5 Topics In Psychology That We’re Not Allowed To Talk About - Dr Cory Clark

Chris Williamson 0:00 Is pervasive misogyny a myth?

Cory Clark 0:02 (laughs) Uh, I have claimed that it is. (laughs) Yeah, I think, um ... I, I don't wanna say it was necessarily always a myth. I ... Just before we got in here, I was talking about how I was treated in Cairo. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 0:15 Yeah. Tell that story.

Cory Clark 0:17 I c- ... Oh, I was just at the airport and I was getting onto an elevator. I was there first. I hit the button, I started to step on, and these two guys walk up and they're like, "No! No!" And they waved to me to get off. And then I got off and they got on and they went up (laughs) and I had to take the next one. Um, so that kind of thing exists in places in the world still in 2023. Um, but in the US, uh, you're not getting much of that anymore and, in fact, you're getting quite a bit of the opposite. So I wrote this paper ... I think this ... Is this a Quillette article, I think? Yeah, yeah, yeah. A year or two ago, um, that reviewed a lot of the recent, uh, research on looking at gender biases in psychology, and a lot of the time you see exactly (laughs) the opposite. So people are biased in favor of women across a lot of different domains. They often treat women better than men. They like women better than they like men. Women get punished less than men for the same things. Um, when there's a scientific finding that portrays men better than women, people are biased against it in relation to scientific evidence that portrays women better than men. So people want women to be better than men. Um, and so this idea that society is sexist against women and we have to be vigilant about potential harm to women, um, I think potentially actually stems from the very fact that we care so much more about women than (laughs) we do about men. And when we discover these biases against men, no one really cares and they don't make the headlines. Um, so yeah. Uh, I would say it is largely a myth in modern Western societies, yes.

Chris Williamson 2:00 Is it really possible to answer this question about whether society is more biased against men than women?

Cory Clark 2:07 That's a good question, and I would say, probably no. Like, practically, it would be really hard to measure all of the different contexts, um, where people potentially could be biased. Uh, so like, some scholars have looked at potential bias against men and women in academia, and they see, for example, it's possible students are slightly biased against women in their teaching evaluations, although hard to know because a lot of these are real evaluations, so it could just be that th- that w- h- (laughs) maybe women aren't as nice teachers, I don't know. Um, um, so people have tried to, like, look at which domains do people have a bias against women or against men. It would be hard to look at everything all at once and say, uh, which direction. But one thing that's been happening that I've seen across a few papers now, including one of my own papers that's coming out, is that a lot of these biases actually used to favor men, like, for example, in hiring for male stereotypical jobs. It really was the case that people used to be discriminating against women in those jobs. Um, and a lot of these things seem to have flipped around 20, 2009. (laughs) So a lot of the biases that used to favor men now favor women, and a lot of the biases that always favor women still favor women. So I do think, uh ... I, I don't know if we can say on whole who gets treated worse relative to the other gender, um, but certainly, it seems to be the trajectory that biases are increasingly in fav- favoring women and then people just don't seem to care as much about that as when they, uh, seem to go against women.

Chris Williamson 3:41 There was that Steve Stuart-Williams study about-

Cory Clark 3:44 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 3:44 ... fake articles f- favoring women or men and, and people's judgments of it, right?

Cory Clark 3:48 Mm-hmm. Yeah, they had one on ... I think it was men or women lie more maybe, and then they did men or women are more intelligent, or men and women better drawers. I think there were, like, three domains. And yeah, they always found that when the, when the evidence said that women have a worse quality than men, people are like, "This is sexist. This is bad research," but when women are portrayed as better, people are like, "Oh, it's even pretty good," r- (laughs) and I, I-

Chris Williamson 4:12 And that was the same as when it was equal, right? So women are better and men and women are equal was seen as-

Cory Clark 4:19 Um ...

Chris Williamson 4:20 ... a s- a similar level, I think?

Cory Clark 4:22 So I have studies where I've looked at something very similar that I have struggled to publish for, like, seven years (laughs) , uh, where we did that. We had men are ... I think we did it with intelligence. Men or women are equally intelligent, women are more intelligent than men, or men are more intelligent than women. And people like the men and women are equally intelligent or women are more intelligent than men more than they like men are more intelligent than women. So that's the one that really irritates people. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 4:48 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 4:49 D- why do you think this is the case? Like, why is it ... Well, actually first, no. Why do mainstream narratives focus so much on the possibility of anti-female biases if-

Cory Clark 4:59 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 4:59 ... it seems, you know, pretty robust that men even have a m- an anti-men bias.

Cory Clark 5:06 (laughs) They do, yeah.

Chris Williamson 5:07 Just sort of, like, the, the call is coming from inside the house-

Cory Clark 5:09 Yeah. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 5:09 ... with regards to some of the, some of the sort of anti-male sentiments.

Cory Clark 5:13 Yeah, so, like, both men and women will show this pro-female bias. It is larger for females usually, but men too have these pro-women, pre- pro-women bias. Um, what was your question? Why do-

Chris Williamson 5:24 Why do mainstream narratives focus on it so much?

Cory Clark 5:26 Oh. Um, yeah. I think, I think it's potentially just because we care more ab- So, okay, so there are two things going on, I think, uh, and one I think has been sort of forwarded as the explanation, but I think it might be a little bit simplistic. So, um, just the idea that men and women ... You know, women have more, like, value essentially from an evolutionary perspective. If you have 100 wom- 100 women and one men ... One men. (laughs) One man, you can have 100 babies. (laughs) But if you have one woman-

Chris Williamson 5:56 And one very happy man.

Cory Clark 5:57 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 5:57 One incredibly happy man.

Cory Clark 5:57 A very happy man. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 5:58 Yeah.

Cory Clark 5:58 If you have, uh, one woman and 100 men, you're gonna have one, you know? I- I-

Chris Williamson 6:02 You have a very disgusting woman, yeah.

Cory Clark 6:04 (laughs) Yeah, exactly. Um, so, so women are the sort of limited resource, and so scholars have argued, and it seems to be, uh, very plausible that-... you know, we care more about harm to women because they are essentially setting the limit on our success as a species. So, that's one piece of it. The reason that I don't think that's necessarily all of it is what we briefly touched on at the start of this conversation, which is that you do see these big cross-cultural differences, and you do see these big differences over time. So, if I were to run this study where, say, like, men are smarter than women, or women are smarter than men in, like, 1920, would I see the same thing? I highly doubt it. Um, so I don't think that's all of it. I think that's part of it, and then on top of it we have this sort of cultural narrative that, you know, women have been disadvantaged for X amount of time, um, and that is a huge problem, and- and now the corrective measures have gone so far that they've fully reversed things. And a lot of the time, men are being disadvantaged, um, for the sake of women. So, I think those are both what's happening. So, you see that in society when you get any of these effects where you're like, "Look, people are sexist against women." Everyone loves it. (laughs) You know, goes viral-

Chris Williamson 7:17 Mm-hmm.

Cory Clark 7:17 ... it's covered by the New York Times. Uh, I don't think anybody will be... Well, I don't want to say anybody, but I don't know if Steve Stu- Steve Stuart Williams' findings are gonna make it to the front page of the New York Times.

Chris Williamson 7:27 No point.

Cory Clark 7:27 I guess we'll see. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 7:27 Are you, uh, are you familiar with gamma bias? Have you learned about this?

Cory Clark 7:30 I don't know. No, I don't think so.

Chris Williamson 7:31 So, this is, uh, Dr. John Barry from the Center for Male Psychology. This is a concept that he, at least-

Cory Clark 7:36 Okay.

Chris Williamson 7:36 ... has popularized. I don't know whether he was the one that came up with it. Uh, and it basically talks about how, especially in popular news, uh, media articles, if the article is pro-women, then they-

Cory Clark 7:48 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 7:48 ... will sex the headline. If it's anti-men-

Cory Clark 7:52 Hmm.

Chris Williamson 7:52 ... then it will sex the headline, but if it's the reverse, it will be gender-neutral. Uh, so basically-

Cory Clark 7:57 Hmm.

Chris Williamson 7:58 ... the- the successes of women and the failings of men both end up getting... So, um, like, "White male shooter" would be put as the headline for something, or like-

Cory Clark 8:08 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 8:08 ... um, "Female CEO" would be put as the headline for something.

Cory Clark 8:12 Hmm. Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 8:12 But the reverse isn't necessarily true. Uh, it seems-

Cory Clark 8:14 Right.

Chris Williamson 8:14 ... to be less true, and this causes a skew in the way that people see the world. You know, more people are spending time inside rather than outside now, which means that their genuine day-to-day experience of the world is limited, so-

Cory Clark 8:26 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 8:26 ... most of them s- live their life vicariously through the news stories that they read and the social media that they follow, which means that this very much is shaping our experience of the world. J- I think Q1 2023 saw the highest ever number of female CEOs in history happen. It was over a third of all CEOs were women. Remembering that this isn't just like finally women have got the opportunity to do this. This is, like, finally we have found enough women that want to become CEOs.

Cory Clark 8:56 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 8:56 A- all, for all that it sounds great, and like 50/50 representation-

Cory Clark 8:59 It's a lot of work.

Chris Williamson 8:59 ... it- it, the reality on the ground probably sucks a lot more dick than you think. So-

Cory Clark 9:03 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 9:04 Um, but you also found, looking at this, uh, this issue, that, uh, psychology academics also have this bias too.

Cory Clark 9:14 Um, did I? (laughs)

Chris Williamson 9:15 Yeah, d- d- wasn't, wasn't it that, um, people have, like, a stronger desire to censor science that disfavors women?

Cory Clark 9:22 Oh, um, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, that's in my... Right, yeah. The, where I surveyed psychology professors. Well, first I interviewed them, um, and I asked them, "Do you-"

Chris Williamson 9:32 No, no, this was, this wa- this was from forever ago. This wa- I think you must have found the teaser that maybe got you onto this track originally, 'cause this was way before you started this study, unless you were doing that study, like-

Cory Clark 9:44 Uh...

Chris Williamson 9:44 ... two or three years ago when you wrote that Quillette article.

Cory Clark 9:47 I probably w- or I possibly was.

Chris Williamson 9:50 Yeah. Well, you don't have to-

Cory Clark 9:50 Was it my own research or was it someone else's research?

Chris Williamson 9:52 I- I'm not sure. Uh, y- what you had was an inclination, I think, that both the, um, way that the general public and the way that the people doing the science that the general public sees-

Cory Clark 10:03 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 10:03 Everybody is kind of aware of this. Like, you know, both men and women seem to have a pro-female bias when it comes to the way-

Cory Clark 10:09 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 10:09 ... they interpret stuff. That boundary doesn't stop outside of academics and academia.

Cory Clark 10:15 Mm-mm.

Chris Williamson 10:15 That seeps into academia too, the difference-

Cory Clark 10:17 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 10:17 ... being that academia is upstream of these realizations. So, there are academics who are concerned about that. Okay, so we've, like, danced around what's going on. What is your explanation for why this is happening? Not why mainstream media focus is on it. Like, why is it the case that this is the interpretation?

Cory Clark 10:37 That the interpretation is that the world is sexist against women?

Chris Williamson 10:41 Yeah.

Cory Clark 10:42 Um, yeah. (laughs) Um, motivated reasoning? (laughs) I don't know. There are, there are a couple things. I mean, o- one is just what I've mentioned before, is that we do have this greater concern for women. There's this cultural shift, and part of that cultural shift is driven by the fact that women now, as you mentioned, are, like, they're more in positions of power, and so their interests, um, they- h- the- the interests of women have more power in institutions. They probably... I mean, if women are taking over the media, they're taking over science, they're taking over all of these positions, and they're particularly concerned about their own interests. Um, they're gonna focus on that even as the problem disappears over time. But as you said, there's also this actual, I think, sincere but incorrect belief about the problem. So, in this paper that we should have hopefully getting accepted any day now, um, we had academics and everyday people estimate discrimination against men and women in hiring contexts, um, in these audit studies where, you know, you're randomly, um, s- uh, sending in appli- job applications to real jobs with, like, a female or a male name. Um, and as I said, we see this flip around 2009 where all of a sudden, um, even for male stereotypical jobs, the biases favor women. They've always favored women for female stereotypical jobs, but among everyday people and academics alike, everyone assumes it's the opposite. They assume that there's this huge bias against women in hiring for male ster- male stereotypical jobs. Um, so they think, like...... they look at just the underrepresentation of women in STEM and say, "Well, there can be only one explanation. Obviously, we're discriminating (laughs) against women in STEM." And it's not, "Oh, maybe, maybe women don't wanna go into (laughs) STEM. Maybe they like other things more." Um, so, you know, there's that tendency to see if there's a disparity, and we know that historically women have discriminated, uh, been discriminated against, then that must be the best and the only explanation, in fact. Um, and so it's this combination of, like, who's, who's in power, so those people's interests ta- uh, are, like, starting to have greater impact on public narratives in the media and academia. Um, but also I just think there's this misperception about what's actually happening, uh, that, that i- uh, maybe it's driven by what you say, what the media are covering. Um, maybe it's willful ignorance? I don't know. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 13:14 I, I think that definitely a part of it is there's no associated social renown or goodwill for anybody that starts really applauding men doing well as-

Cory Clark 13:25 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 13:26 ... CEOs. You know, there's-

Cory Clark 13:27 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 13:27 ... there's no, um, victimhood card-carrying points available for somebody the decides to do that because fuck you. This is no surprise to anybody.

Cory Clark 13:36 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 13:36 But, you know, uh, uh, you know, even taking it from a, a straight-up structural perspective, headlines that are counterintuitive, or at least sound counterintuitive, are the ones that are the most interesting.

Cory Clark 13:46 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 13:46 So why are we going to report on a news story that most people already thought was happening? So you kind of have this public conceptual inertia that most people think the world is one particular way. That means that when stories appear that confirm the worldview that they thought they had, they get br- brushed under the rug. Why should we be bothered about celebrating the number of men becoming CEOs or guys doing whatever, whatever? Because this is the way it's always been.

Cory Clark 14:12 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 14:12 Because they don't know that there may be some shift in the other direction, which would make now the intuitive counterintuitive again.

Cory Clark 14:19 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 14:19 So it's almost like there's a mismatch between what's actually happening and what the press is, uh, releasing and what the, the public believes. But, you know, uh, and this is not to castigate women. It's not like women are choosing to make this, like, misand... Or I don't think almost any women are choosing-

Cory Clark 14:33 Some of them are. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 14:34 Yeah. Well, uh, w- what do you think... I, I can see why some women would maybe have this sort of misandrist or d- d- desire to be, um, to continue to castigate men. You had this quote, "A Google Scholar search for misogyny-"

Cory Clark 14:49 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 14:49 "... yielded 114,000 results, whereas a search for misandry yielded only 2,340." So y- uh, people are not studying or really concerned about anti-male bias, especially from women. And i- it's the same as the, like, "Can Black people be racist" question.

Cory Clark 15:08 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 15:08 It's like, no, of course they can't. Like-

Cory Clark 15:10 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 15:10 ... racism is power plus, plus privilege. Given that women are the ones who have been out of power for so long, there is no way that they could be... Like, I bet that if you did on-street interviews or you surveyed people saying, like, "Can women be sexist?"

Cory Clark 15:21 Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 15:22 ... that it would yield very, very similar results.

Cory Clark 15:25 Yeah. I think that's probably true. There's actually an even better Google result that I think I didn't find until after I read that paper, but I Google Imaged, uh, "Men are stronger than women," which is just empirically correct (laughs) on average. And-

Chris Williamson 15:38 Not even on average.

Cory Clark 15:39 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 15:39 It's like it's just-

Cory Clark 15:40 Yeah, it does appear

Chris Williamson 15:41 almost exclusively.

Cory Clark 15:43 ... very, very... Yeah. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 15:43 Yeah.

Cory Clark 15:43 Um, barely, barely an overlap. Um, but of the, like, 40 first images that popped up on the screen, I think, like, one of them was yes, confirming that, and then there were, like, two neutral, and all the rest were images of men being s- or women being stronger than men. So women running faster than men, women, like, you know, raising a man over her head, you know? (laughs)

Chris Williamson 16:08 Fantastic.

Cory Clark 16:08 Um, and so even when you Google this, this fact, "Men are stronger than women," everyone's like, "No!"

Chris Williamson 16:14 Wild.

Cory Clark 16:15 "Women are stronger than men." (laughs)

Chris Williamson 16:16 There was a football game that happened a couple of weeks ago in the UK. I can't remember the team, but they got, like, the B squad of some fourth division-

Cory Clark 16:26 Oh, yeah.

Chris Williamson 16:27 ... British team to play I think the US Women's Team? And they beat them, I wanna say, like, 12-nil or 14-nil in the space of 25 minutes, and then the, the, the best, uh, presentation, I think, of speed and power, the disparity between men and women is the women's 100-meter record.

Cory Clark 16:44 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 16:45 So the women's 100-meter record that hasn't been beaten in I want to say 20 or 30 years is held by, like, 100 or 200 under-18-

Cory Clark 16:56 High school age.

Chris Williamson 16:56 ... males. Like, like, high school level males-

Cory Clark 16:59 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 16:59 ... hit that, that female number. But that's because of socialization, as we all know.

Cory Clark 17:03 (laughs) Right.

Chris Williamson 17:03 Um, but yeah, I-

Cory Clark 17:04 There, there have been a couple cases where they tried to get these professional female athletes to play, yeah, like, low-tier men's teams, and-

Chris Williamson 17:13 It doesn't go well.

Cory Clark 17:13 ... it's, it's embarrassing. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 17:15 It doesn't go well.

Cory Clark 17:15 It's a little embarrassing. (laughs) Yeah. It does not go well.

Chris Williamson 17:17 Yeah. But if you were to do... If there was a-

Cory Clark 17:18 It's not embarrassing, like, necessarily, but it is just because we're in denial of this reality, uh, for whatever reason. Yeah.

Chris Williamson 17:26 If you were to do a game of, uh, liar detection or-

Cory Clark 17:31 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 17:31 ... um, turning over cards on a table and having to remember the position of them all, if that had happened to become a globally recognized sport for some reason-

Cory Clark 17:38 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 17:38 ... women would wipe the floor with men. We would be like, "This is completely unfair. We can't have a mixed co-ed, uh, uh, uh, team of this," because, you know, for some reason all of the top players happen to be women because they-

Cory Clark 17:49 Are we better at that game? I don't know.

Chris Williamson 17:50 Yeah, we l- we... I th- What's it called? Local spa-

Cory Clark 17:53 Memory?

Chris Williamson 17:53 Local me- memorization or local specialization or something like that.

Cory Clark 17:56 Yeah. I've heard that, but I didn't know it translated to that game. But I guess that makes sense.

Chris Williamson 18:00 That's the only thing that I can think of that's like a modern-

Cory Clark 18:03 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 18:03 ... equivalent of it. Ei- Either that or losing your keys in the kitchen. Like, you know, like-

Cory Clark 18:06 Oh, yeah.

Chris Williamson 18:06 ... every guy loses the keys, but every woman knows exactly where they are.

Cory Clark 18:10 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 18:10 But if the guy then went to throw the keys to the woman, like, she's not catching them. Um-

Cory Clark 18:13 Men can be, like, looking at an object and be like, "Where's my ex?" (laughs)

Chris Williamson 18:16 Yeah. Precisely correct. Yeah.

Cory Clark 18:18 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 18:18 Precisely correct. Okay. So i- th- th- we've kind of got a bit of a story going on here. We've set up this, um, disparity between what people think is happening in the world and what might actually be happening-

Cory Clark 18:27 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 18:27 ... some anti-female, anti-male, pro-male, anti-female bias. There's also, moving into higher education, a lot more women who are-... going into higher education not only as students, but also as academics, too.

Cory Clark 18:40 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 18:40 How has this changed academic culture?

Cory Clark 18:44 Yeah, so, so if you look at the trajectories of women in academia, uh, if you look for men and women. If you look at men, it's, I think it actually goes ever so slightly up, but for women it's, like, huge. You know, they were a very, very small minority, um, decades ago, not even all that long ago. But in the past few years, women are dominating at the undergraduate level, way more women than men. There are more women in graduate school, and now there are actually more women who are faculty as well. So, you went from an institution that was run almost entirely by men, and the people in the institution were almost all men too, 'cause the students were men too. Um, and now it's a majority of women, and I think, I don't wanna say it's the only cause, I don't think it is the only cause, but I do think it is probably, probably a primary contributor to a lot of the cultural shifts that have been happening in the past 10 years, because they all prioritize the values of women. So if you look at stuff, for example, you know, people wanting to do these trigger warnings when they're teaching topics in class. Um, if you look at the cases of scholars getting attacked or fired or harassed on social media for studying, you know, potentially controversial topics, those are skyrocketing. If you look at these editorial changes in academic journals, which maybe some of your listeners won't be familiar with, but there have been some of the most prominent, or most prestigious journals in all of science, of the Nature/Springer family of journals, that have put out a series of editorials over these past few years saying that they would not publish and potentially would retract science that has, like, potential to, um, I think one of the phrasing was "undermine the dignity of human social groups" (laughs) , uh, whatever that means. Um, and so it's all of these, like, harm concerns and these concerns about protecting vulnerable people, um, that are starting to interfere with a process that at least at one point was supposed to be, "Well, we're gonna pursue the truth, you know? If it hurts some people's feelings, you know, th- so be it." (laughs) "That's not what we're concerned with. We're concerned with, um, you know, finding out what is empirically correct about the world and sharing that information with our students." Um, and so if you look at all these... And then the, the, the growing, the bloated, uh, DEI, um, uh, whatever you call them.

Chris Williamson 21:14 Initiative.

Cory Clark 21:15 Initiative, divisions, whatever they have at these, these universities. All of these things are, uh, they all kind of concern the things that women would be worried about, and so you're getting this exact pattern happening as the same time women are es- essentially taking over academia, and now they're probably holding more positions of power, they're the editors at these journals, they're the presidents of the professional societies, um, they're, they're the administration. Um, it's kind of like exactly what you would expect if you changed the gender (laughs) composition of academia and people are so, uh, perplexed by it, but it seems like a pretty simple, straightforward, uh, solution. And I'm not saying that's the only thing. Maybe social media has something to do with it, you know, scientists are directly a- a- like, interacting with the public, so maybe the public gets pissed about a scientific finding, whereas 15 years ago they probably didn't even know we had academic journals. Um, so that could be part of it. But yeah, I think the, changing the composition, the gender composition of academia, um, I think pretty much has inevitable consequences that are gonna prioritize the interests of women, um, which are to protect the vulnerable from harm, um, and they're also way more egalitarian. So they want, they want everyone to kind of have the same outcomes, whereas men are more hierarchical, they're more comfortable with, like, some people are gonna be better at things than other people, and those people are gonna get, um, benefits for that. Um, I've known women who... You know, I know a lot of women in academia, and a lot of them are, like, pained by the process of grading. Like, they don't wanna give anyone a D (laughs) , which I get, like, it's not fun, um, failing a student, but that's kind of part of the process. Uh, if you just give everyone an A, it sort of loses its meaning. But that's, that's painful to women to, to not have everyone be thriving equally all the time.

Chris Williamson 23:06 Can you explain, for the people who are uninitiated, can you explain the driver evolutionarily about why women have this more egalitarian, more sort of cloak and dagger, behind closed doors approach to things?

Cory Clark 23:19 (laughs) .

Chris Williamson 23:19 A- a- and, and the opposite for men?

Cory Clark 23:21 Yeah. So, women, e- essentially, women were having children, raising them to be successful adults that have children of their own, um, whereas men were often working in coalitions to protect the group. So, men are used to, uh, creating coalitions, figuring out who's a good leader, who's good at what, giving that person status to make sure the group works really well together. Um, so they're, they're very comfortable with the fact that some men are gonna rise to the top, because that benefits the whole group. "If we have a strong leader, we all live." Um, women were not participating in that so much. They were s- they were being protected by the men, um, and their primary job was to care for offspring and keep the, keep offspring alive. So, they have this concern for things that are vulnerable and they wanna protect them and help them. Um, the, the, I, I, I think it's actually sort of an interesting discussion about, like, is it that men are hierarchical or women egalitarian? Because it, it might just be that the egalitarian thing could have been the default, but men are the ones that had to change because they had to coordinate and cooperate in this way-

Chris Williamson 24:32 Oh, yeah.

Cory Clark 24:33 ... in order to fight.

Chris Williamson 24:34 Who's, who's the aberration? Yeah.

Cory Clark 24:35 Yeah. Who's the, d- who's... I don't know. So, like, I th- and I think that explanation...... it's almost like the absence of women participating in that, um, potentially made them more egalitarian. But it also could have been because, you know, they're, they're sharing resources with other women and helping other women take care of their, their children too, um, where you wouldn't necessarily need... They're, they tend to be in small groups, um, prefer, you know, a few close friends rather than being in this huge group of people that's really coordinated and trying to, uh, out-compete other groups.

Chris Williamson 25:04 Well, uh, Joyce Benenson has done so much good work on this-

Cory Clark 25:08 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 25:08 ... where she looked at, uh, is it female basketball teams?

Cory Clark 25:11 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 25:11 And I think male oppositions, male opponents on a basketball court show more goodwill physically to each other than female compatriots.

Cory Clark 25:25 Hmm.

Chris Williamson 25:25 So like enemies on the men teams-

Cory Clark 25:28 (laughs) Yeah.

Chris Williamson 25:28 ... they show more love to each other than the same team, the, the same team members for, for women. And, uh, uh, tell me if I'm wrong here. I'm pretty sure that another contributing reason is that women physically are more fragile-

Cory Clark 25:41 Hmm.

Chris Williamson 25:41 ... which means that getting, uh, becoming the enemy of anybody has high-

Cory Clark 25:46 Hmm.

Chris Williamson 25:47 ... consequences. Uh-

Cory Clark 25:48 Hmm.

Chris Williamson 25:48 ... you are physically less capable of defending yourself, plus-

Cory Clark 25:51 Hmm.

Chris Williamson 25:51 ... you potentially have dependents on you, children, so on and so forth. So the externality-

Cory Clark 25:56 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 25:56 ... of you dying, like man dies, not good, but like, you know-

Cory Clark 25:59 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 25:59 ... things can continue 'cause he's been-

Cory Clark 26:00 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 26:00 ... gored by a fucking mammoth or something. Uh.

Cory Clark 26:03 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 26:03 Woman gets too high above her station, she pisses off the wrong other woman, and that woman poisons her in her sleep or takes-

Cory Clark 26:12 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 26:12 ... her child away from her or does something else to cause her to, um, lower down in status, uh, which means that women seem to hide their own successes. I think this is, is borne out of, um, the way that girls in school talk about achieving A grades and B grades and C grades-

Cory Clark 26:29 Hmm.

Chris Williamson 26:29 ... that they're much more disparaging of their own achievements.

Cory Clark 26:31 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 26:31 They will underplay their own achievements a lot more. It's the-

Cory Clark 26:34 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 26:34 ... same thing of, um, if you, if a girl thinks that her results are going to be viewed by other people, she's much more likely-

Cory Clark 26:41 Hmm.

Chris Williamson 26:41 ... to downplay her successes. Whereas if she thinks that they're going to be kept private, they'll be a little bit more-

Cory Clark 26:46 Hmm.

Chris Williamson 26:46 ... um, a- accurate or full of themselves in, in their assessments. Uh, so that's-

Cory Clark 26:50 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 26:50 ... another sort of contributing factor too.

Cory Clark 26:53 I wasn't aware of that, that last one, but yeah, there are pretty consistent gender differences where, like, men have more self-esteem than women. Women tend to underestimate how well they're doing at things, and men tend to overestimate how well (laughs) they're doing things.

Chris Williamson 27:06 Fuck yeah.

Cory Clark 27:07 It's like (laughs) -

Chris Williamson 27:08 Peanut butter it.

Cory Clark 27:08 Well, how beneficial is it? And yeah, as you said, I mean, I don't even necessarily think it's just women on women. Women are vulnerable around men too. And so, I think that there's more pressure to be a conformist when you're a woman, because as you said, you don't want to piss anyone off. Because you're not particularly, uh, strong, and so if someone attacks you, there's a good chance you're gonna get injured or die. Um, whereas men are more capable of, you know, defending themselves, and they're completely capable of defending themselves against almost all women. So their, like, enemies are cut in half, or rather the threats are cut in half, as it were. Um, so, so yeah. There are a lot of these, like, correlated gender differences that if you look at them, like, on their own, the differences don't appear huge when it comes to personality. But the fact that you get them across all of these different kinds of things, like the egalitarianism and the harm concern, the- and I think the pressure to, to be a, uh, to conform to your social group. When, when all of those things are correlated, you end up with these pretty big differences, and then we see these differences in the priorities of men and women. So among psychology professors, men are more supportive of pursuit of truth as, like, the purpose of science than women are. They're more supportive of academic freedom than women are. Whereas women think we need to be balancing these things with moral concerns and harm concerns. Um, so you get these, you know, evolved gender differences between men and women, their personality, and then you change the gender composition of an institution, and it can fundamentally change the goal of what that institution's trying to accomplish. Um, in the case of science, like, truth, so long as it doesn't cause any mean stereotypes to be spread about anybody. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 28:48 Yeah, I've got, I've got some of my favorite stats that you found during your research. 56% of men said that colleges should not protect students from offensive ideas. 64% of women said that they should. 51% of men said colleges should not dis-invite speakers if students threaten violent protest. 67% of women said that they should. 58% of men opposed a confidential reporting system at colleges, which students could use to report offensive comments. 54% of women supported it. Fif- uh, 63% of men thought controversial news stories in student newspapers should not need administrator's approval before publication. 51% of women thought that they should. And it just continues down, whether it's about willingness to, uh, report male counterparts for dismissal campaigns. 71% of men reported that protecting free speech is more important than promoting an inclusive society. 60% of women said that promoting an inclusive society is more important than protecting free speech, all the way down. Then you summarized it really, really nicely here. "Put simply, men are relatively more interested in advancing what is empirically correct, and women are relatively more interested in advancing what is morally desirable."

Cory Clark 29:53 Mm-hmm. Yeah, what I love about all of those numbers too is 'cause they so clearly show what happens when you change the majority representation in an institution, because in all of those cases, it's the majority of men hold view A and the majority of women hold view B. So whichever group has more people, they're gonna be the ones whose, uh, priorities win, right? (laughs)

Chris Williamson 30:18 We could call it, like, the, the academic ratio hypothesis.

Cory Clark 30:21 (laughs) Yeah, we could. Uh, and, and I mean, I haven't actually gotten much pushback on it, which I really thought I would at one point. And I think part of the reason I haven't gotten as much pushback as I would expect, um, for such a claim... Oh, lost my ribbon, um, is because women actually think that it's good that they're like that, right? So-... to people who think academic freedom is obviously this really important thing, and obviously science should be pursuing truth, we look at these statistics and we're like, "Well, shit." (laughs) Like, "This is really bad. Women are potentially causing problems in science and academia." But when women see these statistics, they're like, "Finally," like, "We're saving it. We're making it a safe place for everyone, and we're making sure that science does good, it doesn't do harm." Um, and there's another paper that looked at this, like the priorities of scientists. Men are, they have this sort of like basic interest in understanding the world and like figuring out what's true and figuring out how things work. Whereas women do science because they wanna cause good in the world. So their, their motivation is, "I, I wanna know the truth, but I only wanna know the truth if it's gonna help me help other people." Um, which means that any truth that doesn't help me help other people, and especially any truth that potentially could harm other people, is not valuable, and we should not be pursuing it in science and academia. Um, which is, you know, very fundamentally different from what I think a lot of people thought we were doing for a long time (laughs) with science.

Chris Williamson 31:52 The thing

Chris Williamson 31:53 that I tried to get at earlier on, um, before you sideswiped me with your misogyny-

Cory Clark 31:58 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 31:59 ... was that I, I don't want this to come across like women haven't got their heads on straight, men, you should treat them like they haven't got a clue what they're talking about. The point is, if you were convinced of these viewpoints, you would be convinced of them too.

Cory Clark 32:15 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 32:15 Like, for the most part, people are supporting things that they believe. Now, they might believe them erroneously, it might be motivated reasoning, it might be because of societal pressure, it might be because they want to morally grandstand and look like they're really cool and important and empathetic and all this stuff. All of these reasons contribute. But like, if I convince you that two plus two equals four, you can't unconvince yourself of something that you're convinced of, up until the point at which you are unconvinced, at which point you have a new set of views, right? So it's like, if you felt this way, if you had this biological predisposition plus this sort of cultural, uh, imposition on you from all the girlfriends that you'd spent time with... And the same for men too, like for the women in academia who say, "I can't believe that men don't care about harms and blah, blah, blah." It's like-

Cory Clark 32:58 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 32:58 ... the reason that they're convinced is because they're convinced.

Cory Clark 33:01 Right.

Chris Williamson 33:01 And being able to hold two con- conflicting viewpoints in your mind at one time is really important. Like, look, women can hold this view, and to them, it is the truth.

Cory Clark 33:09 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 33:09 Men can hold this view, and to them, it is the truth, right? Like, i- it's a case of trying to bridge that divide, I think, to help people understand, okay, from first principles, what are we trying to achieve-

Cory Clark 33:19 Right.

Chris Williamson 33:19 ... with academia? Like, what's the goal here? What are we actually trying to get ourselves toward? And I do think that it would lean more toward the male side of this. It's going to be toward the men. It's going to be truth, but-

Cory Clark 33:30 But do you... So one thing that I thought of is like, how do you justi- like, why? Like, how do you justify why science should be pursuing truth?

Chris Williamson 33:40 Because-

Cory Clark 33:40 Is it just, uh, is it just itself a good, or is there a reason that we care about the truth, or we should pursue truth?

Chris Williamson 33:47 T- to me, the goal of science would be to accurately represent what is going on in the world.

Cory Clark 33:52 And why is that good? Why is that better than...

Chris Williamson 33:55 Because that can inform decisions moving forward accurately. If you do it based on some predisposition, some sort of, uh, predetermination or some motivated reasoning, you're going to encounter a situation in which the world doesn't reflect what your, uh, research has supposedly shown or what missed research would have shown-

Cory Clark 34:16 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 34:17 ... because you haven't been trying to represent what the world is.

Cory Clark 34:20 But why is that bad?

Chris Williamson 34:22 Because you're going to end up with massive errors. You're going to end up with people predicting things-

Cory Clark 34:26 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 34:26 ... that don't come true, or not predicting things that do come true that could have been discovered had the research been done.

Cory Clark 34:32 But why do... Why are errors bad?

Chris Williamson 34:36 Why are errors bad? I guess that's a good question. Because downstream-

Cory Clark 34:40 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 34:40 ... downstream from errors, you would end up with a world that isn't ab- or you would end up with a society and a civilization that isn't able to accurately perceive what is going on. That, to me, just seems like, like what, what is science? If science isn't understanding what's happening in the world, and downstream from that, being able to accurately make predictions, I, I don't understand what we're doing here. Like, we, why don't, why don't we just write fiction if that's the case?

Cory Clark 35:06 I was trying to lead you down a path, and you didn't take the bait (laughs) .

Chris Williamson 35:10 Okay. Bait me. What should I have said?

Cory Clark 35:13 Well, where I was gonna try to get like... I- I've seen myself do... I'm a person who thinks science should be pursuing truth, first and foremost, and I don't think other moral concerns should interfere with that unless they're like catastrophic and definitely gonna happen. Um, but I find myself justifying that with consequences, which is, if we don't have the truth, we're gonna waste all this time on these bullshit interventions that aren't gonna accomplish anything, they're not gonna deliver on their promises. You know, they might actually cause harm to people. And so I'm like bringing in the harm element to justify why we should be pursuing the truth. Um, but it sounds like you think truth is maybe just like in itself a good, which I would like to argue that, but I'm like, "Well, where does that value come from?" Is it just like that's just something humans think because truth is... tends to be useful and so we've come to sort of worship the truth?

Chris Williamson 36:06 Yeah. I think it-

Cory Clark 36:06 But when I try to justify it, I go, "Prevent harm" (laughs) .

Chris Williamson 36:11 Yeah.

Cory Clark 36:11 Uh, and then I'm doing the same thing. Like...

Chris Williamson 36:13 Which is oddly what they're, w- what a lot of people are trying to do. But you're-

Cory Clark 36:17 Right.

Chris Williamson 36:18 ... they're going through a less circuitous route. They're just saying, "Okay, we won't ever talk about anything that could harm somebody." And you're like-

Cory Clark 36:23 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 36:23 ... that's the first order of effect. The second order effect might be that they end up being harmed because the thing that you've researched or not researched is the thing that could have protected them from the harm-

Cory Clark 36:31 (laughs) Exactly.

Chris Williamson 36:31 ... in the end. Yeah, I think-

Cory Clark 36:33 Exactly.

Chris Williamson 36:33 ... I think I was, um, really, really poorly talking about the implications downstream-

Cory Clark 36:38 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 36:38 ... um, just very badly.

Cory Clark 36:41 Of But, but it is, it is interesting 'cause, uh, as I assume you know of that Al Shibli paper on the female mentors that got, uh, that the authors-

Chris Williamson 36:49 Talas. Talis. Talas.

Cory Clark 36:49 ... retracted. So it's like two, two...... three, three summers ago? Maybe right around now, um, you know, during that summer, first summer of COVID when everyone was going crazy, uh, th- this, this young female scholar published this paper with a couple of colleagues, and they found that, um, that, uh, female mentees of female mentors, uh, had less impactful careers later down, uh, later down their careers than male mentees that were mentored by male mentors. So essentially, this male-male combo of mentor-mentee led to more successful outcomes than this female-female. Well, so people hated that obviously, because it makes women look like they're not good mentors or something-

Chris Williamson 37:32 Mm-hmm.

Cory Clark 37:32 ... or women aren't cooperating well together. Um, and they retracted the paper, and this is one of the... And, and there was all of this talk about how this is gonna harm women in science, and it's gonna cause all these, like, negative consequences. And what ended up happening is, like, the journal was like, "We're gonna launch initiatives to help women in science, blah, blah, blah, blah." So if anything, it was, like, helpful to women that this paper got published. But then on the other side of it, I'm thinking, no scholar... Let's imagine this effect is real, which I don't think we have a good reason to doubt it. No one, like, really criticized the finding. They criticized, like, the operationalizations and stuff. Um, let's assume it's a true effect. Well, no scholar in their right mind is ever gonna try to study it and figure out, "Why did we... Why did this happen?" (laughs) Which means we'll never try to solve a problem 'cause we don't acknowledge that the problem exists in the first place, if there is a problem. Um, and so yeah. Like, these concerns about harms to women in science very... They definitely have potential to actually cause harm to women in science because we- we're ignoring a potential disparity that potentially could be fixed by something. And we'll just never look for the thing that could fix it, you know? It's a-

Chris Williamson 38:43 Two s- two studies that, that come to mind for me there. One being about, uh, women with female bosses reporting lower levels of job satisfaction.

Cory Clark 38:52 Mm. Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 38:53 Uh, and then a second one that looked at, uh, male academics being more reticent to collaborate with female academics post-MeToo.

Cory Clark 39:08 Post-MeToo, (laughs) yeah. Yeah.

Chris Williamson 39:10 Fucking... I mean... (laughs)

Cory Clark 39:13 Well, it's a... Yeah. It's, that's, that's another thing is, like, it's hard to anticipate what the consequences of any one thing are going to be, of any one scientific finding, or any one social movement, you know? So, like, even if you think you're avoiding harm, you might also be creating harm, and truth has taken a hit, you know? So, like, these aren't questions that are being studied empirically. These are just assumptions people have. People just assume, "This is gonna be bad." Um, but they don't bother to actually figure out if it's going to be bad. And if it is going to be bad, is that the only way it's gonna be bad or is it gonna be bad if you suppress the science? Uh, like, my big concern is I'm like, people shouldn't trust science anymore. Like, there's so much political bullshit going on, um, that even if we thought it was for the right reasons, for whatever progressive values scholars, uh, care about, if they're successfully pursuing those, well, they've undermined the institution of science, and no one trusts us (laughs) anymore-

Chris Williamson 40:14 Yeah.

Cory Clark 40:15 ... because we look like a bunch of political hacks. And it's true. Like, I don't even think we can deny that that's what's happening. So I mean, some people try to, but, uh, you know, you can look at our, our shitty track record if you look at, like, the replication crisis and all of the contradictions just being pumped out into the world day after day. It's a, it's a sad state of affairs.

Chris Williamson 40:37 I think there's a really lovely framing generally for a lot of things that are going on within media, um, that are pushing purposefully obfuscated truths or, like, outright lying about certain things that downstream from that, there are second, third, fourth order effects that people aren't aware of that can be more harmful than an uncomfortable-tasting medicine with a spoon of sugar to take it down type thing. I remember the, uh, Chelsey Conaboy article from the New York Times, uh, maternal instinct is a myth that men created.

Cory Clark 41:11 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 41:11 It's like, okay, that's... Sure, that's an opinion, I suppose. It was backed up by some really shitty, like, very-

Cory Clark 41:17 Is it, like, they created it so that they wouldn't have to do parenting? Is that-

Chris Williamson 41:20 Uh, it was to keep women under the thumb, I think-

Cory Clark 41:23 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 41:23 ... to keep them sort of as domestic prostitutes might have been one of the lines that was used.

Cory Clark 41:28 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 41:28 Um, but my point being that, like, okay, so maybe that is, uh, comforting to women who are from a particular cohort, the-

Cory Clark 41:36 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 41:36 ... you know, career women who are doing these things. But it's very damaging to women who have a maternal instinct, and now they think, "Oh, right, I've been fucking rube-d by the patriarchy. I'm being marionetted by, like... Uh, fucking Andrew Tate and Dan Bilzerian have got ahold of, like, what it is that, like, the way that I, I show up in the world."

Cory Clark 41:54 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 41:54 So the actual real world harm of being, trying to be overly sympathetic or empathetic towards disadvantaged groups-

Cory Clark 42:03 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 42:03 Yeah, I think, uh, it's a really, really nice framing that harm in the immediate... Uh, avoiding immediate harm can cause much worse harm down the road.

Cory Clark 42:12 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 42:12 Uh, and doing that also destroys truth and also kind of wrecks the entire scientific

Chris Williamson 42:18 process. But what, what, what do you say to the people who would push back and say men and women are psychologically different because of patriarchy and social expectations and stuff? We just need to nudge those, change those in some way.

Cory Clark 42:31 Yeah. I mean, some people try to claim that it's all environmental or cultural, and some people try to claim that, you know, there aren't even men and women in the first place (laughs) or it's just humans or something. Um, yeah, I think some of the most compelling data there are that when you look in more egalitarian countries, um, you often see that actually these gender differences get bigger. And so when men are, when women are given, like, more freedom to flourish and pursue what they want to pursue, um, you can see even bigger... Like, women, uh, a lot of... And th- this is related to what you were just saying. Like, a lot of women...... really like being a mom and staying home and taking care of their kids is the most meaningful thing to them. And then you get these, like, scholarly career women who, like, look down on them and, uh, uh, and, and shame them for making that choice. But when women have, you know, a partner who can support them 'cause they're getting paid enough, they've got their, like, healthcare needs taken care of, l- they're more likely to choose to stay home and be a mom. And it's in some of these really poor countries or countries where women are treated really terribly where the women are, like, going into STEM at really (laughs) high rates, you know. So, uh, if it, if, if, if, if it were gonna... If it were caused by these, like, really destructive social expectations that aim to hold women down, I think we would see that places like Sweden and stuff, you know, women are becoming, uh, engineers at the same rate as men. Um, but that's just not the case, and there's evidence that it's precisely the opposite of that, that when women get to choose, um, they choose things that women would be interested in doing because they, like, evolved to be good at those things, and it's really important for them.

Chris Williamson 44:14 There's a interesting lesson I learned from Mary Harrington, where the, um, especially women at the top, the ones who create the culture of feminism in particular-

Cory Clark 44:24 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 44:25 ... uh, don't have the interests of the women at the bottom in mind.

Cory Clark 44:28 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 44:28 So, she used the example of, uh, reducing chivalry. Like, "I don't need-"

Cory Clark 44:33 Mm. Mm.

Chris Williamson 44:33 "... to be sort of protected by a man. I don't need him to hold the door open for me. I don't need him to pull my chair out. I don't need him to pay for the first date," et cetera, et cetera. Like, you know, this is the egalitarian... And it's a, again, you're, um, holding up, you're morally grandstanding for a disadvantaged group, and you're almost presuming that or hoping that they can take care of themselves. They're- you're reducing dependency.

Cory Clark 44:54 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 44:54 But what those women at the top, the bourgeois sort of feminist believers don't realize is that there are women at the bottom for whom their partner might not have had... might have grown up in a single-parent household, might have been abused by a father. Like, they could do with understanding protecting women, which is really what opening the door and pulling the chair out is about, it's like treating them in a more, uh, a, a less robust way, is upstream from, "Don't hit your wife."

Cory Clark 45:19 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 45:20 Right? And-

Cory Clark 45:20 Just a little. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 45:22 Uh, it's... Yeah. But the, the point of women as something that, that require protecting and providing for-

Cory Clark 45:26 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 45:27 ... is something that can be dispensed with if you are part of some, like-

Cory Clark 45:30 Mm. Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 45:31 ... high-faluting class, but necessarily doesn't work down at the bottom. And it feels a little bit-

Cory Clark 45:34 Right.

Chris Williamson 45:34 ... the same as what you're talking about here. There was this really, really great study that, uh, Alexander Date Sykes just put out. I'm gonna bring him on to talk about it in a couple-

Cory Clark 45:42 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 45:43 ... of weeks. Uh, 55% of single men haven't approached a woman in the last year.

Cory Clark 45:48 Hm.

Chris Williamson 45:49 77% of women say that they were approached more, but that-

Cory Clark 45:54 Hm.

Chris Williamson 45:54 ... is in the 18 to 30 age bracket. At-

Cory Clark 45:57 Hm.

Chris Williamson 45:57 ... 41-plus, the trend flips, and 55% of women said that they didn't want to be approached.

Cory Clark 46:03 Hm.

Chris Williamson 46:03 Question being, who is writing all of the op-eds saying, "Men, stop approaching women"?

Cory Clark 46:08 (laughs) Hm.

Chris Williamson 46:08 It's the women that are in that age bracket.

Cory Clark 46:10 The... Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, it's in their... You're, are you saying, so it's the older women who are saying, "Stop approaching women," and it's the women who aren't getting approached? And so, they're, like, taking out the competition. "Stop hitting on-"

Chris Williamson 46:21 You get some-

Cory Clark 46:21 "... the 20-year-olds."

Chris Williamson 46:22 Yeah, intersexual women, uh, intersexual competition-

Cory Clark 46:24 "Pay attention to me."

Chris Williamson 46:25 ... is, is falling, ladies-

Cory Clark 46:26 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 46:26 ... perhaps.

Cory Clark 46:26 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 46:27 And they're the ones writing-

Cory Clark 46:27 I, I wonder-

Chris Williamson 46:28 ... the op-eds.

Cory Clark 46:28 ... that a lot with, um... So, one finding we see is, uh, that there was... I asked a question of psychology professors, like, "Should professors be fired for having sex with their students?" And you see that men (laughs) are more likely to say, "No, they should be f-" And women are like, "Yeah, they should be fired." And it's like, okay, on the one hand, like, maybe women are looking out for their, uh, own interests. They don't, you know... Or maybe they're looking out for young women. They, like, don't want women being harassed by these older professors. But also, maybe these older professors are like, "We don't want our mating pool hooking up with the 24-year-old (laughs) grad students."

Chris Williamson 47:05 Right.

Cory Clark 47:05 Um, so it's hard to tease these things apart. But yeah, a lot of the time there's this... I- I, and I'm, I'm sort of torn, like, I, I think there's probably s- some validity to both perspectives. Like, on the one hand, women do have, especially women who are older and who have kids, they have these, like, maternal instincts and this desire to protect young people. At the same time, young women are also often their competitors for mates. So, um, you know, if you can prevent the, the 45-year-old professor in their department, you're a 40-year-old female professor, and you're single, you don't want him dating the, the 28-year-old grad student, you know?

Chris Williamson 47:40 Yeah.

Cory Clark 47:41 Uh, it's-

Chris Williamson 47:41 There's two, there's two examples that I think about. One is a Bill Burr bit-

Cory Clark 47:45 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 47:45 ... uh, where he says, um, the reason that girls, on average, that women are more, uh, body positive is because they want their fat friends to not get skinny, so that-

Cory Clark 47:58 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 47:59 ... it's, it's intersexual competition all over again.

Cory Clark 48:01 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 48:01 It's like, "No, you're beautiful as you are. Lose a toe, you fat bitch." Like-

Cory Clark 48:04 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 48:04 ... that's his, that's this bit that he does about this, like, diabetic-

Cory Clark 48:08 (gasps) That's true.

Chris Williamson 48:08 ... diabetic woman. Um-

Cory Clark 48:09 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 48:09 And then I saw a study-

Cory Clark 48:11 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 48:11 ... that suggested-

Cory Clark 48:12 Lose a toe. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 48:12 ... um, wo- women are more, uh, dispar-... Or they, they slut-shame more or they're more disparaging of, like, relaxed sexual standards if they have-

Cory Clark 48:22 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 48:23 ... sons. And the more sons-

Cory Clark 48:23 Hm.

Chris Williamson 48:23 ... that they have, the more that that increases.

Cory Clark 48:26 Hm. Uh, they're more disparaging of relaxed sexual standards for men or for women if they have more sons?

Chris Williamson 48:33 For women.

Cory Clark 48:35 For women. Um, why-

Chris Williamson 48:37 I thought that was int- I'm not sure. I thought, I just thought that was really interesting. I'll need to read about-

Cory Clark 48:41 I was gonna say, you might want the girls to be... 'Cause then your son can have a lot of kids (laughs) if the women are just handing it out. But (laughs) I don't-

Chris Williamson 48:48 Perhaps, but I wonder whether, if you did do that, the man is going to need to work harder to try and hold onto his partner. He's basically got a less secure mate.

Cory Clark 48:56 That's true.That's true. So, like, uh, the, a woman who w- wouldn't necessarily be a good mom and help take care of the- the grandkids, yeah. That's-

Chris Williamson 49:04 Absolutely.

Cory Clark 49:04 ... that's an interesting perspective. I- I find the whole... Like, I often wonder why society doesn't slut-shame men more often, 'cause it seems like it would be really important to control male sexual behavior, because they can do so much damage. Like, as we were saying, a woman can only have a handful of babies in her lifetime, and men can father hundreds of children, uh, and not take care of any of them. At least, like, ev- now, you know, depending where you live, you're gonna have to pay some pretty steep child support, but that wasn't always the case. And so, I find it quite perplexing. Um-

Chris Williamson 49:34 What do you think? Put your-

Cory Clark 49:34 If there's anyone who studies this topic, you should bring them on, 'cause I'm really curious

Cory Clark 49:38 to hear- (laughs)

Chris Williamson 49:38 Put your, put your bro science hat on and- and explain why you think there's this disparity in slut-shaming.

Cory Clark 49:44 Um, it could be because slut-shaming is mainly happening for women against other women, and men don't care that much about other men's sexual behavior, because, you know, they- they're only gonna monopolize a woman for like 10 (laughs) minutes or whatever. Um, so it might be that it's really... And- and it might be that men only slut-shame women a little bit because women do, but women slut-shame them more. So, it could just be a female intersexual competition thing, and- and... But I also think women could slut-shame men, but maybe they don't, um, because men don't care about being slut-shamed, (laughs) so there's no point.

Chris Williamson 50:25 Tell- tell more people about all of the women that I'm sleeping with.

Cory Clark 50:27 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 50:28 Oh, so... Okay, so preselection, the fact that a man who is desired by multiple women-

Cory Clark 50:33 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 50:33 ... is seen as desirable, on average, by more women-

Cory Clark 50:36 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 50:37 ... is the reason why guys should have photos on their Tinder profile with them with other women-

Cory Clark 50:40 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 50:40 ... because it shows that you're not a, like a total basement dweller.

Cory Clark 50:42 Some women think I'm cool. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 50:44 Some women. Yeah, exact- yeah, exactly.

Cory Clark 50:45 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 50:45 I'm not totally repulsive to women.

Cory Clark 50:47 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 50:47 Um, and because of that, if a woman does start trying to call out a man's sexual exploits, because it is probably positive expected value on his status-

Cory Clark 50:59 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 50:59 ... it's a pointless thing. Like, if you think about what women-

Cory Clark 51:01 It only makes them look better. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 51:02 Yeah, exactly, but think about, think about like the- the insults that get thrown around on the internet. The first one from any woman or man to a woman is slut, and the first one from any man or woman to a man is cuck, or soyboy, or incel.

Cory Clark 51:14 Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 51:14 Right?

Cory Clark 51:14 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 51:15 So, it's disparaging a lack of sexual chastity on one side, and a lack of sexual experience on the other.

Cory Clark 51:21 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 51:21 Because those are the most valuable things that they have to offer.

Cory Clark 51:24 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 51:24 So, yeah, that's really interesting.

Cory Clark 51:26 But it is, it's strange to me that we haven't somehow, as a society, managed to make it an insult to a man to call him a man-whore, but we haven't. Uh, 'cause I really do think, like, I'm like one or two percent Mongolian, which I think must mean that Genghis Khan was my great-great-great-great-grandparent. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 51:44 Okay.

Cory Clark 51:44 He raped everybody in like-

Chris Williamson 51:46 Yep.

Cory Clark 51:46 ... the whole world. Uh, like, why wouldn't we want to handle-

Chris Williamson 51:50 Have more of him.

Cory Clark 51:51 ... the Genghis Khan? (laughs)

Chris Williamson 51:52 Oh, right. No, sorry. Right.

Cory Clark 51:54 Discourage, uh, someone from monopolizing that much of the, uh, the- the mating pool, but-

Chris Williamson 52:00 Well, you wouldn't exist. If that was the case, you wouldn't exist.

Cory Clark 52:02 I guess I wouldn't. I guess I wouldn't, so thank God. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 52:04 Yeah. This is the oddest type of euthanasia desire that I've ever heard in my entire life.

Cory Clark 52:09 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 52:09 I wanted my genetic line to have ended 50 generations ago, please.

Cory Clark 52:14 (gasps) I guess a- a lot of us wouldn't be here. What percentage of us are related?

Chris Williamson 52:17 S- some insane percentage, I think.

Cory Clark 52:19 Half?

Chris Williamson 52:19 You know, wasn't there a point-

Cory Clark 52:20 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 52:20 ... you might know this, I don't know whether it's your field of expertise, wasn't there a point where there was like 8,000 homo sapiens left on the planet, and we were all in Indonesia or some shit?

Cory Clark 52:29 We've gone, we've gone through... I don't know all the specifics of it, but we have gone through some points where things were getting a little precarious and bounced back, apparently. (laughs) So, that's good.

Chris Williamson 52:39 There was-

Cory Clark 52:39 Uh-

Chris Williamson 52:39 ... a little bottleneck at some point.

Cory Clark 52:39 ... which is maybe good for all the people who are paranoid about AI killing us all. Like if at least, you know, a few hundred of e- hundred of us can survive, maybe we'll fight the robot overlords, and-

Chris Williamson 52:48 As long as it's a few hundred, a f- a few hundred that are sufficiently sociosexual. If you pick, like, the- the, uh, 200 least-

Cory Clark 52:54 Right.

Chris Williamson 52:55 ... sociosexual people here, everyone's just gonna, "No, I'm gonna go and whittle myself something out of this tree-"

Cory Clark 53:00 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 53:00 "... and die on my own."

Cory Clark 53:01 Wouldn't want it to be, like, a bunch of elderly people. That would do us no good.

Chris Williamson 53:04 Mm-mm.

Cory Clark 53:04 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 53:04 That would not be, that would not be good.

Chris Williamson 53:06 Evolutionary psychology, one of your areas of expertise, one of my areas of obsession.

Cory Clark 53:11 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 53:11 Why do you think it is that evolutionary psychology is so detested?

Cory Clark 53:15 (laughs) Um, yeah. So, (laughs) this is the talk I gave at HFEST, and it was, it was definitely not something that I was trying to- to, uh, discover. My purpose wasn't to know why people hate evolutionary psychology or behavioral genetics, which is the other one that people hate. Um, but pretty much all of the controversial conclusions in psychology, um, the ones that will get you in trouble, they all kind of come from evolutionary psychology and behavioral genetics. And it's because people dislike conclusions, um, that regard group differences, so gender differences, or race differences, specifically. And they especially don't like those conclusions if they're supported by an evolutionary explanation or a behavioral genetic explanation, and those two kind of go hand-in-hand, because, you know, evolution works on, uh, our genes. So, uh, I keep ripping out my earbuds. Um, so, when it comes to the kinds of conclusions that are going to really irritate people, people are gonna, they're- they're gonna tend to be in evolutionary psychology and behavioral genetics, and the kind they're really gonna love are gonna be in like social psychology. So, it's all these, "Every group difference is caused by discrimination." Um, "Every group differences is caused by, like, cultural expectations of people." You know, "Men and women are no different if it weren't for the fact that we make girls wear pink (laughs) and make them take ballet class." Um, whereas evolutionary psychologists are like, "No, there are very good reasons to expect that men and women would have evolved to have different bodies, which they do have, and different brains, which they do have, that lead to different, you know, general personality differences." Um-And then, and then people specifically are like, especially hate these differences if, as we were talking about at the start of this conversation, if the differences favor men over women, or if they favor like, specifically white people over Black people. So, if there's anything where white people are outperforming Black people, or women, or men are outperforming women, and then you provide an evolutionary or genetic explanation for that, those are the kinds of things that are gonna get you fired. (laughs) Uh, they're gonna get your paper retracted, um, and people are gonna call you all kinds of names. So, yeah. Evolutionary psychology is kind of screwed, I think. (laughs) Uh, especially as things move toward this, "Let's be careful and avoid the potentially harmful topics as women take over academia." Uh, you would think that people are going to become more accepting of evolutionary psychology because they kind of have been for a little while, but we might be at a turning point and it might-

Chris Williamson 55:48 Oh, it could regress.

Cory Clark 55:49 ... actually become... Mm-hmm. I, I think it's actually quite likely too, yeah.

Chris Williamson 55:53 Wouldn't that be a shame if there's been all of this time spent with behavioral genetics and evolutionary psychology-

Cory Clark 56:00 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 56:00 ... kind of dispensing some of the, uh, slime that maybe it had accumulated or was thrown at it, and slowly over time... You know, if you, if you want to avoid the replication crisis, the two places that you want to be are in evolutionary psychology and behavioral genetics.

Cory Clark 56:13 That's so true, yeah.

Chris Williamson 56:14 They're the two places that haven't been slammed by-

Cory Clark 56:17 And the place you don't want to be is social psychology. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 56:20 Yeah. So, so the least reliable of all-

Cory Clark 56:23 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 56:23 ... of the different psychology disciplines has been the one-

Cory Clark 56:26 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 56:26 ... which is currently the most on the rise, the one that is politically, emotionally the most upheld in order to be able to support. Um, yeah. It's very, very backward. But it would be a shame-

Cory Clark 56:36 Yes.

Chris Williamson 56:36 ... if we've done all of that work, you know, you and your field have done all of this work to get it to the stage where it's regarded in relatively neutral light for a, uh, what did we call it? The academics, uh, the academic, this academic sex ratio hypothesis? What the fuck did we call it?

Cory Clark 56:50 (laughs) Yeah.

Chris Williamson 56:51 What do you call it? Whatever.

Cory Clark 56:52 Gender ratio? Gender ratio hypothesis? Whatever. Yeah.

Chris Williamson 56:54 Um, so you, you tried to work this out. You tried to do a study about taboos and censorship, and for this, you tried to recruit every psychology professor in the US.

Cory Clark 57:04 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 57:04 Wh-

Cory Clark 57:05 At the top 130 institutions, yeah.

Chris Williamson 57:07 Okay.

Cory Clark 57:07 I tried. I only got like, 10 or 11% of them, but, so it was like, about 500 people.

Chris Williamson 57:12 Quite a lot.

Cory Clark 57:13 Yeah. Kind of, quite a lot. Um, and we see these, the, my favorite one... So, I, I, so after I interviewed, I interviewed around 40 or so and asked them like, "What are the most controversial conclusions?" And that's how I discovered it's these types of conclusions with these differences, um, and if they have evolved, people really don't like those conclusions. But then I asked a follow-up sample of these like, around 500 people, um, their views about these conclusions. And one of them is that men and women evolve different psychological characteristics, and... A finding we see across all of the conclusions, but this one it's the most entertaining, is that men are pretty sure that that conclusion is true, (laughs) and women are like, very on the fence about it. So, the mean for women is closer to like, the midpoint, um, whereas men are sort of clustered toward the top of the s- scale. And so we see across all controversial conclusions that men think they're more likely to be empirically correct, whereas women are more likely to think that they're false. Um, and then we see that the people who think that they're true are self-censoring more, which inevitably means that what we hear publicly about controversial conclusions is systematically distorted, and the impression is that these bad, controversial conclusions are false, and they're fringe, and no one believes they're true. People believe they're true. It's just they won't talk about it out loud. Um, so it, it, it really distorts the perception of scientific consensus any time you get like, one of these, one of these conclusions that po- has potential to get you in trouble. Um, and then we looked at like, all these kinds of things. For example, I asked, um, professors, "Imagine a scholar who forwards an evolutionary or genetic explanation for a group difference that favors, um, men over women, or white people over Black people. What should happen to a scholar who would forward such a conclusion?" And across the board we see gender differences here, whereas female psychology professors are more likely to support ostracizing them, uh, calling them racist or sexist or bigoted, uh, shaming them on social media, not publishing their work even if it has merit, not hiring them even if they meet typical standards. And so women, like, their, their moral concerns will, uh, makes them... Uh, which is sort of strange, 'cause I think men might be slightly more punitive than women in general. But in this particular context, women are more punitive across the board, um, toward their peers who forward controversial conclusions or conclusions that they don't like, because they perceive them as potentially like, morally bad. Um, so yeah. I am, I'm quite, (laughs) I'm quite worried for the future (laughs) of science, uh, at least, at least the version of it that, that I thought was what we were doing. Um, it, but it, it just might completely transform into something quite different. Um, and maybe-

Chris Williamson 1:00:09 What?

Cory Clark 1:00:09 ... that'll be good. I don't know. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 1:00:10 Have you got, have you got any idea how, um, supporting or not supporting groups are if you were to give a behavioral genetics or evolutionary psychology explanation for racial or sex differences between groups that favored women or favored minorities?

Cory Clark 1:00:30 Hmm. So, I didn't ask that one because it was not... So, actually it was specifically mentioned as not (laughs) controversial, so when I interviewed, uh, the first round of psychology professors, they were l- they were like, "Well, it's only controversial if the conclusion favors men over women. It's only controversial if it favors white people over Black people." And so it's really this like, particular kind. It's, it's conclusions that have potential to portray groups that are perceived as vulnerable or disadvantaged, um, if you portray them more negatively than the group that is perceived as, you know, powerful or advantaged. So, it's essentially white men. Um, so you can publish things about white men being bad at something, but you can't publish, uh, things about other groups, uh.

Chris Williamson 1:01:12 Um, would they be happy with that being a behavioral genetics or evolutionary psychology explanation, do you think?

Cory Clark 1:01:17 I...Yeah, that's a good question. Um-

Chris Williamson 1:01:19 I reckon they wouldn't. I reckon they wouldn't for the reason that that opens the door to-

Cory Clark 1:01:24 Right.

Chris Williamson 1:01:24 ... a different piece of research. Like, what, the, the easiest way to do this is to delegitimize all of behavioral genetics and all of evolutionary psychology carte blanche-

Cory Clark 1:01:32 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 1:01:32 ... because downstream, like, the presumption is that this has been used previously in a nefarious way, or this could be used in a politically, uh, inconvenient way, even if it's real. Uh, so if we just say that this is off the table, I would guess that-

Cory Clark 1:01:46 Hm.

Chris Williamson 1:01:46 ... on average, you're going to find that basic behavioral, genetic, and evolutionary psychology explanations, even if they do favor underrepresented groups, are, uh, gonna be pushed away.

Cory Clark 1:01:56 I think those would be less, less controversial, but I think you're right that they still would be somewhat controversial because people would fear, um, n- the legitimizing the, the approach to the question.

Chris Williamson 1:02:08 Yep.

Cory Clark 1:02:09 Um, so for example, some people seem to not like that, um, you know, if you look at the NBA in the United States, that's overwhelmingly, uh, African Americans playing in the NBA in the United States. They're vastly disproportionately represented. Um, and so some people have said, "Well, you know, because of different evolutionary pressures, we grow up in different en- or, you know, evolved in different environments that's caused different body structures." Um, and so you provide an evolutionary explanation, well, black men are better at basketball than white men, uh, on average. And there is some resistance to that, and I think it's because of the implication that there are differences, right? And that it makes sense that there would be differences given that different populations evolved in different climates. Um, so yeah. I think it would be less controversial, but it still would be controversial and especially for people who are, like, sort of savvy and know, like, "Well, if I commit to this, what else am I potentially committing to?" Um-

Chris Williamson 1:03:06 Ripley slope.

Cory Clark 1:03:08 Yeah. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 1:03:08 Okay, so you found, there was four of these most taboo conclusions that you found. Men and women have different psychological characteristics because of evolution. Biological sex is a binary for the majority of people. The tendency to engage in sexually coercive behavior likely evolved because it conferred some evolutionary advantages on men who engaged in such behavior.

Cory Clark 1:03:28 Genghis Khan. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 1:03:28 And (laughs) gender, gender biases are not the most important drivers of the underrepresentation of women in STEM fields.

Cory Clark 1:03:37 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 1:03:37 Like, those, th- that's like ahe- that's all headlines that I've read for the last two years-

Cory Clark 1:03:43 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 1:03:44 ... have fall into one of those buckets.

Cory Clark 1:03:45 Those are four of the ten. There are other ones related to, uh, race as well, and then there are other ones related to politics, so just even the idea that psychology discriminates against conservatives, some people mentioned. Um, or the idea that academia, you know, if it doesn't discriminate against black people, what does that say? Um...

Chris Williamson 1:04:03 Uh, so, sorry, d- that's, that's an interesting one. I didn't know about the conservative side.

Cory Clark 1:04:07 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 1:04:07 But what's interesting there is that conservatives aren't an underrepresented group.

Cory Clark 1:04:12 No, they are. Or they are in psychology. Not in-

Chris Williamson 1:04:15 Yes. Ah, yes.

Cory Clark 1:04:15 ... not in the world. Not in the US, but-

Chris Williamson 1:04:16 Yes, yes, yeah, but that's the point, right? So, um, in the world, it's not like, it's not like conservatives are some maligned group that have needed-

Cory Clark 1:04:24 Right.

Chris Williamson 1:04:24 ... to be upheld morally. So that one, to me, screams much more about motivated reasoning that if you poll academics, on average, especially now, modern academia, they're leaning pretty hard left.

Cory Clark 1:04:37 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 1:04:37 So that, that's just, like, out-group tribal bias.

Cory Clark 1:04:40 Hmm. Yeah, people have been debating that one. Some people say that it's that, it's just conservatives aren't good at science (laughs) , or they just don't like science. Um, but there have been other studies, like In- Inbar and Lammers, and they, like, academics will straight up say that they would discriminate against conservatives in hiring and talk invites and things like that. So, there's good reason to believe people are just discriminating against (laughs) conservatives.

Chris Williamson 1:05:05 I think it was, uh, Scott Galloway taught me maybe it's a third or 50% of Democrat parents fear that their child will marry a Republican.

Cory Clark 1:05:13 (laughs) Yeah. The, the in-group/out-group hatred with the political thing is, is really huge, and people just admit it. They don't even feel ashamed, right? Um...

Chris Williamson 1:05:23 If you track, if you track, um, political bias against, uh, racism-

Cory Clark 1:05:30 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:05:30 ... like, people are way more politically racist than they are racially racist.

Cory Clark 1:05:34 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:05:34 By a huge amount. It's like by, uh, l- uh, lots of, lots of multiples.

Cory Clark 1:05:38 Yeah. It's true. It's true. And, and yet we don't care as much about that one for some reason. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 1:05:44 Well, it's bec- uh, the, the interesting thing there is that, like, your politics tell me a lot more about you than your race, right? They tell me more about your worldview, at least how you show up in the world, probably than your race. It's the same reason in the UK that, again, people are more prejudiced against those with different accents than those with different skin colors.

Cory Clark 1:06:01 Mm.

Chris Williamson 1:06:01 There's just a study that was done that was really interesting. And quite rightly, like, if somebody walks into a room that is of a different race to you, but speaks in a similar accent-

Cory Clark 1:06:09 Mm. Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 1:06:10 ... you have an awful lot more in common with that person than someone who walks into the room with the same skin color as you but a different accent.

Cory Clark 1:06:17 Right.

Chris Williamson 1:06:18 Because especially, especially, especially in the UK, and I learned this from someone who is British, um, the UK's got such a rigid class system-

Cory Clark 1:06:24 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:06:25 ... uh, and accent denotes an awful lot of that class.

Cory Clark 1:06:28 Right.

Chris Williamson 1:06:29 So-

Cory Clark 1:06:29 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:06:29 ... I can tell is somebody from an area that's similar to me or different than me? So, we played this game. I went to a, a retreat a couple of weeks ago in LA, and there was one other British guy there, and we were talking about, like, a similar sort of thing. And this guy had, like, he had quite a nice, it's Ed from, uh, uh, w- like, he's a YouTuber. And, uh, he's got a r- a nice British accent. I think he grew up in the Cotswolds, which is, like, quite a fancy sort of countryside place. And the guys are like, "What class do you think he is? Like, tell me what you know about him just based on the way he speaks." I hadn't met this guy before, and I was able to pin him down to pretty much the region he was in, the-

Cory Clark 1:07:05 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 1:07:05 ... uh, class that he grew up in. I knew that he went to private school. I knew that he was university educated. I knew this, this, this, and this, and this, just b- from the way that he spoke.

Cory Clark 1:07:13 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:07:13 So, again, with this, like, you're, th- there are many things that are more, um, informative about who somebody is than their skin color.

Cory Clark 1:07:22 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 1:07:22 And yet, that was originally, 50 years ago, one of the goals of the sort of racial justice movement to try and get us to the stage where skin color kind of was dispensed and moved to the side. And now it's been put front and center again.

Cory Clark 1:07:38 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:07:38 And as, uh, despite the fact that it is not a particularly reliable signal of lots and lots of things about the way that people show up in the world.

Cory Clark 1:07:45 Yeah. It is, it is interesting. We appear to have gone like a little bit, like th- th- there are even some people advocating for like racial segregation on both sides, like well on both sides. Like some, uh, I think it was NYU was considering having all black dorms, which is one thing. But then there was another one where this group of white people were like, "No black people can attend this meeting about racism, because they've had to put up with our shit too much as it is. (laughs) And like we can't subject them-

Chris Williamson 1:08:15 Oh my god.

Cory Clark 1:08:16 ... to us."

Chris Williamson 1:08:16 Surely not.

Cory Clark 1:08:17 Uh, and you're like, "What?" (laughs)

Chris Williamson 1:08:18 You do realize how this sounds, guys?

Cory Clark 1:08:20 This is so backwards. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 1:08:22 Yeah.

Cory Clark 1:08:22 Uh, yeah. It i- it is strange. I, I, I, I lived in England for two years, and, um, I was very surprised by how front and center class is there in a way that it's not so much like when people describe people, they often will like and, "Oh, they're very posh," or whatever.

Chris Williamson 1:08:38 Yeah. Yeah.

Cory Clark 1:08:38 And like in the US it would be really off-putting to be like, "Oh, they're like super rich and they have a great house." You know? (laughs) Like-

Chris Williamson 1:08:44 Yep.

Cory Clark 1:08:44 ... you wouldn't say that.

Chris Williamson 1:08:45 Yeah. Really, really good point.

Cory Clark 1:08:47 ... uh, I don't think you would. Yeah. The, um, that, that's-

Chris Williamson 1:08:49 But I think it might be because you guys don't have as much racial diversity, so this is like more of a defining thing for you guys.

Cory Clark 1:08:54 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:08:54 Not many black people. Lots of Indian people, lots of Pakistani people-

Cory Clark 1:08:57 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 1:08:57 ... like some Chinese people, but not, uh, we just don't have that same, that same sort of s- uh, split. I, I remember, this was a little while ago now, that they were trying to do graduation ceremonies, and they timetabled the graduation ceremonies. It's like, "This is the Hispanic ceremony, and this is the Black ceremony-

Cory Clark 1:09:15 Oh.

Chris Williamson 1:09:15 ... and this is the white ceremony."

Cory Clark 1:09:16 In the US?

Chris Williamson 1:09:16 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Some-

Cory Clark 1:09:17 Oh, gosh.

Chris Williamson 1:09:17 ... I don't know, high school or something. Have you seen Ryan Long? He's a Canadian comedian, and he did a famous video about three years ago that was, "Racists and Anti-Racists Agree On Everything."

Cory Clark 1:09:28 Oh, yeah. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 1:09:28 And him and his friend Danny wore the same T-shirt.

Cory Clark 1:09:30 (laughs) Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:09:31 And it was like, "We believe that the most important thing is your skin color." "Yes!"

Cory Clark 1:09:35 Yeah. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 1:09:35 And they high five. They go, "We believe that black children and white children should not be educated together." "Yes!"

Cory Clark 1:09:40 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 1:09:40 And they keep on agreeing on shit. So good.

Cory Clark 1:09:43 Yeah. I did see that. That was really funny. And it is, uh, strange that it's slightly accurate, at least in some groups of people. Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:09:52 Unfortunate. Okay.

Chris Williamson 1:09:53 So going back to your study, this one where you tried to get every f- fucking psychology professor in all of the US. What did the professors say about how to handle potentially harmful conclusions?

Cory Clark 1:10:05 Mm-hmm. Yeah. So that one, so I, I, I've been talking about these gender differences, but I should say like if I look across all of my data, mostly people do support academic freedom, and mostly people are against taking these moral concerns into consideration when deciding whether to publish something. So, I had a question, um, how certain, yeah, how certain should it be that a finding's gonna cause harm before it was suppressed? And I think the most common response was, "We should never suppress scientific findings." And then there was like a little bit for like high tiers, like there should be evidence that the only way to prevent the harm is to suppress the finding. And you get almost nobody down at the bottom, which is like, um, something like there should be, it should seem like it could cause harm (laughs) or something like that. And the reason to me that is semi-puzzling is because those Nature Springer guidelines I was talking about earlier, that very much seems to be their threshold. Their threshold seems to be like if it seems like it could cause harm, then we will reject or retract papers. But, but almost no psychology professors think that that is the appropriate place to draw the line, like a few people in my whole entire sample. And so that makes me wonder like how is it that the perception of where the field is going and what people want is actually what the extremists want? Um, and is it that the extremists are like trying to get these positions of power to influence policy? Which seems quite possible to me. Like if you're really motivated, maybe you're like, "I'll do that job even though I don't think-

Chris Williamson 1:11:43 Mm-hmm.

Cory Clark 1:11:43 ... being an editor would be all that much fun." But you got a lot of power. Um, is that happening? Or-

Chris Williamson 1:11:49 Is it disproportionate representation in terms of just how loud they are online?

Cory Clark 1:11:54 Yeah. So that's another thing is I think that because we have this relationship with self-censorship, it's the people who support academic freedom and pursuit of truth, and who think controversial conclusions might be true and we should publish them, those are the ones who are self-censoring. And it's the ones who are really concerned about the harms and think that, "You know, we should be firing people and retracting papers," um, they're very willing to say what they think out loud and on social media. So, I think there's just this distortion of what people want, um, because so many of us are too scared to say anything. Um, and, and it allows people who are in this vocal minority, and it's a small minority, a small mi- minority, uh, they can make these bold policy changes and not that many people will put up a fight. A few people have complained, but a lot of people who disagree with them aren't saying anything-

Chris Williamson 1:12:47 Because they're scared.

Cory Clark 1:12:47 ... they're staying out of it 'cause they're scared. 'Cause they don't want to be the next one with the target on their back.

Chris Williamson 1:12:52 What's the implication of this? Like we've got, you know, this milieu of hyper-sensitivity, um-

Cory Clark 1:12:59 Milieu. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 1:13:00 Milieu. That's it. Uh, I, I speak French.

Cory Clark 1:13:02 Nice use of milieu.

Chris Williamson 1:13:03 I speak, I speak, I speak French as well.

Cory Clark 1:13:05 I've always wanted to drop that into it, but I just never have. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 1:13:07 Watch me. Watch me in front of you. Um-

Cory Clark 1:13:09 Well done.

Chris Williamson 1:13:09 Yeah. Like, you, you, you said there's this ambient background, we are concerned about these kinds of harms. Two pretty reliably robust areas of research that are being, you know, uh, thrown to the side and maligned. Um, what's the...... yeah, what are the implications of this? Or what did you, after having conducted the study and then looked at the data and realized, "Holy fuck, what's going on?"

Cory Clark 1:13:33 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 1:13:33 Like, what did it make you reflect on, or what did it make you think?

Cory Clark 1:13:35 Well, part of my motivation for running this study in the first place was just because I had the strong suspicion that this was exactly what was happening, because I... Because I'm sort of like, I'll talk openly about these issues, or at least more openly than a lot of people will, most people will. Um, people will come to me and like, complain to me about stuff, but they don't say anything out loud. So, I know all of these people who don't like the way things are headed, they think these new policy changes that are prioritizing harms over science are bullshit, and they won't say it to each other, but they'll say it to me. (laughs) And I was like-

Chris Williamson 1:14:10 Ah, you're a safe space for bigotry. That's what you're saying.

Cory Clark 1:14:14 (laughs) Ah. Yes.

Chris Williamson 1:14:14 Fantastic. I understand. Cool. Thank you.

Cory Clark 1:14:16 Let's make that the, the clip of the video, please. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 1:14:18 Safe space for bigotry, Corrie Clark, PhD.

Cory Clark 1:14:21 Thank you. (laughs) Um, so I, I, I knew all of these people were afraid, but I was like, "I actually am kind of curious, what is the true majority perspective? Or rather, like, how off am I in relation to other people?" And then once I saw the results, I was like, "Wow, that's even more than I expected." I didn't realize, like, this many people were this against what's happening. Like, we had a question. This was my favorite question, I think, on the, um, whole survey, which was, "How much, uh, contempt versus admiration and respect do you have toward professors who start petitions or social media campaigns to retract papers for moral reasons?" And on a zero to a hundred scale, zero being maximum contempt to a hundred maximum admiration and respect, the modal response was zero. So like, people really hate these people, and I wouldn't know it from hanging out on Twitter. Like, a lot of them are signing the petitions, and they're certainly not like, shaming the people. I mean, some people are, but most people aren't. Most people are just staying quiet, or even participating. Um, so I was quite surprised at how one direction-

Chris Williamson 1:15:26 Cowardly.

Cory Clark 1:15:27 H- Yeah. How cowardly. (laughs) How cowardly everyone's being. But, what I think is potentially interesting about that is it suggests there's a lot of preference falsification going on, which is, I think, Timur Kieran... I'm probably pronouncing that name wrong. His concept. But, what's interes-

Chris Williamson 1:15:45 What's, what's that? Explain that.

Cory Clark 1:15:46 So, preference falsification is essentially when people publicly are s- are saying that they believe or support something that they don't actually truly believe or support. Um, and when you have that, when you have all these people essentially lying, uh, to protect themselves, protect their jobs, or their reputations, or whatever, you create a situation that's really precarious. Because if people get information and, and, and specifically it's that they think their views are the minority and so they don't say anything. If those people find out that their views aren't the minority, that their views are actually the majority, all of a sudden they might be more willing to speak out. Um, so I do think it creates this possibility that if I ever get this paper published, (laughs) we'll see, then suddenly, all of these psychology professors are gonna be like, "Oh, a lot of people feel the way I feel. Maybe it's okay for