How Men Compete For Status - Rob Henderson

There was one study, they showed a series of women videos of men, and then at the end, they asked these women, "How sexually attractive is this man?" Then they showed a group of men the same videos of these same guys and asked them, "How likely is it that this man would win a physical fight with another man?" Then the researchers tracked those men in those videos and had them return 18 months later and asked them a bunch of questions, including, "How many sexual partners have you had over the last 18 months?" The correlation between how sexually attractive the women found these men and how many partners they had was zero, but there was a strong and significant correlation between how intimidating or formidable men rated them and how many sexual partners they recounted over the last 18 months. And so essentially, how tough a guy looks to men is a stronger predictor of his sexual success than how attractive he looks to women. (air whooshing)

You just defended your PhD thesis. What's that mean?

That's right. So a PhD thesis, it's called a dissertation in the US. They call it a thesis here in the UK. It's just a, it's a culmination of the work you do throughout your years of study in a doctoral program. So at least within the field of psychology, typically, you write, uh, you know, a handful of papers, maybe three or four papers, and it's all supposed to build towards some overarching, uh, hypothesis, some kind of framework, and you run a series of empirical studies and, you know, hopefully you get the results you're looking for. And then that sort of, you know, it sort of builds towards, you know, here's, here's what all, all of this means. Here's how it contributes to the research, to the literature more broadly. And, uh, it's supposed to be this sort of original piece of scholarship. It doesn't necessarily have to be empirical either. Sometimes it can be theoretical. Uh, and I'm s- sure there's, like, a whole other set of, uh, criteria for the humanities, but yeah, it's a, it's a huge relief. I mean, when people say, uh, "Oh, when you finish your PhD thesis, you're gonna be so happy, you're gonna be so thrilled," and I was just, like, relieved, you know? Afterwards, I was just like, "Oh, thank God it's over." Like, "It's done." It's, you know, even though it went well, you know, I got the outcome I wanted, uh, it was still just, um, you know, it was still more just like this burden is lifted rather than just feeling, uh, elated or something, you know?

What's the thesis?

So the title of my PhD thesis is Physical and Social Threats Fortify Moral Judgments, and I got really interested in this, uh, when I was in undergrad. So I was taking, uh, classes by this experimental philosopher, Josh Knobe, who, uh, that's where basically I learned that you can use the tools of empirical psychology and social science to test people's moral intuitions. And morality generally has been kind of the wheelhouse of philosophy, you know, armchair philosophers, you know, pondering, what is morality? You know, what does it mean to be a moral person? What is moral character? And with, you know, some, some of the, uh, the instruments in psychology, you can come along and say like, "Well, what do people actually think about morality? What does the average person think about it?" And, you know, maybe some of your listeners will know about, you know, like, administering the, the trolley problem to people. Would people flip the switch? Would they not? That kind of thing. And I was taking classes with, with Paul Bloom too, uh, when I was in undergrad and learned about the sort of developmental origins of morality, and while I was there, I learned about this interesting link between disgust and morality. And many people think of disgust as this emotion that people experience, uh, in response to, uh, you know, contamination, illness, infection. But there's a lot of interesting work indicating that it overlaps with our moral, uh, judgments as well, that people who are very sensitive to disgust also tend to condemn wrongdoers more harshly. Uh, if you induce disgust in people, show them some disgusting images or, uh, get them to smell some repulsive, uh, odors, subsequently their moral judgments become intensified. And so I was, I thought to myself, you know, when I was reading all of this and when I came to Cambridge, I was wondering, is there, (clicks tongue) you know, are there other forms of threat beyond contamination? You know, contamination is a threat to your survival. It's a, it's an evolutionary threat. Are there other kinds of evolutionary threats, challenges to your survival and, and potentially your reproduction, um, (clicks tongue) that could also, uh, intensify your moral judgments? So I did some stuff on, you know, people who were worried about COVID in 2020 were also, uh, stricter in their moral judgments for a variety of different kinds of, uh, moral violations. Not just things like... You know, I, some of the items I used were, uh, (clicks tongue) you know, using a stranger's toothbrush. How wrong do you think that is? And of course, like, of course, people who are worried about COVID will also say, like, "Using a toothbrush that doesn't belong to you is, you know, that's, that's horrible." But it was also things like, uh, you know, betraying a family member or stealing from a store. You know, kind of deception, betrayal, subversion, things that are unrelated to contamination. People who were worried about COVID were, uh, stricter with those kinds of violations. Similar to social threat as well. Similar to age. The age one was the most interesting to me. Um, (clicks tongue) I'm, I'm working on, on this paper, trying to get it published. I think you and I might have talked about this offline before too. Uh, that essentially, uh, there's an, there's a, a direct association between as people grow older, their moral judgments become stricter, and this is controlling for, uh, political orientation, it's controlling for income, for education, you know, so these kind of demographic variables that you would assume. You know, oh, when older people, you know, as they, as they age, they become more politically conservative and that's why they ha- adopt these sort of moralistic attitudes. But even when you control for that, uh, there's something going on here about a- the aging process, and I suggest it has something to do with vulnerability, risk perception. As you grow older, um, the threats around you appear, uh, to be especially formidable, and I suggest this is also potentially why, um, (clicks tongue) there are these interesting moral judgment differences between men and women, such that women are more, uh, strict in their moral judgments relative to men. And some of that can be explained with, um, just the reproductive, uh, differences between men and women. Women have historically been, uh, more at ri- you know, more at risk, uh, for when they're pregnant, when they're carrying young children. They should just be extra alert to potential dangers. Uh, but I also suggest that if you control for certain things like muscularity, uh, height, BMI, all of these other kinds of things, I would bet that the moral judgment differences and disgust sensitivity would actually shrink. I just think that if you're a sort of a, a strong, young, robust, and healthy person, the world just looks less dangerous to you. And, and this includes moral wrongdoers. You think like, "Oh, that guy's doing something bad, but I can, I can take him." Uh, this is sort of the, the, the, the punchline of, of what my thesis is about.