Modern WisdomAbortion, Friendships & Dad Bods - Dr Jaimie Krems
EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 30,376 words- 0:00 – 0:24
Intro
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Among women, for example, chastity is a big thing. Males really prefer fidelity and chastity in female mates. If a woman gains a reputation as being unfaithful or sexually promiscuous, that's a really hard reputation to do away with, right? But it's-
- CWChris Williamson
You can't show everybody how little sex you're having.
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Exactly. Exactly.
- 0:24 – 8:38
How Male & Female Friendships Differ
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
(air whooshes)
- CWChris Williamson
How do male and female friendships differ?
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Oh, God, how much time do you have? Um, okay. So, uh, we're not gonna start with the easy stuff. Um, structurally, they differ and terms of the, uh... So, males typically form these less emotionally close, looser, but multi-male friendship groups. Females tend to form really emotionally intense and close dyadic relationships, so female-female relationships. Um, that's one of the biggest ways that they differ, because it has all kinds of implications for what happens when those friendships break up. Um, female friendships tend to be shorter lived and more fragile than these more robust multi-male friendship groups. It has implications for the acrimonious end. Um, women share much more, uh, intimate details with one another, and this information can be ammunition that, uh, friends can use against each other when this friendship breaks up. Um, they also spend so much time together, so when the friendship does break up, there can be huge grief at that. Um, and I could go on and on, talking for about four hours about it, but that's, those are some of the ways.
- CWChris Williamson
Why would it be adaptive for women to have fewer friends with deeper connection versus men having a broader friend group?
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Yeah, we don't know. (laughs) Um, it's one of the-
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
It's... Honestly, we don't. I'll probably say that a ton. So, we do have really great evidence from non-human primate work, um, Susan Perry's lab at UCLA, Joan Silk who is at ASU, um, and that work suggests that among non-human primate females, so capuchins, uh, baboons, having just a few close female friends can increase the females' own longevity and the health and longevity of her offspring. So, it does seem like there are strong links between, uh, female friendship and female fitness. There is some indication that perhaps in humans as well, so, uh, Stacey Rukis' work, um, perhaps in humans as well, female friendship is also fitness-enhancing. Um, our friends do a lot of good things for us. But why that would be different among females versus males, that's a really great question. And in humans, yeah, we don't know.
- CWChris Williamson
Would it be a potential case that with alloparenting, the shared parenting of your child amongst usually family members, but then sometimes super close friends as well, the cost of choosing a wrong friend to look after your child is so great that the threshold for you to call them a good friend needs to be higher than for men? If you're going to go and try and take down some mammoth that you're almost certainly going to fail at doing, you don't mind who it is that you go with, right?
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
Like, you know, if one-third of you are going to die over the next week, then cool, like it, it can be whoever you want. But if you're going to put your child into the hands of somebody else, that, to me, would suggest, "Okay, well, I, I need to make sure that I have a greater threshold for friendship than the, the guy that just wants to throw spears at things and, and talk shit."
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Yeah, so there's sort of, um, a greater confluence of benefits among men. Among women, maybe not so much. So, that's one of the answers, or possible answers, is the importance of alloparenting. Um, another one is this idea that, um, our women, f- uh, you know, we birth offspring, and somehow, we're closer to our friends because our female friends hijack this hormonal, physiological mental system. Um, that's probably not the case, but that's one explanation. Um, another one that might hold some water that people like Tanya Reynolds and, um, uh, the late and great Anne Campbell have, um, been proponents of is this idea that there's a long history in humans of patrilocality, which means that males stay in their natal group and females often leave the natal group and end up in their, uh, male partner's group with a bunch of co-wives, potentially. And so, if that's the case, then females are potentially going to be designed to form kin-like relationships with people who aren't kin, whereas males have that sort of buffer of, uh, what we'd call lowercase R, relatedness. So, if they help each other, they sort of help themselves 'cause they're genetically related, it boosts their inclusive fitness. For women, if they help the other women in their social group, maybe their co-wives, they're not related necessarily, and so they're not gonna get that just boost to inclusive fitness. Maybe there's something going on that predisposes women to, um, form these kin-like relationships to make other women more invested in them and then maybe more invested in helping them and their offspring.
- CWChris Williamson
Uh, because stuff like infanticide and even, uh, homicide is attempted between women within the harem of whatever guy they're with. When it comes to what men want from men that they're friends with and what women want from women that they're friends with, how do they differ?
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Yeah, so um, my colleague, Kayla Williams, who's a professor at Hamilton College has this really great paper in evolution and human behavior on sex differences in friend preferences. Um, men seem to prefer the sort of coalitional support, social support. Um, women want more emotional support. Um, they also tend to want more time and energy put into the relationship. Um, men also tend to prefer the sort of what are sometimes called shoulder-to-shoulder relationships. So, "Okay, yeah, maybe we'll talk. I don't care if we talk, I don't need to talk to you, but I wanna do stuff together." Um, women, it's more face-to-face, "I need to hash out everything that just happened because that bitch looked at me funny."
- CWChris Williamson
Did you see in Friends by Robin Dunbar, there was a study done on the angle that men stand facing each other-
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
... and that women stand facing each other? Did you see this?
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
No, I read that book too. I, I sent it to my parents 'cause I'm in it. He was, he was my old advisor. He's the coolest.
- CWChris Williamson
He is a legit legend, yes. He was on the show a couple of weeks ago. So, um-
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Nice.
- CWChris Williamson
... in it, he said that... And this is so fas-... I can't unsee this. This is one of those things that you can't unsee. Next time that you go to a party, look at the angle that men are standing talking to each other. It's almost always going to be slightly open, so they're gonna be about 120 degrees, was the average angle that was found. And the argument for this that was put forward is that the only real time that men would stand face-to-face is if they were about to fight.
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Like that's quite a confrontational, this-
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... front on, eye-to-eye thing. And I notice it in myself with my friends, I notice it in people when I go into parties, and yet you see girls, and girls are totally happy to be completely front on to each other.
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
Uh, so yeah, that confrontational undertone, physical confrontational undertone is super interesting.
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
That's, it, it reminds me, so, uh, if men are going to stand at an angle to sort of, um, defray the possible, uh, cue that, "Uh-oh, I'm gonna attack you," um, there's some work that suggests that maybe the reason that women share all of these secrets and share these sort of evaluative information, I might tell you who I really hate or how I really feel about someone or a phenomenon, um, is to say, "Okay, you have some ammo on me. I'm a friend, I'm a friendly, you can trust me." And it does seem to work. Um, so if I share social information with you, particularly information that's sensitive, or even if I just self-disclose to you, you're more likely to trust me, like me, and feel close to me. Um, it's part of why we think that venting works so well among women to manipulate alliances.
- CWChris Williamson
Right. So,
- 8:38 – 18:01
The Female Need to Vent
- CWChris Williamson
venting is different to just saying, "I really don't like that girl over there because of something." That feels... Is, is that too Machi- obviously sort of Machiavellian that it's an outright take-down of somebody else if it's couched in this sort of frustrated, agitated language that, "Oh, you know, I, I, I, I, I just need to tell you, I gotta tell you about this thing, and she's such a bitch and I, I, I, I hate her shoes and I hate her hair and she whatever, whatever"?
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
Is, is that... What's, what's the difference between venting and just outright, like, being abusive to somebody behind their back?
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Yeah, um, so I, I would say that a, a good example of venting is like, "Oh, I'm just so frustrated. Chris, I don't know what to do. I mean, uh, she's just canceled on me again, and I, I have a really hard time, and I don't, I just don't know how to handle this." So, um, what we think is going on is that, um, it's not that venting is any less Machiavellian, although it might actually help venters to not be conscious that they're trying to harm a target, the person they're venting about. Um, it's that compared to more overt competitor derogation saying like, "Oh, she canceled on me again," versus, "She sucks so hard, she's so selfish, I hate her," um, that allows you to harm the target just as much, so you harm their reputation just as much in the eyes of the person that you're talking to as if you said, "She sucks and she's horrible." But unlike if you say, "She sucks and she's horrible," you don't look bad. Your reputation is buffered. How much they like you is buffered. Um, it's really just this form of venting that really makes them, makes the person you're talking to, like the target less but still like you just as much.
- CWChris Williamson
Uh, by playing a agitated victim in one form or another, it doesn't make you look like someone that's actually sly. Because obviously one of the things-
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
(clears throat) ... I, I, I... As someone that was a club promoter for a long time, I saw this, that-
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Oh, yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... a big insight you learn about people that often talk behind people's backs, if you pay attention, is that you shouldn't trust them to not talk behind your back.
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
These are the s-... They're not just doing it for them, they're doing it for everybody, for the most part. But venting circumvents that defense mechanism a little bit because it makes us think, "Oh, well, you know, as long as... Uh, because I'm a good person, I'm not going to agitate Jamie to the point where she's going to say that I've canceled on her again, because I'm not the sort of person that cancels." So, I guess the venting is a little bit more surreptitious with the way that it delivers it.
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Yeah, so I, I think there are two things going on there, and, and one is exactly what you're saying, right? So, um, people think that venting, or venters have much lower intention to harm the targets, and they think that derogators have high intention to harm the targets. And as soon as you manipulate that, then you manipulate all sorts of downstream effects from venting. So, if you think that I want to harm the target, say I, that we're actually secret rivals or something, then my venting isn't gonna be effective in making you think the target sucks, and my venting isn't gonna be effective in making you think that I'm not aggressive and I'm not manipulative.Um, another thing that's going on is that ... So, uh, I subscribe to these, these models of friendship whereby people have sort of friend rankings. Um, and so I might say all kinds of negative, awful things and break all sorts of people's trust to my best friend. I'll tell her what everyone says, um, but if I'm doing that to her, she might infer, sort of as a cue, if I'm saying, "Well, Chris said this," and I shouldn't say it out loud, but Chris said this, she might think, "Oh, well Jamie values me more than Jamie values Chris," and that could just sort of bolster where she thinks I put her in my friend network.
- CWChris Williamson
Ah.
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
And this is Kela Williams, and she really is the top of my friend network, and I really do tell her everything.
- CWChris Williamson
Fantastic.
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
I don't know why people don't assume that.
- CWChris Williamson
Fantastic.
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
But-
- CWChris Williamson
Um, when it comes to getting other people to buy into you as a friend-
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
... understanding that you're giving them privileged information that, in the wrong hands, would be ruinous, that seems like a smart, uh, um, a, uh, costly way to show that you are of good faith. Like if you're going to say, "I need to tell you about my chronic flatulence. It's been-"
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
"... plaguing me for m- a, a long time. I can't really talk to anybody else about it." In the wrong hands, you know, that would be bad, bad info. Uh, what ... uh, are there any more nuances there with regards to how people open up with that privileged information? Does it relate at all to venting in one way or another?
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
So, I do think that, uh, venting shares in common some features with that sort of self-disclosure, right? And to the extent that venting does and can be a form of self-disclosure, like, "Oh, I just really can't stand this person," then maybe venting, um, enjoys some of the same functionality as self-disclosure, like making you think, "I like you better," or making you think that, "I'm really trustworthy." Um, I, I would say too that the, the ammo, the information ... So, I mean, ideally I don't have chronic flatulence, and it can't be smelled, right? Um, but something that's secret that is really hard to assess, that's the reputational damage that's really, really intense. And it might be ... Um, so among women, for example, um, uh, chastity is a big thing. Males really prefer fidelity, and chastity, and female mates on average, cishet, et cetera, et cetera. Um, if a woman gains a reputation as being, um, unfaithful or sexually promiscuous, that's a really hard reputation to do away with, right? But it's-
- CWChris Williamson
You can't show everybody how little sex you're having.
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Exactly. Exactly. But if a guy gets a reputation like, "Oh, you're a bum, and you have no job," or, you know, "You have no income," and he comes along with, you know, a Rolex and a Lamb- uh, my husband really loves the effing Murcielago, which is whatever. He comes along in a Murcielago, which means he probably has a small penis, but it also might mean that he has a lot of money. And so you can refute that reputational attack pretty easily, um, as with most of the reputational attacks on men, but a lot of the dimensions that women are valued for reputationally-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
... they're harder to refute.
- CWChris Williamson
That's interesting. So, the currency that women can manipulate within a friendship group in terms of what is most valued by other women, and specifically by men that are looking at those women as potential mates, is harder to falsify-
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Yeah.
- 18:01 – 25:30
How Attractiveness Impacts Female Friendships
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
- CWChris Williamson
Interesting. What-... role does attractiveness play in terms of impacting a woman's w- uh, role within friendship groups, ability to make friends, fragility as she climbs up the social hierarchy, and stuff like that?
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Yeah. So, one of the things that we thought, and there are some data that- that suggests that attractive women actually evoke or attract more aggression from other women. Um, and that might be the case because the more attractive a woman is, particularly as a mating competitor, you know, the more rivalrous, or the- the worse a competitor she is for you. If she's really good-looking, she can get what she wants better than you can get what you want, if you're another woman. Um, but what we're finding, my- my grad student Laurie and Mary and I, um, are really breaking down, uh, what it is that makes women threats computationally. Um, and what we're finding is maybe not that surprising, um, in light of some work by- by people like David Buss and- and Aaron Sell. It suggests that, for women, attractiveness is really important. Men value attractiveness in women as a cue to potential status and fertility and all of these good things. And attractive women end up getting all sorts of goodies. People wanna be their friends. People wanna give them things. They end up getting bigger salaries than less attractive women. And so, they're kind of formidable. They end up having a lot of power that they could withhold, or a lot of goodies that they can withhold from you. So, it turns out that it, that's actually much more complicated, um, when it comes to attractiveness, because people wanna be their friends, even though they're also potentially really dangerous rivals on the mating market. If a woman's just promiscuous, then it's easy. She doesn't really possess any positive affordances for me. I can just say, "Fuck her," and aggre- gress against her.
- CWChris Williamson
Ah, okay. I was going to ask, why is it the case that guys like to be around other guys that are successful?
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
They have this sort of trickle-down effect of- of casting a broad shadow of their resources and their success. What- w- w- what's the difference there?
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Yeah, so women end up facing this bind that men don't. Um, guys love being around other successful guys, and they're even actually pretty big fans of being friends with guys that can out-compete them on all sorts of things. So, if I'm a guy-
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, positively disposed to having friends that are further up the hierarchy than you.
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Exactly, exactly. You want them to be better than you at stuff. And it doesn't threaten you, it doesn't bother you. That's great. And even when little boys are talking, they'll say, like, "My dad's car is a rocket ship." "Oh, well, my dad's car is a bigger rocket ship." Whereas little girls end up doing very much sort of these weird strategic gymnastics to not stand out and, God forbid, never seem like they're striving or being superior, because among girls and women, if you're the person that says, "Well, mine's even better. Mine's even bigger," you're going to be excluded. And so, women end up facing this bind of having to compete to get what they want, but they can't necessarily lean on some other women to do that, because while competing, while striving, they end up being the kind of person that gets kicked out of the friendship group.
- CWChris Williamson
Why is it more-
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Did that make sense?
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, it does. Uh, I'm trying to work out the difference between men and women of why the women seem to have a more zero-some mentality when it comes-
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
... to their friendships than the men do.
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Yeah, so I don't think we have a good explanation. We have a lot of good data that suggests, uh, so Joyce Benenson's incredible work that men are more cooperative with one another. They can handle more conflict with one another. They reconcile after conflict more with one another than women do. Um, and with my- with my grad student, Crystal Duarte, we have some data that suggests that it's not that women completely disfavor competitiveness in their female friends. They can handle competitiveness in female friends. They just don't want their female friends to be competitive toward them. So, if you're competitive toward your rival, or even if you're competitive toward the woman I don't like, awesome. Good for you. Kick that bitch's ass. But don't be competitive toward me. Whereas guys are okay with that. They can handle that.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Um, the best explanation that I think we have really does come from Joyce Benenson's sort of overview of the costs and benefits of cooperating and competing in- in primate societies. So, males have this ability to band together to guard the group in intergroup warfare. Females never did that. They don't have this pressure to do that. And so, for males, any one ally might be simply more valuable. And so yeah, we might hate each other, and maybe, you know, I wanna kill you, but at the end of the day, if my group is bigger than this other group, even if I wanna kill this other guy in my group, he- he has more benefits to me alive than dead.
- CWChris Williamson
Friend guarding and mate guarding to me seemed like two very similar, uh-
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Yes.
- CWChris Williamson
... uh, dynamics. The fact that, uh, I learned this from David Buss, that mate guarding, if you have a partner that you feel is starting to slip away from you, you move into a cost-inflicting strategy where you try and bring down their mate value. You do things like make sure that you check their texts. You make them feel more insecure. It can come up with things like gaslighting. With men it often results in, uh, even domestic violence, where they can start to inflict physical costs. This is a manifestation of someone being concerned that their partner is going to go and leave them for someone else. And then I found out from you that there is the exact same thing for friends, and that's friend guarding.
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Yeah. Yeah, so, um, friend guarding can look really similar to mate guarding. It's just you're guarding a friend instead of a mate. Um, the sort of things that make, uh, a mate poacher more...... scary to you are gonna be different than the things that make a friend poacher scary. Um, and so we started to investigate some of that. Um, but I, I think for me at least, the coolest difference that we're seeing is that people are not that... are not just absolutely necessarily predisposed to hate people who guard them. So, if I guarded my friend, there are some instances in which my friend might actually like that, and use that as a cue that I really value her. And it's probably the same case in romantic relationships, except much of the research... Although if you look at, like, 1950s women's magazines it's different, but much of the research says that we just hate jealous people. We don't want our partners to be jealous, full stop. And that's not entirely true, um, for our mates or for our friends, and I, I think that's really apparent among friends. If, if I say to my best friend, like, "You're spending a lot of time with this other person, and I, I love our friendship and I don't wanna lose it," um, that is a cue of how much I value my friend and our friendship, and my best friend might love that and increase how much he values me.
- 25:30 – 31:49
Finding a Balance of Jealousy
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
- CWChris Williamson
I suppose outward displays of jealousy are the costly signals that we were talking about before. It's also opening up a degree of vulnerability from you. I guess one of the sort of common dynamics that people talk about avoiding in relationships is coming across too needy-
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... that coming across too needy is something that is a bit of a turnoff for people, and it can cause many attachment styles to turn and run. So, is there something similar when it comes to friendships? Like, what, what's the delicate balance between jealousy, too little, the right amount, and not enough?
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Yeah, that's such a great question. I, I was talking, um, uh, about gratitude and the sort of, the way you have to calibrate gratitude, and you can't give too big a present or too small a present, um, recently, and the... I think the issue is you just have to hit the sweet spot. So, if I tell my friend, "You know, hang out with anyone. Tell anyone anything. I don't care who you're spending your time with. I don't need you or need to talk to you," um, that's a signal that I don't value her as much as I should. Um, and yet if I tell her, "You know, if you leave me, I will slit my wrists and die like Frankie Pentangeli," um, that's probably not the best thing either. So, what I think we have to do are, are these sort of meta representations of, "Okay, where does my best friend value me? How much does she value me? Okay, she values me at a 10. I need to do behaviors at around a 10, 'cause if I do behaviors at an 11, too much Pentangeli land, bad. If I do them at a 1, she's gonna think I don't love, love her and she's gonna go to somebody that does value her the way she deserves to be valued." So, what we think is that these things are about calibration. What we know is very little (laughs) . I mean, we, we really know very little here.
- CWChris Williamson
I suppose this, the, the jealousy and the concern must be one of the reasons why people are sometimes hesitant to... I know that I was like this, 'cause I was an only child so I grew up not really understanding how social... still don't, so- sort of social groups and networks and friendships and stuff work. But I always remember being very hesitant about introducing a friend from one friendship group to a friend from another friendship group in case they started liking each other more than each of them individually liked me, and then they would become friends and then I would, I, I would be left out.
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Yeah. No, people hate that. Women hate that more than men, but, um, I'm also an only child, so good for us. Uh, look at us go, parents. Um, so (laughs) , uh, I do think that people are aware of that, um, especially women. Um, so women report greater friendship jealousy over the potential loss of a best friend than a close friend, um, although males report, uh, report potentially greater friendship jealousy at the loss of an acquaintance. Again, maybe just 'cause any one ally is more beneficial for me. Um, so I do think people are really sensitive to this, but our culture has long said, "Well, jealousy is this horrible vice. You're a bad person." In fact, even researchers have said, um, if you feel jealous it's related to low self-esteem, other personal deficits. Um, oh, my favorite is that, um, if you feel jealousy in a friendship, it's because you just are non-normally developing or you haven't matured enough to realize that no one relationship can fulfill all your needs. So, even researchers are shitting on this emotion that people have felt across cultures, across eras, and probably even non-human animals feel. So, what, what we can say there is we can't ask them, "Do you feel jealous?" but we can say they exhibit behavior pretty consistent with jealousy, like when-
- CWChris Williamson
What, like, what, what animals are, are proxy jealous?
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Oh, man. So, chimps do it, uh, horses do it. So female mustangs in Spain will bite and kick the friend poacher. They sort of have female best friends. They'll do that. Cows do it, dolphins do it, and lions do it. Uh, it does seem to be a social animal phenomenon. Um, so I think we actually, if we knew to look for it, we'd probably see it in even more social species.
- CWChris Williamson
And what you're saying is all of the researchers, or many of the researchers, are shitting on this emotion which has to be adaptive. It's so broadly, uh, found in the animal kingdom and so ubiquitous throughout all of humans. Like, it's here for a reason. It has to be signaling us, "This is something that you need to pay attention to."
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Yeah, exactly. If, if it's so and solely maladaptive, selection would've gotten rid of it-... but it's probably not so, and solely maladaptive. Rather, it does some benefit for us, um, probably and, in our view, pretty similar to Buss on jealousy, um, it serves an adaptive function or a function tributary to reproductive fitness that says, "Hey, don't lose this person that you value." So, for friendship jealousy, we sort of think it's, it's a combination of two things. I'm gonna feel more jealousy the more that I value the friend that I stand to lose, so a best friend versus a rando, um, and I'm gonna feel more jealousy the more threat or replacement threat that this other person stands to pose, the poacher. So, if the poacher is spending a lot of time with my friend, I might feel some jealousy like, "Okay, maybe my friend likes them better," but if my friend definitely prefers me to that person, so if my friend has a plus one to, um ... I'm trying to think of a concert I'd actually wanna go to, and that's really hard right now. A Metric concert 'cause I'm, I'm an aging hipster. Um, my friend has a plus one to a Metric concert and I can go, um, and, but their new friend also wants to go. Well, if my friend takes me, then I know she prefers me over her new friend, and even if she spends 40 hours with, a week with her new friend, I'm not as threatened because I know she prefers me.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- 31:49 – 41:54
Perceiving Women’s Shapes & Sizes
- CWChris Williamson
Okay. You looked at the differences between interpretations of women's body size and women's body shape. What did you learn there?
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Yes. Um, so, I mean, I don't think this is gonna be shocking for any man who has looked at women or for any woman who has cared what she looks like, but, um, to the best of my knowledge, it's the first empirical study to show that fat stigma is, uh, sensitive, not only to how big a woman's body is, but also where her fat is on her body. And so, um, two women who are the same exact height, the same exact weight, and the same BMI, if a woman carries her fat in her gut versus in her hips and thighs, the woman who carries her fat in her gut is going to be stigmatized much more. People have much less favorable views of her.
- CWChris Williamson
What do you mean when you say stigmatized?
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Uh, so they feel less warm toward her. They'd probably be more likely to discriminate against her in all sorts of ways. Um, and we also have some data that we haven't published yet about the stereotypes they hold about her, so they have more negative beliefs about her, that she's lazier, that she's less attractive, that she's less intelligent.
- CWChris Williamson
Okay. Why would it be the case that fat in the gut versus fat in the hips would have that effect?
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Yeah. So, I mean, Steve Gollan, um, and Leszek have, have really exploded the idea that waist-to-hip ratio, which is, um ... So, if your waist is small and your hips are big, you can think of, um, a, a beautiful statue. I'm trying not to say Kim Kardashian, but Kim Kardashian... Dear God. Sorry, I can't believe I've said Kim Kardashian on something scientific, but whatever, it's fine. So, small waist, big hips and thighs, good for her. Um, that probably doesn't signal fertility. It probably signals, though, future reproductive value, so the ability to have more children in the future, um, and-
- CWChris Williamson
What do you mean? What's the, what's the difference between those two things?
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
So, fertility would be, um, "Can I have kids right now?" So, we often think about fertility in relation to ovulation, which is even more immediate, that four-to-six-day window of when sex can lead to pregnancy. Um, but it's very likely more a signal of, of youth in particular, this waist-to-hip ratio, and so, and we do have some data consistent with that. People think that the more fat goes in the gut or around the waist, the larger the waist gets, the older the target is, particularly for women. And so, if we see that a woman has this waist-to-hip ratio, she might be healthier, she might have, um, potentially, more useful genes for us. We, I, I don't know if I buy that, um, but very likely, a woman who has such a waist-to-hip ratio is likely to be younger and have higher future reproductive value. Whereas a woman who has fat in her gut, that's the fat that's typically related to the things we associate with the negative outcomes linked to obesity. So, obesity doesn't cause these things necessarily, but things like, um, type 2 diabetes and heart disease, gut fat is what's really related to that more than just fat, period, which is awesome 'cause my ass is huge.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Sorry.
- CWChris Williamson
So, I remember reading-
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
You didn't need to know that.
- CWChris Williamson
I, I, the internet does know.
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
I remember reading, uh, a bunch of, a bunch of different things that were showing, um, tribe, tribal women and this, like, really insane-sized bum.
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
And one of the arguments that was put forward there is that having a huge ass offsets the weight of a child in front of the spine during child, childbearing, that you actually have a, a different way that the spine is loaded that may be able to make it easier. Another one was that wider hips create a physical cue of a broader birth canal, which maybe would-
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
... reduce complications during childbirth. Uh, but I did see a study about, maybe three months ago that said there is no correlation in fertility, in, uh, like, genuine fertility, between the waist-to-hip ratio-... uh, in, in women. So, I, it, it's one of those things where I'm like, "Why do we like it?" I'm trying to work out why men like it, and it does seem like it's the same as whatever, like, good, smooth skin or something.
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
It's just a cue of youthfulness that maybe we've managed to kid ourselves into, "Oh, it's something to do with the birth canal. It's something to do with the way that women can stand up when they've got a child."
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Yeah, we can come up with a lot of really silly or bad evolutionary takes, and my God, we have as a field. Um, (laughs) but that said, uh, I mean, I think the way that science should work is sort of throw it all against the wall and test it. Um, and for me at least, I, I would put my stock in whatever Lasek and Golin have to say. They're sort of the last word on this stuff for me. Um, and so what we know is that across cultures there does seem to be something going on, right? This is the shape we find most attractive, so something is happening. It's happening across cultures, um, it's happening largely across eras, um, and whatever it is seems to be something that attracts men to women. Okay, most of those things that attract men to women are related to fertility, um, maybe fecundity, youth, that kind of thing. This is probably one of those things, um, and, and I sort of buy the idea that it's, it's this future reproductive potential. Um, but it doesn't mean it's not, you know. Uh, these other, you know, steroplagia or... And there is something going on with the spine, um, that makes women more and less attractive during pregnancy. Um, I think David Lewis has some stuff on that and how stiletto heels change the shape of the spine and the bum, um, so, uh, these things are possible. Um, but if you wanted the, the final answer on it, don't, don't go to me. Go to Lasek and Golin. Um-
- CWChris Williamson
How-
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
... that's where I'd go.
- CWChris Williamson
How does body size interpretations differ from women to men?
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Um, do you mean that women view themselves as bigger or, or when you-
- CWChris Williamson
If you have a woman, if you have a woman that is of a size and if you have a man that is also-
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
... of a size, what are the sort of interpretations about the guy? If you have a fat guy, what do people think about him?
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Yeah.
- 41:54 – 47:56
Why Women Dress the Way They Do
- CWChris Williamson
so you spoke about, um, high heels on women-
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
... there. I wanna talk about the psychology of women's wardrobes 'cause I know that this is-
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Yes.
- CWChris Williamson
... something else that you looked at. What is going on with women's wardrobes? Why do they dress the way that they do?
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
I mean, there is a huge answer to that, and we've studied a sliver of it, and I think I should say here that so much of this stuff, um... So women's clothing seems like this sort of ephemeral, silly little topic, um, and even I agree with that. Um, although I love clothes, and if Phoebe Philo is listening, send me everything you got. Um, but-... it's a really fascinating phenomenon if you couch at it and sort of situate it in the world of these signals, so feathers on birds, um, these physical signals that tell other people about you. And the dimension that's different with humans is that we get to pick and choose. So a peacock doesn't really get to choose how long and beautiful and f- lush its tail is. Um, but for women, we do get to pick and choose these signals, and they can mean a lot. Um, and what we've found is that particularly when women are new to a group, they're gonna meet other women, they're more likely to dress modestly, um, so as to not be excluded or attacked by other women that they're meeting.
- CWChris Williamson
Why would it be the case that dressing non-modestly would cause them to be excluded or attacked?
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
And, um, so Tracy Vaenko has this beautiful study where she had a confederate, um, a, a, a young woman who was probably in college and up in Canada with her, um, and this confederate was dressed in one of two ways when she went into a room to talk to two female friends. Um, one way, she's wearing khakis and a blue crew-neck T-shirt, and she goes into the room to talk to the two friends, and the two friends are very pleasant to her. She also has a ponytail. Um, in the other one, her hair is all, like, va-va-voomy, she's wearing a low-cut pink V-neck thing and a push-up bra. She's dressed very, um, uh, sort of racy. Um, and when that... So it's the same woman, just dressed differently. She goes into that room. Tracy Vaenko has beautiful lists of what happened to that con- that woman when she went into the room. She got called a bitch, she got death stares, um, yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Who did she get called a bitch by?
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Two of the participants. Uh, so two female friends that were in there, they were chatting, uh-
- CWChris Williamson
Hang on. They were friends of the person that was coming in? Oh, no, the two friends were friends with each other.
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
No, no, no. They're two friends with each other.
- CWChris Williamson
Right.
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
And so this person comes into the room, and is just like, "Oh, can I take your surveys now?" Or, you know, um, "I'm trying to..." Just something really, really vicious, uh-
- CWChris Williamson
They knew that they were being studied.
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
... beyond their ideas. They did. They didn't know that they were being studied for this-
- CWChris Williamson
Ah, and they-
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
... but, yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... still called her a bitch?
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Right. Ah, okay, so this is the classic you're doing a study and the bit that his study is actually about is upon your entry or exit from the study, which is the fake thing. Like, the questionnaire-
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Yeah, I mean-
- CWChris Williamson
... that we're getting you to fill out has got fuck-all to do with what we're actually asking you about. It's-
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Exactly.
- CWChris Williamson
... the, the, the old man dropped his pencils, how quickly do you walk-
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
... down the corridor at the end of the, of the thing, like, all of that shit.
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Yes, but I think Tracy's study would replicate, yes.
- CWChris Williamson
Right. Okay. So, (laughs) what's going on there?
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Yeah, so I think women are using especially this promiscuity cue or cues to whether or not a woman is making herself seem sexually available as to the benefits and costs that this woman stands to pose. So if another woman is in the vicinity and she is making her, uh, reproductive resources really widely available by being promiscuous or just advertising that she is open for sex, um, other women don't like that. Other women view that as potentially threatening, um, which there are multiple reasons for that we can go into if you'd like. But women don't like it. They... Even women who themselves are promiscuous don't want other promiscuous women as friends.
- 47:56 – 55:33
Does Slut-Shaming Come More From Men Than Women?
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
- CWChris Williamson
I got destroyed on Instagram for putting up a video of me speaking to Geoffrey Miller explaining the game theory of slut-shaming.
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Ah.
- CWChris Williamson
So I put it up, and it was exactly this, right? It's like that slut-shaming is a price enforcement mechanism. It ensures that no one woman is able to drop the price of sex for all women below a price that most women want to pay. And by slut-shaming, what you do is you enforce more restrictive sexual norms and a, a sexual price that raises that back up. Uh, (laughs) and the number of, the number of people that were particularly unhappy with me, it mostly came from women, perhaps unsurprisingly. Uh, have you seen any data that suggests that most slut-shaming comes from women rather than men?
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Um, you know, I don't know of anything that suggests... Uh, obviously there's all of the stuff on the double standard, but that's about the targets being women rather than men. I don't know of anything that women themselves are more likely to do it. Um, uh, I can say anecdotally, you know, as somebody that also studies this stuff, um, I have gotten, uh... So there are people from the sort of even more feminist wing of my life that would say that I'm doing a disservice to women by talking about the, what I would consider the beautiful strategic nature of their aggression. Um, and then other people say, "Yeah, look, they are evil, manipulative sluts." So, I, I get it. I do get it, and I think we can talk about this stuff in a way that really honors how beautiful and strategic women can be. It's, it's no surprise that men can do this.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Um, we should also elucidate the gorgeous viciousness that women can visit on each other. And I, I don't know why we think of that as somehow worse.
- CWChris Williamson
Well, it triggers a lot of people, right? That there is a, a real sort of elegance to the, the samurai blade that, uh, women's intrasexual competition wields. And-
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Yes.
- CWChris Williamson
But it also, quite rightly, to the people who, uh, don't want mask-off female manipulation to be shown anywhere, that women are sort of to be seen as this protected class that never do anything wrong, it's, it's bad to them. And then to the side that want to say, "See? They are the manipulative sluts that we've said that they were all along," they, they also kind of don't want to see it, and they use it as a cudgel to beat the other people.
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
So the, the comments on that post got, uh, pretty spicy. Uh, it hasn't gone up on YouTube yet, but I'm, I'm looking forward to seeing what happens when that, that goes on as well.
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Oh god, I'm not.
- CWChris Williamson
Oh, it's pretty-
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
That's gonna be awful. (laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
... it's pretty, it's pretty... Don't worry about it. Um, how do you know that the intrasexual changes that women make with their wardrobe aren't just outfit choices that women are dressing for men with? Like how do you control for-
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
... the, the male influence on, on outfits?
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
I mean, the, the really simple answer is you do an experiment, and you tell women, "You're going to hang out with only other women tonight." Um, and then you let them draw an outfit that they would wear, um, and you measure the number of squares where skin is showing versus not.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
For, um... For real, we did that. Um, you could also do, uh... So there's this paper doll set that, um, uh, Stephanie Northover put together, and it's, uh, women in different outfits sort of, um, illustrated. And a different set of people said, "This outfit is modest. This outfit is really not modest." And you just say, "Hey women, you're gonna hang out with only other women. What outfit do you wanna wear?" Um, and then we see how modest that outfit is, or on average. What, what we can't do, 'cause it, in an experiment or probably also in real life, it, it's really a weird setup is say, "Okay, you're only gonna hang out with other women. You're gonna hang out in a mixed sex group," or, "You're gonna only hang out with other men. You're gonna be the only lady there." That gets into sort of a promising young woman territory at the end of the movie, and nobody wants to study that. Or maybe some people do, but not me.
- CWChris Williamson
Yes. So is there any s- is there any data to suggest that men see women who are showing more flesh as more sexually available? My point being here that you could have a case of cross-sex mind reading gone bad.
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
I, I don't think that that is the case. I think that m- w- I see-
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... a, a girl walking down the street who's got a, a habit on or whatever-
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
... and I consider her to be someone who is less sexually promiscuous than someone that's wearing a bikini, uh, but it may be... It m- it could have been the case that women were seeing other women that wear fewer clothes as being more sexually promiscuous and trying to attract more mates, but men wouldn't have paid that much attention to it.
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Yeah, I mean, you know, that's one of the things that there must be a study on that, um, although I've said that multiple times and went into the literature, and it turns out there's not. Um, I don't think that that is a particular instance of cross-sex mind reading gone wrong. Um, I will say... So I don't know if you've had Candice Blake on yet, but my god she's-
- CWChris Williamson
She's coming on toward the end of this year. I'm excited.
- 55:33 – 1:06:47
Attitudes to Abortion as a Mating Strategy
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
So...
- CWChris Williamson
It seems to me that there is a line to be drawn between these strategies that women deploy when it comes to their wardrobe choice and their opinions on abortion, and on being pro-choice or pro-life, uh, their-
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Uh-huh.
- CWChris Williamson
... intersexual competition, and you did an interesting article that I read about attitudes to abortion as a mating strategy rather than being about sanctity of life. Can you take us through that?
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Yeah. So, um, this is what Marty Hazelton at UCLA, who is just a killer scientist, um, and a lot of it rehashes work from, uh, her student, David Pinzot, who's badass as hell, created Cards Against Humanity, um, and, uh, folks like Jason Weeden and Rob Kurzban, uh, so credit where credit is due. But the, the gist of it is that people naturally vary in their sexual strategies. Some people are really committed. They wanna get married early to one partner, have a lot of kids, invest really heavily in those kids. And then there are some other people on the other end of the same spectrum who prefer to sort of play the field for longer and have more sex with more different people. So there's this natural variation, and what's pretty interesting is that the people who are committed sexual strategists are and can understandably be threatened by the uncommitted strategists. So if I'm a woman who got married very early, I'm raising four kids, I've sort of, um, can't economically support myself, my partner is the breadwinner, and he leaves me for this woman who is advertising her wares, um, I'm, I'm in a pretty big hole. That, that's pretty awful. Um, likewise, if I'm a man who's investing so much in my kids, but I've been cuckolded and they're not my kids because this, uh, promiscuous gentleman came over and they're his kids, well, that's not great either. So these committed strategists benefit by preventing the less committed strategists from pursuing their preferred strategy by being uncommitted, having more sex with more different people. If they can decrease the atmosphere of casual sex, or low-cost casual sex, then they benefit. So does that make sense so far?
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, of course.
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Okay. Awesome. Okay. So once you realize that, then you start to... You, you can problematize. I love when people say these words. You can problematize things like, "Okay, so why do people oppose abortion?" Um, it's actually kind of a really fascinating question to think about why I should give any shits whatsoever about somebody who's not related to me, who might not even be in my state, what they're doing with their fetus or their family. It doesn't affect my fitness so why should I care? And then I think the explanation is that people vary on th- on sexual strategies, and if they're pursuing casual sex, or other people in my environment, even if I'm not related to them, et cetera, et cetera, are freely pursuing casual sex and I'm a committed strategist, that can screw me up. And so committed sexual strategists stand to benefit by decreasing the ability of other people to have sexual freedoms, and if that's the case, then we should expect these casual- these committed strategists to do all sorts of things like oppose abortion, because when abortion is legal and free and available and safe, more women are likely to, uh, be okay with having casual sex. They should oppose birth control, because when birth control is available, um, well, there's more casual sex. And it turns out they also oppose some of these other things like marriage equality, which they associate gay men with promiscuity, um, and they oppose recreational drugs, um, because they associate molly and marijuana with promiscuity.
- CWChris Williamson
And this is statistically significant. This is... Uh, more prevalence of this in couples that are married, w- if they've got kids, if they've been together longer? How does that relate?
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
So, uh, usually what we'll do is ask people, um, th- there are different ways to ask it, but, "What's your sexual strategy?" So you don't have to be married. You don't have to have kids. Um, but these things do all go together. Um, there's some really cool work by, uh, Nick Carey and Damien Murray and colleagues that says that... (laughs) So you know that, that old chestnut that people just get more conservative as they age? Yeah, that's probably not true. Um, rather than just getting older and becoming more conservative, it seems like that effect completely washes out when you control for number of children. So if people have kids and have more kids, they become more socially conservative. And again, the idea is that the sort of deep strategy that socially conservative cultures or groups or situations make my investment in my kids safer, better for me.
- CWChris Williamson
Why would it not be the case that the people who oppose abortion are not just morally opposed to all of the moral arguments that you would see around abortion but-... w- why is that not sufficient justification to, uh, wash out all of the stuff to do with co- sexual competition for partners?
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Yeah, I mean, it could be. Some people might genuinely believe that these fetuses are babies, and they don't want babies to be murdered. Um, with my colleague, Jordan Moon, um, we have some data to suggest that that's probably not the case. Um, so if I am a person who thinks that abortion is murder, I should want to prevent abortion, right? So, the more I think it's murder, the more I should wanna prevent it. Okay. So, we asked people how much they think abortion is murder, for example, and we randomly assigned them to read about one of three hypothetical bills. Um, all the bills would cost the same amount of money, and all of the bills would sa- save the same amount of lives. But in one condition, uh, the bills prevented abortions and saved fetal lives by punishing women for having abortions. And so that's the only condition where we also see, okay, if we're gonna punish women for having abortions, that should decrease the availability of abortions and it should decrease women's, uh, engagement in casual sex, so that would be good for the committed strategists. The other two conditions were, um, we're gonna save fetal lives by, um, uh, letting there be sex ed and birth control, which should decrease the need for abortions and therefore save the same amount of lives. And the other one is something that people often... you, you probably heard this talked about, we're gonna save the same amount of lives, but they're newborns, so we're gonna give critical care and provisioning to newborns and save their lives. They'd die without this care and provisioning. So, if I think that abortion is murder and I'm, I'm just about saving lives, then the more that I'm about saving lives, the more I think abortion is murder, the more I should support all three of these. And that's not (laughs) even close to what we find. Um, so the more that I think abortion is murder, the more that I wanna punish women for having abortions. Um, but we actually see slight negative slopes for the other two. The more that I believe abortion is murder and want to save innocent lives, the less that I'm willing to support a bill that would give critical care and provisioning to needy infants. So, that, that probably suggests that what they're saying is driving their behavior is not driving their behavior, which is not surprising. That happens for plenty of people.
- CWChris Williamson
How do you know that that's not just retributive justice that they feel should be duly done against someone that has transgressed some moral boundary?
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
So, it's possible that, you know, they feel like they should punish women because these women are transgressing. Um, but if they're saying that it's not about punishing women, it's about saving lives, then they should probably want to save lives even if they don't get to punish women for having abortions while doing it, and that's just not what we see in the data. And, and some other data... Oh, sorry.
- CWChris Williamson
What you... Just that I, I was thinking about the fact that what you tried to do there with the three different bills is have the same number of human lives, baby human lives, uh, saved or protected, and what you've controlled for is whether or not the mothers are disincentivized from having casual sex as openly.
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Yeah, so th- that's only the one condition that disincentivizes casual sex. The other two, um, save the same amount of lives, so it's the same amount of justice, so to speak, but they don't feel the same toward those. Um, so I, I mean, there are plenty of things going on, and there are probably some people that really do believe that this is just their moral obligation. Um, I don't know those people. I wouldn't wanna be interested, uh, in knowing those people. They'd probably be really boring people, but very nice people, uh. (laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm. I think that, I think that it's interesting to, to consider why we have the motivations that we do. Like-
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
... are my stated preferences and my revealed preferences, like, are they actually what I say that they are?
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
And, and how blind am I to that? I think that the abortion debate, um, a lot of the language... It's surprising to me to find that out, because, uh, so much of the language is around the morality of it, uh, uh, some sort of-
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... uh, e- ethical line in the sand that should not be crossed, so on and so forth. Um, that to me feels like... But that, I- I mean, who- who's gonna put their hand up and say, "Actually, what I'm trying to do is restrict sexual norms, so that, so that all of the other women and men..." But I suppose th- there must be an equivalent for this as well. Didn't you find out that, um... Is it men invest more money in their children, in, in like, in fathering their children? Like, sexually restricted men spend more money on, on their kids?
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
So, uh, I didn't do that. If, if that is out there, that's probably Nick Curry and colleagues would be my guess. Um, and I wouldn't be surprised if that's true. I, I do think that that's true, um, but I, I think exactly what you're saying. So, I can say it's a moral goal, a moral imperative, and that's a much more convincing argument for me to say than saying, "I just want to further my sexual strategy. These free love, new age hippies be damned," right? And it also requires so-
- 1:06:47 – 1:11:26
Impact of Sexual Strategy on Religious Beliefs
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
for that latter thing to happen, "I just wanna further my sexual strategy," it probably requires they have a PhD in psychology (laughs) and have been studying this and realize that there is this notion of reproductive morality, um, or reproductive religiosity, and that things like sexual strategy lead to religion rather than religion leading to sexual strategy.
- CWChris Williamson
Ooh, what do you mean there?
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
So, I mean, it's, uh, obviously we haven't, you know, randomly assigned people to conditions here. But it does seem like the things that religions want, um, serve people who have committed sexual strategies. So, have one mate, have one mate early, invest really heavily in that person, stay together forever and don't get divorced or you'll go to hell. Um, so all of those things that religions often support are restricted strategy benefits. And if that's the case, then you might very well imagine people who have restricted strategies would be attracted to religion. And so it could be that, not totally dissimilar to venting, saying, "Well, this is a religious thing, this is a moral imperative," is cover for people who just really wanna pursue their own fitness interests at the cost of other people's. Of course, nobody's saying they realize this, right? They don't have access to this knowledge, it's not being done consciously, they're not just trying to screw any other people. (laughs) They're trying to screw no one. Um, so (laughs) I couldn't help it. I couldn't help it. But yeah, some of the data do seem to suggest that as people enter periods of being more sexually restricted, they're more likely to adhere to religion, and when they leave those periods, they're more likely to leave religion.
- CWChris Williamson
Oh, so r-
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
So think about going to college.
- CWChris Williamson
Right. So religiosity increases when you're in a committed relationship, and decreases if you get out of it?
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there, there are some pretty cool data to suggest that the arrow doesn't just go one way from religion telling you what sexual strategy to have, but people who have a certain sexual strategy get attracted to religion, 'cause it, it benefits the strategy that they have.
- CWChris Williamson
How should people deal with the discomfort of hearing that, uh, y- you would say their view on abortion, or their, uh, sense of connection between themselves and their religion, um, could be their evolutionary programming coming out in a, uh, how would you say? The press secretary of their mind giving them a very culpable-
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Yes.
- CWChris Williamson
... excuse. Like, how, how should they deal with that? Because that's something that's, like, incredibly uncomfortable to hear.
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Yeah. I mean, what isn't these days? I, I don't know. I, I am not, I'm not the most sensitive person, Chris, so I would just say suck it up. Um, uh, I, I really... There's probably a nicer way to put it. Um, I don't have the capacity or bandwidth or natural disposition to figure out what the heck the nice way is. So, suck it up. Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Do you not find as you learn more about your evolutionary predisposition, though, and the different motivations that are coming out in your behavior, have you not found yourself in sort of an uncanny valley of, of feeling like you're just at the mercy of whatever genes were given to you from a three-billion-year-
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
... like, evolutionary unbroken stream?
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
I mean, would I love to remake the world in an image where everybody thought, like, Lizzo was the hottest bitch ever, which many people do and she really probably is? Yeah. I mean, I would love that. That would benefit me. Um, 'cause she and I are shaped very similarly, for anyone who can't see what I look like. Uh, so that would be awesome, but that's just not the world that we live in, and I think understanding reality is great, and I think acknowledging the fact that we have, um, a lot of personal choices that, that we can make that aren't necessarily making us slaves to some innate programming... Our, our behavior is hugely flexible.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Um, I, I think we have to realize that too. So I, I don't think we're just, you know, sort of these lovely programmed robots that just say, you know, "She's hot. I must mate." Um, I think there's a lot more to us than that, and the, the messiness and the complexity, uh, and the... That part is what I love about humans. Very few of them, but the ones I like.
- 1:11:26 – 1:19:29
Relationship Between Casual Sex & Self-Esteem
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
- CWChris Williamson
Talk to me about the relationship between casual sex and self-esteem, because I know that you've done a ton of work on this as well.
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Yeah. Um, so I mean, I... This is one of those things where I, I don't know why people haven't gone after this effect before, but we knew in media, um, so books, films, uh, the... Have you seen Arrested Development?
- CWChris Williamson
No.
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Um, it's an amazing show. It's hilarious and ridiculous. But in the show, they have a sort of, uh, cheeky analog of the Girls Gone Wild video series, and it's called Girls With Low Self-Esteem. Um, and so we've, we have this... It's so prevalent, the idea that women who have casual sex must have low self-esteem. It's so prevalent in society that it can be a punchline on a popular TV series, or largely unpopular TV series, but nevertheless was funny. Um, and so what we did was simply investigate this and see if it was the case for men as well, and what we find is in, in America, people think that women, but not men, who have casual sex must have low self-esteem. And, you know, self-esteem can be hugely important for one's self, but perceptions of other people's self-esteem are perhaps even more important. Um, so if I perceive you to have low self-esteem, I'm less likely to want to be your friend, I'm less likely to ask you for a date, I'm less likely to hire you for a job, and I am less likely to vote you into political office. So this isn't just, you know, "Oh, woe is this poor, sad little woman that has low self-esteem." These have real, serious economic and social consequences.
- CWChris Williamson
How are you defining self-esteem? What does it mean?
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
... so, uh, feeling good about yourself, very simple, classic definition, a sense of respect for yourself.
- CWChris Williamson
Okay. Why is there a presumption that casual sex, somebody that has lots of casual sex would be low in self-esteem?
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
So, the women have casual sex who... so there's this presumption for women. We see it repeatedly. Um, part of it, not all of it, but part of it seems to be that people presume that women who do have casual sex are sort of making the best of a bad job. So, they presume that women would ideally prefer to have one long-term mate who loves them and they love, and that's that. And so, women who have casual sex are sort of just tossed into doing this. They have to do it to get by, or they have to do it 'cause they're trying to find a partner. Um, so that's part of the thinking underlying it. But I say part, because even when we tell our participants, "This woman is having casual sex, and she fucking loves it. She is so happy doing this, she doesn't want to be tied down. She doesn't want this other stuff," they still believe that she has lower self-esteem than a woman who has committed sex, um, so one partner, and is unhappy pursuing it. So, this is a really robust phenomenon. We couldn't make it go away. Hopefully other researchers continue down this line and can figure out how to do that.
- CWChris Williamson
Would the assumption not be because it is easier for women to get sex than it is for men to get sex?
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
And that there is a presumed, uh, preference for women to get into a long-term committed relationship, so by her having sex, that is her filling some sort of void inside that she can't, uh, fill with a, a long-term monogamous partner?
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
And that, that might be it. They, they think that, yes, it's easier for women to have sex, and so women might have an easier time attracting a mate than a man does. I'm sure you and, and Will Castello can talk about this and the incel phenomenon, or, or maybe the femcel phenomenon all day. Um, but even so, um, when that woman is having casual sex and just enjoying it, she's eschewing the, the strategy that people assume that she has. Even when we say, "Well, she's enjoying it," people don't believe that she's enjoying it. And that, that really might be the sort of deep logic of, of presuming that women are less likely to enjoy or seek out more partners and more variety.
- CWChris Williamson
Why do you think that men, and why do you think that women would hold that view about other women?
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Um, probably the same thing, so I- I don't think that men and women differ in their perceptions and stereotypes there. I think the sort of meta thinking for both is the same, that, "Well, she just can't get what she'd really like, which is a single partner."
- CWChris Williamson
Why would it not be the case that women would want to lower the perceived self-esteem of the other woman in order to make her less of a... you've already said less likely-
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
... to be asked out on a date, less likely to be friends. That woman would be more of a sexual, potential sexual rival, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to lower her perceived self-esteem in ord- like this cartel, this unspoken cartel between everybody on the planet-
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... to do that. But I c- I couldn't see why there would be the same motivation for men to do that.
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Yeah, so, so I should, um, clarify that what we're looking at here are, are the stereotypes and not the reality. So, women and men perceive women who have casual sex to have lower self-esteem. The reality isn't that. (laughs) Um, what's amazing is that... so our same participants, males and females, who report holding the stereotype that women who have casual sex have low self-esteem are participants who hold this stereotype report their sexual behavior, and they report their own self-esteem. And in the participants who hold this stereotype, there is no consistent relationship between their sexual behavior and their self-esteem. So, if there is any real world relationship between men's or women's sexual behavior and self-esteem, it's, it's probably complicated. Somebody like, um, uh, I'm probably gonna butcher her name, but Zana Vrungaulova would suggest that if you wanna have casual sex and you're having casual sex, then you'd have high self-esteem. And that, that makes sense from a sort of nice evolutionary perspective on self-esteem as a sociometer telling you how well you're doing in the world, so-
- CWChris Williamson
How so?
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
... I want this thing.
- CWChris Williamson
What's that mean?
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
So, Mark Leary has this really great idea that self-esteem is really just our sort of cue to ourselves of how well we're doing. So, it's an aggregate of, "Do I have good friends? Do people support me? Am I getting the sex that I want? All right, I feel pretty good about myself. Um, so I'm, I'm pursuing the adaptive goals that I have, and I'm doing pretty well." And low self-esteem would be, "I'm not pursuing these goals, and I'm not doing very well." And so, a, a sociometer perspective would suggest then that if I want to have casual sex and I'm having casual sex, then yeah, I should feel pretty great 'cause I'm doing what I wanna be doing.
- CWChris Williamson
Interesting, and people didn't use the theory of mind that they had about themselves. You said that when you studied the participants-
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... that held those stereotypes, they didn't have any correlation between their sexual strategy and their level of self-esteem.
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Okay.
- CWChris Williamson
But they hadn't decided to use their own theory of mind of their own experience to extrapolate out to other people.
- 1:19:29 – 1:24:46
What’s Next for Jaimie’s Research
- CWChris Williamson
research docket-
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Oh, Jesus.
- CWChris Williamson
... for you soon?
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Dude, I live in Oklahoma, so all I do is research. We could talk about what I have next for a long time. Um, hopefully it'll be going to Philadelphia. Y equals y. ... So, uh, one of the things that I'm really excited about is sort of understanding how the mind aggregates, um, and, and calculates what it means to be a good friend. Um, so what we're hoping to do across 30 nations or 30 locations, including small scale societies, by collaborating with anthropologists, and in industrialized societies, collaborating with other people at other universities, is to explore what we think makes a good friend. Um, and we're gonna do a really simple experiment that I kind of love. So, okay, who's a better friend, in your opinion, Chris? A friend who helps you and helps somebody you don't like, or a friend who helps you and doesn't help somebody you don't like? In fact, I should say, who's a more helpful friend?
- CWChris Williamson
Okay, so the more helpful friend-
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
... would be the first one. The better friend, the petty child in me says the second one.
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
(laughs) So, I mean, that's the, there's the sort of objectivist view, right, that you're taking, which is a person who helps two people is twice as helpful as a person who helps just one. Um, and there's a, a view... So most work in social psych just focuses on the two people in the friendship, not the ways that other people can bear on the two people in the friendship. And so, on that view, however my friend behaves toward me, that should be all that I care about. So if they help me, they're 100 out of 100 on helpful. If they don't help me, they're zero out of zero. And our view is that people do think of the world in terms of, how is my friend gonna radiate positive effects on me, both directly by helping me, but also indirectly by fucking my enemies or at least not helping them? And so, what we predicted and find is that, at least in the US, people view friends as super helpful when they help me but not my enemy. They view them as much less helpful if they help both of us, which is basically saying, "I view objectively more helpful friends as less helpful." And they view friends as very unhelpful obviously if they only help my enemy and not me.
- CWChris Williamson
That's fascinating.
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Fingers crossed, we do it across cultures and find something pretty interesting. It's, it's possible that all sorts of culture and ecology could be affecting people's inputs to this. But I think the re- the overall effect is gonna be robust. And I do think it, it starts to tell us that when we say somebody is nice, we mean they're nice to us. And when we say somebody is a glorious monster, we mean they're a glorious monster for us.
- CWChris Williamson
Yes. Yeah. I wonder whether there'll be a, sort of a sex ratio hypothesis of the number of enemies versus friends that you have in the local environment-
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
... and if you were surrounded by more enemies than you were friends, the relative amount of investment that your friends gave you would, uh-
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... be more or less valuable.
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Yeah. So, uh, there's some really cool stuff on relational mobility, so how able we are to get in new friendships and leave old friendships, and so you could imagine that, in a similar way, if we sort of have to be friends with our enemies, um, there are different costs and benefits of, of how our friends then treat those enemies.
- CWChris Williamson
Ah, yeah, so-
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Um, maybe ideally.
- CWChris Williamson
... if, if you were in a, an environment where you were overrun by enemies, you would have to collaborate with them at some point. So perhaps-
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... you would, perhaps you would be prepared to put up with more, uh, shallow displays of friendship from your friends, and then maybe there would be a change in terms of the amount of venting that you would do behind the scenes-
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
... uh, in order to make sure that, oh, w- we're actually still... I know that you're kind of pretending to be friends with them, but it's like it's still really us that are the proper friends-
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
... on the other side of that. Yeah, it is so interesting that the, the knobs and dials and faders that you think about with regards to people's friendships, what they do for other people, their level of disclosure within their own friends, their level of personal vulnerability, what it is that they tell them, how much venting they do, how much sabotage they do of other people. Like, when you add all of this together, uh, it's not surprising that friendships are such complicated things to try and manage.
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Yes. We don't, we don't talk about that nearly enough. I mean, you had Dunbar on. He said that having friends is the next best thing for your health behind quitting smoking, right? And lacking friends, this is some Holt-Lunstad work, is equivalent, or at least being lonely, to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. So, maybe we should pay as much attention to our friendships as we do about, you know, where our genitals go.
- CWChris Williamson
I, uh, increasingly now, and it's like, whatever, 550 episodes into the show, every single happiness researcher that I bring on, Laura Vanderkam,
- 1:24:46 – 1:29:34
The Need for Friendship for Happiness
- CWChris Williamson
Cassie Holmes, like, whoever it is that I speak to that has dedicated their entire life to studying happiness, uh, it's almost boring to ask, like, you know, "What are the habits of the most happy-"
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
"... people that you've studied?" And they go, "Oh, well, you know, they've got good relationships." The first thing that always comes up-
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
... they've got good relationships. And then downstream from that, maybe it's to do with a sense of belonging to, uh, a community, w- friendships again, maybe it's religiosity in that they have... Like, people that are religious seem to live longer. Well, that's a sense of community again. Like, they, you know, they play team sports. What the fuck's that?
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
Like, all of these things, like so many-
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
... of the things just come back to having friendships and having a community. So yeah, uh, the reason I think that f- friendship gets a bit of a...... bad rap, (smacks lips) o- in the personal development/applied pop psychology, like the not progressive st-
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... like, like advanced stuff, the sort of-
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Ooh.
- CWChris Williamson
... low-level stuff.
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
I can't wait to hear this, yes.
- CWChris Williamson
Well, I think the reason for it is that it's very difficult to optimize for.
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
I think that the current world of personal self-development sees the individual as sovereign, and it's very difficult to sell somebody a course or sell somebody a book where the answer isn't something that you can go away, go away and do yourself. So-
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Fair.
- CWChris Williamson
... it's, it's, it seems like a much more wiggly line between where you are and the outcome that you want to get. Now, if you were to write a book about how to make friends as an adult, like-
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
... the outcome would be, uh, an externality of you following whatever the strategy is that's in the book. But if you were to write a book about happiness, it's like, "These are the things that you should do for happiness." And you go, "Okay, friends are really important." You go, "Right, well, there's 10 books there. Now, I need a 10-book volume-"
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
"... on how friendship works and what to do and who," all that sort of stuff. I, I just think that on the internet, in personal development, in personal growth generally, there is a huge blind spot. Like, friendship is, is spoken of as a big thing that needs to be looked ab- looked after, and then never really applied, and I think it's just because it's-
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
That makes sense.
- CWChris Williamson
... it's hard to do.
- JKDr Jaimie Krems
I mean, a lot of people don't realize how hard it is. And so, if you think about, we say friendship, like, do friendship, but friendship is an umbrella term for about 60 different challenges, right? So, you have to figure out what you want in a friend, find friends, uh, attract friends, make friends, keep friends. Um, and then you do lose friends, and you have to deal with losing friends. So, you have to navigate all of these challenges to simply have these medium to long-term communal bonds, and none of them are necessarily easy. We've mostly studied them in terms of what I need to do to make that friend like me, but we haven't thought about the fact that the chal- so, we've, we've cast these challenges as dyadic challenges. But we haven't thought about the fact that, okay, we've evolved in these small, densely interconnected groups, where my friends inevitably and frequently interact with people who aren't me, and these interactions that my friend has with other people, they're gonna affect my friend, they're gonna affect my friendship, and they're gonna affect, ultimately, me and the benefits that I get out of the thing. And so, if we're thinking about only dyadic challenges, we're not even recognizing the true rich complexity and the fact that friendships also have super dyadic challenges. And that's, that's part of what my, my work will hopefully address, but we just don't talk about it. We don't realize it. Only in the last, like, two, three years have I looked at, um - so, you're gonna know exactly my political leanings as I tell you, The New York Times and The Atlantic. Um, I read them a lot, and only recently, they have come out with papers like, "Okay, friendship is hard." Thank you. Uh, mothers, new mothers especially, have a hard time making friends. Well, yes, and we should probably look into that if social support helps women's infants live, but have we? No. Um, "Oh, it's hard to make friends in your 30s. It's hard to make friends when you move. It's hard to keep friends. We should try and be better friends." And it's like, "No shit, people." Um, sorry, (laughs) I get really excited about this. I'm, I'm gonna, you know, do a little woosah and calm down. But friendship is hard, and I don't think it has to be that hard. Um, we have really good theories of friendship that can tell you what to do to get people to invest in you and have a stake in your continued welfare. And if they do, then you get those benefits of quitting smoking.
Episode duration: 1:30:17
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