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Episode 85: Is online dating worth it, qualifying for your spouse
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all right good evening everybody Naji dr. Lyle how's it going this fine evening good good good hear your voice again lunch alright so we got a couple of questions today I titled the show after a question that we had but we're going to go to that question later it was the manipulation tactic questions so for listeners who were looking forward for that title we'll talk about another time but we're going to be talking about a question from listener about whether or not online dating might be worth it qualifying for a spouse some attraction to pregnant women can't wait for that one doctor while right and now and then liking animals after having kids and then a couple of others if we can get to them so all right let's just let's just hit the ground running dr. Lally ready sure all right here we go dr. Lyle dear dr. Lyle I found an article online I thought it jived really well with what you're saying on the show and it kind of made me wonder that it might be must be extremely unlikely to find that magic 10% through online dating now I find it extremely difficult but I've also noted the same faces across multiple dating sites and apps over a long period of time a lot of them are attractive women and it's strange to me that they haven't been able to find somebody yet the only conclusion I can come to is that we're all more picky online and therefore you're more likely to find your magic 10% through some sort of real-life activity what are your thoughts yes this is very good this this person sent us a copy of the article and I forget who wrote it but there's a there's a couple of articles I believe this research was can't remember I think this was University of Texas which is a hotbed of evolutionary psychology I think that's where it was done I can't remember exactly the this was very interesting what happened was I think there's more than one study but what happened was that they computed the correlation coefficients of like a hundred dating pairs that had and dating had not known each other before they began dating so that they just by talking to people you know when did you guys meet when would you just start to go out etcetera and they had a bunch of so they I think they had a total of about 160 dating pairs altogether and about a hundred of them the people had not known each other at all so they had essentially met online or something like that probably had been mostly online or actually could have been in novel situations could have been in a bar at a Dan to the bar mitzva who knows where but the point is is that they had never met before and then now they're dating and we're catching up with them eight months later and so the question is are these people different than people who had known each other a long time before they started dating and this is what they found they found that the attractiveness correlation between the people who had never met and now are dating that attractiveness correlation is very high in other words those people are very similar in attractiveness the people that have known each other for a long time and then they dated after they had known each other for a long time that correlation coefficient is very low now this is astonishing actually the the prom I don't want to say too confidently about the data just because it was quite technical and and I didn't have a long time to look at this and it was actually it was statistically elegant although I'm not exactly sure how to infer I can't express Eisley what it is that they were after or what they did find my first thought was I'm pretty sure they did not they did not run this analysis and they did not report it was that my first suspicion was is that that that the females were more attractive than the males and that so the correlation coefficient is dropping because the the when people have dated after they've known each other a long time it's more likely for the males to be sleeping up this would be completely consistent with with what I know about evolutionary psychology so what was found is consistent with what I understand but they didn't they did not report that sex effect all they reported was a lowered correlation between the attractiveness so as if it could have gone either way now I wrote to the author authors doing a postdoc at Purdue and she hasn't written back to me yet so hopefully when she writes back to me I'll be able to report what it is that was found so it what were what the the other thing that was interesting i'm i would bet i wouldn't bet everything I own but I'd bet high I bet most of what I own that I know what the what the results are now the the interesting thing about it was that the the effect continued to get stronger in other words the correlation of attractiveness between the two continued to drop for a period of about I think about a year and a half and so sometimes people will ask me women when I explain that the that there's an overlooked opportunity that women are passing up and that overlock opportunity and of course from this data you could say the men are passing it up too but I don't believe it because I don't think the men are included in this the the overlooked opportunity that women are passing up is that they will find males potentially they will find males more attractive over time as they get to know them that that effect has been has been reported actually that was ported by David buss and some materials like 20 years ago but now we're this is a more elegant more elegant demonstration of this and really convincing the now the issue was what what is the slope of that line as we start from a super high correlation when people have not known each other at all before they meet and then we have a century a decay function that goes all the way down in this case to zero the correlation becomes zero at about 24 months the the slope that that that decay function looked linear now it's steep but what I've been telling people is I've been telling women what I call three strikes and you're out if you're if you're not if you don't find any interest in the guy after after three days that I'm saying get rid of them just call it good move on to the next one it's probably not a bad rule of thumb but it's not there's no huge logic to it because the truth is is that the next the next three in the next three and the next three twelve dates later we we have we still have the possibility it continues to increase that the women would be interested so you know this starts to get complicated statistically and we're not actually sure where the biggest piece of the pie probably is but I would say my general rule thumb three-strikes-you're-out it isn't I can't I can't because the decay function was linear and it is not in fact curvilinear then that I actually have to say I don't have any good empirical logic to defend it but I can say that I still think it makes some kind of sense something in that range the now an additional study was done and that was that dating or no people were in a class in a classroom setting a small classroom setting and I believe this was a Texas they they had people rate each other for their essentially their attractiveness and and so it turns out at the beginning of the semester the the court the inter-rater reliability z' were very high in other words people everybody who agreed who is most attractive and least attractive and in the middle the however by the end of the semester that correlation coefficient had dropped considerably that is fascinating and once again I I need to track this down and I need to see who dropped and my guess is the more attractive men dropped in some of the average attractive men rose relative to where they stood I don't know that that would have been true for the females just being a guy in and being around other guys and listening to guys talk I don't see guys assessments of females physical attractiveness drop just because you get to know them and you find out they're just a raving bitch this doesn't seem to impact our aesthetic judgment and and even our sexual motivation per se particularly so the I don't think we're going to find that the reason for that correlation coefficient dropping has to do with males reducing their attractiveness or their attraction to the females I believe it's going to be changing up inside the female bread's this is consistent with the fact that male mate value is more obscured because it's more in their brain it's going to have to do with their behavior about what they can bring to the female in terms of protection and provision then is female mate value so that that is clearly what's happening here so I'd like to see these authors clarify the sex differences about what they found but this the person who's asking this question is this is this is one of the great questions of our time how are you going to find somebody and the what this is saying is and what this research is saying is is that don't overlook the the concept of finding repeat exposure situations that have always been the root of most male and female hookups most female relationships it was work church in school always has been and so if you're in a workplace where that's not going to work and you don't belong to a church and you're no longer at school you're in trouble in a modern environment and the and so how you're going to find the magic 10% we may need to find places where there are repeat exposure situations where that you can get yourself into so there are you know essentially clubs that you can that you can join service organizations etc places where you can go where you can get repeat exposure effects and find it find situations where the opposite sex is gathering because they'd like to be there if you're a guy cultivating interest in dancing if you're female cultivated interest in the martial arts or baseball or whatever it is in other words I'd get creative and think through where you can fish where the fish are and put yourself in a position to be in repeat exposure environments if you can that's that's an additional tool don't rely solely on online dating because the online dating clearly is going to be driven highly by high correlation coefficients and attractiveness and so what we're going to find which is probably what we do find once we grind the data out is that the highly attractive people are probably having a perfectly good time online because it's not that hard for them to hit the magic 10% and the and everybody else is scrambling that's probably what's going on mm-hmm all right yeah I just I just picked up by button no intentional just randomly I picked up a new hobby of painting so you know wonder what that under what those classify great doctor I could pick up a yoga habit that sort of habit I need to pick up all right of the attractive speaking of attractive people online a couple years back today informal study done by some some some user at a bodybuilding forum where he copied and pasted a picture of a stunning hot male model and he made it like all pictures on an internet profile and he detailed blog about what kind of response he would get relative to his normal pictures and then relative a picture of some of another kid who was creamy unattractive and he used the same messages every time and it was just it's just phenomenal to see the response he basically got away with saying anything and the girls were just just having no problem with it so yeah just we as we would expect this is a species that you know will use smell will use sound but mostly it uses vision to analyze gene quality and so and that that goes for males and females alike and so that's why we see this the the evidence from this study that we just reported very high correlation coefficients when people don't know each other in other words if you don't know somebody you better be able to hit their circuits immediately and and it's going to be through vision whereas if they get to know you slowly you have you have a chance to have your inner beauty appreciated and so that's that's uh what it is that it looks like and I believe there's sex difference to teach and so the males in general if you're struggling you need to put yourself in more repeat exposure situations and if you're a female you are you you should also use the opposite of this is that you want to you want to give people who seem like they are very good interesting people if you're meeting them online give them a few chances if you are if you find them interesting as humans and then blow them off you know if out if you just can't tolerate it for our listeners who are interested in this article I posted it up on our website or the episode description on BlogTalkRadio - beat your jeans it's I just linked it up so if you want to read that article I am whether welcome - okay doctor well let's move on to the next question for okay dear doctor well why do you say that men aren't attracted to pregnant women I find myself extracted - wife and a weird side effect was that I also became attracted to other pregnant women not just any pregnant women though they still had to be attractive and relatively skinny in relation to being pregnant okay this is truth might possibly be the worst adaptive evolutionary trait ever here let me work super hard to find a good pair bond only to immediately blow them off after I'm pregnant oh darn where'd my pair bond go I first saw this happen when I had two buddies years eating at wives at the same time and they were falling all over themselves just yet - the strip clubs I thought it was ridiculous at the time but now I kind of understand it yes yeah so we've got a little we've got a pair of Bhandar here who's writing to us the so all good so his wife got pregnant he still found her very attractive and I think that that that isn't that isn't super uncommon it is true that that the most likely time for men cheat on his partner is when she's pregnant that is a statistical fact the and so the his his two buddies were obviously having those circuits go off in their heads going to the strip clubs the I say this for as a result of that data and I also I also say this because we can see the tremendous impact that excess female weight particularly around the in and specifically around the stomach does to reduce their attractiveness to males so it it you know it follows that the reason why you know males aren't too upset if females get heavier and they maintain a waist hips ratio of two to three so there are women who are in just naturally very large and as they get heavier they just get bigger wider hips they get big busts their their waistline stays in a ratio to to the rest of their curvature and it does not reduce their sex appeal to the melt so the it is specifically gathering weight around the waistline which is a huge cue that the female is possibly pregnant and so this does this obviously makes a big impact so it's not going to be all men all the time to all women but what we're looking about here is statistical averages and as we see statistical averages we we see the underlying logic of evolution whenever we see that there is a universal human characteristic that shows up under certain conditions so good question and I have also heard and I don't know if it's an evolutionary adaptation but I've heard from many women that they were when they were pregnant they would times become extremely sexual and the and of course everybody just says well it's his raging hormones and it's all out of whack and crazy and everything else I'm not so sure that that would be true it it strikes me that this this could be an adaptive mechanism to essentially even though you're less attractive you make yourself far more available possibly to your pair bond partner and and therefore keeping him around so that you know I don't know that anybody's investigated that but that seems like a wouldn't surprise me at all if that turns out that's an adaptive mechanism mm-hmm and for anybody considering studying like this what would be the implications if they found that this is in fact true if that you mean that this is an adaptive mechanism mm-hmm well uh I don't know I haven't thought about you stop prescribing that that don't let mp8 oh no oh oh that's uh yeah uh we're gonna we talked about that there's a glitter modality there's a gal at UCLA that it's a big-time researcher in hormones and sexuality Marty Hazleton I think her name is and so the anyway that that's you know they're learning more all the time about the subtleties of hormones and how they influence human sexuality so it wouldn't would surprise me I can't believe that that Hazleton or her similar colleagues has it look haven't looked into this issue with respect to pregnancy hormones but they may not have gotten to it yet it's uh it wouldn't necessarily be the easiest thing to research the the issues with Hazleton has looked at is the issues of birth control on on female mate made choice yeah oh yeah that that's that's actually a a significant issue that troubles her and she she's quite disturbed by by how that can can be a problem all right move on all right we got next question all right next question is about qualifying first spouse Sudheer dr. Lyle the podcasts are fantastic but I'm not going to lie they have me constantly feeling like I no longer qualify for my wife we have two kids and pretty much since we've had one she really has no desire for me except of course for the one week that she wanted to get pregnant with kid number two and was willing to have sex every day that week now I'm smart enough to know this was not a compliment to me but just a checkbox on her agenda for kid number two and to my dismay even at 40 years old one week was just enough and now she has pretty much never initiated sex again my only hope is that she's exhausted and as you say survival provide prioritizes over sex don't know a KA don't overtax my other hope is that maybe the birth control is contributing to low libido via hormones am i spot-on with these feelings what's weird is she stayed with me years ago when I told her that I would date her forever but never saw us getting married this makes me feel like she was sleeping up back then but that was my classic breakup line and now after listening to you and makes so much sense why girls immediately pulled the ripcord out right after that they knew what was going on even though I didn't even kill me realize it until now what do you think interesting this uh this man has a lot of company and the and I'm not sure what a situation is I do know I've got a few things we were just talking about birth control and the impact that it could possibly have on human sexuality I would certainly what's reasonable here is that that these people need to get first of all I don't know how old the children are so that makes a pretty big difference so if you've got a one-year-old that we're chasing around and caretaking for then then trust me that that woman very likely doesn't have any energy at all for for sexuality now if the children are four and six this is starting to look a little bit different and so like I said since I don't know what the person's particulars are it's not it's not that easy for me to speak with any confidence at all about how is that we would approach this however the in principle we would want to approach this with a very gentle but frank discussion and and essentially we you want to you want to look at this whole situation kind of openly and having an open up the discussion by being vulnerable and essentially saying you know I've one of the things that that this seems like it's changed in our relationship I know we've were up to our ears in in trouble and stress and we've got these two kids and we're on this adventure that where they they have tremendous needs and we have to answer to them and I know that it takes a lot out of us however the the I you know the idea of being in a marriage or any relationship romantic relationship is to have some relevance to feel like that that are that our partner likes us and we like them and I just can't help but notice that I just feel like maybe that's not true anymore for you that that this is really you know that this is not a place that you feel that that happy about being and I'm not sure why and if there's anything that I can do to make that different you know I would I would really want to know so is there more than I can do or throw things that I can do differently because I don't I don't want you to be unhappy and that area of your life and I don't want to be unhappy in that area and so to this kind of discussion I'm just doing this off the top of my head but this is this kind of discussion in three minutes you can you talk straight to people and if you if you talk in a way that is not accusing but is sort of reporting what it is that you see and reporting about what it is that you would hope for and reporting also that that you value the relationship a great deal and that you would want to do what does it make make your your wife happier and it does she have any intuition about that this is this is a you know an important discussion and if she blows it off buts okay you can come back and have this discussion again in a month but but she will have heard loud and clear that that your wheels are turning and that you are concerned you are you are considering leaving that's not it's not an open threat and it's not an angry threat at all it's just that she will pick up the idea that you are not gets just going to roll over for the rest of your life and have it be just sheer mediocrity but that's not what we're going to do that in fact we are going to approach this as best we can in a in a joint in a joint exploration to try to figure out whether or not we can recapture some of the of the closeness and intimacy and sensuality into the relationship that was once there and we're going to be open to do the you know the objections and we're going to be open to to her the fact that she may get a she may not feel like she's in a position of power and a possibility of dealing with a possible breakup etcetera so there's all kinds of reasons why she might not be ready for any discussion like this but we can have this discussion quietly and then we can have it again and then we can have it again and so in the months to come we essentially are continually circling around on these issues so that the person is getting more comfortable and realizing we are not on the edge of freaking out we're just trying to solve a problem okay and depend upon what you have on the other side what is the truly the nature of this relationship and if it if it turns out to be the case that you actually do not qualify and that she's not interested in you doing anything to improve your possibility that you could qualify and the kids are not 1 years old they're in fact independent enough that she has time and she has energy and she's not surely exhausted then then we're going to then that's a whole different set of discussions so first we go there and then we see what we have after that mm-hmm ok interesting this made me think of a question about a friend's breakup do you want to talk about this now or should we leader her live yeah go right ahead yeah friend of mine recently you know as he was dating a girl and she broke up with him and they were had they were pretty mature about but everything but from from what he was telling me he was frustrated because she kept it moved past the point of maturity after they already agreed to break up but she kept trying to almost like like trying to get him to get upset and cause drama and we were trying to figure out why that is you know why that's happening and the only thing we could come up with was that she didn't have she wanted closure and she wanted him to be the bad guy but it just makes me think what you know in this type of case here it made me think of it because when people break up you know it's not always the easiest thing is always a mature thing we people don't always act maturely yeah well sometimes remember whenever you don't understand something the right place to look is for status so whenever you can't understand why somebody's doing what they're doing if you are puzzled it is very likely that status is in fact the variable that you're not observing and that you're not understanding and so in that case you could have a situation that that the that the female needed him to to act like he was more upset about losing her and he that she essentially wanted to be able to report honestly to the village that he was all bent out of shape which would have signaled that he was the rejected party and she was the rejecting party which would have defended her mating status okay so that that would that would be almost certainly what was motivating her behavior so in the aftermath of breakups I have not I have not paid close attention at all it just way out at the periphery of my vision folks so far out it barely has caught my eyes the fact that Brad and Angelina are breaking up or got a divorce I don't know what has gone on all right but I am also I have also very peripherally aware that I was told this secondhand that apparently she accused him of some kind of abuse of their children right some damn thing whatever the hell it was now the this is undoubtedly BS so this is uh now is it theoretically possible of course it's theoretically possible it's just exceedingly unlikely so what what likely happened is that this is a this is sort of a classic situation where the male as he ages is not losing mate value as fast as the female is losing mate value and so as a result of this both these people who are you know in the top you know one one ten-thousandth of humanity for sexual attractiveness they meet they they become the you know the tabloid people of the world and Angelina of course gets more credit for landing Brad Pitt than Brad Pitt gets for landing Angelina certainly if you were to tap into the culture of psychology about this it would be the classic issue that the supremely attractive male is in fact the grand prize of evolution not the supremely attractive female that's that's how that's going to work so the as a result of this now you have a situation where where he is not losing his extraordinary mate value as fast as she is and then she I guess she has this issue where she was worried about breast cancer because she had some genes and so therefore she cut her breasts off who knows what went on there and or why or what the real reasons are I don't care at all the but what it is interesting is that in the aftermath of this breakup we have now Angelina apparently like I said I don't know if this is even true but this was reported to me throwing mud on Brad Pitt's reputation this does not surprise me at all so this is this is like the likely truth is that he has moved on he's interested in other people mmm so suddenly there's another Angelina somewhere in the wings or many Angelina's in the wings that are 15 years younger than Angelina and so that that are perfectly interested in Brad Pitt and he knows that and he's probably taking advantage of this Angelina I can't handle it and as a result what she's going to do she's going to tar and feather his reputation and say that in fact he can't fire me because I quit or I fired him first because he's a bad person so this is this is akin to what it is that your friend is going through with this with this breakup it's the same process whenever you do ask again look for status that's that's probably exactly what's happening that's fascinating and so for is there anything that the other party can do to prevent this from happening yes there is the right thing to do if I were if I were if somebody could call Brad Pitt and I would charge him more $10,000 for the hour the thing to do is to go on on Oprah Winfrey let Oprah you know act like the brilliant interviewer she is you know throw a bunch of softball questions and to be as handsome as hell you know not that that goes without saying the guy the guy never got anything other than an A+ and handsome class ah all right so so then I have Oprah throw 80 softball questions about your life in your relationship Evangelina and then the right thing to do is to pour status on top of Lina and have Oprah you know the great interviewer asked a tough question about what she said and all he can say is you know you know I you know I just love her to death she's just the greatest most fascinating person and and I don't know I have a feeling that other people have maybe told her things for their own designs and you know she's such a she's such a responsible person that it probably terrified her and so no I don't hold this against her at all she's just absolutely phenomenal human being and you know love is love and what can you do and I just you know I'd do anything to have us back to where we were but you can't sometimes recover the past and all you can do is swallow your pride and move on and you learn from your mistakes but you know Angeline is the greatest thing that ever walked that's what you say that's what you say no matter what she says you pound that down the media it is front page all over the place it you you want it you know the lead article and Oprah's magazine that she continues remarkably to always make the cover everything it doesn't look a day over 35 okay but the point is is that this is this would be the right strategy to try to defuse this and so in general the right strategy is you go to your village when the other person is throwing mud on you you go against your genetics your the genes tell you fight back and cut their credibility off at the knees as fast as you can the proper move to beat the djinns is to go exactly the opposite direction and go in big okay go in big go in loud go in super positive they will get that feedback from other people and it will be a shock and it will spin the esteem dynamic and the other direction it'll be confusing to them that'll be gratifying and it will be immediately the right thing for them to do is to shut up and take a different tactic it will be in their best interest to do so so that's how that's how we stop the bleeding in a mess like that well we're going to continue with the podcast before any of these celebrities hire you as a PR campaign manager all right believe me they got they got ten other more highly paid advisors telling them to do different ah what ten thousand dollars an hour is too much for them come on yeah oh my goodness all right let's go on what do we got all right our next question is about kids and pets which I guess what we've heard before from you is that they're pretty much the same thing in any way except child kids you can't sell their children once they go grow up you know so right that's a problem well you paid all right that's go ahead dr. Lyle ever since I was a little kid I've always adored pets especially the cute little furry puppies and when I got older I was planning to get a puppy of my own but as soon as I became a father for the first time it was like a switch turned off I no longer felt the same way about cute little animals and when friends bring their dogs with them I hardly even find it interesting to pet them what's the mechanism behind this phenomenon and has my fondness for children been taken over by my emotions for pets you know one of these days I'll know I'm ready to leave the earth when I've heard it all okay this is this is a new twist that I've never heard now I've heard something very similar which is interesting so I'll tell you what I've heard before because this man's intuition is pretty pretty interesting and I and I have a feeling that something very much like this is going on so this is way out there in the future for evolutionary psychology for somebody to to sniff out and run the appropriate experiments to figure this out for mine the data somehow the yeah it's quite possible that the affection for animals and the intensity of the emotion for animals may have to do with a male circuit demonstrating in a part of male that it's grandstanding that they would be good fathers and and so that once they are fathers they may the the utility of that demonstration may be remarkably less so that's an interesting the interesting possibility way out there don't know now here's what it is that I would tell you I had a client that was extremely competent human and he he did not actually think that he had any paternal motivation desire friendliness anything so this guy was just just an extremely competent business person and then he got married and had a couple of kids and he said when he had his first kid his attitude was that he would kill anybody that would hurt that kid yes he he said he was very matter-of-fact okay very matter-of-fact this guy know this is 20 years ago and I remember it because he is extremely decent person and it was very matter-of-fact just like he was in business and he was like no he goes I didn't even know that was in there didn't know it was a possibility for him he had never particularly liked kids never had any desire nothing has his own kid and it's like anybody touches this kid they're dead so it is very interesting that these mechanisms I believe in there certain cases can have something that can look like an on/off switch and we we may have found one inside of this man's head remarkable I myself am crazy about certain pets and not others but boy I live without another day okay I was just gonna ask all right we'll do it another day because I thought when Todd about what you said about animals and pets as a display and I've met people who are just adamant that they just don't like kids and they don't want to have kids ever and I know that you've said that that if they ever did have kids aren't you know any which way that that would most likely change but I went online I heard yeah but I wonder if there's had any like personality characteristics that favor people who end up getting irritated by children well I think I believe that I'm right in other words I I think they're one of your own children it's a whole different kettle of fish completely so I am not attracted to people's small children at all the but the actually there there's a family friend very close to me that they toted over her granddaughter for me to see a few weeks ago and that did strangely not that kid had animation and was hitting my circuits pretty good and I thought oh boy there it is okay so the but but in general I think what you're going to find is that Skaggs of us are not the slightest bit interested in children per se but we would be unbelievably interested in our own and I think that that's probably even more far far more likely to be true of males than it is females hmm interesting yeah I just had a family gathered went to a family gather a couple weeks back and the highlight of the evening was playing with the kids because they're the only they're the only humans that can't figure out where my magic tricks like how my magic tricks go all the adults know where I hide all and everything like that so right no ego grinder for me yeah yeah there you go all right what else we got sure okay all right this might be a long question so might be the last one but in director lab please I would love to hear your thoughts about the marshmallow test experiment the book and everything surrounding it concept of willpower okay so let me tell you about what the marshmallow test was the back way back in the day was probably 1960s a a personality psychologists at Stanford by the name of Walter Mischel ran a very simple little test and it went something like this so a kid a little kid got a choice that they could either have a marshmallow that they can eat it right in front of him or if they would wait I think it was can't remember how long it was short length of time like minute or my probably less than half a minute maybe something like I can't remember but it was a short length of time if the kid did not eat the marshmallow then they could get two marshmallows and so it was this very simple delay of gratification test so Michelle does this test and then what was interesting is that these kids were followed up you know 10 years later so because the Stanford had a lot of they get a lot of they got all these educationally interested humans milling around Palo Alto dragging their kids into Stanford for various and study various studies over the years so they have a lot of data around their longitudinal data and so this was some longitudinal data that was able to be mined and so years later when they were you know young adults they had run I think they had I can't remember GPAs it was probably SAT scores think things of this nature they may be maybe high school GPA maybe even college I can't remember but they had data showing clear evidence that the kids that had that had delayed gratification - had better scores and and I think I think they even had I think that the the book that they're referring to I think they have launched to data that even goes to the present day so I think they followed these people many years later and looked at their careers or I don't even know what they looked at but the point is and here's the whole point the whole point is that that this very simple test wound up being remarkably predictive I don't know how good the correlation coefficients are in terms of who was really good to lay a gratifi when they were you know 6 years old and how they look at 50 but it's better than nothing in other words it's above 0 now quite frankly I have no idea why anybody would make such a big deal out of this the it I knew a book age at once that was talking to a friend of mine and my friend said it was and believe me this wasn't doctor Alan Goldhamer this was this was a got like four friends in the world so wasn't him so this guy this guy was going to write a book on health and so he's going to write a book on health so he's talking to this agent about his book and the agent says not a book maybe a paragraph ha ha in other words you don't have an idea worthy of a book ok this this study that has gotten remarkable press I don't know why I can remember it was presented to me in when I was in school with a bizarre twist and entrance now I don't know I've never read the book that they have they have done about this or anything much more about it the to me it's a joke it's like ok well big deal you just measured conscientiousness and probably IQ so all that's all we got there and we can do that in about eight seconds and you did it in a couple of minutes and no problem I could do it too we don't have to do a marshmallow test we could do it seventy-nine different ways I can make up in about three in about an hour that would come up with the same thing so so the but I think that we have to actually it's just occurring to me we have to we have to see this in context historically in psychology and that is Walter Mischel it was in the heart of what what's called the Situationists movement in psychology Walter Mischel really believed that individual differences in humans were minimal and that situational forces were paramount in deciding individual differences in behavior and so well the concept of of the what I talked about when what we call modern behavior genetics the notion that the genes are driving individual differences this was not this was not in this guy's vocabulary and even when it became evident that this was true late in his career he wasn't going to he wasn't going to choke it down so Michelle is very much a situation of psychologists this isn't this isn't to his discredit it starts being to be people's discredit when they stick their head in the sand and they don't want to face the the phenomenal data from behavioral genetics but he is writing or the marshmallow test you know is happening earlier and so I think he was probably amazed like hey look at that like that's incredible look at my little test and see what it correlates to 15 years later it's like yeah Walter its genetic okay and so the but when this was presented to me in school in the 1980s the inferences that were coming in up I don't know if anybody wrote these but these are my professors saying boy you know it really looks like it's worth as children trying to coach children into having delay of gratification because and and they were all interested how these kids the digital a gratification did it like you know they would count to 10 or shut their eyes right I can't remember what they did but they these kids different kids had different little strategies and the investigators were extremely interested in these strategies because you know they were like wow this could be the key to teaching kids world power you're not going to teach kids well power you are observing the individual differences in willpower that's what you're saying you're not going to teach Michael Jordan to jump you're simply going to watch him that when he's eight years old it's like wow that kids really fast and he can jump it's like no kidding he's not learning how to do it he can just do it and so that's the the marshmallow test to the best of my knowledge has because nothing particularly novel or interesting other than the fact that that a tiny little slice of human behavior that you that you watch systematically even early in the game tells you can absolutely tell you something extremely important about that and predict that person's future if that particular slice of behavior is a nice little demonstration of one of the big five or I Q so that's that my thinking on the marshmallow test wonderful yeah I think I talked with you about this before a long time ago and one of the points that you made was that in one of the groups the absence of the father like basically in in the African descent group there was an East Indian group in a kind of African descent group and the absence of the father in the African descent group was like they said it was the strongest link to delay of gratification and I remember you saying well it's just the kind of dad who would be willing to lead the kid you know with the mom it's going to be little conscientiousness and so he passed all down that DNA to the kid yeah so yes yeah that dennings purpose I'd I'd completely forgotten all about that but that's just exactly what kind of thing that I would say and this is a that that is not having anything to do with those racial groups per se obviously it's talking about the specific data and a specific study of something that they happen to find all right all right you do one work with another we I think we're done for today yeah yeah we're done one day well same for next week and we'll we'll swing again next week alright next week we're going to start with the question about what would a person be like if they were in the middle of the bell curve for every single personality Church so that's good ah good question next week so got it okay all right dr. Lyle as always love hearing you talk about this stuff love it love it love it all right cool great to be here we'll see y'all soon
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