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Episode 74: Millenials
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all right good evening everybody it's Nate G along with dr. Lyle dr. Doug Lyle how you doing dr. Lyle yeah get about yourself I'm pretty good you know it's we are here with the the radio show every week Wednesdays 8:30 p.m. Pacific Standard Time I'm doing fine doing great really love learning about this kind of stuff as I said before I think this should be called revolutionary psychology as well as evolutionary psychology but let's just get right down to the questions we've got a couple of questions today the first one has to do with nurturing and parenting and then the second question has to do with Millennials then we've got one about self-confidence and self-esteem and of course there's any callers that want to call in you're going to go right to the front of the line with your question if you call in the number is six five seven three eight three zero seven five one all right so let's take it away here from the first question here so dear dr. Lyle how important do you think that the nurture element of parenting is in the life outcomes of people for instance mental health wealth happiness and relationships I know you've said before that children are very resilient but as a parent how much of what I do can influence their outcomes maybe through developing close attachments praising effort role modeling behavior and then also what about the other extreme ends what impact do apps and fathers or maternal rejection like through adoption what what factors do what impact does that have many thanks ah good good question the I've talked about this in other at other places the let's uh let's separate out a few different first of all I'm going to go to the heart of what her question is but then I want to make sure that I backtrack and that we talk about the fact that the time that the person spends what their parents is in and itself a important time of life not because of the future but because of its present so if you spend eighteen or twenty years in very close proximity to somebody then that's a very important person tidge of your life and it's a percentage of the happiness or unhappiness and the the essentially the quality of your existence in total is is has to be partially factored by their first 20 years of life so whether or not that first 20 years of life has anything to do with the next 60 years of life is it is an open question and one worth looking at but let's look at what the evidence tells us and then we're going to look at some theories and why white people's intuition about this is so amazingly poor the research evidence indicates that the that you're not going to be shaping these people's personalities basically at all if any at all so the you have tremendous impact on their days then when they're when they are with you but you don't have a tremendous impact on their futures so people have a strong intuition that they are shaping their children's habits their industriousness their intelligence their artistic abilities like you know they're they're good habits for schoolwork etc etc so they have this notion that they're having that it's critical to have a very heavy hand on the tiller as we guide these little individuals into becoming adults and this is going to be a large determining factor in the kids outcome that will not be true the way we know that this is not true is by the monozygotic twin adoption studies that were analyzed at the University of Minnesota in the 1980s so finally after I don't know 6,000 years of recorded history and speculation on this question we finally have a definitive answer so for you if you were to go in the early 20th century and throughout the most of the 20th century the by far the two dominant paradigms of thinking about personality development which is the question of how is that we become individually different from one another the two paradigms were essentially Freudian and neo Freudian thinking which we're going to talk about that in a second and then the other would have been what we're going to call behaviorism or learning theory also can be characterized as what's called the standard social science model so the those two things put together those two things essentially wage their own war in for for most of the 20th century with their being sort of the deep depth psychology psychodynamic folks on in one camp and the sort of more scientifically oriented academically oriented experimentally oriented academic psychologists in the other camp representing learning theory and so hmm okay looks like I'm just going off on this question for a few minutes all right those are dynamic people yeah what nakamoto we do what we want yeah so the psychodynamic model as it was first envisioned by freud had to do with people going through stages of development where they had this energy the libido energy and it's going to the person has to go through certain essentially has to deal with certain crises at certain times of their development so they're going to have to deal with the weaning crisis of getting off the breast they're going to have to learn how to poop they're going to discover their genitals they're going to have to worry about the fact that if they're a little boy somehow they're in conflict with their father over their mother's love these are that's the oedipal conflict so these are in Freud's view if a person didn't satisfactorily resolve this conflict then they wound up with characteristic problems in adulthood associated with not having resolved this conflict now this is turns out to be of course not true at all but tell that to a freudian even today and they would just be stunned to hear that kind of rejection and they would say very confidently how can you know such a thing and the reason why they are unaware that this is incorrect is they're unaware of the monozygotic twin adoption data so I'm the same then and slightly more intellectually aware here is the people from learning theory now the learning theorists were extremely confident that human beings became what they became individually different from one another based on what we're going to call their learning history or their reinforcement or punishment history and this was first clearly and emphatically stated by the American behaviorist John Watson in 1913 in a famous paper one of the most cited papers in the history of psychology it's called psychology as a behaviorist music and it essentially tells the story of that we're not really interested in this psychodynamic mumbo-jumbo in effect what we want to know is the organisms learning history we want to know what what has been the circumstances or the environmental inputs on the organism because that will tell us why the organism behaves the way it does now this was sensible Freud's view was very creative and interesting and he had a he had a reason for sort of believing some of the things that he believed but the the learning model was much more Academical it was fundamentally based on the the classical conditioning discoveries of Ian Pavlov who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or medicine in 1905 so Pavlov definitely demonstrated that the brain will let let us say that at the end of Pavlov's experiments a great many psychologists including those who would become dominant in academic psychology believe that the brain was an association device and so fifty years later a famous psychologist by the name of Donald Hebb would would would quote the famous quote that neurons that fire together wire together in other words which is essentially what Pavlov was demonstrating with classical conditioning that if you present food to a dog and ring a bell at the same time and you keep doing that that sooner or later you can ring the bell and the dog will salivate just as it would salivate when you put the food in front of it and so ie neurons that fire together wire together so you're able to wire the the ringing of the Bell together with an unconditioned reflex which salivation because you're presenting it with food which naturally activates the salivation so this so this becomes you know very confidently the behavior is smart forward they get a further boost from the work of BF Skinner who who extends Pavlovian conditioning to another another important consideration of the way that creatures learn which is going to be what we call operant conditioning which is that when you when you do something let's suppose you raise your hand in class and then the teacher calls on you and your answer and she says oh that was fantastic so now you've been what we call reinforced or if you are a a chicken in a cage and you flutter your left wing and then suddenly a little light goes on that you've learned there's food if you Peck that light then you're going to flutter your little left foot feather again sooner than you otherwise would have and so this means that you do things and then there are consequences good or bad depend upon what you've done now you see how this is fundamentally different from table when Pavlov the dog didn't do anything it's sitting there and we bring the food and now it has an unconditioned reflex that it can't stop itself that it's designed by nature to start to salivate to get ready to deal with the food and now we ring the bell at the same time and the brain fires and wires this together and the organism in other words there are certain conditions upon which the the organism will salivate and if we control those conditions we have quote conditioned the organism okay so this is Pavlov's view Skinner now adds something else which is that we can wait for the organism to do something and then when it does it we either reinforcement reinforce it or punish it either reward it or we punish it and in doing so yes go ahead it's going to sound like I'm trying to make a joke I actually am NOT yeah so ad is the you know the the example you gave with the the chicken you know flap in its wing and then pecking out of the light is that similar to nowadays like someone is doing like a superstition where they're like oh you know I put my wrong sock on before a hockey game and I ended up winning that game so therefore I'm going to put the wrong sock on every game no question in fact this is what BF Skinner he actually called it superstitious behavior so he had believed he had arrived at an explanation as to why you know the Native Americans did rain dances and so this is he's basically saying look this is what it is the they start dancing around and one day they were dancing around in a rant and so now now they're dancing around and they're going to keep dancing around then it rains so they danced and danced and danced until it rains and so as a result of that they're there the system is being rewarded by this behavior and it's being reinforced and a behaviors being reinforced then what's going to happen is the mind like a computer is essentially calculating that it's a good thing to do that in order to get rewards and so it's going to emit or it's going to generate that behavior statistically more often than alternative behaviors and so to to the Urist behaviors says listen if you want to understand why an organism is doing what it's doing what you need to understand is you need to understand its learning history and I can prove to you that the learning history is the variable that is causing the outcome that you're seeing because if I put that animal in a cage and I reinforce it every time it lifts its left feather then I can i I don't know win for sure it's going to let this left feather but I guarantee you in the next 24 hours if we watch it you will lift its left feather farm more times and it's going to lift its right feather and that's because we've reinforced it and then if you want to change it up all I have to do is I have to reinforce it for lifting the right feather and not reinforce it for the left feather and we come back in three days and it will be lifting the right feather and so since this is true by the way and the behaviorist got very good at training animals to do these things they could trade an animal seemingly do just about anything that you can imagine and so as a result of that they said listen if you're trying to understand why one animal of a species is behaving differently than another animal of that species the thing to look for is how it is its behaviors have been reinforced and punished now this is elegant simple reasonable demonstratable at the level of the animals in animal cages so as a result you can imagine that the behaviorists were extremely confident that this was in fact the reason for individual differences in behavior now I'm going to add a few other things to this and that is that when you observe humans you're going to observe two other two other things that are striking number one if you've got a big strong muscular dad out in the yard with a shovel digging up the yard industriously on Saturday morning and you've got two young strapping sons also strong little strong kids and they too are digging up the yard right alongside their dad joyously with their little shovels you look at this and you say ah well they're learning to be industrious little shovelers by watching their dad and you can say well obviously from the time they're tiny kids we see them imitating so they're imitating like crazy and and so human human children have a phenomenal human beings have a tremendous amount of what we're going to call mirror neurons where they can very quickly imitate movements that you will that you will do this is a essentially these are adaptive instincts inside of human beings that we have a genetically coded ability and affinity for copying what other people are doing when we're young and so as a result of this people have observed the extraordinary copying that little children will do and they will also observe as time goes on that the children are are very similar in their characteristics and their behaviors to the parents or sometimes it's stunning how much they're like sometimes they're not so much alike but they very often are alike in fact they are they are more alike those parents and they are like anybody else on their street and not only that they look like their parents more than they look like anybody else on the street or at least the white hope so so at any rate almost like there's a genetic connection right so as a result of this human beings just with their own eyeballs watching these contingencies and also the behaviorists who are just regular old people that are watching watching this imitation and looking at the contingency between fathers and sons and mothers and daughters etc and then they know from the laboratory about just how much phenomenal control they can exert over the pit behavior of laboratory animals by influencing their reinforcement and Punishment history they basically felt like there really wasn't an argument they didn't they didn't consider that there really was any other and then something else they essentially did not consider that there was another argument and the Freudian model which was an oddball model of you know we've got these developmental stages and then there's some kind of conflict with the individual you know intrapsychic conflict and then it's played out with with what we're going to Altima leaked all you know these significant others or what we call object relations which means the the relationship between the individual and these very significant others in their life ie mothers or surrogate mothers or fathers or surrogate father's you know etc that these dynamics that a person might might be you know very neat and orderly because there's mothers very neat and orderly and they want to seek their mother's love and their mother was good to them and they had a good bond or it may turn out that they became unbelievably sloppy in a reaction to the fact that their motherhood was rejecting or whatever the hell in other words the Freudian model could explain anything because if it went opposite to what you would think then they said oh it's a reaction against if it went towards it you'd say oh well that's with it and so it's a very flexible model but essentially it's like it's like the the post Monday morning quarterbacking of an NFL thing like well had we kick the field goal there then you know this or that would happen so this is the so the the scientific community takes one look at the psychodynamic explanation and says forget it guys you don't have a science you don't have any falsifiable hypotheses you don't have a hypothesis that you can tell me what you expect to happen because you're telling me anything could happen you know the kid could be more neat and orderly he could be obedient it goes the other way he could become defiant so you know hey you've got nothing there and they actually called it Jewish science they basically said listen this is Freud and his Jewish buddies and forget it you know we don't believe in this this is bogus there is no scientific observation there is no intent to try to make falsifiable predictions this is not science and the behaviorists went straight forward with their own investigations for decades and I have to tell you that these investigations were very interesting many discoveries were made many many insights in the nature of essentially the way the animal nervous system works in terms of its memory function essentially how many times you have to ring the bell after you don't present the food in order for the the conditioned reflex of salivating to the Bell how long until it goes away so they're plotting on a graph they're plotting extinction curves they're they're plotting learning curves which is a word that is now throughout the language that the concept of the learning curve came from the behaviorists that's who invented that concept and that they plotted those things to show how animals would learn at what speed under different conditions so you can imagine for example how interesting it would be if you're an early behaviorist to say listen what if what if we reinforced that guy and he fluffs his feathers every other time not every time let's see what happens then let's plot the learning curve and see how fast he learns and see how often we get that the left feather fluttering what if it's every third time okay and then BF Skinner one day basically by accident said what if it's random okay what if we reinforce it sometimes and then not others and three times in a row etc etc and so if we do that it turns out if you have what's called a variable interval reinforcement schedule that turns out to be the schedule that has the the slowest extinction curve and this makes sense so an organism that is reinforced every time that you want it to do something then when you stop doing it it catches on the brain says hey wait a second it looks like this contingency is gone if you do it every third time it's going to have a little a little slower extension curve when you stop reinforcing it because it might be thinking about time you hit three and it's expecting reinforcements you might say well something is a little haywire we're going to wait to for something's a little haywire we're going to wait two five you know what we're going to wait two six and it might be until twelve that it finally gives up and quits having the the response but you can imagine if it reinforced on trials one and two and then then not three four or five and then it's reinforced on six and then not reinforced four seven and eight and then it's reinforced nine ten eleven twelve in a row and then it's not reinforced four five in a row the organism is essentially learning there's reinforcements here but we can't predict it so there are four on trial twenty which is the last time that you reinforce it if you then go no reinforcements no reinforcements no reinforcements no reinforcements you might go fifteen trials and you're still getting an effect because that thing is still thinking that it might get reinforced effectively so and and Skinner would say it's not thinking anything doesn't have any conscious designs on what you're up to this is a machine that is effectively trying to model and predict the future and it's got little algorithms in there in it and these algorithms are a little bit different dependent upon what the nature of the reinforcement pattern is that it's saying this makes perfect sense and it's actually quite brilliant and identities are jumbled wait gamm totally it's exactly how bubbling machines are built gambling machines are built with very careful attention to detail about human beings in order to figure out how to optimize or essentially how to reduce the extinction curve for in other words how much money can you take out of their pocket before they quit playing so that's exactly how Las Vegas is built so the so now you you look at the situation and you say okay well how on earth could that not be true so the great scientists of the 20th century in psychology reject the Freudian psychodynamic model it's a none falsifiable set of hypotheses that actually aren't making a lot of sense and there's no there's no fundamental grounding of any observations that are systemic and they go right ahead and forge their way through looking at the brain as this sort of adaptive machine that is looking for payoffs which makes a great deal of sense makes sense to this day and so as a result they find things so they find all kinds of things about how this thing works and they can demonstrate it in a laboratory and they'll tell you listen of course we can't tell you what Harry the rats going to do out there in you know running around your barn because we don't know his reinforcement history but if we did know his reinforcement history we could tell you of course she would be that confident now it turns out they were wrong and there's no way they saw this coming okay so they they were completely caught with their pants down the and and rightfully so I mean this is how this is how science evolves this is how human beings come to know great things about the nature of you know themselves in their universe is that that people keep looking at different angles and looking at alternative hypotheses and then you know one day they started figuring out that they should test them and so that's you know the dawn of science I mean science can essentially be be encapsulated as a set of activities that use systematic observations in in order to to essentially challenge alternative hypotheses and so you're you're trying to figure out at the rig of whether or not you can prove yourself wrong and you know that's that's the highest road of Sciences this is what I think is true let me see as be as imaginative as brilliant as I can to try to set up a set of experiments to try to prove myself wrong and can I prove myself wrong and so my hats off to the the world of twentieth-century psychology in in the academic tradition because they tried to do that now in 1985 they proved themselves wrong so it turns out that if tell Robert Plomin and Sandra's card all these giants of late twentieth-century behavior genetics this was coming on the heels of some very interesting work that had been done earlier the the notion of trying to figure out the question this lady started with which is personality and parenting and how much it matters and all the sort of thing like where do you come from and why are you the way you are and can you influence who your child becomes by how it is that essentially you reinforce and punish and model how to behave so this is this is you know this is a great question and it's an important question and so the so the answer to the question yeah you know there was an alternative hypothesis that wasn't being considered by academic psychology and alternative hypothesis was is the variation that you're looking at between people genetic in origin and I have to tell you folks you know when I when I was doing my undergraduate that wasn't even considered that was not even it was in no textbook that I have any exposure to and then when I was a grad student it still wasn't in any textbook in other words this was just this was not considered at all the I think there was the beginnings of it is that it might be involved genetic variation might be involved in psychopathology so in other words somebody quote might have a bad gene that might cause them to have some very unusual problem ie in in the arena of very disturbing psyche psychiatric dysfunction schizophrenia bipolar disorder major depression obsessive compulsive disorder alcoholism okay these sorts of things people were more biologically oriented psychologists were were looking at this and they were starting to sniff around and starting to see whether or not there was any evidence that genes might play a role well it turns out that the first I believe the first investigations in this I think there was guy named Cyril bird whose famous behavior geneticists that was apparently caught faking his data years later now it turns out I don't believe he was faking his data I think he actually made an honest mistake and that but when that mistake was pointed out that his data was too neat then everybody rained hell on the notion of behavior genetics and it sort of set back the cachet of behavior genetics for some time but meanwhile there was other people like Irving goddess Minh and Sir James Shields in England who were looking at schizophrenia and they they were tracking down twins that had been separated at birth and they're tracking down twins also identical twins versus fraternal twins and they were checking to see what was happening to these people if one of the twin was schizophrenic what was the deal with the coachman and goddess Vincent shields were demonstrating after a lot of painful effort they were figuring out that the monozygotic twins were an awful lot more likely in other words if one code twin was schizophrenic and they were identicals than the odds that the other one was schizophrenic was very high was 50 or 60% and if the one code twin was schizophrenic and the other one was a fraternal twin then I believe the odds were down on animation nature of maybe 5% or so I can't remember what it was it was a huge difference and so publishing this this was not so disturbing to the general grand scheme of of learning theory so the learning theorists weren't even looking sideways when Ghanim goddess Minh and shields were publishing their sort of shrugging their shoulders and like well okay well if you've got something really bizarre and really haywire you know I guess we could understand that that's not normal psychology therefore it doesn't surprise us so that's fine that didn't threaten anybody and was through that side door of looking at what they were finding in extreme pathology bit by bit it started to be acceptable to start to consider the idea that genetic variation might be serious business and so it wasn't until the mid eighties using the Minnesota Twin Registry that they were able to track down a large number of identical twins who had been raised apart and they were able to compare these two identical twins who had been raised together by their biological parents and so this now sets up nature's perfect experiment that you are holding the genes constant in other words we've got exactly the same genes sitting in two different bodies being raised by two different parents and then we have exactly the same set of genes being raised by the same household by the same parents so if the environment has a substantial impact on personality development we should see that the kids who are raised in the same household should be much more alike than the kids that are raised in different households number one and number two it should also be the case that identical twins for example shouldn't be much more alike than fraternal twins if if the environment is guiding the shosho then you could see what the learning theory hypothesis hypothesis would be the learning theory hypothesis would be that you know obviously you would like to use twins and you'd like to have both the same sex and you sew and you'd like because now they're born on the same day so their parents socio-economic situation remains exactly the same for the two people so we don't we're not looking at people who were born at slightly different times so we've got a pair of for example fraternal twins who share half of their genes and those those those people shouldn't be anymore alike if we take say 50 sets of those people those people raised by the same parents those kids kids shouldn't be any more or less alike than a 50 pairs of monozygotic twins that are raised by the parents and it should certainly be the case that if we have a pair of monozygotic or identical twins that's what we mean by that identical excuse me if we take a pair of identical twins and they are raised by different people then it should certainly by different families because they're adopted out it should certainly be the case that the identical is being adopted out should not be anywhere close to as similar as a pair of fraternal who are being raised and nurtured by exactly the same parents number two they're in the same household same clothes same mom same dad same school same church same socioeconomic status same everything well it turns out it's not even close folks so it's going to turn out that the monozygotic raised apart are vastly more similar than the fraternal that are raised in the same house it's not even close so and so it's and it turns out that whether the monozygotic or identical ZAR raised together or they are raised apart makes almost no difference they are extremely similar so now we have the answer to the question of the ages which is how much difference does it make and the answer is not much okay now so now we go back to so this is not meant trash parenting at all and it's also not meant to say that the parenting can't make a difference in outcomes so certainly you can imagine that a child that is is that has an encouraging and supportive parent who recognizes that the kid has some hurdles and does things to get the kid assistance and make sure that we open up opportunities of course that individual has a better odds of you know winding up with better outcomes than someone who has a parent who is sorting them and considering the kid a burden etc etc in all likelihood unless you talk to a psychodynamic theorist who would say well maybe you react against all that obstacle and maybe you become more well so point is is that we got a problem predicting things and it turns out you can't predict things very well by trying to look at the learning history and the situation that the person finds themselves in now the but at the end of the day I think that that we want to use some reasonable judgment that we would use in looking at the actions and behavior of any people around us if they were managing them or there were in a romantic relationship with them or were their friends with them that of course being supportive and encouraging is going to be useful and it's going to improve people's willingness to take chances it's going to help them build their confidence etcetera etc so can you make a difference in the process of a person's development in terms of how much they enjoy their life and possibly the opportunities and doors that they open for themselves later of course you can the how big a differences are going to make in terms of anything measurable that you're going to see pretty hard to find it it's not easy to find it but that doesn't mean it's not there and it's not doesn't mean that psychologists have always been necessarily looking in exactly the right place but if you wanted to predict for example how much money people are going to make don't be looking about you know what what school their dad had him in and how many tutors they had just show me their identical code twin that they've never met just you know turns out they've got an identical code twin in Seattle right now that they haven't seen in thirty six years since the day they were born and if I go find that code twin and I find out how much money that coach wins making that's going to be the best guess I'm going to have as to what this guy's making it's not going to be how nurturing his mom was it's not going to be how hard she pushed him it's not going to be how much their dad encouraged them it's not going to have anything to do with their learning history to speak of it it may a little bit but the biggest factor is going to be what's his coach when doing ie what set of genes does he have that our part and parcel of who it is that he is and he finds himself in the environment known as the United States that environment is fairly equivalent across the United States and Western Europe for that matter in most places and so we throw those jeans at the world and those jeans need to figure out how on earth they can optimize their survival and reproductive success and those jeans will find their ecological niche and they will find places where it is that they have advantages over competitors and they'll find places where they have relative weaknesses and they will they will do what Sandra skaar calls genetic niche picking they will figure out where it is that they are best suited and they will head for those places naturally and so this is this is the big part of the story so I'm you know people will say oh my god you know I'm doing all this work for what you know I mean with these kids and the answer is you're doing this work because number one there's a lot of things that need to take place in childhood just in general there's a process of learning and development that goes on naturally and you got to be there for it and wipe their nose the second thing is however don't be fretting and worried about shaping them in some way you won't do it I've seen kids that that were very clearly pretty cold-hearted little sob s and I've seen mothers banging their heads against the wall trying to get the kids C empathically why they should be nicer to other kids that's a total waste of breath okay that that is not possible so you are not going to teach a child to be empathic they are either empathic or they are not you have parents who are trying to cram information in their kids trying to make them smarter with Baby Einstein and everything else in at the Sun that is a total fiasco and it will blow up right in your face that's that's not going to amount to anything so what I suggest to parents is be with your children like you would be with anybody else be kind be warm be supportive be firm when you need to be set reasonable limits you are living in a space with conflicts of interests between you and that child and you they can learn that there are such conflicts of interests and their boundaries to the limits of your altruism don't let them run your existence enjoy your life as you know as much as you can with with the responsibilities and sacrifices that you need to make do a good job trying to aid and abet their existence don't think that every disappointment and frustration that they have because they didn't get everything they wanted somehow bruises their psyche and we'll make them resent you it will not okay not unless they've got a genetic chip in them too to be disagreeable and entitled in the first place at which point there's nothing that you're going to do is going to help that so the point is is to treat them kindly and warmly and lovingly just the way you would any pet okay so I don't try to take my pets and try to change their personalities my pets I've got two cats they have very different personalities and I do not try to change them I love those caps in the way that they are I enjoy greatly their individual differences I laugh at my ability to predict which one is going to do what I know which one is waking me up at what time of the day and I know how they're waking me up today I know there are different voices and their sounds I can hear the differences in their emotional expressions that's how people are and we didn't shape them to be that way they just are alright so that's that's question number one I'm sorry about that I thought that was going to be a quick way well I had to say dogs didn't know they sold me today oh we only have two questions I've like uh-oh what are we going to do well well I really I really I really have to say and I've said this before in a previous podcast where I did a little intro what we did your interview with Andrew Taylor from spud Fit is that one of the first times I heard you talk it was when a patient asked you what's love and and I remember that because you know most people who are up speaking for whatever reason someone will ask them a question and they'll be like oh what's love oh yeah it's just when people care about each other but no like you went on for I think an hour and a half at night about love and explained explained every little need nitty-gritty detail and of course with someone as with as little successes I have quit love it was really in caddy for me so I really need me to which is why that it it careful it you guys but it was just cool because every little detail you know you ask a question and you don't just get a little simple answer it's like if we pay attention we're basically getting gold here and so you know I really appreciate and you know it's not just me we get we get listener we get listener emails and I read the questions but before the questions actually come into play the the people will actually write paragraphs of you know thank you for expanding and everything like that so really appreciate doctor like these are great great answers very cool well maybe that's alright wait you will want to do one more quick one we have something that could be quote giving a shot let's find out what it yeah let's do one one quick one then we'll go over the self-esteem and self-confidence next week oh and by the way listeners listeners are curious about some of the operant conditioning and reinforcement like that we actually had ad Haverhill therapists call into the show on episode 47 and have a little bit of a question-and-answer with dr. Lyle so feel free to check that out there's some good information there about how dr. Lyle explains it to this behavioral therapist okay so our next question this is from a listener who has an 18 year old son and she went house hunting with the real estate agent and the real estate agent observed the behavior of the son and he basically called him a millennial and so the listener says this is labeling generations real I grew up in the 1980s and I was pretty stereotypical of that label for that time period but it doesn't really seem that much different from the description of today's youth isn't every generation just exhibiting the same old behaviors of wanting to be the most important person in the village or are there legitimate factors making Millennials unique enough to give them a new label that's a really interesting question and obviously we would say that the following would be true so we just talked about how personalities are going to be genetic and so you're going to see the same personality variances generation after generation after generation so you know nothing has changed in half a million years it's the same people the genes keep getting recycled they just look a little bit different and they act a little bit different and every single one of them is unique because it's a unique combination but believe me there have been people that were a lot like you that have walked this planet before and there's some people that are a lot like you that are walk on this planet now now they're not you but they're a lot like you and most people are not like you so most people almost everybody you meet is substantially different from you on one one or more and usually several of the big big five plus intelligence characteristics so the notion that quote the Millennials have all been reinforced or punishment in some specific way in order to stamp them with a quote personality style that would be characteristic of a generation is absurd of course that's not true now that being the case let's talk about let's talk about some reasons why some people might and might even think of this in a certain way it's you could call it a generation I'm not even sure what a millennial means if you're born in 95 what about 2005 you know what about 1998 etc so we're talking about sort of a general thing if you want to mark it arbitrarily to people that are like 18 or 20 now versus people that are 40 or 30 or whatever so let's just talk about a 20 year old now and that 20 year old has had a somewhat different life experience than someone who was born in 1970 and somewhat different so they've had somewhat different cultural events have taken place there's been maybe different worries and different considerations but really they look pretty similar most of the time so really what a millennial Liz at this point is it's a young person for god sakes it's a young person who has significant conflicts of interest with their parents and adults over how it is that they want to be using their time so we're - like you and I had when we were that age so it's going to turn out that when people get to be a certain age ie late teens they start to have very significant conflicts of interest between them and the adults around them and as a result they're about ready to move about a hundred yards down the river and start to fend for themselves starting to call their own shots but not too far from mom just in case they get into hot water so this is why it's difficult for you know 16 17 18 19 year old young people who live into their parents roof now it may be true that we've got a bunch of agreeable people and we don't have a problem but don't count on it if we have a normal distribution of personality under one roof somewhere around the mean then there's a certain amount of disagree ability in there and there are definitely conflicts of interest and so the kids are now the kids went from being sweet little pets whose when they were little kids they were unbelievably cute and their survival and your and your interest in their interests were essentially perfectly parallel they as a parent when it turns out that they're 15 years old their interest in your interests are no longer parallel they are now little reproduction machines and what they care about is how much status and cash a they can get in the sexual dynamics world so you're thinking wait a minute wait a minute what happened to my little kid and aren't you my buddy and aren't we all going to tootle around town and do our errands together and be happy and the answer is no we're not I'm going to make you miserable so the as a result of this these are these are natural conflicts that are taking place and it's also true that there's also a weaning conflict as anticipated by two rivers that that that there's a weaning conflict between parent and offspring whether it's long long term provisioning of offspring where the offspring want the the resource is longer than the parents want to give it to them and so the genes literally have a mathematical conflict here as it's Anna Paris best interest to move on from provisioning and to produce more babies ie it's about time for the parents to kick the kids out and start having sex again maybe well there's some steam left and inputting - that explains a lot yeah yeah so it turns out - the kids are like no I need some more money for this and I need this and I need that and I need the other and dad is thinking you know what I've still got some energy for for having sex with your mother and I'd like to take her to you know the Bahamas and no but jr. needs this and jr. needs that and so jr. just like a nice you know I don't know a little raven tiny raven has his mouth wide open dominating the nest mom doesn't mind the mom doesn't mind moms you know saying George we got a provision jr. here you know I mean he's just got to have more meat so go kill some more things and throw it down his throat because this is really important and so this is the these are the conflicts that go by thousands of modern America so we roll our eyes and calm Millennials but they've been called they've always been called something and they've always been a wonderful an exciting pain in the ass and that's happy very good I think we'll end there
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