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Episode 27: How to Make Great Friends
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today we are talking about how to make great friends and we're going to go over a pretty funny article in my mind called why men are better at friendships and women but before we go over that I want to let all their listeners know is next week that is going to be the 17th of August we're going to have a recap show and any listeners who feel like they've got some questions maybe they've got some comments for dr. Lyle maybe your your you're looking for something to to discuss feel free to call us next week starting at 8:30 p.m. Pacific Standard Time and we'll be able to take the lines and take the listeners take the callers and do what we can to answer your questions alternatively if you don't feel like calling or you can tour the time zone just doesn't work out feel free to email me at beat your jeans at gmail.com and I'll be sure to read your story or your question or your comment on the air anonymously of course but today we're going to be talking about how to make great friends so dr. Lyle you ready I'm ready excellent okay so before we start however there is a question from one of the listeners and it fits very nicely into this into this topic of friendships and so let's go over it pretty quickly so this question is from an anonymous listener and it has to do with presenting new information to her friends so here's the question dear dr. Lyle I have a question about transformative experiences now your perspective seems to advocate downplaying the potential transformative role of certain information and withholding some of that information so as not to pose a threat and maybe elicit a defensive response now I see this as also going with a picture of human nature as fairly insecure protective and defensive and unlikely to change considerably what then do you think is the most effective way to get a high rate of return on transformative experiences and here's an example of that so the listener writes I've been a vegan for animals for over 15 years and a vegetarian for another 10 before that originally the animal rights message was not delivered to me in a graceful or considerate way in fact I didn't like the way it was presented at all and so I didn't want to let on to my friend who presented it to me like that that I thought she had made good made a good point because I didn't like how aggressive she was being all the other hand without her and others directly and explicitly telling me this I would not have had this transformative experience or done the research to understand this topic now I hope I'm more able to present it in a better way but being direct and getting into the complexities must matter to others so I don't know if I mind seeing a difference to see a conflict between grace and directness what do you think dr. Lao how do we reconcile the addition ISM what can we do to maximize our impact if we want to help people with these transformations yeah this is a very thoughtful question and very very wise this is clearly someone who's who's lived and as actually has been through you know probably more than one sticky situation around such issues the that and the town I can't remember though you said it was a woman that uh this uh this is let me let me try to frame this the the fundamental issue that we're talking about here is going to be esteem and we when we communicate with each other with each other those communications can get into problems if the if the receiver of the information feels like they are not being sufficiently esteemed and so the problem with the sort of animal rights vegan people or or could be anybody could be people on other sides a little bit abortion debate could be on people other sides of a political spectrum the the nature of the way that can people communicate with each other is very often not esteeming people on the other side a sense being derogatory towards the position that the other person holds and this is going to elicit people defending their esteem and so you will see this in the simplest of arguments you can think about obviously we can look at it from the standpoint of two warring parties arguing over things viciously but we can also look at it a couple of just look at a married couple who's in an argument and in that argument the core of that argument is that somebody did not feel esteemed in some way that was important and they are signaling their irritation and as when they when the other person receives it they may feel like that the the irritated signal is also a hit on their esteem and then we spin into what we're going to call a vicious cycle and this is not good now a few times in your life you have probably if you've got any wisdom at all and any any sort of I don't know any sort of ability to inhibit your own worst impulses you have probably in your life some time sold somebody else that you saw their point or that you could see that they had a point and in some sort of an argument and if you watch that you'll see immediately the esteem dynamic change where we gave them some esteem and then suddenly they are more generous coming back because they're not having to essentially attack and defend their position I've got theories about why I think this gets so vicious I believe that these arguments in the Stone Age were observed by others and most disputes had audiences and the job of the people in the argument themselves was to be as vicious and quick as possible at getting to the moral high ground and essentially casting the other person as immoral it set their arguments defective and they in the wrong and so the the notion is is that both parties play the same strategy because it turns out that this is going to be what we believe is probably evolutionarily stable as a strategy in other words it's the best strategy over time in evolution and so that's the one that human beings came up with now I have to say that under an awful lot of conditions it's not the best strategy so even though overall it may have been the best strategy for people in throughout natural history that all it had to be was slightly better than alternative strategies and it winds up being the one selected by evolution in general it's a terrible strategy guys so in general you you want to be with your whatever argument that you're making you want to be sensitive to the people on the other side about what it is that their position is and to give them some credit give them some status some esteem so that they are not put in a position where they have nothing to lose and they what they have to do is discredit you because you are nothing but a source of criticism for them you can sort of see the mathematics of this if if your critic actually gives you a bunch of credit then you cannot buy it is not in your best interest to tee off on them and try to discredit them completely and so therefore it's very wise to give some some amount of credit to the other side of an argument or people on the other side of an issue the this what what I think the gal is talking about here is what I have termed also there's a resistance that people have for new information the contradicts those the way they've done things before and there's many potential reasons for this I believe that there are two that are important this is what I have actually termed an informational immune system in sighted people I actually coined this term myself and then it turns out I think somebody else some cognitive psychologists maybe it used it also but the concept is is that we are once we have our position that is defined by ourselves as what we believe is true and that we have people that are on our side on some issue and that there may be people on the other side of an issue that dispute us we are we are effectively we have an immune type reaction to any information that comes in from an opposing camp and so we don't want to hit that head on if we're going to try to change someone's mind it's probably not ideal to hit them head-on because you're walking right into their informational immune system instead what we want to do is we want to slip past their defenses and the way we slip past their defenses is by signaling esteem for them in their position okay and actually communicating that we understand and we've thought deeply about their position and we have respect for their reasoning if we do that they start to not panic about the fact that they're going to get being an all out of steam war and they are now starting to be willing to listen this is not natural for people to make arguments in this way this is a very sophisticated way of making arguments and it doesn't come naturally to human beings to make such arguments that's because the natural way is everybody's all-out cutting down the opposition you know tearing at their credibility if they're criticizing us etc but it is absolutely the most effective way to do things even though it takes more cognitive energy and it takes restraint and it takes a lack of rush that we think that the village is all going to be watching and making it a quick decision on this in the next 60 seconds which is how everybody behaves when there are arguments so instead what we want to do is take your time essentially find strong points and the other guy's argument feed those back to those people with respect for their reasoning and for their position and then we introduce a question that we have not a statement or conclusion but a question we have about where is that they're coming from because we have we have we are aware of some possible different way of looking at it and as we introduce it that way they are not nearly as defensive and we are able to get possible the possibility of some change so that's how I look at the problem and it's a tough one it's a tough one with big emotional issues where there are battle lines between good and evil in people's minds and it's important that we find a way to make this shades of gray mm-hmm yeah I've always thought that transformative experiences from information I mean it's really just hard to create that into somebody else it's almost like they've got to go through that journey all on their own with with a couple of guiding posts but yeah it seems like it's a difficult thing to do well transformative information is by definition I mean it's sort of a fancy word but what it really is is its if you have an important question for you if there are somewhere in your life where there's significant chips on the line for some reason and you have been doing things one way but you have not been actually seeing the whole picture and so as a result you get some new information that opens your eyes and that you now believe in a new vision that where it has significant you know has significant consequences for you or so you believe it might be from your diet or might be from your religion or might be from your politics who knows what this might be and and so as a result as is typical for people they're going to try to share this information with the world with their village anyway within sight of anybody's hearing because they believe that it's so important because it was so important for them and that they want to get credit for bringing the new information to the village and so then if they get stopped because they run into some immune defense informational immune defenses then they can get very frustrated and then they can get aggressive and at that point then you're just going to hyper activate everybody's immune defense and you're going to wind up with a mess I've seen that happen to more animal rights activists and vegan vegetarians and everything under the Sun that essentially they push too hard trying to share their transformative experiences with their families and their friends and acquaintances and they wind up with a mess and and sometimes those messes have tremendous consequences in families and with friendships etc and and they were unnecessary and and so using the tactics that this woman has essentially described about being more patient and finding ways to find a a much muddier moral middle ground on all of these things and to express some humility from your own position like you know these are interesting ideas that I have not sure I'm right about everything but I think it's these are things that I'm now finding I think or we're thinking about if we use that kind of a position were much less likely to to essentially get everybody amped up and defensive yeah you don't have the Buddhist monks running around getting into these aggressive battles about Buddhism well you might but we don't see it and they're not supposed to all right so let's let's get on to this article it's a pretty funny article obviously it's satire but it says 11 reasons why men are better at friendship than women so I can't write it's from men XP magazine which is probably the equivalent of like you know Cosmopolitan or something like that so uh-huh okay oh and it's written by a feet by a woman so here we go all right reason number one men can really have a friends back like truly really the man calls someone his friend his buddy his pal he's usually there for him for life men value friendship and live by the fact that a friend in need is a friend indeed always trust a man to save his friends ass in times of need yeah I mean I have no idea with this with this this cute little gal is thinking she clearly didn't know anything the the truth of the matter is that yeah we got to give her some esteem actually since she's she'll never hear us you know we can go ahead and trash her and we just talk straight to our audience males and females don't differ in how good of friends they are individuals differ and how good of friends they are and so if it were true that males were better friends in evolution than females then there would be an incredibly important evolutionary selection pressure for this being true so there would have been some reason for females to be more flighty and backstabbing and defecting than males are and I don't see what that reason could possibly be so you might say well females might be willing to backstab their friends because they're friends or sexual competitors well males are also sexual competitors and are known to Mack on each other's wives and girlfriends so the there's no reason to think that there is any fundamental difference between males and females there is absolutely individual differences in people and so the agreeableness and conscientiousness and emotional stability of humans differs dramatically and so the quality of an individual as a friendship for you not only that it's also true that individual circumstances change and the cost benefit that people run on into other individuals as friends is always changing and so the truth is is that people's decisions about how to treat their friends is always being seen through a cost-benefit analysis and and then of course the more disagreeable people are running a much much finer grained sharper pencil point cost-benefit analysis and are therefore less trustworthy and they are you know essentially not as good of friends yeah yeah and how about if we've got I was talking about this with a friend who I think is just about as disagreeable as I am and we were we were discussing these personality characteristics and we were thinking like in romantic relationships it probably might make sense that someone's going to be more agreeable on the other person's can be more disagreeable because they'll be willing to put up with each other that way or at least the disagreeable person is going to have the waywe benefit of this whereas with friends yeah both if one person is agreeable or disagreeable they might you know the district real person might get more but they're not gonna be able to relate to each other when they complain about life as friends often do yeah it's interesting however the this is where the ecological context of a friendship gets to be interesting because of two disagreeable people are friends they better not be in business together the other words they better not have direct conflicts of interest with each other or there's going to be a big problem okay so in general the the agreeable people I like you know carbon atoms they can attach to anything and everything works and and that's you know so you will find agreeable people will be friends with disagreeable people they will tend to get exploited in those relationships that's so you know that's sort of a risk that you have as an agreeable person is that you're likely to get exploited you're also likely to never be left out in the cold where as disagreeable people are the ones scratching their head on Christmas Eve trying to figure out how come you know they're not anybody's house by a fire okay so because you know what happened no friend no mate no family it's like well what happened was is that you ran too hard to bargain on everybody and you wound up with nothing so you know that that is the that is the story of Ebenezer Scrooge doing exactly that so yes so this is the nature of of the quality of friendships is within the the personalities of the individuals within it mm-hmm yeah and we're both about the same level of conscientiousness so we can we can understand our own frustrations when people are more flaky towards us and it totally makes sense when we when we can see something yes now if you got a couple of disagreeable people in their friends they better at least have some subconsciousness and some intelligence because that can override some of the otherwise absurd self-serving judgments that they would otherwise be making about life they're reminding me of an acquaintance that I had who was not as conscientious okay yeah so number two men follow the bro code like it's a Bible while women to have certain do's and dont's and friendship nothing beats the sanctity of the bro code that men abide by and the bro code that lays down certain unsaid norms and friendships is something that every guy eating on even unknowingly follows to the hilt be it not getting involved with the friends ex or saving his ass at his hour of need every guy respects the bro code at all times yeah this is all pipe dream like what would she read yeah you know the King Arthur and the knights of the round table of course if if she did she forgot that Lancelot was having sex with Guinevere for God's sakes okay so the this woman is smoking some weed oh she's not she sees Rhett she's God her you know I don't know Rocky movie or something or I don't know where she learned what she thinks is true back about men but no there is no bro code and I'm in my late 50s now and I don't know of such a thing there are there are men and there are women that if they are very good friends if you have an exceptionally good friend of which you know I have one I have one extraordinarily good friend and that extraordinarily good friend would it's actually a female and she she would risk her life to save me I don't know if there's anybody else in my life that would I've got a couple of you know good male friends who you know they might risk a little equity in their house not much maybe a good-sized Jack I know we get all the way to six figures but but the the best friend that I have would risk our life and and so and I feel similarly towards her so this is more about individuals and their own personal connections and their personalities than it is about anything else mm-hmm I have a listener who is commenting right now it says any bro code what can be broken if the girl is hot enough plus your big thumbs up thank you absolutely that sort of stripped through my mind whenever I see a friend that has a hot girlfriend it's like it it instantly starts to compute you know what my suddenly there's creative ways of imagining your friend's death nice done men they give each other space now women may argue that men don't share their innermost feelings with each other as openly as women do which is true fact is men let each other be they don't step on each other's toes with a constant need to share everything which was why whenever a guy wants to chill he chooses his male buddies no pressure just plain acceptance well I'll tell you what there's going to be some differences between men and women and I mean this is sort of this little superficial surface level description that it would pass muster for it I still cheap throwaway magazine article but the the gal has identified a pattern that has some legitimacy and that is that male and female relationships good relationships will have a significant difference in some of the content of what's going on inside those goes relationships and one of the important content that goes on in relationships is that women are almost always in some kind of hot water with respect to relationships so with respect to their romantic relationships in other words an awful lot of times women let's suppose some woman is dating some guy and they've been together for three years and she's sweating what I call the big tickle and the big tickle is I'm getting dirty because this is this big pickle okay for radio dr. Lau the big pyaar so this is okay for radio yeah yeah making sure the big the big pickle is that the female is in is in a tough situation and she's trying to read the tea leaves of the of her mate psychology trying to figure out what his motivation is and whether or not she's being strung along for a casual mating long term casual mating ride or whether or not this is a commitment pair bond situation and so women are routinely in these circumstances and if they're not in those circumstances over a longer term relationship they're under those circumstances over a short term relationship and if they're not then those then they're in a situation with their marriages and there's significant problems with their marriages and they they're trying to figure out should I go should I stay you know how upset should I be about the situation the way it is and so as a result they they are they process a lot of these decisions with their with their good friends and the reason why they're doing this and males aren't doing it is because very often the male doesn't have anything to lose in this decision-making he my he is ambivalent he might be ambivalent about whether or not he wants to stay or leave in a relationship but he doesn't need to talk it over with his buddy just going to follow his instincts and he's going to maybe string a woman along for another year and so he doesn't have to think about this he's not the one under pressure of a time clock the one with the tremendously expensive sexual treasury that is being harvested by his his girlfriend that's not what's happening the shoes absolutely on the other foot female sexuality is vastly more valuable than male sexuality and as a result if a female is giving that up in a relationship she needs to be doing a very strict accounting as to whether or not this payoff is the right one for her and so as a result she needs to process this with her friends because she's trying to get a bunch of brains on the problem to try to make sure that she's not screwing this thing up and so women will talk endlessly and analyze every little move the male and he said this and then he did that but then I was ready to dump him but then he bought me this and then he said he was real sweet and then he said he talked about our future a little bit a bit about of that okay so then she's back in the big pickle so the males don't have the big pickle particularly and they don't they don't particularly need their friends feedback about these decisions and so therefore obviously male and female conversations are quite a bit different males are going to be talking about sports and how the Giants are doing and Madison Bumgarner's arm and all that and that's just fun they check in on their relationships is fifteen seconds whereas women nothing is more important to them than analyzing these things so chick relationships have a lot more psychological mindedness and an analytic quality to them and that isn't that nobody wants space everybody's interested and that's part of the chick world is to be there doing that now is it a red flag if a girl if a girl has enough friends who are not very intelligent about this because they'll kind of encourage wrong thinking a red flag you mean if you're a guy yeah like if you're looking for a fun situation if you're looking for pair-bond situation and you you're dating a girl and her friends just you know aren't really aware of the right way to look at these things so they're constantly giving the wrong information about about where the intentions are coming from and all that is it is are there is their instinct kind of right or or is this as an intelligence issue well it's an interesting thing people can be pretty pretty naive and not very smart about this and let me tell you why the reason is is that these are evolutionary games and as a result this is this is very much this is the girls against the boys and and so as a result it's going to turn out that the girls aren't that smart about this and the boys aren't that smart about it and then it gets worse because it turns out your friend if you're a bureau female your friend may have absolutely have conflicting agendas so if it turns out that you're dating some some hot guy and you're pretty happy about it but you got some insecurities about it your friend we might just sin that that you don't look like you've won the village gene game and she just didn't encourage you to break up if you're feeling some anxiety or you have moments of insecurity so now this depends upon how good a friend this is and that friend is now running a cost-benefit analysis on you know how bad it looks for her that you got the hot guy as opposed to you know how valuable the friendship is to her okay and so this is where things get very complicated in human affairs and so the if you this is why it's a good idea that you know when people enter relationships that they just sort of in some ways take your birth control practice your birth control and otherwise go ahead and try to just push everybody else out of the pool and we don't need their input okay so we don't need the input of your family we don't need the input of your sister we don't need the input of your best friends we don't need anything okay what what two people need is just sort of time to get to know each other and take your sweet time and let the evidence come to you in a nice natural way and if people are sexually active then for goodness sakes protect yourself so that we don't wind up with a with a moral crisis on our hands and remember that that if you are in a bad situation as a female and you are not very happy couple three three four five six months in but you're having a trouble breaking up remember that you are probably designed by nature to believe that you may be carrying his little incipient child and therefore you're designed to stick with him even though it's lousy and this is where you have to beat your James if your relationship is lousy but you're feeling like you're too anxious to leave this guy but you're not that happy you must beat the jeans and get out you have to literally chew yourself through the chains if you miss a tooth fine you'll you'll grow another one okay you get out if you're not happy and do not let your genes order you around in these kinds of situations but yeah as far as your question is we don't need a lot of third party information what you must mostly need is you mostly need quiet one-on-one time with your partner and you will let the evidence tell you just how happy you are as time passes all right number four hold on men not something come on I want to add something to this the the reason why people will a lot of times not honor their instincts won't honor the advice that I'm talking about is because the women are anxious because they're expending their sexual treasury chips and they inherently feel vulnerable about it and they they're designed by nature to try to bail on this relationship as fast as they can if it turns out it's not a good good pair bond solid sort of a thing so they actually are operating on a nice edge okay and so this is where friends and friends feedback is a lot of times not that useful because even if a good friend is still operating with conflicting agendas and everybody is too far in the blind okay so the right move is to do what I say which is to you know if the relationship has promised give it some rope give it some time but when it's not good when it is not good okay and if it is not good it's usually not good at 3-4 months and you can smell it there are and you know down in your soul you know you know what this isn't that good when it's not that good you get out okay that that is that is where we need to beat the jeans very interesting it's um it's it's a yeah so instead of talking to third parties basically they should just call into the show okay yeah call into the show all I will tell you what to do yeah I have no problem I have no problem telling people that the following is true if you've got some conflicted relationship that's four or five six months or a year in and you can't seem to leave you're not that happy and there's problems you're going back and forth you don't need to run to your friends what you need to do is you need to get a break today you get yourself a break and you give yourself about a two-month break let me just sort of chill out if this relationship is so fantastic and this relationship has such promise and this relationship you know this is the best relationship of your et cetera then that is not going to change in eight weeks okay that is not going to change it is exceedingly unlikely that they would find a superior replacement for you in eight weeks and if and yet it's not a process we were we have to put one little brick ahead of the time and that if it ever comes apart then we lose the tapestry absolutely no way is this true Michael Jordan steps away from basketball for two years and he comes back and he is still phenomenal people that that have the dynamic chemistry between them if they have it have the chops to really love each other and it could be a great relationship if you Britt if you take time apart for a couple months you come back together no way that doesn't refire okay so that's like a chemical rocket there's no way when you mix those chemicals they don't come together now more likely what happens is the woman gets herself away convinces the stone-age brand that she's not pregnant because a couple months goes by and there should there is no pregnancy she hasn't been sexual the guy for a couple of months she is relieved to actually be out from under that sort of her head of the tremendous indecision of all the what's been happening in the relationship how uncomfortable she is and now it turns out there's no way she's interested in going back okay that's most likely what's going to happen if the people will people will give themselves a chance to get out from under the either they may even be able to shorten that time if they leave right before their menstrual cycle begins yeah [Laughter] yeah okay well I haven't charted out that carefully but I'm on we go number I'm all about efficiency doctor well you know me better sharp tank boy all right number four men have realistic expectations although guys usually stand up for their bros they don't berate them when they are not able to we hate to admit it but guys are much more chilled out than women women tend to have a love-hate equation in friendships they can go all out to pamper their friends but they also expect the same in return men don't yeah fundamentally the there are some differences in men and women that are pretty significant and one of those differences is that that women are fundamentally they're kinder so women are more agreeable inherently than men are and so men also interestingly enough are significantly more uncomfortable with conflict in the sense that conflict can cause men to essentially fire up some violent feelings and so as a result they're they're uncomfortable they don't like it and and they particularly don't like conflict with women because they there's a there's a low-grade feeling that they don't don't want to be in a position where they're actually going to have ingress of impulses so this was very interesting research that was done by John Gottman I think he was at the University of Washington when he did this this was probably 40 years ago this very very interesting research and it showed that in conflicts and relationships men absolutely wanted to get out of the room and they wanted to just get space because as the things we're getting contentious they were getting that they were getting their adrenaline was rising and they were getting upset interestingly enough and Gottman's research when when they studied couples in conflict they found that this was true it was an astounding as I recall this is we're going back 40 years now but as a but as I recall the score was that it was like 36 times out of 36 times in every single case of conflict the male wanted more physical space and he wanted to be out of there and that was never the case it's a female wanted space so this this was an extraordinary finding and and then I believe later research found that a big issue was just sort of adrenaline aggressive sort of impulses that were writing through the male's minds under conflict so it is likely the case women are much much happier with conflict in the sense that they're not being disagreeable but it's not upsetting them quite as much and so they can they can probably talk and fuss and disagree it so on and so forth in some ways that is not that it isn't as momentous to some degree possibly and so it certainly is the case when men and women themselves have conflict between them in a couple situation so anyway I'm sort of spinning out here out away from some some hard data but that I think I can't remember where I started quite frankly made and lost men have realistic expectations whereas whereas women constantly back to more from their friends so they tend to have a love animation yeah I mean apparently now I don't think there's any truth in that but I think that realistic expectations yeah yeah we're just going to reject the whole thing and go on to the next comment sounds good to me I didn't really understand it either okay all right number five men forgive and forget more easily than women men rarely hold a grudge against their friends for little things like not turning up for a birthday party or forgetting their birthday even unlike women men give little importance to these little breaches and commitment they don't read too much into their friends as actions and usually give them the benefit of the doubt now I'll just say I had lunch with a with a business friend of mine a couple weeks ago and we were just talking to young he had some drama in his office where the women of the office were creating drama and he said yeah it's really really interesting when men have conflict he was telling me he goes they just go Duke it out in the parking lot they come back friends where's women they want to ruin each other like they want to ruin each other's lives they keep this held in for the rest of their life [Laughter] the that's very interesting I actually don't don't know let's see we started about say again what the comment was that women oh that they don't that they don't prevent the slights yeah men forget don't forget more lately you know I don't I don't know I think that's a I can't obviously the several features of this of personality is involved here so obviously there's an awful lot of very easygoing women out there that never packed a grudge about anything and there's unbelievable males out there that are there's such grudge packers that they're they can't even function so the question is whether or not there's what we call a main effect whether that there is a that there's a general direction of truth for this observation and it's that that's an interesting to the question and I'm trying to think about what it is that I actually believe the it it certainly seems that that women I think part of what people may be discussing there and what caught their attention is that women are are paying a lot of attention to the state of what I'm going to call their coalition and so they're they're trying to figure out who's who's in the group and who isn't in the group and they they're there they can be intensively social and and having all kinds of little processes that are all about testing group cohesion as to who's in the group and who's not in the group men are inherently to some degree more independent of Greek group cohesion processes so they're not tracking it probably quite as closely in a lot of ways let me explain a little bit why males and females are going to be somewhat different on this domain in terms of how carefully they're watching processes and it's a little different than than my conclusion would be a little bit different than the than this authors inferences here the women men and women essentially coexist and coexisted and evolved in Stone Age groups probably call it about thirty to fifty maybe sixty people a third of which were children and so as a result it's going to turn out that there was the grand conflict in those groups is going to be male casual mating strategy so the fact that the males are going to be wanting to have sex with more than one partner and that they're going to be competing with each other very vigorously even physically and aggressively for the most attractive sexual partners these things cause potentials for the group to literally break up so the group could no longer function women are going to be designed by nature to want to keep root cohesion so they they are actually doing a lot of little social work naturally to keep people gather to keep them connected to keep them involved and to be smoothing over all kinds of ego bruises that are taking place throughout this process as as men and women advertise to each other and the men compete vigorously the women are competing with each other as well and they're forced into competition women are friendly and up in general they wouldn't necessarily want to compete with each other but they have to they don't have a choice so it's it's when in working at the village cohesion process that is that is deft and subtle okay not not that they are competing but they're also working pretty hard to keep cohesion and they are noticing when people are breaking ranks and it they are they have you know a more conflicted agenda than the males the males in general recognize that we're competing with each other and if we get threatened from the outside by other males we will band together instantaneously as we will defend the village with our lives against people from some other village some other men that are warring on our people but other than that men are are going to give each other plenty of space because they are inherently more competitive with females and they're perfectly comfortable with that sort of relaxed low-grade competition and distance so the females are much more little intensive to trying to like weave the village together the men are willing to have the village have conflict and maybe even break apart and so in those differences I think you will see some of the social dynamics that that these people are observing yeah that leads us read it out of Nighy yeah hold on IEE the women are sweating the small stuff they are they are looking carefully to take the temperature of the village cohesive dynamics and the men are not as concerned about the small dynamics because if all hell breaks loose it's not that bad as far as they're concerned and so they are more willing to walk and let the whole damn thing break apart if it needs to in order to serve their personal you know their personal sexual career if it all goes to hell it all goes to hell we'll live with it whereas the females that's a bad bad thing for them they would like despite the sexual competition that is driving turbulence in the village they want to keep that village together as big as possible because that helps defend them and their children against Marauders from the outside yeah that leads directly nicely into the next part of this satire article which is that men don't bitch behind each other's backs men may hate other men but one thing they don't do is betray the trust of their friends by bitching behind their backs they don't like somebody they are not friends with them of course there are exceptions and men would have at some point of their lives done that but they're not given in to backbiting and friendship as a habit now I know I had about a fair friend fair amount of you know ex friends that did that but that happened to me man laughs I'm Jack I've talked behind people's backs were consistently so uh I would I would say though that again I think that the observer of this may be seeing exactly what I just described that that the women in general are are taking much closer temperature at relatively small details of group cohesion dynamics they're more upset when they see a move on the part of the female that could be risky to the entire cohesion of group dynamics and they're ie somebody macking on somebody else's man and that you know that may get everybody all upset it could be as simple as somebody loses 10 pounds starts looking better and shortens up her skirt it's like a boy can't have that okay now you're threatening hair bonds all over the village okay so the guys are the guys are more comfortable and are more okay and are not going to try to back bite in the same way one thing that I have definitely seen in in male and female group dynamics and again I don't have data for this this has been my personal observation that if a if a great-looking handsome cool dude strides into a new village like hey you know you just kind of realize there's not a damn thing you can do about it and you just you just live with it and you can hear all the twittering of all the females through the village and you just realize that your odds with everybody just went down a big chunk okay the whereas if a hot woman enters the village all hell breaks loose there's very often can some concerted efforts on the part of females to try to trash her reputation talk behind her back and drag down her mating status as fast and as viciously as possible and so this is this is because that that female audio is a bit is a pretty brutal threat to chipper bonds in a way that that you know the hot guy that comes in probably isn't going to threaten your pair bond if you're a guy that's probably not going to happen but but a hot female can threaten anybody spare blonde and a hot female on the loose and so I think the the essentially the value of pair bonds and and the likelihood of males stepping out versus female stepping out behind opportunity those differences those natural sexual differences give rise to an awful lot of cattiness and females that you do not see in males which leads is right next to another point which is that men they confront each other even if it means a fistfight and while they're often accused of piling things on and not sharing their emotions the ironic fact is that when it comes to friendship the opposite often happens while girls will secretly mind the fact that a friend was rude to her one day whereas guys will make their feelings apparent and then they don't make a big deal out of it haha you know could be true and and again we're going to talk about and for listeners that are that are you know subtle and scientific and very smart they would instantly see exceptions all over the place and that's not you know I completely understand that but what we're talking about here is in statistics what we call main effects is this is their truth in this at all in other words is there a tendency for this to be the case and I wouldn't be surprised if that's true I don't actually know the evidence on that and whether anybody's looked at it but it wouldn't be surprised if there was a tendency for for women to be more inhibited about and paying attention to these little small small slights maybe remembering them more etc not not sure interesting and I'm not sure they're observing anything real there but they might be would you agree that this next point that the author wrote is that men are less judgmental than women now I don't think that's likely to be true I think it's likely to be I think that what she's noticing is and what can can you can take notice of is in specific domains so women are going to be very judgmental about other women with respect to other women attractive other women or reasonably attractive other women signaling they're available ability as casual mating strategy partners that women are unbelievably upset about okay men are not because men men know that competitive men are signaling their ability availability is casual mating partners all over the map that's what guys do and we just live with it okay so the so I think again this is getting down to the cattiness and getting down to the quote judgmental-ness I think in general women are not there women aren't more judgmental about somebody's political beliefs or religious beliefs than men are I don't think so at all well I believe that what she's what is she's describing here is something more close to home and much more personal and important to people which is women are going to be very judgmental specifically about competitive women and those competitive is women's breasts excuse me that was a Freudian slip I said I'm a Fed jaidrath and I said breath we don't have Freud remember he's a man and they've had a rebate low father very well-respected governesses soul Holly Pennsylvania no I just like saying God rest his soul cause he passed away it was about 12 of the time we all know about Freud yeah so yes women are going to be pretty ruthless about about judging other other women that are competitively attractive and their style of competition any sign that those females are at all sucking up to local alphas or are signaling the possibility of council mating strategy in their behavior and look out the cat's light is on whereas if a good-looking woman enters an arena and has pair-bond all over her in other words her dresses at her knees nothing is tight you know nothing fancy about her hair it's not frosted you know nice solid diamond ring on her finger and what's on her inner cubicle is pictures of her three children and her nice solid Parabolica husband then nobody's going to be upset okay but as soon as it looks different than that that same woman dressed definitely acting differently no ring on her finger and it's flirting with the local alpha or would-be alphas look out look out for the quote judgmental-ness to be all over that office very interesting now we have a look we have a listener here who just decided to call and let's see you this says put you on ok hey caller how you doing this an Ag and dr. Lila hi hi hi dr. Lyle how are you I do yeah what's your name I I can appreciate um I do have to agree with you dr. Lyle I think that if you want to compare men into women that I feel like you guys will kind of Duke it out if it lands in a fistfight and then the next day it's kind of forgiven and forgotten whereas I do think that women will kind of go out of their way to ruin your life after the hit site you know they'll create stories or do whatever try to wreck your reputation you know ruin relationships and I think that there's definitely daggers but I think that because guys are inherently competitive and they have some of those same characteristics that similar things are done over like a broader period of time it's almost in my opinion like in life they'll set out to be better or compare themselves I think that they just make broader generalizations as far as what kind of guys they think that girls like or what they think that girls want and what they can offer that others can't be it's in everything that they do we're with women it's it's like specific to the incidence I think that women go about their lives trying to be better than the next girl whereas guys just have that kind of competitive nature as you had said earlier yeah I think I hear where you're coming from and I think there's some truth in what you're saying I would say that the I believe one reason the women go underground and get catty is because they're going after one particular issue they they go after the issue of whether the woman is the other competitive woman is being loose and essentially cheating at the game of getting a pair of bond partner or rattling hi hi fancy DNA of the male's loose and the women will be ruthless about going together in this way because if they can convince the village that an attractive competitive woman is in fact loose and is is unscrupulous in her sexual behavior the the women can form an effective coalition to get that woman kicked out of the village okay and it's a dangerous tactic because as you and that's why you have to be careful why these women plot very carefully about how they do things the this is not like a guys sort of thing they're the equivalent would be a major military coup on the part of a beta you know a male trying to overthrow alpha he would be quiet and ruthless about it he might pull it off probably not but when ice ability you can see examples of that in society if you want to look at like media or corporations that are predominantly like mail run like sometimes though I become the truth you know they'll maybe they're just better at the game of chess for lack of a better way to put it yeah the I think I think if we look back in evolutionary time the the the fundamental place where where women get tough in ways that men aren't is in undermining sexual reputations okay and that that men don't do to each other that won't fly but it will absolutely fly with females it is a useful and ruthless tactic it's a dangerous one because if you try to paint an attractive woman as potentially loose she potentially gets more interesting to a lot of males including around okay but at the same time you also essentially can trash your reputation as essentially not worthy of being a pair of under and if you can do that you can you can essentially paint her as someone who's so problematic that we can't have her in the village and you can make her life so miserable that she leaves and you know what that happens and that is not something that males do so I think you've got some points there yeah we're doing yeah are we answering yeah I always assumed that with men will Duke it out in the way men are men Duke it out in the way that that they have to display what they're valued for which is their size and their strength and their ability to provide so they're going to out provide they're going to try to out provide each other which is you were talking about is there going to try to get better than the next guy and they're going to try to show off their size and strength which is fighting whereas women they don't have size and strength to fight it out with so what are they going to use they're going to use their social abilities and their intelligence yeah and I don't you know their fingernails in there and their ability to pull long hair yeah the most realest thing they have is too quiet feeding in the village that the other woman it is not have sexual fidelity and that that casts a pall over that woman's pair-bond value and so this this is where women get ruthless in a way that men do you know I was a bartender for eleven years and the thing that always interests me when you're the only sober eyes at you o'clock in the morning is um women are definitely way slicker um at shady ways so like I've seen a girl give her number when she's on the right side of the guy and his girlfriend is on the left you know and she understood that phone number with the you know the call me versus some guy just made out with a girl and his girlfriend walks in five minutes later and he has this tendency to like trip over himself and almost get himself in trouble and exposed himself you know for for having done something wrong girls definitely like get right into the mental game yes and I think that for a long time evolutionary psychology probably in the 1990s was a little bit devoid of a lot of understanding of the subtlety of a female competitive mind and that was because they in early the early goings the the basic tenets of evolutionary psychology are quite comfortable to males because we're not afraid about talking about casual mating strategy and we're not afraid about talking about beauty and so these things were very upsetting for females and it kept a lot of female minds out of the field but since that time here in the last 15 years or so a lot more you know academic women not a lot because the whole field is is dangerous the whole field is a place to get rejected by by academia so but but more women have come in to the field of evolutionary psychology and have helped us shed insight onto exactly the kind of things that you're talking about which is the deafness the subtleness and some of the schemes that women run which are not typically consistent with male psychology they run there they can be very competitive but they do it in a different in different ways I also think in the last number of years there's been a bit more of a social acceptance of women kind of um rolling fader I got to always be as casual as men when it comes to dating and sex and I think it took a little bit more socially acceptable in the last couple of years oh whatever has been yeah it's going to continue to get it's continuing to be more and more socially acceptable but it will never be descend and it shouldn't because women by nature must be more defended in their sexuality there's very important deep biological reasons why that needs to be true and that will always be true what are some of those alright very very good very good you know we're actually we will we will continue the show next week and we're actually going to have any if you'd like to call back next week we will have a discussion we have a couple listeners that might be calling in so feel free to call back next week and we will be live and we'll have as much time as we need to to talk about more questions caller I didn't get your name can you tell us your name please my name is Jackie Jackie thank you very much for calling in thank you guys very much for the conversation
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