Robert Sapolsky SF Being Human Q&A

I'm part of a journalistic collaboration with the climate desk which includes Mother Jones magazine medium Abington post grist the Center for Investigative Reporting and loss of other awesome news outlets to subscribe the show or hear us you can find us on iTunes it's called inquiring minds and we're a weekly science podcast in which we interview leading intellectuals about how science can help us inform our decisions in society so we're delighted to have this opportunity to do a live taping of our podcast with someone we wanted to interview for a long time so you both this episode of probably err in December so you can look for us there so just to remind you can tweet questions I'll be checking my throwing for messages from my mom but from tweets for you so I apologize if I have to look my home so let's get started what that probably also means is we shouldn't talk anymore about what they want you to go by and this is going to be broadcast but oh we're Levin I was talking about the baboon martini I thought that kind of hot welcome to inquiring minds Robert Duvall seemed glad to hear I guess I'm supposed to say that I'm glad to eat well the first time there's really backfired on me already so for listeners I just want you to know that we are at a live taping of an event as part of the Bay Area Science Festival here in San Francisco so any ambient noise you hear might be because there have been lots of better than martinis consumed by our audience so I begin by asking you to tell us a little bit about your work on stress which is how I first discovered some of your brilliant ideas and specifically how those of us who are working in an urban environment and somewhat stressful jobs what power allies different now perhaps than they were ten twenty years ago in terms of our physiological response to the stress on our work or is it just the same old thing obviously the answer is yes and no what I've mostly studied over the years is stress physiology in my lab work studying have one class of stress hormones damages the brain has something to do with brain aging kills neurons what can you do about it can you do gene therapy against a totally depressant work and my baboon work over the years was looking at what your social rank and what your personality and what your patterns of social affiliation have to do with who's got the elevated blood pressure and who's gotten around in cholesterol levels and the you know irregular cycles and the Muny sort of problems what does psychosocial factors have to do with the stress response so all of that is predicated on the fact that this is like the art type of example of we've got the same physiological system as every other mammal out there birds reptiles etc same exact stress hormones and we secrete the stuff for psychological reasons and the punchline about everything related to stress and health is the system didn't evolve for being chronically activated it's a system that evolved for somebody is attempting to eat you and you have to run very fast and everything you do with your stress hormones in that our brilliant for getting you through that disaster you mobilize energy to your muscles you turn off on essential things you know growth reproduction there's a lion chasing you up you late some other time don't monitor right now all built around coming tomorrow if there is a tomorrow you think more clearly your immune system is sharper all of this is perfect if you're being stressed like a normal mammal which is to say a short term physical crisis and where we get into trouble is we have other sort of psycho socially sophisticated primates we're smart enough to invent chronic psychological stress and we secrete that hormone that's perfect for diverting energy to your thigh muscles and we secrete if thinking about mortality and that's not what it evolved for and if you chronically activate the stress response there's all these diseases that you're more at risk for you know run for your life from Alana and your blood pressure's 180 over 120 this is a good thing be psychologically stressed in traffic on 101 and your blood pressure's 180 over 120 this is not a good thing it's not doing you any sort of advantage there what humans succumb to are diseases of chronic stress and living well enough and long enough to pay the price that we can chronically activating stress response and everything about us as a species and westernized humans in particular just says this is not going to devolve before and these days we have all this pressure put on ourselves to find work that is meaningful and you know is our passion and there's nothing else more that we want to do and so we just do that one thing that we're really great at that brings us a lot of love and although well that sounds like a really great ideal to strive for I think there's a lot of people that are stressed out by this enormous Lee yes well here we are in the center of the universe for gentrify sort of striving in a sense that good is never good enough and there's always something more to achieve and you know we are just examples of how you could take a physiological system that's my first short-term crisis and you do it chronically and it just gnaws away at us most of the diseases we succumb to now are not diseases of poor hygiene and poor nutrition we're not getting done in by scarlet fever anymore we're getting done in by diseases that are caused by your you made worse by stress diseases that chronically eat away at us and these are diseases of taking a mammalian mindset and applying it in an utterly novel westernized way are there any baboon equivalents of this search for meaning um yes but they're usually pretty futile well maybe framing it a little bit differently in terms of hierarchy sort of when I first started doing my work out there what I expected to see was dominance rank completely determined physiology like if you get a choice in the matter you don't want to be a low-ranking baboon you're going to every stress related disease on earth and in a very broad sort of way that turns out to be the case but normally you look more closely there's just much much more interesting psychological stuff going on it's not just your rent it's what your rank means it's what your write means in this particular social context it's the personality filters that you have and essentially what you're left with is there are baboons out there who are number two in the hierarchy and the single most important fact on that guy's life is there's still somebody dominant to him and there's guys out there were number 19 in a hierarchy of 20 and the most important thing for them is thank God there's a number 20 I can dump on you never are going to have movement and remarkably number 19 is going to have lower stress hormone levels than number 2 in that setting they see watering holes as half-empty or half-full and that turns out to be more powerful than the right the psychological state the social interpretation as to what rank is about so in that regard they may not quite be self actualized or great meditators but at least they could do like subtle psychological things with their station in life so along with stress is this related concept of motivation and this what sort of keeps us motivated to do the things that we do and as you mentioned banking has a big influence on your motivation so what can we learn from low ranking baboons that are happy and not stressed that we can apply to aspects in our over which we don't have control or is there anything well yes fortunately there of course I said that I cemented the leaky foundation each time I asked them for money thank you for the teachers much about the human condition actually they can because what do you see is those personality features if you have a choice in the matter between being an alpha male baboon with nobody who greets you willingly or number 20 with lots of social affiliation your to be much healthier in the latter case when you look at the personalities of these guys and personality along with cultural personality is another word that used to get to deny tenure and now that's as trendy of a term entirely ecology as in culture animals besides us have different temperaments have different propensity towards reacting emotionally in different ways some are high-strung some are looks from they differ as to how readily they start fights whether they take out aggression on innocent bystanders do they groom a lot do they play with kids stable personality differences and what you see in terms of like what personality style works for a male baboon like I could go down to a sillim or on the weekend and give like hot tub seminars to baboon executives telling them have any more relaxed in their lifestyle centers in doing this here's what goes into being a successful male baboon in terms of having a low stress response can you tell the difference between the big things and the little things what do I mean by that your baboon you're sitting there you're minding your own business your worst rival on the planet shows up five feet away and threatens in your face this is a big thing what you do you stop doing whatever you would do you take this defensive visual instance in contrast you're sitting there minding your own business and your worst rival on the whole time it shows up and takes a nap 50 yards away do you get crazed at that point the amazing thing is your average male baboon guess his behavior just as disruptive as having the guide mapping over there is threatening on his face this is like look at him I hate that guys do that when are we stories and I just Kennedy I eat that guy this is time a personality has seen threats that other individuals don't if you're a male who tends to interpret your arrival taking a nap as disruptive to your behavior you're going to have twice the stress hormone levels in your bloodstream as the males who could tell the difference between this is nothing this is the big thing second if it is a big thing and the guy's threatening you in your face do you sit there and passively abdicate control and allow him to start the inevitable fight or you at least see some control in the situation and you're the one who initiates it passively abdicate control twice stress hormone levels you've had the fight can you tell the difference between whether you won or lost this seems rather fundamental do you behaviorally distinguish if you've won you go and groom with somebody if you've lost you go beat up somebody smaller or whether you win or lose you go and might take it out on somebody smaller your average male baboon is just as likely to displace aggression onto an innocent bystander after winning a fight then after losing they can't even tell if is a promotion or not or a demotion if you may have distinguished your pain a good outcome and a bad one higher stress hormone levels finally if it is a bad outcome do you have an effective coping strategy okay not do you go and meditate do you go and beat up somebody smaller half of that wound aggression is displacement aggression if you go instead and mope by yourself in the forest higher stress hormone levels look at this can you tell the difference between the big things things if it is a big thing do you at least have some control over it it's healthy outcomes good or bad and if the outcomes bad you at least have some coping strategies and you look at the guys who are like this and they outlive their Co work by two to three years and they have lower stress hormone levels and you go back in the record and they were like that when they were adolescents who first showed up in the troop and this is far more predictive of life span on these animals than what rank they achieve so you've brought up meditation which is the really hot sexy topic in our science right now and everywhere as a panacea for our stress and do you it is your impression that there really is something special about meditation or certain types of meditation say mindfulness practice or do you think that this is a fad that will go away and it depends on as you said the upbringing of the young Feb moon yes it's one of those big it depends okay stress management here's here's what you could say collectively stress management techniques meditation TM mindfulness aerobic exercise prayer playing your clarinet whatever collectively they work they work as in they can lower blood pressure they can lower cholesterol levels that you work they come with a bunch of requirements though first you can't save your stress management for the weekend it's got to be something you do almost daily second you can't do your stress management when you're on hold on the phone for 30 seconds you've got to set out time in circumstances where you can't say no to anything you need to say no to something and set out this day and daily time to do that the third requirement is like so obvious until you think about how easy it is to not remember this but it's got to be a stress management technique that you actually enjoy doing anything absolutely your transcendental meditation has great effects on health nonetheless if I were to do 20 minutes of TM a day I would have a stroke no antithetical to what I'm about so like it's great your friends advocated read the fine print find something that works here okay here's an example of this tank lab rats and let them run in a running wheel and they enjoy this and they make new neurons in their brain adult rats on a part of the brain called the hippocampus that's great now take a second rat psychology jargon yoke the second route to the first one put the second rat in a running wheel that it can't get out of every time the first rat chooses to run the second rat is forced to run they get the exact same exercise voluntary versus involuntary this guy is increasing the birth of new neurons in this brain this guy is decreasing it if it's a source of stress management the guys saying what am i doing in this running wheel this is not a source of stress management this is a source of stress so it's got to be something that works finally do not believe anybody who says it has been scientifically proven that their brand of stress management works better than anybody else's watch your wallet at that point yes I really better stop making my husband got a soul psyche over me I wish you like good I want to call one of the questions from our Twitter feed which is blowing up so thanks everyone for submitting me this is from Eduardo bris and zero and he poses the question of you talked about things that are similar between primates and humans between other types of animals in humans and it seems like every time we search for a difference there's you know some impetus for some group somewhere to find some species that does the same thing so what is what do you think is physically different about our brains that maybe allows for some of these unprecedented things that you talked about okay far and away the single most interesting thing about our human brains is this brain region called the frontal cortex I have spent like 30 years studying the hippocampus I love the hippocampus it's been good to me all of that nonetheless if I had to start over I would be studying the front hippocampus is great for learning and memory you know that's useful that's the part of the brain that's blown out of the water in Alzheimer's this is a good thing frontal cortex though is so much more interesting what the frontal cortex does is it makes you do the harder thing when it's the right thing to do and it's the most recently evolved part of our brain we've got more frontal cortex than any other species it's about gratification postponement and impulse control and emotional regulation destroy somebody's frontal cortex and they become a serial murderer that sort of thing an astonishing percentage of men on death row in this country have the history of damage to frontal cortex from concussive head trauma you get that part of the brain damage and you know the difference between right and wrong but you still cannot control your behavior it's the most human part of the brain the most recently evolved when you look at the parts of our brain where we express genes that are unique to that brain region more that goes on in the frontal cortex in any other brain region we have more any gene expression there than any other brain region versus other primates other apes it's the part of the brain that defines us what's really interesting is it's also the last part of the brain to fully mature one of the things that everybody is used to get hammered into your head is your brain is basically wired up by the time you're a few years old your frontal cortex is not fully online until you're about twenty-five years old think about how much a freshman year of college that explains right all that rather than expand agreement is the last brain region to fully mature that has a huge huge implication if this is the last brain region to fully come online it's the part of the brain that's least constrained by genes and most shaped on environment and experience and it's not by chance the frontal cortex its wiring is not fancier than any other part of the cortex it's not like it's intrinsically a more complicated construction project to make a frontal cortex than the visual cortex we have been selected to delay maturation on it because we need 25 years to learn the contextual cues for whatever our culture is from the cortex evolved to be freed from genes and to be shape Barmes is a defining part of the brain the process humans yeah but the canvas grows the neurons and it's my favorite brain region it's a part of a cream but yes I totally get where you're coming from and so that kind of brings me to this idea that okay so we have this mature frontal cortex that comes on very late and we tend to think of ourselves as largely behaving rationally but we have so much evidence that not only doing not behave rationally most of the time that the vast majority of our behavior is actually controlled by parts of our brain to which we have no conscious access and one of those things is categorization which is something that we talked about and in this month's Nautilus magazine you pose a really interesting question which is that now it seems as though if you ask people whether in the near future our concept of gender is going to be fluid what would most people say and you have an answer is that what you wrote in the article but I'm awfully a little bit okay what the article was prompted by is you know we're we're in the era of oh my god what is her name who use pavement banana yes thank you what am I wasting my time learning science I can't keep hurting with your stuff yes we are in error of that individual and the oranges black is the new black actress I'm showing how unhip I am here too I'm cashing forgiveness but okay where they suddenly America is conscious of transgendered individual suddenly that's trendy suddenly it's occurring to people that dichotomizing my gender may not be all that clear-cut and people are me anyone who's a biologist is known for a long time gender is on a continuum sex is on a continuum sexual identity the steps between your chromosomal sex determination and your gonna dull and your endocrine and your psychosocial there are so many steps in-between where things can change that it is a no way guaranteed it's on continuum something like 2% of birds people are born the sexually ambiguous genitalia intersexual status there's all these disorders and of course that immediately opens a categories as to whether once you have knowledge izing this there are all sorts of these endocrine disorders where you have people who are genetically XY and they have had they have given birth to individuals they had test these very giving somewhere up on their stomachs that haven't done anything since the first trimester few life there's all these ways in which gender is on a continuum and one of the most interesting versions of it is with transgender individuals there's a whole bunch of parts of the brain that the jargon is are sexually dimorphic the size or the chemical makeup or the function of this part of the brain differs by sex not sufficiently so that like you can measure the size of this nucleus of the hypothalamus and by knowing the size you know the gender of that let the brain came from but we're statistically on the average this area is bigger and females than males this area has more axons and males and females with functional significance okay so there are gender differences in brain structure they're not big differences but they are there on a population level so a whole bunch of studies now have looked at the brains of transgender individuals asking what are the sexually dimorphic regions of their brains like and the studies are absolutely in consensus that what you see is the person's brain is that of the sex they say they have always felt themselves to be not the one they were born with and what you suddenly realize there is the mindset that we often have about transgender is these are individuals who think they are of a different sex than they actually are that's not the case these are individuals who were born with a body of a different sex than they actually are and when you look at that this is just on an amazing continuum so you see that and you see like beginning of recognition that you look at Facebook wasn't 56 58 different gender terms you can have your gender fluid gender inter-gender I can remember all of them some of them are just so interesting as to what they are broadly and then there's a not specified or other suggesting that there's some individuals out there were 57 gender categories isn't enough and they said by gender other their sort of thing ladies so the question of this article was like as we get that many more celebrities sort of revelations about their sort of sexual identities and stuff are we a few decades away from gender just seemingly is completely like irrelevant concept and I think what I sort of concluded in the article was despite all of that this dichotomizing of gender in our heads is not anywhere because it is an incredibly fast automatic categorization that we did you put somebody in a brain scanner and you flash your pictures of subliminal speeds it takes you about 80 milliseconds to process the race of an individual how's that for horrifying it takes you about 120 milliseconds that's a little bit more than 1/10 of a second for your brain to respond differently depending on the gender of the face that you just saw on the picture and this is flashing the pictures so fast you're not even consciously aware and confident that you saw something okay suppose I tell you that we just flashed up a picture of the face what was the sex that individual I don't know I couldn't even see it male and then a higher than chance level a hundred twenty milliseconds is all our brains need to process that all sorts of psychological manipulations of categorization showing that for example racial categorizations and people are incredibly flimsy it takes totally minor manipulations of people to switch how they categorize people by gender by race gender doesn't switch anywhere near as easily it is a very very hardwired dichotomy we have and you look at any other species out there you look at any primate on earth and somebody in the group date birth last night and everybody is at some point going to come over and pull the new kids legs open and sniff down there and ask is it a boy or a girl so amid the fact that biologically sex is on a continuum and we're actually beginning to recognize that in some ground nonetheless our brains are really wired to dichotomize by gender very very rapidly so I don't think gender is about to disappear as a category but likely we do have this wonderful frontal cortex that can help us monitor our actions and not offend people in that way but perhaps a corollary of this evolution to this is a question from jealousy Adaro or yahoo fear there I apologize if I mispronounced your name and he brings up the question of whether or not humans than are the only species to suffer from dissociative identity disorder are we the only ones who not only have this sense of secondary self but also are plagued by the possibility of that going awry um well answering that is hampered by the fact that that wounds always lie on questionnaire to suit us there but I think it's pretty clear and as I sort of noted in the talk there if you're a rhesus monkey you can have an automatic implicit on the scale of milliseconds identification with the group you belong to but you don't do something that humans do when it comes to these categorizations which is belong to multiple hierarchies at once to belong to multiple categories to shift which one is most important to you depending on circumstance you may not even consciously be aware of like one of the classic sort of demonstrations in shifting categorization Minds display every every like parent of the kid taking math moves this one which is study carried out on Asian women taking a math test and they were given in Psychological prime beforehand and have the case the person handing out the exams mentioned beforehand that oh you know it's well known that on the average women don't do as well as math as men do in the other case half the time saying oh it's well known that on the average asian-americans - better in math and domination Americans sit in that room and if you were an asian-american woman and you were priming beforehand about your gender math performance went down if you were primed to think about your ethnicity math performance went up we belong to all these different category simultaneously and we flip within seconds somebody who is an other who isn't them and your amygdala is screaming like crazy puts on the same stupid baseball cap is the team that you would be willing to kill for and suddenly they are in US and your brains things on a dime at that point how do you think and this is a question from a couple of people Jordan Preston and Olivier Mercier putting your questions together which is what can we learn from how our brains are different from primates that can help us understand how we're going to have a relationship with artificial intelligence so where are we thank you artificial intelligence and is you know how do we how are we going to get there and how are we going to deal with them it the thing well from what I understand I think the much more pertinent question is how they're going to choose to deal with us hopefully maybe they will be benevolent overlords in that regard I'm very very weak in this area but people I know who are knowledgeable basically are wetting their pants and terror when they think about that is going to be an unrecognizable gap of cognition you know it takes some like one of the sound bites and ethology is like ethology is the process of interviewing another animal but interviewing it in their language and like I know people who think like geckos who because they expect the last 40 years living with geckos or they can think like whatever your species is the gap between us and I think we're generalized artificial intelligence is going to produce is going to be just unrecognizable so any thousand has a great question what has changed most about your understanding of humans in the past few years oh go ahead ask an easy question amountof what has changed about humans weirdly and there's like very little reason to justify this there's like actual vague hints of proclivities of suggestions of maybe feeling slightly optimistic about our prospects in species which isn't totally against my heritage I am extremely pessimistic about virtually anything like I can find the downside of almost anything but when looking at the human condition if you want to look at an amazing book we're gonna book by Steven Pinker the better angels of our nature who documents a bid like the unimaginable horrors of stuff like ice and sir Boko Haram or whatever a Donald Trump or whatever's like nonetheless to look at a longer perspective over the course of centuries or millennia and we're getting much better as a species they our capacity for empathy who we viewers and us sort of the the umbrella of protection were willing to extend our ability to say things like it's not him it's his disease and is associated between the two I think in recent years I like think we got more optimistic about our prospects and when you think about empathy and our ability to feel for ourselves and you know the fact that tit for tat of reciprocity seems to be present in many other species it makes me wonder whether compassion which is more than just putting yourself in someone else's shoes it's actually you know doing something about it and beyond just your own needs whether that is something that we are really good at is that something that is different about humans or are there other species that are compassionate again we're compassion just abstracted realms we care about organisms on the other side of the planet or refugees like go figure that we will act morally in a context of an individual where we know for certain we will never encounter this person again because we're getting on a plane and now we're in flying back home from the other side of the planet kind of thing when we look at those features and sort of what makes sort of our most impressive humans impressive in those domains ironically what I've come to sort of recognize is the frontal cortex actually is very to do with that bro this was great study scientists I love this work Joshua green Josh green at Harbor neuropsychologist there who's done these studies reached six people in brain scanners and these incredibly clever manipulative paradigms where somebody's doing some tasks and each time they get an answer right they get some reward at the end and there's a motivation to do well and he invents these totally like just concocted situations where the person thinks they suddenly have opportunities where they can cheat where the machine isn't working right and they can say whether they had predicted correctly before head and you can monitor people's accuracy rates and see if during periods where they have the opportunity to cheat to they cheat or not and you've got them in a brain scanner so you can see what's going on in their brains as they're wrestling with Satan and deciding whether to do so what he sees with the people who cheat as soon as the opportunities to cheat arise their frontal cortex ghosting should I do it should I not if I do it is there better ways of doing it in other ways how can I make it seem as natural as possible yes you do the frontal cortex use your frontal cortex to do the harder thing when it's the right thing to do subside they'll also use it like crazy when you're lying because in that case that is something cognitively dissonant that takes work in order to control your facial expressions and you're totally poised of all of that some frontal cortex is working like crazy and these people when they're having the opportunity if she had a degree of activation was not predicted as to how much I actually would cheat but then about a third of the people never cheated at all so the question becomes at that point when they have the opportunity what's going on in their frontal cortex and green who's actually trained as a philosopher frames if not neurologically he frames it as is this an issue of will or grace do you do the right thing because you've got SuperDuper frontal cortical neurons that give you more willpower than anybody else out there or is it a state of some neurobiological grace and what he sees in those studies is the people who never cheat who never lie their frontal cortex could be in a coma at that point it doesn't budge in the slightest it's not willpower it's not doing a harder thing because you just don't do that it's automatic it's reflective it's like in their spinal cord as to how primitive the wiring is and that fits exactly when you look at when people do amazing heroic things you know that the cute falls in the river and everybody is standing there like headless check is what we do do when somebody leaves seven saves the kid and it's always the same thing afterward when they're being interviewed what were you thinking when you ran into the burning building working and it's always the same answer I wasn't thinking before I knew it I had dived into the river it's automatic and what you see is that fits perfectly with the whole world of moral development and kids where you have this whole world of cognitive levels of moral reasoning and that predicts squat about who's actually going to be honest it mostly predicts what like the prestige of university you'll get tenure in if you study moral developmental psych how much you sleep in it - what - and Kohlberg stage where you have that sort of thing the cognition of it predicts zero about actual moral behavior in hard dangerous frightening circumstances it's not because there's more willpower it's something completely outside of the realm of the frontal cortex it's people who were raised where that is simply it don't do stuff like that you don't look the other way and that's the studies that came through who sheltered people refugees from the Nazis and great menace to themselves who takes in people who've been left homeless all of that sort of thing and it's got nothing to do with religiosity level of education IQ socioeconomic status it's whether it was made a moral imperative when you were a kid it's not a question of willpower you don't do the wrong thing it's something that's not even tempted it - so I have one last question which is a follow-up on that and I want to bring it back to your work on baboons and the beautiful writings you you've given us about the troop in which those aggressive males died off and it was left with this very almost compassionate troop where you know the behavior was very different so in that true were there any lessons that you learned from how had new males that came into the troop were trained to behave so differently with with such different you know kind behaviors that we can apply to raising our own kids well this was well this was again this was this was my original truth that I started with when I was 20 and some years later there is a disaster having to do with them living in proximity with humans which never turns out to be a good thing for non-human primates and half the male's my troop were killed by humans and it was the more aggressive less socially affiliated limbs and what you were left with was a troop which uniquely had a two-to-one female to male ratio and the males who were left were these socially affiliated nice guys who didn't beat up on others when they were in a bad mood they didn't displace aggression they did lots of grooming they actually groomed a female back when she agreed him for two hours kind of thing which was unheard of and sort of mailed Windom and what i then saw over 20 15 years afterward was as new males join the troop adolescents who'd grown up elsewhere it took them about six months to take on this this behavioral style and the question was what sort of mediated that cultural transmission what I thought initially was maybe there's some sort of self selection going on what about rune male its purity and he's beginning to like transfer to another he'll go check out this trooper week and that one and then wind up 30 miles away so maybe there was something so selective I always call this the well who else would choose to go to Reed College model explained was that there was self selection beforehand but it turned out when males first joined this trip as adolescents they were just as much violent jerks as males joining any other troop what happened over the next six months was I think the key thing was driven by the females the key thing there was in a normal bathroom troop if you're female you are constantly worried about what jerk male in a bad mood is going to displace aggression on to you 50% of babble and aggression is displacement onto an innocent bystander it's this world of like total lack of control and predictability if you are female in there and suddenly this is a troop where instead the male's don't do crap like that stress hormone levels of the females were far lower and what you saw then was as new males would join the troop females could afford to be more pro-social to them join an average by wound troop as an adolescent male and is more than three months before a female first grooms you in this troop it was about five days the females were much more socially fit they outnumbered the males and the males who were there were not jerks and what you see there is in a setting like that over the course of months when male adolescent that wounds are treated nicely they default into being much calmer and much less aggressive it's a default model they didn't have to be taught if they were treated more nicely they stopped being aggressive jerks and once the extraordinary thing is baboons Savannah baboons are like the textbook examples of male dominated aggressive stratified societies this is the inevitability of baboon behavior and all it takes is about six months in the different social setting and these guys adapt to different completely different behaviors thought and basically if baboons could do that we don't have a leg to stand on if we say that there's certain inevitabilities by human social systems well I can't think of a better place to end so for those of you who want to listen to the episode you can find us on iTunes it's inquiring minds you can follow us on twitter at enquiring show and I'm enduring this on Twitter Robert Sapolsky thank you for being on inquiring you

Channel: Reese Jones

Views: 44,680

Rating: 4.9100451 out of 5

Keywords: Health (Industry), consciousness, cognition

Id: smBHZuMuAis

Length: 43min 0sec (2580 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 18 2015