Home 🏠 🔎 Search


Bad Transcripts
for the
Beat Your Genes Podcast & More

Episode 62: Making it to Date 2, Political Correctness, Self-Limiting Beliefs
an auto-generated transcript


To get a shareable link to a certain place in the audio,
hover your mouse over the relevent text,
right click, and "copy link address"
(mobile: long press & copy link address)
 


well dr. Lyle how you doing today good good good to be back excellent well you know we're going to be talking about we actually have a lot of listener emails this week so I just want to tell listeners that we really appreciate them emailing us so we're going to go over as many questions as we can but before we do a really interesting article from the evolutionary psychology news the article is called assessment long-term mate preferences in Iran the Iran part's going to be relevant in just a bit but basically the research indicates that maybe there might be some long-term mate preferences that can be assessed in a similar way to the Big Five personality characteristics so okay the three designs to this particular paper they were trying to collect more data for this using focus groups and then develop psychometrically accurate long-term a preferences in men and then a third arm of this research project was to develop a sex neutral scale for preferences and using factor factor analysis what they found was that six dimensions emerged for men ah and six dimensions emerged for sex neutral preferences now it's Iran so I can't imagine why they didn't do this for the women you know who cares what they think bad go ahead they came up with a acronym it's family here's the six dimensions fam a attractiveness kindness edgy claim religiosity and status now I don't know if I'm the only one who noticed this I can't possibly be but that's the acronym that spells fakers very good and I'm not joking this is how the are just set up like it's not set up so you can read it that way yeah but that's the order nice yeah but beautiful well it's interesting because if we look at this education is going to be essentially intelligence and religiosity is going to essentially be conscientiousness and kindness is obviously going to be agreeableness a physical attractiveness is what it is family is going to be family and Status are going to be sort of interesting variables in a culture that probably I don't know much about that the Persian culture but I assume that there's pretty heavily stratified you know almost a caste system and someone who's out there might be squealing right now and saying doctor well you don't have anything any idea what you're talking about which of course I don't I'm just I'm speculating that as we see this come up it's something that would be very significant for those individuals those things would be important anywhere in the world but they're obviously much less important in the United States because we're we don't have a caste system or really anything like that so the but it still matters sort of what family assets are being brought to bear and that would include both status and family and well obviously in that in cultures like that a lot of times like the mother-in-law lives with you you know or you live with your mother-in-law up here so this sort of issues going on I'm much more than yeah you got it so really I'm surprised that they're talking about the factor analysis as if they are developing a scale at quote like the big five because to me I see four factors that are the big five and then of course we're going to add or three factors that are the big five and then we're going to add a tractive miss on top of that which is obviously the lead variable inmate selection and so that's what it looks like to me so but anyway good enough for them and probably it's essentially a somewhat modified big five to that culture good glad glad to see people doing kind of interesting research like that cool yeah I think for the family part of it they they call they also called domesticity so you know the the culture there is probably highly dependent on on that yes let's move out the the sex neutral preferences for the six dimensions are kind it's essentially the same in just in a different order yeah right and there's no family in this one actually it's kinda attractiveness status education and religiosity for Cho Reserve at the turn going off the same things yeah yeah very uh yeah good enough they're sort of rediscovering so the I guess they're saying that these were the biggest things when they factor analyze what people are looking for and so they sort of we're not sure what's sitting inside that status variable again a hierarchical variable the religiosity is essentially you're you're looking inside I've been conscientiousness I think it's a big issue there and also potentially close my - maybe maybe yeah very good in other words how open or close someone is good for you yes I think you're you're seeing possibly two variables being tapped into there so yeah but once again for for those listeners that are that are familiar with the way we think about things you're seeing the footprint of the Big Five all over this as they have collected data from a culture that we haven't had data from before we factor analyzed mate preferences and and in at no surprise we see physical attractiveness resources and the big and the Big Five footprint very good alright next article this the next article is actually by a developmental psychologist it's called incorporating development into evolutionary psychology and he was he's arguing is that adaptations develop regardless of genetics and are based on hide the highly plastic nature of an infant's and child's brains so this is David Bjorklund from Florida Atlantic University so what he's proposing is that we incorporate developmental psychology into evolutionary psychology and of course he makes the case that it's the behavioral plasticity in the the plasticity early in a child's life and early perceptual and cognitive biases will result in adaptive behavior that would change things as they go along but the two major areas that he claims can be better understood as one the role of parenting so for instance of a parent is more authoritative versus you know think if their thinking is that if they're more authority of their kids will become more conscientious you know that that's a limiting belief that can be corrected and then he makes a weak case in my opinion of he says that if we mesh these two together it'll create a clearer picture of what it means to be a human all right all right here's what I have to say about this the first of all he didn't have any evidence I'm sure so the is a developmental psychologist who who I think he's smelling the the the cannibal in the room is evolutionary psychology and evolutionary psychology even very early in the game and in particularly I would say behavior genetics which isn't exactly evolutionary psychology but it it certainly is informed by thinking and evolution it is essentially cannibalized learning theory in early 90s when tooby and cosmides and company sort of introduced this to the world and the and about the same time the behavior geneticists were coming up with data showing that essentially human beings do not develop their personalities by any sort of mimicry process in other words there's no no correlation between the personality of a child that is adopted by someone and that and that parent so they don't and they're not even reacting to the parent in some way so their words if it has if a adopted child has two or three siblings in the household they all aren't reacting to a parents for example authoritarianism and then becoming either that way themselves or becoming very rebellious this is simply not transpiring so the correlation coefficients are 0 now let me tell you it is difficult for me to describe what it's like to to be an academic psychologist in the middle of academia with this this very unpleasant news is being published and there's no way to not publish it and so this has laid waste to what we're going to call developmental psychology of the social order or social development and this is what this guy is talking about so there's developmental psychologists that are just interested in for example speech and language development and so we they do extraordinary sophisticated and very detailed research and how the human being actually learns how to listen to and figure out sounds and when words begin and end and then learn how to speak and all this sort of stuff so that's very very interesting work in cognitive development but this guy is talking about social development and we're going to find that and the the thing that you said is an amazing quote so it's an amazing thing that he said that we're going to he's arguing that the adaptations developed quote regardless of genetics and are based on highly plastic nature of the children's inference brains this is insanity I can't believe that anybody would say such a thing let me go splenda read what we'll move ok all right ok it might have been because in fact if you're even close to this sounds like something that would sound very sexy to a to an academician who had his was making his bones in social development and doesn't want to hear anything about behavior genetics the but the the notion that first of all adaptations are going to develop under extremely tight genetic control so let me explain partially what this guy's even talking about sort of in a way that my listeners that the listeners can understand I will argue that the adaptations which means the little neural circuits that make up what a human is for example what's funny okay when you cry when you why you make a sad face what you find beautiful or handsome what you find fun what you find not not fun or quote not funny what you the the ambition feelings of ambition that you feel all these kinds of things are going to be obviously they are they are human universals and so therefore there are neural circuits inside the human being that are tightly constrained that cause those thoughts feelings and behavior and motivational processes and they are so tightly constrained that it doesn't matter what environment you grow up in they all wind up to have we wind up with the same equipment which means that essentially it's like your hand you start with a little tiny hand when you're born and then that hand grows up and as you get older that hand gets bigger okay it gets bigger and stronger and you have greater grip strength etc it emerges as an adult hand it starts out as a little tiny hand and it emerge as an adult hand and as that happens as the body goes from a little tiny body of eight six pounds or so into a hundred and thirty pound body it's going to go through all kinds of metamorphosis things are going to get bigger they're going to get hormones are going to turn on and certain features are going to change etc but this thing is going to develop in fact under unbelievably tight genetic control it doesn't that little hand doesn't turn into a claw under under different environmental circumstances at all okay it doesn't really matter what environmental circumstances take place with respect to that hand that hand winds up a human hand that's what it's going to do and the human mind winds up an adult human mind it is quote not highly plastic at all it has a it has a thin veneer or plastic city that will cause it to for example learn a specific language but it's learning a language and it's learning a language in always the same way okay so and why does it always learn it in the same way because the genes constrain how human beings can learn a language that's how it that's how it takes place so the this sounds to me like a social developmental psychologist who is hoping to find some middle ground with the enemy and try to because the enemy is cannibalizing the field of social development easily for anybody who's paying attention and and so we're going to try to now say that well development is really important and I'm going to say no I don't think so and you don't have any evidence to suggest that it is the I will certainly agree with the following truth but it has to be true and that is in order for neural circuits to potentially develop normally in a certain way certain environmental events must take place now that of course is going to be the case so a child living with wolves with Romulus and Remus you know adopted by wolves and before Rome developed could not have developed speech Tarzan you know Lord Greystoke living in African jungle after his parents are killed could not grow up and then as edirol gur rice burroughs said you know this was Lord Greystoke so he you know the books were left behind by his parents and he studied the books hard and pretty soon he's speaking English this is beautiful of course that is now possible there are certain environmental events that are required for these neural circuits to be fine-tuned to work properly however they are all normal environments of all humans if they survive get the environmental inputs that are required for these these developmental programs to be sufficed with the with the environmental stimuli I so that they will develop normally okay so that's why we don't have some bizarre place in the world where they're not doing something and then we wind up with 80% of the kids being autistic never happens okay so this is a this is a mishmash I'd have to read this thing but just the sound of it sounds like this guy's trying to make big arguments for early child development and the plasticity of human mind and how important the environment social environment is going to be and I Got News for him you ain't going to find it chief your friends for the last 50 years have been trying to find it and they've never found a scratch of data to support their that position what we're going to find I had a very interesting interchange over the last week I was talking to a an orthopedic surgeon and we're having a good old time and ice' explaining the facts of life to about about individual differences in human beings psychology being a function of their individual differences in genetics which is a concept he had never heard of never considered in his life and and we were talking about it finally at the end of this after he realized after a while that I wasn't actually crazy nor was I some some Nazi nutcase I mean I actually had all the facts and every single question I could could explain the evidence and he he finally said you know this is absolutely incredible and I said yes it seems absolutely incredible but you're an orthopedic surgeon and if I had told you that that people that were identical twins separated at Birth had very similar knee structures you wouldn't be surprised at all he goes well of course not and there it is we're just not used to thinking of the brain as an intricate device operating under genetic constraint we simply don't think of it that way we think of it like this developmental psychologist is thinking of it he's thinking of it is a highly plastic moldable machine that is highly chained being changed by environmental influence there's many reasons why people think this and for anyone who wants to do an exhaustive education in this I highly recommend highly recommend if you if you haven't been to college in a long time you want to take on a book that's that will really test your your mental abilities Steven Pinker's masterpiece called the blank slate the modern denial of human nature is an exhaustive treatise about about the problem that academia academic social science is having with grasping and choking down the truth about what we now know about human nature yeah I've always wondered when I've heard you say these things why people just have such a hard time choking it down and what like I've thought maybe is it just people's a disappointment that they can't get what they want they can't change people into who they want for services you know really really good the truth is Nate it's multifaceted there there's many reasons why so for example it is true that humans learn to truck killing beings learn a tremendous amount by imitation but the individual differences aren't coming about by imitation but you might say well now wait a maggot some of them do so if I grow up in my dad's car wash I became a car wash King in the Central Valley didn't-didn't my environment have a lot to do with that an answer would be yes but the the reason why you became a car wash King in the Central Valley the superficial levels of the situation are that you're an American operating under free enterprise and your dad was highly conscientious and bright enough to and emotionally stable enough to own a car wash place and then you took it over and then you expanded it now you have six car washes in you're rich now you might say well my environment had everything to do with it and I would say well no it didn't had you grown up in some other place in Kansas and your dad was CPA you might have become CPA you would have gone to college and then you would done this or that and you would have been successful doing that to the other words the superficial issue is that it's a car wash the conscientiousness and financial success is not a coincidence okay and that's what we're talking about so the if you have the high verbal IQ and you are Chinese it doesn't mean you're ever going to learn how to speak English with a dam okay but your your high verbal IQ will be evident to anybody that speaks Chinese and so this Chinese is the superficial level of the information processing that's going on inside that Brent the that I couldn't care less about that that's just the little flavor on top okay that that plasticity is extraordinarily evident to people because we're very conscious about plasticity but we are not actually seeing that beneath that thin veneer of plasticity there is a genetic variation and constraint that is defining who that human being is okay so that's so the of course this gets to be disturbing for people when you start essentially saying people are very much constrained in who it is that they are and who they can become so any developmental psychologist that thinks that they're going to come up with a program to increase the conscientiousness of humans is lost they are absolutely this is what I call being lost in non Darwinian space this is someone who's fell out of touch with Darwin they're just totally wandering out in the weeds and they have no idea what's going on the know this is not how it is we gotta win awards yeah well you know what I have to say that unbeknownst possibly to many of these people underneath the veneer of all this fight as they I mean there's many reasons that look Noble or just ignorant and and honest ignorant but beneath it a lot of it is sheer sexual and professional self-interest that it is sexier to be someone who believes in the flexibility that you could turn any kid in any thing and it is also financially overwhelmingly in your best interest because that's how you survive in academia if you if you come at academia honestly and you come with an open mind and followed it where the data goes you're going to be in a pot of hot water in this in this area and so that's the truth of it so any any good solid self serving human being with it with a brain make sure that they have just the right theory in academia in order to survive that my friends is where this article getting from all right what else all right yeah just like mr. emails sure sure let's do it all right so our first email has to do with how to make it past the first date so you know I couldn't comment to this but dr. Lyle hopefully you can so here's the question dear dr. Lyle I listened to this up to the episode of dr. Lyle saying that what men should do to have a successful first date is the goal is to not get ruled out I'm using online dating pretty much exclusively to go on dates with girls and it seems like every time that I've met a girl that meets my standards physically we'll have a pretty good first date but then when I try to set up another date I usually hear from her that she didn't really feel a connection and based on what you guys talked about it leads me to believe that they're essentially saying in an inoffensive way I'm not physically attractive myself but I remember you dr. Lyle mentioning that for guys that we want to take advantage of the repeat exposure effect since people like others who they become familiar with so my question is how do I take advantage of this effect when I'm consistently told there's no connection from the woman after we've only gone out on one date and as a side thing has online dating ruined this repeat exposure effect since people have to judge each other for romantic potential extremely quickly really good excellent question good thinking and a real live drama here from a listener that is struggling so first of all let's let's walk through this the first thing that we that we are going to understand is that essentially human beings are trying to get the very best deal they can and so typically the most important part of the deal that define someone's mate value is their physical attractiveness yet another thing that my friends and academia don't want to face okay so this this overwhelmingly defines human mate value now it's going to turn out that for both males and females other other features of personality are additive or they're important adding and subtracting mate value in the process and it's going to turn out that the the female of our species is going to be much fussier when it comes to activating her sexuality at first blush with males because she's going to be defending her eggs and so etc so it's not you're going to have to hit her circuits pretty darn well for to get to have her interested in date - typically the whereas a male the I mean the same thing is going on but but it's slightly different in other words a female may you might qualify but you might not qualify it first at first blush but under repeat exposure you could whereas males rarely find females more attractive over time because they're not having to guard the eggs so their their interest in a female is immediately evident to them now one thing that we see about our collar here our listener is that he is frustrated with the situation where when he meets someone that that meets his standards physically quote they have a good date well of course they do he's enjoying himself because he's met someone that qualified and then it turns out when he goes to set up another date usually they're not so interested which is exactly how I would expect it to be the nature of the mathematics here is that anybody that you're interested in is rarely going to be interested in you and anybody that's interested in you you're rarely going to be interested in so I did that that's just straight math based on the fact that two people looking at each other can can analyze how good-looking everybody is and determine whether or not they think they're above them or below them and if they think that you are if you think you're fancier than they are then you're not interested so what we didn't hear from our listener here was all the times when he wasn't interested in the female it's like sort of ignoring that and brushing that aside and he's lamenting that what was happening at the moments when he when the female qualifies and he's interested but suddenly now rarely she's interested well that's exactly what's happening on the other side but he's sort of dismissing that as if that's is it that's an important part of the math problem that we're facing now I'm not saying that that's what he's doing but I'm saying we have to keep track of the fact that he's qualifying for a bunch of people that he don't qualify for him and then the same things happening on the other end now he's absolutely right that we've got a problem in a modern environment about one-shot meetings this is going to be much more difficult for the male than it is for the female and so and the female unfortunately doesn't even know her own psychology since she is unaware of the repeat exposure effect she might even be conceptually aware of it but she unlikely that she is conceptually aware of it but she doesn't have any intuition about it and so as a result she doesn't know that she was designed in the stone age with with sexual act excitation mechanisms that were designed to be inhibited on meeting novel males particularly if they were in this zone of maybe sort of interesting but not that interesting and it's not knocking my socks off and so therefore I'm sort of filled so so like I don't feel any quote connection it turns out that if you meet that guy half a dozen times there's a chance that you would feel that connection you're designed to meet him half a dozen times my god there's only 2,000 people on earth in sub-sahara Africa 83,000 years ago so that's less people than there are an American high school so that shows you how few made choices we had and how much connection that you had with these individuals and therefore the repeat exposure effect was probably very often in effect in these situations now so the modern female doesn't know that that's what's going on with her own psychology and so as a result of that you're under a lot of pressure friend and when you ever show up to a date and that woman qualifies you have to understand from the jump you're probably not going to qualify so your job is to just try to just try to get a first down you know we're just trying to advance the ball down the field and not turn the ball over so we're not going to take any chances we're not going to take unusual political positions we're not going to do anything I could tell you a few things that we are going to want to do you're going to want to dress well you're going to want to absolutely make it very clear that you are paying you're going to make sure that your you know your hair your clothes your your car everything that you can control in terms of your appearance you want to make sure that you're in good shape in other words if you're serious about this arena that that you we need to take seriously making sure that we are in good physical condition as good as we can get there and and then what we're going to want to do is you're going to want to during that date we're going to want to have very good social skill so that means you're going to be asking them questions and you're going to ask them intelligent reasonable questions and you're going to not stare in their eyes but you're going to be making ice eye contact when they are when they're when they're speaking to us and then you're also going to have when there's going to be normal questions that are going to be coming from her she's going to be asking you some things about you this is a very good time for you to have scripted stories so it would it would be very nice to actually realize that you're going to get asked you know there's going to be 20 questions or 15 questions that some woman is going to ask you on a date because you're getting else you asked her the question and then she gives her answer and then she you the same question and right about then is when you have a scripted answer that's got some very clever self effacing humor in this somewhere something funny something interesting etcetera so this may sound like an extraordinary amount of effort to to go to to actually script yourself through a date but the truth of the matter is this is serious business and you have you've got problems you don't have the repeat exposure effect helping you and these two little people out on this date are trying to find what I call the magic 10% and the 10% is where both of them feel like hey this is a heck of a good deal I don't want to walk away from this well it you're obviously you are going to assess that it's a good deal by looking at her appearance and if it turns out that she doesn't have any wacky circuits in there that you can't stand the truth is you're going to be interested if you find her sufficiently physically attractive your problem is she is likely not to find you the same if she's fancier than you she probably will not be finding you fancy in fact she's right on the line for ruling you out and and etc which is exactly what's been happening so what I'm saying here is is that you got to bring your a-game and you're going to have to essentially make it such an interesting hour or 90 minutes that that at the end of it she feels like boy I don't I can't quite rule this guy out I just can't quite rule them out and then when you ask someone out the second time you don't ask them like hey we want would you like to go out again no you have something interesting for them to do and you need to be in paying attention to what it is that their preferences and their likes are and what they like to do so then you think about what would they find interesting and fun to do and you may want to take this out of a romantic context for day two and make it to you know concert in the park or something or Shakespeare in the Park who knows the knot notion is here that we want to sing to her but we're not sitting there with bated breath hoping that she reciprocates our physical interest so that we can get into her sexuality we want to signal to her that we are very patient and relaxed and we find her interesting as a person and would she like maybe want to do this fun thing that is a value proposition that is is going to be more saleable so these are some of the details that we these are things that we can control and if it sounds like a lot of work well it is and it's it takes a great deal of luck Louis Pasteur said chance favors the prepared mind and someday if you keep at it you will eventually bump into a situation where the woman qualifies and you are maybe close to qualifying but it's on the line and it's iffy and if you're ready and you don't fumble the ball you get a first down and then from the first down when she meets you the second time it turns out that you're mmm surprisingly a little bit handsomer than she remembered and suddenly it starts to warm up so that's the plan Wow you're making me all teary-eyed over here love it all right all right so don't turn this around a little bit because our neck out email from your listeners is a completely different topic okay it has to do with politics and the question is dear dr. Lao why does so much anger exist from groups like black lives matter and things like that how will this anger ever be satisfied what is the evolutionary psychology foundation for political correctness and why is it so pervasive why is it so difficult for people to accept political incorrectness without feeling angry or insulted and is there a way to make someone less sensitive to a political incorrectness interesting complicated question person the person is asking a lot of a lot of different things so let me let me just take a pass at I think some some sweeping issues the whether it's black lives matter its protesters anywhere in the u.s. complaining about anything were Western Europe the this is nothing other than then people feeling that things are unfair for their group and the and it's going to be the case all you have to do to actually get a feel for how biased people are at analyzing whether things are fair is just just for your own entertainment turn on an NBA playoffs game this week and just just watch it for ten minutes and you will see in that ten minutes the camera will be panning to the coaches of either team and the players as after call after call after call they look like completely outraged and utterly disgusted and mystified by the refereeing and this goes on all game okay so this is the the they're just besides themselves they just can't believe how utterly unfairly they are being treated okay now it's actually amazing that they can even agree to play given how upset everybody is about the officiating the this tells you that the human being actually is not born with an objective mechanism for analyzing fairness that they are I don't know that anybody's ever put a parameter on it but I personally have put the parameter at what I call fifty five forty five in other words the average person is about 10 percent bias their own direction so they the average person if it's fifty five forty five their way in other words they're getting fifty five percent where fifty percent would have been fair that feels about right okay as a sports fan myself I've watched things where my team got a couple of breaks in one in close game and I'm feeling like now that was done it's like really reasonable that just feels like that was about right okay and so this is this is why it's difficult to do mediations it's to see just how outrageous this can get you go into family court and watch some child custody battles that gets very entertaining so this is nothing other than a group of people in this case the black lives matter people saying oh my god this is just so outrageous the black people you know I've been treated like they don't even matter you know they're being slaughtered by the police and they're they're being shut out of jobs or I don't even know what all their complaints are okay now the truth of the matter is is that the objective evidence will show that the criminal justice system is utterly unbiased and it's just it's just not biased if anything actually the research evidence shows that the criminal justice system bends over fairly backwards in order to treat African Americans fairly so the and it's going to be true that that means there's there's plenty of evidence and I'm sure some somebody with a little bit of datas could be screening right now up and down if they listen to this but this is fact and it's going to turn out that this is also true with the glass ceiling for women etc the it's going to turn out that that women are treated very fairly in the workplace and if you're a woman that hasn't been treated fairly in the workplace I'm going to argue that it isn't because you're a woman it's just that you have a competitor and a difficult conflict of interest with somebody and of course it's possible and happens that some boss tries to push around some female because of a sexuality wants to harvest it and cheat etc of course that's going to happen but in mass that's not what's happening and so it's going to turn out that women are treated very fairly just as you would expect and as all all races are with respect to their education the amount of minutes that they work per day and their amount of expertise and etc etc now but this is not what people feel okay people have a strong tendency to say I'm the member of a group that's being cheated and so then what they're going to try to do is they're going to try to influence the political decision making process in order to get concessions and they feel very angry so if we think back about how anger works what anger is is it's a it's a threatening communication instinct that is designed to activate guilt mechanisms in an opposing party in order to gain concessions that's what it is and so all that black lives matter is doing is that just another group of people as has been true across history this this particular group doesn't have a single leg to stand on in terms of the evidence other groups have had so if there's a black lives matter group that was forming in 1965 believe me they had every every you know Martin Luther King was was not an empty windbag what they were talking about then was totally legitimate and what they're talking about today is not and we have the scientific evidence to prove it but it's probably also sexy to be a member of that group and therefore it's uh it adds to the people's sexual attractiveness now these so that's when people are going to complain they're the evolutionary psychology is that we're designed by nature to be biased in our in our analysis of what's fair and the reason that is true is that that is that it actually has paid to be biased in other words the genes that carry bias ships in their head and activate anger mechanisms have actually been out to been been able to acquire more resources than those that are more more fair and so you can imagine two little children slightly genetically different out of the same mother and one of them is angry and bitching more about how it is that they've been shorted of food or attention and it turns out that they get a little bit more food and attention and they might wind up being a little bit more physically robust and wind up having a survival advantage over their more pleasant brother or sister so these are human beings have evolved to have this sort thing and that's what you're saying now political correctness is a little bit different thing this is sort of a this actually has a sociological history in the United States and once again were we're talking about in-group out-group fairness issues and and so the it's it's turned out in a little people that are paying attention and this all I believe this was cooked up up in academia I think somewhere in the Ivy League somewhere in the 1980s about that this was a way for liberal agendas to essentially get some leverage and get to the moral high ground in order to activate guilt mechanisms and so that's sort of what this is this is a derivative of the very same general process of how to activate guilt mechanisms and it can do so in other words you can feel like wait wait wait I didn't mean to be unfair okay and then they start pointing out that the way you use the language is actually in and by itself and has implications of unfairness in it and sometimes that can get you back on your heels because you're thinking well now wait a second I do want to be fair and if you are pointing out something that that actually makes some sense then I looks like I was a little guilty and so there you can certainly see how that would be possible and how and why it is that the that the world had to open its mind a little bit for some of the things that this this movement was pointing out and then it can get a course totally out of control and co-opted by the notion that we're going to use this to leverage wider agendas etc that are that are trying to get bigger and bigger concessions fantastic all right yeah I remember reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Alex Haley and and Malcolm X was you know what he grew up he remembered the phrase from one of from from an adult figure that he looked up to and the phrase was the squeak wheel gets the grease yes yes you know when it comes to the fairness and fairness there was a a fabulous motivational speaker in California in the 1980s and 90s by the name of Jim Rohn and Jim Rohn you know would tell a story about how you know he was speaking in front of a group of business executives and they were all speculating about I think the new president might've been Reagan or somebody else I can't remember and they said and they're all speculating about what the new you know what the new year was going to be like and run says well I know what the new years could be like they all crowded around so Wilmont mr. Owen what what's going to happen what's going to be like and he said it's going to be about like it's always been okay there's going to be opportunity mixed with adversity which is how it's always been and that is how it is in other words there's some unfairness there's some issues to squawk about there's going to be people that are going to be more genetically disagreeable they're going to band together and they're going to squawk a lot louder trying to essentially utilize that technique they don't know that they're trying to utilize that technique consciously they're they feel morally righteous just the way the NBA coach does that he's that he's being treated unfairly and and they're going to squawk and yell and threaten violence and behind their their righteous rage in order to try to get concessions and that's what's happening that's about how it's always been as Jim Rohn would say fantastic all right our next email hmm yeah connecting to what are men women trying to signal with tattoos and the follow-up question is what are women trying to signal by getting tattoos in non conspicuous locations like behind the ear on the ankle huh well I'm not sure anybody really knows but let's take a broad pass at this the certainly getting a tattoo is to certain extent a signal of openness to experience obviously so that's one thing they're signaling they are also potentially signaling for for reasons that are possibly a bit Oh peg they're probably signaling a bit of lower and conscientiousness and also some degree of disagree ability so so these are little elements in here that I believe are part of these signals and so if you if you're putting them in inconspicuous locations then this means that you are possibly a little bit more conscientious and you're a little bit worried about sending those signals to the broad public because they could be more costly than you want but you want to be able to show under certain conditions you want to be able to show these these essentially these these characteristics when they might be useful for you to show them so for example you might want to show your tattoo to a handsome guy if you're a good-looking pretty good-looking girl but not as good-looking as the handsome guy and you actually are a little bit low in conscientiousness and open to experience and you are therefore susceptible to the casual mating strategy and so therefore rather than rather than then maybe make those obvious to everyone you might make those more obvious to him under you know there might be a way for you to to signal that to him more specifically so I could see that now here's a wacky idea that came from the book spent by Geoffrey Miller who is a brilliant evolutionary psychologist with a lot of really creative ideas Miller says that tattoos potentially have been a method for human beings to actually open up their immune system to bacteria and then to demonstrate that they have a good immune system that could handle that challenge so yet it's possible that this is essentially self injurious behavior that that is is an advertisement for higher level immune function and that may be a potential evolutionary reason for tattoos in general so I don't know how one would prove that and I don't know if that's true and I don't need or if it's partly true certainly tattoos are more than just that there's all kinds of these other signaling processes that are going on but that is a possibility why human beings even came up with this as a as a potential essentially signaling tactic it's clearly a signaling tactic I mean why else would you do it the same reason you write a newspaper article is for somebody to read it and the reason why you put a tattoo on your body is for other people to observe it and to make inferences about you so it is clearly a signal and the things we're trying to signal tend to be big five related and big five and intelligence-related so they are we would want to be being signaling things that would have an influence on other people's behavior and influence things like make choices friend choices and the challenges for example let you can imagine that if you lived in a rough neighborhood with a bunch of rivaling gangs you might want to have tattoos that would signal that you are an extremely dangerous person that had better not be messed with so this is all kinds of little elements that might go into this did I lose you yeah I cannot hear Nate alright well I think that if I'm talking and Nate can't hear me and he can't hear him and people can hear me or they can't hear me whatever's going to happen I think what we're going to do at this point is we're going to wrap it up for this evening and I think we've covered enough for one night and we will be back next week with more listener questions keep those questions coming these are very interesting we have some more that we intended to get to tonight and didn't and will work right down through those next Wednesday evening and we look forward to having you back next week thank you fantastic dr. Lyle thank you very much
Back to the top
🏃     👖




Artist