Office Hours Special: Algebra of Masculinity Part 2

0:00Rinse takes your laundry and hand delivers it to your door. expertly cleaned and folded, so you could take the time once spent folding and sorting and waiting to finally pursue a whole new version of you. Like tea time you. Mmm. Or this tea time you. Or even this tea time you. So did you hear about Dave? Or even tea time, tea time, tea time you. Mmm. So update on Dave. It's up to you. We'll take the laundry. Rinse. It's time to be great. Welcome to the second episode of a special series of the Prop G Pod. As a reminder, we're covering all things masculinity over the next few weeks on Office Hours, or as I like to say, I thought that'd be funnier.

0:43Anyway, something we've been wanting to learn more about is the physiological and biological differences between men and women, specifically the role of testosterone. Not what happens to me when I shoot 80 cc's into my ass every week. A little stronger in the gym, a little hornier, which means not that strong and not that horny, quite frankly, But still, still trying to hold on to those last vestiges of youth because I'm a narcissist. And, you know, let's just end it there. Anyways, we sought out Dr. Robert Sapolsky, who is a critically acclaimed author and professor of biology, neurology and neurosurgery at Stanford University.

1:15If you've ever wondered what it might be like for one professor with much less domain expertise and credibility to speak to a highly credible academic, well, then you're in for a treat. It's coming up. I found this stuff fascinating. He spent, I guess, decades with baboons. I don't know if he was hanging out with Jane Goodall. I don't know what he was doing, but he has observed primate behavior and the role of testosterone and community effects. I think this stuff is just fascinating. We discussed with Dr. Sapolsky the contradictions in human behavior, as well as the common misconceptions surrounding testosterone and estrogen, specifically how these hormones relate to aggressive behavior.

1:53We also get into the concept of free will, including how the understanding of limited free will can influence one's approach to parenting. I really struggle with this because I like to think that we have agency and I think decisions matter and your character is making the right decisions when no one's looking. So this notion of you don't have free will, which is getting a lot of traction right now, kind of doesn't make sense to me until you hear them explain it. And I think what they're saying is a lot of your chemistry and your DNA and your instincts are sort of cooked already. And that's not to say that as parents, I think the best example is parents.

2:28And that is as parents, we like to think that we're engineers, that we get to kind of design the sheep. And the reality is we're shepherds. We get to decide where they graze and point them in the right direction, decide what they eat. But they kind of come to you. You don't get to engineer the sheep. Now, anyways, I found this conversation fascinating. Remember, remember, we're shepherds, not engineers.

2:57Dr. Sapolsky, where does this podcast find you? Well, sitting here at home where it appears to be kind of sunny out there, so that's nice. Where's home? San Francisco. Oh, nice. So let's bust right into it. Can you share more about the way our physiology influences our behavior, specifically as it relates to men in contrast to women? I would say quite relevant are, of course, testosterone levels and the changing levels of it. What one needs to emphasize right off the bat when you're thinking about testosterone, male behavior, human male behavior as such, is that everybody knows what testosterone does and virtually everybody is wrong.

3:45The general theme is testosterone makes you aggressive. And on first pass, that certainly seems that way. You know, males of virtually every species out there are, on the average, more aggressive than females. A couple of really interesting exceptions. Time of year when males have highest T levels, most aggressive. Till you look closely and testosterone does not cause aggression. It does something much more subtle. So take five rhesus monkey males and put them together and they form a dominance hierarchy. And number one trashes two through five. Number two trashes three through five and so on.

4:28And take number three in the hierarchy and shoot him up with testosterone with like just massive quantities of it. And does he get involved in more aggressive interactions? Yeah, absolutely. Whoa, there you go again. Testosterone causing aggression. But then look at the pattern of it. Number three, who up until that moment was completely brown nosing to numbers one and two. Number three now, is he now challenging one and two? Is he taking them on with just ceaseless self-confident aggressiveness? No. Number three steers clear of numbers two and one exactly as he's always done. What does he do instead?

5:10He becomes a complete nightmare to poor numbers four and five. In other words, testosterone has not created a new pattern of aggression going after two in one. All it's done is up the volume on patterns of aggression that were already there thanks to social learning. So we have a hormone driving aggression. It's not driving. It is not inventing it. It's just amplifying what's there already. I almost think that if the aggression was aimed up, you'd have churn, which in some ways is healthy. But if you're just ramping the aggression around dominance where there's already a social hierarchy, isn't that just as bad?

5:53Oh, yeah, absolutely. It's just an interesting reframing. This is not a hormone causing you to do something. This is not biological destiny on that level at all. It's where has your social conditioning brought you to in that moment? And that counts for a lot. But then there's an even more interesting elaboration on it, because it turns out this is what's known in the business as the challenge hypothesis. hypothesis, a guy named John Wingfield, University of California, who pointed out it's not so much that testosterone amplifies pre-existing aggression. What it does is when your status is being challenged, it amplifies whatever you need to do to hold on to status.

6:44Okay, that does not sound like a very interesting distinction. If you're a baboon and somebody is challenging your status, what you do is you get into a fight. It's all about aggression and all that, but you get to humans and we do all sorts of weird things to gain status. Like go to some like fancy fundraiser for some charitable something filled with nothing but wealthy people. And what you'll see is like these wealthy guys who've had too much to drink usually because they've been plied with it by the hosts are there and they're competing for dominance by who can give away the most money, who can make the largest contributions.

7:26And like what an incredibly nutty way in which like a baboon would go about showing dominance. And some studies extraordinarily have shown you take people, you take subjects and you give them testosterone and a ton of it and all of that. And if it's the right sort of economic game where you gain credibility and power by giving more generous offers in terms of reputational stuff, testosterone makes you more generous because that's the ways by which you are strutting your stuff in that game. In other words, when you look at it, not only does testosterone not cause aggression, it doesn't really amplify pre-existing aggression.

8:12It only does it in a circumstance where that's what's being rewarded. And if you've got problems on your planet with too much male testosterone amplifying aggression, don't blame this hormone. blame the fact that we hand out high status for aggression so much of the time. And that's a remarkably different picture. Let's go to the base or the origin story of testosterone. What is the anthropological use of testosterone? And I would think that the most violent and aggressive among us throughout history have been the conquerors. And so high testosterone individuals tend to have more propagation opportunities resulting in increasing levels of testosterone.

8:58So take us back to where, at a very kind of root biological level, the role that testosterone plays and why it's important. And what has happened to testosterone levels throughout history? Well, first what I'm going to come back with is the notion that high testosterone equals social dominance is kind of a myth, because what you see, great example of this is baboons. Baboons, why do I keep coming back to baboons? Because I spent 33 summers in the Serengeti studying what hormones have to do with behavior in these populations of wild baboons. Okay, so baboons, male-dominated, hierarchical, incredible levels of aggression, and that generates this simple prediction, higher rank, higher testosterone go hand in hand.

9:47And it turned out that's not the case in the slightest. It's independent. It's not correlated with rank. Hmm. So who has the high testosterone? Some jerky, high-ranking guy who starts a lot of fights. But the much more typical profile is it's some idiot adolescent male who recently joined the troop. And what is his testosterone elevated doing to him? He's picking fights with all sorts of guys. he has no business going anywhere near and getting trounced. And what you see instead is a high-ranking male, an alpha male, very often, yeah, it's taken a lot of aggression and a lot of muscle and some big canines to attain your high rank.

10:33But at that point, in order to maintain your high rank, if you're getting to a lot of fights, you're going to go down in a hail of bullets pretty quickly. What makes for an alpha male who maintains dominance for a long time, he wants to go months, seasons, years on end without being in a fight. Because if he's doing it right, all he has to do is look at somebody, stare at them for a couple of seconds, and they back off. It's all by psychological bluff at that point if you're going to be one of these successful ones. And they hang on for a long time that way, often well into their like physical decline after their prime years, holding on just by psychological bluff.

11:20And in a case like that, testosterone actually has nothing to do with it. Social intelligence, what coalitions you're forming, who you know how to threaten in which way, which provocations you ignore and just walk away from. And that's a very different picture. So it's all about testosterone and well-timed, socially, you know, calibrated aggression that gets you into high rank in the first place. But after that, the alpha males who last forever, they just become really cagey and socially intelligent. And it's the fights they avoid rather than the fights that they get into that have the biggest impact on their destiny.

12:03I'm trying to sort of summarize. Power can be acquired through deft use of testosterone, but power is maintained through more political or social intelligence. Exactly. And that's the case with like a monkey with a quarter of the number of like brain volume that we have as humans. And what we show is far, far more complicated versions of the exact same theme. When you look at risen populations and who's on the top of the hierarchy there, and you look at testosterone levels earlier on, those are not predictive. Those are predictive of idiot guys who are going to challenge someone, and as a result, they're knifed in the shower there.

12:47What testosterone is mostly about is it gives you problems with impulse control. It gives you problems at looking at somebody's face and decide their facial expression is really not threatening as opposed to what's this guy glaring at me about. It gives you, you know, problems in all those ways. It makes you impulsive and it makes you disinhibited and it makes you a poor calculator of your odds. And typically in the direction of deciding that you are way more likely to be successful in this interaction than you actually are. And most of the time, that's a prescription for a, you know, complicated social primate who's not going to do very well.

13:35And everything we know about us as a species where, yeah, we got a lot of violets, we're the most violent primate on this planet, blah, blah, but we have a lot of alternative strategies. And if you're just running on testosterone, amping up your pre-existing tendencies towards aggression, that's not a human prescription for social success. So men are more violent towards other people and they're more violent towards themselves, right? right? Three times as many men commit suicide in the U.S., I think, as women. When you look at nature versus nurture, when you look at the biology of it, and then you look at the social context, where do you think we should be focused?

14:15Are we focused too much on the nature end of it? Should we be thinking more about early intervention in terms of giving people better social context? My personal bias is, you know, people in my business have been getting paid salaries for thousands of years, arguing about nature versus nurture. And, you know, what the answer is, is everything about our nature only makes sense in the context of nurture and environment. They are inseparable. A great sort of way of framing it from a colleague of mine saying, so which contributes more to the area of a rectangle, the width or the height? and they're inseparable.

15:01It winds up being virtually irrelevant to ask, what does a gene do? Only to ask, what does it do in this particular context? It's meaningless to say what a gene does, just what it does in a particular environment. And likewise, it's meaningless to say what a particular environment does, just what it does to an individual with this particular genetic profile. Now, those pieces put together, the fact that we're the most violent species on this planet, all of this, most of us have not murdered anyone. Most of us males, if we've been in relationships, have not been abusive partners, all of that. It is actually a rare subset.

15:43The percentage of men who actively have violence interactions at some point in their lifetime is very low. What that mostly is telling us, the similarities among all of us biologically are a whole lot more similar than the similarities in how we're raised and our values and our experiences, all of that. But so if, you know, I was given a gazillion dollars to go solve male violence and I could only spend it on nurture sort of things or nature sort of things, recognizing that's totally silly and false, piecing them apart. But I only have the energy to target one of them, environment, much more. And this is from someone where, you know, what I do is I study neurons and hormones and all this nuts and bolts biology.

16:36But in that realm, when you get to somebody like us, you want to understand why one gecko is being miserable to another gecko. You know, biology is on its own. It's good to do a lot of explaining. You get to us, and I think it's much more social issues, socialization and such. Yeah, I just, you inspired a thought that eventually nurture becomes nature, right? I mean, we adapt to our surroundings and start developing different hormones and different instinctual responses, no? Exactly. So if testosterone has been unfairly assigned or there's too much attribution between certain activities and behaviors and testosterone, and while testosterone does create aggression, it creates in inordinate amounts, it creates sort of what I call reckless or unproductive aggression.

17:24What compare and contrast, if you can, testosterone and what are the similar effects of estrogen? interesting estrogen really does have a different profile and it should be noted that you know all of this that we're talking about in terms of testosterone or androgens the more general term for testosterone like hormones androgens and males androgens males females secrete androgens as well doesn't come out of the ovaries it comes out of the adrenal gland adrenal androgens not a ton of this stuff, maybe, I don't know, one-tenth the level as in males, but it serves a similar role. People used to think that adrenal androgens in females caused aggression, then they figured out, no, it amplifies pre-existing, that whole song and dance, just on a less dramatic scale.

18:20So with estrogen, what you find is estrogen can be extremely, extremely enhancing of aggression. in the right setting because you're a mama cat and you've got all those kittens there. And the eight-year-old kid from the neighbor's house who knows nothing about this makes a mistake of coming right up to the kittens. And mom is going to go after him with tremendous aggression driven by estrogen, oxytocin, a hormone that has a lot to do with maternal behavior. So in a context like that, ooh, females aren't aggressive, blah, blah. Females can be incredibly aggressive in defense of their young. Females in some species of primates are incredibly aggressive at trying to kill their competitors or, as Jane Goodall first documented with chimps, try to kill the kids of their competitive females and that sort of thing.

19:21But in other settings, estrogen is very facilitating of pro-social behaviors. It's the context. It's the context over and over and over. We typically assign physical aggression or we assign, I would say, and tell me if you agree with this, we assign aggression predominantly to men because physical aggression gets more media attention and it's more shocking. But there's physical aggression and non-physical aggression. Have you thought about the difference? Are women more prone to non-physical aggression than men, or are they just, generally speaking, their aggression just manifests in different, less harmful ways?

20:03Well, I think absolutely less harmful ways than an automatic weapon kind of thing. But on the average, again, women are far, far less likely to have physical violence. And just look at what people wind up in prison for, and you can see that demonstrated there. Um, women do a whole lot more verbal aggression, social aggression, exclusion, ostracizing, things of that sort. I mean, we're a species where like, this is how subtle we could be like aggressive. It's, it's January each year. And we're looking at all the applications for new grad students who were there. And you go in there and you read a letter from, um, somebody's advisor and they're saying, yeah, so I heard he's interested in your grad program and he like worked in my lab and he did some stuff with this and he's young.

20:59He's pretty good. Wow. He hates the guy. He said he's pretty good rather than amazing and all of that. Whoa, that was an incredibly aggressive act or looking the other way can be or pressing a button and like you drop a bomb from 30 ,000 feet up in the air. So in those cases, it is very, very different in the versions it could take. And what you see is if there's less options for effective physical aggression, which is generally the case with women against men, the alternatives are far more the case. and you know clearly like this epidemic we're having of adolescent girl depression and suicidality and anxiety disorders and how much of a role social media is playing in it nobody is stabbing you literally in the stomach with social media all they're doing is being really socially intelligent and dissing you.

22:04And this is a driving force and all sorts of adolescent girl malaise and misery and all. Yeah, that's pretty awful. Nonetheless, I think at the end of the day, that still counts as better than showing up with an automatic weapon. The statement I'm thinking of is that boys bully physically and verbally and girls bully relationally. Do you think that's true? And do you see that manifest continue as adults? Absolutely. Except I keep sticking in this phrase here, which sounds like it's some sort of like reflex or covering my ass, but is incredibly informative when I say on the average, on the average, statistically across populations.

22:44could you pick out the average male or two of them pick them out and find out their testosterone levels and see who's got higher levels than the other and say with any confidence aha he's the one who's more likely to be physically aggressive does that give you any predictive power it takes you from the chance level of 50 percent to i don't know about 55 percent predictability because there's tremendous individual differences because the guy who seemingly has higher testosterone levels just happens to be, you know, a Buddhist monk and that's not what's going to happen. And then you do the same thing.

23:25You take your average male and average female and what you know by studies of huge numbers of test subjects is on the average, if you have to bet money, the male is going to be more aggressive than the female, and it's going to more likely take the physical form. But on the average, isn't the confidence with each you could predict from any given individual or pair, tremendous individual variation. And I don't know, I guess I know nothing about this world, but there's, you know, auxiliary gangs of some of the most violent ones out there that are all women or all girls and they are plenty violent as well.

24:07Individual differences on the average, on the average. But one of the things we've learned about making sense of like really the worst of human behaviors is if you're just going with on the average, that's not a very good predictor and you can make some horrendous mistakes. We'll be right back.

24:33Avoiding your unfinished home projects because you're not sure where to start? Thumbtack knows homes, so you don't have to. Don't know the difference between matte paint finish and satin or what that clunking sound from your dryer is? With Thumbtack, you don't have to be a home pro. You just have to hire one. You can hire top-rated pros, see price estimates, and read reviews all on the app. Download today. In your latest book, Determined, A Science of Life Without Free Will, you spence with the notion that humans operate with any free will. One particular area you explore is how the United States has really a misguided emphasis on meritocracy, and as a result, it spews out false promises of equal economic potential.

25:20Say more about this? Yeah, it's a pretty grim picture. First off, just to show where I'm coming from, like you talk to, I'm showing my biases, you talk to any sensible neurobiologist and they're going to believe in free will a lot less than your typical person on the street. My particular stance is when you look closely at all the biological nuts and bolts and how each of us turned out to be who we are, there's no free will whatsoever. ever. And I can argue that until the cows come home, as long as you have a broader picture of like, what made me, me, is it the fact that like this guy is pissing me off right now?

26:03Yeah, but it also has something to do with what your hormone levels were yesterday. And if you went through some sort of trauma in the last year or found love in the last year, if what your adolescence was like, childhood, what your fetal life was like, because that has something to do with the propensity of your brain towards all sorts of actions, what your genetic makeup is like, not your genes determining anything, but your genes interacting with what kind of culture your ancestors came up with 400 years ago, and because of what kind of ecosystem, because that was going to influence how your mother was like raising you within minutes of birth.

26:46And you put all the pieces together and free will is a myth. And one of the implications, which get people to immediately assign me to being just like way out there off the charts, this guy is impossible, is punishment in and of itself never makes any sense. Blame never makes any sense. It doesn't because nobody ever does something damaging because they have turned into the person who they are, thanks to a great deal of control on their part over their biological attributes and their environmental experiences. So now we can, you know, argue for hours about what does that do to criminal justice system?

27:31And what do we do with dangerous people? And that sort of thing. And if you really follow through the implications of this intellectually, where it takes you is punishment is okay as a tool like every now and then you bop somebody over the head instrumentally that could bring about like a shaping effect on their behavior and you could do the same thing by like bopping some sea slug uh over one part of its body and it becomes less aggressive or i could learn or things like that so that's wonderful but the whole premise that that people should be blamed and punished for things they had no control over makes no sense at all.

28:14But then you flip things 180 degrees as you did. And what also becomes completely ridiculous and unsupportable is a meritocracy. The notion that people who've come out with the better college degrees, the notion that people who've come out with the higher salaries, Even the notion that people who've wound up that way because they worked harder and studied harder and while their roommate was out partying, they were like getting their work done and all of that, that, whoa, that's a virtue in and of itself. The notion that we praise and reward people for things they had no control over is just as clear.

28:57And this is where people readily fall into a false dichotomy. okay okay nature biology yeah you had no control over you're by nature a good athlete or you by nature have a great memory and digit span memory or by nature you're an introvert or these are things you had no control over this is what like life gave you and where people then fall for free will, like temptation every time, is saying, yeah, that's biology, but what do you do with your attributes? What do you do? Do you get tougher when the going gets tough? Do you show backbone? Do you have self-discipline? Do you have gumption? Are you somebody who is gifted with every like talent and attribute on earth and you go and squander it out of self-indulgence?