Why Modern Life Doesn't Make Us Happy, and How to Fix It with Dr. William von Hippel
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Hello and welcome to Being Well, I'm Forrest Hansen. Today we're exploring a fascinating and kind of frustrating question. The average person today, especially in the developed world, has a life that is, by any objective measure, better than almost any human who has ever lived. We live much longer, safer, more comfortable lives, with more access to just about everything.

But subjectively, that's often not how people feel. Many people feel lonelier, more anxious, and less fulfilled than ever. So what's going on here? To help us answer that question, I'm joined by evolutionary psychologist and longtime professor at the University of Queensland, Dr. William von Hippel. Bill studies how the minds we evolved under very different conditions function in our modern world, and he's the author of more than 150 publications, including his books The Social Leap and most recently The Social Paradox.

The Social Paradox is a very thought-provoking book. It's been living on my bedside table for the last couple of weeks, and I'm really looking forward to talking with him about it. So Bill, how are you doing today? I'm doing well. Thanks for having me.

Digging into your work and just the material related to the book has really made me think a lot, maybe reevaluate some things that I thought about why we are the way that we are. And I wanted to start just with the paradox that's kind of at the heart of the book. Why is it that life satisfaction just has not increased in the same way that, say, lifespan has? Yeah, that's a great question. And it's the same one that I wrestled with in writing the book. In my own case, I came across this question...

out of this feeling of superiority to a friend of mine. I was visiting this, an old childhood friend who's this Richie Rich type character who's made a gazillion dollars and he's living in this crazy fancy house with his cook over there and the maid over there. And I was like, Steve, man, your life is over the top. And

And his immediate response was, yeah, but I'm not any happier. I mean, I've got all these problems. A cook can't get along with a maid. And he went through this list of crazy first world problems. And I admit that at the time I felt super superior to him. I remember thinking, you know, if that were me, if I had this kind of cash, I would be super happy. I wouldn't be unable to appreciate the situation that I'm in. Every day I would wake up to this beautiful life and think, God, how good do I have it? And then...

After feeling so superior to my old friend, I'm reading Frank Marlowe's wonderful book on the Hadza, which is describing one of the last world remaining groups of hunter-gatherers who actually live in East Africa where humanity evolved. So they're very interesting and important group. And

As I'm reading this book, I suddenly realized that I'm just like Steve. I'm a multimillionaire compared to these people. And yet, if anything, I'm not only not happier than they are, they're happier than I am. And so that sent me down this rabbit hole of trying to figure out how could that possibly be the people who have no

savings for tomorrow, people who live in a pre-medical world so they bury almost half their children, people who have none of the wild forms of entertainment we have, who not once in the history of their lives has anyone asked them, what do you want to do for a living because there's only one choice? All that differs between them and us, and yet they're probably happier than we are. And then the question, of course, is why? And it turns out, I believe that the answer is a rather complicated one tied to our two most basic needs.

So those are autonomy and connection. You talk about them a lot in the book. It probably makes sense to start just by diving into it a little bit. We split apart from our chimpanzee cousins about 6 million years ago. And basically we left the rainforest and moved to the savanna. In truth, the rainforest left us because it dried out on the east side of the Rift Valley. So we had no choice but to leave the trees and try to make a living on the savanna. And if you look at modern chimps, which is

probably about what we looked like then, they're not well adapted to life on the ground. They're easy prey to a lot of animals that are not a threat to them at all when they're in the trees. And of course, once you move to the savannah, there's new predators like lions that are irrelevant to the lives of chimpanzees.

So our ancestors would have suddenly faced this incredible evolutionary pressure cooker where the chances of them surviving are really low, but somehow they did. And what the data suggests is that the way that they did so was by connecting with one another, by forming much tighter bonds than chimpanzees ever form, and using those tight bonds to protect themselves, protect each other, look out for predators, and eventually rise to the top of the food chain.

Now, there's lots of evidence for that tight connection that we now have, that cooperativeness that's in our nature, but not in chimpanzees. But my favorite evidence is actually the whites of our eyes. If you look at a chimpanzee's eyes, they're all brown.

Now chimpanzees are very clever and they can tell where other chimps are looking, but then they disguise that information by making it difficult to see where the eyes have been directed. Whereas our eyes, we've done the opposite. We've evolved away from them with these whites glare to our eyes so that when I look lower left, you can instantly see that from across the room. And what that's telling you is that I'm advertising to you, a fellow member of my group, what's caught my attention. And what that means is that if it's a threat,

If I want you to know, therefore, I'm advertising it to you. Therefore, you're probably going to help me deal with it. And if it's an opportunity, you'll probably help me secure it.

And for a chimpanzee, what that tells you is if it's a threat, the other chimps are probably going to run away and say, let them eat him. And if it's an opportunity, they're probably going to compete for it. And so we've got this fundamental cooperativeness in us that's baked into our anatomy as well as our psychology. And that's the first and most important need that we developed when we left the trees. We're just way more cooperative than they are. The second one, as you say, is autonomy. And that's

Our desire for self-governance, our desire to run our own show. Now, if we were dung beetles, we don't need a sense of autonomy because there's only one way to make a living as a dung beetle. Roll as big of a ball of poo as you can and you're going to be a success. But humans have lots of routes to success. And so, you know, imagine you and I are in the same group and I decide I want to be the best hunter. And so you and I go hunting together. Oh, Forrest got the giraffe again and I got nothing. All right. Eventually I realized I'm just not going to be the best hunter. Forrest is better than I am.

So I say, all right, well, maybe I can be the best arrow maker. And there's lots of options I could have taken, but I kind of enjoyed whittling arrows by the fire. And my sense of autonomy will allow me to choose the area where I think I have the best prospects, where I enjoy it so I could dedicate the time and energy to become skilled at it, and then try to develop myself in that way. And so these are our two most fundamental needs. Now, there's an irony there. Evolution played a dirty trick on us because these needs are at loggerheads with each other.

If I want to be a good connection partner, I have to set aside my own immediate goals to cooperate with you to come to some kind of compromise if our needs aren't the same. But if I want to be autonomous and self-governed, I've got to kind of ignore that you want to go south and I want to go north. I have to ignore your suggestion and go my own way.

And so happiness is really brought about by a balance between those two things. And what I think is happening with the question you asked is that we've lost this ancestral balance, that we no longer balance the autonomy connection the way we should. We're way skewed toward autonomy in a form of what's what is called an evolutionary mismatch. And I'm happy to dive into that if you'd like.

I mean, there's already so much in this. And because I find it extremely interesting, I kind of want to go point by point here with you in part to improve my own understanding of it. One of the core ideas that you argue in the book is that there's a kind of inherent trade-off between connection and autonomy, if I'm understanding it correctly. But it's kind of like a Likert scale. There's minus seven on one end, there's plus seven on the other. If you're moving toward autonomy, you're moving away from connection or from intimacy. Use your word of choice.

And I want to kind of start by interrogating that a little bit. Is that really true? Is there like an inherent trade-off here, or is it possible for somebody to be both very autonomous and very connected?

Look, if you get lucky and you happen to have all your good friends share all of your interests and your romantic partner shares your interests, you can satisfy both needs 100% all the time. But it's super rare that you're going to get that lucky. Your friends are the people that you find compatible in important ways having to do with values and things like that. But they're not necessarily the people who also like to climb or play tennis or play chess or whatever it is that really entertains you.

And so whenever you and your friends or you and your spouse aren't in complete agreement about the way you want to go, that conflict is going to emerge.

The upshot of this is that the situation is that most of the time for most of us, we feel some sense of conflict between autonomy and connection. If we want to be a good friend, we have to put aside what we really want to do and compromise with them. And if we want to pursue what we really want, we can't be as good of a friend because our buddy wants to go out drinking or study together and we need to work on our arrow making or whatever the case might be. And by the way, just as a side note, a tiny tidbit here,

When I used to teach at Ohio State, I was colleagues with a woman named Patti Pullman. Her father is Renzis Lickert. So it's actually the Lickert scale and not the Lickert scale. Oh man, there you go. I've always heard it say Lickert scale, the Lickert scale. Okay. She corrected me when I said that to her 30 years ago. And all those people are wrong. And she told me that and I was like, you've got to be kidding me. Your dad is Renzis Lickert?

And I've been calling it Likert all this time. Man, the things that you don't know that you're going to learn during one of these conversations. Well, all right, I will do my best to update that in my brain. It's going to take a minute for that one to stick. But I think that you are overall probably right here. You know, like in most cases, most of the time, if we're becoming more autonomous, we're becoming less connected.

As somebody who has a real interest in psychology and particularly in therapy, I'm not a therapist, but my partner's a therapist, my dad's a therapist. I've been in therapy world for a while. There are so many examples, and it really stuck out to me reading the book, of people landing in more secure forms of relationship with other people, like somebody who has a history of relationship instability, and they finally landed that more connected, more emotionally safe relationship with

and that relationship then becomes a secure base for them to pursue different forms of autonomy, to find out what they really care about, to pursue the things that they like. But that just really stood out to me as an example of a time when maybe autonomy and connection aren't quite so opposed to each other. What do you think about that? Look, that's a great example. In fact, it resonates with DC and Ryan in their enormously influential self-determination theory argue that that's what a secure relationship does, is serves as a basis to allow you to pursue your autonomy.

And so there are cases where relationships can enhance autonomy because maybe I've always felt a little bit nervous. I've got some idea for a new soda that I want to market, but I'm afraid to take a dive. And I'm like, go for it. I'm here for you. I'll happily talk to you all through it. You feel like you have a bigger safety net. And maybe even financial. She says to me, I've got a perfectly good job. I'm a nurse at the hospital. We can go a year without you making the set. Give it a try. It's your life dream, right?

And so other humans can absolutely help you pursue autonomous goals. But in general, as a rule, once you enter relationships, you often have to set aside your self-governance goals, what you really want to do in a moment in order just to coordinate your life with your relationship partner. And of course, once you try to be more autonomous, you then sometimes have to sacrifice relationship goals. So by all means, there's exceptions to the rule where

relationship partners can help you enhance your autonomy in ways you might not have ever done otherwise. But on average, the mere fact that you entered a relationship means you have to dampen your autonomy to some degree and vice versa. Yeah. And I think more broadly, socially, you're totally right. Particularly Western industrialized societies, there's been a massive movement toward, I get to identify what I feel like I'm good at. And I'm going to kind of pursue that often over...

almost any other goal, not to the exclusion of everything else, but that's going to be my primary goal. Would you mind kind of laying out just some of the factors that have pushed us increasingly in that autonomous direction? Sure. And so remember earlier, I referred to this as an evolutionary mismatch. Now, the bottom line is that

It used to be the case, if you look at ancestral life by looking at hunter-gatherers, that opportunities for autonomy in principle are everywhere, but in reality are really rare. So hunter-gatherers tend to live in very egalitarian societies, particularly immediate return hunter-gatherers like our ancestors were, who are not horticulturalists, who can't store food, who eat today what they kill today. Well, those

People who live that life are very egalitarian. They make decisions, let's break camp, let's go north or let's go south. They discuss it and then they do what they want. And often groups go in different directions. So they're called fission fusion groups. They split apart, they come back together. And so in principle, you've got enormous opportunity for autonomy. But in reality, you have to get other people to do what you want to do because it's unsafe to do it alone.

The irony of autonomy is it's actually in service of connection. If I want to develop my skills as an arrow maker, it's to be more valuable to my group. And so really the bottom line is connection is what's really driving the bus here. And so what happened, I believe, is that for ancestors, whenever they got a chance for autonomy, they jumped at it.

Now, let's fast forward to today. Well, you know, I don't need anybody, especially if I'm wealthy. So many opportunities for autonomy. Yeah. Yeah. They're everywhere. Yeah. So if I'm wealthy and you live next door and I run out of coffee beans, I could go borrow some from you, but I could drone them in from Amazon and they'll be on my desk and I don't even need to bother you. And I don't mind bothering you. In fact, I probably like to bother you, but I don't necessarily want you to bother me when I'm busy and doing my own thing. And so...

As I get wealthier, I start to need other people less and less until eventually I could live my entire life on the internet and be perfectly physically safe and well looked after, even if I never talked to anybody. So there's technology and wealth.

Education does the same thing. The more I get an education, the more I can do these kinds of intellectual jobs where I might even be a remote worker. I never even need to go into the office. So again, I can disconnect from others. City living. People have been moving to the cities for, well, started in earnest about 150 years ago.

humanity is moving in mass to cities because of all the opportunities they provide compared to living in the country. But again, cities disconnect us in a weird way. Despite we might have a thousand people in our apartment building, we hardly know any. Whereas if you live in a rural area, if you ask people, do you know someone you would trust with their house keys? They're more likely to say yes, even though their nearest neighbor's 500 meters down the road compared to somebody whose nearest neighbor's on the other side of the wall. And so all the kinds of

aspects of modern life, technology, wealth, education, urban living, have all pushed us toward autonomy and have all severed our relationships.

As a kind of counterpoint to this, there are plenty of modern societies that are pretty connected, pretty collective in terms of their orientation. I'm thinking particularly of countries like Japan, very much a collectivist culture. This is a country that also has a notoriously high rate of suicide and depression, hikikomori, people who close the door on their room and essentially never come out again. If we need more connection in order to be happier, why aren't they happier? Yeah, that's a great question. So there's a

One of the big ways you can divide the world is into collectivism and individualism. And collectivism is an orientation that's around roles and responsibilities, and individualism is an orientation around rights and opportunities. And so here in Australia where I live now, in the United States, Western Europe, they're very individualistic cultures.

Interestingly, the whole world is moving toward individualism as it gets wealthier. And that makes sense because collectivism is a burden. I've got lots of roles and responsibilities that I have to follow through on. And so as I get more and more money and I don't need my neighbors as much, I tend to cut them off. Now,

Collectivism has a lot of positive qualities because I do tend to form bonds with people mostly admittedly in my in-group. They tend to have pretty sharp group boundaries, but I tend to form those bonds and see my roles and responsibilities. However, there's lots of costs to collectivism, which is part of the reason why people move away from it. Self-criticism and criticism from others are much higher in collectivist cultures because everyone's roles and responsibilities are paramount.

And so if you're not meeting your responsibilities, it's my right and actually responsibility to point it out to you because the origins of such cultures tend to be very agricultural or even going way back where we're hunting together and we're hunter-gatherers and we need each other's help. And so if I'm a hunter-gatherer and you're doing a poor job making arrows, I have to say to you, Forrest,

your arrows are unusable, you need to improve. And if you're an agriculturalist, I say, Forrest, you're not doing a good job with the irrigation system. None of the water is getting to my property. And so these cultures have over time become cultures, unfortunately, where criticism is much more rife than in individual cultures and where self-criticism is much more rife. Because if you're going to criticize me for doing a poor job with my irrigation, I'd better think of it before you come to me so that I can forestall that ever occurring.

And so if you look at the psychology of collectives cultures, they are cultures where they kind of go opposite what CBT would tell you to do. You maximize the things you've done wrong. You become very self-critical about those things. Now, in principle, that's all fine if we're all living these close interconnected lives. But Japan is also a very rich culture where, as you say, I can go in my room, close my door and never encounter anybody.

So now I've got the negatives of a collectivist culture, all the self-criticism and roles and responsibilities without the positives of the daily connections that would have come with it if we were not so wealthy now. Gotcha. So it's a collectivist culture, but that doesn't mean that it's a well and healthily connected culture. And you're essentially drawing a distinction between those two things. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And another factor is essentially how we signal value to other people.

Would you draw a distinction in the book between competence and warmth? That I think is pretty relevant here.

So there really are two types of people in our world that we signal to all the time. Potential mates, which is super important. You know, reproduction is the currency of evolution. If you don't reproduce, you could be a wonderful individual, but evolution doesn't care about you anymore. And coalition partners. Nobody is tough on their own. What makes human beings, you know, apex predators is working well with others. And so when you're signaling to other people that you'd be a good coalition partner or a good mate, competence and worth are super important.

Now, we tend to focus on competence more than warmth. But what we forget is actually that warmth in the end is more important.

It's even more important in live or die situations. And so if you look at hunter-gatherers, for example, when they go out on the hunt for the day, they always choose partners who have the minimal level of competence as a hunter. But if they have a choice between the best hunter in the group who's kind of cold and not very friendly and the next couple hunters down who's actually warmer and more generous, they go with the warm and generous every time. Because that cold...

highly competent person is not necessarily going to share with you in a very good way. They're not necessarily going to help you when you need their help, but the warm, friendly person always will. And so warmth trumps competence in the final analysis every time with rare exceptions. You get somebody who's cold as, but incredibly competent, can do something nobody else can, fine. You're going to put up with them and ask them to join your team, your squad, whatever. But that requires an extraordinary level of ability before you'll sacrifice warmth in that kind of context.

So socially, there's this huge value on warmth, but what we're kind of selecting for a lot of the time is competence, particularly in the kind of societies that we've created today around the value of signaling how influential you are, how powerful you are. It's all the things that you were talking about in that initial story where this was clearly a highly competent person, and they had really gone after that and achieved a remarkable level of success, but the ultimate results of that were not quite what they were looking for.

Yeah. And the problem is, I think this is what I call sad success stories. I think that people who pursue competence and forget that that's a goal, that's just an intermediary goal. That's a goal in order to facilitate connection. And so people who pursue competence and competence success becomes its own goal. I think they're the ones who are what I call sad success stories because they end up not using their competence to strengthen their connections.

but they end up using their competence to replace connections. Their connections end up being shallow, few and far between. And so they have these wonderful material successes, but then who do they share them with? Now, I'm not saying that that's the case for everyone who's successful. Far from it. Many successful people do the exact right thing and then pivot and use their success to spend more time with their family, spend more time with their friends, do the things that are fun. But many don't.

Many people who are huge success stories get caught in that race for success. If you'd ask them when they first started, what will be enough? Let's put it in monetary terms. The person said, "Oh, I just need to make my first million dollars." Then you come to them when they made their first million and say, "Hey, you said that would be enough time to spend time with your family,

a lot of them are going to go, no, no, no, no, I was wrong. It's the first $10 million. Look at all the things I can't have with just a million bucks, right? And so the problem is we can get caught in that race and we can lose sight of what the purpose of competence actually is, what the purpose of autonomy is in the first place, which is strengthening our connections. We'll be right back to the show in just a moment.

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Now, back to the show.

So to maybe summarize some of what you've said here already, Bill, and then I want to ask you about evolutionary psychology in general. Sure. We've got a brain that is built for a pretty specific set of circumstances. And one of the key points that you make in the book that really made me think, and it gets to how we think about things using a lens of evolutionary psychology, is that autonomy and connection have these adaptive trade-offs for people.

they're kind of different survival strategies. Connection does some things for us, but it also has some problems, like you were mentioning. If every member of the group is really invested in what you're up to on a day-to-day basis, that can start to get kind of overbearing over time. Another story you tell during the book is

people eat what they collect immediately after collecting it or eat what they have killed immediately after killing it, in part because they're concerned that they're going to have to share everything that they have with everybody else. And if you don't want to share it, you just kind of consume it, right? So there are these problems that kind of exist all over the place either way. And historically, we valued connection because that's what kept people alive. But as time has gone on, we're pursuing more and more autonomy, in part because we're becoming wealthier.

Problem is, connection's kind of a primary need. Autonomy's more in the service of connection. So we've become really unbalanced here one way or the other. And that's kind of your explanation for why people are experiencing more anxiety, dissatisfaction, and so on. In what I've said so far, is there anything that I'm leaving out? Anything that you want to reinforce about that?

No, I think you've hit the nail on the head. And the only thing I would add is that the reason we've gone down this road is that we evolved to pursue autonomy when we could because it was so rare and because connection needs were guaranteed. And so autonomy is a little bit like fat, salt, and sugar, where we, in the past, they were so rare that you just ate them whenever you could, even if you weren't hungry. And now that's a huge problem because you've got a whole ton of it in your pantry.

And so whereas we used to be sort of lean and barely surviving, now we have the opposite problem of overeating and obesity crisis, right? And we have an autonomy crisis in the same exact way.

So I want to now talk a little bit about why you feel like this is the case and what's the evidence for these different ideas. So evolutionary psychology, I think, is one of those fields where people have a lot of misunderstandings about it. Is it fair to start by saying that one of the big goals of evolutionary psychology is to try to explain why we are the way that we are? And how would you put a finer point on that?

Yeah, I think evolutionary psychology has a different set of questions that it starts with. And so in other branches of psychology, we might say things like, well, it makes you happy to get dinner with your friends. And that's our starting point. And so if it makes you happy to get dinner with your friends, let's look at things that make you happier or less happy or why you don't have dinner with your friends. And evolutionary psychologists ask, well, why does it make you happy to get dinner with your friends?

And so you have a different set of starting points because what you want to know is, well, what made our ancestors survive and reproduce? And if something was instrumental in helping them survive or helping them reproduce, it's probably something that's tightly tied to our motivational system. And the reason for that is that evolution did not work by getting you to figure out to do what's in your genes best interests. And the classic example for that is we don't have an evolved desire to have children.

which is the most important thing in our genes interest to have children rather we have an evolved desire to have sex so we want sex rather than wanting children but why don't we want children because our ancestors had no idea how to produce them so it would have done them no good to have this overwhelming desire to have them because they didn't know what was involved in creating them now of course we know very well scientifically what's involved but

Evolution works by different means. If it makes you want to have sex, well, then you're going to create children because there's no birth control. And if it makes you nurture to the children who come along by selecting people who have an evolved affinity for baby faces and feel a need to protect them and stuff like that, those people who looked at that baby face and go, oh, ugly, I'm leaving that in the rocks, that would have happened. But they're not our ancestors because they didn't have babies who made it. Right.

Evolution shaped us by those who are successful having motivations that are in their genes' best interest. And so what we want to understand is evolution and psychology is, all right, what are those motivations? And then ideally, you don't want to just explain things that we already know are true. You want to say, well, what else might I be able to predict from that?

And so, for example, in this book, what I kept doing is I'd, whenever I could find evidence for a point, I just would cite that evidence. I'd talk about research that's already been done. But often, nobody cared about the particular question that interested me, you know, from the perspective that I'm taking in the book. So then I say, well, all right, let's use the General Social Survey. Let's use the International Value Survey. I'm blanking on the exact name, where there's data out there that we can test this hypothesis in representative samples of humans from around the globe.

And when we do that, and when the hypotheses then are supported, that we believe them a lot more than if we just can explain, well, why are men taller than women? You know, you can already see the fact that they're taller than women. We want to know why, but we have more confidence if we can come up with a new hypothesis, test it, and it proves to be true.

My understanding, again, with all of its limitations, is that evolutionary psychology is particularly good at explaining essentially cross-cultural behaviors or other observations that we can make about large, highly generalized groups. So

Social explanations can work quite well under the right circumstances, but maybe a way to simplify this for people is it's a bit like thinking about the difference between software and hardware that a computer is running. There might be small hardware differences between people, but a lot of software differences that are layered on top of them. Is that a kind of simplification that would land with you, or are you like, ooh, I don't know about that one? It's pretty good. It's just that I would...

I would adjust it ever so slightly to say that my hardware makes some software really compatible and it's easily run and other software takes more effort. And so human agency is super important and we have human cultures are there. They have a gazillion different expressions of how humans might behave sexually or behaviorally or any, even in the most important domains. And those cultures that come up with strategies that are counter to our evolutionary interests

typically are harder to be members of and they typically don't work out as well as the ones who happen to latch on to things that we're inclined to do and the ones who also set up rules to try to minimize the way that we misbehave.

And so human beings have been minimizing our misbehavior for gazillions of years, right? We've domesticated ourselves. And those societies that are really successful are the ones that say, all right, well, people have a tendency to be violent if they can be anonymous and a long list of these behaviors. Let's not allow that to happen. Let's just prevent that. And so take a look at the Vikings, for example. A thousand or so years ago, they made a living by

pillaging and going up and down the coast and killing everybody. Well, now they make a living by selling really nice furniture and they're genetically the same people, but they're some of the most peaceful humans on the planet because they set up societies that don't reward pillaging and killing and they set up societies that reward playing by the rules, going along with what everybody wants.

From my perspective, there are some negative aspects of human nature by all means, but we don't protect ourselves from them by pretending they're not true. We protect ourselves from them by understanding them really well and saying, all right, how do we create societal structures so that you don't reward our desire to kill and you do reward our desire to cooperate?

So somewhat related to this, you co-authored a paper in 2018. It was titled Psychological Barriers to Evolutionary Psychology, Ideological Bias, and Coalitional Adaptations. And in it, you highlighted these fundamental misunderstandings that people have about evolutionary psychology. You've already kind of alluded to some of them here, but I'll just read directly from the paper. It's first, evolutionary psychology rejects the notion of genetic determinism. Second, it embraces central roles for environments and situations. And

And third, it carries no notions of intractability nor pessimism regarding change. Would you mind explaining what those things mean maybe in layman's terms here? Sure, sure. It's hard for me to keep all three in mind at once, but let's start with the first one. Yeah, I can prompt you. The first one was about genetic determinism. Yeah. So it's often the case that if I tell you, oh, that's highly heritable, you think, oh, well, so therefore I've inherited

a desire to do X. And X might be a horrible thing like rape, or it might be a really lovely thing like helping little old ladies across the street. But now you think I've got no choice but to do X. And that's just not the case. When we do the behavioral genetics, so we don't do the molecular genetics, we don't worry about the genes involved, but we look at twins, we're identical or fraternal, same environment, but different genes, we can see that on average, most human traits are about 50% genetic. Now that varies a lot, but that's at the average.

And what that means is that there's a huge role for genes, but there's just as huge of a role for the environment. And so to say that your genes caused you to do something is nonsense. Your genes pushed you in one direction or another, and the environment either pushed back or it also pushed you in the same direction. And so it's rare that cultures will be created that go hard against your genes. They do exist. So for example, in the United States, the Shakers were a religion that didn't believe in sex.

How many shakers are there today? Not so many. Big fat zero. Because that's just not a genetically, you know, a wise strategy from an evolutionary perspective.

But you can do it. You can do anything you want, right? You can go against your genes or you can go with them. And so there is no genetic determinism, but there are genetically easy pathways and there's genetically hard one. And a life of celibacy is a really hard one. And so, you know, we see you need only look at the Catholic church and all the scandals that are involved with pedophilia to realize here's a case where you're asking humans who want to be a priest to do something that's about the hardest thing for a human to do and

And many of them succeed. I suspect the vast majority succeed, but the minority who don't succeed create enormous problems. One of the other ones that I'm not sure if, you kind of covered the first two in your answer there, which was genetic determinism and the central role of environment in terms of how we develop, how we change. The third one was that it carries no notions of intractability nor pessimism regarding change. Yeah.

And so people don't like evolutionary psychology if they think, well, if you're saying the men and women are inherently different, then I as a man can't- This means that I can't fill in the blank. Yeah, totally. I can't fulfill my feminine side or whatever the case might be. And that's just not true. And so the Vikings are a good example of that, right? You have the exact same genes who are the most violent humans on earth and now the most peaceful humans on earth by just changing the incentive structure of their society. And so it's wildly tractable. The intractable things

If you try to shape a society to become utopian and you have an ideology of how that ought to work, when that ideology is not consistent with our evolutionary heritage, you're probably going to do a lot more harm than good.

You have a whole section of the book about differences between men and women in terms of autonomy and connection. You just kind of alluded to it there about expressing a certain side of your personality. Men tend to prefer autonomy, women connection. You then suggest a few explanations for this from our evolutionary history. Many other people out there have suggested similar or different explanations of these things.

And you also mention about how talking about evolved and biological sex differences is really quite controversial. So I want to spend a little time here talking about why that is, and particularly how people can understand a statement like men tend to prefer autonomy. What does that actually mean when we say that? Okay, so let's start with that. When I say men tend to prefer autonomy, it's just exactly like my saying men tend to be taller than women.

Now, I stand a towering five foot six in thick socks. And so men tend to be taller than women, but tons of women are taller than I am. In fact, about half of them are. And so even though I am of a group that tends to be taller than women, I personally tend to be shorter than slightly more than half the women in Western industrialized, well-fed countries. So the tend to is a bit confronting because it gives the impression men are X and women are Y or vice versa, actually. But in fact, it's not.

men and women are overlapping distributions and there tends to be more variability within sex than there is between sex, even on big sex differences like height. And so height's a really good example where men on average are about four or five inches taller than women are, but the variability within men and women, even if you ignore the extremes, is over 12 inches of variability. So the differences within men and women are larger than the differences between even in an area where sex differences are very large.

I doubt a single person who is alive on planet Earth doesn't know that men are taller than women because it's so obvious. But I doubt there's a single person who also doesn't know there's a lot of variability around that.

Now the same holds for autonomy and connection. We might want the sex differences to end at height, but they don't, whether we want them to or not. And so one of the biggest sex differences that we see in occupational preferences is between the preference to work with objects or things, which is a competence autonomy goal, and the preference to work with humans, which is a connection goal. And women are far more likely to want to connect with humans and men are far more likely to want to manipulate objects.

Not coincidentally, women are far more likely to become a therapist than men are. It's actually a considerable issue in the field, at least in the United States, I would imagine, and other places as well. That's right. Where if you're trying to look for a male therapist, it's hard to find a male therapist because there are just fewer guys who are trying to get into those roles, which I actually think is a good example because

Then the next question is, why are there fewer guys who are trying to get into those roles? Is this an evolved preference or is this a social pressure thing? Do you walk into a room and you only see other men in it? So if you're a woman, you don't want to enter that room. Or if you only see other women in it, if you're a guy, you don't want to enter that room for whatever reason. Yeah, both of those things are definitely happening.

And so I think it was Toni Morrison, but I could be mistaking her for another writer. Famous black female writer talked about how she worked in a library as a kid and she was putting books on the shelf and she saw a picture of a black woman as the author. She's like, I didn't know I could be an author. And so, yeah, that stuff matters a lot. And the first women who entered male dominated fields typically were not treated well. They had a hard fight ahead of them and often they gave up.

We now can look at what's happened over time and what we can see is that many male-dominated fields, psychology being a perfect example, are now female-dominated. Psychology used to be in the early 70s was about 20 percent female, 25 maybe, and now it's the opposite. It's basically 70 percent female. Women have had no difficulty establishing their agency and overcoming these barriers.

In a field that aligned with those evolved preferences that you're talking about. Yeah, exactly. It doesn't mean those barriers weren't there. It doesn't mean that they didn't hold out lots of women, that they didn't prevent a lot of people who just said, you know what, forget it. I wanted to be a psychologist, but I'll be a nurse because there's lots of female nurses and I won't have to swim against the current.

My personal tendency here is to be very cautious and very skeptical about broad generalizations about groups of people, in part because most of the worst episodes of human history were based, at least in part, on those kinds of generalizations. Kind of morally here, Bill, as somebody who I'm sure has really thought about this in a pretty deep way, you just mentioned that the differences between groups, even in the areas where the differences are large, in quotation marks, are actually relatively small.

So given that the differences are kind of small and the potential for misunderstanding and misuse of this information is historically quite large, where do you kind of come down on this in terms of the desire for the pursuit of scientific wisdom and knowledge versus the concern of like, oh man, somebody might hear that thing that I said, take it really out of context, and all of a sudden we're up the river without a paddle?

It's a good question. And I think that the balance always has to come down on the side of truth. You have to pursue what really is the case because otherwise you pay a social cost. And let's take it for example. So if you look at

what we're just discussing, which is gender differences in fields, you can see that male-dominated fields are more lucrative than the female-dominated fields. In the sciences, now it's now 50/50 across all the sciences, but the physical sciences and computer programming and stuff like that, engineering, are still more male-dominated. And these are very high-paying fields, yeah. Yeah, and they're very high-paying fields. And so you'd say, well, what's going on here? So

I recently wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal, which I would encourage anyone who's interested to look at. But immediately when you hear that, you're like, "Uh-oh, this is going to be this diatribe." Well, hopefully it's not. And what I argued in that article is that both effects are taking place that you're worried about. On the one hand, I believe women are voting with their feet. They don't want to be engineers. They don't want to be computer scientists. And so they're simply choosing not to be. Most men who are good at math science are much better at math science than they are verbally.

Most women who are good at math science are just as good verbally as they are at the math science side. And so rather than spending a lot of money trying to get women to pursue something they don't want to do, I think what's actually happened is men are being forced into it.

Because in actual fact, computer science and engineering stuff aren't very interesting. Now they are lucrative and I'll come back to that in a moment. And so the guys who are really good at math science, men and women, if they're really good at math science and really good verbally, they don't become engineers. And there's the data. We have to accept what people are deciding to do. And those who can do both tend not to become engineers. The ones who become engineers are the ones who are way better at math science than they are verbally. And in other words, they kind of have no choice.

Now, what about the lucrativeness? Why is it the case that, you know, engineers are so well paid and that's a male job? Well, unfortunately, the news there isn't good. And so what we can see if we track people's career interests over time is that as over decades, it doesn't happen within a year or two, but over decades, as fields become more female dominated, they start to pay less.

And so there's both things are going on. We do see bias and discrimination in society. Now, why they pay less is a super interesting question. And I'm not an economist. I don't have the answer to it. There's some answers that probably have to do with society valuing female work. And there's some answers that probably have to do with inherent male overconfidence.

And so men demanding raises and demanding better salary, they're going to leave and women thinking, oh no, that's fine. So I think a little bit of both is going on, but definitely what we see is a discriminatory effect over time whereby as women enter male fields, they start to pay less than. And so right now the caring fields pay way less than the doing fields, the manipulating objects field. I think this is interesting because it's complicated and because it's tricky and because it's hard to say.

where there's an autonomy connection difference between men and women generally in terms of priority. We might go into that a little bit here in more detail. But if women tend to pursue connection more, they're going to be probably more likely to pursue fields that involve more connection, more relating to other people talking to them and so on, vice versa for men as we've already talked about. I don't know where that evolved innate tendency ends,

and where all of the million other factors begin with this stuff. And I think it's a bit of an open question in terms of how much of the slice of the distribution that we say is based on this kind of innate quality or innate movement, and what of it is based on all of the other complicated social factors that are involved here, everything from what the people in the room look like to the incentive structure as you were talking about, fields that pay more, fields that pay less.

layered on top of the very first thing that you said, which is that the differences between the averages of groups are often fairly small relative to the intra-group difference, the difference between two different men or two different women. And

If that's the case, then I would imagine that that would really quite compensate for a lot of these intergroup differences. But I don't know what that looks like at the end of the day in terms of participation percentages or the percentage of women who are interested in becoming an engineer who didn't because they felt like they were swimming upstream or vice versa. So I just think it's a really complicated and intricate question.

It absolutely is. There's no one, no sensible evolutionist would tell you it's all driven by our evolutionary past. Yeah. Because remember, first of all, genes are only half the story. And second of all, culture matters a ton. When we look, for example, across cultural differences in how many sexual partners people want to have or how quickly they'll have sex or any of these kinds of things, we see huge differences between cultures that dwarf the sex differences within those cultures. But we still see sex differences within those cultures. Totally. And those are trackable. Yeah.

The thing is that I just think it's important that we keep both of those in mind because otherwise, what we might end up doing is creating programs that are doomed to failure because we're trying to achieve a goal that people don't want achieved on their behalf. As a for example, when women have children, lots of times they quit their jobs to take care of the children. You'd say, okay, well, fine. Probably what's happening here, men don't do that. Well, they do, but rarely. Women are much more likely to do that.

probably what we have is an insufficient daycare problem where women would not quit their job to take care of the kids if they just had higher quality, more affordable daycare. Well, then we look at data sets where the men and women are extraordinarily gifted. So they're one in 10,000 brains and those data sets exist. And what we see is that women, even in these crazy well-paid fields who are crazy smart women,

a percentage of them, not a high percentage, like 10 to 15, quit when their kids are born to raise the kids. And then they go back to work and make a gazillion dollars when the kids go back to school. So they could have afforded a nanny. They could afford six nannies more. No, but they wanted to raise their kid. Yeah, they wanted to be involved. Exactly. Totally. And so then people say, well, that's just the patriarchy convincing women that they want to do something. And that's when I separate from them and I say, no, no, women know what they want just as well as everybody else on this planet does. Where that want comes from is assuredly

partially genetic, partially the evolution of pressures on us that are manifested in things that don't even differ across the world. Every human feels that way. And of course, wildly driven by your own culture, the way you were socialized, and your own particular route that you took in life. You know, Plowman

talked about how when they originally started doing genetics, they thought there'd be these big gold nuggets of genes that cause a big effect. And there's not. His analogy is gold dust. Lots of genes have a tiny effect. The environment works the same way. It's full of gold dust. There's not this one turning point where if you'd gone left, you'd be person A and you took a right, so you're person B. Lots of tiny influences throughout our lives create who we are. And so whatever our wants are, I take them as genuine. I think humans are agentic and they vote with their feet.

I also think that a piece of this that you highlight both in the book a couple of times and in that paper that I referenced earlier is that when we understand that there are differences between groups in terms of, again, the averages between groups,

It actually supports us in creating environments that decrease prejudice or reduce inequality, in part because we kind of start by accepting that there are indeed inequalities to correct for. And if we just kind of pretend that we're all perfectly tabula rasa and there are no differences between people, then

well, there's nothing fundamental that we should be correcting for. The only thing to correct for is social problems, which of course is very, very important, but that's just one vertical of intervention. I think that kind of approaching it in that way really made me sort of rejigger how I think about a couple of things with regards to this.

And in the end, not trying to get equal outcomes. If we think, well, until 50% of engineers are female, we're failing. We failed. Yeah, totally. Yeah. Then we're going to force women to be engineers who don't want to do it. Who don't want to be engineers. Yeah. Or force men to be therapists who don't want to be therapists, whatever the case may be. No, I think that's a, it's at the very least, it's a fair argument for sure. We'll be back to the show in just a minute, but first a word from our sponsors.

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And I'm interested in some of the minutiae of, and it's not even really minutiae, but that's the word that came to mind, of the kind of evolutionary explanations for those autonomy connection differences between men and women, I did find very personally interesting.

So, yeah, I mean, if you think about what are the pressures on humans to get by in the world, they're, they're almost all of them are the same for men and women. We're all afraid of heights because our ancestors who thought it was fun to walk on the cliff edge splattered and done around, you know, the list spiders and snakes. Yeah, exactly. All that list is crazy long, but there's some ways where we had to diverge because of the different pressures on us. And one of those pressures is that, um,

um women were bearing children and lactating so they have an enormous burden when they're pregnant and then they have an enormous burden for the first two years now it might not seem like lactating is a burden in a modern world where you just keep going to the fridge but for ancestors to get enough to eat so that they could also feed somebody else through their breasts is an enormous burden it's a huge caloric burden and so a lot of the way we do things with regard to children is going to be different as a function whether we're male or female and so females

put most of the effort into raising the children. And so that changes a lot of the preferences they have and what they're looking for in a male, but it also changes their own personal needs. And since they couldn't count on males to help them raise children because men are hunters in these societies, women need to form tight connections to other women in order to successfully raise their young. Because think about it in today's world, how hard is it to have three toddlers in the house when you live in this wildly safe environment?

Imagine how hard it is to have three toddlers where there's lions around every corner. You need other women nearby to help keep an eye on your kids because you can't count on them because they may be a long distance away. And so women evolved to form tight friendships with small groups of other women who they could completely count on each other to help them look after each other's kids. And men didn't devolve that same need because that wasn't their problem.

I also wonder if some of this gets back to sexual strategies theory and things like that, which is complicated and is probably in some ways above my pay grade here. But it's the general notion that men can father many offspring with minimal investment.

And that is simply not the case for women. And one of the more interesting things that you'll bump into if you look at gene lineages and things like that is that we have a fairly small number of male ancestors. And you talk about this a bit in the book, which implies that there were a small number of guys who really out-competed their peers and were able to pass on a lot of offspring in a way that a lot of other men weren't. And this, again, can nudge them toward some more of those autonomy factors that you were talking about, which is about performance, signaling value, all of that.

Yeah. And so that's absolutely important. And it's a good, good point you're making that if basically all women can have kids because they'll be guys who are attracted to them, but lots of men can't because there aren't women who are attracted to them, then the competition among men is fiercer. And how do you win that competition in order to attract female interest? Well, the primary way that males do it is via competence. Because remember, if

If women need a lot of help raising the kids, they need a competent male who is going to be a successful hunter, who's going to put in the effort and protect them and do all those things. And so they look a lot for male competence as a, they care about handsome and good genes and all that stuff too, but male competence matters a lot. And so men are going to compete fiercely with one another to demonstrate competence and ability. And of course, that's exactly what we see, not just in human males, but in males across the animal kingdom. This is

The one of the big points that Robert Trivers made in the 1970s in his parental investment theory is because women invest more, men compete for that investment. And what that means is that some women would rather have share a guy who's a great, you know, competent person than to have sole access to a guy who's not very good at doing things, which meant a lot of men were left out of the gene pool altogether. What do these differences in autonomy and connection between men and women look like in practice these days behaviorally?

Part of it is what we've already discussed, these career things, but part of it is it leaks into lots of other attitudes. Let's look at politics, for example. If you're autonomy-oriented, then you tend to sit a little bit more on the right because you think that competence is what makes someone a success. If somebody's not doing very well in life, they're just not trying hard enough. If they're doing really well, it's because they've tried really hard and so I should not tax them and try to make everything equal because people are landing where their merit

suggest they should because autonomy matters to me a lot and why would i take away your autonomy by taxing you and spending your money as i want to rather than letting you choose how to do it yourself if you're connection oriented you look at the world a little bit differently you say well i want to take care of everybody and there's lots of people who have more barriers to success because life hasn't given them equal playing field like their competence was harder to develop maybe they

grew up poor and so their schools weren't as good or they didn't get as many opportunities. And so connection matters to me a lot more. And I would rather maybe tax, for example, people who make a lot of money and give it to people who don't to try to equal the playing field so people don't suffer. And so sure enough, we see that women who tend to be more connection oriented are more likely to be on the political left. And we see that men who tend to be more autonomy oriented are more likely to be on the political right. Now, again, these are tendencies. There's

There's huge numbers of people on the right and left who are of the other sex. It's just that that's what autonomy and connection do to whatever your sex is, that the more you care about autonomy, the more you are political right, the more you care about connection, the more you're political left.

There are also huge factors here socially that I think are a major, major, major part of, to return to the question that we started with, why people feel disconnected and anxious and so on. And I see this just in the behavior of my fiancée Elizabeth with her friends.

I think I can tell the story on the podcast. I don't think she would bug me about this. She has a text thread, a chat thread with three of her closest female friends. They call it the square. And I was joking with her the other day that I should find five of close male friends and form the cube. But of course, I haven't. Women tend to have these, as you talk about in the book, relatively smaller in terms of the number of members involved in them, but much, much, much tighter, closer friend groups.

Whereas men tend to have more diffuse, you know, I know a lot of people, I've shaked a lot of hands, but I haven't necessarily formed as many of those deep and particularly emotionally rich connections that women have. And we have, even though I don't think that either Elizabeth or I are perfectly normative in terms of our distribution of male and female traits inside of ourselves. But that being said, we've totally mirrored that pattern in terms of our relationships with other people.

Yeah. And it's, it can be disconcerting when you look at what evolution says is typical and then you look at yourself and see it and you say, well, wait a minute, why am I doing this? Is it because I, I, I don't believe in doing just because it's a male thing or a female thing. Is it that I've really evolved to do this or have I been nudged my whole life? Because of course, society nudges us to our parents, nudge us to

A good friend of mine, his little boy when he was about three years old, always wanted to dress up in girl costumes and put on makeup and things like that. And he asked me, what should I do? And I said, well, first of all,

Whatever you do won't make the slightest difference in his eventual sexual interest, whether he's gay or straight. And so you want to do the kindest thing for him that you can. Like if he enjoys dressing up in girls' clothes, you should not punish him in any way. Be supportive and nonjudgmental, yeah. You should be nonjudgmental. But you might let him know that when he goes out in the world, not everybody's always going to feel that same way. And so he needs to be prepared for people who are going to be judgmental.

So, but the thing is that a large part of us is influenced by our own personal biology. And then a large part of us is influenced by the way the world treats us as a consequence. And of course, what

life is about is trying to find that happy medium. And of course, it's also about not trying to make assumptions about people based on their categories, because as we've been discussing this whole time, categories are very weak predictors. If I know nothing other than the fact that you're a guy, I'll say, well, you're probably more likely to be an engineer than if you're female. But if I know the first thing about you, I know, oh, no, you're not an engineer. You're likely to be a priest or whatever it is that interests you.

Another factor here, again, that gets to the mental health of it all, which is what we're pretty focused on the show, is the self-reliance piece. That in part due to the increased level of autonomy, we expect self-reliance often from guys, which we don't necessarily expect from women. And again, that's another one of those things that we see across cultures where there are

plenty of other expectations that are placed on women, to be clear. But one of the big ones for men is a kind of emotional self-reliance, ranging from boys don't cry up to the sort of assumption that you'll solve your own problems. The running joke about men asking for directions on a road trip and their total unwillingness to do that, all of them. And this then has major mental health consequences where we're sort of robbing many men of that deeper sense of connection with other people that is the source of so much of the lasting fulfillment that you're talking about here.

Yeah, you're absolutely right. And the key thing to remember in this regard is not only that this problem exists, but that we tend to, when we look at like female engineers, we think, oh, society really leans on women and prevents them from doing what they want. And it does. But it also does the same thing to men, that the expectations on men are just as constraining as expectations on women are. And so what we really want is to be great about both.

So if we have a son who likes to dress up and put on makeup and do connection-y things, that's just as great as having a daughter who likes to be an engineer and build Lego trains, right? You want to be as supportive of individuals in whatever they want to pursue.

and society can really make that difficult for you. And so in the case of the problem you're talking about, we see that although women are two or three times as likely to be depressed, men are about four times as likely to commit suicide. And so it's in those men who do feel depressed, they've got nowhere to go.

So we've set up the problem really well here, Bill, I think. We've got a society, it rewards individualism, and autonomy and performance are often big, big rewards, like your friend had at the very beginning of the conversation. And this is often at the expense of connection and communal support. Those autonomy factors can feel really good in the moment, but tend to have consequences long-term because they rob us of that social connection.

We've maybe got a brain that was sort of built to look for opportunities for autonomy, in part because they were quite scarce.

And now we are awash in autonomy, and we're drowning in it. And that connection that is so fundamental to actually feeling good about ourselves and good about our lives is getting deprioritized in the pursuit of individual success. So we've got this structure built into modern society that undermines our happiness. Now, given that we've set up our culture in this kind of messed up way, what do you think individuals could do about this?

Yeah, it's tricky. And part of the thing that's tricky is that we're all so busier than we ever were before. Yeah. And I think the reason we're busier than we ever were before is because the world is just so interesting. Now everybody wants the world to be interesting. How could that be a negative? When I was a little kid, you know, if you wanted to play a game, you played a board game where you used a dice and went around the monopoly or whatever. And it's really pretty dull.

And now there's a gazillion game. When I was a kid, if you wanted to watch TV, well, there's three channels on and probably they're all lame. And now there's a gazillion channels with really great content. The list just goes on.

And less swiping on your phone. Yeah. Yes. It's no wonder that we're so crazy busy with so many opportunities, so many things to do. And of course, because we can work more effectively now, we're expected to be more productive as well. Everything is expected to increase. And the consequence of that is that we can't go back to a world that was slower and simpler because it's simply not the world we live in anymore. Why would I want this slow, simple existence when that's kind of dull? Why wouldn't I want all these fun things too? So

In my mind, the solution to this is not say we need to go back to 1950s lifestyle where people got together with their neighbors several times a week and they did all these things that people are just not going to do. But what you can do is ask yourself, all right,

I spend X amount of time during my day alone doing things that I really enjoy. How many of those things do I really want to be alone when I do them, which is fair enough if that's what you want. Like I want my alone time so I can decompress or so I can think about what's next. And how many of those things am I just alone because I happen to be pursuing my interest that's not shared by those right around me?

And for every one of those where you just happen to be alone because you're doing what you want and others were right around, you might not want to do it too. Can you find somebody to do it with? And you can leverage the modern world by finding that someone electronically, they could live halfway across the globe, but if they enjoy your hobby and they can, they're available when you are boom, you do it with them. And you can also leverage that by doing these kinds of things in public settings that

hopefully also engage others to do them as well. Maybe painting at a public studio, maybe gardening at a community garden. The list just goes on, but you want to try to find a world in which you're creating interactions with others rather than just doing your favorite activities alone.

How do you think about social media and all of this, Bill? Is social media a tool for connection? Is it the primary driver of our suffering here? Where do you land with this? Sadly, it's both. Social media is a wonderful thing when you use it to supplement your real face-to-face world.

When I leverage social media to talk to my children who live a long way away and just FaceTime with them for a moment and discuss what they're going to wear that day or what they're thinking about with, you know, what their golf game was like earlier, whatever they're doing, that normally I wouldn't have been able to do that prior to social media because it'd be too expensive and difficult. Then it's a great thing.

And it's a great thing when you use it to connect to somebody half a world away to do an activity together. Like you do the crossword puzzle, you get on your phone, they're on theirs and you talk while you do it. And even though they live thousands of miles apart, that's all great. It's bad when you think, oh, there's this party tonight and it might be fun, but it's a whole lot easier to scroll through Instagram and see what my friends are doing and put up a few photos than it is to go out. I think I'll stay home. That's terrible. And that's,

a direction that leads people to be unhappy. And unfortunately it's all too common, particularly the most recent generations. They've grown up in a world where the socializing on social media is so easy and the socializing in person has always been relatively hard crossing town to meet up whatever, that their face-to-face interactions are suffering compared to the amount of time they spend on their devices.

When you think about rebalancing that, do you think of it more in terms of reallocating the amount of time that we're spending on different platforms, moving the amount of time away from

Whether it's mindless scrolling or individual time spent staring at a screen, playing games on a computer, whatever it might be. To be clear, all of these are things that I do and I think that there's a place for some amount of them in a perfectly healthy life. I just don't know if it's the amount to which people are currently using these tools. So is it more of a time thing or do you think it's more of a intentionality, what you're doing while you're doing it thing?

I suspect it's a bit of both. And so, you know, my, my son when he was young loved gaming where they'd shoot up the bad guys and all that kind of stuff. And what he ended up really enjoying the most was his friends who had gone from school, he would go home from school and then they'd all get online together and they're a team and they're killing the bad guys. Playing games with friends can be pretty great for sure. And that's, look, I thought that was awesome. They're not in the room with him, but that's harder than today's world where they all go to a school across town. That's a fair bit of busting around and

and living in a big city. And so that's our version of Monopoly. We're kind of bored going around and around a board, mostly just luck. And they're doing something that's very engaged because they all have headphones on. They can all talk to each other. They're like, why should I behind you? You know, I thought that was awesome.

And so it depends on how social the activity is that you're doing. If you like to game, do games that involve playing with others. Don't do things where you're just playing on your own. And the list goes on. Everything that you like to do, you should be doing, but you should try to find a way to do it in the context of connections. One of the macro points that I think you're making here, Bill, and let me know if you think this is fair or not, is that there's some value to going with the flow in different kinds of ways, essentially working with our tendencies rather than against them.

and also understanding when it's the moment to go against the flow and try to play against type in a variety of different ways. One of the good examples of this I think that you suggest in the book is the idea of harnessing autonomy

which is the flow, if you want to think about it that way. The flow of culture is a flow toward autonomy right now, but harnessing that in the service of connection. So how can you use your individual strengths to be connected to or of value to other people? How can you use your autonomy to initiate a relationally deepening conversation with somebody that you care about or set goals that are more about connection or personal growth or relational growth, whatever it might be for you? And are

Are there aspects of that for starters that just kind of like sound right to you? But also, are there ways that you see that people do this practically?

Yes, I think that that sounds exactly right. And I think the key is that you want to do those autonomy things that you need to do. And so if you're young, you're an autonomy machine. You need to develop skills to become a value to others and just don't sequester yourself away forever. It's a little bit like waiting for the bus. I remember when I think it was in grad school and I took the bus sometimes and sometimes it would have been quicker to walk. It was like a 25 minute walk and a 10 minute bus ride. But

If the bus was 15 minutes late, now suddenly it was equal. And I sometimes found myself waiting 20, 25 minutes for a bus that now is harder than just walking. And so I decided to myself, okay, you can get stuck waiting forever because you think, well, I've been here a long time. I'm sure it's about to come. Set yourself a goal at the front end. I will wait at the bus stop for X minutes and then I'm walking. And the same holds for anything. I will pursue autonomy. I'm going to dive into this career or the sport or whatever it is I do.

and I'm going to give myself X amount of time in order to be a success at it, to see the gains I want to see, or I'm going to cut my losses. Because it's super important that you decide when to cut your losses and when you decide when you're a success, because both of those goals can change as you go. And so

and you decide I'm going to sequester myself away and work on this entrepreneurial idea I have, great. But don't do it for the rest of your life and don't set yourself a goal when you call yourself a success. All right, fine. Now it's time to back off and not spend all my time doing it. And when you say fine, I fail. So in the case of academics, when I was looking for my first job, I decided I'm going to give myself five years. If I can't find a job in a city I want to live with colleagues I want to have in five years, that's it. I'm just not going to be a psychologist. I'll do something else.

And I got lucky and I did. But if I hadn't got lucky, I was determined to not still be living in a horrible city with horrible colleagues doing a horrible job in hopes that tomorrow would be different.

After five years, that was enough and I was going to move on. And so from my perspective, it's super important to decide what success looks like at the outset, what failure looks like and what the timeline is before you're going to say it's a failure. And then yes, by all means, pursue autonomy within those parameters that you now set yourself at the front end so that you don't get stuck 20 years from now, wildly successful with no friends or a big failure and no friends. Both are bad. The successful version is better, but they're both bad. And so

If you can plan that in advance, then yes, you can make the sacrifices that autonomy requires and that the modern world often requires for us to be as successful as we want to be. But you can do so with a plan for connection on the other end where there's always a light at the end of the tunnel. Yeah, not to sound like a caricature of myself here, but I think that this is just a total middle path thing at the end of the day. We have individual tendencies. Society as a whole has a tendency.

Society's got a big tendency toward autonomy right now. Individuals, it probably varies. There are some people who tend more toward connection, some people who tend more toward autonomy. There are probably consequences for being somebody who is really leaning into connection even as like an 80-20 split, connection and autonomy. We've talked about a couple of them over the course of the conversation. That does come to a certain kind of personal cost. So end of the day, it's just about kind of rebalancing these forces in a way that feels natural for you,

and in a way that relies on self-awareness, that you have to be able to self-assess and look out at the playing field and go, okay, where's there a little deficit these days in my life?

Yeah. And remarkably, there are some apps that actually can really help you do this. And so I was having dinner with my nephew, who's this wonderful kid, and he's a great computer programmer. And I had told him about this Danny Kahneman work where you say, how happy am I right now? What am I doing? And he's like, oh, I need to know, like, I'm going to use this to see how my life is traveling because I get caught up in what I'm trying to achieve and not where I am.

And he said it was wildly eye-opening that, you know, changed his relationships. It changed what he was pursuing as a job because he found when he's doing some things, he was having a great time that he hadn't really considered. And other things that he thought he wanted, he was never having a good time.

And so you can, it does require self-awareness, but you can leverage an app to ask the question, how much fun am I having right now? What am I doing? And it will literally beep you at random. And at the end of the month, you'll know, should I be with this person? Should I be pursuing this career? It's super helpful in that regard. Yeah, that kind of random mood tracking can be a really, really powerful intervention for people. All forms of habit tracking, I think, help people do this because you kind of have your habit tracker during the day and then you look back on it. End of the day, you're ready to kind of

one to five or something like that. How was I feeling? Then you look at what you did and you go, "All right, wait a second here. There might be a couple of pieces of information that I can get out of this." As we get to the end here, Bill, is there anything that you want to leave people with, be sure that you've said, anything you're thinking about as we come to the end?

No, I think we've done a great job of covering what I regard as the big issues, the things that are important. You know, there's, there's devils in the details and, and there's nothing that works forever. And so, you know, you could think, oh, I'm an 80, 20 guy and that's making me unhappy. Let me rebalance. And then you find you're unhappier. No, maybe you really are 80, 20 was the right spot for you. You have to find, you have to discover for yourself. And if we, anybody tells you this will make everyone happier is, is wrong.

Everything is bespoke in our world for humans. And so you need to find your own pathway. But if you aren't happy with what you're doing, or if you do this sort of self-discovery via these mood trackers and you realize the way I'm going isn't right, well, today's always the best day to fix it. It's not, just because you've been doing it for 20 years is not a reason to do it for another 20 years. You know, life starts today. And so make the changes that you think will help. Thanks so much for doing this with me, Bill. I really appreciate it. Totally my pleasure. Fun chatting.

I thought this was an incredibly interesting conversation today with Dr. William von Hippel, the author of The Social Paradox. And the paradox that's in the title of the book is that despite objective standards of living improving dramatically over the last hundred years, our experience of connection and fulfillment and satisfaction has not increased as rapidly. Bill gave an example at the very beginning of the conversation of a friend of his who had achieved fabulous levels of wealth, wealth that our ancient ancestors really couldn't even dream of.

And yet, despite that, was not experiencing the kind of fulfillment and personal satisfaction that he had really set out to achieve. Something was lacking even though he had so much. And Bill's theory about this is that what was lacking was connection, that we have these two deep needs inside of us through our ancient evolutionary history all the way to today.

Autonomy on the one hand, our ability to self-determine, make choices for ourselves, and really importantly in the context of this conversation, pursue the things that we think we are the best fit for. We got to make choices about that. On the other hand, connection, our attachment to other people, our sense of a kind of groundedness in a broader community, the feeling that there are other people who are going to have our back if something goes wrong for us. And

And modern society has tacked heavily in the direction of autonomy, and by doing so has sacrificed connection.

A major theme of the conversation was an evolutionary mismatch. So our brains evolved under one set of circumstances and were built to thrive inside of that environment. And now we find ourselves in a very different set of circumstances today. We were built for these small, tight-knit groups, 10 to 50 people, and now we have to navigate the thousands if not millions of people we're interacting with through social media and all of its assorted complexities.

Autonomy, of course, showed up in our ancestors' lives. They got to make some choices, but those choices were pretty limited. And so our brain evolved to seek autonomy where it could. It was a kind of scarce resource. Connection was everywhere, but autonomy was limited, so we sought it out. But today, autonomy is everywhere. You can be a complete individualist if you live in a relatively industrialized Western society, and particularly if you have a little bit of money. As Bill mentioned during the conversation, education is

wealth, the movement into cities, all of these things are factors that push us toward more autonomy and tend to sacrifice connection. And that's another major point.

Bill thinks of autonomy and connection as being opposite ends of a scale. When you move toward one, you almost always sacrifice another. I layered a little bit of nuance on top of this when I talked about the kinds of circumstances like relationships that can support a person through connection in finding more individual autonomy. And Bill was right there with me. He was like, yeah, absolutely. Under the right circumstances, you can have both autonomy and connection.

But those were not the circumstances by and large that our ancestors were evolving under. And for most people throughout history, moving toward autonomy has meant sacrifice and connection and vice versa.

We then spent a bit of time talking about evolutionary psychology itself. And what I was particularly interested in learning more about was what it really means when we say men are more autonomous and women are more connected. What's the evidence that we're using to support that claim? What does that mean in practice? How big are the differences between these different groups? And so on.

People, I think pretty understandably, have a lot of resistance to being told that you are this kind of way based on your evolutionary heritage. I have a lot of resistance personally to being told that I am a kind of way based on my genes or my ancestors or the fact that I'm a guy or whatever else, right?

I don't want to feel dictated to in that way. And Bill really talked about this during the conversation, how this is a big resistance that a lot of people have to evolutionary psychology broadly, particularly in situations where we are making generalizations about groups of people based purely on group membership. And that's something that Bill, over and over again throughout the conversation, said, don't do that. The inference power of belonging to a group is relatively limited. One of the most robust findings is

in all of the social sciences is that intra-group variation, the difference between one member of a group and another member of that group, tends to be significantly larger than inter-group variation, the difference between the average member of two different groups. And the example that Bill gave for this was height.

height, where the differences between the average man and the average woman in terms of height are certainly noticeable. Most people around the planet are like, "Yes, men do tend to be taller." But the differences are relatively mild, and there are enormous differences between different men and between different women. And knowing that I am a guy does not necessarily tell you that I am going to be taller than a given woman is. Layered on top of that is an enormous amount of complexity.

When it comes to trying to understand the differences between evolutionary factors and social factors, there are often a lot of different plausible explanations for a given behavior. And most of the time, as we talked about during the conversation, there's this layering of things on top of each other. For example, let's say that I see Elizabeth talking to another guy.

And they're off in a corner and they're laughing. They're having a great time. And I experience a feeling of jealousy. What's the explanation for that feeling? Could be a lot of things. It could be that it's because in our ancient evolutionary heritage, we know that men competed with each other really forcefully for potential mates.

We know that there were a relatively small number of male ancestors compared to the number of female ancestors. And because of this, we can infer that a small number of guys passed on a large number of the overall gene copies. In other words, a lot of guys didn't have kits and they were out-competed for a scarce resource. And so, hey, who ended up passing on their genes? Well, those were the guys who were able to out-compete the other guys. And those guys were probably hyper-aware

of the fact that this was all going on. They were really looking out to see what the scarce resource was doing with their time and their effort, and they were hyper-attuned to what was going on. And so it was adaptively useful for me to experience jealousy when I saw that happening. Now, that's a very plausible explanation, and it is probably one piece of the puzzle. Now, what else could be going on? Elizabeth and I maybe got into an argument, and I'm feeling a little insecure inside of the relationship.

Maybe it's that we exist, hey, who knows, in a culture that has its roots in puritanicalism and we've got some pretty strong views culturally still about sex and relationships and what it means to be in a monogamous relationship and all of these other factors and those social factors are really influencing how I'm interpreting this situation.

Maybe we've put one too many TV shows about cheating partners onto the television, and so now I've been primed with this kind of concern. There's a lot going on in the field, and I guarantee you that if Bill heard me saying all of that during this outro, if he were here, he would be nodding over my shoulder. This stuff is complicated.

And so I talked about this with Bill. My personal tendency is to be extremely cautious about generalizations based on group membership. We know for a fact that those kinds of generalizations are the source of xenophobia and racism and sexism and most of the worst episodes of human history. And so I asked him that given that the differences between the average of two different groups are relatively minor and the consequences of inferring from those differences can be very significant,

What should we do here? How should we interpret all of this information? And Bill had an interesting response to this. He started by saying, we got to live in truth. I'm a scientist. My job is to study stuff and to figure out what the truth is. And I think that there are actually a lot of benefits long-term to figuring out what the truth is, in part because we can build social structures that are based on our innate tendencies.

There is an understandable concern that I share about emphasizing the differences between groups, because that can very easily lead to more prejudice. But when we accept that there are differences between groups, what can we do? We can all of a sudden create environments that understand and are appreciative of those differences. And this then gives us another vertical to correct for inequality.

It's also just practically useful to help us understand who we are and why we are the way that we are when we appreciate that these are differences. And again, they are differences on average. The differences I would imagine in this between the group of men and the group of women are actually, if we looked at effect sizes and we were able to really thoroughly study this, I would imagine they're pretty small.

Bill used as an example here differences in connection and autonomy preferences among men and women. Men tend to prefer more autonomy, women tend to prefer more connection. This is a pretty strong finding, and it's a cross-cultural finding. So as near as we can tell with a lot of caveats given, this is not based purely on social or cultural factors. This is some kind of an evolved difference. And there are plenty of explanations for why this might have come about, some of which we talked about during the conversation.

Bill then talked about how there could be different choices about career based on do you have more of a preference for connection or do you have more preference for autonomy? We see a lot of men in STEM fields and working as engineers, things like that. We see a lot of women in nursing and therapy.

And then he talked about how, okay, if we do a big STEM program that's focused on increasing the number of women in STEM, there are a lot of really, really good reasons to do that because there are a lot of barriers to entry into STEM for women. We talked about those throughout the conversation.

His point was that having 50-50 as our ultimate target probably doesn't make sense because even when we correct for all of the social factors, all of the cultural factors, all of the barriers to entry for women into STEM and vice versa for men into becoming a therapist perhaps, even so, there is going to be some kind of difference between men and women based on their just evolved preference for doing those kinds of jobs. Now, is this true?

I don't know. I don't know. I'm not an expert on this subject. And...

I think that Bill was making a compelling case. I would be very interested to look at the specific research into this, particularly research on circumstances where there are fairly low barriers to entry for women into those kinds of fields. I would imagine that that research is out there. I'm just doing this on the fly right after we're doing this recording. If you're familiar with it and you're watching on YouTube, you want to comment down below about this. I'd be very interested in hearing from you about it.

My personal feeling about all of this is the point to take away from this is not so much about any specific difference based on group membership that we were talking about during the conversation.

The point to take away is that people have tendencies. It's okay to acknowledge that. Members of groups have tendencies. It's okay to acknowledge that. These tendencies exist for a variety of very complicated reasons. One of those complicated reasons? Evolutionary selection. There were certain traits that were more adaptive and therefore they were selected for. And those traits were selected for differently in different populations of people.

But again, understanding the tendency of members of a group can help us help them. We can understand the unique problems that they face and therefore support them a bit better. And so we talked a bit about gender differences and how this shows up in terms of that balance of autonomy and connection and the problems that different groups of people can have.

broadly speaking women tend to have smaller more tightly knit friend groups they tend to expect more from their friends and those relationships typically influence their behavior to a greater degree men tend to have more less invested friendships expect relatively less of them and tend to be more biased towards the situation or their own preference as opposed to their specific connections with other men

This then leads to some broad consequences for the members of those different groups. Women, again, tend on average to find it a little bit more difficult to go against the desires of their friends when those desires conflict with their own desires. On the other hand, men tend to feel more disconnected. They've got more of an issue around connection. We've done a number of episodes on that recently.

There's also a difference in terms of self-reliance. We tend to expect men to be able to solve their own problems and boys don't cry, all of that kind of stuff. Is that social and cultural? Yes, that is social and cultural. Does it have an evolutionary basis? I think it plausibly could as well.

This took us toward the end of the conversation. We live in a society, to use that unbelievably overused phrase, that tends to reward individualism and autonomy and performance and chasing that brass ring, all of those things. And it does this at the expense of connection and emotional support and communal support and investment in the small group of people that are really going to carry you throughout the course of your life.

Our ancestors had that in large supply. They had a lot of other problems, but they had that in large supply. So modern life comes with a lot of costs for connection.

And connection, when well balanced with autonomy, leads to a lot of fulfillment for us. So what can we do about all of this? Bill had some ideas about this. First, use your autonomy in the service of connection. Yes, develop your skills, chase that brass ring if that's what feels good for you, sure. But also ask how you can be valuable to others because that's actually why we developed autonomy in the first place. Autonomy is what allows us to select the discipline where we are likely to continue to contribute to the group.

And contributing to the group was an essential life skill when we were evolving. If you didn't contribute to the group for long enough, you were left behind, and that was basically the end of you.

Second, when you can, invest in those small, high-trust communities. Instead of chasing after those weak ties, those more distant connections, can you find a few where you can be more emotionally revealed? That's a kind of autonomy. You get to choose, am I being more emotionally revealed here? Can you spend a little bit more face time with somebody else? Can you create the kind of mutually committed relationship that our ancestors once depended on?

Then third, appreciate that this is not just your fault. There's a self-awareness aspect to this whole thing. We've built a really strange world. A lot of people are having a hard time with it. It is normal to have these kinds of problems. And just that self-compassion aspect of it, I think, is a huge piece of the puzzle here. Then another piece of it that I wish that we had talked about a little bit more during the conversation is this distinction between warmth and competence.

We really select in modern society for competence. That is what a lot of our progression is based on. But the thing is that competence and warmth have a kind of trade-off with each other. They're a bit like connection and autonomy. Autonomy is connected to competence. Connection is connected to warmth.

In the book, Bill talks about some interesting research, how we tend to perceive people who are highly competent as kind of cold, not very warm, and we tend to perceive people who are very warm as not very competent. This is on first meeting. We don't know a thing about the person. This is just our assumption. The problem is that warmth creates connection, but warmth

comes with consequences for us. Maybe we get perceived as less competent. Maybe we're not able to invest in ourselves in exactly the same way because we are in connection. Maybe we're having to show up even when it's inconvenient for us. This is classic delayed gratification stuff. Take the time to help other people when you can. Signal that warmth when you can. It'll open you up to more connection, vulnerability, trust, emotional generosity,

Guess what? All of the stuff that was essential for us thousands of years ago, it's still essential for us today. These are the things that allowed early humans to survive, and they're still what makes life meaningful for us right now. This was an episode about embracing trade-offs and understanding that there is a happy middle path. Socially, we have swung way in the direction of autonomy.

and we talked about how members of different groups might be more autonomy or more connection. You are an individual. You may or may not have the same bias that belongs to the group that you belong to. Maybe you are in a more collectivist culture, but you feel very autonomous. Maybe you're in a more autonomous culture, but you feel like a real collective person. You have your own individual strengths and vulnerabilities. And the real question for each person is, how am I going to live

in this incredibly artificial environment that we've created for ourselves in a way that feels good for me? And how am I going to do that, balancing these two great needs that we all have, autonomy on the one hand, connection on the other? And what are my unique tendencies? What is the prescription for Forrest? What is the prescription for you, person listening to this or watching this?

I hope you enjoyed today's conversation. I suspect we're going to be getting some comments about this one. If you've been listening to the show for a while and you haven't subscribed yet, if you could take a moment to subscribe, I would really appreciate it. I had a great time talking with Bill. He's a really interesting, really warm guy. Again, his book is The Social Paradox.

Couple other quick notes at the end here. You can find us on Patreon, patreon.com slash beingwellpodcast. You can reach us at contact at beingwellpodcast.com if you want to send me an email. I read pretty much every email that we get. And is there anything else I'm supposed to say at the end here, man? No, I don't think so. I think that's it. Once again, thanks so much for listening. Really appreciate it. And I'll talk to you soon.