Transcription
Having previously assessed that some people act fairly and some people act unfairly, and having generalized those observations of fair versus unfair behavior to bigger personality traits like agreeableness and likability and even attractiveness.
Men, when they see fair people experience pain, have a rise in empathy. And when they see unfair people experience pain, do not.
Women, when they see fair people experience pain, have a rise in empathy. And when they see unfair people experience pain, they also have a rise in empathy. So that's the big takeaway here, which is that women respond to people experiencing pain or punishment with an empathetic response regardless of what else they know about that person, regardless of, for instance, whether punishment is justified.
Whereas men, you know, this is a small N and there will be exceptions and these are averages, and you know, all of the usual caveats apply with regard to population level truths. But men have what seems to be the normal and expected response on average, which is that when you see someone who has previously indicated a tendency to cheat, to be unfair, and you see him experiencing pain, you don't tend to have a sense of empathy towards him because it feels justified. That last bit is my interpretation because it feels justified.
Now, one thing that the authors say at the very end of the paper, which is just like a little bit of a caveat for the results, is it is possible that our experimental design favored men because the modality of punishment was related to physical threat, as opposed to psychological or financial threat. But then they also say, "alternatively, these findings could indicate a predominant role for males in the maintenance of justice and punishment of norm violation in human societies." Which is pretty frickin' bold. And the fact that they bury the lead in the title of the paper, that you can't tell that this is about sex-based differences at all in the title of the paper, is part of, presumably, I'm guessing here, how it got published in Nature at all back in 2006. And again, very small and a lot of neurological stuff that I'm not qualified to explicitly assess, although they don't get pushed back anywhere that I find in terms of exactly what they're measuring. And the differences are stark. Men have their empathy evoked in a context-specific way with regard to whether or not the thing that a person is experiencing is warranted in their opinion. And women's empathy tends to be more universal. That's a remarkable finding if it is true across broader society, which we have no reason to think it is not. Yes.
Now, the part of it that surprises me, as you allude to, is the female side of it. It's shocking. It is not obvious to me why this is not a human universal. I, in tolerating this paper, assumed that responses to seeing people experiencing pain would be context-specific. And indeed, when we were professors and I taught animal behavior, I was excited to find examples of chimps responding to observing unfairness and responding to it. And I'm trying to remember, there's a study in which actually there's Old World monkeys as well, not just chimps. They prefer grapes and there's also carrots. And if you have to do something to get a treat and you do something and your friend does something and it's the same thing and your friend gets a carrot or your friend gets a grape and you get a carrot, you sulk. Even if you're not a human, you see this, you're like, "But I did the same thing. Give me what I deserve. I deserve a grape." And I may be butchering that research. No, no, that's very much how I remember it as well. So there's tracking of history, of context, and that's what justice is. That is what justice is. It is inherently a part of a narrative. You can't do justice as an instantaneous read. You can't do it. All right.
The female side of that result, if it is accurate, is so surprising that I think it necessitates an explanation. We don't have it. I'm going to put a hypothesis on the table. Hopefully we can figure out a way to test it. But nonetheless, I think we need a proposal for something that would explain why women don't have, apparently, the natural reaction that you and I, or what you and I both feel is the natural reaction, which is to be what I would call sympathetic. They're calling empathetic on the basis of whether or not somebody deserved fairness or had behaved in a way that decreases how much they deserve good treatment. Let's imagine what is true on the playground with children. Somebody has been harmed by somebody else, and you're attempting to ascertain, what the right thing to do is. The problem is, you don't know, and this is going to be highly relevant to much of our discussion today, but you don't know what unfolded on the playground. In other words, there is, in general, going to be a larger context amongst children. There's a whole history that you won't know or you do know, but it is not safe to analyze within the context of a particular seeming cause and effect because the larger context is going to be playing such a dominant role. So it might make sense to deploy rules that result in the punishment of escalation or something like that. So anyway, I'm just wondering if there's not in the context of children, what appears to be the female response here makes sense that doesn't seem to make sense in the wider world. Yeah, maybe.
Empathy for the helpless is obviously going to be more important in traditional maternal roles than traditional paternal roles. But a standard, good, effective parenting response when your two children are at each other and one of them complains that the other one hit him and he said, "Well, what happened before that?" Or, "What did you do?" And that's not blaming the victim. That's establishing what is true, that is establishing history and establishing accountability. If any time the usual bully does something and he can start screaming and get the empathy of anyone he requests it from, then he will win and we will end up with a society or a playground of weakling idiot bullies who are, many of them will be men because they were encouraged in such behavior early on. Well, I do think this is the question raised by this research. If you set up a system, which seems to exist in women, where you just simply sympathize, again, that's the way I would use the term, but you sympathize with victims, then you incentivize being victimized and... And the game theory is obvious. Right. And then lo and behold, what do you get? Well, you get the BLM riots, you get a feminization of civilization where everybody is competing. What we used to describe as the oppression Olympics. Everybody is competing for the claim of most victimized because that brings about the most power. And I think this thing I said a couple of minutes ago, I think actually might be important. It's not justice. It's quite the opposite of justice. And yet the sort of oppression Olympics, the progressive stack, the DEI, the woke culture, all of these names for the things that have been grabbing hold of society for well over a decade at this point, sound like they're coming from and explicitly are claimed to be coming from a desire for what they have coined social justice. And it would appear to be sort of the people who prioritize justice over the people who prioritize freedom. There's the freedom first people and the justice first people. But I have felt forever that that was an unfair categorization, that was a cheat by the so-called social justice people. And I think this is exactly why they're doing instantaneous reads in which their assessment of whether or not they or someone else has been victimized is not just done instantaneously, but at the point they've come to a conclusion, that's it. We're done. Okay. You know, George Floyd was murdered. Hmm. Probably not. Yeah. Actually. Right. But like, that's the only conclusion you're allowed to come to. And and if you don't agree, then you're against justice. Like, no, I'm against instantaneous reads and blanket empathy where it should not apply. Perfect.
Now I want to go back and rescue my hypothesis. Okay. Because I think the distinction is, are you in a training environment or are you in the adult environment? In the training environment, you may very well want to punish anybody who escalates. Right. So if you, if the point is, Hey, if you victimize somebody, you're about to get punished. Then the point is that tends to frustrate an entire line of gamesmanship in the direction of a more peaceful playground. But if you apply that in the adult world, perfectly gameable, and you have everybody, not only pretending to be victims, exaggerating the extent to which they are victims, creating false flags in order to victimize themselves so that they are justified in going after their aggressor. So the point is the gameable nature of the adult world requires a different set of rules than the playground does. And they're naturally different. But the problem is, oh boy, this is rough. But you and I have talked many times about the fact that it's great that women have achieved parody in science, but what's not great is that the rules of science have been feminized and the right rules under which to do science were the ones that are more natively male, the competitive rules in which you hold each other's feet to the fire. And that having been feminized science, you push on ideas, good and bad, to pressure test them and to not push on them to start with like, oh, that's fantastic. But I have this one little question is to weaken everything about the endeavor. So the point is, if what has happened is men and women had very different roles in society, women were more natively pointed towards the raising of children and even the educating of children, and that now you have parody across civilization and civilization is going mad in part because the rules that make civilization work in which you punish people for bad behavior are now challenged by sympathy with victims that is reflexive, which is imparted from the playground and doesn't belong out here in civilization.
Yeah, there's for a long time, like 90s and the aughts and into the teens, and I don't really hear it anymore, but that may just be because we're not in the classroom and we're not hanging out in academic circles anymore. But since we were undergraduates, honestly, late 80s through very recently, something I would often hear, and I know you will remember this as well, and anyone who's been in an academic setting, except maybe just as an undergrad in giant lecture classes, will have heard something like, we need more of the feminine in power. We need the toxic masculine to go away and we need, and I'm forgetting, there's a framing, there's a number of stock phrases that people used to use, and I can't remember any of them right now, but I've heard them actually as recently as I want to say 2018 when I was giving a talk at a conference that I thought would have been awake to this stuff, and some guy, some aging hippie guy stood up and said, "We really need fewer men in power and more women," and I shocked him by saying, "No, we do not. Absolutely we do not. What we need is to encourage the good forms of both, to recognize that we're talking about populations, that we're talking about averages and proclivities, and that there are masculine-acting women and feminine-acting men, and those aren't inherently bad things, but the toxic forms of both are, in fact, toxic. They are accurately named. Toxic masculine-acting is easier to get rid of though, because it tends to go physical and public and overt and obvious, and we have laws against it, and the toxic feminine is covert and cryptic and socially manipulative, and everyone can adopt toxic femininity, men and women alike, and there are no laws against it, and it's taking over, and frankly, the response to that is good strong women, but also especially good strong men who are empowered, who know that they are empowered, to say, "No, not that. Not now. This is not the time for empathy," just like the authors of this paper actually end their paper with, by saying, "Maybe this suggests that in places of things like law enforcement and injustice, men are the better people to be doing it," and I'm sorry if I butchered what their message was. What they say is, "These findings could indicate a predominant role for males in the maintenance of justice and punishment for of norm violation in human societies." Yep.
Well, I feel pretty good that we've arrived at kind of a rough model of what might be going on, and why it's driving us crazy in the present, that what we have is an undeclared shift in the way we evaluate aggressors and victims and what we do about it, and that that undeclared shift, whether it's a male version to a female version or something else, just simply a reflexive embrace of victims creates a gameable landscape which will be gamed, and what you will end up seeing are the cryptic bullies disguised as, you know, cry bullies. Cry bullies, yeah.