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Episode 163: Expectations vs performance, politics questions, business partner conflict
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so dr. dr. Lyle how do you reconcile the ego trap with the what's called the Pygmalion effect where others expectations of a target person affect the target person's performance yeah that that effect that's interesting I just had this question at turn north on Elektra this weekend so the just by sheer bizarre coincidence the this is this effect was was researched by the Harvard social psychologist Robert Rosenthal I think it was in the 1960s and it became a famous thing so here we are talking about it you know 50 years later the the bottom line was is that it's been sort of misreported and misreported and misreported over the decades the the original effect was interesting and got obviously a lot of attention because it it suggested that this had a lot of implications for education and essentially if you could if you could have a kid expect or have a teacher expect that a kid was going to do well I don't know we heard this here's here's what it was so what that what Rosenthal did was he told teachers that certain kids had been identified that they were likely to have an academic growth spurt in the next year and he had just picked these kids at random but he told them that you know they had taken this special test and the test is had predicted this and so then sure enough when they looked later on on the next year those kids were doing better now so this was the the evidence of sort of the teacher maybe unconsciously having an impact on and encouraging a kid and therefore the kid believes in themselves more and then they you know get better etc this is ludicrous that's not what happened at all what happened on a post-mortem analysis of these these studies and these effects was that the teachers felt pressure from the fact that some academic expected some kid to do better and if the kid didn't do better the teacher was going to look like a bad teacher so the teachers started hustling around with these specified individuals and coaching them about tests that they were going to take and essentially gave them a hell of a lot of extra attention and really did everything possible to bend over backwards to see to it that these kids would would perform better on any kind of assessment device so it had nothing to do with the kid actually get smart or actually having any academic growth support or anything else just had to do with essentially making the outcomes of this thing entirely reactive and as soon as the kids went to the next grade it was all gone never never to return so that's the so essentially the notion of what's called expectancy effects or where this sort of sort of thing doesn't it doesn't fly they're not there now hmm so let's look at this in juxta bitch drugs to position to the ego trap and see if there's anything in here there's any details in here that are interesting at all there there are just a little bit so there is no big million effect per se but what there can be if you think about the person's situation with respect to social expectation for real performance there are essentially three Bloggs scenarios that can be demarked on a continuum that it's actually a continuum of assessment of what other people's expectations are of me number one I can think that the expectations are too low at which point I'm insulted and I'm highly motivated to demonstrate that the wrong that they're not giving me enough credit so if they think that I can't do X then I'm highly motivated to do X the one could argue that if I get feedback that you can't do X that it may lower my self efficacy or my estimation about whether or not I can do X and therefore might undermine my motivation that is also true okay so the it isn't so there's essentially two factors here that feedback from others can influence a person's personal assessment of whether or not that they can do something and whether their assessment of whether or not they can do something is is going to be what we might call their self-confidence or actually it's it's what we technically call their perceived self-efficacy or their perceived probability of success and that perceived probability success is the result of essentially three factors make up the vast majority of variants associated with a person's confidence or their perceived self-efficacy just to be very technical the perceived self-efficacy is the calculation that the mind goes through as it is it runs a probability assessment on the likelihood of success confidence is the emotional result of the self of the self-efficacy computation in the same way that whether you you calculate whether you've been treated fairly or unfairly is the computation and then anger is the the resultant emotional response so so just to keep in mind that these are essentially two different facets of the same phenomenon we could just call it confidence but I get you know in in with respect to Albert bandura who spent a large part of his career detailing out how this works we we want to be precise if we're a psychologist talking about this so really we're talking about perceived self-efficacy so or your perceived probability of success so the so our perceived self-efficacy is going to be the result of the three primary factors are going to be your own personal history with respect to the endeavor so if you're really good at math and this is just another math test and in a long line of tests in your calculus class and we're into the semester and you've been taking all the quizzes in the book and we're now on a new part of the thing you have very high confidence you're high perceived probabilities success as you walk into the next test no problem okay so why is that you don't care what anybody tells you you already know because you personally have already done something extremely similar so this is this is your personal estimation based on your own personal experience this is the most powerful influence on your perceived probability of success or your self confidence now a second line of evidence is what do knowledgeable people think okay so if you if you don't know anything so for example let's suppose you're a judo player and you know you're a pretty good player and you're going to about to go against some other guy and your coach comes over and says oh look out this guy is really really tough you know you just better just grab on and hold on for dear life and just try to get a draw okay well now your coach knows more than you do and you use assume that he's got information now that you don't have it so therefore that's going to influence your perceived self-efficacy with respect to this match so this is another another line of evidence the third line of evidence is going to be how well relevant others or comparative others have done so you the coach tells you this but the friend is about your size and strength and is one in your same little pool the last round went out there just through this guy without any problem and it's like you know your friend is about equal to you so you're like you know what I don't really think I need to be terrified the way the coach is saying so your mind basically uses these three lines of evidence your personal experience the experiences that you observe in relevant others and the opinions of knowledgeable others those are the three lines of evidence that the mind uses to compute its perceived probability of success which then generates certain degree of confidence now so mm-hmm the expectancy effects could potentially influence this business would be knowledgeable others expecting that you could do something and therefore that raise your perceived self-efficacy which could then raise your raise your estimation that the cost is of effort is worth the benefit because you're likely to succeed so this is the notion that sort of straightforward winning or psychology looks at but it's forgetting that that those the potential increase in perceived probability success can be easily out dwarfed by the ego trap easily so the ego trap is when we believe that other people have overestimated our likelihood of success so there's three possible demarcations along this continuum that they have underestimated us so we believe that they are they are not giving us enough credit and now we were excited about going out in that match because we think we're going to beat that guy and our coach doesn't think so and he's going to in for big surprise so we're excited about it now the other thing would be when we think other people are about right so they think we can do X and we pretty much think we can do X so there's no particular influence there of the social influence of other people because it's not at variance with what it is that we think ourselves and so therefore there there's not a lot of motivational addition or subtraction to that endeavor will either do it because of the overall cost benefit or we want but it won't be being influenced by outside source outside inputs the third possibility is that they've given us too much credit and if they've given us more credit than we believe we think we deserve then this puts us in a position where we don't think we're going to live up to expectations and that's the ego trap now you can see how easy it would be for so-called expectancy effects to walk somebody in at ego trap okay Jimmy you're going to start to do really well in math you're really smart and this show this test shows there's going to be a growth spurt really like we think that that's going to cause this kids self-efficacy to increase and therefore work harder and then have more success I don't think that's very likely and so could you engineer circumstances with individuals under individual circle chances could you find little nuances where there's the trade-off between the expectancy effects and the ego trap might tip in the direction of the expectancy affected you might increase motivational action as a result of that yes I'm sure that that's quite possible it's there that could certainly be the case and we've all seen it so we've seen cases where we encourage somebody because we believe that they were under estimating their abilities in a certain area and they were essentially being timid or avoidant about about a challenge because they didn't they felt like that they were going to fail when we instead said listen I think you're actually under estimating your abilities here and let me explain why okay because I I believe that you've got more chops here in this situation than you're seeing and let me let me give you the reasons why I think so now that could in in some circumstances be a winner a winning ticket in other words the individual is not feeling too much pressure from the ego trap but we've boosted significantly their perceived self-efficacy and therefore their their effort of course that would be possible but to think that these two things are not essentially diametrically opposed would be naive because they are and so so in any event this is a very good question about how it is that these would be related and in my clinical experience the it's clear that the most dangerous thing that I can do is to is to walk people in the ego trap I can see it immediately when it's happened they immediately get timid in defensive even though they seem to be being in other words I've been trying to reassure them and it is potentially flattering that I have a higher opinion of their abilities and likely to success than they do themselves so it's not entirely unpleasant to hear it ie they are in fact receiving a scheme but it is now putting them under pressure of the challenge and they're they're likely to lose it and they're not at all sure they feel like I've overestimated it so whenever I do that I immediately walk that back and and put an ink cloud over the whole dynamic and then slowly move our way towards a expectation that isn't too far above what they think they might be capable of so yeah that's the story so the big story of the question there is is their big expectancy effects all ah the Rosenthal effect or the Pygmalion effect and the answer is No those have been not been found to be clinically useful and the the only data out there this sort of gives us a look at this would be the mind set data generated by jukin or colleagues which consistently show the ego trap dynamic fascinating and this is Carol Dweck she has some okay yeah my mind set if I have some parent is dealing with with a family system or a coach or a kid that we can see that there in the ego trap I send them to Carol Dweck's book called mindset it's uh it's clearly has the the ego trap identified the dynamic it her her analysis does not she doesn't understand what's actually happening but she identifies the pattern perfectly and her research always comes up with the ego trap effect in other words if we if we praise praise too much the kids you know people go the opposite direction so she she actually says instead to do what she calls a growth mindset which is to encourage that people's effort which also works what she doesn't apparently know is that the most effective thing is to insult them because she's not actually aware that this is a problem of esteem dynamics she's actually thinking that somehow it's this magical thing a motivational mindset motivational mindset is a derivative of the esteem dynamic processes that are happening as a result of the esteem signals from that are you know that are being inferred coming from outside parties or from an internal audience so the the analysis that we talk about here be true Gian says is a significant step more sophisticated and directs analysis but her analysis and her data are beautiful in other words her they are not her in her analysis and beautiful or analysis is you know has has there's some blanks that need to be filled in there the however the her her research is pretty and her results are crisp and they always show the same result because she has identified this dynamic which is clearly showing that if we if we put expectations too high people are going to go the opposite direction rather than sees the high expectations and now rise to meet them behind a rising self-efficacy so the the idea that that was was born with Rosenthal's early research has not turned out to be an accurate analysis of the situation fascinating now in order for someone to be in an ego trap is they have to want to earn a steam from the purple perilla for the person who's from the person who's giving setting the expectations right like if I if I just meet someone randomly and you know on the street and say oh yeah you're so great at this or that in the other there they're just going to look at me like say good job whereas if i if i yeah i guess insult someone who wants to earn esteem for me then yeah that might you know that's completely different right yeah I mean obviously every situation that has any meaning at all that has any significant motivational force to it we are that that's because the the esteem that's involved is of significance so yeah so I'm not so sure I mean I mean I think it all pretty well works the same so if if someone in an audience that I had never met said hey I don't think that you could do this or that I would instantly feel the insult okay and I'd be highly motivated if I was sure that they were mistaken I would say no you're mistaken let me show you why you're mistaken okay so I don't think it simply all depends upon the you know who the esteemed signaler is whether or not we care about that esteem and it but it you wouldn't have to know the person you would simply have to have a chip in your head that was reading the baddest scheme was important okay so then that's why a heckler can be upsetting for a speaker because you've never met the person before but if they're heckling you that or they're they're contradicting or challenging you you can feel that you're going to lose you're losing a scheme with a bunch of the audience potentially so now that that now what it is that they think and what everybody else thinks matters to you okay this may not be anybody that you've ever met there's maybe nobody in the audience that you know but it doesn't matter you're stone age brain is cataloging this as a as a nose counting event of a scheme and you're there to try to earn some esteem and now if it turns out that you're that that a person that you're losing it or you're getting evidence that you're being underestimated then you're likely to get your bristles up and and then try to attack it okay so anyway yeah the dynamic I think is is a universal dynamic of human motivation all right fantastic okay well let's go on to the politics questions my name's dr. Lila a few episodes ago actually quite a few episodes ago you don't know however they thing what's that yeah which is good go ahead go ahead you know I'm working on setting up a voicemail a call-in voicemail for people who want to leave comments about the show and this is going to fit beautifully alright alright dr. Lila a while ago you talked about how we shouldn't ban anything but this was in regards to people causing their own self-destruction with food things like that do you think there's a place for intelligent preemptive bans on dangerous chemicals and children's too toys or explosives hi magazine assault rifles background checks for more dangerous weapons ownership anything of the sort if not what do we say to people who have lost ones to these very preventable tragedies do we tell them at least you're free to do whatever you want is there a middle ground or is common law and bringing tragic cases before a judge after the fact the only best way or do you think there might be some room for regulation and certifications and Prevention's well why don't we just go out to Doug while his is opinion of you yep ever yeah these are person is asking a whole bunch of questions and the so they're these can be there are different questions on the table here that can be viewed from a variety of perspectives and I would say that that we in in my personal political opinion we begin with a with a philosophy and the philosophy is that the that the government government and government action is here to try to serve the interests of the individuals that are that are influenced by the government that are there working under or in the in the collective population that is under the rule of law of that government so the notion is that that essentially we want the government to govern optimally and that means that in principle we want the maximum amount of freedom with for those individuals with the least possible amount of government interference now it turns out that if we have anarchy in other words we don't have a government we're in trouble because then we're going to get thugs taking taking over resources and that's how that's going to work so that won't work so clearly we have to have a rule of law and but the law starts to get to be fuzzy so the law I mean in principle the notion to Bob optimize human life would be too you essentially have you be able to do whatever the hell it is that you want to do in this life so long as you aren't forcibly interfering with anybody else's rights to do the same that that would be a very reasonable principle but now it starts to get little touchy like well what do we enforce ibly what if I just want to walk around naked what about that okay am I my forcibly interfering with other people's rights to not have to look at naked people when they don't want to do it so that starts to get to be a little little bit tricky that how is that we might start to deal with these conflicts of interests so obviously this question came up when I was talking about probably you know there's always some you know militant foodies out there that want to ban sugar there's always there's always people talking like this and so of course my attitude is no we shouldn't ban anything of the kind when it comes to your own personal consumption this is this is up to you it's your body you own it and if you wanted to do things to it this is your business so long as you aren't forcibly interfering with the rights of other people to do the same so for example it should be illegal to drive a car on the road under the influence of alcohol or drugs or drive effectively erratically because you're so short of sleep or whatever else the problem is so if you if you've got a seizure disorder so you're putting other people at significant risk so just because you want to drive under the influence and it's inconvenient for you to call an uber or have your have to pick up your car the next day too bad okay you are forcibly interfering with my right to have a reasonably safe Highway and so this is where of course there's always going to be these questions but then if we make that illegal we've now clipped somebody's desire to do what is that they want but have we done it for an intelligent reason and that reason is essentially try to optimize the common good so so what the hell is the common good whose ox is being gored at what price okay so what do we have gal is the young congressman from New York Alexandria okay credit our name right so these people I'm very much out of touch in case people didn't know but the point is I read something recently about how she was going to want to finance some things in government by maximally taxing wealthy people well that's you know Robin Hood communistic thinking all the way down without without understanding this is not how you would organize an optimal society optimal society is you you you get to keep what you earn except what we need for government functions okay and if we start to tax the daylights out of people we're going to disincentivize all kinds of creativity and responsibility and so some some people haven't you know haven't actually ever been in like a business partnership where it turns out that you know you kind of feel like you're working a little harder than the other guy and he's not what kind of working as hard as you are so you're kind of pissed off because you're dividing it 50/50 yeah okay so you know the young congressman apparently hasn't a congresswoman hasn't had a few little basic experiences to help her understand that sometimes if you have one lazy kid in one kid that works hard you kind of want to give the one that works hard the allowance until the lazy one they don't get anything until blonde gets mode okay now the now when it comes to banning things drugs you know if you if you ban heroin because there's heroin deaths then about what's going to happen is is that you make you absolutely make for certain that there's going to be an underworld with all kinds of unenforceable contracts because these people are not operating under the rule of law or thugs so you have anarchy okay and so you just made certain that there's going to be all kinds of tragedies as a result of this now the you might say well what about my sixteen-year-old kid that died of a heroin overdose isn't that a tragedy yes it is but so are are the people that got shot in the crossfire of a gang war for drugs okay so this is a so this is once again the the appropriate thing is to step back and say wait a second let's try to figure out why we would want to ban anything you know what is the common good here what is the price that we pay as we have government starting to take over and he'll legalize human activities where we're really you know for what reason so now the how would I look at these questions well you would start with a philosophy that you would be very very careful and under great consideration would you allow government to have any additional power okay because it's the whole idea is listen I want to be as free as possible to do whatever the hell I want so long as I'm not forcibly interfering on anybody else right to do the same the if I if I take heroin I'm not forcibly interfering on anybody else's rights to do anything so I find it a bizarre concept that would be illegal now you start saying well now wait a second what if heroin pushers start pushing it on little kids really okay now now you start first of all if it's if it's not legal I mean if it's legal then it's not going to be particularly costly and there aren't going to be drug dealers because you can get it at the store any so now the question is should it be at the store well maybe not okay and so now now maybe there's an issue where you might want to use government to warn people and so on and so forth and now this is where we start to wonder whether or not I should have a warning on my my my product and you don't have a warning on yours this gets down to the fact that when we get to some of these conflicts ultimately they are empirical questions so we have to make what we consider to be the most reasonable trade-off decisions and then from there we can actually run very subtle experiments in principle and we can look at other populations in other areas of the globe they've done things differently and see what the outcomes are and see whether or not those outcomes look like they serve the common good okay even if they do and they appear - that doesn't mean that will necessarily work with our population because our population may be culturally and genetically different than somebody else's population what works over there might not work here so that means that these are ultimately empirical questions so data not principle will sometimes have to drive the solution now this is all this discussion is all about how many angels dance on the head of the pen because this is not how these things will ever get decided anyway these are get decided through political grandstanding and all kinds of basically let's talk - 100 IQ of the population and convince them of our position that we're a good guy that believes in the things they believe in etc okay I can remember a cousin who is very highly intelligent cousin that was all for banning of drugs and big-time DEA and all this kind of stuff and I just looked at her like oh my god your gift no idea what you're talking about you got 140 IQ and it's not being invoked because you haven't thought through the consequences of what it is that you're saying so you have forgotten what happened in Al Capone Chicago apparently okay so you have forgotten you know of what goes on with all the drug wars so this is this is but what we had was a very visceral reaction she had a young daughter and the idea of any drug being illegal within the United States borders just freaked her out made her all upset okay so that's that that's like the end of discussion there's no point in having a rational discussion about it there really isn't because the truth is these decisions will be decided in Washington and in halls of power by people that are following that there's sort of sniffing the cultural zeitgeist and where 51% of the vote is so they can remain in power it nobody's interested in testing this systematically and trying to integrate data and try to actually make the best decisions for the society so so the persons general question is should we ban things undoubtedly as they said assault rifles and so forth but remember whenever you do ban anything what do we get in illegal trade and a very dangerous the illegal trade in the very thing that we've made it illegal okay so there's always in all questions there's always a cost benefit to any kind of government banning an action of any kind and so we we have to be as prudent as we can and then try to follow the evidence where it's available that's the only rational way that I can see to proceed and if anybody had a more brilliant way to do it I'd be open to listening but I don't think so yeah my topic Milton Friedman has a really wonderful series called free to choose where he goes he goes over I mean it's about 10 10 videos 10 hour long videos where he he describes different government problems and then for half an hour and the other half-hour he was that he's actually has a discussion with experts in the same ideas on both sides and it's it's a wonderful wonderful video series a hilarious that you say that that's where I learned it Milton Friedman was absolutely one of the heroes of my youth I believe he received the Nobel Prize in 1976 I believe and free to choose was I think made very soon after that and as a young and impressionable young man I watched free to choose with rapt attention and the arguments not only in obviously in the video but in his very fine book that he wrote with his wife called free to choose same arguments same same concepts that I'm using here precisely yeah it's like a great series alright so our next question dr. Lyle is a in episode 27 so this question was quite old it's about two years old I think it was Goffman in his research on conflict that you referenced and the analysis inferred that women are more comfortable in conflict than men with this in mind could more women playing a leading role in politics make for a better government at the moment this was the 2017 in the UK and Ireland there are at least five women as political leaders of some of the major parties given north and islands violent past could one be optimistic about the future with more women involved in key decision-making positions um I think this is good thinking and by the way the author I would have cited would have been John Gottman not Kaufman so we've been gotten into research specifically on on romantic relationship conflict so it's and was specifically related to conflicts within romantic relationships where men are uncomfortable and want to get out of the conflict and ostensibly or perhaps because as as they get angry they can infer that they might become violent and they don't want to do so whereas the women are having no such compunction and so they'll follow the guy around the block chirping at him around what the rs7 so this is Wed Gottman discovered so I don't think this really has anything to do with political decision-making etc etc however that in general I think women are are in general going to be less glory hog balcony seeking etc and the forefathers of this country brilliantly realized that the that the personal search for glory behind being a great a great warrior chieftain that wins was the greatest threat that there was to the Republic and so this is specifically why they wanted to separate out the powers of government very carefully because they did not want the executive branch to be able to say well I'm pissed so and so now I'm going to go crush that that country and therefore glory goes to me because we just we just beat up Canada okay so the and women are probably if we were to look at this from any empirical basis they're probably a hell of a lot less likely to be seeking the glory behind such kind of victorious process men like the fight there and particularly men that want to climb dominance hierarchies have plenty of testosterone and they love the thrill of victory and and women in general don't love the thrill of victory at the same level that men love the thrill of victory it's a different animal it has different evolutionary history and so men obviously are potentially much more lethal and dangerous with a much greater desire and need for dominance so good thinking so I think it's a fine thing that more and more women get involved with politics because that probably in general is sort of access one more check and balance on the system and sort of lowers down the the a tidal wave of desire for domination and glory that could could be influencing decision-making in our species and however in general I don't have a lot of a lot of concern about genders gender specific talent individuals are more important than genders obviously and always will be so that that's what counts most but as a general principle yeah I think I think this uh think this questioner has a point fantastic all right dr. Lyle he'd sick of the politics yet or yeah all right go ahead just get it okay okay all right next question dr. Lyle I'm having a personality conflict with a business partner and I'm just trying to figure out what the best way to deal with this is every time I try to talk with her and have a conversation with her about business or life in general she always has a contradicting opinion that she makes known or acts as if she's trying to teach me something this gets me this gets very frustrating because it makes me feel like she thinks she knows better all the time and that I am the ignorant one I'm pretty agreeable so I back down always an act respectful towards her opinion but it's definitely not reciprocated every now and again I have enough and lash out which isn't what I want to do and I always regret it but it gets so frustrating for me every time she happens every time it happens she always backpedals and acts like she hasn't been constantly treating me like a child that needs to be taught by the way I have way more experience in the industry I just don't want any conflict and lashing out every now and then isn't working what would be the best way to deal with the person like this and why is it that someone might be like this or is it me looks like confusing dynamic for me I think the only reason we are doing great and business together is because I always back down but it's definitely not helping me because I stew about it and have secret anger and maybe the only reason why we haven't fought to the death is because I pop in my headphones and listen to your podcast while I work okay first of all the reason why you're doing well in business is because you are providing some product or service that your customers want effectively that's the only reason you're successful in business it's got nothing to do with your relationship structure it has to do with what it is that you're providing so my first question would be how much of your life do you want to spend with this human because this human is never going to change this is this woman's personality your personality is your personality and therefore this is always going to be in mess so my first thought is you should be plotting your way how you're going to get the daylights out of this thing okay and if you're not I haven't begun to think about all the different ways that that I can imagine that we would you know I would nose need to know specifics about the business and the situation etc but certainly I wouldn't be talking to her about anything and I wouldn't you know I would be avoiding all possible conversations and my conversations with her her would be to it to a minimum of what needed to to be discussed in other words what we're trying to do is to get your life as an overlapped with her as possible this is the concept of the disagreeable distance so why is she like this she's disagreeable that's all she's born that way she's going to live this way and she's going to die this way and that's just how it is there's never going to be a change so she's going to be a pain in the ass the whole way so the question is you want to spend the next 20 30 10 15 work 40 years with this because you're in business with her now you know maybe it was a good idea maybe she had talents and abilities that were useful in forming a business together that you couldn't do independently and now it's been successful good lesson learned and you have been successful now see how you can figure out how to separate as much of the business process as you possibly can including splitting up the business okay but if you can't do that if all we're trying to do here is you know survive day to day with the disagreeable pain in the ass is our business partner then there would certainly be a few things that you you might be able to do on I had a client once that would that would ask me advice he would always be in some kind of a kind of a normal life jam and he would ask me my advice and I would give it to him and then he would immediately contradict me and disagree with me now iid hit over the head about 50 times ah so I didn't see him that often I'd see him maybe once a month and so after about five years of this I I finally caught on so I keep walking into the same trap because you know it just seems so reasonable he'd be he'd stew and have a have a 20 minute soliloquy about his little situation and then he finally asked me what I thought I'd say well that's what I think no no no no I just agree so I finally got smart I mean you only have to stub your toe so many times on the same door jamb before you finally eventually figure it out at least for most of the time I did so what I did was he would ask me that question and I would equivocate which isn't like me I'd say gee I'm really not sure I really see I see issues on both sides of the equation what do you think ha ha I went back to dumbbell shrink hood 101 just do it the way every all the other shrinks do it so that's what I did and it would frustrate him I just sit right there in the middle and then when he started leaning one way I'd say well you got a point not you know I I can't I but I could still see both sides I just let him frustrate him and this kept me out of this uncomfortable situation of being you know is basically he would have an irritated contradiction when I would give my opinion and I got tired of it there's a waste of time so hmm I did what I could to drop the insurance carrier that he had so anyway that's uh what can we do you can use essentially Socratic method by asking her questions like well now what are you thinking I you know I'm just interested in hearing well your perspective on this from all sides and when she asks you what you think well I'm really not sure what are you thinking I I could see things both both ways and just try try to put put ink in the water so that we aren't really having a substantive discussion and that we'll just sit there and and let her spin and then go the direction that she's probably gonna go anyway so yeah the blowing up comes from getting so frustrated that you've been treated unfairly enough that you're signalling then with your anger that the other person should feel guilty and back off and concede to a basic standard dynamic and this will happen with Pleasant people they will take it and take it and take it and take it and then when they blow they believe that they have achieved sufficient capital by being so overly fair time after time and conflict that now finally you have to give because I I have given so often now by God you have to give okay what we find is is that the other person wasn't thinking that they were giving it all they just thought that it all was perfectly fine and reasonable while they were taking 80/20 all the way down so when we finally squawk it turns out it doesn't work very well so then what happens is we squawk louder so we go through a very quick escalation cycle to put more and more chips in the middle of this table and basically let them know know that I'm really fed up I'm I'm now volatile for God's sakes I'm so pissed off because you're not reading the cues and you're so damn unfair and I've been put up with this shit for a long time I'm done ok when you get there you know you you you often will find out to your to your amazement and disgust and horror that that wasn't enough okay it's like you just hit an anvil with your hammer and nothing happened you're the hammer bounced right back in your hand this means you are you should read this as the following cue you're in the wrong place okay you're dealing with an 80/20 pain-in-the-ass trader that's never going to be the same so the real answers your question is get the hell out okay maybe it takes a year maybe it takes a month maybe it takes five years but plot your way out of this mess and the meantime do your best to invoke the disagreeable distance and all manners possible and that includes when discussions come up you go to Socratic method you just ask questions and shrug your shoulders and that's that and you try to stay out of situations where she's lecturing you about how you're wrong that's how I would do it penta you I'll get a divorce all right what else we got no right our last question we're kind of circling back around from the ego trap question from the and the very first beginning of the show and now we're going to deal with a listener who says dr. Lyle my teenage daughter is addicted to fast food she stopped eating at home and at the end of every week I find several empty pizza boxes milkshake contain milkshake cups french-fried containers cookie cup cupcake boxes pints of ice cream etc or more shoved under her bed or between her mattress and the wall she's gained 60 pounds in the last three years I worry about her so much she says she likes the taste of food and she doesn't want to give it up she says she doesn't care if she gets cancer at a young age he wants to enjoy her life am I just supposed to sit on my hands and wait for her to hit rock bottom in 10 years oh all right let's see we started circle back to people ought to do whatever the hell it is they want to do as long as they're not forcibly interfering on anybody else's rights so the the daughters eating behavior isn't forcibly interfering on anybody else's rights its interfering on mom's mom's desires for her but mom's desires for her that kid has her own life so the general answer is yeah kid can do what they want number two I want to I want to make sure that you understand that your daughter's eating behavior now has nothing to do with whether or not she's going to get cancer okay so if you've told the kid that she's going to increase your likely to cancer by eating the crap she's eating then then you've unfortunately been operating under under a misunderstanding this caused a lot of unnecessary anxiety so if the kid is eating crap with both hands through their teenage and years and their 20s and their 30s it is not appreciably altering their statistical likelihood of getting cancer and they're sure as hell not going to die particularly early as a result of it so that's kind of off the table now I did write a book about this called the pleasure dragon so in it the pleasure trap is an exploration of why this is an unbelievably slippery problem and very very difficult to to essentially deactivate it and in fact my good friend chef AJ is going to have me do a little class that she's offering to her people if you go to her website you can get this class where I'm going to be pontificating about the pleasure trap for six weeks in a row which I've never done I just can't think of much more exciting than just running myself about this which I will what's the light the but your kid is not going to get cancer and your kid is in the pleasure trap as we would expect in other words I would expect essentially every teenager in the United States to be in the pleasure trap and we can see that it feels feels bad to look at a girl that's gained 60 pounds because we know that there is a lot of emotional impact that comes with this but another little thing actually that comes up about this that I have a question about would be where is the kid getting all the money for this that that's a little odd so if this girl's out there hustling and earning on money and then then buying her own food and turning up her nose at the food that you provide that's one thing but if she's got a credit card or big fat allowance that's allowing her to eat a bunch of pizza and milkshakes then hey cut off the money for god sakes yeah there's no reason to facilitate this process by by making those resources easy to get they're expensive and that's forcibly interfering on your rights to spend those resources in a way that you would want so I'd be very curious about where the resources are coming for such expensive fare and in fact I I heard of a case where a rather remarkable young woman asked her parents to cut off her money because she was getting into trouble with the food and she did she had the parents do that and it was helpful interestingly enough so let me think so make her earn her own money for the pleasure trap but the pleasure trap that she's in now she's likely to get very interested in this problem when she gets increasingly interested in boys and becomes more important to her life later this will very often happen with young young people that they're really not that interested and focused on sexual competition in their teens but as they get a little bit older and they start seeing the handwriting on the wall that that they essentially are going to have to deal with this or not then that would be a time later when when she's more likely to change her cost-benefit analysis about this and there you'll be with a copy of a J reading the pleasure trap the audit body auditory copy that you can give to your daughter and have a listen doesn't even have to read it that don't give it to a 16 year old we're wasting our time all right fantastic I really feel for this for this that teenage daughter but hopefully she can she gets the right information someday maybe she will maybe she walked right uh yeah but her mom her mom's got the information so she's going to hear the information and and she's going to know it's there and it's going to be sitting as a like a little resident memory sitting inside of her mind and more than once back many times I have watched young people turn it around when suddenly they knew they needed to get serious and get competitive and so just like people will do this indie in the in the divorce process we call that the divorce diet like suddenly everybody loses 29 yeah miraculously hit the gym though when I went out and hire a lawyer right what did you say I was talking here today with myself but I caught the end of it what no sorry sorry I drafted no I said the the divorce diet is hit the gym delete facebook and hire a lawyer yeah okay very good there you go so the yeah they're just as that happens so so this young lady will start to have increasing cognitive dissonance when there is more more important issues on the line but not now so don't worry about it let's let's go after the money and otherwise don't let's not worry about our health for goodness sakes because that's not on the table and we'll worry about the rest later
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