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Episode 276: Jealousy and posessive behavior, crystal clear, deception in dating
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so i got a uh uh a doctor contacted me and said hey you know you you probably have this wrong um i went back and looked at the the hopkins study it wasn't uh it wasn't peer-reviewed it's a what's known as a working paper uh i read down through it and the uh looks very solid looks like a really well done meta-analysis so i think i think all that's gonna stand uh there however this doc did did point something out uh i had i basically said the lockdowns are useless the masks are useless and the social distancing is useless and uh the doc said hey careful the mass may not be useless and and sent me some evidence indicating uh that you know studies that have shown that the masks are useful except let me let me clarify what my point was on this and that is that as a policy as as a public policy they are worthless now that doesn't mean that if you're hiding in your own basement you know with three masks on and making sure that nobody comes within 50 yards of you you can defend yourself against around that virus and yeah it may be possible that you know these cloth masks are worthless but it's possible that if you're extremely fastidious with an n95 mask enclosed spaces with other people there there's very possibly that that that's useful but as a but it turns out that it's a matter of practical policy if you actually study the behavior quote in the wild it's going to turn out to be worthless so that's uh that was the point of this uh this hopkins study and as i said it wasn't it wasn't a steady per se it's a meta-analysis of many studies and so that's uh jen had been looking at some of these very studies themselves the independent studies and saying they've been trickling in over the last year all pointing the same direction so it's no surprise that the meta-analysis points that that direction meta-analysis being a a type of statistical technique that allows you to combine a whole bunch of studies to to see that if there was a conflict between in the literature on on alternative points of view of something a meta-analysis can help uh indicate where the truth really is in other words if you have 35 studies on something and 32 are pointing one direction and three are pointing the other direction it isn't that anybody's being dishonest it's just that the three that are pointing the other direction are outliers they are statistical outliers that that are inevitable uh in if if uh some kind of scientific observation is done honestly the the whole point is that every that that we use statistical analyses to define what is probably true by using the laws of probability and that means that if we measure something enough times we're going to find something that goes in the opposite direction and so it's not a surprise if we have something that goes 32 to 3. in this case it it looks very solid that that all this public policy crap uh that has gone on for the last couple of years has been one big pile of manure uh that has been worthless so that's uh that's what that steady uh indicates and my my my look at that study hasn't changed my opinion on that the uh anyway so that's that i love it yeah so that's that the which is why i mean this is uh all you have to do and and many many we had previously talked about this you know a year ago and that is that that when you look at correlation coefficients for different types of policies and then you look around the united states at say 50 different states or 50 different cities with very different policies and then you see what the correlation coefficient is between the policy agenda that you're thinking is helpful and the correlation coefficient of depth rates infection rates etc when you find that the correlation coefficient is zero then you know that there's no utility and that is that's precisely what's been found so that was found a long time ago and then this these meta this meta-analysis is once again pointing to the same facts the uh all right well that's enough yeah that was the pushback we got we got intelligent pushback and thoughtful uh but uh you know my my opinion stands that this has been a a total utter fiasco and it has been also i believe carefully and deliberately engineered in order to cause uh economic advantage for uh monopoly capital that that is you know obviously heavily incentivized uh to push the political agendas that they pushed so lots of little people have been crushed a lot of uh people that are that are very worried and anxious and inherently germphobic have been have been clinging to the hope that if they did all these things right that they would be somehow spared uh and they've been also uh essentially misinformed into thinking that if everybody would do the same then we'd all be safe which has led to an absurd uh way of people being divided in this country on this issue it's ingenious uh this did not happen by by accident and uh it's you know it's a it's a travesty to society and freedom uh that this has gone this direction but hey you know what i think we'll survive it and i think it'll work its way up the truth will eventually grind its way somewhere to the forefront so we got a ways to go on that i think i'm reminded of a phrase you used one time on the podcast by hook or by crook yeah yeah that's an old one of my dad's yeah but hook or bike rook we'll i think we'll uh see the world right side up again at some point thank you dr lyle really appreciate it all right what else we're curious about correlation coefficients i know you gave a little brief overview of what correlation coefficients are in your talk at chef aj's conference couple years ago kyle called uh not your trauma not your mama right right so i encourage people to go check that out okay so let's get to some questions sure dear doctors uh question today is is jealousy and controlling your possessive behavior a sign that a romantic partner loves you or is it just a something to do with their personality um this is a this is sort of a this is a good question for uh hmm there are it's a good a lot of questions are good questions because what they're doing is they they're trying they're they're looking at an interesting uh characteristic of human nature and you're seeing something there and you're just not quite sure how to look at it so um what you're looking at is you're looking at adaptations for mate retention and so you can imagine that adaptations for mate retention that exist in all normal functioning humans it's not going to probably might not exist in some seriously autistic human but in other words giving a normal brain function that we would expect to find mate retention strategies embedded in the system uh they are there okay they're natural to the to the system now the uh so then they should also be context dependent just in the same way that all people normal people that feel hunger and thirst but you don't feel hungry all the time you don't feel thirsty all the time they are context dependent mechanisms and so the you can imagine that it should be the case that um if your glycogen stores are lower and you're lower on calories yeah you should be hungrier uh all things being equal than when you're not that's how that the system should work and in the same way you should feel uh some desire some jealousy and a desire to mate guard your mate when you are under conditions of threat and those conditions of threat for example would be in situations where your mate might be you might perceive that your mate is is more attractive than you are and you also might perceive that your mate is is um uh potentially persuadable and poachable by other people uh and there may be specific under other people that are attempting to poach your mate that you're able to observe uh etc so in other words these these would be conditions uh under which we would expect these instincts to be activated more intensively so it's not a question of whether or not you know if they're possessive they love me if they're not possessive they don't or or that they that that that's you know that that's a better way of being no uh that's not true in fact this was a it's just it's a it's a great question because this question actually was one of the most important questions of my my life um i was uh in a relationship early in life long-term relationship that that i sort of thought i should have been in and it was the right thing to do it's the right person etc and everybody thought it was the right match and the truth is is that i i wasn't uh into it and i remember feeling zero uh possessiveness and the uh and i remember reading in harry brown uh about the feelings of jealousy and then those these are indication that you're in the wrong place and and i i was influenced by that and that turns out to be wrong so this is an example where you know someone is as outstanding and penetrating the vision as harry brown can not actually understand something uh we we now look to david buss doing you know 20 years later post how i found freedom in an unfree world david buss publishing on the jealousy mechanism yeah with his you know characteristic uh just unbelievable precision of thought and so the uh so then i read that research and then of course that made perfect sense and so this the notion is if you are if if something is valuable to you and it's threatened then you should feel the anxiety and that there should be steps that you would take to defend it whether or not it's your food that's being stolen from you or your favorite bicycle or your mate so uh and of course across the course of evolution there would be a host of tactics that would get inscribed to the genetic code of humans that would be there in order to defend a human against the the very substantial loss of a mate when it could otherwise be defended okay so um so what we should see in the best of relationships is a some kind of a dynamic in other words it's changeable but a dynamic balance where you are feeling comfortable a lot of the time but then at times when you might be under situations of threat then you feel the anxiety and you feel the potential desire to constrain your mates behavior constrain their access to the marketplace constrain their access to a specific individual etc the um if you never feel a neuron of jealousy you are undoubtedly in the wrong place okay so the i won't maybe that's a little too strong but i don't think so okay so i think that uh and actually the research evidence uh supports this what is it what is a rather obvious hypothesis about how this would work so if you if you feel so comfortable that you just really couldn't care less who your mates talking to what they're doing etc then i think it's that you don't care that that mate is not perceived by you to be that valuable um that isn't necessarily the worst thing if your life's comfortable maybe you're fine with this but this is uh not the the fingerprints of an excellent relationship that that optimizes human happiness relationships that are excellent that optimize human happiness have a little edge to them the uh your mate may do things to make you feel very secure and therefore you may not feel like you need to be controlling or or have much jealousy mechanism uh activated but it's likely to be the case that there are times when that does happen and and in very good relationships sometimes when that happens that is to the delight of the partner okay and then it's like i'll be darned that made you jealous how exciting is that it's like there's no reason to be jealous i.e i'm not defecting i wasn't thinking of defecting however the it's good to know that you consider me to be that valuable and so that uh the so the answer to the question is there should look like some balance of this in here that makes sense mostly feeling secure with a little hint of periodic anxiety under certain circumstances that would be you know the best place for a relationship to that that would be diagnostic of a relationship that is probably about as good as it gets would you have a comment about if a mate gets a little annoyed if the other mates being jealous let's see let me think about that it depends on let's suppose for example that this is an annoying process because it happens over and over and over okay so now we're talking about and let's suppose for example that there really isn't any any good objective reasons that we can see in other words the the mate that is getting that is uh that is the object of this of this sort of jealousy uh really isn't having their heads turned and really isn't um in that space and now they're getting annoyed well that is a so that's that's either a derivative of the fact that a person number one is feeling substantially over rewarded and therefore they're under threat even though mate you know the mate number two doesn't feel that way but that could be actually objectively true and so even though that's an annoying situation for uh mate number two and it's a it's an anxiety provoking situation for mate number one that is a situation that there could be objective evidence that mate number one is reading that actually makes that it's chronically activating that instinct uh it could also be the case that this is quote personality in other words so mate number one simply has a has a particularly active jealousy organ um they got a little paranoid streak in there and a little disagreeable streak etc and a little unstable so in other words there's a constellation of personality characteristics that's making that instinct fire off when there is not any any objective reasons why it's taking place that is a personality issue and that's going to uh that will you know detract from the overall uh pl uh the overall value of the experience in that relationship that's a that's a a quirk that that person brings into relationships that are going to limit uh the amount of happiness that that relationship can have so that's actually an important and that i think was a part of this question that underlying there in other words it there are people that are in relationships where where that characteristic let's say let's paint this picture we could paint it either way because it could go either way but let's let's say that we've got a male who feels over rewarded anxious and is on edge and the female thinks he's great and she also something about this actually she likes this because it's signaling to her that he finds her very valuable so in the early going it's kind of exciting and it's reassuring for the female that this is the process however now we're like 18 months in and now it's getting annoying in other words now it's no longer a great thing it's just like whoa i have to call him i have to make sure he knows where i am you know i have to turn on the tracker on my phone and then he you know confronts me now and then but really there's nothing going on uh because i my head isn't being turned by by anybody it's like this is now starting to uh this is a personality limitation on the part of this guy and he's not going to change this is a pain in the ass so um and now you know that will have an influence over the what the quality of that a relationship experience is for both of them but certainly for the female so he may have to live in circumstances like that because that may be his personality she doesn't and uh and there are women that that need to grit their teeth and leave relationships with uh with men that have essentially an overly dialed up paranoid chip it's pain in the ass gets really bad you know i've had to um on occasions really help women devise escape escape strategies from from stalking clingy crazy exes uh where they had to you know they had to leave town they had to get out you had to leave job leave home leave and get away away from these people so this is uh this is what we talk about when we say a balance of this like how much is personality how much a situation uh there are circumstances where it's overwhelmingly personality and it's really bad uh and dangerous and you know it's essential it's radioactive that you have to get the hell away from it the um there are other situations where if if you you know if your mate evidences no jealousy mechanism at all towards you um you can feel that there's something very flat and insecure about the relationship it's too nonchalant and whether that's personality or whether it's situation i i would i would generally indicate that that is generally a situation uh the average normal human being has within them jealousy mechanism uh circuitry that will go off under circumstances when they are in relationships that they find highly valuable to come under threat okay so uh if you are a highly valuable mate and there will be times on occasion where you will do things that and be in circumstances that could cause your mate to be threatened if you never see a neuron of threat inside that mate then this is pretty flat you're you're you're not seen as that valuable and they're not that into you so that's uh that's how i would draw that all out you can just see it in sort of uh in your mind's eye it's just a bunch of vector analysis uh is all that's taking place there it's uh you know if a person's nonchalant about buying your car they're not that into it uh if they're falling all over themselves you know then then maybe you're more value your car's more valuable than you thought it was so you know this is all just car sales uh at the end of the day car sales will kind of kind of tell us the story about what's going on inside of relationships wonderful oh i love it dr lyle thank you so much all right well speaking of speaking of uh relationships our next question has to do with crystal clear and maybe not necessarily romantic relationships but in general the question is dear doctors does crystal clear usually only work with honest people i suppose a dishonest person would lie and manipulate during the crystal clear discussion therefore the best outcome of the conversation would be finding out the truth despite their dishonesty or terminating the relationship because of the realization of their dishonesty and that it carries too many costs yeah i mean i don't hear a question there but not exactly but i what i hear is good thinking and that is that um crystal clear is is a useful general strategy for for honest people to find out where on earth they're disagreeing and make sure they understand the nature of the disagreement and for an honest person to smoke out um the shiftiness in a dishonest person or person that's behaving dishonestly with respect to a specific conflict so either way you know that's uh it's a good thing i use crystal clear over and over again with criminals that i was cross-examining about the crime and it was it was super useful to uh i learned crystal clear really from reading vincent boliosi uh the great the great uh criminal attorney the um that i i learned how carefully he would go after small details and continue to make sure that they were completely clear to him before he would go forward and when i started to do that what what looked like very good stories of plausible deniability on the part of a criminal would fall apart uh under crystal clear and so i learned that i interviewed literally thousands of criminals under these kinds of circumstances and that's how i developed a a quiet calm relentless determination to just keep sitting right there on a question uh that i don't quite understand and make them articulate it until i do understand a lot of times if i don't understand the reason i don't understand is they're being deliberately deceptive so uh so crystal clear uh of course yeah crystal clear has an additional value that when you're really irritated at somebody but it's somebody that you care about or that it's a relationship you care about and there's a significant conflict and you're thinking that they're being dishonest or somehow deceptive or they're being stubborn or they're being unreasonable the very same kind of sort of calm discipline uh of crystal clear we're going to begin at the beginning and let me just ask you let me make sure i understand what's going on inside your head i i would say in my life not that i've used this a ton because i'm not in conflict very often but i would say when i have done this uh there has been a high percentage of the time three quarters or so or more where the conflict actually will will dissipate and go away upon closer inspection in other words now there was something about the reason why they were doing what they were doing that i did not see and now that i see what they were thinking the rest of their behavior makes sense so um so again good thinking on the part of this questioner the crystal clear is a is a terrific what it is is it's just a a calm relentless and determined seeking of the truth okay and the truth will either lead us to two people not having such a bad conflict that they can't see each other's position that they can reasonably compromise or that we wind up head first into a situation where we have a very clear disagreement about what is fair and we have a very significant uh conflict of interest and now we're going to need to negotiate that you know uh in whatever way it is that the you know that that could go all the way to a lawsuit or it could go to a parting of the ways etc but the point of it is is that again crystal clear is it's a triangulation on the truth so that we can understand what the nature is of the conflict of interest between two parties so that's the uh that's the point of it and if we see that they're getting dishonest in it and we keep holding the laser to it um and we we see the shiftiness then we then we can start inferring that that we're under deception for a reason that they uh they they are protecting some some position uh where they've got some we've got some asset something we've got some control over something that they want and that they know that we that they're not going to be able to trade fairly for it so they're going to have to use deception so the um so crystal clear is the the obvious technique for getting right to the root of what those conflicts are so that we can get down to it thank you so much dr lyle all right what else we got nathan well our next question is probably some and i ate a uh situation where maybe someone might want to use crystal clear and it kind of comes to our first question about the male possessive or the jealousy and the controlling um and so the the question is actually dear doctors how common is it for men to be successfully deceived about a woman's promiscuity and how easy is it for men to correctly sniff out a woman who's promiscuous and how common is it for women to lie about their promiscuity um um another another good question and we're gonna again go take a wider angle uh look at that sort of what's what's being asked more more generally so it's going to turn out that deception is a is a very core component of motivation and so that's going to be true throughout the animal kingdom and it's going to be true in people so a predator has camouflage on them that is deceptive they are they are attempting to deceive prey in many ways because they have a conflict of interest with the prey there are three ways three basic strategies for human beings to obtain resources from other humans and those three ways are essentially free exchange in other words uh where it's value for value like i tell you what it is that i have in my picnic basket and you tell me what it is that you've got in your picnic basket and we trade uh we trade the the things that you know what we take them out one at a time i've got three apples you've got three oranges and and we swap so that's uh there's a there's a little concept that sits under there you might call it informed consent in other words we're doing these exchanges uh freely that we we may want them badly we may feel under pressure but but there is no nobody's putting a gun to our head to make this trade this is simply just an advantage that we can get if we give up something and get something back so that's free trade uh force is where i put a gun to somebody's head and tell them hand over the money that's force okay fraud is where i trick somebody into buying my used car that i know has a bad transmission but i put you know sawdust in the transmission or whatever it is that they used to do in the old days to uh to make it feel like it's working fine and then it turns out that the transmission blows apart in 90 days so force fraud free trade those are the three ways that we can get the resources i.e we have a an exchange process which is the only thing that a relationship is uh relationships are exchange processes so you have a relationship with the guy behind the counter at the bookstore so you're you're under an exchange uh uh process if only for a few minutes for a minute or two but in relationships where there's more substantial being exchanged then obviously the the stakes are going to be greater and the possible value of deception is going to be more now deception as we can see that you know if you wanted resources uh you want whatever resources you want one way to try to get all the resources you can get your hands on is to take over the world so you're going to be claus schwab or genghis khan or whatever it is in other words you're you're trying to get control too soon yeah yeah bill gates no that's fine yeah same thing in other words they're trying to get uh they're trying to get control by by some means other than free trade so in the case you know force and fraud are are two things that are that are extremely useful and you can see that these would be three uh processes that the evolution would basically say uh well which is the best process for you to be using right now all things considered and so there's gonna be conditions under which the average human being is going to say well the correct decision is force uh that this is this is you know the the ladies not getting out of the phone booth and i've got to you know i've got to get in there because i my phone's not working and i have to call i have to make a serious call because so if i don't get this call through somebody's going to die and she just keeps chatting and i keep waiting at her and she won't get out this comes out of a james bond movie octopus you know 20 years ago so he just pulls her out of the [ __ ] move all right force so there's going to be times when that's going to be uh the organism's going to calculate that that's the most effective uh thing that it can be doing with its time and energy is to use force to cause this a transaction to take place now you know these are these ethical questions you know would you would you steal from the pharmaceutical guy you know the medicine that your dying mother needs if you didn't have enough money it's like well you know this is a it all depends upon what you think your future mating process will work you know who's who's gonna live and who's gonna die and who's going to get locked up and what's going to happen to your dna in other words your brain is going to be running a complex cost benefit analysis and the ethicists can try to see how many you know issues can dance on the head of a pen but the bottom line is is that they're uh you're calculating you're attempting to all things consider trying to figure out whether force is uh the optimum strategy now you can imagine that if we are big strong you're the biggest strongest bully on the island okay and you've got you know there's only 15 men on the island and three of them are your big strong brothers and so between the four of you you can terrorize everybody else then there may be it may be perfectly uh useful and and successful to just use force just take what you want okay now in many conditions that's not going to work very well so the right thing to do obviously many conditions most conditions are going to be that people are not going to be in a position to be using force or fraud very effectively it's going to be expensive you can go back to a stone age village you can see situations where one big bully can't do that because then three guys are going to just set a trap for them walk them into it and then they're going to kill them because of the coordinated effort of smaller weaker males that they can work coordinatedly against a big strong bully big strong bullies don't get to do what they want they they can they can get some of what they want and they can use the threat of force you know to some degree but the bottom line is is that humans because of the possibility of coordinated action are limited in what they can do when it comes to the use of force now the um but the the energy conservation system is going to be ceaselessly trying to figure out how it can get a better deal than through free trade so it's going to be using deception it's going to be trying to trick people into making trades that they don't know that they're making so this is you know rampant this is uh going to be this is why you have just unbelievable amounts of civil law uh because we you know i said this you said that but you know you're saying that i said that but i didn't say that look at how that word is used here no that isn't what i meant it's like well if i had known that's what you meant i wouldn't have made that trade with you it's like well you didn't make the trade and it is what it says and too bad for you okay don't think that uh that isn't there isn't big money in those things so deception is a long-standing process that that if i can get you to make a trade with me and i can deceive you a little bit i can get an advantage in the trade well you can imagine that of course then it would be incredibly important to be able to detect deception and so people are are very good at that in other words they're they they uh they may not be good in a given flash instant but over time they're very good so if you have these deals like well nobody could tell in the social psych experiment who lied to them about this or that oh yeah that that's very interesting and it's kind of nice social psych experiment it shows you that that there's conditions under which where the person is being deceptive is being incentivized to try to get something past you and the other person is incentivized to try to detect the deceit and it turns out the deception can be very very effective okay that's fine but that isn't telling the whole story of human evolution because you have something called memory and the memory was you and i made a deal you said that you're going to do this and i said i was going to do that and i did my part and then you didn't do your part and now i remember it okay so a big part of the check against the the use of deception is memory and you you know i i have memories to go way back i don't look like an elephant got a big nose so i got a big trunk okay yeah i do look a little bit like an elephant but the bottom line is i can remember back 50 years that people said something that they were gonna do and then they didn't do it and record it in my head hmm not so trustworthy of an actor i'll be on guard next time against that specific individual okay so the uh this issue about women and their promiscuity and whether or not they can cloak it you know etc and the men could be duped the truth of the matter is is that that the men have ways of detecting that deception that are not you know they're not little flash instances you're in a relationship with somebody you can't tell where they are they come back with a little bit tighter clothes they're you know that you you meet up with them and they're wearing perfume and they usually don't and they're looking a little too sharp don't say them [Laughter] so in other words your brains are built to be looking for all kinds of cues that look like you are being potentially deceived and it turns out that um in david buss's research that uh or maybe his research he reports but i believe he actually conducted this research that in couples where one was one part of the couple believed that the other one was having an affair in every single case the other party was either having an affair or they were very close to having an affair wow so the party that was uh uh suspect suspicious was always right that was an amazing study uh that's one of those studies that stuck in my mind you know over the last 30 years as being really really interesting the um so uh in in evolution can men detect uh females promiscuity can they can they sniff it out yep they can over time okay can they be duped in the short run of course okay the the females have potential uh and females and males it's about this is not so much about female promiscuity as it is about about the um abilities of humans to deceive each other for how long under what conditions and the fact that human beings have capabilities uh it is so important to detect deceit that they have a lot of machinery in order to try to smoke it out and on the other side this this is all about stakes so it's an evolutionary arms race in situations for example where someone has a great deal of incentive for deceiving you and you don't have that much of an incentive to detect the deceit then you may you you may be not able to detect it because there's been an asymmetry with respect to that specific behavior and set of circumstances that you don't have the machinery you're not alert for that possible problem i had a guy in uh as an example one of my guys in prison was very sharp character sociopathic as hell and he told me yeah he stole half a million dollars and nobody knew it happened because it was all like two dollars and 40 cents at a time on people's credit card bills i thought god how much has been stolen from me you know three dollars at a time from people like this so that i have not looked at the fine details of my charges i never do okay because i just look you know generally like okay 800 for the charges this month that's about right okay i don't go down through the details and he says yeah people don't do that and that's how he did it the uh so there can be situations where the motivation is sufficiently asymmetrical where you're gonna get deceived uh because that's that's how it's tipped uh in a situation of of a male trying to figure out what a female sexual psychology is we would expect that he would be pretty good at smoking this out before he would wind up heavily somehow invested uh in such an individual so it would be pretty hard for her to deceive him for very long um i'm sure there's exceptions but but i think that those uh there's a big difference also between quote female promiscuity and somebody in a course of a long-term relationship that might have had an affair somewhere along the line and worked extremely hard to to cloak it and did so that i think that happens uh quite often because again if uh if the person who is having the affair uh considers their existing situation with their existing partner to be really highly valuable for whatever number of reasons they can be under a tremendous amount of incentive to cloak this and so that's not the same thing as trying to cloak quote promiscuity that is a that is a highly motivated deception uh under a particular set of circumstances and that you know i think a lot of times that's hard to detect if you do detect it you're probably right that's what the evidence shows us but there's probably times when when people never know wow all right yeah it's encouraging in a way that that you can trust your instincts trust your feelings and certainly right that's actually well said nathan that's kind of what it is that i tried to say in you know 10 000 words right that your instincts are are generally quite trustworthy you
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