#27 [EN] Glenn Geher - “How can Evolutionary Psychology help us understand the origins of humour, culture, personality or gender differences?”

Data: Wed, 11 Jul 2018 07:00:00 +0000 · Duração: 00:48:30

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Glenn Geher 00:00:00.00This is a conversation about evolutionary psychology with Glenn Gehrer, professor at the State University of New York at New Paltz for 45 Graus, a podcast based in Portugal. 00:00:09.32The conversation falls right after this very brief introduction in Portuguese. 00:00:17.54Bem-vindos ao 45 Graus. 00:00:19.64Neste episódio estou à conversa com Glenn Gehrer sobre psicologia evolutiva. 00:00:23.74É, já perceberam, o mesmo tema do episódio anterior em que o convidado foi Paulo Finuras. 00:00:28.36O Paulo falou-me de alguns nomes de referência nesta área e como acho que o tema merece, decidi aproveitar para chamar um convidado internacional ao podcast, o que já era uma ideia antiga. 00:00:37.14É por isso também a primeira conversa em inglês. 00:00:39.54Peço desculpa por não haver dobragem, ao estilo das rádios generalistas, mas falta-me ainda o orçamento para isso. 00:00:45.32Glenn Gehrer é professor na State University of New York at New Paltz, uma das melhores universidades públicas dos Estados Unidos e um investigador de referência na área da psicologia evolutiva. 00:00:54.26Tem publicado vários livros sobre este tema, com destaque para Evolutionary Psychology 101, o mais recente, e também Mating Intelligence Unleashed, The Role of the Mind in Sex, Dating and Love. 00:01:05.18Falámos então de temas que cruzam estes dois livros, como a origem evolutiva do humor, um fenómeno misterioso porque parece não ter nenhuma finalidade prática, a origem das diferenças culturais entre povos e das diferenças de personalidade entre as pessoas, este último já foi tema, aliás, de um episódio do podcast, e também as diferenças de comportamento entre os sexos. 00:01:22.38Falámos também das críticas mais comuns a esta área da psicologia evolutiva, que é fascinante, mas também cientificamente controversa e pode levar-nos a conclusões demasiado superficiais e precipitadas. 00:01:31.72Foi uma ótima conversa, espero que gostem, e como diria Lauro Dérmio...

José Maria Pimentel 00:01:37.34Vamos ver uma trilha. 00:01:40.44Let's look at the trailer.

Glenn Geher 00:01:44.12Okay. 00:01:44.12Glenn, thank you very much for accepting the invitation. 00:01:44.12I'm very, very pleased to have a first international guest on the podcast, so this is a first for me. 00:01:53.78This is actually the second time this topic comes to the podcast. 00:01:59.10I've had a conversation with Paulo Finourzo, who is a Portuguese guy who is kind of a lone promoter, preacher of this topic in Portugal. 00:02:10.12So, in your case, you have already some books about this topic, the latest one, Evolutionary Psychology 101, which is... 00:02:15.62I've read only a bit of it, and I think I can recommend it as a great introduction to the topic. 00:02:21.40You've had one before, which you co-wrote with Scott Kaufman, right? 00:02:26.86Mating Intelligence Unleashed. 00:02:26.86That's more on a focused topic. 00:02:26.86So, feel free to direct listeners to each of those books or any other publication along the conversation. 00:02:32.96Very, very quickly, let's describe generally the topic before we dive into more specific topics, even if it's the second time we've talked about it. 00:02:45.90But I feel this is a topic that may be somewhat difficult for people to understand, because it's simple in a way, but at least very counterintuitive. 00:02:58.46So, I found this description in your book, and I'll ask you to comment very briefly. 00:02:58.46I think it summarizes perfectly the topic, this field. 00:03:03.60You said that at its core, evolutionary psychology is an approach to human behavior that takes evolutionary theory into account. 00:03:08.76And I'll describe this in another way as seeing human behavior also as part of the natural world, which is not usually done in the social sciences. 00:03:19.78Do you have anything you should, you want to add on this?

José Maria Pimentel 00:03:23.64Yeah, well, first off, Jose, thank you so much for having me on the show. 00:03:23.64I'm really excited to be speaking to a Portuguese audience. 00:03:28.52So, this is a great opportunity for me. 00:03:28.52And yeah, I'm a big advocate of the field of evolutionary psychology. 00:03:36.60I've been teaching classes and doing research in this field for, I guess, over two decades at this point. 00:03:42.06And like you said, I'm, you know, I'm very excited about it. 00:03:50.00And I'm very, very interested in introducing a lot of the basic ideas to people. 00:03:50.00So, my book, Evolutionary Psychology 101, was designed as, as really just a foundational introduction to the field. 00:04:04.86And like you're saying, it's about looking at human behavior as being part of the natural world is one way to frame it. 00:04:11.70In a broader sense, we can think about human behavior as we can think about the behavior of any animal. 00:04:20.26And that's really what the evolutionary psychology perspective does is it approaches human behavior the way we would approach the behavior of any animal. 00:04:27.72When you think about the behavior of any animal, you can ask the question, well, what is behavior in the first place? 00:04:33.10Why does behavior exist? 00:04:33.10And, you know, then we can start thinking about, well, why does any feature of an organism exist? 00:04:39.42And really, the answer sort of powerfully comes back to evolutionary processes such as natural selection. 00:04:44.28So, natural selection is a process by which life forms have come about over millions and millions of years. 00:04:51.40And, you know, it's a process that Charles Darwin discovered that has been substantiated by lots of, you know, scholars in all different fields, geneticists and paleontologists and anthropologists providing evidence for natural selection. 00:05:14.08What natural selection does is it essentially selects features of organisms that outcompete alternative features. 00:05:21.78So, if there's some feature of one organism that increases the ability to survive or the ability to reproduce, then by definition, that feature is going to be more likely to exist into the future. 00:05:36.58And more offspring, more descendants will have whatever that feature is compared with alternative features. 00:05:43.96So, that's the basic idea of natural selection. 00:05:43.96And human evolutionary psychology simply applies that reasoning to everything about human behavior.

Glenn Geher 00:05:58.36Exactly. 00:05:58.36Great explanation. 00:05:58.36And it gives me kind of a segue to a complementary feature of selection or complementary to natural selection or another side of it, which is sexual selection or on a broader sense, social selection. 00:06:12.82A lot of your work has been actually about that. 00:06:12.82And there's somewhat of a puzzle that I've had for a long time and I think it can start at least being explained by sexual selection, which is the existence of humor. 00:06:27.42Humor. 00:06:27.42Humor is very, very complex. 00:06:27.42And actually, we can talk a bit about that. 00:06:27.42And we all know, for instance, that, for instance, comedians are disproportionately men. 00:06:35.20So there's more men than women comedians. 00:06:35.20Obviously, there are a lot of women who are comedians. 00:06:43.60But we know that humor, at least culturally, it's more of a feature of men, which leads me to the intuition that it may have to do with signaling for sexual selection and that it arose in that sense. 00:06:53.04And actually, my intuition goes a bit further. 00:06:53.04And I actually think that it can also be explained by a narrower theory that is the handicap theory or the handicap principle in that when I try and think of it, humor sometimes is a way of one boasting that I'm so comfortable with this situation that I can make fun of it or that I can crack a joke. 00:07:19.38I don't know. 00:07:19.38What's your view of this?

José Maria Pimentel 00:07:21.18Yeah, no, I think that's a really good way of putting it. 00:07:21.18I think that if someone has a really good sense of humor is noted for a sense of humor, I think you're right. 00:07:21.18I think there's a certain comfort level that that person has. 00:07:21.18I think that person is able to understand a situation and is able to understand it at a higher level at a different level where they can sort of comment back on the situation. 00:07:21.18And these are things that we find attractive in mates. 00:07:46.28So one of the things in the field of evolutionary psychology, since we're interested in qualities that ultimately increase survival and or reproductive success, anything that increases the ability to attract a mate is something that is of strong interest to the field of evolutionary psychology. 00:08:08.08So there's a puzzle, and you got into this a little bit, Jose, and I think I'm going to elaborate a little bit. 00:08:14.22Go ahead. 00:08:14.98Sure. 00:08:14.98I'll elaborate on some of the details. 00:08:14.98But there's a puzzle about human beings, which has to do with what we might call the human uniqueness problem. 00:08:23.88You know, every species by definition is unique, they have their own niche, they have their own ways of, they have their own adaptations and ways of dealing with things in their environment. 00:08:23.88But with that said, humans are very unique. 00:08:23.88I mean, chimpanzees can put a stick into a log and get a bunch of termites out and eat the termites. 00:08:23.88But we can put a man on the moon, you know, or we can communicate with someone across the ocean in real time. 00:08:51.36You know, I mean, the things that humans have been able to do is absolutely amazing. 00:08:51.36So a lot of evolutionary scholars have addressed that question of why? 00:08:51.36Why are humans so unique? 00:08:51.36Why did we end up taking on this form? 00:08:51.36Part of it has to do with why do we have our extraordinary levels of creativity? 00:08:51.36Why do we have the kinds of art forms that we have? 00:08:51.36Why do we have advanced mathematical abilities? 00:08:51.36Why can we write novels? 00:08:51.36Why do we have advanced linguistic capabilities? 00:09:20.90that we have and so forth? 00:09:20.90And so forth. 00:09:20.90Now, there have been a lot of great answers that I think have partially answered that question. 00:09:20.90But the one that relates mostly to what you're talking about now regarding humor was put forward by my collaborator, Jeffrey Miller. 00:09:37.50Jeffrey Miller and his huge integration of evolutionary biology and human evolutionary psychology came up with this idea that a lot of our complex human behavior is what might be called costly signaling. 00:09:56.50Or I guess there's a couple other ways or fitness indicators that a lot of the things we do are we're like signaling things about ourselves in order to attract a mate. 00:10:08.42Now, signaling to attract a mate is nothing new. 00:10:08.42And we see that in any sexually reproducing species. 00:10:15.06Bird songs that you hear in the mornings this time of year, at least here in North America, there's all kinds of songbirds. 00:10:22.48They're attracting mates. 00:10:22.48You know, that's part of what they're doing is they're looking for mates. 00:10:28.66Fish have different colors. 00:10:28.66Salmon have bright pink colors in the Pacific Northwest and the brighter the color, the more likely it is that a salmon of the opposite sex will be attracted to them. 00:10:41.38You know, mate, looking for signals in mate in courtship is a very common thing across the animal kingdom. 00:10:48.38What Jeffrey Miller proposes is that when you see those signals that seem to be really specific to a particular species, those features evolve because they reveal something inside the person. 00:11:04.24They reveal something about the person's health or they might even reveal something about the person's genome or that person's DNA. 00:11:10.34So if we're looking to mate with someone and we're going to produce offspring, all things equal, you're better off producing offspring with someone who has high quality genes or high quality DNA. 00:11:26.26So what Miller essentially argues is that a lot of the things that we have that are complex human behaviors that don't seem to have a survival function, such as creative intelligence, the ability to do fantastic pieces of artwork, the ability to coordinate a large group of people in a symphony or something like this, that these are things that evolved not because they help survival, but rather they serve as courtship mechanisms in our species. 00:11:58.66And so humor fits all those criteria. 00:11:58.66Humor is one of these things that is species typical, meaning we see humor in humans across the globe. 00:12:10.10It does not have obvious survival benefits. 00:12:10.10It is hard to fake. 00:12:14.18So another thing about these costly signals, right, is like someone could try to be funny, but if that person is not funny, you know, no one's really going to buy it. 00:12:21.32So I think humor is one of these things that you sort of have it or you don't. 00:12:27.72And it's related to general intelligence, which is related to all different parts of the brain, which is ultimately related to lots of parts of our DNA or our genome. 00:12:39.26So humor seems to be a very good candidate for a costly signal in human courtship.

Glenn Geher 00:12:46.74Yeah, I agree completely. 00:12:46.74And if you interpret it in the context of the human culture, it's actually not only that you can only do it if you are fun, if you're funny, but you can also only do it if you are in the position to do it. 00:12:59.98So someone who is in the lower ranks of society is not in a position to engage in humor. 00:13:04.70Sure. 00:13:04.70You have to have a certain power or prestige. 00:13:04.70At least that would be my intuition. 00:13:12.02And it leads me to the kind of my second intuition about humor, because as I said, humor is very complex. 00:13:19.08We know it. 00:13:19.08It's puzzling, as you said, because it has to be useful for it to be selected by nature, in a sense, or by the other sex in this case. 00:13:25.52But it's varied. 00:13:31.60Another rule that I think it may have taken is in the moderation of the dominance hierarchy. 00:13:41.00So this is another feature of evolutionary psychology, which is the fact that, unlike chimps, for instance, that you've mentioned before, we have evolved from a pure dominance hierarchy to a more prestige-based one. 00:13:55.42And I guess another side of humor would be to counteract power. 00:14:00.70So maybe this I'm effabulating a bit, but I imagine in a tribe, you have the most powerful individual in that tribe. 00:14:10.56And if during the evening and around the fireplace, someone starts impersonating that leader and mocking some of his features that acts as a counterweight to his or her power. 00:14:25.10I don't know what's your view on this very superficial theory.

José Maria Pimentel 00:14:30.28No, I think it's a really interesting idea. 00:14:33.38And there have been scholars who have examined, essentially, like you're saying, dominance hierarchies in terms of humor's effects and studying that from an evolutionary perspective, there are effects of how high you are in the dominance hierarchy in terms of what kinds of humor are perceived as effective or not. 00:14:56.48Leaders, people that are in high status positions who use self-deprecating humor, that seems to be very effective. 00:15:05.80So if someone's a leader, but is admitting that he or she doesn't have all the answers to everything and has shortcomings and has flaws, that usually is very effective. 00:15:18.46At getting people to like that person, at getting people to be motivated, leaders who use humor that sort of is insulting or that is biting or that is, you know, hurting others, that's not considered as attractive of a form of humor. 00:15:35.48So the kind of humor that someone at the very top uses seems to vary. 00:15:39.82And when, you know, when a leader is using something that is hurting other people, that's almost seen as an exploitation of power. 00:15:48.84So I think that's pretty consistent with what you're talking about. 00:15:53.20And I think you're right. 00:15:53.98I think people that are sort of, quote, lower on the totem pole use different kinds of humor. 00:16:00.00It's not that they don't have humor, but I think that the kind of humor that is effective for them and that is appropriate is different. 00:16:06.68And I do think that future work in this area could really go very far in sort of elaborating on, you know, the evolutionary psychology of humor in human social context and in terms of dominance hierarchies. 00:16:20.80And I think that's a really a great area for research.

Glenn Geher 00:16:23.58Yes, I think it's absolutely fascinating. 00:16:26.30Let me switch to a different topic on this field that also puzzles me a bit. 00:16:32.26One of the principles of this evolutionary psychology is that the characteristics it studies, as it were, are universal to humankind. 00:16:41.76So they exist across the world and they are specific to humankind. 00:16:47.12There are two puzzles that I take from this. 00:16:49.84One of them is the existence of different cultures and the other is the existence of different personalities. 00:16:56.68For me, there are two puzzles of this. 00:16:58.50Let's start with culture. 00:17:00.82Again, my intuition would be that the existence of different cultures are simply, or we can posit that they are simply different equilibria as adaptations to the, in different environments in terms of the same human general characteristics, so to say. 00:17:19.72What's your view on that?

José Maria Pimentel 00:17:20.56Yeah, absolutely. 00:17:22.24I think that you're totally right on that. 00:17:24.02I think that, you know, human beings are the same across the globe. 00:17:28.44And the older I get and the more places I travel, the more that I firmly believe that. 00:17:33.62Cultures vary, but cultures vary to the extent that cultures have their own history, they have their own geography, they have their own environmental context and their own environmental background. 00:17:46.60So, you know, if you're in a nomadic culture, then, you know, nomadic cultures have an entire culture of people sort of supporting one another in a more collectivistic kind of manner and sharing of food in a certain kind of way as a really important aspect of what they do. 00:18:06.70And so when you have those elements of a culture, well, that's partly because that's the nature of the lifestyle that those people have. 00:18:14.68So when you see cultural differences, it often makes sense in terms of, you know, what is the environment like? 00:18:20.52What is the lifestyle like? 00:18:22.14I'll give you a pretty strong example from a recent experience of mine. 00:18:27.48So for the first time ever, I recently came back from China, where I spent 10 days teaching a group of really bright students about evolutionary psychology, which I don't think a lot of people have taught in China before. 00:18:42.40So the students were pretty interested in it. 00:18:45.14And I got to tell you, I was really, I learned so much and I was really interested in the culture and the people. 00:18:52.40And, you know, one of the things about China is it's famous for being what we call very collectivistic. 00:18:59.10So, you know, you could definitely see that, that people define themselves, not in terms of themselves, but in terms of their families or in terms of their, you know, their people or even in terms of their nation. 00:19:10.26You know, they're very, very collectivistic.

Glenn Geher 00:19:13.02That's the case of Portugal, too, by the way. 00:19:14.60Sorry to interrupt.

José Maria Pimentel 00:19:15.44Yeah, yeah, yeah. 00:19:17.04So, and it's very, you know, in the United States, it's very different. 00:19:20.28And, you know, one of the reasons that I think that it works in China, I'll give you one example. 00:19:27.32I went to a museum about something called the Three Gorges Hydroelectric Plant Project. 00:19:32.66Well, that's the biggest electronic electric generator in the entire world. 00:19:36.96And they had to displace millions of people to be able to put that in. 00:19:42.00And there was this whole museum about the history of it and everything. 00:19:45.58And one of my students, I remember she said to me, it was very funny. 00:19:49.02She said, when I learned about this in high school, my teacher said that they could never do this in America because the Americans would never get up and move. 00:19:57.84And I thought, you know, I said, that's exactly right. 00:20:01.18I said, that's, I thought it was very insightful, you know. 00:20:04.58And I'm sure there was, it wasn't perfect. 00:20:06.42But the fact that that project succeeded and went through depended on a collectivistic mindset. 00:20:14.84Without that collectivistic mindset, they would have had too much difficulty in making it happen. 00:20:20.08Well, it's also a country that has a population that's about five or six times the population of the United States, you know. 00:20:27.38So with that many people, that social environment makes collectivism a much more important and much more functional psychological approach to everything. 00:20:39.20So I think when you do see cultural differences, the rules that exist and the policies that exist in certain cultures make sense for that culture, you know. 00:20:49.92And if I were raised in China, I'm sure I would be more likely to have those values. 00:20:54.90And, you know, human beings are flexible. 00:20:57.14We evolve to learn the details of our culture and to be effective within that particular culture. 00:21:04.16I think that's part of, part of the human evolutionary story.

Glenn Geher 00:21:07.98Yeah, this, that topic of cultural differences is another fascinating one. 00:21:12.74There's, there's the work of Hofstede. 00:21:15.32I don't know if you're familiar with it. 00:21:18.68Actually, I've talked a lot of times about his work in the podcast. 00:21:22.56And in the case of collectivism, as I said, Portugal is not too far from China in that regard, which is, it makes it, makes for an interesting comparison. 00:21:31.50And actually, if, I think if you analyze it, every culture is, is, is collectivist. 00:21:36.92So it's not a question of, of collectivism versus individualism, but rather different values in, in, of, of collectivism. 00:21:46.72So even the U.S., it's less collectivistic rather than, than individualistic, I would say. 00:21:54.56And evolutionarily, collectivism makes all the sense because people who stayed within the tribe were much more likely to survive than, than the loners who, who basically left the tribe and went, went elsewhere or were expelled from, from the tribe. 00:22:10.48Actually, I've, I've read something about this, that this is also an interesting part of this topic that we have, we've evolved not only to have these values, but to have, to experience these, these traits, these, these characteristics in a physical way. 00:22:24.78So we, we, you probably know this much better than me, but I found it very interesting. 00:22:29.68If we, the way we experience rejection, so being expelled from a group is, is in the same place of our brain, of a physical pain we feel if, if someone hurts us, which, which is fascinating. 00:22:42.28And, and in the case of collectivism, going back to what I was saying, my, my intuition is that collectivism is a response. 00:22:49.76And then we know from the data that as societies get richer, as people get richer, they become less collectivist, which is basically just, is the exception that proves the rule. 00:23:00.76Because it's telling us exactly that they don't need any more to be collectivist.

José Maria Pimentel 00:23:04.92Right, because they have their own, they have their own resources. 00:23:07.42Exactly. 00:23:08.10Absolutely. 00:23:08.96You know, I've, I've done one of my recent, recent research projects is on the evolutionary psychology of estrangements, which connects very much with what you're talking about. 00:23:20.34So, you know, an estrangement is, is when two people won't talk to each other ever again. 00:23:25.48And, you know, it's, it's a very unpleasant situation. 00:23:29.12And like you're saying, when, when someone is ostracized, when someone is cut out of the group, that hurts in a very visceral sense. 00:23:36.98I mean, the fact that you're saying that it triggers the same pain receptors that are found in the brain for physical pain, that makes so much sense from an evolutionary perspective. 00:23:47.34One of the things that this field focuses on is the fact that there's a very big mismatch between modern, the modern world, especially if you're not a hunter and gatherer. 00:23:59.58If you live in a city or, you know, quote, a civilization under ancestral conditions, until agriculture existed, human groups were never bigger than about 150 because nomadic groups, there's a practical constraint. 00:24:15.08You can't bring 10, 20, 30,000 people from, you know, this part of the country over to this part of the country. 00:24:20.76It just doesn't work. 00:24:22.32So human groups were capped because of ecological conditions at about 150. 00:24:27.68Within those groups, you were mostly finding people that you were related to. 00:24:32.48So you had your relatives or your kin. 00:24:35.16And then the other kind of person in the group was people that you had longstanding relationships with and that your family had longstanding relationships with. 00:24:43.92So that's the human mind evolved not for large cities, not for modern, the modern westernized world. 00:24:51.08Our minds evolved for small scale groups where we were going to see the same people every single day. 00:24:57.22Now, in that kind of condition, if you were kicked out of the group, you know, if you have a group of 150 and you're kicked out, that's pretty much going to mean death. 00:25:06.88You know, being dependent on that group had become at some point in our evolutionary history wickedly important. 00:25:14.70It was absolutely essential that you had to get along with your group at least enough to be accepted at a very basic level. 00:25:22.72So with this all in mind, we asked people, it was about 200 or 300 college students in the United States, to think about how many people they were currently estranged from. 00:25:35.18How many people in the world right now are you not on speaking terms with, even though you used to be on speaking terms with? 00:25:41.82And we predicted, based on this idea that human minds were really evolved to be connected to others in small groups, we predicted that the higher number of estrangements someone had, the more problems that person was going to have in a whole variety of ways. 00:26:00.04So here's some of the statistics. 00:26:01.80We found the average amount, the average number of estrangements was about four. 00:26:07.38And I never thought about this from a cross-cultural perspective, but I think it'd be very interesting to see how that number might differ from country to country. 00:26:16.82So here we have the average is about four, and then we found in the data that there was a small but significant subgroup of people who had 10 or more estrangements in their world, with one person having as many as almost 30, 30 people in the world that they are not on speaking terms with. 00:26:37.02So we looked at that, and we looked at, okay, those people that are estranged from a lot of different people, how does that play out in their psychology? 00:26:45.70And what we found was ubiquitous, meaning it was relevant to all different kinds of variables. 00:26:52.74They were depressed. 00:26:54.38They reported being more anxious. 00:26:56.76They reported having a darker personality. 00:27:01.06They reported being more narcissistic. 00:27:03.22They reported being more psychopathic, caring less about other people. 00:27:07.92More neurotic, I guess. 00:27:09.08Yes, yes. 00:27:09.88They scored higher on neuroticism as well. 00:27:12.10So it was kind of like a whole battery of low-functioning, adverse psychological qualities seems to be associated with being cut off from a lot of people. 00:27:21.62And, Jose, that totally goes back with your idea of saying that the natural state of things for humans really is a collectivistic, psychological world.

Glenn Geher 00:27:30.74Exactly. 00:27:31.06And while you were explaining that, it immediately occurred to me something, which I think I've read somewhere, and I think makes complete sense in this lens, that the reason we tend to be so anxious about public speaking is exactly that we are hardwired to be in small groups rather than speaking to 200 people.

José Maria Pimentel 00:27:52.20Absolutely. 00:27:52.68And if you have the difference between public speaking, if you were just going to give some talk to your family or some good friends or some people that you've known for a long time over the dinner table, no one gets nervous about that. 00:28:07.28But if you're going to do that same exact thing for 200 strangers, the entire situation differs. 00:28:12.86And I think that you're exactly right. 00:28:14.52I think that is an evolutionarily mismatched situation.

Glenn Geher 00:28:17.86Let's speak about the difference of personalities that I've broached before. 00:28:24.40This, again, I think it's somewhat of another puzzle, given that... 00:28:28.66Why do I think it's a puzzle? 00:28:30.04Because we are positing that there's a process of selection that selects for these characteristics and not others. 00:28:38.60And in that sense, so diverse a range of human personalities may be interpreted as a puzzle. 00:28:46.14In this regard, my intuition, I'm not completely confident on this one. 00:28:50.52My intuition would be that this is explained by the fact that we have evolved not only as individual, but more as groups. 00:28:59.14So culturally, as you mentioned before. 00:29:02.24And in a group or in a specific cultural environment, you have different people, different roles or different people whose different strategies succeed in different ways. 00:29:11.84And that would lead to different personalities. 00:29:15.68What's your view on this one?

José Maria Pimentel 00:29:17.58That, you know, it's a really, it's a great question. 00:29:20.08It's something I've thought about a lot. 00:29:22.12Um, and I think that your, your solution, um, it's, to be honest, you might not realize it, but it's actually considered a little controversial in the field. 00:29:31.14Is it? 00:29:31.58Okay. 00:29:32.26I have no idea. 00:29:33.16I'm not saying it's considered wrong, but your solution that it's kind of like a group needs people that come in all different flavors and, and, um, take on all different roles. 00:29:43.84That kind of assumes what we will call, um, multi-level selection, meaning that there's selection forces, not just for individuals to survive and reproduce, but also additional selection forces, um, at the, at the level of the social unit or the social group. 00:30:00.70So that people that sort of come out in a certain ratio with certain personality traits so that they can fill certain roles for the group, you know, whether evolution actually works that way or functions that way is considered a controversy in the field. 00:30:16.28But there certainly are people who, um, who advocate for that agenda, but there's a slightly different way of thinking about personality differences, um, which is what we would call balancing selection. 00:30:28.56And like you said, it's a puzzle, um, and it is a puzzle because if you think about humans coming about from evolution, and if you think that evolution is selecting traits that are good for survival and reproduction, to some extent you would envision these traits coming to what's called fixation. 00:30:46.10So there's certain traits we have, such as, um, generally speaking, we have two feet, we have five fingers on one hand, um, we have two eyeballs. 00:30:54.80Like there are certain physical traits that are just fixed, you know, this is how, unless there's a genetic mutation, this is how all human beings are. 00:31:02.90But when it comes to personality, we see a lot of variability and we see variability, interestingly, along the same basic dimensions. 00:31:13.70So personality psychologists have documented, you know, what, what do we call the foundational trait dimensions of personality. 00:31:21.30And what we have found is that a lot of these dimensions have poles where we can think of it as balancing selection, or we can think about it as one, um, one end of the trait dimension has benefits, but it also has costs. 00:31:38.30And on the other side of the trait dimension, there are other benefits and there are other costs and these things balance out. 00:31:44.52Okay. 00:31:45.56So as an example, um, one of the most common dimensions thought about is neuroticism, which you talked about before. 00:31:54.96Neuroticism's, um, the opposing pole is, um, is emotional stability. 00:32:00.98So some people are just, we, we will say in our country, cool as a cucumber, just, you know, easygoing, you know, nothing can bother this person. 00:32:09.54And some people are nervous wrecks, you know, or is, is people are very anxious all the time, or they have large fluctuations in their mood. 00:32:17.72And you think about it on the surface, it seems to be better to be stable. 00:32:23.66I mean, that's the first, you know, and when we think about mental health, the mental health industry tries to reduce anxiety, it rarely tries to increase anxiety or try to make people less stable. 00:32:34.62So that personality dimension is kind of a puzzle. 00:32:38.26If it's adaptive to be stable, as opposed to neurotic, then why are so many people neurotic? 00:32:45.20And why does, why does everyone have like a splash of neuroticism in them? 00:32:49.62Well, the answer ends up being, we, we can understand that in terms of, um, human evolution. 00:32:55.72So what are the benefits? 00:32:58.78We know what the benefits of stability are, but what are the benefits of neuroticism? 00:33:03.00And when people have started looking at that question, what they found is that people that are neurotic tend to be more vigilant. 00:33:10.30They tend to be more worried that something bad is going to happen. 00:33:14.94And unfortunately in life, bad things do happen. 00:33:18.50So if you're vigilant, if you're, you know, worried that something bad is going to happen, then you're more likely to actually be prepared for all different kinds of things that could happen. 00:33:28.54Um, if, if you're, if you're back in the ancestral times of human evolution or the African savannah, and you're worried about snakes, you're probably less likely to get killed by a snake because you're vigilant about them, because you're worried about them, because you're anxious about them. 00:33:44.92If you're worried about getting kicked out of the group, then you might take steps so that you don't get kicked out of the group. 00:33:50.98And so, um, this is how the tendency to be anxious and to be worried actually has adaptive value. 00:33:58.68And so this is, but, but like I said before, so does being stable. 00:34:02.86So this is how we end up having variability, how we end up having people of these different kinds. 00:34:08.04Um, another basic dimension that, that we can see that we can think about this way is extroversion. 00:34:14.80So extroversion or how outgoing somebody is, how friendly someone is, how willing someone is to talk to a stranger. 00:34:21.44This is another one that varies wildly. 00:34:23.56As a teacher, I will sometimes give my students a test of introversion and extroversion. 00:34:29.40And I will ask people after they take the test to stand up and say their scores. 00:34:34.40And it's funny because the people who choose to stand up and say their scores are always people, they score high on extroversion. 00:34:41.84You know, it's a very, it's a classic, um, it's a classic example, but there's, you know, it's obvious the benefits of extroversion also seem kind of obvious. 00:34:51.04You get to know more people, you connect maybe with more people in some kind of way. 00:34:56.08Researchers have shown that extroverts have more mating partners. 00:34:59.10They end up having more sexual partners and they're across their lifespan. 00:35:04.18However, they also are more likely to die early. 00:35:09.12They're more likely to die of accidents. 00:35:11.04They're more likely to have physical accidents. 00:35:13.20Um, they're more likely to engage in risk-taking and risk-taking by definition doesn't always work out that well. 00:35:20.14Whereas introverts are less likely to have a lot of different social connections, but they're more likely to have some good, close social connections with a smaller number of people. 00:35:31.12They're less likely to be risk-taking. 00:35:33.48They're more likely to take their time in making decisions. 00:35:36.52And that's beneficial as well. 00:35:39.66So from an evolutionary perspective, there's costs and benefits to both of these extreme personality types. 00:35:46.82And that's partly, I think, how we can really understand variability in personality across individuals.

Glenn Geher 00:35:53.70Yeah, this is really interesting. 00:35:55.46In fact, you've started closing this or solving this puzzle for me. 00:36:00.10So this is really a big moment. 00:36:02.88And the fact that you've chosen neuroticism as an example is also good because that's the only trait of the big five. 00:36:10.32The big five has already been a subject of one of the episodes I've recorded. 00:36:15.56And it's the only one about which we have an overwhelmingly negative opinion. 00:36:22.24Correct. 00:36:22.50If you think of it, zero neuroticism, it's obviously not good. 00:36:27.32So having zero of it, it's not good, which means that there's some good in it. 00:36:31.48And also something that you've said, which makes complete sense, and I confess I have never thought of it that way, is that each trait or each end of the continuum has pros and cons. 00:36:44.00And then in nature, we imagine life has some of it which is culturally determined, but a lot of it is almost random, which means that some of the neurotic people from the past have not reproduced due to the disadvantages of their neuroticism. 00:37:02.96But also some of the cool people, to use your words of the past, have not reproduced because they failed to predict that a lion would come around the corner and eat them, which means that that really solves the puzzle in terms of explaining this. 00:37:20.52And to go back to my first point on the personality thing, although I think this is a great explanation, I still think about, for instance, differences in mating strategies. 00:37:32.80You see that in both men and women. 00:37:35.32And I know you've studied this a lot. 00:37:37.38I know, for instance, in men, there are at least two different mating strategies, one of them more promiscuous, if you will, which means that that person wants to have as many partners as possible. 00:37:49.04And the other one is to engage in a monogamous relationship. 00:37:53.26And those are two evolutionary strategies, right, in their own right, so to say.

José Maria Pimentel 00:37:59.50Yeah, absolutely. 00:38:00.56I mean, you can think of mating strategies in exactly that same kind of way. 00:38:05.52Mating strategies, to some extent, are differences in personality. 00:38:09.76And there's a scientific term, strategic pluralism, which means that there is a multitude, a plurality of strategies that can evolve to solve the same problem. 00:38:22.80So the problem is successful mating. 00:38:25.50On one hand, if you're very good at short-term mating, and you can mate with a lot of different partners, that might be effective. 00:38:33.06But there's a cost associated with that, because those offspring might not get great parental care. 00:38:38.86So there's something, there's a benefit and a cost. 00:38:42.58And the same thing is true with long-term mating. 00:38:44.78So long-term mating, if you are really good at settling down and finding one really good partner and having a few offspring, you might only end up having two or three kids. 00:38:53.98But those two or three kids are going to get very high-level parental care and have a higher chance of successfully surviving and reproducing. 00:39:02.62So it's funny that you come at this, Jose, from an economist perspective, because then that means you totally can see these things in terms of equilibria, which is exactly how evolutionary psychologists think about these things.

Glenn Geher 00:39:15.96Exactly. 00:39:16.62And let me talk about another economic term, markets. 00:39:21.68There's a puzzle I've always had about what I can call the mating market, as it were. 00:39:26.86I've listened to an interview of yours in which you mentioned something that I think is very much related to this. 00:39:33.16So I've noticed, and I think you as well and most of our listeners have noticed, that there's kind of an imbalance in the mating market because it's kind of split. 00:39:42.98You have the short-term mating market in which you have a surplus of men, if you will. 00:39:49.54And you have then a long-term mating market in which you have a surplus of women. 00:39:53.76And there's something I came across in that interview that I found fascinating. 00:39:57.90You mentioned that research has shown that most women really don't have a short-term mating strategy. 00:40:05.04So even if they may seem to engage in short-term relationships and then hookups, that's really a proxy for a short-term relationship. 00:40:13.68While in men, I guess you find much more diverse strategies or diverse ways of looking at relationships in terms of the outcomes that one wants. 00:40:24.84Am I right?

José Maria Pimentel 00:40:25.56Sure. 00:40:26.02Yeah, so those ideas relate to research that I've done with several colleagues of mine on what they call hooking up relationships, just very short-term casual relationships, very common in colleges and universities in the United States these days. 00:40:42.48And one of the ideas we had was that while women might be more likely to engage in short-term mating now than in past times, women's physiology is so geared toward long-term mating because women have all the parental costs associated with getting pregnant and childbirth and breastfeeding that women just really are not anatomically optimized for short-term mating, but short-term mating is what hookup is. 00:41:17.12So we asked women in this study, what do you expect to get out of the hookup relationship that you had? 00:41:23.96And a very large majority, much higher than found for men, a very large majority said they were hoping it would last, it would turn into a long-term relationship, which is pretty interesting because the definition of a hookup is, you know, no strings attached, you know, everyone's agreeing this is a short-term relationship. 00:41:42.04But I think that because of the very high parental costs associated with being female, we found that they, it seemed like they kind of secretly really wanted a long-term relationship out of those relationships, whereas males did not necessarily report that same thing. 00:41:59.66Yeah.

Glenn Geher 00:42:00.36Well, Glenn, this has been a very fascinating conversation, but I have to let you go. 00:42:05.78I'll just ask you a final question that I think is the right way to close our conversation. 00:42:11.80And it wouldn't be serious, so to say, to approach this topic without covering the common criticisms that sometimes are made up about evolutionary psychology, which, as you know, and probably have felt almost on your skin, has some degree of controversy on it. 00:42:29.22But actually, I don't care too much about the controversy in itself. 00:42:33.42I care more about the scientific rigor of it. 00:42:36.80And there are two, at least two main topics on which I have seen criticism. 00:42:41.36One of them is the fact that since evolutionary psychology is focused on characteristics which exist only in the human species and are universal to all humans, the sample size is basically one. 00:42:53.60So there's no, there's really no way to, to employ the common scientific method of, of, of, comparison and variability analysis. 00:43:02.92And the other one is, is that there are a lot of assumptions ones, what one makes about the environment in which the evolution of the human species occurs that are based on things we don't really know too much about. 00:43:14.98Because unfortunately, we don't, we don't, we don't know exactly how our, our past was, I think it would be great to end with the, with your comment on these, on these two common criticisms.

José Maria Pimentel 00:43:24.80Sure. 00:43:25.84Yeah, I think you articulated these well. 00:43:28.62The, the, the first one has to do with, I guess, like the scientific rigor question. 00:43:32.62And, you know, there's been lots and lots of great research in the field of evolutionary psychology that has really, I think, made great advances in spite of hurdles that people have talked about. 00:43:47.52So some people have said you can't do experimental research in, in evolutionary psychology because we can't manipulate ancestral conditions. 00:43:55.80Well, in fact, there's a lot of hypotheses that are experimental in nature that have been conducted in evolutionary psychology. 00:44:04.00There's the criticism that, that sometimes we're trying to have a hypothesis that's about people, all people in the world, right? 00:44:13.38So this is kind of what you were saying, but we have a very small sample that we study. 00:44:17.88So it might not be appropriate to make that inference to the larger population. 00:44:22.64That's a good criticism. 00:44:24.28And I'll say that a lot of evolutionary psychologists, largely my friend Dave Schmidt, who's at Brunel University in London, has made an entire career of collecting cross-cultural data from thousands and thousands of people across the world. 00:44:39.92One study, I think as many as 60 different countries had participants included. 00:44:45.86So I think one of the main criticisms that our research is making big claims, so we need to, to have, to be held to a high standard, you know, one answer to that is, well, good, then let's do better research. 00:45:00.50And there's a lot of people who are doing that. 00:45:02.58So I think that's been a really strong response to that kind of criticism. 00:45:06.70The second comment, which has to do with this idea that evolutionary psychologists are making claims about ancestral conditions when, by definition, you know, I wasn't there and you weren't there and none of us were there. 00:45:21.34And on one hand, I'd say that's reasonable to some extent, but on the other hand, there are things that we absolutely do know about ancestral conditions. 00:45:31.10We do know that our ancestors had to have lived in small groups because all the evidence before agriculture is that all the fossilized remains of humans were small groups. 00:45:43.66So we know that. 00:45:45.34We do know that agriculture came about 10,000 years ago. 00:45:49.38We know that before that, people were nomadic. 00:45:52.38So we know that our ancestors were nomadic for a very long time. 00:45:55.44Based on DNA evidence, we know that our ancestors lived in the African savanna. 00:46:00.50And so there's some argument as to whether it's 200 or 300,000 years ago. 00:46:05.12But for the lion's share of human evolution, know that they lived in the African savanna. 00:46:09.98So the features of the African savanna become important in understanding our ancestral conditions. 00:46:15.52We know that our ancestors, and some of this is going to sound simple, but we know that our ancestors didn't have cell phones. 00:46:22.24Now, I don't know about in Portugal, but in the United States, almost everybody is physically addicted to their cell phone, you know, and it's a real problem. 00:46:33.60So there's a lot of, there's, while we, you're right that we definitely don't know exactly what it was like. 00:46:39.22We can use a lot of logical reasoning to figure out things that definitely, that definitely had to be true for those ancestors. 00:46:47.30And that definitely were the things that they did not have just because they're highly modern. 00:46:52.00So we can, we can definitely make estimates as to what the world was like. 00:46:56.12So we can study evolutionary mismatch. 00:46:58.54I think if we're just a little bit resourceful in our research design.

Glenn Geher 00:47:02.44It's the so-called Sherlock Holmes technique, right? 00:47:05.48There's no, there's no other explanation. 00:47:07.54If there's no other explanation has to be that one. 00:47:10.46I think in a sense that encapsulates it. 00:47:13.48Well, Glenn, it has been a great conversation. 00:47:16.04Yes. 00:47:16.56As I said, I'm going to let you go counter to my, my willingness, which would be to, to, to continue the conversation forever, because this, this is a topic really without, without an end in itself. 00:47:28.74There's so many things that you can explore, and it relates, it relates to almost everything that's, that's human related. 00:47:35.98So, so there's really no end to it. 00:47:37.94That's why it's so fascinating. 00:47:39.30Thank you for coming on the show. 00:47:41.18And I'm sure everyone will enjoy very much this episode.

José Maria Pimentel 00:47:43.64Jose, thank you so much for having me. 00:47:45.30And I really appreciate your time.

Glenn Geher 00:47:46.68Thank you. 00:47:47.12Thank you. 00:47:51.40Tem gostado do 45 Graus? 00:47:54.78Nesse caso, não deixem de seguir a página do podcast no Facebook e, se utilizarem a iOS, de o avaliar no iTunes. 00:48:00.72Para além disso, não hesitem em enviar questões ou sugestões de convidados. 00:48:04.24São sempre bem-vindas e é muito bom saber o que vai na cabeça de quem ouve. 00:48:07.72Uma última nota para relembrar que podem tornar-se apoiantes deste projeto através do Patreon, no site www.patreon.com.com.br 45 Graus, por extenso. 00:48:20.76Agradeço desde já aos patronos João Vítor Baltazar, Óscar Sampaio Neves, Ana Mateus e Salvador Cunha, pelo apoio muito generoso. 00:48:27.78Até ao próximo episódio.