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Randolph Nesse on Anxiety and Evolution (Episode 72)
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Want to become more Stoic? Join us and other Stoics this October: Stoicism Applied by Caleb Ontiveros and Michael Tremblay on Maven
In this conversation, Caleb speaks with Dr. Randolph Nesse.
Randolph is the author of Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry. His work focuses on answering fundamental questions like why humans get sick and why we experience anxiety from an evolutionary perspective.
This is an essential conversation for understanding the nature of negative emotions. We touch on why we get anxious, what we can do about it, why we may not want to become less anxious, the role of advice, and, of course, the insights of the Stoics.
https://www.randolphnesse.com/
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Transcript
Introduction to Failure and Stoicism
00:00:00
Speaker
And I think it's so important to talk with each other and with ourselves about how we deal with failure. Some people say, Oh, I'm not the right kind of person. I'm, I am a failure. I can't do anything. I mean, that's, there's a belief that'll never succeed. There's other people who just don't pay any attention to failure and keep right on failing over and over again without learning from failures.
00:00:21
Speaker
Welcome to Stowe Conversations. In this podcast, Michael Trombley and I discuss the theory and practice of stoicism. Each week we'll share two conversations, one between the two of us, and another we'll be an in-depth conversation with an expert.
00:00:38
Speaker
In this conversation, I speak with Dr.
Interview with Dr. Randolph Nessie on Evolutionary Psychiatry
00:00:41
Speaker
Randolph Nessie. Randolph is the author of Good Reasons for Bad Feelings, insights from the frontier of evolutionary psychiatry. His work has focused on applying the evolutionary lens to questions like why we get sick, why we get anxious.
00:00:59
Speaker
I enjoyed this chat a lot. The ability to use the evolutionary model well is exceptionally useful for thinking about the world. We discuss anxiety, what one can do to become less anxious, why that may not even be a worthwhile goal, the role of advice, and of course the insights of the Stoics. Here is our conversation.
00:01:23
Speaker
Welcome to Stoic Conversations. My name is Caleb Ontiveros, and I am here with Dr. Randall Nessie, one of the founders of evolutionary medicine and evolutionary psychiatry. So very honored to be able to speak with him today. Thanks for joining.
00:01:42
Speaker
Thanks so much. I really appreciate the opportunity, Caleb. I want to get to this question about why do people experience anxiety at
Anxiety's Role in Human Evolution
00:01:52
Speaker
all? It's one of the most widely reported problems for people who listen to this podcast, read our newsletter, and of course, generally as a society, it's a huge problem. But when we're coming up with an account of answering that question, there's always issue of what are we talking about? What are we trying to explain?
00:02:12
Speaker
My career has been as a psychiatrist helping to develop the Anxiety Disorders Program at the University of Michigan, and my first 10 years there, we just did what worked, and we didn't think too much about why anxiety exists at all. But I started hanging out with evolutionary biologists who study animal behavior, and they immediately got me saying,
00:02:32
Speaker
What's this problem you're dealing with? Why does it exist at all? The answer is pretty simple. All organisms that get into trouble and can avoid trouble by having some kind of discomfort in a bad, dangerous, or painful situation, it's a good thing.
00:02:48
Speaker
to avoid those situations. And people ask me, so why is anxiety so uncomfortable? Why don't we just say, it's a bad thing, get out of here? Well, because we need to be motivated to get out of bad situations. Furthermore, we need to be motivated to stay out of bad situations in the future. So the capacity for anxiety is shaped by natural selection to help us avoid dangers and losses. And it works, but it works too well. And a lot of my
00:03:13
Speaker
Recent work is trying to understand why perfectly normal brain mechanisms give rise to a lot of useless anxiety.
00:03:22
Speaker
Yeah, that's right, because you can understand why it's advantageous to be anxious about whether a car is crossing the street or not, but people get anxious about all sorts of things, some of which it seems like they're getting a little bit too excited or there's this famous line that we fear more in imagination than reality.
00:03:44
Speaker
Right. And what accounts for that feature of anxiety? Well, as you know so well, humans have this remarkable capacity to imagine futures, adjust their behavior as a function of their imagined futures. And that's a really valuable thing that it may be that no other organism can do.
00:04:02
Speaker
But there's also another reason why we all have more shear than seems justified. We call that the smoke detector principle because smoke detectors always go off most of the time for no reason. But we don't throw them in the garbage. We respect the fact that you need to have that smoke detector going off and having false alarms to make absolutely sure that it goes off at times when there's a real fire.
00:04:28
Speaker
And natural selection has shaped our minds in the same way. Running away from something that might be dangerous might cost you 50 or 100 calories. But not running away, if there's a real danger there, could be fatal.
Balancing Anxiety and Stoic Virtues
00:04:43
Speaker
And so natural selection adjusts the system to a hair trigger in many instances. And so lots of us have much more anxiety than would benefit us. But nonetheless, this doesn't mean there's something wrong with our minds or our brains in general. It means that the way natural selection has shaped the system is the same as smoke structures are adjusted. The false alarm is cheap.
00:05:07
Speaker
And you need to have a lot of those to make absolutely sure that the alarm goes off when there's a real danger present. So I had the greatest privilege to work with Dr. Isaac Marks, who was one of the world's leaders in anxiety research. We worked for many years together and wrote an article called Fear and Fitness. And one of the things we came up with very quickly is recognizing that just with every other bodily response, you can have too little as well as too much.
00:05:34
Speaker
And so, you know, everybody complains about too much anxiety, too much pain and such too much nausea, vomiting and fatigue. But you can also have too little of those things. And that's really bad. People who have too little anxiety have a potentially fatal disorder because they do things like doing acrobatics on the edge of the Grand Canyon or running out in front of cars or playing with guns.
00:05:58
Speaker
Right, right. So the question of hypophobia, that's completely lacking here.
00:06:06
Speaker
This brings to mind the Aristotelian conception of prudence, which is the mean, if you will, between recklessness and too much caution on one side. Do you think of yourself in a way as an evolutionary Aristotelian? That's a very interesting idea. I think I might just adopt that, Caleb. An evolutionary Aristotelian. Certainly, you know, a moderation in all things.
00:06:34
Speaker
is so sensible. You know, when I was younger, I thought that there was, for almost everything, some middle point where everything was just fine, whether it was how hard you work or how many sexual risks you took or other things. And gradually with experience in life and talking with many patients, it's become clear that there isn't any point in the middle where everything is just fine. There are costs on either side, and we just have to accept that that's the way life is and go on.
00:07:02
Speaker
But still in the middle, I think is usually better. And that takes us back to stoicism as well.
00:07:10
Speaker
The great challenge for people is to either take advantage of things in the short term or postpone benefits and be nicer to people and help other people in hopes that you'll get returns in the long term. This is the great challenge and it's one that's pretty unique to humans because for other animals they can't trade favors over the long term like we humans can. So there's this constant pressure
00:07:34
Speaker
And most psychologists, everybody's written about the role of anxiety in keeping us from doing things that make us unacceptable to other people. And that's such a useful thing. On the other hand, it causes enormous unhappiness. In my practice, we saw hundreds of patients with terrible social anxiety.
00:07:55
Speaker
And it gradually became clear, it's not just them. Most of us are very sensitive to what other people think about us. And we have to ask too, why is that? Is it because it's good for the group or something? And it's not. The explanation is that individuals who are preferred by other people as social partners, not just sexual partners, but social partners as a work partners and members of a group or something, they get big advantages because the people who are preferred as partners get better partners.
00:08:22
Speaker
And then the long run on that means that they end up having more offspring. So this is an explanation for the origins of human capacities for morality and love and guilt and shame and social anxiety altogether.
Human Morality and Social Anxiety
00:08:35
Speaker
All those good things and bad things all together. And I think it's useful to ponder the fact that the origins of these capacities for goodness and morality and the like come at this price.
00:08:48
Speaker
for being anxious and the like. Sometimes with my social anxiety patients, I would tell them, you know, you have a terrible problem and you're suffering terribly, but there's something worse that you could experience. They would obviously say, well, what's that? I say, well, if you didn't have that anxiety, if you didn't care what other people thought about you, because there are a lot of people like that. They just don't care what other people think about them. And they're really obnoxious. And they often have big troubles in life because other people don't want to be their part in this for much of anything.
00:09:19
Speaker
Yeah, one central idea in stoicism is the idea of the dichotomy of control. That's always been vigilant about what is up to you and what is not. And that often involves accepting many things that are not under your control and then embracing, taking responsibility for the little
00:09:42
Speaker
that is, which for the Stoics really is not that much. Your powers of attention, your powers of choice and reflective judgments. And this pushes us, I think, towards a view of the world that's more about shaping your character or being a specific person as opposed to maybe taking a more epicurean
00:10:07
Speaker
or one could say crudely hedonistic approach to the world where you're trying to tweak how you feel or optimize particular outcomes. Instead, you're trying to be a specific person with the lot that you are given, both that you could say biologically, socially, economically, and so on. Right. Early in my career treating depression, I always told my patients, don't give up, you can do it. You definitely should not let depression get in the way.
00:10:37
Speaker
And gradually, thanks to this evolutionary thing, I realized that low mood, ordinary mild depression in response to some cue is there for a reason. And we shouldn't just blow past it and try to ignore it. We should try to attend to it and see what it's trying to tell us. And usually what it's trying to tell us is there's something we're trying to do in life that isn't working.
00:11:00
Speaker
And there's a whole sequence of emotions that are aroused when we're trying to do something that isn't working. First, just stopping for a while and feeling discouraged and waiting. Sometimes getting angry and trying to overcome an obstacle. Sometimes trying a whole new strategy. And if none of those things work, actually giving up. And I've had more cures for people with bad depression from actually giving up some unproductive goal and unreachable goal.
00:11:28
Speaker
that I have from helping people get to their grand goal. And again, I think this taps in deeply to stoic ideas. Yeah, there's always a balance, right, between are you trying to change your own desires, your own beliefs, or something about your environment, and I think difference.
00:11:46
Speaker
communities, different times, strike that balance in different ways. And I think right now where I am in Silicon Valley, there's a lot of focus on shaping the world or being a specific, getting the specific outcome, whereas in other communities perhaps there's a lot more.
00:12:05
Speaker
of a pressure perhaps to just accept things in the way they are. And one thing I like about your book is on one hand you have the, you might think of as broader abstract sort of fundamental questions about evolution interspersed with these case studies, right? Where you actually really need to pay attention to the details of what is going on and for a specific patient or for yourself. Are you called to change yourself or change the world?
00:12:36
Speaker
The examples are what we all remember, and when we can apply them to ourselves, we really remember what's going on, and then it becomes the role of the psychotherapist or the counselor. And one thing the Stoics always pressure that I wanted to ask about, or pressure is perhaps not the right word, but one thing they always encourage are cognitive interventions, and they're not alone in that.
00:13:00
Speaker
They promote as long as well as a number of other philosophies, religions, therapies, changing your mind as a response to different problems in life or problems in living. What does the evolutionary approach broadly have to say about how effective that is, that approach is going to be?
Factors Influencing Emotions and Stoic Practices
00:13:23
Speaker
So there are four things that influence our emotions. There's the situation, there's how we think about the situation, there's our behavior, and there's our brain. And each one of those leads to a different kind of intervention. The optimal thing, if there is some bad situation arousing a bad emotion, is to change the situation.
00:13:45
Speaker
And sometimes when I'm talking with radio interviewers or somebody who doesn't know nearly as much as you do about these kinds of things, they say, oh, Dr. Nessie, so you're saying we should just give up to get rid of depression? No. If it was that simple, people would have done it a long time ago. It's never simple. And that's why it takes a clinical experience and patience and empathy.
00:14:05
Speaker
to talk with people about their desires. But now we're coming right back to the court of stoicism because a lot of this is about desires and trying to help people to do the things that can reduce their negative emotions. We talked about bad situations and how you think about the situation. Obviously, that's the mediator between the actual situation and the emotions that we feel.
00:14:27
Speaker
And it's become the key to cognitive behavioral therapy and to most other kinds of therapy too, actually. I mean, reframing both past events and current events in a broader context, I think is the key to good therapy most of the time. Then we come to behavior. Again, I started off treating people with phobias and they would not be able to go out into a park because they were afraid they might see a snake, although there'd never been a snake in that park.
00:14:54
Speaker
I mean, terrible things that people couldn't take their kids to the park. And so we would bring a snake into the room, and we'd hold it in front of the person, and they'd start screaming. And they'd say, are you sure this is going to make me better? And we'd say, yep, it works reliably, but you're going to have to put up with some very bad feelings for about an hour.
00:15:11
Speaker
in order to get over this. And again, we're back to stoicism again. So putting up with those bad feelings, instead of running away from them, turned out for most people, the fear goes down. And we were able to explain to people that's how anxiety works. If you stay in the anxious situation, even though you're having a lot of anxiety, and you wait until the anxiety goes down its own, that that creates learning on a very deep level.
00:15:37
Speaker
But thinking, I mean, I don't know how many patients I've told, you know what, this snake is not dangerous, so quit worrying about it. Think about it as a nice friendly snake. It doesn't work at all. So that's trying to change the way you think about things, and it just doesn't work much more effective for those kind of fears who actually change the behavior, and changing the behavior changes the thinking and the belief.
00:16:02
Speaker
But again, it's more complicated, Caleb, because it was my job to go to the pet store and borrow tarantulas and birds and snakes and spiders. We did quite a business with that pet shop later because many of our patients went back to the pet shop later and said, I've just conquered my spider phobia and now I want to buy a tarantula.
00:16:20
Speaker
So that's interesting, isn't it? People get a sense of mastery when they do control their emotions and get over, but the stimulus still has a lot of power over them because it's deep in there somehow. Yeah, that's interesting. I could see wanting to keep that sort of as a memento of victory of some sorts.
00:16:44
Speaker
People take justified pride, I think, in overcoming those obstacles and their negative emotions.
00:16:52
Speaker
I suppose when you talk about the smoke detector principle, you think about, well, when my smoke detector is just going off and off and it's always wrong, I throw it out or something like this, but we just can't do that so easily with our minds often because if we could, then that probably wouldn't be as effective over time. And that's something I wanted to ask you. I mean, a lot of all Greek philosophies is to find ways of minimizing or avoiding negative feelings. And isn't it interesting that we can't do that?
00:17:20
Speaker
We can't just, oh, let's not worry about that anymore. You can try telling yourself that, but generally, whether it's anxiety or low mood or envy or lust, all these emotions keep bubbling back up to the surface. I think that's intrinsic to how they were formed, because if it was possible to just turn them off, we would, and they wouldn't do their job. Yeah, that's right. Well, I think part of it is,
00:17:46
Speaker
It's you have so much inertia built up from past experience or in addition to the biological history. So that's something that the Stoics in particular emphasize is that we're so deeply shaped by the people around us and end up making similar judgments.
00:18:06
Speaker
as they do. And it's not a matter of, I think, some people think of stoicism and they think, well, you can control your thoughts. And just like this, you can come up with some other judgments and that'll solve the feeling. But of course, whenever you're thinking, you're thinking about the machinery that's been shaped over every single past decision you've made, in addition to all these other factors we've been discussing. So it's really the matter of steering a very slow ship, not a matter of simply switching tracks.
00:18:36
Speaker
Right, right. Do you think people tend to be too optimistic in general about, like I suppose that's one reading of your book, is on one hand, it has an optimistic message in the sense that changing your thoughts can make a difference, changing your desires can make a difference. But unfortunately, we have these particular desires, thinking patterns, if you will, installed into us.
00:19:04
Speaker
These things can make a difference, but if you're thinking about setting a goal, or how much change you should expect, the human animal hasn't changed that much over the last thousand years. So this is something that's grown on me in recent decades. It's more of a sympathy for the plight, the human plight. You know, we're all trapped in these webs of desire, and we can't just turn them off. We have to figure out some way of coping with them.
00:19:31
Speaker
And it's fascinating that there's so many different recommendations for how to cope with them. I mean, the hedonists say, go for it. You know, seek pleasure to hell with the problems that come up in the Epicureans talk about trying to balance things more, and the stoics try to pursue virtue. Preferably, this is grossly, grossly simplified, of course. But I think it's important to recognize the central role of controlling desire.
00:19:58
Speaker
in all of these recommendations and of course religious traditions routinely have something about trying to control desire and virtue and now we're to this deep connection. I mean, how does virtue get in there? Why is it that trying to be good is so central to feeling good and so difficult? I mean, if it just makes us feel good, why don't we all be virtuous all the time?
00:20:22
Speaker
And there are some easy answers to that very often. Benefits now come at the cost of problems later.
00:20:29
Speaker
And so there's this constant tension between now versus later. And there's also a constant tension between taking benefits for oneself now versus the possibility of creating relationships and maintaining relationships by postponing benefits for yourself now and doing good things for other people. And this brings us to the gigantic cognitive social transformation in our species over the last 100,000 years.
00:20:56
Speaker
You get on an airplane, most of the time you have a couple of hundred people sitting there calmly following directions. Nobody's trying to have sex with anybody else or beat on anybody else or steal somebody else's Coca-Cola. With chimpanzees, they couldn't do it. And the fact that we can is one of the most profound and interesting questions in the evolution of our species.
00:21:20
Speaker
Well, maybe not to derail things too much, but I'm curious, what do you think about the explanation for these different religious, philosophical movements, which on the surface are about changing one's feelings? Just the one explanation would be these things play a difference.
00:21:36
Speaker
Function so you can have a really crude version of religious behavior would be it serves a kind of social function bonds people together to have shared goals and All this talk about feelings. Well, maybe that's just a little bit of initial marketing But ultimately that's what human beings are going to be built towards is living with each other as well as is required by
00:22:03
Speaker
the difference evolutionary pressures or something like this. So all of these different schools, the main thought would be serve some other function and they're not so much even about managing one's internal state. What do you think about that? That's what I like a lot.
00:22:18
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I was very committed to something called commitment theory for a time to try to explain this. And for many religions or most, when you join, there is a price, both in terms of learning and rituals and other kinds of commitments that you need to make.
00:22:34
Speaker
And so it's kind of expensive to get into the group and it's also expensive to leave the group if you don't. And this makes it much, you're in a much safer zone with other people who are all committed to treating each other according to certain religious precepts. And I think it makes us all feel more secure and trusting. And it's so important in life to be in the midst of other people that you trust.
00:22:58
Speaker
And this is why things like what's going on with the sexual abuse in the Catholic Church in recent years are so devastating to people because half the point of close, deep religious affiliations is finding a place where you don't have to be suspicious all the time.
00:23:14
Speaker
And one of the benefits people in religious groups get is the ability to trade favors without keeping track. Some people might walk into a church and say, I think I want to join this church because if I get sick, then someone will visit me and help me. And in any religion, the person running it is going to say, I don't think you understand. That is not how this works. You're supposed to be committed because of your spiritual commitments to helping other people in this group and even in other groups.
00:23:43
Speaker
And again, it's marvelous that this exists and we do rely on help from other people in controlling our impulses and trying to find good partners with whom to have good relationships.
00:23:58
Speaker
So, I mean, do you think that general explanation about commitment theory, though, doesn't cash out in the end? It seemed like initially you say that you are more enamored with it. I did a book on the evolution of commitment with a lot of wonderful co-authors. The original idea comes from the technical, mathematical theory, a game theory of commitment, where you promise to do something that in the future won't be in your interests.
00:24:26
Speaker
For instance, I will stay with you and love you no matter what else happens in life and even if you get sick. And that's the promise of marriage. And it's hard to actually live up to that often if somebody gets sick. So how do you know that you can trust a person to live up to that commitment? One thing you do is get a whole lot of other people around to see that commitment. Another way you can do it is by writing a contract where there are penalties if you violate the commitment.
00:24:53
Speaker
But then the other side of commitment theory is you commit yourself to doing something really mean that would hurt you. When the mob comes to a bar owner and says, you need to pay protection money or else, the mob doesn't want to burn down anybody's bar. They just want protection money.
00:25:12
Speaker
But every once in a while, they've got to fulfill that commitment to do terrible things in order to scare people enough to get them to give protection money. So these are both sides of commitment. And the worst, of course, is nuclear destruction, where if all parties agree and believe that the other will unleash terror on the whole world, then they're not going to do anything. But that gets so, I don't need to like to think about it.
00:25:39
Speaker
But when we did research on this and tried to ask people
00:25:44
Speaker
about examples in which someone had done something for them not to get something back in return, but just for goodness, it turned out that those were hard to find.
Social Selection Theory and Morality
00:25:56
Speaker
And most of the examples that we found were from people who had religious beliefs that required them or encouraged them to do generous things towards people that they weren't even in a relationship with.
00:26:08
Speaker
So since then, I've tried to better understand the origins of morality and that this is the next phase of the same project, really. And I think the proper explanation there is what's called social selection. And that is, we all want good social partners, not just sexual partners, but social partners to do projects with and be friends with and all the rest. So who do we choose?
00:26:32
Speaker
Well, we choose people who are honest and trustworthy and empathic and rich. We choose people who have resources, status, and that means that how do you go about getting a good partner?
00:26:46
Speaker
Well, you'd better be the kind of individual that other people prefer as partners. So this whole business of partner choice, I think has been central to the evolution of human pro-sociality. This does not require group selection or anything like that. It's just individuals pursuing self-interested choices in who their partners are.
00:27:07
Speaker
creates selection forces, natural selection, for individuals who are honest, trustworthy, kind, empathic, and generous.
00:27:17
Speaker
And this process seems paradoxical. It's a little hard to explain, and maybe I didn't succeed just then. I'd be glad for your questions. This process not only offers a real explanation biologically for our remarkable capacities for pro-sociality and deep relationships and love and commitment and morality, it also explains why we're so damn sensitive.
00:27:40
Speaker
and why we care so much what other people think and why our self-esteem is low half the time and why we lie awake at night wondering if we said the wrong thing and why many people have social fears so great that they can't go to the grocery store and hand the $20 bill to the cashier for fear that they'll make some social mistake. So there's a huge price we pay for this social sensitivity.
00:28:04
Speaker
It sounds similar to a few years back, Jeffrey Miller wrote a book called Mate with Tucker Max, which was basically a popularization of some dating advice, but also his views on sexual selection. And essentially it said that if you want to find someone to settle down with, you should be the kind of person who other people would choose.
00:28:27
Speaker
That's a good make, which means that you should develop different positive character attributes and ensure that you can genuinely signal that you have those attributes to anyone else in the mating market if you want to describe it in economic terms.
00:28:44
Speaker
I don't think Jeffrey's ideas have gotten nearly enough credit. I mean, he's limited his to sexual selection. And he's saying, hey, you'll get a better mate if you act right and are preferable as a mate, socially as well as sexually. And then there's this interesting thing, of course, at the heart of difficulties in choosing the right mate, people are constantly drawn or torn between the exciting one versus the good one.
00:29:11
Speaker
and you know they'd love to have a very sexy you know attractive
00:29:16
Speaker
with a person for their mate, because that's really good in the short run. In the long run, that often leads to disaster. And so the challenge here, again, stoicism I think would have a lot to say about this, is to find, so how can you either strike a balance or accept the long-term benefits of finding a partner sexually as well as in rearing families who might not be quite so sexual and exciting, but a way better partner for friendship and mutual projects over decades.
00:29:46
Speaker
Right. I know people come up with different theories for explaining why someone might want the more exciting partner. I've always sort of suspected that there's just a fundamental problem is that
00:29:59
Speaker
When we think about either different careers, different partners, we are always thinking about who we are and whether we're worthy of these sorts of careers or partners. And there's a real tragedy. Maybe this is something that as one gets older, this is who I am. I'm not going to live up to these earlier dreams that I had or this definition of myself and the misalignment between who I
00:30:29
Speaker
thought I would be in the future and actual reality sort of increases in some ways as one gets older. I'm curious to get your reaction on that.
00:30:37
Speaker
So I'm sure you've talked with people about the so-called imposter syndrome, where people who are finding success just believe it must all be fake and people are not actually praising them. People are actually just pulling their leg and that kind of thing. And they always feel like they're faking it. And this is because other people are watching us and trying to see if we are overreaching our actual status and people who are overreaching their actual status do get attacked pretty readily. In fact, even if you're not overreaching,
00:31:06
Speaker
Competitors are liable to be attacking you and so this whole this business of imposter syndrome leaves a lot of people not able to enjoy their success Yeah, it does It does seem somewhat so it is really truly surprising that so many humans would experience an imposter syndrome that doesn't match up with their actual skills Wouldn't you expect?
00:31:30
Speaker
humans to have relatively accurate beliefs about their skills that are socially valued. Of course, there's going to be some amount of hedging we need to make with that sort of claim. Right. Right. So here again, a thing that I never thought I would
00:31:46
Speaker
get to from my early work on trying to understand the mind. I always thought that objectivity was good stuff. And we should be objective. That's kind of what you're saying. We should have an objective view of our own worth and other people's eyes and the like. And gradually it dawned on me that natural selection did not shape our minds for objectivity.
00:32:06
Speaker
It shaped them for maximum reproduction. And this means that there are all kinds of distortions built in to our minds. In the case of our worth and other people's views, it can go both ways. You see many, many people who are grandiose and they act like they're a bigger deal than other people see them at first. And this can be a route to becoming a bigger deal because if
00:32:29
Speaker
If other people will give you credit for special skills or connections or abilities that you might not have yet, especially in an online media age, that can lead to great fame and fortune and success. Conversely, a lot of people who feel like they're not actually as capable as other people are giving them credit for,
00:32:51
Speaker
they can get into a self-perpetuating spiral. And because if every time they go on stage or every time they go into a conversation, they're so nervous that they act like they're not as capable as they really are, and other people tend to treat them that way, and it leads to a self-perpetuating negative spiral.
00:33:12
Speaker
So I think the subjectivity in people's views of themselves and others is really fascinating and the key to successful treatment in very many cases.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Objectivity
00:33:24
Speaker
To what extent does successful treatments focus on coming to get people or having people come to objective views versus some other outcome? So sure, we're not maybe built for having objective views, but
00:33:40
Speaker
in your view, should we as a general rule of thumb, trying to get people to see the world accurately or not?
00:33:49
Speaker
So this, of course, is the foundation for cognitive behavioral therapy, is to help people examine their thoughts and identify ones that are inaccurate and replace those inaccurate thoughts with things that are more accurate. If someone says, I'm never going to get a job, we go into that and say, really? Let's go into that. And invariably, it turns out to be an exaggeration.
00:34:15
Speaker
anything that's realistic at all. On the other hand, is it the case that simply being objective about everything is always best? I'm not at all sure about that. For many people, for some long time, I worked with a cancer unit. We talked with cancer patients and their relatives and that kind of thing. And there, too,
00:34:38
Speaker
talking objectively about the exact outcomes, that often was not as helpful as trying to listen to people and trying to understand their views of where they wanted the future to go, where they hoped it would go.
00:34:51
Speaker
and not depriving anybody of hope, just for the sake of objectivity. And sometimes the hope that people had, that doctors didn't have, turned out to be right anyhow. So I think that just objectivity is not a reliable guide. But as you say, I think your fundamental point is, in general, we should, both as therapists and in our lives, try to figure out what the actual situation is, because that's the best guide for behavior in general.
00:35:21
Speaker
Yeah, in general, that might be true. But there are so many things to be objective about. So I suppose if you're thinking about maybe in some idealized world, we could always be searching for the objective truth, be communicating the objective truth, as well as realizing different social values that would be great, but we're not in that world. So often I think in social interactions, focusing on the quote-unquote objective truth is not ideal because of things you have selected to highlight
00:35:49
Speaker
may not be like what's most important to the people at that time and the cancer wards or really many other places in life. It's about facts about human relationship, not about sorting
Objectivity vs. Charisma in Business
00:36:00
Speaker
out. And there's so many stories in recent months about corporations in Silicon Valley where people have tried to get other people to invest millions of dollars
00:36:11
Speaker
So what if you say, you know what, I'm starting a new startup in Silicon Valley, think the chances of it succeeding are about 10% because that's about average, but put your money in here and you might get 20 times the payback if it all works.
00:36:24
Speaker
No way. You have to be like Elizabeth Holmes, who says we are going to conquer the world of doing blood testing on minuscule samples. The people who give unrealistic hopes very confidently are the ones who succeed very often in that environment, and I think in a lot of environments. Fascinating that objectivity in many cases like this may not lead to success.
00:36:49
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's right. That's right. Often there's a kind of charisma that can be had quite easily by refusing a kind of objective approach to things. At the same time, there's a story about Bezos who went on his earlier investment meetings. He was asked, you know, was the probability this would succeed? And he said probably about 30% or something like this. And he was able to get away with that perhaps because too high of an estimate would have looked silly. But perhaps there's something to the thought that
00:37:18
Speaker
you can exude a social competence while also describing the world as you think it is. What do you think about that line? Right. And another thing we haven't talked about yet is failure. I'm here near Ann Arbor where Domino's Pizza started. And the guy who started Domino's Pizza had two bankruptcies before he got going with Domino's. And he just kept on going. And eventually he found a formula that worked.
00:37:48
Speaker
And I think it's so important to talk with each other and with ourselves about how we deal with failure. Some people say, oh, I'm not the right kind of person. I am a failure. I can't do anything. There's a belief that will never succeed. There's other people who just don't pay any attention to failure and keep right on failing over and over again without learning from failures.
00:38:09
Speaker
So I think trying to understand with each individual person, especially in therapy, about how this person deals with failure, it's a very important skill. Letting your failures guide you in more productive pathways and more productive strategies without letting it stop your motivation altogether. Yeah. Do you have any thoughts on how one might do that?
00:38:32
Speaker
Gosh, this brings me to the thing I most wanted to talk with you about. Realizing how much good it can do to give people advice about philosophies that can help guide our emotions makes me realize how reticent I've been to do that. In terms of providing generalizations to people about how you can control your emotions, and I think this kind of work I've been doing has a proper scientific foundation.
00:38:58
Speaker
for attempts to understand our emotions. But I've been very reluctant to come up with any generalizations about try to control your emotions, try to pursue pleasure, try to, just because I've seen so many people, and it's always an individual problem and crisis and personality. And so I've become very committed to trying to understand individuals as individuals, instead of offering
00:39:24
Speaker
global kinds of advice. There are a lot of people who get themselves in trouble by pursuing too much pleasure and there's a lot of people who just sit at home and their drives to pursue pleasure aren't working right. I think different solutions are going to be useful for different people. I realize I probably didn't answer your question at all just there.
00:39:47
Speaker
Well, what if you go the level up, do you like giving advice about how people should think about getting advice or is that also something you're wary? You know, I'm just an old fashioned person in psychotherapy wise of trying to listen carefully and trying to understand that person in that person's terms and help them to gradually see themselves and the world in a different way that allows them to move on.
00:40:12
Speaker
And I found it very difficult. It's not easy to do that. And I think skill and training does it. I think a lot of other people who had more natural empathy and intuition than I did probably were more effective at doing that. I think they're very special skills that connect us with other people. And I also believe that in most of the kind of therapy, the relationship is absolutely crucial.
00:40:39
Speaker
no matter what you call it, whether it's behavior or cognitive or psychodynamics or whatever, I think creating a relationship with someone else who you can unburden yourself to and who can gradually and gently offer not so much advice but options that you might not have thought of or different ways for you to think about yourself and the world, I think that relationship is so central to progress for many people.
00:41:04
Speaker
Why do people often go searching for advice, whether it's from, you know, philosophical programs like this or YouTube books? You know, so that seems like a permanent, permanent feature of
The Quest for Guidance and Advice
00:41:17
Speaker
that. The fact of thinking about doing this chat with you has gotten me thinking about that. And isn't it an interesting question? I mean, it's natural that people want help because so many of us suffer so much with bad feelings so often. And, you know, it's,
00:41:34
Speaker
But people give advice not just about bad feelings. People give all kinds of advice about where to invest in the stock market. The objectivity there is that on average, if you follow the advice, that you will lose more money than you would have lost if you threw darts at a dartboard. But nonetheless, people love it. And they pay money to get advice about what stocks to invest in and all the rest. It's fascinating that we want to find someone we trust to guide us
00:42:02
Speaker
It's almost like Daskievsky, you know, and Brandon Quisitor, and talking about how we really have a deep human need to subserve our own interest to that of some greater power and to follow some leader who tells us what to do.
00:42:16
Speaker
Of course, which leads to political and economic disasters very often. They say nothing of problems in individual lives. But again, there's something very deep in people that often wants to find some solution that some other person can offer to them.
00:42:33
Speaker
Do you know the work of Robin Hanson? So he's an economist and does quite a lot of work, I suppose, in signaling theory. One of the slogans for one of his programs, he has a book called The Elephant and the Brain, which is mostly about how we are motivated by features that are
00:42:55
Speaker
hidden from us. Religion is not about religion. Politics is not about politics. It's the slogan. It's about something else. Education is not about learning.
00:43:06
Speaker
So he was generally a fan of explanations that refer to religion as a matter of social cohesion. So this commitment type theory you said about previously, education as a matter of signaling competence to future employers. And one of them is that advice is not about advice, it's about affiliation, generally. I think you would find, my son says that
00:43:35
Speaker
he would be more on the cynical type explanations in terms of what a lot of these. I wasn't able to go to the human behavior. I wasn't able to go to the Human Behavior and Evolution Society meeting last week, but I saw someone tweeting about it and John Tooby and Lita Cosmonies were cited as mentioning that most debates in science as well as elsewhere are not actually about trying to find the truth. They're trying to recruit allies to your position.
00:44:03
Speaker
And they had some evidence, apparently, that this is exactly what's going on, not just in political kinds of things, but in scientific debates. And they pointed out how, if we really wanted what's true, we really shouldn't be talking so much. We should be listening and really valuing people who set us straight and show us when we're wrong. I thought that was such a lovely point, because it's so often the case that we
00:44:29
Speaker
want to make allies with people who share our beliefs and we want to avoid even reading the newspaper or listening to TV from people who have opposing viewpoints, leading to polarization, which of course is poisoning our whole world.
00:44:43
Speaker
Right, right. Yeah, this instruction that if you were interested in the truth and you should listen more is a good one. I think maybe another one is like if you want to learn more about a field often, this is not true for everyone, but it might look like going to a textbook and doing exercises rather than passively consuming a podcast or something like that. I think it's a similar one that I find myself holding into.
00:45:08
Speaker
My experience in medical school was really influenced by reading a book that somebody had done about, they followed three medical students throughout the whole time. And I read this my first year of medical school and two of the students tried to, you know, be good medical students and they tried to
00:45:24
Speaker
show off what they knew and conceal what they didn't know and get good grades and everything else. The third one kept constantly saying, so I don't understand what you're talking about. Could you please explain exactly how you do that operation? The third person constantly asked questions about things that he didn't know. I was never able to fully embrace that, but it's a wonderful thing to do, to feel confident enough to constantly express your ignorance about things. Then you do learn more, just as you were saying.
00:45:54
Speaker
Excellent, absolutely. Well, is there any final words you'd like to add or places you'd like to point listeners? None of this has been a very interesting conversation. I'd be interested in hearing from people who would like to connect evolutionary psychiatry and these ideas about evolution and emotions with classic philosophical advice kinds of philosophies.
00:46:18
Speaker
I'm not, I'm pretty ignorant about it actually, Caleb. I read Martha Nussbaum and her interpretation about Greek philosophies and how they actually were providing advice in psychotherapy as much as anything else. And it's fascinating to me that these same questions have endured not just over centuries but over millennia. But it has something to do with the nature of the species and our constant conflict between our desires and
00:46:45
Speaker
just acting on our desires leading us into chaos. That too is so deeply connected with the origins of our capacity for being humans instead of some other kind of primates. I think there are all kinds of wonderful connections here that remain to be solidified and drawn out. Excellent. Well, thanks so much for joining. Thanks so much. I really appreciate the opportunity, Caleb. Good luck to you.
00:47:11
Speaker
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00:47:41
Speaker
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00:48:08
Speaker
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