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Episode 168: Why do we get manipulated Are emotions contagious
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but before we get to a question we're going to go over an article that I was reading in the evolutionary psychology journal which is a free source free free journal for evolutionary psychology articles pretty fascinating things here but the article is called face value and cheap talk house smiles can increase or decrease the credibility of our words the primary authors dr. Lawrence Ian Reed the other authors Rachel Stratton and Jessica Ram B's and they are from New York University so the study was was about facial expressions now they claim they say that facial expressions with humans are usually taken at face value the reason why is it it comes from the difficulty in voluntarily controlling them and this is Darwin coined this to inhibition hypothesis and so research had tested the inhibition hypothesis and found that people can actually voluntarily control their facial expressions however those expressions often activate other facial expressions making it very difficult to control an entire entire mode of thinking with just one facial expressions so one example of this are what's called the Duchene smile which is the term for a normal smile that not only raised with the corners of the mouth like a normal smile but also raises the cheeks and forms the wrinkles around the eyes they called a smiling with the eyes or smizing is the slang term for it so in this particular study participants were they viewed a partner who displayed either a neutral expression a non Duchene smile so like a fake smile and a Jane smile and a cor a controlled smile and a controlled smile would be in which the mouth forms a smile but the facial muscle counteracts the upward pull of the lip corners essentially controlling a smile it's usually used when you're embarrassed and you smile and you kind of control the smile these participants were instructed to assess the credibility of a written statement when they were paired with one of the facial expressions and then compared that result to the neutral expression so the hypothesis in the study was that those participants who viewed the Duchene smile would assess more credibility to the statement and that those viewing the Nandu Schoen smile would pick up on the voluntary attempt to manipulate and therefore would assign less credibility to the statement this was done two different experiments the first experiment they split up the participants there was one hundred forty three males hundred thirty three females into three equal groups and the results were as follows the Dushane smiles increased the credibility of a written statement while controlled smiles decreased the credibility aha which was what the hypothesis was right in experiment two obviously because this was an experiment they they had to fake the - Shane smile and they had to fake the fake smile so right they were trying to figure out if this holds true for genuine and facial genuine - Shane smiles so they set up the experiment where they could what they spontaneously emit these expressions so they would say certain phrases that were known to cause these expressions and it turns out that just like experiment one the data supports the signalling hypothesis the credible signalling hypothesis in comparison a neutral expressions duchesne smiles increase the credibility of accompanying statements while the controlled smiles decreased the credibility this suggests yeah that the effects of these smiles remain even when the expressions are spontaneously emitted yep and don't think the chicks can't see it yeah practical person yes it's this is actually interesting for you know a thousand reasons but the this is why it's hard to in many instances it's hard to fake it if you're confident or hard to fake it you sort of about who it is as you are and you can get it get over on some people some of the time but but people can sniff you out and they can they can tell when you're you know when you're selling bs and they they're reading all these little cues this is really this is a you know this is a tiny little piece of a much much wider discussion it's that that is that the fundamental basis of evolutionary psychology and so I'm just going to go off for a few minutes on this we uh keep going yeah good I just I was on a plane with nothing to do and the internet didn't work and I happen to have downloaded on my phone a an interview with leda cosmides and so I was listening to her and it was uh it was I mean it wasn't anything that I didn't know but it was but it was interesting to hear her talk about culture and the because she was sort of bashing the the way that the normal anthropologists and sociologists think about culture and what she was explaining was that that there isn't any such thing as quote culture what all you're really observing is you're observing the activation of latent neural circuits that were built by evolution and so all that happens in a given location there tends to be the similar activation of the same neural circuits so for example if you go up to Alaska you're going to find a lot of people wearing a lot of clothing and worried about the weather and the cold if you go to Los Angeles they're not going to be wearing as many coats and so you could call that culture which God knows what that means but what you're really observing is the activation of temperature regulation circuitry and associated behaviors that would be it would be a instinctual to the organism and in the same way so if you look at the the behavior of any of any entity what you're watching is you're watching the environmental inputs activate latent neural circuits and then cause them to fire and then the person has a behavior and experience so you could be petting your cat and then you take out a shoestring and wiggle it around and now you activate the circuit a predatory circuit and the cat whereas if you were petting a rabbit and you did that it wouldn't have the same effect and so the it's going to turn out that in different areas of the world you're going to have for example similar to POG Rafi similar geographical situations in other words foodstuffs food availability population densities all kinds of things that are going to be similar so one individual to the next is going to be facing a whole of great many of the same similar environmental inputs which is going to cause a behavior that's going to be similar in those people and more similar in those people then they would be in some people somewhere else and so that culture is going to look different now one of the things that cosmides does not talk about but it's been talked about by Nicolas Wade is that we can even go further than that and that is that in specific areas of the world certain personality characteristics are more typical of a given set of people in a given region often also as a result of natural selection or sexual selection as a result of the idiosyncratic characteristics of that particular social or physical ecology over the last thousands of years so in a given area there could be highly conscientious shy people and in other areas of the world they might be loud and noisy and more sexually bold those then also are impacting those become part of the of the set of inputs that are impacting everybody else in that local arena and therefore influencing the psychological and behavioral experiences that those people are going to going to have and we might sit back and call that culture but what we're and you can legitimately call it culture and legitimately study it but when people tend to think of culture they tend to think of some some ether or special rules that are absorbed by an individual as a result of the surroundings that they find themselves in and that they grow up in and that would be an incorrect way of understanding what you're actually looking at well the the social actions that they're if you think of out what what behavioral emotional and behavioral processes are of an individual they are not taking place in multiple brains it's only taking place in one brain at a time and so if a whole bunch of brains are having a whole bunch of similar experiences it's because a whole bunch of brains are looking at the very similar inputs so ie a whole bunch of Eskimos or friggin freezing so they can put their coats on okay or a whole bunch of people in Panama take their shirts off because the Sun came out so so therefore when we really look at at human nature why people behave the way they do we're going to find is what cosmides is trying to exhort the social sciences to understand is that if you're going to study and understand human nature you have to understand that there's all these tiny little fascinating neural circuits that are sitting inside the organism and they're latent and they only come out under certain conditions this study is a beautiful example of this that sitting and in human nature is a suspicion that if somebody fakes a smile with voluntary action that we've that it's you can get over on some of the people some of the time that's why people use those voluntary actions however it's going to turn out that often it they will be caught okay and because it turns out that what we have is we have manipulation and then we have defenses against manipulation and the defense against the manipulation is going to be to look closely at whether their eyes are crinkling and their cheeks are or lifting and if they're not hmm don't trust them okay they could very likely be intentionally deceiving you and that that is nothing incidentally that like this is not something that is learned my parents never sat said look watch their faces okay don't trust them unless their eyes crinkle up ah there's not a chance in hell that that's true these this is the discovery of decision rules for having activating defensive mechanisms inside the inference making machinery do I trust what they say or not trust what they say the answer is if they're neutral there's some baseline credibility to whatever it is if it turns out that they're smiling and crinkling then I believe that what they're saying has more credibility and if they're forcing a smile I has less this these are these are fascinating aspects of the extraordinarily complex web of instincts that makes up human nature so thanks for bringing this to our attention Nate it's a it's a beautiful little jewel that is now sitting in the literature it's fantastic and just to further validate what you just said is in this study in the introduction they talked about this exact phenomenon which is that across conditions they found that that someone can fake an expression and it was about 40% of people could could could fake an expression but 100% of the people could not prevent another expression of their face to to also occur simultaneously when they were faking it right and so so they could do it but they couldn't control every single facial expression which is fascinating yeah you know this is a turns out that I have a favorite all-time TV show and it used to be that my favorite all-time TV show is the original Star Trek and so then when I watch the next generation I was like eh you know I just can't get into people and then I did get into people and then that became my favorite all-time show because the writing is better in the everything's better about it it's just really fabulous series so then when I ran out of that one I was looking around and friend told me oh you should watch this thing called The Mentalist starring Simon Baker and it's about some guy that's a I'm thinking of God you know I can't I'm not going to be interested in something called The Mentalist about a guy that is tricky with the mind well it's fabulous it's just unbelievably good and and this is precisely what the the major thrust is of the entire series is that Baker plays a person who is exceptionally good at reading facial cues and it's it's really very believable and it's you know it's believable number one because it's true and we intuitively know that people leak a lot of stuff on the faces and what's really cool is to watch how how his character you know basically flusters people and surprises them in ways that make them have facial expressions that catch them off-guard and they reveal what their motivations are and he's able to pick it up so it's a it's just incredible writing beautiful acting and it's a it's it's playing out exactly what it is that we're talking about here in this study fantastic well this leads beautifully into our very first question from a longtime listener on line and this is on the topic of the sucker triad which is the combination of intelligence agree ability and high conscientiousness and so dear dr. Lyle and topic of the sucker triad and shifting an interaction from adult adult to parent-child I was wondering if people use this as a baiting technique for mating I would think that if a woman does this to a man it might trip some stone-age feelings in the man of wanting to prove or show off their skills I'm thinking of the classic scenario where a woman plays helpless and it then gives the man a chance display his fitness indicators but I'm also wondering what's actually at play there I've also seen situations where helpless men have for lack of a better term conned women into taking care of them so I so I'm wondering if there is some benefit to this on the part of the person who is being taken advantage of maybe they get esteem from knowing they are providing or are they just guilt-tripped into it because they are a sucker or am i possibly conflating a few different phenomena now this is really good this is a fantastic question and I think that what the person is speculating on they're looking at this is where life gets tricky in evolutionary psychology and other other ways of looking at psychology are can get frustrated because there's a lot to learn and you have to grasp the underlying logic that says listen one not talking about quote everything's genes or quote nothing's environment what we're talking about is an unbelievably sensitive machine that's like the most complicated jukebox you ever saw and the jukebox says if k7 is activated and j16 is activated and np3 is activated then activate circuit z7 okay but if any of those other three is different than we're not going to activate z7 so this is so let's talk about some of the possibilities so this person is mentioning a few but you could have for example the helpless helpless action or helpless display or communication activates parental altruism and therefore it benefits the quote helpless person by sucking time and energy out of that out of the helper but it's also a display for the giver which the person mentions however it's also a signal of interest in the relationship from the standpoint of the giver being able to display interest in the relationship they're willing to invest time and energy so there's an additional possible signal there strangely enough there's a reciprocal signal that if you receive aid from somebody you may be willing to be in a relationship with them because we are beginning the activation of a of a reciprocal altruistic dyad and therefore if you are insuring me then I should be willing to insure you and so it could actually be a signal that I am interested in you if I allow you to help me okay so unlike my my favorite all-time character in a movie is Jack Nicholson and as good as it gets what a crack-up dichotomies go judge okay no don't no I don't need any help okay ie if I don't need help isn't that a good thing I die you don't want to be in debt alright so the now on the other hand the helpless person by playing helpless they get to read a signal which is how much in my light and they get to see how eager the person is or willing they are to be helpful so this is a this is a sign it's a way of assessing the utility of an insurance policy by for example making a claim early so if you if you bought an insurance policy from a company that you're not so sure is worth it a good thing to do would be to file a claim early that has some legitimacy and see if they pay it okay and if they don't pay it then then hey wait a minute I'll be damned if I'm going to go in and and pay a lot of money for an insurance policy that I'm counting on bailing me out of big trouble later so this would be a way to test market whether or not the person is a decent insurance policy so this would be a sort of a disagreeable person's tactic so I believe that people that would pull a stunt like this play helpless and suck people's energy out and sort of play this sort of deeply manipulative type of strategy are probably on average more disagreeable than the average human I would expect that that would be true and that's a that's a nice doctoral dissertation for somebody as they would work their way through that web because I'm sure that that's exactly how that works fascinating question fascinating answer I've often wondered it as you say that you and Jack Nicholson's character doesn't want to have any debts and perhaps there's a you know social theory optimal to this which is you know just like the United States has the highest debt of the world but the highest status of the world we infer that you know part of gaining high-status strategy in a village would include amassing a lot of Stone Age debt interesting think about that a lot of debt actually put you in an interesting negotiating position with people and that is that you can continue to to essentially make trades and potentially make trades where you are in the advantage in other words where were where you're giving 49 percent but taking 51 and the individual on the other side would be possibly foolish to not go along with this additional trade that looks like a legitimate trade with a slightly legit you know a slight disagreement about the value for value but if they refused then you could basically say hey you know what you're holding over their head is the possible reneging on your debt and so this is a this is why it's not the worst thing in the world for a country particularly with the United States with the the massive military and economic resources that we have it's not a bad thing to be in a lot of international debt because what are they going to do the they we we can we can push them around and potentially exploit them by threatening to renege on the debt in principle and and they're on the other side they're really they're really don't have a choice they have to as long as we are not egregiously unreasonable in the in the trades that we are proposing we can use that debt to our advantage and make them essentially force them into a tougher negotiating situation as a result of that debt so that's a that's a it's another aspect to how that would work and now as far as rather than financial debt could it be like stone-age money like insurance ie people have done favors for you you know helped you out of your hole all that kind of thing correct that's right same thing so it's possible that you in theory you could be in a lot of debt and you you could still they could not want to have a fight with you over what's fair in a given situation because if you did the fight could you could be using that as justification to essentially renege on your debt so same principle is involved here and this all gets into why we don't want to make deals with disagreeable people this is precisely why that is because you know in in a multitude of ways disagreeable people are by definition they are trouble when it comes to exchanges and and the cataloguing of debts and credits and so I mean obviously debts and debts and credits are subject to a sort of renegotiation contextual process everything else under the Sun but just in general they are but it's particularly difficult they're particularly problematic when the person on the other side of a of a debt arrangement is you know if anybody in there is disagreeable that situation is potentially loaded so careful careful who you get into bed with because if you sleep with big dogs you're gonna wind up with big fleas I love you idiom alright alright so we have a caller waiting on hold so caller please be patient really appreciate you staying on hold we're going to answer one more question and then then we're going to get to you so dr. Lyle this is from our fans in Australia who go on long road trips love listening to the show so really appreciate listening all the way in Australia dr. Ella I recently read an article about negative emotions being contagious what's your view on this anecdotally it seems to be true for me for example I have a friend at work who does not like the workplace and it's constantly unhappy and negative I find that if I spend too much time with her it rubs off on me and I feel unsettled even the work on the whole is fine for me similarly a friend who is buoyant and always laughing when I spend time with her I feel light and happy do you believe her emotions are contagious on yes they are and let's let's talk about why this is that you you will reverberate cues that indicate the value relations in your environment so you have what what we're going to call independent method that you also have computer checking capabilities that check what other people seem to be experiencing and this would mean this would would reduce the error variance in your own decision-making so an example that I've given before has been to two women a pair of a pair of eights or sitting in a bar and in walks a male that is a that is genetically with it is objectively a nine however in one of the girls heads he's an eight and then the other girl's head he's a 10 so let's suppose for the sake of argument that the two girls are are actually honest with each other they're very good friends now the the one eight that thinks he's ten is you know Oh giggle e when she sees the sky and turns to her friend and says wow what do you think now she's having an independent action in other words she's having an independent process that's going on inside of her head so her independent method says my neural circuits are getting hit by this stimuli and it says that this is an exceptional specimen and it's 20 percent more attractive than I am and therefore I'm very interested in casual mating strategy okay so so she is about to be highly susceptible to casual mating strategy because her stone-age brand is inferring that the delta between her and the males gene quality is substantial enough that this is worth doing it's worth raising the kid alone that's that's the machinery and that's the inferences that it's making now however she does something interesting and that is she turns to her friend who she trusts and says what do you think of him Wow and her friend turns and says he's okay now what you're going to find is you're going to find a deflation inside of her nervous system okay she will literally feel deflated and a little bit depressed if we if we look inside the nervous system there's a disappointment there okay now she looks back at the guy and her own independent circuits say wow it's pretty good but she's got some additional circuits now that are saying ah definitely not worth casual mating strategy now we like I said we're going to ignore all of the history of these girls but let's suppose for the stake sake of principle that the two of them have had many such situations and her friend is highly credible so when they agree they agree and they're both giggly and when they both yeah when they don't agree they're like hey you know that they they're open and honest they're not trying to gain each other in a situation all right so let's suppose that's the case so now when she sees her friend she sees her friends reaction and now what her brain does it says hmm well what we're attempting to do is we're attempting to make the best deal for our genetics because that's how we're built we're built as a gene copying machine now under conditions where we're a male is 20% objectively superior to me I would be willing to raise the kid alone but I am finding now that it appears that the male may only be 10% objectively superior to me because my estimate says 20 and my friends estimate says zero so the truth is probably somewhere in between my independent assessment and my friends assessment so I have to attenuate the extremities by taking a mean of the two and as a result I feel somewhat deflated and not as motivated okay so that will now influence so now we're finding our emotions quote contagious that's a you know we could say contagious but what we're really seeing here is that we're seeing the two sources of inputs that are coming in and influencing a person's integrated experience the and that is that the independent assessment versus a computer checking method where you check what other people are thinking so that you can make sure that your own independent assessment is not an outlier that is a that is a very smart incredible piece of machinery that sits inside of humans okay so it's faceted now Spice Girls the Spice Girls actually had this figured out in a song in the 90s called if you want to be my lover you get the approval of my friends so yeah there you go okay so this is this is all about quote meet the parents and all the other self there's a when you think about meeting the parents it's actually there's all kinds of stuff going on there there's so many different agendas they're all instinctual agendas including looking at the gene quality the gene pool because the person you're with is only one exemplar of the gene pool so you know I've met your sisters Nate they're uh they're a little above you so just don't worry they know no anybody wants to know Nate she's a nice-looking young doctor but his his sisters he's actually he's actually on the low side of his own pretty fancy gene pool so this is uh this is how this is going to work that we're going to use independent other people's checking mechanisms to essentially reduce error variance so therefore emotional processes are definitely contagious as are of course behavioral processes which emotional processes are behavioral because there you can see the expressions of emotions in the muscular contractions of an individual's body but the actual actions that they then take as a result the emotions are or essentially cues as to the value judgments that the brain has is engineered and therefore the emotions are precursors or they are they are forerunners of what behavior you're about to see okay so in the case of our girl in the bar now she's had she had excitement that wanted to close the distance between herself and the theoretical ten and now she just got a big breaking force came in from a different area of the brain a computer checking circuit that said ah wait a minute put your foot on the brake okay and now we're gone I'm going to have to go back and circle around this whole thing again because a nine does not necessarily it is not necessarily the Delta between her eight and his probable nine is now a kid that's an eight and a half and therefore that's not fancy enough to raise alone so that's a so that's why we're going to find that her behavior is likely to have a significant attenuation of its motivation so this is why emotions emotions quote our quote contagious as well as behavior so there's been many studies in the history of psychology that have shown behaviors to be contagions for example divorce is a contagion so one one member of a social group gets a divorce and then suddenly you will find other members will start to get divorces starting smoking stopping smoking all kinds of things have been shown to have contagious aspects to them so contagion is a is an interesting word to use but you can it can start to look mysterious and ethereal and etc but the truth is is what it actually is it's computer checking to that the results in a modification of our own individual personal assessment of the value proposition in a given situation this is why they use shills you know at a carnival so we have somebody saying oh wow that looks really cool and the human brain goes huh somebody thinks it's really cool I was only thinking it was sort of cool and now I think it's more cool and my brain jumps to the midline between that person's assessment in my okay and so this is this is the the nature of quote contagion in human psychology would you say that this is why there are laugh tracks for sitcoms when close definitely there's there's no question that's exactly what it is and and I've noticed many times as speaker that you will feel like quote a crowd as it has a vibe and so other speakers and I will talk about this afterwards where where we'll speak to a group and we'll either say wow great crowd or it's like wow they're flat okay and so and part of the extremes of this isn't because the the means of those individual groups are so far apart they probably are not that far apart but all that it takes is a certain level to either activate a contagious process or not and if you can activate the contagious process then suddenly everybody's having a great time if you cannot activate the contagious process than it isn't so that's you know that's part of how humans work is little social animals it's fascinating you said that I always had an inkling that that might be true and that it might be related to how how spaced apart the chairs are when people are together yeah crowd yeah so all kinds of things that's why if you ever run a seminar you always want to have a wall the wall with the people in them okay you don't want a hundred people in a room with 200 you want a hundred people in a room that could hold 90 and you want the fire marshal to not know about it okay so you want to have you want to have it crammed in there and you'll have the greatest amount of social contagion to those to those processes so that's that's exactly how you do it fascinating all right we're going to welcome our caller who's calling mmm caller thank you so much for stay on hold for the show what's your name where you calling from hello we're here hello yes what a night and uh dr. Lao this is from USA hey I'm in second well compared to Bob okay right and you're from the USA all right very cool what's going on Rob what's happening hey mate and everyone else under the Sun don't you wear state hurry up and invent the technology where you can download people's brains you know into your app from your phone so we can just download dr. Lau's brain right into our phone so we could ask a question whatever we wanted to I mean that would just be a great thing right there can I a iRobot one day there you go all right good good plan up yeah I'm not holding my breath for that but anyway I could I think I got two really good questions dr. Lyle is there ever a time when it would make sense to not flood the circuits and what I mean by that is let you know let's say like if you care about your relationship with the person then that's going to be in that context but if you don't care about your relationship with the person then you know whoever it is family friend trading partners sexual mate whatever it is if you don't care about the relationship then you don't have to go out of your way to plug the circuits but if you care about your relationship with the person do you and let's say you have a big fight and everything blows up and you don't talk for a couple months but you know it's like it is what's itching you you got to get back to it and you get eventually go solve this but if you're a disagreeable person you come bet you don't want to come back I don't want I'm not going to come back and kiss your ass essentially and plug the circuits I want to be on I say how I feel and let's just agree to disagree and then and then we'll agree to disagree and then whatever it is will and then we'll just be civil but I'm not going to flood the circuits and then and not diet for a disagreeable person that's hard - despite your tongue I want to tell you how I feel and then I'll then we'll disagree and then we'll move on you understand what I'm saying sure yeah the the utility of flooding the circuit is that what we're trying to do is we're trying to establish a several things it could be extremely manipulative and if you need it it's good to know that it's there in principle the other the the thing that's good about it is that it can actually be the reestablishment of the correct the the correct global cost-benefit analysis that a person comes to a discussion with about the entire relationship and so when we are when we are arguing and when we have a dispute the there's a there's sort of a point in the dispute where there's a conflict of interest in and the conflict of interest could be a just a difference of opinion about something important about who's valuable in what way um you know there were disagreements that have any edge to them at all are all about status so somebody is feeling slighted but it could be the case that they're feeling slighted in a relatively narrow domain but they're still pissed about it and the and so the problem is is that they could be pissed off enough about this that they're kind of not that that the argument itself can start to put push itself into a vicious cycle and now the the the esteem hits become wider and wider and the thing gets pretty negative and nasty that that's a typical pattern for people now the problem then is that we need to re-establish a wider context of the person's value and the the narrowness and specificity of dispute about somebody's value and so that's where flood the circuit comes in so flood the circuit is is actually done done in its best possible way it's actually accurate in other words these are the most discerning most sophisticated insights that we can have about why we find another person valuable and we feed them to the that individual not only with the attribute but also anecdotes that support what is that we're saying and when we when we essentially feed these to the individual one after the next and what it does is it starts establishing a wider context of why it is that we have a relationship in the first place and reestablishes a framework from which we then can go in and say yes but in this specific area where we disagreed you know I'm still really pissed off and this is where I disagree with you about how it is that you're seeing it and this is how it is that I see it okay and then from here obviously what sits along with on flooding the circuit is crystal clear so this is now where it is that now that everybody's calmed down and we flooded somebody's circuits so we we have reduced everybody's anxiety that they are in an exacerbation vicious cycle where we're going to take you know we're going to threaten each other and take down each other status and basically and I will pillory your status in the village because you are now making noises like you're going to come after mine and so this this is essentially status warfare and that's a disaster so we reverse field and unilaterally force this disagreement into a virtuous cycle and so if we do this then we make it possible then to come back to the source of conflict and then say okay I don't know what we're going to do with this but this is how I think you see it and this is how I see it and this is where I disagree with you okay and am I seeing it the way am i accurately reporting what it is that you're you're thinking now very often under these circumstances what's going to happen is people's positions will soften because it turns out that usually if it's a friend ears and you value them and they value you you recognize that you you did a standard human action which is that the position you took was ignoring some of the truth that they were saying and that there but in their position was somewhat exaggerated in Hostel and your position became somewhat exaggerated in hostile and so you know we wound up in a situation where everybody's playing status defense and getting aggressive and so now we wind up in a vicious cycle that was the argument that threatens the relationship so instead what we do is uh the utility of flood the circuit and and then then moving to crystal clear is that now we find out that we don't have to play so aggressively and we don't have to be so nasty and that we are safe and we can actually find we can see that our disagreements aren't necessarily in such bright contrast as it looked like that they were that it's softer and that it's grayer okay fair enough so I've been through this mate whenever in any relationship when somebody criticizes me I immediately bristle and I've watched my neural circuits like argue and get defensive and then get aggressive towards them etc etc like this is I watch these automated mechanisms like it's not live fault my freakin ancestors put them in there okay so they're interesting to watch and then it becomes my my task as a human that's that can hopefully beat my genes is to actually override that backup not act too impulsively and then see whether or not I can think my way out of a potentially damaging situation so that's how I look at this now as I've described flip the circuit at other times sometimes we're flooding the circuit and we can be doing it we can be disingenuous and the reason why we're doing is to bring in a serious position of weakness and we need to manipulate somebody so it's useful to know that it's there that that card is on the table for you potentially that's a possible get out of jail card in a lot of situations is to know that that's there the but but in relationships that have a future and that you are not under any kind of intimidation or position of weakness where it says you're describing and you you recognize that the relationship may may have limited overlap in your life that you just soon it not be go on with the latent hostility then we there's nothing disingenuous about this process at all and the flooding is a extremely useful tool you don't have to you don't have to do it like it's the most important person in the world but the basic concept you might only flood for 20 seconds but the notion is is that you you you do it well enough that you establish the wider context of where of how it is that you value the individual so that the area that we disagree is put in proper perspective and therefore people can make much better decisions about how they manage that conflict of interest separate and um yeah yeah that makes a lot of sense I'm going to go back and listen to that after this a bunch of times but the other one dr. Lisle real quick was I was laughing recently when you talked about how you could think you were talking about how you couldn't date a person who was too agreeable because she's going to be on the phone when you're out with her and some annoying old friend of hers is gonna call up and because she's so agreeable she can't help herself and it's gonna ruin your whole day with them and I was laughing because I dated a girl who was a flight attendant so she got a bunch of flight benefits and they have they have people who work for the airlines they have a whole list of their buddies that she had like 10 15 people on her list and she was a very agreeable person and I'm disagreeable but our relationship was seeming to work but this was one factor that kind of turned me off where because she had people on her buddy list who would call her and to try and get discounted tickets and stuff and on the outside it's like well why should I care but it I am when I thought about it was like wait a minute you haven't seen this person in three years like he's like when's the last time this person has even called you like so it seemed to me these people were just using her and it annoyed me so my question is dr. Loe why are we just because people like us just disagreeable assholes why can't we just be okay with them doing that for people he can you can you're inferring that that if if resources became tight which in resources are in principle always tight because you're always trying to utilize all of your available resources in order to further your biological success in this case we're not trying to turn those resources into the DNA molecule the way we were designed which was trying to turn those into Joya bowl live processes but anyway you slice it your resources are limited and the more resources you have more possibility you have of turning your life time and energy into enjoyable processes if this a partner is somebody who in principle is adding to your existence and will they bring with them both benefits but they also bring a liabilities and so overall there's still the process of the joint energies attempting to to manufacturer activate out of our out of our energy pool between us we're trying to activate moods of happiness circuits inside of our of our two nervous systems if she is going to be giving away a bunch of her time and energy and resources to third parties and that she's very easily exploited by people who haven't talked to her and she hasn't seen him in three years then you recognize that she's a leaky boat okay you are she brings with her to matter what it looks like today any significant relationships brings with it the potential of liabilities that's why the marriage vows for example say in sickness and his health and rich and poor in other words these are these are sort of deep significant contracts and they have potential significant liabilities so therefore the idea is is that we want to get we want to be estimating what the overall CB is of the entire package that the individual banks if they're very agreeable the nice thing about it is is that they're not fighting us you know in the transactions where there's conflicts of interest of resources between the two of us however if there agreeable they can be giving away the store and out the back door when we're not looking and so that's that's what you saw there you're not just being a disagreeable asshole you're actually I mean you might be but the truth is is that it would frustrate me as well if I looked at that situation and I would see that the individual was being exploited and that that meant that they were pretty far from the middle of the bell curve when it came to the agreeable dimension which is a liability so as is as as as much of an asset as it would be for me personally between our two conflicts of interests it is also a liability that she would be giving away resources that I would otherwise be able to claim and utilize so that's why it's got a totally rational response and obviously the more disagreeable the mail is the more frustrated he would be by this but but even a mail that's right smack down the middle of bellcore even an agreeable mail could wind up frustrated as a female who is just way too agreeable so that that's the dynamic that you were sensing and that's what was frustrating
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