started thinking, and you
Speaker 1: raised a good point about social daring wisinism. But on
Speaker 1: the one hand, on the other hand, until there's an
Speaker 1: applied evolutionary psychology that tells the public that not only
Speaker 1: can this help you understand life, this view of life
Speaker 1: is a powerful one and help us as a human
Speaker 1: community change areas where we all know we need to
Speaker 1: change around, you know, issues like racism or stepping up
Speaker 1: to the challenge of climate change and things of that kind.
Speaker 1: You need an applied evolution in science. And you know,
Speaker 1: you don't have to go too far when you get
Speaker 1: into a cartoon like evolutionary thinking of people making evolutionary
Speaker 1: appeals to things that if you step back and look
Speaker 1: at it, our gender biased or racist or classists or
Speaker 1: I mean and so. And you know, there are really
Speaker 1: good evolutionists there in the past, and even Darwin made
Speaker 1: a few mistakes and how we talked about the Maori
Speaker 1: and things like that. So you know, I think we
Speaker 1: have to sort of step back and take where we
Speaker 1: are now in evolutionary thinking and really bring it into
Speaker 1: the life of the human community. Because the reason why
Speaker 1: people don't reject it when we step forward is I
Speaker 1: think people kind of go like, oh, that makes sense,
Speaker 1: and they've been for it. You know, Darwin's not going away.
Speaker 1: Evolution's not going away. Everybody knows that. Everybody who's thoughtful
Speaker 1: knows that. But it's only we only had one hundred
Speaker 1: years or so to adjust to it. You know, we
Speaker 1: need some time, and we're starting to and I think
Speaker 1: when we finally get to the point where we can
Speaker 1: walk into a legislature and we can say, you know what,
Speaker 1: we can do something about that game. But you know,
Speaker 1: we could do something about those poor performances, and those
Speaker 1: are now appearing, and David's been a champion of it,
Speaker 1: and they're not cartoons. They say something that we there's
Speaker 1: a signal and noise that we can chase and maybe
Speaker 1: make a difference. I'd like to I'd like to make
Speaker 1: sure to provide a capsule description of accept some commitment,
Speaker 1: therapy or training as a managing the evolutionary process, if
Speaker 1: I might and just good time. Well, it might have perfect,
Speaker 1: it might have better come earlier in the in the interview,
Speaker 1: but better late than never. So one fundamental insight about
Speaker 1: evolution is that what counts as adaptive in the evolutionary
Speaker 1: sense of the word often deviates from what counts as
Speaker 1: adaptive in the normative sense of the word. Where we
Speaker 1: might like an a normative sense for us as individuals
Speaker 1: and as cultures is frequently different than what is adaptive
Speaker 1: in the evolutionary sense, and so many of our problems,
Speaker 1: many of what we regard as pathologies, are actually adaptive
Speaker 1: in the evolutionary sense of the word. So for example,
Speaker 1: being nice to your family members becomes nepotism, being nice
Speaker 1: to your friends becomes cronyism and corruption. At the individual level,
Speaker 1: if I'm just avoiding anxiety attacks, that's adaptive. If I'm
Speaker 1: depressed and I don't make use of opportunities, that's adaptive.
Speaker 1: So so many things that we want to change the
Speaker 1: fact are what these evolutionary processes, whether they're modular involved
Speaker 1: in the past or whether they're reinforced in the present,
Speaker 1: are basically evolutionary processes taking us where we don't want
Speaker 1: to go. And so what therapy is and what training
Speaker 1: is is managing the evolutionary process of evolutionary processes in
Speaker 1: order to align adaptations in the evolutionary sense of the
Speaker 1: word within the normative sense of the word. And when
Speaker 1: you look at what acceptance and commitment training does, it
Speaker 1: does exactly that. So here's my understanding of acceptance and
Speaker 1: commitment training speaking in front of the master. So in
Speaker 1: the first place, and this could be done by individuals
Speaker 1: or groups, there's a focusing on what your true goals are,
Speaker 1: what do you really want to accomplish in your life?
Speaker 1: And so this in evolutionary terms, becomes the target of
Speaker 1: selection we have like artificial breeding. Basically we've chosen a
Speaker 1: target of selection which is our normative goal. Then we
Speaker 1: focus on variation. And when people are in need of
Speaker 1: therapy or training, often it's because their behavioral repertoire has
Speaker 1: become fused around their various problems. There are not much
Speaker 1: variation there. And so what the therapeutic process does is
Speaker 1: it encourages flexibility that would be variation, and then to
Speaker 1: select what takes us towards our valued goals. Even if
Speaker 1: some things won't change. So it might be that you
Speaker 1: won't get rid of your panic attack, let us say,
Speaker 1: but nevertheless, is there a way that you can work
Speaker 1: around it in order to achieve your valued goals? And
Speaker 1: so therefore there's a recognition of inflexibility, that there's some
Speaker 1: things that won't change or won't change easily, but nevertheless
Speaker 1: we still can change in the ways that matter most
Speaker 1: to us. And so this is a just as a
Speaker 1: very short description of how we can envision the process
Speaker 1: of training or therapy as a managed evolutionary process at
Speaker 1: the individual level, or just as much at the level
Speaker 1: of groups and even large scale populations. If I can
Speaker 1: build on that. You know, the act folk consciously have
Speaker 1: tried to do this, and then you know, have principles
Speaker 1: around variation and selection and retention, you know, building habits
Speaker 1: and context, building at tension and from a conscious point
Speaker 1: of view, and dimensions you know, being concerned about you know,
Speaker 1: your emotions, thoughts, and motivation, sense of self at such
Speaker 1: a important dimensions and levels. Being concerned about yourself you know,
Speaker 1: physically and your health and sleep patterns and so forth,
Speaker 1: and socially your relationships, the groups you and those six variations, selection,
Speaker 1: retention in context at the right dimension and level is
Speaker 1: my kind of cheat sheet version of evolutionary thinking. And
Speaker 1: what when you get to that level and then you
Speaker 1: look at behavior change. Part of the exciting thing I
Speaker 1: think for evolutionists if they see it, and for behavioral scientists,
Speaker 1: if they realize they've been doing it, is that we
Speaker 1: have all along been doing applied evolution science in the
Speaker 1: behavior change fields. And it's only because we haven't been
Speaker 1: thinking about that way that we failed to notice it.
Speaker 1: And I'm involved in a project right now that's an
Speaker 1: attempt to prove that. And what we're doing is we're
Speaker 1: looking at every single study on psychological intervention ever done
Speaker 1: by every psychotherapy, every behavior change method that we can
Speaker 1: find and list that had a randomized trial, whether treatment
Speaker 1: is usual or a wait list, compared to your active
Speaker 1: intervention that claimed mediation, that claimed statistical tests of the
Speaker 1: functionally important pathways to change. And we've started out with
Speaker 1: fifty five thousand studies. We're looking at everyone multiple times
Speaker 1: and we're down now to it looks like we have
Speaker 1: to score about a thousand studies. But important part of
Speaker 1: it is, though we're trying to do, is score it
Speaker 1: in terms of a system. We've published it in an
Speaker 1: article just came out to say we as Stefan Hoffman
Speaker 1: as team and myself at Boston University in behavior research
Speaker 1: and therapy. It just came out or the some online
Speaker 1: version we're looking at just in the words of the
Speaker 1: people who brought this thing to the table, is that
Speaker 1: particular concept one that makes sense in terms of encouraging
Speaker 1: healthy variation, encouraging healthy context sensitivity, altering the selection criteria,
Speaker 1: you know, looking at levels of analysis and looking at
Speaker 1: the social context, et cetera, or the physical health context,
Speaker 1: or you know, putting in practices that would lead to
Speaker 1: retention of games, and so far it looks like we
Speaker 1: can do it. It looks like we can take basically everything,
Speaker 1: say it this way, grandiose way, everything we know about
Speaker 1: the functionally important processes of change that have been seen
Speaker 1: in a randomized trial in the history of science from
Speaker 1: a psychological point of view, and score it all by
Speaker 1: evolutionary criteria in a pretty reliable way. And if you
Speaker 1: can do that, it means that thirty five thousand feet
Speaker 1: we've been an evolutionists from the beginning. And part of
Speaker 1: me wants to say, of course, because exactly what scientific
Speaker 1: principles do is they explain in this broad scope but
Speaker 1: high precision way, what is already going on. I mean,
Speaker 1: you didn't have to know about the theory relativity for
Speaker 1: those principles to apply to what you're doing. They apply
Speaker 1: to what you're doing in the same way evolutionary principles
Speaker 1: at the level of any system that you're trying to change,
Speaker 1: whether it's an individual or a group, a culture. You know,
Speaker 1: your body being a functioning better health and dealing with
Speaker 1: cancer ontom out of any system is going to alter
Speaker 1: the processes that explain how complex systems evolve. And so
Speaker 1: knowing that when we know that. Boy, are we going
Speaker 1: to do better at that? I would say, you think?
Speaker 1: I mean part of is what happens with principles is
Speaker 1: once you get beyond just techniques and you start seeing principles,
Speaker 1: then you begin beIN to manage these processes. And managing
Speaker 1: evolutionary processes is what we've been doing in the behavioral
Speaker 1: sciences from the beginning, but we just didn't have a
Speaker 1: way of talking about it until a multidimensionality and multi
Speaker 1: level thinking got in there enough to give us a
Speaker 1: place at the table. Wow, you too, What a team?
Speaker 1: What a team? You know? I said this last time
Speaker 1: to you, Stephen, when you were on my podcast last time.
Speaker 1: I said, you're this rare combination of sheer nerdiness plus
Speaker 1: a real humanity, a real true caring and compassion for
Speaker 1: the betterment of the world. And David, your research program
Speaker 1: throughout the years has been very pro social lens, the
Speaker 1: evolutionary lens, but the pro social aspects. So what a
Speaker 1: combination you two are. Can I end this chat today
Speaker 1: with a quote from you, Stephen that I just absolutely adore,
Speaker 1: and I just want to read it to the audience.
Speaker 1: As scientists, I don't think we should be ashamed of
Speaker 1: saying that we're interested in developing knowledge that has a
Speaker 1: pro social impact. We want to play science in the
Speaker 1: high integrity way science should be played. But the purpose
Speaker 1: of playing the game that way is to develop knowledge
Speaker 1: that can be vetted against pro social criteria. It is
Speaker 1: entirely within our prerogative as human beings to say this
Speaker 1: is what we want to do with our careers and
Speaker 1: lives with this wonderful tool called science. In an abstract sense,
Speaker 1: sciences values free, but in the lives of scientists and
Speaker 1: of the consumers of scientific knowledge is anything but. So
Speaker 1: thank you both for joining your superpowers together to increase
Speaker 1: knowledge in a way that will increase pro sociality in
Speaker 1: the world. That does. And by the way, our next
Speaker 1: book is called pro Social. We just finished it, so
Speaker 1: we do yes with our colleague Paul Atkins. Yep, we
Speaker 1: got to just say, so that's our next book Social
Speaker 1: Oh wonderful. Well, I can't wait to read that one
Speaker 1: and devour that one as well. And there's a lot
Speaker 1: of topics obviously we couldn't cover today, but for listeners
Speaker 1: who want to dive into this grand synthesis for a
Speaker 1: wide range of things that we didn't talk about, like
Speaker 1: childhood development, for the development of empathy, for organizational development,
Speaker 1: for understanding the evolutionary mismatch of physical and health. These
Speaker 1: are all just teasers I'm throwing out there. Definitely check
Speaker 1: out in their books. So thanks again guys for chatting
Speaker 1: with me today. Good every time. Thank you for having us,
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening to the Psychology Podcast. I hope you
Speaker 1: enjoyed this episode. If you'd like to react in some
Speaker 1: way to something you heard, I encourage you to join
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