Polygamy with Brooke Scelza
2025-11-18 13:00:00.000 +00:00

David, um what is uh a podcast that isn't this one that you like? Uh I like uh Hidden Minds, that NPR podcast. Okay, good. Well maybe we should go on them. Uh if you're listening to anybody, that'd be great. Yeah. Yeah. Um we can give them a bump. Um anyway. Uh that's funny. On that note, um, what are we listening to in this podcast? Well, we're not listening to it, but you, the listener, are, and you are listening to uh actual evolutionary psychology by actual evolutionary psychologists. And the name of the podcast is Evolutionary Psychology the Podcast. It was the Royal We, by the way. But the bro Yeah, okay. I often mix up the Royal We with the code. No, it's like it's it doesn't translate over the um acoustic modality.

Well, actually it doesn't. Yeah. You there's really no is there a text way to sort of I guess scare quotes. This is why we're not as popular as the in brain podcasts. We have nonsense introductions like this. Well, hopefully we haven't scared you away with our scare quotes or lack thereof. Uh keep listening. But we do have parentheses. Yes. They're like, you know, we're like, parentheses are I like I prefer the parentheses. Gateway directly scare quotes. They really are. It's like the the marijuana to the cocaine of steroids. I love parentheses. I I t I have a habit of overusing parentheticals in my writing. I just I can't. I do too. Yeah. It started for me as a young age. I just thought parenthetical aside.

It's the comedian in you. It's the bad writer in me on the comedian in you. It's true. Parentheticals are great for highlighting contradictions and double standards. I I made great use of them in in my uh alliance theory paper. They're they're they came in very handy. Fantastic. Yeah. Um so if you love parentheses, stay tuned. Yep. Or hate them. Her name is Brooke Shelza, she's a professor at UCLA. She uh studies a group of pastoralists in Namibia known as the Himba. Uh, and uh she just absolutely does fascinating work um studying a um an interesting culture that that will be uh different uh from our vantage point. And I think uh her research really complicates and adds nuance to the evolutionary

psychology of mating and jealousy uh and parental investment. Yeah, absolutely. And I love that we also get in a discussion from there about sort of like what are the what's the landscape of the evolutionary social sciences and how are we doing and our psychologists and anthropologists talking to each other enough. And um we even talk about um uh you know what what else do we talk about, David? Well, we talked about the manosphere briefly, right and how evolutionary social science can sometimes be perverted. We talked about uh the perverse incentive structures of academia, the replication crisis. Yes, that's right. The replication, yeah, we really that was uh I I feel like that was a real um uh moment

there. I think that's a highlight of this episode. Yeah, for sure. Um it was just really fun, wide-ranging conversation. Um I think you'll have a great time listening to it. Enjoy. Okay, we're recording. Today we have Brooke Shelze, who is a biological anthropologist in the Department of Anthropology at UCLA. It's a fantastic department with lots of uh very wonderful evolutionary social scientists. Um Brooke, thanks for being here today. Thanks for having me on. You study a really interesting population that has very interesting attributes. And I was reading up on them, and we'll talk about it in a second, but I also immediately upon reading upon about it, I also imagine that like one worries about essentializing a

whole category of people or a whole group of people. And so I'll just say now that the group of people that you study has noted for the degree to which there's promiscuity or uh paternity uncertainty. And we'll get into that jargon later. But I also imagine that like if I were you, and maybe you can tell me if you're I'm wrong, like I'd be a little bit tired about just having the whole community and the whole world there that you know so well being distilled down to that weird point. Um so can you just sort of start off by by saying like what it is that you study. Um, and we can sort of go, you know, over the different topics. And we just had Karen Kramer on talking about cooperative breeding.

And I think people are really interested in issues, especially in modern circumstances, um, especially with changes in the mating market of like, you know, cuckoldry and especially like the incel movement and those kinds of things, right? The manosphere, where there's sort of men who feel uh downtrodden or left out. Um, and uh yeah, and I know I will shut up in a second and ask a question. But basically, you know, I think as I understand, a lot of your work sort of is relevant to all of that in this context of a society that has sort of a unique uh area on the distribution of mating situations. So can you tell us a little bit about who you study and what's unique about them, but then also in the context of have we sort of essentialized them too much or what can they tell

us? Yeah. Sure. So I actually went there to study cooperative breeding. My dissertation, uh, which was in Australia, was looking at the roles of grandmothers and things like that. And so I originally went there wanting to interview women about the sort of transition to motherhood. And um so that was I I didn't actually go in to study anything about mating at all really. Um and it wasn't until I started talking to people that these topics came up. Um and they started talking to me about this in the context of collecting their reproductive histories. And then I realized, like, oh, they keep bringing this up. Maybe this is something I should ask about. So I kind of followed the question found me, I guess.

Um, but yes, I would say that at this point, the the majority of the work that I have done with them has looked at um the the kind of pattern of what I call concurrency, right? Which is the idea that you have both a formal marital partner and then informal partners as well. And both men and women have multiple partners, and it's quite common. As far as sort of essentializing them, I mean I think one of the things that I was hoping would come out of this work was the idea that there's a spectrum, right? And they may fall on one end of the spectrum in terms of how prominent these extramarital relationships are. But the idea was to expose the spectrum because I think so much of what we do is on the very other end of the spectrum where extrapare paternity is at, you know, something

like 1%. And that's where all of our work and all of our theorizing and our ideas about like you know what's universal and what's not all kind of come from this very thin slice. And so it took my sort of working with a population who was maybe at the other end of the spectrum to actually highlight the fact that there was a spectrum. So I think in that sense, I'm trying not to essentialize them. And then, you know, obviously all populations are in flux. And so I can see changes in their norms and behaviors about this stuff just in the 15 years that I've been working there, right? As they become more market integrated and things like that. So I can talk more specifically about that. But yeah, I'd love I'd love to hear about how their their norms and behaviors have changed

uh over the past fifteen years and what you think might be behind those changes. Yeah, so uh there's when I first started working there, it was 2010. There was pretty much no use of contraception. They were um the vast majority of their diet was still quite subsistence based. Um, so they are pastureless, so it's a lot of um sour milk and meat. Um, and they were they have gardens where they're growing maize and things like that. But they had a very long term drought that started a few years after I started working there. It lasted almost 10 years. And that brought more of an influx of things like store bought maize into the communities and things like that. And then other things also were just changing with the times, right?

So, like, oh even though there's no electricity out there, they all have little mini solar panels to charge their cell phones, right? So basically, everyone has a cell phone, um, uh, but no one has indoor plumbing or running water or anything like that. So as they get more market integrated, you can and they're gonna, their ideas about inheritance and things like that are gonna shift. So to put my anthropologist hat on for a minute, they have something called double descent, is the inheritance practice that they have. So that means that everybody has membership with both their maternal clan and their paternal clan, and those are both important in different ways. But the wealth comes down matrilaterally.

So instead of going father to son, the majority of the cows go mother's brother to sister's son. So they pass through the mother's side of the family. And typically, when you have that happen, it opens up more possibilities to be able to have higher paternity uncertainty because if you don't have to worry about whether your son is your son, right? But you're giving it to your sister's son, there's it it's a little bit more of a safe bet, basically, um, that you're giving your wealth to somebody that you are indeed biologically related to. So you tend to see more paternity uncertainty in cultures that have matrilineal or matrilateral inheritance. That's that's really interesting just because it suggests it's it's obvious, but I want to

say it out loud that it's not just that the psychology is sort of obviously it's concerned about paternity uncertainty. But I think there's this idea that sort of like it either exists or it doesn't. And if it doesn't exist, it's horrible. And there's just sort of like a mushroom cloud coming out of somebody's head, as opposed to sort of there's just facultative responses to that, right? Where it's not only whether or not there's paternity uncertainty, there's also the issue of like, well, what's the transmission of wealth or status? And we've talked about how um reproduction is not just about sex, it's about inheritance and it's about investing. And I think the psychology of that and is really important.

And it sounds like what you're saying is intrinsic to sort of how people get by with or tolerate or or or embrace um different kinds of reproductive strategies is not just about the sex, but it's intimately tied to resource flows, especially intergenerational resource flows. Yep. And so what you're seeing now is that with more market integration, if cat the more cash becomes the currency instead of cows, right? So when cows were the currency, everybody knew the rules, right? You had to give these cows from uncle to nephew, or and as you get cash though, the rules become more flexible, right? Like, well, if I sell these cows and I have the cash in hand, can I give that cash now to my own kids?

And so we've asked people about sort of in an ideal world, especially young people, what would you prefer? Would you prefer to have this uncle to nephew system or the father to son system? And a lot of the younger people were saying, no, I'd prefer to go father to son. And the way one way to get around that is sell your cows and give the cash to your kids, right? So the more they switch to the cash economy, the more ability there is to kind of break with some of those norms. But then along with that, what you also see is that people are going to start caring more about paternity certainty because if they're giving their wealth now father to son, then they may care more that those sons are biologically their sons.

So my which then is going to start to constrain women's autonomy and other things. So normally I think we think about things like globalization as being good for women's autonomy. This may be a situation where over the next 10 or 20 years you start to see a lot more restrictions on women's autonomy as they become sort of more market integrated. So it's these things, like you said, are are really sort of situational and context dependent. a really beautiful example of how uh the relationship between resource flows and mating systems is is is a bi-directional causal relationship. That on the one hand, that if we if the resource flows through uh mothers, such that uncles are investing in their nephews rather than their own direct children, uh then that allows

uh women to engage in more uh you know extramarital uh relationships because you know husbands don't have or their husbands don't have to worry about whether their kids are their own because they're not investing in those kids so much as their uh sisters' kids. But on the other hand, um uh the resource flow also uh sorry uh affects the mating system. Or did I get that backwards? The mating system affects the resource flow. Um and uh so if if we're in a position where I want to be uh investing in my direct kids such that we're, you know, I have cash in my pocket and I w I want to make sure it goes to uh uh my children as opposed to my nephews. Uh then all of a sudden I need to create paternity certainty and that and that affects the

mating system. Um and so uh I think it's a really interesting example of just how complex and mind-bending these things can become um but uh I I I'm curious. So like I just I want to get into the like the details of of how this works. So um right now uh the the men are primarily investing in their sisters' kids, is that right? Not exactly. So this is not exactly okay. This is the part that I think i complicates it even more. Is that one of the really interesting things that we found that to me was uh almost more mind-blowing than the high rate of extra pair paternity itself is how much the men really are still investing in their their kids, whether or not they are biologically their kids. Right.

So you would ex-I think our expectation is that in a system like this where there's high extra pair paternity, that the men wouldn't be investing very much, right? Yet what we see is side by side a high rate of extra pair paternity, and pretty high norms of paternal investment. So if you so we've asked men, you know, we we we did these vignettes with them where we asked, we gave them situations where the men um in this in the story bias their investment toward their biological child um against the child, their sort of social child who wasn't biologically theirs. And the norms are really, really strong that you that that's a bad thing to do, that you should be treating those kids equally. And then we were we mapped the answers to those vignettes onto actual investment

patterns. So we developed vignettes that mapped onto forms of of uh investment that we had actual behavioral data on. And it the norms are stronger than the behavior, right? Which is often the case. But even the behavior was still quite strong, particularly with things like bride price, right? So something where it's like a very public form of paternal investment, the men really didn't want to shirk their duties towards their kids. So they have really strong norms that you should treat your kids equally, and it's not because they're being tricked, right? So you might think, oh, well, maybe that's just because they don't know which kids are theirs and which kids are not theirs, and so they have to sort of take the risk.

That's not the case. They're actually very good, and we know this from the genetics now at knowing which kids are there, are theirs and not theirs biologically. And um I can there's sort of a fun story of how we figured that out, but um but they they have these really strong norms about social fatherhood. And that's and there's a lot of reputation um sort of tied up in being a good father and treating those kids equally. Interesting. So uh uh there is a social norm that th uh the men should treat their wives' children equally, regardless of whether those children are their biological children or not, or whether someone someone else has fathered them. Um it's extremely interesting. Um so I'm I I want to get into the to the fun story of how you found out that uh men

actually know which kids are their own, because it seems like a pr a pretty tough thing to figure out if you know you don't know, you know, the timing of of intercourse and and how it related to offspring. And sometimes kids resemble their their parents, but you know, sometimes it can be kind of ambiguous. So how how how are they figuring this out and and and what's the fun story behind how you figure it out what they're figuring out? So there's a couple different mechanisms that they're using. One is physical resemblance, and and they talk about the idea that once the kid gets to sort of walking around age, that's when they really can start to get a good look at them and s and start to use resemblance.

But they also are using both gossip and direct communication with their spouses. So often people know that their partners have other partners, and they uh you know, will sometimes talk directly to their wives, and their wives will just say, like, yeah, this one's from the boyfriend. Not all couples will do that. That sort of varies depending on the sort of communication in a particular couple. They also have long periods of spousal separation. So the men go off to a cattle post and they'll be gone for several months, right? So in terms of coital frequency and things like that, when they come back, they'll know they were gone for four months and they come back and their wife is pregnant. That's you know a pretty good sign.

So they've got sort of a suite of different ways of doing this. But even so, right, it's we didn't know how accurate they they would be. So one of the things that when we did this paternity study, we developed the methods with the community, right? Because this, as you can imagine, is a difficult thing to do. And so we developed this whole double blind method where we, the anthropologists, wouldn't know more than they would about the results. So we have a whole complicated system to do that. Um, but we went back before we published to present the results. And so we we presented to them uh, you know, uh if if a man has 10 kids, uh around five of them, it turns out, are gonna be he were uh kids where he's

not the the biological father. And they were like, Yeah, yeah, we've been telling you this for ten years. Like this is that so he has so so so any of the kids uh that his wife has, he has about a 50% chance of them being his kids. Interesting. What's interesting about that is that it's it's mathematic if you're thinking in Darwinian terms, you know, it's mathematically equivalent to invest in those kids versus investing uh in his sister's kids because there his kids are 25% uh genetic overlap with him and with uh the wife, if half of the kids are his and half aren't, you know, fifty divided by two is twenty five. So the in terms of the math in Darwinian terms, investing in either uh w woman's kids is

about the same. Which is really interesting. Yes, except that if you go up generation, right, assuming that this is happening across generations, then your sister, there's a likelihood that your sister is not actually your full sister. Ah, okay. Interesting. So it does get a little bit more complicated than that. But if but assuming it's your full sister, then assuming it's your full sister, then yes. And it's 48%. So it's a little bit less, right? But um so but um so then we said to them, so the other thing we found was that both men and women, so we had their assertions. So the when I first started doing this, I was just asking people, do you think these kids are yours or not yours? Right. So the women had started telling me on their own when I was doing their reproductive

histories. And then I started when I interviewed the men the following summer, I I a you know, they would list their wives and their kids, and they have polygyny, right? So there'd be a often a long list of kids. And I they would just go through and say, you know, mine, not mine, mine, mine, not mine, mine. So we had all those assertions that what we could then map onto the genetic paternity results. Um, and neither the community nor us know the specific individual results. So a statistician who's never been to the field and doesn't know them got that information. But we knew the aggregate. So we knew that both men and women were right about 70 to 75% of the time. So when I presented that back to them, I said, you know, here's the extra pair paternity

result for the community. And then about seven out of ten times your uh you know, people are are correct in knowing whether the child is theirs or not theirs. And their response to that was, Oh no, we're better than that. And and I said, Oh, you know what makes you think so, right? And and they said, well, because when we're talking to you, the men are going, both men and women for different reasons, I think, are gonna tell you that a child is is the husband's, even if they're pretty sure that it's not. Because we want you to understand those those men think of those kids as theirs, right? So basically they're telling me that there's gonna be a reporting bias, right? Um, and especially because some of those um assertions we got pretty far back, you

know, it was maybe like five years previous by the time we were telling them about the paternity results, because we did that earlier on. So I didn't know people as well, things like that. So I wanted to take that seriously, right? If somebody tells you that people are giving you, you know, skewed data, you wanna actually look at that, right? So we went back and we looked at the cases where they were wrong, and I'm using air quotes here. Um, and what we found was that 90% of the time that they were wrong, they were wrong in that direction, right? Where they were saying the kid was theirs, but it wasn't theirs. So, given that, we figured that actually that 70-75% accuracy is probably a floor level of accuracy, and they really do know quite well.

Um so I think they're combining all these different methods. A lot of times these are paternity results not on kids but who you know the on adults, right? Because we're taking these data across generations. So they've had a lot of time to sort of figure this out and they seem to be pretty good at it. So they're not being tricked. I mean, there may be individual cases where they would be surprised by the result, but for the on the whole, they're not being tricked. Yeah. It's it's really interesting. I mean, from a uh very simple evolutionary perspective, the idea that people are good at detecting uh paternity would would concomitantly then suggest that that would go along with sort of design for investment, right?

If you didn't invest, if you were uh, you know, I don't know, a shark or something and you just, you know, made it and then you like swam away, there's no you don't worry about paternity because you're not investing. So I think the idea of like parental and especially um uh male parental investment, uh the idea of that would sort of be consistent with this idea that we're you're in your data, you're getting evidence of people being quite good at um detecting paternity uncertainty. Or that's not the right term, but like yeah, but assessing paternity uncertainty. Except I think given that they are so good, it's surprising that they have these norms to treat them equally, right? So they have these norms set up that are saying, Yeah, we know you can people are

figuring this out. Despite that, we have set up this strong norm structure that you should treat those kids equally. And then what yeah, and what do you think is so? I mean, that's the um, and it sounds like because of market integration, it's kind of eroding a little bit because of the fungibility of money. But what to what do you attribute the um how do you get a stable dynamic where that norm is there? What do you have you I'm sure you've thought about a lot about that? Yeah. Well, I think in so I think part of the reason they got to that place was because of this spousal separation, right? So you have other pastoralists, right? Like this isn't just like a thing about pastoralists or something for something, for

example, right? But they lots of paras pastoralists have long periods of spousal separation, right? Sort of somewhat built into sort of to herding, especially in drought prone environments, right? And yet other pastoralists have very, very strict norms about paternity. Um And I but you sort of have two choices, right? One is that you can say we're going to relax these norms and and sort of not do a lot of mate guarding. The other is to sort of double down on mate guarding. And the and I so I think it's sort of a there's sort of a package of things that were going on. You've got the historical cultural inertia of matriliny, you've got the spousal separation making the cost of make guarding higher.

You've got high value to those kids. So the kids are working really hard, right? So I just listened to your episode with Karen Kramer, right? And she was talking about how much work kids do, right? So similar in pastoral societies, the kids are working hard from a young age. They're they're value added to the household, right? And so in that sense, that sort of lowers the cost of those kids, right? And so you've got sort of this whole kind of suite of different things that sort of create a perfect storm that allows these norms to come into place. And then for each individual man, he's not just losing paternity on some of the kids of his wives. He's gaining, because they have, it's not just the wives, boyfriends, right?

They also have all these girlfriends. So they are gaining paternity outside of marriage. And so I think there's sort of a balancing out that happens where and we've again, we haven't looked at this with the genetics, but when I've looked at sort of across age cohorts, what you see is that men can't don't get married until their late 20s. They don't really um start sort of building marital families until sort of later. And so they're getting a lot of extra, they're they're gaining a lot of paternity early on, right? In their teens, their twenties, before they can marry, before they've acquired a bunch of resources. They're sort of sneaking paternity. And then as they get older, they are probably losing more paternity.

But over the if you look at the oldest cohort, it sort of is balanced out how much they think they've lost versus how much they've gained from their their own extramarital relationships. So it kind of is is keeps everybody happy in a way too, right? Because it's like if if the old men were bogarding all of the paternity, you got a lot of unhappy men, especially when you have polygyny, right? And this is the way to to you know ensure in a way that those young men are still getting access, they're still fathering kids. Um, but the you know, they're just not doing it through a the sort of traditional marital pathway when they're young. Right. That's fascinating. Do do the uh do the men invest at all in their girlfriend's kids or how how what's the

relationship there? Yeah, good question. Um, yes. And so kids often know who their biological father is, right? Um, and certainly the social father is primary, right? So the that husband-wife relationship is still quite strong, but kids will often know. And so, for example, if a child is sick, um, the mother or somebody from the mother's family might send somebody to the boyfriend's compound. There's no obligation, but there's sort of a norm that you would do something. So they might just come to the compound and say, This child is sick, right? And then it's up to them to decide whether they want to contribute, you know, contribute a goat or something that they can sell to get money, but often they will.

Um, so there's those kind of like specific responses to emergencies, but also boyfriends give stuff to girlfriends. So we've tracked all those um transfers. Cash is a really good thing to give a girlfriend because it's easy to sort of slip away versus a goat or something that you're bringing home, and then then there's sort of you're sort of breaking the code of silence in a way, right? Creating common knowledge of the transfer. Yeah. If you come home with this goat and you say like, so sometimes they'll have workarounds. So they might, you know, show me goat. Just wandered in here. I don't know where it came from. But they'll but the the boyfriend will drop a goat off at the girl's uncle's compound.

Then she'll go to her uncle's compound and get that goat. And she'll come home and the husband will say, Where'd you get that goat? And she'll say, Oh, from my uncle's compound. Right. It was coming from the boyfriend. So it's so it's it's so like recognizable, right? I I love this about anthropology or humans, is just or any species really when it comes to this stuff. If you if you look past the superficial variation, it's it's all very recognizable. Yeah, So so would you say that the norm that exists with uh the uh the husband's wife's kids where he has to treat the kids equally is absent from uh the girlfriend's kids, such that, you know, when it went to his wife's kids, he should he should treat the kids

equally, but if it's his girlfriend's kids, it's okay for him to preferentially uh invest in his biological kids and not uh the other uh woman's kids. Is that how it works? Yeah, I think I think that's right. I I'm trying to think if we I guess we haven't yeah, we've looked a little bit at that. No, yeah, yeah, we have looked at that. So we have the we had another one of these sort of vignette games because we do a we we these work really well um because we they often have sort of like picture cards and things like that. So we did another um sort of vignette experiment where we had cards where we looked at three different sort of things. So we had wife with your child, wife, not your child, girlfriend, your

child, girlfriend, your child, ex, and then ex-wife, your child, ex-wife, not your child, right? So we varied the paternity, we varied the type of relationship, um, and then we had them allocate like little different kinds of things across those six categories. And they definitely Favored paternity, right? Um, in all the cases, but less so um in when it was a formal partner, right? So you're supposed to treat your wives' kids equally more than your girlfriend's kids. Um and and in part what they said was that's because the girlfriend typically, you know, has a husband who can who's gonna care for those kids, right? So his sort of formalized responsibility, especially the kids that aren't biologically

hids, is gonna be um weaker, right? And what the women say is when you're choosing a husband, wealth really matters, right? Because you're if you're his wife, you're oblig you're you are he's obligated to give you X percentage of his cows to milk every day or whatever. If you have a boyfriend, yeah, wealth is important, but generosity is really what's important because it's up to him to decide whether he's going to, you know, how much he's going to give you. And so you could have a really wealthy boyfriend, but if he's stingy, you're not going to get much out of that relationship. You want a boyfriend who's generous. And what the men say is: yeah, being generous is important because if I'm seen as the kind

of person who is generous towards both my own kids who are not biologically mind or towards my girlfriend's kids. People see that and they respect me for that. And they get sort of cachet among the men in other kinds of decision-making contexts. And so, again, this is like another sort of reinforcing norm that sort of helps the system to work, right? They're sort of they're sort of rewarded for being a good guy towards these kids that everybody knows are are not their kids. And is that in part because number one, um, it's just sort of a uh in some sense it's like just resource status competition just writ large. So sort of, you know, like you're it's intrinsically like, you know, if if David has more

stuff than I do, it's easy to get a norm around, like, you know, people preferring the person who has more stuff, because the person who has more stuff can sort of coerce or you know favor curry favor, you know, like that just sort of intrinsic. Um, but is it also because uh those are also then norms? So if I'm that help the biological f father too, right? So in the sense of if my son is being taken care of by other men, um, right, I, you know, I would almost imagine, and I wonder if this ever happens where, you know, do the do this does the biological father ever talk to the social father and just sort of say, hey, I noticed, you know, you didn't give my son this. Like maybe that's too explicit, but like is that ever happened where, you know, you're kind

of monitoring your kid and how the social father is treating your kid? That's fascinating. Yeah, I would imagine that the biological father has an incentive to enforce this norm that the marital father should treat the kids equally because he has a stake in that in that outcome uh being maintained. I think I think it's more unspoken than spoken, right? So I don't think that you have a lot of boyfriends and husbands negotiating these things individually, right? Like that that the sort of norm seems to be out of each other's. that, yes, in general, there is this sort of system of indirect reciprocity going on underlying this. And I've talked to Kim Hill about this with Dace, who also have this system of partable

paternity, which is similar where the women have multiple fathers sort of linked to these kids. And so you just sort of generally know, right? Like I'm taking care of some kids who may not be mine, but somebody else is taking care of my kids in their family. And so, yes, everybody is sort of enforcing this norm that we should treat them equally, helps me either now or in the future, right? So for the, I think what's interesting about it is that for the young men, they're counting on the older men doing that for them, right? And when you get older, you should have more incentive when you get older to then be like, well, I'm probably not, I guess, having any more extramarital kids, although you might have

extramarital kids still living in other compounds, right? That's really interesting. Yeah, it's like a straightforward application of reciprocal altruism, but where the resource being reciprocated is parental investment and there's an indirect reciprocity system. And cheating would be the equivalent of you know reneging on that deal and and you know neglecting my uh non-biological kids. It's a really interesting uh uh example of that. That's that's that's so cool. Yeah. And it's not priv I mean you can't it can't be private. I mean this maybe is one of the reasons why it's it's it's as you say like you're saying it's it's you know it's just out in the open, right? It's really hard. And maybe with I mean maybe this is the point with the money, right?

Is that to the extent that it's policeable or visible, um, you can see the dynamic sting stable. Yeah. Yeah, it's really, I mean, it's I I was not a person who studied norms or anything when I started doing this, but it's um the it seems to be like the having those norms built in really makes is like the glue that makes the system work. Yeah. It's a really lovely example of, I mean, just like to cut through. It's so complicated if you poke on it. It's like this web of like all these stable, but it's really just like there's a lot of people who are just worried about like, am I getting screwed or not? And there's a stable norm to the extent that everyone's sort of like, I think I'm okay. You know, like like my overall costs and benefits are sort of like aligned with everyone

else's. And if that's true, then we can be okay. And there's lots of different ways to get there. And this is an interesting portion of the possibility space. Yeah. And I think that's where the the infusion of the cash economy is going to be so interesting because is that going to be kind of the thread that you start to pull where now people can kind of sneak money in different ways, they can invest differently. That may shift their mindset right. So it's like, is that gonna be the string that you start pulling on it and it unravels the the whole sweater kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah. Well one question I have is like what do kids have you what do kids think about all of this? You know, obviously as they get older the kids turn into adults and then you talk to the

adults, but what do the kids think about this? I mean the kids seem like they're they're aware too, right? Again, like I mean I haven't I guess I haven't asked the kids when they are kids whether they know that seemed like sort of like yeah, I mean that's that's but what the adults tell me is that the kids know and they will reflect back on their childhoods and they'll say like, yeah, I've always known that so and so was my father and you know, when I was a kid, if I would run into him, because they don't maybe see them as frequently, right? But if I'd s if I'd see him, I would he would always give me a little bit of meat or he would whatever. Buy me a coke if we were both in town or something like that.

So they they seem to be it doesn't seem to trouble them. Um, you know, I think again, because there isn't a stigma about it, they aren't they aren't too worried about it. I mean, you do and what some of the kids have also interestingly said was sometimes, of course, people are people, right? Some men are gonna be more or less jealous than others. And so we had a vignette about the investment stuff where the vignette was about, you know, the father comes home from a funeral and he's bringing a bunch of meat because they slaughter cows at funerals, and the non-biological kid runs up to him and asks him for some meat, and he says no. And then later he's sitting and his biological kid comes up to him and he offers

that kid some meat, right? So that's our like direct bias. Is this okay or not okay? Right. And then we add one of the questions we asked them after that was just, you know, we asked them, is this okay or not okay? Have you how often do you think this happens? Right. Um and then um you know what would happen to somebody if they did that. And then we asked them if they know of any, you know, tell us a story about this if you have one. Um trying to get the sort of ethnographic color. And a lot of the people said like yeah I either they were in that position or they know of that kind of thing. So that was the norms were very strong, the behavior was more mixed, as you would expect, right? Um, and people would say, like, yeah, that that happens, but the other thing

people would say to your point was it's the men sometimes start off with a bias against their non-biological kids, right? Especially men who maybe are more jealous or jealous of the particular boyfriend or the particular wife who they maybe you know love more than their other wives or something. But a lot of times those kids, if they work real, if they're really hard workers in the compound, they become their father's favorite kid, right? So this again, these things are are really dynamic. Um, And so just because you know he might have a bias going in, but you can sort of overcome that. But sort of what you would expect from an evolutionary perspective, there's more of a hurdle to overcome, right?

Because you do have the the non-fraternity sort of working against you. So you've got as kind of good a situation as you can get with having all these norms in place. But you know, there there are still biases. It's not like we found no biases at all in the behavior. Right. But if the kids expect it, I mean, there's this thing called like the Cinderella effect, right? Like based on the Cinderella story, which is just like, you know, the the non-biological kid gets gets treated really poorly, like Cinderella, right? And then she gets, you know, k swept up um in and all is right with the world, right? And we empathize with Cinderella. But um, but I mean it's also the thing of if the kids sort of understand or or

calibrated to, you know, this is my social dad. I'm not going to get invested as much in as this, the biological kid next to me. Then if you're calibrated to that, then you're also not pissed off, right? You're not like in you're not feeling entitled to that to some degree. Um, so you know, that might actually kind of counterintuitively um quell that. Um, and and the thing you said about the even all all sequel, though, the social relationship you have with the kid changes things. I think is really interesting. I think really understudied because I mean there's this whole question of like why is there so much paternity investment? Or why do parents, I mean, like the fact that dads say, like, I want to be with my kids,

and it's really important that like, you know, I have an influence on my kids is like a very universal. Well, maybe I mean, but but like, you know, to to some extent. Um, And I think that's really interesting from the perspective of the kind of social uh affordances your kids have, or your social welfare going forward. And I think the sort of abstract social relationship that fathers have with their kids, or the way that kids embody their father's aspirations for social status and social respect and resources and coalitional support is really understudied. And I think what you're describing in terms of um wanting that uh is is uh is really interesting. Yeah. Yeah. So I want to talk about how your work fits in with the prevailing

ideas in evolutionary psychology. So there's um a lot of work on sexual jealousy um and sexual possessiveness uh you know of women by men. Uh and the evolutionary logic there is pretty straightforward in that uh men face this uh adaptive problem of ensuring paternity certainty. Uh women do not have to ensure maternity certainty. If it comes out of your body, it's your kid. Um there's this saying, you know, mama's baby, papa's maybe. And so uh there's a lot of work in evolutionary psychology basically arguing um that because men face this unique problem of ensuring paternity certainty, that they have evolved uh mechanisms of sexual jealousy and sexual possessiveness. There's a lot of empirical work showing that men uh tend to show uh a greater sensitivity

toward sexual infidelities relative to other kinds of emotional infidelities like having feelings for someone else. Um and in fact I I believe you've replicated this finding uh uh among the Himba. Um so I'm curious w where you think your work w fits into this picture. If if it does fit in, how, if if it challenges certain parts of it, which parts do you think it challenges and which parts do we need to rethink? Yeah. So I I had sort of the same instinct that you uh that you did that this would be a really interesting population to look at this right because we most of the studies of this had been done either in in weird societies or if it was non-weird societies it was still typically sort of university populations in in you know

the global south or something and nobody had done it in a small scale society at the time that I did it with him but I think um and I didn't know what I was gonna find. I I kind of I went in sort of agnostic, right? I'm I'm I'm trained as an evolutionary anthropologist, but not an evolutionary psychologist. So I was but I but I was open, right? I was I thought, let's see what we find. And we found, I think, two important things that spurred me to think about this more. The first was we did replicate the sort of standard bus effect, right? Where men more than women were upset by sexual uh jealousy, sexual infidelity more than emotional infidelity. But the other thing that we found was that both men and women were more upset by

sexual uh infidelity than emotional infidelity. So there was a sex difference. It was like 96, 90 something percent of men were more upset by the sex. But like 67% of women or something like that were more upset. So, right, so it was they if the majority of both were more upset by sexual uh infidelity. And that looks different than like the US, where you s have a sex difference, but it's more like 40 10 or something, right? Where like sometimes you've got like actually the majority of both men and women more upset by emotional infidelity, but just more men than women were upset by the sexual infidelity, if that makes sense. So to me, that part was underappreciated, right? So, like, yes, we found the sex difference.

I I'm not, I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, right? Like, I think that that's real. Um, but I just think that we've gotten so myopic in the jealousy literature, in particular, of like focusing on this sex difference and then just like finding the teeny tiny variation of ways that we can test this, that we lost the other important things that we could learn about jealousy. So I then went out and recruited a bunch of anthropologists who were working and had been importantly had been working in the places that they worked for long periods of time. I think it was like our average was like 11 years that people had been working at their field sites. Because I wanted people who could help um to sort of groupthink about why you

might see variation in these kinds of things. So we did run that forced choice experiment about which is more upsetting to you. But we also looked at the severity of you know how good or bad is it that you know if a partner does this with the different kinds of jealousy. Because the other, let me take one step back. So when I was doing this first with Himba, the other thing that would often happen is you know it's a forced choice right so you say you know which is more upsetting to you if your partner has sex with someone else or if they fall in love with someone else and and you tell them that both both things happen which part is more upsetting and a lot of himba maybe unsurprisingly given everything I've I've told you said it's fine both

both are fine right and I really had to push them to to pick one, right? Interesting. And so that also, again, is a signal, like, yeah, that's very different, right? Whereas if you ask this to Americans, they would say both are horrible, right? That's fascinating. I had to pick which is worse, right? But it's a very different sort of starting point. Right. So would did you ask, sorry, just to clarify, did you ask this question in regard to people's um social uh spouse or in regard to their boyfriend or girlfriend? We asked it about their uh their husband or wife. Got it. Okay. I it would be interesting to look to see if you would get different results if you asked it about their boyfriend or girlfriend.

I guess I I well I'm trying to think 'cause there probably were some unmarried people in the sample. So I'd have to look back what the actual wording was. But it was supposed to be like a long it was a long term partner, not a short term partner that we were asking about. Yeah. Okay. Um and so we went out and replicated this. And you know, we had the Chimane and the Hadza and all the the Mosu who um also have this sort of walking marriage and you know less more informal partnerships. So we wanted to have sort of a range of societies that we chose for reasons that we thought might matter. Um and um and then we so we first we ran these questions about both how upset you were about different kinds of infidelity and then also

the forced choice. And we did find pretty I think the Chamani both men and women, like a hundred percent, said they were more upset by the sex. So there was no no difference. Um But um, but for the most part, across all these all these cultures, the the sex difference was there, right? So that's the thing that like I mean, like I've heard David Buss talk about this, right? Like he likes it, right? Because it it it does um reinforce the original hypothesis, which is fine. I like again, I'm not but to me, the most important thing was how much variation there was in the sort of severity of responses. And then what we tried to do was not just say there is variation, but try to understand what is driving that variation.

So one of the things that we found was that paternal investment was one of the things that was driving it. So we, because we had anthropologists who'd been working in these places for a long time, we came up with these this sort of survey to be able to ask the anthropologists, you know, how much we didn't have behavioral measures of paternal investment that were equal across all these different places, right? So we had to sort of deal with the fact that there were foragers and pastoralists and agriculturalists, and we had like, you know, market integrated people in Okinawa and in the US. And but we asked sort of about different realms of paternal investment and had this sort of paternal investment score.

And that really mattered for the severity of response, right? So the more uh paternal investment there was, the more people were upset about about infidelity. Paternal investment in the particular relationship that was being discussed. Because you c you could, you know, so in the HIBA, for example, uh, there are norms that the man should be investing in his wife's kids, but there aren't the same norms that he should be investing in his girlfriend's kids. So by your logic, you would expect different jealousy responses depending on which partner was being evaluated. Yes, that's true. Although we didn't actually specifically look at that. So this was more about like your wife's kid, like your fo your social kids, right?

Right. Okay. Um but it but it would be that Himbo would score low l on the lower end because they're not giving their wealth, there's no the inherited wealth is going to the nephews, right? So on that form of paternal investment, they're gonna score quite low. Um, whereas if they had father to child inheritance of some kind, they would score higher. But we looked at both inheritance norms, we looked at sort of direct care, like so. This is where it's helpful to have anthropologists who could say, like, yeah, dads are doing a lot of you know, direct caretaking, kids sitting on their laps, helping with feeding, helping with so we had sort of different measures and then we, you know, we um combine them all in sort of a score.

Yeah. I I like that that the focus on the sex difference at the expense of the variation. That's important not only because we don't want to just focus on, you know, well, there's a sex difference, but even from an evolutionary psychological perspective, it tells us about the design of jealousy, right? And so, like what you're saying is the fact that there's this variation suggests that in that it's a function of parental investment, is that it's it comes back to this sort of basic deeper thing of am I being screwed over? You know, so it's sort of like this thing of like if I'm investing, then I'm angry. You know, an analogous thing would be sort of like the theory that, like, if somebody takes

my land, I'm gonna be angry, but that's actually going to be calibrated by whether or not I've invested in that land. Like if it's just my land, but I don't get anything out of it, I've never invested anything in it, versus my livelihood is tied up into it and I've invested for years or generations in it. I'm going to have a very different anger response. And so if you have your theory is like people get angry when somebody takes their land, that's not as good of a theory as like you're angry when it's about investment. And it sounds like what you're describing, it really makes jealousy more sophisticated in this sort of investment dependent way. Yeah, it's not an anti-evolutionary finding to show that culture match, right?

Exactly. Like I think that's the that's I think the the false dichotomy, right? Exactly. No, no, no. Like that's what I try to tell my students from day one, right? But like but understanding how these cultural systems work to sort of reinforce the evolutionary logic. So but I I mean that's I think you know one of the sort of frustrations for me with so much of the mating research that's out there is just we're I understand that the sex differences stuff is easier to test. And so and I think Dan Conroy Beam talked about this too when when you asked him on, right? But it's like we've we've gotten so myopic where we're just like we're just really focused on these sex differences, and there's it's not the end all be all of understanding our

mating behavior. Like we need to, and I think we all know this, and yet we, you know, people keep grasping for it and then doing these sort of small derivations of studies. So instead of, you know, it's not just, it's not just that they're not seeing the forest for the trees, it's that they've like picked one tree and like we know everything there is to know about this one tree, and we're you know ignoring everything else. And I think so. To me, that was the more important part of that jealousy paper was not that we found support for the bus hypothesis across a bunch of small-scale populations. It was that it was that we found these other important things and we should be paying attention to those too.

Yeah. I think I think we haven't really talked so much about this, but I think this is a really important point. Is I think from a very naive perspective, people think about evolution as the little parts of you that are not rational. Right. And so it's this idea, like, and I think, Brooke, what you're describing, it's very conducive to being appealing, which is sort of like, well, people, of course, just like rationally follow costs and benefits. And it's only those little things that like don't make sense from like a cost-benefit perspective that our evolution or evolution can tell us about. And I think there's a kernel of truth to that, which is that if there is this evolved design, and even it's running even counter to modern costs and benefits, then like, yeah,

why else would it be there? But it makes this fallacy that the cost and benefits stuff, like in this case of like jealousy, is a function of how much investment, that's also evolved design, too. And so I think that this comes back to like a very fundamental misunderstanding that oftentimes outsiders or untrained people have. But then it also then means that that kind of work that's framed that way is more appealing because it just appeals to this like un, I mean, frankly, uneducated perspective that evolution isn't the little person in my head. It's the little, it's the things that are tugging on the little person. Like it's the thing that makes me want chocolate even though I don't want it, you know?

Or it's the thing that makes me want to like have sex with the person even though I don't want to, you know. So it's like the things pulling on the homunculus, as they say. Yeah, yeah. And it sounds like this is exactly sort of um what is what you're talking about in this perspective. And I think it explains um to maybe I I don't have data for this, so it's slightly, you know, I'm I'm sort of editorializing a bit, but I suspect um some of the history of that is uh is that that was sort of what was fitting with this sort of view of sort of if there's a rational reason for it, if there's a cost-benefit logic to it, especially in that first wave of psych, you had to stick with that stuff, you know.

And I think David's work is a great example of like the second wave where it's like, no, everything that's cost and benefits, we can take an evolutionary approach and not only just post hoc explain it, but actually derive new predictions. But yeah, I I'll yeah, I think I think you're you're you're treading in like very you've poked on a very deep fundamental issue in the field. I would um I'll just end with that. Yeah. But I think too it's like when you're a graduate student and you come in you're trying to figure out your dissertation topic, the the push is find something counterintuitive. Yes. And so there's a lot of emphasis on, you know, like Dan Fessler always says to, you know, like, why should I care?

Right. Like, and I and I and I I think he's right to push on that. Right. But I think a lot of the that comes from, well, if I can come up with something that's counterintuitive, then that's a real why should I care moment, right? I that's fine if you come up with something like that, right? But I think the idea, like to me, it never sat quite right because there are plenty of things. Just because something is in is intuitive or maps onto what we think doesn't mean that there isn't a good evolutionary explanation for why we're doing that thing. And it may have to do with the fact that the costs and benefits are, you know, aligned in that particular way. And I mean, I think this is where behavioral ecology shines is in thinking about some of

that stuff and looking at the variation and why why we might expect there to be variation. Um, and it often does like it makes sense, right? So sometimes when you paint it out, it really is sort of intuitive in that it's not, you know, but I I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing, right? You can still really important insights into what into our behavior. Um even I mean in yeah oh sorry go ahead yeah I mean because I even I would I would even put it more strongly which is like I think psychologists who don't interact with human behavioral ecologists really fall into that trap. So you know if you're if you're a human behavioral ecologist and you're like well well, from a psychological perspective, well, what's more obvious than like feeding yourself,

right? But a human behavioral ecologist is like not trivial. Like you got to go out, you expend calories, calculation of like what's the return on it, what's the processing, whatever. And that keeps the psychologist um honest because then you're like, oh, if I'm an evolutionary psychologist, I can't just trivialize that it's easy to get food. There's actually software for calculating like foraging time and the costs I'm incurring and the handling time and the return rate and like all this decision making that like the the the human behavioral ecologist is telling me as a psychologist I have to look for in the mind. And so I think like I'd actually put it more strongly that I think especially the

evolutionary social sciences have to keep that relationship to the extent that they don't, it really runs this risk of running this like, well, if your grandmother couldn't tell you as a as a a paper published in the psychology journal. I think just to there's a site, there's a there's a paper in a psychology journal that's a theoretical paper that I think should be retracted. Uh and I think it's this paper that is by um uh by Kurt Gray and somebody else. And it's about uh um, I think it's Dan Gilbert, and it's about like you should do research that's surprising and that your grandmother couldn't tell you about. Um, and everybody has like said that's not great, but I think it actually should be

retracted. It should be made an example of. And it's exactly for this reason. And I think like human behavioral ecologists and anthropology and evolution is what keeps us honest to asking really important questions about basic things. Like how do you not starve? Yeah. It's it's in fact, it's it's even worse than than uh than you know, uninsightful or unproductive. It's actually the opposite of what we should be doing. If you think about you know doing science from a Bayesian perspective, you want to pursue hypotheses with a high prior probability of being correct. But if you're searching for the surprising counterintuitive hypotheses, those are by definition the ones with the lowest probability of being correct.

And so what you've produced by pro by with that perverse incentive structure is a false positive machine, right? You're going out and you're testing all the low probability hypotheses, and you know, by chance a few of them will turn up some positive results. And what you're getting is a bunch of surprising and false findings. It's no, it's no surprise at all that this is leading to a replication crisis. But anyway, uh sorry, Bert, I interrupted you. Okay. I mean, I would I think I would add just one more layer to it, which is that it's adding in the cultural evolution layer on top, right? Which is so I think the behavioral ecologists, the sort of old school first generation, second generation, even behavioral ecologists, were uh really focused on s those

rules about the ecology, right? The ecology and the behavioral ecology. Yes. And sort of all the conditional strategies based on based on those kinds of factors. And often black boxing the culture, right? And I think that the next step is then layering in things like norms and why, because you know, sometimes those are helping us to like, like I said, they're sort of the glue that's helping to enforce these things and and help these things that may be sort of counterintuitive, like how do we get to cooperate in these really large groups or how do we sustain a system with extra pair paternity, right? And so I think that's where we need to sort of complete the circle of these three different perspectives, becoming more integrative.

And and for me, being at UCLA was like mind blowing in that way because I was really, you know, I was trained by Eric, Eric Galton Smith, who's, you know, one of the you know foremost early human behavioral ecologists, right? And um, and he and not not not that he hasn't also integrated this stuff, right? But a lot of his early work was that sort of bread and butter behavioral ecology in a in a foraging population. And when I but that was what I was trained in. I never had any no, no psychology training, really no cultural evolution training. And then I got to UCLA and it was the time when Rob Boyd was still there. And um and so I we had Dan and Clark and Rob and I was like the lone behavioral ecologist, human behavioral ecologist in the department.

And I was like, I felt like I went back to kindergarten, really started as a faculty member because I was like, oh gosh, okay, I have to learn all this stuff. I have to learn all this new language, these new perspectives. But you know, I in a lot of ways feel like I've had more sort of growth as a scholar in the faculty part of my career because of that, because I sort of had to exercise all these new muscles and think about how we could integrate these different perspectives. And it's been I I see a lot of that in like now I'm old, like in the generation below mine, you know, of the like I think people are naturally at least the behavioral ecologists, I think that's what I know best. I don't know whether this is you can tell me whether you think this is true in psychology,

but the the but human behavioral ecologists I think are more naturally drawing from these different fields and integrating them more in their projects in really you know, really cool, exciting ways. Um I wish I guess my my stereotypical bias is that's happening less in psychology, at least from like when you look at like the HBES program, um, just in terms of the titles and stuff like that. But I don't know, do you think that's happening? I'm gonna ask you a question. Do you think that's happening in psychology too? David, you wanna I mean we can both yeah I I mean uh so could you could you get clear on on on on the question what what were you do you think that the evolutionary psychologists are

increasingly integrating perspectives from behavioral ecology and cultural evolution or are they still sort of siloed off? Yeah I It depends. I mean, so I think yes, uh, but it's happening more slowly than I would like. I think slowly but surely we are integrating uh uh and and merging together the the various good ideas. But you know, progress is is slow. Particularly in the social sciences, it happens very slowly. So I'd like it to speed up. But yeah, I do see um quite a bit of it. Um maybe it's just for my background at UCLA where where that's sort of a really great example of a bunch of different um perspectives feeding into each other in a in a in a productive way. Not every department is like that.

Um, so I so I don't know, but yes, I've I've seen some of it. I wish there were more. I don't know. What do you think, Dave? Yeah, I mean, and I came from, you know, I was a student of Lita Cosby's John Tubi. And I, you know, I I was there, I'm a generation after Clark. Um, you know, and I I was sort of on the end where I still had a lot of interaction with Rob Boyd and Pete Richardson and Richardson. And um uh I think in Christina Moya we had on, and I talked to Christina Moya about this. Christina Moya and I spent a lot of time as representatives of sort of John and Lita and Rob and Pete, respectively. So diplomats between the two. Exactly. We really spent a lot of time together. Um but um and Sarah Matthew too and other people.

Um but I think I think what what it is is I don't think the gener the generation now, I don't think there's any uh there's very little disagreement, I think, anymore. And I think it's largely a division of labor, where I think um a lot of evolutionary psychologists understand the importance of cultural evolution, um, but they would view their work as sort of prior to that in the sense of they're still just interested in the the evolved design, independent of which norms are feeding into it by and large. Now there are certain evolutionary psychologists who are really interested in like why is a particular place the way it is, or why are particular norms the way they are. And the more you know about the psychology, um, you know, you can predict what the norms

are, and the more you appreciate that there's cultural evolution. Like as in your work, we were just talking about the whole first part of this was there's all these costs and benefits, right? And so your your, if, for example, just to make it concrete, if an evolutionary psychologist just went to your field site and never looked at any other variation in humans, they might make inferences about the evolved design of human software that would not be as accurate if they didn't realize that some of this was a consequence of coordinated norms. Right. And then there's the question of sort of like uh and so it's it makes your evolutionary psychology better because then you can ask the question, well, like, where do those norms

come from? And I think Pete boy like uh Rob and Pete's insight was in the same way that John and Lita, for example, and other people, I mean, there were Smith and Winter Halder were talking about evolved design in '95, too. Like they're even human behavioral ecologists were talking about the evolved psychology. Um, but the insight of sort of I'm not satisfied with the mind just is the way that is. We want an evolutionary explanation. Rob and Pete were saying, well, we just don't want to say culture is the way it is. We want a causal explanation as well. And I think that for, you know, in the same way, like you an old school evolutionary psychologist may say, well, those are just norms and they are just the way they are.

And that's culture, but we're interested in the evolved design. The new school is sort of like, no, no, no, the norms come from the evolved psychology too. It loops around. So I think that's my long-winded way of saying it's in practice, it might be that evolutionary psychologists do de-emphasize the norm dynamics, but I don't know any of them that aren't excited or interested when a cultural evolutionist then picks up the evolved design they're talking about and and sort of talks about the dynamics those things create. And there are more there are some people starting to do that where they think about what are the dynamics the design creates as a way to think about the design itself. I don't know if that's helpful.

Yeah. It is, but I I want to pick up on something you said in the middle there, which was that you know, if if evolutionary psychology got its origins in Namibia with the himba, right? They might different evolutionary psychology might look different. But I mean I think the the counterpoint to that is we have to then understand that evolutionary psychology looks the way that it does because it was created in a weird world, right? Like Joe had a big contribution, right? Is that like, and so I I think that's where the anthropology is so important because we need to keep pushing on this idea of like, is this evolved psychology or not? Yeah, like and we can only answer that question if we keep looking at this uh you know

across cultures and we sort of I think also build in the idea that we are flexible. Like part of our evolved psychology is that we're flexible and we are a social species who probab we don't know what the norms were, right? 10,000 years ago or 20 or 100,000 years ago, but we but we probably had some, right? And so um I think assuming that the that the you know very specific psychology that we have and we were raised with and that's helping us come up with those predictions, um, you know, we I just think we always need to to push on that and and question. Yeah, I agree. And I think there's a fractal issue too, which is sort of like from uh even even um you know old school quote unquote John Alita of psych was very cross-cultural.

Like they had, you know, the Clark, the Schwartz site. And so compared to psychologists, you know, I was like, I was saying this, Christina. Like I was I went after UCSB, I went to another university, a psych department had a no anthropologist, and I was like the I did the ethnographic veto all the time. I was just like, that's not true. That's not universal. Like there's this other culture. Like I was just like, what is this? These people are making claims. So I think I agree that like even currently evolutionary psychology could still be more cross-cultural. But then I can imagine a lot of evolutionary psychologists listening being like, yeah, but compared to regular psychologists, we're already super not weird.

And we were super not weird way before the weird paper. So I think like, you know, I think everybody's doing their best. Um, but I do think I really do strongly feel that um it's and I've said this before, it would be terrible if uh field and behavioral ecology work doesn't stay together with EV-psych. And I would not want to be in an evolutionary psychology or evolutionary behavioral sciences where like the psychologists don't interact with the behavioral ecologist or the cultural evolutionist. And I think to the degree that they're separated, it's not healthy for either side. Yeah. And I think it's just I mean, I I think that in people often think of this as like, okay, now I need to go and test

my pet hypothesis in some other place, right? And if I can find it in the shore and in the US, therefore it's universal, right? And I mean, yes, and I can talk about the sort of logistical hurdles of doing that, right? Because I don't I don't think that necessarily like helicoptering in and throwing your study design that was designed in the West without thinking through how it may or may not be working the way you think it's working is a good idea. But um, but I think that the conversations, like, I mean, same at UCSB, right? Where you've got John and Lita and then you've got Mike, and right. So these plays it's the more important thing was like keeping your mind fresh and thinking about these things by always having people say, but

what about this? But what about this? And so it's it's having developing kind of, you know, at UCLA we have Beck, which is our behavior, evolution, and culture series, right? And where we try to bring in people, but different ways to be able to bring those voices together. And that that's to me matters almost more than like doing a cross cultural experiment and having that be a chapter of your dissertation because it's about, you know, exercising those muscles and thinking about it from like always having those other voices in your head. I think that helps reframe the way you think about all of this. Um and as opposed to just sort of trying to reinforce the beliefs that you already have by saying, like, Oh, I'm gonna drop in and go do this study somewhere else or ask some

behavioral ecologist to run this with the Hadza or the Himba or something like that. Yeah. I couldn't agree more. Yeah, it's this misguided way of thinking of of doing cross-cultural research as a cudgel, as a way of saying, aha, see, it's universal. I told you. I told you so. Um whereas what we should be doing as psychologists as is trying to explain that cultural variation and and show what is at the root of it and and and how the mind is strategically responding to context to produce that variation. We seem to forget as social scientists that the reason we have brains is precisely to do this kind of flexible, contingent, cost-benefit uh analysis that helps us uh respond to the subtleties of our particular circumstances.

You know, a plant doesn't need a brain because it just does photosynthesis regardless of of where it is. Uh what once you start having, you know, a body and and multiple things to do and multiple courses of action to take that are dependent on where you are and what's going on in your environment, you need a brain. That's why we have them. That's why we have the things that we're studying, so that so that we can precisely respond to these kinds of you know uh subtle distinctions in our environments and our and our social uh norms, et cetera. We should be interested in how the mind does that, not trying to look at how the mind does not do that. Right. Yeah. No, it's a very different I mean I think it's a it's a h humble approach, right?

It's sort of it's like it's going in and being like, d do we have theories to explain this? Right? Like d do we have psychological theories to explain this or not? Um and I think the the tradition in psychology that's very domain general, that's sort of like reasoning and rationality, is also like a very it's also conveniently sort of like a very like um uh not to get too anthro but almost sort of like uh imperial or colonial where it's sort of like um reasoning is hard we do it in modern circumstances with money and math and spaceships and these people who are digging in the dirt don't do it. And so we don't even have to study them because they don't even embody what the hard things the mind does is, right?

I hope that's not the right. But I think, but it, but you can you can really see, like, you know, it's very the a very domain general view of the mind, which is sort of like reasoning is the pinnacle of what we study, and math and like trigonometry is explicit math and trigonometry, the kind we learn in schools. Like you can see how that very conveniently means you don't even have to study other people, right? Because it's like it's not even there's not even interesting data there. It's a very different way. And I actually think an evolutionary approach does this very thoroughly, is it completely inverts that and says trigonometry and spaceships don't matter at all. That's not hard at all. What's really hard is like having a kid and having them not die.

And then it completely inverts like who you have to be humble f to and you have to go around and be like, how do people keep their kids alive? That completely changes like who you follow, what questions you ask, what data you collect. And as psychologists, we should just be like, do we have theories of like, you know, your brook your social network? Like, no, we don't. So we're still failing. You know, like every time we have an anthropologist on, I'm like, we really don't have very much yet. Yeah. I mean, I think answer I mean anthropology makes you humble in a way that maybe is less common in psychology, right? Because you're sort of forced at least to go to a place where you know nothing and all of

your sort of intuitions about how the world works are often like it if they're not turned on their heads, they're at least turned 90 degrees or 30 degrees or something, right? And so it's um and and you sort of have to figure it all out from the from the ground up, right? And so there are things, you know, I mean for me the I the idea when I was talking to people about their relationships, like the idea that people were adamant about the idea that you could be in love with multiple people at once, right? Like things like that that I was like, what? Like that's not that's not real, right? Like that and I and so it you sort of forced to have to keep your mind flexible in a way that I think helps

the science, right? Whereas if you're talking to people, if you're working with undergraduates whose minds all work pretty much the way that your mind works, right? You're you're not sort of forced in the same way to have to to flex those muscles and and figure out, you know, you're challenged to have to think about how these things work. And um that to me is it's it's that to me is the fun of it, right? Is that like it's it's that's the exciting part. It's challenging, but that's also you know, what what keeps me in it, I think, is is that it's so fascinating to sit down and talk to some old guy for two hours and come away being like, Whoa, that is not the way I thought about the world. And yet like it makes sense and it like right, but it um it really, you know, forces you

to to keep your mind open. Yeah. You you have you're one of the editors of the human behavioral ecology book. Um, what how do you think about where the field is going, where it's headed? Is it healthy or in in are psychologists um um doing their part or are we failing? I I think it's I think the more integrative it is, the healthier it is. And so we did in this book want to have. So this book was still meant to be, it's called human behavioral ecology, right? And so it was meant to give you that perspective first and foremost. But and so there are chapters, and there's an evolutionary psychology chapter, there's a cultural evolution chapter, and there's like a human biology chapter. And in an ideal world, the book would the the

book would be evolutionary social sciences or something and the whole book would be more integrated, right? But that wasn't really the goal for this book. This book was like we wanted to sort of give an update to the nineteen ninety two um Smith and Winterholder, the what we call the Green Bible, right? I have it on my shelf behind me. I love it from Durban's class. And it's great, right? And it and so we didn't want to, we didn't want to reinvent the wheel. We wanted this to be so what does it look like 25 years later? But we um and so each chapter is more integrative, I think, but it's still mainly, you know, it's like 80% HBE kind of thing. But um I think that my hope is that the next book finds, you know, would be something that really weaves all

three in throughout, right? And gives a more integrated perspective throughout. And I think that is happening more. I mean, I like I said, most of the behavioral ecologists that I know are um sort of over those debates that, you know, is it domain specific versus domain general? And is it, you know, like I think that that kind of like universal versus versus variation, right? Like to me, like those those debates are kind of tired at this point. And most of the people who are really actively doing this don't want to just keep recycling those old arguments, but we want to now think like, okay, we understand those are false dichotomies. Now, how do we move forward? And I think that's where we need better methods.

We need, you know, we need people talking to each other more. Um, and then we can start to do that. I mean, I I I think it's I I think we need to I still think we need to do it by more better better communication um I really think is key. So getting psychologists in, you know, it it doesn't help that we're in different departments so often, right? So, you know, you and I, all three of us actually came from depart universities where those departments were much more integrated with one another. Yes, UCLA and UCSB were were kind were gold examples of anthropsy and other department inter interdisciplinary but I think that trying to to sort of encourage that kind even if you're you may be housed in different departments and there are

issues about you know sort of the incentive structures of publishing in psychology versus anthropology, right? Like I think we're a lot more forgiving in anthropology for having being able to sort of take your time and publish a little less, but that you know, doing field work is hard and long, right? Um, and and that those are real things, right? Like psychologists still have to get tenure in psychology departments. And so you can't ignore the fact that they have a different incentive structure. But I think if you can the the conversational part of it, the like get together once a week and hash this stuff out in a joint lab group and that kind of stuff, like that that can happen even if each party still has their own sort of incentive structures about what and

where they're gonna publish. Like, but getting those conversations to happen more, I think would be the the soapbox I would I would stand on about how to move the field forward. Yeah, that's great. It's just connecting people. So it's uh John Tuby always talked about science as a bunch of little villages. And it's basically that um it he was always like it's so shocking how you think there's these like formal structures, but really it comes down to like who interacts with who on a regular basis. And I mean it's it's just exactly what you're talking about is if you don't have regular interaction face to face with people, you're not going to treat them with the kind of thought or even think about what they're thinking about, right?

It's just the way to sort of be in each other's minds is to be in each other's faces, I guess. In a in a nice way. I think that they were more able to do that, right? Because there were like you look at that pic that picture of the at Mich at University of Michigan from early meeting, right? And it's like you've got biologists, you've got psychologists, you've got anthropologists, like because there weren't very many of them. And I think maybe that's one of the good things about HBE and the sort of downsides of being an evolutionary psychologist is just the size of the fields, right? So like HBE just has always been smaller. And so we've been more forced. I mean I think we always thought about it as like we're on the margins of, you know, of

something like HBAS or something like that. But in in some ways that's kept us honest in that we've been forced to have to to be a little bit more integrative to sort of, you know, grow our networks and things like that. Whereas psychologists can be more insular because there's so many of you, right? And even even just the evolutionary psychologists within this bigger field of psychology, there's so many of you. And so you can sort of silo off and still be surrounded by lots of people and lots of viewpoints. It's just you're not going outside the field as much, right? Yeah. It's a good example of like you can really fail by succeeding, or even evolutionary psychology. We talked about this with Dan Conroy Beam about how like a lot of psychologists because of

psych sort of succeeded in being acceptable, it's become this thing where there's sort of the like LaCroix-flavored, uh like evolution, like just very like a light touch of evolution. So it's not adaptationism, it's not asking about adaptive problems or going adaptive problem first or even considering adaptive problems, but it's just sort of like with a a little garnish of evolution. And then uh and then you get enough people doing that. Again, it's this base rate thing where there's tons of people who do that in a small number of adaptationists. And then you get students coming in, they're like, well, this is all evolutionary psychology, and 80% of it is the weird garnish, right? And that's that's a concern I certainly feel.

So um, so yeah, maybe the secret to success is not succeeding. And and then you let you put sex on top of that, right? So it's like, oh, you want to get undergraduates interested in taking a course? Sex is a title, right? And sex differences, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And because again, going back to the intuition thing, like everybody, right, they take that class, and this it totally explains why my boyfriend did what he did or this, you know. Like every everybody loves to to you know sort of to to do this. But um it and that grows, right? Everybody it's much it's harder to do the anthropology. It's it's not as cut and dry. Like I feel like I my poor students, it's like they come to me with something like that,

and then I'm like, uh yeah, maybe this explains why your boyfriend's doing what they're doing, right? But I always try to sort of like temper those things when they come into my office with things like that because it's like I don't want to reinforce this kind of pop psychology c explanation for all these things. Yeah. I mean, I think there's a trade-off between if you come in with no thought about it and then you really discover the insights and you're excited about it. That's a wonderful thing. But that's the early stage to a more mature grown-up stage, which is and those are just different things, you know. And I think you have to resp uh one, you know, one wants to respect both things, but

exactly right, is just sort of saying, that's true and that's great, but it's going to be more complicated and let's keep going and not just sort of yeah. Do you run into with the work you do? I mean, this might be a transition to like you have a paper about like the manosphere and what it gets wrong. And I don't want to either essentialize a whole group of people too. Like I think there's, especially in a modern environment where people um uh, you know, and especially like young men feel this deep imperative to be mated. And we talked to Chris von Ruden and there's always sort of losers in their mating market. And it hurts. And it's like it's very, you know, like it's a, I think a lack of empathy for people who

feel the pain of like not feeling like the world fits them and they don't understand why they can't be successful in the way they look around that other people are. I think it's a mistake to not empathize with them. But at the same time, that creates a market for bad ideas that aren't either sophisticated or just done right wrong or dangerous. And so do you have um in your experience or in doing this work, uh like where where are you at in terms of like looking at that stuff, or is that something you're not really looking at? Yeah, I mean, I think when I started looking at cuckaldry, and there sort of was this natural use of the term and the within the manosphere but that sort of played on all of all of that.

And and I agree about the the empathy piece, but I think that there are every it's not just men, right, who are who are you know on the on the downside of the the mating market is right that this can go either way and in in in often cases I think there's an equal um kind of movement of of women, particularly as they get older who are worried about finding a partner and things like that in the mating market is often against them, right? And yet. And and there is some, you know, small slice of man hating that goes that goes along with some of that too, right? So it's not that this is like only men who have these sort of negative perceptions. But I think I think some of it, you know, is every of course there are differences in people's um eligibility on the mating

market and things like that, right? But I think also you can these things are my concern as the mother of a 12 year old boy, right, is that I worry that these things are are getting um thrown at them en masse at such a young age that like the first time they have like a crush who doesn't like them back and they can like spiral into this um this sort of dark web of explanations for why they why that happened to them. And in reality, like these are just blips that happen to everybody over the course of a long love life, right? And so I I I think that's from a personal perspective, that's my concern about it, is that it's sort of spinning some of you know, some extrapolations of this theory where they're

you know taking some piece and they're they're spinning it off in a way that wasn't it wasn't meant to be, you know, spun off in that way, and they're able to sort of foment all of this kind of misogyny, basically. Um, But and I do think that we as scientists have a responsibility if we're if we are talking about these topics to get out there and and right these wrongs in the science, right? So I wrote that piece in part because I was concerned about the fact that the science was getting written about in an incorrect way. And like that Scientific American piece is more about cockledry isn't always what you think it is, right? Like there's this idea that it's about men being tricked and these wily women.

And I was trying to sort of counter that with an anthropological perspective. But I think generally we need to not just lean on the excuse of, well, I didn't mean it that way. You know, I only said this one thing, and it's not my fault that that people, you know, took it and spun it off in this other direction. I think that if, you know, if this is my bread and butter in terms of my research, that I also have a responsibility to explicitly say what I think it does and doesn't mean. And that to me is personally important, like in terms of like the way that I that I think about doing science. Yeah. Do you think that people I mean, because there I can see two arguments. One is that people lean on it because it serves their interests and they don't care if

there's science behind it or not. And there's another argument where people lean on it, but other people believe them because it has a scientific credibility. And maybe both things happen. I have no idea, and I don't know to what extent like this is knowable. But like, you know, I've heard people sort of say, well, people, it doesn't matter what scientists say because they don't care. Like they would just use this towards their own ends anyway. And I actually don't know what I think about that answer. I mean, I guess it's sort of just very much like an excuse to not do anything. But I don't know. Do you have a thought about that? Or I mean, maybe it's sort of obvious that it's just sort of, well, we have to do our best.

I mean I think that there are people very explicitly using the sign like picking picking little pieces of these papers and and trying to use them to justify it. So I think that that I don't know what percentage of the audience cares about that argument versus the other part of the argument or just broader argument. But I think that it is happening for sure. For sure. Yeah that's undeniable. Yeah. And so I think that um you know but we need to correct that course correct that where we can and I think again like part of it is my role as a scientist course correcting it and part of it is my role as a mom course correcting it right because I think that it's also you know just taking off the scientist hat like as

a I'm not having conversations with my 12 year old necessarily about why the science is wrong as much as I exactly you know but I mean more and more but I but um but I think that that we we need to be aware that this stuff is happening and that they are, you know, I mean this gets more into arguments about the role of social media and all this kind of stuff. But I think that that the science is is feeding into it and and we just it I I hope that we can also do the science that gets the nuance a little bit more out there too, right? Because I think that with all with all things, right? It's easier to digest the the soundbite of it. And um and I I I worry about our culture being just increasingly soundbite oriented, I guess, right?

It's not just like the cuckledry stuff is one example of that, but I think it's this is a bigger, bigger problem that I can't solve. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean it's it's hard to fight against, you know, because the the internet incentivizes the quippy, uh simplistic soundbite. Um, and you know, the best we can do is, you know, try to at least make the nuance and and the real science available for people who are looking for it and want to find it. That's I think one of the big impetuses behind this podcast is is not to, you know, condense the science into a soundbite or into you know a talking point for one or another ideology, but to just give people a real glimpse of what the science is like,

warts and all. It may be boring to some people, but that's okay because reality is complicated and nuanced and hard to understand, and it can sometimes overwhelm uh the puny human mind who is trying to grasp it. Um and so I think that that is one of our goals of of putting this this stuff out there. Yes, it's going to be hard for it to compete with the more uh flashy propagandistic stuff that's out there, but at the very least it is available to be found for the people who want to find it. Um so as we're uh approaching um the the end of our time with you, I'm curious if there's anything you wish that we had talked about that we didn't ask you, any any particular topic that you would have loved to to delve into.

Oh gosh. See, I knew you were going to ask me this and now I still don't. So we we we covered we covered you know cuckoldry, we covered you know concurrency and the Inva, we covered the sociology of science and human behavioral ecology and the manosphere. We really we we covered a lot. Is there I mean hmm we didn't get to one of the one of the things that I had on my list, we didn't get to women's status. I know you had a paper on that. I'm I'm very curious about that. It's it's actually a perfect example of the of the sound bidification of our culture in that you know when men seek status they often do it in a very violent and conspicuous way that is hard for us to ignore. And in fact that is often by design.

But yet women's status seeking tends to be less conspicuous. But it is still there and it is still hugely important and we need to uh understand it as social scientists. So I'm curious what what your take is on on on women's status and and what's going on there. Yeah, I think I mean we did have a paper on this, and we found I think actually what was interesting to me was some of the similarities between what was driving men's and women's status, at least among himbus. So generosity, for example, was important for both. Um, so we had found that previously that, you know, as I talked about, sort of being generous was is a good trait for a man to have, and be and we found that for women too. Surpr would more surprisingly to mean that there wasn't kind of a a as clear

explicit an explanation for it. But I think I think it emphasizes to me the extrinsic parts of status are as important as the in like I think because we're focused on men's status that we often think about this in terms of like um internal qualities about masculinity and strength and and things like that, right? And how good a hunter you are or whatever it is. Right. But I think that the social aspects of how how connected are you and in what ways and how do you treat other people? And so things like respectfulness and generosity and things like that um pop out at me as some of the things that, and maybe those are things that again, because they're a little bit more understated, maybe they're a bigger part of women's status than men's

status. I don't know that we know the answer to that yet, because we just don't have enough data on women's status. But I think that even for men, like those subtle things that are a little harder to pick up because you can't measure them in terms of grip strength or muscularity or something, I'd like to see more work on status, I guess, sort of start to look at that. And Chris does do some of that. But I think that if you look at like the larger body of work, the you know, Male attractiveness and male, you know, the ability to get a woman, there's a a much bigger chunk of the literature looking at physical strength and status coming out of the sort of the legacy of sexual selection, right? But I mean, like we said, we're humans, we're complicated, we're cultural, we're navigating

all of these norms. The ways in which we do that I think is probably much more integrated into status than we've uncovered so far. Yeah. I mean, do you do you buy um so there there's this uh approach to you know women versus men's status seeking and social relationships that you know uh throughout evolutionary history, men were more involved in coalitional competition and and intergroup warfare. Therefore their social strategy should be more geared towards forming, you know, larger coalitions. So they should have a you know a larger number of shallow uh male relationships. And if they have a the fight, they should be able to, you know, uh uh make amends more quickly, whereas women it's a smaller number of more intense social relationships.

There's more of a vibe of egalitarianism and mutual trust. Uh perhaps it's more geared toward uh cooperative uh breeding. Um so that's sort of a perspective I see uh in in the literature approaching, you know, women's versus men's uh sociality and status seeking. Uh do you do you buy that narrative? Do you think it's parts of it are right or parts of it are wrong. Where do you where do you fit in with with that picture? I mean I think I buy that the importance of of status for men and women is going to reflect what their daily lives are like, right? And and the source the rules and norms that they have to abide by. So if you have um but so I think first of all, I guess there's this idea that somehow wider, broader networks are

better than deeper, uh smaller networks. And I right like that because I think we've attached this idea that like human sociality and the ability to like that's all because of men's, you know, large networks or something that we've decided that those are the traits that matter the most and not something about these kind of more subtle um connections. I mean, women often are often the ones who are moving into a whole new household upon marriage, right? So so patrilocal residence is more common than matrilocal residence. And so women are having to create and build a whole new network. Now, maybe that has a few deep connections, but that's still really important in terms of alliance building across groups and things like that.

So that's one part. I think the other part is that women's roles in men's networks are really understudied because they often again are more subtle, right? So if men are making these decisions and the men are the ones who are sitting there having the formal discussions, making those decisions, it's often their wives who are they're having behind the scenes conversations with their wives, their sisters, their mothers, right? Who are all you know uh equally involved in that process, but they may not be their influence may not be as easily picked up in that it may not be as showy. And you know, I think that's another way that I think we need to think about the role of women's status that is it's harder to collect those data, but I think it's important and we

need to again think about new ways that we can try and and actually explicit go explicitly go out and try and try and pick that stuff up. Because I think I I do push back against this general assumption that it is men's um ability to cooperate that has driven us as a species as if women were are in the just because they may have been relegated to the backseat doesn't mean that they are actually in the backseat in terms of how a lot of these decisions are made. Yeah no it's interesting I remember we we we sort of touched on this with our episode with with Brenda Bowser on how women's social influence uh may be less conspicuous and visible by design, uh and that if it is detected, then it often gets

penalized. And so they have strategies where they can try to covertly influence affairs, which unfortunately makes our job as scientists much harder, uh, because now we have to detect this thing as that is intentionally being concealed for strategic reasons. Um but it does it make it uh way more interesting, I think. Um I'm curious if you if you have any thoughts about, you know, the the the strategic nature of of the ways in which uh influence might be concealed. Yeah, I mean I think that if like with Himba, for example, they're making these decisions. Like you can wa the this summer when we were there, um they were having a court case. Um And so the way that they do that is that everybody sort of gathers and they're talking

this through, and then through sort of consensus, they're deciding on what the punishments should be. And it's the met like you can it's so obvious, right? Because the men are the inner circle, the main circle are all of these men, right? And then the women are sitting in groups on the outskirts of that main inner circle. Right. And so you look at that, and your first impression might be, well, it's the men who are making these decisions, and the women are just sidelined where they're just sort of passively listening or something like that. Right. And yet most Timba men will tell you that they've had conversations with their wives and their mothers and other women in their house. So, well, they're all sitting around talking about this stuff and deconstructing it around

the fire at night. And then the men go back the next day and they're, you know they're in that same structure where they're talking but to think that they're not being influenced by those fireside conversations which are you know mixed gender kinds of conversations or like then they go back to their huts and they're lying maybe you know even maybe if the women are more silent around the fire but then they go back to their hut at night and just the husband and wife and she may tell them what she really thinks and you know so I mean yes it is hard to pick up but we know better now right like I I I think this is if you're gonna move the science forward, like if you look at like the ethnographic atlas or something like that,

right? Like a lot of what we take for these cross-cultural work, and this is not to throw shade on the ethnographic atlas, right? Like this was a huge accomplishment to create something like this where we can look at cross-cultural patterns, but most of those were collected by male anthropologists in the 19, you know, 50s, 60s, 40s, whatever it was. Right. And they are they're it's a first pass, right? They're picking up what what they think is going on and um and I think that we now can take that information and know to dig a little bit deeper. Like and and so there's sort of no excuse for not doing that, I guess, is my feeling, right? Like we should we we we shouldn't just take for granted that the the way that people

sit in a circle tells you something about who has the most influence, right? It tells you something, but it doesn't necessarily tell you everything. Right. Make making it what makes it even more challenging is that when the men come forward in the political sphere and propose an idea, they often have an incentive to conceal the fact that the idea came from their wife or their mother or their sister. Or if they're if they're pursuing some agenda, they might have an interest in concealing the fact that their you know their wife was goading them to take this course of action. And so that makes it, you know, we have concealing happening from both the women's end and the man's end, uh, which makes it even harder to figure out what's what's really going on.

Um, you know. If there's a norm of respectfulness, then maybe that like women understand that like it I think if women know they have that influence, then whether they're doing if they're following the norm of doing it behind the scenes, that's okay as long as they have that influence. And I and this is not to say that there aren't places where women have very little influence. Like that is also true, right? Like I don't downplay the idea that like you know male coercion is real. Um I think that we need to be able to disambiguate the cases where it's going on under the scenes versus the cases where where they really are having their their thoughts and opinions. Absolutely. But for you know you know, from an evolutionary perspective, even in cases where women are

are very clearly oppressed and coerced, you would still expect uh from a from an adaptationist perspective that they would effectively play the hand that they were dealt, even if the hand they're dealt is shitty, they're still going to do whatever they can to uh you know cause whatever influence they can cause to uh advance their their interests. Um and so even there I think we we should be trying to delve as as deep as we can to figure that out. Yeah. Yeah. I remember John and Brenda saying that um it was only because they knew the community so well that they could even relay these anecdotes about this kind of cryptic leadership. Um, and that really stuck with me. I was like, Oh boy, we're we're really we're the drunk looking for the keys and the under

the light. Yeah. Yep. Yep. I mean, that's like status and leadership was I feel like I've only really barely scratched the surface on that as a topic. You know, we did this one uh this one paper on it. But I think it takes it it takes years to kind of decide that this is your thing and and and dive into it. Um so and it hasn't been my my area of emphasis so far, but it's you know it's fun to sort of you know pick a new pick a new topic and and start to start to dig in on that too. So but yeah, John and John and Brendan did a lot of that. Um so over many, many years. So I trust their data for sure. Yeah. Well, uh well, uh Brook, thank you so much. We'll have to have you on again because I know there's still so much more to cover.

Um, but that's a good thing because it means that there's just so much more to do. Um, but you know, thank you for coming on. Thank you for doing this work. Um, you know, I think every time we have an anthropologist on, we basically want to say thank you for your service because you know, it's hot and dry and uh, you know, uncomfortable to go to the field. And as you said, it's sort of humbling and difficult. Um, and you know, we get to sit be in our like comfortable living rooms, you know, uh, or talk about it in comfortable chairs, you know, on a podcast. In every sentence, you know, there's like a lot of blood, sweat, and tears that goes into like the sentences you're saying. So we just want to thank you for doing that.

Yeah. Well thank you. It was fun. Uh yeah. So uh uh David, any anything? No, this was this was a blast. Thanks so much for for talking to us. Well, here you are at the end of another episode of Evolutionary Psychology, the podcast. If you're still listening, that means you must be liking what you're hearing. And if you like what you hear, then what can people do, Dave? Uh they can support us by leaving a good review. Our reviews have sort of petered off. So uh yeah, please, if you're listening, um leave a review. Yeah, absolutely. Things you like, things you don't like, uh ideas for future episodes, ideas for possible guests. We are open to hearing all of it. Um, if you're so inclined, you can check out our Patreon page and support us there, or uh

you can just say something uh nice about us on social media, spread the word. Yeah, and David still needs that fanny pack. So somebody get on there. So if you have a fanny pack, please send it my way. You can reach out to me uh individually. I won't give my uh contact information right here, but you you know where to go. You can email the the you can email the email the podcast. Please send a picture of the fan factor so I can make sure we'll make sure David gets it. We'll make sure David gets it. It's very the dimensions are very important. But thank you very much for listening. Um and yeah, we're we just have a wonderful guests. I'm very happy with our guests. Yeah, our guests are fantastic.

We can send them fanny packs. Yeah. Yeah. All right. See you next week.