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Episode 63: Marital jealousy, Distancing yourself, Self-limiting beliefs
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all right good evening everybody dr. Lyle how are you doing this evening good all as well excellent well we had a again last week great questions this week even more questions we've had some students some medical students some psychology students some some listeners from all over the world sending us a really really fantastic questions good thinking and really really interesting scenarios so today we're going to go over a couple of those questions right after we talk about some evolutionary psychology news so this week long evolutionary psychology news the journal there's two articles that I read about the first one was with how do husbands react to their wives for double their wives rejecting sex and it turns out that the results that they experimented on this they were trying to decide what is it that predicts their husband's anger when they get rejected sexually from their wives and it turns out that they did a lot of different surveys with I think it was about 50 to 100 husbands and the results showed that the time that their wives spend with their male friends is actually predicts their husbands anger upset and frustration but the time that the wives spend with their male co-workers does not so it turns out that the friends are the ones the male friends are the ones that are going to be predicting this rather than male co-workers oh let me say let me get this straight so the results show that amount of time that wives spend with their male friends but not coworkers predict so my understanding is what I think I'm hearing is if the wives are spending time with male friends that upsets their husbands but if they're spending time with male co-workers it doesn't that correct correct yes okay yeah yeah that that obviously makes perfect sense from the standpoint of that spending time with male co-workers is being essentially put upon there's a secondary reason why it is that the wives are spending time with males that are quote friends then then there is something brewing there that's uh potentially untoward obviously and so it this indicates that what's happening is that that there's an indication of either cuckoldry or potential defection that's going on and that the signal is louder when it's the when it's a male friend and when it's a male coworker so it's it's just basically indicating a that there's no there's fewer innocent reasons and more statistical probability of trouble and therefore the bats that's how the little causality you know the little inference making system is being triggered more simple make sense God so kind of Aegina together is kind of interesting yeah yeah suggestions for wives would be to if they're if they're gonna be rejecting their husband's sexually to not spend as much time with her male friends yeah that's the prescription that comes out of yeah okay all right so our next article is this is actually nothing new this is just 800 this is nothing new this is just hey we're getting a little bit of audio from the other side dr. Lyle yeah I'm here still there yep we're just kidding somebody down okay yep can you hear me yeah okay so this is nothing new they were just hoping to confirm previous studies previous information and what they found was that that people who respond to these surveys were people who are more willing to invest in their own biological tribes and children than in other related children nieces and nephews and also compared to stepchildren and friends as children and this is just directly related to how related they are so I've heard you talk about this in terms of Hamilton's law and the themes for humans it seems like this is true for all animals and what in the animal kingdom the only thing that was interesting to me that I had always a question was was what about personality characteristics so for instance if I have a non related friend and the family that just you know very agreeable conscientious we know we called we get along very well but then I've got someone who's really I'm related to but they're extremely disagreeable not very intelligent you know just not a very good friend will I feel more emotionally close to them and they in fact found that this was true that the association was partially mediated by emotional closeness as well right yeah that makes make sense if you just sort of think this through the right way to think of these things is is how much you like or how essentially how you feel is nothing other than a that a essentially a mathematical calculation or it's the result of a mathematical calculation about some input into the nervous system calculating the profit or loss of a given stimulation of any kind with respect to your gene survival probability so a really great friend etc is is valuable for that reason and a brother who's a real jerk is still carries an awful lot of potential value to you just because since he's your brother when the chips are down if you're in trouble dying in quicksand and he could help you he's more likely to go to more trouble than certainly a non related member of the tribe however the question is is he more likely to put himself out than your best friend who's a great guy answer interesting it's a we're going to find that that you all of this is is these are the tricky problems that evolution had to figure out and so we're going to find that our RS tomates of these things are you know is a mixed bag of of what we're going to call relatedness coefficients at versus how how strong is the emotional closeness you know of a friendship so yeah just simple simple interesting calculus the the jet more general principle is that that all values about everything role in relation to other values and so your mind is is running some pretty sophisticated calculus literally it's how much do I like to spy to chocolate versus how much worried about my waistline and it'll make a difference about whether or not there's some attractive guy at work that some gal is interested in if so she's interested in the attractive gala work suddenly that chocolate it's not worth it but if she's not so interested in the guy at work she was interested in him and then she got close to and find out he has bad breath so now she tonight she's going to go ahead piece of chocolate that's that's what I had a piece of chocolate last night you know me failure all right good night before in the night before mmm okay all right so those are the two kind of studies let's go over some emails in our listeners again great questions we've really want to thank Kate Jeffery Robert a couple other people who've been sending us some some interesting information citric as well okay so our first question and this was one we didn't get to last your doctor Lyle is the concept of self-limiting beliefs the same as ego traps in evolutionary psychology why do these occur and what is their function interesting I'm not I'm not exactly aware of the term self-limiting to beat beliefs with an academic psychology this is certainly a a concept in in pop psychology and so the notion is that that you that you don't believe in yourself as much as essentially you underestimate your potential abilities and therefore by under estimating it you underestimate it then causes you to be less motivated to pursue something so that's a self-limiting belief now that is not the same thing as an ego trap so self-limiting belief is the notion that you really have greater abilities than you somehow are aware of and the therefore you are not investing time and energy and effort in pursuing things that would be of greater value to pursue them the ones that you are pursuing because of your essentially lack of confidence that you could compete at that level now why do these occur the reason that they occur is because yourself is is essentially what you experience as yourself is a repository of calibrations and you are designed to calibrate this accurately as possible in order to utilize your time and energy competing for mates friends or trading partners partnerships of the of the best quality that you can bet best quality meaning essentially the best cost/benefit relationship with respect to genes survival that is possible for you to make the trade now why would one underestimate that answer just because you're making a mistake and so a person could could easily have misinformation about their about their abilities and happen to be underestimated those abilities very very possible usually gets worked out in other words usually there is sufficient evidence first of all we usually are not asleep at the switch with respect to any of these kinds of competitions so it's almost unheard of for someone to be for example extremely attractive and not know it they are getting feedback from people they're getting tremendous evidence about this they so it's unlikely that they don't know it sound likely that people don't know that they're really smart for example it's unlikely that someone who is well above average for smart doesn't know that they're above average they they have a notion of what they could probably do and what they may not be able to do the reason is is that most of these essentially competitive problems which is what these are are not done on one throw or two throws in life you have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of opportunities thousands of data points that help you triangulate on your abilities relative to others so it's unlikely that people have self-limiting beliefs in other words beliefs that are inaccurate and under estimating the their potential reach is almost always the case in fact that people will overestimate their abilities the system seems to be clearly the default of the system is is the other direction now the so that is why they occur they occur for various and sundry reasons of of accidental patterns of for example failure feedback that may have taken place that appear to be compelling evidence that one is not capable of doing something that one is in fact capable of doing so that their function there isn't a function of self-limiting beliefs other than the fact that the system can only be the system has to make judgments about what it thinks that you're capable of doing based on the available evidence and so if the available evidence is in fact a strange pattern of evidence by chance you get particularly negative feedback from some influential people so they tell you well you'll never be a writer you know I'm saying and then it turns out well actually you've got your perfectly you have perfectly enough latent talent to do it so that people can make mistakes but there is the only quote function in self-limiting this is the fact that the system itself is limited in how open-minded it can be about data and it can only question a pattern of negative data for so long to make the entrance that maybe you aren't so capable and therefore you accidentally set the bar too low for yourself and then then you could later on become quite surprised and pleasantly surprised and maybe some angst about lost years or time or opportunity because it turned out that you were you had been better than you thought you didn't know it now pletely different than the ego trap there you go trap what this person is referring to is this is the name that I have given to a an extraordinary process that takes place in undermines motivation which is that it if person scans the evidence from the social world and and makes the entrance that other people actually believe in the individuals abilities at a higher level than they believe themselves in other words they themselves have internal inside dope on their own abilities and they actually are thinking that they are not capable of X whatever X is but everybody else is in that case what they are designed to do is to avoid that challenge so if everybody else let's suppose you write a poem in the 8th grade and you get a big award for it and then everybody else that thinks that you're going to be the next great poet but you're pretty sure that this is bogus why because you've tried to write other poems and nothing seems that great and you showed a bunch of your poems to some people and they're like shrugging their shoulders so just because we had one cool poem it doesn't make you a great poet and yet you might have gotten award for it in the 8th graded so now the expectations from the social world are that you're particularly talented in this arena so when there's a poetry contest it's a very good idea for you to not enter it and the reason for that is that if you enter it and lose then you will potentially lose status but if you don't enter it then then you have delayed the vetting of those abilities and therefore held on to your status as the great would-be poet for a little bit longer so that is a that is a different quite a different look at what is what has some sort of superficial qualities to that this but they are quite different all right so that's that interesting okay so our next our next question comes from one of our listeners who's actually had a question answered before and here's the question my boyfriend and I are very nice people we're very agreeable it's almost like that joke of the Canadians where one holds the door open for the other but the other one wants to give give weight as well so they both die in front of the door well that's us frustrating and funny at the same time but we have a problem figure out what we want since our first reaction is to please other people but because we're not alone in the world what happens a lot is that our decisions are made by others family members friends co-workers bosses and I have a problem with that so I guess I'm more disagreeable than my boyfriend I don't mind making him to make mind him making the decisions probably wouldn't even make mind him making the decisions 98% of the time but I don't like other people making decisions for us like planning our vacation time or what we do on the weekends and it usually happens even after we've decided upon doing something someone just swoops in and suddenly we're doing something neither of us really wanted to do sometimes we complain about it but we complain very quietly while we are for example painting that friend's apartment [Laughter] that's just great go ahead luckily we are not very social which brings me to my second part we're now trying to have a baby and let me tell you we are just too nice there's simply so much written and said on how to raise a child and even what's best for pregnant women I'm panicking even just by looking down this hole since we're both highly conscientious I'm afraid of falling into the pattern of reading everything talking to everyone and then worrying about all the advice that doesn't go well together and trying to find the perfect solution your last show completely almost everything is in the genes that I don't have to worry as much about bringing up a small child so my two questions are this do you have any special advice for first-time parents for instance I have to worry about pregnancy in the next five years first and the number two do you have any sort of suggestions for dealing with these relatives friends acquaintances for - agreeable parents like us because I'm sure everyone will try to butt in this is just fabulous okay so first this is the lady four by the way that you had all got a job before because she's so conscientious not a resume I could good for me highly agreeable highly conscientious people if they have any any intelligence this is what I call the sucker triad that that you got sucker written on your forehead because if you if you could just get the person cornered for a minute and ask them to do something they'll agree and then once they agree their conscientious enough they won't flake out and they got intelligent enough intelligence to get it done so these people are are they are just built to be exploited so by bosses that are looking to rise in dominant argues and they need a sacrificial lamb to make sure that they get 80 hours a week out of them so that they can outperform the other VPS so this is a life for these people now let's uh so let's let's look and look at a few things so I shot a video many years ago and it's on my website it's called success forces and in success forces I talked about this person this type of personality going up against people in the world and things that get in the way of your best interests and one of the big things that I talked about is that today you live in what I call a fractured village so that the main players that want to control the resources of village life and tell everybody what they should be doing those people have to butt heads themselves as they say no Suzy's coming with me to pick berries no she's actually going to be with me because she's going to be weaving you know fishing nets and those two people know who each other are and they have a hierarchy between them and one of them wins those discussions so Suzy doesn't have to pick flowers with one and then go in her over time I go hustle along behind everybody after dark and do a bunch of weaving on the nets so that so that she places both people we let the two potentates Duke it out in the Stone Age and therefore the nice people certainly get pushed around and ordered around but they aren't necessarily working harder than everybody else whereas in the modern environment they will be so they will be volunteering at the church and then they're going to be doing the PTA thing because nobody else wanted to do it and then they're going to be getting a job and then they're going to be organizing the birthday party for their sister like there's just no end to it now so the this is the problem of the fractured village so what we have to do is we have to use techniques such as what I call blame big Louie so we're going to have to learn how to say no to people but assertiveness training as has been taught in psychology won't work personality so you can't I think the title of one book was you know stand up speak up talk back or something like that these people are never going to do this but you can do things that are slick about getting out of problems and that is that you can blame somebody else for why it is that you can't do what these people want you to do so this is what I call blaming big Louie and there's creative ways to blame big Louie I talked about that on success forces so the that's one thing now and let's let's talk about some other things so let's talk about her issues with with being a care it the first of all yes you what your child turns into is is overwhelmingly in the genetic code and our job is people some people have had some hard lives and they'll look back on those lives and they'll they'll also feel like you know part of their adulthood has been tainted possibly by opportunities that were shut in their in their teen years by some poor parenting decisions this is all quite possible but your job as a parent is to is really relatively simple and that is we have a kind pleasant supportive environment the kids are fed decent food they go to bed on time then they go to school that's it no worries and whatever they get in school they get in school and if they get stuck and they're frustrated we we help them out but we're not we're not fretting over their grades we're not going to worry about it because the genes are more or less what school is is more or less a fitness indicator for how intelligent people are and how conscientious they are and so you and I already know that a kid is X amount of intelligence and X amount of conscientiousness so we could figure this out by the time they're about six years old real well just skip the whole thing and we'd be fine so we certainly don't need to bluff it by pushing our children to look more intelligent than they are or pushing them to make them look like they're more conscientious than they are because in the final analysis when they're 45 this is all going to come out on the wash so your answer as a parent is you're just trying to have a good time just trying to enjoy the process of parenting these little people and protecting them and having fun with them etc they're basically pets with your genes in them look at it that way now so far is so as far as everybody else is what everybody else is going to have to say about your parenting ah the attitude it's good to sometimes reverse people and use them with with this technique and that is that we any advice that people are pushing on us we just say oh you're probably right and then we don't do anything and then when they say hey but you're not doing anything about it you see you're probably right but you know we're actually trying to screw it up and then see what happens so we completely we signal to people in a very pleasant way that we're not interested in what they have to say but we don't say it that way and we don't argue with them so we say yeah you're probably right yeah but I'm trying to mess it up just for entertainment see what happens and that that's a confusing frustrating thing for a busybody but if we stay right there and just and and essentially shrug our shoulders to smile and say yeah we're never arguing with them we're going to just give them that same kind of a line like yep you're probably right it's going to be terrible gonna be a disaster oh well that would be kind of fun did you see what kind of exact disaster comes up and what will learn something from the disaster oh I ultimate trol yeah so this is this is what we do and we can be pleasant enough but in that pleasantness what we are signalling is we're signaling that all of their great alarms are not causing us any anxiety and folks they shouldn't shouldn't cause you any anxiety the only thing I'd be worried about with small kids is I'd be worried about feeding them milk or milk proteins that's the one thing that worries me the most because I'm worried about the potential association between milk proteins and autoimmune disease after that I couldn't care less the and I certainly couldn't care less about anything that's going on in school their achievement level whether or not they have any friends or anything else so if they don't have any friends and they're an introvert they don't like anybody fine there's nothing we're going to do to stop this okay so yes it's overwhelmingly in the genes so let it go Adam humm feedom protect them and don't sweat it and if anybody gives you any advice just smile agree and roll your eyes and forget it alright good enough that's that's what we needed to know about parenting all those few things you need to worry about parenting two things and that's is until they're teenagers you need to worry about pregnancy and you need to worry about drug addiction those are the two things so drug addiction does not play fair and therefore it makes sense to to carry a very heavy hand on these young little brains that don't know anything and have no idea they could be very open to experience and agreeable and etc and so as a result they could walk themselves right into a hell of a mess so one thing you're going to do as parents is you're going to let them know no deal no deal not in my house but we get the slightest suspicion you're sneaking around we're going to drug test you and then we're going to come after you like Count Dracula okay that's how I would handle that quite frankly pleasantly but when we get some little rebellious 14 year old 15 year old saying hey I don't care if you're truant you know this isn't going to bother me but if you show up with drugs in your system I'm going to feel like five alarm fire and there's going to be major consequences you're going to be at a place in Wyoming you know doing a ropes course for about six months and that's how that's how we're going to handle that so my my attitude is pregnancy and and with pregnancy you want to be educate your kids be very warm and supportive and let them know if that happens I'm your best friend we got to talk it out so these are these are the two great crises that we have to deal with other than that the jeans are going to find the runway fantastic I was telling my dad the other day about about your advice on how to deal with kids a few episodes back with kids who don't listen to you like for instance cleaning a room and the look on his I was just like oh gosh this is cool like I wish I could have just said that to you when you were a kid yeah overseer yeah I want to do here all the float therapy float there little Sarah to go on that yeah all right next to go okay so I do dr. wah find out about the podcast last week I have a BA in Psychology with an interest in evolutionary and biopsychology my question is is there is there any ecology that examines dictators group compliance and control through an evolutionary lens figures like Stalin Hitler Jim Jones Charles Manson come to mind to name a few and how would something like the door in the face technique be explained through evolutionary psychology okay so let's talk about let's talk about the dictators group compliance control etc few sessions back that the person hasn't gotten to I explained the Milgram study in detail and so I looked at the Milgram study through an evolutionary lens so that that explained to us the behavior of followers in a situation where the leadership can be brutal and so basically amoral and so that that comes about because there's a obviously a circuit in the head that is able to judge the cost-benefit analysis on whether we should be following alpha or not and so there's a very strong follow alpha circuit inside the heads of people that was beautifully discovered or by by Stanley Milgram incidentally in the Milgram studies which were the shock studies that were done in the early 1960s where people thought that they were being ordered to shock somebody to death and 65% of the people did it it Milgram then did a series of studies where he changed characteristics of the situation particular one one of them was to I think make the experiment of themselves a short short unimpressive looking person VI and I'm not saying that short would in principle make you an impressive-looking but they specifically chose somebody that would be very unimposing in in a number of ways versus having someone that was much more stately and grand and so it turns out that there was a substantial difference although even our an imposing person had forty-five percent of the people shocking people to death so but the point is is they clearly the circuit is there but it's picking up variances in how much of a quote alpha this is and that's influencing the amount of follower you know I'm thinking follower behavior now so now we're going to look at the characteristics of of the Alpha so this person is now saying what about Stalin and Hitler and Manson and Jim Jones etc so if you look all of these people are just phenomenally narcissistic so this is what Hitler you know people will talk about Hitler's being a madman or Hitler was a sociopath no these people are narcissists and there's a difference so sociopath is extremely disagreeable and has low conscientiousness Hitler was not low conscientiousness he was you know fastidious organized drop dr. Lao so we are going to get him back on the line and then have him call in I haven't got back on the line but we were talking about the we were talking about the Stalin Hitler hmm so let's just wait just a second for dr. Lisle so our next question after we answer this one is going to be about dog people and cat people so we really want to answer a couple more questions than will be done with the show in just a second so let's give us just a second here I really enjoyed this topic dr. Lisle and I I've been talking about how to make this show more fun and so far we've stumbled upon these really fun fun little questions here in articles so let's just one second here hi this is dr. Doug Lyall I'm not available right now but if you leave me your name and phone number I'll get back to you quickly as possible shit I'm dr. Mac doctor come okay thanks okay everything about Ellen yes so anyway the point is is that the that what you're seeing there is a very bad combination that it will obviously lead a bunch of followers over the cliff which is narcissism and what narcissism is effectively is extremely disagreeable personalities and so god forbid a narcissist has some conscientiousness in them and they have some intelligence and if they have those characteristics and God forbid they're also outgoing enough that they can actually reach out and impact people in their their outgoing going up and this they can get following and then that following can be you know big troubles so I thought he a few years ago and I saw it again the other night I think it's called conspiracy or the conspiracy and it's about the the final solution and not to Germany it's just beautifully beautifully done and it's the story based on actual notes up in in this meeting that all these notes were supposed to been destroyed but one copy of these notes survived so it's the the transcript acted out of the meeting with all the these narcissistic met cases in Nazi Germany that it was the day that they were basically explaining to the group that they were going to execute the Jews in gas chambers now you know it's not this isn't like this isn't like fun Friday night at the movies but if you're interested what I what I like about it is it's um is the fact that we are looking at the real transcripts we're actually looking at the dialogue that took place in that in that room and we can listen to how it is that these people are arguing their various effectives and one of the things that will come out in this as you see it acted out is this there's a but it was well done by the actors and it's obviously constrained by the dialogue that actually took place what you're seeing is narcissism you're seeing an extraordinary narcissism Narcis can can be conscientious enough and have perfectly fine feelings towards the end group and they could love their children and so on and so forth this is this is not going to be characteristic of a sociopath the but a narcissist of it is a ninety five five traitor and believe that that the world is unbelievably unfair to their in-group and that therefore the out-group deserves no consideration whatsoever and that you know that jumps out jumps out at you in watching this and it's a it's a one one heck of a history lesson alright so that's good enough for that let's go on to the next one all right next questions about dog and cat people hmm so dear doctor while in my circle of friends it seems to me that those who identify as dog people are skewed on the disagreeable side of the bell curve while cat people are heavily skewed on the agreeable side of the bell curve dogs tending to be on the agreeable side so they love unconditionally are probably best paired with the disagreeable person whereas cats are well known for their disagreeable nature and all of the dog people in my life can understand why I put up with my cats they shudder in the worm at the plot of sharing life with the ghastly disagreeable cat so I'm skiing on the very agreeable side of the spectrum and sometimes don't identify disagreeable people quickly enough so is there any truth to what I'm saying about this cat and dog person comparison or is it simply a gross generalization actually it's an interesting one and I'm not sure the truth I think the better it I don't think it's agreeable disagreeable I think it's a more introversion extroversion so I think there's a correlation coefficient that dog people are more extroverted and cat people are more introvert like leave that that's true but I I being a cat person completely agree with everything this person said no I actually a dog person by the way - is oh I understand sort of it's a beautiful it's a beautiful sort of a storyline but I don't think that that's true I think that story is one of introversion extroversion that's what I think okay somebody else somebody can write to us until tell us whether or not I'm right about that but that that I believe I've read that sometime in the last couple of years I think that that's I think to the extent that there is obviously whether you have a dog or a cat is not a it's not a perfect score but there looks to be a correlation there and that that correlation you know it makes some sense to me but that would might be true just in my eyeball estimate of people fantastic all right I got a caller on the line so ah we're gonna we're going to welcome a caller caller what's your name welcome to the show oh hey my name is Jerry Jerry welcome the show you're on with Natan dr. Lyle hey Mead and dr. Lyle I spin that you're MOT your martial arts title and if we were sparring I would freaking break your kneecaps bro I but what are you guys talking about on your martial arts on subject here I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about Jerry none I don't I don't recall us talking about martial arts oh I guess we lost Jerry there's something with the call oh well yeah not not sure Jerry wandered off wandered into the wrong room at the at the the mall yes fair enough oh all right all right doctor well I think I'll suit you have a good help okay sounds good why not we're gonna wait till next week it's a long question so we'll wait till next week to answer yes yeah folks yeah I saw a couple question here as just freedom tonight looks like some of them are pretty long detailed and so if you didn't get your questions answered tonight we are working on them we try to feather them in to where it is that it makes sense it fits fantastic well dr. Lyle have a great night thank you everybody again and we'll talk to you next week
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