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Episode 47: Free will, Basis of EvoPsych, PositiveNegative Reinforcement
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good evening everybody this is Nate G along with dr. Doug Lyall how you doing dr. Lyle very good good to hear your voice again thank you it's good to hear your voice too we're coming in on the new year and a couple shows ago we talked about free will you had mentioned that you don't believe that such a thing as free will and it's really interesting that you mentioned that because it came across an article on the Atlanta at the Atlantic magazine and the name of the article was titled there's no such thing as free will but we're better off believing it in any way right and apparently scientists what they did was they they had a couple of different experiments worth it where they showed the you know each control group one control one group they they just let them at left them as they were in the other group they showed them pretty definitively that there was no free will and then they they observe their behavior wanted to see how their life changes after they find out that there's no free will and it turns out according to this article they're saying that people are better off not only if there's no such thing as free will because they're more likely to just assume that that will they've got no choice so they might as well just give in to a lot of their their negative parts of their personality that's interested it's fascinating that's a great study actually I'd like I will have to read what it is that these guys did but and of course that isn't necessarily the case so they clearly didn't necessarily give this information a fair shake so they they painted the issue of not having free well in a particular manner obviously to get the result that they got if they painted in a different manner they would have gotten a different result in other words so there the issue is is that the brain I can't when I say that there's no free will this is specifically what it is that I mean what I mean is is that you can't help what you think and your thoughts are actually the determining feature of your feelings and also the determining feature of your behavior and so you don't have a choice as to what you think so this is going to indicate that you don't have free will but what happens is that what your what your thoughts are going to depend upon is going to be dependent upon the the analytical mechanisms that reside in your mind that and these things are automated mechanisms and so part of the automated mechanism is going to be for example to believe things that are told to you by a credible source so in the absence of no other information if somebody tells you that the water in the pool is very cold you have no reason not to believe it so your free will doesn't say well I I believe that with my free will I'm going to believe that that's not true I believe the water is warm you can't okay your brain says that somebody that is credible ie maybe it's a friend of yours and that friend is completely non psychotic and has no penchant for practical joking and you saw them just stick their hand in the water and then they say to you woah the water is cold and in fact there's reasons why it might be cold that makes sense to you then you don't have a choice is to believe that the water is cold okay removed oh so this is how why it is that you don't have a choice as to what to believe however what you so you're part of your the way your mechanisms work is you believe credible sources well if a credible source says that you don't have any such thing as free will and essentially paints the picture that the implication is is that you can't do anything to modify your circumstances ought to to change your behavior in a positive direction relative to the direction that they are now then you have bought into a series of implications for the quote no free will that are incorrect okay so no free will doesn't mean that you cannot learn and correct your understanding of the world and therefore improve your functioning that's not what no free will means okay so this is so this is so it turns out that they slanted the concept of quote no free will in a in a credible way but in accurate way and as a result the individuals got inaccurate information and as a result of that inaccurate information they then did not they do not actually their brains made incorrect inferences about the nature of reality and therefore they behaved in a way that was not as conducive to survival and reproductive success as it would have been had their brain had a more accurate understanding of reality which indicated the fact that that there was a potential to do things differently and etc so this is this is how you have to you have to understand what it is that we're talking about and more clearly and accurately and that's what I mean by the idea that you don't have free will you don't have a choice as the inferences that you make that you cannot stop yourself for making the inferences that you're making but you can actually continue to learn and improve the the accuracy of your thinking with additional information and so knowing that that is true which is in fact true and your brain once you get evidence to that can recognize that as a fundamental principle then that brain can have encoded in it that says ah there's more to learn and I can learn more okay now some people some philosophers would say what the hell is the difference between not free well okay I will say there's a lot of difference because the free will stay that I could believe in anything and I'm saying oh no you can't okay what you can believe in and therefore you will have feelings and behavior that are based upon the the your thoughts and feelings your thoughts feelings and behavior are an integrated stream that goes from the analytic engine of your brain into the the feeling mechanisms that signal the implications of the analysis which then result in the behavior that you do so that is what the psychology of an organism is is information into the system analytics and then emotional reactions and then behavioral output so you don't have a choice about that but you can but that doesn't mean that the the efforts of your mind at gathering new information do not improve its functioning and therefore improve its its accuracy and therefore have potentials for improving its functioning yeah I think maybe we should have the authors of the study listen to our show yeah yeah clearly clearly they bias their results in a particular direction and it's interesting that they did but they didn't they did not actually fully understand how to do the study properly yeah all right well well we have a we actually have a caller who called in the show and she has some questions for you dr. Lau so let's uh let's let's put her on right now and then let's see where this goes hi caller how you doing hi I'm good how are you great doing good what's your name Sara Sara Sara welcome to the shows natan doctor while very good yeah and thanks doctor why it's nice to meet you I've really enjoyed listening to your podcast and to both of you being on the show so I'm excited to chat with both of you about them so I'll give you a little bit of background about my theoretical understanding and I have a couple questions for you because the first time that I had heard about evolutionary psychology was through the show and I'm actually a board certified behavior analyst so when I heard your explanation of Skinner and Walden Q it was really impressive that you had such a comprehensive understanding of you know determinism and you know some of those concepts related to free well my question for you and this is just without any understanding of kind of the I guess evolution of evolutionary psychology is how how does this field and I guess use the scientific method to kind of prove a lot of the theories that you talked about on the show is there like a journal that I can look at or you know how you kind of determine that a lot of these things actually exists you know in our current phenomena since it's so hard to prove but the genesis through the ages oh well the I would say that that's a big question and so I'm not sure sort of what level of detail that you would need and how comprehensive and understanding that you would need so let me let me at least give you some and then you might ask me sort of more specifics about this or I can give you some specifics to help you understand the night.the the way to to look at psychology is to back the camera up so we can then we can then look at the scientific method and we talk about scientific method in a little bit the but the way to to look at at psychological phenomena is to is to actually look at it in a in a whole comprehensive continuum or what we're going to call Concilium of knowledge and so what we know about the universe is is limited in some ways by what the kind of a creature we are so there's certain things that we can understand and it turns out we can understand a tremendous amount of things with with great levels of probability so let's talk about this so for example we have a pretty deep understanding at this point in time relative to other points in history of physics so that means that we can we can make systematic observations in physics and we can make predictions about how we would expect things to behave based on what we now understand about quarks and protons and neutrons and gravity and so forth so we've got four known sources of you know energy in the universe etc so we've got these sort of processes that we understand and we make observations etc so we can essentially say that we have identified to the best of our knowledge universal truths about the nature of physics now it's going to turn out that there's certain kinds of stuff in the world that lends itself to you know molecules so we're not just talking about particle physics so when we start talking about bigger things a whole element or whole atom we start talking about the concepts of chemistry so we see that the and we're going to find out that of course the the principles and observations in chemistry cannot be in violation of any of our accurate understanding of the laws of physics so if we see anything that's in chemistry that is in violation of the laws of physics we know there's a contradiction here that has to be resolved that there's something that we don't understand so by and by it's going to turn out that what we would consider laws of chemistry never violate the laws of physics and if we go on we're going to find out that there's a certain classic Reacher's or actually we could talk about another field that we would call biochemistry so there's going to be chemical processes involved in living things and it's going to turn out that the biochemical processes if we want to call them that are not going to violate the laws of chemistry and they're not going to violate the laws of physics and then we're going to start talking about the nature of biology so the nature of biology a living thing that thing has certain ways that it operates it's a certain type of matter and it's organized in a certain way with a certain specific purpose and it's going to turn out that the laws of biology as we start to see that these that these living systems have certain properties to them and we're going to call those laws of how it is that they work the laws of biology cannot violate the laws of chemistry which cannot violate the laws of physics and then it's going to turn out that a certain percentage of these things these things living things are going to have a mechanism called the brain and that's brain is going to be an exceedingly useful tool for certain organisms in order to be able to regulate movement so it is that they can move in ways they're advantageous for survival and to success so that is going to be the purpose of a specific organ in in biology that's called a Brent so it's going to turn out that the laws of psychology - how how this thing is designed and how it works the nature of its operation cannot be in violation of the laws of biology okay which are not in violation of the laws of chemistry which are not in violation of the laws of physics so now we've arrived at psychology and we have it now what we're going to call nested it's nested in a whole host of observations that go all the way down to particle physics and they're going to come all the way up through political science and and sociology etc in anthropology so there's nothing about the behavior of political systems that is going to actually defy the laws of psychology as we come to understand them okay so it's going to turn out that the the psychology of different animals is going to be somewhat different so in this particular case we've got a human being now evolutionary psychology is the only perspective on the map in the history of psychology that actually puts psychology the this study of this organism and particularly the human organism but we don't have to be talking about humans we could be talking about the psychology of any any specific species or we could talk about workings of mind in general that it's the only perspective that puts this study the science of it and our understanding of it firmly within biology psychology is a subset of biology now this this perspective by the way is not shared by by the in history of anthropology or sociology so these folks don't actually get it they don't actually understand that their field when you start talking about groups of people that there's nothing in groups of people that is anything other than the individual neurological activity of individuals okay the fact that one individuals neurological activity is impacted by the behavior of another individual is not relevant here there is nothing that is taking place outside of the brains of a group of individuals when they are behaving together that those individuals are a bunch of independent points of consciousness and the the fact that they share some ideas they have similar thoughts and feelings does not make them a new entity they are not a life-form of their own okay so this is a fundamental misunderstanding bid that has his for a hundred years the social sciences have actually sought to divorce themselves from biology and this is guilt psychologists are guilty of this and sociologists are guilty of this and anthropologists are guilty of this they actually don't want to actually have the the the ideas of these fields integrated in biology but this is a mistake they are all integrated away so here's the theory that you're talking about right now about my college is trying to dissociate themselves from biology where is that like where can I read more about that because some of your concepts are so interesting and I want to learn more about them and I'm trying to terrorize their a book on it is there you know where can I figure out whether that learn more about whatever those concepts are yeah if you will if you read for example food you'll find that Boyd actually was attempting to break psychology away from biology so we can dollar three as a psychologist we can agree that the right is not what guides modern day cycle I mean it you know it certainly what prompted psychology to become popular well as a virtually girl psychologists we learned so many things that kind of you know rose show that Freud is very antiquated so maybe my type of psychology that I studied a little more involved that's right and I and I did study in Vienna where you know Europe wildly for it is very very well known but I would say you know most psychologists have kind of moved away from the Freudian approach I would hope but that's what I what I would like to see more so from a behavioral perspective that I'm trying to figure out whether the more evolved perspectives have some type of whether the evolutionary perspective has I guess more empirical research to show that some of those theories you know are either using like randomized controlled trials or even though subject design especially I can read you know to learn about those more ok if you're actually trying to ask whether or not evolutionary psychology and perspectives are grounded in empirical science the answer is overwhelmingly yes ok yeah oh no problem ok so for example even even 20 years ago there was a handbook of evolutionary psychology published by Oxford University Press that has over a thousand pages in it ok mm-hmm though this is and there it's been updated multiple times you will find that there's major encyclopedias of evolutionary psychology with thousands and thousands of citations from thousands of investigations that have been published in the top leading empirical journals so there's no end to the observations that have taken place from evolutionary psychology and so what I would what I would help you understand is that there isn't any other perspective that has been even close to as successful in predicting and finding support for the theoretical positions so when you look at the the history of behaviorism and behavioral analysis etc whatever you want to call it the what you're going to find is series of horrendous failures so for example let's let's go back a hundred years to the dawn of behaviorism and what you have is two very basic concepts coming out out of Pavlovian conditioning that then lead to John Watson's famous thesis that you can essentially reward and punish an individual and childhood into becoming any kind of character that you want so that's a famous quote from if you if you've studied this this field then you know that that's a famous quote from a seminal paper published in 1913 called psychology as a behaviorist music and it's going to turn out that it was a beautiful thing how he wrote his paper and how he said that he essentially could turn anybody into anything by by essentially a reward and Punishment history that he would administer the individual now the the great virtue of some of the behaviors writing and thinking is that they are so easy to prove wrong so the by 1985 the concept that you could modify people's personalities with rewards and punishments would absolutely crash on the rocks behind the investigations of behavior geneticists who would find in monozygotic twin studies but that is not true okay so you can read the work of the behavior geneticists Abe telogen Thomas Bouchard a whole bunch of other people that clearly essentially laid waste to the behavioural view of the modification of personality characteristics by any kind of behavioral paradigm so this is also obviously been shown be a total failure in terms of trying to change people from gay to straight or straight to gay or anything else that you would want to do so what if you're wanting to actually know and get a feel for the extraordinary amount of research that supports this position and how beautifully this lines up you can go to those major you can go to major textbooks so for example if you want to look at a textbook that will give you a comprehensive look at evolutionary psychology David buss is a professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin he's published a textbook that's now I think in its fifth or sixth edition it's called evolutionary psychology the new science of the mind and you will see again thousands and thousands of references for investigations in from an evolutionary perspective that essentially showed the the overwhelming superiority of this perspective the behavioral perspective everything I just pulled up his book and I can see some of the concepts that you're talking about here so this is exactly what I was looking for I remember because for my undergraduate I was a neuroscience major and I remember one of the studies that stuck with me the most which is genetic related was this study where they were trying to figure out whether alcoholism is genetic or not I'm not sure for that matter familiar with it so they had they had a cage of rats and they had a water fountain that was just water they had a water fountain that was just alcohol and then they had a water fountain that was a mix and alcohol in the mix of water and they observed the rats and they figured out which are the ones that are more likely to only drink water so rats that are more likely to only drink alcohol and the ones that kind of went between all three of them are kind of relied on the middle ones and went back and forth and for then they they took those rats and they grouped them into what they call the non-drinkers the alcoholics and the social drinkers and then they made it the alcoholic rats together to see whether their babies would then fall in particular categories they were able to then kind of show that you know alcoholism actually does get handed out handed down genetically because of their children there was a higher probability that those rats would be more likely to be alcoholic down the road so the I remember those types of studies really resonating with me a lot of the times when you talk I get excited about what you're saying and I love those examples and if you have any really interesting examples about that that are more human related I think that would be really interesting to hear about great yeah well the like I said if you're interested just the studies done in behavior genetics there's actually a journal called behavior genetics so literally every month there will be steady after study after study after study published on exactly these kinds of topics that are that are showing the the major contribution of genetic variation to the behavioral observations that we see in people and and there's a lot of nuances to this and it's an ongoing sort of open-ended scientific area within psychology so that's that's just I wouldn't even call behavior genetics exactly a part of evolutionary psychology it sort of is sort of its own thing emulation sorry psychology is a little bit broader and evolutionary psychology is the notion that the mind was evolved or specific biological purpose of survival and reproduction of DNA and that that is a perspective when you bring that perspective in and understand that the human mind was shaped by evolutionary process in the same way that a Gophers mind was so there's a certain there's certain reasons why Gophers do gopher things because they've got a gopher body and they have gopher ecological problems that they have to solve it's going to turn out that every animal has a mind it shaped perfectly to solve the the problems of its evolutionary history that's why the organism has that specific mind this this edge to sort of give you what a revolution this is in the 1960s a behaviorist or actually a psychologist studying a key component of a behaviorist paradigm his name was John Garcia he was a UC Berkeley and I don't know are you aware of the Garcia study with not okay this is my Jerry which one of them no this is an important study this is an important study in the history of psychology the what happened was that the the notion in in sort of standard behaviorism is that if you reinforce or punish an act then or you pair an act you pair something with a reinforcement or punishment you're going to increase or decrease its statistical likelihood of occurring so in the case of Garcia what he did was he he actually tested this in an interesting way in theory if you have if you feed a rat a novel piece of food and then you give it an aversive stimulus at the same time then this should decrease its likelihood of eating that food so what he did was he fed them a novel food and then he had very noisy buzzers and flashing lights that were extremely unpleasant for the rats while he was presenting food to them it turns out that when he then fed them the novel food later they didn't any problem meeting it and they liked it so in no way were they able to be conditioned by punishing the rats for making it an aversive situation while they were eating okay however then what he did is he took the rats and he fed the rats this novel flavor of food and then several hours later he irradiated them so that they felt sick to their stomach okay so now the important thing is is that there's been now a five or six hour even 12 hours even 24 hour difference now in standard behaviorism sort of the laws of learning are such that the the temporal difference between the stimulus onset and then what happens later is going to be of all importance but it turns out it's not important at all not if you understand this from an evolutionary perspective because it turns out that if you radiate those rats 24 hours later and they get sick to their stomach they'll never eat that food again so isn't that just an example of classical conditioning like I know a Seligmann no no talk about that about the sauce bearnaise syndrome wait a second yeah yeah I understand this is not classical conditioning you have to understand that what's happening here is that the rat is biologically prepared to learn certain contingencies but not biologically prepared to learn other contingencies so it's you have a novel food and you have an a current aversive stimulus okay so you have noise and lights that it can't stand it turns out it will not associate that novel food with that aversive stimulus there's no way to get that to learn it it cannot learn that intensity okay that's very important for us to understand that whereas it turns out that if it's a different behavior that it's going to do so it steps on something and then it hears a buzz it can learn that okay is capable of learning that but it's not capable of learning novel olfactory stimulus or gustatory stimulus with an aversive stimulus through a different sensory channel for a different the problem now this represents an important revolution in thinking it turns out that this was so unpleasant for behaviorists that they denied Garcia's work and they wouldn't allow it to be published okay they stopped its publication on numerous occasions even though this is a big-shot professor at Berkeley and in fact one of the reviewers said that there's that's no more likely to be true than there's bird shed in my cuckoo clock okay in other words it was so outside of the paradigm of behaviorism it was unacceptable okay but finally what happened is after multiple submissions and a lot of pressure they actually had to finally concede so now this is this is the dawn of the death of classical behaviorism through through BF Skinner and the concepts of operant conditioning this is now showing that only through an evolutionary perspective can you understand that the nature of the learning that takes place winds up being innate so when you have learning to take place it's a very wise question to ask something that the behaviorist never asked which is what instinct caused the learning now we're down at the roots of evolutionary psychology what is this organism capable of learning and what is it not capable of learning so evolutionary psychology is the investigation as to the nature of the instincts of the human mind Hey and it turns out that only by you know looking at this thing from this perspective that's the only way you're ever going to find them so that's why that's why we yeah I'm going to read up on this because I've never heard of this study and I've taken a lot of course work on behavioral psychology and classical conditioning and then all that stuff yeah somebody left it out one of the most important studies in psychology okay yeah and we're good right so so would you say this is a good example of the type of studies that exist that kind of support that Volusia nary perspective there's so there's a lot out there if I look at that you know what I call yours so many different studies as I said there are thousands of them so therefore there's there's no end to the ways that evolutionary psychologists look at these problems so they're using exactly the kinds of things that if you are well versed in science and you're well versed in social science they will use all kinds of every scientific method that you can imagine is it play here and so there's no no reason to wonder whether or not that if evolutionary psychology is on a solid scientific foundation it's on a solid scientific foundation as any scientific process that's taking place on earth okay great thank you all right very good thanks Mitch okay excellent well Sarah thank you very much for the phone call we really appreciate it thanks for having me all right all right all right well thank you very much that was really informative but you know I don't know enough I had to to to know all these little studies to to question you on so that was a really good perspective yeah it's going to turn out that that it was a very good question and clearly she's got a skeptical slant because she's been educated in a in a different perspective in psychology and so she's like many psychologists she's simply unaware of the of the magnitude of what we call the nomological net so when we when we do science what we're doing is we're actually building a net a network of interrelated observations and this is what's known in the philosophy of science is a noma logical net so this net is if you think of it as you start drawing little lines between the observations all over a wall the you can start to see that the the more complex or the more observations that you get that are identified you're sometimes going to see observations that that contradict other observations and that's going to be a little question mark it's going to be sitting out there in science like how come we have two observations and they appear to be in contradiction and so I'm going to stimulate science to try to figure out did somebody misunderstand or mister poor have an anomalous finding that is not actually consistent with the truth they just didn't happen do get a truly random sample so we've got a rogue observation here that really doesn't line up with the truth the ie we took a sample of short people and they have tall children and that's not supposed to happen so what the hell happened okay it's supposed to be the whole people have trouble children and short people have short children and we have a group of 20 people here it didn't seem to work out what happened and we look at that and we say well statistically significant it looked like it happened but that doesn't mean that it's not a rogue observation that actually won't be repeated if we do the study numerous times so as we continue to make observations what we do is we build a net or a network of different observations that start to link together patterns of causality and so this is how it is you can you can imagine that this is how chemistry would have worked so first you find one element and then you find another element and then you find something called called a molecule and you're not sure what that is and then as you continue to put a table of elements together and you start to understand how it is that they differ from one another reliably and then you start to understand finally a little bit more and a little bit more about you know valence --is and electrons and now you can start to see which ones bond together and which ones don't bond together and how it is that they bond and then what sorts of things can break those bonds so if you have water and you boil it at 212 degrees turns out that you can break these bonds etc so as you start to do this what you start to do is you build the more and more observations that you get then you start building a net that starts being able to predict things that you cannot see okay so this is where you know you have an extraordinarily mature science they can start to predict things that you cannot see based on things that you know okay now this is what evolutionary psychology can now do and that is why those of us that are in it they've actually watched its Genesis and now it's its maturation as a as not just when I I don't even we call it evolutionary psychology but as as the originators of this field formerly we're john tooby and leda cosmides the university of california a hundred years sir now we won't call it evolutionary psychology we're just going to call it psychology okay this is what psychology is and and the noma logical net that has been built on on evolutionary psychology is now vastly surpasses any previous attempts that human beings have ever had to try to understand themselves or the nature of the psychology of any animal so this is that that's why you need to look at at an anthology or compliation like what David buss has done and others have done as you get to see the extraordinary power of this noble logical net as it makes predictions that that no other theory and psychology could ever even dream up predicting yeah so yeah no this is great I mean I guess it's uh yeah it's there's a lot you know like like you've been saying it's evolution psychology really is just psychology right it's just uh yeah and there be a revolutionary psychology yeah I mean it's clearly a revolution and what there has been in in the history of psychology is you've had sort of major attempts by groups of fingers or individual thinkers at at a perspective where they work very hard at this to try to build a multnomah logical net and so when the when the psychodynamic people in the early 20th century tried to build a net of observations it turns out that they couldn't predict anything worth a darn and so as a result you know most people most of that got left by the wayside but it isn't that they didn't have some interesting observations they did have some interesting observations but it turns out that the theories behind them about what they thought that they were seeing or why those things existed turns out to be incorrect the same thing is true of a standard behaviorist paradigm which has a few what we call laws of learning that that are actually correctly describe and predict certain narrow phenom so the thing that behaviorist is used to looking at is they're looking at schedules of reinforcement and learning curves and and those things are real things so if you if you do for example rat maze learning and so you're going to put cheese in the middle of a map rat maze and you're going to make it X complicated or you make the cheese tastier etc you can you can predict a learning curve based on the reinforcement of this that makes perfect sense and the behaviorist looks at this thing and writes this thing up and these people are smart people and they were really desperately trying to figure out and build an illogical net so that they can make predictions ultimately about humans so etc now what they wouldn't have predicted would be for example an evolutionary perspective would say hmm I wonder what else would work for reinforcement in a other than a piece of cheese and somebody might say a mate okay the behaviors might say a mate but here's something that a behaviorist wouldn't come up with but an evolutionary psychologist did an evolutionary psychologist predicted that in the middle of a rat maze that if you if you if you have a male rat learning to run the rat rat maze that the in the evolutionary history of male rats it turns out that something that reliably precedes mating with a female is winning a fight with another male and in order to win a fight with another male you got to have another male to fight so an evolutionary psychologists with a behaviorist background actually predicted and found in an experiment this is a fantastic experiment example of the nomological net that he says okay look and the evolutionary history of a rat rats going to wants to mate of course but it also in order to mate it has to fight so I wonder if I put a male rat in the middle of a rat maze the I wonder if I put a male rat in the middle of a rat maze whether or not we will see a learning curve that is anything like the learning curve that we see if we put cheese in the middle of the rat maze in fact he's going to predict that it might be better because in fact mating with a female that would happen subsequent to a fight with a male rat even if there's only a 50/50 chance of winning that fight is going to be more evolutionarily valuable for the reproduction of genes than a piece of cheese and it turns out that's true so completely unpredicted by any other paradigm in psychology that wouldn't even been dreamed of this evolutionary psychologists consider the possibility that putting a male rat in the middle of the as the reward of a rat running a maze would result in a superior learning curve to putting cheese in there and it does okay so so that I should go out to the bars before I took exams that I don't know what that means but that's a that's sort of an example out of the Noma logical net okay the that's and then there are literally a thousand of such examples that have now have now been observed and found as soon as of course of course as I would have expected this to take place for me I is that I discovered this after I had my PhD so as a lot of research grad students trying to figure out a PhD topic I worked like hell to try to figure out a PhD topic and I did and I eventually got my PhD but I could almost never come up with a decent idea that would work or there would be that novel or interesting after I saw evolutionary psychology for the first time after I already had my degree my my realization was oh my god how easy is this suddenly you have a network of concepts that you are going to be able to have complete leave urgent or territory and science since nobody was looking for these ideas and suddenly from this perspective you're going to be able to see potential investigations all over the map and of course that's exactly what is taking place so when it comes to man-woman dynamics David buss for example doing investigations and evolutionary psychology looking at the jealousy mechanism no other theory in psychology would have predicted that there would be a substantial difference between male and female reactions and jealousy situations that it didn't make any sense from a behaviorist or psychodynamic perspective but there would be any difference between males and females but but David buss predicted that the females would be much more worried about males defecting a relationship where a male would be much more angry and wanting to leave a relationship entirely if a female was unfaithful because he his costs of remaining in the relationship would be greater because he would mean that his potential mate was being impregnated by somebody else and therefore this this cost would be astronomical biologically compared to the female is if your mate steps out on you and sleeps with somebody else at least the child that is within you is yours and so now it's an issue of resources to get from the male it turns out been experiments that he's done in his laboratory have demonstrated this very precisely that the male and female jealousy organ mechanism inside the mind works very differently if you're a male or a female males are much more hostile angry and willing to leave a relationship instantaneously as a result of infidelity females are much less likely for that to happen so that's a that's once again one of thousands of observations that have come to us out of the new nomological net which is evolutionary psychology
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