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Episode 60: What if your mate rival drives a Porsche, Succeeding at job interviews
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all right good evening everybody this is Nate G dr. Lyle how you doing today good good how you doing not too bad you know I was reading a couple of articles this week for the Journal of evolutionary psychology and one of them really just kind of struck my fancy it was called what if your rival drives a Porsche so that's beautiful yeah I mean I've never owned a Porsche I think I you know there was an ongoing joke when I was in junior high right well what's the difference between a cactus and a Porsche right yeah on a cactus the prick is on the outside yeah yeah very good but I've met people who are you know fine people who own Porsche yeah but the price of this was it wasn't to determine who's a prick and who's not a prick yeah they were trying to figure out just how these displays of comes what they call conspicuous consumption affects rivals because as you've said on the program before as we as you know we delve in the evolutionary psychology we see that that males will buy luxury products and then they'll show them off to signal their mate value and the track to attract a mate why so so they've had research on this but they wanted to know what effect that this type of conspicuous consumption has on other males and it turns out in this particular study this was called luxury car spending as a costly signal in male intrasexual competition what they found was that men perceived the guy who does this who displayed this conspicuous consumption of in the particular case a lugged car they perceived him more as a rival and a mate poacher and less as a friend compared to people who compared to the men who didn't display a who displayed a non luxury car right and yet interesting because what they also did was they found that men raided the the guy who displays with a luxury car they also rated him higher for attractiveness higher for sexual willingness higher for intelligence hi Fran mission status which I actually suggest in this study that a man who displays these type of luxuries can actually have an advantage over other men as he could deter any inferior rivals from competing with him right right all all very good this is a goes down directly with coughs costly signaling theory and that that's exactly how that should work yeah this also explains my recent dating failure that I had so I go out with this girl Dowell obviously on my shoes in her late 40s I'm told her and I thought it was actually going very well and so she's very interested in what is that I had to say and this through no fault of my own truly this goes on for three and a half hours and so I'm explaining everything under the Sun and she's taking notes I'm explaining things and we're going through the big five and it's all highly entertaining and then I explained that what we do in uh in in our consumption in consumer behavior is we are using consumer goods to signal the big five so we talk about that and then I guess what kind of car she had and I was pretty close i debit I really don't feel yeah I said it would be a little bit exotic and intelligent signaling intelligence and some degree of openness but not too open because there's a reasonable amount of conventionality there so I said it's not likely to be a United States model carts like would be foreign it's probably European we want to signal a little bit a swab there and she wouldn't have got something as flashes alexis Norah's tightly-controlled probably as an acura but it would have been higher good so I said a a possibly in an Audi or a Saab okay and it turned out it was a Volvo but she hastened explain to me that it was a very cool Volvo that had like it was like a convertible okay so made made perfect sense so as we go all through this I'm all I'm relaxed and happy and I'm getting good good feedback signals and then what happens is is this she asked me what I Drive uh which I didn't even think of like I actually don't think that much about is a signaling device interestingly enough and I Drive a Kia Optima which happens to be the official car the NBA K speaking people it's carpet Blake Griffin jumped over to win the dunk contest as far as I'm concerned which of course why I bought the car any right and I did not get a follow up date so I think that I think that she thought she was dealing with higher socioeconomic status highly more highly consumptive male and it turned out it was sort of a beta male and a Kia so well I will have to rethink my my current strategy all right what's all this is actually like I'm curious when you tell people the story do they try to get you guessed their cars I've had that I've had that happen quite a few times and the guys that I used to work in front of it the prison I guess that that I had a gray Camry and actually my Camry was at the time was bronze so they miss back hey yes by a little but they were basically right so yeah I mean yeah it's all it's a very interesting I don't know what you drive that would be sort of interesting for me to guess but I'm not going to put myself out there on air will do that oh I'll do that later that you guys because I wonder I wonder if do you when you go with your clients and you talk to them when you have your private sessions are you kind of interested in having them you know say okay let's see what kind of car you drive make sure that they're displaying correct at least displaying the personality characteristics that they actually have I actually yeah Oh interesting um I don't think too much about that I might think about that strangely enough I might think about that if there's a guy who is struggling in the dating arena and and we were we're really looking at resource displays and so on and so forth we we might actually look at that and we've certainly looked at that a few times but I I don't usually think too much about that people I simply read the cues I'm most of the time I'm not too worried about what people are signaling to the world they are signaling to me who it is that they are and we're going to get to that very very quickly what we're interested in and the only time when we might be interested in this is when what depresses and frustrates people is when their feedback from the world is below the level of what their self calibration mechanisms are believing that they should be able to attend and so the discrepancy between feedback and expectation is what drives emotion and so in the case of in the case of feedback being better than expected that's what drives happiness and if it's worse than expected that's what drives depression and so the so obviously nobody comes in to report to their therapists that they're happy for God's sakes so everybody that walks in the door is depressed you might not say depressed maybe they're anxious or upset or miserable or frustrated or angry but the bottom line is is they're not getting the feedback they expect that's why they're having a negative emotional response that negative emotional response is an invaluable signal to tell them about the nature of the contrast between the feedback that they are receiving in a competitive arena versus what they expect that they should get and those expectations aren't coming out of the blue they're actually coming as a is a some kind of a sum to average over the over a graph inside their head is connecting dots and running multiple linear regression on what it is that they could reasonably expect to get based on the cues that they picked up from the environment about their competitive standing and so you can't just snap your fingers and lower your expectations your expectations our automated mechanisms being derived from essentially statistical like programs that are inside your head so when people are unhappy my job is to figure out but why it is that their that their feedback is different than they think that it should be and once in a while it could be that that they may not be signalling appropriately with respect to conspicuous consumption maybe sometimes usually not usually the the problem is somewhere else hmm yeah during in my case I'm not so sure I'm not so sure Alexus presence made any difference but it might have actually I don't know I I might have been close but no cigar now do you think like have you ever considered when someone asks what you know if a girl would ask you on a date what do you drive to bluff and just to see what a reaction is when you get to the car you're like oh sorry it's a key on my bad and they just watch her you know to see if she's conscientious enough to like leave you because you're yet a liar and reason because here yeah actually I texted a interesting because my my attitude obviously is anybody who's listening to this podcast or could care less about my situation the bottom line is is that at the end of three hours talking to me I can't either qualify for day two or I don't and I don't really think that if I drove a rolls-royce email have a lot of difference so I'm not I'm not too worried about it all right let's go to the vine okay next next next deal yeah so the next article is actually talking about mate poaching and friendships so mate coaching David buss in one of his articles defined it as behavior intended to attract someone who is already in another relationship and the name of the article is friendship as a relationship infiltration tactic during human mate coaching so it turns out that the the goals of a mate poacher it's not just stealing away the mate but it's also subverting the mates current partner so that protect against this humans have to identify potential mate poachers and then also prevent their partner from being poached so day of us and 2001 did a study and he found that about over 70% of his sample reported that if someone had tried to poach their mate away from them in the past hmm right only 50% of the people reported trying to poach someone else's mate were been reported to be poachers right which will to David buss demonstrated that people have a tendency to over perceived threats to their relationship well I very clever of bus yeah yeah and then he found though that only thirty percent of people actually reported that their partner was successfully poached away which he suggests that the sensitivity to being sensitive to your having your partner poached may actually be a beneficial strategy right David Bob oh yeah people yeah go ahead good yeah for people that don't know David buss is just one of the most brilliant people walking and I believe that he is the world's leading authority on human mating behavior he certainly done more research and more interesting research than than anybody alive actually in all history so this is I remember this study I read the study years ago and it was one of an ungodly number of different angles that bus has has looked at this problem from and I remember some other things possibly discussed in this study or in related studies that he did he found for example that an extraordinarily high percentage of very attracted people are poached out of relationships so if you were to go to 90th plus percentile looking women and you were to ask them how they got together with their mates we're going to find that a hell of a lot of them were poached out of existing relationships they they largely have to be poached out of relationships because they're almost never available okay as soon as a nine and a half hits the market it's very likely that she's going to be selected out of the market pretty quickly and so most of the time if you are going to get a nine and a half if you have the chops to compete for one you're going to have to steal one out of an existing relationship so so it's going to turn out that befriending a someone who has a high-quality mate that you are interested in is one of the only avenues that people have in order to get there I'm not just saying men do it to get women women do it to get men and but but this is all fascinating that bus picks up the fact that as you would expect of something when you are guarding something that you value that you would expect that a degree of paranoia would be would be an evolved mechanism in other words an over over analysis of the threat and I'm going to expect I'm sure someday somebody is going to get a PhD from running the following analysis and they're going to find that this is going to be true it's going to be that the greater the objective we could say subjective would be even more accurate but we could objectify the difference in the mate value between the two partners and we're going to find that the person who is significantly lower than the other apartment a partner in terms of objective made value is going to be by far the most paranoid and have the most distortion and their assessment of poaching behavior on the part of friends rivals etc so every hot chick with some guy who is who is significantly less hot has put up with this that the guy thinks that every move that every guy makes anywhere near them is an effort to get at them and the truth is is that that's only true eighty percent of the time yes that's right so uh so any right yeah all very good great stuff five glad glad you brought that to our listeners attention this the thing that I love about David buss is that more than just a theory armchair theoretician like myself what he did for his career was he went out and actually just would grind out data to actually fill in the dots of evolutionary theory more than anybody else I've ever seen and so he he put the dots on the graph in one career to really show us okay this is this is how it works and it works according to essentially meticulous mathematical logic that would line right up there and rival modern physics and as it should because ultimately what you're really talking about is DNA and you're talking about DNA building neural circuits in such a way as to advantageous Lee leveraged themselves into the next generation and we would expect that over three and a half billion years of evolutionary time that these mechanisms would be extraordinarily stereotyped and precise and so and so we would find that the behavior would rarely surprise us as we would as we would observe what it is that people are doing and we would find that they would have some very standard operations that would be sitting inside the brain to be activated under certain conditions and that is exactly what we find and that's why I love reading his work mm-hmm yeah the to headline is that he found to be accurate in the study was that if the poacher and the poach head if they were friends and that was more likely that it would be successful as you know the MEI poaching would be successful and right they were friends their new long-term relationship was rated as more likely to last longer than a year so you know which of this means we've got to watch out for our potential mates as friends yes you got it all right let's move what else we got going well we've got some listener questions some emails about so the first one is actually about job interviewing okay so dear dr. Lyle I'd love to hear you talk about strategies for job interviewing I was a successful pharmaceutical sales representative in the past and I'm trying to get back into that line of work as I'd been interviewing for the past couple of years I've realized that my ability to succeed at the job is different than interviewing for the job this is a highly competitive industry so any advice or strategies you could provide we can greatly appreciate it uh sleep with the person who's making decisions all right so let's let's look at this I'm actually joking but I'm trying to bring home a point here that we're going to look at and we're going to try to understand the nature of what it is that we're trying to accomplish here now when people interview for a job they they makes they usually will make certain assumptions that are erroneous and this will lead them to behavior that is not optimal for seeking the outcome that they want so because they want to be hired by the company than what they're thinking is they want to essentially build a virtuous cycle between themselves in the company so when they're talking to people that are interviewing them for the job they're basically saying well I really really love your company and I'd do a good job for your company okay so I'd be really good for your company and I reserved your company so therefore you should love me and do good good by me okay that's the basic that is exactly what you would reasonably do and so those are those are the neural circuits that are firing inside the interviewee now that they're making a mistake so here's the real situation so let's paint the picture in a way that would make a lot of sense to people so that they won't forget it suppose you are the fifty-five year old wife of a physician and you are you are sort of his quasi office manager and you're kind of getting ready to just sort of kind of halfway retire and kind of head home you'll still look over the books and let's suppose from the moment that you're female and your husband is the physician and you're interviewing people for the job so let's just figure out the number one qualification that anybody has to do the job the number one qualification is that they not be an attractive female that is the number one qualification for the job okay so right away we see that if you are an attractive female your odds of getting that job are zero okay not unless the woman wants to precipitate a divorce and a big crisis and a fair and a big scandal which God knows maybe she would want to but the truth of the matter is is all things being equal we can see quite clearly that if the woman has a single social neuron in her head there's no way in hell an attractive woman is getting that job so now I want to change it up let's suppose you're the physician male whose wife is at home and there's nowhere near the office and you're interviewing for somebody but job now now what is the highest qualification all right we can see clearly what the highest qualification is in fact if we want to make sure what the qualification is we have the female turn around three times during the interview okay throw some pencils on the floor we're going to see how you could pick them up so let's look at what's happening here when it comes to the decisions about who is hired and who's not hired what counts is a process that we're going to call or dynamic that we're going to call report and what rapport is is in a steam dynamic and so it is essentially a situation where both people find that they value the other individual if you go into yah-hoo and you're going to try to get a job with Yahoo and they're gonna they're going to somebody's going to interview you and you're thinking well I wonder they want to tell them how much I want to work for Yahoo even though I know you guys are in trouble relative to Google I still think you're really good and if you hire me I'll do a great job for you okay the person who's interviewing you couldn't give a rat's ass about Yahoo they couldn't care less the it's in their genetic interest to figure out what is in their genetic interest and what is in their genetic interest is what can you do for them personally they couldn't care less what you would do for the company so as a result what we have to be focused on is how to establish an esteem dynamic between you and the person who's interviewing you and the way you're going to do that is you're going to realize that on their forehead there's a sign hanging right there if you look carefully it says I don't have enough status okay now you might be thinking no that isn't true they're behind the big desk siding on my fate no they may be deciding your fate behind the desk but in their life they're very frustrated that they don't have enough status okay so if you go on in there and you start giving Yahoo status that doesn't give them any status that's only the tiniest part of their identity what's important to them is what's all about the great about them so what we have to do in an interview is we have to we have to watch we have to essentially I want you to think about an interview as a process of used car sales okay so you are trying to sell the used car so what you're trying to do and what we're going to do and they are a potential buyer of the used car so the thing is we have to be very cool about the used car we have to have the attitude that our car is nice and that we're confident that other people will like our car okay and so they on the other hand are trying to figure out how cheap they can get it or if they want it at all and so we have to sing the praises of our own car but we're also we don't want to chase away this buyer so we're going to be a little crafty so let me tell you about what this dynamic would you would want it to look like you're going to go into the interview and you're going to have a resume and there's going to be certain questions that they're going to you can expect to ask and in those questions you're going to want to be professional and competent just as you would expect and what we're going to do is we're going to go in there in that really going to the interview is we are going to earn esteem by a good solid performance okay but the problem is and here's what we're not going to do we're not going to be slobbering all over ourselves telling us how excited we are about selling our car to them oh my god you saw my car oh you like it oh my god I just see that you I just see you in this car okay I can just see you in my car I would love you to have my car you're going to chase that buyer away okay so instead what we want to do is we want to be professional and competent but then somewhere in here we are going to potentially make a self effacing comment okay the reason we're going to do that is we are going you know if there's there's a place for it or a little bit of self effacing humor the reason we're going to do that is that's going to be signaling the fact that we're agreeable okay it's going to signal that we are not a status hungry competitive elbow throwing jerk I know they're going to like it we're going to watch them laugh you have it ready okay so you're going to have some self a self facing humor already planned half a dozen good self effacing little jokes that are consistent with your your answers to the 20 most common questions that you're going to get okay now those self ation jokes need to be good they need to come across like the response spontaneous even though they're absolutely planned and then we're going to say them and then we're going to move on no problem now this individual is going to start inferring something in the same way made that a good-looking female in furs of a nice-looking guy he's a little bit self-effacing they're going to infer whoa this guy's got a fair amount of confidence or he wouldn't be willing to risk that status loss okay he is also agreeable he's going to be pleasant this is a nice thing to see now what's going to happen then somewhere along the line this person if we've done our job and we have we have enough competitive standing in this situation that they're going to try to impress us about them not about the company they couldn't care less about the company they care about themselves and what they're going to be trying to do is they're in a position to try to understand you know if they're in a position of authority it's really about what's good for them not what's good for the company so they're going to want to try to figure out whether you're going to be their ally you're going to sing their praises you're going to line up on their team etc etc okay so what we want to do is we want to be listening for the fact that somewhere in this interview they're going to start they're going to start trying to get status from us and when they say well as part of this project that did such-and-such here's what you don't do oh my god that's fantastic I never would have thought of that you got your genius no we don't slobber all over them we actually are very pleasant about this and we are we acknowledge we aren't we aren't either defensive and we don't respond with oh yeah I know I did something like that to forget it the thing is is that if we are we are cool but Pleasant or I would should say warm but Pleasant about that but we don't follow all over ourselves they're going to still see that we are a pleasant capable professional and agreeable with our self effacing humor and we were not an easy sell okay so they're going to circle back around a little while later and they're going to try to up the ante and try to impress you with something else and when they do if you see this dynamic if it happens and listen for their specific part in the dynamic not the whole team and how great the company was or anything else they're going to try to get their own personal individual status we don't bite on it the first time I don't think that's a good strategy but if we see it that's fine be pleasant give them a little bit of status move on and we continue but then they may circle back around a little bit later and they want more the next time and they're going to try to up the ante to try to get more status and then we're going to give them a lot okay at this point what we do is we've got a little acting job ready and we pause and we say wow that's really that's really superb what you did and I wouldn't have I wouldn't have thought about I didn't know anybody who did that that's really cool ok so now we have an authentic reaction of a we are essentially selling 150% of the truth so they're reporting something admirable they're expecting an admiration response but we are now going to give them an exaggerated response not so over-the-top we've already demonstrated that we're not licking anybody's shoes ok so we are not a hyper signaler but what we're going to wait for is a good solid move on their part to try to get some status for themselves and our job is to look for it and then land a bunch of status on them at that point if we played our cards carefully and well and things have broken in this fashion in this way then what's going to happen is we just became more valuable than our competitor that's all so winding up for this job because they will be giving a bunch of status to the company seeing the company praises and talk about what a puppy dog they are about how much they want to give to the company how much they want to join this coalition well our guys already in the coalition he's not that excited about it if you're if you're a member of the Oakland Raiders you are not you don't want somebody saying oh my god I'm such an incredible Raiders fan I just love the Raiders now they want to know that you really admired them that you know that they're the backup tight-end and that they went to the University of Arkansas that they were selected in the third round and they fought their way and that they almost are being considered as a starting level tight end throughout the National Football League and that you saw their game you know that they had against New Orleans about how they caught several passes and did terrific work and a lot of commentators we're talking about that now that guy just became your best friend okay so he is not excited about you singing the praises about the Raiders he's excited about you singing his praises and that is your job in job interviewing is to figure out how it is that you can you first must earn status by your own legitimate performance and explain to them on a nonverbal level that you are not overly excited about their company and you are not overly excited about them and that's because they have competitors and you are a competitive human and you are under potential competitive pressure and you have options and they are not the last door in the game for you and but you are interested and you are quite interested and so we are there with our shining face and our good prepared answers and our self effacing humor to put our best foot forward but then what we are watching for like a hawk out of the corner of your eye is the moves that the interviewer themselves will make for their own personal status they want status from you and we are going to cleverly give it to them and when we do god forbid that you are a guy interviewing with a heterosexual male for a job that the person coming behind you is a hot chick sorry you won't get the job I don't care if you went to Harvard and she went to San Diego State okay you are out of luck better better no way but then you are a gay you got that's your only hope okay but the bottom line is is all things being equal it what people will say at what interviewers will say as well they're just looking for a vibe they're going by feel just sort of whether we have rapport whether we hit it off what do we think that is folks what those are is they are feelings and what feelings are as guidance systems and their guidance systems for survival and reproductive genetic advantage so what we want to do is we want to indicate to them that it is in their genetic best interest to select us as opposed to our competitor okay and so that that is we go directly to their source code and hit the circuits as hard as we can hit them and that gives us the very best possible chance of competing in that situation okay fantastic all right so all right all right so our next one really got this is what from one of our listeners who's called in before he's wondering what your thoughts are on world belief systems like religion in terms of looks and money as determiners of happiness and its influence on someone's character and personality so the question is dear dr. Lyle I'm Korean and I'm confused about whether my genes are actually of someone who doesn't really care about resources as much as most Koreans and so that's why I don't really want to work as hard for money as my parents would like me to or is it because my parents cared so much about money and looks that I'm just convincing myself that I don't care and I actually do and somehow I find myself in the middle between my parents and the opposite of what my parents want and somehow I'm far from my true nature in relation to wants for resources and wants for how I look physically fascinating question okay the there's there's several things going on here that we can explore and given our time constraints this will probably be our last question of the night so we're going to go several minutes on this the this is there are three directions for us to be thinking about here the first of all the notion of world belief systems Asians this or that cetera forget it everybody cares about looks and resources the looks and resources are the the two trading ships in the game of reproduction in life so whether we are talking about aardvarks or we're talking about chimpanzees we're talking about human beings it's always the same problem its resources and looks I II looks are when we say it looks we're really talking about genes we're talking about mutation loads and so we're talking about essentially what sexual attractiveness are we going to be passing on to our children which is the most important thing that you can possibly pass on to children when it comes to determining their ability to reproduce in the next generation okay so that's why looks are unbelievably important because looks are going to be unbelievably important to the next generation and the next generation after that and the next generation after that that happens to be true in species that have eyes in species that don't have eyes they have other ways of determining mutation load and gene quality so they'll be using other things like smell feel etc things like that now in our species it's dominated by vision obviously so it's going to turn out that Korean or not Korean or anything else everybody's unbelievably focused on books and resources so now we have a situation where we've got parents that are obviously highly conscientious and competitive and are worried about their sons ability to compete now this this makes perfect sense so so as I've said before only in humans - humans care about the competitive prospects of their offspring other other species simply they just fight their own battle they reproduce the best they can and their job is to make sure that their children survive if they're their pair bond species both of them will be involved and if they're just a regular run-of-the-mill species only mom will be involved but the bottom line is is that essentially the parents job is to see to it that the kid survives long enough to get to reproductive age then it's like good luck bro you the car keys and go out there and take your best shot because I'm done okay that's how it is in every other species on earth but not in humans and humans the human parent says oh my god I'm really worried about my kids reproductive prospects okay what can we do not to just ensure my child's survival but ensure my child's ability to compete with all the other children have those bitch mothers that are finagling and scheming to try to give their children a reproductive advantage okay this is what's happening okay so everybody's in the same game human beings evolve neural circuits in order to be extremely concerned about their children's competitive prospects and certainly different parents dependent upon their own individual differences in their own genetics about how focused they are on such things in this case this it's going to turn out that in certain cultures are significantly different genetically than other cultures and as a result certain personality characteristics are more prominent in certain cultures than other cultures so it's no surprise for example and this has been this is a discussion for another day and you know discussion we're not going to wander into but it is no surprise that Koreans are going to be highly conscientious the that that's going to be characteristic of northern Asians and so the the high conscientiousness so it's no surprise that the parents are going to be highly focused on whatever variables are going to associated with child reproductive success and that's going to be looks and money okay it's not going to be as important for females to be thinking about money it's going to be much more important for females to be thinking about looks but if you're a boy you better be thinking about money so the parents are aware that in the village whether it's a Stone Age village or it's a modern nation-state and world economy there's a thing called the dominance hierarchy and the job of the parents to push that child up the dominance hierarchy as far as they can push them okay so highly conscientious parents the tiger parents of our world our push push push push push push trying desperately to get that kid as high on the dominance hierarchy as they possibly can okay and the purpose of this is largely but not necessarily entirely but largely and sometimes entirely it is to make sure that if your child is an eight but that child tries to snatch a nine out of the jaws of the competitors in order so that the grandchildren are eight and a half's so in this way if if your child does that then you have leveraged your child into having children that are superior to himself which means you have this is what I call winning your heat in the darwin derby okay the Darwin Derby is the circle of life that goes around and around and around and the genes are inside the horses and then they jump to the new horses and then they ride around in the new horse and they jump to the next horse so the horses themselves or the people in this case die but the genes live the genes are immortal and so they the genes have built the horses to run as hard as they possibly can and so in this case this young man's parents are doing their job as best they know it that they are being dictated by their genes to force a highly competitive process so that their son recognizes that he is under a dire competitive process that he must in fact squeeze every little bit of resources that he can get out of the world so that he can do conspicuous consumption so that he can get a girl whose nose is just a little bit shorter than the one that he would otherwise get like fun sign me up now the reason why this got this God selected an evolution is because the choices in the Stone Age were very limited so if he only had five girls that would have been the possible prospects one of them was a nine one almost seven one of them was a five one almost a three and one of them was one and let's suppose you're a boy who's six seven or an eight and you got a couple other boys are about like you we can see that there is enormous genetic stakes involved somebody is going to get the nine somebody's going to wind up with the seven and somebody's going to wind up with five so it makes sense to be ferociously competitive and try to rise in every dominance hierarchy that you can now if it turns out that you're a ten boy and the next boy down is seven relax just be a lazy flake like all the really handsome people are okay why work that hard just stroll our way and the nine doesn't have any choice she's going to go for the ten there's no rational alternative for her okay so but the bottom line is is that in most Stone Age situations this is a very tight zero-sum game and the difference between two different slots in the equation is enormous it can be as much as 10 20 or 30 percentile points relative to the bell curve of human attractiveness and so as a result you had better co-evolve with this with the sensitivity to be able to detect the differences between those individuals you also have to have the ability to to summon your resources and take risks in order to try to out-compete your competitors who are facing exactly the same problem that you are now in the modern world we don't have this problem because the truth of the matter is is that you don't have a 9 a 7 a 5 a 3 & a 1 facing you you have a thousand individuals that you're going to have a shot up and so as a result the differences between where you're going to get to depending upon what you accomplish are going to be relatively minor okay now the so this is where this this is one reason why this young man or this whoever went is ages is in some cognitive dissonance because he can sniff that there isn't necessarily that much difference in outcomes depending upon how much accomplishes now there might be and he also has stem and age circuits that are harkening him and telling him that maybe he ought to get off his ass and get as many resources as possible he also however has another problem and that highly competitive parents but or highly conscientious can also set the bar too high and when they set the bar too high they put him in a position that his outcomes he may detect his self calibration systems may detect that he will his his outcomes are likely to fall below their expectations so they put him in the ego trap highly conscientious highly competitive parents put their children in the ego trap and make hallmark characteristics of the ego trap or a desire to kick over the table not give a damn about anything and basically display to everybody including on one's self that I don't care about this game and I'm not even trying so you cannot judge my underlying gene quality because I am NOT going to put out the effort okay now this starts to fence I'm smelling a little bit in this guy's questions and how it is that he has framed it that I believe that he is ambivalent between his natural competitive desires which say you know what I need to go get the last nickel on the table he also can sense the ego trap that no matter how hard he tries he may fall short of expectations and therefore the best way to defend himself against that status loss is to actually not try at all and essentially demonstrate very convincingly that he is not in fact trying okay that process can be not only between him and his parents but as I've described at other times what happens to is is that the internal audience also it takes cues from the outside world about what it expects of us so his own internal audience can actually be expecting him and setting the bar for him to get office and accomplish big things and as a result he can be ego trapped from the inside and so it can be that he is essentially his self so there's three basic components of your of your mind the way they work your mind works your mind has a self which is a set of self calibration mechanisms that essentially are trying to assess what you are capable of that is what we're going to call you then there's going to be an esteem meter which is going to be a device that is sensitive to feedback from real live people about what it is that they think of your competitive displays and so this is going to be the primary generator of your emotional life so when other people say wow that was really good then that's going to feel good they look like they're disappointed in your performance it's going to feel bad you're going to feel rejected in romance or friendship or business if you are not included in into relationships that you expect to be able to compete for and you're going to be elated when you are when you are invited into those and you are going to be reasonably happy when you're in relationships that you would consider that our reasonable trades for you so that's how that's going to work but then you also have an internal audience which is watching you and observing you as if it's an outside people and the reason why we have that internal audience to help us prepare for real audiences so that's why when you go buy a Jaguar even though nobody's seen you in it you can feel elated you can feel it lated because your internal audience is looking at you saying WOW when they see you in this they are going to be impressed so your internal audience will send signals to your esteem meter as if it is real light people okay so I have a feeling it is possible that this young man not only is under ego trap pressure from his parents having too high expectations but his internal audience also has absorbed or those expectations have infiltrated his internal audience and the internal audience now has the bar set pretty high his set set just high enough that his self suspects that he cannot achieve that does those levels and as a result his self is essentially protecting his status from both a loss of status to his internal audience and a loss of status from his parents or others by grandstanding dramatically that he is not trying okay so this is he may in fact probably be splitting the difference on two different strategies try pretty hard but don't try all the way and try to keep my expectations kind of down etc sometimes got really pushed for it etc all the while really quite ambivalent as he feels the potential embarrassment of the ego trap falling short of expectations should he try very hard and also having something else involved which is he's not so sure this is the best way to spend his life so a third set of problems that enters this motivational dilemma is a bright person walking through this problem with as much awareness as possible trying to sniff a way to beat the djinns and so it's like wait a second I find two motivations one of them may be I had a work like hell at my looks and money let's try to get as many resources I can so that I can display as effectively as possible so that I can get the chick whose nose is 1/16 of an angstrom less asymmetrical than the other one okay that's one strategy that's the ancient strategy the genes second strategy the genes is oops the village put the bar too high therefore I need to defend my status because I think I'm going to fail this process then the right move is to back off and demonstrate that I'm not even trying that's a brutal position to be in that's the ego trap and that feels really bad but also has a safety factor in there that and but this is potentially creating some serious cognitive dissonance the if the person is depressed frustrated even as suicidal fantasies is angry if those are emotional reactions this person then it's an ego trap problem okay the third part is that he could be sniffing around all through all of this and basically saying you know what I'm not so sure that everybody else including my internal audience and my parents has analyzed this problem accurately and I just have a sense that maybe this I shouldn't be in the Darwin derby writing as hard as I can okay and trying to figure it out and so the so that that is how I sort of see this person's dilemma and so hopefully this this may have stirred a little bit of curiosity in this individual and if you're interested I have videos that I have done on John MacDougall's website on self-esteem issues one of them is called stepping stones for self esteem it's a webinar that I did another one is called dare to be lousy and another one is called the slow fast way those are three different I think I did another one called something I can't remember esteem dynamics possibly so they're not great there's little slideshows they explain a lot of these internal dynamics but one of the one of the fallout that comes from this is that the place that we want to be is we want to acknowledge that we're in a competition and we want to acknowledge that it's our job to do a very good job putting a good foot forward not our best foot forward because we're not going to it's silly to spend so much of our energy on these competitions when there's an awful lot of other ways to activate the minutes of happiness I activate I could make more money and be more famous and have you know that Jaguar that I should have if I did not spend much time as I do god bless you thank you so much for saying about Casilla liz is that the deal is is that I love petting my cats okay I have three cats two of them are good friends and the other poor one is just such a sourpuss that she can't interact with the other two and she's lonely so the truth is is that I have great joy every day petting my cats and I love that sort of oxytocin cycle that goes on between myself and the cats that is so well documented by Paul Zak in a book called the moral molecule is highly highly recommended book that I may not have talked about before but really these processes of love that go on in in mammals and and obviously some other animals and you know very much in humans these are wonderful experiences and we want to enjoy them and if we are caught up and get get trapped by our genes in a furiously competitive process where all of the energy is being directed towards how much money how much looks how fancy can we demonstrate who it is that we are then unfortunately what will happen is our life gets out of balance and we we are now not going to enjoy our life as much as it could have been enjoyed so I have a feeling that this young man is sniffing the confusion of probably three different major perspectives on how to best live his life and so this is the ego trap straight competitive pressure as well as the truth about about how how would be the most the most insightful and most rewarding way to spend one's existence and it's going to mean that the best way is to fight very hard to keep out of the ego trap because we don't need self-destructive grandstanding that we're not trying we want to try we want to compete we want to do a good job of competition so that we are prepared and ready for the time when we may be in situations where we may be able to to actually secure maids friends or trading partners that would be excellent to add to our existence but along the way we want to have a life with some balance in it where we we are not we are not essentially letting the competitive chip inside of our head run amok okay it would not have run amok in the Stone Edge because you would not have an infinite amount of dominance hierarchies that you could continue to climb and so in the Stone Age what we have is we've got a hill climbing chip inside of our brains that that got put in an environment of which there is no there's no you could have spend your entire life trying to climb to the top of dumbness hierarchy in the Stone Age we wouldn't have had that and so we would have naturally had a better balance between friendship between economic process and a variety of different kinds of displays family kids etc as well as romance so we would not have been singular singularly focused on on something as as narrow as just our looks and our resources and so as a result the modern environment can easily get people out of balance in trouble and then insightful and tortured souls wind up questioning the whole thing and you know winding up in various spiritual and intellectual journeys trying to figure this mess out and hopefully tonight I've shed a little bit of light on what I think the nature of these conflicts are and a reasonable approach is not to kick over the table and try to pretend like we are you know some yogi on a mountainside he doesn't care no that's not who you are you are competing for the sexual interest of other people that is going to require that you do a good job but you don't have to invest your whole life in it and we don't have to set the bar that we're supposed to get as quote hi in the world as we possible possibly could get if we do that we will sacrifice a great deal of very rewarding experiences along the way fantastic all right this is great all right yeah so final final thing here this is a couple of patients in mind they they they told me that they just didn't it's an elderly couple they went into their doctor and they told the doctor that they're having some trouble with their sex life and they asked the doctor could you watch and then offer us some suggestions so doctor v I'm not a sex therapist you should find someone else they said no no we trust you if you could just please and says okay fine so you watch them have sex and he says you know you don't seem maybe having any troubles I actually wish my sex life was just as good I can't really give you any suggestions so they came back the next week in the third week in the fourth week after they finished on the fourth week doctor said listen you're not having any trouble at all is this your idea of kinky sex and the man said no actually the problem is if we have sex at my house my wife will catch us if we have sex at her house her husband will catch us the motel charges 50 we can't afford that but you only talked 35 and Medicare pays for half of it speaking of mating very good fine work for an evolutionary show love it good job
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