Evolved Psychology Vs The Modern World - David & Douglas Kenrick

Douglas Kenrick 0:00 When people are asked, "Would you want to date this person?" for women, it mattered. They would actually prefer to date the dorky looking guy in the Wall Street clothes to the handsome guy who was working at Burger King. For men, they'd prefer the good-looking woman who worked for Burger King to the less attractive woman who was dressed to the nines.

Chris Williamson 0:20 (wind blowing) Doug, you just mentioned that you'd taken two months away from working, and this is one of your first days back. Talk to me about what it feels like to take such a long break when you're used to doing so much work. Do you ever get the compulsion to go and do stuff? Do you get antsy about the fact that you're not working?

Douglas Kenrick 0:41 Yes. I, I like having a bit of fun, but, uh, there's only so much of it I can take. I actually feel better, I fe- I feel better when I'm being productive in some way. Although my work is, you know, uh, writing books and being a college professor and talking to students. It's a, it's a pretty cushy job and, um, you know, it's- it- it's in some ways more pleasant than actually being on vacation, although being on vacation was fun.

Chris Williamson 1:14 What do you think that says adaptively about humans, the fact that you can take more pleasure from doing work than from leisure?

Douglas Kenrick 1:22 What do you think, Dave?

David Lundberg Kenrick 1:24 Well, I mean, I think a lot of it is the affiliation factor, right? I- I know for me, one of the things I like about work is the people I work with, um, and getting to see them. And, uh, and that feeling of sort of purpose, right? That it's like, I think we are sort of designed to want to contribute to those around us and, uh, you know, hopefully if someone is in a job that they like, uh, then they'll feel like, "Oh, I'm working with a group of people to improve the world for people." So I think-

Douglas Kenrick 2:05 Yeah.

David Lundberg Kenrick 2:05 I think that's...

Douglas Kenrick 2:06 That's, I like Dave's answer because I wouldn't have pointed to affiliation right away. I would have thought of status in terms of our little- our hierarchy of motives. Uh, but I like what Dave is saying because it strikes me that in the ancestral environment, if you took two months off, uh, the people in your group might have started to get a little annoyed at you, you know, "When are you gonna start to catch some fish?" and-

Chris Williamson 2:28 Oh.

Douglas Kenrick 2:28 ... when are, you know. Uh, and so, you know, I- I like the fact that Dave connects it to people because it does, uh, I especially like, I do like that as well. In fact, the first thing I- I did after having this- an interview this morning is I went to a- a meeting and our graduate students were there, and my, uh, co-author on a number of papers, Steve Newberg, was there. And it did feel good, felt good to be doing something with the group, uh, and so I guess it- I guess we're sort of wired up to connect those two things.

Chris Williamson 3:03 You just mentioned about your new pyramid of human motives. W- why do we need a new one or what's unique or interesting about this one?

Douglas Kenrick 3:13 So two things. One is that, (coughs) uh, when Maslow made his hierarchy, he didn't make that pyramid. That pyramid-

Chris Williamson 3:22 It wasn't even a hierarchy, right?

Douglas Kenrick 3:24 Yeah. Well, no, it was a hierarchy. He did actually say that there were, uh, there were a set of goals. He was arguing against behaviorists. The behaviorists thought that everything we do can boil down to satisfying thirst and hunger. Even our social motives, the behaviorists argued, were, uh, connected to, uh, secondary reinforcement. We come to like people because our mother nursed us. And, uh, Maslow was a student of Harry Harlow who did those classic old studies with the mon- the baby monkeys that were separated from their moms and so forth. Uh, and Harlow was arguing against the behaviorists that, no, we have- we, at least primates, have other social motives. And Maslow just made a more complicated model th- and argued that deve- developmentally, first we have to just get fed and get, you know, get warm. Uh, but then we get stranger anxiety, we have to protect ourselves, uh, and then we want to make friends, and then we want esteem, which is what we would call status. So we agree with him up to that point. Where we disagree with Maslow was that he thought then we move to non-social things, we move above that. We want to go off and play the guitar by ourselves or write poetry just for our own intrinsic satisfaction. And from an evolutionary perspective, it seems extremely unlikely that we would be designed... that we got here because our ancestors, once they had managed to solve those lower motives, went off and, you know, beat on the, uh, beat on a log just for their own entertainment. If they beat on a log, it was probably to entertain the other members of their groups so that they could achieve, you know, acceptance and respect and find mates. And ma- the other thing that Maslow skipped out on completely was the importance of mating. Now he was an evolutionary psychologist before the modern day and he didn't think about the fact that in some sense, organisms are all designed to reproduce. And so at the- the top of our pyramid is not self-actualization, it's sort of what unfolds developmentally. First, after you've gotten some respect, you find a mate. After you find that mate, you need to keep the mate. And then if you have offspring, you need to care for your family. Uh, and even if you don't have offspring, we're probably motivated to care for our cousins and our- the other people in our group. And so we're not arguing in some sense that it's ideal, that it- that you're, we all, in the same sense that self-actualization, painting a beautiful painting is somehow intrinsically satisfying. What we're arguing is that, is that, uh...... that's the natural course of things is to, is to move on to, you know, to reproduction. Maslow had... The only time he talked about sex was as a lower physiological need. And so, on that model, you could just masturbate and then be done with it, and then you could move on to playing the guitar, you know. (laughs) Um, but w- we, we disagree with that part of it, um...

Chris Williamson 6:35 Yeah. It seems-

Douglas Kenrick 6:36 I don't see anything to-

Chris Williamson 6:37 It, it seems to me that, um, most people when you ask them about the most meaningful stuff that they do in their lives, they talk about rearing children. And it seems as well, I don't know if you guys would agree with this, but we are grandchildren optimizers is the nicest summary of what humans are kind of here to do that I've thought of. It's like you, you need to have some kids. Then you need to make sure those kids have some kids. And after that point, you're kind of sweet. Uh, after that point, you can-

David Lundberg Kenrick 7:03 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 7:03 ... you can pretty much just let everything go.

David Lundberg Kenrick 7:06 Like the great-grandkids are on their own?

Chris Williamson 7:07 Yeah.

David Lundberg Kenrick 7:08 Oh. I mean there is... So your lab did some research on that, right? Like actually asking people what gave them meaning. And it was, it was split, right, into there was parenting and then there was also just general taking care of family that included also, like, brothers and sisters and things like that. So, um, so I guess you, you also have to look out for, like, your nieces and nephews as well, so.

Douglas Kenrick 7:31 So, it's actually even a little more complicated than that. We asked people three kinds... So there's three ways you can define well-being. One of them is just hedonic well-being. I feel good. There's more rewards in my life than punishments in my life. Uh, and then there's what they call eudaimonic well-being which is a fancy way of saying meaning in life, okay? And then the third is self-actualization which is a way of saying fulfilling your highest potential. So what we did in our lab, uh, some research with Jamie Kremz, uh, who's at, uh, Oklahoma State, and Becka Neal who's at the University of Toronto now, we asked people about each of those things. What would you be doing right now if you were fulf- if you were getting meaning in life, okay? What would be the thing that would produce the most meaning in your life? And that's what the thing Dave was referring to. That's when they said, "I'd be caring for my family," or, "I'd be hanging with my friends for the, for the most part." When we asked about self-actualization, "What would you be doing if you were achieving your highest potential?" Then they talked about things like, you know, writing a book or, uh, you know, managing a business, and they connected that with status and also with affiliation. And then the one of hedonic well-being, "What would I be doing if I wanted to just feel good?" Their affiliation still... Affiliation comes in across the board, you know. Uh, but then sex became more, you know... Finding a mate rose up, especially for males. Uh, they would feel good. They'd feel, you know, hedonic satisfaction if they were in a romantic situation. Uh, but it, it's funny that there's other kinds of well-being are... Those... They're all connected to different motives.

Chris Williamson 9:18 Did you look at the Mappiness study that had a ton of data done on it?

Douglas Kenrick 9:24 The what study?

Chris Williamson 9:25 Mappiness.

Douglas Kenrick 9:26 Mappiness. I, I don't know it. No, tell me about it.

Chris Williamson 9:29 Okay. S- so this was a study done by a bunch of researchers who were, uh, using mobile phones to pop up and ask people what they were doing at that point and their subjective rating of how happy they felt.

David Lundberg Kenrick 9:39 Oh, wow.

Douglas Kenrick 9:39 Yes. Right.

Chris Williamson 9:39 Uh, and then Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, who's a data scientist who just released a new book called Don't Trust Your Gut, and in that, he looks through a bunch of this stuff and then lays it out in this really easy table. And the number one thing, plus 20, in terms of happiness, the most happy thing that people were doing, is having sex. Now I couldn't-

David Lundberg Kenrick 9:58 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 9:58 ... I couldn't help thinking about the fact that the only way that that's been able to work is if someone's paused having sex to check their phone, note down that they were doing it, and then rate their subjective level of happiness. Um, (laughs) but, yeah, I mean, this, this is an interesting distinction, I think, between, uh, Dan Gilbert and Daniel Kahneman. Gilbert was talking about the fact that, you know, lying on a li-lo for the rest of your life drinking cocktails might be a good, a way to spend a life well lived because each individual interval of time is something that's been pleasurable. Whereas Kahneman, I think, retrospectively would say a good life is one that, in retrospect, you're glad you lived. It had meaning, it had purpose, it made you feel-

David Lundberg Kenrick 10:36 Yes.

Chris Williamson 10:36 ... retrospectively like something is worthwhile. And I've come to believe, my bro-science, is that that tends toward people that are more introspective and retrospective versus people that are a little bit more impulsive, that really the, um, balance you have between those two things, whether you lean more towards, uh, hedonic pleasure or, sort of, eudaimonic pleasure is mostly because... Okay, what- what- what do you think about when you think about the things that you value in yourself? Do you value, you know, just time with friends, free-flowing and being easy? Or do you like hard things that you're contributing to over a longer period of time?

Douglas Kenrick 11:12 Yeah. No. I like... Uh, you're raising an interesting question, I think, you know, uh, about individual differences in those, in those, uh, que- And we actually have a scale of, that measures in... Becka Neal, who I mentioned before, we... She developed a scale with us that, uh, looks at, uh, the extent to which I am someone who is currently concerned with each of those motives we talked about, finding mates, or finding friends, or, you know, protecting myself from the bad guys. Uh, but what you're suggesting is interesting that those different kinds of well-being, you know, what gives me those might vary as a function of, you know, who I am and maybe what I'm... what my major goal in life is right now.

David Lundberg Kenrick 11:56 Yeah. It could also, I imagine, have to do with sort of situational factors. If you have kids, right, you might be, like, thinking more like, "No, no, I need a meaningful life," because that might tie into also providing for those kids and things like that. Whereas if...... you are younger or you don't have kids and you're like, "No, uh, the people around me are taken care of," then you might opt for just, you know, reading a book in the shade. So, I could see how those could change throughout the life history as well.

Douglas Kenrick 12:23 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 12:24 Given the fact-

David Lundberg Kenrick 12:24 So-

Chris Williamson 12:24 ... that the modern world's more comfortable for humans, why do you think it is then that a lot of human problems seem even more difficult to solve today?

Douglas Kenrick 12:34 What's your take on that, Dave? (laughs)

David Lundberg Kenrick 12:36 Oh, I mean, there's a bunch of things. I mean, well, one is the sort of mismatch, right, of between our instincts and the modern world. Um, and then a big one is we also have, with technology, a lot of sort of things that will remind us, we have technology that's optimized to prime all of these motives at once, right? You're gonna sort of, you're gonna see pictures of attractive people that your brain will think of as potential mates. You're gonna see news about threats, you're gonna see, you know, updates from your friends. And you can get all of these things in a matter of seconds or minutes, right? Uh, if you're on your phone. And so, um, it's pretty overwhelming, right? To try to, to try to like ... In the ancestral world, you can sort of focus on one thing at a time, right? You're, if you're going out to get food, you might not even see any potential mates. Um, you might have a few friends with you who are also there to get food. Um, but these days, I think we gotta do everything at once, right? And we've gotta compete in our minds with, if you wanna compete with status, you're now competing with Elon Musk as opposed to just your actual next door neighbor, right? And same thing, you know, you see this with, um, with girls with Instagram is they have body image issues, right? They're competing with like these, with models all the time. Um, and they're just, that's intermixed with their friend feed. And so I think the, the hierarchies have gotten a lot higher. Like now we're, now we're competing with what? 7 billion people as opposed to 10. Um, and so I think, I think those all combine to make, uh, a pretty stressful, pretty stressful situation, so.

Chris Williamson 14:32 Is there a sense, going back to Maslow's hierarchy of needs, but you could map it onto yours, I guess, as well, is there a sense that because so much of the bottom area of the pyramid, the immediate physiological needs, the safety, the security and stuff like that, that that's been filled? I- is an existential crisis a luxurious position to be in, basically?

Douglas Kenrick 14:49 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 14:49 Is it only in a world that's got so many of those safety features already filled in that you have the opportunity to think, "What am I doing with my life? What should I be doing with my life? How could I contribute better to my sense of wellbeing? Am I really actualizing my potential here?"

David Lundberg Kenrick 15:04 That's-

Douglas Kenrick 15:05 I like that question.

David Lundberg Kenrick 15:05 So that's interesting. I, I-

Douglas Kenrick 15:06 That's a good-

David Lundberg Kenrick 15:08 (laughs) I personally am not beyond worrying about those, uh, those base motives.

Douglas Kenrick 15:13 (laughs)

David Lundberg Kenrick 15:13 You know, living in Arizona, I'm always like reading about our water levels and our drought and things like that. Um, so I mean, I, I don't know. I think a lot of people are still worried about these. Um, they're, they're ... I don't ... I know that we no longer have food insecurity the way our ancestors did, but, you know, health is still a major concern for a lot of people. Um, and so I'm not sure. I'm not sure we're at the point where we're sort of mindfully-

Douglas Kenrick 15:47 Right.

David Lundberg Kenrick 15:47 ... thinking about our higher motives. So, I think we just have them stacked on there, so.

Douglas Kenrick 15:53 I wonder if an existential crisis is just a, it's a, an attribution for something else. It means maybe I'm not, you know, I'm not achieving the goal that I really want to achieve now. I'm not finding a satisfying relationship or I'm not, you know, doing a satisfactory job taking care of my kids or, uh, not getting respect on the job. And then I, I attribute that to something higher 'cause I've got a college degree. And so I think, "Ah, well, I can't just be, uh, some sap who's screwing up." Uh, what's really happening is I'm concerned with the whole meaning of existence. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 16:31 I see. Okay. So it's-

Douglas Kenrick 16:33 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 16:33 It's, uh, loneliness masquerading as a philosophical treatise.

Douglas Kenrick 16:37 Maybe. Maybe.

Chris Williamson 16:38 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

David Lundberg Kenrick 16:38 I, I, I could see it being loneliness and then also sort of status frustration. You know, if you look at people online, I think that, I think these days in the modern era, there's ... I mean, there's all these sort of phenomenon of people who are like, they don't have friends, right? They're staying in their room, but they're, they're eating, they're surviving and so there's this, there's become this big jump where it's like, "Okay."

Douglas Kenrick 17:02 Mm-hmm.

David Lundberg Kenrick 17:03 "I'm surviving, but to get to that next level, to actually contribute, to give my existence meaning to other people seems too hard." Um, and, and so that could be part of what is leading to existential crises perhaps, so.

Chris Williamson 17:24 Talk

Chris Williamson 17:25 to me about the relationship between ancient fears and desires with modern dangers and opportunities then.

Douglas Kenrick 17:33 So you, I mean, you've mentioned the concept of mismatch, you know, that in some sense we are designed to live in a s- in a small village. You know, people debate about what was the ancestral environment actually like. And well, there were lots of different ancestral environments, but they were different from the modern one in, in certain r- recurring ways. They did involve being around your kin, okay? Even when I was a kid growing up in a little urban village in New York, I had my grandmother and my aunts, they all lived in nearby apartments, you know, and now we spread out so, you know, widely that we're, we're n- we can be surrounded by strangers. And our ancestors were, were not surrounded by strangers unless they were about to die (laughs) , okay? Um, and that is, I think that's, that's one of the biggest mismatches and that accounts for many of these problems. The other kinds of ... Well, there's mismatches of different sort at every level. So the, at the low level, the one about survival, uh, we, you know-We certainly don't have to worry about getting food, okay? I mean, as in, during my travels one of the things I was shocked at is that I could buy wood fired pizza and find a fine restaurant with local tasty wines everywhere in the middle of no- you know, in places I would consider the middle of nowhere, there's this fabulous food. And every little convenience store has Ben & Jerry's ice cream. Everywhere you go I could get some really delicious ice cream. I could get a six pack of, of India Pale Ale-

David Lundberg Kenrick 19:10 S-

Douglas Kenrick 19:10 ... uh, and then-

David Lundberg Kenrick 19:10 Can I, can I just say one thing though? But, but this is all contingent on having money, right? And this, this, one of the other ways that the modern world is different, you had mentioned that you weren't likely to get, you weren't likely to be around strangers unless you were about to get killed. There's also this thing of you weren't likely to get killed unless you were around strangers. Like your, the people around you would help you out. But nowadays when we're traveling all over the place, if you run out of money, right, which, you know, for somebody who is like has a good solid bank account may not be a risk, but for a lot of people you're in the middle of nowhere and you run out of money, the risks are really high, right? You, if you try to steal food you're gonna go to jail. Like you're not going to... Somebody is not going to be as forgiving as if you borrow food from a relative. And so-

Douglas Kenrick 20:02 Oh, that's interesting, Dave, because actually, uh, you know, despite having a reasonable bank account, I lived petrified of losing my wallet. Because if I was in Banff, Alberta, beautiful place, but I didn't have a wallet, I would've been screwed, okay? Because I kept thinking that, "What would I do? What would I do for food? What if somebody steals my wallet?"

Chris Williamson 20:23 So one of my friends, uh, a couple of years ago we went on a stag do to Barcelona. Uh, actually no, sorry, it was the wedding. The stag do was wild but the, the wedding was even worse.

Douglas Kenrick 20:31 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 20:31 So we went to a wedding, uh, I- in Barcelona and I don't know whether you know but Barcelona is the robbery capital of Europe.

Douglas Kenrick 20:38 Yes.

Chris Williamson 20:38 Yeah.

Douglas Kenrick 20:38 I'd been warned when I went to Barcelona that-

Chris Williamson 20:41 Unbelievably-

Douglas Kenrick 20:42 ... to keep your pockets zipped.

Chris Williamson 20:43 ... sophisticated. These kids that can do Lionel Messi style tricks with a football will come over and accidentally bump into you and before you know it they've dribbled the ball between your legs but they've also taken your car keys too. So we went to this thing, one of the guys came back, anyway he, one of the lads had a bit too much to drink, he doesn't usually drink, he fell asleep in Barcelona train station, woke up the next morning to find out that his phone, his wallet and his shoes had been stolen.

Douglas Kenrick 21:10 His shoes? Huh.

Chris Williamson 21:11 His shoes had been stolen from him, uh, and then he was trudging around but he was a CrossFit coach. So the thing that he went back to, this is a, a point where you basically don't have any of the, um, no trust required transactional proofs of status or legitimacy which is what paper, paper money could be seen as, right?

Douglas Kenrick 21:30 Mm-hmm. Right.

Chris Williamson 21:30 None of that existed, but he's a CrossFit coach so he walked into a CrossFit gym, he knew that there was a CrossFit gym somewhere in Barcelona. Walked into a CrossFit gym and said, "Hey guys, I know that I look like I've walked a hole in my socks. I'm dressed for a wedding that was yesterday. No phone, no money, no shoes. However, if you go on Instagram you'll see that I'm that guy-

Douglas Kenrick 21:50 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 21:50 ... and I'm that guy that you've probably seen coaching some of your favorite athletes." So what he did was he gravitated toward the closest thing that he could find to kin.

David Lundberg Kenrick 22:00 Uh-huh.

Douglas Kenrick 22:00 That's interesting.

Chris Williamson 22:01 Yeah.

Douglas Kenrick 22:01 Yeah, I like that. That's a great story. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 22:04 Who was that-

Douglas Kenrick 22:05 And also...

Chris Williamson 22:06 I saw, um, a stat from your book that said more people die from obesity than starvation now according to the UN.

Douglas Kenrick 22:15 Yes. Yeah. Yeah, that was-

David Lundberg Kenrick 22:16 Yeah.

Douglas Kenrick 22:16 ... that was a fascinating thing to run across as we were preparing the book.

Chris Williamson 22:19 That is wild.

Douglas Kenrick 22:20 Yeah. Um-

David Lundberg Kenrick 22:21 It is. Oh.

Douglas Kenrick 22:23 ... and, and that's a good example of, of mismatched, because even Dave, even despite the fact that we do worry about... Even if we're poor now, we have enough money that we can afford Twinkies and other, you know, unhealthy foods. And so I, I was amazed that I got a- as I got away from the less wealthy parts of, you know, Canada and into the sticks, I would see more obesity there. It's almost like the, it's almost now, it now, uh, wealthy people I think are thinner. I don't, I don't know if that statistically bears out but I feel like it does, it does hold when I...

Chris Williamson 22:59 Would the, uh, how would you say, the threshold for having enough money to, in order to be able to make yourself fat is actually pretty low. You don't need-

Douglas Kenrick 23:07 Very low.

David Lundberg Kenrick 23:07 In the US.

Chris Williamson 23:07 You don't need a lot of money-

David Lundberg Kenrick 23:08 I think. I mean-

Chris Williamson 23:09 ... in order to be able to make yourself fat.

Douglas Kenrick 23:11 Exactly.

David Lundberg Kenrick 23:11 Right.

Douglas Kenrick 23:11 You actually need, you need more money to buy, uh, organic vegetables and fruits, you know. Like blueberries cost more money than a, you know, than a, a, a similar number of calories, uh, in a loaf of, you know, cheap bread or, uh, and a, some Hostess Twinkies which I don't know if you know what Hostess Twinkies are but they're the, they're the classical fast food of my generation. They're, you know, empty calories as they say.

Chris Williamson 23:36 Is it true that they're supposed to be able to survive a nuclear apocalypse and they basically never go off?

Douglas Kenrick 23:41 (laughs) I, I-

David Lundberg Kenrick 23:42 Apparently. Um, so... (laughs) We haven't tested it, but yeah. Um...

Chris Williamson 23:47 Um, I know that you guys looked at, uh, suicide here as well. Have you ever seen any data around how many people committed suicide ancestrally? Or how common it was?

Douglas Kenrick 23:59 I, I have, I actually thought of that. Do, do you, have you come across that, Dave?

David Lundberg Kenrick 24:03 I mean, I know that there are, you know, you can think about like, um, samurai sort of like, there are traditional societies where suicides were, were part of a thing you would do if you brought shame to your tribe.

Douglas Kenrick 24:19 Ah.

David Lundberg Kenrick 24:19 So it's, it's not unheard of. Um, I don't know that we have, I mean, I certainly don't know of statistics the way we have modern statistics to compare. Um, I mean I think there were also, there were a lot more ways to risk your life rather than just kill yourself, right? If things aren't going well you could just-

Chris Williamson 24:39 Beaten to the punch by, in the environment, yes.

David Lundberg Kenrick 24:42 Yeah. Yeah, you can go out and, and, and this is I think one of the things we sort of talk about, is this idea that suicide might actually ... That, that desire or that lack of desire for self-preservation might come from this place of you've got your sort of basic needs met, but you're not meeting those social needs, right? And so it might actually be your brain's way of saying, "All right. Go take some risks. It's time to, you know, it's time to go out there and maybe get yourself eaten by a lion or whatever. But maybe you'll find a really cool oasis, you know?" And so-

Chris Williamson 25:21 Mm-hmm.

David Lundberg Kenrick 25:21 ... so that is one of the, one of the possibilities we've discussed is that this, that really what people are, they're feeling like these other me- needs are not being met and they're sort of overvaluing survival a little bit.

Douglas Kenrick 25:36 So you know what's cool about what you're saying, Dave? Is that, uh, like I think it's, there's no doubt that people acted s- what we'd call suicidal, you know, uh, in the ansce- They might not have actually gone out and, and, you know, conscious. They, well, they couldn't have taken pills. They could've thrown themself off a cliff. But they could certainly have gone out and screamed at a member of another tribe and gotten themselves killed, or ended up looking good if they won the fight, you know? Uh, as, as we were driving through Montana, Dave ... I don't know. Dave was born in Montana, uh, and as we were driving through, I l- got the audio tape of, of a book called The River Runs Through It, which is a very beautiful book. It's a sort of poetic depiction of this relationship between a guy and his younger brother. And if you haven't ever read it, Chris, it's one of the most beautifully written English, uh, books in English literature. Uh, and it was recommended to me by the, uh, department chair of the University of Chicago, who said he had a colleague who never did anything his whole life and they thought, "Maybe we shouldn't have given him tenure." And then he wrote this book and this guy said, this old professor said, "It should've won the Pulitzer Prize except that it came out the year of Roots." But it's a beautiful depiction. And I remember it as a beautiful depiction of the nature and of, of fly fishing, but a lot of it involves ... These are guys in the 1930s going out into bars, getting plastered, drunk out of their mind, uh, and getting into fistfights and, you know, going out into the wilderness and doing crazy shit, you know? Uh, and, you know, the brother who ends up dead in the end, uh, does have a what we would call a suicidal tendency to ... It isn't like he's thinking of ending his own life purposefully, but he's certainly putting himself in situations where he's either gonna look really good or he's gonna die, you know? And i- it's a true story. In fact, in the end, he gets murdered by some people who he probably pissed off.

Chris Williamson 27:35 Well, I mean, the equivalent ancestrally wouldn't have been death by enemies or death by cop. It might've been death by lion or something. Death-

Douglas Kenrick 27:43 Ah. Right.

Chris Williamson 27:43 Death by goring from some-

Douglas Kenrick 27:45 Exactly.

David Lundberg Kenrick 27:46 A- it could-

Chris Williamson 27:46 ... animal.

David Lundberg Kenrick 27:46 It could be death by, you know, fighting other tribes. It could also be death by challenging people in your tribe, you know?

Chris Williamson 27:56 Yeah.

David Lundberg Kenrick 27:56 Um, and so although that probably would've been less likely to end in actual death-death, but, um-

Chris Williamson 28:02 Mm-hmm.

David Lundberg Kenrick 28:02 But yeah.

Chris Williamson 28:03 So l-

Douglas Kenrick 28:03 The death by cop, that's a nice association, Chris, when you say that 'cause I actually think that that's a good, that's a nice way of capturing what I was just talking about, I think. That a death by cop is probably some macho guy. There's probably an out of wim- a lot of women who die by cop, but it's probably a lot of young guys with a lot of testosterone that decide they're gonna show people how tough they are. Uh ...

Chris Williamson 28:28 That's the thing that you see as well, right? That, uh, over time, testosterone decreases. With a decrease in testosterone, less risk-taking behavior.

David Lundberg Kenrick 28:35 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 28:35 When men get into relationships, testosterone drops. When they get married-

David Lundberg Kenrick 28:38 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 28:38 ... it drops. When they have kids, it drops again.

Douglas Kenrick 28:40 Right. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 28:40 Because the guy that continues to take tons of risks and gets death by lion is of little use to the three children that he's just brought into the world, or the wife that's waiting back at the cave for him.

Douglas Kenrick 28:51 Right.

David Lundberg Kenrick 28:51 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 28:52 Yeah.

David Lundberg Kenrick 28:52 The math, the math changes for what-

Chris Williamson 28:54 (laughs)

David Lundberg Kenrick 28:54 So this, like going back to this sort of like pyramid of motives, like this is part of why I sort of always am like ... a little hesitant to even call it a pyramid 'cause it's like you've got, you know, protection, friendship, um, needs, mating, taking care of kin. That math is constantly changing, right? You have kids and then suddenly, it makes less sense for you to run out and go do something super risky when instead if there's a way for you to just sort of find a little bit, a little bit of food here and a little bit of food there and keep your kids alive, you know. Um, so ...

Douglas Kenrick 29:33 Mm-hmm.

David Lundberg Kenrick 29:34 And our, our physiology changes to sort of accommodate that, like, like these testosterone level drops, so ... Yeah.

Chris Williamson 29:41 How-

Douglas Kenrick 29:41 Do you know the-

Chris Williamson 29:43 Go ahead, David.

Douglas Kenrick 29:44 I was just gonna refer to the... There's a study that you may know, Chris, by, uh, Martin Daly and Margo Wilson. They did a paper on the young male syndrome, uh, and it was about, uh, it was about the tendency to, uh, like die in homicidal conflicts. And what they found is that in fact it's very high for young guys of mating age and, you know, and in subsequent research they found it's especially guys in situations of desperation, okay? Like upper middle class kids who went to college, they don't go out and do this kind of thing. But if you don't have any other way to prove that you're, you know, that you're, you've got something special about you, then you take these desperate acts. Uh, and so in fact, it fits w- with all of what we've been talking about, that the, that it's young, desperate men that are ... In fact, we talk about it in the book. They're the people that you want to watch out for, um, and if you're one of them, you kind of wanna watch out for yourself.

Douglas Kenrick 30:44 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 30:44 Just how violent are humans evolutionarily?

David Lundberg Kenrick 30:50 I- compared to what? Like, compared to how we are now?

Douglas Kenrick 30:53 Yeah.

David Lundberg Kenrick 30:54 Oh. I mean, I think now is the most peaceful time pretty much in human history, right? Um, and like, what we have- we have statistics of the murder rates of... Do you know those off the top of your head, Dad?

Douglas Kenrick 31:08 Yeah. Well, so, there's this big debate 'cause some people, th- you know, like to argue, "Oh, no, it was-" You know, that, "It's exaggerated." Uh, but I talked to Kim Hill, who is one of the- the world's prominent anthropologists who's done studies with like the Aché. Uh, and, uh, what he found in one of his studies of a s- of a South American group is the homicide rate was like 40, 50%. And then people came in and said, "Oh, no, that's only because they got killed by the Spanish agricultural people around." But- but I went and relooked at his data. When you took out the murders by the- by the non-native groups, it was still a 25 or 30% homicide rate. And so, that's a high end, but even amongst the Eskimos and the Bushmen, Steven Pinker talks about this, uh, in a couple of his books, but, you know, particularly the one, The Better Angels of Our Nature, where he compares all of the known data on violence in, you know, in hunter-gatherer groups and the least violent hunter-gatherer groups, the Bushmen and an- another group whose name I'm forgetting, their homicide rates were about similar to the city of New Orleans, which is the most violent city in the United States, which is the most violent, uh, developed country, uh, in the world. And so, it was, yeah, it was dangerous. Why is it then that we feel so unsafe day-to-day if the world is objectively safer than ever before? I'll let you take that, Dave. (laughs)

David Lundberg Kenrick 32:42 Well- well, part of it is, I mean, it's- it's advantageous to feel unsafe, right? It's- it- there's a advantage to just looking for threats and to being hyper-aware of threats. And there- there hasn't been enough time evolutionarily for that to go away, right? Because you don't want to miss a threat. Um, and, uh, and then beyond that there are these sort of, because we don't want to miss a threat, you know, I think you can certainly see with news and things like that, there- there are things that command that attention, uh, for profit or for views or whatever, and so we still... We hear about probably more mur- well, certainly more murders because we hear about more murders than our ancestors would hear about people, right?

Douglas Kenrick 33:35 Mm-hmm.

David Lundberg Kenrick 33:35 So, we're constantly aware of things like, you know, like, I mean the war in the Ukraine, which is a very serious thing, but it's- it's also very far from me right now. But I'm paying attention to it, right? 'Cause I want to know what's happening. And so, I think... So that, there's that interplay between our evolved mechanism and the technology that taps into that.

Douglas Kenrick 33:57 Yeah. So let me just sp- back to what the concept of mismatch that (clears throat) you know, we're designed to look for threats in a world where there aren't that many people. And even though there were homicides, they weren't every day. But the- the news media capitali- we have that powerful motive that Dave was just referring to, I wanna know if there's a threat. And so, if I'm even The New York Times, you know, which is the sort of the liberal media, or if I'm Fox News, which is the more conservative media in the US, it's like, they're both gonna want to give us some bad news. They're gonna want to talk about threats. Why? Because we want to know about it. We, you know, we may say, "Oh, gee, why don't they put more good news?" We don't click on the good news links. We click on the Ukraine. We click on, there was a murder in Chicago. You know? We c- you know, it's like, I know about murders in Africa, you know, and it's like we would have never known about murders in the- in the, you know, in distant places. So, it seems like holy crap, what a dangerous world we live in. But now I ask the question of, you know, well, y- it might be different from you, Chris, but I- uh, you know, I doubt it. Uh, do I know anybody who was murdered? I do not know a single person. I grew up in New York City around lots of people and I knew- I know more people than most of my ancestors ever knew. I don't know any... I did know people who went to war, okay? Um, but I don't know, uh, anyone who was like murdered in a kind of violent, you know, urban or suburban. Do you know anybody who was murdered? Either one of you guys? No, not me. No.

David Lundberg Kenrick 35:40 Uh, I had... My- my neighbor's brother was murdered.

Douglas Kenrick 35:44 Huh.

David Lundberg Kenrick 35:44 Uh, I didn't know him personally but that's- that's the closest I could- I could think of. Um, so...

Douglas Kenrick 35:50 (laughs) Thinking about the fact that

Douglas Kenrick 35:51 we've got this evolutionary mismatch and, uh, how would you say? Vestigial negativity bias perhaps that carries over from, uh, our ancestral past. I'm sure that you guys must have thought about what happens in future if humans continue... If we were able to keep around about 2022-ish, uh, as the level of environment that we're going to be in for the next 100,000 years, what sort of changes do you think we would see to the human psyche? Have you got any idea about what would be adaptive? Obviously, the problem that we have and the reason I need to keep us at 2022 is that technology's gonna move more quickly than our evolution can catch up with it. But if we were to hold ourselves where we're at now, would that, would the negativity bias come down? Would there be other changes that you might expect to see?

David Lundberg Kenrick 36:39 I- I would think you probably would. There- there probably would be 'cause I imagine it takes resources to... I mean, it definitely takes resources to be on alert, right? And so, being less nervous would have...I think it would have enough of a evolutionary benefit. This is not really a thing that we've ever, I think, discussed before, um, but-

Douglas Kenrick 37:03 Yeah.

David Lundberg Kenrick 37:04 ... just thinking about it right now, I mean, we would, yeah, we would-

Douglas Kenrick 37:11 What-

David Lundberg Kenrick 37:11 ... we would redirect that part of our brain to figuring out how to get it more likes, um, and how to, how to program better probably, like... (laughs)

Douglas Kenrick 37:20 It is, it is possible we'll use the technology to... I, I actually don't think there's gonna be enough of a selection pressure, uh, for a short enough appear-

David Lundberg Kenrick 37:29 Against it?

Douglas Kenrick 37:29 ...'cause technology changes so quickly, but I do think we could use the technology. I mean, Dave, you and I have talked about this, developing apps, for example, that, you know, that are much, much more effective at preventing us from spending too much screen time, you know? Uh, and I, I know that I personally will turn off my New York Times. They used to give me, you know, they would give me, uh, uh, daily reminders of the news, okay, and political parties who... asking for my money will give me daily reminders of all the dangerous stuff that the other side is doing out there, and what I do is I close those apps. I, I, you know, I disconnect from them, but I think in the future, that there, maybe we'll be able to get some executive control, you know, sort of IA working, where I can say, "How much of this shit do I want to hear? And I don't want to hear about it more than once a week." Uh, and, uh, maybe, I... I mean, you guys are younger and you ha- you may have a different opinion, but do you think we, there might be a market for that kind of technology and...

Chris Williamson 38:36 I, in my, in my opinion, I think we're going to look back hoping, I, I hope this is the case, that people in about 50 to 100 years are going to look back on what we do with technology now, or more accurately what technology does to us, in the same way as when we can generate our own meat in a lab, people are going to look at factory farms. I think they're going to see it as a complete aberration.

David Lundberg Kenrick 38:58 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 38:58 What on earth were they doing? Look at all of this wasted time and focus and attention. Look what they did to young girls and their body image. Look at the levels of anxiety and self-harm and all of these-

Douglas Kenrick 39:07 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 39:07 ... perverse incentives that we had. I wonder as well, because one of the constraints that you had around psychopathy, uh, and Machiavellianism was the fact that your group was so small that you could only get away with a small number of those people per group.

Douglas Kenrick 39:20 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 39:20 I also found out, um, that, um, psychopathy is actually adaptive on a group level, but not necessarily on an individual level because if you're a Viking tribe, it's pretty useful for you to have a few psychopaths that you can send over to Lindisfarne to go and sack it, kill everybody, and come back with a ton of gold, but you don't want too many so that it actually makes the group unstable. My thinking being that because we're no longer-

Douglas Kenrick 39:42 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 39:43 ... as, uh, at the mercy or as visible, uh, and people can bounce around, you know, the snake oil salesman can go from town to town now, um, that you may have more incentives, more adaptive, uh, pressures that allow people to take advantage of Machiavellian or, or psychopathic traits.

David Lundberg Kenrick 40:01 I- Uh, uh, so the world is certainly set up, you know, we talk about this in the book. Even the automobile, right, does allow for... it makes Machiavellian strategies more effective, right? Um, and so actually just to tie this real quickly back to what you were just asking about how we would evolve, I could see countermeasures to those sorts of things, countermeasures to cheater detection, like becoming more, more salient, you know, like... And also, um, we've been talking about this sort of, I think from the perspective of guys, being worried about other guys. I think for women, there's still a lot of the same sort of threats that they faced, threats of sort of, you know, pregnancy, unwanted pregnancy and things like this. Those might be getting worse because of some of this technology, um, and so those sorts of things. I feel like those countermeasures are going to, we're going to become more and more aware of, wait, is this person, is this person going to rip me off? You know, like, not necessarily they're gonna beat me up, but they're gonna convince me to engage in a, in a pyramid scheme or something like this or, you know, is this person who is approaching me as a potential mate, are they really trustworthy? So I think those sorts of risks are possibly even higher than they've ever been.

Douglas Kenrick 41:32 And I think that's more like cultural evolution than biological evolution, uh, in some sense. So, I know growing up in New York City, I learned not to trust strangers in a way that, you know, my mother-in-law who grew up in a little town in Delaware, you know, when she moved out to Arizona, uh, she would leave her doors unlocked, she would leave her keys in her car, you know, and, you know, one of m- of my cars got stolen from her parking lot, you know? Uh, but for me, I, it was very easy for me to, to be suspicious because I'd grown up around strangers and so some of it might simply be that we, you know, we pick it up. We basically use those old mechanisms and just set them to a, a lower threshold than, uh, than we would have and that may continue.

Chris Williamson 42:30 What did you learn about how friendships work?

Douglas Kenrick 42:35 In the, in the book, yeah, okay, yes. Uh, so...

David Lundberg Kenrick 42:41 Well, I go- I'm gonna just jump in here-

Douglas Kenrick 42:43 Go ahead.

David Lundberg Kenrick 42:43 ... 'cause I, I think one of the things sort of thinking about how friendships work in the ancestral world is they're, they're very goal oriented, right? They're, this sort of affiliation motive is, it can be designed, it can be based on sort of not quite altruism but like kin care and like care of people around you, like sharing food, but it can also be based on teaming up to...... either, you know, like take down a mammoth is sort of the, the classic idea. And so, um, that is the thing that... You know, in modern days, we have a lot of competitive, um, activities. And some of those are sort of team-based, right? Sports, right? If you're playing sports, you are still with your team against the other team. But, uh, one of the things we sort of discuss a lot is this idea that working together, working together is a good way of matching that. That's what our ancestors used to do, right? It's like instead of getting together to play board games, you get together to, to build a hut. And so...

Douglas Kenrick 43:48 Or to fish.

David Lundberg Kenrick 43:49 Yeah, exactly. (laughs)

Douglas Kenrick 43:50 Or to hunt.

David Lundberg Kenrick 43:51 Yeah.

Douglas Kenrick 43:51 Uh, and so that I think is something that we... Like, you know, it's kind of fun w- writing this book 'cause it's like you'd think a lot of this stuff would come automatically, right? But, uh, I don't think it did 'cause our ancestors didn't need to think about it. Okay? They would wake up in the morning and that, their, you know, cousins would say, "We're going fishing today and you're coming." You know? (laughs) .

David Lundberg Kenrick 44:11 (laughs)

Douglas Kenrick 44:11 And that doesn't happen. And so in the, in the modern world, I think sometimes when we think about making friends, we think, "Oh, all I have to do is just go talk to people and then I'll..." You know? But in reality, I think we do have to do something significant with them, you know. Like it's much easier to maintain friendships when you have common goals to accomplish. And...

David Lundberg Kenrick 44:33 E- Yeah. And, and we're skipping the big, the biggest difference in recent modern times, which is, the, these days friendships are often virtual, right? Um, which was obviously never the case. And, and there's data showing that spending more time online, like actually makes people less happy versus spending time in person. So...

Douglas Kenrick 44:55 Mm-hmm.

David Lundberg Kenrick 44:56 So, one of the most simple things is just-

Douglas Kenrick 44:59 Hang with-

David Lundberg Kenrick 44:59 ... we need to be hanging out with real people in real life.

Douglas Kenrick 45:01 Yeah.

David Lundberg Kenrick 45:02 So, um...

Chris Williamson 45:03 I certainly think that for men, uh, bonding through shared effort seems to deepen friendships in a, a pretty profound way. I had a, a guy called Max Dickens who's just written a book called Billy No-Mates about why men have a difficulty with friendships at the moment.

David Lundberg Kenrick 45:18 Huh.

Chris Williamson 45:18 And (clears throat) he, he seems to come across the same, the same conclusion, which is that women are really good at maintaining, uh, friendships over time. Uh, men's friendships peak around about 18, the maximum amount of time that they spend socially. And then that just gets-

David Lundberg Kenrick 45:34 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 45:34 ... frittered away and frittered away. And one of the reasons is that men need to see other men making effort, not only for them but with them. You know, they need to be contributing.

David Lundberg Kenrick 45:45 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 45:45 And that kind of makes sense. Like think about what the friendships would be ancestrally. The men would go out. They would hunt. They would do something hard together. They would bond over the fact that they were doing the hard thing together.

David Lundberg Kenrick 45:56 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 45:56 But they wouldn't get quite as attached as a woman would to her friends, because that guy that you're out hunting with might get killed. You're out on a hunt-

David Lundberg Kenrick 46:04 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 46:04 ... it's pretty likely that they're gonna... It's certainly more likely that they're gonna die than one of the other mothers that's back in the cave. So, I, I think it's called, is it alloparenting where you kind of do shared, uh, shared-

David Lundberg Kenrick 46:16 Right.

Chris Williamson 46:16 ... care of, of children-

David Lundberg Kenrick 46:17 Yeah.

Douglas Kenrick 46:17 Right.

David Lundberg Kenrick 46:17 Uh, stuff like that.

Douglas Kenrick 46:20 I... Yeah. I think even on top of the guys dying, there are other aspects of female friendship. There's sort of like an information economy, you know, that like in female friendships where knowing somebody, they can help you, they can es- help you assess potential mates, right? They can help you raise kids, as you were saying. And so, I think it could also be partly for guys the skillset to get somebody to come and help you, right? If you see a guy who can throw a spear and you're like, "Hey, you can throw a spear. I can throw a rock. Let's go hunt a thing." Whereas if you want somebody to say, "Hey, can I trust you to tell me who else I can trust around here?" Knowing them for a long time really adds value to that. So, that could-

David Lundberg Kenrick 47:04 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 47:04 What about, uh, dominance? You looked at the difference between dominance and prestige when it refers to being effective at getting ahead and s- becoming statusful in life. What did you learn there?

David Lundberg Kenrick 47:16 Well, so people like prestigious leaders, right? Dominant leaders are, they're appealing like if you're thinking about going to war, um, but if you're thinking about just working together as a group, people prefer prestigious leaders. People also often when they conceptualize their ideal boss will prefer a female leader. Um, and so it really depends on the situation at hand. Uh, but often if you're talking about getting along or a thing where resources are gonna be shared, a workplace environment, things like that, prestige, you know, which is the idea that they can teach you skills and help guide you, is pretty key.

Douglas Kenrick 48:03 Yeah, let me, let me just expand on what you just said, Dave. Let's define those terms. A prestige leader is someone who, as Dave just said, it's somebody... Uh, there, there was a, a paper by Joe Henrich and, uh, Francisco Gil White that made this distinction and said that, um, as far as they could tell at least among chimpanzees, uh, and most other mammals, uh, leader, the, the, the top of the status hierarchy is occupied by an aggressive, competitive individual who you won't mess with. You don't wanna go near them because they'll bite your, you know, they'll bite your head off, you know. (laughs) Um, and, uh, we do have that. We have that kind of, you know, dom- the tough schoolyard bully type of thing in human beings as well. And that individual, if they want to take something from you, you know, they're in a better position to do that if they're the big tough bully. Um, and, uh...... a lot of times, for a long time, people would read evolutionary literature like Chimpanzee Politics. Uh, there was the head of the, um ... Newt Gingrich used to give it to incoming Republican, uh, representatives and say, "This is the way it is, man. It's all about blood, you know, and you know, take what you can. Don't give, don't, don't give in. Bond together to kick ass on anybody who gets in your way." Uh, and that's one view of things. Um, it may be why the American Congress doesn't do so well, you know, getting anything done. Um, but another v- uh, another thing that's unique to humans is that we share information with one another. And so a prestigious leader is someone who is, is given status because we want them to be in the decision-making. We want them to be at the, you know, driving the car because they've got the skills. Uh, and you get prestige if you deliver goods and if you can train other people. And so that's the, just to kind of clarify that distinction. Um, and so as Dave was saying, the research evidence suggests that we, we do like the bullies as leaders if we're about to go to war. And that's, uh, van, Mark van Vugt did a lot of that research out, uh, he's at, uh, the V, uh, Free University in Amsterdam. Uh, but we've done a lot of research here and, uh, a number of people who've, like, uh, Henrik's colleagues and John Manner have done research suggesting that, uh, that we really do like prestigious leaders. You know? Uh, if, if I'm gonna work for you, if you're gonna be my boss, I don't want you to be the big bully, okay? I want you to be somebody I can get close to who can, you know, take me and show me the ropes and how to get things accomplished and can lead me in a, you know, lead me in a direction I'll trust.

Chris Williamson 50:57 So our preference for leaders responds to the local demands of whatever situation or ecology or environment we're in?

Douglas Kenrick 51:05 Yeah. And, and most of the time in the modern world, we're not at war. (laughs) Um, and if you're running a corporation, I think it's probably better not to think of yourself as, you know, a dominant alpha male chimp, but to think of yourself as a prestigious human being.

Chris Williamson 51:24 Who was that guy that ended up in a ton of different marriages? Giovanni-

David Lundberg Kenrick 51:30 Giovanni Giotto.

Douglas Kenrick 51:32 Yeah.

David Lundberg Kenrick 51:32 Yes. (laughs)

Douglas Kenrick 51:32 (laughs) Yes. So, and this was, this was before dating apps, right? But he just would do this. He had a car and so he would go from town to town, um, and, uh, he met women at things like antique shows and would sort of get them to fall in love with him and also get them to lend or give him their, their assets, their car, their, you know, their bank accounts. And went around and did this to over 100 women, was married to them, I think, and was- Yeah. ... like, and stealing- Married them all.

David Lundberg Kenrick 52:10 ... their stuff. Um, so, right, this was the ultimate sort of, like, Machiavellian dating strategy, right?

Douglas Kenrick 52:17 (laughs)

David Lundberg Kenrick 52:18 (laughs) Um, so ...

Douglas Kenrick 52:18 Which could not have happened in the ancestral environment because you would have had some brothers come hunting you down and killing you. Uh, but he was able to drive to another state and, uh, start again.

Chris Williamson 52:29 How much evolutionary evidence do you think there is for humans feeling love and thinking about love in the way that we conceive it now in the modern world?

Douglas Kenrick 52:41 So there, uh, the myth in my field of psychology used to be, well, in s- in the social sciences used to be that love was something that was invented in the Middle Ages. Uh, and, you know, it's like about romantic love and chivalry and so forth and those... And before that, love didn't exist. That turns out to be BS. There's a, an anthropologist, uh, Jankowiak & Fisher, they did a study with... They actually did a, a meta-analysis sort of a thing where they got a whole... They looked at all the societies they could find and they'll look... They were anthropologists who looked at the anthropological reports and looked at are there ever powerful bonds between, you know, romantic partners in this society? And what they found is that in the... I'm going to make this number up, but in the, say, 120 that they could look at, they found that the answer was definitely yes in 110 of them and we don't really know in the other 10. And so they guessed that powerful bonds are something that happened even in hunter-gatherers. Uh, and so they're... We... I would argue that they are part of human nature, the bond between, you know, between lovers.

Chris Williamson 53:51 What's the difference between strong pair bonding and love?

David Lundberg Kenrick 53:58 Um, is it just a semantic difference? I mean-

Chris Williamson 54:00 That's what I mean. Yeah.

Douglas Kenrick 54:01 That's what I would say. Yeah.

David Lundberg Kenrick 54:02 (laughs)

Douglas Kenrick 54:03 (laughs) I agree. It's just, it's just the words we're using.

David Lundberg Kenrick 54:07 Yeah. I mean, I think love is a, is a sort of common term that we use that is primarily used for sort of pair bonding and then also sort of parental familial love. Um, but-

Douglas Kenrick 54:22 Yeah. No. There is-

David Lundberg Kenrick 54:23 Okay.

Douglas Kenrick 54:23 ... that distinction. Yeah. No. No. I'm actually just agreeing with you, Dave, that there is... There's actually studies that have been done where they ask people, uh, to think of someone you're in love with and they do think of people in two categories. They think of romantic partners and for that kind of love, they talk about feeling passion and arousal and longing. Uh, and then they talk about familial love or, you know, affiliative love. And then there, they just talk about bonding and being close. So there are two... Those are two different ways we use the word love. But I think what you're referring to, Chris, was romantic love.

Chris Williamson 55:01 Mm-hmm.

Douglas Kenrick 55:01 It's that passionate.

David Lundberg Kenrick 55:02 Right. It, it also, it also sometimes I think is used to refer to that sort of initial-... feeling of euphoria at a sort of early stage-

Douglas Kenrick 55:12 Right.

David Lundberg Kenrick 55:12 ... of a relationship. Oh, and so, which whereas pair bonding includes that, but also includes the sort of longer term-

Douglas Kenrick 55:23 Well, yeah.

David Lundberg Kenrick 55:24 ... um, romantic-

Chris Williamson 55:24 I remember-

Douglas Kenrick 55:24 Yeah, go ahead.

Chris Williamson 55:25 I, I remember hearing, uh, hearing, uh, Jonathan Haidt talk about passionate love and companionate love as being two-

Douglas Kenrick 55:32 Yes.

Chris Williamson 55:32 ... uh, uh, like a, a life cycle that you go through.

Douglas Kenrick 55:37 Well, yes. Ro- romantic relationships do shift to those companionate relationships. So, we have, we have the companionate love with our family members where we never felt any passion for them, okay? (laughs) Uh, but, uh, romantic ro- as Dave just pointed out, romance tends to peak at the beginning of a, a relationship and you really wouldn't want to go on for years with this pounding of heart and sweating palms and anticipation every time you see, you know, your wife, okay? Because it, you'd die of a heart attack, you know? (laughs) Uh, and so turns out that in fact it does go away and gets replaced with that more kind of familial, you know, what you might call brotherly love, you know? Just this is a person who's my mate in the sense that you used the term before, as a, a friend.

Chris Williamson 56:27 Doug, did you do some work on the relationship between dominance and attraction at some point?

Douglas Kenrick 56:33 Yes. Many, many years ago. Uh, it was one of the, uh, one of the first, uh, studies that was published in our major journal, the Journal of Personality and Social Psych from an evolutionary perspective. And it took us 10 years to get it published because people didn't like the idea of comparing us to other animals. Uh, with Ed Sadala, uh, did some research where we actually just... We had been read- e- eh, you know, Ed had been reading sociobiology and I'd been reading a book by Jane Lancaster called Primate Behavior and the Emergence of Human Culture. We thought, "Well, let's start it, to apply this to humans." And so, we did some what would now seem very simple studies where we showed people potential partners who were either dominant in the sense of they'd w- go into an office, they'd sit upright, they'd, they'd lean in towards the person in the desk, uh, or they'd sit meekly over in the corner. And we, we did a number of ways. We had... Sometimes we had a psychologist describe you as dominant, uh, and, uh, what we found in all of those studies is that for women judging men, they judged the guy as sexier when he was dominant. Not when he was domineering, incidentally, not when he was pushy and aggressive, eh, you know, and nasty kind of dominant. But when he was confident and, you know, eh, that kind of dominant, you know? Uh, men didn't care one way or the other. Uh, was she... They asked the question of, was she attractive? Um...

Chris Williamson 58:00 (laughs)

Douglas Kenrick 58:04 Do you know, I don't know if you know the study by, uh, John Marshall Townsend, I think his name is, he, uh, he did a study where he brought people into the lab and showed them, uh, potential... I think maybe it was like a simulated dating study, and I'm not exactly sure of the context. But you would look at a photograph of, if you're a, a man, you would look at a picture of a, a woman who either looked gorgeous, uh, or who looked average, and she was either wearing, uh, a Burger King server's outfit, okay? Or she was wearing a, you know, dressed to the nines, Wall Street, you know, fancy suit and, you know, Rolex watch, uh, the female kind. Or the guy, same thing. You'd see a guy and he either looked like a movie star, uh, a- or he looked like a dorky guy, but he'd be dressed for Wall Street or for the Burger King server. And it turns out that the, um... When, when people are asked, "Would you want to date this person?" uh, or have, uh, you know, amorous relationships with this person, uh, for women it mattered. Uh, y- they would actually prefer to date the dorky looking guy in the Wall Street clothes to the handsome guy who's working at Burger King. For men, they didn't care what, you know, that if she was good looking, they'd prefer the good looking woman who worked for Burger King to the less attractive woman who was dressed to the nines.

Chris Williamson 59:39 Something else that I learned in Seth's book was about the difference in mate value and perceived mate value of men by women based on the amount of money that they earned related to the job and the type of job that they had. And what-

Douglas Kenrick 59:56 Oh.

Chris Williamson 59:56 ... a lot of the time men say that because women are hypergamous and they're resource-seeking creatures that it's hard because I need to climb up the corporate ladder and I need to get myself to $160,000 a year before anyone's even gonna look at me. And the data doesn't seem to suggest that. What it suggests is that you can actually pivot from one career into another career and that women value a cooler job a lot more than they value a high paying job.

Douglas Kenrick 1:00:20 Ah. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 1:00:20 In fact, they found that a man who works in hospitality and was being paid $200,000 a year would be equally attractive as a fireman who was getting paid $50,000 a year.

David Lundberg Kenrick 1:00:32 Wow. (laughs) Um, so, that's inter-... Well, the fireman still, that's a protective sort of job, right? That's a, that... And whereas I guess hospitality, it's, it's still... There's a way in which it's like you're, you're helping other people. So, that's interesting.

Chris Williamson 1:00:51 For one, for one reason or another, it's just not seen as statusful.

David Lundberg Kenrick 1:00:54 Yeah. So, huh.

Chris Williamson 1:00:56 I always remember this example. I think it's in Robert Wright's, uh, The Moral Animal, which is what, like, 30 years old now or something? Nearly.

Douglas Kenrick 1:01:02 Yes, it is. Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:01:03 Yeah, it's still spectacular. And, um-He was talking about why do women fall in love with the starving artist, you know, the guitar s- singer that plays acoustic sets on a night but sleeps on his friend's couch. And his justification for that was that it's basically, uh, buying a penny stock, that it's a future projection-

David Lundberg Kenrick 1:01:23 Ah. Interesting.

Chris Williamson 1:01:23 ... of potential mate value over time. And I think that, you know, if you were to look at the fireman and the value, not in terms of monetary outcome but in terms of status over time, you would think, right, that guy is probably going to accumulate a ton of goodwill, everyone's going to be really altruistic toward him. You know, if he saves a cat from a burning building, that's ... people are gonna owe him. Whereas the hospitality industry- That being said, lawyer was the highest rated in terms of category. And I don't think that many people see lawyers as being super altruistic, uh, creatures either.

David Lundberg Kenrick 1:01:59 But, but dominant, right? They f- they, they will fight. So that could be part of it. Um. And so there's that 'cause both of those have the ... this person has the ability to protect me, which I think is a- you know, an attractive feature.

Chris Williamson 1:02:17 Legally and from a fire, those are the two ways that women primarily need protecting.

David Lundberg Kenrick 1:02:24 (laughs)

Douglas Kenrick 1:02:24 But why is a-

David Lundberg Kenrick 1:02:25 (laughs) Sorry.

Douglas Kenrick 1:02:27 Why the rock- why the rock star?

Chris Williamson 1:02:28 (sighs)

David Lundberg Kenrick 1:02:28 Yeah.

Douglas Kenrick 1:02:28 Why the r- why the local rock star? Because, uh, y- you know, Geoffrey Miller would argue. He a- he wrote a beautiful book called The Mating Mind. I've never spoken-

Chris Williamson 1:02:37 I was with, I was with Geoffrey and Diana last night.

Douglas Kenrick 1:02:39 Oh, were you? Okay. Great.

Chris Williamson 1:02:41 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Douglas Kenrick 1:02:41 Um, so you know about The Mating Mind, then. And what he would argue there is that in some sense if I can show off my, you know, my brilliant mind, uh, it indicates that I have good genes. So even if I don't currently have resources, uh, if you mate with me, your kids will be peacocks too. Your kids will be the human ... the human version of a peacock is someone who can speak eloquently, uh, or who can play the guitar and, you know, tr-

Chris Williamson 1:03:15 Well-

Douglas Kenrick 1:03:15 He'll be able to charm women even though he doesn't have money in the next generation.

David Lundberg Kenrick 1:03:19 I, I'd be curious. Have they ever looked to see how much more or less attractive a guy is with a guitar versus being in a band? Like does the actual-

Douglas Kenrick 1:03:31 Ah.

David Lundberg Kenrick 1:03:31 Th- the ability to sort of put together a band and work as a group seems like it would add an extra level of-

Chris Williamson 1:03:39 (smacks lips) Well, yeah, maybe but maybe it dilutes down where the success is coming from. Perhaps it's less to do with you and perhaps it's more to do with, I don't know, sort of Machiavellian, uh, m- I don't know, coordination and stuff like that, because by that virtue maybe the guy that's the agent of the band or the manager of the band should be the one that's the most important because he's the guy that puts them all together, and yet he's not.

David Lundberg Kenrick 1:04:03 Mm-mm.

Chris Williamson 1:04:04 So-

Douglas Kenrick 1:04:04 He's not, yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:04:04 Yeah, I would be-

David Lundberg Kenrick 1:04:06 But you don't see him doing that, right? Like, uh, when you see the b-

Chris Williamson 1:04:08 Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

David Lundberg Kenrick 1:04:08 I'd be, I'd be really curious to see whether a single guy, like a guy up there with a guitar by himself, how he does compared to a guy with a band. Um, and, and I would bet on the guy with the band, actually, you know?

Douglas Kenrick 1:04:19 It's an empirical question, Dave. You-

David Lundberg Kenrick 1:04:21 Yeah. So-

Douglas Kenrick 1:04:21 You could probably talk a couple of the graduate students here into running that study.

David Lundberg Kenrick 1:04:24 (laughs) In- yeah. So-

Chris Williamson 1:04:25 Easy one.

Chris Williamson 1:04:26 Um, I had a, I had a question, actually. Why is it that human females go through menopause? Because I don't think that many other animals or most other animals do.

Douglas Kenrick 1:04:36 Hardly any. Hardly any. There's ... I heard of one, uh, one cetacean, som- in, in other words some sort of a dolphin, uh, goes through menopause. That's the only other species I've ever heard of. The, uh, the theory is that, uh, at some point a woman reaches a, an age that humans over time began to become more and more long-lived. And, uh, at a certain age it's more dan- ... if a woman ... if we live in social groups, we take care of the members of our group, uh, and if the mother is taking care of her children and then her grandchildren, (smacks lips) her bearing another child, there's the danger she'll die in childbirth, uh, or that she'll die when that child is young. And so it actually ... it's a, an economic, uh, in the sense that our genes making an economic like s- you know like Dawkins talked about in The Selfish Gene. It isn't like th- our genes actually make decisions but we can think of them as saying, "Click, now let's switch to this strategy where I- it's better off me being a grandmother than dying in childbirth or dying while I have a very young child."

David Lundberg Kenrick 1:05:49 And-

Douglas Kenrick 1:05:49 And so better to just invest. That's, that's the-

David Lundberg Kenrick 1:05:52 I think, I think the reason that it, it's sort of unique to humans comes from 'cause of our brains. Pregnancy is particularly dangerous for moms, right?

Douglas Kenrick 1:06:02 They have-

David Lundberg Kenrick 1:06:02 Like labor, labor is dangerous. Um, and also we just need a lot of like ... or we benefit a lot from long-term social support, um, more so than most other animals, so.

Douglas Kenrick 1:06:16 But back, uh, we've talked about this I think, Dave, but Kim Hill also did some data where they actually ... you know, Kim Hill and H- Hillary C- Hilli- Hillary Kaplan, a number of people have, have analyzed things like the calories that are brought in by people over their lifespan in these kind of horticultural ... you know, groups living sort of close to the ancestral circumstances, living in the jungles of South America. And they ... one of the things that they tell me is that, uh, first of all, the average couple, uh, doesn't really bring in enough calories to care for themselves and their children. They're so busy taking care of the kid they can't bring enough calories and so they need their relatives to help them out and their neighbors to help them out. Uh, and the average male doesn't bring in enough calories until he's like 20 years old to really, to be a guaranteed source of protein. And so because we're so incredibly dependent in ways that most other animals ... we're so incredibly dependent on that risk pool group that, you know, that, that's what makes us-... the special species in which it pays for the female to, to stop reproducing 'cause she's still in this group. She's still caring for, she's still sharing calories and time and resources on the, uh, on her, you know, second-generation offspring.

Chris Williamson 1:07:41 But she's no longer continuing to produce more mouths that need feeding.

Douglas Kenrick 1:07:46 Right. Exactly. Right.

Chris Williamson 1:07:47 That's fascinating.

David Lundberg Kenrick 1:07:49 And, and she's, yeah, and she's no longer, she's not taking the risk 'cause if a woman has a kid three years before menopause, right, and she would've died three years later, that, that young three-year-old is going to be essentially helpless, right? So-

Douglas Kenrick 1:08:07 Right.

David Lundberg Kenrick 1:08:07 So those younger kids especially, espe- the more recent the kid was born compared to menopause, if, if there was a risk of death, the better.

Chris Williamson 1:08:18 Does this mean-

Douglas Kenrick 1:08:19 Right, so if you're being a parent-

Chris Williamson 1:08:20 Do- does this mean that, uh, menopause would have only emerged after a time when human females were growing up to be on average older than 40 years old or 45 years old or something like that?

Douglas Kenrick 1:08:38 Would have to. Well, there would have to have been selection pressure operating at that age for it to... 'Cause it's a universal feature of humans. So there would've had to have been some s- selection pressure. I guess one other theory is there could have been a weird bottleneck where there was only a small number of human beings and there was a genetic switch in one of the females that, the only one that survived, that'd be the other possible theory, and it was an accident. Uh...

Chris Williamson 1:09:03 Oh, that is cool.

David Lundberg Kenrick 1:09:05 But-

Chris Williamson 1:09:06 I, I guess that, that could potentially explain a whole bunch of phenomenon that we can't really come up with an explanation for or that there's adaptive explanations-

Douglas Kenrick 1:09:13 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:09:13 ... that are sometimes contested. Wasn't there-

Douglas Kenrick 1:09:16 Right.

Chris Williamson 1:09:16 ... there was a, there was a period that we got to where there was less than 10,000 homo sapiens on the planet, right, and everybody was in Indonesia or something?

Douglas Kenrick 1:09:23 I don't know that, but that, that, uh, that's interesting. If that were true, it would've led to a lot of bottlenecking and some, we might have some unique characteristics that we don't really have to have.

David Lundberg Kenrick 1:09:35 I, I mean, it's also possible, I don't, I don't know the, like, anthropological literature on this, but it's possible that, say it was a mutation that w- worked in a small group, and then it just sort of lived among humans until we got to the point where by and large women tend to live-

Douglas Kenrick 1:09:56 Ah.

David Lundberg Kenrick 1:09:57 ... past 40. Then it suddenly becomes incredibly ad- advantageous, and then that's when it spreads, right? Um-

Douglas Kenrick 1:10:05 Yes. That's, that's the-

David Lundberg Kenrick 1:10:06 That's when it sort of becomes, yeah.

Douglas Kenrick 1:10:07 That's a good point, Dan. That's the way it works. I- i-

David Lundberg Kenrick 1:10:10 (laughs) Right.

Douglas Kenrick 1:10:10 If it had a cost, you know, then it would've been selected out at some point. But-

David Lundberg Kenrick 1:10:16 Mm.

Douglas Kenrick 1:10:16 ... if it actually had an advantage, you know, that advantage could've, could've been magnified.

Chris Williamson 1:10:24 It's like a latent benefit almost that sort of sat-

Douglas Kenrick 1:10:27 Right.

Chris Williamson 1:10:27 ... idling away and then becomes significantly more beneficial at some point. And it, it's the, um, the fortunate timing of both of those things coming together-

Douglas Kenrick 1:10:38 Right.

Chris Williamson 1:10:38 ... that you have the genetic mutation perhaps at a time when there's an explosion of that genetic mutation being advantageous.

Douglas Kenrick 1:10:43 Yes.

Chris Williamson 1:10:43 But I suppose that's what all mutations are at, right? Right.

Douglas Kenrick 1:10:46 That's it. That's, that's the name of the game.

Chris Williamson 1:10:47 Yeah. Cr-

David Lundberg Kenrick 1:10:47 Right.

Douglas Kenrick 1:10:47 Random variation and selective retention. That is evolution. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 1:10:51 Yeah.

David Lundberg Kenrick 1:10:51 I, I mean, it also, but it's, it's kind of wild to think that that still happens. You know what I mean? Like, that these sorts of things... I think even as we've been to- discussing this book of, like, our evolved brains, like, I think it's almo- it's easy to imagine, oh, back in the day everyone had our current brains, and those current brains were perfectly matched. And it turns out, well, that wasn't true 'cause there were other people whose brains were not matched to then and they died off. And then even now-

Chris Williamson 1:11:17 Mm.

David Lundberg Kenrick 1:11:17 ... there's so many different variations on sort of human genes out there, you know? That there are different things that could, in a relatively short number of generations, become very advantageous. So.

Douglas Kenrick 1:11:32 Right. There-

Chris Williamson 1:11:32 What was that

Chris Williamson 1:11:33 s- wha- what was that story about the guys who had brothers that were on the FBI's most wanted list?

Douglas Kenrick 1:11:40 Ah, yes. The-

David Lundberg Kenrick 1:11:41 Yeah. So, sure, sure. Whitey Bulger, right, uh, and his brother, and then, uh, the Unabomber. Uh, so we talk about this, these sort of two stories of brothers with, uh, a very similar choice. And do you want to tell us a little bit about it, Dad? So.

Douglas Kenrick 1:11:58 Sure. The, so, uh, Whitey Bulger was on the FBI's 10 most wanted list, but his brother was the, uh, he was the president of the University of Massachusetts and he was also the president of, he was a lawyer, law professor, so he was the president of the, of the Massachusetts State Senate for some period of time, or the State Repres- House of Representatives, I forget which. But he was a very prestigious, very successful guy. And his brother was a very successful mobster in Boston, killing people. Uh, and, uh, the question came when the FBI, they went to Whitey and said, "Do you know where your brother is?" And he did, but he refused to speak to them. Uh, he lost his job because of it, you know, and it took 20 years for them to find his brother. Uh, and the other one is, uh, David Kaczynski, who was a guy who studied English and was a, you know, uh, I don't know if he ever, uh, what he did for a living. He was a teacher or something. But, uh, he, um, he had a brother who was just brilliant, okay? Uh, Ted Kaczynski. Ted Kaczynski was a professor, uh, at Berkeley, which was, you know, in the US, one of the most prestigious universi- probably in the world, one of the most prestigious universities. But he kind of cracked up and he went to live in Montana. I just drove through by there the other day. It's really beautiful where he was, where he chose to live in Lincoln, Montana. But he, uh...He became the- he started sending bombs to people who he thought were destroying nature, you know. Um, and, uh, his brother turned him in.

David Lundberg Kenrick 1:13:38 Right. And so this was- I think this- I really like this dilemma and these two stories of these, 'cause these are two... If you think about the- each of these guys' brothers, right? They're in a similar situation of you're sort of trying to live a law-abiding life and you- assuming they both knew. I mean, I know with Ted Kaczynski there was a point where, uh, David's wife was like, "Do you- I feel like these wr- letters are written like they were written by your brother." Right? And he's like trying to figure it out. So-

Douglas Kenrick 1:14:07 No, no.

David Lundberg Kenrick 1:14:08 (laughs)

Douglas Kenrick 1:14:08 He first- first wanted to deny it. "No, no. That's not my brother." And he said, "Yeah," you know. Uh, and then she found some exact passage and so-

David Lundberg Kenrick 1:14:15 Right. And-

Douglas Kenrick 1:14:16 ... and then he went and showed it to the FBI.

David Lundberg Kenrick 1:14:18 Yeah. But it's a really interesting question of, of trade-offs, right? This trade-off between sort of getting along with society and kin care, right? Of sort of protecting your family, um, and-

Douglas Kenrick 1:14:34 The question is, Dave, what would you do if you found out that I was-

David Lundberg Kenrick 1:14:37 (laughs)

Douglas Kenrick 1:14:37 ... an automated Unabomber? Which, which-

David Lundberg Kenrick 1:14:39 I mean, so-

Douglas Kenrick 1:14:39 ... route would you go? (laughs)

David Lundberg Kenrick 1:14:41 Well, the answer I think I'd sort of (laughs) ... I mean, I hate to be like... Yeah, I would go the, the Whitey Bulger route. You know? Like, but there is-

Douglas Kenrick 1:14:48 (laughs)

David Lundberg Kenrick 1:14:48 ... there is a sort of feeling of like, oh, do you work it out internally, right? Do you keep... Is it, is it as a family, do you keep your family in check rather than turning to the outside world? Um, and-

Douglas Kenrick 1:15:03 Yeah. Do you- do you have a debt to society? Another interesting case of where, uh, our genetic interests are one thing and then there's our obligation to society, which isn't completely independent of our genetic interests, because if we, you know, if our brother was discovered to be a murderer, it would hurt our social standing too. So, it isn't like they're completely... It isn't like genes versus culture. But, you know, in both cases there's a decision to be made, what's the best- what's in your best interest and what's in the best interest of the rest of society? Um, and I- I think it's a fun question of why did the Unabomber's-

David Lundberg Kenrick 1:15:44 Ye-

Douglas Kenrick 1:15:44 ... brother turn him in, but why Whitey Bulger's brother didn't turn him in? What do you-

David Lundberg Kenrick 1:15:50 Well-

Douglas Kenrick 1:15:50 ... guess on that, Dave?

David Lundberg Kenrick 1:15:51 Well, part of it might be they didn't live in the same place, right? Um, the-

Douglas Kenrick 1:15:55 Hmm. Ah.

David Lundberg Kenrick 1:15:55 Like Ted and David Kaczynski. When people move away, those sort of- that feeling of being part of the same tribe gets harder to maintain.

Douglas Kenrick 1:16:05 Mm-hmm.

David Lundberg Kenrick 1:16:05 And so, uh... Which is one of the things (laughs) we actually discuss. Not, not just so that your family doesn't turn you in for crimes, but we do sort of talk about there's a lot of benefits to staying geographically close to-

Douglas Kenrick 1:16:18 Yeah.

David Lundberg Kenrick 1:16:19 ... your family. And so... And I think that that- a lot of that comes down to you guys help each other out, right? When, when they're nearby. So, um...

Chris Williamson 1:16:30 I wonder as well whether the fact that in the modern world status is probably held in high regard, but any of the f- actual physical fallout and consequences of your brother being the Unabomber or whatever are less. So previously, you said that there's this-

David Lundberg Kenrick 1:16:46 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 1:16:46 ... sort of cohesion between genetic interest and environmental interest, or, or community interest. But-

David Lundberg Kenrick 1:16:52 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 1:16:52 ... let's say that your brother was a dangerous, murdering psychopath. He... If you're in a group of 150 people, he may threaten one of your children. He may threaten w- your, your wife or w- one of your brothers-in-law or something like that.

David Lundberg Kenrick 1:17:05 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 1:17:05 That is no longer... That sort of fallout is no longer a concern, but the status full side of things is potentially even more of a concern because that is one of the commodities that we're playing about with now.

David Lundberg Kenrick 1:17:17 Yeah. Although-

Douglas Kenrick 1:17:18 Yes.

David Lundberg Kenrick 1:17:18 ... although I think a lot of times people who are aggressive in nature are still less likely to be a- aggressive, or at least murderous, to biological relatives. So-

Chris Williamson 1:17:31 Mm-hmm. Right.

David Lundberg Kenrick 1:17:31 ... it actually may be that if you have a murderous sibling, you, whose lives nearby, you reap the benefits, sort of as we're going back to this idea of sort of having a, a dominant person on your team. There may be some advantages to having an aggressive-

Douglas Kenrick 1:17:50 Yeah.

David Lundberg Kenrick 1:17:50 ... person.

Chris Williamson 1:17:50 Is there not a potential risk here that m- most murders of partners are committed by... The first place that they look is the, the spouse. I wonder whether you would be safe, but your immediate, non-biological to them, but biological to you, uh, g- genetic, uh, relatives may be-

Douglas Kenrick 1:18:09 Yeah, no. Again, back to Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, who I mentioned before. They wrote a book called Homicide. And one of the, the counter... People always used to say, "Oh, well. If, if genes are the thing, why is it that people always kill their relatives?" And what it turns out is that they don't kill their relatives, they kill their spouses, okay? Um, uh, and they kill people who they live with who are not related to them, but they hard-... Even though their relatives piss them off more than anybody else, you know. We're doing some research now which, which indicates that people are more likely to get hit and even hurt by their brothers and sisters as they're growing up, but they don't kill one another. They almost ne-

David Lundberg Kenrick 1:18:50 (laughs)

Douglas Kenrick 1:18:50 ... despite the opportunities and despite the annoyances, killings between siblings are so rare as to be, you know, an anomaly when they do occur.

David Lundberg Kenrick 1:19:01 And what, what about, what about like in-laws? Are... 'Cause I know s- killings between step-parents and kids are, are less rare, right? But I've never-

Douglas Kenrick 1:19:10 Right.

David Lundberg Kenrick 1:19:10 ... I've never actually heard this question of, do people kill their brother-in-law, or not?

Chris Williamson 1:19:15 What-

Douglas Kenrick 1:19:15 Yeah, I don't know. That's a good-

David Lundberg Kenrick 1:19:16 What-

Douglas Kenrick 1:19:16 I bet you Martin Daly knows the answer. My prediction is yes, that's, that's a dangerous position to be in. (laughs) Uh-

Chris Williamson 1:19:23 If you're in a- if you're in a house- if a child's in a house with a parent that is non-biological, there's 100 times risk that that child is-

Douglas Kenrick 1:19:30 Yes.

Chris Williamson 1:19:30 ... going to be- is going to be-

Douglas Kenrick 1:19:32 Yes.

Chris Williamson 1:19:32 ... killed. And I think that that shows just how hard it is to raise a kid. And the fact of the matter is that a lot of the reason that you put up with raising them is because they're yours.

Douglas Kenrick 1:19:41 Exactly. Right. That's-

Chris Williamson 1:19:42 Uh, what... So,

Chris Williamson 1:19:43 rounding all of this out, you guys come up with an evolutionary justification for being kind, which, uh, given some of the areas that we've gone into today-

Douglas Kenrick 1:19:51 Uh-huh.

Chris Williamson 1:19:51 ... might seem-... a- a- a verse to, uh-

Douglas Kenrick 1:19:55 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 1:19:55 ... part of our nature. What, give me the evolutionary justification for being kind?

David Lundberg Kenrick 1:20:01 Well, it, I think the justification is that it will help you solve your, it will help you meet your evolved needs in the modern world, uh, right? And so, and one of the ways that I think that we're immediately mismatched is often our s- our selfish desires ring really loudly, right? In our heads. Um, and we don't really necessarily need people out there saying, "Oh, you should really look out for yourself," right? Like, we'll, we'll generally do that. Um, but there are a lot of ways that by helping other people meet these needs, um, you really benefit. And this is a thing that was true in the ancestral kingdom. You know, we've talked about this with status. You know, one of the things I think people see all the time these days is statuses, how big your boat and your house are. But really, those are signs of status that generally in a, in a, in a system that works, those will come from your contributions to the group, right? And that is what even when you think about animal kingdoms, when we've talked about, like, a dominant, like, ape or something, they still can contribute. They still can protect the other members of the group. They can still, you know... And so by thinking about how you can help the other members of your group and the people around you achieve their fundamental motives, that turns out to be a really good way to achieve yours.

Douglas Kenrick 1:21:41 Right. I mean, we're not saying to be totally unselfish. That's an important- in fact, I was just re-listening to the book, The Selfish Gene. And one of the things, and, uh, Dawkins had a 25th anniversary edition, in which he defended himself and said, "You know, I didn't say that Selfish Genes produce selfish people." Selfishness itself, uh, is not a good thing in a whole human being. It's, but it's, it's there in our genes, but our genes may instruct us to be cooperative in order to promote their survival, okay? And in fact, if you're living in a social group, the, you know, uh, there, there's reasons to be nice to other people, uh, and sometimes it is hard. Act- the reason, part of the reason we put that in there is that about when Dave's younger brother, uh, was ten years old, I asked a bunch of my colleagues, some of whom are, you know, famous biologists and positive psychologists, and I asked them, "If you had one piece of advice for a ten-year-old kid, what would it be?" And none of them said, even though they're biologists, they know the theory of evolution, they didn't say, "Go out and, you know, conquer, you know, and do the best for your genes. Uh, find them, feel them, and forget them," and I'll skip the third F in there, you know, ah, and none of them said that. All of these people who are very successful, uh, they said most commonly, "Be nice to other people." Yeah. And my colleague, Mark Schaller, said it best, he said, "Look, you know, being nice to other people is actually, in some level, being nice to yourself because if you're nice to other people, they'll trust you. Uh, they'll be your friends. They'll give you things." And so in some sense, it's the best way to be nice to yourself.