Pod Insights Modern Wisdom Abortion, Friendships & Dad Bods - Dr Jaimie Krems About this episode Dr Jaimie Krems is an Assistant Professor at Oklahoma State University and a social psychologist whose research explores human social cognition, emotions, and behaviour.
Evolution has shaped the way that men and women make and break friendships. It's made us into life-saving, caring, aggressive, jealous, friend-guarding, backbiting, gossiping animals, but why is it that male and female friendships are so different, and a ton of other fascinating insights.
Expect to learn why a woman's body shape is so important to her attractiveness, why venting is a manipulative social strategy, how men with dad bods are literally perceived as better dads, why women who have casual sex are seen as having lower self-esteem even though there's no data to back it up, how a pro-life stance on abortion might be less virtuous than people first think and much more...
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#evolutionarypsychology #dating #friendship
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00:00 Intro
00:24 How Male & Female Friendships Differ
08:38 The Female Need to Vent
18:01 How Attractiveness Impacts Female Friendships
25:30 Finding a Balance of Jealousy
31:49 Perceiving Women’s Shapes & Sizes
41:54 Why Women Dress the Way They Do
47:56 Does Slut-Shaming Come More From Men Than Women?
55:33 Attitudes to Abortion as a Mating Strategy
1:06:47 Impact of Sexual Strategy on Religious Beliefs
1:11:26 Relationship Between Casual Sex & Self-Esteem
1:19:29 What’s Next for Jaimie’s Research
1:24:46 The Need for Friendship for Happiness
1:29:34 Where to Find Dr Krems
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Transcript 14,804 words · 5 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 Among women, for example, chastity is a big thing. Males really prefer fidelity and chastity and female mates. If a woman gains a reputation as being unfaithful or sexually promiscuous, that's a really hard reputation to do away with, right?
0:16 Chris Williamson? You can't show everybody how little sex you're having.
0:19 Speaker 00 Exactly, exactly.
0:24 Chris Williamson? How do male and female friendships differ?
0:29 Speaker 00 Oh, God, how much time do you have? Um, okay, so, uh, we're not gonna start with the easy stuff. Um, structurally, they differ in terms of the, uh, so, males typically form these less emotionally close, looser but multi male friendship groups. Females tend to form really emotionally intense and close dyadic relationships. So female female relationships.
0:57 Speaker 00 That's one of the biggest ways that they differ because it has all kinds of implications for what happens when those friendships break up. Female friendships tend to be shorter lived and more fragile than these more robust multi male friendship groups. It has implications for the acrimonious end. Women share much more intimate details with one another. And this information can be ammunition that friends can use against each other when this friendship breaks up. They also spend so much time together. So when the friendship does break up, there can be huge grief at that. And I could go on and on talking for about four hours about it. But that's, those are some of the ways.
1:39 Chris Williamson? Why would it be adaptive for women to have fewer friends with deeper connection versus men having a broader friend group?
1:48 Speaker 00 Yeah, we don't know. It's one of the, it's honestly, we don't, I'll probably say that a ton. So we do have really great evidence from non-human primate work. Susan Perry's lab at UCLA, Joan Silk, who is at ASU. And that work suggests that among non-human primate females, so capuchins, baboons, having just a few close female friends can increase the female's own longevity and the health and longevity of her offspring. So it does seem like there are strong links between female friendship and female fitness. There is some indication that perhaps in humans as well.
2:32 Speaker 00 So Stacy Rukus's work, perhaps in humans as well. Female friendship is also fitness enhancing. Our friends do a lot of good things for us. But why that would be different among females versus males? That's a really great question. And in humans, yeah, we don't know.
2:50 Chris Williamson? Would it be a potential case that with alloparenting, the shared parenting of your child amongst usually family members, but then sometimes super close friends as well? The cost of choosing a wrong friend to look after your child is so great that the threshold for you to call them a good friend needs to be higher than for men. If you're going to go and try and take down some mammoth that you're almost certainly going to fail at doing, you don't mind who it is that you go with, right? Like, you know, if one third of you are going to die over the next week, then cool. Like, it can be whoever you want. But if you're going to put your child into the hands of somebody else, that to me would suggest, okay, well, I need to make sure that I have a greater threshold for friendship than the guy
3:35 Chris Williamson? that just wants to throw spears at things and talk shit.
3:39 Speaker 00 Yeah, so there's sort of a greater confluence of benefits among men. Among women, maybe not so much. So that's one of the answers or possible answers is the importance of alloparenting. Another one is this idea that our women.
3:59 Speaker 00 You know, we birth offspring and somehow we're closer to our friends because our female friends hijack this hormonal physiological mental system. Um, that's probably not the case, but that's one explanation. Um, another one that might hold some water, the people like Tanya Reynolds and um, uh, the late and great Anne Campbell have um, been proponents of is this idea that there's a long history in humans of patrul locality, which means that males stay in their natal group and females often leave the natal group and end up in their uh, male partner's group with a bunch of co-wives potentially.
4:41 Speaker 00 And so if that's the case, then females are potentially going to be designed to form kin-like relationships with people who aren't kin, whereas males have that sort of buffer of uh, what we'd call lowercase r relatedness. So if they help each other, they sort of help themselves because they're genetically related, it boosts their inclusive fitness. For women, if they help the other women in their social group, maybe their co-wives, they're not related necessarily. And so they're not going to get that just boost to inclusive fitness. Maybe there's something going on that predisposes women to um, form these kin-like relationships
5:23 Speaker 00 to make other women more invested in them and then maybe more invested in helping them in their offspring.
5:30 Chris Williamson? Uh, because stuff like infanticide and even uh, homicide is attempted between women within the harem of whatever guy they're with. When it comes to what men want from men that they're friends with and what women want from women that they're friends with, how do they differ?
5:48 Speaker 00 Yeah, so um, my colleague Keela Williams, who's a professor at Hamilton College, has this really great paper in Evolution in Human Behavior on Sex Differences and Friend Preferences. Um, men seem to prefer the sort of coalitional support, social support. Um, women want more emotional support. Um, they also tend to want more time and energy put into the relationship. Um, men also tend to prefer the sort of what are sometimes called shoulder to shoulder relationships. So, okay, yeah, maybe we'll talk. I don't care if we talk. I don't need to talk to you, but I want to do stuff together. Um, women, it's more face to face. I need to hash out everything that just happened because that bitch looked at me funny.
6:33 Chris Williamson? Did you see in Friends by Robin Dunbar, there was a study done on the angle that men stand facing each other and that women stand facing each other. Did you see this?
6:44 Speaker 00 No, I read that book too. I, I sent it to my parents because I'm in it. He was, he was my old advisor. He's the coolest.
6:50 Chris Williamson? He is a legit legend. Yes, he was on the show a couple of weeks ago. So, um, in it, he said that, and this is so fascinating. I can't unsee this. This is one of those things that you can't unsee. Next time that you go to a party, look at the angle that men are standing, talking to each other. It's almost always going to be slightly open. So they're going to be about a hundred and twenty degrees was the average angle that was found. And the argument for this that was put forward is that the only real time that men would stand face to face is if they were about to fight. Like, that's quite a confrontational, this front on, eye to eye thing. And I'd notice it in myself with my friends. I notice it in people when I go into parties. And yet you see girls and girls are totally happy to be completely front on to each other.
7:35 Chris Williamson? Uh, so yeah, that's confrontational undertone, physical confrontational undertone is super interesting.
7:43 Speaker 00 That's, it, it reminds me, so, uh, if men are going to stand at an angle to sort of, um, defray the possible, uh, cue that, oh, oh, I'm gonna attack you. Um, there's some work that suggests that maybe the reason that women share all of these secrets and share these sort of evaluative information, I might tell you who I really hate or how I really feel about someone or a phenomenon, um, is to say, okay, you have some ammo on me. I'm a friend. I'm a friendly. You can trust me. And it does seem to work. Um, so if I share social information with you, particularly information that's sensitive.
8:25 Speaker 00 Or even if I just self disclose to you, you're more likely to trust me, like me and feel close to me. It's part of why we think that venting works so well among women to manipulate alliances.
8:37 Chris Williamson? Right. So venting is different to just saying, I really don't like that girl over there because of something that feels, is that too obviously sort of Machiavellian that it's an outright takedown of somebody else. If it's couched in this sort of frustrated, agitated language that, oh, you know, I, I, I just need to tell you, I got to tell you about this thing and she's such a bitch and I, I, I hate her shoes and I hate her hair and she whatever, whatever. Is that what's, what's the difference between venting and just outright like being abusive to somebody behind their back?
9:11 Speaker 00 Yeah. So I would say that the, a good example of venting is like, I'm just so frustrated, Chris, I don't know what to do. I mean, she's just canceled on me again and I have a really hard time and I don't, I just don't know how to handle this. So what we think is going on is that it's not that venting is any less Machiavellian, although it might actually help venters to not be conscious that they're trying to harm a target, the person they're venting about. It's that compared to more overt competitor derogation saying like, oh, she canceled on me again versus she sucks so hard, she's so selfish, I hate her. That
9:53 Speaker 00 allows you to harm the target just as much. So you harm their reputation just as much in the eyes of the person that you're talking to as if you said she sucks and she's horrible. But unlike if you say she sucks and she's horrible, you don't look bad. Your reputation is buffered. How much they like you is buffered. It's really just this form of venting that really makes them, makes the person you're talking to like the target less, but still like you just as much.
10:22 Chris Williamson? Uh, by playing a agitated victim in one form or another, it doesn't make you look like someone that's actually sly. Because obviously one of the things. As someone that was a club promoter for a long time, I saw this that
10:37 Speaker 00 Oh.
10:38 Chris Williamson? A big insight you learn about people that often talk behind people's backs, if you pay attention, is that you shouldn't trust them to not talk behind your back. These are the, they're not just doing it for them. They're doing it for everybody for the most part. But venting circumvents that defense mechanism a little bit because it makes us think, oh, well, you know, as long as, because I'm a good person, I'm not going to agitate Jamie to the point where she's going to say that I've canceled on her again because I'm not the sort of person that cancels. So I guess the venting is a little bit more surreptitious with the way that it delivers it.
11:18 Speaker 00 Yeah. So I think there are two things going on there and one is exactly what you're saying, right? So people think that venting or venters have much lower intention to harm the targets. And they think the derogators have high intention to harm the targets. And as soon as you manipulate that, then you manipulate all sorts of downstream effects from venting. So if you think that I want to harm the target, say I, that we're actually secret rivals or something, then my venting isn't going to be effective in making you think the target sucks. And my venting isn't going to be effective in making you think that I'm not aggressive and I'm not manipulative.
11:58 Speaker 00 Another thing that's going on is that, so I subscribe to these, these models of friendship whereby people have sort of friend rankings. And so I might say all kinds of negative, awful things and break all sorts of people's trust to my best friend. I'll tell her what everyone says. But if I'm doing that to her, she might infer sort of as a cue if I'm saying, well, Chris said this, and I shouldn't say it out loud, but Chris said this. She might think, oh, well, Jamie values me more than Jamie values Chris. And that could just sort of bolster where she thinks I put her in my friend network. And this is Kila Williams, and she really is the top of my friend network.
12:43 Speaker 00 And I really do tell her everything.
12:44 Chris Williamson? Fantastic.
12:45 Speaker 00 I don't know why people don't assume that.
12:47 Chris Williamson? Fantastic. Um, when it comes to getting other people to buy into you as a friend,
12:55 Speaker 00 Mm hmm.
12:56 Chris Williamson? Understanding that you're giving them privileged information that in the wrong hands would be ruinous. That seems like a smart, a costly way to show that you are of good faith. Like, if you're going to say, I need to tell you about my chronic flatulence. It's been plaguing me for a long time. I can't really talk to anybody else about it. In the wrong hands, you know, that would be bad, bad info. Uh, what, are there any more nuances there with regards to how people open up with that privileged information? Does it relate at all to venting in one way or another?
13:34 Speaker 00 So I do think that venting shares and comments and features with that sort of self disclosure, right? And to the extent that venting does and can be a form of self disclosure, like, oh, I just really can't stand this person. Then maybe venting enjoys some of the same functionality as self disclosure, like making you think I like you better. Or making you think that I'm really trustworthy. Um, I, I would say too, that the, the ammo, the information. So, I mean, ideally I don't have chronic flatulence and it can't be smelled, right? Um, but something that's secret, that is really hard to assess. That's the reputational damage that's really, really intense.
14:18 Speaker 00 And it might be, um, so among women, for example, um, chastity is a big thing. Males really prefer fidelity and chastity and female mates on average, et cetera, et cetera. Um. If a woman gains a reputation as being unfaithful or sexually promiscuous, that's a really hard reputation to do away with, right?
14:46 Chris Williamson? You can't show everybody how little sex you're having.
14:49 Speaker 00 Exactly, exactly. But if a guy gets a reputation like, oh, you're a bum and you have no job, or, you know, you have no income, and he comes along with, you know, a Rolex and a Lamb... My husband really loves the effing Marciolago, which is whatever. He comes along in a Marciolago, which means he probably has a small penis, but it also might mean that he has a lot of money. And so you can refute that reputational attack pretty easily, as with most of the reputational attacks on men. But a lot of the dimensions that women are valued for reputationally, they're harder to refute.
15:27 Chris Williamson? That's interesting. So the currency that women can manipulate within a friendship group in terms of what is most valued by other women, and specifically by men that are looking at those women as potential mates, is harder to falsify
15:49 Speaker 00 Yeah.
15:49 Chris Williamson? and is easier to manipulate because for the guys, it is more easy to show. He's weaker than me, poorer than me, shorter than me, whatever, whatever. It's like, look, it's all, relatively, it's all on display. Whereas, yes, the sort of socio-sexual elements of a woman's nature are hidden much more open to manipulation.
16:12 Speaker 00 Absolutely. Many of the things that women value one another for as friends, trustworthiness and loyalty, those things are really difficult to assess. In fact, everyone, male, female, et cetera, has an incentive to make everyone else think that... So I have an incentive to make you all think that I'm loyal to all of you and that you're all my best friends. Because if I make you think that I'm your best friend, you're going to value me more, take my side against more other people, give me more finite support than you would over somebody that you think is just your third best friend.
16:52 Chris Williamson? I remember reading something about the common types of insults that are lodged at women and at men. And at women, it was accusations around chastity and like sexual promiscuity. At men, it was questions around manhood dominance and stuff like that. So I'm guessing that this just is completely in line with what we've spoken about so far.
17:16 Speaker 00 Absolutely. There's some really cool work by Anne Campbell. Again, she studied girl gangs. And you don't see that phenomenon in women the way that you do in men, even throughout history. Amazons, great myth, but women have not banded together the way that men have to engage in coalitional warfare. We just don't see that. Although, you know, again,
17:39 Speaker 00 great, great myth. What we see instead is that there is still, even in these gangs, this reputationless denigration, this aggression that's verbal. But when we do see women fight, it's often over accusations of being sexually promiscuous. So it's the reputational denigration that actually leads to the physical altercation.
18:01 Chris Williamson? Interesting. What role does attractiveness play in terms of impacting a woman's role within friendship groups, ability to make friends, fragility as she climbs up the social hierarchy and stuff like that?
18:18 Speaker 00 Yeah. So one of the things that we thought, and there are some data that that suggests that attractive women actually evoke or attract more aggression from other women. And that might be the case because the more attractive a woman is, particularly as a mating competitor, you know, the more rivalrous or the the worse a competitor she is for you. If she's really good looking, she can get what she wants better than you can get what you want if you're another woman. But what we're finding, my grad student Laurie and Mary and I are really breaking down what it is that makes women threats computationally. And
18:59 Speaker 00 What we're finding is maybe not that surprising in light of some work by people like David Buss and Aaron Sell. It suggests that for women attractiveness is really important. Men value attractiveness in women as a cue to potential status and fertility and all of these good things. And attractive women end up getting all sorts of goodies. People want to be their friends. People want to give them things. They end up getting bigger salaries than less attractive women. And so they're kind of formidable. They end up having a lot of power that they could withhold or a lot of goodies that they can withhold from you. So it turns out that that's actually much more complicated when it comes to attractiveness
19:44 Speaker 00 because people want to be their friends even though they're also potentially really dangerous rivals on the mating market. If a woman's just promiscuous, then it's easy. She doesn't really possess any positive affordances for me. I can just say fuck her and aggress against her.
20:00 Chris Williamson? Ah, okay. I was going to ask, why is it the case that guys like to be around other guys that are successful? They have this trickle down effect of casting a broad shadow of their resources and their success. What's the difference there?
20:15 Speaker 00 Yeah, so women end up facing this bind that men don't. Guys love being around other successful guys and they're even actually pretty big fans of being friends with guys that can out compete them on all sorts of things.
20:32 Chris Williamson? Yeah, you're positively disposed to having friends that are further up the hierarchy than you.
20:37 Speaker 00 Exactly, exactly. You want them to be better than you at stuff and it doesn't threaten you, it doesn't bother you. That's great. And even when little boys are talking, they'll say like, my dad's car is a rocket ship. Oh, well, my dad's car is a bigger rocket ship. Whereas little girls end up doing very much sort of these weird strategic gymnastics to not stand out and God forbid, never seem like they're striving or being superior. Because among girls and women, if you're the person that says, well, mine's even better, mine's even bigger, you're going to be excluded. And so women end up facing this bind of having to compete to get what they want.
21:19 Speaker 00 But they can't necessarily lean on some other women to do that because while competing, while striving, they end up being the kind of person that gets kicked out of the friendship group.
21:31 Chris Williamson? Why is it?
21:32 Speaker 00 Does that make sense?
21:33 Chris Williamson? Yeah, it does. I'm trying to work out the difference between men and women of why the women seem to have a more zero-sum mentality when it comes to their friendships than the men do.
21:45 Speaker 00 Yeah, so I don't think we have a good explanation. We have a lot of good data that suggests, so Joyce Benenson's incredible work, that men are more cooperative with one another, they can handle more conflict with one another, they reconcile after conflict more with one another than women do.
22:06 Speaker 00 And with my grad student, Crystal Duarte, we have some data that suggests that it's not that women completely disfavor competitiveness in their female friends, they can handle competitiveness in female friends, they just don't want their female friends to be competitive toward them. So if you're competitive toward your rival, or even if you're competitive toward the woman I don't like, awesome, good for you, kick that bitch's ass. But don't be competitive toward me, whereas guys are okay with that, they can handle that.
22:39 Speaker 00 The best explanation that I think we have really does come from Joyce Benenson's sort of overview of the costs and benefits of cooperating and competing in primate societies. So males have this ability to band together to guard the group in intergroup warfare. Females never did that, they don't have this pressure to do that. And so for males, any one ally might be simply more valuable. And so, yeah, we might hate each other and maybe, you know, I want to kill you, but at the end of the day, if my group is bigger than this other group, even if I want to kill this other guy in my group, he has more benefits to me alive than dead.
23:22 Chris Williamson? Friend guarding and mate guarding, to me, seemed like two very similar
23:28 Chris Williamson? dynamics. The fact that, I learned this from David Buss, that mate guarding, if you have a partner that you feel is starting to slip away from you, you move into a cost-inflicting strategy where you try and bring down their mate value, you do things like make sure that you check their texts, you make them feel more insecure, it can come up with things like gaslighting. With men, it often Results in even domestic violence where they can start to inflict physical costs. This is a manifestation of someone being concerned that their partner is going to go and leave them for someone else. And then I found out from you that there is the exact same thing for friends and that's friend guarding.
24:02 Speaker 00 Yeah, yeah. So friend guarding can look really similar to mate guarding. It's just you're guarding a friend instead of a mate. The sort of things that make a mate poacher more scary to you are going to be different than the things that make a friend poacher scary. And so we started to investigate some of that. But I think for me, at least, the coolest difference that we're seeing is that people are not that are not just absolutely necessarily predisposed to hate people who guard them.
24:40 Speaker 00 So if I guarded my friend, there are some instances in which my friend might actually like that and use that as a cue that I really value her. And it's probably the same case in romantic relationships, except much of the research, although if you look at like 1950s women's magazines, it's different, but much of the research says that we just hate jealous people. We don't want our partners to be jealous, full stop. And that's not entirely true for our mates or for our friends. And I think that's really apparent among friends. If if I say to my best friend, like, you're spending a lot of time with this other person and I I love our friendship and I don't want to lose it.
25:22 Speaker 00 That is a cue of how much I value my friend and our friendship. And my best friend might love that and increase how much she values me.
25:30 Chris Williamson? I suppose outward displays of jealousy are the costly signals that we were talking about before. It's also opening up a degree of vulnerability from you. I guess one of the sort of common dynamics that people talk about avoiding in relationships is coming across too needy. That coming across too needy is something that is a bit of a turn off for people and it can cause many attachment styles to turn and run. So is there something similar when it comes to friendships? Like, what's the delicate balance between jealousy, too little, the right amount and not enough?
26:09 Speaker 00 Yeah, that's such a great question. I was talking about gratitude and the sort of the way you have to calibrate gratitude. You can't give too big a present or too small a present recently. And I think the issue is you just have to hit the sweet spot. So if I tell my friend, you know, hang out with anyone, tell anyone anything, I don't care who you're spending your time with. I don't need you or need to talk to you. That's a signal that I don't value her as much as I should. And yet, if I tell her, you know, if you leave me, I will slit my wrists and die like Frankie Pentangeli. That's probably not the best thing either.
26:52 Speaker 00 So what I think we have to do are these sort of meta representations of, okay, where does my best friend value me? How much does she value me? Okay, she values me at a 10. I need to do behaviors at around a 10. Because if I do behaviors at an 11, too much Pentangeli land bad. If I do them at a 1, she's going to think I don't love her. And she's going to go to somebody that does value her the way she deserves to be valued. So what we think is that these things are about calibration. What we know is very little. I mean, we really know very little here.
27:33 Chris Williamson? I suppose this, the jealousy and the concern must be one of the reasons why people are sometimes hesitant to, I know that I was like this. I was an only child. So I grew up not really understanding how social, still don't, sort of social groups and networks and friendships and stuff work. But I always remember being very hesitant about introducing a friend from one friendship group to a friend from another friendship group, in case they started liking each other more than each of them individually liked me. And then they would become friends. And then I would, I would be left out.
28:04 Speaker 00 Yeah, no, people hate that. Women hate that more than men, but um I'm also an only child, so good for us. Look at us go, parents. Um, so uh I do think that people are aware of that, um especially women. Um, so women report greater friendship jealousy over the potential loss of a best friend and a close friend. Um, although males report uh report potentially greater friendship jealousy at the loss of an acquaintance. Again, maybe just because any one ally is more beneficial for me. Um, so I do think people are really sensitive to this, but our culture has long said, well, jealousy is this horrible vice.
28:48 Speaker 00 You're a bad person. In fact, even researchers have said, um, if you feel jealous, it's related to low self-esteem. Other personal deficits. Um, oh, my favorite is that um if you feel jealousy in a friendship, it's because you just are not normally developing or you haven't matured enough to realize that no one relationship can fulfill all your needs. So even researchers are shitting on this emotion that people have felt across cultures, across eras, and probably even non-human animals feel. So what we can say there is we can ask them, do you feel jealous? But we can say they exhibit behavior pretty consistent with jealousy.
29:28 Chris Williamson? What like, what animals are uh proxy jealous?
29:33 Speaker 00 Oh, man, so chimps do it, uh horses do it. So female mustangs in Spain will bite and kick the friend poacher. They sort of have female best friends. They'll do that. Cows do it. Dolphins do it and lions do it. It does seem to be a social animal phenomenon. Um, so I think we actually, if we knew to look for it, we'd probably see it in even more social species.
29:59 Chris Williamson? And what you're saying is all of the researchers or many of the researchers are shitting on this emotion, which has to be adaptive. It's so broadly uh found in the animal kingdom and so ubiquitous throughout all of humans. Like, it's here for a reason. It has to be signaling us this is something that you need to pay attention to.
30:16 Speaker 00 Yeah, exactly. If it's so and solely maladaptive, selection would have gotten rid of it. But it's probably not so and solely maladaptive. Rather, it does some benefit for us. Probably, in our view, pretty similar to Basson jealousy. It serves an adaptive function or a function tributary to reproductive fitness that says, hey, don't lose this person that you value. So for friendship jealousy, we sort of think it's a combination of two things. I'm gonna feel more jealousy the more that I value the friend that I stand to lose. So best friend versus a rando.
30:56 Speaker 00 And I'm gonna feel more jealousy the more threat or replacement threat that this other person stands to pose, the poacher. So if the poacher is spending a lot of time with my friend, I might feel some jealousy. Okay, maybe my friend likes them better. But if my friend definitely prefers me to that person, so if my friend has a plus one to, I'm trying to think of a concert I'd actually wanna go to. That's really hard right now. A metric concert, cuz I'm an aging hipster. My friend has a plus one to a metric concert and I can go, but their new friend also wants to go. Well, if my friend takes me, then I know she prefers me over her new friend.
31:41 Speaker 00 And even if she spends forty hours a week with her new friend, I'm not a threat, because I know she prefers me.
31:48 Chris Williamson? Hmm. Okay. You looked at the differences between interpretations of women's body size and women's body shape. What did you learn there?
31:58 Speaker 00 Yes. So, I mean, I don't think this is gonna be shocking for any man who has looked at women or for any woman who has cared what she looks like. But to the best of my knowledge, it's the first empirical study to show that fat stigma is sensitive not only to how big a woman's body is, but also where her fat is on her body. And so two women who are the same exact height, the same exact weight, and the same BMI. If a woman carries her fat in her gut versus in her hips and thighs, the woman who carries her fat in her gut is going to be stigmatized much more. People have much less favorable views of her.
32:43 Chris Williamson? What do you mean when you say stigmatized?
32:46 Speaker 00 So they feel less warm toward her. They probably be more likely to discriminate against her in all sorts of ways. And we also have some data that we haven't published yet about the stereotypes they hold about her. So they have more negative beliefs about her, that she's lazier, that she's less attractive, that she's less intelligent.
33:06 Chris Williamson? Okay. Why would it be the case that fat in the gut versus fat in the hips would have that effect?
33:14 Speaker 00 Yeah. So, I mean, Steve Gollan and Lasek have have really exploded the idea that waist to hip ratio, which is, so if your waist is small and your hips are big, you can think of
33:30 Speaker 00 a beautiful statue. I'm trying not to say Kim Kardashian, but Kim Kardashian, dear God. Sorry, I can't believe I said Kim Kardashian on something scientific, but whatever, it's fine. So, small waist, big hips and thighs, good for her. That probably doesn't signal fertility. It probably signals the future reproductive value, so the ability to have more children in the future.
33:59 Chris Williamson? What do you mean? What's the difference between those two things?
34:03 Speaker 00 So fertility would be, can I have kids right now? So we often think about fertility in relation to ovulation, which is even more immediate, that four to six day window of when sex can lead to pregnancy. But it's very likely more a signal of of youth in particular, this waist to hip ratio. And so, and we do have some data consistent with that. People think that the more fat goes in the gut or around the waist, the larger the waist gets, the older the target is, particularly for women. And so if we see that a woman has this waist to hip ratio, she might be healthier.
34:44 Speaker 00 She might have potentially more useful genes for us. I don't know if I buy that. But very likely, a woman who has such a waist to hip ratio is likely to be younger and have higher future reproductive value. Whereas a woman who has fat in her gut, that's the fat that's typically related to the things we associate with the negative outcomes linked to obesity. So obesity doesn't cause these things necessarily, but things like type 2 diabetes and heart disease, gut fat is what's really related to that more than just fat, period, which is awesome because my ass is huge.
35:27 Chris Williamson? So I remember reading, the internet does know. I remember reading a bunch of, a bunch of different things that were showing tribe, tribal women and this like really insane sized bum. And one of the arguments that was put forward there is that having a huge ass offsets the weight of a child in front of the spine during child, childbearing, that you actually have a, a different way that the spine is loaded that may be able to make it easier. Another one was that wider hips create a physical cue of a broader birth canal, which maybe would reduce complications during childbirth. But I did see
36:13 Chris Williamson? a study about maybe three months ago that said there is no correlation in fertility, in like genuine fertility between the waist to hip ratio in women. So it's one of those things where I'm like, why do we like it? I'm trying to work out why men like it. And it does seem like it's the same as whatever, like good, smooth skin or something. It's just a cue of youthfulness that maybe we've managed to kid ourselves into, oh, it's something to do with the birth canal. It's something to do with the way that women can stand up when they've got a child.
36:46 Speaker 00 Yeah, we can come up with a lot of really silly or bad evolutionary takes and my god, we have as a field. But that said, I mean, I think the way that science should work is sort of throw it all against the wall and test it. And for me, at least, I would put my stock in whatever Lassek and Galen have to say. They're sort of the last word on this stuff for me. And so what we know is that across cultures, there does seem to be something going on, right? This is the shape we find most attractive. So something is happening. It's happening across cultures. It's happening largely across eras. And whatever it is, seems
37:31 Speaker 00 to be something that attracts men to women. Okay, most of those things that attract men to women are related to fertility, maybe fecundity, youth, that kind of thing. This is probably one of those things. And I sort of buy the idea that it's this future reproductive potential. But it doesn't mean it's not, you know, these other stereplasia or and there is something going on with the spine that makes women more and less attractive during pregnancy. I think David Lewis has some stuff on that and how stiletto heels change the shape of the spine and the bum. So these things are possible. But if you
38:16 Speaker 00 wanted the the final answer on it, don't don't go to me, go to Lassek and Galen. That's where I'd go.
38:23 Chris Williamson? How does body size interpretations differ from women to men?
38:29 Speaker 00 Do you mean that women view themselves as bigger?
38:33 Chris Williamson? If you have a woman, if you have a woman that is of a size, and if you have a man that is also of a size, what are these sort of interpretations about the guy? If you have a fat guy, what do people think about him? Because we know what they think about a woman.
38:46 Speaker 00 Yeah, so for women, it's generally never that favorable, although I will say that um so we had to create totally new figures because for our stimuli because no figures existed that increased in size to obesity that actually varied shape. And once you do allow shape to vary, people are more favorable of the figure, the female figure who is obese but has that hourglass shape compared to a figure who is overweight and has the her fat and her gut. So their size actually is trumped by shape.
39:25 Speaker 00 Um, for guys, shape also matters, although it's really much less clear in our data. Um, what it seems to be is that sort of male typical gut fat um can relate to perceptions of being a good dad, so that that dad bod phenomenon, and Mitch Brown has some stuff on this.
39:50 Chris Williamson? Hang on, you're telling me that a guy that has a dad bod gut is perceived as being a better father than a guy that doesn't have that?
40:00 Speaker 00 It's it's possible, so Mitch Brown has some stuff on that and and our data would support that view. Um, this is the kind of thing where like the effect is small in in social psychology. We're often talking about small effects and this effect is small, but it's pretty consistent. Uh, people might think that, my guess is, okay, so you have one calorie, you can't spend it twice, you can spend it on mating effort, or you can spend it on parenting effort. Um, if you are a really hot dude, you can spend it on mating effort and do really well. If you're a dad bod dude, not to say that they're not hot, plenty of people loved Ben
40:42 Speaker 00 Affleck when he looked like that, I guess, although that tattoo is hideous, but whatever. Um, so. If you have a more dad bod, people might assume that you're more likely to spend your calorie on parenting effort because you can't get as much out of it.
40:58 Chris Williamson? Oh, my God. Okay, so because because a guy who has a dad bod presumably has more mating opportunity doors closed to him, any potential energy that he does get in is more likely to be spent on his child and on his family because he he simply has less options to do it in terms of frittering away in the bedroom.
41:23 Speaker 00 I mean, I I don't know if this is something that Mitch Brown has already done. It's entirely possible that that's the sort of mechanistic account, the perception that he's more likely to spend his time and energy on parenting and maybe less so on mating. That's that's what I'd go with. But of course, that could all be, you know, completely wrong. And that's that's half of what we do in science is learn how wrong we are.
41:51 Chris Williamson? That is absolutely hilarious. Okay, so you spoke about high heels on women there. I want to talk about the psychology of women's wardrobes because I know that this is something else that you looked at. What is going on with women's wardrobes? Why do they dress the way that they do?
42:09 Speaker 00 I mean, there is a huge answer to that, and we've studied a sliver of it. And I think I should say here that so much of this stuff, so women's clothing seems like the sort of ephemeral, silly little topic. And even I agree with that, although I love clothes. And if Phoebe Philo is listening, send me everything you got. But it's a really fascinating phenomenon if you couch it and sort of situate it in the world of these signals. So feathers on birds.
42:46 Speaker 00 These physical signals that tell other people about you. And the dimension that's different with humans is that we get to pick and choose. So a peacock doesn't really get to choose how long and beautiful and lush its tail is. Um, but for women, we do get to pick and choose these signals and they can mean a lot. Um, and what we've found is that particularly when women are new to a group, they're going to meet other women, they're more likely to dress modestly. Um, so as to not be excluded or attacked by other women that they're meeting.
43:22 Chris Williamson? Why would it be the case that dressing non-modestly would cause them to be excluded or attacked?
43:27 Speaker 00 And, um, so Tracy Vianco has this beautiful study where she had a confederate, um, a, a young woman who was probably in college and up in Canada with her. Um, and this confederate was dressed in one of two ways when she went into a room to talk to two female friends. Um, one way she's wearing khakis and a blue crew neck t-shirt. And she goes into the room to talk to the two friends and the two friends are very pleasant to her. She's also has a ponytail. Um, in the other one, her hair is all like vavavumi. She's wearing a low cut pink V-neck thing and a push-up bra.
44:08 Speaker 00 She's dressed very, um, uh, sort of racy. Um, and when that, so it's the same woman, just dressed differently. She goes into that room. Tracy Vianco has beautiful lists of what happened to that, that woman when she went into the room. She got called a bitch. She got death stares.
44:30 Chris Williamson? Who did she get called a bitch by?
44:33 Speaker 00 Two of the participants. Uh, so two female friends that were in there, they were chatting.
44:38 Chris Williamson? Hang on, they were friends of the person that was coming in. Oh no, the two friends were friends with each other.
44:42 Speaker 00 They're two friends with each other. And so this person comes into the room and it's just like, oh, can I take your surveys now? Or, you know, um, I'm trying to.
44:55 Speaker 00 To something really, really vicious.
44:58 Chris Williamson? They knew that they were being studied.
45:01 Speaker 00 They did. They didn't know that they were being studied for this.
45:04 Chris Williamson? Ah, and they still called her a bitch.
45:07 Speaker 00 Yeah.
45:07 Chris Williamson? Right. Ah, okay. So this is the classic, you're doing a study and the bit that this study is actually about is upon your entry or exit from the study, which is the fake thing. Like the questionnaire that we're getting you to fill out has got fuck all to do with what we're actually asking you about. It's
45:21 Speaker 00 Exactly.
45:22 Chris Williamson? The, the, the old man dropped his pencils. How quickly do you walk down the corridor at the end of the, of the thing, like all of that shit?
45:29 Speaker 00 Yes, but I think Tracy's study would replicate. Yes.
45:33 Chris Williamson? Right. Okay. So what's going on there?
45:37 Speaker 00 Yeah. So I think women are using especially this promiscuity cue or cues to whether or not a woman is making herself seem sexually available. As to the benefits and costs that this woman stands to pose. So if another woman is in the vicinity. And she is making her reproductive resources really widely available by being promiscuous or just advertising that she is open for sex. Other women don't like that. Other women view that as potentially threatening, um, which there are multiple reasons for that we can go into if you'd like.
46:18 Speaker 00 But women don't like it. They, even women who themselves are promiscuous, don't want other promiscuous women as friends.
46:26 Chris Williamson? Hmm. What are the reasons for it? Why is it that women have got this concern?
46:32 Speaker 00 Yeah. So the predominant reason in the literature, um, tends to be about mating competition. So she's going to take the guy that I want. Or she's going to take the guy that I have. And if she takes the guy that I have, well, and I'm a woman, um, well, you know, I've invested a lot. I've aged during the time that I've invested. So perhaps I have less power on the mating market. And if I have a child, that child really benefits from the man's resources, which he's now going to potentially divert to her. Um. So those are the predominant explanations. I think what's missing from that is this notion that um if another woman makes, uh, so you think of it like a market, like um
47:16 Speaker 00 a sort of a biological market. And if men are trading resources for reproductive access and a cis het mating market, um, if women are voluntarily accepting fewer resources for access to their reproduction, um, and another woman's doing that, it lowers the value of my resource on the market, too. And so I think that's an explanation that we need to look at. So if she's, pardon the crude language, if she's giving it away for free, it lowers the price that I can charge for it.
47:56 Chris Williamson? I got destroyed on Instagram for putting up a video of me speaking to Jeffrey Miller, explaining the game theory of slut shaming. So I put it up and it was exactly this, right? It's like that slut shaming is a price enforcement mechanism. It ensures that no one woman is able to drop the price of sex for all women below a price that most women want to pay. And by slut shaming, what you do is you enforce more restrictive sexual norms and a sexual price that raises that back up. Uh, the number of, the number of people that were particularly unhappy with me, it mostly came from women, perhaps unsurprisingly. Uh, have you seen any data that suggests that most slut shaming comes from women rather than men?
48:42 Speaker 00 Um, you know, I don't know of anything that suggests, obviously, there's all of the stuff on the double standard, but that's about the targets being women rather than men. I don't know of anything that women themselves are more likely to do it. Um, I can say anecdotally, you know, somebody that also studies this stuff, um, I have gotten, uh, so.
49:07 Speaker 00 There are people from the sort of even more feminist wing of my life that would say that I'm doing a disservice to women by talking about the, what I would consider the beautiful strategic nature of their aggression. And then other people say, yeah, look, they are evil manipulative sluts. So I get it. I do get it. And I think we could talk about this stuff in a way that really honors how beautiful and strategic women can be. It's, it's no surprise that men can do this. We should also elucidate the gorgeous viciousness that women can visit on each other. And I, I don't know why we think of that as somehow worse.
49:52 Chris Williamson? Well, it triggers a lot of people, right? There is a, a real sort of elegance to the, the samurai blade that women's intrasexual competition wields. And, but it also, quite rightly, to the people who don't want mascot female manipulation to be shown anywhere, that women are sort of to be seen as this protected class that never do anything wrong. It's, it's bad to them. And then to the side that want to say, see, they are the manipulative sluts that we've said that they were all along. They, they also kind of don't want to see it. And they use it as a cudgel to beat the other people. So the, the comments on that post got pretty spicy. It hasn't gone up on YouTube yet, but I'm, I'm looking forward to seeing what happens when that, that goes on as well.
50:31 Speaker 00 Oh God, I'm not.
50:33 Chris Williamson? Oh, brilliant. Brilliant. Don't worry about it. Um, how do you know that the intrasexual changes that women make with their wardrobe aren't just outfit choices that women are dressing for men with? Like, how do you control for the, the male influence on, on outfits?
50:55 Speaker 00 I mean, the, the really simple answer is you do an experiment and you tell women, you're going to hang out with only other women tonight. And then you let them draw an outfit that they would wear. And you measure the number of squares where skin is showing versus not. Or for real, we did that. You could also do. So there's this paper doll set that Stephanie Northover put together. And it's women in different outfits, sort of illustrated. And a different set of people said, this outfit is modest, this outfit is really not modest. And you just say, hey, women, you're going to hang out with only other women. What outfit do you want to wear?
51:42 Speaker 00 And then we see how modest that outfit is, or on average. What we can't do, because in an experiment, or probably also in real life. It's really a weird setup is say, okay, you're only going to hang out with other women. You're going to hang out in a mixed sex group, or you're going to only hang out with other men. You're going to be the only lady there. That gets into sort of a promising young woman territory at the end of the movie. And nobody wants to study that, or maybe some people do, not me.
52:11 Chris Williamson? Yes. So is there any? Is there any data to suggest that men see women who are showing more flesh as more sexually available? My point being here that you could have a case of cross-sex mind reading gone bad. I don't think that that is the case. I think that.
52:30 Chris Williamson? I see a girl walking down the street who's got a habit on or whatever. And I consider her to be someone who is less sexually promiscuous than someone that's wearing a bikini. But it may be, it could have been the case that women were seeing other women that wear fewer clothes as being more sexually promiscuous and trying to attract more mates. But men wouldn't have paid that much attention to it.
52:55 Speaker 00 Yeah, I mean, you know, that's one of the things that there must be a study on that. Although I've said that multiple times and went into the literature and it turns out there's not. I don't think that that is a particular instance of cross-sex mind-reading gone wrong. I will say, so I don't know if you've had Candace Blake on yet, but my god, she's-
53:16 Chris Williamson? She's coming on toward the end of this year. I'm excited.
53:18 Speaker 00 Yes, she's amazing. And she has some really cool work on the sort of benefits of beautification, women's self-beautification when it's not just for men. So it's entirely possible, but it probably, here we're gonna start getting into the real nuances of things. So, am I putting on a push-up bra just for me? Maybe less so than I'm, you know, putting on my particular favorite shirt, even if it looks skimpy just for me. But Candace, Candace will answer that far better than I can. I think that women get it right when they read other women's outfits.
53:56 Chris Williamson? Right, and I guess there is a balancing act going on here that women are playing, especially if they're a woman that's trying to find a mate, because they want to give off cues of sexual availability, of reproductive fitness, of being attractive to men. But if they overcook that, they're going to end up being completely ostracized by the, or more likely to be ostracized and treated aggressively by women that are in their friend group. So there is this sort of game balance that's being played here.
54:27 Speaker 00 Absolutely, and so what I, again, I think that this is just evidence of women being really strategic and flexible. Women know what other women view as not okay clothing. And women flexibly decide what to wear based on the context and how at risk for other women's aggression they are. So if I'm more attractive, I'm more at risk for other women's aggression potentially. And I am especially likely to wear modest clothing when I'm new to a group, I'm just meeting people, I don't have friends, I'm at greatest risk for incurring aggression. And additionally, when I'm new to the group versus not, if I'm about to go meet my friends,
55:10 Speaker 00 I can wear whatever I want to meet my friends, I'm not at high risk for aggression. And so, women understand this about other women's minds, it's not some-
55:20 Speaker 00 Massive calculation. It's something that we do quickly and simply, but it's also beautiful strategic thinking. And yeah, I, I think that that's lovely.
55:33 Chris Williamson? It seems to me that there is a line to be drawn between the strategies that women deploy when it comes to their wardrobe choice and their opinions on abortion and on being pro-choice or pro-life, their intrasexual competition. And you did an interesting article that I read about attitudes to abortion as a mating strategy rather than being about sanctity of life. Do you take us through that?
56:01 Speaker 00 Yeah, so this is with Marty Hazelton at UCLA, who is just a killer scientist. And a lot of it rehashes work from her student David Pinsoff, who's badass as hell, created Cards Against Humanity, and folks like Jason Whedon and Rob Kurzweil. So credit where credit is due. But the, the gist of it is that people naturally vary in their sexual strategies. Some people are really committed. They want to get married early to one partner, have a lot of kids, invest really heavily in those kids. And then there are some other people on the other end of the same spectrum who prefer to sort of play the field for longer
56:45 Speaker 00 and have more sex with more different people. So there's this natural variation. And what's pretty interesting is that the people who are committed sexual strategists are and can understandably be threatened by the uncommitted strategist. So if I'm a woman who got married very early, I'm raising four kids, I've sort of can't economically support myself, my partner is the breadwinner, and he leaves me for this woman who is advertising her wares, I'm, I'm in a pretty big hole. That, that's pretty awful. Likewise, if I'm a man who's investing so much in my kids, but I've been cuckolded and they're not my kids because this
57:29 Speaker 00 A promiscuous gentleman came over and they're his kids. Well, that's not great either. So these committed strategists benefit by preventing the less committed strategists from pursuing their preferred strategy by being uncommitted, having more sex with more different people. If they can decrease the atmosphere of casual sex or low-cost casual sex, then they benefit. So did that make sense so far?
57:56 Chris Williamson? Yeah, of course.
57:57 Speaker 00 Okay, awesome. Okay, so once you realize that, then you start to, you you can problematize, I love when people say these words, you can problematize things like, okay, so why do people oppose abortion?
58:13 Speaker 00 It's actually kind of a really fascinating question to think about why I should give any shits whatsoever about somebody who's not related to me, who might not even be in my state, what they're doing with their fetus or their family. It doesn't affect my fitness, so why should I care? And then I think the explanation is that people vary on fit on sexual strategies, and if they're pursuing casual sex or other people in my environment, even if I'm not related to them, et cetera, et cetera, are freely pursuing casual sex and I'm a committed strategist, that can screw me up. And so committed sexual strategists stand to benefit by decreasing the ability of other
58:57 Speaker 00 people to have sexual freedoms. And if that's the case, then we should expect these casual, these committed strategists to do all sorts of things like oppose abortion. Because when abortion is legal and free and available and safe, more women are likely to be okay with having casual sex. They should oppose birth control because when birth control is available, well, there's more casual sex. And it turns out they also oppose some of these other things like marriage equality, which they associate gay men with promiscuity. And they oppose recreational drugs because they associate Molly and marijuana with promiscuity.
59:37 Chris Williamson? And this is statistically significant, this is a more prevalence of this in couples that are married, if they've got kids, if they've been together longer, how does that relate?
59:49 Speaker 00 So usually what we'll do is ask people, there are different ways to ask it, but what's your sexual strategy? So you don't have to be married, you don't have to have kids, but these things do all go together. There's some really cool work by Nick Currie and Damian Murray and colleagues that says that, so you know that that old chestnut that people just get more conservative as they age? Yeah, that's probably not true. Rather than just getting older and becoming more conservative, it seems like that effect completely washes out when you control for a number of children. So if people have kids and have more kids, they
1:00:30 Speaker 00 become more socially conservative. And again, the idea is that the sort of deep strategy that socially conservative cultures or groups or situations make my investment in my kids safer, better for me.
1:00:47 Chris Williamson? Why would it not be the case that the people who oppose abortion are not just morally opposed to all of the moral arguments that you would see around abortion? Why is that not sufficient justification to wash out all of this stuff to do with sexual competition for partners?
1:01:08 Speaker 00 Yeah, I mean, it could be. Some people might genuinely believe that these fetuses are babies and they don't want babies to be murdered. With my colleague Jordan Moon, we have some data to suggest that that's probably not the case. So if I am a person who thinks that abortion is murder, I should want to prevent abortion, right? So the more I think it's murder, the more I should want to prevent it. Okay. So we ask people how much they think abortion is murder, for example, and we randomly assign them to read about one of three hypothetical bills. All of the bills would cost the same amount of money
1:01:52 Speaker 00 and all of the bills would save the same amount of lives, but in one condition. Uh, the bills prevented abortions and saved fetal lives by punishing women for having abortions. And so that's the only condition where we also see, okay, if we're gonna punish women for having abortions, that's to decrease the availability of abortions and to decrease women's engagement in casual sex. So that would be good for the committed strategist. The other two conditions were, um, we're gonna save fetal lives by, um, uh, letting there be sex ed and birth control, which should decrease the need for abortions and therefore save the same amount of lives.
1:02:34 Speaker 00 And the other one is something that people often, you, you've probably heard this talked about. We're gonna save the same amount of lives, but they're newborns. So we're gonna give critical care and provisioning to newborns and save their lives. They die without this care and provisioning. So if I think that abortion is murder and I'm, I'm just about saving lives, then the more that I'm about saving lives, the more I think abortion is murder, the more I should support all three of these. And that's not even close to what we find. Um, so the more that I think abortion is murder, the more that I wanna punish women for having abortions. Um, but we actually see slight negative slopes for the other two.
1:03:17 Speaker 00 The more that I believe abortion is murder and want to save innocent lives, the less that I'm willing to support a bill that would give critical care and provisioning to needy infants. So that, that probably suggests that what they're saying is driving their behavior is not driving their behavior, which is not surprising. That happens for plenty of people.
1:03:39 Chris Williamson? How do you know that that's not just retributive justice that they feel should be duly done against someone that has transgressed some moral boundary?
1:03:50 Speaker 00 So it's possible that, you know, they feel like they should punish women because these women are transgressing. But if they're saying that it's not about punishing women, it's about saving lives, then they should probably want to save lives even if they don't get to punish women for having abortions while doing it. And that's just not what we see in the data. And some other data, oh, sorry.
1:04:15 Chris Williamson? Just that I was thinking about the fact that what you've tried to do there with the three different bills is have the same number of human lives, baby human lives
1:04:24 Speaker 00 Mm hmm.
1:04:25 Chris Williamson? saved or protected. And what you've controlled for is whether or not the mothers are disincentivized from having casual sex as openly.
1:04:36 Speaker 00 Yeah, so that that's only the one condition that disincentivizes casual sex. The other two save the same amount of lives. So it's the same amount of justice, so to speak, but they don't feel the same toward those. So I mean, there are plenty of things going on and there are probably some people that really do believe that this is just their moral obligation. I don't know those people. I wouldn't want to be interested in knowing those people. They're probably be really boring people, but very nice people.
1:05:11 Chris Williamson? I think that I think that it's interesting to to consider why we have the motivations that we do. Like, are my stated preferences and my revealed preferences, like, are they actually what I say that they are? And how blind am I to that? I think that the abortion debate, a lot of the language, it's surprising to me to find that out, because so much of the language is around the morality of it, some sort of ethical line in the sand that should not be crossed, so on and so forth. That, to me, feels like
1:05:48 Chris Williamson? But I mean, who's going to put their hand up and say, actually, what I'm trying to do is restrict sexual norms so that so that all of the other women and men. But I suppose there must be an equivalent for this as well. Didn't you find out that, um, is it? Men invest more money in their children, in like in fathering their children, like sexually restricted men spend more money on on their kids.
1:06:13 Speaker 00 So I didn't do that. If if that is out there, that's probably Nick Currie and colleagues would be my guess. And I wouldn't be surprised if that's true. I do think that that's true. But I think exactly what you're saying. So I can say it's a moral goal, moral imperative. And that's a much more convincing argument for me to say than saying, I just want to further my sexual strategy. These free love, new age hippies be damned, right? And it also requires so that for that latter thing to happen, I just want to further my sexual strategy.
1:06:51 Speaker 00 It probably requires they have a PhD in psychology and have been studying this and realize that there is this notion of reproductive morality. Or reproductive religiosity and that things like sexual strategy lead to religion rather than religion leading to sexual strategy.
1:07:08 Chris Williamson? Oh, what do you mean that?
1:07:10 Speaker 00 So I mean, it's obviously we haven't, you know, randomly assigned people to conditions here, but it does seem like the things that religions want serve people who have committed sexual strategies. So have one mate, have one mate early, invest really heavily in that person, stay together forever and don't get divorced. Or you'll go to hell. So all of those things that religions often support are restricted strategy benefits.
1:07:41 Speaker 00 And if that's the case, then you might very well imagine people who have restricted strategies would be attracted to religion. And so it could be that not totally dissimilar to venting, saying, well, this is a religious thing, this is a moral imperative, is cover for people who just really want to pursue their own fitness interests at the cost of other peoples. Of course, nobody's saying they realize this, right? They don't have access to this knowledge, it's not being done consciously, they're not just trying to screw any other people. They're trying to screw no one. So I couldn't help it, I couldn't help it.
1:08:22 Speaker 00 But yeah, some of the data do seem to suggest that as people enter periods of being more sexually restricted, they're more likely to adhere to religion. And when they leave those periods, they're more likely to leave religion. So think about going to college.
1:08:38 Chris Williamson? Right, so religiosity increases when you're in a committed relationship and decreases if you get out of it.
1:08:46 Speaker 00 Yeah, yeah, I mean, there are some pretty cool data to suggest that the arrow doesn't just go one way from religion telling you what sexual strategy to have, but people who have a certain sexual strategy get attracted to religion because it benefits the strategy that they have.
1:09:04 Chris Williamson? How should people deal with the discomfort of hearing that you would say their view on abortion or their sense of connection between themselves and their religion could be their evolutionary programming coming out in a, how would you say, the press secretary of their mind giving them a very culpable excuse? Like, how should they deal with that? Because that's something that's incredibly uncomfortable to hear.
1:09:33 Speaker 00 Yeah, I mean, what isn't these days? I don't know, I'm not, I'm not the most sensitive person, Chris, so I would just say suck it up. I really, there's probably a nicer way to put it.
1:09:51 Speaker 00 I don't have the capacity or bandwidth or natural disposition to figure out what the heck the nice way is. So suck it up. Yeah.
1:10:00 Chris Williamson? Do you not find as you learn more about your evolutionary predisposition, though, and the different motivations that are coming out in your behavior? Have you not found yourself in a sort of an uncanny valley of of feeling like you're just at the mercy of whatever genes were given to you from a three billion year like evolutionary unbroken stream?
1:10:24 Speaker 00 I mean, would I love to remake the world in an image where everybody thought like Lizzo was the hottest bitch ever, which many people do, and she really probably is. Yeah, I mean, I would love that. That would benefit me. Um, because she and I are shaped very similarly for anyone who can't see what I look like. So that would be awesome, but that's just not the world that we live in. And I think understanding reality is great. And I think acknowledging the fact that we have
1:10:54 Speaker 00 a lot of personal choices that that we can make that aren't necessarily making us slaves to some innate programming. Our behavior is hugely flexible. Um, I I think we have to realize that, too. So I I don't think we're just, you know, sort of these lovely programmed robots that just say, you know, she's hot, I must mate. I think there's a lot more to us than that. And the the messiness and the complexity and the that part is what I love about humans, very few of them, but the ones I like.
1:11:26 Chris Williamson? Talk to me about the relationship between casual sex and self esteem, because I know that you've done a ton of work on this as well.
1:11:33 Speaker 00 Yeah. Um, so I mean, this is one of those things where I don't know why people haven't gone after this effect before, but we knew in media, books, films, the, have you seen Arrested Development?
1:11:49 Chris Williamson? No.
1:11:50 Speaker 00 Um, it's an amazing show. It's hilarious and ridiculous, but in the show, they have a sort of cheeky analog of the Girls Gone Wild video series, and it's called Girls with Low Self Esteem. Um, and so we've, we have this, it's so prevalent, the idea that women who have casual sex must have low self-esteem. It's so prevalent in society that it can be a punchline on a popular TV series or largely unpopular TV series, but nevertheless was funny. Um, and so what we did was simply investigate this and see if it was the case for men as well. And what we find is in, in America, people think that women, but not men, who have casual sex must have low self-esteem.
1:12:35 Speaker 00 And, you know, self-esteem can be hugely important for oneself, but perceptions of other people's self-esteem are perhaps even more important. Um, so if I perceive you to have low self-esteem, I'm less likely to want to be your friend. I'm less likely to ask you for a date. I'm less likely to hire you for a job and I am less likely to vote you into political office. So this isn't just, you know, oh, whoa, is this poor sad little woman that has low self-esteem. These have real, serious economic and social consequences.
1:13:09 Chris Williamson? How are you defining self-esteem? What does it mean?
1:13:12 Speaker 00 So, uh, feeling good about yourself. Very simple, classic definition, a sense of respect for yourself.
1:13:20 Chris Williamson? Okay. Why is there a presumption that casual sex, somebody that has lots of casual sex would be low in self-esteem?
1:13:32 Speaker 00 So that women have casual sex who, so there's this presumption for women. We see it repeatedly. Um, part of it, not all of it, but part of it seems to be that people presume that women who do have casual sex are sort of making the best of a bad job. So they presume that women would ideally prefer to have one long-term mate who loves them and they love, and that's that. And so women who have casual sex are sort of just tossed into doing this. They have to do it to get by. Or they have to do it because they're trying to find a partner. Um.
1:14:13 Speaker 00 So that's part of the thinking underlying it, but I say part because even when we tell our participants, this woman is having casual sex and she fucking loves it. She is so happy doing this. She doesn't want to be tied down. She doesn't want this other stuff. They still believe that she has lower self-esteem than a woman who has committed sex, um, so one partner and is unhappy pursuing it. So this is a really robust phenomenon. We couldn't make it go away. Hopefully other researchers continue down this line and can figure out how to do that, but.
1:14:51 Chris Williamson? Would the assumption not be because it is easier for women to get sex than it is for men to get sex and that there is a presumed uh preference for women to get into a long-term committed relationship? So by her having sex, that is her filling some sort of void inside that she can't uh fill with a a long-term monogamous partner?
1:15:18 Speaker 00 And that that might be it. They they think that, yes, it's easier for women to have sex. And so women might have an easier time attracting a mate than a man does. I'm sure you and and Will Costello can talk about this and the in-cell phenomenon or or maybe the femme cell phenomenon all day. Um, but even so, um, when that woman is having casual sex and just enjoying it, she's eschewing the the strategy that people assume that she has. Even when we say, well, she's enjoying it, people don't believe that she's enjoying it. And that that really might be the sort of deep logic of of presuming that women are less likely to enjoy or seek out more partners and more variety.
1:16:03 Chris Williamson? Why do you think that men and why do you think that women would hold that view about other women?
1:16:10 Speaker 00 Probably the same thing. So I don't think that men and women differ in their perceptions and stereotypes there. I think the sort of meta-thinking for both is the same that, well, she just can't get what she'd really like, which is a single partner.
1:16:25 Chris Williamson? Why would it not be the case that women would want to lower the perceived self-esteem of the other woman in order to make her less of a, you've already said, less likely to be asked out on a date, less likely to be friends, that woman would be more of a sexual, potential sexual rival. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to lower her perceived self-esteem in order, like this cartel, this unspoken cartel between everybody on the planet to do that. But I couldn't see why there would be the same motivation for men to do that.
1:16:55 Speaker 00 Yeah, so I should clarify that what we're looking at here are the stereotypes and not the reality. So women and men perceive women who have casual sex to have lower self-esteem. The reality isn't that. What's amazing is that, so our same participants, males and females, who report holding the stereotype that women who have casual sex have low self-esteem, our participants who hold this stereotype, report their sexual behavior and they report their own self-esteem. And in the participants who hold the stereotype, there is no consistent
1:17:36 Speaker 00 relationship between their sexual behavior and their self-esteem. So if there is any real-world relationship between men's or women's sexual behavior and self-esteem, it's probably complicated. Somebody like, I'm probably going to butcher her name, but Zana Vrangalova would suggest that if you want to have casual sex and you're having casual sex, then you'd have high self-esteem. And that makes sense from a sort of nice evolutionary perspective on self-esteem as a sociometer, telling you how well you're doing in the world. So I want the same. So Mark Leary has this really great idea that self-esteem is really just our sort of cue
1:18:18 Speaker 00 to ourselves of how well we're doing. So it's an aggregate of, do I have good friends? Do people support me? Am I getting the sex that I want? Alright, I feel pretty good about myself. So I'm pursuing the adaptive goals that I have and I'm doing pretty well. And low self-esteem would be, I'm not pursuing these goals and I'm not doing very well. And so a sociometer perspective would suggest then that if I want to have casual sex and I'm having casual sex, then yeah, I should feel pretty great because I'm doing what I want to be doing.
1:18:53 Chris Williamson? Interesting. And people didn't use the theory of mind that they had about themselves. You said that when you studied the participants that held those stereotypes, they didn't have any correlation between their sexual strategy and their level of self-esteem, but they hadn't decided to use their own theory of mind of their own experience to extrapolate out to other people.
1:19:10 Speaker 00 Exactly. That's what's so wild about it, that it's, it exists, it's persistent, it's robust, and it's fucking wrong. It's, it's kind of wild.
1:19:23 Chris Williamson? Yeah, there does have to be something else going on. Alright, well, what have you got coming up next? Like, what's on the research docket for you soon?
1:19:32 Speaker 00 Dude, I live in Oklahoma, so all I do is research. We could talk about what I have next for a long time. Hopefully, it'll be going to Philadelphia, like, with why. So, one of the things that I'm really excited about is sort of understanding how the mind aggregates and calculates what it means to be a good friend. So what we're hoping to do across 30 nations or 30 locations, including small-scale societies by collaborating with anthropologists, and industrialized societies collaborating with other people at other
1:20:09 Speaker 00 universities, is to explore what we think makes a good friend. And we're gonna do a really simple experiment that I kind of love. So, okay, who's a better friend, in your opinion, Chris? A friend who helps you and helps somebody you don't like, or a friend who helps you and doesn't help somebody you don't like? In fact, I should say, who's a more helpful friend?
1:20:38 Chris Williamson? Okay, so the more helpful friend would be the first one. The better friend, the petty child in me says the second one.
1:20:50 Speaker 00 So, and that's the, there's the sort of objectivist view, right? That you're taking, which is a person who helps two people is twice as helpful as a person who helps just one.
1:21:02 Speaker 00 And there's a view, so most work in social psych just focuses on the two people in the friendship, not the ways that other people can bear on the two people in the friendship. And so on that view, however, my friend behaves toward me, that should be all that I care about. So if they help me, they're a hundred out of a hundred unhelpful. If they don't help me, they're zero out of zero. And our view is that people do think of the world in terms of how is my friend going to radiate positive effects on me? Both directly by helping me, but also indirectly by fucking my enemies, or at least not helping them. And so what we predicted and find is that, at least in the US,
1:21:46 Speaker 00 people view friends as super helpful when they help me, but not my enemy. They view them as much less helpful if they help both of us, which is basically saying, I view objectively more helpful friends as less helpful. And they view friends as very unhelpful, obviously, if they only help my enemy and not me.
1:22:05 Chris Williamson? That's fascinating.
1:22:08 Speaker 00 Fingers crossed we do it across cultures and find something pretty interesting. It's, it's possible that all sorts of culture and ecology could be affecting people's inputs to this. But I think the, the overall effect is going to be robust. And I do think it, it starts to tell us that when we say somebody is nice, we mean they're nice to us. And when we say somebody is a glorious monster, we mean they're a glorious monster for us.
1:22:37 Chris Williamson? Yes, yeah. I wonder whether there'll be a sort of a sex ratio hypothesis of the number of enemies versus friends that you have in the local environment. And if you were surrounded by more enemies than you were friends, the relative amount of investment that your friends gave you would be more or less valuable.
1:22:58 Speaker 00 Yeah, so there's some really cool stuff on relational mobility. So how able we are to get in new friendships and leave old friendships. And so you could imagine that in a similar way, if we sort of have to be friends with our enemies, there are different costs and benefits of how our friends then treat those enemies.
1:23:17 Chris Williamson? Uh, yes.
1:23:17 Speaker 00 Maybe ideally.
1:23:18 Chris Williamson? If you were in an environment where you were overrun by enemies, you would have to collaborate with them at some point. So perhaps you would, perhaps you would be prepared to put up with more shallow displays of friendship from your friends. And then maybe there would be a change in terms of the amount of venting that you would do behind the scenes in order to make sure that, oh, we're actually still, I know that you're kind of pretending to be friends with them, but it's like, it's still really us that are the proper friends on the other side of that. Yeah, it is so interesting that the knobs and dials and faders that you think about with regards to people's friendships, what they do for other people, their level of disclosure within their own friends, their level of personal vulnerability,
1:24:00 Chris Williamson? what it is that they tell them, how much venting they do, how much sabotage they do of other people. Like when you add all of this together, it's not surprising that friendships are such complicated things to try and manage.
1:24:12 Speaker 00 Yes, we don't, we don't talk about that nearly enough. I mean, you had Dunbar on. He said that having friends is the next best thing for your health behind quitting smoking. Right? And lacking friends, this is some Holt Lund stat work, is equivalent, or at least being lonely, to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. So maybe we should pay as much attention to our friendships as we do about, you know, where our genitals go.
1:24:37 Chris Williamson? I increasingly now, and it's like, whatever, 550 episodes into the show, every single happiness researcher that I bring on, Laura Vanderkam, Cassie Holmes, like whoever it is that I speak to that has dedicated their entire life to studying happiness. It's almost boring to ask like, you know, what are the habits of the most happy people that you've studied? And they go, oh, well, you know, they've got good relationships. The first thing always comes up, they've got good relationships. And then downstream from that, maybe it's to do with a sense of belonging to a community friendships. Again, maybe it's religiosity and that they have like people that are religious seem to live longer. Wow, that's a sense of community. Again, like they, you know, they play team sports. What the fuck's that? Like all of these things, like so many of the things
1:25:19 Chris Williamson? just come back to having friendships and having a community. So yeah, the reason I think that friendship gets a bit of a bad rap in the personal development slash applied pop psychology, like the not progressives, like, like advanced stuff, the sort of low level stuff.
1:25:40 Speaker 00 I can't wait to hear this.
1:25:41 Chris Williamson? Well, I think the reason for it is that it's very difficult to optimize for. I think that the current world of personal self-development sees the individual as sovereign and it's very difficult to sell somebody a course or sell somebody a book where the answer isn't something that you can go and wait, go away and do yourself. So it's, it's, it seems like a much more wiggly line between where you are and the outcome that you want to get. Now, if you were to write a book about how to make friends as an adult, like the outcome would be an externality of you following whatever the strategy is that's in the book. But if you're to write a book about happiness, it's like, these are the things that you should do for happiness. And you go, okay, friends are really important. You're right. Well, there's 10 books there. Now I need a 10 book volume on how friendship
1:26:24 Chris Williamson? works and what to do and who, all that sort of stuff. I just think that on the internet, in personal development, in personal growth, generally, there is a huge blind spot, like friendship is, is spoken of as a big thing that needs to be looked, looked after and then never really applied. And I think it's just because it's, it's hard to do.
1:26:44 Speaker 00 I mean, a lot of people don't realize how hard it is. And so if you think about, we say friendship, like do friendship. But friendship is an umbrella term for about sixty different challenges, right? So you have to figure out what you want in a friend, find friends, attract friends, make friends, keep friends. And then you do lose friends and you have to deal with losing friends. So you have to navigate all of these challenges to simply have these medium to long-term communal bonds. And none of them are necessarily easy. We've mostly studied them in terms of what I need to do to make that friend like me.
1:27:28 Speaker 00 But we haven't thought about the fact that the challenge. So we've, we've cast these challenges as dyadic challenges. But we haven't thought about the fact that, okay, we've evolved in these small densely interconnected groups where my friends inevitably and frequently interact with people who aren't me. And these interactions that my friend has with other people, they're going to affect my friend. They're going to affect my friendship. And they're going to affect ultimately me and the benefits that I get out of the thing. And so if we're thinking about only dyadic challenges, we're not even recognizing the true rich complexity and the fact that friendships also have super dyadic challenges. And that's, that's part of what my, my work will hopefully address.
1:28:11 Speaker 00 But we just don't talk about it. We don't realize it. Only in the last like two, three years have I looked at. So you're going to know exactly my political leanings as I tell you, The New York Times and The Atlantic. I read them a lot. And only recently they have come out with papers like, okay, friendship is hard. Thank you. Mothers, new mothers especially, have a hard time making friends. Well, yes, and we should probably look into that if social support helps women's infants live. But halfway, no. Oh, it's hard to make friends in your thirties. It's hard to make friends when you move. It's hard to keep friends. We should try and be better friends.
1:28:55 Speaker 00 And it's like, no shit, people. Sorry, I get really excited about this. I'm, I'm gonna, you know, do a little woo saw and calm down. But friendship is hard and I don't think it has to be that hard. We have really good theories of friendship that can tell you what to do to get people to invest in you and have a stake in your continued welfare. And if they do, then you get those benefits of quitting smoking.
1:29:27 Chris Williamson? There's the book to write. There's the book that we need, Jamie.
1:29:30 Speaker 00 Yeah, just get me out of teaching and I'll do it.
1:29:33 Chris Williamson? Fantastic. Look, let's bring this one home. Jamie Kremes, ladies and gentlemen, if people want to check out the stuff that you do online, where should they go?
1:29:40 Speaker 00 Yes, kremslab.com, K R E M is Mary, S is in Sam, or they can Google me and go to my Twitter, or hopefully find me at a Phillies game when they win the World Series.
1:29:55 Chris Williamson? Thanks, Jamie.
1:29:56 Speaker 00 Thank you.
1:29:57 Speaker 02 Mr. President, my company told me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me. Tom Cruise is.
1:30:08 Speaker 03 Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and the Ravennant.
1:30:14 Speaker 04 What would happen if I stopped going? You stop, you freeze to death, that's what.
1:30:18 Speaker 03 With great power comes great deniability.
1:30:21 Speaker 04 I'm not the first, daddy.
1:30:23 Speaker 03 Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17 and under 18 without parent.
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