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Episode 58: Mate-choice copying, The Milgram Experiment, Trans athletes, Darwin Awards
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a study last year from Texas Christian University found that women actually find men more desirable when they are around other women so in this experiment women were shown pictures of a couple standing close together and they were told that the woman in the couple was either an adopted sister cousin current girlfriend or an ex-girlfriend then the women rated the man for differing levels of attractiveness and desirability skills and turns out surprise surprise the guy with the girlfriend was rated higher in everything next was the ex of the guy standing next to the ex girlfriend and then the other two the related women then the experiment was repeated using a picture of the guy just by himself and of course women rated him much lower so the the scientists who studied this the thinking here is that the women are using other woman's judgement to assume unobservable qualities of a male thus raising the males mate value and the term for this is called female mate choice copy now keep in mind one aspect that was not studied was whether this applies to short term dating or long term dating now the authors when asked about this believed that this effect is most pronounced in long term dating simply because women placed a much greater priority on unobservable qualities and men in long-term meeting rather than in short term dating so dr. Weil what do you think about this I have to go back and change my match.com profile yeah actually it's it's actually obvious and I think the things like this had been done before so I'm surprised I'm surprised that this is news it seems like I've seen this before but maybe I didn't but certainly the concept has has has been around for a long time and we yet we were quite confident that effect was there so I don't think this effect surprised anybody the the the first time I remember reading about this effect was was actually in in tropical fish so the the authors of the study this was probably done I can't remember when it was I think it was in 1990s it might have been even earlier might have been in the 80s it was a study done there was some there's some kind of tropical fish off of I don't know Tasmania and in this fish the males have a an orange component to the side on the markings on their side and so what the what the experimenters did in that study was was fascinating I had I wouldn't have imagined that you would look for this in fish so the but this is what they had done I believe I remembering the numbers pretty close to right but what they did was they set up pairwise choices for for female fish of this particular tropical fish variety and what they would do is they would watch the following drama and the drama was to have a guy with 17% of the side of his body 17 or 18% was this orange material orange stripe type thing and the then they would pair that up with a male who had about 28 or 27 or 28 percent and then what they would do is they would have for some strange reason the in this particular species I believe that the species members can pick up the age of their conspecifics so they they know how old that they know that if a different fish is older than they are so what they had was they had young females observe older females and older females apparently given a choice between the 18% or in the 28% er they would choose the 18% er and then when they let the let the young female in the tank and gave her the same choice between those same two males she would choose the 18% er so this is this is a situation where all things being equal without having been exposed to the older female making that choice all of the fish choose the 28% so then what they did was they took about the 20 28 percent IRR and they put him in with I think it was a 42 percent IRR so a guy with a bit you know gorgeous looking orange stripe on his side and they did the same thing and they found exactly the same effect in other words they could cause the female to choose mister 28% over mister 42% if she had observed an older female make that choice previously so then they decided to test the limits I II Danny DeVito versus Sean Connery and they put the 18% er versus the 42% er and had the the older female apparently choose the 18% or I they did this with smoke and mirrors they were tricking tricking the fish and that did not work so in that case the the younger females chose the 42% er so there were limits to this which was very interesting so they weren't simply doing simple simple copying but rather they were doing a least a two factor decision-making process where they were taking into account other females of their species and their choice and adding adding those or multiplying or how it is that they do this the math along with their own judgment so this is if this is happening in tropical fish for god sakes it sure as heck happening everywhere else all over the animal kingdom so this is going to be a very wide biological principle of how brains are going to function so mating choices are very expensive choices they're essentially the most important choices that animals make and so it would make sense to not rely entirely on your own computer your own computer comes with little bells and whistles and mistakes and and mutations that may make it a less than ideal decision-making mechanism and that's why it's useful to to ask people what they think when you're about to make a big decision just to check your own computer so obvious this is obviously a a widespread device throughout the animal kingdom and so it's hardly surprising that this is working in humans so I can't believe that somebody got a publication of such an easy and obvious thing that wasn't done before but well you know it's cool to see it yeah the reason they had this study and by the way what I just learned from you is that since no woman will take a picture with me I can at least take a picture with my fish you know so what I'm going to go with yeah they accept right big with my Express yeah yeah my Sharpie can penetrate the water and go on the on the fish skin right there you go well okay so the retail study is was published was because they knew that there that there was this effect but they didn't know to what extent and whether or not the girl was giving off cues that she was romantically interested in the mail so they they studied they studied this to determine whether whether there was the same effect if it was just any old female or if it was if it was related or current girlfriend or ex-girlfriend so that was the big difference between listing all the previous ones yeah yeah I I had to read that study there's some interesting details in there I'd be interesting to see what the effect size was just sort of how many how many percentile points up the scale he went very interesting actually and extremely I'm not even joking about match.com that this in my intuition would be so that some guy that would take a picture with an attractive female standing next nearby would that it would be essentially a deterrent that he would look like he was too cool for school and couldn't wasn't was it smart enough to realize that this could be offensive however and then the truth is is that seeing the person under a match calm process where the male may be reaching out to the female that could be a different social psychological situation than one where the female is simply observing a male who have and to be surrounded by or next to an attractive female so it could be that you could break be breaking some implicit covenant that you shouldn't be in a relationship with a competitor etc or that you shouldn't be trying to grandstand in such a way so it could backfire but somebody ought to actually do that research under those conditions because that is a is a very important potential advantage that some some savvy listeners of ours could use there you got it yeah it's interesting you're asking for the the percentages and I'm going to pull them up here but from what I remember it was actually pretty significant for the non-related female so the females who have been in relationships with the male or were total and that I think they actually used because they actually used the females who were ex-girlfriend or actual girlfriend of the guy and because what they what they postulated was that that the the the the people in the experiment the women they could tell through some through some unobservable cues that the man and the woman in the picture were either close or adopted you know adopted brother sister or just you know you know cousin hers in like that so it would like a girlfriend in the ex-girlfriend where the highest and then it was the indited cistern very interesting so got it it would be interesting to see what how obvious any of those little cues were etc very interesting fascinating I have to look at that the this goes to a a wider principle I actually call this this whole concept of computer checking the fistrick and this is what people are doing you know throughout commerson and other things that they are essentially signaling with cues of success that they are a good specimen and that they are under demand and that's so if you are an attorney that has a very nice office you are signaling that other people have paid you a lot of money in for your services so this is a fish trick and and it's it's the same thing with with all kinds of social status issues so driving a fancy car living in a fancy house these things are fish tricks this is all about essentially suggesting that other people have found me very valuable and have traded a lot of of their goods for my time and so therefore conspicuous consumption is essentially a fish trick process where we're trying to gain what I'm going to call pseudo esteem so we it isn't the same thing as esteem because the person actually doesn't know what it is that you did that was supposed to be so great they just know that other people must have thought so or it's very likely that they did and so as a result so pseudo esteem doesn't mean that it's not without value or that it's phony it simply means that it's not the same thing as actually knowing that can be very useful and in fact critically important in marketing to to suggest that others have found me useful and therefore it's very likely that you should - that's this is the the classic fish trick is you know Trident gum you know four out of five dentists survey says that they should we should bite right instead of other gum that that's there you go all that is is fish trick oh yeah I would say a rule I have a little rule for conspicuous consumption because there will be people that will say oh my god you know the world is just so full of terrible waste and so on and so forth and and yet it's actually necessary to compete in a variety of social psychological markets you are you are put in a position where if you do not display waste or conspicuous consumption which is this is what this is what it is obviously you could you could do your work in a closet with a with a hundred watt light bulb and and you know in a old typewriter you don't need a slick office with marble countertops however the but but the issue is is in order for people to believe that you can do your work well you need to display reasonable cues that indicate that other people like them have made the choice that they are about to make that's why I have what I'm going to call an 80% rule for conspicuous consumption and that is that you know if you can if you can afford a house that's it's five hundred thousand dollars you should be living one that's four hundred thousand if you can afford a car that's thirty thousand dollars you should be driving a car that's twenty four thousand dollars you don't need to live out to the limit of your abilities which is what the your genetic instincts will tell you to do your instincts will tell you to do that because everybody else is pushing as hard as they can on the fist trick to try to demonstrate superiority you know and popularity in that marketplace but what we need to do is we need to advertise reasonably in order to capture not everybody you can get out of your market but merely you want to get most of the people out of your market in other words you want to qualify on cursory imitative grounds you'd like to qualify for most of the people who would be seeking out your services now you won't get them all because if you don't if you don't go to the enth degree and spend every last time on your fistrick's then you will you will be leaving some potential customers made set cetera friends in the street because you will not have qualified because they'll be competitors that are displaying more and then you will be seen as a second-class citizen so it will cost you some but these are all probabilistic these are all bell curves and probabilities and so my general rule of thumb is that if you advertise if you fish trick to 88 percent of what it is that you can reasonably afford then you will capture most of your market but you'll you will be saving resources for an important other issues specifically for savings in general so you want to be saving significant percentage of your resources because in that way this puts you in what I call a position of power where you are where emergencies are much less threatening to you and downturns Christ these unforeseen circumstances unforeseen opportunities by putting yourself in a position where you are consistently putting some money way this is a this is an important principle that enhances happiness that is not incidentally part of the genetic code so the genetic code doesn't tell you to save money the genetic code will tell you that everybody else of your similar abilities is fish tricking as fast as they can with everything that they can get their hands on and you will feel a little bit of a panic that you are being left behind this is the push that people have if they can you know if they can reasonably afford a $500,000 house or pushing it to get into something that's five seventy five this is human nature and so this this nature this is part of beating your genes is to actually understand what is driving the the conspicuous consumption grandstanding displays understanding that this is not silly an immature the via there are real live reasons why if you're trying to date a cool girl you better not be you better not be in a $15.00 pair of sunglasses okay you don't need to be in a $200 pair of sunglasses because that may be just flat-out stupid but you probably ought to be in a $50 pair of sunglasses that's obviously only 25% of my 80% rule but but the the principle stands that you want to be signaling at an appropriate level to get most of the market that you're interested in alright that's enough for that that's enough for that so sunglasses my pet fish and then online dating profile I should be set [Music] all right next topic so new research replicates Stanley Milgram's findings now Stanley Milgram you're going to talk about a little bit but nearly 50 years after the controversial Milgram experiments a social psychologist named Jerry Berger PhD has found that people are still just as willing to administer what they believe are painful electric shocks to others urged on by an authority figure so dr. Lisle if you can take us through what the Stanley Milgram experiments were and then a little bit about this new article that's come out yes the Milgram experiments are the most famous experiments in the history of psychology and so and I would argue in all social science the so let me let me walk people through a lot of people have heard them once in a psych 101 class and know vaguely and can remember vaguely what it is but actually the experiment was very sophisticated and and it was it was it had some really fascinating conceptual dynamics that I don't think were particularly well understood at in Milgram's day and we can look back now and see them and perhaps somewhat different more enlightened viewpoint now the Milgram study was essentially the following that there was a Milgram who was the experimenter and then you have a Confederate his name was James Medano and he was a chunky guy round face bald-headed glasses I think he was 45 or so but to me he looks about 58 in the in the pictures and Madonna was a gifted natural actor and so he's going to play a victim and he's going to be making all kinds of screaming noises like he's being shocked to death which of course he's not going to be getting anything of the kind he may be getting little bitty shocks just to let him know that shocks were being administered but he is purely acting so everybody knows that there was no real shocks in the Milgram experiment actually there was one real shock the and I'll tell you what that was the then there had the so there's Milgram there's Medano and then the third person in the drama is of course the subject themselves and the way this is set up is the people answer an ad in the newspaper to make for money I think it was $4 which was real money be the equivalent of $40 now this is in the early 1960s and they come to the experiment and what they have is they meet the experimenter they they ring a little bell or whatever it is and Stanley Milgram comes out greets the experiment the subject it says oh well you know we're just some things set up in the back and and actually we need there's somebody else that's supposed to be in the study we need two of you he hasn't shown up yet now this is a very important psychological gambit madano is there and he's in the back but we they wait until this guy until the actual person comes then Medano sneaks out the back and then a few few minutes later walks in the front door so now this makes it makes the subject in this study feel like he is if anything he's on the in is certainly not there's no possibility that madano and the experimenter in cahoots so this is essentially drives any wedge of any setup completely out of their minds in those days nobody knew about psychology experiments so they wouldn't figure it out anyway then Milgram didn't want to take any chances so then Madonna winds up being chatty so he's kind of chit-chatting in the waiting room and he tells the person he says hey should we tell the person that we're here and the guy says oh no he said it's going to take a few minutes and and so he'll he'll be back out in a few minutes no problem so then Madonna says oh yeah well I've been down to the VA hospital turns out there's something a little wrong with my heart so this is an important little bit Medano has a heart condition he looks like he's fine but he actually is admitting that he's been to the to the doctors and that they're concerned about a heart condition it all makes perfect sense so then they go and the experimenter comes out Milgram comes out and greets everybody and says alright come on back and and then he says hey this is an experiment on on learning and memory and actually this particular experiment is going to be on punishment and memory and actually there's been almost no studies done on punishment and memory we've done Studies on rewarding memory like if we reward people for learning things they learn things better but you know it's it's kind of assumed that punishment would work the same way so when we when we SWAT our children to get them to remember something we assume that that's going to help and when we punish criminals for when they do things wrong we assume this is going to help but we don't really know and so this is going to be a study of learning in in memory but it's going to be specifically about punishment and what it's going to be about is that one of you is going to be trying to learn these word pairs and the other that that's going to be the learner and the other one is going to be the teacher and so you the teacher is going to be reading off these word pairs to you over an intercom and you've got to remember them and then try to say them back and if you if you make a mistake then then the teacher is going to administer a shock and the shocks they might be painful but they can't do any damage and and so will will show the shock apparatus so then they so that these people are going to be in two rooms next to each other separated by a wall and so they can hear each other through the wall and on one side of the wall there's going to be H have a desk to sit out and one of the desks is going to be the desk of the teacher and the teacher's desk is going to be a big old shocked switchboard that's going to go from 15 volts to 450 volts there's going to be gradations of 15 volts all along the way with these switches so it's going to be 15 and 30 then 45 60 75 etc and it's made of heavy gauge steel and it has little dials with needles that as soon as you flip one of those switches the needles go shhh then you quickly go to the right to the left and says Western Electric Company on it so then big old cord that goes through the wall to the other room it's like very clear that this is legitimate and and so this is the shoc switchboard and this is the microphone and here's the word list and so you know if you're the if you're the teacher you're just going to say things through the might through the intercom here and if the learner gets it wrong then you have to just flip these switches that's what you do okay and then we're going to go over the next room we're going to see what the learner does the learner also has a desk and they have a a chair at that desk and they have electrodes coming through the wall big old wires that we're going to attached to these people and so that this is going to be the shock that's going to come through the wall and they've got a microphone or intercom in order to say the words back so what they're going to do is they're going to say okay well one of you needs to be we need to draw straws to figure out who's the teacher and whose learner and so it's going to be so what they did is they have a hat and in that hat they put two little strips of paper and actually both strips say teacher so there is not one that says teacher and one that says learner and so Milgram is going to hand the hat to our subject not to Medano and he's going to say okay well how about you any meaning okay it's you go ahead take it pick one of these things out of the Hat so the person picks it out of the Hat and says teacher so this is important because it just happens by chance that they got to be teacher so it could have been them that was the learner no problem what about the learner yeah so Medano is the learner and our guy our subject is the teacher and what they do is they say you know actually we need you to we've already seen how the switchboard works we need everybody to understand what everybody else is going through and how they're doing this so mr. Jones here what we need you to do is we need you to sit down and we're going to hook you up just the way mr. madano is going to be hooked up so you sort of see what how his part works and so they use electrical paste and they they hook them up and they say oh we need to put some paste on you when we put the electrodes on there just to to make sure that it helps to avoid blistering okay so then they say okay we're going to give you a yeah we're going to give you a mild shock just to see so you see what's going on and they go next door and they flip the little switch supposedly for I don't know like 110 volts that's a big bolt I think it might have been in 1/35 I can't remember what it was but they give them a good blast so this guy knows oh my god the switchboard is totally alive and these electrodes are totally alive and they say okay that's good now hold on just a second here we're going to get you out of the chair we're going to put this chair Medano in the chair and they hook up mr. Bonanno who's just fine with this it's not like the person scowled at 110 they're like whoa you know that'll give you a jump same way if you put your finger in electrical socket it won't hurt you but it will freak you out and so the person is well freaked out they felt the substantial current and now they sit there and watch while they put these electrodes on madano and they paste them on him okay and then and then what they're going to do once they put those electrodes on them they're going to tie his hands down to the chair and as beat I believe and they say well we just have to put you in these restraints so that in case we don't want you overreacting the shocks and maybe hurting yourself okay so what we've got effectively is a prisoner really so Madonna is just fine with this because it's an experiment it's all cool he happens to be the learner not the teacher so he's going to he's going to sit right there at his desk with the intercom and he's going to be listening carefully try to get the words right and no problem so then Milgram is going to take our guy to the next room where the shock switchboard is and Milgram is actually going to be there and he's going to be sort of overseeing the study so yeah can via the learner can they see each other or is the wall so now the wall solid they can only hear each other okay yeah they can hear each other so what's going to happen is that the first they're going to go through about three or four of these and word pairs like tree branch etc and and our guys going to get them all right no problem Madonna is going to get everything right and then he's finally going to make a mistake and so it makes a mistake and the experimenter says or Milgram will say to the to the teacher so go ahead give much 315 volts just no problem and they go on and and then finally Madonna makes him another mistake he says okay given 30 give us a 30 and they go on and given 45 and 60 I believe it was at 75 that madano makes his first reaction that we hear and he'll just do a simple grunt like they throw the switch and Madonna will say uh like that okay that's all and then they go on they do ninety and then we get to 105 and I think at about 105 or 120 Madonna says hey hey this is too painful I can't do this and then the experimenter excuse me the subject will typically turn the Milgram and say hey it's too painful and Milgram will say simply please go on okay and invariably the person will turn back to the thing read another thing read some more words McDonald make a mistake go up to the next one now we're at you know 135 and Madonna bitches again okay hey I can't handle this okay and the alternative may turn to Milgram again and Milgram will say the experiment must continue okay so it's going to turn out that that each level very often the people would just continue on for quite a while up the switchboard I think when they got to the 180s or so Madonna was start pounding on the wall like hey get me out of here and and if it you know if they went on it was most people did all the way to into the two 70s or so Madonna would be screaming in agony every time and and then he would stop responding altogether and if the people would turn to Milgram and and say hey that guy's in trouble shouldn't we check Milgram would say please go on and then it'd be so he's going to have four prompts that he's going to say each time that there's an objection so if the person says hey he's in real trouble he's got heart condition please go on well no I really don't think I should the experiment must continue okay but no I can't I can't continue yet the you know you have no choice the experiment must go on there's there's four prompts and the final one is you have no choice this gets all the way to where Medano no longer responds and says any words and the Milgram will turn on an objection from the subject and say treat a non-response as an error the experiment must go on okay now this will go remember there's now 30 switches on this board and underneath these switches are described like for example in the in the early going into mild shock at you know 90 okay then it says moderate shock and 150 or so strong shock at you know 220 very strong shock at you know 330 and then all the way at the far end of the board is 450 and it says it has Triple X okay act after it's at you know extreme danger extremely strong shock and then as xxx ie it's very clear you kill them now the question is how far will people go that was the great question in the Milgram study and it turns out that about 65 percent of people go all the way to xxx to say that this shock the world of social science is a massive interest understatement and I don't often have a rule my eyes that colleagues in social psychology but you know I have seen behind a lot of PR which is fine Phil Zimbardo 's famous Stanford Prison study is supposed to be you know equivalent or very exciting and fascinating relative to Milgram study this is bogus okay there is no study like the Milgram study the Milgram study is conceptually the most fascinating most important study I think that I have ever seen and I haven't seen anything close the this this completely exonerates any any of the the hoodlums and citizens that were running off spits other than the people in at the top this is showing you that I can take an average guy off the street literally an average human being and I can have them commit a murder and I can do it within half an hour two out of three of them will do it with nothing more than a lab coat and the promise forty bucks to do an experiment now this seems impossible that this would be true but if we're going to figure this out we have to sort of get over our outrage and try to look at this and if we look at it from the standpoint of evolutionary psychology I think it's going to make a lot of sense so we have to we have to understand why what is happening here and what Milgram called it was obedience to Authority and that's good that's a very good description of this but we would now say wait a second it's obedience to alpha so what we're seeing is that human beings are inherently sensitive to change the command and to essentially do what alpha says and in this case what happened was that it was because of some of the elegant methods by which Milgram used it worked beautifully so you start out by essentially doing a small thing and then it makes it difficult for you to ever draw the line and say well if I did 105 you know why shouldn't I do 120 and it makes it difficult for the person to figure this out what point should they draw the line there's no there's no obvious demarcation of when that should happen another thing is that you're getting social pressure from alpha and so alpha is saying basically in a sense telling you you are doing what you're supposed to be doing and and through that through those social cues the person amazingly follows through against their better judgment so the what the what we have here is a crisis of what I'm going to call a crisis of integrity so what integrity is is the the method by which your behavior follows your best judgment and your best judgment means did you integrate all of the relevant values of the problem and did you give them appropriate weight when you don't give them appropriate weight you make a mistake of integrity and in doing so you are doing something that is not in the best interest of the organism and so the organism is designed by nature to behave with integrity and it behaves with integrity almost all the time so you behave with integrity now I know that you don't Nate but most people do how did you know I ate some almond ice cream yesterday how did you know so the point is is that you naturally behave with with integrity because you are built to do so so if you go for a long hard walk on a cold day and you're hungry and you're tired and you're thirsty and you're cold when you walk through the door of the little cabin you have four different targets of action you have water food warmth and lying down and the question is what should you do and your brain is designed by nature to put those things in order of biological value and so you may be much thirstier than you are hungrier or you may much be much colder than you are thirsty and so you will actually answer the bell according to your genes best way to build neural circuits that are sensitive to threats to your survival and they need to put those in they need to juxtapose those in appropriate order that's what a brain is it doesn't do any good for a brain to quote have things that have values if it doesn't know how to put them side-by-side and to analyze them and figure out which one is the most important so that is what it means to have a brain that is integrated neural circuits that it's designed by nature to do values integration so that it answers the most important thing first now the situation is complex even as you walk through the door of the cabin and that is because it's going to turn out that all of those four targets are not equally difficult to do so it may be that the fire places closer it may be that somebody's handing you a glass of water but you're unbelievably famished so you walk right past the water and go right into the kitchen for the food I'm not sure you may be that you just don't have any energy at all and you're just going to stagger on the ground and not not eat or drink anything for a while but you will be in the warmer cabin and you will now recover that first I don't know what you're going to do we will find out what the appropriate most integrated solution is by be simply deserving your behavior but in the case of the the Milgram study what happens is that we get a clash of values and one of those values is Madonna's life and the other value is I'm supposed to do what alpha says those two things are headed for a collision course now the from all the analysis that I've read in the Milgram study I don't hear anybody try the thought experiments that I think would show very clearly how the Milgram instead E is actually working so actually Lee Ross and Dick Nisbet two prominent social psychologists actually proposed one interesting little one interesting little variant of the Milgram experiment that was near and dear to their heart about the concept of what we're going to call channel factors and that is supposed at the beginning of the study you said okay and if at any time in the study there's a little red button here on the desk for any reason you can hit that red button and stop the study so if that were true this button and Ross say we think the results would be entirely different so we really think that it's not about obedience to Authority it's about the inability to be disobedient because the people were actually trying to stop the study and objecting to the guy to Milgram but they couldn't manage to pull off now I actually disagree with the dis Ben and Ross analysis I think I think their analysis is very very interesting and I respect the heck out of both those guys there I think they're both alive and they're both really smart but I actually think that they're they have actually missed understood that the issue here is a stone age cow telling to alpha in an emergency that your own genes best interest is to do what alpha says in an emergency and if you say that there's a chicken switch on the top that there's a red button that you can contradict alpha than you said he's not alpha somebody else was alpha whoever made the rules of the chicken switch is there at your disposal for your own choices alpha not the guy that's telling you you must continue so I think that the nisman and Ross analysis actually misses the fundamental issue as to what's happening here what we have is a Stone Age clash between a what we're going to call an honorary friend which is somebody he just met and human beings treat each other's honorary friends until proven otherwise so Madonna is definitely an honorary friend he's been totally friendly totally alpha ball affable nothing indecent about Madonna at all so you would treat him as an honorary friend and now we have alpha that you have accepted a role as being under alphas guys here that you're supposed to do at alpha says now what alpha says ludicrous but he's he's he's sort of got you into it a little bit at a time so it's a little bit hard for you to figure out how you're going to get out of it and it's going to turn out when you found out reasonable objections he's got you beat he's got the answers for them and it intimidates you into continuing this is a mistake the the system was not well enough designed to figure this one out this is a very novel evolutionary problem and as a result the system is in confusion and Milgram set it up just well enough that the average nervous system defaults to the most the most dominant stone-age circuit which says you'd better do what alpha says in the emergency so I want to propose some changes in the Milgram experiment that would clearly demonstrate what what is what I'm talking about suppose that the person that you meet at the study is not Medano suppose it's your 17 year old son or so the two of you come in as a pair and you are assigned to be the teacher and they're the learner and you start shocking them and they say I can't stand the pain what happens now does anybody in their right mind think that this experiment continues I don't think so I think 100 percent of people stop which tells us exactly what's going on here that Medano has a certain survival value genes survival value to our individual and as they depend upon who that is they're computing that gene survival value and as soon as we make that journey genus or value high it's done in fact if it's a friend I think it's done okay so it's very interesting what we're really demonstrating is how little survival value strangers have to us so that's one thing that's being demonstrated another thing that would be demonstrated would be the following and that is that actually piggybacking accidentally on what we just talked about earlier which is what I'm going to call the fish trick and the imitative mechanisms or the checking computer checking mechanisms that are natural to human beings suppose for example that halfway through this study that Milgram said to our subjects says you know what we're actually out of time for today we're at 220 volts right now what I'd like to do is I'd like you two to come back tomorrow morning and we'll pick up in the middle of this where we are and we'll continue the experiment later okay how many people do you think are going to come back how many people you think in fact are going to get out of there and they're going to go home and they're going to talk to their friends and their friends are going to say what the hell are you talking about that guy is a madman you need to call the cops okay I think the odds have anybody coming back the second day and and resuming at 220 volts are zero which is actually telling us that this is an extraordinary situation where the person is caught without a social frame of reference for checking alphas action and so as a result we've stripped a situation down to an evolutionary novel situation where they're simply following the one circuit that's in there which is you better do what alpha says and so and so for me this dis reminded me of a lot of jams that I worked in the prisons for ten years and my guys in the prisons would get backed into a corner by prison gang dynamics they'd be in a lot of trouble and they would be get pushed to do some things that are dangerous unethical illegal make it impossible for them to leave prison etc and so they would start to get into tough situations just like this and what I would tell them is your first move is you have to get out of the situation you have to buy some time you have to like hey I'll talk to you this afternoon and then you got to go get a second opinion and you got to talk to some people because you got to have the second opinion say wait a minute wait a minute tell me the whole story again and in this way you get yourself out out of the situation this is how to stop major mistakes in terms of your own personal ethics or your own integrity that when you're in a bind and you're feeling an emergency and you're feeling under a lot of pressure under a situation the right thing to do is to figure out how to delay it you get out of there and then the second thing you do once you get a delay is you actually get some input from somebody that you respect okay that is completely independent of the situation and those are two ways to to help you not make breaches of integrity that you don't want to make so now it is nowadays it's very unlikely for something like this to happen just because someone has a problem they'll go on Instagram Facebook social media ask a question and then within minutes there's going to be a hashtag with all kinds of people opinion aiding about what to do that's actually good there there could be the classic situation in in Vietnam was the meal I massacre and when lieutenant Calley was I think I can't remember I think he he was the one that shouldered made major court-martial blame etc and essentially he said hey I was doing what I was told to do and certainly the guys under him were doing what they were told by him to do and so this is their there are I believe they're still going to be situations where a person is is going to feeling be feeling pressure and they're not going to know that the two steps are get out by any sort of delay and then number two go seek advice and those are those are the two so I'm not I'm not discounting what you just said I think that the more people are able to pass their decisions through other brands I think the better but this is it's good to identify in principle what the Milgram study really did for us was it highlighted for us the the limitations of our own integrity and it also showed us that if you prepare for integrity challenges you can be better so your if you actually understand just like preparing for a fire a fire drill in your house with your kids in the same way it's very useful to have some pretty firm principles about how it is that you're going to handle you know ethical moral etc emergencies and one of them is going to be I am going to delay this situation no matter what you know no matter how how much pressure I'm under I am going to find a way to delay that's the first thing I'm going to do and the second thing I'm going to do is I'm damn well going to get some input from somebody with some brands and that not only for emergencies but for general problems in general more general problems that people face that it's also a way to reduce the likelihood that you have actually got your values a little bit of skew and therefore you're going to wind up with some kind of breach of integrity fantastic all right all right yeah in Berger studied they didn't go past 150 volts because they felt that it would traumatize the the teacher that experiment right yes I I understand yes it turns out Milgram followed up his people for years kindness and the Milgram study was largely responsible for a sort of a major new revolution in worrying about the impact of the experiment on psychological subjects and so then it became more difficult to get studies through ethics committees with with definitely justification as far as this goes it got to be ridiculous now now it too to the point where if we have some little steady with a little bit of negative feedback that might cause somebody a little bit of a negative mood you know the whole ethics committee looks at that thing upside down so it gets more difficult to to do some of these interesting deceptive experiments which actually will show us some interesting things about human nature but but a group and ibly the Milgram study should you know these days if you ever redo it it should be done with limits so that people don't think that they they discover that they would have killed the guy that's not the greatest thing to live with turns out I don't think it was particularly problematic for the people in the Milgram study and many of them appreciated the fact that they were in the study because they learned something about themselves about their own natural limitations and therefore to watch out for them and and so at any rate that however good good for them I'm glad they did it right fantastic all right so beyond too we have some news from The Herald there's a 39 year old weightlifter Laurel Hubbard who dominated the competition while competing the Australian international weightlifting competition representing New Zealand Hubbard destroyed her competition in her division she set four records in the process turns out laurels a transgender woman she emerged last year as an international calibre lifter but before then she had competed nationally as Gavin Hubbard her birth name yeah after transitioning in her mid-30s Hubbard apparently started to find a lot more success in the weightlifting field as a woman oh for goodness sake you know I just have to I have to say the obvious in case nobody else is saying it this is ludicrous okay so obviously we cannot be having a International world-record recognized bodies having X males sex-change two females and then competing this is ridiculous so so obviously the Olympic Committee and if they haven't already passed a a decision on this they're going to have to be because somebody is just whacky enough to find int go to no lengths to get a gold medal so ludicrous all right notice that not a single female changing to a male is desiring to compete against males so this is clearly a fiasco and it makes a mockery out of female sports females should not be competing against males it unless they want to and it's openly acknowledged that it is a mixed competition but this is just sheer insanity and somebody is going to have to call you know call it what it is and say that that is not a that is not a genetic female that is a whatever we want to call it you can live its life as a female great I wish you great happiness but it doesn't get to compete in our sanctioned athletic competition against females forget it oh well the world kind of mind I have to wake up to this what one of my friends a couple years ago when Caitlyn Jenner won the Woman of the Year he sent me a text he said yeah this just proves that men are better than women at everything including being a woman that's very very clever all right there I'm just doing a guy I know and my heart goes out my heart goes out to everyone who struggles with these issues and I goes through whatever they need to do to try to get more peace of mind and and sort of to to find themselves that's all fine with me but but it shouldn't be on a wrestling match or a weightlifting competition that's not where we're you're not going to be welcome there not my judgment come on I agree I know a couple acquaintances who are transgender and they're wonderful people and like you said they they struggle in their own way but but the weight lifting thing a little bit a little bit much so alright well we're getting close out of time you got anything so yeah we're just about ready to go with the Darwin Awards are you ready dr. Lisle I'm ready all right let's see here okay so we have our runner-up now in order to win a Darwin Award you have to actually take yourself away from the gene pool this guy got close a 66 year old Netherlands resident he wanted to protect his garden shed against burglars so the best way to do this he decided was to construct a booby trap so he put together some ropes and then a shotgun aimed at his door and he was now proud of his invention that when his friends came over he decided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the device so he pretended to be a burglar burst through the door and promptly got shot in the abdomen the lower arm lock oh my goodness luckily an emergency of operation prevented him from waiting in a Darwin Award he gets an honorable mention all right all right for the for the actual Darwin Award for this evening yes all right Iraqi terrorists Chi Ron Jeanette decided to send a letter bomb in 2000 he wasn't the brightest brightest of sparks so he forgot to put enough postage on the letter meaning it came back to him returned to sender if he was so happy to receive some mail that he ripped it open and his career in terrorism ended right then and there that was that I hope I hope you think oh my goodness the world is a better place for him getting out of work that's good what are you saying I hope these things are what I said I can't remember what I was thinking gone no found all right dr. Lyle thanks again for your fantastic tremendous insight we will talk to you next week very good great fun Nate I'll see you soon
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