The People Versus Things Divide

Do you think that you could have published this book six years ago I think that I could have, but it would have been a less wise move. I think it would have gone down A lot worse six years ago. Things have kind of cooled off a little bit I think. Why is talking about sex differences so controversial Well, it's a good question and I think that it's a few things. I mean sometimes it surprises me because sometimes I think A lot of the differences that we're talking about, they're really quite modest differences. They are often differences in preferences rather than cognitive abilities. so they're kind of neutral as far as I'm concerned. And if anything, I think probably they put men in a worse light than women So sometimes it surprises me, but I think really The main reason is a long history of sexism against women. And I think that we've got quite a long science as well has a bit of a sort of history in terms of how we've spoken about women. especially in the eighteen hundreds. I've got a quote. One of my favorite quotes, one of my favorite examples of this is from scientist by the name of Gustave Le Bon, and he wrote that Sure, there are some women who are as intellectually accomplished as your typical man They're about as rare as a two headed gorilla And so therefore we don't really need to about think about them So stuff like that in our background is I guess not surprising. that people are a little bit a little bit nervous about talking about evolved sex differences, a little bit worried that if we start doing that, it's going to open the door to that kind of That that kind of sexism. I think they're wrong to worry about that. I think that really the science of sex differences has disisproved those kind of ideas And think I think as well that we can treat men and women respectfully and humanely and treat them well, even if men and women are not identical on average on every single train. I suppose The history of scienceces to sex differences what the Nazi partarty is to behavioral genetics. R Eactly And I do think that science is the solution to early sexism rather than a continuation of it. Yeah, that's a great way to put it. Why is it important to study sex differences then? Why should anybody care? I think lots of reasons. The main reason for me is I think this is deeply, deeply fascinating I just think it the best. It's the best. me and you fell in love with the same book, The moral animal by Mor right. It changed my life. Yeah, likeikewise, it changed my life. It shaped the rest of my career ust I think it's deeply fascinating. and Yeah, I remember when I read that book. Uh That's when I fell with fell in love with evolutionary psychology and in particular I fell in love with the evolutionary psychology of sex differences. And I got the same thing that I did when I was a kid and I first understood how the phases of the moon work. And everything just clicked into place, suddenly the whole thing made sense. That is why it looks that way. That is why people are different in that way. Exactly.actly it all made sense. It was clear that it was true And u yeah, just, uh sort of instant insight. and yeah interestnteresting, even as you're saying it, I can hear this sort of Critic sadness inside of my mind. Going Why would you, when you read a book? Why would both of us, when we read a book be so enamored by sex differences dot dot dot. That must be because you are secretly a sexist who is looking to try and keep people in their place and not ever have any progamress and you know what I mean? Like the conversation around this has become so Tarnished accusatory. Yes, yes, yeah. Yeah you can't have an interest in something which is fundamental and fascinating and really important, right? so that you don't try aren't trying to fight against something so that we don't fully account for and understand why behaviour unfolds in particular ways that can allow us to have a better society, a society that's got outcomes that's more close to what we want. Yeah Fascinating. Yeah, it is So I do I agree with that and I think u Yeah. Sorry, I just I just meant blank. What was it going to say about it at all Just why is it important to study sex? Well, it was important. that points to another reason. So one big reason why it's important is just the fact that it's fascinating. But I think also that like you say, it is important in terms of staring society in positive directions. and under understanding ourselves, understanding interactions between men and women in terms of Yeah, trying to keep people in their place and the like. That's certainly not the philosophy that I come away with from having studied all this over the years. I instead of my basic philosophy, I think I can summarize in just four words And those words would be let people be themselves. So if they they fit with traditional gender roles and expectations, that's right But if they don't, that's great as well. It doesn't matter. The fact that something has evolutionary origin doesn't necessarily mean that it's good It doesn't necessarily mean it's bad either. I think that it's morally neutral. And that it's up to us to decide whether it's good or bad or somewhere in between I think that's a big fear that people have that by looking at the evolutionary explanation for why certain traits show up the way that they do, why certain differences occur the way that they do, it sounds like you're excusing away that behavior Indeed I think a lot of people do worry that that's the case people will assume that it's the case. analistic fallacy your way through all of the bad behavior of men or all of the worst behavior of women or the most repressive ideas that we have for how people should behave. Yeah, yeah. And I don't think that it does justify any particular behavior but I do think it's R to worry that people might assume that it does, falsely assume that it does So I do think that we discuss these issues that we should take into account the concerns that people have about this whole topic of sex differences And we should discuss them carefully. And we should always emphasize that most of the gaps are not huge, mostost of the psychological satass differences are not huge that there's a huge amount of variation within both sexes, tons of overlap between the sexes. And also that there's no normative implications of such cilizations. So no sense that because something is evolved, because something is natural, that that therefore means that it's good O even permissible Again, it's up to us to decide then. Right to say that the differences are modest at best.. But when you start to stack them on top of each other, you end up with h you basically end up with two completely separate Venn diagrams, right? It's not just preference for violence and risk taking and parental investment and d It's when you put all of them together, you do have two very different groups of people. Yeah, those are called multivariate sex differences. When you sort of cluster the differences together. I think that Well that's statistically true. I think we need to be a little bit wary about the concept of multivariate stat multivariate sex differences. just because Often we are thinking about single traits. so often we're thinking about sex differences in parenting, sex differences in sexual interests in agression, risk taking and so on. But also if you were to Divide up take a group of people, divide them into two based on a flip of a coin They're not going to be identical in every trait There going to be small differences between them. But then if you add up all those tras, you could just as well stack up the differences between these two randomly chosen groups of people, stack up the differences, and you'd find that they equally massively discrepant from each other based on the multivariate statistical approach. So something they need to be wary about exxaggerating the magnitude of human sex differences based on that statistical approach. you could just as well exaggerate the sex differences between New New Zeanders and Australians or the British and the French, or like I say, too randomly British and the French do thatough I al It's been the last few years there's been a huge debate about what sex actually is What's the definition that you land on Well, there are a few definitions. The one that I land on is the traditional scientific definition by which sex is defined in terms of gamet size So in the vast majority of sexually reproducing species You have two different gamage sizes And the small gametess are called sperm, the larger gametes are called eggs Is that across the board? That is across the board. No way. Yeah. So every almost every seexually reproducing male. Yes, prodrouce sperm. Yes. it's if they reproducing fema produces eggs I know this might this might be like the most face palm thing I'm like, wow, I didn't know that was those are the only two currencies at play I mean, it seems like in biology, it's not like math, right? So in biology, there are very rarely generalizations that apply to every single one species. this is one of them But the reason is that its def it's a definitional truth. So we define males as the ones that produce the smaller gamage. empirical truth that in principle could have gone another way is the fact that In the vast majority of species you have where the gamets' all identical You only have two different types And one is bigger and one is smaller. And that's true right across you know, all spaces except the minority where you you have So that's called anisogomy. We have two different sizes and you have a few isogamous sexually reproducing species, but the vast majority anisogamous. you What what's an isogamous sexually reproducing spit what are some examples of them? There are some very No animals, no plants, but I think maybe some simple bacteria and things like that. And I think that would have been the starting position. So we all evolved from species that originally were isogamous. first of all, sexual reproduction would have evolved and they would have been isogamous. they would have produced the same gametes and mixed them. But then that's evolutionarily unstable and that tends to fall apart into smaller and larger gametes. Why is it unstable? Because when you have same size gametes Uh the selection for any trait that will increase chances of being one of the gam of producing gametes that are going to produce offspring that survive. So that creates a selection pressure for maybe loading up your gametes with some extra supplies to help them survive. So some gametes get a little bit bigger of them. But as soon as they get big enough, the larger gametes, you have a selection for smaller gametes that seek out the larger gametes and kind of ride on their coattails. and you get this it pushes them apart. And it's actually from a ual survival or a gamet survival perspective. Yeah. it's the grreay area in the middle of the barbel is where you go to die And the black and the white on either end are actually the ones that are most effective. Exactly right. because the ones in the middle, they're not big enough. they don't survive as well as the bigger ones. that pack a picnic for their offspring. But they're th mbility, mobility by the smaller ones. Exactly and just numbers, you know. So like if you producing small gametses, you can produce many more So individuals that produce the medium sizizeed gamedes They don't survive as well, plus they don't produce as many. I can't remember what the stat is there's some stat around Jerry, can you look at ChadyPT How many sperm are produced per day human sperm versus human eggs? It's such a hilariously big difference. Okay so Broadly across the animal Kingdom in almost every single sexually reproducing species There's a binary. Yeah, this' is a sex binary There's a sex binary ye. There's also a ton of variation in terms of the phenotypic characteristics within each of those sexes But yeah, there was there is a sex boundary You know, and you do get intersex individuals. Yeah. What about the challenges to this? We have Hmaphrodites, within sex variation, intersex conditions. Does that disprove this? It doesn't. So I guess the easiest one is the within sex variation There is tons of it. So theres variation in terms of levels of masculinity, levels of femininity, just size dimorphosism versus size monomorphosism where they're about the same size But nonetheless, they are all either producing sperm or eggs. the vast majority with within each group. You've seen that image right of the bell curve graph and you say, on average, something, something Yeah. And then somebody says, well, I know a person who is actually more that than the other group. I know a woman who's six feet seven and she's actually taller than most men. Most men on average are taller than women. Well my friends six foot two. Yeah. you go right, okay But that doesn't necessarily disprove the way generalization Exactly. does fact to the generalization that And even more so fact that the gamet size is definitional, as you said, Oh here we go. I don't even know what that number is. that B Billion sperm hundred to three hundred million sperm per day. uced by healthys. No, no, no, no, I want this globally. Total global sperm production, two hundred quadrillion eggs released, seventy million Stab it up, lad So I think fucking lagging behind We need to up the egg production, should I say So much of the debate falls around nature versus nurature. Yeah. So much of it How do you even begin to start to separate this out, right? No almost no women have grown up in a society that hasn't had other women with the expectations of women and almost no men have grown up in a society that doesn't have the expectations of men. How do we know that all of the sex differences aren't just socialization Its a good question and I think the first thing I want to say about that is that evolutionary psychologists don't deny that socialization has a very important impact on the nature of sex differences in any given culture We know that it does have a big impact because we know that sex differences, their size and the details of them, many of them, vary across cultures and vary across times But in terms of how we know that it's not just socialization There are various lines of evidence that point in that direction None of them are perfect, none of them by themselves seal the deal The reason I persuadeed it is that They all point and When you get a sex difference and they all point in the same direction, that just makes a very strong case, I think that's not just due to socialization. book I lay out six different lines of evidence for an innate contribution to any given differeerence S see if I can remember the name. So the first one is that a lot of sex differences They appear very, very early in the lifespan So early in fact that even though it's conceivable that it could be a result of socialization, it just seems less plausible than that there's actually also an innate push so The aggression sex difference and the risk taking sex difference, bothoth of those appear basically as soon as kids are mature enough that they can move around the place and are capable of risk taking capable of aggressing you get that sex difference. like immediately. and a good example of that is that right from the get go, right from early toddlerhood More boys than girls end up in the ER from doing more risk taking U and also if it appears at puberty as well Like a lot of sex differences innate sex differences with an innate basis. they What do you mean when you say innate? U Unlearned So there's an innate contribution, an unlearned contribution. And where that's the case, often you find that the sex difference, you may get it to some degree early in the lifespan, but then post puberty, it just skyrockets and expands. Right. O. Which would suggest that there is a biological basis, or else why would this big change occur when puberty happens? Exactly. and do so right across cultures would the suggestion from social roles socialization theorists be that while during puberty culture ramps up its pressure on people. There's a greater expectation on young men and women to change their behaviour That would be the way that you would you'd have to try to explain it something like that, yeah. I think the more c all restot the more Yeah more plastic at that age, perhap Yeah Yeah. You could do that as well. And that's sort of implying an innate contribution to the plasticity, I guess, but yah, not for the specific sex difference. The reason I don't buy that though is that Most cultures actually try to suppress male aggression, for instance In every culture, male aggression, post puberty, young male aggression, violence, risk taking, homicide is a big problem that the society has to deal with. And so usually they're trying to clamp down on it rather than trying to encourage it And nonetheless, you get this increaseed integration. That's true and And actually this is the second line of evidence is that often these sex differences appear despite culture rather than just because of culture. Culture is trying to push down aggression right from early on. Parents, teachers early on, they actually tell off Boys for aggression, more than they tell of girls for aggression notot because they disapprove of girls' aggression, but just simply because boys are more aggressive Right They have more call more calluse to do it I think FMRIs of developing fetuses in the womb can detect sex differences at three months. They can and think I think even younger in some cases as well. what are they are these Bys and girls, these tiny unbook minus six month year olds Are they learning their brain presumably develop differently. Yeah, they've been socialized to develop different brains side of the world. Yeah ye. not early development. Early development comparing the spite culture rather than because of culture Another one is that They persist often for a long time. So for instance, sex differences and mate preferences. were really consistent right throughout the entirety of the twentieth century in the US. Sex differences in career preferences as well or career related interests. They were evident from like the early nineteen hundreds where people first started measuring them And then they just stayed the same. So the average difference, the fact that men, for instance, on average, more interested in things and things related jobs. whereas women on average are more interested in people and people related jobs that was the case right throughout the twentieth century, despite the fact that there was quite a strong social there's a lot of social pressure to try to get more women into traditionally male roles and it persisted nonetheless. Okay. I've learned from over a thousand podcast episodes that the easier you make your health routine, the more consistent you'll be. It's like golf Right? You want to keep it simple and not mix a bunch of pills. You want the eye of the tiger. not DUI of the Tiger. That's why I'm such a huge fan of AG onene. Onecoop contains seventy five vitamins, minerals, probiotics and whole food sourced ingredients in a single daily drink. and now they've taken it a step further with AG one Next genen backed by four clinical trials. And in those trials, it was shown to fill common nutrient gaps, improve key nutrient levels in just three months, and increase healthy gut bacteria by ten times, even in people who already eat well gone are the days of needing to buy a load of pills in the gym parking lot from some juice bro in a cybertruck If you're unsure about it AG one's got a ninety day money backack guaranteee. So can try it every single day for three months. and if you do not like it, they will give you your money back. Right now, you can get a free AG one welcome kit that includes a bottle of D three K two, an Ay one flavor sampler, and that ninety day money back guarantee by going to the link in the description below. heading to drinkagy one d. com slash utom wisd. What are the socio cultural explanations that hold water U, well, I think a lot of them do. Um You know it's tricky. So I guess we know because of cross cultural differences in male typical behaviour, female typical behavior and the size of the differences, that something is making the difference. But it is actually quite tricky to to figure out what what it is that's making the difference. because we know, for instance that Okay, so like a popular explanation is that it's how parents treat their kids And it seems incredibly plausible that's going to have an effect There are a few reasons to think maybe that it has less effect than we might think So one is that a lot of research in the West finds that parents don't particularly treat their sons and daughters differently in some important ways. L they're equally likely to encourage them to be successful, equally likely to encourage them to be independent. Another line of evidence against parents having a big role is what's called the second law of behavioral genetics and that's the finding that U when two people, like I say, take identical twins identical twins grow up in the same home, you'd expect them to be more similar to each other than two identical twins who are separated at birth and rered apart. And in childhood, they often are quuite a bit more similar than you would exred by chance U By adulthood though, they're often not much more similar at all and in some cases not no more similar than they would be. that they had grown up apart which is a surprising finding, but a very consistent finding And it suggests maybe that u parential treatment affects individuals less than we might think that they would, which kind of pulls out the rug a little bit from the idea that parents are having a huge impact on sex differences specifically What about the gender equality paradox? Well, that undermines another kind of socioc cultural explanation which is the idea that The sex differences that we see are partons of the social roles of a culture. and shaped by social Res theory. Yeah, social roes theory Exactly. And patriarchy theory, the idea that it's due to patriarchy that as well is undermined by the gender equality paradox because both of those theories would predict that in like like more patriarchal societies Societies that are more patriarchal, societies that have stricter gender roles. You'd expect that and predict that the sex differences would be bigger in those societies than they are in less patriarchal societies and ones that have less strict social roles. What would be some examples of how that would play out if that was true at Basically any sex difference you care to name, aggression, sex difference, sex differences in masculinity versus femininity, all of those should be bigger. Sex differences in career related prereferences, they should be bigger as well And the gender equality paradox is the deeply counterintuitive finding and incredibly fascinating finding that often it goes the other way seems to go the other way that actually in more gender equal societies, societies a little less st strict in terms of the gender roles and society are less patriarchal You actually find larger sex differences often rather than smaller ones U which is in the direction that you would predict as well Yeah, so it's opposite to the direction you predict if social role theory right Yes Yes in the direction you would predict if you were taking an evolutionary perspective, I would im. mean Well actually, you know, taking an evolutionary perspective, I didn't originally predict that I thought that in more patriarchal societies, even given that there's an innate push towards certain sex differences, I still thought that patriarchy and stricter sex roles would pry the sexes apart even more. Right. So I was actually versified It doesn't that it doesn't And does the reverse is the real surprise. What are the rebuttals to socioc cultural explainers have for the gender equality paradox? There are a few. One is that people in more patriarchal societies they tend to the men and women have little to do with each other And so that they have a more sort of exaggerated picture of the other sex And so when they fill out personality inventories, for instance they're comparing themselves with other men, if they're men or other women if they're women. and they therefore see themselves as being more similar to the average. for their comparison group. Right The comparison group J just that's so siloid off in these patriarchal societies that they don't know what the fuck the other side's doing. Exactly. You're just in a bunker Yeah so much that you don't know what's going on. Is makesible. It does, but there's also a plausible rebuttal to that rebuttal Which is fucking love it. It's so good. This is my shit. This is my shit So it doesn't just apply to self report things like personality. You also find it for some cognitive abilities, I think spatial ability, for instance, you find it U you find it as well for physical traits like height You saying that in more gender equal societies boys get even better, better at throwing I don't know if that is actually the case, but that would be be of there's research on that. I'm not sure there is actually cross cultural research on.'s my favorite one. It's huge huge. It's one of my absolute favorites. Did you ever look at that study where so the difference in throwing velocity, accuracy is a pretty big sex difference One of the, um The appropriate pushbacks was, well, men's shoulders articulate differently, the length of the forearm means that you've got more leverage, et cetera, et cetera. I think the sex difference at eight years old in throwing velocity and accuracy is basically the same as adult men and women being able to detect adult women and men just by their face. It's ninety percent a huge, huge, huge difference So there was my favorite study on this was in order to negate the articulation argument, the issues of sort of biomechanics. they 've got a tennis ball serving machine and fired tennis balls at students and got boys and the girls to see if they could get out of the way. and I don't think any of the males were hit. I think that this is before you wouldn't have been able to get this past an etics board. But yeah, just the sort of spatial awareness, that spatial rotation stuff is The sex difference is pretty large and apparently maybe in a more gender equal society, even more would be women would be hit by the tennis balls. Well, that's possible. ye. So the gender equality parados it doesn't apply to every trade. so it might not necessarily be. But yeah. But you are right, I think that was probably a seventy, I think it was a seventy study.. I'm not sure you could do that. you couldn't do that. You couldn't aim projectiles at participants in studies anymore. sadly Whats the largest sex difference between men and women Well, the largest ones are physical differences. phhysical seize differences. So the very largest sex differenceces in reproductive anatomy, where basically all males have penises, all females have vaginas and so on Um But other physical sex differences are also very, very large. So the sex difference in upper body strength. is is huge and there's very little overlap, close to no overlap for that one The sex difference in voice pitch is another very, very large one as well. That's huge. which is quite interesting because u the voice pitch sex difference in other apes is not as big. It's nowhere they're as big. And that's even the case for other species that are much more dimorphic than us in terms of size like gorillas and orangutans. So it's a bit of a puzzle, I' notite sure why is why that's the case When it comes to psychological sex differences, the vast majority of them are much more modest but there's one that stands out as as being almost as big as some of these physical ones I always ask people if they can guess what it is. I think last time I was on your show actually, I asked you if you could guess. and you didn't, but but no one does. I've read the book now. You've read the book now Yeah you got out guess what it would be, Jared. the single biggest psychological sex difference between men and women Is aggression It's not aggression. I'll give you a clue and that's that it is It's related to reproduction pretty closely What was that? Well, actually, that is a big sest differe itnce. notot as big as this one. You big as speak for yourself too The six difference in Which sex each sex is primarily attracted to? So men the vast majority of men are primarily attracted to women, the vast majority of women primarily attracted to men And when I say it it's obvious, right it's obvious that it's a big sex difference. and But it's curious. People don't think of it. Even scientists often don't think about it. I've read a bunch of papers that summarize evolved sex differences and they don't tend to mention that one. They often neglect to mention that That very, very large one, but also that one that has quite a clear evolutionary rationale. Yeah That' very interesting Because if that wasn't the case, we wouldn't be here. Exactly. literally literally.iterally wouldn't be here. Yeah. OkayK so what are the biggest sex differennce? Let's get down to some Brass fucking tax. What are the biggest sex differences when it comes to sex? When it comes to sex, One of the largest ones is the sex difference and interest in casual sex and sexual variety and so basically sociosexuality, the trit of sociosexuality. No strings attached to sex. D I need to mention which direction it is? People might be aware of it. Yeah yeah, S someone can intue it, I guess. Yeah So it's mid on average u school higher However you measured that trait that's were higher than women on that trait. differences there Maybe theyough are not as huge as people sometimes assume. We're looking usually at an effect size of Uh, you know, about Cohenenss D equals one. So what that means is there's about one standard deviation between the average for men and the average for women So yeah, between.o point eight and one. And that is pretty big. That is big for human size difference There is still quite a bit of overlap So there are plenty of women who have a higher sociosexuality than plenty of men. I guess an intuitive way to put it, a way to make it intuitive would be to say if you imagine plucking two people at random, one man and one woman With a fect size ofz point eight, or one, probably two thirds to seventy percent at the time, the man would score higher than the woman on that trade Um So that is a majority. It's not an overwhelming majority though. In a significant minority of cases, you'd find that actually the woman scores higher than the man Why Why is that sex difference? That is getting right into the central question of why there are any sex differences.. I suppose we probably need to talk about like the evolution of sex differences, why they exist in the first place. Yeah. So we should jump to that Can just as an aside though, can we mentioned three the six lines of evidence for innateness? Do we want to jump back and do the other three and then maybe get into them? S, this sort of thing So what what have we We had the developmental sex differences, we had the resistance cultural pressure, we had the persistence across time. So another one is hormonal correlates of sex differences And in particular, you find associations between prenatal hormonal exposure and traits found later in life. So higher levels of testosterone in the womb, for instance, are associated with high levels of aggression, later, high levels of risk taking lower levels of parental inclinations and so on so. That is regardless of sex. That is regardless of sex, yees, you can look at within sex differences as well. And yes, so one actually very strong line of evidence for that claim is the fact that womomen who when they're in the womb are exposed to very, very high levels of prenatal testosterone due to having a condition called congenital adrenal hyperplasia or CAH they As girls and then as women, they exhibit a lot of male typical ess interested in playing with dolls, exactly? Yeah. less interested in getting married and having kids, more interest in things related professions as well So that's pretty makes more likely to be bisexual or lesbian. Yeah, yeah, it does. it makes them more likely to be interested in other women sexually as well, either as bisexuals or as lesbians. Yeah So, so a w range of traits seem to inl by. The one is that relates with, Hormons. Yep. The fifth one is cross cultural universality So most of the key setx differences that we've been discussing so far, they are found either in every culture or in the vast majority And if it were all just down to culture You wouldn't expect that You'd expect there to be more variation across cultures than what we found But you don't, you know, you just always have like in every culture, you find that men are more aggressive than women And you find at the extreme of agression, in particular, the differences are particularly big. And you find that the vast majority of homicides perpetrated by guys in every single nation to which we had data Greater risk taking, more accidental fatalities among men than women. Women across cultures are more involved in parental care and so on and so on And last but not least And maybe this is the one I find most plausible on its own is the fact that a lot of these sex differences, you find them as well in other species You don't find them in all other species, but importantly you find them in species that were subject to the same evolutionary selection pressures. as ourselves And actually the selection pressures equion bring us to D the ultimate root have evolved sex differences Uh so Basically Most sex differences emerge from the sex difference in what I like to call the maximum offspring number The male animals versus female animals can produce. And in most species, the males potentially can produce more offspring than f males. that average number of offspring has to be the same At least in the species where you have similar sex ratio The average has to be the same by the variance in the number of offspring produced can be greater in one sex than the other and it's usually greater in males. Why does the average need to be the same if the variants can be different? Because it takes two to tango. And so every offspring that's produced is produced by one male and one female And most part if you can have one male Servicing twenty females, why not have a twenty to one ratio Will that be a twenty to one ratio in terms of the number of parents But the average number of three six would be the same But you got the one male or twenty times more than any female. And then nine and that's a really high number. But then the other nineteen bachelors who never get to have kids, that brings the average for males down And then it's the same for all the females. So you average out across all of them and the average is the same. I get that Maybe I'm being stupid Why is it not the case gi that men given that males are able to produce more children than women can and females can. Yeah. Why is it not the case that there is a bias award fewer males in the animal kingdom. Right, right, That's a great question and that is one of the sort of early mysteries of evolutionary biolog And if it were for the if selection act is for the good of the group That is what we find We'd find if you only need one male for every twenty females and selection were for the good of the group, you get that because If you have twenty of each then the other nineteen are surplus and they're using up ease of resources and they're competing with each other and fighting with each other, it's not good for the species as a whole. But selection favors what's good for the individual And for the individual, I could be the one. You could be the one, exactly. And the average is the same. So it's I guess useful to think about Think about from a parents point of view Like is it better to have sons or daughters and if there were twentywenty females for everyone male It'd be much better to have sons Be each son is gonna just there's going to be tons of females. And so that would mean that selection would slowly favor an increase in number of song. That m fuck you can't beat evolution. Exactly. And. And the reverse if there's twenty males and for every female thenen it would be better for parents to produce daughters because then they get the cream of the crap. and twenty males probably they're going to have a low number, so it's better to have daughters The The equilibrium point is fivety fifty. Yeah, obviously as well, there's survival and not just reproduction. We're not living in this perfect hermetically sealed, safe environment. Yeah. Males do other things than just reproduce regardless of whether they can do twenty to one or not Yeah getting food, helping to protect getting rid of other tribes, et cetera, et ccetera. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And you know there are plenty of species where the male his role in reproduction is just the reproductive act And then then he's off looking for other females. But we're not one of those species I mean, that does happen occasionally. there's ocasional mail that will do that. But generally we're quite involved in childcare Uh yeah, so okay, so The big difference is you get this difference in the variant Some males can have tons of offspring and they can have many more offspring than any female can. Where that's the case though There's going to be some males have had no offspring Um, or maybe a few a few or none And where that's the case, you get strong selection on the males. be one of the lucky females that has many offspring, rather than one of the few that has none. One of the many that has none.. And so that's selectra traits like greater aggression within sex aggression to try to beat up other males for either directly for females or for the territories, the status or the resources that are necessary to attract female attention A tendency to show off, a tendency to grow a great b tail if you're a peacock, you might want to try that, a great big flashy tail to seduce the peaahens U or just a tendency to seek multiple mates. and seeking no strings attached sex basically. So that's the answer to your earlier question is that that's why you have selection for like stronger selection on males and females for an interest in multiple partners and sex without commitment right Did you know your gut controls your energy, your recovery, how well you absorb everything that you eat, and the one nutrient that keeps it all running properly? is fiber? Well, it turns out that ninety five percent of Americans don't get enough of it, which is why I'm such a huge fan of Mens's fiber plus. Most fiber supplements are one trick pony, one type of fiber solving One part of the problem. FiberPlus is a three in one formula built to tackle digestion, gut barrier strength, and blood sugar stability All at once. I use this every single day. It is kind of hard to get in a fiber just through food alone. and best of all, Mentus offers a thirty day money back guarantee. So you can buy it, try it every single day for twenty nine days. and if you don't love it, they will just give you your money back. plus they ship internationally. Right now, you can get up to thirty five percent off your first subscription and that thirty day money back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to livementus dot com d Sash modern wisdom and using the code modern wisdom How does parental investment influence the evolution of sex differences That is a major contributor and The reason is that so this variance, sex difference is mainly a result of sex differences and parental investment So the reason that Some males can have many, many more offspring than any female and a lot of species, is that females invest more in the young. So in mammals, for instance, to produce any one offspring, a female has to have a long pregnancy, has to give birth to the young and then has to nurse the young for a while, whereas a male to produce an offspring just in principle only needs to engage in one sex act. So he can mate with multiple females and have tons of offspring because he invests entially little in any given offspring. whereereas the females on the other hand, they invest a lot in each offspring. That lowers the ceiling for the number of offspring they can produce Therefore, you have to be choosier. You have to be choosier about your mates, exactly. Sleeping with or metating with lots and lots of males less useful for females than for males Um But So So parental investment is really the core to is that the key driver Well, I think the key driver is the difference in the maximum masering number or the reproductive variance. Right Be it's not just shaped by parental investment. Behaviorally that shows up as parental investment. Well, that's a big part of it. yeah. So the parental investment is the major cause of the sex difference in maximum offspring number. But other things do come into it in different species. gestation period too is like a biological imposition on parental investment. actually How long it takes to just make a baby considered part of parental investment? It is' a part of parental investment. Yeah. parental care is and nursing is. Obviously those two, but I wasn't sure whether or not it's class parental investment is classed as actually the making of the baby. It is because it forecloses the option to make other babies. Understood. Yeah ye ye. But ecological things come into it as well So one example of a factor other than parental investment that influences the reproductive variants is ecological factors. So you'll have some species where the males where they're quite solitary. So the males or females might pair up and there aren't many other individuals around. even if the female invests a lot more in the young then the male does. Their maximum osring num is about the same because just simply because they're isolated from other members of the species, the males don't have many other opportunities to sow their wild oats. What' Bateman's principle? atement's principle. So that is the idea that reproductive variance is greater in males than females in most species.. And then Trevor's sort of refinement of that was that the main cause of that is parental investment. So Bateman put it put put a lot of it on anisogamy He explained the difference in reproductive variance in terms of the fact that The females invest more per egg, the males invest per sperm Um Trivvers said Rbert Trivvers, who died recently, he said it's not just that actually All kinds of investment that you put into the young, not just the gametes, but also gestation and parturation, which is giing birth Nursing, parental care, all those things are what matters And I would just say that parental investment is the big one, but other things as well determine reproductive variantance. What is the That' about forty percent of males of human males ancestrally reproduced in about eighty percent of females, is that right I have heard that number banded ab. I actually think that probably and ask mees My guess is that it it's not that big. I've also seen other evidence suggesting that u It's called reproductive skew. And so just the reproductive skew in our species is quite a bit lower. then you find in most mammals And I think the reason for that is that So the for thousand eighty number you think is wrong. Yeah, R. Okay I think so. I think's the re smaller? Well, I think they the's smaller. and I think because males and our species very often invest quite a lot in the young So it's not just the sex act. they often Typically help out with the young as well And so we have high levels of biparental care in our species. that reduces the maximum offspring number for males relative to females and brings it down, brings it closer to what we have for females. So if other animals have less of a reproductive skill also have less male parental investment How would the reproductive skew be so great if we have more male parental investment. Is that what you're saying? That is what I'm saying I fucking no evolionary psychology dude Don't test me on this. I fucking understand this. It's the only topic I understand Um yeah. So's a very instant reproductive success. What do you reckon it was then? if it's not forty eighty, feel free to just brow signcience There's a a cap you can find Kid so. Um I probably shouldn't put a number. I uh otherther than to say I think it's smaller I think it it I like an academic. I know, I know. I's I'm the room, dude. I' just I to put this thing on for the rest of the conversation Well,, you've got bass as well. that's if you want to say something insane. Okay, cool. Well I'll keep it here. Yeah. because say something absolutely insane. You're allowed to put that on. It's actually saved me once already. I got clipped talking about a slightly highly postulated theory. Put that on. It's going be interesting on you because you already have the mustache in the glass. Yeah Well, indeadeed, yeah. Nothing's changed. Nothing' changed Yeah. okay, so we've got a It's like an interesting, I guess an interesting on people think that sort of forty eighty number as far as I was aware, like actually So you think the sU is different? Well I thought might be true is that the overall number might be different too, that the whole to me, like infant mortality Right, right fucking ruthless. So The only way that we can work out how many of our ancestors reproduced presumably is due to some kind of genealogy stuff. And that means that it's not how many reproduced, it's how many survived Yeah, surviveed to reroduce Yeah. It's a grandparent optimizing machine for last book previous book, which is fantastic and everyone needs to go and lookck it. The A ableel understood the universe. eighty percent of women having grandchildren producing Oh eighty percent of women being grandchildren producing people Yeah It seems insanely high I guess the thing is that they would have had a bunch of kids. And only about fifty percent would make it, aboutout fifty percent would make it. And so if they, you know, have sex, for instance. That's what it is. Around about fifty percent Yeah that used to go on to reproduce. Unbelievably high, right Well aboutout fifty percent infant mortality rate. so like half of them didn't make it. One of the great things I think of our civilization is that we had lowered that number to very close to zero because that was, I think, a massive cause of misery throughout most of human history Was it Darwin lost a bunch of kids? He did. Yeahah. he had a he had ten and three didn't make it to adulthood. I think that's the number. Yeah Is it your book or was it I think this might have been the moral animal. Yeah where Robert Wright talks about the fact that Darwin lost multiple children The one that was the most psychologically painful was his daughter who was twelve or thirteen Yeah And the reason for that The evolutionary reason that Robert gives for it is that Parents are able to detect the moment at which the life cycle of their child would have allowed them to just about become the grandparent optimizing machine that evolutionarily we're driven to be. Yeah. And that if a child dies at two years old that's horrible, but they weren't They had a long way to go and many things could have occurred between now and being able to have kids if a child dies when they're old then they've had all of the opportunities to have had kids and that didn't that didn't go well or maybe it did go well. But if you are just on the cusp of being able to reproduce biologically and you die That is from an evolutionary perspective, the most painful. Am I making that up or is that the story? No, that is the story. Yeah. ando Pretty good evidence on it as well. That grief tracks reproductive value of the individual. No fucking way. this has been reproduced. ' that book's thirty years old now yeah, go thek average grief levels go up and up and up as reproductive value goes up as kids move from the very vulnerable, historically very vulnerable. early infancy to childhood, it's kind of peaks at about the age that repduct the value peaks. so couple of years after puberty and then starts coming down again as people get older. Oh fucking fascinating. How is everyone not obsessed with pychology. It is so cool. Fascinating, right? It's so fun. And sheds light on some of the most fundamental stuff in life. Yeah. I mean, obviously it's very in some ways too It's very dark It doesn't paint a particularly flattering picture of human motivation. that the reason that Darwin was particularly sad about his thirteen year old daughter dying is that he had this weird algorithm running in the back of his mind., Oh was like you're just saying that all that children are that's reuced for you to be happy to do. Dude, you don't need to Lord are ultimate evolutionary drives. Yeah. in order to understand and respect them and accept the fact that they are important influences on our behavior. I completely agree. you know and I do feel the pull to it like it is a bit bleak. I remember when I was first reading about that Grief theory, it does seem a bit dark. think about it It's not very flattering, exactly. I mean, I guess one thing is that We we're not actually thinking about reproductive value we just have a built in tendency to react as if we aren. But we're not actually thinking in the back of our minds, this is sad because this kid was close to having kids and then I would like. Well this is This is sort of my least I don't know, actually. I probably could write out a hit list of my least favorite internet rebuttals to anyone talking about evolutionary theory. One of them is a lack of understanding about the difference between proximate and ultimate motivations for behavior. Yeah Eactly. So one of the big ones? Yeah, like the misunderstandings. Why you feel the desire to do a thing and the evolutionary advantage of you doing the thing, the fact that those two things are different Um eat food because it tastes good, but the reason for eating food is to keep you alive you have sex because it feels good, but the reason to have sex is not the reason that it feels good. Exactly right. and it's quite annoying, right when people say So you're saying that, um sex and having like short term relationships or long term relationships is just about babies, but that can't be true because often the last people the last thing people want is to have kids. And I don't want to have kids cont I love to have sex Yeah. Yeah, yeah exactly. so it doesn't make sense. But I've just misunderstood the idea because it's not a psychological theory. like the genes eye view explanations, the evolutionary explanations, Th those are not motivations those are just the explanations for why we had the the appximate psychological drives that we do. notot the ultimate. exactly. Yeah, yeah. and you know, with the What's it referred to as that theory of that sexual not sexual value? Hm ofve uh Darwin's daughter dying, what's the Oh, ye. Reproductive value. Reproductive value. No one is how horrible to say to a parent, Well, it's actually misses Thompson. The reason that your' greatri, misses Darwin, the reason that your grief is so high is because of the reproductive value that your daughter almost didn't cash in on.actly horrible, horrible thing to say. but it doesn't need to It doesn't need to be something that's in your mind until I go, how could you claim that this mother is feeling that, thinking that at the time and that contributing to a grief? No Yeah. She just loves the kid. Yeah and would be the same the same as going Why is it that people get depressed when they're lonely? I'm not thinking about potentially being kicked out of the tribe. And you go, well, yeah, like we're in a modern environment. Why do you think it is that depression and anxiety correlate with isolation? Yeah. if it didn't matter. Well, it does matter. It doesn't matter anymore, not in the same sort of a way. But that doesn't negate the fact that our system is basically ancient programming living in a modern world. Exactly. And even though it does seem bleak sometimes I don't see that other explanations, socioc cultural explanations would be any less bleak You know, Oh it was telling me I'm at the mercy of the memes and trends , well, exactly. And guy decided to start a new cool movements somewhere and then that completely sort of blows the wind of whatever it is that I'm supposed to care about Exactly or you might say, okay, the reason that you grieve this individual is just because you've been socialized to do so And how's that any l any list?'s say, this is why I think there's a lot of similarities between evolutionary psychology and behavioral genetics that if you start to strip away the science and the evidence underneath it what you end up with is an equally or maybe even uglier the world if for instance, if you deny that there are genetic influences on outcomes in life what you're left with is this world where Everybody did start off. Cool You are exclusively at the mercy of the entire world. like that injices. Yeah Yeah. the only reason that this didn't come out is all on your shoulders. All on your shoulders because you didn't try hard enough or your parents didn't try hard enoughor And I guess the thing is that Whatever horrid truth And they're not all hard either but whatever hard tricks ultimately we just got to accept what's true whether we like it or not. And you know sometimes it is positive. so natural selection has given us a whole range of less than noble traits, but it's also given us some really lovely traits as well, like the capacity to form love and to love our children and to love our friends. You know, these are all do sell exactly to be. So I gu want just to round out the we haven't even got into the sex differences yet, which is the meat and potatoes of this, but I don't care Is it Are humans unique in this regard because We've got mutual m choice and we've got bu parental care So when we're talking about evolution of sex differences, parental investment, ability to produce children, volume of children across a lifespan, Bateman's principle, variance and reproductive success Hans do seem to be somewhat of an outlier in mammals and especially in the animal kingdom. What wrinkle does that throw in well, yeah, so we uh So the question, arere we unique? sort of yes and no So the way which we are unique we're very unique among mammals. Like you say in the fact that we have high levels of the tendency to pair bond so to form love and form relatively durable pair bonds and for both sexes rather than just the females to invest in the young. That is found in maybe five ten percent, ten percent at the most of mammals So the overwhelming trend among mammals is that the females do all the investment in the young and the males are basically deadbead dad In birds on the other hand, they are an outlier family of animals among animals in general, and that around ninety percent of birds form pair bonds and had biparental care. And so there's a funny thing and I find this just very, very interesting is that primary reproductive behaviour, humumans are more like the average bird. Then light the average mammal No way Yeah. That's because of our pair bonding and our bike rental tendancy. which is a reinforcement the Parental investment is the key driver of sex differences. Yep, exactly. And are the differenceces in hilarious ly birds. hang on a second. Yeah. Birds are kind of like dinosaurs Humans are closer to birds than they are to most mammals. Yeah, whichich means that humans are kind of dinosaur. Yeah. So that's a evolutionary logic. That's great. That's great. Do you want this one? Yes. I don't need that. I don't need that. No, no, you don't because I agree. So we're mammals that are moreore like dinosaurs in terms of having the primary reproductive arrangement of today's dinosaur.king go. It's wild, right? That's fucking go. And so yeah, so we're an exception among mammals in that respect, a way in which we're not an exception though is that the same evolutionary principles that apply right across Anable Kingdom apply to us as well So the fact that sex differences emerge from the maximum offspring number, the level of seex differences and reproductive variants. That is true across the Animal kingdom and The rules about that apply to us as well and the fact that we have We do have a sex difference in reproductive variants. Men do have and have always had greater reproductive variants than women, but it is relatively low compared to most mammals Most people have no idea where their testosterone levels sit, but what if I told you there was a solution? somethinghing that identifies low tea faster than a high school bully? and it won't cost you all your lunch money. That's where function comes in. Gives you access to over one hundred sixty lab tests, including a deep dive into your full hormone paddle. Every result is reviewed by clinicians, anythingthing out of range flagged clear explanations with a personalized protocol with actionable next steps So if something's off, you know exactly what to do about it. whether you just need to go to the gym more or ad louder in your car. Function will tell you exactly where your test areone, and everything else stands. Normally, this level of testing would usually cost thousands, but with function, it's three hundred sixty five dollars a year. That's one dollar a day to stop guessing. with your health and start knowing. And right now you can get twenty five dollars off, bringing it down to three hundred and forty bucks. So get the exact same blood panels that I do and save twenty five dollars by going to the link in the description below or heading to function health d. com slash modern wisdom using the code modern wisdom cheheck out Isn't there an interesting inversion of this in spiders where female spiders are bigger than the males? Actually most insects it's that way r. And actually there are more animals where the females are bigger than where the males are bigger. But that's not because of the difference in reproductive variants. It's because Um In a lot of species, the main driver of sexual dimorphism is just the number of eggs that you can produce. And females, bigger females can produce more eggs. So selection pressure on them they get bigger and bigger and bigger. They're typically bigger than males,ales don't need to be don't need much room for sperm. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. so the gamet size difference, sperm are bigger than eggs is reflected in the physiology of our species. That's so fucking cool. where' the we it is. We're so used to males being bigger than females, but actually mammals and other large vertebrates were the exception to the rule. And the main reason for it is that You still have the selection pressure. on the females for producing more eggs. So You know they, 've got certain size sort of push for them to be bigger Theyve got an even stronger push on the males to be bigger as a result of intersexual selection, which is selection for the ability to be able to beat each other up Basically. So a lot of species, bigger males do better in fighting than smaller ones. Males get bigger than males get bigger and sometimes they get even bigger than the females. All right, mee and potatoes. G to get back to sex differences in sex drive what? casual sex, sexual variety, cheating. What's going on there? Yep. That's all about producing more offspring So u The male that is equipped with those motivations is going to be sort of like a heat seeking missile going out to seek multiple partners and is therefore more likely to have More offspring, if he's successful than that than he would if he just sort of sat back and wasn't interested in multiple partners And you do find that in many species. Now I don't think that the difference is as big in our species as in many others. And I think that's a side effect of the fact that because we have biparental care The level of reproductive variance among males and our species are somewhat constrained, still greater than among females Be becausecause it's somewhat constrained, sex differences in our species have correspondingly come down as well. So we still have all the traditional sex differences that you find in most mammals and many other species, but they're somewhat muted So you have the sexuality sex differences. But they're somewhat muted. The aggression differences, but they're somewhat muted the parenting differences is the main source of this, so that, you know, is Like the discrepancy in male investment and kids versus female investment has been massively reduced. And that's the driver. And that's thearental Yeah the bip parental investment is the nerfing Yeah, the reason for the nerfing of all of the others. Okay. again, I'm only gonna make this fucking disclaimer once U But said we said it previously, but I think it's worth saying again, just because we can explain using evolutionary logic the reason why men might be driven to cheat more than women is not the same thing as excusing why it happens. notot at all Any more than a socioc cultural explanation would excuse it That's a funny asymetry. Pe seem to think if you explained in evolutionary terms, that excuses it But there's no more reason to assume that than to assume that it' explained in socioultur terms. Because would both of those you are outsourcing the culpability of the individual to something else. in one, it' evolution and ancestors and in the other its's culture and influence. Yeah, exactly. And all our behaviour must have causes, right? So if we're going to say that if we can identify the cause of a behaviour and it's an evolutionary cause, we're going to have to and not hold people to blame. We're going to have to say that for any cause. and we're going to have to say that for all behaviorss because all behaviourors have some kind of cause, whether or not we know what it is, they have some kind ofuse whether it's evolutionary or cultural or most likely a combination of both. Yeah. So I think they basically the institution of holding people responsible We have to keep that institution because it's useful regardless of the fact that of course, people's behavior has causes and it's not inexplicable That's so good. Ashley Madison, the cheating website had twenty million active mail users. and one thousand four hundred and ninety two active female users, despite women getting free lifetime membership and men having to pay. Yeah. That's wild, right? That's a messive differe for twenty million. to a thousand five hundred.'s probably similar to that ratio we had up there before of the It's almost exactly the same, yeah. Yeah. What about men being more turned on by visual triggers U Yeahah, that's another another big sex difference. Both sexes A to some degree, you know, both sexes are interested in good looks and a mate, but it's stronger in men in women And the main reason for that is that the traits that we consider good looking are associated with youthfulness and fertility both sexes. But men place a greater weight on those traits because of menopause basically. So the fact that they place more weight on youthfulness in a mate because youthfulness is more closely linked to fertility in women than men because of the fact that women's fertility shuts off about You know, two thirds of of the way through the lifespan So yeah, so man much more interested in visual sexual stimuli, as psychologists call it. It's part of the explanation for the fact that Men are much more avid consumers of porn than women are. What is the reason that women are much more avid consumers of romanticy and romance novels than men. It's an interesting one, isn't it? So the standard sort of differences in consumer preferences that we hear about, men are much more into porn than women, women are much more into romance novels Um Now Now it is interesting, we've talked about the fact that Men on average are more interested in casual sex than women. And people often assume that the flip side of that is true as well, that women are more interested in long term relationships than men. But actually that's not the case. Typically what we find is that men and women are about as interested as each other and long term committed relationships, You falling in love and forming committed bond with a partner. So you haven't reapportioned the drive, relationship, drive, desire from short term to long term for women. It's just that they don't have this edition that men do of the One Night Stand? Exactly right, But Baronett to the same degree. Yeah yeah yeah Bearing that in mind, the fact that women are so much more interested in romance novels is interesting. And sort of slightly unexpected. You might expect that both sexes would be interested in them. So why it is the case that women are more interested in them? I guess, evolutionarily speaking, I don't know they do seem to be. despite the fact that actually men do seem to be very invested in long term relationships, bunch of papers have come out recently actually saying that in a lot of ways, men are Kind of more romantic. than women, they are more likely to suffer after a breakout. I fall love more quickly I love more soon. Exactly, exactly. So why aren't they more into romance novels? I don't know, Maybe they're just too busy with the porn. Yeah true. Dude, I mean, I sat next to a lady, lovely lady floral dress, slightly older lady on a flight a few months ago, and she had an iPad up resting it and it was a big Big fucker font and she was reading some romanticy thing and she was getting to the good stuff And u, I mean, I couldn't I was we havealized we have legalized women reading porn in public. And it's not It was she was having a she seemed to be having a wonderful flight and I got my When someone sits next to me and they've got an iPad, I think, oh, that's great 'use it's or whatever a kindle or something, it's gonna influence me to not be a degenerate. All I wanted to do was put a pair of blinkers on focus on some brain slop stuff. I've never I've never I've been meaning for ages as a sort of anthropological however you want exxcuse it however want. I haven't gotone around to doing it. I'm gonna to do it. I'm going to read a romance novel at some point. I have heard that the general theme is Boy Misco Boyyss a bit of ans Girl Tames boy and then they live happily ever after And they do involve sex, right? Well, yeah, I mean there is some sex in them, at least there was in her. the one the shoes really, exxactly I mean, there's some interesting stuff, right? The number of if you have sing a sexual fantasy, mental sexual fantasy, men will cycle through I think it's between four and six. differentere partners on average during four and six or forty six? Four and six, I think. but it depends who you are. Whereas for women they tend to have fewer. Yeah, maybe maybe just one. Now I don't know, but I'm going to guess that this would be reflected in romance novels. In fact, I know that this is the case because I've been on the cover of a bunch of them and during those novels at least I would say on average most. Yeah the women who are the protagonists aren't cycling through multiple male suitors If they are, even if you look at movies, movies like the Notebook or Titanic or whatever, it tends to be a pivot between two different life directions. Yeah. It's not a kind of ruthless conveyor belt that is closer to sort of the typical male fantasy U But yeah, the men being more turned on by visual triggers thing I think makes makes an awful lot of sense. I remember in a Badman Buss's book. He talks about how there is an area of the brain that exists in men that lights up when they just see something that's remotely sexual. pair of rocks that look like boobs. Pulling the coin into a vending machine. Pulling a coin into a vending machine. You're fucking kidd me. this was joke I'm not sure there's actually research thatly wouldn't surprise me. No, no, likewise. There is something penetrative about gambling and it was on top of the risk ting on of that. That's it. U Over perception bias as well. An great example that I learned from Badmen by David Yeah, and that's some research by him and spearheaded by his former student, Marty Hazleton. Yeah, the sexual over perception bias Yeah, that refers to the fact that Men are more likely to infer sexual interest on the part of a woman falsely I falsely infer it than women are in the case of men. they're more like to think, yeah, she's into me when actually they're just in a little dream world. and that's not actually true. Men are more likely to think that women are interested in them than they are and women are more likely to think that men aren't interested in them when they are. Yeah. And I think that the data shows The level of attraction that men assume a woman has toward them is roughly equal to the amount of attraction that the man has toward the woman ight Yes, right. Yeah. Exactly. So it seems to be maybe some kind of projecting yourself into the world kind of bias. Yeah. So it's a failure of cross sex mind reading.. but it's also specifically in an over perception bias here too. And this is smoke detector principle. if you as a man had the opportunity to potentially bag an available and attractive woman And because you weren't sufficiently vigilant and detecting it, because you underplayed your potential success likelihood as opposed to overplayed it., you are going to have an error of missing the opportunity as opposed to the error of an awkward and clumsy rejection. Exactly. And this again, fuck, I'm just gonna have to keep saying it does not excuse guys in the workplace with the receptionist in the printing room, having an awkward fumble that she absolutely didn't give off signals for However,, this does explain how you get to that situation or why it is that on average men seem to be unless you're the CEO of who was it Proctor and Gamble? whoo was the one that that Indian dude made the whole fucking conspiracy theory about it went insanely viral. I bet your fishhead Asian wife doesn't have these cannons, do you remember that Goldm Goldman Sachs Goldman Sachs. Yasmin's mum works at Goldman. We should get the inside scoop. Uh Yeah, my get my guess bucker' m mom is like real, real high up at at Goldman Sachs. and then there was that huge, didid you see this thing kick off a couple of months ago? I don'to so No It just it was a guy metooing a very, very high up Um Right. Okay. exact. Yeah bit of a roll Goldman, but as soon as the Pposed accusations came out, there was no It was so rare. It was like the most it would have been incredibly extreme for a guy to do. Yeah The fact that everybody intuited Really? Yeah Sex differences. Yeah Sx differences. how do gay men and lesbians reveal what each sex wants? They do so in a very interesting way, which is that Gay men had more casual sex than straight men and lesbians have less casual sex than straight women And the reason is that gay men and lesbians don't have to compromise with the typical sexual inclinations of the other sex And they therefore their behaviour is like a clearer window on to the sexual motivations of men and women in general. Unsullied by the other sex. exactly. Yeah. So men are compromising by having less because basically women are thwarting their plans.. Wh There's no gatekeeper. Exactly. And yeah, whereas straight women are compromising with men maybe having more than more casual sex than they would choose, att least is revealed by yeah, lesbian behaviour There's an interesting study that Rob brought up, which was inside of marriages. Typically men say that they would like to have twice as much sex as they are having and women say that they are happy with the amount of sex that they are having, which suggests that there is a compromise going on. Yeah, but that the compromise is the guy going, okay, fine. she she's setitting level. She's setittting the than he done God. I do think that there's kind of a And this is I mean, look, are we really going to 's say boohoo poor men not getting exactly what they want. but I do think that it's a kindind of compromise that might be invisible to women because sexual entitlement comes wrapped in some really ugly U paper There is an argument that you can make there to say something like look Men are doing a type of containment, a type of desire containment there that isn't a burden that is that they are paying that isn't being paid in the same way inside of a marriage by the women. And hh, that's well done. well done for doing that. for compromising what it is that you want they and I guess, u And I guess it's more it's more, I guess that men are doing that more often Yeah some women are doing the same thing, no dout, but it's just fewer women than than men in that situation U, There's also more dead bedroom in lesbian relationships. I've heard that Yeah, what is the there's some phrase like that isn't there There's been dead bed or something. Yeahah, yeah Okay, so Make preferences. Yes. When it comes to make preferences Is it surprising how similar men and women are when it comes to what they look for in a partner? Well, I guess it fits with the generalization that in a lot of ways we are quite similar that we sex differences in our species are not as huge as in some others And I guess also just on a everyday level, when you hear about some of the sex differences, we have in common They're all things that I think it's Ov guious why we like them. People tend to be men and women tend to want somebody who's pretty intelligent and who's kind and who loves them and who is attracted to them and who is pretty good looking and who's not mentally unstable Both sexes want that, not just men, not just women.. There are some areas though where you do find sex differences in the strength of different preferences. So both sexes want someone who's pretty good looking for instance. but on average in long term relationships, that's a bigger deal for men than for women. Men put more weight on looks in a mate in a long term mate than women do for the reasons that Iioned that I mentioned earlier womomen on the other hand tend to put more weight on resources. and status and a long term mate than men do. Now In neither of those cases is that the It's not like looks are the most important thing most men. For most men, it's important, but other things equally important or even more important. traits like kindness. And likewise with women resources and status in a mate, they're important, but other things like again, like climness, tend to top a list of the things that are most important for women. Most people don't realize how much being dehydrated impacts their performance, which is why for the last five years, I've started pretty much every morning with Element. Element is a tasty electrolyte drink mix with everything that you need and nothing you don't. This orange salt in a cold glass of water is like a Seet, salty, orangey nectar and I really tell the difference when I take it versus when I don't. It plays a critical role in reducing muscle cramps and fatigue, helps to optimize brain health and regulate your appetite while also curbing cravings. Best of all, there have a no questions ask refent policy with an unlimited duration, so you can buy it and try it for as long as you want and if you don't like it for any reason, I'll just give you your money back Plus, they offer free shipping in the US. Right now, you can get a free sample pack of Element's most popular flavors with your first purchase B going to the link in the description below, I heading to drinklmNT d. com slash modern wisdom. That's drinklmNT d. com Slash. Autom mister What's the evolutionary logic of non physical mate preferences like wealth and status. It all comes down, I think to the fact. Well there are two main explanations for it. So one is that it's part of our evolution of a pair bonding biparental species. So a guy who is able to access resources, you know bringing food and also has good standing within the group, that's going to be someone who is better able to invest in the young. It's a co rare for children And that's explanation I think's most popular and most likely. There is also an explanation though that it's primarily a human equivalent of the peacock's ta So that any male that is capable of bringing in resources and climbing the status hierarchy, that's a male who's got good genes and he's going to pass on whatever traits enabled him to do that to his male offspring, they're going to be able to do the same. They're going to att trap more mates. So those are two main explanations I think it's quite possible that both of them shed light on it that it's both a fitness indicator but also is actually useful in the context of b parental care. you mentioned This is to do with long term relationships. How does this change when it comes to short term relationships? Do women place more or closer to equal weait on phhysical attractiveness in men? They do. They do, yeah. So that sex difference in good looks. We sometimes hear it discussed as if that's a difference between men and women right across the board in every context But actually does justapply to long term relationships. And when it comes to low commitment relationships then that difference basically evaporates And women are at least as interested in physical attractiveness in a mate. as men are, if not, you know, some research suggestsing maybe even more interested in physical attractiveness. Why would that be the case using evolutionary logic? Because well the best explanation is that in a short term context, that's likely to be basically There's going to be no further investment probably. likely no further investment. The only investment is the genes that the male is going to be passing on and therefore trits that are indicative of good genes Much more important They take center stage in terms of what women are looking for. And yeah, with the basic evolutionary logic that when you're reproducing, you are finding somebody to mix your genes with. If you want your jeans to go on in the je pull you got to mix them with good set of jeanses from another individual. And what you want if it' you have a short window to do this assessment in, you want the most obvious representation of those good genes as you can. Exactly. and physical looks are b. I'm sorry, your ability to do non kin altruism and reciprocal care and kindness and your ambition over time. It's like, you, great, but I don't have time. to assess that in the same way. Yeah as I do, your status and your resources, I suppose, it's another one of the reasons. And both men and women, if this sex difference didn't exist, if this preference didn't exist Why would it be the case that both men and women seem to play into a caricature of that in an attempt to get sexual access? Why is the caricature of dudes in Miami nightclubs wearing a Rolex and having a fast car outside. Yeah. Well, that's way to turn wealth ambition and status buying a VIP booth, status into an immediately transactable and obvious advertisement In case there is some of this short term mating that's going, and why is it that women do more beautification when they go on a night out, etcetera, et ccetera. Like becausecause you're playing into, even if you don't intend on doing it, it's always nice to sort of be window shopped against, I suppose. Totally. And it's interesting because these are human equivalents of the peacock's tail. And whereas in peacocks and every other species Basically, they their peacocks tails are non negotiable. That's just how they do it Whereas we, because we're a cultural animal, we always have our peacock' tails, we always have our way of showing off status and whatever else resources But it varies from culture and culture and time to time. Why isn't it that women aren't turning up in a fast car with an expensive watch outside That's a very interesting question and I guess that I guess because that's more indicative of resources and resources are more important to women than men Um, I don't know, there was this, um the study where this guy It wasn't a study actually. This guy in his class was evolutionary psychology class, he was showing a photo of this amazing roolex and people saying how great it was and what a great way of attracting a mate that it would be. And then he revealed the trick was that actually it was a woman's roolex rather than a man's. And and his point was that actually this goes in both directions more than we kind of think it does Have you seen, I think it's Andrew Thomas that did this study Have you seen the prereferences women state when it comes to sperm donors So this is fucking fascinating. becausecause what's interesting is when you run a kind of a split test or you're able to separate out certain motivations from a behavior that people are typical with. So In order for you to do the I want to have kids with this person, typically you need to go through courtship phase and get to know them even if it's a one night stand be seduced by them. But that means that you're optimizing for two different things. You're not just optimizing for the genes that your kid gets, you're also optimizing for the expression of traits that make you want to get into bed with somebody. But if you get rid of the seduction side of this, all you're optimizing for is what do I want my kids to have from a trait perspective Yeah. And that difference of when you get rid of the need to actually be attracted to somebody, you can just optimize for what do I want my kids to be like Itsind of fascinating. It's really fascinating, right? And just the same mate preferences emerge in that context as emerge in an actual interactions, social interactions. This that Clark Hatfields study as well, right? The on street interview Yeah, yeah, that's the one where u basically they got a bunch of Good looking guys, good looking gals to go around a campus on a nice day, walk up to random people on the campus and just say, hello, how you doing? I've noticed you around the place lately and I find you very attractive. and I was just wondering whether you wanted toot dot dot. And then they would finish that sentence with one of three options Uption number one was I was wondering if you wanted to go out with me tonight Option number two was I was wondering if you wanted to come up to my room. And option number three was I wondering wonder if you want to go to bed with me And I got men to us women, women to us men. And the for the first question the go out with me question And the first study they did there was basically no sex difference. So it was about fifty percent, fifty fifty likelihood of saying yes in both cases. Other replication studies have found that It's not a huge difference, but that actually men are more likely to say yes than women are. And then with the other two questions, the gaps get bigger and bigger withith question number two. is would you want to come up to my room What was it? It was basically sixty in the first study about sixty seven percent. A man said, yes So actually bit higher than the date Rate. more likely to go up to your room than I am to go on a date with you. Exactly Hilarious. With womomen on the other hand It sank down to I believe it was six percent. said yes to that And then the gap was even bigger for the last question, unsurprisingly. So would you go to bed with me? seventy five percent of men said yes. to that offer. So at even higher rate of men Whereas exactly zero percent of women said yes to the kind offer. And not only that, but actually the manner of the refusal differed between men and women So are the twenty five percent of men who said Thanks, but no thanks Well they kind of said that they were polite about it. and some of them said, Ohry I'm meeting my fiancee or whatever. B bunch of them even asked for a rain check, apparently. And they said, I cant I'm very busy I'm meeting my fance or whatever, but maybe we could postpone the sex tour later. Whereas none of the women who were refusing were polite about it at all. They were rected more like, A you crazy? How dare you ask me that? None of them apologized and asked for a raange check Why do you think? that the manner of refusal was so different U I think that It reveals two reasons. So one is there's this average difference in interest in casual sex. and because men are more interested in it, they are more likely to be flattered by the request. becausecause men are much more likely to approach women than vice versa traditionally Women are much more likely to get sick of it and to have their you know, u push guys away Whereas guys are much it's a rarer event for them so they are more likely to be flattered and and hugely grateful on the rare occasions when it happens. The other thing though And the reason I think the difference is quite so big is because it's not just a reflection of sex differences and interest in casual sex I think also in that situation Like like if a woman were to go off with a guy that she doesn't know She's at a great a physical risk than if a guy goes off with a woman that he doesn't know So the fact that the difference was massive is partly due to that as well feels like a danger Exactly. Some of that emotional activation of hang on, I'm gonna go with this person who I don't know who is ly stronger than me. ye. Explosion Exactly As opposed to this just way less of a it feels less of a physical threat to me is actually thoseose make those boths make complete sense. There's no an interesting wrinkle in this. Now I'm going to guess that when they did this the Clark Hatfield study, they must have done some sort of rated assessment of the attractiveness of the manen or the men versus the women to ensure that they were similarly high in terms of physical attractiveness. Yeah, rightight Yeah It's something that I learned that I think is Abssolutely fucking hilarious is one of the reasons why women, and I presume men would be too if women approached men at the same rate One of the reasons why women are sometimes quite rude when guys come up to them is if they feel like there's too big of a disparity and make value between them and the person doing it because they go You think You gotta' gota chase with me Yeah Oh my God, it's basically an insult. Yeah. It's essentially an insult if you as a woman think that you're annate, noobbody thinks like this. It's not the whatever podcast You as a woman think that you're innate And a guy that you think is a three comes up to you That is Yeah. it tests your own self perception and you go, fuck, maybe this is how the world sees me. Yeah. Do you not forarminate? Yeah as well. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. and I think that that It feels like an insult. and the same thing, like could know, get away because rightly so, you're kind of pissed that this thing happened. I what if guys would feel the same in reverse. See my hunch is that they would be less likely to take it as a huge insult. If the guy felt he was innate and approached by three. But like a preference for casual sex. Yeah Rarr in any case. Indeed And because women are less likely to approach. Yeah. I think that most guys would actually see it as closer to, you know what I'm so good looking I got that goal to overcome non approach predisposition. Yeah. that the power of my attractiveness. I think that's I think that's how a lot of guys would take and I think that's why it is it is flattering. It's like someomebody running for a bus fast that they really, really want Yeah. You know like you must really want this bus because look at how fast they're going. Yeah, how slow they would you. guys tend to be more overcfident. than women What about sex differences in aggression Sex differences in aggression are very, very consistent, especially for direct aggression, so face to face aggression and guys predominate And a really interesting fact about the aggression sex difference is that it's for like verbal aggression It's there and it's significant, it's fairly modest though. So the effect size might be about like azero point five effect size. so half a standard deviation between the mean for men and women and maybe, you know, pluck two people at random Uh Gian a gal Two thirds of the time, the guy's going to be higher in verbalgression As you go further out to more and more intense forms of aggression, the size of the seest difference gets bigger and bigger with every step So when you go to low levels of physical aggression, slapping, pushing, that kind of thing that you have a larger sex difference, men doing it more Then you get into serious physical aggression, violent crime That's much more m Independent of who the victim is. Independent of who the victim is. Yeah. And then when you get to the extreme of one on one Agression, which is homicide. U Men vastly predominate. So across different cultures, every single nation, every dataset I've ever seen, ninety plus percent of homicides are perpetrated by men. Men are also they're the majority of the victims as well in almost all datasets that I've seen. U But but yeah the ninety percent plus perpetrators very, very strong effect Yeah. men commit more than ninety percent of homicides in every society on Eth where data is available and this gap is remarkably invariant across cultures, not just the absolute rates. In humans, males commit ninety five percent of homicides under seventy to eighty percent of homicide victims. In chimpanzees, male commit ninety two percent of chimpicides and are seventy three percent of victims virtually identical numbers to humans. Wow that they are more aggressive than us. I think sometimes people hear that and they think that the claim is that we're just as aggressive as Chimp they are more. But the size of the sex difference in lethal aggression is the same. And the s the tars the sex difference in the targets of aggression is about the same as well. Why That is a direct offshoot of the fact that is the selection for Getting to be one of the few males that has many offspring rather than the many that have had few or none And one of the ways that males do that is they compete with each other for status and resources which increased their ming opportunities And so you get selection in many species, not just humans, selection for greater aggression in the males and particularly for greater male male aggression, which is why you have the SKU toward Not only are other males more aggressive, but the targets of their aggression tend to be same sex individuals as well For women and for female animals in general, they are capable of aggression in many species But there's just less of a selection pressure. it's less useful for them evolutionarily to engage in same sex. Combat For status in resources The fact that the ceiling offspring number that they have is lower So they can't vastly increase the number of usen they have by fighting each other and getting lots of status, resources and ultimately mates You know, that won' boost the number of off room they have because the ceiling is lower So it's costly afford them. The costs aren't worth The risks. ye Plus I'm more fragile. ye more eas more easily killed just generally. Yeah, But that's possibly just an offshoot of the fact that there's been less selection on them for aggression.ight. So there's been more more agress. don't build up the defenses in order to be able exactly. That's why we have a brow ridge. That's why we bigger hands. Exactly. Yeah. T what's interesting, again, talking to Andrew Thomas about this. He said, Why is it the case if Violence is rightly so such a huge fear that most women have. that lots of women are attracted to powerful men who are able to be violent and Andrew's theory is that It's a perspective guy who is violent is able to turn it on and turn it off in service of the family unit as opposed to violence being a trait that just is more global across the board. think Is Andrew Don Krav Magar? He's into like martial arts type stuff. I so ye ye. And he was explaining how many A Krab Magar, this Israeli martial art, very lethal, supposedly martial art A lot of the guys that you trained with unbelievably lethal physically Yeah A lot of the training was them learning to turn it off, not turn it on. Interesting And that that number of men who are physically imposing and might seem like somebody that would be really great to be able to protect the family unit that have done the work to be able to learn to turn that off to trigger that makes this person likely to be a flash in the pan, You don't want to fuck with me, bro, guy. at least non zeroly are also going to have some triggers that will be more sensitive when it comes to into personersal communication. and domestic disputes. Yeah, and things around the house. Indeed, it's interesting, isn't it? Hving a That kind of temperament, violent temperament and the capacity for physical aggression is it's really a mixed blessing for women. you know, It's great if the guy's going to protect them ot take the family But it's not so great because he can potentially turn that against them as well.. So you know you get the evaluation of those traits. can increase attract. Like aggression itself, I don't think increases attractiveness. Protectiedveness does Muscularity and the like can increase attraction somewat, but because it's a mixed blessing, I think women are also interested in the guy's character. Muscularity seems pretty reliable at improving attractiveness. Yeah. Yeah and it's the probably the most easily modifiable thing that guys can do. Right. Yeah yeah. I In fact, I think Williams said that this is exactly the case because he's looking at his in cell stuff. Yeah.id see Brosigns this. I put the I put the the captain of Brosigns hat on when Macen came through last time Yeah. and I said, I'm pretty sure that I've seen a study that says a woman would be would lose more attraction if her partner didn't protect her during a physical altercation than if he cheated on her And then the guys went and replicated it and And you were right. I was right. I was right. I mean, it wasn't my original insight because I found it in a study that I couldn't discover again. But the same insight being true, the protectiveness, the ability to protect. In fact, you know what it is, it was the willingness to protect. Yes. wasasn't even the ability to protect. Yes. But I suppose willingness to protect is the most important part of protectiveness. becauseuse you can be the biggest guy in the world, but if you're not prepared to step in between your misses and this potential assailant, Yeah, it doesn't mean you might as well not be. Exactly. you know Yeah exactly. I wo you know what it is? I wonder if this would be this is another new skew that the guys should do. Yeah Is it more or less attractive for a guy who could protect you to not than a guy who couldn't protect you to not. That's an interesting one You the separate here. But in terms of the character trait, it would be less attractive for the guy who could protect you, but doesn't, right? That shows a worse character Um But I guess it does also m him I just they're not going to anyone be able to with is that there is that Yeah. but not I need to teach him to be able to be strong enough to be protective or I need to be able to change his character in order for him to use his strength of potential protectiveness. Yeah. Yeah, but if he's definitely not going to do that, that's going to be very off putting. and you might just want the person who is not quite so good at protecting, but is willing to do it If they if they can about. It's trade offffs though right? Why Wh why is it that women care more about a man's height than women do. Is it plain to this? I think it probably is. I think it must be. I think it's the within a cluster of traits that determine protectiveness and the like. muscularity, height, they're all part of the same package. And it's interesting why they those seem to really, really high on the list for women. seem see very important. You know why this makes the most sense and it's probablyroably Yeah Yeah, I would go as far as to say it's the most commonly cited well, you bitches internet kind of rebuttal that guys have around I think Tinder released as an April Fools joke about ten years ago, a height filter that people could use. wouldouldn't it funny if we gave you a height filter? Yeah That's an actual feature. It's an actual feature, right? Yeah. And M women Don't need to date don't want to date men that are under six feet U especially not men when you get sort of like five, seven, five, six, five five, very few would. and I had this insight, the tall girl problem. and it was born out of a friend whose sister is five foot two sorry, As sister is five foot eleven. So if she wants to wear heels on her wedding day, she's looking professional athletes. And they were going around the supermarket And she saw this guy who was like six, five, like tall dude, like you, tall guy. And she sort of nudges her sister and says I might up I might up and talk to him and They round the corner and they say see him with this five foot two Latina bombshell. and she kicks off at her sister quietly and says, like this fucking bitch. Like she could date five foot, five, five foot, six, five foot seven. Why don't you have to take a guy that's a foot and a half? But the point here is If we're talking about protectiveness as the driver The fact that your chick is a five, two Latina Not a five eleven American does not make your height any more or less useful when it comes to protectiveness. I don't need to protect you less just because you're smaller. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And Dade, you know And this is why I think you don't see much of a compensation effect Yeah other than I guess if you're five foot two, you can't really tell the above probably five ten it's all just up there Yeah It's just like it' there you know in the clouds, exactly. Yeah, myousins my cousins are quite tall because I'm from a tall family. and I know they were complaining often and I remember them complaining female cousins about guys, taller guys, dating much shorter women. But guess guess how tall my wife is. She's five foot four So These bloody bitches, how dare they take the toll man? All right, sex differences in stalking. What about that? Our womomen do a lot more of it Men do a lot more of it Men do a lot more of it. I think it's just an example of the fact that men are more, you know, proactive seeking out mates, seeking out multiple mates and stalking as the subcategory of that when it gets into extremely inappropriate examples of them. And also I guess yeah, it's also it's not just mate seeking, it's also with people get fixated on somebody And both sexes can do that. they can get fixated on somebody's sort of limerance type thing. Yeah, exactly, limerance. Yeah. So sort of falling in love except we call it limerance because it's an inappropriate circumstance, IA circumstance where the other person does not reciprocate Byses can't do it But Men are more prone to aggression and risk taking and just bad behaviour. And so they're more likely to do more of those kind of behavis in the context of oblimerance and being fixated What about surveillance, surveilling of a partner checking in because I could see two reasons why either side might be doing it more. Male parental uncertainty, which we haven't talked about yet, but is super important that no woman has ever given birth to a child and wondered whether it was hers many men have looked at, maybe even all men to some degree. In fact, it would be evolutionary useful for you the first time that you look at your kids to be so beautiful Th Th those my eyes? Yeah. Yeah, I think they're my eyes But given the fact that you have high male parental uncertainty because you've got concealed ovulation and you don't have the same kind of sort of harm hermetically sealed sphere when it comes to men and women, humanen and women Um talking I could see your surveing surveillance behavior. mate gu could be a part of mate guarding. Totally. try and counteract that. but I could also see how it would be useful for women in order to ensure that their partner doesn't leave them high and dry because there's more of a dependency, especially if we are going to have a kid or do have a kid The man doesn't need the woman as much for survival But the woman doesn't need to check on the man as much to ensure female parental uncertainty. Yeah. That's exactly right. And both sexes to get jealous Paternity uncertainty or you know, parental uncertainty is uniquely an issue for guys But you're absolutely right that there is the danger of desertion for women. And so for different reasons, both sexes have evolved to be jealous and prone to jealousy. And one way that that manifests. So jealousy drives mate guuardian behavior and one subset of mate guuardian behavior is surveilling and' keeping an eye on what the person is up to and are they getting on too well W that good looking next door neighbor or the good looking guy or woman at work Um, And then if you take that to an extreme, that's where it becomes surveilling behaviour. Isn't it interesting that you have a extreme insight of men about other men and an extreme insight of women about other women. But the failure of cross sex mind reading still occurs even when you add other individuals in. Yeah. So when we're talking about surveillance, jealousy, mate guarding, etceter though I mean William put these stats up recently about how what the percentag is of men who would sleep with a female friend. It's huge. Yeah. It's like fifty percent of relationships used to be friendships. Yeah ye. ye. That's like fifty percent Yeah This's a huge amount and I think u when you put all of this together, you end up with a world where Inside of a relationship Men are trying to explain to women what they see in other men that are around them and women are trying to explain to men what they see in the other women that are around them. Just because it's not them talking about themselves doesn't mean that they can explain it. A woman is no better at understanding another man than her own husband and a man is no better at understanding another woman than his own wife in these sort of more subtle, hard to detect motivations The hing U thoseose data that that William was talking about so yeah, so like a lot of guys would be interesterested in sleeping with friends that they have, right? But it's not true in the other direction. like fewer Some women but fewer of them are particularly interested in sleeping with male friends that they have. Because of the sexual over perception bias, the male friends in question would probably assume otherwise What's the sex difference around sexual violence Sexual violence are men are much more likely to do it and that is partly just an offshoot of the fact that men are more agress more aggressive Um, yeah, and The numbers are pretty big so sexual violence is much more often perpetrated by men than by women. It's not It doesn't only go in the one direction though, but it is just much more common for men to do it. You you any idea what numbers are I probably do. let me have a think. Okay so I do have a few numbers coming to mind, but I'm not actually sure they're the right numbers. so I'm going to again do the annoying academic thing. Directionally interct specifically, they Indeed So directionally correct, and you know, I've got to say that it is a big difference. Um I think the thick size might be something like Hm So like two standard deviations between the mean for men and women for the extreme forms of sexual violence, the sexual assault and harassment and the like. Yeah. Yeah Yeah another situation where it's kind of hard to talk about evolutionary explanations for bad behavior, like the worst behavior, right between this and homicide without sounding like orre excusing it is natural. But Exactly, but again, natural doesn't mean good. Yeah. Oft we can explain bad stuff without saying that actually the bad stuff is not good stuff. It's still bad even if it has an evolutionary explanation It's that u Analysis is not justification. Yeah, yeah, exactly. You know That's a fucking Hasan Albi quote. That's like a Hassan Piker quote. Is Yeah he got cancellled for talking about some stuff to do with the right wing. that is an absolute slam of a line. analysis. It is justification. Yeah. But we can see sexual violence if men are able to procreate without having to do any investment ultimate form of that is to not even have to ask for consent as well Yeah, yeah, indeed. And you know, it has been argued that tendency in some men to do that to take that path. does have evolutionary roots U I guess really you just had to have two things. you had to have Men's greater interest in sexual variety and casual sex U coupled with their willingness to use violence in certain you know, certain situations So because men are more interest in casual sex it's going to be not uncommon for a man to want to have sex with a woman who doesn't want to do so And because men are willing to use violence sometimes to get what they want Every now and then you are going to have that situation where those factors add up and the man is going to try to force the woman to have sex. It's not just found in our species males and many species try to coerce women, females rather into sex. It happens in our species It's also been argued though that because preserving female choice is so important across the animal kingdom, including in our own species. So's important to women that helps explain why Sxual coercion and rape is so upsetting to women You know, it's not haven't this been socialized for it to be upset to women. It's very, very deep in female's nature to be upset by it because it compromises female choice Oh, that's interesting. Yeah That's int because not only not only is it Fucking heas You know us somebody because this male committed that behavior. They've had to disregard the entire female wide value that is supposed to be universally God Well right, well, I mean, she's evolved this tendency to be choosier about inates than men have she's got these mate choice criteria and because she can have fewer offspring and therefore each offspring counts for more. so she's got to be Why is it in every making decision that she makes? And this other mlees come along and has just taken that away from her taking that choice away from her. Uh, has gone against that she's evolved to be to be choosier and I think they' gone against that. Yeah I think that the inability of men to fully understand what fear of sexual violence must feel like? Yeah. is one of the reasons why any guy who's seemingly sort of flipping or callous any type of male, female aggression, even non sexual violence. Yeah, yeah is treated with U veryer strong antibody response from women. Indeed, here. And guys do You know, guys, the idea of going to prison and being raped in prison obviously is terrifying to a lot of guys. so they do get it to some degree But u And I guess particularly when it comes to the sort of lower level stuff, like I think in Buss's Badman book, he talks about research suggesting that men often will underestimate just how upsetting it is to women to be sexually harassed and to have stuff done to them against their will. And that's another very good example of and a very important example of a failure across seatx mind reading. where the guide just doesn't really appreciate just quite how upsetting it is for that to happen because if it would have happened in reverse, if it would have happened to him, he might not like it, but he on average is not going to be quite so upset by him It's interesting that people who deny sex differences seem to sort of not want to argue for parity if women weren't so held back, they'd want to commit just as much violent crime as men do And Did Yeahah and Dade' a directionality Yeah to the way that this analysis happens Yeah.. Why is it not that we've got fifty fifty in terms of homicides that we should do. Yeah should be free to commit just as many killings as they want to. Yeah. And they've just been kept down the fact that they're not doing it Yeah. the patriarchy, the damn patriarchy. And I guess the thing is that they and we all would want to all come down. And it's a good example of how equality is not necessarily a good thing in itself So men are more aggressive than women. the solution to that is so we want to kind of reduce male violence And in the process of doing that, we're going to reduce the size of the sex difference. And that's a very good thing to do. But The reason it's a good thing to do is not because there's anything inherently wrong with a sex difference. it's because violence is bad. It's not because the sex difference is bad, it's because the violence is bad. And we know that because another way to get rid of that sex difference in violence would be to increase the female level of violence. and that could B big thumbs down on there, right? That' going to make the world a worse place rather than a better place . The point is ye, equality is not a good thing in itself. Yeah. yeah yeah. OkayK, what about the differences in parenting D differences in parenting, this is quite controversial one, actually. That's one of the ones that people like least, the agression sense difference, no worries about the parenting sx difference, people aren't so keen on And then it refers to the fat that it. In every culture, again where we have good data, women do more of the direct parenting than men do and they invest more in the young They do more parental care. Men in every culture do more than Your average male chimpanzeee or male walrus, but they do less than women in every single culture And it doesn't seem to just be because men are forcing women to do it. There do seem to be average differences in terms of parental inclinations with women being more interested in doing it than men are on average And Yeah, I guess the reason that it's controversial is that there's a concern that people are saying making up an excuse, why you should do it. So like guys are using it as an excuse. it's just natural that you should want to be changing the nappies and doing these things that coincidentally I would rather not have to do U So that I think is the concern. But in a way it's ironic. The fact that people consider it It would be kind of an insult to say that on average, women are more interested in parenting than men Um implies a negative evaluation parenting or do more of the parenting because if it didn't imply a negative evaluation of that, it would not be an insult to say that women on average has been one of my most One of the best ideas that I think I've come up with over the last couple of years, which was the soft signal of male expectations. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think you mentioned that when we met the first time, right?? Yeahft the soft big try of male expectations. Soft It's like as if we treat the male standard, whatever men do, that's the standard of what is right. And if women do it less that's a bad thing make them more like males, but not much not so much the reverse U And it is very ironic because it' really misogynistic worldview. It is really, isn't it? It is it is. And so we're taking negative evaluation of U are parenting? which is what we are implicitly doing if we say that it's an insult to say women are more parental. We're implicitly if it is actually true that women on average are more parental by nature. They were taking a negative evaluation of a more female typical trait and that is really sexist. Yeah. What's the Kibut' experiment The Kabots experiment so there are u There were this kibot teem that they had in Israel. So these were these communes like Hly egitarian communes where they wanted to get rid of all traditional kind of structures, including traditional male, female ways where the woman is expected to do all of the childcare and the guy' out out in the public doing the public stuff. she's at home doing the private stuff. So what they did was they would u they would get all the kids. And they would house them in communal houses And then they would have dedicated adults within the group who would be theary primarily in charge of looking after all the kids So the kids weren't living under the roof of their biological parents. They didn't think, you know the idea was everyone should care for everyone. rather than having this traditional what they they saw as bourgeois. Uh approach where people are specifically interested in their own biological children. They want to get rid of them. try They did manage to make it work for a while But what happened was that The parents hated it, basically. The the parents hated not having their own kids living with them under their roof And they agitated and complained about it and eventually it broke down. And the interesting thing was that although both parents hated it, Most of the mothers particularly hated him, and a lot of the agitation came from the mothers more than the fathers And it's a great example, a great case study Because we often hear that that women are placed in the primary caregiver role by men. they may have kind of forced them into that role. But here was a case where actually The women in particular were rebelling against the male leaders to try to put themselves into that role instead. So it's another example of a very common phenomenon where you see certain behaviourors and certain aspects of human nature that emerge and persist Despite culture, rather than because of culture. culture is pushing the. going against Eactly Yeahactly ye. I saw this really heartbreaking video of a woman on TikTok. She was at work in a cubicle look like a sort of normal office cubicle and she had a screen up of maybe the Take care. that her kid went to and she was seeing watching her kid say its first words or take its first steps And it was just one of those ones with the caption over it that said me being devastated that I'm at workor This kid is going through one of the most meaningful experiences at the start of its life and I'm missing it. It's tough, right? There's a real that's them the workor family, u clashing roles that that both sexes do experience, but it does seem to be still a bigger deal to women than men. Yeah. it's certainly not something that People are happy to talk about maternity leave and the lack of maternity leave's being kind of barbaric and I agree. I think I mean, the UK gives nine months, which is still not enough, but feels at least remotely humane. Yeah. the U.S. is basically once you're out of the B when you get back to work. Yeah. But very few people I think It's not a big cultural conversation around what is missed by either the need to go back to work to keep yourself financially stable or the desire to go back to work because of expectations that of been adjusted on women about where their value comes from. this soft bigotry thing again. I don't want to be just a mum Yeah, but by being notot just a mum. I'm also missing out on a lot of the joys of motherhood. Yeah. It's it's a kind of It's kind of hard to win that situation. maybe to win a good good outcome there. Yeah. And people in general, I mean in a way, you know, there there are these kind of tradeffs for everybody always and Choosing one option always does mean not choosing another one. I know that a lot of people solve that problem to some degree to the extent that it is solvable. A lot of women do by taking some time off, you know more time off, taking a career break in other words when the kids are young. But in particularly when they go to school, then you know, getting back on the career to reare horse What about differences between men and women in sexual jealousy Um That's an interesting one. so both are prone to it like I mentioned. But for the reasons that you mentioned already, men Men's jealous is more focused than women's on sex So a sexual infidelity, like if you ask men, which would upset you more? Your partner who you love going off and sleeping with somebody else or just forming a close emotional bond with somebody else. Now both of those are upsetting to most men, but men are more likely to say that The sex is more upsetting than just the bondnder. and ose the same question to women And again, both of them are upset to the vast majority of women, but they're more likely to say that their emotional bond They're sort of fall in love, maybe falling in love with the other person, that that's more upsetting than Just six per se interesting one And it comes out of the fact that man had this problem of paternity Uncertainty likeike you say, no man in the history of the species has ever No woman around in the history of the species ever given birth and thought how do I know that this is my kid and not some other woman's kid whereereas you know for most men, more than likeucky it is their own kid But there is always some non zero chance that actually it's not, that it's the good looking nest or neighbor's kid instead. So yeah, that's why Sex is more important issue for men than women Women are more likely to be left holding the baby And that is not good for their fitness because it's going to reduce the time before they can have another kid and just make things a lot more difficult for them. so the stice not great If their partner sort of sleeps with somebody else, it's not great. They'd be very, very upset about it. very often destroys the relationship. But it's even worse For most women, if the partner gets emotionally involved with somebody else because then whether they want the relationship to end or not, it's going to end because they're going to be very likely going to leave and set up shop with the other woman have an example that I heard about from a while ago that A friend was on twenty three me or ancestry. com and one day in the thirties got an email notification saying you've got a new half sister This is the fuck I got a new half sister, what it turns out was that thirty two years ago The dad had had a one night stand affair The kid had never met the father, never been involved again. But three decades later This situation unfolds and Obviously Awful awful to try and live through I would have been fascinated to have done a study to work out What happens to What happens to sexual jealousy and intimacy jealousy and the fear of resource provisioning needing to be split Yeah when you've gone past all of those things because you have this you know, three decade assuming that there's not been more infidelity, this three decade example of someone committing to the family and raising the kids and doing the rest of the stuff. and also The person that would have been the dependent is no longer in need any of the provisioning. You understand what I'm getting to like separate out all of the typical areas. trust, infidelity, all of those things obviously Horrible Kind of fascinating, too It is really fascinating. and I wonder if this could be an example where Proximate and ultimate U cons just like thinking about the prox of an ultimate might solve the mystery because it's possible that because we don't necessarily think about We don't necessarily think it through. We're not necessarily thinking well, I'm going to lose this partner He's going to fall in love with there and he's going to go away. And then I've got this baby and I'm going to have no one to help me with it That's the evolutionary rationale, but it could just be a gut reaction. like he's getting close to somebody else. I hate that. I feel jealous. I feel bad about it. And so that could kick him just as strongly thirty years down the line when it doesn't matter anyway you know, like you say, trust issues and those kind of things is going to kick him C kicking just as strong Even though evolutionarily the circumstances it doesn't matter anymore gut reaction that evolved might be might not discriminate those details What do we know about sex differences in personality Well, there are some and they're pretty consistent. They're not huge. Two of them are bigger than the rest. Now if you're thinking about the big five personality traits So the ocean acronym. So openness to experience, neuroticism, extraversion, agreeableness and C country and just doest I got that in the wrong order. that wasn't ocean, but those were the those are the five. So, um Two sex differences that are largest and most consistent. the sex difference in neuroticism, which is proneess to negative emotions like depression and anxiety, plus emotional volatility, to ups and downs And that is about a medium ofect size. so I guess it's usually estimated between about ero point two andzero point five standard deviation between between men and women. There's that one and then the other consistent one is the sex difference in agreeableness. Uh and Women on average score higher. againgain, it's not a massive difference, heaps of overlap, but again, it's zero two tozero five. I would say it' it's a medium small to medium size difference as well There are some sex differences in the other three big fly traits U often Not always. You sometimes find that women score a bit higher conscientiousness but not always. someome studies don't find that. Extraversion, on average, women slightly higher on extraversion but again, not always. and it's a smaller difference if it is one Uh and then u W consonscientous open openness. Yeah, openness slightly higher for women as well or no difference. What's the explanation for why those would be the case? Well, I don't think we know for sure, but my best guess so neuroticism, sex difference. so that's proness to things like anxiety and depression. And I think women There's a general trend where women seem to be more self protective than men. which is kind of the flip side of the fact that men Take wrer risks. that women They're more risk ty. I think that that evolved because that is about trying to propel yourself the status hierarchy, you've got to take risks in order to do so And men havevol to do that more than women because they have a higher maximum offspring number But yeah the flip side of risk taking is to be more self protective. Part of that is to be more prone to anxiety. Anxiety. The function of anxiety is to it's the same as the function of the turtle shell. It's to protect yourself. So I think that's why Women are more neurotic. Now the agreeleness sex difference. so women on average are more agreeable quuite as strong an idea about that. I do think that well, I guess I guess it could be the flip side of the fact that men are sort of more aggressive more pushy and that evolved like we've discussed to try to Again, get up the status high racking beat rival males to go up in the world and achieve status and resources womomen have evoled to do less of that And one manifestation of that is the fact that they're more agreeable, more friendly, more compassionate Um, And just the way that women have evolved to form social bonds, it does tend to have a high level of compassion. understanding the other person that seems to be more common in women than men. What about the people versus things divide? So that's an interesting one, right? That is Bigger difference That's actually quite a big difference. It's one of the bigger psychological sex differences And the effects size there is like one standard deviation or even a bit more when it comes to people versus things Very very consistent. I think there's a good case that it is not just due to socialization. so one thing is that like I mentioned earlier, it has persisted for as long as we've been measuring it, veryery, very consistent. even when the cult is triing to push against c it and get women more interested in things related professions, traditionally male professions Ses to be related, as we also mentioned, seems to be related to prenatal hormonal exposure And one thing I haven't mentioned already is that it's also very, very cross culturally consistent So there was one study that had about two hundred thousand people in it and found that sex difference in career related interests founded in fifty three out of fifty three nations And another one had half a million people and found that in eight out of eighteen nations Wow And that level it's amazing, right That level of cross cultural uniformity, you just hardly ever find it in the social sciences, but you do find it for that difference. And this has been around for a hundred years It was first documented in nineteen eleven. Yeah, yeah, that's right. Yeah. That's when they first first documented it and it has been consistent ever since One of the biggest differences, and I was find that Pretty interesting, really, because kind of the careers that we have today are evolutionarily novel So you might not necessarily expect that to be one of the biggest sex differences. You know, interest in careers that just haven't existed throughout the vast majority of evolutionary history for our species. Yeah ye ye. But it's there and very consistent. And there's been some deliberate effects attempts to try and close it as well. Indeed, and they're ongoing and it just doesn't seem to It doesn't seem to budge, really Yeah. Interesting how the soft bigotry of male expectations happens with get more women into STEM as well.. Yeah, indeed, as opposed to get more men and traditional female dominant exactly, exxactly. But you know, Richard Reeves who's been on the show right now and that he he's trying to get more mage into those kind of professions. He's trying to do it. But again I think the reason that there is a publicly lauded push toward getting more women into STEM is because of that soft bigotry and If you look I'm going to guess that if you look at the gender equality paradox, you're going to find that in more gender equal nations, fewer women end up going into thingsings based roles and more men go into things based roles. That is exactly right. Yeah. And just the interest in it gets bigger in those cultures as well. Regardless of what you do, that's an interesting one to have to separate out what jobs are available to you and can you get and what ones are you interested in? Yeah. exxactly. And both expand And it's it is interesting. Now I think that you're right that it does reflect the soft bigotry of male expectations. I think I think people who want to close those gaps also will typically point out that those kinds of professions pay more as well And that's another reason to try to close the gap. But that doesn't change the interest. It doesn't change the interest. I mean some people are interested in things because I went to university and did business Yeah because I thought I could get a job in it. Yeah. So I became interested, but it was a very transactional type of interest. Interesting So yeah, I How many people develop an interest in a thing because it's functionally useful them to acquire resources in it, you know is it not depend. I would say that in a pretty wealthy society that more men than women do that Now in poorer societies, I think it's more common for everybody to do that You know, some poore societies you just think, well I would love to do whatever it is. Imressionistic dancing or whatever. But you get in high inequality and high poverty environments, you get some really interesting outcomes. Youave youve seen Candace Blake's work on the female beautification? I have, yeah.ind rememind me of the details. they analyzed, was either Instagram posts or tweets and correlated them with the level of income inequality in the local ecology. And in areas with higher income inequality, women did more self sexualization and more gratification. And supposedly the proposed mechanism for that is when you see not only how high you could climb, but how low you could fall, you try to maximize your ability to be assisted in being dragged out of that from a resource provision perspective. It's cool research there Yeah. It's really cool But basically it's just when material restestrictions are in place. stuff gets pt and squirly And because people are concerned about survival. mean you've seen the ennvironmental security hypothesis as well about men are more attracted to bigger women in times ofes poorer economy and more attracted to skinnier women in times of ad in times of good economy and good yeah. It's an interesting why. And there does seem to be pretty good data on that. I am not one hundred percent persuaded of the evolutionary arguments for it, Dome You can survive a famine, there's a famine in. you couldn'tvive a famine, but it doesn't matter because we got loads of food. Indeed. And I mean it does make sense. the logic there does make sense, but I mean, is it the case that for long enough fraction of human evolutionary history Uh We had face and famemine F and families, I'm sure we did have that, but were the faced pareiods bigig enough that people were actually getting biger. I mean my impression is that hunter gatherers they just didn't really get bigig enough that there would It would have been very, very, very rare. It would have been almost impossible fore what, thirteen thousand years ago. Yeah. It would have been almost exactly impossible definitionally because you could only eat what you could carry. Exactly. There was no surplus. all. That's interesting. So I sort of today we can fucking grow We can talk about that. Yeah because he's a heeser fan of that, right? Yeah, he is. Well he likes the sort of behavioral ecology approach to things. He likes humans as plants as well as humans as as animals. so we grow toward the sun and how is the local ecology imposing and warping, But definitely the seelf sexualization in high income inequality makes makes sense. Yeah And I do agree with the general principle that we've evolved to respond to the ecology I'm just not sure in that case it could have evolved because of there weren't know, fter people around the place for long enough. What about cognitive abilities? Is conitive abilities That's If anything is I would say it's probably the most controversial topic that I deal with in the book Mury it two hours into the episode. Yeah Um So there are some, I guess a few things to say to avoid, try to avoid getting canceled is first of all that there are no sex differences in the cognitive ability that matters most to most people, which is IQ or general cognitive ability. There is basically zero sex difference in the average there. Now people when you say that, some people will say, But that's because IQ tests have deliberately been constructed to create. equal averages And that is true. Some of them have, some of them have, but there are somes like you offffset the sex difference Well, that's the theory. so some of them have been deliberately created that way, but some haven't. But even those ones that haven't been created specifically to give the same outcome and balancing spatial versus verbal and that kind of thing Um, even when they haven't they they give basasically the same averages with representative samples of people. Now sometimes you get some studies that will have males doing slightly better on average, but I'm persuaded by the argument that that is because The very low IQ males are more likely to fall off the map, fall through the cracks and kind of disappear and not end up in the samples. low IQ women bringing down the female average. Because we do have a higher variance. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. In cognitiveabilities there's higher variance. Yeah. Average is the same. The variance is slightly greater in men and women. more male geniuses and more male retot. That is exactly right, but important to note that that's quite a small effect. and that is This is the controversial area and that's maybe the most controversial claim within that controversial area. So I always like to follow that up by saying So people hate that because it's a cognitive advantage that gives an advantage to guys, but there are also other cognitive ability, sex differences that give the advantage to women. So women on average are better verbally that is one. and another one is that Aong The minority people who are really, really gifted at maths The women are more likely than the men to also be gifted verbally So they're more likely to be a double threat. That's cool Uh So this so no average differences in IQ Where you do find differences they're just as likely to favor women as men. Some of them in some cases, men are slightly better, spatial abilities an example Vverbal abilities, though, women tend to be somewhat better. and then most of the differences are small They're more than the personality differences. They're much smaller than the differences and interests. So when it comes to cognitive abilities, we're much more alike than different. But having saidt all that, there are these average differences in these specific abilities U and that like it or not, that just is the fact of the matter and that's been measured for a hundred yearses as well. There's tons and tons of data on it typically found across cultures veryer likely, I think be to be partly innate. you know that it's shaped by culture as well. you can minimize it And I guess also in principle, you could increase it as well. But yeah, I would be surprised if it's just due to socialization. What about physical health Physical health, there are some definite sex differences there One of them and the one that's probably best known is that men are more prone to cardiovascular disease. Theyre women more prone to heart attacks in particular, at least among like in the fifties and sixties, u until very old age, minimal prone to those Women are more prone to immune system disorders prone as well to pain disorders Um Mimal prone to most forms of cancer. other than sort of reproductive cancers that only strike one sex or the other, men are somewhat more prone to cancers as well. And actually one of the big ones is that men die younger on average then men in the vast majority of coaches Including even most cultures where women have high rates of death during childbirth So we drew the short straw there Eunuchs in the Korean Chosen dynasty lived longer than intact males of identical social standing demonstrating that testosterone has a direct biological cost to male lifespans That is very true. So I touched on that in the book in a billion years of sex differences. I write about how actually Most people probably don't know this, but we do actually already have an intervention that we couldn't principle do which would completely obliterate the average difference in lifespan between men and women. and would extend men's lifespan, and that is castration It's got to be castration before you hit puberty though. So you know, sadly enough if anyone wants to take that approach, if you've already hit puberty, it's too late. But yeah, the fact that it would work it's interesting. does show that it's testosterone that is making us bigger, stronger, more aggressive, but also shortening our lifespan as well. If male mortality rates were lowered to female rates, Randy Nessy, who did the evolutionary medicine studies calculated we would save more years of life If we cured cancer. It's male mortality, we're at female rates We would save more years of life than if we cured cancer. Yeah So we're so used to it, so used to the fact that men die younger we don't really think about it, I think. But then when you do think about it, yeah, you find that a massive massive difference. And then we've got eighty eight percent of Darwin awward winners, which are people who die through spectacular self inflicted stupidity of men. but ninety percent of Carnegie hero awards, which are given to people who risk someone's life in order to save a stranger also go to men. So the risk sort of cuts both ways. It's almost exactly the same. eighty percent people who die through stupid self inflicted ways are guys. ninety percent of people who risk one's life to save a stranger are also guys. Yeah. so that is the trade off there of risk taking, right? In fact, almost by definition, taking risks can pay off big time, but can also kill you. Winners and lose. Yeah, exactly. Because men do more of that risk taking I mean, that's one of the reasons I think that, um That You get more males than females will start a business that does really, really well. And people focus on that and they think' that's unfair. gu will bankupt too. Exactly, exactly right. Yeah. they're more likely to go in both directions. so they're more likely to succeed because they take bigger risks, more likely to fail because they take Bger risks. Some people when they hear about that, they think, well we should encourage women to take bigger risks The problem is that they are then To the extent that they do that, they're opening themselves up not only to greater chances of success, but also to greater chances of failure. It doesn't just cut one way. Totally, exactly. And so my solution there, I think, would be just tell everybody all the facts. Tell men and women all the facts This approach to life, this risky approach cuts both ways. you could go up, you could go down, do what you want with that with that knowledge This's my approach to just a lot of gender gaps in general, right? So they' like workplace gender gaps tell people all the facts, try to get rid of I mean just do everything we can to get rid of bias and barriers. But then haaving done that respect people's choices about their own lives and how they want to live them and what careers they want to do. What's really interesting about that is if you try to compartmentalize the information that people see. And you don't give them full access to the information What you end up with is actually a world in which There's more likely to be resentfulness And you need to do more compensation on the bke end because people have made decisions under imperfect information That's exactly right. And some of the steps I think that people take to try to Balance our gender gaps in the workplace, I think can have exactly that effect, creating resentment U This' one of the dangers really, I think of overstating the extent to which gender gaps in occupations are due to bias and barriers. U You know, I do think it's absolutely essential turn look at the extent to which they are due to those facts, but I think we just to buy some barriers. I think we also though need to look at the extent to which they're due to preferences as well Be if we don't, first of all, if we say any kind of gaps that you see are products of discrimination First of all, it's going to create unnecessary resentment because you're going to say look at these gaps, that's because of men mistreating women Uh secondecond it's going to lead to u like costly interventions to try to eliminate the gaps. And those interventions probably not going to work because they're targeting Th things that are not the causes, the primary causes of the gaps in the first place then what happens is because they don't work We start doing more and more coercive things to try to eliminate the gats Um in some cases way do anti male discrimination, kind of inadvertently just trying to eliminate the gaps, we get a bit more coercive and end up Inead of getting rid of discrimination, which is what I think we should do, we end up reversing the direction of discrimination, which I think is just creating it's not undoing past injustices. It is just adding to the injustices. Exactly Exactly and re reverse ones And then that can create a backlash among guys And then also if we exaggerate the extent to which discrimination is behind those gender gaps L in stemM, for instance, we say, There they had these gaps in STEM more men than women go into it and it's just because STEM is just riddled with sexism is a horrible, horrible, hot bit of sexism. that's going to a lot of women off girls women off who might otherwise go into it. So I want to cleave this effort to try to too fight it could actually be, you know, Iciate the reverse. You touched on it earlier on. what about differences in mental health Mental health so There's the neuroticism sex difference, firstirst of all, womomen are more prone to depression and anxiety, just sort of day to day depression and anxiety rather than clinical levels of it But at the extreme of that distribution, they are also more prone to clinical depression and clinical anxiety disorders. Men are slightly more prone to schizophrenia men and much more prone to like antis social personality disorders, sociopathy, psychopathy, more likely to be psychopaths. What else was there? I'll tell you one that where you don't find a sex difference is bipolar disorder. That is I'd say in the book that that's the least sexist disorder on record because it's basically the same Across cultures it's about the same frequency both sexes. What's your explanation for why we would have these differences in mental health Well with the depression and anxiety, I think that's just a side effect of the neuroticism size difference So at lower levels, it's adaptive for women to be girls as well, but especially women to be somewhat more anxiety prone because They protect themselves more and they're not taking risks. in a way that is more adaptive for males because of a higher maximum offspring number. So it's adaptive at that level, but I think that because you have a distribution It means that inevitably some people are going to be the extremeb distribution. I don't think it's actually adaptive out them So I don't accept explanations for clinical depression or clinical levels of anxiety disorders. I think that they're just a sort of non adaptive or actually maladaptive often byproduct of spal type of thing. Kind of a spandril, yeah. So just a side effect exactly of differences that the closer to the mean are adaptive The schizophrenia difference. I don't have a theory about why that is and I don't think there is that there is a theory yet about why that is more common among men than women Some that I didn't mention actually, autism is more common among boys and girls Uh, ADH team is more common among boys and girls as well U So yeah, ADHD. I think that again, that's just a sort of offshoot of the fact that boys kind of more Tive on average Th goes and sort of less attentive and more likely to get distracted and running around the place. It's not a problem and the usual, I mean, it might be irritating for parents and teachers, but it's not a problem and the normal range, but at the extremes, it is quite a problem and it as a problem more often suffered by males than females as an offshoot of The differences at the main After going through all of this, doing all of the The research, obviously you've been deep in this for a long time. Yeah and then doing the book. What happens Now what's your fear when people don't respect sex differences or they deny them. What's the sort of world that we live if that happens? It's a good question, and I think it's a particularly good question because we're always focusing on the dangers of exaggerating sex differences and moralizing sex differences. And I think there are lots of problems with doing that and we need to be careful not to do it. U but Where I think I disagree with a lot of folks is that I think that there are also problems with doing the reverse. I think there are also problems with minimizing stass differences and denying them So one thing is that just in exactly the same way that some people who exaggerate and moralize sex differences, they try to push people into traditional gender roles People who deny the differences or like neessly minimize them They're in danger of trying to push people out of gender roles. So kind of replacing one gender straight jacket with another unisex gender straight jacket or like a maybe reversed, gender role reversed straight jack in U and now we've actually touched on another of the big P problems, I think, with minimizing the differences, which is the fact that trying to explain gender gaps in a society like occupational gender gaps. There's a whole host of problems with doing that that we discussed U O problems with minimizing sex differences is that there are certain physical health problems and mental health problems that So not only do the frequency of different problems differ between the sexes, sometimes the symptoms differ as well They present differently.. So like cardiovascular problems present differently for women than men. Women are more likely than men to have shortness of breath as a symptom rather than sort of shooting pains down the arms and the other kind of classic problems like that. And if you don't focus on sex differences, you might be more likely to overlook the symptoms of heart attacks in women. Traditionally, doctors and people themselves have overlooked it for that reason, because they've underestimated the sex differences Mental health wise same deal. So even though autism is more common among boys than girls There is a strong case that it's underdiagnosed in girls Part of the reason for that is that It presents somewhat different goals. It's less likely for instance, to involve repetitive behavours So people might not if they're not aware of that sex difference, they might overlook it in girls. And that means girls won't get the help that they need. And yeah, likewise with u Social problems. if we're looking at social problems like intimate partner abuse, If we assume that all intimate partner abuse only goes in one direction like male to female uh, they were going like underestimate the center which it sometimes goes in the other direction U Yeah the vast majority of it is bidirectional At low levels, it is. yeah. sort of low levels verbal abuse, pushing and shoving. And actually in the West, there's even some data suggesting that like verbal abuse might be more common women toward men. Other cultures, that's not the case. and it's more likely men to women. And when it comes to severe damned gender equality paradox. indndeed, When it comes to severe aggression though, even in the West, men do predominate But, you know, It's not a hundred percent And what are the harms of exaggerating sex differences? So one of them is trying to push people into traditional gender roles And like if you just let people do what they want Proably a majority are going kind of gravitate in the direct in traditional directions. But not everyone does Um we because we don't have massive massive sex differences, somewhat modest sex differences. There are always going to be some folks who are not going to want to go into the traditional directions and my view, my let people be themselves view would say, well, that's fine, just let them them be themselves. So it doesn't matter. But if you exaggerate and moralize sex differences, you're unlikely to think that, you're going to think, well, no, this is the way of nature. Any exceptions to the rule, that is by definition a problem and we need to push people into those roles U what else? other problems with the exaggeration differences. If you exaggerate the frequency of cardiovascular health problems, you will say, well, you find them in men, not women. so that's another reason that you might overlook them in women. uh, just because you just It does look cd you that okay, she's got these symptoms, what would they be? Well, it's not to be cardiovascular problems because those are men's problems get the same thing with mental health problems. if you're really fixated on the fact that ression For instance, is more common among women than men. You might overlook it in men. because you're exaggerating the size of the sex difference. And you know like a significant minority of people who suffer depression are men, you know about a third of cases are guys. So if you exaggerate that difference, you might not be on the lookout for them Anxiety disorders as well and social problems yes. so social problems like and interpersonal violence, sexual harassment, if you exaggerate the extent of those, you are more likely to focus on just the cases where men are doing it twow women And those are the majority of the cases, but there are cases the majority of the extreme cases anyway, but you do find the reverse. And the reverse is a problem as well. and it's a problemough that we overlook if we exaggerate those sex differences. There's iron only there how which is that u The sex difference in sexual harassment, sex difference in interpersonal into intimate pan abuse. people who are most likely to exaggerate that and say it's all men tend to be gender role progressives. so people who generally are trying to minimize and deny sex differences, in those cases they actually funnily enough, flip to the reverse and adhere to them and in fact just reverse it It mly exaggerate those differences. Fascinating Steve, you're the best. I appreciate.. You've done a wonder job with this book. Eone should go by it, billionares of pych, differences. Whatse What else you want to plug Could I plug my substate? So that's the thing I'm most exited. Nure N I amm a Steve Stewart William Stan Row. I mean, you the Apo understood the universe is in the five books that everybody needs to read from my first reading list and had this one have been out, it would have been in the second one. Yeahah, your substack rules and everyone should go and check it out. I love it. My favorite thing that you do is the Link fests breakdowns once a month you just send like forty or fifty different studies or insights that you've found. You're the best, man. I really appreciate you. Thank you so much for coming. Thank you, Chris. Thanks very much for making this happen. This is great. I got you. All right. goodoodbye everyone. L later folks. Yes All right. nailed it, nailed it, nailed it.arty n