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I'm David Pinsoff.

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I'm David Petrozowski.

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And this is Evolutionary Psychology, the podcast, actual evolutionary psychology.

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By actual evolutionary psychologists.

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Nailed it.

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Today we have a wonderful guest, Josh Tiber.

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Yes.

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Uh Josh is a uh expert in the field of disgust and disease psychology,

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contamination.

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Um he's such a fun person to talk to, and his knowledge of this area is quite

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expansive and breathtaking.

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Particularly because this is an area in evolutionary psychology that has led to a lot of

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ideas.

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It's been very generative.

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Some of these ideas are more dubious than others, and Josh is the perfect person to uh cut

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through the bullshit and tell you what is uh real, or at least what is the most

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promising direction to head in and what is maybe more dubious.

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Um for me, I think it's it's extremely clarifying to get his take on all these issues in

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the literature on disgust, and it's such a huge topic.

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I mean, disgust touches on so many different aspects of our lives uh in a way that is

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really hard to appreciate um until you uh talk to Josh.

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So um we get into lots of stuff.

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Discuss, disease.

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And I really appreciate about Josh that he is very careful and not a

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partisan in the sense of I always feel like I can I very much trust Josh's opinion

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about things in that he is just so careful um and is not fragile epistemically.

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Like he'll entertain an idea, but then think about does this make sense?

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And I just he's just a lovely person to uh emulate in terms of the stance one takes

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towards ideas in in the sense of entertaining them, but also taking an arm's length take on

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them and saying, does this actually make sense, even if it's coming from within Ev Psych,

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for example?

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Yes, he's one of the best examples I think of of a marriage between really good theory and

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really good empirics.

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He's very good in both of those areas, which is rare.

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Absolutely, yes.

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So Josh is a shining example of how to do evpsy.

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So without further ado, here's Josh Tiber.

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Enjoy.

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So Josh Tiber, you are in the Netherlands.

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Um, how did you get there?

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Uh via airplane, Dave.

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Um good, we're done.

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Okay.

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Have a good week, everybody.

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Josh, thanks for coming on.

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That was good.

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So uh yeah, I can give you the backstory.

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I was in a position to finish my PhD right when the great financial crisis was unfolding.

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And I struck out on the job market, which was exclusively targeted at the US for a couple

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years, and I decided to try my luck out at a job ad in Amsterdam.

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And it turned out to be the only hit that I got.

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And I thought, well, that sounds like an exciting adventure to go continue my career in a

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foreign country.

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So I moved over to Amsterdam in 2011.

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It was initially just a two-year contract.

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So jobs worked a little bit different out here rather than a 10-year track.

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It was just you're an assistant professor for two years, and we'll see how it goes from

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there.

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And um yeah, I've I've I felt very at home here and uh both academically and

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personally.

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So I've ended up staying here and now I'm married with a kid and fairly uh integrated into

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the academic system.

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Um for those people who are, I mean, you know, I think we're mostly American listeners.

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Uh, how is how is it different either academically or personally, not to get too personal,

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but we we're we we have we have four hours, so let's well, uh

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academically, I mean there there's tons of differences.

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The commonalities are that European researchers, or at least uh Dutch and UK, and to an

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extent French, German, many other countries, they're publishing in uh overlapping, largely

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similar academic journals.

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And a lot of them are coming to the same academic conferences.

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Um, but there are differences in the education system.

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For example, uh at my university, it's a three-year bachelor's degree, and we have six

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periods rather than uh quarters or semesters or trimesters.

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Um, most people take a fourth year, which is technically a master's, but it's kind of like

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the fourth year of a bachelor's in the US.

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Uh tuition is noticeably different.

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So in the Netherlands, I think that our bachelor tuition is something like 2800 euros per

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year if you come from the EU.

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And our master's tuition, I think, is 5,000 per year.

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Um A financial burden.

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Financial burden.

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Yeah, it's quite a bit different.

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So uh I would I would vastly prefer my son to attend a European or a Dutch university to a

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US one uh when he gets to be that age.

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Yeah, Germany is free.

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Um yeah.

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I would imagine the funding for scientific research is also uh more forthcoming there, or

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is it as uh as bad as it is here in the US?

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Um I don't know about the proportion of proposals that are funded through the Dutch

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National Science Foundation versus the US National Science Foundation, but there's

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certainly been austerity recently.

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There have been budgetary issues in European countries similar to those uh in the US.

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And some of them have been caused by common kind of political movements in the US versus

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the Netherlands, but also there have been some constraints with economic recovery after the

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pandemic in uh in Europe versus the US.

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And you were in you were there for the pandemic, yeah.

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I was here for the pandemic, and that was uh that was an interesting experience, both uh

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research-wise, which we can get to in a little bit.

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Yeah, yeah, yeah.

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But also personally, um I I really learned Dutch well during the pandemic.

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So I'd already been in the Netherlands for eight years and I'd taken several courses and um

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had some Dutch competence, but I really focused on language education and followed the news

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a lot during that period.

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And also living in a very urban and walkable environment, my wife and I would take

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45-minute walks to the city every night.

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And it was like being in that scene in the movie 28 days later, when the

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main character Jim leaves his hospital and there's just no one in downtown London.

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It was exactly like that in Dam Square in Amsterdam, where you just wouldn't see another

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human being where typically you'd see hundreds of people during the middle of the day.

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Yeah, like a CGI that post apocalyptic scene.

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Yeah.

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It was.

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It was also the first time that I'd really, I don't know, know if regret is quite the right

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word, but I lived in Albuquerque, New Mexico for seven years, which just has incredible

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skies, mountains, landscapes.

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And I really regretted not being able to just get in my car and drive somewhere.

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An urban environment felt a little bit more like a prison.

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And of course, there were uh I think that the term lockdown is used very sloppily to refer

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to a lot of things that um are not the same.

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Uh, but we did have curfews and a lot of restaurants and bars were closed.

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So uh options for social and just recreational activities were pretty limited.

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Yeah.

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David, you were in LA L you were in LA for that?

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I was, yeah.

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Uh also, you know, things were locked down.

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It was a bummer for everyone.

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Uh it was, you know, it was it was dark times.

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Uh but I wanna transition into your your research because um

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because everyone's like, no, tell us more about what it's like to walk through Amsterdam.

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Yeah, let's just remember how how bad it was.

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Yeah, exactly.

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Uh so like you actually, as far as I'm aware, you have done some of the

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best and uh highest sample size research on the effects of pandemics on our psychology.

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Uh and also you're one of the foremost experts on disgust and contamination psychology.

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And so here you are in the middle of a pandemic.

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You have uh this huge sample size of studying people's attitudes throughout the pandemic,

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both you know, uh before it really peaked and and after.

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And you have this uh huge, awesome data set.

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I I remember seeing some of your slides at HBES and was really impressed by it.

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Um And I would just love to get some of the takeaways from that project because I found it

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really interesting at the time I saw it at HBS.

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And I I'd love a recap of it.

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Yeah, sure.

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So at the beginning of the pandemic, I was contacted by a lot of journalists because there

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aren't that many researchers who specialize in the psychology of pathogen avoidance.

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And then all of a sudden, there's a once-in-a-generation or multiple generation pandemic.

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And they wanted my insights into how human psychology was going to change as a function of

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COVID-19.

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And initially, I was very skeptical that we would see many changes that had any kind of

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correspondence with our functionally specialized pathogen avoidance psychology.

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Nevertheless, I felt like it would be a good idea to start collecting some data.

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And so I partnered with a local panel research company in the Netherlands called

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Flycatcher.

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And I started with, gosh, I think our first sample was a thousand individuals.

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And we collected data during, let's see, I think that it was May of 2020.

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So just about the peak period of deaths and ICU occupancy in the Netherlands.

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And we had a plan to just collect data every nine months or so, as long as necessary until

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the pandemic was over.

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And the goal was to assess some variables that psychologists have said

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relate to our motivations to avoid infectious disease.

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I can list some of these.

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One of them is disgust sensitivity.

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So, as you and listeners are probably aware, some people are more easily disgusted by bad

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smells and, you know, just based on our folk psychology, gross things than others.

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Um, and researchers have often tied variation in how easily disgusted you are to your

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motivations to avoid pathogen cues.

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So we measured that across the pandemic.

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Um, we measured attitudes toward outgroups.

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So there's a literature suggesting that part of our psychology of inner group biases and

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negativity toward outgroups reflects adaptations for avoiding pathogens, with

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the idea that in our ancestral history, outgroups have posed a greater pathogen threat

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than in-groups.

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And we assessed a variable that I've been assessing in several studies over the last five

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years that we just refer to as contact comfort.

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So it's not how disgusted you are by pathogen cues, but rather how comfortable you

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would be um with indirect contact with another person.

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So an example is if um Dave P, you take a big swig out of a Dasani

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bottle and you offer it to Dave other P.

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I just made that mistake that all of you guys do.

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Right here, look at this.

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Sam Pellegrino.

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Okay, if Pinsoff offers, if Pinsoff takes a swig out of a Sam Pellegrino bottle and offers

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it to Petrozki, uh, how comfortable are you with that, Petrazuki?

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How comfortable are you, Dave?

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I have a cold right now.

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So yeah, you don't.

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All right.

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You can pass.

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And then we also asked them about their explicit concerns about disease.

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So uh items here are, you know, I'm concerned about getting an infectious disease right

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now.

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And we could um track how these variables relate to each other, but also how they changed

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across these assessments during the pandemic to see if early on the pandemic, when disease

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is very salient, you know, there's press conferences weekly or so in the Netherlands,

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there's lockdowns, people are worried about dying and about the parents dying.

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They don't want to get close to each other because they're worried about these pathogens

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transmitted by invisible respiratory droplets and aerosols.

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If then these variables that we think reflect pathogen avoidance motivations are

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changing with the intensity of the pandemic.

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So ultimately, we had four assessments every nine months starting in 2020 and ending in

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2022 when the World Health Organization had declared that the pandemic was

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complete.

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And uh what what did you find from from this uh massive undertaking?

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We found zero differences in most of these variables.

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So discuss sensitivity uh did not change across the pandemic.

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This was actually a little bit contrary to some early papers that were pushed out very

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early in the pandemic, um, but were kind of small sample size, and we're just looking at

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what a mean was here and what a mean on another sample was that would have been pulled out

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of the literature.

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Since we could follow our participants across time, uh we had a very high-powered uh study

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for detecting fairly small effect sizes.

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And we didn't see that, you know, when people were very worried about disease and they were

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getting cues to at least socially transmitted cues to there being uh threats posed by

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disease, we didn't see that they were more disgusted by mold or bad smells or sores or

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anything like that.

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Um, we also saw no differences in anti immigrant bias across the

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pandemic.

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Um, so when people were explicitly saying, Yes, I'm quite worried about disease, they were

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no more um negative toward immigrants than uh when they weren't as concerned.

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Now I just skipped it a little bit.

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When we did ask them their kind of reflective concerns about disease, I'm worried about

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getting sick right now, we saw very large effect sizes.

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Yes, people were consciously worried about disease early, not late, but that didn't

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correspond with then greater anti immigrant bias.

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Maybe most interestingly, there was no change in contact comfort.

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So people weren't saying I'm less comfortable sharing a water bottle with someone, even

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when health authorities were saying you really don't want to be doing this on the

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self-report instruments, uh, they were no less comfortable early in the pandemic

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um than late in the pandemic.

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And that might seem counterintuitive, but if you actually saw behavior during the pandemic,

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some people were you know consciously worried about things.

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Um, but when I would go out in public, the majority of people were disregarding most of

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these recommendations.

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They were not keeping their in Europe their meter and a half, uh, or I don't know if it was

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it was six feet uh in the US.

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And they were rushing out to bars and restaurants when they were uh opened again.

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So I I'll leave that there if you have any follow-up questions, then I can explain

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something else that was interesting that we found.

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Uh is the idea that the stable were there are there stable individual differences in these

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things that what were already in the literature and that you found again.

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Yes.

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Yeah.

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So there's high test-retest reliability for these measures.

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Okay.

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So if you look at the interclass correlation coefficient in the multi-level model that we

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used, you have a very high ICC reflecting stable individual differences.

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Got it.

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So if you know I sit down in a chair and it's still warm from the previous person, that

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fine, I find that gross.

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Somebody else doesn't.

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whether or not we're in a pandemic, I'm gonna still find it gross.

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The other person still isn't.

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So the idea is that the individual stable differences wash away any effect there might have

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been from the overarching pandemic cues.

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Is that the general idea?

256
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That's right.

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And you know, any effect there might have been, again, we had very high power to detect

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very small effects, and we didn't even detect those.

259
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Yeah.

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And then did you find any within cohort correl correlations?

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So like within a a cohort, say, you know, one of you know, between one of your nine month

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separations or whatever, did you find correlations between say disgust sensitivity and

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anti-immigrant sentiment or fear of disease and anti-immigrant sentiment or or anything

264
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like that?

265
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Yeah, we replicated these effects.

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So um individu individuals who are higher in disgust sensitivity are more negative toward

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immigrants.

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pretty small effect size, but uh we we did detect that, yes.

269
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And what what what is if I can just push on that for a second, what's the logic?

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You talked a little bit about the logic, but can we unpack that?

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Because I think one of the one of the reasons why people find the behavioral immune

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system stuff interesting is number one, it's just interesting to think about

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psychological adaptations for avoiding disease.

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But number two, I think there's been an argument that it has a host of concomitant

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effects that might seem sort of irrational from a naive or or

276
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maybe standard social science model to be sort of coalitional about of psych.

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Can you either unpack like what's the logic of avoiding out groups?

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And is this uh a real in your opinion?

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Like what's up with that?

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And can you just talk more about that for people who may not know?

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Absolutely.

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And I'll take a circuitous route to doing that and hopefully not monologue or lecture too

283
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much because I think that this is a really interesting topic.

284
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So there's a social psychologist, evolutionary psychologist named Mark Schaller, who really

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pioneered this area.

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And Mark wrote a nice chapter in Buss's handbook of evolutionary psychology, in which he

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described the behavioral immune system as an evolutionary success story.

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And when Mark first started working on this stuff in the early aughts, I was only familiar

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with a couple papers that engaged with the psychology of disease and disease avoidance.

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Most of it was looking at attitudes toward gay men in the 1990s because they were

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explicitly associated with HIV, and researchers thought this might underlie part of

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anti-gay prejudice.

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And then uh the evolutionary psychologist Rob Kurzban and co-author Mark Leary wrote a

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classic paper that really kind of uh got me thinking about evolutionary psychology in

295
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2001 on stigmatization, and they proposed that one of three reasons uh

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explaining general stigmatization processes in humans is parasite avoidance.

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Um, regardless, Mark Schaller, being a social psychologist largely interested in prejudice,

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started thinking well, people kind of have aversions to a lot of individuals for

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seemingly irrational reasons.

300
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So um birthmarks, physical disability, just looking different than other

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people.

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And a lot of theories in social psychology have difficulty explaining that.

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And so he started proposing that a lot of this might be our specialized pathogen avoidance

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psychology treating features of different individuals in our social environments as

305
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diagnostic of an increased infection risk.

306
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Now, this again is something that if you're not thinking about evolution and what our minds

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should be designed to do, you really have a tough time coming to that hypothesis.

308
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And if we unpack that a little bit further, in talks I give on this topic, I often give a

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picture of this really cool looking virus virus, a bacterial phage.

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And phages are specialized for infecting bacterial cells.

311
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So some bacteria that infect humans, like E.

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coli, they're actually infected by these viral cells.

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And what this suggests is that pathogens have been a problem for life on Earth pretty much

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as long as life on Earth has existed.

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And they should be one of the most important factors in shaping the evolution of

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life.

317
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And we should expect a lot of complex adaptations for this problem in all animals,

318
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and specifically what we're interested in as psychologists, humans.

319
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Now, if we think about all of the things that humans have to do that have non-zero disease

320
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risks, well, eating puts things in our mouths.

321
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We often need to touch our food with our hands, which are coming into contact with other

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things that are pathogen risks.

323
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Um, having sex requires close proximity and contact with someone else.

324
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And evolutionary psychologists have pointed out that sex is pretty important and make

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preferences for understanding uh the mind.

326
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Um, basic social interactions, so touching things that other people have touched, so

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exchanging artifacts or physical contact for cooperative interactions, uh, interacting with

328
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animals, either as food or with dogs.

329
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And the list goes on: child rearing.

330
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And so by unlocking better knowledge about how our minds have evolved to deal with

331
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pathogens, to detect them and then manage the threats posed by them, we should be able to

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make inroads in a lot of different research areas in evolutionary psychology.

333
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So that's kind of the pitch for why this is important.

334
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Let me stop there for a second before we go on to the outgroup thing, just to see if you

335
00:20:45,520 --> 00:20:47,360
guys have any questions or comments.

336
00:20:47,810 --> 00:20:52,770
No, it's it's it's a wonderful um tour of of the history of this thinking.

337
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And uh I'm eager to get to the punchline of you know what is real here uh

338
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and what uh was a wrong turn.

339
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Yeah and I just want to say too uh before I to interrupt um it's also a great example of it

340
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reminds me of Annie Wirtz's plant work where you know people are like, oh, that's weird

341
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that there's like psychological stuff for pathogen avoidance or any with like with plants.

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But then if you and that's from a very like ivory tower, like the purpose of cognition is

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thinking, we don't think about the embodied physical environment or nature really at all.

344
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But if you come from this other perspective, yeah, like pathogens have been around forever.

345
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I mean, there's arguments that the evolution of sex is because of pathogens, right?

346
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And uh and something like plants or pathogens, it's the prior for there being lots of

347
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adaptations for these things is so high.

348
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So I just love this idea that you're taking a thing that is sort of counterintuitive from

349
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this very narrow perspective, but really there's really good evidence or arguments or logic

350
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for why it would be.

351
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So I think it's just a good example of the argument of taking an evolutionary approach,

352
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providing a novel, different way of thinking about things.

353
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But that's that's just my commentary before we proceed to the street.

354
00:22:01,480 --> 00:22:01,800
Yeah, absolutely.

355
00:22:02,440 --> 00:22:03,160
Absolutely agreed.

356
00:22:03,400 --> 00:22:07,640
So when we get to outgroups, I'll also say that in this research area, there were a lot of

357
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exciting hypotheses early on.

358
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And then, as is the case with you know all kinds of generative and productive scientific

359
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enterprises, there's uh pruning, and then there's more generation, and then there's further

360
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pruning.

361
00:22:19,570 --> 00:22:22,130
And there's not an absolute consensus in this area.

362
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I think that you could have guests that might disagree with some of my perspective, but

363
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I'll give you mine here.

364
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Some of the early work in this area, uh, by Mark Schaller, by uh really, really smart

365
00:22:33,570 --> 00:22:39,570
people like Dan Fessler, Carlos Navarrett, also uh Randy Thornhill, a lot of it was focused

366
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on this idea of outgroup biases and prejudices having something to do with pathogen

367
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avoidance.

368
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And the authors that I just mentioned, some of them have slightly different perspectives on

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this.

370
00:22:50,780 --> 00:22:55,900
But I'll give you the account from the parasite stress model, which has some commonalities

371
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with other accounts.

372
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The idea here is that people specialize their immune responses

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to pathogens in their local ecologies.

374
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And the pathogens in different ecologies are going to be different.

375
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And so if you have two groups that live, let's say, on two different sides of a

376
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mountain or across an ocean, they're going to develop some immunity

377
00:23:21,730 --> 00:23:25,410
based on their exposure to specific pathogens in their ecologies.

378
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And so the average interaction with someone from your ecology who shares some

379
00:23:31,570 --> 00:23:37,340
immunity to the type of pathogens there, that's going to be less of a threat to you simply

380
00:23:37,340 --> 00:23:41,340
because you have some immunity to the pathogens that that person is going to transmit to

381
00:23:41,340 --> 00:23:45,260
you if you're shaking their hand or eating food with them or something like that.

382
00:23:45,500 --> 00:23:50,380
However, if you have an interaction with a person on the other side of that mountain who

383
00:23:50,380 --> 00:23:55,100
has exposure to different pathogens that you might not have some adaptive immunity toward,

384
00:23:55,580 --> 00:23:59,900
that interaction is going to be more likely to infect you with something that has higher

385
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costs for you.

386
00:24:00,540 --> 00:24:02,350
And those costs could ultimately be death.

387
00:24:02,510 --> 00:24:06,670
But of course, pathogen with pathogens is not you die or you don't die.

388
00:24:07,150 --> 00:24:08,510
There are metabolic costs.

389
00:24:08,670 --> 00:24:12,030
You could infect social partners or kin.

390
00:24:12,510 --> 00:24:16,350
There could be phenotypic differences that lead you to be stigmatized.

391
00:24:16,510 --> 00:24:20,510
You have less time and energy to hunt, to invest in friends, all sorts of bad things with

392
00:24:20,510 --> 00:24:21,230
infection.

393
00:24:21,470 --> 00:24:27,390
So the idea here is that the mind might have evolved to treat out-group membership as a

394
00:24:27,390 --> 00:24:33,260
cue to pathogens, or at least to the infectiousness or the danger

395
00:24:33,260 --> 00:24:34,780
of pathogens to you.

396
00:24:35,020 --> 00:24:40,220
And hence, we should see these relations between disgust sensitivity and outgroup biases.

397
00:24:40,380 --> 00:24:45,100
So the individuals who, when they see pathogen cues, they feel more disgusted.

398
00:24:45,580 --> 00:24:50,140
Their affective systems are basically investing more in avoidance in response to these cues

399
00:24:50,140 --> 00:24:52,460
than the people who are low on disgust sensitivity.

400
00:24:52,780 --> 00:24:56,860
Those high disgust sensitivity individuals should be more biased against outgroups.

401
00:24:56,970 --> 00:25:02,010
uh, we should see greater inner group biases in parts of the world with a higher

402
00:25:02,010 --> 00:25:04,970
concentration of parasites, et cetera.

403
00:25:05,290 --> 00:25:07,450
So that's the argument.

404
00:25:07,610 --> 00:25:12,890
And there are a lot of studies that have been interpreted as supporting that argument.

405
00:25:13,290 --> 00:25:17,610
Um, I have personally been skeptical of that argument for a few reasons.

406
00:25:17,690 --> 00:25:22,490
And part of this might be uh my background in social psychology as it is.

407
00:25:22,740 --> 00:25:28,100
And Dave Petrozky, uh, given that you're interested in groups and group psychology, you

408
00:25:28,100 --> 00:25:30,100
might have some thoughts to add to this as well.

409
00:25:30,340 --> 00:25:36,020
Um, one is that the psychology of groups has very little overlap with uh ecological origin.

410
00:25:36,420 --> 00:25:41,540
And this perspective really is centered around people come from different ecologies that

411
00:25:41,540 --> 00:25:42,900
have different pathogens.

412
00:25:43,150 --> 00:25:48,110
So the minimal group paradigm, which was developed in the 1970s, demonstrates that if you

413
00:25:48,110 --> 00:25:52,910
just get a bunch of strangers in a room and you tell half of them that they are people who

414
00:25:52,910 --> 00:25:58,190
favor the artist Klee, and the other half that they favor the artist Kandinsky, you can get

415
00:25:58,190 --> 00:26:01,150
these manifestations of intergroup biases.

416
00:26:02,430 --> 00:26:08,270
The erasing race work, and Dave, your other work on alliance detections and the

417
00:26:08,270 --> 00:26:14,200
Who Said What paradigm suggests that the way that group membership is encoded

418
00:26:14,600 --> 00:26:19,880
based on phenotypic features is kind of flexible and probably tracking coalitions more so

419
00:26:19,880 --> 00:26:21,960
than it's tracking ecological origins.

420
00:26:22,120 --> 00:26:27,400
And the work by uh Tosho Yamagishi and others that kind of follows up on minimal group

421
00:26:27,400 --> 00:26:32,970
paradigm studies suggests that these perceptions or at least behaviors of intergroup

422
00:26:32,970 --> 00:26:36,250
biases are really tracking assumptions of interdependence.

423
00:26:36,570 --> 00:26:42,170
So kind of first principle aspects of this account leave me

424
00:26:42,170 --> 00:26:47,770
skeptical that we would actually be treating out group members per se as

425
00:26:47,770 --> 00:26:49,130
accused of pathogens.

426
00:26:49,690 --> 00:26:50,970
I'll pause there in case, yeah.

427
00:26:51,370 --> 00:26:51,690
Yeah.

428
00:26:52,090 --> 00:26:53,860
So I I fully agree.

429
00:26:53,940 --> 00:26:57,060
I I share your skepticism of this hypothesis.

430
00:26:57,300 --> 00:27:00,980
And uh I I I would add though, I mean, and this connects to some of your other research,

431
00:27:01,140 --> 00:27:06,820
there may be a grain of truth to it uh insofar as you know, any kind of social

432
00:27:06,820 --> 00:27:10,340
interaction has some pathogen risk associated with it.

433
00:27:10,580 --> 00:27:15,300
And we should have evolved to weigh the costs of those pathogen risks against the potential

434
00:27:15,300 --> 00:27:15,860
benefits.

435
00:27:16,070 --> 00:27:21,830
And so, insofar as you view outgroups as lower value social partners, then the

436
00:27:21,830 --> 00:27:24,710
costs of interacting them with them may outweigh the benefits.

437
00:27:24,870 --> 00:27:30,070
So, in that sense, it wouldn't be that you're viewing outgroups as a as a particularly high

438
00:27:30,070 --> 00:27:31,830
pathogen risk and therefore you're avoiding them.

439
00:27:31,910 --> 00:27:34,070
It's that you already don't like them for other reasons.

440
00:27:34,150 --> 00:27:39,660
Uh, and because we evolved to uh um not bear the costs of interacting with people we don't

441
00:27:39,660 --> 00:27:45,020
like, then that could uh contribute to some you know, say greater disgust toward outgroups

442
00:27:45,100 --> 00:27:49,260
or disgust might win the battle in terms of the cost-benefit analysis of interacting with

443
00:27:49,260 --> 00:27:49,340
them.

444
00:27:49,500 --> 00:27:53,100
Do you do you buy that um grain of truth story?

445
00:27:53,420 --> 00:27:53,740
Yeah.

446
00:27:53,980 --> 00:27:54,940
Yeah, absolutely.

447
00:27:55,180 --> 00:28:00,990
So that's a nice segue, uh Dave, in that one thing that I've argued for recently is that

448
00:28:01,070 --> 00:28:05,630
uh the majority of our path to avoidance psychology in terms of social interactions is

449
00:28:05,630 --> 00:28:06,910
based on two things.

450
00:28:07,150 --> 00:28:12,590
One of them is: does this person actually have a feature that is diagnostic of

451
00:28:12,590 --> 00:28:13,390
infection?

452
00:28:13,550 --> 00:28:19,540
And I'm skeptical that things like old age or obesity, uh, some cues that

453
00:28:19,540 --> 00:28:24,820
have been proposed uh when this literature first started developing are actually treated as

454
00:28:24,820 --> 00:28:28,580
diagnostic of being contagious with an infection right then.

455
00:28:28,900 --> 00:28:34,260
I would bet, well, maybe not bet money, but uh reputation, that um

456
00:28:34,740 --> 00:28:40,020
the the cues that people interpret as diagnostic of contagion are really going to be

457
00:28:40,020 --> 00:28:45,950
limited to things like oozing sores on the face, things related to skin color, skin

458
00:28:45,950 --> 00:28:49,950
texture, irregular dots of color, that type of stuff.

459
00:28:50,190 --> 00:28:56,190
So that's going to be one feature that's important in kind of regulating this.

460
00:28:56,590 --> 00:28:58,910
Do I take a risk associated with pathogens?

461
00:28:59,070 --> 00:29:02,110
How likely is this person that has uh has an infection?

462
00:29:02,270 --> 00:29:08,000
One interesting thing about that is that the actual pathogens that infect people now don't

463
00:29:08,000 --> 00:29:13,120
need to be the same as the pathogens that infected people 50,000 years ago or 100,000 years

464
00:29:13,120 --> 00:29:15,520
ago or two million years ago or anything like that.

465
00:29:15,760 --> 00:29:21,200
A lot of times what we're responding to is other individuals' immune systems activating.

466
00:29:22,320 --> 00:29:26,960
And in fact, some researchers at the Karolinski Institute have this really cool method

467
00:29:26,960 --> 00:29:31,750
where they inject their participants with something called lipopolysaccharide.

468
00:29:32,230 --> 00:29:37,190
It's like the cell wall of bacteria that cause infections.

469
00:29:37,270 --> 00:29:42,390
And when you inject people with it, they don't, they're not actually infected, but these

470
00:29:42,390 --> 00:29:47,590
cell walls do provoke an innate immune response, high level, high increases in things like

471
00:29:47,830 --> 00:29:52,870
interleukin 6, pro-inflammatory cytokines, and they feel really sick for like six hours.

472
00:29:53,040 --> 00:29:56,400
And so um awesome study.

473
00:29:57,520 --> 00:30:01,680
They uh they bring the people to the lab twice, one time with the placebo, one time with

474
00:30:01,680 --> 00:30:02,480
the LPS.

475
00:30:02,640 --> 00:30:06,240
And yeah, I've spoken with the researchers who do this, and they say, yeah, people pretty

476
00:30:06,240 --> 00:30:08,720
much know what condition they're in pretty quickly.

477
00:30:09,440 --> 00:30:14,320
Um, but in some of their studies, they've taken photographs of the individuals who have

478
00:30:14,320 --> 00:30:18,800
gotten the LPS, uh, and then you know, at time two or time one, depending on the

479
00:30:18,800 --> 00:30:21,360
counterbalanced order, gotten the placebo.

480
00:30:21,600 --> 00:30:25,630
And um you can really tell which one was the sick one.

481
00:30:25,870 --> 00:30:31,710
So uh just based on internal inflammation, you can detect cues to another person

482
00:30:31,710 --> 00:30:33,310
having uh an immune response.

483
00:30:33,630 --> 00:30:34,190
Is it anyway?

484
00:30:34,270 --> 00:30:36,990
What do you what do you what do you think the is it because I would imagine a big part of

485
00:30:36,990 --> 00:30:40,510
it is they just look really like tired and out of it, their eyes are probably droopy.

486
00:30:40,590 --> 00:30:44,110
I imagine that's part of it, but is there's probably skin coloration effects as well, or do

487
00:30:44,110 --> 00:30:47,070
we or do we not know what cues they're picking up on?

488
00:30:47,420 --> 00:30:47,980
Oh yeah.

489
00:30:48,140 --> 00:30:52,140
I mean, I I show this image in my episode class that I teach and everyone loves it.

490
00:30:52,300 --> 00:30:56,460
But um yeah, they look paler, the eyes look a little puffy.

491
00:30:57,020 --> 00:31:02,220
Um uh there's there's a little bit uh of irregularity in the cut in the color.

492
00:31:02,300 --> 00:31:04,540
Uh the sclera look a little bit less clear.

493
00:31:04,860 --> 00:31:06,940
And that's just with visual cues, right?

494
00:31:07,020 --> 00:31:10,700
Like, I mean, if you know the person, like I mean, I have a slight cold, like I said, it's

495
00:31:10,700 --> 00:31:11,580
like right on time for you.

496
00:31:11,660 --> 00:31:12,700
And like I sound different.

497
00:31:12,860 --> 00:31:18,570
I assume a lot of the inflammation of of these areas is also

498
00:31:18,730 --> 00:31:23,050
has really, you know, we have a lot of machinery for detecting very subtle acoustic

499
00:31:23,050 --> 00:31:23,690
differences.

500
00:31:24,090 --> 00:31:28,250
Um, you know, so I think you could if you know what the person usually sounds like, you can

501
00:31:28,250 --> 00:31:31,450
really tell when somebody is like, you know, congested and or not.

502
00:31:31,610 --> 00:31:31,930
Yeah.

503
00:31:32,250 --> 00:31:32,730
Absolutely.

504
00:31:32,890 --> 00:31:36,810
I I find this interesting just to think about the number of times that people might say,

505
00:31:37,050 --> 00:31:37,610
are you sick?

506
00:31:37,770 --> 00:31:38,490
Are you feeling okay?

507
00:31:38,570 --> 00:31:40,570
Do you think no it's allergies.

508
00:31:40,650 --> 00:31:40,810
Yeah.

509
00:31:40,890 --> 00:31:41,850
No, somebody will be like, yeah.

510
00:31:42,010 --> 00:31:42,090
Yeah.

511
00:31:42,720 --> 00:31:42,800
yeah.

512
00:31:43,280 --> 00:31:47,760
Um, another evolutionary psychologist, Josh Ackerman, has an interesting research program

513
00:31:47,760 --> 00:31:52,800
right now on people uh concealing whether they're sick because there could be cost to

514
00:31:52,800 --> 00:31:57,200
disclosing that you're infected to other individuals based on how they treat you, uh

515
00:31:57,280 --> 00:31:59,040
opportunities they might give you, etc.

516
00:31:59,440 --> 00:32:04,400
But uh regardless, there's this one part of our pathogen avoidance psychology, which should

517
00:32:04,400 --> 00:32:10,400
be um trying to detect or estimate how likely someone is to uh be contagious, right,

518
00:32:10,480 --> 00:32:11,360
at this moment.

519
00:32:11,670 --> 00:32:17,510
The other part is well, we basically don't know if anyone we can't, we

520
00:32:17,510 --> 00:32:19,750
don't have perfect knowledge that people are contagious.

521
00:32:19,910 --> 00:32:25,430
And some of these cues can update our estimates that they're contagious, but we're never

522
00:32:25,430 --> 00:32:26,870
going to have perfect knowledge.

523
00:32:27,430 --> 00:32:31,030
And, you know, some sometimes infections aren't producing any symptoms at all.

524
00:32:31,190 --> 00:32:35,190
Sometimes these symptoms are are of, you know, they could be false alarms in terms of

525
00:32:35,190 --> 00:32:35,990
detection.

526
00:32:36,340 --> 00:32:40,580
But we do need to take these risks with all individuals who don't necessarily have

527
00:32:40,580 --> 00:32:41,140
symptoms.

528
00:32:41,220 --> 00:32:47,060
And so we should be calibrating those risks based on things not related to pathogens, but

529
00:32:47,060 --> 00:32:53,060
rather based on how beneficial is contact and proximity with this individual?

530
00:32:53,300 --> 00:32:59,210
And how much of a cost would I pay to categorize them as posing a pathogen risk to me

531
00:32:59,450 --> 00:33:01,770
in the absence of any kind of visual cues.

532
00:33:02,010 --> 00:33:07,850
So, in one paper that Deb Lieberman and I and Tom Kupfer and some other

533
00:33:08,170 --> 00:33:14,090
Le Fan and Rainette Fries published a while ago, we tested this idea that it's

534
00:33:14,090 --> 00:33:19,130
one of those ideas where you have a giant effect size, and uh, yeah, your grandma would

535
00:33:19,130 --> 00:33:20,410
know this kind of thing.

536
00:33:20,650 --> 00:33:25,700
Um, we just randomly assigned participants to think about uh a target.

537
00:33:25,780 --> 00:33:29,540
And we asked them to think about a target who is either their romantic partner or their

538
00:33:29,540 --> 00:33:35,540
closest friend or an acquaintance or an enemy, someone that they know well,

539
00:33:35,620 --> 00:33:37,300
but they really can't stand.

540
00:33:37,460 --> 00:33:41,220
And we asked them these questions how comfortable would you be sharing drinking from a

541
00:33:41,220 --> 00:33:45,540
water bottle that this person drank from, touching this person's socks after they

542
00:33:45,540 --> 00:33:49,700
exercised, taking a bite out of a sandwich that this person had taken a bite out of.

543
00:33:49,860 --> 00:33:54,430
So none of them required them to actually touch the person or risk transmitting pathogens

544
00:33:54,430 --> 00:33:59,550
to that individual, but basically just touch something they touched and have some risk of

545
00:33:59,550 --> 00:34:01,230
pathogens being transmitted to them.

546
00:34:01,390 --> 00:34:07,230
And you just get these gigantic effect sizes, even though these individuals have no cues

547
00:34:07,230 --> 00:34:08,750
to pathogens that we're aware of.

548
00:34:08,830 --> 00:34:10,990
You know, we just ask them to think about this person.

549
00:34:12,030 --> 00:34:17,620
And so that's some good evidence that people are calibrating their pathogen avoidance

550
00:34:17,620 --> 00:34:22,820
tendencies for specific individuals based on how important that person is to them.

551
00:34:23,300 --> 00:34:29,300
But we further propose that within these folk categories, there should be variation in

552
00:34:29,300 --> 00:34:32,900
how much you value that relationship with that target.

553
00:34:33,140 --> 00:34:39,060
So Dave Pinsoff, you might value your best friend more than Dave Petrozowski, you

554
00:34:39,060 --> 00:34:42,500
value your best friend, or you might value the acquaintance that you think of more than

555
00:34:42,500 --> 00:34:45,300
Dave Petrozzewski values the acquaintance that he thinks of.

556
00:34:45,490 --> 00:34:50,290
So we also administered something called a welfare trade-off task, something developed by

557
00:34:50,290 --> 00:34:51,730
uh Dave Petrozicki.

558
00:34:51,810 --> 00:34:54,770
You probably went to grad school with Andy Delton and uh Tess Robertson.

559
00:34:54,850 --> 00:34:56,210
You were probably there at the same time.

560
00:34:56,450 --> 00:34:59,810
But this is this is developed from the UCSB group.

561
00:35:00,370 --> 00:35:04,450
And if there are psychologists in the audience, this is very similar to something called

562
00:35:04,450 --> 00:35:07,250
social value orientation, but it's target specific.

563
00:35:07,570 --> 00:35:13,020
But effectively, what you assess is the proportion of

564
00:35:13,020 --> 00:35:18,460
benefit that you would be willing to give up for a target to get some

565
00:35:18,460 --> 00:35:19,100
benefit.

566
00:35:19,340 --> 00:35:25,260
So, said differently across 10 trials, I could ask, I could ask you 10 questions where Dave

567
00:35:25,260 --> 00:35:28,860
Dave Petrozowski always gets uh 30 bucks.

568
00:35:29,020 --> 00:35:33,820
Um, and Dave Pinsoff has asked, well, would you rather get 80 bucks or Dave Petrozki get

569
00:35:33,820 --> 00:35:33,980
30?

570
00:35:34,140 --> 00:35:37,580
Would you rather get 60 or Dave Petrozki get 30, etc., etc.?

571
00:35:37,990 --> 00:35:42,870
And based on the point at which they start saying, well, I'll give up the benefit for uh

572
00:35:42,870 --> 00:35:48,630
Dave Petrozowski to get that benefit, you can estimate the ratio of uh the

573
00:35:48,630 --> 00:35:52,790
target's welfare uh relative to your own that you're willing to give up.

574
00:35:53,030 --> 00:35:58,070
So, with that kind of long-winded explanation for what this task is out of the way, we find

575
00:35:58,070 --> 00:36:02,660
these really consistent correlations also within these kind of folk categories.

576
00:36:02,820 --> 00:36:06,660
The people who value their closest friend more are also more comfortable with these

577
00:36:06,660 --> 00:36:07,860
pathogen risks.

578
00:36:08,260 --> 00:36:12,820
And at a bivariate level, if you just look at welfare trade-off ratio and contact comfort,

579
00:36:13,060 --> 00:36:14,900
correlation coefficients are like 0.7.

580
00:36:15,300 --> 00:36:17,300
It's insanely large.

581
00:36:19,620 --> 00:36:21,380
We replicated this over multiple studies.

582
00:36:21,460 --> 00:36:26,260
We even replicated it, we even uh tried it where we gave photos of strangers and we

583
00:36:26,260 --> 00:36:31,030
described them with the personality traits uh high in honesty, humility, and agreeableness,

584
00:36:31,110 --> 00:36:33,590
or low in honesty, humility, and agreeableness.

585
00:36:33,750 --> 00:36:39,350
And these are personality traits that meta-analyses show predict cooperation in anonymous

586
00:36:39,350 --> 00:36:40,630
interactions between strangers.

587
00:36:40,790 --> 00:36:43,430
So amount of money you give in a prisoner's dilemma, for example.

588
00:36:43,590 --> 00:36:45,110
And we see the same thing.

589
00:36:45,350 --> 00:36:50,790
Um, you see the same thing in that context, meaning even with a stranger,

590
00:36:51,110 --> 00:36:57,060
you're more likely to tolerate disease from them if they're higher on

591
00:36:57,060 --> 00:36:57,940
these traits.

592
00:36:58,260 --> 00:36:58,900
That's correct.

593
00:36:59,220 --> 00:37:02,500
I'm more willing to share a drink with a nice guy than with an asshole.

594
00:37:02,580 --> 00:37:05,940
And it's interesting that we use that term asshole because it itself elicits disgust.

595
00:37:07,700 --> 00:37:08,020
Yeah.

596
00:37:08,340 --> 00:37:09,220
Yeah, that's right.

597
00:37:09,460 --> 00:37:15,220
So looping back to the COVID study, this was one thing that we replicated strongly within

598
00:37:15,220 --> 00:37:16,180
that COVID study.

599
00:37:16,340 --> 00:37:21,930
So at the four different time points that we surveyed participants, we randomly assign them

600
00:37:21,930 --> 00:37:26,410
to have a different target and assessed welfare trade-off ratio across those times.

601
00:37:26,490 --> 00:37:30,090
And we see that within participant as well as but as well as between participants.

602
00:37:30,250 --> 00:37:34,330
So if you ask the same person to think about different targets, you know, at nine months

603
00:37:34,330 --> 00:37:39,610
apart, you have this really strong relationship that, yes, an individual, when they think

604
00:37:39,610 --> 00:37:45,160
of someone who they have a higher interpersonal value for, they're more comfortable taking

605
00:37:45,160 --> 00:37:50,200
these uh infection risks just based on touching things that another person has touched than

606
00:37:50,200 --> 00:37:52,840
someone that they have a low interpersonal value for.

607
00:37:53,400 --> 00:37:58,920
I mean, this seems bad for the generic outgroup hypothesis in the sense of you're getting

608
00:37:58,920 --> 00:38:04,920
sensitivity on these measures to other things that sort of from first principles you would

609
00:38:04,920 --> 00:38:05,480
expect.

610
00:38:05,960 --> 00:38:07,910
So like relationship, yeah.

611
00:38:07,990 --> 00:38:13,110
I mean, so what's can we is that it seems like a problem, but is it is there an argument to

612
00:38:13,110 --> 00:38:15,110
steel man that hypothesis?

613
00:38:15,190 --> 00:38:18,310
Is it the argument that it's specific kinds of groups?

614
00:38:18,550 --> 00:38:23,750
Or how it sounds really bad for the group, the the group pathogen

615
00:38:24,070 --> 00:38:24,710
idea.

616
00:38:25,990 --> 00:38:31,910
Um so with my former PhD student, Annika Karnan, we have another paper in

617
00:38:31,910 --> 00:38:37,700
which um this was a registered report where you have hypotheses peer review before the

618
00:38:37,700 --> 00:38:40,900
data are uh are published or before the results are known.

619
00:38:40,980 --> 00:38:46,340
But we randomly signed participants to read about an immigrant that was either uh really

620
00:38:46,340 --> 00:38:49,940
low on assimilation or really high on assimilation.

621
00:38:50,100 --> 00:38:55,300
Um, and we also had another uh it was cross with this in the vignette, they're really high

622
00:38:55,300 --> 00:38:57,060
in contact or low in contact.

623
00:38:57,190 --> 00:39:00,870
So they were either living in kind of a ghetto with other immigrants, or they were really

624
00:39:00,870 --> 00:39:02,070
integrating in town.

625
00:39:02,310 --> 00:39:07,830
They're really adopting the local norms or they were really keeping the norms of their home

626
00:39:07,830 --> 00:39:08,630
country.

627
00:39:09,030 --> 00:39:14,390
We did see that discuss sensitivity was related to anti-immigrant attitudes when they were

628
00:39:14,390 --> 00:39:19,750
not assimilating, but they were not related to the anti-immigrant attitudes when they are

629
00:39:19,750 --> 00:39:20,470
assimilating.

630
00:39:20,710 --> 00:39:26,300
So I think this ties back into the other account well in and that the assimilation might be

631
00:39:26,300 --> 00:39:30,460
a cue for being a good co-op, a valuable uh interactions uh partner.

632
00:39:31,100 --> 00:39:35,180
Um, when they're not assimilating, then you're getting the people who are higher in disgust

633
00:39:35,180 --> 00:39:40,060
sensitivity who are really like, uh, I really don't want to one that person around me.

634
00:39:40,220 --> 00:39:44,540
And so you could still have people varying on their trait level pathogen avoidance, and

635
00:39:44,540 --> 00:39:50,350
depending on how they're framing that immigrant in terms of being uh a likely uh

636
00:39:50,350 --> 00:39:53,710
benefit socially versus not, you could get this relationship.

637
00:39:54,110 --> 00:39:59,710
So to summarize, if I'm hearing you right, it's that it's not that the pathogen system is

638
00:39:59,710 --> 00:40:04,670
sort of overriding the social valuation system.

639
00:40:05,150 --> 00:40:10,180
It's that the social valuation system is sort of tracking: is this somebody worth

640
00:40:10,180 --> 00:40:10,820
interacting with?

641
00:40:10,980 --> 00:40:12,020
Is it a friend?

642
00:40:12,180 --> 00:40:14,820
Is it somebody who I'm going to get benefits from?

643
00:40:15,220 --> 00:40:19,940
What's the what's the likely forecast of social value?

644
00:40:20,180 --> 00:40:26,020
And then if that's already low, then all of the problems or cons of interacting

645
00:40:26,020 --> 00:40:31,460
with that person anyway are just going to be like the excuse or come to the fore.

646
00:40:31,540 --> 00:40:34,980
And one of those cons might be pathogen.

647
00:40:35,890 --> 00:40:39,010
but but it sounds like roughly speaking, that's the order.

648
00:40:39,170 --> 00:40:42,770
Is that a fair characterization of the literature as you see it?

649
00:40:43,170 --> 00:40:44,610
Um yes.

650
00:40:44,770 --> 00:40:50,770
Although I I I think that this idea of outgroups being categorized as a pathogen thread

651
00:40:50,770 --> 00:40:52,690
is still prevalent in the literature.

652
00:40:52,770 --> 00:40:58,760
Um, so of course, I'm I'm giving you my read, which is shaped by uh my data, But I I

653
00:40:58,760 --> 00:41:03,080
would be curious how uh how others generally uh look at this.

654
00:41:03,240 --> 00:41:07,960
Um now there is another issue though, and uh Dave Pinsoff, I know that you mentioned this,

655
00:41:08,040 --> 00:41:13,960
maybe it was in your podcast with Deb Lieberman, some other work on uh pathogen avoidance

656
00:41:13,960 --> 00:41:15,160
and sexual strategies.

657
00:41:15,320 --> 00:41:19,000
So there's another finding that's been prevalent in the literature, and that is that

658
00:41:19,160 --> 00:41:24,770
largely in US samples, although there's some cross-cultural data that support this as well.

659
00:41:25,010 --> 00:41:29,490
Individuals who are higher in discuss sensitivity tend to be more politically conservative.

660
00:41:29,570 --> 00:41:35,090
So they score higher on measures of right-wing authoritarianism and traditionalism and just

661
00:41:35,090 --> 00:41:40,130
self-identification as liberal versus conservative, especially on social issues.

662
00:41:40,370 --> 00:41:45,330
And again, the argument for this relation has really tied back to intergroup interactions

663
00:41:45,410 --> 00:41:51,340
for the most part, suggesting that those who are more invested in avoiding pathogens should

664
00:41:51,340 --> 00:41:56,940
find these right wing ideologies more appealing because they interrupt intergroup

665
00:41:56,940 --> 00:41:59,980
interactions and they're anti immigrant and that type of stuff.

666
00:42:00,220 --> 00:42:04,380
For the same reasons that I articulated earlier, that there are some reasons to be

667
00:42:04,380 --> 00:42:07,100
skeptical of that account.

668
00:42:07,660 --> 00:42:13,580
My colleagues, including uh Yal Imbar and Catherine Moulho, and I suggested that

669
00:42:13,910 --> 00:42:19,590
maybe this could be a byproduct of something else, namely sexual strategies, in that

670
00:42:19,830 --> 00:42:25,350
having kind of more permissive reproductive lifestyles or reproductive strategies

671
00:42:25,670 --> 00:42:27,990
exposes people to higher pathogen threats.

672
00:42:28,070 --> 00:42:33,670
So people need to kind of weigh how valuable is having a less restricted sexual

673
00:42:33,670 --> 00:42:39,220
life to me relative to the higher pathogen costs imposed by that lifestyle.

674
00:42:39,380 --> 00:42:44,180
And this need not just be what we call sexually transmitted infections, which are called

675
00:42:44,180 --> 00:42:47,540
that because they are transmitted via sex specifically.

676
00:42:47,700 --> 00:42:51,300
So they infect largely genitals and are transmitted via genitals.

677
00:42:51,460 --> 00:42:56,180
But if you can get the flu by standing in a room with someone, you can get the flu by

678
00:42:56,180 --> 00:42:57,140
having sex with them.

679
00:42:57,300 --> 00:43:01,220
And so individuals who are especially invested in avoiding pathogens, they might actually

680
00:43:01,220 --> 00:43:06,530
select reproductive strategies that uh lower that risk of pathogen

681
00:43:06,690 --> 00:43:07,330
transmission.

682
00:43:07,490 --> 00:43:12,610
And once you have a specific reproductive strategy, certain political ideologies are more

683
00:43:12,610 --> 00:43:16,050
favorable versus disfavorable to those strategies.

684
00:43:16,290 --> 00:43:19,490
So, of course, this is in line with David Pinsoff.

685
00:43:19,570 --> 00:43:22,610
You've probably discussed some of this on one of these podcasts.

686
00:43:23,650 --> 00:43:29,010
But uh conservative ideologies, they're often disincentivizing

687
00:43:29,440 --> 00:43:32,560
these more unrestricted type of sexual lifestyles.

688
00:43:32,720 --> 00:43:36,800
So they're making it harder to get abortion abortions, access to birth control, they're

689
00:43:36,800 --> 00:43:40,560
moralizing pornography and hookups and that type of stuff.

690
00:43:40,720 --> 00:43:45,920
And so you might get this relation where you have more pathogen avoidant

691
00:43:45,920 --> 00:43:46,800
individuals.

692
00:43:47,200 --> 00:43:49,440
They select these specific sexual strategies.

693
00:43:49,520 --> 00:43:54,400
And then based on sexual strategies, people sort into these political coalitions partially.

694
00:43:54,720 --> 00:44:00,250
And so this bivariate relation between pathogen avoidance and political

695
00:44:00,490 --> 00:44:04,010
values might be operating through these uh sexual strategies.

696
00:44:04,170 --> 00:44:05,290
And that's what we find.

697
00:44:05,450 --> 00:44:10,570
And over and over and over, if you ask people how disgusted they are by sexual things, um,

698
00:44:10,810 --> 00:44:16,570
and you ask them how disgusted they are by pathogen things, and uh there's no independent

699
00:44:16,570 --> 00:44:21,770
relation between how disgusted they are by the pathogen things and um political values,

700
00:44:21,930 --> 00:44:24,890
once you control for the the sexual disgust.

701
00:44:25,400 --> 00:44:27,800
Some of that uh original work, too.

702
00:44:27,880 --> 00:44:31,080
I I my understanding was it didn't really replicate.

703
00:44:31,240 --> 00:44:34,280
So some of the like I like John Hibbing, for example.

704
00:44:34,440 --> 00:44:40,040
I remember he came to UCSB when I was a graduate student and presented a lot of work on

705
00:44:40,040 --> 00:44:42,680
conservatives being more disgust prone.

706
00:44:42,920 --> 00:44:48,730
Um, but uh, but that was sort of during the days of um, you know, uh John was a

707
00:44:48,730 --> 00:44:53,690
lovely person and I know he's retired now so I've I can say like I'm not sure how much that

708
00:44:53,690 --> 00:44:54,730
stuff holds up.

709
00:44:54,890 --> 00:44:58,570
Um is you what is your understanding of that?

710
00:44:59,530 --> 00:45:03,530
Um that sounds like you guys replicate some of it or at least that like if there is a

711
00:45:03,530 --> 00:45:07,610
difference it's driven through this sexual um path.

712
00:45:07,930 --> 00:45:12,410
So the the this is quite robust actually just the the self-reports of discuss sensitivity

713
00:45:12,410 --> 00:45:15,660
relating to the self-reports of political ideology.

714
00:45:15,900 --> 00:45:21,260
What uh John Hibbing and others have published that is not replicable

715
00:45:21,980 --> 00:45:24,860
is largely, I believe, psychophysiological measures.

716
00:45:25,420 --> 00:45:31,420
So, you know, they were looking at conservatives versus liberals in

717
00:45:31,420 --> 00:45:36,780
threat reactivity using things like galvanic skin response, etc.

718
00:45:37,340 --> 00:45:43,330
And uh multiple researchers, Ev and Eva in the Eve

719
00:45:43,410 --> 00:45:49,010
community have contributed this, basically suggesting that uh a lot of what these measures,

720
00:45:49,170 --> 00:45:52,050
a lot of what these methods are assessing is is noise.

721
00:45:52,290 --> 00:45:57,730
And uh papers publishing these findings have capitalized on um

722
00:45:58,050 --> 00:45:59,860
noisy data at best.

723
00:46:00,180 --> 00:46:00,660
Okay, great.

724
00:46:00,740 --> 00:46:02,180
Well, thank you for clarifying that.

725
00:46:02,340 --> 00:46:07,540
Um, what what is your bottom line take on on like wrapping this aspect up?

726
00:46:07,940 --> 00:46:13,380
How important is this behavioral immune system idea?

727
00:46:13,460 --> 00:46:17,540
From there's two ways I understood like broadly, and maybe this is an oversimplification.

728
00:46:17,700 --> 00:46:23,380
One is you have to deal with the fact that pathogens exist while making a social

729
00:46:23,380 --> 00:46:24,020
living.

730
00:46:24,420 --> 00:46:29,370
And there's another one that sort of says pathogens really matter a lot more for your

731
00:46:29,370 --> 00:46:33,930
social choices than you might think, even in terms of like interacting with somebody.

732
00:46:34,250 --> 00:46:38,890
So the the first one is sort of like, well, yeah, we have to we make our decisions about

733
00:46:38,890 --> 00:46:42,010
social partners and then we just deal with the fact that sometimes they're sick or not.

734
00:46:42,090 --> 00:46:45,930
The other one is sort of saying, No, you actually really choose your soul social partners

735
00:46:46,010 --> 00:46:47,930
even based on cues of illness.

736
00:46:48,250 --> 00:46:53,610
Are both right in different contexts, or is one really wrong, or is that a wrong dichotomy?

737
00:46:54,060 --> 00:46:55,820
No, I think that they're both right.

738
00:46:56,060 --> 00:46:59,260
The thing is that individuals get sick all the time.

739
00:46:59,420 --> 00:47:04,700
So of course you have long-term social relationships and you don't just abandon someone

740
00:47:04,700 --> 00:47:05,260
when they're sick.

741
00:47:05,340 --> 00:47:06,220
I mean, that could happen.

742
00:47:06,540 --> 00:47:07,100
Yeah, exactly.

743
00:47:07,180 --> 00:47:09,740
Yeah, no, that's but um but generally you don't.

744
00:47:09,900 --> 00:47:14,460
And I mean, one thing that all three of us have in common, we all have young children, and

745
00:47:14,450 --> 00:47:18,930
of course, child rearing takes a lot, uh puts you at risk of a lot of uh infections.

746
00:47:19,090 --> 00:47:24,690
And of course, that's exacerbated in modern contexts with you know indoor air sharing and

747
00:47:24,690 --> 00:47:27,490
respiratory viruses and daycare.

748
00:47:27,650 --> 00:47:32,530
There is something to kind of short-term interactions, interactions with strangers where we

749
00:47:32,530 --> 00:47:38,450
might kind of approach specific individuals for those types of interactions

750
00:47:38,450 --> 00:47:40,530
differently depending on whether they're infectious.

751
00:47:40,690 --> 00:47:45,140
And of course, we could try to manage the infection risk by individuals when they do have

752
00:47:45,220 --> 00:47:48,180
uh cues to infection, even if they're close to us.

753
00:47:48,340 --> 00:47:54,340
Um, but yes, I would say that pathogens, huge problem, impact all sorts of aspects

754
00:47:54,340 --> 00:47:58,180
of our social psychology and our food psychology and our mating psychology, et cetera.

755
00:47:58,420 --> 00:48:04,030
And uh we are we are going to be able to tell to a degree uh

756
00:48:04,190 --> 00:48:05,710
which people are sick when.

757
00:48:05,950 --> 00:48:10,990
Um, but even in the absence of those cues, we're still going to be assuming a non-zero

758
00:48:10,990 --> 00:48:16,030
pathogen transmission risk, just because humans are the most likely things to infect us,

759
00:48:16,110 --> 00:48:17,950
even in the absence of things that we can detect.

760
00:48:18,270 --> 00:48:18,510
Right.

761
00:48:18,670 --> 00:48:18,990
Cool.

762
00:48:19,150 --> 00:48:19,390
Yeah.

763
00:48:19,550 --> 00:48:24,190
And so what one of the things we've talked about before, in and I think it was, I forget

764
00:48:24,190 --> 00:48:29,020
which episode, was that something like sex, it might have been with Deb, um, Deb Lieberman.

765
00:48:29,260 --> 00:48:35,260
Was that, you know, given that this pathogen avoidance is a primary thing in

766
00:48:35,260 --> 00:48:41,100
our psychology, then as you say, certain other co-adaptations or other adaptations will

767
00:48:41,100 --> 00:48:44,620
co-vary the disgust sensitivity when there's a benefit.

768
00:48:44,700 --> 00:48:49,500
So, for example, like sex should turn down disgust, parenting, like I don't know about you

769
00:48:49,500 --> 00:48:54,910
guys, but like my my child is the one person where I'm like, I don't even care what happens

770
00:48:54,910 --> 00:48:55,310
to me.

771
00:48:55,390 --> 00:48:58,990
I just I don't want to get them sick, but like if they're sick, whatever, like I don't care

772
00:48:58,990 --> 00:48:59,390
at all.

773
00:49:00,110 --> 00:49:01,470
At least that's my experience.

774
00:49:01,710 --> 00:49:07,550
So has there been work in mating or parenting on the turning down of

775
00:49:07,550 --> 00:49:11,390
disgust sensitivity, which you would expect like there to be really big effects for?

776
00:49:11,710 --> 00:49:14,270
Yeah, it's it's difficult to do this work well.

777
00:49:14,430 --> 00:49:17,390
I I would say that those things are absolutely true.

778
00:49:17,620 --> 00:49:23,220
It's it's so has to be true based on your priors and based on your lived experience.

779
00:49:24,500 --> 00:49:30,340
I don't know if the the way that a social science study comes out should inform

780
00:49:30,580 --> 00:49:32,340
how we're thinking about that that much.

781
00:49:32,660 --> 00:49:37,300
But I can comment on the little research that's been done with parenting.

782
00:49:37,540 --> 00:49:43,380
There is a study in which uh some researchers in Australia, Dick Stevenson, Trevor Case,

783
00:49:43,460 --> 00:49:49,010
and others, asked parents to imagine how disgusted they would be by their own baby's diaper

784
00:49:49,010 --> 00:49:51,250
versus other people's baby's diapers.

785
00:49:51,650 --> 00:49:55,090
And they said that they'd be more disgusted by other people's baby's diapers.

786
00:49:55,250 --> 00:50:00,450
And then they had a smell test where parents actually did a blind diaper smelling test.

787
00:50:00,770 --> 00:50:05,810
Oh, that sounds like a fun study to these are these are like the real hits of like

788
00:50:06,920 --> 00:50:10,040
So in this study, you will be smelling diapers.

789
00:50:10,120 --> 00:50:15,560
Some of them will be uh the the finding reported is that parents find their own

790
00:50:15,560 --> 00:50:20,680
baby's diapers smell to be less aversive even when they don't know it's their own baby's

791
00:50:20,680 --> 00:50:21,160
diaper.

792
00:50:21,320 --> 00:50:26,280
The replicability of that I'm I can't say based on the sample size and the methods at the

793
00:50:26,280 --> 00:50:26,600
time.

794
00:50:26,760 --> 00:50:29,800
Um, but I I'm not familiar with other research on the topic.

795
00:50:30,070 --> 00:50:34,390
One PhD student and I are about to launch a big study that I'm kind of excited about,

796
00:50:34,630 --> 00:50:40,550
looking at uh these same variables of contact comfort, but having the child be

797
00:50:40,550 --> 00:50:45,670
the um the target and then very uh sampling people who have children who are a bunch of

798
00:50:45,670 --> 00:50:51,270
different ages to see if this is invariant across child's age or if this is kind of dialed

799
00:50:51,270 --> 00:50:54,700
to the dependency of the child on you.

800
00:50:54,940 --> 00:50:56,220
So stay tuned.

801
00:50:56,300 --> 00:50:59,580
We might have some interesting results at some point.

802
00:50:59,820 --> 00:51:05,020
In terms of mating, there's a similar issue in that it's both difficult

803
00:51:05,020 --> 00:51:10,940
methodologically and then also questioning whether the method that

804
00:51:10,940 --> 00:51:14,540
you're using actually tracks with the question that you want to be asking.

805
00:51:14,790 --> 00:51:19,990
So there's a famous and perhaps infamous study by Dan Arielli in which he asked

806
00:51:19,990 --> 00:51:23,990
participants to uh masturbate while they were completing questionnaires.

807
00:51:24,470 --> 00:51:29,030
And they said that they were willing to do all sorts of disgusting things in the

808
00:51:29,190 --> 00:51:32,790
participants were masturbating condition more than in the other condition.

809
00:51:32,950 --> 00:51:37,590
There are other aspects of that study that maybe make you question what you can take from

810
00:51:37,590 --> 00:51:37,750
it.

811
00:51:37,910 --> 00:51:43,160
And then there are various studies in which participants have watched erotic videos or had

812
00:51:43,160 --> 00:51:46,200
guided visualizations, and then you ask them to do disgusting things.

813
00:51:46,280 --> 00:51:49,880
And some studies have found that yes, that's the case.

814
00:51:50,040 --> 00:51:52,840
People are willing to do more disgusting things.

815
00:51:53,160 --> 00:51:58,680
But this is a broader issue in these kinds of approaches of what can

816
00:51:58,760 --> 00:52:04,040
broadly be described as priming, which is do you should you actually expect the system to

817
00:52:04,040 --> 00:52:08,520
be designed so that you're in a state of sexual arousal and you're just indiscriminately

818
00:52:08,650 --> 00:52:14,490
more open to exposure to pathogens versus should this be really targeted

819
00:52:14,490 --> 00:52:20,410
toward um whatever is elisting that sexual arousal and targeted toward the specific types

820
00:52:20,410 --> 00:52:22,970
of pathogen risks that are necessary for sex.

821
00:52:23,530 --> 00:52:29,370
So of course, you know it's an open question how the system is designed, but um it would be

822
00:52:29,370 --> 00:52:34,860
a pretty blunt design feature to say, okay, I I'm in a state of sexual

823
00:52:34,860 --> 00:52:35,500
arousal.

824
00:52:35,660 --> 00:52:38,940
I'm going to eat that yogurt that expired two months ago.

825
00:52:39,740 --> 00:52:40,300
Not impossible.

826
00:52:40,780 --> 00:52:41,660
This happens all the time.

827
00:52:42,300 --> 00:52:46,700
You know, this could be this could be a byproduct, depending on how general the system is.

828
00:52:46,780 --> 00:52:47,100
Yeah.

829
00:52:47,740 --> 00:52:51,980
But I would guess that it has uh better design features than that.

830
00:52:52,140 --> 00:52:52,620
Yeah.

831
00:52:52,940 --> 00:52:55,070
Yeah, No, I love the way you're thinking about this.

832
00:52:55,150 --> 00:53:00,910
And in many ways, um what you're discovering is that the system is smarter than we thought

833
00:53:00,910 --> 00:53:01,710
it it was.

834
00:53:01,870 --> 00:53:07,790
And that people um in their first pass at sort of laying out the design features uh of this

835
00:53:07,790 --> 00:53:12,030
system, they sort of underestimated just how sophisticated and well-designed uh it, in

836
00:53:12,030 --> 00:53:16,860
fact, is that we're not just indiscriminately viewing anyone from a quote unquote out group

837
00:53:17,020 --> 00:53:21,260
as a pathogen threat or anyone who quote unquote looks different as a pathogen threat, that

838
00:53:21,260 --> 00:53:24,060
the system is actually more subtle and sophisticated than this.

839
00:53:24,140 --> 00:53:27,660
It's actually using valid cues to uh pathogen risk.

840
00:53:27,900 --> 00:53:31,500
And most of the decision-making variance is going to be explained by more subtle

841
00:53:31,500 --> 00:53:33,740
calculations of social valuation.

842
00:53:33,900 --> 00:53:38,700
Um, and that uh if if the disease risk is held constant, then the main source of variance

843
00:53:38,700 --> 00:53:44,050
is gonna be how valuable I find you or someone else as a social partner and whether those

844
00:53:44,050 --> 00:53:49,490
costs are going to be um worth incurring to get the benefits of the social relationship.

845
00:53:49,730 --> 00:53:55,010
So I I I think it's it's really um outstanding work and and and a huge leap forward to to

846
00:53:55,010 --> 00:53:58,450
think about this system uh in terms of this logic.

847
00:53:58,850 --> 00:54:04,770
I also think it sheds a lot of light on um rituals and uh signals of affiliation.

848
00:54:05,010 --> 00:54:10,280
So around the world we have handshakes, hugs, uh kissing on the cheek.

849
00:54:10,360 --> 00:54:13,640
Um, these are ways that we signal affiliation with a group of people.

850
00:54:13,800 --> 00:54:18,680
And if I refuse a handshake or refuse to hug or like step back when you're trying to hug

851
00:54:18,680 --> 00:54:21,480
me, um that could be viewed as insulting, and rightly so.

852
00:54:21,560 --> 00:54:26,840
And I think your theory explains why these are such common signals of social affiliation.

853
00:54:26,920 --> 00:54:28,680
Uh they are in fact costly signals.

854
00:54:28,760 --> 00:54:34,200
You are incurring uh a slight cost of pathogen risk in order to signal that you value uh a

855
00:54:34,200 --> 00:54:35,480
relationship with someone.

856
00:54:35,640 --> 00:54:41,610
Um and so it is no coincidence that around the world we have contact rituals as signals

857
00:54:41,610 --> 00:54:42,730
of affiliation.

858
00:54:43,210 --> 00:54:47,850
And it's also honestly, um, I've I've been thinking, I have a pet theory about um sort of

859
00:54:47,850 --> 00:54:52,090
quote unquote kinky sexual practices that I think also fits in with your with your

860
00:54:52,090 --> 00:54:57,690
theorizing, uh, which is that if um um doing if

861
00:54:57,690 --> 00:55:03,140
pathogen risk can be a costly signal of affiliation, it might be that doing

862
00:55:03,140 --> 00:55:06,420
disgusting things sexually can be a costly signal of sexual arousal.

863
00:55:06,580 --> 00:55:11,220
So if sexual arousal dials down your disgust, then if you're willing to do really gross

864
00:55:11,220 --> 00:55:15,940
things in the bedroom, then that uh is a is a hard-to-fake signal that you truly are

865
00:55:15,940 --> 00:55:16,420
aroused.

866
00:55:16,500 --> 00:55:20,340
And insofar as there is an arms race between, you know, figuring out if someone is truly

867
00:55:20,340 --> 00:55:25,790
aroused versus faking it, um, if they're willing to do disgusting things, then that could

868
00:55:25,790 --> 00:55:28,830
be a hard to fake signal that they truly are aroused.

869
00:55:28,910 --> 00:55:33,390
And the same thing goes for potentially dangerous things in the bedroom, like BDSM stuff.

870
00:55:33,790 --> 00:55:38,990
If sexual arousal requires you to dial down your fear, then if you're willing to expose do

871
00:55:38,990 --> 00:55:44,350
dangerous things like getting handcuffed or choked or whatever, then that is a hard to fake

872
00:55:44,350 --> 00:55:45,950
signal of sexual arousal.

873
00:55:46,110 --> 00:55:50,510
Anyway, that's my pet theory about what might explain some of these practices.

874
00:55:50,590 --> 00:55:52,270
I'm curious if you if you buy it or not.

875
00:55:52,780 --> 00:55:55,260
I I look forward to the BBS paper.

876
00:55:57,580 --> 00:55:59,500
No, that sounds really that sounds really interesting.

877
00:55:59,660 --> 00:56:04,860
I mean this is um you point out something that for evolutionary psychologists this is uh

878
00:56:04,940 --> 00:56:05,740
this is a mystery.

879
00:56:05,900 --> 00:56:09,420
Why are these types of things uh prominent across cultures?

880
00:56:09,820 --> 00:56:15,020
Of course there are um uh a minority of individuals um as a as a brief aside I've also done

881
00:56:15,020 --> 00:56:20,650
some behavioral genetics work And I've collaborated with a researcher in Finland who runs

882
00:56:20,650 --> 00:56:23,370
the genetics of sexuality and aggression database.

883
00:56:23,450 --> 00:56:27,130
So he has population level data on BDSM practices.

884
00:56:27,370 --> 00:56:32,570
And it's a it's a fairly small amount of the population in his data that

885
00:56:32,810 --> 00:56:34,570
reports engaging in these.

886
00:56:35,610 --> 00:56:40,970
But that small proportion is present in Finland, present in Germany, present in the

887
00:56:40,970 --> 00:56:45,290
Netherlands, present in the US, present in Japan, etc.

888
00:56:46,420 --> 00:56:52,180
and uh presumably via independent kind of pathways popping up.

889
00:56:52,340 --> 00:56:56,660
This probably isn't something that's just culturally transmitted uh from one source to all

890
00:56:56,660 --> 00:56:57,940
of these different locations.

891
00:56:58,100 --> 00:57:01,860
And of course, individuals develop these preferences and practices within their own

892
00:57:01,860 --> 00:57:07,770
relationships, and they're not uh probably broadcasting broadly their

893
00:57:07,850 --> 00:57:09,930
desires or their practices to do this.

894
00:57:10,250 --> 00:57:12,330
So it demands some kind of explanation.

895
00:57:12,490 --> 00:57:15,130
And I think that I tentatively buy it.

896
00:57:15,210 --> 00:57:17,130
I mean, it it sounds compelling what you say.

897
00:57:17,370 --> 00:57:21,770
Definitely, I think that their costly signaling has some kind of explanation to play in it.

898
00:57:22,250 --> 00:57:28,010
David, can I just poke poke on this idea, which is that is an

899
00:57:28,010 --> 00:57:32,580
alternative, because the way I had been thinking about it as like just this is not my area,

900
00:57:32,660 --> 00:57:38,100
but just sort of as like, you know, uh an amateur was that um there's just individual

901
00:57:38,100 --> 00:57:43,860
differences already in sort of like aggressiveness or proneness to pathogen

902
00:57:43,860 --> 00:57:44,820
sensitivity or not.

903
00:57:45,060 --> 00:57:50,820
And then if you're getting this human universal of when sexually aroused certain things get

904
00:57:50,820 --> 00:57:55,940
turned up or down, whatever the state of these other systems are in people, like some

905
00:57:55,940 --> 00:58:01,470
people are just lower in um disgust sensitivity to begin with,

906
00:58:01,790 --> 00:58:06,510
or when the sex they're sexually aroused, they're really sexually aroused, or the

907
00:58:06,510 --> 00:58:10,430
relationship between the sexual arousal system and the disgust system is just really

908
00:58:10,430 --> 00:58:13,790
stronger in some people, just as just a distribution.

909
00:58:13,950 --> 00:58:15,470
I mean, it's sort of boring.

910
00:58:15,630 --> 00:58:21,390
Um, that you would you would get, oh, the disgust sensitivity is so low in some

911
00:58:21,390 --> 00:58:26,960
people, and there's just like a market for um uh um for sort of

912
00:58:27,120 --> 00:58:32,720
uh I don't know how to put it, but just yeah, I mean uh uh do you see you're the

913
00:58:32,720 --> 00:58:37,440
byproduct of just sort of like the discuss sensitivity is so low with the caveat of Josh

914
00:58:37,440 --> 00:58:41,040
that it's not going to be like a meeting stale yogurt or something or expired yogurt.

915
00:58:41,200 --> 00:58:42,400
But is that a different account?

916
00:58:42,560 --> 00:58:47,200
Or or is your account that there's sort of more functionality, that it's a signal or a cue

917
00:58:47,360 --> 00:58:53,230
of uh that's sort of in the marketplace of like I'm uh I'm more aroused by you than this

918
00:58:53,230 --> 00:58:53,870
other person.

919
00:58:54,590 --> 00:59:00,190
Yeah, so I would so I would make the prediction that people who engage in kinky practices

920
00:59:00,190 --> 00:59:04,590
will be judged as more aroused than people who are not engaged in kinky practices.

921
00:59:04,670 --> 00:59:08,830
And if we're trying to say estimate the probability that someone's faking an orgasm, I

922
00:59:08,830 --> 00:59:14,400
would predict that um a a person who is engaged in a kinky practice would be viewed as

923
00:59:14,400 --> 00:59:17,920
less likely to have faked the orgasm.

924
00:59:18,320 --> 00:59:20,320
And so I would view it as a costly signal.

925
00:59:20,400 --> 00:59:26,000
And because we are aroused by the other by our partner's arousal itself, then those costly

926
00:59:26,000 --> 00:59:30,160
signals should be arousing to us because they're signaling to us in a hard-to-fake way that

927
00:59:30,160 --> 00:59:33,520
our partner is aroused and we should be aroused by our partner's arousal.

928
00:59:33,840 --> 00:59:37,360
And that can create a kind of feedback loop where each partner is aroused by the other's

929
00:59:37,360 --> 00:59:41,830
arousal, which is you know they're aroused by our arousal, and so forth.

930
00:59:42,070 --> 00:59:47,670
And so uh for that reason kinky practices can create mutual uh arousal uh uh through this

931
00:59:47,750 --> 00:59:49,430
this signaling function.

932
00:59:49,670 --> 00:59:55,590
Um and so if it's just um a random variation I wouldn't necessarily expect it to

933
00:59:55,590 --> 00:59:58,710
take uh to take on this the signaling function.

934
00:59:59,200 --> 00:59:59,360
Right.

935
00:59:59,440 --> 00:59:59,520
Yeah.

936
00:59:59,760 --> 01:00:03,440
And the and the argument then is maybe, and this is like obvious when you say it out loud,

937
01:00:03,600 --> 01:00:09,120
but it's that there's design for sexual recipient receptivity in the partner.

938
01:00:10,080 --> 01:00:15,200
And that's the primary target of sort of like this is how aroused I am.

939
01:00:15,360 --> 01:00:18,320
And there's design for gauging that, which makes sense, right?

940
01:00:18,400 --> 01:00:18,960
For lots of reasons.

941
01:00:19,200 --> 01:00:19,810
Yes, exactly.

942
01:00:19,970 --> 01:00:23,570
So the argument isn't that kinky practices themselves are adaptations, is they're a

943
01:00:23,570 --> 01:00:29,170
byproduct of uh systems for gauging partner sexual arousal, uh and um

944
01:00:29,330 --> 01:00:35,330
avoiding uh sexual deception, uh, and trying to accurately gauge arousal and and in turn um

945
01:00:35,410 --> 01:00:39,970
calibrating your own arousal to uh estimates of your partner's arousal, and kinky practices

946
01:00:39,970 --> 01:00:45,860
emerge as a byproduct uh of those um of those systems of trying to gauge arousal or not.

947
01:00:46,020 --> 01:00:51,380
And they emerge perhaps in cultures where um that are more sexually uh liberal uh in terms

948
01:00:51,380 --> 01:00:55,140
of norms and and and and what have you and then they probably are less likely to emerge

949
01:00:55,140 --> 01:00:59,140
where um sex is more um taboo, I guess.

950
01:00:59,380 --> 01:01:00,980
Yeah, cool.

951
01:01:01,220 --> 01:01:06,950
Josh, do you um this is a slight change of topic, but it's still in the neighborhood is um

952
01:01:07,190 --> 01:01:12,150
do you ever encounter people when they're talking to you or misunderstanding or

953
01:01:12,150 --> 01:01:17,590
understanding your theories I think to some people it might sound sort of reductive that um

954
01:01:17,910 --> 01:01:23,350
well the reason why we have these um uh adaptations is because of pathogens.

955
01:01:23,510 --> 01:01:27,110
Like I think like you know that we we prefer to think well it's like something like David's

956
01:01:27,190 --> 01:01:28,790
like you know ideology, right?

957
01:01:28,950 --> 01:01:34,470
Sort of um the idea that sort of anything is driven by pathogen avoidance.

958
01:01:34,870 --> 01:01:40,780
Uh how do uh how do humans view that idea?

959
01:01:40,940 --> 01:01:42,060
And I can imagine two things.

960
01:01:42,220 --> 01:01:47,900
One is some people pushing against it because they're like, why do why does our highfalutin

961
01:01:47,900 --> 01:01:50,460
psychology care about something so low brow is disease?

962
01:01:50,620 --> 01:01:56,300
But then another version would be like, yeah, it's good that we don't like out groups

963
01:01:56,380 --> 01:02:01,260
because they're riddled with pathogens and like lice, and you know, like obviously that's

964
01:02:01,260 --> 01:02:06,870
like rhetoric of of um So, like, have you have you

965
01:02:06,870 --> 01:02:12,870
brushed up against either of those reactions where one is sort of like, how

966
01:02:13,030 --> 01:02:15,990
dare you contaminate the ivory tower with disease?

967
01:02:16,150 --> 01:02:17,750
We don't, we don't we need to worry about that.

968
01:02:17,830 --> 01:02:19,350
We're doing math and science.

969
01:02:19,510 --> 01:02:25,350
And then the other version is like, you know, racist xenophobia that uses

970
01:02:25,350 --> 01:02:27,350
disease, you know, as a cudgel.

971
01:02:27,910 --> 01:02:33,780
So um I'll I'll give a brief anecdote about a social psychologist named Paul Rosin, who

972
01:02:33,780 --> 01:02:37,140
was maybe the first and most well-known disgust researcher.

973
01:02:37,300 --> 01:02:42,660
In a paper he wrote in I think the 1980s, he commented on how no one was researching

974
01:02:42,660 --> 01:02:43,300
disgust.

975
01:02:43,460 --> 01:02:48,260
And it might be because when you tell people you research disgust, they draw some really

976
01:02:48,260 --> 01:02:49,780
weird inferences about you.

977
01:02:50,290 --> 01:02:52,530
Why would you why would you study that?

978
01:02:52,930 --> 01:02:55,330
You know, you have to be thinking about these weird things.

979
01:02:55,410 --> 01:02:59,250
It's kind of like responses to people who work in a morgue or something like that,

980
01:02:59,410 --> 01:03:00,370
undertakers.

981
01:03:00,770 --> 01:03:03,810
And uh I I've experienced that a little bit.

982
01:03:03,890 --> 01:03:08,850
Uh so not talking about pathogens is actually uh a little bit less of that reaction.

983
01:03:08,930 --> 01:03:13,250
But if you say you research disgust or you're interested in disgust, um you do get some

984
01:03:13,250 --> 01:03:14,210
weird looks.

985
01:03:14,530 --> 01:03:20,220
That said, relative to evolutionary psychologists who study mating or

986
01:03:20,220 --> 01:03:24,220
maybe even politics, I think that I found very little pushback.

987
01:03:24,540 --> 01:03:30,380
I think that people are very open to the idea that we have specialized

988
01:03:30,380 --> 01:03:33,500
aspects of our psychology for navigating pathogens.

989
01:03:33,660 --> 01:03:39,180
I think that it's not controversial or offensive or butting up against other kinds of

990
01:03:39,180 --> 01:03:44,540
priors or ways of looking at the world or science in the way that some of these other

991
01:03:44,540 --> 01:03:45,340
topics are.

992
01:03:45,570 --> 01:03:50,690
It seems orthogonal to a lot of other theoretical approaches within social psychology.

993
01:03:50,850 --> 01:03:56,370
And I think people find it both a part of it has to be true, um, B important,

994
01:03:56,770 --> 01:04:01,170
and C perfectly compatible without uh stepping on any toes.

995
01:04:01,490 --> 01:04:07,170
Um, so in terms of evolutionary psychologists sometimes getting some resistance in

996
01:04:07,170 --> 01:04:12,610
terms of uh scientific, ideological or political ideological reasons, I really have

997
01:04:12,610 --> 01:04:14,770
experienced very little of that in my career.

998
01:04:15,120 --> 01:04:15,440
Cool.

999
01:04:15,600 --> 01:04:21,440
And then the the other half was like the sort of cudgel of racists pathogens sort of thing.

1000
01:04:21,520 --> 01:04:22,160
Yeah.

1001
01:04:23,200 --> 01:04:28,000
Uh yeah, I I haven't run into too many racists that I'm aware of.

1002
01:04:28,800 --> 01:04:34,720
Or at least I I haven't um I haven't gotten pushback from perspectives that might

1003
01:04:34,720 --> 01:04:40,330
be motivated by seeing races as differentially clean or wanting to

1004
01:04:41,290 --> 01:04:47,210
uphold the idea that there's some something essential in our categorization of races or

1005
01:04:47,210 --> 01:04:51,690
groups that does have some correspondence with a real threat like pathogens.

1006
01:04:52,090 --> 01:04:56,650
I know those people are out there, but they haven't really engaged in my research so much,

1007
01:04:56,730 --> 01:04:58,490
and I haven't had conversations with them.

1008
01:04:58,730 --> 01:04:59,850
Yeah, cool.

1009
01:05:00,440 --> 01:05:06,200
Um, I I was just gonna ask about um some other areas of discussed research

1010
01:05:06,200 --> 01:05:08,280
that may not be holding up so well.

1011
01:05:08,440 --> 01:05:14,360
Um, like the idea that we're grossed out by, say, fat people or old old people or people

1012
01:05:14,360 --> 01:05:18,520
with physical deformities or abnormalities that make them look different or weird.

1013
01:05:18,680 --> 01:05:23,640
Uh the idea there, presumably, is that this is a kind of dumb pathogen avoidance system,

1014
01:05:23,720 --> 01:05:28,430
and we're just kind of being grossed out by anyone who deviates from species typical

1015
01:05:28,430 --> 01:05:29,630
proportions or whatever.

1016
01:05:29,790 --> 01:05:31,950
Um, I uh am skeptical of that.

1017
01:05:32,030 --> 01:05:35,790
Uh it seems like a pretty dumb way to design a pathogen avoidance system.

1018
01:05:36,270 --> 01:05:40,910
But I think what might be going on there is that the reason why we're grossed out uh by,

1019
01:05:40,990 --> 01:05:46,430
say, you know, physical abnormalities is that w what it's really cueing is low social

1020
01:05:46,430 --> 01:05:51,470
value, uh, or or perhaps the expectation that others will view the the person as low social

1021
01:05:51,470 --> 01:05:51,870
value.

1022
01:05:52,030 --> 01:05:54,440
And that is driving the disgust response.

1023
01:05:54,600 --> 01:05:56,920
Do you do you buy that that way of thinking about it?

1024
01:05:57,560 --> 01:05:58,120
I do.

1025
01:05:59,160 --> 01:06:04,200
I should say that some of these hypotheses were generated in the the mid to late aughts,

1026
01:06:04,600 --> 01:06:08,200
uh, the obesity and the um the elderly.

1027
01:06:08,440 --> 01:06:13,000
And there was some preliminary evidence published consistent with that, but again, with

1028
01:06:13,000 --> 01:06:15,640
methods that were kind of standard for the time.

1029
01:06:16,040 --> 01:06:21,010
And those ideas, I think, have really stuck around in the literature, but based pretty much

1030
01:06:21,010 --> 01:06:26,850
only on some studies that don't provide the most diagnostic evidence for the hypothesis, I

1031
01:06:26,850 --> 01:06:27,490
would say.

1032
01:06:28,050 --> 01:06:33,810
And so there's not been a lot of recent research looking at pathogen avoidance and obesity.

1033
01:06:35,410 --> 01:06:40,130
I would guess to the extent to which there is a kind of pathogen avoidance response toward

1034
01:06:40,130 --> 01:06:41,730
people with those features.

1035
01:06:42,290 --> 01:06:48,060
It is based on social value or the idea that in certain

1036
01:06:48,060 --> 01:06:53,820
ecologies, obesity is associated with other features that

1037
01:06:53,820 --> 01:06:57,500
people interpret as diagnostic of infection.

1038
01:06:57,580 --> 01:07:02,220
So we talked about the kind of skin coloration differences that correspond with

1039
01:07:02,220 --> 01:07:05,020
inflammatory responses in laboratory experiments.

1040
01:07:05,260 --> 01:07:10,450
If you're in the US and people with a BMI of 35,

1041
01:07:11,570 --> 01:07:17,570
you know, they might be in uh settings where they're not getting a lot of

1042
01:07:17,570 --> 01:07:20,850
physical activity, which affects vascular health.

1043
01:07:21,010 --> 01:07:27,010
Um, they're not eating a lot of nutrient-rich uh foods, which can affect,

1044
01:07:27,410 --> 01:07:33,360
I I forget the name, carotene, some something with carotens that can affect the type of

1045
01:07:33,360 --> 01:07:38,320
skin coloration that people find attractive in mates and social partners and take as

1046
01:07:38,320 --> 01:07:44,240
diagnostic to metabolic condition potentially, and maybe also contagiousness, that there

1047
01:07:44,480 --> 01:07:50,240
you might have something where you're treating BMI or obesity as a Q2 infection.

1048
01:07:50,480 --> 01:07:56,000
Whereas if you're in some foraging society and you have someone of a similar

1049
01:07:56,000 --> 01:08:00,890
BMI, they're only going to maintain that if they're getting a lot of nutrients and if

1050
01:08:00,890 --> 01:08:06,730
they're in fairly good condition and able to resist and have high tolerance for pathogens.

1051
01:08:07,450 --> 01:08:13,130
So I I wouldn't rule out the possibility that there is something where

1052
01:08:13,450 --> 01:08:18,760
some features of people who are obese are being interpreted as related to

1053
01:08:18,760 --> 01:08:19,560
infection.

1054
01:08:20,120 --> 01:08:25,640
But I'm guessing that most of it is the social value hypothesis that obesity is

1055
01:08:25,640 --> 01:08:29,320
associated with low social value for a number of reasons.

1056
01:08:29,480 --> 01:08:35,320
A lot of these for individuals are probably perceptions that other people find obese people

1057
01:08:35,320 --> 01:08:36,760
to be less valuable.

1058
01:08:37,480 --> 01:08:43,160
And therefore, you know, you're just not willing to invest in that pathogen risk that's

1059
01:08:43,720 --> 01:08:45,720
present for any interaction partner.

1060
01:08:46,110 --> 01:08:46,350
Right.

1061
01:08:46,430 --> 01:08:49,870
And what's great is about that is that it's eminently testable, this idea.

1062
01:08:50,030 --> 01:08:54,350
You could look at disgust toward people with physical abnormalities or obese people or

1063
01:08:54,350 --> 01:08:59,230
whatever, and see if that uh if the relationship between the physical abnormality and the

1064
01:08:59,230 --> 01:09:01,710
disgust is mediated by say a welfare trade-off ratio.

1065
01:09:01,870 --> 01:09:05,230
And if that accounts for the relationship, then that would confirm the hypothesis that this

1066
01:09:05,230 --> 01:09:10,900
is driven by social valuation uh rather than um a uh the uh a

1067
01:09:10,900 --> 01:09:12,340
pathogen cue per se.

1068
01:09:12,500 --> 01:09:12,740
Yeah.

1069
01:09:13,060 --> 01:09:13,860
Yeah, 100%.

1070
01:09:14,420 --> 01:09:18,900
You know, another interesting thing is that out of out of being very overweight versus

1071
01:09:18,900 --> 01:09:24,340
being very underweight, I would suspect that underweight individuals are probably um that

1072
01:09:24,340 --> 01:09:30,260
would be more similar to the appearance of someone who is uh struggling to handle an

1073
01:09:30,260 --> 01:09:32,820
infection than someone who's very overweight.

1074
01:09:32,980 --> 01:09:36,740
That hasn't really been I don't I can't say that it hasn't been proposed, but I'm not

1075
01:09:36,740 --> 01:09:39,220
familiar with the test of that hypothesis in the literature.

1076
01:09:40,330 --> 01:09:45,850
On that note of somebody struggling to deal with infection, uh, one of the standing most

1077
01:09:45,850 --> 01:09:49,850
important questions for all evolutionary psychologists to answer is what's up with zombies?

1078
01:09:50,090 --> 01:09:51,770
Uh, have you thought about that?

1079
01:09:52,090 --> 01:09:54,970
Uh do you have a pet theory of zombies?

1080
01:09:55,530 --> 01:09:57,450
I've never thought of zombies, I'm afraid.

1081
01:09:57,690 --> 01:10:03,450
And um, because we talked about this Colton uh in his uh I think we talked about Colton

1082
01:10:03,770 --> 01:10:06,810
Swivner uh in the morbidly curious stuff.

1083
01:10:06,900 --> 01:10:09,380
Um in just the genre of horror.

1084
01:10:09,460 --> 01:10:15,460
Um and right there's like a lot of cues of, you know, this is a this is a

1085
01:10:15,460 --> 01:10:21,220
incapacitated, con specific with sort of a lot of cues of, you know, I I don't know a

1086
01:10:21,220 --> 01:10:23,940
channel edithagan like zoonotic infection too, right?

1087
01:10:24,100 --> 01:10:29,140
Like that's another I mean it seems like a supernormal stimulus of pathogen risk.

1088
01:10:29,220 --> 01:10:31,140
I mean, like their flesh is literally falling off their body.

1089
01:10:31,380 --> 01:10:31,620
Exactly.

1090
01:10:31,860 --> 01:10:34,100
And the zom their zombiehood is literally contagious.

1091
01:10:34,370 --> 01:10:35,650
Yeah, they're eating brains.

1092
01:10:35,730 --> 01:10:38,370
They're exactly like it feels like a very deep scrope.

1093
01:10:38,530 --> 01:10:43,090
Yeah, it's exactly of like a zoonotically infected conspecific who's coming for you, who's

1094
01:10:43,090 --> 01:10:44,530
like got rabies or something.

1095
01:10:45,010 --> 01:10:45,330
Yeah.

1096
01:10:45,810 --> 01:10:50,450
Yeah, it it's really interesting because um people who have severe infections, they don't

1097
01:10:50,450 --> 01:10:51,570
move around much.

1098
01:10:51,810 --> 01:10:57,570
Um and I I was I was an anthropology minor at ASU where I did my bachelor's degree, and I

1099
01:10:57,570 --> 01:11:01,040
took multiple classes in the the evolution of infectious disease.

1100
01:11:01,200 --> 01:11:06,560
And my professor was fond of talking about how people pictured Ebola as zombies running

1101
01:11:06,560 --> 01:11:06,960
after you.

1102
01:11:07,120 --> 01:11:07,280
Yeah.

1103
01:11:07,600 --> 01:11:10,720
Because Ebola, you know, it's a hemorrhagetic, hemorrhagic, hemorrhagic.

1104
01:11:11,040 --> 01:11:11,200
Yeah.

1105
01:11:11,280 --> 01:11:12,400
I think I'm mispronouncing that.

1106
01:11:12,560 --> 01:11:14,640
Anyway, um, it causes bleeding.

1107
01:11:14,880 --> 01:11:18,480
But uh, you know, people are just listless, they're laying down, it's not like they're

1108
01:11:18,480 --> 01:11:19,360
vomiting blood.

1109
01:11:19,440 --> 01:11:22,640
Well, it's not like there's blood pouring from their pores all the time.

1110
01:11:23,200 --> 01:11:26,240
And uh, this is gonna be the case with most infections.

1111
01:11:26,400 --> 01:11:31,770
And so when you think about zombies, whether they're sprinting like in the 28 Days Later

1112
01:11:31,770 --> 01:11:36,810
franchise, or kind of shuffling along like Dawn of the Dead, these are

1113
01:11:37,130 --> 01:11:40,410
pathogen risks that you're almost never going to encounter.

1114
01:11:40,570 --> 01:11:45,850
When I talk about emotional reactions to pathogen threats, you know, emotion researchers

1115
01:11:45,850 --> 01:11:50,410
might think about emotions varying along the lines of along an approach or avoidance

1116
01:11:50,410 --> 01:11:51,130
continuum.

1117
01:11:51,290 --> 01:11:54,700
Disgust and fear are both avoidance emotions.

1118
01:11:54,860 --> 01:11:58,380
But the thing with disgust is that pathogens are not chasing you.

1119
01:11:58,540 --> 01:12:04,380
You know, viruses and bacteria, um, they don't have legs, they can't travel long distances.

1120
01:12:04,620 --> 01:12:08,700
They get in you by you touching something that has them on them.

1121
01:12:08,940 --> 01:12:14,380
Um, lions and tigers and bears, these are the things that have their own legs and their own

1122
01:12:14,380 --> 01:12:16,220
motivations to get to you.

1123
01:12:16,380 --> 01:12:21,290
And that's where you need different kinds of coordinating affective responses that motivate

1124
01:12:21,290 --> 01:12:23,370
a different types of avoidance reaction.

1125
01:12:23,530 --> 01:12:29,450
And so looping back to zombies a little bit, it is interesting that kind of this

1126
01:12:29,450 --> 01:12:34,810
archetype is combining the paths to threat with the locomotion.

1127
01:12:35,450 --> 01:12:38,810
Other than saying that's interesting, I haven't thought about zombies beyond this.

1128
01:12:39,130 --> 01:12:42,970
Yeah, I think it may be worth just saying, like, too, like this is also like the natural

1129
01:12:42,970 --> 01:12:44,890
selection of like vectors, right?

1130
01:12:44,970 --> 01:12:45,930
So disease vectors.

1131
01:12:46,010 --> 01:12:51,920
So like from a pathogens perspective, you can't you have to maintain your spreadability,

1132
01:12:52,000 --> 01:12:52,240
right?

1133
01:12:52,320 --> 01:12:58,320
So this is why diseases that involve like mosquitoes can really um incapacitate the the

1134
01:12:58,320 --> 01:12:59,680
victim or the host.

1135
01:12:59,920 --> 01:13:04,720
But other diseases that require, you know, interaction, like if you if you really

1136
01:13:04,720 --> 01:13:09,840
incapacitate a host right away, that might curtail your ability to spread, right?

1137
01:13:09,920 --> 01:13:13,680
So like a cold, the person can still get up, walk around and like spread it.

1138
01:13:13,790 --> 01:13:18,110
But if you immediately incapacitate the person, then you're not going to spread.

1139
01:13:18,190 --> 01:13:22,190
And so that's why, for example, like you know, diseases that are spread by mosquitoes or

1140
01:13:22,190 --> 01:13:27,790
other like vectors that are not the primary host can be more virulence.

1141
01:13:27,870 --> 01:13:30,430
So it's this virulence spreadability trade off.

1142
01:13:30,510 --> 01:13:33,870
And that's also something you kind of get from an evolutionary approach that you might not

1143
01:13:33,870 --> 01:13:35,070
think of otherwise.

1144
01:13:35,470 --> 01:13:36,670
Yeah, that's exactly right.

1145
01:13:36,830 --> 01:13:42,380
So uh Paul Ewold wrote a book that uh also inspired me when I was an undergraduate, the

1146
01:13:42,380 --> 01:13:45,820
evolution of infectious disease, largely making this broad art argument.

1147
01:13:45,980 --> 01:13:50,380
And arboviruses, these are things spread by vectors or insect vectors.

1148
01:13:51,660 --> 01:13:57,020
If falciparum malaria causes someone to just be bedbound for a week, well, the mosquito can

1149
01:13:57,020 --> 01:14:00,460
just go to him and bring the parasite to uh to someone else.

1150
01:14:00,620 --> 01:14:02,780
And of course, that's not in the mosquitoes' interest either.

1151
01:14:02,950 --> 01:14:05,430
The parasite is also manipulating the mosquito.

1152
01:14:05,750 --> 01:14:07,190
Bibonic plague is similar.

1153
01:14:07,270 --> 01:14:09,190
So the rats are running around with the fleas.

1154
01:14:09,350 --> 01:14:12,310
It it does get a little bit complex with these trade-offs.

1155
01:14:12,470 --> 01:14:17,910
Uh, and there's uh, you know, asymptomatic periods also influence this.

1156
01:14:18,070 --> 01:14:20,390
Um, how naive the population is.

1157
01:14:20,550 --> 01:14:24,870
I'm I'm not really deep in the literature, but I've been told that it's not quite as

1158
01:14:24,870 --> 01:14:30,500
straightforward as we might think in terms of just selection to low

1159
01:14:30,500 --> 01:14:33,140
virulence versus spreadability.

1160
01:14:33,380 --> 01:14:37,700
But yes, ultimately it is not a thing that only an evolutionary perspective gets you.

1161
01:14:37,940 --> 01:14:38,500
Yeah, cool.

1162
01:14:38,740 --> 01:14:41,780
Speaking of an evolutionary approach, and you know, we can transition to other stuff.

1163
01:14:41,940 --> 01:14:46,660
I saw you at the most recent HBES, and you had a diatribe against evolutionary mismatch.

1164
01:14:47,140 --> 01:14:52,250
And I at the time I didn't even have anything about evolutionary mismatch in any of my

1165
01:14:52,250 --> 01:14:57,130
work, but like since I thought about free will, um, I'm arguing that mismatch is important

1166
01:14:57,130 --> 01:14:58,010
about free will.

1167
01:14:58,170 --> 01:15:02,490
But I still think f mismatch is over over uh extended.

1168
01:15:02,730 --> 01:15:06,970
But I don't know, do you still have the do you want to give us the the your your take on

1169
01:15:06,970 --> 01:15:10,410
evolutionary mismatch being uh and what do you think about it?

1170
01:15:10,820 --> 01:15:12,580
Yeah, I I think I gave you that.

1171
01:15:12,660 --> 01:15:15,140
Um, I would call it a monologue after a few beers.

1172
01:15:15,220 --> 01:15:17,540
So maybe maybe it did turn into a diatribe.

1173
01:15:18,020 --> 01:15:19,220
Maybe the bar was just loud.

1174
01:15:19,300 --> 01:15:21,300
So no, it was all the above.

1175
01:15:21,460 --> 01:15:23,300
It was, it was uh, yeah, exactly.

1176
01:15:23,620 --> 01:15:24,980
Um, yeah, sure.

1177
01:15:25,140 --> 01:15:30,900
Uh so I I've been there's been something about the concept of

1178
01:15:30,900 --> 01:15:36,660
mismatch that has struck me as um uh not quite right for several

1179
01:15:36,660 --> 01:15:41,670
years, and just slowly I've I've kind of been able to articulate a few of those reasons,

1180
01:15:41,910 --> 01:15:45,270
although I haven't really talked with people about them other than a few side

1181
01:15:45,270 --> 01:15:45,830
conversations.

1182
01:15:45,910 --> 01:15:51,910
So maybe this can be a nice exercise that the audience can also listen around with.

1183
01:15:52,150 --> 01:15:56,710
So the idea of evolutionary mismatch, as it's articulated in the evolutionary psychology

1184
01:15:56,710 --> 01:16:02,470
literature, is that we have adaptations that are specialized for

1185
01:16:02,470 --> 01:16:05,750
ancestral environments and are good, are good for our fitness.

1186
01:16:06,780 --> 01:16:09,820
But the environment has changed in some way.

1187
01:16:09,980 --> 01:16:15,580
And it's often, authors often say that the environment has changed more rapidly than we've

1188
01:16:15,580 --> 01:16:21,420
had time to evolve psychological adaptations or non

1189
01:16:21,420 --> 01:16:27,260
psychological other types of adaptations to catch up, to then behave adaptively

1190
01:16:27,820 --> 01:16:29,260
in this new environment.

1191
01:16:29,420 --> 01:16:32,700
And so these mechanisms are no longer adaptive.

1192
01:16:32,970 --> 01:16:36,330
uh, they no longer have the same fitness associations.

1193
01:16:36,890 --> 01:16:42,890
And um authors often say that this has consequences for our well-being

1194
01:16:42,890 --> 01:16:45,130
and our values and this type of stuff.

1195
01:16:45,450 --> 01:16:51,130
And so um, is there anything that you guys have to add to that in kind of the boilerplate

1196
01:16:51,130 --> 01:16:53,290
definition of a mismatch that I've missed?

1197
01:16:53,660 --> 01:16:58,700
Uh the example that people love to throw out is junk food, that we gorge ourselves on on

1198
01:16:58,700 --> 01:17:03,500
junk food because it was scarce in ancestral environments and that causes all sorts of

1199
01:17:03,500 --> 01:17:04,460
health problems.

1200
01:17:04,620 --> 01:17:09,180
People sometimes talk about pornography uh as a mismatch.

1201
01:17:09,340 --> 01:17:10,860
Um trying to think of other examples of the case.

1202
01:17:15,350 --> 01:17:20,870
not to deal with large scale social dynamics, um, whether that involves like meeting

1203
01:17:20,870 --> 01:17:24,390
strangers or understanding complicated social dynamics.

1204
01:17:24,550 --> 01:17:30,550
Like the argument is social reactions and understandings are plainly

1205
01:17:30,550 --> 01:17:35,270
for a smaller scale interpersonal world, not a large scale international world, for

1206
01:17:35,270 --> 01:17:35,510
example.

1207
01:17:35,910 --> 01:17:37,270
Would be another example, yeah.

1208
01:17:37,740 --> 01:17:38,940
So these are good examples.

1209
01:17:39,020 --> 01:17:43,420
And I did listen to your guys' interview with uh Daniel Nettle, which I enjoyed quite a

1210
01:17:43,420 --> 01:17:43,580
bit.

1211
01:17:43,740 --> 01:17:49,500
And Daniel has uh written about and argued nicely on your uh podcast

1212
01:17:49,740 --> 01:17:55,740
that the I this junk food idea doesn't really hold up to scrutiny, and that um in

1213
01:17:55,740 --> 01:18:01,390
ancestral environments we should have you know, not rarely encountered situations where we

1214
01:18:01,390 --> 01:18:04,670
could gorge ourselves on honey, for example.

1215
01:18:04,830 --> 01:18:10,350
And that lots of other animals, non-human animals, have kind of stop mechanisms to keep

1216
01:18:10,350 --> 01:18:13,070
themselves from overconsuming calories.

1217
01:18:13,390 --> 01:18:19,070
And that obesity is not just eating too much

1218
01:18:19,070 --> 01:18:19,630
sugar.

1219
01:18:19,790 --> 01:18:25,120
There's a bunch of other factors during development that seem to lead people to vary in

1220
01:18:25,120 --> 01:18:28,240
their BMI and their obesity and how they store body fat, etc.

1221
01:18:28,800 --> 01:18:34,240
So I think that that is a nice pushback to how some people have thought about in terms uh

1222
01:18:34,400 --> 01:18:39,520
junk food and just our modern food ecology mismatching with our evolved psychology.

1223
01:18:39,680 --> 01:18:45,280
Um, but I further question if the basic concept of mismatch is useful to

1224
01:18:45,280 --> 01:18:46,560
evolutionary psychologists.

1225
01:18:46,720 --> 01:18:48,880
I question the coherence of the idea.

1226
01:18:49,040 --> 01:18:52,320
Um, and I'll I'll I'll give you a few reasons why.

1227
01:18:52,480 --> 01:18:58,430
Uh one of them is that you know, if if you take the Santa Barbara style uh

1228
01:18:58,430 --> 01:19:02,110
evolutionary perspective, which both of you guys do, and it's kind of the mainstream

1229
01:19:02,110 --> 01:19:08,030
capital E, capital P evolutionary psychology, it's uh its orientation is to

1230
01:19:08,030 --> 01:19:13,950
make hype uh generate and test hypotheses about design features, not to look at the fitness

1231
01:19:13,950 --> 01:19:19,710
consequences of those design features in any specific ecology, um, especially a

1232
01:19:19,710 --> 01:19:22,260
specific ecology at a specific time.

1233
01:19:22,580 --> 01:19:28,260
And so just even saying that this is mismatch because it has a different effect on fitness

1234
01:19:28,500 --> 01:19:33,380
seems to be conflating, you know, some kind of behavioral ecology perspective with an

1235
01:19:33,380 --> 01:19:38,500
evolutionary psychology perspective in a way that's not really furthering knowledge in

1236
01:19:38,500 --> 01:19:39,540
either area.

1237
01:19:39,860 --> 01:19:45,300
But further, when we make these claims about a mismatch, no one is actually measuring

1238
01:19:45,300 --> 01:19:46,100
fitness.

1239
01:19:46,950 --> 01:19:52,630
So it's not that it's unfalsifiable, it's just never actually tested if it's a mismatch.

1240
01:19:53,830 --> 01:19:59,510
Further, there's no consideration typically in what kind of phenotype would

1241
01:19:59,510 --> 01:20:01,990
actually be matched, so to speak.

1242
01:20:02,310 --> 01:20:05,510
So let's for a second go back to the junk food example.

1243
01:20:05,670 --> 01:20:10,710
Um, we say that our preferences for sugar are mismatched in the modern environment because

1244
01:20:10,870 --> 01:20:16,360
ancestrally, sugar, you know, glucose or fructose, or I'm afraid that I might not be

1245
01:20:16,360 --> 01:20:20,920
getting the terms exactly correct, but they're in fruits that have a lot of vitamins and

1246
01:20:20,920 --> 01:20:24,040
nutrients that are really fitness good for us.

1247
01:20:24,280 --> 01:20:30,120
Now they're in these low nutrient foods that are fitness neutral or fitness negative.

1248
01:20:30,600 --> 01:20:36,360
Well, is the proposal then that our taste perception should find sugar disgusting

1249
01:20:36,440 --> 01:20:37,080
right now?

1250
01:20:37,400 --> 01:20:42,610
If we just could not tolerate the taste of sugar, is that a better phenotype than the

1251
01:20:42,610 --> 01:20:44,450
current phenotype that we have?

1252
01:20:44,690 --> 01:20:50,450
And are we then expecting, I would guess no, that people who find any flavors of

1253
01:20:50,450 --> 01:20:55,890
sugar to be disgusting, that outcome would be worse than our current phenotypes that have

1254
01:20:55,890 --> 01:20:57,410
their current sugar preferences.

1255
01:20:58,050 --> 01:21:03,570
So are we saying that between these two kinds of theoretical

1256
01:21:03,570 --> 01:21:09,490
endpoints that we could have, that anything is going to be a mismatch if it's not perfectly

1257
01:21:09,490 --> 01:21:15,380
calibrated to the best fitness consequences of sugar preferences in this

1258
01:21:15,380 --> 01:21:16,740
specific environment.

1259
01:21:16,980 --> 01:21:22,900
If that's the case, are our adaptations mismatched in every single ecology we

1260
01:21:22,900 --> 01:21:23,540
could be in?

1261
01:21:23,780 --> 01:21:26,900
Because humans live in a ton of different ecologies.

1262
01:21:27,060 --> 01:21:29,380
And in fact, I mean that's the case now.

1263
01:21:29,540 --> 01:21:34,820
But if we think about how the EEA, the environment of evolutionary adaptedness, is

1264
01:21:34,820 --> 01:21:40,310
conceptualized And just borrowing from how Tuby and Cosmes have discussed this, it's a

1265
01:21:40,310 --> 01:21:44,470
statistical composite of the invariances across ecologies.

1266
01:21:44,790 --> 01:21:48,550
But this is going to be a ton of different ecologies with a ton of different food sources,

1267
01:21:48,710 --> 01:21:50,790
a ton of different social structures, et cetera.

1268
01:21:51,030 --> 01:21:56,150
And so we should be kind of, you know, aiming for some composite or average of all of

1269
01:21:56,150 --> 01:22:01,900
these, not saying that, okay, this is how the condition was in the ancestral

1270
01:22:01,900 --> 01:22:06,220
past, um, and our current environment is different than this one thing.

1271
01:22:06,460 --> 01:22:11,820
The reality is every ecology is going to be different in some way from the statistical

1272
01:22:11,820 --> 01:22:12,460
composite.

1273
01:22:12,620 --> 01:22:16,540
And so both everything is a mismatch and nothing is a mismatch.

1274
01:22:16,780 --> 01:22:22,140
And the final kind of point that I think I'll make is that identifying things as having bad

1275
01:22:22,140 --> 01:22:26,780
fitness consequences or matching poorly is not at all straightforward.

1276
01:22:27,180 --> 01:22:32,610
So if we think about uh snake detection, for example, so this is the classic kind of signal

1277
01:22:32,610 --> 01:22:38,130
detection or error management theory uh outcome, there are asymmetric

1278
01:22:38,130 --> 01:22:42,370
costs to false alarms versus misses in detecting snakes.

1279
01:22:42,530 --> 01:22:48,370
And so the idea is that if you give people some ambiguous stimulus, like a little piece of

1280
01:22:48,370 --> 01:22:53,570
wood that's shaped kind of like a snake, people's intuitive immediate response might be to

1281
01:22:53,570 --> 01:22:56,780
categorize that as a snake until they get more information.

1282
01:22:57,180 --> 01:23:02,860
And you could look at that and say, well, our minds are mismatched to that

1283
01:23:03,420 --> 01:23:07,420
because we've acted like it's a snake, even though it's not a snake.

1284
01:23:07,580 --> 01:23:12,860
And we've paid some metabolic cost and attentional cost to doing that.

1285
01:23:13,180 --> 01:23:16,700
And a perfectly matched psychology wouldn't make that type of mistake.

1286
01:23:16,860 --> 01:23:21,970
But the design feature is to make that kind of mistake because ancestrally there are

1287
01:23:21,970 --> 01:23:27,810
asymmetric costs to having the mental mechanism be biased in one way versus the

1288
01:23:27,810 --> 01:23:28,050
other.

1289
01:23:28,290 --> 01:23:34,130
So simply, simply, the uh idea that we can observe something that doesn't appear to be

1290
01:23:34,130 --> 01:23:39,570
optimized for the modern environment or for any kind of ecology, it's not at all clear to

1291
01:23:39,570 --> 01:23:45,360
me that that's evidence of the ecology being different or there being a misfiring in terms

1292
01:23:45,360 --> 01:23:50,800
of the mental mechanism, it might be, it might have error uh by design for the benefits of

1293
01:23:50,800 --> 01:23:54,080
having a certain number of errors over a certain amount of time.

1294
01:23:54,400 --> 01:23:58,720
Um, I might have one or two others, but I'll uh I'll leave it there.

1295
01:23:59,040 --> 01:23:59,200
Yeah.

1296
01:23:59,360 --> 01:24:04,800
I wanna, I wanna, um, your your physical neighbor, Mark von Vogt, uh has has made a lot of

1297
01:24:04,800 --> 01:24:05,520
mismatch.

1298
01:24:05,680 --> 01:24:07,760
Have you had discussions with him about this?

1299
01:24:07,920 --> 01:24:13,850
Um You know, I I chatted with Mark a little bit about this a while ago, but haven't

1300
01:24:13,850 --> 01:24:15,930
chatted about uh it since then.

1301
01:24:16,010 --> 01:24:18,090
I would be curious, uh curious to do so.

1302
01:24:18,170 --> 01:24:19,210
I don't know if he listens to the podcast.

1303
01:24:19,370 --> 01:24:19,610
Yeah, yeah.

1304
01:24:19,770 --> 01:24:20,010
I don't know.

1305
01:24:20,090 --> 01:24:26,010
Um, I mean, I think to characterize my understanding of how he uses it, like my read of

1306
01:24:26,010 --> 01:24:29,770
his work is often he's talking to like organizational psychologists and sort of saying,

1307
01:24:29,850 --> 01:24:35,770
like, look, I'm studying leadership, and things that you might not think would factor

1308
01:24:35,770 --> 01:24:41,560
into people's leadership decision making are leaking in because they were evolutionarily

1309
01:24:41,560 --> 01:24:42,440
relevant.

1310
01:24:42,680 --> 01:24:48,040
Like, and I think like his argument is the reason to use mismatch.

1311
01:24:48,280 --> 01:24:51,400
And I actually don't, I don't know what I think of this, but I'm curious what you think

1312
01:24:51,400 --> 01:24:51,720
about this.

1313
01:24:51,800 --> 01:24:56,440
Like his argument, I think, would be like, it's it's code for sort of like you would think

1314
01:24:56,440 --> 01:24:59,240
this would be irrelevant, but it turns out it is relevant.

1315
01:24:59,400 --> 01:25:01,160
Like, kind of like the pathogen thing, right?

1316
01:25:01,240 --> 01:25:04,630
Like if you're coming from a business perspective, if you don't take an evolutionary

1317
01:25:04,630 --> 01:25:07,510
approach, then you might think this would be irrelevant.

1318
01:25:07,590 --> 01:25:12,070
But it turns out our evolved psychology is like for a world where other considerations

1319
01:25:12,230 --> 01:25:18,150
other than like profitability is relevant, and there's leakage of these other things that

1320
01:25:18,150 --> 01:25:21,350
are in fact, you know, hurting profitability, for example, maybe.

1321
01:25:21,430 --> 01:25:22,070
I don't know.

1322
01:25:22,150 --> 01:25:28,140
Um, but it's because our minds desire are evolved for evolution and offspring and in

1323
01:25:28,140 --> 01:25:32,300
a natural ecology, not you know, maximizing the the bottom line.

1324
01:25:33,180 --> 01:25:33,740
I don't know.

1325
01:25:33,900 --> 01:25:39,740
I mean, does that what what what what would let that would be my argument

1326
01:25:39,820 --> 01:25:42,220
that like that would be Marx's argument?

1327
01:25:42,380 --> 01:25:42,780
I don't know.

1328
01:25:42,860 --> 01:25:45,100
What what what is the what do you think about that?

1329
01:25:45,580 --> 01:25:49,740
Well I I'm quite sympathetic to this idea that if you're talking to lay people and they

1330
01:25:49,740 --> 01:25:55,490
have some impression that if there's any evolutionary function of the mind, it's to

1331
01:25:55,490 --> 01:26:01,410
figure things out and maximize utility or make us feel

1332
01:26:01,410 --> 01:26:06,770
good or something like that, that it can be rhetorically useful to say that look, our minds

1333
01:26:06,770 --> 01:26:12,530
evolve for one thing, and uh that's not perfectly matched with what our we consciously

1334
01:26:12,530 --> 01:26:15,410
might be trying to do in a business environment.

1335
01:26:15,650 --> 01:26:15,970
Right.

1336
01:26:16,320 --> 01:26:21,600
My my comments earlier are more how useful this is, this concept is to us as evolutionary

1337
01:26:21,600 --> 01:26:22,640
psychologists.

1338
01:26:22,960 --> 01:26:28,800
And uh the the term pops up in a lot of scientific papers of academics talking to

1339
01:26:28,800 --> 01:26:32,160
each other and in fact evolutionary psychologists talking to each other.

1340
01:26:32,400 --> 01:26:38,170
And I I wonder, um I mean I'm I don't know if

1341
01:26:38,170 --> 01:26:42,010
it's been a if I'm right here, if these thoughts are sensible.

1342
01:26:42,410 --> 01:26:48,170
I don't know if it's been a huge uh handicap to our field, if there's if we've

1343
01:26:48,170 --> 01:26:53,850
lost out on something by allocating time or energy to this idea, or if

1344
01:26:54,010 --> 01:26:58,090
uh, you know, it's just something that people feel obligated to write in a paragraph

1345
01:26:58,090 --> 01:27:02,200
without thinking about it too deeply and then moving on and doing the same stuff they would

1346
01:27:02,200 --> 01:27:02,520
otherwise.

1347
01:27:02,840 --> 01:27:03,000
Right.

1348
01:27:03,080 --> 01:27:04,120
Like it's boilerplate.

1349
01:27:04,280 --> 01:27:08,360
I mean, to straw man your argument, and I'll make this even stronger than what you're

1350
01:27:08,360 --> 01:27:08,520
saying.

1351
01:27:08,600 --> 01:27:13,640
I'm not saying you're saying this would be it's it's sort of reflecting a laziness about

1352
01:27:13,640 --> 01:27:18,920
not being adequately design-minded, and that if you take input, output, output, input,

1353
01:27:19,000 --> 01:27:24,330
output process seriously, then you you it doesn't buy you anything.

1354
01:27:24,570 --> 01:27:28,410
And if you just translate everything into like, here's one account, it says this is the

1355
01:27:28,410 --> 01:27:31,930
design features, here's another account, these are the design features.

1356
01:27:32,730 --> 01:27:36,330
You know, you're not really it's not really buying you anything.

1357
01:27:36,490 --> 01:27:36,890
I don't know.

1358
01:27:36,970 --> 01:27:42,740
Is that is that fair or you know, I'm not saying you're saying that, but is that I

1359
01:27:42,900 --> 01:27:43,700
think it is fair.

1360
01:27:43,860 --> 01:27:48,660
And uh, I mean, you guys have discussed multiple times how hard evolutionary psychology can

1361
01:27:48,660 --> 01:27:54,660
be since we have our own evolved psychologies to be perceiving ideas and individuals

1362
01:27:54,820 --> 01:28:00,820
and uh our lived realities in in different ways that aren't necessarily reflecting the

1363
01:28:00,820 --> 01:28:02,340
design features of the mind.

1364
01:28:02,500 --> 01:28:07,870
And I I do think that it's it can be easy for evolutionary psychologists to think in these

1365
01:28:07,870 --> 01:28:13,470
terms of mismatch because it's a very lay intuitive way to think about evolution.

1366
01:28:13,710 --> 01:28:18,990
And so even if you're being extremely rigorous in one area and you're very focused on

1367
01:28:18,990 --> 01:28:24,510
something, uh that it can be easy to slip into that kind of

1368
01:28:24,510 --> 01:28:28,750
layperson type of thinking in other areas or at other times.

1369
01:28:28,990 --> 01:28:29,390
Yeah.

1370
01:28:29,720 --> 01:28:32,680
It's easy to do FSI because it's just uh just so stories.

1371
01:28:32,840 --> 01:28:36,360
So Yeah.

1372
01:28:36,520 --> 01:28:40,360
No, interestingly, I feel like, you know, the just so story uh might be valid when it comes

1373
01:28:40,360 --> 01:28:42,120
to like lazy mismatch stories.

1374
01:28:42,280 --> 01:28:46,760
Like it's easy to tell a lazy mismatch story to explain pretty much anything.

1375
01:28:46,840 --> 01:28:51,720
And I think that speaks to the problem you're you're raising, uh Josh, is that this is not

1376
01:28:51,720 --> 01:28:57,310
a useful tool and it can be very easily abused to uh explain anything you want to explain.

1377
01:28:57,470 --> 01:29:01,870
Um it's it's the opposite of the kind of adaptationism and design mindedness that we want

1378
01:29:01,870 --> 01:29:02,590
to be taking.

1379
01:29:02,750 --> 01:29:08,190
And it I I think probably part of the motivation is um is that it gives us

1380
01:29:08,510 --> 01:29:14,030
a kind of power to say you're wrong and bad and here's how you can be right and smart.

1381
01:29:14,190 --> 01:29:18,350
And I have the answers for how you can you know live a better life and you know I've

1382
01:29:18,350 --> 01:29:20,190
discovered the source of all of our problems.

1383
01:29:20,340 --> 01:29:23,860
uh, you know, give me status and attention for for giving you the solutions.

1384
01:29:24,100 --> 01:29:28,900
Um, I think it's too easy to slip into that mindset of of wanting to have the answers, of

1385
01:29:28,900 --> 01:29:32,020
wanting to, you know, give people solutions to all their problems.

1386
01:29:32,180 --> 01:29:36,100
When really what which what we should be focused on is first understanding how the damn

1387
01:29:36,100 --> 01:29:36,820
thing works.

1388
01:29:36,980 --> 01:29:42,420
And then once we really get have a good handle on how the mind works, then maybe we could

1389
01:29:42,420 --> 01:29:47,540
start to get into tentative, you know, proposals and solutions to people's problems and

1390
01:29:47,670 --> 01:29:48,310
applications.

1391
01:29:48,470 --> 01:29:50,230
But first, we just have to understand the thing.

1392
01:29:50,390 --> 01:29:55,670
And I think we too often lose sight of that and we skip ahead to the proposal part of it

1393
01:29:55,670 --> 01:29:56,470
too quickly.

1394
01:29:57,030 --> 01:30:02,790
Yeah, I'll loop back into something else that your guest Daniel Nettle said a few episodes

1395
01:30:02,790 --> 01:30:08,150
ago, which was kind of evolutionary psychology 1.0 or first generation evolutionary

1396
01:30:08,150 --> 01:30:11,910
psychology was really popular because it was saying all these things that are obviously

1397
01:30:11,910 --> 01:30:17,300
true that other academics didn't want to really talk about or dismiss away with

1398
01:30:18,340 --> 01:30:20,500
language that's kind of non-intuitive.

1399
01:30:21,060 --> 01:30:26,180
Evolutionary psychology 2.0 or more in-depth stuff is

1400
01:30:26,820 --> 01:30:29,300
less penetrable and less intuitive.

1401
01:30:29,460 --> 01:30:33,780
And I think there might be some overlap with mismatch in that it's really kind of the

1402
01:30:33,830 --> 01:30:35,830
evolutionary psychology 1.0.

1403
01:30:35,990 --> 01:30:39,510
But then if you uh if that terminology makes any sense.

1404
01:30:39,750 --> 01:30:45,110
But when you when you drill down to the meta theory and thinking about trying to identify

1405
01:30:45,110 --> 01:30:50,230
and understand design features, the the concept loses some of its appeal, some of its

1406
01:30:50,230 --> 01:30:51,350
benefits and coherence.

1407
01:30:51,590 --> 01:30:51,830
Yeah.

1408
01:30:53,430 --> 01:30:57,030
I mean, to bring it back to pathogen and discuss, do you think some of that early pathogen

1409
01:30:57,110 --> 01:31:01,030
and discuss work was a little bit by like a mismatchy?

1410
01:31:02,820 --> 01:31:03,780
Yeah, I think so.

1411
01:31:03,940 --> 01:31:09,540
I think that it might be drawing a little bit on uh kind of lay intuitions about how these

1412
01:31:09,540 --> 01:31:10,580
systems might work.

1413
01:31:10,820 --> 01:31:15,620
Although I'll also say that I I think that it's perfectly scientifically defensible to

1414
01:31:15,620 --> 01:31:17,380
think about the system being very general.

1415
01:31:17,540 --> 01:31:23,460
And that I I don't think that the uh the people working early in this area were

1416
01:31:24,020 --> 01:31:27,380
doing anything intellectually wrong or lazy.

1417
01:31:27,780 --> 01:31:32,510
Uh I I think that um it was an open question.

1418
01:31:32,670 --> 01:31:38,270
And my read of the data is that there's greater specificity than first assumed.

1419
01:31:38,430 --> 01:31:42,110
But I wouldn't attribute that outcome to laziness or anything by those researchers.

1420
01:31:42,510 --> 01:31:43,070
Yeah, that's right.

1421
01:31:43,150 --> 01:31:48,670
I mean, I think to just say the loud part out loud is my read of that work was

1422
01:31:49,310 --> 01:31:55,230
people wanted genuinely to provide a biologically plausible account of a

1423
01:31:55,230 --> 01:31:56,030
phenomenon.

1424
01:31:56,240 --> 01:32:00,400
And you're allowed to say, be speculative and say, here, here's this other biologically

1425
01:32:00,400 --> 01:32:01,440
plausible thing.

1426
01:32:01,680 --> 01:32:07,440
Maybe it accounts for this thing that doesn't yet have an adequate biological grounding.

1427
01:32:07,920 --> 01:32:08,320
Yeah.

1428
01:32:08,480 --> 01:32:09,120
Yeah.

1429
01:32:09,680 --> 01:32:10,720
But it might be wrong.

1430
01:32:10,800 --> 01:32:12,000
And that's that's great.

1431
01:32:12,240 --> 01:32:13,680
Then we'll we'll know something.

1432
01:32:13,840 --> 01:32:14,160
Yeah.

1433
01:32:14,400 --> 01:32:14,640
Yeah.

1434
01:32:14,800 --> 01:32:19,270
I mean, part of why I love your work, Josh, is that you've you've um led the charge in sort

1435
01:32:19,270 --> 01:32:24,790
of clearing away some of these first pass ideas that um were wrong turns or or misleading

1436
01:32:24,790 --> 01:32:25,350
in various ways.

1437
01:32:25,430 --> 01:32:28,230
And this isn't to disparage the people who came up with them, but you know, this is part of

1438
01:32:28,230 --> 01:32:32,230
how science works, is we we come up with ideas and we, you know, dismiss the ones that

1439
01:32:32,230 --> 01:32:36,630
aren't working or that aren't are colliding uh with with uh reality.

1440
01:32:37,030 --> 01:32:42,550
Um and uh uh I I like that you have shaped my thinking both on um

1441
01:32:42,740 --> 01:32:48,580
on outgroups, also on on this this idea that uh discuss sensitivity should

1442
01:32:48,580 --> 01:32:53,380
lead you to uh prefer facial symmetry and sexual dimorphism more.

1443
01:32:53,620 --> 01:32:57,860
I was reading one of your papers on that, that that turns out that hasn't really panned

1444
01:32:57,860 --> 01:32:58,100
out.

1445
01:32:58,260 --> 01:33:02,980
Um I'm curious, what do you think about this idea that uh pathogen

1446
01:33:03,490 --> 01:33:05,490
sensitivity should relate to conformity.

1447
01:33:05,570 --> 01:33:07,890
I know this is another one that was popular in the field.

1448
01:33:08,050 --> 01:33:08,450
I'm curious.

1449
01:33:08,530 --> 01:33:12,930
Has has that stood stood the test of time or has that been shaky as well?

1450
01:33:13,330 --> 01:33:15,410
You know, I I can't comment on it too much.

1451
01:33:15,490 --> 01:33:20,850
Um, my collaborator Florian van Leuwen, who also works in the Netherlands, has published a

1452
01:33:21,010 --> 01:33:24,450
like an eight-study paper evaluating that idea.

1453
01:33:24,690 --> 01:33:29,890
And my my read of it is that uh this is not a robust phenomenon.

1454
01:33:30,040 --> 01:33:30,120
Okay.

1455
01:33:30,600 --> 01:33:35,160
But I'm afraid that I don't recall enough of the nuances to comment on it deeply.

1456
01:33:35,800 --> 01:33:38,600
I can uh recommend a pivot.

1457
01:33:38,680 --> 01:33:42,360
Uh, we'll see how deeply we can get into it in the interest of time.

1458
01:33:42,520 --> 01:33:47,480
And that is a different aspect of disgust, and that is how it relates to moral judgment.

1459
01:33:48,600 --> 01:33:50,120
Yeah, what is morality and disgust here?

1460
01:33:50,440 --> 01:33:52,680
This could this could be like another two-hour podcast.

1461
01:33:53,080 --> 01:33:58,760
So uh we'll we'll see if we want to do a 15-minute now or uh just go for another two hours.

1462
01:33:59,270 --> 01:34:03,110
But uh so, yes, and this is a strong pivot.

1463
01:34:03,510 --> 01:34:04,310
Oh, I'm glad you did.

1464
01:34:04,390 --> 01:34:05,510
I would have, I would have done it myself.

1465
01:34:05,670 --> 01:34:07,670
I was looking to get to this topic myself.

1466
01:34:07,830 --> 01:34:08,390
So yeah.

1467
01:34:08,950 --> 01:34:14,550
Maybe not quite as much of a high-level overview as I did with uh pathogen avoidance, but

1468
01:34:14,550 --> 01:34:20,150
there's a classic paper in social psychology by John Heidt, who uh researchers might be

1469
01:34:20,150 --> 01:34:25,110
more familiar with for moral foundations theory or for his more recent work on

1470
01:34:25,160 --> 01:34:28,760
advocating against social media for teenage girls.

1471
01:34:29,000 --> 01:34:34,920
But his uh highest impact paper, and I'm not sure if this has the same impact as the Henrik

1472
01:34:35,080 --> 01:34:35,400
et al.

1473
01:34:35,560 --> 01:34:38,600
Weird paper, it's like that kind of level of citations.

1474
01:34:39,000 --> 01:34:44,600
But it was effectively arguing that a lot of our moral judgments are not

1475
01:34:44,600 --> 01:34:50,040
stemming from moral reasoning and considerations of uh who's been harmed or

1476
01:34:50,040 --> 01:34:55,410
victimized by certain interactions, but rather by social or

1477
01:34:55,410 --> 01:34:57,090
emotional intuitions.

1478
01:34:57,250 --> 01:35:01,970
And then our argumentation afterward, or our just, well, our justifications and our

1479
01:35:01,970 --> 01:35:07,170
reasoning is actually argumentation for why we're having these judgments.

1480
01:35:07,490 --> 01:35:13,490
And one of Height's examples really focused on, or some of Height's examples really focused

1481
01:35:13,490 --> 01:35:17,330
on disgust related things because they seem to be victimless crimes.

1482
01:35:17,650 --> 01:35:21,740
And he pointed out what, you know, it's kind of a thought experiment.

1483
01:35:21,820 --> 01:35:25,100
It was described as a study, although it was never really uh published.

1484
01:35:25,260 --> 01:35:29,980
Um, this famous in the moral psychology literature story about Mark and Julie.

1485
01:35:30,140 --> 01:35:34,140
Mark and Julie are brother and sister, they they love each other deeply, they go on

1486
01:35:34,140 --> 01:35:38,700
vacation, uh, they care about each other, and so they decide to have sex.

1487
01:35:39,020 --> 01:35:44,990
Um, and then in the story, all of the kind of plausible harms that could result

1488
01:35:44,990 --> 01:35:47,630
from this are neutralized in the vignette.

1489
01:35:47,870 --> 01:35:53,390
They take Shizan hormonal contraception, they use a condom, they're not

1490
01:35:53,390 --> 01:35:57,950
emotionally damaged by it, they never do it again, no one ever finds out about it.

1491
01:35:58,110 --> 01:36:02,350
And according to this idea, participants are morally dumbfounded.

1492
01:36:02,430 --> 01:36:06,430
They still find that it's wrong, even though they can't justify it at that point.

1493
01:36:06,750 --> 01:36:12,700
So this led to an idea that people's intuitions about disgust are feeding into

1494
01:36:12,700 --> 01:36:14,780
and producing a lot of their moral judgments.

1495
01:36:15,020 --> 01:36:20,220
And this led to a small explosion of research in social

1496
01:36:20,220 --> 01:36:26,220
psychology in the mid to late aughts, testing whether

1497
01:36:26,620 --> 01:36:31,740
if you make people disgusted, that increases the degree to which they

1498
01:36:32,380 --> 01:36:34,380
will morally condemn actions.

1499
01:36:34,590 --> 01:36:39,630
And so there were a lot of, you could call them disgust primes, people smelling bad odors

1500
01:36:39,710 --> 01:36:43,870
or looking at gross pictures or being hypnotized.

1501
01:36:44,910 --> 01:36:49,630
And finding after finding after finding showed that when you make people disgusted, they

1502
01:36:49,630 --> 01:36:51,710
think that stealing is more wrong.

1503
01:36:52,190 --> 01:36:57,390
You know, all these individual items that describe something that could be morally

1504
01:36:57,390 --> 01:36:58,030
condemned.

1505
01:36:58,270 --> 01:37:01,390
People condemn them more on a liker scale.

1506
01:37:02,380 --> 01:37:07,980
Well, in 2015 or so, there was a meta analysis of this literature, and uh the

1507
01:37:07,980 --> 01:37:13,500
outcome was that there's nothing there, that the meta analyzed effect size is very, very

1508
01:37:13,500 --> 01:37:13,900
small.

1509
01:37:13,980 --> 01:37:19,340
And if you take into account uh publication bias, uh it's it's effectively zero.

1510
01:37:19,660 --> 01:37:25,020
And so this idea uh combined with another line of

1511
01:37:25,020 --> 01:37:29,260
research on um not priming, but uh

1512
01:37:30,510 --> 01:37:33,470
Reports of disgust toward immoral behaviors.

1513
01:37:33,630 --> 01:37:37,550
So not feeling disgusted and then condemning something, but seeing something that's

1514
01:37:37,550 --> 01:37:43,230
condemnable and saying you're disgusted by it has led to kind of a backlash against the

1515
01:37:43,230 --> 01:37:47,630
idea that disgust is at all relevant to moral psychology.

1516
01:37:48,030 --> 01:37:53,310
And some social psychologists have made uh strong arguments, or at least

1517
01:37:53,790 --> 01:37:58,740
strong statements along these lines, that there's nothing important about it discussed in

1518
01:37:58,740 --> 01:38:00,340
terms of moral cognition.

1519
01:38:00,500 --> 01:38:06,500
Um, and uh others, uh, you had uh Leo Fatucci on a while ago.

1520
01:38:06,740 --> 01:38:12,660
And he has also argued uh that purity can be just boiled down to

1521
01:38:12,660 --> 01:38:18,580
perceptions of self-control and other kinds of more general um dimensions of

1522
01:38:18,580 --> 01:38:21,300
uh reciprocity and interdependence, etc.

1523
01:38:21,700 --> 01:38:25,870
And in some of those arguments, there's been some connection back to this discussed

1524
01:38:25,870 --> 01:38:29,070
literature, although it's it's not a complete uh critique.

1525
01:38:29,310 --> 01:38:33,950
I think that the baby has been thrown out with the bathwater a little bit too early here.

1526
01:38:34,190 --> 01:38:40,030
And so a lot of the research that I'm currently doing uh alongside the pathogen research is

1527
01:38:40,030 --> 01:38:45,880
trying to better under untangle this potential relation between disgust and morality,

1528
01:38:46,120 --> 01:38:51,160
which might be several different types of relationships, and try to understand why that

1529
01:38:51,160 --> 01:38:52,600
relationship might exist.

1530
01:38:53,640 --> 01:38:55,800
Have you have you discovered anything so far?

1531
01:38:55,960 --> 01:38:59,160
Do you have any uh guesses as to what you'll find?

1532
01:38:59,640 --> 01:39:05,560
Uh so we do we do have some findings that I'm kind of excited about, but um maybe uh

1533
01:39:05,720 --> 01:39:10,550
maybe just think higher level what the phenomenon are that we're talking about.

1534
01:39:10,790 --> 01:39:16,550
So, for one thing, we talk about disgust as uh one thing.

1535
01:39:16,950 --> 01:39:18,790
It's kind of a folk emotion.

1536
01:39:18,950 --> 01:39:23,510
And there's been a lot of resistance to talking about moral disgust because when people say

1537
01:39:23,510 --> 01:39:27,110
disgust, they're thinking specifically about pathogen disgust.

1538
01:39:27,190 --> 01:39:32,230
And they're saying that if something doesn't have, from an emotions perspective, um

1539
01:39:32,470 --> 01:39:37,500
appraisals and action tendencies, uh, et cetera, that correspond with pathogen disgust,

1540
01:39:37,580 --> 01:39:39,260
then it's not really discussed.

1541
01:39:39,420 --> 01:39:43,900
And so, if we're talking about any relation between disgust and morality, that's not really

1542
01:39:43,900 --> 01:39:44,300
disgust.

1543
01:39:44,460 --> 01:39:49,500
That's just some kind of metaphor, that's really anger, or that's people being confused, or

1544
01:39:49,820 --> 01:39:50,620
something like that.

1545
01:39:50,780 --> 01:39:55,500
So I think that that's really limited our scientific understanding about this relationship,

1546
01:39:55,580 --> 01:40:01,260
in which people are really saying pathogen disgust is the only thing important in terms of

1547
01:40:01,260 --> 01:40:03,670
all these things that we could call disgust.

1548
01:40:03,750 --> 01:40:07,670
And so if there's disgust in the moral domain, that's kind of a category error.

1549
01:40:07,830 --> 01:40:11,830
And we shouldn't really be even thinking about that as something distinct from anger.

1550
01:40:12,310 --> 01:40:17,830
My lab does have a lot of findings showing that you can get distinct reports of

1551
01:40:17,830 --> 01:40:23,590
disgust versus anger to moral violations, dependent on whether the

1552
01:40:23,590 --> 01:40:28,300
moral violation impose costs on you versus someone else.

1553
01:40:28,460 --> 01:40:33,340
So if you take the exact same action and you describe it as happening to you, the

1554
01:40:33,340 --> 01:40:38,700
participant versus someone else, you get different effects on disgust versus anger.

1555
01:40:39,180 --> 01:40:43,500
If it happened to someone else, disgust is higher than if it happened to you.

1556
01:40:43,660 --> 01:40:47,900
And if it happened to you, anger is higher than it happened to someone else.

1557
01:40:48,060 --> 01:40:53,330
And we further ask participants: what can what kind of motivations do you have in response

1558
01:40:53,330 --> 01:40:54,690
to this moral violation?

1559
01:40:54,850 --> 01:40:58,450
And we divide them into direct aggression versus indirect aggression.

1560
01:40:58,610 --> 01:41:04,530
And we see that reports of anger relate to desires to directly aggress against someone,

1561
01:41:04,770 --> 01:41:09,090
whereas reports of disgust relate to desires to indirectly aggress towards someone.

1562
01:41:09,250 --> 01:41:14,210
We have several studies replicating this finding, also showing that the identity of the

1563
01:41:14,210 --> 01:41:18,930
victim in terms of their interpersonal value relates differently to disgust and anger.

1564
01:41:19,010 --> 01:41:23,720
So the more valuable the victim is, the more angry you are, but not necessarily the more

1565
01:41:23,720 --> 01:41:24,520
disgusted.

1566
01:41:24,680 --> 01:41:30,040
And when we show uh participants photos of people making disgust versus anger

1567
01:41:30,040 --> 01:41:35,480
expressions and disgust versus anger vocalizations, they make inferences about direct

1568
01:41:35,480 --> 01:41:39,000
aggression and indirect aggression differently across those.

1569
01:41:39,560 --> 01:41:45,160
So again, if I interrupt real quickly, have you also looked at the social value of the

1570
01:41:45,160 --> 01:41:47,960
perpetrator in addition to the social value of the victim?

1571
01:41:48,200 --> 01:41:54,070
Because you might expect that if we uh view the perpetrator uh as having lower social

1572
01:41:54,070 --> 01:41:57,270
value, that that might predict greater disgust relative to anger.

1573
01:41:57,910 --> 01:42:00,710
That that's a major part of what we're looking into right now.

1574
01:42:00,950 --> 01:42:06,950
So um it when when I tell people about this uh research program, you know, I tell them

1575
01:42:06,950 --> 01:42:10,630
that in the moral foundations theory literature, a lot of the disgust and morality

1576
01:42:10,630 --> 01:42:16,620
literature, the ideas are really tied to the content of the action itself rather than who

1577
01:42:16,620 --> 01:42:19,020
the who is involved in the action.

1578
01:42:19,900 --> 01:42:25,900
But if you think about, and uh sorry to get political here, guys, but um there was uh

1579
01:42:25,980 --> 01:42:29,020
this was topical at the time when I was giving these talks a lot.

1580
01:42:29,260 --> 01:42:34,060
Uh Donald Trump had recently gone to Arlington National Cemetery and had this photo op

1581
01:42:34,140 --> 01:42:38,060
where he had thumbs up and a big grin over a guy's grave.

1582
01:42:38,300 --> 01:42:43,830
Um, and you had very different responses depending on who

1583
01:42:43,990 --> 01:42:49,990
you were and what your value of Trump was, your coalitional value and him as a leader in

1584
01:42:49,990 --> 01:42:51,110
your coalition.

1585
01:42:51,350 --> 01:42:56,710
And people who um were not in the the MAGA coalition often expressed

1586
01:42:56,710 --> 01:42:58,390
disgust toward this.

1587
01:42:58,550 --> 01:43:03,590
Um, and so and people who are not in the MAGA coalition were not bothered by it at all.

1588
01:43:03,750 --> 01:43:06,940
Um who were in the who were in the MAGA coalition, yeah.

1589
01:43:07,180 --> 01:43:10,780
Yes, sorry, people who were in the MAGA coalition uh were not bothered at all.

1590
01:43:11,020 --> 01:43:17,020
Um, and so that has something very specific to do with the identity of that person and what

1591
01:43:17,020 --> 01:43:19,660
their interpersonal or coalitional value is to you.

1592
01:43:19,900 --> 01:43:25,820
And you could also think uh about anger having a different relation with valuation in

1593
01:43:25,820 --> 01:43:30,690
that for people who are higher value to you, or people who you're going to have a long-term

1594
01:43:30,690 --> 01:43:36,370
relationship with, directly intervening and broadcasting how you

1595
01:43:36,370 --> 01:43:42,130
view your valuation, how you view, how you perceive how you're valued by them

1596
01:43:42,450 --> 01:43:48,290
and changing that and letting that be known can be beneficial to you versus

1597
01:43:48,290 --> 01:43:53,400
being discussed by them and maybe not directly intervening, but spreading

1598
01:43:53,400 --> 01:43:59,160
reputationally damaging information about that person, that's not beneficial to you if

1599
01:43:59,160 --> 01:44:02,040
that person is a valuable interaction partner to you.

1600
01:44:03,800 --> 01:44:09,320
So, anyway, this is one phenomenon of the relation between disgust and morality in that we

1601
01:44:09,400 --> 01:44:13,400
we observe people engaging in behaviors and we often have these morally condemning

1602
01:44:13,480 --> 01:44:19,250
responses, but the affective tinges of those responses differ depending

1603
01:44:19,250 --> 01:44:25,250
on who is affected by the action and who is engaging in the action.

1604
01:44:25,410 --> 01:44:29,010
And I think that just saying that disgust is irrelevant to this and we should just be

1605
01:44:29,010 --> 01:44:34,850
thinking about general outrage or this just being anger loses out on understanding a lot

1606
01:44:34,850 --> 01:44:36,130
of important things.

1607
01:44:36,930 --> 01:44:42,530
The other body of findings is that when people engage in behaviors that

1608
01:44:42,690 --> 01:44:48,480
you yourself would be disgusted to engage in, we sometimes condemn

1609
01:44:48,480 --> 01:44:49,680
those individuals.

1610
01:44:50,160 --> 01:44:55,360
Again, that's a very different phenomenon, potentially, with a different explanation that

1611
01:44:56,080 --> 01:44:57,520
needs to be demanded.

1612
01:44:57,840 --> 01:45:01,760
But I think that that is a phenomenon, and it's not just

1613
01:45:02,880 --> 01:45:08,240
representative of assessing people on self-control or assessing the degree to which their

1614
01:45:08,240 --> 01:45:12,610
behaviors harm other individuals, which are kind of the alternatives that have claimed that

1615
01:45:12,610 --> 01:45:17,090
there's nothing unique or important about the relation between disgust and morality.

1616
01:45:17,250 --> 01:45:22,450
So I can just share with you guys a couple of findings that we have that I find are

1617
01:45:22,690 --> 01:45:24,850
interesting and supportive of this idea.

1618
01:45:25,090 --> 01:45:31,090
One is that we've sampled vegetarians who are a really nice population for

1619
01:45:31,090 --> 01:45:36,780
the testing this idea because they vary on the degree to which, well,

1620
01:45:37,260 --> 01:45:40,300
they vary on their feelings toward uh meat eaters.

1621
01:45:40,540 --> 01:45:45,980
They also vary on how much disgust they would experience by consuming meat.

1622
01:45:46,220 --> 01:45:51,420
So we asked them specifically a bunch of questions with imagine that you ate a veggie

1623
01:45:51,420 --> 01:45:54,380
burger that would have been cooked in the same pan as a beef burger.

1624
01:45:54,620 --> 01:45:59,020
Imagine you ate a pasta sauce and you later found out that it actually had some ground beef

1625
01:45:59,020 --> 01:46:00,610
in it, et cetera.

1626
01:46:00,770 --> 01:46:06,770
And then we ask them how negatively they feel about individuals who engage in a variety of

1627
01:46:06,770 --> 01:46:08,450
what you could call norm violations.

1628
01:46:08,610 --> 01:46:14,450
Some of these are cooperative violations, some of these are hygiene violations, some of

1629
01:46:14,450 --> 01:46:17,970
these are unusually large amounts of eating meat.

1630
01:46:18,210 --> 01:46:24,140
And what we find is that vegetarians self-disgust, how disgusted they would

1631
01:46:24,140 --> 01:46:29,580
be by eating meat, uniquely and most strongly predicts their negative evaluations of these

1632
01:46:29,580 --> 01:46:34,540
meat-eating actions, not the hygiene actions or the cooperative norm interactions.

1633
01:46:34,700 --> 01:46:40,460
And further, it predicts that independent of their moral motivations for being a

1634
01:46:40,460 --> 01:46:40,940
vegetarian.

1635
01:46:41,100 --> 01:46:45,340
So we also ask them: Are you a moral vegetarian or a health vegetarian?

1636
01:46:45,570 --> 01:46:50,210
we have them complete individual differences measures that assess how strongly their

1637
01:46:50,210 --> 01:46:53,010
vegetarianism is motivated by these moral motivations.

1638
01:46:53,250 --> 01:46:58,370
There's really the strong residual and strongest effect of their own disgust toward the

1639
01:46:58,370 --> 01:47:02,050
behavior in terms of condemning other individuals for engaging the behavior.

1640
01:47:03,010 --> 01:47:07,410
We have further research that's extended this, where we use multi level modeling

1641
01:47:07,650 --> 01:47:12,130
approaches, where we both look at within participant the degree to which they're disgusted

1642
01:47:12,130 --> 01:47:17,580
by a bunch of things that could evoke disgust, and then their condemnation of other

1643
01:47:17,580 --> 01:47:19,980
individuals who engage in these behaviors.

1644
01:47:20,380 --> 01:47:26,220
And the relation within participant between their own disgust toward engaging in behaviors

1645
01:47:26,220 --> 01:47:29,420
and how strongly they condemn people is there.

1646
01:47:29,740 --> 01:47:33,660
And that's stronger than if you do the same thing with other emotions like fear.

1647
01:47:33,820 --> 01:47:36,300
So you see how scared they would be of doing different things.

1648
01:47:36,460 --> 01:47:40,780
And then you ask them how much they condemn people who engage in these behaviors that could

1649
01:47:40,780 --> 01:47:41,580
be scary.

1650
01:47:42,220 --> 01:47:45,330
And so we we think that there is something here.

1651
01:47:45,490 --> 01:47:51,170
It is important, and it hasn't been adequately tested by just using priming studies or

1652
01:47:51,170 --> 01:47:53,490
having discussed sensitivity instruments.

1653
01:47:53,650 --> 01:47:59,410
Um, and we have some other ideas as to why this might be the case, uh, but we

1654
01:47:59,410 --> 01:48:02,690
haven't really tested those, but we could talk about some of those ideas.

1655
01:48:03,010 --> 01:48:03,730
I I would love to.

1656
01:48:03,810 --> 01:48:05,730
I mean, that that's actually absolutely fascinating.

1657
01:48:05,890 --> 01:48:09,090
Um, really excited to you know read the stuff when it comes out, and that those are those

1658
01:48:09,090 --> 01:48:10,050
are really cool results.

1659
01:48:10,210 --> 01:48:13,340
I'd love to hear you know what your thinking is on the on the why question.

1660
01:48:14,140 --> 01:48:18,460
So it's really strongly influenced by ideas that were originally developed by uh Peter

1661
01:48:18,460 --> 01:48:20,300
DeSholy and Rob Kurzman.

1662
01:48:20,540 --> 01:48:25,100
And those were, of course, probably influenced by John Tuby and Lita Cosmes as well.

1663
01:48:25,740 --> 01:48:31,020
So Peter and Rob, in one of their great papers on the mysteries of morality,

1664
01:48:31,580 --> 01:48:37,580
proposed that you might see disgust being moralized sometimes because it could be

1665
01:48:37,580 --> 01:48:42,970
acting as a cue to whether you have any advantage in engaging

1666
01:48:43,130 --> 01:48:44,810
behavior in the future.

1667
01:48:45,130 --> 01:48:50,970
And their general idea is that people should be having moral sentiments

1668
01:48:50,970 --> 01:48:56,890
that contribute to shaping or resisting rules that are either

1669
01:48:57,130 --> 01:49:02,250
beneficial, shaping rules that are beneficial to you, or resisting rules that are costly to

1670
01:49:02,250 --> 01:49:02,570
you.

1671
01:49:02,940 --> 01:49:07,820
The idea that you feel disgust toward doing something is a good indication that you would

1672
01:49:07,820 --> 01:49:09,420
never do it yourself.

1673
01:49:09,660 --> 01:49:14,940
And so there's very little cost toward endorsing rules against that.

1674
01:49:16,300 --> 01:49:21,820
Now, going back to uh Deb Lieberman's conversation with you

1675
01:49:21,820 --> 01:49:27,670
guys on this topic, Deb has a slightly different view on this, I think, although

1676
01:49:27,670 --> 01:49:29,350
the our views are quite complementary.

1677
01:49:29,590 --> 01:49:35,430
Deb really emphasizes the idea that people who engage in behaviors that other find others

1678
01:49:35,430 --> 01:49:41,350
find disgusting are good candidates for exploitation, and that they're just generally

1679
01:49:41,350 --> 01:49:42,390
going to be low value.

1680
01:49:42,470 --> 01:49:48,390
So this could be a good kind of coordination mechanism for people to all gang up on

1681
01:49:48,390 --> 01:49:49,670
the same individual.

1682
01:49:50,470 --> 01:49:55,840
I think that that probably happens, although I think that there are probably other types of

1683
01:49:55,840 --> 01:50:01,520
processes in which people just don't resist rules that

1684
01:50:01,520 --> 01:50:04,160
don't actually impose costs on them.

1685
01:50:04,320 --> 01:50:09,520
And so through processes of cultural evolution, you can kind of get these as gravity points

1686
01:50:09,760 --> 01:50:15,600
where if rules are constantly or repeatedly being proposed and cycling through, and some of

1687
01:50:15,600 --> 01:50:19,010
them are transmitted and maintained in populations.

1688
01:50:19,330 --> 01:50:24,290
And part of what influences whether they're whether they're maintained and transmitted is

1689
01:50:24,290 --> 01:50:27,250
people objecting to them or making arguments against them.

1690
01:50:27,490 --> 01:50:33,170
Well, if if people only pay costs in terms of arguing against

1691
01:50:33,170 --> 01:50:38,450
certain rules and they don't get any benefits from arguing against them, you could get

1692
01:50:38,450 --> 01:50:44,140
these disgust-oriented ones popping up quite a bit and being a little bit sticky and a

1693
01:50:44,140 --> 01:50:45,900
little bit cross-culturally prevalent.

1694
01:50:46,140 --> 01:50:51,820
So I think that this line of thinking has something to say about the prevalence of

1695
01:50:51,820 --> 01:50:57,420
incest taboos, which is kind of a puzzle because almost no one wants to

1696
01:50:57,420 --> 01:51:00,620
engage, wants to sleep with their siblings or their parents.

1697
01:51:01,260 --> 01:51:04,700
It can happen occasionally, but it's very, very rare.

1698
01:51:04,990 --> 01:51:10,430
And the actual consequences of it for most people are almost zero.

1699
01:51:10,670 --> 01:51:13,230
Um, so it's not good for your kin.

1700
01:51:13,310 --> 01:51:18,670
Like if your sibling sleeps with your parent, that has some inclusive fitness uh

1701
01:51:18,910 --> 01:51:20,190
costs to you.

1702
01:51:20,430 --> 01:51:24,270
Um, but for other people, it's it's not really all that relevant.

1703
01:51:24,510 --> 01:51:29,420
Um, what we should expect is that people really don't want to do it themselves, but to

1704
01:51:29,420 --> 01:51:33,500
actually condemn other people and for this again to be so cross-culturally prevalent is

1705
01:51:33,500 --> 01:51:34,620
kind of strange.

1706
01:51:34,940 --> 01:51:40,780
Now, if you do think about the idea that if different rules are proposed all the time

1707
01:51:40,940 --> 01:51:45,420
and certain ones are sticky and people just don't disagree with them, well, if people are,

1708
01:51:45,500 --> 01:51:49,900
if incest is one of the most disgusting things that people could kind of imagine engaging

1709
01:51:49,900 --> 01:51:51,980
in, you're going to have very little pushback.

1710
01:51:52,060 --> 01:51:55,290
And then people can maybe coordinate around this specific rule.

1711
01:51:55,450 --> 01:52:01,450
And so this might partially explain why you get so many rules around uh kind of minority

1712
01:52:01,450 --> 01:52:05,290
sexual behaviors that most people would be disgusted to engage in.

1713
01:52:05,530 --> 01:52:08,890
I think that this has something to say with the cross-cultural condemnation of

1714
01:52:08,890 --> 01:52:10,090
homosexuality.

1715
01:52:10,330 --> 01:52:15,900
So this is kind of difficult for um us weird

1716
01:52:15,900 --> 01:52:21,900
researchers to completely understand, although us older millennials may be a little bit

1717
01:52:21,900 --> 01:52:27,500
better than my Gen Z students, but Western

1718
01:52:27,500 --> 01:52:32,540
Europeans and to an extent Americans are living in really extraordinary times in terms of

1719
01:52:32,540 --> 01:52:34,300
acceptance of homosexuality.

1720
01:52:34,460 --> 01:52:39,930
And when I show Pew research data on the proportion of individuals in different countries

1721
01:52:39,930 --> 01:52:43,450
who think that uh homosexuality is unacceptable.

1722
01:52:43,530 --> 01:52:45,050
Um, it's really shocking.

1723
01:52:45,210 --> 01:52:49,850
Uh, and you get this across countries with very different economic systems and very

1724
01:52:49,850 --> 01:52:52,810
different religions and very different cultural histories.

1725
01:52:53,050 --> 01:52:57,290
And so for some reason, this has just been popping up in different areas.

1726
01:52:57,450 --> 01:53:00,890
And of course, it's been transmitted uh into some areas.

1727
01:53:01,210 --> 01:53:06,540
Um, But again, you get, you know, China, South Korea, the Middle East,

1728
01:53:06,860 --> 01:53:11,740
Sub-Saharan Africa being very large with very different kinds of colonial histories and

1729
01:53:11,900 --> 01:53:13,500
cultural transmission histories.

1730
01:53:13,980 --> 01:53:18,220
And so you get this being fairly sticky, but you also have this fascinating phenomenon

1731
01:53:18,220 --> 01:53:19,500
where it's quickly extinguished.

1732
01:53:19,660 --> 01:53:22,460
So it seems like it'll never change until it does.

1733
01:53:22,540 --> 01:53:24,220
And then it changes very quickly.

1734
01:53:24,460 --> 01:53:29,930
And I think that this is also somewhat compatible with thinking about disgust

1735
01:53:30,170 --> 01:53:35,930
shaping rules, in that if if we take the perspective of an average person in a

1736
01:53:35,930 --> 01:53:40,570
society, and you know, the rule is proposed that homosexuality is wrong.

1737
01:53:40,730 --> 01:53:46,730
And they implicitly think, okay, I engage in homosexuality, I'm disgusted by that

1738
01:53:46,730 --> 01:53:47,130
thought.

1739
01:53:47,210 --> 01:53:51,220
And that's not to say there's anything disgusting about homosexual individuals, but most

1740
01:53:51,220 --> 01:53:54,820
people are disgusted by the thought of engaging sex with most other individuals.

1741
01:53:55,380 --> 01:54:00,660
But if you're not homosexual, that thought uh might have a tinge of disgust.

1742
01:54:00,820 --> 01:54:05,460
And that might be a cue to well, I'm never going to benefit from that behavior in the first

1743
01:54:05,460 --> 01:54:07,540
place because I experience disgust toward it.

1744
01:54:07,700 --> 01:54:12,340
So I'm not going to resist review uh rules that homosexuality is wrong.

1745
01:54:12,500 --> 01:54:17,370
Well, if enough people start resisting that rule, then you also don't have much of a

1746
01:54:17,370 --> 01:54:22,330
benefit in saying, no, I really, really want homosexuality to be wrong.

1747
01:54:22,810 --> 01:54:27,930
Of course, some people do, depending on how many people in their coalition are saying that.

1748
01:54:28,330 --> 01:54:34,250
But for a lot of people, this house could crumble pretty quickly if they're not in those

1749
01:54:34,250 --> 01:54:38,650
coalitions where that rule is kind of a sacred value that's non-negotiable.

1750
01:54:38,840 --> 01:54:44,360
And so you can have potentially these phenomena where it lasts at a very stable level for a

1751
01:54:44,360 --> 01:54:47,000
long time, but then can crumble quickly.

1752
01:54:47,240 --> 01:54:52,840
And I looked at general social survey data a while ago, and you

1753
01:54:52,840 --> 01:54:58,360
saw very high, uh, very consistent ratings of homosexuality being

1754
01:54:58,360 --> 01:55:04,200
extremely wrong or always wrong or something from when the survey started in the early 70s

1755
01:55:04,200 --> 01:55:06,200
until the mid to late 90s.

1756
01:55:06,280 --> 01:55:08,990
And then it just assessment after assessment.

1757
01:55:09,070 --> 01:55:11,550
It's almost going down in a linear fashion.

1758
01:55:11,710 --> 01:55:14,750
And that's not the case with other types of sexual rules.

1759
01:55:14,830 --> 01:55:18,350
So another question on the survey was is adultery wrong?

1760
01:55:18,510 --> 01:55:22,590
And there, you started out at almost the exact same level as homosexuality.

1761
01:55:22,830 --> 01:55:25,150
It's kept at almost the exact same level.

1762
01:55:25,470 --> 01:55:31,140
And there, that's a rule where pretty much everyone can be disadvantaged by having their

1763
01:55:31,140 --> 01:55:32,740
spouse commit infidelity.

1764
01:55:32,900 --> 01:55:38,020
So you should see people being much less flexible in dumping that once there's momentum

1765
01:55:38,020 --> 01:55:39,460
from other people in doing so.

1766
01:55:39,620 --> 01:55:45,540
And in fact, we do see, and I'm sometimes um approached with surprise from

1767
01:55:45,540 --> 01:55:50,260
people in the polyamory community or the ethical non-monogamy community that, oh, this is

1768
01:55:50,260 --> 01:55:51,460
getting really big.

1769
01:55:51,620 --> 01:55:52,980
Um, and no, it's not.

1770
01:55:53,060 --> 01:55:57,970
It's getting big within very, very small uh circles, but it's really not penetrating the

1771
01:55:57,970 --> 01:56:03,490
broader population because people do perceive these costs in terms of their monogamous

1772
01:56:03,490 --> 01:56:04,530
relationships.

1773
01:56:05,330 --> 01:56:11,170
Yeah, so just to just to put a bow on that, I think that there is this relation between

1774
01:56:11,170 --> 01:56:16,370
self-experience disgust and your degree, the way that you view other individuals who engage

1775
01:56:16,370 --> 01:56:17,570
in these behaviors.

1776
01:56:18,130 --> 01:56:24,060
And I think that part of the reason why these disgust-based rules seem to pop up a lot and

1777
01:56:24,060 --> 01:56:29,900
be a little bit sticky is because of the the information that one's own experiences have

1778
01:56:29,900 --> 01:56:35,580
discussed gives about the consequences of these behaviors or rules in the ecology.

1779
01:56:38,140 --> 01:56:39,580
Fascinating stuff.

1780
01:56:39,740 --> 01:56:39,820
Yeah.

1781
01:56:40,380 --> 01:56:40,540
Super.

1782
01:56:41,980 --> 01:56:42,860
Yeah, really important.

1783
01:56:43,980 --> 01:56:49,830
I do kind of lean toward uh Deb's take

1784
01:56:50,150 --> 01:56:55,910
here, and that um I I think it I I totally buy the logic that it is less that um

1785
01:56:56,550 --> 01:57:02,470
s endorsing a rule against something that I find disgusting uh doesn't cost me anything,

1786
01:57:02,630 --> 01:57:02,950
right?

1787
01:57:03,190 --> 01:57:08,700
But it in order for for my own disgust to affect my moral judgments, it also has to affect

1788
01:57:08,700 --> 01:57:10,220
the benefit side of it as well.

1789
01:57:10,380 --> 01:57:14,140
Like if it merely didn't impose a cost on me, then I would be neutral about it.

1790
01:57:14,380 --> 01:57:18,700
But um in order for me to actively morally campaign against something, there has to be

1791
01:57:18,700 --> 01:57:23,980
something in it for me, some sort of benefit um for for for my own disgust to translate

1792
01:57:23,980 --> 01:57:25,420
into moral judgment.

1793
01:57:25,580 --> 01:57:31,580
And I think something like the deb reasoning where it gives me an opportunity to exploit or

1794
01:57:31,580 --> 01:57:36,540
exclude or or dominate someone else, um, that that

1795
01:57:37,170 --> 01:57:40,450
benefit side of things might also be playing a role here as well.

1796
01:57:40,530 --> 01:57:44,690
And you could make the further prediction that when there is, say, greater resource

1797
01:57:44,690 --> 01:57:50,290
scarcity, greater zero-sumness, greater incentive to exclude and exploit people,

1798
01:57:51,250 --> 01:57:55,970
that you might uh see an increase in these kinds of uh disgust-based moral rules.

1799
01:57:56,050 --> 01:58:00,450
And that people are just looking for opportunities to exclude people or exploit people and

1800
01:58:00,450 --> 01:58:06,050
are actively searching the rule space uh for for rules that they can use to marginalize

1801
01:58:06,050 --> 01:58:11,560
people because it's in a very zero-sum context or a very uh resource-limited context.

1802
01:58:11,720 --> 01:58:15,640
And you might see these uh uh discuss-based rules more likely to pop up in those kinds of

1803
01:58:15,640 --> 01:58:16,040
environments.

1804
01:58:16,120 --> 01:58:18,200
I'm curious what you think of that idea.

1805
01:58:18,600 --> 01:58:22,040
Yeah, that's that sounds uh totally plausible to me.

1806
01:58:22,120 --> 01:58:26,600
Um and I I should um emphasize again that I think that these different perspectives are

1807
01:58:26,600 --> 01:58:27,960
completely compatible.

1808
01:58:28,360 --> 01:58:34,190
Um there there is a cost to not moralizing that is independent of

1809
01:58:34,190 --> 01:58:40,190
benefits of exploitation, I think, in that if you if there's 10 people in a circle and

1810
01:58:40,190 --> 01:58:46,190
nine of them have said, I think that um incest is wrong, and then you say,

1811
01:58:46,430 --> 01:58:51,550
actually, I don't want to moralize that, or actually, I don't think it's that wrong, um,

1812
01:58:51,870 --> 01:58:54,430
you could then be a target of that coalition.

1813
01:58:54,740 --> 01:58:55,220
Correct.

1814
01:58:55,460 --> 01:59:01,380
And so you could certainly benefit from ganging up on the person who's

1815
01:59:01,380 --> 01:59:03,220
accused of committing incest.

1816
01:59:03,620 --> 01:59:09,300
And there's probably a lot of overlap between that, but simply not agreeing with the

1817
01:59:09,300 --> 01:59:13,780
moral sentiment when other people are advertising it or asking your opinion about it is a

1818
01:59:13,780 --> 01:59:15,140
cost in of itself.

1819
01:59:15,780 --> 01:59:16,660
That's true.

1820
01:59:17,170 --> 01:59:21,010
Yeah, but uh but you but that presupposes that peop that you have the nine people who are

1821
01:59:21,010 --> 01:59:23,490
coming out against it or g asking your opinion about it.

1822
01:59:23,650 --> 01:59:27,810
And it it seems like it's still kind of mysterious why people would have an opinion about

1823
01:59:27,810 --> 01:59:31,010
it or ask your you know your judgment about it in the first place.

1824
01:59:31,090 --> 01:59:32,770
Like why why do people care at all?

1825
01:59:32,930 --> 01:59:38,290
Um unless they're actively looking for rules that they can enforce and use to uh exploit or

1826
01:59:38,290 --> 01:59:39,650
marginalize people.

1827
01:59:40,320 --> 01:59:42,320
Yeah, no, I I think that's totally true.

1828
01:59:42,480 --> 01:59:47,760
I mean, another question is should it be your own disgust toward engaging in the

1829
01:59:47,760 --> 01:59:53,200
behavior versus your perception of how disgusted other people are toward engaging the

1830
01:59:53,200 --> 01:59:53,760
behavior?

1831
01:59:54,000 --> 01:59:59,600
So is your own disgust going to be diagnostic of uh of the exploitation

1832
01:59:59,600 --> 02:00:04,960
value of this individual, or is your perception of um how

1833
02:00:04,960 --> 02:00:06,320
disgusted other people?

1834
02:00:06,670 --> 02:00:06,910
Yeah.

1835
02:00:07,070 --> 02:00:11,870
And I think I think like a lot of people, uh, their moral outrage is just sort of throwing

1836
02:00:11,870 --> 02:00:13,550
things on the wall and seeing what sticks.

1837
02:00:13,630 --> 02:00:17,310
Like I think a lot of people like rail against things and everyone's like, why you why do

1838
02:00:17,310 --> 02:00:17,950
you care about that?

1839
02:00:18,030 --> 02:00:18,350
You know?

1840
02:00:18,510 --> 02:00:22,670
I mean, I think some people are clever and really gauge the reaction of third parties.

1841
02:00:22,750 --> 02:00:27,390
Like if you're if it seems like to me there's design in all of us to just sort of be

1842
02:00:27,390 --> 02:00:31,950
morally outraged and just generate like this bothering me, I'm gonna say it out loud, but

1843
02:00:31,950 --> 02:00:37,700
there's another um subset of people who are sort of like, um, I'm gonna look and

1844
02:00:37,700 --> 02:00:43,700
see what gets reaction from people, like a politician, whether explicitly a

1845
02:00:43,700 --> 02:00:44,580
politician or not.

1846
02:00:44,740 --> 02:00:50,660
And that seems like it's a um a strategy uh of people, and there's real sensitivity to like

1847
02:00:50,740 --> 02:00:52,500
what I'm getting a response from and not.

1848
02:00:52,660 --> 02:00:58,500
And those are the people who are sort of like internalize the the ambient cultural

1849
02:00:58,500 --> 02:01:01,860
reactions of people, but may not may not feel them themselves.

1850
02:01:02,180 --> 02:01:02,580
Mm-hmm.

1851
02:01:02,980 --> 02:01:03,220
Yeah.

1852
02:01:03,380 --> 02:01:07,890
No, that's a that's a good example of of a case where someone would actively benefit from

1853
02:01:07,970 --> 02:01:13,970
from the rule, um, like a politician who might rise to power by uh demonizing uh say

1854
02:01:14,050 --> 02:01:16,930
a group a group of people or a disgusting practice.

1855
02:01:17,170 --> 02:01:23,170
Um I it it seems that you could test um the the deb perspective by seeing if

1856
02:01:23,330 --> 02:01:28,600
say dark triad traits um uh interact with

1857
02:01:28,840 --> 02:01:34,520
personal disgust uh to predict moral condemnation such that um I'm more

1858
02:01:34,520 --> 02:01:40,280
likely to to moralize um behaviors I find disgusting if I'm a

1859
02:01:40,440 --> 02:01:45,000
high dark triad person who's looking for opportunities to exploit people or to aggress

1860
02:01:45,000 --> 02:01:45,800
against people.

1861
02:01:45,960 --> 02:01:51,320
Uh and uh it seems like that would be a a a prediction entailed by by the deb

1862
02:01:51,480 --> 02:01:52,040
perspective.

1863
02:01:52,590 --> 02:01:54,590
Yeah, I think that's a really interesting thought.

1864
02:01:54,750 --> 02:02:00,430
Um, going back to John Heid's work and moral foundations theory, um, the

1865
02:02:00,430 --> 02:02:05,470
idea there is that people vary in the degree to which they prioritize these different kinds

1866
02:02:05,470 --> 02:02:08,750
of domains in terms of making their moral judgments.

1867
02:02:08,990 --> 02:02:14,430
And some people prioritize purity more in deciding whether or not something is

1868
02:02:14,430 --> 02:02:15,070
wrong.

1869
02:02:15,310 --> 02:02:20,400
And, you know, I think that you can uh, regardless of whether the categorization of moral

1870
02:02:20,400 --> 02:02:26,400
domains or or that idea is correct, it is recognizable that um, you know, you could have

1871
02:02:26,400 --> 02:02:32,400
two people who are uh equally disgusted by yeah, engaging

1872
02:02:32,400 --> 02:02:36,480
in some kind of sexual practice, and one of them is going to strongly morally condemn

1873
02:02:36,480 --> 02:02:41,360
someone, and another person is going to say, uh, live and let live, or this is not my

1874
02:02:41,360 --> 02:02:41,760
business.

1875
02:02:41,920 --> 02:02:46,250
And understanding what separates those people in terms of personality variation, which

1876
02:02:46,250 --> 02:02:52,170
you've referred to, um Pinsoff, or um kind of broader strategic

1877
02:02:52,170 --> 02:02:56,970
orientations based on uh exploitation versus cooperation.

1878
02:02:57,370 --> 02:03:02,170
There's also a thing of it's not just exploitation of certain outgroups, it even happens

1879
02:03:02,170 --> 02:03:03,130
within an individual.

1880
02:03:03,290 --> 02:03:07,290
Like I'm thinking like religious beliefs, where we are to sort of say, all of us are

1881
02:03:07,290 --> 02:03:13,200
sinners, we all have bad parts of us, And I'm broadcasting an idea of we all

1882
02:03:13,200 --> 02:03:15,520
have temptations to do the wrong thing.

1883
02:03:15,680 --> 02:03:20,400
And I'm signaling we're all going to coordinate about the right thing to do.

1884
02:03:20,560 --> 02:03:26,240
So the moralization is sort of like there's a counterfactual world where we all do the

1885
02:03:26,240 --> 02:03:27,440
wrong thing.

1886
02:03:27,680 --> 02:03:33,120
But I'm going to sort of um broadcast, we're going to curtail that in

1887
02:03:33,360 --> 02:03:36,850
ourselves, but instead do this other thing.

1888
02:03:37,090 --> 02:03:41,890
Um, and I think that also could be a benefit, David, without exploiting anybody, where it's

1889
02:03:41,890 --> 02:03:47,410
sort of the what we're moralizing is we might all do the wrong

1890
02:03:47,410 --> 02:03:53,410
thing, but I am advertising this is a way to be better

1891
02:03:53,650 --> 02:03:59,010
or get better stuff or do the right thing, which is something organisms should care about.

1892
02:03:59,410 --> 02:04:03,760
Um, But I get some benefits by being the leader of that.

1893
02:04:03,920 --> 02:04:05,200
You might defer to me.

1894
02:04:05,600 --> 02:04:06,560
I might have status.

1895
02:04:06,720 --> 02:04:10,480
I might say, look, we've all had bad things happen to us.

1896
02:04:10,640 --> 02:04:12,880
I'm going to show you the right way to do things.

1897
02:04:13,120 --> 02:04:19,120
And so the moralization of what's bad may not be individuals that we exclude.

1898
02:04:19,280 --> 02:04:22,320
It might be the paths that we might all take.

1899
02:04:22,570 --> 02:04:26,010
And I'm going to say we might fall into moral badness.

1900
02:04:26,170 --> 02:04:28,090
We might get bad outcomes.

1901
02:04:28,330 --> 02:04:33,130
Listen to me, and I will guide you to the morally superior outcome.

1902
02:04:33,370 --> 02:04:34,730
I think that's also a trope.

1903
02:04:34,890 --> 02:04:40,810
And that and that can involve even not in excluding anybody per se, but just up paths

1904
02:04:40,810 --> 02:04:45,610
of policy or or paths individuals might take, even within our own group.

1905
02:04:46,000 --> 02:04:46,320
Hmm.

1906
02:04:46,480 --> 02:04:47,520
I I like that way of thinking.

1907
02:04:47,600 --> 02:04:52,560
So insofar as you care more about the right non-disgusting thing to do, you might be more

1908
02:04:52,560 --> 02:04:56,560
likely to moralize the disgusting wrong thing to do.

1909
02:04:56,800 --> 02:05:02,400
And that say if I if I care more about a certain type of of sexual

1910
02:05:02,400 --> 02:05:07,600
strategy and and and I view that as the right path and I and I I really care about

1911
02:05:07,600 --> 02:05:11,040
coordinating around that particular sexual strategy, I'm going to be more likely to

1912
02:05:11,040 --> 02:05:17,010
moralize anything that is is outside of that sexual strategy or or deviant

1913
02:05:17,010 --> 02:05:17,650
from it.

1914
02:05:17,810 --> 02:05:20,690
Um whereas if I don't know Yeah, or even the reverse.

1915
02:05:20,770 --> 02:05:23,650
It's just like the question is like, what would the benefit be?

1916
02:05:23,810 --> 02:05:27,730
How would I benefit from moralizing that doesn't involve excluding somebody?

1917
02:05:27,970 --> 02:05:33,490
And it would just be that I just do the calculation of I want to have high status, I want

1918
02:05:33,490 --> 02:05:35,970
to be listened to, I don't want to exclude anybody.

1919
02:05:36,130 --> 02:05:37,890
How can I square that circle?

1920
02:05:38,050 --> 02:05:43,720
Well, I'm just gonna say, look, everybody who I'm not I'm not excluding anybody, but I'm

1921
02:05:43,720 --> 02:05:49,240
just sort of saying, look, you should listen to me because there's a class of

1922
02:05:49,240 --> 02:05:53,880
outcomes that we might all engage in that are disgusting or morally bad.

1923
02:05:54,120 --> 02:05:57,560
But I can give you a way to avoid that.

1924
02:05:57,880 --> 02:06:03,720
Um so it's just an example of so you might not even like care about the thing,

1925
02:06:03,800 --> 02:06:09,240
but it's just you're like, okay, this is a way to get status without excluding anybody.

1926
02:06:09,400 --> 02:06:15,390
Um, But still using that cudgel of disgust and moralization as a way to get

1927
02:06:15,390 --> 02:06:17,950
your own status uh achieved.

1928
02:06:19,390 --> 02:06:20,670
Yeah, that makes sense.

1929
02:06:20,910 --> 02:06:25,470
Um we've been going on for so long, but I want to just get one last question because I've

1930
02:06:25,470 --> 02:06:30,110
been thinking about I've I've been thinking about um alliances and and the role they might

1931
02:06:30,110 --> 02:06:31,300
play in disgust.

1932
02:06:31,540 --> 02:06:35,540
Uh, and so I've been doing some some math modeling work on the simple majority game, which

1933
02:06:35,540 --> 02:06:39,780
is a three-player game where or or three or more where a subset of players coordinate to

1934
02:06:39,780 --> 02:06:43,940
receive a benefit while uh the outsider to that subset incurs a cost.

1935
02:06:44,100 --> 02:06:47,940
And so it's basically a coordination game, uh, where you can coordinate to get a benefit,

1936
02:06:48,100 --> 02:06:50,820
and whoever is outside of the subset incurs a cost.

1937
02:06:50,980 --> 02:06:53,460
Uh, and there are a number of situations that might apply to.

1938
02:06:53,620 --> 02:06:58,020
Say there's a communal resource, we could form an alliance and exclude uh one or more

1939
02:06:58,020 --> 02:07:01,130
people from that resource to get a higher share of it for ourselves.

1940
02:07:02,570 --> 02:07:07,450
If we all have our own private resources, two of us could gang up on someone and take their

1941
02:07:07,450 --> 02:07:09,290
resource, assuming they submit to us.

1942
02:07:09,690 --> 02:07:12,010
These are all kind of versions of the simple majority game.

1943
02:07:12,090 --> 02:07:16,650
And I I'm thinking of another of a bunch of different examples of this, how this would play

1944
02:07:16,650 --> 02:07:16,890
out.

1945
02:07:17,130 --> 02:07:22,090
But one one thing I've discovered is that there are a lot of uh ESSs or evolutionarily

1946
02:07:22,090 --> 02:07:25,290
stable strategies in this game that relate to what I call transitivity.

1947
02:07:25,450 --> 02:07:30,620
So the uh the friend of my friend is my friend, The enemy of my friend is my enemy.

1948
02:07:31,260 --> 02:07:34,300
The uh friend of my enemy is my enemy.

1949
02:07:34,780 --> 02:07:36,620
The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

1950
02:07:36,860 --> 02:07:42,380
So these are all uh ESSs in the simple majority game because they um facilitate

1951
02:07:42,460 --> 02:07:43,900
coordination on an alliance.

1952
02:07:44,060 --> 02:07:48,060
It's much easier for me to coordinate on an alliance with you if we share the same enemies

1953
02:07:48,060 --> 02:07:49,580
and share the same friends, right?

1954
02:07:49,660 --> 02:07:53,390
If we have different enemies and different friends, uh were going to disagree about what

1955
02:07:53,390 --> 02:07:58,030
alliance we prefer, about who we prefer to be an insider and who we prefer to be an

1956
02:07:58,030 --> 02:07:58,830
outsider.

1957
02:07:59,630 --> 02:08:05,630
And so because of these transitivity rules, that creates a kind

1958
02:08:05,630 --> 02:08:11,630
of social contagion, such that if I uh do something that signals my enmity toward the

1959
02:08:11,630 --> 02:08:16,910
group or disloyalty to the group, um that not only means that you should um oppose me, you

1960
02:08:16,910 --> 02:08:18,860
should oppose anyone who supports me.

1961
02:08:19,260 --> 02:08:23,900
And if we use cues of similarity as cues of allegiance, then you might also want to oppose

1962
02:08:23,900 --> 02:08:27,820
anything that's similar to me, or that suggests that you're similar to me, or that suggests

1963
02:08:27,820 --> 02:08:33,660
that you're maybe even if you're a family member of me, uh my uh norm violation might

1964
02:08:33,660 --> 02:08:37,580
contaminate to my family members because they're going to be viewed as my friends.

1965
02:08:37,820 --> 02:08:41,660
And um, from the group's perspective, the friend of my enemy is my enemy.

1966
02:08:42,010 --> 02:08:42,490
Right.

1967
02:08:42,650 --> 02:08:48,650
And so because uh of these alliance dynamics, when you do anything that

1968
02:08:48,650 --> 02:08:52,730
uh signals disloyalty or enmity toward a group of people, it creates a kind of contagion

1969
02:08:52,730 --> 02:08:58,010
where everyone is rushing to signal that they oppose that person and anyone or anything who

1970
02:08:58,010 --> 02:09:02,840
is associated with that person, which is isomorphic to the logic of contagion, right?

1971
02:09:03,160 --> 02:09:07,560
In the same way, if that person is contagious, you also want to avoid that person and avoid

1972
02:09:07,560 --> 02:09:12,280
anyone who has made contact with them and avoid any objects that have been in contact with

1973
02:09:12,280 --> 02:09:12,760
that person.

1974
02:09:12,920 --> 02:09:18,760
And so because the logic of contagion is similar with alliances and with pathogens,

1975
02:09:18,840 --> 02:09:23,240
um, it would have been a very ideal motion, a motion to co-opt by natural selection to

1976
02:09:23,240 --> 02:09:27,720
serve this new function of dealing with social contagion uh as opposed to pathogen

1977
02:09:27,720 --> 02:09:28,200
contagion.

1978
02:09:28,360 --> 02:09:33,730
I think this might uh explain some of the uh properties of moral disgust and that it's

1979
02:09:33,730 --> 02:09:38,530
geared toward um the the kind of contagion that can flow through a social network when a

1980
02:09:38,530 --> 02:09:42,530
moral violation is committed or when a signal of disloyalty is sent.

1981
02:09:43,250 --> 02:09:46,450
And so I'm curious what what you think of that logic and whether that fits in with some of

1982
02:09:46,450 --> 02:09:49,570
your research on on moral disgust.

1983
02:09:50,130 --> 02:09:54,050
Yeah, what what you say about the common properties with physical contamination and

1984
02:09:54,050 --> 02:09:55,810
contagion makes a lot of sense to me.

1985
02:09:55,980 --> 02:10:01,580
And uh, you know, I what I really like about that, um, David, is uh you've taken

1986
02:10:01,580 --> 02:10:05,980
something that kind of when you don't think too hard about it makes sense and you've kind

1987
02:10:05,980 --> 02:10:09,020
of laid a foundation to understand it more systematically.

1988
02:10:09,260 --> 02:10:15,100
Um there are critical differences, of course, in that uh

1989
02:10:15,340 --> 02:10:21,180
with pathogen disgust, it really is about physical contact versus with moral disgust,

1990
02:10:21,340 --> 02:10:27,210
um not so much, but it is maybe about being seen associating with the individual,

1991
02:10:27,290 --> 02:10:28,010
as you suggest.

1992
02:10:28,170 --> 02:10:34,090
Now, if we think about the types of uh behavioral motivations that we've observed that are

1993
02:10:34,090 --> 02:10:40,010
corresponding with reports of disgust versus reports of anger, um these

1994
02:10:40,250 --> 02:10:45,290
are related to indirect aggression, uh, damaging the person's reputation, gossiping about

1995
02:10:45,290 --> 02:10:48,010
them, letting people know what they've done.

1996
02:10:48,380 --> 02:10:54,300
And we've mostly been thinking about those things in terms of imposing costs on the

1997
02:10:54,300 --> 02:10:55,260
individual.

1998
02:10:55,740 --> 02:11:01,100
But uh gossip could also be protecting you from

1999
02:11:01,420 --> 02:11:07,020
inferences from others that you agree or that you're uh an ally of that

2000
02:11:07,020 --> 02:11:07,660
target.

2001
02:11:08,060 --> 02:11:13,930
Um And uh, you know, oftentimes when people think about moral disgust versus

2002
02:11:13,930 --> 02:11:19,370
pathogen disgust, the reason why there's a common word is that there is some commonality in

2003
02:11:19,370 --> 02:11:23,450
the phenomenology, and there's some overlap in the facial expressions.

2004
02:11:23,610 --> 02:11:29,050
Um, so, and of course, this gets encoded in language and it's not unique to English as

2005
02:11:29,050 --> 02:11:29,370
well.

2006
02:11:29,690 --> 02:11:34,650
Um, and so a question is is there something that's sufficiently overlapping in the in the

2007
02:11:34,650 --> 02:11:39,260
phenomenology that's reflecting both of those functions, the the

2008
02:11:39,900 --> 02:11:45,900
contamination avoidance, the contagion avoidance in terms of physical properties versus the

2009
02:11:45,900 --> 02:11:51,900
contamination avoidance uh in terms of alliance detection or or cooperation.

2010
02:11:52,300 --> 02:11:55,020
Um I I'm I'm not sure.

2011
02:11:55,100 --> 02:11:56,460
You know, I don't have an answer to that.

2012
02:11:56,620 --> 02:12:02,430
What the function of the phenomenology, if there is one in terms of uh discussed in the

2013
02:12:02,430 --> 02:12:03,230
moral realm.

2014
02:12:03,630 --> 02:12:09,550
In terms of facial expression or vocal expression, that could be co-opted pretty easily, I

2015
02:12:09,550 --> 02:12:15,470
think, if there's a signal of contagion physically, that then people can

2016
02:12:15,470 --> 02:12:21,310
make an inference of contagion perception more socially or

2017
02:12:21,310 --> 02:12:22,350
symbolically.

2018
02:12:22,680 --> 02:12:25,720
I could see that happening uh fairly easily.

2019
02:12:25,880 --> 02:12:27,400
Well, I shouldn't say fairly easily.

2020
02:12:27,560 --> 02:12:30,120
I could see that uh bridge happening.

2021
02:12:30,280 --> 02:12:36,120
Um, you know, one thing that I've pondered about with this shared phenomenology, which

2022
02:12:36,120 --> 02:12:38,120
people say that they're sick to their stomach.

2023
02:12:38,200 --> 02:12:43,560
And I personally have experienced phenomenology that seems to overlap with smelling

2024
02:12:43,560 --> 02:12:49,210
something bad toward social violations that others have engaged in.

2025
02:12:49,690 --> 02:12:55,690
I think back to an analogy that Rob Kurzman made in terms of effort, in

2026
02:12:55,690 --> 02:13:01,130
that you can have people talk about something being effortful in terms of mental

2027
02:13:01,130 --> 02:13:07,130
effort related to, you know, the old ego depletion studies are not eating chocolate chip

2028
02:13:07,130 --> 02:13:12,680
cookies or eating radishes instead, or having to identify circle dot every I in a sentence

2029
02:13:12,760 --> 02:13:13,800
or something like this.

2030
02:13:13,880 --> 02:13:19,880
Um, and that feels effortful, uh, not in an identical way, but in a similar enough

2031
02:13:19,880 --> 02:13:24,840
way that it feels effortful to run a marathon or something like that, or lift weights a

2032
02:13:24,840 --> 02:13:25,080
lot.

2033
02:13:25,320 --> 02:13:30,920
Um, and that this similarity in phenomenology isn't reflecting underlying

2034
02:13:30,920 --> 02:13:36,570
similarity in uh metabolic effort or uh or

2035
02:13:36,570 --> 02:13:41,930
something like that, which that assumption kind of led some research down the wrong path in

2036
02:13:41,930 --> 02:13:43,610
trying to explain mental effort.

2037
02:13:43,770 --> 02:13:46,970
But it's probably some kind of representation of opportunity costs.

2038
02:13:47,130 --> 02:13:52,890
And you can pay high opportunity costs by um proceeding with a

2039
02:13:52,890 --> 02:13:58,600
mundane uh typing task when you're not getting any feedback of things that are

2040
02:13:58,600 --> 02:14:04,520
beneficial for you, or you can pay opportunity costs in terms of uh caloric or muscle,

2041
02:14:04,760 --> 02:14:10,280
muscle, or strength, or whatever output in terms of a task where you're also not getting

2042
02:14:10,280 --> 02:14:13,000
feedback of any kinds of benefits.

2043
02:14:13,240 --> 02:14:18,360
Um and so their proposal was that sense of effort is actually a representation of

2044
02:14:18,360 --> 02:14:23,000
opportunity costs, but opportunity costs can vary quite a bit across domains.

2045
02:14:23,270 --> 02:14:28,630
Now, whether that commonality across moral disgust and pathogen disgust is a

2046
02:14:28,630 --> 02:14:34,150
representation of contagion, but in pathogen contagion versus

2047
02:14:34,150 --> 02:14:39,270
reputational or reliance or social contagion, which I have not thought about in those terms

2048
02:14:39,270 --> 02:14:43,110
before, versus something else that I've thought about, which is some representation of

2049
02:14:43,110 --> 02:14:48,940
valuation, which is you can have low valuation in terms of caloric or contact benefits

2050
02:14:48,940 --> 02:14:54,700
relative to pathogen costs, or you could have low valuation in terms of association

2051
02:14:54,700 --> 02:15:00,620
based on that person's behavior rather than how other people are going to

2052
02:15:00,620 --> 02:15:02,700
treat you for being around that person.

2053
02:15:03,340 --> 02:15:05,740
Although those aren't mutually exclusive either.

2054
02:15:06,140 --> 02:15:10,940
A person's valuation could partially be what your relationship with them would be

2055
02:15:11,100 --> 02:15:13,020
reputationally in the eyes of others.

2056
02:15:13,580 --> 02:15:19,350
So all of this is to say I find the account uh promising and convincing

2057
02:15:19,510 --> 02:15:25,510
um but whittling down on why there's that commonality in phenomenology and

2058
02:15:25,510 --> 02:15:28,950
outputs, uh I I'm not completely sure yet.

2059
02:15:29,270 --> 02:15:30,550
Yeah, cool.

2060
02:15:31,510 --> 02:15:33,270
Well, this was great.

2061
02:15:33,430 --> 02:15:39,340
Um Josh, you're um you're you're well into the evening hours

2062
02:15:39,340 --> 02:15:41,500
here and we might have just lost Josh.

2063
02:15:41,580 --> 02:15:42,780
Uh can you hear us?

2064
02:15:43,020 --> 02:15:43,340
All right.

2065
02:15:43,580 --> 02:15:44,140
I'm back.

2066
02:15:44,300 --> 02:15:49,580
I think I think my I think my connection cut me off like mid-sentence after no you are

2067
02:15:49,580 --> 02:15:49,900
great though.

2068
02:15:49,980 --> 02:15:54,700
We I think we got that all that um you are just saying how ego depletion is is all right.

2069
02:15:56,860 --> 02:15:57,340
Thumbs up.

2070
02:15:57,500 --> 02:16:02,380
Yeah that's no yeah I think you you left off where yeah uh where you think it's interesting

2071
02:16:02,460 --> 02:16:07,810
but then uh getting more specific about why the the phenomenology um uh overlaps in in

2072
02:16:07,810 --> 02:16:11,890
those two cases it would would be uh promising.

2073
02:16:12,450 --> 02:16:16,690
Yeah, the idea that there might be a common higher level commonality in terms of sort of

2074
02:16:16,690 --> 02:16:20,370
what it affords to the organism is sort of this possible idea.

2075
02:16:20,850 --> 02:16:21,090
Yeah.

2076
02:16:21,250 --> 02:16:21,810
Yes, exactly.

2077
02:16:22,050 --> 02:16:22,530
Very cool.

2078
02:16:22,770 --> 02:16:24,930
Well, Josh, uh we've taken up a lot of your time.

2079
02:16:25,010 --> 02:16:25,890
I know it's late there.

2080
02:16:26,050 --> 02:16:29,410
I don't even think we have time for the what we should have asked you question, but I think

2081
02:16:29,410 --> 02:16:34,860
you uh you've already done that unless there's another uh think we've covered all the

2082
02:16:34,860 --> 02:16:35,180
bases.