WEBVTT

00:00:00.640 --> 00:00:03.120
Uh David, what is this podcast?

00:00:03.440 --> 00:00:06.160
It is Evolutionary Psychology the Podcast, and what is the tagline?

00:00:06.640 --> 00:00:11.520
Actual Evolutionary Psychology by Actual Evolutionary Psychologists, and let's get right

00:00:11.520 --> 00:00:11.840
into it.

00:00:12.160 --> 00:00:12.800
All right.

00:00:29.890 --> 00:00:33.410
David, today we have a fantastic guest, Anne Opizel.

00:00:33.970 --> 00:00:38.850
Yes, Anne is a wonderful scholar, brilliant thinker, doing absolutely uh a cutting edge

00:00:38.850 --> 00:00:43.730
research into the nature of group psychology and intergroup relations, overturning our

00:00:43.730 --> 00:00:49.660
understanding of what intergroup uh animosity is and and and also flipping it

00:00:49.660 --> 00:00:54.780
on its head and showing uh ways in which people can and do uh interact uh and cooperate

00:00:54.780 --> 00:00:56.300
across group boundaries.

00:00:56.380 --> 00:01:02.300
Um yeah, and I think the theme of this episode is connections, because in two ways, one is

00:01:02.380 --> 00:01:07.500
uh Anna's talking about all of the ways in which the evolved psychology makes connections

00:01:07.500 --> 00:01:13.010
across and between groups to sort of shore up against risk and uncertainty.

00:01:13.170 --> 00:01:18.690
But then also this conversation itself, I feel like was a super great example of Anne just

00:01:18.690 --> 00:01:23.650
knows so much uh in the literature and was making connections and we were all sort of

00:01:23.650 --> 00:01:29.490
really riffing in in a wonderful way and really uh crossing a lot of different topics and

00:01:29.490 --> 00:01:30.450
making connections.

00:01:30.610 --> 00:01:36.530
I certainly learned a lot um in this um in this episode and I think people will uh enjoy

00:01:36.530 --> 00:01:37.090
it very much.

00:01:37.340 --> 00:01:40.380
Yeah, this was this was a really fun one and I think you'll enjoy listening.

00:01:40.460 --> 00:01:43.020
So without further ado, here is Ann Pizor.

00:01:47.100 --> 00:01:49.500
Today we have Ann Pizor.

00:01:49.580 --> 00:01:50.140
Did I say that right?

00:01:50.300 --> 00:01:50.700
Pizer?

00:01:50.940 --> 00:01:51.260
Pizer.

00:01:51.500 --> 00:01:51.820
You did.

00:01:51.900 --> 00:01:51.980
Yeah.

00:01:52.140 --> 00:01:53.420
Pizer, Pizer.

00:01:53.740 --> 00:01:53.900
Okay.

00:01:54.140 --> 00:01:54.380
Yes.

00:01:55.020 --> 00:01:57.740
I have a difficult P last name too.

00:01:57.900 --> 00:02:01.340
Um, so yes, we got three P's on the call right there.

00:02:01.900 --> 00:02:02.540
Hey.

00:02:03.290 --> 00:02:08.890
Um, so uh Ann, you are at um you run the Sociality Lab, um, and that's at

00:02:08.890 --> 00:02:11.610
Penn State in the Department of Anthropology.

00:02:11.690 --> 00:02:12.330
Is that right?

00:02:12.730 --> 00:02:13.130
That's right.

00:02:13.290 --> 00:02:13.530
That's right.

00:02:13.610 --> 00:02:15.930
I co run it with Chris Smith, who's at Washington State.

00:02:16.250 --> 00:02:16.970
Ah, fantastic.

00:02:17.290 --> 00:02:20.730
And Chris Smith was we've we've talked about Chris on the podcast.

00:02:20.810 --> 00:02:22.250
We we need to have him on.

00:02:22.410 --> 00:02:24.410
Was he a student of yours?

00:02:24.860 --> 00:02:26.700
He was my postdoc for a few years.

00:02:26.780 --> 00:02:27.020
Yeah.

00:02:27.260 --> 00:02:27.500
Okay.

00:02:28.380 --> 00:02:29.420
Yeah, Chris is great.

00:02:29.500 --> 00:02:31.980
We should friend of the podcast, as they say.

00:02:32.700 --> 00:02:33.100
Indeed.

00:02:33.420 --> 00:02:39.180
Um, and and you study um, I know you've you've been doing, I think, different

00:02:39.180 --> 00:02:44.860
things, but one of the things most recently, at least for me, um, is group

00:02:44.860 --> 00:02:50.810
relationships that are sort of cross traditional group boundaries, which I

00:02:50.810 --> 00:02:56.730
really like and I really want to get into because for me, coming from

00:02:56.730 --> 00:03:02.490
a social psychology background, people have this idea that groups, to the extent they

00:03:02.490 --> 00:03:06.010
exist, really are boundaries of interaction.

00:03:06.330 --> 00:03:10.730
And, you know, I think there's this idea from like archaeology, you know, you find like

00:03:10.730 --> 00:03:15.220
physical, like pottery from distant lands, and you have this idea, well, maybe people

00:03:15.220 --> 00:03:16.580
tolerate like trade.

00:03:16.820 --> 00:03:22.260
You know, if this shiny thing is really attractive, yeah, I'll, you know, we'll we'll let

00:03:22.260 --> 00:03:23.460
the traders do that.

00:03:23.700 --> 00:03:29.540
But otherwise, it's very much this sort of nature-red tooth and claw view of group

00:03:29.540 --> 00:03:30.500
boundaries.

00:03:30.740 --> 00:03:36.100
Um, and so uh, I mean, we can start anywhere, but I'm just wondering, sort of,

00:03:36.450 --> 00:03:42.370
you seem to be maybe interjecting a bit of sophistication into that view

00:03:42.930 --> 00:03:48.210
that groups are not these sort of concrete walls between people.

00:03:48.290 --> 00:03:52.610
And there actually can be somewhat strong ties between people.

00:03:52.850 --> 00:03:57.010
And you're also looking at sort of why people do that and what benefits there are.

00:03:57.970 --> 00:04:00.450
Is that a fair characterization?

00:04:01.170 --> 00:04:03.000
That is a fair characterization.

00:04:03.160 --> 00:04:03.480
Yeah.

00:04:03.640 --> 00:04:08.040
So I'm going to go into story time a little bit here, if I may, when it comes to groups.

00:04:08.280 --> 00:04:08.600
Yeah.

00:04:08.760 --> 00:04:13.080
So so as you know, and as the listeners know at this point, there's a tradition of thinking

00:04:13.080 --> 00:04:17.960
about groups in evolutionary anthropology and in evolutionary psychology, where we're often

00:04:17.960 --> 00:04:21.960
thinking about groups as kind of boundaries, as containers for cooperation.

00:04:22.440 --> 00:04:26.270
And humans are really social, and they certainly are extremely important.

00:04:26.430 --> 00:04:30.270
And I think also of your work, Dave, on that as well, in terms of what one can do with

00:04:30.270 --> 00:04:30.830
groups.

00:04:31.070 --> 00:04:36.910
And so when I first started doing research, when I was thinking about cooperation, working

00:04:36.910 --> 00:04:42.350
with Mike Irvin at Santa Barbara, I was thinking a lot about group dynamics in Bolivia.

00:04:42.670 --> 00:04:47.150
So you have this kind of through line in training where we're all thinking about groups and

00:04:47.310 --> 00:04:51.760
how groups structure cooperation, regardless of our intellectual tradition and evolutionary

00:04:51.760 --> 00:04:52.960
behavioral sciences.

00:04:53.120 --> 00:04:56.240
And then at the same time in Bolivia, it was really interesting.

00:04:56.480 --> 00:05:01.760
It was this era with a new constitution where there were 36 different pueblos indigenes,

00:05:02.000 --> 00:05:03.360
different indigenous groups.

00:05:03.520 --> 00:05:07.760
And so even the political discourse in Bolivia was really heightening the salience of

00:05:07.760 --> 00:05:09.120
groups and group boundaries.

00:05:09.280 --> 00:05:13.360
And so when I started doing research in Bolivia, I was just really thinking in terms of

00:05:13.360 --> 00:05:14.080
groups.

00:05:14.430 --> 00:05:18.030
And what ended up happening, of course, is as I did more and more of that research, I

00:05:18.030 --> 00:05:21.150
realized that groups weren't really stopping anybody from cooperating.

00:05:21.390 --> 00:05:23.390
They were often salient in certain contexts.

00:05:23.470 --> 00:05:28.030
You could certainly activate group boundaries, as we know so well from psychology, and that

00:05:28.030 --> 00:05:29.470
would change cooperation.

00:05:29.710 --> 00:05:32.270
But a lot of the time, folks are just trying to get stuff done.

00:05:32.430 --> 00:05:36.590
And things like ethnic group boundaries were really flexible at the end of the day.

00:05:37.100 --> 00:05:42.860
So yeah, I'd say it's fair to say that my thinking about groups has has shifted over time.

00:05:42.940 --> 00:05:46.140
And then also the story that I've been telling about groups and the research I've been

00:05:46.140 --> 00:05:48.140
doing on groups has shifted along with it.

00:05:49.340 --> 00:05:55.340
It might be worth getting into what defines a group, what a group actually is at the end of

00:05:55.340 --> 00:05:59.580
the day, because if it's not a container for cooperation and if it's not preventing me from

00:05:59.580 --> 00:06:04.290
cooperating or interacting with or having relationships with people in the other group,

00:06:04.370 --> 00:06:05.250
then what is it actually doing?

00:06:05.410 --> 00:06:05.730
What is it?

00:06:06.050 --> 00:06:07.170
Is there a boundary there at all?

00:06:07.810 --> 00:06:08.690
Is there a group at all?

00:06:08.850 --> 00:06:10.450
Like what are we talking about here?

00:06:10.850 --> 00:06:11.490
No, exactly.

00:06:11.570 --> 00:06:15.730
And this, I have to actually cue this up right because I've actually been teased by

00:06:15.730 --> 00:06:19.650
students for putting my hands on the desk at this point and saying, what is a group?

00:06:19.810 --> 00:06:21.330
And turning the question back.

00:06:21.730 --> 00:06:23.410
It's one of my favorite questions.

00:06:23.650 --> 00:06:27.890
So there are two kind of through lines on what a group is that I think are somewhat

00:06:27.960 --> 00:06:30.680
implicit in the evolutionary behavioral sciences.

00:06:30.920 --> 00:06:35.880
So one is this idea of groups that's coming through, say, the primatology literature or the

00:06:35.880 --> 00:06:41.240
behavioral ecology literature, where it's the idea of who isn't proximate to to who else

00:06:41.240 --> 00:06:42.760
for the most amount of time.

00:06:43.000 --> 00:06:48.040
And so that makes things easy for primatologists in terms of talking about one male units

00:06:48.120 --> 00:06:52.920
or talking about nested groups or thinking about um kind of multi-level structures and

00:06:52.920 --> 00:06:53.560
primates.

00:06:53.950 --> 00:06:55.390
So this is one kind of group.

00:06:55.870 --> 00:06:58.270
Group as a spatiotemporal cluster.

00:06:58.750 --> 00:06:59.150
That's it.

00:06:59.310 --> 00:06:59.710
Exactly.

00:06:59.870 --> 00:07:04.190
And that's where we get some of the terminology, like fission fusion dynamics, for example,

00:07:04.350 --> 00:07:08.750
instead of groups, because there's kind of this soft boundary about how much time

00:07:08.750 --> 00:07:12.590
individuals have to spend together before we start calling them a group that's in reliable

00:07:12.590 --> 00:07:14.110
association with one another.

00:07:14.440 --> 00:07:16.680
So that's that's one definition of group.

00:07:16.840 --> 00:07:20.680
And then on the other side, when we're coming from social science, we're often talking

00:07:20.680 --> 00:07:24.840
about identity groups, or we're assuming identity groups where there aren't any, which is

00:07:24.840 --> 00:07:26.120
also a really interesting one.

00:07:26.360 --> 00:07:29.640
And so identity groups are something that humans do really well.

00:07:29.880 --> 00:07:34.760
It also ends up that you can see identity groups popping up in the animal world as well.

00:07:34.840 --> 00:07:38.760
If we're looking at certain species of ants, for example, identity groups become salient.

00:07:39.080 --> 00:07:40.920
So what what is an identity group then?

00:07:41.550 --> 00:07:42.190
yes.

00:07:42.510 --> 00:07:45.710
So this is where my anthrop comes out.

00:07:45.950 --> 00:07:47.550
It depends on who you ask, right?

00:07:47.790 --> 00:07:48.030
Okay.

00:07:48.190 --> 00:07:53.150
Um, so so let me give you what I would consider to be a working definition of an identity

00:07:53.150 --> 00:07:53.310
group.

00:07:53.390 --> 00:07:56.350
And I'm gonna pull a little bit on Dave's research here.

00:07:56.590 --> 00:08:01.230
So other folks recognize us as being in a group, and then it's part of my own identity in

00:08:01.230 --> 00:08:04.510
terms of who I see as, say, a reliable cooperator.

00:08:04.590 --> 00:08:08.110
That might be one way that we have a working definition of an identity group.

00:08:08.420 --> 00:08:14.180
Another one might be to say that I recognize other individuals as kind of being folks who

00:08:14.180 --> 00:08:18.420
share something with me that makes it easier to coordinate, whether that's for cooperation

00:08:18.420 --> 00:08:19.220
or otherwise.

00:08:19.460 --> 00:08:22.260
Those are often what we see as identity groups.

00:08:22.580 --> 00:08:25.540
We often talk about identity, of course, is just the sense of self.

00:08:25.700 --> 00:08:29.810
I think it starts to get a little squishy in there, but there's something to that that

00:08:29.810 --> 00:08:30.770
humans are doing.

00:08:30.930 --> 00:08:34.770
And I think what often happens is we end up conflating the two things.

00:08:34.930 --> 00:08:39.570
So we're thinking about group identity and bounded groups and groups in the mind, as it

00:08:39.570 --> 00:08:44.610
were, um, and that are recognized by by others around us, and then also who we're spending

00:08:44.610 --> 00:08:45.090
time with.

00:08:45.170 --> 00:08:50.610
And those two I those two group definitions can overlap, but they don't have to.

00:08:50.900 --> 00:08:51.300
Mm-hmm.

00:08:51.700 --> 00:08:55.300
So is this different from having a label for a group?

00:08:55.380 --> 00:08:57.540
So that's sort of what I think of in terms of identity.

00:08:57.700 --> 00:09:02.100
So like I am white, I'm a Californian, I'm an American.

00:09:02.180 --> 00:09:04.820
Um these are label or uh you know a Democrat, whatever.

00:09:04.900 --> 00:09:09.620
I I can put these labels on me in terms of my, you know, partisanship, religion, you know,

00:09:09.780 --> 00:09:12.420
ethnicity, socioeconomic status.

00:09:12.580 --> 00:09:15.380
Um, but that's different from what you're talking about.

00:09:15.570 --> 00:09:21.330
Um, and that if uh what you're talking about is is uh uh similarity to a group of people,

00:09:21.490 --> 00:09:26.530
willingness to cooperate with a group of people, uh uh common knowledge that we're all

00:09:26.530 --> 00:09:29.730
similar and good cooperative partners, that kind of thing.

00:09:29.890 --> 00:09:32.850
But that doesn't necessarily need to correspond with a particular label.

00:09:33.010 --> 00:09:36.530
And you you could have the reverse where you have a label, but the the people who share

00:09:36.530 --> 00:09:41.000
that label don't actually see each other as as cooperative partners and don't see uh each

00:09:41.000 --> 00:09:42.360
other as as similar.

00:09:42.760 --> 00:09:44.600
So how does the label fit in?

00:09:44.680 --> 00:09:47.480
Is that a a third way of thinking about groups?

00:09:47.960 --> 00:09:51.320
Yeah, so this is where I'm going to pull a little bit on Christina Moya, who actually has a

00:09:51.320 --> 00:09:54.520
really nice paper on this and has been on the show as well.

00:09:54.760 --> 00:09:58.760
And so what Christina did is I thought broke this down really nicely, is it's basically

00:09:58.840 --> 00:09:59.640
kind of what is a group?

00:09:59.800 --> 00:10:04.470
She has a table on it in a paper, and a table, it does a lot of work for this, actually.

00:10:04.550 --> 00:10:10.470
And what she kind of pulls apart is whether things like gender, ethnicity, um, the

00:10:10.630 --> 00:10:15.190
kind of job you hold, how frequently those are things that people actually tap into in

00:10:15.190 --> 00:10:20.790
terms of forming cooperative groups and kind of using the labels to scaffold cooperation.

00:10:21.030 --> 00:10:25.110
And it ends up that humans could pretty frequently will do that with ethnicity, which of

00:10:25.110 --> 00:10:29.750
course is a slightly different meaning than race when we're talking to anthropologists,

00:10:29.830 --> 00:10:29.990
right?

00:10:30.070 --> 00:10:33.760
We're talking about a shared history that we recognize.

00:10:34.320 --> 00:10:37.520
And those identity markers again kind of come into play there.

00:10:37.760 --> 00:10:42.720
And so it seems that there are certain kinds of labels, if you will, to pull on your

00:10:42.720 --> 00:10:48.240
language here, that are more reliably used to scaffold cooperation.

00:10:48.400 --> 00:10:52.960
But as we know from research coming out of the Center for Evolutionary Psychology, for

00:10:52.960 --> 00:10:58.150
example, at Santa Barbara, is that you can actually move around which labels structure

00:10:58.150 --> 00:11:03.190
cooperation and which labels are recognized by others as being something that is unifying

00:11:03.430 --> 00:11:04.070
for people.

00:11:04.470 --> 00:11:09.670
And so I think sometimes we have kind of three different ways of thinking about groups that

00:11:09.670 --> 00:11:10.630
are somewhat conflated.

00:11:10.710 --> 00:11:15.320
So one is the assumption that things like gender, you which you mentioned, scaffold

00:11:15.320 --> 00:11:18.760
cooperation or scaffold groupishness and it really depends on the situation.

00:11:18.920 --> 00:11:23.320
Are there affordances to cooperating along gendered lines, for example, that can actually

00:11:23.320 --> 00:11:25.320
elicit groupishness but doesn't have to.

00:11:25.560 --> 00:11:30.120
Then you have this through line as well of just identity groups that people self-ascribe,

00:11:30.360 --> 00:11:34.970
which sometimes we miss when we're doing scientific um social scientific research is we'll

00:11:34.970 --> 00:11:38.650
forget to ask people what they ascribe as, which I think is really important.

00:11:38.890 --> 00:11:43.690
And then additionally, we have this idea of groups coming in also from ecological research,

00:11:43.770 --> 00:11:45.850
which is just individuals and association.

00:11:46.010 --> 00:11:50.010
And so sometimes I think those three are kind of getting mixed up in the work we're doing.

00:11:50.090 --> 00:11:52.090
And I think it behooves us to pull them apart.

00:11:52.730 --> 00:11:53.210
That's great.

00:11:53.370 --> 00:11:57.210
And I think there's even an additional complication and maybe this is leading into the

00:11:57.210 --> 00:12:02.420
research, which is that groups are a social coordination or

00:12:02.420 --> 00:12:03.380
convention.

00:12:03.860 --> 00:12:09.220
And so we've talked a little bit about, and I know, Ann, in your work, the idea that sort

00:12:09.220 --> 00:12:15.140
of, you know, and again, this comes back to sort of a more complex view of human

00:12:15.140 --> 00:12:20.740
nature and our evolved psychology, but it's not sort of that we're just sponges for soaking

00:12:20.740 --> 00:12:22.020
up the existing groups.

00:12:22.170 --> 00:12:23.210
And clearly kids are.

00:12:23.290 --> 00:12:24.890
And there's interesting developmental work on that.

00:12:24.970 --> 00:12:29.530
Like, for example, that kids learn labels really easily, especially applied to groups of

00:12:29.530 --> 00:12:33.690
people, which is actually just as an aside important for how you talk about people with

00:12:33.690 --> 00:12:34.090
your kids.

00:12:34.170 --> 00:12:35.850
So maybe we can talk about that a little bit.

00:12:36.010 --> 00:12:41.930
But um but uh but in addition to that, at a certain point, you just sort

00:12:41.930 --> 00:12:46.650
of look around, and you know, adolescents and even young kids do this too, where they're

00:12:46.650 --> 00:12:49.930
just looking around and they're like, okay, adults, I don't like what you're doing here.

00:12:50.140 --> 00:12:53.580
I'm going to do something different and make kind of go my own way.

00:12:53.820 --> 00:12:59.340
And that then cashes out also in the group context where groups are also, you know,

00:12:59.580 --> 00:13:03.340
you create a group identity like evolutionary psychology, right?

00:13:03.420 --> 00:13:07.180
Like that didn't exist 30 or 40 years ago or something.

00:13:07.340 --> 00:13:10.860
And, you know, people just started using that word and said, I'm an evolutionary

00:13:10.860 --> 00:13:11.500
psychologist.

00:13:11.580 --> 00:13:13.180
And now, like, that's a group, right?

00:13:13.340 --> 00:13:18.460
Um, and that's just one example of there's just a time course too, where people are

00:13:18.460 --> 00:13:19.500
negotiating.

00:13:19.750 --> 00:13:24.870
And for some people, it's a benefit to be a group member, be seen as a group member, and

00:13:24.870 --> 00:13:27.430
they want to promulgate that identity.

00:13:27.590 --> 00:13:31.590
And then there's the opposite where sort of, you know, and a good example would be like

00:13:31.590 --> 00:13:36.470
colonialists sort of just coming in and like, you know, massacring the natives, and they're

00:13:36.470 --> 00:13:39.350
just viewing everybody as like, oh, the rebels, right?

00:13:39.510 --> 00:13:42.710
When it's in fact like a very small group of people, but then they just broaden that

00:13:42.710 --> 00:13:47.940
category to everybody because they don't know the ethnography of the area.

00:13:48.420 --> 00:13:54.100
And so both in terms of like co mission or omission or aggression or defense,

00:13:54.260 --> 00:13:59.220
there's all these negotiations of group identities as sort of

00:13:59.220 --> 00:14:02.900
entrepreneurial coordination things.

00:14:03.060 --> 00:14:06.260
And so I think it's even more complicated than just those three things.

00:14:06.420 --> 00:14:12.190
It's sort of like by design, uh there's motivation to sort of for some people

00:14:12.190 --> 00:14:16.590
to want new groups to exist, or for some people for existing groups to not exist.

00:14:19.150 --> 00:14:24.030
And it's interesting too, it comes back to this idea as well about

00:14:24.590 --> 00:14:29.230
what's sometimes called structure versus agency and the social sciences, if I can bring

00:14:29.230 --> 00:14:35.070
that up, in the sense that any individual will actually, for example, as you said,

00:14:35.150 --> 00:14:37.710
maybe try to negotiate for certain groups to exist.

00:14:37.790 --> 00:14:42.140
But then you also have the structure, which is basically all what everyone else is trying

00:14:42.140 --> 00:14:45.740
to do in terms of their group coordination and what they would like to see happen to your

00:14:45.740 --> 00:14:45.980
point.

00:14:46.140 --> 00:14:50.780
And so I think this actually pops out again and again in the social sciences, but sometimes

00:14:50.780 --> 00:14:54.380
we're actually not thinking, as you said, about the whole space when it comes to

00:14:54.380 --> 00:14:58.940
coordination problems, when it comes to motivations that different folks have, and thinking

00:14:58.940 --> 00:15:03.500
about both the psychology and then the interpersonal dynamics of it all at once.

00:15:03.790 --> 00:15:08.190
Yeah, no, it's a really, it's no surprise that, you know, it's this thing of like groups

00:15:08.190 --> 00:15:11.630
are hard enough to measure, the individual psychology is hard enough to measure.

00:15:11.710 --> 00:15:16.190
And then when you get this dynamic of it's like that's, you know, very agent-based model-y

00:15:16.270 --> 00:15:20.830
kind of thing where it's sort of, or or game theory, um, you know, which I know David's

00:15:20.830 --> 00:15:25.070
been thinking a lot about too, which is just sort of you have all these coordination games,

00:15:25.230 --> 00:15:30.720
there's conflicts of interest, and so it's just it's it's no wonder that studying these

00:15:30.720 --> 00:15:35.440
things has been difficult and that we've often sort of oversimplified them.

00:15:36.960 --> 00:15:38.240
So how how are you?

00:15:38.400 --> 00:15:43.440
So let's let's try to make the rubber meet the road in terms of actually going out into the

00:15:43.440 --> 00:15:47.360
world and seeing how it works and measuring things and and observing things.

00:15:47.440 --> 00:15:53.280
So how are you uh wading into this morass of of definitional confusion about what a group

00:15:53.280 --> 00:15:53.440
is?

00:15:53.520 --> 00:15:57.360
And how are you getting in there and how are you operationalizing what it means to be a a

00:15:57.360 --> 00:15:58.640
member of a group?

00:15:59.200 --> 00:16:00.570
Yeah, it's a great question.

00:16:00.730 --> 00:16:05.210
So one thing that's really fun, I was actually listening back to Shane Lou Levy's uh

00:16:05.210 --> 00:16:06.650
interview with y'all.

00:16:06.810 --> 00:16:11.770
Um, and one thing that she mentioned that really resonated with me that I actually want to

00:16:11.770 --> 00:16:15.450
just bring back for listeners too, is this idea of storytelling and then also about

00:16:15.930 --> 00:16:20.410
revising and being wrong and talking a bit about our process in the literature.

00:16:20.650 --> 00:16:23.940
So so when I started out thinking about groups, let's let's go back.

00:16:24.100 --> 00:16:29.220
So y'all might know, um, some of you listening and definitely both of you, David and David,

00:16:29.300 --> 00:16:31.620
um, that I started out working in Bolivia.

00:16:31.700 --> 00:16:36.100
So I was working in Bolivia in the Bolivian Amazon with Mike Irvin, Chris Von Ruden, and

00:16:36.100 --> 00:16:37.140
others that you know.

00:16:37.220 --> 00:16:39.780
Um and I was working there from 2010 to 2018.

00:16:39.860 --> 00:16:44.740
And as I mentioned, I had a lot of assumptions about what groups were up to.

00:16:44.900 --> 00:16:48.670
One of the things I was really interested in, right, is that groups as kind of containers

00:16:48.670 --> 00:16:51.550
for cooperation, because they often are, as you mentioned earlier, David.

00:16:51.630 --> 00:16:52.990
So to come back to that.

00:16:53.630 --> 00:16:58.510
And that who is in and who is out might be shifting as people are participating more in

00:16:58.510 --> 00:16:59.310
market economies.

00:16:59.390 --> 00:17:05.230
That maybe the notion of who's in is expanding, which then makes cooperation easier when it

00:17:05.230 --> 00:17:09.470
comes to, say, getting a job, sending your kid out of college, lots of different things

00:17:09.470 --> 00:17:13.150
that folks are trying to achieve in Bolivia in the 21st century.

00:17:13.550 --> 00:17:18.940
And so what ended up happening, of course, is I had to take a big step back because I first

00:17:18.940 --> 00:17:24.620
found out by doing the field work, by by talking to folks that groups really mattered, but

00:17:24.620 --> 00:17:25.740
in very specific ways.

00:17:25.900 --> 00:17:28.220
So they certainly mattered for discrimination, right?

00:17:28.380 --> 00:17:33.020
So when working with Chimane people, for example, and then working with other groups in

00:17:33.020 --> 00:17:37.650
Bolivia, I would often hear that Chimane were considered to be groups, you know, members of

00:17:37.650 --> 00:17:42.690
a group that were discriminated against, that sometimes were considered to be out in the

00:17:42.690 --> 00:17:44.690
woods and kind of not knowing anything, right?

00:17:44.770 --> 00:17:48.210
So you get some really kind of strong through lines of discrimination there.

00:17:48.450 --> 00:17:53.650
And then additionally, you would hear from folks who identified as Chimane that as well

00:17:53.730 --> 00:17:55.890
they were experiencing that from the other side.

00:17:56.050 --> 00:17:59.810
And so really starting to unpack who was in and who was out was important to me.

00:17:59.970 --> 00:18:05.040
So one of the first things I started to do to understand this a bit more was to use a very

00:18:05.040 --> 00:18:09.520
similar kind of scale to something Dan Hushka was using at the time, which is this idea of

00:18:09.520 --> 00:18:10.320
closeness.

00:18:10.560 --> 00:18:15.520
So actually having people tell me by using physical space how close or far they felt to one

00:18:15.520 --> 00:18:16.640
group versus another.

00:18:16.800 --> 00:18:19.280
So you can see this kind of feltness popping out here, right?

00:18:19.360 --> 00:18:23.520
Those identity groups, people actually kind of opting in and telling me a bit about who's

00:18:23.520 --> 00:18:25.120
in and who's out for them.

00:18:25.910 --> 00:18:31.350
And so then I was starting to write papers about when folks made these intergroup

00:18:31.350 --> 00:18:31.670
connections.

00:18:31.750 --> 00:18:36.390
And what I was starting to realize is that groups were not always salient to folks.

00:18:36.630 --> 00:18:41.590
And so what I did ended up doing later in the day is with Cody Ross, I ended up writing a

00:18:41.590 --> 00:18:44.470
paper where I said, you know, I think there's two different things going on here.

00:18:44.710 --> 00:18:49.940
One thing is groupishness and groups as containers for cooperation and also groups as

00:18:49.940 --> 00:18:50.820
structure, if you will.

00:18:50.980 --> 00:18:55.220
So in Bolivia, when they're central to the discourse, they kind of become reified, right?

00:18:55.300 --> 00:18:58.100
They become things that are salient to interactions.

00:18:58.500 --> 00:19:02.260
And then at the same time, though, people are trying to manage things that are very

00:19:02.260 --> 00:19:03.700
distance bound in Bolivia.

00:19:03.860 --> 00:19:07.940
So if you need a connection in the city so that your kiddo can get a job, you need to know

00:19:07.940 --> 00:19:10.980
someone in the city, and it doesn't really matter which ethnic group they're in.

00:19:11.300 --> 00:19:17.070
And if you need to sell your lumber to someone, you need to have someone who's able to

00:19:17.070 --> 00:19:17.710
engage in trade.

00:19:17.870 --> 00:19:20.030
This is something you alluded to at the top, Dave.

00:19:20.270 --> 00:19:24.430
And so what I started to realize is that we actually need to split these things apart,

00:19:24.510 --> 00:19:24.670
right?

00:19:24.750 --> 00:19:28.030
So when we're thinking about cooperation, people are trying to solve multiple problems.

00:19:28.190 --> 00:19:30.350
Some of them are group bound, some of them aren't.

00:19:30.510 --> 00:19:34.350
And even when they are group bound, it ends up that people are very creative and there's

00:19:34.350 --> 00:19:37.220
often ways to find ways around boundedness.

00:19:37.460 --> 00:19:42.340
One thing I often think about for pastoralist groups in Africa, especially, is that you

00:19:42.340 --> 00:19:46.260
have things like stock friendships that can often go across ethnic boundaries.

00:19:46.340 --> 00:19:50.260
And if you have one of those friendships, you're often given a free pass to visit, even if

00:19:50.260 --> 00:19:55.700
your two groups are kind of at war or just even just tense with one another.

00:19:55.940 --> 00:20:00.230
So I start to kind of insert myself into this conversation by saying, let's take this step

00:20:00.230 --> 00:20:00.390
back.

00:20:00.470 --> 00:20:03.910
Let's start thinking about the kinds of problems people are trying to solve with

00:20:03.910 --> 00:20:08.790
cooperation and when groups would actually be something that's relevant to that situation

00:20:08.870 --> 00:20:13.350
versus something that can either be a not thought about in a particular study.

00:20:13.510 --> 00:20:17.510
Maybe we're talking about distance and that the groupishness is not really putting a

00:20:17.590 --> 00:20:19.190
container on that, as it were.

00:20:19.350 --> 00:20:21.830
Or two, that people are finding ways around.

00:20:21.910 --> 00:20:26.760
And those ways around are either individual or they're something that can also get baked in

00:20:26.760 --> 00:20:31.640
over time to cultural practices in terms of say stock friendships being a way to make a

00:20:31.640 --> 00:20:32.440
connection.

00:20:32.680 --> 00:20:37.320
And so this eventually leads me to kind of start going back to the literature and say we

00:20:37.320 --> 00:20:40.280
need to even rethink concepts like parochial altruism.

00:20:40.440 --> 00:20:44.920
So this idea of in-group favoritism and out-group animosity and actually start to kind of

00:20:44.920 --> 00:20:48.760
pull apart the conditions under which we would actually expect to see that happen.

00:20:48.920 --> 00:20:53.610
So nature, again, not always red in tooth and claw, but what about nature would actually

00:20:53.610 --> 00:20:56.010
say lead to red and tooth and claw versus not?

00:20:56.250 --> 00:21:00.250
So that's my long-winded kind of background story there, David, about how I ended up

00:21:00.250 --> 00:21:04.970
starting to insert myself into this conversation and actually go a bit from my own

00:21:04.970 --> 00:21:08.570
assumptions about groupishness and the way it should be playing out in the research world

00:21:08.570 --> 00:21:12.010
and in the lived world in Bolivia to where I am now.

00:21:12.380 --> 00:21:15.420
And how do you actually, like on the ground, study that?

00:21:15.580 --> 00:21:16.940
Because that seems like it would be difficult.

00:21:17.020 --> 00:21:18.940
Like, so what does that actually look like?

00:21:19.580 --> 00:21:20.140
Yeah.

00:21:20.380 --> 00:21:23.180
So this has been something I've been iterating on over time.

00:21:23.340 --> 00:21:24.700
So a couple things.

00:21:24.940 --> 00:21:29.100
First, right, is to start asking folks who's in and who's out.

00:21:29.180 --> 00:21:30.380
So I started to do that.

00:21:30.460 --> 00:21:32.940
And it's always from the individual's perspective, right?

00:21:33.020 --> 00:21:35.100
So they're the ones telling me who's in and who's out.

00:21:35.260 --> 00:21:39.180
Although one can make inferences on a larger scale from those data.

00:21:39.790 --> 00:21:44.190
Then additionally, one thing I started to do is doing what a lot of what we call lab in the

00:21:44.190 --> 00:21:44.510
field.

00:21:44.590 --> 00:21:50.110
So I was doing economic experiments in the field, having folks allocate money to strangers

00:21:50.110 --> 00:21:52.990
who are in-group or out-group members and identified as such.

00:21:53.230 --> 00:21:56.670
It ends up that those games are pretty powerful, but design really matters.

00:21:56.830 --> 00:22:01.230
And so this ends up being something I thought through with Cody Ross, Ben Persicki, Matt

00:22:01.230 --> 00:22:05.390
Gervais, and others about how we can actually use things like economic experiments to

00:22:05.390 --> 00:22:10.640
really give us purchase on particular questions about groupishness, cooperation, et cetera.

00:22:10.880 --> 00:22:15.040
And then another thing, of course, is actually to just ask people the questions.

00:22:15.200 --> 00:22:19.920
So I found out over time, of course, is if you ask who's in and who's out, and you get a

00:22:19.920 --> 00:22:25.760
sense of how people are kind of negotiating this in real time, just actually having

00:22:25.760 --> 00:22:28.400
conversations about it makes a big difference.

00:22:28.560 --> 00:22:33.110
But again, at the end of the day, you come back to a lot of this is is a bit squishy.

00:22:33.190 --> 00:22:36.470
So you actually have to triangulate across different sources.

00:22:36.710 --> 00:22:39.590
At least this is the way I've been doing it to figure out what a group is, how it's

00:22:39.590 --> 00:22:42.390
structuring cooperation, when people are using it and when they're not.

00:22:42.630 --> 00:22:42.790
Yeah.

00:22:42.870 --> 00:22:46.150
And is it like showing photos of people or names?

00:22:46.230 --> 00:22:46.950
Or how do you do that?

00:22:47.030 --> 00:22:51.110
Because I mean, as David mentioned, you know, labels may not, there might not be labels.

00:22:51.190 --> 00:22:56.820
Like you, the three of us might have lots of group identities that were all common

00:22:56.820 --> 00:23:00.660
knowledge for us, but we we don't even think about them in that way because we don't have a

00:23:00.660 --> 00:23:01.300
label for them.

00:23:01.460 --> 00:23:05.700
So how do you is it photos or pup in individual identities or or how do you do it?

00:23:05.780 --> 00:23:06.100
Yeah.

00:23:06.340 --> 00:23:06.500
Yeah.

00:23:06.660 --> 00:23:06.900
Yeah.

00:23:06.980 --> 00:23:08.740
So I started out with photos.

00:23:08.980 --> 00:23:13.540
So originally, right, I was thinking that I could just describe an in-group and an outgroup

00:23:13.540 --> 00:23:13.860
member.

00:23:14.020 --> 00:23:17.620
I really liked the idea of using photos because it made things more real.

00:23:17.790 --> 00:23:21.790
And this has been a kind of movement in the lab and the field space for folks who are doing

00:23:21.790 --> 00:23:24.030
this kind of work is to increasingly use photos.

00:23:24.190 --> 00:23:25.870
Cody Ross has done a lot of work on this.

00:23:26.110 --> 00:23:28.110
He's at the Mox Planck Institute.

00:23:28.350 --> 00:23:33.950
And basically, what we start to do is use these photos to basically simulate a

00:23:33.950 --> 00:23:39.120
first-time interaction or to get additional information, even about known alters, known

00:23:39.120 --> 00:23:43.360
other people as well, in terms of, okay, so tell, tell me a bit about how you'd like to

00:23:43.360 --> 00:23:47.200
allocate money or take money from other individuals, tell me the story of how you made that

00:23:47.200 --> 00:23:49.680
decision and to add some richness there.

00:23:49.840 --> 00:23:54.000
The thing that's complicated, as y'all might guess, including folks listening who know a

00:23:54.000 --> 00:23:58.400
bit about evolutionary psychology, as I know you do, is that you have to think about what's

00:23:58.400 --> 00:24:02.490
in a face and you have to think about what's in the background and you have to think about

00:24:02.490 --> 00:24:03.450
what's on the body.

00:24:03.530 --> 00:24:05.770
There's a lot of things that go into a photo.

00:24:05.930 --> 00:24:11.690
And so it's something that we've been kind of trying to find that happy medium on as

00:24:11.690 --> 00:24:17.290
we've been using photos in field contexts, across continents, across evolutionary

00:24:17.290 --> 00:24:20.090
psychology, evolutionary anthropology and beyond.

00:24:20.250 --> 00:24:21.290
What is what is in a photo?

00:24:21.530 --> 00:24:22.490
What is it telling us?

00:24:22.730 --> 00:24:27.520
What are people seeing there that they're that we're not able to capture as outsiders, to

00:24:27.520 --> 00:24:28.640
your point, David.

00:24:28.880 --> 00:24:30.800
And so it's been interesting.

00:24:31.040 --> 00:24:35.760
I started out kind of trying to elicit categories that people were paying attention to and

00:24:35.760 --> 00:24:39.200
then actually introduced the strangers in the photos with those categories.

00:24:39.280 --> 00:24:45.040
So name, age, and whether they were saying a religious in-group or outgroup or ethnic in

00:24:45.120 --> 00:24:45.920
group or out group.

00:24:46.240 --> 00:24:49.040
But again, that is still only capturing a fraction of the variation.

00:24:49.200 --> 00:24:52.160
And when I asked people back afterwards, how did you make the decision?

00:24:52.320 --> 00:24:56.170
They would actually tell me things about like wealth that they were inferring from how the

00:24:56.170 --> 00:24:58.810
person's face looked or what was in the background of the photo.

00:24:58.970 --> 00:24:59.370
Oh wow.

00:24:59.530 --> 00:25:01.130
So there's a lot going on there.

00:25:01.290 --> 00:25:06.490
It's a fun method, but yeah, it's always that trade-off we're making between that kind of

00:25:06.490 --> 00:25:11.450
contextual richness and the control that we can get in a in a lab space on campus.

00:25:11.690 --> 00:25:11.850
Yeah.

00:25:12.010 --> 00:25:12.810
So what what percent?

00:25:13.050 --> 00:25:16.890
So when you show someone a photo, what percent of the time do they actually know the person

00:25:16.890 --> 00:25:19.610
in the photo and what and what percent of the time is it just a stranger?

00:25:19.930 --> 00:25:20.250
Yeah.

00:25:20.410 --> 00:25:23.240
So in Bolivia, I tried really hard to make it be stranger.

00:25:23.320 --> 00:25:27.000
So I actually collected a bunch of photos for my dissertation work before I showed them

00:25:27.000 --> 00:25:28.120
back to everyone.

00:25:28.360 --> 00:25:31.640
And I would ask everyone if they knew anyone in the photos.

00:25:31.720 --> 00:25:33.480
And if they did, I would swap it out.

00:25:33.720 --> 00:25:33.880
Okay.

00:25:34.120 --> 00:25:38.200
It does end up that some folks would say that they didn't know anybody and then they

00:25:38.200 --> 00:25:38.600
actually did.

00:25:38.680 --> 00:25:40.280
And then that would drive their decisions.

00:25:40.440 --> 00:25:45.240
So I was able to, in some circumstances, at least kind of elicit that afterwards and kind

00:25:45.240 --> 00:25:50.450
of a confessionary follow-up and then deal with those data accordingly, put a little flag

00:25:50.450 --> 00:25:51.890
on them in the analysis.

00:25:52.130 --> 00:25:54.050
But yes, that was the that was the plan.

00:25:54.130 --> 00:25:57.410
But it takes a lot of work to do that, it ends up, especially if you're working in an

00:25:57.410 --> 00:26:01.810
environment, say, where you're saying these are in group members, these are other folks who

00:26:01.810 --> 00:26:06.610
I identify as chimane or Mosaten or Intercultural different groups in Bolivia.

00:26:06.770 --> 00:26:11.250
But then at the same time, you know, at the time there were 16,000 people identifying as

00:26:11.250 --> 00:26:15.010
Chimane, every once in a while you would try to present someone with a stranger and they

00:26:15.010 --> 00:26:16.520
would they would not be a stranger.

00:26:16.760 --> 00:26:18.920
So lots of little layers here.

00:26:19.320 --> 00:26:19.800
Got it.

00:26:19.960 --> 00:26:20.120
Okay.

00:26:20.200 --> 00:26:23.960
So you have uh you so you're bringing people in to to run the experiment.

00:26:24.040 --> 00:26:28.120
You show them a you know picture of someone who's in a different group and then presumably

00:26:28.120 --> 00:26:31.960
you you have some kind of economic game where they could divide a sum of money with this

00:26:31.960 --> 00:26:33.160
person from the other group.

00:26:33.320 --> 00:26:35.960
So you're doing this uh many, many times.

00:26:36.120 --> 00:26:38.120
Um what are what are the results?

00:26:38.200 --> 00:26:39.240
What are you discovering?

00:26:40.590 --> 00:26:45.710
So, what I thought was really interesting is at first, right, remember, I'm thinking about

00:26:45.710 --> 00:26:46.750
market participation.

00:26:46.910 --> 00:26:51.310
And one thing that folks may not be familiar with is that there's a through line of work in

00:26:51.310 --> 00:26:55.710
the evolutionary behavioral sciences about how cooperation changes with market

00:26:55.710 --> 00:26:56.510
participation.

00:26:56.750 --> 00:27:02.190
So the idea is that as people participate in markets, social worlds expand and there are

00:27:02.190 --> 00:27:03.710
more and more strangers in them.

00:27:03.950 --> 00:27:09.160
Now it ends up that this is not a nuanced necessarily interpretation of the world.

00:27:09.320 --> 00:27:14.280
So when we go back and look at data from, say, uh Kim Hill and colleagues, uh, my colleague

00:27:14.280 --> 00:27:18.680
here, Doug Bird, and Rebecca League Bird here at Penn State, my colleagues here, know that

00:27:18.680 --> 00:27:22.360
social worlds are actually quite large, even for folks who are living in what we would

00:27:22.360 --> 00:27:24.280
call, say, a small-scale society.

00:27:24.520 --> 00:27:30.110
And so there are sometimes strangers, and that's not unusual, right?

00:27:30.190 --> 00:27:34.590
But the idea is that you just get strangers at this just huge level once you start

00:27:34.590 --> 00:27:35.870
participating in market economies.

00:27:35.950 --> 00:27:38.110
There's just so many strangers around.

00:27:38.350 --> 00:27:41.310
So how is it changing people's behavior with respect to strangers?

00:27:41.390 --> 00:27:45.870
And is that behavior with strangers scaffolded in any way by group membership?

00:27:46.110 --> 00:27:51.380
And so what you see is that looking at three different groups of let me not use the word

00:27:51.380 --> 00:27:55.460
group, three different pueblos indigenas, so three different ethnic groups in Bolivia.

00:27:55.620 --> 00:28:00.340
So Mosetenes, Interculturales, and the Chimane as well.

00:28:00.580 --> 00:28:05.620
In Bolivia, what you see is that Chimane were giving a lot less money in these games, this

00:28:05.620 --> 00:28:10.420
kind of open and cooperative move to outgroup members relative to folks who identified as

00:28:10.420 --> 00:28:12.180
Moseten or Intercultural.

00:28:12.650 --> 00:28:16.090
And of course, one might say that's actually the market economy, right?

00:28:16.170 --> 00:28:20.970
So Mosatenis and Interculturales are participating a lot more in the market economy.

00:28:21.130 --> 00:28:22.570
Maybe that's what we're seeing there.

00:28:22.810 --> 00:28:26.730
But when you actually kind of talk back to people afterwards, after the game, and you ask

00:28:26.730 --> 00:28:28.090
them how are they making the decision?

00:28:28.170 --> 00:28:30.410
Who would how are they deciding who gets money and who doesn't?

00:28:30.730 --> 00:28:36.300
Shamani participants would really regularly say, I am never treated well by members of

00:28:36.300 --> 00:28:36.940
those groups.

00:28:37.420 --> 00:28:38.220
They're never good to me.

00:28:38.300 --> 00:28:39.580
Why would I be good to them?

00:28:39.820 --> 00:28:43.820
And you really get this sense of kind of the not only the affordances, but also the

00:28:43.820 --> 00:28:44.380
discrimination.

00:28:44.460 --> 00:28:47.260
And I think those two things overlap pretty substantially, right?

00:28:47.420 --> 00:28:50.300
In terms of, am I going to invest in one of these relationships?

00:28:50.460 --> 00:28:54.860
And also, these aren't really, in some ways, first-time interactions if you're activating

00:28:54.860 --> 00:28:55.660
group membership.

00:28:55.820 --> 00:29:01.590
People are often thinking about this group as an entity and as having a value to them as a

00:29:01.590 --> 00:29:03.430
potential, say cooperative partner, right?

00:29:03.510 --> 00:29:05.110
This is often getting ascribed.

00:29:05.270 --> 00:29:09.430
And so Shimani participants would often say, it's just not worth it to me.

00:29:09.590 --> 00:29:12.950
And so what's really popping out, there could be a market integration story, but I think

00:29:12.950 --> 00:29:17.670
it's also a story about the haves versus have-nots and how that's actually mapping onto how

00:29:17.670 --> 00:29:22.710
people are being treated in Bolivia and to some of the bits of discrimination that were

00:29:22.710 --> 00:29:24.790
often popping out when I was talking to people.

00:29:28.040 --> 00:29:29.240
sorry, go a go ahead, Ann.

00:29:29.400 --> 00:29:29.560
Yeah.

00:29:29.880 --> 00:29:31.480
No, no, I'm I I would like to hear what you're saying.

00:29:31.640 --> 00:29:34.360
Oh yeah, I was just gonna say that's really interesting because I mean I think you know

00:29:34.440 --> 00:29:38.280
there had been work in social psychology on sort of warmth and competence.

00:29:38.520 --> 00:29:41.640
So um Cuddy and Fisk and those folks.

00:29:41.880 --> 00:29:47.720
Um and the idea is that uh when you represent groups or collections of

00:29:47.720 --> 00:29:51.310
people, um, there's sort of a a deep software structure.

00:29:51.470 --> 00:29:53.550
I don't think they would have called it evolved design at the time.

00:29:53.710 --> 00:29:58.990
I think nowadays they might, but you know, for sort of like is this person or group of

00:29:58.990 --> 00:30:02.350
people competent um to like actually carry things out?

00:30:02.430 --> 00:30:06.670
Um and then the other one is sort of warmth, and that's sort of a kind of fuzzy word for

00:30:06.670 --> 00:30:08.190
sort of like how are they treating me?

00:30:08.270 --> 00:30:13.720
And I like what I'm hearing you say is that really there's the valve

00:30:13.880 --> 00:30:19.720
design for when when a group or collection of people are represented, just

00:30:19.720 --> 00:30:22.360
intrinsic to that is sort of how are they treating me.

00:30:22.440 --> 00:30:25.160
And that makes complete sense from an evolutionary perspective.

00:30:25.240 --> 00:30:29.880
And I don't think we've emphasized that enough that there's a valve design, not only for

00:30:29.880 --> 00:30:30.680
individuals, right?

00:30:30.760 --> 00:30:32.680
Like it it's intuitive for an individual.

00:30:32.760 --> 00:30:38.690
Like, you know, if you if you imagine the the evolved software for an agent file for

00:30:38.690 --> 00:30:43.650
a person, one of the most important things aside from sort of what do they look like for

00:30:43.650 --> 00:30:45.650
each person would be like how do they treat me?

00:30:45.730 --> 00:30:49.410
Is this somebody who I love who takes care of me or I need to take care of?

00:30:49.570 --> 00:30:50.530
Is it my child?

00:30:50.770 --> 00:30:52.210
Is it my um partner?

00:30:52.690 --> 00:30:54.130
Is it a family member?

00:30:54.290 --> 00:30:55.090
Is it an enemy?

00:30:55.170 --> 00:30:57.570
Or is it somebody who dislikes me or treats me poorly?

00:30:57.650 --> 00:30:59.010
That's obviously really important.

00:30:59.090 --> 00:31:03.860
And then it just extends up to um this category level thing.

00:31:03.940 --> 00:31:08.100
So if I've been treated poorly by this one member of this group, I will infer that the next

00:31:08.100 --> 00:31:10.420
time I encounter a member of that group, they don't.

00:31:10.580 --> 00:31:13.460
And that's I think that's really important in what you said.

00:31:13.700 --> 00:31:19.540
And I think our literature, even till this day, hasn't really emphasized that evolved

00:31:19.540 --> 00:31:24.100
design enough that there's this evolved design that sort of intrinsically there's sort of a

00:31:24.100 --> 00:31:26.260
slot for like how do they treat me?

00:31:27.710 --> 00:31:28.590
No, agreed.

00:31:28.670 --> 00:31:33.150
And I think it pops out nicely from some of the literature, but could be emphasized more.

00:31:33.310 --> 00:31:37.150
Um, one of my favorite papers on this is actually a paper that that John Tuby led.

00:31:37.230 --> 00:31:38.990
Uh, it's a book chapter, I believe.

00:31:39.150 --> 00:31:42.110
And it's kind of focused on these end-person coordination problems.

00:31:42.190 --> 00:31:43.470
I know you know this paper well, Dave, too.

00:31:43.630 --> 00:31:44.510
Is it the groups in mind?

00:31:44.830 --> 00:31:45.230
Groups and mind.

00:31:45.550 --> 00:31:47.230
Yes, it's the groups in mind paper.

00:31:47.470 --> 00:31:51.710
And and what I what I like about it as well is just kind of thinking about how one can

00:31:51.710 --> 00:31:53.780
represent kind of the group as an entity.

00:31:53.860 --> 00:31:57.460
Sometimes it's called entitativity coming out of social psychology.

00:31:57.780 --> 00:32:03.700
And it seems to just kind of be this rule of thumb that makes things more straightforward.

00:32:03.860 --> 00:32:09.140
But also in thinking about this in terms of risk management, I mean, if you are in an

00:32:09.140 --> 00:32:14.180
environment where groups actually could be sources of harm and you don't know who folks

00:32:14.180 --> 00:32:18.420
are, and we do know that social worlds have been very large for humans in the past, not

00:32:18.420 --> 00:32:23.050
only in the present, is that again, as exactly as you said, having that feature of the mind

00:32:23.050 --> 00:32:26.970
that's paying attention to groupishness and using that as a first pass, it shouldn't

00:32:26.970 --> 00:32:27.770
surprise us.

00:32:27.930 --> 00:32:32.010
What kinds of groups get mapped onto it kind of harkens back to the earlier part of our

00:32:32.010 --> 00:32:32.490
conversation.

00:32:32.570 --> 00:32:36.330
And there are certain ones that seem to scaffold that more readily than others, but it's

00:32:36.330 --> 00:32:37.530
not a hundred percent of the time.

00:32:37.610 --> 00:32:39.770
Again, it as you said, it depends on the environment.

00:32:39.930 --> 00:32:42.330
Kids are often renegotiating this, et cetera.

00:32:43.460 --> 00:32:49.300
And what I just heard you mentioned get into is sort of this idea of part of groups is

00:32:49.460 --> 00:32:52.100
uncertainty and then also risk.

00:32:52.340 --> 00:32:54.980
Um, and I know you've been thinking a lot about that.

00:32:55.140 --> 00:33:00.180
Can you talk a little bit about that, either in the context of what you were just talking

00:33:00.180 --> 00:33:03.940
about a second ago or what you've been studying with your students?

00:33:04.450 --> 00:33:05.730
Yeah, absolutely.

00:33:05.890 --> 00:33:10.290
So a lot of the work we're talking about actually emerged from my dissertation, which is

00:33:10.530 --> 00:33:13.010
probably longer ago now than I care to admit.

00:33:13.170 --> 00:33:18.210
But basically, I spent a lot of time focusing on groups, market integration.

00:33:18.370 --> 00:33:21.890
And as I mentioned earlier, that led me to think a lot about distance.

00:33:23.010 --> 00:33:28.980
So humans, omnivorous, really high energy throughput, especially little kiddos, right?

00:33:29.060 --> 00:33:33.780
You know, I think about we we all have little kids, and three year olds are often spending

00:33:33.780 --> 00:33:36.820
50% of their calories every day just on their brain, right?

00:33:36.900 --> 00:33:38.900
So yes, yes.

00:33:39.140 --> 00:33:41.140
So yeah, that that's amazing.

00:33:41.220 --> 00:33:41.620
Yeah.

00:33:41.940 --> 00:33:42.740
It's amazing.

00:33:42.820 --> 00:33:44.980
It maybe explains some behavioral things we encounter.

00:33:45.140 --> 00:33:46.340
I have an old five year old.

00:33:47.140 --> 00:33:49.860
Yeah, it explains the love of popsicles.

00:33:49.940 --> 00:33:50.580
Yeah.

00:33:51.190 --> 00:33:56.790
The love of popsicles, the in the very deep grumpiness, and also potentially the aversion

00:33:56.790 --> 00:33:58.470
to certain certain foods as well, right?

00:33:58.550 --> 00:34:00.390
Which of course is a whole nother tangent.

00:34:00.870 --> 00:34:05.030
Um, but so you have this really high energy throughput that humans have.

00:34:05.190 --> 00:34:07.670
And we're omnivorous and we're moving around quite a bit.

00:34:07.830 --> 00:34:12.070
There's a big through line of mobility, of course, over the course of human history.

00:34:12.520 --> 00:34:16.840
And so a lot of the problems we had to solve were inherently spatial problems.

00:34:17.000 --> 00:34:21.720
They were problems of accessing really key resources that could never be obtained locally.

00:34:21.880 --> 00:34:26.440
So things like salt, for example, in the Amazon basin, they, it occurs in certain areas.

00:34:26.600 --> 00:34:29.000
You need it, you have to figure out how to get it.

00:34:29.160 --> 00:34:34.760
And then also, we have these past and present, these experiences of these really correlated

00:34:34.760 --> 00:34:35.080
risks.

00:34:35.240 --> 00:34:38.110
If you have a flood, it hits everyone on the floodplain.

00:34:38.270 --> 00:34:41.470
If you have a big drought, it can be even wider scale than that.

00:34:41.710 --> 00:34:47.470
And so the risks that humans have faced have been kind of inherently tied up in space, in

00:34:47.470 --> 00:34:48.670
space and in time.

00:34:49.230 --> 00:34:53.710
And one thing I think we miss, and this came up a bit earlier for us when we were chatting,

00:34:53.790 --> 00:34:58.720
was this idea of who's in and who's out, and thinking about warmth and thinking about

00:34:58.720 --> 00:35:01.520
family, and that kind of helps us guide in our behavior.

00:35:01.760 --> 00:35:05.600
Oftentimes we we focus on those more immediate things in the evolutionary behavioral

00:35:05.600 --> 00:35:06.000
sciences.

00:35:06.080 --> 00:35:07.120
We're thinking about family.

00:35:07.280 --> 00:35:08.960
Maybe we're thinking about neighbors.

00:35:09.120 --> 00:35:13.440
But are we thinking about the escape valve when things get really rough locally?

00:35:13.520 --> 00:35:18.080
Or are we thinking about that salt trade or that trade for medicine when you really need

00:35:18.080 --> 00:35:21.920
something that you can't get locally and you maybe only need it once or twice a year, but

00:35:21.920 --> 00:35:23.920
then you have to figure out how to get it.

00:35:24.230 --> 00:35:26.550
And so being able to study that has been key.

00:35:26.710 --> 00:35:31.270
It's been the focus of my research program largely now for about five or six years, really

00:35:31.430 --> 00:35:32.790
moving in that direction.

00:35:33.030 --> 00:35:35.670
And so inherently, it's a risk management problem.

00:35:35.830 --> 00:35:41.590
It's a risk management problem that comes from the kind of lifestyle we lead and is solved

00:35:41.590 --> 00:35:42.390
through cooperation.

00:35:42.470 --> 00:35:45.350
So it's kind of a continuation of my previous work.

00:35:45.430 --> 00:35:47.670
And that work on groups is what got me here, right?

00:35:47.750 --> 00:35:50.950
It's thinking about the these different problems that are being solved.

00:35:51.270 --> 00:35:56.060
And so today, what's interesting, right, is that when you talk to folks about what are

00:35:56.060 --> 00:36:01.020
these big risks that they're solving that are in fact, you know, correlated in space or

00:36:01.020 --> 00:36:05.820
that have to do with accessing resources that are often not locally available, things that

00:36:05.820 --> 00:36:09.260
really come up are things like climate change, for example, right?

00:36:09.340 --> 00:36:14.540
So people are experiencing these increasingly long, intense, sometimes highly correlated

00:36:14.540 --> 00:36:16.780
things like large-scale droughts.

00:36:17.010 --> 00:36:20.530
And then additionally, also things like natural resource management.

00:36:20.690 --> 00:36:25.570
So, what strategies are people using to manage resources that are often very large that

00:36:25.570 --> 00:36:27.810
require cooperation across distances?

00:36:27.970 --> 00:36:31.810
It ends up that this kind of perspective applies really well to both of those contexts.

00:36:33.570 --> 00:36:36.930
That's uh stuff that we're we are all dealing with.

00:36:37.010 --> 00:36:40.130
Uh, and that's it feels like a big theme.

00:36:40.370 --> 00:36:43.250
And just to hear to make sure I'm understanding.

00:36:43.410 --> 00:36:48.860
So in the old literature, there were things about like risk buffering with cooperation,

00:36:48.940 --> 00:36:50.380
even just something like sharing food.

00:36:50.460 --> 00:36:55.100
So, like if you're in a context where you don't have modern technology and you can't store

00:36:55.100 --> 00:36:58.940
food in a refrigerator, then you store the food in your neighbor, right?

00:36:59.180 --> 00:37:02.780
Because if you provide them with food one day, then they'll give you food the next day.

00:37:02.860 --> 00:37:08.220
And it sounds like this sort of idea is extending in your thinking and in your work to

00:37:08.220 --> 00:37:14.210
groups, in the sense of groups are also sort of a way, or maybe groups is the wrong word,

00:37:14.290 --> 00:37:20.050
but sort of large scale or larger scale and spatially larger relationships are

00:37:20.050 --> 00:37:25.410
sort of key for risk buffering or risk management.

00:37:26.370 --> 00:37:26.930
That's right.

00:37:27.090 --> 00:37:31.730
And I think it's actually there in the literature before, but it wasn't a focus and it it

00:37:31.730 --> 00:37:35.730
kind of pops up more as fun anecdotes and less as a through line.

00:37:36.050 --> 00:37:40.640
So thinking, for example, about Harrow exchange among San people.

00:37:40.800 --> 00:37:43.440
This is something that pops out in the ethnographic literature.

00:37:43.520 --> 00:37:46.640
It's spelled H-X-A-R-O for folks who are curious.

00:37:46.880 --> 00:37:51.760
And it often is something we learn, say in anthropology 101, is we we talk about exchange

00:37:51.760 --> 00:37:53.920
relationships that are built over time.

00:37:54.080 --> 00:37:55.920
They're often inherited across generations.

00:37:56.080 --> 00:38:01.130
And then when times get rough for San people, they're traditionally very mobile people,

00:38:01.450 --> 00:38:04.890
sawn people would kind of scatter to the winds, as it were, and go to different places

00:38:04.890 --> 00:38:06.730
where they could get access to water.

00:38:06.970 --> 00:38:08.810
And so that shows up there.

00:38:08.970 --> 00:38:12.490
We even see thinking about Argonauts of the Western Pacific, right?

00:38:12.570 --> 00:38:17.850
Thinking about Malinowski, we see this examples from the cooler ring, where you maintain

00:38:17.850 --> 00:38:22.250
relationships from trading over long periods of time that can be important escape valves.

00:38:22.490 --> 00:38:23.290
So those are there.

00:38:23.450 --> 00:38:28.880
I think where we often miss them is that really getting down to the brass tacks of what it

00:38:28.880 --> 00:38:34.400
means to be human and how humans cooperate and how the human social niche is something that

00:38:34.400 --> 00:38:40.000
enables us to be human and to understand evolved human psychology is something we really

00:38:40.000 --> 00:38:44.560
kind of needed to drill into and really structured a lot of the work that we've been doing

00:38:44.640 --> 00:38:47.930
from 1980s, 1990s, the 2000s.

00:38:48.090 --> 00:38:51.210
But then to actually kind of come back to some of those things we knew from before and to

00:38:51.210 --> 00:38:52.090
broaden it out.

00:38:52.330 --> 00:38:55.530
It's something that that we've known in that ethnographic literature.

00:38:55.610 --> 00:38:58.170
It's something archaeologists have known for quite a bit of time.

00:38:58.330 --> 00:39:03.610
And so thinking about how that is structuring human life over the course of human

00:39:03.610 --> 00:39:07.770
evolution, but then also, of course, the mind has been something that's been interesting

00:39:07.770 --> 00:39:10.570
for me to kind of retackle and pull together these different threads.

00:39:10.820 --> 00:39:11.220
Yeah.

00:39:11.540 --> 00:39:15.700
Do you I I wonder, I mean, I wonder if you've thought of I mean I'm just thinking of this

00:39:15.700 --> 00:39:19.620
now and I'm sure you've thought of this, where sort of I wonder if some of the de emphasis

00:39:19.620 --> 00:39:25.220
on this is also sort of just rhetoric or in David's terminology propaganda in the sense of

00:39:25.460 --> 00:39:29.540
one could view certain kinds of relationships as disloyal.

00:39:30.100 --> 00:39:35.220
And so I wonder too if you're talking about, you know, people coming from a particular

00:39:35.220 --> 00:39:39.850
cultural background doing the science, it's sort of this thing of there's a narrative of

00:39:39.850 --> 00:39:44.650
what groups exists and loyalty to the group is really important, especially if you're

00:39:44.650 --> 00:39:49.370
talking to the people sort of whose interest it is to sort of reify the groups.

00:39:49.530 --> 00:39:55.450
And so I wonder if the reality of actually there's lots of relationships that

00:39:55.610 --> 00:40:01.450
cross cut groups is sort of um uh it's very uh rebellious in

00:40:01.450 --> 00:40:06.660
a way to sort of hierarchical relationships or impose group boundaries.

00:40:06.740 --> 00:40:12.740
And I wonder, I I don't know if if that's something you've come across or or if

00:40:12.740 --> 00:40:15.940
that's true, but I'm just sort of thinking real time about that.

00:40:16.740 --> 00:40:19.700
No, it it's definitely something that's come across.

00:40:19.860 --> 00:40:21.380
It's it's interesting.

00:40:21.540 --> 00:40:25.540
I think sometimes folks talk about the science of science and thinking about who's doing

00:40:25.540 --> 00:40:26.420
the science.

00:40:26.660 --> 00:40:32.390
And just to give an example, one can see if one's say looking at the literature on war and

00:40:32.390 --> 00:40:37.590
peace, which is something that is alive and well in thinking about that in the evolutionary

00:40:37.590 --> 00:40:43.430
behavioral sciences, is that you can see kind of upticks and declines in whether

00:40:43.430 --> 00:40:49.020
people have been studying warfare or intergroup aggression Western

00:40:49.020 --> 00:40:51.900
science over the course of the 20th and 21st centuries.

00:40:51.980 --> 00:40:56.140
And you can see upticks and downticks that probably track people's own experiences.

00:40:56.300 --> 00:41:00.220
So big uptick after World War II in terms of folks who were actually involved in World War

00:41:00.220 --> 00:41:03.900
II, in terms of studying intergroup dynamics and tensions.

00:41:04.140 --> 00:41:06.540
Funding drives it up and drives it down as well.

00:41:06.620 --> 00:41:10.940
So you can see funding interest in it over time in terms of where the money's coming from.

00:41:11.260 --> 00:41:16.750
And then I think also what we do, of course, is we create cultures of research, right?

00:41:16.910 --> 00:41:22.910
So again, earlier I mentioned this a bit, but I kind of came up in this time where we were

00:41:22.910 --> 00:41:27.070
thinking a lot of intergroup dynamics in the evolutionary behavioral sciences.

00:41:27.230 --> 00:41:31.870
And so it was almost my assumption that that is how the world was going to function.

00:41:32.140 --> 00:41:36.780
And when it didn't function that way, when there were nuances, when it when it depended,

00:41:38.060 --> 00:41:40.220
that was news and that required some rethinking.

00:41:40.380 --> 00:41:41.820
So I think you're right.

00:41:41.900 --> 00:41:44.220
I think there may be different incentives involved.

00:41:44.460 --> 00:41:46.300
I think they come from multiple different directions.

00:41:46.460 --> 00:41:49.900
I also think they come from the experiences of the researchers themselves.

00:41:50.140 --> 00:41:53.820
And so Cody Ross and I have a paper on parochial altruism.

00:41:53.900 --> 00:41:59.130
Again, that's in-group favoritism and out-group animosity being paired.

00:41:59.210 --> 00:42:01.770
So you actually, when you get the two of those things together.

00:42:02.010 --> 00:42:06.490
And what's interesting is that we actually caution in that paper that we should be

00:42:06.490 --> 00:42:11.130
sensitive to our own kind of preconceptions about what we're gonna see out there in the

00:42:11.130 --> 00:42:14.170
world, which is easier said than done for scientists, right?

00:42:14.330 --> 00:42:15.690
Requires a lot of unpacking.

00:42:15.850 --> 00:42:17.370
I've had to do that work myself.

00:42:17.450 --> 00:42:18.810
I'm still not perfect.

00:42:19.050 --> 00:42:24.920
Um, but I think it helps, I think it helps ultimately to to have that perspective, to take

00:42:24.920 --> 00:42:29.080
that step back, because it ends up this is one of the thing I think things I think I can

00:42:29.080 --> 00:42:30.440
say with with pretty good confidence.

00:42:30.600 --> 00:42:34.120
Humans are extremely flexible when it comes to our sociality.

00:42:34.200 --> 00:42:39.640
And I think sometimes we don't give humans the credit that we're due for how we make things

00:42:39.640 --> 00:42:39.960
work.

00:42:40.280 --> 00:42:40.760
Right.

00:42:41.000 --> 00:42:41.400
Yeah.

00:42:41.560 --> 00:42:46.510
I think that's uh and giving people humans credit, I think is one of the areas that get an

00:42:46.510 --> 00:42:51.390
evolutionary approach sort of always, and I'll speak for myself, even.

00:42:51.630 --> 00:42:56.990
I I thought as an evolutionary social psychologist, for example, well, I'm giving people

00:42:56.990 --> 00:43:00.670
much more credit than many people who don't take an evolutionary approach, but even I

00:43:00.670 --> 00:43:01.950
wasn't giving people enough credit.

00:43:02.030 --> 00:43:06.510
And like the data I would get, you know, every time it's sort of like people are really

00:43:06.510 --> 00:43:07.470
smart, as you said.

00:43:07.550 --> 00:43:10.030
The d their evolved psychology is very smart.

00:43:10.190 --> 00:43:15.580
And I think like our prior should always be that there's even if it's a bad reason, there's

00:43:15.580 --> 00:43:18.140
a smart reason why people are doing something.

00:43:19.980 --> 00:43:23.900
So I won't get into this this paper on parochial altruism.

00:43:24.060 --> 00:43:27.180
It's a really interesting uh paper and set of ideas.

00:43:27.420 --> 00:43:32.860
Um I I wonder if you would accept um a substitute term for parochial altruism, just

00:43:33.100 --> 00:43:34.220
tribalism.

00:43:34.460 --> 00:43:40.150
Uh and that, you know, uh you know liking the in-group and and and disliking the outgroup,

00:43:40.230 --> 00:43:43.030
we we sort of colloquially think of that as as tribalism.

00:43:43.110 --> 00:43:46.070
Uh would would you accept that uh substitution?

00:43:46.630 --> 00:43:47.190
Hmm.

00:43:47.830 --> 00:43:50.950
So I I would have two little areas of pushback.

00:43:51.110 --> 00:43:54.790
I would think just in terms of discourse right now, even thinking about the way folks are

00:43:54.790 --> 00:43:59.380
talking about these dynamics um in the United States and beyond at this moment.

00:43:59.540 --> 00:44:03.220
Tribalism is very commonly used and I think very easily recognized.

00:44:03.540 --> 00:44:08.580
The only just for the listeners, just a couple cautions about why I have some hesitations

00:44:08.580 --> 00:44:09.860
about the word tribalism.

00:44:10.020 --> 00:44:14.340
One is that it kind of assumes that tribe and tribalism equate.

00:44:14.500 --> 00:44:18.980
And so, of course, tribes then often are thought about in group and outgroup, and there's

00:44:18.980 --> 00:44:22.420
almost kind of an implicit through line of aggression and intergroup aggression there for

00:44:22.420 --> 00:44:24.020
tribes, for native groups.

00:44:24.180 --> 00:44:26.740
And so that's my one little bit of pushback on that term.

00:44:26.950 --> 00:44:32.950
The other one is actually that parochial altruism has a specific meaning that comes out

00:44:32.950 --> 00:44:38.150
of early 2000s research, thinking especially about work by, for example, Sam Bowles and

00:44:38.150 --> 00:44:43.270
colleagues about 20 years ago, and this idea that these two things would coevolve, that you

00:44:43.270 --> 00:44:47.350
would get in group favoritism co evolving with outgroup animosity.

00:44:47.510 --> 00:44:51.510
And it's a little bit stronger even than just not liking the outgroup.

00:44:51.590 --> 00:44:55.990
It's actually kind of it's an us versus them, a really strong thing.

00:44:56.420 --> 00:44:59.380
Now, yes, other than those two things, yes.

00:44:59.540 --> 00:45:02.740
I mean, tribalism, we're talking roughly about the same thing.

00:45:02.820 --> 00:45:05.620
So when folks hear that in the news, we're we're in the same genre.

00:45:05.700 --> 00:45:05.860
Yeah.

00:45:06.180 --> 00:45:06.340
Okay.

00:45:06.420 --> 00:45:09.460
Well I'll I'll I'll st I'll stick with parochial altruism then because it's a little more

00:45:09.460 --> 00:45:10.900
um accurate to to what you're talking about.

00:45:11.060 --> 00:45:15.620
I'll be and then listeners can, you know, understand that it's roughly tribalism, but but

00:45:15.620 --> 00:45:16.180
not quite.

00:45:16.740 --> 00:45:22.610
So uh in thinking about parochial altruism, um uh you you go through what

00:45:22.610 --> 00:45:26.770
I think is the million dollar question, which is what pushes it up and what pushes it down.

00:45:26.930 --> 00:45:31.810
I mean, this is this is what we all want to know uh as citizens of the world.

00:45:31.970 --> 00:45:35.330
We see uh tribalism for lack of a better term all around us.

00:45:35.490 --> 00:45:38.690
We want to know what causes it and what decreases it.

00:45:38.850 --> 00:45:42.690
Um and I think your your paper has some really interesting insights into that million

00:45:42.770 --> 00:45:43.490
dollar question.

00:45:43.650 --> 00:45:49.410
So so what are some of the um the the mechanisms that can uh push push that up or down?

00:45:49.820 --> 00:45:50.300
Yeah.

00:45:50.540 --> 00:45:53.020
So there's three key ideas that we go over in this paper.

00:45:53.100 --> 00:45:54.620
And I want to rehash these a bit.

00:45:54.700 --> 00:45:58.780
And they're actually coming from different sides of the evolutionary behavioral sciences.

00:45:58.940 --> 00:46:01.340
So one of course is resource competition.

00:46:01.500 --> 00:46:05.820
And in fact this pops up as a really strong through line when we're doing comparative work

00:46:05.820 --> 00:46:11.260
on on humans and say non-human primates, thinking about the primate order more broadly, is

00:46:11.260 --> 00:46:16.130
that it ends up when there's incentives for resource defense, when resources are very

00:46:16.130 --> 00:46:17.730
clumped in one particular place.

00:46:17.970 --> 00:46:22.610
What you can often see is that you get this these groups cohering around those resources

00:46:22.610 --> 00:46:26.210
and often defending them against other individuals, especially if you have to go a long

00:46:26.210 --> 00:46:29.090
distance before you can find additional resources.

00:46:29.330 --> 00:46:31.890
So that's something that's popping up in non-human primates.

00:46:32.050 --> 00:46:34.130
It's something we see in humans too.

00:46:34.320 --> 00:46:39.680
And for listeners, for example, if you think about uh discourse that involves resources and

00:46:39.680 --> 00:46:43.280
who has what and who's taking what, you can see how that's kind of kind of clearly

00:46:43.280 --> 00:46:45.840
activated as well in our own psychology today.

00:46:46.080 --> 00:46:50.400
The second one is thinking about institutions.

00:46:50.640 --> 00:46:51.760
What's an institution?

00:46:51.920 --> 00:46:56.480
Well, it's a collection of norms for how to do things, as the simplest way to put it.

00:46:56.640 --> 00:46:58.560
And institutions are cultural.

00:46:58.730 --> 00:47:02.490
And so what's interesting about institutions when it comes to something like parochial

00:47:02.490 --> 00:47:06.970
altruism, in-group favoritism, and out-group competition or out-group aggression is that

00:47:06.970 --> 00:47:09.290
that can actually be structured by culture.

00:47:09.610 --> 00:47:14.810
And so you can have expectations set about who's in and who's out, who's a reliable

00:47:14.810 --> 00:47:16.010
cooperator and who's not.

00:47:16.170 --> 00:47:21.210
That doesn't just come from individual experience, but also from, say, transmission from

00:47:21.210 --> 00:47:21.930
other individuals.

00:47:22.090 --> 00:47:26.900
Well, they said that this group isn't a reliable cooperator, or where a boundary is

00:47:26.900 --> 00:47:29.140
actually set for you that you actually can't talk to those folks.

00:47:29.300 --> 00:47:32.900
I think you alluded to this earlier, Dave, when you said, you know, if you go over there,

00:47:33.140 --> 00:47:34.500
are you being disloyal?

00:47:34.740 --> 00:47:36.660
That itself is an institution, right?

00:47:36.740 --> 00:47:41.060
This is an expectation about behavior that's kind of coming down and affecting us.

00:47:42.020 --> 00:47:47.060
And then this third component is coming a lot from social psychology and it's thinking a

00:47:47.060 --> 00:47:48.180
bit about valence.

00:47:48.470 --> 00:47:51.670
So we're talking earlier a bit about warmth, for example.

00:47:51.910 --> 00:47:56.710
One can, from past interactions, have positive and negative valences towards members of

00:47:56.710 --> 00:47:57.110
other groups.

00:47:57.190 --> 00:47:59.750
I feel more warm to them or I feel more cold to them.

00:47:59.830 --> 00:48:04.550
That's kind of an easy way that often translates across cultures, this idea of warmth.

00:48:04.790 --> 00:48:10.790
And so what ends up happening is you basically have this updating of uh internal

00:48:10.790 --> 00:48:16.560
bookkeeping about whether groups are kind of worth the time, whether they're

00:48:16.560 --> 00:48:19.120
going to cause you harm, et cetera.

00:48:19.360 --> 00:48:23.360
Those three components are the ones we really hone in on in terms of how we can think about

00:48:23.360 --> 00:48:25.600
parochial altruism and what moves the needle.

00:48:25.840 --> 00:48:26.160
Yeah.

00:48:26.320 --> 00:48:27.280
That's fantastic.

00:48:27.360 --> 00:48:31.920
It's a lovely like core um d distillation.

00:48:32.080 --> 00:48:32.720
Yeah.

00:48:34.400 --> 00:48:38.170
Um yeah, I mean I I I I like that way of thinking a lot.

00:48:38.330 --> 00:48:44.010
Um it it sort of ties into the way that that Dave is

00:48:44.010 --> 00:48:44.970
thinking about groups.

00:48:45.130 --> 00:48:51.050
I mean, just the mere fact that um we can ascribe an attribute like warmth or

00:48:51.050 --> 00:48:56.810
competence to an entire group of people as opposed to an individual presupposes that um if

00:48:56.810 --> 00:49:00.970
one person is is warm toward me, then everyone else in that subset is also going to be warm

00:49:00.970 --> 00:49:01.210
to me.

00:49:01.370 --> 00:49:06.860
That inference is itself part of the underlying group psychology, that I can validly

00:49:06.860 --> 00:49:11.740
generalize this trait from this individual to this other individual by virtue of the fact

00:49:11.740 --> 00:49:13.820
that they share the group label.

00:49:14.060 --> 00:49:16.220
And you could imagine that inference not being made.

00:49:16.380 --> 00:49:20.380
You know, if someone from another group is mean to me, I don't necessarily have to infer

00:49:20.380 --> 00:49:23.180
that everyone else from that group is also going to be mean to me.

00:49:23.420 --> 00:49:29.310
And so what is is driving the mind to make that kind of inference, that if one member does

00:49:29.310 --> 00:49:34.750
it, then the others have to do it as well, as opposed to not generalizing that inference.

00:49:35.950 --> 00:49:38.830
When I'd be curious to hear Dave's follow-up on this as well.

00:49:39.150 --> 00:49:44.590
One thing that I often think about here is the cost of the downside, the cost of being

00:49:44.590 --> 00:49:44.990
wrong.

00:49:45.550 --> 00:49:48.670
And partially one would say that would depend on the ecology.

00:49:48.750 --> 00:49:53.310
So I'm gonna use the word ecology pretty broadly here, but it depends on the social

00:49:53.310 --> 00:49:53.790
environment.

00:49:53.870 --> 00:49:54.910
So who's around you?

00:49:54.990 --> 00:50:00.880
And it also depends on if you're wrong about someone else, does that mean that you're not

00:50:00.880 --> 00:50:01.440
going to have a meal?

00:50:01.600 --> 00:50:03.520
Does that mean that you're not going to have a place to sleep?

00:50:03.680 --> 00:50:05.760
What are the costs of being wrong?

00:50:06.080 --> 00:50:11.200
And what's interesting, of course, is that different ecologies can increase or decrease the

00:50:11.200 --> 00:50:12.720
cost of being wrong.

00:50:13.040 --> 00:50:16.800
Now, I'm curious, I'd be curious to hear Dave's thoughts about whether the mind kind of

00:50:16.800 --> 00:50:21.200
defaults to there being a high cost of being wrong or whether that's actually kind of

00:50:21.210 --> 00:50:25.850
updating in real time with ecological uh context, because I bet you have some thoughts

00:50:25.850 --> 00:50:26.490
about that.

00:50:27.370 --> 00:50:32.730
But in general, I think that if there are cues, that the costs of being wrong are high.

00:50:32.810 --> 00:50:36.330
And those cues can come from a lot of things, they can be socially transmitted.

00:50:36.490 --> 00:50:39.770
When I say so socially transmitted, that can include the media, right?

00:50:39.930 --> 00:50:44.570
So if we're talking about things that are that we're seeing on TikTok, et cetera, social

00:50:44.570 --> 00:50:45.770
transmission is happening, right?

00:50:45.850 --> 00:50:46.970
So we're getting cues.

00:50:47.850 --> 00:50:53.760
So if the costs seem like they are high of being wrong, then if you have

00:50:53.760 --> 00:50:57.200
one interaction and it goes poorly, you would imagine that the updating would go very

00:50:57.200 --> 00:50:57.440
quickly.

00:50:58.000 --> 00:50:59.360
Okay, not worth it.

00:50:59.680 --> 00:51:05.360
That members of that group, whatever salient identity that person is in, are now folks who

00:51:05.520 --> 00:51:06.160
are high cost.

00:51:06.240 --> 00:51:08.880
And again, salient identity here could be lots of different things.

00:51:09.040 --> 00:51:10.640
I'm sitting in the middle of Pennsylvania.

00:51:10.720 --> 00:51:14.160
It could be whether you're wearing an Eagles or a Steelers jersey, for example.

00:51:14.560 --> 00:51:17.040
There's lots of things that could be salient in that.

00:51:17.200 --> 00:51:20.650
But if you've got those two things, that salient identity and that high cost, and then a

00:51:20.650 --> 00:51:25.130
bad interaction happens, you very quickly get that kind of down regulation of interest.

00:51:25.370 --> 00:51:26.650
Dave, what are your thoughts on that?

00:51:27.050 --> 00:51:29.370
Yeah, I mean, I agree everything with what you're saying.

00:51:29.450 --> 00:51:33.690
And I think I would even just add to it by putting it back in the language that you

00:51:33.690 --> 00:51:39.540
provided us, these three factors of sort of one resource competition, to boundaries.

00:51:39.620 --> 00:51:41.780
I like the idea of sort of boundary propaganda.

00:51:41.940 --> 00:51:43.300
You've talked about institutions.

00:51:43.380 --> 00:51:48.340
So one is resources, two is boundary propaganda, and three is valence.

00:51:48.500 --> 00:51:49.700
So how do you experience?

00:51:49.780 --> 00:51:55.620
And so just to make it concrete, I would, and this is the idea of costs, is like, let's say

00:51:55.780 --> 00:51:56.820
start with valence.

00:51:56.980 --> 00:52:02.100
Like if I have, if we all have a negative interaction from an individual person, right,

00:52:02.580 --> 00:52:06.990
then there's sort of a market for, well, what's the story?

00:52:07.230 --> 00:52:09.630
Is that one person just like an asshole?

00:52:09.790 --> 00:52:12.590
Or is there like a group of people who are out to get me?

00:52:12.990 --> 00:52:17.390
And that is a function of sort of the marketplace of boundary propaganda.

00:52:17.550 --> 00:52:22.830
And then what's the function of boundary propaganda includes competition over resources.

00:52:23.230 --> 00:52:28.990
So if there is competition over resources, or there's just sort of this market

00:52:29.150 --> 00:52:31.470
of what are the social groups?

00:52:31.920 --> 00:52:33.600
am I a winner or a loser?

00:52:33.840 --> 00:52:39.200
Which ideas stick in this in this kind of coordination of group

00:52:39.200 --> 00:52:42.800
identities around power and resources?

00:52:43.600 --> 00:52:48.800
Then if if there's low um competition for

00:52:48.800 --> 00:52:53.760
resources among boundary propaganda, then we'll just be like that person's an asshole,

00:52:53.970 --> 00:52:54.610
roughly.

00:52:55.170 --> 00:52:59.970
But if there is competition for resources and there's the boundary propaganda that's sort

00:52:59.970 --> 00:53:04.530
of enough people are sort of buying into and we buy into, they're like, oh, that's an X.

00:53:05.010 --> 00:53:07.810
And boy, those X's, those are really bad people.

00:53:07.970 --> 00:53:10.210
And this is an example of X's being bad people.

00:53:10.290 --> 00:53:15.330
And the next X I see, I'm justified to assume they're gonna that they're gonna be bad too.

00:53:15.490 --> 00:53:17.250
And I'm justified in taking their stuff.

00:53:17.490 --> 00:53:23.200
So I view it as like the the three factors you listed is just a beautiful um

00:53:23.360 --> 00:53:25.360
distillation of the of this dynamic.

00:53:25.520 --> 00:53:30.720
That's so it's it's it's the cost answer, but that's I'm just kind of making it concrete uh

00:53:30.800 --> 00:53:32.400
based on what you just said.

00:53:33.680 --> 00:53:34.320
Interesting.

00:53:34.480 --> 00:53:40.320
Uh in terms I mean I uh it seems like the the resource competition um aspect of it is

00:53:40.320 --> 00:53:43.970
sort of like the the source of a lot of the hostility.

00:53:44.050 --> 00:53:48.370
So that will so if there's resource competition, there's going to be um boundary

00:53:48.370 --> 00:53:54.130
propaganda, as Dave put it, to uh uh make the the competing group

00:53:54.130 --> 00:53:59.250
seem negatively valenced so that we can more effectively outcompete uh that group, right?

00:53:59.330 --> 00:54:03.940
And so the resource competition is fueling the animosity um in in that case, and it's also

00:54:03.940 --> 00:54:08.660
fueling the the boundary uh uh uh propaganda as well and the institutions that form around

00:54:08.740 --> 00:54:11.060
you know who's in and who's out of the group.

00:54:11.220 --> 00:54:14.820
And to to a certain extent it's it's framing the the valence aspect of it as well.

00:54:14.980 --> 00:54:18.340
That if we view these people as competitors, we're gonna be more likely to focus on

00:54:18.340 --> 00:54:22.020
information that frames them in a negatively valenced light.

00:54:22.430 --> 00:54:28.030
So given that uh resource competition is often at the base of a lot of this stuff,

00:54:29.150 --> 00:54:31.870
would you take a broader view of what resource competition is?

00:54:32.270 --> 00:54:33.470
Is it just physical resources?

00:54:33.630 --> 00:54:38.350
Or would you consider things like social status or political power to also be resources

00:54:38.350 --> 00:54:40.990
that lie at the heart of these issues?

00:54:41.710 --> 00:54:42.590
They absolutely are.

00:54:42.670 --> 00:54:43.550
It's a great question.

00:54:44.030 --> 00:54:49.870
So so thinking about status, thinking about what matters, what translates into

00:54:50.560 --> 00:54:52.080
increased something for folks.

00:54:52.240 --> 00:54:54.000
We can talk about proxies of fitness.

00:54:54.160 --> 00:54:56.640
I assume y'all have talked about fitness before on the show, Ms.

00:54:56.880 --> 00:54:57.200
Mitch.

00:54:58.480 --> 00:54:58.960
Just a little bit.

00:54:59.200 --> 00:54:59.920
I don't I don't know.

00:55:00.400 --> 00:55:04.320
David was sending I actually don't think I don't actually don't like the idea of fitness in

00:55:04.320 --> 00:55:09.600
the sense of like when when I when you teach early or like new people, because it kind of

00:55:09.600 --> 00:55:13.360
essentializes I don't I don't want to go into this, but like, but anyway, but the point is

00:55:13.440 --> 00:55:17.670
yes, like we've talked about like what gets selected for, I think, and you know, things

00:55:17.670 --> 00:55:20.310
that would be beneficial from a gene's eye view.

00:55:20.390 --> 00:55:21.190
I think we've talked about that.

00:55:21.510 --> 00:55:23.030
Yeah, but we've never we you're right.

00:55:23.110 --> 00:55:24.790
We haven't directly tackled the issue.

00:55:24.950 --> 00:55:29.590
We probably should actually, but um, but but yeah, fitness, inclusive fitness, um, you

00:55:29.590 --> 00:55:32.070
know, uh survival, reproduction, reproduction of kin.

00:55:32.150 --> 00:55:33.510
That's what that's sort of thing we're talking about.

00:55:33.670 --> 00:55:36.710
We're talking about fit fitness proxies, we're talking about things that were reliably

00:55:36.710 --> 00:55:40.230
correlated with fitness in ancestral environments and things that presumably the mind

00:55:40.230 --> 00:55:44.320
evolved to uh pursue and and to find uh appealing and and motivating.

00:55:44.640 --> 00:55:48.800
So with that in mind, uh can continue and who's running this podcast?

00:55:48.880 --> 00:55:52.720
It's like, what are we 18 episodes in and we haven't even talked about fitness?

00:55:52.960 --> 00:55:54.400
Like, what's evolution?

00:55:54.480 --> 00:55:55.120
I don't know.

00:55:55.600 --> 00:55:56.400
Sorry, Ann.

00:55:56.480 --> 00:55:56.960
Yeah.

00:55:57.520 --> 00:55:58.080
You're good.

00:55:58.240 --> 00:56:00.400
Well so we can talk about about proxies.

00:56:00.480 --> 00:56:01.520
You've talked about proxies.

00:56:01.600 --> 00:56:03.600
So that that's that's a great way to think about it.

00:56:03.840 --> 00:56:07.250
So what are what are the proxies that basically bring well-being?

00:56:07.410 --> 00:56:11.410
We'll use again kind of a gloss here about you know things that matter for folks.

00:56:11.490 --> 00:56:16.210
Um, and that could be, for example, that you have well-being in the sense that I mentioned

00:56:16.210 --> 00:56:19.410
before, you have a place to sleep, you have food, you have you have a job.

00:56:19.490 --> 00:56:21.490
Um, these are things that matter for folks.

00:56:21.650 --> 00:56:25.330
Uh, even things like having health and well-being also matters, right?

00:56:25.410 --> 00:56:29.740
These are all different things that kind of factor into us doing well, which again, in an

00:56:29.740 --> 00:56:31.580
ancestral environment would would matter quite a bit.

00:56:31.660 --> 00:56:34.220
And I'm gonna argue it matters still quite a bit today.

00:56:34.460 --> 00:56:38.460
And so what what happens, I almost got a little derailed there.

00:56:38.540 --> 00:56:40.060
So let's see if I can come back to your question.

00:56:40.300 --> 00:56:41.100
No, you're good.

00:56:41.260 --> 00:56:42.140
It was fun.

00:56:42.300 --> 00:56:48.300
Um is again thinking about what what is a resource, we think about what is it that

00:56:48.300 --> 00:56:49.020
matters?

00:56:49.340 --> 00:56:54.890
And some of that stuff is, I would, I dare say, uh, attractors, right, for our evolved

00:56:54.890 --> 00:57:00.410
psychology in the sense that if it is something that is about um often often land,

00:57:00.730 --> 00:57:04.890
or if it's about something like food, that is extremely salient to people.

00:57:04.970 --> 00:57:06.490
And it's actually really easy to get that.

00:57:06.570 --> 00:57:11.450
I again think about Christina Moya was thinking about on what can one build groupishness.

00:57:11.530 --> 00:57:14.250
And there's certain things that are easier and that are more commonly used.

00:57:14.410 --> 00:57:16.250
I think about the same thing when it comes to resources.

00:57:16.330 --> 00:57:19.050
There are certain things that are just more salient to people.

00:57:19.280 --> 00:57:24.240
And I think, I think power and I think status is also one of those things that really pops

00:57:24.240 --> 00:57:25.040
out for folks.

00:57:25.200 --> 00:57:28.880
Now, does other stuff matter like ability to say get a job, which I alluded to?

00:57:29.120 --> 00:57:34.000
I I think it does as well, but I think it's actually even tied up, almost scaffolded on

00:57:34.080 --> 00:57:37.680
some of those other things that the mind is paying a lot of attention to, like social

00:57:37.680 --> 00:57:38.480
relationships.

00:57:38.640 --> 00:57:42.080
We know at the end of the day that a lot of times social relationships are what get you

00:57:42.080 --> 00:57:44.270
jobs, even in 2025.

00:57:44.510 --> 00:57:48.350
And so again, that's a bit of a meandering answer, but I agree with you.

00:57:48.510 --> 00:57:50.270
I think that resources are more than one thing.

00:57:50.350 --> 00:57:55.150
And I think there are certain resources that are just more salient to people in pretty

00:57:55.150 --> 00:57:56.030
predictable ways.

00:57:56.270 --> 00:57:56.510
Yeah.

00:57:56.830 --> 00:57:57.950
Can I just clarify?

00:57:58.350 --> 00:58:03.630
So to make sure I understand what you're saying, the idea would be that there's sort of

00:58:03.630 --> 00:58:07.630
some privileged categories because they've just been so evolutionarily important.

00:58:07.790 --> 00:58:12.320
So just like to make it really concrete, like if there's a kid growing up and there's sort

00:58:12.320 --> 00:58:16.080
of like arbitrary groups like the yellows and the blues.

00:58:16.240 --> 00:58:22.080
And the blues just have more stuff or have more territory, like that, like

00:58:22.320 --> 00:58:27.920
having stuff, or having just like territory or land, like just at a very like quote

00:58:28.000 --> 00:58:33.280
unquote primitive level or very simple level, is sort of a privilege thing that feeds into

00:58:33.920 --> 00:58:39.370
um uh both sort of the spawning of group differences, but also it's sort of

00:58:39.370 --> 00:58:43.930
implicitly opening an entry for there's a difference in power here.

00:58:44.170 --> 00:58:49.930
Um, just because it's so always correlated, you know, in like or think like access

00:58:50.010 --> 00:58:53.530
like who's eating, who's hungry, who's not, who has stuff or not.

00:58:53.690 --> 00:58:58.560
I mean, like, as we all know, like toddlers get this, you know, like space, food, just

00:58:58.560 --> 00:58:59.440
having stuff.

00:58:59.520 --> 00:59:03.600
Like these are very basic, easy to see things.

00:59:03.920 --> 00:59:05.280
Um, is that what you're saying?

00:59:05.360 --> 00:59:08.960
That these are they're sort of like privileged categories in a way, or cues.

00:59:09.200 --> 00:59:10.080
They are they are.

00:59:10.240 --> 00:59:13.840
And I confess in some ways I'm thinking through some of these as as we're talking.

00:59:14.000 --> 00:59:16.080
Um, but I I think that's the case.

00:59:16.240 --> 00:59:20.690
I think there are certain ones that are are just more salient, and I think that's why, even

00:59:20.930 --> 00:59:26.050
say for for listeners of the podcast, thinking back to um previous guests, for example, why

00:59:26.050 --> 00:59:31.170
things like like leadership and power kind of pop out, why we say uh see certain salient

00:59:31.170 --> 00:59:35.170
things when it comes to social learning, for example, kiddos are coming into the world and

00:59:35.170 --> 00:59:38.690
they are paying attention to who's who the haves are and who the have nots are.

00:59:38.930 --> 00:59:43.170
And what what is had will vary of course across space and time.

00:59:43.250 --> 00:59:47.090
But things like food and power, I think, are generally quite salient to humans for again,

00:59:47.250 --> 00:59:49.010
the exact reasons you specify.

00:59:50.240 --> 00:59:56.000
I mean, uh, it makes me think that there should be um a theoretical paper on the psychology

00:59:56.000 --> 01:00:00.720
of a resource or what a resource is and what are the salient attractors for the for the

01:00:00.720 --> 01:00:06.240
mind to categorize something as a resource um that is worth fighting over, um, and what

01:00:06.240 --> 01:00:08.800
things are not put into that category.

01:00:08.960 --> 01:00:10.960
Um it's a very interesting concept.

01:00:11.120 --> 01:00:15.360
I I would think that um one of the main factors that would cause something to be

01:00:15.360 --> 01:00:20.330
categorized as a resource is the degree to which it is zero sum or monopolizable, such that

01:00:20.330 --> 01:00:22.490
the more of it you have, the less of it I have.

01:00:22.650 --> 01:00:27.210
So land in that case is very salient in terms of a zero-sum resource.

01:00:27.370 --> 01:00:30.650
The more space you have, uh, the less space I have.

01:00:30.810 --> 01:00:33.130
Um, food is uh is kind of a a tricky one.

01:00:33.210 --> 01:00:37.450
In some cases, um, the more food you have, the less I have if there's like a fixed amount

01:00:37.450 --> 01:00:38.170
of food here.

01:00:38.250 --> 01:00:43.740
Um, but in terms of uh food being the product of collaboration, uh uh and and coordination,

01:00:43.900 --> 01:00:48.380
uh you know, you could work really hard to get food and we could work really hard to get

01:00:48.380 --> 01:00:48.540
food.

01:00:48.700 --> 01:00:52.700
And it's not necessarily the case that, you know, there's like a fixed amount of food, and

01:00:52.700 --> 01:00:56.380
the more food that that group has, the less food uh my group has.

01:00:57.500 --> 01:01:01.580
Um and so maybe food is is sort of a blurry one, where in some cases it could it could be

01:01:01.580 --> 01:01:06.570
limited if there's like a specific, say, patch of land, for instance, that produces food,

01:01:06.650 --> 01:01:10.970
like in an agricultural setting, or if there's a specific body of water where animals tend

01:01:10.970 --> 01:01:15.290
to congregate, we want to defend that specific patch of land that gives rise to food.

01:01:15.770 --> 01:01:21.050
But in other cases, it might not be viewed as a zero-sum resource.

01:01:21.930 --> 01:01:26.730
On the other hand, political power, I think, is a very strongly uh zero-sum resource.

01:01:26.810 --> 01:01:31.660
You know, the more power, uh, the more seats in Congress, say the Republican Party has, the

01:01:31.660 --> 01:01:34.540
less the fewer seats the the Democratic Party has.

01:01:34.620 --> 01:01:38.860
Um the more control they have over legislation, the less control uh we have.

01:01:39.020 --> 01:01:42.220
Uh who you know, if if they're in the White House, we're not in the White House.

01:01:42.300 --> 01:01:45.020
I mean it's it you know is is the space metaphor as well.

01:01:45.100 --> 01:01:48.700
They're in the physical space of the White House and we are not in that space.

01:01:48.860 --> 01:01:54.630
Um so I'm curious how you think the the zero-sumness of of

01:01:54.630 --> 01:02:00.470
the resource feeds into this and in in what context do we view a resource as zero sum uh

01:02:00.550 --> 01:02:01.510
uh or not?

01:02:02.310 --> 01:02:03.350
I actually think this is great.

01:02:03.510 --> 01:02:05.990
Partially I feel like we're actually writing the paper while we're talking.

01:02:06.070 --> 01:02:08.950
So that's also fun because this pushback is useful.

01:02:09.430 --> 01:02:14.560
So as you you brought out, for example, with food, food is not necessarily zero sum.

01:02:14.720 --> 01:02:18.960
If it is communally produced, I think about um, for example, collaborative hunting, for

01:02:18.960 --> 01:02:23.360
example, or the way that food can get shared out, then of course it's not it's not zero

01:02:23.360 --> 01:02:23.600
sum.

01:02:24.160 --> 01:02:25.440
Same thing with land, right?

01:02:25.600 --> 01:02:30.400
So if we think about um, for example, traditional landholders thinking about notions of

01:02:30.400 --> 01:02:34.720
country or landess capital, which is a term coming out of archaeology, there's often an

01:02:34.720 --> 01:02:39.680
idea as well that that of course, if land is kind of being co-managed, that people are

01:02:39.680 --> 01:02:43.350
actually are not experiencing a zero-sum environment when it comes to land.

01:02:43.510 --> 01:02:44.150
Everyone can use it.

01:02:44.230 --> 01:02:47.830
I think about the experience of Mardu people, for example, in Australia.

01:02:48.070 --> 01:02:50.390
And then thinking also about power.

01:02:50.950 --> 01:02:52.310
That's an interesting one.

01:02:52.390 --> 01:02:56.390
And I'm sure folks in the audience have thoughts too, but I think it also depends.

01:02:56.550 --> 01:03:02.470
I think about contexts in which allies, for example, thinking about non-human primates,

01:03:02.630 --> 01:03:06.900
oftentimes allies can actually depose, for example, an alpha.

01:03:06.980 --> 01:03:10.100
So if I'm thinking about, say, chimpanzee society, for example.

01:03:10.340 --> 01:03:14.580
And so, um, and again, that's not a one-to-one with humans, but again, just kind of

01:03:14.580 --> 01:03:20.500
thinking here about when one would expect to get the notion of a resource and the notion of

01:03:20.500 --> 01:03:22.180
a resource that is worth fighting over.

01:03:22.340 --> 01:03:27.620
I think your zero stumness is hitting on something here, because even then, um, if one's

01:03:27.620 --> 01:03:31.460
thinking about food, and of course we know toddlers think a ton about food, for example, we

01:03:31.460 --> 01:03:32.820
know that all too well.

01:03:33.140 --> 01:03:36.250
Um, at the same time, is food limited?

01:03:36.410 --> 01:03:39.610
And so it I think your point is is well taken on the zero-sumness.

01:03:40.170 --> 01:03:40.410
Yeah.

01:03:40.650 --> 01:03:42.250
I also think about food a lot.

01:03:42.970 --> 01:03:44.730
Can I push back a little bit, David?

01:03:44.810 --> 01:03:50.410
Like let me let me challenge the idea that power is zero-sum in the sense of if somebody is

01:03:50.570 --> 01:03:56.280
um uh in the uh in power, it's not zero sum if I

01:03:56.280 --> 01:04:01.160
view them as an ally, or if even if I view them as like kind of an outgroup, if I do think

01:04:01.160 --> 01:04:05.960
like there's a broader social identity that that we sort of have in common.

01:04:06.120 --> 01:04:11.640
So it's sort of like nested sets of like, how much do they care about my

01:04:11.640 --> 01:04:12.280
interests?

01:04:12.440 --> 01:04:16.520
And I think there is rhetoric now of like, you know, if the Republicans are in power, the

01:04:16.520 --> 01:04:18.360
Democrats are in power, like you're gonna get nothing.

01:04:18.440 --> 01:04:19.400
They're the enemy.

01:04:19.590 --> 01:04:21.110
It's literally zero sum.

01:04:21.430 --> 01:04:25.030
But I think historically, you know, it's this thing of, well, yes, like we disagree about

01:04:25.030 --> 01:04:28.710
some issues, but then there's a larger set that we all agree on, and of course we're all

01:04:28.710 --> 01:04:30.710
together if there's another issue.

01:04:31.030 --> 01:04:34.550
So I don't know if that's a a devil's advocate position.

01:04:34.630 --> 01:04:36.710
That might be a too strong articulation.

01:04:36.950 --> 01:04:41.510
But do would would that view challenge this idea that political power is zero sum?

01:04:41.670 --> 01:04:42.390
I don't know, actually.

01:04:42.470 --> 01:04:44.950
I'm I'm just asking both of you.

01:04:45.510 --> 01:04:46.950
I yeah, no, it's interesting.

01:04:47.030 --> 01:04:52.200
I I so maybe there's a caveat there that um it's only zero sum in cases of conflicts of

01:04:52.200 --> 01:04:52.600
interest.

01:04:52.920 --> 01:04:56.600
So where there are different groups with different interests, then then it's zero sum,

01:04:56.680 --> 01:04:59.320
where more more power goes to one group to advocate for those interests.

01:04:59.720 --> 01:04:59.800
Yeah.

01:05:00.040 --> 01:05:04.920
But but if there are if there are no conflicts of interests, um then it's not necessarily

01:05:05.480 --> 01:05:06.360
zero sum.

01:05:06.600 --> 01:05:08.120
Um if we all have the same interests.

01:05:08.360 --> 01:05:08.600
Yeah.

01:05:08.920 --> 01:05:10.120
Um I like that.

01:05:10.290 --> 01:05:10.610
Yeah.

01:05:11.170 --> 01:05:15.330
And and this also there is like a little bit of what you talked about in the Pascal Boyer

01:05:15.570 --> 01:05:15.650
paper.

01:05:15.890 --> 01:05:21.810
We should have Pascal on in his psychology of ownership, um, where it's sort of uh

01:05:22.290 --> 01:05:28.290
I think in that paper he's he's he's alluding to the sociality of resources, uh, which

01:05:28.290 --> 01:05:29.570
is a really cool idea, right?

01:05:29.730 --> 01:05:33.360
Wait, this is the idea like David that you're saying you're saying is like we don't really

01:05:33.360 --> 01:05:36.960
consider oxygen a res or like, you know, air a resource right now.

01:05:37.600 --> 01:05:43.200
But boy, if David had it all and and you and I didn't have any, you know, we we immediately

01:05:43.200 --> 01:05:43.920
would, right?

01:05:44.080 --> 01:05:46.240
Uh and we'd be knocking on your door, David.

01:05:46.400 --> 01:05:50.880
Um so if we're out in space, all of a sudden air is, right? 'Cause like some people have

01:05:50.880 --> 01:05:53.200
it, some people don't, and like tanks or something, right?

01:05:53.280 --> 01:05:58.230
So it's it's it what counts as a resource is not an objective feature of the world.

01:05:58.310 --> 01:05:59.910
David, I really like that you pointed that out.

01:05:59.990 --> 01:06:03.350
And I do think like the Pascal paper starts to get into it.

01:06:03.430 --> 01:06:09.430
But that's that's such a cool sort of unlifting of like the matrix programs, as John Tuby

01:06:09.510 --> 01:06:09.990
would talk about.

01:06:10.070 --> 01:06:14.470
Like it's that we just think resources just exist, but really it's kind of like groups.

01:06:14.550 --> 01:06:15.750
It's the same principle, right?

01:06:15.830 --> 01:06:21.670
Like both groups and resources, they're so obvious, but that obviousness is instinct

01:06:21.670 --> 01:06:25.590
blindness to like there's actually a lot of calculation going on.

01:06:25.910 --> 01:06:31.560
And the idea that like what counts as a resource is is social is such a weird, cool idea

01:06:31.720 --> 01:06:34.760
that I agree is just starting to be thought of, David.

01:06:34.840 --> 01:06:36.360
I think that's a really nice thought.

01:06:36.440 --> 01:06:41.640
And I mean, and I think that's a lot of what your work is also looking at.

01:06:41.720 --> 01:06:46.120
If if, you know, you can tell me if you're wrong, but basically it's this idea that sort of

01:06:46.350 --> 01:06:51.790
even what groups exist is sort of a function of these resources.

01:06:52.030 --> 01:06:56.910
As you talked about, like one of the drivers is resource competition, as we talked about

01:06:56.910 --> 01:06:57.390
earlier.

01:06:57.630 --> 01:07:03.470
There's an old paper by Liz Cashton that is like, and we're gonna have Liz Cashton on it at

01:07:03.470 --> 01:07:03.790
some point.

01:07:03.870 --> 01:07:06.670
I'm going back and forth with her scheduling, that's incredible.

01:07:06.750 --> 01:07:09.070
That talks about, and Annie, I saw you nodding your head.

01:07:09.310 --> 01:07:15.220
I'm sure you know this paper even better than I do, which is that she found that the

01:07:15.540 --> 01:07:21.540
density of ethnic groups across the globe is a function of basically

01:07:21.540 --> 01:07:25.940
what she discovered was sort of like the density of resources.

01:07:26.180 --> 01:07:31.940
So, for example, if you're in a really high-latitude area where you have to travel very far

01:07:32.260 --> 01:07:36.420
to just get enough stuff to keep a small number of people alive, because you got to go get

01:07:36.420 --> 01:07:42.190
a polar bear or you know you've got a fish, then the the spatial scale of a group

01:07:42.190 --> 01:07:43.950
identity will be very large.

01:07:44.190 --> 01:07:48.830
But if you look at like very much lower latitude areas where there's like rainforests and

01:07:48.830 --> 01:07:52.990
density of food and you can just go to the river really close by or go to trees really

01:07:52.990 --> 01:07:57.550
close by and get everything you need, then the number and density of sort of group

01:07:57.550 --> 01:07:59.470
identities increases.

01:07:59.760 --> 01:08:01.680
And for me, that was just mind blowing.

01:08:01.840 --> 01:08:06.400
And it's exactly like in in accordance with with Anne with your what you're saying here,

01:08:06.480 --> 01:08:11.600
which is that, you know, sort of what gr drives these containers of cooperation

01:08:11.760 --> 01:08:17.760
ultimately, as David put it, is sort of this engine of of group of of resource competition

01:08:17.760 --> 01:08:21.680
or or corpor cooperation or competition for resources.

01:08:21.760 --> 01:08:22.240
Yeah.

01:08:23.840 --> 01:08:24.480
Yeah.

01:08:25.290 --> 01:08:27.770
I mean, I I love this uh this this train of thought.

01:08:27.930 --> 01:08:32.410
I mean, uh one interesting aspect that I I throw in just because we're um we're spitballing

01:08:32.410 --> 01:08:35.850
in an interesting area is um jobs as a resource.

01:08:36.090 --> 01:08:39.610
Um what's interesting about jobs is that they're kind of they're they're somewhat

01:08:39.610 --> 01:08:40.330
unprecedented.

01:08:40.410 --> 01:08:43.450
I uh there were there and that there wasn't really a market economy in ancestral

01:08:43.450 --> 01:08:46.490
environments, although certainly we had roles and division of labor, but we didn't really

01:08:46.490 --> 01:08:50.490
have uh quite formalized jobs the way we do now.

01:08:51.520 --> 01:08:56.000
and um it seems like a lot of people think of jobs as a resource.

01:08:56.080 --> 01:08:59.200
You know, there's rhetoric, uh anti-immigration rhetoric that you know they're taking our

01:08:59.200 --> 01:08:59.760
jobs.

01:08:59.920 --> 01:09:04.000
Um and what's interesting is that economists will tell us that they're actually not a

01:09:04.000 --> 01:09:05.120
zero-sum resource.

01:09:05.280 --> 01:09:09.520
That when when immigrants come in, uh, you know, yes, uh they might take some jobs, but

01:09:09.520 --> 01:09:13.530
they also produce more jobs because they're there are more consumers to uh consume

01:09:13.530 --> 01:09:17.530
resources which creates more jobs and then they they work and they grow businesses and they

01:09:17.530 --> 01:09:21.290
create more products to sell and and you know they add more mouths to feed which creates

01:09:21.290 --> 01:09:24.970
more money and so when you so when you think about it in terms of uh you know the economic

01:09:24.970 --> 01:09:29.130
system the uh there isn't really like a fixed amount of labor right there's known as like

01:09:29.130 --> 01:09:34.090
the lump of labor fallacy where you know less few fewer jobs for for you means yeah or more

01:09:34.090 --> 01:09:37.930
jobs for you means fewer jobs for me that's really not how it works in the economy and yet

01:09:38.010 --> 01:09:43.020
there's something about it that we we sort of think of uh jobs as like a a fixed resource.

01:09:43.180 --> 01:09:45.580
It's it's sort of an attractor for the mind.

01:09:45.900 --> 01:09:49.180
Um and I'm wondering, you know, you you mentioned Ann that you were working with with

01:09:49.180 --> 01:09:54.060
societies that were just starting to integrate into a a market economy if if you have if

01:09:54.060 --> 01:09:59.020
you've caught wind on any of this psychology of of of whether job is is is is seen as a

01:09:59.020 --> 01:10:00.140
resource or not.

01:10:01.830 --> 01:10:03.590
That's a really interesting question.

01:10:05.990 --> 01:10:07.750
Is it seen as a resource?

01:10:07.990 --> 01:10:10.390
My so my brain's going in a couple different directions.

01:10:10.550 --> 01:10:13.430
I'm going to start to answer the question to see where it gets us because I actually

01:10:13.430 --> 01:10:15.030
haven't thought about this before.

01:10:15.830 --> 01:10:21.350
So, first line: one thing that we know is that households are

01:10:21.980 --> 01:10:25.900
basically at the end of the day, if we think about the household as a unit, risk

01:10:25.900 --> 01:10:29.340
diversification is kind of a through line of household decision making.

01:10:29.580 --> 01:10:34.060
And one thing that we see again and again, whether it's planting more diverse crops for

01:10:34.060 --> 01:10:38.460
agriculturalists, whether it is pursuing different kinds of game if you're if you're

01:10:38.460 --> 01:10:44.060
hunting, whether it's having different income streams from different sectors if you're

01:10:44.010 --> 01:10:47.610
participating in markets, is that households are diversifying.

01:10:47.770 --> 01:10:51.770
We see that kind of pop up again and again, whether we're, you know, economists, whether

01:10:51.770 --> 01:10:54.250
we're uh anthropologists, et cetera.

01:10:54.570 --> 01:11:00.490
And so when I think about resources in this context, about what a job is, I think about it

01:11:00.490 --> 01:11:03.530
as kind of a reliable source of diversification.

01:11:03.770 --> 01:11:09.080
So that's kind of answer number one there is that it's kind of part of a portfolio from the

01:11:09.080 --> 01:11:11.880
household perspective, which I think is really salient for folks.

01:11:12.040 --> 01:11:17.240
And then additionally, when you add to that, that that particular

01:11:17.560 --> 01:11:23.400
avenue of resource access can be outsized in terms of how much it's bringing into the

01:11:23.400 --> 01:11:23.960
household.

01:11:24.200 --> 01:11:30.120
I think that, again, thinking about this kind of zero-sumness, what is the magnitude of

01:11:30.150 --> 01:11:33.270
that pathway when it comes to household diversification.

01:11:33.510 --> 01:11:37.590
And I think here we're thinking a bit about concepts that show up in something like human

01:11:37.590 --> 01:11:42.390
behavioral ecology when it comes to making decisions about how to invest one's time, what

01:11:42.390 --> 01:11:47.030
are the average returns versus the variance, and that really will affect decision making.

01:11:47.190 --> 01:11:50.470
It's something we also see when we're talking about household decision making.

01:11:50.550 --> 01:11:55.670
If we're talking to a labor economist or talking to an agricultural economist, is thinking

01:11:55.670 --> 01:11:58.790
about those trade-offs again when it comes to mean versus variance.

01:11:59.400 --> 01:12:04.680
And so what I'm hearing here a little bit when I'm thinking about jobs is people are often

01:12:04.680 --> 01:12:07.080
talking about high paying jobs.

01:12:07.240 --> 01:12:13.160
And high paying jobs are as salient in the US right now as they are in rural

01:12:13.160 --> 01:12:15.800
Bolivia right now is how do I get a high paying job?

01:12:15.960 --> 01:12:19.880
When people talk to me about long distance relationships, they're often talking about that

01:12:19.880 --> 01:12:21.400
resource as the key thing.

01:12:21.560 --> 01:12:26.120
How do I find a good job, a high paying job that pays well is something that's really

01:12:26.120 --> 01:12:26.840
salient.

01:12:27.080 --> 01:12:32.230
And so I think what ends up happening then is that if there's not just competition over

01:12:32.230 --> 01:12:37.510
jobs, but there's competition over that one job that is going to be the high mean, low

01:12:37.590 --> 01:12:41.430
variance job that's going to be coming into the household and it's going to just really

01:12:41.750 --> 01:12:46.870
expand our options when it comes to thinking about diversification portfolio, that's when I

01:12:46.870 --> 01:12:48.950
would expect that competition to arise.

01:12:49.680 --> 01:12:50.080
Interesting.

01:12:50.160 --> 01:12:55.040
Yeah, no, I like that distinction a lot because you know jobs as an abstract category don't

01:12:55.040 --> 01:12:59.280
really make much sense to it doesn't make sense to think of them as as zero sum or as

01:12:59.280 --> 01:13:02.240
limited, um, because you know they grow as the economy grows.

01:13:02.400 --> 01:13:06.240
Uh but one job is a zero-sum resource.

01:13:06.400 --> 01:13:10.240
If you, you know, if we both want the same job, if you get it, then I don't get it.

01:13:10.400 --> 01:13:14.960
You know, uh, you know, if the president, that is one job, you know, if uh if the

01:13:14.960 --> 01:13:17.600
Republicans get that job, then the Democrats don't.

01:13:17.760 --> 01:13:18.320
Right.

01:13:18.650 --> 01:13:21.290
Um, and so that's that's an interesting way of thinking about it.

01:13:21.370 --> 01:13:26.170
Um, that it's it's not necessarily jobs as an abstract category, but a a particular job or

01:13:26.250 --> 01:13:31.130
particular type of job um that that might be driving um this this kind of psychology.

01:13:31.290 --> 01:13:32.010
Um cool.

01:13:32.730 --> 01:13:37.370
I like that too, because I mean it reminds me, coming from like a social dynamics

01:13:37.370 --> 01:13:43.370
perspective, where um there's a lot of situations where people do

01:13:43.560 --> 01:13:47.960
really sort of horrible things, like they have a job that involves, like, I mean, like at

01:13:47.960 --> 01:13:50.760
the extreme version, you know, like working in a concentration camp.

01:13:50.840 --> 01:13:54.680
Like, actually, what you're describing reminded me of when I visited one, where it was sort

01:13:54.680 --> 01:13:59.800
of like, why would somebody ever who's sort of in the victim category ever have one of

01:13:59.800 --> 01:14:00.600
these jobs?

01:14:00.760 --> 01:14:05.000
Or why would they ever do one of these jobs that sort of is like helping the machinations

01:14:05.240 --> 01:14:05.800
of the camp?

01:14:05.960 --> 01:14:08.570
And it was because there was a finite job.

01:14:08.650 --> 01:14:10.570
And it was basically, am I better off having it?

01:14:10.730 --> 01:14:12.010
Do I get more food or not?

01:14:12.170 --> 01:14:14.250
And if I don't take it, someone else will.

01:14:14.490 --> 01:14:18.250
And so it's not like I have the power to change the fact that the jobs exist.

01:14:18.330 --> 01:14:22.410
Like I don't want the job to exist, but like it's just basically like, do I have enough

01:14:22.410 --> 01:14:26.490
food for me and maybe the person I love over on the other side of the camp and I can give

01:14:26.490 --> 01:14:27.370
them a little more food?

01:14:27.530 --> 01:14:32.140
And I think that's an extreme version, but I think this happens a lot where like a job,

01:14:32.300 --> 01:14:36.780
just as David put it, just like there's this thing of like, here's the package, like, take

01:14:36.780 --> 01:14:37.580
it or leave it.

01:14:37.740 --> 01:14:39.900
And if you leave it, someone else will take it.

01:14:40.140 --> 01:14:41.820
I think that's a really powerful decision.

01:14:41.900 --> 01:14:44.380
And I think there's lots of people who have jobs.

01:14:44.540 --> 01:14:49.340
There's aspects of them they don't like, but institutionally it's sort of like it's a

01:14:49.340 --> 01:14:50.300
package deal.

01:14:50.460 --> 01:14:55.910
And it's just the question of like, is it better for me to take it or leave it.

01:14:56.070 --> 01:15:01.990
And I think a lot of sort of negative externalities are a consequence of people making what

01:15:02.070 --> 01:15:05.590
what are pretty rational decisions in that context of saying, well, take it.

01:15:05.750 --> 01:15:06.150
Right.

01:15:06.390 --> 01:15:07.190
Um, yeah.

01:15:07.350 --> 01:15:11.990
I wonder, does that happen in the market integration thing where people who are going in

01:15:12.150 --> 01:15:16.950
sort of don't like aspects, but the old package deal is sort of, well, I can't beat this as

01:15:16.950 --> 01:15:17.830
a resource package.

01:15:17.990 --> 01:15:19.990
Like, is that something you've encountered?

01:15:20.310 --> 01:15:20.950
Hmm.

01:15:21.740 --> 01:15:22.540
That's interesting.

01:15:22.620 --> 01:15:22.940
Yeah.

01:15:23.020 --> 01:15:27.020
So um I can talk about the larger literature, but let me start with some some stories here.

01:15:27.180 --> 01:15:29.020
So um we can start in Bolivia.

01:15:29.180 --> 01:15:34.060
I work in in Kenya mostly now, Kenya and and a little bit in Tanzania with Chris.

01:15:34.460 --> 01:15:40.300
And what what often happens is that people will take relatively um

01:15:40.300 --> 01:15:42.220
low-skill wage labor jobs.

01:15:42.300 --> 01:15:43.500
They're a bit precarious.

01:15:43.660 --> 01:15:49.250
I mean, again, if one had the entire range, as you say, of options of jobs, then one could

01:15:49.250 --> 01:15:49.970
pick and choose.

01:15:50.130 --> 01:15:55.490
But if there's a really limited choice set, um, and there's fewer, there's few outside

01:15:55.490 --> 01:15:59.170
options, again, I'm thinking here about a lot of the language that pops out of things like

01:15:59.170 --> 01:16:04.370
um behavioral ecology or even optimal decision-making in the context of evolutionary

01:16:04.370 --> 01:16:06.690
psychology, the choice set's very small.

01:16:06.880 --> 01:16:08.000
It's often constrained.

01:16:08.080 --> 01:16:11.360
It's a constraint for folks like say Shimane laborers.

01:16:11.440 --> 01:16:15.680
It's constrained for folks who are migrants, often moving between country and country.

01:16:15.760 --> 01:16:20.000
There's often a really constrained labor market from which to choose.

01:16:20.240 --> 01:16:26.080
And then within that set, one may just take the best of a bad deal, as it

01:16:26.080 --> 01:16:26.320
were.

01:16:26.890 --> 01:16:31.610
And it it might be again that it's better that one has it home or it diversifies options

01:16:31.610 --> 01:16:34.970
for the family because families are actually often part of the decision making in terms of

01:16:34.970 --> 01:16:35.930
job taking.

01:16:36.170 --> 01:16:40.490
And so I think that's to your point, partially what we're seeing here.

01:16:40.650 --> 01:16:44.890
And that's what we definitely see, I was seeing in Bolivia as well, is that having that

01:16:44.890 --> 01:16:46.970
wage labor job, it it wasn't perfect.

01:16:47.050 --> 01:16:50.410
The hours were long, you were away from your family for long periods of time.

01:16:50.890 --> 01:16:52.970
Sometimes folks would take advantage of you.

01:16:54.440 --> 01:16:55.320
it was an income.

01:16:55.640 --> 01:16:56.280
Right.

01:16:57.000 --> 01:17:01.080
Yeah, and that's a really powerful, I think, way to think about this as jobs, there's

01:17:01.080 --> 01:17:04.120
resources, and then that there's just what's the market and what's the choices.

01:17:04.280 --> 01:17:06.360
I think that's a really and I don't know.

01:17:06.440 --> 01:17:11.160
I mean, I'm not an expert in this either, but I I don't know if this has been looked into

01:17:11.160 --> 01:17:11.800
enough.

01:17:12.600 --> 01:17:13.000
Yeah.

01:17:13.240 --> 01:17:14.520
You know, I think there might be a bit.

01:17:14.600 --> 01:17:17.870
I know Pascal Boye has a a paper on folk economic beliefs.

01:17:17.950 --> 01:17:20.910
There might be something there about jobs as a resource, I forget.

01:17:21.230 --> 01:17:25.630
Um but certainly there are a lot of you know folk intuitions we we bring to bear in in into

01:17:25.630 --> 01:17:29.950
a market economy um that that economists might um scoff at.

01:17:30.270 --> 01:17:35.950
Um so uh uh related to this uh discussion of of of jobs uh is is

01:17:35.950 --> 01:17:36.590
inequality.

01:17:36.670 --> 01:17:41.230
Um so I'm curious what your thoughts are on uh how uh what what the role of inequality is

01:17:41.230 --> 01:17:43.470
in in parochial altruism.

01:17:45.120 --> 01:17:50.640
Yeah, and I assume here thinking kind of a bit about in between group inequality and how

01:17:50.640 --> 01:17:52.880
that can reify over time.

01:17:53.040 --> 01:17:58.960
So what's interesting, and this is popping a bit out of social psychology, is this

01:17:58.960 --> 01:18:02.720
idea of the relative difference between two different groups.

01:18:02.880 --> 01:18:07.040
So let's just say for the for the sake of argument that one has two different groups that

01:18:07.090 --> 01:18:10.930
are salient, that people recognize, maybe they're ethnic groups, for example, could be

01:18:10.930 --> 01:18:13.170
something else, could be just social classes.

01:18:13.410 --> 01:18:17.730
And one group has a lot and the other group has very little.

01:18:18.450 --> 01:18:23.090
It ends up that, at least the data show, and I'm gonna channel this here, that if that

01:18:23.090 --> 01:18:27.970
difference is very large, you actually can sometimes get what's called magnanimity going

01:18:27.970 --> 01:18:30.290
from the group that has to the group that doesn't have.

01:18:30.530 --> 01:18:35.410
So thinking about donations to the poor, for example, or thinking about charitable giving

01:18:35.420 --> 01:18:36.380
more broadly.

01:18:36.620 --> 01:18:42.060
But what ends up happening is that if the distance between those two groups shrinks in

01:18:42.060 --> 01:18:45.100
terms of the power dynamic, let's say power is a resource here.

01:18:45.260 --> 01:18:49.820
If it's uh thinking about money, if that's what it is, again, these are all things that

01:18:49.820 --> 01:18:54.700
could matter to folks, and that distance starts to shrink, then the behavior of the group

01:18:54.700 --> 01:18:56.700
that has more is going to change.

01:18:56.860 --> 01:19:00.460
And it partially depends again on whether there's some zero-sumness involved, right?

01:19:00.620 --> 01:19:06.590
So I have power, and then this other group is looking like they may also be vying for

01:19:06.590 --> 01:19:12.030
power here, and that that distance starts to shrink, or it's money and that distance starts

01:19:12.030 --> 01:19:12.510
to shrink.

01:19:12.670 --> 01:19:16.030
That's when that charitable giving is at risk of going away.

01:19:16.270 --> 01:19:19.710
That's when you tend to see more between group tensions.

01:19:19.870 --> 01:19:23.470
What I think is really interesting here, and again, this is coming as an anthropologist

01:19:23.470 --> 01:19:28.510
who's often thinking about humans in this larger context of primates, is that when you

01:19:28.510 --> 01:19:33.840
start to decrease the power distance between non-human primate apes as well, thinking about

01:19:33.920 --> 01:19:38.240
say chimpanzee groups, for example, is that that is also when you start to get a lot of

01:19:38.240 --> 01:19:39.120
intergroup tension.

01:19:39.200 --> 01:19:40.800
So it can be numbers.

01:19:40.960 --> 01:19:44.240
Um, you kind of have very similar numbers between two groups.

01:19:44.400 --> 01:19:49.360
That usually signifies that they're similar threats, they have similar potential to hold on

01:19:49.360 --> 01:19:51.440
to resources between two different groups.

01:19:51.600 --> 01:19:53.680
That's also when you see tensions rise.

01:19:53.840 --> 01:19:58.050
You might not see an attack, but you might see those tensions go up.

01:19:58.290 --> 01:20:00.850
And so I think it's an interesting through line.

01:20:01.010 --> 01:20:04.850
And I believe that's the thrust of your question is what happens with inequality.

01:20:04.930 --> 01:20:08.130
And I think it actually just depends on how extreme the inequality is.

01:20:08.370 --> 01:20:11.810
And you actually see different behaviors from this group to this group.

01:20:11.970 --> 01:20:15.330
Now, just to quickly clarify here at the end, I'm thinking a lot about the group who's

01:20:15.330 --> 01:20:16.050
being threatened.

01:20:16.210 --> 01:20:19.810
If you think about the group who is actually the have not position, if there's a big

01:20:19.810 --> 01:20:24.540
distance between those two groups, that that doesn't mean that folks in the group who don't

01:20:24.540 --> 01:20:27.500
have anything aren't going to clamor for more as well.

01:20:27.900 --> 01:20:30.620
So the experience of being in those two groups is going to be quite different.

01:20:31.420 --> 01:20:34.780
That's that's uh a really fascinating way of putting it.

01:20:34.940 --> 01:20:39.740
Um it it it it's somewhat counterintuitive in that, you know, uh from a naive perspective,

01:20:39.820 --> 01:20:42.780
you might expect, you know, the greater the inequality, the greater the animosity.

01:20:43.340 --> 01:20:46.700
You know, if if this group is really powerful and really dominating the other group, then

01:20:46.700 --> 01:20:51.830
that's gonna that's gonna be the worst situation um for for um for the lower group.

01:20:51.910 --> 01:20:54.790
Um but what you're saying is it's actually more complicated than that.

01:20:54.870 --> 01:20:59.830
That um it's not so much with the with the inequality is greater you see more conflict, but

01:20:59.830 --> 01:21:04.310
but it's when it's smaller, uh actually fascinatingly you you see more tensions.

01:21:04.390 --> 01:21:08.310
Uh and so I'm curious, you know, how how would you explain that from an evolutionary

01:21:08.310 --> 01:21:08.710
perspective?

01:21:08.790 --> 01:21:13.670
You know, why why when the power differential decreases you see more tension?

01:21:13.750 --> 01:21:15.430
What is the evolutionary logic there?

01:21:15.820 --> 01:21:16.300
Yeah.

01:21:16.540 --> 01:21:18.300
And I will note too a couple things.

01:21:18.380 --> 01:21:23.260
So, so first, just to kind of give a wave here to political science, is that oftentimes

01:21:23.340 --> 01:21:27.500
when it comes to things like ethnic tension or political tension, one of the worst things

01:21:27.500 --> 01:21:31.820
you can have is two groups that are about 50 50 in terms of their size.

01:21:32.060 --> 01:21:32.460
Yeah.

01:21:32.700 --> 01:21:37.740
That is really hard in terms of getting things done when it comes to collective action, to

01:21:37.740 --> 01:21:38.860
governance, etc.

01:21:39.180 --> 01:21:42.620
Actually, if you have smaller groups with different amounts of power, it's actually less

01:21:42.620 --> 01:21:42.940
bad.

01:21:43.100 --> 01:21:44.540
So food for thought there.

01:21:44.860 --> 01:21:49.450
But when you I think the key thing here, and that you alluded to, David, I want to I want

01:21:49.450 --> 01:21:54.010
to pull it back up, is that it's not when you start to get these tensions, is actually when

01:21:54.010 --> 01:21:55.370
distance is shrinking.

01:21:55.690 --> 01:21:59.690
So if there's actually movement in statuses, that's when you start to see this pop out.

01:21:59.850 --> 01:22:04.810
And again, I'm channeling other folks' work here right now, so this isn't my own, but that

01:22:05.290 --> 01:22:09.200
is what I think is where we start to see threat kind of pop out.

01:22:09.280 --> 01:22:14.480
So if we're going back to thinking earlier about groups, about boundary pop propaganda,

01:22:14.560 --> 01:22:17.120
which I thought was a really interesting term, Dave, that I would like to borrow.

01:22:17.520 --> 01:22:18.000
It's David's.

01:22:21.840 --> 01:22:22.400
Oh, there we go.

01:22:22.480 --> 01:22:23.840
I'm sorry, whoever brought it up earlier.

01:22:24.080 --> 01:22:27.840
No, no, I brought it up, but I'm I'm giving credit to David because that's baked into a lot

01:22:27.840 --> 01:22:32.430
of David's um pol political idea his idea of like political discourse is all propaganda.

01:22:33.070 --> 01:22:36.990
I love that David is bringing back the idea of propaganda, which you know, it just lays

01:22:36.990 --> 01:22:37.230
bare.

01:22:37.630 --> 01:22:41.870
You know, the idea of rhetoric is just very sort of like fuzzy and like propaganda, it's

01:22:41.870 --> 01:22:42.670
much more direct.

01:22:42.830 --> 01:22:43.710
So I just like this.

01:22:43.790 --> 01:22:46.110
So that's so that's very much a David term, but I did say it.

01:22:46.190 --> 01:22:46.590
You're right.

01:22:46.670 --> 01:22:47.870
So I'm just yeah, yeah.

01:22:48.190 --> 01:22:49.390
You added the word boundary to it.

01:22:49.470 --> 01:22:50.750
And so I did, I did, I did it.

01:22:50.830 --> 01:22:51.390
Yes, exactly.

01:22:51.710 --> 01:22:53.070
Yes, boundary propaganda.

01:22:53.230 --> 01:22:54.430
I do like boundary propaganda.

01:22:54.670 --> 01:22:55.870
I should put that on a t shirt.

01:22:56.030 --> 01:22:56.350
Yeah.

01:22:56.590 --> 01:22:56.910
Yeah.

01:22:57.070 --> 01:22:57.700
We need to do that.

01:22:57.860 --> 01:23:02.180
Well, and I think that again, thinking about those three things mutually reinforcing, which

01:23:02.180 --> 01:23:07.460
is I I think a key thing emerging from our conversation earlier and from this larger

01:23:07.700 --> 01:23:12.020
understanding that we have in evolutionary behavioral sciences and in the social sciences

01:23:12.020 --> 01:23:16.260
and ecological sciences more broadly, because we're really kind of playing with all those

01:23:16.260 --> 01:23:21.220
ideas here today, is this idea that when you start to see that threat, is that that's when

01:23:21.220 --> 01:23:26.190
you should start to see things pop out like sudden resource salience, like uh boundary

01:23:26.190 --> 01:23:30.750
propaganda, like the valence shifting about warmth, for example, that these things are kind

01:23:30.750 --> 01:23:35.070
of moved together in a way that that y'all laid out really nicely earlier.

01:23:35.230 --> 01:23:40.590
And so it's that closing of the gap that seems to be something that's really salient for

01:23:40.590 --> 01:23:40.910
folks.

01:23:41.230 --> 01:23:44.190
Do you think that that's because of like coordination?

01:23:44.350 --> 01:23:48.990
So, in the sense of like if the large group in the small group, the small group is sort of

01:23:48.990 --> 01:23:54.440
like, look, we're not, we're not gonna, we might, if we're

01:23:54.440 --> 01:23:59.320
integrated into this group, let's say, you know, we might become like a subgroup or

01:23:59.320 --> 01:24:04.760
sub-identity, but there's no way we can like just take over the coordination or cultural

01:24:04.760 --> 01:24:05.320
norms.

01:24:05.480 --> 01:24:10.440
And I think there's even an analog in the animal conflict literature where like you don't

01:24:10.440 --> 01:24:11.590
get fighting.

01:24:11.750 --> 01:24:13.590
Like fighting is very costly, right?

01:24:13.670 --> 01:24:16.710
So there's this whole literature of the asymmetric or of attrition, which is sort of

01:24:16.710 --> 01:24:21.430
jargony for just this idea that if you have a huge lion and a very small lion, they just

01:24:21.430 --> 01:24:23.430
look at each other and they don't fight, right?

01:24:23.590 --> 01:24:25.910
Because the small lion's like, well, I know it's gonna happen.

01:24:25.990 --> 01:24:27.910
The big lion's like, I know what's gonna happen.

01:24:28.070 --> 01:24:30.070
And so the small lion just backs off.

01:24:30.310 --> 01:24:31.590
There's a complication, right?

01:24:31.670 --> 01:24:35.750
Which is of course, if the small lion is starving and the big lion is sated, then there

01:24:35.750 --> 01:24:39.120
might be right escalation, but all sequel there, they're the same.

01:24:39.280 --> 01:24:43.680
But then if the lions are equally matched, they'll escalate and they might like stalk back

01:24:43.680 --> 01:24:44.240
and forth.

01:24:44.400 --> 01:24:50.080
And what they're trying to do is evaluate if there was a conflict, who would win.

01:24:50.320 --> 01:24:55.920
And if they can both arrive at that, that knowledge, then they will not even touch each

01:24:55.920 --> 01:24:56.160
other.

01:24:56.320 --> 01:25:02.170
And it's only when there's still ambiguity that there's an escalation to actually sometimes

01:25:02.170 --> 01:25:05.930
ritualize conflict, which you know, for rattlesnakes, they like wrestle.

01:25:06.010 --> 01:25:09.290
They don't actually bite each other, like they're coordinated about this, right?

01:25:09.530 --> 01:25:14.170
Um, and it's only when there's really a matched thing that the conflict escalates.

01:25:14.250 --> 01:25:20.160
So it almost, I wonder if it's this thing of um that it's sort of

01:25:20.160 --> 01:25:22.000
obvious who the winner and loser is.

01:25:22.080 --> 01:25:27.760
And it's only when it's so equally matched that it just drives that you never reach this

01:25:27.760 --> 01:25:33.440
thing of like, well, it's obvious who would win in a conflict over coordination,

01:25:33.920 --> 01:25:35.040
more or less, right?

01:25:35.120 --> 01:25:37.120
Um, of sort of whose norms wins out.

01:25:37.280 --> 01:25:39.440
And then that would be why it it escalates.

01:25:39.600 --> 01:25:42.080
Um I don't know what you what you think about that.

01:25:43.040 --> 01:25:46.470
I think that's interesting as I'm hearing kind of two different ideas there.

01:25:46.550 --> 01:25:50.550
So one is the the norm and the coordination perspective, and the other one is just the

01:25:50.550 --> 01:25:53.670
physical harm perspective as well in terms of taking that on.

01:25:53.830 --> 01:25:53.990
Yeah.

01:25:54.150 --> 01:25:59.590
And I think I think what's interesting here is that one might make two slightly different

01:25:59.590 --> 01:26:00.630
predictions about that.

01:26:00.790 --> 01:26:04.550
So the harms thing in terms of numbers, I think is very salient.

01:26:04.710 --> 01:26:10.280
As you said, across the animal world for humans as well, There are workarounds to that in

01:26:10.280 --> 01:26:15.080
terms of initiating conflict in humans and otherwise.

01:26:15.320 --> 01:26:19.160
But yes, I think numbers matter a lot in terms of how things are structured when it comes

01:26:19.160 --> 01:26:20.760
to those intergroup tensions.

01:26:20.920 --> 01:26:25.800
Thinking again about chimpanzees, sizing up group size, often through vocalizations.

01:26:26.040 --> 01:26:30.600
A lot of times when when you have um lots of intergroup tension in in primates,

01:26:30.760 --> 01:26:33.880
vocalizations are really key for actually hearing group size.

01:26:34.390 --> 01:26:40.390
And then also here thinking about norms and what would what would take hold and

01:26:40.390 --> 01:26:46.230
whether coordination would actually be something that would be more challenging for me as a

01:26:46.230 --> 01:26:52.230
member of a smaller minority group in the context of of coordination

01:26:52.390 --> 01:26:54.470
if there was more involvement.

01:26:54.630 --> 01:26:58.150
I'm thinking here I'm in a riff a smidge and then I want to see if I'm on base with where

01:26:58.150 --> 01:26:59.430
you were headed with this Dave.

01:26:59.670 --> 01:27:03.080
So I'm thinking about work done by John Bunce.

01:27:03.240 --> 01:27:07.160
I was for a while, I mentioned the Mox Planck Institute earlier, Mox Planck Institute for

01:27:07.160 --> 01:27:08.440
Evolutionary Anthropology.

01:27:08.760 --> 01:27:12.520
I did my postdoc there with Richard McElwreath and crew.

01:27:12.760 --> 01:27:18.520
And in that space, John Bunce was working a lot on with Machiganga people in

01:27:18.840 --> 01:27:24.590
Peru and with Mestizo people in Peru, who are a numeric majority

01:27:24.670 --> 01:27:30.270
and who had a settlement very close to the Machaganga community, which Machigenga people,

01:27:30.350 --> 01:27:34.190
for reference, are living in the Amazon, have been living there traditionally for quite a

01:27:34.190 --> 01:27:34.670
long time.

01:27:34.910 --> 01:27:38.030
And so then the question is, is what happens at the boundary, right?

01:27:38.110 --> 01:27:42.510
When you have these two different norm systems, one group is much bigger numerically.

01:27:43.200 --> 01:27:43.920
what is going on?

01:27:44.000 --> 01:27:47.200
And when do you actually say get norm displacement across those boundaries?

01:27:47.360 --> 01:27:51.440
Are those boundaries actually sources of really strong norm differentiation?

01:27:51.600 --> 01:27:55.360
And again, for listeners who have heard your conversation with Christina Moya, a lot of

01:27:55.360 --> 01:27:56.720
this will sound familiar.

01:27:56.960 --> 01:28:02.960
And so what's interesting is that it partially depends on the incentive for the

01:28:02.960 --> 01:28:05.040
minority group to hang on to those norms.

01:28:05.280 --> 01:28:08.800
And there's lots of different contexts we can think about this today, thinking about

01:28:09.040 --> 01:28:13.450
indigenous people, for example, and the continuity of traditional ecological knowledge.

01:28:13.610 --> 01:28:18.490
We can think about incentives to hang on to traditions for folks.

01:28:18.650 --> 01:28:22.970
Even I'm sitting in Pennsylvania right now, I think about plain communities, for example,

01:28:23.050 --> 01:28:26.170
so Amish communities, for example, hanging on to norm systems.

01:28:26.410 --> 01:28:30.650
And I think it partially depends on the perceived incentives for hanging on to that.

01:28:30.730 --> 01:28:35.200
And it, including for the purposes of coordination within the smaller community and what

01:28:35.200 --> 01:28:36.240
those affordances are.

01:28:36.400 --> 01:28:39.520
Again, that's a meandering answer to your question just because I thought it was

01:28:39.520 --> 01:28:40.000
interesting.

01:28:40.480 --> 01:28:41.440
But that's where my brain went.

01:28:41.680 --> 01:28:42.800
Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense.

01:28:42.960 --> 01:28:44.960
I think that also explains generational things, right?

01:28:45.040 --> 01:28:49.280
Like if you're a more senior Amish person, just for example, I mean, you could use any

01:28:49.280 --> 01:28:54.650
example, but it's just in a minority uh numerically or norm in a norm sense.

01:28:54.810 --> 01:28:59.290
Um, you know, if you're a senior person and that's your status, you've kind of locked into

01:28:59.450 --> 01:29:04.410
that's your status scheme to to Riff on David, then, you know, you're incentivized to sort

01:29:04.410 --> 01:29:04.890
of stick with it.

01:29:04.970 --> 01:29:09.210
But you're if you're a kid, you know, like then maybe you're looking around and you're

01:29:09.210 --> 01:29:13.290
like, well, maybe there's other ways to make a living in this this world that doesn't

01:29:13.290 --> 01:29:14.810
involve, you know, sitting in a buggy.

01:29:14.970 --> 01:29:19.100
I mean, I I I love horses, so you know, but I'm just so nothing personal against that.

01:29:19.180 --> 01:29:22.940
But just so but I think that might explain like kind of intergenerational conflict of sort

01:29:22.940 --> 01:29:24.780
of like, you know, the market.

01:29:25.020 --> 01:29:28.860
And maybe you mean Adam, you can tell me better than most people.

01:29:29.020 --> 01:29:33.100
I mean, is it true that like a lot of times the market integration is driven by kids and

01:29:33.100 --> 01:29:38.330
sort of, you know, like the the older folks are sort of, you know, I mean, they're not,

01:29:38.570 --> 01:29:40.090
they're not necessarily locked in.

01:29:40.170 --> 01:29:44.650
They're not necessarily Leadites per se, but I mean they they probably are all all sequel,

01:29:44.810 --> 01:29:49.930
a little more locked into the status game or their way of making a living than the young

01:29:49.930 --> 01:29:54.490
people who are sort of still flexible and figuring out what what they can and want to do.

01:29:54.650 --> 01:29:55.450
Is that fair?

01:29:55.610 --> 01:29:58.570
Like, do you find generational effects like that?

01:29:59.530 --> 01:29:59.770
Yeah.

01:29:59.850 --> 01:30:02.170
And this, so I'm going to switch literatures in my head here.

01:30:02.250 --> 01:30:06.080
And again, I'm going to be channeling other literatures out there, thinking a little bit

01:30:06.080 --> 01:30:08.480
about econ, thinking a little bit about anthropology.

01:30:08.720 --> 01:30:14.640
But in general, when we start to see folks pick up a new trade, leave

01:30:14.640 --> 01:30:18.720
their community, for example, engage in wage labor, they often tend to be younger.

01:30:18.880 --> 01:30:21.840
Part of that is a life stage thing, for example, right?

01:30:21.920 --> 01:30:23.440
So oftentimes folks are unmarried.

01:30:23.520 --> 01:30:25.280
It's actually easier to pick up and move.

01:30:25.490 --> 01:30:26.930
And so that's often when we see it.

01:30:27.010 --> 01:30:31.090
And sometimes then that we'll actually come home to marry and either go back to the same

01:30:31.090 --> 01:30:32.610
trade or et cetera.

01:30:32.690 --> 01:30:34.530
So I think part of it's a life stage thing.

01:30:34.690 --> 01:30:37.650
I also think it's interesting to think about the evolved psychology here.

01:30:37.730 --> 01:30:42.530
So again, you'll have Liz Cash and once another opportunity to talk about um spatial

01:30:42.530 --> 01:30:47.490
experiences among young folks and moving around and the opportunities to find mates among

01:30:47.490 --> 01:30:48.610
jobs and everything else.

01:30:48.770 --> 01:30:50.610
It's a little riff right there.

01:30:51.170 --> 01:30:57.040
But I think that you're also right in the sense that A, there's

01:30:57.200 --> 01:30:58.320
you haven't invested much.

01:30:58.400 --> 01:31:02.560
There's not a lot of sunk cost in terms of investing into the status game in a particular

01:31:02.560 --> 01:31:04.400
community if you're if you're leaving early.

01:31:04.560 --> 01:31:06.080
That's a really interesting point.

01:31:06.320 --> 01:31:08.800
I think another one of them, as you said, is kind of the reskilling.

01:31:08.880 --> 01:31:14.080
You're not reskilling if you're 40 years old and shifting to a new sector versus you're

01:31:14.080 --> 01:31:16.080
actually kind of coming up in that sector.

01:31:16.240 --> 01:31:18.930
And I do think kids have their eyes open, right?

01:31:19.010 --> 01:31:20.610
They're able to see what's out there.

01:31:20.770 --> 01:31:24.690
They're often, when we when we talk about cultural change, they're often the prime movers,

01:31:24.770 --> 01:31:24.930
right?

01:31:25.010 --> 01:31:27.810
So they're often the ones who are picking up the fresh languages, they're picking up the

01:31:27.810 --> 01:31:31.890
new norms, they're the ones who are changing languages or changing cultural practices.

01:31:32.370 --> 01:31:36.610
And sometimes older folks in communities have some thoughts about that because that often

01:31:36.610 --> 01:31:40.930
has something to do with with cultural loss that happens further down the line.

01:31:41.090 --> 01:31:46.440
Um, including in Bolivia, where say traditional languages are being spoken less and less as

01:31:46.440 --> 01:31:50.920
the affordances of speaking Spanish and even English are greater and greater.

01:31:51.320 --> 01:31:53.880
So I think there's a few different things going on there.

01:31:54.040 --> 01:31:57.960
But I think you're right in terms of I'm if I'm hearing this correctly, almost like the

01:31:57.960 --> 01:32:03.560
games we play when it comes to status, when it comes to investment in reputation, and also

01:32:03.560 --> 01:32:07.080
investment in different social networks who are going to be, again, bringing that

01:32:07.080 --> 01:32:10.530
cooperation back, opportunities for for mutual support.

01:32:10.770 --> 01:32:11.650
Where is that going to be?

01:32:11.730 --> 01:32:13.250
Where are you going to put your roots down?

01:32:13.410 --> 01:32:16.850
What's what's in the best interest for self and family?

01:32:17.010 --> 01:32:20.770
And there's a lot of decisions I think that are going on there that could be could be

01:32:20.770 --> 01:32:21.730
unpacked even further.

01:32:21.890 --> 01:32:22.850
It's an interesting question.

01:32:23.170 --> 01:32:24.450
Yeah, that's really interesting.

01:32:24.610 --> 01:32:29.490
I think what you just said, I think summarizes so much of the dynamics, like even with in

01:32:29.490 --> 01:32:30.780
modern culture, right?

01:32:30.860 --> 01:32:34.140
Like of like there's competition for sort of getting kids.

01:32:34.220 --> 01:32:39.500
Like I'm I'm thinking even, I remember um, you know, I I grew up kind of religious and I

01:32:39.500 --> 01:32:43.740
always have a little bit of an ear to like how do these religions or like, you know,

01:32:43.900 --> 01:32:48.780
religious proselyte work, proselytation, religious proselytation work works, excuse me.

01:32:48.940 --> 01:32:53.190
Um and there's this thing of like get them while they're young um thing.

01:32:53.350 --> 01:32:58.390
And I think it's a very, it's the expression, I think, of a very similar thing, right?

01:32:58.550 --> 01:33:03.910
Where um and and in in other contexts too, where it's sort of like education is important.

01:33:04.070 --> 01:33:09.510
We set kids on a trajectory to either be like pro social, antisocial from the

01:33:09.510 --> 01:33:11.510
perspective of the society, right?

01:33:11.750 --> 01:33:15.830
So like that's why we have after school programs or like teach them a trade or a skill so

01:33:15.830 --> 01:33:17.030
they stay out of trouble.

01:33:17.190 --> 01:33:18.710
You know, there's these all these things.

01:33:18.790 --> 01:33:23.520
And it's it's you know, from a m a stepped back perspective, if you drop the morality out,

01:33:23.600 --> 01:33:28.320
it's really just about it's it's just you're providing there's competition for sort of

01:33:28.320 --> 01:33:30.400
what's my status scheme I'm gonna play.

01:33:30.640 --> 01:33:35.360
And it's sort of this institutional acknowledgement that a lot of times kids, exactly as

01:33:35.360 --> 01:33:39.680
you said, their their eyes are open and they're sort of they're the ones shopping because

01:33:39.680 --> 01:33:41.680
the uh the switch costs are low.

01:33:41.760 --> 01:33:42.960
And I love what you said.

01:33:43.040 --> 01:33:45.120
Those are I think those are really great points.

01:33:45.200 --> 01:33:45.680
Yeah.

01:33:46.480 --> 01:33:47.150
Really interesting.

01:33:47.310 --> 01:33:52.670
I mean, it i it brings to bear um that, you know, back to this conversation about

01:33:52.670 --> 01:33:57.950
resources, it it may be that um the local packet of of norms and linguistic

01:33:57.950 --> 01:34:03.950
practices, um that that this is itself a kind of uh uh resource that

01:34:03.950 --> 01:34:04.750
people fight over.

01:34:04.910 --> 01:34:08.430
And that, you know, if I'm in the older generation and I grew up speaking a certain

01:34:08.430 --> 01:34:11.700
language and the younger generation is starting to speak a different language, well, that's

01:34:11.700 --> 01:34:12.740
a huge threat to me.

01:34:12.900 --> 01:34:16.900
If if if everyone else is going to speak this language that I don't know how to speak, um,

01:34:16.980 --> 01:34:20.260
that's going to exclude me from social opportunities, from social networks.

01:34:20.420 --> 01:34:23.860
It's going to lower my social status because I don't know how to speak the reigning

01:34:23.860 --> 01:34:24.180
language.

01:34:24.260 --> 01:34:29.300
So I might really have an incentive to rebel against this cultural change that puts me on

01:34:29.300 --> 01:34:32.100
the losing end of this new status game.

01:34:32.180 --> 01:34:36.820
And you could imagine similar dynamics arising from other changes in local norms and status

01:34:36.820 --> 01:34:37.060
games.

01:34:37.140 --> 01:34:42.010
You know, there are going to be uh um some people who win out from those changes and some

01:34:42.010 --> 01:34:43.450
people who really lose from those changes.

01:34:43.530 --> 01:34:47.370
So culture itself can be a battleground with winners and losers.

01:34:47.450 --> 01:34:50.810
Uh and and there can be a zero-sumness to that uh as well.

01:34:52.490 --> 01:34:54.090
Yes, I it agreed.

01:34:54.170 --> 01:34:57.850
And I think what's really interesting about culture too is that it emerges from lots of

01:34:57.850 --> 01:34:59.130
individual decision making.

01:34:59.210 --> 01:35:03.050
You can be in a position of power and have an outsized influence on what happens with

01:35:03.050 --> 01:35:07.240
cultural practices, but there's a lot of negotiation coming all the time.

01:35:07.640 --> 01:35:09.800
We're not, of course, blank slate.

01:35:09.960 --> 01:35:11.080
I know y'all have talked about that.

01:35:11.240 --> 01:35:15.960
We're not just here to receive culture and not negotiate a bit and actually kind of be

01:35:15.960 --> 01:35:19.960
pushing back and looking at that, looking out for for what's good for us.

01:35:21.000 --> 01:35:25.400
And and I think that's interesting in terms of, you know, thinking about how that

01:35:25.400 --> 01:35:27.240
negotiation's happening in in real time.

01:35:27.400 --> 01:35:28.520
So yes, to your point.

01:35:28.680 --> 01:35:29.240
Mm-hmm.

01:35:29.810 --> 01:35:30.050
Yeah.

01:35:30.130 --> 01:35:34.290
I mean, in in in a way, we're trying to change the status game in the social sciences to,

01:35:34.370 --> 01:35:38.210
you know, to privilege evolutionary perspectives, which, you know, we win out from that

01:35:38.210 --> 01:35:42.130
because we've invested a lot of time and energy into learning uh evolutionary ideas.

01:35:42.210 --> 01:35:45.570
And the people who lose out from that are the people who have not invested time and energy

01:35:45.570 --> 01:35:49.170
in learning evolutionary ideas, and their status is going to fall if we end up winning,

01:35:49.330 --> 01:35:51.960
which, you know, who's to say whether we will or not?

01:35:52.120 --> 01:35:57.000
But yeah, uh every cultural change has winners and losers.

01:35:57.080 --> 01:36:02.200
Um, and I think that that sheds light on why you know we have things like culture wars,

01:36:02.440 --> 01:36:04.600
wars over culture itself.

01:36:05.320 --> 01:36:06.600
Um Yeah.

01:36:07.000 --> 01:36:07.720
That's great.

01:36:07.880 --> 01:36:11.880
Um and if you're listening, you are learning, so you're not the losers.

01:36:12.600 --> 01:36:13.080
Yeah, exactly.

01:36:13.160 --> 01:36:14.600
You'll be on the winning side of the cultural work.

01:36:15.080 --> 01:36:15.960
Because you're a learning side.

01:36:16.490 --> 01:36:21.770
Um and uh we can we can sort of I uh this has been an incredible conversation and it's

01:36:21.770 --> 01:36:22.170
wonderful.

01:36:22.250 --> 01:36:26.650
Um I'm gonna just ask this question now because we need to get to it and we can see how far

01:36:26.890 --> 01:36:29.370
we we are we are reaching the end here.

01:36:29.530 --> 01:36:31.850
But is there anything we should have asked you?

01:36:32.250 --> 01:36:37.130
Um and one of the questions, uh maybe or one of the options, and you can just, you know,

01:36:37.290 --> 01:36:38.250
say whatever you want.

01:36:38.410 --> 01:36:42.170
We we've gotten away from asking people how they got into stuff because you know, people

01:36:42.170 --> 01:36:46.900
also said like I don't some people said they didn't care but I am I am curious sort of like

01:36:46.980 --> 01:36:52.740
you know um if uh so yeah one is what should we we should have asked you and number two

01:36:53.060 --> 01:36:58.660
um if you do have sort of uh if you want to share sort of like what your background was or

01:36:58.660 --> 01:37:03.460
how you got into doing this especially for me and I think I have talked to people who are

01:37:03.460 --> 01:37:07.460
very interested in like especially people who decide to go to the field you know because

01:37:07.540 --> 01:37:12.580
you know as as as we've all heard from people who are in the field, you know, there's

01:37:12.660 --> 01:37:16.230
there's there's lots of things in the field.

01:37:16.310 --> 01:37:21.590
Um and that's quite a hardship, but it's also a really exciting and interesting place to

01:37:21.590 --> 01:37:21.830
be.

01:37:21.990 --> 01:37:27.430
Um and I think at least for those of us who just stay in the lab, um, sometimes it feels

01:37:27.430 --> 01:37:30.310
like it requires an explanation, fair or not.

01:37:30.390 --> 01:37:32.790
Um but like how did you get to that point?

01:37:32.950 --> 01:37:35.670
Um or any other question you think we should have asked you.

01:37:35.750 --> 01:37:35.990
Yeah.

01:37:36.300 --> 01:37:37.660
Yeah, that's really interesting.

01:37:37.900 --> 01:37:42.140
Well, I want to talk a little bit about kind of uh that background and how I've ended up

01:37:42.140 --> 01:37:46.780
where I am now, which will also open up for for folks who are listening if they want to

01:37:46.780 --> 01:37:51.740
follow up with me and talk about um the kind of applied work I'm I'm doing now combined

01:37:51.740 --> 01:37:54.220
with with some of the basic science that I do.

01:37:54.460 --> 01:38:00.220
Um so the short story is that I was in undergrad and I loved

01:38:00.220 --> 01:38:05.990
psychology, anthropology, I loved ecology and I loved international relations.

01:38:06.150 --> 01:38:10.470
And I was sitting in a social psych class one day, and there was a single paragraph in my

01:38:10.470 --> 01:38:12.950
textbook about evolutionary psychology.

01:38:13.110 --> 01:38:14.630
I was at UCLA.

01:38:14.790 --> 01:38:20.070
And so I Googled evolutionary psychology, UCLA, and found Dan Fessler, who was my

01:38:20.070 --> 01:38:21.270
undergraduate advisor.

01:38:21.430 --> 01:38:25.430
And so that's actually how I ended up in the evolutionary behavioral sciences, is it

01:38:25.430 --> 01:38:26.870
checked all of my boxes.

01:38:27.140 --> 01:38:30.660
And so when you hear that story, what you'll also hear is you'll hear kind of the

01:38:30.660 --> 01:38:33.700
international relations, that kind of global perspective.

01:38:33.940 --> 01:38:38.180
And that is the the bug that's been sitting in there the whole time that got me to the

01:38:38.180 --> 01:38:38.820
field.

01:38:39.300 --> 01:38:44.500
So if you are listening and you are like, I could I could never do field work, that was me.

01:38:44.660 --> 01:38:46.500
Um I was scared of everything.

01:38:46.660 --> 01:38:52.340
I have a five-year-old she's turning five tomorrow and she is afraid

01:38:52.470 --> 01:38:56.470
of some very predictable things that we we know about from studying evolutionary

01:38:56.470 --> 01:39:00.230
psychology, things like the dark things like monsters.

01:39:00.390 --> 01:39:04.470
Shout out to Clark Barrett here as well, and things big dangerous animals are very salient.

01:39:04.710 --> 01:39:07.190
And so I was afraid of all those things as an adult.

01:39:07.270 --> 01:39:10.310
And here I was living in the Amazon with no electricity.

01:39:10.470 --> 01:39:12.070
Um, there were lots of bugs.

01:39:12.230 --> 01:39:14.390
We were, you know, getting sick all the time.

01:39:14.550 --> 01:39:17.670
And this is the life that folks live in the Amazon every single day, right?

01:39:17.750 --> 01:39:20.870
It was just me experiencing it for the first time as an outsider.

01:39:21.270 --> 01:39:25.720
And what I really liked about it is first of all, I felt like I could do anything, which

01:39:25.720 --> 01:39:26.200
was really nice.

01:39:26.360 --> 01:39:31.240
It made any things that came after seem less challenging to do, which is nice.

01:39:31.480 --> 01:39:36.760
The other thing also that I've really enjoyed about it is I love thinking hard about the

01:39:36.760 --> 01:39:37.080
mind.

01:39:37.240 --> 01:39:40.760
I love thinking hard about human sociality, about why it is the way it is.

01:39:40.920 --> 01:39:44.120
And I also really love the opportunity to apply that.

01:39:44.750 --> 01:39:49.950
And one of the reasons I caught that particular bug is by living with folks and seeing what

01:39:49.950 --> 01:39:51.310
was salient to them.

01:39:51.790 --> 01:39:54.590
Climate change came up a ton when I was working in Bolivia.

01:39:54.750 --> 01:39:56.750
People were experiencing huge floods.

01:39:56.990 --> 01:40:00.830
A big flood came in in 2014 and really affected everyone.

01:40:00.910 --> 01:40:02.510
And I was there in the aftermath.

01:40:02.750 --> 01:40:08.430
And so that was an opportunity to also think for me how can I continue to do the work that

01:40:08.430 --> 01:40:13.380
I love doing when it comes to thinking hard about human evolution and human sociality, and

01:40:13.380 --> 01:40:18.020
at the same time, actually apply that to the context of climate change or apply that to the

01:40:18.020 --> 01:40:20.100
context of natural resource management.

01:40:20.260 --> 01:40:26.260
And so what's really fun now is I do my job in terms of doing that hard thinking and also

01:40:26.260 --> 01:40:28.980
doing the applied work and pairing the two.

01:40:29.140 --> 01:40:33.970
And I think what's interesting too, speaking of the incentives offered by granting agencies

01:40:34.130 --> 01:40:38.370
that is ebbing and flowing in real time in the United States, but in a broader global

01:40:38.370 --> 01:40:41.970
perspective, when it comes to the granting landscape, there's still a lot of interest in

01:40:41.970 --> 01:40:46.690
how to go from that basic to the applied when it comes to things like climate change.

01:40:47.490 --> 01:40:52.930
So I'm always happy to talk about that more, but that's kind of how I landed at where I am

01:40:52.930 --> 01:40:53.250
now.

01:40:53.410 --> 01:40:57.660
And how you'll hear me in one conversation talk about parochial altruism.

01:40:57.740 --> 01:41:02.460
And then in the next c conversation, I might be talking about how people are migrating in

01:41:02.460 --> 01:41:06.300
response to certain climate shocks and not others and what leads people to move.

01:41:06.460 --> 01:41:08.380
Uh, those are all parts of my purview today.

01:41:08.620 --> 01:41:09.020
That's great.

01:41:09.180 --> 01:41:09.420
Yeah.

01:41:09.500 --> 01:41:15.020
I think a lot of people, um, as they get um far enough along that it's not

01:41:15.020 --> 01:41:20.140
desperate um in their career, they want to do something and make an have an impact too.

01:41:20.220 --> 01:41:24.300
And I think that's that's wonderful that you're able to to do that.

01:41:25.110 --> 01:41:28.870
And uh um yeah, I uh that's just that's fantastic.

01:41:28.950 --> 01:41:29.590
Yeah.

01:41:31.430 --> 01:41:36.630
Well I think we're um getting to that time in the episode where we ask our uh our typical

01:41:36.630 --> 01:41:40.310
question which is uh is there anything we should have asked you

01:41:42.710 --> 01:41:48.360
beyond that um the the really funny thing, and I'll say this because it came up recently,

01:41:48.520 --> 01:41:52.200
is someone said to me, uh, are you leaving academia?

01:41:52.440 --> 01:41:56.200
And I say this because I actually spend some time, these are for folks who who end up

01:41:56.200 --> 01:41:57.320
looking me up after this.

01:41:57.560 --> 01:42:01.080
I spent some time with a foot in industry and a foot in academia.

01:42:01.240 --> 01:42:03.240
And David, I see you here.

01:42:03.400 --> 01:42:07.790
And one of the reasons I really like it, and maybe, maybe you too, is that I get the best

01:42:07.790 --> 01:42:08.430
of both worlds.

01:42:08.590 --> 01:42:12.750
I actually think I heard you mention that when you were talking about your your story, is

01:42:12.750 --> 01:42:17.550
that I get to spend time kind of helping folks figure out how they can help other people,

01:42:17.710 --> 01:42:21.710
what what folks need, how to better serve a community or a customer.

01:42:21.870 --> 01:42:23.070
It's a lot of fun.

01:42:23.310 --> 01:42:28.100
And then I also, of course, do my full-time job faculty at Penn State.

01:42:28.260 --> 01:42:29.540
And so I really love that.

01:42:29.700 --> 01:42:31.860
I actually love academia for that reason.

01:42:31.940 --> 01:42:35.620
So here's a little plug for academia for folks who are thinking about the compare and

01:42:35.620 --> 01:42:41.380
contrast is that in my academic life, I'm actually rewarded for doing research and then

01:42:41.380 --> 01:42:45.300
also contributing to things like professionalization and contributing to things like

01:42:45.300 --> 01:42:48.100
placing our students in other sectors.

01:42:48.340 --> 01:42:52.900
I think it's really fun and it's another opportunity to think about how our work translates

01:42:52.970 --> 01:42:55.130
beyond just the academic realm.

01:42:55.610 --> 01:42:57.210
So that would be the question to ask me.

01:42:57.370 --> 01:42:59.370
Answer is no, I actually love my job.

01:43:00.010 --> 01:43:04.730
And I love my job for that specific reason because it actually is mutually compatible with

01:43:04.730 --> 01:43:05.850
doing that kind of work.

01:43:07.130 --> 01:43:11.770
Well yeah, no, it's uh it's it's a great I mean it's it's wonderful to to be in in that to

01:43:11.770 --> 01:43:16.570
have that privileged position of of of getting the best of both worlds and and uh and you

01:43:16.570 --> 01:43:17.690
know being in both sectors.

01:43:17.850 --> 01:43:21.640
I will say, you know, I do have a blog and I can write stuff that, you know, thousands of

01:43:21.640 --> 01:43:27.640
people will will read, but um uh it's not it doesn't give me the same fulfillment as,

01:43:27.720 --> 01:43:31.960
you know, you know, having a a a a theoretical insight and and writing an academic paper

01:43:31.960 --> 01:43:35.880
about it, even though, you know, maybe ten, twenty people will read the academic paper um

01:43:35.960 --> 01:43:37.640
compared to thousands on the blog.

01:43:37.880 --> 01:43:42.680
Still, those ten twenty people will take that idea and they will, you know, maybe they'll

01:43:42.920 --> 01:43:46.360
amend certain things to it, maybe they'll elaborate on it, maybe they'll criticize certain

01:43:46.360 --> 01:43:48.200
parts of it and they'll build off of it.

01:43:48.370 --> 01:43:51.650
Um and it will lead to intellectual progress.

01:43:51.810 --> 01:43:53.730
Um and you don't get that with the blog post.

01:43:53.810 --> 01:43:56.770
Um people will read it and then they'll just go on about their day and then maybe they'll

01:43:56.770 --> 01:43:57.730
forget about it next week.

01:43:57.890 --> 01:44:02.050
But if you write an academic paper, you are contributing to intellectual progress in a in a

01:44:02.050 --> 01:44:02.770
meaningful way.

01:44:02.930 --> 01:44:08.450
Um and so that for me is is the is the thing that keeps me uh uh going uh in in that

01:44:08.450 --> 01:44:08.850
direction.

01:44:08.930 --> 01:44:14.050
Uh just the the the thrill of of uh intellectual progress and and contributing to it.

01:44:14.290 --> 01:44:19.260
Um so thank you for uh contributing to our intellectual progress and and the intellectual

01:44:19.340 --> 01:44:20.940
progress of our of our listeners.

01:44:21.180 --> 01:44:23.980
Um and uh yeah, this was a wonderful conversation.

01:44:24.060 --> 01:44:25.340
We really appreciate having you.

01:44:25.660 --> 01:44:26.940
Yeah, thank you for your time.

01:44:27.340 --> 01:44:28.540
Yeah, this was super fun.

01:44:28.700 --> 01:44:32.300
I feel like um you know we we covered a lot of ground.

01:44:32.460 --> 01:44:37.180
Um I'm certainly gonna have to listen to this to catch everything, so uh

01:44:38.630 --> 01:44:39.990
But it was it was wonderful.

01:44:40.070 --> 01:44:40.790
Thank you, Ann.

01:44:40.870 --> 01:44:44.790
And I know we've taught we've hit on a lot of people, some that we've had on before, some

01:44:44.790 --> 01:44:45.590
we haven't.

01:44:45.750 --> 01:44:51.430
Um, and uh, and you know, you you have created and part of a wonderful social

01:44:51.430 --> 01:44:57.430
network of people moving the um the knowledge forward and intellectual progress forward.

01:44:57.510 --> 01:44:58.710
And so thank you for that.

01:44:58.870 --> 01:45:04.740
Um and we look forward to having you back and having some of your uh academic lineage um in

01:45:04.740 --> 01:45:06.420
both directions on as well.

01:45:06.580 --> 01:45:10.420
So thank you for being part of the evolutionary behavioral sciences.

01:45:10.580 --> 01:45:16.500
And I think your your ability to sort of articulate and even like source a

01:45:16.500 --> 01:45:16.980
lot of that.

01:45:17.140 --> 01:45:22.020
I think for a lot of people, especially who might be outsiders, you you have really

01:45:22.020 --> 01:45:27.140
articulated the connections between areas so so well in this in this session.

01:45:27.300 --> 01:45:29.220
So thank you for doing that too.

01:45:30.010 --> 01:45:30.650
Absolutely.

01:45:30.730 --> 01:45:30.970
Yep.

01:45:31.130 --> 01:45:33.130
Study human society and love it myself.

01:45:33.290 --> 01:45:34.330
So happy to do it.

01:45:34.490 --> 01:45:35.290
Thank you for having me.

01:45:35.370 --> 01:45:36.490
It's been a great conversation.

01:45:36.650 --> 01:45:40.410
And also shout out to Pascal Boyer for writing the paper that we were all thinking about

01:45:40.410 --> 01:45:40.730
writing.

01:45:40.810 --> 01:45:42.890
And I realize that he's gotten there before us.

01:45:43.290 --> 01:45:44.650
Well, I think it I think it's a paragraph.

01:45:44.810 --> 01:45:45.210
We have to see.

01:45:45.290 --> 01:45:48.490
I feel like we should call Pascal up and dial a friend here.

01:45:48.570 --> 01:45:52.730
And uh, but we'll have to have him on, or we can all four talk about it.

01:45:52.880 --> 01:45:55.040
so um in a in a later episode.

01:45:55.120 --> 01:46:00.080
But yeah, thank you again, uh Ann, and uh and thanks everybody for listening.

01:46:03.200 --> 01:46:06.480
So David, uh this is the end of the podcast.

01:46:06.640 --> 01:46:08.160
People made it through.

01:46:08.400 --> 01:46:12.880
Um and uh I don't have my

01:46:15.130 --> 01:46:19.610
This is the part where we say, uh, you know, uh leave us a kind review, visit us on

01:46:19.610 --> 01:46:20.330
Patreon.

01:46:20.490 --> 01:46:24.650
Uh honestly just talk to us, reach out to us on social media, or send us an email.

01:46:24.810 --> 01:46:28.490
Like we we love to hear from you if you have any questions, topics you want to get covered,

01:46:28.650 --> 01:46:29.850
ideas for episodes.

01:46:30.090 --> 01:46:33.050
We uh we're we're very uh friendly and and pleasant to talk to.

01:46:33.370 --> 01:46:35.850
You know, I don't think I have we've ever linked the email.

01:46:35.930 --> 01:46:37.610
We should put that link in the show notes.

01:46:37.690 --> 01:46:38.090
I'll do that.

01:46:38.740 --> 01:46:40.260
yeah, that's we should probably do that.

01:46:40.500 --> 01:46:41.300
That'll be an oversight.

01:46:41.380 --> 01:46:43.700
So send us an email, but we won't tell you what the email address is.

01:46:43.780 --> 01:46:44.420
We'll we'll put that in.

01:46:46.020 --> 01:46:47.620
One of our mem many bumbling mistakes.

01:46:48.020 --> 01:46:48.340
Exactly.

01:46:48.500 --> 01:46:49.060
Okay, good.

01:46:49.140 --> 01:46:50.420
Well thanks everybody for listening.

01:46:50.500 --> 01:46:51.060
Have a good week.