WEBVTT

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Okay.

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Uh I I am me and you are you.

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Yes, and that would work, except there's this thing David called uh common knowledge.

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You might I'll I'll tell you all about it later.

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Okay, so you might not know who me is.

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Exactly.

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There uh you are uh y yeah.

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Yes, you are not me is not sufficient.

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I'm the other David P David Pinsoff.

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I'm with uh my friend and co-host Dave Petrozowski.

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That is me, which in this case context is sufficient because it gets

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complicated.

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It takes a while to wrap your head around it.

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But anyway, we're here.

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Boy, this is really uh interesting conversation.

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People are gonna be turning podcast if they can't

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explain this, how are they going to explain like how the mind works, right?

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Which is actually a question I ask myself every day.

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So yeah.

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And we're doing the evolutionary psychology podcast.

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Even that I screwed up.

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Evolutionary psychology, the podcast.

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It was a good throwback to the first one.

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Yes.

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Um and uh we're doing a fantastic job introducing this episode.

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Hey Dave.

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Hey David.

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So we've done a few interviews now.

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Uh and this is the episode where we get back to just you and me, the Dave's putting

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their heads together.

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And I think this was a really fun, wide-ranging conversation.

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Yeah.

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This is uh instead of sort of being on our looking backwards, this is sort of looking

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forwards or positively saying, Well, what is evolutionary psychology and what are some

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examples of really great work that explain what it is and give meat

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to the idea that it makes predictions and gives people insights.

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And so I think if especially for those people listening who want some concrete examples

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of insight that can be provided from this perspective.

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And yes, and not just insight, but important, socially relevant insight.

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So we spend a good chunk of the episode talking about race and uh racial categorization,

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racial prejudice, and what evolutionary psychology can tell us about this uh important

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topic.

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Uh and we really get into the nuts and bolts of it in a in a fascinating and and

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mind-blowing way.

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Um from there we go go into anger, we go into happiness.

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We cover a lot of stuff in this episode.

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It was it was really fun.

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Yeah, absolutely.

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Yeah.

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And um and it was sort of fun because the some of the work is some of some of my empirical

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work that I do sort of in my day job.

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Um so um yeah so I'm the horse's mouth in that situation.

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Yeah.

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So without further ado, enjoy how to be a good evolutionary psychologist.

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David, good to see you today.

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Good to see you too.

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Excited to get into the nitty-gritty of how to actually be a good evolutionary

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psychologist.

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Yeah, that's right.

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We've had a couple guests on, but we haven't really talked about sort of what evps

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is positively per se.

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And I think it would be really helpful, especially for people who are listening who aren't

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part of the regular community of people, to just get a better idea of sort of what it is.

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Yes, I agree.

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There's plenty of discourse surrounding whether evolutionary psychology is good

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or bad, or whether we should take an evolutionary approach or what kind of evolutionary

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approach we should take.

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But there's very little discourse surrounding the very large difference between good

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evolutionary psychology and bad evolutionary psychology.

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And I think any person in the field would agree that there is plenty of bad stuff in there

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and plenty of good stuff in there.

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And I think the wider public has no way of telling the difference between those two things.

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Would you agree?

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I would agree, yeah.

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And I think also, I mean, this is the problem with the format of scientific dissemination

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is a lot of stuff is behind paywalls or it's in sort of boring journals.

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I think one of the things that is really cool that I hope people will start to get a sense

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of is what a treat it is to talk to people who are actually doing the science because

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they're really cool people.

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They have lots of cool experiences and they're studying really cool stuff.

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And I think one thing I tell people, like my students in classes, is that textbooks are

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usually anywhere from 10 to 20 years behind.

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Journal articles are, you know, three or four years behind.

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Because if you think about it, you know, you have an idea, you test the idea, you run the

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study, or you write the paper.

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It takes a while to then get accepted.

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Talking to people, you really catch up.

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And so, you know, if you're reading a popular book or a textbook, you're 20 years or 15

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years behind.

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If you're reading journal articles, you're three or four or five years behind.

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But if you're talking to people, you really get the update, up-to-date stuff.

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And that's a real treat to have.

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And so that's the other thing is so much of the empirical work and theoretical work is so

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new.

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Like David, your we'll talk about your humor work in some episode.

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I just saw that a couple months ago.

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I was completely blown away.

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Um, um, John Tuby, my uh recently um he passed away recently,

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but he was one of the founders of Ev Psyche, and he would famously sort of say you

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shouldn't study humor as your first project because it was such a trippy, tricky thing to

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do.

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Um, and I think uh humor's always been one of these sort of um things that are difficult in

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he thought it was it was tricky in the sense of mysterious or or um people won't take you

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seriously as an academic if you're no no no no no the first one he he said sort of you know

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you should start a project with clear selection pressures and an obvious design.

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So sort of sort of something like, you know, uh not starving to death, you know,

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reproducing clear survival, reproductive uh benefits, clear

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selection pressures, humor, things like that.

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He he put humor in this category of it's there's such a number of

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layers between clear design and the phenomenon that it would be very tricky,

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especially for an early career student, to do.

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And I think seeing your talk, you lifting the veil of actually, there's only a

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few straightforward designs involved.

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Uh, it was just to your credit.

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Uh I'm sorry, I sort of feel like I'm doing a teaser here.

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Uh so we should uh but anyway, yeah, no, it was uh really good and cool

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insight.

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But I think the point is that's an example of cool new work that

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it's exciting to talk about or share in this venue as well.

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Yeah, it's not very widely understood just how young the field of evolutionary psychology

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is.

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So it started in the 90s.

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Uh um, I mean, sociobiology was sort of the early beginnings of it.

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E.O.

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Wilson was beginning to bring ideas from evolutionary biology to study the social

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behavior of animals.

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And in his classic book, Sociobiology, he had a final chapter on humans, where he started

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to apply some of these ideas from evolutionary biology and the Neo-Darwinian synthesis to

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humans.

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And of course, it was extremely con controversial when he did that.

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But uh I think it took a couple decades to find the right way to apply

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evolution to human behavior.

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I mean, you know, Eo Wilson got some things right, But I think the the framework of

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sociobiology was not psychological enough.

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Um, and that is where Tubian Cosmodes came in in the nineties with evolutionary psychology,

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um, where the adaptation um in question was not behavior,

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but psychological mechanisms, cognitive systems.

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There are many ways to describe them, but the stuff in our head that takes in information

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and guides behavior, that is the appropriate target of scientific inquiry.

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That is where we should be looking for adaptations and for um functional

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organization.

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We should not be looking at the level of behavior per se.

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We should be looking at behavior regulation systems inside the nervous system.

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That's right.

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Yeah, the the level, the invariance is is the design.

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And a good example of that would be something like plants growing towards light.

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If you tried to have a science of describing where all the plants are growing, it would be

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complicated.

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Plants are everywhere, There's they're growing in all kinds of directions.

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The level of invariance is there's something phototropism, the auxins reduce the plant

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growth.

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And so that you can economically describe all plant behavior.

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I mean, there's other designs too, but in terms of photophotropism,

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the invariance is the underlying rule of you know, bend towards light

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and as you're growing.

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it's a beautiful analogy because if you were to try to study plant growth as the

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target of scientific inquiry, you'd be very confused.

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You'd have, you know, plants moving in uh this direction and that direction, uh to, you

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know, in this diagonal, that diagonal, and you would have no way of understanding why they

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were growing in which direction.

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And you could collect all this data about all the different trajectories of different

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plants, and you'd be incredibly confused as to what was going on.

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Uh And it is only when you realize the adaptive function of phototropism that you can

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organize all that data in an elegant and parsimonious way.

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And you can look at the at the at the level of the growth regulation system within the

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plant that was designed by natural selection to find sunlight.

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And I think a similar paradigm shift is needed for human psychology.

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We shouldn't be looking at the uh superficial level of behaviors.

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We should be looking deeper at what are the underlying systems that were selected for to

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generate the behavior.

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That's right.

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And it's also this is a point that Paul Smaldino makes.

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And before that, Noam Chomsky, which is that in just as a general point in science, and

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Noam Chomsky has a nice example of this uh, where you could set up a video camera and

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record a bunch of leaves falling outside of your window.

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Um, you could record that uh get a statistical analysis of how do those leaves

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behave.

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And one could probably get a better prediction of how those leaves will behave than even a

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physicist could do, right?

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Um, but the problem is that that sort of statistical description of those

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leaves is brittle and doesn't apply to new contexts.

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And this is Paul Smaldino's point, where if you have a mathematical description of behavior

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in a certain context, if a new context in a new context the behavior won't be

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the same, then you actually lose the predictive power of the model.

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So for example, those particular leaves falling in that particular place, you might have a

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good model of that, but you're not going to be able to model something else falling, right?

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Because it's just different.

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And there's nothing in the theory about coefficient, drag coefficients, or things like

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that.

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And so one of the reasons scientifically to have an underlying model that is

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causal is that it allows you to make inferences to

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new situations.

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And otherwise, you're sort of stuck with descriptions of a particular set of behaviors,

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but you lose the predictive power of a scientific theory.

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That's one of the main differences between just a description.

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And we talked with Dan Conroy Beam in a previous episode about there are a lot of

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theories in psychology that are descriptions of what happens either in a study or just

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general behavioral phenomenon.

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But if you don't unpack the underlying causal invariances like

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phototropism, then you're just stuck with statistical descriptions of those plants growing

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in those places, but you might not capture the right data in terms of like which direction

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does the light coming from.

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Same thing, the plants or the leaves falling and the video camera, if you uh

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extrapolate to a new context, that model might be useless.

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So it's very brittle.

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Um and so the point is a theoretical approach where

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the level of invariance is not behavior, but the underlying psychological design.

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I think this is sort of where we are as a field in psychology generally.

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And I think F-Psych was on the forefront in Lita and John's work in particular, really on

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the forefront of pushing that idea that the level of invariance is in the mind and the

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software and the mind, not at the level of behavior.

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Yes, absolutely.

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Um, and certainly psychology is stuck in this rut where there is a

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proliferation of endless biases and effects that pile up.

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I think Wikipedia has a list of biases that's like hundreds long.

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This is the sign of a field that is stuck in a cul-de-sac, I think.

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Um if you're just collecting biases and effects without a deeper theoretical framework to

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organize them, um, you're just you're butterfly collecting.

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Um, you're looking at the wrong thing.

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Um so I think that is one of the great benefits of evolutionary psychology

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is it causes you to look deeper into the underlying structure of the mind,

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into what we might call human nature, for lack of a better term, the reliably developing

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species typical uh developmental and psychological architecture um

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that uh has been produced by natural selection.

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That is the the place to look for adaptation, for function.

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Um and uh a science that doesn't look at that as

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the source of invariance, as you put it, is inevitably going to get lost

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um in descriptive cul de sacs and overfitting to data

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rather than finding the the underlying patterns.

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Yeah, I I I think that's right.

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I think you're what you're saying is that the

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evolutionary psychology is a kind of correction, and there are other ways to get there.

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Like I think there are areas of like AI or computer science or anywhere where people have

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there's sort of tasks that need to be solved that get at uh aside from just the

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behavior, what is the underlying design that I think is is sort of a crucial thing.

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And we're we're still not quite there.

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One one thing maybe to shift to to make this concrete for listeners, especially.

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Uh let me pose a question to you and you can you can uh take this question if you want.

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So one of the common misunderstandings of evolutionary psychology is that it's just so

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story.

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And I'm curious uh if in in well, yeah, what do you

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how do you typically explain why it isn't that?

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Or do you have an example of a study that you're aware of, or an example research project,

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either your own or someone else's, that's a clear example of why it isn't a just so story?

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I mean, uh, I've been I've seen this this idea over and over again.

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It's one of those zombie ideas that just won't die, no matter how much you correct it.

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Um so just so stories.

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The idea is that you take any human behavior and you spin a uh uh an

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evolutionary story about us as cavemen or whatever, um, and and you um

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make up some reason why it might have helped our ancestors survive and reproduce, and then

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your work is done.

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Uh and that's that's the criticism: is that evolutionary psychology does this.

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And I think it can be a fair criticism of some bad

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evolutionary psychology.

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So that's that's um a place uh where bad evolutionary psychology can go.

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If you don't uh have the right way of thinking and and and the right way of doing task

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analysis, you can sometimes get lost in this uh just so story trap.

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So I think it's it's it's a valid concern and something to look out for.

00:16:49.830 --> 00:16:55.460
Um but just as an empirical matter, um the idea that

00:16:55.460 --> 00:17:01.380
evolutionary psychology does not make testable predictions um is false.

00:17:01.780 --> 00:17:07.700
Um what I find ironic about the just so story idea um is that it itself is

00:17:07.700 --> 00:17:09.300
often unfalsifiable.

00:17:09.540 --> 00:17:15.390
Like a lot of people will just lazily say that some idea I present is unfalsifiable,

00:17:15.470 --> 00:17:17.870
and then I'll say, Well, actually, no, here's how you could falsify it.

00:17:17.950 --> 00:17:21.470
And I'll I list uh a number of empirical tests that you could falsify.

00:17:21.550 --> 00:17:26.190
And then I I often engage you know in petty debates with people on the internet when I

00:17:26.190 --> 00:17:29.230
blog, and and you know, when every now and then when someone says this is unfalsifiable,

00:17:29.310 --> 00:17:30.830
I'll say, No, here's how you can falsify it.

00:17:30.990 --> 00:17:34.990
And then what's funny is uh what I sometimes get is well, no, I don't believe you.

00:17:37.380 --> 00:17:41.860
Which which suggests to me that the idea that the hypothesis is unfalsifiable is itself

00:17:41.860 --> 00:17:42.660
unfalsifiable.

00:17:42.820 --> 00:17:44.580
Nothing could actually falsify it.

00:17:44.900 --> 00:17:47.940
No matter what I say, you know, the person will continue to believe that it's

00:17:47.940 --> 00:17:48.900
unfalsifiable.

00:17:49.140 --> 00:17:54.260
Um so uh I mean the best way to just dismiss this idea is just to

00:17:54.980 --> 00:18:00.180
like point to, say, the Journal of Evolution and Human Behavior, point to the latest uh,

00:18:00.260 --> 00:18:04.740
you know, two volume handbook of evolutionary psychology, uh, which I believe is uh over

00:18:04.740 --> 00:18:10.350
fifty chapters uh covering just an an enormous wealth of empirical research um that has

00:18:10.350 --> 00:18:12.750
been generated by evolutionary psychologists.

00:18:12.830 --> 00:18:17.070
Um so clearly they're not just sitting around telling stories.

00:18:17.310 --> 00:18:22.110
Clearly these people are doing research, they're testing hypotheses, they're doing

00:18:22.110 --> 00:18:24.830
statistical analyses, they're doing something.

00:18:25.150 --> 00:18:25.470
Yeah.

00:18:25.870 --> 00:18:26.350
Right.

00:18:26.510 --> 00:18:30.670
Um so that's one thing I might do is just point them to that stuff.

00:18:31.700 --> 00:18:32.340
I don't know.

00:18:32.420 --> 00:18:36.420
I mean, there are plenty of cases where evolutionary psychology hypotheses have been

00:18:36.420 --> 00:18:37.460
falsified.

00:18:38.900 --> 00:18:44.740
Perhaps the easiest one to wrap your head around is this hypothesis about homosexuality.

00:18:44.900 --> 00:18:49.220
So homosexuality is kind of mysterious from an evolutionary perspective, and that you would

00:18:49.220 --> 00:18:55.220
expect uh heterosexual uh mating to be selected for and homosexual mating to be

00:18:55.220 --> 00:19:00.580
heavily uh selected against, given that you're not uh reproducing and spreading your genes.

00:19:01.630 --> 00:19:07.230
So, one hypothesis for why genes for homosexuality might persist, despite their uh

00:19:07.230 --> 00:19:13.230
selective downsides, is that maybe it's a way, it's like a different fitness

00:19:13.230 --> 00:19:14.270
maximizing strategy.

00:19:14.510 --> 00:19:19.630
Maybe gay people are investing more in their kin, in their nieces and nephews.

00:19:20.030 --> 00:19:24.830
And because fitness isn't just about your direct reproduction, but about the reproduction

00:19:24.830 --> 00:19:30.280
of anyone who shares genes with you, maybe on net homosexuals are still doing okay

00:19:30.280 --> 00:19:35.400
evolutionarily evolutionarily if they're investing uh a lot in their nieces and nephews.

00:19:35.640 --> 00:19:38.360
Um the coin it's like helpers in the nest, I think.

00:19:38.840 --> 00:19:39.320
Helpers in the nest.

00:19:41.640 --> 00:19:45.080
No, as as a matter of fact, I don't think this is a very plausible hypothesis.

00:19:45.320 --> 00:19:48.920
Um but at the very least, it is falsifiable.

00:19:49.000 --> 00:19:50.280
It is very easy to test.

00:19:50.360 --> 00:19:52.890
It makes a very clear, bold prediction.

00:19:53.050 --> 00:19:59.050
And that prediction is that gay people should be absolutely effusive toward their

00:19:59.050 --> 00:20:00.170
nieces and nephews.

00:20:00.330 --> 00:20:06.330
They should just uh absolutely adore them and invest tons of time and energy into taking

00:20:06.330 --> 00:20:11.210
care of their nieces and nephews, enough to offset themselves not having kids of their own.

00:20:11.450 --> 00:20:15.480
And you can go out and you can run the tests.

00:20:15.720 --> 00:20:19.560
You can uh ask gay people how much time they spend with their nieces and nephews, you can

00:20:19.560 --> 00:20:25.560
compare it, you know, it to uh straight people, and uh the data has come in

00:20:25.640 --> 00:20:26.920
and the answer is no.

00:20:27.160 --> 00:20:32.120
Gay people are not particularly uh effusive toward their nieces and nephews relative to

00:20:32.120 --> 00:20:32.920
straight people.

00:20:33.160 --> 00:20:36.910
So that hypothesis has been uh falsified.

00:20:37.070 --> 00:20:42.590
Uh, that is uh no longer a viable hypothesis about the evolution of

00:20:42.590 --> 00:20:43.470
homosexuality.

00:20:43.630 --> 00:20:46.910
So that's one clear example of a hypothesis that was falsified.

00:20:47.310 --> 00:20:47.710
Right.

00:20:48.030 --> 00:20:52.910
And and I think there's also, I think this comes back to

00:20:53.790 --> 00:20:58.590
why people misunderstand evolutionary psychology and not only why, but how they

00:20:58.590 --> 00:21:03.640
misunderstand it, comes back to what we talked about, which is this idea of it's not about

00:21:03.640 --> 00:21:05.080
behavior but design.

00:21:05.240 --> 00:21:10.360
And where evolutionary psychology typically makes predictions is at the level of design.

00:21:10.600 --> 00:21:16.440
So what you just described was if this idea is right about that um if

00:21:16.440 --> 00:21:22.350
homosexuality, there should be design in this sort of type to

00:21:22.350 --> 00:21:24.750
be really strong and allo-parenting.

00:21:25.390 --> 00:21:27.230
And you don't see that.

00:21:28.350 --> 00:21:34.270
And other examples of design, a good example of this that

00:21:34.270 --> 00:21:36.670
is falsifiable but but turns out to be true.

00:21:36.750 --> 00:21:41.300
I, you know, I know this is just my own work, which is that one idea about like where it

00:21:41.300 --> 00:21:43.940
is, why do people categorize people by race?

00:21:44.420 --> 00:21:48.660
People had shown that people always categorize people by age, sex, and race.

00:21:48.820 --> 00:21:50.660
This was looked at um using a parallel.

00:21:51.060 --> 00:21:54.980
So let's we should probably unpack what it means to categorize someone by something,

00:21:55.060 --> 00:21:57.300
because a lot of people might not know what that what that means.

00:21:57.620 --> 00:21:58.100
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:21:58.180 --> 00:21:58.420
Great.

00:21:58.580 --> 00:22:04.470
So categorization is uh a process whereby when you're meeting somebody

00:22:04.550 --> 00:22:08.310
or you're judging somebody or evaluating somebody, you're not just treating their

00:22:08.310 --> 00:22:09.910
individual characteristics.

00:22:10.230 --> 00:22:15.430
Oh, this person is nicer or you know uh has this particular um

00:22:15.590 --> 00:22:16.550
attribute.

00:22:16.710 --> 00:22:21.270
They're also an instance of a broader category, which is a set of people.

00:22:21.430 --> 00:22:26.070
So they might be uh all this might be a woman, this might be

00:22:26.630 --> 00:22:32.380
somebody who is uh of a particular tribe or a race, like they might be

00:22:32.380 --> 00:22:37.900
black or white, whatever the local sort of cultural categories are,

00:22:39.020 --> 00:22:41.100
an old person, a young person.

00:22:41.740 --> 00:22:46.780
And this has been an important part of studying social cognition

00:22:47.660 --> 00:22:53.470
since the 20th century, especially in social psychology, because many bases of

00:22:53.470 --> 00:22:59.230
discrimination and unfair treatment are treating people not because of their individual

00:22:59.230 --> 00:23:04.190
attributes, but because of the category membership that they embody or people perceive them

00:23:04.190 --> 00:23:04.910
as embodying.

00:23:05.070 --> 00:23:11.070
So, for example, if you apply to my to to be

00:23:11.070 --> 00:23:16.680
a renter in my apartment, if somebody is using a social category as a

00:23:16.680 --> 00:23:20.280
basis to not allow them in, that's discrimination, right?

00:23:20.360 --> 00:23:23.800
And it's not that there's any problem with them as an individual, it's that because they're

00:23:23.800 --> 00:23:25.400
an instance of this category.

00:23:25.640 --> 00:23:31.000
So category based discrimination is a really important social

00:23:31.000 --> 00:23:32.760
phenomenon to understand.

00:23:33.640 --> 00:23:39.080
And categorizing people, that is, when a new person is encountered, the

00:23:39.080 --> 00:23:45.070
cognitive process whereby their Their cues that

00:23:45.070 --> 00:23:48.990
they embody in their face or the how they look or talk or whatever, because they can be

00:23:48.990 --> 00:23:51.950
verbal, they can like you know how they talk can be a category.

00:23:52.190 --> 00:23:56.830
Um, these all activate the representation of the category.

00:23:56.990 --> 00:24:01.630
And understanding that process is really important because it's the categorization process

00:24:01.710 --> 00:24:06.260
that's the first step prior to any discrimination.

00:24:06.500 --> 00:24:10.260
If people didn't never categorize people in the first place, there would be no racial

00:24:10.260 --> 00:24:13.700
discrimination, sexual discrimination, et cetera, because there wouldn't be categorization

00:24:13.700 --> 00:24:14.980
by this feature in the first place.

00:24:15.140 --> 00:24:20.340
So there was a long history of trying to understand not only the

00:24:20.340 --> 00:24:25.540
discrimination or the attitudes people held towards these categories, but starting around

00:24:25.540 --> 00:24:31.460
the 1960s and 70s in social areas of social cognition, people wanted

00:24:31.460 --> 00:24:36.270
to start to understand: well, what are the cognitive processes that cause people to

00:24:36.270 --> 00:24:37.950
categorize by social categories?

00:24:38.030 --> 00:24:40.910
In the first place, what are the social categories people use?

00:24:41.310 --> 00:24:43.950
And there were new methods to sort of study that.

00:24:44.030 --> 00:24:49.230
And one of the things I do in my day job as an empirical psychologist is study some of

00:24:49.230 --> 00:24:50.510
those cognitive processes.

00:24:50.590 --> 00:24:54.830
And one of the tools people use is something called the Who Said What paradigm, where

00:24:54.830 --> 00:24:57.870
people are shown photos of people along with a sentence.

00:24:57.950 --> 00:25:00.990
So it could be something like you're told, oh, you're going to see a bunch of people,

00:25:01.150 --> 00:25:06.040
they're just all having a conversation, and then you see a picture of like a person and

00:25:06.040 --> 00:25:09.400
there's text underneath, they say something, and then there's another person, and they say

00:25:09.400 --> 00:25:11.240
something else, like, hey, nice to meet you.

00:25:11.400 --> 00:25:13.000
Like, you know, what are you doing today?

00:25:13.080 --> 00:25:16.360
And then somebody says something else, and they just this sort of a conversation.

00:25:16.520 --> 00:25:22.120
Um, and usually participants or or people in a study would sort of see this on a computer.

00:25:22.450 --> 00:25:23.570
It's been done in real life.

00:25:23.650 --> 00:25:24.930
You get the same kind of result.

00:25:25.170 --> 00:25:27.890
And then at the end, there's a surprise recall task.

00:25:27.970 --> 00:25:31.490
So usually there's a long conversation.

00:25:31.650 --> 00:25:33.890
Usually it's between like eight people.

00:25:34.530 --> 00:25:37.410
You see about 24 statements, whatever.

00:25:37.970 --> 00:25:42.930
But at the end, there's a surprise recall task where all of a sudden you see all the faces

00:25:42.930 --> 00:25:46.690
or all the people that you had seen earlier, and then you're asked to try to remember who

00:25:46.690 --> 00:25:47.970
said which sentence.

00:25:48.600 --> 00:25:50.520
And it's a surprise task.

00:25:50.680 --> 00:25:52.760
And it feels really, really hard.

00:25:52.920 --> 00:25:58.920
Like shockingly, memory for what people have said or who have said what is quite

00:25:58.920 --> 00:25:59.240
bad.

00:25:59.400 --> 00:26:04.760
I actually make these stimuli, and I still, to this day, even the stimuli that I make, I'm

00:26:04.760 --> 00:26:05.560
like terrible at it.

00:26:05.640 --> 00:26:07.560
And I like it feels like random guessing.

00:26:07.720 --> 00:26:13.240
But the cool thing is that even though it feels like random guessing to the participants,

00:26:13.800 --> 00:26:17.710
their choices are not random typically.

00:26:17.950 --> 00:26:23.390
And what happens is that, so for example, if you present people in the conversation that

00:26:23.390 --> 00:26:27.150
differ in their sex, so half of them are male, half of them are female.

00:26:27.950 --> 00:26:33.470
When people are given that sentence and they look at it and they're like, Hi, how are you

00:26:33.470 --> 00:26:33.630
doing?

00:26:33.790 --> 00:26:34.670
Like, what are you doing today?

00:26:34.750 --> 00:26:37.470
And they're like, Man, I don't remember at all who said this.

00:26:37.630 --> 00:26:40.350
And you just click on one of the faces you saw randomly.

00:26:40.590 --> 00:26:41.950
Feels like random guessing.

00:26:42.030 --> 00:26:43.630
You're not conscious of anything.

00:26:43.870 --> 00:26:49.840
But it turns out that, and this is a very reliable, replicable finding, is

00:26:49.840 --> 00:26:54.880
that what ends up happening in people's cognitive processing is that they're

00:26:54.880 --> 00:26:59.760
categorizing the statement not as just coming from an individual, but also a social

00:26:59.760 --> 00:27:00.320
category.

00:27:00.480 --> 00:27:04.480
So for example, this is a statement coming from a woman or a man.

00:27:04.720 --> 00:27:10.610
And what will happen is in the guessing process, the fact that that

00:27:10.610 --> 00:27:16.050
statement was said by a man or a woman will cause them to be more likely to

00:27:16.050 --> 00:27:21.170
choose one of the men or one of the women, even if they don't remember the correct speaker.

00:27:21.410 --> 00:27:26.450
So, in other words, like if there's four male speakers, even if they get the male speaker

00:27:26.450 --> 00:27:31.970
wrong, the actual particular individual one, they'll be more likely to attribute it to

00:27:31.970 --> 00:27:32.850
another one of the men.

00:27:33.010 --> 00:27:38.100
So if you and I were talking to somebody and they forgot which one of us said it.

00:27:38.500 --> 00:27:39.220
Which David, yeah.

00:27:39.940 --> 00:27:40.660
Yeah, exactly.

00:27:41.220 --> 00:27:43.460
They'd be like, well, one of the Davids said it, right?

00:27:43.620 --> 00:27:46.100
Um and Or one of one of the men said it.

00:27:46.500 --> 00:27:47.060
Exactly.

00:27:47.220 --> 00:27:53.060
And and so, and it turns out then you can quantify for each participant the

00:27:53.060 --> 00:27:58.980
degree to which their errors cluster non-randomly, and to the degree that a statement that

00:27:58.980 --> 00:28:04.830
had come from a man was attributed to other men, a statement that had come from a woman is

00:28:04.830 --> 00:28:10.190
attributed to other women, that quantifies in a very precise way to the degree to which

00:28:10.190 --> 00:28:13.470
that particular participant categorized by sex.

00:28:13.950 --> 00:28:19.230
And it's good because it allows you to measure categorization by, for example, sex in a way

00:28:19.230 --> 00:28:20.270
that's non-conscious.

00:28:20.430 --> 00:28:22.270
So there's no social desirability things.

00:28:22.350 --> 00:28:25.710
Because if you ask somebody like, oh yeah, no, are you categorizing people by like, you

00:28:25.710 --> 00:28:27.630
know, race, the people are like, no, no, no, no.

00:28:27.700 --> 00:28:31.780
but like they might be right they just know that you know that you're I'm not supposed to

00:28:31.860 --> 00:28:36.020
so you just sort of are you are you likely to confuse what one black person said with what

00:28:36.020 --> 00:28:39.860
another black person said oh no of course not no exactly but and but if you look at the

00:28:39.860 --> 00:28:44.100
data they're they're actually doing that yeah exactly and so this is in this this who said

00:28:44.260 --> 00:28:49.300
what paradigm was used for basically 40 years and what people found was that

00:28:49.540 --> 00:28:54.980
categorization by many categories like social class, like

00:28:56.070 --> 00:29:00.790
sort of more arbitrary things, like maybe if they're a university student or a teacher,

00:29:01.430 --> 00:29:06.790
even visible things like clothing, styles, these were things that would sometimes be

00:29:06.790 --> 00:29:11.110
categorized as measured by this paradigm, but sometimes not.

00:29:11.270 --> 00:29:11.510
Yeah.

00:29:11.670 --> 00:29:14.790
So like it would just sort of depend on is it relevant or not?

00:29:15.750 --> 00:29:20.260
You know, like in we all have this experience of like, you know, sometimes we categorize

00:29:20.260 --> 00:29:26.260
people by like whether or not they are a supporter of a particular team or of a political

00:29:26.260 --> 00:29:30.500
party or something, and maybe not other times, you know, like it's just not relevant.

00:29:31.460 --> 00:29:37.140
But um, but there were certain categories that people always use, um, regardless of whether

00:29:37.140 --> 00:29:38.820
or not it was relevant to the context.

00:29:38.900 --> 00:29:44.500
And one of those was um, well, one of them was sex, as we talked about,

00:29:44.740 --> 00:29:50.110
one of them was age, um, you know, usually broad, broad strokes of age, like old, young,

00:29:50.190 --> 00:29:51.470
um, kind of thing, you know.

00:29:51.710 --> 00:29:53.790
And then the third one was race.

00:29:54.990 --> 00:30:00.030
And uh, especially for race, people were interested in seeing if there was a way to reduce

00:30:00.030 --> 00:30:01.470
categorization by race.

00:30:02.030 --> 00:30:07.840
Because again, uh, for something that is socially problematic, like racism, uh

00:30:08.000 --> 00:30:13.280
changing categorization would be a way to change discrimination by race.

00:30:13.440 --> 00:30:18.320
And so people immediately, once they discovered people seem to always categorize people by

00:30:18.320 --> 00:30:18.640
race.

00:30:18.800 --> 00:30:23.040
And this is usually like black versus white, like that, that broad stroke.

00:30:23.280 --> 00:30:29.200
There, there have been other um other kinds of categories that you find similar

00:30:29.200 --> 00:30:29.360
things.

00:30:29.520 --> 00:30:35.280
So, for example, um uh an analogous category sort of in Germany is um

00:30:35.600 --> 00:30:41.530
people who are um sort of a Middle Eastern or particular Turkish descent and that has been

00:30:41.530 --> 00:30:41.770
found.

00:30:41.930 --> 00:30:46.570
So like people will categorize by like sort of white European German versus Turkish in

00:30:46.570 --> 00:30:47.530
Germany, for example.

00:30:47.690 --> 00:30:53.530
So like visible, physically visible sort of like racial categories in a local

00:30:53.530 --> 00:30:54.090
context.

00:30:54.410 --> 00:30:57.290
This is sort of a what people have typically meant by race.

00:30:57.610 --> 00:30:57.770
Okay.

00:30:57.850 --> 00:31:03.020
I just want to lay the groundwork for the discovery that I think you're about to get to,

00:31:03.100 --> 00:31:05.820
which was made uh by an evolutionary psychologist.

00:31:06.060 --> 00:31:10.220
So th i i i in this context of when when was this research being done?

00:31:10.300 --> 00:31:11.500
Like 80s, 90s?

00:31:12.460 --> 00:31:16.220
The first Who Said What paradigm was done in uh 78.

00:31:17.660 --> 00:31:23.020
And then from then on uh in up and through early 2000s.

00:31:23.340 --> 00:31:28.010
So this is two or three decades of research on this paradigm.

00:31:28.250 --> 00:31:34.010
And people are are finding that that the mind is intuitively categorizing people by

00:31:34.010 --> 00:31:34.650
race.

00:31:34.970 --> 00:31:35.370
Correct.

00:31:35.610 --> 00:31:41.450
And the holy grail that everyone in this field is looking for is how to we how do

00:31:41.450 --> 00:31:44.490
we get people to stop categorizing by race?

00:31:44.810 --> 00:31:45.050
That's right.

00:31:45.770 --> 00:31:50.730
The thought is if we can cut this at the root, and if we can stop people from

00:31:50.730 --> 00:31:56.020
categorizing by race at the beginning, then it will solve this

00:31:56.020 --> 00:32:01.780
downstream problem of people discriminating or treating

00:32:01.780 --> 00:32:03.140
black people unfairly.

00:32:03.380 --> 00:32:07.860
All of these social problems that we as social scientists are trying to solve, we can cut

00:32:07.860 --> 00:32:13.140
them at the root by trying to eliminate this bias in the human mind to categorize by race.

00:32:13.300 --> 00:32:18.580
So everybody is looking for the holy grail of how do we get people to stop

00:32:18.580 --> 00:32:20.170
categorizing by race.

00:32:20.250 --> 00:32:21.850
Is that a fair characterization?

00:32:22.090 --> 00:32:22.490
That's right.

00:32:22.570 --> 00:32:26.810
And I think I don't, I'm not even sure they had that, uh, all of that in mind.

00:32:26.970 --> 00:32:32.170
I think it was some of it was just at the level of well, we're finding it is always a basis

00:32:32.170 --> 00:32:36.490
of categorization, and it would seem like a good idea to get it to not be.

00:32:36.570 --> 00:32:38.090
So let's figure out a way to do it.

00:32:38.250 --> 00:32:43.130
And people sort of stood on their head, I think, as a care a fair characterization.

00:32:43.290 --> 00:32:46.650
Um, they would tell they would change the relevance of race.

00:32:46.810 --> 00:32:52.740
Many theories in social categorization were theories that predicted roughly

00:32:52.900 --> 00:32:58.100
that if a context is relevant to the category, then it should be categorized.

00:32:58.340 --> 00:32:58.580
Yeah.

00:32:58.820 --> 00:33:00.260
So relevance, yeah.

00:33:00.420 --> 00:33:02.660
Um, or stereotypicality.

00:33:02.820 --> 00:33:07.540
So is the context one where race is relevant for stereotypes, or is it counter

00:33:07.620 --> 00:33:08.740
stereotypical?

00:33:09.140 --> 00:33:12.350
All of these things telling people attend to race.

00:33:12.430 --> 00:33:15.230
So that part of the instruction would be attend to the race.

00:33:15.550 --> 00:33:18.830
One instrument another a different set of instructions was don't attend to race.

00:33:18.990 --> 00:33:22.830
Um you know the default is not nothing nothing changed.

00:33:22.910 --> 00:33:28.750
So so everything that the current theories of categorization uh were

00:33:28.750 --> 00:33:31.310
predicting uh weren't working.

00:33:31.470 --> 00:33:31.710
Yeah.

00:33:32.030 --> 00:33:32.270
Yeah.

00:33:32.430 --> 00:33:37.720
And I also wanted to add that at this point, you can correct me if I'm wrong, people were

00:33:37.720 --> 00:33:43.560
starting to grow rather pessimistic about the possibility of eliminating this tendency to

00:33:43.560 --> 00:33:44.840
categorize by race.

00:33:45.080 --> 00:33:50.280
There was even some talk of maybe this is just a part of human nature, maybe this is just

00:33:50.280 --> 00:33:54.200
in our DNA, we're innately racist because of our evolutionary heritage.

00:33:54.280 --> 00:33:58.280
There was some bad evolutionary psychology coming out of social psychology at this time

00:33:58.440 --> 00:34:02.760
that maybe this stuff is just is hopeless and that we're just uh we're innate racists.

00:34:02.870 --> 00:34:03.030
right?

00:34:03.350 --> 00:34:09.270
Yeah, I th I think the the I think the that that um innate racist was sort of

00:34:09.270 --> 00:34:12.390
outside the professional vein of research.

00:34:12.550 --> 00:34:18.230
The professional vein of research, however, did was as you it's correct what you're saying,

00:34:18.310 --> 00:34:21.430
it was not just resigned to it would be inevitable.

00:34:21.670 --> 00:34:25.110
They were to their credit trying to make claims about the underlying design.

00:34:25.190 --> 00:34:30.420
And so one of those claims was well maybe it's built into our psychology.

00:34:30.580 --> 00:34:35.460
I don't think they were claiming we're sort of innate racist, but um, but it it it sort of

00:34:35.460 --> 00:34:40.740
amounts to the same thing, which is that race, age, and sex are all really important.

00:34:41.700 --> 00:34:47.620
And they may be primitives to the human mind and sort of built-in

00:34:47.620 --> 00:34:49.540
categories to the human mind.

00:34:49.780 --> 00:34:55.590
And that was the conclusion, reluctantly, uh particularly in the case of race,

00:34:55.830 --> 00:35:00.710
based on these decades of failures to change categorization by race, correct?

00:35:01.590 --> 00:35:01.910
Okay.

00:35:02.310 --> 00:35:02.950
Yeah.

00:35:03.830 --> 00:35:04.150
All right.

00:35:04.230 --> 00:35:07.670
Now should we should evolutionary psychology enter the stage?

00:35:07.990 --> 00:35:08.310
Yeah.

00:35:08.470 --> 00:35:13.590
So uh and this is where this is a really nice example of two principles.

00:35:13.750 --> 00:35:17.670
One of evolutionary psychology not just being a just so story.

00:35:17.830 --> 00:35:23.320
And the second thing is that having an idea of an ancestral environment

00:35:23.640 --> 00:35:29.400
as different than modern circumstances, both of these principles

00:35:29.400 --> 00:35:34.840
are really useful for what we're about to say and were really necessary for what we're

00:35:34.840 --> 00:35:35.400
about to say.

00:35:35.640 --> 00:35:41.310
So what ended up happening was, um, and so so Lita

00:35:41.470 --> 00:35:46.110
Cosmeties, John Tuby, um at the time Rob Kurzman had did some work, and then I've done a

00:35:46.110 --> 00:35:46.910
lot of this work as well.

00:35:46.990 --> 00:35:51.470
So sort of all of us as a team are are sort of responsible for this work.

00:35:51.630 --> 00:35:54.190
Um, and we're just talking about it because I know it so well.

00:35:54.350 --> 00:36:00.190
Um but but basically um what what especially I think Lita Lita

00:36:00.350 --> 00:36:06.240
and John um sort of did in Rob were to was to look at

00:36:06.240 --> 00:36:10.400
this phenomenon of people always categorize people by race in particular.

00:36:10.640 --> 00:36:15.600
And then this additional claim of there's sort of software in the mind for categorizing

00:36:15.600 --> 00:36:16.720
people by race.

00:36:17.040 --> 00:36:19.280
This idea is a functional claim.

00:36:19.440 --> 00:36:24.800
This is saying there is a system in the mind that is well designed to categorize people by

00:36:24.830 --> 00:36:25.470
race.

00:36:25.790 --> 00:36:31.470
A claim about what the function of a particular piece of software is in the mind has to be

00:36:31.470 --> 00:36:34.590
consistent with the way natural selection works.

00:36:35.790 --> 00:36:41.710
And uh and this is just simply because this is the only way that you get complexity,

00:36:41.790 --> 00:36:45.870
as you put very uh eloquently in previous episodes, David.

00:36:46.270 --> 00:36:51.640
The only way that complex, non-entropic

00:36:52.200 --> 00:36:58.200
structure can get built into the mind, just like as in the body, is if that structure

00:36:58.520 --> 00:37:04.200
is based around features of the environment that would have been present over evolutionary

00:37:04.200 --> 00:37:04.520
time.

00:37:05.320 --> 00:37:10.920
And those structures would have responded to those features that would have been present

00:37:10.920 --> 00:37:16.440
over evolutionary time in a way that would have been fitness benefiting, i.e.,

00:37:16.850 --> 00:37:22.050
would have generated differential reproductive success on average over

00:37:22.050 --> 00:37:23.330
evolutionary time.

00:37:23.970 --> 00:37:29.330
So the idea is that if we think of human software as sort of a bunch of

00:37:29.330 --> 00:37:34.770
complicated input-output processes, the claim that the social

00:37:35.170 --> 00:37:41.010
psychological literature was making was that there is a system in the mind that

00:37:41.010 --> 00:37:44.290
is for categorizing people by race.

00:37:44.740 --> 00:37:48.340
And this is precisely where an evolutionary approach comes in handy.

00:37:48.740 --> 00:37:54.420
And I want to interject, this is also precisely the point where bad evolutionary

00:37:54.420 --> 00:37:56.100
psychology could have been done.

00:37:56.500 --> 00:38:01.780
So if I see this pattern of people are naturally categorizing people by race, I could very

00:38:01.780 --> 00:38:07.590
easily tell a just-so story about how uh in the ancestral environment there was

00:38:07.590 --> 00:38:13.430
lots of intergroup warfare, intergroup competition, and categorizing people by you know of

00:38:13.430 --> 00:38:17.750
a different race would have been adaptive in the ancestral environment when we were cavemen

00:38:17.830 --> 00:38:22.150
and we were encountering people from different regions, and we would it would have been it

00:38:22.150 --> 00:38:26.070
would have benefited us to go to war with those other tribes that we encountered.

00:38:26.230 --> 00:38:28.630
So and and that I would end the analysis there.

00:38:28.790 --> 00:38:30.070
No further empirical work.

00:38:30.150 --> 00:38:32.150
That's my untestable just so story.

00:38:32.320 --> 00:38:33.040
my work is done.

00:38:33.200 --> 00:38:36.160
So that's an example of where you could do very bad evolutionary psychology.

00:38:36.400 --> 00:38:36.720
That's right.

00:38:36.800 --> 00:38:40.080
And you could look across cultures and then say, sort of, look, these people, this is the

00:38:40.080 --> 00:38:41.120
group basis here.

00:38:41.200 --> 00:38:44.720
And you say, well, yeah, that's because that's, you know, that's activates their tribal

00:38:44.720 --> 00:38:45.440
psychology, whatever.

00:38:45.600 --> 00:38:46.320
Yeah, no, exactly.

00:38:46.480 --> 00:38:46.800
That's right.

00:38:46.880 --> 00:38:47.040
Yeah.

00:38:47.440 --> 00:38:51.680
But but you and and Rob and Leda and John did not do bad evolutionary psychology.

00:38:51.760 --> 00:38:53.040
You did good evolutionary psychology.

00:38:53.360 --> 00:38:54.160
Better, yes.

00:38:55.120 --> 00:38:56.160
It's it's still oversimplified.

00:38:56.400 --> 00:38:56.960
But yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:38:57.600 --> 00:39:03.390
So I mean, but but it's so the the claim there's sort of um so yeah, let's

00:39:03.390 --> 00:39:04.510
just so thank you.

00:39:04.670 --> 00:39:10.590
The claim then is all right, let's look at the claim from uh this functional perspective.

00:39:10.750 --> 00:39:16.750
So the claim is that evolutionary um over well, the

00:39:16.750 --> 00:39:20.590
claim is there's a system in the mind for categorizing people by race.

00:39:21.070 --> 00:39:23.470
There's two parts to any evolutionary account.

00:39:23.630 --> 00:39:29.220
One is is the feature of the world present, And then two is

00:39:29.700 --> 00:39:34.180
would there have been selection for dealing with that feature of the world in a way that

00:39:34.180 --> 00:39:35.940
would have been fitness relevant?

00:39:36.980 --> 00:39:42.740
And if you look at race, even on just the first criteria of would this have been a feature

00:39:43.220 --> 00:39:46.020
of around which our minds could have evolved?

00:39:46.180 --> 00:39:51.860
Because something has to be a stable feature of the environment for our minds to uh

00:39:52.180 --> 00:39:54.420
to have some structure to represent it.

00:39:54.580 --> 00:39:56.850
A good example is like a mother.

00:39:57.090 --> 00:39:58.610
Mothers are always present.

00:39:58.690 --> 00:40:04.290
That's a stable, enduring feature of the sexually

00:40:04.290 --> 00:40:05.810
reproducing organisms.

00:40:06.050 --> 00:40:11.730
And especially where your mother is investing in you, there's really good

00:40:11.970 --> 00:40:14.450
ideas that like you always had a mother.

00:40:14.530 --> 00:40:17.010
And so that's a stable feature of the world.

00:40:17.090 --> 00:40:21.890
And that feature of the world, given that you have a mother who has an identity who's

00:40:22.050 --> 00:40:27.260
individual, that's an enduring feature that can create selection pressures and mental

00:40:27.260 --> 00:40:30.060
machinery for identifying who your mother is, right?

00:40:30.380 --> 00:40:32.140
Which is of critical adaptive importance.

00:40:32.380 --> 00:40:32.620
Exactly.

00:40:32.700 --> 00:40:35.820
And that's the so it's a feature of the environment.

00:40:36.060 --> 00:40:39.100
One, two, it would have fitness relevance, right?

00:40:39.260 --> 00:40:44.860
A robot, a squishy robot that doesn't identify its mother versus one that does.

00:40:45.260 --> 00:40:51.180
There's clear, straightforward logic to why one design would do well

00:40:51.420 --> 00:40:52.380
versus another.

00:40:52.670 --> 00:40:52.990
right?

00:40:53.390 --> 00:40:56.350
And um so that so that's that.

00:40:56.670 --> 00:41:02.590
In the case of race, even the first criteria, was it present over

00:41:02.590 --> 00:41:03.790
evolutionary time?

00:41:04.030 --> 00:41:09.950
Already we're in tricky uh tricky ground, uh shaky ground, let's put it that way.

00:41:10.190 --> 00:41:15.790
Um so race as we talk about it, if you look uh just from an objective biological

00:41:15.790 --> 00:41:21.700
perspective, um, you know, human beings have uh superficial

00:41:21.700 --> 00:41:27.060
variation in response to like climactic um exposure.

00:41:27.220 --> 00:41:31.700
So what we think of as race is sort of very skin-deep superficial differences

00:41:32.900 --> 00:41:35.460
between populations of people.

00:41:36.100 --> 00:41:41.940
Um but the degree to which those physical features track

00:41:41.940 --> 00:41:47.490
ancestry is actually quite weak because um different

00:41:47.490 --> 00:41:52.770
populations of people who have different recent common ancestry um can look similar because

00:41:52.770 --> 00:41:57.890
they've been exposed to similar climates or uh it's sort of you know um things like how

00:41:57.890 --> 00:42:02.690
much melanin people have, like what their um what their eye shapes are, things like that.

00:42:02.850 --> 00:42:08.450
A lot of these things are very superficial um adaptations and they're very recent too.

00:42:08.690 --> 00:42:12.960
Um white skin evolved something like shockingly recently.

00:42:13.040 --> 00:42:15.440
I think it's even less than 5,000 years ago.

00:42:15.520 --> 00:42:16.400
There's actually really good.

00:42:16.560 --> 00:42:17.200
Yeah, it's incredible.

00:42:17.520 --> 00:42:18.400
That's that's not enough time.

00:42:18.640 --> 00:42:19.120
No, no, no.

00:42:19.280 --> 00:42:21.520
Modern humans, you know, we're 60,000 years ago.

00:42:21.600 --> 00:42:25.920
A 60,000-year-old, well, not year old, but like, you know, if in a time machine, if you if

00:42:25.920 --> 00:42:30.960
you met a uh a person from 60,000 years ago, they'd be a much better hunter and runner and

00:42:31.040 --> 00:42:32.560
et cetera, than you.

00:42:32.800 --> 00:42:38.710
Um, But they would be different in certain ways, but they're still us, right?

00:42:38.870 --> 00:42:43.590
So, you know, our current brains were around 60,000 years ago.

00:42:44.870 --> 00:42:47.670
And, you know, human beings don't come into subspecies.

00:42:47.990 --> 00:42:52.710
Like even chimps, for example, have five to six times more genetic variation than we do.

00:42:52.870 --> 00:42:54.950
And even chimps don't have subspecies.

00:42:55.510 --> 00:42:59.670
And so we're really related, which is consistent with, you know, there's more recent

00:42:59.670 --> 00:43:05.300
genetic evidence that there were really uh tight bottlenecks in our ancestral populations.

00:43:05.380 --> 00:43:10.420
So like as a as a from a biological perspective, we are extremely similar to one another,

00:43:10.580 --> 00:43:12.020
humans as humans are.

00:43:12.340 --> 00:43:18.100
So um so the idea that sort of race as we talk about it would have been a feature over

00:43:18.100 --> 00:43:19.380
evolutionary time.

00:43:19.620 --> 00:43:25.220
Number one, um very racial quote unquote what we count what the physical features that we

00:43:25.220 --> 00:43:29.430
think of as race are very recent um things.

00:43:30.230 --> 00:43:36.230
Also, it's only with recent transportation technology that you would people

00:43:36.230 --> 00:43:40.230
would have encountered sort of large-scale systematic differences among these things

00:43:40.310 --> 00:43:43.350
because otherwise everyone's traveling on foot or even by boat.

00:43:43.510 --> 00:43:46.870
You're meeting people, you're mating with them, you're, you know, like it's just

00:43:47.750 --> 00:43:53.280
ecologically valid or non-modern technologically

00:43:53.280 --> 00:43:59.280
mediated social world is one where basically as the scale of social interaction,

00:43:59.840 --> 00:44:05.600
whatever scale that is, people are sort of blending together in terms of what they look

00:44:05.600 --> 00:44:05.840
like.

00:44:05.920 --> 00:44:08.160
Um just by virtue, yeah.

00:44:08.640 --> 00:44:12.880
Very unlikely for an ancestral hunter-gatherer to be doing intercontinental travel.

00:44:13.360 --> 00:44:14.320
Exactly, yes.

00:44:14.560 --> 00:44:19.210
Um and and even if they were, it would be just them, and then they're just part of that

00:44:19.210 --> 00:44:21.770
community, and their children look like the community, right?

00:44:21.850 --> 00:44:27.850
So it's not uh this this large scale, large numbers of groups that are socially isolated

00:44:28.010 --> 00:44:33.690
remain so distinct for multiple generations, is really a modern phenomenon,

00:44:33.770 --> 00:44:34.090
right?

00:44:34.570 --> 00:44:39.210
And and so race as we think about it, you know, it's it's it would have not have been an

00:44:39.210 --> 00:44:40.410
enduring feature.

00:44:40.490 --> 00:44:44.060
Um, And even what counts as a race varies historically, right?

00:44:44.140 --> 00:44:47.580
So, like, you know, in the United States, being Irish was literally a race.

00:44:47.660 --> 00:44:48.940
It wasn't figuratively a race.

00:44:49.100 --> 00:44:54.940
You know, you can if you look across places, you know, Rwanda, Hutu, uh, Twitsi, you know,

00:44:55.020 --> 00:45:00.940
this was a uh we know the history of this was a hallucinated racial distinction

00:45:00.940 --> 00:45:02.620
that had no objective basis.

00:45:02.940 --> 00:45:03.100
Right.

00:45:03.180 --> 00:45:08.010
And I'm sure if you brought people into the lab at that time period and showed them some

00:45:08.010 --> 00:45:12.410
Irish people and some they would say, Oh, it was one of the Irish people said that.

00:45:12.650 --> 00:45:15.610
And they would have you would have seen categorization by Irishness.

00:45:15.930 --> 00:45:16.330
That's right.

00:45:16.970 --> 00:45:21.610
The idea that we have inbuilt software for detecting Irishness is preposterous.

00:45:22.250 --> 00:45:23.450
So something something has gone wrong here.

00:45:23.770 --> 00:45:23.930
Yeah.

00:45:24.170 --> 00:45:27.690
If you showed the same thing to ancient Greeks or Romans, the racial categories would have

00:45:27.690 --> 00:45:28.330
been different.

00:45:28.490 --> 00:45:30.570
But the same idea, right?

00:45:30.700 --> 00:45:34.300
Um, and this is sort of a part of what we talked about, instinct blindness, right?

00:45:34.380 --> 00:45:38.700
This idea that if we experience something vividly, and we do, like there's a pop-out

00:45:38.860 --> 00:45:39.420
effect, you know.

00:45:39.580 --> 00:45:45.500
Like one analogy I like to use is something like you can see

00:45:45.500 --> 00:45:51.260
the clothing color of people or what a car looks like, but there's a pop-out effect if you

00:45:51.260 --> 00:45:56.940
see a police officer or uh an EMT or an ambulance or a

00:45:56.940 --> 00:45:59.260
police car or military uniform.

00:45:59.690 --> 00:46:05.130
And it's not just a consequence of the color, but it is something about there's this

00:46:05.130 --> 00:46:05.850
additional inference.

00:46:05.930 --> 00:46:08.810
Or another example of this would be like sort of gang colors, right?

00:46:09.130 --> 00:46:10.330
Or team colors, right?

00:46:10.410 --> 00:46:12.170
There's just like this additional inference.

00:46:12.250 --> 00:46:13.690
And that I think is the idea.

00:46:13.850 --> 00:46:16.730
There's sort of pop-out for these for these categories.

00:46:16.890 --> 00:46:22.860
But anyway, getting back to this idea, race would not have been a feature in which

00:46:22.860 --> 00:46:24.300
our minds evolved.

00:46:24.460 --> 00:46:30.220
What counts as a race is really different and volatile across historical time and even

00:46:30.220 --> 00:46:32.540
within historical time across cultures.

00:46:32.780 --> 00:46:37.980
And so the idea that the mind has software for this particular

00:46:37.980 --> 00:46:41.260
category is sort of seems strange.

00:46:41.660 --> 00:46:47.020
And then the logic of an evolutionary approach or adaptationism is that you take the

00:46:47.020 --> 00:46:52.970
behavior, but then you say, look, any outcome is either a product of adaptations, or it's

00:46:52.970 --> 00:46:56.330
a byproduct of adaptations, or it's noise, right?

00:46:56.810 --> 00:47:02.170
And it's some combination of those three things underlie any behavior.

00:47:02.330 --> 00:47:06.410
Now it might be multiple adaptations, it might be multiple combinations of these, but just

00:47:06.410 --> 00:47:10.010
by virtue of the logic of how natural selection works, it has to be one of these three

00:47:10.010 --> 00:47:10.730
categories.

00:47:10.970 --> 00:47:11.530
Yep.

00:47:12.020 --> 00:47:16.980
And one question then, and this is part of doing a task analysis, which we may or may not

00:47:16.980 --> 00:47:22.420
get to here, is then you look at a certain behavioral phenomenon or a particular phenomenon

00:47:22.420 --> 00:47:23.380
you're interested in.

00:47:23.460 --> 00:47:29.060
And then you say, well, you know, what kind of an adaptation or sets of

00:47:29.060 --> 00:47:34.180
adaptations does this look like it might be either a result of or a byproduct of?

00:47:34.660 --> 00:47:40.010
And so when looking at how people were treating race, what

00:47:40.010 --> 00:47:43.530
inferences follow, what kind of thing does it look like?

00:47:43.770 --> 00:47:47.850
This led to an idea, and this is called the alliance hypothesis of race.

00:47:48.010 --> 00:47:53.290
So the idea is that there would not have been selection pressures on the mind for

00:47:53.290 --> 00:47:55.450
categorizing people by race.

00:47:56.170 --> 00:48:00.730
In contrast, there would have been selection pressures on the mind for

00:48:01.370 --> 00:48:03.530
tracking alliances.

00:48:03.840 --> 00:48:09.600
So an alliance is uh people joining together

00:48:09.920 --> 00:48:11.760
to cooperate.

00:48:12.000 --> 00:48:14.720
That cooperation can also involve antagonism.

00:48:14.800 --> 00:48:19.120
So then an alliance can be who's on whose side in a conflict.

00:48:19.360 --> 00:48:22.800
It can involve coordination, so who's coordinated with who.

00:48:23.280 --> 00:48:29.130
And there's a lot of evidence, a lot of theory, a lot of modeling, what we know from

00:48:29.130 --> 00:48:34.490
the hunter-gatherer literature, and just deductive logic is that

00:48:35.050 --> 00:48:39.370
and even you know comparative evidence of from other primates, chimpanzees also have

00:48:39.370 --> 00:48:40.250
intergroup differences.

00:48:40.650 --> 00:48:40.810
Right.

00:48:41.050 --> 00:48:41.290
Right.

00:48:41.450 --> 00:48:47.450
So the idea is that cooperation, competition, coordination are

00:48:47.450 --> 00:48:52.220
really important, deep principles of our evolutionary past.

00:48:52.700 --> 00:48:58.380
The ability to negotiate these relationships is super important for

00:48:58.380 --> 00:49:01.340
fitness, meaning the designs that are successful or not.

00:49:01.500 --> 00:49:06.540
Designs that could negotiate these relationships will do better than those that cannot.

00:49:06.700 --> 00:49:12.700
A concomitant of doing well or navigating these relationships is

00:49:12.700 --> 00:49:17.180
the ability to track who is affiliated with who.

00:49:17.790 --> 00:49:19.630
This is a complicated problem.

00:49:19.870 --> 00:49:25.630
I mean, most of my empirical work is on this problem, and we know very

00:49:25.630 --> 00:49:28.510
little about how the software for this works.

00:49:28.910 --> 00:49:32.110
But what the idea is that we have this software.

00:49:32.190 --> 00:49:34.830
This is a clear set of adaptive problems.

00:49:35.310 --> 00:49:40.180
The ability to identify who is allied with who is important.

00:49:40.340 --> 00:49:44.500
It's important for predicting when you see two people come together.

00:49:44.820 --> 00:49:46.900
Can you predict what their relationship will be?

00:49:47.060 --> 00:49:51.380
If you see another person, can you predict what their relationship will be towards you?

00:49:52.100 --> 00:49:56.340
And part of the way that the system would work is

00:49:57.860 --> 00:50:03.570
just like who your mother is, the groups that exist, the alliances that exist

00:50:03.810 --> 00:50:05.970
are dependent on local circumstances.

00:50:06.130 --> 00:50:09.170
So it's a learning system, it's a learning adaptation.

00:50:10.370 --> 00:50:15.810
There would have been no consistent way in which groups demarcated themselves throughout

00:50:15.810 --> 00:50:17.330
our evolutionary history.

00:50:17.730 --> 00:50:18.050
That's right.

00:50:18.290 --> 00:50:19.810
In the same way it would be a good idea.

00:50:19.890 --> 00:50:19.970
Yeah.

00:50:20.130 --> 00:50:24.690
You have to learn exactly how groups are being differentiated, what the what the markers

00:50:24.690 --> 00:50:24.770
are.

00:50:25.280 --> 00:50:25.600
Exactly.

00:50:25.760 --> 00:50:29.680
In the same way that who your mother is always varies over every generation.

00:50:29.760 --> 00:50:35.120
And therefore, it's a learning system that has an open parameter that says there are a set

00:50:35.120 --> 00:50:41.040
of cues that are reliably present that tell you who your mother is,

00:50:41.200 --> 00:50:46.770
but the system doesn't develop to create an identity Ahead of time.

00:50:46.850 --> 00:50:49.650
It's not innate, yes, quote unquote, in the system.

00:50:49.810 --> 00:50:52.050
The identity itself is not in the system.

00:50:52.930 --> 00:50:58.850
The rules for identifying the identity that exists in the world is in

00:50:58.850 --> 00:50:59.490
the system.

00:50:59.650 --> 00:51:05.010
And that's the same principle in the alliance system, which is

00:51:05.490 --> 00:51:11.280
what the basis of group interaction or treat social interaction

00:51:11.280 --> 00:51:16.880
will be will vary, but then you can use cues to learn

00:51:16.880 --> 00:51:18.880
who's affiliated with who.

00:51:19.120 --> 00:51:24.960
And the idea is that so there's software in the mind for tracking alliances, and part

00:51:24.960 --> 00:51:30.640
of that design is a learning system that is looking out in the world for reliable

00:51:30.640 --> 00:51:32.960
patterns of cooperation and competition.

00:51:33.120 --> 00:51:35.280
You could do a task analysis of what those are.

00:51:35.360 --> 00:51:41.030
It might be when you see two people physically hurting one another, encode not only their

00:51:41.030 --> 00:51:46.390
individual identities, but any any category level features that they have, and see if that

00:51:46.390 --> 00:51:51.030
category level predicts future conflict.

00:51:51.110 --> 00:51:55.670
So, for example, like if if the people who live on this side of the river versus who live

00:51:55.670 --> 00:52:00.950
on this side of the river or who have this tattoo versus have this other tattoo, it's

00:52:00.950 --> 00:52:05.540
basically this learning thing of there's the software that's looking out in the world for

00:52:05.540 --> 00:52:10.100
who's cooperating with who, who's fighting with who, and then what are the cues that are

00:52:10.100 --> 00:52:14.500
correlating in thus predicting those relationships.

00:52:15.460 --> 00:52:21.300
All of this has very clear selection pressure advantages, to just put

00:52:21.300 --> 00:52:22.020
it that way.

00:52:22.660 --> 00:52:23.780
Would have been enduring.

00:52:23.860 --> 00:52:27.940
We're talking about it at a fairly abstracted level, but it's the it's the level of

00:52:27.940 --> 00:52:28.820
invariance, right?

00:52:28.900 --> 00:52:30.980
We're not talking about what the particular cue is.

00:52:31.190 --> 00:52:35.590
We're not talking about the particular relationship, but it's the abstract, relevant

00:52:35.590 --> 00:52:36.630
categories, right?

00:52:36.710 --> 00:52:37.990
Of that's constant.

00:52:38.230 --> 00:52:38.710
And the idea of the question is.

00:52:53.300 --> 00:52:53.540
Right.

00:52:53.620 --> 00:52:53.780
Yeah.

00:52:54.020 --> 00:52:57.700
Um, and what you're saying here throws a wrench into that whole dichotomy because what

00:52:57.700 --> 00:53:00.740
you're talking about is an evolved learning system.

00:53:01.060 --> 00:53:01.380
That's right.

00:53:01.460 --> 00:53:01.620
Yes.

00:53:01.700 --> 00:53:02.900
And there's been yeah, yeah.

00:53:03.780 --> 00:53:04.100
Yeah, yeah.

00:53:04.180 --> 00:53:08.900
And Annie Wirtz has another great we will have her on too, uh, where this is exactly her

00:53:08.900 --> 00:53:14.740
point where there's another context where just like learning who your mother is, when the

00:53:14.740 --> 00:53:16.580
invariance is variance, right?

00:53:16.660 --> 00:53:20.490
The invariance is uh you can't build this in.

00:53:20.650 --> 00:53:26.170
You can't build in what David Pinsoff mother David Pinsoff's mother looks like to every

00:53:26.170 --> 00:53:30.570
human being because except for you, David, or your siblings, that will be wrong.

00:53:30.730 --> 00:53:36.650
Um and so when the invariance is uh is variation, it

00:53:36.650 --> 00:53:38.250
builds a learning system, right?

00:53:38.490 --> 00:53:38.730
Yes.

00:53:39.050 --> 00:53:40.250
This is Annie's point as well.

00:53:40.330 --> 00:53:40.490
Yeah.

00:53:40.730 --> 00:53:45.290
So I just wanted to quickly interject that you're talking about an evolved learning system.

00:53:45.620 --> 00:53:47.300
So continue with with what you're doing.

00:53:47.460 --> 00:53:47.620
Yeah.

00:53:47.860 --> 00:53:48.500
Yeah, thank you.

00:53:48.580 --> 00:53:52.020
It's good to dispel these sort of simple misunderstandings as we go.

00:53:52.260 --> 00:53:52.580
Yeah.

00:53:52.660 --> 00:53:54.900
So this is an evolved learning system.

00:53:55.140 --> 00:54:01.060
And the idea is that this description of the software, even at this basic level, the idea

00:54:01.060 --> 00:54:07.060
is that that software could be an explanation for why we see

00:54:07.060 --> 00:54:08.660
categorization by race.

00:54:08.980 --> 00:54:14.910
And the argument for that was that in a place where certain physical

00:54:14.910 --> 00:54:18.750
features become correlated with how people interact and treat one another, and there's a

00:54:18.750 --> 00:54:24.670
clear history about what that is in our culture and many cultures and in m most of our

00:54:25.390 --> 00:54:28.190
current milieus.

00:54:29.790 --> 00:54:34.910
So certain physical features become associated with how people treat one another, interact,

00:54:34.990 --> 00:54:35.950
and get along.

00:54:36.190 --> 00:54:41.700
So this software, this alliance tracking software, and that's just the label for it, When

00:54:41.700 --> 00:54:47.380
it grows up in a society or a social world in which certain physical features

00:54:48.020 --> 00:54:53.700
are picked up by this alliance tracking system, the idea is that those

00:54:53.700 --> 00:54:56.420
physical features are predicting these relationships.

00:54:56.580 --> 00:55:00.420
The evolved learning system is picking up on those physical features.

00:55:00.820 --> 00:55:04.100
It's not designed to pick up on physical features per se.

00:55:04.260 --> 00:55:06.420
It doesn't care if they're physical or not.

00:55:06.660 --> 00:55:10.890
The idea is that it's learning which physical or which features.

00:55:10.970 --> 00:55:16.330
I'm sorry, I don't mean physical features, any cues that predict how people interact or get

00:55:16.330 --> 00:55:17.690
along with one another.

00:55:17.930 --> 00:55:23.130
It picks up on those and then it stores those as being

00:55:23.130 --> 00:55:27.210
relevant for predicting other people's behavior, but then also how they're going to

00:55:27.210 --> 00:55:29.770
interact with me and how I should interact with them.

00:55:30.010 --> 00:55:35.940
And the idea is that that such that kind of software could

00:55:35.940 --> 00:55:41.620
explain why people are categorizing people by race, which has nothing to do with there

00:55:41.620 --> 00:55:45.300
being a dedicated system for categorizing people by race in the in their heads.

00:55:45.540 --> 00:55:45.700
Yeah.

00:55:46.100 --> 00:55:46.260
Yes.

00:55:46.420 --> 00:55:49.940
And I want to add one more thing that people get caught up on.

00:55:50.020 --> 00:55:54.980
So a common criticism of evolutionary psychology is that they think everything is an

00:55:54.980 --> 00:55:55.620
adaptation.

00:55:55.940 --> 00:56:00.930
They think our belly buttons are adaptations that so that we could, you know, put nuts and

00:56:00.930 --> 00:56:02.130
small pieces of food there.

00:56:02.450 --> 00:56:07.570
They think that, you know, our uh the the ridge of our nose is an adaptation to hold up our

00:56:07.570 --> 00:56:08.050
glasses.

00:56:08.210 --> 00:56:11.330
They see adaptations everywhere, even where they don't exist.

00:56:11.650 --> 00:56:16.530
So here we have a very clear um rebuttal to that criticism.

00:56:16.770 --> 00:56:22.370
We have a an instance where the hypothesis is specifically a byproduct hypothesis.

00:56:22.610 --> 00:56:28.500
You are not claiming that we have specific adaptations for categorizing by race.

00:56:28.660 --> 00:56:34.580
By contrast, you are claiming that we have adaptations for detecting alliance membership.

00:56:34.820 --> 00:56:40.500
And in the modern world, race becomes a cue of alliance membership.

00:56:40.660 --> 00:56:46.260
And so we categorize by race as a byproduct of adaptations for

00:56:46.260 --> 00:56:49.150
categorizing by alliance membership.

00:56:49.310 --> 00:56:53.950
So this is a byproduct hypothesis, not an adaptationist hypothesis.

00:56:54.030 --> 00:56:56.190
I just wanted to state that for the record.

00:56:56.510 --> 00:56:56.910
Yeah, yeah.

00:56:57.070 --> 00:57:02.990
And I would even say further: the idea is that what race is is

00:57:02.990 --> 00:57:08.270
a hallucination in the sense of race doesn't exist objectively.

00:57:08.590 --> 00:57:11.680
It's that it's a social convention.

00:57:12.080 --> 00:57:16.400
And the physical features that we think of as race get picked up on.

00:57:16.480 --> 00:57:22.080
And why they become race is because they're those things that have been picked up by

00:57:22.320 --> 00:57:27.280
this alliance tracking machinery because of the way that these features have been used

00:57:27.280 --> 00:57:30.800
historically and as a basis of discrimination.

00:57:31.280 --> 00:57:36.640
Um, and I mean that in the precise sense, I mean, uh, you know, discrimination, it could be

00:57:37.010 --> 00:57:42.850
treating other people better, you know, for example, like, you know, um uh white people um

00:57:43.090 --> 00:57:46.530
discriminating towards on behalf of other white people.

00:57:46.690 --> 00:57:52.450
Um, but the idea is that like these categories, again, like the Hutu Tutsi thing, can

00:57:52.770 --> 00:57:57.250
be uh not based on a sort of objective uh features, right?

00:57:57.330 --> 00:57:59.900
It's just uh coordination uh hallucination.

00:57:59.980 --> 00:58:05.660
It's could you speak if everyone has shares this uh is coordinated around this, um, that's

00:58:05.900 --> 00:58:08.380
that's where you get the category race appearing.

00:58:08.540 --> 00:58:14.380
It's it's after it has become socially predictive and people are acting as if

00:58:14.380 --> 00:58:15.340
it's socially predictive.

00:58:15.580 --> 00:58:20.700
That's that's it's it's it's a social construct in the in the precise meaning of that word.

00:58:21.180 --> 00:58:27.070
Um So, this explanation of being a byproduct, and thank you for emphasizing that.

00:58:27.310 --> 00:58:31.230
Um, what's crucial about it is this makes predictions.

00:58:31.870 --> 00:58:37.070
And it makes predictions because the claim is there's a well-designed system for tracking

00:58:37.070 --> 00:58:38.110
alliances.

00:58:38.670 --> 00:58:43.800
And part of that includes then that it should be sensitive to what uh

00:58:44.360 --> 00:58:48.120
who's cooperating with who, who's competing with who.

00:58:48.440 --> 00:58:54.360
And the job of this system is to track these relationships, keep track of

00:58:54.360 --> 00:58:59.560
the cues that predict them, and then use these cues to generate inferences about who will

00:58:59.560 --> 00:59:02.520
cooperate with who, who will compete with who, et cetera.

00:59:02.920 --> 00:59:08.200
So the paradigm that had shown that people always categorize by race this who said what

00:59:08.360 --> 00:59:14.230
paradigm, what Rob and Lita and John and myself have done, and we've really

00:59:14.870 --> 00:59:18.630
tested the heck out of this, and I'm quite confident in it.

00:59:18.710 --> 00:59:23.190
Um, and I was a bit skeptical at first, um, you know, but I convinced myself, and that was

00:59:23.190 --> 00:59:29.030
a good um, you know, that was a good, you know, 10 or 15 years of running lots of

00:59:29.030 --> 00:59:34.950
different studies trying to falsify it, um, was that this system,

00:59:35.430 --> 00:59:41.180
what it should be designed to do is to track the validity of a cue.

00:59:41.660 --> 00:59:47.500
So if race is being treated as an alliance cue, in the

00:59:47.500 --> 00:59:53.500
old studies, there was nothing in the stimuli that told

00:59:53.500 --> 00:59:56.460
people that there was some other alliance cue present.

00:59:56.700 --> 01:00:01.820
So even though the conversation wasn't about race or relevant to race, the idea is that

01:00:01.850 --> 01:00:07.050
alliances, especially alliances that have to do with like people treating each other, you

01:00:07.050 --> 01:00:12.010
know, at the level of like, you know, conflict, strong levels of

01:00:12.010 --> 01:00:17.610
discrimination that are valid across situations, people's lives, um,

01:00:17.930 --> 01:00:21.930
there's no better cue of alliance in the stimuli except for race.

01:00:22.170 --> 01:00:26.570
And so the reason why people were categorizing people by race is because this software

01:00:26.570 --> 01:00:32.320
system, this alliance tracking system, was looking at the people, detected this relevant

01:00:32.320 --> 01:00:36.320
cue and it wasn't detecting any other countervailing information.

01:00:36.560 --> 01:00:41.760
And the idea is that the alliance tracking system, if it's well designed, should be able to

01:00:41.760 --> 01:00:46.000
pick up on which cues are relevant for the current situation.

01:00:46.960 --> 01:00:51.680
And so the idea is that a well-designed alliance tracking system, it has to, as part of its

01:00:51.680 --> 01:00:57.650
job, juggle multiple alliances and be able to inhibit when a current alliance,

01:00:57.730 --> 01:01:02.530
uh a particular alliance is not relevant and activate one when it is and learn about new

01:01:02.530 --> 01:01:02.850
ones.

01:01:03.170 --> 01:01:06.530
These are just the con the implications of a well-designed system.

01:01:06.930 --> 01:01:07.090
Yes.

01:01:07.170 --> 01:01:12.770
It would be disastrous if you were to use an outmoded alliance category and

01:01:12.770 --> 01:01:16.450
mispredict who is going to come to your aid or fight with you.

01:01:17.170 --> 01:01:21.480
This would be dis a disastrous outcome uh from a Darwinian perspective.

01:01:21.640 --> 01:01:27.400
We would expect uh design for getting the answers to these questions right

01:01:27.480 --> 01:01:31.960
of what is the most relevant alliance uh in in the current social environment.

01:01:32.040 --> 01:01:32.840
Aaron Powell That's right.

01:01:32.920 --> 01:01:33.640
Yes, exactly.

01:01:33.800 --> 01:01:39.320
It needs to be a flexible, nimble system that's really sensitive to like what is

01:01:39.320 --> 01:01:41.640
currently organizing the conflict.

01:01:41.800 --> 01:01:44.760
And if you get it wrong, uh you're in trouble.

01:01:44.840 --> 01:01:50.550
Um And this prediction then is that so you so that's the

01:01:50.550 --> 01:01:52.230
idea of how the software works.

01:01:52.390 --> 01:01:57.830
So then what you do is then you think, okay, the software is an input-output system.

01:01:57.990 --> 01:02:00.310
Current humans have this software.

01:02:00.630 --> 01:02:06.630
How can we test to see if that's the design underlying racial categorization?

01:02:06.920 --> 01:02:07.080
Yes.

01:02:07.320 --> 01:02:12.120
And then you just you take, then say, well, what are the class of inputs that this thing

01:02:12.120 --> 01:02:13.240
should be sensitive to?

01:02:13.480 --> 01:02:18.680
And so we've conducted studies where we show people in this who said what paradigm just

01:02:18.680 --> 01:02:23.240
social groups that are a basis of cooperation.

01:02:23.400 --> 01:02:26.920
So we tell people, like, look, this is a group of people, they're all working together,

01:02:27.080 --> 01:02:30.520
traveling, they they really trust and count on one another.

01:02:30.680 --> 01:02:36.510
And you show them having a conversation where one group is talking about how they all

01:02:36.510 --> 01:02:41.550
work together, spend a lot of time together, trust one another, have had difficult,

01:02:41.870 --> 01:02:44.110
dangerous experiences together.

01:02:44.350 --> 01:02:48.190
And then there's another group who also is similarly like that.

01:02:48.350 --> 01:02:54.030
And so you're basically showing people the system cues of

01:02:54.350 --> 01:02:57.550
this set of people are all highly cooperative.

01:02:57.820 --> 01:03:00.460
This other set of people are all highly cooperative.

01:03:00.620 --> 01:03:05.180
And it's, you know, with like text, but you know, the presumably there's like any number of

01:03:05.180 --> 01:03:06.700
cues that you could use.

01:03:07.020 --> 01:03:07.660
Yeah.

01:03:07.980 --> 01:03:13.900
Um, but this was a first-pass test of like if there is an alliance tracking system, these

01:03:14.220 --> 01:03:19.340
cues of a history of deep engaged cooperation

01:03:20.220 --> 01:03:23.740
for each group with one group, group A and group B, right?

01:03:24.610 --> 01:03:27.810
this should satisfy the input conditions of the system.

01:03:28.770 --> 01:03:34.770
And then the idea is that if this alliance tracking system is good at not only picking up

01:03:34.770 --> 01:03:40.690
on new group memberships, it should also be able to deactivate

01:03:40.690 --> 01:03:46.530
or inhibit the use of cues that are no longer relevant, then the simple way to show that

01:03:46.530 --> 01:03:52.340
is we show people that race is no longer predictive of who's in group

01:03:52.340 --> 01:03:53.620
A or who's in group B.

01:03:53.780 --> 01:03:58.660
So concretely, there's an equal number of black and white people in group A and an equal

01:03:58.660 --> 01:04:00.740
number of black and white people in group B.

01:04:01.060 --> 01:04:06.260
And so as the people are shown having this conversation, so basically there's somebody in

01:04:06.260 --> 01:04:08.500
group A and they're like, Hey, nice to meet you.

01:04:08.660 --> 01:04:12.900
And the groups are having a friendly conversation, but the people are getting a window

01:04:12.900 --> 01:04:14.980
into, oh, there's one group here.

01:04:15.390 --> 01:04:19.870
they're all uh I think it was something like Habitat for Humanity and like partners in

01:04:19.870 --> 01:04:21.630
health, like they were charity groups.

01:04:21.790 --> 01:04:26.910
Um each charity group, those groups really work together.

01:04:27.230 --> 01:04:31.710
And the people who are in that group are all in alliance, basically, is the idea.

01:04:31.870 --> 01:04:32.110
Yeah.

01:04:32.270 --> 01:04:32.910
Yeah.

01:04:33.870 --> 01:04:39.640
And then that idea then is that there's two important

01:04:39.880 --> 01:04:42.440
cues in that stimuli, in those stimuli.

01:04:42.680 --> 01:04:48.600
One is that race is no longer predictive of who's on who who's allied with whom.

01:04:49.080 --> 01:04:53.880
And then there's a new basis of alliance, which is this team membership.

01:04:54.120 --> 01:04:59.790
And basically, when you do that and you show people the same

01:04:59.790 --> 01:05:04.590
stimuli that in the past studies had always found categorization by race.

01:05:04.990 --> 01:05:10.590
In fact, you get categorization by the new team membership, by charity group

01:05:10.590 --> 01:05:16.510
membership, and you get people decreasing, strongly decreasing

01:05:16.510 --> 01:05:18.350
their categorization by race.

01:05:18.590 --> 01:05:23.220
And we vary how strong the cues are to charity group membership.

01:05:23.380 --> 01:05:28.740
And in the conditions where it's very strong, people are often not categorizing by

01:05:29.140 --> 01:05:30.020
race at all.

01:05:31.140 --> 01:05:31.780
Say that again.

01:05:31.860 --> 01:05:32.740
Not categorized by race.

01:05:32.900 --> 01:05:34.180
Not category by race at all.

01:05:34.580 --> 01:05:37.140
So you have accomplished the holy grail.

01:05:37.300 --> 01:05:41.780
You have done what social psychologists have been trying to do, have been hoping they could

01:05:41.780 --> 01:05:46.340
do, which is to eliminate categorization by race.

01:05:46.580 --> 01:05:51.150
And how you got there was by doing good evolutionary psychology.

01:05:51.310 --> 01:05:55.630
And it's hard to see how you could have gotten there without doing that kind of

01:05:55.870 --> 01:05:57.710
evolutionary psychology.

01:05:57.950 --> 01:05:58.270
Right?

01:05:58.590 --> 01:05:59.870
Yeah, I mean I think that's fair.

01:05:59.950 --> 01:06:02.430
I mean it's it's a uh yeah I'd say that's fair.

01:06:02.510 --> 01:06:07.790
Aaron Powell So I I I consider that a big win for evolutionary psychology.

01:06:07.950 --> 01:06:12.590
It is an empirical discovery that we did not know existed.

01:06:13.000 --> 01:06:16.600
Doing this kind of evolutionary thinking resulted in this new discovery.

01:06:16.680 --> 01:06:19.000
And it's an extremely important discovery.

01:06:19.240 --> 01:06:24.200
We basically learned that this thing that we thought was an ineradicable part of the human

01:06:24.200 --> 01:06:29.320
condition, which is racial categorization, uh, we we thought it was uh uh impossible to get

01:06:29.320 --> 01:06:29.640
rid of.

01:06:29.800 --> 01:06:34.650
And then here come the evolutionary psychologists saying, wait a second, the idea that we

01:06:34.650 --> 01:06:38.890
would have uh evolved software for categorized by race makes no sense.

01:06:38.970 --> 01:06:42.970
If you know anything about human evolutionary history, what makes way more sense is that we

01:06:42.970 --> 01:06:45.290
would have alliance detection systems.

01:06:45.530 --> 01:06:51.370
If you uh give cues of uh alliances that are more relevant than race,

01:06:51.690 --> 01:06:55.290
we would expect the mind to categorize by alliance and not by race.

01:06:55.370 --> 01:06:57.450
And lo and behold, we run the test.

01:06:57.690 --> 01:07:00.730
Humans categorize by alliance and not by race.

01:07:00.970 --> 01:07:05.140
We have eliminated the tendency to categorize by race.

01:07:05.300 --> 01:07:08.500
The first paper that ran this test, I believe, was with sports teams.

01:07:08.980 --> 01:07:12.580
They found that that racial categorization was eliminated.

01:07:12.900 --> 01:07:14.900
They called the paper, Can Race Be Erased?

01:07:15.140 --> 01:07:18.100
And of course, the answer that the paper gave was yes, it can.

01:07:18.580 --> 01:07:24.420
So I I find this to be uh a really inspiring success story for

01:07:24.420 --> 01:07:25.220
the field.

01:07:25.370 --> 01:07:27.770
Uh, do you would you agree with that assessment?

01:07:28.170 --> 01:07:34.170
Yeah, and I and to be I I sort of because it's my own research too, I sort of feel like uh

01:07:34.330 --> 01:07:38.730
a bit, maybe it's false modesty, but I'm kind of like, what you know, there's still a lot

01:07:38.730 --> 01:07:39.370
we don't know.

01:07:39.690 --> 01:07:40.010
Yes.

01:07:40.250 --> 01:07:44.730
Uh what one one thing that's really important to say because if people are thinking about

01:07:44.730 --> 01:07:46.410
it, they might have this concern.

01:07:46.570 --> 01:07:52.330
And I had many concerns, is um we know because of the

01:07:52.330 --> 01:07:55.980
research, we know a lot about how this works.

01:07:56.060 --> 01:07:57.820
So there's a couple things that are important to say.

01:07:57.980 --> 01:08:03.820
One is if you do the exact same manipulation, but instead of

01:08:03.820 --> 01:08:08.700
with race, you do it with sex or with age, which were the big three categories: age, sex,

01:08:08.780 --> 01:08:09.100
and race.

01:08:09.260 --> 01:08:15.180
So, in other words, you instead of crossing race with team, you cross sex with team,

01:08:15.260 --> 01:08:18.940
meaning there's an equal number of men and women on each team, or there's an equal number

01:08:18.940 --> 01:08:20.940
of old people and young people on each team.

01:08:21.420 --> 01:08:21.980
Yeah.

01:08:22.350 --> 01:08:27.070
Age and sex are not affected by the same manipulation.

01:08:27.230 --> 01:08:31.390
And that's really important because you might think well, the reason why people are

01:08:31.390 --> 01:08:37.390
reducing their categorization by race is because the mind is just shifting attention

01:08:37.390 --> 01:08:39.310
from one category to another.

01:08:39.550 --> 01:08:42.350
And so people can only keep track of one category.

01:08:42.510 --> 01:08:47.560
But it turns out people have no trouble keeping track of alliance

01:08:48.200 --> 01:08:51.480
and sex or alliance and age.

01:08:51.720 --> 01:08:56.840
So it really seems to be that alliance is rival with race specifically.

01:08:57.080 --> 01:09:01.720
And the idea for why we believe that is, and this is consistent with this idea, the data

01:09:01.720 --> 01:09:07.240
are consistent with this hypothesis, is because, in fact, race is an instance of

01:09:07.330 --> 01:09:07.810
alliance.

01:09:07.970 --> 01:09:13.170
And the idea is that these this pattern of data is the prediction and

01:09:13.170 --> 01:09:19.010
consistent with that idea that really, as far as the

01:09:19.010 --> 01:09:23.730
mind treats it, race is an instance of an alliance cue.

01:09:24.610 --> 01:09:29.170
There's another thing that's important too, which is that, and this is where the

01:09:29.410 --> 01:09:35.250
evolutionary psychology is smarter than I am, like uh, is

01:09:35.250 --> 01:09:40.240
that I also wanted to know well, how is racial categorization being reduced?

01:09:40.720 --> 01:09:45.040
In memory literature, and it's a memory task, the who said what task is a memory task.

01:09:45.120 --> 01:09:49.200
There's two different ways that information can be lost.

01:09:49.360 --> 01:09:53.280
So if you're like studying for an exam and you forget it, or or if you know you don't know

01:09:53.280 --> 01:09:54.000
the answer.

01:09:54.240 --> 01:09:58.160
One one way is that the information was never encoded in the first place.

01:09:58.320 --> 01:10:02.240
So, for example, you're just like you couldn't, you weren't paying enough attention.

01:10:02.400 --> 01:10:04.880
You just stopped paying attention to race, for example, in this case.

01:10:06.290 --> 01:10:10.690
The other possibility is that the racial information is encoded, but then it's not

01:10:10.690 --> 01:10:12.770
retrieved during the task.

01:10:13.010 --> 01:10:16.450
And I actually didn't know which two uh things it would be.

01:10:16.530 --> 01:10:20.770
And there's a way to experimentally test between encoding versus recall.

01:10:20.850 --> 01:10:26.130
So the question is: is the reduction happening at encoding or is it happening at a recall?

01:10:27.320 --> 01:10:29.720
But there's a way to experimentally test between the two.

01:10:29.800 --> 01:10:31.080
And I ran that study.

01:10:31.240 --> 01:10:37.080
And what I found was that categorization by race was being encoded,

01:10:37.160 --> 01:10:39.560
but it was being inhibited in the system.

01:10:40.600 --> 01:10:44.200
And like there's a paper, you can people can look it up if they want you to know how you

01:10:44.200 --> 01:10:44.520
know that.

01:10:44.680 --> 01:10:47.640
But basically, those details are sort of kind of in the weeds.

01:10:47.800 --> 01:10:53.330
But the point is that that's actually a really smart way for the system to work.

01:10:53.410 --> 01:10:56.610
And that was actually something that I hadn't really thought about.

01:10:56.770 --> 01:11:02.290
But the idea is that if there's an alliance queue that has a

01:11:02.290 --> 01:11:08.290
high prior probability of being relevant across situations in your life,

01:11:08.370 --> 01:11:12.850
and then all of a sudden you're faced with a particular context in which it's no longer

01:11:12.850 --> 01:11:15.730
relevant, the system has two possibilities.

01:11:15.890 --> 01:11:20.450
One is to encode the category, but not use it for this particular context.

01:11:20.660 --> 01:11:23.780
And another is to just ignore the cue altogether.

01:11:24.260 --> 01:11:29.380
And if you think about what a really well-designed system should do that's has the job of

01:11:29.380 --> 01:11:34.820
tracking alliances, if there's a queue that's really high prior probability of being

01:11:34.820 --> 01:11:40.260
relevant, but it's not relevant right now, then a really good system shouldn't code but

01:11:40.260 --> 01:11:40.820
inhibit it.

01:11:40.900 --> 01:11:41.860
We talk about it.

01:11:42.340 --> 01:11:47.940
The expression was promiscuously encode but selectively retrieve these categories.

01:11:48.100 --> 01:11:53.970
And so that was a nice example of sort of an empirically

01:11:54.610 --> 01:12:00.210
generated insight into the design of a system that in retrospect sort of

01:12:00.370 --> 01:12:06.050
uh is the way a well-designed system would have um, you know, uh would

01:12:06.050 --> 01:12:06.690
appear.

01:12:06.850 --> 01:12:10.850
But that's one where even I wasn't, I wasn't even being adaptationist enough about it.

01:12:10.930 --> 01:12:15.200
You know, I was sort of, you know, and so this is a good example of the system is really

01:12:15.520 --> 01:12:20.960
well designed for this function, to the point of even me, a hyper adaptationist,

01:12:21.520 --> 01:12:23.360
wasn't giving it enough credit.

01:12:23.520 --> 01:12:26.240
And it was like, no, no, no, I'm actually really smart here.

01:12:26.320 --> 01:12:28.560
I'm gonna show you this additional design feature.

01:12:29.120 --> 01:12:29.840
That's really cool.

01:12:30.000 --> 01:12:33.280
I mean, so I mean, it it it makes sense, you know, on reflection.

01:12:33.360 --> 01:12:37.040
So, like, let's say we have you know the habitat for humanity, and I don't know what the

01:12:37.040 --> 01:12:37.520
other charity was.

01:12:37.600 --> 01:12:39.360
Let's say it's the Make a Wish Foundation.

01:12:39.550 --> 01:12:44.510
And uh so we have this strong cue that these two groups are in uh a cooperative

01:12:44.510 --> 01:12:48.270
relationship uh with uh other members of of each group.

01:12:48.430 --> 01:12:52.510
Um and so that's gonna be more relevant for this situation than race.

01:12:52.670 --> 01:12:58.590
Um it would be very bad design if if if we just totally forgot about race because it's such

01:12:58.590 --> 01:13:03.080
a relevant and enduring feature of modern social environments, it would be a bad idea to

01:13:03.080 --> 01:13:05.880
completely uh dispense with it altogether, because you never know.

01:13:06.040 --> 01:13:09.000
Maybe there could be a racial conflict between one of these organizations.

01:13:09.160 --> 01:13:13.640
Maybe one uh you know African-American accuses the organization of uh discriminating

01:13:13.640 --> 01:13:18.440
against him or her, or or or uh unfairly treating the black uh staff relative to the white

01:13:18.440 --> 01:13:18.760
staff.

01:13:18.920 --> 01:13:22.520
These issues could easily crop up as they do in workplaces around the country.

01:13:22.680 --> 01:13:25.480
It would be very foolish to forget about race altogether.

01:13:25.850 --> 01:13:30.490
What you want to do is keep the information online, keep it available, but just suppress it

01:13:30.490 --> 01:13:34.250
because there's a more relevant cue right now in this particular situation.

01:13:34.730 --> 01:13:35.130
That's right.

01:13:35.210 --> 01:13:35.450
Yeah.

01:13:35.610 --> 01:13:40.090
And so there's really two conclusions, and then we can maybe loop back to like our broader

01:13:40.090 --> 01:13:42.810
point about why it's not just those stories.

01:13:42.970 --> 01:13:48.730
The two conclusions are: this is evidence that even modern skulls

01:13:49.480 --> 01:13:55.320
are showing the signature of a system that's well designed for an alliance tracking system.

01:13:56.200 --> 01:14:01.640
And the idea that that's a long enduring ancestral adaptive problem

01:14:02.440 --> 01:14:08.440
was the reason why those particular stimuli were created because the idea was if

01:14:08.440 --> 01:14:13.240
that system exists, it should be sensitive to these inputs and should generate this output.

01:14:13.400 --> 01:14:15.960
In this case, we we've so far just talked about categorization.

01:14:16.040 --> 01:14:18.280
There's other outputs we could talk about, but anyway.

01:14:18.440 --> 01:14:18.680
Yeah.

01:14:19.170 --> 01:14:19.330
Yeah.

01:14:19.410 --> 01:14:20.610
No, that's all fascinating.

01:14:20.850 --> 01:14:25.490
And I I I will also add that this that this empirical work is really very much the tip of

01:14:25.490 --> 01:14:26.130
the iceberg.

01:14:26.290 --> 01:14:26.450
Yeah.

01:14:26.690 --> 01:14:30.610
And in in in in terms of the additional empirical work that could be done.

01:14:30.850 --> 01:14:32.930
So this is just uh scratching the surface.

01:14:33.010 --> 01:14:36.450
I mean, yeah, it's like proof of concept.

01:14:37.010 --> 01:14:38.370
So like it's it's incredibly mysterious.

01:14:38.450 --> 01:14:44.060
You know, there are probably many do dozens of cues that are are used to track alliances.

01:14:44.140 --> 01:14:47.740
Um, you just you know gave people a text-based description of you know which group was

01:14:47.740 --> 01:14:51.020
cooperating with whom, but uh you could do further work on this.

01:14:51.100 --> 01:14:55.100
You know, maybe dialect is important, uh, maybe dress is is important.

01:14:55.500 --> 01:15:00.220
Um there are there are lots of really interesting predictions you could make about how the

01:15:00.220 --> 01:15:06.110
alliance detection system is working and reverse engineering it um based on uh details of

01:15:06.110 --> 01:15:11.070
the local context versus um other situations you might have encountered in the past, which

01:15:11.310 --> 01:15:14.430
cues are going to be uh given higher priority when.

01:15:14.670 --> 01:15:19.550
Um there's a lot of work to be done here of really nailing down the specifics of how this

01:15:19.550 --> 01:15:21.630
alliance detection system works.

01:15:21.950 --> 01:15:25.550
Yeah, and and and the inputs and that's the inputs and then there's other work in

01:15:25.550 --> 01:15:30.040
psychology, some of which sort of inadvertently is getting at it too, like spatial

01:15:30.040 --> 01:15:32.120
proximity and like who lives with who.

01:15:32.600 --> 01:15:34.600
And I actually do have some work on accent too.

01:15:34.680 --> 01:15:36.760
We could talk about that another time or not.

01:15:37.560 --> 01:15:39.240
But uh but no, that's right.

01:15:39.320 --> 01:15:41.880
And that's all on the input end, but then there's also the output end, right?

01:15:41.960 --> 01:15:44.600
Which is that the the categorization is a byproduct.

01:15:44.680 --> 01:15:46.440
It's not what the system evolved to do.

01:15:46.600 --> 01:15:52.330
And so there's this whole other thing of um more ecologically

01:15:52.330 --> 01:15:56.410
valid outputs, which is inferring who's going to behave, you know, how they're who's going

01:15:56.410 --> 01:15:57.690
to support who in a conflict.

01:15:57.770 --> 01:16:00.410
And my students and I are working on that as well.

01:16:00.570 --> 01:16:01.210
But that's right.

01:16:01.290 --> 01:16:06.890
The point is that all of a sudden you're moving from stuck with a behavioral

01:16:06.890 --> 01:16:09.130
phenomenon, categorization by race.

01:16:09.450 --> 01:16:12.730
We're standing on our heads trying to get it to change.

01:16:12.970 --> 01:16:13.210
Yep.

01:16:13.450 --> 01:16:18.730
And then coming at this from a different perspective, which is to not just be locked into

01:16:19.780 --> 01:16:24.340
what can I just intuitively think of that might be relevant for categorization by race?

01:16:24.580 --> 01:16:30.100
But to then come from this perspective of weirdly, we're not allowed to think there's a

01:16:30.100 --> 01:16:31.460
system for categorization by race.

01:16:31.540 --> 01:16:36.180
It's got to be a byproduct of another system because of an evolutionary history where race

01:16:36.180 --> 01:16:37.060
was not present.

01:16:37.220 --> 01:16:42.770
And because we're only allowed to stipulate that there would be software in the mind around

01:16:42.770 --> 01:16:43.970
adaptive problems.

01:16:44.210 --> 01:16:50.050
And then immediately the hypothesis based on an adaptive problem generated a prediction

01:16:50.130 --> 01:16:51.410
and you get this result.

01:16:51.570 --> 01:16:53.250
Now it might be oversimplified.

01:16:53.330 --> 01:16:58.530
There might be a million adaptations in the social world, and this is just the first pass

01:16:58.530 --> 01:17:00.850
at it, and it is still oversimplified.

01:17:01.010 --> 01:17:06.450
But it's a really nice example of the just so story of

01:17:07.170 --> 01:17:12.440
look, um, it's racial categorization is inevitable, right?

01:17:12.520 --> 01:17:14.920
Because of our intrinsic tribalism.

01:17:15.160 --> 01:17:20.600
Or even the just so story of it's not inevitable, it's a byproduct of our alliance

01:17:20.600 --> 01:17:21.240
tracking.

01:17:21.480 --> 01:17:27.320
The thing is, is that the sense in which these are not just so stories

01:17:27.400 --> 01:17:30.840
is that they're making additional design predictions, right?

01:17:31.080 --> 01:17:31.400
Yes.

01:17:31.640 --> 01:17:36.650
Um even this, even the eyeglasses, and so there's this fanciful thing, Dr.

01:17:36.730 --> 01:17:41.450
Pangloss, the Panglossing thing where, like, you know, the reason why we have a nose is to

01:17:41.450 --> 01:17:42.890
hold up eyeglasses.

01:17:43.450 --> 01:17:48.970
People one of the ways people care criticize adaptationism is to say,

01:17:49.690 --> 01:17:51.610
is to use that example, right?

01:17:51.770 --> 01:17:56.400
And to say, well, you're just obviously that's um stupid.

01:17:56.560 --> 01:18:01.360
But the thing that I think is funny about that is they're being an adaptationist to make

01:18:01.360 --> 01:18:06.080
that point, which is that it's very obvious that noses are not well designed to hold up

01:18:06.080 --> 01:18:07.040
eyeglasses.

01:18:07.280 --> 01:18:12.160
If I was gonna build something that was well designed to hold up eyeglasses, I wouldn't

01:18:12.160 --> 01:18:17.120
make it sloped and greasy, um, such that you had to like have things around your ears,

01:18:17.200 --> 01:18:17.440
right?

01:18:17.520 --> 01:18:20.510
Like something well designed to hold up eyeglasses on your nose.

01:18:20.590 --> 01:18:22.990
Like a nose is not designed to hold up eyeglasses well at all.

01:18:23.150 --> 01:18:28.270
It's it's really eyeglasses are well designed to stay on noses, which are not designed well

01:18:28.270 --> 01:18:29.230
to hold anything.

01:18:29.390 --> 01:18:31.470
They're super slippery slopes, right?

01:18:31.630 --> 01:18:36.910
Um, and so the point is when you make a claim about

01:18:37.230 --> 01:18:42.700
something is for something, it makes predictions about how it should be

01:18:42.700 --> 01:18:43.340
structured.

01:18:43.580 --> 01:18:46.300
It makes new predictions in the future.

01:18:46.620 --> 01:18:52.140
And what adaptationism is and why it's not a just so story

01:18:52.380 --> 01:18:56.860
is that the logic of what follows from the claim about function.

01:18:57.020 --> 01:19:02.460
For example, the function is not race per se, but it's about alliances that

01:19:02.460 --> 01:19:08.030
predicts that the system should start to care about alliances that are not racial and

01:19:08.030 --> 01:19:09.790
should stop caring about race.

01:19:10.110 --> 01:19:15.870
So it's an example of claims about function make predictions, and that's why

01:19:15.870 --> 01:19:17.790
it's not a just so story.

01:19:18.270 --> 01:19:18.910
Yes.

01:19:19.390 --> 01:19:23.150
Form follows function, is my mantra.

01:19:23.470 --> 01:19:29.390
Um, and if you are trying to develop a theory of the form of the human mind, the

01:19:29.390 --> 01:19:35.070
best way to do that is to come up with a good theory of what the function of

01:19:35.180 --> 01:19:39.020
the human mind is or what the function of the part of the mind you're looking at is.

01:19:39.340 --> 01:19:44.140
Once you have a good theory of what its function is, and that function is necessarily going

01:19:44.140 --> 01:19:48.300
to be an evolutionary theory because evolution is the only source of antientropic

01:19:48.300 --> 01:19:53.340
functional organization we know of, once you make a claim about function, all of a sudden

01:19:53.340 --> 01:19:55.420
all the form falls into place.

01:19:55.580 --> 01:20:00.940
You have a beautiful framework for predicting what form that system should take.

01:20:01.340 --> 01:20:01.900
Right.

01:20:02.250 --> 01:20:02.490
Yeah.

01:20:02.570 --> 01:20:06.250
And I think in, you know, the racial categorization work, it's a nice example.

01:20:06.330 --> 01:20:11.770
But then there's all this work on, for example, uh, work on anger, which is a really

01:20:11.770 --> 01:20:13.050
important thing to understand.

01:20:13.210 --> 01:20:18.410
And this approach has also an adaptationist approach has revolutionized our understanding

01:20:18.410 --> 01:20:23.290
of anger, what elicits anger, what reduces anger, which is extremely important because

01:20:23.290 --> 01:20:26.570
anger is the basis of a lot of domestic violence.

01:20:26.730 --> 01:20:29.980
It's the basis of a lot of group based conflict.

01:20:30.220 --> 01:20:35.820
Um things like um shame or pride, same same analysis.

01:20:35.980 --> 01:20:39.820
Uh, David, your work on humor, another example, right?

01:20:40.060 --> 01:20:45.420
Where um, you know, these these things that we phenomena we all know.

01:20:45.740 --> 01:20:51.660
Um, you know, obviously we experience race, we experience shame or pride or things being

01:20:51.660 --> 01:20:57.340
funny, but to then unpack the logic of it such that we can predict what is

01:20:57.340 --> 01:21:01.990
funny or when people will feel shame or pride um or anger.

01:21:02.150 --> 01:21:07.750
Um that's that I think is a really good example of the

01:21:07.750 --> 01:21:09.350
power of this approach.

01:21:09.510 --> 01:21:12.390
And it's we're just it's sort of just getting started.

01:21:12.790 --> 01:21:13.590
Absolutely.

01:21:13.830 --> 01:21:14.230
Yeah.

01:21:14.310 --> 01:21:20.230
Uh it would be very difficult to try to understand how anger works or how pride or

01:21:20.230 --> 01:21:26.150
shame works or how humor works without having any idea of what these things are for,

01:21:26.720 --> 01:21:28.560
of what their function is.

01:21:28.960 --> 01:21:34.960
Um and once you have a good idea of what their function is, all of a sudden you begin you

01:21:34.960 --> 01:21:36.400
you're drowning in predictions.

01:21:36.560 --> 01:21:41.280
That's some one of the things that uh really shocks me when people uh level this accusation

01:21:41.280 --> 01:21:44.560
against evolutionary psychology that you know it doesn't make predictions or it's

01:21:44.560 --> 01:21:45.920
unfalsifiable or whatever.

01:21:46.160 --> 01:21:52.080
And in my experience as an evolutionary psychologist, uh doing work in this field, my

01:21:52.080 --> 01:21:56.650
problem uh is not having a lack of hypotheses to test.

01:21:56.890 --> 01:22:02.810
My problem is being overwhelmed with with predictions and hypotheses to test and just

01:22:02.810 --> 01:22:07.770
being filled with deep sadness that there aren't enough hours in the day to go out and test

01:22:07.770 --> 01:22:09.130
all these hypotheses.

01:22:09.370 --> 01:22:12.170
That is really more is closer to my experience.

01:22:12.410 --> 01:22:17.690
That it's really uh I'm so d I'm drowning in this stuff and I and I I need an army of

01:22:17.690 --> 01:22:20.890
people to go out and do this research and that army isn't here.

01:22:21.240 --> 01:22:21.480
Right.

01:22:21.560 --> 01:22:21.800
Yes.

01:22:22.040 --> 01:22:27.640
No, I mean, so I started teaching a grad class, even though UCSB is a really important

01:22:27.880 --> 01:22:32.040
hub and one of the origin places of evolutionary psychology.

01:22:32.200 --> 01:22:34.200
There had never been a graduate seminar in it.

01:22:34.280 --> 01:22:38.040
And one of the things that I had done, I did in the graduate seminar, was have the graduate

01:22:38.040 --> 01:22:39.800
students do a task analysis.

01:22:40.040 --> 01:22:44.200
And we did task analyses of jealousy, um, other things.

01:22:44.280 --> 01:22:49.270
Um and and basically would fill up a whiteboard and maybe we can talk a little bit about

01:22:49.270 --> 01:22:54.230
what doing a task analysis means um maybe or we you know we can talk about that but

01:22:54.230 --> 01:23:00.150
basically you know it's taking an adaptive problem like you know not starving to death

01:23:00.230 --> 01:23:05.110
for example you know um or taking something like jealousy and then sort of saying well what

01:23:06.060 --> 01:23:09.740
everybody sort of examine your intuitions or what you know about jealousy.

01:23:09.820 --> 01:23:14.060
Like what kind of a um, you know, does it quack like a duck, does it sound like a duck,

01:23:14.140 --> 01:23:15.020
does it swim like a duck?

01:23:15.100 --> 01:23:15.500
That kind of thing.

01:23:15.580 --> 01:23:16.140
Like what is it?

01:23:16.220 --> 01:23:19.100
What uh what is jealousy compared to everything else?

01:23:19.340 --> 01:23:24.940
And then at a certain point, it's characterizing that phenomenon like

01:23:24.940 --> 01:23:28.810
jealousy or that adaptive problem like not starving to death.

01:23:28.970 --> 01:23:34.330
And then just saying, well, what are all the design features that would be necessary,

01:23:34.490 --> 01:23:36.410
almost sort of like in a robot, right?

01:23:36.650 --> 01:23:42.090
To actually achieve, to successfully like navigate a world in which this is the

01:23:43.210 --> 01:23:46.810
desirable outcome to navigate this thing, to not starve.

01:23:47.050 --> 01:23:51.140
And then immediately, like if you just and we just fill up a whiteboard where you just sort

01:23:51.140 --> 01:23:53.620
of say, well, like, okay, an organism needs to not starve.

01:23:53.700 --> 01:23:55.220
Well, then it has to figure out, well, what's food?

01:23:55.300 --> 01:23:55.860
Well, that's a problem.

01:23:55.940 --> 01:23:57.140
Well, how does it know what's food?

01:23:57.300 --> 01:24:00.740
You know, and maybe like it's koala bear, there's a template, but then maybe not.

01:24:00.820 --> 01:24:04.980
And this is like part of Annie Wirtz's point, like for for humans who are extractive

01:24:04.980 --> 01:24:07.620
foragers, who occupy a lot of different food niches.

01:24:07.780 --> 01:24:11.860
We're omnivores, we don't have like any reliable cue, and so it's a social learning

01:24:11.860 --> 01:24:12.100
problem.

01:24:12.260 --> 01:24:16.740
So maybe there's social cues of like the adults around me are so are alive, they haven't

01:24:16.740 --> 01:24:17.780
been poisoned to death.

01:24:18.050 --> 01:24:20.850
They're so somehow like they've learned what's food.

01:24:20.930 --> 01:24:26.210
And so the learning system, like the alliance tracking system, is a learning system for

01:24:26.210 --> 01:24:30.450
tracking relationships of like, you know, literally what do people put in their mouth?

01:24:30.530 --> 01:24:31.170
Okay, what is that?

01:24:31.330 --> 01:24:35.570
Intent to that, remember that, extrapolate, like how where did that come from?

01:24:35.730 --> 01:24:40.610
Um and you can just go through the list of like if you were going to build a robot that

01:24:40.610 --> 01:24:46.360
could grow up and say, what Very hard.

01:24:46.680 --> 01:24:49.960
Even even just the simple heuristic of eat what other people around you are eating.

01:24:50.120 --> 01:24:54.680
If I'm a kid and I see my dad drinking coffee, which my daughter often does, she never

01:24:54.680 --> 01:24:56.200
wants to t have a sip of my coffee.

01:24:56.360 --> 01:24:57.160
She's not interested in it.

01:24:57.480 --> 01:24:57.800
That's right.

01:24:57.880 --> 01:25:01.880
And the extr and the in even the inference rule of like it was it that particular cup?

01:25:02.040 --> 01:25:04.120
Is it anything that has that color, right?

01:25:04.200 --> 01:25:08.680
This is the the the the the um Hume's problem of induction, right?

01:25:08.760 --> 01:25:14.710
Or it's the uh the the Gavagai problem um in uh in philosophy, which

01:25:14.710 --> 01:25:19.190
is that the referent or the the or the rule could be almost anything, right?

01:25:19.270 --> 01:25:25.110
And so so even just not starving to death and then learning how to extract

01:25:25.110 --> 01:25:28.790
things or forage and like you know, exerting them, you have to exert a certain number of

01:25:28.790 --> 01:25:30.310
calories to like get food.

01:25:30.470 --> 01:25:32.310
So there has to be a calculation for that.

01:25:32.470 --> 01:25:35.430
There has to be a representation of when do I get this thing?

01:25:35.670 --> 01:25:37.270
What's the processing to get it?

01:25:37.430 --> 01:25:39.900
So there's this you know enormous problems.

01:25:39.270 --> 01:25:39.510
problem.

01:25:40.380 --> 01:25:41.340
How valuable is this food?

01:25:41.420 --> 01:25:45.180
How much work should I be willing to expend to exactly.

01:25:45.340 --> 01:25:51.260
And so, you know, modern environments where you have a whole industry of people sort

01:25:51.260 --> 01:25:55.660
of pulling the levers of this psychology, like it's a very complicated psychology, and

01:25:55.660 --> 01:25:58.540
that's why people can pull the levers on like highly processed food.

01:25:58.620 --> 01:26:01.980
And it just you know turns off uh stop eating signals.

01:26:02.140 --> 01:26:07.790
But like, but the idea is there's a really complicated machinery for For not

01:26:07.790 --> 01:26:08.750
starving to death.

01:26:08.910 --> 01:26:14.590
And if you map out that problem, or if the pro any other problem of like not losing status,

01:26:14.670 --> 01:26:20.350
right, or competing in a status game, any any number of things, or coordinating about like

01:26:20.350 --> 01:26:21.550
making a mistake.

01:26:21.710 --> 01:26:27.600
Um, the second that you you think about what are all the entailments of this, you start

01:26:27.600 --> 01:26:32.640
to populate the whiteboard figuratively and literally with a bunch of additional functions

01:26:32.640 --> 01:26:33.920
and subfunctions.

01:26:34.080 --> 01:26:39.360
And it really is the kind of thing where any one empirical project just gets at one or two

01:26:39.360 --> 01:26:45.200
of these elements, but it would organize an entire career or a whole research discipline of

01:26:45.200 --> 01:26:46.480
empirical work.

01:26:46.720 --> 01:26:52.290
And I'm always struck with how little we know about any one of these functions and how

01:26:52.290 --> 01:26:54.370
little empirical work there is on it.

01:26:54.610 --> 01:27:00.610
So I completely agree with you that the

01:27:00.610 --> 01:27:04.210
limiting problem is not predictions.

01:27:04.370 --> 01:27:06.450
It's not knowing what to look for.

01:27:09.240 --> 01:27:13.000
having a community of people to actually start to test these ideas.

01:27:13.080 --> 01:27:17.080
And I would say to the extent they've been tested, for example, the shame, the guilt work,

01:27:17.160 --> 01:27:22.840
the anger work, the racial categorization alliance work, uh, Annie's work on uh learning

01:27:22.840 --> 01:27:25.560
about food and plants uh and children.

01:27:25.720 --> 01:27:29.400
Um, I mean, you just uh name name the area.

01:27:29.560 --> 01:27:32.360
It's just been extremely um fruitful.

01:27:32.600 --> 01:27:38.530
Um And I think this is all uh uh examples of why

01:27:38.530 --> 01:27:44.450
it's not a just so story and what it is positively, uh aside from sort of

01:27:44.450 --> 01:27:48.770
addressing the negative ideas about what evolutionary psychology is.

01:27:49.170 --> 01:27:51.090
Yeah, absolutely.

01:27:52.210 --> 01:27:57.760
Um should we maybe take a look at one of those things you mentioned?

01:27:58.000 --> 01:28:04.000
Either anger or shame or pride or humor, just to take a take a dive into one of those?

01:28:04.240 --> 01:28:05.600
Yeah, what do you want to do?

01:28:07.600 --> 01:28:08.880
All right, why don't we do anger?

01:28:09.120 --> 01:28:10.240
Yeah, that's great.

01:28:10.560 --> 01:28:12.000
Uh I I I love this work.

01:28:12.080 --> 01:28:16.640
This is uh uh Aaron Sell uh and Leda Cosmodies and John Tubi have done work on this.

01:28:16.880 --> 01:28:21.390
Um Aaron actually gave a talk at UCLA at our lab.

01:28:21.870 --> 01:28:26.110
And he had a talk on the 12 triggers of anger.

01:28:26.270 --> 01:28:27.310
Yes, that's 12.

01:28:27.630 --> 01:28:32.110
So he had a bunch of participants just tell him stories, just submit stories of a time that

01:28:32.110 --> 01:28:34.110
they were mad at somebody about something.

01:28:34.350 --> 01:28:39.950
And he looked through all those stories and he was able to glean 12 distinct triggers that

01:28:39.950 --> 01:28:41.390
commonly reemerged.

01:28:42.030 --> 01:28:47.840
And he was able to dissect each anecdote um in in a way that was

01:28:47.840 --> 01:28:49.360
so brilliant and inspiring.

01:28:49.440 --> 01:28:54.560
Like I I am not aware of any social science theory that could look at a specific anecdote

01:28:54.560 --> 01:29:00.000
of of human behavior and be able to explain each precise detail the way that he was able

01:29:00.000 --> 01:29:00.160
to.

01:29:00.480 --> 01:29:00.640
Yeah.

01:29:00.800 --> 01:29:05.520
And to just and to just take a step back, the idea is not that, uh just to clarify for our

01:29:05.520 --> 01:29:10.160
listeners, because I know this and you I know you know this, but uh it's not that Aaron was

01:29:10.160 --> 01:29:11.840
sort of saying, well, I don't know how anger works.

01:29:11.920 --> 01:29:17.870
I'm gonna just get surveys and then do a a um latent thing of like what clusters

01:29:17.870 --> 01:29:18.830
in the surveys.

01:29:18.990 --> 01:29:24.270
It was the complete opposite, where the idea was there are current theories of anger, some

01:29:24.270 --> 01:29:26.590
of which are like things like he went through the list.

01:29:26.670 --> 01:29:28.190
I mean, his dissertation is wonderful.

01:29:28.270 --> 01:29:30.030
There's a lot of empirical work on this.

01:29:30.270 --> 01:29:35.470
A good example, though, just to to just sort of give one example was frustration

01:29:35.550 --> 01:29:36.030
aggression.

01:29:36.110 --> 01:29:38.910
So the idea is that when your goals are blocked, you get angry.

01:29:39.020 --> 01:29:41.340
And that seems like an intuitive, reasonable thing enough.

01:29:41.500 --> 01:29:45.020
But Erin, Erin and I overlapped in the CP, and it was talking about this example.

01:29:45.100 --> 01:29:47.580
And I give this in classes when I talk about this.

01:29:48.220 --> 01:29:49.580
That predicts that.

01:29:49.740 --> 01:29:55.660
So, for example, imagine you're driving and um somebody cuts you off in traffic.

01:29:55.820 --> 01:29:59.260
Um, and uh, you know, imagine how angry you would be.

01:29:59.340 --> 01:30:01.580
Or, like, let's say, even worse, a four-way stop.

01:30:01.660 --> 01:30:05.900
You stop, and then somebody like doesn't stop and goes through the four-way stop sign.

01:30:05.980 --> 01:30:07.580
Like, clearly their fault, right?

01:30:07.750 --> 01:30:09.750
Just think about how angry you would be.

01:30:10.390 --> 01:30:15.670
Now imagine that that car was just like, you know, uh Mercedes-Benz Silver convertible

01:30:15.830 --> 01:30:17.510
versus was an ambulance.

01:30:18.310 --> 01:30:18.870
Right.

01:30:19.190 --> 01:30:19.510
Yeah.

01:30:19.750 --> 01:30:23.990
There's a real difference in how much anger you feel between those two kinds of cars.

01:30:24.230 --> 01:30:24.470
Yeah.

01:30:24.630 --> 01:30:26.310
And they're both they're both thwarting your goals.

01:30:26.470 --> 01:30:29.910
And that's exactly Aaron's point, is that they're both thwarting your goals.

01:30:29.990 --> 01:30:34.390
And if the idea, the function of anger is that you get angry when your goals are thwarted,

01:30:34.720 --> 01:30:39.200
then there's nothing in that theory that explains why the ambulance is different from the

01:30:39.200 --> 01:30:41.840
um the Mercedes, right?

01:30:42.080 --> 01:30:47.120
And Aaron's idea, I mean, do you want to do you want to give Aaron's I mean Aaron's idea?

01:30:48.160 --> 01:30:48.720
Yeah.

01:30:49.760 --> 01:30:55.200
Aaron's idea and David you you'll flesh it out even better is just that um

01:30:56.160 --> 01:31:01.970
what anger is, is a set of adaptations for negotiating treatment

01:31:01.970 --> 01:31:03.410
and how people treat one another.

01:31:03.570 --> 01:31:08.770
So how much people trade off their welfare with each other is a really fundamental

01:31:09.010 --> 01:31:09.890
important thing.

01:31:10.050 --> 01:31:15.890
Um, meaning uh when we make decisions, we're deciding is the

01:31:15.890 --> 01:31:17.570
thing I'm doing benefiting me?

01:31:17.810 --> 01:31:19.970
Is it going to benefit somebody else?

01:31:20.290 --> 01:31:26.160
And when there's rivalry between these two things, To what degree

01:31:26.160 --> 01:31:28.400
do I trade off my welfare for their?

01:31:28.560 --> 01:31:34.480
So, for example, my son, I am very willing to trade off my welfare for

01:31:34.480 --> 01:31:35.280
his, right?

01:31:35.920 --> 01:31:40.560
Um, so that's very different though than like a stranger, right?

01:31:40.640 --> 01:31:42.880
So I would not be willing to do that.

01:31:43.440 --> 01:31:49.410
And we have this trade off between your welfare and somebody

01:31:49.410 --> 01:31:49.970
else's.

01:31:50.130 --> 01:31:55.330
And Aaron's idea, and Lita and John and Daniel Schnitzer and other people have been doing

01:31:55.330 --> 01:31:56.050
work on this.

01:31:56.290 --> 01:32:01.330
The idea is that what anger is, is it's a program,

01:32:02.130 --> 01:32:07.730
software in the mind for negotiating and bargaining for better

01:32:07.730 --> 01:32:08.370
treatment.

01:32:08.530 --> 01:32:14.040
So it detects situations in which you are

01:32:14.680 --> 01:32:19.320
not being treated with the correct welfare trade-off.

01:32:20.280 --> 01:32:25.320
And then it deploys a number of different strategies.

01:32:25.560 --> 01:32:29.000
And those strategies are often relationship-dependent.

01:32:29.160 --> 01:32:35.080
So, for example, if you are in a close relationship with somebody and they

01:32:35.080 --> 01:32:40.630
do something that suggests that they're not taking your welfare into account well,

01:32:41.510 --> 01:32:46.710
then the first step would be to like be motivated to find out why they did that thing.

01:32:46.790 --> 01:32:49.990
That seems like they weren't treating you well because there can just be like, you know,

01:32:50.310 --> 01:32:50.950
not another.

01:32:51.190 --> 01:32:54.790
So so one example would be something like, I left the door open and your cat got out.

01:32:54.950 --> 01:32:56.630
Maybe I didn't know you had a cat, right?

01:32:56.790 --> 01:33:01.440
And so before you decide that I'm I'm a jerk, you should just be like, hey man, did you

01:33:01.440 --> 01:33:02.880
know I have a cat and my cat got out?

01:33:03.040 --> 01:33:06.320
Like it's a low benefit to you, a high cost to me, you know?

01:33:06.480 --> 01:33:10.320
Um and and my reaction would be extremely different depending on what you said.

01:33:10.480 --> 01:33:12.960
If you said, Oh, I'm so sorry, I didn't know you had a cat, my bad.

01:33:13.040 --> 01:33:16.320
I'll next time I'll close the door, my anger would evaporate.

01:33:16.400 --> 01:33:16.560
Right.

01:33:16.720 --> 01:33:18.960
But if you said, uh, yeah, I know you had a cat, whatever, I don't care.

01:33:19.200 --> 01:33:19.680
Yeah, exactly.

01:33:19.760 --> 01:33:20.080
Yeah, yeah.

01:33:20.400 --> 01:33:21.360
Forget about your cat.

01:33:21.600 --> 01:33:26.080
So in in the idea is that this is again gets at this level of invariance thing, right?

01:33:26.320 --> 01:33:32.270
Where it's there's benefits to me and cost to you, benefit of me of

01:33:32.270 --> 01:33:34.830
opening the door, or just the cost to you of losing your cat.

01:33:35.070 --> 01:33:40.990
And you want to see, look, is Dave not taking my interest into

01:33:40.990 --> 01:33:41.550
account?

01:33:41.790 --> 01:33:47.710
Do I need to change either how I treat him because he's a jerk, more of a jerk than I

01:33:47.710 --> 01:33:48.030
thought?

01:33:48.270 --> 01:33:54.190
Or do I need to let him know that this particular situation was a bigger cost than I'm

01:33:54.190 --> 01:33:55.310
willing to put up with?

01:33:55.470 --> 01:33:57.550
So I want to make sure he doesn't do it in the future.

01:33:57.710 --> 01:33:57.950
Right.

01:33:58.420 --> 01:34:03.460
And so that's that's sort of the underlying logic of anger.

01:34:04.100 --> 01:34:09.860
And if we have a good relationship, it can be checking on that you know.

01:34:10.100 --> 01:34:14.820
Well, sorry, if we have a good relationship, we're checking first, did you even know that

01:34:14.820 --> 01:34:16.740
you were imposing a cost on me?

01:34:17.940 --> 01:34:23.450
And then uh if we if I did, and I'm not sure

01:34:23.690 --> 01:34:28.890
that I want to change my behavior, then David, your recourse can be

01:34:28.890 --> 01:34:30.810
withdrawing cooperation.

01:34:31.450 --> 01:34:37.290
So, so anybody who's in a romantic relationship will probably recognize this, where if you

01:34:37.290 --> 01:34:43.290
know your partner is mad, what their partner looking like mad is not what a stranger

01:34:43.290 --> 01:34:43.850
looks like mad.

01:34:44.010 --> 01:34:47.450
What a partner looking like mad is just somebody with a stone face, right?

01:34:47.610 --> 01:34:47.770
Yeah.

01:34:47.930 --> 01:34:50.920
Like, and that's just a cue of withdrawing cooperation.

01:34:51.160 --> 01:34:51.320
Yes.

01:34:51.560 --> 01:34:57.240
Now, for somebody that doesn't have a relationship with you, then uh

01:34:57.400 --> 01:35:00.360
the idea is that it's a threat to impose costs.

01:35:00.520 --> 01:35:06.360
So looking angry, you know, and either social costs or physical costs, or at least the

01:35:06.360 --> 01:35:07.320
threat of that.

01:35:07.480 --> 01:35:13.430
Um, and the idea is that those costs we either of withdrawing benefits that

01:35:13.430 --> 01:35:19.430
are currently existing or imposing new costs actively, um, is a way to

01:35:19.430 --> 01:35:21.190
negotiate for better treatment.

01:35:21.350 --> 01:35:25.270
And the idea is that this is the logic of that software.

01:35:25.430 --> 01:35:31.270
So that's all the background to now David talking about the vignettes that Aaron

01:35:31.270 --> 01:35:31.990
presented.

01:35:32.150 --> 01:35:37.830
Um how Aaron was able to extract in a very detailed level,

01:35:37.990 --> 01:35:39.110
um yeah.

01:35:39.520 --> 01:35:40.160
Yes.

01:35:40.400 --> 01:35:45.920
Um so first I I want to see if I can maybe do a quick summary of what you just said, just

01:35:45.920 --> 01:35:48.800
in case it's still unclear for people in their heads.

01:35:49.120 --> 01:35:54.960
So um when something uh makes me angry, um

01:35:55.280 --> 01:36:01.120
there are four important things that are within that angering scenario.

01:36:01.360 --> 01:36:07.310
The first is the benefit So let's say, let's take the example

01:36:07.310 --> 01:36:10.110
of you leaving my door open and my cat running out.

01:36:10.350 --> 01:36:16.270
Um so I'm representing how much that benefited you, Dave, to uh save a bit of time,

01:36:16.350 --> 01:36:17.550
you know, closing the door.

01:36:17.710 --> 01:36:17.790
Right.

01:36:17.950 --> 01:36:20.830
How much does it benefit you to just be able to walk out without closing the door?

01:36:20.990 --> 01:36:21.230
Okay.

01:36:21.390 --> 01:36:23.630
That's the first part that the mind is representing.

01:36:23.950 --> 01:36:29.220
The second part is the cost that was inflicted on me as a result of that action.

01:36:29.460 --> 01:36:35.300
So how costly was it for me for my cat to run out of the door and for me to uh chase my cat

01:36:35.300 --> 01:36:35.940
around?

01:36:36.180 --> 01:36:36.820
Right.

01:36:37.380 --> 01:36:40.660
The third part is the ratio between those two numbers.

01:36:40.900 --> 01:36:46.900
Um so when anger happens, um, the benefit to Dave is

01:36:46.900 --> 01:36:49.460
very small and the cost to me is very large.

01:36:49.620 --> 01:36:51.140
I'll say that again.

01:36:51.450 --> 01:36:57.370
When anger happens, the benefit to the person making you angry is small, and the cost to

01:36:57.370 --> 01:36:59.290
you is large.

01:36:59.610 --> 01:37:05.450
So if you inflict a huge cost on me in order to get a very small benefit for

01:37:05.450 --> 01:37:08.570
yourself, that is going to piss me off.

01:37:09.290 --> 01:37:09.610
Okay.

01:37:10.970 --> 01:37:16.860
And once so I'm my mind is basically trying to figure out what that ratio is.

01:37:17.020 --> 01:37:18.060
What's the benefit to you?

01:37:18.140 --> 01:37:19.100
What's the cost to me?

01:37:19.340 --> 01:37:22.940
If it is too low, then anger gets activated.

01:37:23.100 --> 01:37:29.020
And what anger is, is a way for me to uh without neurosurgery, changing that ratio

01:37:29.020 --> 01:37:29.580
in your head.

01:37:29.740 --> 01:37:29.980
Correct.

01:37:30.220 --> 01:37:36.220
So that um you are no longer willing to impose those costs on me at that exchange rate

01:37:36.220 --> 01:37:38.590
to yourself, so that you treat me better in the future.

01:37:38.750 --> 01:37:42.830
So the idea is that we all have these ratios in our head for every person in our life.

01:37:42.990 --> 01:37:47.790
We have a level of cost that we're willing to inflict at them for a level of benefit we're

01:37:47.790 --> 01:37:48.750
willing to receive.

01:37:48.910 --> 01:37:49.230
Okay.

01:37:49.550 --> 01:37:52.590
And the idea is we have to have these ratios, otherwise, we wouldn't be able to make

01:37:52.590 --> 01:37:53.470
decisions.

01:37:53.950 --> 01:37:58.990
So everyone we have, everyone in our lives, we have a welfare trade-off ratio.

01:37:59.390 --> 01:38:04.740
Um and what anger is, is a way of uh trying to

01:38:04.740 --> 01:38:08.340
recalibrate someone else's welfare trade off ratio toward you.

01:38:08.420 --> 01:38:13.620
So let's say yours toward me is say one one over four, and I think that's too low.

01:38:13.860 --> 01:38:18.020
What anger is doing is I'm trying to get that up to a one over three or a one over two or

01:38:18.100 --> 01:38:23.860
or whatever I think is the correct or uh justifiable ratio or the the ratio

01:38:23.860 --> 01:38:29.490
that I deserve based on a variety of factors like my social status or or how kind I am to

01:38:29.490 --> 01:38:32.290
you or or or history as friends or whatever.

01:38:32.770 --> 01:38:34.290
So that's what anger is.

01:38:34.450 --> 01:38:40.210
Um it's a way of recalibrating uh other people's uh welfare trade-off ratios toward

01:38:40.210 --> 01:38:43.250
you um without doing neurosurgery.

01:38:43.410 --> 01:38:47.010
Um and and the way you do that is by threatening to inflict costs.

01:38:47.090 --> 01:38:49.650
So if you don't change, if you don't treat me better, if you don't change your welfare

01:38:49.810 --> 01:38:54.420
trade-off ratio, I'm gonna punch you um, or I'm gonna uh or I'm gonna withhold benefits,

01:38:54.500 --> 01:38:55.780
I'm gonna stop talking to you.

01:38:55.940 --> 01:38:59.220
I'm going to stop uh sharing my food with you, whatever.

01:38:59.380 --> 01:39:04.100
Uh it's these are these are attempts to inflict costs or withhold benefits, uh uh

01:39:04.340 --> 01:39:09.620
conditional on the person um recalibrating their welfare trade-off ratio and expressing

01:39:09.620 --> 01:39:14.740
that they've recalibrated it through an apology or a show of guilt, the function of which

01:39:14.740 --> 01:39:19.540
is to change your um welfare trade-off ratio towards someone who you've wronged so that you

01:39:19.540 --> 01:39:21.140
treat them better in the future.

01:39:22.030 --> 01:39:22.350
Okay.

01:39:22.990 --> 01:39:28.830
Um there's one beautiful example that uh Aaron gives, which is that imagine uh

01:39:28.910 --> 01:39:33.310
Dave and I are uh eating uh French fries together.

01:39:33.630 --> 01:39:38.350
Um and uh Dave has a bit of ketchup on his lip.

01:39:38.590 --> 01:39:42.270
And we're both we're we're we're wearing beautiful uh nice suits.

01:39:42.510 --> 01:39:48.190
And uh Dave reaches across the table and takes my beautiful nice tie and wipes the ketchup

01:39:48.510 --> 01:39:50.510
off his face with my tie.

01:39:50.920 --> 01:39:51.800
True story.

01:39:52.520 --> 01:39:53.320
This actually happened?

01:39:53.480 --> 01:39:54.040
No, I'm kidding.

01:39:54.360 --> 01:39:55.000
No, no, no, no.

01:39:55.400 --> 01:39:57.000
I I'm this might have happened to Aaron.

01:39:57.240 --> 01:39:57.480
I don't know.

01:39:59.000 --> 01:40:03.320
What's so beautiful about that is that it's it's it's the perfect angering scenario.

01:40:03.560 --> 01:40:09.000
The benefit to you of wiping the ketchup off your face is so small.

01:40:09.240 --> 01:40:12.040
You could have easily just gotten a napkin.

01:40:12.120 --> 01:40:12.360
Yeah.

01:40:12.600 --> 01:40:17.210
And and the and the cost to me, if you're ruining my tie, is huge.

01:40:17.370 --> 01:40:19.450
The ratio is so out of whack there.

01:40:19.530 --> 01:40:19.610
Yeah.

01:40:20.010 --> 01:40:22.650
I would be so pissed off if you did that.

01:40:22.890 --> 01:40:23.130
Yeah.

01:40:23.210 --> 01:40:28.090
It's it's a great, it's I love about it that examples really just, you know, like saying

01:40:28.090 --> 01:40:32.010
the abstract logic sounds really stilted and weird and foreign.

01:40:32.330 --> 01:40:36.730
But then the second you give examples, uh, like like the door thing, right?

01:40:36.810 --> 01:40:38.570
Like I left the cat, I let your cat go out.

01:40:38.650 --> 01:40:44.580
Well, what if like, you know, I had like severed my like artery was running out the door.

01:40:44.740 --> 01:40:46.340
You wouldn't you wouldn't think twice.

01:40:46.580 --> 01:40:49.300
You wouldn't be angry at all about me leaving the door open.

01:40:49.700 --> 01:40:55.460
Because it was it was a super uh I mean I was there was there it was super

01:40:55.460 --> 01:40:59.620
high benefit to me um to to just go out the door, right?

01:40:59.780 --> 01:41:04.020
Um and so you wouldn't care at all about the fact that your cat, I mean you might be, but

01:41:04.020 --> 01:41:05.700
you're gonna be angry at me, you know.

01:41:05.780 --> 01:41:08.980
But if I was just like no good reason, then it would be very different.

01:41:09.270 --> 01:41:09.430
Right.

01:41:09.510 --> 01:41:13.270
So in that scenario, you would have three different strategies for diffusing my anger.

01:41:13.510 --> 01:41:17.750
The first one would be to highlight how the benefit to you was actually much larger than I

01:41:17.750 --> 01:41:18.070
thought.

01:41:18.230 --> 01:41:21.830
So I didn't know that you were you know gushing blood and you were rushing out the door.

01:41:21.990 --> 01:41:26.070
Had I known that, then the benefit of you uh of getting to the hospital quicker and not

01:41:26.070 --> 01:41:28.310
having to close the door, that was actually a pretty big benefit.

01:41:28.390 --> 01:41:30.630
And it's probably worth it for you to not close the door.

01:41:30.870 --> 01:41:33.910
So in that case, your welfare trade off ratio toward me was fine.

01:41:33.990 --> 01:41:35.350
It's fine that you didn't close the door.

01:41:35.510 --> 01:41:37.240
It was a really big benefit to you.

01:41:37.560 --> 01:41:37.880
That's right.

01:41:37.960 --> 01:41:39.080
I'm not the kind of that's right.

01:41:39.160 --> 01:41:43.320
I'm not the kind of person who wouldn't ordinarily like take your cats into account, but

01:41:43.400 --> 01:41:44.520
man, like I was dying.

01:41:44.680 --> 01:41:44.840
Yeah.

01:41:44.920 --> 01:41:45.160
Exactly.

01:41:45.560 --> 01:41:45.880
Exactly.

01:41:45.960 --> 01:41:46.280
Exactly.

01:41:46.520 --> 01:41:48.440
So that's one w strategy you could use.

01:41:48.920 --> 01:41:53.400
The other strategy is to say that the cost inflicted on me actually wasn't that great or

01:41:53.400 --> 01:41:54.360
what wasn't that huge.

01:41:54.440 --> 01:41:55.000
And you knew that.

01:41:55.080 --> 01:41:58.490
So like yeah your cat always runs uh out the door and always comes back.

01:41:58.570 --> 01:41:59.690
It's never it's never a big deal.

01:41:59.770 --> 01:42:00.410
Like, who cares?

01:42:00.490 --> 01:42:02.170
Why are you getting so bent up about this?

01:42:02.490 --> 01:42:02.650
Right.

01:42:02.810 --> 01:42:06.570
That's another strategy that it wasn't that big of a cost to me, so I should chill out

01:42:06.570 --> 01:42:07.210
about it.

01:42:07.610 --> 01:42:12.410
Uh, and the third strategy you could use is ignorance that you did just didn't know.

01:42:12.570 --> 01:42:13.930
You didn't know how big of a cost.

01:42:14.250 --> 01:42:17.850
You didn't know I had a cat, or you didn't know that the cat has you know run away in the

01:42:17.850 --> 01:42:22.170
past and has caused me a lot of stress and and pain, or or whatever.

01:42:22.250 --> 01:42:27.580
Um, and in that case, your behavior is not reflecting your true welfare trade-off ratio

01:42:27.580 --> 01:42:28.220
toward me.

01:42:28.300 --> 01:42:30.860
Um, had you known, you would have acted differently.

01:42:31.020 --> 01:42:33.580
So this is the your apparent behavior is misleading.

01:42:33.660 --> 01:42:36.700
It was a product of of you not knowing and you being uninformed.

01:42:36.860 --> 01:42:40.940
So those three strategies, if successful, could diffuse my anger.

01:42:41.980 --> 01:42:43.340
Um, okay.

01:42:44.220 --> 01:42:46.060
Um, other examples.

01:42:46.220 --> 01:42:51.420
So uh Aaron, when he came in, he gave tons of vignettes of real vignettes, real things that

01:42:51.420 --> 01:42:52.300
happen to people.

01:42:52.490 --> 01:42:57.850
And he was able to identify the benefit to the person, the cost inflicted on the

01:42:57.850 --> 01:43:03.850
aggrieved party, whether it was too high or too low, whether it was intentional or not,

01:43:04.010 --> 01:43:09.290
whether the person knew the ext magnitude of the cost or the or the benefit that they would

01:43:09.290 --> 01:43:10.010
be receiving.

01:43:10.170 --> 01:43:15.700
And he was able to just dissect each individual scenario in a way that was so beautiful and

01:43:15.700 --> 01:43:16.340
inspiring.

01:43:16.820 --> 01:43:22.740
And it it was also beautiful in the way that it was so specific that it's not merely

01:43:22.740 --> 01:43:25.700
behavior that anger is directed at.

01:43:25.940 --> 01:43:30.900
So anger isn't about your actions, it's about a number in your head.

01:43:30.980 --> 01:43:36.020
It's about the ratio in your head, and it is exquisitely fine-tuned to that ratio and not

01:43:36.020 --> 01:43:37.540
to your overt behavior.

01:43:37.810 --> 01:43:41.810
So a beautiful example that he gave, uh, this is a real example from someone's life.

01:43:41.970 --> 01:43:47.970
Um, so um uh a woman and her boyfriend, and um they have had previous

01:43:47.970 --> 01:43:51.570
interactions where the boyfriend has insulted her driving ability.

01:43:51.730 --> 01:43:55.570
So she the boyfriend is constantly giving her shit for being a shitty driver, right?

01:43:56.050 --> 01:43:57.570
Or he perceives her as a shitty driver.

01:43:58.050 --> 01:43:59.490
He perceives her as a shitty driver.

01:43:59.810 --> 01:44:05.570
Um, and because our welfare trade off ratio depends on how much we value the person, you

01:44:05.700 --> 01:44:08.740
know, if the if the boyfriend thinks she's a shitty driver, he's he's gonna have a lower

01:44:08.740 --> 01:44:13.300
welfare trade-off ratio toward her and not treat her as as as well as he otherwise would.

01:44:13.540 --> 01:44:17.380
So that that in and of itself could be a could be a problem that would make her angry.

01:44:17.620 --> 01:44:23.620
Um so in this scenario, um, she uh misses the exit and cuts someone

01:44:23.620 --> 01:44:26.980
off in in traffic and you know almost gets into an accident.

01:44:27.460 --> 01:44:33.300
And um the boyfriend doesn't even say anything, doesn't even do

01:44:33.620 --> 01:44:34.420
anything.

01:44:34.580 --> 01:44:35.060
Yeah.

01:44:35.370 --> 01:44:37.290
And she says, don't.

01:44:37.770 --> 01:44:39.930
And she got mad at the boyfriend at that moment.

01:44:40.090 --> 01:44:40.250
Sure.

01:44:40.410 --> 01:44:42.490
Because she because she knew what he was thinking.

01:44:42.730 --> 01:44:43.130
Yeah.

01:44:43.290 --> 01:44:43.610
Yeah.

01:44:43.770 --> 01:44:44.330
Yeah.

01:44:44.570 --> 01:44:46.170
So he didn't do anything at all.

01:44:46.410 --> 01:44:48.970
There the anger was not caused by any overt behavior.

01:44:49.050 --> 01:44:54.090
It was caused by a belief about what was going on inside his head.

01:44:54.330 --> 01:44:54.890
That's right.

01:44:55.130 --> 01:44:59.850
Which is such a beautiful example of the specificity of this emotion.

01:45:00.020 --> 01:45:00.260
Yeah.

01:45:00.500 --> 01:45:05.140
That it's designed to pick up on something inside the other person's head about how much

01:45:05.140 --> 01:45:06.340
they value you.

01:45:06.500 --> 01:45:10.820
Um and if it's too low and they're not valuing you high enough, you're gonna get angry.

01:45:10.980 --> 01:45:11.620
Yeah.

01:45:12.100 --> 01:45:13.780
Um so that was my favorite example.

01:45:13.860 --> 01:45:15.460
Uh there are other others that I can't remember.

01:45:15.780 --> 01:45:20.100
Yeah, but but but it sounds like what you're saying is that you know, a way a way to put it

01:45:20.100 --> 01:45:21.300
is there's a grammar.

01:45:21.620 --> 01:45:26.980
So there's Erin, this idea of taking the adaptive problem of how people treat one another,

01:45:27.310 --> 01:45:31.710
understanding that it's a long-standing problem, understanding that there is a level of

01:45:31.710 --> 01:45:37.470
specificity where there are commonalities, there are invariances like cost, benefit, the

01:45:37.470 --> 01:45:42.190
person not holding a high enough regard for your welfare, check to see if they understood

01:45:42.190 --> 01:45:42.350
it.

01:45:42.510 --> 01:45:43.870
Are they ignorant or not?

01:45:44.110 --> 01:45:45.150
Do I negotiate?

01:45:45.310 --> 01:45:49.950
Do I need to impose a cost, withdraw benefits, impose active costs?

01:45:50.190 --> 01:45:54.670
These are all the things that are common across individuals, across time, across

01:45:54.670 --> 01:45:56.980
generations that are built into the software.

01:45:57.060 --> 01:46:03.060
And by thinking about all of those invariances, Aaron was able

01:46:03.060 --> 01:46:09.060
to sort of create a grammar, a social grammar, if you will, that then

01:46:10.020 --> 01:46:13.620
was common in all of these vignettes.

01:46:13.700 --> 01:46:19.690
And you could look at the vignette and go in and really lift out in each case

01:46:19.850 --> 01:46:25.050
the reason why somebody is saying this thing is because they're trying to communicate that

01:46:25.050 --> 01:46:30.330
the cost wasn't so great, as in like the cat really didn't go very far, or I had a huge

01:46:30.330 --> 01:46:34.490
benefit because you know I was bleeding and I needed to actually like get out the door, I

01:46:34.490 --> 01:46:35.130
would die.

01:46:35.450 --> 01:46:40.970
Um and so again, it comes back to this thing of if you have a theory of function,

01:46:42.580 --> 01:46:48.260
It reduces down all of the complexities and all of the noise

01:46:48.500 --> 01:46:54.100
and blooming, buzzing confusion, sort of uh of the data.

01:46:54.340 --> 01:46:54.500
Yes.

01:46:54.740 --> 01:47:00.740
And then you can really compactly and economically describe when

01:47:00.900 --> 01:47:06.820
somebody's angry, what they will do, in the same way you can compactly describe sort of how

01:47:06.820 --> 01:47:08.180
a plant will grow towards light.

01:47:08.260 --> 01:47:10.020
Is that sort of the point?

01:47:10.660 --> 01:47:11.220
Yes.

01:47:11.410 --> 01:47:11.810
Yes.

01:47:11.970 --> 01:47:12.690
Well put.

01:47:12.930 --> 01:47:13.570
Yeah.

01:47:14.130 --> 01:47:17.330
So I think the so the anger thing is a really great example.

01:47:17.410 --> 01:47:21.170
So I think both the anger thing and the racial categorization thing are really nice

01:47:21.170 --> 01:47:27.010
examples of taking uh a phenomenon we already know about.

01:47:27.250 --> 01:47:27.650
Mm-hmm.

01:47:27.970 --> 01:47:29.890
Anger, racial categorization.

01:47:30.050 --> 01:47:32.450
I mean, people have been studying anger for for decades.

01:47:32.610 --> 01:47:34.130
There were different theories of anger.

01:47:34.530 --> 01:47:36.690
People have been studying racial categorization for decades.

01:47:36.770 --> 01:47:39.410
There are many theories about why that was happening.

01:47:39.650 --> 01:47:45.580
Um, and you know the you even really smart people,

01:47:46.140 --> 01:47:50.060
you know, um it's not enough to just be smart.

01:47:50.220 --> 01:47:52.780
You have to think about what the thing is for.

01:47:52.940 --> 01:47:57.660
It's to take an artifact analogy, like if you don't know what a car is for, you can be

01:47:57.660 --> 01:48:00.540
really smart, but you can come at it the wrong way.

01:48:00.780 --> 01:48:06.710
And I'm not it's not saying that anyone approaches right, and and there are there can be

01:48:06.710 --> 01:48:10.950
wrong evolutionarily informed hypotheses, but that's fine because you're at least narrowing

01:48:10.950 --> 01:48:11.990
down the possibilities.

01:48:12.150 --> 01:48:17.350
But in these cases, this welfare trade-off and this alliance tracking

01:48:17.990 --> 01:48:23.110
idea really cut through all the confusion surrounding these

01:48:23.510 --> 01:48:24.070
phenomena.

01:48:24.150 --> 01:48:27.190
And these are just two examples sort of off the top of our head.

01:48:27.590 --> 01:48:28.230
Yes.

01:48:29.080 --> 01:48:35.080
The m one of the main benefits I see to doing this kind of task analysis, reverse

01:48:35.080 --> 01:48:41.000
engineering, um adaptationism, whatever you want to call it, is that it really constrains

01:48:41.000 --> 01:48:45.720
the hypothesis space once you start thinking in this way.

01:48:46.040 --> 01:48:51.720
So if you're gonna do a good task analysis of an adaptive problem uh that our

01:48:51.720 --> 01:48:57.000
hunter-gatherer ancestors uh would have reliably faced throughout our evolutionary history,

01:48:57.510 --> 01:49:02.950
uh, and you're and you're going to posit a cognitive system that evolved in response to

01:49:02.950 --> 01:49:07.270
this selection pressure, and you're going to test for the existence of that cognitive

01:49:07.270 --> 01:49:07.590
system.

01:49:08.150 --> 01:49:13.990
Already you have wiped away 99.99% of all

01:49:13.990 --> 01:49:18.360
the possible hypotheses you could have about the thing you were studying.

01:49:18.520 --> 01:49:23.160
So, like right off the bat, um, I'm I'm positing an adaptive problem our ancestors would

01:49:23.160 --> 01:49:23.960
have likely faced.

01:49:24.040 --> 01:49:28.920
That screens out tons of hypotheses because there were lots of things, like uh racial

01:49:28.920 --> 01:49:32.360
groups, that our ancestors would not have plausibly encountered.

01:49:32.600 --> 01:49:37.240
And so, right off the bat, that suggests that any adaptation for racial categorization is

01:49:37.240 --> 01:49:38.120
implausible.

01:49:38.280 --> 01:49:40.840
We should not explore that hypothesis.

01:49:41.160 --> 01:49:41.560
Right?

01:49:41.800 --> 01:49:42.360
Right.

01:49:42.840 --> 01:49:48.470
So right off the bat you have constraints about what the ancestral environment would have

01:49:48.470 --> 01:49:52.630
plausibly been like, what kinds of challenges our ancestors would have likely faced.

01:49:52.870 --> 01:49:56.070
Um another Yeah, can I just inter interrupt really quick?

01:49:56.390 --> 01:49:59.670
One thing I think that's really important to say, because I can imagine people listening

01:49:59.830 --> 01:50:04.630
thinking this, and it's an important thing to say, is people often say, Well, we don't

01:50:04.630 --> 01:50:06.310
know, we can't know for certain.

01:50:06.550 --> 01:50:12.220
But that that is exactly like the um uh criticism of uh

01:50:12.460 --> 01:50:15.100
just so stories because the nose is poorly designed.

01:50:15.180 --> 01:50:21.020
It uses the principle to reject the principle, which is of course we can't know

01:50:21.020 --> 01:50:22.220
certain things for certain.

01:50:22.300 --> 01:50:26.460
So that's why you are always thinking for the thing that you're most certain about.

01:50:26.620 --> 01:50:31.420
We can be certain that alliances were present over evolutionary time.

01:50:31.550 --> 01:50:34.270
The idea that there was a particular kind of alliance is less certain.

01:50:34.350 --> 01:50:37.230
It might still be more certain than like even something less certain.

01:50:37.550 --> 01:50:43.390
But the idea is that we're constantly criticizing our thinking

01:50:43.710 --> 01:50:49.310
and trying to describe things in a way that would be the most certain.

01:50:49.550 --> 01:50:49.870
Yes.

01:50:50.110 --> 01:50:54.030
That you can't get at if you just ignore the issue altogether.

01:50:54.190 --> 01:50:57.710
So when people sort of say, well, you can't know anything about the evolutionary past,

01:50:58.240 --> 01:51:03.360
often what they were saying then is that we shouldn't even think about how likely it is

01:51:04.080 --> 01:51:07.280
that there were certain selection pressures as opposed to others.

01:51:07.440 --> 01:51:12.480
But that's the exact opposite of their own point, which is that we should actually just try

01:51:12.480 --> 01:51:16.400
to stay in the range of things like where can we pre certain people impose costs on each

01:51:16.400 --> 01:51:19.520
other or confer benefits, you know, and needed to negotiate that.

01:51:19.600 --> 01:51:20.720
There's the anger thing.

01:51:20.960 --> 01:51:22.240
That's very likely.

01:51:22.480 --> 01:51:27.510
So I just want to point out that yes, weirdly, people will often say things like, Well, we

01:51:27.510 --> 01:51:33.510
can't know anything with certainty, and then therefore, any attempt to be more or less

01:51:33.510 --> 01:51:35.270
certain is is hopeless.

01:51:35.430 --> 01:51:37.270
That second thing doesn't follow at all.

01:51:37.430 --> 01:51:42.390
So I just I don't want to interrupt too much, but I want to say that important, yeah.

01:51:42.870 --> 01:51:43.990
Crucial point, yeah.

01:51:44.150 --> 01:51:49.880
We want to build our evolutionary theories off of things that are most certain.

01:51:50.040 --> 01:51:54.120
To the extent that we're building our theories on a on a shaky foundation of uncertain

01:51:54.120 --> 01:51:59.480
premises about our evolutionary past, well, that should cause us to doubt the hypothesis,

01:51:59.640 --> 01:52:01.640
the more uncertain that that premise is.

01:52:01.720 --> 01:52:02.200
That's right.

01:52:09.720 --> 01:52:15.320
Insofar as we're building our theories on foundations or on assumptions that we're not sure

01:52:15.320 --> 01:52:18.350
about, that should weaken our confidence in the theory?

01:52:18.510 --> 01:52:23.870
So the anger stuff is based on some pretty plausible assumptions that there were people in

01:52:23.870 --> 01:52:28.510
the ancestral environment and they could have imposed costs on us uh in order to benefit

01:52:28.510 --> 01:52:30.910
themselves, and they likely did in various ways.

01:52:31.230 --> 01:52:35.470
That is a pretty that is that's pretty hard to deny that that was a feature of ancestral

01:52:35.630 --> 01:52:36.670
environments, right?

01:52:36.830 --> 01:52:40.190
We know that our ancestors were social, we know that other primates are social, we know

01:52:40.190 --> 01:52:44.190
that humans are intensely social, and simply by existing in the world, humans have

01:52:44.190 --> 01:52:49.200
opportunities to inflict costs on one another, and there would have been selection pressure

01:52:49.200 --> 01:52:50.880
for minimizing those costs.

01:52:51.120 --> 01:52:56.480
Okay, so that theory is resting on a pretty solid foundation on uh what uh ancestral

01:52:56.480 --> 01:52:58.240
selection pressures would have been like.

01:52:58.400 --> 01:53:01.120
Um similarly with the racial categorization work.

01:53:01.360 --> 01:53:05.840
We know from evolutionary genetics works work that skin color is a recent adaptation and

01:53:05.840 --> 01:53:09.590
would uh would have uh not been an enduring feature of ancestral environments.

01:53:09.750 --> 01:53:13.910
And even even if it was, the idea that our ancestors were engaging in intercontinental

01:53:13.910 --> 01:53:15.030
travel is implausible.

01:53:15.110 --> 01:53:19.510
So that theory is resting on a really shaky foundation, and therefore we should have lower

01:53:19.510 --> 01:53:23.510
confidence in that in that theory that we have adaptations for racial categorization.

01:53:23.670 --> 01:53:26.470
And that's part of how we can rule out that hypothesis.

01:53:26.630 --> 01:53:30.550
We can also rule it out with empirical data showing that we don't, in fact, categorize by

01:53:30.550 --> 01:53:33.670
race when there are other alliance uh cues present.

01:53:33.880 --> 01:53:37.160
But another way we can rule it out is just by saying that this is evolutionarily

01:53:37.160 --> 01:53:37.560
implausible.

01:53:37.880 --> 01:53:38.200
That's right.

01:53:38.280 --> 01:53:42.440
And if somebody disagrees with that, they can make that claim and say, but that's the point

01:53:42.600 --> 01:53:43.800
is you say it explicitly.

01:53:43.880 --> 01:53:49.480
And then that's the thing is by making it explicit, it's not less falsifiable.

01:53:49.560 --> 01:53:55.400
It's more because you're actually giving the logic of implicitly or explicitly, I think

01:53:55.400 --> 01:53:57.720
this is an enduring, long-standing problem.

01:53:57.800 --> 01:54:03.310
And that's why I'm thinking there's a system that has X, Y, and Z, like the anger system.

01:54:03.550 --> 01:54:09.390
And by making that explicit, it's not naive, it's or it's

01:54:09.390 --> 01:54:14.990
not sort of uh incautious about certainty about ancestral environments.

01:54:15.070 --> 01:54:21.000
It's actually so by making it explicit, if somebody wants to claim Aaron, for

01:54:21.000 --> 01:54:24.920
example, like I don't think that's a feature of ancestral environments.

01:54:25.240 --> 01:54:31.080
By making it explicit, you open yourself up correctly, I think, to even a discussion about

01:54:31.080 --> 01:54:31.240
that.

01:54:31.400 --> 01:54:37.000
And there are many examples of within the evolutionary social sciences of different

01:54:37.000 --> 01:54:43.000
evolutionary hyp hypotheses about certain selection pressures, like how how large were

01:54:43.000 --> 01:54:47.850
social groups over evolutionary time, for example, or other things where where we can have

01:54:47.850 --> 01:54:48.890
these discussions.

01:54:49.050 --> 01:54:54.730
But if you don't make explicit the idea of here is the

01:54:54.730 --> 01:55:00.170
claim about the enduring feature of the environment, then it's not more

01:55:00.170 --> 01:55:04.170
careful about certainty, it's less careful.

01:55:04.650 --> 01:55:05.130
Exactly.

01:55:05.290 --> 01:55:10.890
It it is not it is the opposite of unfalsifiable because what it does is it opens up new

01:55:10.890 --> 01:55:14.570
avenues for falsification and for criticism of the theory.

01:55:14.810 --> 01:55:18.620
If you're explicit about the assumptions you're making about the ancestral environment,

01:55:18.780 --> 01:55:23.660
that opens you up to new kinds of criticisms and arguments against your theory.

01:55:23.820 --> 01:55:29.660
You are making your theory more vulnerable to being challenged or even falsified.

01:55:32.140 --> 01:55:37.180
To take the example of race, if you're arguing that we have adaptations for

01:55:37.660 --> 01:55:41.660
detecting race, and I come along and show you some evidence from genetics showing that

01:55:41.660 --> 01:55:45.150
actually race is a really recent trait and it wouldn't have been present.

01:55:45.310 --> 01:55:49.390
Well, you've falsified my hypothesis, or you've at least cast significant doubt on it.

01:55:49.470 --> 01:55:53.550
So what you're doing when you talk about ancestral selection pressures is you are opening

01:55:53.550 --> 01:55:56.430
up new opportunities for falsification.

01:55:56.670 --> 01:55:57.310
Right.

01:55:57.790 --> 01:56:00.190
So um moving right along.

01:56:00.270 --> 01:56:05.070
So right off the bat you have to come up with an ancestral selection pressure that would

01:56:05.070 --> 01:56:09.230
have been plausible, a foundation that you can build your theory on.

01:56:09.470 --> 01:56:12.820
That rules out adaptations for racial categorization.

01:56:12.900 --> 01:56:17.220
It rules out tons of other hypotheses that you would be inclined to make.

01:56:17.620 --> 01:56:23.380
Number two, the system you're positing has to uh

01:56:23.620 --> 01:56:28.420
be a good solution to that adaptive problem you're positing.

01:56:28.660 --> 01:56:30.660
Um, and what does it mean to be a good solution?

01:56:30.740 --> 01:56:36.470
It has to be well designed, It has to actually get the job done of, say, finding food or

01:56:36.470 --> 01:56:39.830
categorizing alliances or negotiating for better treatment.

01:56:39.990 --> 01:56:45.270
And to the extent that it it does those things poorly, then that's another avenue by which

01:56:45.270 --> 01:56:46.950
your hypothesis can be falsified.

01:56:47.270 --> 01:56:52.790
What you're trying to do empirically is to show that this system does the job really well.

01:56:53.120 --> 01:56:58.000
Anger does the job of recalibrating welfare trade-off ratios really well.

01:56:58.240 --> 01:57:03.280
The the degree to which it is non-randomly organized to fulfill this function of

01:57:03.280 --> 01:57:09.280
recalibrating welfare trade-off ratios, that level of organization can only be explained

01:57:09.280 --> 01:57:10.160
by natural selection.

01:57:10.240 --> 01:57:12.640
It cannot be explained by random noise.

01:57:13.120 --> 01:57:15.520
This is the best fit for the data.

01:57:15.680 --> 01:57:17.120
This is the best theory.

01:57:18.290 --> 01:57:19.330
that's what you're doing.

01:57:19.490 --> 01:57:23.010
So it has to be consistent with what we know about evolutionary history.

01:57:23.090 --> 01:57:28.930
The feature uh to which the adaptation um uh is is adapted to must have been present.

01:57:29.170 --> 01:57:34.530
The the system you're positing uh must actually solve the problem in question, and it must

01:57:34.530 --> 01:57:39.730
solve it uh efficiently, reliably, precisely, and effectively.

01:57:40.610 --> 01:57:46.260
Um just incorporating that into your theory building

01:57:46.260 --> 01:57:48.500
rules out so many hypotheses.

01:57:49.220 --> 01:57:54.900
Um there's so much psychology, for example, that argues that the function of a

01:57:54.900 --> 01:58:00.100
cognitive system is to pursue happiness or to generate positive

01:58:00.260 --> 01:58:05.090
hedonic states, to uh to make us feel good.

01:58:05.330 --> 01:58:11.090
So social identity theory argues that we we like to identify with groups and um

01:58:11.410 --> 01:58:15.650
uh defend the reputation of our groups because we feel good when we belong to a group and

01:58:15.650 --> 01:58:17.730
we feel good when our group looks good.

01:58:17.970 --> 01:58:23.250
And and the function of this system is to produce positive emotional states.

01:58:24.050 --> 01:58:29.620
If you're doing good evolutionary psychology, good adaptationism, the function of

01:58:29.620 --> 01:58:35.540
pursuing happiness or increasing positive hedonic states is not a viable

01:58:35.860 --> 01:58:37.620
evolutionary function.

01:58:39.380 --> 01:58:44.420
Evolution does not design organisms to get stuff inside of their own heads.

01:58:44.660 --> 01:58:50.500
Evolution designs organisms to get stuff in the world that would have reliably increased

01:58:50.500 --> 01:58:53.300
their fitness in ancestral environments.

01:58:53.540 --> 01:58:58.340
The idea that we have adaptations for increasing happiness is

01:58:58.970 --> 01:59:00.730
incredibly implausible.

01:59:00.890 --> 01:59:06.730
Even if you were to assume that happiness, for whatever reason, was correlated with fitness

01:59:06.730 --> 01:59:07.930
in ancestral environments.

01:59:08.090 --> 01:59:09.050
Let's just make that assumption.

01:59:09.130 --> 01:59:14.330
Let's make the dubious assumption that in our hunter-gatherer past, people who were happier

01:59:14.410 --> 01:59:16.330
uh were more likely to survive and reproduce.

01:59:16.410 --> 01:59:18.650
I don't think it's plausible, but let's make that assumption.

01:59:18.890 --> 01:59:24.410
Even if that's true, that would not result in a motivational system designed to

01:59:24.410 --> 01:59:26.060
seek happiness.

01:59:26.300 --> 01:59:30.220
The result would be that we would evolve to be happier.

01:59:31.500 --> 01:59:36.540
Just as if a squirrel is insufficiently fearful of predators, the squirrel would not evolve

01:59:36.540 --> 01:59:40.780
to pursue fear as a goal and try to like, they wouldn't be jumping out of the bushes of

01:59:40.780 --> 01:59:42.780
each other and scaring each other to pursue fear.

01:59:42.940 --> 01:59:44.620
No, they would just become more fearful.

01:59:44.780 --> 01:59:45.100
Right?

01:59:45.260 --> 01:59:49.020
If happiness truly increased our fitness, we wouldn't evolve to pursue happiness, we would

01:59:49.020 --> 01:59:49.900
just become happier.

01:59:50.060 --> 01:59:55.710
So, right off the bat, this is ruling out, you know, a huge chunk of existing psychology.

01:59:56.350 --> 01:59:57.950
Can I can I push back a little bit?

01:59:58.750 --> 02:00:01.070
And I think we should have a happiness uh description.

02:00:01.230 --> 02:00:02.590
Yeah, that would be a good good topic.

02:00:02.670 --> 02:00:02.830
Yeah.

02:00:03.070 --> 02:00:06.030
I mean, what about the argument that it's a proxy?

02:00:06.190 --> 02:00:11.390
I mean, uh the way I think about those claims is that those are fine descriptions.

02:00:11.550 --> 02:00:13.870
And we even talked about this because you know I study groups.

02:00:14.340 --> 02:00:16.980
People are motivated, they feel good when they join a group.

02:00:17.140 --> 02:00:23.060
That's a perfectly fine sort of within the experience of a person description of

02:00:23.060 --> 02:00:24.260
sort of how they work.

02:00:24.500 --> 02:00:30.260
But it it but then you can translate into a more evolutionary perspective, which is well,

02:00:30.420 --> 02:00:36.020
what features of a group um would actually uh why would people feel

02:00:36.020 --> 02:00:41.930
happy about joining a group, or what should if we think about sort of like that's the

02:00:41.930 --> 02:00:45.130
robot expressing this is a good situation.

02:00:45.530 --> 02:00:49.610
If if somebody says, like so, again, like thinking about people from this level of

02:00:49.610 --> 02:00:51.450
software, like people are robots.

02:00:51.850 --> 02:00:56.890
If the robot tells you I feel good right now because I'm a member of a group, you could be

02:00:56.890 --> 02:01:02.330
an engineer about it by thinking, well, okay, the robot software is registering, it's in a

02:01:02.330 --> 02:01:07.340
good situation from an evolutionary perspective, given what

02:01:07.980 --> 02:01:12.940
affordances and functions group alignment membership is,

02:01:13.740 --> 02:01:18.700
what can we predict about the kinds of cues or the kinds of software this robot would have

02:01:18.700 --> 02:01:24.220
to detect what counts as a good group, what counts as a bad group, and correspondingly when

02:01:24.220 --> 02:01:25.900
it should feel good or not good.

02:01:26.140 --> 02:01:29.180
Um and I think that's the way for me, at least I think about it, right?

02:01:29.260 --> 02:01:34.790
So it gives teeth to what is otherwise trapped inside the internal

02:01:36.070 --> 02:01:39.430
arbitrary thing of just like it's essentializes, right?

02:01:39.510 --> 02:01:43.990
It's saying like a group is an essentialized category, feeling good is an essentialized

02:01:43.990 --> 02:01:46.950
category, and they're stuck together, like velcro together.

02:01:47.110 --> 02:01:51.590
And what an evolutionary approach does is it says group, you're not allowed to think a

02:01:51.590 --> 02:01:52.550
group exists.

02:01:52.710 --> 02:01:58.480
It has to be composed of a bunch of evolutionarily recurrent cues and happiness,

02:01:58.560 --> 02:02:04.240
or like the detection of this is a situation that's good, or maybe more sophisticatedly, a

02:02:04.240 --> 02:02:08.320
detection of a situation that's even better than is expected for now.

02:02:08.560 --> 02:02:13.440
Um what would those kinds of situations be?

02:02:13.680 --> 02:02:13.920
Yeah.

02:02:14.160 --> 02:02:20.000
And from an evolutionary perspective, and that gives that unessentializes and turns

02:02:20.000 --> 02:02:21.600
into an engineering problem.

02:02:22.320 --> 02:02:22.640
Yes.

02:02:22.880 --> 02:02:27.130
What is otherwise the bland statement of like, I like to be happy because I'm a member of a

02:02:27.130 --> 02:02:27.370
group.

02:02:27.610 --> 02:02:29.850
Like, I don't think it's a problem for people to say that.

02:02:29.930 --> 02:02:33.690
It's just it's a very limited perspective on the broader phenomenon.

02:02:34.090 --> 02:02:34.570
Got it.

02:02:34.730 --> 02:02:38.490
I'm I'm going to do something I rarely do on this podcast, which is disagree with you.

02:02:38.970 --> 02:02:39.290
Excellent.

02:02:39.370 --> 02:02:39.530
Yes.

02:02:39.770 --> 02:02:41.290
I think it is a problem when people do that.

02:02:41.610 --> 02:02:41.770
Good.

02:02:42.010 --> 02:02:43.370
Um, and here's why.

02:02:43.610 --> 02:02:49.420
If I'm designing a robot to say, uh join groups and defend

02:02:49.420 --> 02:02:50.780
group reputations.

02:02:51.260 --> 02:02:55.660
Uh and I'm drawing up my blueprints of what the robot needs to be sensitive to and what it

02:02:55.660 --> 02:02:57.100
should be motivated to go out and get.

02:02:57.420 --> 02:03:01.580
There's gonna be no spot on my diagram for happiness or for good vibes, right?

02:03:01.740 --> 02:03:02.860
I don't need that.

02:03:03.100 --> 02:03:08.270
I can just program the robot to go out and and find groups and detect them and join them.

02:03:08.350 --> 02:03:12.030
And if it detects cues that its group is under attack and needs to defend the group's

02:03:12.030 --> 02:03:16.030
reputation, the robot will spit out a compelling monologue about why the group is actually

02:03:16.030 --> 02:03:19.870
heroic and brave and making the world a better place or whatever.

02:03:20.350 --> 02:03:26.270
But I don't need happiness to motivate the robot to do those things.

02:03:27.150 --> 02:03:32.670
And so we need to ask the adaptationist question about happiness itself, about feeling good

02:03:32.670 --> 02:03:32.990
itself.

02:03:33.150 --> 02:03:34.190
What is that for?

02:03:34.360 --> 02:03:35.800
Why does that exist?

02:03:36.600 --> 02:03:42.040
And once we ask that adaptationist question, uh people are inclined to give the answer, oh,

02:03:42.200 --> 02:03:44.600
it's it evolved to motivate us to go out and get things.

02:03:44.840 --> 02:03:48.200
That is a bad adaptationist answer.

02:03:48.760 --> 02:03:53.880
Because if the purpose of happiness is to motivate me to go out and get stuff that

02:03:53.880 --> 02:03:59.480
increases my fitness, well then how does evolution motivate me to want happiness?

02:03:59.960 --> 02:04:00.200
Right.

02:04:00.250 --> 02:04:01.530
I remember that.

02:04:01.690 --> 02:04:03.770
Does it have to give me does it have to give me more happiness?

02:04:04.010 --> 02:04:04.330
Yeah, yeah.

02:04:04.410 --> 02:04:05.210
It's a circular problem.

02:04:05.290 --> 02:04:06.810
So what is what is completely circular.

02:04:06.970 --> 02:04:08.730
Yeah, so what's your argument for what it is?

02:04:08.810 --> 02:04:09.130
Yeah.

02:04:09.610 --> 02:04:15.130
So my argument is that um what happiness is is a way of

02:04:15.130 --> 02:04:20.570
recalibrating our motivations and our expectations when

02:04:20.570 --> 02:04:26.280
something turns out to be better than we intuitively expected.

02:04:27.000 --> 02:04:32.680
So if I'm uh, let's say making a paella and I'm not

02:04:32.680 --> 02:04:37.880
confident about it, and uh and I think it's gonna taste bad, and it ends up being

02:04:37.880 --> 02:04:43.320
amazing, um, well, my mind has a lot of recalibration to do.

02:04:43.480 --> 02:04:49.350
I had some mistaken beliefs about the quality of paella and my own ability as a

02:04:49.350 --> 02:04:49.670
cook.

02:04:49.750 --> 02:04:51.990
And those beliefs need to be recalibrated.

02:04:52.150 --> 02:04:54.710
And also my motivations need to be recalibrated.

02:04:54.790 --> 02:05:00.470
I now need to jack up my motivations to make more Spanish cuisine in the future.

02:05:00.790 --> 02:05:04.870
And so all that recalibrational work has to be done somehow.

02:05:05.110 --> 02:05:09.190
And I think the job of happiness is to do that recalibrational work.

02:05:09.430 --> 02:05:15.360
So what it what happiness does is it forces you to slow down, stop, pay attention to the

02:05:15.360 --> 02:05:16.960
awesome thing that's happening to you.

02:05:17.200 --> 02:05:20.160
Figure out how this thing could have happened.

02:05:20.480 --> 02:05:23.360
What how could how could you have been so mistaken?

02:05:23.520 --> 02:05:23.840
Right?

02:05:24.160 --> 02:05:26.080
Where did you go wrong in your expectations?

02:05:26.240 --> 02:05:28.880
Where did you go wrong in your priorities and your motivations?

02:05:29.040 --> 02:05:32.240
Pay attention to the thing and figure out what is causing it, what is unique to this

02:05:32.240 --> 02:05:32.640
outcome.

02:05:32.880 --> 02:05:38.080
Once you figure that out, change your priorities, change your expectations, seek out more

02:05:38.080 --> 02:05:39.120
of this thing in the future.

02:05:39.280 --> 02:05:44.210
The next time you encounter it, encounter it, expect it to be good or expect it to be

02:05:44.210 --> 02:05:44.530
better.

02:05:44.690 --> 02:05:44.930
Yeah.

02:05:45.090 --> 02:05:45.250
Right?

02:05:45.570 --> 02:05:45.730
Good.

02:05:45.890 --> 02:05:46.530
Yeah, yeah.

02:05:46.690 --> 02:05:48.370
And and so that's excellent.

02:05:48.450 --> 02:05:49.570
And that is you're right.

02:05:49.650 --> 02:05:50.850
It's much more sophisticated.

02:05:51.010 --> 02:05:56.850
I wonder if then so like let's imagine, let's go back to social identity

02:05:56.850 --> 02:05:57.330
theory.

02:05:57.490 --> 02:05:57.810
Yeah.

02:05:57.970 --> 02:06:03.410
Um for me, which is like I think it's right, and it's for me it's a source of additional

02:06:03.410 --> 02:06:08.520
hypotheses about additional design, but I agree it's not fully fleshed out in the way that

02:06:08.520 --> 02:06:09.800
they talk about it.

02:06:10.040 --> 02:06:16.040
Um imagine you're sort of

02:06:16.040 --> 02:06:21.880
um just going around and then like you just decide somebody is like you know got

02:06:22.120 --> 02:06:27.800
involved you in something on on the weekend and you go to it and it's like a really great

02:06:27.800 --> 02:06:32.360
social experience and you and it's a group, it's some group thing.

02:06:32.600 --> 02:06:34.680
All of a sudden you feel really happy.

02:06:34.990 --> 02:06:40.910
I think the the argument would be like all those same functions are there, which is that

02:06:40.990 --> 02:06:46.510
you know, you were mistaken, you weren't expecting this to be an important part of your uh

02:06:46.910 --> 02:06:52.910
uh the benefits, the sort of grammar of my representations of like, is this

02:06:52.910 --> 02:06:57.310
a group or set of people that I'm gonna invest in that I get benefits out of that are worth

02:06:57.420 --> 02:07:02.140
prioritizing compared to all the other things I could do, that feeling of happiness is

02:07:02.140 --> 02:07:03.660
happening now for that group.

02:07:03.820 --> 02:07:09.660
And so I wonder, and maybe this is just saying the same thing in a different

02:07:09.660 --> 02:07:15.660
way, but for me, like when I hear social identity theory, I'm translating like people are

02:07:15.660 --> 02:07:21.180
motivated to feel good or to join groups because it feels good, as um

02:07:22.060 --> 02:07:27.850
that the feeling good is the thing that is leading them

02:07:27.850 --> 02:07:33.690
towards of all possible groups, the ones that

02:07:33.690 --> 02:07:38.650
are in a gradient towards better than what they're currently in.

02:07:38.890 --> 02:07:44.890
And the step-by-step movement towards better than they're currently in is

02:07:44.890 --> 02:07:48.010
caused exactly by this process you're describing.

02:07:48.840 --> 02:07:49.240
Yes.

02:07:49.480 --> 02:07:53.800
So that is a much better way of uh because then you have some sophisticated predictions

02:07:53.800 --> 02:07:55.880
about when you're gonna feel good joining a group.

02:07:56.120 --> 02:07:56.280
Correct.

02:07:56.520 --> 02:07:59.960
When the group is better and a better investment than you would have expected compared to

02:07:59.960 --> 02:08:01.400
the existing alternative groups.

02:08:01.640 --> 02:08:05.000
And so we have another example of a beautiful prediction you can make by taking an

02:08:05.000 --> 02:08:07.080
evolutionary perspective.

02:08:07.320 --> 02:08:10.520
So um And when you should be dissatisfied with the group too.

02:08:10.680 --> 02:08:10.840
Yeah.

02:08:11.160 --> 02:08:12.120
Yes, exactly.

02:08:12.360 --> 02:08:17.910
Um but uh we can also say that uh being part of a group shouldn't necessarily always make

02:08:17.910 --> 02:08:18.710
you feel happy.

02:08:18.950 --> 02:08:19.590
Right.

02:08:19.830 --> 02:08:25.350
Um if if you know the group is is treating you exactly as well as you thought and exactly

02:08:25.430 --> 02:08:27.510
it's exactly as cohesive as you thought, yeah.

02:08:27.670 --> 02:08:28.710
There's no reason to feel happy.

02:08:29.110 --> 02:08:32.710
Your motivations are are set correctly, your expectations are set correctly, you can hang

02:08:32.710 --> 02:08:35.910
out with the group all day and not feel much happiness at all.

02:08:36.860 --> 02:08:42.540
And so that's one case where taking this hedonic perspective of everything is about

02:08:42.540 --> 02:08:44.060
pursuing happiness will lead you astray.

02:08:45.420 --> 02:08:49.100
And there are even cases where um defending the group will make you feel unhappy.

02:08:49.340 --> 02:08:54.940
So being vigilant against threats to the group and and thinking in a conspiratorial way

02:08:54.940 --> 02:08:59.980
about all the people who might be out to get you or all the all the harms that might befall

02:08:59.980 --> 02:09:02.380
your group, that's going to make you sad a lot of the time.

02:09:02.770 --> 02:09:06.930
Uh, but we we should still evolve to do it and still adaptive to do it, because what we're

02:09:06.930 --> 02:09:11.410
pursuing is not happiness, but group integrity and group success in competitions.

02:09:11.730 --> 02:09:12.290
Yeah, that's right.

02:09:12.370 --> 02:09:16.450
And it makes predictions about to the extent that the group membership thing, what you're

02:09:16.450 --> 02:09:22.290
getting out of it is social benefits and compared to alternatives or your own intrinsic

02:09:22.290 --> 02:09:26.450
value with respect to the group, it makes predictions of you should become more

02:09:26.450 --> 02:09:31.820
dissatisfied with a group to the extent that, for example, if all of a sudden your social

02:09:31.820 --> 02:09:37.740
status or bargaining power increases and nobody else is in the group does, that

02:09:37.740 --> 02:09:39.740
should make you more dissatisfied with the group.

02:09:39.900 --> 02:09:45.340
Or if another group all of a sudden becomes available and it has a better, it's better for

02:09:45.340 --> 02:09:45.500
you.

02:09:45.580 --> 02:09:48.220
And the argument is none of this is conscious, quote unquote.

02:09:48.300 --> 02:09:50.460
It's just the systems detecting this.

02:09:50.780 --> 02:09:54.780
Then all of a sudden the new opportunity should make you more dissatisfied with the current

02:09:54.780 --> 02:09:55.020
group.

02:09:55.180 --> 02:10:00.750
And so these are you're you're right, these are all predictions that are

02:10:00.990 --> 02:10:06.590
unpacking what is otherwise a description staying at the level of emotions.

02:10:06.750 --> 02:10:11.470
It doesn't, and it's like kind of what Jamie Krem said in the other uh a previous episode,

02:10:11.550 --> 02:10:15.310
which is there's an additional why question, which is and how questions.

02:10:15.390 --> 02:10:17.150
It's well, what is a group?

02:10:17.230 --> 02:10:19.150
Why does join a group make you feel good?

02:10:19.230 --> 02:10:20.830
And and why and how, right?

02:10:20.910 --> 02:10:22.270
And what are the what are the predictions?

02:10:22.430 --> 02:10:24.800
And so I think so, yeah.

02:10:24.880 --> 02:10:27.520
I mean, do you think that that's fair, the what we just characterized?

02:10:27.760 --> 02:10:28.960
I think we just kind of converged on.

02:10:29.280 --> 02:10:30.560
Yeah, I think I think we did converge.

02:10:30.640 --> 02:10:30.880
Totally.

02:10:31.040 --> 02:10:31.760
Yeah, agreed.

02:10:31.840 --> 02:10:32.080
Yeah.

02:10:32.160 --> 02:10:37.920
No, I it's okay to say that we do things um to feel good, I suppose, as long as you're

02:10:37.920 --> 02:10:41.680
unpacking what it means to feel good from an adaptationist perspective.

02:10:42.000 --> 02:10:42.320
That's right.

02:10:42.480 --> 02:10:42.800
Yeah, yeah.

02:10:43.040 --> 02:10:48.490
Otherwise, you're stuck in sort of this um uh Marvin Minsky has a book that's called The

02:10:48.490 --> 02:10:49.210
Emotion Machine.

02:10:49.290 --> 02:10:54.090
And it's interesting because he's coming at it from an uh uh an AI perspective, but it's

02:10:54.090 --> 02:10:55.930
very much this engineering perspective.

02:10:56.170 --> 02:11:01.450
And it's the Emotion Machine is it's his follow-up book to the much more popular Society of

02:11:01.450 --> 02:11:04.090
Mind book, which I recommend people read if they haven't already.

02:11:04.330 --> 02:11:08.250
The Emotion Machine book, in some sense, it's very sophisticated, in other ways, it's not,

02:11:08.330 --> 02:11:13.200
because some of the things he appeals to are sort of not in his wheelhouse, but but it's a

02:11:13.200 --> 02:11:14.960
very good book in in some respects.

02:11:15.040 --> 02:11:19.040
And it's about sort of high-level uh cognitive architecture things.

02:11:19.280 --> 02:11:24.480
And one of the things he talks about in this book is that if you stay at the level of what

02:11:24.480 --> 02:11:27.680
we had talked about before is the intentional level, he doesn't use this language, but he

02:11:27.680 --> 02:11:30.880
sort of stumbles on this idea of motivations.

02:11:31.040 --> 02:11:35.440
So the person is motivated to like pursue groups that make them feel good.

02:11:35.610 --> 02:11:35.770
Yeah.

02:11:36.090 --> 02:11:39.770
It's sort of it really it's not an engineering problem, right?

02:11:39.930 --> 02:11:43.930
Or if you are an engineer, you just you're stuck with these questions, these deeper why

02:11:43.930 --> 02:11:45.690
questions that like Jamie pointed out.

02:11:45.850 --> 02:11:51.370
And so I think this is again another reason why it's not a just so

02:11:51.690 --> 02:11:52.170
story.

02:11:52.410 --> 02:11:56.970
In some sense, it's actually people are motivated to join groups they like, is a just so

02:11:57.130 --> 02:11:57.450
story.

02:11:57.660 --> 02:11:59.020
It's kind of ironic, right?

02:11:59.100 --> 02:12:04.860
It's that staying at the intentional level and not translating that into the fleshed out

02:12:04.860 --> 02:12:06.780
with teeth, with predictions.

02:12:07.020 --> 02:12:10.380
What counts as a why should we feel good?

02:12:10.540 --> 02:12:16.460
Translating emotions and concepts like groups and belongingness

02:12:16.780 --> 02:12:22.620
um into a set of circumstances and outcomes that is the

02:12:22.620 --> 02:12:24.620
opposite of a just so story.

02:12:24.970 --> 02:12:25.690
I agree.

02:12:25.850 --> 02:12:31.690
Um, I I wanna chime in on that point in particular, which is I

02:12:31.690 --> 02:12:36.490
have this belief that there is no such thing as non-evolutionary psychology.

02:12:36.730 --> 02:12:38.890
I don't think that exists.

02:12:39.050 --> 02:12:43.210
I don't think you can do psychology in a non-evolutionary way.

02:12:43.370 --> 02:12:48.650
What you can do is do psychology with your evolutionary assumptions unstated and

02:12:48.650 --> 02:12:49.610
implicit.

02:12:50.170 --> 02:12:51.600
Um, you can do that.

02:12:51.840 --> 02:12:56.320
And that allows you to come up with theories that are evolutionarily implausible and have

02:12:56.480 --> 02:13:00.480
uh uh dubious assumptions attached to them because you don't bother to state those

02:13:00.480 --> 02:13:03.040
assumptions and make them vulnerable to criticism.

02:13:03.280 --> 02:13:08.800
So you can do uh psychology, uh you can do bad evolutionary psychology without knowing

02:13:08.800 --> 02:13:11.920
you're doing bad evolutionary psychology because you haven't made your assumptions

02:13:11.920 --> 02:13:12.480
explicit.

02:13:12.640 --> 02:13:18.080
But at the end of the day, the psyche is uh an evolved organ, it is a product of evolution

02:13:18.160 --> 02:13:24.010
like any other organ, It is divided into subsystems with specific functions, like all of

02:13:24.010 --> 02:13:25.210
our organs are.

02:13:26.410 --> 02:13:31.690
The only way to study the design of that organ is

02:13:32.330 --> 02:13:37.130
by properly understanding the evolutionary history that gave rise to it,

02:13:38.250 --> 02:13:41.450
or the functions that were selected for.

02:13:42.820 --> 02:13:48.420
So when you're doing psychology, there's no way to study the psyche as something other than

02:13:48.420 --> 02:13:49.380
an evolved organ.

02:13:49.620 --> 02:13:53.860
If you're s making a claim about the mind, you are implicitly making an evolutionary claim

02:13:54.020 --> 02:13:55.860
because the mind is a product of evolution.

02:13:56.020 --> 02:13:59.780
Any claim about it entails certain evolutionary assumptions.

02:14:00.020 --> 02:14:05.140
And so what evolutionary psychology is, is just making those assumptions explicit, forcing

02:14:05.140 --> 02:14:10.430
you to make those assumptions explicit so that they are open to criticism and that they

02:14:10.430 --> 02:14:16.270
allow you to screen out implausible hypotheses and constrain the hypothesis space

02:14:16.350 --> 02:14:21.070
and open up new avenues for criticism and refutation and falsification.

02:14:21.310 --> 02:14:26.990
It's just doing psychology, but you're being explicit about all the assumptions you're

02:14:26.990 --> 02:14:27.230
making.

02:14:27.560 --> 02:14:28.280
Yeah, that's right.

02:14:28.360 --> 02:14:28.600
Yeah.

02:14:28.680 --> 02:14:31.400
And Dan Nettle and Tom Scott Phillips have this great paper.

02:14:31.560 --> 02:14:34.200
Is a non evolutionary psychology possible?

02:14:34.520 --> 02:14:39.560
Um and I think that uh you know roughly is their point as well.

02:14:39.720 --> 02:14:42.440
I think that's sort of a a way of putting it.

02:14:42.600 --> 02:14:43.720
Um yeah.

02:14:44.440 --> 02:14:45.000
Cool.

02:14:45.400 --> 02:14:51.400
So uh yeah that so yeah so number one that's why uh number one point is just that's

02:14:51.480 --> 02:14:56.520
that's why evolutionary psychology isn't a just so story or um

02:14:57.250 --> 02:15:02.690
as Lita once once said it, one of her students used to say that it's just so, meaning like

02:15:02.930 --> 02:15:05.090
it just spits everything just so.

02:15:05.250 --> 02:15:09.650
Um oh by the way, Richard Kipling, like uh, you know, of the just so stories.

02:15:10.130 --> 02:15:10.610
Rudyard.

02:15:10.930 --> 02:15:12.210
Rudyard, is that yeah, yeah.

02:15:12.850 --> 02:15:14.690
Um super racist.

02:15:15.010 --> 02:15:15.490
Oh really?

02:15:15.730 --> 02:15:19.650
And not in like a like, oh well, we have to like understand like he's a product of his

02:15:19.650 --> 02:15:19.890
time.

02:15:20.050 --> 02:15:25.320
Like uh Mark Twain, uh George Orwell were contemporaries were like

02:15:25.560 --> 02:15:27.000
scathing about him.

02:15:27.160 --> 02:15:28.440
Uh yeah, no, no, no.

02:15:28.520 --> 02:15:32.680
So uh so it's kind of funny people kind of throw Rudyard, how did you say it?

02:15:32.760 --> 02:15:35.000
I can't even say Rudyard or Rudyard I don't know how to do it.

02:15:35.560 --> 02:15:36.680
I don't know how to apologies.

02:15:36.840 --> 02:15:37.880
Well not really but yeah apologies.

02:15:40.360 --> 02:15:45.480
Like uh yeah no no no so like people kind of throw that those just so stories um out of

02:15:45.560 --> 02:15:51.350
psych but they're sort of throwing a very racist imperialist uh person um at

02:15:51.350 --> 02:15:56.630
evpsy which is i think sort of ironically i i wasn't aware of that that little bit of

02:15:56.630 --> 02:16:02.390
history yeah yeah yeah uh he has this book called um or it's a poem the white man's burden

02:16:02.550 --> 02:16:08.390
um you know oh okay uh and then mark twain did a uh spoof on it sort of

02:16:08.390 --> 02:16:13.590
to the person sitting in darkness or something like that and it's sort of uh so Kipling's

02:16:13.590 --> 02:16:18.230
point was sort of imperialism you know it's sort of like for the good of the half demons uh

02:16:18.310 --> 02:16:20.120
I think is a quote Yeah.

02:16:20.280 --> 02:16:23.480
And Mark Twain was sort of like maybe not.

02:16:24.600 --> 02:16:24.920
Okay.

02:16:25.080 --> 02:16:25.400
All right.

02:16:25.480 --> 02:16:30.360
Well, that gives us yet another reason to be happy that our discipline is not engaged in

02:16:30.360 --> 02:16:36.040
just so storytelling and is not uh associated with ruddyard or ruddyard Kipling.

02:16:36.280 --> 02:16:36.920
Yeah, that's right.

02:16:37.000 --> 02:16:42.760
And and and maybe check your uh if you're gonna use Kipl just so stories as a as a a wedge

02:16:42.760 --> 02:16:46.280
or as a cudgel, just check who you're who you're citing before you do that.

02:16:46.450 --> 02:16:47.250
But yeah, yeah.

02:16:47.330 --> 02:16:49.570
Maybe maybe Panglossianism would be the better site.

02:16:49.650 --> 02:16:51.570
Although I'm sure Molière was was racist too.

02:16:51.650 --> 02:16:51.970
Who knows?

02:16:52.850 --> 02:16:53.730
Yes, exactly.

02:16:53.810 --> 02:16:54.130
Yes.

02:16:54.210 --> 02:16:55.410
Uh things get better.

02:16:55.570 --> 02:16:55.730
Um.

02:16:57.490 --> 02:16:58.770
So yeah.

02:16:59.570 --> 02:16:59.890
Okay.

02:17:00.130 --> 02:17:01.170
Have we have we done it?

02:17:01.250 --> 02:17:03.650
Have we explained how to be a good evolutionary psychologist?

02:17:04.050 --> 02:17:04.930
Or today.

02:17:05.250 --> 02:17:05.570
Okay.

02:17:05.810 --> 02:17:06.050
All right.

02:17:06.210 --> 02:17:08.130
I mean, this is very much a to be continued.

02:17:08.450 --> 02:17:11.650
To be that's a p that pun pun intended to be continued.

02:17:12.210 --> 02:17:13.010
Very, very nice.

02:17:13.090 --> 02:17:13.330
Okay.

02:17:14.240 --> 02:17:14.880
All right.

02:17:18.400 --> 02:17:21.200
Uh well, here we are at the end of the episode.

02:17:21.280 --> 02:17:22.320
Thank you for listening.

02:17:22.480 --> 02:17:26.320
Uh, if you like what you're hearing, uh please don't be shy.

02:17:26.400 --> 02:17:28.880
Uh tell people about it on social media.

02:17:28.960 --> 02:17:30.800
Uh shout it from the mountaintops.

02:17:30.960 --> 02:17:34.640
We're a new podcast, we're trying to build an audience and gain support for what we're

02:17:34.640 --> 02:17:34.800
doing.

02:17:34.880 --> 02:17:37.680
And and where can people uh support us, Dave?

02:17:38.130 --> 02:17:43.330
Well, they can support us emotionally however they want, but in terms of behaviorally, they

02:17:43.330 --> 02:17:45.090
can sort of leave a good review.

02:17:45.570 --> 02:17:47.730
They can support us on Patreon.

02:17:48.370 --> 02:17:53.010
And yeah, just listening, liking, subscribing, and leaving reviews

02:17:54.290 --> 02:17:58.050
that are neutral to positive is certainly helpful.

02:17:58.940 --> 02:17:59.660
Absolutely.

02:17:59.820 --> 02:18:00.060
Yeah.

02:18:00.620 --> 02:18:05.100
If you feel that way, you know, if you feel like it's you feel negatively about it.

02:18:05.500 --> 02:18:07.580
Um you know, I'll leave that to your discretion.

02:18:07.820 --> 02:18:07.900
Yeah.

02:18:08.140 --> 02:18:08.220
Yeah.

02:18:08.300 --> 02:18:10.220
You if you hate us, you can send us hate mail too.

02:18:10.300 --> 02:18:11.020
Uh but you know.

02:18:11.420 --> 02:18:13.580
I would not maybe no, maybe not hate mail.

02:18:13.900 --> 02:18:17.340
No, if you hate us, just think about why you hate us and maybe think about something more

02:18:17.340 --> 02:18:18.620
productive you could do with your time.

02:18:18.860 --> 02:18:21.740
Yeah, if you have nothing nice to say, then don't say it at all.

02:18:22.060 --> 02:18:23.930
I think that's a good rules to live by.

02:18:24.010 --> 02:18:27.690
So but you know, you take that wo take that with a grain of salt.

02:18:27.770 --> 02:18:31.450
So but uh but yeah, thanks for listening and we'll see you next week.

02:18:31.690 --> 02:18:32.170
See ya