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Episode 71: Hard-wired Nature vs Nurture
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all right dr. Lyle how's it going today good good good hear your voice again Nate oh thanks yeah another day another week another year today is the longest day of the year June 21st and I think I think the summer is upon us this is where the Sun sets pretty late for us yes absolutely you get your very hot down there in Los Angeles yeah you know Southern California has two to two main seasons warm and warmer and that's it you've officially started warmer yeah I used to meet people from you know Midwest and other places and they were always just jealous how we only have to see how we only have two seasons yeah but but my times before seasons can be helpful now my dad I grew up in Southern California and my dad who was a real estate guy would rub his hands together whenever the Rose Bowl was on and it was you know 72 degrees on January 1st he'd be like good good more people more people are going to move in and that is certainly what has happened no doubt yeah all right well we've got a couple of articles today I was reading a couple of different things on Facebook and and the news and I came across an article from The Guardian so obviously we know we all know where that it's gone but the Guardian they had an article it says that there's reporting on a study that found the following that older men tend to have quote geekier sons who are more aloof have higher IQs and more intense focus on their interests than those born to younger fathers so they did a study with about a little less than 8,000 British twins and they see a horde according to their nonverbal IQ at 12 years old and then parents reported also how focused and socially aloof they were then they combined this in what they called a geek index remember and they found that children born to older fathers tended to score higher on this index so for example if the father was 25 years old or the average score was 39 a few is 35 to 44 the score was 41 and then if you use over 50 the score was 47 so the study's author said that this is the first studies suggest that having older father can have benefits for a child but it takes that inference yeah I'm gonna have write is interesting because I said oh you know maybe it's that that more aloof more socially aloof fathers tend to just have kids later on life because they're just not a success yeah the but they found that 57% of this geek index score is inherited that was likely going to vary with rage and it suggests that DNA and the environment have roughly equal Sharon howdy key quote someone turns out and of course the final statement from the study author she said the following certain men who delay fatherhood tend to be better educated and have better jobs and a higher geek index and so they passed on genetics into the offspring yeah by the way other than that later on but other factors might contribute to oh my god that's hilarious so this is this is great because this is an example of a yeah they finally got their act together they clearly this is obvious what's happening here so what's happening is obviously geekier less socially skilled men are clearly and they're smarter so they're taking their time amassing some resources finally they get laid you know what I mean starting at about age 40 which is certainly reminiscent in my oh good good I have eight years left so finally they might start to get a little bit of action and so finally somebody says all right all right house looks good enough car looks good enough tension looks good enough and you don't look like you're completely falling apart and you look like you've got some security okay maybe so then they finally get lucky and they have a kid and that kid turns out to be remarkably haha we started the whole game all over again with the next generation so this is obviously what's happening and I think it's hilarious that they say that 57 percent is inherited and 43 percent is what they call it learned or environment this is not true they're they're misinterpreting their data 53 percent of it is directly attributable to genes 43 percent is not attributable to anything okay so this is the this is the classic mistake that that has gone in the reading of the literature in behavior genetics since the 1980s when a diligent and his crew and Robert Plomin and guys like this figured out that the genes were dominating the show and so because the genes going to count for somewhere around half of the measurable variants the other half is unexplained and so what happens is that the social development researchers are quick to say oh well in the other half the environment it's like well not exactly sports fans the other half is unexplained and so when they go into trying to study environmental influence to try to look for any systematic impact of the environment they don't find anything okay so that they might find I don't know one or two percent of the variance might be associated with birth order that's about that's about where that stacks up there is no other there's no imitative function that's involved so the kids don't become geeky by watching their geeky fathers it turns out if you were to look at look at this and you put them in with the you had them adopted into homes with cool young fathers they would be just as Nikki by being adopted with cool young fathers as as they were being raised by their geeky 50 year old fathers now so the question is where does the other 50% of the variance comes from the other 50% of the variance is unexplained variance and Steven Pinker in the blank slate argues that a great deal of the unexplained variance probably has to do with random factors taking place in utero so if you have two identical twins and you know their genes are identical that the when you look at them 3040 years later you're going to explain 50 or 60 percent of the variants in their behavior straight by the genes in other words they're very similar people but they're not identical people when it comes to personality measurements and/or IQ they're very close but they're not identical and the reason has always been the social developmental people say see half of the variance is the environment yes but probably a great deal of the quote environment in fact probably of the remaining 50% of the variance to be explained it's very quite likely at least half of it has to do with variances of the of the biological ecology or the chemical ecology of the uterus and which kid was sitting on the left of the uterus and which kid was sitting on the right and so these are these are variances that have obviously nothing to do with the concept of the quote environment that the social development people are trying to sell as explaining quote half of the variance in the equation so this is a this is once again a study that at least for a rare study - we're now starting to see that a study like this at least somebody is considering the genes I have to tell you when I was in school and thereafter in the 1980s 1990s and in the 2000s people would continue to do social development studies of this kind and then what finds its way to the press and even out of the discussions is oh see older dad's or geekier so they're you you heard what they said there's some benefit to having your kids sooner it's like really if you completely missed what the evidence just told us in Korea so obviously this is a this is a beautiful study in behavior genetics and we can see the pathway of exactly how this outcome transpired so fantastic steady Natan I'm glad you brought our attention to it good good stuff cool yeah it seems like they were grasping at straws trying to justify their position which is that oh at least environments got something to do with it right first 100 weirdo for environment then it was 18 no it's 5050 so yes it's 50/50 that we can't really defend but we can sort a half-ounce defend it so yeah that's exactly right mm-hmm okay I'm not going to yeah what else we have another cool study so some evidence in the evolutionary psychology journals suggest that a lot of physical behavioral and trait qualities they can actually be detected just by the sound of a person's voice regardless of what they're saying and so this particular study I just came out a couple months ago they examined whether people could accurately assess the likelihood that a person has cheated on committed romantic partners simply by hearing the speaker's voice so they rented they heard voice samples they self-reported that they either cheated or had never cheated and they controlled for the aspects that might clue a person to the speaker's made value by making sure they were same for voice of track notes for age for voice pitch and other acoustic things and they found that yes indeed participants who rated the voices of those who had a history of cheating were more likely to cheat had been more likely to be the ones who were cheating and so this was really cool because regardless of pitch bed Malaysian they were able to assess accurately the history of the infidelity now the only exception was that the men's accuracy decreased when judging women whose voices were lowered maybe that's why when girls go to the bathroom all together they hushed their voices you know because every listener this is actually really interesting and so yeah you could send me a link to this thing this is a so I want I want to see what they controlled for and how they did it but this is so I'm wondering what it is that they're finding they're in it it it sounds to me like it is what they're saying is that they can tell that essentially they almost the sec personality or the sexiness of the people and then that is that what they think is related to whether or not they're cheating or do we think that we're picking up acoustical evidence of conscientiousness or openness to us what they were trying to pick up is beyond that that that statistically people who are more extroverted are more likely to engage in fidelity same thing with low conscientious and high agreeable I mean a low diable so they were just got these cues yes very good bad they controlled by the sexiness of the voice good he controlled for the sexiness but then they were taking up a cubical of disagreeable conscientiousness and and the other one was extra wet openness extra extraversion yeah actually this goes along the lines of I think you I've said this before and other times that we there is a suspicion that that you know obviously there's tremendous benefits to being an extrovert of which I I have gotten none not as singles as benefit because I'm very introverted however what's interesting is that we we think that the reason or an important reason why there may be a bell curve about which we still have you know relatively introverted people relative I mean only relative to humans humans are very very social but the reason why there may be a bell curve around introversion extroversion is that the extroverts success may being being checked by a coevolution of venereal disease and so this this study is actually consistent with that so extroverts that are more likely to engage in extra pair copulations would have been also more likely to ultimately be yielded as as infertile by venereal disease so this could have been the reason could have checked human beings in the same way that ecological forces have checked humans in many ways they're going to check the your physical size and strength and etc etcetera so even though it's useful for males to get big and strong we find out that as we saw earlier in a study that you talk to us about earlier in last year Nate that as men get extremely big and strong they are less physically attracted to females which is fascinating in other words they get they literally are showing too much size and strength and at that point for whatever reasons the females rate them is less attractive so there is a sweetheart out there are clunkers yeah they don't want to look their daughters to look like football players and so as a that's probably what's taking place there and so and also just that much testosterone way out over the line probably indicates is probably going to drive a high degree of dissagree ability impulsivity dangerousness and also low fidelity so it also essentially insisting on their way in the relationship so there's there's costs associated with this and so this is an example of that there is a that there's a sweet spot for optimizing characteristic and the sweet spot for males is you know six-foot 180 pounds you know that whatever that is right right in that range add you know mesomorphic solid mesomorphic and for the and four personality characteristics this sweet spot is going to be on the you know open and relaxed and confident emotionally stable and in the middle of the road for introversion extroversion and so so but it is interesting that we're picking up the characteristic that we would think that we would pick up which is that extroverts are sleeping around more often and therefore we would in principle expect that if that were true if you really think about this from a mathematical you know population genetics aspect if that is true which it appears that it is true you would then expect it to be the case that extroverts would would be you know that the species would drift consents consistently be drifting towards an increasingly extroverted species and I don't know that that's true but it's probably not true and so if you're if it is not true then that means it is hit in equilibrium because there's a selection pressure the other direction and the selection pressure the other direction is very likely to have been venereal disease so there we have it great great little study nice little fascinating little piece of evolutionary psychology great stuff thank you for bringing that to our attention yeah and it's interesting because it also falls in line with something that you we've discussed on the show earlier which is that men are more anxious about women cheating because of the the paternal investment the turned out the other surveys men reported women as being more cheap more women reported men as being more likely to cheat than the other way around even though it wasn't necessarily true mm-hmm interesting so yeah all right all right okay so we've got a couple of questions from our listeners as usual and we're going to try to get to as many as we can and if we don't get to them we will get to them another show okay so first number one from our listener are women on average more emotional than men and if so what's the evolutionary reason for this I said it's a very good question and I actually don't know the answer to it dear the in principle on the face of it I wouldn't expect that to be true however there are reasons to expect that it may be true and and then there are reasons behind that where it would be evolutionarily plausible for it to be true so someone may know I have just never come across research or that question attack from the standpoint of an evolutionary theorist but it may have been so I just haven't seen it now the issue of women being more emotional the the strongest argument from the standpoint of any kind of data that I can recall was a a clinical psychologist actually academic by the name of Susan Nolan hooks Emma was writing in the 1980s I think she got her PhD at the University of Pennsylvania and so she was she was she was writing along the lines of a of a more cognitively oriented theory and she was very interested in depression and the University of Pennsylvania is a hotbed of of research and theory on cognitive behavioral treatments for depression so she was sort of trained out of that out of that group that you know Aaron Beck was the Godfather of cognitive therapy and so that Pennsylvania has been influenced under the umbrella of that that thinking so Nolan hooks Seema then wrote about this and one of her one of her findings that she was reporting was the women were a lot more depressed than men and as I recall I think her reports were that women were twice as often to be diagnosed as depressed etc now I I was very surprised by this and I wasn't even thinking about this in evolutionary terms at the time but I remember my BS meter went off in my head I was in grad school and I thought that that just doesn't make any sense to me that that would be true and in retrospect I have a number of questions about this one of them could be the case said that remember that women are very often in positions of in dominance hierarchies in general women are going to be often lower in the dominance hierarchy than a male or at least in a situation where they are essentially on they're in much more what looks like a parent-child relationship to some degree they're in often positions of weakness and this is this is for one reason just size and strength differences and another issue is going the differences in the relative investments that they have an offspring so males can defect and will defect more often out of relationships so this is going to put females in a relative position of weakness oftentimes now it's it wouldn't surprise me if a if a defense against that position could be greater expression of essentially childlike expressions that would be then more resulting in potentially paternalistic altruistic instincts in the male that might be in a relationship with them so let me let me give you an example of where it is that I think we would see this would be true so think about a woman in a conflict with her boss and who do you think is more likely to cry in the boss's office in order to be able to get home and you know deal with her kids or to deal with the she's so upset with Suzy over an accounting and etc who is more likely to cries at the female or is it a male that's going to go cry to his male boss okay so I think we know what the answer to this is and so the question would be why would we see this behavior a crying behavior so much more often so much more obviously publicly in a female than a male and the answer would be that it would be a that it would be essentially in negotiating and manipulative tactic and it would be a tactic that would be consistent with being in a subservient position and therefore attempting to activate in order to fight back from the subservient position to try to get a more fair or equitable outcome it would make sense to try to activate paternalistic and therefore altruistic or parental istic cues in other words try to act to activate those mechanisms in the person on the other side of the table so in this case it could be the case that women with respective expressions of these emotions it might make sense that women would be more more expressive than males males it could be it could be more evolutionarily costly to actually display these kinds of things because it would indicate weakness in a weakness that might cost them in terms of sexual selection so I can definitely see how the expression of emotion and therefore the feelings of emotion particularly these types of emotions frustration depression etc could could be quite different between males and females the expressions of emotions generally may may be less differentiated so laughter smiling happiness etc these these might be significantly different I mean they may not be nearly as different but it is it is possible that it appears to be the case that when males when photographs are taken of males for on match.com like sites it turns out that males are judged more attractively if they are not smiling now this is very interesting this this indicates god forbid any pictures I've ever had on there were smiling just like the goofy friendly beta male that I am exactly what has always gone on alright so but my key index is higher than your geek index so how we measure things now that's how we measure things now that's our that's our that's our only hope to compete on that index now the I think that so anyway it is interesting that females find males who are not smiling you know as attractive and so it wouldn't surprise us then if the expression on who knows what is going on inside the nervous systems and how intensively the nervous systems are activating you know feeling systems etc but short of that we can we can we can at least measure the expression of the notion and and even potentially for example the the variance in in voice tone and how expressive and dynamic voice tone is to indicate how how emotional people are under different conditions and it would not surprise me if there if there's a difference on average between males and females between these various dynamics so in other words some of these things have been observed but I don't I don't know of a coherent discussion about male and female emotionality differences by an evolutionary psychologist somebody may be able to boot it up online and find one I've just never seen it but that that would be my thinking at this point I think males are probably more likely to be less reactive not laughing as easily uie not given up the status to somebody else as easily and more have a little bit more of a cold and a less reactive or less dynamic emotional state and certainly less likely to to display evidences of frustration through through crying and therefore submissive behavior fascinating and so you're saying that that emotional stability is that there's no genetic component is in essence or women you know less less stable than men are or vice versa right I'm saying I don't know and I don't know emotional stability to mention I don't know if there's differences in males and females that's what this question really is and I think that what we may find is that we have to get inside and talk about specific emotions and so it may be more finely grained than just emotionality in general it may be specific specific emotions maybe maybe have been sexually selected for greater or lesser reactivity mm-hmm well next time someone's speeding and you get pulled over by a police officer we'll see who gets out of the ticket yeah yeah it won't yeah the the crying not going to be me better no you and I crying and going to get it done alright let's go on okay our next question our beliefs like religion and politics hardwired by our evolutionary past and if not can our beliefs become hard wires into our brains okay first of all know your beliefs cannot become hardwired into your brains in fact the concept of hardwiring is kind of a funny concept in general the hard wiring just do just to actually explain this in a certain amount of depth so that we all can be confident that we actually understand the underlying principles that are there being questions here or you know so that in other discussions of hardwiring you actually have a clear conceptualization of what on earth we're really talking about the if you I want you to think about I think about sort of three you've got a piece of paper and in you're going to have three columns and in the very middle column we're just going to have one thing we're going to call that G and that's going to be the gene and the gene will build a specific that's a gene for something so let's suppose let's suppose that in principle this is the gene for how light or dark your skin is okay so then on the left column what we're going to do is we're going to call that environmental variance so we're going to label that for e 1 down to e 10 okay so e e 1 e 2 e 3 45 down to e 10 those are going to be demarcations of 10 different levels of the amount of sunshine that a person is going to get on a day okay and then on the so 10 will be the massive you live at the equator you're up at dawn you're out there naked all day long okay and you never stand under a tree in other words you get the maximum amount of sunlight possible for a human being on your skin so that would be eat anyone is you live in a cave and all you have is 25 watt light bulb and they shove food under your door okay you never see the Sun that's a one so then there's everything else in between so those those different we're going to say ten different levels are are impacting or those are environmental inputs that are hitting the genetic code they're hitting the genes that are sitting inside the skin skilled skin cells now the then what we're going to see is we're going to have a row on the right and the row on the right is going to be what we're going to call phenotype one through ten another words that's the outcome I'm just using a fancy word phenotype in other words a genotype that's your genes that's the genetic code phenotype is what you actually see so your genotype is sitting inside your genetic code inside your cells your phenotype is you that's the whole person with ears and eyes and tongue and teeth and all that kind of stuff those are phenotypes and genotypes is the genetic code itself so the phenotypes one through ten in this case is going to be what happens at each level of environmental input to the output that we're seeing so we have an e1 hits the gene and what do we wind up with we wind up with phenotype one which is the skin that that person would have we go to e2 which is the first the first level of real life Sun that hits the gene we get phenotype two now we see what that person's skin like looks like under those conditions and all the way down okay so the concept of okay so now we see the concept of this is this is the concept of what we call reaction range in genetics so we're seeing how how wide is the reaction range of this particular gene so in this in a particular gene of a typical person for their skin there if you're if you're an anglo-saxon you have fairly wide you know dynamics of let's suppose you're an anglo-saxon but you have you know a grandmother that is from Guatemala so you got a little more pigment in the skin so now it's going to turn out you may have file fairly high reaction ranges in other words from Pete from phenotype 1 to phenotype 10 you might be able to get pretty dark dark whereas if it turns out that you didn't have a grandmother from Guatemala which all of your all of your ancestors came from the north of Scotland it could be denied on how much Sun you get you're still going you're going to be either white or pink and nothing in between okay so this is going to be what we call the reaction range of the phenotype on you know how dynamic the jeans action can get now the concept now we are going to move that very same concept but we're going to move it into neuroscience so we're going to look at neurons and in particular we're going to be look at people thinking okay so we're going to say well is something hardwired okay is your personality hardwired is your religious beliefs hardwired is this about hardwired what are we talking about here what we're talking about is what is the reaction range of the phenotype given a diversity of environmental inputs that's what we're talking about so in the case of for example eye color the reaction range is extremely narrow in other words I guess some people's eyes do change color may be dependent upon environmental inputs I don't know if the environmental inputs have anything to do with it but most of us your eye color doesn't change much and so the reaction range of eye color in general is unbelievably narrow okay so that's how that works the reaction range of IQ dependent upon what inputs come in from the environment is very small so you're really not going to influence somebody's quote general intelligence very much at all doesn't matter if you have Baby Einstein hanging over their crib doesn't make any difference your you will have essentially no impact on children's IQ dependent upon what what sets of experiences you give them now so now the question is what about something like religion or some other so you can see now so the question is would a gene Jeane be set up for a belief system that it would say well given a certain amount of environmental inputs can it be the case that I have a belief about something that that the phenotypic outcome is not is not variable in other words it's not going to it's not dynamic and it can't change with new inputs now the answer is no you can always change your mind okay the mind has the ability to change its thinking depending upon the evidence and also depending upon the cost-benefit analysis this related to the inferences that are involved and I'm going to explain that in a minute so let's look at things like I guess the question was what religion and politics and things like that now typically if we looked at something like politics that would be a good example and religion is also a good example that the things that are going to cause people to believe the things that they believe is going to be first of all they're going to be making they're going to be thinking through and trying to figure out the truth so they have in their brains the ability to try to integrate data according to the law of non-contradiction and so they're going to be trying to think these things through and make sense and they'll come up with something you know somebody will give them an explanation and their brain will attempt to integrate that information and it may or may not find contradictions in that analysis and it will seem it let's suppose it seems reasonable now the thing is is that is this the explanation as to why people believe what they believe well partially this is true in other words they're making inferences that make sense to them however it's also going to be the case with respect to certain of these things they're they're genetically laid in personalities are going to cause them to have different types of opinions of things that make sense so you can imagine for example that if you are if you are low conscientiousness then you might be more more apt to be have less you've got a little less interest in and conservative political philosophy because the notion is here that low conscientiousness would just assume have other people kind of cover for them in a social welfare kind of a situation so we should expect to find that in general people that are going to be more conservative are going to score higher on conscientiousness scores generally and that is generally true okay incidentally for all my liberal friends out there this means nothing about you see sir these are population statistics that we're talking about we're trying to try to see how it is the people wind up thinking what they think now it's also going to be the case that people are going to for example we know that children but with 13 out of 14 children believe in the religion that their parents believe so this clearly is telling us that environmental impact is having a tremendous influence on the outcome so this really talk about something that doesn't look hardwired we're looking at wow you know the ecological circumstances are having a big influence here now what are we seeing we're seeing that people are are learning about a bunch of complex information and theory about how things ought to be and how things came to be from people that they really trusted and that they had no reason to believe we're trying to pull the wool over their eyes we're trying to essentially you know feed them anything that wasn't true and so it's going to turn out that as they grow up and they listen to other religious perspectives those are other religious perspectives do not answer the questions that that may come up to them in terms of sniffing contradictions in their own religious upbringing those other answers aren't any better and so therefore they don't jettison them now there's also something else that's going on and that is that people the brain is not necessarily designed simply to try to figure out the truth through making inferences integrating data according to law of non-contradiction it is the brain's ultimate purpose is survival and reproduction it is not actually true seeking the truth it seeks the truth usually in an almost all circumstances because the truth is true and therefore the truth is the identification of the relationship of the person between themselves in reality and therefore if you're going to predict and control outcomes in reality you are going to want to know what the truth is so therefore the brain is largely wired to seek the truth and it is wired to actually be uncomfortable and unhappy with situations where it doesn't quite fit and it causes cognitive dissonance in the system however ultimately once again the brains job is not to figure out the truth the brains job is to try to figure out how to survive and reproduce and so it's going to turn out that the main the main conduit of resources that people need in order to survive and reproduce are not them visa vie physical reality it's the them visa vie to psychological realities of other human beings so because most of our cost-benefit analysis about most of the variances in our resource management decisions about survival and reproduction have to do with other people and our relationship to other people it's going to turn out that if other people have a wacky idea then it's going to be in the brains best interest to believe in the wacky idea if it gets you laid ok and if it gets you knocks it out of the group so it's going to turn out this is now going to help us understand why 13 out of 14 kids believe what their parents believe it's going to turn out that the brain is going to scan the situation and it may sniff all kinds of contradictions in the story of how the earth came to be and you know why we're all here and what we're doing and you know what God said and all this sort of jazz so in other words it it may you know particularly a smart person may start sniffing contradictions that it doesn't that it didn't like the feel of however brains decided by nature to run a cost-benefit analysis on what it is that we should be believing if that's going to optimize our survival reproductive success and it may very well come up with the right answer of the quote right thing to believe is going to be to believe what everybody else believes okay so this is not hardwired what's hardwired is or what it would is not variant in the system is the fact that the system is designed by nature to optimize survival and reproductive success that means it's going to be flexible about what it believes to be true depending upon what other people in the environment believe to be true and so this is this is now explaining where human beings are flexible with respect to their beliefs and why they will demonstrate a remarkable in flexibility even in the face of extraordinary evidence that that basically would contradict their position so the question or that asked you know are these beliefs hardwired or they become hardware the answer is no they don't but they sit under ecological constraints their personal ecological circumstances will drive stability even in the face of tremendous evidence that there that position should be jettisoned logically so that that is why it could look hardwired but it is not if suddenly all the the women in the church that you're trying to get laid in suddenly become atheists the the bright person who is suspecting maybe he didn't quite believe in this whole thing might have an epiphany okay so this is uh so in principle that that's how the brain actually works around these issues I guess that's how astrology got invented as well sure and his main aim I have to tell you yeah my belief in astrology is a direct correlation of how attractive the female is on this is I'll ask ya our last question for this evening this has to do with jeffrey miller's book called spent and it talks about the personality characteristics he called them central six you call them the big five plus one saw the same but he says in his book dear dr. Lila Jeffrey Miller says in his book that in the developed world emotional stability predicts overall life satisfaction more strongly than does income or any of the other personality characteristics and so this listener is asking dear dr. Lisle I fall into the lower than average group for stability and I was wondering if you could recommend any strategies to beat the genes in this scenario I recognize that we are somewhat range-bound in just how much we can change I currently minimize dietary stimulants like caffeine trigger foods like sugar and presses junk and depressants like alcohol are there any other effective strategies I've been quite resistant to learning more about meditating but if it really does work I'm willing to give it a shot but if there's other ways that would be preferable good question very good question alright so first of all we're going to we're going to go back to the the we're going to look at an underlying an unchallenged inference that is sitting inside the question and is sitting inside of miller's commentary now first of all I don't know that Miller's commentary is correct so I don't believe that any finding that he's quoting there is very robust so I don't think it's likely to be true that income predicting outcomes versus muscle stability is that I doubt that it is the case that emotional stability is a better predictor than income of life satisfaction so I would question that and I actually I have reason to believe that that Miller is probably essentially he could be not quite fairly presenting that evidence because the entire book spent wines wines up towards a point the Miller is trying to make and so he essentially is trying to say that money shouldn't be such a big deal we should not have the current world based on a dumb integrity of financial success and therefore everybody ought to be be displaying in different fashion other than income now I am I am enormous ly respectful of Jeffrey Miller I believe he's he is a brilliant mind he's not he's not just smart he's he's really special but that doesn't mean that I can't disagree with him and that there aren't times when his own his own biases in his own put to possible issues or zone just perspective can get him wandering off into the weeds and so in this case we're not going to take the bait so first of all I would say that as a clinical psychologist the most important thing that you need to be thinking about with respect to your life satisfaction has nothing to do with your personality it has to do is success you're designed by nature to have your moods shifting in terms of your moods are dynamic and your happiness is a dynamic process and it is dependent upon cues that are coming either from your internal audience watching your efforts or from outside people actually giving you feedback about whether or not your you are competitive with respect to your competitors in terms of trying to secure and maintain relationships across work love and human relationships that you find valuable and so what counts is success that's what you need to be focusing on so income is one factor when it comes to professional success it's not the only factor hitmen are quite successful the there so are there there are doctors that defraud Medicare they have high incomes I wouldn't expect these people to be particularly happy in other words their income is not the only variable the the tagline on my website is happiness results from earning esteem in the right way from the people that matter okay and that is where we want to keep our focus so I'm not going to so for example don't don't don't take the bait from spent that basically says don't bother in achieving financial success what you ought to do is try to learn to play the fiddle and there and paint and then people will think you're cool and that's a better way to display your load gene mutation load unfortunately the world isn't buying it and so income is a very significant and very reasonable way for people to be attempting to display their genetic fitness it isn't the only way and it isn't the only way that people look and I would agree with Miller that it can be a better life to expanding your range of displays out you know learn to shoot a bow and arrow play it play the fiddle play basketball with your friends you know I don't know become a makeup guru and have your friends come over and show them how to do things there's all there's other ways other than just save up all your money and try to big a big house and wow everybody with how many square feet you have there of course I understand the point that he's making but from my standpoint don't bother trying to worry about the personality variables that you bring to the table other than the traps that we will talk about here that if you're highly agreeable you know we've got some work to do if you're highly open we got things to watch out for etc if you're if you're a highly disagreeable etc there are if you're highly introverted there's things that you could probably do that it would be smart to make sure that you don't have your range of social you know is too narrow in the modern world because you don't belong to a village that's pulling you into the dancing circle and so there's things to look out for but at the end of the day we we can look at the problems the three major three major problems that we all face and that is the competitive feedback that we receive from potential or existing mates potential or existing friends or potential or existing employers or clients our happiness is going to be determined by how well we we are prepared and ready to display our value proposition to those three classes of individuals if we are unhappy it is likely that we are suffering from some negative feedback in those domains and those domains need attention and then they need some essentially analysis and an expenditure of energy in an intelligent fashion so that we can get better feedback okay our outcomes of our lives in fact he may or may not have said this in his book and he probably didn't but the number one predictor of human happiness is how happy you are in your primary romantic relationship that is a fact as human life okay and so that doesn't mean that you can have a good life without a mate but it but it does tell us what sits at the core of human beings and that that is the fundamental thing that sits at our core as a as an animal that reproduces sexually you would expect and it's a para bond you know largely pair bond oriented animal we would expect that the recurrent esteem dynamic that would take place between us and somebody that we are very proud and happy to be with should be the the number one predictor and it is so it would also then secondarily be a very high predictor of are you ready to meet that person do you look good enough is your bank account good enough is your hair good enough is your car good enough you know are you are you well-read enough and are you seasoned enough and have you had enough experience and screwing up are you ready okay that if you are ready whether or not you ever win the that readiness and a sense from your own internal audience that you're ready that is a very important influence on your happiness state and so we focus on those those essentially competitive problems rather than worrying about trying to move around our our stability as a personality factor fascinating this is great thank you very much doctor well we actually we have a caller that's call that just called it in the middle of this so let's see what they have to say caller how you doing what's your name Emily from Amy I'm calling from Sherman Oaks California and I got my first time calling in so are we allowed to ask a question that isn't on tonight's topic like if it's something we heard in another episode because I don't know what your rules are absolutely sure yeah here's the deal what's your name AJ 8'o AJ go ahead AJ go ahead and give us a question and I can I'll try to answer it quickly give it a shot okay right because because I literally just started listening to you guys two weeks ago because no one told me you had a podcast so I've done 35 episodes in two weeks and those are a lot of them are about women and being overweight and how you know things like that and how men don't like overweight women so my first question is if nobody was overweight in the Stone Age how do you account for Fred Flintstone because he is quite overweight but that's not my real question it's a great question but but but my real question is is now more people are overweight and obese than not and so somebody's marrying all these overweight women and if men really prefer thin women how do you account for certain cultures that seem to prefer heavier women or certain like like celebrities like Kim Kardashian or Ashley Graham the plus-size model how do you account for their popularity if men really just wants in women when there's so few thin women left well first of all okay so first of all we have to understand a number of things first of all the people can't always get what they want so so as a result an awful lot of men are with an awful lot of women that they would prefer to not be with but it's the best they could get ok so right away we obviously trust me if if the women of the world were what it is that the men of the world would want we know what they those women would look like ok they they would they would look like very thin you know pretty models or they would be very curvy pretty models but that's what they would look like and as and so and now another so now is it you're also going to have on the basis of both cultural and natural genetic variation you're going to have some degree of attractiveness in women that so in other words there's always an there's some outlier men that are very attracted to women that are 5 5 and 250 pounds because this is these are individual differences in genetics but they're rare in other words and we know that they're rare for the following reason and that is we can see that those are uncommon preferences and we can see why it is that they're uncommon because undoubtedly there were many men that fell in love with women that were already pregnant in the Stone Age and they thought there were wonderful people and they had sex with them but they didn't leave as many offspring as the men that were very fussy about that and we're looking at those women's waste lines like like a hawk and if there's women's waste lines were a little too thick in the waist line and they weren't interested those are far more common genes that are built into the men that we see on the earth today so when it comes to the preferences of men and the fact that there's going to be some plus-size models you know people can people going to be overweight and be extremely attractive based on other features but the when we really look at who is starring in in all of these soap operas around the world well they're in India whether they're in Pakistan whether they're in South America or whether they're in North America or England we know what the women look like they all look like they're about five five and about 125 pounds and so more or less you know I've yet to see even though I hear about these supposed cultures where where all the men seem to be attracted really overweight women I want to see a a soap opera that is being shot up in that culture and you show me who the lead female is in all the stores where I've been in where I've been getting my my Pakistani food and they've got the TV on they all look the same to me all the women around the world that are playing the leads and these things all look the same so I think that the the story of the variation there is way over sold and in fact the scientific evidence indicates that the variances between what we find beautiful here and what they find beautiful anywhere else the variances are very small Wow okay okay all right all right good enough AJ you very much for the call we really appreciate it yeah please call again I love the show I love thanks guys thank you so much very cool all right you got it all right dr. Lao we'll have a great week ahead of you this is the first week of summer so enjoy yourself and we will speak with you next week
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