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#1075 - Roy Baumeister - Why Men Are at the Top of Society

Modern Wisdom

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  • Why Baumeister Says Cultures Exploit Men
    • Roy Baumeister argues cultures flourish by exploiting male expendability, sending men into risky productive roles because losing men hurts reproduction less than losing women.
    • He says men built most visible structures and institutions, from roads and buildings to banks, armies, and governments. Transcript: Chris Williamson You say that cultures flourish by exploiting men. What’s that mean? Roy Baumeister Well, there are multiple aspects to it. But first of all, men are more expendable than women, probably for basic biological reasons. If a small group loses half its men, the next generation can still be full size. Loses half its women, it’ll be a long time to recover. So it takes, it risks men, puts men to work, to produce things. Most of, you know, the structures of society are really created by men. I was talking to Carol Hoeven at Harvard, and she said there was a feminist who had an epiphany at one point. She was looking out the window and said, the whole world was built by men. Look at the buildings and the roads and the cars and all those things, and that’s just the physical the institutions too, the banks and the schools and the armies and the governments And the marketplaces. Women do plenty of wonderful things, and they’re important partners in the flourishing of our species. But creating large social systems, that seems always to be the men’s job. And so our cultures compete against other cultures, which is mostly groups of men competing against other groups of men. (Time 0:00:00)
  • Why Men Build Groups And Women Build Bonds
    • Baumeister says women specialize more in one-to-one bonds while men more naturally operate in larger groups, helping explain sex differences in intimacy, expressiveness, and institution-building.
    • He cites child studies where two boys welcomed a third boy into play, while two girls more often excluded a third girl. Transcript: Chris Williamson Why is it the case that men have been overrepresented as the builders in that case, both cognitively, systemically, physically? Why is it? Roy Baumeister It’s because men do those things and, and, and women don’t. Um, what I realized fairly early on, and I have some publications of this and it was an early part of my thinking, um, is that the way people are being social, there are a couple of ways. There’s interacting one-to or there’s doing things in large groups. Now I noticed this because in my field, social psychology, people were starting to say women are more social than men because they’re really invested in the relationships, the one-to Relationships, which is a big area of study in my field. But if you start looking at things that people do in groups, men do those much more than women. And I think probably, again, it’s an innate tendency. The most important relationship in biology is the mother-to one. And so that’s a one-to relationship. In humans, women got particular men to a one-to relationship with them to protect and provide and do all those things, which really enabled the larger brain to grow and made everything Else possible. Whereas men do things more in larger groups. And so competition between groups is men against men, whether it’s on the battlefield or in the business marketplace or scientifically. Men compete in groups. It’s not something that women naturally do and form large groups. There are even experiments when I was researching this that would do with children. They’d have two boys playing together, and then the experimenter would bring in a third boy. And the boys would say, okay, sure, come on, join the game. But if it’s two girls, they don’t really want the third girl. They exclude her and reject her. It suggests there’s this mental focus on the one-to relationship. Again, it’s better for intimacy. A lot of the differences, psychological differences between men and women can be understood this way. For example, most data show that women are more emotionally expressive than men. They share their feelings directly and so on. Well, in a one-to relationship, that’s what you want to do so the other person understands you, so you can share your feelings and the other person can take care of you and respond to you And so on. In a large group, showing your feelings all the time is not so useful. Obviously, in the economic marketplace, if you go, oh, this is wonderful, I’ve got to have it, well, the price is going to be higher than if you say, I’m not sure. Maybe not today. Wait a minute, come back, I’ll give you a better deal. And you may have, in a large group, you have rivals and competitors. So, again, you don’t want to give away too much. The emotional reserve of men is more suited to the large group where the expressiveness of the woman is suited to the one-to relationship. That’s why love and family and all those things women are sometimes considered they are the natural experts at these things and some of the researchers tell the men well listen to your Wife on this but it also explains why women haven’t ever organized themselves in large groups to to to get things done I mean why didn’t women ever, 50 women, build a boat and sail off into The unknown to explore things? You know, men did things like this throughout history and all over the world. But you don’t do that as one or two people. You do it in a larger group. (Time 0:01:45)
  • How Female Competition Often Goes Indirect
    • Baumeister says women compete too, but often indirectly through reputation attacks and gossip, especially around desirable men rather than overt status contests.
    • In Tanya Reynolds’ study, women spread hookup gossip mainly when the target was attractively dressed, while framing it as concern. Transcript: Chris Williamson What about the ways that males compete and females compete? I have to assume that that level of competition drives different kinds of outcomes for each sex. Roy Baumeister Yes. Well, there was the idea for a long time that women don’t compete or don’t like to compete as much, and then they gradually realize that this is wrong. It’s just they don’t want to acknowledge it that openly. They do compete often for love, specifically for the affection and attraction of the most desirable men. But that often can’t be acknowledged. It’s done sometimes by blackening the reputation of the other woman and spreading negative stories about her. Even some of those, my former PhD student Tanya Reynolds has really made a terrific career studying female competition in evolutionary context. In one of her experiments, she wanted to see will there be gossip used? Will women just spontaneously gossip about someone else? So she had people come in, told two women to work on a project together. And so she leaves them alone and they’re working. And then the one who’s actually a research assistant who’s working, pretending to be a subject of an experiment, but she’s actually following a script. And she says, oh, I just can’t do this today. I don’t feel good. I drank too much last night. I think I hooked up with two different guys last night. So she delivers this very juicy tidbit, and then they go on. And then that woman leaves, and then in comes another woman, who is another real subject, and the question is, does the woman repeat this gossip about her? Well, it turned out what they also varied is the woman who made this disclosure. Sometimes she was dressed really sexy and hot and looked very nice. And sometimes she just looked like a mess. It was not very attractive. Well, when she was attractive, so she energized the woman’s competitive gears. Then they gossiped. Then they said so-and hooked up with two men last night. But Tanya also noticed, and other research by her has borne this out, they don’t do it in a seemingly malicious way. They say, oh, I was really concerned about so-so. I wonder, there’s a problem. She said she hooked up with two different men last night. That must be bad for her. I’m kind of worried about her. So the negative information gets spread. And remember, why would you only worry about the well-dressed, attractive woman? Why would you worry about the other woman? But that shows the competitive edge to it. So anyway, there is competition among women in the romantic sphere. Most studies look in terms of Kerr stuff. Now, I have to say, when we talk about differences between men and women, we’re talking overlapping distributions. So the difference between the average man and the average woman is real, but it might be fairly small compared to the variety within women. On average, women are less ambitious too. Probably a good evolutionary people talk about it that were descended from men that really the top male got to do most of the reproducing. So in, say, the other great apes, and even in polygamy, which has existed in the majority of cultures in the history of the world, one man with multiple wives. Well, that’s the rich, successful man, and he gets to have multiple wives and multiple children, which means a lot of men don’t get any wife. So the drive to get to the top, you know, we’re descended from the man who did it. A man may have been pretty smart, but he didn’t care about outdoing all the others, or he might have been very physically strong, he didn’t care about that. Well, then he didn’t rise to the top, didn’t pass on his genes, were descended from the ones who really did try to compete. It’s part people bringing this up, I’ve been thinking about the great inflation issues and problems recently. And it disengages the young men because my wife explained this to me once. She said, well, the woman wants to get an A. And she doesn’t really mind if everybody else gets an A too. As for the man, if he can’t be better than the other people, what’s the point? If everybody gets an A. So interesting. Yeah, it doesn’t engage him in the the same way. And so our schools, which are now run mainly by women, are failing all students, but they’re especially failing the boys. That seems to be. And this is one of them. Chris Williamson Because they’re driven more hierarchically. Roy Baumeister Yes, definitely more hierarchy. I remember reading too, back in the 80s when women started really moving up in the businesses, in the organizations that men created. There was a lot of simplification. One estimate that stuck in my mind was the average male business hierarchy had seven different levels of authority. And once women became influential in it, they cut it to about four. So they don’t like as much hierarchy. They favor more equality. (Time 0:07:27)
  • How Female Choice Shapes Male Ambition
    • Baumeister says much male achievement is ultimately shaped by female mate choice because status, money, and success historically increased reproductive odds.
    • Even in egalitarian hunter-gatherer groups, he says women still knew who the best hunter was and preferred him as a partner. Transcript: Chris Williamson And so it’s hard to male and want to do it. You want to be the number one. Historically, how much of male achievement do you think was driven by the desire to attract women? Roy Baumeister Well, a lot. The evolutionary people would say, I mean, that may not be the thing that’s in their mind. But the evolutionists say, well, that is what drives everything. I mean, maybe some men want to succeed because they want money, but the people would say, well, why does the man want money so much? It’s because that’s what attracts the women. So I’m not one of these people that evolution explains everything, but it certainly is the starting point and explains a lot. Chris Williamson I think I’m interested in whether or not, to what extent female mate choice sort of shapes male ambition. We’re talking about this hierarchical sense. You’ve already mentioned that there’s a relatively limited pool of men typically that reproduce and a bigger pool of women. I think it’s about 40% of men ancestrally reproduced and about 80% of women. So you’ve got twice as many female ancestors as male ancestors. And if you’ve got that plus competition, plus big group coordination, a preference for hierarchy, you can begin to see how the pyramid becomes pretty pyramid-y. Yes. Roy Baumeister Yeah. I mean, there was an interesting interlude during the hunter-gatherers in which there was equality, and they really resisted the hierarchy. This was part of the transition away from the apes kind of society that they did it. But I’ve talked to a couple of people who studied hunter-gatherers. And, well, is it true they’re all equal? Well, yes, but the women all know who’s the best hunter, and they all want him for their partner. Even though the food is shared, it does look like the best hunter. Everybody makes sure to be nice to him and his family, so they do get more food. And, of course, if push came to shove, having the best hunter as your partner would make sure you’re likely to starve or go hungry. (Time 0:13:20)
  • Why Men Cluster At Both Extremes
    • Baumeister says men appear at both the top and bottom because male traits show greater variability, producing more geniuses and more severe failures.
    • He speculates XY genetics may expose male mutations more directly because women have a second X as backup. Transcript: Chris Williamson Yeah. I guess, why is it the case that men are overrepresented at both the top and the bottom of society? All right. Roy Baumeister Well, that was another thing I emphasized in the book. You know, the complaints where the feminists look at the top and say, oh, well, the presidents and the governors and the executives are mostly men. It must be great to be a man. But I said, well, look at the bottom of society. Who’s in prison? Who’s homeless, who’s cannon fodder, being killed in battle. You see mostly men there. Now, why that is, that’s a more difficult question to answer. For one thing, though, there’s more variability among men. Men are more different from other men than women are from other women. So it’s even true with basic things like height. Obviously, on average, men are taller than women. But there are a lot of pretty short men, and the distribution is flatter, as we say. They’re more really tall and really short men than really tall and really short women even though the average is different. The difference in average is much smaller than intelligence but the same thing you see more males at both extremes. We have more data at the bottom end because people have done decades of studying research on mental retardation. And as you move from the mild to the moderate to the severely retarded, the sex ratio becomes more skewed, more and more boys at each level. And there’s less at the other end, but it’s the same thing as you move from mildly genius to moderate genius to super genius. Chris Williamson The idea for super genius. Yeah. Roy Baumeister The super high IQ. This is Lawrence Summers at the Harvard meeting. They asked, how come there aren’t a lot of math and physics professors at Harvard who are women. And he said, and he was right, if you have to be just super intelligent to be able to work at that kind of level, there are more men there. And people got all upset and it led to his downfall. They thought he was saying men are smarter than women, which is not what he was saying. He was just saying there’s more variability. So again, if you look at the bottom end of the intelligence distribution, men predominate more. Chris Williamson It wouldn’t have got the rankled groups in the same way if he’d said, there’s more stupid men than there are stupid women. Roy Baumeister Yeah, nobody minds that. But it’s this feminist control. Now, why that is, why men are more variable, I have a pet theory. I’ve talked to some biologists. They said it’s plausible. We don’t know that it’s true. Chris Williamson Speculative bro science is very welcome. I’m very excited to hear this. Roy Baumeister Well, you know, the man has the XY chromosome, the woman has XX. So producing something new, there’s a mutation on the chromosome, right? So something goes wrong and produces a different variation. And there’s a question, does that then show up in behavior? Do the genes show up in the physical properties? Well, for the woman with the X chromosome, there’s always a backup. So even if something goes wrong on one of the little weirdnesses or one of the branches of the X, there is only a 50-50 chance that we’ll get through, and maybe even less than that, maybe The healthy one takes over or something. So there are less few, but nature can roll the dice more easily with men, because if it happens on the bottom part of the Y where there’s no backup, then that will more likely come true. It’s certainly adaptive in a way that evolutionarily successful for nature to gamble with men more than women because a lot of men don’t reproduce at all. And most mutations are bad. Most mutations are not an improvement. And so you want that flushed out of the gene pool right away. If there’s a bad mutation, well, that’s easy with the men since most men don’t reproduce anyway. Chris Williamson Such a good, yeah, I totally, what’s that line about men and nature’s playthings? Yeah, that’s mine. I hadn’t realized, that’s yours? Yeah. Roy Baumeister I love quoting someone to them when I didn’t realize it was them. And it works the other too at the other end because a woman can’t really have more than about a dozen children, but there are men who have hundreds. And so if you have a good mutation, then you want it to spread through the gene pool, right? That’s how evolution makes progress. And so the bad mutations are gone in one generation and the good ones spread more. (Time 0:15:53)
  • Why Men Take More Risks And Compete Harder
    • Baumeister links male risk-taking to reproduction: most women could reproduce by playing safe, but many men had to outperform rivals to avoid being left out.
    • Chris Williamson uses chess and Scrabble to argue top male dominance reflects obsessive competitive motivation, not just raw ability. Transcript: Chris Williamson Okay. What about risk-taking? Because that has to be a big… In fact, forget even the risk-taking thing. The differences in the motivations, when we’re talking about something that controls for physical ability is maybe heavily influenced by cognitive variance. So something like chess playing, there was a study that came out again recently looking at the total ELO scores over time of the best chess players in the world. And I think there was only one female player that ranked in the top something, maybe the top hundred, maybe the top 50. Uh, there’s only one and you think, well, this might be due to some cognitive differences, inability that, you know, if you’ve just got all of these outliers that, you know, the 50 men In that 50 are just the tail of the tail of the tail at the very top processing power. But that’s not just what chess ability measures. It also measures your stubbornness and your motivation to compete with other people for hours and hours and hours obsessively. So I like the idea of the chess thing because it controls for pretty much every variable except for one type of ability or like a smaller bucket of abilities that are typically kind of Denied, I guess, when you look at denial of sex difference stuff and motivations. Motivations to me seem to play a much bigger role in that than you would be able to excuse if it was something that was biomechanical. Roy Baumeister Well, two points to that. One is I remember being surprised that men and women have separate chess tournaments. I mean, I can understand in basketball that the girls’ team won’t be able to play against the boys’ team as the men are taller and so on, but why in chess? But, you know, it could be this kind of distribution in terms of ability. There also may be more competitive motivation. My friend John Tierney, he’s a super good writer. He wrote for the New York Times for many years, and he likes Scrabble. He said nationwide in the U S there are more women than men on the Scrabble clubs playing Scrabble, uh, and so on. Um, and you know, it goes with women are highly verbal and so on. And many say their verbal skills are superior, uh, to men’s, but when they have tournaments, all the top winners are men. It’s very rare. There may be one or two occasional women to get in there. But in the competition, the men do it. And so it could be an ability difference that really at the super high level to win a large scrabble tournament, you have to be really good. But he said also the men are more motivated, more ambitious. So they’ll spend the time doing the drills and memorizing the words, doing that. The women go to the Scrabble Club and they want to play Scrabble and have fun. They don’t care about memorizing lists of words so that they could possibly do better in the future. But putting in that training effort, that would go to motivation. That’s higher among the men. Motivation and ability, they probably go together, and especially with something as important as men and women being slightly differently crafted for slightly different tasks In the biological past. You want to be motivated to do the things you’re good at. Chris Williamson What about risk-taking, then? What’s the difference in risk-taking? Roy Baumeister Well, risk-taking, first of all, going back to twice as many of our ancestors were women than men, and women are much more likely to reproduce than men, which means odds are in your favor. If your biological goal is to produce a child or several and produce grandchildren, for a woman, playing it safe was going to get there. Most women reproduced. But most men didn’t. So if you just go along with everybody else and play along, you’ll end up left out. So we’re descended from the ones who were ambitious and rose to the top, and some of that means taking chances. It’s said in the book, sailing off into the unknown to explore. All kinds of bad things can happen to you. It’s not surprising. Women didn’t want to risk that. But you might come back rich. We’re descended from the men who took the chances and did succeed. Lots of men took chances and drowned or were killed or got nowhere. But that’s life. As a man, in fact, true, I think, in many other species. (Time 0:25:40)
  • Why Some Intellectual Conflict Turns Into Exclusion
    • Baumeister says men more readily enter adversarial collaborations, while women in his colleague’s experience avoided setups where they might be directly proven wrong.
    • He argues this same preference shows up in academia as exclusion and silencing instead of open contest between opposing views. Transcript: Roy Baumeister But I think it applies in the social realm too. Women don’t like to take chances. I have a colleague who is arranging getting researchers together to do what you called adversarial collaborations, where say, you and I are both working in some area and we have a theoretical Disagreement. You think your theory is right and I think my theory is right. So one thing we could do is get together and do an experiment together that will agree this will be the critical test, okay? And people don’t usually do this because they don’t reach out to their rivals who they often don’t like or whatever. But this woman, Carrie Clark, was at Penn and she had a big grant and could encourage people to do it. And she said, yeah, people often once, she said, why don’t you do a collaboration with them? I think, yeah, that’s a great idea. But that was the men’s reaction. She said, I just couldn’t get the women to do it. She had something like 30 or 40 of these things going. And I talked to her at one point. She said, I finally got a woman to agree to be part of one of these things. But it was only on the condition that she would be the neutral third party. So she could not be proven wrong. And so taking that chance she elaborates why women want to exclude someone they disagree with rather than confront them and you bring your data, I’ll bring mine and we’ll duke it out That’s more a male strategy so in a way science has become much more about excluding (Time 0:31:29)
  • Why Trade Offs Matter More Than Easy Fixes
    • Baumeister says modern gender discourse ignores trade-offs and treats every difference as a fixable problem instead of asking what costs the fix creates.
    • His example is grade inflation: students feel better and institutions look kinder, but incentives collapse and learning falls. Transcript: Chris Williamson Do you think modern gender discourse is missing the concept of trade-offs? What is it that’s going wrong when it comes to talking about men and women? Absolutely. Roy Baumeister I was convinced of trade-offs fairly early in my career. And I think social science in general, they want to say this is good and that’s bad. And not all of them. There are lots of people who believe in trade-offs. But sort of the dominant view is, well, this is a problem and we have to do this to fix it. And I started seeing, well, you fix one problem, you create another, and it isn’t so easy just to solve problems. So I have this view, some social scientists see it as our work is a way of making society better. And so they have a clear idea of what’s going to be better. And don’t want to acknowledge that if we make a change to bring about this better state, well, maybe it’ll make some other things worse. So students are happier with grade inflation where everybody gets an A. But then they learn less. There’s less incentive to study and less punishment. Schools get rated on how many of your students graduate and graduate on time and things like that. Well, but that puts pressure on the institution to put out, you know, to make sure everybody passes whether they deserve it or not. And then they’re more uneducated or poorly educated people. I was just reading something in this morning’s paper, I think, about the Chicago schools, which a number of them, they don’t have a single pupil who is reading or doing math at grade level. (Time 0:35:56)
  • How Equality Talk Can Smuggle In Male Defaults
    • Chris Williamson argues equality rhetoric often smuggles in a male default, praising women mainly when they match male-coded roles like hunters or CEOs.
    • Baumeister replies hunting carried special protein value and says corporate prestige tracks functions that drive revenue, not internal harmony. Transcript: Chris Williamson Of sort of toxic compassion I had this idea in my head you remember the study that was done where some feminist scholars had tried to reanalyze the big game hunting data of hunter-gatherer Tribes? And they basically said, women not only did just as much big game hunting as men, but sometimes they did even more. And this was their reanalysis of existing data. It was about five years ago and it sort of broke through. And I remember looking at it at the time and I thought, this doesn’t seem to make sense to me. I don’t really understand why, but I’m not a scholar. I can’t read the data. Someone analyzed their reanalysis and there was so much fuckery with the data. It was one contribution to a single hunt was counted the same as an entire lifetime as hunting from the men. There was no difference made for the size, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And what I realized was there’s a kind of soft bigotry of male expectations around this stuff that whatever men do is implicitly preferred. That’s seen as the desirable thing. That women did just as much big game hunting as men implies that big game hunting and the male default is somehow more desirable. In the same way as there are just as many female CEOs are on the rise, and this is something that should be celebrated. Well, because that’s a position that’s been typically held by men. Now, it’s the prestigious ones. You wouldn’t see this for there are just as many female addicts and homeless people as men. There are just as many women in jail for violent crimes as men. You wouldn’t get that in the same way. But I realized for a society that’s increasingly obsessed with talking about equality, which is not equality, it’s trying to make men and women the same, not to make them equal. It really is, it slips so much low-key misogyny in by just tacitly derogating whatever it is that women tend to do naturally. That, oh, alloparenting, gathering. Gathering is not as important as hunting. Raising children is not as important as war. Building the HR department is not as important as being the CEO. There is always this sort of implicit prioritization, this soft bigotry of male expectations. And I saw it happen with that hunter-gatherer big game hunting thing. And once I’ve seen it, I can’t unsee it really. Roy Baumeister Okay, a couple of things. First, in terms of hunting and gathering, they’re both important, and gathering sometimes yields more calories. It certainly does much more reliably. But from what I’m told, protein has this particular higher value. And so men gather too, for sure, especially the modern ones, because I don’t think there’s as much big game to hunt anymore for the remaining hunter-gatherers anyhow. But protein is a particular need. So if you want to make women look good, you just count the calories, and then the difference is smaller. Protein which you need to grow the brain and the muscles and everything else that is a higher prestige food it’s a more valuable kind of food and so there is a genuine superiority getting Food, or getting protein food, which would come from mainly from hunting. Now, women do, I understand, sometimes hunt small game. So, there’s some degree of overlap, as you would expect. But it’s not that the men made up that hunting is better than gathering. Being the good hunter, again, is what made the man attractive to women, so that he could get his choice of mates and have a tassel of children and we’d be descended from him. And the women knew this too. Joyce said they all know who’s the best hunter, and they all want him. So there is some benefit to protein. And in terms of what makes a corporation The HR department just manages things internally, but it doesn’t improve the bottom line. You got to work on the manufacturing technology and the sales opportunities. And those are the things where the corporations make money so that they can afford a human relations thing, which will make sure there are no office romances and things like that. Which, incidentally, is something of a recent issue I’ve been thinking about. I wonder if young people aren’t marrying and mating nearly as much as they used to. And I wonder if the prohibition on workplace romance threw out a lot of real babies with the bathwater. I mean, it was done to protect women from a few abusive guys who would take advantage of their position. And I sympathize with that. But I think I, like most men, our guests, like you two, we hate those guys who abuse their positions because they discredit the rest of us. Absolutely. And again, I was visiting at Harvard and a woman there said, you know, our friends are all these long, happily married couples, but none of those marriages would be allowed today. A lot of them started off with professors and students and things like that. And so they pushed more and more to prohibit that. But often the woman initiated that herself and women like to marry somebody like that. And again, there’s a lot of long, happy marriages are being prevented. And the dating apps aren’t doing an adequate job. (Time 0:38:00)
  • Why Gender Ideals Clash With Protection Instincts
    • Chris Williamson says modern feminism often tells women to become the kind of man they want to marry, reducing sexual polarity and clashing with real-world desires for male protection.
    • He points to viral footage of a boyfriend hiding during a knife attack, while commenters still demanded he protect his partner. Transcript: Chris Williamson Interesting element here is modern feminism has encouraged women to turn into the sort of man that they want to marry. Very much encouraging dominance, assertiveness, independence, derogating, nurturing, soft, sensitive skills, unless they’re in a man, obviously. And the lack of polarity, you just can’t sort of re-engineer this out. And it’s interesting to see how many of the cultural commentators online that will endorse a view that they don’t embody. How many of the people that are writing about this stuff, if you were to look at the inner dynamic of their relationship, it probably looks quite traditional. But from the outside saying, you don’t need to have a family, you don’t need to be a mother, you don’t need to be in any way submissive or follow or be led by the partner all the rest and you Look internally at what a lot of these commentators online do especially as they grow up a little bit more and you realize that those positions those positions aren’t held there was A really interesting uh situation i don’t know if you saw it went viral about six months ago There was a man and a woman, young pair traveling in Thailand, some sort of East Asian country. And it was CCTV footage. And the woman was attacked by a man with a knife. And he was trying to steal her bag off her, some of her possessions. And the man that she was with hid around the side of a pillar. So there was a sort of a bollard or something and this guy hid over there as the woman was fighting, trying to sort of hold onto a bag and this guy’s got a knife and that I don’t really remember How it finished. All of the comments were basically saying, girl, just leave him. He’s trash. This guy, absolutely no respect at all. And I wish that he had protected her. I wish that it hadn’t happened. I don’t think that she should have had to go through it. But it is difficult to diminish the protector provider elements that men typically take value from and in the same breath say, yeah, but if it happens, you should stand up for the woman. Because if you’ve been trained for your entire life, well, women don’t need the doors holding open for them. Women don’t need you to make sure that they get home safe at night. They can do everything that a man does, sometimes even better, just as much big game hunting. Are the training wheels for men to learn to step up in those sorts of situations? Roy Baumeister Right. Yes, very much. Yeah. My generation, we were told we’ve got to take care of the girls and the women and hold the doors for them and protect them. And if there’s danger, you put yourself into it. There’s a funny story by Warren Farrell, who I guess initially was one of the main male feminists. He was. But he kind of woke up to that. But he talked about being at a conference on feminism and he was out for a walk with one of the top women feminists. And they’re walking down in a park or something. A man jumped out from behind a tree. It turned out it wasn’t dangerous, but it suddenly was. And immediately the woman ducked behind him, and he stepped forward. And he said, Oh, we had such a long, awkward conversation after that. How could… Anyway. Chris Williamson Oh, my embodied misogyny just pouring out of me. The patriarchy came and pulled her back behind me. Roy Baumeister Okay, I’m not sure I believe in either misogyny or patriarchy. But those are common terms, which… Yeah, maybe that’s what she blamed or something like that. But I certainly don’t know any men who hate women. Chris Williamson No. Roy Baumeister I know men who hate specific women, ex-wives and whatnot, and often for understandable reasons. But a man who hated women in general, I don’t do it. I mean, if there’s any gender hatred, it’s feminists hating men in general uh and i think there’s i think there’s subcultures now unfortunately there are subcultures of men who hate Chris Williamson Women you know you look at sort of some of the darker corners of the internet now guys that are um they’re upset uh uh entire sex that they think has rejected them or their friends or has Made a society where they’re no longer wanted. I do think that the more militant edges of feminism have been mirrored now on the men’s side. Roy Baumeister Yeah, that could be. I wouldn’t be surprised. And, you know, if a woman who’d been raped a couple times hated men in general, we wouldn’t be that surprised. And I kind of see those involuntarily celibate incels somewhat in the same category. I’m less sympathetic. But, I mean, the experiment would be if a woman would take one of these incels and strike up a relationship with him and start having sex with him uh he might come around very rapidly and Chris Williamson All these women are bad would just evaporate so it’s a spicy theory that we can fix inceldom by just getting women to have sex with men more but uh i do i do agree that, I mean, it’s even discouraged In the world of incels. I’m not sure how familiar you are with it, but one of my best friends is the number one researcher on the planet, William. And they have this term called ascending. And ascending is no longer becoming an incel by being attractive to a woman and getting her attention, getting her in a bed, being found to be attractive in this way. And it’s actively discouraged. And I think the reason it’s actively discouraged is if somebody else that you saw as an equal is able to ascend, is no longer involuntarily celibate, that means that maybe you’re not Doomed. And if that’s the case, your sort of fatalistic view of why things are happening this way might not actually be so fatalistic. It might be more self-imposed and maybe there’s something you could do. And as soon as you have hope, you also have the opportunity for disappointment. And without the hope, there can’t be disappointment. So removing the hope and saying, I’m a genetic dead end, there’s nothing that I can do, women are X, Y, and Z, and that’s not going to change. It’s misery-inducing, but predictable, consistent, and reassuring in some ways. Yeah. Roy Baumeister Yeah. Yeah. Well, I would like to know more about the incels. It’s an odd corner of the world, and I don’t know people, (Time 0:44:30)
  • What Happens When Male Sacrifice Stops Paying
    • Baumeister says societies weaken when they stop rewarding male sacrifice, because men lose the incentive to serve, protect, and identify with the culture.
    • Chris Williamson notes these role experiments persist only when selection pressures are low; war quickly restores traditional expectations. Transcript: Roy Baumeister If your theory is correct, what do you think happens when societies stop rewarding male sacrifice? That would be a weakness. I remember my professors remembering World War II when it was declared, and all American men rushed to sign up and volunteer to go fight the war, and I don’t think that would happen today. The men have been brought up to think, you know, they’re bad and the women are just as good and society, you know, we teach our kids that America and the UK and so on are bad places who’ve Done bad things and don’t stress the positive accomplishments. So that would be a vulnerability as long as there’s no war. Chris Williamson Ironic to say this, there’s a war going on. Yeah, I mean, it’s so true that the reason that we’re able to sort of play around in this kiddie pool with roles and switching of sacrifice and who’s supposed to do what is literally because There aren’t any intense selection pressures going on. If there was something more extreme happening and imposing itself on us from the outside, shit would get real, really quick. I mean, look at the Ukraine war, right? The Ukraine war kicks off and men were being turned away at the border, including trans men were being turned away at the border because, hey, no, sorry, buddy, women and children get To go, but you got to stay. I don’t know how progressive thinking Ukraine was prior to the war kicking off. I’m unsure about the cultural landscape there. But yeah, it seems to me like we might be entering a period where male motivation collapses. And And obviously you wrote this book in 2010 and 16 years later, the male motivation collapse, which you could have seen, it just would have been a natural byproduct of you rolling the Clock forward from what you’d already seen, has completely come to fruition. So I guess I can congratulate you on being Cassandra in that way. (Time 0:51:55)
  • Why Ego Depletion Looks More Like Conservation
    • Baumeister says ego depletion is heavily supported but better understood as conservation, not total fuel exhaustion: incentives can restore performance while leaving people more drained afterward.
    • Sugar repeatedly revived depleted participants in double-blind lemonade tests, while Splenda had no effect. Transcript: Chris Williamson It’s true that ego depletion is one of the most successful findings in social psychology, that willpower is a limited resource, which when used can be sapped and takes time to come back Online. If it’s true that it’s one of the most successful findings in social psychology, how come it keeps on being attacked? This is replication crisis. It doesn’t repeat. Why is that the case? What are people getting wrong? Roy Baumeister I don’t know. People do like to tear down other things and there’s a lot of so forth. But evidence in favor is overwhelming. There must be a thousand successful findings in the research literature, which hardly any point has that much support. I heard somebody was saying, well, that must have just been all been by chance, that maybe by accident the statistics turned out this way. Well, chance works equally both ways. Half the findings should be in the opposite direction. There are essentially none in the opposite direction. I mean, saying that it’s a chance where there’s that much. There was the one initially big multi-lab replication, which was reported as a failure. And so that got a lot of publicity, because people like negative publicity, and they never correct it when the positive comes around. Even those data were reanalyzed a couple years later and somebody said, oh no, actually, they didn’t get people depleted enough to really show any effects, but to the slight extent That they did deplete people, they did what the theory predicted. So that was confirmed. Chris Williamson A quick aside, if your sleep’s been off, you’re taking ages to fall asleep, waking up at random times, feeling groggy in the morning, Momentus’s Sleep Packs are here to help. They’re not your typical knock you out supplement, just overloaded with melatonin. It only has the most evidence-based ingredients, perfect doses to help you fall asleep more quickly, stay asleep throughout the night, and wake up feeling more rested and revitalized In the morning. These things are an absolute game changer. I take them every single night and when I’m on the road. They’re unbelievable because they’re pre-dosed. Just take this and just sleep will improve. What you read on the label is what’s in the product and absolutely nothing else. And if you’re still insured, they’ve got a 30 day money back guarantee. So you can just buy it completely risk free. Use it. If you don’t like it, if your sleep doesn’t improve, they’ll just give you your money back. That’s how confident they are that you’ll love it. Plus, they ship internationally. Right now, you can get a 35% discount on your first subscription and that 30-day money-back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to livemomentous.com/modernwisdom And using modern wisdom at checkout. That’s L-I dot com slash modernwis Modern wisdom. Check out. How much is true of the fact that ego depletion works, either only works or works more if you believe in it, that it’s this self-fulfilling thing? If you believe that you have a limited amount of willpower, then it sort of manifests. But if you don’t believe that, it’s a protective mechanism. Roy Baumeister Well, that’s a really interesting idea that some people at Stanford published some work on that. And we were intrigued by that. And so we tried to copy their experiment. And we did find that if you give people a really strong sales pitch that your willpower is unlimited, then, at least when they first get depleted, they don’t show the effect. We did show when you get seriously depleted, then you show an even worse effect. So that belief that you have unlimited willpower is helpful. Think of the analogy of physical energy. If you somehow could be convinced that you have unlimited physical energy today, and then you go out for running a race. But first, when you start to get fired, tired, it’ll probably help you continue to do it. But at some point, it may backfire. My thought in the big picture is if it were true that believing in unlimited willpower would give you unlimited willpower, you’d think most societies in the world would have that belief. Chris Williamson They would have created some sort of cultural meme around it because it would have conferred such an improvement for everyone. Roy Baumeister So much benefit to society, to having people with better self-control. And yet most societies don’t. Now, there was some argument that some people in India have the opposite belief, and I wish to see more there. But it’s very rare most people seem to know. And I think, you know, they just have the experience that trying to exert control over a long period of time, you just can’t keep it up. Chris Williamson What, if anything, has been accurate in some of the critiques around the original research? Or what’s been most accurate, or has given you most reason to? Roy Baumeister Okay, well, at first we thought, at first we were thinking that willpower is kind of a metaphorical thing. But, well, okay, the brain has a limited amount of fuel, and it used it up, so it has to recover. But then people started showing you get people depleted, and then you offer them a big financial reward if they can still perform well. Well, they can. They’re extra depleted afterwards, but it’s not that the brain is out of fuel. It just goes into a conservation mode. It turns out physical muscles are the same way. There are lab studies where you come into the lab and do physical exertions where you have to press, and after a while your muscles get tired, and then the researchers will say, well, I’ll tell you what, I’ll give you $10 if you can do it once, pressing as hard as you did when you first walk in. Well, they can. It’s still that there is a point at which your muscles can’t work anymore. There’s probably a point like that at which your willpower is so badly depleted that you can’t do it. But in the laboratory would never get people to that extreme situation. So one big switch early was to shift from being out of fuel to conserving remaining fuel. And it makes sense. We evolved under conditions of uncertain food supply. And then people started linking it to the glucose, the chemical in your body that carries the energy from your stomach to your brain and muscles (Time 0:54:08)
  • Track Behavior First To Build Self Control
    • Improve self-control by increasing monitoring before chasing more willpower; track spending, weight, workouts, or any target behavior so feedback stays visible.
    • Baumeister says self-control also strengthens with cross-domain practice, citing studies where better money management improved studying, tidiness, and diet. Transcript: Chris Williamson Beyond having more glucose across all of the work that you’ve done, what are the best, most evidence-based ways for people to improve their willpower? Roy Baumeister Okay, well, improving self-control, which is the real goal, you can do that without improving willpower. Chris Williamson Can you distinguish for me the difference between self-control and what? Roy Baumeister Okay, so willpower would be the energy that you exert. But self-control also depends on keeping track of the behavior. So the easiest way to improve self-control is to keep a record of what you’re doing. Even my grandmother told me a long time ago, well, when you’re a poor student, you don’t have money, you just write down everything you spend, and then you know how much you’re spending And what you’re spending it on. Or if you’re trying to lose weight and keep it off, well, you’ve got to weigh yourself more carefully. Or if you’re trying to take up an exercise program, tell your friends you’re going to do it. And you’re going to tell them each day, did I exercise today? So improving the monitoring will improve self-control without needing any more willpower because it gives you more feedback. And I was going to try to jog three times a week and I haven’t jogged all week. So I better do it. It’s easier to fool yourself if you don’t keep track. And certainly if you don’t know, it’s very hard to regulate something that you don’t know. In terms of improving the willpower, it seems to work like a muscle. And a lot of people have produced findings like this, that if you exercise self-control on a regular basis, then you get better at it. I didn’t know if that would work. We had an early study where it did work and then done a fair number of others. And other people have too. There are a couple of meta-analyses combining results of a great many studies and saying, yes, it does practice self-control. To design the study properly, you have to exercise self-control on one sphere and then measure self-control in something else to show that it’s a general improvement. But it does seem to work. Some of the biggest effects I’ve seen were this Australian group. They did several studies. One was they took students who had money trouble and they trained them to manage their money better. And they met with them once a month for several months or something and taught them how to manage their money. And so they did get better at that. But their measure, one key was they came to the laboratory and had to do self-control tasks that had nothing to do with money. It was just like maintaining focus on this while you’re being distracted by that. They were better at that. They also reported on the questionnaire that they started studying better just because they’re working on managing their money better, but they also study, their study habits improved. After they finished dinner, they would clean up rather than just stack the dishes in the sink. They even said they ate healthier, which, again, is a sign of self-control. But as they point out, healthy food is more expensive than junk food. So it kind of went against what they were training self-control for, which is to manage their money better. But they also improved their diet. So they saw a whole variety of positive changes in there that came from it. (Time 1:05:47)
  • Why Sexual Novelty Can Be Spent Too Fast
    • Baumeister argues sexual novelty is finite, so unlimited porn and rapid escalation can burn through excitement early instead of deepening pair bonds.
    • He contrasts today’s app-to-sex-in-days pattern with slower courtship, where each new step created separate shared novelty inside one relationship. Transcript: Chris Williamson Wisdom i’ve been completely obsessed with this series that you’ve been doing on sub stack about sexual novelty what did you learn there i was intrigued with the idea that partly with Roy Baumeister Thinking about pornography, it’s so widely available. I’ve seen over the course of my life that that become more and more available, for better and for worse. Um, but, but the, the novelty of it, it might’ve been Naomi Wolf or one of those who remarked that her generation, which I think was about the same as mine, was the last time a woman could Have this huge effect on a man just by taking off her clothes and letting him see her naked body. But it was such a thrill to see it. When I was a kid, we didn’t see pictures of naked women. One of my buddies would find a playboy that somebody had thrown away or something, but they didn’t even show the full nudity. So you really didn’t quite know what a woman entirely looked like. And even if you could find an occasional picture or something, it’s not like endless amounts of pornography and lots of women and ads where they’re showing everything. So, some of the mystery is gone. It made me think, well, maybe there’s some loss there that novelty is arousing but it’s a limited amount of novelty. You can only do something the first time once. There’s only one first time. So in a way it’s a bit sad for young men to have all this available to them. And if it had been available when I was young, I doubt I would have resisted. I probably would have been curious enough to look at it all and so on. Available. But that way, there’s still novelty as I got into my 30s and 40s, which I hadn’t explored yet. But if you’ve seen everything by the time you’re 25 or even by the time you’re 20, there isn’t as much novelty available. On the different sex partners, and that seems to be what people are shifting, that’s kind of what I came to after writing those columns, that people are blazing through all the novelty And pornography. Novelty within the relationship. So the second base plan, you know, that you just sort of gradually go from one step to the other. One of my young friends said, oh, yeah, today I just did it again from first contact on the dating app to having lots of sex under a week. It’s just a few days. Whereas, you know, back in the day, the earlier day, you had to practically be engaged before you could go all the way. Certainly, I grew up in the 70s. You had to have a series of interactions and, you know, you had the relationship. And so the step-by the novelty, you know you could appreciate so the the first time you undo her brassiere whatever oh that’s that’s really exciting but if you’ve had sex you know and Done it all right away that doesn’t i think strengthen the relationship in the way that shared novel experiences, a series of them, will do. I can’t prove it on that, but that’s a speculation. But going for novelty in terms of lots of different partners rather than novelty within one relationship of gradually exploring many different activities, that seems much less well-designed To produce healthy families, which is what society needs. (Time 1:10:50)
  • The Wife Who Fixed Desire With One New Move
    • Baumeister recounts a letter about a long-married couple whose sex life had faded until the wife finally read a sex manual and tried touching her husband with her hand.
    • She said he became harder than he had for years, showing how little novelty earlier generations sometimes explored. Transcript: Chris Williamson Was that story about the couple where the woman had never used her hand? Roy Baumeister Right. Yes, I remember reading that. I think it was in the Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex but Were Afraid to Ask book, which is one of the first bestsellers to the public about sex. She’d written to the physician and said they’d had a good sex life with her husband and then gradually couldn’t perform well. It got weaker and weaker and it stopped altogether and it was kind of sad. She felt bad for him. And then she thought, you know, morals, women didn’t do sexual things. But she said, well, I love my husband and we’ve been married a long time. I’m not going to worry about morality. And she went and bought a book about sex, which, you know, back in those days there weren’t that many things available. And it said if you put your hand on the man’s genitals, it was exciting to them. So I tried that and he got harder than he had for years. And so it was a very nice kind of sweet story. So that’s the opposite extreme of novelty. (Time 1:16:36)
  • Why Sexual Variety Seems Much Stronger In Men
    • Baumeister says sexual novelty appears to drive male desire far more strongly than female desire, with men wanting far more lifetime partners on average.
    • He cites a student survey where women averaged 2.5 desired partners while men averaged 64, plus Eli Finkel’s claim one-night stands are rarer than assumed. Transcript: Roy Baumeister It’s much harder to get convincing data, anything on that. And so I can write what we do know about female sexuality and so on. But the role of novelty, I mean, it’s not nothing, but it doesn’t seem to be as powerful a driving force. I recall some years ago, someone reported a survey, I think it was first-year COD students at Southern Cal or one of the California universities, and they asked, how many people would You like to have sex with for the rest of your life, assuming no constraints of marriage or laws or disease or anything like that if it were up to you. And the women’s response average was two and a half. So they wanted to have a fling or two and then settle down. The average for the men was 64. Chris Williamson And that’s the average. So you’ve got some impressive outliers there to bring that back down. Roy Baumeister Yeah, there definitely were. Because they said actually a lot of people just said one. Presumably these were people who were still virgins, and they were just hoping to have the first one. Oh, wow. Chris Williamson Okay. Roy Baumeister Yeah, yeah, yeah. So both men and women, there were a lot saying, I would like to have one. But a lot of the men wanted to have a really high number. And not very many women were saying, I want to go have sex with 100 men. So I’m not doing it now. There was that woman in the UK who did it all in one day, right? Chris Williamson A thousand, yeah, Bonnie Blue. I had a debate with her on the show. I moderated a debate with her on the show. Roy Baumeister It wasn’t a thousand001 day, right? Chris Williamson No, it was. You’re talking about Lily Phillips who did 100, and then Bonnie Blue had sex with 1,000 men in one day, which even if you just run the numbers is insane, but the whole thing was recorded. It’s a real fact. I mean, more than anything, it’s an endurance feat, more than it is one of sexual novelty. But I mean, what you’re looking at there is basically someone who’s kind of the Michael Jordan or the LeBron James or the Tiger Woods of sociosexuality. It’s just somebody that’s so far. She is the tail of the tail. She’s the Elon Musk of having sex. And I had a conversation with her. I sat down. I sat across from her. She was perfectly cordial. She had her defenses up at the start, but when she realized it wasn’t going to be a cantankerous takedown conversation, it was really nice. And I was looking, I mean, I think I’m a pretty good judge of character. And I was looking for, is there some deception going on here? Is there some secret trauma that’s leaking out? Is there whatever? And by the end of it, my summary is just, she is the most extreme sociosexual being that I’ve ever seen. She just is able to completely detach emotions from having sex. It’s not alchemizing some childhood in a way that I think a lot of BDSM and kink actually is. There seems to be a good amount of data coming out that a good bit of BDSM and kink is, preferences for that are predisposed by some situations people have been through in childhood. That was Catherine Page Harden from UT. She was teaching me about that a couple of weeks ago and a couple of other conversations I’ve had. It’s definitely unique, but I mean, yeah, maybe there’ll be studies done on her at some point in future. Who knows? Roy Baumeister The one who did 100 said she wouldn’t recommend it. Chris Williamson The one who did 1,000 said that she’d do it again. So again, the people at the extremes, the people who are at the tail of the tail, they’ll… Roy Baumeister Okay, well, that’s what she wants. Good for her. And it must have been fun for the thousand men too. I wonder, does she want to get married at some date? Chris Williamson That would be actually, that could be a fix for your incel problem. That could be, we could just put a thousand of the men who were struggling with the inceldom thing in there, and then that’s a thousand fewer men who are maybe thinking that sex is inaccessible. Who knows? Roy Baumeister Yes. My wife thinks they’re just caught up by the publicity that great sex is going on all over the place. She says they probably just want the really attractive women, which is unrealistic for them. She wonders, have these insults made a serious effort to date, say, the fat girls or others who aren’t nearly as much in demand? Traditionally, historically, that’s what people sometimes did. They found someone at about the same level. But that was before there was the assumption that lots of people are having lots of great sex all the time. Which I’m told by the researchers who are studying this is that it’s not nearly as wild as that. The Hollywood version of what a young person’s sex life is not realistic. It may be realistic even in Hollywood. But those are beautiful people with lots of money and status and so on. So, I don’t know. I don’t have to say to you you said you know an expert on this well have you ever tried to date the less attractive girls who are wishing for more attention and action or if you insist you Have to have the gorgeous one well you may be disappointed unless you’re a big rich handsome man. Chris Williamson There was a really interesting article that was posted by my friend Rob Henderson a couple of days ago. And he was talking about people assume that it’s this small number of men that are capturing sex from a large number of women, but it’s not. It’s a sociosexual few at the top. And yeah, there is a little bit of a skew within there, but most people aren’t having that much sex. Many people aren’t having any sex at all. And there is a small number of people having loads of sex with each other. And that’s just a really interesting wrinkle, I think, in the sort of 80-20 discourse that’s been going on for a while. And I knew that this had got turned upside down three or four years ago by a friend, Alex Deitsike. And then Rob re-reported on it the other day and basically found out the same thing. You’ve just got this group of people who want to have sex with lots of people. And yeah, everybody else is, I don’t know, looking at it, maybe thinking it was good. I guess one interesting thing is probably more men would want to be in that group of highly sociosexual people, whereas fewer women (Time 1:21:18)