Jordan Peterson on Psychopaths and Animal Behavior

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The document tree is shown below. the chimp primary chimp dominant structure is male and you could think well it's like the caveman chimps whose biggest and toughest to necessarily rules and who rules longest but that isn't what do all found see the problem with being mean let's say and not not negotiating your social landscape and not trading reciprocal favors is that no matter how powerful you are as an individual to two individuals three quarters your power can do you in and that happens with the chimps fairly regularly if the guy on top is too tyrannical and doesn't make social connections then weaker chimps males make good social connections and when he's not in such good shape they take him down and viciously to do wall has has documented some unbelievably horrendous acts of let's call it regicide in among the chimpanzee troops that he's studied mostly in the Arnhem zoo they have a big troop there that's been there a long time but he's very interested in prototypical morality and here's some other examples of prototypical morality emerging among animals there's many of them but one is no two wolves have a dominance dispute that again that would be more likely among the male wolves but it doesn't really matter they basically display their size and they grow ferociously and puff up their hair so they look bigger and you know you can see cats do that when they're they go into fight or flight right not only do they puff up including your tail but they stand sideways and and the reason they do that is because they look bigger right because they're trying to put out the most intimidating possible front so anyways if two wolves are going at it they're what they're really trying to do is to size each other up and they're trying to scare each other into backing off fundamentally because see the worst case scenario is like your world for number one and I'm world number two and we tear each other to shreds but I win but I'm so damaged after that that wolf number three comes in and takes me out so like there's a big cost to be paid even for victory in a dominance dispute if it degenerates into violence and animals and human beings but animals in particular have evolved very very specific mechanisms to escalate dominicks disputes towards violence by step so that they don't so that the victor doesn't risk incapacitating himself by winning so what happens with the Wolves is that you know they grow with each other and posture and display and maybe they even snap at each other but the probability that they're going to get into a full-fledged fight it's pretty low and what happens is one of the Wolves backs off and flips over and shows his neck and that basically means all right air it out you know and the other wolf says of course he doesn't well you're kind of an idiot and you're not that strong but we might need you to take down a moose in the future and so you know despite your patheticness I won't tear out your throat and then they've established their dominance position and then from then on at least for some substantial period of time the subordinate wolf gives way to the dominant wolf but at least the subordinate wolf is alive and you know he might be dominant over other wolves and so everyone in the whole hierarchy is sorted that out through either through mock combat or through combat itself and you know the low-ranking members aren't in the best possible position but at least they're not getting their heads torn off every second of their existence and so there's even some utility in the stability of the dominance Harkey for the low-ranking members because at least they're not getting pounded they're getting threatened which is way better I mean it's not good but it's way better than actual combat and then there's the example of rats but panksepp observed I think this is a brilliant piece of science is that first of all juvenile male routes in particular like to rough and tumble play they like to wrestle and they actually pin each other just like little kids do or like adult wrestlers do they pin their shoulders down and that basically means you win so the little rat who got is the subordinate one he has to do the invitation and then the big rat can Allah agree to play because he's in the dormant position but if you pair them repeatedly and this is really worth thinking about because see morality emerges out of repeated interactions because you might say well if you're only interact with someone once you might as well just take advantage of them and run off that's what a psychopath does by the way so anyways if you repeatedly pair these rats unless the big rat let's the little rat win at least thirty percent of the time the will not ask the big rut to play and that is it's a staggering discovery it's a staggering discovery because you've got the emergence thereof of an implicit morality essentially that's even incarnated in rats that emerges across multiple play sessions it's like yes exactly that's exactly what Piaget said about the emergence of morality now this is an interesting thing so you got the emergence of morality and say chimps you've got the emergence of morality and wolves you got the emergence of morality in rat so what this means because rats can't talk and wolves can't talk and chimpanzees can talk and what that means just as PSA suggested was that the damn morality emerges before the representation of the morality it's a big deal to know that and that it emerges as a consequence of repeated social interaction so it's not a top-down thing it's a bottom-up