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Episode 127: Do men judge more than looks, keeping peace in the family, pop psychology
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all right good evening everybody it's Nate G here along with dr. Doug Lyall dr. wild how you doing this fine evening good how you doing not too bad it's a little bit warm down here but for all of our listeners who want to listen to us live we broadcast live from W BlogTalkRadio calm to us live but for everybody else you can listen to us on the podcast app any podcast up that you have so dr. Lyle we've got a couple of questions today and we had a lot of a lot of people emailed me actually after last show about the 10 paid dates questions that we had and so I thought that we would continue on a little bit on going to talk about what men look for women and what men women look for for in men and today's question just has to do with what men look for in women now in previous podcasts the what what what listeners heard is that you were saying that male psychology looks at the physical attraction first and then that that's basically what catches the guy's eye and so this is the question that the listener had oh and by the way and whereas women they are they're looking for attractiveness physically but they're what factors into their equation quite a bit is the person's character and the personality and the ability to provision resources towards the female sure so dr. Lyle you've explained that in previously in heterosexual mating men are judged like women primarily on physical attractiveness but unlike women their other skills are also important such as the ability to provide resources so the question is have researchers found any extra things that make women attractive to men this listener personally thinks that they find women extra attract if they are intelligent or caring and also find a bit of physical strength attractive to if a woman's a seven then being physically fit kind of bumps her up way to an eight point five or 9v my unusual it seems to make evolutionary sense to me that women should be able to add value with extra skills and mating are there any reasons why this is not the case you know great great question a really good question and and so the a complete answer on this is going to take us a little bit away I'm going to wander off and then we're going to come back and we're going to try to put this all in perspective reminds me of a of an one of my earliest biggest aha moments in my life my my good friend Alan Goldhamer said had gotten had basically had hell figured out you know in our early twenties he had read the works of a of a flaming evangelists chiropractor by the name of Herbert Shelton who had a system of thinking about health called natural hygiene and despite the fact that Shelton was you know disagreeable and a little bit of a whack job the truth is is that he was white and and essentially Shelton wouldn't have quite put this way didn't quite have the language but essentially he was thinking in terms of the theory of evolution and his thinking was that it's not it's essentially very difficult to beat if you have illusionary programming that's in the system for to cause health and that the ideas that helped results from healthful living etc now let me tell you why this is relevant to this question as Alan and I were talking I remember the conversation so we're going back 35 years and he I was I was trying to understand like which foods were good for you and which foods weren't good for you and as we be kept discussing that he had this principle that he was trying to get across and I got it and I I finally said okay what you're saying is there's no such thing to food that's good for you what there is is that there's foods that have different degrees of how this track of your health he says yeah so this is this is the appropriate way to think about health and food and exercise or anything else in the Sun is that there is a the genetic code has a limit and that there would be a theoretical perfect set of inputs that you could put into that system that would optimize its health for example among Java T and any alteration from that perfect set of subsets of inputs would detract from the organism self you there's no such thing as adding to its health and now that gets to be important there's a lot of people that are awfully kind of not there even in the hyper health arena that I live in so we've got a lot of doctors and writers that are thinking oh well this particular food is good for you because it has this or that substance in it that's incorrect way of thinking I'm not going to say it's categorically correct because it may be true that someone hasn't resolved you as a pathology and it could be that some particular isolated nutrient in a food might have a pharmacological effect that might be useful but this is not what we're talking about this in principle there's no a grape is not better for you than an apple and kale it's not better for you than a steamed potato all of these things meet criteria we're not doing damage to the atavism and so it isn't that we're looking to add something to make it more we are having something it suffice as the organisms genetic they built needs and they're therefore we can either pat if we have something like a french fry that actually has materials in it to be damaged now we have subtracted from your health so there would be potentially an infinite combinations of different healthy foods that you could eat and no one set will be will be superior to some other set but if we add something that is destructive it makes it subtracted from the organism self okay this is analogous to the question that the person is asking him so the person is asking and we add something to someone's presentation that that makes them fancier the answer is no you cannot okay so let's look carefully at how it is that we're going to think about this you have evidence of physical law is going to be chipping away at a person's attractiveness so DV ations from species prototype the the you know knows too big you know feet too big hands too small too tall too short whatever the hell it is okay in other words deviations from prototype are going to be subtracting little bits now if we look at personality characteristics we're going to talk about personality characteristics and mental and as well as knowledge and abilities inside the individual as well as ecological circumstances I mean how much their family is how you know what their financial situation is etc there's a whole host of characteristics that that it isn't it if you have something good there that it adds your attractiveness what it does is it fails to subtract from attractiveness okay what what's being suggested here by the person is thinking that we can add to somebody's point I know you can't all you can do is fail to subtract points so a person who is at seven four attractiveness they are seven for their attractiveness and if they if that does not need your personal threshold what suppose you're a nine and that seven does not meet your aesthetic threshold then and they're not going to meet your aesthetic threshold that what's going to happen is here's you if you're a female you may not know if that seven meets aesthetic threshold for a while because it turns out that females have a guarding device on their sexual impulses essentially they have a protective mechanism that reduces their impulsivity so that they so that they don't make an impulsive you know expensive biological decision however after they get to know that person and they have scoped the inside to that person lying in character that seven male naming criteria will he may not be pictured but what didn't happen was is that you didn't add points if it turns out he has a great mind a great character all he did was not have any of this possible sex appeal how'd it be subtracted okay so this is now you might say well this is kind of a are we talking about semantics here and maybe we are because in fact part of the situation here is where do you stand relative to competitors and so in that case if you have better better chops in other words better brains personality and circumstances and competitors then in effect that someone gets to know you you are wising relative to competitors but I actually don't think that that's what's happening my intuition tells me that in fact what there is an individual would say our girl is a nine that girl how they have inside of her head a range of that of acceptance for males with specific characteristics I don't think that's going to change what's going to happen is is that she doesn't know what that range is because in order for her to know what that range is she also has to know what their what their personality characteristics are so we know if she needs a ten she doesn't hardly give a damn about what the personality characteristics are because she's being were loaded with positive data and she may be in week news Delta if she meets a nine and he superficially seems like he's okay then she's also very interested if she needs an eight she has her Jets are cooled down but she might be moderately interested in as she finds out that there's no flaws on the inside that she can see him starting to prove his strengths she may relatively quickly find out that he meets criteria if it turns out that he's a seven she may find out after working side by side with him on six months under stressful circumstances and finding heroic and terrific capabilities and character she may discover that he in fact meets criteria and she may work with someone else who's six point eight as all the same things at equal stellar level and does not be criteria so I don't believe you can add and I think the concept of adding as a result of brains and personality is fundamentally flawed in the same way that my doctor friends think that if you meet I don't know juicy red berries that this is going to be more helpful for you than if you eat berries that aren't quite as juicy and aren't quite as red the truth of the matter is is that those are fundamentally flawed ideas and my my good friend Larry Gatlin is got a genius for for for distilling a high concept called this the myth of inner beauty so the myth of inner beauty is that you can add and the truth is is that I don't believe that you can so this person talking about what could a woman do to add the answer is she can't do anything to add what she can do is she can reduce the likelihood of having points subtracted but we're not going to find that it's going to work quite the same way for males and females so if a female doesn't meet looks criteria pretty quickly pretty obviously to the male then it doesn't matter this is Madame Curie or mother Teresa in there that we're not going to add points to the nail to aesthetic responses and if she doesn't need criteria she's probably never going to meet criteria and it's not going to make any difference what she accomplishes well he finds out that she is okay that won't necessarily be the case for how much she might love the human obviously there are other other things involved in human relationships than just sex appeal so he could they could become best friends and he could he could think the world of her as a given being and love her but that's not the same thing as being sexually attracted to it so he's not going to become sexually attracted to her because he finds out that she has stellar character and great abilities and therefore she can protect him and provide for him okay that's not a variable inside of his equation for reproducing his DNA so therefore we're not going to I going to see this out of the function now what can you do if you're a female who is attempting to try to not have points subtracted well you kind of intuitively know be in very good physical condition is this person to talk about not going to say that physical strike per se the males are going to differ on that dimension about what they find physically attractive so so that that's a that's a aesthetic variable that doesn't have a unitary answer to it so there are males that are going to like the look of females who are extremely lean that looked like these female bodybuilding competitors I don't understand this they those females look like they don't have enough fat on them to to live through the tough winter and raise a child and in fact we see that their menses shut down at such low levels of bat etc so I'm not surprised that that's not typical for what males find most sexually attractive but the notion is to be in very good physical condition and to you know do some other things that are smart like I use your conscientiousness in your intelligence to develop marketable skills so that they that they would judge you is not a financial burden and then and also to I don't know where nice clothes compete with the other females with makeup and hair etc in other words bring your a-game that's what you can do but if you if you think that if you are below a male's threshold for sexual attractiveness and you're making $32,000 a year that if you could just make three hundred thirty two thousand of dollars a year that you would qualify you will not okay you will that that will not add points if thirty two thousand dollars a year for that male is not subtracting from his assessment then adding a million dollars a year will not add not add one percent to your attractiveness so this in the same way that if you're reading a very healthy diet exclusively of healthy full natural foods if you then start the meat I don't know that one of these doctors think sixteen beats has a whole bunch of extra stuff in it it's so good for you and it correlates with lower risk of cancer yes it does correlate with lower risk in cancer because people eat a lot of steamed beets or eating less Fritos okay and ham sandwiches so that's why it correlates it doesn't correlate because there's something beats that is magically superior to something in grapes or something in lettuce or something in turnips or something in rice okay so this is the concept of the myth of inner beauty of food and there's also the concept of the myth of inner beauty and mating and it's the same principle and so this is uh this is the correct way to look at this I believe from my perspective and I I believe the scientific evidence tracks this quite well but but obviously nobody has its tested this quite directly so I can't prove it but I believe the principles sound fascinating you're reminding me of your book the pleasure trap at I remember the I loved the book when I first started reading it in the part that caught my eye most was a chapter where you were talking about Sherlock Holmes and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and out he had the the story of Sherlock Holmes was he was so brilliant because everyone was looking of what was there and Sherlock Holmes was looking at what wasn't there and yeah yeah the concept of everyone helped the Rena's trying to add things whereas you know a lot of times we should be subtracting things so very fascinating concept which reminds me we we could get I'm so glad this happened to come up this is exactly the extraordinary value of water vessel is that that water fasting is a magnificent way for for the body to restore health and so it's all about taking everything out and letting the system restore itself okay and so this is this is a vastly superior way to create health outcomes than anything that you could possibly concoct and add okay now again I'm not going to say that is a categorical statement because if you have some raging infection and someone gives you an antibiotic that could save your life so you can't make a categorical but in general in principle but yeah we're going to give somebody that's got a health problem a bunch of fancy food and that's going to what reverse their heart disease no it's not it's going to stop the damage from being done and allow the body to heal itself that's all that's what an Esselstyn or a mcdougal bite or a tune or diet or to what chef AJ does that our healthy diets are not quote causing health what they're doing is they're stopping disease processes and they're allowing the body to heal itself and it turns out that there's an even more effective way of doing that same thing which is water passing now isn't that ironic we take all of its so-called fancy building blocks of health that are in the food and the magic food and the kale and the beets or the nuts or whatever it is everybody's counting today and it turns out we take them all out and it completely put the person on nothing but water and they'll get I'll be way faster than any concoction that any of these doctors can come up with okay and that is the truth and that I can prove I've got the evidence for that and the evidence that a microbiological level is being it's being documented right now at Renault felt center so we we have clinical outcomes already that can beat the daylights out of about anybody's data it's not it's close and it turns out that if you can't get into terminal health center there's a place called Basking State common by doctor Neji in Southern California all right good you got a damn doctor let's let's move on thank you thank you all right for those on your toes it's fasting escape calm there you go very good all right Nate what do we got so our next question now we're going to turn the compass a little bit and instead of yeah human mating we're going to talk about getting along and we've got a couple of questions on families who are fighting and not giving getting along very well so dr. Lyle yeah love the podcast I'm soaking up all the information like a sponge my question is is there an effective way for family members to peacefully interact if they each have varying degrees of agreeableness especially when dealing with narcissists for example if your mother-in-law tends to be narcissistic but the daughter-in-law who admittedly is also disagreeable wants to keep the peace at Holiday times asking for a friend wink wink yeah there you go I love that good for them all right I would say the following it's true that there's a there's this couple of principles here that I think that we can we can look to the first principle is the concept of the disagreeable distance so we want our live when there are people that are disagreeable we want our lives to intersect with them as much as necessary for whatever or whatever critical financial or social processes are needed for us today in Iraq with them so we we needed to be as much as necessary but as little as possible okay so that's the idea the disagreeable bit so so we need to move our relationships with disagreeable people to the smallest possible overlap with our existence and this isn't some theoretical ethereal way of looking at we're talking about how many minutes are you going to have to interact with this person and the answer should be the minimum okay so whatever it is that we need done second of all we also need to know some things about our own instincts our own instincts will tell us that these people are in our village and we're going to have disputes with them and they are disagreeable ie and they're unfair and therefore we need to correct this unfairness and negotiate and intimidate them into and educate them into seeing the world more correctly because we're going to have to repetitively deal with them and so this is a this is an interesting instinct and it's instinctive that we need to in fact I should name it it's a it's the the false native consensus the or the illusion of needed consensus so we have a feeling that we have we need consensus we need agreement and the reason is is that we're going to have to be dealing with these people in their complaint integral component of our lives and so people will feel this way arguing at with all kinds of people about politics or various things or whether or not you should be on a plant-based diet or a paleo diet or where an Atkins diet or whatever kind of decide and the answer is you don't need any consensus at all we don't need any consensus none all you need to optimize your life is a few friends who think similarly dude you've done so when we go into these situations where we're going to wind up with a disagreeable person in there they are operating on the same false illusion of the need for consensus we need a better name for this I this is an important concept so it deserves spores little Mozart Google Android L alliteration good okay yeah so there's a so the thing is they're feeling the same thing and they're feeling irritated that you don't see the world where they see it and so they also feel the need to like beat you into submission so it is that you are you were going to vote their way at the village council so that the so that so that terrible mistakes aren't made in the village in terms of village resources and decision making that you clearly are haywire on and you're going to make a mistake and it's going to be costly to them in their genes and you're such an idiot don't you know that we share genes and you're you need to know that this is the right way we're going to do things so they could be for big global decision making for the village or it could also be to just the unfairness that you are that you know that you're not giving me enough esteem right now and that's going to signal that there's going to be decision-making conflicts later whatever it is it's still the illusion that we need a consensus so what I would tell you is hey let it go if you've got to put up with this person for an hour and 47 minutes or 2 hours and 47 minutes before you can hit the door then just do it just you know blood their circuits a little bit give them some give them some status and don't worry about move on there just stay away from all conflict all you're doing there is is calling them you know a couple of hours of your time and you're doing it for a damn good reason there better be a damn good reason you're doing it or you shouldn't do it okay there you're either there because it's worth checking a little social box and making sure that we don't know that that it's two hours invested because it's because there's an important reason for that investment or it's not worth the investment if we're really supposed to be there and supposed to have a good time and that's the purpose of this and you're not having a good time then we shouldn't be there only time we should be in these situations that there they are but they are a necessary investment for other little tentacles and levers associated with their lives ie our partner it's their mother you know again they they feel like they we need to put on a show that we like their mother even though their mother's a bitch and you know etc and fine okay then we'd suck it up and we just flatter the person add them on the head say they're right and get out that's what we do the last thing we need is to let our instincts let our genes step into this mess and and then start to try to battle with them and then try try to you know in a panic over the the false need for consensus then get into it like it's not worth the trouble what who they vote for doesn't make a damn bit of difference to you should why should it it's absurd okay what they think about diet what they think about religion what they think about anything with the hell difference is amazing the only reason it makes any difference to you is because you you feel the need the distorted need or the illusion of the need for consensus okay so that's you no longer live in a circumscribed village of a few people that we need to get some these kinds of consensus and we need to push our point we don't live in anything like that we are unbelievably free of the village so one of the problems is is that we're not in touch with that and so once we start to let that go what other people think about anything becomes unbelievable totally unimportant there's all we need to do is make sure that we're not on the other end of some nuts bullet you know I mean that thinks that he needs to do something for some cause this we need to be safe and we need to be away from other people's you know bizarre anger and their their insistence that we think that way they do just get out of it we can be free and it doesn't matter how haywire the world is all right I don't know I look at that bulb fascinating that's you just closed a couple of open loops in my head so yeah yeah let me continue on with this just for a second make and that is that know if I've said this before I just said this in a you know the webinar I did with AJ yesterday a couple days ago and that is the this concept of the limitations of your life span and the it's useful too I believe it is for me to think about your life not in terms of years or even in months but in ours because ours is the level of which you make so many decisions your life is literally a string of decisions that are essentially how am I going to spend this hour and then how am I going to spend the next hour it's more or less like that and if we think about our lifespan it's useful to try to to reap our way out of what's known as the denial of death and that is the human lack of ability to conceptualize that you're going to be dead like you vaguely know that you're going to be dead but you don't really know what you're going to be dead because it just doesn't you just don't block it you're not billed to guac it and the it was a there's been times when all of us have done this where I've sat around I don't know watch three NFL games at the end of it and like what the hell did I just do I didn't really enjoy it I'm just looking for something on TV I don't really care about the Bengals and Steelers and like why the hell did I just spend do that one in I haven't done this in many years but I had done such things and there are and the truth is it's a waste of time and when you're young you don't really think of that much about it but in my age do so I now know that I have in all in all probability I have lived at least two-thirds of my life and so I also know that I've got call it maybe 14 hours a day a decent waking time that none on the shower brushing my teeth or whatever we're sleeping and so you've got 14 hours a day we've got more or less 100 hours a week more or less 5000 hours a year and more or less call it in the next you know 20 years call it a hundred thousand hours so if you look at your life as a hundred thousand hours then here's another way to conceptualize five hundred thousand hours and that is that think of yourself as having a bank account with a hundred thousand dollars in and every hour there's a little buzz on your cell phone for a second it tells you that you just spend a dollar and the problem is is that there's no way to earn anymore it's impossible there is no magic deep juice there is no magic nut butter there's nothing they can add to this hundred thousand hours it is impossible if you eat really healthy food exercise go to bed on time get sunshine and do periodic water fasting you may get all 100,000 hours and you may get them in help that you cannot get a hundred thousand and one because you're limited by your genetics how long you live and you're going to die in a ditch for short okay so now if I have a hundred thousand hours left in every hour that goes by a little buzz goes at the end of today I'm going to have ninety nine thousand nine hundred and eighty six and then when I look at my cell phone the next day one of this little computational app and it's going to be ninety nine thousand nine hundred and seventy two and down it goes they don't they don't take them up when you sleep because we're only computing it on the hours that I'm awake those the hours I'm making decisions but every hour I'm giving up one of these precious hours and then they're gone okay now you can give them all up you can you know try to get everybody to believe in your religion or your politics and you can try to save the whales or you do whatever the hell it is that you want and you can do it so you can you're going to drop three children from some crack addicts and your two give them the best life that you can there's all kinds of things you can do with your time and I'm not saying that there's a right or a wrong way to do this what I'm saying is that there's more enjoyable ways and less enjoyable ways there's decisions that are going to result in more enjoyment attitudes as since in those decisions so you're going to result in less okay so the concept here is to try to use your time wisely that to me you know there are going to be mistakes that are going to be made there's going to be opportunities lost there's no way to get around that even have mine that is perfectly calibrated it's perfect as possible in its decision-making doesn't get sucked into any traps at all there's a certain background radiation level of mistakes you can you're not going to take the 500 stocks on the S&P 500 this year and invest your money in all of your money and the one that's going to have the highest rate of return you cannot do this it's not possible in other words that would be the best investment that you can make financially in those markets but you cannot make that investment because there's no possible way for you to figure that out now you might do it you could gamble it all but that would be a mistake is your odds of winning that gamble or exceedingly highly against you same reason you don't take the retirement fun to Vegas and put it on you know 13 black and now so you inherently are constrained by your ability to analyze the evidence in in order to make the best decisions possible for your existence you are inherently constrained by this however past the inherent constraints there are simply mistakes that you could avoid they you can eat the wrong food and had you known better you wouldn't have done it you wouldn't got to answer heart disease and died early okay you can but you can recognize that for example mr. slick over there okay that that has a criminal record and has you know three ex-wives don't be wife number four not a good decision and so there's ways for you to figure out you know how to use your time how to make these decisions wisely so that you optimize your resistance that's what we're trying to do here at beat your games this is what this is what this analysis is about so one of the things that we're trying to do is we're trying to look for the decision-making apparatus apparatus that sit inside the game in mind that can be susceptible to mistakes and one set of those mistakes is where with Stone Age environment and its design the design of the mind in responding to bid demands the Stone Age environment will miss opportunities in the modern environment or make mistakes in the modern environment that they don't need to make one of those is spending time trying to convince other people or or you know iron out conflicts between us and other people that we don't need to that's a big mistake so this question about how do I get along with my pan house mother-in-law the answer is just smile flatter her and get the hell out of it and be there at the minimum of those hours because those three hours that you're there at Christmastime a little bomb goes off in your in your purse every hour a dollar got sucked out don't give these people hardly any of your time if you can possibly avoid it and you know a great life a life that is close to optimal is one where the answer to that question is Vigo I'm not giving any of those people any of my time okay so that's so that's the that's the other part of the answer to that question so if we're going to be there there better be a damn good reason that we're there and it's actually necessary for a lot of other values that are involved at which point don't get sucked into the arguments at all don't bother the other side of it is make damn sure we're there for reasons that we really need to be there yes if we don't need to be there don't give these people your life it's fascinating all right all right we've had a caller on hold we're going to welcome caller what's your name were you calling from hi this is Greta I'm calling from Denver okay well I Greta I'm evening Greta welcome to the show I was just listening to the podcast and I hope this question isn't too personal but I'm on the beat your Jean Facebook page and I always watch dr. Lyles YouTube videos and stuff and a lot of people have been asking like why wondering why dr. Lisle isn't on social media that much if there's no specific reason why and like what you do in your downtime instead of being on social media grata we've never met that I'd give you a big hug beautiful question all right ironically enough I was speaking with a good friend of mine earlier today that as a business that is that is uh where Facebook makes sense to be part of you know part of doing your marketing so she goes to other people's Facebook page she sees what the lengths are to post things she posts con man she talks to them about like all this stuff about about that kind of marketing interconnected process to me that that is what we call there's a name for this it's called Doug Lyall hell I mean it is Doug Lyall health the concept of finding out what somebody else that does what they posted what they say or what they think about what I posed like oh my god I'm sorry I'm an introvert I have like no interested in is us so I actually not on Facebook my might my business facebook pages is one by a good friend of mine and so we have a we have a deal and so that's how that's how that works okay she's confident up she knows what what would go on that thing and what wouldn't go on that thing so that's all good now the answer is that I like they I hate anything that remotely looks like social process that's just not me now what do I do in my downtime I pet my cat and right now I'm up in Portland Oregon with my good friend dr. Alan Goldhamer he discovered a thing called never too late basketball so never too late basketball it's for old geezers who-who want to show that they were undervalued in their youth as a player and they're going to beat up on some people so Alan and I are up here licking our chops because this camp starts in a day or so and we're going to be ready we're going to go to the gym tomorrow we're going to shoot our shots are going to be sharp and then we're going to go out there try to beat up on 14 year old 14 other old men that have showed up from around the country for this length so that that's what I do with my time I'm trying to beat up on old men okay so thank you better you bet credit thank you very much for the phone call and for calling the show really appreciate it yeah Wow dr. Lyle I have a whole new respect for you well at least they're older reckon because I can I can manage five days without a goal never yeah there that's that that's respect that's a respect actually he's great fun he's got he is and he is the king and sarcastic let me tell you there's nobody like yeah all right all right so our next we have lecture yeah we had one more that was right after this one about getting along but you answered it so thoroughly this was just a personal situation having two grown daughters they're not speaking to each other and so you know I think we'll leave it we will leave it for now if we want to go over we always can but the principles are exactly the same as what you just said one quick question about positive psychology do you do we only have a couple of minutes for the sure okay dr. Lila can you give the Doug download on positive psychology all I know about is that it's a new branch of psychology invented in 1998 and whenever someone tells me of one of its principal my BS radar goes off the charts now that I have some understanding of evolutionary psychology in steam dynamics well good BS meter should go off it's it's not as bad as it might be and it's uh not really a bad thing this is the guy that coined this term he didn't really start it in it but the term was coined in in the late 1990s by by Martin Seligman and Seligman I believe at the time he was the president the American Psychological Association and Seligman is a legitimate researcher he was he was you know nationally recognized researcher for his this actually started out as a essentially a learning theorist learning running researcher and discovered earlier a little event called learned helplessness which I kind of got blown out of proportion for its importance but it but it was never will lots of legitimate he didn't legitimate science and the roots of professor at the University of Pennsylvania and he and later in his career he he kind of looked at things in he said hey we were spending an awful lot of time he's actually a here's a he's a clinical I believe he's a clinical not even been a clinical psychologist I think he was I don't think he ever really saw impatience to speak of or did any work in that in that arena but the field and said that the the tone or the focus of the field clinically in clinical psychology is on pathology so you know anxiety disorders eating disorders depression schizophrenia bipolar disorder that it would solve disorder disorder disorder disorder and he said it seems out of balance that what about thinking about how it is that we increase human happiness and so it turns out of course clinicians are doing that intuitively all the time and but Seligmann felt like hey it's not sort of formally recognized that but that's we ought to have research on this we ought to be thinking about this in this direction and so that's where positive core positive psychology was born now the truth is it wasn't born there it more formally we go all the way back to Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow and humanistic psychologists of mid twentieth century that was known as the third force and so the behind me obviously psychoanalysis and behaviorism being the two the two twin pillars of twentieth-century psychology that dominated the field with the psychodynamic or psychodynamic Neo Freudians dominating the clinical arena for most of that time whereas learning theory was dominating academic psychology and so those two things were like I don't know like two things have never met in the middle like there was sort of separate spheres in the universe that didn't do much touching the the the academic psychologists didn't really have a lot of use for psychodynamic thinking that they didn't really see it as as a coherent theory about anything with any real testable hypotheses and when efforts were made in that regard they kind of flubbed around and nothing happened for the name of an excitement the whereas learning theory learning theories have legitimacy oops learning theories have legitimacy and have and there's a history of a accretion of knowledge that kicked took place behind advances in science they are in the 20th century however the positive psychology or humanistic humanistic psychology was a was exactly what solid man is talking about it was the the notion of hey why don't we be white why don't we want we looking to try to understand the causes of human happiness and so there was some some of the more important thinking in this area was done by Rogers Abraham Maslow Csikszentmihalyi who did who is the father of flow theory these are all the sort of fundamental thinkers that were sitting underneath what eventually fell in men terms as positive psychology so positive psychology I don't think has any it doesn't it's not sitting on any big theoretical revolution or edifice or anything else it's more a man's statement about shouldn't we be looking over here to try to understand positives what what things cause positives it's not a revolution in anything it's not a bad thing it's just not we're not going to get a ton of insights from something that is fundamentally theoretically nowhere the big big push forward in positive psychology will come from evolutionary theory obviously it's evolutionary theory now we finally have a coherent understanding of the nature of motivation of all of all life all animal life and including humans and so now with evolutionary psychology is specifically focuses on human nature being allows us to understand the causes of human happiness with far greater precision and starts us down a pathway towards finding improved human decision-making so that we can cause more happiness circuits to be fired in people so that's a fancy way of saying that we finally have a theory that works and it's going to be you know the next half a century is going to be truly the birth of positive psychology you know now now wedded to evolutionary biology and therefore it finally has a place to set its lever so that it can move with human psychological world
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