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- [00:00]
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- [00:30]
Steve Stewart-Williams
Maybe 10, 20 years ago, you'd see a lot of headlines that would say, okay, we've discovered an IQ gene or a gay gene or a warrior gene, longevity gene, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And the vast majority of those have failed to replicate. So they were false positives due to studies that had samples that were too small, Basically. But what does seem to be replicating now is that just hundreds of thousands of genes contribute to almost every complex trait that you get.
- [01:04]
Yasha Monk
And now the good fight with Jascha Monk. One of the fields of social science that I don't have any formal training in and didn't do a lot in my formal studies, but that I've become increasingly interested in is is psychology. There are just fundamental questions about human beings, about the social world and about politics, but I think are best answered from a psychological point of view. And there's one substack that I've been reading with great pleasure on psychological questions. It is called the Nature Nurture Nietzsche Newsletter, written by Steve Stewart Williams, who is a professor at the University of Nottingham in Kuala Lumpur. And so I invited him to a podcast to talk about all of the big questions in psychology. Questions like what really explains our universal human trains? And what explains the difference between you and me, between me and my sibling, between you and your cousin? Is it nature or is it nurture? What is the best evidence from twin studies and others about how big an influence a shared environment and how big an influence genes have on how we act? We talked also about the importance and the relevance of evolutionary explanations of how we act. Can evolutionary biology really inform how we understand human nature and the human human speeches? And isn't it always in danger of committing us to political conclusions that we might not like? Isn't it just a way for people to try and rationalize injustice or inequality in the world? We also talked extensively about the role of IQ and other individual characteristics in the world. How predictive is IQ of life, success, and all kinds of other human attributes? And if you wanted to predict whether somebody is successful, what metrics would you need to look at? Beyond iq, what is the importance, for example, of psychological dimensions like neuroticisms or conscientiousness? And finally, in the part of a conversation that is reserved for for paying supporters of this podcast, we talked about political psychology. How is it that basic psychological concepts like the in group out group distinctions help us understand our politics? How do they shape whether we are on the left or the right, whether we're moderates or extremists, when we might enter into conflict with others, while we exaggerate the differences between my political tribe and your political tribe? And finally, can we actually trust all of these findings? 10, 15 years into the big replication crisis in psychology, do we have greater insight into which parts of the discipline actually is built on a firm footing and which part is very much questionable? To listen to those parts of the conversation, please go to yashamonk.substack.com and become a paying subscriber. And to thank you for being a listener to the show, I'm throwing in a special discount if you go to yashamon.substack.com thegood fight, you get 25% off an annual subscription. That makes this about the dollar the week to support the work. Steve Stewart Williams, welcome to the podcast.
- [05:11]
Steve Stewart-Williams
Thank you very much. Nice to be here.
- [05:13]
Yasha Monk
Like Dasha, it's my pleasure. So I really enjoy reading your substack, which is very wide ranging from psychological perspective. It's called the Nature Nurture Nietzsche newsletter, which is a lot of ends. So let's start with a question of nature and nurture. This is a question that I know a lot of people are very interested in, often without really knowing the latest research and so on at 10,000ft. To start off with that question, what is the best evidence today about the extent to which the most important human traits are caused by nature and the extent to which they are influenced by nurture?
- [05:56]
Steve Stewart-Williams
All right, and at the deep end, great. I think there are basically two ways that you can tackle the nature nurture issue. And one is the nature and nurture of individual differences between people. And the other is the nature and nurture of traits that we all have in common. And I guess a good example to pry those two apart would be, so basically everybody, all normally functioning human beings, have the emotion of fear, for instance. And so the question would be, to what extent is that emotion a product of nature versus nurture? People differ, though, in their proneness to fear and how fearful they get in different situations. And then the nature nurture question there would be, what explains the differences between people and Then the first question I think is best answered by evolutionary psychology. So applying evolutionary biological principles to the human beings and the human mind. And the answer there might be, okay, we all have the emotion of fear because fear encourages certain kinds of behavior that on average are adaptive. So steering us clear of the edge of the cliff, for instance, if you
- [06:59]
Yasha Monk
don't have right, if you're not afraid at all, then you might tumble over the cliff or you might get eaten by the lion. And so over time, people who lack that faculty are not going to be able to pass on their genes.
- [07:09]
Steve Stewart-Williams
Exactly. As are people who have that faculty too strongly as well. So there's a sort of, type of, sort of happy medium somewhere in between the two. So that's the universals question. And then in terms of differences in fare, the field that we'll look at, that would be behavior genetics. And that looks at the extent to which differences between individuals in traits like fair and any other trait, you can measure the extent to which those differences are correlated with differences among those individuals and the genetic variance that they have.
- [07:42]
Yasha Monk
Great. And so the first one, there isn't really a nature versus nurture question. The first one, I mean, what would be a human universal, something that all humans have that is not influenced by evolutionary pressures in our biology? Are there examples of things that every human being has, but it is probably caused by nurture?
- [08:07]
Steve Stewart-Williams
I would say that there are these days. So I said I think that it is a nature nurture question. And maybe fear isn't the best example, because I think that's a pretty obvious example where it is part of our nature, other faculties, like language, for instance, I think it's less obvious. I do think that we are by nature a talking animal, but that's more of a debatable issue than is the case of fear. And as for the question of whether there are human universals, well, I guess part of the debate actually is for a given trait, whether it is a human universal. And once you've established that it is,
- [08:39]
Yasha Monk
once we believe it's a human universal, then we're going to be assuming that it has something to do with our nature. And then people are going to go around saying, but what about this tribe and some part of the Amazon that doesn't have a particular linguistic feature or it doesn't have a particular other thing, and so then perhaps it's not actually part of our nature. Is that the idea?
- [08:58]
Steve Stewart-Williams
Yeah, exactly. Exactly Right. But there are some things that probably would or could come quite close to being human universals that are not Directly products of nature. Like, I don't know, I can only think of joke examples off the top of my head like drinking Coca Cola and having smartphones and doom scrolling and eating pizza and things like that. Maybe a more serious example would be literacy, which isn't universal, but it's sort of close to universal in many nations. And you can sort of imagine that it could become a universal. And whereas I think spoken language, I think there's a good case to make that that's part of our nature, the capacity to learn a spoken language. I think reading and writing is a cultural invention instead, and one that could become a.
- [09:42]
Yasha Monk
That's interesting. Right. So, I mean, there's universals that are in the realm of something like technology that obviously are not part of our nature. Right. I mean, one way of thinking about reading or writing, one way of thinking about a smartphone, you know, a T shirt. Probably most human beings in the world own a T shirt. Certainly not every human being, but most human beings. Right. But that's because those kind of technologies, and you might think that the things that allow us to produce those technologies are human universals. But the particular technology that we, that we employ today, you know, has to do with material culture and a particular stage of economic development and, you know, the universality of Western cultural influence in the world and other kinds of things that are much more contingent.
- [10:27]
Steve Stewart-Williams
Yeah, and I see what you mean, and I think. So maybe a better example would be something that could be a universal that's in our minds as opposed to T shirts that we're wearing or technology that we're using. And I guess reading and writing that is implemented in the brain. And so I think that probably would be the. The best example I can think of of psychological trait that's nurture rather than nature that could become a universal.
- [10:50]
Yasha Monk
That's very interesting. Yeah. Before we move on to the very interesting question of differences between individuals, I know from a lot of people that they have these deep reservations against using evolutionary explanations for our nature today. In fact, I was teaching a chapter from one of my favorite books, certainly one of my favorite books in political psychology, the Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt, a number of months ago. And some of his students sort of rebelled against it a little bit and said evolutionary biology is a discredited field. And what they seem to have in mind, I think, is the fear that a certain kind of argument from evolutionary biology might commit them to political conclusions they don't. Like there might be people in the manosphere, for example, who say it's in the nature of men to want to sleep with as many women as possible in the nature of women to want to find one man to commit to them. And therefore, men should act like this and women should act like that or something like that. Presumably, the answer to those concerns is to say that you can point out certain traits that we have as humans universally, or certain differences between different groups of human beings without thereby committing yourself in any way to a normative conclusion. So to those who may have this kind of skepticism about evolutionary biology, what would you say? First of all, to establish that, in fact there are important insights to be gained from it. And secondly, perhaps to reassure them that they're not going to wind up getting committed to, for example, certain sexist views about, you know, the right division of roles in society between men and women.
- [12:34]
Steve Stewart-Williams
Yeah, I think I'd start with the second part first and just reiterate your point that I think that the descriptive differences that we might see between the sexes and other kind of things don't have any immediate political implications or ethical implications. To assume that they would is fallacy of reasoning, known as the naturalistic fallacy. The idea that the fact that something is natural therefore means that's good. Also, I think people are unnerved by the prospect that if something is natural, that therefore means that it's inevitable and can't be changed. Both of which I think are wrong. I guess the first thing I would say actually is, even if that were true, so even if your worst fears were true, it doesn't actually mean that an evolutionary biological approach cannot shed light on human nature and human behavior, even if that were true. But I do think that it's not true. I do think that, I guess, two things. So one thing is, I think that a lot of the things that they worry about. So we're sort of starting to head into the territory of sex differences, which is where a lot of the misgivings come from. And I think that a lot of the differences are actually not as big. The claims about how large the sex differences are. They're not the kind of claims that people are worried about. Differences are often quite modest. There's a ton of overlap between the sexes in most traits where you have average differences. So that for a start. But people do notice the differences. And I think I would caution people that if we make it off limits to talk about these kind of things, then there are going to be. You're going to have more of a concern about people who think, okay, well, they're not talking about this, but there are obviously these differences between the sexes. Obviously there's an innate kind of pushes in certain directions, so they're not telling us the truth. And I think that means it's more likely that they're irresponsible people. And the people who are lacking a nuance in talking about these kind of things are more likely to take that ball and run with it and draw inappropriate ethical conclusions from a garbled version of an evolutionary psychological perspective, as opposed to if more responsible people with a more nuanced view, if they tackle it, then I think they're less likely to come to those dodgy conclusions.
- [14:40]
Yasha Monk
Let me make two points here, one where I fully agree with you and one where perhaps I'm not quite as sure that I agree with you. So I think there's a sort of strange fallacy of discourse control that pops up in big parts of our public intellectual life. I've written in the past about how journalists, I think, often overestimate the amount of influence they have over the views and the conclusions of their readers. And I think that one of the mistakes that many journalists have made over the last 10 years is to come to have the self conception as wanting to save democracy. Now. I want to save democracy. I think that moxie is in peril and it's important to protect it. I think it's perfectly fine as a citizen to feel like one of your obligations is to do what you can to maintain this system of government. I think if journalists, particularly beat reporters, particularly journalists who are reporting on what's actually happening in the world, allow that ambition to influence what they write, they're actually going to be doing damage to that cause because they think, for example, if I don't talk too much about the fact that Joe Biden seems to have some amount of mental decline and and so on, then that's not going to give sucker to Donald Trump. It's not going to make it easier for Trump to get reelected. What actually happens is that that's what ends up committing the Democratic Party to Biden for far too long, and they don't have time to have a real primary and you end up with Biden, with Trump getting reelected. So there's all kinds of ways in which this desire to control the discourse ends up not working. What you actually mostly do is to convince people that they can't trust you and therefore to turn to other sources of information which are often less responsible and less so. I completely agree with you on that, that if people can sense that there may be certain sex differences out in the world and you say that's absolutely none that might get us into difficult territory. You're not going to get the great enlightened policies you want at the end of this. You're just going to get people to mistrust you and possibly listen to people who have much more retrograde views. Now, I think there is perhaps, and I agree with you obviously on the naturalistic fallacy, that just to say that something has a biological tendency doesn't mean that's good, or that we should encourage it or anything like that. But there may be an extent to which things that are hard coded in our nature make it very difficult to change. So, for example, I believe that there are certain elements of human nature which make it very hard to live in fully communal living. And as a result, every time that people have tried to live in communes, and there's many examples of this now, Nicholas Christakis has written about this, for example, in very different cultural contexts, different time periods, different ideologies, different religious aspirations. It works for a little while at the beginning when the founders are there and everybody's super committed. And then it always goes wrong in very similar ways. And I think that does tell you, look, it might sound lovely to live in that kind of commune. It just ain't gonna work. Now, perhaps some of that is true for sex differences as well. I mean, one of the famous studies is that if you believe in a nurture account, jumping ahead here a little bit to a different topic of sex differences, right? If the reason why men are more likely to want to be engineers and women are more likely to want to be teachers, for example, is just the cultural norms in that society. When you should think that more egalitarian a society is, the more women are going to want to be engineers and the more men are going to want to be teachers. What you actually find in a really fascinating international study is that in Norway and Sweden and other societies that may not be perfectly equal, where there may be some nurture effects nevertheless, but that are clearly among the most gender equal societies in the world, the difference in predilection for what professions people want is stronger than in some of the less gender equal societies, for example, in Iran or other parts of the Middle east or societies in Africa and Asia that are much more traditional on a number of dimensions. So doesn't that mean that, you know, we do need to grapple a little bit with the fact that if our ideal is, which I don't think it needs to be, that 50% of engineers need to be women, you Know, then perhaps if some of those differences actually have a nature component, we just, we're just not going to get there and we kind of do have to give up on that ambition.
- [18:50]
Steve Stewart-Williams
Yeah, I do think we do have to grapple with it. I don't disagree with you there. I think that the fact that something has an evolutionary origin doesn't mean that it's necessarily unchangeable, but it does mean that it could be difficult to change and it could mean that it's impossible to change, at least without draconian interventions that are more likely to do more harm than good. So I think your point, your comparison with journalists not telling the truth, trying to get certain outcomes, I think is really apt here. I think the best policy for journalists and for scientists talking about these kind of issues is to just, is to tell the truth and to tell the whole truth and to do so carefully and responsibly. But to, to do that rather than trying to just put out the truth, to try to accomplish a certain kind of aim. Because I think our best bet for making the world a better place is to have as, as accurate a picture of the world as we possibly can. I do agree, like I say though, I do agree that there may be limits, it may uncover limits to what we can do in terms of engineering the large scale structure of society. And I'll say about that, first of all, even if that's true and that gives people misgivings about applying these ideas, it still could be true that that is the case and it is something that we should grapple with. And I think, yeah, that gender equality paradox and 50, 50, trying to get 50% men and 50% women in every field is an example of where we may find that we come up against limits to what we can do without really coercive practices. Because that gender equality paradox that you mentioned, it's quite a firm finding. And it's not just stem fields, it's many different psychological traits. You do find that the prediction from a sort of social role perspective, a socialization perspective would be that the more patriarchal a nation is and the less gender equal it is and the more men and women are treated differently and funneled into different social roles, you would anticipate that sex differences, psychological sex differences would be larger in those countries. And in some cases they are, some cases there's no real association. But yeah, often and very surprisingly you do find the reverse, that they actually the differences get larger in the more gender equal nations. Not completely sure why that is, but one possibility is that in societies that are more gender equal, they tend as well to be wealthier, more education, they're more individualistic. There's a whole cluster of traits that mean that people are more able to pursue what interests them most and nurture their own individuality. And when that happens, it does seem that certain. One possible explanation is that certain inherent differences between individuals flourish more. And so too certain average differences between the sexes. Some follow the noise, Bloomberg follows the money. Whether it's the funds fueling AI or crypto's trillion dollar swings, there's a money side to every story. Get the money side of the story. Subscribe now@bloomberg.com
- [22:02]
Yasha Monk
yeah, that seems like an intuitive explanation. I mean, here's a quite kind of different example that might go in the same direction, right? To what extent is psychological predisposition going to influence the job choice among number one, second generation immigrants whose parents came to a country, let's say to the United States from a much poorer country, and who are smart and who have good high school degrees, etc. Or be among people who've been in the country for 150 years who come from a very affluent background. I would expect the psychological disposition of the WASP in this example to have a much greater influence on the job they choose because they probably have the financial security and the knowledge of the society and all kinds of other things that make them say, if I want to go off and be a Broadway actor, I can afford to take the risk to try and do that, and I may know how to go and do something like that, which probably takes more cultural capital to succeed in, and so on and so forth, right? Versus the smart kid of immigrants who perhaps would also thrive on Broadway if they tried, but who's under a lot more pressure to go and do a secure, lucrative job. And that might also be more accessible because there's a more straightforward career path. You sort of know how to do that. They can take the risk more. And so you'd expect that with psychological predisposition that would make you go more towards more typical of Broadway actors than of investment bankers. The share among those of investment bankers with a recent immigrant background would be higher than among the members of a traditional society. And in a similar way, you might think the same is true for whether those on average, differences in psychological disposition between men and women express themselves in a ready, affluent society, very affluent society like Sweden or Norway. Many more women might then take the risk to pursue careers that are true to their dispositions, whereas in a society that's much less affluent, they might simply go for the most prestigious job with a job that's most likely to give them a decent income, even if that's not what they dream of doing?
- [24:12]
Steve Stewart-Williams
I think that's absolutely right. I think that's a big part of the explanation. I think also though it does seem to be that it's not just at a behavioural level though, that you get the gender equality paradox, it does seem to be that personality traits and preferences and internal kind of stuff does also seem to magnify in more gender equal, wealthier, better educated, more individualistic societies, as well as just the behavior.
- [24:41]
Yasha Monk
Oh, that's very interesting. So it's not just that in one society people are more likely to want to do a certain kind of thing, to have that kind of predisposition and then to act on it versus not act on it. Is that in fact the difference in basic preferences about what to do or how to relate to the world is bigger in more gender equal society? That's more surprising. What could the explanation of that be?
- [25:01]
Steve Stewart-Williams
Well, I mean, my best guess is that it is this phenomenon because people have more scope to pursue their own individuality. It just emerges and flourishes to a greater extent. I think that an analogy might be with height, for instance. In wealthier societies, people are better fed and so they grow bigger. But also individual differences get larger, average sex differences get larger just because they have more of an opportunity to flourish. And so maybe that's analogous to what's going on psychologically with people as well.
- [25:32]
Yasha Monk
Oh, that's very interesting. Yeah. So I think we've inadvertently started to move into the second part of the nature nurture debate, which is the differences between individuals. So tell us a little bit more about what we know about that in general. This is one interesting example we've been discussing in terms of gender equality paradox. When you look at differences in intelligence, in life outcomes, in predisposition, in psychological traits, in some of the most important things you can think of, what's our best evidence about what elements of the difference between you and me, between me and my brother, between you and your sister, I know we have any brothers or sisters is based on nature rather than nurture.
- [26:20]
Steve Stewart-Williams
Well, the best evidence we have, we've got a ton of evidence from twin studies, adoption studies and studies of twins adopted out at birth. And they paint a pretty clear message, at least in broad strokes, the message is quite clear, which is that almost any measurable trait, any trait that people differ on psychologically or physically, is partly due to genes, but not completely due to genes. And that is captured. And so that there's famous set of conclusions from this area. Behavior genetics is the name of the area, famous set of conclusions which are the four laws of behavior genetics. And the first law, is that what I just said? Basically, that every trait is partially heritable, though not completely heritable. Typical estimates are, I guess, roughly 50. 50. It spans from about 30% of differences due to differences in genes to 70% depending on the trait. Nowhere near close to 100% though. And I think the most intuitive way to grasp the fact that it's not completely down to genes is the fact that identical twins, if it were just down to genes, identical twins would be identical, literally, as opposed to just surprisingly similar, but never identical. Same traits like schizophrenia, for instance. If one member of an identical twin pair has schizophrenia, there's not a 100% chance that the other individual does as well. There's a 50% chance.
- [27:45]
Yasha Monk
That's very interesting. Tell us a little bit more what exactly twin studies do. The idea, presumably, is that you look at people where the genetics is held constant, which obviously is not between siblings, because even though you come from the same parents, if you're full siblings, there's going to be some random variation in which genes you inherit and which express themselves. And so you're only about 50% equal, but with identical twins, you are going to be fully equal. And so then presumably you look to some extent at identical twins within the same families, but particularly when that is possible at identical twins who have been raised in quite different families from each other.
- [28:26]
Steve Stewart-Williams
Yeah, and that's the sort of gold standard study, as we have identical twins reared separately. That's the best example. A lot of the comparisons, though, come from comparing identical twins with fraternal twins. And if you have enough of them. So you're right that with the fraternal twins the average is 50%, but it can be more or less. But if you have a sufficiently large sample, and often they do have very large samples for these studies, the average is close enough to 50 that you can get a close approximation that basically you doubled the level of genetic similarity with the identical twins as compared to the fraternal twins, it turns out, does
- [29:03]
Yasha Monk
it, that the identical twins actually have much more similar life outcomes than the fraternal twins. And here, obviously, what you're doing is to hold constant on the same environment, because not only are we growing up in the same family, we're growing up in the same family at the same time. Right. Whereas with siblings, it might be like there's Some event that happens in the three or five years before the younger sibling is born where the family gets much richer or much poorer. There's some psychological trauma. You're mostly ruling that out once you have those fraternal twins or identical twins.
- [29:34]
Steve Stewart-Williams
Exactly, yeah, exactly. And so fraternal twins, I think do tend to be somewhat more similar. Because of that, there's no cohort effect. They are at the exact same age, somewhat more similar than regular siblings who are born at different times. But identical twins, like a lot more, a lot more similar than fraternal twins. And you know, so one question people raise, they say, okay, well maybe is that because if they're reared in the same home, maybe people just treat identical twins more similarly to each other than they treat fraternal twins for some reason. So you can measure that. And typically they don't treat them much more similar anyway. But in any case, you can get around that by, you can look at identical twins who are reared apart and you can compare those identical twins reared together or fraternal twins reared apart altogether. And even when they're reared apart, identical twins are notably more similar than two randomly chosen people of the same age or fraternal twins rear apart, or you name it, give us a little bit
- [30:33]
Yasha Monk
of a sense of the sort of magnitude of these outcomes. Right, so how much more similar are identical twins compared to fraternal twins? Or different question, you know, when you take these identical twins and they do end up getting weird apart, how similar different do their life outcomes end up being?
- [30:53]
Steve Stewart-Williams
Well, so take a trait like IQ for instance. If you look at like you calculate the heritability level of that trait in childhood, early childhood, you know, five, six, that kind of age, it's maybe 20% heritable. And there's a notable effect of growing up together in the same home. So two individuals growing up in the same home, they're more similar than they would be if they'd grown up separately in early childhood. But then one of the very counterintuitive findings from behaviour genetics is that as kids get older, the heritability of IQ actually goes up rather than you might expect that it would go down as people have more experience and more nurture, but it doesn't. It actually, it goes up. And so by early adulthood, typical kind of estimate might be about 0.5. So the heritability level, in other words, is 0.5. So 50% of the differences among individuals in terms of their IQ scores due to genes and the rest is due to, is due to experience and non genetic Factors. Interestingly though, the effect of the shared family environment, so the level of similarity caused by growing up together, that wears off as people get older. So even though it's not all due to genes when people are adults, but within the normal range of family homes, almost all the similarity between siblings, including twins, is due to genes rather than the shared environment. And identical twins who are reared apart are basically as similar in IQ and many traits. Actually, they're as similar as identical twins reared together. So that the identical twins reared together are not much more similar by adulthood than the identical twins reared apart, even though it's not all down to genes.
- [32:40]
Yasha Monk
So unpack that for me a little bit, right? Because if you're saying that something like 50% of the heritability comes down to genes, then I would expect that at the age of 30 or 40 there would still be some very significant differences between them. But what you're saying is that the older they get, the more similar they end up becoming. And somehow even the similarity that seems to be down to growing up in the same household appears to have this genetic component. So help me puzzle through this because these two things seem to pull in slightly different directions, right?
- [33:17]
Steve Stewart-Williams
It's an odd finding, right? It's a surprising finding. They do become more similar as they get older. They're not completely similar though. And it seems that by adulthood the similarity is largely due to shared genes and the environmental contribution seems to be largely to create the differences between them. Whereas bizarrely, the environment doesn't seem to like sharing an environment. Growing up together doesn't seem to make people much more similar than they would be otherwise. And people often, when they hear that, they think that sounds like the claim is that it's all down to genes, but it's not. Because identical twins are not literally identical. It just means that the environment, whatever it is in the environment that's shaping people, it seems to make them different from each other much more readily and easily than it makes them similar to each other. The similarity seems to come mainly from the shared genes. Surprising, right?
- [34:07]
Yasha Monk
So let me try and puzzle through this because I'm not sure I fully grasp it right now. So let's take two 50 year old identical twins who have exactly the same level of iq. That's not always going to be the case, of course, but in this particular case I stipulate that happens to be true. There. You're saying the reason why they're so similar is their genes, particularly if they were really apart. Now let's look at two 50 year old identical Twins that were reared apart and they have a significant difference in IQ. Let's say that one of them has an IQ of 110 and one of them has an IQ of 90, which is a significant difference. He's saying, well, that's likely, if that is the case. That is likely to be the case because they grew up in vastly different environments. Perhaps one of them grew up in an environment that really maximized the opportunities of his child and gave him access to all kinds of developmentally appropriate learning materials, et cetera. Perhaps the other one had some amount of genuine food deprivation or some significant influence on the development that really meant that they weren't able to reach their full potential. Is that getting in the right direction?
- [35:14]
Steve Stewart-Williams
It is. It's tricky, though, because when you're talking about heritability, you're talking about it applies to groups of individuals rather than specific pairs of individuals. So if you have identical twins who have the same iq, the fact that it's exactly the same may or may not be due to nature or nurture. It could be in that particular case, it could be something different. It could be more due to nature, more due to nurture. One of them might have had an accident, had a head injury or something like that, one individual smarter, and then had a head injury that took them to the same level. So it applies to groups of individuals. And it would be that if the average among a group of people, the correlation between IQs is 0.7 in a group of identical twins, to what extent is that due to Genesis, that 0.7 correlation? And it's about 50% due to genes, 50% due to other stuff in terms though of things that environmental factors that change iq, I think the ones that you're suggesting are very plausible candidates for things that could affect individuals, IQs, serious kind of things like food deprivation opportunities as well. And so actually, and I should say so, that what I'm talking about now, in terms of the effect of the shared environment, that's called the second law of behavior genetics. And that's the idea that the effect of the shared environment is much smaller than the effect of genes. And sometimes there's no effect at all. Growing up together doesn't make you any more similar than you would otherwise be. So that's the second law of behavior genetics. And it's worth pointing out that mainly seems to apply when it comes to just within the normal range. So the kind of normal range where people have decent opportunities, they're fed well and the like. And I think outside that range, all bets are off. If people are being abused, suffering food deprivation, total lack of opportunities, that's certainly going to have an effect.
- [37:08]
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- [38:02]
Yasha Monk
Why wait? Ask your doctor. Visit botoxchronicmigraine.com or call 1-844botox to learn more. And it's that lopsided because you're talking about outside the normal range and then all of the examples you gave are negative, right? Which is to say are the exceptions mostly in the direction of once you've cleared a certain minimum threshold, you're within the normal range. But if you have a child of a billionaire and you have all of the possible opportunities, that doesn't make that big of a difference? Or is that similar? Is it sort of? On the one side, if you have food deprivation, that's obviously going to ding your IQ a lot. On the other side, if you have all the best tutors in the world, it's going to go up a lot. It's only on the downside. It's only on the risk side that makes a big difference.
- [38:44]
Steve Stewart-Williams
I think unfortunately, it's mainly on the downside that you have a big difference. You get diminishing returns. It just seems to be a lot easier to throw development off course than to massively increase it.
- [38:55]
Yasha Monk
So I had on the podcast recently Emily Oster, who's a great economist, thinking about some questions about parenting and so on, and I would love to get your feedback on one kind of stylized takeaway that I had from that Conversation. Right. Which was, roughly speaking, that the impacts of parenting tend to be much smaller than people realize that they agonize about how much screen time children are going to have, about whether they can afford to sign the kid up for that extra ballet class, whether they're being a bad parent if they don't engage with the kid for an extra half an hour at night because they're tired that day, et cetera.
- [39:39]
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- [39:39]
Yasha Monk
But roughly speaking, the studies that she's looking at, these things really don't make much of a difference now. She doesn't get into the nature nurture debate. Right. But you might sort of speak to it from either perspective. You know, a, a huge part of a development is just predetermined by genes. Even, you know, identical twins raised in completely different households are going to end up having pretty similar results. So what you do in your household is not going to matter that much. And B, to the extent that that household matters, it's really going to be at the extreme. So if you are a loving parent who's able to provide your child with basic sustenance, if you make sure, which is hard enough, that they're not going to get some horrible trauma in their childhood, that they're not going to starve and all of those things, you really should relax. Don't worry so much about it. Your choice about the extra ballet class or this school or how much screen time, it's just not going to make a big difference. Again, Emily might have quibbles with how I presented this, but that's my personal takeaway from the conversation. Would you roughly second this or do you have quibbles about that picture?
- [40:47]
Steve Stewart-Williams
No, I would definitely second that. I think that that is definitely what the second law of behaviour genetics, all the evidence for that, I think, is pointing that direction, which is that within the range, within the normal range, little differences in parenting philosophy and the number of books that you have on the bookshelf and screen time and time that you spend with your kid, all of that kind of stuff does seem to have surprisingly little impact. And so, in principle, I think that, yeah, parents should chill out a bit. So it's a good implication from that. And I'm pretty persuaded by that. I'm quite strongly persuaded by that and agree with the implication that you should chill out. Certainly with my own kids, though, even knowing that I still found that I would, you know, agonize about those things and little differences, I would. I would think about a lot. So it's easier said than done, I think. But I do think that that is. I think she's right and I think the implication is true as well.
- [41:40]
Yasha Monk
It's particularly easier said than done if, like in my own case, what, one doesn't have children, Right?
- [41:45]
Steve Stewart-Williams
Indeed. Only thing I'd add is that I think that the fact that it doesn't make a big difference isn't because it's all just down to Genesis. I think that it's partly because genes have a bigger impact than people think. But I think it's also partly just because we don't have a particularly accurate picture of exactly what it is in the environment that does shape people, because the environment is having a big impact. But I just don't think things like half an hour versus an hour of screen time or the extra ballet class are among the environmental things that make a difference. And I think we have less of an idea about what does make a difference than we sometimes think that we have.
- [42:21]
Yasha Monk
Well, and presumably, I mean, the genes, by the time a baby is born are set in stone, a lot of the environment is also set in stone. Right. You're going to be a parent in 2025 in whatever country you live in at a certain socioeconomic status with a certain set of personality traits, you know, and any sort of choice you make within that is just going to make a very, very marginal difference to those basic background conditions.
- [42:48]
Steve Stewart-Williams
That's very true. Yeah, I, I completely agree. And actually, I do think the country that you're born into does seem to have a big difference. So the economist Brian Kaplan has has argued that quite a bit that. So within a given country, within a given socioeconomic sphere, we don't have a huge idea what the environmental contributions are. But we do know that moving, for instance, from a poor country to a rich country has a huge impact on kids life outcomes. And all the odds are that they're going to do a lot better in the wealthier country than they would have if their family had not moved and they'd grown up in the poorer country.
- [43:25]
Yasha Monk
That's very interesting. And what kind of life outcomes are we talking about here? I mean, obviously it's unsurprising that they might end up making a lot more money over the course of their lives because they're just in a context where even a similar kind of job is going to command a much, much higher wage. Is that also true, for example, for the kind of IQ they're going to have, or the kind of psychological traits we're going to have, or other kinds of things where that might be a little bit more Surprising because again, the wage level is sort of, that seems definitionally true, right? You're a teacher in Malaysia today or you're a teacher in the United States today. You're just going to earn a lot more money in the United States even for presumably a similar level of skill and predisposition. People with similar levels of skill and personality might end up being teachers in Malaysia or the United States. You're just going to earn a lot more in the United States is a much richer economy. But is it also true for those other kinds of things where that is sort of more surprising?
- [44:17]
Steve Stewart-Williams
That's a great question, and I'm not completely sure of the answer. I think like with, with iq, I'm not so sure. With education, I believe that it gets, it's elevated. Health, I think is elevated. But in terms of other surprising things, I'm not, I'm not actually sure.
- [44:31]
Yasha Monk
So we've talked about two laws of, I believe you call it population genetics, behavior genetics. Let me do this again. So we've talked about two laws of behavior genetics. I believe you said there's four laws. Are there laws three and four that we need to cover before we move on to the next topic.
- [44:47]
Steve Stewart-Williams
We could do briefly. So the third law of behavior genetics is kind of the flip side of the second one. So the second one is that the shared family environment doesn't have a particularly big impact. And then the third law of behavior genetics is that there's a lot of variation left over that's not explained by genesis or explained by the shared family environment. So there's what's called the non shared environment, which is something that is the environmental contribution that shapes individuals over and above genes and growing up together. And not completely sure what that is. The interesting finding there though is that it's been argued pretty persuasively. I think that just random chance and random noise and development is a bigger part of what shapes who we are than we might want to think or than we might intuitively think. So a lot of the differences between us, a lot of it's due to genes, a little bit due to the family environment that we grow up in. And then a not trivial amount is just due to random developmental noise, especially early on.
- [45:52]
Yasha Monk
And what kind of random developmental noise might that be? An interesting study popped in my mind when you, you said that, which is that younger siblings tend to have somewhat lower IQs than older siblings. And again, you might think that's about nurture, that perhaps parents should somehow spend more time with or invest more resources into Older siblings. I read a recent study or came across a recent study which seemed to suggest that perhaps older siblings are more likely to pick up colds and other kinds of mild viral diseases that they might then pass on to their younger siblings, and that perhaps that creates enough developmental noise to ding the IQ of those younger siblings. But 2 or 3 percentage points, the difference isn't huge. But perhaps that kind of random thing was just at some crucial development stage. They happen to have a flu for a couple of weeks, and that somehow dings them by a couple of IQ points in a lasting way. What kind of, you know, when we're talking about random noise like that, what kind of factor are we talking about? Is it that kind of thing? Is it whether you happen to have gotten the flu at 18 months of age?
- [47:00]
Steve Stewart-Williams
Yeah, it is that. So I think the. That's. That's a really interesting idea, by the way. That's. That's quite fascinating. The. That they're more likely to get the flu or something like that at a younger age than their older siblings would have been. But that would be systematic in that case. That would be systematic because there's an increased chance that the younger sibling is going to be in that situation, and
- [47:23]
Yasha Monk
therefore it explains the systematic difference in iq.
- [47:28]
Steve Stewart-Williams
Yeah, yeah, exactly right. But nonetheless, if you do happen to breathe in a flu virus versus not breathing a flu virus at a certain age, you know, that's just. That's basically random. That's as random as getting struck by lightning. But it could have that effect. So that is the sort of thing, you know, one way. I think Steven Pinker put it in one of his books that a neuron and setting up the brain, a neuron zigs rather than zags for no particular reason. Just, you know, there are billions of neurons in the brain, and exactly what they do isn't controlled by. We've got 20,000 ish genes, so it can't all be controlled by those. So there's just some. Some random. Some randomness in them. Yeah, flu, random accidents. Somebody happens to slip and ding their head, bump their head for no particular reason unrelated to personality traits or risk proneness. Those would be the kind of things. Accidental stuff.
- [48:20]
Yasha Monk
Earlier, the message was, don't worry too much about what you're doing, because the basic life outcomes of your children are set in stone. Now, I feel like people could latch onto this part of a conversation, say, oh, my God, you know, I mean, whether or not my toddler falls over and bangs their head one more time could make this huge difference and whether they get into an Ivy League school or not or whatever it is that your dreams of a kid might be. Yeah.
- [48:45]
Steve Stewart-Williams
And true. And they might be. They might get a lot more worried about early life flus and keeping people away from that. That is tricky. That is tricky. And I'm not sure what to say about that. I would say that the difference that started us down this track, like you mentioned, it's a small difference, right? That, that IQ difference. I don't know, I guess a couple of points is a big difference. I mean, I guess some things, I mean, I guess possibly there are some things that have a bigger impact than others. And I guess maybe the conclusion is that a lot of the stuff that we think has an impact doesn't, but maybe there are other things that do have a somewhat bigger difference, like whether you contract a flu virus early on and accidents and the like. I'm not sure, actually, I don't want to fully endorse what I just said. So. So I think there are differences in the size of the impact and the scale of the impact to different things. But actually, I think one meta lesson from psychology is that pretty much nothing has a huge impact. So psychology is quite tricky, I think, in the fact that the vast majority of influences on us have really, really a tiny impact, but they're just lots of them.
- [49:50]
Yasha Monk
Interesting. Yeah, yeah. And so if, you know, it's not enough to get the flu, you have to get the flu and to get dinged on your head and certain other things, you know, then, then perhaps you'll, you'll go to university that's a little bit less selective, which might not make you a less productive or happy person either. Indeed, we can still, if you want to tell people, parents to relax, you can always, always find reasons to relax them. But I, I feel like this, this, this, this is going to make people a little bit more nervous. I believe we've now covered three or four laws. What is, what is the fourth law of behavioral.
- [50:20]
Steve Stewart-Williams
Yeah, the fourth law is the fact that complex traits are never due just to one gene or two genes or even, you know, half a dozen or a dozen genes. They're almost always due to hundreds or even thousands of genetic variants, each of which has only a tiny, tiny impact. But collectively they have a pretty big impact, accounting for the heritability of the traits. But that's not just due to one gene or a couple. You know, like maybe 10, 20 years ago you would see a lot of headlines that would say, okay, we've discovered an IQ gene or A gay gene or a warrior gene, longevity gene, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And the vast majority of those have failed to replicate. So they were false positives due to studies that had samples that were too small, basically. But what does seem to be replicating now is that just hundreds of thousands of genes contribute to almost, almost every complex trait that you care to name.
- [51:16]
Yasha Monk
So what you're trying to tell me is that my biology teacher lied to me when they talked about a nice simple example of a dominant gene and a recessive gene. And, you know, if my child gets the recessive gene from me and the recessive gene from the mom, then that's presumably true for certain diseases or for certain kind of conditions. But for most of the most interesting character traits, that's not going to be the case.
- [51:38]
Steve Stewart-Williams
Case, that's exactly right. Yeah. So it is true. Eye color and things like that. Eye color. That dominance model does work, but most genetic effects don't work like that. They're additive rather than having that dominance recessive structure.
- [51:50]
Yasha Monk
So much for Mendel. For Mendel. We've been using the concept of IQ on and off in this conversation. And I know that that is another concept that people who don't know the scientific literature well are quite often quite confused about. Right. On the one hand, there's a popular fascination with IQ tests and the importance of iq. On the other hand, there's quite a lot of skepticism about the idea that, you know, these strange tests where you're supposed to look at these patterns and guess, you know, which next pattern is the logical continuation and the number that they give you really have a meaningful predictive capacity about the world to capture some really meaningful difference in intelligence between different people. What are the psychological findings about, first of all, how predictive IQ is of different kinds of life outcomes and other things that we might want to care about?
- [52:48]
Steve Stewart-Williams
Yeah, well, it is surprisingly predictive. It's only one factor among many, but it is surprisingly predictive. I do get the intuition. It does. It does seem bizarre, right, that doing a whole bunch of little quirky little tests could give you one number that would predict lots of stuff. It does seem a little implausible on its face, but it does seem to do it. It does seem that just for a start, and maybe least surprising is that it does predict how well people do in education. And so that does sound like. At first glance, that seems unsurprising. But then I think it is a little bit surprising that a single number does a reasonable job of predicting how people are going to do across all their different school subjects. You could easily imagine that it wouldn't come out like that, that you would need several different numbers and you would need different numbers for different subjects. But actually, it does seem that that one number does a reasonable job of predicting.
- [53:39]
Yasha Monk
It's not obvious. I mean, it may perhaps be obvious why looking at this set of patterns and being able to predict, you know, what the next logical step in the sequence is, might make you good at math. You know, not exactly the same activity, but sort of related. It's harder to see why would, you know, make you predict whether or not you're good at writing an essay about history, but you're saying that empirically, it just turns out to be true.
- [54:04]
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- [54:34]
Steve Stewart-Williams
Exactly right. Yeah. And that's education. But it also does predict other life outcomes further down the track. So it predicts career success, job success, it predicts income, it predicts. It predicts longevity. It even predicts things like it predicts health, it predicts mental health. So, basically contrary to the stereotype, higher IQ is statistically associated with lower rates of most mental illnesses. Possibly anorexia is an exception to that rule. But for the most part, you look at the curves, rates of mental illness come down as IQ is going up. Yeah, those are some of the main ones. And those are all quite. Those are things that really matter to people. Right. Like how well you do at your job really matters to people, how long you live really matters to people. Health and mental health, these are all. It's predicting really important stuff, not just quirky, random stuff that doesn't matter too much in the real world.
- [55:38]
Yasha Monk
One of the ways in which that runs up against my intuition from real life is that I can see how all kinds of intellectual skills might be related. But there's also ways in which people who are genuinely pretty smart are really bad at other things. Things. You know, I'm thinking of an acquaintance of mine who is literally a legendary figure in one field of mental activity. People might be able to guess who I have in mind, who, it turns out, has a terrible sense of orientation. I mean, you try to meet up with him on some street corner of New York and he will be standing at the wrong street Corner.
- [56:21]
Steve Stewart-Williams
Right.
- [56:22]
Yasha Monk
I don't want to compare myself to that person in any way, but I think I'm good at some things. Intellectually, I'm not the stupidest person in the world, and I'm generally good at various kinds of things. Right. I have mild face blindness. Right. I'm just. Yeah, yeah. So I'm not formally diagnosed, but I've taken online tests, you know, provided by various universities, et cetera. And I'm in, I think, the sixth percentile of a population for my ability to recognize face, not disaster is not one of those cases like Oliver Sachs, you wouldn't recognize their own mom out of context. But certainly we're looking at each other as we're having this conversation. If you sat next to me in the subway tomorrow and said hi to me out of context, I would have no idea who you are.
- [57:08]
Steve Stewart-Williams
Interesting.
- [57:09]
Yasha Monk
So how do those two findings go together? If IQ is generally suggestive of all these different kinds of things, why is it nevertheless that people who clearly seem to be pretty good at a lot of mental activities can then have other kind of mental activities at which they're just terrible?
- [57:26]
Steve Stewart-Williams
It's interesting, isn't it? It's really interesting. I think with the face blindness, one that is less surprising. I've seen research suggesting that people's facial recognition abilities are pretty much separate from iq. It does seem to be a kind of separate function implemented in the brain in some way that seems to be separate from however general intelligence is implemented. The spatial one is more surprising, I guess, and less common as well. So it's just less common to have massive discrepancies between different faculties that make up iq. And spatial abilities are part of, you know, that they do correlate with iq, I would say, like, first of all, so with iq, even though it is just one number, and it's a pretty useful number within that, there are different cognitive abilities. And it's not the case that everybody has the same level of those abilities. So everybody, everybody has strengths and weaknesses. And one of the reasons that IQ isn't everything is the fact that it does obscure those strengths and weaknesses. And yeah, it is interesting that you can have such a big discrepancy. It does seem you can. Yeah. I don't know. Don't know really what else to say about that. But there is variability, and I guess there's variability among individuals in terms of how much the extent to which you have those discrepancies. And then at the tails, you're just going to have a small number of people who just have very, very large discrepancies.
- [58:51]
Yasha Monk
Yeah. And I suppose the other thing to say about it is that it's one thing for it to be strongly correlated. That doesn't mean that in each individual all of those things will be correlated. Right. And maybe true for a lot of the people that I'm thinking of that in fact, that general cognitive skill is correlated in such a way that nine out of 10 tasks are really good. There's always going to be one out of 10 tasks where they happen to be somewhat less good. And perhaps if you modeled that presumably into 10 different faculties, you would still end up with a very strong statistical correlation, Even if on one of the 10, but not very good. What would be your best parsimonious model of trying to predict life success? You've made a strong case that IQ goes into that, right? That high IQ predicts life success and that perhaps to have extraordinary success at some field of endeavor, you really do have to have a high level of iq. Presumably there's other things that go into that as well. So when I think of people who might have a high level of IQ, but who haven't turned out to be very successful, usually either they're really lacking in some form of self control, or perhaps they really have particularly strong mental health challenges, or they really are lacking in some form of social facility. They're really lacking in an ability to cooperate with people. There's sort of like a few other things that I would intuitively throw in where, you know, you have to have at least a kind of minimum threshold of competence and those other things in order to maximize your chance of success. What, what would you say if you're designing a character in a sim game to see whether or not they're going to be successful? What qualities would you be trying to double click on to make sure that they have a certain level to guarantee that overall success?
- [60:43]
Steve Stewart-Williams
Well, definitely not just iq. So you're absolutely right. I think some people become kind of IQ fanatics and kind of seem to put everything on iq. And it's certainly not the only factor. Personality as well comes into it. And it is interesting that a lot of the traits that you mentioned, I'm thinking about the literature on the big five and how the big five predicts life outcomes as well. And a lot of the traits, the
- [61:11]
Yasha Monk
Big five personality traits, sometimes known as the Ocean Test. So openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.
- [61:21]
Steve Stewart-Williams
Neuroticism.
- [61:22]
Yasha Monk
And what is it, I think, is it conscientiousness and neuroticism that are particularly predictive.
- [61:26]
Steve Stewart-Williams
Yes. So conscientiousness is the most predictive of the big five, and so iq. Of all these traits, IQ is the single best predictor, followed by conscientiousness. And that would embrace traits like that you mentioned, like self control. Neuroticism is the next one after that, and that's a negative predictor of many life outcomes. It's a weaker predictor than conscientiousness, though, and in turn weaker than iq. Agreeableness would capture some of the inability to cooperate, inability to get on with people, people who score very low on that, who are highly disagreeable. That would come under that, I think perhaps mental health sort of separate. I guess some of mental health is captured by extreme neuroticism. So depression and anxiety and the like, that wouldn't capture things like schizophrenia and other severe debilitating things. So, yeah, So I guess I would put so IQ first, and you'd want a pretty decent minimum threshold of that, followed by conscientiousness, followed by neuroticism, agreeableness, openness. And what's the one that I'm missing out on? Agreeableness, openness and. And extroversion. Yes, extraversion. They're less productive, but they are as well, protective. Extroversion tends to be associated with better outcomes in a lot of ways. Job outcomes, for instance, and then low on the mental health. So severe mental health problems are extremely debilitating. Right.
- [63:00]
Yasha Monk
And what about this idea that I kind of threw in there, but I hadn't quite thought through, as I said that with which is that I guess my intuition is you can certainly be very intelligent and not successful in life. And that's all of those examples of general leaders in life who are always going on about how the members of Mensa, the organization, reserve 15,000 people, et cetera. And that presumably is because even if you have a high iq, there's all kinds of things that can throw you off a cause of success, including random chance and so on, but also a lack of conscientiousness, a lack of agreeableness, a lack of these other kinds of things that are necessary. What about the inverse claim that I sort of threw in there, which is that when you look at the people who are particularly successful in the world, whether you look at inventors, whether you look at writers, whether you look at musicians, whether you look perhaps at athletes, that you need to have certainly a minimum threshold of IQ and perhaps a high level of IQ in order to have this special level of achievement in life. Is that true? Or do you think that somebody with an IQ of 100 or perhaps an IQ of 90 can still have a real chance not just of holding down a good job and having a decent life and having a meaningful existence on earth, but really of making the mark with some extraordinary level of achievement?
- [64:28]
Steve Stewart-Williams
It's a good question. I think so. I think I want to answer it statistically, I think, and I think that perhaps they do, but just the further down that scale you go, I think it just becomes less likely. I think possibly there's a minimum threshold for a lot of forms of achievement where it gets close to zero at a certain point if you go far enough down the scale. But zero chance of massive achievement. I wouldn't want to hazard a guess as to exactly where that is. Yeah, but I do. I want to double click on your point about how further down I think it's perfectly possible to have a meaningful life and a good life and, and a life where you're contributing something to the world. Just extreme, extreme accomplishment is a different story. And I guess the thing is, talking about extreme accomplishment, only a small number of even people with very high IQs have extreme levels of accomplishment.
- [65:25]
Yasha Monk
Yeah, of course, but I know there's studies on that. But, you know, let's say we took the CEOs of S&P 500 companies, right? Yeah. I know from conversations with people that I think there's really widely varying intuitions about what percentage of that group would have ordinary IQs. And I think there's a lot of my friends who would say, oh, I bet that half of them or quarter of them have an IQ of. I mean, others would say, no, no, no. I bet that perhaps one or two somehow inherited a company or some weird kind of circumstance have an IQ below 110 or perhaps below 120. But really the vast majority of them would have, you know, IQ in a rare range above 120, above 130, something like that. Do you have a sense from the literature of which of these two kind of claims is more likely to be right?
- [66:14]
Steve Stewart-Williams
I do. I think that second group of people would win that bet. So there's research, for instance, by Jonathan Y. And he has found he's looked at CEO IQ levels, and they do tend to be that. They do tend to be very high.
- [66:27]
Yasha Monk
And one thing that strikes me as interesting here, and I'm going to make some assumptions about listeners to this podcast, but I think it's an assumption that probably is justified, which is that it's probably people who seek out quite intellectual content and know have a real interest in that, which certainly means they have probably openness to experience and other kind of psychological traits, but probably also means that on average, they have a higher than average iq. And what I'm struck by, certainly in my social milieu, is that, you know, in a place like the United States in particular, it's a society that's incredibly stratified, probably much more stratified than most in the history of mankind by IQ level, right? I mean, to get into a good college, you have to do well on the sat. The SAT is basically an IQ test, et cetera, et cetera. And so it always strikes me that when people in my social milieu, and again, I recognize I'm saying something about my own social circle here, sort of say, oh, this person is kind of stupid. You know, look, they're successful and they're kind of stupid. We're talking about people who to them seem rightly or wrongly, fairly or unfairly, strikingly unintelligent within a group that is highly, extremely selective like you. And so the people who they would describe as being of ordinary intelligence may in effect still have quite unusually high IQ relative to the average or to the median of a population that seems entirely cause me. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Good Fight. In the rest of this conversation, Steve and I talk about political psychology, about what psychological insights can tell us about our politics, can tell us about when we cooperate with each other and when we end up in conflict, about why we are so tempted to ascribe overly extreme views to our political opponents, about who ends up as a political extremist and who ends up being more moderate. About why people drawn to the extremes often have a particularly simplistic worldview which separates the world into the good guys and the bad guys in an inaccurate way. And we also talked about the replication crisis in psychology. Steve runs through all of the different things you might have learned about in high school that turn out not to be true, but also emphasizes the parts of psychology that over the last 10 or 15 years have proven to stand on a firm footing. To listen to this part of the conversation, please support this podcast. Please be a good member of your in group. Please help us do what we do by going to yashamonk.substack.com thegoodfight and becoming a paying subscriber with 25% off your first year. That's yashamonk.substand.com. Thank you so much for listening to the Good Fight. Lots of listeners have been spreading the word about the show. If you two have been enjoying the podcast, please be liked. Rate the show on itunes, tell your friends all about it, share it on Facebook or Twitter. And finally, please mail suggestions for great guests or comments about the show to good. FightPodmail. That's good. FightPodmail.com
- [69:53]
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this recording carries a Creative Commons 4.0 International License.
- [69:58]
Yasha Monk
Thanks to Silent Partner for their song Chess Pieces.