#643 - Michael Kasumovic - Are Violent Video Games Actually That Harmful?

27:42And I wonder whether what we're seeing, you know, the last 10 years or so, we have seen the prevalence of some misogynistic echo chambers online of guys who spend an awful lot of time on the internet, very, very carefully nitpicking and breaking down what's happening within the dating market, why women perhaps don't care about them. And I would guess if you were to look at some of the black pill and in -cell forums that a lot of those guys would be very heavy violent video game users. This is, you know, you're talking to one of my favorite studies that I've ever written. You know, why are individuals behaving in kind of sexist aggressive ways to women online?

28:24This is a study I did a while back with a colleague, Jeff Kuznikov. If you give me a second to tell that story, I'd love to tell it. Yeah, Jeff did an incredible PhD where he ended up playing about 500 games of Halo back in the day when it was really, really popular. And I told the story and everyone was like, oh man, I wish I could do that for a PhD. And it was incredible what he did. With those 500 games, a third of them he played as himself with a male voice, that he would just press buttons to respond to individuals in game. And that would say different phrases to colleagues, to teammates, right?

29:11Because you can't speak to your opponents. So it's important to say that these are all teammates. He played another third of those games where he didn't talk at all and another third of those games where he used a female voice. When he pressed those buttons, a female voice would, you know, comment on anything that's going on in the game. So you have these two treatments in a control. And what you end up doing is he ended up playing the game really, really well because he was actually quite good at Halo at that time. Or he played it kind of half -hazardly where he didn't try his hard. And he found that he got a lot more negative comments to himself from his teammates when he used a female voice significantly more.

29:53And this goes back to that whole sexist kind of perception. What's going on there? Why are men being aggressive for his woman? I read this paper and I said, Jack, these are incredible data. Have you ever looked at what, who is saying those negative comments? Because if you look at your positive comments, men and women are getting, male and female voice treatments are getting the same number of positive problems as well. So it's just that men are more aggressive towards women. Before you go into the next bit where you got involved. Yeah. How much did his performance mediate, whether he was playing well or badly, you said that he would either be lactobacillus successful, how did that mediate people's responses to the male and female voice?

30:33A little bit, but not nearly as much as the treatments. So the factors that affected the kinds of comments he received were largely explained by the treatment much more than his own performance. The treatment, the male voice or the female voice. So that explained... But was there any difference for how we play? Very little. Very little. Almost nothing. Right, because I would have thought, you know, let's say, just spitballing, I would have maybe assumed that a very competent male player would have caused some eye and jealousy, but we also know that men's introsexual bonding is very heavily based around co -olitional warfare.

31:17So if you've got some guy that's an absolute killer on your team, maybe some people will be jealous, but I would guess that a lot of the guys would defer to the prestige. Definitely, and it goes back to that whole conversation we had about a hierarchy. We want to know where we sit, because when we don't know where we sit in a hierarchy, it's actually very, very stressful. Because individuals lower in the hierarchy, know there's going to be competition for that alpha position or the top few positions, and you have to tip to all around and it's really stressful. Even for the individuals in the top three, for example, who are fighting for that hierarchy, we know that it's also very stressful because you have to keep competing.

31:56We know that because we've seen that research done in a lot of primates and it comes out really, really nicely. So when hierarchies are disrupted, it's actually bad for everybody, including Alpha and all the males. So would it be bad for, let's say, a chimp 15 to 20 to be fighting for status, chimp 1 to 3, similarly, even goes back up the chain as well? Absolutely, because if you imagine those top 3 males in that kind of a situation, they want to know who's first and they're fighting the rest of them. Let's say that top three, let's say that one to 15's locked in and then bottom end, let's say the peg is completely secure, but there is some turbulence toward the bottom.

32:42Does that still cause cascades up and down? No, no, not at all. At that point, it's not really the bottom, the bottom rungs of the individuals that are determining what's going up on top. And that content, those contests happening between the bottom individuals aren't as aggressive and aren't as important. right. However, I'm going to guess that if one and three are huge and competing that 50 to 20 are still downstream. Ah, so let me give you because you don't want to get in the way of an aggressive male. Understood. Let me give you this. So you'll be familiar and we'll get back to the video again in a second I'm you'll be familiar with that famous graph that some Manusphere creators used to explain hypogamy.

33:29And it basically explains how the top guy can date, you could imagine you've got from top to bottom number one to 10, going down on both sides, both men and women, the top guy can date number one, all the way down to number 10. The guy from number five, can date from number five down to number 10, and then from 10 can go across. Tony Volk at Bullying Researcher that I explained to you about from the other week. What he's being works is it isn't bullying if you end up competing with somebody who is higher in status than you, that's just straight up aggression, right? Bullying has to be done to somebody that's in lower status.

34:05So if you could imagine the same sort of diagram that I'm talking about here with the one to ten, you basically have a bullying range and the higher your status, the more people you can bully, the lower your status, the fewer people you can bully. And what you're saying here is that the higher up the status of the person or the group who are competing for status, the larger the downstream implications are. So let's say that, you know, number 10 and 11 and 12 are competing. I would guess that maybe 15 and 20 do get a little bit of cascade down from that. Yeah. One, two, and three, don't. Yes, you'll definitely see that kind of an effect.

34:46You'll see that cascading kind of happen. But it's also when you're getting back to that bullying content comment that you made those Those few individuals on the top they don't need to bully This is individuals really low down because they're on top There's no benefit to be gained for them to do that It's the individuals in the middle of the hierarchy who are likely bullying individuals lower than them because they have Some status to be gained above that If you're number one, you're not going to bully number 15. You're getting nothing. But if you're number 10, you want to bully 15. Because if you don't, there's a potential for that individual to rise up.

35:28It might be 14, and then 14 might be 13, and get the five and half. That's not good. OK, so video games, you find out that this guy has played 400 games. He's split it up to three buckets, one's female, one's male, one's no voice at all. And you've said, wow, this is fantastic. like, did you look at who was giving you these comments? What, what, how do you get involved in this study? So Jeff said, I'd love to, but you know, I'm just moving universities. I got a new faculty position and I just don't have the time. I said, well, can we work on this together? Because I think this is what you've done is absolutely fascinating.

36:01And, you know, I think we could look into what's going on and see who's behaving in that kind of way. So he agreed and it was super kind to share his data. We transcribed everything, what everybody said, and because Halo at the end of every match, you actually have a status screen at the end, right? You know where you sit, how well you performed, how many kills you got, how many deaths you got, and your performance relative to others, right? We all love that screen because we love seeing our killed death ratio, right? So we take a snap of that and we can see how well everybody did. Now what we can start looking at is who said what, to who, and how well they did in the game.

36:47So we have a measure of status. And now we can see how an individual status affected what they said to Jeff when he played as a male character or a female character. And remember, there were no, these were all men that were playing. There were no women playing at that time. And what we find is that men who were playing against Jeff and outperformed Jeff as a male were kind to him. There are lots of positive comments. Men who didn't perform as well as Jeff, so Jeff outperformed them as a male, fewer positive comments but still very few negative comments. And that kind of makes sense. That gets back down to what we just talked about, Chris, where men who are lower in the order don't want to be aggressive to someone who is better than them.

37:44Because there's a hierarchy there. There's a chance that that could turn out really badly for you. And even if it's a video game and digitally and virtually online, you're not going to interact with this individual in the real world. But we still behave in that way because that's how our systems have been selected for to work. This is just a new environment that's happening. And of course, when you're top, there's no need for you to be aggressive and mean to people below. So you're more supportive because you want to help those people out. So that's what was happening when Jeff played as a male voice.

38:17It's completely different when you look at how Jeff played when it was a female. So when Jeff played when he was a female, what happened is that men that outperformed him were very positive and supportive, which is really great to hear. Again, they're not losing any status by being supportive to somebody who is not as good as them. But it's the men who performed worse than Jeff when he used a female voice that were very, very aggressive. And there's a beautiful correlation between an individual's level and their performance in the game. The number of kills they got in the game that are killed at that ratio and how aggressive they were.

39:00Individuals that were of lower status and performed more poorly were more aggressive to Jeff as a woman than they were to when Jeff was a male. Why? It goes back to exactly what we were just talking about in this hierarchy. If you are a level 15 male in this game and there's a woman coming up and she's outperforming you. Not only is she better than you, meaning that she's a higher status than you are, she's also knocking you down the total pool. And if we think about what that means for a man is, now I'm lower status than I used to be, I've lost to a woman and I have fewer potential mating choices in that environment.

39:54It's exactly what you just said. And the best way to make sure that women don't compete in that kind of an environment is to make them not want to compete. And how do you make them not want to compete? you'll be very aggressive towards them and you use sexist slurs because you know that hurts the most. I've been thinking for a long time about some of the challenges of women's over -achievement in education and employment and the fact that we've basically flattened the playing field for maybe even not, maybe even skewed it slightly toward women in that it's mostly knowledge work, it's a brain -based, not a brown -based economy, conscientiousness, you know, the ability to just sit in a seat and not have ADHD and all the rest of it.

40:47It is an advantage. I wonder whether you're seeing an increase in male to female adversarial communication because women are now playing in the state's hierarchy that previously would have been siloed off just for men and you have two things going on which you hinted at before. First one is in the overall hierarchy of status there are this many hundred people, thousand people in the game in the company whatever. You've been spotted down one generalized status anxiety right is the first thing but the second part is hypochemy which is if you can get that specific female herself and drag her down a little bit.

41:31Perhaps there's a chance that she might date you, because if there is too big of a disparity in make value or status, there's no way that that woman's going to look at you. And if you can manage to get your status to stand on the shoulders of the insults that you've thrown at her, perhaps she'll see you as a potentially viable mate. What do you think about that? What do you think about how the flattened playing field for employment and education could maybe be tied in with what you've learned from video games? You know, absolutely. If you think about how the world has changed in the last, you know, 100 years, for example, we've seen a huge shift in what determined status.

42:09We've seen a huge shift in the traits that are associated with individuals are forming well in a certain environment. That's especially when you're talking about, like you said, working companies, things that don't require physical strength and traits. If we look historically speaking, if we look past tens of thousands of years, we know largely that men and women did have certain roles. But it's not even as important of what men did and what women did. generally there was a female hierarchy and there was a male hierarchy and individuals competed within that hierarchy. Correct. It was intersectional, not intersectional competition.

42:53That's exactly it, right? It's all happening within and you're competing against the same sex and it's kind of straightforward and that's largely because whatever society you're in the society is the side of this is what men do, this is what women do, sometimes there's overlap but very little. Whatever that decision is. What you've just said is this flattening is this idea that now men and women are unable to compete against one another because they're trying to attain the same things. They're trying to attain the same jobs. They're trying to attain the same status, same house, same car, same everything.

43:31So now all of us have men and women are competing for the same things. And that's problematic from an evolutionary perspective because that's not the kind of environment that we generally grew up in. And that's not how our system has been selected for in an evolutionary context to be able to deal with this kind of stuff. So when men see women competing in this field, it's bizarre, maybe a little bit different. And like we said, it's the best way to make sure is by nagging them. You make them feel bad about themselves and you feel better and then it allows you to gain status and allows you to potentially a more mating opportunities open up for you.

44:12But I think what needs to kind of happen now is a cultural shift. We have to start understanding that that world where those higher keys were separate from men and women are gone. They no longer exist. They're never coming back. Nor should they because in this world that we live in now, those separate higher keys are irrelevance. They don't matter anymore. We're working together for the same things. So what has to happen is a shift in how men think. It's not, why is it bad to lose to a woman? It doesn't matter. It's nothing to do with strength anymore. It's nothing to do with physical endurance or differences in our physical bodies or hormonal changes or physiology.

44:55Those aren't limiting factors anymore. It doesn't matter how strong you are. That doesn't determine how good you are at warzone. It's your reaction point. It's how quickly you can process information. And men and women do that equally. There's no difference in that. So all of a sudden, we have a level playing field in that kind of a world for men and women. And women are starting to thrive in it. If we look at some of my research, women who play more violent video games have a better self -reception of themselves. So they are responding in a similar way to men in response to the zirfa status. So we actually have less fewer differences between us than we think and we're really ready to admit.

45:40So getting back, I think the idea is that we have to change that cultural shift of what it's like to lose to a woman. It's not bad to lose to a woman. You're losing to someone who is better than you. And if you want to be better, then you just gotta try harder. How much of that do you think is culture? I don't disagree, I don't disagree that it would be a good idea for status hierarchies to be able to be like gender non -specific, that it doesn't matter whether you lose to a guy or a girl. But I think it would be naive to presume that this is all just culture and that men can think the way out of this.

46:14We can't reprogram men's status hierarchies. You know, this is very, very, this is back of the brain shit, right? Mm -hmm. So I think I don't think that that would be the case. But yeah, how much of this do you think is just straight up culture? And how much of this do you think is coming from elsewhere? I don't think you can separate culture from what's going on. You know, culture is a strong part of what it is to be human. You can't just take that out and say, this is how humans behave. This is the things are, let's ignore culture of what's going on with it. Culture is part of us and it determines who we are.

46:51It also evolves over time. So culture is changing. We are changing. There is selection, evolution happening now as we speak. So these are all these things are intertwined and you say we can't think our way out of this. It's true, we can't think our way out of this. But I think we also have to shift the way we think There are rules that we've made as a side of it. We said, these things are unacceptable. And we've all decided this kind of way, so we shouldn't behave in those kind of unacceptable ways. I think, as a side, we have to start realizing that it's not losing to a woman. It's losing to a person.

47:32And status is no longer determined by simply competing intrasexially. We now are, we've opened the playing field And we've shifted how our culture works. That's shifted how selection functions. That shifted how we behave. And yes, there are those back of the brain stem kind of behaviors. But we're also human. We are also able to think quite logically. And we have to start using that ability to be able to understand what's going on. I think stepping into mediate the really sort of negative pathological manifestations of that behavior is good. but I also, you know, I sympathize with sympathize. I understand why guys who are struggling within status and of course, highly competitive, you study yourself, you know, even 50 years ago, even 50 years ago, you didn't have a lot of them.

48:26How long have women been in the workplace properly? 50 years, maybe something like that. You know, they've only been in university, they've only been in university like properly for about 30 years, that's when they got to about Exactly. 25. So, you know, it's very, very novel for the guys that are out there. Absolutely. Going back to the language and the analysis that you did of that, the successful males speaking to the females within the video game, were they more or less complementary than when they were speaking to the man? So we didn't see any differences there and it was, it would be hard to tease apart.

49:06It's hard to tease that apart simply because we didn't get enough individuals repeat playing. So we can't see how they behave in both of those environments. There wasn't enough sample size. There's too much individual variation between players to be able to say, oh, this is the equivalent player across whatever, okay, I understand. So, you know, getting to that way of thinking that you're talking about, I'm really, really interested in what happens to those high -stay -lis -mails when they're playing really well and they lose. How do they behave and they lose to a woman? How do they behave then?

49:38Well, there's one of two ways they could behave, right? They could be very confident in their own status and when they lose to a woman, they could say, brilliant, well done. I know how good I am. You did really, really well. No problem. So they could still behave in that way because they are high -status -mails or they could be these high status males that have lost a woman at that stage and now see themselves sliding down that hierarchy and they could become more aggressive. The only reason they didn't is because they happened to out compete that woman. We haven't teased those two things apart and I don't know how those high status males would behave in a situation where they lost to a woman.

50:19I think that's an interesting kind of question that needs to be answered. I'm also interested to just find out whether they are more benevolent to a same sex or an alter sex because I've seen some really interesting research around the usefulness and protective nature of benevolent sexism. The benevolent sexism is actually psychologically very healthy. It's a predictor of men being more effective protective providers. They have better view that women are happier working for these sorts of men. They're happy being in a relationship with these sorts of men, that an excessive denial of sex differences seems to be at the detriment of both sexes.

50:58Absolutely. The benevolent sexism thing, I'd be interested there. What about any other domains that you're so excited by this video game studio is fascinating to see lower status males, derogating females that outcompete them within a single status hierarchy with relatively flat competences or opportunities at least. You must have kept your eyes peeled for other domains that you saw a similar effect in. Have you observed anything? Have you found anything there? You see really similar kinds of results in the field of computer science, in the field of surgeons, so in medical science, and also in business.

51:40It's that same kind of response and that same kind of behavior. And that study cited quite a lot in those fields. It's in studies where they've actually looked at how individuals in high status in business or medicine behave towards women who are lower status. And you see very, very similar kinds of behavior. So it does seem to kind of translate in other worlds as well. You also did something to do with playing violent video games and subjective fighting ability and perceptions of men's toughness and facial recognition and stuff. What was all of that? Yeah, so another way of thinking about violent video games is they allow us to practice.

52:23They allow us to practice certain skills that could be beneficial in some kind of hierarchical encounter. If we think about a violent video games, there's really low cost to playing. If you lose, it's no big deal. Not like compared to a physical fight. If you lose in a physical fight, you're likely going to be damaged and hurt. And that's a very, very bad thing for you. But in video games, it's okay if you lose, it's not the end of the world. So it's almost like it's a way of training to see how well you can form and see if you can up your status. At the same time, it could be a way for us to gain signals of what makes a good competitor so we can make better decisions when we go into that competition.

53:11Like if I could, for example, get a better understanding of when I'm interacting with someone, how likely they are to fight that, how like, when are they going to be most aggressive? And I can see those little signals in that potential opponent. That's my advantage, right? Because then I know how hard to push somebody, I know whether I could potentially take someone, and those are all good things. So we wanted to see if any of those kinds of behaviors gained from playing video games could potentially spill over to the real world and how we assess our opponents or individuals. And what we ended up...

53:51And the way we did that, maybe I should explain a little bit more there, is we let them play a game, a violent game or a non -violent game, and then we put them through a small number of tests where we look at how well can you discriminate emotions, how well can you potentially discriminate whether an opponent is better or worse than you. And what we ended up finding was that individuals who played that violent video game were less adapt at noticing someone's shift towards anger, which we found really, really interesting. And this is kind of opposite to what you'd think. It seems that playing that violent video game pumped individuals up to such an extent that they're worse off at being able to tell when someone is angry at them.

54:48And you would think that's really, really bad because that could potentially lead to more aggression, which can potentially be heated to getting hurt and getting hurt is never a good thing. Why? Why would it be the case that someone who has spent all of that time working out whether they're about to be attacked by this enemy comes retarded when it's time to actually work out whether or not someone's going to attack them? I don't know, it's crazy isn't it? Because you wouldn't expect that. But that's what we see happening. And And the only thing that we can think of, because this starts diving into the realm of physiology.

55:26What's going on in there in your system? What's changed? Are there testosterone spikes? Are we seeing some kind of a shift in our bodies functioning that's changing our ability to distinguish how we perceive our opponents? Something's happening there, but it's not something simple. It does seem to be something in the physiological realm, which is not something that we've been able to explore yet. Could it be a look at me, Bro Science, in your study? Let's do it. Could it be something to do with a desensitizing to aggression? It may well be. If we think of ourselves in society, I was a good friend of mine.

56:06Rob Brooks has this great analogy. If you're sitting in a crowd of people, you're very unlikely to throw a water bottle at somebody who's saying terrible things on stage in some kind of a protest, for example. because you're not that kind of person, you don't want to hurt anybody. But if someone else throws a water bottle first, does that change? You're likely to do that? How about if there's a second or a third or a tenth? Now all of a sudden, well other people are doing it. You know, maybe I should kind of join in. So it does seem to kind of, there's a shift in what you perceive as acceptable behavior.

56:43And it does seem that our previous kinds of interactions are in some way coloring what we're doing in the future. Whether that is a physiological thing or whether that is a self -perception thing, it's tough to say. I think definitely self -perception has something to do with it. I don't know the relative importance to something underlying physiological. And that's kind of what we're missing for that puzzle. What about the subjective fighting ability and the perceptions of toughness as well? How was that mediated? Yeah, individuals who played those violent video games did see themselves as tougher.

57:25And we did another study to kind of push that and see what exactly is going on there. And in that same kind of a way that I talked earlier about how men responded to losing or winning that coffee date. We did a very similar study where we were told individuals, you're going to compete physically in a bunch of physical challenges against another opponent, and that opponent is either stronger or tougher, sorry, or weaker than you. And we found that individuals who were more likely to compete against that tougher individual were more likely to want to play a violent video game. So it does seem that these opportunities to become aggressive even in a virtual world.

58:10And it's the practice of aggression and dominance in a virtual world is spilling over to real world behaviors and our desire to kind of how we see our opponents. And that real world is then filtering back into the virtual world and shifting how we want what we want to do in that virtual and the games that we want to play in that. So there is definitely that feedback in that virtual and real world, just like we talked about earlier, that delineation is becoming smaller and smaller. Why do you think it is that our own self perception, our own sense of self, is so heavily impacted by the local social environment, even if that environment is virtual?

58:56Why would that be adaptive. If you think about the environments that we used to live in, you know, they're very different than we live in now. There were small local villages, communities, we knew everybody. We would want to be in a hierarchy there. There was a level of status just like we see in all animals. So we lived in small communities. So this is a system that's been that's evolved through millennia of that type of an environment. And now all the sudden all bets are off. You're no longer competing against 50 or 100 people that lived in your small village. You're not competing against hundreds of thousands of people online.

59:36You're competing in a global market and that seems overwhelming at times. And it doesn't help that our evolved systems aren't selected to compete in that kind of a world. That's why I think Our interactions in the social environment online, through things like Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, and all those things have such a huge effect on us, because we normally had those kinds of interactions on a very small local scale where we knew everybody. But all of a sudden, this is a global scale where we don't know everyone. And that person's getting more likes than I am, and I want more likes, that's not fair.

1:00:17And it's a very weird kind of competition where these companies have drawn out all these evolved kinds of behaviors that we have and put them in a completely different context and take them back to Java. Going back to the combat thing that you were talking about earlier on, do Beards provide an advantage during combat? That is always a fascinating thing because in the literature, there's been so many arguments for why Beards exist. And you and I are both Bearded Men, And I was wondering this beautiful handlebar guy at the moment the people that are just listening I look like a Miami cop from the 70s And if you look at mine, I'm starting to go gray everywhere but this handlebar.

1:01:04I am. We look like we fuck both of us look like fuck. I'll take it. I'll take it. But in the literature, yeah, in the literature is a funny thing. Men are trying to explain why beards exist and they start talking about, you know, they're more attractive, they hide your jawline to make you look like a morpheus to stosteron male. And the most interesting one that a colleague of mine found, Barnaby Dixon, was this idea yet that beards are really good because if you got hit in the face, beards could potentially act as a, you know, to kind of support your face a little bit and maybe you fist slides off and you don't get that hit as hard in the way they're insulating your face from that full on hit that you would get.

1:01:59And if you think about that, if you've ever found someone's beard like this isn't going to insulate against anything, let's be honest, this tiny little beard, if I get hit in face. I'm going down the best that you can hope for is mild irritation like a rash on the nickels of the person that's hit you. Yeah. But this is this is huge in a literature and there's lots of people talking about it. And Barnett is like this is enough. There's got to be a way to answer this question. So we looked at a bunch of UFC fighters and you if you know this UFC fighters change their facial hair all the time. Sometimes they're bearded, sometimes they're not, sometimes have a mustache, sometimes they have a goatee, have all kinds of beard shapes.

1:02:39So you can actually score their beard shapes from one to five based on nothing to a mustache, to a goatee, to a full beard, to a heavy beard, you know, score all that, then you can look at their wins and losses against individuals that do or don't have beards. Not only that, you can look at their likelihood of getting knocked out. And you would think if beards are good at insulating a punch, individuals with bigger beards would be knocked out less. And they're not. It just doesn't happen. So I know. So everyone out there, if you're growing it, you're beard to make sure you're insulated from a good hit.

1:03:24This mustache was my prophylactic against someone trying to assault me in the street, actually, that was first off, because I wanted to look like I fuck in the second thing was that I wanted to knock it knock it knocked out. So I've definitely seen some evidence that suggests men who have beards are perceived as more masculine, perceived as more dominance, perceived that they would be more likely to win in a fight. The same thing goes for lower vocal pitch, the same thing goes for greater brow ridge, for people that are smaller, etc., etc., more muscle mass shoulder to waist ratio. So even though beards may not provide any physical protection in a fight or in a contest which has already been pre -agreed that it's going to happen, as a deterrent, I imagine that it must be effective.

1:04:22And that's a very different thing again, right? And just like you said at the beginning, what you said, it changes our self -perception. That seems to be a recurring thing we keep coming back to. And my research keeps coming back to as well. If you put in a bunch of men in a room, they are really quickly able to figure out a general hierarchy of where everybody sits. It's fascinated kind of stuff. They jump into a room, they don't know anybody, and they generally get a feel for where they sit in that hierarchy of individuals in that room. Amazing. Somehow our self -perception and our experience of perceiving others who are of similar traits gives us the ability to understand where we sit.

1:05:08And like I said, that's a great thing because that reduces our likelihood for that physical confrontation. physical confrontations are bad. They're horrible. Like I said earlier, you're going to get injured. If you get seriously injured, there's the possibility that you won't be able to attract a mate. So all across all animals, what we end up seeing is these really kind of, these contests that follow a very strict set of rules. Let's look at each other, let's determine what's going on. you display, I display, we take turns, we figure out who's better, if we're still not sure after displaying, then we escalate that display and maybe start physically touching.

1:05:56If we still can't figure it out, only then do we actually get into a physical confrontation. So basically the The justification here is most of the weaponry that humans and every other animal has is used as a deterrent. The goal of the weaponry is not actually for fighting. It is you don't want to do this because the risks for both sides, even if you do have the bigger weaponry, are still pretty high. Absolutely. But you have to develop that weaponry because if you don't, you're at a huge disadvantage. Precisely. And it has to be a costly signal, right? It can't be something that's easily faked or else.

1:06:39That's exactly it. You're just going to test it. You used the word in one of your studies contest competition. I learned about this months ago. And I can't remember the distinction between contest competition and some of the other different types of competition. Can you just give me a primer on that again? Oh man, I'm funny, you can share it, you can give me that. Okay. So, yeah, so what do you mean by contest competition? You... So, there's definitely differences between contest and competition. And competition. Is that, is that what you mean? I think I speak to about this. David Puntz. David Puntz.

1:07:19Oh yeah, okay. Was who I spoke to about this. Okay, what was I talking to David Puntz about? male male aggression has driven a lot of the sexual dimorphism that we see between men and women. The traits have been developed to be effective at dominance and aggression. Right, okay. So I think this is to do with female mate choice looking at basically allowing females to select guys off the top and contest contest competition would be a different form of their selection. I see what you mean. Yeah, yeah, sorry David puts speaking about the masculinity thing David puts told me this story this really funny story from when I think he was a grad student who stood in line at a Check out some super These two guys talking behind him and he couldn't believe how low the voices were they sounded like that Chocolate rain kid from 2006 and And they couldn't believe how low their voices were and he turned around and he saw that there was a really attractive girl in between him and them.

1:08:24And that got him onto the men modulate their voice based on whether there are women around them. If you have men looking to cross the road and women are present, the distance between the car and them is way shorter than they would be prepared to accept if there was no women present. What was the other one that he told me about? So there was the lowering of the voice. Oh, that was the other thing that your vocal pitch basically acts in deference to the status or the potential threat of another male that's with you. So men will tend to actually raise their vocal pitch when they're talking to a man of much higher status and they will lower their vocal pitch when they're talking to a man who's of equivalent status, usually because if you raise your voice up a little bit and you kind of talk like this, I'm no threat, you don't need to worry, please don't smash me into the ground.

1:09:24I am absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, precisely. I thought that we were of similar status. Another study, another study that you did that I thought was great was about Basketball players, male and female basketball players. Tell me about that. Yes. So there, you know, we talked a lot about male and female performance. You know, in these worlds where we're talking about physical performance, men largely outcompete women. And it makes sense, right? If you're going to put a man and a woman, the average man and average woman in 100 meter race, the man's gonna end up leading the woman. And that's simply because of differences in musk literature, differences in bone structure, physiology, and all the other line.

1:10:10I feel like I have a lot of psychology, right? You know, when you look at ball throwing sports, like three year olds have got seven times more throwing accuracy, male to female. You know, like you've been around for three years, this isn't socialized, you haven't hit puberty. You had driven by Androgens in the womb, but it's also driven by protein folding in the brain. And what is it? Children that are 10 years old, you can detect with a 90 % accuracy, whether it's a male or a female, just from the brain scan. So, you know, this is just, I know that I've derailed the question I literally asked.

1:10:41No, that's okay. Um, this for me is the most compelling con... The most compelling talking point to push back against trans, M to F female, male to female athletes going into female sports. And it's because all of the conversation that people usually get caught up in is to do with How much bone density do you lose if you've been at the estrogen for a year and oh, you know look at the power output differential and blah blah blah and people that oh, but the structure and the size of the hands There's differences in the length of the forearm that makes it better growing and all of this stuff to me is icing on the top of the cake that is What is the mental capacity of the athlete that I'm looking at?

1:11:24What are they actually good at? And David Geary, you feel me David? Yes, yes. Yeah, so David did this great study. He at least told me about a great study where some University researcher used a tennis ball machine to fire tennis balls at his students and Instead of catching the students were actually trying to dodge the tennis balls and And this is not, this is that spatial rotation thing again, but it was mediated for catching. And the males were able to apparently dodge the tennis or whatever the basketballs are something relatively easily. And the female students less so apparently quite an old study.

1:12:06I imagine that you wouldn't get away with firing tennis balls at your level. I was going to say the same thing. I couldn't imagine getting the ethics to be able to do study like that. My point being, and this is for every person that gets into a discussion about, should we have M to F trans athletes in support, I think that the most compelling argument by far is that there's different fundamental psychological capabilities. If you wanted to have M to F male to, sorry, female to male athletes in a sport that was to detect lying or that was to remember cards that have been turned over on a table and to have to match them, it's unfair.

1:12:45local memorization, cues of emotion and stuff like being able to detect lying, women are going to wipe the floor with the average man and elite women will wipe the floor with almost any men. So I think you know all of that stuff makes sense but that's my that's my current sort of contribution to that discussion. Now when someone says okay so what's the solution here? What do we do with trans athletes in sport? I think that's a really really difficult conversation and I feel I feel bad for people who not only are going through you know a challenging gender identity but then also want to play the sport that they love and give them tons of pleasure and I'm saying a number of people are saying well you know you can't do that way but you also can't stay in the one that you're in that's that's challenging however I think that there is sufficient evidence to suggest like let's let's treat um allowing them to go into whichever gender category then now identify as with a good bit of caution.

1:13:43Yeah, there's, and if you, if we look at what, when we often think about men and women, we think about them like this, right? This is where men are, this is where women are, but the reality of there's distributions across both of those things, right? There's going to be variation around the means. If we talk about means, yes, men and women are different. But if we look at those distributions, they overlap quite dramatic. So even if we're talking about things like memory or competitive ability and we're thinking about transports, where is this individual that's transitioning from F -M or M -to -F?

1:14:24Where do they sit in that distribution? They may already sit in more of a male distribution in certain traits if they're transitioning from F -to -M or vice versa. Right, we do know that both many women demonstrate traits of the opposite sex and these are huge spectrums. So one of the problems that you have within sports though, I think is that a lot of the not only extremes, but also the e -drivers were talking about hand grip strength, there's no crossover, upper body strength, there's a crossover. It's two side revisions and I think that the same goes broadly for like some of the psychological, especially when you roll them out into sweets.

1:15:07You know, if you take an individual trait, conscientious, then let's roll agreeableness on top and let's roll this on top and let's roll that on top. And you can go, this is getting more complex. This is a signature of a man. Okay. Okay. Absolutely. You did a study looking at basketball players. What did you learn? Yeah. So we wanted to see how individual performance changed over time. You know, can imagine that individuals when they're younger, they're great. You've got a lot of energy, you've got a lot of strength, you haven't semester as much. So you just haven't aged as much. So your body just isn't breaking down as much.

1:15:45And what you find is that's generally the case in male basketball players. If you look at their performance in various skills over their lifetime, what you end up seeing is that men generally hit a peak. I can't remember exactly when that peak is at this point. but they hit a peak and then they start senescing and start performing more poorly. Which is what you see in a lot of non -human animals as well. They hit this peak and then you start aging and you just not able to attract as many mates or be able to protect your parombe and you longer, you know, red deer and elephants. Those are really great examples of that.

1:16:24You're a king at some point where you have all the ladies and then after that There's just somebody who will compete to you and you just don't do as well. So we did the same thing in female basketball players because you know the nice thing about the NBA and the WNBA, you have a lot of data for a large number of years and you can start looking at how individuals are actually performing. What we end up seeing in women is they don't actually hit that peak. They don't seem to senesce in their performance like men do. Now, there's caveats in our data. Of course, the WNBA hasn't been around for as long as the NBA quite yet.

1:17:03So it's hard to tell if we start seeing the same amount of data as in the NBA, could we see those differences? And secondarily, the WNBA doesn't have as many teams. That means that women aren't playing as many games. So their bodies aren't under as much stress potentially because they're not playing as many games and traveling as much. So maybe we don't end up seeing that peak because women aren't pushed to their limits like men are in these really, in the NBA where they're playing a lot more games. And that may be true. Nonetheless, it's quite interesting that men are hitting their performance peak at some point and then senes and women generally doubt and it can and keep performing from much longer until they retire and choose to stop playing.

1:17:54Without trying to account for some of the ways structurally that this could be explained anyway, why? What is your hypothesis for? Yeah. Testosterone is damaging. So it could be physiological in that sense where, you know, we're selecting for aggressive, strong men playing the NBA. and these men likely have higher testosterone levels. As a consequence, at some point, that starts breaking things down in their bodies and has that negative effect where we just start senescing. And our bodies just can't repair themselves as well to keep functioning in that really great way and that necessary way. Women don't have as much testosterone as a consequence.

1:18:40Maybe things aren't breaking down as quickly or as strongly for women so we don't see that happening in female performance over time. So that's a possible idea as well. But of course that needs testing. So that would be the mechanism. What's the adaptive reason? Well, you know, not everything has to be adaptive. You know, the reality. I'm gonna believe, I'm gonna put forward a theory that I think that this is, but I'll let you. Okay. So we know that men want to be in a hierarchy. If there's an advantage to having testosterone to ensure that you're hired in a hierarchy, that's going to be selected for.

1:19:28We know that once, if we look at the average lifespan of a male, that's increased a lot over time. We're a lot older now, and we're living a lot longer now than we did, you know, in 10 ,000 years ago, for example, and that's for a number of different reasons. If there's selection for testosterone to be able to improve individual performance and then we hit our peak at about 40 and then we start senescing, I'd like to think it's a little bit later than that because I'm older, but anyway, hitting 40 and then we start senescing. 10 ,000 years ago we weren't living to 40. So there was no benefit to be able to select for late life benefits.

1:20:09As a consequence, a selection would have been very strong to maximize performance to the age of 40. And that means you're doing really well after that, it doesn't matter, because you're either going to be dead and you're definitely not going to be reproducing and you're definitely going to be outcompeted by somebody else. So it's a ralda. You're essentially dead at that point, reproducibly speaking, because you're not going to get a chance to make with anybody. That's changed obviously now, right, where individuals are living for much longer, but that system that's been selected for still exists.

1:20:40And as a consequence, we senesse at that age, at that point because that's the system that we've evolved to have. And that's just how we work. Well, you have spoiled my theory because that's what I was gonna say. Yeah, it just seems to make sense. The burn bright accumulate states. It loads as much as possible. you know, 17, 18, 19 years old, you're some prehistoric killer, everybody thinks you're the shit, run around, impregnate, hope to stick about for, you know, 10, 12 years so that you can do a bit of hair bonding and protect the one woman that you've got and you've three kids or whatever.

1:21:22And then they'll be fine, you know, they'll be fine. So whereas for women, you know, grandmother hypothesis for why men oppose this. Women and also women on average live longer than men. Like just even now women live on average live longer than them. Absolutely. And this is not why it will be contributed to, but the risky behavior thing is only going to be a partial contributor to this. It's just that women's longevity seems to be more effective than men's. So yeah, I think that's an interesting one. That's an interesting way to think about why men burn everything a little bit brighter and a little bit quicker.

1:22:06And yeah, downstream from that, you're going to have some physiological impacts. Let's say that you have 100 units across your lifetime of athletic ability to deploy. Men are able to squeeze more of that out. They're sealing from which they can draw is going to be higher than women's because it is in their interests to try and accumulate that status to accumulate that and then do the reproduction thing. But the moms need to stick and then need to then become grandmothers and then need to become aunties and then need to become sisters and so on. One of the other things, considering the changing modern landscape for dating online, how that's changed the way that people go about things as well, didn't you do a paper that looked at mate guarding the modern world and how mate guarding had been adjusted?

1:23:00Didn't want you involved in something to do with that? I was not, but that sounds really interesting. Your name's down, your name's down on something. If you look at Google, scolar closely enough. Uh -oh. Which paper, do you know the title of the paper by chance? No, I'll have to pull it up. But I mean, you'll do. Look, face it, your H index is going up, is going up through the roof. I think the other one that I saw seemed an awful lot like, fuck, who's that? Who's that Australian researcher, the blonde lady that you did? You've done this, Blake. And this Blake. Thank God. Yes. Dude, I've had so many female eavescik researchers on the show over the last 12 months.

1:23:42I basically, everybody is just blended into one very interesting episode. So Candice did some interesting stuff that looked at how economic inequality predicted sexual objectification, like the post -execence selfies, and you did something that looked at national income inequality predicting women's preference for masculineized faces. Yes. What's that? Why is it better than health? Explain that to me. Yeah, that was an interesting study that I was part of. I was lucky to be part of it. So a paper came out and said, on a global kind of scale, they looked at, can we start looking at how masculine men look?

1:24:29And can we correlate that to the amount of disease within that social environment? And the idea here is that individuals have more testosterone in an environment where you're more likely to get sick are showing off good genes because testosterone is damaging. It's a costly trait and if you're pumping resources into creating testosterone and creating large jaw lines and the signals that are associated with increased testosterone, testosterone, that means you must be so good that because you're also able to survive an environment that has a lot of disease and then wow you must be a high quality male because you can do all those things.

1:25:14So you must have really, really great genes. And that's a wonderful idea. And that idea is lived in the non -human animal literature for a really, really long time. And we talked about it a lot until we realized that it doesn't work. There are much more proximate explanations for what's going on. And those proximate explanations explain things much better than these underlying genetic potential explanations. Explain that. Yeah, so if you think about, for example, if there are you and I in a bunch of other males in an environment, we're competing for females and we have big jaws and traits that...

1:26:00Good moustaches. Good moustaches. Thank you very much, Abbey. Thank you. I appreciate that. Then those are all signals to potential mates. And if we're in an environment and those signals potentially show off our good underlying genes. So we have very strong genes and that's really great. The problem with that is if females end up mating with us, yes, they'll get our good genes, but they're only 50 % of those genes. They may not be the right genes because of how DNA works and all that. And we don't know how those genes are actually going to interact with others. So there are potential benefits that there's no doubt to that.

1:26:43But if you and I have a lot of money and we have a provider safe environment and we have a lot of access to a lot of resources, that's a direct benefit that females gain from mating with us because they have access to that immediately and that immediate benefit outweighs that potential genetic benefit because that's more long term and isn't as clear -cut. So what we did in that study is we said, all right, yeah, sure, that could be a potential explanation, but we feel that there is a simpler, more immediate explanation. And that's just the the fact that in those environments that have a lot of disease around, where there is potential for social unrest, there's a benefit to being around males who are bigger and stronger because they can potentially protect you from that.

1:27:37So it has nothing to do with the genes that they harbor. It's just the fact that, well, if you hang with me, I'll make sure nothing bad happens to you and you'll get all the resources you need. And that's immediate. That happens that without having to reproduce. And that's a stronger benefit that women can gain immediately. And that's why that has such a stronger effect. That's fascinating, man. Very, very interesting. It's cool stuff. But it's the inequality thing. Yeah. It's like, am I missing something there? No, I don't, you know, it's, again, it's tied to our culture. And that's why I say that you can't separate those kinds of things.

1:28:19In those countries where there's more social unrest and there's more disease, they're likely not as developed. They don't have the medicine, they don't have the resources, the populations may be higher, the risks are greater. And that's part of the environment. Not to do with lack of development, right? It's to do with inequality specifically, or at least that's what it says here. So let me, yes, I'm going to put my bro -signing hat on again. Yeah, yeah, go for it. And this is from Candice Blake's stuff. And what she said her justification was in areas that have high income inequality women post more sexy selfies they do more sexual objectification blah blah blah.

1:29:00Her reason for that was that when you are in an area of high economic inequality as a female you are able to see both how high you can rise and how low you can fall. And what it gives you is this explanation or this example of I don't want to go there. I can't go here. I don't want to go there. What are the tools in my arsenal that can allow me to get up this ladder that I can attract a higher value mate? And everything can be great. So a study that looks at income inequality predicting women's preference for masculineized faces would suggest to me that they presume downstream from the masculinized face is a greater protector provider who is more likely to get them away from the life that they've been exposed to because it's not just exposure to the high -flying life, it's also exposure to the underclass life that they want to try and avoid.

1:29:58And I think it's both the motivation to run away from something you want and the desire to run toward something that would be desirable, run away from something that you don't want, sorry, and run towards something that's desirable. Yeah, absolutely. It is the inequality and that inequality is often tied very, very strongly to sex. You know, men and women, if we look at different societies and we look at, you know, the gender inequality index, we see that varies quite a lot around the world. And yes, I would agree that in that environment where there are more risks, there are likely more gender inequality and women will behave in a way that maximizes their likelihood for fitness.

1:30:46So I'm wondering, it was just national income inequality, income inequality between the sexes or income inequality between most wealthy and least wealthy. Between the sexes. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. It makes all of the sadness. I throw my entire last five minutes of what I've just spoken about. Not all, I hope that's get to this point. So don't throw that away at all. We needed, of course. Of course it would be. If you as a woman are less capable of earning your own way, you are more aligned on the man. The masterlionized face of the man is a predictor of protector provider. Therefore, find the right fight.

1:31:27That's actually relatively straightforward. forward. It is, but it's really interesting. And it's great that you say it's relatively straightforward because I totally agree, but it's interesting that people went, the first explanation was, it must be good genes. They must be those high quality genes that those women won in that environment to be able to get them out of there. And again, that's not direct when that direct benefit of having access to that individual and the status that they hold is much stronger. What you say direct, but what you're doing is you're looking at someone's face and Prozuming from their face how much money they own so I mean it's it's like relatively direct compared to good jeans hypothesis and Sexy son, but it's not that it's still relatively convoluted It's just that we see we don't see code right we just see matrix.

1:32:16We see the actual simulation Look Mike, let's bring this one homemade. This has been really really fantastic I had a blast you do. Good. Where should people go if they want to keep up to date with the things that you do, why should they head on the internet? Well, you know, I'm doing some fun stuff now. If I can, I'd like to mention that I started a company a few years ago and the company's actually gotten a little bit larger than it's called our Ludo and we create games that help people explore more about the natural world. And we've created games that help people understand and how individuals behave towards one another.

1:32:53So these are all little mobile games and apps that individuals can download, teachers can use to teach in class, and you collect data really, really quickly. The key is it allows students to do the stuff that we just talked about over the last hour. So you can start exploring data, start understanding the human world a little bit better, start to understand our own brains and our minds a lot better. Because I think what needs to change, like we talked about a little bit is our environments changed so dramatically over the last 100 years that our culture has as well and that intersection between those two things is still coming to a head so we can better understand how we should kind of be behaving in society and towards one another.

1:33:37And I think people can get a better understanding when they start reading more, when they start interacting and engaging, collecting data, running experiments, seeing individual behaviors, because then you start getting to understand a lot more about how our bodies behave, bodies and brains behave automatically. Because some of the stuff that you talked about about a Bacandis's research and our research and what I think is most fascinating is all this stuff is happening automatically. It's not like in Candis to study for example, that girls are thinking, well, I know that I'm in a really kind of lower economic area.

1:34:12And I see that women over there in that lower economic area are showing more skin. I'm going to do the same because they seem to be successful. It's just automatically happening. That's the key. And if we start understanding what's automatic, what's not, when it is, when it isn't, we can get a better understanding of ourselves and our society. And I think we'd start to really get a, you know, start answering all those societal problems that we have because we're being a lot more honest with one another. Where should people go if they want to check out more of that? Check out the website, ourludel .com, and all our games are free to download, and you can play them.

1:34:50Yeah, get in touch with me there, and I'd love to help teachers teach the next generation of kids to better understand themselves and the world around them. Hell yeah, Mike, I appreciate you. Thank you. Yeah, absolutely. Pleasure. Thank you so much, Chris. I had an awesome fun.