1
00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:03,440
This is Evolutionary Psychology, the podcast.

2
00:00:03,920 --> 00:00:05,120
I'm David Pinsoff.

3
00:00:05,280 --> 00:00:06,720
I'm David Petrozowski.

4
00:00:07,040 --> 00:00:11,680
And this is Actual Evolutionary Psychology by Actual Evolutionary Psychologist.

5
00:00:30,490 --> 00:00:33,050
David, today we talked to Josh Ackerman.

6
00:00:33,690 --> 00:00:34,010
Yes.

7
00:00:34,090 --> 00:00:40,090
Uh this was a really fun conversation um about all things diseasey and immune system y.

8
00:00:40,490 --> 00:00:42,490
It wasn't a gross conversation at all though.

9
00:00:42,570 --> 00:00:46,730
I I would say because we've had these kinds of um you know, with like Josh Tiber, Deb

10
00:00:46,810 --> 00:00:47,450
Lieberman.

11
00:00:47,770 --> 00:00:49,770
I'm not saying those were gross either.

12
00:00:50,010 --> 00:00:54,320
Um but uh but this was I don't think there was too much gross in this.

13
00:00:54,400 --> 00:01:00,320
I think this was more uh That's true was fun and uh in a good way abstracted

14
00:01:00,320 --> 00:01:03,520
away from the the things that would elicit disgust, I would say.

15
00:01:03,840 --> 00:01:04,320
That's true.

16
00:01:04,480 --> 00:01:10,160
And in fact, we get into the distinction between uh anxiety about disease and being

17
00:01:10,160 --> 00:01:12,880
grossed out and why they are different things.

18
00:01:13,040 --> 00:01:15,040
It's kind of an interesting question, you know.

19
00:01:15,120 --> 00:01:20,010
Like you could, you know, why are we why are we grossed out versus just afraid.

20
00:01:20,170 --> 00:01:23,050
You know, what what are these different emotional profiles doing for us?

21
00:01:23,210 --> 00:01:23,930
We get into that.

22
00:01:24,010 --> 00:01:29,770
We get into the the effects of disease concern on social life and

23
00:01:29,770 --> 00:01:31,130
social networks.

24
00:01:31,450 --> 00:01:37,450
Um it was yeah, we get into like picking up on sex ratios and population density, and

25
00:01:37,450 --> 00:01:43,160
just I like this is another example of people doing really cool work that is

26
00:01:43,160 --> 00:01:46,840
counterintuitive because it's not the kind of thing you would think that pathogens would

27
00:01:46,840 --> 00:01:49,560
have a big effect on human psychology, but of course they do.

28
00:01:49,640 --> 00:01:51,400
They're huge selection pressure.

29
00:01:51,640 --> 00:01:57,000
And by doing an analysis of how pathogens affect our psychology from an evolutionary

30
00:01:57,000 --> 00:02:00,280
perspective, it suggests a whole area of research to look into.

31
00:02:00,360 --> 00:02:06,190
And as we talked about, pathogens are not a chapter in intro psych textbooks.

32
00:02:06,510 --> 00:02:12,430
But Josh is, for example, looking at how why people don't protect other people from disease

33
00:02:12,510 --> 00:02:16,910
and why why they, you know, and things like that that are really important that you

34
00:02:16,910 --> 00:02:21,070
wouldn't necessarily find out if you weren't studying the psychology of disease avoidance.

35
00:02:21,390 --> 00:02:22,350
Yeah, totally.

36
00:02:22,580 --> 00:02:25,540
And uh we even touch on reality TV a little bit.

37
00:02:25,620 --> 00:02:29,540
So if you're reality TV fans, this episode's sponsored by uh Survivor.

38
00:02:29,620 --> 00:02:32,580
David's proselytizing about the Please watch Survivor.

39
00:02:32,660 --> 00:02:33,620
Do yourself a favor.

40
00:02:33,700 --> 00:02:35,140
It's it's fantastic.

41
00:02:35,860 --> 00:02:40,100
Survivor, please send us Survivor as if Survivor is an entity.

42
00:02:40,180 --> 00:02:41,060
Um I know.

43
00:02:41,300 --> 00:02:44,630
But anyway, I enjoyed this episode with Josh and uh it was lovely.

44
00:02:44,710 --> 00:02:45,110
It was nice.

45
00:02:45,190 --> 00:02:47,510
And David, it's nice to just be back to regular episodes.

46
00:02:47,670 --> 00:02:49,510
Yeah, good to great to be back.

47
00:02:53,590 --> 00:02:56,230
Josh Ackerman, thanks for being here.

48
00:02:56,470 --> 00:03:02,390
Um, Josh, um, we haven't always done origin stories lately, um, but

49
00:03:02,390 --> 00:03:04,070
I am curious about yours.

50
00:03:04,230 --> 00:03:10,230
Um, either in terms of in what order you came across evolution versus

51
00:03:10,840 --> 00:03:14,920
the subfield of behavioral science you apply evolution to.

52
00:03:15,080 --> 00:03:16,440
Which one came first?

53
00:03:16,760 --> 00:03:17,400
Yeah.

54
00:03:18,200 --> 00:03:20,040
Well, thanks for thanks for having me.

55
00:03:20,280 --> 00:03:23,560
And um in turn, I think evolution came first.

56
00:03:23,800 --> 00:03:27,720
I was one of those kids in high school that was reading like Stephen J.

57
00:03:27,880 --> 00:03:29,720
Gould books, uh, those kind of things.

58
00:03:29,960 --> 00:03:35,170
I think really was one of the places that got me interested in just evolution as a concept.

59
00:03:35,410 --> 00:03:41,170
Um, but it it wasn't necessarily something that I, you know, knew what to do with, at least

60
00:03:41,490 --> 00:03:45,090
in terms of my um professional trajectory.

61
00:03:45,330 --> 00:03:51,330
Uh, but in college, I was undecided about what I was you

62
00:03:51,330 --> 00:03:52,050
know gonna do.

63
00:03:52,130 --> 00:03:54,610
And so I was taking uh psychology courses.

64
00:03:54,690 --> 00:03:58,930
I was also taking uh uh biological anthropology courses.

65
00:03:59,400 --> 00:04:05,240
And that's what really I think became that starting point

66
00:04:05,240 --> 00:04:07,960
for integrating kind of evolution and behavior.

67
00:04:08,280 --> 00:04:12,520
I took a course, and there really was one course that I think started it.

68
00:04:12,840 --> 00:04:18,200
It was a course on sociobiology, which I don't think was all that common in terms of like

69
00:04:18,520 --> 00:04:21,000
course offerings at a lot of places at the time.

70
00:04:21,240 --> 00:04:27,080
But it was taught by Carl van Scheik, who was

71
00:04:27,750 --> 00:04:33,270
uh he has done a lot of work i think if i remember correctly with orangutans and looking at

72
00:04:33,270 --> 00:04:38,870
the evolution of behavior but it was really it was non-human behavior and so but at the

73
00:04:38,870 --> 00:04:44,470
same time it was really clear how this would start to apply to people and um

74
00:04:44,790 --> 00:04:49,760
so that's what really got me interested in like oh I like psychology.

75
00:04:49,920 --> 00:04:50,880
I like evolution.

76
00:04:50,960 --> 00:04:52,480
And so I was still undecided.

77
00:04:52,560 --> 00:04:55,600
Should I do some kind of primatology work or should I do people?

78
00:04:56,000 --> 00:05:00,240
But uh I think for many reasons people want out.

79
00:05:00,800 --> 00:05:02,400
Yeah, um, makes sense.

80
00:05:02,560 --> 00:05:08,240
Uh did you find, do you know what what about the class you that you found interesting?

81
00:05:09,200 --> 00:05:15,170
I think it was the uh it was it was several things but I think uh one of

82
00:05:15,170 --> 00:05:21,090
it was just I mean evolution it evolution is just a fun idea uh in a lot of

83
00:05:21,090 --> 00:05:27,090
ways and it is so um universal in its

84
00:05:27,090 --> 00:05:33,090
application I think that it really was uh like sort of a lens through which to see not

85
00:05:33,090 --> 00:05:37,410
just a particular type of behavior but any aspect of what it means to be human.

86
00:05:38,440 --> 00:05:41,960
As well as having these real tools to use.

87
00:05:42,040 --> 00:05:46,840
So a lot of the sub theories that, you know, were sort of classic ones that were discussed,

88
00:05:46,920 --> 00:05:51,480
like inclusive fitness theory and so on, were things like, oh, I can really see how this is

89
00:05:51,480 --> 00:05:56,760
directly applied to non humans, but also human behavior.

90
00:05:56,920 --> 00:06:01,320
And so I think it was a sort of a combination of just sort of loving the

91
00:06:02,410 --> 00:06:08,170
biological world in general, but having a framework to organize all of that

92
00:06:08,170 --> 00:06:14,010
into something coherent um with these with these tools that sort of show you where to

93
00:06:14,010 --> 00:06:15,130
go with this kind of thing.

94
00:06:15,210 --> 00:06:21,210
And it was, I don't know, it's sort of one of these it's a big picture theory.

95
00:06:21,450 --> 00:06:27,240
And it, you know, think about like how what what it means to be alive in the universe.

96
00:06:27,400 --> 00:06:33,320
And so you've got these different sort of major uh big perspectives on how you

97
00:06:33,320 --> 00:06:37,720
want to do that and you know in different fields, but in in behavior and biology, I think

98
00:06:37,720 --> 00:06:38,600
it's evolution.

99
00:06:38,760 --> 00:06:41,240
And so um it was just exciting.

100
00:06:41,480 --> 00:06:41,720
Yeah.

101
00:06:41,880 --> 00:06:44,120
I'm I'm curious what both of you think about this.

102
00:06:44,200 --> 00:06:47,640
And this is sort of fast forwarding to in your both of your experiences.

103
00:06:47,800 --> 00:06:50,430
Um and Josh, we should start with you.

104
00:06:50,590 --> 00:06:56,510
Um, but uh I I wonder, do you think that there's individual differences in how much people

105
00:06:56,510 --> 00:06:57,630
like principles?

106
00:06:57,790 --> 00:07:01,710
Uh, in the sense of like you're describing like you're really attracted to principle.

107
00:07:01,790 --> 00:07:03,310
I think we're all here because of that.

108
00:07:03,630 --> 00:07:08,750
And anecdotally, I don't even know if I think this, but I will say it out loud as a

109
00:07:08,750 --> 00:07:09,630
hypothesis.

110
00:07:09,790 --> 00:07:14,750
There seems to be an individual difference where some people don't like principles because

111
00:07:15,640 --> 00:07:21,080
it sort of detracts from looking clever, um, or sort of being

112
00:07:21,080 --> 00:07:22,840
having unique knowledge.

113
00:07:23,000 --> 00:07:26,120
And there are aspects of human life that that makes sense, right?

114
00:07:26,200 --> 00:07:29,000
Like sort of it's a fashion um dynamic.

115
00:07:29,480 --> 00:07:34,600
Um, I don't know what do you guys think that that happens where some people dislike

116
00:07:34,600 --> 00:07:38,600
principles because of that, or am I reading into it too much?

117
00:07:38,760 --> 00:07:39,720
Um, yeah.

118
00:07:40,840 --> 00:07:43,150
Yeah, I mean, uh, there probably is.

119
00:07:43,310 --> 00:07:48,670
I think that there's, you know, I guess principles can uh what what's ringing in my head is

120
00:07:48,670 --> 00:07:54,110
this um common refrain that you sometimes hear from people about like

121
00:07:54,350 --> 00:08:00,190
removing the mystery from uh from experience by applying

122
00:08:00,190 --> 00:08:01,230
principles, right?

123
00:08:01,390 --> 00:08:06,750
And so I think that if that's the take that you have, then I mean maybe it is an individual

124
00:08:06,750 --> 00:08:11,640
difference that you just you don't want to know the details about a lot of things and so

125
00:08:11,720 --> 00:08:16,600
but um on the other side it's just like well how do we actually grapple with these things

126
00:08:16,680 --> 00:08:22,600
uh I think is I would hope maybe it's not maybe it's not universal

127
00:08:22,680 --> 00:08:26,600
but I would hope is really just sort of an embedded fundamental part of like a scientific

128
00:08:26,600 --> 00:08:27,160
mindset.

129
00:08:27,720 --> 00:08:33,350
Yeah well put yeah Yeah, it's sort of like individual differences and whether you want the

130
00:08:33,350 --> 00:08:35,750
magic trick to be explained at a magic show.

131
00:08:35,910 --> 00:08:40,470
I mean I mean me personally, I always like deeply want to know how the trick is pulled off.

132
00:08:40,710 --> 00:08:44,390
And like it's it's hard for me to enjoy a magic show because I'm just so curious about how

133
00:08:44,390 --> 00:08:46,230
they pulled off the trick.

134
00:08:46,470 --> 00:08:49,270
Um and I think some people really just don't want to know it.

135
00:08:49,430 --> 00:08:52,790
It just ruins the whole show if they if they know how the how the trick works.

136
00:08:53,350 --> 00:08:58,260
Um and I think there might be something similar when it comes to explaining

137
00:08:58,260 --> 00:09:03,460
psychological phenomena that it sort of demystifies the

138
00:09:03,460 --> 00:09:04,500
phenomenon.

139
00:09:04,820 --> 00:09:10,260
Um I've had that reaction to my work sometimes, but particularly with humor.

140
00:09:10,500 --> 00:09:15,140
Like when I explain sort of like the mundane, you know, uh game theoretic problem that that

141
00:09:15,140 --> 00:09:21,110
hu the sense of humor evolved to solve, it sort of demystifies humor uh um in a way

142
00:09:21,110 --> 00:09:24,390
that uh is kind of unsatisfying for some people.

143
00:09:24,550 --> 00:09:26,870
Um that that probably is an individual difference variable.

144
00:09:26,950 --> 00:09:27,590
I don't know.

145
00:09:28,390 --> 00:09:31,510
If you have to explain the joke, then it's uh no that's true.

146
00:09:32,230 --> 00:09:33,270
That that's true, yeah.

147
00:09:33,430 --> 00:09:37,430
But if you have to explain why why jokes exist at all, you know, they could also have have

148
00:09:37,670 --> 00:09:39,110
have a different effect.

149
00:09:39,510 --> 00:09:42,710
It's kind of it's funny because it misunderstands the point of a joke, right?

150
00:09:42,870 --> 00:09:43,990
Which is your point, David.

151
00:09:44,150 --> 00:09:44,790
Yes, exactly.

152
00:09:44,870 --> 00:09:46,710
The theory explains why it's sort of funny.

153
00:09:46,790 --> 00:09:46,950
Yeah.

154
00:09:47,110 --> 00:09:51,500
Um I wonder there must be I I'm sure there's work on I mean, I know there's individual

155
00:09:51,500 --> 00:09:53,180
differences on curiosity.

156
00:09:53,420 --> 00:09:59,420
Um, but I wonder I like this idea of uh uh Joshua this idea of

157
00:09:59,660 --> 00:10:05,660
um explaining something taking taking it as as sort of deflationary and tr

158
00:10:05,820 --> 00:10:07,020
understanding it that way.

159
00:10:07,180 --> 00:10:10,860
I would hope there's work on that as an individual difference as it would be worth looking.

160
00:10:11,100 --> 00:10:15,340
Um I'm curious I'm curious to see if that's part of the curiosity literature.

161
00:10:15,420 --> 00:10:15,580
Yeah.

162
00:10:15,740 --> 00:10:16,060
Yeah, exactly.

163
00:10:17,430 --> 00:10:21,030
for me uh it's almost like a kind of anger when something doesn't make sense.

164
00:10:21,750 --> 00:10:22,790
It's like I'm like frustrated.

165
00:10:22,870 --> 00:10:24,070
I'm like, no, it has to make sense.

166
00:10:24,150 --> 00:10:24,710
That doesn't make sense.

167
00:10:24,950 --> 00:10:25,590
Yeah, you can't tell me.

168
00:10:25,670 --> 00:10:27,190
Yeah, you're you're it's a secret.

169
00:10:27,270 --> 00:10:27,430
Yeah.

170
00:10:27,510 --> 00:10:31,590
It's sort of like I know, yeah, some people I know they're like it's angry because it's

171
00:10:31,590 --> 00:10:33,350
like it's keeping something away from you.

172
00:10:33,430 --> 00:10:36,230
It's like keeping it's uh it's a magician.

173
00:10:36,310 --> 00:10:37,110
Um yeah.

174
00:10:37,590 --> 00:10:41,910
Uh maybe this need for uncertainty would be one of the individual differences that is

175
00:10:42,230 --> 00:10:42,870
that's there.

176
00:10:43,200 --> 00:10:47,600
Although I was thinking when you're talking about this, I I don't necessarily believe that

177
00:10:47,600 --> 00:10:52,400
understanding you know how something works removes the I'm gonna say mystery, I don't know

178
00:10:52,400 --> 00:10:54,640
if that's the right word, but the excitement about it.

179
00:10:54,800 --> 00:10:55,040
Yeah.

180
00:10:55,200 --> 00:11:00,960
Uh and you know I also this is I guess I'm just I

181
00:11:00,960 --> 00:11:03,760
essentially was a nerd as a kid, but I was also into magic.

182
00:11:04,000 --> 00:11:09,570
And uh I I think that understanding that there is a solution to how this works

183
00:11:09,730 --> 00:11:13,170
isn't necessarily the same thing as wanting to know the solution.

184
00:11:13,330 --> 00:11:18,690
So I didn't always want to know the solution to magic, but I got that there was a practical

185
00:11:18,690 --> 00:11:19,570
way of doing it.

186
00:11:19,810 --> 00:11:20,130
Right.

187
00:11:20,290 --> 00:11:26,210
And so I think even when I understand aspects of principles or theories,

188
00:11:26,370 --> 00:11:32,300
whatever it is, it doesn't take away much like people often assume, it doesn't take away

189
00:11:32,300 --> 00:11:32,940
from that.

190
00:11:33,100 --> 00:11:39,100
Um that I guess the mystery of like how it came to be in the first place, what

191
00:11:39,100 --> 00:11:41,340
it means in the bigger picture, those kind of things.

192
00:11:41,580 --> 00:11:41,740
Yeah.

193
00:11:41,900 --> 00:11:42,060
Yeah.

194
00:11:42,140 --> 00:11:46,540
For me at least, like when I learned about how my visual system worked, it was more amazing

195
00:11:46,700 --> 00:11:52,060
because I was like, I can't believe that all those little doohickeys are all summing up to

196
00:11:52,060 --> 00:11:52,940
this thing I'm doing.

197
00:11:53,020 --> 00:11:56,060
And that seems even more incredible than just the thing I'm seeing.

198
00:11:56,220 --> 00:11:56,540
Yeah.

199
00:11:56,780 --> 00:11:58,220
Yeah, exactly.

200
00:11:58,770 --> 00:12:03,570
So PSA kids, don't um don't think that science explains away things.

201
00:12:03,650 --> 00:12:05,010
But yeah, it is an individual thing.

202
00:12:05,090 --> 00:12:05,330
Okay.

203
00:12:05,410 --> 00:12:06,850
Anyway, so that that was great.

204
00:12:06,930 --> 00:12:12,610
Um uh you study, roughly speaking, um, illness.

205
00:12:12,850 --> 00:12:16,770
Uh or is that how would you characterize uh yeah, maybe that's completely the wrong way to

206
00:12:17,250 --> 00:12:18,370
no, I don't think that's wrong.

207
00:12:18,850 --> 00:12:19,490
Yeah yeah.

208
00:12:19,730 --> 00:12:23,330
Um I think that the major it wasn't always like this.

209
00:12:23,490 --> 00:12:29,460
I took a lot sort of a winding route to get to this uh topic area, But um I

210
00:12:29,460 --> 00:12:34,500
would say I'm interested in the role of infection in our psychology.

211
00:12:34,740 --> 00:12:34,980
Right.

212
00:12:35,140 --> 00:12:39,620
So illness can be broader, and there's a lot of overlap, I think, between infection and

213
00:12:39,620 --> 00:12:45,380
non-infection, but specifically how infection plays a role and uh

214
00:12:45,380 --> 00:12:51,370
who we are, sort of as what what it means to be human, is very much grounded in the history

215
00:12:51,370 --> 00:12:57,290
of infection uh and how we think these days and how we manage uh the

216
00:12:57,530 --> 00:13:01,610
particular threats and opportunities that come along with infection.

217
00:13:02,570 --> 00:13:02,810
Yeah.

218
00:13:03,050 --> 00:13:06,970
No, it's it's uh a particularly important point reminds me of the episode we had with Dan

219
00:13:06,970 --> 00:13:12,010
Conroy Beam about how one of the most widely accepted theories for why we sexually

220
00:13:12,010 --> 00:13:17,640
reproduce at all as opposed to clonally reproducing is because of the risk of infection of

221
00:13:17,800 --> 00:13:23,800
pathogens just constantly evolving to hack our biological machinery and

222
00:13:23,800 --> 00:13:29,560
the need to throw out a lot of variation to make it harder for the pathogens to keep up

223
00:13:29,560 --> 00:13:29,880
with.

224
00:13:30,680 --> 00:13:35,880
So you know one of the most basic aspects of who we are as a species, the the fact that we

225
00:13:35,880 --> 00:13:41,770
have men and women and reproduce sexually, like that itself derives ultimately from the

226
00:13:41,770 --> 00:13:42,570
threat of pathogen.

227
00:13:42,730 --> 00:13:46,090
So it really is, really does lie at the at the foundations of who we are.

228
00:13:46,810 --> 00:13:47,530
Yeah, exactly.

229
00:13:47,610 --> 00:13:53,370
I think it's true in our history, and it's true even in our current day-to-day life,

230
00:13:53,530 --> 00:13:54,410
in a sense.

231
00:13:54,650 --> 00:14:00,490
Um, there's this fact that I like to throw out with uh with evolutionary psych courses, um,

232
00:14:00,730 --> 00:14:06,540
where essentially if you just think about yourself right here sitting right now on

233
00:14:06,540 --> 00:14:11,420
this podcast, if you were to count up all the cells in your body, more than half of those

234
00:14:11,420 --> 00:14:12,700
are bacteria right now.

235
00:14:12,860 --> 00:14:17,260
So you're actually more bacteria than human, at least by number of cells in your body,

236
00:14:17,500 --> 00:14:22,460
which is suggesting that there's a very, and it's maybe not what we would call infection

237
00:14:22,460 --> 00:14:27,980
necessarily, but it is still the agents of infection are there, present at all times inside

238
00:14:28,060 --> 00:14:28,220
us.

239
00:14:28,770 --> 00:14:34,610
Yeah, we talked to um uh Catherine White Whiteson about um uh the microbiome too

240
00:14:34,690 --> 00:14:38,770
which is mind blowing that was a great great episode yeah cool oh thanks yeah we'll pay you

241
00:14:38,770 --> 00:14:44,690
later um you you mentioned that the what it means to be human is is is

242
00:14:44,850 --> 00:14:49,090
is really driven by this can you unpack that because that sounds very intriguing.

243
00:14:49,170 --> 00:14:50,370
Uh what do you mean by that?

244
00:14:50,450 --> 00:14:56,260
Yeah um I mean essentially what at least the starting point is what David was

245
00:14:56,420 --> 00:14:57,060
was talking about.

246
00:14:57,540 --> 00:15:03,140
So this idea that much of how our physical form is set up, but also our

247
00:15:03,140 --> 00:15:08,900
behavioral tendencies are a response to the very, very long history of

248
00:15:08,900 --> 00:15:09,620
perfection.

249
00:15:09,780 --> 00:15:10,020
Right.

250
00:15:10,180 --> 00:15:16,100
So thinking everything about things like um yeah, the mating behaviors that we

251
00:15:16,100 --> 00:15:21,730
show, um, the fact that we have uh uh live births

252
00:15:21,970 --> 00:15:24,210
is is related to infection.

253
00:15:24,450 --> 00:15:26,610
Um so I think it's something like that.

254
00:15:26,770 --> 00:15:31,090
I mean, there's an important theory, I think, around the placenta being a response to, or

255
00:15:31,090 --> 00:15:36,530
actually a both a response to infection, but also the the result of a particular infection.

256
00:15:36,850 --> 00:15:42,450
Um, and so those in combination with a lot of the I'm

257
00:15:42,480 --> 00:15:47,520
particularly interested in the social behavior, the ways in which people navigate various

258
00:15:47,520 --> 00:15:53,520
types of social behaviors and various instances of sociality as a sort of in

259
00:15:53,520 --> 00:15:56,800
terms of the trade-offs that people have to make with infection.

260
00:15:56,960 --> 00:16:02,160
And so I think that although it's not something that is top of mind for many people in

261
00:16:02,160 --> 00:16:06,880
day-to-day life, I think that it is something that is always either lurking beneath the

262
00:16:06,880 --> 00:16:11,470
surface, or for some of us that are a little bit more germophobic.

263
00:16:11,790 --> 00:16:17,150
Um, it's a constant issue to navigate through our through our lives because every instance

264
00:16:17,150 --> 00:16:22,990
of interaction, whether it's with another person, um, some type of food or

265
00:16:22,990 --> 00:16:28,910
object, uh, is has the potential to create this kind of uh problem for us.

266
00:16:29,070 --> 00:16:31,550
And so it's it's just always there.

267
00:16:32,080 --> 00:16:32,480
Interesting.

268
00:16:32,560 --> 00:16:38,000
So it's kind of like gravity where it's a part of the design baked into the

269
00:16:38,000 --> 00:16:38,880
phenotype.

270
00:16:39,040 --> 00:16:44,720
But because gravity is constant, I mean, we we think about it, but we don't usually we

271
00:16:44,720 --> 00:16:48,400
think about like what objects are falling or could something fall in the same way, like

272
00:16:48,480 --> 00:16:49,360
could I get sick?

273
00:16:49,520 --> 00:16:52,640
But the fact of pathogens is invariable.

274
00:16:52,720 --> 00:16:55,680
So we it just sort of cancels out and we don't really think about it.

275
00:16:55,920 --> 00:16:57,520
Yeah, I think that's a great analogy, right?

276
00:16:57,600 --> 00:17:03,390
It's something that's always affecting us, but it only sometimes comes to top of mind, you

277
00:17:03,390 --> 00:17:03,550
know.

278
00:17:03,710 --> 00:17:07,070
Uh maybe not often enough sometimes.

279
00:17:07,390 --> 00:17:07,470
Yeah.

280
00:17:07,710 --> 00:17:13,470
So it's an intellect interesting intellectual exercise aided presumably by thinking from an

281
00:17:13,470 --> 00:17:19,230
evolutionary perspective of how is our psychology shaped, given that this

282
00:17:19,230 --> 00:17:23,390
is really strong selection pressure, but at the same time there's instinct blindness

283
00:17:23,550 --> 00:17:28,840
because it's not maybe, I don't know, what what a psychology book 50 years ago did it have

284
00:17:28,840 --> 00:17:30,360
much much about infection?

285
00:17:30,520 --> 00:17:31,400
Probably not.

286
00:17:31,480 --> 00:17:32,600
I don't I don't know actually.

287
00:17:32,680 --> 00:17:38,200
I mean I think even today, most psychology books would have nothing about infection in

288
00:17:38,200 --> 00:17:42,920
them, um, unless they're taking this kind of either biological or evolutionary angle to

289
00:17:42,920 --> 00:17:43,240
them.

290
00:17:43,400 --> 00:17:44,040
Um, yeah.

291
00:17:44,120 --> 00:17:48,650
I mean, I I just gave a talk to some people and they were like, oh, this is so interesting.

292
00:17:48,730 --> 00:17:50,330
It's stuff you would never think about.

293
00:17:50,570 --> 00:17:53,610
Like, well, we should be thinking about these kinds of things.

294
00:17:53,930 --> 00:17:54,010
Yeah.

295
00:17:54,170 --> 00:17:58,490
It reminds me of Annie Wirts's like plants where it's just like it's so foundational.

296
00:17:58,570 --> 00:18:02,090
It's like poison versus food, you know, like infection.

297
00:18:02,330 --> 00:18:03,610
So many people die.

298
00:18:03,770 --> 00:18:06,090
So many of our ancestors died from infection.

299
00:18:06,330 --> 00:18:10,490
We're very lucky uh to to not to take that for granted.

300
00:18:10,570 --> 00:18:15,600
And like we're I think we're like 1.5 point five or point seven five generation of taking

301
00:18:15,600 --> 00:18:18,240
that for granted and it's already biting us.

302
00:18:18,400 --> 00:18:23,520
Taking it for granted is already we're we're we're quickly eroding that taking for granted

303
00:18:23,520 --> 00:18:23,840
issue.

304
00:18:23,920 --> 00:18:26,720
Um where like outbreak childhood diseases outbreaks.

305
00:18:26,800 --> 00:18:31,920
But yeah but yeah, so I mean it's really it's it's it's funny um to just interject that um

306
00:18:32,080 --> 00:18:34,960
people are like, Oh yeah, that's that's what a novelty, right?

307
00:18:35,120 --> 00:18:37,920
Uh yeah, exactly.

308
00:18:38,080 --> 00:18:42,910
Uh there's this it's not really evolutionary, I guess, but just essentially the taking it

309
00:18:42,910 --> 00:18:43,550
for granted, right?

310
00:18:43,630 --> 00:18:48,030
So if you look at the places that are showing the biggest spikes in vaccine hesitancy, so

311
00:18:48,190 --> 00:18:51,870
people who are, you know, not as interested in getting vaccinated, it's the places where

312
00:18:51,870 --> 00:18:53,630
vaccines have been the most effective.

313
00:18:53,870 --> 00:18:56,830
And you're just not, you just don't have the constant exposure.

314
00:18:56,910 --> 00:19:00,830
So you don't think that you need to worry about things like vaccines.

315
00:19:00,990 --> 00:19:06,000
Um, so yeah, that's uh definitely not top of mind for a lot of people.

316
00:19:06,160 --> 00:19:10,480
But yeah, I mean, I think that's yeah, one of the things that I I thought was the most

317
00:19:10,480 --> 00:19:15,120
interesting about an evolutionary perspective with psychology is that you do have to kind

318
00:19:15,120 --> 00:19:21,120
of back away sometimes from the most complex kinds of thought patterns or behaviors that

319
00:19:21,120 --> 00:19:24,480
people you know might have been studying for a long time and really get down to the the

320
00:19:24,480 --> 00:19:30,480
core of what people what what is what are the key affordances or motivations or

321
00:19:30,640 --> 00:19:33,520
or uh inputs that are really out there.

322
00:19:33,770 --> 00:19:34,090
Hmm.

323
00:19:34,810 --> 00:19:40,570
Do you think the um our our infection or pathogen psychology could perversely

324
00:19:40,650 --> 00:19:43,850
play a role in driving vaccine skepticism?

325
00:19:44,090 --> 00:19:49,930
And that there is something kind of scary about stabbing yourself and putting a

326
00:19:49,930 --> 00:19:55,530
foreign substance into your body, you know, based on you know faith that the person who's

327
00:19:55,530 --> 00:20:00,170
telling you to do this has your best interests at heart, uh and and knowing that the

328
00:20:00,170 --> 00:20:03,740
substance you're putting in your body is itself a a disease.

329
00:20:03,900 --> 00:20:08,940
Like it it seems like, you know, um uh you know people often talk about vaccine skeptics as

330
00:20:09,020 --> 00:20:13,980
you know being you know gullible or un unintelligent or something but it in many cases like

331
00:20:14,220 --> 00:20:18,460
the uh it is more counterintuitive to take the vaccine.

332
00:20:18,620 --> 00:20:23,020
It is it is uh it's kind of hard to wrap your head around like I feel like that's more

333
00:20:23,020 --> 00:20:27,020
psychologically mysterious is why so many people go along with vaccines than why so many

334
00:20:27,020 --> 00:20:28,380
people are are resistant to them.

335
00:20:29,020 --> 00:20:34,770
Because it takes a lot of you know uh overriding uh uh of your instincts of

336
00:20:34,930 --> 00:20:40,850
of what is you know a good idea absolutely i mean uh i think it might have been josh tiber

337
00:20:41,090 --> 00:20:47,090
that's done some work on this idea of um what is i think in the field called body envelope

338
00:20:47,090 --> 00:20:52,930
violations uh yeah so the idea of like yeah stabbing yourself creating an open wound

339
00:20:53,330 --> 00:20:56,930
uh to protect yourself not not the most um

340
00:21:01,080 --> 00:21:05,320
And I don't know that I would be interested to know.

341
00:21:05,480 --> 00:21:10,520
I don't think that most of the people who are hesitant about vaccines are really thinking

342
00:21:10,520 --> 00:21:16,440
deeply about the idea that they're getting injected with bacteria or virus of some sort,

343
00:21:16,840 --> 00:21:17,880
even if it's inert.

344
00:21:18,520 --> 00:21:23,320
I think it's probably more the superficial, either don't want the needle, maybe it's

345
00:21:23,320 --> 00:21:28,750
something about the information that they're receiving around these things, whether it's

346
00:21:28,750 --> 00:21:34,750
historically from how certain parties have used vaccines and other kinds of injections in

347
00:21:34,750 --> 00:21:39,790
the past, to you know, the messaging that's out there today around

348
00:21:41,390 --> 00:21:47,310
what vaccines mean, how what role they play in people's group identities, and so on.

349
00:21:47,950 --> 00:21:53,860
But certainly the sensory experience of it is really the

350
00:21:53,860 --> 00:21:56,900
opposite of what you would to help protect yourself.

351
00:21:57,220 --> 00:21:59,220
It certainly makes it easier for a bunch of people.

352
00:21:59,300 --> 00:22:02,900
Like if you got up on a soapbox and said, Hey, you know this thing where we all have to go

353
00:22:02,900 --> 00:22:04,740
through this painful thing at the doctor's office?

354
00:22:04,820 --> 00:22:08,180
Let's not do that anymore, versus like, hey, let's not eat candy anymore.

355
00:22:08,260 --> 00:22:12,100
You know, like one of those things is going to be easier to get people on board with on if

356
00:22:12,100 --> 00:22:13,780
they're not like burying their kids, right?

357
00:22:13,860 --> 00:22:18,020
Um because they're they died from some disease, which was happening, you know, two

358
00:22:18,020 --> 00:22:18,740
generations ago.

359
00:22:19,090 --> 00:22:21,570
Yeah, it makes me think about most places, many places.

360
00:22:22,130 --> 00:22:22,770
Yeah, exactly.

361
00:22:22,850 --> 00:22:28,690
It makes me think about that whether there is a uh correlation with this kind of

362
00:22:28,690 --> 00:22:33,730
hesitancy around something like vaccines or other types of injections.

363
00:22:34,050 --> 00:22:40,050
And this tendency towards towards wanting to, like if you're a parent, I guess,

364
00:22:40,290 --> 00:22:46,050
not expose your children to any type of hardship, despite the fact that those kinds of

365
00:22:46,050 --> 00:22:51,760
experiences can produce better outcomes where our minds and our bodies are

366
00:22:51,760 --> 00:22:57,040
designed to, in some sense, expect some of those kinds of experiences.

367
00:22:57,200 --> 00:23:01,280
And when you don't trigger them, then you might have problematic downstream outcomes.

368
00:23:01,440 --> 00:23:07,360
I wonder how much there is that kind of sense that it's really about removing

369
00:23:07,360 --> 00:23:08,880
all difficulty.

370
00:23:09,350 --> 00:23:10,070
That's interesting.

371
00:23:10,150 --> 00:23:10,390
Yeah.

372
00:23:10,470 --> 00:23:14,950
I also I would love to have somebody, and again, maybe I I haven't looked this up.

373
00:23:15,110 --> 00:23:19,030
I would, I would, I would love to have a cultural evolution person collaborate with like a

374
00:23:19,030 --> 00:23:24,550
developmental psychologist on this because the idea that you should um protect your kids

375
00:23:24,550 --> 00:23:27,510
from difficulty, I think Josh, that's like spot on.

376
00:23:27,670 --> 00:23:29,350
But it's clearly not universal.

377
00:23:29,430 --> 00:23:33,270
I mean, even German, Germany is very different than the US in that respect, and

378
00:23:33,270 --> 00:23:39,040
hunter-gatherer, like the the um uh Akka kids, for example, kind of, you know,

379
00:23:39,120 --> 00:23:43,920
like famously are very self-sufficient, you know, or you know, Schwar kids, you know,

380
00:23:44,000 --> 00:23:46,160
they're like using machetes and things like that.

381
00:23:46,320 --> 00:23:49,440
Um, you know, we talked to Shinalu Levy about, you know, they're keeping an eye on the

382
00:23:49,440 --> 00:23:52,960
kids, the toddlers using the machete, but they're and it's not, you know, but they're still

383
00:23:52,960 --> 00:23:54,160
using a machete, you know.

384
00:23:54,320 --> 00:23:59,920
Um, but this idea, I wonder if it's just this thing of if there's a market for

385
00:24:00,240 --> 00:24:06,130
precaution and um combined with other things, you can

386
00:24:06,130 --> 00:24:11,810
just imagine this thing of there's always this appetite for easier

387
00:24:11,810 --> 00:24:14,770
things um or protective things for your kids.

388
00:24:14,930 --> 00:24:20,930
And it just creates this sort of bad dynamic where you um you overprotect yourself

389
00:24:20,930 --> 00:24:22,850
and kids from difficulty.

390
00:24:22,930 --> 00:24:23,410
Yeah.

391
00:24:23,730 --> 00:24:24,050
Yeah.

392
00:24:24,210 --> 00:24:27,170
Um to the detriment of their well-being sometimes.

393
00:24:27,400 --> 00:24:27,560
Yeah.

394
00:24:27,960 --> 00:24:28,120
Yeah.

395
00:24:28,280 --> 00:24:29,560
I mean it would be interesting to see.

396
00:24:29,640 --> 00:24:34,440
I mean, I uh it's probably a very complicated phenomenon, but I bet one factor is just the

397
00:24:34,440 --> 00:24:36,440
total fertility rate of the population.

398
00:24:36,520 --> 00:24:40,440
Like if you have a smaller number of kids, you're gonna be more precious about each

399
00:24:40,440 --> 00:24:42,760
individual kid and try to minimize the risk.

400
00:24:42,920 --> 00:24:47,320
But if you have a lot of kids, then your your fitness interests are more distributed and

401
00:24:47,320 --> 00:24:52,370
you could be you could afford to be a little more risk prone uh uh in evolutionary terms

402
00:24:52,450 --> 00:24:56,450
but if your all of your fitness is bound up with one kid or two kids, like you really need

403
00:24:56,450 --> 00:25:01,410
to make sure that nothing bad happens to them because you know I don't know.

404
00:25:01,650 --> 00:25:07,090
Yeah that's also uh there's also a thing of like um if the kids get hurt is it going to be

405
00:25:07,090 --> 00:25:12,140
catastrophic so like just US versus Germany like I I'm much more worried about getting hurt

406
00:25:12,300 --> 00:25:15,260
just because there's like, you know, health insurance is worse here.

407
00:25:15,420 --> 00:25:20,220
So um I'm sure that plays a part too, although that doesn't explain the hunter-gatherer

408
00:25:20,220 --> 00:25:20,380
thing.

409
00:25:20,460 --> 00:25:25,820
But I guess, David, the point would be then you're you've got multiple irons in the fire,

410
00:25:25,900 --> 00:25:27,980
as it were, in terms of the next generation.

411
00:25:28,060 --> 00:25:28,540
Yeah.

412
00:25:28,860 --> 00:25:29,020
Yeah.

413
00:25:29,180 --> 00:25:34,670
And I think the the culture evolution piece might be useful in thinking about whether

414
00:25:35,150 --> 00:25:40,910
some of this precautionary tendencies is forecasting potential blame

415
00:25:40,910 --> 00:25:45,790
that people might um might expect that if uh you know somebody gets your kid gets hurt,

416
00:25:45,870 --> 00:25:46,750
it's gonna come back to you.

417
00:25:47,550 --> 00:25:50,030
You are the bad parent, uh essentially.

418
00:25:50,190 --> 00:25:52,670
And so anything you can do to ward that off.

419
00:25:52,990 --> 00:25:55,470
Yeah, or like legal repercussions.

420
00:25:55,630 --> 00:25:58,430
I also think, you know, like just the structure of the society, right?

421
00:25:58,590 --> 00:26:04,500
Like where if you're um yeah, if you have to be defensive, um, and you know, or like even

422
00:26:04,500 --> 00:26:05,220
as a school, right?

423
00:26:05,300 --> 00:26:08,740
Like if where you're worried you're gonna get sued, it just selects for an institution that

424
00:26:08,740 --> 00:26:12,180
isn't like, well, what's the way we're gonna expose most kids to good risk?

425
00:26:12,340 --> 00:26:16,820
It's what's the way we're gonna keep all kids as safe as possible so the one kid doesn't

426
00:26:16,820 --> 00:26:18,820
sue, you know, the one family doesn't sue us.

427
00:26:18,900 --> 00:26:19,060
Yeah.

428
00:26:19,300 --> 00:26:19,380
Yeah.

429
00:26:19,540 --> 00:26:21,060
How are we gonna reduce our own risk?

430
00:26:21,380 --> 00:26:22,260
Yeah, exactly.

431
00:26:22,500 --> 00:26:22,900
Exactly.

432
00:26:23,220 --> 00:26:23,780
Yeah, yeah.

433
00:26:23,860 --> 00:26:27,730
No, that's that would be a really great area for there's just all these unintended

434
00:26:27,730 --> 00:26:28,290
consequences.

435
00:26:28,770 --> 00:26:31,570
Really this the a lot of this is about risk, as you just put.

436
00:26:31,650 --> 00:26:35,170
Like I think that's really putting the the the heart at the heart of it.

437
00:26:35,250 --> 00:26:40,050
It's really uh strategies for uh guarding against different risks.

438
00:26:40,370 --> 00:26:40,690
Yeah.

439
00:26:40,850 --> 00:26:41,490
Yeah.

440
00:26:42,130 --> 00:26:43,250
Interesting stuff.

441
00:26:43,650 --> 00:26:48,770
So you you I mean, speaking of how different features of the ecology might affect our this

442
00:26:48,850 --> 00:26:50,450
this parental overprotectiveness.

443
00:26:50,530 --> 00:26:55,320
I know you've done a lot of work on how different features of people's environments might

444
00:26:55,320 --> 00:26:56,680
affect their decision making.

445
00:26:57,000 --> 00:26:58,760
We've just talked about pathogens.

446
00:26:59,240 --> 00:27:05,080
What are some of the other ecological features that might push me to behave in a

447
00:27:05,080 --> 00:27:08,280
different way or make different decisions for myself or for my family?

448
00:27:08,760 --> 00:27:11,960
Yeah, I mean, some of them still relate to pathogen risk in some sense.

449
00:27:12,120 --> 00:27:15,240
So something like population density is a big one.

450
00:27:15,320 --> 00:27:20,920
And a lot of these are I'm I'm drawing to some extent on work from a former

451
00:27:20,920 --> 00:27:26,070
postdoc of mine, Oliver Singh, who has done a lot of work like mapping some of the

452
00:27:26,070 --> 00:27:31,270
dimensions that are common in behavioral ecology work onto human ecology work, essentially.

453
00:27:31,430 --> 00:27:33,510
So population density being one of those.

454
00:27:33,670 --> 00:27:38,630
So if you live in these places where there's just a lot of people around, that does present

455
00:27:38,630 --> 00:27:43,190
an increased chance of infection transmission, pathogen transmission, but also a lot of

456
00:27:43,190 --> 00:27:48,200
other things in terms of competition for resources and what you have to do to navigate

457
00:27:48,200 --> 00:27:48,520
that.

458
00:27:49,240 --> 00:27:55,160
Another dimension that I've done probably more work on has to do with the sex ratio of

459
00:27:55,160 --> 00:27:56,280
the environment.

460
00:27:56,760 --> 00:28:02,200
So this is something that's widely known to have an effect, even at small scale

461
00:28:02,200 --> 00:28:03,880
increments of difference.

462
00:28:04,840 --> 00:28:10,280
And so, yeah, if the population or at least the local population that you're exposed to is

463
00:28:10,490 --> 00:28:15,930
shifted or biased in one direction or the other in terms of women versus men, that has an

464
00:28:15,930 --> 00:28:20,490
impact on a variety of things that people think about and do, behave.

465
00:28:20,810 --> 00:28:26,810
So again, things related to, in some sense, resource competition, but at the heart

466
00:28:26,810 --> 00:28:32,640
of it is probably some connection to mating opportunities,

467
00:28:32,800 --> 00:28:36,560
or at least people's forecasted mating opportunities.

468
00:28:37,360 --> 00:28:43,040
And so yeah, so sex ratio is one where we've seen a wide

469
00:28:43,040 --> 00:28:48,240
variety of effects, everything from things related to changes in aggression or associations

470
00:28:48,240 --> 00:28:53,280
with aggression to decision making around risk again.

471
00:28:53,520 --> 00:28:59,450
So how much people are wanting to essentially uh be cautious about the kinds of

472
00:28:59,450 --> 00:29:00,490
decisions that they're making.

473
00:29:00,650 --> 00:29:04,410
We've looked at that often in sort of financial decisions, but I think it probably spreads

474
00:29:04,410 --> 00:29:06,090
to other kinds of decisions.

475
00:29:06,250 --> 00:29:08,730
Um, versus kind of going all in.

476
00:29:08,970 --> 00:29:14,730
Uh, and these kind of patterns are things that we see again in non-human animals just as

477
00:29:14,730 --> 00:29:17,690
much as we see them in human animal uh humans.

478
00:29:17,850 --> 00:29:23,020
Uh, and so um those are probably some of the ones that we've looked the most at.

479
00:29:23,580 --> 00:29:27,820
But there's there's others like mortality risk, how dangerous is the environment that

480
00:29:27,820 --> 00:29:31,420
you're in, how much are people being aggressive towards each other?

481
00:29:34,060 --> 00:29:35,500
It's all that's coming to mind right now.

482
00:29:35,820 --> 00:29:35,980
Yeah.

483
00:29:36,060 --> 00:29:40,460
The the uh riskiness, can you unpack what the direction is?

484
00:29:40,620 --> 00:29:44,060
Is this with so unmated men acting risk?

485
00:29:44,460 --> 00:29:46,060
What can you unpack what the result is?

486
00:29:46,300 --> 00:29:46,700
Yeah.

487
00:29:46,940 --> 00:29:52,450
So um The influence of some of these

488
00:29:53,010 --> 00:29:58,130
uh dimensional factors is not always simple.

489
00:29:58,370 --> 00:30:04,290
So it does we we sort of see different kinds of effects depending upon the um

490
00:30:04,450 --> 00:30:07,890
the type of question that you're looking at, but also the the sample that you're looking

491
00:30:07,890 --> 00:30:08,050
at.

492
00:30:08,130 --> 00:30:12,450
So sometimes we see, for instance, sex ratio effects on a whole population, sometimes it's

493
00:30:12,450 --> 00:30:14,450
only on, like, for instance, males.

494
00:30:14,770 --> 00:30:20,740
Um, But yeah, so if you have a male skewed uh population

495
00:30:21,060 --> 00:30:26,580
where there's more men than women, that means, you know, from the point of view of uh

496
00:30:26,580 --> 00:30:31,300
mating opportunities, it reduces the number of potential opportunities for any given man,

497
00:30:31,380 --> 00:30:32,980
you know, all else equal.

498
00:30:33,140 --> 00:30:38,980
Um, and so that can produce different outcomes like um a

499
00:30:39,300 --> 00:30:45,070
desire to essentially show off more, so to be competitive with other

500
00:30:45,070 --> 00:30:48,030
men, so to stand out from the crowd.

501
00:30:48,430 --> 00:30:53,710
It can lead to things like feeling like, okay, well, if I don't have uh

502
00:30:54,430 --> 00:30:59,150
strong possibility of finding a partner, and I don't know that a lot of this is especially

503
00:30:59,150 --> 00:31:04,780
top of mind, but this is the logic anyway, um, That if you don't have a strong opportunity,

504
00:31:04,860 --> 00:31:07,740
well, you might need to really break out.

505
00:31:07,980 --> 00:31:11,260
And so what that means is taking more risks.

506
00:31:11,580 --> 00:31:17,340
And so doing things like we sometimes are doing studies where we're looking at financial

507
00:31:17,340 --> 00:31:22,300
decision making where people were having to make decisions between spreading out their

508
00:31:22,300 --> 00:31:27,820
investments essentially in finances into different options, which is essentially a form of

509
00:31:27,820 --> 00:31:33,350
bet hedging, and uh versus uh sort of putting everything into one risky option like where

510
00:31:33,350 --> 00:31:38,790
the payoff could be big but the risk is high um and in these male skewed environments or at

511
00:31:38,790 --> 00:31:42,470
least when people were thinking about male skewed environments you see more risk-taking

512
00:31:42,470 --> 00:31:48,150
behavior so less bet hedging and that's not inconsistent with what we see and again some

513
00:31:48,150 --> 00:31:52,470
other species like birds will do this in terms of the number of eggs they lay depending on

514
00:31:52,470 --> 00:31:55,760
the environmental conditions or the sex ratio of that.

515
00:31:56,240 --> 00:32:02,080
So, but in terms of like larger scale work at like a population or

516
00:32:02,080 --> 00:32:07,360
a country level uh analysis, there's a lot of interesting work suggesting that when you

517
00:32:07,360 --> 00:32:12,800
have these kinds of shifts in a sex ratio, you get really wide-scale

518
00:32:13,520 --> 00:32:16,880
population level uh changes in behavior.

519
00:32:17,120 --> 00:32:22,240
So things like at least at the mating level, if you have a more female skewed environment,

520
00:32:22,530 --> 00:32:27,970
that means that it's always about the minority sex having more power on the mating market,

521
00:32:28,130 --> 00:32:28,370
right?

522
00:32:28,530 --> 00:32:34,530
And so you see things like less um long-term relationships, people be more open to

523
00:32:34,770 --> 00:32:36,130
shorter-term relationships.

524
00:32:36,210 --> 00:32:40,050
Uh, whereas you get the opposite of that when in these male skewed environments, people

525
00:32:40,050 --> 00:32:42,210
want to stay the relationships if they find them.

526
00:32:42,370 --> 00:32:46,770
They want to, so men actually do more caregiving of children.

527
00:32:47,010 --> 00:32:51,560
Um, but there's a lot more people, a lot more men, I guess, left out, and those are the

528
00:32:51,560 --> 00:32:54,680
ones showing higher degrees of aggression and competition.

529
00:32:56,280 --> 00:32:56,760
Interesting.

530
00:32:56,920 --> 00:33:02,760
Uh it reminds me of um some work uh I saw at HBus uh by Pat Barclay on

531
00:33:02,840 --> 00:33:07,160
on risk taking, yeah, where he uh defines two different types of risk taking.

532
00:33:07,320 --> 00:33:12,520
One is where you would expect it to be higher among uh people with l in you know bad shape

533
00:33:12,600 --> 00:33:18,200
or in in poor condition or in dire straits, where they're below some need threshold.

534
00:33:18,450 --> 00:33:22,370
Um you know, let's say you know they're they're not going to find a partner, they don't

535
00:33:22,370 --> 00:33:26,530
have adequate resources to survive uh or be healthy.

536
00:33:26,610 --> 00:33:30,690
Uh and in that case, they just want to do anything possible to get above that need

537
00:33:30,690 --> 00:33:31,170
threshold.

538
00:33:31,330 --> 00:33:34,770
And that means they're going to accept riskier uh decisions.

539
00:33:34,930 --> 00:33:37,490
And then there's the other type of risk taking where it's actually the opposite, where

540
00:33:37,490 --> 00:33:40,130
you're when you're in particularly good condition and in good shape.

541
00:33:40,210 --> 00:33:41,810
Uh you have a lot of resources.

542
00:33:41,890 --> 00:33:45,170
And in that case, the costs of risk taking are just going to be lower because you're going

543
00:33:45,170 --> 00:33:49,860
to be buffered against the downside, presumably, and you might have greater ability to to

544
00:33:49,860 --> 00:33:51,140
show off by taking risks.

545
00:33:51,460 --> 00:33:56,260
If you're wealthier, you can afford to gamble more and show off your wealth.

546
00:33:56,900 --> 00:34:01,460
And so that predicts, you know, basically the opposite pattern based on, you know, where

547
00:34:01,780 --> 00:34:03,700
you're doing your best, where you're doing your worst.

548
00:34:03,940 --> 00:34:08,100
But it seems like if in a in a biased sex ratio environment, you know, both of those

549
00:34:08,100 --> 00:34:11,930
factors would be at play because you're going to have more, let's say, you know, it's a

550
00:34:12,010 --> 00:34:14,090
it's a male-biased sex ratio.

551
00:34:14,250 --> 00:34:18,570
You're gonna have more men who are below that need threshold where they uh it's looking to

552
00:34:18,570 --> 00:34:22,090
them like they're not gonna be able to find a mate and they're need to take whatever risk

553
00:34:22,090 --> 00:34:24,730
is necessary to get above that threshold.

554
00:34:24,890 --> 00:34:29,770
And then at the same time, um, the men who are doing better, they might want to show off

555
00:34:29,770 --> 00:34:33,530
more uh and and and better outcompete uh other men.

556
00:34:33,610 --> 00:34:36,650
And so you might have both of those types of risk-taking increase.

557
00:34:37,050 --> 00:34:37,770
Yeah, exactly.

558
00:34:37,930 --> 00:34:42,580
I think what you're hitting is this idea that it's you're often when you're thinking about

559
00:34:42,580 --> 00:34:48,180
this idea of risk as a function of some of these ecological dimensions, you're it's often

560
00:34:48,180 --> 00:34:51,620
not going to be a linear relationship in terms of how those are connected, right?

561
00:34:51,700 --> 00:34:56,100
So um, and this will depend on you know other factors that come into play.

562
00:34:56,180 --> 00:35:02,100
But if it's like something around sex ratio and romantic intentions, well,

563
00:35:02,260 --> 00:35:06,420
so the people that are likely to want to take those risks are the people who are most

564
00:35:06,420 --> 00:35:10,010
relevant to romantic encounters in the first place, right?

565
00:35:10,170 --> 00:35:14,090
So if you are um thinking specifically about age.

566
00:35:14,250 --> 00:35:19,450
So if you are somebody who's post-puberty and you don't have a lot of um

567
00:35:19,690 --> 00:35:24,090
resources or like you don't have a lot of uh ways of uh of breaking past that threshold,

568
00:35:24,170 --> 00:35:26,810
then you might need to take more risks to do that at the same time.

569
00:35:26,890 --> 00:35:31,450
As you're saying, David, people at the high end also have less less cost of taking those

570
00:35:31,450 --> 00:35:31,610
risks.

571
00:35:31,850 --> 00:35:32,490
You might see that.

572
00:35:32,650 --> 00:35:38,500
But if I'm pre puberty, then uh it might make sense actually to, and

573
00:35:38,580 --> 00:35:44,580
and I'm still in a in a biased sex ratio where there's a lot more of my same sex in that

574
00:35:44,580 --> 00:35:45,460
population.

575
00:35:45,620 --> 00:35:49,780
That does present a problem, but it's a problem where I might approach it differently.

576
00:35:50,020 --> 00:35:54,580
And so I might, instead of taking risks, I might use that opportunity.

577
00:35:54,660 --> 00:35:58,870
And again, a lot of I'm not intending to talk about this in a way that is a, you know,

578
00:35:59,030 --> 00:36:04,710
conscious top of mind processing, but you might essentially uh want to

579
00:36:04,710 --> 00:36:08,870
build up your resources before you start taking risks, right?

580
00:36:08,950 --> 00:36:13,590
So you might start acting in a way that improves your own condition, right?

581
00:36:13,750 --> 00:36:17,910
Who you are, what are the skills that you have to show off, what are the, you know, what

582
00:36:17,990 --> 00:36:22,460
kind of maybe even what kind of job interests you have in terms of like, are you going to

583
00:36:22,460 --> 00:36:26,300
go for you know a career that's more exciting and sexy versus not?

584
00:36:26,460 --> 00:36:30,220
Um and we see those kinds of patterns with other ecological dimensions.

585
00:36:30,380 --> 00:36:34,540
So I mentioned Oliver Singh before he's got this interesting work on population density

586
00:36:34,780 --> 00:36:39,180
suggesting that if you were in a really population dense place, that inherently means

587
00:36:39,180 --> 00:36:41,420
there's competition for resources, right?

588
00:36:41,740 --> 00:36:47,260
But what the consequence of that can be is essentially leading people to

589
00:36:47,260 --> 00:36:52,970
act in more, I don't love the slow, fast language of life history

590
00:36:52,970 --> 00:36:57,850
theory, but essentially in slower ways, where they instead of just going all out, they step

591
00:36:57,850 --> 00:37:02,650
back and they focus on building up their ability to obtain resources.

592
00:37:02,810 --> 00:37:08,490
So things like education, things like health and fitness, those kinds of

593
00:37:08,490 --> 00:37:14,220
things, which are a way of managing risk down the road, but not

594
00:37:14,220 --> 00:37:18,380
something that you're you would say is like an you're trying to achieve an immediate

595
00:37:18,380 --> 00:37:20,700
solution to the to the issue.

596
00:37:20,940 --> 00:37:24,700
So I think you're always going to get these kinds of interesting nonlinear relationships

597
00:37:24,780 --> 00:37:29,100
depending upon something could be like age or it could be other kinds of factors.

598
00:37:29,260 --> 00:37:31,500
Um depending on the demand.

599
00:37:31,980 --> 00:37:34,140
Is that related to sort of like niche?

600
00:37:34,300 --> 00:37:40,270
I mean we we talked uh also about that like Patrick Durkey about you kind of

601
00:37:40,270 --> 00:37:42,990
look out in the world and you say, How can I make my living?

602
00:37:43,150 --> 00:37:46,350
This is also David's point about like choosing a status scheme.

603
00:37:46,830 --> 00:37:49,310
Um, is that related to this too?

604
00:37:49,470 --> 00:37:55,390
Where, you know, if you're in a higher density place, there may be more I mean, there's

605
00:37:55,390 --> 00:38:00,270
some evidence that, you know, with more with more density, essentially social capital.

606
00:38:00,510 --> 00:38:03,710
If you're in a place with higher social capital, there's more opportunities for different

607
00:38:03,710 --> 00:38:05,310
ways of making a living, maybe?

608
00:38:05,390 --> 00:38:05,710
I don't know.

609
00:38:05,790 --> 00:38:05,950
Yeah.

610
00:38:06,380 --> 00:38:06,860
I think so.

611
00:38:06,940 --> 00:38:07,180
Yeah.

612
00:38:07,340 --> 00:38:13,100
I think um, and I don't know how true this is just under general high levels of

613
00:38:13,100 --> 00:38:18,220
competition, but I think in these situations, I think you would expect that it's uh you

614
00:38:18,220 --> 00:38:21,980
could try to go all in and take risks to outcompete the entire crowd, or you could break

615
00:38:21,980 --> 00:38:27,900
off and create new ditches um and try to specialize essentially uh in ways that

616
00:38:28,110 --> 00:38:32,270
it's easier, essentially it's the you know, the big fish in the small pond kind of

617
00:38:32,270 --> 00:38:32,990
approach.

618
00:38:33,230 --> 00:38:36,990
Um and so yeah, I think that that fits very well with that idea.

619
00:38:37,390 --> 00:38:38,350
It's not straightforward.

620
00:38:38,430 --> 00:38:42,190
It's quite complicated as you as you as you put it, because I mean if if your higher

621
00:38:42,190 --> 00:38:46,350
resource or your higher density, it might also be that externalities of lots of people

622
00:38:46,350 --> 00:38:48,990
around mean that there's roughly speaking more resources.

623
00:38:49,070 --> 00:38:51,070
So you don't have to discount the future.

624
00:38:51,310 --> 00:38:51,550
Right.

625
00:38:51,720 --> 00:38:56,360
Um, so it is quite, I mean, it's it it as you're saying, it's not top of the mind, but it

626
00:38:56,360 --> 00:39:02,200
really suggests that there's these very smart systems that are detecting features in the

627
00:39:02,200 --> 00:39:05,240
world that we're not conscious of and they're having these weird effects.

628
00:39:05,400 --> 00:39:06,600
And it's it's weird.

629
00:39:06,680 --> 00:39:11,000
I mean, weird precisely in the sense of it's not intuitive, but it might be things like

630
00:39:11,160 --> 00:39:12,600
should I discount the future?

631
00:39:12,840 --> 00:39:15,000
Is the density such that I should or not?

632
00:39:15,160 --> 00:39:17,560
Or it affords delaying things.

633
00:39:17,720 --> 00:39:21,240
I mean, the even what those inputs are is not straightforward.

634
00:39:21,650 --> 00:39:24,530
Yeah, I mean, I think it is an incredibly complex problem.

635
00:39:24,770 --> 00:39:30,210
And it's it shows that you know we're not just paying attention to one particular type of

636
00:39:30,210 --> 00:39:30,690
input.

637
00:39:30,850 --> 00:39:36,050
But at the same time, there are people that make mistakes uh with these kinds of this this

638
00:39:36,050 --> 00:39:37,490
complex decision making.

639
00:39:37,570 --> 00:39:41,490
Um, and they might go off down a path where things are not as beneficial to them.

640
00:39:41,650 --> 00:39:46,690
Uh, but it I think it just points to this idea that there's this a lot of machinery that's

641
00:39:46,690 --> 00:39:50,370
involved to have to have to manage all the variety of inputs that are there.

642
00:39:50,600 --> 00:39:50,920
Yeah.

643
00:39:51,800 --> 00:39:52,520
David, go ahead.

644
00:39:52,600 --> 00:39:53,000
Yeah.

645
00:39:53,320 --> 00:39:58,760
Uh so I'm curious, do you think the mind has systems for

646
00:39:58,760 --> 00:40:03,720
representing features of the ecology like sex ratio or population density, and that affects

647
00:40:03,720 --> 00:40:04,200
behavior?

648
00:40:04,280 --> 00:40:08,600
Or is it another possibility I can think of is that the mind isn't actually representing

649
00:40:08,600 --> 00:40:10,120
these features of the population.

650
00:40:10,200 --> 00:40:14,360
It's just looking at, you know, what's best for me, what are my options here right now.

651
00:40:14,600 --> 00:40:20,410
Like if the sex ratio is male biased, for example, I might not have a representation of

652
00:40:20,410 --> 00:40:20,890
that fact.

653
00:40:20,970 --> 00:40:24,250
I might just be aware of the fact that, hey, uh, there aren't a lot of women who are

654
00:40:24,250 --> 00:40:24,970
interested in me.

655
00:40:25,050 --> 00:40:26,410
Uh most of the women are taken.

656
00:40:26,650 --> 00:40:30,650
Uh there are a lot of men out there who are also looking for relationships and they're

657
00:40:30,650 --> 00:40:31,530
pretty competitive.

658
00:40:31,610 --> 00:40:33,370
Like, uh, I don't know what I'm gonna do here.

659
00:40:33,450 --> 00:40:36,250
I better, you know, change my strategy, right?

660
00:40:36,570 --> 00:40:42,520
Uh and and I can do that without knowing that the sex ratio is male biased, right?

661
00:40:42,920 --> 00:40:47,720
Um, in the same way, you know, if I'm in a really population-dense area, I don't need to

662
00:40:47,720 --> 00:40:47,880
know.

663
00:40:47,960 --> 00:40:51,480
I I my mind doesn't need to calculate the population density of that area.

664
00:40:51,640 --> 00:40:55,240
I could just be aware of the fact that, hey, there aren't really a lot of opportunities for

665
00:40:55,240 --> 00:40:57,080
me to stand out or gain status.

666
00:40:57,240 --> 00:41:01,560
And I have a lot of competitors who also want those limited positions of power or those

667
00:41:01,560 --> 00:41:03,320
limited jobs or or whatever.

668
00:41:03,480 --> 00:41:07,960
And uh, I better change the way I behave to really make sure I get those limited

669
00:41:07,950 --> 00:41:08,750
opportunities.

670
00:41:08,910 --> 00:41:13,950
And so do you view it as more just looking at at what is best for me in terms of my

671
00:41:13,950 --> 00:41:17,870
individual situation, or is the mind actually representing these population level

672
00:41:17,870 --> 00:41:18,670
variables?

673
00:41:20,350 --> 00:41:24,910
My take on it is probably the former, that it's it's not that people have some kind of

674
00:41:24,910 --> 00:41:28,110
holistic representation of each of these dimensions.

675
00:41:28,350 --> 00:41:32,460
I think that would be difficult for in a lot of situations for people to do, right?

676
00:41:32,620 --> 00:41:38,300
I mean, there are there are maybe some modern uh technologies that help people do this

677
00:41:38,300 --> 00:41:38,860
today.

678
00:41:38,940 --> 00:41:44,860
If you're thinking about like an online dating pool, maybe people look up data

679
00:41:44,860 --> 00:41:46,140
on these kinds of questions.

680
00:41:46,300 --> 00:41:46,460
Yeah.

681
00:41:46,620 --> 00:41:50,940
But I think in general, um, it's really what you're exposed to and who you're seeing or

682
00:41:51,180 --> 00:41:51,980
around you.

683
00:41:52,300 --> 00:41:56,650
And um yeah, I don't think that it's I think these are just kind of convenient ways of

684
00:41:56,650 --> 00:41:58,890
carving up the the research space.

685
00:41:59,050 --> 00:42:03,850
Uh and but really it's about that that exposure that people have and like what their

686
00:42:03,850 --> 00:42:08,090
experiences are on the ground rather than that that that bigger uh representation.

687
00:42:08,250 --> 00:42:08,410
Yeah.

688
00:42:09,450 --> 00:42:13,930
I like that too, because I mean, like in behavioral ecology, so like Hannah Coco had some

689
00:42:13,930 --> 00:42:18,010
work on like the asymmetric or of attrition where there's decision thresholds for

690
00:42:18,010 --> 00:42:19,770
continuing or withdrawing from conflict.

691
00:42:19,850 --> 00:42:25,080
And she had a paper that was amazing where she argued that there might even be tuning of

692
00:42:25,080 --> 00:42:28,360
that for an organism based on how often it encounters conflict.

693
00:42:28,760 --> 00:42:32,520
So it's a really nice example of this middle thing where it's it's sort of it's a

694
00:42:32,520 --> 00:42:35,720
consequence of the ecology or the population.

695
00:42:36,760 --> 00:42:41,640
But it's still this thing that David's pointing out, which is still it's sort of the local

696
00:42:41,640 --> 00:42:45,880
experience of how when I'm just motoring around in the world, how often as a squirrel do I

697
00:42:45,880 --> 00:42:47,160
see other squirrels fighting?

698
00:42:47,240 --> 00:42:49,160
How often do squirrels fight me?

699
00:42:49,400 --> 00:42:55,090
And that is a function of lots of population or or ecological level things,

700
00:42:55,330 --> 00:42:59,570
but the squirrel can't, you know, fly a drone to find out or like, you know, work with the

701
00:42:59,570 --> 00:43:03,650
local wildlife biologist to find out like what's the holding capacity of the of the land

702
00:43:03,650 --> 00:43:04,210
I'm in.

703
00:43:04,370 --> 00:43:05,970
So it's got to use these on-the-ground cues.

704
00:43:06,050 --> 00:43:10,850
So I really like that, that even the description of the population density still requires

705
00:43:10,850 --> 00:43:13,010
this cue-based middle ground.

706
00:43:13,090 --> 00:43:13,330
Yeah.

707
00:43:13,730 --> 00:43:13,890
Yeah.

708
00:43:13,970 --> 00:43:19,500
And I think that if you think about the wide array of uh ecological factors that are really

709
00:43:19,500 --> 00:43:20,460
existing out there, right?

710
00:43:20,540 --> 00:43:25,180
It's like, am I as a squirrel or as a human, am I

711
00:43:25,900 --> 00:43:31,020
understanding like a long history of seasonal rainfall that's going to affect things?

712
00:43:31,100 --> 00:43:35,980
Or do I have to create, let's say, technologies to track that if I really care about it?

713
00:43:36,060 --> 00:43:40,540
Is it something that is just in my mind is designed to like track, or is it just whatever

714
00:43:40,540 --> 00:43:44,110
the, you know, the the current rainfall is is going to predict what I'm going to be doing

715
00:43:44,110 --> 00:43:45,790
over the next season something like that.

716
00:43:46,110 --> 00:43:46,350
Yeah.

717
00:43:46,430 --> 00:43:51,150
Although I will say on the uh counter to what I'm saying also there are like well plants,

718
00:43:51,230 --> 00:43:56,350
you know, they have the variability in rainfall or season or temperature, they actually

719
00:43:56,350 --> 00:43:58,670
account for that to make good blooming decisions.

720
00:43:58,830 --> 00:44:04,680
So they actually do um aggregate um so it's not if you're too I I forget

721
00:44:04,680 --> 00:44:09,400
the statistical if you basically overfit or if you if you're too sensitive you can make the

722
00:44:09,400 --> 00:44:13,880
wrong decision and you actually want to aggregate over some noise because you know if it's

723
00:44:13,880 --> 00:44:19,080
spring maybe there's one warm day and if you just have a simple mechanism you bloom and

724
00:44:19,080 --> 00:44:20,280
then you freeze the next day.

725
00:44:20,440 --> 00:44:24,990
But if you average across some of the variability that's a smarter um system.

726
00:44:25,230 --> 00:44:30,830
So so even plants, for example, have in their uh mRNA the ability to sort of track

727
00:44:30,830 --> 00:44:32,910
aggregate um temperature, for example.

728
00:44:33,230 --> 00:44:33,390
Yeah.

729
00:44:33,470 --> 00:44:37,710
So there's probably this like this this window and which uh or to subtract.

730
00:44:37,790 --> 00:44:41,390
And when I was talking about birds and and egg laying, they do the same thing in terms of a

731
00:44:41,470 --> 00:44:47,390
you know, a few seasons in terms of what the egg cache number should be, how you

732
00:44:47,390 --> 00:44:51,710
know how much to invest in a lot, just a single egg versus a few, those kind of things.

733
00:44:51,790 --> 00:44:53,470
And but it's a sh it's a short window.

734
00:44:54,020 --> 00:44:54,340
Yeah.

735
00:44:54,500 --> 00:44:59,060
Um, for um for sex ratio things, you mentioned they're shorter term things.

736
00:44:59,140 --> 00:45:03,460
So like, you know, uh anecdotally, like when a bunch of guys get together, typically, I

737
00:45:03,460 --> 00:45:09,140
mean, depending on, you know, what their what their status schemes are and what their, you

738
00:45:09,140 --> 00:45:12,020
know, uh uh yeah, did their personal histories are.

739
00:45:12,180 --> 00:45:16,020
You know, a group of guys getting together versus a mixed sex group versus a bunch of women

740
00:45:16,020 --> 00:45:19,780
getting together, um, which I've never been because I'm, you know, not a woman, but you

741
00:45:19,780 --> 00:45:24,570
know, anecdotally or I I've been told, um, you know, typically these things are different.

742
00:45:24,730 --> 00:45:30,730
Do you think that really short time frame is that a sex ratio thing in the same

743
00:45:30,730 --> 00:45:30,970
way?

744
00:45:31,130 --> 00:45:36,170
Or is it just that, you know, the the the kind of way that we affiliate or the status games

745
00:45:36,170 --> 00:45:42,090
we play or what what counts as status or what's acceptable behavior um just changes real

746
00:45:42,090 --> 00:45:42,250
time?

747
00:45:42,410 --> 00:45:43,530
Like how have you thought about that?

748
00:45:43,610 --> 00:45:46,250
You know, because I'm sure there's studies where like you get five guys in a room and all

749
00:45:46,250 --> 00:45:47,450
of a sudden they're more competitive.

750
00:45:47,770 --> 00:45:53,640
Does that is that analogize to like you have a high male ratio population where

751
00:45:53,800 --> 00:45:57,960
that's just a permanent feature when kids are growing up till the time they're 16, like

752
00:45:58,040 --> 00:45:59,800
that seems like a different situation.

753
00:45:59,880 --> 00:46:00,200
Yeah.

754
00:46:00,600 --> 00:46:01,400
Yeah, I agree.

755
00:46:01,560 --> 00:46:07,400
And I think in the sort of how uh how this type of

756
00:46:07,400 --> 00:46:13,080
work has progressed, I think there has been at least up until a point, uh,

757
00:46:13,400 --> 00:46:18,840
this idea that these really temporary changes are reflective of these longer scale uh

758
00:46:18,840 --> 00:46:19,800
behaviors.

759
00:46:20,200 --> 00:46:25,990
And I think, you know, this kind of just relates to a lot of the the uh I guess the

760
00:46:26,470 --> 00:46:31,350
meta science uh on on priming type work uh and so on.

761
00:46:31,510 --> 00:46:35,430
And so I think that people are a lot more hesitant to think that, okay, maybe these

762
00:46:35,430 --> 00:46:36,310
short-term changes.

763
00:46:36,390 --> 00:46:42,230
And I and I know in the work that that we've done, those short-term effects are much

764
00:46:42,230 --> 00:46:47,260
less reliable than the ones that are associated with either individual differences or long,

765
00:46:47,500 --> 00:46:50,540
long time periods of exposure to environments.

766
00:46:50,780 --> 00:46:56,780
And so whether those are really reflective of something like the the sex ratio of a

767
00:46:56,780 --> 00:47:00,780
place you've been in for a a substantial period of time, I'm I'm less convinced about that.

768
00:47:00,860 --> 00:47:04,140
I think it's more these social dynamics that just might pop into play.

769
00:47:04,460 --> 00:47:10,310
Um and yeah so I would I would definitely not want to go out in the

770
00:47:10,310 --> 00:47:16,230
limb and say that uh yeah these short term things are um producing the same

771
00:47:16,230 --> 00:47:18,630
kinds of of calculations as the long term ones.

772
00:47:18,870 --> 00:47:19,030
Yeah.

773
00:47:19,190 --> 00:47:19,750
Which makes sense.

774
00:47:19,830 --> 00:47:22,790
I mean as a uh evolved system that would that would make sense.

775
00:47:22,950 --> 00:47:27,350
It would make sense to have contingency based on who you're interacting with, right?

776
00:47:27,510 --> 00:47:32,140
Like just even the individual identity you interact with, if it's somebody different, you

777
00:47:32,140 --> 00:47:33,660
pull up what you know about them versus them.

778
00:47:33,740 --> 00:47:34,300
That makes sense.

779
00:47:34,380 --> 00:47:36,140
That's a real-time quick change.

780
00:47:36,300 --> 00:47:39,740
But yeah, that would be different than you know, um, the lifetime's experience.

781
00:47:39,820 --> 00:47:39,900
Yeah.

782
00:47:40,140 --> 00:47:40,860
Yeah, exactly.

783
00:47:41,020 --> 00:47:41,340
Exactly.

784
00:47:41,500 --> 00:47:45,100
And I think, you know, just in terms of like these groups of guys and groups of women that

785
00:47:45,100 --> 00:47:49,580
get together, um, throw out these social dynamics, whether it's the status competition or

786
00:47:49,580 --> 00:47:52,540
whether it's just um who else is around, right?

787
00:47:52,620 --> 00:47:58,270
If you're, you know, if it's just the guys who are by themselves versus guys in the room

788
00:47:58,270 --> 00:48:00,190
with groups of women, you got different things going on there.

789
00:48:00,830 --> 00:48:01,470
Yeah, yeah.

790
00:48:01,550 --> 00:48:03,230
And and beyond sex too, right?

791
00:48:03,310 --> 00:48:08,590
Like a bunch of like 10-year-olds versus uh 16-year-olds versus 80-year-olds, a bunch of

792
00:48:08,590 --> 00:48:12,590
academics versus a bunch of firefighters versus a bunch of people sports fans.

793
00:48:12,670 --> 00:48:13,150
It's all different.

794
00:48:13,230 --> 00:48:13,710
Yeah, yeah.

795
00:48:13,870 --> 00:48:14,110
Right.

796
00:48:14,430 --> 00:48:14,830
Yeah.

797
00:48:15,070 --> 00:48:15,710
Absolutely.

798
00:48:15,950 --> 00:48:18,590
Um are you are you a fan of uh reality TV?

799
00:48:19,470 --> 00:48:20,030
Josh?

800
00:48:20,960 --> 00:48:23,120
I am not so edit this up.

801
00:48:24,480 --> 00:48:26,880
I feel like this is a test of an individual difference.

802
00:48:27,040 --> 00:48:29,520
Um I'm not so much.

803
00:48:29,680 --> 00:48:32,720
I my wife got me into Survivor.

804
00:48:32,800 --> 00:48:34,640
So I've watched quite a bit of Survivor.

805
00:48:34,880 --> 00:48:35,120
Nice.

806
00:48:35,280 --> 00:48:35,840
I am as well.

807
00:48:35,920 --> 00:48:36,720
I'm very much into it.

808
00:48:37,360 --> 00:48:38,640
And so I do like that.

809
00:48:38,720 --> 00:48:41,440
Um, but most reality TV, not so much.

810
00:48:41,520 --> 00:48:46,720
Um there was a period of time in in grad school where I was doing some work in the space of

811
00:48:46,720 --> 00:48:52,110
romantic interactions, including on things like how people use groups of uh of

812
00:48:52,110 --> 00:48:56,350
same-sex others like friends to navigate some of the romantic goals that are out there.

813
00:48:56,910 --> 00:49:02,830
And I was doing a little bit of um work interacting with or consulting with

814
00:49:02,830 --> 00:49:05,150
one of one particular reality TV show.

815
00:49:05,230 --> 00:49:10,660
But um aside from that, you know It's a little too I think

816
00:49:10,820 --> 00:49:12,900
scripted, I think, than uh for me.

817
00:49:13,220 --> 00:49:13,700
That is fair.

818
00:49:13,860 --> 00:49:14,420
That is fair.

819
00:49:14,580 --> 00:49:19,700
Uh I do recommend Survivor for everyone listening in terms of just understanding the

820
00:49:19,700 --> 00:49:20,820
psychology of alliances.

821
00:49:20,900 --> 00:49:23,060
It's just it's one big alliance game.

822
00:49:23,140 --> 00:49:28,180
Uh and there's no better source of data for how humans make alliance decisions than just

823
00:49:28,180 --> 00:49:29,460
watching Survivor.

824
00:49:29,620 --> 00:49:34,260
Um in my sponsored by who does Survivor's MBC MBC MBC.

825
00:49:35,750 --> 00:49:37,270
I think there it's on Paramount Plus now.

826
00:49:37,350 --> 00:49:37,910
It's been a minute.

827
00:49:38,470 --> 00:49:39,910
I'm so yeah.

828
00:49:40,230 --> 00:49:40,550
Yeah.

829
00:49:40,630 --> 00:49:44,310
Uh any but anyway, the reason I brought it up because is because you know the Bachelor or

830
00:49:44,310 --> 00:49:47,110
the Bachelorette is the most extreme possible sex ratio there is.

831
00:49:47,190 --> 00:49:50,950
There's one man or one woman and a bunch of different women competing for the man or a

832
00:49:50,950 --> 00:49:52,630
bunch of different men competing for the women.

833
00:49:52,870 --> 00:49:58,600
Uh and you might naively expect it to be a bloodbath between all the different uh

834
00:49:58,680 --> 00:50:00,040
same sex competitors.

835
00:50:00,200 --> 00:50:04,360
Uh and you know, there is, you know, obviously some some conflict and some bitterness uh in

836
00:50:04,360 --> 00:50:05,000
every season.

837
00:50:05,160 --> 00:50:10,440
But what's surprising to me is the deep friendships that form among the same sex

838
00:50:10,680 --> 00:50:16,040
competitors, despite the fact that they're literally in zero sum competition, uh you know,

839
00:50:16,200 --> 00:50:17,800
for for the same mate.

840
00:50:17,960 --> 00:50:23,190
Um and that to me is is surprising and and kind of hard to explain that th you're in this

841
00:50:23,190 --> 00:50:27,590
intense zero sum competition and yet you have a deep friendship with this person that

842
00:50:27,590 --> 00:50:29,110
you're competing with.

843
00:50:29,350 --> 00:50:34,470
Uh and you know, you in some sense you might be heartbroken if you're, you know, let go,

844
00:50:34,710 --> 00:50:40,310
but you might also be happy for your friend that, you know, they ended up with this person.

845
00:50:40,870 --> 00:50:43,190
So I I I don't know how to explain that.

846
00:50:43,270 --> 00:50:44,950
I I find it very interesting.

847
00:50:45,560 --> 00:50:49,080
Yeah, I it's been a very long time since I've done this.

848
00:50:49,160 --> 00:50:53,320
But so it was it was the bachelor actually that I was uh working with a little bit about

849
00:50:53,320 --> 00:50:58,040
this kind of stuff because we were again doing this work on coalitions and friendship

850
00:50:58,040 --> 00:51:02,680
coalitions and how they navigate how you navigate opposite sex romantic goals uh

851
00:51:02,920 --> 00:51:03,720
interactions.

852
00:51:03,880 --> 00:51:06,840
Um, and showing that people were not just competitive, right?

853
00:51:06,920 --> 00:51:08,520
So they were cooperative with each other.

854
00:51:08,600 --> 00:51:12,920
Sometimes they play different roles in terms of who is going to be essentially the lead or

855
00:51:12,920 --> 00:51:15,160
the target of the interaction.

856
00:51:16,090 --> 00:51:21,930
But it was interesting how, at least from our point of view, how men did it in a certain

857
00:51:21,930 --> 00:51:26,010
fashion and women did it in another fashion, both of which were complementary to each

858
00:51:26,010 --> 00:51:26,170
other.

859
00:51:26,250 --> 00:51:32,090
So it was sort of really directly showing this interface of different kinds of goals

860
00:51:32,090 --> 00:51:36,090
that each team in a sense was using.

861
00:51:36,540 --> 00:51:40,620
But we didn't go, I think, into the level of depth you're talking about, uh, David, in

862
00:51:40,620 --> 00:51:45,740
terms of like how do people then continue to navigate those relationships uh among their

863
00:51:45,900 --> 00:51:48,220
those people who are part of their coalitions.

864
00:51:49,420 --> 00:51:54,300
I mean, David, a facile answer would be right, it's like, you know, whether or not you get

865
00:51:54,300 --> 00:51:59,100
the guy, you know, he might not be a good fit for you, but a friend is worth a lot too,

866
00:51:59,180 --> 00:52:00,540
yeah, if not more.

867
00:52:01,180 --> 00:52:02,460
Yeah, totally.

868
00:52:02,620 --> 00:52:05,010
Um Uh yeah, no, I just I I find that interesting.

869
00:52:05,250 --> 00:52:06,690
Um yeah.

870
00:52:06,930 --> 00:52:12,850
Uh so speaking of friendship, I I know you've done a little bit of work on that

871
00:52:13,410 --> 00:52:14,610
um a little bit.

872
00:52:14,770 --> 00:52:20,450
Uh is is friendship just a kind of fictive kinship, an extension of kinship

873
00:52:20,450 --> 00:52:20,930
psychology?

874
00:52:21,090 --> 00:52:21,890
Is it something more?

875
00:52:21,970 --> 00:52:23,410
How are you thinking of it?

876
00:52:24,280 --> 00:52:30,200
uh that's a that's a tough one um so we did a long time ago this was again

877
00:52:30,360 --> 00:52:36,200
grad school uh have this work where we're trying to make a claim that uh men and women

878
00:52:36,200 --> 00:52:41,960
treat friendship differently and you might expect given a history of um

879
00:52:41,960 --> 00:52:47,640
um interaction among people and and individuals moving

880
00:52:48,330 --> 00:52:54,330
between their sort of home bases and their partners, home base in

881
00:52:54,330 --> 00:53:00,090
a sense, that you might expect differences in how women and men treat

882
00:53:00,090 --> 00:53:03,930
friends, uh, how they conceptualize them, how they interact with them.

883
00:53:04,090 --> 00:53:08,330
Um, and finding that women were essentially thinking about friends a little bit more like

884
00:53:08,330 --> 00:53:09,690
they were thinking about kin.

885
00:53:09,850 --> 00:53:15,040
So whether that's fictive kinship, I don't know that they actually think that there's

886
00:53:15,040 --> 00:53:19,680
probably more examples of men using things like fictive kinship terminology, but at least

887
00:53:19,680 --> 00:53:25,360
in terms of the actual patterns of um of behavior, I think we found women were doing that

888
00:53:25,360 --> 00:53:29,600
more with their friends, essentially showing closer types of cooperative behaviors uh with

889
00:53:29,600 --> 00:53:31,040
friends than men were.

890
00:53:31,360 --> 00:53:35,520
Whereas men oftentimes in some of these kinds of game type environments were treating

891
00:53:35,520 --> 00:53:37,040
friends like strangers.

892
00:53:38,650 --> 00:53:42,810
So that was some of the early, early work we were doing on that.

893
00:53:43,530 --> 00:53:47,050
I've only kind of sporadically come back to friendship.

894
00:53:47,450 --> 00:53:52,570
It hasn't really been at the at the heart of things, although I was convinced early on by

895
00:53:52,570 --> 00:53:57,290
some of the um, I think it was a paper by uh

896
00:53:58,320 --> 00:54:04,160
martin and margo so martin daily and margot wilson where they were saying um actually they

897
00:54:04,240 --> 00:54:10,080
i think martin might have brought this up in the podcast he was on uh that uh kinship

898
00:54:10,080 --> 00:54:16,000
was really an underrepresented uh type of concept

899
00:54:16,000 --> 00:54:21,970
in human psychology research and so was convinced by that, thinking

900
00:54:22,050 --> 00:54:24,050
like, we need to have have more of this.

901
00:54:24,530 --> 00:54:28,930
And so that was part of the motivation of trying to think, okay, how do people think about

902
00:54:28,930 --> 00:54:30,290
friends and kin?

903
00:54:30,370 --> 00:54:34,610
And are there is there overlap between these kinds of concepts?

904
00:54:36,210 --> 00:54:39,810
Do people think of friends as just fictive kin?

905
00:54:43,060 --> 00:54:44,100
Probably not.

906
00:54:44,500 --> 00:54:49,060
There's probably a lot of places where that would break down, I think, if people are

907
00:54:49,060 --> 00:54:49,700
pushed.

908
00:54:50,180 --> 00:54:56,100
To you know, is it the case that you're really going to be inspiring things like

909
00:54:56,420 --> 00:54:59,140
incest avoidance mechanisms with friends?

910
00:54:59,380 --> 00:55:00,420
Probably not.

911
00:55:01,380 --> 00:55:07,230
But yeah, so I I that's as probably

912
00:55:07,230 --> 00:55:10,590
as as deep as I can go in answering that particular question.

913
00:55:10,750 --> 00:55:15,070
Um, but I think more recently we've been thinking about friends in terms of the the other

914
00:55:15,070 --> 00:55:20,990
kinds of uh dilemmas that they present to people, in terms of the uh both

915
00:55:20,990 --> 00:55:23,870
the opportunities and the threats that they uh provide to people.

916
00:55:23,950 --> 00:55:28,350
Because we often don't think about friends at the level of threat, although there's always

917
00:55:28,430 --> 00:55:34,140
you know competitive interactions that people have and so on but we've married that with

918
00:55:34,140 --> 00:55:39,580
things like the infection psychology that people are um are really concentrating on and so

919
00:55:39,580 --> 00:55:42,940
the more people you have that you're engaged with the more there's an infection risk

920
00:55:42,940 --> 00:55:48,620
possibility there and so we were interested in this question this is with a former grad

921
00:55:48,620 --> 00:55:53,790
student uh soyan choi who was really interested in this question of do people

922
00:55:54,110 --> 00:55:59,310
alter or modify their friendship networks as a function of these types of things like

923
00:55:59,310 --> 00:56:00,190
infection threat?

924
00:56:00,350 --> 00:56:03,070
And they do apparently.

925
00:56:04,910 --> 00:56:05,310
Interesting.

926
00:56:05,390 --> 00:56:09,390
So what what is how are you measuring an an infection threat?

927
00:56:10,190 --> 00:56:16,030
Um so in that work, it was primarily thinking about individual differences in

928
00:56:16,030 --> 00:56:17,870
concern around infection.

929
00:56:17,950 --> 00:56:23,900
And there's all sorts of this is a sort of a whole other uh project area that uh that

930
00:56:23,900 --> 00:56:26,780
some people in our lab but also other labs are interested in these days.

931
00:56:26,940 --> 00:56:30,700
How do you measure these kinds of uh these kinds of factors?

932
00:56:31,020 --> 00:56:36,700
And some of these measures that exist out there have to do with um how

933
00:56:36,700 --> 00:56:38,540
concerned I actually am about infection.

934
00:56:38,620 --> 00:56:42,140
Do I pay attention to the idea that I could get sick from other people?

935
00:56:42,380 --> 00:56:45,190
Others are more superficial in a way.

936
00:56:45,270 --> 00:56:47,750
That is just do I get grossed out easily?

937
00:56:47,910 --> 00:56:53,110
They're more having to do with these sensory inputs that have that are in some sense

938
00:56:53,350 --> 00:56:54,070
icky.

939
00:56:54,950 --> 00:57:00,710
And so, but these kinds of um these kinds of individual individual differences are what we

940
00:57:00,710 --> 00:57:06,470
looked at primarily to think about how people then might construct or

941
00:57:07,140 --> 00:57:12,100
construct a friendship network, or maybe even remove people from their friendship networks.

942
00:57:12,340 --> 00:57:17,140
So, what is essentially the threshold that we have for who is part of our networks?

943
00:57:17,300 --> 00:57:22,260
And we were finding things like the people who are most concerned about infection through

944
00:57:22,260 --> 00:57:27,860
these various measures, they tend to have smaller networks, generally speaking.

945
00:57:28,020 --> 00:57:32,260
And I think that makes logical sense in terms of just reducing the number of contacts that

946
00:57:32,260 --> 00:57:32,900
you have.

947
00:57:33,220 --> 00:57:38,190
Those, that reduction was all happening at the um at the

948
00:57:39,070 --> 00:57:42,110
form that the layers of the network that were less close.

949
00:57:42,270 --> 00:57:44,910
So it's not like people had, they still had really close friends.

950
00:57:45,070 --> 00:57:49,390
They still had best friends to the same degree that people who didn't care about germs did.

951
00:57:49,550 --> 00:57:55,310
But they were just sort of not engaging as much with people, at least at a frequent

952
00:57:55,470 --> 00:58:00,910
regular level, with people that were just more distant in their in their environment.

953
00:58:01,500 --> 00:58:07,500
And that was really interesting, I think, because it could be there's like just sort

954
00:58:07,500 --> 00:58:13,100
of the one form of logic you could you could ask about that is um it may be that if I

955
00:58:13,100 --> 00:58:17,020
prioritize infection, of course I'm going to interact with with fewer people and I'm going

956
00:58:17,020 --> 00:58:18,540
to be fine with that, right?

957
00:58:18,620 --> 00:58:19,980
Because I'm meeting my goal.

958
00:58:20,140 --> 00:58:23,820
But it turns out those people who are most concerned about infection who had the smaller

959
00:58:23,820 --> 00:58:29,210
networks were unhappy with their network, more so than the people who had the larger

960
00:58:29,210 --> 00:58:32,970
networks, because they weren't getting everything else that a you know somebody might get

961
00:58:32,970 --> 00:58:33,850
with from their friend.

962
00:58:34,010 --> 00:58:37,450
They weren't getting enough social support, they weren't getting enough emotional support,

963
00:58:37,530 --> 00:58:42,490
um, tangible support from like you know, what people are actually doing to help you out.

964
00:58:42,650 --> 00:58:48,170
And so it really showed the, I guess, the psychological dilemma of this

965
00:58:48,170 --> 00:58:54,160
trade-off where people couldn't these people who were really concerned about infection

966
00:58:54,240 --> 00:58:58,800
couldn't necessarily bring themselves to to start incorporating more people in their lives,

967
00:58:59,520 --> 00:59:05,040
but also to the detriment of all the other stuff that that exists in life.

968
00:59:06,240 --> 00:59:06,800
That's interesting.

969
00:59:06,960 --> 00:59:12,960
I mean, uh so you've did you find uh correlations both with disgust sensitivity and with

970
00:59:13,200 --> 00:59:16,450
uh germophobia, uh for lack of a better term.

971
00:59:16,610 --> 00:59:21,410
So people who are explicitly trying to avoid disease and people who are just more easily

972
00:59:21,410 --> 00:59:22,130
grossed out.

973
00:59:22,290 --> 00:59:25,090
Both of those things are both predicting a smaller social networks?

974
00:59:25,410 --> 00:59:26,050
We did.

975
00:59:27,170 --> 00:59:30,930
And one I think was a little bit more reliable.

976
00:59:31,410 --> 00:59:36,770
We've this might get into the weeds a little too much, but there's the people who are the

977
00:59:36,770 --> 00:59:41,580
researchers who study a lot of this infection psychology work, however they wanted to label

978
00:59:41,580 --> 00:59:46,220
that, um, tend to gravitate towards certain measures more than others.

979
00:59:46,300 --> 00:59:50,140
And but it just depends on who's doing the gravitating.

980
00:59:50,380 --> 00:59:55,980
Uh, and so we tend to do a little bit more work focusing on things like

981
00:59:56,220 --> 01:00:02,220
um the uh concerns that people have, the anxieties that are raised from

982
01:00:02,220 --> 01:00:08,030
uh the possibility of infection, whereas disgust sensitivity, I think, is a little

983
01:00:08,030 --> 01:00:13,710
bit more of a this kind of like sensory experience of something, there's a trigger that

984
01:00:13,710 --> 01:00:17,630
just creates this aversive reaction in me.

985
01:00:17,950 --> 01:00:23,470
And so, uh, which other other researchers tend to focus on a little bit more, but we've

986
01:00:23,470 --> 01:00:24,350
sometimes married those.

987
01:00:24,430 --> 01:00:29,070
And so in some of these studies, we had both of these measures, and we found, I think, a

988
01:00:29,070 --> 01:00:34,030
little bit more reliable uh effects with, in terms of everything I've just been talking

989
01:00:34,030 --> 01:00:39,380
about, with something like germ aversion or something where it's a bit a little bit more,

990
01:00:40,020 --> 01:00:45,940
I'm gonna say cognitive in terms of how people are thinking about uh the risk of infection.

991
01:00:46,100 --> 01:00:50,660
But we still set we still saw the same pattern of effects with discuss sensitivity.

992
01:00:51,380 --> 01:00:52,020
Interesting.

993
01:00:52,420 --> 01:00:56,790
And I think like I I I imagine, you know, personal incredulity is not a scientific

994
01:00:56,790 --> 01:00:57,110
argument.

995
01:00:57,270 --> 01:00:59,670
I want to wear a t-shirt like that whenever I get a review.

996
01:00:59,910 --> 01:01:01,430
My personal incredulity is.

997
01:01:01,510 --> 01:01:07,190
Um, but uh, but let me unpack this because I think people listening might think this, and I

998
01:01:07,190 --> 01:01:08,790
want to hear what your response to this is.

999
01:01:08,870 --> 01:01:14,470
So the idea is that the more concerned I am about germs, the more I'm going to

1000
01:01:14,710 --> 01:01:18,630
not extend sort of my zone of frequent interaction with people.

1001
01:01:19,350 --> 01:01:24,230
One one question I think people might have, and one question I have is that

1002
01:01:25,120 --> 01:01:30,960
is it is it that you're restricting how many friends you

1003
01:01:30,960 --> 01:01:36,960
have because you're worried about getting sick, or is it that if you're in a

1004
01:01:36,960 --> 01:01:42,720
bad state for for different reasons, like you're you don't have a lot of um

1005
01:01:42,880 --> 01:01:47,280
resources, you're just I mean different people are just more or less lucky or different

1006
01:01:47,280 --> 01:01:50,560
paths in life, you might just be in a worse state.

1007
01:01:50,640 --> 01:01:55,350
And so consequently you're both more worried about disease because compared to everyone

1008
01:01:55,350 --> 01:01:59,830
else, when I get sick, it hurts me financially, physically more.

1009
01:02:00,950 --> 01:02:06,550
And because of that, I also just have fewer social connections.

1010
01:02:06,790 --> 01:02:12,790
So, in other words, um, it's it's the same point where they go together, but it's kind of

1011
01:02:12,870 --> 01:02:17,030
they they're combined because of the dynamics of the environment, as opposed to the

1012
01:02:17,030 --> 01:02:19,760
psychology is sort of tying them together.

1013
01:02:19,920 --> 01:02:21,200
I'm sure I'm sure you've thought of this.

1014
01:02:21,280 --> 01:02:24,000
I'm just curious like what that what that is or if both are going on.

1015
01:02:24,080 --> 01:02:24,400
Yeah.

1016
01:02:24,800 --> 01:02:27,760
So it correct me if if if I'm characterizing this wrong.

1017
01:02:28,000 --> 01:02:33,040
So the the first one is really about the the role of the individual who's concerned about

1018
01:02:33,040 --> 01:02:33,200
this.

1019
01:02:33,280 --> 01:02:36,560
And the second one is the role of the friends who are like I'm out of here because you're

1020
01:02:36,720 --> 01:02:41,010
there's too much you're you're taking too much from me or asking too much for me.

1021
01:02:41,170 --> 01:02:47,010
Uh one that's one way of putting it or even just that uh if I if I'm a low

1022
01:02:47,170 --> 01:02:52,690
uh I'm gonna just be very like impolitic about this to just put it in like brass tacks

1023
01:02:52,850 --> 01:02:54,050
biological sense.

1024
01:02:54,290 --> 01:03:00,130
If I'm a organism I'm I'm a human agent I have a certain social bargaining power or like

1025
01:03:00,130 --> 01:03:05,970
what I can offer to the world you know and there's variation in that and if mine

1026
01:03:05,970 --> 01:03:11,720
is lower it might mean uh that I have fewer resources to

1027
01:03:11,720 --> 01:03:15,000
deal with problems that come up, including infection.

1028
01:03:15,160 --> 01:03:20,920
But then it's also going to mean that as I just try out to be accepted by the

1029
01:03:20,920 --> 01:03:25,000
social world, the degree to which the social world accepts me is just going to be

1030
01:03:25,000 --> 01:03:25,560
shallower.

1031
01:03:25,720 --> 01:03:27,880
Like so that's the brass tax way of putting it.

1032
01:03:27,960 --> 01:03:28,120
Yeah.

1033
01:03:28,600 --> 01:03:34,600
I think the possibility that somebody who has been chronically worried about infection

1034
01:03:34,600 --> 01:03:40,450
over long periods of time are is going to develop a different set of strategies

1035
01:03:40,610 --> 01:03:44,370
of social interaction, or maybe in some sense, maybe a less

1036
01:03:46,770 --> 01:03:52,610
complex or less uh well designed for

1037
01:03:52,610 --> 01:03:54,690
actual social interaction set of strategies.

1038
01:03:54,930 --> 01:03:56,370
I think that's a really interesting question.

1039
01:03:56,450 --> 01:04:00,940
Um, not one we we've explored, but I think that would I think it would make a lot of sense.

1040
01:04:01,180 --> 01:04:07,100
What the the factor that we were able to identify in a way with this was that it seemed to

1041
01:04:07,100 --> 01:04:12,860
be that the people who are most concerned about infection also had the highest standards

1042
01:04:12,860 --> 01:04:14,060
for their friends.

1043
01:04:14,460 --> 01:04:20,140
So they were wanting people that also prioritized

1044
01:04:20,140 --> 01:04:21,500
concern around infection.

1045
01:04:21,900 --> 01:04:25,900
And so those people who are really concerned it's going to be more top of mind for them

1046
01:04:25,900 --> 01:04:27,340
than somebody who's not concerned, right?

1047
01:04:27,500 --> 01:04:30,670
They're going to be thinking about this at least more regularly.

1048
01:04:30,910 --> 01:04:36,910
And so these standards were essentially a way of maybe

1049
01:04:36,910 --> 01:04:42,750
in inadvertently, but a way of essentially walling off that individual from a lot of

1050
01:04:42,750 --> 01:04:44,830
opportunities, a lot of social opportunities.

1051
01:04:44,990 --> 01:04:45,230
Yeah.

1052
01:04:45,470 --> 01:04:51,060
And so I think it's at least what we found was that's more of that that that individual

1053
01:04:51,060 --> 01:04:52,420
agent was causing something.

1054
01:04:52,740 --> 01:04:53,380
Yeah, no, that's great.

1055
01:04:53,700 --> 01:04:58,980
That would not what you just said would not be predicted by this alternative sort of fewer

1056
01:04:58,980 --> 01:04:59,780
opportunities.

1057
01:05:00,340 --> 01:05:01,380
That's really interesting.

1058
01:05:01,620 --> 01:05:06,820
Is there a is there um do you know what predicts being worried about

1059
01:05:06,820 --> 01:05:07,780
infection?

1060
01:05:08,980 --> 01:05:11,140
Hmm that's a big question.

1061
01:05:11,380 --> 01:05:11,620
Yeah.

1062
01:05:11,780 --> 01:05:17,220
Uh so there's been um some obvious this is an important question.

1063
01:05:17,300 --> 01:05:23,110
There's been some work in this space How

1064
01:05:23,430 --> 01:05:28,790
how reliable I think the data are there, I'm not fully convinced.

1065
01:05:28,950 --> 01:05:31,030
So I'll give you some some examples.

1066
01:05:32,150 --> 01:05:37,670
It does seem to be the case that having a history of infection across development is one of

1067
01:05:37,670 --> 01:05:37,830
these.

1068
01:05:37,910 --> 01:05:39,510
And I think that's that makes a lot of sense.

1069
01:05:39,590 --> 01:05:41,110
That's pretty reasonable, right?

1070
01:05:42,550 --> 01:05:46,150
And so the more you got sick, the more concerned you are about these things.

1071
01:05:46,230 --> 01:05:50,240
And it actually that also predicts getting sick less in the future.

1072
01:05:51,120 --> 01:05:55,520
People have looked at also other kinds of things like, well, what about something a little

1073
01:05:55,520 --> 01:05:56,800
bit more physiological?

1074
01:05:56,880 --> 01:06:02,640
Like maybe it's something around how um robust your physiological immune

1075
01:06:02,640 --> 01:06:03,280
system is.

1076
01:06:03,600 --> 01:06:08,960
And if that is really, and there's people have had these different models of how this could

1077
01:06:08,960 --> 01:06:09,200
work.

1078
01:06:09,360 --> 01:06:10,800
Maybe one is compensatory.

1079
01:06:10,880 --> 01:06:15,890
So if your um If your immune system is compromised for some reason, you're going to be

1080
01:06:15,890 --> 01:06:21,330
really over the top about avoiding sickness cues psychologically.

1081
01:06:21,410 --> 01:06:24,370
Or maybe they just kind of work together in a complementary way.

1082
01:06:25,890 --> 01:06:31,810
My take on that literature is that it is just it's too messy

1083
01:06:31,810 --> 01:06:34,690
to really draw strong conclusions right now.

1084
01:06:35,400 --> 01:06:39,880
And so there was some really interesting initial work on this from people like Dan Fessler

1085
01:06:39,960 --> 01:06:42,040
and Carlos Navaret and some other people like that.

1086
01:06:42,360 --> 01:06:45,320
And then Sarah Hill has done some work in that space too.

1087
01:06:45,880 --> 01:06:51,240
But I think that part of the issue is that the more that psychologists, I think, have

1088
01:06:51,240 --> 01:06:56,810
gotten into studying the physiological immune system, The more I think we

1089
01:06:56,810 --> 01:06:58,810
realize how complicated it is.

1090
01:06:59,370 --> 01:07:04,970
And so it is there's just a lot of noise and a lot of

1091
01:07:04,970 --> 01:07:10,410
unknowns about which particular markers of immune functioning we should be looking at.

1092
01:07:10,970 --> 01:07:14,650
And so it's, yeah, I I think we're

1093
01:07:17,760 --> 01:07:19,600
very early in that process.

1094
01:07:19,680 --> 01:07:20,880
There's still a lot more to be done.

1095
01:07:21,040 --> 01:07:24,400
So I think that's those are some of the things that people have talked about as predicting

1096
01:07:24,480 --> 01:07:26,160
this this kind of stuff.

1097
01:07:26,560 --> 01:07:29,600
But I think there's probably some some other really interesting ones.

1098
01:07:29,680 --> 01:07:32,240
I mean, obviously there's got to be cultural effects on this, right?

1099
01:07:32,400 --> 01:07:37,920
There's just cultural differences in discuss sensitivity based on whatever the norms are

1100
01:07:37,920 --> 01:07:40,160
that are common in those places.

1101
01:07:40,320 --> 01:07:46,250
But yeah, I mean, I think a whole you could have a whole um body of work on

1102
01:07:46,250 --> 01:07:47,370
this this very question.

1103
01:07:47,610 --> 01:07:48,250
Yeah.

1104
01:07:49,290 --> 01:07:52,090
There's something about this literature that confuses me.

1105
01:07:52,330 --> 01:07:55,850
I'm hoping you can maybe clear up this confusion for me.

1106
01:07:56,170 --> 01:08:02,170
So uh the idea is that disgust serves a pathogen avoidance function, and that makes

1107
01:08:02,170 --> 01:08:02,490
sense.

1108
01:08:02,570 --> 01:08:05,050
It explains a lot of data in the discussed literature.

1109
01:08:05,210 --> 01:08:10,060
Um, But then there's also this separate construct that has been developed, which is like

1110
01:08:10,060 --> 01:08:15,900
fear of germs, like how consciously, you know, worried you are about getting sick.

1111
01:08:16,140 --> 01:08:22,140
And disgust and explicit fear of disease are not actually very highly correlated

1112
01:08:22,140 --> 01:08:22,860
with each other.

1113
01:08:23,500 --> 01:08:25,100
They seem to be separate things.

1114
01:08:25,260 --> 01:08:27,660
And also phenomenologically, they feel very different.

1115
01:08:27,740 --> 01:08:31,870
When you're grossed out, that feels very different than being worried about getting sick.

1116
01:08:32,030 --> 01:08:36,350
I mean, during COVID, I wasn't really feeling a lot of disgust or being grossed out by

1117
01:08:36,350 --> 01:08:36,590
things.

1118
01:08:36,750 --> 01:08:38,270
I was just worried about getting COVID.

1119
01:08:38,430 --> 01:08:43,150
And I know Josh Tiber has data showing that disgust didn't really change throughout the

1120
01:08:43,150 --> 01:08:43,630
pandemic.

1121
01:08:43,790 --> 01:08:47,070
It was more of this explicit worrying about disease.

1122
01:08:47,310 --> 01:08:52,830
Um, and so my question would be: why does it seem to be the case that we have these two

1123
01:08:52,830 --> 01:08:58,700
separate systems that are both phenomenologically distinct and

1124
01:08:59,020 --> 01:09:01,740
to some extent take in different types of inputs.

1125
01:09:02,060 --> 01:09:05,100
And yet they serve the same function.

1126
01:09:05,260 --> 01:09:06,860
Why wouldn't we have just one system?

1127
01:09:07,020 --> 01:09:10,300
Why wouldn't disgust just be applied to COVID?

1128
01:09:10,460 --> 01:09:10,620
Right?

1129
01:09:10,780 --> 01:09:13,180
Like why weren't people more grossed out during COVID?

1130
01:09:13,420 --> 01:09:18,460
So why do we seem to have these two systems that serve the same function when we could just

1131
01:09:18,460 --> 01:09:18,860
have one?

1132
01:09:19,180 --> 01:09:23,900
Yeah, I mean, I think that's a it's a critical question, and one that

1133
01:09:25,020 --> 01:09:28,990
I think early on there was some theorizing about this.

1134
01:09:29,150 --> 01:09:31,390
I think there are people who are taking this more seriously now.

1135
01:09:31,470 --> 01:09:33,550
So I have a grad student who's working on something related to this.

1136
01:09:33,630 --> 01:09:38,590
And I know there's some other uh labs that are doing some more trying to sort of pit these

1137
01:09:39,550 --> 01:09:45,070
systems or models against each other and ask what is the what is the reason for this?

1138
01:09:45,230 --> 01:09:50,780
And I think one of the explanations that I think makes a lot of sense

1139
01:09:51,420 --> 01:09:54,140
is from Mark Schaller, who's uh big in the space.

1140
01:09:54,220 --> 01:09:59,340
And he talked about this idea of a differentiation between reactive responses and proactive

1141
01:09:59,340 --> 01:10:00,060
responses.

1142
01:10:00,300 --> 01:10:03,660
And so disgust is a reactive system, right?

1143
01:10:03,820 --> 01:10:07,900
You it's very difficult to get yourself to feel disgust, absent cues.

1144
01:10:08,300 --> 01:10:08,460
Right.

1145
01:10:08,790 --> 01:10:14,710
I can't just, unless I'm thinking about a cue in a really sort of very embodied

1146
01:10:14,710 --> 01:10:17,910
way, then it's going to be really difficult for me to experience disgust.

1147
01:10:18,230 --> 01:10:24,230
But these proactive responses could help to, in some sense, prevent the

1148
01:10:24,230 --> 01:10:29,830
disgust response in the first place, but really help me manage the situations that I engage

1149
01:10:29,830 --> 01:10:35,660
with and the ways in which those various infection type of threats uh that are

1150
01:10:35,660 --> 01:10:41,660
out there might be mitigated when there aren't cues that are relevant to

1151
01:10:41,660 --> 01:10:42,780
the disgust system, right?

1152
01:10:42,940 --> 01:10:48,780
So COVID is a great example because early on, um, there just weren't a lot of

1153
01:10:48,780 --> 01:10:52,140
sensory cues that people were exhibiting that would trigger disgust.

1154
01:10:52,300 --> 01:10:58,300
And so, in fact, if you think about diseases that are often spread um sort

1155
01:10:58,490 --> 01:11:03,610
pre-symptomatically, which is a lot of them, there are no cues at all.

1156
01:11:03,850 --> 01:11:09,450
And so unless you're taking in information from other sources, then you're just leaving

1157
01:11:09,450 --> 01:11:11,130
yourself exposed to that.

1158
01:11:11,370 --> 01:11:16,730
Now that idea brings with it a lot of interesting implications.

1159
01:11:17,050 --> 01:11:22,080
So that more proactive system is likely to have more

1160
01:11:23,760 --> 01:11:26,720
be shaped more by cultural evolutionary forces.

1161
01:11:27,440 --> 01:11:32,640
It's likely to be historically, I would assume historically less old.

1162
01:11:33,840 --> 01:11:38,160
Depending on I think that some of the original, some of the work at least by some of the

1163
01:11:38,160 --> 01:11:42,960
original people in psychology undiscussed, was really grounding that in the uh the the role

1164
01:11:42,960 --> 01:11:46,080
of food, not actually a person to person interactions.

1165
01:11:46,160 --> 01:11:47,360
So how do we avoid certain foods?

1166
01:11:47,520 --> 01:11:48,880
They're going to make us sick.

1167
01:11:49,110 --> 01:11:53,430
Obviously, that's a problem we've faced for for a very long period of time.

1168
01:11:53,670 --> 01:11:59,510
Whereas things like communicable diseases between groups of people were

1169
01:11:59,510 --> 01:12:05,510
likely very rare up until a particular period in our history where we're able to maintain

1170
01:12:05,510 --> 01:12:07,590
denser populations, right?

1171
01:12:07,910 --> 01:12:11,910
Beyond that, we were before that, we were really getting sick from things like foods or

1172
01:12:11,910 --> 01:12:16,550
animal transmission, where there are probably going to be or disgust related cues.

1173
01:12:16,710 --> 01:12:22,100
And so I would say that the, at least my take on it is that this

1174
01:12:22,900 --> 01:12:28,820
precautionary system, the prospective system, is probably more evolutionary novel to

1175
01:12:28,820 --> 01:12:33,300
some extent, but it's still likely to be shaped by these forces.

1176
01:12:33,380 --> 01:12:37,140
Like if I'm somebody who's chronically concerned about germs, I'm avoiding certain kinds of

1177
01:12:37,140 --> 01:12:41,300
situations, even though I can't detect, I don't really know that there's an infection

1178
01:12:41,300 --> 01:12:41,860
threat there.

1179
01:12:42,020 --> 01:12:44,820
If there is, I'm safe, other people are not.

1180
01:12:44,980 --> 01:12:50,370
And so over time, you could imagine that there is uh the evolution of this kind of a system

1181
01:12:50,370 --> 01:12:50,770
as well.

1182
01:12:53,010 --> 01:12:53,810
Great response.

1183
01:12:53,890 --> 01:12:56,850
Um that cleared up a lot of confusion on on my end.

1184
01:12:56,930 --> 01:13:02,770
Um I wanted to ask you uh about the relationship between the

1185
01:13:02,770 --> 01:13:08,680
behavioral immune system and um avoidance of outgroups or attitudes toward

1186
01:13:08,920 --> 01:13:09,480
outgroups.

1187
01:13:09,560 --> 01:13:15,160
I know we talked to Josh Tiber about this, um, and he expressed some skepticism about this

1188
01:13:15,160 --> 01:13:16,040
hypothesis.

1189
01:13:16,200 --> 01:13:20,200
Uh I'd like to get your take on this, whether whether you share that skepticism or whether

1190
01:13:20,200 --> 01:13:24,360
you're more sympathetic to the idea and what you think the state of the evidence is there.

1191
01:13:26,040 --> 01:13:26,520
Yeah.

1192
01:13:26,680 --> 01:13:32,510
Um also a one of these topic areas that people have started to revisit, like Josh Tiber, to

1193
01:13:32,510 --> 01:13:37,470
ask questions, which I think are really important ones, about um how

1194
01:13:39,390 --> 01:13:45,230
um careful, I guess, have we been about making predictions in this space?

1195
01:13:45,390 --> 01:13:48,990
And I think, I mean, you can think about this in any kind of research space, where as soon

1196
01:13:48,990 --> 01:13:54,720
as the topic area becomes popular in some sense, people make predictions about all sorts of

1197
01:13:54,720 --> 01:13:54,960
things.

1198
01:13:55,120 --> 01:13:57,920
Just how far can we push the boundaries of this idea?

1199
01:13:58,160 --> 01:14:01,840
And then I think there's some scaling back and saying we went too far and so on.

1200
01:14:02,000 --> 01:14:07,280
So when it comes to out groups, um I

1201
01:14:08,560 --> 01:14:13,910
do agree with Josh uh Tiber that the types of

1202
01:14:13,910 --> 01:14:19,830
interactions that really matter for presenting infection threats are probably going

1203
01:14:19,830 --> 01:14:25,350
to be those in which people you're engaging with people who are practicing different

1204
01:14:25,350 --> 01:14:31,110
kinds of behavioral X, cultural traditions, things that are

1205
01:14:31,110 --> 01:14:36,920
likely to essentially not have culturally evolved to

1206
01:14:36,920 --> 01:14:39,880
prevent infection in the environment that you are in, right?

1207
01:14:40,120 --> 01:14:45,960
Because different types of bacterial and even viral threats that exist in an

1208
01:14:45,960 --> 01:14:51,720
ecology and cultures have developed in many ways, uh, many places, ways of

1209
01:14:52,040 --> 01:14:57,400
at least minimizing some of that danger if you engage in the right kinds of acts for that

1210
01:14:57,400 --> 01:14:57,880
location.

1211
01:14:58,040 --> 01:15:03,770
So somebody who is an outsider who's bringing in new norms, new practices, That person is

1212
01:15:03,770 --> 01:15:08,570
going to present a potential risk because they're not doing the behaviors that minimize

1213
01:15:08,570 --> 01:15:09,450
that infection.

1214
01:15:09,690 --> 01:15:11,450
So I think that makes a lot of sense.

1215
01:15:11,610 --> 01:15:15,530
So it's like a particular type of outgroup number.

1216
01:15:16,410 --> 01:15:21,210
Um, I think as a superficial feature of

1217
01:15:21,530 --> 01:15:27,290
difference and a potential threat, I I do still believe that there's some

1218
01:15:27,930 --> 01:15:30,980
um Reaction, some essentially a cue.

1219
01:15:31,060 --> 01:15:34,580
This is still a cue that I think people are reactive to to some extent.

1220
01:15:35,220 --> 01:15:38,980
When there's any given threat that that is uh existing there.

1221
01:15:39,140 --> 01:15:40,500
So that could be an infection threat.

1222
01:15:40,660 --> 01:15:41,620
It could be another kind of threat.

1223
01:15:41,700 --> 01:15:45,220
So I don't think it's outgroups are specific, like outgroup threat is specifically tied to

1224
01:15:45,220 --> 01:15:46,100
infection.

1225
01:15:49,300 --> 01:15:50,500
Oh sorry, David, go ahead.

1226
01:15:50,830 --> 01:15:55,150
I mean, could it just be an extension of this social network idea that you're, you know,

1227
01:15:55,310 --> 01:16:00,190
more restrictive about uh the people you spend time with more choosy and you're uh and

1228
01:16:00,190 --> 01:16:04,750
you're less willing to have a you know a larger social network which could include quote

1229
01:16:04,830 --> 01:16:08,030
unquote outgroups, uh but doesn't necessarily have to.

1230
01:16:08,510 --> 01:16:09,390
Yeah, absolutely.

1231
01:16:09,550 --> 01:16:11,790
I mean, I think that that makes a lot of sense.

1232
01:16:11,950 --> 01:16:17,600
Um so your if your standards are higher, that means that anybody who's you know not

1233
01:16:17,600 --> 01:16:23,600
meeting those standards is going to be treated uh as somebody uh you need to be

1234
01:16:23,600 --> 01:16:25,680
more cautious around, you're to keep them at a distance.

1235
01:16:25,840 --> 01:16:30,880
And that could in some cases end up looking like prejudice, uh, depending upon what the

1236
01:16:30,880 --> 01:16:32,960
kind of measure is that you're that you're looking at.

1237
01:16:33,120 --> 01:16:34,400
So I think that makes a lot of sense.

1238
01:16:34,560 --> 01:16:40,410
And I think um we see that a lot when it comes to large-scale events like

1239
01:16:40,410 --> 01:16:46,330
COVID, where there are there can be these really explicit outgroup

1240
01:16:46,330 --> 01:16:48,570
prejudices that emerge, right?

1241
01:16:49,450 --> 01:16:54,170
Whether it's really a function of being prejudiced to all outgrowths, I don't think that's

1242
01:16:54,170 --> 01:16:58,810
necessarily the case, but it is probably an outgrowth of that same kind of a system.

1243
01:17:00,160 --> 01:17:05,840
And and and at the same time, disgust uh and disease fears can be very profitably

1244
01:17:05,840 --> 01:17:11,440
mobilized by political entrepreneurs and used uh to to to

1245
01:17:11,440 --> 01:17:14,800
generate uh you know opposition to a particular group.

1246
01:17:14,960 --> 01:17:16,000
Uh exactly.

1247
01:17:16,160 --> 01:17:22,160
And there's a long history of using language uh to trigger disgust and create those kinds

1248
01:17:22,160 --> 01:17:25,610
of um Barriers or conflicts with other groups.

1249
01:17:25,930 --> 01:17:26,090
Yeah.

1250
01:17:26,330 --> 01:17:31,770
I think one way of putting maybe how I'm hearing the answer to Josh is that, or one version

1251
01:17:31,770 --> 01:17:37,770
of the hypothesis is that of all the group boundaries, when a group boundary

1252
01:17:38,250 --> 01:17:44,090
involves differences in practices that evoke disgust

1253
01:17:44,330 --> 01:17:46,330
or different hygiene practices.

1254
01:17:46,570 --> 01:17:51,900
So if I'm in a culture and I go somewhere and everybody is even cleaner and and more

1255
01:17:51,900 --> 01:17:54,780
hygienic than me, I'm gonna notice that.

1256
01:17:54,860 --> 01:18:00,300
And like I've crossed a norm, a culture boundary of hygiene, or like conversely, if it's

1257
01:18:00,300 --> 01:18:01,260
less right.

1258
01:18:01,420 --> 01:18:07,100
And so, I mean, thinking like Borat, like, you know, the humor of uh doing uh, you know,

1259
01:18:07,180 --> 01:18:11,500
like bodily functions or cleaning differently, you know, like that really stands out.

1260
01:18:11,660 --> 01:18:17,500
And so I I I one version of this hypothesis is that there's lots of group boundaries,

1261
01:18:17,750 --> 01:18:23,590
but there's a particular noticing of the system when you cross

1262
01:18:23,910 --> 01:18:29,910
any behavior that activates this sort of pathogen or hygiene

1263
01:18:29,910 --> 01:18:33,830
practice or this open entry for like infection risk.

1264
01:18:33,910 --> 01:18:39,350
And then that really that that's that's a very strong um

1265
01:18:40,310 --> 01:18:44,860
detector that really draws that boundary in a unique way.

1266
01:18:44,940 --> 01:18:47,980
It's sort of saying we're crossing a hygiene boundary.

1267
01:18:48,140 --> 01:18:52,700
And then as you said, that because that's true, then you can have demagogues using it to

1268
01:18:52,940 --> 01:18:54,860
really reinforce a group boundary as well.

1269
01:18:55,020 --> 01:18:55,260
Yeah.

1270
01:18:55,660 --> 01:19:00,940
And I think something that's interesting with that idea is that people don't have a ready

1271
01:19:01,020 --> 01:19:06,790
or at least a a um I will say evolved, I don't not

1272
01:19:06,790 --> 01:19:12,470
gonna rest on that word, but uh evolved um understanding of what a good hygiene practice

1273
01:19:12,470 --> 01:19:12,630
is.

1274
01:19:12,950 --> 01:19:13,670
No, totally, yeah.

1275
01:19:13,830 --> 01:19:13,990
Right?

1276
01:19:14,070 --> 01:19:18,950
Yeah, and so you could have a group of people who is engaging in a behavior that's actually

1277
01:19:18,950 --> 01:19:23,670
better than the one that your group is using to prevent infection, and you still might

1278
01:19:23,670 --> 01:19:25,110
treat that as a problem.

1279
01:19:25,190 --> 01:19:25,350
Yeah.

1280
01:19:25,750 --> 01:19:29,540
So think about like mask wearing prior to COVID, right?

1281
01:19:29,700 --> 01:19:32,580
That was often treated as some sort of weird thing that people did.

1282
01:19:32,740 --> 01:19:36,900
And even post-COVID, like even uh as COVID started, it was like, why?

1283
01:19:37,060 --> 01:19:38,900
Why are we what's going on here?

1284
01:19:39,140 --> 01:19:45,060
And so um even though though it's an effective strategy, uh people can still

1285
01:19:45,060 --> 01:19:50,180
react negatively and and it's a useful one for, like you were saying, those demagogues to

1286
01:19:50,260 --> 01:19:50,980
to leverage.

1287
01:19:51,290 --> 01:19:51,450
Yeah.

1288
01:19:51,530 --> 01:19:55,610
I think uh all the anthropologists listening are like thinking of all the examples in

1289
01:19:55,610 --> 01:19:59,930
ethnographic history of colonialists going to a native population that had culturally

1290
01:19:59,930 --> 01:20:02,090
evolved a really good way of making the living there.

1291
01:20:02,330 --> 01:20:06,650
And then being like, no, that's the wrong way to do it, because in England we do it this

1292
01:20:06,650 --> 01:20:06,810
way.

1293
01:20:06,890 --> 01:20:11,450
And then it's a terrible idea and people die and get diseases or like it doesn't work.

1294
01:20:11,690 --> 01:20:17,040
So yeah, no, totally like the the the sort of um the uh uh

1295
01:20:17,280 --> 01:20:22,640
parochialism of the way we do things is the right way everywhere uh is a very human thing

1296
01:20:22,640 --> 01:20:22,960
to do.

1297
01:20:23,360 --> 01:20:23,760
Exactly.

1298
01:20:24,160 --> 01:20:24,800
Yeah, it is.

1299
01:20:24,960 --> 01:20:29,760
And I guess that's suggesting that there's some ecological insensitivity that the events

1300
01:20:30,880 --> 01:20:31,120
No.

1301
01:20:31,200 --> 01:20:34,720
I mean there's a kernel of truth to that, which is as you said, like I think something Rob

1302
01:20:34,720 --> 01:20:38,640
Boyd always said that it really stuck with me is that the world is opaque, right?

1303
01:20:38,720 --> 01:20:41,440
Like we don't have a germ theory like until very recently.

1304
01:20:41,600 --> 01:20:45,870
So there's this open slot for it seems like magic.

1305
01:20:46,270 --> 01:20:50,030
We kind of do this thing, and it's like this proactive thing, right?

1306
01:20:50,110 --> 01:20:54,190
It's like, you know, it's like we do this thing and somehow it keeps the spirits away.

1307
01:20:54,430 --> 01:20:57,470
Or we're we're maybe dying less, but we don't know, you know.

1308
01:20:57,550 --> 01:21:01,870
So it's a really hard thing to get right, these like opaque things in the world.

1309
01:21:02,110 --> 01:21:07,550
And that's why you get all these hitchhiking things of rituals um or spirit

1310
01:21:07,550 --> 01:21:08,830
accusations, right?

1311
01:21:08,990 --> 01:21:14,860
Um the this this open entry, like you said, this proactive thing it reminds me of Pascal

1312
01:21:14,940 --> 01:21:20,300
Boe's work too about sort of like precautionary stuff with this issue of being

1313
01:21:20,300 --> 01:21:24,620
precautionary about infections really hard to get right you know if you're not if you don't

1314
01:21:24,620 --> 01:21:29,420
have like a lab to test pathogens and even that like that's not so reliable either.

1315
01:21:29,740 --> 01:21:33,180
Yeah and you can't even rely on the cues of infection because they're so variable.

1316
01:21:33,260 --> 01:21:36,620
Even within person the same disease could present differently different ways.

1317
01:21:36,780 --> 01:21:42,230
So you just kind of have to gloss over a lot of those uh

1318
01:21:42,550 --> 01:21:44,790
things we can't really understand very well.

1319
01:21:45,190 --> 01:21:45,510
Yeah.

1320
01:21:45,830 --> 01:21:50,390
And in a in a world where there are lots of false positives because of you know error

1321
01:21:50,390 --> 01:21:55,510
management logic where people are assumed to be unclean or unhygienic or impure or

1322
01:21:55,510 --> 01:21:59,670
contamination risk for whatever reason, even though they're perfectly fine, you know, that

1323
01:21:59,670 --> 01:22:01,430
itself can become a selection pressure.

1324
01:22:01,590 --> 01:22:06,180
If that is a dynamic that exists in your social world where you run this risk of being

1325
01:22:06,180 --> 01:22:12,100
perceived by others as a contamination risk or unclean or uh unhygienic, then you might

1326
01:22:12,100 --> 01:22:18,100
have to actively perform certain rituals or send certain signals to minimize that risk

1327
01:22:18,180 --> 01:22:23,540
that you're going to be uh excluded and and uh ganged up on and or treated as a as a

1328
01:22:23,540 --> 01:22:24,180
pariah.

1329
01:22:24,340 --> 01:22:29,300
And you might want to, you know, incur lots of costs to really signal to people that um

1330
01:22:29,780 --> 01:22:32,730
you're not a contamination risk.

1331
01:22:32,970 --> 01:22:33,290
Yeah.

1332
01:22:33,850 --> 01:22:36,250
I think that's a that's an excellent point, David.

1333
01:22:36,330 --> 01:22:40,650
And it's really um we didn't set this up in advance, but that's that's sort of the

1334
01:22:40,650 --> 01:22:43,210
direction that uh some of my work is going in these days.

1335
01:22:43,370 --> 01:22:43,770
Oh, cool.

1336
01:22:44,010 --> 01:22:49,610
Is um really interested in that question of how people manage those kinds of trade-offs or

1337
01:22:49,610 --> 01:22:54,540
those kinds of dilemmas that they have uh with respect to this, you know, how they're going

1338
01:22:54,540 --> 01:22:59,580
to be treated by other people, how they're going to manage uh the risks that they're seeing

1339
01:22:59,580 --> 01:23:04,220
around infection versus versus social life, um, and then what are the strategies that

1340
01:23:04,220 --> 01:23:05,740
people are taking to do that, right?

1341
01:23:05,820 --> 01:23:10,460
So are they having to go far in one direction in terms of showing something about

1342
01:23:10,460 --> 01:23:10,940
themselves?

1343
01:23:11,100 --> 01:23:17,020
Are they hiding cues to that that are gonna that could be used to ostracize

1344
01:23:17,020 --> 01:23:18,780
them, those kinds of things?

1345
01:23:22,150 --> 01:23:22,790
All right.

1346
01:23:23,430 --> 01:23:29,190
Well, we're we're starting to to get up uh to uh a long time uh in this

1347
01:23:29,190 --> 01:23:35,030
conversation so I mean I I think it might be s time to start zooming out a a little bit

1348
01:23:35,270 --> 01:23:41,190
and um moving toward uh if there are any topics that you uh wish

1349
01:23:41,190 --> 01:23:45,430
we had gotten to or any things that you're really excited about right now that that you'd

1350
01:23:45,430 --> 01:23:47,030
love to delve into.

1351
01:23:47,350 --> 01:23:50,060
Um is there anything Yeah.

1352
01:23:50,300 --> 01:23:56,060
Um so I would say that one of the arms of work in this space that we've been doing for the

1353
01:23:56,060 --> 01:23:59,500
past few years, um I I just think it's really a fun topic.

1354
01:23:59,580 --> 01:24:04,940
I I always hesitate to say fun when we're talking about sickness, but it's fun for me.

1355
01:24:05,100 --> 01:24:10,940
Uh and is is one of the ways in which people manage these kinds of

1356
01:24:10,940 --> 01:24:16,410
uh dilemmas or trade-offs, and that is through concealment of sickness.

1357
01:24:16,570 --> 01:24:20,810
And so we've been doing a lot of our uh the work that I was doing early on in this space

1358
01:24:20,890 --> 01:24:25,130
was more about kind of fitting in the behavioral immune system literature, really about how

1359
01:24:25,130 --> 01:24:26,650
do we prevent infection.

1360
01:24:26,810 --> 01:24:29,770
We've been doing a lot more about post infection psychology.

1361
01:24:29,930 --> 01:24:33,450
So once you get sick, what do you what do you do about that?

1362
01:24:34,010 --> 01:24:36,970
And uh specifically around social life.

1363
01:24:37,200 --> 01:24:42,960
And so we have this whole series of projects where we're

1364
01:24:42,960 --> 01:24:48,480
thinking about this idea that people hide signs of illness from others

1365
01:24:49,200 --> 01:24:52,880
because they are concerned about the reactions of other people, right?

1366
01:24:52,960 --> 01:24:57,360
I don't want to trigger somebody else's behavioral immune system such that they're now

1367
01:24:57,360 --> 01:25:03,030
going to react negatively to me, want to avoid me, you know, not allow me to

1368
01:25:03,030 --> 01:25:05,990
engage in in social life in other ways.

1369
01:25:06,230 --> 01:25:12,070
And so we were approaching that from the question of okay, there's lots of things that

1370
01:25:12,070 --> 01:25:13,990
people could do to sort of alleviate that.

1371
01:25:14,070 --> 01:25:18,710
But the the easiest, it's not in some ways, it would be to just not trigger those reactions

1372
01:25:18,710 --> 01:25:19,750
in the first place.

1373
01:25:20,150 --> 01:25:25,910
And so we have been studying that and uh asking people about how they uh

1374
01:25:25,910 --> 01:25:28,470
engage in social life when they're sick.

1375
01:25:28,630 --> 01:25:33,760
Uh and uh maybe good for us, bad for everybody else.

1376
01:25:33,840 --> 01:25:39,760
Um, this is a really common behavior that that uh yeah people engage in.

1377
01:25:40,080 --> 01:25:40,880
That's super important.

1378
01:25:40,960 --> 01:25:44,240
I mean, that's so useful to know because again, that's like another thing where like if I

1379
01:25:44,240 --> 01:25:47,520
wear a mask, then everybody knows I'm sick, but then I could prevent people.

1380
01:25:47,600 --> 01:25:49,680
But I but you want to that deal with that psychology.

1381
01:25:49,760 --> 01:25:54,320
I love this idea, like the self-conscious emotions dealing with infection.

1382
01:25:54,480 --> 01:25:57,200
You would imagine there's this this huge um thing.

1383
01:25:57,360 --> 01:25:58,640
That's awesome that you're doing that.

1384
01:25:58,720 --> 01:25:59,040
Yeah.

1385
01:26:00,030 --> 01:26:00,190
Yeah.

1386
01:26:00,270 --> 01:26:01,150
It's been really interesting.

1387
01:26:01,230 --> 01:26:01,550
I'm sorry.

1388
01:26:01,870 --> 01:26:07,230
I mean, I I would I would imagine that um anger or anticipated anger is also at play uh in

1389
01:26:07,230 --> 01:26:12,510
addition to concerns about being the object of disgust or contamination fear.

1390
01:26:12,670 --> 01:26:17,310
And that, you know, if I'm putting someone at risk of being sick, I'm inflicting a cost on

1391
01:26:17,310 --> 01:26:21,870
them uh for a particularly small benefit, just so I can have the pleasure of, you know,

1392
01:26:21,950 --> 01:26:24,110
hanging out or being outside or or whatever.

1393
01:26:24,270 --> 01:26:28,800
I'm you know, I'm inflicting cost on them for a comparatively low benefit to myself, Uh,

1394
01:26:28,880 --> 01:26:30,160
and that could trigger anger.

1395
01:26:30,240 --> 01:26:33,200
It could signal that I have a low welfare trade-off ratio toward other people.

1396
01:26:33,360 --> 01:26:36,480
I'm not very concerned about other people and and their well being.

1397
01:26:36,640 --> 01:26:41,120
And I might anticipate that and hide the fact that I'm sick to avoid eliciting other

1398
01:26:41,120 --> 01:26:41,760
people's anger.

1399
01:26:41,840 --> 01:26:46,320
It's sort of like I'm getting away with a a transgression of of putting people at at risk.

1400
01:26:46,480 --> 01:26:49,200
So I I bet that is a part of it as well.

1401
01:26:50,160 --> 01:26:52,810
So I can speak a little bit to that.

1402
01:26:52,890 --> 01:26:57,210
Um where we've we so we've tried to collect data on the reasons that people give us, at

1403
01:26:57,210 --> 01:26:58,730
least for why they do these things.

1404
01:26:59,290 --> 01:27:04,970
And what we've found so far, which I think so I had the same intuition that uh that you

1405
01:27:04,970 --> 01:27:05,210
did.

1406
01:27:05,290 --> 01:27:10,330
Um what we found so far in terms of the reasons that people give for why they would hide

1407
01:27:10,330 --> 01:27:13,850
illness, this is specifically in face-to-face social interactions.

1408
01:27:15,100 --> 01:27:20,780
There's about 20% of people that we've talked to say they do it

1409
01:27:20,780 --> 01:27:23,980
specifically to avoid those reactions from other people.

1410
01:27:25,020 --> 01:27:26,140
But it's only 20%.

1411
01:27:27,260 --> 01:27:32,140
And there's some other reasons that seem to dominate this much more.

1412
01:27:32,300 --> 01:27:37,090
In fact, when I when I tell people, like why would you engage in in social life when you're

1413
01:27:37,090 --> 01:27:37,330
sick?

1414
01:27:37,490 --> 01:27:42,530
The number one thing that people seem to to respond with is, well, if I'm thinking about

1415
01:27:42,610 --> 01:27:46,930
like going to work when I'm sick, or if I'm a student going to class when I'm sick, it's

1416
01:27:46,930 --> 01:27:47,890
because I have to, right?

1417
01:27:47,970 --> 01:27:51,810
It's because I don't have adequate sick leave or I have the, you know, there's a policies

1418
01:27:51,970 --> 01:27:52,530
in place.

1419
01:27:52,690 --> 01:27:56,290
But really, that one is also not uh leading the pack.

1420
01:27:56,370 --> 01:27:58,130
That's only five percent of people.

1421
01:27:59,580 --> 01:28:05,580
The majority of the reason why people say they do this is a combination of

1422
01:28:05,820 --> 01:28:08,620
feeling like they are, they would burden other people.

1423
01:28:09,100 --> 01:28:14,460
So if like if I I'm going to go to work when I'm sick because other people would have to

1424
01:28:14,460 --> 01:28:16,140
take my work on if I wasn't there.

1425
01:28:17,260 --> 01:28:22,370
And equally as strongly is basically just, I think, FOMO.

1426
01:28:23,410 --> 01:28:26,450
They are just prioritizing their own goals.

1427
01:28:26,530 --> 01:28:28,290
They don't want to stay home.

1428
01:28:28,450 --> 01:28:32,450
They don't want, they don't, it's it's less about the reactions of other people.

1429
01:28:32,610 --> 01:28:37,410
It's more about like my goals are what matter.

1430
01:28:37,810 --> 01:28:43,680
And that is a that is both in some ways maybe an expected uh uh

1431
01:28:43,680 --> 01:28:47,360
behavior, but also a tough one to really deal with, right?

1432
01:28:47,600 --> 01:28:53,040
Um it's and so I'm not saying that that I don't that that people are not worried about the

1433
01:28:53,040 --> 01:28:56,960
anger of other people or the welfare trade-offs that they're they're expecting, um, that

1434
01:28:56,960 --> 01:29:01,200
other people might calculate about them, but at least in terms of their top of mind

1435
01:29:01,200 --> 01:29:06,720
explanations, it's really they're just prioritizing their own goals to some extent over

1436
01:29:06,720 --> 01:29:08,000
those of other people.

1437
01:29:08,530 --> 01:29:14,530
And we get that, I mean, I think that where that anger and concern for others would would

1438
01:29:14,530 --> 01:29:18,930
probably rest is in when you have a pre-existing close relationship with other people.

1439
01:29:19,090 --> 01:29:22,690
So we do see that people do this less with close others.

1440
01:29:23,890 --> 01:29:26,050
But there's a lot of places where they do it.

1441
01:29:26,530 --> 01:29:30,450
They do it a lot, this kind of hiding behavior.

1442
01:29:30,850 --> 01:29:35,860
And I think it was really interesting to find that it's really, as far as we can tell, so

1443
01:29:36,020 --> 01:29:40,100
right now, it's really about this goal prioritization where it's just like either I'm just

1444
01:29:40,100 --> 01:29:45,940
gonna go after my own goals, and it's partly it's because people believe that uh

1445
01:29:47,060 --> 01:29:49,780
that it's everyone's gonna get sick.

1446
01:29:50,100 --> 01:29:55,460
And so if you're out in the world and you get sick,

1447
01:29:55,780 --> 01:29:58,970
maybe it's my fault, but you know, people can't see germs.

1448
01:29:59,050 --> 01:30:00,810
So maybe you got to see somebody else.

1449
01:30:01,050 --> 01:30:03,450
So there's some plausible deniability there.

1450
01:30:04,090 --> 01:30:08,090
And it's like, oh, you're going into social life, you're, you're running the risk yourself.

1451
01:30:08,170 --> 01:30:11,850
You know, you're interacting with me, uh, whether I'm sick or not.

1452
01:30:12,010 --> 01:30:16,890
And so you're just putting yourself out there as a possible infection target.

1453
01:30:17,130 --> 01:30:21,770
And so I think there's a lot of ways that people can sort of navigate that that those those

1454
01:30:21,780 --> 01:30:24,660
cognitions around that sounds like a rationalization.

1455
01:30:24,980 --> 01:30:29,300
I think I think what we need to do is we need to get this subset of your population, Josh,

1456
01:30:29,380 --> 01:30:29,860
that does this.

1457
01:30:29,940 --> 01:30:32,820
And we need the David to sit down with them and explain to them.

1458
01:30:32,980 --> 01:30:35,780
I feel like there's a there's an intervention for it.

1459
01:30:35,940 --> 01:30:36,180
Yeah.

1460
01:30:36,820 --> 01:30:37,140
Okay.

1461
01:30:37,380 --> 01:30:43,140
So this the subset uh of people who actually hide illness in in our studies so far has been

1462
01:30:43,140 --> 01:30:44,260
75% of people.

1463
01:30:44,900 --> 01:30:45,140
Yeah.

1464
01:30:45,300 --> 01:30:45,540
Wow.

1465
01:30:46,340 --> 01:30:51,190
And that included, we did some studies during COVID with healthcare workers, and that

1466
01:30:51,190 --> 01:30:53,590
included people who work in hospital systems.

1467
01:30:53,830 --> 01:30:58,230
Um, and it was less, but it was still over 50% of people.

1468
01:30:58,790 --> 01:31:02,390
And we have some recent data, like people we were presenting with some of this.

1469
01:31:02,550 --> 01:31:04,950
A lot of this work has been led by by graduate students.

1470
01:31:05,110 --> 01:31:08,870
I should shout out Wilson Merrill as being a lead on some of this work.

1471
01:31:09,030 --> 01:31:13,990
Um he was doing some presentations, uh, he's a post hoc in Denmark right now with people in

1472
01:31:13,990 --> 01:31:18,660
Europe, and they kept saying, Oh, it's an American thing, because Americans are just you

1473
01:31:18,660 --> 01:31:23,780
know self-interested, and so we've done some international data collection, and the US is

1474
01:31:23,780 --> 01:31:28,580
actually at the low end, one of the least frequent countries doing this behavior.

1475
01:31:29,140 --> 01:31:34,660
So um it seems to be really common, seems to be really prevalent, and uh

1476
01:31:35,620 --> 01:31:41,460
yeah, and it does seem to be the biggest predictor we found, I think, is exclusion concern.

1477
01:31:41,750 --> 01:31:46,630
So people who are worried about those those negative reactions from in terms of ostracism.

1478
01:31:46,870 --> 01:31:50,870
I hope you're getting a tremendous amount of funding for this because like getting sick and

1479
01:31:50,870 --> 01:31:55,350
illness is a huge uh uh harm to everybody.

1480
01:31:55,590 --> 01:32:00,230
I mean, forget about a you know, they're just just yeah, like missing school, missing loved

1481
01:32:00,230 --> 01:32:02,630
ones, missing social interaction.

1482
01:32:02,790 --> 01:32:05,580
Uh I hope you're getting a lot of funding for this.

1483
01:32:05,740 --> 01:32:09,100
They're laughs I just environment I'm not sure.

1484
01:32:09,420 --> 01:32:11,740
Yeah, but this is super incredibly important.

1485
01:32:11,820 --> 01:32:17,820
I mean, just yeah, this this idea that like missing out um is why uh people are getting

1486
01:32:17,820 --> 01:32:23,340
each other sick is it makes sense, but it's it's it feels like there would be a way around

1487
01:32:23,340 --> 01:32:23,980
all of this.

1488
01:32:24,140 --> 01:32:24,780
Um yeah.

1489
01:32:25,100 --> 01:32:25,900
Yeah, yeah.

1490
01:32:27,110 --> 01:32:30,950
Can you try an intervention where you just record me just yelling at these people?

1491
01:32:31,670 --> 01:32:32,870
I really want to get this Tony.

1492
01:32:33,030 --> 01:32:34,470
Yeah, this you self-entitled.

1493
01:32:34,630 --> 01:32:35,270
Yeah, no, exactly.

1494
01:32:35,830 --> 01:32:36,070
Yeah.

1495
01:32:36,710 --> 01:32:36,870
Yeah.

1496
01:32:37,030 --> 01:32:40,070
I actually one question is this is this what is the population?

1497
01:32:40,150 --> 01:32:42,310
Is it is it undergrads at a convenience sample?

1498
01:32:42,390 --> 01:32:44,230
Not as a duck uh a knock on it.

1499
01:32:44,310 --> 01:32:48,310
I'm just curious, like what is the are these people with kids or not, or old people?

1500
01:32:48,390 --> 01:32:48,630
Yeah.

1501
01:32:49,030 --> 01:32:49,350
Right.

1502
01:32:49,670 --> 01:32:54,940
So the first group of studies where we looked at this was a combination of undergrads.

1503
01:32:55,100 --> 01:32:58,460
We we did some online samples with different different platforms.

1504
01:32:58,540 --> 01:33:00,380
We did the healthcare workers.

1505
01:33:00,700 --> 01:33:04,780
Um since then, we've been mostly doing various online platforms.

1506
01:33:04,860 --> 01:33:10,380
Um international study was um with this platform that does a lot of different countries

1507
01:33:10,380 --> 01:33:14,700
around the world, focusing a lot of it on non weird uh uh populations.

1508
01:33:15,340 --> 01:33:20,810
And so most of it is people, I would say, who are adults, you know,

1509
01:33:20,890 --> 01:33:24,490
ranging from, you know, I think the average age is like 35 to 40.

1510
01:33:24,730 --> 01:33:29,450
So I, you know, we haven't actually looked at the kids' question yet.

1511
01:33:29,610 --> 01:33:29,770
Yeah.

1512
01:33:30,010 --> 01:33:31,290
That is definitely an important one.

1513
01:33:31,370 --> 01:33:33,290
But we've we have not explored it yet.

1514
01:33:33,450 --> 01:33:37,130
So I think it would be um interesting to see what happens there.

1515
01:33:37,520 --> 01:33:43,520
Anecdotally, we've been told many times that um people do this for their kids.

1516
01:33:43,760 --> 01:33:47,520
So you know there's always the the question of kid like kids saying, oh, I'm sick mom, I

1517
01:33:47,520 --> 01:33:48,560
don't want to go to school.

1518
01:33:48,880 --> 01:33:54,560
But if your kids are young and you want to put them in daycare and go to work

1519
01:33:54,720 --> 01:34:00,640
and they're sick, well now you're faced with that dilemma of like, do I hide

1520
01:34:00,640 --> 01:34:02,960
illness on the part of my child?

1521
01:34:03,120 --> 01:34:03,280
Yeah.

1522
01:34:03,440 --> 01:34:07,490
And we've been told that parents are not uncommonly doing that.

1523
01:34:07,730 --> 01:34:08,370
Yeah.

1524
01:34:09,810 --> 01:34:10,370
Yeah.

1525
01:34:10,690 --> 01:34:15,010
Uh have you found any correlates of you said you looked at this in a bunch of different

1526
01:34:15,010 --> 01:34:15,330
countries.

1527
01:34:15,490 --> 01:34:21,090
Is there something that predicts the likelihood with which people are are um going to hide

1528
01:34:21,090 --> 01:34:22,530
their disease cues?

1529
01:34:22,850 --> 01:34:23,970
So I hope so.

1530
01:34:24,130 --> 01:34:30,130
But what's really interesting uh in in where we've looked so far, we have found

1531
01:34:30,130 --> 01:34:33,490
no country level factor that predicts this.

1532
01:34:33,880 --> 01:34:34,280
Wow.

1533
01:34:34,520 --> 01:34:34,920
Interesting.

1534
01:34:35,400 --> 01:34:37,000
Not even collectivism or anything like that.

1535
01:34:37,160 --> 01:34:38,920
I would expect naively expect that to be the case.

1536
01:34:39,000 --> 01:34:39,160
No.

1537
01:34:39,400 --> 01:34:39,880
Yeah, I know.

1538
01:34:39,960 --> 01:34:43,400
We had a lot of predictions about these things, and we have found nothing so far.

1539
01:34:43,560 --> 01:34:47,960
We have found individual level predictors that that have come within each country.

1540
01:34:48,120 --> 01:34:50,360
So exclusion concern is the biggest.

1541
01:34:50,520 --> 01:34:53,960
Um, I think followed by psychopathy.

1542
01:34:54,200 --> 01:34:56,710
Uh and that makes sense.

1543
01:34:56,950 --> 01:34:57,190
All right.

1544
01:34:57,430 --> 01:34:58,630
Yeah, that's that's I'm gonna include that.

1545
01:34:58,870 --> 01:35:00,150
That's a group that David needs to talk to.

1546
01:35:00,230 --> 01:35:01,190
That's yeah, I don't care.

1547
01:35:01,510 --> 01:35:02,470
Get me all the psychopaths.

1548
01:35:02,790 --> 01:35:03,430
It's opaque.

1549
01:35:03,510 --> 01:35:03,910
Exactly.

1550
01:35:04,150 --> 01:35:04,550
Yeah.

1551
01:35:04,870 --> 01:35:08,710
Uh the last one is this is this disease avoidance motivation that people like.

1552
01:35:08,790 --> 01:35:13,430
So if you're more concerned about illness yourself, like you're somebody who's germ averse

1553
01:35:13,430 --> 01:35:18,020
or whatever, um, it turns out you actually are more pro-social in a sense.

1554
01:35:18,180 --> 01:35:20,740
You hide it less from other people when you do miss it.

1555
01:35:21,140 --> 01:35:27,140
So I think that's an interesting sort of benefit, I guess, to being um a

1556
01:35:27,140 --> 01:35:29,540
little bit more, you know, uh germ concerned.

1557
01:35:29,940 --> 01:35:34,820
Well it's yeah, it suggests that you know you perceive disease as a higher cost.

1558
01:35:34,900 --> 01:35:38,650
And presumably, you know, if it's a higher cost to you, then you translate that as a higher

1559
01:35:38,650 --> 01:35:41,450
cost to other people and you're less willing to inflict those costs on them.

1560
01:35:41,690 --> 01:35:41,850
Yeah.

1561
01:35:42,330 --> 01:35:44,650
So long as you're not a sociopath or psychopath.

1562
01:35:44,810 --> 01:35:44,890
Yeah.

1563
01:35:45,050 --> 01:35:45,130
Yeah.

1564
01:35:45,690 --> 01:35:46,250
Exactly.

1565
01:35:46,570 --> 01:35:51,450
So I'll just mention one other project that's related to this that the sociopath thing

1566
01:35:51,450 --> 01:35:52,010
triggers.

1567
01:35:52,250 --> 01:35:56,490
But I it can't be all sociopaths in these samples.

1568
01:35:56,650 --> 01:36:02,410
So what we've looked at also is not just the individual decision makers' behavior

1569
01:36:02,490 --> 01:36:06,570
once you're sick, but third-party evaluations of this behavior.

1570
01:36:06,900 --> 01:36:11,300
And so does this influence the judgments that you have about people engaging in this?

1571
01:36:11,380 --> 01:36:14,900
Like, does it change your perception of their moral character or something like that?

1572
01:36:14,980 --> 01:36:16,420
Because they're being deceptive.

1573
01:36:16,740 --> 01:36:20,420
Um, and what's really interesting is the answer is only sometimes.

1574
01:36:20,580 --> 01:36:26,260
There are certain situations where most people excuse this

1575
01:36:26,260 --> 01:36:30,450
behavior, Not just the person who's doing it, but like the observers.

1576
01:36:30,610 --> 01:36:34,610
They're like, yeah, it doesn't change my judgment of them because it's something like if

1577
01:36:34,610 --> 01:36:40,530
they're going to work or they're having to go to an obligation, I expect them to hide

1578
01:36:40,530 --> 01:36:40,850
it.

1579
01:36:41,730 --> 01:36:42,050
Yeah.

1580
01:36:42,210 --> 01:36:43,570
Um, which is weird, right?

1581
01:36:43,650 --> 01:36:48,130
Yeah, I think you, if you really cared about this stuff, you should expect them to admit to

1582
01:36:48,130 --> 01:36:49,010
it and still do it.

1583
01:36:49,170 --> 01:36:54,240
But I guess that they're the calculation is that if they did that, they would be somehow

1584
01:36:54,240 --> 01:37:00,160
prevented from um engaging in that that behavioral I mean that suggests that,

1585
01:37:00,240 --> 01:37:04,640
you know, in order to avoid inflicting the cost on you, I would have to inflict an even

1586
01:37:04,640 --> 01:37:09,840
bigger cost by like missing work when I'm really financially strapped or or missing, you

1587
01:37:09,840 --> 01:37:14,450
know, important social obligation like missing that would be a huge cost to me and it it

1588
01:37:14,450 --> 01:37:17,570
seems reasonable that we wouldn't expect people to incur those costs.

1589
01:37:17,810 --> 01:37:18,050
Yeah.

1590
01:37:18,130 --> 01:37:22,370
And so it doesn't translate into um any kind of knock on your your character, your moral

1591
01:37:22,450 --> 01:37:23,010
your moral character.

1592
01:37:23,250 --> 01:37:23,330
Yeah.

1593
01:37:23,570 --> 01:37:24,530
It's a common knowledge problem.

1594
01:37:24,610 --> 01:37:27,810
David, this is another thing you got to get on the common knowledge pathogen avoidance.

1595
01:37:27,890 --> 01:37:31,570
So like is the chef going to wear like a mask and be like I have a cold and everybody

1596
01:37:31,570 --> 01:37:32,450
thinks that's fine.

1597
01:37:32,770 --> 01:37:38,380
You you know nobody's gonna knock the chef, but ideally uh everyone would have a norm of

1598
01:37:38,460 --> 01:37:40,300
well, if he has to work, he should do that.

1599
01:37:40,380 --> 01:37:42,620
But there's not common knowledge.

1600
01:37:42,700 --> 01:37:46,700
So we wouldn't we wouldn't expect the chef to do that because we know the chef would know

1601
01:37:46,700 --> 01:37:49,500
that everyone would be think that's terrible.

1602
01:37:49,580 --> 01:37:51,260
And what are you gonna do?

1603
01:37:53,340 --> 01:37:55,580
I keep thinking of yeah, yeah.

1604
01:37:55,660 --> 01:37:58,940
I keep thinking about the somebody just being like, excuse me, while I sneeze on your baby.

1605
01:37:59,020 --> 01:38:04,410
This is Um I I I had one last question about this that that occurred to me.

1606
01:38:04,490 --> 01:38:05,210
I'm curious about.

1607
01:38:05,290 --> 01:38:11,130
It seems like um the psychology of um hiding a contagious

1608
01:38:11,130 --> 01:38:16,970
temporary illness um is going to be very different from the psychology of hiding

1609
01:38:16,970 --> 01:38:21,210
a chronic and a potentially uh non-contagious illness.

1610
01:38:21,290 --> 01:38:24,250
And the reasons for doing so might be very different in in either of these cases.

1611
01:38:24,330 --> 01:38:29,860
Have you looked at at the different types of illnesses uh or or or and how that might be a

1612
01:38:29,860 --> 01:38:30,500
factor here.

1613
01:38:30,740 --> 01:38:31,380
Yeah.

1614
01:38:32,020 --> 01:38:37,620
We have um not looked at comparisons with chronic illness, but we've looked at

1615
01:38:37,620 --> 01:38:40,260
comparisons with uh hiding other types of information.

1616
01:38:40,420 --> 01:38:46,340
So like um the chronic illnesses, I think the the major reason this these have been studied

1617
01:38:46,340 --> 01:38:46,980
a fair amount.

1618
01:38:47,060 --> 01:38:51,540
Uh the major reason people hide those is because they're anticipating some type of stigma

1619
01:38:51,540 --> 01:38:52,180
to result.

1620
01:38:52,660 --> 01:38:57,770
And but there's other types of information, people do this also because of the the stigma

1621
01:38:58,010 --> 01:38:58,490
concern.

1622
01:38:58,650 --> 01:39:04,010
So hiding something about your identity could be like sexual orientation, it could be like

1623
01:39:04,010 --> 01:39:06,250
criminal history, it could be all sorts of things.

1624
01:39:06,970 --> 01:39:12,730
We have done those comparisons and we find that people

1625
01:39:13,210 --> 01:39:19,210
who do, who are, who are hiding the contagious illnesses, they do anticipate some type

1626
01:39:19,210 --> 01:39:20,570
of stigma associated with that.

1627
01:39:20,650 --> 01:39:26,340
But even over and above that, they are still likely to engage in that

1628
01:39:26,340 --> 01:39:26,900
behavior.

1629
01:39:27,140 --> 01:39:31,780
So it I think that it is an appropriate comparison to make with something like chronic

1630
01:39:31,780 --> 01:39:33,140
illness or identity concealment.

1631
01:39:33,460 --> 01:39:38,100
But the major difference is those don't create the potential for direct harm.

1632
01:39:38,500 --> 01:39:43,620
There's no transmitted harm just from interacting with somebody.

1633
01:39:43,700 --> 01:39:49,060
Even if the deception was not uncovered, you still can have harm that results from that.

1634
01:39:49,220 --> 01:39:53,540
And I think that's what makes this contagious illness concealment interesting.

1635
01:39:55,210 --> 01:39:55,850
Cool.

1636
01:39:57,130 --> 01:39:58,090
All right, Josh.

1637
01:39:58,170 --> 01:40:01,450
I mean, this was a really fun conversation.

1638
01:40:01,610 --> 01:40:03,290
I had a great time chatting with you.

1639
01:40:03,770 --> 01:40:04,330
I enjoyed it.

1640
01:40:04,410 --> 01:40:05,370
Yeah, this is fun.

1641
01:40:05,610 --> 01:40:05,770
Yeah.

1642
01:40:06,010 --> 01:40:06,250
All right.

1643
01:40:06,330 --> 01:40:07,610
Um yeah.

1644
01:40:07,690 --> 01:40:08,650
And thank you for coming on.

1645
01:40:08,730 --> 01:40:14,650
And yes, please, uh, if you are sick, uh what can we can we end on a

1646
01:40:14,650 --> 01:40:15,050
PSA?

1647
01:40:15,290 --> 01:40:16,970
If you're sick, what do you recommend people do?

1648
01:40:17,130 --> 01:40:19,840
Like watch reality TV so they don't feel FOMO.

1649
01:40:20,160 --> 01:40:23,840
Like can we wrap us all up in a watch survivor?

1650
01:40:24,240 --> 01:40:24,880
Yeah.

1651
01:40:25,280 --> 01:40:28,240
I probably shouldn't have mentioned that thing about people excusing it.

1652
01:40:28,480 --> 01:40:30,240
Uh no, it's good.

1653
01:40:30,560 --> 01:40:31,440
That's not helpful.

1654
01:40:32,320 --> 01:40:38,080
No, it's it it reality is we should always accept the data and deal with the data.

1655
01:40:38,160 --> 01:40:38,480
Yeah.

1656
01:40:38,800 --> 01:40:39,040
Right.

1657
01:40:39,200 --> 01:40:43,570
I would say just admit to it or prepare to be yelled at by David.

1658
01:40:44,050 --> 01:40:45,170
Yeah, I I will find you.

1659
01:40:45,250 --> 01:40:45,730
I will find you.

1660
01:40:45,890 --> 01:40:46,370
Wear a mask.

1661
01:40:46,530 --> 01:40:47,170
Wear a mask.

1662
01:40:47,650 --> 01:40:51,410
Or, you know, just be on like if you're you have a social thing, just like tell your

1663
01:40:51,410 --> 01:40:55,890
friends that, you know, you have a cold and you know, if if if you don't want to risk

1664
01:40:55,890 --> 01:40:57,730
getting sick, then you you understand.

1665
01:40:57,970 --> 01:41:00,450
But if you know, leave put it in their hands.

1666
01:41:00,610 --> 01:41:05,010
Like let them, you know, have the the full information and make an informed decision.

1667
01:41:05,250 --> 01:41:05,490
Yeah.

1668
01:41:05,650 --> 01:41:08,210
Everybody gets sick and there's always other stuff that's gonna happen.

1669
01:41:08,610 --> 01:41:10,210
If you miss this one thing, so whatever.

1670
01:41:10,450 --> 01:41:10,690
Yeah.

1671
01:41:10,900 --> 01:41:11,700
Yeah, exactly.

1672
01:41:11,860 --> 01:41:12,100
All right.

1673
01:41:12,260 --> 01:41:13,220
Josh, that was awesome.

1674
01:41:13,300 --> 01:41:13,940
Thank you so much.

1675
01:41:14,260 --> 01:41:14,500
Okay.

1676
01:41:14,660 --> 01:41:14,900
Great.

1677
01:41:15,060 --> 01:41:16,420
Great to talk to you both.

1678
01:41:21,780 --> 01:41:24,500
Uh David, do we think we still need to be doing these outros?

1679
01:41:24,740 --> 01:41:26,820
I mean we're here anyway, so we should say something.

1680
01:41:27,220 --> 01:41:29,060
Yeah, we we should say something.

1681
01:41:29,300 --> 01:41:34,970
I really do like your um uh your song The Oh the this the music?

1682
01:41:37,130 --> 01:41:37,610
Can I ask you?

1683
01:41:37,770 --> 01:41:39,690
It's called, can I tell people what it's called?

1684
01:41:39,930 --> 01:41:40,250
Sure.

1685
01:41:40,410 --> 01:41:41,370
It's Manafort.

1686
01:41:41,530 --> 01:41:42,490
What is that?

1687
01:41:42,890 --> 01:41:44,090
Uh it was totally random.

1688
01:41:44,250 --> 01:41:48,490
I think I might have been like watching a documentary where Paul Manafort was mentioned and

1689
01:41:48,490 --> 01:41:50,250
it was just on my head and I needed a title swift for it.

1690
01:41:50,490 --> 01:41:52,170
It's a great, it's a great, it's a it's perfect.

1691
01:41:52,250 --> 01:41:52,570
I love it.

1692
01:41:52,650 --> 01:41:54,650
But in case you're wondering, it's called Manafort.

1693
01:41:54,730 --> 01:41:54,890
Yeah.

1694
01:41:55,210 --> 01:41:55,610
Yes.

1695
01:41:55,880 --> 01:41:58,920
Um again not not enough Glockenspiel.

1696
01:41:59,080 --> 01:42:05,000
Um David, what should we do in this uh outro other than remind people to um

1697
01:42:05,640 --> 01:42:06,680
make comments?

1698
01:42:06,760 --> 01:42:07,960
That's not the verb.

1699
01:42:08,440 --> 01:42:10,600
Produce comments, excrete comments.

1700
01:42:10,840 --> 01:42:13,960
That was a very excited, yeah.

1701
01:42:14,440 --> 01:42:14,680
Yeah.

1702
01:42:14,760 --> 01:42:18,120
Uh comment, like, uh subscribe.

1703
01:42:18,360 --> 01:42:18,600
Yeah.

1704
01:42:18,760 --> 01:42:21,000
Uh say nice things on social media.

1705
01:42:22,130 --> 01:42:22,690
Patreon.

1706
01:42:22,770 --> 01:42:23,490
Uh Patreon.

1707
01:42:23,810 --> 01:42:24,770
We do have a Patreon, yes.

1708
01:42:24,850 --> 01:42:25,010
Yeah.

1709
01:42:25,250 --> 01:42:25,490
We do.

1710
01:42:25,650 --> 01:42:27,090
Has anyone we have?

1711
01:42:27,250 --> 01:42:27,410
Yeah.

1712
01:42:27,570 --> 01:42:27,810
Yeah.

1713
01:42:27,890 --> 01:42:28,930
It's just it's just yeah.

1714
01:42:29,170 --> 01:42:30,850
We I sh yeah we there we do.

1715
01:42:30,930 --> 01:42:34,610
I mean we should actually figure out what we're gonna do with with those ten cents.

1716
01:42:34,690 --> 01:42:35,570
But yes we do.

1717
01:42:35,810 --> 01:42:36,610
Oh, all right.

1718
01:42:36,690 --> 01:42:37,010
Yeah.

1719
01:42:37,170 --> 01:42:37,570
Hmm.

1720
01:42:37,730 --> 01:42:39,490
What can we spend that money on?

1721
01:42:39,570 --> 01:42:42,130
Maybe we'll enjoy a a Snickers bar.

1722
01:42:42,210 --> 01:42:46,850
Uh I was gonna say we could support a graduate a graduate student for a summer or

1723
01:42:46,850 --> 01:42:51,330
something, you know, two people on MTurk.

1724
01:42:51,560 --> 01:42:57,480
Or we can uh we can advertise the podcast to m we can we should advertise shorts

1725
01:42:57,720 --> 01:43:01,400
um on YouTube and then because we do no advertising.

1726
01:43:01,800 --> 01:43:02,360
That's true.

1727
01:43:02,520 --> 01:43:07,000
So yeah maybe we could put that that money into some ads for yeah and then grow the grow

1728
01:43:07,000 --> 01:43:08,600
the thing like a pyramid screen.

1729
01:43:08,680 --> 01:43:12,590
Um one of the comments people gave uh somebody was listening to one of the episodes on

1730
01:43:12,590 --> 01:43:16,670
YouTube and they said, Oh, you guys could get a lot more hits and views if you had gotten

1731
01:43:16,670 --> 01:43:18,590
on this like bandwagon cultural thing.

1732
01:43:18,670 --> 01:43:18,990
I don't know.

1733
01:43:19,070 --> 01:43:20,110
I'm just, you know, whatever.

1734
01:43:20,270 --> 01:43:24,590
Um, it was something I think it was like the Colton Scrivener episode where they said, You

1735
01:43:24,750 --> 01:43:26,590
you guys could have had a lot more.

1736
01:43:26,830 --> 01:43:30,430
It was a great episode, and you guys could have had a lot more views if you had gotten on

1737
01:43:30,430 --> 01:43:35,870
this, like, you know, people watching horror movie reaction bandwagon, if you had got on

1738
01:43:35,870 --> 01:43:36,110
this.

1739
01:43:36,270 --> 01:43:40,820
And I was just thinking, like, that assumes we uh what band the movie reaction band?

1740
01:43:41,140 --> 01:43:41,300
What?

1741
01:43:41,540 --> 01:43:45,220
You know how there's like YouTube videos of people like playing video games and people

1742
01:43:45,220 --> 01:43:49,780
watch people playing video games and I think it's like that where you like react to horror

1743
01:43:49,780 --> 01:43:50,100
movies.

1744
01:43:50,180 --> 01:43:50,820
I have no idea.

1745
01:43:50,900 --> 01:43:54,020
I I I I only spent about four seconds looking into this.

1746
01:43:54,500 --> 01:43:56,580
People watching people watching horror movies.

1747
01:43:56,900 --> 01:43:57,540
Correct, correct.

1748
01:43:57,700 --> 01:43:59,380
Which is actually kind of interesting.

1749
01:43:59,700 --> 01:44:01,810
That is a recursive for sure.

1750
01:44:02,130 --> 01:44:02,370
Okay.

1751
01:44:02,530 --> 01:44:03,090
Um, yeah.

1752
01:44:03,170 --> 01:44:04,450
So number one, that exists.

1753
01:44:04,610 --> 01:44:10,530
Number two, this commentator on YouTube said if we had gotten into this, I guess,

1754
01:44:10,770 --> 01:44:14,290
um uh we could have gotten a lot more views and likes.

1755
01:44:14,370 --> 01:44:20,290
And so if we watched movies and videotaped us watching movies, I don't know.

1756
01:44:20,370 --> 01:44:24,690
I don't know how we were gonna get out on the ground floor of the people watching people

1757
01:44:24,690 --> 01:44:25,650
watching horror.

1758
01:44:25,810 --> 01:44:26,770
I don't know.

1759
01:44:27,460 --> 01:44:29,220
Maybe we can ask them what they meant.

1760
01:44:29,540 --> 01:44:31,620
Yeah, I think we need some clarification.

1761
01:44:31,940 --> 01:44:36,660
Some guidance and how but what at my point in saying bringing the whole stuff is it assumes

1762
01:44:36,660 --> 01:44:38,980
that we want to be like a viral podcast.

1763
01:44:40,820 --> 01:44:42,500
Where we want more views.

1764
01:44:42,820 --> 01:44:43,540
It assumes that.

1765
01:44:43,620 --> 01:44:44,980
And I I don't know that's true.

1766
01:44:45,060 --> 01:44:45,220
Yeah.

1767
01:44:45,380 --> 01:44:48,340
I mean it's a reasonable assumption to make that you know we wouldn't want something.

1768
01:44:48,660 --> 01:44:52,740
But I would I would poke on that like the idea that like numbers are what counts.

1769
01:44:52,820 --> 01:44:58,670
Like if I I don't maybe this is a justification for not um being more

1770
01:44:59,150 --> 01:45:02,270
Yeah, it sounds sounds like rationalization I I don't know, man.

1771
01:45:02,350 --> 01:45:07,230
I I this is this thing of like I I I really question this modern assumption that like

1772
01:45:07,310 --> 01:45:13,070
everything should be like entertaining and everybody should be putting content up for the

1773
01:45:13,070 --> 01:45:16,750
point of having as many people like it as possible.

1774
01:45:17,150 --> 01:45:21,660
Maybe it's the um it it feels like very hollow to me.

1775
01:45:21,820 --> 01:45:25,740
Like the point is you present stuff that you care about and that you're happy people are

1776
01:45:25,740 --> 01:45:29,340
engaged with, but there's always a higher number, you know?

1777
01:45:29,660 --> 01:45:30,140
That's true.

1778
01:45:30,380 --> 01:45:34,380
Like what yeah, what hole in your soul are you trying to fill by having more people like

1779
01:45:34,380 --> 01:45:35,500
your stuff?

1780
01:45:35,980 --> 01:45:38,700
Yeah, that to I mean, I I totally get that.

1781
01:45:38,780 --> 01:45:41,580
Yeah, I I don't you know, we don't need to have a massive following.

1782
01:45:41,740 --> 01:45:42,540
Uh but at the same time.

1783
01:45:48,810 --> 01:45:50,810
mom, I'm talking to you, Mom.

1784
01:45:50,890 --> 01:45:51,530
You gotta listen.

1785
01:45:52,810 --> 01:45:55,130
If you've got a neighbor, go knock on their door.

1786
01:45:57,770 --> 01:46:02,570
No, I mean I I'm with you that we don't want to be too we don't want to water down um the

1787
01:46:02,570 --> 01:46:05,050
science or or be too flashy.

1788
01:46:05,130 --> 01:46:09,770
Uh um but at the same time, numbers matter in the sense that we don't want it to be zero,

1789
01:46:09,850 --> 01:46:11,130
in which case it would not be worth doing.

1790
01:46:11,290 --> 01:46:14,810
No, that's they matter in the sense that it would be nice to have more a bigger audience.

1791
01:46:14,970 --> 01:46:17,050
I wouldn't I wouldn't uh complain.

1792
01:46:17,700 --> 01:46:19,540
Uh I'll have to think about that.

1793
01:46:19,620 --> 01:46:23,220
But I appreciate if you're listening now, and especially if you're getting to the end of

1794
01:46:23,220 --> 01:46:24,020
this nonsense.

1795
01:46:24,180 --> 01:46:25,220
Thank you for listening.

1796
01:46:25,380 --> 01:46:27,140
Uh David, this was really fun.

1797
01:46:27,300 --> 01:46:28,740
Um, I'll see you next week.

1798
01:46:28,900 --> 01:46:32,820
Next week we'll have another normal episode with a guest, I assume.

1799
01:46:33,380 --> 01:46:34,020
Sounds good.

1800
01:46:34,180 --> 01:46:34,420
Yeah.

1801
01:46:34,500 --> 01:46:34,820
Uh good.

1802
01:46:35,140 --> 01:46:35,540
All right.

1803
01:46:35,780 --> 01:46:37,300
Thank you everybody for listening.

1804
01:46:37,380 --> 01:46:38,900
And uh hey, your two.

1805
01:47:01,720 --> 01:47:06,840
Ponton Pontin Do Pontum Pan

1806
01:47:07,000 --> 01:47:12,120
Pontan Do Penton Ponton Pont

1807
01:47:12,280 --> 01:47:17,080
Ponton Pon Ponton Do Pont Pontum

1808
01:47:17,560 --> 01:47:20,040
Pontan Do Pont Punning