Evolutionary Psychologist Explains Why Women Fall For “Bad Boys”

here's another thing that could be pitted in that competition so imagine you had people who men who could confer benefit and who were incapable of inflicting inflicting cost and men who could confer benefit but were capable of inflicting cost i think you'd see winners on that side because of that free rider problem and so and that ties into what we'll discuss in relationship to the dark triad because because there's some mystery about why women seem to be attracted to these so-called dark triad traits and i would say that they're using them as insufficient markers for the ability to or the acquisition of status so and narcissists capitalize on that right because a narcissist looks confident and lots of confident people are competent but some confident people aren't competent but they can fool you and then i think the other explanation is that if you had to choose between a benefit confer who could punish free riders and one who couldn't you should pick the former uh one who could one who could who could deal with free riders who could and would had the capability to and so you see you see this sort of thing i really like the disney movie beauty and the beast i think it i think they got it right and so there's gaston in that movie and he's a narcissist but he's he has physical prowess like he can't understand why he's not the guy but he's narcissistic and then there's the beast who's a beast but he's tameable and so he he can be a benefit conferrer and he has the capacity to inflict cost yes yeah and and and the two are often correlated in nature so like for example if you have physical prowess or athletic ability then you have both the ability to confer benefits you know in the form of say protection or hunting skills but also the ability to inflict costs by you know okay so let's talk about the dark triad then in relationship to agreeableness because the doc do you want to just tell everybody what the dark triad is first so that we're all on the same page yeah so so the dark triad um i think this was originally named by uh one of your canadian psychology colleagues del paula so the ubc and it the dark triad originally was uh uh three of triad but it's narcissism machiavellianism and psychopathy so where narcissism is typically marked by a sense of grandiosity a sense of entitlement they think they're the most intelligent the smartest uh the most attractive the most charming the most skilled et cetera uh were in the words of one of my former graduate students they think they're hot but they're not uh so uh and i think i think there's a way in which people do have the ability to assess whether that uh high self-esteem is uh warranted or not you know because we have even words in our language for things like arrogant you know that kind of uh [Applause] con out someone who is uh thinks that they're more beautiful or more intelligent or more capable than they actually are so that's narcissism but the entitlement is i think a critical component of narcissism where they feel i i'm so great i'm i deserve a larger share of the pie including the sexual pie if we when we get to the issue of sexual conflict and sexual coercion uh machiavellianism i mean that stems from the the the prince of i can't remember how many hundreds of years ago that was written but um it's basically people who pursue an exploitative social strategy so they can they they are when we were talking about reciprocity earlier they will feign reciprocity fame being uh good reciprocators but then they will they will cheat and so these are the the liars the cheaters right so if the if the patriarchy was based on exploitative power then dark triad personality traits would be adaptively and practically useful and desirable if that was the case yeah if that if that was the case yes yes okay now and that gets complicated because one of the things your research has indicated is that there is a manner in which women are attracted to people who manifest dark triad traits yeah i would say i would add the qualifier that it tends to be younger women so teenagers or women in their early 20s women as they mature and get more experience on the mating market tend to be less attracted to these dark triad characters okay so here's a here's a hypothesis it's not that easy to distinguish the willingness to use casual power and and control from competence when you're not very experienced and so the dark triad types can feign status related competence and they can ensnare naive women yes yeah that's right they also have some qualities that women genuinely do desire so the they tend to like the narcissists tend to put themselves at the center of attention and one of the things we know about status hierarchies is that uh the attention structure is very important that is the high status people tend to be those to whom the most people pay them the most attention uh and so women are drawn i i one anecdote a female colleague of mine very intelligent evolutionary psychologist said went to a conference and found herself very attracted to the organizer of the conference and then six months later she he she encountered him and he was just a normal attendee at the conference and she didn't find him very attractive she went what was i thinking but what it was is he was he was at the center of the attention structure well the the attention structure is an unbelievably reliable indicator of what's valuable because we don't devote our visual attentive resources to anything that isn't of singular value in the environment and so that's why we get precisely why we compete for attention it's also an extremely valuable resource absolutely so i mean a valuable and limited resource it's finite and so really at every moment in time we're making decisions about what to allocate our attention to i read a funny study once you might be aware of this where monkeys i think they were green monkeys but i'm not sure were shown photographs of other members of their troop and they gazed much longer at the high status individuals in the photographs so and you know and then you think about that too there's there's something really interesting about that because imagine that that compulsion to attend to what acquired status or let's say competence status is accompanied in human beings by a profound instinct to imitate right that's right because um i mean we are we are social learners and one of the things that we try to do is to emulate those who have qualities that are associated with status you know and and that that gets into you know and those those vary from group to group and subgroup to subgroup and in the modern environment we have this uh kind of a weird situation of a proliferation of status hierarchies you know where you can be the i don't know the top social influencer where the only thing you have going for you is i don't know a line of makeup or something like that or nothing at all i mean paris hilton was like famous for being famous and so she got a lot of attention but there was no no no real benefit there but you know we have like uh you can if you're if you play video games for example which which i i don't happen to but uh their status hierarchies within those you know the most skilled video game player the most skilled football player rugby player tennis player yeah well it's a good thing you know that we can create all these competence hierarchies because what it means is that diverse talents have the opportunity to acquire the status that might also all alternatively entice them to violence let's say because that is associated with status inequality and so one of the solutions to status in co inequalities diverse games of competence as diverse range as possible yeah and and that's i mean and that's definitely a a good thing uh because i mean if if there was just one status hierarchy then that means um i mean status is in inherently a relative uh gauge by relative metric you know so and if you're the number one no one else can be the number one uh but you know if you can be the best uh scholar the best writer the best uh world of warcraft player the best tennis player these multiple status hierarchies gives more peop give more people the opportunity to to gain in status another another argument against the patriarchy as unitary idea right well which patriarchy do you mean do you mean like the evil coalition of plumbers which is a joke i've made before it's like you know that's power is it plumbers really no they're not organized in terms of their success by which plumber is the meanest and the toughest it's that's not how it works at all right so yeah absolutely and and i mean that that gets into the the issue of uh oh there there are large pools of men who are at the bottom of the status hierarchy and um who uh who who don't have the qualities that that women desire and so are they really oppressing uh women there's this interesting uh cap there's an interesting photo that i think got captioned but it's too very elegant women with designer handbags and they're walking by a guy who's like fixing uh the the tar in the street he's a street worker fixing the tar and as they walk by this guy who's groveling on the ground they say stop oppressing me right so anyway right right well i wanted to talk to you a bit more about the dark triad issue too because there's a mystery in it and i think it's one that corrupts psychology to some degree research psychology oh yes okay oh just so we didn't mention the third one oh yeah the third element of the dark hair which is psychopathy uh and and you probably have a deeper understanding of psychopathy than i do but um one of the hallmarks is a lack of empathy that is most normal humans have an empathy circuit that we we feel compassion if someone gets hurt or if a pet gets injured or a child falls down and skins a knee we feel a sense of compassion for the suffering of other people but psychopaths don't it's like they might laugh uh if someone gets hurt and and uh so that empathy circuit seems to be severed uh and also one of the hallmarks seems to be that they're um not responsive to punishment um that they're more oriented toward reward wardens that punishing them doesn't tend to change their behavior it isn't obvious that they have an empathy for their future selves right so punishments like well you know part of the reason that you react to punishment is because you don't want your future self to be punished again but you have to care about that before that works right right yeah that gets the the issue of uh steepness the steepness of future discounting yes exactly exactly yeah they uh grab for all the gusto right now and don't think about the future consequences so so one of the things that one of the big five personality traits that the dark triad is most associated with is agreeableness low agreeableness and that's and i do think that research psychologists and psychologists in general have a kind of ethical bias in relationship to the agreeableness dimension you know and and it it and of course women are higher in trade agreeableness that men right reliably it's about half a standard deviation it's one of the biggest sex differences and it's associated with compassion and politeness in in the work we've done anyways and so that's empathy at least to some degree now the question is what is the ethical utility of lower agreeableness right because you'd think what would interfere possibly with sharing right because if you're more compassionate and more compassionate more empathic you're going to feel the hunger of other people and you'd be more motivated to to care for them let's say but it's also possible that that low agreeableness has something to do with well perhaps hunting prowess that might be part of it but it also might be part of the solution to the free rider problem and so women are in a conundrum with agreeableness right because they need a mate who's agreeable enough so they can bond with them and that will care for their children and it cares in general but they need someone who's disagreeable enough so that they're capable let's say of dealing with free riders and that's right yeah so one way of saying that is uh agreeable with respect to them but the potential for being disagreeable with respect to those others when they need to be punished or they need to ward off an attacker right and you can see that that's a real tight line to walk down you know and part of what constrains agreeableness let's say from a temperamental perspective so if you're low in agreeableness let's say well you're less empathic you're more competitive you're rougher blunter tougher you know emo what would you say at least with regards to the at the compassion you show to others um and so what what helps modulate that well some of that would be conscientiousness and so in the dark triad types you see low conscientiousness as well you know really low agreeable high conscientious types are quite interesting because you can trust them because they'll do their duty but they're very blunt and direct and harsh and that can be helpful as well because they'll tell you unpleasant truths even if they hurt your feelings so there's some utility in that so you can imagine that agreeableness can be modified let's say by conscientiousness so that and that takes the the psychopathy edge off it because low agreeableness and low conscientiousness that's that's a rough combination yes and so yeah yeah yeah because there's nothing constraining it and so women are attracted to some degree to the lower agreeable types and i think that accounts for the bad boy paradox that you described at least in part and maybe it takes further experience and and wisdom on the part of judicious women to see where they can get the disagreeableness that's necessary but it has to be hemmed in by something like well conscientiousness uh yeah other personality traits like conscientiousness yeah i mean one other reason that i think that women are attracted to the dark triad at least the younger women is that they're often risk takers so um they will do things like um motorcycle jumping or ski jumping or take physical risk speeding in their their cars or uh and and so the kind of daredevil uh mentality and women at least younger women find that exciting but i wonder if they can i wonder if they confuse that with trait openness right because the open types are going to experiment they're going to try lots of different things and that that daredevil you know i don't care might be easily not easily distinguished from the capacity to engage in creative problem-solving pursuits you know and and perhaps with courage as well yeah yeah so i think i think courage and also one of the you know that people who take risks often in in fact have the ability to afford those risks uh if if you will so for example you know doing some uh dangerous athletic feat if if you're not an athletic person you're gonna fail at that and so in some sense some of these uh daredevil uh behaviors i think are kind of cues that you have the ability to afford to take those risks but but these guys these high dark guys are absolutely disastrous as long-term mates um so that they might be exciting for sure i mean that's why i think that women as they mature uh stop being attracted to these guys especially if they're looking for a long-term mate because these are guys they're the dark red they're more likely to cheat uh they're more likely to seduce and abandon them they're more likely to engage in deceptive uh mating tactics uh and so and so they tend to be big trouble when it comes to long-term mating yeah well it also looks like they value themselves greatly and you know sometimes people value themselves greatly and so they have high mate desirability in in your in your terminology or maybe some little corruption of your terminology and again i think the dark triad guys mimic that it's like i'm so good i can afford to you know distribute my sexual prowess wherever i see fit and there's some some of that happens as men rise incompetence hierarchies as well well yes and it happens with women when they rise in their higher

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

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Keywords: Jordan Peterson, Jordan B Peterson, psychology, psychoanalysis, Jung, existentialism, maps of meaning, biblical series, free speech, freedom of speech, biblical lectures, personality lectures, personality and transformations, women, women mating strategy, nice guys finish last, nice guys, jordan peterson nice guy, bad boy persona, why women like bad guys, women vs men, what women want in a man, what women want in men, what women like in men, what women need

Id: hXJlYjyHujI

Length: 17min 40sec (1060 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 18 2022