#09 - Darren Burke - The Psychology of Evolution, Attraction & Dark Personality Types

In Episode 09, I sit down with Associate Professor Darren Burke to explore the psychology of evolution, attraction and dark personality traits.

Darren is an Experimental and Biological Psychologist whose work examines how evolutionary pressures have shaped the way we see, think, learn and relate to one another. We unpack what evolutionary psychology actually is (and what it isn’t), why sexual dimorphism exists and how traits linked to attraction may function as signals of health, dominance or reproductive fitness.

We also explore the darker side of attraction — discussing traits associated with the Dark Tetrad (Narcissism, Machiavellians, Psychopathy, and Sadism), why they can sometimes appear appealing and how evolutionary theory helps explain both their persistence and their risks.

This episode challenges oversimplified narratives about “men vs women” and instead focuses on variability, function and the deeper psychological mechanisms that shape human behaviour.

If you’re interested in biology, social cognition, attraction or the evolutionary roots of personality — this conversation brings nuance to one of psychology’s most misunderstood areas.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:04

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SPEAKER_00 1:01

Okay. Yep, I'm Darren Burke. I'm an academic at the University of Newcastle. Been there for uh 15 years now, trained at Sydney University many years ago. So bi so biopsychology is everywhere, every way in which you could think about biology and psychology intersecting. So I mean a lot of people when they think about bios biological psychology think about how the brain controls behavior, which is a big part of biopsychology, but you know, it's also it's also it's also about genes, it's also about hormones, it's also about you know all the and evolution, it's about all the kind of biological stuff that impacts on psychological mechanisms, basically. What got you interested in it? So I've always been interested in biology. In fact, I started so for most of my life I was convinced I was gonna be a vet. And until kind of year 10 at school, I was gonna be a vet, and then the first Cosmos series came on TV, and I was like, oh no, wait, I'm gonna be a scientist because that's cool. And so it was like it was a really it was like the Carl Sagan version of Cosmos, and it was like incredibly inspirational. And so I changed my plan basically, but the plan was originally to do physics, right? And so, because that's what cosmos was kind of about, and so I went to university, I did a science degree. In second year, physics and genetics clashed, and so I couldn't do them both. And so, because I was always interested in biology, you know, I thought, oh, psychology must have something to do with biology, and so picked psychology in second year as like an elective kind of thing in my main biology kind of pathway that I then settled on, and kind of fell in love with the perceptual aspect of it, really, with the the experimental psychology stuff, right? So, you know, I didn't really know very much about psychology, and most people who start psychology don't know very much about it, never really thought about doing psych. And, you know, I always had this biological interest, and then there was this area of psychology, the kind of perception stuff, looking at vision, which is what I ended up doing my PhD in. There was a really inspirational lecturer who who became my PhD supervisor, talking about the visual system, and and what he did that really attracted me to the area was that he kind of tied together physiology, like you know, what we know from recording what's happening in monkey brains while they look at stuff, and perceptual experiences that we have, right? It was this place where you could see how that link really worked, right? You could under you can understand, wait, I'm seeing this like this because of this physiology being active. And so that that was really exciting to me, right? It was really exciting because it tied together biology with behavioral stuff, which is always always also kind of interested in. And so I threw away physics as a plan and and you know, I was tossing up biology and psychology right up until fourth year, and then decided to go psych for fourth year, and there you go.

SPEAKER_01 3:55

Now here I am. Yeah, it's an interesting one. I'm similar in regards to I didn't I think I knew what psychology was when I started studying it because I started rather late, but people do get into it thinking it's gonna be that talk-based counselling side of things, and it is a science. Absolutely. And yeah, I think the fact that you can link the bio side to the psychology side makes it more valid. It's not like you're just interpreting or you're you're working off the fly. Like, yeah, the the bio side of it is so important, I think. You have a strong interest in evolutionary perspectives. Yeah, when did that come through?

SPEAKER_00 4:33

I mean, that's a good question. So I I don't remember exactly, but I look, I I've I've always like I said, I've always been I've always loved animals basically. And so, you know, understanding, caring about evolution is something that I did since I was a kid. Like every kid loves dinosaurs, you know, that kind of encourages you to think about evolution because they're gone, like most species. Well, they're not gone, they're birds. It, you know, it it's a logical thing for anyone interested in biology to be interested in. It's really rare in psychology for people to care about evolution. My interest in evolution is lifelong, basically. My using that to try to understand psychological mechanisms is newer than my PhD, right? I was also always interested in that kind of stuff, but you know, you do you get drawn into particular kinds of research areas, everybody does. Most people end up getting channeled into a particular research area and staying there. I'm not very good at that. And so, so, you know, I did I did kind of basic perception stuff, right? Like my PhD was about understanding a particular aspect of how we perceive movement, right? How we detect movement in the visual world, and you know, trying to tie that to the physiology, right? That's that's the kind of stuff that my PhD supervisor did, and that's what we did in that lab, you know, trying to understand our personal and you know, our our experience in terms of known physiology, tying those two things together. It wasn't really until I'd finished my PhD, got an academic job that I that I was then kind of freer, I guess, to go, oh wait, I could do this other stuff, right? I could do other kinds of research. And so, you know, two the two large government grants I've got to do research have both been about understanding communicative signaling, right, which is an evolutionary question. But it also kind of ties to perceptual stuff, right? It ties into, you know, how you detect things in the world and how so the first one was was lizards, in fact, signaling to each other. So non-human animals signaling. It's a big area of investigation in this area called behavioral ecology, which is uh an area of investigation that looks at the evolution of particular kinds of behaviors, basically, the function of those behaviors and how that got selected for evolutionarily. And so there's a big area of investigation in that field is animal signaling, right? Communication between a signaller and a receiver. And then my other big research grant was to study the same kind of thing in humans, right? To study interactive signaling between people like us, right? Primarily collected data where we had dyads interacting, people, you know, literally discussing controversial topics, and we measured their facial movements while they were doing that to look at the kind of nonverbal signaling that's going on between them. It kind of developed into something that I was able to do more of, kind of thing, right?

SPEAKER_01 7:16

But I but I've always had that interest in evolution. For people that don't come from a psych background or even like a university background, why does learning evolution and biopsy matter?

SPEAKER_00 7:28

It's a good question. So look, in terms of so biosych matters, let's start with the last one because that's all I can remember. But biosych matters because, you know, I mean people don't people don't really think about psychology in this way, but we're biological beings, right? Everything that we do is, you know, constrained by our biology and influenced by our biology. Um, and so if you want to understand people, and lots of people want to understand people, then you need to understand psychology, obviously. But but I think taking a biological perspective on that gives you a much deeper insight into those psychological processes than than thinking about it in any other way, right? And there's a long history, there's a long tradition in psychology of trying to think about psychological mechanisms kind of without biology. Some people are, you know, actually opposed to doing that for reasons I don't really get. Um, like I genuinely don't understand. Like it just doesn't make sense to me. But you know, if you think about, you know, if you if you were gonna study nutrition, then then there's no way you would have an area of investigation of nutrition that didn't take into account human biology, right? You just wouldn't do it. Psychology is what we not what we do with our guts, is what we do with our brain. Brains are part of our body as well, right? And so it just makes sense to me that if you want to understand people completely, then you kind of need to think about their biology, right? And and you know, evolution is what gave us the brains that we have. And so if you want to understand why we work the way we do, then you kind of need to roll in an evolutionary perspective, I think.

SPEAKER_01 8:59

One of the big topics we wanted to talk about was sexual dimorphism.

SPEAKER_00 9:03

Sexual dimorphism is has many forms. It just refers to there being a difference between the sexes. So in a whole bunch of species, um if you look at a whole range of different birds, there'll be examples of the males being much more colourful than the females, for example. So there's that that's an example of sexual dimorphism, right? So there's a difference between the sexes that's consistent. There's size differences, so lots of animals. So in all in almost all the mammals, including us, males tend to be substantially bigger than females. That's an example of a size dimorphism. It's not true in every mammal. So leopard seals, for example, is an example of a species where the females are actually bigger. In most insects, females tend to be bigger, in most spiders, females tend to be bigger because and they're bigger because they need to provide more for the offspring, right? So they need to lay eggs and do those kinds of things, provision the offspring. That's why um leopard seal females are bigger, but in most of the mammals, males are bigger because males compete with each other to get access to the females. And so evolution has selected for bigger and bigger males, right? Because the ones that win the fights are the bigger ones, and so that's led to males just ending up substantially bigger than females. And you know, there's there's costs to being big as well. So if you've got a bigger body, you need more resources, you need to eat more, that makes your life harder, right? And so there's this evolutionary balance between sexual selection and natural selection, right? Being able to get access to mates selects for you being bigger, but being able to eat enough selects for you being smaller, right? And so there's this balance point breached.

SPEAKER_02 10:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 10:38

Before we dive into it too much more as well, uh, what are the key drivers of evolution?

SPEAKER_00 10:44

Well, so I mean, I was just talking about sexual versus natural selection. There's so Darwin kind of discovered both of these. The f his first book was a mostly about natural selection, didn't discover them. Well, I mean it's he kind of formulated them, right? I mean, they were happening, they were happening and he kind of worked it out. Yeah, natural selection is about random variation in you have a population of individuals, they vary because of their genes, basically. And so, you know, there are genetic differences between the individuals in that population. Some of those individuals, just by chance, well, by selection really, some of those individuals are going to do better than other individuals, right? So they'll be better able to get access to food, or they'll be faster and so better able to escape from predators, or they'll be able to, they'll produce more sperm if they're a male, for example, and so be more likely to produce offspring, or they'll make more milk if they're a female mammal, and so be better able to feed their offspring. All of those just by chance, right? So genes will just make them have that characteristic. Evolution is about selecting for the successful characteristics. And it's not deliberate, it's just the case that if you are a female mammal and you produce better milk or more milk, then you can feed your offspring better, right? And those offspring are going to do better. And so those, yeah, and so those genes for producing that effect get passed on to the next generation, right? And that then becomes the new norm, and so on and so on, right? And so that's that's how natural selection works. Darwin also realized that there are a bunch of characteristics that were pretty hard to explain that way, right? So one of the things he was really impressed with was peacocks having these gigantic tails, which he kind of guessed, and it turns out he's it's right, because people have done the experiments, was actually a big survival impediment, right? And so that's hard to explain from natural selection. If you're a male peacock and you have this, if you have this great big tail, then that makes you much easier to catch, right? So it so tigers eat you more frequently if you have this great big tail. And so he realized he needed a different explanation for for that kind of stuff, right? For things that looked like impediments, survival handicaps of some kind. And the idea he came up with was, well, if there's if the opposite sex is in some way selecting for between individuals, yeah, then if so if they're using, if the female, if the pea hens are using tails to select the best quality males, then that is an evolutionary process that will select for bigger and bigger tails, right? Or more and more and more elaborate and beautiful tails. And of course, natural selection and sexual selection frequently work in opposite directions, right? So the females will be picking the biggest, most colourful tails possible, but natural selection will be saying, well, they can't be too big, right? Or you you just won't be able to get around. And so there's this balancing going on between them.

SPEAKER_01 13:23

And so how how do we tie that into um sexual selection in humans?

SPEAKER_00 13:29

Yeah, that's a good question. So humans are an unusual example, right?

SPEAKER_01 13:33

So I assume it would be more pronounced in animals than it would be in humans.

SPEAKER_00 13:38

Yeah, it kind of depends, right? So that's so there's I mean, there's some species where not a lot of sexual selection seems to be going on, right? And so natural selection shaped up everything. And there's there's there they're species in which there's very little either choice. So the two kinds of sexual selection that exist are mostly females, not always females, but mostly females choosing the best males. And the reason it's the females that do the choosing is because they're the ones that have the most to offer a partnership, a sexual relationship partnership. They provide the offspring, yeah. Yeah, because they're the ones that that either lay the eggs or or grow the offspring inside them, etc. And so they necessarily provide more resources. And so they've got more to lose by making bad decisions. And so they tend to be the sex that is choosier, right? That picks between the op the other sex. And so it's usually males that are being selected. And so one kind of sexual selection is that females pick the best males based on, you know, visual or acoustic or some kind of characteristic that is a measure of their quality. Yeah, right. So female frogs will pick the males that can croak the loudest, right? Because that suggests that they're strong and robust and they'll be giving good genes to their offspring. Yeah. The other kind of sexual selection, which is also operates mostly on males, again, because females have the most to offer a reproductive relationship, is direct competition between males. And so sexual selection creates, you know, the giant antlers that that male deer and moose have where they battle battle each other with, right? Sexual selection also kind of selects for elephant seal males to be three times the size of elephant seal females because the big males are literally beating each other up in order to get access to a whole beach full of females. And so there's massively strong selection pressure for being able to win those fights. Because if you lose, you have no offspring in the next generation. If you win, you have hundreds. And so there's really strong selection pressure. And so, you know, we were talking earlier about sexual dimorphism. Most of the size differences where males are bigger than females are a consequence of that kind of sexual selection. Males competing with each other directly for access to females. Yeah. Humans, you know, humans are a good example of a species. So if you look at all the other primates, so you know, look at gorillas, look at chimpanzees, look at even monkeys, but you know, particularly the great apes, the males are two or three times bigger than the females. They're much bigger than the females. That's because they engage in strong, you know, sexual selection, sexually selected competition between each other. Humans, in humans, males are bigger than females on average, but that difference is much smaller. And it's been getting smaller across evolutionary time if you look at, you know, human ancestors. What that suggests is that humans until relatively recently had a similar kind of mating system in which males competed with each other to get access to females, but that's been getting weaker over evolutionary time. What would you say the drivers of that? I mean, the best theories of what produces that is that human babies require so much help that humans have been under kind of natural selection, selection pressure to pair bond, to bond up, and males and females form relationships, long-term relationships, or it I mean it varies, right, depending on all sorts of things. But typical human mating pattern is that men and women, every culture has marriage of some kind, they pair bond for an extended period of time in order to raise offspring. And so that means that that strong selection pressure for males winning fights and having hundreds of babies is massively weakened in humans, right? Because if you need to pair bond in order to care for those offspring, then you have far fewer opportunities to completely dominate an entire population and and father all of the children, right? And so, yeah, so the idea is that that pair bonding, which is pretty rare in mammals, so there's a there's a couple of species of rodents and there's a couple of other primates, but they're they're like little tiny South American monkeys. They're not the not none of the great apes do this, none of them pair bond, except for us. But it's really common in birds, right? So birds have offspring that require lots of help, and they pretty much all pairbond, right? Because because both the male and the female need to provide for those offspring because they just sit there in the nest begging for food, and so it requires both parents to feed them. That's but it's particularly true in Australia, right, where resources are kind of scarce. So the idea is that humans have evolved from animals in which there was strong male-male competition for males to get all the matings with all the available females, basically. But we're a species that's clearly moved into this different mating system, right?

SPEAKER_01 18:27

Where where we pair bond. It makes sense to pair bond when you're raising offspring. It's gonna sound like a stupid question to ask, but why is it that humans stay together once their offspring has left? Well, they don't always, but why is the uh the norm, sorry, to be um together?

SPEAKER_00 18:45

Yeah, it's yeah, it's a really good question. I think, yeah, one of the reasons it's a really good question, which you may or may not have you may have done this unconsciously, but one of the reasons it's a really good question is because it focuses in on the fact that evolutionarily selected mechanisms will not always they won't always work perfectly because they're they're all they're dur they're they're chance variations, right? So, you know, they've had a long time to be honed by selection, and so they're often really good, right? They're amazing. Like, you know, every aspect of our internal biology is incredible in lots of ways, right? Because it's been shaped and shaped and shaped and shaped by generation after generation. But it's not always going to be true that a mechanism will work perfectly, and in particular, it's not always gonna be true that a mechanism will work perfectly just no matter what the environment is, right? People tend to ignore when they think about evolutionary psychology. You know, there's a lot of people who kind of pick up evolutionary psychology and go, oh wow, this means this. And you know, the the things they focus on is look, you have genes for doing this and genes for doing this, and so you'll necessarily behave in that way. But actually, genes make proteins, right? It's literally all they do. And so it will always be true that a genetically selected mechanism will be dependent on a particular environment to work in a p in a particular way, right? So if you put the same organism in a different environment, then that gene may well express itself completely differently, right? And you know, uh the world has changed too rapidly for evolution to keep up, basically. And so look, one reason so maybe, so maybe the mechanism, it's hard to know, right? Because you can't go back in time and look at how these mechanisms worked.

SPEAKER_01 20:20

Worked, yeah. Can you think of an example as to where the trait would express differently?

SPEAKER_00 20:23

Our eating behavior is a perfect example, right? So humans clearly are a species that have faced strong evolutionary selection pressure to pull every possible nutrient out of the food that they eat, right? So so the evolutionary challenge that we have faced in the past has been not having enough food, right? So we've been through famines, we've been through just food scarcity, right? So humans have these incredibly efficient physiological mechanisms, but we also have psychological mechanisms that predispose us towards eating as much kind of high-calorie food as we can possibly get our hands on, right? In the past, that's what kept us alive, right? When food was scarce and hard to get. Now that food isn't scarce or hard to get, that can be pretty maladaptive, right? So it can lead to all kinds of health problems because people just take on board way more calories than they need and end up, you know, that's part of what produces the obesity crisis, right? It's that people don't have evolved mechanisms. I mean, people can do it consciously, right? But they don't have evolved mechanisms that stop them eating too much.

SPEAKER_01 21:24

It's not a physiological regulation. Yeah, exactly. I mean, you get full, but like Right.

SPEAKER_00 21:29

But it's but it's based on volume, right? Yeah. Rather than calories. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 21:32

That's right. How do you actually understand or how do you know when a trait functions as a signal of an underlying quality?

SPEAKER_00 21:39

Yeah, that's a really good question. You don't. So it's I mean, it's a hypothesis, right? It's all like inferences or it's it's I mean, you so what people do is generate hypotheses based on, well, if that was true, then this ought to be true, right? It ought to be the c it ought to be the case that so you know, if you hypothesize that something is a signal of some underlying trait, then the very least you should be able to demonstrate is that it varies with that trait, right? So if you get a bunch of women and you measure their level of estradiol, right? So you just, you just in any, you take their blood or you get their saliva or any in any bodily fluid, you can measure how much you can measure the hormones, right? You can do assays that measure their hormone levels. There's natural variation, right? So there's variation across menstrual cycles, there's very variation across the day and all these things. But if you measure at the same time every day across a bunch of different women, for example, there's similar things with men. If you get a bunch of, if you measure the hormones in a whole bunch of women and you get the the 10 women that rate the highest level of estradiol and you get the 10 women that have the lowest level of estradiol, and then you take an make an average of their faces, right? You just take photographs, high quality photographs of those faces and you just average them together. Right. And then you get people to rate the attractiveness of those faces, then the ones that are high in estradiol will by every single person be rated as more attractive than the ones that are low in estradiol. There you go. And so what that suggests is that there's something about their face and you know you still need to work out what that is but there's something about their face that is signaling that level of estradiol. And you know that the evolutionary hypothesis is that that means, you know, if you've got a high level of estradiol then that suggests that you're going to be more fertile. If you think about the evolutionary past, if men are attracted to that the faces with those qualities, then they're likely to leave more offspring, right? Because they're going to pair bond with the with the if they can, if they're you know if they're high quality enough male. So those females because they're more attractive also have more choice about who it is that they pair bond with right.

SPEAKER_01 23:39

Would you say the the inverse for men is testosterone?

SPEAKER_00 23:42

Yeah so that's why it's more complicated right so there was a hypothesis and it made perfect sense that men who are higher in testosterone should have more masculine faces. So you know if you get if you measure masculinity and there's ways of doing that right so they're probably not perfect ways of doing it. The way people tend to do it is you like I was saying if you take an average of a face if you get a whole bunch of male and female faces and they make an average of all of them you end up with a face that's kind of in between right a kind of androgynous face.

SPEAKER_01 24:12

Would that be the way that we're steering in evolution?

SPEAKER_00 24:14

Sorry coming back to what you said before where we're getting similar maybe yeah so so you mean like hypermasculine and hyperfeminine faces might be getting rare. Closer together yeah yeah yeah rarer is probably maybe yeah that's possible I guess yeah and so people might be I mean it kind of depends right on the it depends on what's on what's selecting for those differences in the first place right true if look if you if you get this androgynous face and then you measure an average male face against that and an average female face against that then you end up with this multidimensional thing that tells you about how those faces vary you can then exaggerate the masculinity of those faces. And then you know you have a means of measuring how masculine a face is or how feminine a face is right if you do that and you get a whole bunch of men and you mathematically measure the masculinity of their face and you measure their testosterone level then one straightforward hypothesis is the men with more testosterone should have more masculine faces because that's what makes male faces more masculine. Turns out that's not true. So in in adulthood there's no relationship between I mean there's a bunch of studies right and they vary in their results but overall it looks like there's no strong relationship between how much testosterone a male has as an adult and how masculine their face is. But the studies that people haven't done that are probably much more important is to look at the testosterone level of adolescents as their faces are actually changing. And that almost certainly because that's you know we know that testosterone is responsible for male facial characteristics and deeper voices and he said using a male voice, you know, that the all those kinds of characteristics are clearly driven by testosterone right yeah so it's probably the case that those studies have just about not been measured at the right time right the whole masculine so a more masculine face if it reflects higher levels of testosterone during development then that should make a difference not just to the face it should make a difference to a whole bunch of other things right because we know testosterone you know biases people to focus on short-term goals it biases people to be both males and females to be more sexually promiscuous it biases people to be more aggressive right to just respond to things in a more aggressive way. A lot of those characteristics are not the kind of thing you want in a long-term partner right so if you're if you're selecting a long-term partner who's going to help you look after kids yeah then you could see how in the evolutionary past women that are attracted to those characteristics might end up with male partners who are not very good for helping to look after kids. There you go, yeah. And so that suggests that you know maybe those characteristics were really useful when men competed with each other to get access to females but in a pair bonding system females would probably in the evolutionary past would do worse if they were peck picking these highly masculinized males. Yeah because they're not parental yeah because they so pe people have looked at more masculine faces. Men with highly masculine faces are less interested in children in general like you just give them questionnaires and ask them they just care less about kids right yeah again suggesting they're probably not ideal long-term partners if if you need a partner who's going to help raise kids they might be good partners if all you're gonna get out of that relationship is genes, right? Because they might have really good genes and and that's itself a reasonably complicated story because one of the things that testosterone does is reduce your immune function. So so you know if you put a testosterone patch on someone they're much more likely to get sick. People taking steroids of various kinds are much more likely to get infections because it re it it literally suppresses their immune system. This is one of the things testosterone does the hypothesis is if you can be a big robust male with a big masculine face despite having your immune system compromised then you must have a fantastic immune system. All right and so one of the one of the main functions of I mean this is another complicated story evolutionarily but one of the main theories about why sex evolved in the first place is because it mixes genes together. So lots of species don't use sex to reproduce at all right so starfish just drop off one of their arms and it grows four more arms and makes a new starfish or bacteria or you know there's heaps of species that yeah it it and it and in in particular it mixes together two sets of functioning genes, right? One of the benefits of that is that it gives your offspring potential immunity to a whole bunch of different pathogens, different diseases and things. If that's true, then it makes sense to pick to mix your genes with someone who shows some evidence of being resistant to the local bugs, right?

SPEAKER_02 28:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 28:46

If you're a big robust male with a masculine face and you've reached adulthood, you must be pretty resistant to the you must have natural resistance to the yeah to the local bugs.

SPEAKER_01 28:55

So from a sexual selection point of view you would provide you would you would be a more suitable candidate from that evolutionary point. Yeah just to kind of come back to the whole society aspect I think I find it fascinating putting an evolutionary lens on modern day behaviors. Yep. And when we look at um mate selection in the 20th century it's quite often categorized in terms of yes good genes ability to provide resources. How do you apply the evolutionary lens sexual selection lens to social constructs where being physically dominant might not directly correlate with your ability to provide resources where did where did genes come in there?

SPEAKER_00 29:34

Yeah yeah that's a good question. Yeah look this is this is one of the one of the reasons I wanted to raise the issue earlier that you know genes express themselves differently in different environments. And and you know there's a there's a whole bunch of so it depends how the mechanism works, right? So like I said a gene just makes proteins and so any gene that has any kind of effect is going to be a long indirect series of steps between the gene and the behavior itself right it kind of depends on and you know you need really careful research to try to work these question to answer these questions but it depends on how the mechanism actually works. So there's pretty good evidence there's really good cross-cultural evidence for example that women much more than men if you're picking a long-term partner then women much more than men are concerned about the capacity of their long-term partner to provide resources right women this is something that women care much more about on average I mean not all women care about but and you know some men really care about it. But on average men and women differ and that's cross-culturally true right it doesn't matter where you where you do this in any culture in the world including like hunter-gatherer groups the women are just much more concerned about is this potential partner of mine going to be able to provide and that makes perfect evolutionary sense right because if you are the one who's providing all the resources for actual raising offspring and you're gonna be pregnant, you're gonna be breastfeeding yeah you're preoccupied yeah then you need resources right you the one of the main functions of having a pair bond from an evolutionary perspective is that the male can provide resources of some kind. Yeah what we don't know so we know that that's something that women across the world are more interested in than men are right but you know from a purely logical perspective if you think if you forget about evolution it actually makes just as much sense for men to care about that right because because resources are resources right it doesn't matter really where they come from they're valuable to everyone. Yeah but but that sex difference implies that there's some evolutionary origin for that difference right and it makes perfect evolutionary sense. What we don't know is what cues women actually use to to assess that right and so in an ancestral environment maybe cues like being big and strong were pretty reliable cues that this guy's going to be able to provide resources right because he's gonna be able to get them obviously eating well yeah yeah yeah and he and he's literally able to potentially dominate other potential competitors for those resources right um and so in a in a world where resource access is is determined by just strength just being able to grab stuff then maybe that makes sense right but this is what I mean by we don't you need careful research to work out how the mechanism works. We know that women care more about that than men do but we know much less about and this is this is kind of symptomatic of evolutionary psychology really evolutionary psychology is much more concerned with saying look this would be functional this would make sense in an evolutionary context let's see if it's true let's see if there is that difference and much less concerned about digging deeper into the mechanism right digging deeper into how does that actually work how do what like what during a woman's development does she where does she get these cues right where does she get when does she start to evaluate yeah yeah yeah and and what does she use to evaluate it right like in the modern world yeah being able to provide resources you know Bill Gates is not a big strong guy right but can provide a lot of resources. Yeah and so you know there it's maybe maybe the cues that women use and men use in other contexts are shaped up by those the culture in which they grow up right you know there's there's a whole butt there's there's lots of examples of of things that you know there's a tendency for people to gloss over the mechanism right to just think about the function and just say well that makes functional sense and so that must be kind of universally true. But actually that you know you need to carefully dig you need to do proper experiments right and work out you know developmental experiments and work out whereabouts during development and what kinds of cues matter right so so a good example of that is is there's this phenomenon called kin selection where every in every species that has relatives that they could possibly know they favor their relatives right because that makes evolutionary sense because they share genes with them and so that helps those genes to spread through the population and so evolution likes that right it likes genes being selected for and so if you you know if you help your brothers and sisters to do well in the group that you find yourselves in and help them to find partners and help to look after their kids and help them to reproduce then in a sense you're helping your own genes right because they share half your genes. They're as closely related to you as your own offspring are right yeah or your parents for that matter. Even though it's more costly yeah even though even though it costs you something to care to to provide that help.

SPEAKER_01 34:27

Yeah increases the chance that it passes on.

SPEAKER_00 34:29

Yeah but the but they share your genes and so you're still helping copies of your genes and so evolution can select for that.

SPEAKER_01 34:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 34:35

So this so this kin selection's a widespread phenomenon in a whole bunch of species humans show it too that's what nepotism is right nepotism's all about helping your kin right it's kind of weird so so when when you know places like Great Britain colonized the world and and you know set their own structures up one of the things they were you know tried to get rid of was well you can't just you can't just employ your relatives in all these positions right you need to have proper fair and the people that they had colonized were like what do you mean we can't just have a relative that's the whole point of setting up this business right is that I can that I can help my relative what are you talking about? Like it just made no sense right because it doesn't in some sense make sense.

SPEAKER_01 35:13

Yeah it's interesting when they when you when you tie these yeah evolutionary lenses with like I said before with society because you and again I I assume you can make quite a few inferences from that just as like a almost from like a a symptomology point of view in terms of you see this like underlying drive for something and then you see it interact with society and create something different and you can kind of work your way backwards.

SPEAKER_00 35:38

Right exactly yeah yeah yeah that's right and that's and that's one of the things that makes trying to understand this tricky right is that is that there are those interactions right I mean this is the thing that people lose sight of with evolutionary psych is that people kind of tend tend to think of it as a gin as you know a a gene reductionist explanation right that it's all about genes.

SPEAKER_01 35:56

Yeah yeah the even the misconception of evolutionary psych is just men versus women.

SPEAKER_00 36:01

Right absolutely yeah yeah yeah yeah but but evolution by definition is genes in environments right like you literally they are equally important components of that there's no such thing as selection unless you're in an environment right yeah a gene can only be successful or unsuccessful in an environment and so you need to understand both right so it's necessarily interactionist and and that's something that yeah that's definitely something that people kind of gloss over when they pick up little snippets of evolutionary psych and make them part of how they think about the world.

SPEAKER_01 36:34

Yeah yeah it's hard to you you you have to be very careful what you generalize with the two things that I want to talk about and it kind of comes back to the first question I asked in why do we stay together which I don't think I answered but we we tangent but that's fine. Talk to me about love uh in humans and how did it evolve to be what's the function of it and why do we have it yeah it's a great question.

SPEAKER_00 36:56

So there were there was a theory which is not true but there was a theory that was pretty popular until relatively recently that the whole idea of romantic love was invented in like the 19th century and that before that there was no such thing. It's not true. You know again there's no there's no not only is there no culture in the world that doesn't explicitly talk about things like love, there's no culture in the world that doesn't have artistic creations that are tokens of love, right? It's a you know it's it's an obvious thing that runs through every culture, right? One of the themes of every culture is that part of what mostly men produce but women to some extent too but part of what gets produced in terms of you know artistic artifacts will be devotions of love of some kind of it's I mean look it's a it's a it's a difficult question to answer in non-humans, right? Whether the extent to which their mating behavior and pair bonding behaviour depends on love. I I mean I my natural tendency is to assume continuity unless there's evidence of discontinuity right so to assume look if we experience love when we're you know engaged in a in an intimate romantic relationship with someone seems to me not unreasonable to assume that maybe other animals do as well right yeah maybe not all of them maybe not cockroaches but but you know there's it you do see attachments in animals. Absolutely yeah and I'd like I'd like some kind of evidence to the contrary to to believe that that wasn't true. Yeah very true yeah you know you need evidence both ways and that it's there's always the null hypothesis thing. Yeah there's always well there's always a bias to assume that humans are special right yeah my way of thinking about things is less coloured by that right so I kind of see continuity more than I see differences. Maybe that's just because I think about things from an evolution perspective right but chimpanzees with guns. Yeah yeah yeah exactly so so I I think about love I mean I I don't think about it very much right because it's not one of the things that I explicitly research. I mean which is weird right because one of the things I look at is is meat selection yeah is is is how men and women pick each other right how what they're interested in and what they find attractive etc.

SPEAKER_01 39:08

That is one of the things I researched I'm thinking of the study that I've mentioned to you previously on infidelity and why the reasons as to why men cheat versus why women cheat. Yep and it kind of comes back to that difference in terms of selecting for genes or selecting for resources for women and for men it kind of came back to selecting for what's available. And so yeah I'm interested in in terms of what did you find did it does it correlate with the hypothesis of separating resources from genes and attractiveness maybe right or is it something different?

SPEAKER_00 39:39

Yeah look it so you look so you we've already talked a little bit about some of this stuff right so so look if you think if you think about what men find attractive in women and of course it varies right so people vary.

SPEAKER_01 39:51

And this will be from a this is yeah again we can preface it's a it's a brief overview it doesn't explain everything.

SPEAKER_00 39:57

And um look at so if you take if if you it just look at physical characteristics right then anything that makes uh an image of a woman because that's the way almost all of this research is done right it's really rare for people to people have done it a little bit but it's really hard experiments to do to actually put people in field settings and then see how they pair up right that's the way you should be doing it. Right. But actually that's pretty hard um because there's so many other factors that impact that right there's personality factors there's there's all sorts of things right so the the default way of studying this is to is to show people images or videos sometimes and get them to make ratings right to just say look how attractive do you think this person is etc both men and women agree and it's cross-culturally universal that if you take a woman a woman's face or if you if you morph a woman's face in a more feminine direction if anything you can do to make a woman look more feminine will and by feminine I mean I mean I don't mean culturally dependent femininity I mean you know this literal mathematical take move move her away from the average in the direction of a female face right there's universal agreement both for men and women which is interesting that a more feminine female face is rated as more attractive. So anything that increases femininity so bigger eyes or bigger lips or anything that is sexually dimorphic, right? Men and women's faces vary.

SPEAKER_01 41:16

Men tend to have smaller eyes and bigger jaws women tend to have bigger eyes and smaller jaws and you know fuller lips etc longer necks there's bodily differences too obviously between men and women anything that exaggerates that difference in the female direction will result in a woman's face being rated as more attractive a woman being rated as more attractive and so so men are clearly attracted to that right yeah one question on that sorry before we keep going when you say like if you were to say level rates of femininity was to increase over time and then you averaged it um you know say span a hundred years or two thousand years, whatever, just for the sake of the question, um you averaged it and say obviously the average is going to be one is going to be higher in femininity levels than the other where where is the basis to make that preference from is it what's different from the average or is it just the femininity level as a whole?

SPEAKER_00 42:07

Well it depends how you I mean how do you define femininity level as a whole right unless you unless you go in and measure the hormones that are actually producing it. But yeah look that that whole the whole idea that there'll be changes over time is offset by so it it's it's almost certainly true that every almost every man who's looking for a almost every heterosexual man who's looking for a female partner will be most attracted to the most feminine female available right yeah it's not true that every one of those men will be able to get the most feminine female available right because part of pair bonding is that the females are making choices as well right and so one of the things that stands in the way of that runaway selection towards highly masculine males and highly feminine females if that's what's being selected for is that not everyone's going to be able to get what they want, right? Like we have we have evolved and this is another another way in which in which evolved mechanisms interact with the world right we have preferences that make evolutionary sense but we can't always yeah we can't always express those preferences because we don't have the options right we just don't have those options available to us.

SPEAKER_01 43:16

Yeah and so what would make a female choose a man?

SPEAKER_00 43:19

So so the females choosing men if you do that that kind of experiment right where you where you make a male face more masculine or less masculine is really interesting because most of the time most women will actually choose a slightly feminized male face as the most attractive so you take the male's face and you move it slightly in the female direction then most women most of the time when picking a long term partner so you you preface this with what you're looking for is someone to pair bond with then most of the time women will pick a slightly feminized one if you get them to make a rating for a short term relationship. So this is just a one night stand now, now their preference shifts in the more masculine face direction. Interesting so less Likely to choose a more feminized male, they're more likely to choose a more masculinised male. And there's that hypothesis for slightly more feminine men might correlate with the Yeah, they're much more prepared potentially to and much more able, maybe, to help care for offspring, right? They just might be better equipped to be a carer, right? Maybe not a provider, but I mean in the modern world, maybe they're perfectly good at providing as well, right? Because there's not, you know, it doesn't mean you're one or the other.

SPEAKER_01 44:29

Yeah, yeah, very true. And then for the one-night stands, it's it's preference from an evolutionary point is genes and attractiveness.

SPEAKER_00 44:36

Exactly. So the yeah, the idea is that in if you're only picking for one night stand, then all you can possibly get out of it. I mean, you can have fun, right? Obviously. You're not looking for reasons. I mean, that's a I mean, you look, the the reasons people have sex is also another great example of the difference between an ultimate select selective force, right? The thing the reason people have sex evolutionarily, the reason sex evolved at all, is to reproduce, right? Yeah. The reason people have sex in some sense is to reproduce, but almost no one has sex because they go, Oh, I want to have a baby, right? Some people do. People choose to have kids and they reproduce in order to try to make the kids. But almost all sex that happens is not really about having sex, right? It's and it's not it's not directly motivated by sorry, it's not directly motivated by producing kids. Yeah. And so this is another example of the mechanism is divorced from the conscious motive that people have, right? I mean, another good example of that is when men are men are choosing the most attractive women, if you give them silhouettes of their bodies to pick, then men will choose a silhouette where the waist is 0.7 of the hips, way above chance, right? So they just that seems to be the magic ratio where men seem to be preferring that that um that kind of waist to hip ratio. There is no sense in which a man has ever walked into a nightclub, looked around and gone, oh, she looks like about a 0.7. I should I should target her, right? That it doesn't operate at that conscious level, right? Yeah, it's just the men see that and go, ooh, that that kind of piques something, right? They have a they have an evolved psychological mechanism that's shaped up by evolution that favors those kinds of things, but they're not consciously aware of that, right? There's a there's a separation here between their conscious motive and the ultimate evolutionarily it's an internal written program, it's not a conscious choice. Yeah, and and a lot of these things will be completely outside conscious access, right? Yeah, people won't even be able to tell that that's why they're doing it.

SPEAKER_01 46:31

Which is like, and again, not to get too opinionated on this, but it's an interesting thing again when you when you apply that to the sociological level, you know, a physically short man, like I'm not overly tall, and I've always heard like a in terms of women's preferences, like, oh you know, six foot plus or whatever it is. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 46:50

And then you also that's the famous magic number, right?

SPEAKER_01 46:53

Yeah, yeah. And then you always hear from men sli the slimmer the better. And so it's like, yeah, it's interesting because the evolutionary point, again, it doesn't mean that it's right or wrong. It's just it is like it's written in the program as to what you prefer.

SPEAKER_00 47:08

Right. Although it's gonna be it's gonna be relative, right? So the whole six-foot thing, for example, yeah, is bound to be environmentally shaped up, right? Yeah, and the whole you know, the whole preference for particular kinds of body types is also gonna be shaped up by the environment that you find yourself in. It must be, right?

SPEAKER_01 47:24

Yeah, well, it's also very there was a interesting point on that was there was a study done on males' preferences for women and they were hungry versus when they weren't. Right. Ow. I don't know if you've seen that one. Right, no.

SPEAKER_00 47:35

So I can guess I can guess what the result is.

SPEAKER_01 47:38

Yeah, when you're hungry, it differs and you prefer like larger type women. When you're full and you've eaten, you prefer slimmer. And I guess it comes back to that point of well, I guess that that's almost evidence in the contrary that men do almost look at resources as as much. Maybe not as much, but yeah, yeah, right. But as well.

SPEAKER_00 47:57

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a good point. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, maybe they're assessing she must be able to get access to stuff, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's interesting.

SPEAKER_01 48:03

Yeah, right. But yeah, it is very um contextual.

SPEAKER_00 48:06

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, and so the height, you know, the height thing that yeah, presumably that's an unconscious when so there's so the height the height preference goes both ways, right? So not only do women prefer taller men, men prefer shorter women, right? And so, and so that whole size and that and that maps onto the fact that men on average tend to be taller than women, right? And so it's difficult to disentangle the kind of natural selection aspects of that, which is the idea is that that, you know, in the evolutionary past, larger men were just more successful from the sexual selection aspect, right? So if it's true that women are have a preference for taller men, then maybe sexual selection is part of what's producing the height difference between men and women, right? So women are actually like peacock tails, women are actually choosing taller men and men are choosing shorter women, yeah. And so that could be, you know, helping to shape up that difference as well. But that height difference is an example of yeah, of a female preference, right?

SPEAKER_01 48:59

Yeah, definitely.

SPEAKER_00 49:00

You're also asking about the kind of infidelity thing. Yeah. So the you know, the cheating in long-term relationships, we kind of think about this as a human thing, but actually there's really good evidence from every pair bonding species that in many cases both sexes will cheat outside that pair bond. So they will take what what behavioral ecologists call extra pair copulation. So they'll just go and seek so both males and females. So you get nesting birds, they're pair bonded, they're you know, commit, they're both highly committed to the chicks that are in the the eggs that are in their nest that turned into chicks, but in many cases, both of them will go out and seek extra paired copulations. And so, you know, some of the eggs that are in the nest that a male's caring for might not be his, right? Because the female will have snuck off and got genes from another male, or the male may have gone off and fathered someone else's eggs.

SPEAKER_01 49:58

So both have a desire to spread genes as much as possible.

SPEAKER_00 50:01

Yeah, and that's what evolution is flexible, right? What evolution loves is your genes being successful in the next generation. It doesn't care, I mean it doesn't care about anything, right? So it doesn't care how you do that. It, you know, we it feels like it feels inappropriate to us because we have a whole bunch of mechanisms that are that evolution is selected for for pair bonding, right? For caring about that pair bond and and caring about infidelity in that pair bond. And you know, there's good, it's a whole different story, but there's good evidence that men and women care about different kinds of infidelity, which also maps onto the kind of evolutionary story, right?

SPEAKER_01 50:35

Yeah, that's the uh the emotional bond versus the physical attraction thing. Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 50:39

Yeah, yeah. So men are much more upset by sexual infidelity, by their partner having had sex with someone else. Women tend to be much, on average, right? Women tend to be much more upset by emotional infidelity, right? So they're less concerned about whether when they care. But because well, they care partly because sexual infidelity often implies emotional infidelity, right? But the reason but the thing women tend to be is whether the male has fallen in love with the person with whom they've cheated.

SPEAKER_01 51:07

Would you say that from again from the evolutionary point, women have more to lose in that regard?

SPEAKER_00 51:13

Would you say and that's why they care about emotional infidelity, right?

SPEAKER_01 51:16

Because they're concerned they'll lose the investment. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But the investment of resources? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 51:21

Yeah. I mean, from an evolution, from an evolution and and again, this is a great example of the fact that the women aren't necessarily consciously thinking this, right? They're not sitting there going, oh my god, I'm gonna lose the resources he's providing. Because they've they've got evolution they've got evolved mechanisms that just make them feel terrible in this situation, right? The care of to care about this this kind of infidelity, right? Yeah, it doesn't necessarily mean that they're consciously weighing up, well, wait, I'm gonna lose those resources. But from an evolutionary perspective, that's what would have been the consequence of that, right? So if a male if a male partner ends up wanting to invest in someone else, then they've only got finite resources, right? So some of those resources are gonna have to be directed elsewhere. Whereas men, male mammals in general, well, males in general really, if there's well, no, it's in fact males in general, right? It doesn't matter. If the males by definition are the ones that are providing less to the to the offspring from the very beginning, they're always the ones that are in danger of if they ki if they pair bond, right? If they care for their offspring, then there's always a risk that the male might be caring for offspring that are in fact not theirs, right? That's possible. So if you if you're a male mammal, then you know, you provide sperm to the female, but if another male has done that too, then there's some possibility that the offspring that you might be caring for won't be yours, right? Mammals very rarely care for their offspring anyway, right? And so it doesn't really matter. Um, but if you're a male bird and you're you know looking after chicks in a nest, then if some of those chicks are not yours, then evolution can't select for that, right? Because they don't have your genes. And so that's a bad thing from an evolutionary perspective, right?

SPEAKER_02 53:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 53:01

It's good for the chicks in the nest because they're getting someone to help them, but but those males um in some sense are wasting those resources on genes that are not theirs, right? From an evolutionary perspective.

SPEAKER_02 53:13

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 53:14

Um, and so men kind of need male males in general, male organisms need to be more concerned about that, right? Misdirected care for offspring that are not theirs. And so it makes sense that from an evolutionary perspective, that men would be more concerned about sexual infidelity. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 53:32

Can you talk to me about the jewel mate hypothesis? I I think that's been a like it's been a popular topic in evolutionary psychology, but I think it's also been one of the most widely debated. Where's what's your stance? What's your thing?

SPEAKER_00 53:45

Yeah, so you mean in terms of fem women kind of so the yeah, so the look not only does it make evolutionary sense for men to be more concerned about sexual infidelity and their long-term partners, it also makes perfect evolutionary sense that if a man has extra opportunities to produce offspring where he doesn't have to care for those offspring, then evolution is going to select for that, right? Yeah. Because uh because if you if you think about if if evolution selected for men to be kind of generally more promiscuous, right? Just be more interested in mating opportunities in general, then that could get selected for, right? Because the male might be able to, you know, in in a hundred days, it might be able to make a hundred babies, potentially, right? If a female had a mechanism that made her be interested in having multiple, you know, one night stands across the hundred days, then in a hundred days she's still only going to make one baby, right? Or two, maybe if she has twins. Yeah. But it's not going to increase her reproductive success. And so if evolution selects for that mechanism in men, that mechanism can be more successful.

SPEAKER_01 54:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 54:45

And so it kind of makes evolutionary sense. It's kind of crappy, but it may, but it makes evolutionary sense that it's crappy in a in a pair bonding species where we fall in love, right? It's a crappy thing to be doing. But it makes evolutionary sense that men are likely to be more interested in those opportunities more in general than than are women, right? And there's good evidence that that's true. So there's these great studies where they just get these random research assistants to come up to people on a college campus and say, Would you like to come back to my room and have sex? And and about one in a hundred women go, Oh, yeah, okay. Most of them go, Well, I don't even know who you are. And about eighty out of a hundred men go, short.

SPEAKER_01 55:24

Yeah, yeah. And that that's reflective of the study I was talking about before, in terms of which is what led me to the jewel mate hypothesis question was yeah, the reasons that men were showing that they uh would cheat. And some of them were they measured their own relationship um status of when when they cheated. Right. Um, and there was a fair proportion that were happy in their relationship. And they still did it anyway, and it's which is much rarer for women, right?

SPEAKER_00 55:50

Yeah. So it's much rarer for rarer for women to be cheating what when they're happy in the relationship. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 55:54

Um and for men, again, it was just because it was available. Right. Um, and there was this again, obviously there's other things that go into it. Right. But from the evolutionary point, it was it was available, the opportunity presented itself, just gonna select for it. Whereas with women, it was, which led me to the jewel main hypothesis, was they were if their relationship was with someone that was providing resources, then they their their preference for infidelity was with someone that was genes focused. So someone that was more attractive, and vice versa, someone that was with a genes would then look for someone that could provide resources. Um yeah, I'm assuming that that's where we land with the dual made hypothesis in terms of you might be in a relationship with either someone that is your preference was for genes in that moment, you've had offspring with them, but maybe they don't have resources, right? So then you look for it elsewhere. Yep.

SPEAKER_00 56:46

Yeah, potentially. Or or you've or you've selected this this less masculine male who's a good good with the kids, right? Who's good at helping to raise those offspring, and that's the long-term relationship that you've hit. What you're potentially sacrificing then, though, is that if it's true, and we the jury's still out, right? But if it's true that a more masculine male has better genes, yeah, then what you've sacrificed by having this stable long-term relationship where the kids reach adulthood is you've sacrificed those high-quality genes, right? Because you've selected a male who's less masculine who might not have such great genes, potentially. If you're gonna be cheating, then and you and it's gonna be short-term, you're not gonna. I mean, there's let me finish this first. If it's gonna be short-term, then it makes sense that you ought to be going for good genes, right, from an evolutionary perspective. And so it makes sense that you should be more attracted to a highly masculine male, right? Conveniently, they're the ones who are also more interested in having those short-term relationships, right? And so, and so as a dual mating strategy, that probably works, right? Yeah, very true. And so that, you know, there's a bunch of evidence collected suggesting that that that happens, right? So women, you know, when they pick short-term for short-term relationships, they tend to pick more masculine males. There's also the the you know, the evidence has become more controversial, but there's also evidence that preferences for masculine male faces vary across the menstrual cycle. So when women are right at the peak of fertility, then there's a sudden shift towards a more masculine male face as their preferred.

SPEAKER_01 58:18

Do you know what the chemical is?

SPEAKER_00 58:21

Well, so it's probably yeah, we don't know, right? So one of the problems with these so there's also been studies done, replications of those studies, that have suggested maybe that's not true. But, you know, and and you know, the people who did those replications tried to argue, well, that's the end of the matter, but of course there's there's old studies that show that the effect did happen, right? And so it's likely to be a pretty subtle effect, right? And so I think of it as we don't really know, right?

unknown 58:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 58:48

What people tend not to do in those studies is actually measure the hormones of the um participants, right? So they just get them to self-report on what phase of the menstrual cycle they're at.

SPEAKER_01 58:57

Yeah, right? Yeah, and everyone's uh hormones are different, absolutely, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 59:01

And and of course, though, and you know, there's four different hormones that vary that produce the menstrual cycle, right? So there's progesterone, there's lutinizing hormone, there's estradiol, they all vary across the menstrual cycle. And so which of those is responsible? I don't know, right? Yeah, you'd be guessing. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 59:15

So yeah, kind of moving on with that, the dark tetrade is something I'm I'm interested from, just a personal point of view. I've always found it fascinating. Uh, for those that don't know, it's darker personality types. Um, so when you talk about psychopathy and narcissism and things, um, that's what you're referring to. It used to originally be the dark triad, I think, um, and they've recently added sadism, um, so dark tetrad now. Um, and just for context, to put some brief definitions with them, narcissism is that grandiose sense of self, you know, very selfish in in that regard, little regard for others, they're the superior. Machiavelliism is the tendency to use other people for means of achieving their own goals. Again, a little bit of a lack of remorse there as well. Psychopathy, the massive one of a lack of effective empathy and willingness to exploit others. I think there's an impulsive element on it too. And then sadism, the tendency to yeah, derive pleasure from the pain or humiliation of others. There is a somewhat controversial but interesting like conversation to be had on the evolutionary, what's the word, the evolutionary birth of these personality types? And especially when you see there's the the differences in men and women in their presentations of these personality types as well. Is there a is there an argument to be had that as society developed and we are getting, you know, there's laws and there's consequences for disregard of consent. Is there an argument to be had that the more manipulative style personality traits or people that might correlate with these have evolved from that point? Yeah, can we put an evolutionary lens on it?

SPEAKER_00 1:01:07

The I mean, the existence of those kinds of personality types, so they exist in both men and women, aren't they? Like you're saying, they're more common in men than they are in women, that they're both both men and women show those characteristics, but they manifest them slightly differently. You're right. The fact that they've evolved at all in a species that, like us, that is has faced really strong selection pressure to be cooperative, right? So humans, one of the things that really characterizes humans is that we help each other. We help each other a lot, like much more than most other species do. We engage in cooperative endeavors all the time, right? Hunting, farming, everything we do is kind of cooperative. But obviously, those kinds of personality types are, if they were really common, would be a massive problem for a cooperative society. Part of the idea of how they evolved at all is that if you have already evolved a really cooperative society, right, where you have a whole bunch of mechanisms that predispose you towards helping others, then this is a kind of predatory personality type that can exploit that, right? That can exploit the fact that everyone else is going to be cooperative. We have all these mechanisms for, you know, if someone says something, it's probably true, right? One of the reasons psychopaths get away with stuff is because they just keep lying, and everyone else has these mechanisms to go, well, they wouldn't they wouldn't lie about that. But of course they do, right? Because they they're lying about everything.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:26

It's a it's an advantage.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:28

Yeah, and so and so that so they can infiltrate, infiltrate, you know, cooperative groups and and reap massive benefits, right? Because they don't pay the costs, because they don't do any of the helping stuff, they just manipulate, right? They just manipulate, they exploit, they take benefits without paying the costs, right? Cooper cooperation, genuine cooperation requires both, right? You get benefits, but you also have to pay stuff, you have to do stuff.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:51

I think as well, just before you continue, the it's hard to not put an evolutionary lens on it when the more literature you read, and again, a lot of these are subclinical. There's obviously clinical levels of of things, but when you're talking about, I refrain from using the word diagnosing, but even just for the sake of like assessing the personality trait, and you're doing history, you'll talk about short-term relationships and a frequency and and whatnot. And I think that comes back to the the evolutionary point you made before of terms of you'll feel bad if you're like cheating on a partner or something, and that's a that's a drive. And then you look at the biological side of some of these personality traits, and there is that lack of remorse, lack of empathy. So it does make sense.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:35

And that makes it possible for them to do it, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's right.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:38

I mean, it you know, I don't want to be absolving them of all blame, right? But 100%, yeah. But this isn't to make it as an excuse or to say it's okay, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:46

But it but it's true that they genuinely probably do not really get it, right? Not really, I mean, so you know, one of the characteristics of psychopaths, which frequently have the other characteristics as well, right? Is that they they seem to honestly believe that everyone else is engaged in exploitation as well, right? They seem to honestly believe that this is just how the game works, right? Yeah, and so and you know, they'll they'll warn people, right? They'll give people little warnings. Well, you you shouldn't trust everything I say. Like they'll and and they count that as, you know, so they're not just completely cold-hearted manipulators. They're they're you know, they're humans, right? They're they have many of the mechanisms that everybody else has, but you're right, they have this reduced empathy, this reduced kind of capacity to feel bad about that stuff. One of the one of the things that enables them to to live with themselves, I guess, is that they genuinely believe that this is just how everyone does stuff, right? This is just the way the world works.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:43

There's an argument to say that the the only reason that they do drop little hints is from the social construct that they've been brought up in.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:50

Yeah, maybe. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, look, who knows, right? Like the that whole feeling good about yourself is has many dimensions to it, right? And so, yeah, a big a big part of what makes us feel like we're successful members of our group is taking on board the social norms that we live in, right? So the you know, in different cultures, different things are valued, right? And so, and so, you know, yeah, but yeah, you're right that that the you know, in terms of sexual infidelity, the way people have characterized the male that you know, the dark tetrad male cluster of traits is to think about it as a reproductive strategy, right? But it's I mean it's also a resource-gathering strategy.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:31

Very true, yeah. Some of the and you see that with the statistics, especially in psychopathy, most of the research has been done. They'll either be in prison or they'll be CEOs. Right, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:42

Yeah, that's right. And it's a high risk strategy, right? And so, or you know, you could go bankrupt six times, for example, and still end up president of America. Yes. You know, that I mean that it's a high-risk strategy where you where yeah, whether the outcomes can be really good or really bad, but if they're really good, then they can be spectacularly good, right? Particularly if it's a reproductive. Strategy, right? If you think about this serial, you know, reproducing with many people lots of times, yeah, then then that can get selected for, right? And so that trait can that cluster of traits can be passed on.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:11

Which is again where I guess the impulsive element comes into. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:15

Yeah, it's a lack of being able to regulate that and yeah, look, exploiting people just requires impulsive um impulsivity, right? Because there's going to be limited opportunities to do it. And so when it comes around, you you want to be impulsive. Yeah. Right. Whereas most people will be like, oh, maybe this is not the best time. And then they'll miss the opportunity, right?

SPEAKER_01 1:06:30

Yeah. What about, and I want to be careful with the way I word this, and this isn't again, we're not to saying we're not saying that there's this isn't an excuse or a reasoning behind why something is, we're definitely not saying it's okay. Um, what's the contributing factors to how men will spread their their genes in in that regard? And a lot of it previously was just being able to overpower women, um, and they could just physically do it. And there was that genetic advantage, the the dominance in that regard, and then fast forward to society now, there's consequences and repercussions for for that. Yep. Would there be a hypothesis to say that that's why the more Machiavellian manipulative types would be coming through?

SPEAKER_00 1:07:13

Yeah, maybe. I mean, look, it so go back to the first point about non-conceptual sex. Every culture has rules about that not being okay, right? And so, you know, every religious text, every, you know, you go to eight hunter-gatherer groups, it's not okay, right? So it's not considered to be appropriate behaviour. But you're 100% right, in the absence of you know social construct. Yeah, and and in in the absence of being, you know, having strong like things like police forces and and and authority, yeah, and prison systems and things, like a whole justice system, in the absence of that, it was much harder to police that, right? It was much harder to regulate that. And so it definitely happened more frequently, right? And it will and it look, it continues to happen in places where that breaks down, right? So every war zone is a place where that stuff happens all the time, right? Yeah. And so what that suggests is that, yeah, is that in the absence of things getting in the way of that happening, then then put many people, many people who wouldn't even think of themselves as doing that, probably end up engaged in that kind of behavior, right? Where everything else has fallen apart.

unknown 1:08:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:22

Yeah, what that suggests is structured society, but it it needn't be modern structured society, right? So, you know, hunt together in groups, every society has all has always had that's always been considered an inappropriate behaviour. But you're right, people have got away with it much more commonly.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:36

And you would say that in group dynamics as well. I I I can't recall it perfectly, but even in in the prison system, when you when you talk about the group dynamics in terms of an alpha male being around or someone that's dominant, and then someone that might be, you know, in this darker personality tri tetrad, and they might not be physically dominant, but again, it was the manipulation that allowed them to do so. Yeah. And then when you pair them with some level of authority figure that that can overpower them, they quite often depress down. So yeah, it makes sense that when you remove the authority and you remove the repercussions, that's when it engages manifests itself.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:13

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And look at I mean I think there's probably really interesting research to be done. It's hard research to do, right? Hard and potentially controversial research to do. Very controversial, yeah. To to look at whether different elements of those of that tetrad are more likely to express themselves in different kinds of social structures, right? Because that seems to me pretty likely. Yeah. And you know, maybe the whole look, I mean, the whole notion of the tetrad or the triad, or you know, what because it all used to just be thought about as psychopathy, and then people were like, oh wait, there's these other elements that and you know, the fact they don't correlate perfectly implies that there's something about them, these different dimensions, right? They do seem to be a common cluster though, right? And so maybe it's really one thing, one kind of personality trait that that manifests itself differently depending on the circumstances, right? And so maybe you know, I mean, in psychology we have this tendency that if you can if you can measure it with a per with a questionnaire that it must be a real thing, right? Um Well, there is not sure that's necessarily true.

SPEAKER_01 1:10:13

So much crossover in the diagnostics. Anyway, so yeah, no, it's a good point. Is it is it yeah, just the same underlying um cause genes, potentially, right?

SPEAKER_00 1:10:25

If it's actually selected for, yeah, yeah, and it gets expressed differently depending on circumstances, right?

SPEAKER_02 1:10:29

Very true, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:30

Um so it'd be interesting to see if if different cultures even had different profiles, right? If Machiavellianism was more common in some places than others, right?

SPEAKER_01 1:10:40

Yeah, yeah, that would be an interesting study. Uh even if like, and I go back to the original reason as to why I was asking it was kind of formulating that hypothesis in my head anyway, of was this something, is this something that's always existed? Obviously, there's the different, like you said, it maybe it all comes from the same cluster, presents differently. But even Machiavellianism was coined from a very old book of um, I think it was political or something in terms of how to take advantage of people. So yeah, I would argue that it has probably always been there. Absolutely, and it's just getting expressed differently. Yeah. I have some listener questions, and I say listener questions, but it is really Neve. So I'm gonna She's a listener. She is a listener, she is, yes. Shout out to Neve. But um interesting one here. There are many anecdotal stories spreading throughout social media of women on birth control medication coming off of it and no longer being attracted to their partner. Different theories suggest that it changes your sense of smell, which is a obviously a key component in attraction. I think there is, I think they've even mapped it down to beta something in terms of what that is. How does birth control medication change who you are attracted to?

SPEAKER_00 1:11:51

Yeah, so I mean we've already talked about this whole shift across the menstrual cycle of women's preferences for different kinds of men, right? But for more feminine or more masculine, or just neither, right? Average. Which you'd think average would be attractive, right? I mean, and in fact, there's good evidence that average is attractive, right? If you take ten different faces and you average them together, it's almost always more attractive than the ten faces you made it from.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:13

Yeah. Even if those faces are well, there's five that are unattractive, five that are. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:16

Yeah, that's right. Cause because what you've done is smooth over the edges, right? You've got rid of all the ways in which those faces might have some unattractiveness, right? You've you've minimized that by averaging it. So average faces are rated as more attractive. When you're on birth control, I mean depends on the particular birth control, right? But one of the things that I mean, one of the things it's a there's massive oversimplification, but one of the things it kind of what one of the ways it works is that it kind of mimics being pregnant, right? And if you're pregnant, you can't get pregnant. Yeah. And so it mimics the hormone profile of someone who's pregnant. There's very few studies looking at preferences women have for male faces when they're pregnant, but the few that have been done suggest that they also have this preference for more feminine faces. Because it's like being in the non-fertile phase of the menstrual cycle.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:01

Yeah, you're looking for parental.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:03

Yeah, you're looking for someone who can help care for kids, right? Because you're in, you're, I mean, if you you're literally pregnant, right? So this is something you need to be careful about.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:09

Yeah, you've got the genes. You don't need to tick that box anymore. You're looking for that. Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:14

And so if that's true, then being on the pill is likely to bias your preference for the entire duration of being on the pill towards less masculine males. It may be, and probably and there's you know, there's evidence to suggest this is true, that when women then come off the pill, then suddenly they're back to their normal, you know, their normal fluctuation. And so when they, particularly when they're in the peak fertile phase of their menstrual cycle, they might look at their long-term partner who they picked when they were on the pill and go, this doesn't match what I'm actually after. And so there's this mismatch, right? Between and, you know, it's a good and it's another good reflection of the well, it's a good reflection of two things, right? One of the unconscious way in which we make these choices, but also of the fact that, you know, when you pick a long-term partner, there is no sense, you know, I'm I'm guilty of doing the research that glosses over this, right? But there's no sense in which you make that decision on the basis of any single factor, right? You're making this decision on the basis of masses of, yeah, masses of all sorts of, you know, personality profiles, all sorts of things, right? Social stuff.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:20

Your upbringing, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:21

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, it wasn't long ago that that in many cultures, it's still true in some cultures, that the long-term partner you ended up with, you didn't pick it all, right? It was picked by your parents, right? It was picked by, you know, they arranged it and in still cultures were.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:35

Yeah, for a trade of resources quite often.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:37

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Um, that doesn't mean they were the only people with whom you ever reproduced, but you know, there's there's a multitude of factors that that contribute to that, right?

SPEAKER_01 1:14:46

Yeah. How does the use of ornamentation and attraction change throughout the lifespan? Whilst fertile, you obviously want strong genes, but perhaps again, like you said before, once you're older, you're looking for maybe a more stale, caregiving mate.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:00

It's interesting. When we think about ornamentation traditionally, we've tended to think about women doing the ornamenting, right? There's be being the ones that are which is weird, right?

SPEAKER_01 1:15:08

Because and for those that don't know, that's the process of attracting.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:11

Yeah. Yeah, of of you know, so it's the peacock with the big flowers. Yeah, there's n there's an entire industry based on on selling to women things that will make them more attractive, right?

SPEAKER_01 1:15:25

That's true.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:26

Um and there's this idea that that there's this kind of traditional idea that they're doing that for men. There's actually some pretty good evidence emerging that a lot of that ornamentation that that you know, wearing makeup, doing all kinds of things that women do to increase their attractiveness is much less about directly attracting men and much more about intersexual competition between women. If men are making choices based on attractiveness, then the space in which women are competing is in terms of attractiveness. And so in the modern world, right, there's mechanisms evolved when there was a small pool of both sexes who were competing with each other for access to the best quality mates they could get, right?

SPEAKER_01 1:16:06

If you're the most attractive, you've got the best choice.

SPEAKER_00 1:16:08

Yeah, exactly. And so anything you can do to increase your attractiveness compared to the either either by increasing yours or decreasing theirs, I guess.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:17

Or or you know, or again, another hypothesis for the the darker type personalities. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 1:16:23

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or or yeah, that's right, or spreading rumors about them, right? So so damaging them socially rather than physically.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:29

Yeah. Fascinating stuff.

SPEAKER_00 1:16:31

Well, there's actually really good evidence that that's that that a lot of that makeup wearing and other things is actually driven by female-female competition rather than directly trying to attract men, right?

SPEAKER_01 1:16:43

Very true. Kind of brings me to the point of dating apps and things in the modern day and uh the selective self-presentation model in terms of there's like a healthy limit of putting your best foot forward, like you're not gonna post a photo that of you just getting out of bed. Um, but there is a fair quantity of people that are uh presenting themselves in an overcompensatory way. I guess you would say that it's the same thing in terms of intra sexual competition.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:11

So there's so there's a nice study that uh was done by someone whose name I can't think of at the moment, but an Australian AvoSyc researcher that showed that that posting selfie sexies, sexy selfies, selfie sexies, yeah, sexy selfies, right? Where you take pictures of yourself by women, what yeah, is much more likely to be driven by that kind of female-female competition than by by men liking those. Men preference male preferences. Yeah. That look, the whole the whole social the whole online dating thing is itself kind of embedded in a society now where or a uh an environment now, not that's not just social, it's not just societal. Like the environment that so if you think about the the range of faces we used to be exposed to, right? The range of bodies and faces, the range of attractivenesses we used to be exposed to. Like if you grow up in a small hunter-gatherer, if you grow up in, you know, rural Australia, right? Without access to everything, the internet world, yeah. Yeah, then you get a representative sample of attractivenesses, right? The sample of attractivenesses that everyone in the world is now exposed to is not only massively wider than it would ever have been, it's also massively biased in the highly attractive range, right? So what people like is attractive people, and so what you see is attractive people, right? And so if we judge our if we if we base our our judgments of attractiveness on the faces and the bodies that we've seen, which we there's good evidence we do, then we all have this ridiculous idea of what an average attractiveness is, right? Because Well, when you're you're exposed to the the most attractive human. Absolutely. And ever everybody just thinks that everyone's more attractive than like you know, everyone just thinks that they're let much less attractive than average, right? Because the average that they've seen is wildly attractive. And so look, in in some senses, look, it makes sense, like you said, to put your best foot forward anyway, right? But part of what must be driving this is that shift in in how in our norms, right? In our baselines.

SPEAKER_01 1:19:20

We just think you're now competing with the best of the best.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:22

And well, yeah, I mean, you literally are competing with them, right? But but unconsciously, you also think that you need to be making yourself much more attractive than you are because everybody's like that, right? Everybody is much more attractive.

SPEAKER_01 1:19:33

Do cultural trends evolve faster than evolution? What could this mean for ornamentation? For example, a few centuries ago, heavy women again were considered attractive, symbolizing wealth and the ability to eat. Now slight, like slimmer built women are deemed more attractive.

SPEAKER_02 1:19:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:50

So the first part of that question is absolutely. So cultural practices change much more quickly than evolution can keep up with. Like everything, you know, we're sitting here in air conditioning with artificial lighting, with and none of that is stuff that our evolved mechanisms have have caught up with, right? So, you know, you people are less able to sleep because they get exposed to artificial light, to take a really straightforward example, way into the night, right? People can fly to other countries and then fly back, and so they can't sleep because they've got jet lag, right? There's a all of those practice none of that happened in the past, right? So, so it disturbs our well-being in some senses, right? Because we're living in a world in which we we're living in a world we didn't evolve in, right? We're living, and we we made it, it's our fault. But but and we made it to fit our evolved preferences. We live vastly more comfortable lives than we ever lived before, right? But yeah, look, the whole, the whole preference for, I mean, and the the preference for women of particular sizes or men of particular sizes for that matter. So, I mean, you look at one of the Facebook groups that I'm kind of a member of is this it this Edgar Iceborough's group, right? That has all these pictures of the old Tarzans. You look at the you know, 1920s Tarzans, and they were just like not particularly muscular dudes with bellies, right? They were just they were just like guys, but they were big, right? They were big for the time. And so people are like, oh wow, he's pretty hot. He's the epitome of like the you know the best of the best of the sample. And so, yeah, and so I mean it's partly a reflection of the fact that, you know, there's many, many more people to you see many more people now, right? But yeah, that that that variation in preference for particular body types fluctuates a lot. It's fluctuated a lot across historical time, right? There's good evidence that it varies, and it varies with things like affluence, right? And so in it's still true in many cultures in the world where where food has recently been scarce, that being heavy was seen as a sign of affluence, right? And was seen as, well, this is what this is what I aspire to, right? And so this is what I really desire. And so, yeah, our notions of particular body shapes in particular are really strongly, I mean, everything's really strongly influenced by culture, right? This is one of the, I mean, one of the really important things to keep in mind is that people don't think about evolutionary psychology like this, right? But one of the things evolutionary psychologists quite frequently do is to say, look, if this is an evolved mechanism, it we it might take on board information from the environment, right? It might manifest itself differently depending on the the cue that it gets, right? So to take a little digression for a straightforward example, right? There's a good evolutionary theory about called life history theory that suggests that if you early in your life get exposed to a harsh, unpredictable environment, right? So you just have few resources, you're hungry all the time, you have like kind of, you know, dangerous family life, then you go on what's called a fast life history strategy pathway where you get pushed in a developmental direction where you take on board those signals and you develop quickly, you reach, you genuinely reach puberty earlier, you're more likely to reproduce earlier, you're more likely to die earlier. So it literally predicts lifespan. If you get cues from the environment that's a nice, safe, comfortable environment that has lots of resources, then you develop more slowly, you reach puberty later, you're more likely to get a full education, you're more likely to end up with a higher paying job, you're more likely to live longer. All of that are, you know, and these are both thought of as evolved, right? This is a consequence of evolution. The fact that this happens is because of evolution. It makes sense, right? If you, if the world's a harsh place, you need to reproduce quickly, you need to develop and reproduce quickly. But what you actually do critically depends on the environment, right? And so evolutionary psychologists are interested in this a lot, right? They're interested in how does this mechanism manifest itself in different environments. And so, you know, we people, you know, people who pick up snippets of evolutionary psychology think that it's much less flexible than that, right? They think that genes produce effects independently of the environment, right? Men will always be like this, women will always be like this. You know, women will always like this, men will always like this. And that's not how it works, right? It doesn't, because it's shaped up by the environment you're in. And and yeah, that the, I mean, the preference for particular kinds of body shapes is a really good example of that, right? It's a and it's a good example of the fact that when you're when you ask people, and you know, like I said, I'm guilty of doing this, when you ask people to make an attractiveness judgment of something, of someone, then there's a whole bunch of unconscious mechanisms that they're accessing to do that, right? And so, you know, they may well be unconsciously evaluating the affluence of that person. Like if you ask them, is this a good long-term partner? Yeah, then their physical attributes are what you think they're using. Like, you know, do they look attractive? But but they might be unconsciously evaluating, well, are they, you know, are they well resourced, right? Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:24:48

Or even this person reminds me of someone and I've already got a built-up idea. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Very hard to get a reliable set.

SPEAKER_00 1:24:55

The hope is that all that other variation averages out, right? And you still manage to find something, right?

SPEAKER_01 1:25:00

Where are you looking to in the space now? What's what's next for you? What are you interested in?

SPEAKER_00 1:25:04

Well, this so this life history thing that I was just talking about is one of the is one of the new things we're doing in the lab at the moment. So there's all sorts of manifestations of that. So we've we, if it's true that you, when you're on this fast life history trajectory, so we know that people are more likely to gamble, they're more likely to take risks. One of the things we were interested in a couple of years ago was does that mean that if you give them a really simple decision-making task that has nothing to do with the real world, will they need less evidence to make a decision, right? And so we had this really boring task where people just had to judge the direction dots were going, right? But it was hard. And there's this model you can use to work out this kind of computational cognitive model to work out how much evidence they need before they just jump one way or the other to go, it's moving left or it's moving right. People in the fast life history path just needed much less evidence, right? So they just went, oh, they just made quick, dirty decisions, right? Whereas people in the slow trajectory evaluated for longer and you know made slower, more careful decisions, even in this task that has nothing to do with the real world, right?

SPEAKER_01 1:26:08

What was the accuracy differences?

SPEAKER_00 1:26:11

So the people doing it slower were a little bit more accurate. But yeah, but again, one of the nice things about this life history approach is that it it enables you to understand the kinds of decisions that people make in that pathway without thinking this is just because they their brains don't work properly, right? Like the the old way of thinking about that that resource difference, right? So if you come from a dangerous, impoverished environment, we've known for a long time that you have worse life outcomes, right? People used to think that's because your brain just didn't develop properly, your frontal lobes just never worked properly. Yes. There's this great so do you know the marshmallow test where you get kids, you sit them in front of one marshmallow and you say, Look, if you wait a minute, yeah, I'll give you two marshmallows, right? And then the experimenter walks out, and then when they come back, kids will have either eaten the marshmallow or not, right? If they've got really good self-control.

SPEAKER_01 1:27:01

They did a version of that with early, like again, it's hard to diagnose it at such a young age, but with ADHD.

SPEAKER_00 1:27:07

Right.

SPEAKER_01 1:27:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:27:07

Oh, right, right. And I imagine the ADHD. Ate it every time. Ate it, right? Yeah. Right. So, so kids, kids from low SES backgrounds, right? Impov kids from impoverished backgrounds were much less likely to s wait for the two marshmallows, right? Yeah. And they thought this is really weird. They they should want two marshmallows, right? Because two is better than one. And they just attributed that to, well, they just can't control themselves, right? Their frontal lobes are less developed, and so they're just less able to control their behavior. They're impulses, right? They're more impulsive. They then interviewed some of the kids afterwards and said, Well, why did you eat the marshmallow? And the kid said, Adults tell me I'll get stuff if I wait all the time, but I never do. And so when something's there, I'm just gonna take it.

SPEAKER_01 1:27:48

Yeah, so which uh eliminates the the unconscious decision to eat it because there's there's reason behind it.

SPEAKER_00 1:27:55

Yeah, yeah exactly. Yeah, and so you know, this this thing that was thought of as malignant. Adaptive actually fits their environment perfectly, right? This is based on you know, when something's there, you better take it because not only are they not going to give you the other one, they may well take that one away, right? When they come back. And so just eat it, man. And so, yeah, we're doing that. So we've I've just had a PhD student finish who's been looking at whether so, you know, this whole masculinity versus feminity thing in faces. His idea is that maybe one of the things faces might be signaling is which of these life histories you're on, right? Because if it's true that you go through puberty earlier, then that suggests it might be affecting hormones, right?

SPEAKER_02 1:28:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:28:33

And so maybe people in the fast trajectory end up with looking a particular way, right? End up with faces that that signal that this is their strategy, whereas people in the slow trajectory end up with faces that signal that this is their trajectory. And how does it differ?

SPEAKER_01 1:28:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:28:48

Yeah, maybe that makes a difference to the kinds of you know, um decision mate mating decisions that people make, right? Yeah, fascinating. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:28:55

Well, thank you very much. I think we're pretty much out of time now, but um, yeah, a lot of the chat, definitely keen to get you back on if you're interested. Yeah, sure. But yeah, I find it the evolutionary side of things is it's again, uh, within context, it's it's fun to talk about, but it's yeah, it does explain underlying mechanisms for things, and it's always gonna be everything like anything. It's always more complex than a one-word sentence. Absolutely. But it's a fascinating topic, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:29:20

Well, I am firmly of the view that the answer to any question in psychology is it depends, right? Yeah. Which which is which is not what people expect someone interested in evolutionary stuff to say, right? But but evolution's about an interaction, right? And so interactions depend, right? Depends on which level of each thing you're talking about.

SPEAKER_01 1:29:38

Yeah. Oh, thank you so much for your time. Appreciate it.

SPEAKER_00 1:29:40

No worries.

SPEAKER_01 1:29:42

Done.

SPEAKER_00 1:29:43

Yeah, that was crack out. That was good. I'll be keen to see what comes out of it.