Conspiracy Theories and Group Boundaries with Cristina Moya
2025-08-05 12:00:00.000 +00:00

David, good to see you. Good to see you, Dave. Uh, what is your last name? It's Petra Zuski. It's not easy to say. And what's my last name again? Uh Pinsoff. Although you uh you late I heard you there's a rumor that you would like to go by Von Pinsoff. Uh yes, that's right. Ideally. Uh if you could call me Von Pinsoff, that would be much appreciated. Um, we have a wonderful episode today, and uh that episode involves actual evolutionary psychology by actual evolutionary psychologists, which is our tagline. Oh, I was gonna say, I think there's a a podcast with a tagline like that. So yeah, enjoy and uh we'll see you in a few seconds. I can cut that out. Um let's see. We'll be back in a few seconds after a brief musical interlude.

Seven seconds, yeah. Okay. So David, today we have Christina Moya. We do. Uh this was a oh sorry, David. Uh Christina uh goes by. I don't know if she still has this her signature in her email, but it's Christina without the H. So it's C-R I S T I N A. Okay, cool. Um I mean it's a homonym, so you can't tell the difference, but that's right. Uh we're doing great so far. Uh it's Christina, not Christina. Yes. And uh what who is she? Christina Moya is I don't well, who she's uh Christina Moya. I don't know if I'm like wow we're like three minutes in and we still haven't even gotten it. Uh no, no, no. She's a professor of anthropology at UC Davis. Uh and Christina is from the academic family over at Boyd and Pete Richardson.

Um, she was a graduate student at UCLA. And um Christina is just an incredibly uh I think she's one to my mind, she's one of the most sort of um well rounded and just intensely fierced intellects in the evolutionary behavioral sciences. Um and I just love talking to Christina. She's so charitable and willing to argue in a very positive way. Um and so I just I'm always happy to talk to Christina and it makes my my uh my day and my month and my year when I get to see her. So it's it's been a while because we're all busy professors now. And so it was really good to talk to her on this episode. And she talks about um ethnolinguistic boundaries. Yep. We get into uh you know intergroup boundaries, intergroup essentialism, which we get into

in the podcast. We even get into some of the different branches of the evolutionary social sciences. Uh and and we we go into some interesting tangents too. We talked about like coolness and charisma, like it was a really fun, wide-range. This is when we also talked about uh flat Earth uh flat earth conspiracies and yeah uh conspiracies in general. Yeah. So um yeah if if you're interested in flat earth um things, uh this is the one for you. Yep. Uh so with without further ado, I love this one. This is a great, great episode. Uh without further ado here is Christina Moya and David and I talking about um flat earth and everything uh related and joy okay we're recording um christina moya from uc davis anthropology uh professor

there um is joining us today christina we're super happy to have you thanks so much for having us well us me the royal um uh christina yes exactly um uh christina i was thinking about this like what um i was thinking yesterday like what to say about you. And I think honestly, you're probably one of the people who has like most changed my mind of any person I've talked to. Yeah. Um, and we can get into sort of what that is, but I mean the short version is like you were a student at UCLA. I was a student at UCSB. And the idea of sort of cultural evolution and the validity of it and why it was important and how it fits with natural selection or biological evolution is something that you and I over kind of conversations as we were graduate students, we just went over year over year.

And um, you know, I really learned a lot talking from you. And you know, you convinced me that cultural evolution is a thing and it's important to understand. And so thank you for doing that. It's the nice to be honest. Oh my gosh, that's like the nicest thing I've gonna hear this week, I'm sure. So we're we're gonna end the episode right now. So thanks for joining us. Done. Done. Mission accomplished. Dave, why don't you you should tell the world, but I convinced you of none. Oh, I mean, I I was already on board with cultural evolution. I think there's a bit of a difference in between the UCLA and UCSB uh schools of thought. I think um UCLA is more like let's marry the two approaches of you know classic to

be cosmedies of psych and you know Boideian cultural evolution. They're compatible, let's find you know how they inform each other. And that's very much Clark Barrett's approach that he he put forward in his uh excellent book, um, The Shape of Thought. Um, we're getting a little in the weeds here, but no, it's great. No, shape of thought is great. Yeah, we'll we'll yeah. But I feel like, yeah, no, the the UCSP school is more like we're gonna stick to the to the Bible, the Tubian Cosmeties Bible, and anything outside of that we're gonna be a little hostile to. Is that is that unfair, Dave? Um, no, I think I was uh uh embodying that and I think during this conversation with Christina. And I mean Christina and Christina, I also have we I also have great guilt because we're

working on this uh paper. And maybe we can talk a little bit about um uh why why we wrote the paper, because I think in some sense, uh time has assassinated it to some degree for us, but I think it's still worth doing the paper. I mean, um, but but basically, David, and and we can explain because there's gonna be different audiences for this, some people who know us, some people who don't know anything about this. But um this I think this goes in the category of like the people you fight with are the people that you're closest to. And so compared to everyone else in the world, UCLA, sort of Rob Boyd, Pete Richardson doing taking an evolutionary approach to understanding cultural dynamics, and

then Lita Cosmid is in John Tuby taking an evolutionary perspective to understand cultural dynamics through psychology. I mean, that's like really similar, UCLA, UCSB, really close by. And, you know, I wasn't there for all of the um controversy. I heard stories about it from more senior folks um like Clark. Um but um and but but I do understand that there was sort of controversy. But I think our generation, Christina, you and I, we sort of we were the on the ground um grad students sort of resolving what that conflict was. And I would say I wouldn't want to diminish that some people do like I I still hear from some parts of the evolutionary social sciences kind of this wariness about evolutionary

psychology specifically, right? Um, and that I think is born out of maybe like some of what the worst part of that work might be, but also some of these old conflicts that haven't been totally resolved. So to your point, Dave, that I do think there is still value in saying where is our division of labor and where is our true disagreement. Like that was kind of one of our goals there because what and I try to do this even my now that I'm undergraduate teaching, um, which I guess you're starting as well, right? Like like thinking about what how do we teach our students to make sure that, you know, they're go they're going to hear different stories from different classes and to recognize the value of different fields and different approaches as specialization to some extent.

But then also being able to engage like when it really is when the when there really are debates, like figure trying to figure out like where where is the debate, like name that debate, and figure out is it something tractable from a scientific perspective? Right. Yeah. Um and I and I think there might be some of those still, but I think some of them it's increased like you said that it's assassin time has assassinated that paper. I think that some of the big debates that remain are like about just hard, really hard to answer questions, maybe intractable. Um, what do you think? So I'm curious. So you you put that out there, and it's a really interesting distinction between like a pseudo-disagreement where there's actually no conflict, and it's just an intellectual dil

division of labor where we're gonna focus on these questions and these topics, and we're gonna focus on these questions and these topics, and then we can, you know, meet each other in the middle when we tunnel through the mountain on on either side. Um But there may be some genuine disagreements and genuine conflicts about how the world works. Do you see that existing? And if so, what are those genuine disagreements and conflicts? I think we might we could even talk about them as like different priors about how the way the world works, like different emphasis put on different processes as being relatively more important. And I think um those probably come down in the to the field of like cooperation.

That's a big one. Um and then um kind of how much how much information has to be in the mind or has in that how much how strong do those priors that natural selection endowed us with have to be or how are they structured um to be able to get us like the full range of complex behavior that we see today. And so I think we start with different assumptions or different, at least priors. I would like to think that hopefully we can all update our beliefs as you know Dave has. But it's hard sometimes, right? Like we're we have a lifetime of living our world in our subfields. But those two, those two questions I think are ones that we start with different expectations of the world. Yeah. So just to clarify for people who don't know, a prior is in Bayesian mathematics, it's the

expectation you have uh that a certain hypothesis is true before you encounter the evidence, and then you update your prior once you get the evidence. Um what's interesting about you highlighting this um disagreement about what the prior is, is that I think the difference in priors is itself about our priors. Because uh for so we come to This is getting too meta for me. So on one perspective, let's say we come to the world with a rich set of priors about how reality works. We're expecting to receive certain kinds of really precise inputs. Uh and we and we come to the world with a a a wide variety of hypotheses about how the world is structured, you know, plants, animals, people, social categories, etc.

Uh and the other perspective is our when we come into the world and our priors are actually quite relaxed and we're kind of open to any kind of input uh and we sort of the the mind sort of evolves based very contingently on the input and we and we don't really have uh you know a a strong expectation one way or the other and the development of the mind is very much a product of the inputs themselves and not of the the priors that we have uh before we get the input. Is that one of the big way of characterizing? I think that's true. I think that's one of the big debates. And then I think the other one which we can or don't have to talk about is like what helps explain like large-scale cooperation.

Right. Um, or most of cooperation, maybe with but yeah, I agree. That's a really good way of putting the debate about the nature of the mind. Um priors about priors. Um Christina, um, your um we'll start talking about your research too. Um, do you think uh this is a choose your own adventure? Do you think it's useful to um talk about when you said sort of we in different areas have different fields? Do you think it would be helpful to sort of sketch out what the different areas are um um of of the social sciences, like kind of like a recapitulation? Because we haven't really done that. We've sort of de facto had lab experimentalists on, and then also field anthropologists. And I can almost hear people listening who don't know already sort of the

topography or the map of the landscape of who does this thing. That I would expect, you know, a podcast uh with evolutionary psychology in the title. People might be imagining certain things and not other things that's different than sort of those of us who are actually in it. Would would it be okay to sort of, you know, what's or or or you know, what's your take on sort of what is the the landscape of who does it and what is that division of labor? Yeah, I there's this classic paper that tries to divide the evolutionary social sciences like in the early 2000s by Eric Smith into three flavors, right? So maybe that's a place to start. I think it's it's gotten more complicated to some extent. But you know, some of the three flavors are, you know, one coming from the psychology,

like grow growing up out of psychology and maybe cognitive sciences as well, which is evolutionary psychology per se, that is um kind of trying to do well, you you guys could I don't want to put words in your mouth, you guys could probably define it better, but I my understanding is kind of make sense of the computational machinery that evolves and include like including its contingencies, right? Which is something that I think a lot of people get wrong. Like, how does it take input to adapt to the current world that it sees, right? So it is a contingent computation, you know, machinery that is um under investigation by most evolutionary psychologists. And to some extent, um, then there's another field that traditionally has been called human

behavioral ecology that's coming out of anthropology and to some extent, like more rooted in animal behavior as well, I would say, and ethology, given that the tools of behavioral ecology make basically how do animals, including humans, respond adaptively to the environments that they see? Like again, if it it it's it sounds so similar to some extent, because you're saying it's about how do the inputs into the psychology burn to the mind that behavioral ecologists tend to black box because they're trained more as biologists and anthropologists? How do the different environments that serve as inputs kind of get translated into adaptive behavior? And the classic assumption in behavioral ecology, or at least their area of investigation,

is that we're going to be investigating the adoptive out um kind of parts of the phenotype. And we're kind of going to ignore the neutral forces in evolution for now because whenever you see something that kind of looks like a complex behavior, it's probably there by design. It's a little bit of a simplifying assumption with the kind of the recognition that those are models of that probably there are non-adoptive phenotypes as well. And then gosh, where does cultural evolution come from? Like it has a complicated history because it's using like uh in the 70s, like it's you know, it develops using population genetic models is where it first kind of gets to be formalized. And there are people working on it who are um geneticists, who are ecologists.

Um yeah, I guess like not necessarily squarely in the anthropology tradition, when it first gets developed by people like um Mark Feldman, Kavale Sforza, Pete Um Richardson, and Robert Boyd. Um at least the first instantiation, I think it's expanded what it what that means, but but then it gets kind of rooted in more ethnographic work as well. So I think it tends to get done more in anthropology departments, even though it has that um history. And it's um trying to make sense of a cut, it has a couple of questions at its heart. Like, why are humans a cultural species? Like, what was that good for? How can we make sense of um our cultural nature? Like when would c culture meaning social learning from others and you know there are other

entailments? A lot of species do social learning, but humans do social learning at a massive scale, and we kind of accumulate it intergenerationally in a way that some people like to distinguish as culture or at least cumulative culture. And so how did that get off the ground? How can that evolve? And then what are the consequences of having those kinds of um that type of cultural cognition for the way that um behavior is shaped. And so it does have a, you know, at least part of it is a psychological question also of like what is that? How did natural selection shape our social learning capacities? Right. So is that okay. Yeah, That's good. I mean, I want to add one more uh chess piece on the board.

So cultural evolution itself has different factions within it. So there's the the school coming out of you know Rob Boyd, uh Joe Henrik. Um that's very much about um how culture accumulates in an adaptive way and and um and it talks you know it's about cultural adaptation, about how cultures are smarter than any individual. Um We did the canoe and kayak example on the podcast a couple episodes ago. So we did the classic, Christina, just to let you know sort of what we talked about. And then you were thinking about the Sperbarian. Yes, and then on the other side of the pond, we have this sort of French or the Paris School of Cultural Evolution, uh, pioneered by Dan Sperber, um, uh, you know, currently uh uh put forward by you know people like Hugh Mercier, uh Nicolas Baumard, um

uh, Pascal Boyer uh in in America. Um, and this approach uh is uh uh derives less from population genetics and more from epidemiology. So it looks at culture uh not necessarily as an engine of adaptation, but just as a spreader of representations. And in order to understand how these representations spread, you need a more detailed and thorough ex uh uh model of what's going on in the mind. So you need to know what ideas are sticky, what ideas are memorable, what ideas are counterintuitive or intuitive, and that helps you predict which um ideas or which representations are going to be stickier or going to persist. And and and it it's very much and it's it's more of a psychologically um informed

approach than than the Boidean uh school of cultural evolution. Increasingly I I think they're they're beginning to merge and there's you know becoming less and less of a of a distinction between them. But um that is another piece of the puzzle. I guess I would add also um kind of across the pond as well, the kind of a British tradition that is also more grounded in animal behavior as well. And sometimes there's still some of their practitioners are in biology departments um that looks that um looks at social learning in non-human animals um and often goes is this a fair characterization but the like the the concept of niche construction the fact that that non-human animals as well kind of um socially learn or even if they are not socially learning they construct different

niches, they change their environment in some ways that are parallel to the ways that humans change their environments and therefore are create new forces of selection. And the classic case of that would be um like a beaver dam, which actually now I feel bad. I don't know how socially learned that is. Is that do you just get to do that like totally with genetics? Yeah, no that's a good question adaptations as we joke I'm not that kind of doctor like I don't know I'm not sure what's be fascinating to look at being a little bit more if there's a beaver specialist listening please reach out we would love to have you on I would love to talk about I'd love to have a a beaver focused episode that would be fantastic but even if

whichever its sources like it is a new and like those dams then create like new environments that shape um evolution and yeah So so both for that reason that new niches are created in the same way that culture in humans creates new niches. Um and for the reason that like social learning is just so prevalent in so many different species. There's also that kind of that focus of um research that's you know somewhere between comparative cognition and animal behavior and cultural evolution. Yeah. Yeah. When you you um yeah, we should have the Stu West folks out like Nikolai Morhani and Max Burton Jones out and just all kinds of people. Um, Christina, you worked with Rob Boyd and you you talked about sort of cultural evolution, human behavior ecology, and of psych.

How do you think of yourself or no or how did you get to Rob Boyd? What was the I actually don't think I know this story. Oh my goodness, that's this is like just because I was such a naive undergraduate and I did an undergraduate. So this might be relevant to a lot of listeners, is like I did an undergraduate degree in a place that was did not have evolutionary social sciences. And it was yeah. I was at yeah, I was at Berkeley and in fact like all of the biological evolution um anthropologists had kind of been kicked out of that department. So then I just kind of pieced together classes that from different fields from psychology, from anthropology. I actually did a double major with psych and anthro, but from biology as well, that had

something to do with human evolution. Um and then I just started trying, I forgot how I how I found them, but I just found like the the universities in the world that had those um those fields well represented. And you know, UCLA and um came out as one that did have a lot of um expertise and I actually did like that at UCLA there were people who are more psychologically and uh focused and also ones who are more anthropologically and cultural evolutionarily focused. Um but yeah it's it's it was almost like an accident of history because I didn't really know what I was getting myself into. Um and then like how I identify today. I don't I usually just say I'm an evolutionary anthropologist because it's like so

inclusive. And I'm in an anthropology department. But but that can mean that I study like Homo erectus fossils, which I definitely don't. Although Homo erectus is awesome. Maybe you guys could have some Palio people if I do. If if if somebody gave you a fossil, you would be happy to look at it. But I teach about it actually. But it's not my it's not not my expertise. Right, right. Um, what what um so when you got to UCLA and like how and and you don't have we can like edit this or you cut it out like what was the training like with Rob Boyd and Pete Richardson? Um and you're the first sort of representative from that. And you know, I've had lovely conversations with both of them. They've been wonderful.

I've gotten to know them more. Um what was it like sort of in that? Um we've had a bunch of CP people on, but we haven't had a lot of UCLA folks on. What was the what was the feeling there and sort of what was like when you show up and what you start to study and maybe this can be a segue also into like what your your in your day job sort of thinking not just about like these broad field wide things but sort of what you study um and what you're really passionate about. Um yeah either scientifically or sort of personally what was it like to sort of start there and what was what was the trajectory sort of for you um uh there so it I wish I could recreate that environment because it was so intellectually

stimulating. Like we had weekly, it was a community of um people who studied evolution of human behavior and cognition. Um so Clark Barrett, Zan Fessler, uh Rob Boyd was there, were there, and then several behaviorally oriented primatologists. So Susan Perry, Joe Manson, and Joan Silk. They were kind of the core when I first got there. Some people have um since joined. And we would have weekly speaker series that would bring people from all sorts of different fields, like across the social sciences, across the natural sciences, some people in the humanities. Like it was just really a rich intellectual environment. And we would also have a seminar that every um fall all of those faculty, it was like an amazing faculty to student ratio, right?

Would give us feedback on what we were up to. And then we also had a really good um kind of culture of engaging just kind of on a regular basis, um, kind of informally and socially. And so just having so many different people who are focusing on evolutionary approaches to behavior, including across some species, was really stimulating to the point that like it didn't particularly feel like I was any one particular person's student. Um and and of course it like became more relevant as like, but but the expectation was that we would take seminar, like whenever those people would offer seminars, the expectation was that if we could make it, we would try to make those people seminars. um for graduate students.

Um and then of course as we got into more the nitty-gritty of like each particular like a dissertation topic we'd start talking more to um and have like yeah committees that were more focused, but we would still be getting all of that feedback from these kind of structure, these institutional structures. So that was really great. it was a very supportive um community but it like each faculty also had like very different advising style so i don't know when when when did you get your PhD there 2012 oh we just missed each other I started in 2013 okay so we just because you're because you're describing your experiences it was like I had the same experience uh at UCLA as well uh in that environment.

I I was actually in the psychology department, but I was sort of considered an honorary anthropologist because I spent way more time with uh with the anthropology people than with the psychology people just because there was more evolution happening in the anthropology department. And so yeah, I also got to experience that, you know, diversity of different perspectives and and the and the richness of you know the the faculty member is uh it was it was a really cool uh experience. Yeah, and they have it's it just seems like it keeps growing. I don't know how they do that. Yeah. We David did mention though, he talked to Dan Fessler and he was like, This whole like, you know, field work thing, do I actually have to do it?

And Dan was like, Yep. And David is like, Nope, not for me. I do it I do wonder about that, like who gets attracted to different fields based on kind of the expectations and um yeah, I don't know. I I do think fieldwork is really valuable, and uh I just don't want to do it myself. Yeah, yeah. I but it is really hard. Like, I think there's a bit of like a taboo in anthropology to talk about like the difficulties of field work, um, because it might mean that like you're not cut out for it, or you're not strong enough, or you're not being socially gracious enough, and it is like I I at least my experiences have been quite difficult. Um, and so but I don't want to dissuade people from doing it because it is I think a

necessary part of uh a robust evolutionary social science, right? Yeah. Yeah. I almost want to like say thank you for your service whenever we have an anthropologist on like I have that impulse like I can't believe you're doing this. Yeah and I'm sitting here in the comfort of my home in Los Angeles. Like I I feel so guilty. I don't know. Especially in especially in like the especially in the low latitude, like does like very high like pathogen parasite load places where like the like I cre I mean like people just like at these conferences like pulling up their shirts comparing their scars for where you know like a worm ate into their torso. Sorry if people are eating while we're they're listening to this.

But I mean to be honest and frank, like I actually chose where I work. So I you know I started I wanted to work on ethnolinguistic boundaries and kind of that's something like all all um primates, you could think of all primates living in some kind of group, even if there's some solitary ones, but most of them have some social grouping. But we're pretty weird in that we have these like ethno-linguistic boundaries. And that's what motivated me to do field work in a place where like ethno-linguistic boundaries were quite different from the ones we see in the US. Like there's so much social psychology on like ethno-racial taxonomy in the US, but that's a pretty weird system, right? Um, but you could go to a lot of places to study ethnolinguistic boundaries that are

interesting. And I definitely chose one that was above the mosquito line. I'm not gonna lie. So I have very little oxygen where I work in the Peruvian altiplano. It's at like 13,000 feet above sea level, um, or through 3,800 meters. I don't know who your audience is, but there are no mosquitoes and that's really valuable to me. But I to me like the difficulty is actually like the social difficulty more than like the environmental. Yeah. Uh do you when you when you come back from the field site, do you feel like s like a superhero? Like you can just run around when you get to some level, yeah. I have I when I was at UCLA I would swim sometimes with do you know do you guys know Andreas Vilki? He's also an opposite.

Of course. Oh yeah, Andreas Andreas. Well well, I I I I have a lot to say about Andreas, but I'll just shut up and let you tell your story. Can I shame him online? You could cut this if you're not sure. Hi Andreas, good and talk. So he's a really large, strong German with very little hair. And so which is important for the swimming part, right? Like you know, hydrodynamic. And usually like it wasn't a competitive endeavor because there's like Norway that I can um beat him. But it's not that I was stronger after coming up down to sea level from um the high altitude it's that I could stay underwater for longer. Oh nice. So you just you just beat Andreas. Yeah. I don't know that he knows that I beat him, but I was keeping track.

Now he does, yeah. Yeah. Yeah the ox the hemoglobin's amazing. Fantastic. Um uh can you tell us a little bit about um so ethnolinguistic boundaries are super interesting. We just had Brenda Bowser on talking about that with Schwar Achwa or Qichwa. Um I my ignorance is overwhelming, so apologies. But um that's a really interesting issue and question. And there's also the field site. Um, can you tell us a little bit about like how did you so you get to UCLA, there's all this, all these people. Like, what is it like? Or how do you pick a field site? Like, I don't I actually don't know any of this. Like, can you where do you go from like you're walking around, is it Haynes Hall and UCLA, you know, doing doing stuff in Southern California?

How do you get to Peru and study ethnolinguistic groups? I think everybody has a slightly different path. I was lucky that actually an undergraduate I mentioned there weren't evolutionary social scientists, but I was lucky that I worked with some archaeologists, um, Christine Hassorf, who um helped me get to the Peruvian ultiplanetary, like help with archaeological and some ethno-archaeological field work. So I did some interviews in undergraduate in the Bolivian on the Bolivian side of the boundary. And I had, you know, I had read some on also some ethnolinguistic boundaries in Panama that I thought would be interesting to study. Um, but I ended up, you know, it's I I will admit that like the fact that

mosquitoes much more really love me and much more common where I would have been working in Panama did play a role in saying, like, well, actually the ethnolinguistic boundary between Kachwanaymara speakers sounds pretty interesting. And I was also lucky that there were um not social science or or not ethnographers who are working in that area, but archaeologists at UCLA who worked in that area where I wanted to work with Ketchwanaymara speakers. So I did have a little bit of previous experience knowing that I would be, you know, environmentally comfortable enough in that area. Um, and that there was like something interesting to study there. And there's was very little previous work done on interactions, at least definitely no

evolutionary work done on interactions between Ketchuna and Mara speakers, but I don't think that's the great barometer. But more generally, like we're relatively little um kind of anthropological work um done in that area. So yeah, I was cool. It was a confluence of convenience, having good social connections, and then it being an appropriate place to study the questions that I wanted to study. Yeah. And what what can you set up? Like what is the scientific question? Rationale, right. So I want for my dissertation, I wanted to know whether actually it c it comes back to priors a bit. Like I wanted to know if humans kind of had genetically evolved priors for thinking about, learning about certain kinds of social groups that were present in

humans and we know not present in our closest relatives. And those are symbolically marked groups of people that oftentimes share cultural traits, oftentimes are marked by linguistic boundaries. That was another reason why Dave and I have talked a lot because Dave, I think, has showed has you done some research to suggest that, yeah, maybe, maybe it looks like humans are thinking about language in a way that's fundamental language differences, linguistic differences in a way that's fundamentally different to the way that we think about race and coalitions. Right. And so I that in the American context, the those boundaries that we, that like sociologists, that social psychologists tend to look at

between like African American and European American and Hispanic and Hispanic of various kinds and Asian American, they're just, I mean, that like all boundaries are complex, but these have been really studied and they confound a lot of different processes, including the fact that They're the result of long-distance, oftentimes forcible or self-selected migrations that then come with incredible economic differences and power differentials between and then get perpetuated. And these power differentials get perpetuated by institutional structures. There is residential segregation, but like in a very weird kind of way, right? Like sometimes it's um because of policies like red mining, like it's it, it's it's

not um, but sometimes it's because of like the patterns of migration. So it's it's kind of unlike most of the boundaries that we think were probably important for human evolutionary history, right? Right. So just just to interrupt, so basically if you're walking around or driving around or traveling around the United States, for example, or sort of North America, most of North America, and the relationship that people see between language and social interaction, or sort of what the groups look like, the ideas that that, if that's your intuition for sort of basing the full range of human experience or what a linguistically marked group is, the idea is that that's you're a little bit in trouble because we there's a very

particular history. Right. And everybody, you know, I don't want to presume that like I'm working with agropastoralists. They're a sedentary, they're ag agricultural societies. Like I don't want to presume that this is the type of the type of boundary that like represents human Paleolithic. Like that doesn't really make sense either. Um, but it is quite different in important ways, right? They have been so Ketchua and IMAR speakers, they are speaking totally mutually unintelligible languages, which is also quite interesting. But they're languages that, as far as we can tell, um, have been in touch with each other for centuries. And nobody, yeah, they've mutually influenced each other. Um, and nobody in the area where I work is like, oh, we've been here longer and you guys

are recent migrants and maybe you don't belong and maybe you should go back to where you come from. Like that's not a part of the rhetoric because for a time immemorial, obviously everybody comes from somewhere, but like for time immemorial, like they've been in that place. Um, the power differentials are also um not like pretty much minimal compared to the power differentials that exist between like indigenous people and more mestizo or urban or market-integrated people. Like that's really kind of the source of status and power differences in that society. So it's not to say that power doesn't matter, but it's just not super highly correlated with being ketchup my speaking. Or at least it's a different all right.

So like minimally I think we could all agree that at least it represents some other part of like the vast diversity that um human social boundaries uh yeah, represented in human social boundaries. But maybe we could easily even be a little go a little bit further to say that like the lower status differentials, the fact that there aren't phenotypic differences like that are not cultural, like you know, marked morphological differences between Ketra and AMR speakers that are important to them. Um, and that one of them isn't like a recent migrant and the other one's not like a kind of a host, that those might be informative for some kinds of boundaries that are important to human evolution. Right.

Yeah. So it it's a really interesting set of distinctions you made between sort of the the group dynamics that we see uh in the US, for example, and the group dynamics that you see in the communities you study. So uh here are we have, you know, a a strong correlation between group and class. Right. Uh we have this immigrant native dynamic as well, and you throw in um the dynamics of political coalitions and how different ethnic groups are associated with different political coalitions, uh, and you get a kind of volatile mix um that can perpetuate conflict stereotypes, animosity, and so forth. In the communities you study, insofar as there is conflict and animosity, if it's not coming from the sources that we're familiar with here, where you know, where it's

like conflicts over social class, you know, natives versus immigrants, um, conflicts over political power, and so forth, if it's not coming from there, then where is it coming from? What what do you think uh is uh is the source of of the intergroup hostility, uh if there is any? So where I work there isn't that much intergroup hostility, which is also quite nice. But there but there is, but there is, but it's not so um it's like these are not at war. Um but but um in recent memory, and to some extent now, there are like land conflicts that don't don't result in like war or anything like that or raiding. Um, but there are land conflicts, and those tend to be like the the organizational structures that um kind of rural altipano people have for dealing with those land

conflicts are usually at the community level. right? So it's like, what is the boundary of this community versus this other community? And they can call on other members of their community oftentimes to like help um deal with those kinds of conflicts. Um but the big conflicts are again like something not around in the Paleolithic. The big conflicts are with like the massive power differentials with the state and the urban people that um kind of are represented um by I mean, I don't it is a bit of a it is a racialized let me see, how should I say this? There there is a morphological variation that's associated with this. Like a hundred percent the people who are wealthier in Peru tend to be less ancestrally

indigenous, for example, like have more European ancestry. And this is something very common in Latin America, which is really striking, like every time you look at uh TV that shows like the centers of power and who is elite culturally in a society, they're like so unrepresentative of the kind of diversity of Latin American societies. Um, and in Peru that's very striking. So you get very, very white, like European ancestry-looking people kind of representing the elites of Peruvian society. And people in increasingly have like access to TVs and satellites and phones in the rural area. So they know that. But it is complicated by the fact that there it's not a super racialized boundary. Traditionally, like in Peruvian society and in the Andes, like moving to the

cities and losing your indigenous language capacity is seen as like a a form of ethnic change in a sense. And important. But is it seen as like a betrayal to your to your it can. It seems like it does cause some like both admiration and resentment is my sense of that, right? There's like envy that goes along with it, but also um admiration because frankly, like a lot of people want to be able to live in the bigger cities in Lima or Arequipa, or maybe even Huliaca, which is like a more local big city. Like so there's so much um yeah pr desire to have your students like your kids educated be good students and then have a good job. Like everybody aspires to that even if it's not attainable. So it's almost like what you're saying is, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, is that

there is a difference between the ethnolinguistic divides and the divides that actually create conflict and hostility. So when you have an ethno-linguistic divide, that doesn't necessarily lead to animosity. What leads to animosity is is something that we'd actually be more familiar with as Westerners, like a conflict over land or territory, or a conflict between high status and low status, or or groups' relative uh positions in a in a social hierarchy. That those are really the drivers of conflicts, not ethnolinguistic differences per se. Aaron Powell I think that's fair. And I think that we see, you know, I'm not the first person to say that you're we're not the first people to highlight that.

Um, but it could like, I guess the question that remains in my mind, and I'm not sure that I've resolved this for myself or that I have a s very strong belief, is like, does it be does the fact that a boundary is ethno-linguistic or culturally structured make it more plausible that that conflict arise or exacerbate the conflict once it does arise? And I think we can't really answer that question with one case study. Like that's a type of work that requires kind of multi-sided comparative research. But yeah, like we, you know, we've seen in the Balkans, for example, some boundaries that do matter that are, or in that case, it's amazing. Like there is barely an ethnolinguistic boundary, and yet people really fight over it.

And in other places like Switzerland, where language has divided people or people are very multi multilingual in Switzerland. They have four official languages, but it has, you know, the Swiss identity overrides that linguistic variation and been a pretty stable nation state for centuries. So I don't know, I still don't know if it, you know, just by virtue of, for example, like inhibiting communication or meet or when it's when it's a more structured ethnic boundary where there are more cultural norms that are different between each other between each other, which is not so much the case among Ketra and Aymar, where I work. Where like at the very local level where I work, Ketra and Aymara speakers are pretty

similar culturally. And so that also probably mitigates conflict, be my guess. But but I think it is possible that like with more cultural variation, then it just becomes like harder to coordinate with each other and come to agreement. So I think that's possible, but I think it hasn't really been totally demonstrated. Yeah. Just for sort of the uh people like me who are slow to catch up, sort of, um, or for people who may not know, like what is the so you talked about Ketchuaimara. Um what is the relationship between them other than not super con conflictual or like you're in a a field site. Can you just like walk us through like do they live different places? Like I don't I don't know anything.

Yeah. Right, right, right. So they so there is a boundary. They if you're in rural community, that's maybe let's say um a community of let's say 20 to a hundred families, let's say those tend to be only Ketra speaking or only Aymara speaking, with like a handful of people, like especially younger people who have maybe migrated in at marriage, like that married across that language boundary. But then there are these towns, like the one that I did my dissertation in Wata Sani, is like a town where it's pretty split because there's that's kind of a stepping stone of rural to urban migration. Um you can have some um yes everybody kind of has does some agriculture and some pastoralism, but you can also have your little shop there or you can

make it easier for your kids to go to the high school which is in town. And there it's much more mixed. The high school when I was working there had about 70% of its students were Ketra speaking and 30% were MR speaking. And then you have these opportunities to go to even larger market towns, where, for example, Wangane is the nearest market town that everybody in this area would go to pretty regularly, once a week or every two weeks. And that is squarely on the Aymara speaking side of the boundary, but people from both sides of the boundary go. And then you have even a larger city that's about um an hour and a half uh bus ride away called Huliaka. And again, it's a because it's a center of urban rural migration, it's just very heavily

mixed between Quechua and Aymara speakers, and of course, increasingly um just uh Spanish monolingual speakers as well. Um, so there are all these opportunities for interaction in markets, in schools, um, and um increasingly well at marriage. Um, so there was a sociologist who did work there in the 70s in Watasani who did document already at that time quite a lot of intergroup um marriages as well. Yeah. So can I just so so the idea is that in the rural areas, roughly speaking, you know, because I think people are asking like what maintains the linguistic difference, it's sort of the rural areas, the just the way it works, where you like, you know, you grow up and what do the people around you speak, you learn that.

But then if people are moving in from the rural areas, there's more contact. Um is that fair? I think that's probably true. I guess there's there that is an interesting question of what maintains cultural boundaries if there's constant contact, right? And the default would be something like that. People don't interact. I think that there's reason to be skeptical that generally that's the only process, right? Um and I don't know enough about I haven't done like a quantitative study here to know exactly, but do you know um William Lebev's um work in the US suggests that even with contact, even with common interaction across, in his case, like dialectical groups, people maintain their dialects for potentially something like

signaling purposes. Maybe that's too much interpretation. So I I don't want to go too far on a limb to say that it's only because of a lack of interaction that they're maintained. And I will say that there's a lot of more Spanish speaking and actually I think that the kind of l loss, some people don't like that term, but the loss of indigenous language use in the multilingual areas might be actually a bit faster because Spanish is such a useful lingua franca. Right. So some neutral kinds of processes might be involved, but but it's possible that there's also kind of identity based reasons for just I mean, there's like even the social inputs to these learning systems, like kids learn. And Christina, correct me if I'm wrong, but like, you know, kids learn like what are the

other kids speaking, and that's sort of what they learn. And that's why you can get something like a pigeon or to into it turned into a creole, which is you know, where there's people forcibly removed, like, you know, in the slaveries, um, in the slave trade. Um, the adults couldn't speak a a grammatical language because they were speaking uh they they were coming from different places brought together forcibly to work together. And so they were just sort of getting by on sort of a um what is called a a pidgin. And then the next generation, Des Nouveau, the kids build in build that into a grammatical language. That was all often used sort of to argue against sort of sort of a skinarian minimal language acquisition system to show that kids can just, you know, make up a new

language kind of de nouveau. But it's also relevant to show that there's a lot of social cues to language learning and that you learn from other kids and it's a coordination thing. Um, and I mean even when I looked at like sort of second language learning capacity, People who, for example, are like romantically involved with somebody who speaks the other language are much more likely to learn it. Independent of sort of like the age at which they, you know, um uh show up. Like obviously, like when you're young, it's much, it's better because that system is turned on. But I think there's probably all kinds of social cues, even of sort of quote unquote, like more prototypical language learning, as opposed to sort of something like a dialect.

And I mean the boundaries are all fuzzy, but you know, there's all this code switching stuff of, you know, how do you speak when you're in a professional context versus with your friends? Um, and these cohort your generational effects. So yeah, I just wanted to flesh that out. But yeah, that's really interesting, Christina. Yeah. Yeah, that's a good point. That's interesting about the romantically involved. I wonder if they're also accounting for just having more access to a teacher. Yeah. But I but I but I take your point. Like the motivations matter, right? Yeah. Yeah. Um and and we do see people who were um trilingual even in this area or who were market like who are vendors and so therefore had more of an incentive to learn

a little bit of the other language, right? Because they'd want to go to the market towns on both sides of the border. Yeah. Um yeah. Sorry David, you were gonna say something. No, I mean I I have a a thousand questions running through my head. I mean one one thing that um is is popping into my head is is something that stuck with me when we had Brenda Bowser on. Um and she mentioned that there was a uh pretty strong uh difference between saying I am a member of Group X versus I am with a member of Group X. So the former is sort of mark you know marking your ethno-linguistic uh membership and the latter is more of a political statement that I am I am loyal to this group and I'm going to support them in whatever uh conflict uh might be underway.

Do you see a similar distinction in the communities you study between belonging to a group and being with or loyal to a group? Yeah, that's such a good distinction. Um the something maybe a little bit parallel to get it to get me to start thinking about this is um the fact that when I I would ask people if they were catch where I amara when I first got there, and they wouldn't really use those terms. They would say quechuista or aimarista. So the ista ending is the same as the American, the English ist, right? Which to me denotes kind of like a a practice, like a maybe potentially like temporary identity. Like I'm a socialist. I could stop being a socialist tomorrow and become a capitalist or an anarchist.

I'm a flautist, yeah. That's true. Once a flautist, always a flautist. Exactly. That's really interesting. I mean, it sounds kind of odd to substitute it with like Western like I'm it would be very weird to say I'm a whitist. You know it would make me sound right that sounds really bad. It sounds terrible actually. Yeah. And yet that's that's sort of how it's linguistically differentiated. Yeah. So that's how they would use well and but then if you looked at the signs like the political signs when you walk into town it's it when it got there it would say um the land of Quechua's and aymaras. And so they would use the I like to actually, I think like a more centralizing language, like you are a Ketra, you are a Aymara, you don't practice Ketra, you don't practice

Aymara. But the people would use the ist, the practice Ketra and practice aymara. And I did do some studies where I would ask people, like, well, what if somebody marries in, learns a language, becomes fully competent? Are they um like how quechwa are they or how queista are they um and and you would become queista like i like most people would say that i would become quechista like if i that they admired my attempts at quechwa but they're not nearly as fluent as they could be um and so like it wasn't about ancestry it wasn't about being for your life. It's about it was about practicing for them. Um I am currently now doing like more regional studies. I get farther away from the border. And I am getting the suspicion, the impression I should say, that that less

essentialist attitude um might be more common closer to the boundary and that people farther from the boundary might have more of these like are and do seem to be using like their quechua, their nah. Could you unpack what with what this word essentialist means? Because it's a really important concept and might not be familiar to everyone. It's really it's really complicated to so let me let me use for na for now. I would I was using it in as an operational definition, I was using it to mean kind of like a fixed part of somebody's identity. But people really debate whether essentialism has to be also uh like something that you're born with, um, j if it has to be thought of as something that is

genetically transmitted or as if genetically transmitted, and whether people have to have kind of this notion in their head that it's some deep core part of you that then has these outward manif like multiple outward manifestations. So do people do use it differently. Some of the classic work, I think we're almost all of your listeners are going to be essentialists about species. So that's a good place to start. Right. Where if you people do really fucked up experiments, even with kids, and they ask them like if we take a fox and then we give it plastic surgery and change how it looks and make it look like a dog. Is it a fox or is it a dog? And I think we all have that intuition that it would still be a fox and that would be kind

of an indicator of essentialist reasoning. Um so if you change the outward appearance, it still has this internal essence of dog. Of dogness, yeah. Dogness. Anyway, uh we can continue it. Well, in in the human domain, we don't do anything quite so brutal, but we do t often tell these stories of like, um, imagine that a child was born to one community and then raised by a different by members of a different community. What would they be? Like to kind of Brenda's um language term, like what would they be? And so and it's very underspecified what that means, exactly. Being right. And so we don't totally know what that literature is telling us. I've done a meta-analysis of it that shows that it's really variable.

Like children around like that one has been done cross-culturally quite a bit. And children tend to be a little bit on the end of essentialism of saying that that child will be, will be the identity of the parents, um, of the birth parents, rather than the adoptive parents. But by the time we get to adulthood, at least cross-culturally, it's really variable. Like um that some people it depends on the identity, it depends on where you're doing the study. But you get anywhere from like 90% of people saying that I think it was like let's say um Fijian native Fijians versus um Indophagyans, like their identities are fixed at birth, all the way to like 10% or lower of people saying that, let's say among Himba and

Herero pastoralists, like if you move at birth and you're raised in one community, you're just going to become the member of the community that you're raised in. So it's it's really quite variable. And I'm not sure, like if we do have priors about treating ethnolinguistic groups as kind of having some sort of essence, they're very weak priors and they're quickly overridden. Christina, that's cool. And it's really, and I'll I'll David, I'll let you I just uh that variability, and it sounds like you're doing this meta-analysis. Um, to me, that variability suggests that there's systems in the mind that the function is just sort of like to just it's social learning or prediction, right? It's sort of like what's the what do I experience as the correlation

between a social identity and what I need to do to deal with them. Right. So if if there's like a a group membership that is like belligerent towards me, um, if anybody um can become that based on their behavior, it's in my interest to not be essentialistic about it because, you know, it the the the the whole point of me representing that group is to predict like how they're gonna treat me. Um so that's just one example. And I mean there are others, it could be not how they behave, but like what you know, what do they tend to do? What are their beliefs, what are their characteristics, where do they live? Are they good coordination partners or just predicting like just sort of like what what how

the how they live, what they eat, how they talk, right? Um is that a fairer characterization? Like even if we haven't, I mean, it's a it's a huge lift to sort of wrap your head around it. I'm glad you're doing that. Um but uh is that a fair characterization? I think that that for sure that that it's kind of about predicting kind of correlations in the world. Now, what those correlations, which which correlations matter, I think is still an open question. I think like some of the early people proposing a functionalist kind of approach to essentialism, like Susan Gellman, who's a developmental psychologist, or Larry Hirschfeld, it's not always clear exactly what all of these proponents of like humans

being essentialists have in mind, but it does seem to be like that this helps do the heavy lifting of being able to predict lots of different things about people. And you need to learn that there is definitely types in the world. And then you have to figure out like who's going to be a good partner to do, who's going to be easy to coordinate with. Like you're going to be able to predict lots of things once you figure out what the types are in the world. Um, what we're seeing so far in the meta-analysis, although it's you know, it's the sample of societies where we've done these studies, but it it does seem like it's more likely when there are power differentials across those boundaries. And so it might be that some kinds of predictions are more important than others, right?

And the predictions about um kind of whether you can transcend that boundary, whether are barriers in place to be able to move across that boundary might matter. And it's a bit mixed. Like we did um, we did not see that when I collaborated with Brooks Shelde to do this among uh Hemba uh Herero. Well, she did it with Himba participants, but thinking about the Herero and Damara boundary, where one of those has a big power difference and the other one does not. Or like pretty much 100% of her participants said that they would be, um, they would prefer their daughters to marry a Herero person than a Damara person. So clearly there's a status difference there. And yet that didn't really correspond to or at least our measure of essentialism.

But other studies done with like the Indian caste system, which is very hierarchical, very rigid, kind of cloud, you could call it class, more than class hierarchy. There you do see these asymmetries. And Mahalingam has showed that, for example, higher caste individuals are more rigid about that boundary. Like you cannot become one of us than the lower caste individuals who don't maintain that boundary as rigidly. So it's probably it seems like it's not just about predicting stuff, but that it's at least by adulthood, right? Like it's work maybe in childhood it's working differently than it is in adulthood, but at least by adulthood it seems to be working kind of through this pathway of predicting

certain kinds of interactions. Right. Yeah, and just so I understand. Sorry, David, it is just that um yeah, because the early essentialism stuff, it's it was great, but it was like very vague about what was being predictor, what dimensions. And so what you're saying is if I understand it, is that um power and power and status and class, things like that, roughly speaking, um That's a really privileged, it seems to be so far, in some cases, that it's a really privileged dimension in the sense of when those things are more open or closed correspondingly, essentialism is sort of higher or lower, meaning that if if you can't become the higher class thing, then you will represent that these social categories are quote unquote more essentialized.

And then there's additional like sort of flavoring, which is that if you are high class, you're also incentivized to sort of be like, let's all agree on a norm where nobody can be where I I am permanently the winner of this sort of sort of um uh you know arrangement here. Is that fair? I think so. And I think it's an open question how much this is working kind of in at the individual level, like people perceiving that boundary versus like taking the story for give like as a like is it that people are individually interacting with others and then building up that sense of that boundary? Or is it that they just have been told, you know, you're not going to become high cast. Right. And that's what's being so I don't I don't know about we don't have the details of how that

those representations arise, but yeah. That's really cool. That's cool. You're making progress on that. Thank you for your service. This one's easier. I mean, no mistake. So could it be that when a group boundary is politicized or becomes a marker of rival conflicting alliances, that that marker becomes more essentialized so long as the marker is still present? So for example, in the United States, there are uh conflicts between uh black and white people. Um, I if if a white person is raised by a black family or a black person is raised by a white family, that doesn't change their race. So the white person is still white, still white even if they're raised by black parents, the black person is still black even if they're raised by white parents.

Um, could it be that the reason that is true is because skin color itself is a cue of uh alliance membership and is used by everyone else in the society as a cue of alliance membership as as Dave has shown. And once a a trait becomes a common knowledge that that is signifying which side you're on in a in a particular conflict, that uh as long as that difference is there, it sends a signal to everyone of whose side you're on and there's nothing you can do to change that. Whereas if um if there's a different marker of of alliance membership, um, and it can change such that if you change it, then you're signaling that you're on a different side, then uh the essentialism goes away. And that's sort of how I'm starting to try to understand what's going on here.

Do you think I'm on the right track here? I think it's a good hypothesis. I think I I have two points of skepticism. One is that we also have political alliances that we're very happy for people to move between. So like we're very happy for to convert people to becoming Democrats or Republicans. And we don't like it's kind of the opposite of essentialism and that we want to grow those coalitions. At least it's at least it's the opposite of essentialism, insofar as essentialism is about having a fixed trait. Right. Right. And the other thing is like if I'm thinking phylogenetically, like I kind, I think I would you guys agree with me? Like we have a coalitional psychology that we share with non-human primates.

Do you agree with you agree with that? Definitely. Like that it's pretty similar, like at least those are the building blocks, right? And and I again, like I'm not sure that those building blocks are essentialists either. Like I guess I don't know I should know more about primate coalitions, but I would imagine that like you know, dominance hierarchy shift and whose alpha shifts, and then like whether beta and whatever the third primate is in the dominance hierarchy, like they might all of a sudden find themselves like on different sides of the coalition. So I'm a little bit skeptical that that's kind of like the building, that coalitional psychology is like the building block or has like a notion of fixedness attached to it for

those reasons. I don't know what you guys think. Right. So let me let me see if I can reframe the hypothesis. So with with the example of say switching a political party. Yeah. Um, so I would imagine that some features of being a Republican or Democrat are more diagnostic of of political loyalty than others. Um say voting for a particular party, that's probably one of the most diagnostic. So it let's say I vote for Republican, but all of my outward beliefs are consistent with uh progressive ideology. I think we would have uh something of an essentialist intuition there that I'm still a Republican, right? Because I'm I'm I I'm exhibiting the cue that is a stronger cue of alliance membership, even if all of my superficial features uh are are resembling um the Democrats.

It's more about you know, secretly I'm loyal to Republicans. I'm a closet Republican or something like that. And so I I would suggest that, you know, the hypothesis is that some traits are categorized by the mind as if you have it, you're on this side. If you don't have it, you're on the other side. Um and I think that is is more what's what's driving the essentialism intuitions. And and of course it depends on what that what that thing is. If it's something that can be changed, like say voting for one party or another, then uh categorization will change. Um but if it's something that can't be changed, like skin color, uh then there's nothing you can do to uh erase that. It's always going to be um it's always going to signify that you're on one side or the

other. Does that sort of track? I mean, I s I still think I disagree with you, but I do think it's like a cool hypothesis. And like that idea that like essentialism is about like the the core part of what essentialism is about predicting is like whose side are you really on? I think is a really cool hypothesis. Um I'm gonna give you another case study. Maybe this is like too much of a an ethnographic veto. That's why you're here, is to is to keep us honest. That's a great question ethnographic veto. It's not mine. I forget where I I I mean it's usually used disparagingly to be like, Oh, I'm I'm going to be the anthropo the annoying anthropologist. I want to raise my hand in a talk and be like, here's an ethnographic.

Yeah. And I do accept that like if there are tendencies in the world, then like we should accept that there are tendencies and also the possibility to vary away from that tendency. So I don't think the ethnographic veto should be used as a like blunt instrument. But it should be Christina. We should just use it as a blood. But here's my admiration. Beat us with that blood instrument, please. And it's not my work. It's Rita Astudi's work. And she's worked in uh Madagascar with um people who are well she works with the Veso who are uh Austronesian descent. So they're an indigenous um kind of Malagasy uh Madagascar uh natives. They work, I think, mostly with fishing. And they have, at least by adulthood, they have this notion that you are Veso, that that

ethnic category, if you do the Veso things. Again, kind of like the is ending, like you go fishing and you do the kinds of work that we do. That be makes you Veso. And she talked, she did these kinds of same essentialism studies, both with children and adults there, um, to ask them about this boundary with um with Karani, which are actually um more recent migrants from India. I forget the history of their migration there. It probably had something to do with the British, but I don't remember the details. But there's like an Indian origin population in Madagascar and an Austronesian kind of earlier migration to Madagascar. And they do look physically different. Like they can't change kind of your skin tone.

And they recognize that. Like the adults that I forget of the children. I think the children also, like by age eight or seven or so, like they recognize that the skin tone is something that you're not going to change. And presumably, like in the real world, um, like this does map on to some kinds of coalitions. They live in different areas. But they all but they don't, at least by adulthood, they do not um treat that cue um as an indicator of being, right? Right. Yes, yes, yes. So if so you'll ask adults, Veso adults, like if a Karani child, like a child born to Karani parents is then raised by Vesoparents and they'll say yes, it'll be Veso when it grows up. So I'm a little bit skeptical that So they will say that that a person who looks

uh right like they belong to one group and is raised by uh a a group that looks different, that they will be that they will become the different looking group. Yeah. And so it would be equivalent to say a white person becoming black by being raised by black parents. Exactly. Exactly. And that's my reading of the literature too, that the inference about the Q um and the group and the group um underlying membership, those are distinct things. And the old literature sort of conflated those. Um, and it that's sort of what made it confusing. But if you tease the two apart, people will still say, look, this feature is biologically inheritable. Right. But but they'll but that's separate from what constitutes the group identity.

Sorry, Christina. I just wanted to that that's that's fascinating. So my follow-up question would be is there a political divide or rivalry by skin color per se? So is there social stratification based on skin color per se? Is there some kind of uh intergroup conflict over power or resources or status or whatever based on skin color like there is in the United States, or is it not based on skin color per se? I suspect that it's not like institutionalized by skin color, but I'm not totally sure. I definitely should read more about this case. And but I think that another way to talk about your your hypothesis about this being about loyalty detection is that if you are raised, if you do have this information that you are

raised in a different community, like not only is that going to influence like how your your cultural expectation, like your your cultural worldview, it very likely is going to affect your loyalty as well. Right. Yes. Yes. And so I think that this idea that it's not just about predicting lots of different cultural traits, but predicting who you're loyal to, I think, is a really interesting question. That is interesting. But you also have to consider not just the person's loyalty themselves, but how everyone else in society will will treat them. So if if I'm raised by black parents, I might be loyal to the black community, uh, but everyone else in society is still going to see me as white and give me the privileges that

are granted to white people in our society and and uh make all sorts of assumptions about me based on my skin color, regardless of of of my personal loyalties. And that may itself also change my loyalties. If people are treating me differently, then that might be a factor that pushes me in a different direction than I otherwise would have gone if I was black. That's right. Yeah. So it's not just the individual's loyalty, but it's it's it's um uh common knowledge of of uh of of the person's perceived loyalties and how how they're seen by others and how that affects the alliances. No, totally. Yeah, yeah. That that is, I mean, yeah, when I talk about you know the alliance stuff and and sort of race or any cue, that thing is also that really inhibits individuals who want

to change it, right? So even if somebody says I don't want to do this, you know, just um um I don't want to discriminate based on race, um, let's say somebody in like, you know, 1960s US or now, um, but if if they see that other people are, they're still representing this as a relevant cue. Um and it just or if people treat me based on this, but I would prefer we didn't. They didn't. You know, it makes the individual decision is not sufficient to stop the cue from being relevant because it is. It's a coordination thing that it requires common knowledge. And so especially when that's why you need like larger scale coordination to sort of stop using a cue or circumstances to change or institutions to change

precisely for this reason. And then especially when the feature or the cue is permanent, like you know, I I like to to an extreme aversion, like you know, in in Germany people could like take their swastikas off, right? But you can't do that if the way that a group is marked is like what you look like or the way you talk. I mean, what the way you talk is a bit different, but um so that that also has an effect as well. Yeah. And I think it's an important distinction and has probably been some, but could do more theorizing like how other members of your group are going to interact with you versus the other, the out group is going to interact with you. Because um some of those things like um there's been a lot of proposals that like you're

the fact that we have a really hard time in adulthood, like changing the accents that we are raised with, or the fact that like tattoos much more permanently like can be used as kind of bridge-burning devices. Like you tattoo your face, and all of a sudden people know something about you and will treat you differently because of it. And actually, tattoos, I guess, now we can take get rid of them. And that's an important tool for like dealing with kind of reintegration into society for some members, right? Like gangs. But but traits like that that are harder to get rid of. Like there's been a lot of speculation, I think, among evolutionarily social um evolutionary social scientists that this is like a really way good way of like committing

you to the in group. But what's I think what's missing in that theorizing is that it requires it's not something that the in group can control by itself. It actually totally depends on how the out group's gonna perceive you. Right. It it requires that the outgroup burns that bridge as well, which is not always it shouldn't be taken for granted. Like we should be thinking more carefully about like why would the out group not be willing to interact with somebody with a certain accent or a face tattoo. And I think it's not always clear. Yes, that's a really crucial point. Um there's also this this uh interesting idea that beliefs themselves can be bridge burning tactics. Right. So if I voice support for a particular narrative or myth in my culture, um that you know

people in my culture you know won't think twice about it and they'll they'll find it plausible. Um but people in other cultures might think that I'm crazy or or or stupid or you know, out of my mind, whatever, that that itself can be a bridge burning tactic. So a really, you know, uh flagrantly nonsensical conspiracy theory can can can can be a signal of loyalty to uh the the extremist group that I'm a part of while uh alienating me from everyone outside of that group. Or if I belong to a cult, if I subscribe to this really uh Rococo uh myth about, you know, aliens or abducting me or whatever, that that could signal loyalty to that group and alienate me from everyone outside the cult. Do you do you buy that way of thinking?

Uh I'm I'm curious. I do. I'm laughing because one of our students here at Eli Elster is working on um kind of why people have beliefs that the majority of kind of educated elites don't have. And he uses the example of flat earth. And um he's trying to talk about some other reasons why people might have those beliefs, but I very much think that they can act as bridge burning devices. I still think it's interesting that as somebody who would be a bit wary of somebody who is espousing flat earth beliefs, for example, um, like why wouldn't I want to like buy fruits from them or you know, engage in other mutually beneficial interactions? Like maybe I wouldn't want to like learn my geography from them or my geology from them.

But like, why would why would it inhibit other kind of mutually profitable profitable interactions? Um I would go to yeah, I would go to a flat earthers restaurant if they, you know, if it was highly recommended and had good food. Like, yeah, I don't care what they believe. Yeah. Um, but yeah, I might I wouldn't uh you know get maybe maybe I wouldn't get directions from them. I don't know. I wouldn't buy it. I wouldn't I wouldn't trust their like GPS. Don't don't go too far in that direction. You'll you'll drive off the edge of the earth. Right. Exactly. Yeah. Um That's funny. I mean, I my intuition is that I'd be like a bit wary about going to their kitchen. Oh really? But I don't know, like I don't know why.

I don't know why. Well, I guess what it meant, it would does it depend on sort of like how their beliefs, you know, like it's interesting. I I I think part of the reason why I would eat at a flat earthers restaurant is because I uh I am a social scientist and I understand the logic of bridge burning tactics and I know that it's just a bridge burning tactic and it doesn't actually c communicate anything about their intelligence, that they're probably no smarter or dumber than anyone else. And so because I know that I would I would feel comfortable eating the restaurant, but I bet the average person does not think that way and might actually judge them as as being dumb or crazy. Oh, I think I'd be hesitant precisely because of the British reading.

Like I think it is me thinking coalitionally, to be honest. Interesting. Well, it depends. Do they want to bring you into the Flat Earth Society or are they like spiting you? Right? Because if they're want to be like we want, we're appealing, that might be cheaper and better because there's an agenda, right? Um, so sort of, you know, like they're they're trying to sell you something. And so that's true. Like, think of Hare Krishna. Like, would you eat, yeah, would I eat the Hare Krishna food where they are using the food for proselytizing purposes? I think I haven't, and I'm a little bit wary because I don't want to engage in the proselytizing endeavor, but like I probably would. So I don't know.

I'm being inconsistent here. Yeah. Um, I definitely think this is a cool area of research, the the ways that they do act as bridge burning and like what it does for what other in-groups think and what other out-groups think and about what, right? Um, I think like categories the whole categorization and stereotyping literature is um, I think like very underspecified about what are those predictions about. Yes. Because they tend not to think very functionally. And um like bringing it back to materially in the world, what is this going to do for you? Yes. What is it going to do for your interactions, I think would be really helpful. Yeah. And I think that's ultimately like what and what this is another example of like where

taking evolutionary approach is helpful, right? Because it it grounds like sort of and Christina like one of the things I love about your work is that we we are taking this thing groups that's so amorphous and trying to sort of create like what what is the underlying like what's the bone structure like you know is it about coordination is it about power and like there's reasons to privilege those kinds of things over like other categories because of an evolutionary approach right like because these are like things that actually matter to us as organisms that matter to us as social beings. Right. Yeah. What are the benefits that we get from being with other people? Um, whereas there are a lot of things, and this speaks to kind of these what we think of as

like implausible beliefs or improbable beliefs, is like a lot of them don't really have any consequences for your day-to-day interaction. And I think that's kind of why it does make sense to think about them as bridge burning, because um it probably isn't going to change your GPS settings, even though we joked about it. Like, you know, I'm guessing that flat earthers and non flat earthers, round earthers and cone earthers, like all of them are. I don't know about those. No, no, that's Eli. That's Eli's term. I don't think they exist. And his argument is like, isn't that interesting that only certain kinds of earth shapes exist? The ones that are like more intuitively realistic is his argument.

Interesting. And and so they could have burned the bridge with the cone with the cone Earth as well, but they didn't choose that one because it's not as intuitive as his argument. Um but I I suspect that in their day-to-day lives, like it doesn't have an effect, right? They I do do they use different GPS? No. Do they fly on planes? I don't know. That's an interesting question. Do they fly on planes? I think they do. And I think they do, yeah. And it doesn't such a lot of people. And the fact that the the fact that the pilot doesn't have to keep steering down, I think is an argument in favor of the flat earth. I think that's the argument. Oh, I see. Interesting. Okay. So yeah, so it doesn't really have an ap a practical implication for the life.

And then and that is interesting, but like it is harder to theorize about why we have beliefs that don't actually affect our everyday material interactions. Um except if it has a social purpose, right? Right. Yeah. No, I I I find that extremely fascinating as well to what extent we really believe our beliefs or whether they're just social signals. Um, you know, because be precisely because they don't serve the practical functions that that beliefs normally serve of guiding behavior, you know, of you know By the way, I just I just quietly looked this up. There's a great documentary about Flat Earthers called Behind the Curve. I don't know if you guys have seen it. It sounds like it's fodder for puns, though.

Oh yeah, a lot of great puns. No, it's a great document. It just basically just follows people in a flat earth society, just interviews them, and just and you just get a glimpse of what life is like, what these people are like. Uh and I found it really fascinating. And I think it does largely support this idea that the beliefs are are social signals. Um that that these people get a sense of community from being part of the Flat Earth society, that this is a a collection of of weirdos and and the flat earth belief is a way for them to find each other and and demarcate themselves from uh the rest of society. Um and it's it's very much a social thing and not an intellectual thing that was arrived at

intellectually. So I'd I'd recommend that documentary. It's it's it's it's a good watch. Cool. Anyway, yeah. I also like just want to say, like, you know, because I people, it's easy, especially like scientists, to make fun of flat earthers, but I also feel very I see I feel affection towards them in the following sense: of um You shouldn't just believe something because people tell you, right? Where where I would take issue is they're not typically, I don't want to paint broad strokes, but in my experience, what I've seen is they're not one remains a flat earther because one doesn't look exhaustively for the evidence for why the earth isn't flat, right? So there's a difference between sort of like not accepting the digested outcome of science,

right? Like I personally have an experience that the earth is a globe. Um, that's a fine starting point to be a scientist. That that is being a scientist. But then the question is: well, if the earth is flat versus if the earth is around, what does that predict? And what is the evidence in for one and the other? And there's all kinds of data, you know, we weren't flying spaceships or satellites for a long time, and people knew the earth was around like for a long time. Like, you know, um, what data did people use just from like the way the sky looked, you know, just from the way things like worked on Earth, like seeing a ship go go across? Like, so I think um I want to just like demarcate that it's it's sometimes people laugh at

flat earthers, but I think like the thing to be laughed at is ignoring evidence as opposed to sort of like holding a belief that's different from what other people believe. I think those are two very different things, and it's important to distinguish between them. Can I can I add to that by saying we shouldn't la laugh at fat earthers because we're all flat earthers about some things. Exactly. And I would say like it's and a lot. I I think of quantum mechanics always as this example of like there's no like we cannot investigate all of the evidence, right? It's just impossible. And I do feel like as somebody who does who's interested in culture evolution, I think this is one of those places where cultural and evolutionary psychology really have to work

together um to make sense of like how people process the vast amount of information that is available to them right now. And like I don't it's really hard and unintuitive for me to imagine that a particle is a wave and a particle like quantum mechanic phenomena like don't work with my brain. But um or probably I would argue with like most people's brain you have to really develop those intuitions um through a lot of hard training. Yeah and I don't think it is I don't think they ever do. I think people who you know they just they just sort of like it, nobody understands it. You just sort of get familiarity with it, but it's not intuitive. And so like and the reason that I believe that is just because I trust a certain group of

people and not an an over another group of people, right? So it's not because I've actually looked through all the I didn't go and look at like the people who are against quantum mechanics and consider their evidence. I didn't. It would just waste all of my time. So I do think that there is a really big challenge right now, probably for a lot of human history to deal with that. Yeah. I mean it's almost like what you're saying is that with the flat earth earth example, sorry to return to it, um, the the bridge burning is not happening from the side of the bridge that we think it's happening from. So we think of it as the flat earthers are burning the bridge. They're choosing this crazy sounding, stupid belief that's going to alienate themselves

from the rest of society. But really, uh, once you think about it, the idea that the earth is round is kind of counterintuitive. Uh and we are the ones who have to take that leap of faith by trusting the experts and trusting the scientific community that to to believe in this counterintuitive thing. If you think about it, that's really the crazy sounding belief. And we have already agree. Yeah. Um and so maybe we already bri burned the bridge from our side. How did and how did the podcast transition into a flat I'm sorry. I'm sorry. But but I think like but but I but you can't I do think that the bridge burning hypothesis for why people believe things as a marker of group identity is a legitimate one.

And it just only makes sense if you consider both what's happening within and outside the group. So I'm not like it like bridge burning could be a thing and it requires some sort of understanding of what the outgroup things and so forth. So the c it's a culturally constructed bridge. Like everyone needs to know that the bridge is there and that it's been burned, otherwise it doesn't work. And how you're going to interact with people once it's been burned. Yeah, that it exactly that it's no longer there. Yeah. So Christina, like your point is that like if somebody sort of like says something outrageous and in one social context nobody cares about it. And in another context it immediately causes people to break up into groups.

Right. That's the point is like the same behavior in two different social ecologies. One creates coalitional divisions and the other one is just sort of like, well, this is just some person saying something kind of weird. Yeah. I interact with a bunch of people who I have disagreements with and it doesn't mean um that I'm no longer their friends or that I disrespect them in other domains of life. Like it would be impossible to find somebody who totally believes exactly the same things that I do. I guess like the point of it being outrageous, I do think is interesting. Like um like there's maybe like a a bit of a positive feedback loop to go kind of into one extreme corner that's opposite of what somebody else believes.

So that maybe is a bit different. Yeah. Or like a dynamic that ensues when it is for coalitional purposes. But right. This is something John Tuby talked about. I actually started doing empirical study. I never finished it up. I shouldn't start it again or somebody should um where the idea is sort of like really outrageous ideas um versus normal ideas. The outrageous ideas are much more diagnostic of a social interaction. It's kind of like the language principle, right? Like if you see two people or you hear two people and they speak similar languages, the inference is just like at some level, there's been a concatenated series of like events where like these two people share a fuzzy set of like um social

interactions, right? Like it's impossible that they speak similarly and grew up without growing up in like sort of this fuzzy set of like common people. And if you like show up and like some two people say, Well, it's raining outside, versus like, you know, I believe God is like a purple headed elephant, you know, the purple headed elephant, like that's really low prior, right? That like anybody's even going to think that. So it's really much more diagnostic. Like at some point these two had a weird conversation and for whatever reason agreed on it, versus, you know, you could just arrive at it's raining because you're looking outside and it's raining, it's not predictive. And so, like John Tubi's point was sort of maybe sometimes, and Christina, this sounds like

what you were saying too, is like the the weirdness of the of the content is actually serving this function. It's not always the right thing to do. Um, but it might be it it it it's sort of more clearly it's such a low probability thing unless it was arrived at by um people all getting together and sort of agreeing on it. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. And otherwise it'd just be like a single crazy person. Exactly. Yes. And and so that is something I'm kind of working on now. Sorry, not to make this about myself. No, this the this is about you. No, it's about Christina, you should be asking us. No, but it is like it is precisely like how we arrive at common understandings of w what a lot of people would think of originally as a crazy

belief, that it's kind of motivating me to look at the origin of a pilgrimage site in the Peruvian altiplano. And that's that's that's kind of exactly the yeah, the contrast I make is like so people started celebrating like the fact that Jesus Christ appeared on the side of a mountain um in 2014. And so then I've been trying to map on like through time, like who's adopting that belief, who's going to this pilgrimage, who doesn't believe it. And the important connection here is just that um The first person who saw Jesus' face on the side of the mountain and thought it was worth celebrating, it is a low prior. People should have a low prior on that. And so they could have just been dismissed as a crazy person.

So then how do they go about creating a set of people who both all agree? Yeah. And I don't think that it was that concertive of an effort of one person trying to create that community. Um, although some individuals might have been more involved than others. Um, but yeah, the first person who said this is a flat earth, that the earth is flat, like I d don't know the history of it. Um maybe we do have enough records, but they somehow managed to not just be a crazy person, perceived as a crazy person by the society, but actually build a community around it. Right. It's like the origins of religion religion, right? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so uh a working hypothesis I have about this is that in order to trust

someone's testimony, um, you have to assume that they have your best interests at heart and they're not trying to manipulate you or ex or exploit you. Um, so you have to be sort of loyal and trusting to the person to to trust what they have to say about any topic, whether it's you know, flat earth or or or Jesus being born a virgin or or whatever. Um And so it could be that maybe the first person who started Flat Earth as a maybe this was like a really high status, charismatic beloved person. And people wanted to basically signal their loyalty to this person by trusting this person's opinion and not calling them crazy. And maybe that was diagnostic to the person of, you know, these people believe me, these

people don't. These people are my friends, they're with me, they're on my side, they trust me. These people don't. And so bel belief itself can become a cue of loyalty and trust to a group. And that might be the origin of where these crazy beliefs come from, is it's precisely because they're hard to believe that they're good signals of loyalty and trust. Yeah. So that would be like a different process. Like by one, by one dynamic, like you have the kind of extreme belief to begin with. Um, by another one, like they become more. Another possibility is that they become more extreme. Like you start off with somebody who just asks you to believe that, um, to question whether we have good evidence that the earth is round, let's say, and then like it becomes more

extreme. So I don't, again, I don't know the history of this one. Um, I think that in some ways, what our results are suggesting in this particular case is that another pathway is like for it not to be to try to work with the perception of the extremity to of the content itself to begin with. So I agree with you. We do have evidence that people are more likely to go to the site if they first learned about it from somebody that they trusted, like a close family member or friend, right? So that increases our belief. That's not we're not, we actually can't actually find the person. Everybody says that there was a first person who saw this, and they everybody agrees that it was a minor. Um, and then beyond that, we have not been able to find the first person, and we have not

been able, like they have very different beliefs. Like some of them say he's dead, some of them say he's in jail. Like it's so we have not been able to track that down. But we are able to see that, in fact, like it consistent with your prediction, David. Like, you are more likely to believe this, you are more likely to go if you have trustworthy sources, and you've and other people tell you that miracle has been granted there, because it does require that kind of faith. However, another thing that seems to be happening, which is quite different then from the flat earth, possibly possibly, is that it's trying to piggyback on belief systems that already exist, right? And so making it feel less unfamiliar.

So I think and that is an inherent tension, right? Like of like whether a belief system acts for bridge burning purposes, or if it's trying to bring everybody in along for the ride and say, like, no, no, no, this is actually quite similar to that other pilgrimage site that you've been going to for several years. Right. So I I think belief change can work in different ways. And and this kind of goes back to the question of like what counts as like a crazy belief. And you know, Dave, your point that you're affectionate towards flat earthers, like, um, yeah, because because there are like some beliefs that are crazy that we just accept, and some beliefs that are crazy that are probably wrong, but like we don't

really think people are crazy for having them. So um it's it's like almost like what you're saying is you you need a backdrop of cultural similarity in order to get a cultural difference. That in order to have a bridge burning tactic where one belief is considered crazy by one side and sane by the other side, is there needs to be a common cultural understanding of what counts as crazy and what counts as not crazy. Without that common cultural understanding, the the mechanism uh wouldn't work. Right. So the and then the cultural background can be used either to create something that's going to be understood as crazy or like or bridge burning, crazy enough that you're burning some bridges, or cultural background can be um used to inform how to make it not

sound crazy. Um so both of those can produce change, right? There's a there's sort of a trope too of like, and I I mean it always seems to be like um, you know, like if you watch like a Bigfoot documentary or like spiritualism, and maybe this is just wrong, but you know, maybe it's just like people with lots of disposable income have the time to do this. But, you know, people who are like looking for the Loch Ness monster, like when I was a kid, I love Loch Ness Monster books, you know, or like those kinds of things. Um, there there's this sort of thing of like conspiratorial or sort of wacky beliefs. And this is my this, I this is me taking off my scientist hat and just like my my personal observation is that it almost looks kind of entrepreneurial in the sense of like people

with status and resources are more willing to sort of say wacky things. Um and again that might be wrong and it might just be that like those are the people who can afford to like buy the boat in the sonar looking for the Loch Ness monster. And the guy who like you know is too poor to do any of that, you know, there's no documentary about him. He just thinks it's true. But yeah, is that is that a thing where, like, sort of can this be used entrepreneurially to sort of people are generating, you know, if you find yourself in a high bargaining phenotype or context, you're sort of spouting sort of things that are, like you said, like within this range of sort of like maybe some people come along with me

and maybe they won't. It's almost like a leadership or um a grouping entrepreneurial thing. Is that um is that crazy? That seems possible. It's consistent with well, with I was thinking of the early adopter literature, which is usually not about coming up with like a new belief, but coming like being an early adopter of a new technology, is where that's been studied a lot. And um some people might be seen as crazy for adopting a new technology, right? Um, but but it is overwhelmingly that literature suggests um kind of higher status individuals who are um the ones doing the early adoption. But then that could be like a very kind of minimal, not so strategic explanation for it. It could just be that they can't, like you you hinted at, right?

That they can afford to do that. They can afford to lose some reputational status points if it turns out to be a bad choice. Right. Or just can about they can afford like the monetary risk, right? Even just the monetary risk. But also if um like but I think it is an interesting alternative that like all the people who did do this kind of early adoption that didn't get followers and didn't it didn't pay off like that, we just don't see them in the literature. Yeah. Um but I think you were hinting at something a bit more strategic, right? That like there is a way that people are doing this when they want to create some sort of grouping. Right. I also I I one sometimes wonder like in the context of like science being a status game

that you know science sort of works this way too or like certain people are just sort of motivated to be like, what I'm doing is different, you know, like that kind of thing. Yeah, yeah. That's true. Yeah. You do get rewarded for being different. Yeah. But you I think you have but to your point, Dave, I think you have to have a certain level of status to even get away with, you know, going out on a limb and saying crazy things. Right? People have to be willing to give you the benefit of the doubt um in order for you in order for it to pay off. Um so yeah I I I buy that that way of thinking. I mean I I I don't think it's a coincidence that cult leaders are often very charismatic people. It's because they have to earn that status and loyalty before they can right whip out their

crazy beliefs. Yeah. Uh what is charisma then though? Like I kind of unwonder. I mean, we know like people have been talking about it since the early 20th century, but some people that are currently like obviously very charismatic. I have a hard time understanding why. Um do we have like good operational definitions of that? Because like if we think of it as just like high SES, like they actually have the material backing. I don't is that also true of cult leaders that they have like the material wealth to become cult leaders? Um, or is it like these more intangible things. I think it's more in I mean, there's so little high quality work on charisma. I've been thinking about it a bit myself, actually.

Um I think it's a kind of social intelligence. So um I have a paper uh called The Evolution of Social Paradoxes. I'm I'm I'm trying to get published now. Um, and it's about how a lot of our signals have to be concealed in order to be successfully transmitted. Um so we have to uh compete for status without revealing the fact that we're competing for status. Because if we're outed as a status seeker, we actually lose status. Or we try to get other people's attention without being an attention seeker. Or we, you know, we try to be be brave and defy social norms in order to win the approval and esteem of our peers. And there are a lot of these kinds of paradoxical signals that we send where uh the when

the signal itself is revealed, it collapses and you fail to gain any of the benefits. If you're seen as a virtue signaler, you're not going to get virtue. In order to get virtue, you have to be seen as authentically caring about helping or doing good. And if you're just trying to boost your reputation as a morally superior person, then you're going to look morally inferior. And so I think what charisma is, is the ability to send these kinds of concealed signals. So a charismatic person is a person that can successfully virtue signal without uh revealing the fact that they're virtue signaling. They're a person who can display their status without displaying the fact that they're displaying their status.

They can capture others attention without outing themselves as an attention seeker. They're exceptionally good at at playing these kinds of social games that require lots of levels of recursive mentalizing about knowing what the other person knows you know and and knowing that um they're not going to know that you intentionally wanted them to know that. That's my working model of what charisma is. It's a kind of ability to play social games really well. Yeah. And that itself becomes a cue of your likely status in the future. Because if you're socially attractive, Um and and I I I find myself, you you're sort of emitting all of the cues that I'm looking for in a good social partner. Um well that's suggests to me that you know other people are going to respond the same way

and you're likely to win a lot of followers and a lot of friends and you're likely to ascend uh the the the status hierarchy even if you're not high status right now. Um and so I think that's what what charisma is about. Sorry, I'm I'm just sort of spewing my my thinking on this topic. Um I like that. Yeah, I'm curious if if you think that's that's plausible or not. Yeah, I like that you're kind of getting to an more operational definition of it. And I know that they're like game theoretic models about that, about like um burying signals, right? Um that I think also boggle my mind a little bit in terms of you have yeah being I I don't know how they're stable to like higher order thinking, but I think

they are. I think they are. I don't know if they're true well enough. Um yeah, like how to be just subtle enough while still having the same motivation and having more work is kind of amazing. My thinking about why it's stable is that the ability to send deceptive signals effectively is itself a valid cue of your likely social status. Right. But then that's true for so those kinds of like positive feedback loops, they could be for anything, right? Like if you kind of that's what sexual selection models do, right? Like it's like, oh, you you want somebody tall, oh, because other people want somebody tall. And so that could stabilize anything, right? So I I like this idea that it's about like specifically these kinds of

games um being played where you cannot be too overt about what you want. But that I don't know. Some people right now don't want to name names, but like some people right now seem quite overt about their motivations and still seem to be quite charismatic. That is true, but only certain motivations. Yeah. So um yeah, so I mean I I I imagine you're you're you're thinking about a politician whose name rhymes with dump. Um but uh yeah I think we'll cut that out. We'll cut that out. Um yeah, uh he's definitely overtly braggadocious and uh overtly um narcissistic. Um but I think what ultimately he's he's signaling is uh is a kind of loyalty to his his base and an enmity toward their enemies. And I think he's signaling that um effectively because he's using bridge burning tactics as

we've been discussed. He's saying things that are outrageous to uh the the left uh wing intelligentsia. Um and that and then it's precisely because they're so outrageous to the left wing intelligentsia that that it wins him uh approval from his uh his base. So I think that's that's really what he's signaling. Um and I think he's doing it effectively. Um whether he's concealing that signal, I don't know. That's an interesting question. I don't know. Yeah, in a different in a different direction. I've always thought like, I don't know, has anybody done the evolutionary psychology of cool of being cool? Is that is cool different than charismatic? I think so, right? No. I don't know. I mean, because I think um I mean I'm I I I take a slightly different take.

Well David, what do you think? I I view them as largely synonymous. Yeah. I think I mean I think cool. I think there's like people that just are sort of wired. Um, you know, because like, you know, even like kids, so like my son, for example, is much more charismatic than me. Um, you know, and when he walks into a room like he'll be so harsh on yourself. He's well, no, but it's no, no, it's an age thing. He is like he's he's just very charismatic. Like, like, you know, and I is I'm not the only person to like observe this. And like there's just something about the way he's wired that like people enjoy being around him. And he like the room is different when he's in it and not. And and I see that, you know, I've had enough experiences like where, you know, whatever,

parents are biased. But like, um, so even if it's not true, like I still think this can be true even like of kids. And so I think the value of sort of like that this person is wired to make people feel good. I think, I think the things David's talking about will come along, right? Or or like that skill set or whatever that is, then kind of naturally leads into this strategic use for good or bad or neutral. That's just because you know people are people. But I think um but yeah I was just wondering if anybody's sort of done the evolutionary psychology of cool that would be cool. I don't think so. Not not to my knowledge. Yeah. No, I I I think may I feel like coolness is like part charisma and part just like status in

general. That like you can be a non-charismatic cool person if you're just really well respected and high status. That's true. That's that's definitely true. Like I could be a really awkward um person and yet if I am widely regarded as a genius, I could still be cool, you know? Right. I think this may be a conversation where it's useful it might be again like useful to think about like functionally what do you do with that information or with that like leverage that now you have? And um or like what are the people who are assi assessing you as cool do with that, right? Is it that they're gonna learn from you? Is it that they want to become part of your coalition? Yeah. Um is it that you have like insider information?

Because I had kind of had the sense that cool would also be somebody who's kind of up on trends so that they would be like an early adopter. Is that not true? Like if you're I think you're right that it's a placeholder for lots of different I think there's there's ambiguity about what it refers to, yeah. And I suspect it's you know well picking up on on social trends and, you know, uh conforming to the to the latest trends without revealing the fact that you're a conformist, that is itself the same skill that I that uh uh produces charisma, I think. So I think being fashionable and trendy and being charismatic are largely synonymous and they stem from the same underlying ability. Yeah. Yeah, but I think I think is it worth like um thinking about each of those kinds of things

that you want to signal without being overt? Like that you're trying to signal that you're have inside information without conforming, seems kind of different from um you are um trying to show that you're very moralist morally racious without showing that you're morally racious, right? Like they're at least it's different content. I don't know if it's going to be functionally then used for different purposes, but definitely different content, but I think the the level of rec recursive uh mind reading is the same in in both cases, and that you have to descend a few layers of recursive mind reading to so that I can know that you don't know that I want you to know X, right? Or I I anticipate that you're going to be anticipating that I'm going to try to make you

think uh X and therefore I'm going to do Y instead so that you don't think that I wanted you to think X. Sorry, that got very complicated. I'm stuck at two levels. Like I don't do recursive reasoning. I'm stuck at two levels. Well it's it's precisely that ability that is the same thing. That's why I'm not charismatic. Well, we do know the systems in the natural format. Yeah, no, exactly. Um, Christina, um uh to make sure we get to there's a couple of things. One is like, how did you um discover evolutionary social science? Like, how did you get interested in it? Gosh, I'm such I think maybe a lot of us are contrarians, and so maybe it's not going to work so much so well for the next generation because I think we're more established now.

But at the I do remember being a history major and then taking my intro-bioanthro class from Jonathan Marks. Um, and he is uh a well-respected biological anthropologist, but who really likes to point towards the kind of its sordid history and all the ways that it's misused and and it's and kind of not propping up some of like the interesting triumphs of like evolutionary approaches to um human, to understanding humans, not just behavior. And so I think that really hooked me, to be honest. Just not the sordid history, but like the search for like what is good about this and like what can we do about this. Um and so that that's when I switched to anthro. Can you clarify so uh that the class was saying like there's a sorted history, but there

were like there's a a core can you just flesh that out? Sorry, I just missed I I kinda I'd have to like reconstruct what his complaints were, but um Well wait, was he complaining about biological anthropology? Like that sounds good? Yeah. And I was like, that sounds good. Yes, yes, yes. That's why I think I'm a bit of a contrarian. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So he was like, biological anthropology, these are all the bad things about it. And I'm like, oh, but there must be something good here. There must be something useful here. And I think at the time, like, you know, that we're also I I I do think about this with our current students. Like, I think they're often like, and I I mean myself at the time, probably also like drawn

to issues that seem like um politically like contentious. And at the time I think it was maybe a bit more so. And so I think that's less so now. I think most people believe and understand like how evolution is important to understanding humans, but maybe disagree about exactly how. And so just the fact that there was like a controversy there, I think drew me to it and like wanted to dig more. So I did change to being an anthra major and then I just started picking and choosing classes that seem to speak to also this possibility of having like a big kind of holistic understanding of all of the things about why we are the way we are. Um, and I think it's not surprising that it's often a somewhat it it doesn't have to be,

but it tends to draw kind of secular people, maybe as a replacement for like a framework for understanding. Um, kind of pretty puzzling things about humans and our relatives. And I I suspect it does some sort of replacement, even if it works differently for that was that was a big part of Dave's origin story back when I interviewed him. You mentioned your religious upbringing, Dave. Yeah, that's a that was a two-hour episode. I'll have to listen to that then. Yeah, episode two. Coming soon. Okay. Out out already by the time people are hearing this. So go back. Christina, is there anything that we should have asked you? Oh man, I didn't prepare for that. No, we didn't. Well we haven't this is not yet published.

Pretty much everyone is completely taken off guard by that question. And then we just have a couple of thirty seconds of filler banter and then but no we we this is a surprise because we're not actually published yet when we've been recording this. But we should discuss I don't have an answer to it, but we should discuss about like what are the next steps or like the big things that evolutionary social sciences has to do. Yeah. Um potentially. We should have you we should have you back on for for for that. Somebody else has better no no no no no that would be an awesome episode. Yeah the future of evolutionary social science with Christina Moya. I don't know to be continued on that one. A bunch of good t-shirts for this episode.

What was it? Essence of Dog and Essence of Dog, yeah. Essence of Dog. Flat Earther uh restaurant. Restaurant. I figured it'd be like a hot dog place. That's sort of what I was imagining. I don't know what you guys were imagining. Like I thought more like Casadillas. Oh, that would be more fitting. Okay, you couldn't. You won that competition. Sorry, Christina. You're saying you were about to say something. Oh no, something else. I guess like I also I don't have another thing I don't have a good answer for, but I want somebody else. Maybe you guys should interview somebody else who tells us about kind of um evolutionary approaches in the real world and like what they can give us, other because I pr I very much

come to this from a basic science perspective and I'm just motivated by curiosity. Um and I sometimes think that's not enough or like that we could do more. Um, and I feel guilty sometimes about just being motivated by curiosity. And so just to you know, particularly in this moment where like um science and understanding the world and cross cultural diversity, I think is not particularly valued. Um I think we'd have to kind of work on our argument for that. So I think you should cut it because I don't have the argument ready. But I think we should discuss it. Yeah. Not figure out a good answer. Yeah, no, that's true. I mean, we've had so like we had Michael Moncrief on and he does like work on like

terrorism, international humanitarian law. Right. Um, but um, but yeah, but where where these things sort of get cashed out into policy, though I know and David is a a good a good critic of this of the long history and social sciences of sort of taking a half-baked or maybe completely raw idea, foisting it on people and having, you know, the road to hell is paved with good intentions kind of thing. Yeah. Totally. And I think that is maybe that is a there's a book called Applied Evolutionary Anthropology. I don't know if you've David Lawson is your colleague, actually. Is a editor. Oh, great. We're gonna have one another, David. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It won't get confusing at all. Um, but but I think some of the case studies that they highlight are ones where actually it

was just kind of like putting the brakes on kind of strong hypotheses that like development econ people had, right? Just by being ethnographically informed and thinking like just having a broader set like the evolutionary framework giving you like a broader set of like possible predictions of the ways that things could turn out. Right. Sometimes I feel like that's paralyzing. At least for me. I'm like I don't know where to go from here. But but but it but it it is important to have those cautions. But I think I think I'm just overly cautious. And then somebody's going to make those policies anyway. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And so then the question is how do we, how do we speak to that? Yeah. And there's so much documented.

Like I was, I was just looking at like the Afghanistan papers book, like just for as an example for in psych one, just sort of like conformity, because like what's the newest decade? You know, what's in the last two decades? And and there's all this evidence, like tons of people on the ground. Um, you know, the war in Afghanistan, there were just tons of people on the ground who would be like like criticizing or concerned with like what are we doing in this particular case? Like, or or now that we're here, which was fine, why aren't we leaving now? And this was across parties, across area, like this was just like you know, people who knew the situation. Um, and so there's tons of examples, like that's just one of it's not like you

know, you people are splitting hairs often, and it's sort of like, well, is this good or not? It's often a thing of like the people at the top don't want to hear it. Right. Or the people at the top, their their life and death, quote unquote, is sort of like independent of what's the reality, right? Like I don't want to look soft to my constituents. It doesn't really matter what's happening on the ground. Right. So I think like, you know, keeping, I think this is where like having anthropologists on the ground or like keeping open, transparent information of like if we do implement this policy, what what is the consequence? And keeping keeping a conversation with the people affected. It's obvious to say, but it's shocking how infrequently that actually like happens.

Yeah. And I mean you're pointing to more intractable problems at that point. Sure. No, no, no. But I think it's just an example of like, you know, I think at every level, like even you know, I think this just happens, right? Yeah. I'm gonna send a message to you, but that's for David as you were talking about your charisma paper. Do you know what I mean? I love that stuff. Yeah, I know, yeah. The buried signal. Yeah, Moshe Hoffman and they do they do excellent stuff. Okay. I just I couldn't help but thinking about those for for those who would so Chris Christina just sent a chat in the in the Zoom thing about um a very cool paper by um Moshe Hoffman and Aries Yoeli about the game theory of buried signaling.

Um and they do also um they're they have a book uh called Hidden Games uh that that reviews the research which is is wonderful and highly recommended. I didn't know we were still on the air. I thought we were doing the Bantary thing. No, no, we're still recording. So uh so you know swear all you want. I don't know. Anyways, uh thank you so much, Christina. I really uh love this conversation. I love that we just got to bounce ideas off each other. That's you know the best kind of fun conversation to have. So thank you so much for it was super fun. Yeah. And lots of food for thought. Absolutely, including from the Flat Earth restaurant. Yep. Somebody's gonna start that. Well, you've wasted another hour to two uh with David, myself, and most likely

a guest, unless uh this was one where it's just David and I. Yeah, chances are there was a guest. Yeah. Um but if you enjoyed randomly we're just randomly attaching outros to the to these episodes. Yeah, we don't know which episode this is going to be attached to. I have no idea. Yeah. So maybe there was a guest, maybe there wasn't. Uh but in any case, if you enjoyed what you just listened to, uh please leave us a kind review, check out our Patreon page, uh do what you can to support us because you know we depend on your support to keep doing this. Yeah. Um and please just spread the word. Let people know if you're enjoying this podcast. If everybody who's listening just told one other person, uh, then we would,

I don't know, when we do the math, that would what, double our listenership? Uh I think that I think that checks out. And then the next generation, oh, it's like exponential, right? Yeah. So maybe we could take over the world if if if all of you tell someone about our podcast. I don't know if this is like a reproduction or uh differential reproductive success in natural selection or a pyramid scheme or why choose? Yep, all of the above. Okay. Uh we'll see you guys uh next week and David. I'll see you in a little bit. Sounds good. Okay.