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Episode 181: Showing weakness, Dominance Hierarchy, Sharing Evopsych, Ego Trap
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dear dr. Lyle men often have to listen to pop psychology telling them to quote get in touch with their emotions not be ashamed of showing weakness etc it seems to me that pathetic communication or showing weakness for a man is a pretty honest and carefully weighted signal in the ancestral environment because although it may bring them help in sympathy it's also going to hit their mate value pretty hard do you agree and do you think that there are situations where a man showing weakness to a woman can be positive conversely can women get away with it easily or weak as weakness also or weakness also a signal of sexual interest when it comes to them hmm what sort of more than one idea floating around there the first idea I think so one of the more ludicrous things is the notion that men should be doing this or men should be doing that you know from from some fool that's writing in the media it's going to sort of try to try to explain how it is that that the people that are out there actually trading for real live chips with real life stakes in the world don't know how to run their own show when it comes to expressing their emotional responses that's ridiculous so of course this this writer has nailed it that men aren't suppressing their emotions and looking tougher than they are they're just following evolutionary guidelines and so that means of course often though the the way the mind works it has possibly know two or more competing agendas and on the one hand it might be wanting to draw a sympathy because it feels like it's got a problem but on the other hand it recognizes that to do to do so and try to cash in some insurance ships to get a lighter load or to get some some kind of resources or a break or some kind of assistance that it's going to cost it okay and so I think I just I just had a memory very few listeners are old enough to remember a classic movie called the summer of 42 work I think a kid named hermie lives next door to a beautiful young woman whose husband has gone off to war was Jennifer O'Neill and he he comes over and he starts helping over things because now she's a she's a single lady effectively with her husband off to war and at one point he's she wants some things lifted into the Attic and her me who's a pretty strong young kid of 1718 high-school student he is lifting this this like a toolbox or whatever it is and he's he see him is beautifully done he's grimacing like crazy as he he lifts this box and it's all he can do to lift it into the Attic and he wants to make it look like it's easy and she might even say do you need some help or oh no he's fine uh what guy hasn't done this okay so me a lot because without a lot of that a lot of strength I got to do a lot of bluffing when everybody was watching so anyway uh me and my dad used to compete as to who can take the most amount of groceries with one trip you know when my mom brought them home right right you know held open oh yeah that actually and in a classic finding in in ethology the it was gosh I know the guys name it's going to kind of leap out at me it's Amos a hobby and at the University of Tel Aviv I believe you know in in studying the Arabian babbler which is a little bird how the male's will beat up the other males that the other males try to help out by defending the the tribe it won't let them do it so like I know we don't need your help okay if anybody's going to get killed it's going to be me so no one is there's a correlation between between birds like that and whether or not they like the movie Armageddon yeah exactly so so this is excuse me so this is clearly males have to to essentially deal with the competing demands of survival and reproduction and and so you're you're best off looking like you've got such great Fitness that you don't need help don't need assistance don't need anybody to give you directions you don't need anybody to give you any sympathy and so yeah if you are if you are literally crying from the pain of whatever it is don't show it okay so this is so the the notion that men should quote show their feelings more is ludicrous they were they're designed by nature to display their feelings when they're evolutionarily advantageous and they do so and so every situation is different so there of course there's going to be times when it's going to be great to show your feelings like here's one of these times so you're you you you thought that you were in love with a girl but it turns out lo and behold after you're successfully we were into bed you're playing cow mating strategy and didn't know it and so now you have some feelings guilt about this and some feelings of confusion this is a great time to really show your feelings of confusion and your feelings of angst about how puzzled you are in this life and how difficult it all is for you and how how you you really have deep feelings for her but at the same time you're confused ah there is a good times to show your feelings okay and there's good times to not show your feelings spits out what the feelings are depends on who the audience is and what the stakes are so yeah so I can't remember the rest of the question but forget we don't have a hard or dr. Lao now no big rathne quark I'm in enough trouble as it is I think that is going to the next question every male Linder all right he just blew you just blew our secret how did you alright alright what else do we go I'm just kidding no no we're okay all right all right so dear doctor loud love to hear a Doug download on the perceived difference between a competence hierarchy and a dominance hierarchy objectively I'm not sure there is one but subjectively relative to the observer perhaps there's a huge difference if you look to the far left every hierarchy is based on dominance if you look to the far right every hierarchy is based on competence so don't find anything particularly interesting at the extremes what interests me is in the middle and how our nervous systems seem to be tuned to pay attention when we appear to be operating on a dominance or competence based a competence basis I'm particularly interested in the individuals who seem to be tortured about disappearance some people seem to be so driven to compete and rise to the top however their internal audience is constantly asking them are you sure you're not being too dominant is this step-up worth it either directly or indirectly in the form of general stress emotional stability seems to be a huge component how this plays out on an individual basis that'd be curious to know what you think curious if you think this competence dominus inner battle is part of what plays into the pleasure trap seems that those some people are unable to resist the pleasure trap the further they rise in a particularly particular hierarchy as a way of compensating and reducing their appearance of dominance there boy quieting the neural chip inside them that is constantly monitoring their confidence dominance status hmm I think we better stop there because I think it's wandering into the weeds I don't think any of this has anything to do with the pleasure trap pleasure trap is a is a novel evolutionary problem that doesn't have anything to do with human evolution so the now the notion of a competence versus dominance hierarchy also doesn't really make any sense now there's the the least not to me the it's a hierarchy itself implies dominance okay so just a matter of what degree we're talking about so rather than use the word dominance let's just call the whole thing influence so you know dominance may be a word that conjures up a great deal of baggage that comes with it that can get confusing and then thinking that that we have to parse this thing out into different dynamics rather than the one that there is think of it think of the whole thing as a hierarchy and so that hierarchy has influence so the hierarchy there's a hierarchy in Miss America contest all right so the nobody needs to be more competent than anybody and nobody easily be dominating anybody but what we're seeing is is that the winner had more influence over the voters perceptions for whatever reasons bought some people off slept with somebody who the heck knows okay but in principle what there is is there's a there's a slotting of relative influence that's the way to look at this so that that obliterates the competence dominance dichotomy which is a false dichotomy so now it's going to turn out that in different circumstances so when we start talking about dominance hierarchies in general we're talking about its leadership over a group so the so what's going to happen is that that different conditions different ecological conditions with respect to a group and what it needs what its weighing these things are going to have different you know judgment criteria so the that's how this is going to go so it may be that you need to be the funniest it may need the men to be the kindest that see how this hierarchy is being slotted the you may need to be the best all-around balance between compassion and strength so you can imagine in a Stone Age village the the the individuals involved - are themselves essentially a congregation of a marketplace of different trading the trading of different values most predominantly insurance production etc against the vicissitudes of life across various dimensions could be tribal warfare it could be famine could be injury etc so there's a there's a many criteria that could be used and when it came to leadership and dominance generally in in human in human history there was not one criterion so this is not this is how human beings are one of the many ways that human beings are significantly different than so many other animals they literally have dominance hierarchies and the dominance hierarchies is literally physical vigor its size strength viciousness this is these are the dimensions it's literally who is willing and capable of doing the most damage to a competitor that's how dominance hierarchies are are dealt there's no other way to do it the two to Stallions threatening for the mating rights to the herd those those are vicious fights and they're not resolved until one stallion has demonstrated to the other one that if we continue you're going to get the worst of it and it's going to be bad okay humans are far or Vaseline more complex than this there's more on the line than just mating success there is a member of the insurance pool there's also the entire safety of the insurance pool completely so in our modern political environment the great angst of the left when at this point in this country is that they many of them honestly and deeply fear that trumps personality is destabilizing and dangerous a set of characteristics they could walk us in a nuclear war walk us into all kinds of disastrous consequences so that's one of the things that they are deeply fearful and why it is that they dislike him that's that's one of the reasons is that they feel like this is not anything close to an ideal leader this is actually vastly eons away from it in terms of the criteria variables that they would use to analyse what's in their best interests okay so so you can see that in different times a group of people under certain conditions they would they would intuitively and collectively tend to vote for someone who would be very strong very dominant very aggressive and potentially unstable enough to be dangerously protein so that his behavior couldn't be predicted now this this to some degree resembles Trump Trump is the most protein president I think we've ever had protein meaning unpredictable you you can't tell what he's going to do and so this keeps everybody back on their heels it gives everybody wide berth if you want to think about this if you I have a friend of mine who's uh similarly described 'el the that has stated that once in a while what he'll do when he's driving is he'll wiggle the car into the opposing lane and he does this so that you and I know this individual maybe don't forget there's I think the point of doing it it used to be your boss the uh well the reason for this is to let it have everybody give him very wide berth so therefore make himself safer that that's the point that's what he does it and I would never think of anything like this that to me is crazy but it's not it's not actually crazy it's a very interesting strategy although its aggressive and bizarre you can imagine that there would be times in world history probably many times in world history where those kinds of characteristics would have been perceived to be advantageous and they would have been advantageous if you game it out in terms of game theory now there's going to be other times when that's not going to be true so in times of relative peace where the person on the other side of the river is not is not particularly aggressive and is reasonable then then we would want a reasonable person to be at the head of a representative our village so that we can just maintain the beasts but if we have somebody over there that's very aggressive and opportunistic then that may not be the best strategy so this is so all the questions of dominance hierarchy and competence this all this is all going to mold together and nothing other than an issue of influence and in the case of a village a generalized preference so the so in human societies as opposed to animal societies animal societies generally the the herds survival is not on the line these are on the decision-making of the leader usually the leaders are they our males fighting over mating you know and in conflicts of interest within the herd this is not what's going to take place with respect to human dominance hierarchies so they're their influence processes and they they generally have the interests of the group as a very important integral factor of what's being decided rather than just you know sexual preferences of a bunch of females and a bunch of males on the sidelines that don't really have anything to say about it so so anyway that's the that's the answer here leadership ideals or influence influence variables are highly variable or quite a criteria are highly variable depending upon situation and the confidence dominance hierarchy is say is it's an interesting interesting conceptualization but it ultimately won't hold up mmm and now to the to the point about you know furthering as you rise in a particular hierarchy people may be more unable to resist the pleasure trap you've talked about this in your pleasure trap book when you talked about Elvis Presley where ah where you know that's a little different issue so into the rope that's uh that that's not it's not because heroes in hierarchies Perseids because he had resources okay so anybody with enough money to lie around eat whatever they want and have it order or doctor around to give them whatever drugs they want that that person's in that same set of circumstances so that's not rising in a hierarchy that's just having a lot of resources so yeah so that no I don't think those two things are particularly correlated in other words I don't think that you're going to find that the CEOs of Fortune 500 are in the pleasure trap more than the average citizen in the United States okay nice I would expect that that would be less the case by the way there's nine other words the conscientiousness that's required to rise in those hierarchies is going to play itself out and the intelligence okay so they're going to get less pleasure trap than the average show so yeah those are I see why someone so might have made that connection reading the pleasure trap at that that was a that's a spurious correlation okay yeah my assumption again thank you for clarifying it my assumption was that that the less village pressure you have to make ends meet the more your psychology will take over in such a world of abundance but okay oh well I mean yeah except that probably everybody you're sort of watching the situation now it's not like people get up at the crack of dawn and strap on their tool belt and work to their fingers to the bone they where they might have 50 years ago so most of the people in the world they may go to work but they're that they're not working particularly physically taxing jobs most people and so it isn't like they're exhausted so and everybody has essentially equal access to the pleasure drop so that it's cheap it's easy it's convenient as hell so yeah I don't like there would have been a time in the world where hard-working people barely making ends meet wouldn't have had the opportunity to get into the pleasure trap because they couldn't afford it it but that's no longer the case here to thank you now all right dr. Lyle dear dr. Lyle thank you for doing the podcast you've given an a tomorrow on mail Oh hmm oh go ahead let's do this go ahead to do this question now remember we got a listen we got a yes I will do this question then we'll get the listener on hold so I thought you hung in there go ahead yeah no worries okay do dr. Lyle oh it's okay thank you for doing the podcast you've given an 18 year old male some wisdom to think clearly enough to end a relationship gone south thank you so much I'm a big fan of evolutionary psychology and I often hear conversations on topics that have been perfectly illuminated by evolutionary thinking but I'm often reluctant to share this usable information because of the social stigma around it there's a new meme going around that people who think in Darwinian terms are creepy involuntary celibate misogynist misogynist and I've seen female friends of mine having a visceral disgust emotion to it I want to spread the truth of evolutionary psychology but I also don't want to hurt my mating chances by getting labeled a reject should I keep my evolutionary thoughts a secret and only explain it an easy to digest chic talk or should I spread these ideas with testicular fortitude I love both you take pennant I wish now I added a new phrase to my vocabulary just secular fortitude yeah I love it yeah unfortunately I had just barely enough to Circular fortitude to uh to just fail miserably yeah you should be warned you know uh don't don't do as I do do as I say the uh be smooth talk ask them what their sign is stuff like that ya know this is a this is a wonderful question and keep in mind that that these ideas are are you many of them very revolutionary counterintuitive and they are also very threatening to many people and so the one of the things George Bernard Shaw said if you're going to tell the truth make them laugh or they'll kill you and I think that's pretty close to an exact quote so this so this didn't escape this writer and this so keep this in mind that these ideas the way an idea is introduced the way that is said how it is said with how much vehemence these are all very important you know stylistic features of sharing interesting exciting novel controversial and threatening ideas so many times I've given so many lectures in my life I've given lectures where for one reason or another who knows what I was listening to on the radio or music when I walked in the door but I came in like fired up ready to take on anybody and and ready to really lay the truth on an audience and sometimes when that happens that if I'm if I happen to be God knows probably peeking in my in my pathetic little testosterone cycle the then it can sometimes get uncomfortable because because I'm feeding too much too fast too harsh and the people aren't actually adequately prepared and it's and there may be personalities in the audio that are particularly threatened in its you know it doesn't go well and I really don't like that and I'm not sure what purpose is served what what gains are had by by such a sort of confrontation process much better to have things you know much warmer and it can be it can be curious and interesting and somewhat controversial but but you should you should keep a kind of upon them and like smirk a friendliness about it and a warmth about it and a good humour about it that that if you share these ideas that we aren't going to battle so I would tone down the testicular fortitude and I would make things warmer and these ideas can be shared in ways that are that are inherently fascinating for people this is this is what we call a source code when you start actually speaking directly to the way the system is engineered it recognizes truth then light start going on as the system for the first time actually gets in sight conscious insight into its own design and so so it can be it can be great there's a reason why there's there's fifty women out there who might not have ever given me a second date but they had a very interesting time listening to the dug down bug in fact they might have written any questions afterwards about it not that they wanted to see me again but they were curious and they had questions so everyone gives you a placemat right so yes they get to keep the place about exact which that's been that's happened more than once that women fold it up the paper that I wrote on all over the all over the tablecloth the paper tablecloth and put it in their purse so yeah be a little smoother and you'll have a little better luck when it comes to gene spreading facsimile behavior around antastic alright so we've got a caller on hold and so we'd like to welcome to caller Joe welcome to the show thanks for calling hi hi there hi hello dr. Lauer and Nate it was a very good to hear from you I arrived a little early audio trouble if you can keep your phone directly in front of your mouth and and tell us your question okay can you hear me yes perfect all right firewood risk I have a question about bravery mm-hmm so I've been watching the Hong Kong protest and at first I wasn't I wasn't paying at much attention to it even though I have a lot of family members there and I do go back once or twice a year to see them and it's kind of my second home but I wasn't paying a lot of tension to it because to me this protest is an example of David versus Goliath and in this case David just don't stand a chance and and why is David even fighting you know so my first question is what is the CD of the Hong Kong people and then and my second question is there have been numerous numerous news about the communist government harvesting organs from healthy freedom fighters in China who practices Falun Gong you know is a kind of ancient meditation breathing exercise practice to calm the nerves and I've never done it before but I just heard that it is a very lucrative business for the communist government and the Hong Kong people obviously knows about it and you know if if there are a lot of cameras in Hong Kong now and you have 5k quality so yes if they if they get caught obviously they will set a chance to be put in this so-called education camp and you know they send a chance to have their organs harvested while being alive and with no anesthesia so how did they even get the courage to stand up to protest against this evil giant and one day I was watching this YouTube video and about this lady who stood up against one of those fake cops that were sent over from China to pretend you know to take down the people and and she kind of yell at him and then because she was because the cop was you know raising her voice at her and then but she wouldn't chew and stand down and from what I saw she's she's highly disagreeable but as the camera was on her at first you know thinking that she's going to just the cop was asking her for for her Hong Kong ID and then she said hey can you be a little bit more polite to me and stop yelling at me in my face if you want me to show you my Hong Kong ID why don't you show me your police ID to me first and then of obviously the cop wouldn't show it to her because we just we think he's a fake one from sent now from China and that his video kind of became viral and she's kind of became the hero of the Hong Kong protests online community and to me she's kind of brave you know but I see the reason that she's brave - what's him is because she she's disagreeable and she's open to new experience so my second question is is bravery a personality trait that's strongly associated with disagree ability and openness to new experience or is it a genes that's passed down from our ancestors because some people just don't have the guts to stand up to evil forces when time comes and I would like to know if it isn't gene oh yeah this is definitely genetic all personality characteristics are so and you're you're accurately identifying this Jo that that disagreeableness has a huge amount to say about this so this is going you're going to find that very disagreeable people will do very dangerous act and some of those acts will be heroic and some of them won't be heroic there'll be something else the so when it comes to what what can appear to be incredibly dangerous acts of defiance or or your combat often often in a in a potential rage of what you're going to find is a chemical called dihydrotestosterone and this is a I think women have almost none of it so I don't know what this woman had other than just disagreeable but men had this I'm sure we're going to find out as I as you find out slowly about everything that men and women have differential amounts and the amounts are you know considerably different that they're they're going to probably be in both genders now the but what we know about dihydrotestosterone is that it's involved with with essentially essentially short-term supercharging to the effects of testosterone so this is this is where men get unbelievably gutsy men and women potentially but particularly men so men will get unbelievably gutsy about taking on someone or something where the odds are overwhelmingly against them and the question is why how how could such a thing involved and the answer would be that that there would be mating ships that would be making up for the risks that would be incurred by you know the statistical likelihood of death as a result so you could see that let's suppose that you had a very dangerous unfair untrustworthy adversary who wasn't agreeing yeah would agree to something and then was taking more but would you you can imagine a situation where you had surrendered and then they let's let's forget the idea that we had arms let's go back to a time when it was hand to hand with with knives okay knives and clubs and we we could see that we were going to be fifteen against seven and they started to hold us down and then we said okay we cry uncle so we have some local custom of how it is that we we display this and and so we make that display we're full of testosterone we're our little tribal chief but we essentially make this display and we have all of our guys make the display one of which is dead one of which is going to be dead and there's five of us left and there's fifteen of them and we've damaged a couple of them so now it's thirteen to five now now the the sociopathic sob that happens to be their chief comes over with his knife and cuts one of our heads off and now now what you're going to see is the rest the remaining four of us running the cost-benefit analysis and the cost-benefit analysis is going to say okay going belly-up didn't work with this with this monster so what we're going to feel is a surge of rage and that rage is going to an energized an all-out effort to at any cost and flick whatever damage we can so that we we potentially either you know either live or die but we may actually be so dangerous that they have to renegotiate and so this is and effectively running the CB that it's the best strategy you could see how this would be you can see that in in fights between men there's a there's a cost-benefit about how risky the strategy that you take how self-sacrificing of your own health so this is you can imagine two men in close quarters grappling with each other and one of them decides I'm going to bang my forehead right into your forehead as hard as I can interesting strategy and it's a strategy that if you are in serious trouble and you can feel like you're otherwise going to lose better to trade even okay for a moment because maybe you just might get the better end of it so this kind of hyper aggressive very very dangerous all-in strategy that also has a protein component that it's whoa this this we we went from one one side of the of the matrix to the other side of the matrix and this will very often get a stronger more dangerous opponent to back off it's like whoa we've got something to lose here you can imagine going into a crowd with a bunch of unbelievably dangerous people in other words that are Pro Thien ly angry and if you're a cop you don't want to go into that crowd there are you know there's people in that crowd that that they seem to not care this is the the freakish thing that you'll see sometimes on tape of people beating themselves and so on and so forth it's like look out they're dangerous they quote don't care okay so this is part of what it is that you're saying you're seeing a there's an element of this process that's going on and so this is a that that's part of a deep evolutionary strategy I saw this a great deal when I worked in the prisons and I saw effect similes of it in other words I didn't see the real strategy but I saw the strategy start to get activated where we're less or less fearsome prisoners would display high levels of anger and basically say that they didn't care what the consequences were about so and so that that is you know threatening them to take advantage of them that that they you know I won't use their language but the notion is I don't care what happens to me and it's like well if you can actually make that case then you may absolutely get concessions out of a bigger stronger opponent the opponent's job isn't to see you dead or isn't to when they're there their job is to win and stay intact with a minimum of damage that's a very different outcome than just winning so it depends upon an opponent having measured risks and if your opponent does not have measured risks they just got unbelievably dangerous 125-pound little male against a 250 pound monster that hundred 25 pound males it's actually extremely dangerous if he literally is willing to go all-in and with the attitude of I don't care what happens to me okay and you can see how this such a thing could evolve particularly when it comes to village protection because if you've got wife children etc that you're protecting you can see how you could evolve an insurance scheme and bravery that would be passed down through genes that would drive dihydrotestosterone that would most often wind up in males you wouldn't want to put it in females because they've got other jobs to do they've got children to look after children to protect and they they're not going to be specialising in weaponry and they don't have nearly the size and strength amounts so we don't need it there okay where we need it is we need it in the males and we need it measured and we need it tied to senses of justice which it typically is and so under these under just the right conditions you can activate it and I've had it activated in my head more than once so me of meager testosterone fortitude testicular fortitude the had enough that under conditions that that can activate inside my nervous system and I do have the attitude of I'm going to get you and I'm going to do you buried serious damage and I don't care what happens to me okay now fortunately I live in a very civilized world with people that that aren't usually doing that much damage or threatening that much damage and I've got enough IQ and enough stability that those impulses didn't go anywhere but they were there just just right out of an evolutionary psychology textbook so what is what is courage and bravery it's mostly the the the activation of very interesting aggressive strategic instincts that will come about under certain conditions in certain individuals that's and it is absolutely genetic and it requires a just like all instincts require the ecological input in order to activate them just as if you you know if you light a fire in your gas fireplace and it goes whoosh you go back automatically that's an instinct to that threat you have similar instincts to to when it is that you will suddenly become Britt so that's a very good question Joe and and now thank you for asking Oh No thank you very much hello hello yeah yes yes I have something to add yeah so I've seen a lot of women they kind of stood up and they're kind of brave you know standing in front of the fake cops alone by themselves even 70 year-old or women they're doing it just so happy yeah do you think that the jeans kind of have evolved as time goes by and now that because cut women don't really need a man to stand and protect them they kind of evolve not this bravery gene as well no no it's got nothing to do with that they haven't evolved any such thing they are they're smart enough that they're recognizing that there's a wider force of social processes and if they do this they it is well recognized that they are helpless and so a surefire way for a regime or set of a regime of male dominance or individual male to lose all credibility and to have the wrath of the world targeted them is to attack a female and so that's what's going on so those females are disagreeable enough but they've also run a cost benefit and they believe that they will not be targeted in the in a way that a male would be targeted for you know for exactly those reasons so this is a as though that that's what's happening though they have not evolved some some spectacular courage that's not what's taking place there
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