Athena Aktipis: (00:03) Have you been zombified by your evolutionary motives? Welcome to the Zombified podcast, your source for fresh brains. I'm your host, Athena Aktipis, psychology professor at ASU and chair of the Zombie Apocalypse Medicine Alliance. Dave Lundberg-Kenrick: (00:21) And I'm your cohost, Dave Lundberg-Kenrick, media outreach program manager at ASU and brain enthusiast. Athena Aktipis: (00:29) Brains. Dave Lundberg-Kenrick: (00:29) Brains. [laughter] Athena Aktipis: (00:29) Brains. [laughter] So, uh, you know what I love about this episode? Dave Lundberg-Kenrick: (00:37) What's that? Athena Aktipis: (00:38) That we get to talk to your dad. Dave Lundberg-Kenrick: (00:40) That's true, we do! We get to talk to my dad who, um, didn't just come on the show cause he's my dad. [Athena laughs] He, uh, right? He does some research on stuff. Athena Aktipis: (00:52) He does. He is a, you know, really one of the founders of the field of evolutionary psychology. Dave Lundberg-Kenrick: (01:00) That's uh, that's right. That's what he tells people. Athena Aktipis: (01:02) What was it like growing up with that? Dave Lundberg-Kenrick: (01:05) Um, it was uh. . . that's a question I was totally not prepared to answer. Let me think about that. [Athena laughs] You know, I think it was, um, I mean it was all I've ever known, but it definitely did have a big impact, I think, on how I view the world. Um, but it's all science-based, you know? And so I think in some sense it gives me an accurate view of the world, but it also sort of gives me a view of the world that doesn't necessarily, uh, have meaning, I guess? Athena Aktipis: (01:41) Mmm, so does it like, you think you're more cynical than you would have otherwise been? Dave Lundberg-Kenrick: (01:48) Uhm, well, I mean, certainly, so my dad is cynical even apart from his research [Both laugh] and so, uh, no, but I think, I think it's sort of, it's sort of like growing up in a sort of existential crisis so uh... [laughter]. Athena Aktipis: (02:04) Wow! Dave Lundberg-Kenrick: (02:04) In the best possible way. [Both laugh] Which is sort of, I think what we're, what we're going to talk about today, right? Athena Aktipis: (02:16) Yeah. I mean, this is sort of a way of bringing our listener into what it was like for you growing up with an evolutionary psychologist for a dad, right? [Dave agrees] Like, you know, well, why do we really do what we do? What are the motives underlying it? And are we really responsible for, you know, making the decisions ourselves? Or are, you know, are we being guided by forces that are beyond us?And... Dave Lundberg-Kenrick: (02:43) Right, and is there a right and wrong? You know, there's always these sort of questions of the naturalistic fallacy, which I actually think is really interesting in terms of Zombified [Athena agrees], like this idea of... Athena Aktipis: (02:53) Yeah well, what is- let's talk about what is that? What is the naturalistic fallacy? Dave Lundberg-Kenrick: (02:56) Well, just the idea that even if something is sort of natural, uh, that doesn't mean it's right, you know, it's sort of... sort of this idea that even if we're zombified by our genes to pass on our genes, that doesn't really give us a moral imperative to pass on our genes. Right? It's almost like we're zombified by ourselves. [Athena agrees] Um... Athena Aktipis: (03:22) So it's like just layers and layers of zombification is what you're saying? Dave Lundberg-Kenrick: (03:26) Yeah, I think so. [Athena laughs] I mean, I think that, yeah, I think it's sort of that we're- it raises this question of, are we zombified at our core? And... Athena Aktipis: (03:35) What's our responsibility or not? Or really what is our responsibility? Dave Lundberg-Kenrick: (03:39) Yeah, and is that good or bad- Athena Aktipis: (03:39) Because we do have a responsibility ultimately, right? I mean, even if we don't feel like we are fully autonomous, we at least have responsibility to think about the ethical issues that are being raised and like try to be active in making those decisions. Dave Lundberg-Kenrick: (03:55) Yeah, and I think that's a lot of what sort of my dad's more recent sort of focus has been on is sort of this idea of, all right, given if we're saying "all right we were designed to pass on our genes," how do we then go about doing that in a way that is essentially... ethical? Athena Aktipis: (04:16) Yeah. Yeah. Well I think this was a awesomely rambly intro to what is admittedly a rather long and rambly episode that we have. [Dave laughs] It is, I mean it's good but it is long. [Dave agrees] It is a very long episode, so don't feel like you have to listen to it all in one sitting. You know, you can listen to some of it and then, you know, come back to it later. Because it's a lot, but we didn't want to break it up into two episodes because it has a flow to it and a conversational nature that we didn't want to break up. Dave Lundberg-Kenrick: (04:53) Well, let's check it out! Athena Aktipis: (04:54) All right, let's hear from this week's fresh brain, Doug Kenrick. Intro: (05:00) [Psychological by Lemi] Doug Kenrick: (05:36) Hello, my name is Doug Kenrick and I am a social psychology professor at Arizona State University. Athena Aktipis: (05:44) Excellent. And uh, what are your main interests? Doug Kenrick: (05:48) My main interests are, I'm afraid to say fairly broad. Uh, I have for a long time been thinking about human social behavior in an evolutionary perspective and I have studied everything from altruism, aggression, attraction to xenophobia. Uh, so basically, probably if you took any chapter in a social psychology textbook, uh, I have done some research where we try to look at a topic like social cognition or you know, some kind of a cognitive bias and think about how would this look different if we thought about it in evolutionary terms. Athena Aktipis: (06:32) So you're basically taking an evolutionary lens to like all of human social behavior essentially. Doug Kenrick: (06:39) Yes. Or whatever, whatever strikes me as interesting, uh, or my students as interesting recently. Athena Aktipis: (06:46) Excellent. Dave Lundberg-Kenrick: (06:47) Cool! What do you find most interesting these days? Doug Kenrick: (06:54) These days, so we have a paper which just got tentatively accepted, If we don't make some really big mistakes, that perspectives on psychological science in which we are, we have looked at people's fundamental motives. So we have a scale that asks you to what extent you're concerned with things like taking care of your children or protecting yourselves from the bad guys or, uh, you know, making friends or, uh, gaining status or finding mates or keeping mates, which is a slightly different problem. Uh, and so people fill out this scale and you know, each of those, each of the things I just talked about has a, a subscale. Athena Aktipis: (07:44) So just a minute, the fundamental motives, that's like a way of sort of thinking about the things that evolution would have equipped us with in terms of motivations, right? So you're, that's already kind of drawing from evolutionary biology to understand human behavior. Doug Kenrick: (08:01) Right, so one of the things that evolutionary people do conceptually is to try to think what are the problems that our ancestors would have had to solve and particularly the ones that we continue to have to solve now. Okay? Uh, and a lot of those problems were social problems. Okay? They were making sure that your friends didn't reject you because in the good old days, if you were thrown out of the group, you were likely to die. And, uh, everybody had to find mates. And so we sort of, you know, conceptually- well we looked at Maslow's old Pyramid of Motives and Maslow was arguing that humans don't just have one motivational state, one motivational goal, which is to feel good, but they have multiple goals. And Maslow talked about distinguishing between basic physiological hungers and thirsts, you know, and then social needs, and then what he called the need for self actualization. And what we did is thought, "okay, well in modern evolutionary terms, how would we revisit that pyramid?" And so, uh, what we presume, and in fact there's some evidence from developmental psych that the motives kind of come into play at different phases of your life. When you're a little baby, all you're concerned with is getting food and keeping warm. Athena Aktipis: (09:19) Right, cause the babies that didn't manage to do that didn't survive. [Doug agrees] Right? And so they didn't have the genes go on into the next generation. So the babies that were best at staying warm and getting fed and getting protected... Doug Kenrick: (09:33) Right, getting their parents to take care of them by going "wah", right, and smiling when they did something good. Athena Aktipis: (09:39) Yeah. So, so speaking of which, I just, I feel like we can't go on without acknowledging- Dave Lundberg-Kenrick: (09:43) Right, we probably should have addressed this early on, but uh... Athena Aktipis: (09:46) Yes. [laughter] Dave Lundberg-Kenrick: (09:51) Yeah. So let's, let's take a minute to say, so- we're, there's a reason our voices sound very similar I think to people at home. And that's that we're related, right? Doug Kenrick: (10:01) Yes, I was around, uh, when Dave was saying "wah." [laughter] Dave Lundberg-Kenrick: (10:06) Yes, and also actually on that same note, we've been talking about this, uh, fundamental motive stuff, a lot in it in a way that I think would be interesting possibly for another podcast at some point. Cause I know we're going to talk about sort of robo parasites, but we've been talking about the ways that, uh, so my dad and I have been talking about the ways that movies tap into these different fundamental motives and the sort of dilemmas and the debates that people have. Because you can't really always optimize every one of these things. And so the, it, it leads to a lot of dilemmas that, that are very cognitively, they're, they're intrinsically interesting, I think. Uh, which I think is what makes for good movies. And I think that'd be an interesting thing to discuss in a future... Athena Aktipis: (10:55) Yeah, well, it's, I mean, in a way, it's kind of related to the topic that we sort of set out to talk about today, right, of sort of the smart phones and all that has to do with screens [Dave agrees] and how screens present us with things that- Dave Lundberg-Kenrick: (11:07) That's true. It does. So maybe we can talk about that a bit today too. [Athena agrees] Because I think it's a really interesting... Doug Kenrick: (11:14) So, let me just talk about one thing that you said, which is this notion that there's always trade-offs. So in fact, when we thought about Maslow's pyramid again, we also were thinking about a kind of a pyramid that they have in biology of life history. And according to life history theory, basically every organism needs to allocate- resources are scarce. There's not an infinite amount of resources and those organisms that got more resources and were able to build their bodies and then turn those into offspring were the ones that are around today. And so all animals face kind of, there's three choices. Okay, how much do I invest in building my own body? And then when do I start reproducing? When do I start changing my investment strategy to, uh, invest in my offspring? And then, should I keep investing in these offspring or should I actually seek new mates? Which is also another way to invest in your resources. And so there's always trade-offs. Athena Aktipis: (12:14) Isn't there also, like, do I keep investing in these offspring or have more offspring? Right, so like, how many offspring you're going to have. Doug Kenrick: (12:20) Right, so there's probably more trade offs than I just said- Athena Aktipis: (12:22) Life history theory is like so many- it's all about trade offs, yeah. [Doug agrees] Doug Kenrick: (12:25) But I think the punchline of life history theory and sort of the punchline of life is that you can't have it all. You can't maximize everything. You gotta pick one place to invest your resources. And animals are designed to do a pretty good job of that. Okay? To invest the resources in such a way that if their ancestors did it, they would have survived and reproduced. And so that's kind of the big game in life. And what we'd say about humans is that humans are equipped with a set of systems. We face a number of questions, okay, about how to allocate- do I, do I allocate my resources into protecting myself? Do I allocate my resources to making friends? Do I allocate my resources to gaining status? And there you can already see a conflict because if I'm going to step on your head on my way up, then you're not going to like me as much. Athena Aktipis: (13:16) You wouldn't do that, though, would you? Doug Kenrick: (13:17) Well I wouldn't do that [All laugh], but we're not in direct competition because, you know, I'm a lot older than you are. Dave Lundberg-Kenrick: (13:25) That's also, that's an interesting thing cause there's also ways that these different, you can work- these resources or these motives sometimes compete and there's also things people can do that can, that can improve multiple motives at the same time. Like working together on a project can build affiliation and it can build the status for everybody, so [Doug and Athena agree]. Doug Kenrick: (13:43) So it isn't always a zero sum game. [Athena agrees] Cooperation is a, is a way in which you can advance your own interests and another's interests at the same time. Athena Aktipis: (13:53) Right, if you find those things where you have aligned interests and then you work on those things and you don't do anything with the things where you have different interests. Right? [laughter] Like I mean that's a simple way to get some of the benefits of cooperation. Doug Kenrick: (14:05) Exactly. I mean, in fact, that's one of the things, I think a new way that people think about it. It used to be that evolution was considered a sort of bloody tooth and nail competition. And it's not that there isn't a lot of that out in the animal kingdom and even in human life, but it turns out that the people that we like the most, the people that we actually most want to have as leaders in organizations are actually the people we trust, the people who we think are actually serving our interests as well as theirs at the same time. A good leader is a sort of an invisible leader because they're helping you get ahead and by helping you get ahead, they help the whole organization do well. And so yes, not all trade-offs, not everything is a zero-sum game. And in fact, let's go back- the topic that you guys are interested in, which is zombification or basically the, why don't you tell me what that means? Athena Aktipis: (14:56) Yeah, so when you essentially get hijacked, your brain gets hijacked, your behavior gets influenced by things that are not necessarily in your own best interest. Doug Kenrick: (15:05) Right. So I think if you think about our, sort of this imaginary Maslow-ian hierarchy where all of these, every one of these goals- I have an interest. Okay. My interest is to get resources to protect myself, to build a house, you know, to put an alarm system in to put in locks on the doors. Okay. Uh, then I have an interest in making friends, people who cooperate with me, who will share with me, who will, you know, uh, if I give them lunch, they'll pay me back. Okay. Uh, and they'll help me out when I need to do something like move the couch. Uh, then I, so I invest resources in friends and wherever there is, wherever there's resources in nature, there are parasites. Okay. Cause there's energy being exchanged and parasites want part of that energy. Athena Aktipis: (15:55) Yeah, they just want their little piece. You know, they're just trying to make a living too... [All laughs] Doug Kenrick: (16:01) Well, I came across a great quote and I think it was from E.O. Wilson, said that "parasites are predators that consume their hosts in units of less than one." [laughter, Athena agrees] You know? And that's a lovely way to think about it. And then another important thing I think about parasitism as we go on is that there's a continuum of parasitism. Okay. There is, for example, at one end, I'm not even sure we call this parasitism, but there's mutualism in which I want your resources, but I also have something to give you and we help each other out. So we're both kind of mutually exploiting one another for our, for the good, the net gain of both of us. Okay. Uh, then there's commensalism, which is basically one of us is taking advantage of the other, but not really to any great costs. Okay. So, uh, an example in nature is a pilot fish, which swims along with a shark and basically takes some of the scraps when the shark finds some fry. No costs to the shark to speak of. Doug Kenrick: (17:00) Uh, then there's what they call micro-parasitism, which doesn't mean it's microscopic, but it's like a mosquito. A mosquito is really consuming only the teeniest part of its prey. It may accidentally bring you something that will kill you, [Athena and Dave laugh] but mostly, mostly that's not their job, but what they're doing is taking a teeny-weeny bit of your blood so much that you're not even going to notice it, okay. That you won't even, maybe even catch it when they sting you and take a little- they're not trying to sting you, they're trying to sneak in there, get a little bit of your blood. Doug Kenrick: (17:31) And then there's sort of big time parasites that, some of which approach predators. But they do it very slowly. So, there's like, the worst examples are things like parasitic wasps. What they do is they paralyze a caterpillar, lay their eggs inside- the caterpillar stays alive, the eggs hatch, and then they basically eat their way out of the host. So, they consume it very slowly. So that's really nasty parasitism, and when we talk about humans and you know, parasitism and our fundamental motives, whenever I'm trying to invest to make friends or whenever I'm trying to invest to make mates, there's somebody out there trying to ride. There's somebody trying to be either a pilot fish or a mosquito. Okay. Or even possibly a parasitic wasp who's going to try to take everything I've got. Uh, and at the same time, though, there are others that are trying to just say, "okay, if you want this, I can help you." Josh Ackerman and I have done research on how people help each other find mates, and that's sort of, you know, in the interest. If, you know, uh, a friend of mine- so I'm Dave's father, if he's seeking a mate, you know, it's in my interest to help him find the best possible mates because you know, there’s benefits for me. But even if I were, you know, just helping a friend who was looking for a mate, uh, I want that friend to be happy because if my friends are happy and they have good mates, then we have, we have, our network has extended in a positive way. Okay, so we do, we do sometimes have mutual interests. And then there's other times when maybe I just want to, you know, take a little bit out of the person who I'm tagging along with and- Dave Lundberg-Kenrick: (19:19) What would be an example of a sort of social mosquito? Doug Kenrick: (19:22) A social mosquito. Yeah, that's a good one. Um, I think if you think about, uh, the finance industry, they mostly don't want to kill you. But they do take a teeny bit of every interaction that you, every time you move some of your funds, the finance industry takes a little cut. Okay, and they're not, they actually hope that you'll get bigger and fatter financially so they can keep taking a little bit bigger cuts. So they're not really trying to kill you, but they are trying to suck a little bit of that blood out every time there's some resources exchanged, they want some. Athena Aktipis: (19:57) That's a special kind of parasite though, one that actually needs it's host to stay alive and does better if it's hosts survives. Doug Kenrick: (20:05) It does. Oh, you're right. So that is interesting. It's actually a combination of mutualism and, uh, mosquito-ism in finance industry. Uh- Dave Lundberg-Kenrick: (20:14) Right. I mean I think it depends because, well the financial industry is big. So it's like if you have somebody who's actively managing a fund, they're trying to like, then it's a little more mutual. But then there's other where if they're, if they're just taking their interest, regardless of how much you have- Doug Kenrick: (20:26) There's the Bernard Madoff's out there who are pretending to be mutualists and actually are parasitic wasps. I mean Bernard Madoff actually destroyed some of his clients by taking their money in investing in nothing. Uh, so an interesting question we have when we're approaching relationships is, is this person like a pilot fish? Are, are they, uh, like a clown-fish that's going to help us? Okay. Uh, or uh, are they a piranha? Athena Aktipis: (21:00) Or just a little mosquito? [Athena laughs]. Doug Kenrick: (21:02) A little mosquito, yeah. Then probably have a fist. It's like a little mosquito too. Actually. There is one that Bob Cialdini uses it in his book on influence the Sabretooth Lenny, which pretends to be a cleaner fish and you know, fish like cleaner fish cause they come along and eat a little bit of fungus off their scales and cleaned them up. Uh, but the, the saber tooth plenty looks just like a cleaner fish. Little teeny fish comes up to a big Morrill and bites a chunk out and then swims away. It doesn't kill the ill. Okay. Uh, but it does take a little bit and I think that that's part of our, the issue in social life is trying to figure out what is this, what is this other person? You know? Dave Lundberg-Kenrick: (21:45) So one thing I was thinking about in terms of the mosquito, like I can think even for myself, right, for my interactions will be different. So like if I'm, if I go to get my haircut from the person who's been cutting my hair for years, I might give that person an extra tip and I'm trying to, you know, they're doing a good job. Athena Aktipis: (22:04) Cultivating a relationship with them- Dave Lundberg-Kenrick: (22:04) Yeah. Whereas if I'm buying something on Amazon or I don't know the person I'm going to take the cheapest, I'm going to get the best deal for myself. You know what I mean? And in a sense that sort of relationship, I'm being a little bit more like, I'm going to take that little bite if I can, you know. Um, and I think that might be- Doug Kenrick: (22:22) That's an interesting point I think because I think it gets, we're going to talk about robo parasites and I think, so our interactions online are, you know, there's been a big debate within the field of psychology about, uh, the question of what are ultimate, what's, what are ultimately people seeking. Okay. And one model, the kind of, uh, the economic model, the wall street model is that everybody's selfish. Everybody's looking out for their own interests. Okay. And that makes sense. You think about wall street and economic strangers dealing with strangers in, uh, financial trades. Your company does well. If you can cheat, not cheat, but if you can get the most you can possibly get it, get the best deal, get the product for the cheapest. Uh, and what's interesting about that metaphor is that it worked its way into psychology and people when I was a young man, I used to think, well, that's the way social relationships are. And it turns out that that model doesn't actually apply to close relationships. Athena Aktipis: (23:20) Yeah. It was also, I mean, really prevalent for a long time in evolutionary biology and cooperation theory, right? That like organisms evolve to be selfish and that the conditions for cooperation are, you know, so hard to achieve. Um, you know, the whole idea of the selfish gene that Dawkins popularized, I mean, on one level, yes, it's true. Things will evolve to, you know, have genotypes that allow them to accomplish the goals that perpetuate those genotypes. But that doesn't necessarily make for individuals that look selfish. [Doug agrees] It makes for individuals who look like they're really loving and caring for their offspring. Doug Kenrick: (24:07) Well, look- Athena Aktipis: (24:07) And also they intrinsically care about their friends. The thing is, they actually do. They actually do. Doug Kenrick: (24:12) Yes, I mean, that's a good, that's a great point. Selfish genes don't make selfish people necessarily. They can. Okay. But in some sense, your self-interests are best served by mutualism because people don't hate you when now there’s sort of different levels here too. There's your interactions with your kin there. In fact, you know, when Dave does well, that's 50% of a benefit to me because I share half of his genes. Okay. And if I lend him $1,000, it's really only 500. Too much. Athena Aktipis: (24:50) Does it really work that way, Doug? Doug Kenrick: (24:50) Not psychologically, but from an evolutionary perspective, the math is, the math is different when I'm thinking about my kid. Okay. Because it's in specifying the parents and I have fewer remaining reproductive years. Okay. And I don't know. Athena Aktipis: (25:05) Every year. [All laugh] Doug Kenrick: (25:05) Yes. Right. Athena Aktipis: (25:09) Your welcome. Doug Kenrick: (25:09) I may die before the end of this interview, you know, I hope he can get some use out of it. Uh, so in any event, I actually do share genetic interests with my kids, but even with my friends, I do share if our team is strong, we all benefit. Okay. And that's something that I think biologists were still struggling with and economists were still struggling with this, this idea that somehow everything's going to move back towards cheating. No, actually the system should, and I'm not in favor of group selection at all, but I would say basically that it's still selfish. I want to be part of a team where I can trust you to have my interests and the more you can, you've done this research, Athena, on the walkaway strategy. You know, I don't want to be policing all the time, but I do want to get the hell away from you. If I find out that you're, you're maybe going to be sneaky cheating a little bit on, you know, then I'll just move to a new partner. Athena Aktipis: (26:07) Yeah. Partner choice. And then fitness interdependence. I mean, if you're in a group where your survival and your reproduction actually depends on the wellbeing of others in your group, then you don't need reciprocity or kin selection or anything. Doug Kenrick: (26:24) You all just need to do well. [Athena agrees] And the better, the more, you know, just sharing it. So Kim Hill has that. Kim Hill and Magdalena Hurtado and I guess Hillary Kaplan and there's one other person, uh, Hawks. What is her first name? Kristen Hawks. They published some classical work showing that in fact, amongst the [inaudible], was it the, that these people who live down in Paraguay, that if you actually record the amount of calories that every family brings in on a daily basis, uh, there are periods when some when everybody would starve. Okay. But what happens is some families, you know, get up, find a pig one day, okay. And they can't store it, so they share it. And on average, when you, when you're sharing like that, uh, everybody survives much better. So it's actually in my interest for you to continue on doing well. If you're a member of my group, it's still selfish, but actually it's selfish at, uh, an ultimate level. But at approximate level- Athena Aktipis: (27:24) well, psychologically it's not, right? Psychology is not- Doug Kenrick: (27:28) And also behaviorally it's not. [Athena agrees] It's not. yeah. Dave Lundberg-Kenrick: (27:28) So here's a question though. What, how many people are on earth right now? Doug Kenrick: (27:34) 7 billion, I think. Dave Lundberg-Kenrick: (27:35) Okay. So we've got 7 billion people and we're designed for much smaller groups. So just like I'm, I'm thinking about the fact that, you know, we've got sort of wealth inequality at an all-time high. Is it that people are in these sort of small groups where they're, they're trying to help their, their own little group, but is that at the cost? Doug Kenrick: (28:01) There is competition between groups. There's no question about that. So the Trumps of the world and the people working in the West Virginia coal mines, they're at odds with one another. Okay. Despite what Trump may tell them, uh, but the poor people are, are exploited by the rich people and the rich people have no interest in increasing their taxes. And so yes, there is intergroup competition, you know. So this model isn't a Pollyannish model that says everything's nice and everybody's going to get along. But it is saying that within your groups, cooperation has always been a better strategy than being a cheater because what do we do with, you know, we tar and feather people who we find out to be cheaters or we just leave them alone. We or we expel them from the group. And so, uh, so at least at the local level, cooperation and I, you know, I think you're raising a big question because at the broadest level, perhaps we can use these mechanisms of small group cooperation to think about other people because it turns out that now we're all in the same boat. Athena Aktipis: (29:07) We're all on the same earth- Doug Kenrick: (29:10) Yeah, we're all in the same little tribe as it turns out. Yeah. And it's getting clearer and clearer all the time that we have to cooperate across tribes and the extent to which we can learn about, learn enough about evolutionary psychological principles of cooperation to get people to think about other people to understand that. In fact, we have shared fates now. [Athena agrees] Dave Lundberg-Kenrick: (29:29) Uh, so I wonder, you know what Athena Aktipis: (29:31) Though, just want to say, we got to share our brains too, right? If we're going to solve these problems- Doug Kenrick: (29:37) Spell that out for me. Athena Aktipis: (29:39) Well, so you, all of these issues that we're now facing, they are not just sort of cooperation dilemmas, but they also involve a huge number of complex systems that no one human brain can represent. [Doug agrees] So we have to be able to talk across disciplines. And all have some understanding of cooperation theory, I think to get somewhere. Dave Lundberg-Kenrick: (30:03) So I'm wondering if we want to- Doug Kenrick: (30:05) Hopefully not all of us, hopefully it's just enough of us that can influence leaders or the leaders themselves. Dave Lundberg-Kenrick: (30:12) I wonder if we want to talk about sort of technology and how technology ties into this cause I love it, but I'd like to come back to this at the end cause normally we sort of come back and talk about sort of- [Athena agrees] Athena Aktipis: (30:23) Can I jump in with a, cause I think we talked about the fundamental motives at the beginning in this sort of context of um, you know, where are their aligned interests with fundamental motives where they're potentially conflicting interests. Um, and I think there's another interesting dimension to this that may be, can kind of move us into talking about robo parasites, which is, you know, the actual parasitism of the mechanisms in the brain, which is a little bit different, right? Than like a social parasite. Someone who maybe wants to, um, interfere with your motives to meet their own goals. Like, let's talk a little bit about like what is actually going on in terms of the psychology underlying these mechanisms. And you know, does that psychology actually get parasitized? Doug Kenrick: (31:13) Yes. Okay. So that's a good segue actually. So let me talk a little bit about this. So evolutionary psychologist presume that in fact the brain is not designed to just do one thing to feel good. It's designed to do a bunch of different things sometimes, which sometimes those things are in fact a little bit contradictory. Okay? Sharing with my son Dave, I use a different set of rules than I would use in sharing with a stranger in the market, uh, on wall street. Okay. Uh, and so I have a whole bunch of little systems. Okay. And the systems don't always, depending upon what's currently active in terms of the goals and opportunities that you know and the threats that are out there in the environment. One, one of my little subsystems, we think of the brain as sort of divided into what we might call sub selves. Okay. Not literally little chunks of your brain, but basically there are subprograms in your brain. Athena Aktipis: (32:06) So give us an example of like two different sub programs. Doug Kenrick: (32:09) Okay. So let's take the program for, uh, for gaining status. Okay. Uh, when I'm, when that is primed, I'm thinking about getting ahead. I'm thinking about, you know, doing something that other people will notice. I'm thinking about distinguishing myself from other people, uh, versus the program for affiliation. Okay. When, if when the program for affiliation as primes, I'm thinking of actually being level with other people and wanting them to be like, and similar to me. I don't want to stand out necessarily. I want, I want to draw out similarities. Oh, we're just like each other. Okay. Uh, and uh, or think of the, the, another distinction might be sharing with kin versus, you know, sharing with friends, with friends. I might have a reciprocity thing if I'm not related to you and I'm always buying you lunch and you never buy me lunch. And they start to notice that, okay? Athena Aktipis: (33:04) I think maybe he has been buying me lunch. Doug Kenrick: (33:04) Yes, yes, right. [All laugh]. Doug Kenrick: (33:04) I'm having to give you tracking- Dave Lundberg-Kenrick: (33:04) This is my way of [Athena laughs] of letting you know- Doug Kenrick: (33:04) It's actually- I know it's not true because- Dave Lundberg-Kenrick: (33:04) I know he buys me lunch- [Athena laughs] Doug Kenrick: (33:04) Athena's Greek and so she's always serving other people food. So I go to your house, you may be forgetting this. And I eat everything in sight. And so. Athena Aktipis: (33:24) And drink everything too, actually. Doug Kenrick: (33:31) Let's not talk about that. [Athena laughs] Yeah. Um, but okay, but on the other hand, when I'm dealing with Dave, if I buy Dave lunch all the time, you know, or at least 75% of the time, if we're going to do the math, um, then that's fine with me. Okay. Because I want to transfer my resources to my offspring. Okay. With my friends, I want to trade resources. Okay. And so those are different, the different systems. And so the assumption is that depending on what situation I happen to find myself in, who's there, what are the opportunities? What are the threats? You know, are there a lot of dangerous looking people? Are there a lot of attractive potential mates in the situation? Uh, are there people who I might want to impress to gain status or to maintain status? Uh, that's going to trigger a different little system in my head, a different calculation system in my head. Uh, that's going to say, okay, now I want to do this again. Now I'm going to do the, you know, I'm going to engage in these, I'm going to cooperate. Now I'm going to share now I'm going to say is a funny joke now, okay, I'm not, I'm going to suppress- Athena Aktipis: (34:31) the idea is we have kind of all of these, um, sort of programs in our heads and when we're in a situation where we could potentially increase our evolutionary fitness by doing a certain thing that helps to fulfill those goals, that like that program becomes active and it's like go and impress that person or go and talk to that attractive person or um, take care of your kid. They will go green. Doug Kenrick: (34:55) Right? Yeah. And so, so these systems turn out to be extremely powerful. I would say that almost everything we do is under the control of one of these systems where either, you know, we're powerfully motivated to do certain kinds of things. So let's start at the very bottom of the pyramid. We have a system that is designed to get us calories and you know, it's basic physiological survival. We want the nutrients to keep us alive. We want to satisfy our thirst and our hunger. Okay. And that's a good thing because our ancestors who didn't care to feed themselves, okay, they didn't become our ancestors. Okay. Our ancestors did a pretty good job. They did the best job they could of, of extracting calories from the environment. Athena Aktipis: (35:38) We come from a long line of people who are good at getting resources from the world. Doug Kenrick: (35:43) Exactly right. And you know, getting food and you know, and drinking, but so wherever you have a system, you know, that's designed to motivate people to go seek resources, there's going to be a profit that one could make from either providing those resources or attempting to sort of, you know, parasitize people as they are seeking after those resources. Dave Lundberg-Kenrick: (36:08) Can you give an example? Doug Kenrick: (36:10) So there's an example of providing the resources. You know, supermarkets wouldn't exist if not for the fact that people are hungry a lot of the time and they really like food. And so that's always a reliable business to get into, you know, serving food or, you know, uh, supermarkets probably have what they've always been there or whatever markets or do wealth. Uh, on the other hand, there's also some kinds of people that are selling you food. Now there's competition to be, I want you to buy my food as compared to the other guy's food. So I'm making, uh, um, I have a choice. What can I make in terms of desserts for you? I can make something that's really healthy. Okay. I can give you, for example, cranberries with no sugar on them, okay? Dave Lundberg-Kenrick: (36:55) That doesn't sound good Doug Kenrick: (36:55) And if you've ever eaten cranberries with no sugar on them, bitter, okay? And it turns out that kids, give kids the choice. Well, let's take plums with no sugar on them, okay? Even plums. Okay? When you offer kids the choice between fruit and what Ben and Jerry's is selling, they'll almost always take Ben and Jerry's even over really good fruit, even over like ripe strawberries, kids will go for Ben and Jerry's double chocolate fudge. Why? Because not only does it have the sugar, it has the fat, so it has things that our ancestors really could never get. So what Ben and Jerry's is doing is they're basically attempting to satisfy us and at one level, uh, but they're also kind of, they're really not helping us. Okay. Dave Lundberg-Kenrick: (37:45) They're sort of tapping into, were designed to crave those things. Right? Where did we have like- Doug Kenrick: (37:50) And they're tapping into it by giving us more than we actually even need. Okay. And let's go one step further. There are some kinds of, you know, Ben and Jerry's is pushing something that we actually want and it gives us something. Athena Aktipis: (38:05) My stomach is getting rumbly, guys. Doug Kenrick: (38:05) Yeah, I'm getting- [All laugh] I want some double chocolate fudge. But then there are other kinds of, you know, so for example, the alcohol industry, uh, when we hear our pleasure center in our brain say that was a good thing. Okay. When alcohol gets us, there's a little signal our brain that goes good. Good, good, good, good. Do it again. Do it again. Well, it turns out that when you drink alcohol, the pleasure center goes off. You know, basically releases pleasure. Uh, but you really didn't necessarily do yourself that much good. There's a little bit of nutrient. If you had a, you know, if you had a glass of red wine or something, but then some drugs dealers even go further and you can just inject it into your arm. Okay. You can take a drug that will actually just go to your pleasure center. Do you know nutritive good and in fact get you addicted. But there's so much money in it. This is one of the problems with these, with the sort of the technology and the kind of, you know, the fact that that, you know, marketing and advertising are designed to get us to choose this product as opposed to that product. And so if people start to crave the product, that's fabulous for the people who are selling it. Okay. But it isn't always good for the individual. Athena Aktipis: (39:20) So what's going on with this in terms of technology, I mean are- Doug Kenrick: (39:24) So let's move up the hierarchy and think about the, you know, let's think about things like self-protection. Okay. So my mind is designed to feel good when I get out of-- Dave and I were once biking through a scary neighborhood one night and some guy yelled at us cause we were in-- we went from a trailer park and it was a little scary actually. And Dave, when we got out of that neighborhood, he said there's something nice about living in a middle-class neighborhood, you know? Um, so when you get safely into your home and you lock the doors at night, especially if you felt scared walking home, uh, it feels good. Okay. Well, so we have mechanisms designed to protect our ancestors who were in danger of actually being killed when they went out at night. Okay. By predators and also by other human beings. Okay. Typically packs of males who are wandering around looking for more resources. Uh, so in the modern world, those, that desire for safety is exploited by news services that feed you things to be afraid of all the time. Dave Lundberg-Kenrick: (40:27) Okay. It's not part of this, I just want to get, part of it is that we're, we're designed also to notice threats, right? Like, not only designed to, it's not like we watch the news and then when we turned it off, we feel good. It's also similar to the way, like our mouth is designed to react to like fatty ice cream. Our brain is also designed to, to really have trouble paying attention to anything else when there's threats around. Doug Kenrick: (40:54) Exactly, that's a good point. So we, we want to know that there's a threat. We don't enjoy feeling threatened, but we don't want to miss it. Okay. And so what the news media does is they feed us these threats. So the conservative news media feeds you, you know, uh, continual messages about- there are people from other countries trying to break down the barriers of our country. Come in here, rape people, steal from you, you know, uh, and you know, and then the Canadians even are going to come in and force us to have socialized medicine. OK? Uh, now if you're a liberal, you get different kinds of fears. You know, the, uh, the right wingers are going to come in and they're going to take grandma's social security check, okay? They're going to starve children. They're going to separate children from, they're going to do mean nasty things, uh, to, to, uh, helpless people. Uh, and so it turns out that that when you, once you start reading the news, it'll start feeding you the, the, the big data systems are now designed to feed you more of whatever it is that you're afraid of. Because we click on that, we don't want to miss the threat. It's like, Oh shit, what did Trump do today? Click, I want to hear about it. Okay. [Athena agrees] And Trump is a master of this. Okay? He's gotten, every liberal and conservative is listening to what he says because he's talking about potential threats all the time. And- Athena Aktipis: (42:16) So when you click it, then the algorithm gets the data that that's a thing that you're afraid of. So then it can feed you more- Doug Kenrick: (42:22) Gives you more. And so basically, so this is basically exploiting our S R because we're not threatened by all of these things. I personally, even though I live in Arizona near the border, okay, I probably get more, this is a liberal thing to say and I'm sorry, but I, you know, I get a lot more benefits from having people from South of the border around me. Okay. I get things like the Mexican food we had for lunch. Okay. There's lots of benefits to me to having, you know, people from South of the border. I've never been threatened with rape for, you know, uh, you know, and maybe I've had an occasional thing robbed from me and I don't know who did it, what their ethnicity was. OK. But, uh, so for me it's not a gigantic threat, but if I'm continuously reminded that this possible, look, here's the scary thing that happened. Here's one you don't even, we don't get the statistics on how likely this is. You know, this, this all classic research that shows that people overestimate the probability of dying from homicide as compared to suicide. Why? Because homicide is in the news and homicide is a, it's a scary thing. Shit, there are people out there killing other people. I want to know all about it. Give me every detail about that. Who did that? Where did they do it? Okay. So our brains crave this and the modern news media is designed to basically make money off that craving for information about threats. Athena Aktipis: (43:40) Yeah. And it's even, you know, sort of more extreme in terms of the, the parasitism part now with the way that these algorithms are working. Cause it used to be just that like Oh if it bleeds it leads, right? [Doug agrees] Like using things that seem threatening to engage people, but now it can be actually targeted. Doug Kenrick: (44:01) Your specific fears. Dave Lundberg-Kenrick: (44:03) Fears and on top of that we choose what to click on. You know what I mean? Like as, as consumers. Cause even like if you think back up the news, the nightly news that was on 30 years ago, we had three choices, right, of what nightly news we were going to watch. Nowadays we have thousands of choices. So since it seems that if it bleeds, it really does lead when there's just these thousands of things. It does. Like we've moved more towards a sensational sort of thing because it's hard not to click. Athena Aktipis: (44:38) Yeah. Right. But you also bring up a really good point that we are the ones who are doing the clicking right. So in theory we should be able to get some control back over this. Doug Kenrick: (44:48) You know what this is like, you love this example of the, uh, the parasite that infects the brains of ants to get the ants to go out onto the ends of, of a blade of grass where they are then going to eaten by cows. In a sense, these, these parasites of our fears are just like that. They're basically leading us in the direction, uh, in the wrong direction and we're helping them. We're helping them, we're telling them, we're giving away unknowingly information about what it is that we're most afraid of and they're using it against us. Athena Aktipis: (45:29) So in this analogy, what's the cow that comes over and eats us or- [Athena laughs] Doug Kenrick: (45:36) Politicians- Athena Aktipis: (45:37) Although- Dave Lundberg-Kenrick: (45:37) Also, there's- Athena Aktipis: (45:37) Maybe it's the other- a politician, well cause some of the, these, um, cordyceps fungus that they actually get the ants to go to a high point where then they explode and the fungus goes all over the ant colony. Dave Lundberg-Kenrick: (45:52) I think- Athena Aktipis: (45:52) So maybe turn you into like someone who's just spouting about all of these threats all the time. Doug Kenrick: (45:57) Go ahead, you were gonna say- Dave Lundberg-Kenrick: (46:00) I still think there's a thing where ultimately this is to drive that revenue, right? This is the goal. And so it's, I think the best example is almost when you think of like, uh, I want to say Edward Jones, but he's the, that's the financial guy. He's the guy where- Athena Aktipis: (46:15) Doesn't matter. Just go- Dave Lundberg-Kenrick: (46:15) But he has the show where he says, you know, okay, there's frauds out there who will turn your kid gay unless you buy my anti-gay powder. Um, and so, and I think that that is like the extreme example of you get the fear going and then you sell people. So like the cow is that, that thing that people buy at end of the day- Doug Kenrick: (46:38) I think the cow is, um, it's the news media and it's the politicians because they're continuously, you know, Steve Neuberg apparently knows some politicians and his wife gets involved. And what he told me is that as soon as they win one election, the first thing they do is to go out and start collecting money for the next election. That's their job is to just get my Nickle, get a lot of money. We're increasingly spending more and more and more money. So these fears are helping them. We're stuffing their mouths. So everybody's wondering why are the Republicans online with Trump? Because he's helping scare their people to contribute more money to them. And why now the Democrats are now looking for, and everybody's talking about, oh, are we going to come up with somebody too radical? Okay, well the more radical you are, the more money you're going to get. You know, the more you can scare me about how bad the Republicans are going to destroy the world, you know, the more I'm going to send you a hundred-dollar contribution. Okay. And so I think the politicians are, I don't think they're consciously thinking, I want to Parasitize, but they are, they are Parasitizing. There are the cows that are eating us off the ends of blades of grass after we've been beautifully scared by the, the extreme. Uh- Athena Aktipis: (47:51) How about, um, some of the other fundamental motive? Doug Kenrick: (47:54) So let's see. Let's go through each one of them and think about this. So, so I've, uh, I've fed myself. Okay. I protected myself from the bad guys. Uh, and now the next thing I want to do when I'm developing as a child is to make some friends. Okay? Uh, and we all, we all have to do all of these things throughout the rest of our lives, but you know, so, uh, we have a bunch of systems that are designed to make us feel good when we're hanging out with other people and we're playing okay with other people. And we're cooperating with other people in sharing with other people. And so that's a system. It's a very powerful system and it gets exploited by things like Facebook. You know, I don't know whether Facebook is a- is a mosquito or, or what it is, but you know it might even be like a clown fish. It might be helpful to us because it makes it real easy. We've all been moved all around the world with mobility. We're not near our old friends. And so you go on Facebook and you can see, you can contact your friends from junior high school. You can see if the, you know, if Athena Aktipis is on. Okay, I can click and see, Oh yeah, look, she's, Oh look, she's in Arizona. Athena Aktipis: (49:02) Clinically good for creeping and I can find her. [Athena laughs] Doug Kenrick: (49:05) Yes we are making it creepy, but it's still so good because sometimes actual real old friends contact you and then you have a network of, you know, all these hundreds and hundreds of people, most of whom aren't necessarily your closest friends in the world. But that is a, that's kind of beneficial to us. But at the same time, you know, the more we use it, the more money the Facebook gets and then the more Facebook can basically- can start to take a little bit more. There's an incentive for them to say, okay, we've got this information about all those people and all their friends. How can we use that? Who can we sell that to? Yeah- Dave Lundberg-Kenrick: (49:37) No, there's, there's another aspect that I think you've talked about a bit, um, and not in this podcast, but just in general, which is that, so Facebook, apart from any money they take or any influence they, they put on us, there's also a thing where through their very existence, they parasitize our time, right? Doug Kenrick: (50:01) Yes, that's true Athena Aktipis: (50:02) Yeah. Well, and the thing is like as we are on Facebook, and more and more people are on Facebook and it becomes the place where you, you know, have those social connections and learn about what's happening with your friends. It's almost like they're gaining a monopoly on- Doug Kenrick: (50:23) Your time Athena Aktipis: (50:23) Not that, but not only that, but also the social affiliation. Right? It's like that's the place, right? And so you have to spend your time and attention on Facebook and get that Dave Lundberg-Kenrick: (50:34) Placing the sort of genuine affiliation, right? Is that like, yeah. Athena Aktipis: (50:40) Yeah. You mean if you click like that's not genuine? Dave Lundberg-Kenrick: (50:44) Well, what are-- you research this, right. Doug Kenrick: (50:46) And then research it. But I, but um- Athena Aktipis: (50:48) But he has speculated, actually. Doug Kenrick: (50:51) I've read a little bit about the genes. [Athena laughs] He has a beautiful article in the Atlantic which said how the iPhone destroyed a generation and she had some data there that suggests, and I don't know how replicable this is, but it's, it's certainly worth thinking about that since kids have gotten iPhones, they're less likely to go on dates. They're less likely to go out and hang out with their friends face to face. But they spend more and more hours on social media. But it turns out that the more hours you spend on social media relative to the amount of time you spend with real friends, the more depressed and anxious you are. And then if you're somebody on the other side who actually spends relatively more than average time with real friends versus on social media, you're happier than, uh, than other people. So it looks like it's sort of like what heroin does for us. Okay. Heroin makes us feel good. It capitalizes on this desire to have our, you know, our, uh, gustatory pleasure centers, uh, satisfied. What Facebook is doing is it's giving us satisfaction of our affiliative needs, but it's not doing as good a job with it. We're basically getting an ersatz, we're getting a kind of a fake version of real friendship and there's a lot of other things that happen on Facebook. It gives you this false sense of, cause everybody posts on Facebook, Dave was talking to me about this the other day. They post, Oh, I'm eating in a fancy French restaurant in Paris and that makes you think, what am I doing? I'm sitting here working and they're, my friends are all in Paris. Or in Barbados, you know. Athena Aktipis: (52:19) Well, but this actually speaks to yet another motive that's kind of Paris [inaudible], which is self-presentation, right? Like you want to present yourself well and Facebook offers this way where you can completely manage every aspect of your image. I mean, aren't there like these apps where you can like have your picture of yourself process to before you post it to make yourself more attractive? Dave Lundberg-Kenrick: (52:44) Sort of filters. There is like, I know there's like on Instagram they do a lot of- Doug Kenrick: (52:48) So I can have my face morphed with George Clooney and just look a little bit. Dave Lundberg-Kenrick: (52:54) Like there's a, there's a filter that'll make you look younger. Uh, there's probably a filter that will like make you look more masculine or more feminine and like gathers and so, uh, yeah. People say, but yeah, so that taps into this sort of status, right? Athena Aktipis: (53:09) That is the King. So presentation. Yeah- Dave Lundberg-Kenrick: (53:12) That's like the next level. Doug Kenrick: (53:15) So again, when our ancestors gained status, it was good for them. Okay. Because those with high status, if they're males, to have more access to mates, if females to have more accesses, access to resources. So for males is a double payoff. For females. There's only a single, but it's pretty good payoff. Okay. Getting resources. When you have high status, you get to drink at the watering hole first. If you're, uh, you know, most primates, and this is true for humans as well, you get, you live in a nicer house, you know, you get more respect, uh, you get a private office and so forth. And so status is something that has always come with some benefits also with some costs. But, uh, in general, we'd rather have increased status and have people score on us to have, you know, to lose status. Okay. And so, uh, we are designed to want to gain some status and a real parasite on that. Is computer games okay. Because how do we care? Do I know how well I'm doing? So in academia I count how many citations did I get? You know, I do a blog for psychology today and I've got a couple of them this week after HBS and I'd go on every day and count how many hits did I get? Oh, I'm in the most red section. Oh yeah. Well man, yeah, people are paying attention to the bull crap. Then I'm spouting. Okay. And so I get to count things. Okay. And I'd say that actually in the case of things like my citations or you know, uh, the number of people who've, you know, say bought my books, it's something real. It's actually, there is some real benefit there. But this desire to count it gets explained by computer games because when you're increasing your numbers and you're increasing your numbers of book sales, that's a good thing. Okay. But when you're increasing your, your numbers on what's up a computer game that our kids play Dave Lundberg-Kenrick: (54:59) Still has score. Um, well there there's a, I could think like if you play a game like the legend of Zelda cause they don't- points aren't as big a thing as they used to be. Doug Kenrick: (55:08) There was one that I had on just had this picture of fairly well- Dave Lundberg-Kenrick: (55:13) But what I was trying to say is that there, there's levels there. There's also, they now have this thing of you'll solve a quest for somebody and they'll say, Oh thank you. You're the hero of the town. Right. So they have a really more, a sort of a more direct way of tapping into this- Doug Kenrick: (55:29) But then they also have levels of levels that you can feel. Dave Lundberg-Kenrick: (55:32) Like if somebody's playing, like when Liam would play like Overwatch, you could like, you could get better. Doug Kenrick: (55:37) Yes. It can raise your level and you can get more points. Okay. You can get more life or whatever. Dave Lundberg-Kenrick: (55:43) And even in like, yeah. And like role playing games you get sort of, yeah. Doug Kenrick: (55:47) Yes. But so it turns out the kids who spend a tremendous amount of time on those games, and that means most kids now, they actually are taking time away from their studies. And it turns out that if they were getting points in school, they'd be benefiting themselves in life because they're going to want to get into, into a good college. They're going to want to get a good job. The more time you spend racking up points and racking up successes in the game, in computer games, unless you want to become a professional computer gamer. Okay. Which I don't think there's a lot of jobs in that domain. There's computer game designers, but even then you better be doing both. Dave Lundberg-Kenrick: (56:21) Either one. Actually neither one is very good industry to get into these days because there's more people who, there's far more people who would like to have those jobs than there are jobs. Doug Kenrick: (56:31) It's not a typical thing if it's too much. It's like being a professional athlete. Dave Lundberg-Kenrick: (56:38) So one other thing I'd like to add with the computer games though is they also, they tap into that self-protection thing a lot too. I think that combination. Um, yeah. Doug Kenrick: (56:48) Well that's right because somebody is always attacking you and so you're actually, yeah, you're protecting yourself and then you're getting more and more status. It's like you're becoming a personal Harry Potter, but in real life you're not getting anywhere. Athena Aktipis: (56:59) Yeah. Well, and at least the games that existed when I was a kid, there was also the mating motive in there. Right? There's like the princess that you were trying to save. Right. I don't know that that's so much these days anymore. But- Dave Lundberg-Kenrick: (57:13) I mean I think that, I think all entertainment media these days does its best to tap into all seven motives as much as it can. Yeah. Doug Kenrick: (57:23) So the only game that I play these days is a game called Threes- they didn't even bring up, cause it's addictive but it has nothing. It has nothing but numbers. Nothing but numbers. Okay. It's just, it's combining numbers first to combine twos with ones to make threes. Then you combined threes and threes to make six, isn't that, it keeps going up. And the more of those that you can double, the higher your score and then it tells you at the end what's your, what's your score? And it's only numbers. And I have spent, you know, I might even say a hundred hours on that game trying to rack up numbers when I could've been working on a published paper, which would have actually resulted in some benefits for me. Athena Aktipis: (58:03) Could have racked up those numbers. Dave Lundberg-Kenrick: (58:03) That I could have racked up. Those numbers make a difference. You can stay influenced, you know, they influence my salary. Okay. And so, you know- Athena Aktipis: (58:11) Those influence those other numbers of your salary. Doug Kenrick: (58:13) Yes. The other numbers, that number, I can take that number to the bank and buy more Haagen Das double chocolate fudge. That number. At least have some something real in it. So then we get status so it gets exploited by things like computer games and probably lots of other things as well. Dave Lundberg-Kenrick: (58:32) Yeah. Actually I'm going to throw out a couple more. Uh, well certainly YouTube, uh, an Instagram, anything that has like buttons, Reddit, [Doug agrees] those really those really tap into, you know, Reddit has like a high score for your life essentially for everything you've ever written in terms of- Doug Kenrick: (58:50) Exactly like, so you say something. In fact, people do. The things get combined because if I put up some really nasty thing about Trump, a bunch of my friends, I don't do that. Okay. So I stay away from the stuff on it, but some of my friends do, and I'm often likely to say like when somebody puts some really clever, nasty thing about a politician, like, like, so if I were doing that, I'd be combining sort of the, I'd be feeding you fear and then you'd be feeding me status, a return for me, feeding you fear, you'd be paying the, you'd be paying. The- Dave Lundberg-Kenrick: (59:22) One other interesting thing about like Reddit is Reddit has essentially, it used to be people would be paid to write content, right? And reddit doesn't pay any of the people who provide its content. They only, people only get paid in likes, right? Like it's an entire webpage that's like kept alive by likes and so, so they've completely taken having to pay. Athena Aktipis: (59:45) It's like they've taken the academic model of us writing things for, I mean we have a salary, right? But we're not getting paid per content. In fact, we have to pay usually to get our things published and just generalize it to broader public. Doug Kenrick: (01:00:01) Yes. Right. No, that is interesting. The whole publication game. It's like the people, people pay now, they want to pay. So if we're going to have open science, that actually means if Elsevier and these, these and Sage have their way, what open science means is actually you pay to publish your paper with Elsevier and Sage and they continue to make a lot of money, kind of parasitizing academics’ desire to get ahead. Uh, and in fact, that's set up in such a way that it's got this, the rich get richer because you have to have a grant in order to be able to pay $2,000 to get good science. Athena Aktipis: (01:00:37) That sounds great. But then if it's actually creating a lot of inequality, then it's not so great. Right? So- Doug Kenrick: (01:00:44) No, it's definitely a parasitic, it's definitely, it's, and I'm not sure whether it's mosquito like, or I'm getting closer to the parasitic wasps as a big fight now going on in academia. Right. Uh, but that's true in general. In some sense, the publication business is in the interest of generating funds in any way that they can. And that's the way that the economic world goes around. Um, so what goes after that? So after I've gotten status, if I'm a male in particular, now I can move on to trying to find a mate. Okay. Uh, and so we're designed, all of us, our ancestors all found at least one mate. We wouldn't be here to talk about it. Okay. So we have strong mechanisms designed to find this, that gets parasitized at times by things like these dating apps. Okay. Things like that. Basically, you know, I was reading some article and the number of swipes that a guy has to do in order to get a date and a something in the thousands. Okay. Because there's, because the things, there's a natural tendency for females to be more selective and careful because of differential parental investment, which I don't know if you want me to go into what that is. Athena Aktipis: (01:01:52) If a woman's going to have a baby, she's got to gestate it and then at least evolutionarily she'd be breastfeeding it too. So that's a lot of calories, a lot more investment compared to what a male- Doug Kenrick: (01:02:02) It's mostly- Dave Lundberg-Kenrick: (01:02:02) So that means that a woman needs to, she would like to pick a male who's going to either contribute fantastic genes or contribute to the rearing of the offspring. Athena Aktipis: (01:02:17) Or both. Dave Lundberg-Kenrick: (01:02:17) Yeah. Athena Aktipis: (01:02:17) That would be my preference. [Dave and Athena laugh] Dave Lundberg-Kenrick: (01:02:21) Uh, so that's sort of where it gets too- Athena Aktipis: (01:02:23) Yeah Dave Lundberg-Kenrick: (01:02:24) Yes. Yeah. Which, which I think also in this, this mate mating phase, it's not like, cause you made it sound like, well guys then have to mate, but both people have to mate, and this is a really, this is a big important decision for women, right? This mate selection. Um, Doug Kenrick: (01:02:39) For guys it's a less of a, you know- Athena Aktipis: (01:02:42) Guys just make a guess though, right? If males are going to invest a lot, then it's a more important- Doug Kenrick: (01:02:46) If they want a lot, if they want a long-term mate, then they want to be extremely careful and selective. Okay. Um, but if they're interested in short term mating, okay, then they're dealing with that. We've done some research on this and we ask people, what are your criteria for short-term and long-term needs? And what we find is if you think about a date, both sexes want someone who's about average in intelligence. If you think about someone, you're going to marry both sexes, want somebody who's well above average in intelligence. If you think about someone for a one-night stand, women wants somebody who is smarter than the average guy they're going to date. But guys are actually willing to have a one-night stand with a woman who isn't as smart as the person they'd be willing to date. I don't know how that actually works itself out in real life, you know? Doug Kenrick: (01:03:25) But that's- Athena Aktipis: (01:03:27) Tinder. Doug Kenrick: (01:03:27) Yeah, that's exactly where it is. Right? But then who's going to make out in Tinder? It's only going to be those guys with the extremely good, the muscular, handsome, you know, guys with a, you know, symmetrical face and a beard, you know, the George Clooney's of the world. Um, and uh, so when you go on a system like this, somebody's making some money off it. Okay. Uh, and in some sense, I don't know, it's maybe kind of mutualism because it's helping people meet one another. But at the same time, I actually think in the modern world that's not doing us much good because people have, you know, uh, there's a lot of people who get kind of depressed over the, uh, the outcomes that they have. And they, you know, I talked to our cleaning lady who said she went on and she had like a thousand guys making an offer in the first day and she just went off immediately cause it was overwhelming. Okay. And then I talked to guys who are like thousand swipes and then you know, people also people have inclination to present themselves not using an old picture who, whatever their best picture, the best angle, you know, from when they were in high school Athena Aktipis: (01:04:32) Or maybe one of those pictures that they've- Doug Kenrick: (01:04:35) The doctoring you were talking about- Athena Aktipis: (01:04:35) Through one of those filters. Doug Kenrick: (01:04:39) So, you know, in some sense there, there is, you know, technology is kind of riding that motive. Okay. And then it also rides it. Well, let's take the next motive, which is to basically maintain relationships because our ancestors- Dave Lundberg-Kenrick: (01:04:54) Question real quick before we move on. Cause is there, so that taps, I know for guys those like apps like Tinder and things really tap into that sort of mate acquisition sort of motive in terms of always making it seem like, hey maybe maybe, somebody's gonna say yes next time you know- Athena Aktipis: (01:05:13) There is another smiling face looking at you. Dave Lundberg-Kenrick: (01:05:16) Exactly. So what about the, are there robo parasites for, for women from mate selection? Cause it seems like there must be because it's such a, or maybe you know like- Athena Aktipis: (01:05:31) Well a lot of the other dating websites, I think they're, they have mostly women on them. Yeah, I think so. Like the ones that are for- Doug Kenrick: (01:05:43) Long-term relationships. Athena Aktipis: (01:05:43) Yeah, I think so. I mean I'm not an expert on this, but um, yeah there's more, more women typically on- Doug Kenrick: (01:05:51) I thought I'd heard that almost all of these sites have more men. Like Okay Cupid even has more than- Athena Aktipis: (01:05:58) I think it also depends on the ages. So like the ones who are for people who are a little bit older or women- Dave Lundberg-Kenrick: (01:06:06) It used to be that Match had more women than men. I don't know if that's still the case, but I could see, right. That idea of, I guess probably the dating apps are, they're probably doing the same. Well yeah. But I'm thinking for women, they might be where it's like you're giving them a choice of a lot of men. Um, but I was just trying to think. Athena Aktipis: (01:06:28) Yeah, I dunno. I mean I think, I think these, I, you know, I unfortunately or maybe fortunately have really no idea what the differences are among these apps other than the Tinder is like, you know, basically short-term meeting. Um, and like Match I think is more like people are looking for long-term mates. But yeah, somehow, you know, people sort of sort I think based on what they're looking for, figure it out and then, yeah. Anyway- Doug Kenrick: (01:06:56) So what are the ads that I saw for Tinder? It shows three attractive women kind of as a fuzzy photo, you know, but they're basically, they definitely have, you know, nice figures. Okay. And they're kind of looking like they're dancing kind of. And it's, and it says single is a terrible thing to waste. Clearly that's appealing to men cause it's, I mean it's beautiful women and it's like, Oh gosh, look at all the single women out there that looked like this. [Athena agrees] Okay. Uh, and so I don't think that when we say parasitizing, it isn't always with evil intent. Okay. I think that these apps are, it seems that that's Ben and Jerry, they're nice guys. Okay. They want to make you feel good. They're like, you know, the Italian or Greek mom who feeds you. Come on, you know, Italy, I went to Liz Mangia Mangia Mangia [Athena laughs] there is no evil intent there. Okay. And I think it's similar here. There isn't always evil intent. These people just want it. They want to make a profit, giving people what they want. Dave Lundberg-Kenrick: (01:07:52) All right. All right. How about this one? This, does this tap into mate selection? It might tap into mate retention, but it's not technological, but the diamond industry is that- Doug Kenrick: (01:08:02) Yes. The diamond industry is definitely one of these things that we know. Diamonds have no real intrinsic value except they're hard. That'd be, they're really useful for tools. Okay. And then not really the, even the prettiest gem out there, but the, the company from, what's the company that's so famous, the Dutch company, um, that, that runs most of the diamonneers. Doug Kenrick: (01:08:26) The Beers- Doug Kenrick: (01:08:26) The Beers did an incredibly good job of making diamonds. First of all, they slowed the, apparently the market value of diamonds, they're not that hard to find, would be well above the market value of iron, but not that expensive. They might be worth about $10 for one carat diamond given how hard they are to find. But what, yes, what the Beers did is they slowed down. Athena Aktipis: (01:08:50) The supply. Doug Kenrick: (01:08:50) They controlled the supply, they lowered the supply, and then they paired diamonds with love. They, yeah. And this is really for mate retention, but they basically made it like if you really care, you know, diamonds lasts forever. So if I'm willing to give you a diamond and the more I pay now find the man, the more I pay, the more that shows that I have status and resources that want to burn on you. Uh, and so yes, the diamond industry is, is an exploitation of our mate retention Athena Aktipis: (01:09:17) Was also status potentially, right? Because it's a signal that you have- Doug Kenrick: (01:09:22) Yes. But I have to, yes. I have, you know, how much Melissa, my commitment to you, you know, cause if I'm poor and I buy you a one carat diamond, I'm really, you know, I'm really committed to a costly signal. And if I'm rich and I bought you one, Garth, I haven't said, Oh you can buy this guy can buy me one carat diamonds, you know? Athena Aktipis: (01:09:38) Right. Yeah. Once you get people believing that this is a signal, then it becomes a real thing. Doug Kenrick: (01:09:45) Yes. Right, right. Athena Aktipis: (01:09:46) Yeah. Yeah. So what comes after mate retention? Does anything come after that? Doug Kenrick: (01:09:50) Well, mate retention, I think we have one thing that we've kind of skipped over. One of the, one of my favorite things that exploits that it's uh, Ashley Madison. Okay. So mate retention is a hard thing to do. Okay. People don't, you know, um, you guys have been married and you know, you know this, that people, there are natural conflicts involved, you know, trying to raise kids and you know, limited amounts of time and resources. Athena Aktipis: (01:10:15) I don’t know if you know this, Doug, but my husband Carlo, he's like, he read your paper. And he was like, Oh, like mate-retention is a thing. [All laugh] I'm like, Carlo, yes. Athena Aktipis: (01:10:34) But he didn't realize that that was something that actually needed to- Doug Kenrick: (01:10:39) Glad to be of benefit there. But it's a tough thing to do, it really, it's tough and it requires some investment and uh, and so incomes, things like Ashley Madison, which basically, you know, the, I saw one of their ads which shows this very beautiful woman. Um, and it's basically saying it's basically insinuating, you know, you can do this in life. You know, why? You know, why be faithful when there's so many opportunities out there. And so, because relationships are hard and everybody goes through a period, I think this is, no, my partner doesn't appreciate me much as I should be appreciated. We all have these biases, you know, all this stuff that shows that when you ask people how much of the housework they do, it adds up to over 100%. And you know, how does that happen? That's why how's it so clean, right? Cause people doing 150% of the housework, but it's just each person has a tendency to see themselves as giving a little more than they actually give. And their partner is taking a little more than they actually take. Um, and so there's going to be times when, because my inherent self-serving biases, we're going to think, why am I in this relationship? And so something like Ashley Madison's and so you can just sneak off and have a little affair on the side and you know, it's just- Dave Lundberg-Kenrick: (01:11:51) it's also promising mate acquisition within the context of- Doug Kenrick: (01:11:56) Oh, I guess it's, it's promising- Dave Lundberg-Kenrick: (01:11:58) I guess secrecy- Athena Aktipis: (01:11:59) The mating opportunity. Dave Lundberg-Kenrick: (01:12:00) The secrecy opportunity, Doug Kenrick: (01:12:01) And other mating opportunity, even when you're not attached. Dave Lundberg-Kenrick: (01:12:02) But then by keeping it quiet, I guess that's where the retention thing- Doug Kenrick: (01:12:04) That's right. It's not actually helping you retain mates. It's basically, it's tears' advising on a natural conflict that happens within longterm relationships. [Athena agrees] Um, and, and then, so the final one in the end is, you know, kin care okay, why do we do all this? Why do we, why do humans even spend time together? It turns out that most mammals don't, 95% of males and females, their meetings, their meetings strategy is a lot like Los Angeles, 1972. Okay. It's one nightstands period. That's it. You know, uh, there's no commitment for most mammals. Okay. The females only take the genes from the most physically fit males that have been able to compete with the other males and who show off how attractive they are and so forth. Uh, but humans aren't like that. Okay? Humans, the males hang around, they know he's hanging around for life, but they often hang around for years and they in fact, over half the time they do hang around for life, even in the United States about over half. But it's, you know, something in that range. Um, and so, uh, humans hang together. Why? Because we have these, especially health helpless infants, we have infants who come into the world. First of all, females, female humans don't function as well when they're pregnant as say female cows do because we're upright posture. And suddenly you've got this big thing hanging in front of your body and not as mobile as you used to be. Uh, then then the baby comes out and it immediately starts nursing on the female and it’s- babies are so helpless. You know, a little calf comes out and it can feed itself often, you know, very soon it can certainly walk around on its own. Human beings have to be carried for like close to a year. Okay. And the whole time they're sucking nutrients out of the mother. So, uh, there was this co-evolution of these big brains, helpless offspring with male investment in the, in those offspring. So it helped us get to the big brain- Athena Aktipis: (01:14:03) And also great intergenerational investment. Like there's a bunch of data about how Hunter gatherers wouldn't actually be able to have the reproductive rate that they did without having the parents or the grandparents basically investing. [Dough agrees] So there's sort of this whole, you know, community of individuals in the family that would be contributing to making it possible for, for humans to have these really vulnerable offspring that require lots of years of care. [Doug agrees] Doug Kenrick: (01:14:34) And so we, we have lots of strong mechanisms to care for our offspring. And how do those get parasitized? Uh, well I mean, here's one sort of simple one, which is, you know, when you've got a kid- Athena Aktipis: (01:14:49) Do you have any embarrassing stories about Dave you could just throw in there? Doug Kenrick: (01:14:52) Any embarrassing stories. You know, I had it more for, um, yeah I have it more for, uh, we've already skipped over the sort of the mate acquisition phase. [Dave and Athena laugh] It's not that embarrassing, but it's like, um, you know, I said these things develop, they don't, they don't unfold. So young kids don't care at all about mate acquisition and they do care about friends. They do care about getting fed. They do care about protecting themselves from the bad guys. But they don't care about retention or mate acquisition cause they don't care about me. And they don't care about taking care of children cause they don't have any children. Um, but so these things unfold developmentally. And I remember one day, it was at this critical phase, he was probably about 12 years old and we're driving along the coast of California actually. And one of the surfing songs comes on and it was a song by Jan and Dean, I think called surf city and one of the lines, and it was two girls for every boy. And Dave said, yuck. Doug Kenrick: (01:15:54) And I said, really? And he said, why would you want to be in a town where there's two girls, God. And I said, trust me Dave, let's wait a couple of years. [All laugh] And then when I told this story recently, Dave said, you're making that up. I never believed that. I thought I was making it up because you didn't think you were ever that uninterested in, you know, uh, in mating opportunities. But you are not, you thought it was a yucky concept that there might actually be all these women floating, two girls for every guy. It would be a bad thing. Doug Kenrick: (01:16:26) And what happened is he eventually developed biologically, you know, testosterone did it staying in suddenly all of us. And this interesting thing about the way these motivational systems work, uh, once they come online, they can monopolize our attention. You know, they can make things. All of a sudden, you know, when you're a prepubescent guy, you don't care at all about, you can kind of notice some women look pretty, some women, you know, whatever. Um, but then all of a sudden when you're 14 years old, it's like, Holy shit, there are Italian girls out there. I'm like planning my trip in this surf city. What is this I heard about in Australia, females want to have more sexual partners than they do in China, where do I want to travel to? [All laugh] Doug Kenrick: (01:17:11) Um, and so yeah, it totally, it totally changes, you know, once these motivational systems take over, they can, they can really direct or redirect a lot of energy to them. So what about the Kin care one? How's it going to exploit it? And that's try, I have a good example. Maybe you guys could help me, but I know for me the iPad is, is one that's sort of, it's an interesting, it's a technology that helps babysit. Okay. And almost everybody says, can to take your kid on the plane, get an iPad. Okay. And so in fact, we bought Dave's brother, actually we could even pick on Dave here. You know, when we used to drive around the country a lot, we traveled an awful lot in the summer, did a lot of camping and Dave got one of these devices, game board- Dave Lundberg-Kenrick: (01:17:54) A game boy. Doug Kenrick: (01:17:54) A game boy, yeah. And it was like, we thought, Oh, this is great. Doug Kenrick: (01:17:56) Because it keeps him from whining and saying, when are we going to get there? He was just, he's perfectly happy to sit in the back of the car. Athena Aktipis: (01:18:03) Like this. Doug Kenrick: (01:18:03) And we'd be complaining- Dave Lundberg-Kenrick: (01:18:08) I don't know what he's- Doug Kenrick: (01:18:08) About this because we'd be driving along and I swear to God it was, you know, it's like Dave, look the grand Canyon. And he went, yeah, yeah, yeah. Hold on, hold on. I'm almost up to 12,783 points. [Athena laughs] Then I'd say, no, it's the grand Canyon. Look out the window. Yeah. Nice. Okay. 12 um, and so, you know, these technological devices, which can help us with babysitting. They turn around then and they get our kids addicted. And you know, I get the iPhone uh, you know, you had a game boy, it only had a few games on it. You know, our kids have iPad games and the games are designed to get better and better and better and better and better at addicting the kids and keep taking their attention. So they won't complain on the plane, but they also, you can't get them to do their homework when it comes to dinner. Dave Lundberg-Kenrick: (01:18:57) So the, there's also in that same vein these days, there's like, like Gretta used to always play these virtual baby games, you know, and those sort of also directly tap into the sort of Kin care motive where you're taking care of. And they were terrible little games, but she just loved you to put the baby to sleep and then you, you know, and I mean, and I remember like there was always that story in the news of like the couple who can accompany they like had like, did you ever hear this about like they were parents and their actual kid died while they were taking care of a virtual baby. They were playing like a Sims type game with a little virtual baby and they sort of- Doug Kenrick: (01:19:36) They neglected their own child. Now I don't know that I've ever looked at the date on that. I have a hard time believing it. Dave Lundberg-Kenrick: (01:19:41) But it's like urban legend. Doug Kenrick: (01:19:43) It could be an urban legend. Yeah. Yeah. It's a good story because I know that Oliver Sng talks about it cause he wants to get some grant to do technological research and he uses that same story and he's a very rigorous guy. So he probably actually found the story and you know, but it's certainly the case that it sounds possible to me that people can, you know, people deal, your younger brother Dave has brother who is 15 years old now. I'm not sure he would come to dinner on its own, you know, I have to tear him away, you know, and it's like you. Dave Lundberg-Kenrick: (01:20:17) Probably, if I just let him- Doug Kenrick: (01:20:19) certainly they lose weight if we didn't force them to, you know, I'm going to come in and close that thing now. And the other thing is it results in, it results in anger. You take the, it's like you're taking the kids, um, heroin away. You know what I mean? It results in anger. And so there's this thing that we, we got to help us, you know, they be set and it turns around and it basically is taken out. It's, it's zombified our kids. Dave Lundberg-Kenrick: (01:20:44) It works too well. It works too well. Athena Aktipis: (01:20:46) Yeah. But then it actually can interfere with your real parenting motives of like wanting to help your child develop and a successful existence. Doug Kenrick: (01:20:58) Right? No cause they're wasting now their, their brains have been wasted. Actually, you'd be happy to hear this. One of the women who works in my lab, uh, she refers to these as zombie boxes. She has two children and she said yes. Uh, the uh, the iPad is a zombie box. It just takes your kid's brain and eats it. Athena Aktipis: (01:21:24) So I have a question about, um, self-actualization. Doug Kenrick: (01:21:30) Okay. Athena Aktipis: (01:21:31) So in the Maslow approach, right? Self-actualization is the thing that you do after you've accomplished everything else. What's your view about what self-actualization is? There is an evolutionary self-actualization. Doug Kenrick: (01:21:47) So this is one of the questions that we got. It's a really good question because what, when we rebuilt Maslow's pyramid, we took self-actualization off the top, just sliced it and apparently threw it away. But we didn't talk about that in a second. And at the top, what we put there, some things that completely ignored, completely ignored, mate acquisition, mate retention and Kin care. For him it was like if you got to the point where you had satisfied your social needs, you'd move above that. You'd go off and you'd write poetry. He liked to talk about poetry, music, and art. You'd go off and do things that were only designed to satisfy your higher intellectual need for beauty and understanding. And that all sounds lovely, especially to academic intellectual nerds. That's, yeah, that sounds great. Right? Uh, what we argued is that what really people, any organisms that was designed to stop caring about social motivation when they had achieved all these other, where they have all these difficult to achieve goals, to now move off and go play the guitar by themselves. It doesn't sound like a functional, it sounds nice. It sounds like cool to philosophers and nerds. Okay. But could we really have been designed that way? We thought no. What we're designed to do is to turn all of that energy. We got, we got some status and we got some friends. Now let's use those. You know, let's use that social capital to find some mates and to have some offspring. Okay. Not that we consciously think that- Athena Aktipis: (01:23:16) Can I jump in? No. Cause for the, you know, given that this podcast is about Zombification and self-actualization seems like maybe it has some relation to that. Like is there maybe a sort of cap on top of that evolutionary version of the pyramid, which is like about de-zombification like reducing the number of things that have like parasitized you along the way as you've tried to accomplish all these goals. Dave Lundberg-Kenrick: (01:23:44) Sort of worked with my dad on like some book proposals on this topic. You mind if I take a shot at answering this because I think that there's a sense in which, like, okay, so evolution as a philosophy is one that doesn't necessarily provide a moral framework the same way of religion. Like Christianity would, right? Like you could say, I want to have lots of babies and maybe that way you're succeeding or you could say, I'm just going to make my own brain happy by taking heroin and either one of two those things. Athena Aktipis: (01:24:19) These don't sound like good options, Dave. [Athena laughs] Dave Lundberg-Kenrick: (01:24:25) So in terms of this framework, I think it's like, I don't know that it promises some sort of transcendent thing above sort of success and contentment for yourself and the people you care about. Right? And so the sort of top of the pyramid, which we have, we have kin care at the top, but that doesn't actually mean it's more important than things like affiliation. It partly is there because it's that it sort of comes last developmentally. But the real, I think, promise of living a sort of good life according to these motives is actually, it's similar to what you're saying of avoiding Zombification in any one thing. It's, it's just creating, uh, sort of like I, I've talked about it in terms of it's this pyramid of life and what you're doing is you're not really climbing to the top of a pyramid as much as you're building a pyramid that won't crumble on top of you. And so essentially it's just living your life in a way that you are happy and content and your family is happy and content with how you're living your life and your friends are happy and content with how you're living your life and I think that's essentially the promise of the pyramid. Does that sound- Doug Kenrick: (01:25:41) Yeah. I, I would say I would agree with what you just said and it's, and I don't think taking on vacations are at the top. I'm agreeing with that in some sense. At every level. We want to be sure that we are investing our resources in such a way. We're really getting a maximal, a good payoff for them. Okay. Rather than throwing them away rather than being tricked and getting the Bernie Madoff's of the world getting rich at our expense. I'll say so. I would say that at every level we want de-zombification, but that's not the thing about self-actualization I would say is that I think it's a real thing. I think that people do have a desire to fulfill themselves philosophically and intellectually and musically, but actually think it's mostly part of what we've done research on this and we ask people, what would you be doing now? Doug Kenrick: (01:26:28) Maslow had this idea of self-actualization, which is the idea of fulfilling your highest potential. What would you be doing? If you were fulfilling your highest potential. And we asked people to describe what they will be doing and they often said, I'd be doing, I'd be writing a novel or I'd be, you know, uh, making films for Disney, or I would be managing a business and, you know, selling yachts. Okay. Then we ask them to say, we told them about the fundamental motives and said, so this, there's different motives in life, like making friends and keeping friends, uh, gaining status, uh, and respect, uh, finding and keeping mates. Okay. And we gave them each of those fundamental motives. Then we ask them what you just said you'd be doing if you are self-actualized, which of these motives does it connect to? And the highest one was status. Uh, and that was a little bit higher for men than for women. Okay. But for women, it was also important. The status was, that's what they'd be doing if they were fulfilling their highest potential. Athena Aktipis: (01:27:27) To me, the thing that seems similar across all those examples is actually the autonomy part of it. Right? Like that's something that someone else isn't telling you to do. You're not working for someone else, you're not doing what someone else is asking you to do. Doug Kenrick: (01:27:42) That's interesting. Yes. We didn't give them autonomy as a choice to tell you the truth. You know, that you could just be, you know, um, right. Doug Kenrick: (01:27:56) Being free is an interesting, it's really interesting cause it doesn't fit with what I've been talking about here. In some sense. There's no such a thing as real- real autonomy is not a good thing to seek. You know, really being totally autonomous is not good. Do you want to be connected? Although you don't want to be connected in a way that you're being forced to be connected. Okay. You want, you don't want imprisonment. Okay. But you want mutuality. Yeah. Dave Lundberg-Kenrick: (01:28:18) Right. I'll bet you a lot of times the people who are thinking about writing the great American novel, they're probably also picturing the book signing tour. Doug Kenrick: (01:28:28) Yes, exactly. They're picturing being on NPR. [Dave agrees] Talk to you about that. About what? Why did you write this great amount of American Novel, Athena? Okay. Uh, and you know, I think that's what's, what's driving people is a desire for status, but also a desire for affiliation was pretty high because if you accomplish things, you'll also enhance your social capital. Okay. You'll become more valuable. Okay. To the extent to which I do useful and good things, then I become a more, if I'm, for example, you know, let's put us aside, even music, uh, well, music probably makes me attractive. It turns out that women are very attracted to guys with musical talent and with poetry and writing skills. And it's not because they like it from an evolutionary perspective. It's not that we're designed to be poet lovers were designed to appreciate good brains. Athena Aktipis: (01:29:21) Mmm, brains. [All laugh] Doug Kenrick: (01:29:21) Because if you get a mate with a good brain, what that brain, and you can get some benefits from that because mates with good brains can solve problems. Okay. And mates with good brains can pass on good genes to your offspring. Okay. Cause it's, in order to be intelligent, to be a good musician, you have to have no developmental, you know, real serious anomalies. Because if you were, uh, you know, bilaterally, uh, you know, handicap- Athena Aktipis: (01:29:48) One of the best dancers. I know actually it's like one leg is significantly shorter than it really. Yeah. Doug Kenrick: (01:29:54) Well that's good. That's overcoming a serious, a real handicap. Yeah. Dave Lundberg-Kenrick: (01:29:57) Right. But it also, it does show that probably in terms of despite that, it's still a fitness cue, right? So he's got a good dancer. Athena Aktipis: (01:30:08) Yeah. Can I just bring us back to the autonomy thing? Because I guess my sense of like self-actualization, if there is such a thing as that is like what I am doing is like what I really, what the deepest me really wants. Like not being driven by someone else's goals. That's kind of like, that's what I think about if I think about self actually. Doug Kenrick: (01:30:37) Right. But would you want to be doing it all off on your own in a cave? Athena Aktipis: (01:30:41) Cave, you know? Well maybe some of the time, but not all of them. Dave Lundberg-Kenrick: (01:30:45) So, so here's an interesting thing. So here's from my own life, right? I had, when I graduated from film school, I wrote a bunch of scripts, right? And so I would think I was self-actualized uh, I was particularly self-actualized in the sense that when I sent them out, they were sent back. [Athena laughs] I personally didn't find that to be this wonderful transcendent experience. And I wonder if people were to picture that. Right. Cause then there, cause it was like I was clearly, I was doing my own thing. I wasn't doing what script reader. Athena Aktipis: (01:31:16) Right. It's like if you successfully manage to do that then you would have felt like you were self-actualizing. Doug Kenrick: (01:31:23) Cause he would've gotten the status and they would've gotten benefits. And also there's a connection- Dave Lundberg-Kenrick: (01:31:27) Right? You're writing a novel and people resonate with the novel. I think that's, then it's like now you've achieved this deep social connection that I've had when I've read a great novel. You know? And I'm like wow. And so I think that's- Athena Aktipis: (01:31:40) You can achieve those fundamental motives in like coming from a place where you're very autonomous. Then maybe that is something like what we mean by self-actualization. Dave Lundberg-Kenrick: (01:31:51) An idea that this idea that you, cause there's, there is, there's something more appealing to being the person who writes the amazing screenplay. Than being even like the person who is the, you know, the gaffer or whatever, who's doing a very good job and they're part of a team, but it's not their vision. Doug Kenrick: (01:32:08) I just don't love the word autonomy here, but I saw, I see what you're saying. I think that in some sense, what, you know, what we appreciate, you know, what makes you self-actualized is that you've got one thing that you do so especially well, that you actually stand out. Okay. That's the thing. So I don't think that's necessarily autonomous so much is that you're picking the thing that you can excel at. Okay. You're, when you know, Pablo Neruda writes a poem, or Pablo Picasso paints a painting. Okay. They're doing something that, you know, they're really fabulously good at. Okay. When Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dance on whether dancers regard them as good dancers, but certainly all the rest of us did when I was growing up. You know, you watch these people, Whoa, look what they can do with their bodies. They were picking the thing that they were really good at and, but they turned that into a real social success. Okay? They turned that into status when they weren't thinking. Now here's the thing, this and evolutionary biology, we think to talk about the distinction between proximate and ultimate motivations. We're not designed to be in touch with our ultimate motivations, were not designed to know why. We're designed to know what I want to do next. But I'm not designed to know why I want to do that. I mean, one good metaphor for this is that, you know, when you think about birds who migrate North and South, uh, apparently, you know, what makes them migrate is something like the length of the day. Okay? That's the trigger for their migrating. Okay. And ultimately speaking, the length of the day is just a cue that basically says that it's going to be getting colder in this part. So let's move to, you know, or opportunity is going to emerge in the North because the days are getting longer, so let's move that way. Doug Kenrick: (01:33:56) Uh, but the birds aren't thinking either about the length of the day or about the, about the genes that will be benefited from finding nests up North during the summer and so forth. They're responding to this queue and it ultimately, the system is designed to have them produce more eggs. Okay. But they're not consciously aware. And I think this is true for our fundamental mode and we were zombies for our genes, but we are, yeah- Athena Aktipis: (01:34:27) We all self-actualize when we're just being autonomous as opposed to being those. Doug Kenrick: (01:34:32) Yes. If you feel, if you feel self-actualized when you're autonomous and that's a good thing to say to yourself, great. But from an ultimate perspective, I'd say that you know, that that sense of wanting to sort of excel for yourself is ultimately done for others. Not even consciously, but it's, it wouldn't be there. We wouldn't have that desire unless the ancestors that really wanted to excel and really want it to perform really well in something unique. We really like to be unique. Okay. Uh, that would have had to have some social benefits or we wouldn't, it wouldn't be such a powerful human motivation. Athena Aktipis: (01:35:09) Okay. So I think, uh, we should ask our last question. Dave Lundberg-Kenrick: (01:35:13) Well, yeah, I think, I know we've been going for a while. I'd like to ask about what's for dinner? Athena Aktipis: (01:35:17) Well, yeah, they zombie apocalypse. So what, what's your zombie apocalypse scenario for like hijacking of these fundamental motives? Like if we were, you know, in a world where these fundamental motives and we just sort of like turn up the knob on them so they're even more intense or maybe they're getting hijacked just even more. Dave Lundberg-Kenrick: (01:35:38) I mean, I actually, this is one of those where there could be a zombie apocalypse. Doug Kenrick: (01:35:43) I think it's happening now in some sense. I think that basically politicians are getting in this, the system is designed in such a way that they're there more and more and more and more scaring the shit out of us to get more and more of our resources. Okay. And you know, companies like Ben and Jerry, they can't stop giving us sugars. I mean, we all know this now. You know, you don't, you don't have to read nutrition magazines to know that sugar is bad for you, but the food industry can't stop giving it to us and we're getting worse and worse. We're getting fatter and we're getting more and more dependent upon our news things. I think it's actually, unless we can think of some ways, yes. But let me just actually say, I don't want to be totally depressing to end up, but I think that that's the direction we're moving because the, because big data, you know, and profits are so strong that they're, they're basically sucking all this energy out of us. Doug Kenrick: (01:36:39) But I do think, I do think that we can design, uh, inoculations and we can design a sort of a defense system and immune system. In fact, we would pay, I for example, would pay for programs that will control my son's time on the iPad and will control my time on the iPad. I would pay for programs that can help me avoid eating too much. Ben and Jerry's ice cream. I would pay for programs that can help me get along better with my spouse. Okay. And so, you know, uh, and they can help me, you know, we could have something that says you're about to enter the zone, the button you're about to press right now. You just press the button now. You know that if you press this button for Ashley Madison, here's some of the consequences that are going to happen now as the Madison's not going to pay for that. But I would, I would pay for an immune system, you know, that builds into my computer some information that says, well David, we've been talking about doing this. Dave Lundberg-Kenrick: (01:37:43) Yeah. Actually to the point where I then maybe a, I have another thought that I wanted to talk about now, which is, um, I also think there's a way to do a cure, right? Which would be like, so let's say for example, we think about, well not necessarily a cure, but a rewiring of these mechanisms. So if we go back earlier we were talking about wealth inequality, right? And the sort of group dynamics. And I was thinking, is there a way that we could leverage these same mechanisms to do a thing where it's like, I think about, you remember, I remember the thing where you could adopt a kid and you get a letter for a kid. And so it's like, I wonder if you could have the children, yeah, they could have things these days where you'd get up votes for every person you've saved and things like that, you know, what do you mean? Like, so let's say, let's say there's people starving in wherever, third world country somewhere, and then I donate money to them or whatever. Then I get, I get little- Athena Aktipis: (01:38:46) This is sort of like the effective altruism movement where it's like very focused on how do you spend your resources to, you know, save lives and improve lives and this community that's built up around it, it's very much like I think status you get status from doing more. Doug Kenrick: (01:39:04) Yeah. I think they could exploit technology to help with that because you know, rather than just kind of self-righteously saying, gee, you're wasting your, your, uh, contributions. Um, if there was a way that we can actually build in programs that tell us, okay, that I can actually see. In fact, it's getting kind of close to that now when I want to buy a product, I can see the complaints about that product. If I'm going to contribute money to a politician, maybe I get to see their voting record. Okay. And maybe I can see, Dave Lundberg-Kenrick: (01:39:34) If you're going to vote for a billionaire or buy from the billionaire's company, you can see how much of their money they've, like how many people they've helped. You know, if you were to look at someone like bill Gates who's given a lot of money away, you know, um, like I think these sorts of things like you could use technology to make it visible to make, you know, the same way they tap into these sort of status. Doug Kenrick: (01:39:56) Right? It's like a consumer reports does something where they tell you you're going to buy this car. Okay, here's the breakdown rates on this kind of a car as compared to that kind of a car. Here's the, you know, and then they recommend make a recommendation based upon educated. So we actually can use, we could use big data to actually give you fair and honest feedback about what's the next choice you're about to make. Athena Aktipis: (01:40:24) Yeah. Well it seems like, uh, you know, in addition to the potential for kind of leveraging these reputational mechanisms, you know, maybe also having more of a sense of the interdependence that's there and how like we actually- for people in general to be okay for any of us to even be safe. Right. Ultimately- Dave Lundberg-Kenrick: (01:40:49) Yeah. That could help too. Yeah. Doug Kenrick: (01:40:52) There again, those interests because the people, there's a lot of money and being a parasitic wasp. Okay. Um, and so all of us down at the bottom, you know, need to band together. It's like that the 1% movement was pretty successful and sort of at least building up some momentum to say, look, there's a lot more people who are being cheated than who are, you know, doing the cheating. Why don't we band together? Dave Lundberg-Kenrick: (01:41:21) Well it could, cause there also are like, there's real benefits to their social benefits to altruism, right. If people are aware of it. I think in terms of, I think it makes people more attractive and it makes me feel more trustworthy. And so I do think- Athena Aktipis: (01:41:36) But then if you're just doing it for that, then that undermines the value of it as a signal. But no- Dave Lundberg-Kenrick: (01:41:44) I don't, I mean I, I've always had this sort of philosophy when I used to volunteer with people, like special needs that everybody, everybody had some sort of agenda to some degree or another. And if they didn't like, you know, it might be like to me, so you go there to be social or you go there to sort of show people how to cause you like the accolades and it's like if you, if we got rid of everybody who had some sort of selfish motive, we wouldn't have had enough people to run this sort of organization. Athena Aktipis: (01:42:17) But it also depends what you mean by selfish. Right? So like if it makes you feel good to do something where you're taking care of kids. Yeah. Then you, somebody who is cynical might say, well, it's selfish because you're doing it to make yourself feel good, but really evolutionarily, right? Like you're, you know, maybe on some ultimate level you can say that like it benefits your genes, but it creates organisms that have altruistic motivations. Like that's actually the psychology of it. Doug Kenrick: (01:42:49) Here's an interesting thing. One of my favorite findings in psychology, and I'm bringing it up all the time, and it's from Liz Dunn at UBC. It's this study that shows the following. When you ask people, what do you think would make you feel better spending $20 on yourself or spending $20 on someone else? The answer to that survey question as well, spending $20 on myself, but it's actually, there's some research where she went out on the campus at UBC and gave people $20 and she asked them to either spend it on themselves or spend it on others and then come back. They came back the next day and then they were asked how happy they are and the ones who'd spent money on others were happier. Uh, and then she had some other research where she looked at people who got raises and looked at how much of the raise they spent on themselves versus on others. Doug Kenrick: (01:43:43) Ones who spent more money on others were happier and this is correcting for how happy they were to begin with. Okay. Um, because it could be just happy people are more than others, but no, that wasn't what it was. It was that independent of where you started out. Those who gave more money to others were happier. And there are a number of findings that have converged upon this that we're seeing. We are designed to feel good when we do something for other people. And it makes sense because we're social animals. And in fact, there are natural things that come. If you look at the people, we often talk about Vanji Keith, a, uh, a friend of, uh, one of, uh, they've, uh, Dave's friends, mothers and, uh, the wife of one of my long-term, uh, friends, Rich Keefe, uh, she's always going out and doing favors for people. Doug Kenrick: (01:44:31) Long story, sorry to who she was, but this is a woman that we both know who is really good friend, was really helpful. She's always smiling. She's always supportive. She always asks you a question about you that's sincere. She really cares about people. Well, you know, she's not doing this for any kind of cynical reason. She just, but it turns out that everybody likes her. And so when people see her, they hug her, they smile at her. You know what I mean? They, they would bring her food if she was hungry. They invite her into their houses. They care about her and it turns out that she is getting, there's a real benefit to being the really nice person. Uh, and it's not why you should be nice, but actually people should be aware of it because then that's when people think I want to be happy. Why am I not happy? I want to be happy. The best thing for you to do is to not want to be happy, try to make somebody else happy, forget about you. Go out and make somebody else out. And then incidentally, you will have made a stronger social network and you'll probably get a little boost from it. Athena Aktipis: (01:45:32) Well that is a really great way I think to end our podcast today. And um, I just want to say that you should feel really good about yourself cause I think you've just made us very happy sharing your awesome brands with us this episode. Thank you. Outro: (01:45:49) [Outro plays] Athena Aktipis: (01:47:06) Zombified is a production of ASU and the zombie apocalypse medicine Alliance. Thank you to the department of psychology, the interdisciplinary cooperation initiative and the president's office at ASU and also the Lincoln center for applied ethics thanks to all the brains that helped make this podcast including Tal Rom, who does our awesome sound, Neil Smith, our amazing illustrator, Lemmy, the creator of our songs, psychological and our awesome Z -Team at ASU. You can follow us on Twitter and Instagram. We are @zombifiedpod and we're zombified podcast on Facebook. Our website is zombified.org and on our website you can find our tee shirts and our stickers and get your very own zombified merge to help support us. Remember, we are all educational, we have no ads and we rely on your support to help make zombified happen. So please go on our website and buy, merge or join us on Patrion for just $1 a month. You can help to make this podcast work. Athena Aktipis: (01:48:10) At the end of every episode I share my brains and offer a story or connection to my work. And, uh, today I just want to share a few thoughts actually, which is that this episode we recorded it before the COVID-19 pandemic. And so a lot has changed in terms of the landscape of our social interactions, um, and especially our interactions through technology. And so to me, I see two sides to this. One is that right now we have in a way a much greater vulnerability to being hijacked by social media and these social parasites that Doug talks about in our episode because we do not have the same opportunity for face to face interaction. So the things that we see on our social feeds are the things that algorithms are deciding to feed us. So that I think leads to some new vulnerabilities that we didn't have before when we were able to also have those face to face interactions much more regularly. I think there's also an opportunity though, and for me, I know and for a lot of my colleagues and friends that I've talked to about this, the fact that we now are not able to sit down in person across from each other and have a conversation really brings into clear relief how much we value that. And we don't want to give that up. And definitely, you know, if, if we were forced to only interact with each other through text messaging and, and zoom for the rest of our lives, it would really, you know, be something that would have a dramatic long-term impact on us. Um, so I think by not having that face to face interaction, it makes it clearer how important it is to us. So perhaps we'll be able to use this situation as an opportunity to really think about what role we do want face to face social interaction to play in our lives. So that when we come out of the other end of all of this, we can be a little bit more intentional about the kinds of social parasitism that we want to be involved with. And those that we don't want to be involved with. Thank you for listening to zombified your source for fresh brains. Outro: (01:50:54)