Athena (00:00:04):
Have you been zombified by your love, by your relationship, partner by your wife, by your husband, by your boyfriend, by your girlfriend, by your non-binary significant other? Well, welcome to the Zombified Podcast, your source for fresh brains! I'm your host, Athena Aktipis, psychology professor at ASU and chair of the Zombie Apocalypse Medicine Alliance.

Dave (00:00:31):
And I am your co-host, Dave Lundberg-Kenrick, media outreach program manager and brain enthusiast!

Athena (00:00:37):
Yeah! Brains and love and we're just covering it all this season!

Dave (00:00:43):
It's a big topic this season!

Athena (00:00:44):
Yeah! So today we talk with Diana Fleishman about love and manipulation in relationships.

Dave (00:00:53):
Interesting. And so specifically what aspects?

Athena (00:00:57):
So Diana has a really cool background where she brings together the back, this background about behaviorism and sort of evolutionary psychology and she brings them together to gain some insights into how we as humans actually sort of condition each other to behave in certain ways. Yeah! So, you know, how do you use positive reinforcement to get your partner to do what you want them to do? How do you use negative reinforcement to get them to stop doing things you don't want them to do? And this applies also to thinking about parenting and other things as well, but the big picture is really how, how to train those around you to behave in a way that suits you!

Dave (00:01:46):
So do you guys talk about the ways that people should be doing it or the ways that people actually end up doing it?

Athena (00:01:52):
Yeah, so we kind of weave between those topics. So a lot of it is just, you know, well what is actually going on in relationships and how do we sometimes unwittingly use behaviorist principles to manipulate each other and how can we maybe with a greater awareness of it, be acting in a way that is maybe kinder than we would if we don't realize actually what we're doing. So, so we kind of examine it both from the perspective of, you know, how it can get used in a negative way, but also how a greater awareness of what we're doing can help us be sort of more intentional about how we act in relationships.

Dave (00:02:35):
That sounds pretty useful.

Athena (00:02:37):
Yeah, it's great! So [so] we'll hear from Diana Fleishman this episode.

Intro (00:02:43):
['Psychological' by Lemi plays].

Outro (00:02:43):
['Psychological' by Lemi plays].

Athena (00:03:21):
Diana, welcome!

Diana (00:03:22):
Hi Athena!

Athena (00:03:24):
Would you mind starting by just introducing yourself in your own words who you are, where you are, what you're interested in.

Diana (00:03:31):
Okay, sure! I'm Diana Fleishman, and I'm at the University of Portsmouth, but I'm about to take a long sabbatical to write a book and I study disgust, I study sex hormones and behavior and most recently I've been thinking about how people manipulate each other in interpersonal relationships with what are essentially behaviorist techniques.

Athena (00:03:54):
Sounds so awesome! So how did you get interested in the whole like people manipulating each other question? Like what made you get excited about studying that?

Diana (00:04:07):
I thought about this actually I wrote a paper on it in graduate school for David Buss who was my, who was my graduate advisor and I wrote a little bit about it and I had been thinking about behaviorist techniques and I think that behaviorists, they were generally men and they were generally studying nonhuman animals doing very simple tasks and they were trying to come up with these kinds of building blocks, essential aspects of behavior. But as an evolutionary psychologist, I was thinking if these certain things like reinforcement ratios, for example, giving a reinforcement at random intervals the way that a slot machine does, if that actually maximizes how long the behavior lasts before it extinguishes or before it stops, then it would be really surprising if organisms didn't use this kind of reinforcement for one another. And so that's around the time that I started thinking about that. But also I think when you're engaging interpersonally with other people, if you're an evolutionary psychologist like we are, I don't know if you've had this experience, but I tend to have a more cynical view of my behavior and my emotions than other people do. [laughter] And some sets, I'm radically honest with myself in a way that other people are not. So you'll often hear somebody say, 'I just have this bad feeling,' but it doesn't mean that I'm jealous or I don't want to talk to this person, but it's not that I'm angry. [Athena agrees] And they're trying to posit some kind of special pleading about their individual reactions to certain kinds of things. And for me it really comes down to reinforcement and punishment, the way that people interact and at the very simple and very cynical way of looking at things. And I think that there's a good reason why nobody wants to talk about what they're doing in that way because it actually would undermine them and the manipulation that they're trying to assert. [Athena agrees, "Oh yeah that's interesting."] So I think that the, the self-deception itself is important for that reason. But yeah, as an evolutionary psychologist, just interacting with people in the world and interacting in romantic relationships and sometimes, you know, having conflict and sometimes having really good cooperation facilitation - it just always seemed to me that there were these underlying behaviors - techniques that people were using on one another. And it's very similar to, I can't remember who it was, but you want to make the familiar exotic and the exotic familiar, that people who feel somewhat alienated in social interactions are often the people to figure these things out. And I think that because I'm so disgusted sensitive and not prone to guilt or shame, [laughter] I am actually more familiar. Like it always seems strange to me how people have certain kinds of feelings, or that they weren't willing to admit certain kinds of bad motivations on their part. And I don't have Asperger's, but I do have a certain kind of blindness that makes me able to see this particular facet of human behavior that I think other people have more trouble seeing.

Athena (00:06:51):
That's really interesting! So it's sort of this convergence of like number one, some stuff that you like learned in undergrad and grad school about behaviorism and how behaviorism works and evolutionary psychology and then like your own way of seeing the world that is unique because of what you bring to the table just as a person and like neurally. And then adding to that, like the interactions with people where you see or feel things that, like in that interaction that are, that kind of make you sort of connect the dots.

Diana (00:07:26):
I mean I think people talk about this a little bit, but I think it'd be cool to do some kind of broad survey about how individual differences in personality actually really help some people discover things that they might not have otherwise discovered. I mean we know about people in our field who have said that their mind blind, or that they have schizophrenia or whatever and about how this kind of neural diversity actually helps people see human behavior in a new light.

Athena (00:07:51):
Yeah, that's a really awesome point, and I think is something that's been kind of neglected in academia. I mean, I think there's just now starting to be like a, a realization that neuro-diversity is a thing and it's not just like, oh, there's normal people and then there's handicapped people. Like, no, there's actually like legitimate differences in how people process information, what they attend to more, how they learn. Um, and like you're saying how they discover!

Diana (00:08:19):
Yeah, there's so much individual difference and you know, people talk a lot about culture and culture is also a way of seeing things. You know, just the other day somebody was asking me about jealousy and you know, the way that we perceived jealousy in America as a very negative thing that we want to minimize the sort of Latin interpretation of jealousy. And potentially you have some cultural experience with other manifestations, or thinking about jealousy as a very romantic thing that you want to maximize to show your partner how much you care for them, how much suffering you're willing to endure, even for some small transgression. So it's a way of kind of a costly signal, not something that is really intended to be minimized. [Athena agrees]

Athena (00:09:02):
So I'd love to talk about them, kind of break down this whole thing about like the behaviorism, and the evolutionary psychology and the interpersonal relationships and stuff. Can, can you give like a, you know, just a short, like, you know, what is the like one or two things about behaviorism that you need to know in order to like get how this is all working?

Diana (00:09:23):
Yeah! I think it's amazing that people don't, I mean, I know behaviorism is somewhat fallen out of favor and they had some assumptions about the human mind that I think are not true, but they also have some assumptions that have just totally been caricatured. So B.F. Skinner totally thought evolution was a thing, totally thought that genetics were a thing, and definitely didn't think that, you know, internal mental states didn't exist. But he was really focused on the external manifestations of behavior. So the main things that you have to know-

Athena (00:09:52):
Sorry to interrupt, but did you say that he did think that-

Diana (00:09:55):
He did think that evolution and individual differences were important-

Athena (00:09:58):
And that there were internal mental states?

Diana (00:10:00):
Yeah, he called that private behavior and he, he was a fan of Darwin and these were all, I heard a lot of super slanderous lies about Skinner I just happened to have worked, I forgot to mention this - I worked at a chimpanzee facility - when I was an undergraduate called 'Language Research Center' where they taught chimps how to use language with just behaviorist techniques and seeing interactions with chimps and with humans. So there was a chimp at that time, she died a few years ago. Her name was Pansy, and Pansy had an outdoor enclosure and she would recruit you to go and get food and things that had been stashed up there. So someone would stash something out there and she would recruit somebody [to] point to the food item on the, on the symbol board.

Athena (00:10:42):
When you say recruit, she would like point to someone there?

Diana (00:10:45):
Yeah! She would be like, you, come outside and then you'd follow her, you'd go all around the, around the building. She'd go through a tunnel-

Athena (00:10:50):
So when you say she would say, 'You come outside,' was she like signing or something?

Diana (00:10:54):
She was literally pointing to a symbol and then she was, she'd do this thing like not a 'come hither' with her hand thing, but sort of like a slapping her hand down on the floor or on her leg making some noise; making some grunting. And then she'd kind of play a game of 'warmer-colder' with you, but in some sense she was actually engaging in reinforcement as well. There was no 'colder' if you were in the wrong place or moving the wrong way, she would just look away and ignore you! [laughter] But, if you're going the right way, she would give you signals and grunts and things like that! So that was actually a form of her, conditioning [Athena agrees] to get closer to the - shaping you - to get to the food item that you want. Anyway, behaviors - things that you have to know - is that it's actually exceedingly simple! Basically, if you reinforce the behavior, or if something pleasurable or good happens after a given behavior, then that behavior's intensity, or frequency is going to increase. If you're punished, or something aversive happens and you know - aversive - there's a broad variety of things that can be aversive, then that tends to decrease behavior. You can also decrease behavior by taking away something good, or you can also increase behavior by taking away something bad, right? So you can get somebody to do what you want by stopping, yelling at them, or stopping crying, because you're removing an aversive stimulus. [Athena agrees] Which, you know, increases the, the positive, whatever valence of the situation. So the idea basically is that people are engaging in these kinds of interactions with each other, a reinforcement and a punishment. And that in certain kinds of interactions, like the interactions that mothers have with their children, they're very prone to shaping behavior. They're very prone to celebrating very small steps towards the behavior that they want the child to exhibit, right? But in adult interactions, because punishment is so cheap, people are much more likely to use punishment because it can prune away a given behavior much more quickly and you don't have to use the memory, etc, that it takes to shape behavior - shaping behaviors - like you want your dog to sit. If they just moved their bottom down an inch, then you reinforce that behavior, and let's say you want your husband to take you out on a nice date. You want him to take you out to dinner and a movie. It's pretty hard to shape that. I mean I have some ideas about techniques, but it's pretty hard to shape that! [laughter] What you could do is just make him like feel really bad that he hasn't taken you out on a date, and then that's like a lot easier than, for example, trying to like first you, you give him the phone number to the restaurant, and then you stand there while he makes a call, and then you reinforce that particular behavior, and then you can put together the whole repertoire. Like that's not something that people do very naturally, but what they do [do] very naturally is act irritated when they don't get the behavior that they want - if they don't get a signal of investment for example.

Athena (00:13:40):
So the sort of very big picture here is like evolution has equipped us with these mechanisms for learning, right? Because that's a good thing to be able to learn, like what works, what doesn't work. And you can then get better outcomes for yourself if you can learn, but then once you have this learning system in place that works in this certain way, then other organisms can start tapping into that to try to affect behavior. And so, [so] now we're like in a strategic space instead of just to like, you know, 'input, output' kind of space. Now there's like feedback loops and there's like all this stuff that can happen in terms of organisms affecting each other once.

Diana (00:14:26):
Yeah, and you can't [you can't] not have these learning mechanisms. So if you engage in a series of behaviors and you get injured, it's very important for you to know not to engage in those series of behaviors anymore. If you engage in a series of behaviors and you get food, then it's very important for you to remember those [behaviors]. And so, when other organisms - you know - hijack those learning mechanisms, and they reinforce, and punish you, so that they can facilitate their own strategy, so that they think they can use your behavior for whatever it is that they want. [So] you can see this very much with parasites. This is all the way from like parasites to members of our own species. When a Guinea Worm gets in somebody's foot, what they do is the next phase of their life cycles in water. And so you can think about this from a behaviorist's perspective too, it itches and it burns, and the only way to get rid of it is to submerge your foot in water. So what this organism is doing in a very behaviorist sense is using what they would call negative reinforcement. That is taking away an aversive stimulus to get you to do what they want, which is put your foot in water. If there are organisms that want you to, I mean, there's some ideas that, for example, that the flu virus might want you to interact with other people, for example. So if there was any kind of organism in you that wanted you to engage in certain behavior, or you know, if Cordyceps Fungus is in the ant, and it's driving them up that stock, I don't know what the subjective experience of the ant is like, but it's probably a positive experience of going up. [Athena agrees, "Right."] It's probably feeling rewarded in some sense, you know, [Athena agrees, "Yeah."] Neurochemically by going up that stock to where it can better transmit the spores. And then if I want a man to invest in myself and my offspring then I will be using his learning mechanisms, and using the reinforcements and punishments, that I have in my repertoire to try to shape his behavior, to facilitate my own adaptive strategies.

Athena (00:16:19):
So when you're talking about like you wanting, or like an ant wanted to climb up, or um, you know, a flu virus wanting to have you interact with others, what do you mean by want?

Diana (00:16:32):
Oh, it's, yeah, it's a very good point. Yeah. It's a shorthand way of saying that there's, that there's motivation, not necessarily that the end is in mind. So, yeah, I don't think that the cordyceps has a conscious goal orientation, or the ant has a conscious goal orientation. They just have this motivation to do this specific thing, and if I am, you know, if I want somebody to do what I want them to do or it's not even necessarily that I feel a conscious motivation, it's actually that the genes that in some sense are the very highest order thing that's hijacking our behavior. If you want to talk about it, and kind of ha-hark away.

Athena (00:17:13):
Yeah. Right. So we could sort of think about, you know, when we say wanting, it's kind of like a, 'as if' intentionality. Like it's, you know, evolution has selected entities that behave in this way that looks intentional, but that doesn't necessarily mean that there's like a seat of conscious, you know, motivation where they're consciously representing what they are.

Diana (00:17:37):
We can get really meta and say that we are talking about people wanting and not wanting things, because it's the easiest way for us to grasp [Athena agrees, "Yeah."] How people do and don't do, or how any organism, doesn't do behavior. It's because that's how we conceptualize one another's behavior.

Athena (00:17:51):
Yeah. It's a good heuristic, at least who knows what's really going on, like under the hood, right? So [so] you talked a little bit about like the sort of very like basics of behaviorism, but you mentioned something earlier about variable reinforcement schedule do you wanna explain what that is and how it relates to this whole, um, you know, training and interpersonal relationships issue?

Diana (00:18:18):
So if you [you] think about, it's just tickle terms, but it's not the most intuitive way to think about-

Athena (00:18:25):
Maybe an example?

Diana (00:18:25):
Yeah. So if you get reinforced every time you press a lever, you know, if you're a rat or whatever, if you are even get reinforced every time you do, you are doing a drawing for your mom, and she says, 'Good job,' right? That's one thing, but if you get reinforced for behavior just at random intervals, so it could be every time you do it for a while, it could be every seven times that you do it for awhile. What an organism, any organism, does before they stopped doing the behavior is they want to see if they can do the behavior enough times that they will be able to get the reinforcement again. So what happens with a rat that's pressing a lever is if they're on an interval, reinforcement schedule of like two, then they'll press the lever whatever, 10 or 20 times, and then they'll quit. That's called a extinction burst, so you do a behavior a lot more right before it stops.

Athena (00:19:14):
Can you sort of explain that again? So what do you mean if they're on a reinforcement schedule of two, what does that-

Diana (00:19:20):
Oh, sorry. So if every two times they press the lever, they get a pellet of food, for example, then if you stop giving them food, they're going to try for a while to press the lever before they stop. And that's called an extinction burst. So what will often happen is you know what we call frustration, which is like if you do a behavior, like let's say you're trying to unlock your door, and it won't unlock and you're used to the door unlocking every time, you might start doing things like, you know, wildly turning the key and you'll be doing kind of experimental behavior, but you'll also increase the intensity and frequency of the behavior right before you stopped doing it.

Athena (00:19:54):
Yeah. I'm just thinking of like someone like trying to get something out of a vending machine.

Diana (00:19:58):
[laughter] That's right!

Athena (00:19:58):
Like they end up, you know, sticking their hand up there and then you have to call the paramedics [Diana laughs] and this disaster.

Diana (00:20:07):
The kind of extinction burst. Well if you like, let's say if you have an animal and you, or this is the slot machine thing where you have a slot machine and you get reinforced on a variable interval schedule. So sometimes you pull the slot machine lever and you get reinforced. Sometimes it takes a hundred times, sometimes it takes 50 times. It just, you never are sure how long it's going to take. Then if you think about an extinction burst, like exploring the whole possibility, like the, the number of times that you would usually engage in the behavior, like exploring, what's the tail end of that? When you would expect to get reinforced, you see that it takes a lot longer for that behavior to extinguish. So if you want to keep a behavior around for a long time, if you want to make sure that if you don't reinforce it sometimes that the person, or the organism, or whatever will engage in the behavior more often; so you don't want to give your dog a treat every time he sits. You want to give him a treat like at random intervals when he sits. And the same way, if you want somebody to do something for you, it's important. You know at the beginning when you're shaping the behavior, you can reinforce them every time, but eventually you want to be very variable in your reinforcement, because if you don't reinforce for a long time, that behavior is going to not extinguish for a long time; because it's like a long way to get to the end of that potential pay off, right? They're never sure when that pay off might come.

Athena (00:21:30):
Right. It's almost like there's a, you know, a bucket of [of] goodies and like if you reach your hand in there and sometimes like you get something delicious and sometimes you don't, then if like if you don't get something good for awhile, it's like you want to know, like is there anything left in the bucket? And so you're just like, right, or do I just abandon this bucket or do I like stick with this bucket?

Diana (00:21:52):
There's a lot of natural examples of this, but it's kind of hard to, you know, so I think for example, for a cat engaging in kind of stalking behavior, there's two things going on; I think they're intrinsically motivated. Like they find that pleasurable, their evolution has endowed the pleasure of stalking things, but there's also a variable reinforcement schedule. Sometimes they'll be waiting for an hour and something good will come and sometimes not. And so they'll be engaging in stalking all the time [Athena agrees] because that's on a variable reinforcement schedule as well.

Athena (00:22:20):
Yeah. Mhm so that's why like if you're playing with the cat, like you can't give them too much of what they want, right? You have to like-

Diana (00:22:28):
It's really boring. [Athena agrees, "Yeah"] For them. Yeah. Exactly, and I think that in interpersonal relationships, this is one reason I think that people are moody, or that people exhibit what you might call emotional lability, which is this fluctuation in emotion is because it actually facilitates this variable reinforcement strategy. Then you sometimes reinforce somebody for the behavior that they give you, and that you sometimes don't, you could never instantiate I think in human psychology, a full understanding of these behaviorist principles. In fact, it's amazing how difficult we find them to grasp, given I think that we are actually using them all the time.

Athena (00:23:06):
Hmm. Yeah. That they're sort of just happening with our mechanisms, but we don't have that mental layer of awareness necessarily, but it's happening.

Diana (00:23:16):
And so the talk that I gave at HBES here, the Human Behavior and Evolution Society here in Boston was about how well people can remember one of those preferences. So cats and dogs and other organisms, they have things that they like and they don't like. And those things are fairly stable, but humans are really idiosyncratic, right? If I brought you a cup of coffee, or a piece of chocolate, or a piece of watermelon, I don't know which of those things is gonna make you want to affiliate with me more and be my friend, right? [laughter] Like I don't know because I don't know what kinds of foods you like to eat. And so one idea is that we are remembering each other's preferences and diversions in order to better facilitate, you know, reinforcing and punishing people, because why do we remember each other's preferences? If you look at like a pair of birds, like a [a] male who... Dem... Displays for the female, the female mates with him once, um, she's not gonna take the time to get to know his preferences cause there's no, well there's not enough time anyway. But I talk about how in a couple of different birds species, the males are actually bringing the females foods that they prefer, especially potentially on the nest. And so you could think about that as a signaling device, 'look, I can remember your preferences', right? But other one is like if you give the female the foods that she likes most, then that's going to reinforce her better than the foods that she that she doesn't, and so this research that I've looked at, which is people in romantic couples, how well do they know each other's preferences in a few domains? Are women better than men at remembering preferences? There's mixed evidence about that, but also looking at people's like things that disgust people, so that's my other main area of work. And weirdly, it seems in all of the studies about people's preferences, people get worse at remembering each other's preferences over time as the relationship goes on. It's very weird, and almost every study has shown that if you control for age, there's kind of no effective relationship length.

Athena (00:25:16):
Are people's preferences changing over time, and they're like not updating, or they're just forgetting-

Diana (00:25:22):
I think two things might be happening. One thing is like, yeah, age makes people forget, older people tend to be the ones in longer relationships. That's one possibility. Another possibility is that the person who is reporting on that, so like let's say I ask you like, 'How much do you like cake?' And you're like, 'I don't like cake that much,' and then I ask your husband how much you like cake, and he's like, 'She loves cake.' There's no cake in the fridge because she ate it all or whatever, and so that might be another thing is that people develop an idealized view of their partner, or themselves over time, right? That's another possibility. But, you know, finally it could just be that people don't, they either don't need to signal, or they don't need to punish and reinforce each other as much as the relationship goes on. Funny thing though, I did another study with a student where we were finding -- asking romantic couples, can you predict how much this picture is going to disgust your partner? The longer people are together, the better they are at predicting what disgusts the other person.

Athena (00:26:15):
That's interesting!

Diana (00:26:16):
And disagreeable people - so agreeableness is a big five personality construct - disagreeable people were better at predicting what disgusted other people. [Athena says, "Hmm."] So if you think about disagreeableness from this kind of behaviorist perspective, he might say disagreeable people are more prone to use punishment and it's important for them if they're ready to use punishment to encode, to remember, what, what's punishing to people. So that's not a, I mean, you might not be able to, you know, actually create a scenario that disgusts somebody, but you're never sure when these kinds of, this kind of stuff is gonna come in handy. And that's why we developed such a wealth of information about each other.

Athena (00:26:58):
Or could it just be that they're more focused on the negative in general? [Diana says, "Yeah."] Like remembering negative stuff like for themselves, and for others!

Diana (00:27:06):
Yeah, we did the, in the, in the presentation I just did, we also did the, the kind of mind and the eyes task where we looked at people's ability to detect emotions just looking at eyes, which, um, I think that's came up. Simon Baron Cohen came up with that back in the 90s, and what we found was that obviously people who are better at reading other people's facial expressions were better at remembering their preferences or not. There was like a pretty high correlation with those things, especially in men.

Athena (00:27:35):
Hmm. [Diana says, "Yeah"] Interesting. So given that we have these ways of learning and they can get, you know, hijacked and used by others is this necessarily like an exploitative thing, or like can it also be like a positive, like mutualistic thing? Like can like, can that get used to just like create a better relationship, or like better coordination or like use your brains better together? Like is there a positive [Diana asks, "Well this is a really simple?"] Side to it?

Diana (00:28:11):
Yeah. Simple way of doing it. Think of a simple thing, like if you're feeding your baby, your baby's, your, you know, genetic vehicle. If you're thinking about it from an evolutionary perspective, like it's in your best interest to feed your baby, but your baby still smiles and makes cute noises, and makes eye contact with you when you're feeding him or her, because that's reinforcing to you. So you and the baby are kind of mutually reinforcing each other for a behavior that's in your both- suggests both are in mutual best interests] and people really celebrate mothers and celebrate maternal behavior. Even though it comes quite naturally to most people, they're adding reinforcement on top of that I think as kind of insurance, you know, in case you got tired of it or something I guess! In order to, to make sure that behavior really is perpetuated.

Athena (00:28:56):
I guess also sometimes like, you know, the behavior could be, you know, in mutual best interests cause you have that like deep fitness interdependence, right? Cause you're genetically related, but there might be some part of it that actually requires information transfer, right? In order to figure out like how to do this best to meet everyone's preferences that, you know, maybe can't encode all of that like genetically in behavior. So maybe there's some portion of it where you have to actually kind of establish a kind of a rapport or something. Maybe that ability to learn and have that like, you know, mutual manipulation happening like facilitates that possibly?

Diana (00:29:36):
Absolutely. Yeah, that makes perfect sense, and also in terms of in a cooperation if [if] everybody's on one team together and one person makes a goal, obviously it's in the group's interest. It's not manipulative to like give somebody a high five or say 'you're awesome' after they make a goal for your team. They are intrinsically motivated to do that, but it's, people are still adding a reinforcement on top of it. So people generally use the word exploitation when they're talking about getting somebody to do things that are like not in their self interest, but are instead in your self interest. But if you're reinforcing somebody, you're punishing somebody to do behavior that's also in their best self interest, then that's a more difficult thing to explain. So you know, for example, if you're trying to encourage somebody to eat better food, you know, they might also want to eat better food, but then they're evolved mechanisms are overpowering that, because they like salty, or sweet, or fatty foods, of certain kinds. So it's very difficult to say like what's exploiting what or who's exploiting who. I like to say that it's especially difficult because what are we, we're basically vehicles for our genes. Our genes have manifested behaviors in us so that they can get passed on. So that's part of you. Another part of you is all of the learning that you've done, often times because other people were reinforcing and punishing you for certain behaviors, so that's another aspect of you. So when you think that you have a desire or motivation, it's either from your history of learning, or it's from your genes, so what's, what's really like what's really you, right? So if somebody sort of trains you or teaches you or reinforces and punishes you to do a new behavior, you're going to have a, what I think is the kind of irrational attachment to that. So we, we have this aversion to other people changing our behavior, because that -- you know, they could possibly exploit us, so we have an, I think what is an irrational attachment to our preexisting habits and behaviors. Because evolutionarily, if somebody comes along and wants to change you, then that often means that they're trying to change your behavior for their, their own best interests. You see this in teenagers a lot. When when kids are kids, they're generally happy. Like if you say 'great job' for doing something that's a reinforcement for them. If you say, no, you did badly, that's a punishment for them, but teenagers, because they're starting to get the impression that their parents' interests are not aligned with their reproductive interests. They want to go out and find mates or do whatever it is risk taking that they want to do and their parents are trying to prevent that things can really become flipped. Your mother's disapproval can become really reinforcing and her [her] approval, can be really punishing.

Athena (00:32:18):
That's interesting!

Diana (00:32:19):
Yeah! So like you see that where if you think somebody's self interests are interested and aligned with your own, you become desensitized to their, their praise or their disapproval.

Athena (00:32:31):
Yeah. And then so if we kinda think about this in the context of just like genetic conflict much more broadly. So we actually talked with David Haig a couple episodes ago about, you know, maternal-fetal conflict and we talked to Amy Boddy also about like microchimerism and maternal-fetal conflict. So like that's kind of a framework that we've talked about before. And it seems like this question of like the behavior modification, like in families is, is an extension really of this broader issue that like parent and offspring have largely, you know, overlapping interests, but not entirely overlapping interests, right? And the things that a parent wants, you know, for the offspring are not necessarily going to be the same things that the offspring wants. And maybe we can even put lawns and scarecrows again, cause you know, evolutionarily, you know, you don't necessarily have that awareness. So, so yeah, so when you're a kid, like when you're a baby, when you're a toddler, you really have no choice, but to be completely, you know, dependent on your parents. Right? So they have a lot of power then to potentially shape behavior in a way that might be in the best interest of the parents. I mean, even just like, you know, all right everybody, let's share equally as opposed to like, you know, letting them fight it out so that the biggest one gets more cake, right? So it seems like that, that whole framework is totally relevant. The parent-offspring conflict framework to thinking about what's happening in families!

Diana (00:34:07):
Yeah, definitely. I think so. And I also think that this happens a lot in, in relationships. So that there's a lot of, you know, in all kinds of relationships, friendships parental relationships and [and] in romantic relationships where people -- there's this kind of a struggle of, um, kind of reinforcement schedules and then also desensitization to certain kinds of punishment and certain kinds of, of reinforcement. And I, I am really fascinated by this kind of thing that happens with teenagers where if their mom says, 'I hate what you're wearing,' that [that] feels awesome all of a sudden. [laughter] Yeah, I know I'm on the right track, [laughter] because your disapproval actually is a good indication that my peer group will like this!

Athena (00:34:48):
That's interesting! Yeah. Hmm. So, so you have this process that happens where like, you can get this like reaction. It's almost like, I know that you're trying to manipulate me and so therefore I'm just whatever you say, I'm not gonna, I'm not going to do it. Is it like, because there's like a suspicion about manipulation?

Diana (00:35:09):
Yeah, about that, but that's another reason I think people are very unaware of their [their] manipulative tendencies. Like, you know, even saying thank you, and please, and smiling at people, and hugging people, and giving somebody a compliment, bringing up an embarrassing story - all of these things are ways that we can like reinforce and punish each other. And if you were consciously aware of that, those things, then you'd be less well able to use them. So one thing that I talk about, I'm writing a book in a paper about this is that behavior it, behaviorism has shown that the sooner you punish or reinforce a behavior, the most effect that it has. And so there's this selection of automaticity over awareness. You want to punish or reinforce the behavior as soon as possible, which is one thing that causes the self-deception, but another thing is that if someone thinks that you're trying to get something from them, right? Even though all friendships, all relationships involve some kind of desire of benefit, like that's, we're cynical enough to know that. But if you consciously think about that, then you're going to discount all of the ways that somebody is trying to make you feel good or, or as [as] kind of self-interested manipulation. So that's why it's kind of important that we engage in this self-deception because yeah, if you have this impression that someone is interacting with you for their own self-interest then if [if] this is the same kind of stuff as if somebody is trying to persuade you of something, then you're, you're much more likely to doubt what they say than if they're just having a conversation.

Athena (00:36:46):
Yeah. It seems like it kind of ties in with this issue of like, are you like emotionally like valuing someone because of their like instrumental value, like what they can do for you or for their intrinsic value, right? [Diana agrees, "Yeah."] Like just like, I like this person, like they're a person that I like and right. Those emotionally are really different. Like the way that we represent them in our nervous systems, like totally different if you're like, oh, I like you cause you can, you know, connect me with this thing and get me this job and whatever. That's very different than like, I like you cause like you're good company and it's fun and we, you know, have a good time together, right? Like that's a very different way of approaching-

Diana (00:37:29):
Yeah, a friendship. If you're thinking about what is the Cosmides and Tooby, um, thing about a welfare tradeoff ratios, which is like, 'how much money would I forfeit in order for you to have money?' Like thinking about the trade off in terms of money, right? I've even heard people say things like, thinking about relationships in this way at all in a quantitative way is actually a moral right. We're even thinking about morality in a quantitative way, which I do all the time. [laughter] People are really averse to the quantification of human feelings, of human suffering. I think that's actually an obstacle to psychology generally because of this resistance to manipulation. That's kind of a, a very basic level. So I think that that's one reason why people give responses on surveys and things like that cause they, if people just don't want to be able to be predicted, that's one thing, but also people just don't like the quantification of, of relationships and yeah, exactly! I like you and you're fun is different than like, I have these objectives and interacting with you, but that might -- would be what the underlying programming looks like in I like you and we're having fun.

Athena (00:38:35):
Yeah. Yeah. So maybe should we get back to like the, the whole question about like what is like going on like nuts and bolts, like in interpersonal interactions, like with reinforcement. So you mentioned something earlier about like, you know, with the variable reinforcement schedule, [Diana agrees, "Yeah."] I thought it was interesting like that at the beginning you like if you're trying to reinforce someone, right? Say in a relationship like you should reinforce pretty regularly and then like later, like make it a very low reinforcement schedule. Like it sounds kind of like that might be a little bit of like, you know, people complain like, 'Oh, when we first started dating, like you always blah, blah, blah!' [laughter] Right? But then you saw like, and do you think that's the same kind of thing?

Diana (00:39:26):
It's really kind of bad, because people also, well people also punish and reinforce each other for like not getting the reinforcement or punishment that they were expecting, or not getting the reinforcement that they were expecting. So yeah, if I do something nice for you and then you don't say thank you, then I will feel angry with you and I'll have a desire to punish you, because I didn't get the reinforcement that I was expecting. So it's like layers on, on layers of this kind of stuff. So you know, you said at the very beginning of a relationship, people will say, 'Well at the beginning you always reinforce certain whatever.' [Athena says, "Yeah."] I think courtship is really interesting kind of from a behaviors perspective, because you're very strongly, you know, reinforced by what the other person is doing in courtship, but that's also the period of time when you're learning somebody's preferences a lot. Like you're really spending all of their time in coding everything about them that you can, that you can learn a lot of stuff about what they, what they like and they don't like the things that rile them up, and the things that make them happy. And so that's another thing that happens in courtship is that people also can see the whole behavioral repertoire that somebody's capable of. So let's say you get together with somebody and they're actually showing you not only their best behavior, but also the largest, you know, breadth of behavior. So what I'm seeing-

Athena (00:40:43):
Do people do that?

Diana (00:40:44):
Well Skinner, I mean this is how I'm relating it. I'm actually the only person who ever said this. So Skinner and some other some, some humanist psychologists have talked about if you're in a [in a] therapy office, what the therapist does is gives you unconditional positive regard, so no matter what you say or do, they regard you positively and they engage with you positively, right? And what you're going to see is if punishment, prunes away behavior in the face of unconditional positive regard, you're going to see a proliferation of behaviors. You're going to see way more kinds of behaviors, verbal behavior, private behavior [Athena says, "Hmm."] And other behaviors than you would even, you'd normally see things that are often suppressed in relationships with other people that involve punishment. And it seems to me like courtship is really similar, courtship very rarely involves punishment. Courtship also involves kind of unconditional positive regard. 'Oh, you're telling me about that drunken weekend you had with your friends? I'd love to- tell me every detail of it. I want to hear all about it. And so it's really the best way to learn about somebody is to completely suspend your punishment in those early stages of a relationship.

Athena (00:41:45):
That is really interesting! Wow! So just by like being so fascinated and enamored with someone, and having like this feeling that they could do no wrong, and they have done no wrong, and like all of their escapades are just, an expression of how adventuresome they are. I'm like whatever, like all of that could just be there to make it so that they're going to expose their whole behavioral repertoire to you so you can learn them.

Diana (00:42:15):
Yeah, I mean, when you put it like that it doesn't sound very romantic! [laughter] courtship as a concept is really romantic, but actually it just seems like the, it's like the exploration phase of the exploration, exploitation trade off, right? You explore the whole landscape, of their behavior, the whole landscape of their, their individual differences in the personality, and then you figure out how to exploit it best in that exploration phase and exploration lesson, you know, varying amount of time depending on how long a courtship lasts. People have said that courtship is a, you know, people call the honeymoon period, which is a little bit later is ideal for facilitating having a child. But it seems to me that generally by like nine months into a relationship, if you conceived like really soon after you met, you're out of that courtship phase, and you are starting to use punishment in your interactions with the romantic partner usually around that time. I would imagine.

Athena (00:43:09):
So it seems like also with this whole courtship thing, if like, you know, you are learning your full behavioral repertoires there could be a positive side to it, which is like learning each other's weaknesses and strengths and maybe being able to like, divide cognitive labor better or something? [Diana says, "Yeah."] By like really understanding each other.

Diana (00:43:30):
Well, I, one thing that I talk about is that people are likely to punish others even if that person had nothing. They had no conscious regard for what they were doing. So let me give you an example. If somebody I know, like my romantic partner doesn't remember something about my life, like I know that he didn't forget on purpose, but I still am inclined to punish him for forgetting. Similarly, we know for sure that bedwetting is a behavior that kids engage in and they don't mean to wet the bed. They're asleep, but punishment still happens when kids do things, even though those things are not under their control. So if you have a tradeoff between a punishing something that is not under conscious control, and just giving somebody some negative feelings, versus punishing something. That - what I'm saying is that there's a kind of a bias basically to punish a rather over, over, not punishing overall because it's better to punish a behavior than to leave or not get the opportunity to, to prune away at behavior that you, that you don't like. And so during courtship, what you see is what somebody's capable of, right? You're seeing somebody's best possible behavior, but even if you never saw a behavior during courtship, this is what I sometimes tell female friends of mine. It's like if you didn't see a behavior during courtship, it's not something you should punish someone for not exhibiting later because you're steaming.

Athena (00:44:55):
What do you mean?

Diana (00:44:55):
So if a man never took you to a spa or bought you flowers, or gave you a massage, or wrote you poetry when you were doing courtship, then you can't get angry about that behavior being lacking later, because you saw the whole behavioral repertoire. But I think still people are inclined to punish when they don't see behavior that they want because we're biased towards punishment, and especially because we live in a context in which we often don't see our romantic partners admired by other people. We don't see that there's competition for our romantic partners, and so I think the emphasis is even stronger to punish them because where are they going to go? They have no other, there's no other game in town, but you, and that's what I think isolated families, isolated couples, that leads to more punishment, and interpersonal romantic relationships than you might otherwise see. Because you know, in, in traditional societies, if a man had more than one wife then they were in some sense, you know, they were often being really nasty to each other, but they, if one of them was nicer to him then everybody else was, then she was going to be getting a better deal as being his wife than everyone else was. So there was certain amount of competition to see who could be more rewarding to that, to that if there, if there was like co-wives for a particular husband. Whereas if a woman is monogamous with a man, I mean it's unclear, you know, she's not necessarily competing with anybody else to be nicer to him than anybody else, right? So I think this is one kind of problem. If you don't see that your partner is valued by other people, it's very easy to get into a very strong punishment cycle with them.

Athena (00:46:30):
Yeah. I mean it's kind of ironic in a way, cause like the whole way that punishment works, it's sort of cheap and easy for the person doing the punishment. [Diana says, "Yeah."] But like in the long term, it can be really costly on the person who's getting punished, [Diana says, "Yeah."] Not just because of like the immediate cost of the punishment, but doesn't it also just like increase like anxiety more and like if you're getting all that right? So, so if you're, if you're locked in with someone, like you should be trying to not be imposing costs on each other as much, right? Because you're like, you're in it together for the long game, but-

Diana (00:47:09):
There's a lot of kind of cynical reasons why that might happen and kind of a learned helplessness state where somebody's basically kind of stuck where they are. That's, that's a sign. Um, but that's basically what abusers do, right? Abusers punish and punish and punish. And the person gets in this kind of depressed state, and what they're doing is they're kind of pruning away all the behaviors that that person could use to find another mate, and they're locking that person in psychologically, right? By eroding their self esteem, but that constant punishment yet also causes, um, like that kind of learned helplessness state, and so people talk about those behaviors as sort of being maladaptive. But, if you have somebody that's much better than you, like if a man has with a woman who he thinks has got very high value, then he might want to do that in order to, you know, so a man might be abusive with one woman and not with another, depending on how much he wants to prune away any behaviors that she would use to find another mate.

Athena (00:48:04):
So how might somebody like recognize if that's happening to them? Like what would that look like? Everybody does that to some extent, right? Yeah. But like, you know, like what, you know, if someone's listening to this and they're like, hmm, I wonder if like I'm in a relationship where I'm getting, you know, like seriously negatively reinforced and like maybe it's not good for me. Like what, like what would make-

Diana (00:48:28):
I think it's, I think that there is a little bit of a double standard about this these days. In that I think that if [if] you hear a man saying, 'I'm afraid to bring up certain topics with my wife, cause I'm afraid that she's gonna yell at me,' or 'I don't see my friends as much as I used to because my wife disapproves,' or whatever, you might say, 'Oh, that's really terrible. Sorry.' But if a woman says, 'I can't see my friends cause my partner would disapprove and I can't talk about certain things because I worry about my husband's disapproval', you'd say, 'You're in an abusive relationship,' right? So I do think that people are more sensitive to when men do this to women than when we do this to men, obviously below the threshold at which there's physical abuse happening. So I would say that, yeah, if you feel like constant low level anxiety, if you feel like you're walking on eggshells, but so many people feel like that in relationships. [Athena- "Hmm."] And sometimes, I mean not all the time, but sometimes that's solved by the one person making it clear to the other. They have other options and then they get treated better, right? So if you think about there's some kind of termite species where the female finds the male and the male has got these huge antenna that he uses to these like solitary termites uses to, to find females. And when the male comes into the female, they're monogamous after that point, and the first thing she does is snip off his antenna, and I do think that some degree of that is happening in romantic relationships and it, it really rains up people's parade. But I talk about romantic relationships in this way, but I think that if we're really conscious of how we might be trying to reduce other people's mate seeking behavior, so one man might punish his, his girlfriend for wearing feminine or tight clothing or wearing a makeup a woman might punish her partner every time he sees, she sees that he's like looked at a woman on the street, for example. Both of those have the same goal but people are not consciously aware of that goal. [Athena says, "Hmm"].

Athena (00:50:27):
So in, in relationships, like you mentioned that there's kind of this double standard a little bit in terms of that. Do you think that that like exists because they're sort of like structural differences, like between like the opportunities that men have and women have, like, you know, there's still like the pay differential and like all this stuff or, or that oftentimes men are older than women in relationships. And so people are like more biased towards wanting to protect women, like they see them as like the more vulnerable group?

Diana (00:50:57):
Yeah! I think people see women as more vulnerable and Tonya Reynolds did some studies showing that people are more sensitive to women's pain [Athena agrees] than they are to men's pain. And people, for example, if you ask them to donate to like a woman's only homeless shelter, even though men are homeless at a much higher rate than women, people are more likely to take that seriously. I think that's, you know, the kind of women and children on the boats first. Women are more valuable, you know, in the absence of any individual markers, like obviously a high status man has a certain value, but women like as a whole, as a group are considered more valuable because they have to begin meets and they are investing in offspring and-

Athena (00:51:39):
But also sometimes more vulnerable, right? And so people want to like help the parties that they see as more vulnerable like, you know, [Diana says, "Yeah"] system, right?

Diana (00:51:48):
There's a, there's a dichotomy that people don't think about very much. There's a study, I think Paul Bloom was one of the authors on it, which is about objectification versus animalification, and they had pictures of women clothed, or nude, or in kind of sexy poses. And they said, you know, how much do you think this person can make their own decisions? How much do you think this person experiences pleasure or pain? And the nude women are the sexy seeming women. They were thought to be like less agentic, right? Like less able to make decisions, less competent. But they were also thought to be more sensitive, to experience, more sensitive to pain and pleasure, and so if you're thinking about somebody in a sexual way, you might not think that they're like, so it's actually not objectification. What people are doing when they sexualize someone, in some sense they're, they're actually animalifying them, which is they're saying, I don't necessarily think you're as competent as I did before. I thought about you as a sexual prospect, but I do think that you're more sensitive to and more vulnerable to, to pleasure and pain and that you have more what they called it experience, right? And I do think that this actually explains a lot about these kinds of differences. If you think about sexist behavior or you think about discrimination is that actually people are very concerned with women's feelings and how they experience the world, but they don't always think that women are as competent to make their own decisions.

Athena (00:53:06):
Hmm. So if we sort of think of it in the context of zombification and they're like, okay, [laughter] you know, they're, they have this bias when women are presented more sexually that they're like not as autonomous acting decision making, but they have a lot of experience. So it sounds like pulling apart things that we almost like put together, right? Like experience and consciousness and decision making, but they're like getting-

Diana (00:53:34):
I mean, it could just be a way that, the, the, your, your courtship psychology is like simplifying another person, so that elicits more behavior towards them. Like more courtship behavior towards them. I can't really, you know, I haven't really thought much about why that bias, uh, necessarily happens, but it doesn't seem like it's a cut and dried, you know, bad thing to think about somebody that way. It's also the way we think about you know, other vulnerable people like children.

Athena (00:54:01):
Yeah. So if you wanted to, you know, use all of these things that we've talked about today, um, for good, like, either to protect yourself or to, you know, like have to protect others, or to like create positive long lasting relationships where you're not like negatively reinforcing each other and getting stuck in these like cycles of punishment. Are there any like, you know, tips or advice that you would give for like how to use this to make your life better and to make the world a better place?

Diana (00:54:42):
Yeah! [laughter] I will be writing a book about this! It's going to be out in like probably in a year and a half or something like that! [Athena- "Awesome"] So I am writing about this right now, but I think that for me, having some cynicism about my own motivations is really important. Like, why am I angry with this person? Why am I motivated to bring up something embarrassing? Why am I motivated to stop talking to him, or stop making facial expressions or, or to just people generally, right? And you can dig down, and what generally people don't do is they don't think very much past 'I'm upset.' They don't kind of think about the deep reasons or if they do think about the deep reasons, they think about them as virtuous possible reasons that they could have for feelings, the feelings that they, that they do. And what I'm saying is that if you're willing to admit that you are an animal that's trying to kind of maximize the investment of others, then actually you can treat people even better than if you think that you always have a good and virtuous motivations. [Athena -"Hmm."] So I think that the general advice that I give people is to, you know, to be cynical about yourself and be skeptical of your own feelings, and it's very easy to just kind of go through life without actually having some, some insight into your, you know, native programming. And I talk about mindfulness too, is that it's very hard if you feel jealous, or angry, or upset, or even happy and grateful, to hold those emotions at arms length and to examine them without some ability to feel them in your body and to notice that that's not you, that's kind of your state right now. But it isn't, it isn't you itself, and it's almost impossible to do that and you're highly aroused, you know, jealous, angry states. [Athena- "Sure"]. And, but you know, it's true that if you are like, okay, I feel this kind of knot in my stomach, I feel my heart racing, my hands feel cold. If you kind of take a stock like that, it's amazing how much it reduces those feelings. So these are the things we'll be talking about, you know, in the book as well. Not just, you know, how to have a more skeptical and cynical, and I'm always you cynical, like a really positive way, [laughter] but also, you know what actually, practically you can do to get a better, better perspective.

Athena (00:57:01):
Yeah! Alright, so at the very end of each episode, I have to ask the like zombie apocalypse scenarios, right? [laughter] So now it's like, you know, we have, right, all these organisms, we have these learning systems, and then we can hijack each other's learning systems. If we take this ability, this capacity, this thing that's already happening and we just like turn up the volume on it. What kind of zombie apocalypse are we in?

Diana (00:57:34):
What if we all had like [inaudible] in our brains and I could administer like delicious chemicals directly to you every time you did something I liked [Athena- "yeah"] directly in your mind. I think that the kind of zombie apocalypse version of this is actually, and we're about to go see a talk by Ann Hagan is drugs. [Athena- "Oh"], I mean people, the drug doesn't actually ask you to ask people for spare change or to, you know, give up, steal from your grandmother, or anything like that. But that reinforcement and that punishment, the reinforcement of taking a drug and the punishment of,of not having it, that aversive feeling drives so much behavior. All of your behavior for example, and people have said, you know, love is like a drug. People also do things for romantic partners because of the pleasure of their approval, or to avoid the pain of, or there's approval, but yeah, you could turn this up. I also always thought when I watch Star Trek, like if people really had telepathy they would, [laughter] you could actually be in somebody's head engaging in these kinds of techniques. And certainly I think people reward and punish others for manifestations of what they think are thoughts, right? If I don't feel like you're listening to me or you because you're thinking about something specific, I can, you know that that could be something that would trigger an angry outburst. A form of punishment, so yeah, those are, I think some, some zombie apocalypse burning -- Zombie Apocalypse Skinner!

Athena (00:58:59):
Yeah! Cause if we, if I mean if like I you know, had like an app on my phone, and right, and I have like all of my Facebook friends or something and I could just like push a button to make them feel like good or bad. Like for anything, which I mean is that kind of what we do and we're like liking [Diana- "Social media."] Media is very-

Diana (00:59:15):
Dopaminergic! Yeah! I have felt so much better since I've been off of, but I have to go back on, but yeah, it's, it's very dopaminergic and yeah, that refresh. I don't know if you've gotten into that cycle where you're like, have I gotten more likes? Have I gotten more likes?

Athena (00:59:29):
That's crazy! I mean is that is that kind of like, [Diana says, "Yeah."], Behaviorist tapping into each other's brains through this, these apps like-

Diana (00:59:39):
Well there's a, there's a whole more complicated thing I think going on there, which also involves that reinforcement for signaling and about people like your signaling values that I agree with. I'm going to reinforce you that kind of thing, and certainly there are kinds of 'flame wars' that people get into online because they are not getting all the cues that would make them stop in interpersonal interactions.

Athena (01:00:02):
So there's a couple of zombie apocalypse scenarios for this, I guess some of which were already in [laughter]. I was like, well Diana, thank you so much for sharing your brains with us!

Diana (01:00:13):
Thank you for eating my brain!

Athena (01:00:16):
Anytime! ['Psychological' by Lemi plays]

New Speaker (01:01:35):
Zombified is a production of Arizona State University and the Zombie Apocalypse Medicine Alliance. Thank you to the department of psychology, the interdisciplinary cooperation initiative, and the president's office at ASU, also to the Lincoln Center for Applied Ethics. Big thank you to all of the brains that helped make this podcast! To Tal Rom who does our sound, Neil Smith, our awesome illustrator, and Lemmy, the creator of our song, Psychological! Thank you also to the Z-Team, our amazing undergraduate team who support our podcast! You can follow us on Twitter and Instagram. We're Zombified Pod [@zombifiedpod] and we're Zombified Podcast on Facebook. Our website is zombified.org. You can also support us going on Patreon! We are totally educational - we have no ads - so, please, if you like what we do, consider becoming a patron on Patreon, it's $1 a month or if you're open to supporting us at a higher level, just $5 a month would be really, really awesome! You can also support us by buying merchandise, there's t-shirts and stickers! You can find them on our website, www.zombified.org, and finally you can support us by leaving a review! Please consider going on Apple podcasts and leaving a review of Zombified. Alright, now we've gotten to the end of the episode where I share my brains and this time I want to do actually a little bit of a public service announcement and then share some of my thoughts. So the whole issue of abusive relationships kind of came up in this episode, so I wanted to say a few words about that. I think that, you know, when we talk about Zombification there's sort of a, you know, negative, extreme, right where one individual is hijacking the other in a way that is not in the best interests of the other and that's like the negative end. And there can be a more positive end, right? Where maybe there's mutual manipulation for mutual benefit, and I think it's important to sort of distinguish, you know, in relationships when that mutual influence crosses over into a sort of, you know, one sided negative coercive kind of control. And I'm no episode [oops subconscious slip], I'm no expert on this, but I looked online, and there's some great resources. There's hotline.org and they talk a little bit about this relationship spectrum from healthy, to unhealthy, to abusive, and they say that, you know, an unhealthy relationship is one where you have sort of inequality and you have a power struggle. But it goes into abusive when one partner is really mistreating the other and there's no option really for communication. So, and one example or one component of this is when one partner has economic control. So if one person controls all the money and access to resources, then that can really contribute to the abusive scenario. And I wanted to bring this up because Diana brought up in this episode the, this double standard of people being more likely to worry that a woman is in an abusive relationship than a man is, you know, sort of given the same information about what's happening. And I think oftentimes women are still at a disadvantage economically compared to men, and this puts them in a weaker position to advocate for themselves, therefore making it more likely that they'll end up in a relationship that might be unhealthy, or abusive. And so, I think that that whole context is a important part of sort of understanding why people potentially respond differently to the same kind of information about what's happening in a relationship. So if you're in a relationship and you're worried that you're worried that it might be abusive, please seek out resources like hotline.org, and also, you know, if you're in a relationship and it's sort of unhealthy, welcome to the rest of us, like I think for the majority of humanity, you know, relationships often kind of involve these zombification dynamics, some of which are benign, some of which are like really positive, and some of which can be damaging. And so, you know, hopefully we can use some of the knowledge and strategies that Diana talked about to reduce the burden of zombification in our relationships. So one of the things that she offers is this idea of being more cynical about the reasons for what you were doing. And I guess I would add to that, that maybe you should be, especially sort of cynical or reflective, if you are the person in the relationship that has, you know, greater power, like socially or economically that, you know, that that might be, you might be at more of a risk of actually, you know, engaging in these behaviors, maybe even without realizing it. So I think that's [that's] important, so you can ask yourself, you know, am I using my more powerful position to try to zombify my partner? And if you are reflecting on that, honestly then that will probably improve the quality of your relationship. So like I mentioned though, zombification in relationships doesn't always have to be bad, right? And, and one of the things that can make us actually really happy is this sort of positive mutual zombification like what Mark Flynn was talking about in one of our earlier episodes about, you know, possibly the definition of love or an approach to love being that it's enjoying being exploited. So, you know, it can feel really good sometimes to be zombified and to be in love. I would just offer that, you know, it probably only makes us happy in the long term. If this love zombie scenario is, uh, equal opportunity zombification situation. Thank you for listening to zombified your source for fresh brains! ['Psychological' by Lemi plays]