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Episode 191: Impostor Syndrome, Parenting a mischievous son, Boyfriend went to stripclub
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today's topic we've got a few questions for my listeners but we're going to start the show with the topic of imposter syndrome now but this is an article that is coming out it came out it's coming out actually in December of this year volume 115 of the Journal of vocational behavior and the name of the article the name of the study is I must have slipped through the cracks somehow an examination of coping with perceived impostor ISM and the role of social support now this was done with a collaboration of the United the University of Nevada Las Vegas Nevada Brigham Young University in Utah and Stanford University and so it's a 57 page study so we're not going to go through all of it but a few choice choice coats that I've got from this article it's actually very interesting because we've been doing this podcast long enough for now I I'm looking at this and piecing this together I'm dr. Lyle I'm hearing your voice and pretty much all of these explanations so mm-hmm they're a little bit from this from the study perceptions of fraudulence by high achieving individuals has been labeled by previous research as quote the imposter phenomenon or the imposter syndrome but most existing research characterizes the imposter phenomenon as principally dispositional and is focused on uncovering other individual traits and negative outcomes that are correlated with these perceptions but this study seeks to relax the assumption that that perceived imposter ism is dispositional and assumes that these perceptions are malleable and suggests essentially dynamic it suggests that this impostor syndrome may actually be triggered by various contextual characteristics and then can be mitigated by certain effective coping tactics they also say is that previous research on social support and impostor syndrome treats social support as a 1-dimensional concept and suggests that more social support will mitigate this impostor syndrome but these authors are arguing that the source of social support may be an important consideration when seeking to understand the relationship between social support and impostor syndrome so this was done in two different studies yes it's a long winded way of saying what you've been saying I miss Jeff dr. Lyle and no so so first they introduced the idea of imposter syndrome this was first introduced on clinical observations of accomplished women who felt that their success was undeserved and then were concerned about eventually being revealed as a fraud however more research found that perceptions of imposter syndrome are not isolated to high achieving women and can occur as individuals develop across the course of their careers and encounter situations where they may perceive that they are quote out of their league like training for starting a new job entering an elite group or receiving some sort of promotion so there were two studies in this and they're very long long-winded but essentially the first study they were identifying who gets impostor syndrome and they interviewed twenty different students and they were trying to identify all the little variables that have to do with impostor syndrome so they actually had the interviews in the study which was some quotes from the interview and the authors said that most of the students that were interviewed worked really successful in high school and their first four years of college which helped create a concept founded on being a high achieving student but after these students were admitted to the undergraduate accounting program they started to compete against an increasingly impressive peer group so many started to feel that sense of impostor syndrome because they then encountered a larger group of students who were able to perform at their same level making it difficult to view themselves as one of the best students in the class so in contrast the dispositional view of impostor syndrome people indicated that teams of imposters were confined to the particular program rather than feeling like their fraud in other areas of life which was interesting because one of the interviewees direct quote says that should she guests that feeling behind others is a natural feeling that occurs when a group of capable hard-working individuals are competing against one another so we go on that that their way of coping with this was to to to escape by doing certain activities like playing sports having a set of part-time job taking some breaks video games just worship and so it's fat they found that students could find balance but if they've spent way too much time like for example one of the interviewees spent about five or six hours a day playing video games that actually did not help with the imposter syndrome have left him very unhappy in that and even more more things of imposters yeah aget this straight you gotta tell me this is fifty seven pages were wasted I oh yeah and three groups of social scientists said what dyu nevada las vegas and stands well we've so we've got a question at the bottom is that with those three places mmhmm yeah but that you've got a really we've got a really question the self-concept that these young people have of themselves and what's so challenging to it in this new environment it's really mysterious it's really like it's going to take a real crack team of experts to unravel this mmm that's like I've been feeling the imposter syndrome ever since I met dr. Hawk I have a concept of myself as a smart person looking back three years now incredibly absurd and I can't believe this is like blind people like in a cage with elephants that they've already seen them before and they can't imagine what they're feeling it's just amazing I did the NB I don't know have you got a you've got a bit better way crap what for listen to Jerry why don't you just like yeah just just roll out on this thing and explain it to everybody yeah I mean it's it's we've got the on this podcast I feel like people are pretty they're already at a level where they're familiar with the nature of competition and the fact that you know when we're intimidated by a competitive problem we get obviously very accurate messaging from the nervous system about our standing and the hierarchy and and that's what's going on here but it's also it's so much of this personality so much of what we think of as impostor syndrome is personality interacting with context because disagreeable narcissists are not really subject to what we would think of as imposter syndrome it's not it's not really in there it could possibly if the environment is just if they've gotten themselves in just over their heads enough but they're just less likely to experience it then someone who's agreeable in conscientious that's that's what it is so agreeable engine Goldammer yeah grammar didn't feel like he was an imposter when he was nine years old telling all the adult no no no no yeah exactly that's the kind of psychology this just doesn't exist in there it doesn't matter how out of his League he is he makes his own League he designs the rules as he goes zero percent agreeable we know we've made him take the test but someone like I've spent a lot of my life in various impostor syndrome processes because I'm very agreeable and very conscientious so I never feel like I quite belong I always feel like someone made a mistake these phrases that you hear people say and then you put me in a gate like it's dependent context dependent on my position of power relative to the situation so when I was in high school like these study subjects are you're you're very clearly getting the signals that you know you're doing you're doing better than most people everything's cool no problem nobody's coming up on your heels there's no reason for anxiety you go off to college and suddenly it's a different deal you've got everybody now you're in a peer group where you're just one among many who share equal skills and you've been coasting along for a long time not not doing the fundamentals not building the self-esteem process and of course that's going to unleash all kinds of of anxiety processes and what we would refer to as an impostor syndrome and of course people are going to respond to that by resorting to various phases of the ego trap they're going to go play a bunch of video games they're going to go try to avoid problem or they're going to try to reframe the problem in other ways that we see people reframing competitive problems so yeah there's no there's no huge mystery here as far as why people would be feeling the anxiety about being taken down a notch and a competitive hierarchy under Lee Lewis that anybody would have been five minutes studying on us this is in there acting like there's a there's a debate between dispositional and situational yeah growl you know yeah others have thought that this was dispositional but but they we have a different view you know more optimistic view that that this is such major to paper on everybody and how to get published yeah every single personality characteristic is is this personality is dispositional and not change personality is yes yeah the experience of disposition immunity to main moment or people who don't know yes personality is in and the yeah and it be the experience that you have at any given moment if you're Al Capone you know that that with a gun to your head suddenly you get very agreeable okay and yeah suddenly you even Alan might a mister gay even Alan he might I don't know find a way to make it feel like there's this idea yeah yeah so this is absurd I mean this is like calling it something the hot syndrome like I don't know every time I go into a sauna I feel hot you know yeah what this is yeah so yeah this is a yeah this is an amazing display of ignorance and yet like when was published it's gonna be not polio coming out number it says December 2019 I'm assuming that's not a typo so it's coming out soon coming out no good the world gets to hear a bunch of dribble from some people that are publishing on personality that have not studied the field Wow now cool what's that but hey you know welcome to academia it's a pub it's the pub it scored so that's all that matters doesn't matters here the 47 thoughts are listed in the fourth institution and it's a useless study it's still a pub still goes on the CV a part of the tenure race yeah oh man but this is I mean people people often we could we can move on if you want to but there's no I was going to just delete a marine on this and less we have more present things but people will often kind of confuse the imposter syndrome with the ego traps they think they're the same thing and and they're really they're they're not quite but they are I mean to the degree that the chronic impostor syndrome is a personality problem it's it's like you if you're just never feeling like you're good enough and you're never you're never supposed to be there they shouldn't have let you into the club you you slip through the cracks that's your personality that's that's your distortion cross to bear that you have but there is much like the ego trap the more this is why we harp on the self-esteem process so much and the process of addressing the fundamentals of a competitive problem if there is any resolution to impostor syndrome that's context dependent it's by really throwing yourself throwing yourself diligently into the fundamentals of the problem just like you would get out of the ego trap so convincing your nervous system as best as you're able that you haven't left anything on the table you've done the best you can you're just as trained up as anybody else you you you deserve to be there just as much as anyone you're doing the same work and and this is like any other process of distortion the more experience you have the more feedback you get and the more you're able to calibrate these estimates over time yeah that's why I know what they did is excuse me as typical social scientists they said well what you really need to just cool it okay and so right our big brilliant insight is going to be who you get so she went from okay this rail like we nearly pattycake and I mean is there some truth in it yeah there's a little bit of truth in it but what Jen is talking about is massively more important insight and of course you know it's not these fault these people don't have it there they don't have it figured out hang on it is there it is their fault that they are blatantly ignorant of personality clearly and the act is if this is a this is a I don't know some either personality or or fascinating you know dynamic rather than earnestly high conscious people that are that occasionally get in situations behind their achievements that put them in water where they're no longer obviously dominant no problem like yeah I wouldn't call that syndrome I would just simply call that a continuous variable on a psychological experience just like how hot it feels in the sauna that's what it is yeah all right Nathan let's move on and do we now that's our July literally very dusted yes yeah is this is this so I guess this is also a way to figure out to find your ceiling so would you say then that if you're not maybe not regularly finding a ceiling or not not bumping up against the ceiling that means you may not be taking enough risks or working hard enough what would you say that is yeah I mean you you could be or you could just be really really disagreeable and really just super super confident and so it's going to be personality and context that are running the show here mm-hmm know what I mean is is if someone is feeling totally secure in their position in life and studying or jobs does that mean that they may not be working hard enough essentially that they need to have a few losses that they need to have a few situations where they are feeling like oh I'm a little bit above and I need to work harder to get to get where I need to be this is this is a typical natural process for people and what the what the nervous system is attempting to do remind me where I'm going with this in case I get lost I bet what the nervous system is doing is that it's attempting to send you it computes what would be the highest rate of return of gene survival on any action that you could take that is the purpose of nervous systems purpose of nervous systems is to regulate movement and so what the what this machine is attempting to do is to contract muscles in a sequence and a combination of and their sequence of livens in order to optimize chain survival so that's fundamentally what a nervous system does it doesn't matter where we find that nervous system if it's in a cat or if it's a giraffe or him and it's always the same that what the mind is is a computational device to bring in data from the nerve you know from the sensory system and consult both memory systems and and resident algorithms to try to figure out what muscular contraction pattern would optimize genes survival and so what the system is doing is it's running a rate of return on capital it's ready a rate of return on investment is what this is now I totally forget where I was going with this hitting ceiling means you know how do you feel about right I got it yeah so the so the issue is is that the nervous system has a is a signaling device to tell you when you are not optimizing rate of return on capital it's called boredom okay so mmm-hmm that's what it is it's a feeling that says hmm this is too easy and if it's too easy I know that life isn't inherently competitive and for a human the competitive process is going to involve a steam so we're trying to be more in a position to earn more steam from mates friends and trading partners and so if we're bored while we're in a situation where the system knows that the rate of return on a bit on its investment in terms of the energy that's expending is likely to be suboptimal that it's aware that there are competitive domains that it could be improving its standing and it and it knows this intuitively you can smell it that's what it's job is to simply figure these things out so of course it can tell when it's too easy so that's why nobody you know try to learn how to high jump basically gets over the two-foot bar and then just keeps going over the two-foot bar for the next year now within minutes they're like well let's put it up to two point you know two to two for two six okay you're the excitement is when you are you're a design by nature to attempt to reach the limits of your capacities in order to compete as effectively as possible for the finest trades that you have in the estate marketplace so that's so of course you don't get to just sit around and do the same thing over and over again easily without a price no it isn't that people don't do this but when they do it the price is boredom and and that's the impetus excitement is the signal that you are reaching possibly the ideal situation in terms of your time and energy investment in an opportunity okay so this is where where it's like hey this is as good as it gets oh this is now this is now determining our entire you know focus now because there's a there's an opportunity to mine either an increase on our abilities or an increase in our scheme trading process and so this is you know this is following the lab this is you know seeing a great old friend that you haven't seen in a while where this is you know a new business opportunity that that you know that you haven't seen before and now your or it hasn't been available before and now you're super excited about it or it's just for example doing work that you're really good at but it's at the limit of your abilities so you are pushing hard that day to try to use the best of your ability to solve a difficult problem and your nervous system rewards you with the excitement is it says you are working as hard and demonstrating everything that you're capable of and it's watching you and it then the excitement generated is the system essentially analyzing the rate of return on on time and energy capital on whether or not we're optimizing genes survival capabilities so that's that's actually how that works it's fascinating so would you would you say that that if someone is trying to achieve something and they're working hard or something and they're not feeling some versions of this impostor syndrome that there that that page that they are likely to feel that if there on the right path towards achieving their potential mmm I want you to back up and give us that question again so I want to make sure I understand it yeah so if so let's say someone's working at a problem would it be normal for for anybody working hard at something that's maybe a little bit other league at first to feel these imposter syndrome type of symptoms or characteristics hmm no anxiety yes yes in Germany now that's correct the Pacha syndrome would would have the additional inference that other people are thinking that you're at a level of ability that you don't know not confirm that you're at okay but jen has it exactly right what would be normal would you have to have anxiety about whether or not you could accomplish it and as you know a feeling of uncertainty and challenge but not the imposter syndrome ostracism is specifically associated with the ego trap looking dynamic where were you believe that people are overestimating your abilities and therefore you know you're getting this feedback from the nervous system that there's additional status risk because you may not be able to live up to expectations so that's huh that's what that posture syndrome is is a is a cousin what they're calling a posture syndrome you know is just a psychic experience that is associated with with with your estimate that the village is overestimating you in your in your yeah just your innate estimate you're systematically undervaluing yourself because you you have a personality that does that you could well you could just be someone right you could you could be someone that is experiencing that because of unusual environmental circumstances but in one of the route albums yeah most likely what we're seeing is they as I read this thing it said 20% of people or whatever it's like 20% of high achieving people well that makes sense in other words Toronado that apply achieving people are on the top 20 percentile of the conscientiousness curve so what do you suspect that all those people if I give them a big five test they all land in the upper 20% of the conscientiousness curve mystery solved yeah but all those other things can't do that in this particular study there I can't no time to get back together yeah yeah you know yeah I shouldn't give him a 35 question test that's not so hard no that's too hard to do Castagnoli and look out go ahead move one all right well speaking of finding ceilings here we have a question of a young man who found a ceiling near his house so dear dr. Lyle lot and dr. Hogg lots and lots of ugly background here but I'll try not to wander my wife and I have been separated for two years ink to paper on an ugly and contentious divorce in May I have primary custody of our two kids daughter's 17 son is 14 and I live in the home which we've owned for 20 years a couple weeks ago I came home to find my son and two of his friends up on the roof of our little Sun Deck I asked him what he was doing and if he was being safe and they said they were playing army so since I've coached the other two kids and mountain biking for almost a few for for almost a decade I knew their parents wouldn't mind them being up on the roof so I told them to at least put the ladder away when he was done and to keep his phone on in case I needed him to come down I was actually more irritated because he didn't put the ladder away so they did this every day for a week until a few days ago my daughter came home from her job and her ever so sweet and ass Arabic tone asked me if I was really so stupid to think that my son and his friends were playing army and she let me know that the real reason that they're up on this roof is that our 22 year old neighbor was in her backyard topless and the Sun had set up a perch on the Sun Deck to get a better view I climbed up thinking that she was just trying to get him in trouble but sure enough the deck had the perfect view of the chaise lounge chair where I assumed the girl had usually sat I told my son to knock it off and he said he would well last week I got an angry knock at the door and it was my ex-wife and the neighbor who they've been friends for many years apparently the neighbor called my wife sometime last week and they had agreed that they were confront me and my son in the morning we sat down and it went from a calm this is something we're concerned about to accusations of me being an irresponsible absentee parent and that my son may potentially lead to an adolescent sex ring in a matter of seconds I tried to remain calm and explained that they are just acting like fourteen-year-old boys and I've gotten them to stop my wife asked if I planned on punishing him and I said that I don't feel like he did anything punishment worthy and rather that this was a learning experience about respecting people's privacy well my neighbor said that if it was her son he'd be in intensive psychotherapy and medicated I told her that was really overkill but my wife told me not to talk to her friend like that and asked them to leave before it got any more nuts my wife since text me that I'm being incredibly irresponsible if I if I don't do something she's going to go to her lawyer to revisit the custody agreement and all of that she called me an asshole several times and said it was me it was more miserable being divorced from me than it was to be married to me well there goes my weekend I guess that's it out that's about it but I have to ask am I the asshole for house handling the situation with my son I'll lob this softball the doctor Hawk oh my god I mean it no he is like spoiler alert he is he is the reasonable one here he probably knows that which why submitting the question you're getting getting a little status from you know to painting this picture of the son disagreeable character of the ex-wife and the friend so I mean I love this question because this is this is great because this is what relationships are whether they're whether it's your ex-spouse or whether it's a friend or whether it's someone you're currently married to like relationships or stable equilibrium between stable personalities and sometimes those personalities are super disagreeable and ridiculous and that's probably why he's not married to her anymore and she's absolutely overreacting to this he's handled it completely reasonably their 14 year old kids you know and he told them to stop and he corrected their behavior they're opportunistic 14 year olds presumably heterosexual or heterosexual adjacent boys like not shocking there's nothing shocking about this they they took this too far he told them cut it out and they did so turning this into some broad debate about their psychopathology trying to medicate them this is appalling so and also the neighbor I feel like the neighbor is likely jumping on board this collective hysteria to overcompensate for what was probably a little bit of a mrs. Robinson situation she she probably knew they were watching and she's like she's signaling her heard you know outrage in solidarity with the ex-wife here so this is but this is what happens this is what happens when you partner with someone disagreeable who's going to overreaction situations like this and then you have children with them and then you're you're bound up in the dynamics of that relationship even when you end the relationship and you still have to manage these disagreements over how to how to discipline or not discipline the children so this is totally ridiculous he's totally in the right his ex-wife is completely overreacting in the neighbors net it's beautiful it's great yeah my comments would be a friend of mine named honoree al lives down in San Jose area and 20 years ago we have many conversations about life and onna had a saying don't breed with freaks I knew that was going to come out I thought that was very same for some reason but I almost said in a second ago yeah be careful you know with people yeah please so so first of all what's really interesting me is is the sanctimonious you know neighbor I'm surprised as a daughter that is topless in the backyard it's like hmm the apple fell kind of far from that tree oh well maybe amateur this is a question I thought the sanctimonious neighbor was the one bathing topless no no is the daughter that's the no it's a daughter Oh so yeah the apple did not fall far from that tree at all yeah no I think yeah I think it did in other words you think it did some kid that's back there with it with her top off is not too sanctimonious at all she's got a free spirit so yeah yes but suddenly I think we've got some overcompensating moral outrage here yeah well the mothers you know exactly wouldn't be interesting to the 14 year olds but the 22 year old is yeah so the and the 14 year old deserves if it was my kid I'd give them a plaque give them the James Bond award emerging porn King give a little human jacket yes you have your jacket that's what it would be yeah so yeah he's going to go far those those jeans are headed to a good place there you go all right it's it's like that you know these arguments it's also just worth reminding people that these these conflicts over discipline and you know oh well if you don't if you don't get the discipline just right or the kids growing up and too permissive of a household or too controlling of a household and that's going to affect who that child becomes this is completely wrong again it has no bearing upon who that child becomes the child becomes exactly who the child is going to be regardless of what kind of childhood discipline context it's raised in so it's when you're dealing with if you if you have bred with a freak and you're dealing with this kind of disciplinary and you know conflict then it's a pick your battles you know would you rather be right or happy like getting into it with somebody disagreeable about how to discipline your kid actually has no impact on who that kid turns out to be in the long run all it does is make you miserable in the short term hmm how would you suggest that this this man deals with this situation just stand firm and yeah that's a party actually there's did be so there's such a wide variety of options to this one of them would be like go ahead you have fun with your lawyer like yeah okay sure it's like knowing I self out dere SK yeah yeah yeah that's no custody risk and email me only the most worthless lawyer would take your money for anything like that you know that yeah I that'd be one one thing that bending one reaction yeah the other reaction is no I hear what you're saying makes sense you know happy early and blah I just this is you know just complete shining the person on but not having him know that you're doing it you know and I'm not doing anything about it doing absolutely nothing I and I would put the James Bond plaque on the wall next question is about a little more sneaky James Bond guy so maybe maybe the James Bond villain over here so yeah dear doctor while doctor Hogg one of my boyfriend's colleagues was leaving work recently and she had a staff party organized because of that so the party was supposed to take place in the restaurant in which they are working however they ended up in a strip club afterwards my boyfriend claims that he did not get a lap dance or anything else but his married co-workers were paying girls for dances and I don't really believe the innocence of my boyfriend anyway but never mind that I have questions about my feelings regarding the situation it does bother me and I'm wondering if that is caused by my insecurities and my own body dysmorphia I wonder if a woman who is confident about her looks would be fine with the situation like that are my insecurities at fault here because no matter who I date I will I I may end up in a similar situation or are my negative feelings reasonable and I should look for another partner because this one demonstrated that he is willing to create these four defection I'm just trying to understand my low mood in this case should I stay because I am the problem and what he is doing is normal in common place or should I leave because situation is caused by his personality type and are there guys that do not end up in strip clubs in these cases I'm 25 years old and our relationship has many other flaws which made me doubt it even before this particular situation hmm have at it Jen of the agency just one day oh yeah sure yeah I ain't the thing that really jumps out with this point is how she's just signaling right and left how she's already unhappy in the relationship she tells us like three times you know she's she doesn't trust him that that's not relevant we'll come back to that and then she's oh the relationship has other problems and so that you know the strip club incident is a little bit of a pretext her it's the relationships in trouble anyway and I guess the as far as the strip club being a deal breaker why she's feeling the way that she's feeling this again this is going to be a this is personality mingling with context so some some women are going to feel insecure in that situation kind of regardless of who they're dating and what to what degree they're over rewarded or not but every almost every woman at some point if she is sufficiently over rewarded and she's she's you know in a position of weakness relative to her competitive value B to B this guy she's going to be more prone to those fits of jealousy because the likelihood of losing him is higher so her perception of likelihood of losing him is higher so if it's the opposite if you're even if you're someone who is kind of predisposed to fits of jealousy about this kind of thing anyway if you're super under rewarded and the guy worships the ground you walk on your your threshold for where you're going to experience that jealousy is going to be lower so it's it's personality plus context but it's like to me that the essence of this question is it sounds like he just doesn't he doesn't qualify he just doesn't qualify she's already made up her mind about that to some degree in the jealousy over the strip club is a bit of a red herring yeah not not your soulmate lady you're 25 you know take arrested adventure the one tiny thing that you you just said I would at I it would be the notion of who's qualifying and who's not qualifying it's very possible she doesn't qualify and very popular at yeah yes and so so this is a pre-emptive for rank yeah and there's in the thing that Jen's also describing here she's describing a lot in that answer but one of them is the that this was a perfect like a little slider of explaining context and personality but the personality issue here is I mean independent of the particulars of this question which are absolutely signaling a conflicted relationship that's you know in trouble the would be the notion of let's suppose that the relationship was actually quite good and very solid most of the time but this was a point of conflict this is where we have a process of self-discovery of the individual where you discover that it turns out it makes you very uncomfortable to be in that situation and it's not a good one for you people differ tremendously in their inherent openness around sexual issues and so I've known people that that their attitude towards their husbands or boyfriend's going to strip bars is like oh I'll go with you or hey whatever have a good time like they're not actually threatened by this and it it isn't because they don't care and it isn't that they don't feel that they're but they don't have a good deal in there that they're in an inherently competitive situation for that partner but they have a natural openness to essentially feeling like you know what there's no big threat coming from that quarter they're not running off with a stripper and they're not sleeping with a stripper and also if I if I respect the fact that males have a casual mating strategy circuit in that head that could probably use some form of expression and experience from time to time then maybe that makes me a more valuable Terrebonne partner okay continuum of the chippy tolerance what that yeah chippy tolerance it's a continual amount of chippy tolerance yeah yeah whether it's sort of like behavior sort of suggestive and performative around it like a strip club or having an actual should be on the side like yeah women are absolutely going to differ profoundly on that dimension yeah and so part of your young life is the self-discovery process through relationships which are sometimes the only way to find out you know what is the nature of your nervous system what is in fact your identity and so you find out you know you can somebody to ask you if you like Sam and the only way to tell them is to have it tasted at once and if someone says well how would you be if your boyfriend went to a strip club you know you have to kind of have something like that happen in order for you to discover you know how is it that that makes me feel and how threatened am i and how upset them I know people that are that are very inherently very closed and extremely sexually conservative and anything like that is just so far out of bounds that it would just disqualify that relationship and I have other people that would just sort of roll their eyes and laugh so Tuesday night you'd say yeah with that it's just Tuesday night you know that's a good we do yeah this is a individual different process as well as the dynamics that Jim was talking about all right fascinating all right okay so our next question about openness now is not just personal wealth increase openness I'm thirty years old and I feel as though I've become wealthier and I've become more open to new experience due to some HCN see behavior I've increased my personal net worth from effectively zero to about a quarter of a million dollars in the past five years while this may not seem much to some I've done this on a salary no greater than $75,000 therefore relative to my lifestyle expectations I feel very financially stable sorry for the humble brag but it feels as though this has been the primary factor in my feeling as though I've become much more open experience relative to my mid-20s I'm not saying I've jumped from the 10th percentile to 9 yet but maybe 40th to 60th does this seem likely to you yeah go right ahead Jen this feels like a very I mean we can definitely let you spin out the full logic of this if you want to but the I kind of feel like when we're on the podcast at the same time I don't know if anyone out there ever watched the old McLaughlin group on PBS that I feel like John McLaughlin with these Curt little answers like no wrong issue one moving on if this one like of course of course you're going to move on this dimension on openness or anything else there seems to be a theme tonight of personality plus context like personality plus environment so it's this is how when people say the environment matters this is how the environment matters so this this person's position of power has changed they they can afford to risk more they literally have more money in the bank they can they can make more mistakes they can they can they're financially secure enough to go make some really exciting and fun and glorious mistakes I'm jealous as an open person myself so it's absolutely reasonable that that your situation and especially your relative position of power in a situation is going to affect your relative risk tolerance and it's that it's going to cascade down the spreadsheet of your cost-benefit analysis on everything that you're doing in your life and one of the ways that that's going to make itself apparent to you and manifest in your life is how open you feel to have any new adventures that you were not open to having before you were in that position how how willing you are if you're an agreeable person if you're if you've been in a position of weakness at your job you're going to be very meek and you're going to take on every little assignment that your boss gives you and you're not going to make a peep about it but if you feel more and more secure in that job because you know you a very specialized skills that no one else can do or you've gone out and you collide for some other jobs and you know that you could find another job no problem you're going to start you're going to feel yourself becoming a little more aggressive a little more disagreeable it's not that your personality has changed it's just you're more willing to set some boundaries and stand up for yourself and create create your experience in a way that you were not when you were in less of a position of power so there are all kinds of ways that these things can change for people over the course of their lifetime depending on what's changed in my life and what's going on and money is a huge huge dimension of this question so completely reasonable I guess that was a longer answer than I thought it would be the answer is I just love when she talks like that this is real fabulous in with the sort of little laser analysis and that's that if you if you think about this you understand that the differences of as just as Janice describing obviously that your circumstances change with financial capability and therefore the risks actually the risk tolerance actually is not changing if we look at this technically accurately the personalities remain exactly the same but what was a what was a risk that would cost you for example three gene units of risk is now cannot the same same outcome the same bad outcome of boss browning cannot cost you three units of gene risk when you've got $250,000 in the bank that frown can now only cost you point three units of gene wisk okay so the very same worst-case scenario no longer carries the same risk and so as a result of that it it will inexorably lead you to be more assertive about expanding your range of potential opportunities it will force your algorithms to cause behavior that you will not have seen before okay that's just it is we can't sit though so looked at through the proper perspective what I would call a plumb in perspective where we were looking at the personality algorithm as genetically fixed what's happening is that the person's environment is changing okay so the person is standing in the same place relative to other people in terms of the construction of their neural circuits well want a bell curve and their relative risk tolerance or relative introversion extraversion and everything else in the Sun okay let's imagine a person for example that had some disfigurement on their face maybe he had a very unattractive nose something like that and they were otherwise like quite attractive but that nose to make them was grotesque enough that it actually caused them to fall from a nine to six today because it was pretty funny looking and then in one day they'd saved up their quarters and they get a dentist's job and now suddenly they go from a nine to a now there are nine it goes six to a nine okay and so now now what happens is is that they're very likely to be quote more outgoing and the reason is is they're picking up cues from the environment that attractive other people are encouraging interactions with them so their algorithm is still they're still just as shy or just as I'm going as they ever were but this the context around them their environmental circumstances have shifted considerably okay and so this is this is actually the right way to think of it the personality does not change however the person's manifest pattern of behavior can change substantially because their circumstances have changed not because they have changed so that's the that's the way look at that yeah I don't know me Chris but great yeah dr. Lloyd woman would you say that that uh would you say that intelligence is affected if someone's not making a lot of lot of income Oh interesting yeah Jen fire away on that used to mean you mean you used to be merely very smart [Laughter] go ahead not implement then there's financial insecurity so financial insecurity can definitely affect your yes the expression of your IQ because you you're you're too bound up with trying to solve too many other problems in living months months and paying your bills and you're too distributed so but as far as like having having a general low income past a certain threshold where your basics are met and you're not worried about how you're going to feed yourself and your hypothetical dogs the next month I think there's there's diminishing effects after a certain point but certainly yeah financial insecurity I forget the the exact percentage of IQ it knocks off is it is it like 10 points it will do this a lot um it was a mug I think he was on the order of 10 to 15 points which was she very significant amount so this is then this is this is documented and yeah if you're if you're in a situation where you you can't pay your bills and you're struggling you were basically paying the price with your working IQ which is a really hefty price to be paying if you're trying to solve big problems in the world no very good great question is there yeah where would be able to read more about that study that's that sounds fascinating uh yeah I don't know God knows you're gonna have to just look it up okay it's out there in the world I done that go find it somewhere all right I get our next hard to find they're good and I don't think all right addition when I when I first heard about it I went hunting for more evidence to see if it was just like something that someone had documented with ten grad students or something that no it's actually a well documented effect mm-hmm okay all right all right we're good last question there are many you know this is a pretty long one so I'm going to read the question then we might end up answering it next so there are many prophecies of Homo sapiens more and more visibly splitting into two into two socio-economic lines I'm thinking more along the lines of some people happening to be more fit for the modern environment having financial sense capable of long term planning not living on social grants and being able to navigate the various pleasure traps in the modern world and not acting like animals trapped in the zoo and the people who fail at these like of course tend to mate with so do you see these gaps widening or closing this is a pretty interesting quote the interesting question there's are there's some entrances there Jen go ahead and you thought about these types of things probably for a long time so just let's hear what you have to think about it that's just some degree I mean this is this is a fallacy about that is that if you ignoring a couple of different things this idea that you know that because like meets with like because you know you're you're sticking to people who look like you have a similar intelligence level similar social norms all of that that that you're going to basically create these mini mini siloed civilizations within a common shared environment and this is this is ignoring a couple of things like the fact that these are not none of these characteristics are being driven by single genes so people still have sort of single gene thinking about some of these things there's a single gene for intelligence or there's a single gene for conscientiousness and they're not these are these are clusters these are very complex like tens of thousands of genes interacting and so and all of this all of this is working very hard to always return to the mean of the bell curve in any given population so you can have two uses meet with each other and produce a pretty you know smart kid but not a genius kid because the the pull of the average of the mean of the distribution is always is returning to the mean so as long as you're sure you're sharing the same general environment general selection pressures you're not going to have entirely different civilizations and have being the same the same sort of space in the way that people like to scare monger about this yeah there's no there's a lot of lot of derivative conclusions from that but that's the that's the main thing that I would say about that question yeah there there isn't two distributions there's one big monstrous bell curve it's the best way to describe any population and so you're not going to so god that's a so the person's saying prophecies I don't know who's being prophetic about it but whoever's being pathetic about it you know apparently didn't understand that yeah kind of basic and important super my field where I stagger them the it's reminiscent of some of the charles murray inferences and you know you're going to have the haves and have-nots essentially the two Americas that we were becoming increasingly polarized because some people are more intelligent and able to work in the ideas economy rather than the the labor economy and this is this is contributing to this polarization process that's what this brings up to me yes right and intelligent and interesting discussion in 1986 now we know a great deal more about behavior genetics and and population genetics and so we're going to change our mind about things so for example it's going to turn out that as Jen was describing if you have to you know unknown related people catch in two non related people randomly drawn from the population there the difference in their IQs is 17 points it's just just in general just go out in the world and point to two people in line at Disneyland and the odds are any pair that you point to typically if you do it to a hundred times and run the average is going to be 17 points different yeah if you look at a parent and child the average distance of a parent and a child's IQ is 13 points I've kind of made it about the same got the same so right so there's no way that you can get a interbreeding elite and that but it was not unreasonable based on some inferences that a that our Amory might have been thinking and people like that might have been thinking all the way back to the dawn of eugenics they wouldn't have known what Jen is describing this very powerful regression to the mean and how essentially the genes are churning their way in ways that that are not conducive to this kind of a bizarre situation
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