Shame, Pride, and Guilt with Daniel Sznycer
2025-10-21 12:00:00.000 +00:00

This is Evolutionary Psychology, the podcast. Actual Evolutionary Psychology by Actual Evolutionary Psychologists. Who is our guest, Dave? It is Daniel Schnitzer. The great, the preeminent. Uh Daniel Schneezer. Yes. Uh what what is there to say about this guy? He's so lovely, uh, so funny. Uh research is is is absolutely brilliant, beautiful. He's really pushing the the boundaries of sort of like functionalist approaches to emotions, evolutionary approaches to emotions, particularly things like shame, pride, guilt, Um, and you know, there's a lot to unpack about how those work and th they're really important and there's sort of a trope that like shame is useless, for example. Um, and we really cover the ground of sort of the history and then also like what what's

the evidence and what's the argument for what's the logic for why we have this emotion. Yeah. A lot of fun things came up in this conversation, whether self-esteem is bullshit, the three breasted woman from Total Recall, uh traveling, uh uh whether uh reading uh long uh boring books makes you a better person. Uh this was a really fun conversation. Oh yeah, you had sort of like a fire around well, what is that called when you like it's uh I gave him some stumpers. Yeah, you gave him some stumpers, yeah. That's right. And it was fun to kind of tackle those. Yeah, maybe we can have that as a segment. Like, Yeah, maybe we should do a recurring thing where we where we stump the guest. Stump the guest.

Ooh, good. And maybe we can f dial a friend. Oh yeah. Yeah. And then we can give the guest a million dollars if they get it right. Uh well w maybe we uh quote unquote, we can get it. Well let's let's wait and see if maybe more people support us on Patreon and then we can use the Patreon funds for that project. Yeah. Okay. It'll be some dollar amount. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Yeah. It'll be a it'll be to the left of the decimal point. Yeah. Okay. All right. Enjoy it. Without further ado, Daniel Schnitzer. Yeah. All right. So today we are very blessed to have Daniel Schnitzer on. We were just going over a pronunciation of your name. Um, I I my name is horrible, Petra Zuski, and my dad has like three uncles, and they each

pronounce it differently. Is that true in your family? Does everybody pronounce it differently? Uh in Spanish it's more uh uh common, but in in in Polish it would be Petroszywzewski. Oh I didn't realize your name was Pietrofkitting. No, no, no, yeah. No, uh the correct Polish way for my name is uh Pietroszewski. Pietroszewski. I went to Warsaw and somebody I checked in a hotel, and it was the first time in my life where they were like, I didn't they weren't asking me how to say it. And then I said, so they so I asked them, like, how do I say my name? And then they said it. And then I said, um, my then I then them were like, well, how do you say your name to me? And I was like, Petrozuski. And then they like stopped for a second.

They were like, Well, it is your name. I guess you could say it however you want. So they were very, very kind about it. But uh Daniel, we're very happy to have you here. Likewise. Uh great to be here with you. Um, and we've we've had some people on, we've talked about anger and emotions. Um, you study, as far as I understand it, what is considered self-conscious emotions. Um, that term uh is that I think I even sort of came across that term most consistently in some of your reviews of the past literature. Can you tell people a little bit about what is that? And then there's two options. One is either, you know, how do you think about what you study and is it different than that? And then the other option is sort of like what's the history of that research on

self-conscious emotions. Uh okay, those you ask uh many uh questions. Uh and it's a question. We're professional questions. I'm gonna give you 10 questions. I thought we were gonna talk about TV shows and TV diners and now you give me a question to you. Yeah, I know. Can I check my notes? Can I chat we sand? Yeah, we were like we were just chatting for like 20 minutes about nothing, and then boom, yeah, exactly. No, we have plenty of time. We can edit out you searching chat GPT. No, no, for s for real. Yeah. So I'll I'll check GPT if I uh exactly. But what's up with the emotions? Yeah. So so uh you're getting me self-conscious now, but uh the thing began back in the early days when I was uh a young boy, I guess.

And Tubi grabbed me by the uh John Tubi Graphic. John Tubi. The the great John Tubi, yeah. Yeah, grabbed me by the by the shirt and he told me, Sonny, uh you're gonna study shame. And I said, Yes, sir, uh whatever you say I'll do. Um Okay, and uh the self conscious emotion, yeah. So so your origin story for getting into this area was uh John Tubi told me to. Yes. Okay, that's a pretty good reason, which is the best way to start any research project. So yeah, I started doing that, and the self conscious uh moniker is a moniker that comes from uh psychodynamics and Freudian, I think, uh ways of looking at shame. And uh there's a prehistory of this which I'm a little bit shady on. I and I should know much more than I do.

But what I can say, there's a woman named HR Block. Uh HR Lewis. No, HR Block is the taxes. HR Lewis, uh, and she was a psychologist, she was a clinician, and she was of the idea that uh shame and guilt were self-conscious in that um now emerging with her disciple of uh or some some more experimental person who took research from H.R. Lewis and translated more into the research context, uh Jun Tangney. Her object of study is not so much shame and guilt, but rather the contrast between shame and guilt, like in free variation, uh, like two sounds that you can make in free variation. So, in some context, uh you can make two different sounds in a language, and linguists refer to that as free variation.

And June uh was important in establishing uh differences, similarities and differences in shame and guilt. Basically, when people feel guilt, uh they, at least in the American reports of the label guilt, they appro it it's kind of an approach and make up and apologize and uh stuff like that. And the theme in shame is uh illusion, avoidance, um, and um uh escape. And uh she was very instrumental in alerting people to these interesting differences. Uh when you mess up, when you screw up, people feel people say that they feel shame, they feel guilt, they feel embarrassed, and and we go back and forth with these labels. Uh, although there's some for some reason, people they're they tend to roughly match what we believe is the reputation management uh system

to the shame level and uh imposing undue costs on someone that you value the guilt label. Okay, the all of this is boring and academic and no one cares. But uh they they're we're done with the episode now. Okay. They pay me to they pay me to dissertate about things that no one cares. So I'm um I'm inured to it. So I'm gonna do it. I love the verb dissertate. I'm gonna I'm gonna do it unless and until you you you stop me. Uh no we're gonna children tell me all the all to shut up all the time, so I'm I'm also inured to that, so you can tell me to shut up anytime and I'm happy. I'm happy. So the so so shame is about hiding, escaping the situation, covering yourself up. Um guilt is about eva evasion evasion evasion is a good label.

Yeah. Evasion. So shame is about evasion. Guilt is about apologizing and making amends. Is that a fair characterization of the distinction that had been in the literature for for a while? And yeah, and June was uh very important in uh uh recognizing these facts and sorting what goes with what, and saying that there's similarity that that in the general scene when you screw up, uh people may feel shame, people may feel guilt, people may feel embarrassment. And one question that she elaborated in her career is what are the conditions under which what functions, if any, these things have, and do they have functions at all? And what are the conditions that elicit these emotions? And her answer, based on her reading of Helen Lewis and her own research,

is that shame is the poor cousin of guilt. Um if you uh this is the free variation, there are two elements that could uh two alleles that could uh compete for a uh place in the in the lousa in the locus uh of evolutionary genetics reference to make things easier for to use the sim very you you you you can you can feel one thing or the other thing in this context and they're more or less interchangeable except that they're not interchangeable in the sense that if you have a healthy attributional style if you if you've been socialized to and you had socialization is a big uh aspect of this theory, and maybe other things too. But if you had a good socialization with nurturing parents and uh a healthy way

to disentangle that maybe you're not stupid necessarily because you failed the exam, you can correctly you know give yourself a break, etc. Uh, then you impute that uh unfortunate event to something specific about yourself. It's the self judging the self or some part of the self, uh judging the self. And it's it's very much what it's a very much it's very much a psychodynamic intra-personal question. It's how I uh judge the event. So if I judge the event as reflecting poorly upon my whole self, and that's the maladaptive slash pathological, pathogenic, uh bad and ugly way to do it, uh the system s flips to shame. And why? Well, because thinking oh bad dad, so my my daughter says bad daddy, bad

daddy. If I screw up the exam or the whatever, I didn't tip the waitress or something. If I if I for whatever reason I my judgment of myself is bad daddy, bad Daniel, yuck, disgusting self, uh, I feel shame because it's very painful. And the pain of the attribution makes me want to escape and uh hide, etc. And there's uh June recognizes that there's a paradoxical thing that Chef uh it's he's a guy, so it's very interesting. Sociologist at UCSB, he studied shame, he studied something he called the shame rage cycle, and he, in marital disputes and so on, he sees that you know, uh, I'm ashamed for something that I did, I lash out in anger at my wife and then my wife is hurt and I feel additional shame now in addition to the baseline shame but

now I have shame about the rage and I have further taint to my honor and I need further aggression maybe an honor killing in order to uh paper over the slide or something. That sounds like it makes absolutely no sense. I don't usually I don't usually engage in onorky links. I have never done it so far. Okay. I think David meant the science, not the um but anyway, yeah. But it's good to know both my own. I was referring to the the shame leading to rage leading to shame model of how this uh I don't understand that. It sounds terrible. I mean, just if it does happen, but uh so just to just so we're on the same page. So self-referential emotions, the self-refer or self-conscious it's self-referential.

I misspoke. So basically, it's that there is a there is a representation of not only the social world and others and how I feel about them. Are you nice? Are you good? For some reason, so far, which the theories haven't come up with or talked about, there's another set of uh attention placed upon the self. And then there's an evaluation of as I'm bumbling through the world, doing good things and bad things, there's an attribution to like if I I'm the source of this good thing or bad thing, how do I feel about that? And then how does that in consequence, if I attribute it a bad thing to myself, all of a sudden I'm judging myself if it's self-referential. And then there are these emotions when the detection of I've judged that bad,

Dave, bad. That's a very good um summary. Yes. And there are good emotions and bad emotions, and this model applies to guilt and shame, the bad pair, and also to what Tiny calls alpha pride and beta pride. If you achieve uh and you attribute to the self, that's alpha pride, uh, Jessica Tracy calls that hubris, uh hubris, the arrogant variety of pride, uh, whereas if you impute the success to something transient, unstable about yourself, controllable, then that's beta pride, slash authentic pride, slash achievement oriented pride. We're writing a paper on pride. And there's not much of a question of why there should be these things in the head, which are the functions of these things. They they're universe or their referential frame is

these things happen, there's an antecedent to these things, so the antecedent is king here. But moreover, uh Jessica Tracy, then in further models, she incorporates the social view. But Tanny says explicitly in some papers that um not only these things are about the self, but emphatically she thinks that these things are very much not about other people. Uh any which is I think weird, but uh interesting. Interesting, nevertheless, uh testable. We have tested that recently with Mitchell Landers and Patrick Durkey. And uh yep, and um so okay, so and the the the data in the the data in support of these uh so-called attributional theories of self-conscious self-conscious emotions are mostly correlational.

Uh, for example, they find correlations between your attributional style more more to more bad daddy goes with shame, and I should have studied more goes with guilt as they predict. But the teacher. So individual differences and tendency to do these things. Exactly. Yes. Got it. Yes. You know, it it's I guess it uh meshes with the clinical framework. Right. There's variation among people, there's healthier people with healthier attributional styles. And there's more pathological people, pathological, pathogenic, whatever people. There's an interesting, there's a very interesting paper of Tanyi on on the a number of papers on the correlates of shame. Fantastically informative and important work on the correlates of shame.

And shame correlates with a whole bunch of interesting things. It correlates with suicidality, it correlates with feelings of inferiority, with feeling small, wanting to hide, um in the clinic with paranoia, with anxiety, with all the kind of all all items that you would predict uh if you adopt a more functionalist or adaptationist uh interpersonal view of this emotion, as in you screwed up, you emitted costs, and people are aware of these costs and now uh they recalibrate how much they value you, and that's uh fitness uh decreasing. And the question is how to evade detection, evade the their imposition of costs, etc. Okay. So let me let me see if I can s summarize what but put a put put a footnote

that the evidence is is correlational. There's a few experiments, but the experiments were confirm in the confirmationist uh framework or uh things to confirm. And we've recently f uh run falsificationist approach. But yeah, go go ahead and we'll setting the stage for Daniel Sneezer to come in and tell everyone why they're wrong. Exactly. So you've let you've laid the groundwork for the pre-existing research that has been done on shame and pride. And it's mostly it's descriptive. It's, you know, shame is about David is bad, guilt is about David did a bad thing, Pride, there's authentic pride and hubristic pride. Hubistic pride is David is awesome. Authentic pride is David did an awesome thing.

And this is coming from not an evolutionary functionalist approach, but more of a how do we make people feel better? How do we fight mental illness? And so the thinking there is, oh, well, shame is bad because you're thinking that you yourself are bad, that's gonna lead to depression and suicidality. So we want to avoid shame, shame is bad, guilt is better, it's it's not about you, it's about what you did. Um so shame is a bad emotion, guilt is okay. When it comes to pride, uh you don't want to be too arrogant and think that you yourself are awesome, you want to attribute it to what you did. So uh, you know, hubristic pride bad, um authentic pride good. I mean, it's even baked into the words authentic has positive connotations.

So this is basically the paradigm where we're we're thinking in terms of good or bad emotions, in terms of mental health, not in terms of what their underlying functions are and why they exist, why they're in the head. Um, but we are now we are on the evolutionary psychology podcast, and we want to know why these systems are in the head. Uh and so that's where Daniel Sneer comes in and tells us why are these systems. I I I very much agree with uh platforming me. I've been deplatform, but you're platforming me, so I'm very happy and I thank thank you very much. But before I'm being I'm platforming myself about my my theory and Tubi's theory, I we should say that a public choice theory of why people do what they do, including ourselves, is the the more funding is needed theory

of everything of academia. We are government employees and we do what they pay us to do, and if they pay us to find things we find and if they pay us to not find things we don't find. And um and the the what they pay and I'm not saying this dismissively, we uh everyone is an apparatus, everyone is uh government here in Academia, most of people not you not talented people like you Pinsov who made it in the real world, but uh and also smart people that but um okay. So everybody listen. So so so what so Tangni, and again, this is not this I I have high respect for her. Tangni is being paid to do clinician work. And she I believe she does uh I don't know if she's a clinician or not, but okay. So um yes, exactly like you said, there's uh

the if shame is associated with bad things, in the clinical uh uh scene, we want to help people to avoid bad things and to be happy. And it stands to reason that if guilt is associated with more making up and restoring the relationship and etc., Then maybe it stands to reason that uh and and people in shame go crazy and kill their daughters or more more salary they kill themselves or they harm their wives, etc. It stands to reason that you want to fix that. But but so so maybe there's a link between the what they pay you for and what you find, And uh, but like you said, also it's important to note that one big goal of the clinical work on this is to remove or minimize the experience of shame.

So, shame is a bad thing, uh, it's not a messenger of bad news. It there's an analogy straightforward with the physical pain system. Uh, you feel pain, you pay you take painkillers, but actually, physical pain is a highly organized adaptation. The bad thing is the damage to the tissue. And if you don't have physical pain, you die young because you're harming, you're burning yourself and you're not removing your hand. And so there's a I think there's a direct analogy with that. And in the clinical context, if you um they want to get rid of the bad stuff and shame is in the ledger of the bad stuff, but okay, now I can platform myself, and uh but but but we believe that sh shame is not the bad thing but the the bad thing is the consequences of

being demoted uh in the representation of value in the heads of other people when information reaches their brain and those are badly sorry let's unpack that so th the the representation of value in other people's brains is being demoted when you feel shame. So what what let's unpack all what is a representation of value? What makes it go up or down? Okay, so uh Tubi and Lida got a grant in 2005, the grant in NIH to do explore uh their brilliant ideas that they had since the 90s, or perhaps since they were born, because they came to the world with all the knowledge. And uh there was uh there was a lot of work in our lab, this the CPUCSB lab under Tubion Lida and and our and other labs too, but but uh

the idea is that the brain has machinery for um things, events, states of affairs, partners, anything, pretty much anything has positive, negative, or neutral effects on the probability that your genes will replicate in the long term, and we expect um organisms designed by selection to have ways to capture the goods and to like the okay I I I I I I am usually okay like the standard uh the the JAS standard accentuate the positives eliminate the negatives uh it's a nineteen forty Bing Crosby I think uh we can put it in the show notes. Yeah, there's a lot that'll be great. I'm trying to be weedy because I think people are trying to be weedy in these things, but uh I don't know. Tell me anime. Can I can I pause real quick?

So, like um so like for example, Daniel, if you're a really good cook and it's easier for you to cook and like get food than it is for me, and you're just really good at it, um you're and there's sort of positive externalities for me. Um, whether it's sort of reciprocal or it's just a positive externality or a mutualism. We sort of talked about that on the podcast, but sort of I'm going through the world, sort of looking for the events, as you put it, or attributes of people that are sort of more beneficial to me. And I should be designed by natural selection, or my mechanisms precisely, should be designed to value aspects of you or you compared to David, for example, if you have more of these things or you have this thing and David doesn't have any.

So uh is that is that right? Well let me back up. So so we first have the broader concept of value, which is just anything that has a positive or negative effect on the fitness of the valuer, right? That natural selection designed our value systems to uh track fitness regularities, stuff that promoted our fitness ancestrally will have value to us in the present moment. And so anything can have value from a desk to a chair to a piece of food to a predator will have highly low value. A potential disease will have really negative value. An attractive mate might have really positive value. Um, a beautiful landscape might have really positive value. So that's just the broader concept of value can apply to anything.

But within that broader subset, we can look at people and say, does this person have positive or negative value for me? Is this the type of person that would have positive that would have had positive fitness consequences? Yeah. Positive fitness affordances for me. Um, and if so, uh I want to spend more time with that person and try to get some of those benefits from that person. If this is person has low fitness value to me or would have ancestral or has cues of low fitness value, um, then I want to avoid that person, stay away from them, etc. Is that a good summary of the way you're thinking about it? That's a great summary, yes. Okay. And so there is a very rich and uh complex, we believe, uh, psychology for imputing value,

positive or negative, to other people. And some elements of value computation may be similar across domains, but a workhorse or a or a part of the identity of F-Syche is if Psych spent, I think, I don't know, just to pull the number out of my head, 50% or 70%, I think a huge part of F EP work, F-Syc work, is on value computation. Mate value and partner value and landscape value, food value. And there are specificities in how the mind computes the value of people or partners, like Lida is fond of saying, if I evaluate uh John as a mate the way I would evaluate a piece of food, then I would take the cue of richness that's that's proper to do for foods. Uh richness may be a cue to fat content, uh which is important for important nutrient.

Uh but if I apply that cue to computing the value of people, then that's that's doesn't work. You don't want to eat your mate and copulate with your food. That would be disaster. Or what Leah said is I would have married a uh she she put it succinctly, is I would have married a chocolate bar. I would have married a chocolate bar. Yes, that's right. And the argument there is the argument there is that value is not just general, there are domain-specific uh values. So what's what makes a food value valuable is going to be different than what makes a mate valuable, which will be different than what makes, say, an ally valuable, or a piece of furniture valuable, or a landscape valuable. So we have domain-specific criteria for evaluating things.

Right. And just to say out loud, and this is I feel like we're recapitulating the CP, we're like taking first principles here, like Big Bang. But the evaluation of value has been something traditionally, and you guys can tell me if you agree with this, has been very much sort of an instinct blindness in psychology. And I think taking an evolutionary approach, the idea that the software or the evolved organism needs to compute value is something that it's very hard to think when you're just the organism itself and you're just like, well, of course, like, you know, things are beautiful, like this is beautiful. I like food. This tastes good. Well, why is that? Why is that? Well, it just is, right?

So taking an evolutionary approach forces you to, um, and this is very much the tube point, not take anything for granted. We talked about this, we had Debon and we talked about that a lot. Like you don't, and so why is it good? It's because there's some valueslash corresponding outcome in the world that corresponds to to fitness, right? So like water, nutrients, um, surviving, having social support, et cetera, et cetera. So yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. There's no objective value there's in addition to the same thing. So we just established value. Yep. And we have people, so not only value in general, but value of people. Okay. So we have those building blocks. What do you do with those building blocks?

How does shame fit into this? Well, so uh once you have that in place or co-evolving with the psychology of value, you have a number of adaptive problems that arise from the existence of this machinery and you know uh promoting the higher value in the brains of other people. Um, so like if you can evaluate me. So Daniel, the moment that like the software is in you to evaluate other agents according to like what value they have, that's a problem for me now. Because I don't want to be in your category of a bad person. Right. That would be design so if you if you have view me as low value, or if everyone in my social environment views me as a low value social partner, that is catastrophic for my

fitness. It's equivalent than to death. Um even perhaps even worse than than death. You know, no one's going to want to mate with me, no one's want going to want to help me or take my side or support me in any way. Um so that is a huge fitness cost. So the what you're talking about is a really big adaptive problem. How do I make others in my social uh environment value me? It's yes, very much so. It's a representation in the brain that is not just a pattern of beats in the brain, but it translates into very real consequences because these in in a simple model of how this value person partner value works, these uh magnitudes set thresholds on, for example, in uh altruistic in decisions on whether to be altruistic with other people, these things set the set

thresholds of what's the highest cost that you would incur in order to benefit other someone else by a given set of but a fixed number of benefits and reciprocal. So if I value you, Daniel Sneezer, I'm going to be willing to make big sacrifices to benefit you. But if I don't value you, then I am not willing to do much of anything to benefit you. And in fact, I might even do things that hurt you because your welfare just doesn't matter to me at all. Right. So I might just in going about my life, I might bump into you or step on your whatever. You have low value to me, so who cares? But if I really value you, I'm going to, you know, avoid stepping on you and bumping into you. I'm going to do things to help you if I can.

If I can benefit you really highly at a low cost to myself, I'm going to do that. And even if I could if I can benefit you really highly at a high cost myself, I might even do that because you're just so valuable to me. So it's so uh how much we value people directly translates into how we treat them, into the things we actually do uh in in the world that affect them. Yes. In in a toy model of this uh value variable uh these this runs in theory from minus infinite to plus infinite If I value you positively, I'm willing to sacrifice for your welfare. If I value you at exactly zero, I'm not willing to lift a finger to save your life if you're drowning, for example. If if I could spend one penny to save your life and the life of your family, etc.

I wouldn't if I value you at exactly zero. But I wouldn't spitefully impose costs on you. If I value you negatively, uh, I would pay costs uh in order to harm you. There's a genre of YouTube videos where people key the Lamborghinis of other people out of envy. And envy is a spiteful emotion. Some people are paying the cost, the risk of going to jail in order to impose costs on the enemy or the rival. So that would be a case of negative value. So like I'd yeah, I'd be willing to I'd be willing to make a sacrifice to hurt you when we both wind up worse off. But because you're more worse off than me, I'm gonna do it because that's how much I hate you. So that that would correspond to something like hatred or envy or something like that.

Yeah, exactly. Okay. Uh so I uh go to go back to shame, I screw the it's it's a two person game. The minimal game is kind of a two person game. So i i in the sh in the in the tiny story it's a maybe it's a one person game, you're solitary in the island, you didn't live up to your ego ideals or something like that. You feel shame. You say bad daddy, bad Daniel, and you feel shame because you're you are the judge, you are the judge of yourself. Uh, but but here in this story, it's a two-person game where uh Daniel screws up uh somehow in tennis or in cooking or in whatever. Uh David David learns about this information. They used you guys used to value my welfare at 50% as highly as your own welfare.

That is to say that in this toy model, you were willing to spend a maximum of five bucks in order to benefit me by 10 bucks, or that you required um only five bucks when you're imposing uh um uh you're requiring a minimum of five bucks in order to impose a cost of ten bucks to me in the reciprocal taking. Um, but you're valuing me at 50%. But if you additionally learn new information, regulatory information, that my I suck, my suckiness is higher, then you correspondingly downgrade that and that translates into less favorable terms of the relationship. Now for me, and that means I get fewer good stuff from you and I you guys take more actions that would benefit you but cost me. And so that's a bad thing for me because I'm getting fewer chocolate bars from you and I'm

getting more patches in the face from you, uh, less supporting conflicts, etc. And the and that's not a good state of affairs for a creature that needs uh cost and benefits to allied the cost and and and uh collect benefits from the environment. And uh we we can imagine that in response to this recurrent problem, uh there may have been selection for something whose function is to minimize the capturing of those bad costs. Right. And so perhaps shame is that machine. Yeah. So if I can just sort of be, yeah. So we've got so the in the old model, it was that sort of like for some reason, we're just conscious of ourselves, we're self-judging, and it's it's sort of maladaptive and sort of, you know, especially shame is useless, right?

Because it's just sort of like you're just trying hard on yourself, and we just want to get rid of that. This idea is that the reason why we have a representation of ourself is because that software allows us to prevent or address social costs when other people either have found out or might find out about something that would cause them to devalue me. So it's either preventative or reparative for this for a very specific class of situations, social situations where other people are going to value me less. Is that right? Yes. Yeah. And so one question then is, and maybe we can start talking about the data a little bit too. And David, I'll let you go in a second too. Sorry. Um is uh I imagine one of the reasons why people don't think

it's social is because of this sort of preventative aspect, right? There's sort of like a almost proximate ultimate idea where sort of like if I'm alone in a room, I might um, and if I like, let's say, let's say I kill somebody in a room, right? Um, and I don't think anybody's gonna find out, but I still might feel guilt or shame about that. And I think there's sort of this toy idea, or like, let's say it's like I steal a candy bar from a store, let's just make it less crazy, right? And like I have good reason to think that nobody's gonna find out. There might be individual differences, and maybe some people don't feel any, but maybe some people would feel guilt and shame. And I think maybe that residual feeling, even when it feels like there's no

social consequence per se, might be part of the intuition that it's not social at all. Could be. Is that true? And then for people who haven't kind of understood the idea of sort of like cost benefit or like signal detection or error management. So number one, is that fair? And then number two, um, uh is my summary right that this the the idea is that these are preventative or reparative emotions for other people um uh devaluing you yeah uh yes uh or no uh yeah no yes i agree yes uh yeah i i think the lingering residual feeling of the self it could be one reason why uh there's this theory of the self Uh, there's an analogy with other adaptations, social adaptation with that adaptations that we believe are social, right?

That can also be used in solo mode. And so Chomsky says that language is for articulating ideas, uh, a little bit of self-theory of language, and other people think that language is a complex machine for the sake of interacting with other people. So there's a little bit of an analogy there. Other emotions, social, we believe social emotions can also be deployed in solo mode. So imagination, planning, etc., are important components of these things. My suspicion, although I haven't done any study on this, is that the folk theory of shame is if I ask my mom or my aunt or someone like that, I imagine that normal people might uh have the social theory of shame. Uh hey mom, why would you why do people feel shame?

Well duh, when you screw up, uh you don't want people to catch you. Sure. Of course yeah, of course you destroy incriminating evidence. Like what kind of question is that? Sure. So they don't catch you. Duh. Uh so I think my my my vague suspicion is that normal people think this um have the social theory, and maybe you have to go to college maybe to learn the self-theory of shame, maybe more fun. Yeah. Um and so uh early size on shame that I've done so so it's a little bit like recapitulating the self-esteem theory of self-esteem. Uh in self-esteem, people found a correlation between self-esteem, how I feel about myself, and all sorts of good outcomes, you know, hap happy people, richer people with more attractive mates and happy kids and beautiful large cars in

California. Exactly. All of our problems will be solved. Yeah. it's a it's a story worth of uh Tom Wolf, the great American sat satirist uh and commentarist. Um there's a guy by the name of Joe Vasconcellus or something like that. Th they they saw correlations between good sel high self esteem and all sorts of good outcomes, and they ran to say, Okay, we need a task force and we need to invest millions of dollars in uh interventions. They run to the interventions, the college interventions, school interventions, and they spend God knows how much money in order to boost self-esteem. So I go to UCSB when I was a grad student, and I'm riding my bike to on the way to some department or somewhere.

I see an art uh student holding uh a mirror with a with a banner on top of the mirror, and the the thing says, I'm you're beautiful or I'm beautiful, meaning it it's a s self-esteem boosting intervention. And if we do that, then everyone is happy and winning. And I'm I'm thinking to myself, what the what what what crap is this? I'm ugly. I you're not gonna fool me. I'm ugly, I'm not beautiful. What is this? What is this garbage? Okay, so all of these things, participation trophies, and this uh decade multi-decadile uh intervention on self-esteem has the origins in this um uh iffy weak thinking that there's a self, there's a correlation, let's uh let's uh let's push the correlation and so yeah it's kind of amazing how much how much bad psychology has just

infiltrated Western culture. I mean, this idea that that we do things to to increase our self-esteem or to feel good about ourselves and we need to make everyone feel good about themselves. Like that is a really huge part of Western culture. And it's kind of amazing how much that idea is just pervasive in the way we talk and engage with each other. Yeah. Yeah. It's like there's a lot of like advertising too. It's just this sort of like throw yeah. And I just like to we had Ed Aikan on and he had this really good point that it's sort of the uh the medical analog with pain is really clear. And Daniel, you alluded to that earlier where you would sort of laugh if somebody said, well, you know, like we've done these studies, and like if a bone is broken or their lung

is punctured, or you know, they're bleeding, uh, you know, their skull is fractured, they're in pain. And so the way to make uh people's bodies better is to get rid of pain. Right. Like if you just gave them drugs so they wouldn't feel the pain, like that would be a joke, right? Of course what you do is you fix the problem and the pain, but you don't just give them the painkiller and then just send them back out in the world with a broken bone or punctured lung or, you know, a cracked skull. And I think that exactly the, the, the self-esteem, if Daniel, what you're saying is that the reason why self-esteem was tracking these things is because these were good things, like people who are healthy, people who have support, who have resources, uh, who are doing

okay in life, it makes sense that their psychology has this setting of like things are pretty good, but that's not the causal element, just in the same way. And that's not like the point of leverage of changing it. Um, it's in the same way that like you wouldn't just change the pain level without addressing like the broken bone. Totally. Yep. Yep. Um so I have early studies showing. so it's an amazing uh Geiger counter like thing the brain in registering in different uh formats or domains all the time the the goods and bads that are impacting your yourself or your uh um extended genotype. Um so the festivist, this thing where you you you error the grievances is a real thing that your brain is constantly like, these are the costs that are currently being

imposed on me, these are all the good things, whether we're conscious of it or not, it's sort of always cranking. Yes. Um sorry, I lost the train of thought, but sorry, Jane. Uh more registering all the time and um And uh so early, so the sh the shame that you feel in yourself very closely tracks uh so you I've done studies where people are put into one of two perspectives, the perspective of the person who screws up, or the perspective of an observer of someone else who screws up. And for each of 20 or 30 bad things like sexual infidelity and theft and bad table manners, etc. etc., I ask half of the people how much shame would you feel if this was true of you? The other half of the people imagine this is true of someone else, how negatively would you

view them? A rough measure of devaluation. And what I find is that the feeling of shame that people report in anticipation, it's not uh shame can like many other emotions, shame can activate in retroactive mode if they if they have seen you stealing and now they frown at you and they tell you you suck, uh they avoid you, they want to punch you, uh you feel shame, but also you feel shame in anticipation. Um and uh the idea here is that for behavior guidance, uh you need a number of uh anticipated payoffs of the actions. Uh, one is the personal payoff derived from an action. Uh stealing is good, Uh stealing is a good thing because if I steal from you I get stuff and and that's good for me. Quote Daniel Schnitzer.

We'll put that on a T shirt and interview team. Stealing is bad because if you catch me then I go to jail or you punch me. Right. And so um and so okay, the other thing I wanted to say is cost and benefits are perhaps the most fundamental variables in all models of the evolution of anything. Uh, RB greater than C in kin selection, in friendship uh evolution, in parental investment, in the evolution of war, in the evolution of anything, cost and benefits are the fundamental variables. So this is about uh how organisms evolve to estimate these Cs and B's, and parts of these things are social. And so the feelings, these fluffy feelings, the genius idea that Tubi and Lida had, these fluffy feelings in the social domain or emotions are not

pure fluff. They convey important information, fitness-relevant information. And so in these studies that I ran a number of years ago, I find that the you you ask people to focus on their own shame, their own personal shame. Don't think about anything, don't think about other people, just focus on your own most innermost uh feelings. And those most innermost feelings spookily track very strongly uh the negativity with which other people evaluate you if you take actions X, Y, or Z, uh very much in Goldilocks fashion. And what one element of value. So I started doing so shame, then pride, and other emotions, then value of food, then value of body parts and other things. And now I'm working more on abstract elements of value computation.

The thing is that so Goldilocks is one element of value computation. You can imagine value needs to be computed just right or accurately, a different way to put it. If you overcompute the value of a watermelon, you are over investing in how much you would be willing to trek in order to acquire that watermelon so that puts you in the red. Uh it would be weird if I like protected a watermelon like I did my son and like threw the watermelon out to like and be like was run over by a semi truck or something. You'd be like, that was dumb. Why did he do that? Yeah. Exactly. It's very important to get the values right evolutionarily. If you get the values wrong, your your genes are toast. Yes, there's there's two types of mistake.

And so Goldilocks, uh just right. Uh, in the story of Goldilocks, the big the hot too hot bowl is not good, you burn yourself, too cold is your uh etc. not cooking the food, and there's a just right, and there's a just right for everything, uh, including for uh so for behavior guidance, so you're integrating two streams of value. One is the personal payoff of getting the piece of cake or having the sex act with that person or staying lazy in bed instead of selling, etc. And the other one is the social payoff. And in order for adaptive behavior guidance, you need a lawful, smart fitness promoting integration of these values. And so the idea is that the anticipatory feeling of shame that you have with respect on an

act by act basis, for stealing, for becoming lazy, etc., may perhaps it might convey information about the actual consequences in the brains of others if they find out about these things. And the answer is that yes, the amount of shame, the intensity of shame that people report for each of these acts very closely tracks. It moves up or down in lockstep with the actual displeasure that other people report if it was someone else taking that action. And moreover, these things happen in many different places, in big societies societies, in small-scale societies, very remote from each other, some of them off-the-grid, uh hunter, gatherer, foragers. Um, yeah. One other uh iteration is millennia ago, so we went to a cousin of the

Hammurabi laws uh four thousand roughly four thousand years ago in modern day Iraq in ancient Mesopotamia, and uh the we have beautifully preserved incredible, it's almost a miracle that we have these incredible laws in the in the if then threat conditional format. If you um rape your slave, you need to pay uh X number of shekels of silver. If you kill a man, even though he hasn't done anything, you have to pay 66 shekels of silver. If your ox has sharp horns and the agent of the state told you to file their horns and you haven't, then the next day they run a mock, they kill someone, you need to pay 30 shekels of silver. So those are in full fossil-like forms, those are Those are artifacts containing an ancient lawmakers evaluation and the

shame that people express for each of all of these acts, ancient acts from remote societies, culturally extremely foreign societies, they track A the evaluations of other people and B massively cross-culturally, harmonically across many cultures, the shame in 15 small-scale societies track the devaluation expressed by people in each of these 15 small-scale societies, but also the devaluation expressed by people in each of the other 14 small-scale societies. So the shame expressed by the Schwar of the Equatorial Amazon for each of these uh 12 different acts tracks massively highly the interpersonal devaluation that people in the Mongolian step uh report for each of these 12 acts. So there's a very strong um universality in how people evaluate

other people and how people feel shame about these things. And again, shame is not a fluffy feely, it is, but it also conveys information that might be useful in guiding your behavior. One one question, Daniel, is then are there aspects in which it doesn't vary or where it does var vary across so like I mean that's an interesting test of the hypothesis, right? So for just for example, like if we just have this arbitrary rule that like if I touch a gum tree, um, we think spirits will come into me for whatever reason. And so in in our local island, touching a gum tree will be devalued. Yes. Um but nowhere else. So in our island, I should feel shame when I do it. People should devalue me. And that's important for m uh this particular place, but not ever other places.

Are there things like that? Yes, absolutely. Uh so um don't quote me on this, but I my eyes glaze on water in tears when I hear about cultural variation. I don't care. I don't care. The short of it is I don't care. Uh there's so much rich architecture that uh I want to look at that first. Sure, yeah. Like the hard thing is the main question. But variation is very important. But I think the key to understand variation is to understand the architecture because you have the lever to understand everything. And so, exactly like you're saying, if the shame machine is designed to minimize, to accentuate the positives and minimize the negatives, it stands to reason that it should track exactly like a good Geiger counter.

Yeah. Uh these not everything is gonna be universal. There are gonna be arbitrary conventions because coordination exactly. Um and so that's that is yeah exactly. And shame does it so there's a there is there's there so value computation is generic. Uh as Thomas Sowell might say it is generic and it's also specific. Uh there's a massive layer of genericness in value computation. Uh humans make a living similarly, uh far and wide, past and present. And so that predicts that there will be strong regularities in how people impute um values in and in and okay. Yeah, so walking around with poop on your shoes is sort of universally devalued unless you're an infant, as Paul Boone points out. But yeah.

Yes, yes. And then there's uh local games and people track those local regularities too. So eating with your left hand is polluting in India, and in our data, people devalue more in India those who eat with their left hand more than in America, and correspondingly in India people feel more shame if they eat with their left uh polluted hand in India more than in America. So there are these patterns of similarities and differences, and the different I think I think value value is, you know, you have one hammer and everything is a nail. My hammer is value, and value is a huge um lock to the mystery of many things in these systems. And so much of my work has been on value. So the um so I started expanding to many different things: uh,

shame, pride, and pride is pride is the cousin of shame. So, same thing with many different cultures. The pride is the emotion of advertising your greatness so that other people uh value you more highly and demanding that increase in valuation. It's not not just doing the I'm great, but also um making sure that other people increase how much they value you. So it's like uh it's like because we talked about anger. So the idea is that pride it's not just sort of incidental window dressing of hey, a good thing happened to me. It's actually doing in it's changing sort of settings and sort of uh what should I ask for from the world, the physical world, social world, and I'm entitled to more now. Yes.

That there's sort of common knowledge, or maybe to the degree. I mean, maybe we can start talking about some of the outputs. Yes, common knowledge is interesting in pride because uh this creates common knowledge, uh, we believe. Uh and uh yeah, exactly like you're saying, uh, the terms for the interaction should be more favorable to me if I really achieve something great. Uh right. I mean that that sort of runs counter to uh uh a popular cultural idea that we do things to increase our self-esteem or to feel good about ourselves, regardless of how what other people think of us. We might even say, I don't care what other people think. I want to write this book for me so that I can feel good about myself, that I did a good

thing. I don't care what other people think about me writing the book, or I'm gonna I'm gonna get I'm gonna uh get this PhD because it's it's for me, it's personally fulfilling, or I'm gonna do this charity work for me, it's per it's uh you know, I don't care what other people think of it, right? Um what your data shows is that that's wrong. In some part of the mind, you are judging what other people are going to think of you for doing this thing, and you are going to be more motivated to do the things that other people uh judge you positively for doing right that there is a very tight relationship between what I feel pride uh proud of and what I anticipate feeling proud of and and the status I

get from other people uh for for doing that thing and and you would not expect that relationship to exist if pride was just about me uh and not about how other people see me right yeah that that this is since uh as the expert bull sh bullshitologist these are um the trope that I'm doing it for myself and I don't care what other people say, that seems like bullshit, and that seems like bullshit relevant to these social games. Yeah. Yeah. Can I can I just uh can I say that there's a version of that that is exactly bullshit, but there's another one that isn't? Can I push on this a little bit? Yeah. Which is that I think when people are saying that, I think it's a smart evolved system that's sort of saying it's almost like it's sort of finding a status game where it's sort

of like, I want to do this thing, like write a book, but I'm worried about people uh laughing at me and making fun of me. And I think the expression of like I'm gonna do it for myself and not care about what people think is the output of planning and motivational systems that are basically saying, I think I'm still gonna get status or some benefit to doing this, but I need to recalibrate which audience I calibrate my self-conscious emotions to. So in other words, like um, you know, I'm gonna actually I'm going to do well in school and I'm not gonna worry about what the bullies think about me. Um and so I'm gonna do it for myself is the expression of I'm gonna play this status game, but I'm in currently getting like the outputs of worrying about audiences that I don't

think are in my long term interest. So I do think like there is a smart version of this, but I don't think, you know, the simple version I think is probably wrong. Yeah, that that that that's that's that's a nice I like that idea. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that the that shame should be calibrated to not just audiences in general, but the specific audiences that uh matter most to you and that you're trying to um trying to impress or the specific status game that you're invested in. Yeah. And I think a lot of like the narrative of like, I don't care, I'm not going to care about what people think. And that's the beginning of people sort of like actualizing what they want of themselves. I think it's the expression of it's a hard problem, right?

Of sort of like the current status game I'm in is not the one I want to be in. So in order to sort of like move out of it, I actually have to sort of like not take what the current group is doing and evaluating as seriously. And I need to like consider another status group or just pause it temporarily, even. So like if I want to be a scientist and I'm and I think I'm going to be good at it, but I'm around a bunch of people who are like making fun of being intelligent, that's a really bad situation. And there should be design to sort of detect that that I could do well, but if I follow the local social norms of this value community, then I'm I'm I'm sort of in trouble. And you gotta square that peg by either be like, well, I'm not gonna do science or bye

guys, I'm gonna go do science. Wait, one or the other. Yeah, that's a great yeah. That's a great uh point I think. There there's a number of uh so to to introduce chaos in this conversation, I wanted to say something before and then return to this. Uh the the something before is that everything is value, and this shame contain there's a conceptual structure in value, just like there is, I think, conceptual structure in concepts. And this there's uh things that are like syntax-like, like embeddedness and hierarchical structure. So um, So, for example, uh, if I steal uh in the Heinz dilemma, if I'm I steal medication that I cannot afford because I have some infection, in the grammar of infection, the worse the

infection is, the worse it is for me, the more the more shame I feel because other people are gonna avoid me more. But on the other hand, the medication in the in the the stealing medication for curing the disease there's disease embedded in the concept of stealing and uh so stealing rules the the rules and uh but in the grammar of welfare trade-offs if i if i steal a medication because i had a bigger infection then the benefit of that medication is greater for me so that should lead to less shame so there's uh There's complex structure in value, and so you can concatenate elements of different value systems. Uh so I did a study in which uh, you know, the same study over and over and over, shame and

value, same same logic, but I uh concatenated with the food value of things, and so people impute different values to different food items, and the yummy yummy subjective value that people think they would experience if they eat one watermelon, one strip of bacon, one almond, one onion, etc. It tracks the new the protein, the carb, the fat, and the water content of these foods, number one. So that's interesting because um you have some F FDA, uh not FDA, whatever. Uh we're getting the values right or we're we're the our estimators are pretty good. Yes as evidence of design here. Yeah. That's number one. Yes, it reaches out into the world and it uh accurately cla grasp the nutrient control of the food, this food.

But then in addition, you can once you have this value of the food, you can transport internally to many different systems that operate on the b basis of value. So the shame that I feel ex from you carries in it uh a s uh uh a trace of the protein content of the food that I steal from you. Right. If I stole a carrot versus a hamburger, it would be different. Yeah. Yes. So so that's that's a footnote. And to return to the Dave comment of the changing the audience, I think there we've run studies with landers uh more experimentally and falsificationistly eron. Popper would be very happy with you. Pitting the adaptation is interpersonal against the attributional theory of shame. And we've recently shown in the United States and in India that variables relevant to shame

and guilt interpersonally they very much predict how much shame and how much guilt people report. uh, but variables relevant to how I interpret or attribute these events, they do close to nothing, uh, they do worse than nothing. And okay, so we have evidence in falsificationist uh mode that the evidence strongly supports this interpersonal view, uh, almost don't support at all the Oh wait wait no I th I thought I thought uh evolutionary psychology hypotheses were just so stories and they were un unfalsifiable. I don't understand how how how this could be happening. You're you're you're telling me not only that they're testable, but that they they uh are m uh do a better job of accounting for the data than other psychological theories.

That's sometimes sometimes I don't know. Uh one study at least uh For for his part, Daniel. Yeah. Yeah, they can be useful, yes, I think. Yeah. Funding is needed. More fun and go always, yes. Uh so there's useful if they give us funding. So the idea is so they're smart, like these emotions that are sort of had been seen as useful, useless. The emotions are useful to navigate social interactions, and like you're saying, Dave, um, then the question is what can we use this interpersonal theory to interpret um we should we should still pay attention to the effects found in the attributional intrapersonal theory. And I think there's a number of uh explanations that uh can be generated from the interpersonal theory to make sense of findings that seem purely intrapersonal,

like the one that you um like when you're stealing a candy bar and nobody's around. Yeah or something. Yeah. Yes. Uh so I think a number of interesting things. One, for example, is something pointed out by David Gilbert, uh Paul Gilbert, a brilliant British uh shamologist, truly brilliant guy, uh, highly inspiring guy, and and he says he's a clinician too, but more interpersonal. And he says, uh, there's a feeling of inferiority, and um what is it exactly? Yeah, feeling of inferiority and shame. Okay, so so this is a big theme in attributional. If I feel shame, I feel like crap, I feel inferior, etc. And Gilbert says that women in abusive relationships, they blame and blaming the self is a big uh attributional shame effect.

And he says that women in abusive relationships blame themselves, like in attributional theory, but when they exit the relationship, they blame the other guy. So blaming the self could be in the inter So uh standard textbook uh intrapersonal attributional effect. It could very very much be in the service incidental to or tributary to or functional to interpersonal functions, namely deterring attacks, Uh if you're bullying me, I b sure. Sorry, yeah, it would my it was my fault that I didn't do the thing, right? Uh my fault. So it's sort of a it's e it's even really smart. It's not that it's dumb, it's that it's sort of self protective. It's it's the b making the best of a worse situ a bad situation.

It's sort of like what can I do to minimize being a target? I'm not gonna do things that like demand better treatment because that's just gonna recoil, right? I mean, presumably that's sort of calibrated, so interesting. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we shouldn't try to get rid of shame. Shame isn't isn't bad. It's not a bad emotion that we we need to make go away. We need to invest millions of taxpayer dollars into making people feel less shame and make people feel good about themselves. Shame is actually doing useful things for us. It exists in our head for a reason. It was selected by natural selection for a reason. It's analogous to physical pain, just as we wouldn't want to eliminate people's ability to

feel physical pain, we wouldn't want to eliminate people's ability to feel social pain. It is sending them important signals about how they are viewed by others in their social environment. It has a function, it's useful, let's not get rid of it. Yes. And if there's any if a clinician wants to know what then what intervention you suggest to eliminate the bad feeling of shame, the the straightforward answer would be: well, make yourself great again, namely uh become richer, more attractive, have better health, and then your shame will be r aswaged or reduced. And how you do that I have no idea. But maybe a magic wand or something. Yeah, it's not so much I need to change the feeling in your head and and lower that

feeling, it's what can I do to your situation in the world such that your feelings will correctly represent the world and represent it as being better for you. So, how can I change how other people value in your environment to make you a more valuable social partner? Right. And yeah, and this is a good thing. Find people who value you, appreciating what you can. Yeah. Okay. So yeah, find people who value you, or if you're feeling shame, um, I mean, this gets to like what the outputs are. Like we talked a little bit, we've we talked about sort of what the eliciting conditions are. In anger, we talked about sort of what the outputs are. And this also gets to like clarifying functionally what it's for.

We can talk about guilt in a second, but for shame, what does it so the idea of shame is it's minimizing the costs that others might represent about me by is it is it then there's a grammar of sort of like preventing knowledge from from this happening? Is that roughly what it is? Yeah. Part of it is uh limiting the broadcast or the leakage of negative information. Okay. So for example, it might be like introversion. So like if I have a teacher and there's a student who I think is really smart, but they're just completely introverted, like Erin Lukashewski's idea of like there's cost to extroversion, right? Like if I think, you know, I'm at home, my parents are abusive, let's say, and I'm a kid,

and I'm calibrated to that world. I go into a classroom and the teacher calls on me, and I could be brilliant, but I'm like super introverted because in my head, the the world is just out to get me. If I say anything, I'm just gonna get literally smacked or figuratively smacked. And so that that might be like quote unquote a maladaptive sense of shame, but it's in this sense, it's sort of like it makes sense why that evolved psychology would have that setting in that situation. And that's for minimizing it's calibrated to minimize the cost of the home environment, but it might not be it might not be correct objectively or ideal in that school environment, for example. Yeah, that's a great point.

Yeah. Uh ideally the shame the system works frictionlessly and doesn't hallucinate, right? Carry over effects, but yeah, there could be things like that. Right. Yeah. I mean I suspect like I suspect a lot of like the clinical stuff is the is actually evolved systems for detecting when it doesn't work, right? Like I think it's probably it works really well, but it's this minority of times when it doesn't, that's when it becomes part of our folks psychology. Yeah, yeah. That yeah, I I can hear uh I did some therapy in Argentina because that's what Argentinians do. Uh like New Yorkers on the Argentinas are famous for uh going to a shrink and uh and uh I I can hear I can hear a therapist say, uh, but your girlfriend

isn't your father. Uh we understand that, Daniel, right? Right. So yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. That's like the home model, the model of sort of yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And then and then there's another interesting case, which is uh kind of a dark side of shame. Uh I'm replying to something you alluded to and I'm forgetting what, but uh okay, something like as long as you don't do as long as other okay, so we have a study with uh Tess Robertson, and uh you can feel shame. There's a side of shame that is dark. Uh, there's a guy who has a paper uh titled uh The Tortured Feel Shame or something like that. Um you can you can be made to feel shame if we are if we are bullies and we maliciously are out to get you,

like you're a Jew and we are Nazis. Right. And we have the power to humiliate you or kill you, and we just like to humiliate you because it's fun. Um then people feel shame even though they haven't done anything wrong and they know that they haven't done anything wrong. But people in this kind of um malicious dynamic uh interpersonal or intergroup, they can be made to feel shame. And uh we have an experiment in which in a public good game contributions, um there's some set of people who contributed everything, their private uh tokens to the public good. So they know in their heart of hearts that they are good people, uh altruistic, whatever, but they get feedback experimentally manipulated to the extent that no one wants to work

with them because they're cheaters and they're bad people, and people feel shame. So that's uh another story. But yeah, right. In general, there's a niche. Yeah, and that's a really good prediction, right, of the idea that it isn't really it cares about the social world and what you can do about the social world. So you know you did the right thing, you know you're a Jew in Germany, you didn't do anything wrong. This is unfair, but it's the reality you're living in, and you got to deal with that. Yeah, totally. The the Geiger counter uh system of evaluating uh these positively charged particles or value is highly tuned to the social reality, not to the cosmic uh objective reality, and and if other people are humiliating you or

uh out to get you dispossessing you uh starving you sending you to the gulag etc the shame system ha activates because you're having the social problem whether or not you in the eyes of god or the lord almighty have done things wrong or right Right. The system is highly tuned to the very narrow set of inputs of the social evaluation system. Right. And it would be very bad design if it was attuned to cosmic moral rightness or or something like that. You know, so if I don't feel shame for being a Jew in Nazi Germany because I did nothing wrong, well, uh bad things are going to happen to me. That's going to be very bad for my well-being. Um if I'm a gay person in a homophobic community and I feel no shame about that, bad things

are gonna happen to me. So shame is actually doing things to protect me in the real environment that I actually inhabit, not um independent of whether what I'm doing is wrong in some cosmic sense. Right. Yeah. And Daniel, how smart is the shame system? So, like in that example, I just follow up, but that's a great example, Daniel. Like let's say uh somebody, so I'm gay and I feel shame, you know, because the local social environment, but then there's like one particular place I always go where I'm safe, you know, in the first couple times I go, I still feel sort of shame, but then I sort of warm up. Is there is there sort of like smartness to, you know, and I think we've all experienced this.

Like some places we feel like status threatened and feel introverted and don't feel like expressing ourselves. Other places we do. Do you have research on that? Have you thought about that? Like, is it is it can it be very context specific once it learns that it's true? Yeah. Yeah, we haven't published data. Uh maybe 20 years from now we'll publish this. But uh, we have a number of experiments with that, and Shame is highly sensitive to audience. Uh, it's like the uh Lukashevsky kind to whom effect. Uh we care about people, you know. Uh Mary, uh there's a meme that Mary is good or nice, but what I care in Mary is is she good to me? And I don't care too much if she's good to you or etc. So highly, highly self-referential.

And there's uh yeah, these evaluative systems are very highly self-referential to the self. Yeah, what I care about is uh val evaluative affordances to me. Someone is good to the Pope or to the whatever yeah, I I care but insofar as the indirect effects imp impinge upon me. But uh so yeah, Darwin says that a girl who is highly shy in the in the world scene is extremely not shy in the eyes of those whose affection she's assured of, like her mother. Right. Uh uh Darwin says that uh so we have d st studies with supporting that idea. Right. That's really interesting. I mean it suggests that like the trope of people feeling like they find their community or like feeling like they need to be validated.

It kind of sounds hokey, it sounds fluffy, but it suggests that it's actually the expression of the system that that really has some teeth. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's uh Mark uh Bangladesh paradox um that's very uh right yeah. Can I can I share my my favorite uh example of the other oriented nature of shame from from culture that I I recently encountered. I found a fan so do you guys uh have you seen Total Recall? The the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie where he goes on Mars and there are like mutants on on Mars. So there's uh you know uh a relatively well known scene where he goes into this bar or this like I think it's like uh maybe it's a strip club, I forget. Uh and there's this mutant and she has three breasts and there's this guy and he's like, oh

baby, you made me wish I had three hands. Right. Um so what's interesting is that when they were filming this, the actress who played the three breasted woman who got like three prosthetic breasts put on her, she felt so humiliated and shameful for having to be the three-breasted woman, and she like burst into tears and they had to stop filming. Um and uh to me, this is a really interesting example of how you know she she did obviously she did nothing wrong. She's an actress playing a part in a movie. She doesn't actually have three breasts, right? But the the mere thought that others might think of her or look upon her with disgust was what activated the shame. And so to me, that's a really beautiful example of how shame is laser focused on other

people's judgments or potential judgments. And sometimes even a hyper-vigilant way where you're overestimating how much people are going to be disgusted with you or view you negatively. And that is the trigger of the shame, uh, more than doing anything, you know, cosmically wrong, as you put it, uh sneezer. Yeah. It's really interesting. I mean, it really does suggest again, like I think the folk psychology really focuses on when it doesn't go right, where it's sort of like you have like these wonderful people, you know, like I'm thinking, like, you know, as a parent, like I think many parents have this experience of like their kid is doing something that is uh has some attribute that either isn't as bad as they think it is, but they think it's really bad, you know, because like

well, let's say they stutter, you know, and it's like it's fine, it's not you'll get over it, or even if you don't, it's fine, you know, or like or if they're gay, right? Or just whatever. Um the people that you care about, you see them sometimes sort of worry about an audience that they need to worry about. And it's sort of a conflict of of sort of like, well, no, you're good, you're intrinsically fine, I value you, but I'm aware there's another audience that you're worried about. And that and that difference or where it's a discrepancy, that's sort of like I think there's like a lot of folk attention to that. Yeah. There's um old sociology 1902 um now eight twentieth century's ancient history, but there's a guy by the name of

Cooley, I think George or something Cooley, uh, the mirror image self or something like that. Uh phenomenology or something like that. And he has extremely brilliant insights on shame and pride and these self emotions and he says something like this uh it's like an electrocardiogram of continuous registering uh of the tone of this if other evaluative uh input in the form of shame and pride even even if it's not, you know, uh peak as in you win the Olympics, but there's a continuous I I I see it's an a date I see that in myself. Um I'm highly other oriented and some some people are more they don't care too much or they seem to not care too much. But I c I can see it's like a continuous uh input um

for the good or for the bad even even tiny if even even at the very low it's highly precise so we have uh another study um the same logic of shaman evaluation and with a Canadian student and we grab so uh Gilfang uh Michelle she has for her norm title lose culture, she created stimuli that are in the form of three categorical set of things that are, you know, highly nonviolating, intermediate nonviolating, and low non-violating. So she they constructed 20 situations that are like completely kosher, 20 that are intermediate, and 20 that are like, you know, you steal and you kill. Okay. So so now so we looked at those. So pushing the system, how how far the system can go, what's the resolution and the

precision, and we don't we don't have the minimal detectable, the just noticeable difference. And we don't have good calibration with the you know uh atomic resonance uh what is a second we don't have that objective standard to know what's the minimal unit. But but there is shame there's pretty strong shame tracking of devaluation even for actions like you're sitting on your couch reading a book versus you are riding the bus versus you are at the store buying food. Okay, yeah. So it's it's it's exactly that the coolie notion. So you're gonna feel there's an extraordinarily sensitive machine for registering on a second by second basis this evaluative input of other people. It's it's amazing. Right.

So I'm gonna feel more proud sitting on a couch reading a book than I am writing a book. Yes, because I'm I'm learning something, so that makes me more valuable partners. I made up the book thing. I I made up the book thing, but the there's you you could I could go back and and maybe remove the things that are kind of uh more obvious m more but there's really nothing you know uh it's not uh forget about the book. Uh yeah, but it's it's there's something or you're sitting on the TV like watching uh TV, you know. Like imagine just imagine your boss, we walk in and like you're either reading like a a sophisticated book or like watching like really like you know dumb and reality TV. Yeah, exactly.

People do people do feel shame about watching reality TV or guilty pleasure. Guilty pleasure, as they say. Yeah, yeah. So what I don't I don't I don't because I never watch reality TV, but but people tell me that they feel shame, yeah. Sure, sure. And I want to get I want I want to get into some stumpers like that. So, what's going on? Why do people feel shame for watching reality TV? What is it about watching reality TV that makes you a worse social partner? And to clarify, this is not a question about what makes reality TV bad. Correct, correct. It may be bad. Yeah, so so why why do people feel shame about you know watching trashy stuff? It's weird. Uh it's slow brow coded. And I d I I I well, uh I don't think everyone gets shame.

Uh maybe intellectual types, but normal people may like it. So it would depend on the specific audience. So so more more highly educated uh intellectuals might feel shame. Is do you think it's it's because of the intellectual opportunity cost that like I could be watching a documentary or like a great black and white French film and instead I'm watching uh reality TV? Is you think that might might be part of it? Yeah. Or or to to go full theory, it's if the intellectuals say that if you're an intellectual and it's common knowledge in the intellectual community that that's a lowbrow, low status uh thing, then you feel shame. If the intellectuals agree that it's uh risque and and and cool to to say no to your duties, you know, yeah uh

every now and then in blue sky or these places they say it's it's cool to say no to your boss. I'm not 24 hours available. I also have a life let's fight for the let's fight for 25 then if it's cool then maybe it's good to watch lowbrow sure but that just raises the question of why watching lowbrow stuff would would be uncool or low status or low or or lowbrow. Like what what what grounds that so there you have uh two experts here too for what are coalitional values on and how is that a group membership badge that we we watch the intellectual stuff as a as a group and if you don't watch intellectual stuff then you're not a member of our group. Is that that might that be not mixing meat and uh milk and or

marrying or not marrying your parallel cousin And it's so it's analogous to like a food taboo or like a d uh pattern of dress or something it's just a way of mark demarcating rival groups. Maybe I mean I also think like I mean I also think like there's it's comp there's lots of things, right? Because the other thing, David, so like for example, like let's say you're watching reality TV. Yeah. If we're both academics and I don't know you that well, you don't feel like I'm gonna give you the benefit of the doubt, and y I come in and I see you watching lowbrow TV, you might be worried that like, you know, I you know, or let me let me try to, it's also hard to do common knowledge explicitly. Okay.

You I you have a representation of how smart I think you are, right? And if I don't know you that well, so you might be like, okay, Dave thinks I'm like, you know, a nine or a 10th smart. And I really am, but I just like this stuff and I like I do have psych of like reality TV. But he doesn't know me that well. He's not gonna give me the benefit of the doubt. So I'm worried when he sees me that he's gonna make an inference of like the only people I know who watch this stuff are usually not doing it to like, you know, find out about human nature of psych. So like the fact that he's enjoying this probably means he's like actually a four or five intelligence-wise. And you're you're worried about that.

That's one example. There's probably a lot of examples. But then, like, if we have a better relationship where you trust me, and I'm not gonna view this as like I'm gonna give you the benefit of the doubt. Right, I'm gonna come in and be like, oh, David's watching this. Well, I know David's smart, like, or I know have enough information that like if he's watching this, it's not gonna affect my inference about you and like all these the things that are valuable, like your work ethic, how smart you are, how funny you are. Uh it's not gonna hurt that. And if you have an accurate model of that, then you won't. And I think like feeling closeness or comfortable with somebody to like laugh at stupid

jokes, right? Like the when you feel comfortable, you watch like lowbrow TV together. Like I don't know. I've I've felt like watching TV for entertainment, sometimes with people you don't know well, kind of feels uncomfortable to you get to know them better. And I think it's probably part of this. It's just sort of like, uh, I'm like monitoring the costs to uh my reputation here, right? Not only about seeming dumb perhaps, but also a coordination about the values that you hold. Exactly. What if you laugh about a gay joke, but they're not sure. So it's that's an interesting idea. So uh if if the amount of data you have about me is really sparse, then each individual data point is really gonna matter more.

And so it's gonna really matter if you catch me watching reality TV and you don't know me well. well if and that's the only information you have about me, then you're gonna make stronger inferences about me uh and and my intelligence or or work ethic or or whatever. But if you know me really well, you have a much larger data set. Uh and me watching reality TV isn't gonna change your your uh estimate of me very much. And so it may be that um when we feel closer to someone and we have more common experiences with them, we can sort of relax a little bit and and not worry about each, you know, you know, micro uh activity we engage in with them. Yeah. Microaggression. Yeah. And that really suggests it's really smart because it actually is like it's not only like

what are the things I'm doing, like watching TV, relaxing, being like vulnerable with this other person. It's also then like there's a constant update of sort of what do they know about me and how do I think the event I'm doing now of putting my foot up, um, you know, belching, watching reality TV, how is that gonna affect their assessment of me? So it really suggests like a very rich representational system of like what am I doing and how will it be received by this other person given what they know about me currently? Yeah. I want to add another layer on top of this. I think self-control is probably part of it too. So uh Leo Fettucci, uh who we should probably have on uh at at some point has done really

interesting work on uh how uh self-control and delaying gratification is moralized, that we that we view people who have a lot of self-discipline as more virtuous, and we view activities as expressing your your self-discipline or self-control as uh being you know morally praiseworthy. Um and so I and his argument is that you need self-control to be a good cooperative partner. That part of being in a cooperative relationship with someone is resisting the short-term temptation to defect. So if you can think about it as a marriage, you know, if if we're if we're married to each other, I have to resist the short-term temptation of cheating with with someone because I might get a short term benefit, but in the long run, it'll harm my my uh committed

relationship. So if you're gonna trust me to be a good committed partner, uh a good uh thing to look for is my ability to resist temptations, right? And so we use self-control, uh self-uh discipline as a cue to a person's cooperative potential, their, their, their, uh, their trustworthiness, um, their likelihood of of being able to commit to us uh over the long run. And it may be that if you do things that require a lot of self-control, like watching a really boring movie or really reading a really long, boring book, that suggests that you have a lot of self-control and you're a really virtuous person. But if you're watching stuff that you don't need any self-control at all, you know, it's just immediately gratifying, like reality TV or junk food, then that suggests that you

don't really have a lot of self control. Um and so I think that might so there there might be a a a uh an element of virtue uh and virtue signaling in here as well that you know it's seen as more virtuous to watch the black and white French film or to read the long boring novel from you know the the eighteen hundreds and Russia or whatever. Like that shows that I have a lot of self-discipline and I'm I'm gonna be a virtuous uh person. Interesting. Okay. Um I got some more stumpers for you, Sneezer. Um why should we be proud of the fact that we're humble? So if you think about humility as not being proud or not being arrogant or boastful about yourself, why should we be proud of the fact that we're not proud?

Why should we be proud of our humility? Um so that is the topic of a paper that we have in the works with Landers and Durkey again, but in the pride domain. So pride has a mixed reputation in the Bible. My go-to book uh says that uh pride uh before the fallfall, yeah. Go with friend uh and uh Hottie spirit uh something. Uh before before the fall there is hubris and arrogance and pride is uh followed by catastrophe. But but at at the on the other hand, it's also the case that pride is part of a price system in the positive range uh of the price the brain collected he left. Yeah, David will be back. Uh, but just while David's coming back, it's pride goeth before destruction. Goeth. I love that.

Okay. Pride goeth before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall. Before a fall. Yeah. So there you go. All the all the people who know the Bible better than us were cringing a few moments ago. Uh yes, yes, yes. Sorry. Yeah, it's uh it's a mortal offense to not know the Bible. No. I apologize. You shouldn't apologize. You should not feel shame. I feel shame. Yeah. Um, okay, and and pride is also part of a price of a price system that tells you the implicitly the collective price attached to positive things. And it uh so pride uh provides the incentive. has a bad reputation. Uh the Lord Almighty in heaven punishes if you have too much pride, but at the same time, pride provides the incentive for producing uh as a side as a side

effect of your status pursuits socially valuable outcomes. So it's really the price system in the social games with which people produce great societal things, civilizations, families, uh conquests, uh commercial quests, uh population of new environments, uh, great things, big and small, are driven in big part by pride and the carrot to having higher status if you achieve these things. Right. So pride is the as a side effect of pride, you have great stuff. And so like if if you were to impair, like if we're if you think about humans as squishy robots, if you were to like snip out the pride system, probably a lot of the good or like non-entropic stuff that has been produced by humans over history

would probably not exist. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think so. Interesting. Okay. Yeah. Go ahead. No, okay. Sorry, go ahead. Go ahead. But I found the bail I found the Bible quote, David. It was pride goeth before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall. So Ah, that's a lovely example of of the paradoxical nature of pride. Um so if you have anything more to add, uh add it, but I'll uh if not I'll move on to the next dumper. long story short, uh Jessica Tracy, one person in the Tangni realm intrapersonal, she started off with a theory of pride as intrapersonal. It's pride is the bad pride is if I attribute the success to my great self. Uh it's good pride if I think the pride is uh due to my action.

But we have uh falsificationist uh experiments run in several countries showing that the there's probably we we believe that these two facets or subtypes of prides is not a thing. There's a pride system that is complex, and the moniker or the concept of hubris or arrogance is not so much a pride system, but rather a concept leveraged at those who claim too much respect. Um it's it's a concept applied to other people. I'm not arrogant. Uh you are arrogant, uh Dave. I'm not arrogant. It's you guys who are arrogant. And and we have support for that in our papers. And again, like in the Shaman Gill paper, we have strong support for the interpersonal theory of pride and low support for the attributional theory of pride.

And I think what happens is we show that the hubris thing is a function of the degree to which a person or someone else overclaims relative to the true social price of the action that they attain. And so arrogance people don't like because uh for various reasons, because you have to pay higher than the price that they're worth, and that's uh excessive uh cost, that's not good. But also in envious rivalrous relationships, um, if you achieve even if you're correctly calibrated, that's bad for me. So there's a number of things, but uh long story short, arrogance people dislike for those reasons and uh so to show lack of arrogance is is good and um so to show proper calibration is is good uh it's it's better than if you show excessive pride from the standpoint of

showing the thing yeah and you may still get some crap if other people are envious Um, and you have a bullshit also side to the story, which is uh pretending that so all the academics now are now are hot about humility, uh, and that seems like bullshit, if I could paraphrase you, and uh humble brag or something that seems like bullshit. They now that they have achieved the it seems like the kind of stuff that you do when you have achieved and you promulgate and you proselytize so that the upstarts uh don't dethrone you or something like that. It could be in part. Yeah. I mean can I can cause I often talk about humility being good things, so I'm gonna defend humility a little bit, which is the way I use it at least is sort of um it's calling out a

status game that's sort of uh orthogonal to the one I think we should be playing. So for example, like uh not not like you know studying kids or like women's social coalitional uh power because like those are important aspects of like human phenotypes but um, but like they're low bargaining power entities in our cultural milieu. And so like being humble about like that, you know, these are important classes of evolved situations of like being a kid, being a woman, like you know, having low bargaining power. Um, it the the call to humility is sort of like uh don't just read out of sort of like what status aspirational in your mind scientists think about the things that like are humble um in in order to sort of pursue those things, like you know,

the low bargaining power situations or people. So that's my defense of like a call to humility. Sorry, uh I couldn't follow if you're saying uh people with low bargaining power are humble in their relationship with more powerful people, or intellectuals who or academics who study uh women, they need to be humble in order to be open to the what low-power people do, or yeah, I think I mean the second one. I mean, I think the first is true, but like I think the the second one is what I mean in this context. Yeah, that's right. Like I think that there's uh you can look at like evolved psychologies of scientists and sort of say we should be more humble, which could mean like um it doesn't just mean like, you know, a f keep affording me the status, Daniel, you know, or if I

tell you to be humble, right? It could mean like, yeah, I've I've made it and I want you to not, you know, be an upstart against me. But it could also mean like we should um we might be blind to like looking at uh things respecting things that we don't respect because of the bargaining power status that our brains register. Right. So so the so the no so the call to study non-weird people is humble humble we should look beyond our own naval and uh exactly, or like who like if there's a category of people that like our society devalues, and to the extent that I register that, and that biases me not even understanding like the psychology of those people, a call to humility is sort of like don't use the readout of your value system

as a human being uh or correct for that when you're doing the science is the way to put it. That that that's that uh not not to psychoanalyze you or anything, yeah, but that's that sounds like the like the AWA system uh in the form of noblesse oblige because traditionally it's the peasant that owes me allegiance and and respect if I'm the king. Right. That's uh but it but in the nobless of leash of this thing, uh we are now uh enlightened um elites and we can uh give voice to the unvoiced or the the platform. Yeah, okay. So it's it sounds like that, but in the liberal value, yeah. Yeah. Yep. Yep. Okay. Next dumper. Fashion. So my wife has been uh telling me that apparently baggy pants are in and all of

my pants are non-baggy. And so when I was alerted to this fact, I'm like, oh no, my entire wardrobe is uncool. I'm an uncool person. Yeah, keep your wardrobe from like 20 years ago, just it's gonna come back. Just wait it out. Yeah, exactly. But if I if I wait it out, you know, if I do that strategy, I'm gonna be uncool for a certain period of time, and I might even feel some shame about being uncool and wearing unfashionable clothes. What on earth is that about? Why should I be feeling shame for uh the bagginess or lack thereof of my pants? What does that have to do with my value as a social partner, Daniel Sneezer? Well if you're it's if it's your wife not not to not to get inside of your bedroom uh I don't want to be able to do that.

No, you're you're you're welcome. You're welcome in my bedroom, Danny. But uh well uh that's a different quote. But if you're if your wife is giving you hints that your fashion is out of step, then maybe I don't know. So you think the fact that it's coming from my wife, if it was coming from someone else, maybe I wouldn't feel shame. Uh yeah, I don't know. Um did she bring it up, David, or did you notice it? Well, I mean, my my wife is i incredibly fashionable. And she's very you know, very, you know, gets compliments all the time about, you know, her out her outfits. So I trust her as an authority on what is cool and and what isn't it's not merely that she's my wife. I uh it's that I I trust her her judgments on on this matter.

But did you bring it up or did she bring it up? The pants? Uh, she brought it up. Uh, okay, yeah. I don't know fashion because I could never afford more than old navy uh things at a discount. But um but yeah, I guess yeah, I I don't know these uh fashion things, but I guess if your wife tells you things like uh this is the first order, right? I don't know the more exotic games, but uh hey honey, you have uh your your belly is too big or uh you ain't the tiger that you used to be, or something like that, then that gives you pause, right? Mm-hmm. Well that makes sense. But it then it just begs the question of why she or others would be using the bagginess of my pants as a criterion for evaluating my character.

What on earth does that have to do with my value as a social partner? Yeah, that seems crazy. Maybe, maybe maybe, maybe she's worried. Maybe it's like a humor thing, or it's sort of like you don't know the it's a it's a worry that she's on top of the changing coordination norms. And and she's like, oh well David is and I am in the same boat, so I don't, I'm not saying this just about you, like I also don't have baggy pants. But um, you know, if David is blind to these changing norms, there's a concern that the coordination, your coordination and in just keeping up to date with sort of what is the culture valuing, it's a it's a cue that you're not you're no longer um and there might even be you're you're let me finish the sentence there you're

no longer keeping up to date as much as you need to and I do wonder like there's this these tropes of like I don't like as you get older you know, like kids are just like sponges of sort of like what's the coordination game, what's the status game? There's like a certain age where you're just like, I've ballistically committed to one of these, right? And like there might even be like recursion of sort of like that's known. And so she's sort of like, David, are you are you like ossifying like culturally with your status game? Like that might even be like clubbing for that. So it's a cue to my low social intelligence, my low ability to coordinate on the changing social conventions and social norms.

And that's a cue that I'm going to do lots of awkward, oafish things and social interactions and make various faux pas. Uh and that's just a cue to my my social intelligence and coordination ability. I buy that. I think that's a good that's a good explanation. Yeah. And then you know it's and it's empirically testable too. You would expect you know, uh people to draw inferences about more well dressed fashionable people as being more socially intelligent. And you would expect that that inference to be correct. That is, more fashionable people should be more socially intelligent. They should be better at playing coordination games than than less fashionable people. The age thing is really interesting too.

Like I threw out all this. I mean, I know we're all parents too. Like this whole thing about like kind of shame and guilt, like kids, you know, there's this thing that the this this trope of sort of guilt is useless or shame is useless, and kids learn it. And I think like there is something to that, right? In the sense of like it's calibrated to the social world. But like clearly, the conclusion here is like it's not useless. But there is like this this um lifespan trajectory of sort of acquiring this, becoming worried about things. Infants don't seem to have this, or young kids don't. There there's uh stuff on the life history, life trajectory of uh shame. And it's um uh it doesn't track exactly what you

mentioned about ballisticness. Now now I'm I'm retired and I don't give a fuck about what other people think of me. Right. But but it's uh uh U shaped in that there's another effect when you're old in that you become you lose your, you know, muscle tone and skills, etc. And you become dependent on others. Yes. So there's higher shame. Oh interesting. Yeah. Chris von Ruden mentioned that too. That really like old the the status um and the dimensions of status, like the oldest people. Um it it can happen, but it is the he that very much matches with him and his experience in Schwarland, yeah. My my my grandma, uh the Polish grandma that I have, may the Lord bless her soul, uh, she told me something that was uh shockingly hilarious,

uh, namely uh she was very old and she told me something like I can't reproduce exactly because but something like don't put me in an old people's home or something like that, because uh I dislike old people they're sorry I I they are they're ugly they're disgusting and she was saying that as an old person herself who but she didn't like all people right and uh where I'm going with this um yeah something along those lines uh yeah yeah you can the loss of new traits that you possess as as low value you can be disgusted by people who are just like you. Yes, yes, yes. Yeah, yeah. that make you do that, but at the on the other hand, you have the ancient machines for assessing mate value and skills and force and this and that

productivity and those are low. Right. Yeah. Ugly people are gonna think hot people are hot just as much as hot people think hot people are hot. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um, Yeah, interesting. Okay. Um well I have a few more stumpers. Maybe, maybe, maybe do one more and then we'll uh wrap things up. Yeah, yeah. Um Okay. They're all traveling. People often get status for having traveled to exotic locations. And people often humble brag about their uh wonderful vacations that they've taken. If you've been to many places in Europe, uh places very far away, the further away you go, the more status you gain, I think. Why what is going on there? Why why is that a cue to to a valuable social partner? Uh well you have money and you have the insulation from the

consequences of traveling to faraway places with no cane or something, and so you're powerful uh less powerful, resourceful people can ill they have to toil uh endlessly in pain. So maybe it's a cue that you have what it takes to do that. So I'm sturdy and I'm wealthy. That's I think that's probably partly what's going on. But but I I would imagine that the inference would still be there even if I'm not the one who's paying for it. If someone else is paying me to travel to exotic lands, say I'm a journalist and I'm you know traveling to very faraway places to do journalism work. But but you like but you have but you have the you acquire the knowledge in other remote places, but also you have the social worth big enough for someone else to pay

your thing. So your job. Yeah. Or like when I lived in Berlin, like a trip to like Barcelona was like 45 euros. Um you know, and so uh yeah. So yeah, I mean, I think I I agree, Daniel. Like I think there there is something definitely to that. I mean, do you think it's also like just this thing of like again, it's like social capital, right? It's just sort of like you know, and you know another place. Like I can say, like living in another uh country, it took a really long time to get adaptable to that. And I can tell you right now, like if we were we all went to Berlin, I could like really coordinate for all three of us in a way that it took me like months and I was like in tears sometimes, like of being just discordinated.

And so like I value that about like that I have that skill. Like it's almost like a hunting skill. Like I know how to, you know, I know how to be in a place. And I think that like that's pretty valuable. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. One one of the one of the favorite pastimes of Jews is uh to map out early on two Jews meet for the first time from from different countries or from different states or whatever. And a favorite pastime of Jews having been dispossessed and slaughtered, etc., is to map out the in geography and in social landscape and in geographical landscape who they know in in joint. And this is a big important thing that I suspect that maybe other people do that too.

Uh it's a I suspect it's a universal, but it's um oh you know this person, I know that person too, and they're and I know this other person in that same place. Does that person know this person? And what about this this place? Uh they they used to be in this place. Do you know anybody? You know, it's it's basically the more uh the richer your view of the geographic landscape and how it uh intersects with your social network, the more escape routes you potentially have. Should you be in danger, right? The more people you know in a faraway place you can go and and potentially meet up with them. Uh yeah, interesting. It it's not exactly the competitive game, or it could be competitive, but it's also

collaborative because it's joint and uh there's seems more collaborative. Uh it's not so much bragging, although there could be some of that. There there's a fantastic book uh in the tenth century by uh by one Benjamin of Tugela. Tugela is a city in Spain, and the guy traveled a little bit like Marco Polo from his small town in Spain to uh out of Europe and Mesopotamia or uh Iraq, uh Israel and many uh Syria, Lebanon, and he he gives a census of all the Jewish communities, 500 here and 200 here, And the book is absolutely fascinating. Uh, down to the, you know, the name the name of the notables and the uh the professions. And I don't know why I mentioned this, but it's absolutely fascinating as a

piece of uh historical literature and psychology too, I think. Yeah. I think getting the lay of the land, like even like mundane things. Like even I like if you go, like if we all went for like a hike in the backcountry of like Southern California and it's like hot and dangerous, and there's somebody who is like skilled and knows stuff, like you just kind of value that, right? Of like this is somebody who knows the landscape. We're not gonna get lost. They know like where water is. It's not exactly that, but it's kind of it's that's like a very like light version of of this thing where there's just sort of like somebody knows the lay of the land, can navigate well, knows more about it than you do, and can kind of be your tour guide.

You know? Yeah. It's a true there might even be a bit of mismatch. You know, if we lived in smaller geographic locations ancestrally, then a person who has been to more distant regions is going to be more useful because maybe you know they'll they'll be able to guide you through that new region if you need to go there. But in in a in a more globalized world, like if someone who's been to you know Morocco, uh I'm probab you know, maybe I'll never go to Morocco in my entire life, but they still get status for having been to Morocco because sort of my Stone Age mind thinks that that's useful information that might come in handy someday, even though it probably won't, right? Because their our Stone Age mind is adapted to a smaller geographic uh circle.

Interesting. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cool. Anyway. Editors and reviewers value your paper to the degree that your data are hard to get. And part of the hardness to get is the distance that you travel to get that data. And it's been devalued by MTurk because you can collect. So in the in the early 2000s, when there was no MTurk, if I get data from India, I get a top journal because I went f it's the labor theory of value, Marxist theory of value applied to academia. I traveled far away, I trekked a lot, and I collected exotic data and I'm cool, I have high status. But fast forward ten or fifteen years, I get I send my papers with India M Turk and it's not weird and it's uh all hat and who cares because I have the M Turk.

Yeah, and almost it almost ties back to the too. That's Adam Smith, not just Marx. Yeah. But that that ties back to the idea of of the virtue of self-control that if you have the amount of self-discipline to travel to an exotic location and and brave the the wilderness and the novel novelty there, then you you must you know you must really be you know a virtuous, committed person. But if you just you know get a bunch of easy data on MTurk, you know, any any schmuck could do that. Exactly. Uh Daniel, one question for you. Well, well, one question is because we're wrapping up, is you we spent some time together in CP. You spent a lot of time with John Tubi. We don't always talk about, but we've we've had like you know some Tubi students on, um,

you know, and we miss John. Do you have any sort of like um, and I don't want to like, you know, uh put you on the spot, but is there anything about John that like for people who didn't know him? Um, or or like, you know, to convey sort of like what what being around John was like or um, you know, he we we both spent a lot of time with him, but uh but part of the the point of doing this is sort of like getting people to know the people doing of psych one of the people we can't do that for anymore is John. Um, you know, is there something that you think of that sort of conveys what John was like? Or an alternative is sort of like um, you know, for me at least, you know, working with John and Lita, you know, like they really were important in this field, and

it's such an honor to have worked with them. Um, for you, how has it been, or what was it like kind of working with them and and sort of how do you think about that going forward and and sort of continuing the legacy of of their work? Uh you put me in an emotional spot, it's hard to say. Um, but uh to say that I owe them my life would be a little bit too dramatic, but it was something like that. Um uh initially in the lab I was extremely shameful because there they are gods, and I was a um a lowly creature, And but they paradoxically, because they are incredibly kind, as everyone says, not corresponding with the amount of power that they have given their wisdom. So slowly, I'm a slow thinker, and it took me a many, a long, very long time to

uh calibrate to the American experience. Uh that I could stare at them in the eyes or call them by their first names, etc. and then and then at some point it clicked and i was spending uh many long hours at night in their home making completely inappropriate jokes with uh to be unspeakable things like he was like a like a father uh and uh yeah yeah yeah yeah He he was an incredible observer and hysterically hilarious and unspeakably funny. Yes. Uh he would say things in me that I didn't know myself, so yeah, very, very extremely brilliant and extremely kind and nice and funny and everything else. Yeah. Yeah. And for John, uh for me it was like uh there's this category of like people who every time

they open their mouth they learn something. And the John was like that category for me. Yeah. Small group. Yeah. And I feel uh imposter syndrome in that uh t till today, in that people ask me things and some some things I memorize by wrote, uh the shame, blah blah. And some and sometimes I'm asked things I'm out of my comfort zone because I don't know things by wrote and I don't know what to say. And so I'm like an empty, I have no idea, but I say, okay, I'm an empty tube, and let's say what Tubi would say. Exactly. And something completely not completely incoherent comes out, but it's only because of Tubi. It's not because of Twitter. You have an inner tubi. I know. I I do the exact same thing.

I'm I'll often be like, what would John what what's the tubi thing right here? Yeah, exactly. W W J D, what would John do? Exactly. Yes. Too bad that his phenotype didn't correspond with the greatness of his soul and spirit and wisdom. Yeah, cool. Um, is there anything that we should have asked you, Daniel? Yeah, but maybe not for public consumption. Well, no, no, no, no. I and uh I'm working on stuff on human nature and value in general, so maybe at some point uh we can chat, but uh it was delightful to chat with you. Uh I was feeling a little bit down about the entropic nature of the world, but uh you guys made me feel more fuzzy and nice. So that's good. Great. Reverse entropy for a couple hours.

That could be our tagline. Yeah. Thank you so much for your interest and for creating this service to the whoever is watching this. Yeah, and we and Daniel, we are proud of your work. I mean I will say like the the emotion work and just the function, the beautiful predictions and the the the rapidity with which you've collected beautiful cross-cultural data and the people who are just interested in emotions don't have a dog in the fight of like evolution or not. There are there's just so many people who I'm meeting that love your emotion work because it's just clarifying like, oh, I understand if the function of it is this, I can make better predictions, I can understand it, I can understand what conditions elicit, what

outputs it will generate. And I think like you the work you're doing is just such a good example of like at the end of the day, the proof's in the pudding and you're just doing a wonderful job like in providing insight to these important things like shame and um uh guilt and and pride and and and things like that. Beautiful is the is the is the correct word. Um when when I do look at your work, Daniel, I am sort of confronted with a feeling of scientific or epistemic beauty. Just the elegance, the parsimony, the the the the powerful effect sizes, the cross cultural regularities. You you you get the sense that you're you know, you're glimpsing the contours of human nature uh in your work and it's it's really beautiful to behold.

Yeah. That's high price. If uh one person doesn't find what I do worthless then that I have achieved. Uh yeah, that would be completely uh a completely inappropriate low bar for the private sector. But given that I'm a government employee, I think that's a high uh breakthrough and for which I'm very grateful uh to my life givers to being lida and also to your company of great intellect and and mensch fullness okay uh fantastic well wonderful daniel thank you uh and uh uh thanks again for being here uh more fun thank you thank you so much yeah good to see bye bye bye wow you're still listening good for you i i'm proud I'm proud of you. I'm proud of me. I'm proud of us. Uh what else can you do to express your pride for having listened to this uh wonderful

episode and avoid the shame of uh well, I don't know what you'd be ashamed of, but what what can you do to support us, Dave? Um well what you I mean well before you even do that, I mean you could look we'll put a link to Daniel's info in the show notes. You can look at Daniel. Honestly, every single thing this guy has written is gold. So I would recommend just reading through his research catalog. Daniel's a beautiful writer, too. Oh yeah. Just to say, yeah. So definitely. Yeah. Um, but uh, but if and as far as we're concerned, you know, keep listening. Um you know, subscribe, like, um, leave a positive review. Um, I'm really tell a friend. Yeah, that would be really helpful. I mean, I think I really do like the idea of shouting it to other people, but don't

probably don't do that. Yeah. Um, but yeah, and and and also you can you know contribute to our Patreon account if you want to be really generous and feel really proud of yourself. Yeah, that sounds good. So, and just you know, take a moment to be proud of yourself for something that you're gonna do this week. Yeah, but don't don't be too proud. Don't be arrogant, because that that would be bad. Yeah, if you're listening and you're arrogant, don't be, but if you're not arrogant, do it. But do people I have a question: do people who are arrogant think they're arrogant? Hmm, that might be the topic of a whole new episode. Ooh, yeah, maybe we have to have some people back. Okay. Well, and on that note, have a good week and we'll see you next week.

See you next week.