WEBVTT

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So uh so David, do you want to just do one where it's just you?

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Sure.

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Okay.

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So this is taking to say I'm Dave Petrozowski,

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right?

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It would be weird if you said I'm Dave Petrozowski.

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But you could say we're your hosts, David Pencil.

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This is uh yeah, we're your host, David.

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Okay, I do that.

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Yeah, so all right, let's see.

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Three two one ten nine eight seven six five four three two one.

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So take one.

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David, good to see you.

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Good to see you too, Dave.

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We have our first guest today.

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We do.

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I'm very excited.

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Yeah, and a very, a very good guest.

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I think one of the most uh uh excellent top-notch thinkers in the field of evolutionary

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psychology right now, uh applying uh computational and mathematical methodology

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to uh mate choice and how we choose our mates.

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Um absolutely fascinating work uh this guy is doing.

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Um we we get into all of it.

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We get into the origin of evolutionary psychology uh uh as a lens uh to

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understand through which to see human mating.

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Um we get into uh current issues in the study of mate choice, uh, and

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and what Dan's criticisms are of some of this research and and what his takes are on the

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various controversies.

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We cover a lot of ground.

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Yeah.

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And I like this because it's an example of uh people within EvSec actually thinking about

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and characterizing sort of how their own field is going.

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And Dan has just a great perspective on that.

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Uh super fun, um, super informative.

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And yeah, enjoy.

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So Dan Conroy Beam, thanks for being with us today.

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Thanks for having me.

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Um, Dan is a neighbor down the hall and also uh where where we live.

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Um and but you know, I actually realized, Dan, in getting ready for this meeting, there's

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like a lot of questions I've never asked you.

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Um because we see each other all the time that I never think that's

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um but uh Dan, you are a professor at UC Santa Barbara.

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Um and uh you how long have you been at UC Santa Barbara?

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I came here in 2016.

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So what does that mean?

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Coming up on the years.

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We should celebrate the 10 year uh the 10 years.

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Um, and before that, you were at Austin working with David Buss.

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How did you um, and you don't have to answer this if you don't want to, we can talk about

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something else immediately, but how did you um find uh David Buss and how did you get

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interested in Evpsych?

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Yeah.

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Uh you want the long version?

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You want the short version?

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Uh the the the extra long version, which whatever you want.

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Uh all the gory details.

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Yeah, yeah.

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Well, actually, we did like a really long version of ours.

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So that was like an entire episode.

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So yeah.

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Yeah, we like went into our childhoods.

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It got really good.

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It was a therapy.

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It was a therapy session.

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So I was born on a snowy day in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

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No, uh it wasn't snowy because it was August.

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Um, uh yeah, I mean, so I I did both my my bachelor's and my

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PhD at the University of Texas, uh, which is where David Buss happens to work, or at least

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you know, did by the time I was there.

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Um, so it was total freak accident luck stuff.

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Um I I never really had much of an idea of what I wanted to do with my life.

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Um, I didn't have like a good understanding of what careers existed in the

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world.

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Um I was always really biology was always my favorite subject in school.

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Uh and I was always like really into just nature and wildlife and just living things.

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Uh like as a kid, I would just like that was my thing as a kid, just like drawing different

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animals and I had a zoo books subscription.

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My mom had a zoo books subscription for me.

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Uh and I just like every month when that zoo books came in and you just had a magazine to

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learn about like different animals from around the world, that was like Christmas every

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month.

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Um so like I knew that I liked biology, but I didn't really know that like you could be a

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biologist.

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And I don't know how it never occurred to me that like there were people whose job it was

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to generate this information that I was assuming.

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So I like the only thing I the only job I knew that was like connected to biology was

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just like something in medicine.

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Yeah.

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Um, so I just like I was like, I guess I want to do something related to that.

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I don't really know what.

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Um but I uh I remember, you know, I I started at UT as an

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undergrad.

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I was ostensibly pre-med, but like didn't just because I didn't know what else to

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be.

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Um I took a psych class, um, fully expecting to hate it,

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fully expecting like this is gonna be like, you know, Freud laying on couches

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talking about your mother.

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Uh, is it gonna be stupid?

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I'm interested in science, I'm not interested in this, but it just like fit my schedule.

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It like fulfilled the GE.

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That's I was like, I'll just get this, it'll be easy.

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Uh, and it was taught by David Lewis, who was a grad student in David

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Buss's lab at the time, who was intro-psych.

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Um, it was over the summer, actually.

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Uh, and so he had like probably way too much latitude in how he taught the

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course.

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Uh, so he taught it very much from an evolutionary perspective.

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Um, and uh yeah, I did I just I I remember it was

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mind-blowing.

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First of all, that psychology is a science, that like you can study human thought and

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emotion and behavior scientifically was a revelation to me.

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Uh, and then also the fact that you could take evolutionary theory, you could take this

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biological theory, uh, which I had independently already been really interested in.

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Um, you know, this was like There were a lot of stars that kind of

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aligned, I guess, maybe to like put me on this exact path.

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Because this was, you know, in Texas.

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Uh this is around the time.

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I don't know what the time what is the schedule for this.

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Um, this was around the time where um, you know, the

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the Texas Public School Board was revising standards for textbooks,

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which turns out to matter a lot for the whole country because Texas is such a big textbook

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market that like whatever the Texas public schools decide goes in the textbooks basically

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dictates what goes in the textbooks for the whole country.

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And so there was some debate about how are we going to talk about evolution in, you know,

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Texas school textbooks.

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And so evolution was like very much in the air.

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There were a lot of like this was a sort of resurgence of the like scopes monkey trial

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stuff going on.

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There was a lot of discussion in Texas about, you know, do we teach the controversy or not?

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And so I was like reading a lot about like reading a lot of blogs at the time about like a

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lot of skeptic blogs about evolutionary theory.

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I'd like taken a red rhetoric class and I wrote it about like evolutionary theory,

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skepticism on evolutionary theory.

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Um, and you know, it had always again being interested in biology and wildlife, it had

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always been evolution had always been super interesting to me.

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Um, so the idea that you could take this like embattled scientific theory and apply it to

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humans and apply it to human behavior, I was like, why this is so cool.

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Why didn't someone tell me about this before?

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Um I was super into it.

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I think David noticed I was super into it.

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Um, and you know, as you do when you're teaching a class, you're always on the lookout for

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like, you know, good research assistance.

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Uh so I think you know there's usually like, you know, two or three kids per class who are

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like really into it and really good students and genuinely curious, and everyone else just

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wants to get the grade and wants to know whether it's like gonna be on the test or not.

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And you know, yeah, yeah, exactly.

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Yeah.

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But you were you were one of those, one of those two or three.

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Yeah, yeah.

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I I would say this is one of the first classes that I can remember being like really

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intrinsically motivated to do too.

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Like I just wanted to imbibe as much of this as possible.

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And I I think you know fortunately David just saw that and he's like, you know,

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I think you should maybe do more of this.

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You want to help me out with my research.

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Um so I got involved with David Lewis as a research assistant for him.

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Um, and you know, just really enjoyed doing that, spent a lot of my

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free time in the lab helping DL with all kinds of things.

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Um, you know, as you do starting with like grunt work, running participants, doing

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literature reviews.

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Um, but you know, I think he just kept seeing that I kept being really interested in it and

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really invested in it.

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He kept giving me more and more to do.

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Um and then another, you know, another star that aligned um was UT

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at the time had this, I think it maybe still exists, but had this program uh for

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sort of getting undergraduates more connected in research.

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Um you know, kind of we have similar programs at UCSB, I guess, but it was uh unusually

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well funded.

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Um so DL and I signed up for this.

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It was like a mentorship program.

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And one of the perks was they funded the student to go to an academic conference.

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So after my freshman year of college, I got money to fly out

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to HBus in Fullerton.

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So that HBUS was my very first academic conference.

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I had no idea what an academic conference was like.

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Um flew out there, um, attended that HBS.

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And that was like that, I remember especially it was just a mind-blowing experience, right?

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Like this whole conference halls full of people who are exactly

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as obsessed with this topic as I am.

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And you just get to sit there for three days, you know, nine to five, and just

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hear about all the cool cutting edge science that like everybody, all these people are

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doing.

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You get to hear about these like discoveries before anyone else.

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You're just like drowning in this like really cool topic for days.

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It was so exhilarating.

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It was so fun.

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It was so fun to meet a bunch of people.

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Um and so I think that was like a real turning point.

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I was like, okay, like there's a career here.

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I really enjoy doing this.

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Like, I want to keep coming to this conference as much as I can.

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Um, so yeah, at that point I was like dead set on being an evolutionary psychologist.

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Um and uh, you know, I was already in the bus lab.

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I was already like learning about evolutionary psychology, primarily from David Lewis.

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But you know, I took David Buss's classes after that.

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I took as many classes as I could at UT that sort of like cobbled together like an F-Syc

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degree as much as I could.

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I switched majors immediately.

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I switched in the psych program as soon as I could.

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Um, but I minored in biology and I took as many like biostats psych

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courses to like cobble together and like an as much of an evpsych degree as I could.

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Um, you know, it's probably not an accident that I fell into human mating being in the bus

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lab.

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I mean, I may may have fallen into it anyway, but that just seemed like the natural topic

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to study.

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Um and then, you know, ended up staying there for grad school, not Not

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necessarily intentionally, but that's just what ended up happening.

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And yeah, no, I'm here.

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Does anybody, when anybody ever interviews you, because I've seen you in several

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interviews, does anybody ever ask you how you got interested in mating?

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Or is that is that sort of a yeah, it's maybe a given.

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Right?

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I don't know.

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No, yeah.

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I don't know if that question has ever really come up.

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Uh, how did you guys avoid getting interested in mating?

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Well, for a while, you know, till I turned 10 or something.

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Yeah, I don't know that I was ever not interested.

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It's sort of an intrinsically interesting topic.

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You know, anything related to to sex or death is sort of innately interesting to us, I

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think.

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And I think for me, for me, oh David, sorry, go ahead.

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No, no, go ahead.

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I was just gonna for me, like I think uh as a lot of people, like mating was especially

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like sort of a a gateway drug for Ev Psych too, where it was sort of, you know, as a

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seventeen, eighteen, nineteen year old, whatever, you're like, whoa, a science of this.

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Cause that's that was one of the other things that I found a bit disappointing about

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psychology, as interested as I was, is that the topics were sort of reasoning, problem

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solving.

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And I was like, well, what about like jealousy or anger or mating or love or something like

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that?

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And so for me, that was like definitely um exciting.

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So yeah.

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Yeah.

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No, for me, I think, I mean, I st I I do think mating and I do try to keep up in

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developments and mating psychology as much as I can.

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Uh but uh for me, uh it wasn't that it didn't, you know, it didn't make sense or it wasn't

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insightful and interesting.

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It was almost that it made too much sense and it was too insightful.

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Like you know, like I'm like, Oh, I totally buy this.

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This makes so much sense.

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I love the connections with other animals, but like I want to move on to the more

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mysterious things, like the like what what's going on with you know ideologies and sacred

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values like this weird stuff that's totally mysterious.

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I wanted to like I I wanted to be more ambitious and like tackle something that was really

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confusing.

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I don't know that's just my personality I guess you don't open the behavioral ethology

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textbook and see like you know political uh ideologies in the gazelles or red stack here.

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Right, exactly.

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It depends on what book you open.

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Um I for for the mating literature, Dan, um, is there um

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do you think that like it's been going on long enough that you could characterize sort of

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what its trajectory has been?

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Or like where where do you think the mating um stuff is at?

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Or or maybe even like more broadly, like you know, of psych we talked a little bit about um

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people thinking of psych is just a just-so story.

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We talked a little bit about um um you know making design or software level claims we

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haven't really talked about like evolutionary game theory, you know, and I assume that the

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audience of this will be a combination of just sort of people who know a lot, maybe people

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who don't know a lot.

00:15:10.190 --> 00:15:16.140
One of the things I really like about your work um is uh is that

00:15:16.220 --> 00:15:21.980
you know you're bringing these different tools to bear um and uh and i'm

00:15:21.980 --> 00:15:27.820
wondering like things like modeling or game theory or selection pressure dynamics um

00:15:28.140 --> 00:15:33.740
you know could you talk a little bit either about like how you see those

00:15:34.060 --> 00:15:39.820
um affecting the way we study things in ep or or mating more

00:15:39.820 --> 00:15:45.710
specifically That's that's two really big,

00:15:45.870 --> 00:15:47.470
really good questions.

00:15:48.030 --> 00:15:53.550
Um You know, uh it it's gonna be hard to

00:15:53.550 --> 00:15:57.230
characterize the trajectory of mating research in a way that's not like totally

00:15:57.230 --> 00:15:58.190
self-serving.

00:15:58.430 --> 00:16:00.590
Uh I mean uh please be self-serving, Dan.

00:16:00.750 --> 00:16:06.620
Please I mean I I can tell you sort of uh let me answer it

00:16:06.620 --> 00:16:11.100
this way, maybe to excuse how self-serving it's gonna necessarily be.

00:16:11.180 --> 00:16:17.100
Like I can tell you how I, you know, a direction I see that

00:16:17.100 --> 00:16:20.780
the work needs to go in, uh, a gap that I try to fill.

00:16:20.860 --> 00:16:21.500
Let me put it in there.

00:16:21.660 --> 00:16:21.900
Yeah, yeah.

00:16:21.980 --> 00:16:26.300
We're gonna do a thousand let a thousand flowers bloom, but what's the flowers that you

00:16:26.300 --> 00:16:28.780
think a couple that you you would like to pursue?

00:16:28.860 --> 00:16:29.180
Yeah.

00:16:29.820 --> 00:16:34.630
So I I I think there's like um, I don't know.

00:16:34.790 --> 00:16:40.310
There's maybe like there's maybe like a couple phases

00:16:40.950 --> 00:16:46.390
I can see I could see dividing the history of like human mating research into perhaps.

00:16:46.710 --> 00:16:52.710
Um I think um you know obviously human mating is at

00:16:52.710 --> 00:16:54.870
the core of it what evolutionary psychology is, right?

00:16:54.950 --> 00:17:00.870
Like I think Don Simon's um evolution of human sexuality, you could consider the first

00:17:00.870 --> 00:17:04.840
F Psych text, uh depending on how you wanna, you know.

00:17:05.320 --> 00:17:10.440
I would I would argue that um the descent of man by Darwin is is the first

00:17:11.400 --> 00:17:12.280
F-sych text.

00:17:12.440 --> 00:17:14.440
But even that is also full of mating stress.

00:17:16.920 --> 00:17:18.920
Critique of pure reason I got you guys beaten.

00:17:21.320 --> 00:17:27.290
Uh I you know obviously strains of these ideas have been present in lots of places for a

00:17:27.290 --> 00:17:31.530
lot of times, but I feel like the first time sort of modern adaptationist evolutionary

00:17:31.530 --> 00:17:37.530
psychology cohered in a single place, you know, I would unselfishly call evolution of human

00:17:37.530 --> 00:17:38.250
sexuality.

00:17:38.410 --> 00:17:41.610
Um was that was that before or after Adapted Mind?

00:17:41.930 --> 00:17:44.000
It was about ten years before adapted.

00:17:44.240 --> 00:17:46.960
Yeah, that was 778 or 79.

00:17:47.360 --> 00:17:47.440
Yeah.

00:17:48.000 --> 00:17:48.320
Oh wow.

00:17:48.400 --> 00:17:48.480
Okay.

00:17:48.560 --> 00:17:48.800
Oh yeah.

00:17:48.960 --> 00:17:49.120
All right.

00:17:49.200 --> 00:17:50.160
Then then you are correct.

00:17:54.320 --> 00:17:54.480
Yeah.

00:17:54.560 --> 00:17:54.640
Yeah.

00:17:54.800 --> 00:17:55.280
It was great.

00:17:55.600 --> 00:17:58.960
Dawn was instrumental in getting John and Lena here.

00:17:59.040 --> 00:18:04.400
And I think the, you know, the sort of UCSB,

00:18:05.040 --> 00:18:10.950
you know, uh collective, I think really is sort of like forged uh

00:18:11.270 --> 00:18:17.190
forged this uh this uh discipline um out of their collection of interests.

00:18:17.430 --> 00:18:23.350
Um so you know I I think you know that book was was obviously a you know

00:18:23.510 --> 00:18:24.550
a turning point.

00:18:24.630 --> 00:18:28.950
Um and that really inspired people like Marco Wilson and Martin Daly.

00:18:29.190 --> 00:18:31.350
It also really inspired people like David Buss.

00:18:31.670 --> 00:18:37.360
Uh so I think there's like a that sort of first phase in between Dawn and David, where like

00:18:37.440 --> 00:18:41.840
the field was kind of coming together and sort of basic like evolutionary.

00:18:42.240 --> 00:18:45.520
Don was really sketching out like what are the basic evolutionary principles?

00:18:45.760 --> 00:18:51.040
And what are the basic facts of human evolution and human life history as we understand

00:18:51.040 --> 00:18:56.160
them at the time that are relevant for you know making predictions about human psychology

00:18:56.160 --> 00:18:58.160
in the in the domain of human mating.

00:18:58.470 --> 00:19:03.750
Uh, and then I think David Buss, a lot of people picked up and ran with that, but David

00:19:03.750 --> 00:19:09.430
Buss really like established a particular brand uh that was very

00:19:09.430 --> 00:19:12.150
empirically successful and very popular.

00:19:12.790 --> 00:19:18.150
And so I think that maybe starts a kind of second phase of human mating research, which we

00:19:18.150 --> 00:19:19.990
may or may not still be in.

00:19:20.310 --> 00:19:24.960
Uh, because David, a lot of people don't know this, but David was trained originally as a

00:19:24.960 --> 00:19:26.000
personality psychologist.

00:19:26.160 --> 00:19:29.040
He was not, you know, obviously he wasn't an evolution trained as an evolutionary

00:19:29.040 --> 00:19:32.480
psychologist because there was no possible way to get trained as an evolutionary

00:19:32.480 --> 00:19:33.600
psychologist at that time.

00:19:33.760 --> 00:19:36.000
So he was trained as a personality psychologist.

00:19:36.160 --> 00:19:41.120
And his innovation, his first he got famous originally for personality we work.

00:19:41.200 --> 00:19:45.680
Like he got a job at Harvard on his personality stuff, uh and was really famous for

00:19:45.680 --> 00:19:51.030
developing this, you know, act nomination procedure for mapping what a personality

00:19:51.030 --> 00:19:51.910
construct is, right?

00:19:51.990 --> 00:19:56.870
Rather than looking at the dictionary and having people rate all the words in a dictionary

00:19:56.870 --> 00:20:01.750
that describe a person and deriving your measures through factor analysis of dictionary

00:20:01.750 --> 00:20:02.310
terms.

00:20:02.630 --> 00:20:07.670
He just said, let's go to people and just ask them, you know, what are the things that an

00:20:07.670 --> 00:20:09.270
extroverted person does?

00:20:09.430 --> 00:20:14.940
And let's define the construct in terms of this like collection of behaviors that people

00:20:14.940 --> 00:20:16.380
associate with this.

00:20:16.620 --> 00:20:22.300
Um so he was already very used to developing scales

00:20:22.460 --> 00:20:23.500
and measures.

00:20:23.820 --> 00:20:29.820
Um he's used to doing these like large scale survey projects and he was interested in

00:20:29.820 --> 00:20:32.060
these evolutionary approaches that were emerging.

00:20:32.220 --> 00:20:37.500
He met Lita and John he was a faculty member when Lita and John were like undergrads at

00:20:37.500 --> 00:20:38.780
Harvard, right?

00:20:38.940 --> 00:20:44.270
And you know they tell the story of like you know going to David's office as he was like

00:20:44.350 --> 00:20:47.790
just starting to write about this evolution stuff and telling him he was doing everything

00:20:47.790 --> 00:20:48.110
wrong.

00:20:48.510 --> 00:20:52.910
Um I once I once asked Lita what she said to David Buss during that, and I forgot what she

00:20:52.910 --> 00:20:53.070
said.

00:20:53.150 --> 00:20:54.190
We'll have to have Lita on.

00:20:55.630 --> 00:20:58.910
Um it sounded like it was very polite, actually, in the end.

00:20:58.990 --> 00:21:02.270
It sounded much worse more uh more salacious than it might have been.

00:21:02.350 --> 00:21:02.510
Yeah.

00:21:02.750 --> 00:21:04.590
Well, you know, you should maybe ask David for his version.

00:21:04.830 --> 00:21:05.150
That's true.

00:21:05.310 --> 00:21:05.710
Fair enough.

00:21:05.790 --> 00:21:08.350
Yeah, they may not have the same version, I don't remember.

00:21:08.590 --> 00:21:13.120
Um so I I think there was some exchange of ideas there.

00:21:13.440 --> 00:21:19.200
Um so David, I think, took this sort of very, you know,

00:21:19.440 --> 00:21:25.280
measuring latent constructs sort of approach from personality psychology and

00:21:25.280 --> 00:21:30.240
sort of brought this together with you know the evolutionary insights that Don Simons was

00:21:30.240 --> 00:21:30.800
bringing.

00:21:30.960 --> 00:21:36.350
So he's saying, you know, okay, if we think drawing from sexual selection theory, there's

00:21:36.350 --> 00:21:40.910
reason to expect you know humans have these preferences, but some of them may be sex

00:21:40.910 --> 00:21:45.950
differentiated for these particular, you know, evolutionary historic reasons.

00:21:46.350 --> 00:21:51.790
Let's develop a questionnaire to measure preferences and see do we see the kinds of

00:21:51.790 --> 00:21:56.190
patterns one would expect that you know what kinds of things are popular, but most

00:21:56.190 --> 00:21:58.670
importantly, what sort of sex differences are there?

00:21:58.750 --> 00:22:04.200
Because that's going to be know, David's motivation at the time, also, uh, we have to

00:22:04.200 --> 00:22:08.360
remember this is applying evolutionary theory to human behavior was extremely

00:22:08.360 --> 00:22:09.560
controversial.

00:22:09.800 --> 00:22:14.680
Um, and this is coming after the like sociobiology wars, which you know, David, Lita, and

00:22:14.680 --> 00:22:16.920
John were all exposed to firsthand at Harvard.

00:22:17.160 --> 00:22:17.480
Right.

00:22:17.640 --> 00:22:22.040
So I think in David's mind, I I I don't know, I don't want to speak to him too much.

00:22:22.120 --> 00:22:28.040
This is me sort of uh piecing together maybe a history, but you'd have to ask him.

00:22:28.200 --> 00:22:33.750
But I imagine part of just from knowing David and knowing the history, I imagine a big part

00:22:33.750 --> 00:22:39.590
of his goal here is not necessarily to map the map mating

00:22:39.590 --> 00:22:45.430
psychology per se, as much as to like provide a proof of concept that validate

00:22:45.430 --> 00:22:50.790
evolutionary approaches in the first place against all of this controversy.

00:22:50.950 --> 00:22:56.790
Um so I think you know he gets a lot of flack for focusing a lot on sex differences and

00:22:56.790 --> 00:22:58.550
overemphasizing sex differences.

00:22:58.710 --> 00:23:02.840
And that's, I think, where this sort of I'll get into that, but I think that's you know

00:23:03.080 --> 00:23:05.480
what ends up defining this kind of phase of mating research.

00:23:05.560 --> 00:23:10.200
But I think that's because sex differences were like a really natural lever, right?

00:23:10.440 --> 00:23:16.440
Like if you want to prove to the world, show the world that like there's some value in

00:23:16.440 --> 00:23:21.080
this evolutionary theory stuff, this can make really strong predictions that no one else

00:23:21.080 --> 00:23:24.760
can, that you need this evolutionary theory stuff to do your psychology.

00:23:25.000 --> 00:23:28.360
Sex differences are a really easy, natural place to start.

00:23:28.570 --> 00:23:30.090
And so that's where he started, right?

00:23:30.170 --> 00:23:36.010
So that's where like bus 89 comes from is evolutionary theory makes this

00:23:36.010 --> 00:23:40.970
really clear prediction that no other existing social psychological theories or preferences

00:23:40.970 --> 00:23:46.330
make, uh, which is there should be these cross culturally invariant sex differences on

00:23:46.330 --> 00:23:47.130
certain dimensions.

00:23:47.290 --> 00:23:49.930
So he took his personality psych know how.

00:23:50.730 --> 00:23:55.370
And you know, he actually borrowed I think a lot of people don't know this as well his his

00:23:55.370 --> 00:23:56.730
first preference questionnaire.

00:23:57.020 --> 00:23:57.980
He didn't come up with it.

00:23:58.060 --> 00:24:02.700
He actually just took it from a paper Hill 1945 or something like that.

00:24:02.860 --> 00:24:07.420
So it was a preference questionnaire that you know had been in use in the US at that time

00:24:07.420 --> 00:24:09.580
for some amount of use for 50 years.

00:24:09.660 --> 00:24:14.140
He basically just took Hill's questionnaire and administered it around the world with maybe

00:24:14.140 --> 00:24:15.020
some slight modifications.

00:24:15.100 --> 00:24:16.140
I don't remember.

00:24:16.380 --> 00:24:22.290
Um and yeah, established that there are these cross-culturally universal sex differences,

00:24:22.530 --> 00:24:26.770
at least among, you know, thirty-seven relatively industrialized cultures.

00:24:27.090 --> 00:24:32.130
Yeah, it's it's interesting, um, just reflecting on the history of evolutionary psychology.

00:24:32.290 --> 00:24:37.250
And, you know, you make a very good point that if you want to start somewhere in applying

00:24:37.250 --> 00:24:42.920
evolution to human behavior and human psychology, sex differences makes the most

00:24:42.920 --> 00:24:43.320
sense.

00:24:43.560 --> 00:24:45.800
You know, the the predictions there are the clearest.

00:24:45.960 --> 00:24:48.760
You see parallels in other animal species.

00:24:49.000 --> 00:24:52.280
Um, there are really large effect sizes to be found there.

00:24:52.440 --> 00:24:55.400
You can look, you can do interesting cross-cultural work.

00:24:55.640 --> 00:25:01.160
Um so it's a it's a really meaty good place to start if you want to just prove to the world

00:25:01.160 --> 00:25:06.690
that hey, this perspective works, it had it makes predictions and discoveries, the

00:25:06.690 --> 00:25:08.050
findings are solid.

00:25:08.210 --> 00:25:10.530
Um, look at what this field can do.

00:25:10.770 --> 00:25:14.690
But I can also imagine a downside to that, and that not only is you know the sex

00:25:14.690 --> 00:25:18.290
differences it's the easiest place to start, but it's also the most controversial and

00:25:18.290 --> 00:25:21.730
provocative and inflammatory place you could possibly start.

00:25:21.970 --> 00:25:27.090
And so I'm I'm imagining like what would evolutionary psychology be in the parallel

00:25:27.090 --> 00:25:30.770
universe where it didn't start with sex differences and it started with something else?

00:25:30.930 --> 00:25:33.490
Would would the field be completely different today?

00:25:33.960 --> 00:25:37.160
And I think there's a good case to be made that it probably would be very different.

00:25:37.560 --> 00:25:43.400
That starting with this, you know, uh inflammatory issue of sex differences sort of stamped

00:25:43.400 --> 00:25:48.200
the field with this controversial edgelord reputation.

00:25:48.600 --> 00:25:53.800
And it attracted all of these people who wanted to be edgelords and wanted to study

00:25:53.800 --> 00:25:57.400
controversial things and study titillating topics.

00:25:57.800 --> 00:26:03.610
And it sort of provided this inertia for the field that in many ways is probably not a

00:26:03.610 --> 00:26:04.330
good thing.

00:26:04.570 --> 00:26:10.090
Um yes, the the predictions are solid, the findings are solid, uh, but I really

00:26:10.090 --> 00:26:15.210
wonder what evolutionary psychology would have been like if it started somewhere else.

00:26:15.370 --> 00:26:19.450
Say if it started with like group psychology, the stuff that Dave studies, or some or or

00:26:19.530 --> 00:26:20.250
you know, something else.

00:26:20.330 --> 00:26:25.290
I I'm curious what what your reaction to that is in terms of just the his the historical

00:26:25.530 --> 00:26:27.370
inertia of the field.

00:26:28.020 --> 00:26:31.220
I think that's exactly right.

00:26:32.820 --> 00:26:37.940
And I I think that's uh not to criticize David or anything, right?

00:26:38.020 --> 00:26:38.900
I think his work is great.

00:26:38.980 --> 00:26:44.660
And I think he's done, you know, no one can um no one can

00:26:44.660 --> 00:26:46.900
deny David's like service to the field.

00:26:46.980 --> 00:26:51.300
And we're talking David, we have David Bus free David's format this conversation.

00:26:53.380 --> 00:26:55.700
Both David's here as well as David Bus.

00:26:56.050 --> 00:27:00.690
All of my work on mating mating has been really important since the eighties when I was

00:27:00.850 --> 00:27:04.530
when I was a some year old, a single digit year old.

00:27:04.610 --> 00:27:04.770
Yeah.

00:27:05.090 --> 00:27:05.570
It's true.

00:27:05.650 --> 00:27:06.370
I should be careful.

00:27:06.530 --> 00:27:09.890
Um but yeah, I no one can deny David Buss's you know service to the field.

00:27:09.970 --> 00:27:15.650
And you know, he's really he's done more than nearly anyone to like put the field on the

00:27:15.650 --> 00:27:16.050
map.

00:27:16.210 --> 00:27:21.410
Um but I do think there have been downsides to the particular approach that he chose.

00:27:21.730 --> 00:27:27.700
Um and I I think um you know, there's there's several sort of founders of

00:27:27.700 --> 00:27:29.060
the field that you could identify, right?

00:27:29.140 --> 00:27:33.460
If we're talking about capital E, capital P evolutionary psychology per se, and not just

00:27:33.460 --> 00:27:37.940
all approaches to evolution behavior, you know, I think of like Lita Cosmodies, John Tuby,

00:27:38.020 --> 00:27:42.660
kind of together, Steve Pinker, Martin Daly, Margot Wilson, the people in that picture,

00:27:42.820 --> 00:27:43.140
right?

00:27:43.460 --> 00:27:46.020
Um, David Buss, Don Simons.

00:27:46.250 --> 00:27:50.010
Um and they I think they had sort of different approaches to this.

00:27:50.170 --> 00:27:53.770
And you can sort of see the lineage of their work.

00:27:53.930 --> 00:27:57.770
Because yeah, David David's David Buss has never been one to shy away from controversy,

00:27:57.930 --> 00:27:58.730
that's for sure.

00:27:58.890 --> 00:28:03.770
Uh and I don't think he's quite edge lowered.

00:28:04.010 --> 00:28:06.250
Um there are he's a very lovely man.

00:28:06.330 --> 00:28:08.490
He definitely does not have this reputation.

00:28:08.730 --> 00:28:10.810
Uh we should have that reputation.

00:28:11.130 --> 00:28:15.400
Oh I mean No, no, he hasn't earned it.

00:28:16.840 --> 00:28:17.000
Yeah.

00:28:17.160 --> 00:28:17.400
Yeah.

00:28:17.720 --> 00:28:21.800
There are certainly some people who uh relish in controversy.

00:28:21.960 --> 00:28:25.480
David does not, uh, but David does not shy away from it either.

00:28:25.640 --> 00:28:30.040
Um and he's actually, yeah, I think he's actually he's he's a very savvy guy.

00:28:30.120 --> 00:28:34.690
I he wouldn't be where he was if he wasn't, you know, good at at navigating these kinds of

00:28:34.690 --> 00:28:35.090
topics.

00:28:35.250 --> 00:28:39.330
But I think, you know, like Lita Cosmanese and John Tube, they did kind of go the round

00:28:39.330 --> 00:28:40.450
that you were talking about, right?

00:28:40.610 --> 00:28:44.930
Like they wanted to prove evolutionary psychology as a as a useful discipline.

00:28:45.090 --> 00:28:49.890
And so they did go to something very, you know, pretty uncontroversial, very like

00:28:49.890 --> 00:28:50.770
cooperation, right?

00:28:50.850 --> 00:28:53.650
It's very heartwarming, very positive.

00:28:53.890 --> 00:28:57.650
And you know, they they try to demonstrate that you can make useful predictions in this

00:28:57.650 --> 00:29:01.420
area that there should be something that we can all agree is a good thing and people should

00:29:01.420 --> 00:29:02.940
be minimally angry about.

00:29:03.260 --> 00:29:08.220
I did I don't know what's your sense, Dave, as a student of theirs.

00:29:08.380 --> 00:29:13.580
Like, you know, I see David, he started at Harvard, so that probably helped him.

00:29:13.740 --> 00:29:16.300
So did they, but he was like faculty at Harvard already.

00:29:16.540 --> 00:29:22.460
I think he was able to parlay that into a position at Michigan, maybe still riding off the

00:29:22.460 --> 00:29:23.340
personality fame.

00:29:23.420 --> 00:29:27.500
Like David had a massive advantage in already being a very successful personality

00:29:27.500 --> 00:29:28.220
psychologist.

00:29:28.370 --> 00:29:31.650
So he was able to do this very controversial stuff.

00:29:31.810 --> 00:29:37.570
Um, just like using the last of his personality psych credit, like just burning all of

00:29:37.570 --> 00:29:43.570
that, and then he just got lucky that this F-Syc stuff took off in time before people hated

00:29:43.570 --> 00:29:45.890
him, basically, for doing that sort of stuff.

00:29:46.130 --> 00:29:51.490
Um, I don't know that he that you know, Lita and John have obviously been extremely

00:29:51.490 --> 00:29:56.500
successful and extremely influential, like in the long game played out, but I don't know

00:29:56.500 --> 00:30:02.180
that they had the like immediate success that David had for going with something that was

00:30:02.180 --> 00:30:04.420
more salacious and controversial.

00:30:05.140 --> 00:30:10.340
Yeah, I think I mean, so they I think the the group or the the cooperation thing,

00:30:10.900 --> 00:30:16.810
um, and I don't I don't know this for sure, but I think uh what I the

00:30:16.970 --> 00:30:21.450
the cooperation thing, you're right, is not as salacious immediately and it's sort of warm

00:30:21.450 --> 00:30:21.930
and fuzzy.

00:30:22.090 --> 00:30:28.090
My understanding of what I do know is and what Lita has said is that um I

00:30:28.090 --> 00:30:33.130
don't know the how strategic using cooperation was.

00:30:33.290 --> 00:30:38.650
What I do know was what was strategic, and this is sort of not along the salacious

00:30:38.650 --> 00:30:44.490
dimension, but along the scientific dimension, which is I love about John and Lita

00:30:44.570 --> 00:30:50.060
um is uh is their thinking, well, reasoning

00:30:50.380 --> 00:30:55.900
is a bastion of sort of unitary assumptions, right?

00:30:56.060 --> 00:31:00.380
Like what I love about John Alita's work was it was an articulation of the assumptions that

00:31:00.380 --> 00:31:04.060
were such deep assumptions that they weren't even treated as assumptions.

00:31:04.220 --> 00:31:04.860
Um, right.

00:31:05.020 --> 00:31:07.580
Like I think that's that's what I really love about the work.

00:31:07.660 --> 00:31:13.570
And so it was strategic to say reasoning is something we're going to go after and

00:31:13.570 --> 00:31:18.370
say, look, this idea that reasoning is content-independent, a unitary thing, that an

00:31:18.370 --> 00:31:21.010
evolutionary approach doesn't help you for thinking about reasoning.

00:31:21.090 --> 00:31:22.450
We're going to go after that.

00:31:22.930 --> 00:31:26.610
And so I think that was the idea.

00:31:26.690 --> 00:31:31.010
And then after there was an acceptance of that, people would say something like, Well, but

00:31:31.010 --> 00:31:35.800
emotions, you know, aren't going to, you know, so so it was just sort of following the um

00:31:35.960 --> 00:31:38.440
and what about this, what about that, and sort of following that.

00:31:38.520 --> 00:31:43.160
So I believe that was their um str strategy.

00:31:43.400 --> 00:31:48.680
Um so I think it was really at the level of the scientific claims and not about the

00:31:48.680 --> 00:31:51.560
reactions um of people per se.

00:31:55.170 --> 00:32:00.930
Yeah, well, I mean, um so I I to your point, David, I I think you've

00:32:00.930 --> 00:32:04.290
described a lot of the history exactly right, unfortunately.

00:32:04.450 --> 00:32:08.770
Um, you know, I think the the sex difference and stuff, that was that was that 1989

00:32:08.930 --> 00:32:11.090
behavioral and brain sciences paper, that was huge.

00:32:11.170 --> 00:32:15.250
That was yeah, you know, that was a big paper in you know, psychology period.

00:32:15.490 --> 00:32:20.610
Um, and that really planted a flag for this like evolutionary psychology stuff.

00:32:20.770 --> 00:32:25.420
You know, from there, David went on to he picked up some ideas again that trace themselves

00:32:25.420 --> 00:32:29.340
to Don Simons through Martin Daly and Margot Wilson on jealousy.

00:32:29.580 --> 00:32:33.180
Again, you know, looking at sex differences and jealousy as a really natural prediction,

00:32:33.340 --> 00:32:38.700
just showing we can make a prediction that no one else can and we can validate this around

00:32:38.700 --> 00:32:39.180
the world.

00:32:39.340 --> 00:32:43.100
And then, you know, Busin Schmidt ninety three, he went to mating strategy.

00:32:43.270 --> 00:32:47.910
Again, you know, it's sort of picking up there's this like intuitive kind of dimension

00:32:47.910 --> 00:32:51.670
along which mating relationships vary between, you know, they called it short-term,

00:32:51.830 --> 00:32:53.190
long-term at the time.

00:32:53.350 --> 00:32:59.110
You know, these sort of like high commitment, monogamous romantic relationships, which seem

00:32:59.110 --> 00:33:04.310
to be somewhat human unique, versus these sort of like short-term, uncommitted sexual

00:33:04.310 --> 00:33:05.030
relationships.

00:33:05.110 --> 00:33:10.640
And David just like sicked his personality psychology training on that, and you know,

00:33:10.800 --> 00:33:15.440
developed some measures and made a bunch of sex different again, sex difference predictions

00:33:15.440 --> 00:33:19.360
about how these things should be sex differentiated, drawing on ideas, going back again to

00:33:19.360 --> 00:33:20.080
Simon's.

00:33:20.240 --> 00:33:26.000
Um, so that sort of set up this like holy trinity of mating research, right?

00:33:26.080 --> 00:33:28.320
Like jealousy, preferences, mating strategy.

00:33:28.560 --> 00:33:34.320
Those are like big three constructs in mating psychology because of David Buss's early work

00:33:34.560 --> 00:33:39.750
and uh you know a huge amount of mating psychology research following that has been

00:33:40.070 --> 00:33:45.350
basically like pick one of those three or any combination they're in, you know, and then

00:33:45.350 --> 00:33:51.270
either, you know, show some kind of sex difference in it, you know, riff on it a little

00:33:51.270 --> 00:33:57.270
bit, like, you know, uh, you know, we want to demonstrate a sex difference in mating

00:33:57.270 --> 00:34:02.180
strategy either through people's attitudes or through people's behaviors or, you know, the

00:34:02.180 --> 00:34:05.300
kinds of things that they regret doing, you know, post hoc, right?

00:34:05.380 --> 00:34:09.380
Just like show, you know, come up with a new way to demonstrate the same sex difference in

00:34:09.380 --> 00:34:13.380
the same dimension, but yeah, either in a new context or a new cultural context or with

00:34:13.380 --> 00:34:14.500
some kind of new measure.

00:34:14.740 --> 00:34:20.740
And so so much of the mating research for the last what has it been, 30 years

00:34:20.900 --> 00:34:26.900
has been just sort of rehashing through those same three constructs again and show

00:34:26.900 --> 00:34:31.950
a sex difference in some kind of slightly novel way that David Bus didn't technically

00:34:31.950 --> 00:34:33.630
already show in 1990.

00:34:33.950 --> 00:34:37.150
Um, and I think that's been bad.

00:34:37.550 --> 00:34:42.350
Uh I mean that has generated a lot of knowledge, generated like a really robust foundation

00:34:42.350 --> 00:34:45.870
for human mating psychology research, which I'm grateful for.

00:34:46.350 --> 00:34:51.460
Um, but I think, you know, my opinion is we've we've done it.

00:34:51.620 --> 00:34:52.660
We've exhausted.

00:34:52.740 --> 00:34:53.140
Yeah.

00:34:53.300 --> 00:34:54.980
Uh we know that now.

00:34:55.140 --> 00:34:59.220
We don't need any more papers on sex differences and mate preferences, despite being a

00:34:59.220 --> 00:35:01.300
person who's published some of those recently.

00:35:01.540 --> 00:35:06.500
Uh I mean it is like a nice it's you can there's always money in the banana stand, right?

00:35:06.580 --> 00:35:10.980
Like you can always get another paper on on sex differences and mate preferences if you

00:35:10.980 --> 00:35:12.180
just need something.

00:35:12.500 --> 00:35:18.210
Um uh but yeah, I I I think that stuff has

00:35:18.210 --> 00:35:22.290
attracted a lot of people who, yeah, are not necessarily as interested in the science as

00:35:22.290 --> 00:35:23.650
they are in pissing people off.

00:35:23.810 --> 00:35:27.410
And I think that kind of work is just always easy to do.

00:35:28.050 --> 00:35:28.370
Right.

00:35:28.610 --> 00:35:34.450
And it it's just it's become it's it was so influential, it was so valuable

00:35:34.690 --> 00:35:38.530
that sex differences have kind of come to like dominate.

00:35:39.250 --> 00:35:45.120
Um kind of come to dominate the literature to the point where I think it's a very important

00:35:45.120 --> 00:35:45.120
thing.

00:35:45.200 --> 00:35:48.480
Or or at the very least, the the public perception of the field.

00:35:48.640 --> 00:35:52.640
I don't know if it necessarily, you know, uh has a disproportionate number of researchers

00:35:52.640 --> 00:35:53.280
working on the topic.

00:35:53.360 --> 00:35:54.000
Maybe it does.

00:35:54.160 --> 00:35:58.640
But even beyond that, just the public perception of it, I feel like, is dominated by the

00:35:58.640 --> 00:36:02.560
sex differences research, even more than perhaps exists in reality.

00:36:03.040 --> 00:36:05.200
I think the public perception's about right.

00:36:05.680 --> 00:36:05.840
Really?

00:36:06.000 --> 00:36:06.480
You think so?

00:36:06.800 --> 00:36:11.430
I I think I think all there's people out there who are not doing sex differences research.

00:36:11.830 --> 00:36:12.150
Yeah.

00:36:12.390 --> 00:36:13.510
I think that's true.

00:36:14.870 --> 00:36:20.550
But I think a lot of the you know a lot of the human

00:36:20.550 --> 00:36:26.550
mating research has been studying sex differences in psychology, I think to the exclusion

00:36:26.550 --> 00:36:28.390
of studying the psychology itself.

00:36:29.030 --> 00:36:32.470
So that's what I would like to see as like a third phase of human mating research.

00:36:32.550 --> 00:36:37.980
Like just getting back to, you know, I I the way I think of it is while Lita and John were

00:36:38.060 --> 00:36:43.260
playing this long game of like, you know, how do you really

00:36:43.580 --> 00:36:49.100
carefully, yeah, systematically pick a topic and just really systematically map the

00:36:49.100 --> 00:36:53.500
information processing design of that psychology, really systematically map the design of

00:36:53.500 --> 00:36:57.100
cooperation psychology, of emotion psychology, of group psychology.

00:36:57.340 --> 00:37:03.340
Um, that maybe doesn't get like as big of headlines as like you know, new

00:37:03.340 --> 00:37:09.150
universal sex difference, you know, men are men are, you

00:37:09.150 --> 00:37:14.910
know, new research finds that that men are uh uh men are all

00:37:14.910 --> 00:37:18.590
hussies and women are all you know chased or whatever.

00:37:18.750 --> 00:37:21.550
Uh you know, that'll get you like fun headlines.

00:37:21.710 --> 00:37:24.590
Um, but it doesn't really tell you that much about how the psychology works.

00:37:24.830 --> 00:37:28.590
Um and I think human mating research maybe needs to get more back into that.

00:37:28.750 --> 00:37:34.700
Yeah, like let's return to some of the more Don Simon-y approach to of like, let's

00:37:34.700 --> 00:37:40.380
be really clear-eyed about what are the adaptive problems that humans would have

00:37:40.380 --> 00:37:43.900
recurrently faced in human mating in the in the mating domain.

00:37:43.980 --> 00:37:49.740
And especially like, yeah, I just I just feel like uh the old guard, I think,

00:37:49.900 --> 00:37:52.540
get very defensive about this kind of thing.

00:37:52.780 --> 00:37:55.750
Um, but sex differences are important.

00:37:55.910 --> 00:37:56.630
Don't get me wrong.

00:37:56.790 --> 00:38:00.470
Again, I've published sex differences papers, I don't know, recently within the last couple

00:38:00.470 --> 00:38:01.110
of years, probably.

00:38:01.190 --> 00:38:02.150
I can't remember.

00:38:02.310 --> 00:38:08.310
Um, but I feel like a five year moratorium on sex differences papers would just like help

00:38:08.310 --> 00:38:08.870
the field.

00:38:08.950 --> 00:38:14.710
Like not ban it forever, but just like force people to be a little creative in finding

00:38:14.710 --> 00:38:16.150
other things to study.

00:38:16.870 --> 00:38:17.270
Right.

00:38:17.510 --> 00:38:22.760
I mean, the downside of of the complexity of the human mind and of human nature is that

00:38:22.760 --> 00:38:27.480
when you pick one part of it, it's easy to get carried away and think that that part of it

00:38:27.480 --> 00:38:28.760
represents the whole.

00:38:29.160 --> 00:38:29.400
Right.

00:38:29.480 --> 00:38:32.440
Like, yes, we can all agree men and women are different.

00:38:32.600 --> 00:38:35.560
They have different they have face different selection pressures throughout our

00:38:35.560 --> 00:38:36.520
evolutionary history.

00:38:36.760 --> 00:38:40.360
We can make specific predictions about how they're going to be different and we can, you

00:38:40.360 --> 00:38:44.200
know, see parallels between those differences and the differences you see in other species

00:38:44.200 --> 00:38:45.720
facing similar selection pressures.

00:38:45.880 --> 00:38:46.440
Yes.

00:38:46.770 --> 00:38:47.570
agreed.

00:38:47.890 --> 00:38:49.410
But there's a huge but.

00:38:49.650 --> 00:38:54.130
There's so much more to the story than that simple starting point, right?

00:38:54.370 --> 00:38:57.650
Yes, men and women are different and they have different mating strategies, etc.

00:38:57.970 --> 00:39:02.770
But they are also more similar to one another relative to other animals than you know many

00:39:02.770 --> 00:39:05.090
animals uh in the animal kingdom.

00:39:05.250 --> 00:39:10.050
Um the degree of paternal investment in offspring is way higher uh in humans than you see

00:39:10.050 --> 00:39:11.330
in many other animals.

00:39:11.570 --> 00:39:15.040
Um the we without a doubt have a parabonding psychology.

00:39:15.200 --> 00:39:19.360
We without a doubt have substantial similarities between men and women in that parabonding

00:39:19.360 --> 00:39:20.080
psychology.

00:39:20.160 --> 00:39:26.160
Uh and the sophistication with which we look for mates, with which we uh uh

00:39:26.400 --> 00:39:32.240
maintain relationships, look for alternative relationships, et cetera, is uh uh mind

00:39:32.320 --> 00:39:32.880
boggling.

00:39:32.960 --> 00:39:34.720
So there's just so much more to the story.

00:39:34.960 --> 00:39:37.920
Once you once you have this foundation, it's a good foundation to have, it's a good

00:39:37.920 --> 00:39:38.560
starting point.

00:39:38.720 --> 00:39:44.330
But yes, we need to move beyond this starting point and and drill into the complexity of

00:39:44.330 --> 00:39:49.610
what is going on with with human mating psychology beyond, you know, male, female sex uh

00:39:49.770 --> 00:39:51.210
sexual psychology.

00:39:51.770 --> 00:39:52.970
Yeah, agreed completely.

00:39:53.130 --> 00:39:58.090
And and I there's also you throw in the sort of like perverse incentives of academia where,

00:39:58.410 --> 00:40:04.400
you know, to get a job, to get tenure, you need a a sort of baseline level of productivity,

00:40:04.480 --> 00:40:07.440
you need to be getting papers out the door on a pretty regular basis.

00:40:07.600 --> 00:40:09.280
And so I don't blame people, right?

00:40:09.600 --> 00:40:15.280
Like if you're a young human mating researcher, you know you need a certain number of

00:40:15.280 --> 00:40:18.640
papers to stay alive or make it to the next stage.

00:40:18.800 --> 00:40:19.920
Like, what are you gonna do?

00:40:20.080 --> 00:40:25.440
Are you gonna pick the easy topic that you know is gonna result in some kind of finding

00:40:25.440 --> 00:40:29.760
that someone is gonna publish somewhere, or are you gonna go on a limb and you know try to

00:40:29.760 --> 00:40:34.510
make a bold hypothesis about how something works that may or may not pan out.

00:40:34.910 --> 00:40:39.310
Um so you know it it's the safe sex differences is the safe pick.

00:40:39.470 --> 00:40:45.070
Uh yeah I mean you you seem to have escaped the gravitational pull of this process, at

00:40:45.070 --> 00:40:50.270
least in your in your research on you know mate preference integration, uh

00:40:50.590 --> 00:40:52.190
desirability covariation.

00:40:52.270 --> 00:40:54.680
This stuff is not sex differentiated.

00:40:54.760 --> 00:40:55.880
And you can correct me if I'm wrong.

00:40:55.960 --> 00:41:00.120
The mate preference integration, this is exists in both men and women.

00:41:00.280 --> 00:41:06.120
Uh you we have these wide variety of of things that we're looking for in a partner, whether

00:41:06.120 --> 00:41:11.400
it be looks, kindness, uh shared culture, uh intelligence, whatever.

00:41:11.560 --> 00:41:13.640
Uh we have all of these desired preferences.

00:41:13.800 --> 00:41:16.840
We the mind needs some way to integrate them.

00:41:17.150 --> 00:41:20.270
And what you're after is how does it integrate them?

00:41:20.430 --> 00:41:24.750
Uh it's actually uh a a really tough question to answer.

00:41:24.910 --> 00:41:26.270
It's not obvious what the solution is.

00:41:26.350 --> 00:41:30.190
There are many candidate ways that the mind can integrate these preferences.

00:41:30.270 --> 00:41:34.270
Um so this is a clear aspect of our mating psychology that does not appear to have strong

00:41:34.270 --> 00:41:35.710
sex differentiation.

00:41:35.950 --> 00:41:39.220
Um it's uh deeply computational.

00:41:39.540 --> 00:41:44.100
Um you cannot study this problem except in computational terms.

00:41:44.420 --> 00:41:46.260
How to integrate different preferences?

00:41:46.340 --> 00:41:49.380
Like I I don't see an alternative way of thinking about that topic.

00:41:49.620 --> 00:41:54.980
So it's intrinsically computational, intrinsically non-sex differentiated, and you went in

00:41:54.980 --> 00:41:58.340
this direction and you you're successful.

00:41:58.420 --> 00:42:01.780
You're at Santa Barbara professor, uh almost 10 years now.

00:42:01.940 --> 00:42:04.500
Uh how did you escape the gravitational pull?

00:42:05.140 --> 00:42:09.910
Well, I I don't know that I fully escaped it because along the way I've been publishing sex

00:42:10.070 --> 00:42:11.670
differences stuff too, right?

00:42:11.990 --> 00:42:15.110
Uh so my first paper was on sex differences and preferences.

00:42:15.190 --> 00:42:19.190
You know, we had a big replication paper in 20 whatever, 2016.

00:42:19.590 --> 00:42:24.470
You know, so it it has been that has been old, reliable for me too, right?

00:42:24.630 --> 00:42:30.560
Like, um, but yeah, we've been doing that on the side of some more risky stuff

00:42:30.560 --> 00:42:33.280
that that has kind of just happened to pan out.

00:42:33.600 --> 00:42:37.760
Um which is, you know, a a strategy I I would recommend to my students.

00:42:37.920 --> 00:42:42.880
And I I try to try try to um to advise them through.

00:42:43.040 --> 00:42:48.320
Um so I mean where that stuff comes from is yeah, what I this is the self serving part,

00:42:48.400 --> 00:42:52.400
like what I would sincerely hope ends up becoming kind of like a third phase of human

00:42:52.400 --> 00:42:53.680
mating research.

00:42:53.840 --> 00:42:59.630
Um which is like this is a good, a good example of why focusing so much on sex differences

00:42:59.790 --> 00:43:05.710
really hurt us because there was this, you know, 20, 30 years of research on mate

00:43:05.790 --> 00:43:11.070
preferences, which is basically take a questionnaire that asks people, you know, what do

00:43:11.070 --> 00:43:12.590
you want your ideal partner to look like?

00:43:12.750 --> 00:43:16.110
They just say, I want them to have these features, I don't want them to have those

00:43:16.110 --> 00:43:16.830
features.

00:43:17.100 --> 00:43:21.660
And then you know, you show there's a sex difference in how people respond to those some of

00:43:21.660 --> 00:43:22.060
those questions.

00:43:22.140 --> 00:43:24.380
You write the paper, you send it off, you call it a day.

00:43:24.540 --> 00:43:27.180
Uh and people were doing that for 20, 30 years.

00:43:27.500 --> 00:43:32.700
And people kind of forgot to ask, do those

00:43:32.700 --> 00:43:36.940
preferences actually get reflected in behavior?

00:43:37.180 --> 00:43:42.140
Like when you look at the partners people actually choose, do they really pursue those

00:43:42.140 --> 00:43:42.540
things?

00:43:42.700 --> 00:43:45.110
Uh And then they didn't entirely forget to do that.

00:43:45.190 --> 00:43:49.190
I mean, so there were some studies that tried to get at that with like hypothetical choice

00:43:49.190 --> 00:43:50.070
paradigms.

00:43:50.230 --> 00:43:52.230
You know, here's like two profiles.

00:43:52.390 --> 00:43:53.670
Which profile do you choose?

00:43:53.750 --> 00:43:56.150
Or they they would look at things like personals ads.

00:43:56.230 --> 00:44:01.190
Do you see these sex differences reflected in the kinds of personals ads people post or or

00:44:01.190 --> 00:44:02.070
respond to?

00:44:02.710 --> 00:44:07.430
Um, you know, David had looked a little bit at uh David Buss had looked at a little bit at

00:44:07.880 --> 00:44:11.960
do people's actual chosen partners reflect the things that they say that they want?

00:44:12.120 --> 00:44:15.480
Although, you know, there's all kinds of methodological problems with that.

00:44:15.800 --> 00:44:19.240
You don't necessarily know just because your partner matches your preferences, you don't

00:44:19.240 --> 00:44:23.480
know necessarily that's because your preferences cause that choice versus you said you

00:44:23.480 --> 00:44:25.400
wanted those things because your partner had them.

00:44:25.880 --> 00:44:29.800
So there had been like a little bit of work throughout the years just sort of like as but

00:44:29.800 --> 00:44:33.160
it was so it's sort of seen as just like a validation of the preferences.

00:44:33.450 --> 00:44:36.730
It wasn't seen as like a research topic in and of itself.

00:44:36.890 --> 00:44:42.890
Like, can we actually predict people's behavior on the basis of these abstract preferences

00:44:42.970 --> 00:44:44.170
they say they have?

00:44:44.810 --> 00:44:48.970
Uh, so that people were so interested in the sex differences they just kind of forgot about

00:44:48.970 --> 00:44:50.170
that more basic question.

00:44:50.410 --> 00:44:56.410
Until about the mid-2000s, there happened to be like a series of papers from

00:44:56.620 --> 00:45:02.140
as far as I'm aware, totally disconnected research groups that all use the same

00:45:02.140 --> 00:45:04.140
methodology to test this question.

00:45:04.380 --> 00:45:10.220
There was uh you know Peter Todd and colleagues in Germany, there's Rob Kurzban, uh, and

00:45:10.220 --> 00:45:11.740
then there was Paul Eastwick.

00:45:12.140 --> 00:45:17.740
Um, all around the same time, had the same thought we can use speed dating,

00:45:17.970 --> 00:45:23.250
which was like you know, a popular new invention at the time, new ish invention at the

00:45:23.250 --> 00:45:23.490
time.

00:45:23.650 --> 00:45:28.370
You can use speed dating as like a natural experiment to test do people actually choose the

00:45:28.370 --> 00:45:31.170
partners that they say they want on these abstract preference questionnaires.

00:45:31.570 --> 00:45:35.010
So they would administer the same kinds of questionnaires that people are using for this

00:45:35.010 --> 00:45:37.330
preference research just before a speed dating event.

00:45:37.410 --> 00:45:40.770
So they'd have either they would arrange one or they would work with a company.

00:45:40.930 --> 00:45:46.210
You know, you'd have 10 to 20 people who all showed up, single people interested in being

00:45:46.210 --> 00:45:51.700
in a relationship, they all talk to each other in little five to 10 minute

00:45:51.700 --> 00:45:52.340
sessions.

00:45:52.580 --> 00:45:55.780
And then afterwards, they just say, Do you want to go on a date with that person?

00:45:55.940 --> 00:45:56.500
Yes or no?

00:45:56.660 --> 00:46:01.060
And it's a perfect little, in theory, it's a perfect little mating experiment, right?

00:46:01.140 --> 00:46:04.260
You can see really quickly a lot of decisions that one person makes.

00:46:04.340 --> 00:46:09.220
And you can see, do they actually say, Yes, I want to date the person who has the features

00:46:09.220 --> 00:46:12.260
I just said I wanted on that abstract preference questionnaire?

00:46:12.500 --> 00:46:16.590
And from those initial studies, the answer seemed to be no.

00:46:17.070 --> 00:46:23.070
Uh, that people were not, by and large, you know, knowing what a person's preferences were

00:46:23.070 --> 00:46:28.750
before that speed dating event did not give you a lot of statistical power to predict the

00:46:28.750 --> 00:46:30.990
people they actually said yes to in that event.

00:46:31.150 --> 00:46:36.510
And that was kind of uh that that was a big moment in mating research too.

00:46:36.590 --> 00:46:39.390
Like that that is perplexing, right?

00:46:39.550 --> 00:46:39.950
Yes.

00:46:40.190 --> 00:46:43.600
Um and and people took that in a lot of different directions, right?

00:46:43.680 --> 00:46:49.280
So I think the the sort of Kurzman interpretation was

00:46:49.280 --> 00:46:53.280
something between, you know, maybe you're not quite getting to know this person enough,

00:46:53.440 --> 00:46:57.440
maybe speed dating is activating more of a short-term mating context.

00:46:57.520 --> 00:47:00.160
And so your long-term preferences don't apply.

00:47:00.400 --> 00:47:04.570
Uh, I think at one point he speculated maybe, and he did have some evidence for this.

00:47:04.730 --> 00:47:10.250
Like maybe there are these sort of consensual preferences that matter, but these individual

00:47:10.250 --> 00:47:12.810
differences and preferences, maybe that's just noise.

00:47:12.970 --> 00:47:18.570
Um, and you would see that, like, you know, if you stratify the speed dating events by, for

00:47:18.570 --> 00:47:22.730
example, like age or professional status, you would see, you know, people went to the speed

00:47:22.730 --> 00:47:26.640
dating events that sort of catered to their general desires.

00:47:26.800 --> 00:47:30.240
But then within those dates, within those events, you couldn't necessarily predict the

00:47:30.240 --> 00:47:31.680
specific person each person chose.

00:47:32.000 --> 00:47:36.320
So maybe there's some sort of like general preference for age or something like that.

00:47:36.480 --> 00:47:39.040
But like your is specifically doesn't matter.

00:47:39.280 --> 00:47:42.640
Is the idea there that it's not that mate preferences don't matter?

00:47:42.800 --> 00:47:46.640
It's that the ones that matter are a part of human nature and a part of human mating

00:47:46.640 --> 00:47:51.890
psychology, and the ones that individuals vary on, at least as we can judge based on their

00:47:51.890 --> 00:47:53.970
questionnaire responses, those don't matter.

00:47:54.130 --> 00:47:57.810
But that doesn't is that isn't to say that preferences in general don't matter.

00:47:58.370 --> 00:47:59.570
That's one interpretation.

00:47:59.810 --> 00:48:00.050
Yeah.

00:48:00.290 --> 00:48:03.090
And I think that's something that Kurzman kind of floated.

00:48:03.330 --> 00:48:03.650
I don't know.

00:48:03.730 --> 00:48:04.850
I don't know if that's fair.

00:48:05.010 --> 00:48:08.050
He might disagree with, he would disagree with whatever I say because he's Kurzman.

00:48:08.770 --> 00:48:14.290
But uh, you know, that's may maybe one read I would put into his interpretation.

00:48:14.610 --> 00:48:18.820
You know, the the Todd and colleagues' interpretation was, you know, there is a preference

00:48:18.820 --> 00:48:23.380
in there somewhere that matters, but it's not what people are able to verbalize.

00:48:23.460 --> 00:48:29.060
Whatever people are verbalizing, that's just some sort of like weird, you know, ad hoc like

00:48:29.300 --> 00:48:30.500
folk theory of what they want.

00:48:30.900 --> 00:48:33.460
So it's not the preferences don't matter, it's that we're measuring them the wrong way.

00:48:33.620 --> 00:48:34.500
The measurements suck.

00:48:34.740 --> 00:48:34.980
Okay.

00:48:35.140 --> 00:48:35.380
Yeah.

00:48:35.540 --> 00:48:35.780
Yeah.

00:48:35.860 --> 00:48:38.900
And then the Eastwick interpretation was that preferences don't matter.

00:48:39.700 --> 00:48:40.980
People don't know what they want.

00:48:41.140 --> 00:48:45.860
And he's really like come to a point where like he's really kind of arguing that like

00:48:45.940 --> 00:48:49.270
attraction might be fundamentally unpredictable.

00:48:49.510 --> 00:48:54.230
Um and and he would argue, he he also has kind of come around.

00:48:54.470 --> 00:48:57.910
I don't think he sees it this way, but I see it as him coming around at the sort of

00:48:57.910 --> 00:48:59.670
Curzbanian view.

00:48:59.830 --> 00:49:04.950
Um, where he argues like, in order to show that a preference matters, you need to show that

00:49:04.950 --> 00:49:06.790
the individual differences and preferences matter.

00:49:06.870 --> 00:49:12.070
So you need to show that, like, because you value age more than I do, because you value

00:49:12.070 --> 00:49:15.990
older partners more than I do, you choose older partners more often than I do.

00:49:16.240 --> 00:49:20.880
But if you show that like the average preference for older partners, if you show that on

00:49:20.880 --> 00:49:24.400
average people have a preference for older partners, like he would count that as there not

00:49:24.400 --> 00:49:26.480
being a preference, which I think is bizarre.

00:49:26.640 --> 00:49:28.240
Because yeah, how would you measure that?

00:49:28.800 --> 00:49:30.640
Yeah, how would you get there otherwise?

00:49:31.040 --> 00:49:32.080
Uh yeah.

00:49:32.240 --> 00:49:37.600
I I think if you show that humans in general tend to choose older partners, you have shown

00:49:37.600 --> 00:49:39.520
that humans have a preference for older partners.

00:49:39.680 --> 00:49:42.400
And that's that's how we measure preferences in non-human animals, right?

00:49:42.480 --> 00:49:46.830
We show that in general prefer peacocks with more elaborate tails, right?

00:49:47.070 --> 00:49:48.430
We more elaborate training.

00:49:48.830 --> 00:49:52.990
I mean, my my intuition just hearing this is I uh maybe I'm wrong.

00:49:53.070 --> 00:49:54.110
You can correct me if I'm wrong.

00:49:54.350 --> 00:49:56.990
The most plausible one to me is just the measurement suck.

00:49:57.150 --> 00:50:02.350
That, like, yeah, I would obviously expect preferences to matter um in shaping behavior,

00:50:02.510 --> 00:50:07.000
uh, but I don't think I know what my preferences are deep down.

00:50:07.160 --> 00:50:10.760
I don't think most people have access to that information.

00:50:11.320 --> 00:50:13.960
Um at least in any straightforward sense.

00:50:14.040 --> 00:50:17.240
You know, I uh when I'm attracted to someone, I know it when I see it, but I don't know

00:50:17.240 --> 00:50:20.520
that I can articulate what it is about that person that drew me to them.

00:50:20.680 --> 00:50:23.240
And maybe people just don't have conscious access to this.

00:50:23.770 --> 00:50:26.490
Or or if you do, like it's a restricted range thing too.

00:50:26.570 --> 00:50:27.610
It sounds like that was the other thing.

00:50:27.770 --> 00:50:31.690
So, like, you know, people, there's a there are studies of people s arguing, well, look,

00:50:31.770 --> 00:50:36.410
like using drugs doesn't affect life outcomes because their sample is college students.

00:50:37.370 --> 00:50:39.610
You know, and that's a restricted range issue, right?

00:50:39.690 --> 00:50:43.290
You know, it's a sub it's a bias sample of everybody is high functioning enough to be in

00:50:43.290 --> 00:50:43.690
college.

00:50:43.850 --> 00:50:49.610
But if you looked across from homeless people to um to successful people and you looked at

00:50:49.610 --> 00:50:51.370
drug use, you would find a different result.

00:50:51.450 --> 00:50:51.850
So yeah.

00:50:52.250 --> 00:50:52.650
Yeah, totally.

00:50:52.810 --> 00:50:52.890
Yeah.

00:50:53.040 --> 00:50:56.400
And and normally he has made that argument in the context of the speed dating stuff, right?

00:50:56.480 --> 00:51:00.400
Like, especially in these like speed dating studies of college students, which a lot of

00:51:00.400 --> 00:51:04.240
these are, you know, yeah, it's not a random sample of humanity that's showing up to these

00:51:04.240 --> 00:51:05.120
speed dating events.

00:51:05.280 --> 00:51:05.840
It's yes.

00:51:06.080 --> 00:51:10.640
Again, especially for these college students, it's mostly other young, relatively wealthy,

00:51:10.720 --> 00:51:13.440
relatively successful college students that you're picking among.

00:51:13.520 --> 00:51:15.600
And so yeah, there's just not a lot of restriction of range.

00:51:15.680 --> 00:51:20.330
So he he he did a study where they literally like they intentionally tried to expand the

00:51:20.330 --> 00:51:22.970
range of people in the speed dating events beyond just college students.

00:51:23.050 --> 00:51:26.730
Like they literally like intentionally went out and recruited like gas station attendants

00:51:26.730 --> 00:51:29.050
to participate alongside the college students.

00:51:29.610 --> 00:51:33.850
And they did see they did find evidence in that case that that preferences were more

00:51:33.850 --> 00:51:38.330
predictive when you increase the the types of people who are showing up to these events.

00:51:39.370 --> 00:51:44.380
But the point is you know this this was a huge uh

00:51:44.860 --> 00:51:46.060
puzzle, right?

00:51:46.460 --> 00:51:52.300
Um and I think there's now a a good handful of people who have been

00:51:52.300 --> 00:51:57.740
weighing in on this sort of emerging debate on what actually predicts people's mate choice

00:51:57.740 --> 00:52:02.780
behavior and why do these speed dating studies come out the way that they do.

00:52:03.130 --> 00:52:08.570
And I I don't think a clear consensus I have my opinions, um, but I don't think a clear

00:52:08.570 --> 00:52:11.130
consensus has emerged and it's been really exciting.

00:52:11.210 --> 00:52:17.130
I and this is this is a much again as as much as I value obviously like I got

00:52:17.130 --> 00:52:22.810
into evolutionary psychology because of that sort of like second phase 90s era mating

00:52:22.970 --> 00:52:23.770
research.

00:52:24.010 --> 00:52:29.220
That I think this has been a much more interesting and productive direction

00:52:29.780 --> 00:52:33.700
than maybe what was happening in a lot of the like early 2000s.

00:52:33.780 --> 00:52:39.700
Uh and what it like, I think the field has like come to a point where, yeah, we can

00:52:39.860 --> 00:52:43.940
now be asking serious questions about how the psychology of human mating work.

00:52:44.260 --> 00:52:45.380
How does it work?

00:52:45.540 --> 00:52:48.340
Um, and what sorts of predictions can we actually make?

00:52:48.500 --> 00:52:52.740
Um, you know, for my part, I think there's a lot of things going on.

00:52:53.230 --> 00:52:58.590
Uh I think speed dating just sucks as an institution.

00:52:59.470 --> 00:53:03.070
I mean there is some evidence that you know people do form relationships in speed dating

00:53:03.070 --> 00:53:03.470
events.

00:53:03.630 --> 00:53:09.310
So I don't think it's like totally worthless, but yeah, it's a really, really brief

00:53:09.310 --> 00:53:11.070
exposure to a person.

00:53:11.630 --> 00:53:15.790
I think when you know saying yes or no to someone at the end of a speed date is not really

00:53:15.790 --> 00:53:16.590
a mate choice.

00:53:16.670 --> 00:53:20.190
It's it's just like, yeah, I'd be willing to talk to that person more.

00:53:21.240 --> 00:53:25.160
And it's it's probably a pretty you're getting a pretty noisy snapshot of what that person

00:53:25.160 --> 00:53:29.400
is like, and you're pretty you're making a pretty you know low commitment bid.

00:53:29.640 --> 00:53:29.880
Yeah.

00:53:30.120 --> 00:53:34.680
So I don't know that we should expect preferences to predict those choices all that much.

00:53:35.080 --> 00:53:35.400
Sure.

00:53:35.560 --> 00:53:39.560
And especially if you think from an evolutionary perspective, this is such an artificial

00:53:39.560 --> 00:53:39.960
context.

00:53:40.120 --> 00:53:44.200
Throughout our evolutionary history, we almost certainly would have had tons of exposure to

00:53:44.200 --> 00:53:48.370
the person to a person before attempting to form a romantic relationship with him.

00:53:48.530 --> 00:53:53.090
So this is just such a weird artificial context to study mating.

00:53:53.250 --> 00:53:53.570
Yeah.

00:53:53.730 --> 00:53:54.050
Yeah.

00:53:54.210 --> 00:53:54.450
Yeah.

00:53:54.610 --> 00:53:57.330
And this, I mean, this by the way is how I got into this work, right?

00:53:57.410 --> 00:53:59.570
So I was originally, I was interested in human mating.

00:53:59.650 --> 00:54:00.370
I was in grad school.

00:54:00.450 --> 00:54:02.370
I was thinking about doing totally different stuff.

00:54:02.530 --> 00:54:03.730
And then all these papers came out.

00:54:03.890 --> 00:54:06.450
Paul Eastwick was at UT at the time.

00:54:06.770 --> 00:54:11.410
Uh, so I was having, you know, face-to-face interactions with him when he was saying, you

00:54:11.410 --> 00:54:13.400
know, these preferences don't matter.

00:54:13.560 --> 00:54:19.480
I also think like to be honest, I think there's there's part there's a bit of I there's a

00:54:19.480 --> 00:54:25.320
bit of ideology here um in that I think some of the people, I won't

00:54:25.320 --> 00:54:31.240
name names, but some of the people who are highly invested in this debate, um, I think

00:54:31.240 --> 00:54:34.920
they're very excited about these findings, especially these speed dating findings where

00:54:34.920 --> 00:54:39.790
preferences don't seem to predict choice very well because, you they have this sort of

00:54:39.790 --> 00:54:43.390
ideological opposition to evolutionary psychology as a discipline.

00:54:43.550 --> 00:54:48.590
And mate preferences have been, you know, one of the key success stories of evolutionary

00:54:48.590 --> 00:54:49.150
psychology.

00:54:49.310 --> 00:54:53.870
So if you're able to show that these preferences don't predict choices, well, that, you

00:54:53.870 --> 00:54:56.910
know, that disproves evolutionary psychology, right?

00:54:56.990 --> 00:54:58.830
That takes a lot of the wind out of our sails.

00:54:58.910 --> 00:55:01.390
That undoes one of our major success stories.

00:55:01.630 --> 00:55:06.340
So I think there are people who are highly invested in demonstrating that preferences don't

00:55:06.340 --> 00:55:10.740
predict choice just because they want to undermine evolutionary psychology as a field.

00:55:10.900 --> 00:55:15.620
Um, and I I think that's that partly got me interested in this just because I was like

00:55:15.620 --> 00:55:17.380
annoyed as a partisan.

00:55:17.940 --> 00:55:21.940
Annoyed at these people trying to like take a pot shot at our field.

00:55:22.180 --> 00:55:27.690
Um and I also think it's it's just kind of like a really it is an annoying just kind of

00:55:27.690 --> 00:55:32.090
crappy rhetorical position because it's you know if you want to find a null result it's not

00:55:32.090 --> 00:55:37.770
that hard to do right um yeah arguing for the null is is a really weak uh

00:55:37.930 --> 00:55:42.170
rhetorical position but I think just because evolutionary psychology is controversial

00:55:42.170 --> 00:55:45.290
enough for for reasons that we've earned in many ways.

00:55:45.370 --> 00:55:49.050
Yeah um I think there's a lot of people who are willing to tolerate kind of crappy

00:55:49.050 --> 00:55:54.160
arguments and crappy data in the surface of undermining this unlikable field.

00:55:54.480 --> 00:56:00.400
It's it's such a bizarre way to gratify yourself intellectually, because if that's correct,

00:56:00.640 --> 00:56:06.400
that the most biologically important decision we can make throughout our entire

00:56:06.400 --> 00:56:12.000
lifetimes is essentially random, if that's correct, that not only demolishes evolutionary

00:56:12.000 --> 00:56:17.930
psychology, that demolishes evolutionary theory, sexual selection, modern biology as we

00:56:17.930 --> 00:56:18.410
know it.

00:56:18.570 --> 00:56:22.810
Like that is devastating to our understanding of reality itself.

00:56:23.210 --> 00:56:25.050
That that is not something to celebrate.

00:56:25.210 --> 00:56:30.010
That is something to say, like, holy shit, we really need to think twice before we

00:56:30.650 --> 00:56:32.170
advance this position.

00:56:32.330 --> 00:56:38.280
Like, shouldn't we be trying to evaluate the plausibility of our hypotheses

00:56:38.280 --> 00:56:44.120
in light of how consistent they are with existing knowledge before we go out and and argue

00:56:44.120 --> 00:56:44.440
for them?

00:56:44.520 --> 00:56:44.840
Right.

00:56:45.000 --> 00:56:50.360
Like it should have basic evolutionary plausibility, basic consistency with everything we

00:56:50.360 --> 00:56:51.960
know about how the world works.

00:57:00.280 --> 00:57:03.690
But yeah, I mean I th I think the people who feel this way probably don't see it that way.

00:57:03.770 --> 00:57:07.690
I think they see it as like I I probably I don't know I don't know what they think.

00:57:07.770 --> 00:57:09.370
I can't get into their heads because I'm not them.

00:57:09.450 --> 00:57:14.250
But you know, I think they probably see it as like i evolutionary theory is still fine, but

00:57:14.250 --> 00:57:15.050
we're humans, right?

00:57:15.130 --> 00:57:20.250
We're smarter, we have free will and consciousness, and so we're freed from our genetic

00:57:20.250 --> 00:57:21.370
puppet strings.

00:57:21.640 --> 00:57:22.600
Yeah, it's so dumb.

00:57:22.840 --> 00:57:23.000
Yeah.

00:57:23.240 --> 00:57:28.280
So I mean so we have this really interesting result, which is that preferences don't appear

00:57:28.280 --> 00:57:31.960
to matter, at least when you measure them in speed dating contexts, and you ask people on

00:57:31.960 --> 00:57:34.120
questionnaires what they're looking for in a partner.

00:57:34.360 --> 00:57:36.360
We floated a number of solutions to the puzzle.

00:57:36.520 --> 00:57:37.640
Maybe the measurements suck.

00:57:37.720 --> 00:57:39.080
Maybe speed dating is weird.

00:57:39.160 --> 00:57:43.080
Maybe preferences don't actually matter, and we're just picking it random uh when it comes

00:57:43.080 --> 00:57:46.040
to our most biologically important uh decision we can make.

00:57:46.200 --> 00:57:51.350
Um, or maybe it's it's human nature that matters, but individual variation doesn't matter

00:57:51.350 --> 00:57:51.750
as much.

00:57:51.910 --> 00:57:53.670
Maybe there are unseen forces at play.

00:57:53.750 --> 00:57:56.470
Maybe we don't have conscious awareness of our mate preferences.

00:57:56.630 --> 00:58:00.230
Out of all of these different possibilities, all these different buckets, where are you

00:58:00.230 --> 00:58:03.350
putting uh your vote in?

00:58:03.590 --> 00:58:07.030
What do you what do you what do you think is the most likely solution to this puzzle if

00:58:07.030 --> 00:58:07.670
there is one?

00:58:07.990 --> 00:58:10.390
I I think there's a bit of a lot of things going on.

00:58:10.630 --> 00:58:12.630
Um I think speed dating just sucks.

00:58:12.740 --> 00:58:16.180
Uh and I think you can partly see that there are other study designs.

00:58:16.260 --> 00:58:20.020
So, you know, there's been a couple of nice longitudinal papers that have come out in the

00:58:20.020 --> 00:58:20.820
last couple of years.

00:58:20.980 --> 00:58:25.780
For example, from like Tanya Gerlock's group, Lars Penko's group, uh, where you know you

00:58:25.780 --> 00:58:27.860
measure someone's preferences when they're single.

00:58:28.020 --> 00:58:30.420
One of them actually comes out of one of these speed dating studies.

00:58:30.500 --> 00:58:34.740
They manage to go back like 15 years after one of these speed dating studies, get the

00:58:34.740 --> 00:58:39.590
original speed daters, follow up with them, and then you know, ask them well who are you

00:58:39.590 --> 00:58:44.790
with now uh and they were able to use their preferences from that speed dating study 15

00:58:44.790 --> 00:58:49.510
years ago and use that to try to predict you know who do they end up with 15 years later.

00:58:49.670 --> 00:58:49.910
Interesting.

00:58:50.630 --> 00:58:52.710
And they do predict right so okay.

00:58:52.950 --> 00:58:57.590
Yeah yeah it's not you know it's not huge but there is a significant correlation between

00:58:57.590 --> 00:59:01.350
what you were looking for in a partner you know I forget maybe I'm forgetting the details

00:59:01.430 --> 00:59:04.550
but it's something like 15 years ago and who you're actually with now.

00:59:04.720 --> 00:59:05.680
Um, and you can do that.

00:59:05.760 --> 00:59:08.800
They've also done that on like a shorter time scale, like a three-month time period.

00:59:08.880 --> 00:59:12.080
You know, I ask you what you're looking for now when you're single, come back with you

00:59:12.080 --> 00:59:13.200
three months later.

00:59:13.360 --> 00:59:16.960
Um, and your preferences from three months ago predict what your partner is like now.

00:59:17.120 --> 00:59:20.880
We haven't published this yet, but you know, Dave knows my student Carlos has just

00:59:20.880 --> 00:59:21.920
replicated this.

00:59:22.480 --> 00:59:28.430
Um, so preferences can predict future choices when you are looking at, and Lauren

00:59:28.510 --> 00:59:29.950
Campbell has a similar paper.

00:59:30.030 --> 00:59:34.830
Uh, when you're looking at sort of naturalistic real world choices that are not, you met

00:59:34.830 --> 00:59:37.870
this person for five minutes, do you want to see them again?

00:59:38.270 --> 00:59:42.430
It's an actual real world mate choice out, you know, in free ranging humans.

00:59:42.590 --> 00:59:46.350
Um, their their preference, their response to these preference questionnaires do predict

00:59:46.350 --> 00:59:48.030
what their later partners look like.

00:59:48.270 --> 00:59:53.630
Um, I think a lot of the measurement in these preference uh these speed dating studies just

00:59:53.630 --> 00:59:54.190
sucks.

00:59:54.740 --> 00:59:59.620
This is, again, I think an artifact of being so focused on sex differences.

00:59:59.700 --> 01:00:05.140
And also, I think honestly, coming out of this personality psych tradition where,

01:00:05.540 --> 01:00:10.900
you know, you're only ever thinking about abstract latent

01:00:10.900 --> 01:00:14.820
variables, uh, but you're not necessarily thinking about like what does that latent

01:00:14.820 --> 01:00:20.210
variable mean in terms of an information processing variable in the mind.

01:00:21.010 --> 01:00:25.330
So people have been studying preferences for a really long time, but have been really

01:00:25.330 --> 01:00:28.370
unclear on what a preference is supposed to be.

01:00:28.610 --> 01:00:32.130
And the result of that is if you look at the way people measure preferences across the

01:00:32.130 --> 01:00:34.210
literature, it's super heterogeneous.

01:00:34.610 --> 01:00:39.330
So some people, you know, two different people will say they're studying the same thing.

01:00:39.490 --> 01:00:43.380
They'll say they're doing the same, uh, they're replicating the same measure or uh

01:00:43.460 --> 01:00:47.700
methodology but if you look at how are you measuring preferences in one case it'll be

01:00:47.700 --> 01:00:52.340
something like well how important and a lot of the speed dating studies do this they'll ask

01:00:52.500 --> 01:00:58.100
the participants how important is physical attractiveness to you in a partner one to ten

01:00:58.580 --> 01:01:03.430
and then they'll ask you know how physically attractive is this partner you know, one to

01:01:03.430 --> 01:01:03.670
10?

01:01:03.750 --> 01:01:07.830
And then they'll ask, does your answer to that importance question predict the physical

01:01:07.830 --> 01:01:10.070
attractiveness of the person that you chose?

01:01:10.390 --> 01:01:16.230
And that it feels kind of reasonable if you don't think about it too hard, but asking how

01:01:16.230 --> 01:01:21.030
important physical attractiveness is to you is not the same as asking how important or how

01:01:21.030 --> 01:01:22.390
attractive you want your partner to be.

01:01:22.550 --> 01:01:26.470
It could be very important to you that your partner is unattractive, right?

01:01:26.740 --> 01:01:28.260
Those are distinct things.

01:01:28.500 --> 01:01:33.140
Or it could just be that it's very important to me that my partner isn't a total uggo.

01:01:33.380 --> 01:01:33.620
Yeah.

01:01:33.780 --> 01:01:36.580
But once they're not a total ugly, like ever anything's fine, right?

01:01:36.660 --> 01:01:36.900
Yeah.

01:01:37.060 --> 01:01:37.220
Yeah.

01:01:37.460 --> 01:01:39.940
So there's lots of like implicit models of preference.

01:01:40.020 --> 01:01:40.180
Yeah.

01:01:40.580 --> 01:01:40.980
Yeah.

01:01:41.220 --> 01:01:46.100
That you could have that different people seem to have that aren't translated out clearly

01:01:46.100 --> 01:01:46.980
to the measures.

01:01:47.150 --> 01:01:50.750
And so a lot of these papers are saying like we're finding that preferences aren't

01:01:50.750 --> 01:01:51.470
measuring choice.

01:01:51.550 --> 01:01:53.550
But then you look at well, how did you measure preferences?

01:01:53.630 --> 01:01:54.590
How did you measure choice?

01:01:54.670 --> 01:01:56.270
And it's all over the place.

01:01:56.430 --> 01:02:01.310
And it's not really like a theoretically motivated what should we expect the preference to

01:02:01.310 --> 01:02:05.310
look like and how should we expect that to lead out to a choice.

01:02:05.790 --> 01:02:09.390
So I think if you clean up the measurement a little bit, things look clearer.

01:02:09.630 --> 01:02:12.990
And then this is also how I got into that preference integration stuff, right?

01:02:13.070 --> 01:02:17.720
There's a major issue here too in that a lot of this work is strictly univariate.

01:02:17.800 --> 01:02:21.320
So it's looking at what is your physical attractiveness preference?

01:02:21.480 --> 01:02:23.560
How attractive is the person that you chose, right?

01:02:23.720 --> 01:02:24.040
Yes.

01:02:24.200 --> 01:02:27.400
Um, but we know people have more than just one preference, right?

01:02:27.560 --> 01:02:31.160
Especially when you're looking at like a speed dating event, the most attractive person you

01:02:31.160 --> 01:02:32.040
only talk to 10 people.

01:02:32.120 --> 01:02:34.440
The most attractive person you talk to might have been a total asshole, right?

01:02:34.520 --> 01:02:35.560
They might have been an idiot.

01:02:35.880 --> 01:02:38.920
And you can only pick one person at the at the end of the day, right?

01:02:39.080 --> 01:02:41.880
And one person does not have one trait, they have many traits.

01:02:41.960 --> 01:02:46.410
Yeah, and you have to make a balancing consideration of all of their traits together.

01:02:46.490 --> 01:02:51.130
Do I like this whole bundle of traits uh uh enough for me to mate with this person?

01:02:51.290 --> 01:02:54.730
It's not just, oh, they're they meet my attractiveness threshold, therefore I will mate

01:02:54.730 --> 01:02:54.890
with them.

01:02:54.970 --> 01:03:00.570
It's no, this person is a hugely complicated entity with all sorts of traits and costs and

01:03:00.570 --> 01:03:01.210
benefits.

01:03:01.370 --> 01:03:06.090
How am I going to evaluate this complicated uh bundle of costs and benefits?

01:03:06.250 --> 01:03:07.850
And that's what what you're interested in.

01:03:08.250 --> 01:03:08.650
Exactly.

01:03:08.730 --> 01:03:09.050
Yeah.

01:03:09.130 --> 01:03:09.530
Yeah.

01:03:09.770 --> 01:03:15.080
Um so yeah, my argument has been if you if you consider that sort of balancing act that

01:03:15.080 --> 01:03:20.680
people are doing, you probably see clearer correspondence between uh

01:03:20.840 --> 01:03:21.800
preferences and choice.

01:03:21.880 --> 01:03:23.960
And I think we have some evidence of that.

01:03:25.000 --> 01:03:27.640
And that's also been like a good way of shoeh I don't know.

01:03:27.880 --> 01:03:31.720
I don't know how successful I've been in this, but I I I've seen it as a good way of

01:03:31.720 --> 01:03:36.670
shoehorning in this more adaptationist, you know, psychological

01:03:36.670 --> 01:03:40.990
design-oriented thinking into the mating psych literature in general, right?

01:03:41.150 --> 01:03:45.950
Like we need to stop with this sort of purely statistical approach where we're just

01:03:45.950 --> 01:03:50.510
predicting latent constructs from latent constructs and really ask hard questions about how

01:03:50.510 --> 01:03:55.950
do we think the mind works and let let those hypotheses about the design of the mind guide

01:03:55.950 --> 01:03:57.390
our predictions about people's behavior.

01:03:57.720 --> 01:04:02.040
And what is a plausible function that the mind evolved to perform?

01:04:02.280 --> 01:04:07.240
The mind did not evolve to pick uh dates at a speed dating uh

01:04:07.880 --> 01:04:09.000
event, right?

01:04:09.320 --> 01:04:11.480
Uh it evolved in a very different context.

01:04:11.720 --> 01:04:16.440
And the decision that the mind evolved to make from an evolutionary standpoint is not is

01:04:16.440 --> 01:04:22.040
this person uh you know uh a six or above on my attractiveness meter, therefore I'm gonna

01:04:22.120 --> 01:04:22.600
mate with them.

01:04:22.760 --> 01:04:27.770
It's okay, I can only pick one person to rear offspring with, right?

01:04:28.090 --> 01:04:32.890
And they might be, you know, a bit uh more attractive than than usual, but a bit dumber

01:04:32.890 --> 01:04:37.130
than usual, or a bit nicer than usual, or you know, a bit you know younger than I'd like,

01:04:37.210 --> 01:04:37.770
or whatever.

01:04:37.930 --> 01:04:41.530
Like there are all these considerations to make, and that is the decision that is of

01:04:41.530 --> 01:04:42.810
evolutionary relevance.

01:04:43.050 --> 01:04:48.010
That is the decision that natural selection is going to be selecting for in uh in terms of

01:04:48.010 --> 01:04:50.730
making that decision uh well and effectively.

01:04:50.970 --> 01:04:54.460
It's not the decision of are they hot enough for me?

01:04:54.620 --> 01:04:59.980
It's is this a good choice for me to uh is this person a good choice for me to rear

01:04:59.980 --> 01:05:05.740
offspring with cooperatively uh in a way that will uh increase my fitness in future

01:05:05.740 --> 01:05:06.220
generations?

01:05:06.300 --> 01:05:11.900
And that is a much more complicated decision to make than is this person hot enough?

01:05:12.220 --> 01:05:12.540
Yeah.

01:05:12.700 --> 01:05:13.020
Yeah.

01:05:13.260 --> 01:05:13.580
Yeah.

01:05:13.820 --> 01:05:19.410
It's also uh I think we've neglected a lot of the people who've

01:05:19.730 --> 01:05:23.010
come at this, they're coming from sort of like social psych and cognitive psych

01:05:23.170 --> 01:05:27.890
perspectives on decision making, where you're normally studying a thing where you're the

01:05:27.890 --> 01:05:29.490
one only one making a decision, right?

01:05:29.570 --> 01:05:35.490
Like you're you're the decision you make is like what brand of laundry detergent do I buy,

01:05:35.650 --> 01:05:41.640
or what car do I buy, or like what I don't know, political party do I choose to support,

01:05:41.720 --> 01:05:42.680
or something like that.

01:05:42.920 --> 01:05:45.640
But these are very unilateral decisions.

01:05:45.720 --> 01:05:49.160
Like you just get to pick what you want, but mating doesn't work that way, right?

01:05:49.240 --> 01:05:54.440
You're making the choice in the context of a mating market where you have to pick a partner

01:05:54.440 --> 01:05:56.200
and also be picked back by them.

01:05:56.440 --> 01:06:01.410
And so, you know, it might not be rational to pick a partner that you don't expect to pick

01:06:01.410 --> 01:06:02.370
you back as well.

01:06:02.530 --> 01:06:06.370
And so you have to consider, like especially in a speed dating event where you're getting

01:06:06.370 --> 01:06:10.530
immediate feedback from this person, uh, are they mutually interested in you?

01:06:10.690 --> 01:06:10.930
Right.

01:06:11.010 --> 01:06:15.730
There might be partners who in a different world maybe you would choose, but you know, by

01:06:15.730 --> 01:06:19.970
virtue of uh their preferences, you decide to go elsewhere.

01:06:20.210 --> 01:06:25.340
So you also need to consider the the broader, you know, social networks that people are

01:06:25.340 --> 01:06:30.060
embedded in and the feedback systems that that happen in in mating market dynamics.

01:06:30.540 --> 01:06:30.700
Yeah.

01:06:30.940 --> 01:06:31.100
Yeah.

01:06:31.180 --> 01:06:32.300
And totally.

01:06:33.020 --> 01:06:34.860
A whole nother comp set of complications.

01:06:35.180 --> 01:06:40.540
The costs of pursuing a mate that's not going to reciprocate your affections, uh, the costs

01:06:40.540 --> 01:06:44.620
of being more into them than they are into you, or vice versa.

01:06:45.420 --> 01:06:46.650
Yeah, it's huge.

01:06:46.810 --> 01:06:52.730
I mean, so this brings us to another uh topic that you're interested in, which is your

01:06:52.730 --> 01:06:54.490
desirability as a mate.

01:06:54.810 --> 01:07:00.810
Um, so another potential solution to this puzzle of why uh mate preferences

01:07:00.810 --> 01:07:06.490
don't appear to matter is that um it takes two to tango and you need the other partner to

01:07:06.490 --> 01:07:07.530
reciprocate.

01:07:07.690 --> 01:07:12.500
Um and perhaps the biggest mate preference of all we have is that the mate has to be into

01:07:12.660 --> 01:07:13.140
you too.

01:07:13.380 --> 01:07:15.700
That's probably the mother of all mate preferences, right?

01:07:15.940 --> 01:07:18.100
If they're not into you, then then the deal is off.

01:07:18.260 --> 01:07:18.500
Yeah.

01:07:18.660 --> 01:07:18.980
Yeah.

01:07:19.380 --> 01:07:25.300
Um so uh the problem is um, you know, if you are

01:07:25.300 --> 01:07:30.500
not a very desirable mate, then you're going to have a very limited pool of of mates to

01:07:30.500 --> 01:07:35.930
choose from, even if even if you really care about hotness as your number one criteria in a

01:07:35.930 --> 01:07:39.530
mate, well, the most of the hot people aren't out there aren't willing to mate with you,

01:07:39.610 --> 01:07:41.210
and you have to choose the hottest mate you can get.

01:07:41.290 --> 01:07:45.210
So even if I really want a 10, and I say that on a questionnaire, I really want to mate

01:07:45.210 --> 01:07:47.530
with a 10 and all the 10s reject me.

01:07:47.690 --> 01:07:51.610
Well and and you know a three is the is the hottest partner I can get, well, there's going

01:07:51.610 --> 01:07:56.240
to be a really low correlation between my hotness preference and and the the mate I end up

01:07:56.240 --> 01:07:56.320
with.

01:07:56.480 --> 01:07:58.080
But that's not because it doesn't matter to me.

01:07:58.160 --> 01:08:01.040
You know, I still would probably prefer the three over the two over the one.

01:08:01.200 --> 01:08:05.360
It's that there are constraints in the in the mating market based on my desirability.

01:08:05.600 --> 01:08:11.520
Um so would you expect a greater correlation between preferences

01:08:11.520 --> 01:08:15.600
and outcomes among more desirable mates than among less desirable mates?

01:08:15.680 --> 01:08:17.200
And do you actually see that empirically?

01:08:17.920 --> 01:08:20.000
I would argue you would expect that.

01:08:20.160 --> 01:08:22.160
And we have evidence that that's true.

01:08:22.320 --> 01:08:24.240
We have evidence that's true around the world.

01:08:24.550 --> 01:08:30.470
I would argue, you know, that's a major reason to doubt uh the interpretations that people

01:08:30.470 --> 01:08:32.550
have drawn of these feed dating studies.

01:08:32.630 --> 01:08:34.950
Uh, but that tends to fall on deaf ears.

01:08:35.830 --> 01:08:41.590
Um you know, I I I if I put my like tinfoil hat on, this is my like,

01:08:41.830 --> 01:08:46.070
this is the problem the the the problems we're seeing in mating psychology are just

01:08:46.070 --> 01:08:49.590
reflective of the broader problem with in psychology as a whole.

01:08:49.830 --> 01:08:54.540
Um, which uh, you know, Dave, you both heard me talk about this probably endlessly, but uh

01:08:54.620 --> 01:08:57.820
this is blog post uh from 2013.

01:08:57.980 --> 01:08:59.500
I think Denny Borsboom.

01:09:00.540 --> 01:09:04.780
Yeah, I just adore and he you know puts a name to this issue that I I hadn't heard before.

01:09:04.860 --> 01:09:08.220
I don't know if he came up with it or not, but you know, he says psychologists are stricken

01:09:08.220 --> 01:09:14.140
with theoretical amnesia, where like we just don't know what a scientific theory even looks

01:09:14.140 --> 01:09:17.740
like, and we end up replacing scientific theories with statistical models.

01:09:17.820 --> 01:09:21.660
Like we we can't see the difference between a statistical model and a theoretical model.

01:09:21.820 --> 01:09:26.870
Uh, and that's so emblematic, I think, of what's happened in this mate choice literature,

01:09:27.190 --> 01:09:33.190
where you know, people are so the whole approach has just been, I'm going to set

01:09:33.270 --> 01:09:35.190
up this linear regression model.

01:09:35.350 --> 01:09:39.990
And if preferences predict choice, then I should be able, I have these data where I've

01:09:39.990 --> 01:09:43.590
collected people's preferences and I've collected the choices they've made.

01:09:43.840 --> 01:09:48.640
if preferences predict choice, then the preference should predict the choice in this linear

01:09:48.640 --> 01:09:49.440
regression model.

01:09:49.520 --> 01:09:53.600
And I do my linear regression model and I get a p-value greater than 0.05.

01:09:54.000 --> 01:09:56.720
So therefore, preferences don't predict choice.

01:09:56.960 --> 01:10:01.360
And I think that makes a lot of sense if you don't think about it very hard.

01:10:01.520 --> 01:10:06.400
But then when you do this harder work of thinking about, well, what is the problem people

01:10:06.400 --> 01:10:08.080
are actually trying to solve?

01:10:08.240 --> 01:10:11.360
What is the problem selection has actually built us to solve?

01:10:11.570 --> 01:10:14.770
you think through like, how does the system have to work, right?

01:10:14.850 --> 01:10:18.930
What are the things, yeah, selection would design an organism to pay attention to?

01:10:19.090 --> 01:10:23.250
How would you integrate those all down into one decision value?

01:10:23.410 --> 01:10:27.490
How would you enter a market where you've got a certain amount of buying power, you have a

01:10:27.490 --> 01:10:32.050
limited number of options available to you, you've got to negotiate a match, given your

01:10:32.050 --> 01:10:36.690
preferences, your you know, your affordances, their preferences, their affordances?

01:10:37.250 --> 01:10:41.680
You know, how is that going to cohere into this, you know, singular choice?

01:10:41.840 --> 01:10:45.920
I think when you think all of that through, when you build models of how all that has to

01:10:45.920 --> 01:10:50.880
work, you can see the predictions of that theoretical model are not necessarily one, you

01:10:50.880 --> 01:10:56.320
can see that linear regression model is a really impoverished picture of what's

01:10:56.320 --> 01:10:57.840
happening in the world.

01:10:58.000 --> 01:11:02.990
And it's like trivial to show this theoretical model can actually predict that you wouldn't

01:11:02.990 --> 01:11:04.990
find anything in that linear regression model, right?

01:11:05.150 --> 01:11:10.670
Like you, if you want to see what you're looking for, you need, you need a more complete

01:11:10.670 --> 01:11:11.710
theoretical model.

01:11:11.870 --> 01:11:17.630
Um, but I think psychologists are not capable of seeing the relevance of

01:11:17.630 --> 01:11:19.550
that theoretical model to making predictions.

01:11:19.710 --> 01:11:22.960
They don't understand that like your predictions should come out of a theory.

01:11:23.040 --> 01:11:24.800
They shouldn't come out of a statistical model.

01:11:25.200 --> 01:11:26.320
And that's crazy.

01:11:26.640 --> 01:11:26.720
Yeah.

01:11:26.800 --> 01:11:31.280
And Dan, you're doing some of that in the computational agent based modeling work.

01:11:31.360 --> 01:11:32.000
Is that right?

01:11:32.320 --> 01:11:32.560
Yeah.

01:11:32.640 --> 01:11:34.640
I mean, I that's the point of the agent based models, right?

01:11:34.720 --> 01:11:38.320
The point of the agent based models is it's a representation of the theoretical model that

01:11:38.320 --> 01:11:43.840
allows you to you can parameterize it with data from real people and you can make

01:11:43.840 --> 01:11:46.160
predictions about how those real people will behave.

01:11:46.320 --> 01:11:50.310
And you can see, do their predictions line up with their real behavior?

01:11:50.470 --> 01:11:55.590
And sometimes the predictions are that yeah, they won't choose a partner that matches what

01:11:55.590 --> 01:11:56.790
they said their preference was.

01:11:57.030 --> 01:11:59.430
That doesn't mean that they're not acting on their preference.

01:11:59.510 --> 01:12:04.630
And that I think is a really subtle idea that's hard to get across to people who are just

01:12:04.630 --> 01:12:06.310
used to looking at correlation tables.

01:12:06.790 --> 01:12:07.030
Right.

01:12:07.270 --> 01:12:10.950
And what are you thinking about in terms of so you're talking about the adaptive problem

01:12:10.950 --> 01:12:12.630
and underlying psychology?

01:12:12.870 --> 01:12:17.360
Um, you know, there's this, these, these backwards looking issues about why this result

01:12:17.680 --> 01:12:18.800
didn't happen.

01:12:19.120 --> 01:12:22.960
As you're going forward and thinking about what is the psychology?

01:12:23.280 --> 01:12:26.640
And I know you've talked a bit about, you know, like love, right?

01:12:26.800 --> 01:12:28.480
Um, or attraction.

01:12:29.040 --> 01:12:34.640
Um, have you either personally or in the lab or you know, thinking down the road, are there

01:12:34.640 --> 01:12:39.830
things that you're interested in tackling or that you've been thinking about uh sort of the

01:12:40.070 --> 01:12:45.990
the system and how it works that we haven't been looking at yet uh yeah

01:12:46.070 --> 01:12:51.590
it's I mean we've been doing so much work on choice um you know I I don't know that like

01:12:51.670 --> 01:12:57.350
we're right about anything sure um I think we have some you know intriguing evidence I

01:12:57.350 --> 01:13:02.230
think we've contributed helpfully I hope to some of these debates and you know we have

01:13:02.230 --> 01:13:07.960
models of what kind of computational object are these preferences, which I

01:13:07.960 --> 01:13:09.000
think work okay.

01:13:09.240 --> 01:13:13.160
We have models of how these preferences are integrated, yeah, into like mate value

01:13:13.160 --> 01:13:15.400
estimates, which I think work okay.

01:13:15.640 --> 01:13:18.920
We have models of sort of the psychology of attraction.

01:13:19.080 --> 01:13:23.240
How do you integrate those mate value estimates and the kind of feedback you're getting

01:13:23.240 --> 01:13:26.520
from other people to guide who you actually pursue?

01:13:26.760 --> 01:13:28.200
Those seem to work okay.

01:13:28.360 --> 01:13:30.520
Like um, I think they can be improved.

01:13:30.600 --> 01:13:35.610
Hopefully, there's there's more work to do, and hopefully we're like inspiring people to

01:13:35.610 --> 01:13:36.970
have more of those conversations.

01:13:37.050 --> 01:13:38.730
And I should say I'm not doing this work alone.

01:13:38.810 --> 01:13:43.690
Like I'm you know in dialogue with these people, Paul Eastwick, Tony Gerlock, Jordan

01:13:43.770 --> 01:13:47.050
Brandner, um, Norm Lee, Peter Todd.

01:13:47.290 --> 01:13:51.690
Like uh I think it's been a really productive debate among all of us.

01:13:51.850 --> 01:13:56.890
Um, and I think yeah, I I'm I'm I'm happy with a lot of the contribution contributions

01:13:56.890 --> 01:13:57.770
we've made so far.

01:13:57.930 --> 01:14:03.440
And I want to keep doing that, but yeah, I do I do want to push beyond choice

01:14:03.760 --> 01:14:09.200
increasingly um and and try to get some purchase on what happens after

01:14:09.200 --> 01:14:09.840
choice.

01:14:10.000 --> 01:14:15.680
Um how do people make decisions about you know how to behave toward their

01:14:15.680 --> 01:14:19.760
relationship partner I mean the way you said it before David is exactly right like it's a

01:14:19.840 --> 01:14:24.090
it's a it's a it's a cooperative relationship it's just a cooperative relationship that's

01:14:24.090 --> 01:14:30.010
focused on reproduction rather than like food production or yes uh you know other kinds of

01:14:30.010 --> 01:14:35.770
things so uh you know how do people navigate this particular cooperative relationship how

01:14:35.770 --> 01:14:39.290
do you decide how do you decide how to behave your towards your partner how do you decide

01:14:39.290 --> 01:14:43.680
when to end a relationship when to pursue a different relationship Um, I'd really, really

01:14:43.680 --> 01:14:45.680
love to study that kind of stuff.

01:14:45.840 --> 01:14:50.800
Um, it feels like going out on a limb because I I I don't know that I have really clear

01:14:50.800 --> 01:14:53.120
ideas about how that psychology works.

01:14:53.440 --> 01:14:53.760
Yeah.

01:14:54.080 --> 01:14:59.760
I mean, for my part, I'm shocked at the extent at how little integration there has been

01:14:59.760 --> 01:15:05.470
between cooperation research and mating research, given that a mateship is

01:15:05.470 --> 01:15:10.670
inherently a cooperative relationship, you would think that all of the lessons we learn

01:15:10.670 --> 01:15:15.470
from cooperation and game theory would apply naturally to mating.

01:15:15.630 --> 01:15:21.310
You know, not defecting in prisoners' dilemmas, you know, detecting cheaters, uh, you know,

01:15:21.390 --> 01:15:27.230
uh uh uh contributing when uh the benefits outweigh the costs, uh calculating,

01:15:27.310 --> 01:15:28.990
you know, are are they pulling their weight?

01:15:29.070 --> 01:15:30.910
Is this is this a fair division of resources?

01:15:31.070 --> 01:15:37.060
You know, all this stuff uh is the the warp and weft of our relationships from

01:15:37.220 --> 01:15:42.180
from date anyone who's been in a relationship knows that it is a constant cooperative, uh

01:15:42.420 --> 01:15:48.180
endlessly varying, uh uh endlessly negotiated relationship.

01:15:48.660 --> 01:15:53.940
Um and there are things being traded, there are things being offered, uh uh things being

01:15:53.940 --> 01:15:59.780
threatened to uh uh be taken away or or you know all all this stuff comes to bear.

01:15:59.940 --> 01:16:05.030
So why hasn't cooperation uh been integrated with uh mating.

01:16:05.510 --> 01:16:06.550
And parenting too.

01:16:06.870 --> 01:16:08.790
And parent parenting, yeah, that's the big one.

01:16:08.870 --> 01:16:12.630
That's the whole reason why this this machinery exists in the first place is that you know

01:16:12.710 --> 01:16:16.390
these relationships ultimately exist so that we can parent together.

01:16:16.550 --> 01:16:21.270
Uh wha why is there so little research on parenting, which which is the whole point of this

01:16:21.430 --> 01:16:23.430
this relationship at the end of the day.

01:16:23.670 --> 01:16:24.070
Yeah.

01:16:24.230 --> 01:16:24.470
Yeah.

01:16:24.710 --> 01:16:27.190
I I think part of it is historical artifact, right?

01:16:27.270 --> 01:16:31.020
As we've been talking about sort of David Buss and mating research went one way.

01:16:31.180 --> 01:16:35.100
You know, John T B and Lida Cosmities and Cooperation Research went another way.

01:16:35.260 --> 01:16:35.500
Yeah.

01:16:35.660 --> 01:16:40.460
David was very focused on this sort of like personality, psych just map these abstract

01:16:40.620 --> 01:16:46.460
latent constructs and map relationships between these constructs, but not really digging

01:16:46.460 --> 01:16:49.180
all that deep into the the psychological design.

01:16:49.490 --> 01:16:53.490
very emphasis, very heavy emphasis on sex differences rather than design.

01:16:53.650 --> 01:16:59.250
And so mating people very much go into that area and they don't necessarily read as much of

01:16:59.250 --> 01:17:00.210
the cooperation stuff.

01:17:00.370 --> 01:17:04.850
You know, Lita and John took cooperation in this very like cognitive science, very

01:17:04.850 --> 01:17:09.250
cognitive psychology, you know, map decision rules of cooperation.

01:17:09.410 --> 01:17:13.330
Um, and so I think just different kinds of people end up being interested in the different

01:17:13.330 --> 01:17:15.650
topics and they they pick different questions.

01:17:15.890 --> 01:17:21.500
Um and I I think there is a lot to learn uh in mating psychology from

01:17:21.500 --> 01:17:22.620
cooperation research.

01:17:22.780 --> 01:17:26.780
And I've been really inspired by that, especially since coming to Santa Barbara, right?

01:17:26.940 --> 01:17:31.500
Like the best mate choice models we have are reciprocity models, and they look almost

01:17:31.500 --> 01:17:36.140
indistinguishable from the kinds of models you would use to model reciprocity and other

01:17:36.140 --> 01:17:38.060
kinds of cooperative exchanges.

01:17:38.220 --> 01:17:40.940
Uh so I think that's gonna be an obvious place to start.

01:17:41.020 --> 01:17:44.380
And I have, you know, a new grad student starting in the fall who's interested in these

01:17:44.380 --> 01:17:44.620
questions.

01:17:44.700 --> 01:17:49.270
So I'm really hoping I can, you know, he and I can, this is a good opportunity for both of

01:17:49.270 --> 01:17:52.950
us maybe to dig into like how do we study relationships from this adaptationist

01:17:52.950 --> 01:17:53.590
perspective.

01:17:53.750 --> 01:17:58.230
Um I will say my impression, which is maybe ignorant, because again I'm a mating guy, I'm

01:17:58.230 --> 01:17:59.350
not a cooperation guy.

01:17:59.510 --> 01:18:05.110
Um but my impression is a lot of the cooperation literature is very focused on

01:18:06.390 --> 01:18:11.350
relatively, how do I say this, kind of like isolated cooperative dilemmas?

01:18:11.510 --> 01:18:17.500
Like how do you make choices in this cooperative scenario, but isn't as

01:18:17.500 --> 01:18:19.900
focused on relationships per se?

01:18:20.300 --> 01:18:20.700
Yeah.

01:18:20.860 --> 01:18:23.500
So it's like, you know, how do you have this?

01:18:23.660 --> 01:18:29.420
Uh and that's maybe not entirely fair, but like, how do you have like a sort of how do you

01:18:29.420 --> 01:18:33.900
navigate a repeated prisoner's dilemma kind of situation is maybe the closest you would get

01:18:33.900 --> 01:18:39.170
to like a relationship, but like a relationship is a bunch of different cooperative

01:18:39.170 --> 01:18:39.810
dilemmas.

01:18:40.050 --> 01:18:40.370
Yes.

01:18:40.450 --> 01:18:40.690
Yes.

01:18:40.930 --> 01:18:42.210
All with the same person.

01:18:42.370 --> 01:18:48.130
And like there is something complicated about like playing multiple games with the

01:18:48.130 --> 01:18:52.530
same person across multiple different sorts of different resource types.

01:18:52.690 --> 01:18:53.570
And yes.

01:18:54.210 --> 01:18:59.100
What does the ledger look like when it's like, yeah, time spent parenting versus time

01:18:59.100 --> 01:19:03.740
spent, you know, foraging versus time spent on sex and stuff like that.

01:19:03.900 --> 01:19:06.780
Like it's yeah, it's it's a mindfuck.

01:19:06.860 --> 01:19:11.340
Uh and it it speaks again to this issue we've been bumping into, which is the clash between

01:19:11.340 --> 01:19:14.940
the complexity of reality and the crudeness of our methods.

01:19:15.260 --> 01:19:15.900
Yeah.

01:19:16.780 --> 01:19:21.470
Um and I think there's a theme too of the history.

01:19:21.790 --> 01:19:26.590
I've almost I've always thought about like there's like a provisional evps and evpsy

01:19:26.750 --> 01:19:28.510
proper, like pep and ep.

01:19:29.070 --> 01:19:31.710
Um and it's and it's sort of it was this thing.

01:19:31.790 --> 01:19:35.630
Like I remember reading David's BBS paper, and I remember people being like, Well, this is

01:19:35.630 --> 01:19:37.310
great, but you need more data, right?

01:19:37.470 --> 01:19:43.390
And like really it was an incredible thing of that generation to to provide data

01:19:43.800 --> 01:19:49.080
And even for Alita and John's work, like the cheater detection work, the domain general

01:19:49.080 --> 01:19:50.520
versus domain specific thing.

01:19:50.600 --> 01:19:53.240
You know, that was the analog of the sex differences thing.

01:19:53.400 --> 01:19:57.240
But I oftentimes a lot of eager students will come in and they want to be like, well, I

01:19:57.240 --> 01:19:59.000
want to show something's domain specific.

01:19:59.560 --> 01:20:03.640
And I think like one of the things we're we're kind of the theme we're we're we're talking

01:20:03.640 --> 01:20:09.250
about is that this the the the third wave sort of or this of like

01:20:09.490 --> 01:20:12.450
proper thing is, well, no, you just do a task analysis, right?

01:20:12.530 --> 01:20:18.130
It's like nobody's thought about, well, how do you model a family as a relationship or

01:20:18.530 --> 01:20:19.410
reciprocity thing?

01:20:19.490 --> 01:20:22.290
So there's no domain-specific or general argument to be made.

01:20:22.370 --> 01:20:24.210
It's that you've got to come up with this de nouveau.

01:20:24.610 --> 01:20:25.490
It's not a measure.

01:20:25.570 --> 01:20:27.410
It's not a personality survey.

01:20:27.490 --> 01:20:29.570
Um, it's not a waste and task.

01:20:29.890 --> 01:20:35.040
You're not reaffying the measure, you're actually going adaptive problem task analysis

01:20:35.040 --> 01:20:35.280
first.

01:20:35.360 --> 01:20:36.320
And you're exactly right, Dan.

01:20:36.560 --> 01:20:40.080
I think like the incentives, the perverse incentives, and this is what the Burzroom paper,

01:20:40.160 --> 01:20:44.800
too, is like if you don't have data, uh, and if you don't have a lot of papers with a lot

01:20:44.800 --> 01:20:48.000
of data, then it's really hard to be competitive.

01:20:48.080 --> 01:20:51.600
And actually, what we're arguing is that you need, no, you need to like derive what you

01:20:51.600 --> 01:20:53.920
should be looking for with a task analysis.

01:20:54.080 --> 01:20:59.430
And, you know, and and how would you study that is down the road from what is it you should

01:20:59.430 --> 01:21:00.870
be looking for in the first place.

01:21:01.030 --> 01:21:06.790
So um so no, I think like that's that theme of going from sort

01:21:06.790 --> 01:21:12.390
of a task analysis adaptive problem first as opposed to reaffying the measures um

01:21:12.630 --> 01:21:18.470
or the arguments that were necessary to like make Evpsych uh even uh

01:21:19.030 --> 01:21:25.030
part of the discussion scientifically yeah yeah and I I mean it this connects something to

01:21:25.110 --> 01:21:29.940
something you were saying earlier David about like these sort of early conversations, the

01:21:29.940 --> 01:21:31.940
kinds of people that they attract to the field.

01:21:32.100 --> 01:21:37.460
Um again, going back to Dawn, this is a quote that around here gets attributed to Dawn a

01:21:37.460 --> 01:21:40.340
lot, but I'm never actually sure what the source of this quote is.

01:21:40.500 --> 01:21:44.740
But he apparently would say that you can't understand what someone is saying unless you

01:21:44.740 --> 01:21:46.340
understand who they're arguing with.

01:21:46.580 --> 01:21:50.740
Um, and I think if you look back at a lot of the early F-Syc work, exactly like what you're

01:21:50.740 --> 01:21:55.950
just saying, Dave, There's part of it that is sketching out what

01:21:55.950 --> 01:21:57.550
adaptationism should look like.

01:21:57.710 --> 01:22:02.030
This is this is what the adaptationist program for studying psychology should be.

01:22:02.590 --> 01:22:08.110
But there's another part of it that is just, you know, applying that sort of stuff in the

01:22:08.110 --> 01:22:12.350
background, but really just trying to establish the validity of this approach.

01:22:12.590 --> 01:22:17.230
And so a lot of these early founders picked these particular topics, yeah, like sex

01:22:17.230 --> 01:22:23.060
differences, like domain specificity, because they were like useful points of leverage for

01:22:23.060 --> 01:22:26.020
showing that this adaptationist program was useful.

01:22:26.180 --> 01:22:31.060
Um, and that was very successful in sort of like getting F-Sec in the door.

01:22:31.220 --> 01:22:36.740
But then I think when you have these newer generations who maybe aren't as

01:22:36.740 --> 01:22:42.610
familiar with who the interlocutors were at the time, they don't know who

01:22:42.610 --> 01:22:47.810
people were arguing with when they were proposing sex differences or proposing arguments

01:22:47.810 --> 01:22:51.650
about domain generality, domain specificity that they missed that, like, no, that was just

01:22:51.650 --> 01:22:57.170
supposed to be a useful wedge to like sneak in this adaptationist program stuff.

01:22:57.250 --> 01:22:59.810
So, like, we're we're past that now, hopefully.

01:23:00.210 --> 01:23:05.170
Like enough people agree evolutionary psychology is a worthwhile thing to do.

01:23:05.330 --> 01:23:09.280
And so we need to, we need to give up on these like old dead debates.

01:23:09.520 --> 01:23:14.720
And we need to just apply this like adaptationist program that people, you know, put a lot

01:23:14.720 --> 01:23:18.720
of work into crafting and just apply it to the topics we want to study now.

01:23:18.880 --> 01:23:23.280
But I I think if if you weren't there for a lot of those conversations, it's it's easy to

01:23:23.280 --> 01:23:25.600
miss that that's what we're supposed to be doing now.

01:23:26.290 --> 01:23:27.810
Do you think that's happening, Dan?

01:23:28.290 --> 01:23:29.970
Like like applying adaptationism?

01:23:30.050 --> 01:23:34.770
I mean, do you think that that's effective or do you think um I don't.

01:23:35.090 --> 01:23:35.810
I don't know.

01:23:36.370 --> 01:23:38.610
I'm I'm I'm a little pessimistic.

01:23:38.770 --> 01:23:39.410
I don't know.

01:23:39.650 --> 01:23:45.570
I think um I think there are a lot of people who are in the field now because they

01:23:45.570 --> 01:23:47.250
just like making people angry.

01:23:47.410 --> 01:23:52.600
Um so they they just like those arguments they just like those debates and so you know,

01:23:52.760 --> 01:23:57.880
they really just want to keep like banging the sex differences, pots and pans, and making

01:23:57.880 --> 01:23:59.640
as much noise as possible.

01:24:00.040 --> 01:24:04.040
Um, I I I don't know.

01:24:04.440 --> 01:24:10.120
Uh you know, Dave, you know we've been recently cleaning out the the physical CEP lab

01:24:10.120 --> 01:24:11.880
space, trying to prepare a move.

01:24:12.040 --> 01:24:17.690
And it's been a trip like going through uh just like 30 years of

01:24:18.090 --> 01:24:20.570
nothing that ever entered that room ever left it.

01:24:20.730 --> 01:24:25.130
So there's just 30 years of like F-Syc history in this physical space.

01:24:25.530 --> 01:24:31.370
We found like an old uh HBS program from like 1992

01:24:31.450 --> 01:24:35.450
or something like that, and just like thumbing through the pages of that.

01:24:35.770 --> 01:24:41.300
Like I think the quality of work is probably overall higher now than it was back then on a

01:24:41.300 --> 01:24:42.420
lot of dimensions.

01:24:42.740 --> 01:24:48.420
But I had the sense just from like a quick thumb through that there were a lot, there was

01:24:48.420 --> 01:24:52.340
much more diversity of topic in that older program.

01:24:52.420 --> 01:24:56.980
And there were a lot of people that were just like, I want to study this topic.

01:24:57.060 --> 01:25:01.620
Like here's my attempt at an adaptationist approach to that topic.

01:25:02.980 --> 01:25:07.790
And I feel like that doesn't happen as much at ACS these days.

01:25:07.950 --> 01:25:12.430
I think there's a there's a much higher percentage that's just like I'm just gonna riff off

01:25:12.430 --> 01:25:14.750
of this thing from the 90s.

01:25:14.990 --> 01:25:18.190
Um and many fewer people not none.

01:25:18.350 --> 01:25:22.670
I think there are there's some really good work out there that really makes me hopeful for

01:25:22.670 --> 01:25:23.310
the future.

01:25:23.470 --> 01:25:29.390
But I I worry that the the percentage of like adaptationist approaches is decreasing

01:25:29.390 --> 01:25:29.870
over time.

01:25:30.420 --> 01:25:32.020
I don't know what your responses are on that.

01:25:32.500 --> 01:25:34.660
Adaptationist as compared to what?

01:25:34.900 --> 01:25:39.220
So for for for those who who don't know, we should d briefly define adaptationism as a kind

01:25:39.220 --> 01:25:45.060
of reverse engineering approach to uh the mind, um, where you try to th uh

01:25:45.220 --> 01:25:50.420
think about what a a plausible adaptive problem would have been for our ancestors and map

01:25:50.420 --> 01:25:52.740
out what a viable solution to that problem would be.

01:25:52.820 --> 01:25:58.180
And then you make predictions based on on your model of what uh that effective solution

01:25:58.180 --> 01:25:59.810
might look like very briefly.

01:25:59.970 --> 01:26:05.250
Um uh so adaptation is you you you have been bemoaning the decline of

01:26:05.250 --> 01:26:06.130
adaptationism.

01:26:06.370 --> 01:26:08.610
Yeah yeah uh what what has been replacing it?

01:26:08.770 --> 01:26:11.490
What what is it what is the uh the foil to it?

01:26:11.970 --> 01:26:17.650
I I think um what it is is sort of like mainstream

01:26:17.650 --> 01:26:21.810
psychology with just a sort of twist of evolution.

01:26:21.970 --> 01:26:26.060
It's like yes yeah F Psych flavored LaCroix or something like that.

01:26:27.100 --> 01:26:28.780
That's a I buy that.

01:26:29.980 --> 01:26:33.260
It's a beautiful and hideous analogy at the same time.

01:26:33.580 --> 01:26:33.820
Yeah.

01:26:33.980 --> 01:26:35.980
It's you know, again, I I don't know.

01:26:36.060 --> 01:26:38.380
I I I don't want to shit talk people to you.

01:26:38.540 --> 01:26:41.580
Like, you know, people are doing their this is this is the place to do it, man.

01:26:41.660 --> 01:26:43.740
This is the place where all the shit gets out.

01:26:44.700 --> 01:26:45.740
It's just us three, man.

01:26:45.980 --> 01:26:46.620
It's just us three.

01:26:46.700 --> 01:26:48.780
It's just I love HBass.

01:26:48.940 --> 01:26:54.410
It's my favorite conference, you know, and and God bless anyone who's who's out there

01:26:54.410 --> 01:26:56.330
trying to do evolutionary psychology.

01:26:56.410 --> 01:26:59.290
Um, and again, I think there are a lot of people out there really trying, but I I think

01:26:59.290 --> 01:27:05.050
there are people who, again, they're just either just trying to stir controversy, they're

01:27:05.050 --> 01:27:08.330
not really trying to eliminate how the mind works, they're just trying to say things that

01:27:08.330 --> 01:27:10.170
makes people that will make people angry.

01:27:10.410 --> 01:27:15.940
And then I think there are people who are kind of just like they're just applying the sort

01:27:15.940 --> 01:27:21.700
of same statistical theoretical amnesia from like mainstream social psych or cognitive

01:27:21.700 --> 01:27:27.220
psych or developmental psych or whatever, but towards questions that historically have been

01:27:27.220 --> 01:27:33.140
of interest to evolutionary psychologists, but not even questions, like topic areas.

01:27:33.300 --> 01:27:37.300
They're taking a topic area that has been popular in evolutionary psychology and just doing

01:27:37.300 --> 01:27:38.740
mainstream psychology on it.

01:27:38.900 --> 01:27:43.750
And because it's a mating topic, it sort of gets classified as evolutionary psychology.

01:27:43.910 --> 01:27:45.110
But there's no task analysis.

01:27:45.430 --> 01:27:50.150
There's not really much consideration of like what is the specific adaptive problem that

01:27:50.150 --> 01:27:51.270
you're studying here?

01:27:51.350 --> 01:27:54.550
What's your evidence that this would have been a recurrent reproductive problem throughout

01:27:54.630 --> 01:27:55.830
human evolutionary history?

01:27:55.990 --> 01:27:56.310
Right.

01:27:56.470 --> 01:28:02.150
There's no consideration of like what is a what are the possible psychological designs that

01:28:02.150 --> 01:28:03.990
could actually have been good at solving this problem?

01:28:04.070 --> 01:28:07.700
And how do you know that they actually would have been good at solving this problem?

01:28:08.020 --> 01:28:13.540
And then how do those psychological designs interact with the features of the modern

01:28:13.540 --> 01:28:16.340
environment that you think are relevant to generate behavior?

01:28:16.580 --> 01:28:22.260
It's just like, well, David Buss found this sex difference in preferences, but

01:28:22.420 --> 01:28:24.820
uh, you know, Tinder exists now.

01:28:24.900 --> 01:28:28.820
And so nobody has asked, do these preferences also manifest on Tinder?

01:28:28.990 --> 01:28:33.390
So we looked at people's Tinder choices and looked to see if the sex differences are there.

01:28:33.870 --> 01:28:38.110
There's a much higher volume of that kind of stuff and a much lower volume of like, you

01:28:38.110 --> 01:28:41.630
know, I'm I'm interested in, I don't know.

01:28:41.870 --> 01:28:47.470
I mean I won't name names, but like I remember specifically showing you, Dave, in that

01:28:47.470 --> 01:28:53.070
program uh some work of a person who I don't have a very high opinion of their current

01:28:53.310 --> 01:28:53.870
watch.

01:28:55.280 --> 01:28:58.640
and I wasn't aware of like the kind of stuff that they were doing back when they were

01:28:58.640 --> 01:28:59.120
younger.

01:28:59.680 --> 01:29:04.560
Um, and I I remember looking at their abstract and thinking, holy crap, like this really

01:29:04.720 --> 01:29:04.800
good.

01:29:06.880 --> 01:29:12.240
They were really swinging for the fences, they were really trying to come up with a deep

01:29:12.480 --> 01:29:15.360
adaptationist theory of I don't even remember what the topic was.

01:29:15.520 --> 01:29:16.720
It might have been parenting.

01:29:16.960 --> 01:29:22.870
Like they're doing, you know, they were trying to do some serious evolutionary psychology

01:29:22.870 --> 01:29:28.870
at one time, and then I don't know, they got hit in the head with a coconut and now do uh

01:29:29.510 --> 01:29:31.190
really crazy stuff.

01:29:31.430 --> 01:29:33.270
Uh now they're a provocateur.

01:29:33.510 --> 01:29:35.190
You gotta watch it for those coconuts.

01:29:35.510 --> 01:29:36.150
Yeah.

01:29:36.790 --> 01:29:40.470
Um yeah, yeah.

01:29:41.700 --> 01:29:42.020
Yeah.

01:29:42.180 --> 01:29:43.300
Well that's depressing.

01:29:43.540 --> 01:29:49.460
Um wha what are the parts of the field that give you hope to s you

01:29:49.460 --> 01:29:52.660
know, we're starting to wrap things up or drift in that direction.

01:29:52.980 --> 01:29:54.260
Be good to end on a high note.

01:29:54.500 --> 01:29:56.900
What are the the trends that you see as positive?

01:29:57.060 --> 01:29:59.540
Where do you see uh the hope?

01:30:00.020 --> 01:30:00.340
Yeah.

01:30:00.500 --> 01:30:04.820
I mean I I I think these discussions, like this this focus on this debate in the mate

01:30:04.820 --> 01:30:06.420
choice area has been really positive.

01:30:07.290 --> 01:30:11.370
I think that's pushed mating research in a much better direction than it was going.

01:30:12.890 --> 01:30:14.330
I don't think I said Brendan Zietz's name.

01:30:14.410 --> 01:30:17.690
Brendan Zieg has also been contributing to this literature in a really nice way.

01:30:18.410 --> 01:30:19.050
Yeah.

01:30:19.450 --> 01:30:21.610
So I think that stuff is positive.

01:30:22.570 --> 01:30:26.490
And just behavior behavioral genetics, just for people who aren't familiar, bringing

01:30:26.490 --> 01:30:31.770
behavioral genetics analysis into uh uh conversation with the mating psychology literature,

01:30:31.850 --> 01:30:33.050
which I think is extremely useful.

01:30:33.290 --> 01:30:33.930
Yeah, yeah.

01:30:34.650 --> 01:30:38.620
Um, you know, I I I think cooperation stuff has always been going strong and that still

01:30:38.620 --> 01:30:39.260
goes strong.

01:30:39.420 --> 01:30:42.860
Um at HBest this last year, I thought HBest is last year was great.

01:30:43.020 --> 01:30:46.300
Uh I thought it was one of the best programs I can remember in a while.

01:30:46.380 --> 01:30:50.300
I don't know that I'm uh I don't know how popular of an opinion that is, but like in my

01:30:50.300 --> 01:30:53.820
opinion, I I thought this was an extremely strong program, maybe too small of a program,

01:30:53.980 --> 01:30:55.580
maybe a little too restrictive.

01:30:55.740 --> 01:30:59.660
Um uh but uh uh I thought the overall quality was really good.

01:30:59.740 --> 01:31:04.230
And I I was like really, really impressed with the stuff coming out of like the Paris

01:31:04.230 --> 01:31:04.630
school.

01:31:04.710 --> 01:31:05.350
Uh oh, yeah.

01:31:06.070 --> 01:31:06.870
Paris school rules.

01:31:07.270 --> 01:31:07.670
Yeah.

01:31:07.830 --> 01:31:13.830
Um again, I think really inventive questions approached in a really just sober,

01:31:14.470 --> 01:31:17.670
um dedicated, adaptationist way.

01:31:17.750 --> 01:31:21.990
Um, I was so impressed with um a lot of the stuff coming out.

01:31:22.150 --> 01:31:27.110
Um again, either the like sort of Toulouse, the sort of new there seemed to be like a kind

01:31:27.110 --> 01:31:32.300
of new approach to cultural evolution that was cohering that like a lot of talks were, you

01:31:32.300 --> 01:31:37.420
know, Nicola Bamar and um uh Leo Fitucci and

01:31:37.980 --> 01:31:43.420
Singh and uh I think a new way of sort of bridging a sort of Santa Barbara style

01:31:43.660 --> 01:31:49.500
Boye kind of perspective on cultural evolution with a sort of UCLA boy

01:31:49.660 --> 01:31:52.700
Richardson Henrik style of thinking about cultural evolution.

01:31:52.940 --> 01:31:57.980
Um I I hope that coheres into its own sort of moot like

01:31:58.430 --> 01:32:03.950
perspective soon, because I I was just hearing things across those talks that I hadn't

01:32:03.950 --> 01:32:07.790
quite heard as like commonalities and ways people were thinking about things yet.

01:32:07.950 --> 01:32:09.710
And I think that's that's super exciting.

01:32:09.790 --> 01:32:14.990
And I think that's going to be really good for yeah bridging a divide that I think has

01:32:14.990 --> 01:32:18.110
gotten too big and and too weird.

01:32:18.420 --> 01:32:19.380
Um totally.

01:32:19.540 --> 01:32:21.780
And such an understudied area too.

01:32:21.940 --> 01:32:27.220
Um, I remember so uh Tom Scott Phillips is another great scholar um who studies uh you know

01:32:27.300 --> 01:32:29.620
the game theory of communication, evolution of language.

01:32:29.780 --> 01:32:35.140
Uh and he recently I remember him remarking at how little work there was being done on

01:32:35.140 --> 01:32:36.740
communication at HBS.

01:32:37.140 --> 01:32:40.900
There's barely any work being done on communication, even though communication is basically

01:32:40.900 --> 01:32:42.180
our superpower as a species.

01:32:42.420 --> 01:32:45.730
It's like the main thing we do as an animal if we spend most of our time.

01:32:45.970 --> 01:32:48.930
I mean, HBS is itself just a bunch of communication.

01:32:49.810 --> 01:32:53.730
And how little we know about communication is kind of mind-boggling.

01:32:54.290 --> 01:32:57.970
It should be at the front and center of what we're doing, and it's not there.

01:32:59.330 --> 01:33:02.130
Similarly, you know, you're talking about the Paris School, Hugo Mercier.

01:33:02.290 --> 01:33:08.130
It's a wonderful book, Not Born Yesterday, on our skepticism

01:33:08.130 --> 01:33:09.090
of information.

01:33:10.180 --> 01:33:13.860
You wouldn't expect us to be easily duped and easily exploited and manipulated.

01:33:13.940 --> 01:33:19.940
So we have a sophisticated information-seeking psychology that is sensitive to the costs

01:33:19.940 --> 01:33:25.300
of being manipulated and to people's competence and benevolence toward us.

01:33:25.620 --> 01:33:26.580
Fascinating stuff.

01:33:27.140 --> 01:33:31.540
He also has a theory of reasoning where reasoning evolved in this social interactionist

01:33:31.540 --> 01:33:36.580
context where reasoning is not just this solitary thing that we do in our heads to arrive

01:33:36.580 --> 01:33:42.410
at wisdom, but something that uh uh occurs between people, that we we use reasoning to

01:33:42.410 --> 01:33:45.450
persuade other people and to justify our actions.

01:33:45.690 --> 01:33:47.130
Uh that stuff is awesome.

01:33:47.210 --> 01:33:50.890
And yet, as far as I'm aware, he's the only one working on reasoning.

01:33:51.130 --> 01:33:56.890
Um as far as I'm aware, him and a handful of other people are the only ones working on our

01:33:56.890 --> 01:34:01.960
skepticism toward communicated information and what that skeptical psychology should look

01:34:01.960 --> 01:34:02.200
like.

01:34:02.360 --> 01:34:06.600
And yet these are at the center of human existence, and we know barely anything about them.

01:34:06.840 --> 01:34:12.280
So, yeah, uh the lopsidedness of what we're focused on uh as as a research

01:34:12.280 --> 01:34:14.440
community is kind of startling.

01:34:14.600 --> 01:34:18.680
Even within mate, I mean, I agree that mating should be, you know, front and center of of

01:34:18.680 --> 01:34:20.600
of you know studies of human nature.

01:34:20.680 --> 01:34:24.360
Mating is huge, it's one of the most important things going on in our lives.

01:34:24.600 --> 01:34:29.010
And yet even within mating, the parts of mating that we're focusing on are the are the

01:34:29.010 --> 01:34:30.130
least important parts of it.

01:34:30.210 --> 01:34:32.050
We're we're focusing on choice, right?

01:34:32.130 --> 01:34:32.850
Or attraction.

01:34:33.010 --> 01:34:38.610
The initial feelings of attraction you feel towards someone and not parenting, which is

01:34:38.610 --> 01:34:42.850
completely ignored, which is the whole purpose of of of mating, right?

01:34:43.010 --> 01:34:47.170
And yet we know nothing about parenting and we know tons of crappy stuff about attraction

01:34:47.170 --> 01:34:48.450
in a speed dating context.

01:34:48.610 --> 01:34:54.400
That's basically uh so the the lopsidedness of of what our

01:34:54.400 --> 01:34:57.840
priorities are in terms of what to study is is startling.

01:34:59.280 --> 01:35:04.720
That said, the few people who are working on reasoning and communication and epistemic

01:35:04.720 --> 01:35:08.560
vigilance are our skepticism of information, those people are doing awesome work.

01:35:08.720 --> 01:35:12.890
It's really insightful, inspiring, beautiful work.

01:35:13.130 --> 01:35:15.050
Um, people doing work on emotions.

01:35:15.210 --> 01:35:17.450
Aaron Sell's work on anger is incredible.

01:35:17.530 --> 01:35:21.370
Uh he recently did a guest talk uh at at our lab at UCLA.

01:35:21.530 --> 01:35:23.450
Uh mind blowing stuff.

01:35:23.530 --> 01:35:27.130
Uh Dan Sneezer doing work on pride and shame and cross cultural regularity.

01:35:27.290 --> 01:35:28.410
That stuff's awesome.

01:35:28.570 --> 01:35:32.250
Uh so there is there is a lot of good stuff happening.

01:35:32.410 --> 01:35:37.050
I wish there were more of it, and I wish um the awesome stuff was growing.

01:35:37.290 --> 01:35:39.320
Uh but it is there.

01:35:39.880 --> 01:35:41.480
Jamie Krems and friendship.

01:35:41.720 --> 01:35:42.120
Yeah.

01:35:42.360 --> 01:35:42.920
Yeah.

01:35:43.160 --> 01:35:48.280
Excellent stuff on friendship and how it's not just this dyadic uh uh

01:35:48.520 --> 01:35:54.520
reciprocity relationship, but a complex uh uh uh dynamic where you have to uh figure out

01:35:54.520 --> 01:35:58.600
whether you're more loyal to me than other people or you know what my relationship with you

01:35:58.600 --> 01:36:01.800
says about my relationships to other people and when and thinking about friendship

01:36:01.800 --> 01:36:07.510
networks, like that stuff is again this this clash between the complexity of

01:36:07.510 --> 01:36:10.070
reality and the simplicity of our methods.

01:36:10.310 --> 01:36:15.350
Um Jamie Krims is an excellent example of of looking at the actual complexity of

01:36:15.350 --> 01:36:15.910
friendship.

01:36:15.990 --> 01:36:18.550
Uh and we'll we'll talk to her on a on a on our next episode.

01:36:18.630 --> 01:36:19.750
I'm excited about that.

01:36:19.990 --> 01:36:24.870
Um but yeah, there is there are stars in in the darkness.

01:36:25.900 --> 01:36:28.540
Dan, I have uh yeah, oh Dan, I have a question.

01:36:28.700 --> 01:36:34.460
Uh if you could wave a magic wand, uh how would you uh what would be

01:36:34.460 --> 01:36:38.780
different either about uh HBS or of psych or psychology?

01:36:40.060 --> 01:36:41.100
Oh man.

01:36:41.820 --> 01:36:47.810
Uh if I could wave a magic I mean, part of you know, we'll see

01:36:47.810 --> 01:36:53.730
if our symposium at HBiscets uh shopping this talk around that is partly like if I could

01:36:53.730 --> 01:36:59.090
wave a magic wand, I would I would yeah, force all psychologists to

01:36:59.330 --> 01:37:04.610
express their hypotheses in the form of a formal adaptationist model.

01:37:04.930 --> 01:37:09.920
Uh that you need to give a you know logico mathematical

01:37:10.160 --> 01:37:15.840
computational formalism for what you think is the relative relevant adaptive problem,

01:37:16.160 --> 01:37:22.160
and what you think are the designs that are you know reasonably good, improbably

01:37:22.160 --> 01:37:24.320
good at solving that problem.

01:37:24.800 --> 01:37:30.800
Um and how do those uh psychological models make predictions

01:37:30.800 --> 01:37:32.560
about the kinds of behavior people will make?

01:37:32.720 --> 01:37:38.690
Uh so yeah, I think I would love it if not all people would agree with me, I guess,

01:37:38.770 --> 01:37:39.010
on this.

01:37:39.090 --> 01:37:43.330
You know, we do have to be mindful uh in these conversations that HBS is not just

01:37:43.330 --> 01:37:44.450
evolutionary psychology.

01:37:44.610 --> 01:37:48.850
So I think, you know, our anthropology colleagues, especially our behavioral ecology

01:37:48.850 --> 01:37:51.570
colleagues, have been studying a lot of these topics like parenting.

01:37:51.730 --> 01:37:52.050
Yes.

01:37:52.130 --> 01:37:53.730
Um that we've been neglecting.

01:37:53.890 --> 01:37:54.210
Totally.

01:37:54.370 --> 01:37:58.050
Uh I think they've been rightfully annoyed at us evolutionary psychologists for being,

01:37:58.130 --> 01:38:03.240
yeah, so obsessed with like sex and dating to the exclusion of, yeah, these these very big

01:38:03.240 --> 01:38:04.440
parts of human life as well.

01:38:04.600 --> 01:38:05.640
Yeah, foraging.

01:38:05.800 --> 01:38:06.280
Yeah.

01:38:06.600 --> 01:38:06.920
Yeah.

01:38:07.000 --> 01:38:07.400
Yeah.

01:38:08.040 --> 01:38:13.640
So I think it's not necessarily H best's problem as a whole, as much as it is as like the

01:38:13.640 --> 01:38:19.320
evolutionary psychologists have not been uh holding up their end of the bargain, maybe.

01:38:19.560 --> 01:38:23.960
Um so I do want to give credit to our anthropology friends for doing that.

01:38:24.040 --> 01:38:28.210
And I also, you know, so that's why part of me why I want to say like all submissions to

01:38:28.210 --> 01:38:31.010
HBAS need to be explicitly adaptationist.

01:38:31.170 --> 01:38:34.850
But like I think it's fine if the behavioral ecologists and maybe even the cultural

01:38:34.850 --> 01:38:35.810
evolutionists aren't.

01:38:35.890 --> 01:38:40.690
But at least maybe you should have to say what wing, what which of the three fields are you

01:38:40.690 --> 01:38:41.250
submitting in?

01:38:41.330 --> 01:38:45.570
And if you're submitting as an evolutionary psychologist, like you need to include a task

01:38:45.570 --> 01:38:47.010
analysis in your submission.

01:38:47.440 --> 01:38:49.120
That's actually a beautiful idea.

01:38:49.280 --> 01:38:55.280
Um it's just just when you're filling out the form to submit a talk or symposium, there's

01:38:55.280 --> 01:38:58.960
just a s a section on task analysis, adaptive problem, and you have to and you have to

01:38:58.960 --> 01:39:01.280
input those, and that's the way you submit something.

01:39:01.440 --> 01:39:04.160
I think potentially very interesting idea.

01:39:04.400 --> 01:39:06.720
Um Yeah, might cut submissions a bit.

01:39:07.280 --> 01:39:08.000
That's true.

01:39:08.320 --> 01:39:13.760
Or it might force people to think in in terms of adaptationist you know frameworks.

01:39:13.920 --> 01:39:14.560
Yeah.

01:39:14.800 --> 01:39:16.170
Um, which might be a good thing.

01:39:16.330 --> 01:39:16.570
I don't know.

01:39:16.890 --> 01:39:17.050
Yeah.

01:39:17.130 --> 01:39:20.730
Do you think it's a lack of knowledge and that if we just provide the knowledge or force

01:39:20.730 --> 01:39:26.090
people to do it in their submission uploads but uh or is it are there perverse incentives

01:39:26.090 --> 01:39:31.130
or structural things in the way too I think it's a bit of both.

01:39:31.210 --> 01:39:37.140
But yeah I I think the the structural issue here is the perverse incentives I think should

01:39:37.140 --> 01:39:38.420
not be understated, right?

01:39:38.580 --> 01:39:43.380
Like I think it's it's just y you need papers, man, and it's so easy to publish a six

01:39:43.460 --> 01:39:44.660
differences paper.

01:39:44.820 --> 01:39:49.620
Uh it's so hard to take a lot of time trying to build a a really precise model of some

01:39:49.780 --> 01:39:50.980
evolutionary system.

01:39:51.300 --> 01:39:56.980
Um so yeah, I I don't blame people, you know, especially these days when resources in

01:39:56.980 --> 01:39:58.340
academia are especially taxed.

01:39:58.500 --> 01:40:00.580
Like to just go especially, yeah.

01:40:00.660 --> 01:40:05.130
I mean I mean the the the line you said that has been haunting me is that a lot of the the

01:40:05.130 --> 01:40:10.250
worst F Psych is just like um just psychology with an evolutionary twist, like a like a

01:40:10.330 --> 01:40:13.930
like a LaCroix with evolutionary flavoring.

01:40:15.130 --> 01:40:18.970
Uh and and I think you know part of that comes from the fact that, you know, we are

01:40:18.970 --> 01:40:22.250
psychologists, we have to get jobs in in psychology departments.

01:40:22.380 --> 01:40:26.860
A lot of people come into F Psych from psychology departments, and that has a way of

01:40:26.860 --> 01:40:29.180
thinking, a methodology behind it.

01:40:29.260 --> 01:40:33.420
And often it's the path of least resistance to just do psychology with an evolutionary

01:40:33.420 --> 01:40:33.660
twist.

01:40:33.740 --> 01:40:37.900
And that's the best way to get a job in a psychology department is to do things that are

01:40:37.900 --> 01:40:41.660
recognizable to other psychologists, but have this cool twist that, you know, sets you

01:40:41.660 --> 01:40:43.100
apart from other people.

01:40:43.420 --> 01:40:49.270
Um so Yeah, and I think I mean I think there's other, like obviously, there's

01:40:49.350 --> 01:40:52.950
like many good people in lots of areas of psychology who are trying to get away from what's

01:40:52.950 --> 01:40:54.390
called effectology, right?

01:40:54.470 --> 01:41:00.070
And there's fortunately one of the things in the theory crisis literature is this idea.

01:41:00.470 --> 01:41:05.590
Um uh Iris von Rouge, I I I don't know how to say your last name, apologies, but you know,

01:41:05.670 --> 01:41:09.270
it talks about you can't just take a bunch of effects and like cobble them together like if

01:41:09.270 --> 01:41:13.300
you bunch like almost like a bunch of iron filings thrown into a magnetic field that it's

01:41:13.300 --> 01:41:14.740
all going to coalesce around a theory.

01:41:14.820 --> 01:41:18.820
Like that's not, if you look across the history of sciences, that's not effects, collecting

01:41:18.820 --> 01:41:21.460
effects is not um the way, the way things work.

01:41:21.540 --> 01:41:26.180
And so I do think um the the idea that you have to think about the underlying psychology

01:41:26.180 --> 01:41:29.460
and the design, whether or not people take an evolutionary approach or not, that you're

01:41:29.460 --> 01:41:34.430
getting at the underlying the invariance you want is how the system works and what its

01:41:34.430 --> 01:41:35.070
function is.

01:41:35.470 --> 01:41:38.350
And I think I think people are aware of that.

01:41:38.510 --> 01:41:42.430
But yeah, I wonder, like even when I do task analyses here, like I've been I taught a grad

01:41:42.430 --> 01:41:43.790
course this fall.

01:41:44.030 --> 01:41:49.550
Um it's very much like, you know, there's a lot of uncertainty when you're doing a task

01:41:49.550 --> 01:41:53.470
analysis is very much a creative process of and it's sort of brainstorming.

01:41:53.550 --> 01:41:57.230
It's sort of, well, given what are all the sub problems entailed, you know, and just even

01:41:57.230 --> 01:42:00.190
not starving to death, what are all the systems, what are all the functions?

01:42:00.350 --> 01:42:05.720
And you can really see in students that there's a reluctance to not be wrong, to not say

01:42:05.720 --> 01:42:08.280
something that they don't have already have evidence for.

01:42:08.440 --> 01:42:13.880
Um, and I think like that's a real problem because you know that we're talking about, and

01:42:13.880 --> 01:42:19.160
this is Borsboom's point, is that we need theory to derive what to look for in the first

01:42:19.160 --> 01:42:19.320
place.

01:42:19.400 --> 01:42:25.160
Like Dan, I think your work is some of the most lovely in terms of doing lots of

01:42:25.160 --> 01:42:29.400
methods to derive what to look for ahead of time.

01:42:29.750 --> 01:42:35.510
And I think we we've we've we've trained generations of students who don't feel like

01:42:35.510 --> 01:42:41.270
they're allowed to say what we should be looking for unless you already have data for it.

01:42:41.510 --> 01:42:46.470
And I think that sounds rigorous if you think about it for one second, but if you think

01:42:46.470 --> 01:42:50.950
about it for longer than one second, um it becomes looking under it's the person looking

01:42:50.950 --> 01:42:55.670
for their keys under the light where we're trivializing the things we're looking for

01:42:55.750 --> 01:42:59.680
because we were only allowed to look for the things we already have data for.

01:42:59.920 --> 01:43:05.840
And I think that's a real um structural issue of we have to

01:43:05.840 --> 01:43:11.840
let a task analysis breathe and not request data from it right away, for example, is

01:43:12.000 --> 01:43:12.880
what I think.

01:43:13.920 --> 01:43:14.080
Yeah.

01:43:14.240 --> 01:43:18.400
And we need a a healthier respect for theory in general.

01:43:18.750 --> 01:43:22.110
Um not just more theory, because there's lots of crappy theories in psychology.

01:43:22.190 --> 01:43:26.990
I don't I don't mean to like any theory, like uh a respect for for what a good theory is.

01:43:27.310 --> 01:43:29.230
Um it's not a factor analysis.

01:43:29.310 --> 01:43:32.670
I mean, there's there's a place for organizing disparate findings, and that can be

01:43:32.670 --> 01:43:33.630
extremely useful.

01:43:33.790 --> 01:43:38.510
But many theories, it's again this you're not allowed to theorize unless you have data, and

01:43:38.510 --> 01:43:43.310
then it it's it's a uh it's a uh a a factor analysis.

01:43:43.470 --> 01:43:45.060
Um It's not deductive.

01:43:45.140 --> 01:43:45.780
It's induction.

01:43:45.860 --> 01:43:50.260
It's just sort of here's what we have evidence for, and I will just characterize the common

01:43:50.260 --> 01:43:54.260
variable or latent variable underlying these effects.

01:43:54.420 --> 01:43:57.300
I think that kind of theorizing is allowed.

01:44:00.260 --> 01:44:06.230
Yeah, I I don't, again, I I genuinely don't think a lot of psychologists are aware

01:44:06.230 --> 01:44:07.670
of what a theory is.

01:44:07.990 --> 01:44:13.590
Um, a lot of what gets called theory in psychology, yeah, is either a factor

01:44:13.590 --> 01:44:19.590
analysis or yeah, it's like a string of empirical general generalizations,

01:44:19.750 --> 01:44:19.990
right?

01:44:20.070 --> 01:44:26.070
Like Murray at all 1975 found this, and Campbell et

01:44:26.070 --> 01:44:26.230
al.

01:44:26.470 --> 01:44:27.910
1980 found that.

01:44:28.120 --> 01:44:33.880
And so, given those two observations, my hunch is you combine those two

01:44:33.880 --> 01:44:37.480
facts, you know, a third fact should be true.

01:44:37.640 --> 01:44:41.800
Or what we don't know what happens if you combine those two facts.

01:44:41.880 --> 01:44:43.880
And so here's some possibilities.

01:44:44.040 --> 01:44:49.960
Um, but they're not none of these are yeah, descriptions of how you think the

01:44:49.960 --> 01:44:53.160
world works grounded in some sort of broader theoretical principle.

01:44:53.240 --> 01:44:57.030
It's just either these things correlate.

01:44:57.190 --> 01:45:03.110
And so here's yeah, here's the shared variance, or it's here's three things that

01:45:03.110 --> 01:45:04.230
people have found before.

01:45:04.470 --> 01:45:07.750
And so here's how they mash together.

01:45:08.390 --> 01:45:09.030
Yeah.

01:45:10.150 --> 01:45:15.910
Or or here's here's a an analogy to a the mind is a

01:45:15.910 --> 01:45:17.510
symphony and there can be dissonant notes.

01:45:17.590 --> 01:45:21.270
So there's cognitive dissonance, or you know, the mind is a hydraulic system and we need to

01:45:21.270 --> 01:45:26.040
let out steam, so there's venting, and you know, like these kinds of uh glib analogies also

01:45:26.040 --> 01:45:29.320
populate our our psychology in a troubling way, anyway.

01:45:29.560 --> 01:45:33.720
I'll even take an analogy because an analogy is at least like makes it something

01:45:35.480 --> 01:45:40.440
has an internal logic, and if you follow that logic out, it makes predictions that could be

01:45:40.440 --> 01:45:41.640
right or wrong.

01:45:42.360 --> 01:45:45.080
But like a path model doesn't really.

01:45:45.720 --> 01:45:45.960
I know.

01:45:46.120 --> 01:45:47.960
Most most theories aren't even wrong.

01:45:48.280 --> 01:45:49.320
Yeah, yeah.

01:45:49.570 --> 01:45:49.810
Yeah.

01:45:50.290 --> 01:45:53.490
Uh Dan, any question that we should have asked you?

01:45:55.570 --> 01:45:57.170
Uh that's a great question.

01:45:57.410 --> 01:45:59.170
I should have anticipated that question.

01:46:00.130 --> 01:46:02.290
Should we have asked you that very question?

01:46:04.130 --> 01:46:06.050
Is there any question we shouldn't have asked?

01:46:08.450 --> 01:46:10.050
Uh I don't know.

01:46:10.290 --> 01:46:11.650
Or do you have a question for us?

01:46:11.970 --> 01:46:15.500
This has been a great this has been a great uh been a great conversation.

01:46:15.580 --> 01:46:15.980
I don't know.

01:46:16.140 --> 01:46:18.300
Yeah, no, it's really nice to this is the thing.

01:46:18.380 --> 01:46:21.340
This is also, I mean, like, this is part of the reason I'm doing this too.

01:46:21.420 --> 01:46:25.660
It's very selfish on my part too, because it's just like you really like day to day you

01:46:25.660 --> 01:46:30.940
just see people and you're like, I really respect people as scientists, present company

01:46:31.100 --> 01:46:36.220
excluded, but um but uh no no for real like I mean I like you guys I deeply respect you

01:46:36.220 --> 01:46:40.540
guys and uh and but then I you know we see each other and other things are going on and you

01:46:40.540 --> 01:46:44.230
don't get a chance to talk about you know, like what are you actually thinking about and

01:46:44.230 --> 01:46:45.030
thinking deeply.

01:46:45.110 --> 01:46:49.910
And it's one of the things I love about being a scientist is that

01:46:51.350 --> 01:46:56.470
the people you get to meet and and be with over time.

01:46:56.870 --> 01:47:01.590
And like both of you are a great example of like, you know, when I when I see you in

01:47:01.590 --> 01:47:07.430
person, it's like no time has changed or passed, you know, and it's just um and knowing

01:47:07.430 --> 01:47:13.360
people who are sort of fellow travelers and getting to do it with people

01:47:13.360 --> 01:47:18.320
like you it's just a real pleasure so it's nice to be able to talk um not about like the

01:47:18.320 --> 01:47:22.000
mundane stuff but sort of about what you're thinking about it's one of the reasons I wanted

01:47:22.000 --> 01:47:22.880
to do this.

01:47:25.440 --> 01:47:30.160
Well I mean one question I can ask both of you this is something we I think the three of us

01:47:30.160 --> 01:47:35.920
have talked about informally but but maybe we can just sort of make it all mutual knowledge

01:47:36.080 --> 01:47:42.050
is like how do you think our field's stock is doing Are

01:47:42.050 --> 01:47:42.930
we on the rise?

01:47:43.010 --> 01:47:45.090
Are we are we flat?

01:47:45.250 --> 01:47:46.370
Are we going down?

01:47:46.770 --> 01:47:48.450
What's your impression?

01:47:50.370 --> 01:47:50.850
Interesting.

01:47:51.010 --> 01:47:52.610
Uh I have conflicting intuitions.

01:47:52.770 --> 01:47:57.970
On the one hand, I think it's undeniable that our stock has gone up in the past 30 years.

01:47:59.010 --> 01:48:04.850
Um and you know, I think evolutionary psychology used to be incredibly controversial

01:48:04.850 --> 01:48:05.730
and disdained.

01:48:05.810 --> 01:48:10.930
It is now much more mainstream and accepted uh as as a valid perspective.

01:48:11.540 --> 01:48:16.180
It's much easier to get uh a publication accepted in a journal with an explicitly

01:48:16.180 --> 01:48:19.940
evolutionary approach than it used to be 30 years ago.

01:48:20.180 --> 01:48:25.780
Um you will get way fewer uh adverse reactions to

01:48:26.020 --> 01:48:28.820
bringing up evolutionary psych ideas.

01:48:29.540 --> 01:48:34.100
Um and you know the uh and I think uh in some ways the quality has increased.

01:48:34.180 --> 01:48:39.790
You know, we've we've gotten um new perspectives, new methodologies, um

01:48:40.110 --> 01:48:44.270
new ideas from cultural evolution, uh evolutionary game theory.

01:48:44.590 --> 01:48:50.030
Um so I think in some ways uh the work is getting better.

01:48:50.270 --> 01:48:54.110
Um it's slower than I'd like.

01:48:54.590 --> 01:48:57.630
You know, I I do think it's headed in the right direction.

01:48:58.240 --> 01:49:00.720
it's it's like a fucking sloth.

01:49:00.880 --> 01:49:03.200
I want it to pick up the pace, you know.

01:49:03.440 --> 01:49:07.360
But maybe that's just an un maybe that's just how the world works, and you know, that's the

01:49:07.360 --> 01:49:10.480
best we can hope for is for things to slowly get better.

01:49:10.640 --> 01:49:15.040
Um, you know, if you look at progress in any other area of human life, it's it tends to be

01:49:15.040 --> 01:49:16.000
pretty slow.

01:49:16.240 --> 01:49:20.800
Um, so so maybe this is just uh as fast as we're gonna get, and we just gotta wait for the

01:49:20.800 --> 01:49:23.040
sloth to to make its way forward.

01:49:23.280 --> 01:49:29.170
Um part of me worries that maybe we're we're starting to decline a bit, that maybe we've

01:49:29.410 --> 01:49:32.050
we've um I don't know.

01:49:32.690 --> 01:49:37.250
The we're we're starting to go downhill and that the number of people with truly

01:49:37.250 --> 01:49:40.530
adaptationist ideas is starting to decline.

01:49:41.250 --> 01:49:42.850
Um I don't know.

01:49:42.930 --> 01:49:44.370
That's that's a fear I have.

01:49:46.370 --> 01:49:47.410
What do you think?

01:49:49.820 --> 01:49:52.300
I agree that you know our stock has risen considerably.

01:49:52.460 --> 01:49:57.420
I mean, um, you know, I I became a student or I was interested in working with John Alita

01:49:57.740 --> 01:50:00.300
when I was coming up into things.

01:50:00.460 --> 01:50:05.020
And uh there are some people who read the psychological foundations of culture.

01:50:05.420 --> 01:50:10.300
Um, Rob Kurzman called it the uh standard social science straw man or something.

01:50:10.380 --> 01:50:13.100
Standard, you know, he was like, I don't think this is like true.

01:50:13.420 --> 01:50:19.370
The the um uh I really found that to be exactly the water I was swimming in

01:50:19.370 --> 01:50:20.010
as an undergrad.

01:50:20.170 --> 01:50:26.010
I mean, the the what was described as the SSSM in that chapter was my undergraduate

01:50:26.010 --> 01:50:26.490
education.

01:50:26.650 --> 01:50:32.250
So for me, um the there's been quite a change in uh

01:50:32.730 --> 01:50:35.610
in in our stock in that respect.

01:50:35.850 --> 01:50:41.690
The the the degree to which people are just saying, oh, from an evolutionary perspective,

01:50:41.770 --> 01:50:46.780
and genuinely meaning like this is adding something, and it's not, there's no blink,

01:50:46.940 --> 01:50:50.700
there's no, you know, it's just sort of without you know, just in passing.

01:50:50.860 --> 01:50:56.140
Um, so I think the idea that evolution is useful, which is something that Lita

01:50:56.300 --> 01:51:01.420
famously talked about, how her cognition waste and stuff, uh, the reviewers were like,

01:51:01.580 --> 01:51:04.380
Well, you can't say that you got this idea from evolution.

01:51:04.540 --> 01:51:08.530
Lita would always say, you know, if I had the idea like in the shower, it would have been

01:51:08.530 --> 01:51:08.770
fine.

01:51:08.930 --> 01:51:13.090
The problem wasn't the theory, the problem wasn't the data, the problem wasn't the

01:51:13.090 --> 01:51:16.850
implications about the design of the mind, the problem was the source of the hypothesis.

01:51:16.930 --> 01:51:22.850
Um, and it was a real, real uh stretch to publish something that was premised on this is

01:51:22.850 --> 01:51:27.570
where I got the idea for it from, which is exactly what you would think in a science where

01:51:27.570 --> 01:51:29.090
you would want theory, right?

01:51:29.330 --> 01:51:33.400
Um, and so I don't think it's an accident that the theory crisis exists because you know

01:51:33.560 --> 01:51:35.880
Lita, for example, and John went through that.

01:51:36.120 --> 01:51:36.920
Went through that.

01:51:37.160 --> 01:51:38.920
So I think that's very different.

01:51:39.000 --> 01:51:44.520
The idea, the general idea that evolutionary approaches are helpful and useful is well

01:51:44.520 --> 01:51:45.480
understood.

01:51:45.960 --> 01:51:51.320
My opinion is there's two things that are not going great.

01:51:51.560 --> 01:51:57.160
One is what we've characterized sort of as provisional of psych is um

01:51:58.150 --> 01:52:03.430
Is sort of largely what's understood and so uh as what evpsy is.

01:52:03.590 --> 01:52:07.430
So the idea of sort of, you know, there are certain things that evolutionary psychology can

01:52:07.430 --> 01:52:09.910
tell you, but not everything is domain-specific, right?

01:52:10.070 --> 01:52:11.990
Not everything is a sex difference.

01:52:12.150 --> 01:52:17.430
Um, and so the what sort of gets understood as what evpsy is,

01:52:18.150 --> 01:52:20.080
is is some things.

01:52:20.240 --> 01:52:22.640
It applies to some things, but not everything.

01:52:22.880 --> 01:52:27.360
And and then people sort of have this map then of, well, you know, it's great, it's an

01:52:27.440 --> 01:52:30.320
overlayer approach, but it's not really relevant to what I study.

01:52:30.720 --> 01:52:36.240
If people understood adaptationism, if people understood task analysis,

01:52:36.560 --> 01:52:40.560
I think it would look very different in the way evolutionary psychology would be

01:52:40.560 --> 01:52:44.630
interfacing with the rest of psychology and where it is would be very different.

01:52:44.790 --> 01:52:49.670
The way I think about it is Ev PSYC is answering a question that isn't largely being asked,

01:52:50.070 --> 01:52:54.470
which is sort of, you know, what are the design features underlying a lot of these

01:52:54.470 --> 01:52:55.270
phenomena?

01:52:55.590 --> 01:53:01.110
And I think unfortunately for Evpsych, if Ev PSYC had come along at a time where

01:53:01.110 --> 01:53:06.020
psychology was more asking questions about what's the underlying design features, then the

01:53:06.500 --> 01:53:08.740
relevance of the answer would have been clearer.

01:53:08.820 --> 01:53:12.180
And I think it's it's we're still fighting that battle.

01:53:12.340 --> 01:53:14.500
Um, that's outside of EvSec.

01:53:14.740 --> 01:53:17.620
But I do think people are generally okay with it.

01:53:17.940 --> 01:53:23.300
But I I do think, and in this is coming back to this other problem of sort of people being

01:53:23.300 --> 01:53:28.870
interested in controversy, I I appreciate and understand, and John

01:53:29.030 --> 01:53:30.550
Alita talked about this a lot.

01:53:30.950 --> 01:53:36.950
People felt like it was a real personal point of courage to be able to stand up and say, I

01:53:36.950 --> 01:53:38.550
take an evolutionary approach.

01:53:38.790 --> 01:53:44.470
And there were there were there was a lot of controversy, and there were a lot of

01:53:44.470 --> 01:53:50.070
accusations about people being malicious for taking an evolutionary approach.

01:53:50.340 --> 01:53:56.340
Um, and even why Don Simons is was at UCSB apparently is because uh he was

01:53:56.340 --> 01:54:00.820
at Berkeley and there wasn't really it wasn't appreciated that he was applying evolutionary

01:54:00.820 --> 01:54:04.580
approaches to humans, so he he went down to Santa Barbara from Berkeley, which is why we're

01:54:04.580 --> 01:54:06.180
here Dan now, basically.

01:54:06.420 --> 01:54:12.030
Um but yeah, um but I do

01:54:12.190 --> 01:54:18.190
worry that collecting people who are interested in controversy does uh

01:54:18.750 --> 01:54:24.590
it leads to a dynamic where sometimes controversy is sort of uh coddled at the expense

01:54:24.590 --> 01:54:25.870
of good science.

01:54:26.190 --> 01:54:31.790
Um and and more to the point is I do believe we have earned social

01:54:32.030 --> 01:54:35.790
capital with respect to like other scientists.

01:54:36.030 --> 01:54:41.500
And I and I do appreciate that people have different

01:54:41.500 --> 01:54:47.420
experiences, people have different political views, and people can feel really put upon and

01:54:47.420 --> 01:54:52.860
want to express um when they feel like things have been unfair or unjust.

01:54:53.020 --> 01:54:58.140
Um and and I I wouldn't question that or suggest they shouldn't be able to do that.

01:54:58.540 --> 01:55:04.510
But from an ideal perspective, one of the things I worry is when people talk

01:55:04.510 --> 01:55:10.350
about Evpsych being controversial, they're they're we're using up the

01:55:10.350 --> 01:55:14.430
social capital for things that are not about EV-psych.

01:55:14.990 --> 01:55:20.910
So one of the things like I I worry about is people who are attracted to Evpsy

01:55:21.230 --> 01:55:27.150
and who are saying, look, you know, uh, we're there's there's not enough diversity

01:55:27.310 --> 01:55:33.060
of viewpoints in psychology, they're not talking about the lack of adaptationism in

01:55:33.060 --> 01:55:33.780
psychology.

01:55:33.940 --> 01:55:38.660
They're not talking about the lack of task analyses in psychology.

01:55:39.140 --> 01:55:45.140
And as an evolutionary psychologist, that's what I would have hoped that our

01:55:45.140 --> 01:55:50.980
social capital would have earned us, is that argument.

01:55:51.460 --> 01:55:55.940
And if uh and that's not to say other arguments should be excluded, but I think to the

01:55:55.940 --> 01:56:00.730
extent they are, that's the thing that I find really frustrating: is we're using up

01:56:00.730 --> 01:56:06.650
whatever social capital we had as a collective to make points that have nothing

01:56:06.650 --> 01:56:10.970
to do with evolutionary psychology or if they do, they're very indirect.

01:56:11.450 --> 01:56:15.130
Um and so that's my that's my two cents.

01:56:17.530 --> 01:56:17.930
Yeah.

01:56:18.090 --> 01:56:24.010
It's a tragedy of the commons situation where we have this common resource of our

01:56:24.060 --> 01:56:29.980
credibility as a field and people are are squandering it and not using it efficiently.

01:56:30.220 --> 01:56:31.500
Um yeah.

01:56:31.900 --> 01:56:33.660
Yeah, I think that's exactly right.

01:56:33.820 --> 01:56:36.700
I think I agree with with both of those perspectives.

01:56:37.580 --> 01:56:41.900
Well, um hopefully this uh is a little bit of light.

01:56:42.060 --> 01:56:46.700
Um Dan, it was uh it was a pleasure to to talk to you.

01:56:46.860 --> 01:56:52.700
And um um your your lab uh has a website, so people want to sort of keep up to

01:56:52.700 --> 01:56:55.930
date on your work, um, they should go there.

01:56:57.050 --> 01:56:57.530
Yeah, yeah.

01:56:57.770 --> 01:56:59.450
Danconraybeam.com.

01:56:59.770 --> 01:57:00.010
Okay.

01:57:00.250 --> 01:57:01.770
Computational Mate Choice Lab.

01:57:02.010 --> 01:57:02.730
Yeah, is that right?

01:57:02.810 --> 01:57:03.290
Yeah, yeah.

01:57:03.370 --> 01:57:03.610
Yep.

01:57:03.770 --> 01:57:04.090
Yep.

01:57:04.410 --> 01:57:05.370
Fantastic.

01:57:05.610 --> 01:57:06.010
Good.

01:57:06.170 --> 01:57:07.770
Well, well, Dan, thank you so much.

01:57:07.930 --> 01:57:08.890
It was a pleasure.

01:57:09.050 --> 01:57:14.490
And uh we'll um maybe we should we'll all get together at HBES when we see each other in in

01:57:14.490 --> 01:57:16.170
real life, as the kids say.

01:57:16.810 --> 01:57:17.690
That sounds great.

01:57:17.770 --> 01:57:18.970
Thanks, thanks so much for having me.

01:57:19.050 --> 01:57:20.410
This is a really great conversation.

01:57:20.650 --> 01:57:21.210
Yeah, thanks.

01:57:21.370 --> 01:57:23.100
Yeah, Thanks for coming, man.

01:57:29.180 --> 01:57:31.420
Well, that about does it for this episode.

01:57:31.580 --> 01:57:32.780
Thank you for listening.

01:57:32.860 --> 01:57:36.380
Uh, if you like what you're hearing, please don't be shy.

01:57:36.620 --> 01:57:37.980
Leave us a kind review.

01:57:38.060 --> 01:57:43.820
Uh, spread the word on social media, uh, visit our Patreon page if you want to support us.

01:57:44.060 --> 01:57:48.030
Uh, and the plan is we're going to do this again next week, right, Dave?

01:57:48.190 --> 01:57:48.830
Yeah, that's right.

01:57:48.990 --> 01:57:53.470
David, um, we will do this once a week and and who knows?

01:57:53.550 --> 01:57:55.310
We'll just we'll just keep going.

01:57:55.390 --> 01:57:56.590
The sky's the limit.

01:57:56.830 --> 01:57:57.150
Yeah.

01:57:57.230 --> 01:58:00.430
So make sure you subscribe to this podcast so you get the next one.

01:58:00.590 --> 01:58:02.030
And uh we'll see you next week.

01:58:02.270 --> 01:58:02.510
Yeah.

01:58:02.590 --> 01:58:05.870
Enjoy your week and be kind to yourself this week.