The Truth Behind Video Games & Their Psychological Impact - Michael Kasumovic

Individuals who have a stronger drive to find mates are more likely to want to play violent video games and to play them more often. I I never would have thought it actually would have worked out if it didn't keep showing up constantly in our studies. Why do people play violent video games? What's the motivation? That is an age-old question since video games really came out, isn't it? Um you know, they're fun, first off. Let's be honest. They're a really good time and people love playing them. But that's not really enough of a an answer, is it? It's um seems like there's more than that just driving us. And you know, my research and the research of my colleagues, uh Tom Denson for example, um we believe that it's a search for status. Video games really allow you to test your metal against others and they allow you to see how well you stand up to other folks. And as a consequence, it allows you to see how you stack up and where you sit in a hierarchy. So we're arguing that it really allows you to get a better understanding of yourself and where you sit in between others. Why the violence? Yeah. Well, if we look through human history, you know, there's not a lot of kindness or as much kindness going on as there is kind of aggression and violence. And if we look at all animals, all almost all animals have some kind of social hierarchy. And individuals on the top of that hierarchy have, you know, extra or gain more benefits than other individuals lower in that that hierarchy. And violence is a way to kind of keep that order in that hierarchy. And it actually a hierarchy works really well because we are able to understand where we sit. And when we know where we sit, we actually don't have to compete against one another and we don't have to be violent against one another. It's when that hierarchy is kind of removed do we find that that there's disorder and individuals within that system need to figure out where they sit and that's when more aggression usually happens. So, we have this kind of interesting system in video games where individuals play games to have fun, but also can compete against one another, can kind of see where they stand against one another and that allows everyone to constantly keep changing and testing where they sit in that hierarchy. So, we see a lot of kind of an attraction to violent video games because of that. I had a researcher called Tony Volk on the show recently and he did some stuff around bullying. One of the interesting insights that he gave me was that bullies need to bully somebody who could be conceivably within a similar status hierarchy because if it's a 12-year-old bullying a 5-year-old, what's what's the status here? Or the same thing the same thing if it's a fight between two guys in the street, but one of them's got a baseball bat and the other just has his hands. That also isn't a particularly reliable measure of status because you don't have two people It's why there's no status associated with some young guy punching an old lady. Like there's no competition for hierarchy when it comes to that and presumably one of the things that you get with games. And this is interesting thinking about games like Fortnite and Call of Duty Warzone, what they've done is the only real upgrades you I guess Warzone is slightly different. The only real upgrades that you get especially on Fortnite artificial aesthetic ones. So, you're not getting anything that gives anybody an advantage in the game. Every single game of Battle Royale on Fortnite, the playing field is completely flat and it is how good are you from the beginning to the end. Best man wins. Woman. Yeah, person. Exactly. Absolutely. And and that is key, isn't it? Because if you have an advantage, then there's a problem. It's really hard to say what what caused you to win or to lose. Oh, well, you know, I lost that game because that person had you know, spent a lot of money to be able to get those upgrades. So, of course I was going to lose. And that's a that's a really interesting question as well because winning and losing we know have effects in a lot of different animals. Uh and we are starting to see that same kind of research being done on humans, which is really neat. You have this loser effect where if you lose, you're more likely to lose in another game. Uh in a future game that you play. If you win, you're more likely to win in a future game that you end up playing. But if those odds aren't are stacked against you, does that winner effect have the same effect or that loser effect have that same effect on your perception of yourself and how you behave in a future match? You know, for example, if if I'm playing someone like we talked about in war zone and they have you know, a much better gun than I do, but we're equal in all other parts, I'm going to end up losing. And when I end up losing, I'll say to myself, "Wow, I didn't lose because I'm really terrible at this game. I lost because that person had an advantage." So, it's unlikely that that's going to have that same kind of effect on my self-perception of my own ability as a real loss where we're equals. So, absolutely, you know, fighting within your status or closer to your status likely has a much bigger effect. But there's actually very very little research done on that kind of stuff, which is kind of interesting. So, it's an open playing field. So, if we look at a lot of non-human animal research, that's where we've done a lot of research on what happens to losers after they lose and what happens to winners after they win. And in those systems, we see a a really neat kind of pattern where it's not them necessarily adjusting things as far as we can tell. It seems to be some kind of internal response. For example, let's imagine two crickets uh fighting for some space where they're going to call for some females to try and attract some females and mate with them. You'll have males fight pretty aggressively for that space. If that fight escalates to something that's really physical, where they have to be really aggressive with one another and there's a chance of them hurting with hurting one another, then what happens is that the winner ends up it's almost as if he feels better about himself. But that's a very human way of thinking about it. Um but comes out of that fight and if you match that individual with another male of the same size and same traits, they end up outcompeting that male. They have a better chance of winning than if they fought them for the first time. And it's vice versa for the loser. The loser will go into another fight and if you match them for the same size and the same weight and all those traits, they're more likely to lose that fight than they that second fight after they win after they lost. So it's not necessarily it it seems as if something's going on internally. So in a lot of systems we've looked at, physiology, maybe there's some hormonal changes of what's going on and that's shifting how individuals perceive themselves, but there's no real clear kind of pattern across and the animal kingdom. And when you look at it in humans, it's even more complex. So we've not figured that out at all and there's still a lot of research to keep looking into. It's so strange when the Matthew principle and power laws end up appearing in nature as well. You wonder you know, there's Jordan Peterson's stand up straight with your shoulders back thing about the lobsters and serotonin and and things like that. Um but especially when it comes to a computer game, I don't know, you you know, you you don't think that it's quite as limited by let's say that there's some sort of hormone cascade that stops people people's muscles from being able to deploy power in the same way if you're a loser, right? Or or you are beaten in a fight, so you spend the next couple of weeks further down the status hierarchy, which means that you're malnourished and underfed and depressed, which means that the next fight that you get into but you're iterating so quickly in video games that you you're almost controlling for the physical uh changes. So, it makes me think that at least in humans it a lot of it has to be about self-perception and about the story that we're telling ourselves. I think so, too. Because if you think about when you're talking about physiological or hormonal shifts that are happening within our body, and you mentioned that if we go down the status hierarchy, then we're going to experience less interaction, less food, potentially become more depressed. That's really, really costly. If that was built into our system, you can see that being selected out from an evolutionary perspective really quickly because that's really bad. If you can't survive after losing, well, then it's going to be hard for you to find a mate and, you know, have your genes continue on for the population. Well, you you would end up producing or selecting for a population of people who are immune to losses. That's exactly it. So, it doesn't seem like it's that simple. I And I do agree with you because I do think, personally, that it is something about self-perception. And this is a really hard thing to test in non-human animals, which is why I moved to humans to kind of explore this question. But it's also really hard to look at in humans, especially in the video games that we currently play because game designers really do something interesting, right? They kind of balance wins and losses for you. Because if you keep winning, and you realize I'm really good at this game, then all of a sudden you don't really want to play anymore because that challenge is kind of gone. The same thing if you end up losing a bunch of matches over and over again, you end up not wanting to play because you realize you're not very good, and it's no longer any fun. So, designers are balancing that. When you first start playing a game, they match you to people who are of your level. You know, if you win something, they might match you with someone more difficult where you end up losing. So, you end up going down that self-perceived hierarchy. But, then you they match you with someone who's a little bit worse than you and you end up winning. So, they're balancing those wins and losses for you, so you're always kind of in that sweet spot and you're always wanting to kind of play more. So, that's why it's actually really, really hard to use current video games to explore these outcomes because it's not just what's happening to us, it's under the system is under control by the game designers. So, it's really hard to tease those aspects apart. You also looked at demographic, status-related, and mating-related correlates to playing video games, right? Mhm. Yes. So, I've always been fascinated with this kind of outcome cuz I never expected, you know, our desire to want to attract mates or to interact with the opposite sex or potential sexual partners as a driver to want to play video games. But, it really predicts it really well and consistent. And that's for both men and women. Individuals who have a stronger drive to find mates are more likely to want to play violent video games and to play them more often. would have thought it it actually would have worked out if it didn't keep showing up constantly in our studies. Why? What's going on? Yeah. So, if we go back to the idea of a hierarchy again, individuals high up in that hierarchy have access to more mates. You have access to more potential partners. You have access to more resources. And individuals who are wanting access to those things want to keep getting up in that hierarchy, so are driven to kind of play more violent video games. Because once again, that gives you that feedback of where you stand within that social system. If you keep winning and you're doing really well, then you know you're or you perceive yourself as a better individual even if the is just in video games. It kind of reflects your self-perception of your own ability in other aspects. So, and what does it say that the people who uh most status seeking in the virtual world perceive a particular thing which actually leads to relatively few successes of status in the real world? Like it seems to me if if you are looking to be successful sociosexually, winning at Fortnite is not the most direct route to go down. So, it seems almost like this desire for status and esteem and prestige in the eyes of the opposite sex and and your own sex has been hijacked in a way which doesn't actually realize many of the gains that you should do. Is that fair? It is. It If we think about what you just said, you know, the virtual world and the real world, that line's blurring very, very quickly. You know, what is the virtual world now? What is the real world? Um and if we look to our evolutionary history, this virtual world never existed. So, our systems evolved in response to the real world. And just like you said, developers are able to kind of hijack that whole system. And we seem to not be able to tell the difference between how a win occurs in the virtual world and the real world. Those are both very satisfying kinds of things and allow us to kind of change our self-perception of ourselves in response to that win or loss. Oh, so I understand what you meant about the lines being blurred. Uh individuals who play these video games are struggling to distinguish between successes in the virtual world and successes in the real world. I wouldn't say that you're able to cash in status from being good at video games as effectively in the real world. Now, I would be interested to see if you looked at people who are who have more followers on social media platforms who post more frequently, who use items in their captions and in tweets and stuff more frequently, I would guess that you will find basically the same effect going on, but that is complete bro science. Well, if that's an interesting one as well, right? Because you're self-selecting for a a group of individuals who are doing really really well. They're not only status seeking, but they're doing really really well in that environment and are really high in that hierarchy. So, possibly, but it's it's hard to tease apart kind of what's going on. But, if we go back to just something you said just before that, I don't think necessarily that it's a concern that these virtual skills transfer into the real world. I don't think our minds kind of think in that kind of a way, even though there are some studies showing that performance in certain video games actually does translate into greater performance in the real world in a work context. Like, when you're playing games like SimCity and managing games, you actually seem to be much better at managing projects and and and doing work in a team in the real world. So, interestingly enough, some of those skills do translate. But, I don't necessarily think that someone who's playing Warzone a lot and they're killing it in that game and they step out and go, "Man, I'm just so incredible." They realize that those skills don't translate to anything real, but they still feel really good about themselves. And if we know about trying to gain friends and trying to gain mates, we know confidence is a really strong thing. And if that interaction online improves your confidence, your self-confidence, that is going to translate to some real-world kind of benefits. Do you have any evidence for that? There isn't much right now because this is a kind of a new way of thinking. And it just hasn't looked at that. I would be so fascinated to see if that works. So I'm I'm currently of the opinion that that the almost the opposite thing happens. So um it's my belief that screens, video games, and porn are sedating men out of their status-seeking, uh team-bonding, and reproductive fitness behavior. That they're given a titrated dose, right? Just a tiny tiny little amount that uncanny vulvas, as they're called by Diana Fleischman. Um and what this is doing is it's causing young male syndrome, which we should have seen given the amount of uh matelessness and sexlessness and loneliness that young men particularly are suffering with at the moment. That's the reason that young male syndrome hasn't kicked in. That men are being sedated out of these behaviors by this. But what you're suggesting, if this is true, is that confidence and status that's derived in the virtual world would cause people to uh believe that more readily in the real world. Now, what would be surprised The reason that that would be surprising to me is that we're seeing people retreat from real-world behaviors that would have been predicted had they have found success in the virtual world and it crossed over. More and more we're seeing people silo themselves off just into an online world that doesn't come back across. Now, this could be due to something that isn't just status hierarchies, you know, about. This could be the generalized addictive nature of these uh of these tools. It could be the comfort crisis or convenience, the fact that the couch is just way more comfortable. Um but yeah, the what's what's your thoughts on that? Male sedation hypothesis, all of this stuff I've just thrown at you. Yeah, those those ideas have been around and I listen to them a lot and they seem like really simple answers to me to a very very complex problem. I don't think it's that simple and I don't think it's any of one of those things that are causing individuals to kind of behave in that in that way. Um, and here, let me explain explain why. If first off, as a scientist, one thing I learned really early in my career is everything is really complex. Way too complex to actually simplify in these single or one or two or even three different kind of factors. Um, second, with you earlier we talked about this idea that individual individuals who are more interested in sex and finding partners are more driven to play violent video games because they're more driven for status, right? Interestingly, what else explains this behavior or what else is correlated with this behavior of playing violent video games if you're is your own self-perception of your own mate value. If you perceive yourself as a high-quality mate, you end up playing more violent video games. Then we started manipulating that. Could we actually change an individual's self-perception of themselves and what do they do afterwards? So, what we did is we took a bunch of individuals and we ended up letting them play different video games. Some were violent and some were non-violent and we looked at their performance in those games. Individuals in the non-violent games, they didn't change their self-perception of their own ability and performance and that didn't seem to affect their own self-perception of their mate value. But, individuals who performed really badly in the violent video game saw themselves as worse off. Less desirable. Exactly. They actually decreased their own self-perception of their mate value, which I think is fascinating that a video game can actually do that to somebody. And you didn't see this in non-violent video games? That's correct. It was mediated less? It it we didn't even see it. Wow. So, Yeah. to recap, violent video games are able to contribute to self-perceived mate value. Non-violent video games are not able to elicit the same effect. However, this could be How much of this could be a selection effect that the people who want to play video games are the type of people whose status and self-perception of mate value would be impacted by playing the Right. Okay. I I I understand. Absolutely. And and that and you can see how complex that can be. And then now it can If you take it to the next step, there are individuals who prefer certain styles of games. What happens when you match that style of game with that individual's personality? Do we see more of or less of that? So, you can see all All of a sudden things are stacking up to make things really, really complex. Yeah. But there's another little addition to the story. I have a paper that we're actually writing up. So, I'll give you a little bit uh uh kind of some uh some early news on on how things are looking on this. And something will probably be submitted very soon. What we did is we took a a few undergraduates, both men and women, uh at our university, and we asked them to come in and we told them, "We're working on a dating study. We're really interested to see what young people are looking for in potential partners. Um would you like to help us with the study?" And they inevitably do. Um and then we did this kind of a neat experiment where we had a a TV in front of them and we said, "We're going to allow you to talk to someone just virtually, cuz we're looking at online dating, and we want to see how you interact with that individual. And that individual is going to meet somebody else, and then they're going to choose a potential coffee date with one of you. So, at the end of the day, what we're doing is we're doing we're allowing individuals to compete for a potential mate, and they win or lose that opportunity. Right? So, with that individual that's on screen that they're talking to, that's actually a recording. So, it's never going to happen, they're never going to meet somebody, but that individual is attractive and fun and bubbly, and they want to end up dating that individual. Then, what we do is we provide them with an envelope that says yes or no that they ended up getting that coffee date. And we didn't know what result they received, so that was completely randomized for us. The fun thing comes to what we asked them to do after that. So, they were given that envelope, they opened it, and they were given that coffee date either they were not given that coffee date. And then, we asked them, "Uh thank you so much for being part of this study. If you don't mind, we just need to kind of finish things up, but we're actually starting a new study in a few weeks. Uh and this is actually going to be exploring about video games and what video games people like to play. Um we have six games here, and we're trying to figure out if if these are good games that we should show folks. Can you let us know which one you'd like to play, and then you have an opportunity to play it and test it out for us?" Three of those games were violent video games, and three of them were non-violent video games. And I have a feeling you know where this might be going. The individuals that ended up or men that ended up losing that coffee date were more likely to want to play a violent video game, while individuals that won that coffee date were more likely or less likely to play a violent video game. So, after that competitive mate loss, individuals shifted their preference of what they wanted to do. And our argument was they ended up wanting to The losers wanted to play more violent video games because it allows them that opportunity to regain that status that they ended up losing in that sexual interaction. So interesting, man. It's fun, isn't it? It's so much fun to be able to see how people interact in that kind of a system. And that's why I think video games are so powerful in a way that we can explore some really interesting questions. And I don't think they've been used in the best kinds of ways. I mean, let's say let's say that you managed to get a research um partnership with Fortnite or with Warzone. I know. And you would be able to um do things like have a front-facing camera detect microexpressions on people's faces. You'd be able to look at uh what's reaction What happens to reaction time? And then you could get some some, you know, chemists or some biology biology dude to come in and have a look at what the hormones do. How is reaction time mediated? What about eye pattern movement? Is there more lateral or up-down eye pattern movement? What does that suggest about someone's brain state? Yeah, I mean, we you know, you could get an awful lot um Absolutely. an awful lot of information. Just to round out the um video games discussion, when you gave people the opportunity of choosing these different games, and you're saying people who are more uh preoccupied, that they're more concerned with uh status, specifically mate seeking as one of those. Mhm. What is the personality trait that you think is driving that? Is it sociosexuality? Is it externalizing behavior? Is it extroversion? What is it? Uh to be honest, I'm not sure if there's a single trait. Um I don't think it maps to the big five that well. Also, I I think it varies in an individual's lifetime. Um you know, I think there's definitely feedback in in our in our own personal experiences that potentially influence those outcomes. That changes our personality, that changes our outcomes, that changes our likelihood to behave in certain ways. mechanism. Yeah. Yeah, so again, you know, I don't think it's that simple that we can just go ahead and say, you know, extroverted individuals are more likely to play these games, they're more likely to get that that hit of what they need, that self-perceived increase in mate value, you know, they see them higher in the hierarchy and they behave that way. So, if we hit those individuals, we get that better understanding of what's going on. I think it's a lot more complex. Um but I do think we can start using video games and that feedback individuals gain from video games to better understand why certain people continually are drawn to that and become addicted to video games as we know it. Okay, uh other question from earlier. You gave people the opportunity to choose between violent and non-violent video games. Mhm. Mhm. Have you got any suggestion or is there any evidence that suggests that people who are more preoccupied with status full stop play video games more? Not that you get a bucket of gamers and then gamers move within that. Does it make them more likely to play video games full stop? I I do think there is a status-seeking individual who are more driven to play violent video games. Because what we do end up seeing as well as a very very strong age effect. We know that um you know, our our desire for sex kind of decreases over time as we age. As that happens, we are less interested in gaining status because we just don't need it as much any longer because we're not trying to achieve those hierarchical kind of goals. So, I do strongly believe that individuals who are more status-seeking are going to end up wanting to play more violent video games. Uh and then as a result, you end up getting that feedback. So, there may actually be something in those individuals who do become addicted, our thinking is, and this is something that still needs to be tested, our thinking is that it's individuals who aren't getting that satisfaction with their own status that are constantly being driven to want to go play violent video games. And that is that bizarre feedback loop that keeps getting people in into violent video games um when they should stop. Isn't it strange that the cohort of people that we think about when we think about compulsive uh high hour violent video games users would be, you know, your mom's basement incel retreat from society guy. But these people it seems are more preoccupied with sex and status. They're more preoccupied with gaining prestige in the eyes of the people around them. And 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 uh of guys who spend an awful lot of time on the internet uh very very carefully nitpicking and breaking down what's happening within the dating market, uh why women perhaps don't care about them. I would guess if you were to look at some of the black pill and incel forums that a lot of those guys would be very heavy violent video game users. This is 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? This is a study I did a a while back and um uh with with a colleague Jeff Kuznekoff. All right. And if And if you give me a second to tell that story, I'd love to tell it. Um yeah. Jeff is Jeff did an incredible PhD um where he ended up playing about 500 games of Halo uh back in the day when it was really really popular. And I you know, I've told this story and everyone's like, "Oh man, I wish I could do that for a PhD." Uh and it was 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? Cuz 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 and a control. And what you end up doing is he ended up playing the game really really well cuz he was actually quite good at Halo at that time. Uh or he played it kind of haphazardly where he didn't try as 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. And this goes back to that whole sexist kind of perception. What's going on there? Why are men being aggressive towards women? I read this paper and I said, "Jeff, 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 your male and female voice treatments are getting the same number of positive comments 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 he would either be lackadaisical or successful. How did that mediate people's responses to the male and female voice? A little bit, but not nearly as much as the treatments. So, the 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. Right. Right. Right. Okay. Okay. Cool. So, that explained Uh but within that within that was there was there any difference for how he played? Very little. It almost nothing. Right. Cuz I would have thought, you know, let's say, just spitballing, I would have maybe presumed that um a very competent male player would have Yeah. caused some ire and jealousy. Mhm. But we also know that men's intersexual bonding is very heavily based around coalitional warfare. So, 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 And it's And it goes back to that whole conversation we had about a hierarchy. We want to know where we sit. Because where we 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 the top few positions, and it's so you have to tiptoe 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 that's it's also very stressful because you have to keep competing. We know that because we've seen that research done in a lot of primates, and it's it comes out really really nicely. So, when hierarchies are disrupted, it's actually bad for everybody, including alpha uh and all the males. Oh, so it's would it be bad for, let's say, uh chimp 15 to 20 to be fighting for status, chimp one to three uh as similarly affected even goes back up the chain as well? Absolutely. Because if you imagine those those top three males in that kind of a situation, they want to know who's first, and they're fighting aggressively. let's say that top three. Let's say that one to 15's locked in. And then the bottom the bottom end, let's say the pecking order is completely secure, but that there is there's some turbulence toward the bottom. Does 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 contact those contacts 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 competing, that 15 to 20 are still downstream. Ah, so let me give you Absolutely, because Yeah. You don't want to get in the way of an aggressive male. Understood. Let me give you this. So, um you'll be familiar and we'll get back to the the video thing in a second. I'm fine. You'll be familiar with that um famous graph that uh some uh manosphere creators use to explain uh hypergamy, and it 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 Volt, uh a bullying researcher that I explained to you about from the other week, what he bullying 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. So, if you can imagine the same sort of diagram that I'm talking about here with the one to 10, 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 uh larger the downstream uh implications are. So, let's say that uh 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 you'll definitely see that kind of an effect. You'll see that cascading kind of happen. But, it's also when you're getting back to that bullying comment comment that you made, those those few individuals on the top, they don't need to bully necess- 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 gain 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 and take be 14, and then 14 might be 13 and get the back on them. good. Okay, so video games. You find out that this guy has played 400 games. He's split it up into three buckets. One's female, one's male, one's no voice at all. And you've said, "Wow, this is fantastic." Did you look at who was giving you these comments? What what what How do you get involved in this study? So, Jeff said, "I'd love to, but you know, I'm 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, and you know, I think we could look into what's going on and and see who's behaving in that kind of way." So, he agreed, and he was super kind to share his data. We transcribed everything what everybody said. Um 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 cuz we love seeing our kill death ratio, right? Um 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. So, 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. They lots of positive comments. Men who didn't who didn't perform as well as Jeff. So, Jeff outperformed him 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. Because there's a hierarchy there. There's a chance that that could turn out really badly for you, right? And even if it's a video game and it's digitally and virtually online, you're not going to interact with this individual in the real world, but we'll still behave in that way because that's how our systems have been selected for to work. This is just a new environment that it'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 cuz you want to help those people up. So, that's what was happening when Jeff played as a male voice. It's completely different when you look at how Jeff played when he 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, and their kill to death ratio, and how aggressive they were. Individuals 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 man. Why? It goes back to exactly what she we were just talked 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 she's higher status than you are, she's also knocking you down the totem pole. 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. It'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 be very, 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 overachievement in education and employment. And the fact that we've basically flattened the playing field for or maybe even not or maybe even skewed it slightly toward women in that it's mostly knowledge work. It's a brain-based, not a brawn-based economy. Uh conscientiousness, you know, the ability to just sit in a seat and not have ADHD and all the rest of it uh it it is is an advantage. I wonder whether you're seeing an increase in male-to-female adversarial communication because women are now playing in the status 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 the company whatever. Uh you've been slotted down one. Generalized status anxiety, right? Is is the first thing. But the second part is hypergamy, which is if you can get that specific female herself and drag her down a little bit, perhaps there's a chance that she might date you. Because if there is too big of a disparity in mate 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 uh 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, hundred years, for example, we've seen a huge shift in what determines status. We've seen a huge shift in the traits that are associated with individuals performing well in in a in a certain environment. That's especially when you're talking about like you said, working in companies, uh you know, things that don't require physical strength and traits. If we look historic evolutionary speaking, if we look past, you know, tens of thousands of years, we know largely that men and women did have certain roles. But it's it's not even as important of what men did and what women did. Generally, there was a a female hierarchy and there was a male hierarchy. And individuals competed within that hierarchy. Correct. It was intersexual, not intersexual competition. That'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 has decided this is what men do and 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 able 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. So now all of a sudden men and women are competing for the same things. Um 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 the 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. It may be a little bit different. And like we said, it's the best way to make sure is by negging them, right? You You make them feel bad about themselves and you feel better and then it It you to gain status, it allows you to potentially a mating opportunities open up for you. But I think what needs to kind of happen now is a cultural shift. We have to start understanding that that world where those hierarchies were separate for 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, that those separate hierarchies are irrelevant. 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. Those 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 time. 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-perception of themselves. So, they are responding in a similar way to men in response to desire for status. So, we actually have less fewer differences between us than we think and we're really ready to admit. So, 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's better than you. And if you want to be better, then you just got to try harder. How much of that do you think is culture? I I I don't disagree. I don't disagree that it would be a good idea for status hierarchies to be able to be Mhm. uh 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 their way out of this. We can't reprogram men's status hierarchies, you know, this is very very this is back of the brain right? Mhm. Mhm. So, um I think I don't think that that would be the case, but yeah, how much of this do you think uh 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 and what's going on with it." Culture is part of us and it determines who we are. It also evolves over time. So, culture is changing. We are changing. Uh there is selection and evolution happening now as we speak. So, these are all these things are intertwined. And I and you 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. Like, there are rules that we've made in society where we said these things are unacceptable. And we've all decided in this kind of way, so we can't we shouldn't behave in those kind of unacceptable ways. I think, you know, as a society we have to start realizing that it's not losing to a woman, it's losing to a person. Um and status is no longer determined by simply competing intersexually. We now uh we've opened the playing field. And we've shifted how our culture works. That's shifted how selection functions. That's 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 in to mediate the really sort of negative pathological um manifestations of that behavior is good, but I I also, you know, I I sympathize with sympathize. I I I understand why guys who are um struggling within status and women are highly highly competitive. You study yourself, you know, even 50 years ago even 50 years ago you didn't have women Absolutely. How 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 for like properly for about 30 years. That's when they got to about parity, 25. So, you know, it's very very novel for the guys that are out there. Absolutely. Going back to the uh um language and and and the analysis that you did of that the successful males speaking to the females within the video game, were they more or less complimentary 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. Um be It's hard to tease that apart simply because we didn't get enough individuals repeat playing. So, we can't see how they behaved in both of those environments. There there wasn't enough sample size to see that. individual variation between players to be able to say, oh, this is the equivalent player across whatever. Right, okay, I understand. So, but you know, getting to that way of thinking that you're talking about I'm really really interested in what happens to those high status males when they're playing really well and they lose. How do they behave and they lose to a woman? How do they behave then? Well, 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 males. Or, they could be these high-status males that have lost a a woman at that stage and now see themselves sliding down that hierarchy. And they could become a more aggressive. And the only reason they didn't is because they happened to outcompete that woman. So, 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. And I 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. Uh the benevolent sexism is actually psychologically very healthy. Uh it's a predictor of men being more more effective protector providers, that they have a 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 you know, a an excessive denial of sex differences seems to be at the detriment of both sexes. And um the benevolent sexism thing, I'd be interested that um what about any other domains that you you know, you're so excited by this this video game study and it 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 medical science. Um and also in business. It's that same kind of response and that same kind of behavior. And And study's cited quite a lot in those fields. Um in in studies where they've actually looked at how individuals in high status in business or medicine uh behave towards women who are lower status. And and you see very very similar kinds of behavior. So, it does seem to kind of translate into 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 What was all of that? Yeah, so you know, another way of thinking about violent video games is they allow us to practice. Um they allow us to practice certain skills that could be beneficial in some kind of hierarchical encounter. You know, if we think about a violent video games, there's really low cost to playing. If you lose, it's no big deal. Um not like compared to a physical fight. If you lose in a physical fight, you're likely going to be damaged and hurt. Uh and that's a very very bad thing for you, right? But in 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 perform in that and see if you can up your status. At the same time, you know, 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. Like if I could, for example, get a better understanding of when I'm interacting with someone, how likely they are to fight back, how like when are they going to be most aggressive. And I can see those little signals in that potential opponent, that's to my advantage, right? Because then I know how far 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 kind of what we ended up And what the way we did that is maybe I should explain a little bit more there is, you know, we let them play a game a violent game or a non-violent game and then we put them through a 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 adept 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 such an extent that they're worse off at being able to tell when someone is angry at them. And you would think that's really, really bad because that could potentially lead to more aggression, which could potentially lead you to getting hurt. And getting hurt is never a good thing. Why? 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 becomes when it it's time to actually work out whether or not someone's going to attack them? I don't know. It's It's It's crazy, isn't it? Cuz you wouldn't expect that. But that's what we see happening. And the only thing that we can think of, because this this starts diving into the realm of physiology. What's going on in there in your system? What's changed? Is Are there testosterone spikes? Are we seeing some kind of a shift in how our body's functioning that's changing our ability to distinguish uh 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 and your study? Uh I love it. Let's do it. Could it Could it be Could it be something to do with a desensitizing to aggression? It may well be. You know, if we if we think of ourselves in society uh I was a good friend of mine um Rob 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 a some kind of a protest, for example. Um 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 your likelihood to do that? How about if there's a second or 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. And 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 and 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 is that mediated? Yeah, individuals who you know, play those violent video games did see themselves as tougher. And 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 a very similar study where we were told we 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 I'm 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, those opportunities to practice aggression and dominance in a virtual world is spilling over to real-world behaviors and our desire to kind of how we how we see our opponents. And that real world is then, you know, filtering back into the virtual world and shifting how we want what we want to do in that virtual world 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? Why would that be adaptive? If you think about the environments that we used to live in, you know, they're very different than than they we live in now. They were small local villages, communities. We knew everybody. Um 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 of a 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. You'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 um our interactions in the social environment uh 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. And 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 taken advantage of them. Going back to the uh combat thing that you were talking about earlier on, do beards provide an advantage during combat? I That is a always a fascinating thing because in the literature um there's been so many arguments for why beards exist. And you and I are both bearded men. And I would say we're I'm growing this beautiful handlebar guy at the moment. For 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. So, you know, I'm We look like we Both of us look like we I'll take it. I'll take it. But in the literature Yeah, in the literature it's 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, um to make you look like a more testosterone male. Uh and the the most interesting one that uh a colleague of mine found, Barnaby Dixon, was this idea that beards are really good because if you got hit in the face, beards could potentially uh act as a you know, just kind of support your face a little bit and maybe fist slides off and you don't get that hit as hard. In a way, they're insulating your face from that full-on hit that you would get. And if you think about that, if you've ever felt 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 the face, I'm going down. The best that you can hope for is mild irritation, like a rash on the knuckles of the person that's hit you. Yeah. But this is this is huge in our literature. There's lots of people talking about it and Barnaby's like, this isn't There's got to be a way to answer this question. So, we looked at a bunch of UFC fighters. And you if you notice UFC fighters change their facial hair all the time. Um sometimes they're bearded, sometimes they're not, sometimes they have a mustache, sometimes they have a goatee. They have all kinds of beard shapes. So, you can actually score their beard shapes um from, you know, one to five based on nothing to a mustache to a goatee to a full beard to a heavy beard, you know, score the 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. Kind of a war. So I know. So everyone out there if you're growing it your beard to make sure you're insulated from a a good hit, it's not going to work. mustache was my prophylactic against someone trying to assault me in the street actually. That was First off it was because I wanted to look like I the second thing was that I wanted to not get not get knocked out. So I I've definitely seen um some evidence that that suggests uh men who have beards are perceived as more masculine, perceived as more dominant, 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 uh greater brow ridge, for uh people that are taller, etc. etc. more muscle mass, uh shoulder to waist ratio. Um so even though beards may not provide any physical protection in a fight or in a contest which is already being pre-agreed that it's going to happen as a deterrent I imagine that it must be effective. And that's that's a very different thing again, right? And just like you said at the beginning of what you said, this it changes our self-perception. That is that seems to be a you know a recurring thing we keep coming back to and 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 fascinating 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 of perceiving others who are of similar traits gives us the ability to understand where we sit. And 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. Uh 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. If we still can't figure it out, only then do we actually get into a physical confrontation. So, basically, the uh the justification here is most of the weaponry that humans and every other animal has is used as a deterrent. Yeah. The 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. Um Absolutely. But, you have to develop that weaponry because if you don't, you're at a huge disadvantage. Precisely. Yeah, and it has to be a costly signal, right? It can't be something that's easily faked, or else That's exactly right. going to test it. Um Exactly. Yeah. 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 not even sure I can give you that. Okay. so, yeah. So, what do you mean by contest competition? You So, there's definitely differences between contest and competition and and competition. Is that Is that what you mean? Let me speak to you about this. David Buss. David Buss. Oh, yeah. Okay. Was who I spoke to about this. Okay, what was I talking to David Buss about? Uh 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. Mhm. Right. Okay. So, I think this is to do with um female mate choice looking at um Yeah. basically allowing allowing females to select guys off the top. Um and contest contest competition would be a different form of that selection. I see what you mean. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, sorry. Yeah. David Buss speaking about the masculinity thing. David Buss told me this story, this really funny story from when I think he was a grad student who stood in line at a a checkout 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 like 2006. And um they could he 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. Right. And that got him onto the men modulate their voice uh based on whether there are women around them. Um if you have a um 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. Uh what was the other one that he told me about? So, there was the vo- the lowering of the voice. Oh, that was the other thing that um 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. I am absolutely no absolutely. Yeah, precisely. So, I 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. Um So, there you know, 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 and it makes sense, right? If you're going to put a man and a woman the average man and average woman in a 100-m race, the man's going to end up beating the woman, and that's simply because of differences in musculature, differences in bone structure, um physiology, and all the underlying aspects. lot of psychology, right? You know, when you look at ball-throwing sports, like 3-year-olds have got seven times more throwing accuracy, male to female. You know, like you this you've been around for 3 years. This isn't socialized. You haven't hit puberty. Yeah, it's driven by androgens in the womb, but it's also driven by protein folding in the brain. And what is it Uh 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, there's And this is just I know that I've derailed the question I literally asked you a minute ago. Um this for me is the most compelling 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 on 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 for throwing. 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. What are they actually good at? And um David Geary, you familiar with David? Yes, yes. Yeah, so David did this great study or he he at least told me about a great study um where some uh 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 this is that this is that spatial rotation thing again, but it was it mediated for catching, and um the the males were able to apparently dodge the tennis whatever the basketballs or something relatively easily, and uh the female students less so. Uh apparently it's quite an old quite an old study. I imagine that you wouldn't get away with firing tennis balls at your I was going to say the same thing. I couldn't imagine getting the ethics to be able to do a study like that anymore. But yeah, my my point being, um you know, and this is for every person that gets into a discussion about, you know, should we have like uh M to F uh trans athletes in sport, uh 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 uh 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. Local uh memorization uh cues of uh 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 man. So, I think, you know, all of that stuff makes sense, but that's my That's my current sort of uh contribution to to that discussion. Now, when someone says, "Okay, so what 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 I I Yes. 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 gives them tons of pleasure. And I'm saying number of people are saying, "Well, you know, you can't do it that way, but you also can't stay in the one that you're in." That's That's challenging. However, I I think that there is sufficient evidence to suggest like let's let's treat um allowing them to go into uh whichever uh gender category they now identify as with a good bit of caution. Yeah, there is. And if you if we look at with when we often think about men and women, we think about them like this, right? Um This is the 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 mean. If we're talking about means, yes, men and women are different. But if we look at those distributions, they overlap quite dramatically. So, even if we're talking about things like memory or competitive ability and we're thinking about trans sports, where is this individual that's transitioning from F to M or M to F? Where do they sit in that distribution? They may already sit in more of a male distribution in certain traits uh if they're uh if they're transitioning from F to M. Mhm. They or vice versa. Right? We do know that both men and women demonstrate traits of the opposite sex. And then these are huge spectrums. So, One One problems that you have within sports though, I think is that a lot of the not only extremes but also the key drivers we're talking about hand grip strength does no crossover. Upper body strength does huge crossover. It's two separate distributions. And I think that the same thing goes broadly for for like some of the psychological, especially when you roll them out into suites. You know, if you take an individual trait, conscientiousness, okay, but 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 way or that way. And then let's roll this on top and let's roll that on top. Yeah. Okay. Okay. So, I'm doing you you you 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, you can imagine that individuals when they're younger, they're great. You know, you've got a lot of energy, you've got a lot of strength, you haven't senesced as much. So, you just haven't aged as much. So, your body just isn't breaking down as much. And um what you find is that's generally the case in in men 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. Um but they hit a peak and then they start senescing and start performing more poorly. Which is what you'd 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 harem any longer. You know, red deer and elephant seals are really great examples of that. You're the king at some point where you have all the ladies and then after that there's just somebody who outcompetes 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, so it's hard to tell if if we start seeing the same amount of data uh as in the NBA, could we see those differences? And secondarily, you know, women it the WNBA doesn't have as many teams. That means that women aren't playing as many games, so their bodies aren't on under as much stress potentially because they're not playing as many games and traveling as much, so maybe they we don't end up seeing that peak because women aren't pushed to their limits like men are in these really uh these 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 senesce, and then women generally don't. And they can keep performing for much longer until they retire and choose to stop playing. Without trying to account for some of the ways structurally that this could be explained away, why? What is your hypothesis for that? Yeah. Testosterone We know testosterone is damaging. Um 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 our 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, in that necessary way. Women don't have as much testosterone as a consequence, maybe things aren't breaking down as quickly or as strongly for women, so we don't see that happening in 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. Mhm. What's the adaptive reason? Mhm. Well, you know, not everything has to be adaptive. You know, the reality is though I'm I'm going to believe I'm going to put forward a a theory that I think that this is, but I'll I'll let you Okay. So, we we know that com- men want to be in the hierarchy. If there's an advantage to having testosterone to ensure that you're higher in the hierarchy, that's going to be selected for. We know that once if we look at the average, you know, lifespan of a male, that's increased a lot over time. We're a lot older now and we 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 cuz I'm older, but anyway, uh hitting 40 and then we start senescing. 10,000 years ago, we weren't living to 40. Right. So, there was no benefit to be able to select for late life benefits. As a consequence, that selection wouldn't 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 cuz you're either going to be dead and you're definitely not going to be reproducing and you're definitely going to be out-competed by somebody else. So, it's irrelevant. You're essentially dead at that point, reproductively speaking, because you're not going to get a a to mate 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. And as a consequence, we senesce 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've have spoiled my theory cuz that's what I was going to say. Yeah, I I it just seems it seems to make sense. The burn bright, accumulate status Right. print loads as much as possible, you know, 17, 18, 19 years old, you're some prehistoric killer, everybody thinks you're the you're the run around, impregnate, hope to stick about for, you know, 10, 12 years so that you can do a bit of pair bonding and protect the the one woman that you've got and your three kids or whatever, and then they'll be fine, you know? Yeah. They'll they'll be they'll be fine. So, whereas for women, you know, grandmother hypothesis, why menopause exists, Yeah. um women and also women on average live longer than men. Yeah. now, women live on average live longer than men. Absolutely. Um Absolutely. And this is this is not well, it'll be contributed to, but the risky behavior thing is only going to be a a partial contributor to this. It's just that women's longevity seems to be more effective than than men's. So, yeah, I think um that's an interesting one. That's an interesting way to to think about uh why men sort of burn burn everything a little bit brighter and a little bit quicker. Um and yeah, you know, downstream from that you're going to have some physiological impacts. Yes. Let's say that um you have a hundred units across your lifetime of athletic ability to deploy. Men are able to squeeze more of that out. Relatively, their their ceiling from which they can draw uh 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 you know, do the reproduction thing. But the moms need to stick and they need to then become grandmothers and they need to become aunties and they need to become sisters and and so on. Um 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? Weren't 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 Scholar 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're dude, look, face it. Your your H index is going up is going up through the roof. Um I think the the other one that I saw seemed an awful lot like who's that Who's that Australian researcher, the blonde lady that you did your you've done Candace Blake? Candace Blake, thank god. Dude, I've had so many female Eve psych researchers on the show over the last 12 months. I basically everybody is just blended into one very interesting episode. Um so, Candace did some interesting stuff that looked at how economic inequality predicted sexual objectification, like the posting of sex and selfies. And you did something that looked at national income inequality predicting women's preference for masculinized faces. Yes. What What What's that? Why is it better than health? Explain that to me. Yeah, that that was an interesting study that I was part of. Um and I was lucky to be part of it. So, a paper came out and said on a global kind of scale, they looked at you know, can we start looking at in mass how masculine men look and can we correlate that to the amount of disease within that social environment. And the idea here is that individuals have um 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 uh creating testosterone and creating large jawlines 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. Cuz and then wow, you must be a high-quality male because you can do all those things. So you must have really, really great genes. And that's a a a wonderful idea and that's That idea has lived in the non-human animal 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. Um and those proximate explanations explain things much better than these underlying genetic potential explanations. Explain that. Yeah, so if you think about if you For example, if there are you and I and a bunch of other males uh in an environment we're competing for females and we're we have um big jaws uh and traits that that Good mustaches. Good mustaches, thank you very much, and beards, thank you. I appreciate that. Um then those are all signals to potential mates. And if we're in an environment and 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 it's only 50% of those genes. They may not be the right genes because of how, you know, uh 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 there. There's no doubt to that. But, if you and I have a lot of money, and we have a provide a safe environment, and, you know, 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 gene- 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 fact that in those environments that have a lot of disease around, um 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. So, 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 now without having to reproduce. And that's a stronger benefit that uh women can gain immediately. And that's why that has such a stronger effect. That's fascinating, man. Very, very interesting. stuff. But, I it's it's the it's the inequality thing. Yeah. That's like I I Am I missing something there? No, I don't 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. In 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. Uh the risks are greater. And that's part of the environment. to do with lack of development, right? It's to do with inequality specifically, or at least that's what it that's what it says here. So, let me Yes. I'm going to put my my bro science hat on again. Yeah, yeah, go for it. Uh and this is from Candace Blake's stuff. And what she said, her justification was um in areas that have high income inequality, uh women post more sexy selfies. They do more sexual objectification, blah blah blah. Mhm. Mhm. Her 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. Yes. it gives you is this explanation or or this example of I don't want to go there. I can 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. Uh and everything will be great. So, this a study that looks at income inequality predicting women's preference for masculinized 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 cuz 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. And I think it's both the motivation to run away from something you want and the desire to run towards something that would be desirable. Uh run away from something that you don't want, sorry, and run towards something that's desirable. Yep. Absolutely. You're right. It is the inequality. And that inequality is is often um it's tied very, very strongly to sex. Uh 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 uh around the world. And yes, I would agree that in that environment where there are more risks, uh there are likely more gender inequality and women will behave in a way that maximizes their likelihood for fitness. So, I'm wondering I'm 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. YEAH. NOW IT makes all of the sense. Yeah. I right, I throw my entire the last 5 minutes of what I've just spoken about No, no, it helped us get to this point. So, don't throw that away at all. Right. Yeah, we needed No, we Well, of course. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Of course it would be that if you as a woman are less capable of earning your own way, you are more reliant on the man. The masculinized face of the man is a predictor of protector, provider. Therefore, find the Exactly. Right. Fine. I mean, that's that's that's actually relatively straightforward. It it it is, but it's it's really interesting. And it it's great that you say it's relatively straightforward, which is 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 want 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. Well, you say direct, but what you're doing is you're looking at someone's face and presuming from their face how much money they earn. So, I mean it's it's like relatively direct compared to Good Genes 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. We we see the actual simulation. Look, Mike, let's bring this one home, mate. This has been really really fantastic. Uh I I fascinating you do. Good. Where should people go if they want to keep up to date with the things that you do? Where should they head on the internet? Well, you know, we're I'm doing some fun stuff now. Um if I can, I'd I'd like to mention that I started a company a few years ago and the company's actually gotten a little bit larger. It's called Arludo and we create games that help people explore more about the natural world. And we've created games that help people understand how individuals behave towards one another. So, these are all little mobile games and apps that individuals can download, teachers can use to teach in class, and we can collect data really really quickly. The key is it allows students to do the stuff that we just talked about over the last hour or so and you can start exploring data, start understanding the human world a little bit better, start to understand our own brains and our own minds a lot better cuz I think what needs to change, like we talked about a little bit, is our is you know, our environment's changed so dramatically over the last 100 years that our culture our culture has as well and that intersection between those two things uh is still coming to a head so we can better understand how we should kind of be behaving in society and towards one another. And 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. Cuz some of the stuff that you talked about about Candace's research and and our research and what I think is most fascinating is all this stuff is happening automatically. It's not like in Candace's study, for example, that girls are thinking, "Well, I know that I'm in a really kind of lower economic area and 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 you know, 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? Yeah, check out the website arludo.com and all our games are free to download and you can play them and uh yeah, get in touch with me there and I I'd love to help teachers teach the next generation of kids to better understand themselves and and the world around them. Hell yeah. Mike, I appreciate you. Thank you. Uh absolute pleasure. Thank you so much, Chris. I had an awesome time. What's happening, people? Thank you very much for tuning in. If you enjoyed that episode, then press here for a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last few weeks and don't forget to subscribe. Peace.