Jordan Peterson – Physiology of Motivation and Morality

There are parameters within which conscience has to operate and that it's sort of like this it's like things the same parameters that govern fair play we'll say that and so you can say there's fair play within a game and there's fair play across sets of games and the set of games is pretty much indistinguishable from the actual environment right if you think about all the things you do as nested games at some point the spread of that is large enough so it encompasses everything you do which includes the environment and so I believe that you're adapted to the set of all possible games roughly speaking all possible playable games something like that and that you know the rules for that which is why we talked about this a little bit why you're so good at identifying cheaters you have a module for that according to the evolutionary psychologists and you not only do identify the but you really remember them it really sticks in your mind and there's other evidence too so one piece of evidence that I love I think it's so while there's a couple one I would derive from friends to wall who's the famous primatologists and he studied he studied the prototype morality that emerges in chimpanzees and it's very much rest nested in their dominant structures you know because you could think of morality in some sense as the understanding of the rules by which the dominance hierarchy operates right and so you could say well the biggest ugliest meanest chimp and the male dominance hierarchies in chimps seem to be the predominant ones although the females also have a dominance are key in it it's not quite so clear in bonobos which seem to be more female dominated but in any case the chimp primary chimp dominance 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 the wall 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 talk 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 all has has documented some unbelievably horrendous acts of let's call it regicide in among the chimpanzee troops that he 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 you know – wolves have a dominance dispute that again that would be more likely among the male wolves but 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 dominance disputes towards violence step-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 is pretty low and what happens is one of the wolves backs off and flips over and shows neck and that basically means all right tear 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 dominant Sarki 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 Rapp which I love this is Jacques Panks Epps work and he wrote a book called our fective neuroscience which I would highly highly recommend I have a list of readings recommended readings on my website it's a brilliant book and he's a brilliant psychologist really one of the top top psychologists as far as I'm concerned both theoretically and experimentally a real genius huh he's the guy who discovered that rats laugh when you tickle them they loud laugh ultrasonically so you can't actually hear them but if you record it and slow it down then you can hear them giggling away when you tickle them with an eraser which sort of like their mother's tongue often what loud people used as a substitute for the licking of the little lap by the mother so so and he discovered the play circuited in mammals which is like a major deal right he should get a Nobel Prize for that that's a big deal to discover an entire motivational circuit whose existence no one had really predicted you know apart from the fact that obviously mammals play and even lizards maybe some of the more social lizards seem to play you know so anyhow what panksepp observed I think this is a brilliant piece of science is that first of all juvenile male rats in particular liked to rough-and-tumble play they liked 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 and so okay so that's pretty cool but what's even cooler I think well there's three things one is the rats will work for an opportunity to get into an arena where they know that play might occur and so that's one of the scientific ways of testing and animals motivation right so imagine you have a starving rat and it knows that it's got food down the end of a corridor you can put a little spring on its tail and measure how hard it pulls and that gives you an indication of its motivational force now imagine the starving rat that's trying to get to some food and you have a little spring on his tail and you walked in some cat odor so now that rat is starving and wants to get out of there he's going to try to pull even farther towards the food so getting away plus getting forward our separate motivational systems and if you can add them together it's real potent and part of the reason why in the future authoring exercise that you guys are going to do as the class progresses you're asked to outline the place you'd like to end up which is your desired future and also the place that you could end up if you let everything fall apart is so that your anxiety chases you and your approach systems pull you forward you're maximally motivated debt and it's important because otherwise you can be afraid of pursuing the things that you want to pursue right and that's very common and so then the fear inhibits you as the promise pulls you forward but it makes you weak because you're afraid you want to get your fear behind you pushing you and so what you want to be is afraid more afraid of not pursuing your goals then you are of pursuing them very very help and lots of times in life and this is something really worth knowing you know and this is one of the advantages to being an autonomous adult is you don't get to pick the best thing you get to pick your poison you have two bad choices and you get to pick which one you're willing to suffer through and every choice has a bit of that element in it and so if you know that it's really freeing because otherwise you torture yourself by thinking well maybe there's a good solution to this you know compared to the bad solution it's like nah nah sometimes there's just risky solution one and risky solution two and sometimes both of them are really bad but you at least get to pick which one you're willing to suffer through and that's that actually makes quite a bit of difference because you're also facing it voluntarily then instead of it chasing you and that is an entire different entirely different cycle physiologic response challenge versus threat it's not the same even if the magnitude of the problem is the same and so putting yourself in a challenging let's call it mind frame you can't just do that by magic putting yourself in a challenging mind frame is much better much easier on you cycle physiologically because you don't produce you don't go into the generalized stress response to the same degree and you're activating your exploratory and seeking systems which are dopaminergic Lee mediated and that involved positive emotion so if you can face something voluntarily rather than having it chase you it's way better for you cycle physiologically so that's partly why well it's worthwhile to go find the dragon in its lair instead of waiting for it to come and eat you so and especially when you also add the idea that if you go find the dragon in its lair you might find it when it's a baby instead of a full fledged bloody monster that is definitely going to take you down and so that's part of the reason why well there's a whole bunch of things that that that emerge out of that observation like don't avoid small problems that you know are there face them because they'll grow into big problems all by themselves and you can think about Majan the tax department sends you a notification you owe them like three hundred dollars well it's you know that's annoying maybe you don't even want to open the letter or maybe if you do you just put it on the shelf but that damn thing doesn't just sit there like a piece of paper on the Shelf right you ignore that for five or six years it's going to become attached to all sorts of horrible things and if you ignore it long enough you get the idea it's going to turn into something that is completely unlike the little piece of paper that it's written on and and many many problems in life or like that you'll see they'll you'll see that they pop their ugly little head up and you know and you might want to turn away by not a lot not want to think about it which is the easiest way of turning away right you just don't attend to it felt like you repress it or anything like that you just fail to attend to it and that's of really as a long-term strategy it's visible it's also something I think that's more characteristic of people who are high in neuroticism and high in agreeableness because agreeable people don't like conflict and people hi in neuroticism we're high negative emotion are hit harder per unit of uncertainty or threat and so you know and that's partly why in psychotherapy a lot of times the people you see need assertiveness training so that would be the opposite of agreeableness or they need to help get their anxiety and emotional pain under control it's those are not the only reasons there's antisocial behavior but you can't fix that in therapy no likelihood there's alcoholism there's lots of lots of other reasons but those are two major reasons so anyways there is a that was all to tell you that oh yes back to the rats okay the rats are pulling on you can measure rat motivation by how hard they pull on this on the spring let's say and they're more motivated if they're running away and running towards but let's go back to play so you can take juvenile rats who haven't been able to play for a while maybe they've been isolated or maybe they just haven't been able to engage in physical activity like many school children that you might be thinking about neither allowed to play nor allowed to engage in physical activity and there's a reason I'm telling you that so anyways you get one of these little rats and you can measure how hard he wants how hard it he'll pull the grout and play or how many buttons he'll push you know nuts gives you an indication of his motivation so anyways you can see that the play deprived juvenile rat will fight harder to play than an on play deprived you've now rat and so you can infer that the rat wants to go play and you know you do that you do the same measurement with everyone around you if they want to do something you're going to poke and prod out them to see what sort of things they're willing to overcome in order to go and do that you'll object even if you don't really object it's like it's a measurement device and if they're willing to overcome a bunch of your objections then you think oh well maybe they really want to and that's another weird thing to really know if there's something you want you need about five arguments about why you want it because the probability that the person who's opposing you will have five arguments about why you shouldn't have it is very low they just won't have thought it through enough so the other thing that happens in the future authoring exercise is that you're asked to articulate the reasons for all the goals that come out of your vision of the future so you're asked like why would it be good for you why would it be good for your family why would it be good for broader society so that gives you three levels of argumentation right there if you have it articulated down into detail and it's related to other important goals then you're you're a hell of a thing to argue with because people just aren't that deep by which I mean they just don't have that many levels of explanation or objection and it's also really useful in relationship to your own mind because if you want to do something that's difficult and that requires energy a lot of different subsystems in your mind are going to throw up objections it's like well maybe that isn't what you should be doing right now maybe you should be doing the dishes or vacuuming or watching TV or looking at YouTube or if you're really sneaky when you're trying to do something hard what your brain does is give you something else hard to do that's not quite as hard so that you can feel justified and not doing the thing you're supposed to because you're doing something else useful and if you give in to that temptation which you often will then it wins and because it wins it gets a little dopamine kick and it grows stronger everything anything you let win the internal argument grows and anything you let be defeated shrinks that it's punished it doesn't get to have its way so that's another thing really to remember don't practice what you do not want to become and because those are their neurological circuits you build those things in there man they're they're not going anywhere you can build another little machine to inhibit them that's the best you can do once they're in there you can't get them out so and then the ones you build to inhibit can be taken out by stress and the old habits will come back up so you've got to be be careful what you say and what you do because you you build yourself that way so anyways back to the rats okay so the little rat gets to go out there and play now imagine one little rat is paired with another route but the little other little route is 10% bigger 10% in juvenile rats is enough to attain permanent dominance so the 10% bigger rat will win the first wrestling contest okay and so that's what happens and then so the little rat gets pinned and maybe they play a bit then they're done with it and so you separate them then you let them play again the next time what happens is that the subordinate rat does the invitation to play and that's like you know like a dog does when it wants to play you can recognize that kind of plays its feet apart and it looks up and looks interested in sort of dances around and you can do with any kid that has a clue you know that hasn't been destroyed by adults if your little three-year-old kid or four-year-olds are better for this if you go like this like they know exactly what's going to happen you know they're ready to dart back and forth and they'll usually smile and and kids love rough-and-tumble play which is now basically illegal in all daycares it's seriously it seriously is it kids need it so desperately because it teaches them the limits of their body and your body and it teaches them what's painful and what isn't and it teaches them the dance of play and without that they're just little disembodied blobs like they have no finesse what that's what you're checking out when you dance with someone you know you're seeing if they have that that fluency and facility for mutual reciprocal action embodied in them and if they're kind of like this you know and and just have no sense of rhythm and don't pay any attention to you and all of that you have reason to question whether they actually inhabit their body and whether they can engage in a mutual interaction a physical interaction that's going to be reciprocal and mutually satisfying it's really important to check out and a lot of that rough-and-tumble play even interactions between a child and its mother if you have a happy mother and a happy infant and you videotape them and you speed up the videotape you'll see that they're dancing so one response then the other response then the other response it might just be with I gaze and and movement and all of that but there's a dynamic interplay which you don't see with depressed mothers and their entrance so ok so back to play so the little rat who got is a subordinate one he has to do the invocation 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 and the is there is room in the environmental niche for Psychopaths but they have to keep moving around because otherwise people figure out who they are so they just move around and they can take advantage of one person you know maybe five times or ten times or something and then the reputation spreads and they got to get the hell out of there but so it's not a good long-term strategy unless you can't think of a better one so anyways if you repeatedly pair these rats unless the big rat lets the little rat win at least 30% of the time the little rat will not ask the big rat to play and that is it's a staggering discovery it's a staggering discovery because you've got the emergence thereof of a 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 it's exactly the same idea at the rat level so it's it's a massively and the fact that there's a circuit a separate neurophysiological circuit that's actually specialized for that sort of thing is also a big deal now the other thing banks have figured out is that if you deprive juvenile rats of the opportunity to engage in rough-and-tumble play their prefrontal cortexes don't develop properly and they become impulsive and Restless and then you can fix them with methylphenidate or Ritalin and those are the drugs that are used to fix hyperactive kids most of whom are male and that's because well really you're going to take your six-year-old your five-year-old you put them in a desk you're going to get them to sit there for six hours that's your plan right that's a stupid plan and there they're denied the opportunity to engage in play and that means that their ability to become social is being impaired it may cause neurological impairment that's what the rat evidence suggests and then you suppress that within fetta means because in fetta means actually don't activate the play circuit they activate a different circuit which will suppress the play circuit so it's very very it's not very wise and I'm not going to go off on that tangent because I couldn't tell you why the school systems who are set up that way which I probably will at some point it's quite an interesting story in and of itself and it's the reason all you guys are sitting in desks right now somebody laughingly referred to this once is grade 15 which I thought was pretty funny given the look at the bloody place you know Oh hideous and okay so now this is an interesting thing so you got the emergence of morality and say chimps you got the emergence of morality and wolves you got the emergence of morality and rats and the morality governs sequential interactions or group interactions they have to repeat because because it's an emergent property of social or repetitive interactions that's why you can't just localize it one instance to repeat it and there's been computer simulations of this to help you figure out how you might attain victory across games across time maybe you need a strategy and there's a very simple strategy which I believe is called modified tit-for-tat so if you're nice to me I'm nice back and if you do something bad to me I do something bad back but but imagine you run that out in sequences of behavior and see who who does best with what strategy across time or an alternative strategy here's the best strategy I trust you you trust me we start interacting you screw up I whack you and then I forgive you when we started yet that's modified tit-for-tat and so and there hasn't been a net it's very simple algorithm no one has come up with a better algorithm in computer game in the computerized simulation of game space than not particular strategy so it's like trust but don't be a pushover if someone violates the rules you've got to nail them but then you don't hold a grudge you open the door to further interactions so pretty smart you