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Ep 15 - Brad Wilcox, Institute for Family Studies - Facts About Family And Sex Which Will Surprise You
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On this episode of the Sphere Podcast, Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, Publisher of Sphere Media, talks to Brad Wilcox, a professor of sociology at the University of Virginia and Fellow at the Institute for Family Studies. He is also the author of "Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization." They talk about the Institute for Family Studies and what it is and what they do, his research on sex and marriage and why married people have more and better sex, his findings on religion, marriage, and happiness, why you should indeed "get married" and more.
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Transcript
Introduction and Opening Remarks
00:00:00
Brad
Thank you.
00:00:00
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Low Production Value Sphere podcast, which is shot from my terrorist hideout in the Northwest Frontier province of Pakistan.
The Value of Sociology with Brad
00:00:11
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah I have with me a very, very smart guest.
00:00:16
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah Brad, one of the previous guests on this podcast was our common friend Gabriel Rossman. And when I had him on, I asked him to justify the existence of sociology as an academic discipline.
00:00:30
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
And when I think of how sociology can actually be like a useful and interesting ah discipline, I think about you, because over the years you've produced so much work that sort of puts numbers and data and uses empirical methods to sort of confirm what we all know or or what we sense about the family relationships
00:00:53
Brad
Thank
00:01:01
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
and and that entire area.
Mission and Motivation of IFS
00:01:04
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah And you did something even more interesting which and impressive, which is that you started an organization called the Institute for Family Studies, which has been growing enormously, being very successful in terms of building its influence in the policy world, in the discourse, as overused as that word is.
00:01:25
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah So I guess my first question is, you know, tell us about what IFS is, what you do, the main and initiatives, how do you how do you pitch it?
00:01:38
Brad
Yeah, thanks, Pascal. So I think that the main story of the IFS, the Institute for Family Studies, is that we're really kind of dedicated to underlining all the ways in which, you know, families matter for for children, for adults, and for our civilization.
00:01:52
Brad
um And as we've kind of grown and expanded, we've come to realize that one of the main threats to flourishing families, Pascal, is the ah the rise of of new technologies that kind of distract us from in-person relationships and kind of end up degrading our capacity to connect with others, including with potential, you know romantic partners who obviously might become spouses. and um and parents with us later. So that's sort of one dimension of our work is kind of marriage, family, technology now. And then we've also kind of added um a new track headed up by Lyman Stone on the importance of kind of thinking about the future of fertility.
00:02:30
Brad
And it's our new pronatalism initiative. So Lyman's heading up to pronatalism. um Wing of IFS, Michael Toscano is doing the family technology wing and I'm focusing on the marriage side of of our work. But again, the the broader point is we think that we need to be kind of reminded of all the ways in which families matter for um human flourishing, kids, adults and and the civilization at large. And that's what we're about.
00:02:56
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
that ah Thank you. That's great. ah You do excellent work. I had Lyman on to talk about the natalism stuff. And he's very good, obviously. i just i just want more, you know, sort of stories. ah Can you tell me what it was like to start IFS and sort of the story of why you decided to start it?
Founding and Growth of IFS
00:03:18
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
and sort of how it grew into this very important thing that it is now because I remember like you you were a professor at the University of Virginia. you I think you were sort of part time originally, like it was the IFS was was just you part time at the start or or am I wrong about that? And now it's this significant organization. So, you know, why did you decide to sort of embark on this adventure of sort of policy entrepreneurship?
00:03:47
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah And what was that like?
00:03:51
Brad
Well, Pascal, there were kind of a number of think tanks in the mix, obviously, in American life, from Heritage on the right to Brookings on the center left. um And you know about 13 or 14 years ago, there wasn't really a kind of an American think tank focusing on family. And so um I and some other scholars like Scott Stanley at the University of Denver were kind of talking about this and just thinking that there was a need for a new think tank focusing on family.
00:04:19
Brad
And that was kind of the genesis of this. um i and I still teach at the University of Virginia. I still um you know do research at UVA. I'm still employed by UVA, um but I work with other scholars and you know, some colleagues and staff to start this nonprofit in Charlottesville.
00:04:37
Brad
And then we brought in Michael Toscano about five years ago, and he's been very successful in kind of building up our internal capacities. ah Then can kind of run across Lyman Stone on the Internet on Medium, actually, and see that he seems to be an important voice on on the fertility front.
00:04:54
Brad
and we incorporated him into our work as well. And so just been a kind of place where people who are broadly kind of interested in the, in the character and the quality and the future of family have kind of um convened. and my still, my main job is
Debunking Cultural Myths on Family and Marriage
00:05:08
Brad
at UVA. I, you know, um do things, you know, kind of on a very part-time basis at IFS, but we now have a kind of a staff there, um including Dr. Wendy Wang, who can kind of do their own research ah for IFS and, you know,
00:05:23
Brad
ah We also have a a number of young kind of hires who are also just cranking out numbers and statistics um as well. And i'm I'm hopeful because they kind of represent the future um for you know the the broader pro-family ah scholarship and policy work that IFS is you know is now about.
00:05:44
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah, that's great. So now i'm good i'm i i wanted I wanted to talk about your story because, i again, i think it's so impressive. ah But I'm going to ask you about your research now.
00:05:57
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah You've written, you've published ah so much stuff on family and sort of debunking ideas that are prevalent in the culture about the family or to the contrary, sort of confirming um And one of my favorite findings of yours, ah one which I find myself sharing a lot on social media and like angrily sending to people in group chats, ah relates to sex.
00:06:22
Brad
Yes.
00:06:27
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
um And, you know, it's one of those things. People who are married have more sex. And when you think about it, it's obvious because, you know, when you share a bed with another person, you know,
00:06:42
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
It's easier to have sex than when you're alone in your bed. ah But actually, if you look at popular culture, the image in popular culture is that when you're single, it's this sort of never ending bacchanal of nightclubs and sexual encounters. And meanwhile, every married couple on television is sort of you know unhappy and and and pointedly not having sex. Like it's a total trope on popular culture, the married couple that's miserable because the couple is not having sex.
00:07:10
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah So can you can you give us some more detail on you know sex and the married couple? Like the numbers, who has more versus less sex? Also, it's better sex is is one of your findings.
00:07:27
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
I mean, I'm going to let you go on there.
00:07:30
Brad
Yeah, so Pogobri, this story is an interesting one. It's actually gotten more complicated, I think, in recent years, and I'll come back to that in a second. But um it's really a case that, you know, work that we've seen done over the years from Linda Waite at the University Chicago and from Lyman Stone more recently with IFS, among others,
00:07:47
Brad
you know, just tells us that, you know, sexual frequency is much more common. Again, this is not rocket science for married folks compared to single folks. Now, where it's a little bit complicated, whom Pascal, is that cohabiting couples, in part because they tend to be younger in their relationship, um actually have more sex than married couples.
00:08:07
Brad
um So that's, you know, that's, an and I think this is an issue of kind of like often the kind of timing. So when people are first, you know, together physically,
00:08:16
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right, right.
00:08:17
Brad
you know, there's a kind of a novelty and a freshness there, right? And that just translates into more more sex, right? The problem cohabitation is it's not very stable. And so people who are who are not getting married, um you know, and if they're cohabiting often will end up splitting up.
00:08:34
Brad
um So cohabitation often leads to kind of you know, being single again down the road. That's that's the main point about cohabitation and sex. But in terms of married, you know, folks versus, you know, unmarried folks more broadly, married folks have more sex and they're they're happier.
00:08:48
Brad
um But what we are seeing more recently is is a little bit of, there's a kind of complication that is that sex is down for everyone, you know, including married folks. This is Gene Twenge's work.
00:08:57
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:08:59
Brad
And the the newest wrinkle on this that comes out in my my book, to some extent, Get Married, as well as in just some continuing work I'm doing with the general social survey, is we're now seeing that less than half of more secular couples have sex at least once a week. That is folks are married, um which is down.
00:09:20
Brad
um And at the same time, more than half of religious married couples have sex at least once a week. So What's kind of striking about this, Pascal, is that in 2000, there was no gap in sexual frequency between religious and secular couples who are married in America.
00:09:37
Brad
Today, there is. i'm going to do a piece on this soon, hopefully, for IFS. And i would attribute this to a number of things. One is that I think the kind of um you know the competition that pornography and that you know just screen time and Netflix and all that stuff kind of exerts from like real sexism is more salient, I think today, and especially maybe for more secular couples.
00:09:58
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
That's fascinating.
00:09:59
Brad
And then for religious couples, I think the other piece here is they may be more likely to you know kind of be a bit more aesthetical in the technology, which is helpful for their sex life.
Religious Couples and Marital Satisfaction
00:10:08
Brad
But I think the other piece that's unrecognized is sort of the importance of generosity.
00:10:13
Brad
in marriage, right? Generosity when it comes to sex. And and I think for people who haven't been married or who are newly married, you can kind of like, you may not get it, right? But for a lot of couples, you know, once you've been married 5, 10, 15, 20, you know, 25, 30 years, um generally speaking, and of course there are exceptions, you know, you might have to, you know, mention the exceptions, but um in in, you know, for academics and and other types, um generally speaking, obviously, you know husbands tend to want more sex than wives.
00:10:43
Brad
And so that creates a challenge I know it's shocking news, breaking news from Brad Wilcox.
00:10:45
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
that that's That's the first time I've heard of this.
00:10:51
Brad
um So, but that's obviously creates some tension in marriage, right? And so I think the the yeah sort of the way in which religious couples have an edge here, Pascal, is that they are more likely, and and actually my data support this in the YouGov survey we did for my book, it looks like religious wives are more likely to have sex when they're not entirely into it, right?
00:11:13
Brad
At the same time, so they're they're generous, right? um At the same time,
00:11:18
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm laughing, but what what you say makes total sense.
00:11:22
Brad
Right. But but it's the key that this is a two way street here. But at the same time, it looks like they also so they also kind of are reporting to that their husbands are more kind of considerate when they make it clear that they are not interested in having sex.
00:11:35
Brad
So the point is, both husbands and wives kind of try to embrace the spirit of generosity in this domain where the wives are more likely to kind of you know go forward with this when they're not entirely you know in the mood, so to speak.
00:11:37
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
I see.
00:11:51
Brad
And at the same time, husbands seem to be more likely to kind of rein in, you know, um their desire um when they can clearly see that their wives are are not, you know, in the mood for, ah for you know.
00:12:04
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
That's fascinating.
00:12:06
Brad
So, but it was the bottom line is that today, we you know, yes, married couples have more sex than single, you know, adults, no no question. But there's a ah religious gap that's emerged in favor of those married couples in the US who are more religious.
00:12:21
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
That's fascinating. ah
00:12:23
Brad
Thank you.
00:12:23
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
I don't know to what extent I want to push the the sex discussion. I know you and I have talked about this in private. um Like the the thing I've tweeted a number of times because this is a topic that recurs on social media endlessly is ah the wife needs to make an effort on quantity and the husband needs to make an effort on quality.
00:12:44
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
And if they both do that, then they'll be fine because it'll be easier for the wife if the sex is better and and so on and so forth. And it sounds like ah ah you're saying something that's sort of proximate
Commitment and Emotional Security in Relationships
00:12:59
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
to that. And I love the notion of generosity, which in a sense is is what this is.
00:13:04
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah i i want to do a sidebar ah or my next question about, unless you want unless you want to expand on that, about methodology.
00:13:12
Brad
Well, I would say, yeah, I think, yeah, I think it's important to note that um for both actually men and women, there's a way in which kind of commitment, trust, and emotional security seem to be related to higher quality sex, you know, and we see this not just in a religious context, but just kind of more generally in the research that I've, that I've run across.
00:13:28
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right. Yes. Yes. Yeah.
00:13:34
Brad
um So that's, I think, you know, worth thinking about. um And um I think, ah yeah, so certainly quality is important.
00:13:45
Brad
And that's more likely to be kind of taking place in a context where people really feel safe emotionally in their marriage.
00:13:49
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
yes
00:13:52
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
yeah Yeah, no, that's that's a very good point, and that's another thing that your research shows. It's this sort of thing that's obvious when you think about it, except that ah the culture tells you the opposite, which is actually sex with somebody who you know well and who you love and who loves you is actually better than sex with a complete stranger.
00:14:12
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
who you don't know and who you don't particularly have feelings for and who doesn't particularly have feeling for you. It's it's actually kind of it's it's actually kind of ah extremely meh.
00:14:25
Brad
Mm-hmm.
00:14:26
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
But again, it's a total trope in popular culture, the sort of two random strangers who have this sort of
Scientific Rigor and Unexpected Findings
00:14:33
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
mind-blowing sex. That's a TV trope. And there's the other TV trope of this sort of completely boring, ah unpleasurable married sex.
00:14:43
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah Yeah, no, i I wanted to ask you about methodology because, as I say, like I keep sharing your research, sending it to people in group chats and so on and so forth, and sometimes people will be like, oh, you know, that's like a right-wing sort of attack shop. It's fake. It's not.
00:15:00
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
And I don't like your real academic sociologist like you're still a professor at good standing at the University of Virginia, which is one of the great universities in America.
00:15:11
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
The people who the other people who do research for ah IFS have, you know, they have proper PhDs and so on and so forth. ah Most of your data or all of it, I don't know, I want you to answer this question, ah is from the General Social Survey, which is a sort of data that's put together by the US government that's you know publicly available.
00:15:29
Brad
Thank you.
00:15:35
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Anybody can reproduce your research. ah Yeah, could you could you just talk about the methodology of your studies and just explain for the record that you know you're not making it up? you're not you know when When you say ah your results, you're not asking like 12 people and saying this represents a couple.
00:15:53
Brad
Yeah, no, it's a good it's a good question, Pascal. And I would say I want to make two points here quickly. One is that, you know, I had a big tenure battle at UVA. lost at every level of the tenure process at UVA. And one of the allegations that was lodged against me was that I was just kind of like cooking the books empirically in my research. And so that's why they didn't want to give me tenure at the University of Virginia.
00:16:14
Brad
Now, thankfully, the provost at the end of the process overturned the earlier decisions and gave me tenure. I'm grateful for that, obviously. But um the the irony, though, is that when they made the allegation, I was working with a colleague, Nicholas Wolfinger, who is, you know,
00:16:30
Brad
secular Jewish progressive guy, you know another sociologist, um UCLA trained, um and he was the one crunching the numbers. So we were doing this joint work on religion and urban relationships and finding that religious couples, Black, Hispanic, some white um in urban America were happier in their relationships than their more secular peers.
00:16:51
Brad
And this was kind of deemed to be kind of just you know more ideologically driven stuff, not accurate. And what they didn't they didn't know really is that, again, my my more secular progressive colleague was the one actually crunching the numbers on this you know large ah longitudinal data set.
00:17:09
Brad
And so um I am committed to kind of letting the facts speak for themselves. And the vast majority of work that I do is done with publicly accessible data sets like the general social survey.
00:17:21
Brad
And so if people are skeptical of my claims, they're free to kind of jump on the on the internet and download the data and run the numbers themselves. um The second thing that I would say is that um I'm also in there. but I'll say three things. The second thing I would say quickly is that, you know, there are times when I've kind of come across findings that surprised me and didn't conform to my worldview. So I did a project on paternal presence and kids' educational attainment around the globe. And found that in some places, Pascal, when dad is you know in in the home, no positive effect on kids' education. And I was surprised, didn't expect to find that.
00:17:58
Brad
But I did find that And then, of course, I tried to figure out why is it in some countries, in some contexts, having a father present does not you know predict kids' educational success. And that's a different story. But again, the point is that I i did kind of published this research, which went against my priors.
00:18:14
Brad
And the final point I would make here is that a lot of the work that I do is cross-sectional. And so I think the legitimate kind of concern here is, you know does for instance, marriage actually causally predict outcomes for kids and for adults, rather than just being kind of a manifestation of having some underlying good traits, you know whether they're genetic or you know or environmental or advantages. um And so there, I think the challenge is more profound.
00:18:37
Brad
And there are some newer kind of methodologies that, you know, i can point to, like twin studies, for instance, that lend greater empirical kind of evidence to this idea that marriage is a causal impact on kids' development.
00:18:48
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah, but the I mean, this problem is a problem with all empirical social science, right?
00:18:52
Brad
A lot of research, yeah, yeah. So let's it's legit.
00:18:53
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
I mean, I ah you i used to have this thing, ah you know, if you look at the way, so there, and you know this stuff better than I do, there's very famously a college wage premium.
00:19:06
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
And there's very famously a marriage wage premium. So people who are married make more money and people who go to college make more money. If you look at the way this is described in the lit in the literature, it's almost opposite, meaning people will always tell you that the marriage wage premium is a selection effect.
00:19:24
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah and And but they will almost and like you can flip the arguments both ways and like the sentences would work and it's clearly people's priors that lead them to think that college is a valuable thing whereas marriage isn't.
00:19:40
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah so But that's that's a problem with social science in general, but you're, you know, just want to see you, you know, make clear that you use the best standards of social science, which means you still have the limits of social science, but you're not, you know, you're not doing some weird thing. You're using the same standards as any research that could be published in a peer-reviewed journal.
00:20:06
Brad
Yeah, that's so um that's right. And again, I think some work that I do is for peer reviewed you know journals these days, but other work is done just for you know a broader public audience. And you know I think it's also just important to know though too, that in a context where on the left,
00:20:20
Brad
We hear things like in the new York Times, there was a piece that said that you know married heterosexual motherhood in America is a game that no one wins. um And she was talking about women. And so the idea there on the left oftentimes is that for women, you know marriage and motherhood are kind of a pathway to misery.
00:20:37
Brad
um And even in some context, emisseration.
00:20:38
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right. Right.
00:20:39
Brad
Of course, now on the right, what we're getting is a different message, but very kind of similar in other regards. And that is you know people like Andrew Tate saying that for men, marriage is a dead end path.
00:20:50
Brad
And that you mentioned on Invest in Family Life.
00:20:51
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
right
00:20:52
Brad
And so I think one of the hopefully services that I'm performing is that I can show empirically at the cross-sectional level that, you know, the average man and the average woman in America who are married with kids are markedly happier and report more meaningful lives than their peers who aren't married with kids. And so kind of at least the sort of average story that we're seeing play out in the American context runs directly in the face of these Brooklyn progressives and these red pill rightists online.
Promoting Marriage: Benefits and Ideological Biases
00:21:23
Brad
And that's, I think, helpful in kind of just correcting the record.
00:21:28
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
That's great. And that's a great segue to my next question. So you have this book, which is titled Get Married, ah which I, you know, from the title, I think it's a book that's encouraging people to get married. Am I getting that right?
00:21:44
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah yet Why don't you tell us about the book, what the argument in the book is, what the research behind the book is?
00:21:51
Brad
Yeah, so as I've been kind of doing the work of you know writing and researching, teaching about family, you know my my first motivation in doing all this was kind of just showing how much marriage matters for kids. and But to be honest, personal, I was raised by a single mom and I kind of realize realized in college that marriage was the institution that kind of connected dads to their children.
00:22:11
Brad
And so a lot of my work historically has been about how much marriage matters for kids. But as I've been talking to students, particularly to younger women, there's been kind of this reoccurring theme that they're really concerned about their prospects for marriage.
00:22:24
Brad
They have the sense that there aren't enough marriageable men out there. It's harder to date guys who are really you know worthy of commitment or interested in commitment.
00:22:30
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:22:31
Brad
And so i wanted to kind of reorient the discussion away from just the importance of marriage for kids and towards kind of the importance of marriage for adults. And then to give you know women and men who are considering marriage or who are already married some kind of guidelines about how to forge a strong and stable marriage. And so that's kind of the genesis of the book.
00:22:50
Brad
And again, the book is Get Married and Why Americans Should Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families and Save Civilization. The ah they Defy the Elites you know idea kind of got a immediate flack from Matt Iglesias when the title first came out.
00:23:06
Brad
He's like, what you talking about, Brad? The elites are the ones succeeding at marriage. Ironically, Matt himself had published a piece in... I think it was in Vox, um you know, a while back, kind of saying that the decline of marriage was no not a problem for, you know, for our country.
00:23:23
Brad
And so unwittingly, that was kind of exhibit A about why the elites need to be defined. And here he was making the case a number of years ago, I think he's actually evolved on this, but a number of years ago, kind of suggesting that the institution of marriage was not important for our country. And that's the kind of thinking that I'm obviously trying to counter in the book.
00:23:38
Brad
And then in terms of forging strong families, I kind of lay out five C's, communion, children, commitment, cash, and community that I think are the pillars of of strong and stable marriages today and kind of give us some confidence when we're kind of worrying about the but messages from the left and now the red pill right that would kind of tell us that there's no way to forge a good marriage in you know in today's world.
00:24:00
Brad
There are good ways to do that. And I lay it lay them out in the book. And the final piece is just kind of underlying you know all the ways in which are the most important ways in which marriage matters for our civilization.
00:24:11
Brad
And we could talk a lot about that, but I would just kind of give you one example. We've seen a decline in happiness in America. So kind of people are not realizing Jeffersonian pursuit, the pursuit of happiness as much in America today.
00:24:19
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes. Oh.
00:24:23
Brad
And there's a recent, of course, Chicago ah study that tells us that the number one factor there um that it explains why Americans are less likely to be happy today is because fewer Americans are married today. So that's just one example of how, you know, fortunes of the family really kind of affect the fortunes of our country.
00:24:48
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Oh, that's very interesting and very sad. ah So we don't have we don't have a lot of time because I know you have a plane to catch because you're a very busy and important man, which is great.
00:25:00
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah But so in preparing for this interview, i sort of looked around at the stuff you'd written recently and the stuff that IFS published recently. And I noticed that you'd written about a theme which is near and dear to my heart, which is one, well, which is very sad, but...
00:25:18
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
also, I have to admit, kind of funny, which is the phenomenon of unhappy liberal women. ah Why are liberal women so...
Happiness in Conservative vs. Liberal Women
00:25:29
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Well, first of all, how unhappy are liberal women?
00:25:32
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Why are they so unhappy? And why is this important?
00:25:37
Brad
Yeah, great question, Pascal. And so there's actually been, you know, a good bit of work done by people like Gene Twenge and Jonathan Haidt, who are obviously very prominent social psychologists and and some earlier grad students who kind of caught this this story with Pew data, you know, a while back and about five years ago, really, to be more precise.
00:25:55
Brad
And what they were finding is that there was more kind of reports of mental illness, like depression and anxiety, et cetera, things like that among more progressive women in particular.
00:26:05
Brad
um And by contrast, conservative men and conservative women were doing much better on the sort of mental health you know end of things. and of course, then wanted to look at just the happiness piece, since the happiness piece I think is is so important in the American context, especially, and found that, you know similar pattern there, that basically liberals are less happy um than conservatives. And for liberal women, they're about um twice as likely to be, you know, not happy with their lives compared to conservative women.
00:26:34
Brad
And then when you kind of flip it, In our most recent research at the Institute of Family Studies, we find that um conservative women aged 18 to 40 are about three times more likely to be completely satisfied with their lives.
00:26:48
Brad
And as we kind of explain this, we kind of reference a broader um discussion from people like Jonathan Haidt and Gene Twenge, and then also on the left, Matt Iglesias and Michelle Goldberg in terms who kind of think this is about a mindset issue. They think that liberal women are more likely to catastrophize, to have kind of like negative thoughts about the world based upon social media consumption and other you know factors in their lives.
00:27:11
Brad
And so they kind of think this is just about a bad mindset, you know makes them more likely to just sort of look at the world through a dark lens rather than through a rose colored lens.
00:27:23
Brad
So that I mean,
00:27:23
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah, but this is sort of pushing back the question one step, because somebody who has that mindset is somebody who's already not doing well. And also, it's the opposite of the stereotype about conservatives. it's It's the conservatives who's supposed to think that everything is going to hell in a handbasket, who's supposed to look at the world through a dark lens, and you know maybe correctly, right?
00:27:45
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
But so anyway, go on.
00:27:48
Brad
Yes. So the the idea was this is you know all about the mindset. And I don't want to minimize the mindset, right? That's something that's an important part of the the puzzle. But what we find in our own research and looking at the factors that help to explain this ideological divide for younger women, in this case, women aged 18 to 40, in our most recent research, we find that ah dramatic differences in marital status, in religion, and reports of loneliness really do a ah great job of explaining this gap um empirically between liberal and conservative women. so So we're just kind of making the additional point that is indebted to, you in a sense, your forebearer from France, Emile Durkheim, the great French sociologist, that people's social integration into core institutions and communities is incredibly important for their well-being.
00:28:34
Brad
And today, conservative women are more likely to be integrated into core institutions like marriage, religion, um and maybe other you know kinds of community. And that's the thing that really helps to explain not just mindset differences, you know these gaps between ah the well-being of conservative women and liberal men.
00:28:59
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
OK, so talk more about the loneliness bit, because, well, first of all, ah you might want to explain like I take this for granted, but first it is it is ah it is ah fact that on average, religious people and people who attend religious services, particularly Christians and Jews, I think, ah are happier.
00:29:17
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
This is something that most people may not be aware of. ah But can can can you you know, why are liberal women so lonely? ah Yeah, I mean, why?
00:29:28
Brad
Yeah. So, you know, one of the things that's going to illustrate the point, Pascal, is that Gallup was tracking kind of, i think, happiness or satisfaction across the pandemic. Right. And found the the only group of Americans who did not see a dramatic dip in their like happiness or satisfaction across the pandemic, you know, back in 2020 2021.
00:29:47
Brad
ah were Americans who regularly attended religious services. So just kind of being part of a community where there are common rituals, you know there are you know social gatherings happening, there's kind of a sense that life is meaningful, and all this stuff you can kind of link to religion um is linked to you know less depression, less anxiety and greater happiness for ordinary Americans.
00:30:08
Brad
um And then when it comes to obviously marriage, you know much the same story. And so we see in this new research we did is that only 31% liberal women are are married compared to 51% of conservative women.
00:30:21
Brad
Only 12% of liberal women attend services regularly, religious services regularly compared to 55% of conservative women. So again, a majority of conservative young women are religious and married, only a minority of liberal women are married
Conclusion and Recommended Reading
00:30:38
Brad
and religious. And so again, these differences in social integration help to explain why one group is more likely to be flourishing And one group is more likely to be floundering.
00:30:50
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
That's fascinating. um Sad, but fascinating. um
00:30:58
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
let's see Let's see what else I have here. ah Well, i you know what? I'm not going to make you be late for your flight, so I'm going to ask you the traditional final question that we ask every guest on the show, which is recommend a book. It can be any book, fiction, nonfiction, old, new, whatever, that's not related to your area of expertise.
00:31:22
Brad
Yeah. So that's a great question. I've just, um, pretty recently finished, um, a, um, a history of the Pacific, um, war.
00:31:34
Brad
Um, and it's, um, it's a three volume series by a Naval historian.
00:31:40
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
wow
00:31:41
Brad
Um, and it's, um, incredibly well-written. Um, you know, just does a good job of the book conveying the social history and then also the, um,
00:31:53
Brad
you know, the military history and and really the big characters in the political and the in the military worlds, both in Japan and in the US. And i've I've read a lot of European books, but on the sort of European side of the theater.
00:32:07
Brad
um But ah the author is Ian Toll. And yeah
00:32:11
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Ian Toll, how do you spell that?
00:32:13
Brad
he Yeah, Ian Toll, T-O-L-L. And um the book is, the i think the first book is called The Conquering Tide by Ian Toll. But it's, again, three volumes on the Pacific War and just incredibly well written and engaging, three volume series.
00:32:30
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Wow, that's that's a great that's a great recommendation.
00:32:32
Brad
Yeah.
00:32:33
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
i I've started ah reading on my Kindle app on my phone at the gym ah and in and during ah in between sets.
00:32:33
Brad
So.
00:32:42
Brad
Yeah.
00:32:45
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes, I go to the gym. I know it's not obvious when you look at me. ah So I've actually been reading more that way. ah So I'm definitely, that's that's a great one. well Brad wilke ah Wilcox, Institute for Family Studies, thank you very much for your time.
00:33:02
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah This was very interesting. um Maybe one day we'll do a longer one. ah But in the meantime, ah it was a lot of fun to have you and go catch your flight.
00:33:16
Brad
Thanks. Great to be with you this morning.