Views of Mind with Clark Barrett
2026-02-10 13:00:00.000 +00:00

David, this is Evolutionary Psychology the Podcast. Actual Evolutionary Psychology by Actual Evolutionary Psychologist. You're David Pinsoff. I'm Dave Petrozowski. Do you have anything to say? Wow, you got it all by yourself. I didn't even need to help you in any way. All right. Well, you can do the next part. All right. Uh enjoy listening. We have a very special guest, the amazing Clark Barrett, professor of anthropology at UCLA. I interacted uh a lot with him while I was at UCLA. Uh he was on my dissertation committee. Wonderful, brilliant thinker, uh really insightful guy. I think he's perhaps the best at integrating and merging different uh perspectives within the evolutionary behavioral sciences.

Uh, you know, his book, How mental adaptations are sorry, The Shape of Thought, How Mental Adaptations Evolve, uh, is uh a a wonderful text in terms of integrating evolutionary psychology with cultural evolution, uh, with human behavioral ecology, uh, showing how um we're all studying the same thing and uh we can all just get along. Yeah. Clark is sort of, I I, in my view, is sort of the um second wave evpsy person, one of the main second wave evpsych people in the sense of after the initial generation of psych people, to just sort of say, look, here is what the mature science looks like. Here's the boundaries of it. And let's avoid the unnecessary arguments and baggage. And let's do what what can we do generatively going forward?

And um and I think this conversation is a good example of Clark's philosophy of respecting the insights of lots of different diverse uh viewpoints and then steel manning them as you as you put it in this episode. Yes. And then we we cover a lot of really interesting topics, uh spirituality, uh social cognition. Uh we get into ayahuasca, we get into ghost murders, drugs and rock and roll. Drugs and rock and roll, um, you name it. And and just the future of evolutionary social science uh and how we can create a bigger tent and be more welcoming to lots of different people and uh lots of different cultures. Uh so um this was a wonderful just wide ranging conversation with a really great thinker and I think you'll enjoy it.

And fish with two jaws. Yeah, we even get into fish. Yeah he was a fish guy. You'll hear all about that soon. So enjoy. So we can just get right into it. Clark, you don't have to answer this, but one thing I don't know about you, or the or maybe the beginning of the story, is you are a a younger Clark Barrett is on a boat studying fish. Can you paint us that picture? And how did you get there? And how did you get to where you are now from there? Yeah. Well, I can't guarantee that that ever happened, but I do have some memories to that effect. Okay. Um it might have been implanted in you. Yeah. But you did you studied like fish, right? Yes, I I um I my early dream was to be a marine biologist, um, influenced by childhood viewings

of Jacques Cousteau, and also um my dad had a a business um boat business, and uh we were on boats a lot, and including in the Caribbean, and so there I learned how to snorkel and then later scuba dive. When I was in an undergraduate, I actually was a bio major and I did an honors thesis at Harvard on reproductive seasonality in rainforest stream fish, and which would not technically be marine biology because those are freshwater fish. But um yeah, I was a fish guy. And uh then I started grad school at UCSB um for a year or two working in the biodepartment and um you know didn't really hadn't really selected a project or anything like that but I did go and um you know help some of the other graduate students who were doing their research

down in St. Croix. And at that point I realized that um humans might be my thing uh more than fish even though studying and learning about fish definitely informed um lots of lots of what I do including you know the fish behavior stuff but also my undergrad mentor at um at Harvard was Carl Leem who's a functional morphologist And his claim to fame was trying to understand why cichlid fish have two jaws, an inner and an outer jaw. And that played a role in their diversification. I don't know if you know that cichlids are one of the most diverse family of freshwater fish. And they um, because they can specialize their inner and outer jaws separately, um, there's many niches that they can occupy.

Um so it kind of preadapts them for diversification or adaptive radiation. That was his that was his hypothesis anyway. So that's cool. You know, there was a connection there with functional morphology, which then, you know, thinking about adaptationism in the context of evolutionary psychology, I feel like I was already kind of ready to start thinking about that. Sort of like a Swiss army jaw. It can sort of be that's cool. Yes. In addition to a uh uh jaw muscular adaptation. Yes, and and it's and it's kind of interesting to think about what the phenomenology of these fish is when they're controlling their inner and outer jaw separately and and and um you know cool. Uh they also you know that the they're one of the fish um that are mouth uh they they

breed their they protect their young inside their mouth. Oh, cool. So um the babies hatch out of the eggs. And then I mean, sometimes you can see this in aquarium stores. They'll all like run into the mother's mouth um when it's danger time. And so there's also got to be a lot of circuitry there to decide, you know, when to start chewing or not. Yeah. Yeah. And avoid swimming into the wrong mouth. That's right. Yes. Yeah. The baby design can't be swim into the nearest fish's mouth when you get in feel danger. Yeah, that's not that's a dead end. Yeah. Yep. Interesting. And then you and then from there, so you decided people. Yes. Yeah. And I, you know, I'd always I had always been interested in um also as an undergraduate, I

I really wanted to double major in biology and philosophy because I was always interested in philosophy of mind, um, interested in questions about consciousness and free will. And I think, you know, early on, I had a strong intuition that evolution could tell us about some of those things. But as an undergraduate, with, you know, it wasn't really feasible to do to double major in those things and do an honors thesis that would encompass both. And so I really doubled down on the biology side. And I think when I got to graduate school and started getting a sense of what is possible in a PhD, um, I realized that there was a more open set of possibilities than you know what you can study as an undergrad, at least at that time.

And so yeah, that's when I switched over within UCSB to work with um Tubi and Cosmodies. How did you find them? The phone book. Okay. So paint a picture for the kids that are. Did you know that is that like Facebook? Like what is the phone book? Like No, this is the this is this is the strange thing. It was it was um it was uh some sort of reverse landing um where I did not know what evolutionary psychology was at that time, uh at least to the best of my recollection. Um you know, I was I was familiar with um that there was that there were evolutionary approaches to human behavior, um including you know Io Wilson and um Stephen Jay Gould and others that I interacted with at Harvard. So I was familiar with that, but I I just didn't know I didn't know John and Lita and I

didn't know that they were at UCSB. And I just started looking around. You know, this was nineteen ninety. Yeah, it's the early days of John and Lita, yeah. One, ninety two, something like that. So um there wasn't you know the same kind of um was there even an internet then i can't remember um i mean what what luck maybe enormous luck people are using so so it's like yeah I'm looking in the directory of these different departments for which for the faculty and you know what their specializations are and uh yeah and I actually called John's um you know landline. Um did you pick up? No. It was in his lab and and one of the students picked up. But you know, eventually I ended up meeting with them and and um yeah, moved over to to

start working with them in the anthro department. You just happened to be at the epicenter of evolutionary psychology right at the moment that it was being born. Yes. Like I said, you know, that's the that's my personal mythology, whether I'm remembering it wrong. Exactly. But I'm pretty sure that's how I'm pretty sure that's how that's how it happened. Yeah. Yeah. And then um I love your uh your dissertation work is on predator prey stuff. Yes. And I think because you've done so many wonderful things since then, um, but at least for me, there's a very special place in my heart for the predator prey work. You don't have to talk about it if you don't want to. Like I know everybody feels differently about their dissertation work.

But um it was that um part of your figuring out how to take an evolutionary approach to people? Like was that addressing the interest that you had? Like what how did you get on that topic? Yeah, I mean, it it did end up going in that direction. So it was a a way to you know it was a way to unify my background and knowledge in biology and ecology um with an interest in how we how we humans think about the mind. And so um, you know, the I the idea was to kind of look at how What kinds of models, if you will, people have of animal of animal minds and animal behavior? Um, and it was, you know, honestly, a lot of it was John Tuby's idea. Um, both John and Lita, you know, they they kind of pushed me to that.

When I came, I I I was, you know, I mentioned that I had this interest in free will and consciousness, and um, you know, I wanted to go straight for the jugular on that. And they they did the right thing as advisors and said, that's too big of a bite to to you know to attempt for a PhD. And so go for go for something more tractable. And um, and so I, you know, I ended up doing the predator prey stuff and turned it into um, you know, something that actually did steer towards this direction of like models of the mind, how we think about free will and consciousness and and you know, agency, I guess, is the better concept there. Um, and I and I still am interested in this idea of you know, I think part of the key, I Dave, I know you you've you've you've done some stuff also on free

will and and that topic. And you know, I think one of the sources of evidence about it that we should attend to is how and why people think about free will. Um, you know, when we attribute choice to others, when do we do that? Why do we do that? Um, and I'm actually in the camp that thinks, you know, yes, we may be mistaken sometimes, but human social cognition is so good that I think that when people make a distinction between, you know, voluntarily chosen action and something else, they're onto something. And I do think that there are mysteries there. But to me, that's an angle that we should pursue more. And I think hasn't been pursued as much because people in neuroscience and psychology, when

they look at these questions, they they tend to think of it more like, you know, let's get inside the box and see what's in there, as opposed to um why do humans attribute uh these kinds of properties and processes to other organisms and when and what use does it do to them uh for them and so on. And that that kind of led to my interest in moral cognition and this question of, you know, culpability, which is can be closely linked to um our models of you know how much control we have over our own behavior and things like that. Cool. Yeah. I mean, it and you've done cross-cultural work so on sort of like intention and things like that. And that's another thing we can um maybe talk about. But what but what I'm hearing you say is that the one mistake or a difference between

evolutionary approaches and non, or at least the kind that you're doing, is is sort of taking a step back and saying why would an organism think this way, or what's the sense that it would make? But that that also sort of assumes that um our introspection about it isn't the the end all and be all, which I think you get from an evolutionary approach. Right. I agree with that totally. Yeah. And you know, and and we do in know, psychologists, anthropologists, evolutionary psychologists, we do understand broadly that you know people are some of the best source of evidence about. I mean, if we're, you know, we look, we get data from how people think about things, right? Um, but maybe it's not so common

to take those data as actually telling you a little bit about the things that they're about, the targets of those cog of that cognition. I mean, to me, I think in in in, you know, so so when we look at say intuitive physics, to take an example that people talk about, like nobody would really well, maybe they would, but it seems unlikely that somebody would study the actual ontological reality of the physical world by looking at how people think about it. Although I guess maybe right. Yeah. But it's different in a domain like morality or the understanding of human behavior, right? Because, well, certainly morality is one where it's very complicated, but the object itself may be entirely a construction of the human mind.

So if you want to understand it, you know, you should be looking at how people think about it. Um, which is not how it's always done, or it's not always how it has been done in philosophy, because a lot of times it's from the armchair and thinking about metaphysics and things like that and not taking human data seriously. So morality is a good domain to think about it. Um humans as a source of understanding the phenomenon itself. Yeah. And, you know, thinking how how people think about the mind is kind of in between, right? Because you know, um, the mind is a biological physical object, and there are truths about how the brain operates. And obviously, there's going to be some truths that we're going to end up knowing about

what free will actually is or isn't eventually, um, that you know human intuitions can't tell us completely about, but I think it's an untapped source of of insight into um into it. I mean, having done a lot of cross-cultural work on people's intuitions about the importance of, say, intentions in uh moral transgressions, um, the role of uh knowledge in informing a person's choices, um, and even in uh to a certain extent in terms of uh people's moral judgments. Do you see um a universality in the structure of moral cognition and uh and mind reading for lack of a better term that uh uh around the world people carve up the social world in roughly similar ways and make inferences in roughly similar ways or um is it do you take more of a view that uh this is really

um uh open-ended and and profoundly shaped by culture such that there aren't really uh universal organizing principles. Um I know I'm I'm painting a character of two extreme positions and presumably you lie somewhere in between, but I'm curious how you've been thinking about this, having gathered a lot of cross-cultural data on these questions, w what do you see as the universal people to use um a a term that that Dave and I like from Don Brown? Is there a universal people and what do those people look like? Well, that is the the million-dollar question right there. Um, which, you know, if I could answer that succinctly, I would be done with my research project. But um I I think the answer to what, so I mean, the answer to the to the first question you

asked is in this continuum of how much commonality versus difference is there in how people think about the mind and how it's related to ideas about morality around the world, I think there's a lot more similarity or universality than um than some anthropologists might think, um, for example. Although I'm also also reluctant to attribute these beliefs to anthropologists. Um, you know, oftentimes in this sort of divide between psychology and anthropology, the psychologists are seen as the universalists and the anthropologists are the cultural relativists. And, you know, I I I've spent a lot of time recently um, you know, in communities of cultural anthropologists, and I'm I'm not at all convinced that that's that that's the

right, um, that's the right description of the distinction. Anyway, that said, you know, there's no question that you you, you know, there there's a perfectly plausible intuition that um our views about the mind are radically different across cultures. And my my intuitive sense is is no. Um, in the cases where you know I've done what what I can do in terms of a deep dive into models of the mind that different cultures have, you do see a lot of commonality. And you would expect it to be that way, given that to the extent that there are universal properties of the mind, then you would hope that folk models of the mind or cultural models of the mind would converge in a lot of ways. And it's, you know, so there are these classic questions in, for example, you know,

the questions about uh language and thought, about how different languages carve up mental state terms, emotion terms. Um, you see differences there. Um I think some people maybe amplify those different differences too much. I think um, you know, the um One way that you can think about it is that there's, you know, the these different sort of cultural models of the mind have different kinds of vibes or flavors to them, something like that. Um, that they may emphasize. Um, you know, so so just to take one example, philosophical models of the mind in the West, which I take as one sort of cultural lineage, you know, the one stretching back to the Greeks and Aristotle and Plato and stretching up into kind of European

philosophy of mind in the 19th century and so on, are very oriented towards rationality and conscious thought processes and processes of inference and deduction. Philosophers have been obsessed with this stuff, and people in cognitive science as well, right? But I and I think you know, everywhere in the world people can understand those kinds of processes. But I think there are other kinds of cultural models of the mind that see those aspects of cognition as being a pretty small slice of the pie compared to things like embodied physical knowledge and skill that come out through the way that you move your body and the way that you sense the world that is sort of not heavily rational or um maybe you know more on the intuitive end of

things, right? And you know, all models of the mind are capable of dealing with those different kinds of things. But I think it's interesting, even when you, I mean, I've written a little bit about this lately. I mean, even when you look at the history of cognitive science, um, the the focus on rationality and processes of um explicit conscious inference and stuff like that has really driven the model of the mind that cognitive science has had for quite a while. And it it's weird that the embodiment turn in cognitive science and things like four E cognition, you know, are pretty recent things. I mean, you can find them there throughout the history of um just what are the four E's for those four E's or embodied.

What is it? When have you got a it's it's embodied, enacted um probably environments in there, maybe. I don't know. Actually don't ecology. I don't I actually don't extend it, that's it. Extended, right? Because the idea is that you have prostheses of your mind um acting in the world. Um so kind of like the extended phenotype kind of view. I got it. Embodied, embedded, and active. Embedded. And extended. Extended. There you go. I'm not surprised we didn't remember. It's not a super um. Well, and it's you know, yeah to be fair, you know, ac academia loves acronyms. And so finding four E's in a row is a is a real is a real coup. It's an egregious yeah, no, sorry. That said, it is, I mean, every E there matters, right?

And for an evolutionary psychologist, we can understand every single one of those, right? Um And so anyway, the the point is when I said there's sort of flavors or vibes of different approaches to the mind, I think that that that's true. And then and the way that we see the mind kind of highlights or plays down different kinds of aspects that change over time and across cultures. And you know, they're not necessarily wrong. I mean, even somebody like Freud, if you go back and read Freud's stuff, of course he he got some stuff wrong, but actually it's you know, his his books are like packed with insights um about how the mind works. And yeah, that you know, there's he had a particular model. We were just talking um, you know, before we started recording about id and ego and all

these things, which are terms that we don't use anymore, but they were referring to something that's intelligible. And um anyway, so that's I think that's the interesting space when we think about linguistic and cultural differences involved in the mind. And the argument that I would make is just that we should um when there are these different, you know, slightly different varieties or flavors of mental state terms, um, ways of carving up the space of the mind and the body um around the world and and they're ones that have been around for a long time, they probably contain some useful insights about the mind that we should pay attention to. Yeah. No, it's it's interesting. Even there, so I I certainly agree that in Western culture, this view of the autonomous, uh

rational agent that's disconnected from uh his surroundings, and it's usually a he uh and and and you know exerting these top-down principles to uh manipulate the the environment and it's all conscious uh and calculated. It's certainly, you know, a rough sketch of a potential cultural difference you might see between the West the West and the rest. Um but even there, like I still get the other view. I still get the idea of just feeling things out and like using your intuition and feeling the vibes and like feeling it in your body. Like if you think about one of the most uh culturally impactful uh cinematic universe is Star Wars. So my daughter is obsessed with Star Wars, so I've been watching a lot of it, so that's on

my on my mind. The force is very much the opposite of like a conscious, rational manipulation of the world. It's just feeling it out, feeling your connection to to the rest of the world. You know, Yoda is always delivering these lines about you're you're overthinking it, Luke. You know, you gotta you there is no there is no try. You either do it or you don't. and uh that to me is uh uh very reminiscent of the types of things you're talking about. You you sort of learn to to just feel it as opposed to think it. Um and I think a lot of people understand that on a gut level. Certainly our culture might be you know biased toward one end of the continuum, but I think the flavors, you could think about it to use your your analogy of flavors, you know, we all

have tongues with certain uh taste buds, And we have, you know, the conscious rationality taste bud, but we also have the embodied vibes based taste bud. And uh, you know, maybe the Western palette, you know, is more geared toward, you know, the rational conscious taste bud, but we still have that other taste bud. We still know what it is. Uh and it might be that other cultures, their their palette is is more geared toward uh the the embodied taste bud. So even there I think there's there's more universality than it might seem on on its face. Yeah. I I I agree with that. I mean that that is that is right. And that's also a classic kind of insight for um when you learn a term that is present in another language and not your own.

I mean, the classic one is when we all learn what Schadenfreude is and we hear that term that we didn't know when we were kids, and um when we speak English, and it makes perfect sense because we felt it or or or seen someone else feel it. Um and so yeah, I think that all of the the palette of or the um the flavor profile is available to everyone. Um for for for for science and for other kinds of things, you know, the question is um you know what are the what are the consequences of the variations that are there? And so one of the things that I think for sciences, you know, we may not, because of the fish and water issue of the kinds of cultural models that we've been brought up in, you know, when we're trying to create a universal sort of

theory of human cognition, we may not notice that our theories are kind of heavy in certain areas or biased towards certain areas and kind of light on other areas. so with the kind of um, you know, in in in the West, also when we talk about these processes of rationality and deliberation, right, these are not just parts of models of the mind. Again, that everyone can understand. There's no there's no question there, but they're not just parts of models of the mind. They actually end up having, well, I would argue, they end up having moral and ethical force. They become values. So when you look at the way that Western education is targeted, it's very much targeted towards training our logical facilities and things like that.

I mean, and we know that that doesn't have to be the way it is. You know, I mean, your example of Star Wars, um, you know, or other kinds of cases where um, and I think these are actually pretty common around the world, where the pinnacle of wisdom would be acting without um conscious deliberation, essentially. Um that you know, and it corresponds to this Bourdieu notion of habitus, right? Um, I I've so the book that I was mentioning to you guys, it's called Southern Epistemologies that's just coming out. Um it looks it's a collection of essays um On how people in the Andes and Amazon think about knowledge. And so I, as part of that, I've been taking a deep dive into the Quechua language, which I

don't speak. But it has this very the way that it carves up knowledge, you know, the primary knowledge word is called yachai, which my understanding is it is it's embodied knowledge. So it's, you know, when you're walking on the path that you've walked your entire life, your body just sort of takes you along the path. And in this, in this sort of cultural setting, my understanding is, you know, the pinnacle of being an intelligent, rational, in some ways actor in the world, a wise actor is to, you know, basically have all of the important knowledge subsumed into a sort of subcognitive, if you will, space where you just act. Um, and so it's it's interesting, right? Because that is a cultural model of like it's there's a kind of virtue um ideology in

there about what um being a truly knowing being is that's a little different than kind of maybe if you grew up in 19th century England or Germany, where it would be the ability to manipulate propositions in some way to generate um certain inferences or something like that using a logical calculus, which is also valid, but just different. Yeah, I love that. And I love that, you know, if you're watching like kids on YouTube or like I'm watching old Michael Jordan clips or um a musician or an athlete just do something really well and just sort of reveling in, man, this is just, it's, it's art, you know, it's just this, you're somebody has just nailed how to do this thing so beautifully. Um, again, I think it goes back to David's point, which is we can all understand it, but it

goes back to your point too, Clark, that you don't value it, uh, or maybe it just gets compartmentalized to sort of like it's what the kids are doing on the playground, or it's the status scheme of like, yeah, I gotta learn logic, but I really want to be like the best, basketball player I can be. Um I certainly I think that model of the mind is more prevalent in the arts um than and perhaps in athletics um than it is in say the sciences or the hu or the humanities um or or even you know the business world. Um because there you that that's what you you need to do to be successful in your career is to cultivate that kind of embedded, embodied knowledge of your craft. But with a with a top-down uh uh discipline such as ours, that kind

of knowledge and wisdom is is less desired because I can't prove it to you. I can't set it down on paper and and walk you through the propositional logic and have you say, ah, I get it. Whereas, you know, with art, the proof is in the pudding, it's in the painting, it's in the the feat uh of athleticism. But with uh a scientific discipline, um, we all need to agree on on what is correct. Um yeah, I don't know. Uh that's interesting, yeah. Clark. So I'm gonna say something sorry, Clark, you're gonna say something, yeah. No, I I think I think that's really insightful. I I think um yeah, it it you know, we maybe you know, those of us who are who are doing evolutionary psychology, you know, maybe we don't think

enough about the fact that it's a it's essentially a verbal format that this that science that we do is is written and with pictures, um visual and verbal. And that um what part of part of what we're doing is rhetoric and persuasion. You know, and you have people like um Hugo Mercier and others, you know, who have argued that um, you know, these kinds of things are about changing other people's minds and so on. Um And, you know, it makes sense that we focus on these skills of rhetoric and debate and logic. It also makes me at least worry, right? Because if you believe somebody like like Mercier or others, you know, the target of those of those things is not necessarily the truth. And so we we do have to worry about that a little bit.

Yeah. Absolutely. It it definitely worries me as well. I mean, it on the one hand, it is somewhat comforting in that the collective emergent result of all this arguing and debate among a scientific institution that has good incentives should, in theory, produce, you know, true beliefs or truer beliefs over time. Right? It has a kind of self corrective mechanism. But when you zoom in on any individual part of that apparatus, any individual scientists, they are very unlikely to have the whole truth inside of their head. And since I am an individual person, you know, within that apparatus, that's very worrying because I want to have the whole truth. I want to have the answers. And what Mercier and others' research has told me is that that is impossible and I need to

give up give up hope. And that's worrying. Yeah. I wanna I want to pick your brain on another uh idea that came to me about spirituality and religiosity and supernatural concepts and the connection between this embodied, embedded uh model of the mind and spiritual and supernatural belief. Because it seems like there is a connection there. So when you know the force is a supernatural force in Star Wars. Like it's it's literally magic. You know, you're you're you have telekinesis, you're picking up objects with your mind. Uh and I and I find that when people who are who lean more on this flavor profile of intuitive, uh embedded, uh embodied knowledge, they tend to be more spiritual, or at least

talk in more spiritual terms. And it it it may be that when something is opaque to us or unconscious, that we sort of fill in the gaps of our ignorance with supernatural concepts. and so that might be why you see a greater prevalence of of spiritual beliefs in cultures with a more uh intuitive embodied model of the mind. Because um because so much of the magic is coming from forces unknown. Uh and it just becomes very easy to just uh you know put those forces unknown into a supernatural bucket. It's the ancestors, it's a spirit, it's the force, it's whatever. I mean, do you buy that way of thinking? Um yeah, I think that yeah, that that that seems right. I mean I've never been a huge fan of the argument,

the sort of God of the gaps type of argument. Um that that the that the function of sort of spirituality is to maybe comfort us or explain things that we don't know. But I don't I don't take you as saying that exactly. But I do, but I do think, you know, that there's this sense. So if you, if you, if you are someone who values and pays attention to your intuitions and the embodied feelings that you have as you're going through the world, and you try to develop a sense of um, you know, intuitive connection with your physical and sensory presence in the world, there's going to be stuff that pops out at you where it's it's gonna get your attention. Yeah. And um, and so I think that's one component of it, right?

Because it, you know, if you look at I don't know, I feel like this in Los Angeles. I mean, I try to cultivate that side of myself. Um, but I also, you know, I go on hikes all the time. And I mean, people are out there walking, like literally reading a cell phone on a on a trail. Um yeah. And they're not in touch with as far as I can tell, they're they're you know they're they're micro learning, Clark. They're micro learning. Yeah, they're they're they're they're definitely they're choosing to devote their attention to something, but they but there has to be a a cost that they're not attending to what's going on around them. Right. And so um anyway that that's the kind of thing where I would say that you know that's gonna

pull you away from some of these ineffable experiences that um lead to a sense of spiritual connectedness to the world and that there's stuff out there um that you know that beyond you that that that you can sense occasionally in the periphery or maybe even directly. Um, those all come connected with this kind of ya-chai embodied knowledge view. And I, you know, I also think that, you know, when you when we think about um that the the hyper rationalists of Europe, you know, Immanuel Kant and people like this, I mean, you know, some some of them were um believed in God and some of them were atheists, but there's no question that the sort of move towards excessive sort of rationality was part of

know what Max Weber has called disenchantment, where um people argued their way out of God uh using logic. Um I mean there's some interesting cases to the contrary, like Descartes and others who tried to use um logic and introspection to prove that God exists. Um I never was persuaded by the argument that there has to be a perfect being because I've never experienced one through my senses. And so the only way that I could know this is if they existed and planted the idea in my mind. That seems like a weird kind of proof. But the point is, like when you get into that space of logic and rationality, it does lead you away from um, It can lead you away from a spiritual attitude about the world. So I think that's another component of it.

That's cool. Yeah. It reminds me there's uh Conrad Lorenz, uh, it's called the Russian manuscript. Apparently, it was like post posthumous. Um, so Konrad Lorenz was in a Russian gulag during World War II because he fought for the Nazis. And um uh he wrote this with like bird beaks on like burlap sacks or whatever, but it was all these notes, and it came out in the 70s, like somebody found it in like some attic in the 70s. But what it's really amazing, like I think every evolutionary psychologist should read this um uh book, the uh Russian manuscript by Conrad Lorenz, but it basically talks about how Conrad Lorenz, they were doing the the ethology, and he was talking about the early 20th century fight between the vitalists and the mechanists of animal cognition.

And what he was saying as an ethologist is even though he was on the side of the mechanists and not thinking there was some magical spirit, he was sort of like, the mechanists are all these people in the lab. Um, like I'm glossing over things, but basically it was sort of like there's no beauty or art or nature in the models. It and it reminded me of what you're saying, which is sort of like you, there's sort of, I think there was sort of a historical accident of like, well, if we're gonna be hard-nosed scientists about it, we're gonna study rats in a maze, and we're not gonna think about like nature or cool functions. And that was sort of what Conrad Lorenz was saying, too. And so like I think there was like a false choice between a rich environmental

biological view and sort of but it was like vitalistic versus it was mechanical but it was like concrete and math and uh zeros and ones and like very sterile. Yeah that makes sense. I mean I also think that you know we're seeing in some ways I mean there are these cultural trends about how we think about the world and cognition and our place in the world? And there's a kind of um winding path. Like I mentioned, you know, um the importance of embodiment in in sort of the cognitive sciences, it kind of comes and goes. But um right now, uh, for example, in when we think about um animal rights and ethics, you know, there's this move towards rights of nature kind of perspectives, which view non-human beings as having a moral

status and ethical status, partly due to the fact that they have internal lives and things like that. I mean, that actually fits very well with an evolutionary view. Um, it fits very well with a lot of indigenous perspectives on the relationship between humans and other non-human beings. It doesn't fit very well with the 19th century European view that only humans have rationality. That's what gives us our status as moral beings. You know, that's the source of a lot of of that disjuncture in a lot of ways. And I would say that the sort of um you know there's a parallel when we think about animal behavior where for a long, and I think Lorenz might have been talking about this, you know, for a long time.

Um, it was sort of forbidden to anthropomorphize or what people would call anthropomorphize other species. Um, for understandable reasons, I guess. You could say, well, you know, you don't want to project human specific processes or values onto things that aren't human when they don't share them. But, you know, that extended that that was that went way overboard, right? To the point where, you know, now you have animal behaviorists. I mean, I remember, you know, an article within the last 10 years, you know, that uh that hit like the New York Times that announced that dogs feel pain um because they had managed to put a dog into an fMRI scanner and show that the pain areas in the dog's brain homologously, you know, were activated under conditions of pain in a way the same way that

humans are. I mean, yeah. It is an interesting study, that's for sure. But, you know, in some sense, the pendulum has, you know, swung way too far in our um, you know, attempt to be hyper rationalistic about not attributing things to to to uh other other species. And now you you all probably know there's just really interesting stuff on plant cognition now. Yeah. A whole field of it that's that's pretty that's pretty interesting and very, very scientific. Um, it raises questions like what's going on, do is there consciousness? I mean, who knows? But um there's no question that there's like response to stimuli and um and and and you know, reacting at pretty quick timescales to things that are happening,

touch and all that stuff. Yeah. But and I I don't want to go too far afield of the next topic. I actually wanted this reminded me, hunting magic. Can you talk a little bit about hunting magic? Because I think this is a great example of the embodied thing concretely. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I actually have a um I finally um have a have a have a piece coming out on this in the in the edited volume. And um for those of for those audience members who speak Spanish, there already is a volume that came out in Spanish a couple years ago on Andean and Amazonian epistemologies, and a version of this chapter is in there in Spanish. But there's an English language one coming out in June. And you know, I in this in this chapter, I talk about a little bit of what I have learned

in Schwar communities about some of these hunting practices that include the singing of certain kinds of songs that are involved in hunting. And in the chapter, I sort of talk about, based on some interviews that I've done, The range of possibilities for of like how people think about those songs, um, how they think that they might work, whether or not they think that they might work. And um, so this takes place before the hunt? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so like immediately before or like the the previous year. Yeah, in the morning. People get up like ridiculously early, basically while it's still dark, go out hunt and go out, and they sing these songs, um, or they used to anyway, um, on the way, on the way out to the hunt.

And it's kind of a private event that you're singing to yourself and singing to the forest and singing to these animals. And the lyrics of the songs um, you know, often are things like requests or commands um to the animals, or just statements like today, I'm gonna kill this kind of animal, um, repeated with rhythm and and and music um melody. And so um, you know, one possibility that I discuss is, you know, that these could be kind of technologies of the self where they're basically getting you into getting the hunter into a particular kind of mental state and focus that may actually have some effects. And there there is some literature on this, like flow states and things like this in sports

and the arts. Um, where like a warm-up activity. Yes, you know, like actors and athletes often have warm-up activities to sort of get themselves in the right mental state. Yes, exactly. Yeah, yeah. Um, yes, and and and and and focusing the mind on certain kinds of outcomes by visualizing them. Um things like that. Um and One thing that I you know, I I I could talk more about this if you have other things that you want to know about it, but but the thing that I do in this paper, so that the the the the chapter um is called The Uncertain Virtues of Incomplete Knowledge. And it's talking about how you know this this phenomenon where most of the things that we do, where we deploy some kind of technology, nobody knows everything about how

the technology works. And um, and that's that's an interesting thing, right? It's ordinary actually. Um, most of the things that we do are in a state of incomplete knowledge. Um, and there's great work in cognitive science on this, people like Frank Kyle and others who've shown that nobody knows how a toilet works. I mean, the plumber does, right? But the plumber doesn't know how a helicopter works, right? Like that's right. Yeah. Um, and we don't, you know, people can't even really like reproduce a proper bicycle from memory because we don't have an accurate model of of what's going on. And of course, you'd use a cell phone, you have no idea how it works, but it does. And so, you know, you learn these procedures and you do them.

And then the the idea is that if they're if the conditions of efficacy hold, you know, then what you're doing is going to work. And so you you can have limited knowledge. And the the case of Anant, these these particular songs in Schwar, you know, they're they're they've been around for a long time and um they're they're transmitted, you know, um, with great kind of respect um for this tradition. And so, you know, most people now don't really know how to use them, or um, but there's this view that you know these are kind of ancestral technologies that helped and did things, and there's a trust in that. Um and then and so in the chapter, what I compare it to is our use of statistics and science, you know, and this is kind of uh, you know, I I do a callback to my my um my

postdoc that I did with Gerard Gigerenzer and Peter Todd at the MPI in Berlin, where you know, one of Gigerenzer's ideas was that we use statistical rituals in psychology and other fields, especially null null hypothesis significance testing, where, you know, people just you can plug something into an algorithm and you get some numbers out, and then people interpret those in a certain way, which is often wrong. And so, you know, there's two levels of kind of incomplete knowledge there. Sometimes people don't know, often people don't know the conditions of efficacy for the statistics to give the right answer. Right. And so we are trained that there have to be normal distributions and all these things, but

often people ignore those. And there's other more technical stuff that people don't run the checks to make sure that the model is appropriate for that what they're doing. And then there's a second level, which is you know, they misunderstand what the p-value means. So in this piece, I'm kind of bringing those two together to say, isn't this an interesting comparison? Because usually when we think about something like uh indigenous hunting technology, you know, it's often viewed by anthropologists as superstition or um, you know, something that can't possibly have any effects in the world that matter. Um, but when you look at people's, what I'm focusing on is sort of people's attitudes towards them, which are very reminiscent of the attitudes that we have in science, where

you trust some ancestors who were rigorous and made sure that this procedure works. And they tell us you can only do it under these circumstances. And if you do it this way, it'll work. And we trust that and we do it. And if everything is working right, I mean, if we're in some sort of equilibrium condition or where the efficacy conditions still hold, then we trust that the effects that we want are going to happen. And so that's that's kind of where I've been thinking in that space that you know science has more of that kind of stuff than we than we like to think. Um and it may make use and it may it makes use of social processes. I mean, many philosophers of science have talked about these social processes in science,

that trust is critical, nobody can know everything, there's a cognitive division of labor. Um and um all those things are the all those things are true. Um and you know there's a double-edgedness to them. I'm I'm just imagining like um a group of scientists joining hands and dancing around uh a fire pit uh singing P is less than 0.05. Right. Is the point in in Clark is the point like I can imagine there's like a couple points. Like, is it is it to sort of humble scientific um chauvinism? Or like what what's the do or do you have a couple like what's the point, you know? Uh I think I think I think that's yes. I mean what yes, I mean what I have in mind is the um importance of reflecting on what it is that we that we don't know.

So, yeah, something like humility. Um but um it's also intended, you know, the sort of ethnographic part is intended to be an intervention in this space in anthropology where Often people think when they think about something like a ritual, um that that that that the the the sort of view is well, this is a completely mindless repetition of certain kinds of procedures without any reflection on what they are or why they work. And my point is is you know, in in Schwar communities, in any other community where there's ritual, I mean, when you go into church as a Catholic and get communion as a kid, you're like, what the hell is this? Yeah. Right. And you're and you know, and I mean, everyone is essentially, right?

Um and so that process of reflection is is ordinary, and sort of knowing that you don't know is ordinary. Um and so we we we should think about these practices that have happened historically in that way and then comparing it with what's going on in science is kind of interesting. And you know, right now I'm on a little bit of a journey of you know worrying about some of the features of science um that we don't attend to enough that could lead to to error. And so it's part of that as well. I mean, I talking back to scientists and saying, you know, don't be so confident that I think, for example, that the the the problem of overdoing statistics in um behavioral science is a is a real is a real problem.

I mean you go through these papers that are just completely full of statistical models, and at the end it can be like, okay, but is that really true what you're claiming on the basis of all these graphs? Um and we tend to be bewildered by these things. I mean, they're they have a beguiling effect almost like magic. Do you think it's almost like intimidation? I mean, is that too too uh blunt? But is it sort of like people just get intimidated by it? And they're like, Well, this seems sciencey. Yeah. I definitely think there's a there's a there's a kind yeah, there's a rhetorical persuasive effect of like um the and and and if you question the conclusions then one kind of way of defending yourself say, okay, so show me where

this model is wrong or something like that. It's like different. You know, we should we you know we should we should be able to do that, but there are plenty of times I feel like where I read a paper and I'm like, okay, yeah, but you know we s there's just fancier and fancier versions of doing things like mistaking correlation for causation. I mean it's all over the place in behavioral science. Yeah. Um this whole conversation is making me realize that a lot of our supernatural concepts are correct in a way. So if you think about it, if you if you have a kind of embodied and active intelligence where I'm say uh inferring your mental states, your beliefs and desires and intentions. And I have no idea how I do that because it's unconscious and it's just happening in an

intuitive way, that is basically telepathy. I mean, or or at least the it's telepathy, but the causal process that allows allows it to emerge is just opaque to me, right? Yep. If I'm making an unconscious inference about what's going to happen next or tomorrow, and it does happen, that is a kind of precognition if I don't know the causal process that happens in between the inference and the event, right? Mm-hmm. Um, similarly, if I have a hunting technology that has uh evolved culturally uh down the generations and has been proven effective because of that cultural evolutionary process, and it helps me uh hunt um uh an animal. Um that literally is my ancestors helping me, right? It is, you know, you could think of it as the the ghost of my ancestors helping me uh uh

catch this animal. Uh and and there's so so there is a a a way in which all of these concepts are correct, um if if certain parts of the causal process are up are opaque to you. And it may be that a lot of supernatural concepts are just shorthand. You know, that I'm just describing the way in which the ancestors have helped me. I'm describing the way in which uh i it seems to me that I can just read your thoughts or I can predict what's going to happen. Um these are kinds of magical things, literally. If you don't know how it works, it's just magic. Um I don't know. Uh uh uh uh do you do you buy that that way of thinking that this um the intuitiveness of a lot of these concepts just comes from the fact that the causal process is opaque and once

you snip out the middle of the the causal sequence, it's indistinguishable from magic. Yes, definitely that I I definitely think there's something there. And I also agree with what you're saying about um the that so I mean I, you know, I I I was I was giving the I mentioned like Freud and the ego and the id and the you know there's these kinds of ways he had of dividing up the mind. And then there's this question of don't do those refer to anything at all? Um and one view would be no, those are just completely um hallucinated or whatever. But there's an analogy to what you're talking about, David, where you know there may be words for things, intuition, um, insights and things like this, which do refer to

something real. Um, and but we don't have a grasp of them in psychology enough to be able to they have a flavor of they're not real or they're you know they're imagined, but um because maybe they're folk terms, um maybe you know we don't have a proper neural model of how it would work or something like that. Um but yeah, I think there's I think there's a lot of uh there can be a lot of things like that. Um I mean, even in LA there's a lot of um, you know, I'm I'm I'm in social networks that are, you know, sort of quasi-spiritual into astrology and stuff. And there are these people uh in LA, these intuitives. And basically what it is is you go, you go up to them and they just kinda listen to you and observe you and are just extremely attentive to every detail about you.

And they just tell you stuff about yourself that might not have been apparent to you. Right? Your your your desires, your your character traits, your personality, what you want in life. And it seems to me that, you know, these people are just really good uh they're really good at social cognition. They're just really good at picking up on you know subtle cues of body language and dress and posture, and they just give you a readout of their intuitions about you. And t to a lot of people that can be really powerful, uh and and give them insights that they wouldn't have otherwise had. And because they don't know how it's happening, it feels like magic. It feels like a supernatural thing. It's just a it's just a a person who's just really socially intelligent.

Uh and and and merely just being around someone who's socially intelligent can feel like magic. It can feel like a spiritual experience. Absolutely. Do they self-label as intuitive? I believe I believe they do, yeah. Okay. So Sherlock Holmes, yeah. Um I mean some of them uh are spiritualists or whatever, they're different words for it, but that's basically, you know, a lot of what it is. And I I imagine that's pretty common to all, you know, even tarot card readers or palm readers. I imagine a big part of what they're doing is just reading the body language and the and the dress and the mannerisms of the person and just weaving it into their uh their narratives about what the cards reveal or what the the lines on their palm reveal.

Um I I would imagine that's a big part of how they pull off the the magic trick. Yeah. Yeah. I mean so an another kind of domain that I've been thinking about a lot is um so I I have this this this paper that came out pretty recently with um Alejandro Erut and Chris Smith Incognition called Lying About the Future. And it's it's it's um based on on vignette style interviews and stuff that we've done in Schwar communities um that originally were about trying to nail down what people think is a lie or put what people would consider to be a lie. Um and there's an interesting phenomenon in that paper. There's also some cross-cultural data that Schwar the Schwar people that we interviewed, there are many kinds of predictions about the future that they would consider to be a lie

if the prediction doesn't come true. And ones that I would consider kind of strange from my cultural background. And, you know, things like doctors making a prognosis that turns out to be wrong. And, you know, that there's other examples too. And so in the paper, we kind of try to say, is it about the social identity of the person, that they're not trustworthy, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And in the end, it seems to be that, you know, making a confident statement about the future um, when you don't know it's true, is considered a lie, which differs from commitments about the future where it's under your control. So people do there do seem to agree. If I promise that I'm gonna be on the Zoom call um at 9 a.m., but something happens to me

and my, you know, the power goes out at my house or something, I didn't lie, right? Um, but there are things where I say, oh, this is going to happen tomorrow. And if it doesn't, that's considered a lie. I think there can be, I mean, that that's not necessarily so culturally strange, but but the reason I'm mentioning it is because there are really interesting views in this community about like knowing the future. And there are kind of um ideas that the future can be known through things like um using ayahuasca, but also dreams that dreams foretell the future. You know, and the reason the one reason I'm mentioning it is because you're talking about, you know, spirituality and and you know, could there be things, magical things that are

real or whatever, that we don't quite understand? And so thinking about this started to get me thinking about well, you know, can you know something through a dream? I think the, I mean, I think the conventional answer would be no. But the more I started to think about that, the more I realize actually, there's plenty of cases where I have a dream and I wake up in the morning and I'm like, wait a second. And I realize something. I mean, do you know that you know from the dream? You know, think things like where a dream will tell you something about how you feel about another person, right? Yeah. And you wake up and you're like, I didn't realize that's how I saw that person, that they're a threat to me or whatever it might be, right?

Yeah. And um so I do I do I know for sure that you can know things through dreams? I don't know, but I do think it's something that's been dismissed um, you know, quite a bit because you know dream interpretation is considered kind of a A lot of artists and musicians have personal accounts of they dream up a melody in their sleep and it becomes like their hit song. Like Paul McCartney famously, I believe, dreamt up the melody of might have been yesterday, I forget. Uh one of his like most famous songs just came to him in a dream. He just woke up and it was in his head and he just wrote it down. Um but a lot of other artists have stories like that where like they have creative insights while they're dreaming.

Um and it could be that there's something about the unconscious churning that happens when you're dreaming, it just it it can sometimes give you insights that you wouldn't have otherwise had when you're awake. I mean, this happens all the time. If I'm you know, sometimes I'll have a realization that happens to me like unconsciously while I'm not thinking about it. Like sometimes thinking about something is a bad way to figure it out, and and the solution will come to you when you're not thinking about it. And it could be that dreaming is a similar kind of process where it's just kind of scanning the space of your cognition for possible solutions in a way that's more distributed and decentralized than conscious thought.

And oftentimes that kind of uh, you know, trawling the space for solutions is a more effective way to arrive at an insight than conscious deliberation. Um absolutely. Yeah. John Cleese has a great short YouTube video about creativity and it or how do you be funny all the time. And it's exactly this point, David, that um it's you have to do a lot of conscious work, but then you have to just sort of shut that off and let entrust the non-conscious walk away from it process happen. But it's effortful to sort of like throw it into the um you kind of you kind of cook it in an oven and you don't know what's going on subconsciously. And I I get this experience, I don't know if you guys get it, even when I'm writing, you

know, like I'll work and work at like, or like how am I going to articulate this thing and then I just can't do it, but then I walk away, but then I'm doing something else. Like I'm going for a walk, and all of a sudden I'm like, oh no, this is the way to do it. So clearly that thing was just sort of going on in a way that quote unquote I wasn't controlling, but I but I did all the effort to sort of load up all the ingredients and then just throw it into the subconscious. Yeah. Right. You know, there's a there's a cool theory of dreaming. Uh I I forgot I'm blanking on the guy who who thought of it. Um, but the idea is that um we're constantly building predictive models of the world around us.

And in the same way that AIs often overfit, they uh they overgeneralize from uh local patterns uh and and make rules that don't apply more broadly, um the human mind can overfit uh based on the data of of a transient experience or a local experience. Um and the idea is in the same way that you often uh AI uh technicians will often uh just feed a bunch of random noise into a predictive model so that it doesn't overfit and overgeneralize from one data set. Uh the idea is that dreaming is the same serves the same function, that it prevents us from overfitting and just by feeding random noise into our predictive models. Uh and that's a big part of the function of dreaming. And that and that goes along with this idea that, yeah, maybe, maybe you can arrive at some

some insights through dreaming and maybe maybe it's not all bullshit. Um, you know, maybe the the part of it that that is giving you real insights is the part of it that lends itself to these cultural belief systems. Yeah. Yeah. And Clark, you mentioned like uh uh drugs or hallucinogens. I mean, uh, this is a weird question, maybe a weird direction, but is there any cognitive science sort of I mean people seem to use that and find it personally meaningful in some contexts, you know, or sort of like insight is gained. And I can imagine sort of a story of it's sort of mixing ontologies that aren't typically mixed or systems that aren't usually talking to each other. Do you have have you thought about that?

I mean you mentioned that a little bit like what what's going on with that? Yeah, I mean I have I I don't have thought about it, but I um and I do know that there is, you know, especially um with um things like ayahuasca, which is a mix of several different plants, it's a kind of tea made of several different plants that has DMT is one of the main ingredients, but there's there's many psychoactive ingredients in there, um and monoamine oxidase inhibitors and many other things. And um so it's a kind of technology that alters your mental states. And um there's been a lot of interest in it for all kinds of reasons. I mean, I I think the number of people who have tried this has gone way, way up in in

places like California and Europe and other places, but also, you know, interest in those things for therapies and other kinds of things. And I do I think that there's some um there's some research on it, but I I also think that I I know that there's a huge problem with using those things. You can't do kind of like blind randomized assignment because people know when they've been given the stuff that is psychoactic. Yeah, you can't be blind. Yeah, you can't be blind. And and so, you know, because there have been attempts to do, you know, these sort of randomized control trials and see what effects they have on various things like definitely things like depression. Um, it's been talked about for breaking out of alcoholism and other kinds of addictions,

but also the cognitive effects. Um so there is research. I'm not, I I don't know. I'm not an expert on it though. Um just it's just an interesting, it just reminded me sort of this this other thing of where it it reminded me of David's point about dreaming, just that you know, there's there's a phenomenon there of people sort of using a technology to ult to just sort of yeah it it's sort of consuming this is a weird thing I'm experiencing and using that as a tool essentially yes putting yourself into a different mental state um and making yourself out of like overly rigid priors that have developed because you know in Bayesian learning sometimes you can get stuck in a rut where if you're if your prior is too

high and you know every piece of evidence you find can confirm the prior and then you get stuck in this rut. Sometimes a dream or a a psychedelic experience can s can shake you out of that rut by giving you some new stimuli that you wouldn't have otherwise experienced. Yeah. You know. It's interesting. Cool. Yeah, don't do drugs. Uh so speaking of spirits spirits and ghosts. For some reason I I love these stories of uh of ghosts killing people. So we we had an episode with Brenda Bowser and she told a story about there was a murder and there was like blood all over the walls and uh the village council came in and they investigated the crime scene and they determined that the murder was caused by a phantasm

or ghost. Um and we and we really uh got into the details of what was going on there and and what kinds of social functions that narrative was serving or whether they they truly believed that it was a ghost or whether they were doing it to sort of stem the cycle of violence that would have resulted if they had pinned it on a particular person. Right. You told a similar story about um I believe two guys they they uh maybe two or three I forget they would they went off to the river or something and then they came back and one of them one of them didn't come back. Could you recount that story? Because it has haunted me all these years. Well yeah it wa it was a case um where someone someone died.

I mean, the body ended up being found in the river. And um it was on a hunting trip. Uh and if yeah, I I believe that there were three people and two two came back. There may have, there may have been more. I wasn't I wasn't there. I don't all I know is, you know, that this event ended up being kind of debated and discussed in a similar kind of way to what you're referring to in the community where Brenda was working, which I believe was Canambo. And so where I was, this was a this was a Chevillar community in the late 90s. And the thing is with these hunting trips, it actually was probably a fishing trip, if I remember right. So the way that the fishing works there is they use this plant poison called

Barbosco, which is a kind of vine. Actually, one of the it contains one of the first things that was extracted from plants in a commercial way to use as a pesticide. Um the the active material basically binds with uh hemoglobin, and so it it suffocates, um, it suffocates you. And um, it's actually also a great technology because you you put it in the river, it's kind of this milky substance, it kills the fish, but it's perfectly safe to eat the fish because the fish have basically been suffocated. Um, but all of the chemicals have bound inside the fish and it it doesn't hurt you. If you drank it yourself, that is a way that you can, you know, poison someone or commit suicide. But in any case, the way that you do it is, you know, one person goes upstream, um,

or one or more people will go upstream with a big basket of this stuff and like pound it with with you know, pound it um To kind of pulp out the this this white stuff into the water. And then people the fish start to float downstream. And so people are positioned at different places along the river to sort of collect the fish as they as they're floating downstream. And so there's this point where people separate and they separated. And when they came back together, the claim was that they just found this guy floating in the river. And so that it had been yeah, a non-human spiritual being that killed this guy. And then yeah, a debate ensued about whether that was not true, and it was an excuse that that wasn't actually a it was actually a murder and so on.

Um and so that you know that is the kind that yeah, That's how that was framed. And I I remember there was a piece of dialogue you recounted that stuck with me in the ensuing debate, where they were debating whether it was a murder or whether it was a spirit. And one of the parties who was there, uh, one of the three guys who came back, I believe he said something like Um, It was a spirit, and if you don't believe me, there's going to be a problem. Was it something like that? Do you remember it? Yes. Yes. That's right. Yeah. That you yes. You remember it better than me now. Um but uh that that's right. Basically they they um in the in the context of the argument or debate, it was like this, you know, this is what happened, case closed.

Um there'll be no more discussion of this. Um so a kind of authoritative Yeah. And in that, David, like to just unpack it, is it that the it's a threat, but because there's ambiguity whether or not the threat's coming from the spirit versus me? Is that the sort of technology or the social strategy there? It was it was um For one of the families or one of the yeah, one of the parties, it was better for them in the social situation to have you know to have that be the the story, basically. And so they're basically saying this is what happened. I think. Yeah. And did they and presumably they had the social and political authority to to make a print like presumably that family would was high status enough and had enough allies and support

that they could say that and and make the threat and have it be heated. Mm-hmm. That's right. Yep. It's fascinating. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I mean it's a it's it's a it's a case of yeah, it's a case of kind of in a s in a in a relatively small community of kind of like, yeah, use of numerical strength or or whatever to to push one's case through. But that, you know, it doesn't mean that the other people, I mean, we know all kinds of cases of this from politics, right? Where um, you know, someone strong says, this is the way it is. Yeah. And I don't want to hear any other discussion of this going forward, right? Doesn't mean that the other parties don't continue to hold the representation that it wasn't that way.

Right. And so, you know, this was a case of a kind of beef that lasted for multiple years and um there there you know it it didn't extinguish the idea that this was a murder, although it did definitely um you know make it so that that had to not really be discussed in in or at least not op out of the open and you know that's right. Yeah. Clark, Clark, there's a I have this reminds me of a question, which is those of us evolutionary behavioral scientists who don't go to the field, um, we have gotten to a tradition where we tell students that in um non-weird cultures, if there's somebody in the community that really is problematic and like really problematic, occasionally they'll there'll be a hunting

accident. Is this tr is this is this a urban legend? Is this true? Uh I I have never actually asked a um uh credible um uh anthro person and I feel like you are uh are one of the best to ask that does does has that actually happened or is this sort of an urban legend that's got spun a little bit well I can't really say beyond my own. I mean, I I have obviously read some ethnography from some other places. Um, but I but I think yeah, yeah, I mean I would say, yeah, I I would say that um yeah, in in in in all kinds of places, rural places, it might be easier to maybe kill somebody or have you disappear. Yeah. Um happens in cities too, though. Yeah. And I mean, it's not necessarily always that it's a kind of community um

punishment of someone. I I think that it probably mostly isn't. It's more like a personal um, this person is inconvenient to me. And so I'm going to get rid of them. And so, I mean, if you're a fan of the true crime podcast genre, um, you can find any number of those things happening in the US, um, you know, now where people like suddenly, you know, this person left left the house and they didn't come back and we don't know what happened to them. So I think, yeah, it's those are the kinds of things in the case that we're talking about here was something like that. There was some there was some kind of well, one interpretation is there's some kind of beef um that was extreme enough that somebody wanted to basically kill another

person. Yeah. And and that's the corollary of the suspects are the people who are in deep r uh engaged relationships with the person. It's likely probabilistically not a stranger. So the initial suspects are right, you know, and it's for this reason where it's the the motivation behind doing it is this person's continually imposing a cost on me and I I need to do something about it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um yeah. And and or you know and some sort of possibly perception or calculation of that, whether that's really true or not. Um, but also, you know, at whatever what they call acts of passion or something like that. You know, who knows? Some of those things may also be that kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah.

So we're covering drugs and murder. We we haven't hit rock and roll yet. Maybe we'll have Greg on. Oh, how's the music? Schwarz music. Schwarz music is great. It's it's um and there's there's a there's a um there's quite a big music scene there, um, which is uh which is which is great. I mean the the sort of um indigenous music scene in South America is burgeoning and really good. Do didn't we? What what kind of music is it? Is it like drumming or well now you know now there's all there's I mean, you know, now there's just all of these like hybrid forms of um so you know um there's a lot of schwar artists, you know, and people who sing in other indigenous languages who are using things like cumbia, technocumbia, regatone, um,

hip-hop, other kinds of formats like that. The traditional schwar instrumentation is is is like drums. They also have a there's a kind of violin type of thing. People play guitars, flutes. Um, but yeah, the the the young kids have been transforming this, you know, as they as as music does everywhere in the world, just taking all the ingredients. And, you know, it's I sometimes um I get I I'm an old man, I get grumpy about how music and film are going. I don't want movies made with AI um or music made with AI, but at the same time, we know that the technologies are becoming available are you know really create this like level leveling of the playing field for people to make music and that's happening in in a lot of

rural communities around the world you just get these you know kids who are just like yeah I'm gonna I got I'm gonna get a keyboard and and then they they do their thing and it's great. Yeah they have an orchestra at their fingertips. Yeah super cool. Yeah music seems to me like one of the outstanding mysteries in the evolutionary social science. Uh and aesthetics in general, I think. Yep. But but music in particular. Um, there are just a lot of really mysterious aspects to it, like how it just sticks in your memory so clearly, and how in particular it sticks in your memory like during your youth. You know, like during my teenage and 20s, like all the songs that I heard at that time are just burned into my memory.

And when I listen to a song now, it just doesn't have the same sticking power, it doesn't have the same intensity the m same emotional intensity as it did. That's right. Um and um we're just awash in music and the and it just has such such a hugely uh powerful emotional effect on us. Um I feel like there there's so many aspects of it that are really mysterious and s and still have yet to be explained. I mean I know Ed Hagen has some ideas about what might be going on about coordination and signaling group cohesion. I don't know if I quite buy that as the whole story. Like it does like I want an explanation of music that explains like why a minor third has a different vibe than a minor fifth and like why the mathematical properties of a melody are

the way they are. Like what what is going on there? I I have no idea. Um We have to have a Greg on, maybe. Yeah, maybe we'll have Greg on and see if he can dispel the mystery. I mean, do you do you view it as as still an outstanding mystery or do you do you find some like a few years? Definitely. I mean, I you know, it's it's it's some it's one of those it's one of those things where I you know, I think calling back to your your conversation that I was listening to with Daniel Nettle, you know, he was making the point, which I agree with that sometimes for for complex phenomena like like that, um you know, there's this tendency to want to s assign someone function um that's maybe overdoing it.

Um, and so I think there's a lot of cases like this with phenomena like music, aesthetics, um, fiction, um, you know, religion, other kinds of things like this, uh, even morality, where um it's a kind of uh, you know, complex, emergent thing that definitely is the result of a lot of functional stuff. but to say that music has a function is or one function um seems to me un unlikely um even even though even though some of you know some of these things that music can do is correct i mean music can coordinate people um music can um change your emotions it can uplift you it can um do all these things but um yeah, it's it's a it's it's it's strange. And and and that the particular the the the the the things that you're alluding to, David,

like melody and um chordal structure and stuff like that, I mean I I agree completely that there's a mystery there and it's you know somewhere in the vein of also the mystery of mathematics, which you know has really intrigued me for a long time that you have this symbolic system um that has aesthetic properties that people find very, very appealing and they discover new forms of mathematics through aesthetics in some way. And they end up corresponding to the world. Absolutely bizarre. How do we explain that? You know, imaginary numbers were forbidden by Pythagoras. And then once they were allowed into mathematics, it turned out that they explained a bunch of natural phenomena through entertaining the square root of a negative number, right?

And so what's going on there? Um it actually reminds me of like it's almost like what we were talking about before is like articulating an intuition. So sort of like respecting the uh the nonlinear thing we were talking about like the mathematics or like the the the supernatural stuff. Like uh because David you were even saying before that um you know in the the the Western canon the the sort of embodied stuff we don't really respect. And I agree with that, especially like at universities and schools, but like when you get to the highest level, like I don't know about you guys, but like when you talk to like the best scientists, a lot of it is like creativity and art. And you're just sort of like, oh, that person is just really good at this thing, and I

don't know how they do it. And they might not even know how they do it. So I think like anybody who's at like a really high level, or when you get to that really high level, um, that that sort of assignment of like this is art or creativity or imagination or aesthetic. Um, like when I for me at least, whenever I hear anybody who's really, really good at what they do, a lot of it isn't explicit. And it I think it just comes back to like it's articulating or it's it's a placeholder for this intuition. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, a lot of it is you you've absorbed a lot of good ideas and you're you're good at distinguishing the good ideas from the bad ideas, and you've just stored them in your unconscious and have made them available whenever they're needed.

And when you talk to like a smart person and they can just pull the the perfect concept at the perfect time and they and they've just uh like that feels like a kind of art form. Yeah. Uh analogous to you know, someone riffing on the guitar. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah, like I don't know how you felt, Clark, but like when I would sit in at the Center for Evolutionary Psychology and listen to like John Orlita, you know, it was sort of as a s young student of theirs, and and David you might have had a similar experience at UCLA where it's sort of it's very much that experience right like where it's sort of oh this is a uh it's it's an apprenticeship in a way yeah yeah and you know I think something to think about for our field is um

You know so a a topic that I I wanted to possibly return to if it's okay, or just to insert as something to, you know, is the importance of diversity of ideas, diversity of people, diversity of ideas um in science, which you know is a contested thing right now. Um but um you know, one of the ways one of the reasons that we can once you become um steeped in a tradition of thinking about the mind and the body, I mean, the the the number of sources that we have to think about these things and the number of concepts that we have to draw on is incredible. I mean, when you think about um all the all the things that we've all the things we've talked been talking about, when you're in evolutionary science, you have you all we've we

also have certain kinds of concepts that are incredibly generative, like mismatch. I mean, I think people can be wrong about mismatch and it's overused perhaps. But that is something that comes out of evolutionary thinking. That is, I mean, once you know what that is, it's incredibly generative, right? And there's and there's different kinds of mismatch, right? I mean, there's um sort of deep time evolutionary mismatch, there's historical mismatch, there's even personal experience mismatch. I mean, I'm not a digital native. I grew up before I didn't have an email account or whatever. And so I have a mismatch in my own life with the way things are right now. What a useful, what a useful concept.

I mean, it comes from dynamical systems and it interfaces with these other areas. Um, and that's just to take one. I mean, there's just so, so, so many. And, you know, when we when um one tradition that I've been looking at quite a bit lately is, you know, the phenomenology tradition, Husserl Heidegger, Merlo-Ponty, people like that, you know, where it, I mean, if you look at that, they have really, really interesting um Views about sort of how we engage with the world at a kind of non representational level through direct interaction with other people. And so there's a bunch of words and concepts from that field that are useful. If we were to expand this out to the rest of the kind of systems in the world that exist

for thinking about minds and bodies and all the other kinds of things we want to talk about, I mean, it can only benefit, it can only benefit evolutionary science. Some of the things may end up being wrong or we may have to modify them in some way. But one of my things right now is to make a pitch that our field, because we are telling the story of all humans, when you actually look at the way the field is composed, it is not being told by all humans or by a representative sample of all humans. And I and um there's various reasons why that might or might not be. I have my own feelings about it, but I I do think that one of the things is that we're not um that there's something about evolutionary science where it is not creating a kind of

welcoming space for a lot of people to come in from other cultural traditions and other kinds of backgrounds to a certain extent. I don't want to go too far in that direction, but I but I think that it will benefit us as a field to think about how do we bring in people from these other traditions? Because when you start to look, I mean, you know, one thing I have to say from working in South American indigenous communities like the idea of evolution is not a problem for most people. In fact, you know, the idea that humans are one species among many and that we're related to everything else through kinship, essentially, is a deeply reverberating idea in indigenous communities. In fact, it's way makes way more sense to people growing up in those

traditions than it does to people raised, for example, in a religious European tradition where humans are special and separate. So there's all kinds of reasons why bringing in people from outside of the traditions that we are normally in is are going to help evolutionary science and give us this sort of broader palette of ideas we can think of. So that you know, when I think about the sort of how much we have internalized and embedded in our own thoughts these ways of thinking that are really generative, I think we can expand it even further. Is the argument that uh evolutionary behavioral sciences is still born out of behavioral sciences, psychology? And it's more maybe cross-cultural, just to sort of be reductive about it, but it's more

cross-cultural than a lot of that stuff. Yes. But we can still do better in the sense of because there's a theory, because we already are coming from things in a very different way, we have a way to look around at even more stuff and say, look, here's the sense in which this is a helpful tool. We can understand why this makes sense. Whereas traditional scientists might just poo poo this idea or think it's unsophisticated, like in the example of magic. Right. You know, where you're just sort of like physicists are like, that's garbage, or like, you know, just to be super um unfair, but like cognitive scientists might be that's just garbage, right? Like it's not real. We don't study that. We're we're we're sophisticated psychologists and we study deduction.

We have this unique thing of we have we have the the secret tool to understand the way in which everything can be science and we're not doing as good of a job, or we could always do a better job of just going out and going to all the places where people have sort of been not taken seriously and take them seriously. Definitely. Um, you know, uh the the other thing that I would say, just to kind of uh make what I'm saying even a little bit more explicit, is I think that that evolutionary science has Heated most evolutionary scientists have read the weird paper, you know, the the idea from Henrik et al. that you know we're our research participants are coming from an unrepresentative sample of humanity.

Like I don't think we've actually fixed that problem, but most evolutionary scientists are aware of it and I think would agree. Um, but that is still seeing that that's that is still making essentially an argument that we need to get data from other places. And I think there's an additional step, which is that the people doing the science have to be um from all from all walks of life. Right. And that um in so you know in in the in the area that I work in morality, it's become increasingly obvious to me, you know, that we have these theories of what morality is or might be that might be a subset of possible theories. And when we de when we develop these kind of methods for testing them, which I've done

myself as well. You know, we develop these vignettes and that have to do with like the importance of intentions and so on. We go out to these other societies, you know, it might be too going too far to say that we're projecting something onto these places, but we're certainly choosing a space in the moral landscape to look at very carefully because the theories that come from Europe, for example, tell us this is the these are the important distinctions to make. And if we had people, you know, um from other traditions to tell us, well, morality is about more than this, or there there might be other kinds of things here. I think we'd make real progress in that area. Yeah. No, for I mean we are making some progress, but I think we'll make it Yeah.

I mean from my point of view, I mean the literature and moral psychology is absolutely saturated with Western philosophy, historical traditions, Kant and the categorical imperative, utilitarianism and deontology, mensrea, and the whole legal system and legal framework for thinking about crime and punishment. Like all these ideas are absolutely, you know, at at the theoretical uh center of our thinking in terms of moral cognition, moral psychology. Um That isn't to say that's bad. I mean, you gotta start somewhere. Right. But this is very different from the way that moral practices uh are conducted in different cultures. And that and the idea that these distinctions and these categories and these concepts are

shaping our theorizing about morality, um, I think i is bound to have a distortive influence on what our our picture of morality is looking like. Yep. Yep. And I think it goes back to, I mean, I think some of the the problems, I I agree with everything that you just said there. I mean, you got to start somewhere. It's not like the work that exists is is is bad necessarily. Um, but it's the kind of like, um, I mean, one as one one problem that that can arise from this is that you, you know, you're looking for the keys under the street light because the light is better there kind of problem. Sure. And then and then the other one I think which comes up with morality is the kind of flavor thing that we're talking about.

Where um, so you know, my view of the problem with the sort of intentions versus outcomes debate, which has really occupied most of the And so what is that, just to familiarize people who don't know what that is? It's it's it's it's the it's you know, there's an idea that I mean you mentioned mensrea. I mean, there's an idea that comes from certain kinds of Western philosophy, deontology, and other kinds of approaches that say it's the intention behind an act or the reason behind an act that makes it morally good or bad. And that is the basis for most, you know, Western law, um, at least criminal law, right? But um the and then there's been a debate, you know, partly because of a paper that I was part of in 2016 in PNAS, where we did a bunch of vignettes

around the world and showed that, you know, there seems to be blaming people for intent versus outcome. If you create scenarios where you can sort of play those off against each other, it's not always the case that intent wins over outcome. Outcome, you know, the the the fact that you cause harm, even if you didn't intend it, can sometimes be very morally blameworthy. And then there's a debate about why that is. I've participated in that debate. I think it's an important one. But what has been missing and is starting to change a little bit in the moral literature is that you know we're people that perspective, which is very much act focused, it's focused on acts. I mean, if you listen to what people say in communities around the world and you look more

at the literature on morality from cultural anthropology, relationships are extremely important. Everything is embedded in within relationships. And the same act matters differently depending on what your relationship is. It's not that that's something that evolutionary psychologists don't know, um, or or cognitive scientists who are who are designing, you know, philosophers who are designing these vignettes. But it hasn't been foregrounded in this literature at all. Right. And, you know, that there's also this huge, you know, if you look at traditions, even Aristotle and others, virtue, um, virtue ethics, right, you know, have to do with um, there's many moralized things that aren't even acts.

you know, that I mean ways of being that are virtuous or vicious, um, that that don't involve causing harm to another person, for example. And ways of thinking. And ways of thinking, yes. We yeah, exactly. Um, those are kind of those are kind of missing. And so, you know, I think we're off to a good start, but I think um, you know, one of the arguments I would make is that if we had brought if we if we if we had brought in some of these perspectives from outside of the kind of theoretical traditions that we've had, we would be making progress faster because there would be people from other traditions saying, wait a second, yeah, okay, of course we care what the intention is, but really it's about who is this and why are they, you know, who is person A and who is person B?

Um and it's funny, I realized that when I, you know, when I was doing those initial studies, that's the number one thing that people would ask you. when you're running these things in the field. They're like, who is this guy? And I'm like, Well, I it's just a guy. It's just a guy. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. Right. And then as psychologists, we're kind of trained. We want to remove everything from the framing that's considered a virtue, right? In running the experiment. It's just a random guy. And they're like, Well, if it's just a random guy, I can't tell you whether it's bad or good. Yeah. People would say that. And I and it's like, oh yeah, duh. Right. I mean, that is a reasonable perspective.

Yeah. Um yeah. No. Uh i it's it's a fascinating response that you know, we come up with these questionnaires in our weird societies and then we bring them to a person uh living in a very different culture and they ask us these these flabbergasting questions like who is this guy? And if I don't know him, then it doesn't matter. Like I don't know. It's it's just such a shocking thing to be confronted with. Yeah. And and such a profound thing, you know. Uh like obviously that should be of even from an evolutionary perspective, this should have occurred to us. That like obviously if the person is a member of your family versus your member of your group or a a friend or an ally or an enemy that like uh or a stranger, that this should be

deeply I mean, it's evolutionarily in terms of the fitness implications of the act incredibly relevant. And this and the fact that this didn't occur to us, you know, in in crafting our theorizing and our questionnaires, uh, you know, tells us that we are missing something. We're missing a per a perspective. Yeah. Um Yeah. I think that's right. And, you know, I mean the one the other the I just one thing that I wanted to to to to circle back to, David, that you said something about legal systems. Yeah. You know, I I I the more that I've done these these studies, you know, I think, you know, and I and I'm working in the in this sort of field of experimental philosophy where you take vignettes and it has this wonderful um feature where you can just vary like a tiny

thing in the vignette and then you're sort of doing a controlled comparison of well if we and you can even do that for like I change the identity of the person it's a brother versus a stranger or whatever. And we are doing some of that. We've been doing that in Geography Philosophy project. But um you know I will say that I've I've also started to really entertain this the possibility that you know our legal systems are basically built for impersonality. yeah, if that's a word, and um impartiality, right? Obviously, they're supposed to be impartial, but also the jury-based legal system in the US and other places is about strangers judging strangers. That's the entire point of it, right? You actually want the people to be strangers who are making the judgment.

And that is, you know, we have this value system where that's supposed to lead to impartiality. Um, and in order to do that, then we have developed this apparatus where evidence has to be presented in a very strange way. You um have to exclude things that you that are obvious about the person that would be relevant to almost anybody. Right. I mean, I understand why that is. We can understand why that is, right? A lawyer can say, Well, we have to exclude this because it's not relevant to this case. This is a bad person, but we're going to leave all of that out because it's not relevant, et etc., etc., etc. Many of these procedures that we have. I I I my sense is that first of all, those are kind of unusual for moral systems,

and and and we definitely don't want to conflate morality and the law as identical, but um, the law is this kind of way of adjudicating moral issues, um, which has this strange, strange property. And so when you when you make vignettes where you say, Oh, it's just a guy and he punched another guy in the face or whatever, you can give that to a bunch of Americans or Europeans or people trained or educated in that system. And they'll say, Okay, I see what you mean. I'm extracting out everything except that the that the act was intentional, and then I'm gonna say that's one point worse on a liker scale than the other one, right? People can do that, but in real life, it's this person perception gestalt, like you have, you know, you have all this information and it and it's part of the

judgment. And um, you know, people that study like legal cognition, I think there's a there's a tendency to say that's irrational or bad to include all that information, but in fact that might be the way it's done, right? So that you'll, you know, and it leads to biases. It leads to like in-group, outgroup biases and things like that, perhaps. But um, it's also the functional way that you know it makes sense to say, I forgive you for this, or no, this is unforgivable. Um, and I think it's I think it's worth thinking about that when we design these studies, because many of them are kind of really based in this legalistic, hyper-rationalistic kind of framework for judging others. And I think that some of the weird findings that we get when we bring some of these

vignettes to other places might come from that, that people are just like struggling with how to figure these things out. Including, you know, one of the biggest things that we see in some of the studies I've done is that the effect sizes of the manipulations are just much smaller in other places than they are. And so the effect size of like intentional versus accidental can be much smaller in other places sometimes than it is when you do it with like a college sample or a prolific sample. And and you know, I think sometimes that's been taken as an actual meaningful data point that these these other participants don't care about intentions as much. But I'm what I'm trying to say is well, you just these manipulations that are supposed to

be highly salient to people who are used to thinking in this vignette-based way, they might work there. But for somebody else who's like, I don't, you're telling me this thing. I have no idea what the background is here. So I'm just gonna say it's a one on a Likert scale, and you just don't get any difference across the conditions. That that's that you know, that's something that can happen. Do you do you think that's from going to the field? I mean, like one of the themes of this podcast is anthropologist keeps us psychologists honest. Like I don't think that was I don't think that was grammatical, but you get the point. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I yeah, I mean the field and maybe just outside of academia, um interacting with people and trying to get a sense of of

of what their cognition is like and what they're and what they're in the in the realm of morality. I mean I don't sorry there's people outside of the the academia. Sorry what? Who are where are these people? Who are these people? Outside the ivory tower. Yeah. You know, I mean we all have access to what's going on in the political world right now. And I mean so uh I you know, I I find it interesting to talk to people who are on different sides of the political spectrum and people who are outside of academia in it, it's you know, to to figure out like what so why there's something that I think is bad morally and somebody else thinks it's good morally. Um, and then you know, why is that? And I think it's actually not so hard to understand once you start looking into it.

Um, but it can be very perplexing to an academic, like, why? You know, just for example, like somebody lies all the time. Why are we tolerating this? And it's like, well, I think there are reasons. I think there can be reasons. And I think it can even be understood that that there are lies, and people are just like, Yeah, that's a lie, but I'm still on the side of this particular agenda. Yeah. I mean, uh, to to bring it back to this social embeddedness that it depends so much on who is lying and why they're lying and what their relationship is to you socially. Um I was just uh reading a really interesting book called Legal Systems, very different from our own, and um there was a chapter on uh Romani uh legal systems and Romani uh

morality. And what's interesting about them the Romani is that um they constantly lie to everyone who is outside of the Romani, such that they often give fake names to people who are interviewing them, researchers even, uh, and and and census takers in the countries they're living in. And because they have this cultural custom where they always lie to anyone who is not one of them, it becomes very hard to even know how many Romani are living in a particular area because people are giving, you know, the same names or they're not revealing any personal information. It makes it very difficult for the census takers. Um, and so uh to them it's like it's totally okay to just lie to anyone and just not give

them any true information if they're not part of your group. And perhaps it's it's born of centuries of of oppression and and mistrust toward outsiders, that if you give outsiders true information, it could be a threat to the group. Uh and there's that's that's the way it is. And for them, like it could be it could be an ethical thing. Like if we tell the truth to someone who's not a part of your group, that could be immoral. Right. Sure. Because you're giving away information that could be a threat uh to members of the group. And so and there it just it's another example of the profound importance of who is the person, what their relationship is to you, what the full context is. It's not just lying bad.

It's what's all this what's all the contextual information uh surrounding that. Um yeah. Super interesting. Yeah. Um I want to get I'm just personally curious. What is your take on the intention outcome debate uh and its universality? Whether whether this distinction between I intentionally wrong someone versus I accidentally wronged someone, uh is that distinction uh un culturally universal or something close to it? If if I could just get a soundbite of what what is your summary, because you you you're an expert in this in this area, and I'm just curious about what you've synthesized uh from from your work on it. Yeah, I would say so um I think that the the distinction between intentional and and you know various forms of

accidental is universal. I think everyone can understand that. Um I think you know how it's used to assign blame is complex and varies across situations within you know groups and and across groups. I mean I I have a I'm I'm a I'm a I'm skeptical of what I've called the cultural main effects model of intentionality. You know, so I have a paper on this with Rebecca Sachs, where we basically are arguing, you know, there are there are lots of differences, but the idea that there's just some dimension where some societies are more intention oriented and others aren't, um, is something to be kind of skeptical of. Um, and and that the methods that we have um can't even really tell you that because there's no principled way to

generate like a range of scenarios that completely flatly surveys the morality space to show that, say, Americans care more about intentions in assigning moral blame than you know, someone in Fiji, for example, where you know there's this claim that intentions matter less. I'm not saying that there's not discourse in Fiji about how you can't know other people's minds and so on. There's this idea of mental opacity, I think, is very real and comes out through ethnographic work. But whether it's easily mapped onto sort of moral judgments about the role of intentions and culpability is harder to say. The other thing I'll mention is I, you know, and I don't want to spoil this too much because I have unpublished data from geography and philosophy, but um, you know,

we so some of the stuff I've been talking about about relationships, we've been starting to manipulate those and see how those affect judgments. But the other kind of category that I think is important to keep in mind is there's a lot of mistakes or accidents that are not good. And we see, you know, and we see those in the news a lot. And there is also, we have evidence from a pretty interesting cross-cultural study that everywhere that we looked, um, people do make fine-grained distinctions between different kinds of accident that are in the law. So the classic one is between recklessness and negligence. And we we use vignettes to show that that's a very fine-grained distinction. And those words don't exist in every language.

But you can create scenarios where an actor does something knowing that harm might happen and they don't care, which is recklessness, right? Or they do something where they they just don't know what might happen, but they do it anyway, which is kind of negligence. I mean, there's those are not the legally technical terms, right? But um, they're you know, recklessness is a little bit worse than negligence in the law, right? Because you know that there might be some bad effects of what you're doing, but you're speeding anyway, or you're driving drunk, or whatever. Um, everywhere that we looked, we found that people make those distinctions, and those are not intentional harm. So e so and the reason that that matters is that if you think so,

there's some kind of views of the sort of um society, you know, that that societies that don't pay attention to intentions are just outcome-oriented and that they're kind of mind-blind in their moral judgment. I mean, these the this study shows that they're not actually, even for cases of accidental harm, you're you're calculating or you can be calculating what the other person knew. And this is a huge domain of morality, I think, is important that overlaps with epistemology. There's virtues and vices associated with knowledge. Yeah. Right. And I mean, um, you know, a theme that you see across cultures is if you're taking action, and you know, the lying about the future thing has something to do with this

too. If you're if you're taking action that has some kind of moral or ethical significance, your state of knowledge matters. And there's many cases where I think it's almost universal. People would say you shouldn't do that if you don't know certain things. Right. And so that so having the relevant knowledge is actually a prerequisite to acting as an ethically virtuous individual, right? I mean, and we would agree, nobody should say agree to do brain surgery unless you you know, unless you know what you're doing. I mean, the ex the the excuse, well, I'm sorry I messed up your frontal lobe. I it was a mistake, you know, doesn't really work well if you're not a trained surgeon, right? Yeah. Yeah.

Don't blow up the building if you don't know if somebody's in it, you know. That's yeah. So and so the and so these so that so that's a long way of saying, yes, I think not only do intentions matter, but that actually people make really fine-grained distinctions about the reasons for action. And we do know that there are domains, and this is also true in Western law, where there are things like strict liability domains where you basically are going to have to pay a penalty regardless of what you did or didn't know. I think those are special cases and they exist in all cultures, but but it makes sense to have those in certain kinds of situations where it's just like a deterrent. It's like basically.

But I think again that, you know, and Rebecca and I argue this in that paper about mind-blind morality, you know, that doesn't mean that people aren't making more fine-grained moral judgments underneath that. They can be like, yes, you have to pay this fine or you have to go to jail for this period of time because you did it. But they they still may be, if they know details of the situation, they still may be like, man, it's really unfortunate that we had to send so and so to jail or it's really unfortunate that he had to pay this money. But that's the way it is because we have that rule and it's there for some kind of reason. So that's how I would sort of see the landscape. Yeah. So it's not this idea that certain cultures, you know, the mental states don't matter in

moral cognition. That's actually couldn't be further from the truth because when you actually look into it, it seems like mental states matter so much that they're, you know, teasing them apart with a scalpel. You know, that they're they're zooming in on these really nuanced distinctions about mental states in terms of their moral evaluations. I wonder if the cultural variation that we do see is a byproduct of variation in trust and who the agent committing the act is. So there's some interesting modeling work by Julian Lapenie, and he argues that these kind of rigid all or nothing moral systems where there are no excuses, you know, your mental states don't matter, that these tend to uh uh evolve uh

naturally in low trust settings, where sometimes the only information you get about another person's mental states depends on testimony. And if you don't trust that testimony, and people are constantly trying to make excuses and wiggle out of paying the price for their transgressions, then you get these kind of rigid rules where there are no excuses. If the outcome is this, then you're punished. when you don't trust the sources of information um that reveal mental states, then you get this kind of uh uh seeming uh ignorant or seeming downplaying of the importance of mental states just because the information about them is less reliable and less trustworthy. It's not that the intentions don't matter or that we're or that they don't factor into

morality, it's that we're actually very sensitive about the reliability of the information sources that are uh telling us about mental states. You know, do you I do. I think I mean it also fits with um the literature on mental opacity, for example, in the Pacific, um, in places like New Guinea and and and Fiji and places like this, you know, it's a kind of um Explicitly held value, or you know, it's something that's taught by parents to kids where they say, Well, you can't really trust you can't really trust what people say. Um and so, you know, just because somebody tells you that this is what they think or know or or do, you know, or why they did something, you can't you can't really trust it, which

is pretty reasonable advice. Um, and and you know, as we know, mental opacity is actually the norm. And we don't you can't actually see into somebody else's mind. So all those kinds of beliefs are sensible. The that it would correlate with trust, yeah, makes sense. I mean, I would want to know, yeah, a little bit more about like why there are some societies that are high trust or low trust. Um, for sure. But um, you know, I think that also in the case of the mental opacity things, you know, with testimony, I mean, there is the the some of the anthropology literature does say that that it's these sort of um values about uh not um that they're there's they're oriented towards testimony cases like you're saying like you

can't trust what people say but you know obviously we have many other ways to make inferences about people's thoughts and so um you know one of the things that would be useful in some of those places would be to have um you know to look at how at people's just person perception whether that makes a difference when they judge you know whether what somebody something somebody did was bad or good or on purpose or not. Um because sometimes you can just tell from other cues besides what somebody's saying. Yeah I like that example David I but also I mean I also think that there's probably lots of things because like for example if you're in a community with people and you're constantly interacting with them like let's say I'm in a hunting relationship with somebody and

somebody doesn't mean to be loud in the forest, but they're scaring all the game away. You know, um, if we're just passing on the street for five seconds in a modern large scale society and they just happen to be loud, and I'm like, well, they didn't mean to be, I'll forgive them. But I'm stuck with this guy. He's loud. And every time I go out with him, he's scaring away all the food for me and my family. Yeah, I don't care if he means it or not. Like I'm I'm dealing with the consequences. I'm stuck with him. So that's like another example where it's just like the the nature of the local ecology is that whether he intends it or not, in one case, I'm minimally affected in the large scale environment.

In the small scale environment, I am just I'm I'm really negatively impacted. And so yeah, I'm not gonna care if he intends it or not, because even if it's unintended, it still sucks for me. Yeah, I mean I think we're face these days. I don't know about about about you all, but like, you know, maybe it's always been this way, but like there's so many changing norms in the world. You know, can you have a FaceTime call, um, you know, with volume loud on the screen next to somebody or whatever? No, your phone, yeah, exactly. Yeah. And um, I you know, I don't know what's going on there, but there's a lot of cases where I'm like making judgments about what other people are doing. And then it, you know, you both have to fold in like the effect that they're having

on you, what they know and intend. And then, you know, we all have some personal sort of set points of like how relativistic are we going to be? Like, I'm just being like, Well, okay, that's that person's um yeah, That's that's how that person grew up, or that's it, and and then so I I let it let it ride or or or whatever. But you know, we're faced with those kinds of nuanced situations all the time. Yeah. One one theme I feel like of this whole conversation as we're sort of wrapping up because we're getting in, is that the theme has been like respect stuff that hasn't been respected um adequately. Um do would you agree with that? That that's sort of maybe a a North Star for the evolutionary behavioral sciences is

to sort of double check that we're respecting um things um adequately Respecting well, like I mean, so an evolutionary psychologist who's like, oh yeah, no, magic, that's dumb, or like free will, that's dumb, or you know, cultural anthropology, that's dumb, or cultural theory, that's dumb. And we're hard-nosed scientists, and so screw them, and we're better because we take a gene's eye view. That's one way to sort of just be like, we feel good about ourselves, but we're insulating ourselves, versus like, you know, yeah, the cultural anthropologists, whether they're spitting at us or or not, we go in and we're like, this is a evolved organism. There's gonna be some sense in which what they're saying is deeply insightful if we'll just

shut up and listen to it. And that's a different way to approach the sociology of science, sort of. Yeah. i think that's right yeah i i definitely think that it's important to take seriously what you know when when when people whether they're other theorists or um other um you know people that we're interacting with as research um collaborators or interlocutors or participants in our studies and when there's things that people take seriously um we should take them seriously as well and and there's various ways you know of of of dealing with that um or theorizing it or thinking about it. Um but so you know, and people kick around this idea of humility, scientific humility. I mean, you know, I I do I do think that that's that's an important um trait,

but it's also kind of um I I I guess I would make I mean, humility in some ways you could say, well, it's just like, I don't know, I don't know, maybe I don't know. And that that's fine. But I think we can go beyond that to be more, I would call for reflexivity. Like, look at what you're doing, look at, you know, um, take seriously different pop different possibilities. I mean, for example, I think a lot of evolutionary science is essentially confirmatory. I mean, people think of an idea and they're like, I'm gonna demonstrate the plausibility of this idea, which I think we can all we can all agree that's a good first step, right? Um, but you gotta go past that at a certain point. And I and when you look at the the amount of stuff that's out there, like genuine

hypothesis testing is actually kind of rare, I think. Um Putting one's own ideas in jeopardy or putting it up against a plausible alternative. So that's the kind of thing where I think respect for other possibilities is something we should have. I mean, I just to take one example, you know, um the the the the ideas um that to being cosmides, you know, my own PhD advisors, you know. in in the adapted mind in 1992, they they they they coined this idea of the standard social science model, which is basically kind of a blank slate view of the mind. And I think that that's an I mean I understand why they did that. And I think that was an important move. I think that it has caused some damage, however, because by being able to put everything

that's an alternative to your theory, whatever it might be as an evolutionary scientist, into that folder, it means that no other kinds of theories are ever given a fair shake. Or it's just very rare for people to give other kinds of theories a fair shake when testing an evolutionary hypothesis. And so I, you know, I think that's something where we could do, we could do better. I also think that the promise of adaptationism hasn't really um been as fulfilled as we might have wanted it to be. Um, you know, that one of the things that I was taught and you were both taught as being part of the community of evolutionary psychologists is that the the standards of evidence for adaptations, you know, should be high.

The bar should be high. Um and when you actually look, I mean, you know, I don't want to harsh on our own field too much, but I mean if you look out there, I feel like the bar is not high in a lot of the studies that are out there. Um, for for, you know, really confirming that we've discovered an a biologically evolved adaptation in the mind. Um, there's not as many cases that seem satisfying as you might think. And there's a lot of cases where people say that they've discovered an adaptation, but the evidence that they have is is pretty thin. So I mean that would be another case where I think whatever the word is, humility, respect for other alternatives, but also just active reflexivity of trying to do better, I think would help us a lot.

Um yeah, cool. Yeah, there's a Toms of evolutionary psychology, you know. Yeah. Tom Scott Phillips has a paper about um I think it won the um uh Don Simons Award was about um arguing that something wasn't adaptation that people had been talking about was and he sort of brought up this idea that adaptation is an onerous concept as George Williams put it that right we should reserve it. Um Yeah. I mean, I I do want to appreciate, and you know, David and I do this, and Clark, you do too, that like you have to speculate about adaptations to look for evidence to test whether there is one. Um, but that's a separate enterprise than assuming a way that it is an adaptation and not being rigorous even down the road.

That those are two different things, you know, speculating or proposing one versus testing it or assuming it. These are different phases of science. And I think we kind of smush them together. Yeah. That's right. And you know, there's a bunch of kinds of things that we have. I mean, the you know, two of the major kinds of evidence that that that you see in evolutionary science papers are, you know, correlations. So something, how you answer on some scale is correlated with how you behave in some other context. Because adaptation is often the explanation that's given, which could be, but right, I mean, there's all kinds of reasons that you need to push harder than that. And you know, the other the other kind of thing is kind of universal patterns, um, which

are of course really useful to know when it, but I mean, if some if if you know 80% of people answer a question the same way around the world, you know, it's a long way from that to adaptation. Um obviously you need to have it coupled with a good theory and all that stuff, but um, and that matters. But um, the standards of evidence also, you know, often there's a big gap between um the evidence and the claim that there's an adaptation underlying the universality. And I just say that because I think, you know, this is something that we, you know, this is this is the this is the the kind of gold standard of our field. Like you're mentioning George Williams, right? I mean, to discover a correlation is great.

That could be a fact. That how you answer on a scale is correlated with how close you stand to people in public or something like that. But to go that, you know, to say that there's an evolved adaptation that's responsible for it in a particular mechanistic way is a whole other layer that needs that often we don't go far enough to showing that or to ruling out other alternatives. Yeah, agreed. Yeah. Agreed indeed. All right. Well, we uh uh anything we should ask you, Clark, as we wind down here. Um no, I mean I think did you guys have any other topics you wanted to cover? Probably probably a lot, including how does a double jawed fish uh um chew its food, but maybe that is where it's I would love to have a whole episode about cichlids and their

double jaws. Uh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Fish are fish are weird. Fish are cool. They are. Well, Clark, but uh anyway, yeah. So yeah, we'll definitely have you back on. But I really want to uh say thank you for um for being on, but also being uh the you know, being in this field. There there are so many people that I talk to who outside of evolutionary psychology are like, oh, I hate evolutionary psychologists, except for Clark Barrett. Uh and he's okay. Um, and actually, I mean, I think that's gotten less and less, but in part because I've also heard many evolutionary scientists as I've grown up in this field also being like, I'm gonna do the Clark way and just be nice. Like you win more flies with honey.

Um, and so I think you've you've sort of made uh the evolutionary social sciences um a kinder, um, more um uh welcoming place. Um, and I think that that, as you say, only helps in the sense of uh getting more people doing it because ultimately that's the point, right? Is like we as we as David and I have said, and that we everyone has said, the goal of all this is to make evolutionary psychology disappear because it's just part of the water that all the scientific fish to bring it back to fish swim in. And and we can do that by just you know being nice about it. No, I appreciate that. Thank you. I mean I I think that you know also um a another way to think about that, in addition to just being nice, which I think is a virtue, um, is that

you know, a lot of things that evolutionary psychologists think of as sort of zero sum games or trade-offs really are not. Um, and so, you know, as I said, this kind of this this that this kind of conflict that's happened between evolutionary science and you know, other branches of science, like certain kinds of anthropology and so on. Um, sometimes both sides of that see it as a kind that there's a conflict there but um my experience is that that's not true or it doesn't need to be true uh and um you can have an evolutionary science that takes cultural phenomena and and human diversity incredibly seriously And everyone kind of should agree that it should, in order to be a proper revolutionary

science. And so there's no, there's no loss to us from doing that. There's only there's only gain. And I I, you know, I do feel from you know having been involved with HBS and other kinds of things in our community, I do notice that sometimes there are people who feel not welcome in our community for various reasons because of the theoretical Persuasion that they have, or or whatever it might be. You know, not all of that is our fault, but it's worth reflecting on what parts of it, you know, what what way in what ways can we make evolutionary science a more welcoming uh community? Including, you know, for people who might not be sure or not very know very much about evolutionary theory, but they are interested in human behavior.

Um, and they and they might bring a lot to the table. Um, I think there are things that we can do to make people feel welcome who have just a curiosity about these things. And you know, so part of that involves being nice, and part of that also involves, as you said before, kind of respect for um for people and and why, you know, why that we are we all have reasons for getting involved in academia. We all want to know something about ourselves or the mind or the world or whatever. And I think if we expand the tent of evolutionary psychology, we can bring in a lot of people who are fascinated by all the things that we're talking about. Right. To view the modus operandi of our discipline not as a a conquering mindset where we're

we're right and they're wrong and we're gonna conquer them and and bend them to our will, but more of an absorbing mindset where, you know, we're taking the insights that they have and absorbing it and into our framework uh and and welcoming people. Um I think is a better way to think of it. Yeah. And I think being nice, like I want to really be clear, like nice is not like wishy-washy, like, oh, there's some crappy theory, and we're like, well, maybe that's right too. It's it's actually the opposite of that, which is sort of to say that crappy theory, here's the smart translation of that. So it's actually more rigorous to absorb than to just sort of do the mediocre thing of like, well, that's a crap theory.

I'm gonna ignore it. You're like, okay, what's what is the sense that that makes? Why would a why how is it right? Is a hard, harder question than saying it's not right, Right. That's a different, and that's that's the argument I think. Yeah. Yeah. No, there's this idea of you know steel manning, which is the opposite of straw manning, where like making the best possible case for the for the view that you disagree with. And, you know, bringing it back to the standard social science model, um, I you know it was a helpful distinction at the time. Um, but you know, there could have been a more steel manned position of what the standard social science model is. Uh and I think we should constantly be stri striving to frame alternative theories,

alternative models uh in in in the best possible light, and and you know, find out you know what what insight there is there. Yeah. Or at least making it um as as rigorous as possible to combat the ever-tempting uh presence of straw manning in our in our thinking. You know? So yeah, I agree with that. And I think, you know, it's yeah, that that distinction that was made, you know, uh as you said, might have been useful at the time. I think it I think you know there's also a kind of r residual feeling of combativeness in evolutionary psychology because when it originated it was, you know, people felt it was combated. Yes. And and and and you know, but you know, I think eventually, whether now is the time, but I

think now is the time, we um it will benefit us and everyone else to move past that kind of mindset and um also to realize that um, you know, if people come to the table with an idea or a phenomenon or um a theory or whatever, if it's not evolutionary um, quote unquote, uh in the sense that we would see it that way right off the bat, um, that's not a reason to dismiss it. That's not a reason to um, you know, it it should be allowed into the into the discussion. And um and if possible, translated into our way of thinking, because a lot of non-evolutionary theories often can be translated uh into an evolutionary framework quite fruitfully. Yeah. Um, you know, they the the the theoretician who developed the idea might not have been

thinking about evolution, but you can integrate it with existing ideas uh and buttress it with existing ideas that can often be very very helpful. Um Yep, absolutely. Yep. So we should have called it the podcast. Maybe that'll be our uh our last episode in you know 30 years. We can we will change the name to the podcast and our our work will be done. Very good. Yeah. Well Clark, this is great. Thank you so much. I'm sure we'll have you on again. And uh yeah. Thanks for the conversation. And um thank you both for doing this podcast. Um I've been listening to some of them and I've been really enjoying them and it's a great format for kind of extended discussions and hearing things from um colleagues as well as

you know new voices that I haven't heard before um in this space and and I know it's some work for you guys to do as well. So I appreciate that. Yeah. Awesome. Thanks. Thanks so much. Yeah. And it's it's awesome to just get a chance to talk to you. Like, you know, I see you a bunch and but I I don't I rarely get a chance to talk to you this in depth. So it's a treat for for both David and I. I I assume David for you too. But yes, absolutely. All right guys. Thanks so much. Uh Eric, have a gun. Thanks. Take care. Well, you're still listening, uh, which means you like what you're hearing. Uh so what can you do to support us, Dave? Um, you can go out and buy Clark Barrett's Shape of Thought book.

Wonderful book. One of my favorites. Yeah. Bang Banger. But uh banger. Uh uh what what else what else can people do who are listening? You know, we maybe we should have an evolutionary psychology of the podcast book. Oh, that would be interesting. Maybe like transcripts of uh of our some of our best interviews. Yeah, maybe we can have a coffee table book of some kind. Maybe just pictures of us uh just talking talking to people. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. I haven't really thought too much about it, obviously. It's it's very apparent, but we can we can workshop that. Let's let's let's circle back to that as they say in bureaucratic ease. Um but anyway, uh we we have a job now, which is to end the episode.

And the way to end the episode is to remind you to please support the podcast by uh visiting our Patreon page and maybe pitching in some money so that we can pay for a huge print run of Evolutionary Psychology the Book. Sorry, Evolutionary College the Podcast the Book. Oh nice. And then the coffee table book. Coffee table book. Maybe we should make evolutionary psychology the podcast, the book, the movie, the video game. But we should just go through the whole journey. Nice. And the last word is the uh thing it is. So it would be a video game about a movie, about a book, about a podcast. That's right. Yeah. Got it. Yeah. That's that was straightforward. I think I think uh it's gonna be a real money maker.

Yeah, let's do it. Anyway, if you want to make that happen, give us some money on Patreon. Otherwise, leave us a kind review, send us an email, uh, say something nice about us on social media. Uh your support keeps us going, so please be generous with it. And have a good week, and we'll see you next week. See you next week, David.