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Episode 80: On-Air Session w Listener and Dr Lisle
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this week on our show we have an on-air session with one of our longtime listeners David and dr. Lyle so listen in and let's see what we can learn hey dr. Ron hey there's this David this is David very good okay all right so you're calling in and we've got an issue that you're looking to get some help with and just tell me a little bit about yourself and what sort of the situation is okay dr. ah uh I've listened to your podcast and I really appreciate the information you and they are putting out there and particularly my question today is on personality characteristics of specifically conscientiousness yuba when you've talked about conscientiousness before a few times it was really in the nature of a friend as opposed to trading partners or even honorary saint or friends or neighbors and simply which I guess I classify his honorary friends and I wanted to know the difference because I I'm in commercial industrial sales and didn't my trading partners are quite limited and I guess I take this to being a Stone Age village where we had trading partners that were fixed and unlike my friends who I can choose not to be friends with trading partners in a you know in a commercial industrial I had to deal with these people Reiter though they're the limited number of buyers for the stuff I sell so right I find that I occasionally I run into people that are of low conscientiousness right at Circle and I still have to deal with them I can't you know to use not to deal with them right and I was wondering if you had some tips on dealing with low conscientiousness when you're when you're forced to okay alright well you can uh we're gonna need to get a little bit more specific but the first thing that comes to mind are you ready for this it's called written agreement okay so the reason why we have civil law is for disagreeable people and for low conscientious people if we had high conscientious nice people running the world we wouldn't be we wouldn't even need courts so that's the first thing that comes to mind but tell me about what sorts of situations come up for you that are that are problematic because you must have some people in mind that you're thinking of and there must be some situations that that you can recall that are you know sort of stereotypic of the what's got you frustrated yes well I said I sell commercial and industrial equipment that's very specific and before we and it's all built to order stuff so it's not and it's not something we just have on the shelf and we give it to someone like you would go to Nordstrom's or Walmart and get and then just take it back if it does work now this study is built specifically for a certain you know job or project and then it has to work and so we before the sale we do our diligence we send them to send customers drawings we send written agreements written pricing things like that and we have some people that are very diligent about going through the drawings and checking every measurement checking electrical characteristics performance characteristics and making sure the piece of equipment they're about to buy is exactly right and we do you know and as a sales guy I tried to do that as well with the customer and so forth design I have certain customers that just assume that we're going to I guess they have magical thinking out there that did we can read minds and see through walls and that just because we have a model number of piece of equipment that was built in the 1950s that will know everything detail there is to know about it and it will just build a rep replicate it even if it's the same brand that we sell today but not necessarily the same model I mean you wouldn't expect a Chevrolet Impala for 1970 to be have an interchangeable part with a 2017 chevy impala sure I mean yeah of course I just like that these are these customers have the lo certain low conscientious customers have that seeing as seemingly as that assumption or they act like they do maybe they don't have that assumption maybe they just maybe they're just throwing the onus back on on me why tell people like myself can I just don't know how to take okay so or a right so give me a typical kind of a typical scenario that that comes up for you repetitively so what I'm hearing is is that there's complicated orders of these big how bigger these sales five thousand twenty-five thousand hundred thousand what what hundred 100,000 to them to a hundred thousand to several million so case were though and these are these are what some kind of fancy tools machine tools or errands like that or got it all right differing your equipment got okay so this is really this is big high-end sales so very big you're selling to big commercial real estate people etc big clients ride got it okay and so did the people on the other end of this then did these have to be pretty fancy people I would assume in other words they don't have dholtze ordering their air-conditioning I wouldn't assume so are you your refusal talking to yeah it's a multiple level yeah we we sell to mechanical contractors some of the mechanical contractors we sell to our trade are were mechanics and work they work themselves up to this leg and they started out as people that install stuff there they're not necessarily engineers some of them are there it's a diverse crowd of a group of customers but they they could be what someone some some people refer to as boiler room Bob an engender that sits at the bottom of the building and so his is gain of status is basically when someone like myself comes and sees him the Snowy steady get right and the only other phone call he gets his when something's not working he never gets a phone call when things are working right you're right right to core does that make sense all right so the problem starts when that they've ordered some some fancy unit at or is it parts or whole units that you sell well I fell whole unit and okay so you're selling a whole unit then what kind of problem would they be having with a whole unit coming there it doesn't fit in the right space or that's not the right unit is which doesn't fit doesn't have the right power characteristics voltage or just not to type in and it could be something as simple as where we sent them drawings and specifications or what we are about to order and they didn't know they didn't bother to look at them or past god their electrical contractor and sub yes and then therefore once the piece of equipment made and there they've got a crane you know 50 or $60,000 crane set up to lift this unit up to the penthouse of a building or or to a roof then they find out oh this isn't right David if you're like okay all right I got a question for you yeah so that let's let me think about this the yet so that the timing on these things you're talking to these people what in march and then this thing takes place in or what's the what's the time the ones here last night yeah really they're very long cycle sales so some of them can happen in short is a week between the time we we prepare a bid or a quote until it's ordered and then and then it usually takes about 12 weeks until it's installed or Purdue produced and installed and then summer break two or three years right okay depending on the type of project alright so the way you're seeing this is I mean this is just sort of curious to me you're seeing this as so do you see for example in the different transactions that you observe people that you work with that there are people who get get it right and therefore there's no problems or effectively no problems that were it could have been anticipated and then there's people that are essentially flaking flaking out and not paying attention these details is that what you're observing that's exactly in it yes in the in the collective group of customers I have there's all types there's some that will pepper me they'll look at things they'll pepper me with questions back and forth would get some answers will make changes and then when the equipment is ordered and shipped and everything everything works like a you know work out fits like a glove and what you know like a fine-tuned machine and then others is just you know I can call them I can send them details I can ask them to double-check things and then then there's going to be a problem and it seems to be that there's certain people and I and I'm from my standpoint I see it those are you know these these people come up and it's you know from listening to you its realization to me that this is some sort of personality thing with it between myself and them and and I'm not saying that it's not mine you know it could be they maybe I need to step up my conscientiousness or elements for these low conscientious people right the yes I mean that that's really good thinking David and now I just want to ask you just one little side question and that is if you had to estimate how much of this problem might be an IQ issue that they're just not that detail-oriented and not that smart as opposed to just sheer conscientiousness do you any guesstimate that this is that that is playing a part in this or do we just feel like that they should be able to do this they could do it but they're not now I know I don't see it as an IQ issue because if they actually worked themselves up to this they work themselves up because they are actually bright enough and they understood things and and so for and I would say for the most part now there might be one or two out there right but I would say for the most part no it's not and I it's not IQ I think they are smart people and that that as far as this realm of expertise in this area of the field of air conditioning and your project management I think they do a fairly good job and I thought you're competent excuse me I'm not necessarily good job but they're confident the hospital though you know right so it's a question that they're just sort of flaking out not given the attention to detail yes that that's the way I see it yeah right okay the well I would say that the following I mean I would I can't right off the top of my head I have you know a few things that come to mind for strategies the whenever we're going to give anybody bad news we always want to blame somebody else and so this is a standard technique that I call blame big Louie like never take responsibility for ever anything that's my my general strategy and so the if we're going to put a little bit extra heat on these people and make their lives a little bit more uncomfortable to to respond to some some demands for details etc and for doubled triple-checking we want to blame somebody so we want to blame we want to you would sort of want to talk this over with whoever your direct report is and explain that we have these problems with this subset of people and you need some some kind of leverage somebody to blame about why you have to be a pain in the ass to them see it's not it's not that you have an issue with them it's that big Louie you notice your boss has an issue that this is that these types of problems are happening system-wide and that they've we have done some what do you call it analytics on the problem and we've found that we need to do XYZ and so now this is how we have to do things we have to triple-check when you we used to be able to just leave it to you and you know that's generally fine but we can't do that anymore okay so this is a some storytelling that we do to to get more leverage and and we we might even send you I don't know how you communicate with them but email fax etc sort of little warnings so that they have a little anxiety provoking language in them so you know warning likely likely installation failure or whatever unless this or that these you know six things have been attended to all you know I will be making sure that this is true et cetera because whatever in other words we we it were low conscientious people what they the in principle problem with low conscientiousness is that they are under estimating the worst case scenario the hyper conscientious person is is has been selected out by evolution because they have spent too much time and energy worrying about the worst-case scenario that's why the bell curve looks like the bell curve whereas what you and I would call reasonably conscientious dominates bell curve and the the to tail ends of this thing have less people in those tail ends now the hyper conscientious people make great employees you know their true terrific credit risk they're just fine people we like them okay so that's all good but the problem is is that the half of the people are below the mid line on the bell curve for conscientiousness and so I can see how some people that are sort of swimming around at the 40th or 50th percentile or even 30th percentile for conscientiousness but probably 50th percentile for conscientiousness could rise in a system like this well enough and at 50th percentile conscientiousness they're not egregious they're just kind of mediocre and the problem is is that when we start getting something with a lot of technical specifications and it's actually going to be a tight fit to make sure that everything's right they just don't have the mental anxiety that will pause them to drill into the details and make sure that's right no matter if you're warning them okay so the the in principle solution is to scare them in other words increase their probability that there's a disaster looming and so if we're going to do that we want to blame somebody else that we aren't the ones that are actually writing hurt on them that we are that this is being passed down to us and we are as gently as possible passing it on to them but we've got some urgency in our communications so that's how I would do it the I yeah I don't I don't I'm not immediately coming up with anything else other than that but that's what I would do so I'd have my I'd have my emails for my diligent people and I'd have my emails for my not so diligent people and my my emails for my not so diligent people would have would have you know a little bit of some creative bending of the story to put some additional pressure on them through no fault of your own that's how I would do it okay okay one yes sir no sir and then the same line from along conscientiousness I uh yes I have a question about one of my or my neighbors I live in a high-rise condominium and so I have 300 neighbors that we all share the same elevators and so forth like that one of my neighbors we have a brand-new Stadium in Atlanta right down the road from our house so quite a few of our neighbors bought season tickets for the Atlanta Braves this year and one of my neighbors and maybe I should recognize this ahead of time just ran into financial straits and wanted to sell the tickets and or sell his his tickets and he finally lowered the price such that I said well yeah I'll do that and then he offered me to buy only half of them such a great because going to 81 baseball games in a year is almost like having a second job is actually having a job yes right so I I bought I bought this half the season tickets from the guy and I found out after I bought them that the guy has no is also very low conscientious and we we split the tickets but he uses the electronic method of tickets I used the old fashioned hand ticket and I found that there were a couple of situations a couple of times where he's actually sold his electronic tickets did the games I had the hard tickets to and when I could confront him about it I get no response whatsoever yeah and I did like yes yes I don't know how to deal with someone of that low conscientiousness and and I would all my neighbors that are not friends I would classify them like you did in the Milgram experiment their honor yeah friend and yeah so how do you how do you deal with honorary friends they're low conscious oh brother this is precisely why two doors down for me there's a guy that actually makes living as a gardener and my next-door neighbor told me oh yeah you should hire this guy he's a very very good gardener you know his house looks great he's got the best looking house on the street and so he hired you know so my next-door neighbor I'm saying is the gardener has the best looking house on the street my next-door neighbors got a pretty nice yard and the gardener take care of it and then suddenly so this went on for several years and then suddenly the last few months I've seen like my next-door neighbor mowing his old life so what do we have we had a falling-out okay because we had a business view with our neighbor which is always a bad idea so the so to some extent you kind of asked for it the I guess I guess it's really probably not particularly uncomfortable do you see this guy much or do you feel uncomfortable about it is the mean know that your no you're not uncomfortable about it just your issue that you got a problem you don't know whether your tickets are good or not well yeah and actually the Atlanta Braves are nice enough they could look at the system and tell me which tickets he sold from but I just cannot imagine being of so little of conscientiousness not know thinking that you would not run into me on the elevator and how would you deal with it I just can't imagine that they're people of that conscientious level walking around right they don't see these things coming and realize it that people will actually take a section and I'm not a violent person but but shouldn't do this in New York City to a mobster which of course not that's actually fascinating like how much how much monetary loss are we talking about probably oh well the four reads game I guess the tickets are about $50 a seat and so forth but you know actually the Braves did did me right the last time it happened I go to the ticket resolution office they saw where the guy hold the tickets on StubHub and they handed me up his ticket and I think they'd acted out because everything's kind of interlinked through their website so I think they backed the money out that he was he made through StubHub to pay for the secret they handed me why just okay so this all know if I'm surly hey with some hassle right I guess you're just astonished you're you're astonished that you're going to have to put up with some of this hassle for one thing because you we don't know when he's going to sell these tickets next that that's exactly true and right and I'm just astonished that there would be people walking around again that would do other people that way and yeah well not like I'm on the other side of the country I'm in his own bed well that's because you've never visited a state prison okay so the the truth is is that yes you're you're shocked and appalled and amazed that such an individual would exist and I would have to say that this this rank solidly in the bottom you know the bottom 15 percentile but it doesn't rank in the bottom 3 percentile for behavior so this is uh you know what the heck so you see you got a neighbor with a with a slightly crooked chip in his head and he did some slightly crooked stuff and you know that's what we've got but ya know shock I'm not sure I'm not sure I could help you with this other than than to inform you that that this is this is this is why we have you know a hundred thousand pages of civil codes because because the country has been around long enough and there's been just long enough transactions to find this I have to tell you that back in the 1970s my parents were real estate brokers and and I actually got my own license as a young person and and so for a little while there I you know worked in the office and tried to sell the real estate myself when I was a you know early college-age kid and the contracts were a page long and then within a few years they had amended the contract at California California Association of Realtors contract it was about a page and a half for page and two-thirds it's a little more complicated contract and it seemed like a pain the neck because when you were going down through contract with client you know now you had to go over 27 items instead of the 13 items that had been on there a couple years earlier the today if you sign a real estate contract in California there is I don't know it's about six seven eight pages long so what you're looking at is you're looking at the history of litigation over the last 40 years that's what you're looking at so you're looking at every disagreement over who owed who what and under what circumstances and somebody tried to get the upper hand and was low in conscientiousness about what the lobbyist verbal agreement was so finally that had happened about 17,000 times and they decided we better put it into the law okay so there you go so no worries such as life these are these are these are this is a classic example of a first world world problem so you know don't don't do big transactions with your neighbors over verbal contracts unfortunately this is a fairly minor league deal but you know don't don't buy the guy's used car yeah you're exactly right and next year I will not be buying you season tickets or split that well I do I will take the whole season and not not try splitting them with them where I have to have yeah he'll make it go like a glut for punishment I wouldn't be anywhere near this guy yeah okay well you that's that's more likely what will happen anyway well I do have other questions if you have short arm and and I get rig in the size or it could be edited sure go right ahead Adam okay a couple other questions I have one follow-up on your the spectacular alterus um discussion you had the other day about the the female what about and then this kind of ties into my question last week than I asked or that Nate read my email from about status seeking and and or what I misunderstood is not your your lack of status seeking but your lack of successful status seeking you have the girl is a spectacular altruist and yes is one of the potential reasons she was she was doing what she did what about people in this world that are altruistic that aren't looking for status people that make donations anonymously or people even when I'm going out early in the morning when it's still dark I see people out walking around trash bags picking up trash and no one would see them and so obviously it's not about status seeking in those those cases and I just said are they missing an opportunity and you know if if dr. Lila I'm trying to may increase my mate status in the village yes sir I go pick up trash during the daytime only yep and we're right over there oh it would not yeah absolutely no here's I guess here's the thing the way to think about this the the altruistic behavior is just a subset of all behavior and all behavior is is considered by the brain through the lens of cost-benefit analysis and the cost-benefit analytics that the brain runs is it's running those cost-benefit analytics on genes survival and so in the case of altruistic behavior there would be a potential number of reasons why it is that people would do altruistic behavior so the most classic altruistic behavior would be the resources of of a mother giving it to their child okay so the mother is actually doing something costly to herself but we don't really recognize it as altruism because it's so close to us as a species it seems so reasonable its quote what a good mother does but the truth is is that this is altruistic behavior so if the mother is is putting energy I directed to their child there are less resources directed towards themselves personally and therefore they in principle are reducing their own likelihood of survival and they are increasing the likelihood of their child's survival now people might say that seems a little odd Doug to be talking about if a mom slices up an apple and hands it to her son is this altruistic behavior and the answer is yes it is in an infinitesimally and so there has to be a reason for it and the reason in this case is that the son is carrying half of her genes and he's a beneficiary of this behavior so the brain is designed by nature to compute whether or not that this would be a behavior that would be ultimately beneficial in terms of gene gene success probabilities as we play out this situation over over the next thousand years so a thousand years from now the genes in that female are they more likely to be on the planet because she is cutting that Apple for her son than if she didn't cut the apple for her son and the answer is yes it would be exceedingly difficult to measure that but it wouldn't be so difficult to measure it if we looked at it for example over the course of that child's development so a mother that would give more of that type of energy to her son particularly if you start thinking about harsh conditions of a Stone Age environment and you start realizing bed hmm the resource flow from mother to son there the difference of how much resources flow from others son could easily statistically influence the likelihood of that son's survival to adulthood and therefore the reproductive success so we see that the the all tourism the all tourism within the family is neither surprising but if we shrug our shoulders and don't look deeply enough about the cause then we'll miss something extremely important which is that the behavior is motivated just like any other behavior it's motivated within a matrix of possible options for behavior and it simply is selected as a behavioral option because it looks like it's an efficient way to to essentially answer the question that all animal brains are trying to answer which is what is the next thing that I can do that is most valuable to statistically enhance gene survival so though that's the that's the solution to the Gordian knot of trying to figure out what is driving behavior is ultimately or actually to be to be very specific that is what drove the those those are the constraints that shaped the animal Boldwood's body and its behavior that you see today in any species is that that that that is the question that nature is attempting to solve so therefore when you see altruistic behavior in humans you're not seeing anything fantastical or bizarre or noble or you can call it whatever you want it is interesting behavior because it's not obviously self-interested it is it is uh opaquely self-interested and so that doesn't mean by the way that other people don't benefit it just means that they benefit so for example the young man that helps a little old lady across the street this is actually helps a little old lady across the street she has a reduced likelihood of death from being run over by a car that she can't see very well however the the reason for doing this was to increase his likelihood of getting laid that's why he did it okay so the not by her but by somebody that's observing this situation so this this uh we always hear this stuff about these anonymous donors I always roll my eyes at this they're never anonymous they're somebody knows oh I knew a guy that made a big anonymous donation really how anonymous was that somebody knew he did it that somebody might well have been some female that he was trying to impress why would it be anonymous why wouldn't he shout it from the rooftops well perhaps it's it's more awesome to makes you look even more possibly altruistic if you don't try to claim every bit of status that you can from it there are other reasons to be anonymous about making donations for example there can be very costly to be Bill Gates where everybody's coming after you is if you're a chunk of meat and they're a bunch of piranhas and everybody wants a piece of your time and energy and so instead what you want to do is you want to you may want to get status from select individuals and situations in the world but you don't want to put up with a bunch of riffraff that you don't want to have to hassle remember happiness comes from earning a steam and the right way from the people to matter if you're going to be a philanthropist you're going to want to think through who matters to me okay and how am I going to go about getting the sustain from them am i doing it this in the right way and so that doesn't mean we make a million dollar donation to I don't know some some cat hotel and then we we shot it from the rooftops so that all the other cat hotels and dog hotels in the Western Hemisphere are going to come after us for money that was going to be too much hassle so the altruistic behavior is is curious and interesting and in fact it was an extraordinary puzzle for human beings to solve and it appeared to be violating what we thought was the underpinnings of biology which was survival of the fittest but that turns out to not be the case the problem of altruism was solved by William Hamilton in 1963 and 1964 in a in a couple of papers that he that he wrote in the Journal of theoretical biology that outlined what is now known as Hamilton's rule and that is that too rather than give you the mathematics that the fundamental issue is is that organisms can benefited in numerous ways potentially by doing things that are that are sacrificial for themselves but actually good for their genes so the mom can work herself to the bone scrubbing floors in a hospital and actually have a pretty rough life but as she is she denies herself any and all pleasures she's making sure that her son gets a college education and in doing so the genes are actually being selfish in other words the genes are saying I don't really care what happens to you I care what happens to us the genes and therefore the woman that feels tremendously meditated to do self sacrificial behavior in order that her genes are actually benefited so the so that that is the hamilton solves the problem it first with respect to obviously what we call ken so it's also known as kin selection theory but it also becomes wider than that so as soon as that principle is is recognized now we have many different ways that the the genes can be selfishly served by self sacrificial behavior and one of them is to become spectacularly altruistic that is to be very giving very essentially display that one has the excess energy and resources in order to give to others and have this be observed and therefore indicate in the ability to be able to do this that one has superior genes and that makes one sexier is what it does and so this is now to to just to to back up for one second and take a breath the the people will often get twisted up and upset about this because they will do altruistic things and they will swear on the Bible that they are not doing this for any for any reason that they can see this is very possibly true the system doesn't it isn't necessary for the system to understand why it's doing what it's doing if if you were not told and you were not educated explicitly about this you wouldn't know that sex caused kids no other species knows this and they don't have a clue so there can be very important in fact critical behaviors that are being done by organisms and they don't have any insight into why it is that they're doing what they're doing what's going on is they're blind and conscious programs that have been coded by the DNA is being effective so altruistic behavior in humans is a is is a complex set of behaviors that take place under certain conditions and those certain conditions are if we look and we scratch our way through those let me tell you what they are not they are not taking place under under situations where the individual has no possible reasonable hope of benefiting that is not how altruistic behavior is selected altruistic behavior is selected under conditions where the neural circuits selected by evolution have determined there are relationships between that individual and and circumstances in their social environment that dictate that if they do certain behaviors their genes are more likely to wind up in succeeding generations so for example and all this will be and I'll take a breath here so people can absorb this thinking this is why people want to be doctors people want to be doctors if you ask some seventeen-year-old bright kid why wants to be a doctor yeah he wants to have a cool Jaguar big house and a pretty wife but if you one of the things that's at the forefront of his mind is I want to save people's lives and the reason he wants to save people's lives is if you can save people's lives he's extremely valuable and therefore he gets tremendous cachet so the so people don't just say oh great you saved my life let me give you a check that's not what they say what they say is thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you my god thank you okay thank you is Stone Age Stone Age language for IOU and so what that individual wants is that they want to have enormous credits in their social environment they want to do the thing that would be the most possibly valuable thing that they could do that others would owe them a lot in fact what they want to be is they want to be Stone Age rich and so the the heroism of it of the long hard hours and the you know hazing the ghost hunt in medicine and all the other things that are associated with this just adds to the glory of it all and this thing this is thing the pursuit of altruistic ask status that that makes the individual look spectacular so they don't they don't consciously know that they are after this glory quite they sort of know in other words not entirely unconscious of it but they can actually be thinking no dr. Lisle what I really want to do is save people's lives and to my response is I know you really do want to figure out the most valuable thing that you can give the village but the reason why you want to give people the most valuable thing that you can give them is so that you can get as much as you can get and by getting what I mean is reproductively relevant resources not just a check and not just a pension not just a Jaguar even though believe me the little munchkins are calculating those issues but the most important thing that the Raptor is status and status is not sought for no reason it's sought for absolutely very recognizable survival and reproductive reasons and so they are seeking greater sexual cachet and greater insurance from the village in terms of their value and therefore greater safety so yeah altruism is you know was in fact so this is a great question and a fascinating you know problem in understanding human nature that was had mystified all analysis until Hamilton figures it out in in the early 60s since that time there it's it's exceedingly clear that the all tourism is altruistic behavior that you see in in human beings is part and parcel of all behavior that you see in humans and it's not an actually part and parcel of all behavior that you see throughout the animal kingdom so you will also see altruistic behavior in the animal kingdom it will it will take place under specified conditions as per that species humans are the same so they have altruistic behavior that will take place under specified person person-- social environment conditions that that are advantageous for the altruist in order to execute those behaviors and they will have the feelings that will cause them to quote want to be helpful and that will that is the ultimate reason for that so when people are out picking up trash it could very very likely be that they can't save anybody's life because they can't cut out an appendix so they're doing something that they can do they are being observed because somebody saw them they're not out there at 3:00 in the morning with em for infrared goggles doing it the so there is there's reasons to believe and also if they do it they can reliably report that they do it so if it was truly altruistic we would follow those people around and if we said you'd do anything for your fellow man for which you don't actually receive any payment they would they would say and you know don't tell us if you don't want to oh yes I do I get up in the morning and this is what I do and so there there are all kinds of ways that the altruistic individual has has to scheme and like I said not in any underhanded nasty fashion this is a fascinating characteristic of humans that we do this but there are reasons why it is that they do what they do and those reasons have deep biological roots right yes yes sir okay okay I know a mouthful right well if we nail it how do I be an animal in animal species like like dogs and cats is the altruistic just from the the mother to the offspring or do you see it in other ways too and really the the dogs and cats are bird to do this or species or the conscious of the fact that it's altruistic behavior well of course not they're not conscious of anything now the but they're doing it nonetheless so for example in the Arabian babbler which is little desert bird what will happen is is that the males are the males defend the little group of birds and it's dangerous these are little birds and there's predators to try to get these birds and so the males will patrol the outside of the pack and it's going to turn out that the males are rather nasty to other males that want to do it so it's only the biggest toughest strongest males that are allowed to do this and they get all bent out of shape if any of the general junior males want to do it so what you're seeing is altruistic behavior in the sense that they are risking their own hide to get this done however with the the payoff here is fairly obvious and that is that they are they're quote higher in status as a result of doing this and they are and that they mate differentially moores more successfully than the males that do not do this so this is this is akin to that the Marines are looking for a few good men you know military is is a essentially quasi altruistic kind of a thing but we recognize that young men for example to go into the military aren't going in for nothing the the women that go into the military everybody's got their own agendas but looking to be heroic and putting your life on the line etc this is uh this is very much akin to the Arabian babbler and it enhances these these people's mating status in the world and their status in general so they're they're vaguely aware of this you say I'm saying the knot I mean people have awareness of these things they're not all the dots aren't lined up in their head exactly how this all translates into into their agendas in life they don't know they actually a lot of them could tell you they've got they've got remarkable insight if I get into the Marine Corps then I'm going to be sexier and I'm going to get laid by a by a fancier bunch of in this if it's a young man then he's looking at better-looking women and more successful with the ladies if he's a Marine there's no question about that and the the motto of the Marine Corps is first to fight ok so we are the first ones in we are the ones in the line of fire we are the ones with the guts we are the exoskeleton of this village we are the Arabian babbler ok we are the most spectacularly altruistic group and this is there's a reason why there is extra cachet for that and there is you know somebody probably could run an interesting study for somebody's doctoral thesis to see how many what we're going to call causal mating populations take place if you're a marine rather than regular army ok and I'll just bet you it's at least 1.2 - what ok so it's there there was some there's some leverage there but who knows that we would find it well in if he's a marine guy plays guitar it yeah really plays it over the top that are there you go ha ha there you go David that you you're integrating it nicely you got it all together alright you have anything else or I think we're going yeah yeah would right to ask you a question about the other end of the spectrum recently in the past week in Atlanta there was a road rage incident where someone got rear-ended on the Beltline and the guy got out of the car that was rear-ended into and just shot the shot the other driver no words no nothing and and there seems to be a we have road rages all over the United States what is the psychological process that's going or the evolutionary process that drives you know seemingly people that we would see them in a kids baseball game or maybe well maybe that's a bad a bad analogy there or maybe an alum in line at the McDonald's or Starbucks and and they'll be our honorary friends people behind the wheel in a traffic situation and next thing we're everyone's mortal enemies at the at the slightest glance they're really not see you're you're looking at this through the wrong lens Road range incidents are exceedingly rare the and in fact people you know the people there's a lot of irritation in in high-density traffic and there are feelings when people crowd up to you or if they hit you or they cut off in front of you that they're not playing fair they're pushing their way quickly to get to the food they're they're essentially not taking their turn properly and so this is so the driving behavior can violate a lot of group norms and so it can be very irritating so I feel murderous usually a least on a monthly basis if not a weekly basis my pet peeve is people tailgating behind me if I'm doing 70 miles an hour and somebody's to car lengths back I'm extremely irritated and I feel like taking out a 45 and just poking a poking through the the passenger window just you know if there's nobody there to just warn the jerk that he should be you know seven car lengths back so he's not threatening my survived it's infuriating to me that that people are so ignorant about this and unfortunately I will die before the world ever gets educated about this problem they will eventually be educated because they'll be driven by computers and the computers won't mess this up they'll have an appropriate length for the optimal safety of the people that are writing in the car but for now we have to deal with bonehead individuals that don't understand just how how dangerous that situation potential is and what I would say is unnecessarily dangerous so the point is is that these traffic dynamics are going to cause a great deal of irritation for people and once in a blue min a once in a blue moon literally out of millions and millions and millions of incidents there will be somebody always a male ok that obviously with high testosterone it's not likely to be a 70 year old male it's not even likely to be a 55 year old male it's very likely to be a male 40 years or under highly testosterone eyes male that is you know highly cano a personality with a great deal of disagree ability in it or wouldn't have a gun in the back of his car and so all of these things come together and you know if you you light enough enough dead fireworks sooner or later one of them is going to go off and that's actually what you're looking at so you're looking at an exceedingly rare behavior that to me is actually surprising that it doesn't happen more often but it's obviously a sensational behavior that gets reported in the press but our intuition about how common it is is is being distorted by by media it's actually exceedingly uncommon behavior okay so what you're saying drives it is the high disagreeable ability of those drivers in the high-tech the yes okay it's it it's high disagreeable it's it's the high testosterone that you're looking at that that's who is always going to be they're going to be overwhelmingly low conscientious and disagreeable in other words they're they're starting to lean towards being sociopathic even though they're not they don't necessarily have to be sociopathic but you're talking about disagreeable low conscientiousness so just about you know even but we can see that their behavior is not actually freakish because that same thing gets rehearsed in my head I don't have a gun in my car but I'm thinking about it when people are essentially doing things that I I consider to be dangerous to me and I bet I that caused a considerable distress for me and so I have the same kind of violent fantasies and violent fantasies are the precursors for violent behavior so the obviously you can have a million violent fantasies before you ever have a violent act but you are statistically increasing the likelihood as you have these kinds of sort of norm breaking behaviors taking place with cars that if you if you were having them with people in a small space you would also get a great deal of irritation so people are are crowding and they're crowding behind you at a movie theater and they're bumping into you from behind you're very annoyed you're like hey what are you doing so I'm saying in the Stone Age that kind of behavior unnecessarily crowding you is grounds for turning around and clock on somebody and so that that's essentially what it is that you're saying in traffic like I load high stress right yes you got it yes all right sir I think that's probably enough for one evening but all right doctor thank you for calling you bad good questions thanks for calling and thanks for listening thank you doctor well thank you Nate we definitely appreciate it in group of my friends out here I'll appreciate it please keep up the great work
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