Sex and Dating Apps | Rob Henderson | The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - S4: E47

i wonder if this has something to do with just sort of sociosexual orientation of you know whoever whoever happens to be expanding the beliefs so if you tend to be a person who's had your heart broken or had a lot of negative interactions maybe you had the expectation of monogamy and then you sort of have one too many negative experiences then you may start to be very preoccupied with uh with the issue of concern i think that's exactly what happens i i think that so you know we talked about people being shielded from the consequences of their luxury beliefs and they're shielded to some degree right but my suspicions are is that the relationship between sex and emotional intimacy is a lot tighter than people want to presuppose when they insist that all forms of sexual expression are laudable it's just not the case emotionally [Music] hello everyone i'm pleased today to be able to speak with rob henderson he's a phd student in evolutionary and social psychology and gates cambridge scholar at the university of cambridge he received his bachelor's degree in science in psychology from yale and is a veteran of the u.s air force his writing has appeared in the new york times the wall street journal and colette among other outlets he is currently writing a memoir tentatively titled troubled a memoir of foster care family and social class to be published in late 2022 by gallery books a division of simon schuster he is possibly best known for the idea of luxury beliefs which is where i first came across them first published in the new york post in short form and then in longer form in colette thanks very much for agreeing to talk to me today rob it's a pleasure to have you here it's great to be here dr peterson thank you no problem so let's talk first of all about luxury beliefs and exactly what that means and how you came uh come up with the idea and what the consequence of disseminating it has been yes so the luxury beliefs idea i define as ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class while often inflicting costs on the lower social classes and i mean there are multiple strands to this idea but it originally started with my observations in undergrad at yale um so as you said you know currently i'm a grad student at cambridge before this i was a student at yale but before that my life was a lot different i grew up in foster homes in la later i was adopted into a working class town in northern california serving the military so i just had a completely different set of life experiences and background than many of my peers at this ivy league university and in that new york post essay the the original luxury beliefs essay i opened with this story of uh this conversation i had with a classmate of mine in undergrad uh we're sort of talking about relationships and career and she said to me you know i just think monogamy is outdated i just think it's you know not really good for society i think it's just this sort of old patriarchal way of thinking and i'd heard things like this before but this time i asked her um well what do you plan to do you know what do you want to do with with your own life and with your own relationship situation and so on in the future and she herself said well i'd like to get married and settle down and have a family at some point you know sort of after my career takes off and i asked her what was your life like before that you know how did you grow up and essentially she had come from a very stable intact to parent family and so this puzzled me because this was uh emblematic of so many of the opinions i'd heard of my uh in undergrad from my peers they would say one thing they would believe this one set of interesting or unusual beliefs that i'd never heard before from anyone else uh but then they themselves had come from sort of more conventional uh upbringings and they themselves planned to have that kind of life that sort of uh more stable traditional family i'd once heard someone put this way that um you know a lot of sort of affluent people they uh what is it they walk the 50s and talk the 60s and i wondered you know what's going on here um and so while i was an undergrad i came across a series of papers series of ideas both from psychology and sociology so these sort of sociological aspects um i drew this from thorsten vablin and vaden's idea you know he wrote the theory the leisure class in the late 19th century and he basically said that you know the elites of his day they broadcast their status with their material goods with you know expensive clothes tuxedos uh evening gowns they take up these very uh expensive and time-consuming hobbies like golf or beagling and all of this is to basically indicate their high social position and you know some people say this book was written sort of tongue-in-cheek but i think there's a lot of truth to this now if we fast forward to the modern day uh i think it's there are two things going on with why it's not actually fashionable anymore to display your status with luxury goods with material goods number one i think it's become viewed as kind of gauche if you walk around an ivy league campus today the students don't look like they don't have the iv look of like the 1950s or 1960s they kind of just look like regular college students number one and i mean this is true pretty much anywhere if you look at very wealthy people and the famous example of this would be mark zuckerberg wearing cargo shorts and a hoodie it's just not that cool anymore to wear clothes that indicate that your high social status the other thing is material goods have become more affordable um you know even my sort of poor and working class friends back home all of them have iphones um you know maybe of course like their life aren't as comfortable as my peers in college but a lot of material goods have become so affordable that it's become harder to stand out in that way yeah you so reflected i think to some degree in the decline in burglary all right material objects just aren't as worth as much as they were and so they don't distinguish between people anymore it's not worth it anymore uh to steal things and and so so that's uh that's the aspect of it that led me to think okay well first of all you know luxury goods are not being displayed as much by the upper class but i still think it still seems to me they care very much about social status and this is where the psychology aspect of it comes in from a researcher named cameron anderson at uc berkeley he's a psychologist who found he and his colleagues found that basically the upper class cares the most about social status they care the most about obtaining it and they care the most about preserving it which at first i thought was a bit counter-intuitive i thought that perhaps the the most downtrodden the kind of uh people who are in the lowest strengths of society we care the most about obtaining money and wealth and status but that's actually not true it's the people who are already at the top who care the most about it and that's really what i saw at yale 2 uh where you know these people were very much they were strivers um they were very interested in pursuing status do you suppose that's a partial consequence of the fact that failure is perhaps more painful than success is rewarding so once you have it let's say you have high social status you're very much inclined to keep it because the alternative would be so i suppose in some sense unthinkable so catastrophic for you right so so this is the the idea of almost like this prospect theory idea that when you have it it hurts twice as much as obtaining it i think there is something to this idea um i noticed there was a lot of anxiety uh among many of my peers uh this feeling that they have to keep up they have to constantly strive they have to get on to the next goal and i think what exacerbates this feeling is that they're surrounded by people just like them uh it was it was a bit unlike my own experience when i had got into undergrad i um i thought like okay so i'm okay i got into college like that was my goal i never thought i was ever going to get into college and so when i got there i thought like oh i'm okay and then i saw that these people didn't feel okay that they had to get the next internship they had to get into law school they had to do this they had to do that and i think a lot of it is because they're around people they've grown up around those kinds of people their entire life and so there's this belief like it was inevitable like they always had to do this there was never a question of their success right right for me it wasn't like that yeah well it wasn't all this pressure when i taught at in boston at harvard i mean one of the things i noticed was that the students there were you know they were pleased to be at harvard there was no doubt about that but they it was extremely competitive implicitly and i suppose that's part of the consequence of it being essentially based as as much as it could be on on competitive merit and so it was also the case that many of these students had been outstanding where they had come from they were class valedictorians and usually had at least one or two other major accomplishments under their belt but then when they got to these intensely selected institutes they were also in some sense average instantly and below average in many ways because you know no matter how smart you are the probability that you're the smartest person in your class at harvard is pretty damn low and so the implicit level of competition was extremely high and so that might also exacerbate the sort of tendencies that you're describing and people tend to compare themselves to their immediate peers not to the broader world right and and and this is part of why i think is is is driving this um you know i make this this point in the essay that they're they're dunbar's number you know they're the 150 closest people to them are large part have reattached or they sort of detached status to goods and reattached it to beliefs uh and this was driven by my you know sort of what i saw where i heard opinions and ideas that i had never heard anywhere else i mean probably the most you know contentious uh recent example of what uh of a luxury belief is this idea of abolishing the police um to me this is so emblematic of you know very comfortable highly affluent educated people who would never have to bear the cost of of what that policy would entail and yet they're propounding it they're you know they're they're broadcasting it and promoting it uh with the knowledge that this is going to make them look good to their peers it's going to make them look uh progressive and interesting and provocative and win them all these social points from their social circle uh without really giving much thought to what would happen to the poorest among us and yeah one of the things that always struck me about beliefs in progressive so-called progressive causes among high status individuals or those who are about to be high status individuals which would typify everyone in an ivy league university i mean if they're not high economic status at the present time they certainly will be by all likelihood by the time they're 30 or 40. so they're already part of the upper class regardless of their claims they seem to want to have it both ways they want to be members of the most privileged class and then also be rewarded for their ally ship let's say with the oppressed and so they get to be rich and privileged and friend to the oppressed at the same time which always seemed to me to be a form of of of greed rather than sympathy rather than genuine sympathy there's not much self-sacrifice involved in the adoption of the beliefs that you just described and what i don't remember who said it when the upper class catches a cold the lower class gets pneumonia and so these destabilizing beliefs are a lot harder on people at the bottom of the socioeconomic structure than they are for people at the top who as you said tend to get married disproportionately often compared to people who are lower down on the socioeconomic structure yeah there's uh there's sort of this sinister theme that i saw sometimes uh where i would see students for example say um that investment banks are emblematic of capitalist oppression and then i would see those same exact students attending recruitment sessions for goldman sachs um and my interpretation of what they were doing here is basically they were trying to undercut their rivals they were trying to undercut their competition so uh if you and i are students and i can convince you that investment banks are evil don't work there that's one less competitor that i have in my quest to the top uh some people have told me that this is too cynical i used to think that i don't know as time goes on most likely yeah well i was struck too at harvard by the disproportionate movement of harvard undergraduates into financial services so i didn't understand until i went to the united states and worked at that extraordinarily powerful university what a staggering proportion of the students end up in jobs exactly like that and they are considered very broadly i would say among the undergraduates as the highest status jobs they certainly have tremendously high starting salaries and i mean harvard produced comparatively few scientists let's say so yeah i noticed this uh i mean it's i've seen the data on this something like 30 of of undergrads at places like harvard yale and princeton at least 30 it might be closer to 40 percent end up working in either investment banking finance or i think tech is the the third most popular right and they end up being often being consultants and so forth so and fair enough i mean they're high cognitive ability individuals generally and so it's not surprising that they vie and they're competitive for the reasons that you described in other reasons there's powerful socialization at work too so it's not surprising that they gravitate towards those jobs but then i suppose to what degree do you think beliefs of this sort are also motivated by guilt i mean i've often i've often seen you know in the united states in particular more well-to-do people tend to put their children in private schools and i think there's a tremendous amount of guilt about that because they are well they are racially segregated comparatively speaking at least along some dimensions and and that's a really not an egalitarian thing to do even though you may be motivated to provide whatever advantage you can for your children so is it guilt as well as the broadcasting of status in your opinion i i don't know i think that there's a lot of um performative guilt it seems like they talk a lot about guilt but when it comes to actually paying any kind of personal cost i really don't see their their behaviors aligning with their luxury beliefs uh like you said they they're willing to shell out all this money for private schools they're willing to pay money to live in secure neighborhoods there was a story last year sort of at the height of the uh the pandemic in addition to a lot of the protests and the rights that were going on in manhattan a lot of rich new yorkers fled to the hamptons and they had hired private security um and you know that's that's perfectly sensible i mean i understand why they would do that but this is sort of the the actions of of the affluent that they take um the broadcast one set of beliefs but then privately they'll do everything they can to secure the their safety and the future of their their children so maybe it's guilt but i'm not sure how how genuine it is um i mean i i just saw like i mean there's so many examples of these luxury beliefs that i saw uh you know from like i said the the police issue to uh the like open borders to uh decriminalization of drugs i mean all of these uh these issues i think are disproportionately harmful to working class lower class people and there's there's no cost no actual maybe there's guilt but there's no actual uh uh sort of costly uh benefit or costly extraction well it also may be that when you're relatively have been relatively protected but implicitly let's say okay so you live in a gated community you live among wealthy people you live in a neighborhood where crime is essentially non-existent where privation is essentially non-existent all of these things then the cost of order provision seems disproportionately high because you have no idea what it's good for and so you can imagine that you might also be inclined to only look at the negative side of well drug criminalization and police funding and all of that because it doesn't appear in your world that there's a necessity for those things so if you've lived your whole life so comfortably and you've never experienced any kind of hardship or any serious hardship then a lot of this is taken for granted well at least not of the not the kind of hardship i mean it's not like people who are well-off don't still have hardship because their families get sick and there's still all sorts of but they're protected very well from social unrest let's say and so the means necessary to ensure that society remains at peace the enforcement reasons for example and that would include border protection seem exclusionary and unnecessary when they've never been a threat of any sort at all yes i mean even beyond the physical safety issue um one one other interesting example of this phenomenon i think is a lot of people in tech these sort of tech tycoons will sort of promote the benefits of addictive technology while privately they uh go on these sort of dopamine fasts they don't use this technology steve jobs famously would not let his kids use an ipad um a lot of other people in tech reportedly tell their nannies to carefully monitor how much their children use smartphones and so on there are tv personalities who own television networks but they don't have a tv at home and a lot of this i think is sort of like you know don't get high on your own supply uh you know addictive technology is okay for the masses all of you can sort of get sucked into these screens but i'm going to be very careful with how me and my children and my family interact with this technology that i'm getting rich off of so it goes even beyond the sort of physical security i think it's more even more so about um you know you're taking care of yourself while not so much thinking about the harmful effects on on others yeah so it's a matter of wanting to have it both ways and so what what would you consider what is the universe of luxury beliefs like uh well i would say that luxury beliefs are are primarily situated of course uh among highly educated affluent people and essentially i mean there's i suppose you know i'm not keeping this compendium at least not yet of every luxury belief that exists but essentially um if someone of a high social position expresses a belief i think it's important for anyone who holds any kind of influential position in society to think about well what are the consequences of if that belief were to be implemented and especially when it trickles down um it's one of the effects yeah well i mean conservatives are always concerned with unintended consequences right and so they don't presume that hypothetically benevolent social policies are going to produce a positive result sure and and i think there's there are social patterns that that uh give reason for for concern so for example um the this idea of sexual promiscuity i think the the latest manifestation of this is is polyamory um i had this conversation with a friend of mine uh you know a couple years ago he uh told me you know rob when i when i opened up my my tinder app you know this dating app uh and i i put the radius to just a couple of miles around you know he also attends you know a university when i when i put it just to a couple miles around um you know it's pretty much all of my matches all of the other profiles i see are other other women students at the university and when i look at their bios half of them say that they're polyamorous or they're interested in an open relationship or they're not looking for anything too serious and then he told me when he extended the radius to match with women outside of the university uh into the town which is um you know sort of this working-class town uh he said that about half of the women that he he saw on on his app were single moms and so and it's the same age group right like 18 to say 23 years old so in the university they're interested in having fun and then the 18 to 23 year old working class women are having a much different experience of life and my claim is that the luxury beliefs of the former have basically trickled down and wrecked havoc among the latter so starting in the 1960s there's data from robert putnam and charles murray and others which you may have seen showing for example that in 1960 uh working children born to working class families and children born to affluent families 95 of them were uh born and raised by both of their birth parents and if you fast forward from 1960 to 2005 uh the affluent families the children of the affluent uh had dipped slightly so it was 95 in 1960 and by 2005 it had dropped to 85 percent so it was a slight drop but by and large still overwhelmingly uh intact families and for the working class again in 1960 was 95 and by 2005 it had dropped to 30 percent so a completely different world too because there's an interesting progression between different ethnicities and races along that curve so the first correct me if i'm wrong but i believe this to be the case the first population that really affected was the black population then it was the hispanic population then it was the the white population but the curves match they're just um they're just like 10 years apart if you if you look at the same socioeconomic level and so yeah that's a good example of policies that are hypothetically liberal at the high end having a devastating effect farther down and you know these people who it's people who claim that marriage for example is a patriarchal institution well the best rejoinder to that i know of is then well why do the rich get married and the poor don't they choosing to oppress themselves given their options it doesn't make any sense i mean i think it's an absolutely foolish theory to begin with but but that seems to me to be a piece of data that indicates quite clearly that if you have a choice that's what you pick or if you have the widest possible level of choices that's what you choose and so yeah it's a it's a catastrophe although you know that's that the fact that it's a catastrophe is also hidden by a whole other set of luxury beliefs like all families are of equal value which in some sense is true right because if if you're thinking about how each person should be valued and whether or not the child of a single mother should be valued well obviously the answer to that is yes but that doesn't mean that all family configurations are equally functional on average and i think the data is absolutely clear that children with intact to parent families do far better now if you get divorced there are things you can do that moderate the effect of the divorce what's his name he wrote the boy crisis warren farrell has documented farrell has documented a number of ways that people who get divorced can ensure that their children do about as well as they would in an intact family and some of that involves approximately 50 percent contact with each parent i think the parents also need to attend counseling third party counseling so that they can maintain a reasonable relationship and they have to live within something approximating a 20-minute drive from one another something like that but i mean that takes a lot of balancing and dancing to replicate that environment and it seems impossible in our society to have us discussion about the fact that some forms of families are better for children than others and because we think of any imposition of a value analysis of that sort as discriminatory and you know in some sense it is discriminatory because when you say that one thing is better you're also saying at the same time that the opposite of that is worse well then it depends on who you're trying to focus on and well i i go by the data fundamentally and you know children born to young single mothers especially if the young single mothers are troubled and therefore also easy targets for predatory males they don't do well and there's multi-generational effects of that and we're too bloody naive and and i don't know immature i guess to have a serious conversation about such things and we also don't know how to put the genie back in the bottle but there's no tax break for example for stable married couples so there's no economic policy that supports it yeah i i mean i i'm not entirely sure that that would even change much i mean i think this is much more of a cultural issue than an economic issue i mean you know a lot of people say well the reason well it's kind of interesting how how many different excuses are produced for this i mean like you said a lot of people say that it's this patriarchal institution but then why are the rich getting married more than the poor well i don't know and then a lot of people let let's talk about that for a minute i mean sure i suppose that claim is grounded in the historical interpretation that in the past women were treated in some sense as the equivalent of property and now whether or not that's a reasonable interpretation of the past is entirely up for debate although we could say that it was more true 150 years ago than it is now but we could also point out that birth control was a lot less reliable yeah and so the relationships between men and well and women didn't have the freedom they have today for all sorts of reasons hygienic reasons for that matter i mean one of the things that freed women was the easy access to technology that dealt with menstrual cycle and public toilets and all of that i mean we just don't understand how much sanitary technology for example is built into the infrastructure as well as safety because women can walk down the street unaccompanied without any problem comparatively speaking we don't understand how much of that has changed the relationship between the sexes and so there may have been property-like associations with marriage 150 years ago but first of all that doesn't necessarily mean that that was a patriarchal institution i mean it was still the case that the idea was that the men would stick around and provide economic support and care for the children and that's a long-term binding contract and it seems to me the obvious opposite in some sense of libertine freedom so where's the patriarchy in that precisely i mean women weren't equal in some sense but there are reasons for that i mean many people have made the argument that by loosening the norms around marriage it's actually been to the benefit of of men in some sense you know to be able to have lots of promiscuous partners with many different women and perhaps impregnate some of them and not have to stick around there's no obligation to them beyond maybe producing childhood that means that it's advantageous to psychopathic men right darker bad types well exactly because you know the hallmark of psychopathy is short-term advantage taken by a given individual without care for anyone else and it certainly seems to me like dating apps like tinder now i don't i don't want to call every male who's successful on tinder a psychopath i'm not saying that but i would say that it isn't obvious to me at all that if you're a successful polyamorous male on tinder and so that's going to be a very tiny subset of men that are hyper selected by women a tiny subset of men who who receive almost no rejection they're set up to learn to be psychopathic because all their interactions with other people can be devoted to short-term sexual gratification with no emotional intimacy or long-term commitment and that's a hell of a training ground as far as i'm concerned that's that i mean it depends on what you want for a society but as you said even the affluent women who profess a desire for polyamory which is complete bloody rubbish in my estimation and completely underestimates the economic consequences of sex they still dream of the fairy tale princess who meets the prince who you know wakes her up with a kiss and and they're married happily ever after so it's it's such bloody nonsense we allow our culture to be run by the pathetic fantasies of immature adolescent delusion fundamentally as far as i can tell there was a study i saw um i think it was last year on on this very question of of who uses dating apps and sort of their personality traits and so on and they did indeed find and these these were just university students which you know take it for what it's worth but the uh uh the people who are using the dating apps which is about one-third of the the students uh in in the sample pool the they were um sort of more likely to be interested in short-term sexual conquest not really surprised more uh more interested and more likely to use drugs and alcohol more likely to have sort of callous sexual attitudes i can't remember the exact term they used for this for this construct but basically they were more likely to agree with statements like sex is like a game where one person wins and the other person loses so if you're using a dating app you're more likely to say uh yes to that kind of question so in a way status element to that i mean there's the old trope of notches in the bed frame and among adolescent competitive adolescent males there's no reason there's every reason to be competitive about how much you can drink and how many people you can lure into bed i mean even if you don't necessarily believe that personally you know at a deep level and maybe you suffer for it emotionally to some degree even though you might obscure that from yourself it's certainly something to score points with with your peers and there's plenty of that kind of you know that competitive bantering in in adolescent especially adolescent male culture and i mean it's not surprising to some degree because adolescent males have to figure out how to navigate the sexual landscape and they're going to do that in all sorts of awkward and finely unproductive ways it's not an easy thing to bind or to regulate properly but i mean these technologies like tinder tinder is a transformative technology and it's radically underestimated in terms of its potency because it produces hyper-successful predatory males and reduces rejection it eliminates rejection because i mean you can be totally rejected in which case you're a failure on tinder but in normal pre-mating interaction let's say there's a high probability of rejection especially on the part of males and that text well there's actually research on this yes on tinder uh yes uh so there's there's research basically showing this so on tinder uh women are they they like you know swipe right they like the profiles of only four percent of the men that they see on the app whereas for for uh men when they see female profiles they swipe right or like uh more than sixty percent that six zero sixty percent of the profiles right so that's really worth concentrating on because that's a great example of hypergamy right so women mate across and up success hierarchies and men mate across and down right so and women like men who are about four years older cross-culturally they like men who manifest signs of success as well as being handsome and personable in all of that and the reason for that as far as i can tell is that they're looking to equalize the economic disparity that exists because women take a harder hit from sex and pregnancy than men so they're looking to equalize that and no wonder they're looking for someone who's competent this is for long-term media who's competent and generous right you want both of those so competence would be intelligence general cognitive ability and the markers that go along with that they want conscientiousness or openness as well as other desirable personality traits and they want generosity honesty all of those but so they're looking for someone who can provide well it's not because they're greedy precisely it's because well they're going to put themselves in a more vulnerable position if they have a child and we know this because even affluent women who have a child by themselves or who get divorced tend to drop down the socioeconomic hierarchy a fair bit which is of course why alimony payments and all of that are necessary so this hypergamy means women are much more selective in their mating than men are and that's true cross-culturally and it's not surprising because they pay a bigger price for sex it's more dangerous for women because they can get pregnant and it might be more dangerous emotionally as well and i believe that would be a reflection of their higher levels of agreeableness and higher levels of negative emotionality so women do put themselves at risk more and that might be why there's such a intense debate about what constitutes can't consent on campuses despite these beliefs in polyamory and all of these things but so anyways on tinder as you said women select four percent of the men yes so that means i would imagine that four percent is very high up on what you're calling into the success hierarchy i have a friend a good looking guy uh he was very active on tinder for a while and he accumulated more than twenty thousand matches on the app twenty thousand twenty thousand and he was so successful that tinder uh pinpointed him early on and uh gave him all kinds of free perks and bonuses and lifted his radius restrictions gave him the the tinder gold app or whatever version of it basically trying to continue to use the app yeah they wanted to entice him this is so amazing they never want you to leave these are unbelievably pernicious and vicious broad-scale social experiments that are far more potent than anything like government policy you know i mean he's in genghis khan territory with 20 000. i don't know i mean it's really twenty thousand yeah well my suspicions are he tried and i i know he'll get a kick out of that that records for for like me athletes for example and movie stars there's some of the men have reportedly slept with thousands of women yes wilt chamberlain and um there's others who who are in the same category but they're people they're men who have women throwing themselves at them all the time lining up for them and and i've read biographies of people who had that sort of thing happen as well but that's not the typical male experience i know the typical male experience is all rejection exactly right they might get a couple matches a week right right so while so you see what's happening is that tinder is one of the forces that's transforming monogamy into polygamy and the problem with polygamy is that it it follows a pareto distribution like the distribution of wealth is that some tiny minority of men get all the sexual opportunity and all the rest get virtually none and that is a recipe for for social instability i mean that that sort of deregulation of romantic relationships you know whereas in the past it was expected for you to have one partner and over time settle down whereas now it's a total free-for-all i mean there are aspects to this that a lot of people don't think about i mean i talk to young people so i have younger friends who who i talk to who are sort of very active on on the apps and then sort of the dating scene and they'll tell me things like it's it's even easier to cheat so in the past if you wanted to be unfaithful to your partner it was risky because you know essentially like you you had the same social circle you had the same friends everyone knew everyone else but now with the apps you can match with someone who is completely outside of your social reality outside of your partner's social reality you can have a very discreet rendezvous no one will ever know about this um ghosting has become more common i don't know if you about ghosting but it's basically where you're in a relationship with someone um and after you have sex you know once or however many times then you just vanish you never see that person again uh delete you know delete them from your phone block them on social media you never have to see them again and there's no social cost to this that's a real psychopathic conquest strategy yes right yeah because the psychopaths they tend to form relationships that are very um predatory and then disappear because that way their reputations stay intact as long as they can continue to disappear but i'm interested in what you had said before about whether this is actually sort of cultivating psychopathy in young people and young men where you know in the in the past you know typically a psychopath would do that on their own but now with the apps and the technology removing all of the friction from you know breaking up with someone or having to communicate with someone that you no longer want to see them i think a lot of people who who ghost others they're not even thinking in those terms they're not thinking i want to maliciously hurt this person or i don't care about this person it's just it's like it's easy you know you press a few buttons on your smartphone and you can move on to the next conquest um and i think a lot of people wouldn't act that way otherwise well the question would be what happens to you after you do that four or five times you know let's say you're not particularly psychopathic to begin with it's like you you you learn what you practice and i would say look if if you're using people continually as a means to an end and i think sex is probably the most effective way of doing that then you're establishing a pattern of interaction between you and other people at perhaps the deepest possible level and so if you do that repeatedly first of all you're not you're certainly not engaging in anything that might be regarded as a as a meaningful or deep relationship quite the contrary you regard that as excess baggage that's an impediment to your next conquest so to speak so how would that not i mean it'd be now you said there was research on tinder has there been research on the relationship between the dark triad and these hyper successful men well i've seen research on dark triad and tinder use and you know people who are high on dark triad do tend to be more successful accumulate more partners uh specifically whether you know this is related to gender and whether men are more successful or or more likely to to hurt others using these apps i haven't seen anything on that i have interestingly seen um i think this was from pew where they broke down the data by education level and they asked people questions like have you ever been harassed on this dating app have you ever met someone on a dating app who inflicted physical harm on you basically the wide variety of negative experiences through using dating apps and they found that people who are not college graduates were far more likely the women were far more likely to report negative experiences on the dating apps compared to college educated women and to me this is also indicative of this you know this sort of social class divide um another manifestation of the luxury belief of sexual promiscuity where you know you introduce these dating apps you have no idea what's going to happen or how this is going to warp society and how people are going to interact in romantic relationships and it's disproportionately harming uh lower educated lower income women who are like you're saying they're probably more likely to meet psychopaths they're probably perhaps less adept in some ways at screening for certain kinds of guys the other thing is because well they're a lot more they're a lot easier to prey upon i mean their straights are a lot more desperate and they've knocked themselves out of the single girl dating market and lowered their market value so to speak i hate to speak of it in terms like that but it's clearly the case because to initiate a relationship with a woman who has a child already is to initiate a relationship that has a lot higher up front cost the complexity of negotiating the relationship with the child the additional responsibility that has to be taken on instantly and none of that's the least bit trivial so so so that means and we know that in general if you do a triangular imagine triangular representation of a social hierarchy on any valued dimension the people who are at the lowest level are those who are most susceptible to any sort of uh destructive tendency that comes whistling through they don't have as much social support they're a lot closer to abject poverty they don't have the the broad social network or the opportunities um so everything affects them disproportionately including epidemic illnesses and it's the case throughout the kingdom of life that low status confers vulnerability that's why people go for higher status at least in part yeah so right that the tinder i mean i don't know how widespread tinder use is i don't know that much about tinder but when i first found out about it i thought this is a technology that while they certainly named it properly because tinder starts fires and it's a fire starter and not just sexually and something like 40 last i saw something like 40 percent of people under 30 are using the apps i would imagine it's probably higher now especially in the wake of covet so the data that i saw when we collected i think in 2019 but after covid and the pandemic and the lockdowns um there's no other way to meet people so i'd imagine a lot more people download those apps and we'll see if they wean themselves off or if they're hooked i mean these tech companies use very manipulative strategies i talked to an executive i won't say which dating app this was but he told me that some dating apps some dating apps will um basically what they call i think they're called seating where they'll put fake profiles of very attractive usually women right because men are are actually more likely to use dating apps and they're sort of more likely to pay for the premium profiles compared to women who don't have to because they're going to get matches anyway um so anyway the the dating app companies they'll see them with fake attractive women profiles and intentionally match with men who have recently downloaded a new profile who basically newly created one and the idea here is that if they if they download the app and they immediately match with an attractive woman uh and then they usually have a couple of conversational exchanges like hey how's it going good how are you and then that's it the uh the robot no longer responds to the user but the reason why this is done is basically to give them a little hit right it gives them it's like it's a major hit yeah yeah and so basically they called it chasing the dragon which is basically a term from from from drug usage right from heroin you give them a little hit and then they're going to be chasing that high for the rest of their lives so you know i think that there's so many complexities to this it yeah it is and and yeah they are uh creating a lot of i think a lot of heartbreak and a lot of frustration over that wow if if you're interacting with someone fake i mean that could be tailored to your desire be people i'd have all you'd have to do is look at the pictures that someone was looking at and produce a composite that's a that's an amalgam of those attractive women let's say and mean that the possibility for manipulation is almost infinite and you won't say which dating app that's too bad because they deserve the exposure but you know i i understand your reticence that's really unbelievably appalling and malevolent well i will say that if if one app is doing it then that means more than likely they all are so it almost doesn't even matter uh they're probably all doing some version of that because that's how they get users right yeah well it's not that clever an idea you know it's it's a pretty obvious idea in a very crooked and horrible sort of way so it's not like it would take a genius to think it up yeah yeah and so so this idea of oh and i wanted to go back so so this idea of um differently educated women different social classes having different experiences on the dating apps well they're also having entirely different experiences in in the real world too in terms of their dating and romantic relationships after the erosion of marriage after the um sort of deteriorating norms around dating and romance if you know i i talked to some people from my hometown for example and i think about you know the kinds of guys who stayed behind who didn't go off to college who didn't join the military who just sort of languished and hung around there these are not you know just to put it bluntly these are not uh it's not prince charming and so when women are dating these men and there's no social norms no no forces constraining them many of them act very poorly um you know a lot of alcoholism a lot of drug use uh you know verbal and sometimes physical abuse emotional abuse um a lot of these guys who sort of are not not so educated don't have a lot of money not a lot of life prospects when they get involved with a woman they don't necessarily treat her very well whereas you know in the past i think that there were stronger norms around how you're supposed to treat the opposite sex and how you're supposed to interact with them date them what's expected of you and so on i think with the um sort of dissolution of expectations has come a lot more trouble for lower income young women yeah hypothetically the ones that the progressives are trying to do something for are removing this constraints of patriarchal relationships for example the question always is what flows in when you remove the dikes right i mean that's another problem i suppose in some sense that's analogous to the the protection of of social classes many of these institutions that are so casually criticized we don't know what forces shaped them so you know i've been pilloried in the press repeatedly for pointing out that um normative monogamy controls male aggression now that it's amazing to me that i've been slashed to ribbons for making that case because i thought that was like anthropology 101. so you know there's two things that every society needs to control and one is female fecundity because of its high cost and the other is male aggression it's like well i thought everyone knew that if they were even moderately educated and well how do you control that regulate it for everyone's interest particularly for the interest of children the answer seems to be the imposition of monogamous norms now people object well are people truly monogamous and the answer is not if you set up the environment to differentially award hyper-successful polyamorous males which is exactly what gender does and there are societies where that's the case where one man has a thousand wives so to speak and 999 men have none but those aren't societies that are stable and those young men who have nothing to do find things to do and they aren't necessarily the sorts of things that you want them to be doing because what the hell do they have to lose fundamentally and it's not a good idea to generate a society full of young men who have very little to lose so i and it is an appalling thing that the privileged classes are more likely to disparage marriage let's say and these ideas trickle down over time they sort of permeate throughout society because elites affluent educated people wheel disproportionate influence uh whether it's through media pop culture fashion do you know here's something cool yeah so do you know that names drift down the social hierarchy huh well so well so uh influential upper class people will produce a name for their child and then that name is gets popularized all the way down the social hierarchy until it becomes passe and so and becomes more and more common as it drifts down so this influence that you're describing you can measure it everywhere they're the fashion leaders they're on the cutting edge and everyone imitates and so yes and i think that so so you know of course like actual fashion clothing of course the sort of trendsetters and then it trickles down to everyone else i i didn't i didn't know this about names which is really interesting but i think it it is also for sort of moral beliefs as well one idea that i've sort of been playing with maybe this is you know a little bit dangerous for me to say but i've been thinking about this you know who was championing um sort of color blindness integration this idea that you know we should treat everyone on their merits and so on i mean whatever 50 or 60 years ago this was a very progressive idea and it was mostly championed by highly educated people more affluent people they also tended to leave the abolitionist movement in the u.s and so on but more recently uh things have changed so my idea here is that in the past the elites had this idea of color blindness over time that idea trickled throughout society such as such that now today if you talk to a typical middle class or working class western person they do tend to basically believe in color blindness um their racial attitudes are basically like who cares um and it's not it's not an important thing in their lives and so now that the elites have spread this belief how do they once again distinguish themselves from the hoi polloi from those middle and working class people they once again have to make race an important feature of our social reality um so now i have to comment about your theories there for a sec if you don't mind when francis galton 150 years ago started studying he thought about it as excellence something like that i mean some of the iq research came out of that he started to measure people on a whole variety of different dimensions but his conception of of excellence of superiority let's say wasn't so much cognitive capacity the more differentiated sorts of things that we might measure today and associate with some degree of value conscientiousness creativity intelligence galton who is an english aristocrat which is the reason i'm bringing this up was at the forefront of that movement and he believed like most english aristocrats of his time that england was a superior culture and that english aristocrats were the hallmark of english superiority right and so but that superiority was fundamentally i would say moral that the superiority that was being searched for wasn't economic exactly that the economic superiority was an indicator of the moral superiority and so and that would be associated yes yes so that would be associated with something like moral purity and and and associated with disgust now george orwell talked about because he was from relatively higher social status i think he was upper middle class but he said he had a visceral distaste of the working class and he had to overcome that and he did he worked in restaurants and he worked in all sorts of jobs he went to war i mean orwell strove to overcome that visceral disgust and disgust is the opposite of disgust is purity and that's associated with a kind of moral superiority and so one of the things that your idea one of the ideas that your concept brings up is the notion that the central axis of social hierarchy is something like assumed moral superiority and everything else is a marker of that including economic wealth you know i have this economic wealth because i deserve it that's an indicator that i'm superior morally and that would go along with the idea of i think that would go along with the idea of luxury belief you need to distinguish yourself from the contaminated lower classes constantly and there were reasons which is i think with the past you think that is what's going on i do i think that that that drives in large part the motivation to uh to broadcast these beliefs is to basically tell the world i'm not one of the you know the the hoi polloi one of the little people unwashed masses the unwashed mashes and and so they're they're telling us you know to society at large and and in particular they're telling their peers you know don't mistake me for one of those people there and so this is sort of what i'm getting at with this idea that you know now that now that the masses believe that race should no longer be treated as a big deal in society if you're a member of the elite if you say that you're you may be at risk of being mistaken for one of the masses and so now you have to sort of reintroduce the importance of race and ethnicity and so on and say that we you know you don't want to be colorblind you want to sort of highlight our differences and and so on but this here is a luxury belief because you know you may be able to sort of promote this sort of racial divisions among highly educated highly affluent people and in all likelihood it's probably not going to hurt you very much but if that belief is reintroduced into society where we should once again pay very close attention to what skin color we are or what race we are that could create a lot of problems for ordinary people well i think it is the world problems already because well because look i think one of the factors and i'm certainly not alone in this although maybe i can differentiate it a bit better i think a big part of the reason that trump was so attractive i saw this hat in florida i've told this story before it said trump 2021 trump 2020 yeah because you twice and i thought yeah that's exactly right it's because there's this perception on the part of the working class perhaps particularly among working-class males and maybe even more particularly among working-class white males that the progressive types that hypothetically stand for the oppressed have nothing but contempt for them and the attraction to trump was yeah well here have some of this i feel that um every once in a while i'll go back to my to my hometown red bluff california yeah and i'll talk to people and i can feel this you know like i'll tell them i grew up here i'm you know i'm sort of this is my hometown and whenever it comes up so what do you end up doing uh i'm honest and i say you know i ended up going to yale or cambridge or whatever but i i'm i'm always very quick to follow it up with but but i i enlisted in the military this is sort of my protection of like i was in the military before i did all this other stuff because i can sense like when i say go to yale there's this sort of moment of awkward silence and i can tell they're sort of updating their view of me and probably not in a good direction either uh and so then when i follow it up with but i enlisted and then sort of things calm back down i had this experience a couple years ago in a casino playing cards uh in corning which is an even more poor and small town in northern california uh and my sister had you know let it slip to the dealer that i was a student at yale and the dealer looked at me for a second he's like what are you even doing in here you know in the sense that like number one why would you be gambling in here if you go to a school like that and then number two like it sort of sounded like i'm not really sure i want you to be in here and i told him like you know hey i serve in the military i just want to play some cards let's you know let's just have a good time and and he sort of let his guard down at that point but i think there is this um feeling among more blue-collar working-class people that you know the elites over there are they look down on us they view us in a certain way they treat us like we're stupid or backwards or evil or racist or whatever and really it's i mean it's just not true um that kind of disdain also just sort of amplifies the divisions and that is something that i'm also trying to highlight to elites as well i think that there's been a lot of emphasis in psychology on the role of fear in promoting belief but i think that disdain contempt and disgust have been under appreciated as separating motivational factors yes and it's one thing if someone's afraid of you that's not exactly offensive i mean you might regard it as unfortunate but there's also a kind of implicit respect a little bit of dominance exactly exactly but if they're disgusted by you or disdainful of you that means that you're in the contemptible and rotting category essentially and that's a lot bigger dagger aimed at your heart than than fear i mean would you rather be shied away from or sneered at right right yeah right yeah yeah i think this is this is part of what's uh what's driving these these sort of class divisions um that that the sort of working class and lower class they feel this they feel that there's this disdain for them on the part of the upper class and this is part of what i'm trying to highlight too with this idea is to to basically say that like there are these divisions social class exists in america and this is something that we need to be thinking about whenever we broadcast these silly beliefs that no one believes in and uh what blows my mind is that you know the data are freely available you can see what the majority of americans believe about the police or voter id laws or drugs or what have you uh and the affluent just don't care very much they're still going to broadcast their very silly beliefs um i guess well it could even be to take your hypothesis perhaps a step further but perhaps you've already thought this up it's a real marker of my status that i can afford insane beliefs look look how crazy i can be and still survive well it's yes is it right exactly it's completely significant exactly it's exactly that it's that it's like a peacock's tail i can laden myself down with this palpable absurdity it has no material effect whatsoever on my continued existence so the peacock is dragging around this very heavy colorful set of tail feathers and can still survive and the sort of highly educated affluent members of the side can drag around these very expensive costly luxury beliefs that clearly have no correspondence to reality and they can still survive well and they have some correspondence to reality for them because they can afford to experiment with the beliefs without immediately perishing or without you know fatally compromising their lives in most cases not all but in most cases whereas if you're farther down the chain and have less protection you toy around with polyamory and you end up as a single mother when you're 18. that's the end of that and so then you have the rest of your life to think about well perhaps that wasn't very wise but you know it's a little late then yeah well you can believe whatever you want if you are a graduate of a top university and you are economically comfortable you can have whatever set of beliefs you want and in all likelihood you'll be just fine but you know i i want to underline that because you are the you know you are the most sort of sealed from the consequences of your beliefs you actually and at the same time you wield the most influence in society it's very important to understand if you have a belief and you're trying to implement it into policy or to uh sort of erode or create new norms or whatever just be very careful with what it is that you're doing um you know you can treat it as a game and gain status but in the longer term this is going to hurt um you know it's going to hurt a lot of people it's going to hurt the very people that supposedly we care the most about so what have been the consequences for you of being known for this kind of theory you're a student at cambridge you're in psychology um you were an undergraduate at yale i believe you were an undergraduate yale were you an undergraduate when you wrote your essay on luxury beliefs no that was um during my first year here at cambridge uh in 2019 um you know it's been it's been an interesting experience i was a little bit nervous when i first wrote it simply because of the way things are going in universities i had a very um sort of turbulent introduction to university life to campus life when i first entered undergrad so this was in the fall of 2015. it's kind of funny so in 2015 so i had just gotten out of the military in august i started class in september and a couple weeks later um i saw that jonathan height was giving a talk on campus and i had just read his book the righteous mind about moral psychology which is an interest of mine and i thought that that's what his talk was going to be about but the entire talk was basically about you know our university is meant to equip students with the ability to seek truth or is it meant to keep them safe and protect them and shelter them and so on i went to this talk totally confused because that is not what i expected him to talk about that's not what i knew height for i knew him for his research his psychology research um right so i didn't really i hurdled the coddling of the american mind as well that hadn't come out until next year the year after okay um so i only knew heid as the author of the righteous mind and i i didn't have the context for what that talk was about because i was basically an outsider to this kind of world of you know free speech debates and you know what is the purpose of a campus and all of this stuff i was basically just like a dude who felt lucky to get into this great university um and then about what three weeks after that uh erica christakis who was a faculty member at yale wrote this infamous email about uh basically defending freedom of expression uh the yale university administration basically emailed the students on halloween yes yes so they basically told students that the administration told students you know be careful what you wear and all this stuff and erica costas wrote a follow-up email saying you know if you have a problem with what people are wearing you should talk to them you know it's important to uphold freedom of expression and so on and there was this entire campus eruption my first experience you know having seen any kind of uh campus uh protests like this before students coming together there was this uh very sort of dark undercurrent around campus people were very afraid to to speak out against what was happening um and so that basically uh was my introduction to what uh college is like uh and that has basically stayed with me ever since it was very formative experience for me to see what had happened there the other thing is i mean i i met with erica christofis later i was interested in taking a class with her she taught a class at yale called the concept of the problem child uh which is basically you know this idea of of um you know sort of orphaned children children who get into trouble and mischief and so on in this sort of history and psychology of all that and you know naturally to me given my background is a very interesting idea i was wait listed for that class and i was very disappointed to learn that she stepped down from teaching she said that yale is not a good climate for for teaching anymore because yeah well it's no pain right exactly it doesn't take very many mobbing experiences to do you in yeah well i mean i i had met with her and i met with nicholas her husband later who was also targeted by the mob and to see like like the way that the students treated them called them every name in the book demanded that they be fired and so on and then to like you know discover that they were very good people uh in in their personal lives um they had taken in foster kids of their own and and helped them and so on and so like to see this this clash between like what the students were saying about them and who they actually were uh i mean it uh you know sort of formed this this cynical perspective that i still have about what kind of people go to these universities and what their intentions are um but in any case to talk to you about too in terms of your luxury beliefs so you know we were talking we've talked about two things in some sense we've talked about luxury beliefs and we've talked about sexual politics i suppose right and so i there's a way of bringing those together so do you think there's have you look at gender differences in luxury beliefs so for example i the universities especially the liberal arts are now dominated by women and that's not a trivial transformation it's a fundamental transformation and it i mean heights coddling idea is easily associated with you know an excessive amount of dependence let's say and so if the maternal role is fundamentally the sheltering of infants which i think is a reasonable way of looking at it then well then what happens when that becomes political i mean because we don't know anything about women's large-scale political behavior because this is all new and so when you have an institution that's essentially oriented to young people who could be regarded as children but wouldn't have to be but could be regarded as children is the maternal expression that their safety and security and emotional well-being is paramount and then let's take this a step further just to be annoying and horrible these are all women who are at their peak age of fecundity and you might say well what's happening with all those maternal instincts they're just gone all of a sudden i mean many 19 year old girls i've talked to many of them believe that their career is going to be the most important thing in their life very few 30 year old women believe that even if they have high-powered careers because they tend to discover that high-powered careers come at a substantial cost like 60 70 hour work weeks etc and so that life might be best spent in the bosom of family and friends and with children etc that's where much of the true value is and most women figure that out by the time they're in their 30s which is why high-powered law firms for example have a hell of a time retaining their extremely competent and highly valuable women no one likes to talk about this they wouldn't talk about it in the law firms that i consulted for many many of them all the women would talk about it privately but never publicly the discussion was always about how the law firms weren't doing enough to support women with their children and all the women knew that wasn't true that wasn't what was going on and the law firms were bending over backwards to try to accommodate them because they wanted to keep their high-performing women for obvious economic reasons and so we have all these young women in who dominate institutions now like well especially the humanities and liberal arts and universities it's like well is that the reason that security and safety and the sanctity of the home this is a community this is a home it's like no that's not what a university is actually but but that's what it could be so what do you think of that and these are discussions that no one will have obviously yeah yeah i'm sorry to put you on the spot you can tell me to go to hell if you want because you're probably already in enough trouble but no i mean i think it's an interesting idea uh i'm just not entirely sure if that's what's happening here i mean maybe i guess it maybe it would depend on the level of analysis we're talking about here i mean i think at a more proximate level so maybe at that approximate level it's about sort of gaining social status in your local environment but perhaps there's sort of this ultimate evolutionary level like why is it that these are the steps now that one must take to obtain social status yeah yes maybe underlying that are the evolutionary reasons well that's exactly the question here well you also might wonder what messages do women at the peak of their fertility want to broadcast to the community well to the men and to the women for that matter and it might be i'm a caring person well well why why would you broadcast that that specifically because we're looking at all sorts of potential values you could broadcast right the luxury values that are selected appear to be ones that are putatively associated with compassion i mean it tilts hard in that direction and height has shown that because liberal types and and and the luxury values that you're describing seem to be associated with progressive liberalism tremendous amount of that is driven by compassion and lack of harm rather than more conservative uh values let's say well i did see this study fairly recently i think mitch brown is a grad student he was an author on this basically showing that broadcasting uh moral values uh does sort of increase attractiveness to others and i can't exactly remember what the specifics were but they were sort of involved around social justice about caring for the oppressed and the downtrodden and so on and i think the effect was was most pronounced for men broadcasting these views uh and women found this to be particularly attractive um but i i could imagine like it would go the other way too although a lot of the sort of evolutionary psych papers i've seen on sort of mating psychology it doesn't i mean men seem especially young men seem most interested in in appearance like far far more than any other sort of uh personality or behavioral uh dimension among the women but it's possible i mean what you're saying that maybe it's not so much about um you know trying to trying to impress the man but maybe just the community as a whole or or their fellow peers it also might not be a matter of impressing it might be a matter of a particular form of orientation taking a new target i mean for for most of human history women who were in between 19 and 25 had infants right okay so now they don't okay so that that's not like triv that's not a trivial transformation that's a fundamental earth-shaking traumatic dramatic transformation and so we would expect that to have no political impact whatsoever yeah i i mean it's it does seem to me that it it's unlikely that it would have zero effect um i guess my question would be why now then um why would it i mean because women have been going to university now for 50 plus years um i think they've been the majority dominate well they've dominated i mean i think they've tipped past 50 since i think the early 90s so why is it now that you know this i mean perhaps you know that's that's one ingredient is sort of the uh the dominance of of women on universities in addition to maybe social media and a few other sort of more recent uh inventions that have that have spurred this on yeah well there was definitely a spike in politically correct beliefs of the sort that you've described in the 90s oh interesting right right i mean but what seemed to happen then i think that was when i was teaching in boston it it bubbled up but then the economy boomed so madly that people seem to be preoccupied by other things for a long period of time so and then it went kind of back underground and i thought well maybe we're done with that nonsense to some degree but it certainly popped back up more recently and also 30 years isn't very long i mean we're looking at massive demographic transformations in the structure of our society we don't understand i mean we already talked about the effect of technology of computer technology on on mating but we certainly haven't talked about the effect of of relatively um accessible and effective birth control technology and all of that we touched on that but i mean these are huge changes that we don't know anything about i mean even the the sort of birth control issue i mean it's really interesting to see just like how the how the the the discussion around dating has changed so much i mean i remember you know reading things from the sort of early 2010s like 2012 2013 about how hookup culture was this great thing that was liberating and i think more recently people are now starting to question that um about whether that's i mean educated people questioning whether this is good for society and yeah i i mean i've read this very interesting article a long form article in brookings i can't remember the authors specifically about reproduction technology and how essentially this has given rise to in some ways to to more broken homes and their reasoning was that once um once reproduction became a biological choice for the mother then fatherhood beca in a social choice for the man simply because in the past if a woman got pregnant there were all of these norms in place uh for the man to basically marry the woman you know these sort of shotgun marriages the community shamed the men into marrying the women if you skipped out on the woman then you were seen as a deadbeat and so on there was a lot of taboo and shame around that but we don't even know what effect there is socially for example with the presumption that well if you get pregnant it's your own fault because the reliable reproductive prevention technology is at hand you know and many women who get pregnant have not taken the pill properly for example and so i'm not saying that they should be blamed for that i'm not saying that what i am saying is that it opens the door for attribution of responsibility to the women and we don't know what that effect has what effect there is of that on social institutions that is actually the argument if i recall from this brookings article which was that you know not necessarily societal of it wasn't like society suddenly said well now if you get pregnant your fault because of the pill it was more on a local level um couples started to believe this men started to believe it um the neighborhood the community right started to accept that you know if a man has sex with a woman and she gets pregnant the man can say to himself well that's not my problem that's kind of your fault because you know you have this magical pill that can whatever so i don't have to get involved anymore and i think the the local community and the social environment sort of tacitly if not if not um sort of openly but at least tacitly started to accept this kind of logic this kind of reasoning and this basically allowed men to skip out on their responsibility well it's almost inevitable to accept it if you accept the proposition that women now have control over the reproductive function and we don't want to dm like i thought the 20th century would be remembered for three things hydrogen bomb computer chip the pill three bombs right the tree because i mean there hasn't been a time in human history where females had control over the reproductive function it's a it's it's the equivalent of almost the equivalent of a new species in terms of dramatic biological transformation someone's going to someone's going to edit that part out and turn good luck to them it's not like i don't feel bad for the women who are put in this position i certainly do they have a tremendous amount to contend with but you know the the the other thing that's quite interesting is all of the debates about consent that have emerged on campus and exactly what constitutes consent i mean because the the 60s hypothesis in the wake of the pill was well sex doesn't really matter so you know any consent will do because it's now become a trivial endeavor i mean that was the theory right it's just sex well and aids put the blocks to that theory very very rapidly and and you know no one likes to talk about this because there's many things we don't like to talk about but the aids virus mutated to take advantage of promiscuity in a major way and so promiscuity gener promiscuity distributed aids and and contributed to the manner in which it manifested itself and so sex turned out to be as deep a dangerous force in multiple dimensions apart from mere reproductive um you know danger the other sexually transmitted disease were reasonably controlled with antibiotics so i find it interesting that people are so just reluctant to talk about the importance of sex as an incentive i mean there's a lot of discussion in society for example about economic incentives about jobs professions economic and equality and so on but there's not much talk about the the role that sex plays i mean you know from the sort of evolutionary perspective sex has been around since before we were human sex is still going to be around long after humans have gone extinct like sex is universal it's it's what drives every single species but we i'm just surprised at how often we overlook it as as an incentive for behavior and how fast things are changing in the realm of sex i just saw this uh statistic uh from the washington post showing that from 2008 to 2018 the number of sex the amount of sexlessness among men under the age of 30 has doubled so in 2008 15 of men under age 30 reported not having sex in the past year and by 2018 it had doubled to about 30 percent and for women it had it it increased slightly it was something like 10 in 2008 to like 15 in 2018 so there was an increase a slight increase but for men it has doubled to the point where about one in three young men are reporting that they haven't had sex in the past year which is a very new thing um despite the despite the media gaps right despite the apps despite um even more uh support supposedly for um sexual freedom and for polyamory and novel relationship arrangements and the further sort of devaluing of of the importance of sex um more people are having less of it men and women but especially young men yeah well my understanding is that's damn near epidemic in japan so what's happening a tremendous number of young men in japan are falling into that category and in fact this society has become increasingly sexless even among young people i mean that's reflected to some degree in the declining birth rate but now it's been a long time since i look looked at the statistics but that's my understanding and so if it happened there it's not surprising that it you know might happen here and that might be a consequence too of this emergent polygamy that we were describing is that all the spoils are going to a very few few men of course there's also the the also the effect of pornography which is a substitute and you know that's also i don't know much about the literature on pornography use and the relationship between it and and actual sexual activity um i have read some ominous things about the increase in failure to achieve erections among young men that at least in principle is a consequence of pornography use but um i don't know how reliable that is data that that married men are more likely to experience divorce if they watch any amount of pornography and it's sort of uh you know the more the more pornography they use the more likely they are to to get divorced um i think that yeah this this is another i mean this is a very recent invention too sort of streaming digital pornography um i've heard that researchers are having difficulty even studying this simply because they can't really find a control group they you know there's no young men who don't watch porn at least at least have never not been exposed to it and so this is a very difficult thing for them to even even study well it's another indication of the emergence of polygamy because it's virtual polygamy we can have an unlimited number of attractive sexual partners now it's all virtual right but but that as that is a transformative technology i mean there's more pictures of of nude women in one day than anybody in history would have ever seen in their entire life yeah and i and i see this uh you know the the consequences of this how young people interact now where there's even these contests to see how long they can go without watching it almost like it's a game um you know these sort of communities on reddit or on social media where they'll sort of try to um go for a month or go for 90 days or whatever without watching it um at first i think it starts this game no fap and they're trying to i think you know on the one hand it's sort of a game for them it's a contest but on the other hand i think there is this underlying you know beneath the sort of joking around about it i think there is this view that like this probably isn't good for us and let's see if we can get off of it let's see if we can stop um and i i don't i don't see like how this isn't changing people i mean i was i feel very fortunate because i came of age just before uh you know sort of uh fast internet and all of this stuff that started taking off like right before youtube all of this stuff and i can imagine that if i was a i don't know if i was 13 and all of this stuff had existed today like i'm sure it would be warping my brain in one way or another i mean between between the internet between social media and then of course the digital porn and the endless images um i i don't know how like very young boys are are dealing with this this new um this new technology well these are all it's very difficult for society to structure itself around monogamous norms that took a lot of work and when that's taken apart it's not at all obvious how to put it back together so and it does appear that we're seeing the consequences of that the consent issue on campus i think is extraordinarily interesting because it isn't what you would would have expected it isn't what anybody predicted right we thought with the relaxation of sexual norms that there would be this possibility that sex could become casual and there is an insistence it's so strange to watch and this is associated with your luxury belief item our idea on the one hand we have this absolute insistence by the progressive types essentially especially that any and all form of sexual expression is not only acceptable but to be celebrated no matter what the form is and on the other hand we have this insistence that sex is so dangerous that the culture is best conceptualized as a rape culture and that every step of sexual interaction between the young man and the young woman needs to be documented like formally and perhaps even in writing because that has been proposed at some universities and so there's this perversity about the twin insistence right it's all forms of sexual expression are laudable and freeing yet it's so dangerous that every bit of it has to be documented and the fundamental orienting structure is something like rape i wonder if this has something to do with just sort of sociosexual orientation of you know whoever whoever happens to be expanding the beliefs so if you tend to be a person who's had your heart broken or had a lot of negative interactions maybe you had the expectation of monogamy and then you sort of have one too many negative experiences then you may start to be very preoccupied with uh with the issue of concern i think that's exactly what happens i i think that so you know we talked about people being shielded from the consequences of their luxury beliefs and they're shielded to some degree right but my suspicions are is that the relationship between sex and emotional intimacy is a lot tighter than people want to presuppose when they insist that all forms of sexual expression are laudable it's just not the case emotionally and those people the ones who are who are supporting or promoting the complete sexual freedom they may just be sort of less sensitive to having negative sexual experiences because like you're saying all of it is fun all of it is free there's uh all of it is laudable and so for them if they have you know experience that someone else might do as negative for them it's just not a big deal and so this is why they're they're promoting more of a more open sexual they could be high in openness say so exploratory and low in agreeableness so you know they're not as they're not as so associated they're not as likely to form immediate empathy i mean this itself may be connected to your earlier question about sort of the the the growth in the number of female students on campus i mean there's been interesting research from uh so john berger i think i'm getting his name right wrote a book called datonomics where he goes uh he he discusses at length the role that sex ratios play uh for social interactions for romantic interactions and basically he found that on campuses where there's uh more women than there are men uh there's much more hookup culture women expect less of the men they report that like basically feeling despondent about their chances of getting a boyfriend uh men on the other hand seem to have a much more uh uh enjoyable time uh they report having more sexual partners feeling uh more upbeat feeling more hopeful having more hookups and so on whereas on university campuses like caltech where there tend to be more men than women it's actually the reverse where women are more likely to have a boyfriend to be more satisfied with their romantic situation and so on and basically the the um i mean and this has been documented in across cultures in different cities different societies and so on and basically the idea is that when there's a large number of women and a scarcity of men women have to compete for that small pool of men and they're more willing to basically modify their behavior in ways that men find appealing which you know oftentimes is sort of short-term casual sex uh you know hookups um sort of very casual situations whereas when the river versus the case and there's a scarcity of women in a large number of men then men tend to modify their behaviors to be more oriented toward long-term relationships towards commitment and emotional connection and so on and so as universities uh become more dominated by by women and the sort of sexual uh so their satisfaction with the sexual landscape declines then maybe this is related to some of what we're seeing of course maybe with consent and some of these other social justice issues that we're seeing that a lot of it may be sort of driven by um sort of dissatisfaction with the romantic landscape and and the way that men are behaving a sense of being exploited but then i would be interested to know if in those universities where there's a relatively smaller proportion of men and the men report being more satisfied i wonder if that's the median or the average right because i would say that's the average you think so i because i was thinking that in those situations it would still be a relatively small minority of men who are getting all the sexual attention now it might be better to be the mean well wouldn't that mean that the mean satisfaction would be high whereas the median might yes that is sorry yes you're exactly right that's exactly right okay so there'd be there'd be a fair bit of variation around the mean as well yeah right yeah i i would agree with that i mean there's there's a lot of like sort of interesting findings i think this was a study from mit which showed that like something like half of the graduates of mit male male graduates of mit graduate as virgins and um i think that this this pattern has also been found in other top universities as well and and so this probably goes to this idea that a small number of the men at at universities are accumulating uh more well that would go along with the four percent rating four percent description of tinder and so what happens is that where there's a relatively small number of men that competition between women becomes incredibly intense but for a very small fraction of the men and because those men have endless short-term options there's no satisfaction on the female side with regard to anything past you know a short-term casual relationship i saw this really uh kind of amusing study it was in pnas of um this idea of sexy selfies and which countries uh in which countries are women most likely to post sort of sexually provocative image of themselves on the internet and on social media and so the researchers you know they put forth various hypotheses one of them was maybe it's maybe it's patriarchy maybe in cultures where uh women are treated very poorly they feel like they have to present themselves in a certain way very sexually provocative poses and so on but that's not what the researchers found what they found was that in in countries where um uh income inequality tends to be high uh that's when women are most likely to post sexy selfies and their um their conclusion here was that when women are competing for a shrinking number of highly successful men um they're more likely to pose in provocative ways on the internet in in the hopes of capturing their attention which is maybe what we're seeing on you know on instagram and on on various other social media apps where um i think there is this this sort of like i don't know tilting towards more more and more sort of pornographic adjacent content in the hope of capturing uh more attention and so i think that a lot of a lot of what we're seeing may be it may be due to sort of this this overlooked topic of of the sexual dynamics in society so what's been the consequence for you of having pursued this line of thought we we started to touch on that but we didn't touch on it that much um it hasn't been too bad um you know some people have questioned me on this i've had some somewhat nasty comments uh from other graduate students here at cambridge um social media stuff but it really hasn't been that bad um yeah i've actually met uh quite a number of people who agree with me and who are glad that someone is speaking out about this issue um i actually met um yeah a lot of friends by by talking about this openly i think that this is if this is just one of those things where people are are silent because they're afraid of the reputational cause but when someone else starts speaking out they feel more comfortable sort of coming out of their shell more and more and discussing it i on the other hand i you know i'm sort of reluctant to continue uh along a career in academia simply because of everything that i've seen so i mentioned before what i saw at yale with the christakisses um part of the reason why i came to cambridge you know there are many reasons but one of the reasons why i came here was because i thought it would be different i thought that the um sort of uh social mobbing and the sort of student protests and i thought that was kind maybe i hoped that it was an american thing and i thought that well maybe if i go to england things will be calm maybe things aren't as political over there and within a matter of months two things happened one was you were supposed to come here to be a research fellow and then you were just invited because of the student protests and then two there was a young postdoc named noah carl who was supposed to you know he's a postdoc here and he was fired uh because of student protests as well and so i thought okay well i come over here hoping to get away from that and it sort of followed me over here so maybe maybe this is a sign that uh i'm supposed to be doing something else other than than uh than remaining uh within within uh the the academy so once i'm finished with my phd i may have yeah i heard the grapevine that uh you know hypothetically i was disinvited from cambridge because a photograph was taken with me in new zealand of someone wearing a t-shirt that was critical of islam but i learned through the grapevine that the decision to disinvite me had been taken before that and that was used as an excuse and not at all reliable source yeah so stunning stunning so that all of that it was very costly and painful for me to undergo that and you know it's so peculiar because i was going to cambridge hypothetically to talk about biblical stories with you know people at the divinity center there and the biblical story the lectures that i've done have been very popular and in reasonably influential and you know well received by atheists and religious people alike so it was a serious academic endeavor and it was very difficult to bear the oprobrium let's say that was associated with that um i understand that that you know things have perhaps changed for the better with regards to such decisions more recently but um it was shocking to me to to find out that it was based on a lie and yeah my reputation you know it's it's it's it's uh it's quite something so so where are you in your phd program now uh so finishing up my third year i should have one more year and then i will be returning to the states don't know exactly what i'll be doing but uh yeah like i said probably probably not in a university at that point yeah things have changed uh yeah so much over the last few years in terms of the you know political correctness and how reluctant people are to speak out and i think um yeah i started to experience that at the university of toronto i started to get nervous about talking about sex differences and personality you know when i was just i taught a personality course and i published papers on sex differences in personality so it was actually an area of specialization of mine and for years i would lay out the data which was somewhat ethical i don't mean laying it out i mean the data itself it's like while there might be differences between men and women and there might not be but the empirical evidence suggests that if you add all the personality differences between men and women together you can reliably discriminate between who's a man and who's a woman with women with about 75 percent accuracy which is pretty accurate but trait by trait men and women are more alike than different so yeah fair enough um and there are two dimensions where the differences particularly manifest themselves sensitivity to negative emotion and agreeableness and and so that's that and then those differences are bigger in egalitarian countries than in non-egalitarian countries which is counter-intuitive and surprising and shocking and interesting also holds true for dark triad characteristics by the way so psychopathy narcissism and machiavellianism the gender gap is larger in more egalitarian cultures you may not be surprised to know that but i found that pretty interesting i mean it sort of falls in line with all the other research you're describing yeah it's very interesting that more egalitarian policies magnify some differences they ameliorate in scandinavia the preferred age gap between women and men is somewhat smaller than in non-egalitarian countries so there are some there are some phenomena that do modify towards equality with egalitarian social policies but lots don't anyways i started to get nervous about lecturing about those sorts of things i i thought geez i'm nervous about this isn't that strange and part of it was because i did have some female students who came up to me after lectures and who were offended you know they were snippy and and sarcastic and that very rarely happened to me and so it was quite marked you know i'd have the odd hyper feminist type stomp out of my first class even a few years ago just as a you know demonstration of sorts but that that really meant nothing but and then now my graduate students started telling me that they were very nervous about discussing anything to do with sex differences and the women particularly and and so that's that started to become worrisome so and what do you see happening in in cambridge what's it been like there for you i mean well well really it's been it's been a very strict lockdown over the last uh 15 plus months or so but before that it wasn't you know it wasn't bad i was i was still fairly open with my views uh you know i wrote i defended uh you in an op-ed in the new york times i've written you know the luxury beliefs post i've i've not been i've not necessarily withheld my views um fortunately within my department i haven't had much of an issue i think the psych department here is very solid um but you know more broadly the culture the campus culture is um you know about the same as it is anywhere else uh sort of um people are people are afraid i had a conversation with a professor here last year i had lunch with him and he it was interesting when he told me he said that um it's not necessarily that the faculty agree with a lot of the sort of extreme political uh movements that are going on but they just want to be left alone um they just want to do their work they just want to do the research yeah and if a bunch of social mobs come after them and say you know you better sign this petition or you better say this or you better post that they just want to do it and and get get these people out of their lives get it out of their hair and so they're not they're not ideologues many of them probably most of them are not but they just want to sort of get back to their lives and they'll just do whatever they have to they're selected for that i mean to become an academic a research academic you have to be obsessive about some specialization and you have to wall yourself off from everything else and pursue that because otherwise you're not publishing your three papers a year or whatever it requires to maintain your academic status it takes a tremendous amount of specialization and so we set up universities to put up walls around people who were willing to specialize so they could do exactly that but it's laid them open to invasion by people who have a political agenda and that's often failed researchers who become administrators for example and who are interested in power which is pretty much what they talk about all the time as well and so i mean i've seen faculty are in some sense powerless by choice in some ways against the kinds of demands that you're describing but it's also a consequence of the selection methods that produce them to begin with and the purpose of the university i had a friend here uh who was very active online on social media so he was a graduate you know medical school graduate who came here is against cambridge scholar to do research and i think biochemistry or something and he posted something online about um his views on on being a pro-life person and you know his phd supervisor and people in his department were getting all kinds of calls you know saying that they had to let him go that they should fire him uh they need to kick him out of cambridge and so on and you know they basically they didn't kick him out but they told him like you have to take down your social media account because we just can't have people constantly calling and emailing and harassing and so on the activists just make it so costly to have an opinion that people just sort of you know they sort of silence themselves you know why why would you want to get involved they just sort of acquiesce to it not because they agree but just because they don't want to have to deal with the burden it's very it's i mean it's a sort of clever strategy i think on on the part of the activists um that's something that i'm interested in too is just like who who tends to to be attracted to those movements and how effective they are i mean i've seen academic papers retracted because um the journal editor uh you know they posted something like you know we had to withdraw this paper because the journal editor received credible threats of physical violence like you can literally threaten to kill the journal editor and then they'll just take take out whatever paper you want him to take out i mean it's uh like it's very interesting to see that this is this is uh the world we're living in yeah well it's no it's no joke to be targeted like that and it's not surprising it shuts people down it's really hard i mean it's understandable yeah i don't begrudge anyone for for for doing it um a lot of people don't yeah they just don't have the stomach to deal with with that level of of notoriety or controversy um the way that you and others have yeah well it isn't obvious that i've dealt with it either so i'm still here but that's about all i'd say about it it certainly hasn't been it's been terrible i'm sorry i took your personality test um shortly after it it came out when you still had the discount going and i scored in the ninth percentile in agreeableness um so i think that might have something to do with why i'm okay with with uh you know sort of taking on some of this heat yeah yeah well the thing about disagreeable people is that they will say what they think yeah yeah yeah yeah so was that compassion or politeness it was it was it was very low on politeness and a little higher on compassion but still like pretty low on both uh and it averaged out to the ninth percentile so so at least i'm i'm you know a little more compassionate than i am polite well one in 10 isn't you know isn't that low really all things considered so but but that would explain that would explain your willingness to take confrontational positions or adversarial positions let's say well obviously you also believe that they're you know that you're relating something that is true so we don't know how much moral courage it takes and what personality attributes are shaping the ability to voice unpopular truths but i suspect disagreeableness has something to do with it it's strange in my case because i'm very agreeable as it turns out but which is probably why i pay a high price for doing it even though i do do it so interesting yeah i was uh yeah i mean i i'd gotten in a lot of trouble in school as a kid i um yeah i just always had this sort of um disposition to uh to rebel and to question rules and and so on and and fortunately over time i was able to get it under control to some extent i also scored pretty high in conscientiousness which may be part of why i was able to land where i where i've landed but i you know it was a long securities path to get here right yeah well conscientiousness is a colder virtue but it tends to pay off in the long run so what do you think you're going to do when you finish your degree you know you said you're you're not that interested in pursuing an academic path yeah i well my book is supposed to come out later next year so near the end of next year and i'll probably be spending a lot of time promoting that and yeah i i don't know i do enjoy research writing teaching all of those things so in whatever capacity i can continue to do that whether it's working at a think tank or or even just going full independent and and sort of starting my own channel or something like that um and yeah i'll just be continuing writing and and sharing my views in one way or another although i'm not exactly sure what form that'll take well it was really good talking with you today i thought the discussion was moved along at a great clip and uh i appreciated your viewpoints and your candor all of that and i learned a fair bit as a consequence of talking to you and so much appreciated likewise thank you dr peterson you bet you bet good to meet you maybe we'll meet up in cambridge if i ever come there let's do it [Music] you

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

Views: 410,634

Rating: 4.9314847 out of 5

Keywords: dating, dating apps, 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, tinder, rob henderson, rob henderson jordan peterson, polygamy, monogamous, monogamy, relationships, tinder relationships, Tinder dating

Id: -6ZyQKiwMQw

Length: 108min 56sec (6536 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 20 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/letsgocrazy]

This episode was recorded on May 7th 2021.

Dr. Jordan Peterson and Rob Henderson exchange ideas about the impact of luxury beliefs on the different socioeconomic classes, polyamory, and the idea of the patriarchal institution. Dr. Jordan shares his experience with Henderson as they discuss psychopathy and its relationship with dating apps. Check out this episode to listen to what they have to say about pornography, defunding the police, the role of sex, the consequences of reproductive technology, and much more.

Rob Henderson, a veteran of the US Air Force, is a Ph.D. student in evolutionary and social psychology at the University of Cambridge. He also got his bachelor’s degree in psychology from Yale. His writing has appeared in worldwide newspapers like the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Quillette. Currently, he is writing a memoir to be published in late 2022.

[u/AOmnist]

Really good episode. More about the concept of "luxury beliefs".

[u/mrpersona]

this episode is great!

at 36 minutes in theres a really funny example of the matthew principle in action.

i dont want to spoil it because its so funny

DAMN!