How 2 Obvious Lies Corrupted Psychology - Dr. Camilo Ortiz

0:01 In my experience, if you ask any psychologist what their training is in genetics and in evolution and in natural selection, it will be practically zero. And that is bizarre to me if we're trying to understand why people do what they do. Um you know, so uh if you read a little bit of Richard Dawkins, you go back to the selfish gene written in the '70s, it is a great place to start to understand a lot of why we do what we do. We are replication machines and his thesis is that it is at the gene level that really is driving behavior. Genes want to replicate. That is we are basically sort of being hijacked by our genes to do whatever we can to replicate them. And that has a lot of very interesting implications, uh one of which for psychology is that our genes don't give a if we're happy or not. As long as we are replicating, they they are satisfied. And so if we are nervous wrecks looking for danger everywhere, but that keeps us alive, then that's going to replicate over time.

1:07 So that's that's one idea, but it's more again this >> survive. Yeah. Yeah, like have you ever seen a calm squirrel? No. They're amazing at looking for danger everywhere and they're really good survival machines. And so when you look at the ignoring of of everything we know about evolution, that leads to some rather bizarre conclusions that people in my field come to. And the main one, there are actually two, is the blank slate hypothesis, which is that we are the product 100% of our environment. And the other is that there are no sex differences, which is related to the blank slate hypothesis.

1:49 And you can only believe either of these two myths if you have no understanding of natural selection. How can you as a functioning adult that makes your way through to advanced degrees honestly put your head on the pillow at night truly believing that? I'm I'm asking this seriously. I don't understand how you can navigate this planet and believe in the blank slate. It is it especially if you're in a job like clinical psychology, how can you go through your field and believe this horse it's horse How do How do they believe it?

2:31 Yeah, so it's an interesting sort of sociological question of how a smart person can get to a place where they fully believe uh assertions that have zero evidence and in fact have a ton of evidence. And and having gone through graduate school, having received a PhD in and being in a a liberal state, uh although, you know, this this affects everybody this sort of group thing, but it is also a fact that in higher ed it tends to be a progressive uh direction.

3:08 You You Anyone who who's who's who's been in graduate school really has had the experience of someone saying something in class that doesn't strike you as correct and then you look around and everyone is nodding. And then as a sort of reasonable person, you you then have the thought, oh, well, maybe maybe I didn't understand it cuz every everybody here is nodding. And then you combine that with the imposter syndrome that every graduate student feels, that everybody must be smarter than them.

3:42 They only got into graduate school on some fluke. These smarter people are all nodding, so it's obviously my problem. I'm wrong. So the easy thing to do at that point is just to agree. And there's there's a ton of hilarious experiments where in social psychology people will will uh you know, like the easy one is like everyone facing one direction in an elevator and then you you see the person turning or backwards, but there are there are other ones involving shocking other people when you you see other people doing it.

4:14 >> The Milgram experiment. Yeah, Milgram and and other variations of it. Um and there are problems with the Milgram experiment, but but still the the the the general area of social psychology tells us that we want to agree with people. It feels good. It actually is quite uncomfortable to disagree with people. And so if you do that almost like with evolution very slowly over time, then you can easily get to a place in a couple of years where you are saying things out loud that make no sense. And then you have the other component of graduate school that there's not discussion or debate or pushback. And so there's never practice with explaining why you think what you think. You just think the right things and you don't have to explain it.

5:03 And in fact, it is inappropriate to have to explain. It is violence to have to explain why you believe what you believe. You put those together and you get people graduating who believe the sky is red and will die on that hill. The um it it feels like it's modern fashion to be talking about speech as violence and and that kind of that kind of nonsense, but this is very old. Well, I guess it's not very old in the geologic sense, but um the the blank slate hypothesis goes goes pretty far back. It goes back well before the like woke reign of terror of the past 10 years.

5:49 And um the the critical theory types that sort of put forward this speech as violence ethos, this recasting of the role of speech, um they go back to the '70s, '80s, '90s, papers like words that wound and Derek Bell and these these folks. Um is it possible that there's some other force at work here too that's like personality oriented? So um what I mean by that is >> Yeah.

6:20 You're You're describing a situation of social pressure to conform. And because we're social creatures, that makes a lot of sense. I am sitting there in my PhD lecture hall and somebody that's never created anything in their entire lives who's sitting in front of me as my professor is spouting nonsense and everyone's nodding and I'm like, this guy's a lunatic, but I guess I'm wrong and hey, who am I? But is there a selection bias because the kind of person that goes into this is maybe high on agreeableness and is the kind of person that wants to find consensus. And and then again, it comes back to this the gender disparities taking place. And now I'm like 85% women in the in the in the in the seats and a woman at the front. And so of course words are violence and of course there's no differences between men and women and and that's it. Is that Help me unpack the other inputs into this seat that you just described. Yeah. Yeah, so there's so many pieces of that I want to talk about. So one of the main ways that psychologists understand human behavior is through this lens called operant conditioning. And it basically is just what behaviors are reinforced and what behaviors are punished. And so you go back to your example of you're sitting there and you're noticing all this. And if you if you raise your hand and say, but but why?

7:47 That's going to be punished in a in some time in in some instances a quite severe way. Whereas if you just stay quiet, you don't get any punishment and in fact you may get slight reinforcement of people around you considering you one of the in-group. And so from an operant conditioning perspective, it would be bizarre for most people to push back on that. Now, there are some people who do that and so that's a very interesting question. I would consider myself in that group. I remember as a first-year doctoral student having a professor yell at me when I asked for evidence. It wasn't woke stuff. It was just like he was saying a particular treatment was really effective and I said, can you give give me some data to show that? And he got really mad at me. But so that points to possibly personality differences. And so you know, like what makes some people do that? Now, we know more about the side that will seek consensus and that will actually try to uh hurt those who are pushing against consensus is what has sometimes been called the dark triad of personality traits. We know less about the people who push back. So I can tell you about my experience, but I don't think there's a lot of data about why it is that that happens. But then the last piece that I just want to mention is the natural selection of people like me out of academia.

9:22 And uh you know, if you look at like who's left in academia, they tend to be pretty boring and non-controversial and consensus seekers. And that is not a good way to advance science. You need people to be wrong, to say things that don't make sense because then you have a discussion about it. And in my 25-plus year career in psychology, all of the interesting, exciting people, not all, many, are not there anymore. And the people who kept a low profile and agreed tend to do better at surviving if we want to think about it that way. And so that's troubling because once that's in place, I think that's the piece that is going to be hardest to talk about and you know, you've had other guests on your show like Peter Boghossian who talks about that there's no use saving the institutions we have. We have to build new ones and I can't really disagree with him on that.

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