WEBVTT 00:00:00.160 --> 00:00:05.600 David, um what is uh a podcast that isn't this one that you like? 00:00:06.320 --> 00:00:10.000 Uh I like uh Hidden Minds, that NPR podcast. 00:00:10.640 --> 00:00:11.200 Okay, good. 00:00:11.360 --> 00:00:12.560 Well maybe we should go on them. 00:00:12.720 --> 00:00:14.800 Uh if you're listening to anybody, that'd be great. 00:00:14.880 --> 00:00:15.200 Yeah. 00:00:15.360 --> 00:00:15.600 Yeah. 00:00:15.840 --> 00:00:17.840 Um we can give them a bump. 00:00:18.000 --> 00:00:18.960 Um anyway. 00:00:19.680 --> 00:00:21.920 Uh that's funny. 00:00:22.160 --> 00:00:25.200 On that note, um, what are we listening to in this podcast? 00:00:25.670 --> 00:00:30.070 Well, we're not listening to it, but you, the listener, are, and you are listening to uh 00:00:30.310 --> 00:00:34.470 actual evolutionary psychology by actual evolutionary psychologists. 00:00:34.550 --> 00:00:38.310 And the name of the podcast is Evolutionary Psychology the Podcast. 00:00:38.470 --> 00:00:40.150 It was the Royal We, by the way. 00:00:40.310 --> 00:00:41.670 But the bro Yeah, okay. 00:00:41.990 --> 00:00:43.270 I often mix up the Royal We with the code. 00:00:43.430 --> 00:00:46.870 No, it's like it's it doesn't translate over the um acoustic modality. 00:00:47.190 --> 00:00:47.910 Well, actually it doesn't. 00:00:47.990 --> 00:00:48.150 Yeah. 00:00:48.230 --> 00:00:52.390 You there's really no is there a text way to sort of I guess scare quotes. 00:00:53.800 --> 00:00:56.360 This is why we're not as popular as the in brain podcasts. 00:00:56.840 --> 00:00:58.680 We have nonsense introductions like this. 00:00:59.000 --> 00:01:02.360 Well, hopefully we haven't scared you away with our scare quotes or lack thereof. 00:01:02.520 --> 00:01:03.240 Uh keep listening. 00:01:03.560 --> 00:01:04.920 But we do have parentheses. 00:01:05.240 --> 00:01:05.720 Yes. 00:01:05.960 --> 00:01:10.360 They're like, you know, we're like, parentheses are I like I prefer the parentheses. 00:01:11.000 --> 00:01:12.680 Gateway directly scare quotes. 00:01:13.000 --> 00:01:14.040 They really are. 00:01:15.890 --> 00:01:19.650 It's like the the marijuana to the cocaine of steroids. 00:01:19.970 --> 00:01:20.770 I love parentheses. 00:01:20.850 --> 00:01:24.610 I I t I have a habit of overusing parentheticals in my writing. 00:01:24.770 --> 00:01:25.330 I just I can't. 00:01:25.650 --> 00:01:26.050 I do too. 00:01:26.210 --> 00:01:26.370 Yeah. 00:01:26.690 --> 00:01:28.290 It started for me as a young age. 00:01:28.450 --> 00:01:29.810 I just thought parenthetical aside. 00:01:31.650 --> 00:01:33.010 It's the comedian in you. 00:01:33.090 --> 00:01:35.010 It's the bad writer in me on the comedian in you. 00:01:35.330 --> 00:01:35.650 It's true. 00:01:35.810 --> 00:01:39.890 Parentheticals are great for highlighting contradictions and double standards. 00:01:40.210 --> 00:01:43.940 I I made great use of them in in my uh alliance theory paper. 00:01:44.100 --> 00:01:45.380 They're they're they came in very handy. 00:01:45.780 --> 00:01:46.420 Fantastic. 00:01:46.660 --> 00:01:46.900 Yeah. 00:01:47.140 --> 00:01:50.340 Um so if you love parentheses, stay tuned. 00:01:50.660 --> 00:01:50.980 Yep. 00:01:51.300 --> 00:01:52.100 Or hate them. 00:02:06.100 --> 00:02:09.220 Her name is Brooke Shelza, she's a professor at UCLA. 00:02:09.530 --> 00:02:13.770 She uh studies a group of pastoralists in Namibia known as the Himba. 00:02:14.090 --> 00:02:19.850 Uh, and uh she just absolutely does fascinating work um studying a um an 00:02:19.850 --> 00:02:24.650 interesting culture that that will be uh different uh from our vantage point. 00:02:24.730 --> 00:02:29.130 And I think uh her research really complicates and adds nuance to the evolutionary 00:02:29.130 --> 00:02:33.020 psychology of mating and jealousy uh and parental investment. 00:02:33.340 --> 00:02:33.980 Yeah, absolutely. 00:02:34.220 --> 00:02:37.980 And I love that we also get in a discussion from there about sort of like what are the 00:02:38.140 --> 00:02:42.540 what's the landscape of the evolutionary social sciences and how are we doing and our 00:02:42.540 --> 00:02:45.500 psychologists and anthropologists talking to each other enough. 00:02:45.740 --> 00:02:51.710 And um we even talk about um uh you know what what else do we 00:02:51.710 --> 00:02:52.350 talk about, David? 00:02:52.670 --> 00:02:56.990 Well, we talked about the manosphere briefly, right and how evolutionary social science can 00:02:56.990 --> 00:02:58.430 sometimes be perverted. 00:02:58.590 --> 00:03:02.830 We talked about uh the perverse incentive structures of academia, the replication crisis. 00:03:03.150 --> 00:03:03.710 Yes, that's right. 00:03:03.790 --> 00:03:08.990 The replication, yeah, we really that was uh I I feel like that was a real um uh moment 00:03:08.990 --> 00:03:09.230 there. 00:03:09.390 --> 00:03:11.070 I think that's a highlight of this episode. 00:03:11.390 --> 00:03:12.110 Yeah, for sure. 00:03:12.270 --> 00:03:15.550 Um it was just really fun, wide-ranging conversation. 00:03:15.630 --> 00:03:17.390 Um I think you'll have a great time listening to it. 00:03:17.740 --> 00:03:18.620 Enjoy. 00:03:24.060 --> 00:03:25.340 Okay, we're recording. 00:03:25.420 --> 00:03:30.540 Today we have Brooke Shelze, who is a biological anthropologist in the Department of 00:03:30.540 --> 00:03:32.140 Anthropology at UCLA. 00:03:32.220 --> 00:03:37.740 It's a fantastic department with lots of uh very wonderful evolutionary 00:03:37.980 --> 00:03:39.180 social scientists. 00:03:39.340 --> 00:03:41.580 Um Brooke, thanks for being here today. 00:03:41.900 --> 00:03:43.340 Thanks for having me on. 00:03:44.130 --> 00:03:49.970 You study a really interesting population that has very interesting 00:03:49.970 --> 00:03:50.690 attributes. 00:03:50.850 --> 00:03:55.730 And I was reading up on them, and we'll talk about it in a second, but I also immediately 00:03:55.810 --> 00:04:01.330 upon reading upon about it, I also imagine that like one worries about essentializing a 00:04:01.330 --> 00:04:04.530 whole category of people or a whole group of people. 00:04:04.690 --> 00:04:10.610 And so I'll just say now that the group of people that you study has noted for the degree 00:04:10.610 --> 00:04:14.360 to which there's promiscuity or uh paternity uncertainty. 00:04:14.440 --> 00:04:16.600 And we'll get into that jargon later. 00:04:16.920 --> 00:04:21.960 But I also imagine that like if I were you, and maybe you can tell me if you're I'm wrong, 00:04:22.120 --> 00:04:27.880 like I'd be a little bit tired about just having the whole community and the whole 00:04:27.880 --> 00:04:32.440 world there that you know so well being distilled down to that weird point. 00:04:32.840 --> 00:04:38.730 Um so can you just sort of start off by by saying like what it is that you study. 00:04:38.810 --> 00:04:42.810 Um, and we can sort of go, you know, over the different topics. 00:04:42.890 --> 00:04:46.170 And we just had Karen Kramer on talking about cooperative breeding. 00:04:46.330 --> 00:04:52.250 And I think people are really interested in issues, especially in modern circumstances, 00:04:52.410 --> 00:04:57.770 um, especially with changes in the mating market of like, you know, cuckoldry and 00:04:58.240 --> 00:05:01.680 especially like the incel movement and those kinds of things, right? 00:05:01.760 --> 00:05:07.280 The manosphere, where there's sort of men who feel uh downtrodden or 00:05:07.280 --> 00:05:08.240 left out. 00:05:08.400 --> 00:05:13.840 Um, and uh yeah, and I know I will shut up in a second and ask a question. 00:05:14.000 --> 00:05:19.520 But basically, you know, I think as I understand, a lot of your work sort of is relevant to 00:05:19.520 --> 00:05:25.280 all of that in this context of a society that has sort of a unique 00:05:25.370 --> 00:05:29.370 uh area on the distribution of mating situations. 00:05:29.530 --> 00:05:35.450 So can you tell us a little bit about who you study and what's unique about them, but then 00:05:35.450 --> 00:05:40.490 also in the context of have we sort of essentialized them too much or what can they tell 00:05:40.490 --> 00:05:40.650 us? 00:05:40.730 --> 00:05:41.210 Yeah. 00:05:41.690 --> 00:05:42.250 Sure. 00:05:42.650 --> 00:05:46.650 So I actually went there to study cooperative breeding. 00:05:47.530 --> 00:05:53.450 My dissertation, uh, which was in Australia, was looking at the roles of grandmothers 00:05:53.450 --> 00:05:54.090 and things like that. 00:05:54.170 --> 00:06:00.160 And so I originally went there wanting to interview women about the sort of 00:06:00.160 --> 00:06:01.600 transition to motherhood. 00:06:01.840 --> 00:06:07.440 And um so that was I I didn't actually go in to study anything about mating at all 00:06:07.600 --> 00:06:07.920 really. 00:06:08.160 --> 00:06:13.120 Um and it wasn't until I started talking to people that these topics came up. 00:06:13.280 --> 00:06:18.000 Um and they started talking to me about this in the context of collecting their 00:06:18.000 --> 00:06:19.360 reproductive histories. 00:06:19.520 --> 00:06:22.230 And then I realized, like, oh, they keep bringing this up. 00:06:22.310 --> 00:06:23.910 Maybe this is something I should ask about. 00:06:23.990 --> 00:06:27.670 So I kind of followed the question found me, I guess. 00:06:28.230 --> 00:06:34.230 Um, but yes, I would say that at this point, the the majority of the work 00:06:34.230 --> 00:06:40.150 that I have done with them has looked at um the the kind of pattern of what I 00:06:40.200 --> 00:06:41.720 call concurrency, right? 00:06:41.960 --> 00:06:47.320 Which is the idea that you have both a formal marital partner and then informal partners as 00:06:47.320 --> 00:06:47.480 well. 00:06:47.640 --> 00:06:52.920 And both men and women have multiple partners, and it's quite common. 00:06:53.560 --> 00:06:59.240 As far as sort of essentializing them, I mean I think one of the things that I was 00:06:59.240 --> 00:07:04.670 hoping would come out of this work was the idea that there's a spectrum, right? 00:07:04.750 --> 00:07:09.230 And they may fall on one end of the spectrum in terms of how prominent these extramarital 00:07:09.230 --> 00:07:09.950 relationships are. 00:07:10.110 --> 00:07:15.550 But the idea was to expose the spectrum because I think so much of what we do is 00:07:15.870 --> 00:07:20.430 on the very other end of the spectrum where extrapare paternity is at, you know, something 00:07:20.430 --> 00:07:21.070 like 1%. 00:07:21.710 --> 00:07:26.340 And that's where all of our work and all of our theorizing and our ideas about like you 00:07:26.340 --> 00:07:31.140 know what's universal and what's not all kind of come from this very thin slice. 00:07:31.380 --> 00:07:37.380 And so it took my sort of working with a population who was maybe at the other end of the 00:07:37.380 --> 00:07:40.580 spectrum to actually highlight the fact that there was a spectrum. 00:07:40.740 --> 00:07:44.660 So I think in that sense, I'm trying not to essentialize them. 00:07:44.740 --> 00:07:48.990 And then, you know, obviously all populations are in flux. 00:07:49.150 --> 00:07:55.070 And so I can see changes in their norms and behaviors about this stuff just in the 15 years 00:07:55.070 --> 00:07:56.350 that I've been working there, right? 00:07:56.510 --> 00:07:58.910 As they become more market integrated and things like that. 00:07:59.070 --> 00:08:01.470 So I can talk more specifically about that. 00:08:01.550 --> 00:08:05.870 But yeah, I'd love I'd love to hear about how their their norms and behaviors have changed 00:08:05.950 --> 00:08:10.030 uh over the past fifteen years and what you think might be behind those changes. 00:08:10.510 --> 00:08:15.380 Yeah, so uh there's when I first started working there, it was 00:08:15.460 --> 00:08:16.580 2010. 00:08:16.900 --> 00:08:20.740 There was pretty much no use of contraception. 00:08:20.980 --> 00:08:26.980 They were um the vast majority of their diet was still quite subsistence based. 00:08:27.060 --> 00:08:32.820 Um, so they are pastureless, so it's a lot of um sour milk and meat. 00:08:32.900 --> 00:08:36.500 Um, and they were they have gardens where they're growing maize and things like that. 00:08:36.740 --> 00:08:42.550 But they had a very long term drought that started a few years after I started 00:08:42.550 --> 00:08:42.950 working there. 00:08:43.030 --> 00:08:44.790 It lasted almost 10 years. 00:08:45.750 --> 00:08:51.190 And that brought more of an influx of things like store bought maize into the communities 00:08:51.270 --> 00:08:51.910 and things like that. 00:08:51.990 --> 00:08:55.110 And then other things also were just changing with the times, right? 00:08:55.190 --> 00:09:00.550 So, like, oh even though there's no electricity out there, they all have little mini solar 00:09:00.550 --> 00:09:02.230 panels to charge their cell phones, right? 00:09:02.310 --> 00:09:08.240 So basically, everyone has a cell phone, um, uh, but no one has indoor plumbing 00:09:08.240 --> 00:09:10.640 or running water or anything like that. 00:09:11.360 --> 00:09:17.360 So as they get more market integrated, you can and they're gonna, their ideas 00:09:17.360 --> 00:09:19.680 about inheritance and things like that are gonna shift. 00:09:19.840 --> 00:09:25.040 So to put my anthropologist hat on for a minute, they have something called double descent, 00:09:25.120 --> 00:09:27.440 is the inheritance practice that they have. 00:09:27.600 --> 00:09:32.830 So that means that everybody has membership with both their maternal clan and their 00:09:32.830 --> 00:09:36.190 paternal clan, and those are both important in different ways. 00:09:36.350 --> 00:09:39.390 But the wealth comes down matrilaterally. 00:09:39.550 --> 00:09:45.310 So instead of going father to son, the majority of the cows go mother's brother to 00:09:45.310 --> 00:09:46.190 sister's son. 00:09:46.830 --> 00:09:49.710 So they pass through the mother's side of the family. 00:09:49.870 --> 00:09:55.520 And typically, when you have that happen, it opens up more 00:09:55.680 --> 00:10:00.960 possibilities to be able to have higher paternity uncertainty because if you don't have to 00:10:00.960 --> 00:10:05.040 worry about whether your son is your son, right? 00:10:05.120 --> 00:10:10.960 But you're giving it to your sister's son, there's it it's a little bit more of a 00:10:10.960 --> 00:10:16.560 safe bet, basically, um, that you're giving your wealth to somebody that you are 00:10:16.560 --> 00:10:19.040 indeed biologically related to. 00:10:19.290 --> 00:10:25.290 So you tend to see more paternity uncertainty in cultures that have 00:10:25.290 --> 00:10:27.930 matrilineal or matrilateral inheritance. 00:10:28.730 --> 00:10:33.850 That's that's really interesting just because it suggests it's it's obvious, but I want to 00:10:33.850 --> 00:10:39.770 say it out loud that it's not just that the psychology is sort of obviously it's 00:10:39.770 --> 00:10:42.700 concerned about paternity uncertainty. 00:10:42.940 --> 00:10:46.620 But I think there's this idea that sort of like it either exists or it doesn't. 00:10:46.700 --> 00:10:49.180 And if it doesn't exist, it's horrible. 00:10:49.260 --> 00:10:53.100 And there's just sort of like a mushroom cloud coming out of somebody's head, as opposed to 00:10:53.100 --> 00:10:56.380 sort of there's just facultative responses to that, right? 00:10:56.620 --> 00:11:02.380 Where it's not only whether or not there's paternity uncertainty, there's also the issue of 00:11:02.380 --> 00:11:06.730 like, well, what's the transmission of wealth or status? 00:11:06.890 --> 00:11:12.570 And we've talked about how um reproduction is not just about sex, it's about 00:11:12.570 --> 00:11:14.890 inheritance and it's about investing. 00:11:15.050 --> 00:11:17.770 And I think the psychology of that and is really important. 00:11:17.850 --> 00:11:23.770 And it sounds like what you're saying is intrinsic to sort of how people get by 00:11:23.770 --> 00:11:29.600 with or tolerate or or or embrace um different kinds of 00:11:29.600 --> 00:11:34.160 reproductive strategies is not just about the sex, but it's intimately tied to resource 00:11:34.160 --> 00:11:36.800 flows, especially intergenerational resource flows. 00:11:37.040 --> 00:11:37.520 Yep. 00:11:37.760 --> 00:11:43.760 And so what you're seeing now is that with more market integration, if cat the more 00:11:43.760 --> 00:11:46.400 cash becomes the currency instead of cows, right? 00:11:46.560 --> 00:11:49.760 So when cows were the currency, everybody knew the rules, right? 00:11:49.920 --> 00:11:55.290 You had to give these cows from uncle to nephew, or and as you get cash 00:11:55.450 --> 00:11:58.170 though, the rules become more flexible, right? 00:11:58.250 --> 00:12:02.890 Like, well, if I sell these cows and I have the cash in hand, can I give that cash now to 00:12:02.890 --> 00:12:03.850 my own kids? 00:12:04.010 --> 00:12:09.690 And so we've asked people about sort of in an ideal world, especially young people, what 00:12:09.690 --> 00:12:10.250 would you prefer? 00:12:10.410 --> 00:12:14.570 Would you prefer to have this uncle to nephew system or the father to son system? 00:12:14.730 --> 00:12:19.130 And a lot of the younger people were saying, no, I'd prefer to go father to son. 00:12:19.530 --> 00:12:24.680 And the way one way to get around that is sell your cows and give the cash to your kids, 00:12:24.840 --> 00:12:25.000 right? 00:12:25.160 --> 00:12:30.840 So the more they switch to the cash economy, the more ability there is to kind of break 00:12:30.840 --> 00:12:32.200 with some of those norms. 00:12:32.360 --> 00:12:37.320 But then along with that, what you also see is that people are going to start caring more 00:12:37.320 --> 00:12:43.000 about paternity certainty because if they're giving their wealth now father to son, then 00:12:43.000 --> 00:12:46.840 they may care more that those sons are biologically their sons. 00:12:47.330 --> 00:12:52.210 So my which then is going to start to constrain women's autonomy and other things. 00:12:52.370 --> 00:12:56.770 So normally I think we think about things like globalization as being good for women's 00:12:56.770 --> 00:12:57.570 autonomy. 00:12:57.890 --> 00:13:02.770 This may be a situation where over the next 10 or 20 years you start to see a lot more 00:13:02.770 --> 00:13:08.690 restrictions on women's autonomy as they become sort of more market 00:13:08.850 --> 00:13:09.490 integrated. 00:13:09.570 --> 00:13:14.690 So it's these things, like you said, are are really sort of situational and context 00:13:14.770 --> 00:13:15.410 dependent. 00:13:17.220 --> 00:13:22.500 a really beautiful example of how uh the relationship between resource flows and mating 00:13:22.500 --> 00:13:25.620 systems is is is a bi-directional causal relationship. 00:13:25.700 --> 00:13:30.660 That on the one hand, that if we if the resource flows through uh mothers, such that uncles 00:13:30.660 --> 00:13:34.820 are investing in their nephews rather than their own direct children, uh then that allows 00:13:34.820 --> 00:13:39.780 uh women to engage in more uh you know extramarital uh relationships because you know 00:13:39.940 --> 00:13:43.570 husbands don't have or their husbands don't have to worry about whether their kids are 00:13:43.570 --> 00:13:47.570 their own because they're not investing in those kids so much as their uh sisters' kids. 00:13:47.810 --> 00:13:53.730 But on the other hand, um uh the resource flow also uh sorry uh affects the mating 00:13:53.730 --> 00:13:53.970 system. 00:13:54.130 --> 00:13:55.490 Or did I get that backwards? 00:13:55.730 --> 00:13:57.970 The mating system affects the resource flow. 00:13:58.130 --> 00:14:04.130 Um and uh so if if we're in a position where I want to be uh investing in my direct kids 00:14:04.340 --> 00:14:07.700 such that we're, you know, I have cash in my pocket and I w I want to make sure it goes to 00:14:07.700 --> 00:14:10.340 uh uh my children as opposed to my nephews. 00:14:10.500 --> 00:14:14.580 Uh then all of a sudden I need to create paternity certainty and that and that affects the 00:14:14.580 --> 00:14:15.460 mating system. 00:14:15.700 --> 00:14:21.060 Um and so uh I think it's a really interesting example of just how complex and mind-bending 00:14:21.060 --> 00:14:26.350 these things can become um but uh I I I'm curious. 00:14:26.430 --> 00:14:30.830 So like I just I want to get into the like the details of of how this works. 00:14:31.230 --> 00:14:36.830 So um right now uh the the men are primarily 00:14:36.830 --> 00:14:40.510 investing in their sisters' kids, is that right? 00:14:41.470 --> 00:14:42.110 Not exactly. 00:14:42.190 --> 00:14:43.310 So this is not exactly okay. 00:14:43.550 --> 00:14:46.350 This is the part that I think i complicates it even more. 00:14:46.670 --> 00:14:52.670 Is that one of the really interesting things that we found that to me was uh 00:14:53.100 --> 00:14:59.100 almost more mind-blowing than the high rate of extra pair paternity itself is how much 00:14:59.340 --> 00:15:05.340 the men really are still investing in their their kids, whether or not they are 00:15:05.340 --> 00:15:06.540 biologically their kids. 00:15:06.700 --> 00:15:06.940 Right. 00:15:07.020 --> 00:15:11.980 So you would ex-I think our expectation is that in a system like this where there's high 00:15:11.980 --> 00:15:15.980 extra pair paternity, that the men wouldn't be investing very much, right? 00:15:16.300 --> 00:15:21.750 Yet what we see is side by side a high rate of extra pair paternity, 00:15:22.070 --> 00:15:25.910 and pretty high norms of paternal investment. 00:15:25.990 --> 00:15:30.390 So if you so we've asked men, you know, we we we did these vignettes with them where we 00:15:30.390 --> 00:15:36.390 asked, we gave them situations where the men um in this in the 00:15:36.390 --> 00:15:42.160 story bias their investment toward their biological child um against the child, their sort 00:15:42.160 --> 00:15:44.400 of social child who wasn't biologically theirs. 00:15:44.560 --> 00:15:49.840 And the norms are really, really strong that you that that's a bad thing to do, that you 00:15:49.840 --> 00:15:51.680 should be treating those kids equally. 00:15:52.080 --> 00:15:57.680 And then we were we mapped the answers to those vignettes onto actual investment 00:15:57.840 --> 00:15:58.320 patterns. 00:15:58.480 --> 00:16:04.400 So we developed vignettes that mapped onto forms of of uh investment that we 00:16:04.400 --> 00:16:06.870 had actual behavioral data on. 00:16:07.270 --> 00:16:10.870 And it the norms are stronger than the behavior, right? 00:16:11.030 --> 00:16:12.550 Which is often the case. 00:16:12.710 --> 00:16:17.190 But even the behavior was still quite strong, particularly with things like bride price, 00:16:17.350 --> 00:16:17.590 right? 00:16:17.750 --> 00:16:23.030 So something where it's like a very public form of paternal investment, the men really 00:16:23.030 --> 00:16:26.550 didn't want to shirk their duties towards their kids. 00:16:27.030 --> 00:16:32.780 So they have really strong norms that you should treat your kids equally, and it's not 00:16:32.780 --> 00:16:34.140 because they're being tricked, right? 00:16:34.220 --> 00:16:37.500 So you might think, oh, well, maybe that's just because they don't know which kids are 00:16:37.500 --> 00:16:41.820 theirs and which kids are not theirs, and so they have to sort of take the risk. 00:16:41.980 --> 00:16:42.780 That's not the case. 00:16:42.860 --> 00:16:47.660 They're actually very good, and we know this from the genetics now at knowing which kids 00:16:47.660 --> 00:16:50.780 are there, are theirs and not theirs biologically. 00:16:51.100 --> 00:16:56.460 And um I can there's sort of a fun story of how we figured that out, but um 00:16:57.150 --> 00:17:01.710 but they they have these really strong norms about social fatherhood. 00:17:01.790 --> 00:17:07.550 And that's and there's a lot of reputation um sort of tied up in being a good father and 00:17:07.550 --> 00:17:09.150 treating those kids equally. 00:17:09.630 --> 00:17:10.190 Interesting. 00:17:10.350 --> 00:17:16.270 So uh uh there is a social norm that th uh the men should treat their wives' 00:17:16.430 --> 00:17:21.710 children equally, regardless of whether those children are their biological children or 00:17:21.710 --> 00:17:24.830 not, or whether someone someone else has fathered them. 00:17:25.070 --> 00:17:27.480 Um it's extremely interesting. 00:17:27.720 --> 00:17:32.760 Um so I'm I I want to get into the to the fun story of how you found out that uh men 00:17:32.760 --> 00:17:37.800 actually know which kids are their own, because it seems like a pr a pretty tough thing to 00:17:37.800 --> 00:17:43.160 figure out if you know you don't know, you know, the timing of of intercourse and and how 00:17:43.160 --> 00:17:44.200 it related to offspring. 00:17:44.280 --> 00:17:47.960 And sometimes kids resemble their their parents, but you know, sometimes it can be kind of 00:17:47.960 --> 00:17:48.440 ambiguous. 00:17:48.760 --> 00:17:53.560 So how how how are they figuring this out and and and what's the fun story behind how you 00:17:53.560 --> 00:17:55.320 figure it out what they're figuring out? 00:17:56.310 --> 00:17:59.670 So there's a couple different mechanisms that they're using. 00:17:59.830 --> 00:18:05.270 One is physical resemblance, and and they talk about the idea that once the kid gets to 00:18:05.270 --> 00:18:10.150 sort of walking around age, that's when they really can start to get a good look at them 00:18:10.150 --> 00:18:12.550 and s and start to use resemblance. 00:18:12.790 --> 00:18:18.230 But they also are using both gossip and direct communication with their spouses. 00:18:18.550 --> 00:18:24.070 So often people know that their partners have other partners, and 00:18:24.390 --> 00:18:28.500 they uh you know, will sometimes talk directly to their wives, and their wives will just 00:18:28.500 --> 00:18:30.260 say, like, yeah, this one's from the boyfriend. 00:18:30.420 --> 00:18:31.540 Not all couples will do that. 00:18:31.700 --> 00:18:36.420 That sort of varies depending on the sort of communication in a particular couple. 00:18:36.660 --> 00:18:40.260 They also have long periods of spousal separation. 00:18:40.340 --> 00:18:44.580 So the men go off to a cattle post and they'll be gone for several months, right? 00:18:44.660 --> 00:18:49.750 So in terms of coital frequency and things like that, when they come back, they'll know 00:18:49.750 --> 00:18:52.550 they were gone for four months and they come back and their wife is pregnant. 00:18:52.630 --> 00:18:54.550 That's you know a pretty good sign. 00:18:54.630 --> 00:18:58.070 So they've got sort of a suite of different ways of doing this. 00:18:58.310 --> 00:19:02.150 But even so, right, it's we didn't know how accurate they they would be. 00:19:02.310 --> 00:19:08.230 So one of the things that when we did this paternity study, we developed the methods 00:19:08.230 --> 00:19:09.190 with the community, right? 00:19:09.270 --> 00:19:12.310 Because this, as you can imagine, is a difficult thing to do. 00:19:12.550 --> 00:19:17.830 And so we developed this whole double blind method where we, the anthropologists, wouldn't 00:19:17.830 --> 00:19:20.980 know more than they would about the results. 00:19:21.060 --> 00:19:24.340 So we have a whole complicated system to do that. 00:19:24.500 --> 00:19:29.060 Um, but we went back before we published to present the results. 00:19:29.220 --> 00:19:35.220 And so we we presented to them uh, you know, uh if if a man 00:19:35.220 --> 00:19:41.220 has 10 kids, uh around five of them, it turns out, are gonna be he were uh kids where he's 00:19:41.220 --> 00:19:42.980 not the the biological father. 00:19:43.140 --> 00:19:45.700 And they were like, Yeah, yeah, we've been telling you this for ten years. 00:19:45.860 --> 00:19:50.610 Like this is that so he has so so so any of the kids uh that his wife has, he has about a 00:19:50.610 --> 00:19:53.010 50% chance of them being his kids. 00:19:53.810 --> 00:19:54.290 Interesting. 00:19:54.450 --> 00:19:58.050 What's interesting about that is that it's it's mathematic if you're thinking in Darwinian 00:19:58.050 --> 00:20:02.450 terms, you know, it's mathematically equivalent to invest in those kids versus investing uh 00:20:02.450 --> 00:20:08.220 in his sister's kids because there his kids are 25% uh genetic overlap with 00:20:08.220 --> 00:20:12.540 him and with uh the wife, if half of the kids are his and half aren't, you know, fifty 00:20:12.540 --> 00:20:13.820 divided by two is twenty five. 00:20:13.900 --> 00:20:19.660 So the in terms of the math in Darwinian terms, investing in either uh w woman's kids is 00:20:19.660 --> 00:20:20.540 about the same. 00:20:20.780 --> 00:20:21.500 Which is really interesting. 00:20:21.820 --> 00:20:26.140 Yes, except that if you go up generation, right, assuming that this is happening across 00:20:26.140 --> 00:20:31.580 generations, then your sister, there's a likelihood that your sister is not actually your 00:20:31.900 --> 00:20:33.090 full sister. 00:20:33.730 --> 00:20:34.450 Ah, okay. 00:20:34.610 --> 00:20:35.090 Interesting. 00:20:35.490 --> 00:20:37.730 So it does get a little bit more complicated than that. 00:20:38.050 --> 00:20:41.890 But if but assuming it's your full sister, then assuming it's your full sister, then yes. 00:20:42.850 --> 00:20:43.810 And it's 48%. 00:20:44.210 --> 00:20:45.490 So it's a little bit less, right? 00:20:45.650 --> 00:20:51.490 But um so but um so then we said to them, so the other thing we found 00:20:51.810 --> 00:20:55.730 was that both men and women, so we had their assertions. 00:20:55.810 --> 00:21:00.180 So the when I first started doing this, I was just asking people, do you think these kids 00:21:00.180 --> 00:21:01.220 are yours or not yours? 00:21:01.300 --> 00:21:01.460 Right. 00:21:01.540 --> 00:21:05.780 So the women had started telling me on their own when I was doing their reproductive 00:21:05.780 --> 00:21:06.260 histories. 00:21:06.420 --> 00:21:11.380 And then I started when I interviewed the men the following summer, I I a you know, they 00:21:11.380 --> 00:21:13.940 would list their wives and their kids, and they have polygyny, right? 00:21:14.020 --> 00:21:16.420 So there'd be a often a long list of kids. 00:21:16.660 --> 00:21:20.820 And I they would just go through and say, you know, mine, not mine, mine, mine, not mine, 00:21:21.150 --> 00:21:21.390 mine. 00:21:21.790 --> 00:21:26.830 So we had all those assertions that what we could then map onto the genetic paternity 00:21:26.830 --> 00:21:27.470 results. 00:21:27.630 --> 00:21:33.630 Um, and neither the community nor us know the 00:21:33.630 --> 00:21:35.310 specific individual results. 00:21:35.390 --> 00:21:39.790 So a statistician who's never been to the field and doesn't know them got that information. 00:21:39.950 --> 00:21:41.310 But we knew the aggregate. 00:21:41.390 --> 00:21:46.590 So we knew that both men and women were right about 70 to 75% of the time. 00:21:46.750 --> 00:21:51.380 So when I presented that back to them, I said, you know, here's the extra pair paternity 00:21:51.380 --> 00:21:52.340 result for the community. 00:21:52.420 --> 00:21:58.020 And then about seven out of ten times your uh you know, people are are 00:21:58.020 --> 00:22:00.980 correct in knowing whether the child is theirs or not theirs. 00:22:01.140 --> 00:22:04.260 And their response to that was, Oh no, we're better than that. 00:22:04.580 --> 00:22:09.380 And and I said, Oh, you know what makes you think so, right? 00:22:09.860 --> 00:22:15.590 And and they said, well, because when we're talking to you, the men 00:22:15.750 --> 00:22:21.270 are going, both men and women for different reasons, I think, are gonna tell you that a 00:22:21.270 --> 00:22:27.110 child is is the husband's, even if they're pretty sure that it's 00:22:27.110 --> 00:22:27.430 not. 00:22:27.990 --> 00:22:33.670 Because we want you to understand those those men think of those kids as theirs, 00:22:33.830 --> 00:22:34.150 right? 00:22:34.390 --> 00:22:38.680 So basically they're telling me that there's gonna be a reporting bias, right? 00:22:39.080 --> 00:22:45.080 Um, and especially because some of those um assertions we got pretty far back, you 00:22:45.080 --> 00:22:48.840 know, it was maybe like five years previous by the time we were telling them about the 00:22:48.840 --> 00:22:50.840 paternity results, because we did that earlier on. 00:22:50.920 --> 00:22:53.000 So I didn't know people as well, things like that. 00:22:53.160 --> 00:22:54.920 So I wanted to take that seriously, right? 00:22:55.000 --> 00:23:00.200 If somebody tells you that people are giving you, you know, skewed data, you wanna actually 00:23:00.200 --> 00:23:01.080 look at that, right? 00:23:01.240 --> 00:23:06.950 So we went back and we looked at the cases where they were wrong, and I'm using 00:23:06.950 --> 00:23:08.230 air quotes here. 00:23:08.470 --> 00:23:13.990 Um, and what we found was that 90% of the time that they were wrong, they were wrong in 00:23:13.990 --> 00:23:14.950 that direction, right? 00:23:15.110 --> 00:23:18.390 Where they were saying the kid was theirs, but it wasn't theirs. 00:23:18.790 --> 00:23:24.310 So, given that, we figured that actually that 70-75% 00:23:24.630 --> 00:23:30.500 accuracy is probably a floor level of accuracy, and they really do know quite well. 00:23:30.580 --> 00:23:33.780 Um so I think they're combining all these different methods. 00:23:33.940 --> 00:23:39.300 A lot of times these are paternity results not on kids but who you know the on adults, 00:23:39.460 --> 00:23:39.620 right? 00:23:39.700 --> 00:23:42.260 Because we're taking these data across generations. 00:23:42.340 --> 00:23:47.620 So they've had a lot of time to sort of figure this out and they seem to be pretty good at 00:23:47.620 --> 00:23:47.780 it. 00:23:47.940 --> 00:23:49.860 So they're not being tricked. 00:23:50.090 --> 00:23:54.010 I mean, there may be individual cases where they would be surprised by the result, but for 00:23:54.010 --> 00:23:56.890 the on the whole, they're not being tricked. 00:23:57.130 --> 00:23:57.370 Yeah. 00:23:57.930 --> 00:23:59.130 It's it's really interesting. 00:23:59.210 --> 00:24:05.130 I mean, from a uh very simple evolutionary perspective, the idea that people are good at 00:24:05.450 --> 00:24:11.450 detecting uh paternity would would concomitantly then suggest 00:24:11.450 --> 00:24:14.730 that that would go along with sort of design for investment, right? 00:24:14.890 --> 00:24:19.580 If you didn't invest, if you were uh, you know, I don't know, a shark or something and you 00:24:19.580 --> 00:24:23.740 just, you know, made it and then you like swam away, there's no you don't worry about 00:24:23.740 --> 00:24:25.260 paternity because you're not investing. 00:24:25.420 --> 00:24:30.940 So I think the idea of like parental and especially um uh male parental 00:24:30.940 --> 00:24:34.860 investment, uh the idea of that would sort of be consistent with this idea that we're 00:24:34.940 --> 00:24:40.620 you're in your data, you're getting evidence of people being quite good at um detecting 00:24:40.750 --> 00:24:42.030 paternity uncertainty. 00:24:42.190 --> 00:24:46.110 Or that's not the right term, but like yeah, but assessing paternity uncertainty. 00:24:46.510 --> 00:24:52.510 Except I think given that they are so good, it's surprising that they have these norms to 00:24:52.510 --> 00:24:53.550 treat them equally, right? 00:24:53.790 --> 00:24:59.470 So they have these norms set up that are saying, Yeah, we know you can people are 00:24:59.550 --> 00:25:00.590 figuring this out. 00:25:00.990 --> 00:25:05.640 Despite that, we have set up this strong norm structure that you should treat those kids 00:25:05.640 --> 00:25:06.120 equally. 00:25:06.520 --> 00:25:08.840 And then what yeah, and what do you think is so? 00:25:08.920 --> 00:25:13.320 I mean, that's the um, and it sounds like because of market integration, it's kind of 00:25:13.320 --> 00:25:16.840 eroding a little bit because of the fungibility of money. 00:25:16.920 --> 00:25:22.920 But what to what do you attribute the um how do you get a stable dynamic where that norm 00:25:22.920 --> 00:25:23.560 is there? 00:25:23.800 --> 00:25:26.360 What do you have you I'm sure you've thought about a lot about that? 00:25:26.440 --> 00:25:26.680 Yeah. 00:25:27.160 --> 00:25:32.630 Well, I think in so I think part of the reason they got to that place was because of this 00:25:32.630 --> 00:25:33.750 spousal separation, right? 00:25:33.910 --> 00:25:35.830 So you have other pastoralists, right? 00:25:35.910 --> 00:25:39.430 Like this isn't just like a thing about pastoralists or something for something, for 00:25:39.430 --> 00:25:40.150 example, right? 00:25:40.310 --> 00:25:44.710 But they lots of paras pastoralists have long periods of spousal separation, right? 00:25:44.950 --> 00:25:50.150 Sort of somewhat built into sort of to herding, especially in drought prone environments, 00:25:50.230 --> 00:25:50.550 right? 00:25:50.710 --> 00:25:56.150 And yet other pastoralists have very, very strict norms about paternity. 00:25:56.390 --> 00:26:00.260 Um And I but you sort of have two choices, right? 00:26:00.420 --> 00:26:06.100 One is that you can say we're going to relax these norms and and sort of 00:26:06.420 --> 00:26:08.260 not do a lot of mate guarding. 00:26:08.500 --> 00:26:10.900 The other is to sort of double down on mate guarding. 00:26:11.060 --> 00:26:16.180 And the and I so I think it's sort of a there's sort of a package of things that were going 00:26:16.180 --> 00:26:16.340 on. 00:26:16.420 --> 00:26:21.730 You've got the historical cultural inertia of matriliny, you've got the spousal separation 00:26:21.810 --> 00:26:24.050 making the cost of make guarding higher. 00:26:24.290 --> 00:26:27.090 You've got high value to those kids. 00:26:27.330 --> 00:26:29.970 So the kids are working really hard, right? 00:26:30.050 --> 00:26:32.770 So I just listened to your episode with Karen Kramer, right? 00:26:32.850 --> 00:26:34.850 And she was talking about how much work kids do, right? 00:26:34.930 --> 00:26:38.770 So similar in pastoral societies, the kids are working hard from a young age. 00:26:38.930 --> 00:26:42.130 They're they're value added to the household, right? 00:26:42.530 --> 00:26:47.720 And so in that sense, that sort of lowers the cost of those kids, right? 00:26:47.800 --> 00:26:52.440 And so you've got sort of this whole kind of suite of different things that sort of create 00:26:52.440 --> 00:26:56.040 a perfect storm that allows these norms to come into place. 00:26:56.360 --> 00:27:02.360 And then for each individual man, he's not just losing paternity on 00:27:02.360 --> 00:27:03.720 some of the kids of his wives. 00:27:03.800 --> 00:27:07.750 He's gaining, because they have, it's not just the wives, boyfriends, right? 00:27:07.830 --> 00:27:09.510 They also have all these girlfriends. 00:27:09.670 --> 00:27:13.270 So they are gaining paternity outside of marriage. 00:27:13.510 --> 00:27:19.030 And so I think there's sort of a balancing out that happens where and we've 00:27:19.270 --> 00:27:23.670 again, we haven't looked at this with the genetics, but when I've looked at sort of across 00:27:23.670 --> 00:27:29.180 age cohorts, what you see is that men can't don't get married until their late 00:27:29.180 --> 00:27:29.740 20s. 00:27:29.900 --> 00:27:35.660 They don't really um start sort of building marital families until sort of later. 00:27:36.060 --> 00:27:41.500 And so they're getting a lot of extra, they're they're gaining a lot of paternity early on, 00:27:41.660 --> 00:27:41.820 right? 00:27:41.980 --> 00:27:46.140 In their teens, their twenties, before they can marry, before they've acquired a bunch of 00:27:46.140 --> 00:27:46.700 resources. 00:27:46.860 --> 00:27:49.550 They're sort of sneaking paternity. 00:27:49.790 --> 00:27:54.830 And then as they get older, they are probably losing more paternity. 00:27:54.910 --> 00:28:00.270 But over the if you look at the oldest cohort, it sort of is balanced out how much they 00:28:00.270 --> 00:28:05.310 think they've lost versus how much they've gained from their their own extramarital 00:28:06.030 --> 00:28:07.230 relationships. 00:28:07.470 --> 00:28:12.840 So it kind of is is keeps everybody happy in a way too, right? 00:28:13.000 --> 00:28:18.200 Because it's like if if the old men were bogarding all of the paternity, you got a lot of 00:28:18.200 --> 00:28:20.760 unhappy men, especially when you have polygyny, right? 00:28:21.160 --> 00:28:27.080 And this is the way to to you know ensure in a way that those young men are still getting 00:28:27.080 --> 00:28:29.400 access, they're still fathering kids. 00:28:29.640 --> 00:28:34.600 Um, but the you know, they're just not doing it through a the sort of traditional marital 00:28:34.600 --> 00:28:35.640 pathway when they're young. 00:28:35.890 --> 00:28:36.050 Right. 00:28:36.290 --> 00:28:36.850 That's fascinating. 00:28:37.090 --> 00:28:42.450 Do do the uh do the men invest at all in their girlfriend's kids or how how what's the 00:28:42.450 --> 00:28:43.170 relationship there? 00:28:43.410 --> 00:28:44.610 Yeah, good question. 00:28:44.770 --> 00:28:45.730 Um, yes. 00:28:45.970 --> 00:28:50.850 And so kids often know who their biological father is, right? 00:28:50.930 --> 00:28:54.450 Um, and certainly the social father is primary, right? 00:28:54.530 --> 00:28:59.380 So the that husband-wife relationship is still quite strong, but kids will often know. 00:28:59.460 --> 00:29:04.260 And so, for example, if a child is sick, um, the mother or somebody from the mother's 00:29:04.260 --> 00:29:08.340 family might send somebody to the boyfriend's compound. 00:29:08.580 --> 00:29:13.860 There's no obligation, but there's sort of a norm that you would do something. 00:29:14.100 --> 00:29:18.260 So they might just come to the compound and say, This child is sick, right? 00:29:18.340 --> 00:29:22.430 And then it's up to them to decide whether they want to contribute, you know, contribute a 00:29:22.430 --> 00:29:26.350 goat or something that they can sell to get money, but often they will. 00:29:26.670 --> 00:29:32.110 Um, so there's those kind of like specific responses to emergencies, but also 00:29:32.270 --> 00:29:33.950 boyfriends give stuff to girlfriends. 00:29:34.030 --> 00:29:37.550 So we've tracked all those um transfers. 00:29:37.870 --> 00:29:42.670 Cash is a really good thing to give a girlfriend because it's easy to sort of slip away 00:29:43.310 --> 00:29:47.950 versus a goat or something that you're bringing home, and then then there's sort of you're 00:29:47.980 --> 00:29:50.780 sort of breaking the code of silence in a way, right? 00:29:51.340 --> 00:29:52.780 Creating common knowledge of the transfer. 00:29:53.020 --> 00:29:53.180 Yeah. 00:29:53.740 --> 00:29:57.740 If you come home with this goat and you say like, so sometimes they'll have workarounds. 00:29:57.820 --> 00:30:00.140 So they might, you know, show me goat. 00:30:02.620 --> 00:30:03.420 Just wandered in here. 00:30:03.500 --> 00:30:04.220 I don't know where it came from. 00:30:05.420 --> 00:30:09.750 But they'll but the the boyfriend will drop a goat off at the girl's uncle's compound. 00:30:09.990 --> 00:30:12.150 Then she'll go to her uncle's compound and get that goat. 00:30:12.310 --> 00:30:14.790 And she'll come home and the husband will say, Where'd you get that goat? 00:30:14.870 --> 00:30:16.870 And she'll say, Oh, from my uncle's compound. 00:30:17.030 --> 00:30:17.430 Right. 00:30:18.390 --> 00:30:20.710 It was coming from the boyfriend. 00:30:20.790 --> 00:30:25.750 So it's so it's it's so like recognizable, right? 00:30:25.830 --> 00:30:31.750 I I love this about anthropology or humans, is just or any species really when 00:30:31.750 --> 00:30:32.710 it comes to this stuff. 00:30:32.790 --> 00:30:36.550 If you if you look past the superficial variation, it's it's all very recognizable. 00:30:36.870 --> 00:30:42.580 Yeah, So so would you say that the norm that exists with uh the uh the husband's wife's 00:30:42.580 --> 00:30:47.620 kids where he has to treat the kids equally is absent from uh the girlfriend's kids, such 00:30:47.620 --> 00:30:50.740 that, you know, when it went to his wife's kids, he should he should treat the kids 00:30:50.740 --> 00:30:55.620 equally, but if it's his girlfriend's kids, it's okay for him to preferentially uh invest 00:30:55.780 --> 00:31:00.500 in his biological kids and not uh the other uh woman's kids. 00:31:00.660 --> 00:31:02.100 Is that how it works? 00:31:02.580 --> 00:31:04.980 Yeah, I think I think that's right. 00:31:05.060 --> 00:31:11.030 I I'm trying to think if we I guess we haven't yeah, we've looked a little bit at 00:31:11.030 --> 00:31:11.270 that. 00:31:11.430 --> 00:31:13.190 No, yeah, yeah, we have looked at that. 00:31:13.350 --> 00:31:17.830 So we have the we had another one of these sort of vignette games because we do a we we 00:31:17.990 --> 00:31:22.710 these work really well um because we they often have sort of like picture cards and things 00:31:22.710 --> 00:31:23.030 like that. 00:31:23.190 --> 00:31:29.030 So we did another um sort of vignette experiment where we 00:31:29.030 --> 00:31:32.800 had cards where we looked at three different sort of things. 00:31:32.880 --> 00:31:38.880 So we had wife with your child, wife, not your child, girlfriend, your 00:31:38.880 --> 00:31:44.800 child, girlfriend, your child, ex, and then ex-wife, your child, ex-wife, not 00:31:44.800 --> 00:31:45.440 your child, right? 00:31:45.520 --> 00:31:50.960 So we varied the paternity, we varied the type of relationship, um, and then we had them 00:31:50.960 --> 00:31:56.240 allocate like little different kinds of things across those six categories. 00:31:56.560 --> 00:32:01.890 And they definitely Favored paternity, right? 00:32:02.050 --> 00:32:08.050 Um, in all the cases, but less so um in when it was a formal partner, right? 00:32:08.130 --> 00:32:12.770 So you're supposed to treat your wives' kids equally more than your girlfriend's kids. 00:32:13.010 --> 00:32:18.370 Um and and in part what they said was that's because the girlfriend typically, you know, 00:32:18.450 --> 00:32:21.330 has a husband who can who's gonna care for those kids, right? 00:32:21.410 --> 00:32:26.130 So his sort of formalized responsibility, especially the kids that aren't biologically 00:32:26.130 --> 00:32:29.960 hids, is gonna be um weaker, right? 00:32:30.440 --> 00:32:35.800 And what the women say is when you're choosing a husband, 00:32:36.120 --> 00:32:38.040 wealth really matters, right? 00:32:38.200 --> 00:32:43.560 Because you're if you're his wife, you're oblig you're you are he's obligated to give you X 00:32:43.640 --> 00:32:46.440 percentage of his cows to milk every day or whatever. 00:32:46.600 --> 00:32:51.480 If you have a boyfriend, yeah, wealth is important, but generosity is really what's 00:32:51.480 --> 00:32:56.870 important because it's up to him to decide whether he's going to, you know, how much he's 00:32:56.870 --> 00:32:58.070 going to give you. 00:32:58.230 --> 00:33:03.030 And so you could have a really wealthy boyfriend, but if he's stingy, you're not going to 00:33:03.030 --> 00:33:05.030 get much out of that relationship. 00:33:06.550 --> 00:33:07.990 You want a boyfriend who's generous. 00:33:08.150 --> 00:33:13.990 And what the men say is: yeah, being generous is important because if I'm seen as the kind 00:33:13.990 --> 00:33:19.940 of person who is generous towards both my own kids who are not biologically mind or towards 00:33:19.940 --> 00:33:21.220 my girlfriend's kids. 00:33:21.380 --> 00:33:24.100 People see that and they respect me for that. 00:33:24.340 --> 00:33:30.180 And they get sort of cachet among the men in other kinds of decision-making contexts. 00:33:30.340 --> 00:33:36.260 And so, again, this is like another sort of reinforcing norm that sort of helps the 00:33:36.260 --> 00:33:37.460 system to work, right? 00:33:37.540 --> 00:33:43.490 They're sort of they're sort of rewarded for being a good guy towards these kids 00:33:43.490 --> 00:33:46.530 that everybody knows are are not their kids. 00:33:47.490 --> 00:33:53.410 And is that in part because number one, um, it's just sort of a uh in some sense 00:33:53.490 --> 00:33:57.090 it's like just resource status competition just writ large. 00:33:57.170 --> 00:34:02.450 So sort of, you know, like you're it's intrinsically like, you know, if if David has more 00:34:02.450 --> 00:34:07.170 stuff than I do, it's easy to get a norm around, like, you know, people preferring the 00:34:07.170 --> 00:34:10.960 person who has more stuff, because the person who has more stuff can sort of coerce or you 00:34:10.960 --> 00:34:14.640 know favor curry favor, you know, like that just sort of intrinsic. 00:34:14.720 --> 00:34:19.840 Um, but is it also because uh those are also then 00:34:20.160 --> 00:34:20.800 norms? 00:34:20.960 --> 00:34:24.560 So if I'm that help the biological f father too, right? 00:34:24.720 --> 00:34:30.560 So in the sense of if my son is being taken care of by other 00:34:30.560 --> 00:34:36.240 men, um, right, I, you know, I would almost imagine, and I wonder if this ever happens 00:34:36.400 --> 00:34:41.850 where, you know, do the do this does the biological father ever talk to the social father 00:34:41.850 --> 00:34:46.570 and just sort of say, hey, I noticed, you know, you didn't give my son this. 00:34:46.890 --> 00:34:51.050 Like maybe that's too explicit, but like is that ever happened where, you know, you're kind 00:34:51.050 --> 00:34:56.490 of monitoring your kid and how the social father is treating your kid? 00:34:56.890 --> 00:34:57.450 That's fascinating. 00:34:57.610 --> 00:35:02.330 Yeah, I would imagine that the biological father has an incentive to enforce this norm that 00:35:02.330 --> 00:35:06.780 the marital father should treat the kids equally because he has a stake in that in that 00:35:06.780 --> 00:35:08.460 outcome uh being maintained. 00:35:09.180 --> 00:35:13.500 I think I think it's more unspoken than spoken, right? 00:35:13.740 --> 00:35:19.580 So I don't think that you have a lot of boyfriends and husbands negotiating 00:35:19.580 --> 00:35:21.260 these things individually, right? 00:35:21.420 --> 00:35:26.060 Like that that the sort of norm seems to be out of each other's. 00:35:32.190 --> 00:35:37.150 that, yes, in general, there is this sort of system of indirect reciprocity going on 00:35:37.310 --> 00:35:38.110 underlying this. 00:35:38.190 --> 00:35:43.070 And I've talked to Kim Hill about this with Dace, who also have this system of partable 00:35:43.070 --> 00:35:48.350 paternity, which is similar where the women have multiple fathers sort of linked to these 00:35:48.350 --> 00:35:48.830 kids. 00:35:49.150 --> 00:35:53.070 And so you just sort of generally know, right? 00:35:53.150 --> 00:35:57.440 Like I'm taking care of some kids who may not be mine, but somebody else is taking care of 00:35:57.440 --> 00:35:58.640 my kids in their family. 00:35:58.800 --> 00:36:03.600 And so, yes, everybody is sort of enforcing this norm that we should treat them equally, 00:36:03.920 --> 00:36:06.960 helps me either now or in the future, right? 00:36:07.040 --> 00:36:12.720 So for the, I think what's interesting about it is that for the young men, 00:36:12.800 --> 00:36:17.990 they're counting on the older men doing that for them, right? 00:36:18.230 --> 00:36:23.990 And when you get older, you should have more incentive when you get older to then be like, 00:36:24.150 --> 00:36:29.590 well, I'm probably not, I guess, having any more extramarital kids, although you might have 00:36:29.590 --> 00:36:32.950 extramarital kids still living in other compounds, right? 00:36:33.590 --> 00:36:34.310 That's really interesting. 00:36:35.270 --> 00:36:39.190 Yeah, it's like a straightforward application of reciprocal altruism, but where the 00:36:39.190 --> 00:36:43.750 resource being reciprocated is parental investment and there's an indirect reciprocity 00:36:43.750 --> 00:36:43.990 system. 00:36:44.070 --> 00:36:48.760 And cheating would be the equivalent of you know reneging on that deal and and you know 00:36:49.080 --> 00:36:51.800 neglecting my uh non-biological kids. 00:36:51.960 --> 00:36:55.000 It's a really interesting uh uh example of that. 00:36:55.080 --> 00:36:56.040 That's that's that's so cool. 00:36:56.280 --> 00:36:56.440 Yeah. 00:36:56.520 --> 00:36:59.000 And it's not priv I mean you can't it can't be private. 00:36:59.160 --> 00:37:03.640 I mean this maybe is one of the reasons why it's it's it's as you say like you're saying 00:37:03.720 --> 00:37:05.960 it's it's you know it's just out in the open, right? 00:37:06.040 --> 00:37:06.760 It's really hard. 00:37:06.920 --> 00:37:09.640 And maybe with I mean maybe this is the point with the money, right? 00:37:09.800 --> 00:37:15.590 Is that to the extent that it's policeable or visible, um, you can see the dynamic 00:37:15.750 --> 00:37:16.550 sting stable. 00:37:17.270 --> 00:37:17.670 Yeah. 00:37:17.910 --> 00:37:23.030 Yeah, it's really, I mean, it's I I was not a person who studied norms or anything when I 00:37:23.350 --> 00:37:28.870 started doing this, but it's um the it seems to be like the having those 00:37:28.870 --> 00:37:34.070 norms built in really makes is like the glue that makes the system work. 00:37:34.500 --> 00:37:34.660 Yeah. 00:37:34.900 --> 00:37:37.940 It's a really lovely example of, I mean, just like to cut through. 00:37:38.020 --> 00:37:39.780 It's so complicated if you poke on it. 00:37:39.860 --> 00:37:44.500 It's like this web of like all these stable, but it's really just like there's a lot of 00:37:44.500 --> 00:37:48.660 people who are just worried about like, am I getting screwed or not? 00:37:48.820 --> 00:37:53.460 And there's a stable norm to the extent that everyone's sort of like, I think I'm okay. 00:37:53.860 --> 00:37:58.260 You know, like like my overall costs and benefits are sort of like aligned with everyone 00:37:58.260 --> 00:37:58.660 else's. 00:37:58.740 --> 00:38:01.210 And if that's true, then we can be okay. 00:38:01.290 --> 00:38:02.890 And there's lots of different ways to get there. 00:38:02.970 --> 00:38:06.970 And this is an interesting portion of the possibility space. 00:38:07.530 --> 00:38:07.930 Yeah. 00:38:08.250 --> 00:38:13.370 And I think that's where the the infusion of the cash economy is going to be so interesting 00:38:13.450 --> 00:38:18.330 because is that going to be kind of the thread that you start to pull where now people can 00:38:18.330 --> 00:38:23.680 kind of sneak money in different ways, they can invest differently. 00:38:23.840 --> 00:38:25.120 That may shift their mindset right. 00:38:25.280 --> 00:38:29.520 So it's like, is that gonna be the string that you start pulling on it and it unravels the 00:38:29.680 --> 00:38:31.280 the whole sweater kind of thing. 00:38:31.600 --> 00:38:31.680 Yeah. 00:38:31.840 --> 00:38:32.160 Yeah. 00:38:32.400 --> 00:38:37.040 Well one question I have is like what do kids have you what do kids think about all of 00:38:37.040 --> 00:38:37.280 this? 00:38:37.440 --> 00:38:41.040 You know, obviously as they get older the kids turn into adults and then you talk to the 00:38:41.040 --> 00:38:42.880 adults, but what do the kids think about this? 00:38:43.200 --> 00:38:46.960 I mean the kids seem like they're they're aware too, right? 00:38:47.040 --> 00:38:53.010 Again, like I mean I haven't I guess I haven't asked the kids when they 00:38:53.010 --> 00:38:57.730 are kids whether they know that seemed like sort of like yeah, I mean that's that's 00:39:00.370 --> 00:39:04.690 but what the adults tell me is that the kids know and they will reflect back on their 00:39:04.690 --> 00:39:09.650 childhoods and they'll say like, yeah, I've always known that so and so was my father and 00:39:09.730 --> 00:39:13.740 you know, when I was a kid, if I would run into him, because they don't maybe see them as 00:39:13.740 --> 00:39:14.380 frequently, right? 00:39:14.460 --> 00:39:19.180 But if I'd s if I'd see him, I would he would always give me a little bit of meat or he 00:39:19.180 --> 00:39:20.540 would whatever. 00:39:20.860 --> 00:39:24.060 Buy me a coke if we were both in town or something like that. 00:39:24.220 --> 00:39:28.620 So they they seem to be it doesn't seem to trouble them. 00:39:28.780 --> 00:39:34.380 Um, you know, I think again, because there isn't a stigma about it, they aren't 00:39:34.620 --> 00:39:37.170 they aren't too worried about it. 00:39:37.330 --> 00:39:42.290 I mean, you do and what some of the kids have also interestingly said was sometimes, of 00:39:42.290 --> 00:39:43.650 course, people are people, right? 00:39:43.730 --> 00:39:46.850 Some men are gonna be more or less jealous than others. 00:39:47.250 --> 00:39:52.690 And so we had a vignette about the investment stuff where the vignette was about, you know, 00:39:52.850 --> 00:39:58.360 the father comes home from a funeral and he's bringing a bunch of meat because they 00:39:58.360 --> 00:40:04.360 slaughter cows at funerals, and the non-biological kid runs up to him and 00:40:04.360 --> 00:40:06.680 asks him for some meat, and he says no. 00:40:06.840 --> 00:40:12.840 And then later he's sitting and his biological kid comes up to him and he offers 00:40:12.840 --> 00:40:13.960 that kid some meat, right? 00:40:14.040 --> 00:40:16.760 So that's our like direct bias. 00:40:17.000 --> 00:40:18.440 Is this okay or not okay? 00:40:18.600 --> 00:40:18.760 Right. 00:40:18.840 --> 00:40:22.850 And then we add one of the questions we asked them after that was just, you know, we asked 00:40:22.850 --> 00:40:24.450 them, is this okay or not okay? 00:40:24.610 --> 00:40:27.170 Have you how often do you think this happens? 00:40:27.410 --> 00:40:27.730 Right. 00:40:28.290 --> 00:40:33.010 Um and then um you know what would happen to somebody if they did that. 00:40:33.170 --> 00:40:37.570 And then we asked them if they know of any, you know, tell us a story about this if you 00:40:37.570 --> 00:40:38.130 have one. 00:40:38.210 --> 00:40:41.250 Um trying to get the sort of ethnographic color. 00:40:41.650 --> 00:40:47.260 And a lot of the people said like yeah I either they were in that position or they know of 00:40:47.260 --> 00:40:48.140 that kind of thing. 00:40:48.380 --> 00:40:54.300 So that was the norms were very strong, the behavior was more mixed, as you would expect, 00:40:54.540 --> 00:40:54.860 right? 00:40:55.260 --> 00:41:00.940 Um, and people would say, like, yeah, that that happens, but the other thing 00:41:01.020 --> 00:41:06.940 people would say to your point was it's the men sometimes start off with 00:41:06.940 --> 00:41:11.090 a bias against their non-biological kids, right? 00:41:11.170 --> 00:41:15.330 Especially men who maybe are more jealous or jealous of the particular boyfriend or the 00:41:15.330 --> 00:41:20.050 particular wife who they maybe you know love more than their other wives or something. 00:41:20.370 --> 00:41:25.250 But a lot of times those kids, if they work real, if they're really hard workers in the 00:41:25.250 --> 00:41:28.530 compound, they become their father's favorite kid, right? 00:41:28.690 --> 00:41:32.450 So this again, these things are are really dynamic. 00:41:32.610 --> 00:41:38.100 Um, And so just because you know he might have a bias going in, but you can sort of 00:41:38.100 --> 00:41:38.740 overcome that. 00:41:38.900 --> 00:41:43.540 But sort of what you would expect from an evolutionary perspective, there's more of a 00:41:43.540 --> 00:41:45.140 hurdle to overcome, right? 00:41:45.380 --> 00:41:50.260 Because you do have the the non-fraternity sort of working against you. 00:41:50.420 --> 00:41:56.420 So you've got as kind of good a situation as you can get with having all these norms in 00:41:56.420 --> 00:41:56.660 place. 00:41:56.900 --> 00:42:00.250 But you know, there there are still biases. 00:42:00.330 --> 00:42:03.210 It's not like we found no biases at all in the behavior. 00:42:03.450 --> 00:42:03.690 Right. 00:42:03.770 --> 00:42:07.210 But if the kids expect it, I mean, there's this thing called like the Cinderella effect, 00:42:07.290 --> 00:42:07.370 right? 00:42:07.450 --> 00:42:11.290 Like based on the Cinderella story, which is just like, you know, the the non-biological 00:42:11.290 --> 00:42:14.170 kid gets gets treated really poorly, like Cinderella, right? 00:42:14.250 --> 00:42:18.490 And then she gets, you know, k swept up um in and all is right with the world, right? 00:42:18.570 --> 00:42:20.250 And we empathize with Cinderella. 00:42:20.410 --> 00:42:26.090 But um, but I mean it's also the thing of if the kids sort of understand or or 00:42:26.090 --> 00:42:30.160 calibrated to, you know, this is my social dad. 00:42:30.400 --> 00:42:36.400 I'm not going to get invested as much in as this, the biological kid next to 00:42:36.400 --> 00:42:36.640 me. 00:42:36.880 --> 00:42:40.800 Then if you're calibrated to that, then you're also not pissed off, right? 00:42:40.880 --> 00:42:44.800 You're not like in you're not feeling entitled to that to some degree. 00:42:44.960 --> 00:42:50.400 Um, so you know, that might actually kind of counterintuitively um quell that. 00:42:50.640 --> 00:42:56.130 Um, and and the thing you said about the even all all sequel, though, the social 00:42:56.210 --> 00:42:59.010 relationship you have with the kid changes things. 00:42:59.170 --> 00:43:00.130 I think is really interesting. 00:43:00.370 --> 00:43:04.850 I think really understudied because I mean there's this whole question of like why is there 00:43:04.850 --> 00:43:07.170 so much paternity investment? 00:43:07.330 --> 00:43:11.890 Or why do parents, I mean, like the fact that dads say, like, I want to be with my kids, 00:43:12.130 --> 00:43:16.770 and it's really important that like, you know, I have an influence on my kids is like a 00:43:16.770 --> 00:43:17.650 very universal. 00:43:18.130 --> 00:43:21.890 Well, maybe I mean, but but like, you know, to to some extent. 00:43:21.970 --> 00:43:27.200 Um, And I think that's really interesting from the perspective of the kind of social 00:43:27.920 --> 00:43:33.440 uh affordances your kids have, or your social welfare going forward. 00:43:33.520 --> 00:43:39.280 And I think the sort of abstract social relationship that fathers have with their kids, or 00:43:39.280 --> 00:43:44.960 the way that kids embody their father's aspirations for social 00:43:44.960 --> 00:43:50.000 status and social respect and resources and coalitional support is really 00:43:50.170 --> 00:43:51.050 understudied. 00:43:51.130 --> 00:43:56.970 And I think what you're describing in terms of um wanting that uh 00:43:57.210 --> 00:43:59.610 is is uh is really interesting. 00:43:59.770 --> 00:44:00.410 Yeah. 00:44:00.730 --> 00:44:01.370 Yeah. 00:44:03.930 --> 00:44:09.450 So I want to talk about how your work fits in with the prevailing 00:44:09.450 --> 00:44:12.010 ideas in evolutionary psychology. 00:44:12.250 --> 00:44:17.820 So there's um a lot of work on sexual jealousy um and sexual 00:44:17.820 --> 00:44:20.780 possessiveness uh you know of women by men. 00:44:21.020 --> 00:44:26.700 Uh and the evolutionary logic there is pretty straightforward in that uh men face this uh 00:44:26.700 --> 00:44:29.660 adaptive problem of ensuring paternity certainty. 00:44:29.820 --> 00:44:32.460 Uh women do not have to ensure maternity certainty. 00:44:32.620 --> 00:44:34.700 If it comes out of your body, it's your kid. 00:44:34.860 --> 00:44:37.820 Um there's this saying, you know, mama's baby, papa's maybe. 00:44:38.570 --> 00:44:42.970 And so uh there's a lot of work in evolutionary psychology basically arguing um that 00:44:42.970 --> 00:44:46.570 because men face this unique problem of ensuring paternity certainty, that they have 00:44:46.570 --> 00:44:50.810 evolved uh mechanisms of sexual jealousy and sexual possessiveness. 00:44:50.890 --> 00:44:56.170 There's a lot of empirical work showing that men uh tend to show uh a greater sensitivity 00:44:56.170 --> 00:45:01.100 toward sexual infidelities relative to other kinds of emotional infidelities like having 00:45:01.100 --> 00:45:02.140 feelings for someone else. 00:45:02.300 --> 00:45:06.060 Um and in fact I I believe you've replicated this finding uh uh among the Himba. 00:45:06.540 --> 00:45:12.380 Um so I'm curious w where you think your work w fits into this picture. 00:45:12.540 --> 00:45:16.940 If if it does fit in, how, if if it challenges certain parts of it, which parts do you 00:45:16.940 --> 00:45:19.260 think it challenges and which parts do we need to rethink? 00:45:19.740 --> 00:45:20.060 Yeah. 00:45:20.380 --> 00:45:26.250 So I I had sort of the same instinct that you uh that you did that this 00:45:26.250 --> 00:45:30.810 would be a really interesting population to look at this right because we most of the 00:45:30.810 --> 00:45:36.410 studies of this had been done either in in weird societies or if it was 00:45:36.410 --> 00:45:41.930 non-weird societies it was still typically sort of university populations in in you know 00:45:42.090 --> 00:45:46.890 the global south or something and nobody had done it in a small scale society at the time 00:45:46.890 --> 00:45:52.780 that I did it with him but I think um and I didn't know what I 00:45:52.780 --> 00:45:53.340 was gonna find. 00:45:53.500 --> 00:45:56.300 I I kind of I went in sort of agnostic, right? 00:45:56.380 --> 00:46:00.860 I'm I'm I'm trained as an evolutionary anthropologist, but not an evolutionary 00:46:00.860 --> 00:46:01.500 psychologist. 00:46:01.580 --> 00:46:03.980 So I was but I but I was open, right? 00:46:04.060 --> 00:46:06.060 I was I thought, let's see what we find. 00:46:06.300 --> 00:46:11.100 And we found, I think, two important things that spurred me to think about this more. 00:46:11.260 --> 00:46:15.740 The first was we did replicate the sort of standard bus effect, right? 00:46:15.900 --> 00:46:21.710 Where men more than women were upset by sexual uh jealousy, sexual infidelity 00:46:21.870 --> 00:46:23.710 more than emotional infidelity. 00:46:24.670 --> 00:46:30.670 But the other thing that we found was that both men and women were more upset by 00:46:30.670 --> 00:46:33.390 sexual uh infidelity than emotional infidelity. 00:46:33.470 --> 00:46:34.830 So there was a sex difference. 00:46:34.910 --> 00:46:39.790 It was like 96, 90 something percent of men were more upset by the sex. 00:46:40.830 --> 00:46:44.030 But like 67% of women or something like that were more upset. 00:46:44.190 --> 00:46:50.000 So, right, so it was they if the majority of both were more upset by sexual uh 00:46:50.160 --> 00:46:51.040 infidelity. 00:46:51.280 --> 00:46:56.560 And that looks different than like the US, where you s have a sex difference, but it's more 00:46:56.560 --> 00:46:58.800 like 40 10 or something, right? 00:46:58.880 --> 00:47:03.600 Where like sometimes you've got like actually the majority of both men and women more upset 00:47:03.600 --> 00:47:09.250 by emotional infidelity, but just more men than women were upset by the sexual 00:47:09.250 --> 00:47:10.530 infidelity, if that makes sense. 00:47:11.330 --> 00:47:15.170 So to me, that part was underappreciated, right? 00:47:15.330 --> 00:47:17.250 So, like, yes, we found the sex difference. 00:47:17.330 --> 00:47:20.290 I I'm not, I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, right? 00:47:20.370 --> 00:47:22.290 Like, I think that that's real. 00:47:22.690 --> 00:47:28.690 Um, but I just think that we've gotten so myopic in the jealousy literature, 00:47:28.850 --> 00:47:33.410 in particular, of like focusing on this sex difference and then just like finding the teeny 00:47:33.490 --> 00:47:39.020 tiny variation of ways that we can test this, that we lost 00:47:39.820 --> 00:47:43.180 the other important things that we could learn about jealousy. 00:47:43.820 --> 00:47:49.180 So I then went out and recruited a bunch of anthropologists who were working and had been 00:47:49.660 --> 00:47:53.660 importantly had been working in the places that they worked for long periods of time. 00:47:53.820 --> 00:47:57.740 I think it was like our average was like 11 years that people had been working at their 00:47:57.740 --> 00:47:58.460 field sites. 00:47:58.540 --> 00:48:04.350 Because I wanted people who could help um to sort of groupthink about why you 00:48:04.590 --> 00:48:06.830 might see variation in these kinds of things. 00:48:06.990 --> 00:48:12.030 So we did run that forced choice experiment about which is more upsetting to you. 00:48:12.190 --> 00:48:17.950 But we also looked at the severity of you know how good or bad is it that you know 00:48:18.030 --> 00:48:21.870 if a partner does this with the different kinds of jealousy. 00:48:22.030 --> 00:48:23.950 Because the other, let me take one step back. 00:48:24.030 --> 00:48:27.710 So when I was doing this first with Himba, the other thing that would often happen is you 00:48:27.720 --> 00:48:31.880 know it's a forced choice right so you say you know which is more upsetting to you if your 00:48:31.880 --> 00:48:37.720 partner has sex with someone else or if they fall in love with someone else and and 00:48:37.960 --> 00:48:43.480 you tell them that both both things happen which part is more upsetting and a lot of 00:48:43.480 --> 00:48:49.240 himba maybe unsurprisingly given everything I've I've told you said it's fine both 00:48:49.480 --> 00:48:55.000 both are fine right and I really had to push them to to 00:48:55.690 --> 00:48:57.050 pick one, right? 00:48:57.450 --> 00:48:57.930 Interesting. 00:48:58.490 --> 00:49:02.570 And so that also, again, is a signal, like, yeah, that's very different, right? 00:49:02.650 --> 00:49:07.050 Whereas if you ask this to Americans, they would say both are horrible, right? 00:49:07.370 --> 00:49:08.010 That's fascinating. 00:49:08.330 --> 00:49:10.090 I had to pick which is worse, right? 00:49:10.170 --> 00:49:12.410 But it's a very different sort of starting point. 00:49:12.890 --> 00:49:13.130 Right. 00:49:13.290 --> 00:49:16.890 So would did you ask, sorry, just to clarify, did you ask this question in regard to 00:49:16.890 --> 00:49:21.450 people's um social uh spouse or in regard to their boyfriend or girlfriend? 00:49:21.770 --> 00:49:24.570 We asked it about their uh their husband or wife. 00:49:25.080 --> 00:49:25.320 Got it. 00:49:25.400 --> 00:49:25.560 Okay. 00:49:25.640 --> 00:49:28.760 I it would be interesting to look to see if you would get different results if you asked it 00:49:28.760 --> 00:49:30.280 about their boyfriend or girlfriend. 00:49:30.680 --> 00:49:35.480 I guess I I well I'm trying to think 'cause there probably were some unmarried people in 00:49:35.480 --> 00:49:36.200 the sample. 00:49:36.280 --> 00:49:38.600 So I'd have to look back what the actual wording was. 00:49:38.760 --> 00:49:43.000 But it was supposed to be like a long it was a long term partner, not a short term partner 00:49:43.240 --> 00:49:44.200 that we were asking about. 00:49:44.360 --> 00:49:44.600 Yeah. 00:49:44.920 --> 00:49:45.080 Okay. 00:49:45.560 --> 00:49:49.270 Um and so we went out and replicated this. 00:49:49.510 --> 00:49:55.510 And you know, we had the Chimane and the Hadza and all the the Mosu who 00:49:55.510 --> 00:50:01.270 um also have this sort of walking marriage and you know less more informal partnerships. 00:50:01.350 --> 00:50:06.710 So we wanted to have sort of a range of societies that we chose for reasons that we thought 00:50:06.710 --> 00:50:07.670 might matter. 00:50:07.990 --> 00:50:13.560 Um and um and then we so we first we ran these 00:50:13.560 --> 00:50:17.800 questions about both how upset you were about different kinds of infidelity and then also 00:50:17.800 --> 00:50:18.680 the forced choice. 00:50:18.840 --> 00:50:24.680 And we did find pretty I think the Chamani both men and women, like a hundred 00:50:24.680 --> 00:50:26.840 percent, said they were more upset by the sex. 00:50:27.000 --> 00:50:28.920 So there was no no difference. 00:50:29.000 --> 00:50:34.990 Um But um, but for the most part, across 00:50:34.990 --> 00:50:39.390 all these all these cultures, the the sex difference was there, right? 00:50:39.630 --> 00:50:43.950 So that's the thing that like I mean, like I've heard David Buss talk about this, right? 00:50:44.030 --> 00:50:45.150 Like he likes it, right? 00:50:45.310 --> 00:50:51.150 Because it it it does um reinforce the original hypothesis, which 00:50:51.150 --> 00:50:51.550 is fine. 00:50:51.710 --> 00:50:57.660 I like again, I'm not but to me, the most important thing was how much 00:50:57.660 --> 00:51:01.100 variation there was in the sort of severity of responses. 00:51:01.260 --> 00:51:06.780 And then what we tried to do was not just say there is variation, but try to 00:51:06.780 --> 00:51:09.180 understand what is driving that variation. 00:51:09.900 --> 00:51:14.700 So one of the things that we found was that paternal investment was one of the things that 00:51:14.700 --> 00:51:15.340 was driving it. 00:51:15.420 --> 00:51:20.190 So we, because we had anthropologists who'd been working in these places for a long time, 00:51:20.430 --> 00:51:26.110 we came up with these this sort of survey to be able to ask the anthropologists, 00:51:26.270 --> 00:51:31.390 you know, how much we didn't have behavioral measures of paternal investment that were 00:51:31.390 --> 00:51:33.630 equal across all these different places, right? 00:51:33.710 --> 00:51:36.990 So we had to sort of deal with the fact that there were foragers and pastoralists and 00:51:36.990 --> 00:51:41.630 agriculturalists, and we had like, you know, market integrated people in Okinawa and in the 00:51:41.630 --> 00:51:42.030 US. 00:51:42.110 --> 00:51:46.500 And but we asked sort of about different realms of paternal investment and had this sort of 00:51:46.500 --> 00:51:47.940 paternal investment score. 00:51:48.100 --> 00:51:52.100 And that really mattered for the severity of response, right? 00:51:52.260 --> 00:51:58.100 So the more uh paternal investment there was, the more people were 00:51:58.100 --> 00:52:00.420 upset about about infidelity. 00:52:01.220 --> 00:52:05.220 Paternal investment in the particular relationship that was being discussed. 00:52:05.380 --> 00:52:09.620 Because you c you could, you know, so in the HIBA, for example, uh, there are norms that 00:52:09.620 --> 00:52:13.700 the man should be investing in his wife's kids, but there aren't the same norms that he 00:52:13.700 --> 00:52:15.790 should be investing in his girlfriend's kids. 00:52:15.950 --> 00:52:21.150 So by your logic, you would expect different jealousy responses depending on which partner 00:52:21.150 --> 00:52:22.190 was being evaluated. 00:52:22.590 --> 00:52:23.310 Yes, that's true. 00:52:23.390 --> 00:52:25.550 Although we didn't actually specifically look at that. 00:52:25.710 --> 00:52:30.750 So this was more about like your wife's kid, like your fo your social kids, right? 00:52:30.990 --> 00:52:31.230 Right. 00:52:31.310 --> 00:52:31.470 Okay. 00:52:31.710 --> 00:52:37.070 Um but it but it would be that Himbo would score low l on the lower end because they're not 00:52:37.070 --> 00:52:41.220 giving their wealth, there's no the inherited wealth is going to the nephews, right? 00:52:41.300 --> 00:52:45.060 So on that form of paternal investment, they're gonna score quite low. 00:52:45.380 --> 00:52:50.900 Um, whereas if they had father to child inheritance of some kind, they would score higher. 00:52:51.060 --> 00:52:55.540 But we looked at both inheritance norms, we looked at sort of direct care, like so. 00:52:55.620 --> 00:52:59.060 This is where it's helpful to have anthropologists who could say, like, yeah, dads are 00:52:59.060 --> 00:53:04.350 doing a lot of you know, direct caretaking, kids sitting on their laps, helping with 00:53:04.350 --> 00:53:09.230 feeding, helping with so we had sort of different measures and then we, you know, we um 00:53:09.390 --> 00:53:11.310 combine them all in sort of a score. 00:53:11.550 --> 00:53:11.710 Yeah. 00:53:11.870 --> 00:53:16.190 I I like that that the focus on the sex difference at the expense of the variation. 00:53:16.590 --> 00:53:21.790 That's important not only because we don't want to just focus on, you know, well, there's a 00:53:21.790 --> 00:53:25.630 sex difference, but even from an evolutionary psychological perspective, it tells us about 00:53:25.630 --> 00:53:26.910 the design of jealousy, right? 00:53:27.180 --> 00:53:31.820 And so, like what you're saying is the fact that there's this variation suggests that in 00:53:31.820 --> 00:53:35.900 that it's a function of parental investment, is that it's it comes back to this sort of 00:53:35.900 --> 00:53:38.620 basic deeper thing of am I being screwed over? 00:53:38.780 --> 00:53:43.020 You know, so it's sort of like this thing of like if I'm investing, then I'm angry. 00:53:43.100 --> 00:53:47.900 You know, an analogous thing would be sort of like the theory that, like, if somebody takes 00:53:47.900 --> 00:53:51.990 my land, I'm gonna be angry, but that's actually going to be calibrated by whether or not 00:53:51.990 --> 00:53:53.030 I've invested in that land. 00:53:53.190 --> 00:53:57.430 Like if it's just my land, but I don't get anything out of it, I've never invested anything 00:53:57.430 --> 00:54:03.270 in it, versus my livelihood is tied up into it and I've invested for years or generations 00:54:03.270 --> 00:54:03.590 in it. 00:54:03.670 --> 00:54:05.910 I'm going to have a very different anger response. 00:54:06.150 --> 00:54:09.830 And so if you have your theory is like people get angry when somebody takes their land, 00:54:09.910 --> 00:54:13.510 that's not as good of a theory as like you're angry when it's about investment. 00:54:13.590 --> 00:54:18.640 And it sounds like what you're describing, it really makes jealousy more sophisticated in 00:54:18.640 --> 00:54:20.560 this sort of investment dependent way. 00:54:20.960 --> 00:54:25.840 Yeah, it's not an anti-evolutionary finding to show that culture match, right? 00:54:26.160 --> 00:54:26.560 Exactly. 00:54:26.960 --> 00:54:30.320 Like I think that's the that's I think the the false dichotomy, right? 00:54:31.120 --> 00:54:31.280 Exactly. 00:54:33.840 --> 00:54:34.320 No, no, no. 00:54:34.560 --> 00:54:37.600 Like that's what I try to tell my students from day one, right? 00:54:38.170 --> 00:54:43.690 But like but understanding how these cultural systems work to sort of reinforce the 00:54:43.690 --> 00:54:44.650 evolutionary logic. 00:54:44.810 --> 00:54:50.730 So but I I mean that's I think you know one of the sort of frustrations 00:54:50.730 --> 00:54:55.690 for me with so much of the mating research that's out there is just 00:54:56.570 --> 00:55:01.050 we're I understand that the sex differences stuff is easier to test. 00:55:01.290 --> 00:55:07.180 And so and I think Dan Conroy Beam talked about this too when when you asked him on, right? 00:55:07.420 --> 00:55:13.100 But it's like we've we've gotten so myopic where we're just like we're just really focused 00:55:13.100 --> 00:55:17.980 on these sex differences, and there's it's not the end all be all of understanding our 00:55:17.980 --> 00:55:18.700 mating behavior. 00:55:18.860 --> 00:55:24.700 Like we need to, and I think we all know this, and yet we, you know, people 00:55:24.700 --> 00:55:30.070 keep grasping for it and then doing these sort of small derivations of studies. 00:55:30.150 --> 00:55:35.590 So instead of, you know, it's not just, it's not just that they're not seeing the forest 00:55:35.590 --> 00:55:39.910 for the trees, it's that they've like picked one tree and like we know everything there is 00:55:39.910 --> 00:55:44.310 to know about this one tree, and we're you know ignoring everything else. 00:55:44.470 --> 00:55:45.590 And I think so. 00:55:45.750 --> 00:55:51.750 To me, that was the more important part of that jealousy paper was not that we 00:55:52.360 --> 00:55:57.080 found support for the bus hypothesis across a bunch of small-scale populations. 00:55:57.160 --> 00:56:01.080 It was that it was that we found these other important things and we should be paying 00:56:01.080 --> 00:56:02.280 attention to those too. 00:56:02.680 --> 00:56:02.920 Yeah. 00:56:03.160 --> 00:56:07.560 I think I think we haven't really talked so much about this, but I think this is a really 00:56:07.560 --> 00:56:08.120 important point. 00:56:08.200 --> 00:56:13.720 Is I think from a very naive perspective, people think about evolution as the little parts 00:56:13.720 --> 00:56:15.800 of you that are not rational. 00:56:16.270 --> 00:56:16.510 Right. 00:56:16.670 --> 00:56:20.590 And so it's this idea, like, and I think, Brooke, what you're describing, it's very 00:56:20.590 --> 00:56:25.630 conducive to being appealing, which is sort of like, well, people, of course, just like 00:56:25.950 --> 00:56:28.430 rationally follow costs and benefits. 00:56:28.670 --> 00:56:33.310 And it's only those little things that like don't make sense from like a cost-benefit 00:56:33.310 --> 00:56:36.190 perspective that our evolution or evolution can tell us about. 00:56:36.430 --> 00:56:40.520 And I think there's a kernel of truth to that, which is that if there is this evolved 00:56:40.520 --> 00:56:44.920 design, and even it's running even counter to modern costs and benefits, then like, yeah, 00:56:45.000 --> 00:56:46.520 why else would it be there? 00:56:46.760 --> 00:56:51.000 But it makes this fallacy that the cost and benefits stuff, like in this case of like 00:56:51.000 --> 00:56:55.080 jealousy, is a function of how much investment, that's also evolved design, too. 00:56:55.320 --> 00:57:00.690 And so I think that this comes back to like a very fundamental misunderstanding that 00:57:00.690 --> 00:57:03.730 oftentimes outsiders or untrained people have. 00:57:03.970 --> 00:57:08.210 But then it also then means that that kind of work that's framed that way is more appealing 00:57:08.290 --> 00:57:14.130 because it just appeals to this like un, I mean, frankly, uneducated perspective 00:57:14.290 --> 00:57:16.610 that evolution isn't the little person in my head. 00:57:16.690 --> 00:57:19.490 It's the little, it's the things that are tugging on the little person. 00:57:19.570 --> 00:57:22.690 Like it's the thing that makes me want chocolate even though I don't want it, you know? 00:57:22.930 --> 00:57:25.890 Or it's the thing that makes me want to like have sex with the person even though I don't 00:57:25.890 --> 00:57:26.690 want to, you know. 00:57:26.850 --> 00:57:29.660 So it's like the things pulling on the homunculus, as they say. 00:57:29.900 --> 00:57:30.300 Yeah, yeah. 00:57:30.540 --> 00:57:36.300 And it sounds like this is exactly sort of um what is what you're talking about in this 00:57:36.300 --> 00:57:36.780 perspective. 00:57:36.860 --> 00:57:42.860 And I think it explains um to maybe I I don't have data for this, so it's slightly, you 00:57:42.860 --> 00:57:48.620 know, I'm I'm sort of editorializing a bit, but I suspect um some of the history of 00:57:48.620 --> 00:57:54.290 that is uh is that that was sort of what was fitting with this sort of 00:57:54.530 --> 00:57:59.890 view of sort of if there's a rational reason for it, if there's a cost-benefit logic to it, 00:58:00.050 --> 00:58:04.690 especially in that first wave of psych, you had to stick with that stuff, you know. 00:58:04.770 --> 00:58:08.450 And I think David's work is a great example of like the second wave where it's like, no, 00:58:08.530 --> 00:58:12.610 everything that's cost and benefits, we can take an evolutionary approach and not only just 00:58:12.610 --> 00:58:15.970 post hoc explain it, but actually derive new predictions. 00:58:16.290 --> 00:58:21.560 But yeah, I I'll yeah, I think I think you're you're you're treading in like very you've 00:58:21.560 --> 00:58:24.440 poked on a very deep fundamental issue in the field. 00:58:24.600 --> 00:58:26.120 I would um I'll just end with that. 00:58:26.200 --> 00:58:26.520 Yeah. 00:58:26.920 --> 00:58:31.720 But I think too it's like when you're a graduate student and you come in you're trying to 00:58:31.720 --> 00:58:36.840 figure out your dissertation topic, the the push is find something 00:58:36.840 --> 00:58:37.800 counterintuitive. 00:58:38.670 --> 00:58:38.830 Yes. 00:58:39.150 --> 00:58:44.430 And so there's a lot of emphasis on, you know, like Dan Fessler always says to, you know, 00:58:44.590 --> 00:58:45.790 like, why should I care? 00:58:45.950 --> 00:58:46.190 Right. 00:58:46.350 --> 00:58:50.990 Like, and I and I and I I think he's right to push on that. 00:58:51.070 --> 00:58:51.390 Right. 00:58:51.470 --> 00:58:55.150 But I think a lot of the that comes from, well, if I can come up with something that's 00:58:55.150 --> 00:58:59.870 counterintuitive, then that's a real why should I care moment, right? 00:59:00.350 --> 00:59:03.680 I that's fine if you come up with something like that, right? 00:59:03.840 --> 00:59:09.200 But I think the idea, like to me, it never sat quite right because there are plenty of 00:59:09.200 --> 00:59:09.680 things. 00:59:10.000 --> 00:59:14.560 Just because something is in is intuitive or maps onto what we think doesn't mean that 00:59:14.560 --> 00:59:18.480 there isn't a good evolutionary explanation for why we're doing that thing. 00:59:18.560 --> 00:59:22.880 And it may have to do with the fact that the costs and benefits are, you know, aligned in 00:59:22.880 --> 00:59:23.680 that particular way. 00:59:23.760 --> 00:59:28.670 And I mean, I think this is where behavioral ecology shines is in thinking about some of 00:59:28.670 --> 00:59:33.790 that stuff and looking at the variation and why why we might expect there to be variation. 00:59:34.110 --> 00:59:36.990 Um, and it often does like it makes sense, right? 00:59:37.070 --> 00:59:42.910 So sometimes when you paint it out, it really is sort of intuitive in that 00:59:42.910 --> 00:59:48.040 it's not, you know, but I I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing, right? 00:59:48.200 --> 00:59:53.000 You can still really important insights into what into our behavior. 00:59:53.080 --> 00:59:58.280 Um even I mean in yeah oh sorry go ahead yeah I mean because I even I would I would even 00:59:58.280 --> 01:00:01.640 put it more strongly which is like I think psychologists who don't interact with human 01:00:01.640 --> 01:00:04.200 behavioral ecologists really fall into that trap. 01:00:04.440 --> 01:00:08.510 So you know if you're if you're a human behavioral ecologist and you're like well well, 01:00:08.590 --> 01:00:12.110 from a psychological perspective, well, what's more obvious than like feeding yourself, 01:00:12.190 --> 01:00:12.350 right? 01:00:12.510 --> 01:00:15.070 But a human behavioral ecologist is like not trivial. 01:00:15.230 --> 01:00:19.310 Like you got to go out, you expend calories, calculation of like what's the return on it, 01:00:19.390 --> 01:00:20.750 what's the processing, whatever. 01:00:20.830 --> 01:00:25.710 And that keeps the psychologist um honest because then you're like, oh, if I'm an 01:00:25.710 --> 01:00:29.630 evolutionary psychologist, I can't just trivialize that it's easy to get food. 01:00:29.790 --> 01:00:34.350 There's actually software for calculating like foraging time and the costs I'm incurring 01:00:34.430 --> 01:00:39.400 and the handling time and the return rate and like all this decision making that like the 01:00:39.480 --> 01:00:43.400 the the human behavioral ecologist is telling me as a psychologist I have to look for in 01:00:43.400 --> 01:00:43.880 the mind. 01:00:44.200 --> 01:00:49.000 And so I think like I'd actually put it more strongly that I think especially the 01:00:49.000 --> 01:00:54.600 evolutionary social sciences have to keep that relationship to the extent that they don't, 01:00:54.760 --> 01:00:59.320 it really runs this risk of running this like, well, if your grandmother couldn't tell you 01:00:59.400 --> 01:01:02.920 as a as a a paper published in the psychology journal. 01:01:03.080 --> 01:01:07.750 I think just to there's a site, there's a there's a paper in a psychology journal that's a 01:01:07.750 --> 01:01:10.070 theoretical paper that I think should be retracted. 01:01:10.630 --> 01:01:16.630 Uh and I think it's this paper that is by um uh by Kurt Gray and somebody 01:01:16.630 --> 01:01:16.870 else. 01:01:16.950 --> 01:01:21.270 And it's about uh um, I think it's Dan Gilbert, and it's about like you should do research 01:01:21.270 --> 01:01:24.150 that's surprising and that your grandmother couldn't tell you about. 01:01:24.310 --> 01:01:28.840 Um, and everybody has like said that's not great, but I think it actually should be 01:01:28.840 --> 01:01:29.400 retracted. 01:01:29.480 --> 01:01:30.680 It should be made an example of. 01:01:30.760 --> 01:01:32.360 And it's exactly for this reason. 01:01:32.520 --> 01:01:36.840 And I think like human behavioral ecologists and anthropology and evolution is what keeps 01:01:36.840 --> 01:01:40.200 us honest to asking really important questions about basic things. 01:01:40.520 --> 01:01:41.880 Like how do you not starve? 01:01:42.120 --> 01:01:42.280 Yeah. 01:01:42.600 --> 01:01:47.400 It's it's in fact, it's it's even worse than than uh than you know, uninsightful or 01:01:47.400 --> 01:01:47.880 unproductive. 01:01:47.960 --> 01:01:49.800 It's actually the opposite of what we should be doing. 01:01:50.200 --> 01:01:53.730 If you think about you know doing science from a Bayesian perspective, you want to pursue 01:01:53.730 --> 01:01:56.770 hypotheses with a high prior probability of being correct. 01:01:56.850 --> 01:02:00.850 But if you're searching for the surprising counterintuitive hypotheses, those are by 01:02:00.850 --> 01:02:03.570 definition the ones with the lowest probability of being correct. 01:02:03.730 --> 01:02:07.490 And so what you've produced by pro by with that perverse incentive structure is a false 01:02:07.490 --> 01:02:08.450 positive machine, right? 01:02:08.610 --> 01:02:12.130 You're going out and you're testing all the low probability hypotheses, and you know, by 01:02:12.130 --> 01:02:14.370 chance a few of them will turn up some positive results. 01:02:14.450 --> 01:02:16.930 And what you're getting is a bunch of surprising and false findings. 01:02:17.010 --> 01:02:20.440 It's no, it's no surprise at all that this is leading to a replication crisis. 01:02:20.600 --> 01:02:22.440 But anyway, uh sorry, Bert, I interrupted you. 01:02:23.320 --> 01:02:23.480 Okay. 01:02:23.560 --> 01:02:29.480 I mean, I would I think I would add just one more layer to it, which is that it's 01:02:29.560 --> 01:02:32.280 adding in the cultural evolution layer on top, right? 01:02:32.520 --> 01:02:38.120 Which is so I think the behavioral ecologists, the sort of old school first generation, 01:02:38.280 --> 01:02:44.110 second generation, even behavioral ecologists, were uh really focused on s those 01:02:44.110 --> 01:02:45.950 rules about the ecology, right? 01:02:46.030 --> 01:02:48.030 The ecology and the behavioral ecology. 01:02:48.190 --> 01:02:48.350 Yes. 01:02:48.750 --> 01:02:53.630 And sort of all the conditional strategies based on based on those kinds of factors. 01:02:53.870 --> 01:02:57.070 And often black boxing the culture, right? 01:02:57.310 --> 01:03:03.150 And I think that the next step is then layering in things like norms and why, because 01:03:03.310 --> 01:03:08.140 you know, sometimes those are helping us to like, like I said, they're sort of the glue 01:03:08.140 --> 01:03:11.980 that's helping to enforce these things and and help these things that may be sort of 01:03:11.980 --> 01:03:15.900 counterintuitive, like how do we get to cooperate in these really large groups or how do we 01:03:15.900 --> 01:03:18.460 sustain a system with extra pair paternity, right? 01:03:18.620 --> 01:03:24.060 And so I think that's where we need to sort of complete the circle of these three different 01:03:24.060 --> 01:03:25.900 perspectives, becoming more integrative. 01:03:26.060 --> 01:03:31.820 And and for me, being at UCLA was like mind blowing in that way because I was 01:03:31.820 --> 01:03:37.410 really, you know, I was trained by Eric, Eric Galton Smith, who's, you know, one of the you 01:03:37.410 --> 01:03:41.730 know foremost early human behavioral ecologists, right? 01:03:41.970 --> 01:03:46.690 And um, and he and not not not that he hasn't also integrated this stuff, right? 01:03:46.770 --> 01:03:51.490 But a lot of his early work was that sort of bread and butter behavioral ecology in a in a 01:03:51.490 --> 01:03:52.770 foraging population. 01:03:52.930 --> 01:03:55.090 And when I but that was what I was trained in. 01:03:55.170 --> 01:04:00.660 I never had any no, no psychology training, really no cultural evolution training. 01:04:00.820 --> 01:04:05.540 And then I got to UCLA and it was the time when Rob Boyd was still there. 01:04:05.700 --> 01:04:11.300 And um and so I we had Dan and Clark and Rob and I was like the 01:04:11.300 --> 01:04:16.020 lone behavioral ecologist, human behavioral ecologist in the department. 01:04:16.180 --> 01:04:21.510 And I was like, I felt like I went back to kindergarten, really started as a faculty member 01:04:21.590 --> 01:04:24.790 because I was like, oh gosh, okay, I have to learn all this stuff. 01:04:24.950 --> 01:04:27.670 I have to learn all this new language, these new perspectives. 01:04:27.910 --> 01:04:33.670 But you know, I in a lot of ways feel like I've had more sort of growth as a scholar in the 01:04:33.670 --> 01:04:39.110 faculty part of my career because of that, because I sort of had to exercise all these new 01:04:39.110 --> 01:04:42.630 muscles and think about how we could integrate these different perspectives. 01:04:42.790 --> 01:04:48.340 And it's been I I see a lot of that in like now 01:04:48.420 --> 01:04:54.260 I'm old, like in the generation below mine, you know, of the like I think people are 01:04:54.260 --> 01:04:58.500 naturally at least the behavioral ecologists, I think that's what I know best. 01:04:58.580 --> 01:05:01.940 I don't know whether this is you can tell me whether you think this is true in psychology, 01:05:02.100 --> 01:05:07.380 but the the but human behavioral ecologists I think are more naturally drawing from these 01:05:07.380 --> 01:05:11.380 different fields and integrating them more in their projects in really you know, really 01:05:11.380 --> 01:05:12.980 cool, exciting ways. 01:05:13.220 --> 01:05:19.010 Um I wish I guess my my stereotypical bias is 01:05:19.010 --> 01:05:24.210 that's happening less in psychology, at least from like when you look at like the HBES 01:05:24.450 --> 01:05:27.490 program, um, just in terms of the titles and stuff like that. 01:05:27.650 --> 01:05:29.330 But I don't know, do you think that's happening? 01:05:29.490 --> 01:05:30.530 I'm gonna ask you a question. 01:05:30.690 --> 01:05:33.490 Do you think that's happening in psychology too? 01:05:35.060 --> 01:05:40.820 David, you wanna I mean we can both yeah I I mean uh so could you could you get clear on on 01:05:40.900 --> 01:05:45.700 on on the question what what were you do you think that the evolutionary psychologists are 01:05:45.700 --> 01:05:50.900 increasingly integrating perspectives from behavioral ecology and cultural evolution or are 01:05:50.900 --> 01:05:53.700 they still sort of siloed off? 01:05:54.020 --> 01:05:56.450 Yeah I It depends. 01:05:56.610 --> 01:06:01.730 I mean, so I think yes, uh, but it's happening more slowly than I would like. 01:06:01.970 --> 01:06:07.650 I think slowly but surely we are integrating uh uh and and merging together the the various 01:06:07.650 --> 01:06:08.370 good ideas. 01:06:08.610 --> 01:06:10.530 But you know, progress is is slow. 01:06:10.850 --> 01:06:13.170 Particularly in the social sciences, it happens very slowly. 01:06:13.330 --> 01:06:14.610 So I'd like it to speed up. 01:06:14.690 --> 01:06:17.250 But yeah, I do see um quite a bit of it. 01:06:17.330 --> 01:06:21.570 Um maybe it's just for my background at UCLA where where that's sort of a really great 01:06:21.570 --> 01:06:26.020 example of a bunch of different um perspectives feeding into each other in a in a in a 01:06:26.020 --> 01:06:26.660 productive way. 01:06:26.820 --> 01:06:28.500 Not every department is like that. 01:06:28.660 --> 01:06:31.620 Um, so I so I don't know, but yes, I've I've seen some of it. 01:06:31.700 --> 01:06:32.340 I wish there were more. 01:06:32.420 --> 01:06:32.740 I don't know. 01:06:32.820 --> 01:06:33.380 What do you think, Dave? 01:06:33.620 --> 01:06:37.300 Yeah, I mean, and I came from, you know, I was a student of Lita Cosby's John Tubi. 01:06:37.460 --> 01:06:41.140 And I, you know, I I was there, I'm a generation after Clark. 01:06:41.300 --> 01:06:46.420 Um, you know, and I I was sort of on the end where I still had a lot of interaction with 01:06:46.420 --> 01:06:49.380 Rob Boyd and Pete Richardson and Richardson. 01:06:49.460 --> 01:06:55.430 And um uh I think in Christina Moya we had on, and I talked to Christina Moya 01:06:55.430 --> 01:06:55.590 about this. 01:06:55.670 --> 01:06:59.350 Christina Moya and I spent a lot of time as representatives of sort of John and Lita and 01:06:59.350 --> 01:07:01.030 Rob and Pete, respectively. 01:07:01.750 --> 01:07:02.710 So diplomats between the two. 01:07:03.110 --> 01:07:03.270 Exactly. 01:07:04.230 --> 01:07:05.350 We really spent a lot of time together. 01:07:05.510 --> 01:07:08.870 Um but um and Sarah Matthew too and other people. 01:07:09.030 --> 01:07:14.870 Um but I think I think what what it is is I don't think the gener the 01:07:14.870 --> 01:07:20.560 generation now, I don't think there's any uh there's very little disagreement, I think, 01:07:20.720 --> 01:07:21.200 anymore. 01:07:21.360 --> 01:07:27.360 And I think it's largely a division of labor, where I think um a lot of evolutionary 01:07:27.360 --> 01:07:33.200 psychologists understand the importance of cultural evolution, um, 01:07:33.520 --> 01:07:39.120 but they would view their work as sort of prior to that in the sense of they're still just 01:07:39.120 --> 01:07:45.120 interested in the the evolved design, independent of which norms 01:07:45.120 --> 01:07:47.610 are feeding into it by and large. 01:07:47.850 --> 01:07:51.930 Now there are certain evolutionary psychologists who are really interested in like why is a 01:07:51.930 --> 01:07:56.970 particular place the way it is, or why are particular norms the way they are. 01:07:57.130 --> 01:08:01.850 And the more you know about the psychology, um, you know, you can predict what the norms 01:08:01.850 --> 01:08:04.650 are, and the more you appreciate that there's cultural evolution. 01:08:04.730 --> 01:08:08.170 Like as in your work, we were just talking about the whole first part of this was there's 01:08:08.170 --> 01:08:09.850 all these costs and benefits, right? 01:08:10.010 --> 01:08:15.440 And so your your, if, for example, just to make it concrete, if an 01:08:15.440 --> 01:08:19.360 evolutionary psychologist just went to your field site and never looked at any other 01:08:19.360 --> 01:08:25.200 variation in humans, they might make inferences about the evolved design of human 01:08:25.200 --> 01:08:31.200 software that would not be as accurate if they didn't realize that some of 01:08:31.200 --> 01:08:35.360 this was a consequence of coordinated norms. 01:08:35.600 --> 01:08:36.000 Right. 01:08:36.400 --> 01:08:41.890 And then there's the question of sort of like uh and so it's it makes your evolutionary 01:08:41.890 --> 01:08:46.210 psychology better because then you can ask the question, well, like, where do those norms 01:08:46.210 --> 01:08:46.530 come from? 01:08:46.610 --> 01:08:52.050 And I think Pete boy like uh Rob and Pete's insight 01:08:52.370 --> 01:08:57.090 was in the same way that John and Lita, for example, and other people, I mean, there were 01:08:57.090 --> 01:09:00.690 Smith and Winter Halder were talking about evolved design in '95, too. 01:09:00.770 --> 01:09:04.370 Like they're even human behavioral ecologists were talking about the evolved psychology. 01:09:04.450 --> 01:09:09.480 Um, but the insight of sort of I'm not satisfied with the mind just is the way that is. 01:09:09.560 --> 01:09:11.480 We want an evolutionary explanation. 01:09:11.720 --> 01:09:15.080 Rob and Pete were saying, well, we just don't want to say culture is the way it is. 01:09:15.160 --> 01:09:17.400 We want a causal explanation as well. 01:09:17.640 --> 01:09:22.360 And I think that for, you know, in the same way, like you an old school evolutionary 01:09:22.360 --> 01:09:25.880 psychologist may say, well, those are just norms and they are just the way they are. 01:09:25.960 --> 01:09:29.160 And that's culture, but we're interested in the evolved design. 01:09:29.400 --> 01:09:34.350 The new school is sort of like, no, no, no, the norms come from the evolved psychology too. 01:09:34.430 --> 01:09:35.390 It loops around. 01:09:35.550 --> 01:09:41.550 So I think that's my long-winded way of saying it's in practice, it might be 01:09:41.550 --> 01:09:47.150 that evolutionary psychologists do de-emphasize the norm 01:09:47.310 --> 01:09:53.230 dynamics, but I don't know any of them that aren't excited or interested when 01:09:53.230 --> 01:09:59.000 a cultural evolutionist then picks up the evolved design they're talking about and 01:09:59.080 --> 01:10:03.000 and sort of talks about the dynamics those things create. 01:10:03.240 --> 01:10:07.400 And there are more there are some people starting to do that where they think about what 01:10:07.400 --> 01:10:11.640 are the dynamics the design creates as a way to think about the design itself. 01:10:12.120 --> 01:10:13.800 I don't know if that's helpful. 01:10:14.280 --> 01:10:14.520 Yeah. 01:10:14.680 --> 01:10:19.510 It is, but I I want to pick up on something you said in the middle there, which was that 01:10:19.590 --> 01:10:24.710 you know, if if evolutionary psychology got its origins in Namibia with the himba, right? 01:10:24.870 --> 01:10:28.550 They might different evolutionary psychology might look different. 01:10:28.950 --> 01:10:33.750 But I mean I think the the counterpoint to that is we have to then understand that 01:10:33.750 --> 01:10:39.480 evolutionary psychology looks the way that it does because it was created in a weird 01:10:39.480 --> 01:10:40.040 world, right? 01:10:40.360 --> 01:10:43.160 Like Joe had a big contribution, right? 01:10:43.240 --> 01:10:49.160 Is that like, and so I I think that's where the anthropology is so important because 01:10:49.160 --> 01:10:54.760 we need to keep pushing on this idea of like, is this evolved psychology or not? 01:10:54.920 --> 01:11:00.760 Yeah, like and we can only answer that question if we keep looking at this uh you know 01:11:00.840 --> 01:11:06.360 across cultures and we sort of I think also build in the idea that we are 01:11:06.510 --> 01:11:07.070 flexible. 01:11:07.150 --> 01:11:12.270 Like part of our evolved psychology is that we're flexible and we are a social 01:11:12.910 --> 01:11:17.470 species who probab we don't know what the norms were, right? 01:11:17.710 --> 01:11:23.390 10,000 years ago or 20 or 100,000 years ago, but we but we probably had some, right? 01:11:23.870 --> 01:11:29.400 And so um I think assuming that the that the you know 01:11:29.640 --> 01:11:33.880 very specific psychology that we have and we were raised with and that's helping us come up 01:11:33.880 --> 01:11:39.720 with those predictions, um, you know, we I just think we always need to to push on that and 01:11:39.800 --> 01:11:40.360 and question. 01:11:41.000 --> 01:11:41.640 Yeah, I agree. 01:11:41.720 --> 01:11:46.360 And I think there's a fractal issue too, which is sort of like from uh even even um you 01:11:46.360 --> 01:11:51.320 know old school quote unquote John Alita of psych was very cross-cultural. 01:11:51.400 --> 01:11:53.720 Like they had, you know, the Clark, the Schwartz site. 01:11:53.880 --> 01:11:58.190 And so compared to psychologists, you know, I was like, I was saying this, Christina. 01:11:58.270 --> 01:12:03.630 Like I was I went after UCSB, I went to another university, a psych department had a no 01:12:03.710 --> 01:12:07.710 anthropologist, and I was like the I did the ethnographic veto all the time. 01:12:07.870 --> 01:12:09.390 I was just like, that's not true. 01:12:09.470 --> 01:12:10.270 That's not universal. 01:12:10.430 --> 01:12:11.630 Like there's this other culture. 01:12:11.790 --> 01:12:13.230 Like I was just like, what is this? 01:12:13.390 --> 01:12:14.510 These people are making claims. 01:12:14.670 --> 01:12:19.620 So I think I agree that like even currently evolutionary psychology could still be more 01:12:19.620 --> 01:12:20.580 cross-cultural. 01:12:20.740 --> 01:12:24.420 But then I can imagine a lot of evolutionary psychologists listening being like, yeah, but 01:12:24.420 --> 01:12:27.700 compared to regular psychologists, we're already super not weird. 01:12:27.780 --> 01:12:30.820 And we were super not weird way before the weird paper. 01:12:30.980 --> 01:12:33.860 So I think like, you know, I think everybody's doing their best. 01:12:34.260 --> 01:12:40.100 Um, but I do think I really do strongly feel that um it's and I've said this before, 01:12:40.260 --> 01:12:46.250 it would be terrible if uh field and behavioral ecology work doesn't stay 01:12:46.250 --> 01:12:47.450 together with EV-psych. 01:12:47.850 --> 01:12:51.930 And I would not want to be in an evolutionary psychology or evolutionary behavioral 01:12:51.930 --> 01:12:56.570 sciences where like the psychologists don't interact with the behavioral ecologist or the 01:12:56.570 --> 01:12:57.370 cultural evolutionist. 01:12:57.530 --> 01:13:00.890 And I think to the degree that they're separated, it's not healthy for either side. 01:13:01.210 --> 01:13:01.530 Yeah. 01:13:01.690 --> 01:13:07.440 And I think it's just I mean, I I think that in people 01:13:07.600 --> 01:13:13.520 often think of this as like, okay, now I need to go and test 01:13:13.840 --> 01:13:17.680 my pet hypothesis in some other place, right? 01:13:17.840 --> 01:13:22.720 And if I can find it in the shore and in the US, therefore it's universal, right? 01:13:22.960 --> 01:13:28.720 And I mean, yes, and I can talk about the sort of logistical hurdles of doing that, right? 01:13:28.800 --> 01:13:32.960 Because I don't I don't think that necessarily like helicoptering in and throwing your 01:13:32.960 --> 01:13:38.370 study design that was designed in the West without thinking through how it may or may not 01:13:38.370 --> 01:13:41.250 be working the way you think it's working is a good idea. 01:13:41.490 --> 01:13:46.130 But um, but I think that the conversations, like, I mean, same at UCSB, right? 01:13:46.210 --> 01:13:48.690 Where you've got John and Lita and then you've got Mike, and right. 01:13:48.770 --> 01:13:54.130 So these plays it's the more important thing was like 01:13:54.370 --> 01:14:00.130 keeping your mind fresh and thinking about these things by always having people say, but 01:14:00.130 --> 01:14:00.690 what about this? 01:14:00.770 --> 01:14:01.490 But what about this? 01:14:01.890 --> 01:14:07.440 And so it's it's having developing kind of, you know, 01:14:07.760 --> 01:14:11.680 at UCLA we have Beck, which is our behavior, evolution, and culture series, right? 01:14:11.760 --> 01:14:15.760 And where we try to bring in people, but different ways to be able to bring those voices 01:14:15.760 --> 01:14:16.240 together. 01:14:16.400 --> 01:14:22.320 And that that's to me matters almost more than like 01:14:22.560 --> 01:14:27.520 doing a cross cultural experiment and having that be a chapter of your dissertation because 01:14:27.600 --> 01:14:33.310 it's about, you know, exercising those muscles and thinking about it from like always 01:14:33.310 --> 01:14:34.990 having those other voices in your head. 01:14:35.070 --> 01:14:38.670 I think that helps reframe the way you think about all of this. 01:14:38.910 --> 01:14:44.430 Um and as opposed to just sort of trying to reinforce the beliefs that you already have by 01:14:44.430 --> 01:14:48.190 saying, like, Oh, I'm gonna drop in and go do this study somewhere else or ask some 01:14:48.190 --> 01:14:52.590 behavioral ecologist to run this with the Hadza or the Himba or something like that. 01:14:52.910 --> 01:14:53.230 Yeah. 01:14:53.640 --> 01:14:54.520 I couldn't agree more. 01:14:54.600 --> 01:14:59.080 Yeah, it's this misguided way of thinking of of doing cross-cultural research as a cudgel, 01:14:59.240 --> 01:15:01.320 as a way of saying, aha, see, it's universal. 01:15:01.560 --> 01:15:01.960 I told you. 01:15:02.200 --> 01:15:03.160 I told you so. 01:15:03.400 --> 01:15:09.080 Um whereas what we should be doing as psychologists as is trying to explain that cultural 01:15:09.080 --> 01:15:14.840 variation and and show what is at the root of it and and and how the mind is strategically 01:15:14.840 --> 01:15:17.880 responding to context to produce that variation. 01:15:18.040 --> 01:15:24.010 We seem to forget as social scientists that the reason we have brains is precisely to 01:15:24.010 --> 01:15:30.010 do this kind of flexible, contingent, cost-benefit uh analysis that helps us uh respond 01:15:30.010 --> 01:15:33.210 to the subtleties of our particular circumstances. 01:15:33.370 --> 01:15:37.850 You know, a plant doesn't need a brain because it just does photosynthesis regardless of of 01:15:37.850 --> 01:15:38.570 where it is. 01:15:38.730 --> 01:15:44.200 Uh what once you start having, you know, a body and and multiple things to do and multiple 01:15:44.200 --> 01:15:47.960 courses of action to take that are dependent on where you are and what's going on in your 01:15:47.960 --> 01:15:48.920 environment, you need a brain. 01:15:49.000 --> 01:15:49.800 That's why we have them. 01:15:49.960 --> 01:15:54.280 That's why we have the things that we're studying, so that so that we can precisely respond 01:15:54.280 --> 01:15:59.720 to these kinds of you know uh subtle distinctions in our environments and our and our 01:15:59.720 --> 01:16:01.480 social uh norms, et cetera. 01:16:01.640 --> 01:16:05.960 We should be interested in how the mind does that, not trying to look at how the mind does 01:16:05.960 --> 01:16:06.680 not do that. 01:16:07.000 --> 01:16:07.480 Right. 01:16:08.200 --> 01:16:08.360 Yeah. 01:16:08.610 --> 01:16:12.370 No, it's a very different I mean I think it's a it's a h humble approach, right? 01:16:12.450 --> 01:16:17.890 It's sort of it's like it's going in and being like, d do we have theories to explain this? 01:16:18.130 --> 01:16:18.370 Right? 01:16:18.610 --> 01:16:22.610 Like d do we have psychological theories to explain this or not? 01:16:23.010 --> 01:16:29.010 Um and I think the the tradition in psychology that's very domain general, that's 01:16:29.010 --> 01:16:34.800 sort of like reasoning and rationality, is also like a very it's also conveniently 01:16:34.880 --> 01:16:40.480 sort of like a very like um uh not to get too anthro but almost sort of like uh 01:16:40.720 --> 01:16:46.640 imperial or colonial where it's sort of like um reasoning is hard we do it in 01:16:46.640 --> 01:16:51.680 modern circumstances with money and math and spaceships and these people who are digging in 01:16:51.680 --> 01:16:52.640 the dirt don't do it. 01:16:52.800 --> 01:16:57.600 And so we don't even have to study them because they don't even embody what the hard things 01:16:57.600 --> 01:16:59.310 the mind does is, right? 01:16:59.550 --> 01:17:01.150 I hope that's not the right. 01:17:01.230 --> 01:17:05.070 But I think, but it, but you can you can really see, like, you know, it's very the a very 01:17:05.070 --> 01:17:09.470 domain general view of the mind, which is sort of like reasoning is the pinnacle of what we 01:17:09.470 --> 01:17:15.150 study, and math and like trigonometry is explicit math and trigonometry, the kind we learn 01:17:15.150 --> 01:17:15.950 in schools. 01:17:16.190 --> 01:17:20.940 Like you can see how that very conveniently means you don't even have to study other 01:17:21.180 --> 01:17:21.900 people, right? 01:17:22.060 --> 01:17:25.020 Because it's like it's not even there's not even interesting data there. 01:17:25.100 --> 01:17:26.300 It's a very different way. 01:17:26.460 --> 01:17:31.020 And I actually think an evolutionary approach does this very thoroughly, is it completely 01:17:31.020 --> 01:17:35.020 inverts that and says trigonometry and spaceships don't matter at all. 01:17:35.180 --> 01:17:36.220 That's not hard at all. 01:17:36.460 --> 01:17:40.460 What's really hard is like having a kid and having them not die. 01:17:40.620 --> 01:17:45.090 And then it completely inverts like who you have to be humble f to and you have to go 01:17:45.090 --> 01:17:47.490 around and be like, how do people keep their kids alive? 01:17:47.730 --> 01:17:52.290 That completely changes like who you follow, what questions you ask, what data you collect. 01:17:52.450 --> 01:17:57.410 And as psychologists, we should just be like, do we have theories of like, you know, your 01:17:57.570 --> 01:17:59.010 brook your social network? 01:17:59.170 --> 01:18:00.130 Like, no, we don't. 01:18:00.290 --> 01:18:01.170 So we're still failing. 01:18:01.250 --> 01:18:05.730 You know, like every time we have an anthropologist on, I'm like, we really don't have very 01:18:05.730 --> 01:18:06.530 much yet. 01:18:06.690 --> 01:18:06.930 Yeah. 01:18:07.250 --> 01:18:13.120 I mean, I think answer I mean anthropology makes you humble in a way that maybe 01:18:13.120 --> 01:18:16.000 is less common in psychology, right? 01:18:16.080 --> 01:18:21.840 Because you're sort of forced at least to go to a place where you know nothing and all of 01:18:21.840 --> 01:18:27.200 your sort of intuitions about how the world works are often like it if they're not turned 01:18:27.200 --> 01:18:32.000 on their heads, they're at least turned 90 degrees or 30 degrees or something, right? 01:18:32.240 --> 01:18:38.070 And so it's um and and you sort of have to figure it all out from the from the 01:18:38.070 --> 01:18:38.870 ground up, right? 01:18:38.950 --> 01:18:43.990 And so there are things, you know, I mean for me the I the idea when I was talking to 01:18:43.990 --> 01:18:48.790 people about their relationships, like the idea that people were adamant about the idea 01:18:48.790 --> 01:18:52.390 that you could be in love with multiple people at once, right? 01:18:52.470 --> 01:18:55.110 Like things like that that I was like, what? 01:18:55.430 --> 01:18:57.910 Like that's not that's not real, right? 01:18:58.070 --> 01:19:02.950 Like that and I and so it you 01:19:03.840 --> 01:19:09.840 sort of forced to have to keep your mind flexible in a way that I think helps 01:19:09.840 --> 01:19:11.200 the science, right? 01:19:11.360 --> 01:19:16.240 Whereas if you're talking to people, if you're working with undergraduates whose minds all 01:19:16.240 --> 01:19:18.400 work pretty much the way that your mind works, right? 01:19:18.480 --> 01:19:24.160 You're you're not sort of forced in the same way to have to to flex those muscles and 01:19:24.240 --> 01:19:29.040 and figure out, you know, you're challenged to have to think about how these things work. 01:19:29.280 --> 01:19:34.270 And um that to me is it's it's that to me is the fun of it, right? 01:19:34.430 --> 01:19:37.230 Is that like it's it's that's the exciting part. 01:19:37.390 --> 01:19:43.230 It's challenging, but that's also you know, what what keeps me in it, I think, is 01:19:43.390 --> 01:19:48.990 is that it's so fascinating to sit down and talk to some old guy for two hours and come 01:19:48.990 --> 01:19:53.070 away being like, Whoa, that is not the way I thought about the world. 01:19:53.150 --> 01:19:59.140 And yet like it makes sense and it like right, but it um it really, you know, forces you 01:19:59.140 --> 01:20:01.140 to to keep your mind open. 01:20:01.460 --> 01:20:01.940 Yeah. 01:20:02.260 --> 01:20:07.380 You you have you're one of the editors of the human behavioral ecology book. 01:20:07.540 --> 01:20:13.140 Um, what how do you think about where the field is going, where it's headed? 01:20:13.460 --> 01:20:19.380 Is it healthy or in in are psychologists um um doing their part 01:20:19.540 --> 01:20:21.140 or are we failing? 01:20:22.970 --> 01:20:28.170 I I think it's I think the more integrative it is, the healthier it is. 01:20:28.330 --> 01:20:31.690 And so we did in this book want to have. 01:20:32.570 --> 01:20:38.090 So this book was still meant to be, it's called human behavioral ecology, right? 01:20:38.170 --> 01:20:42.330 And so it was meant to give you that perspective first and foremost. 01:20:42.410 --> 01:20:46.250 But and so there are chapters, and there's an evolutionary psychology chapter, there's a 01:20:46.250 --> 01:20:50.170 cultural evolution chapter, and there's like a human biology chapter. 01:20:50.500 --> 01:20:56.180 And in an ideal world, the book would the the 01:20:56.180 --> 01:21:00.980 book would be evolutionary social sciences or something and the whole book would be more 01:21:00.980 --> 01:21:01.700 integrated, right? 01:21:01.780 --> 01:21:03.540 But that wasn't really the goal for this book. 01:21:03.700 --> 01:21:08.660 This book was like we wanted to sort of give an update to the nineteen ninety two um Smith 01:21:08.660 --> 01:21:12.500 and Winterholder, the what we call the Green Bible, right? 01:21:13.460 --> 01:21:15.290 I have it on my shelf behind me. 01:21:15.850 --> 01:21:17.770 I love it from Durban's class. 01:21:18.250 --> 01:21:19.210 And it's great, right? 01:21:19.290 --> 01:21:22.410 And it and so we didn't want to, we didn't want to reinvent the wheel. 01:21:22.490 --> 01:21:25.610 We wanted this to be so what does it look like 25 years later? 01:21:25.850 --> 01:21:31.450 But we um and so each chapter is more integrative, I think, but it's 01:21:31.450 --> 01:21:35.610 still mainly, you know, it's like 80% HBE kind of thing. 01:21:35.850 --> 01:21:41.530 But um I think that my hope is that the 01:21:41.530 --> 01:21:47.020 next book finds, you know, would be something that really weaves all 01:21:47.020 --> 01:21:48.940 three in throughout, right? 01:21:49.100 --> 01:21:51.500 And gives a more integrated perspective throughout. 01:21:51.580 --> 01:21:53.260 And I think that is happening more. 01:21:53.340 --> 01:21:59.020 I mean, I like I said, most of the behavioral ecologists that I know are um 01:21:59.980 --> 01:22:05.740 sort of over those debates that, you know, is it domain specific versus domain 01:22:05.740 --> 01:22:06.060 general? 01:22:06.140 --> 01:22:11.820 And is it, you know, like I think that that kind of like universal versus versus variation, 01:22:11.980 --> 01:22:12.220 right? 01:22:12.300 --> 01:22:17.310 Like to me, like those those debates are kind of tired at this point. 01:22:17.470 --> 01:22:22.830 And most of the people who are really actively doing this don't want to just keep 01:22:22.830 --> 01:22:27.150 recycling those old arguments, but we want to now think like, okay, we understand those are 01:22:27.150 --> 01:22:28.350 false dichotomies. 01:22:28.510 --> 01:22:30.110 Now, how do we move forward? 01:22:30.350 --> 01:22:33.790 And I think that's where we need better methods. 01:22:34.030 --> 01:22:37.470 We need, you know, we need people talking to each other more. 01:22:37.630 --> 01:22:39.630 Um, and then we can start to do that. 01:22:39.790 --> 01:22:44.620 I mean, I I I think it's 01:22:45.500 --> 01:22:51.340 I I think we need to I still think we need to do it by more better better 01:22:51.340 --> 01:22:53.980 communication um I really think is key. 01:22:54.140 --> 01:22:58.780 So getting psychologists in, you know, it it doesn't help that we're in different 01:22:58.780 --> 01:23:00.380 departments so often, right? 01:23:00.620 --> 01:23:05.890 So, you know, you and I, all three of us actually came from depart universities where those 01:23:05.890 --> 01:23:08.370 departments were much more integrated with one another. 01:23:08.690 --> 01:23:14.450 Yes, UCLA and UCSB were were kind were gold examples of anthropsy and other 01:23:14.450 --> 01:23:20.290 department inter interdisciplinary but I think that trying to to sort of 01:23:20.290 --> 01:23:24.290 encourage that kind even if you're you may be housed in different departments and there are 01:23:24.290 --> 01:23:30.260 issues about you know sort of the incentive structures of publishing in psychology versus 01:23:30.260 --> 01:23:31.140 anthropology, right? 01:23:31.220 --> 01:23:35.140 Like I think we're a lot more forgiving in anthropology for having being able to sort of 01:23:35.140 --> 01:23:40.340 take your time and publish a little less, but that you know, doing field work is hard and 01:23:40.340 --> 01:23:41.060 long, right? 01:23:41.300 --> 01:23:43.620 Um, and and that those are real things, right? 01:23:43.700 --> 01:23:46.500 Like psychologists still have to get tenure in psychology departments. 01:23:46.580 --> 01:23:50.340 And so you can't ignore the fact that they have a different incentive structure. 01:23:50.580 --> 01:23:56.190 But I think if you can the the conversational part of it, the like get together once a week 01:23:56.190 --> 01:24:00.750 and hash this stuff out in a joint lab group and that kind of stuff, like that that can 01:24:00.750 --> 01:24:05.230 happen even if each party still has their own sort of incentive structures about what and 01:24:05.230 --> 01:24:06.270 where they're gonna publish. 01:24:06.430 --> 01:24:12.030 Like, but getting those conversations to happen more, I think would be the the soapbox I 01:24:12.030 --> 01:24:15.100 would I would stand on about how to move the field forward. 01:24:15.420 --> 01:24:16.220 Yeah, that's great. 01:24:16.380 --> 01:24:18.460 It's just connecting people. 01:24:18.700 --> 01:24:23.180 So it's uh John Tuby always talked about science as a bunch of little villages. 01:24:23.340 --> 01:24:28.540 And it's basically that um it he was always like it's so shocking how you think there's 01:24:28.540 --> 01:24:32.620 these like formal structures, but really it comes down to like who interacts with who on a 01:24:32.620 --> 01:24:33.340 regular basis. 01:24:33.500 --> 01:24:37.660 And I mean it's it's just exactly what you're talking about is if you don't have regular 01:24:37.660 --> 01:24:43.150 interaction face to face with people, you're not going to treat them with the kind of 01:24:43.150 --> 01:24:46.030 thought or even think about what they're thinking about, right? 01:24:46.110 --> 01:24:50.350 It's just the way to sort of be in each other's minds is to be in each other's faces, I 01:24:50.350 --> 01:24:50.510 guess. 01:24:50.670 --> 01:24:51.630 In a in a nice way. 01:24:55.870 --> 01:24:59.470 I think that they were more able to do that, right? 01:24:59.550 --> 01:25:04.280 Because there were like you look at that pic that picture of the at Mich at University of 01:25:04.280 --> 01:25:06.360 Michigan from early meeting, right? 01:25:06.440 --> 01:25:10.440 And it's like you've got biologists, you've got psychologists, you've got anthropologists, 01:25:10.520 --> 01:25:12.280 like because there weren't very many of them. 01:25:12.360 --> 01:25:18.200 And I think maybe that's one of the good things about HBE and the sort of 01:25:18.200 --> 01:25:21.960 downsides of being an evolutionary psychologist is just the size of the fields, right? 01:25:22.120 --> 01:25:25.170 So like HBE just has always been smaller. 01:25:25.330 --> 01:25:27.250 And so we've been more forced. 01:25:27.330 --> 01:25:31.490 I mean I think we always thought about it as like we're on the margins of, you know, of 01:25:31.490 --> 01:25:33.410 something like HBAS or something like that. 01:25:33.490 --> 01:25:39.490 But in in some ways that's kept us honest in that we've been forced to have to 01:25:39.570 --> 01:25:44.060 to be a little bit more integrative to sort of, you know, grow our networks and things like 01:25:44.060 --> 01:25:44.220 that. 01:25:44.460 --> 01:25:49.420 Whereas psychologists can be more insular because there's so many of you, right? 01:25:49.580 --> 01:25:53.580 And even even just the evolutionary psychologists within this bigger field of psychology, 01:25:53.740 --> 01:25:54.940 there's so many of you. 01:25:55.340 --> 01:26:01.260 And so you can sort of silo off and still be surrounded by lots of people and 01:26:01.260 --> 01:26:02.220 lots of viewpoints. 01:26:02.380 --> 01:26:06.380 It's just you're not going outside the field as much, right? 01:26:06.620 --> 01:26:06.780 Yeah. 01:26:06.940 --> 01:26:11.390 It's a good example of like you can really fail by succeeding, or even evolutionary 01:26:11.390 --> 01:26:12.270 psychology. 01:26:12.430 --> 01:26:16.990 We talked about this with Dan Conroy Beam about how like a lot of psychologists because of 01:26:17.070 --> 01:26:21.870 psych sort of succeeded in being acceptable, it's become this thing where there's sort of 01:26:21.870 --> 01:26:26.590 the like LaCroix-flavored, uh like evolution, like just very like a light touch of 01:26:26.590 --> 01:26:27.070 evolution. 01:26:27.230 --> 01:26:32.860 So it's not adaptationism, it's not asking about adaptive problems or going adaptive 01:26:32.860 --> 01:26:36.620 problem first or even considering adaptive problems, but it's just sort of like with a a 01:26:36.620 --> 01:26:38.380 little garnish of evolution. 01:26:38.540 --> 01:26:41.340 And then uh and then you get enough people doing that. 01:26:41.500 --> 01:26:46.780 Again, it's this base rate thing where there's tons of people who do that in a small number 01:26:46.780 --> 01:26:47.900 of adaptationists. 01:26:47.980 --> 01:26:50.940 And then you get students coming in, they're like, well, this is all evolutionary 01:26:50.940 --> 01:26:54.730 psychology, and 80% of it is the weird garnish, right? 01:26:54.810 --> 01:26:57.850 And that's that's a concern I certainly feel. 01:26:58.090 --> 01:27:02.010 So um, so yeah, maybe the secret to success is not succeeding. 01:27:02.970 --> 01:27:06.010 And and then you let you put sex on top of that, right? 01:27:06.090 --> 01:27:09.690 So it's like, oh, you want to get undergraduates interested in taking a course? 01:27:10.010 --> 01:27:10.890 Sex is a title, right? 01:27:11.530 --> 01:27:12.490 And sex differences, yeah. 01:27:12.810 --> 01:27:13.690 Yeah, yeah, yeah. 01:27:13.770 --> 01:27:17.610 And because again, going back to the intuition thing, like everybody, right, they take that 01:27:17.610 --> 01:27:22.280 class, and this it totally explains why my boyfriend did what he did or this, you know. 01:27:22.360 --> 01:27:27.160 Like every everybody loves to to you know sort of to to do this. 01:27:27.400 --> 01:27:30.600 But um it and that grows, right? 01:27:30.920 --> 01:27:34.440 Everybody it's much it's harder to do the anthropology. 01:27:34.520 --> 01:27:36.600 It's it's not as cut and dry. 01:27:36.760 --> 01:27:40.840 Like I feel like I my poor students, it's like they come to me with something like that, 01:27:40.920 --> 01:27:46.810 and then I'm like, uh yeah, maybe this explains why your boyfriend's doing what they're 01:27:46.810 --> 01:27:47.210 doing, right? 01:27:47.290 --> 01:27:51.850 But I always try to sort of like temper those things when they come into my office with 01:27:51.850 --> 01:27:57.610 things like that because it's like I don't want to reinforce this kind of pop psychology c 01:27:57.770 --> 01:27:59.450 explanation for all these things. 01:27:59.770 --> 01:27:59.930 Yeah. 01:28:00.010 --> 01:28:04.900 I mean, I think there's a trade-off between if you come in with no thought about it and 01:28:04.900 --> 01:28:07.780 then you really discover the insights and you're excited about it. 01:28:07.860 --> 01:28:09.060 That's a wonderful thing. 01:28:09.220 --> 01:28:14.580 But that's the early stage to a more mature grown-up stage, which is 01:28:15.300 --> 01:28:16.980 and those are just different things, you know. 01:28:17.060 --> 01:28:21.700 And I think you have to resp uh one, you know, one wants to respect both things, but 01:28:21.700 --> 01:28:26.370 exactly right, is just sort of saying, that's true and that's great, but it's going to be 01:28:26.370 --> 01:28:30.210 more complicated and let's keep going and not just sort of yeah. 01:28:30.370 --> 01:28:32.370 Do you run into with the work you do? 01:28:32.530 --> 01:28:37.490 I mean, this might be a transition to like you have a paper about like the manosphere and 01:28:37.490 --> 01:28:38.530 what it gets wrong. 01:28:38.770 --> 01:28:41.650 And I don't want to either essentialize a whole group of people too. 01:28:41.730 --> 01:28:47.650 Like I think there's, especially in a modern environment where people um uh, you 01:28:47.650 --> 01:28:52.530 know, and especially like young men feel this deep imperative to be mated. 01:28:52.720 --> 01:28:56.720 And we talked to Chris von Ruden and there's always sort of losers in their mating market. 01:28:56.880 --> 01:28:57.680 And it hurts. 01:28:57.760 --> 01:29:03.520 And it's like it's very, you know, like it's a, I think a lack of empathy for people who 01:29:03.520 --> 01:29:08.960 feel the pain of like not feeling like the world fits them and they don't understand why 01:29:08.960 --> 01:29:12.240 they can't be successful in the way they look around that other people are. 01:29:12.400 --> 01:29:14.880 I think it's a mistake to not empathize with them. 01:29:15.170 --> 01:29:20.690 But at the same time, that creates a market for bad ideas that aren't either sophisticated 01:29:20.690 --> 01:29:22.530 or just done right wrong or dangerous. 01:29:22.610 --> 01:29:28.450 And so do you have um in your experience or in doing this work, 01:29:28.530 --> 01:29:33.010 uh like where where are you at in terms of like looking at that stuff, or is that something 01:29:33.010 --> 01:29:34.370 you're not really looking at? 01:29:35.330 --> 01:29:40.930 Yeah, I mean, I think when I started looking at cuckaldry, and there sort of was this 01:29:40.930 --> 01:29:46.680 natural use of the term and the within the manosphere but that sort of 01:29:46.680 --> 01:29:48.280 played on all of all of that. 01:29:48.440 --> 01:29:53.880 And and I agree about the the empathy piece, but I think that there are every 01:29:54.520 --> 01:30:00.520 it's not just men, right, who are who are you know on the on the downside of 01:30:00.520 --> 01:30:06.280 the the mating market is right that this can go either way and in in in often cases I think 01:30:06.280 --> 01:30:12.210 there's an equal um kind of movement of of women, particularly 01:30:12.210 --> 01:30:15.890 as they get older who are worried about finding a partner and things like that in the 01:30:15.890 --> 01:30:18.370 mating market is often against them, right? 01:30:18.450 --> 01:30:18.850 And yet. 01:30:19.650 --> 01:30:25.010 And and there is some, you know, small slice of man hating that goes that goes along with 01:30:25.010 --> 01:30:25.970 some of that too, right? 01:30:26.050 --> 01:30:30.370 So it's not that this is like only men who have these sort of negative perceptions. 01:30:30.530 --> 01:30:35.620 But I think I think some of it, you know, is every 01:30:36.260 --> 01:30:42.100 of course there are differences in people's um eligibility on the mating 01:30:42.100 --> 01:30:43.620 market and things like that, right? 01:30:43.940 --> 01:30:49.860 But I think also you can these things are my concern as the mother of a 12 year old 01:30:49.860 --> 01:30:54.820 boy, right, is that I worry that these things are are getting um 01:30:55.510 --> 01:31:00.790 thrown at them en masse at such a young age that like the first time they have like a crush 01:31:00.790 --> 01:31:06.710 who doesn't like them back and they can like spiral into this um this sort of 01:31:06.710 --> 01:31:12.470 dark web of explanations for why they why that happened to them. 01:31:12.630 --> 01:31:16.550 And in reality, like these are just blips that happen to everybody over the course of a 01:31:16.550 --> 01:31:17.590 long love life, right? 01:31:18.630 --> 01:31:23.680 And so I I I think that's from a personal perspective, that's my concern about it, is that 01:31:23.680 --> 01:31:28.880 it's sort of spinning some of you know, some extrapolations of this theory where they're 01:31:28.960 --> 01:31:33.920 you know taking some piece and they're they're spinning it off in a way that wasn't it 01:31:33.920 --> 01:31:39.840 wasn't meant to be, you know, spun off in that way, and they're able to sort of foment 01:31:39.840 --> 01:31:42.560 all of this kind of misogyny, basically. 01:31:43.040 --> 01:31:48.790 Um, But and I do think that we as scientists have a responsibility if we're 01:31:48.870 --> 01:31:54.870 if we are talking about these topics to get out there and and right 01:31:55.190 --> 01:31:57.110 these wrongs in the science, right? 01:31:57.190 --> 01:32:01.990 So I wrote that piece in part because I was concerned about the fact that the science was 01:32:01.990 --> 01:32:03.910 getting written about in an incorrect way. 01:32:03.990 --> 01:32:08.460 And like that Scientific American piece is more about cockledry isn't always what you think 01:32:08.460 --> 01:32:09.020 it is, right? 01:32:09.100 --> 01:32:14.460 Like there's this idea that it's about men being tricked and these wily women. 01:32:14.540 --> 01:32:18.140 And I was trying to sort of counter that with an anthropological perspective. 01:32:18.220 --> 01:32:24.060 But I think generally we need to not just lean on 01:32:24.060 --> 01:32:28.380 the excuse of, well, I didn't mean it that way. 01:32:28.620 --> 01:32:33.850 You know, I only said this one thing, and it's not my fault that that people, you know, 01:32:34.010 --> 01:32:36.170 took it and spun it off in this other direction. 01:32:36.330 --> 01:32:41.850 I think that if, you know, if this is my bread and butter in terms of my research, that I 01:32:41.850 --> 01:32:46.410 also have a responsibility to explicitly say what I think it does and doesn't mean. 01:32:46.490 --> 01:32:52.090 And that to me is personally important, like in terms of like the way that I that I think 01:32:52.090 --> 01:32:53.210 about doing science. 01:32:53.610 --> 01:32:53.770 Yeah. 01:32:54.010 --> 01:32:59.820 Do you think that people I mean, because there I can see two 01:32:59.820 --> 01:33:00.380 arguments. 01:33:00.540 --> 01:33:05.980 One is that people lean on it because it serves their interests and they don't care if 01:33:05.980 --> 01:33:07.740 there's science behind it or not. 01:33:07.900 --> 01:33:11.180 And there's another argument where people lean on it, but other people believe them because 01:33:11.180 --> 01:33:12.700 it has a scientific credibility. 01:33:12.780 --> 01:33:14.540 And maybe both things happen. 01:33:14.780 --> 01:33:18.780 I have no idea, and I don't know to what extent like this is knowable. 01:33:18.940 --> 01:33:23.190 But like, you know, I've heard people sort of say, well, people, it doesn't matter what 01:33:23.190 --> 01:33:24.790 scientists say because they don't care. 01:33:24.950 --> 01:33:27.830 Like they would just use this towards their own ends anyway. 01:33:28.070 --> 01:33:31.430 And I actually don't know what I think about that answer. 01:33:31.590 --> 01:33:35.110 I mean, I guess it's sort of just very much like an excuse to not do anything. 01:33:35.190 --> 01:33:35.670 But I don't know. 01:33:35.750 --> 01:33:37.030 Do you have a thought about that? 01:33:37.190 --> 01:33:42.150 Or I mean, maybe it's sort of obvious that it's just sort of, well, we have to do our best. 01:33:42.600 --> 01:33:48.440 I mean I think that there are people very explicitly using the sign like picking 01:33:48.600 --> 01:33:53.480 picking little pieces of these papers and and trying to use them to justify it. 01:33:53.640 --> 01:33:58.360 So I think that that I don't know what percentage of the audience cares about that argument 01:33:58.360 --> 01:34:01.560 versus the other part of the argument or just broader argument. 01:34:01.880 --> 01:34:03.880 But I think that it is happening for sure. 01:34:04.280 --> 01:34:04.520 For sure. 01:34:04.600 --> 01:34:05.640 Yeah that's undeniable. 01:34:05.720 --> 01:34:05.880 Yeah. 01:34:06.360 --> 01:34:11.850 And so I think that um you know but we need to 01:34:12.010 --> 01:34:17.210 correct that course correct that where we can and I think again like part of it is my role 01:34:17.210 --> 01:34:21.450 as a scientist course correcting it and part of it is my role as a mom course correcting it 01:34:21.610 --> 01:34:27.610 right because I think that it's also you know just taking off the scientist hat like as 01:34:27.610 --> 01:34:31.850 a I'm not having conversations with my 12 year old necessarily about why the science is 01:34:31.850 --> 01:34:37.770 wrong as much as I exactly you know but I mean more and more but I but um but 01:34:37.770 --> 01:34:43.620 I think that that we we need to be aware that this stuff is happening 01:34:43.700 --> 01:34:48.660 and that they are, you know, I mean this gets more into arguments about the role of social 01:34:48.660 --> 01:34:50.100 media and all this kind of stuff. 01:34:50.260 --> 01:34:56.260 But I think that that the science is is feeding into it and and we 01:34:56.260 --> 01:35:02.020 just it I I hope that we can also do the science that gets the 01:35:02.020 --> 01:35:04.500 nuance a little bit more out there too, right? 01:35:04.660 --> 01:35:09.330 Because I think that with all with all things, right? 01:35:09.410 --> 01:35:13.410 It's easier to digest the the soundbite of it. 01:35:13.730 --> 01:35:19.090 And um and I I I worry about our culture being just 01:35:19.090 --> 01:35:21.890 increasingly soundbite oriented, I guess, right? 01:35:21.970 --> 01:35:26.290 It's not just like the cuckledry stuff is one example of that, but I think it's this is a 01:35:26.290 --> 01:35:28.610 bigger, bigger problem that I can't solve. 01:35:28.850 --> 01:35:30.210 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. 01:35:31.020 --> 01:35:34.940 Yeah, I mean it's it's hard to fight against, you know, because the the internet 01:35:35.180 --> 01:35:39.100 incentivizes the quippy, uh simplistic soundbite. 01:35:39.260 --> 01:35:44.940 Um, and you know, the best we can do is, you know, try to at least make the 01:35:44.940 --> 01:35:49.900 nuance and and the real science available for people who are looking for it and want to 01:35:49.900 --> 01:35:50.300 find it. 01:35:50.460 --> 01:35:55.500 That's I think one of the big impetuses behind this podcast is is not to, you know, 01:35:55.660 --> 01:36:01.030 condense the science into a soundbite or into you know a talking point for one or 01:36:01.030 --> 01:36:06.870 another ideology, but to just give people a real glimpse of what the science is like, 01:36:07.030 --> 01:36:08.070 warts and all. 01:36:08.230 --> 01:36:13.030 It may be boring to some people, but that's okay because reality is complicated and nuanced 01:36:13.030 --> 01:36:18.230 and hard to understand, and it can sometimes overwhelm uh the puny human mind who is trying 01:36:18.230 --> 01:36:19.030 to grasp it. 01:36:19.190 --> 01:36:24.340 Um and so I think that that is one of our goals of of putting this this stuff out there. 01:36:24.580 --> 01:36:30.500 Yes, it's going to be hard for it to compete with the more uh flashy propagandistic stuff 01:36:30.500 --> 01:36:34.660 that's out there, but at the very least it is available to be found for the people who want 01:36:34.660 --> 01:36:35.540 to find it. 01:36:35.780 --> 01:36:41.780 Um so as we're uh approaching um the the end of our time with you, I'm curious if 01:36:41.780 --> 01:36:45.300 there's anything you wish that we had talked about that we didn't ask you, any any 01:36:45.300 --> 01:36:48.260 particular topic that you would have loved to to delve into. 01:36:48.970 --> 01:36:49.530 Oh gosh. 01:36:49.690 --> 01:36:52.090 See, I knew you were going to ask me this and now I still don't. 01:36:53.930 --> 01:36:58.890 So we we we covered we covered you know cuckoldry, we covered you know concurrency and the 01:36:58.890 --> 01:37:04.730 Inva, we covered the sociology of science and human behavioral ecology and the manosphere. 01:37:04.890 --> 01:37:06.010 We really we we covered a lot. 01:37:06.090 --> 01:37:11.370 Is there I mean hmm we didn't get to one of the one of the things that I had on my list, we 01:37:11.370 --> 01:37:12.570 didn't get to women's status. 01:37:12.730 --> 01:37:14.090 I know you had a paper on that. 01:37:14.490 --> 01:37:16.170 I'm I'm very curious about that. 01:37:16.730 --> 01:37:20.700 It's it's actually a perfect example of the of the sound bidification of our culture in 01:37:20.700 --> 01:37:24.380 that you know when men seek status they often do it in a very violent and conspicuous way 01:37:24.460 --> 01:37:25.580 that is hard for us to ignore. 01:37:25.660 --> 01:37:27.420 And in fact that is often by design. 01:37:27.900 --> 01:37:30.540 But yet women's status seeking tends to be less conspicuous. 01:37:30.620 --> 01:37:34.220 But it is still there and it is still hugely important and we need to uh understand it as 01:37:34.220 --> 01:37:34.860 social scientists. 01:37:34.940 --> 01:37:40.380 So I'm curious what what your take is on on on women's status and and what's going on 01:37:40.380 --> 01:37:40.700 there. 01:37:41.370 --> 01:37:46.250 Yeah, I think I mean we did have a paper on this, and we found I think actually what was 01:37:46.250 --> 01:37:51.530 interesting to me was some of the similarities between what was driving men's and women's 01:37:51.530 --> 01:37:52.970 status, at least among himbus. 01:37:53.050 --> 01:37:56.490 So generosity, for example, was important for both. 01:37:56.730 --> 01:38:01.130 Um, so we had found that previously that, you know, as I talked about, sort of being 01:38:01.130 --> 01:38:05.770 generous was is a good trait for a man to have, and be and we found that for women too. 01:38:05.930 --> 01:38:11.560 Surpr would more surprisingly to mean that there wasn't kind of a a as clear 01:38:11.800 --> 01:38:13.560 explicit an explanation for it. 01:38:13.720 --> 01:38:19.560 But I think I think it emphasizes to me the extrinsic 01:38:19.560 --> 01:38:25.480 parts of status are as important as the in like I think because we're focused on men's 01:38:25.480 --> 01:38:31.240 status that we often think about this in terms of like um internal qualities about 01:38:31.240 --> 01:38:34.200 masculinity and strength and and things like that, right? 01:38:34.280 --> 01:38:36.360 And how good a hunter you are or whatever it is. 01:38:36.520 --> 01:38:36.760 Right. 01:38:36.840 --> 01:38:42.650 But I think that the social aspects of how how connected are you and in what 01:38:42.650 --> 01:38:44.250 ways and how do you treat other people? 01:38:44.330 --> 01:38:50.250 And so things like respectfulness and generosity and things like that um pop out at 01:38:50.250 --> 01:38:54.970 me as some of the things that, and maybe those are things that again, because they're a 01:38:54.970 --> 01:38:58.170 little bit more understated, maybe they're a bigger part of women's status than men's 01:38:58.170 --> 01:38:58.410 status. 01:38:58.490 --> 01:39:01.980 I don't know that we know the answer to that yet, because we just don't have enough data on 01:39:01.980 --> 01:39:03.020 women's status. 01:39:03.260 --> 01:39:08.540 But I think that even for men, like those subtle things that are a little harder to pick up 01:39:08.700 --> 01:39:13.740 because you can't measure them in terms of grip strength or muscularity or something, I'd 01:39:13.740 --> 01:39:18.300 like to see more work on status, I guess, sort of start to look at that. 01:39:18.380 --> 01:39:19.980 And Chris does do some of that. 01:39:20.060 --> 01:39:25.670 But I think that if you look at like the larger body of work, the you know, Male 01:39:25.670 --> 01:39:31.190 attractiveness and male, you know, the ability to get a woman, there's a a much bigger 01:39:31.190 --> 01:39:36.630 chunk of the literature looking at physical strength and status coming out of the sort of 01:39:36.630 --> 01:39:38.310 the legacy of sexual selection, right? 01:39:38.470 --> 01:39:43.430 But I mean, like we said, we're humans, we're complicated, we're cultural, we're navigating 01:39:43.430 --> 01:39:44.390 all of these norms. 01:39:44.550 --> 01:39:49.910 The ways in which we do that I think is probably much more integrated into status than 01:39:49.910 --> 01:39:51.830 we've uncovered so far. 01:39:52.870 --> 01:39:53.110 Yeah. 01:39:53.340 --> 01:39:58.300 I mean, do you do you buy um so there there's this uh approach to you know women versus 01:39:58.300 --> 01:40:02.140 men's status seeking and social relationships that you know uh throughout evolutionary 01:40:02.140 --> 01:40:06.780 history, men were more involved in coalitional competition and and intergroup warfare. 01:40:06.940 --> 01:40:11.740 Therefore their social strategy should be more geared towards forming, you know, larger 01:40:11.740 --> 01:40:12.380 coalitions. 01:40:12.460 --> 01:40:16.620 So they should have a you know a larger number of shallow uh male relationships. 01:40:16.700 --> 01:40:21.410 And if they have a the fight, they should be able to, you know, uh uh make amends more 01:40:21.410 --> 01:40:25.010 quickly, whereas women it's a smaller number of more intense social relationships. 01:40:25.090 --> 01:40:28.530 There's more of a vibe of egalitarianism and mutual trust. 01:40:28.690 --> 01:40:33.090 Uh perhaps it's more geared toward uh cooperative uh breeding. 01:40:33.250 --> 01:40:38.930 Um so that's sort of a perspective I see uh in in the literature approaching, you know, 01:40:39.010 --> 01:40:42.420 women's versus men's uh sociality and status seeking. 01:40:42.580 --> 01:40:44.020 Uh do you do you buy that narrative? 01:40:44.180 --> 01:40:46.900 Do you think it's parts of it are right or parts of it are wrong. 01:40:46.980 --> 01:40:49.460 Where do you where do you fit in with with that picture? 01:40:49.940 --> 01:40:55.460 I mean I think I buy that the 01:40:55.460 --> 01:41:00.340 importance of of status for men and women is going to reflect what their daily lives are 01:41:00.340 --> 01:41:01.060 like, right? 01:41:01.300 --> 01:41:05.060 And and the source the rules and norms that they have to abide by. 01:41:05.220 --> 01:41:11.130 So if you have um but so I 01:41:11.370 --> 01:41:15.690 think first of all, I guess there's this idea that somehow wider, broader networks are 01:41:15.690 --> 01:41:19.370 better than deeper, uh smaller networks. 01:41:19.530 --> 01:41:24.330 And I right like that because I think we've attached this idea that like human sociality 01:41:24.330 --> 01:41:29.050 and the ability to like that's all because of men's, you know, large networks or something 01:41:29.130 --> 01:41:34.010 that we've decided that those are the traits that matter the most and not something about 01:41:34.010 --> 01:41:37.050 these kind of more subtle um connections. 01:41:37.290 --> 01:41:41.540 I mean, women often are often the ones who are moving into a whole new household upon 01:41:41.540 --> 01:41:42.260 marriage, right? 01:41:42.340 --> 01:41:45.940 So so patrilocal residence is more common than matrilocal residence. 01:41:46.020 --> 01:41:49.940 And so women are having to create and build a whole new network. 01:41:50.100 --> 01:41:55.220 Now, maybe that has a few deep connections, but that's still really important in terms of 01:41:55.220 --> 01:41:57.700 alliance building across groups and things like that. 01:41:57.780 --> 01:41:58.660 So that's one part. 01:41:58.820 --> 01:42:04.330 I think the other part is that women's roles in men's networks are really understudied 01:42:04.490 --> 01:42:06.730 because they often again are more subtle, right? 01:42:06.890 --> 01:42:11.610 So if men are making these decisions and the men are the ones who are sitting there having 01:42:11.690 --> 01:42:17.610 the formal discussions, making those decisions, it's often their wives who are they're 01:42:17.610 --> 01:42:22.250 having behind the scenes conversations with their wives, their sisters, their mothers, 01:42:22.330 --> 01:42:22.570 right? 01:42:22.730 --> 01:42:28.440 Who are all you know uh equally involved in that process, but they may not be 01:42:28.600 --> 01:42:33.080 their influence may not be as easily picked up in that it may not be as showy. 01:42:33.480 --> 01:42:38.680 And you know, I think that's another way that I think we need to think about the role of 01:42:38.680 --> 01:42:43.640 women's status that is it's harder to collect those data, but I think it's important and we 01:42:43.640 --> 01:42:49.240 need to again think about new ways that we can try and and actually explicit go 01:42:49.480 --> 01:42:52.200 explicitly go out and try and try and pick that stuff up. 01:42:52.360 --> 01:42:57.470 Because I think I I do push back against this general assumption that it is 01:42:57.470 --> 01:43:03.470 men's um ability to cooperate that has driven us as a species as if women were 01:43:03.550 --> 01:43:08.430 are in the just because they may have been relegated to the backseat doesn't mean that they 01:43:08.430 --> 01:43:11.790 are actually in the backseat in terms of how a lot of these decisions are made. 01:43:12.190 --> 01:43:16.040 Yeah no it's interesting I remember we we we sort of touched on this with our episode with 01:43:16.040 --> 01:43:21.480 with Brenda Bowser on how women's social influence uh may be less 01:43:21.480 --> 01:43:26.520 conspicuous and visible by design, uh and that if it is detected, then it often gets 01:43:26.520 --> 01:43:27.240 penalized. 01:43:27.400 --> 01:43:32.200 And so they have strategies where they can try to covertly influence affairs, which 01:43:32.200 --> 01:43:36.120 unfortunately makes our job as scientists much harder, uh, because now we have to detect 01:43:36.120 --> 01:43:39.720 this thing as that is intentionally being concealed for strategic reasons. 01:43:39.880 --> 01:43:44.030 Um but it does it make it uh way more interesting, I think. 01:43:44.190 --> 01:43:48.110 Um I'm curious if you if you have any thoughts about, you know, the the the strategic 01:43:48.110 --> 01:43:51.550 nature of of the ways in which uh influence might be concealed. 01:43:52.110 --> 01:43:57.230 Yeah, I mean I think that if like with Himba, for example, they're making these decisions. 01:43:57.390 --> 01:44:03.310 Like you can wa the this summer when we were there, um they were having a court case. 01:44:03.470 --> 01:44:09.000 Um And so the way that they do that is that everybody sort of gathers and they're talking 01:44:09.000 --> 01:44:14.120 this through, and then through sort of consensus, they're deciding on what the punishments 01:44:14.120 --> 01:44:14.760 should be. 01:44:15.000 --> 01:44:19.960 And it's the met like you can it's so obvious, right? 01:44:20.040 --> 01:44:24.360 Because the men are the inner circle, the main circle are all of these men, right? 01:44:24.520 --> 01:44:29.550 And then the women are sitting in groups on the outskirts of that main inner circle. 01:44:29.630 --> 01:44:29.870 Right. 01:44:30.030 --> 01:44:33.470 And so you look at that, and your first impression might be, well, it's the men who are 01:44:33.470 --> 01:44:37.550 making these decisions, and the women are just sidelined where they're just sort of 01:44:37.550 --> 01:44:39.550 passively listening or something like that. 01:44:39.710 --> 01:44:39.950 Right. 01:44:40.350 --> 01:44:46.270 And yet most Timba men will tell you that they've had conversations with their wives 01:44:46.270 --> 01:44:48.270 and their mothers and other women in their house. 01:44:48.350 --> 01:44:51.870 So, well, they're all sitting around talking about this stuff and deconstructing it around 01:44:51.870 --> 01:44:52.670 the fire at night. 01:44:52.750 --> 01:44:56.860 And then the men go back the next day and they're, you know they're in that same structure 01:44:56.860 --> 01:45:00.940 where they're talking but to think that they're not being influenced by those fireside 01:45:00.940 --> 01:45:06.860 conversations which are you know mixed gender kinds of conversations or like then they 01:45:06.860 --> 01:45:10.300 go back to their huts and they're lying maybe you know even maybe if the women are more 01:45:10.300 --> 01:45:13.660 silent around the fire but then they go back to their hut at night and just the husband and 01:45:13.660 --> 01:45:19.100 wife and she may tell them what she really thinks and you know so I mean yes it is hard to 01:45:19.100 --> 01:45:24.110 pick up but we know better now right like I I I think this is if you're gonna move the 01:45:24.110 --> 01:45:27.870 science forward, like if you look at like the ethnographic atlas or something like that, 01:45:27.950 --> 01:45:28.270 right? 01:45:28.350 --> 01:45:33.870 Like a lot of what we take for these cross-cultural work, and this is not to throw shade on 01:45:33.870 --> 01:45:35.070 the ethnographic atlas, right? 01:45:35.150 --> 01:45:38.670 Like this was a huge accomplishment to create something like this where we can look at 01:45:38.670 --> 01:45:44.350 cross-cultural patterns, but most of those were collected by male anthropologists in the 01:45:44.350 --> 01:45:47.710 19, you know, 50s, 60s, 40s, whatever it was. 01:45:47.870 --> 01:45:48.110 Right. 01:45:48.270 --> 01:45:50.910 And they are they're it's a first pass, right? 01:45:50.990 --> 01:45:56.680 They're picking up what what they think is going on and um 01:45:56.840 --> 01:46:02.200 and I think that we now can take that information and know to dig a little bit deeper. 01:46:02.360 --> 01:46:07.560 Like and and so there's sort of no excuse for not doing that, I guess, is my 01:46:08.200 --> 01:46:08.920 feeling, right? 01:46:09.080 --> 01:46:15.030 Like we should we we we shouldn't just take for granted that the the way that people 01:46:15.030 --> 01:46:19.110 sit in a circle tells you something about who has the most influence, right? 01:46:19.190 --> 01:46:22.070 It tells you something, but it doesn't necessarily tell you everything. 01:46:22.470 --> 01:46:22.630 Right. 01:46:22.790 --> 01:46:27.190 Make making it what makes it even more challenging is that when the men come forward in the 01:46:27.190 --> 01:46:31.190 political sphere and propose an idea, they often have an incentive to conceal the fact that 01:46:31.190 --> 01:46:34.710 the idea came from their wife or their mother or their sister. 01:46:34.950 --> 01:46:38.390 Or if they're if they're pursuing some agenda, they might have an interest in concealing 01:46:38.390 --> 01:46:42.150 the fact that their you know their wife was goading them to take this course of action. 01:46:42.310 --> 01:46:46.600 And so that makes it, you know, we have concealing happening from both the women's end and 01:46:46.600 --> 01:46:51.000 the man's end, uh, which makes it even harder to figure out what's what's really going on. 01:46:51.160 --> 01:46:51.800 Um, you know. 01:46:52.440 --> 01:46:57.480 If there's a norm of respectfulness, then maybe that like women understand that like it I 01:46:57.960 --> 01:47:03.240 think if women know they have that influence, then whether they're doing if they're 01:47:03.240 --> 01:47:07.230 following the norm of doing it behind the scenes, that's okay as long as they have that 01:47:07.230 --> 01:47:07.550 influence. 01:47:07.630 --> 01:47:10.670 And I and this is not to say that there aren't places where women have very little 01:47:10.670 --> 01:47:11.070 influence. 01:47:11.150 --> 01:47:12.430 Like that is also true, right? 01:47:12.590 --> 01:47:17.150 Like I don't downplay the idea that like you know male coercion is real. 01:47:17.230 --> 01:47:23.230 Um I think that we need to be able to disambiguate the cases 01:47:23.230 --> 01:47:29.150 where it's going on under the scenes versus the cases where where they really are having 01:47:29.150 --> 01:47:30.980 their their thoughts and opinions. 01:47:31.860 --> 01:47:32.180 Absolutely. 01:47:32.260 --> 01:47:35.860 But for you know you know, from an evolutionary perspective, even in cases where women are 01:47:35.940 --> 01:47:40.180 are very clearly oppressed and coerced, you would still expect uh from a from an 01:47:40.180 --> 01:47:43.860 adaptationist perspective that they would effectively play the hand that they were dealt, 01:47:44.020 --> 01:47:48.260 even if the hand they're dealt is shitty, they're still going to do whatever they can to uh 01:47:48.340 --> 01:47:53.060 you know cause whatever influence they can cause to uh advance their their interests. 01:47:53.220 --> 01:47:58.580 Um and so even there I think we we should be trying to delve as as deep as we can to figure 01:47:58.580 --> 01:47:58.980 that out. 01:47:59.590 --> 01:47:59.910 Yeah. 01:48:00.150 --> 01:48:00.390 Yeah. 01:48:00.470 --> 01:48:06.150 I remember John and Brenda saying that um it was only because they knew the community so 01:48:06.150 --> 01:48:11.030 well that they could even relay these anecdotes about this kind of cryptic leadership. 01:48:11.190 --> 01:48:12.870 Um, and that really stuck with me. 01:48:12.950 --> 01:48:18.230 I was like, Oh boy, we're we're really we're the drunk looking for the keys and the under 01:48:18.230 --> 01:48:19.110 the light. 01:48:19.430 --> 01:48:20.070 Yeah. 01:48:20.550 --> 01:48:21.110 Yep. 01:48:21.340 --> 01:48:21.660 Yep. 01:48:22.300 --> 01:48:28.060 I mean, that's like status and leadership was I feel like I've only really barely scratched 01:48:28.060 --> 01:48:29.740 the surface on that as a topic. 01:48:29.820 --> 01:48:32.780 You know, we did this one uh this one paper on it. 01:48:32.860 --> 01:48:38.060 But I think it takes it it takes years to kind of decide that this is your thing and and 01:48:38.140 --> 01:48:39.500 and dive into it. 01:48:39.740 --> 01:48:45.500 Um so and it hasn't been my my area of emphasis so far, but it's you know it's fun to sort 01:48:45.500 --> 01:48:50.770 of you know pick a new pick a new topic and and start to start to dig in on that too. 01:48:50.850 --> 01:48:54.050 So but yeah, John and John and Brendan did a lot of that. 01:48:54.130 --> 01:48:56.050 Um so over many, many years. 01:48:56.130 --> 01:48:59.730 So I trust their data for sure. 01:48:59.970 --> 01:49:00.530 Yeah. 01:49:00.850 --> 01:49:03.490 Well, uh well, uh Brook, thank you so much. 01:49:03.570 --> 01:49:06.530 We'll have to have you on again because I know there's still so much more to cover. 01:49:06.690 --> 01:49:10.690 Um, but that's a good thing because it means that there's just so much more to do. 01:49:10.850 --> 01:49:14.000 Um, but you know, thank you for coming on. 01:49:14.160 --> 01:49:15.920 Thank you for doing this work. 01:49:16.080 --> 01:49:19.680 Um, you know, I think every time we have an anthropologist on, we basically want to say 01:49:19.760 --> 01:49:24.960 thank you for your service because you know, it's hot and dry and uh, you know, 01:49:25.200 --> 01:49:27.200 uncomfortable to go to the field. 01:49:27.440 --> 01:49:30.800 And as you said, it's sort of humbling and difficult. 01:49:31.040 --> 01:49:36.850 Um, and you know, we get to sit be in our like comfortable living rooms, you know, uh, or 01:49:36.850 --> 01:49:40.050 talk about it in comfortable chairs, you know, on a podcast. 01:49:40.210 --> 01:49:43.970 In every sentence, you know, there's like a lot of blood, sweat, and tears that goes into 01:49:43.970 --> 01:49:45.330 like the sentences you're saying. 01:49:45.490 --> 01:49:47.490 So we just want to thank you for doing that. 01:49:47.810 --> 01:49:48.050 Yeah. 01:49:48.290 --> 01:49:48.930 Well thank you. 01:49:49.010 --> 01:49:49.810 It was fun. 01:49:50.370 --> 01:49:51.170 Uh yeah. 01:49:51.330 --> 01:49:54.130 So uh uh David, any anything? 01:49:54.450 --> 01:49:55.890 No, this was this was a blast. 01:49:56.050 --> 01:49:57.780 Thanks so much for for talking to us. 01:50:00.580 --> 01:50:04.980 Well, here you are at the end of another episode of Evolutionary Psychology, the podcast. 01:50:05.140 --> 01:50:08.180 If you're still listening, that means you must be liking what you're hearing. 01:50:08.260 --> 01:50:10.820 And if you like what you hear, then what can people do, Dave? 01:50:11.220 --> 01:50:14.420 Uh they can support us by leaving a good review. 01:50:14.660 --> 01:50:16.820 Our reviews have sort of petered off. 01:50:16.980 --> 01:50:21.220 So uh yeah, please, if you're listening, um leave a review. 01:50:21.630 --> 01:50:22.670 Yeah, absolutely. 01:50:23.070 --> 01:50:27.310 Things you like, things you don't like, uh ideas for future episodes, ideas for possible 01:50:27.310 --> 01:50:27.790 guests. 01:50:27.950 --> 01:50:29.790 We are open to hearing all of it. 01:50:29.950 --> 01:50:34.590 Um, if you're so inclined, you can check out our Patreon page and support us there, or uh 01:50:34.670 --> 01:50:37.870 you can just say something uh nice about us on social media, spread the word. 01:50:38.110 --> 01:50:40.030 Yeah, and David still needs that fanny pack. 01:50:40.110 --> 01:50:40.910 So somebody get on there. 01:50:41.390 --> 01:50:44.270 So if you have a fanny pack, please send it my way. 01:50:44.430 --> 01:50:46.120 You can reach out to me uh individually. 01:50:46.200 --> 01:50:49.000 I won't give my uh contact information right here, but you you know where to go. 01:50:49.800 --> 01:50:52.120 You can email the the you can email the email the podcast. 01:50:53.960 --> 01:50:56.680 Please send a picture of the fan factor so I can make sure we'll make sure David gets it. 01:50:58.440 --> 01:50:59.800 We'll make sure David gets it. 01:50:59.880 --> 01:51:02.520 It's very the dimensions are very important. 01:51:02.680 --> 01:51:04.360 But thank you very much for listening. 01:51:04.520 --> 01:51:07.400 Um and yeah, we're we just have a wonderful guests. 01:51:07.480 --> 01:51:09.000 I'm very happy with our guests. 01:51:09.290 --> 01:51:10.890 Yeah, our guests are fantastic. 01:51:11.050 --> 01:51:12.650 We can send them fanny packs. 01:51:13.050 --> 01:51:13.530 Yeah. 01:51:13.690 --> 01:51:14.330 Yeah. 01:51:14.890 --> 01:51:15.530 All right. 01:51:16.090 --> 01:51:17.610 See you next week.