WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:01.120 I'm David Pinsoff. 00:00:01.360 --> 00:00:02.880 I'm David Petrozowski. 00:00:03.280 --> 00:00:07.120 And this is Evolutionary Psychology, the podcast, actual evolutionary psychology. 00:00:07.360 --> 00:00:09.280 By actual evolutionary psychologists. 00:00:09.600 --> 00:00:10.480 Nailed it. 00:00:16.960 --> 00:00:19.680 Today we have a wonderful guest, Josh Tiber. 00:00:20.320 --> 00:00:20.720 Yes. 00:00:20.880 --> 00:00:26.640 Uh Josh is a uh expert in the field of disgust and disease psychology, 00:00:26.800 --> 00:00:27.840 contamination. 00:00:28.080 --> 00:00:33.390 Um he's such a fun person to talk to, and his knowledge of this area is quite 00:00:33.390 --> 00:00:35.230 expansive and breathtaking. 00:00:35.790 --> 00:00:40.430 Particularly because this is an area in evolutionary psychology that has led to a lot of 00:00:40.430 --> 00:00:40.910 ideas. 00:00:41.310 --> 00:00:42.670 It's been very generative. 00:00:43.230 --> 00:00:48.990 Some of these ideas are more dubious than others, and Josh is the perfect person to uh cut 00:00:48.990 --> 00:00:54.480 through the bullshit and tell you what is uh real, or at least what is the most 00:00:54.480 --> 00:00:58.960 promising direction to head in and what is maybe more dubious. 00:00:59.120 --> 00:01:03.840 Um for me, I think it's it's extremely clarifying to get his take on all these issues in 00:01:03.840 --> 00:01:06.000 the literature on disgust, and it's such a huge topic. 00:01:06.160 --> 00:01:11.920 I mean, disgust touches on so many different aspects of our lives uh in a way that is 00:01:11.920 --> 00:01:15.600 really hard to appreciate um until you uh talk to Josh. 00:01:15.760 --> 00:01:17.840 So um we get into lots of stuff. 00:01:18.000 --> 00:01:18.880 Discuss, disease. 00:01:19.330 --> 00:01:24.690 And I really appreciate about Josh that he is very careful and not a 00:01:24.690 --> 00:01:30.530 partisan in the sense of I always feel like I can I very much trust Josh's opinion 00:01:30.530 --> 00:01:35.810 about things in that he is just so careful um and is not fragile epistemically. 00:01:35.890 --> 00:01:38.770 Like he'll entertain an idea, but then think about does this make sense? 00:01:38.930 --> 00:01:44.850 And I just he's just a lovely person to uh emulate in terms of the stance one takes 00:01:44.850 --> 00:01:50.580 towards ideas in in the sense of entertaining them, but also taking an arm's length take on 00:01:50.580 --> 00:01:54.260 them and saying, does this actually make sense, even if it's coming from within Ev Psych, 00:01:54.500 --> 00:01:55.060 for example? 00:01:55.380 --> 00:01:59.700 Yes, he's one of the best examples I think of of a marriage between really good theory and 00:01:59.700 --> 00:02:00.740 really good empirics. 00:02:00.820 --> 00:02:03.540 He's very good in both of those areas, which is rare. 00:02:04.340 --> 00:02:05.060 Absolutely, yes. 00:02:05.140 --> 00:02:08.100 So Josh is a shining example of how to do evpsy. 00:02:08.340 --> 00:02:10.180 So without further ado, here's Josh Tiber. 00:02:10.660 --> 00:02:11.220 Enjoy. 00:02:14.740 --> 00:02:17.620 So Josh Tiber, you are in the Netherlands. 00:02:17.930 --> 00:02:19.930 Um, how did you get there? 00:02:20.730 --> 00:02:22.490 Uh via airplane, Dave. 00:02:22.730 --> 00:02:24.010 Um good, we're done. 00:02:24.170 --> 00:02:24.490 Okay. 00:02:24.890 --> 00:02:25.930 Have a good week, everybody. 00:02:26.010 --> 00:02:27.210 Josh, thanks for coming on. 00:02:27.450 --> 00:02:27.850 That was good. 00:02:28.250 --> 00:02:30.650 So uh yeah, I can give you the backstory. 00:02:30.810 --> 00:02:36.410 I was in a position to finish my PhD right when the great financial crisis was unfolding. 00:02:36.810 --> 00:02:41.690 And I struck out on the job market, which was exclusively targeted at the US for a couple 00:02:41.850 --> 00:02:46.890 years, and I decided to try my luck out at a job ad in Amsterdam. 00:02:47.120 --> 00:02:50.720 And it turned out to be the only hit that I got. 00:02:50.960 --> 00:02:56.240 And I thought, well, that sounds like an exciting adventure to go continue my career in a 00:02:56.240 --> 00:02:57.120 foreign country. 00:02:57.360 --> 00:02:59.680 So I moved over to Amsterdam in 2011. 00:02:59.840 --> 00:03:01.760 It was initially just a two-year contract. 00:03:01.840 --> 00:03:04.880 So jobs worked a little bit different out here rather than a 10-year track. 00:03:04.960 --> 00:03:09.040 It was just you're an assistant professor for two years, and we'll see how it goes from 00:03:09.040 --> 00:03:09.360 there. 00:03:09.840 --> 00:03:15.830 And um yeah, I've I've I felt very at home here and uh both academically and 00:03:15.830 --> 00:03:16.150 personally. 00:03:16.230 --> 00:03:21.750 So I've ended up staying here and now I'm married with a kid and fairly uh integrated into 00:03:21.750 --> 00:03:22.950 the academic system. 00:03:23.350 --> 00:03:28.310 Um for those people who are, I mean, you know, I think we're mostly American listeners. 00:03:28.390 --> 00:03:34.230 Uh, how is how is it different either academically or personally, not to get too personal, 00:03:34.310 --> 00:03:39.750 but we we're we we have we have four hours, so let's well, uh 00:03:39.990 --> 00:03:42.310 academically, I mean there there's tons of differences. 00:03:42.470 --> 00:03:47.960 The commonalities are that European researchers, or at least uh Dutch and UK, and to an 00:03:47.960 --> 00:03:53.640 extent French, German, many other countries, they're publishing in uh overlapping, largely 00:03:53.640 --> 00:03:55.080 similar academic journals. 00:03:55.240 --> 00:03:58.360 And a lot of them are coming to the same academic conferences. 00:03:58.520 --> 00:04:01.160 Um, but there are differences in the education system. 00:04:01.320 --> 00:04:06.520 For example, uh at my university, it's a three-year bachelor's degree, and we have six 00:04:06.520 --> 00:04:11.080 periods rather than uh quarters or semesters or trimesters. 00:04:11.320 --> 00:04:16.550 Um, most people take a fourth year, which is technically a master's, but it's kind of like 00:04:16.550 --> 00:04:19.270 the fourth year of a bachelor's in the US. 00:04:19.430 --> 00:04:21.830 Uh tuition is noticeably different. 00:04:21.910 --> 00:04:26.950 So in the Netherlands, I think that our bachelor tuition is something like 2800 euros per 00:04:26.950 --> 00:04:29.350 year if you come from the EU. 00:04:29.830 --> 00:04:33.030 And our master's tuition, I think, is 5,000 per year. 00:04:33.670 --> 00:04:36.420 Um A financial burden. 00:04:36.660 --> 00:04:37.940 Financial burden. 00:04:38.340 --> 00:04:39.780 Yeah, it's quite a bit different. 00:04:39.940 --> 00:04:45.140 So uh I would I would vastly prefer my son to attend a European or a Dutch university to a 00:04:45.140 --> 00:04:47.540 US one uh when he gets to be that age. 00:04:47.940 --> 00:04:49.460 Yeah, Germany is free. 00:04:49.620 --> 00:04:50.900 Um yeah. 00:04:51.460 --> 00:04:57.460 I would imagine the funding for scientific research is also uh more forthcoming there, or 00:04:57.460 --> 00:05:00.500 is it as uh as bad as it is here in the US? 00:05:01.060 --> 00:05:06.710 Um I don't know about the proportion of proposals that are funded through the Dutch 00:05:06.710 --> 00:05:10.310 National Science Foundation versus the US National Science Foundation, but there's 00:05:10.310 --> 00:05:12.070 certainly been austerity recently. 00:05:12.230 --> 00:05:17.910 There have been budgetary issues in European countries similar to those uh in the US. 00:05:18.390 --> 00:05:23.830 And some of them have been caused by common kind of political movements in the US versus 00:05:23.830 --> 00:05:28.310 the Netherlands, but also there have been some constraints with economic recovery after the 00:05:28.310 --> 00:05:31.030 pandemic in uh in Europe versus the US. 00:05:32.180 --> 00:05:35.700 And you were in you were there for the pandemic, yeah. 00:05:36.020 --> 00:05:41.220 I was here for the pandemic, and that was uh that was an interesting experience, both uh 00:05:41.220 --> 00:05:43.220 research-wise, which we can get to in a little bit. 00:05:43.700 --> 00:05:44.420 Yeah, yeah, yeah. 00:05:44.660 --> 00:05:50.580 But also personally, um I I really learned Dutch well during the pandemic. 00:05:50.660 --> 00:05:54.660 So I'd already been in the Netherlands for eight years and I'd taken several courses and um 00:05:54.890 --> 00:06:00.170 had some Dutch competence, but I really focused on language education and followed the news 00:06:00.170 --> 00:06:01.610 a lot during that period. 00:06:02.330 --> 00:06:06.570 And also living in a very urban and walkable environment, my wife and I would take 00:06:06.570 --> 00:06:08.970 45-minute walks to the city every night. 00:06:09.050 --> 00:06:14.980 And it was like being in that scene in the movie 28 days later, when the 00:06:14.980 --> 00:06:20.020 main character Jim leaves his hospital and there's just no one in downtown London. 00:06:20.580 --> 00:06:24.980 It was exactly like that in Dam Square in Amsterdam, where you just wouldn't see another 00:06:24.980 --> 00:06:28.660 human being where typically you'd see hundreds of people during the middle of the day. 00:06:28.900 --> 00:06:32.660 Yeah, like a CGI that post apocalyptic scene. 00:06:32.820 --> 00:06:33.140 Yeah. 00:06:33.780 --> 00:06:34.260 It was. 00:06:34.420 --> 00:06:38.330 It was also the first time that I'd really, I don't know, know if regret is quite the right 00:06:38.650 --> 00:06:42.730 word, but I lived in Albuquerque, New Mexico for seven years, which just has incredible 00:06:42.730 --> 00:06:44.570 skies, mountains, landscapes. 00:06:44.730 --> 00:06:48.970 And I really regretted not being able to just get in my car and drive somewhere. 00:06:49.930 --> 00:06:52.490 An urban environment felt a little bit more like a prison. 00:06:52.650 --> 00:06:58.490 And of course, there were uh I think that the term lockdown is used very sloppily to refer 00:06:58.490 --> 00:07:01.930 to a lot of things that um are not the same. 00:07:02.090 --> 00:07:05.740 Uh, but we did have curfews and a lot of restaurants and bars were closed. 00:07:05.980 --> 00:07:10.620 So uh options for social and just recreational activities were pretty limited. 00:07:10.860 --> 00:07:11.340 Yeah. 00:07:11.660 --> 00:07:14.220 David, you were in LA L you were in LA for that? 00:07:14.620 --> 00:07:15.660 I was, yeah. 00:07:15.820 --> 00:07:18.780 Uh also, you know, things were locked down. 00:07:18.860 --> 00:07:20.060 It was a bummer for everyone. 00:07:20.140 --> 00:07:23.020 Uh it was, you know, it was it was dark times. 00:07:23.180 --> 00:07:27.910 Uh but I wanna transition into your your research because um 00:07:29.750 --> 00:07:33.510 because everyone's like, no, tell us more about what it's like to walk through Amsterdam. 00:07:33.830 --> 00:07:35.350 Yeah, let's just remember how how bad it was. 00:07:36.470 --> 00:07:37.430 Yeah, exactly. 00:07:38.230 --> 00:07:44.150 Uh so like you actually, as far as I'm aware, you have done some of the 00:07:44.150 --> 00:07:49.500 best and uh highest sample size research on the effects of pandemics on our psychology. 00:07:49.580 --> 00:07:55.420 Uh and also you're one of the foremost experts on disgust and contamination psychology. 00:07:55.660 --> 00:07:57.820 And so here you are in the middle of a pandemic. 00:07:57.900 --> 00:08:03.100 You have uh this huge sample size of studying people's attitudes throughout the pandemic, 00:08:03.180 --> 00:08:06.700 both you know, uh before it really peaked and and after. 00:08:06.860 --> 00:08:09.500 And you have this uh huge, awesome data set. 00:08:09.660 --> 00:08:13.740 I I remember seeing some of your slides at HBES and was really impressed by it. 00:08:13.820 --> 00:08:19.810 Um And I would just love to get some of the takeaways from that project because I found it 00:08:19.810 --> 00:08:21.650 really interesting at the time I saw it at HBS. 00:08:21.810 --> 00:08:24.370 And I I'd love a recap of it. 00:08:24.850 --> 00:08:25.570 Yeah, sure. 00:08:25.730 --> 00:08:30.690 So at the beginning of the pandemic, I was contacted by a lot of journalists because there 00:08:30.690 --> 00:08:35.410 aren't that many researchers who specialize in the psychology of pathogen avoidance. 00:08:35.560 --> 00:08:39.800 And then all of a sudden, there's a once-in-a-generation or multiple generation pandemic. 00:08:40.200 --> 00:08:44.280 And they wanted my insights into how human psychology was going to change as a function of 00:08:44.280 --> 00:08:45.400 COVID-19. 00:08:45.880 --> 00:08:51.560 And initially, I was very skeptical that we would see many changes that had any kind of 00:08:52.120 --> 00:08:57.080 correspondence with our functionally specialized pathogen avoidance psychology. 00:08:58.070 --> 00:09:02.230 Nevertheless, I felt like it would be a good idea to start collecting some data. 00:09:02.470 --> 00:09:08.150 And so I partnered with a local panel research company in the Netherlands called 00:09:08.150 --> 00:09:09.350 Flycatcher. 00:09:09.510 --> 00:09:14.150 And I started with, gosh, I think our first sample was a thousand individuals. 00:09:14.390 --> 00:09:19.670 And we collected data during, let's see, I think that it was May of 2020. 00:09:19.750 --> 00:09:24.950 So just about the peak period of deaths and ICU occupancy in the Netherlands. 00:09:25.110 --> 00:09:30.700 And we had a plan to just collect data every nine months or so, as long as necessary until 00:09:30.700 --> 00:09:32.140 the pandemic was over. 00:09:32.540 --> 00:09:38.540 And the goal was to assess some variables that psychologists have said 00:09:38.860 --> 00:09:42.940 relate to our motivations to avoid infectious disease. 00:09:43.260 --> 00:09:44.380 I can list some of these. 00:09:44.540 --> 00:09:47.180 One of them is disgust sensitivity. 00:09:47.500 --> 00:09:53.420 So, as you and listeners are probably aware, some people are more easily disgusted by bad 00:09:53.420 --> 00:09:58.330 smells and, you know, just based on our folk psychology, gross things than others. 00:09:58.490 --> 00:10:03.530 Um, and researchers have often tied variation in how easily disgusted you are to your 00:10:03.530 --> 00:10:05.850 motivations to avoid pathogen cues. 00:10:06.010 --> 00:10:08.330 So we measured that across the pandemic. 00:10:08.570 --> 00:10:12.250 Um, we measured attitudes toward outgroups. 00:10:12.570 --> 00:10:17.610 So there's a literature suggesting that part of our psychology of inner group biases and 00:10:17.610 --> 00:10:23.480 negativity toward outgroups reflects adaptations for avoiding pathogens, with 00:10:23.480 --> 00:10:29.400 the idea that in our ancestral history, outgroups have posed a greater pathogen threat 00:10:29.400 --> 00:10:30.520 than in-groups. 00:10:31.320 --> 00:10:36.600 And we assessed a variable that I've been assessing in several studies over the last five 00:10:36.600 --> 00:10:39.240 years that we just refer to as contact comfort. 00:10:39.480 --> 00:10:45.310 So it's not how disgusted you are by pathogen cues, but rather how comfortable you 00:10:45.310 --> 00:10:49.150 would be um with indirect contact with another person. 00:10:49.390 --> 00:10:54.910 So an example is if um Dave P, you take a big swig out of a Dasani 00:10:55.150 --> 00:10:57.550 bottle and you offer it to Dave other P. 00:10:57.790 --> 00:10:59.470 I just made that mistake that all of you guys do. 00:10:59.870 --> 00:11:00.430 Right here, look at this. 00:11:00.590 --> 00:11:01.470 Sam Pellegrino. 00:11:01.630 --> 00:11:06.670 Okay, if Pinsoff offers, if Pinsoff takes a swig out of a Sam Pellegrino bottle and offers 00:11:06.670 --> 00:11:10.350 it to Petrozki, uh, how comfortable are you with that, Petrazuki? 00:11:11.880 --> 00:11:12.760 How comfortable are you, Dave? 00:11:14.040 --> 00:11:15.000 I have a cold right now. 00:11:15.080 --> 00:11:16.120 So yeah, you don't. 00:11:17.960 --> 00:11:18.280 All right. 00:11:18.360 --> 00:11:19.080 You can pass. 00:11:20.360 --> 00:11:23.880 And then we also asked them about their explicit concerns about disease. 00:11:24.120 --> 00:11:28.360 So uh items here are, you know, I'm concerned about getting an infectious disease right 00:11:28.360 --> 00:11:28.600 now. 00:11:28.840 --> 00:11:34.270 And we could um track how these variables relate to each other, but also how they changed 00:11:34.270 --> 00:11:39.950 across these assessments during the pandemic to see if early on the pandemic, when disease 00:11:39.950 --> 00:11:44.430 is very salient, you know, there's press conferences weekly or so in the Netherlands, 00:11:44.590 --> 00:11:48.270 there's lockdowns, people are worried about dying and about the parents dying. 00:11:48.350 --> 00:11:51.980 They don't want to get close to each other because they're worried about these pathogens 00:11:51.980 --> 00:11:55.580 transmitted by invisible respiratory droplets and aerosols. 00:11:56.460 --> 00:12:02.060 If then these variables that we think reflect pathogen avoidance motivations are 00:12:02.060 --> 00:12:04.460 changing with the intensity of the pandemic. 00:12:04.780 --> 00:12:10.700 So ultimately, we had four assessments every nine months starting in 2020 and ending in 00:12:10.700 --> 00:12:16.300 2022 when the World Health Organization had declared that the pandemic was 00:12:16.300 --> 00:12:16.940 complete. 00:12:17.790 --> 00:12:22.510 And uh what what did you find from from this uh massive undertaking? 00:12:23.310 --> 00:12:26.830 We found zero differences in most of these variables. 00:12:26.990 --> 00:12:30.750 So discuss sensitivity uh did not change across the pandemic. 00:12:30.910 --> 00:12:34.910 This was actually a little bit contrary to some early papers that were pushed out very 00:12:34.910 --> 00:12:40.600 early in the pandemic, um, but were kind of small sample size, and we're just looking at 00:12:40.600 --> 00:12:45.160 what a mean was here and what a mean on another sample was that would have been pulled out 00:12:45.160 --> 00:12:46.200 of the literature. 00:12:46.680 --> 00:12:52.600 Since we could follow our participants across time, uh we had a very high-powered uh study 00:12:52.600 --> 00:12:54.520 for detecting fairly small effect sizes. 00:12:54.680 --> 00:12:58.280 And we didn't see that, you know, when people were very worried about disease and they were 00:12:58.280 --> 00:13:03.640 getting cues to at least socially transmitted cues to there being uh threats posed by 00:13:03.640 --> 00:13:08.970 disease, we didn't see that they were more disgusted by mold or bad smells or sores or 00:13:08.970 --> 00:13:10.010 anything like that. 00:13:10.170 --> 00:13:15.610 Um, we also saw no differences in anti immigrant bias across the 00:13:15.610 --> 00:13:16.490 pandemic. 00:13:16.650 --> 00:13:21.610 Um, so when people were explicitly saying, Yes, I'm quite worried about disease, they were 00:13:21.610 --> 00:13:26.970 no more um negative toward immigrants than uh when they weren't as concerned. 00:13:27.130 --> 00:13:28.540 Now I just skipped it a little bit. 00:13:28.620 --> 00:13:33.100 When we did ask them their kind of reflective concerns about disease, I'm worried about 00:13:33.100 --> 00:13:35.500 getting sick right now, we saw very large effect sizes. 00:13:35.580 --> 00:13:40.940 Yes, people were consciously worried about disease early, not late, but that didn't 00:13:41.180 --> 00:13:43.740 correspond with then greater anti immigrant bias. 00:13:43.900 --> 00:13:47.260 Maybe most interestingly, there was no change in contact comfort. 00:13:47.420 --> 00:13:52.690 So people weren't saying I'm less comfortable sharing a water bottle with someone, even 00:13:52.690 --> 00:13:56.050 when health authorities were saying you really don't want to be doing this on the 00:13:56.050 --> 00:14:01.890 self-report instruments, uh, they were no less comfortable early in the pandemic 00:14:01.970 --> 00:14:03.650 um than late in the pandemic. 00:14:03.810 --> 00:14:08.690 And that might seem counterintuitive, but if you actually saw behavior during the pandemic, 00:14:09.010 --> 00:14:11.810 some people were you know consciously worried about things. 00:14:11.970 --> 00:14:17.170 Um, but when I would go out in public, the majority of people were disregarding most of 00:14:17.170 --> 00:14:18.210 these recommendations. 00:14:18.370 --> 00:14:22.740 They were not keeping their in Europe their meter and a half, uh, or I don't know if it was 00:14:22.900 --> 00:14:24.820 it was six feet uh in the US. 00:14:24.980 --> 00:14:29.380 And they were rushing out to bars and restaurants when they were uh opened again. 00:14:30.020 --> 00:14:33.620 So I I'll leave that there if you have any follow-up questions, then I can explain 00:14:33.620 --> 00:14:35.780 something else that was interesting that we found. 00:14:36.100 --> 00:14:42.100 Uh is the idea that the stable were there are there stable individual differences in these 00:14:42.100 --> 00:14:45.140 things that what were already in the literature and that you found again. 00:14:45.450 --> 00:14:45.690 Yes. 00:14:45.850 --> 00:14:46.090 Yeah. 00:14:46.170 --> 00:14:49.130 So there's high test-retest reliability for these measures. 00:14:49.370 --> 00:14:49.530 Okay. 00:14:49.690 --> 00:14:54.330 So if you look at the interclass correlation coefficient in the multi-level model that we 00:14:54.330 --> 00:14:58.250 used, you have a very high ICC reflecting stable individual differences. 00:14:58.730 --> 00:14:58.970 Got it. 00:14:59.050 --> 00:15:03.130 So if you know I sit down in a chair and it's still warm from the previous person, that 00:15:03.210 --> 00:15:04.330 fine, I find that gross. 00:15:04.490 --> 00:15:05.690 Somebody else doesn't. 00:15:05.940 --> 00:15:09.220 whether or not we're in a pandemic, I'm gonna still find it gross. 00:15:09.380 --> 00:15:10.740 The other person still isn't. 00:15:10.980 --> 00:15:16.980 So the idea is that the individual stable differences wash away any effect there might have 00:15:16.980 --> 00:15:20.100 been from the overarching pandemic cues. 00:15:20.180 --> 00:15:21.700 Is that the general idea? 00:15:22.260 --> 00:15:22.900 That's right. 00:15:22.980 --> 00:15:27.140 And you know, any effect there might have been, again, we had very high power to detect 00:15:27.140 --> 00:15:30.100 very small effects, and we didn't even detect those. 00:15:30.340 --> 00:15:30.900 Yeah. 00:15:31.770 --> 00:15:36.010 And then did you find any within cohort correl correlations? 00:15:36.090 --> 00:15:41.290 So like within a a cohort, say, you know, one of you know, between one of your nine month 00:15:41.450 --> 00:15:46.730 separations or whatever, did you find correlations between say disgust sensitivity and 00:15:46.730 --> 00:15:51.530 anti-immigrant sentiment or fear of disease and anti-immigrant sentiment or or anything 00:15:51.530 --> 00:15:51.850 like that? 00:15:52.250 --> 00:15:53.850 Yeah, we replicated these effects. 00:15:54.090 --> 00:15:58.730 So um individu individuals who are higher in disgust sensitivity are more negative toward 00:15:58.810 --> 00:15:59.370 immigrants. 00:15:59.540 --> 00:16:02.420 pretty small effect size, but uh we we did detect that, yes. 00:16:02.980 --> 00:16:07.700 And what what what is if I can just push on that for a second, what's the logic? 00:16:08.420 --> 00:16:11.300 You talked a little bit about the logic, but can we unpack that? 00:16:11.380 --> 00:16:17.140 Because I think one of the one of the reasons why people find the behavioral immune 00:16:17.140 --> 00:16:22.500 system stuff interesting is number one, it's just interesting to think about 00:16:22.500 --> 00:16:25.380 psychological adaptations for avoiding disease. 00:16:25.540 --> 00:16:31.030 But number two, I think there's been an argument that it has a host of concomitant 00:16:31.030 --> 00:16:36.950 effects that might seem sort of irrational from a naive or or 00:16:36.950 --> 00:16:40.790 maybe standard social science model to be sort of coalitional about of psych. 00:16:41.110 --> 00:16:45.990 Can you either unpack like what's the logic of avoiding out groups? 00:16:46.230 --> 00:16:49.270 And is this uh a real in your opinion? 00:16:49.350 --> 00:16:50.230 Like what's up with that? 00:16:50.310 --> 00:16:52.710 And can you just talk more about that for people who may not know? 00:16:53.240 --> 00:16:53.800 Absolutely. 00:16:53.960 --> 00:16:58.840 And I'll take a circuitous route to doing that and hopefully not monologue or lecture too 00:16:58.840 --> 00:17:01.560 much because I think that this is a really interesting topic. 00:17:01.800 --> 00:17:06.760 So there's a social psychologist, evolutionary psychologist named Mark Schaller, who really 00:17:06.760 --> 00:17:08.200 pioneered this area. 00:17:08.360 --> 00:17:13.480 And Mark wrote a nice chapter in Buss's handbook of evolutionary psychology, in which he 00:17:13.480 --> 00:17:18.200 described the behavioral immune system as an evolutionary success story. 00:17:18.440 --> 00:17:23.770 And when Mark first started working on this stuff in the early aughts, I was only familiar 00:17:23.770 --> 00:17:29.210 with a couple papers that engaged with the psychology of disease and disease avoidance. 00:17:29.450 --> 00:17:33.530 Most of it was looking at attitudes toward gay men in the 1990s because they were 00:17:33.530 --> 00:17:38.330 explicitly associated with HIV, and researchers thought this might underlie part of 00:17:38.330 --> 00:17:39.530 anti-gay prejudice. 00:17:39.690 --> 00:17:45.690 And then uh the evolutionary psychologist Rob Kurzban and co-author Mark Leary wrote a 00:17:45.690 --> 00:17:51.060 classic paper that really kind of uh got me thinking about evolutionary psychology in 00:17:51.060 --> 00:17:56.500 2001 on stigmatization, and they proposed that one of three reasons uh 00:17:56.500 --> 00:18:01.220 explaining general stigmatization processes in humans is parasite avoidance. 00:18:01.380 --> 00:18:06.340 Um, regardless, Mark Schaller, being a social psychologist largely interested in prejudice, 00:18:06.580 --> 00:18:12.500 started thinking well, people kind of have aversions to a lot of individuals for 00:18:12.500 --> 00:18:14.260 seemingly irrational reasons. 00:18:14.500 --> 00:18:20.210 So um birthmarks, physical disability, just looking different than other 00:18:20.210 --> 00:18:20.530 people. 00:18:20.850 --> 00:18:25.650 And a lot of theories in social psychology have difficulty explaining that. 00:18:25.810 --> 00:18:31.650 And so he started proposing that a lot of this might be our specialized pathogen avoidance 00:18:31.650 --> 00:18:36.530 psychology treating features of different individuals in our social environments as 00:18:36.530 --> 00:18:39.330 diagnostic of an increased infection risk. 00:18:39.800 --> 00:18:44.680 Now, this again is something that if you're not thinking about evolution and what our minds 00:18:44.680 --> 00:18:49.080 should be designed to do, you really have a tough time coming to that hypothesis. 00:18:49.240 --> 00:18:54.120 And if we unpack that a little bit further, in talks I give on this topic, I often give a 00:18:54.120 --> 00:18:59.480 picture of this really cool looking virus virus, a bacterial phage. 00:18:59.790 --> 00:19:03.630 And phages are specialized for infecting bacterial cells. 00:19:03.790 --> 00:19:06.270 So some bacteria that infect humans, like E. 00:19:06.430 --> 00:19:10.510 coli, they're actually infected by these viral cells. 00:19:10.670 --> 00:19:14.990 And what this suggests is that pathogens have been a problem for life on Earth pretty much 00:19:14.990 --> 00:19:17.470 as long as life on Earth has existed. 00:19:17.630 --> 00:19:23.070 And they should be one of the most important factors in shaping the evolution of 00:19:23.630 --> 00:19:24.190 life. 00:19:24.430 --> 00:19:30.180 And we should expect a lot of complex adaptations for this problem in all animals, 00:19:30.580 --> 00:19:34.980 and specifically what we're interested in as psychologists, humans. 00:19:35.700 --> 00:19:41.380 Now, if we think about all of the things that humans have to do that have non-zero disease 00:19:41.380 --> 00:19:44.500 risks, well, eating puts things in our mouths. 00:19:44.900 --> 00:19:49.140 We often need to touch our food with our hands, which are coming into contact with other 00:19:49.140 --> 00:19:50.900 things that are pathogen risks. 00:19:51.070 --> 00:19:55.710 Um, having sex requires close proximity and contact with someone else. 00:19:55.870 --> 00:19:59.710 And evolutionary psychologists have pointed out that sex is pretty important and make 00:19:59.710 --> 00:20:02.590 preferences for understanding uh the mind. 00:20:03.150 --> 00:20:08.990 Um, basic social interactions, so touching things that other people have touched, so 00:20:09.070 --> 00:20:14.750 exchanging artifacts or physical contact for cooperative interactions, uh, interacting with 00:20:14.750 --> 00:20:17.630 animals, either as food or with dogs. 00:20:17.870 --> 00:20:20.190 And the list goes on: child rearing. 00:20:20.800 --> 00:20:26.480 And so by unlocking better knowledge about how our minds have evolved to deal with 00:20:26.480 --> 00:20:31.440 pathogens, to detect them and then manage the threats posed by them, we should be able to 00:20:31.440 --> 00:20:36.000 make inroads in a lot of different research areas in evolutionary psychology. 00:20:36.240 --> 00:20:39.520 So that's kind of the pitch for why this is important. 00:20:40.560 --> 00:20:45.520 Let me stop there for a second before we go on to the outgroup thing, just to see if you 00:20:45.520 --> 00:20:47.360 guys have any questions or comments. 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. 00:20:52.930 --> 00:20:58.690 And uh I'm eager to get to the punchline of you know what is real here uh 00:20:58.850 --> 00:21:01.170 and what uh was a wrong turn. 00:21:01.410 --> 00:21:06.690 Yeah and I just want to say too uh before I to interrupt um it's also a great example of it 00:21:06.690 --> 00:21:10.680 reminds me of Annie Wirtz's plant work where you know people are like, oh, that's weird 00:21:10.760 --> 00:21:15.400 that there's like psychological stuff for pathogen avoidance or any with like with plants. 00:21:15.480 --> 00:21:19.560 But then if you and that's from a very like ivory tower, like the purpose of cognition is 00:21:19.560 --> 00:21:24.680 thinking, we don't think about the embodied physical environment or nature really at all. 00:21:24.840 --> 00:21:28.760 But if you come from this other perspective, yeah, like pathogens have been around forever. 00:21:28.920 --> 00:21:33.070 I mean, there's arguments that the evolution of sex is because of pathogens, right? 00:21:33.310 --> 00:21:38.750 And uh and something like plants or pathogens, it's the prior for there being lots of 00:21:38.750 --> 00:21:41.150 adaptations for these things is so high. 00:21:41.390 --> 00:21:46.910 So I just love this idea that you're taking a thing that is sort of counterintuitive from 00:21:46.910 --> 00:21:51.710 this very narrow perspective, but really there's really good evidence or arguments or logic 00:21:51.710 --> 00:21:52.430 for why it would be. 00:21:52.510 --> 00:21:55.950 So I think it's just a good example of the argument of taking an evolutionary approach, 00:21:56.200 --> 00:21:58.520 providing a novel, different way of thinking about things. 00:21:58.680 --> 00:22:01.320 But that's that's just my commentary before we proceed to the street. 00:22:01.480 --> 00:22:01.800 Yeah, absolutely. 00:22:02.440 --> 00:22:03.160 Absolutely agreed. 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 00:22:07.640 --> 00:22:09.800 exciting hypotheses early on. 00:22:09.960 --> 00:22:14.680 And then, as is the case with you know all kinds of generative and productive scientific 00:22:14.680 --> 00:22:19.000 enterprises, there's uh pruning, and then there's more generation, and then there's further 00:22:19.000 --> 00:22:19.480 pruning. 00:22:19.570 --> 00:22:22.130 And there's not an absolute consensus in this area. 00:22:22.290 --> 00:22:25.810 I think that you could have guests that might disagree with some of my perspective, but 00:22:25.810 --> 00:22:27.330 I'll give you mine here. 00:22:28.130 --> 00:22:33.570 Some of the early work in this area, uh, by Mark Schaller, by uh really, really smart 00:22:33.570 --> 00:22:39.570 people like Dan Fessler, Carlos Navarrett, also uh Randy Thornhill, a lot of it was focused 00:22:39.570 --> 00:22:45.500 on this idea of outgroup biases and prejudices having something to do with pathogen 00:22:45.500 --> 00:22:45.980 avoidance. 00:22:46.060 --> 00:22:50.300 And the authors that I just mentioned, some of them have slightly different perspectives on 00:22:50.300 --> 00:22:50.540 this. 00:22:50.780 --> 00:22:55.900 But I'll give you the account from the parasite stress model, which has some commonalities 00:22:55.900 --> 00:22:57.180 with other accounts. 00:22:57.420 --> 00:23:03.420 The idea here is that people specialize their immune responses 00:23:03.420 --> 00:23:05.660 to pathogens in their local ecologies. 00:23:05.740 --> 00:23:09.660 And the pathogens in different ecologies are going to be different. 00:23:09.970 --> 00:23:15.730 And so if you have two groups that live, let's say, on two different sides of a 00:23:15.730 --> 00:23:21.730 mountain or across an ocean, they're going to develop some immunity 00:23:21.730 --> 00:23:25.410 based on their exposure to specific pathogens in their ecologies. 00:23:25.810 --> 00:23:31.570 And so the average interaction with someone from your ecology who shares some 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 00:23:37.340 --> 00:23:41.340 because you have some immunity to the pathogens that that person is going to transmit to 00:23:41.340 --> 00:23:45.260 you if you're shaking their hand or eating food with them or something like that. 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 00:23:50.380 --> 00:23:55.100 has exposure to different pathogens that you might not have some adaptive immunity toward, 00:23:55.580 --> 00:23:59.900 that interaction is going to be more likely to infect you with something that has higher 00:23:59.900 --> 00:24:00.460 costs for you. 00:24:00.540 --> 00:24:02.350 And those costs could ultimately be death. 00:24:02.510 --> 00:24:06.670 But of course, pathogen with pathogens is not you die or you don't die. 00:24:07.150 --> 00:24:08.510 There are metabolic costs. 00:24:08.670 --> 00:24:12.030 You could infect social partners or kin. 00:24:12.510 --> 00:24:16.350 There could be phenotypic differences that lead you to be stigmatized. 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 00:24:20.510 --> 00:24:21.230 infection. 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 00:24:27.390 --> 00:24:33.260 cue to pathogens, or at least to the infectiousness or the danger 00:24:33.260 --> 00:24:34.780 of pathogens to you. 00:24:35.020 --> 00:24:40.220 And hence, we should see these relations between disgust sensitivity and outgroup biases. 00:24:40.380 --> 00:24:45.100 So the individuals who, when they see pathogen cues, they feel more disgusted. 00:24:45.580 --> 00:24:50.140 Their affective systems are basically investing more in avoidance in response to these cues 00:24:50.140 --> 00:24:52.460 than the people who are low on disgust sensitivity. 00:24:52.780 --> 00:24:56.860 Those high disgust sensitivity individuals should be more biased against outgroups. 00:24:56.970 --> 00:25:02.010 uh, we should see greater inner group biases in parts of the world with a higher 00:25:02.010 --> 00:25:04.970 concentration of parasites, et cetera. 00:25:05.290 --> 00:25:07.450 So that's the argument. 00:25:07.610 --> 00:25:12.890 And there are a lot of studies that have been interpreted as supporting that argument. 00:25:13.290 --> 00:25:17.610 Um, I have personally been skeptical of that argument for a few reasons. 00:25:17.690 --> 00:25:22.490 And part of this might be uh my background in social psychology as it is. 00:25:22.740 --> 00:25:28.100 And Dave Petrozky, uh, given that you're interested in groups and group psychology, you 00:25:28.100 --> 00:25:30.100 might have some thoughts to add to this as well. 00:25:30.340 --> 00:25:36.020 Um, one is that the psychology of groups has very little overlap with uh ecological origin. 00:25:36.420 --> 00:25:41.540 And this perspective really is centered around people come from different ecologies that 00:25:41.540 --> 00:25:42.900 have different pathogens. 00:25:43.150 --> 00:25:48.110 So the minimal group paradigm, which was developed in the 1970s, demonstrates that if you 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 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 00:25:58.190 --> 00:26:01.150 these manifestations of intergroup biases. 00:26:02.430 --> 00:26:08.270 The erasing race work, and Dave, your other work on alliance detections and the 00:26:08.270 --> 00:26:14.200 Who Said What paradigm suggests that the way that group membership is encoded 00:26:14.600 --> 00:26:19.880 based on phenotypic features is kind of flexible and probably tracking coalitions more so 00:26:19.880 --> 00:26:21.960 than it's tracking ecological origins. 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 00:26:27.400 --> 00:26:32.970 paradigm studies suggests that these perceptions or at least behaviors of intergroup 00:26:32.970 --> 00:26:36.250 biases are really tracking assumptions of interdependence. 00:26:36.570 --> 00:26:42.170 So kind of first principle aspects of this account leave me 00:26:42.170 --> 00:26:47.770 skeptical that we would actually be treating out group members per se as 00:26:47.770 --> 00:26:49.130 accused of pathogens. 00:26:49.690 --> 00:26:50.970 I'll pause there in case, yeah. 00:26:51.370 --> 00:26:51.690 Yeah. 00:26:52.090 --> 00:26:53.860 So I I fully agree. 00:26:53.940 --> 00:26:57.060 I I share your skepticism of this hypothesis. 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, 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 00:27:06.820 --> 00:27:10.340 interaction has some pathogen risk associated with it. 00:27:10.580 --> 00:27:15.300 And we should have evolved to weigh the costs of those pathogen risks against the potential 00:27:15.300 --> 00:27:15.860 benefits. 00:27:16.070 --> 00:27:21.830 And so, insofar as you view outgroups as lower value social partners, then the 00:27:21.830 --> 00:27:24.710 costs of interacting them with them may outweigh the benefits. 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 00:27:30.070 --> 00:27:31.830 pathogen risk and therefore you're avoiding them. 00:27:31.910 --> 00:27:34.070 It's that you already don't like them for other reasons. 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 00:27:39.660 --> 00:27:45.020 like, then that could uh contribute to some you know, say greater disgust toward outgroups 00:27:45.100 --> 00:27:49.260 or disgust might win the battle in terms of the cost-benefit analysis of interacting with 00:27:49.260 --> 00:27:49.340 them. 00:27:49.500 --> 00:27:53.100 Do you do you buy that um grain of truth story? 00:27:53.420 --> 00:27:53.740 Yeah. 00:27:53.980 --> 00:27:54.940 Yeah, absolutely. 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 00:28:01.070 --> 00:28:05.630 uh the majority of our path to avoidance psychology in terms of social interactions is 00:28:05.630 --> 00:28:06.910 based on two things. 00:28:07.150 --> 00:28:12.590 One of them is: does this person actually have a feature that is diagnostic of 00:28:12.590 --> 00:28:13.390 infection? 00:28:13.550 --> 00:28:19.540 And I'm skeptical that things like old age or obesity, uh, some cues that 00:28:19.540 --> 00:28:24.820 have been proposed uh when this literature first started developing are actually treated as 00:28:24.820 --> 00:28:28.580 diagnostic of being contagious with an infection right then. 00:28:28.900 --> 00:28:34.260 I would bet, well, maybe not bet money, but uh reputation, that um 00:28:34.740 --> 00:28:40.020 the the cues that people interpret as diagnostic of contagion are really going to be 00:28:40.020 --> 00:28:45.950 limited to things like oozing sores on the face, things related to skin color, skin 00:28:45.950 --> 00:28:49.950 texture, irregular dots of color, that type of stuff. 00:28:50.190 --> 00:28:56.190 So that's going to be one feature that's important in kind of regulating this. 00:28:56.590 --> 00:28:58.910 Do I take a risk associated with pathogens? 00:28:59.070 --> 00:29:02.110 How likely is this person that has uh has an infection? 00:29:02.270 --> 00:29:08.000 One interesting thing about that is that the actual pathogens that infect people now don't 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 00:29:13.120 --> 00:29:15.520 ago or two million years ago or anything like that. 00:29:15.760 --> 00:29:21.200 A lot of times what we're responding to is other individuals' immune systems activating. 00:29:22.320 --> 00:29:26.960 And in fact, some researchers at the Karolinski Institute have this really cool method 00:29:26.960 --> 00:29:31.750 where they inject their participants with something called lipopolysaccharide. 00:29:32.230 --> 00:29:37.190 It's like the cell wall of bacteria that cause infections. 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 00:29:42.390 --> 00:29:47.590 cell walls do provoke an innate immune response, high level, high increases in things like 00:29:47.830 --> 00:29:52.870 interleukin 6, pro-inflammatory cytokines, and they feel really sick for like six hours. 00:29:53.040 --> 00:29:56.400 And so um awesome study. 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 00:30:01.680 --> 00:30:02.480 the LPS. 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 00:30:06.240 --> 00:30:08.720 much know what condition they're in pretty quickly. 00:30:09.440 --> 00:30:14.320 Um, but in some of their studies, they've taken photographs of the individuals who have 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 00:30:18.800 --> 00:30:21.360 counterbalanced order, gotten the placebo. 00:30:21.600 --> 00:30:25.630 And um you can really tell which one was the sick one. 00:30:25.870 --> 00:30:31.710 So uh just based on internal inflammation, you can detect cues to another person 00:30:31.710 --> 00:30:33.310 having uh an immune response. 00:30:33.630 --> 00:30:34.190 Is it anyway? 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 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. 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 00:30:44.110 --> 00:30:47.070 we or do we not know what cues they're picking up on? 00:30:47.420 --> 00:30:47.980 Oh yeah. 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. 00:30:52.300 --> 00:30:56.460 But um yeah, they look paler, the eyes look a little puffy. 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. 00:31:02.300 --> 00:31:04.540 Uh the sclera look a little bit less clear. 00:31:04.860 --> 00:31:06.940 And that's just with visual cues, right? 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 00:31:10.700 --> 00:31:11.580 like right on time for you. 00:31:11.660 --> 00:31:12.700 And like I sound different. 00:31:12.860 --> 00:31:18.570 I assume a lot of the inflammation of of these areas is also 00:31:18.730 --> 00:31:23.050 has really, you know, we have a lot of machinery for detecting very subtle acoustic 00:31:23.050 --> 00:31:23.690 differences. 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 00:31:28.250 --> 00:31:31.450 really tell when somebody is like, you know, congested and or not. 00:31:31.610 --> 00:31:31.930 Yeah. 00:31:32.250 --> 00:31:32.730 Absolutely. 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, 00:31:37.050 --> 00:31:37.610 are you sick? 00:31:37.770 --> 00:31:38.490 Are you feeling okay? 00:31:38.570 --> 00:31:40.570 Do you think no it's allergies. 00:31:40.650 --> 00:31:40.810 Yeah. 00:31:40.890 --> 00:31:41.850 No, somebody will be like, yeah. 00:31:42.010 --> 00:31:42.090 Yeah. 00:31:42.720 --> 00:31:42.800 yeah. 00:31:43.280 --> 00:31:47.760 Um, another evolutionary psychologist, Josh Ackerman, has an interesting research program 00:31:47.760 --> 00:31:52.800 right now on people uh concealing whether they're sick because there could be cost to 00:31:52.800 --> 00:31:57.200 disclosing that you're infected to other individuals based on how they treat you, uh 00:31:57.280 --> 00:31:59.040 opportunities they might give you, etc. 00:31:59.440 --> 00:32:04.400 But uh regardless, there's this one part of our pathogen avoidance psychology, which should 00:32:04.400 --> 00:32:10.400 be um trying to detect or estimate how likely someone is to uh be contagious, right, 00:32:10.480 --> 00:32:11.360 at this moment. 00:32:11.670 --> 00:32:17.510 The other part is well, we basically don't know if anyone we can't, we 00:32:17.510 --> 00:32:19.750 don't have perfect knowledge that people are contagious. 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 00:32:25.430 --> 00:32:26.870 going to have perfect knowledge. 00:32:27.430 --> 00:32:31.030 And, you know, some sometimes infections aren't producing any symptoms at all. 00:32:31.190 --> 00:32:35.190 Sometimes these symptoms are are of, you know, they could be false alarms in terms of 00:32:35.190 --> 00:32:35.990 detection. 00:32:36.340 --> 00:32:40.580 But we do need to take these risks with all individuals who don't necessarily have 00:32:40.580 --> 00:32:41.140 symptoms. 00:32:41.220 --> 00:32:47.060 And so we should be calibrating those risks based on things not related to pathogens, but 00:32:47.060 --> 00:32:53.060 rather based on how beneficial is contact and proximity with this individual? 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 00:32:59.450 --> 00:33:01.770 in the absence of any kind of visual cues. 00:33:02.010 --> 00:33:07.850 So, in one paper that Deb Lieberman and I and Tom Kupfer and some other 00:33:08.170 --> 00:33:14.090 Le Fan and Rainette Fries published a while ago, we tested this idea that it's 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 00:33:19.130 --> 00:33:20.410 know this kind of thing. 00:33:20.650 --> 00:33:25.700 Um, we just randomly assigned participants to think about uh a target. 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 00:33:29.540 --> 00:33:35.540 closest friend or an acquaintance or an enemy, someone that they know well, 00:33:35.620 --> 00:33:37.300 but they really can't stand. 00:33:37.460 --> 00:33:41.220 And we asked them these questions how comfortable would you be sharing drinking from a 00:33:41.220 --> 00:33:45.540 water bottle that this person drank from, touching this person's socks after they 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. 00:33:49.860 --> 00:33:54.430 So none of them required them to actually touch the person or risk transmitting pathogens 00:33:54.430 --> 00:33:59.550 to that individual, but basically just touch something they touched and have some risk of 00:33:59.550 --> 00:34:01.230 pathogens being transmitted to them. 00:34:01.390 --> 00:34:07.230 And you just get these gigantic effect sizes, even though these individuals have no cues 00:34:07.230 --> 00:34:08.750 to pathogens that we're aware of. 00:34:08.830 --> 00:34:10.990 You know, we just ask them to think about this person. 00:34:12.030 --> 00:34:17.620 And so that's some good evidence that people are calibrating their pathogen avoidance 00:34:17.620 --> 00:34:22.820 tendencies for specific individuals based on how important that person is to them. 00:34:23.300 --> 00:34:29.300 But we further propose that within these folk categories, there should be variation in 00:34:29.300 --> 00:34:32.900 how much you value that relationship with that target. 00:34:33.140 --> 00:34:39.060 So Dave Pinsoff, you might value your best friend more than Dave Petrozowski, you 00:34:39.060 --> 00:34:42.500 value your best friend, or you might value the acquaintance that you think of more than 00:34:42.500 --> 00:34:45.300 Dave Petrozzewski values the acquaintance that he thinks of. 00:34:45.490 --> 00:34:50.290 So we also administered something called a welfare trade-off task, something developed by 00:34:50.290 --> 00:34:51.730 uh Dave Petrozicki. 00:34:51.810 --> 00:34:54.770 You probably went to grad school with Andy Delton and uh Tess Robertson. 00:34:54.850 --> 00:34:56.210 You were probably there at the same time. 00:34:56.450 --> 00:34:59.810 But this is this is developed from the UCSB group. 00:35:00.370 --> 00:35:04.450 And if there are psychologists in the audience, this is very similar to something called 00:35:04.450 --> 00:35:07.250 social value orientation, but it's target specific. 00:35:07.570 --> 00:35:13.020 But effectively, what you assess is the proportion of 00:35:13.020 --> 00:35:18.460 benefit that you would be willing to give up for a target to get some 00:35:18.460 --> 00:35:19.100 benefit. 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 00:35:25.260 --> 00:35:28.860 Dave Petrozowski always gets uh 30 bucks. 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 00:35:33.820 --> 00:35:33.980 30? 00:35:34.140 --> 00:35:37.580 Would you rather get 60 or Dave Petrozki get 30, etc., etc.? 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 00:35:42.870 --> 00:35:48.630 Dave Petrozowski to get that benefit, you can estimate the ratio of uh the 00:35:48.630 --> 00:35:52.790 target's welfare uh relative to your own that you're willing to give up. 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 00:35:58.070 --> 00:36:02.660 these really consistent correlations also within these kind of folk categories. 00:36:02.820 --> 00:36:06.660 The people who value their closest friend more are also more comfortable with these 00:36:06.660 --> 00:36:07.860 pathogen risks. 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, 00:36:13.060 --> 00:36:14.900 correlation coefficients are like 0.7. 00:36:15.300 --> 00:36:17.300 It's insanely large. 00:36:19.620 --> 00:36:21.380 We replicated this over multiple studies. 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 00:36:26.260 --> 00:36:31.030 described them with the personality traits uh high in honesty, humility, and agreeableness, 00:36:31.110 --> 00:36:33.590 or low in honesty, humility, and agreeableness. 00:36:33.750 --> 00:36:39.350 And these are personality traits that meta-analyses show predict cooperation in anonymous 00:36:39.350 --> 00:36:40.630 interactions between strangers. 00:36:40.790 --> 00:36:43.430 So amount of money you give in a prisoner's dilemma, for example. 00:36:43.590 --> 00:36:45.110 And we see the same thing. 00:36:45.350 --> 00:36:50.790 Um, you see the same thing in that context, meaning even with a stranger, 00:36:51.110 --> 00:36:57.060 you're more likely to tolerate disease from them if they're higher on 00:36:57.060 --> 00:36:57.940 these traits. 00:36:58.260 --> 00:36:58.900 That's correct. 00:36:59.220 --> 00:37:02.500 I'm more willing to share a drink with a nice guy than with an asshole. 00:37:02.580 --> 00:37:05.940 And it's interesting that we use that term asshole because it itself elicits disgust. 00:37:07.700 --> 00:37:08.020 Yeah. 00:37:08.340 --> 00:37:09.220 Yeah, that's right. 00:37:09.460 --> 00:37:15.220 So looping back to the COVID study, this was one thing that we replicated strongly within 00:37:15.220 --> 00:37:16.180 that COVID study. 00:37:16.340 --> 00:37:21.930 So at the four different time points that we surveyed participants, we randomly assign them 00:37:21.930 --> 00:37:26.410 to have a different target and assessed welfare trade-off ratio across those times. 00:37:26.490 --> 00:37:30.090 And we see that within participant as well as but as well as between participants. 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 00:37:34.330 --> 00:37:39.610 apart, you have this really strong relationship that, yes, an individual, when they think 00:37:39.610 --> 00:37:45.160 of someone who they have a higher interpersonal value for, they're more comfortable taking 00:37:45.160 --> 00:37:50.200 these uh infection risks just based on touching things that another person has touched than 00:37:50.200 --> 00:37:52.840 someone that they have a low interpersonal value for. 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 00:37:58.920 --> 00:38:04.920 sensitivity on these measures to other things that sort of from first principles you would 00:38:04.920 --> 00:38:05.480 expect. 00:38:05.960 --> 00:38:07.910 So like relationship, yeah. 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 00:38:13.110 --> 00:38:15.110 steel man that hypothesis? 00:38:15.190 --> 00:38:18.310 Is it the argument that it's specific kinds of groups? 00:38:18.550 --> 00:38:23.750 Or how it sounds really bad for the group, the the group pathogen 00:38:24.070 --> 00:38:24.710 idea. 00:38:25.990 --> 00:38:31.910 Um so with my former PhD student, Annika Karnan, we have another paper in 00:38:31.910 --> 00:38:37.700 which um this was a registered report where you have hypotheses peer review before the 00:38:37.700 --> 00:38:40.900 data are uh are published or before the results are known. 00:38:40.980 --> 00:38:46.340 But we randomly signed participants to read about an immigrant that was either uh really 00:38:46.340 --> 00:38:49.940 low on assimilation or really high on assimilation. 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 00:38:55.300 --> 00:38:57.060 in contact or low in contact. 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 00:39:00.870 --> 00:39:02.070 integrating in town. 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 00:39:07.830 --> 00:39:08.630 country. 00:39:09.030 --> 00:39:14.390 We did see that discuss sensitivity was related to anti-immigrant attitudes when they were 00:39:14.390 --> 00:39:19.750 not assimilating, but they were not related to the anti-immigrant attitudes when they are 00:39:19.750 --> 00:39:20.470 assimilating. 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 00:39:26.300 --> 00:39:30.460 a cue for being a good co-op, a valuable uh interactions uh partner. 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 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. 00:39:40.220 --> 00:39:44.540 And so you could still have people varying on their trait level pathogen avoidance, and 00:39:44.540 --> 00:39:50.350 depending on how they're framing that immigrant in terms of being uh a likely uh 00:39:50.350 --> 00:39:53.710 benefit socially versus not, you could get this relationship. 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 00:39:59.710 --> 00:40:04.670 sort of overriding the social valuation system. 00:40:05.150 --> 00:40:10.180 It's that the social valuation system is sort of tracking: is this somebody worth 00:40:10.180 --> 00:40:10.820 interacting with? 00:40:10.980 --> 00:40:12.020 Is it a friend? 00:40:12.180 --> 00:40:14.820 Is it somebody who I'm going to get benefits from? 00:40:15.220 --> 00:40:19.940 What's the what's the likely forecast of social value? 00:40:20.180 --> 00:40:26.020 And then if that's already low, then all of the problems or cons of interacting 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. 00:40:31.540 --> 00:40:34.980 And one of those cons might be pathogen. 00:40:35.890 --> 00:40:39.010 but but it sounds like roughly speaking, that's the order. 00:40:39.170 --> 00:40:42.770 Is that a fair characterization of the literature as you see it? 00:40:43.170 --> 00:40:44.610 Um yes. 00:40:44.770 --> 00:40:50.770 Although I I I think that this idea of outgroups being categorized as a pathogen thread 00:40:50.770 --> 00:40:52.690 is still prevalent in the literature. 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 00:40:58.760 --> 00:41:03.080 would be curious how uh how others generally uh look at this. 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, 00:41:08.040 --> 00:41:13.960 maybe it was in your podcast with Deb Lieberman, some other work on uh pathogen avoidance 00:41:13.960 --> 00:41:15.160 and sexual strategies. 00:41:15.320 --> 00:41:19.000 So there's another finding that's been prevalent in the literature, and that is that 00:41:19.160 --> 00:41:24.770 largely in US samples, although there's some cross-cultural data that support this as well. 00:41:25.010 --> 00:41:29.490 Individuals who are higher in discuss sensitivity tend to be more politically conservative. 00:41:29.570 --> 00:41:35.090 So they score higher on measures of right-wing authoritarianism and traditionalism and just 00:41:35.090 --> 00:41:40.130 self-identification as liberal versus conservative, especially on social issues. 00:41:40.370 --> 00:41:45.330 And again, the argument for this relation has really tied back to intergroup interactions 00:41:45.410 --> 00:41:51.340 for the most part, suggesting that those who are more invested in avoiding pathogens should 00:41:51.340 --> 00:41:56.940 find these right wing ideologies more appealing because they interrupt intergroup 00:41:56.940 --> 00:41:59.980 interactions and they're anti immigrant and that type of stuff. 00:42:00.220 --> 00:42:04.380 For the same reasons that I articulated earlier, that there are some reasons to be 00:42:04.380 --> 00:42:07.100 skeptical of that account. 00:42:07.660 --> 00:42:13.580 My colleagues, including uh Yal Imbar and Catherine Moulho, and I suggested that 00:42:13.910 --> 00:42:19.590 maybe this could be a byproduct of something else, namely sexual strategies, in that 00:42:19.830 --> 00:42:25.350 having kind of more permissive reproductive lifestyles or reproductive strategies 00:42:25.670 --> 00:42:27.990 exposes people to higher pathogen threats. 00:42:28.070 --> 00:42:33.670 So people need to kind of weigh how valuable is having a less restricted sexual 00:42:33.670 --> 00:42:39.220 life to me relative to the higher pathogen costs imposed by that lifestyle. 00:42:39.380 --> 00:42:44.180 And this need not just be what we call sexually transmitted infections, which are called 00:42:44.180 --> 00:42:47.540 that because they are transmitted via sex specifically. 00:42:47.700 --> 00:42:51.300 So they infect largely genitals and are transmitted via genitals. 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 00:42:56.180 --> 00:42:57.140 having sex with them. 00:42:57.300 --> 00:43:01.220 And so individuals who are especially invested in avoiding pathogens, they might actually 00:43:01.220 --> 00:43:06.530 select reproductive strategies that uh lower that risk of pathogen 00:43:06.690 --> 00:43:07.330 transmission. 00:43:07.490 --> 00:43:12.610 And once you have a specific reproductive strategy, certain political ideologies are more 00:43:12.610 --> 00:43:16.050 favorable versus disfavorable to those strategies. 00:43:16.290 --> 00:43:19.490 So, of course, this is in line with David Pinsoff. 00:43:19.570 --> 00:43:22.610 You've probably discussed some of this on one of these podcasts. 00:43:23.650 --> 00:43:29.010 But uh conservative ideologies, they're often disincentivizing 00:43:29.440 --> 00:43:32.560 these more unrestricted type of sexual lifestyles. 00:43:32.720 --> 00:43:36.800 So they're making it harder to get abortion abortions, access to birth control, they're 00:43:36.800 --> 00:43:40.560 moralizing pornography and hookups and that type of stuff. 00:43:40.720 --> 00:43:45.920 And so you might get this relation where you have more pathogen avoidant 00:43:45.920 --> 00:43:46.800 individuals. 00:43:47.200 --> 00:43:49.440 They select these specific sexual strategies. 00:43:49.520 --> 00:43:54.400 And then based on sexual strategies, people sort into these political coalitions partially. 00:43:54.720 --> 00:44:00.250 And so this bivariate relation between pathogen avoidance and political 00:44:00.490 --> 00:44:04.010 values might be operating through these uh sexual strategies. 00:44:04.170 --> 00:44:05.290 And that's what we find. 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, 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 00:44:16.570 --> 00:44:21.770 relation between how disgusted they are by the pathogen things and um political values, 00:44:21.930 --> 00:44:24.890 once you control for the the sexual disgust. 00:44:25.400 --> 00:44:27.800 Some of that uh original work, too. 00:44:27.880 --> 00:44:31.080 I I my understanding was it didn't really replicate. 00:44:31.240 --> 00:44:34.280 So some of the like I like John Hibbing, for example. 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 00:44:40.040 --> 00:44:42.680 conservatives being more disgust prone. 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 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 00:44:53.690 --> 00:44:54.730 stuff holds up. 00:44:54.890 --> 00:44:58.570 Um is you what is your understanding of that? 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 00:45:03.530 --> 00:45:07.610 difference it's driven through this sexual um path. 00:45:07.930 --> 00:45:12.410 So the the this is quite robust actually just the the self-reports of discuss sensitivity 00:45:12.410 --> 00:45:15.660 relating to the self-reports of political ideology. 00:45:15.900 --> 00:45:21.260 What uh John Hibbing and others have published that is not replicable 00:45:21.980 --> 00:45:24.860 is largely, I believe, psychophysiological measures. 00:45:25.420 --> 00:45:31.420 So, you know, they were looking at conservatives versus liberals in 00:45:31.420 --> 00:45:36.780 threat reactivity using things like galvanic skin response, etc. 00:45:37.340 --> 00:45:43.330 And uh multiple researchers, Ev and Eva in the Eve 00:45:43.410 --> 00:45:49.010 community have contributed this, basically suggesting that uh a lot of what these measures, 00:45:49.170 --> 00:45:52.050 a lot of what these methods are assessing is is noise. 00:45:52.290 --> 00:45:57.730 And uh papers publishing these findings have capitalized on um 00:45:58.050 --> 00:45:59.860 noisy data at best. 00:46:00.180 --> 00:46:00.660 Okay, great. 00:46:00.740 --> 00:46:02.180 Well, thank you for clarifying that. 00:46:02.340 --> 00:46:07.540 Um, what what is your bottom line take on on like wrapping this aspect up? 00:46:07.940 --> 00:46:13.380 How important is this behavioral immune system idea? 00:46:13.460 --> 00:46:17.540 From there's two ways I understood like broadly, and maybe this is an oversimplification. 00:46:17.700 --> 00:46:23.380 One is you have to deal with the fact that pathogens exist while making a social 00:46:23.380 --> 00:46:24.020 living. 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 00:46:29.370 --> 00:46:33.930 social choices than you might think, even in terms of like interacting with somebody. 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 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. 00:46:42.090 --> 00:46:45.930 The other one is sort of saying, No, you actually really choose your soul social partners 00:46:46.010 --> 00:46:47.930 even based on cues of illness. 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? 00:46:54.060 --> 00:46:55.820 No, I think that they're both right. 00:46:56.060 --> 00:46:59.260 The thing is that individuals get sick all the time. 00:46:59.420 --> 00:47:04.700 So of course you have long-term social relationships and you don't just abandon someone 00:47:04.700 --> 00:47:05.260 when they're sick. 00:47:05.340 --> 00:47:06.220 I mean, that could happen. 00:47:06.540 --> 00:47:07.100 Yeah, exactly. 00:47:07.180 --> 00:47:09.740 Yeah, no, that's but um but generally you don't. 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 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. 00:47:19.090 --> 00:47:24.690 And of course, that's exacerbated in modern contexts with you know indoor air sharing and 00:47:24.690 --> 00:47:27.490 respiratory viruses and daycare. 00:47:27.650 --> 00:47:32.530 There is something to kind of short-term interactions, interactions with strangers where we 00:47:32.530 --> 00:47:38.450 might kind of approach specific individuals for those types of interactions 00:47:38.450 --> 00:47:40.530 differently depending on whether they're infectious. 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 00:47:45.220 --> 00:47:48.180 uh cues to infection, even if they're close to us. 00:47:48.340 --> 00:47:54.340 Um, but yes, I would say that pathogens, huge problem, impact all sorts of aspects 00:47:54.340 --> 00:47:58.180 of our social psychology and our food psychology and our mating psychology, et cetera. 00:47:58.420 --> 00:48:04.030 And uh we are we are going to be able to tell to a degree uh 00:48:04.190 --> 00:48:05.710 which people are sick when. 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 00:48:10.990 --> 00:48:16.030 pathogen transmission risk, just because humans are the most likely things to infect us, 00:48:16.110 --> 00:48:17.950 even in the absence of things that we can detect. 00:48:18.270 --> 00:48:18.510 Right. 00:48:18.670 --> 00:48:18.990 Cool. 00:48:19.150 --> 00:48:19.390 Yeah. 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 00:48:24.190 --> 00:48:29.020 which episode, was that something like sex, it might have been with Deb, um, Deb Lieberman. 00:48:29.260 --> 00:48:35.260 Was that, you know, given that this pathogen avoidance is a primary thing in 00:48:35.260 --> 00:48:41.100 our psychology, then as you say, certain other co-adaptations or other adaptations will 00:48:41.100 --> 00:48:44.620 co-vary the disgust sensitivity when there's a benefit. 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 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 00:48:54.910 --> 00:48:55.310 to me. 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 00:48:58.990 --> 00:48:59.390 at all. 00:49:00.110 --> 00:49:01.470 At least that's my experience. 00:49:01.710 --> 00:49:07.550 So has there been work in mating or parenting on the turning down of 00:49:07.550 --> 00:49:11.390 disgust sensitivity, which you would expect like there to be really big effects for? 00:49:11.710 --> 00:49:14.270 Yeah, it's it's difficult to do this work well. 00:49:14.430 --> 00:49:17.390 I I would say that those things are absolutely true. 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. 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 00:49:30.580 --> 00:49:32.340 how we're thinking about that that much. 00:49:32.660 --> 00:49:37.300 But I can comment on the little research that's been done with parenting. 00:49:37.540 --> 00:49:43.380 There is a study in which uh some researchers in Australia, Dick Stevenson, Trevor Case, 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 00:49:49.010 --> 00:49:51.250 versus other people's baby's diapers. 00:49:51.650 --> 00:49:55.090 And they said that they'd be more disgusted by other people's baby's diapers. 00:49:55.250 --> 00:50:00.450 And then they had a smell test where parents actually did a blind diaper smelling test. 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 00:50:06.920 --> 00:50:10.040 So in this study, you will be smelling diapers. 00:50:10.120 --> 00:50:15.560 Some of them will be uh the the finding reported is that parents find their own 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 00:50:20.680 --> 00:50:21.160 diaper. 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 00:50:26.280 --> 00:50:26.600 time. 00:50:26.760 --> 00:50:29.800 Um, but I I'm not familiar with other research on the topic. 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, 00:50:34.630 --> 00:50:40.550 looking at uh these same variables of contact comfort, but having the child be 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 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 00:50:51.270 --> 00:50:54.700 to the dependency of the child on you. 00:50:54.940 --> 00:50:56.220 So stay tuned. 00:50:56.300 --> 00:50:59.580 We might have some interesting results at some point. 00:50:59.820 --> 00:51:05.020 In terms of mating, there's a similar issue in that it's both difficult 00:51:05.020 --> 00:51:10.940 methodologically and then also questioning whether the method that 00:51:10.940 --> 00:51:14.540 you're using actually tracks with the question that you want to be asking. 00:51:14.790 --> 00:51:19.990 So there's a famous and perhaps infamous study by Dan Arielli in which he asked 00:51:19.990 --> 00:51:23.990 participants to uh masturbate while they were completing questionnaires. 00:51:24.470 --> 00:51:29.030 And they said that they were willing to do all sorts of disgusting things in the 00:51:29.190 --> 00:51:32.790 participants were masturbating condition more than in the other condition. 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 00:51:37.590 --> 00:51:37.750 it. 00:51:37.910 --> 00:51:43.160 And then there are various studies in which participants have watched erotic videos or had 00:51:43.160 --> 00:51:46.200 guided visualizations, and then you ask them to do disgusting things. 00:51:46.280 --> 00:51:49.880 And some studies have found that yes, that's the case. 00:51:50.040 --> 00:51:52.840 People are willing to do more disgusting things. 00:51:53.160 --> 00:51:58.680 But this is a broader issue in these kinds of approaches of what can 00:51:58.760 --> 00:52:04.040 broadly be described as priming, which is do you should you actually expect the system to 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 00:52:08.650 --> 00:52:14.490 more open to exposure to pathogens versus should this be really targeted 00:52:14.490 --> 00:52:20.410 toward um whatever is elisting that sexual arousal and targeted toward the specific types 00:52:20.410 --> 00:52:22.970 of pathogen risks that are necessary for sex. 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 00:52:29.370 --> 00:52:34.860 a pretty blunt design feature to say, okay, I I'm in a state of sexual 00:52:34.860 --> 00:52:35.500 arousal. 00:52:35.660 --> 00:52:38.940 I'm going to eat that yogurt that expired two months ago. 00:52:39.740 --> 00:52:40.300 Not impossible. 00:52:40.780 --> 00:52:41.660 This happens all the time. 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. 00:52:46.780 --> 00:52:47.100 Yeah. 00:52:47.740 --> 00:52:51.980 But I would guess that it has uh better design features than that. 00:52:52.140 --> 00:52:52.620 Yeah. 00:52:52.940 --> 00:52:55.070 Yeah, No, I love the way you're thinking about this. 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 00:53:00.910 --> 00:53:01.710 it it was. 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 00:53:07.790 --> 00:53:12.030 system, they sort of underestimated just how sophisticated and well-designed uh it, in 00:53:12.030 --> 00:53:16.860 fact, is that we're not just indiscriminately viewing anyone from a quote unquote out group 00:53:17.020 --> 00:53:21.260 as a pathogen threat or anyone who quote unquote looks different as a pathogen threat, that 00:53:21.260 --> 00:53:24.060 the system is actually more subtle and sophisticated than this. 00:53:24.140 --> 00:53:27.660 It's actually using valid cues to uh pathogen risk. 00:53:27.900 --> 00:53:31.500 And most of the decision-making variance is going to be explained by more subtle 00:53:31.500 --> 00:53:33.740 calculations of social valuation. 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 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 00:53:44.050 --> 00:53:49.490 costs are going to be um worth incurring to get the benefits of the social relationship. 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 00:53:55.010 --> 00:53:58.450 think about this system uh in terms of this logic. 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. 00:54:05.010 --> 00:54:10.280 So around the world we have handshakes, hugs, uh kissing on the cheek. 00:54:10.360 --> 00:54:13.640 Um, these are ways that we signal affiliation with a group of people. 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 00:54:18.680 --> 00:54:21.480 me, um that could be viewed as insulting, and rightly so. 00:54:21.560 --> 00:54:26.840 And I think your theory explains why these are such common signals of social affiliation. 00:54:26.920 --> 00:54:28.680 Uh they are in fact costly signals. 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 00:54:34.200 --> 00:54:35.480 relationship with someone. 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 00:54:41.610 --> 00:54:42.730 of affiliation. 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 00:54:47.850 --> 00:54:52.090 quote unquote kinky sexual practices that I think also fits in with your with your 00:54:52.090 --> 00:54:57.690 theorizing, uh, which is that if um um doing if 00:54:57.690 --> 00:55:03.140 pathogen risk can be a costly signal of affiliation, it might be that doing 00:55:03.140 --> 00:55:06.420 disgusting things sexually can be a costly signal of sexual arousal. 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 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 00:55:15.940 --> 00:55:16.420 aroused. 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 00:55:20.340 --> 00:55:25.790 aroused versus faking it, um, if they're willing to do disgusting things, then that could 00:55:25.790 --> 00:55:28.830 be a hard to fake signal that they truly are aroused. 00:55:28.910 --> 00:55:33.390 And the same thing goes for potentially dangerous things in the bedroom, like BDSM stuff. 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 00:55:38.990 --> 00:55:44.350 dangerous things like getting handcuffed or choked or whatever, then that is a hard to fake 00:55:44.350 --> 00:55:45.950 signal of sexual arousal. 00:55:46.110 --> 00:55:50.510 Anyway, that's my pet theory about what might explain some of these practices. 00:55:50.590 --> 00:55:52.270 I'm curious if you if you buy it or not. 00:55:52.780 --> 00:55:55.260 I I look forward to the BBS paper. 00:55:57.580 --> 00:55:59.500 No, that sounds really that sounds really interesting. 00:55:59.660 --> 00:56:04.860 I mean this is um you point out something that for evolutionary psychologists this is uh 00:56:04.940 --> 00:56:05.740 this is a mystery. 00:56:05.900 --> 00:56:09.420 Why are these types of things uh prominent across cultures? 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 00:56:15.020 --> 00:56:20.650 some behavioral genetics work And I've collaborated with a researcher in Finland who runs 00:56:20.650 --> 00:56:23.370 the genetics of sexuality and aggression database. 00:56:23.450 --> 00:56:27.130 So he has population level data on BDSM practices. 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 00:56:32.810 --> 00:56:34.570 reports engaging in these. 00:56:35.610 --> 00:56:40.970 But that small proportion is present in Finland, present in Germany, present in the 00:56:40.970 --> 00:56:45.290 Netherlands, present in the US, present in Japan, etc. 00:56:46.420 --> 00:56:52.180 and uh presumably via independent kind of pathways popping up. 00:56:52.340 --> 00:56:56.660 This probably isn't something that's just culturally transmitted uh from one source to all 00:56:56.660 --> 00:56:57.940 of these different locations. 00:56:58.100 --> 00:57:01.860 And of course, individuals develop these preferences and practices within their own 00:57:01.860 --> 00:57:07.770 relationships, and they're not uh probably broadcasting broadly their 00:57:07.850 --> 00:57:09.930 desires or their practices to do this. 00:57:10.250 --> 00:57:12.330 So it demands some kind of explanation. 00:57:12.490 --> 00:57:15.130 And I think that I tentatively buy it. 00:57:15.210 --> 00:57:17.130 I mean, it it sounds compelling what you say. 00:57:17.370 --> 00:57:21.770 Definitely, I think that their costly signaling has some kind of explanation to play in it. 00:57:22.250 --> 00:57:28.010 David, can I just poke poke on this idea, which is that is an 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, 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 00:57:38.100 --> 00:57:43.860 differences already in sort of like aggressiveness or proneness to pathogen 00:57:43.860 --> 00:57:44.820 sensitivity or not. 00:57:45.060 --> 00:57:50.820 And then if you're getting this human universal of when sexually aroused certain things get 00:57:50.820 --> 00:57:55.940 turned up or down, whatever the state of these other systems are in people, like some 00:57:55.940 --> 00:58:01.470 people are just lower in um disgust sensitivity to begin with, 00:58:01.790 --> 00:58:06.510 or when the sex they're sexually aroused, they're really sexually aroused, or the 00:58:06.510 --> 00:58:10.430 relationship between the sexual arousal system and the disgust system is just really 00:58:10.430 --> 00:58:13.790 stronger in some people, just as just a distribution. 00:58:13.950 --> 00:58:15.470 I mean, it's sort of boring. 00:58:15.630 --> 00:58:21.390 Um, that you would you would get, oh, the disgust sensitivity is so low in some 00:58:21.390 --> 00:58:26.960 people, and there's just like a market for um uh um for sort of 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 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 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. 00:58:41.200 --> 00:58:42.400 But is that a different account? 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 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 00:58:53.230 --> 00:58:53.870 other person. 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 00:59:00.190 --> 00:59:04.590 will be judged as more aroused than people who are not engaged in kinky practices. 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 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 00:59:14.400 --> 00:59:17.920 less likely to have faked the orgasm. 00:59:18.320 --> 00:59:20.320 And so I would view it as a costly signal. 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 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 00:59:30.160 --> 00:59:33.520 our partner is aroused and we should be aroused by our partner's arousal. 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 00:59:37.360 --> 00:59:41.830 arousal, which is you know they're aroused by our arousal, and so forth. 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 00:59:47.750 --> 00:59:49.430 this signaling function. 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 00:59:55.590 --> 00:59:58.710 take uh to take on this the signaling function. 00:59:59.200 --> 00:59:59.360 Right. 00:59:59.440 --> 00:59:59.520 Yeah. 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, 01:00:03.600 --> 01:00:09.120 but it's that there's design for sexual recipient receptivity in the partner. 01:00:10.080 --> 01:00:15.200 And that's the primary target of sort of like this is how aroused I am. 01:00:15.360 --> 01:00:18.320 And there's design for gauging that, which makes sense, right? 01:00:18.400 --> 01:00:18.960 For lots of reasons. 01:00:19.200 --> 01:00:19.810 Yes, exactly. 01:00:19.970 --> 01:00:23.570 So the argument isn't that kinky practices themselves are adaptations, is they're a 01:00:23.570 --> 01:00:29.170 byproduct of uh systems for gauging partner sexual arousal, uh and um 01:00:29.330 --> 01:00:35.330 avoiding uh sexual deception, uh, and trying to accurately gauge arousal and and in turn um 01:00:35.410 --> 01:00:39.970 calibrating your own arousal to uh estimates of your partner's arousal, and kinky practices 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. 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 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 01:00:55.140 --> 01:00:59.140 where um sex is more um taboo, I guess. 01:00:59.380 --> 01:01:00.980 Yeah, cool. 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 01:01:07.190 --> 01:01:12.150 do you ever encounter people when they're talking to you or misunderstanding or 01:01:12.150 --> 01:01:17.590 understanding your theories I think to some people it might sound sort of reductive that um 01:01:17.910 --> 01:01:23.350 well the reason why we have these um uh adaptations is because of pathogens. 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 01:01:27.190 --> 01:01:28.790 like you know ideology, right? 01:01:28.950 --> 01:01:34.470 Sort of um the idea that sort of anything is driven by pathogen avoidance. 01:01:34.870 --> 01:01:40.780 Uh how do uh how do humans view that idea? 01:01:40.940 --> 01:01:42.060 And I can imagine two things. 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 01:01:47.900 --> 01:01:50.460 psychology care about something so low brow is disease? 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 01:01:56.380 --> 01:02:01.260 because they're riddled with pathogens and like lice, and you know, like obviously that's 01:02:01.260 --> 01:02:06.870 like rhetoric of of um So, like, have you have you 01:02:06.870 --> 01:02:12.870 brushed up against either of those reactions where one is sort of like, how 01:02:13.030 --> 01:02:15.990 dare you contaminate the ivory tower with disease? 01:02:16.150 --> 01:02:17.750 We don't, we don't we need to worry about that. 01:02:17.830 --> 01:02:19.350 We're doing math and science. 01:02:19.510 --> 01:02:25.350 And then the other version is like, you know, racist xenophobia that uses 01:02:25.350 --> 01:02:27.350 disease, you know, as a cudgel. 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 01:02:33.780 --> 01:02:37.140 was maybe the first and most well-known disgust researcher. 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 01:02:42.660 --> 01:02:43.300 disgust. 01:02:43.460 --> 01:02:48.260 And it might be because when you tell people you research disgust, they draw some really 01:02:48.260 --> 01:02:49.780 weird inferences about you. 01:02:50.290 --> 01:02:52.530 Why would you why would you study that? 01:02:52.930 --> 01:02:55.330 You know, you have to be thinking about these weird things. 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, 01:02:59.410 --> 01:03:00.370 undertakers. 01:03:00.770 --> 01:03:03.810 And uh I I've experienced that a little bit. 01:03:03.890 --> 01:03:08.850 Uh so not talking about pathogens is actually uh a little bit less of that reaction. 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 01:03:13.250 --> 01:03:14.210 weird looks. 01:03:14.530 --> 01:03:20.220 That said, relative to evolutionary psychologists who study mating or 01:03:20.220 --> 01:03:24.220 maybe even politics, I think that I found very little pushback. 01:03:24.540 --> 01:03:30.380 I think that people are very open to the idea that we have specialized 01:03:30.380 --> 01:03:33.500 aspects of our psychology for navigating pathogens. 01:03:33.660 --> 01:03:39.180 I think that it's not controversial or offensive or butting up against other kinds of 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 01:03:44.540 --> 01:03:45.340 topics are. 01:03:45.570 --> 01:03:50.690 It seems orthogonal to a lot of other theoretical approaches within social psychology. 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, 01:03:56.770 --> 01:04:01.170 and C perfectly compatible without uh stepping on any toes. 01:04:01.490 --> 01:04:07.170 Um, so in terms of evolutionary psychologists sometimes getting some resistance in 01:04:07.170 --> 01:04:12.610 terms of uh scientific, ideological or political ideological reasons, I really have 01:04:12.610 --> 01:04:14.770 experienced very little of that in my career. 01:04:15.120 --> 01:04:15.440 Cool. 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. 01:04:21.520 --> 01:04:22.160 Yeah. 01:04:23.200 --> 01:04:28.000 Uh yeah, I I haven't run into too many racists that I'm aware of. 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 01:04:34.720 --> 01:04:40.330 be motivated by seeing races as differentially clean or wanting to 01:04:41.290 --> 01:04:47.210 uphold the idea that there's some something essential in our categorization of races or 01:04:47.210 --> 01:04:51.690 groups that does have some correspondence with a real threat like pathogens. 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, 01:04:56.730 --> 01:04:58.490 and I haven't had conversations with them. 01:04:58.730 --> 01:04:59.850 Yeah, cool. 01:05:00.440 --> 01:05:06.200 Um, I I was just gonna ask about um some other areas of discussed research 01:05:06.200 --> 01:05:08.280 that may not be holding up so well. 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 01:05:14.360 --> 01:05:18.520 with physical deformities or abnormalities that make them look different or weird. 01:05:18.680 --> 01:05:23.640 Uh the idea there, presumably, is that this is a kind of dumb pathogen avoidance system, 01:05:23.720 --> 01:05:28.430 and we're just kind of being grossed out by anyone who deviates from species typical 01:05:28.430 --> 01:05:29.630 proportions or whatever. 01:05:29.790 --> 01:05:31.950 Um, I uh am skeptical of that. 01:05:32.030 --> 01:05:35.790 Uh it seems like a pretty dumb way to design a pathogen avoidance system. 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, 01:05:40.990 --> 01:05:46.430 say, you know, physical abnormalities is that w what it's really cueing is low social 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 01:05:51.470 --> 01:05:51.870 value. 01:05:52.030 --> 01:05:54.440 And that is driving the disgust response. 01:05:54.600 --> 01:05:56.920 Do you do you buy that that way of thinking about it? 01:05:57.560 --> 01:05:58.120 I do. 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, 01:06:04.600 --> 01:06:08.200 uh, the obesity and the um the elderly. 01:06:08.440 --> 01:06:13.000 And there was some preliminary evidence published consistent with that, but again, with 01:06:13.000 --> 01:06:15.640 methods that were kind of standard for the time. 01:06:16.040 --> 01:06:21.010 And those ideas, I think, have really stuck around in the literature, but based pretty much 01:06:21.010 --> 01:06:26.850 only on some studies that don't provide the most diagnostic evidence for the hypothesis, I 01:06:26.850 --> 01:06:27.490 would say. 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. 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 01:06:40.130 --> 01:06:41.730 people with those features. 01:06:42.290 --> 01:06:48.060 It is based on social value or the idea that in certain 01:06:48.060 --> 01:06:53.820 ecologies, obesity is associated with other features that 01:06:53.820 --> 01:06:57.500 people interpret as diagnostic of infection. 01:06:57.580 --> 01:07:02.220 So we talked about the kind of skin coloration differences that correspond with 01:07:02.220 --> 01:07:05.020 inflammatory responses in laboratory experiments. 01:07:05.260 --> 01:07:10.450 If you're in the US and people with a BMI of 35, 01:07:11.570 --> 01:07:17.570 you know, they might be in uh settings where they're not getting a lot of 01:07:17.570 --> 01:07:20.850 physical activity, which affects vascular health. 01:07:21.010 --> 01:07:27.010 Um, they're not eating a lot of nutrient-rich uh foods, which can affect, 01:07:27.410 --> 01:07:33.360 I I forget the name, carotene, some something with carotens that can affect the type of 01:07:33.360 --> 01:07:38.320 skin coloration that people find attractive in mates and social partners and take as 01:07:38.320 --> 01:07:44.240 diagnostic to metabolic condition potentially, and maybe also contagiousness, that there 01:07:44.480 --> 01:07:50.240 you might have something where you're treating BMI or obesity as a Q2 infection. 01:07:50.480 --> 01:07:56.000 Whereas if you're in some foraging society and you have someone of a similar 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 01:08:00.890 --> 01:08:06.730 they're in fairly good condition and able to resist and have high tolerance for pathogens. 01:08:07.450 --> 01:08:13.130 So I I wouldn't rule out the possibility that there is something where 01:08:13.450 --> 01:08:18.760 some features of people who are obese are being interpreted as related to 01:08:18.760 --> 01:08:19.560 infection. 01:08:20.120 --> 01:08:25.640 But I'm guessing that most of it is the social value hypothesis that obesity is 01:08:25.640 --> 01:08:29.320 associated with low social value for a number of reasons. 01:08:29.480 --> 01:08:35.320 A lot of these for individuals are probably perceptions that other people find obese people 01:08:35.320 --> 01:08:36.760 to be less valuable. 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 01:08:43.720 --> 01:08:45.720 present for any interaction partner. 01:08:46.110 --> 01:08:46.350 Right. 01:08:46.430 --> 01:08:49.870 And what's great is about that is that it's eminently testable, this idea. 01:08:50.030 --> 01:08:54.350 You could look at disgust toward people with physical abnormalities or obese people or 01:08:54.350 --> 01:08:59.230 whatever, and see if that uh if the relationship between the physical abnormality and the 01:08:59.230 --> 01:09:01.710 disgust is mediated by say a welfare trade-off ratio. 01:09:01.870 --> 01:09:05.230 And if that accounts for the relationship, then that would confirm the hypothesis that this 01:09:05.230 --> 01:09:10.900 is driven by social valuation uh rather than um a uh the uh a 01:09:10.900 --> 01:09:12.340 pathogen cue per se. 01:09:12.500 --> 01:09:12.740 Yeah. 01:09:13.060 --> 01:09:13.860 Yeah, 100%. 01:09:14.420 --> 01:09:18.900 You know, another interesting thing is that out of out of being very overweight versus 01:09:18.900 --> 01:09:24.340 being very underweight, I would suspect that underweight individuals are probably um that 01:09:24.340 --> 01:09:30.260 would be more similar to the appearance of someone who is uh struggling to handle an 01:09:30.260 --> 01:09:32.820 infection than someone who's very overweight. 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 01:09:36.740 --> 01:09:39.220 familiar with the test of that hypothesis in the literature. 01:09:40.330 --> 01:09:45.850 On that note of somebody struggling to deal with infection, uh, one of the standing most 01:09:45.850 --> 01:09:49.850 important questions for all evolutionary psychologists to answer is what's up with zombies? 01:09:50.090 --> 01:09:51.770 Uh, have you thought about that? 01:09:52.090 --> 01:09:54.970 Uh do you have a pet theory of zombies? 01:09:55.530 --> 01:09:57.450 I've never thought of zombies, I'm afraid. 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 01:10:03.770 --> 01:10:06.810 Swivner uh in the morbidly curious stuff. 01:10:06.900 --> 01:10:09.380 Um in just the genre of horror. 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 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 01:10:21.220 --> 01:10:23.940 channel edithagan like zoonotic infection too, right? 01:10:24.100 --> 01:10:29.140 Like that's another I mean it seems like a supernormal stimulus of pathogen risk. 01:10:29.220 --> 01:10:31.140 I mean, like their flesh is literally falling off their body. 01:10:31.380 --> 01:10:31.620 Exactly. 01:10:31.860 --> 01:10:34.100 And the zom their zombiehood is literally contagious. 01:10:34.370 --> 01:10:35.650 Yeah, they're eating brains. 01:10:35.730 --> 01:10:38.370 They're exactly like it feels like a very deep scrope. 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 01:10:43.090 --> 01:10:44.530 like got rabies or something. 01:10:45.010 --> 01:10:45.330 Yeah. 01:10:45.810 --> 01:10:50.450 Yeah, it it's really interesting because um people who have severe infections, they don't 01:10:50.450 --> 01:10:51.570 move around much. 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 01:10:57.570 --> 01:11:01.040 took multiple classes in the the evolution of infectious disease. 01:11:01.200 --> 01:11:06.560 And my professor was fond of talking about how people pictured Ebola as zombies running 01:11:06.560 --> 01:11:06.960 after you. 01:11:07.120 --> 01:11:07.280 Yeah. 01:11:07.600 --> 01:11:10.720 Because Ebola, you know, it's a hemorrhagetic, hemorrhagic, hemorrhagic. 01:11:11.040 --> 01:11:11.200 Yeah. 01:11:11.280 --> 01:11:12.400 I think I'm mispronouncing that. 01:11:12.560 --> 01:11:14.640 Anyway, um, it causes bleeding. 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 01:11:18.480 --> 01:11:19.360 vomiting blood. 01:11:19.440 --> 01:11:22.640 Well, it's not like there's blood pouring from their pores all the time. 01:11:23.200 --> 01:11:26.240 And uh, this is gonna be the case with most infections. 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 01:11:31.770 --> 01:11:36.810 franchise, or kind of shuffling along like Dawn of the Dead, these are 01:11:37.130 --> 01:11:40.410 pathogen risks that you're almost never going to encounter. 01:11:40.570 --> 01:11:45.850 When I talk about emotional reactions to pathogen threats, you know, emotion researchers 01:11:45.850 --> 01:11:50.410 might think about emotions varying along the lines of along an approach or avoidance 01:11:50.410 --> 01:11:51.130 continuum. 01:11:51.290 --> 01:11:54.700 Disgust and fear are both avoidance emotions. 01:11:54.860 --> 01:11:58.380 But the thing with disgust is that pathogens are not chasing you. 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. 01:12:04.620 --> 01:12:08.700 They get in you by you touching something that has them on them. 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 01:12:14.380 --> 01:12:16.220 motivations to get to you. 01:12:16.380 --> 01:12:21.290 And that's where you need different kinds of coordinating affective responses that motivate 01:12:21.290 --> 01:12:23.370 a different types of avoidance reaction. 01:12:23.530 --> 01:12:29.450 And so looping back to zombies a little bit, it is interesting that kind of this 01:12:29.450 --> 01:12:34.810 archetype is combining the paths to threat with the locomotion. 01:12:35.450 --> 01:12:38.810 Other than saying that's interesting, I haven't thought about zombies beyond this. 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 01:12:42.970 --> 01:12:44.890 selection of like vectors, right? 01:12:44.970 --> 01:12:45.930 So disease vectors. 01:12:46.010 --> 01:12:51.920 So like from a pathogens perspective, you can't you have to maintain your spreadability, 01:12:52.000 --> 01:12:52.240 right? 01:12:52.320 --> 01:12:58.320 So this is why diseases that involve like mosquitoes can really um incapacitate the the 01:12:58.320 --> 01:12:59.680 victim or the host. 01:12:59.920 --> 01:13:04.720 But other diseases that require, you know, interaction, like if you if you really 01:13:04.720 --> 01:13:09.840 incapacitate a host right away, that might curtail your ability to spread, right? 01:13:09.920 --> 01:13:13.680 So like a cold, the person can still get up, walk around and like spread it. 01:13:13.790 --> 01:13:18.110 But if you immediately incapacitate the person, then you're not going to spread. 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 01:13:22.190 --> 01:13:27.790 other like vectors that are not the primary host can be more virulence. 01:13:27.870 --> 01:13:30.430 So it's this virulence spreadability trade off. 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 01:13:33.870 --> 01:13:35.070 think of otherwise. 01:13:35.470 --> 01:13:36.670 Yeah, that's exactly right. 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 01:13:42.380 --> 01:13:45.820 evolution of infectious disease, largely making this broad art argument. 01:13:45.980 --> 01:13:50.380 And arboviruses, these are things spread by vectors or insect vectors. 01:13:51.660 --> 01:13:57.020 If falciparum malaria causes someone to just be bedbound for a week, well, the mosquito can 01:13:57.020 --> 01:14:00.460 just go to him and bring the parasite to uh to someone else. 01:14:00.620 --> 01:14:02.780 And of course, that's not in the mosquitoes' interest either. 01:14:02.950 --> 01:14:05.430 The parasite is also manipulating the mosquito. 01:14:05.750 --> 01:14:07.190 Bibonic plague is similar. 01:14:07.270 --> 01:14:09.190 So the rats are running around with the fleas. 01:14:09.350 --> 01:14:12.310 It it does get a little bit complex with these trade-offs. 01:14:12.470 --> 01:14:17.910 Uh, and there's uh, you know, asymptomatic periods also influence this. 01:14:18.070 --> 01:14:20.390 Um, how naive the population is. 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 01:14:24.870 --> 01:14:30.500 straightforward as we might think in terms of just selection to low 01:14:30.500 --> 01:14:33.140 virulence versus spreadability. 01:14:33.380 --> 01:14:37.700 But yes, ultimately it is not a thing that only an evolutionary perspective gets you. 01:14:37.940 --> 01:14:38.500 Yeah, cool. 01:14:38.740 --> 01:14:41.780 Speaking of an evolutionary approach, and you know, we can transition to other stuff. 01:14:41.940 --> 01:14:46.660 I saw you at the most recent HBES, and you had a diatribe against evolutionary mismatch. 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 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 01:14:57.130 --> 01:14:58.010 about free will. 01:14:58.170 --> 01:15:02.490 But I still think f mismatch is over over uh extended. 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 01:15:06.970 --> 01:15:10.410 evolutionary mismatch being uh and what do you think about it? 01:15:10.820 --> 01:15:12.580 Yeah, I I think I gave you that. 01:15:12.660 --> 01:15:15.140 Um, I would call it a monologue after a few beers. 01:15:15.220 --> 01:15:17.540 So maybe maybe it did turn into a diatribe. 01:15:18.020 --> 01:15:19.220 Maybe the bar was just loud. 01:15:19.300 --> 01:15:21.300 So no, it was all the above. 01:15:21.460 --> 01:15:23.300 It was, it was uh, yeah, exactly. 01:15:23.620 --> 01:15:24.980 Um, yeah, sure. 01:15:25.140 --> 01:15:30.900 Uh so I I've been there's been something about the concept of 01:15:30.900 --> 01:15:36.660 mismatch that has struck me as um uh not quite right for several 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, 01:15:41.910 --> 01:15:45.270 although I haven't really talked with people about them other than a few side 01:15:45.270 --> 01:15:45.830 conversations. 01:15:45.910 --> 01:15:51.910 So maybe this can be a nice exercise that the audience can also listen around with. 01:15:52.150 --> 01:15:56.710 So the idea of evolutionary mismatch, as it's articulated in the evolutionary psychology 01:15:56.710 --> 01:16:02.470 literature, is that we have adaptations that are specialized for 01:16:02.470 --> 01:16:05.750 ancestral environments and are good, are good for our fitness. 01:16:06.780 --> 01:16:09.820 But the environment has changed in some way. 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 01:16:15.580 --> 01:16:21.420 had time to evolve psychological adaptations or non 01:16:21.420 --> 01:16:27.260 psychological other types of adaptations to catch up, to then behave adaptively 01:16:27.820 --> 01:16:29.260 in this new environment. 01:16:29.420 --> 01:16:32.700 And so these mechanisms are no longer adaptive. 01:16:32.970 --> 01:16:36.330 uh, they no longer have the same fitness associations. 01:16:36.890 --> 01:16:42.890 And um authors often say that this has consequences for our well-being 01:16:42.890 --> 01:16:45.130 and our values and this type of stuff. 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 01:16:51.130 --> 01:16:53.290 definition of a mismatch that I've missed? 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 01:16:58.700 --> 01:17:03.500 junk food because it was scarce in ancestral environments and that causes all sorts of 01:17:03.500 --> 01:17:04.460 health problems. 01:17:04.620 --> 01:17:09.180 People sometimes talk about pornography uh as a mismatch. 01:17:09.340 --> 01:17:10.860 Um trying to think of other examples of the case. 01:17:15.350 --> 01:17:20.870 not to deal with large scale social dynamics, um, whether that involves like meeting 01:17:20.870 --> 01:17:24.390 strangers or understanding complicated social dynamics. 01:17:24.550 --> 01:17:30.550 Like the argument is social reactions and understandings are plainly 01:17:30.550 --> 01:17:35.270 for a smaller scale interpersonal world, not a large scale international world, for 01:17:35.270 --> 01:17:35.510 example. 01:17:35.910 --> 01:17:37.270 Would be another example, yeah. 01:17:37.740 --> 01:17:38.940 So these are good examples. 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 01:17:43.420 --> 01:17:43.580 bit. 01:17:43.740 --> 01:17:49.500 And Daniel has uh written about and argued nicely on your uh podcast 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 01:17:55.740 --> 01:18:01.390 ancestral environments we should have you know, not rarely encountered situations where we 01:18:01.390 --> 01:18:04.670 could gorge ourselves on honey, for example. 01:18:04.830 --> 01:18:10.350 And that lots of other animals, non-human animals, have kind of stop mechanisms to keep 01:18:10.350 --> 01:18:13.070 themselves from overconsuming calories. 01:18:13.390 --> 01:18:19.070 And that obesity is not just eating too much 01:18:19.070 --> 01:18:19.630 sugar. 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 01:18:25.120 --> 01:18:28.240 their BMI and their obesity and how they store body fat, etc. 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 01:18:34.400 --> 01:18:39.520 junk food and just our modern food ecology mismatching with our evolved psychology. 01:18:39.680 --> 01:18:45.280 Um, but I further question if the basic concept of mismatch is useful to 01:18:45.280 --> 01:18:46.560 evolutionary psychologists. 01:18:46.720 --> 01:18:48.880 I question the coherence of the idea. 01:18:49.040 --> 01:18:52.320 Um, and I'll I'll I'll give you a few reasons why. 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 01:18:58.430 --> 01:19:02.110 evolutionary perspective, which both of you guys do, and it's kind of the mainstream 01:19:02.110 --> 01:19:08.030 capital E, capital P evolutionary psychology, it's uh its orientation is to 01:19:08.030 --> 01:19:13.950 make hype uh generate and test hypotheses about design features, not to look at the fitness 01:19:13.950 --> 01:19:19.710 consequences of those design features in any specific ecology, um, especially a 01:19:19.710 --> 01:19:22.260 specific ecology at a specific time. 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 01:19:28.500 --> 01:19:33.380 seems to be conflating, you know, some kind of behavioral ecology perspective with an 01:19:33.380 --> 01:19:38.500 evolutionary psychology perspective in a way that's not really furthering knowledge in 01:19:38.500 --> 01:19:39.540 either area. 01:19:39.860 --> 01:19:45.300 But further, when we make these claims about a mismatch, no one is actually measuring 01:19:45.300 --> 01:19:46.100 fitness. 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. 01:19:53.830 --> 01:19:59.510 Further, there's no consideration typically in what kind of phenotype would 01:19:59.510 --> 01:20:01.990 actually be matched, so to speak. 01:20:02.310 --> 01:20:05.510 So let's for a second go back to the junk food example. 01:20:05.670 --> 01:20:10.710 Um, we say that our preferences for sugar are mismatched in the modern environment because 01:20:10.870 --> 01:20:16.360 ancestrally, sugar, you know, glucose or fructose, or I'm afraid that I might not be 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 01:20:20.920 --> 01:20:24.040 nutrients that are really fitness good for us. 01:20:24.280 --> 01:20:30.120 Now they're in these low nutrient foods that are fitness neutral or fitness negative. 01:20:30.600 --> 01:20:36.360 Well, is the proposal then that our taste perception should find sugar disgusting 01:20:36.440 --> 01:20:37.080 right now? 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 01:20:42.610 --> 01:20:44.450 current phenotype that we have? 01:20:44.690 --> 01:20:50.450 And are we then expecting, I would guess no, that people who find any flavors of 01:20:50.450 --> 01:20:55.890 sugar to be disgusting, that outcome would be worse than our current phenotypes that have 01:20:55.890 --> 01:20:57.410 their current sugar preferences. 01:20:58.050 --> 01:21:03.570 So are we saying that between these two kinds of theoretical 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 01:21:09.490 --> 01:21:15.380 calibrated to the best fitness consequences of sugar preferences in this 01:21:15.380 --> 01:21:16.740 specific environment. 01:21:16.980 --> 01:21:22.900 If that's the case, are our adaptations mismatched in every single ecology we 01:21:22.900 --> 01:21:23.540 could be in? 01:21:23.780 --> 01:21:26.900 Because humans live in a ton of different ecologies. 01:21:27.060 --> 01:21:29.380 And in fact, I mean that's the case now. 01:21:29.540 --> 01:21:34.820 But if we think about how the EEA, the environment of evolutionary adaptedness, is 01:21:34.820 --> 01:21:40.310 conceptualized And just borrowing from how Tuby and Cosmes have discussed this, it's a 01:21:40.310 --> 01:21:44.470 statistical composite of the invariances across ecologies. 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, 01:21:48.710 --> 01:21:50.790 a ton of different social structures, et cetera. 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 01:21:56.150 --> 01:22:01.900 these, not saying that, okay, this is how the condition was in the ancestral 01:22:01.900 --> 01:22:06.220 past, um, and our current environment is different than this one thing. 01:22:06.460 --> 01:22:11.820 The reality is every ecology is going to be different in some way from the statistical 01:22:11.820 --> 01:22:12.460 composite. 01:22:12.620 --> 01:22:16.540 And so both everything is a mismatch and nothing is a mismatch. 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 01:22:22.140 --> 01:22:26.780 fitness consequences or matching poorly is not at all straightforward. 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 01:22:32.610 --> 01:22:38.130 detection or error management theory uh outcome, there are asymmetric 01:22:38.130 --> 01:22:42.370 costs to false alarms versus misses in detecting snakes. 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 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 01:22:53.570 --> 01:22:56.780 categorize that as a snake until they get more information. 01:22:57.180 --> 01:23:02.860 And you could look at that and say, well, our minds are mismatched to that 01:23:03.420 --> 01:23:07.420 because we've acted like it's a snake, even though it's not a snake. 01:23:07.580 --> 01:23:12.860 And we've paid some metabolic cost and attentional cost to doing that. 01:23:13.180 --> 01:23:16.700 And a perfectly matched psychology wouldn't make that type of mistake. 01:23:16.860 --> 01:23:21.970 But the design feature is to make that kind of mistake because ancestrally there are 01:23:21.970 --> 01:23:27.810 asymmetric costs to having the mental mechanism be biased in one way versus the 01:23:27.810 --> 01:23:28.050 other. 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 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 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 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 01:23:50.800 --> 01:23:54.080 having a certain number of errors over a certain amount of time. 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. 01:23:59.040 --> 01:23:59.200 Yeah. 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 01:24:04.800 --> 01:24:05.520 mismatch. 01:24:05.680 --> 01:24:07.760 Have you had discussions with him about this? 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 01:24:13.850 --> 01:24:15.930 chatted about uh it since then. 01:24:16.010 --> 01:24:18.090 I would be curious, uh curious to do so. 01:24:18.170 --> 01:24:19.210 I don't know if he listens to the podcast. 01:24:19.370 --> 01:24:19.610 Yeah, yeah. 01:24:19.770 --> 01:24:20.010 I don't know. 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 01:24:26.010 --> 01:24:29.770 his work is often he's talking to like organizational psychologists and sort of saying, 01:24:29.850 --> 01:24:35.770 like, look, I'm studying leadership, and things that you might not think would factor 01:24:35.770 --> 01:24:41.560 into people's leadership decision making are leaking in because they were evolutionarily 01:24:41.560 --> 01:24:42.440 relevant. 01:24:42.680 --> 01:24:48.040 Like, and I think like his argument is the reason to use mismatch. 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 01:24:51.400 --> 01:24:51.720 about this. 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 01:24:56.440 --> 01:24:59.240 this would be irrelevant, but it turns out it is relevant. 01:24:59.400 --> 01:25:01.160 Like, kind of like the pathogen thing, right? 01:25:01.240 --> 01:25:04.630 Like if you're coming from a business perspective, if you don't take an evolutionary 01:25:04.630 --> 01:25:07.510 approach, then you might think this would be irrelevant. 01:25:07.590 --> 01:25:12.070 But it turns out our evolved psychology is like for a world where other considerations 01:25:12.230 --> 01:25:18.150 other than like profitability is relevant, and there's leakage of these other things that 01:25:18.150 --> 01:25:21.350 are in fact, you know, hurting profitability, for example, maybe. 01:25:21.430 --> 01:25:22.070 I don't know. 01:25:22.150 --> 01:25:28.140 Um, but it's because our minds desire are evolved for evolution and offspring and in 01:25:28.140 --> 01:25:32.300 a natural ecology, not you know, maximizing the the bottom line. 01:25:33.180 --> 01:25:33.740 I don't know. 01:25:33.900 --> 01:25:39.740 I mean, does that what what what what would let that would be my argument 01:25:39.820 --> 01:25:42.220 that like that would be Marx's argument? 01:25:42.380 --> 01:25:42.780 I don't know. 01:25:42.860 --> 01:25:45.100 What what what is the what do you think about that? 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 01:25:49.740 --> 01:25:55.490 have some impression that if there's any evolutionary function of the mind, it's to 01:25:55.490 --> 01:26:01.410 figure things out and maximize utility or make us feel 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 01:26:06.770 --> 01:26:12.530 evolve for one thing, and uh that's not perfectly matched with what our we consciously 01:26:12.530 --> 01:26:15.410 might be trying to do in a business environment. 01:26:15.650 --> 01:26:15.970 Right. 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 01:26:21.600 --> 01:26:22.640 psychologists. 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 01:26:28.800 --> 01:26:32.160 each other and in fact evolutionary psychologists talking to each other. 01:26:32.400 --> 01:26:38.170 And I I wonder, um I mean I'm I don't know if 01:26:38.170 --> 01:26:42.010 it's been a if I'm right here, if these thoughts are sensible. 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 01:26:48.170 --> 01:26:53.850 lost out on something by allocating time or energy to this idea, or if 01:26:54.010 --> 01:26:58.090 uh, you know, it's just something that people feel obligated to write in a paragraph 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 01:27:02.200 --> 01:27:02.520 otherwise. 01:27:02.840 --> 01:27:03.000 Right. 01:27:03.080 --> 01:27:04.120 Like it's boilerplate. 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 01:27:08.360 --> 01:27:08.520 saying. 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 01:27:13.640 --> 01:27:18.920 not being adequately design-minded, and that if you take input, output, output, input, 01:27:19.000 --> 01:27:24.330 output process seriously, then you you it doesn't buy you anything. 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 01:27:28.410 --> 01:27:31.930 design features, here's another account, these are the design features. 01:27:32.730 --> 01:27:36.330 You know, you're not really it's not really buying you anything. 01:27:36.490 --> 01:27:36.890 I don't know. 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 01:27:42.900 --> 01:27:43.700 think it is fair. 01:27:43.860 --> 01:27:48.660 And uh, I mean, you guys have discussed multiple times how hard evolutionary psychology can 01:27:48.660 --> 01:27:54.660 be since we have our own evolved psychologies to be perceiving ideas and individuals 01:27:54.820 --> 01:28:00.820 and uh our lived realities in in different ways that aren't necessarily reflecting the 01:28:00.820 --> 01:28:02.340 design features of the mind. 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 01:28:07.870 --> 01:28:13.470 terms of mismatch because it's a very lay intuitive way to think about evolution. 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 01:28:18.990 --> 01:28:24.510 something, uh that it can be easy to slip into that kind of 01:28:24.510 --> 01:28:28.750 layperson type of thinking in other areas or at other times. 01:28:28.990 --> 01:28:29.390 Yeah. 01:28:29.720 --> 01:28:32.680 It's easy to do FSI because it's just uh just so stories. 01:28:32.840 --> 01:28:36.360 So Yeah. 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 01:28:40.360 --> 01:28:42.120 to like lazy mismatch stories. 01:28:42.280 --> 01:28:46.760 Like it's easy to tell a lazy mismatch story to explain pretty much anything. 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 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. 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 01:29:01.870 --> 01:29:02.590 to be taking. 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 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. 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 01:29:18.350 --> 01:29:20.190 discovered the source of all of our problems. 01:29:20.340 --> 01:29:23.860 uh, you know, give me status and attention for for giving you the solutions. 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 01:29:28.900 --> 01:29:32.020 wanting to, you know, give people solutions to all their problems. 01:29:32.180 --> 01:29:36.100 When really what which what we should be focused on is first understanding how the damn 01:29:36.100 --> 01:29:36.820 thing works. 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 01:29:42.420 --> 01:29:47.540 start to get into tentative, you know, proposals and solutions to people's problems and 01:29:47.670 --> 01:29:48.310 applications. 01:29:48.470 --> 01:29:50.230 But first, we just have to understand the thing. 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 01:29:55.670 --> 01:29:56.470 too quickly. 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 01:30:02.790 --> 01:30:08.150 ago, which was kind of evolutionary psychology 1.0 or first generation evolutionary 01:30:08.150 --> 01:30:11.910 psychology was really popular because it was saying all these things that are obviously 01:30:11.910 --> 01:30:17.300 true that other academics didn't want to really talk about or dismiss away with 01:30:18.340 --> 01:30:20.500 language that's kind of non-intuitive. 01:30:21.060 --> 01:30:26.180 Evolutionary psychology 2.0 or more in-depth stuff is 01:30:26.820 --> 01:30:29.300 less penetrable and less intuitive. 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 01:30:33.830 --> 01:30:35.830 evolutionary psychology 1.0. 01:30:35.990 --> 01:30:39.510 But then if you uh if that terminology makes any sense. 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 01:30:45.110 --> 01:30:50.230 and understand design features, the the concept loses some of its appeal, some of its 01:30:50.230 --> 01:30:51.350 benefits and coherence. 01:30:51.590 --> 01:30:51.830 Yeah. 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 01:30:57.110 --> 01:31:01.030 and discuss work was a little bit by like a mismatchy? 01:31:02.820 --> 01:31:03.780 Yeah, I think so. 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 01:31:09.540 --> 01:31:10.580 systems might work. 01:31:10.820 --> 01:31:15.620 Although I'll also say that I I think that it's perfectly scientifically defensible to 01:31:15.620 --> 01:31:17.380 think about the system being very general. 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 01:31:24.020 --> 01:31:27.380 doing anything intellectually wrong or lazy. 01:31:27.780 --> 01:31:32.510 Uh I I think that um it was an open question. 01:31:32.670 --> 01:31:38.270 And my read of the data is that there's greater specificity than first assumed. 01:31:38.430 --> 01:31:42.110 But I wouldn't attribute that outcome to laziness or anything by those researchers. 01:31:42.510 --> 01:31:43.070 Yeah, that's right. 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 01:31:49.310 --> 01:31:55.230 people wanted genuinely to provide a biologically plausible account of a 01:31:55.230 --> 01:31:56.030 phenomenon. 01:31:56.240 --> 01:32:00.400 And you're allowed to say, be speculative and say, here, here's this other biologically 01:32:00.400 --> 01:32:01.440 plausible thing. 01:32:01.680 --> 01:32:07.440 Maybe it accounts for this thing that doesn't yet have an adequate biological grounding. 01:32:07.920 --> 01:32:08.320 Yeah. 01:32:08.480 --> 01:32:09.120 Yeah. 01:32:09.680 --> 01:32:10.720 But it might be wrong. 01:32:10.800 --> 01:32:12.000 And that's that's great. 01:32:12.240 --> 01:32:13.680 Then we'll we'll know something. 01:32:13.840 --> 01:32:14.160 Yeah. 01:32:14.400 --> 01:32:14.640 Yeah. 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 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 01:32:24.790 --> 01:32:25.350 in various ways. 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 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 01:32:32.230 --> 01:32:36.630 aren't working or that aren't are colliding uh with with uh reality. 01:32:37.030 --> 01:32:42.550 Um and uh uh I I like that you have shaped my thinking both on um 01:32:42.740 --> 01:32:48.580 on outgroups, also on on this this idea that uh discuss sensitivity should 01:32:48.580 --> 01:32:53.380 lead you to uh prefer facial symmetry and sexual dimorphism more. 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 01:32:57.860 --> 01:32:58.100 out. 01:32:58.260 --> 01:33:02.980 Um I'm curious, what do you think about this idea that uh pathogen 01:33:03.490 --> 01:33:05.490 sensitivity should relate to conformity. 01:33:05.570 --> 01:33:07.890 I know this is another one that was popular in the field. 01:33:08.050 --> 01:33:08.450 I'm curious. 01:33:08.530 --> 01:33:12.930 Has has that stood stood the test of time or has that been shaky as well? 01:33:13.330 --> 01:33:15.410 You know, I I can't comment on it too much. 01:33:15.490 --> 01:33:20.850 Um, my collaborator Florian van Leuwen, who also works in the Netherlands, has published a 01:33:21.010 --> 01:33:24.450 like an eight-study paper evaluating that idea. 01:33:24.690 --> 01:33:29.890 And my my read of it is that uh this is not a robust phenomenon. 01:33:30.040 --> 01:33:30.120 Okay. 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. 01:33:35.800 --> 01:33:38.600 I can uh recommend a pivot. 01:33:38.680 --> 01:33:42.360 Uh, we'll see how deeply we can get into it in the interest of time. 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. 01:33:48.600 --> 01:33:50.120 Yeah, what is morality and disgust here? 01:33:50.440 --> 01:33:52.680 This could this could be like another two-hour podcast. 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. 01:33:59.270 --> 01:34:03.110 But uh so, yes, and this is a strong pivot. 01:34:03.510 --> 01:34:04.310 Oh, I'm glad you did. 01:34:04.390 --> 01:34:05.510 I would have, I would have done it myself. 01:34:05.670 --> 01:34:07.670 I was looking to get to this topic myself. 01:34:07.830 --> 01:34:08.390 So yeah. 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 01:34:14.550 --> 01:34:20.150 there's a classic paper in social psychology by John Heidt, who uh researchers might be 01:34:20.150 --> 01:34:25.110 more familiar with for moral foundations theory or for his more recent work on 01:34:25.160 --> 01:34:28.760 advocating against social media for teenage girls. 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 01:34:35.080 --> 01:34:35.400 et al. 01:34:35.560 --> 01:34:38.600 Weird paper, it's like that kind of level of citations. 01:34:39.000 --> 01:34:44.600 But it was effectively arguing that a lot of our moral judgments are not 01:34:44.600 --> 01:34:50.040 stemming from moral reasoning and considerations of uh who's been harmed or 01:34:50.040 --> 01:34:55.410 victimized by certain interactions, but rather by social or 01:34:55.410 --> 01:34:57.090 emotional intuitions. 01:34:57.250 --> 01:35:01.970 And then our argumentation afterward, or our just, well, our justifications and our 01:35:01.970 --> 01:35:07.170 reasoning is actually argumentation for why we're having these judgments. 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 01:35:13.490 --> 01:35:17.330 on disgust related things because they seem to be victimless crimes. 01:35:17.650 --> 01:35:21.740 And he pointed out what, you know, it's kind of a thought experiment. 01:35:21.820 --> 01:35:25.100 It was described as a study, although it was never really uh published. 01:35:25.260 --> 01:35:29.980 Um, this famous in the moral psychology literature story about Mark and Julie. 01:35:30.140 --> 01:35:34.140 Mark and Julie are brother and sister, they they love each other deeply, they go on 01:35:34.140 --> 01:35:38.700 vacation, uh, they care about each other, and so they decide to have sex. 01:35:39.020 --> 01:35:44.990 Um, and then in the story, all of the kind of plausible harms that could result 01:35:44.990 --> 01:35:47.630 from this are neutralized in the vignette. 01:35:47.870 --> 01:35:53.390 They take Shizan hormonal contraception, they use a condom, they're not 01:35:53.390 --> 01:35:57.950 emotionally damaged by it, they never do it again, no one ever finds out about it. 01:35:58.110 --> 01:36:02.350 And according to this idea, participants are morally dumbfounded. 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. 01:36:06.750 --> 01:36:12.700 So this led to an idea that people's intuitions about disgust are feeding into 01:36:12.700 --> 01:36:14.780 and producing a lot of their moral judgments. 01:36:15.020 --> 01:36:20.220 And this led to a small explosion of research in social 01:36:20.220 --> 01:36:26.220 psychology in the mid to late aughts, testing whether 01:36:26.620 --> 01:36:31.740 if you make people disgusted, that increases the degree to which they 01:36:32.380 --> 01:36:34.380 will morally condemn actions. 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 01:36:39.710 --> 01:36:43.870 or looking at gross pictures or being hypnotized. 01:36:44.910 --> 01:36:49.630 And finding after finding after finding showed that when you make people disgusted, they 01:36:49.630 --> 01:36:51.710 think that stealing is more wrong. 01:36:52.190 --> 01:36:57.390 You know, all these individual items that describe something that could be morally 01:36:57.390 --> 01:36:58.030 condemned. 01:36:58.270 --> 01:37:01.390 People condemn them more on a liker scale. 01:37:02.380 --> 01:37:07.980 Well, in 2015 or so, there was a meta analysis of this literature, and uh the 01:37:07.980 --> 01:37:13.500 outcome was that there's nothing there, that the meta analyzed effect size is very, very 01:37:13.500 --> 01:37:13.900 small. 01:37:13.980 --> 01:37:19.340 And if you take into account uh publication bias, uh it's it's effectively zero. 01:37:19.660 --> 01:37:25.020 And so this idea uh combined with another line of 01:37:25.020 --> 01:37:29.260 research on um not priming, but uh 01:37:30.510 --> 01:37:33.470 Reports of disgust toward immoral behaviors. 01:37:33.630 --> 01:37:37.550 So not feeling disgusted and then condemning something, but seeing something that's 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 01:37:43.230 --> 01:37:47.630 idea that disgust is at all relevant to moral psychology. 01:37:48.030 --> 01:37:53.310 And some social psychologists have made uh strong arguments, or at least 01:37:53.790 --> 01:37:58.740 strong statements along these lines, that there's nothing important about it discussed in 01:37:58.740 --> 01:38:00.340 terms of moral cognition. 01:38:00.500 --> 01:38:06.500 Um, and uh others, uh, you had uh Leo Fatucci on a while ago. 01:38:06.740 --> 01:38:12.660 And he has also argued uh that purity can be just boiled down to 01:38:12.660 --> 01:38:18.580 perceptions of self-control and other kinds of more general um dimensions of 01:38:18.580 --> 01:38:21.300 uh reciprocity and interdependence, etc. 01:38:21.700 --> 01:38:25.870 And in some of those arguments, there's been some connection back to this discussed 01:38:25.870 --> 01:38:29.070 literature, although it's it's not a complete uh critique. 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. 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 01:38:40.030 --> 01:38:45.880 trying to better under untangle this potential relation between disgust and morality, 01:38:46.120 --> 01:38:51.160 which might be several different types of relationships, and try to understand why that 01:38:51.160 --> 01:38:52.600 relationship might exist. 01:38:53.640 --> 01:38:55.800 Have you have you discovered anything so far? 01:38:55.960 --> 01:38:59.160 Do you have any uh guesses as to what you'll find? 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 01:39:05.720 --> 01:39:10.550 maybe just think higher level what the phenomenon are that we're talking about. 01:39:10.790 --> 01:39:16.550 So, for one thing, we talk about disgust as uh one thing. 01:39:16.950 --> 01:39:18.790 It's kind of a folk emotion. 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 01:39:23.510 --> 01:39:27.110 disgust, they're thinking specifically about pathogen disgust. 01:39:27.190 --> 01:39:32.230 And they're saying that if something doesn't have, from an emotions perspective, um 01:39:32.470 --> 01:39:37.500 appraisals and action tendencies, uh, et cetera, that correspond with pathogen disgust, 01:39:37.580 --> 01:39:39.260 then it's not really discussed. 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 01:39:43.900 --> 01:39:44.300 disgust. 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 01:39:49.820 --> 01:39:50.620 something like that. 01:39:50.780 --> 01:39:55.500 So I think that that's really limited our scientific understanding about this relationship, 01:39:55.580 --> 01:40:01.260 in which people are really saying pathogen disgust is the only thing important in terms of 01:40:01.260 --> 01:40:03.670 all these things that we could call disgust. 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. 01:40:07.830 --> 01:40:11.830 And we shouldn't really be even thinking about that as something distinct from anger. 01:40:12.310 --> 01:40:17.830 My lab does have a lot of findings showing that you can get distinct reports of 01:40:17.830 --> 01:40:23.590 disgust versus anger to moral violations, dependent on whether the 01:40:23.590 --> 01:40:28.300 moral violation impose costs on you versus someone else. 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 01:40:33.340 --> 01:40:38.700 participant versus someone else, you get different effects on disgust versus anger. 01:40:39.180 --> 01:40:43.500 If it happened to someone else, disgust is higher than if it happened to you. 01:40:43.660 --> 01:40:47.900 And if it happened to you, anger is higher than it happened to someone else. 01:40:48.060 --> 01:40:53.330 And we further ask participants: what can what kind of motivations do you have in response 01:40:53.330 --> 01:40:54.690 to this moral violation? 01:40:54.850 --> 01:40:58.450 And we divide them into direct aggression versus indirect aggression. 01:40:58.610 --> 01:41:04.530 And we see that reports of anger relate to desires to directly aggress against someone, 01:41:04.770 --> 01:41:09.090 whereas reports of disgust relate to desires to indirectly aggress towards someone. 01:41:09.250 --> 01:41:14.210 We have several studies replicating this finding, also showing that the identity of the 01:41:14.210 --> 01:41:18.930 victim in terms of their interpersonal value relates differently to disgust and anger. 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 01:41:23.720 --> 01:41:24.520 disgusted. 01:41:24.680 --> 01:41:30.040 And when we show uh participants photos of people making disgust versus anger 01:41:30.040 --> 01:41:35.480 expressions and disgust versus anger vocalizations, they make inferences about direct 01:41:35.480 --> 01:41:39.000 aggression and indirect aggression differently across those. 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 01:41:45.160 --> 01:41:47.960 perpetrator in addition to the social value of the victim? 01:41:48.200 --> 01:41:54.070 Because you might expect that if we uh view the perpetrator uh as having lower social 01:41:54.070 --> 01:41:57.270 value, that that might predict greater disgust relative to anger. 01:41:57.910 --> 01:42:00.710 That that's a major part of what we're looking into right now. 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 01:42:06.950 --> 01:42:10.630 that in the moral foundations theory literature, a lot of the disgust and morality 01:42:10.630 --> 01:42:16.620 literature, the ideas are really tied to the content of the action itself rather than who 01:42:16.620 --> 01:42:19.020 the who is involved in the action. 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 01:42:25.980 --> 01:42:29.020 this was topical at the time when I was giving these talks a lot. 01:42:29.260 --> 01:42:34.060 Uh Donald Trump had recently gone to Arlington National Cemetery and had this photo op 01:42:34.140 --> 01:42:38.060 where he had thumbs up and a big grin over a guy's grave. 01:42:38.300 --> 01:42:43.830 Um, and you had very different responses depending on who 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 01:42:49.990 --> 01:42:51.110 your coalition. 01:42:51.350 --> 01:42:56.710 And people who um were not in the the MAGA coalition often expressed 01:42:56.710 --> 01:42:58.390 disgust toward this. 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. 01:43:03.750 --> 01:43:06.940 Um who were in the who were in the MAGA coalition, yeah. 01:43:07.180 --> 01:43:10.780 Yes, sorry, people who were in the MAGA coalition uh were not bothered at all. 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 01:43:17.020 --> 01:43:19.660 their interpersonal or coalitional value is to you. 01:43:19.900 --> 01:43:25.820 And you could also think uh about anger having a different relation with valuation in 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 01:43:30.690 --> 01:43:36.370 relationship with, directly intervening and broadcasting how you 01:43:36.370 --> 01:43:42.130 view your valuation, how you view, how you perceive how you're valued by them 01:43:42.450 --> 01:43:48.290 and changing that and letting that be known can be beneficial to you versus 01:43:48.290 --> 01:43:53.400 being discussed by them and maybe not directly intervening, but spreading 01:43:53.400 --> 01:43:59.160 reputationally damaging information about that person, that's not beneficial to you if 01:43:59.160 --> 01:44:02.040 that person is a valuable interaction partner to you. 01:44:03.800 --> 01:44:09.320 So, anyway, this is one phenomenon of the relation between disgust and morality in that we 01:44:09.400 --> 01:44:13.400 we observe people engaging in behaviors and we often have these morally condemning 01:44:13.480 --> 01:44:19.250 responses, but the affective tinges of those responses differ depending 01:44:19.250 --> 01:44:25.250 on who is affected by the action and who is engaging in the action. 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 01:44:29.010 --> 01:44:34.850 thinking about general outrage or this just being anger loses out on understanding a lot 01:44:34.850 --> 01:44:36.130 of important things. 01:44:36.930 --> 01:44:42.530 The other body of findings is that when people engage in behaviors that 01:44:42.690 --> 01:44:48.480 you yourself would be disgusted to engage in, we sometimes condemn 01:44:48.480 --> 01:44:49.680 those individuals. 01:44:50.160 --> 01:44:55.360 Again, that's a very different phenomenon, potentially, with a different explanation that 01:44:56.080 --> 01:44:57.520 needs to be demanded. 01:44:57.840 --> 01:45:01.760 But I think that that is a phenomenon, and it's not just 01:45:02.880 --> 01:45:08.240 representative of assessing people on self-control or assessing the degree to which their 01:45:08.240 --> 01:45:12.610 behaviors harm other individuals, which are kind of the alternatives that have claimed that 01:45:12.610 --> 01:45:17.090 there's nothing unique or important about the relation between disgust and morality. 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 01:45:22.690 --> 01:45:24.850 interesting and supportive of this idea. 01:45:25.090 --> 01:45:31.090 One is that we've sampled vegetarians who are a really nice population for 01:45:31.090 --> 01:45:36.780 the testing this idea because they vary on the degree to which, well, 01:45:37.260 --> 01:45:40.300 they vary on their feelings toward uh meat eaters. 01:45:40.540 --> 01:45:45.980 They also vary on how much disgust they would experience by consuming meat. 01:45:46.220 --> 01:45:51.420 So we asked them specifically a bunch of questions with imagine that you ate a veggie 01:45:51.420 --> 01:45:54.380 burger that would have been cooked in the same pan as a beef burger. 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 01:45:59.020 --> 01:46:00.610 in it, et cetera. 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 01:46:06.770 --> 01:46:08.450 what you could call norm violations. 01:46:08.610 --> 01:46:14.450 Some of these are cooperative violations, some of these are hygiene violations, some of 01:46:14.450 --> 01:46:17.970 these are unusually large amounts of eating meat. 01:46:18.210 --> 01:46:24.140 And what we find is that vegetarians self-disgust, how disgusted they would 01:46:24.140 --> 01:46:29.580 be by eating meat, uniquely and most strongly predicts their negative evaluations of these 01:46:29.580 --> 01:46:34.540 meat-eating actions, not the hygiene actions or the cooperative norm interactions. 01:46:34.700 --> 01:46:40.460 And further, it predicts that independent of their moral motivations for being a 01:46:40.460 --> 01:46:40.940 vegetarian. 01:46:41.100 --> 01:46:45.340 So we also ask them: Are you a moral vegetarian or a health vegetarian? 01:46:45.570 --> 01:46:50.210 we have them complete individual differences measures that assess how strongly their 01:46:50.210 --> 01:46:53.010 vegetarianism is motivated by these moral motivations. 01:46:53.250 --> 01:46:58.370 There's really the strong residual and strongest effect of their own disgust toward the 01:46:58.370 --> 01:47:02.050 behavior in terms of condemning other individuals for engaging the behavior. 01:47:03.010 --> 01:47:07.410 We have further research that's extended this, where we use multi level modeling 01:47:07.650 --> 01:47:12.130 approaches, where we both look at within participant the degree to which they're disgusted 01:47:12.130 --> 01:47:17.580 by a bunch of things that could evoke disgust, and then their condemnation of other 01:47:17.580 --> 01:47:19.980 individuals who engage in these behaviors. 01:47:20.380 --> 01:47:26.220 And the relation within participant between their own disgust toward engaging in behaviors 01:47:26.220 --> 01:47:29.420 and how strongly they condemn people is there. 01:47:29.740 --> 01:47:33.660 And that's stronger than if you do the same thing with other emotions like fear. 01:47:33.820 --> 01:47:36.300 So you see how scared they would be of doing different things. 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 01:47:40.780 --> 01:47:41.580 be scary. 01:47:42.220 --> 01:47:45.330 And so we we think that there is something here. 01:47:45.490 --> 01:47:51.170 It is important, and it hasn't been adequately tested by just using priming studies or 01:47:51.170 --> 01:47:53.490 having discussed sensitivity instruments. 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 01:47:59.410 --> 01:48:02.690 haven't really tested those, but we could talk about some of those ideas. 01:48:03.010 --> 01:48:03.730 I I would love to. 01:48:03.810 --> 01:48:05.730 I mean, that that's actually absolutely fascinating. 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 01:48:09.090 --> 01:48:10.050 are really cool results. 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. 01:48:14.140 --> 01:48:18.460 So it's really strongly influenced by ideas that were originally developed by uh Peter 01:48:18.460 --> 01:48:20.300 DeSholy and Rob Kurzman. 01:48:20.540 --> 01:48:25.100 And those were, of course, probably influenced by John Tuby and Lita Cosmes as well. 01:48:25.740 --> 01:48:31.020 So Peter and Rob, in one of their great papers on the mysteries of morality, 01:48:31.580 --> 01:48:37.580 proposed that you might see disgust being moralized sometimes because it could be 01:48:37.580 --> 01:48:42.970 acting as a cue to whether you have any advantage in engaging 01:48:43.130 --> 01:48:44.810 behavior in the future. 01:48:45.130 --> 01:48:50.970 And their general idea is that people should be having moral sentiments 01:48:50.970 --> 01:48:56.890 that contribute to shaping or resisting rules that are either 01:48:57.130 --> 01:49:02.250 beneficial, shaping rules that are beneficial to you, or resisting rules that are costly to 01:49:02.250 --> 01:49:02.570 you. 01:49:02.940 --> 01:49:07.820 The idea that you feel disgust toward doing something is a good indication that you would 01:49:07.820 --> 01:49:09.420 never do it yourself. 01:49:09.660 --> 01:49:14.940 And so there's very little cost toward endorsing rules against that. 01:49:16.300 --> 01:49:21.820 Now, going back to uh Deb Lieberman's conversation with you 01:49:21.820 --> 01:49:27.670 guys on this topic, Deb has a slightly different view on this, I think, although 01:49:27.670 --> 01:49:29.350 the our views are quite complementary. 01:49:29.590 --> 01:49:35.430 Deb really emphasizes the idea that people who engage in behaviors that other find others 01:49:35.430 --> 01:49:41.350 find disgusting are good candidates for exploitation, and that they're just generally 01:49:41.350 --> 01:49:42.390 going to be low value. 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 01:49:48.390 --> 01:49:49.670 the same individual. 01:49:50.470 --> 01:49:55.840 I think that that probably happens, although I think that there are probably other types of 01:49:55.840 --> 01:50:01.520 processes in which people just don't resist rules that 01:50:01.520 --> 01:50:04.160 don't actually impose costs on them. 01:50:04.320 --> 01:50:09.520 And so through processes of cultural evolution, you can kind of get these as gravity points 01:50:09.760 --> 01:50:15.600 where if rules are constantly or repeatedly being proposed and cycling through, and some of 01:50:15.600 --> 01:50:19.010 them are transmitted and maintained in populations. 01:50:19.330 --> 01:50:24.290 And part of what influences whether they're whether they're maintained and transmitted is 01:50:24.290 --> 01:50:27.250 people objecting to them or making arguments against them. 01:50:27.490 --> 01:50:33.170 Well, if if people only pay costs in terms of arguing against 01:50:33.170 --> 01:50:38.450 certain rules and they don't get any benefits from arguing against them, you could get 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 01:50:44.140 --> 01:50:45.900 little bit cross-culturally prevalent. 01:50:46.140 --> 01:50:51.820 So I think that this line of thinking has something to say about the prevalence of 01:50:51.820 --> 01:50:57.420 incest taboos, which is kind of a puzzle because almost no one wants to 01:50:57.420 --> 01:51:00.620 engage, wants to sleep with their siblings or their parents. 01:51:01.260 --> 01:51:04.700 It can happen occasionally, but it's very, very rare. 01:51:04.990 --> 01:51:10.430 And the actual consequences of it for most people are almost zero. 01:51:10.670 --> 01:51:13.230 Um, so it's not good for your kin. 01:51:13.310 --> 01:51:18.670 Like if your sibling sleeps with your parent, that has some inclusive fitness uh 01:51:18.910 --> 01:51:20.190 costs to you. 01:51:20.430 --> 01:51:24.270 Um, but for other people, it's it's not really all that relevant. 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 01:51:29.420 --> 01:51:33.500 actually condemn other people and for this again to be so cross-culturally prevalent is 01:51:33.500 --> 01:51:34.620 kind of strange. 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 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, 01:51:45.500 --> 01:51:49.900 if incest is one of the most disgusting things that people could kind of imagine engaging 01:51:49.900 --> 01:51:51.980 in, you're going to have very little pushback. 01:51:52.060 --> 01:51:55.290 And then people can maybe coordinate around this specific rule. 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 01:52:01.450 --> 01:52:05.290 sexual behaviors that most people would be disgusted to engage in. 01:52:05.530 --> 01:52:08.890 I think that this has something to say with the cross-cultural condemnation of 01:52:08.890 --> 01:52:10.090 homosexuality. 01:52:10.330 --> 01:52:15.900 So this is kind of difficult for um us weird 01:52:15.900 --> 01:52:21.900 researchers to completely understand, although us older millennials may be a little bit 01:52:21.900 --> 01:52:27.500 better than my Gen Z students, but Western 01:52:27.500 --> 01:52:32.540 Europeans and to an extent Americans are living in really extraordinary times in terms of 01:52:32.540 --> 01:52:34.300 acceptance of homosexuality. 01:52:34.460 --> 01:52:39.930 And when I show Pew research data on the proportion of individuals in different countries 01:52:39.930 --> 01:52:43.450 who think that uh homosexuality is unacceptable. 01:52:43.530 --> 01:52:45.050 Um, it's really shocking. 01:52:45.210 --> 01:52:49.850 Uh, and you get this across countries with very different economic systems and very 01:52:49.850 --> 01:52:52.810 different religions and very different cultural histories. 01:52:53.050 --> 01:52:57.290 And so for some reason, this has just been popping up in different areas. 01:52:57.450 --> 01:53:00.890 And of course, it's been transmitted uh into some areas. 01:53:01.210 --> 01:53:06.540 Um, But again, you get, you know, China, South Korea, the Middle East, 01:53:06.860 --> 01:53:11.740 Sub-Saharan Africa being very large with very different kinds of colonial histories and 01:53:11.900 --> 01:53:13.500 cultural transmission histories. 01:53:13.980 --> 01:53:18.220 And so you get this being fairly sticky, but you also have this fascinating phenomenon 01:53:18.220 --> 01:53:19.500 where it's quickly extinguished. 01:53:19.660 --> 01:53:22.460 So it seems like it'll never change until it does. 01:53:22.540 --> 01:53:24.220 And then it changes very quickly. 01:53:24.460 --> 01:53:29.930 And I think that this is also somewhat compatible with thinking about disgust 01:53:30.170 --> 01:53:35.930 shaping rules, in that if if we take the perspective of an average person in a 01:53:35.930 --> 01:53:40.570 society, and you know, the rule is proposed that homosexuality is wrong. 01:53:40.730 --> 01:53:46.730 And they implicitly think, okay, I engage in homosexuality, I'm disgusted by that 01:53:46.730 --> 01:53:47.130 thought. 01:53:47.210 --> 01:53:51.220 And that's not to say there's anything disgusting about homosexual individuals, but most 01:53:51.220 --> 01:53:54.820 people are disgusted by the thought of engaging sex with most other individuals. 01:53:55.380 --> 01:54:00.660 But if you're not homosexual, that thought uh might have a tinge of disgust. 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 01:54:05.460 --> 01:54:07.540 place because I experience disgust toward it. 01:54:07.700 --> 01:54:12.340 So I'm not going to resist review uh rules that homosexuality is wrong. 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 01:54:17.370 --> 01:54:22.330 benefit in saying, no, I really, really want homosexuality to be wrong. 01:54:22.810 --> 01:54:27.930 Of course, some people do, depending on how many people in their coalition are saying that. 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 01:54:34.250 --> 01:54:38.650 coalitions where that rule is kind of a sacred value that's non-negotiable. 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 01:54:44.360 --> 01:54:47.000 long time, but then can crumble quickly. 01:54:47.240 --> 01:54:52.840 And I looked at general social survey data a while ago, and you 01:54:52.840 --> 01:54:58.360 saw very high, uh, very consistent ratings of homosexuality being 01:54:58.360 --> 01:55:04.200 extremely wrong or always wrong or something from when the survey started in the early 70s 01:55:04.200 --> 01:55:06.200 until the mid to late 90s. 01:55:06.280 --> 01:55:08.990 And then it just assessment after assessment. 01:55:09.070 --> 01:55:11.550 It's almost going down in a linear fashion. 01:55:11.710 --> 01:55:14.750 And that's not the case with other types of sexual rules. 01:55:14.830 --> 01:55:18.350 So another question on the survey was is adultery wrong? 01:55:18.510 --> 01:55:22.590 And there, you started out at almost the exact same level as homosexuality. 01:55:22.830 --> 01:55:25.150 It's kept at almost the exact same level. 01:55:25.470 --> 01:55:31.140 And there, that's a rule where pretty much everyone can be disadvantaged by having their 01:55:31.140 --> 01:55:32.740 spouse commit infidelity. 01:55:32.900 --> 01:55:38.020 So you should see people being much less flexible in dumping that once there's momentum 01:55:38.020 --> 01:55:39.460 from other people in doing so. 01:55:39.620 --> 01:55:45.540 And in fact, we do see, and I'm sometimes um approached with surprise from 01:55:45.540 --> 01:55:50.260 people in the polyamory community or the ethical non-monogamy community that, oh, this is 01:55:50.260 --> 01:55:51.460 getting really big. 01:55:51.620 --> 01:55:52.980 Um, and no, it's not. 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 01:55:57.970 --> 01:56:03.490 broader population because people do perceive these costs in terms of their monogamous 01:56:03.490 --> 01:56:04.530 relationships. 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 01:56:11.170 --> 01:56:16.370 self-experience disgust and your degree, the way that you view other individuals who engage 01:56:16.370 --> 01:56:17.570 in these behaviors. 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 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 01:56:29.900 --> 01:56:35.580 discussed gives about the consequences of these behaviors or rules in the ecology. 01:56:38.140 --> 01:56:39.580 Fascinating stuff. 01:56:39.740 --> 01:56:39.820 Yeah. 01:56:40.380 --> 01:56:40.540 Super. 01:56:41.980 --> 01:56:42.860 Yeah, really important. 01:56:43.980 --> 01:56:49.830 I do kind of lean toward uh Deb's take 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 01:56:56.550 --> 01:57:02.470 s endorsing a rule against something that I find disgusting uh doesn't cost me anything, 01:57:02.630 --> 01:57:02.950 right? 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 01:57:08.700 --> 01:57:10.220 the benefit side of it as well. 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. 01:57:14.380 --> 01:57:18.700 But um in order for me to actively morally campaign against something, there has to be 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 01:57:23.980 --> 01:57:25.420 into moral judgment. 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 01:57:31.580 --> 01:57:36.540 exclude or or dominate someone else, um, that that 01:57:37.170 --> 01:57:40.450 benefit side of things might also be playing a role here as well. 01:57:40.530 --> 01:57:44.690 And you could make the further prediction that when there is, say, greater resource 01:57:44.690 --> 01:57:50.290 scarcity, greater zero-sumness, greater incentive to exclude and exploit people, 01:57:51.250 --> 01:57:55.970 that you might uh see an increase in these kinds of uh disgust-based moral rules. 01:57:56.050 --> 01:58:00.450 And that people are just looking for opportunities to exclude people or exploit people and 01:58:00.450 --> 01:58:06.050 are actively searching the rule space uh for for rules that they can use to marginalize 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. 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 01:58:15.640 --> 01:58:16.040 environments. 01:58:16.120 --> 01:58:18.200 I'm curious what you think of that idea. 01:58:18.600 --> 01:58:22.040 Yeah, that's that sounds uh totally plausible to me. 01:58:22.120 --> 01:58:26.600 Um and I I should um emphasize again that I think that these different perspectives are 01:58:26.600 --> 01:58:27.960 completely compatible. 01:58:28.360 --> 01:58:34.190 Um there there is a cost to not moralizing that is independent of 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 01:58:40.190 --> 01:58:46.190 nine of them have said, I think that um incest is wrong, and then you say, 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, 01:58:51.870 --> 01:58:54.430 you could then be a target of that coalition. 01:58:54.740 --> 01:58:55.220 Correct. 01:58:55.460 --> 01:59:01.380 And so you could certainly benefit from ganging up on the person who's 01:59:01.380 --> 01:59:03.220 accused of committing incest. 01:59:03.620 --> 01:59:09.300 And there's probably a lot of overlap between that, but simply not agreeing with the 01:59:09.300 --> 01:59:13.780 moral sentiment when other people are advertising it or asking your opinion about it is a 01:59:13.780 --> 01:59:15.140 cost in of itself. 01:59:15.780 --> 01:59:16.660 That's true. 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 01:59:21.010 --> 01:59:23.490 coming out against it or g asking your opinion about it. 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 01:59:27.810 --> 01:59:31.010 it or ask your you know your judgment about it in the first place. 01:59:31.090 --> 01:59:32.770 Like why why do people care at all? 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 01:59:38.290 --> 01:59:39.650 marginalize people. 01:59:40.320 --> 01:59:42.320 Yeah, no, I I think that's totally true. 01:59:42.480 --> 01:59:47.760 I mean, another question is should it be your own disgust toward engaging in the 01:59:47.760 --> 01:59:53.200 behavior versus your perception of how disgusted other people are toward engaging the 01:59:53.200 --> 01:59:53.760 behavior? 01:59:54.000 --> 01:59:59.600 So is your own disgust going to be diagnostic of uh of the exploitation 01:59:59.600 --> 02:00:04.960 value of this individual, or is your perception of um how 02:00:04.960 --> 02:00:06.320 disgusted other people? 02:00:06.670 --> 02:00:06.910 Yeah. 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 02:00:11.870 --> 02:00:13.550 things on the wall and seeing what sticks. 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 02:00:17.310 --> 02:00:17.950 you care about that? 02:00:18.030 --> 02:00:18.350 You know? 02:00:18.510 --> 02:00:22.670 I mean, I think some people are clever and really gauge the reaction of third parties. 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 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 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 02:00:37.700 --> 02:00:43.700 see what gets reaction from people, like a politician, whether explicitly a 02:00:43.700 --> 02:00:44.580 politician or not. 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 02:00:50.740 --> 02:00:52.500 what I'm getting a response from and not. 02:00:52.660 --> 02:00:58.500 And those are the people who are sort of like internalize the the ambient cultural 02:00:58.500 --> 02:01:01.860 reactions of people, but may not may not feel them themselves. 02:01:02.180 --> 02:01:02.580 Mm-hmm. 02:01:02.980 --> 02:01:03.220 Yeah. 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 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 02:01:14.050 --> 02:01:16.930 a group a group of people or a disgusting practice. 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 02:01:23.330 --> 02:01:28.600 say dark triad traits um uh interact with 02:01:28.840 --> 02:01:34.520 personal disgust uh to predict moral condemnation such that um I'm more 02:01:34.520 --> 02:01:40.280 likely to to moralize um behaviors I find disgusting if I'm a 02:01:40.440 --> 02:01:45.000 high dark triad person who's looking for opportunities to exploit people or to aggress 02:01:45.000 --> 02:01:45.800 against people. 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 02:01:51.480 --> 02:01:52.040 perspective. 02:01:52.590 --> 02:01:54.590 Yeah, I think that's a really interesting thought. 02:01:54.750 --> 02:02:00.430 Um, going back to John Heid's work and moral foundations theory, um, the 02:02:00.430 --> 02:02:05.470 idea there is that people vary in the degree to which they prioritize these different kinds 02:02:05.470 --> 02:02:08.750 of domains in terms of making their moral judgments. 02:02:08.990 --> 02:02:14.430 And some people prioritize purity more in deciding whether or not something is 02:02:14.430 --> 02:02:15.070 wrong. 02:02:15.310 --> 02:02:20.400 And, you know, I think that you can uh, regardless of whether the categorization of moral 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 02:02:26.400 --> 02:02:32.400 two people who are uh equally disgusted by yeah, engaging 02:02:32.400 --> 02:02:36.480 in some kind of sexual practice, and one of them is going to strongly morally condemn 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 02:02:41.360 --> 02:02:41.760 business. 02:02:41.920 --> 02:02:46.250 And understanding what separates those people in terms of personality variation, which 02:02:46.250 --> 02:02:52.170 you've referred to, um Pinsoff, or um kind of broader strategic 02:02:52.170 --> 02:02:56.970 orientations based on uh exploitation versus cooperation. 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 02:03:02.170 --> 02:03:03.130 within an individual. 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 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 02:03:13.200 --> 02:03:15.520 have temptations to do the wrong thing. 02:03:15.680 --> 02:03:20.400 And I'm signaling we're all going to coordinate about the right thing to do. 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 02:03:26.240 --> 02:03:27.440 wrong thing. 02:03:27.680 --> 02:03:33.120 But I'm going to sort of um broadcast, we're going to curtail that in 02:03:33.360 --> 02:03:36.850 ourselves, but instead do this other thing. 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 02:03:41.890 --> 02:03:47.410 sort of the what we're moralizing is we might all do the wrong 02:03:47.410 --> 02:03:53.410 thing, but I am advertising this is a way to be better 02:03:53.650 --> 02:03:59.010 or get better stuff or do the right thing, which is something organisms should care about. 02:03:59.410 --> 02:04:03.760 Um, But I get some benefits by being the leader of that. 02:04:03.920 --> 02:04:05.200 You might defer to me. 02:04:05.600 --> 02:04:06.560 I might have status. 02:04:06.720 --> 02:04:10.480 I might say, look, we've all had bad things happen to us. 02:04:10.640 --> 02:04:12.880 I'm going to show you the right way to do things. 02:04:13.120 --> 02:04:19.120 And so the moralization of what's bad may not be individuals that we exclude. 02:04:19.280 --> 02:04:22.320 It might be the paths that we might all take. 02:04:22.570 --> 02:04:26.010 And I'm going to say we might fall into moral badness. 02:04:26.170 --> 02:04:28.090 We might get bad outcomes. 02:04:28.330 --> 02:04:33.130 Listen to me, and I will guide you to the morally superior outcome. 02:04:33.370 --> 02:04:34.730 I think that's also a trope. 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 02:04:40.810 --> 02:04:45.610 of policy or or paths individuals might take, even within our own group. 02:04:46.000 --> 02:04:46.320 Hmm. 02:04:46.480 --> 02:04:47.520 I I like that way of thinking. 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 02:04:52.560 --> 02:04:56.560 likely to moralize the disgusting wrong thing to do. 02:04:56.800 --> 02:05:02.400 And that say if I if I care more about a certain type of of sexual 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 02:05:07.600 --> 02:05:11.040 coordinating around that particular sexual strategy, I'm going to be more likely to 02:05:11.040 --> 02:05:17.010 moralize anything that is is outside of that sexual strategy or or deviant 02:05:17.010 --> 02:05:17.650 from it. 02:05:17.810 --> 02:05:20.690 Um whereas if I don't know Yeah, or even the reverse. 02:05:20.770 --> 02:05:23.650 It's just like the question is like, what would the benefit be? 02:05:23.810 --> 02:05:27.730 How would I benefit from moralizing that doesn't involve excluding somebody? 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 02:05:33.490 --> 02:05:35.970 to be listened to, I don't want to exclude anybody. 02:05:36.130 --> 02:05:37.890 How can I square that circle? 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 02:05:43.720 --> 02:05:49.240 just sort of saying, look, you should listen to me because there's a class of 02:05:49.240 --> 02:05:53.880 outcomes that we might all engage in that are disgusting or morally bad. 02:05:54.120 --> 02:05:57.560 But I can give you a way to avoid that. 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, 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. 02:06:09.400 --> 02:06:15.390 Um, But still using that cudgel of disgust and moralization as a way to get 02:06:15.390 --> 02:06:17.950 your own status uh achieved. 02:06:19.390 --> 02:06:20.670 Yeah, that makes sense. 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 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 02:06:30.110 --> 02:06:31.300 play in disgust. 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 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 02:06:39.780 --> 02:06:43.940 receive a benefit while uh the outsider to that subset incurs a cost. 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, 02:06:48.100 --> 02:06:50.820 and whoever is outside of the subset incurs a cost. 02:06:50.980 --> 02:06:53.460 Uh, and there are a number of situations that might apply to. 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 02:06:58.020 --> 02:07:01.130 people from that resource to get a higher share of it for ourselves. 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 02:07:07.450 --> 02:07:09.290 resource, assuming they submit to us. 02:07:09.690 --> 02:07:12.010 These are all kind of versions of the simple majority game. 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 02:07:16.650 --> 02:07:16.890 out. 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 02:07:22.090 --> 02:07:25.290 stable strategies in this game that relate to what I call transitivity. 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. 02:07:31.260 --> 02:07:34.300 The uh friend of my enemy is my enemy. 02:07:34.780 --> 02:07:36.620 The enemy of my enemy is my friend. 02:07:36.860 --> 02:07:42.380 So these are all uh ESSs in the simple majority game because they um facilitate 02:07:42.460 --> 02:07:43.900 coordination on an alliance. 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 02:07:48.060 --> 02:07:49.580 and share the same friends, right? 02:07:49.660 --> 02:07:53.390 If we have different enemies and different friends, uh were going to disagree about what 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 02:07:58.030 --> 02:07:58.830 outsider. 02:07:59.630 --> 02:08:05.630 And so because of these transitivity rules, that creates a kind 02:08:05.630 --> 02:08:11.630 of social contagion, such that if I uh do something that signals my enmity toward the 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 02:08:16.910 --> 02:08:18.860 should oppose anyone who supports me. 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 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 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 02:08:33.660 --> 02:08:37.580 contaminate to my family members because they're going to be viewed as my friends. 02:08:37.820 --> 02:08:41.660 And um, from the group's perspective, the friend of my enemy is my enemy. 02:08:42.010 --> 02:08:42.490 Right. 02:08:42.650 --> 02:08:48.650 And so because uh of these alliance dynamics, when you do anything that 02:08:48.650 --> 02:08:52.730 uh signals disloyalty or enmity toward a group of people, it creates a kind of contagion 02:08:52.730 --> 02:08:58.010 where everyone is rushing to signal that they oppose that person and anyone or anything who 02:08:58.010 --> 02:09:02.840 is associated with that person, which is isomorphic to the logic of contagion, right? 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 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 02:09:12.280 --> 02:09:12.760 that person. 02:09:12.920 --> 02:09:18.760 And so because the logic of contagion is similar with alliances and with pathogens, 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 02:09:23.240 --> 02:09:27.720 serve this new function of dealing with social contagion uh as opposed to pathogen 02:09:27.720 --> 02:09:28.200 contagion. 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 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 02:09:38.530 --> 02:09:42.530 moral violation is committed or when a signal of disloyalty is sent. 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 02:09:46.450 --> 02:09:49.570 your research on on moral disgust. 02:09:50.130 --> 02:09:54.050 Yeah, what what you say about the common properties with physical contamination and 02:09:54.050 --> 02:09:55.810 contagion makes a lot of sense to me. 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 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 02:10:05.980 --> 02:10:09.020 of laid a foundation to understand it more systematically. 02:10:09.260 --> 02:10:15.100 Um there are critical differences, of course, in that uh 02:10:15.340 --> 02:10:21.180 with pathogen disgust, it really is about physical contact versus with moral disgust, 02:10:21.340 --> 02:10:27.210 um not so much, but it is maybe about being seen associating with the individual, 02:10:27.290 --> 02:10:28.010 as you suggest. 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 02:10:34.090 --> 02:10:40.010 corresponding with reports of disgust versus reports of anger, um these 02:10:40.250 --> 02:10:45.290 are related to indirect aggression, uh, damaging the person's reputation, gossiping about 02:10:45.290 --> 02:10:48.010 them, letting people know what they've done. 02:10:48.380 --> 02:10:54.300 And we've mostly been thinking about those things in terms of imposing costs on the 02:10:54.300 --> 02:10:55.260 individual. 02:10:55.740 --> 02:11:01.100 But uh gossip could also be protecting you from 02:11:01.420 --> 02:11:07.020 inferences from others that you agree or that you're uh an ally of that 02:11:07.020 --> 02:11:07.660 target. 02:11:08.060 --> 02:11:13.930 Um And uh, you know, oftentimes when people think about moral disgust versus 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 02:11:19.370 --> 02:11:23.450 the phenomenology, and there's some overlap in the facial expressions. 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 02:11:29.050 --> 02:11:29.370 well. 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 02:11:34.650 --> 02:11:39.260 phenomenology that's reflecting both of those functions, the the 02:11:39.900 --> 02:11:45.900 contamination avoidance, the contagion avoidance in terms of physical properties versus the 02:11:45.900 --> 02:11:51.900 contamination avoidance uh in terms of alliance detection or or cooperation. 02:11:52.300 --> 02:11:55.020 Um I I'm I'm not sure. 02:11:55.100 --> 02:11:56.460 You know, I don't have an answer to that. 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 02:12:02.430 --> 02:12:03.230 moral realm. 02:12:03.630 --> 02:12:09.550 In terms of facial expression or vocal expression, that could be co-opted pretty easily, I 02:12:09.550 --> 02:12:15.470 think, if there's a signal of contagion physically, that then people can 02:12:15.470 --> 02:12:21.310 make an inference of contagion perception more socially or 02:12:21.310 --> 02:12:22.350 symbolically. 02:12:22.680 --> 02:12:25.720 I could see that happening uh fairly easily. 02:12:25.880 --> 02:12:27.400 Well, I shouldn't say fairly easily. 02:12:27.560 --> 02:12:30.120 I could see that uh bridge happening. 02:12:30.280 --> 02:12:36.120 Um, you know, one thing that I've pondered about with this shared phenomenology, which 02:12:36.120 --> 02:12:38.120 people say that they're sick to their stomach. 02:12:38.200 --> 02:12:43.560 And I personally have experienced phenomenology that seems to overlap with smelling 02:12:43.560 --> 02:12:49.210 something bad toward social violations that others have engaged in. 02:12:49.690 --> 02:12:55.690 I think back to an analogy that Rob Kurzman made in terms of effort, in 02:12:55.690 --> 02:13:01.130 that you can have people talk about something being effortful in terms of mental 02:13:01.130 --> 02:13:07.130 effort related to, you know, the old ego depletion studies are not eating chocolate chip 02:13:07.130 --> 02:13:12.680 cookies or eating radishes instead, or having to identify circle dot every I in a sentence 02:13:12.760 --> 02:13:13.800 or something like this. 02:13:13.880 --> 02:13:19.880 Um, and that feels effortful, uh, not in an identical way, but in a similar enough 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 02:13:24.840 --> 02:13:25.080 lot. 02:13:25.320 --> 02:13:30.920 Um, and that this similarity in phenomenology isn't reflecting underlying 02:13:30.920 --> 02:13:36.570 similarity in uh metabolic effort or uh or 02:13:36.570 --> 02:13:41.930 something like that, which that assumption kind of led some research down the wrong path in 02:13:41.930 --> 02:13:43.610 trying to explain mental effort. 02:13:43.770 --> 02:13:46.970 But it's probably some kind of representation of opportunity costs. 02:13:47.130 --> 02:13:52.890 And you can pay high opportunity costs by um proceeding with a 02:13:52.890 --> 02:13:58.600 mundane uh typing task when you're not getting any feedback of things that are 02:13:58.600 --> 02:14:04.520 beneficial for you, or you can pay opportunity costs in terms of uh caloric or muscle, 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 02:14:10.280 --> 02:14:13.000 feedback of any kinds of benefits. 02:14:13.240 --> 02:14:18.360 Um and so their proposal was that sense of effort is actually a representation of 02:14:18.360 --> 02:14:23.000 opportunity costs, but opportunity costs can vary quite a bit across domains. 02:14:23.270 --> 02:14:28.630 Now, whether that commonality across moral disgust and pathogen disgust is a 02:14:28.630 --> 02:14:34.150 representation of contagion, but in pathogen contagion versus 02:14:34.150 --> 02:14:39.270 reputational or reliance or social contagion, which I have not thought about in those terms 02:14:39.270 --> 02:14:43.110 before, versus something else that I've thought about, which is some representation of 02:14:43.110 --> 02:14:48.940 valuation, which is you can have low valuation in terms of caloric or contact benefits 02:14:48.940 --> 02:14:54.700 relative to pathogen costs, or you could have low valuation in terms of association 02:14:54.700 --> 02:15:00.620 based on that person's behavior rather than how other people are going to 02:15:00.620 --> 02:15:02.700 treat you for being around that person. 02:15:03.340 --> 02:15:05.740 Although those aren't mutually exclusive either. 02:15:06.140 --> 02:15:10.940 A person's valuation could partially be what your relationship with them would be 02:15:11.100 --> 02:15:13.020 reputationally in the eyes of others. 02:15:13.580 --> 02:15:19.350 So all of this is to say I find the account uh promising and convincing 02:15:19.510 --> 02:15:25.510 um but whittling down on why there's that commonality in phenomenology and 02:15:25.510 --> 02:15:28.950 outputs, uh I I'm not completely sure yet. 02:15:29.270 --> 02:15:30.550 Yeah, cool. 02:15:31.510 --> 02:15:33.270 Well, this was great. 02:15:33.430 --> 02:15:39.340 Um Josh, you're um you're you're well into the evening hours 02:15:39.340 --> 02:15:41.500 here and we might have just lost Josh. 02:15:41.580 --> 02:15:42.780 Uh can you hear us? 02:15:43.020 --> 02:15:43.340 All right. 02:15:43.580 --> 02:15:44.140 I'm back. 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 02:15:49.580 --> 02:15:49.900 great though. 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. 02:15:56.860 --> 02:15:57.340 Thumbs up. 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 02:16:02.460 --> 02:16:07.810 but then uh getting more specific about why the the phenomenology um uh overlaps in in 02:16:07.810 --> 02:16:11.890 those two cases it would would be uh promising. 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 02:16:16.690 --> 02:16:20.370 what it affords to the organism is sort of this possible idea. 02:16:20.850 --> 02:16:21.090 Yeah. 02:16:21.250 --> 02:16:21.810 Yes, exactly. 02:16:22.050 --> 02:16:22.530 Very cool. 02:16:22.770 --> 02:16:24.930 Well, Josh, uh we've taken up a lot of your time. 02:16:25.010 --> 02:16:25.890 I know it's late there. 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 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 02:16:34.860 --> 02:16:35.180 bases.