David Sloan Wilson and Steven Hayes || Evolution and Contextual Behavioral Science

Stephen Hayes on the podcast. David Sloan Wilson is President of the Evolution Institute and a Sunny Distinguished Professor of Biology and Anthropology at Binghamton University. Sloan Wilson applies evolutionary theory to all aspects of humanity in addition to the biological world. His books include Darwin's Cathedral, Evolution for Everyone, The Neighborhood Project, and Does Altruism Exist? Hayes is Foundation Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of

Nevada Reno. An author of forty four books and over six hundred scientific articles, his career has focused on an analysis of the nature of human language and cognition, and the application of this to the understanding and alleviation of

human suffering and the promotion of human prosperity. Hayes has received several awards, including the Impact of Science on Application Award from the Society for the Advancement of Behavior Analysis and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies ABCT. For SURE, together, they edited the recent book Evolution and Contextual Behavioral Science and Integrated Framework

for Understanding, predicting, and Influencing Human behavior. David and Stephen, what a great honor to have you both on the podcast today. Thank you very much. That's fun to be here. Looking forward to it. Yeah, I'm very much looking forward too. I was just going to say, this is definitely one of the longest intros I've ever done in this podcast, because there's two of you, and you're both like legendary

and have a long bio teach of you. But you know, I think it does put into context a little bit. You're both of your unique flavors, so to speak. And then it'll be really cool to talk today about, you know, how you both got together and decided to do this great grand synthesis and integration of different things. So along those lines, let me start by could each of you kind of talk a little bit about your own perspective, like that you primarily focused on in your career. We

could start with Steve, how did you go first? Okay, well, I'm a you know, I have a background and behave analysis. I'm a clinical psychologist, but basic work, animal work even But what I took from that was this kind of radical functionalism, interested in context and and it kind of a multi dimensional way. I wrote about evolutionary topics actually with some regularity, but not with in hindsight much sophistication. I kind of have in my career try to fill

what I saw as holes in the behavioral tradition. And the two biggest holes were you really have to deal with language incognition. Something different is happening that we're doing right now compared to what the bird is doing outside the window. If you just compare it over two hundred years, five hundred thousand years, it's very very obvious that there's something in language and cognition that is perhaps not unique, but it is at least so characteristic that acquires a

special analysis. And the other is one that's frustrating for the scnarian wing, which is they tried to do it and failed of trying to find a way to put a selection within the lifetime of the individual, both by direct contingencies reinforcement. I'm beginning to really think also by contingencies of meaning, by the meaning systems that are afforded by symbolic learning, to put that into the larger fabric

of evolutionary thought. And so our book is titled Contextual Behavioral Sciences, not so much to mean a specific group, but more the behavioral scientists to think in this functional, contextual, multidimensional, longitudinal, selective way. And I've just been overjoyed to over the

last ten years or so. It's been a while now David, hasn't it been to find David as a colleague and to somebody who's, you know, really committed to exploring that unexplored territory of the interface between the traditional evolutionary thinking as it embraces an extended synthesis and a behavioral science wing that has been interested in that but needed a lot of education and still does in the larger field of evolutionary thought. Seeing that Wing as a partner. Great,

and then what is evolutionary science? And it's interesting called evolutionary science, you know, instead of like evolutionary psychology. Is there a difference between the is one of larger umbrella? Sure? Yeah, absolutely, Evolutionary science covers everything, all living processes. I was trained as an evolutionary biologist, started artworking with non humans, and

then sort of add humans to my toolkit. I got my PhD in nineteen seventy five, which was the same year that the other Wilson, Edward oh Wilson, published socio Biology, and of course the idea that you could have a single theory that applies to all social species, including humans, was what he introduced and which was outrageous at the time, created so much controversy. But me just getting my PhD, then that was just an exciting prospect. So you could

call me the first post sociobiology generation. And as I matured as a scientist, I thought more and more about humans and meaning systems and language, and a lot of it was centered on multi level selection, which is what I'm best known for. The idea that adaptations evolved at

the group level, or even the ecosystem level. If special conditions are are mad and so the idea that evolution needs to expand beyond the biological sciences to include all things human includes psychology plus more, it includes all of

the human related disciplines. When I landed at Binghamton University, I created the first campus wide evolutionary studies program called EVOS, and then after building that on campus, I thought, gosh, let's use our community as like a field site as an evolutionary ecologist would understand the term, and I was especially interested in studying altruism and pro sociality in the context of everyday life. So I boldly announced the Binghamton Neighborhood Project started to do this kind of work. I

remember I was there. I was there in the audience when you announced it at NEEPS two thousand and six. Yeah, there you go, Yeah, and with quite a bit of hubrisfs. And soon enough I was discovered by people who were already doing this kind of work in the applied sciences, and especially Tony Biglin, who is a prevention scientist and was prevention science. It's a term that not many people have heard, but it is one of the contextual behavioral sciences.

And to make a long story short, It was Tony who introduced me to Steve, and then we started to work together, and I began to see that what Tony was doing at a population level, and what Steve was doing largely at an individual level but also extending into groups. And a third person, Dennis Embry, was doing in an entrepreneurial way. He's a scientific entrepreneur, was applied cultural evolution.

I see that these guys were really good at actually making positive change happen in the real world at a variety of scale. So they were doing basically what I aspire to do. And yet our respective disciplines were all

different from each other and different from evolutionary psychology. We can segue now to evolutionary psychology and actually just signal, and we can spend more time on it during this interview, very complicated and in retrospect, crazy history academic psychology, in which behaviorism first was dominant as the most scientific approach to psychology, but then was deposed by the so called cognitive revolution, and then evolutionary psychology emerged as a critique

of the cognitive revolution. The idea that the mind is not a sle computer but many special purpose computers, the idea of massive modularity and evolutionary psychology, actually both cognitive psychology and evolutionary psychology. Rejecting behaviorism as part of the so called standard social science model is something that was somehow fundamentally wrong. And here I am an evolutionist working with Steve Hayes, who is part of the Scinarian tradition,

although he's also gone beyond it. And so we have this profound lack of integration and I hate to say it self described evolutionary psychology playing a role in the lack of integration. So these are some of the things that we need to discuss in what our book represents. I think the way I think of it is it's

evolutionary psychology done right. Oh nice. It actually does justice to the to the modularity concept, does justice to it, but also does justice to the emmenense open ended aspects of human nature, both at the individual level, the individual's capacity for open ended change and also the cultural capacity through open ended change. If you can't acknowledge that, then you don't understand our species. I like that, Steve, you said that Skinner thought of himself as an evolutionary psychologist.

Is that right? He did? And for some time, I mean the last sentence he wrote the night before he died, which was to finish an article coming out of an award he won for the American Psychological Association, said that he predicted that variation and selection would be important to the future of applied work in his area, and he wasn't sure that they'd be called psychologists, but he was

sure that evolution was important. I mean, and then he dies the next morning, and it's kind of a symbolic expression of what he was trying to do, but also the frustration of the inability to make that happen, because

it isn't even just that it wasn't picked up. The behavioral folks were outright rejected, and this link between contingencies of reinforcement and a cultural evolution on the one hand and a genetic evolution on the other was outright rejected and really even laughed at as a loose metaphor that had nothing to do with how variation selection actually worked in these other dimensions. And what gives the light to

that is a multidimensionality and multi level thinking. And when you add those back in and then you say, well, wait a minute, you know where did these cultural variations come from? They had to start somewhere, and you know, they start often. You can see it in the places we've actually looked at it. You know, this particular animal did this particular thing, and then through social learning processes are protected through the troop, and now you have this evolutionarything.

And then you start seeing well, then, but look what happens. I mean, the just the Japanese snow monkeys so called, that have been followed now for many decades. You know, the fact that out there washing their potatoes in the first in the streams, but then actually in the ocean and salting them there. And now they're starting to catch fish and they're actually changing you know, their diet, which is changing some of their you know, group practices around

things having to do with mating choice. And it's like, you know, you see right in front of you the kind of you know, the extended version of the moths changing or coloring when the when coal is no longer burned in England, et cetera. Evolution has fast enough that you can see that you have to account for variation selection within lifet on the individual. Now you add in epigenetic processes and other things like that, and we're now able to do some of these things literally in minutes.

I mean, you can sit somebody down for fifteen minutes and keep track of how many of their genes are reliably turned on or off. There's a nice little piece with fifteen minutes meditation and affecting something like three percent of your genes in a reliable way. How long we're doing that work. But you know that the cells or systems that are just organized to turn environment and behavior

into biology. So where is an environment and behavior not just in population biology and some of these things, but in the grit and grain. Well, I think it's in psychology. And so I tip my hat to the evolutionary psychologists in the sense of insisting that the most important theory in all the life sciences be given adequate attention and

due weight inside psychology. That's the right move, and I think they can be forgiven for not knowing how to do that and kind of taking the obvious step forward to say, well, what just happened in the Paleolithic period, for example, that might have set us up to do this or that that's important. It actually doesn't get wiped away. I mean some of the more integrative ideas is massive modularity still have a role. There's still pieces where that's true.

But we get to as we said it in the book, you know, everyone was wrong and now it's time for

us all to work together. And I'm part of what I'm sort of stunned by is how much needs to be done, and with all disrespect, typing my hat towards the far more prestigious area of the two that are coming together, evolutionary theory itself needs to really take a step back and then another run up the hill, because even people who are promoting an extended evolutionary synthesis will still leave various and selection within the lifetime the individual off the table, and you just can't do it. You

cannot do it and create a care hairent account. It's hard to do. But the other part is you can't do it and then still have an applied discipline, and evolutionary science needs to be an applied discipline. In part, it doesn't make sense to develop these high precision, high scope principles and then leave them laning on the floor. So this partnership is not just about you know, being recognized finally in a way that's very firm about the

importance of behavioral science to the larger picture. It's also what then happens synergistically when you bring these islands and the academic archipelago together and it turns out that they change each other's thinking mutually. And we're still part of that roller coaster ride, David and I are, and not

just us. There's a much larger group, are you know, walking down this yellow brick road, and we're finding all kinds of interesting things there that I think are going to have a profound impact on the field as that played out a much larger group of colleagues. Wow, do you want respond to that? Well, yeah, let me just add to it. Of course, Steve and I talk a lot,

and we're really on the same page. So there's nothing to disagree with there, only some things to elaborate upon, and a sense of history academic I think is very important. One thing that happened to have evolutionary thought was that it became highly gene centric during the twentieth century, as if the only kind of inheritance is genetic inheritance. Now

that's being avers. We have great books such as Evolution and Four Dimensions by Tablanca and Lamb is an iconic book for basically going back to basics and defining evolution in terms of heredity, not just genes. This is known as the extended evolutionary synthesis. And then a metaphor not a metaphor, but an analogy that Stephen Iestress, which I think is enormously helpful for integrating evolutionary psychology and behaviorism,

is the immune system. Now, the immune system is something we understand very well, and it was said to have an adaptive and an innate component. The innate component is densely modular. We inherit it and it does not change during our lifetime. It is something that evolved by genetic evolution and is triggered by environmental circumstances. Just as the evolutionary psychologists love to point out, the adaptive component of

the immune system is highly evolutionary. That's the ability of antibodies to vary and for those that successfully behind antigens to ramped up. So that's an evolutionary process that takes place during the lifetime of the organism. It is also densely modular. If you look at the mechanisms, it's not by a happy accident that there's one hundred million different antibodies and mechanisms promote the ones that are salooned. So the whole thing is densely modular but also amazingly open ended.

Why can't we say the same thing about the human behavioral system the human behavioral system because it offends me when you say that. That's why I don't think, how dare you reduce me to put to put to adoption? Well, but it's not. It's not a reduction when you I know I'm talking component. Yes, yes, I do, Yes, I do. And I also think that it's very persuasive to make that comparison. So there is some additions to what Steve

was saying. I think that the evolutionary psychology done right acknowledges both in a nate and adaptive component, and that's the integration that we need between evolutionary psychology and the scinarian wing. Steve mentioned Skinner's dying words, but you don't have to wait that long. He wrote an iconic paper in nineteen eighty one titled Selection by Consequences publishing Science Magazine. Might be his best known work, and it's just as

clear as a bell. Anyone who reads just the abstract of that paper is that he was more or less envisioning what today we think of as cultural evolution, which begins with the individual as an evolving system. This also goes back to the Baldwin effect and the Baldwin effect.

The idea that learning leads genetic evolution, that learning is the leading edge of genetic evolution, was proposed all the way back in the beginning of the twentieth century, but it has been this orphan concept all these years, did not play an important goal in eat modern synthesis, and only now is coming into its own. Are we really beginning to comprehend what it means for first individual pay real flexibility, and second cultural evolution to be the leading

edge of genetic evolution. And that's where Duel A. Hardan's theory and all of these things are heading. And it has enormous practical applications. I mean, once you really take this on board, the idea that we can use it to manage positive change in real world settings, both at the individual level and the population level, becomes just self evident. And our book is is I would like to think

an important step in those practical applications. Wow, wonderful, wonderful, and you both if I'm a geegat a second wrote about this in your BBS article Evolving the Future. You talked about that metaphor of the mileage that you can get out of thinking about the behaval system like the immune system. So that was a cool paper, you know, the way BBS works as you get a lot of people responding and were there any particular responses to your argument that you want to point out as well, that's

a fair point. That was a good point, you know, and it changed your thinking about it. I like to think of the BBS article as our first milestone that after we had been working almost six or eight years together Tony, Dennis, Steve and myself, then we wrote that article and the and then this book is the second milestone. When I think back over the commentaries, it's not that I've read them recently, but what I see is mostly acceptivity, as I recall, and the main thing is is that

progress on these fronts. I think academic culture is so slow that progress gets mentioned, gets measured in decades when it needs to get measured in years, and so I think there's a problem of catalysis. I think that in order to get things to change more more quickly, so I'm thinking that those commentarries that was twenty fourteen, now it's twenty eighteen. Four years went by, and how much

has happened then? Then not enough? So we really need to think in terms of years, not decades, for both cultural academic cultural change, and cultural change in real world settings. You know, the commentaries were I think startlingly supportive in the sense of, you know, appreciating the effort, and it

wasn't waved away. I think something has changed because you know, there were very dismissive things that happened in these early efforts, but the ground work has been laid by all these different wings in their own way doing their slow but careful academic development. And the ones that were a little challenging but were not because it was like, oh I didn't thought of that, but were the ones where you really or being challenged to put it into the context

of an extended synthesis. And so we talked a little more about tim bergens of four questions for example, in the response to the commentaries, is trying to see that trying to help people see that what we're trying to do is put this into a well rounded evolutionary synthesis. But you know, as that happens. This is the part where you begin to see change happening in all directions.

There's double headed arrows everywhere. You know. What I see, as this has played out in my own thinking, is much more of an appreciation of the dynamical system like quality of the life of an individual, the life of a couple or a group, the life of a community, and human life as part of all of life, as part of you know, this almost planetary scale way of thinking,

it keeps going up. You can't think just in once you get into multi dimensional, multi level, you can't just take a piece of it and say I'm focused just on this, whatever it is, and then fail to understand as you do that that what you're doing bears on the larger picture. And so I'll pick one that David and I haven't really talked about it at all, but I mentioned to them an impact that these years together have had on me. You know, I'm writing now about

processes of change in psychotherapy. I find myself writing essentially this multi level, multi dimensional way of thinking about process of change in psychotherapy that is, you know, really stretches my ability even to think about how to study it because I find myself having to learn things like how to do a complex network analysis and dynamical systems analyses and things that I don't think most researchers in psychotherapy do. I mean, they're doing randomized trials, which is fine, but

it's so cledgy. It's so and then their process accounts or you know, things like mediational analyses, these very limited one headed arrows. If they're a system, they're a really crude system. It's all linear and all goes in one direction. Nothing's recursive, nothing interacts, it's not multi dimensionally to have one or two things that you say, this is why the therapy works. What nonsense, of course, says that you're

going to have to build in. I can see the I'm coming when people are actually literally doing things in psychotherapy, like doing oral swabs, looking at what happens with up and down regulation of genes through genetic processes. But that's just that not just appreciating that levels of analysis, but

appreciating the multidimensional and dynamic nature of it. That's much more like how you would in fact analyze, let's say that the functioning human immune system than it is like, you know, just getting a blue ribbon for the evidence based therapy. I mean what we you know, the behavioral

with a small bee. The human behavioral sciences really need to up their sophistication about the multidimensional and multi level nature of the questions that they're asking across time and so that these kind of crude one time boom and it's in our measurement system. Psychometrics is wrong in my opinion, It doesn't stand up to an evolutionary view. Group designs are wrong. You are just so crude as an instrument.

Our process designs and methods are wrong. I said to my lab last Friday, David I said, here's the effect of more than ten years of David Sloan Wilson. I think ninety eight percent of the research for doing in psychology is wrong. Wow, wait a minute, hold on, hold on, because that's what you touched on them. He touched on my field there. So why is psychometric which instruments in particular right? They're all wrong with the Big five is wrong.

Let's takedown psychometrics. I come out of that tradition. Alan Edwards is my grandfather, Okay, my intelectual grandfather A. R. Gilliland, who is at just Chicago School and had the first measure of it, intelligence and infants is my great grandfather. So I come out of the psychometric lineage. John Cone was my mentor and a psychometrician, and try to bring classic psychometric concepts in behavioral assessment. I think with a

net negative Frankly the wonderful man. But I don't think it was a good idea because what psychometrics does is it says we're going to look at consistency by looking across items and people at a given point of time, and that's our fundamental unit, not within individuals across time. And you know Ktel's had his p techniques. He knew

he was doing it. He had a little matrix there, and you know when they fought about factor analysis, they fought over this, should we look at the clustering within individuals across time or should we look at clustering across items and people at a given point in time? And that other view one which is a huge mistake. You

wouldn't go out think about this. You wouldn't go out into a natural environment and watch the behavior of a troop, let's say, and then say, you know, I'm really not interested in that animal, animal, animal, animal, I'm interested in the average. I'm interested in the average of the truth. You know, that basic move which is deep inside psychometrics. Yeah,

it fails. Is that there's a set of assumptions that are required to do that called argotic assumptions that the mathematicians in nineteen thirty four are worked out and showed in physics by the way, that that only works. That the larger superset is a good measure of a process only works under a set of assumptions which cannot be applied to individuals across time. As soon as you have a trend, because you'd have to assume that every animal is showing the same trend and sequence of how these

different processes come together, that's nonsense. Of course that's not true. So you end up with an average that reflects often no one. But when you like assess, like the intervention effectiveness of an act intervention, you know you have to have measures to actually you need a measure something, right, the measures we're demanded. Even APA try to put it in the ethics that you genuflect the psychometrics. But I

think that psychometrics is going down. I don't think it's time. Well, one kind I mean one kind of I mean one kind of psychometrics might be going down, but not all kinds. I mean, that's well measure that's what you mean by psychometrics, if you mean classical psychometrics. The reason is it's the wrong level of analysis in my opinion, for characterizing processes of change and measuring. So if you went back and you do let's say, ecological momentary assessment, you high density

measurement like you would do naturally. If you're out in the field doing a biological study and you look to see what are the trends for the organisms you're looking at one at a time, and then collected, you can look at the group level. That's not what I'm saying. It doesn't have to be at the individual level, but it has to be respectful of the actual data spread across time. There's a different way of looking at quality of assessment than the way that we have come of

view with essentially a latent variable that you're modeling. There's nothing you don't need the latent variable. This is a longer conversation. It probably takes it right. There is an evolutionary Definitely, we're definitely, we're definitely, we're definitely dwelling down here. I hope your audience is keeping up with those people. Oh, they love that. I think they love this kind of nerdiness.

But I do want to refocus us after it. But I feel like I would feel guilty if I didn't respond to what you just said real quick though, I would feel guilty. So I do feel like there are a session, there is a greater awareness, and I feel like people like Will Fleeson and there are a bunch of researchers that are really interested in that within person variation level of analysis. And I'm totally with you that level analysis has been neglected for a lot of the

field of personality psychology. Okay, I just wanted to say that, But let's move on and then maybe I'll get you back on something. We can have a whole chat just about psychometrics. That could be fun. So, Steve, how come when the first time you encountered David's work you came home and you cried? Yeah, or David has had to hear the story through every time, but I sort of swore I'm not going to subject him to it again. And here now you've you've made it happen. But you know,

the longest shore have to answer it. Well, it would be like a person if I'm sure I can, I can listen to it one more time. You know, It's like a person out in a desert wandering around who suddenly, you know, found an ice chest with the with the diet coke and it or something. I mean, you know, it would be fair to say that some of the evolutionary thinking that in the gene centric era was really not friendly to the idea of variation selection in a

lifetime the individual and as being important number one. But number two is, you know, there is kind of a David. I'm sorry to say it this way, but some of the evolutionists are mean. I mean I go to their websites and stuff, and I say, how do you do it? I mean, goll Lee, you know, they these not down, drag out fight you know, Stephen J. Gould, you know, and Dawkins and you know, and some of this it's no holds barred. It's like in order to watch cage

fighting or something acts acade of a cage fighting. Well, you know, I'm like, suddenly, well and most evolutionists literally I had literally had laughed in my face. I mean I went to UCSD, I tell this story. And I'm giving a talk this is twenty five years ago to the behavioral geneticist. For some reason they asked me to do it, and and the students are there, and I'm saying,

you know, it is always a gene environment interaction. Always it's you might as well say one hundred percent of the variants if you add in you know, just the right time frame. And the students literally laughed out loud in my face in a talk. What Yeah, because if you do classic behavioral genetics with G and E G TIMEZ with this, never interacts. Yeah, never interacts works. But of course, I mean you can say things like there's

no interaction with skin color and what. And it's because wherever you go, if you're the blackest of the black person, prejudice is there. It doesn't matter if you're raised together or raised apart. I mean, idea that this isn't well. And then you show if you take something. My classic example is physical attractiveness. It's the most powerful demographic variable, even more than gender and race. But we've done the studies.

If you do a randomized trial, you know with repair, you know, with plastic surgery, in almost every area where physical attractiveness looks like it's genetic. If you do it through classic things, all of the stuff identical twins, hello, they're more likely to look similar is called genetic because all of this social variance that comes from you you're ugly and you're pretty, which is huge. It's called genetic because it's a genetic input to a consistent social system.

But when you step out of it and you say, well, let's do a randomized trial plastic surgery, it turns out all those effects go away, so they can't be genetic. And that the way that people mean it, and you know, good behavioral geneticist. Well, if you get them in the corner and you fight for half an hour and you say, they'll always admit this is true. They always say yeah,

but it's not very plausible. It's not very important because and they forget that like some of the early work they didn't even keep track of fraternal twins whether or not they're the same gender. In the early work, they didn't even keep track of male female female versus male male versus male female. And so I'm getting a little excited here, but it's great. No, I feel like we need to do another podcast chat don't behavioral genetics. Now

I'm realizing as well. But do you want to find somebody with this level of sophistication who is saying something very different about the behavioral folks and who stop and say, well, wait a minute, that kind of fits my way of It was enough to make me weep in the same way that a thirsty person would weep to find a glass of ice water. David is very special in general, but also within the field of evolutionary psychology. So I can totally see, you know, the resonance that you had.

I can resonate with that resonance that you had. You know, I do have some criticisms of what has been dubbed by what's his name, He calls it pop evolutionary psychology. Who dubs it that? What's his name, David Buller? David Buller, yeah, David, Yeah, So he refers to pop evolutionary psychology, and I think there is something there that there are some really misguided

kind of theories within within the field. I mean, obviously the whole field of evolutionary psychology is not perfect, right, So how would you distinguish yourself, your perspective from the sort of pop idea of you know, we only evolved these models in this certain timeframe, that we're not still evolving that all these other kinds of chrisms that he kind of raises about about what he calls pop evolutionary psychology, Well, okay, so there's more than one thing that needs to be said.

David Buller's book was a great book, by the way, but I could acknowledge that without trashing evolutionary psychology. And I think that the accusation that evolutionary psychology is bad science is itself bad commentary. And you know, I'm always reminded social Darwinism, I mean, evolutionary thought has suffered under the labeled majority of label of social Darwinism for a whole century. That's a load of shit too. That's a

real bogey man. And we have to be vigilant against the sort of bogey man dismissals of what often ends up being just perfectly fine science. I mean, give me a break. These are articles that make it through the peer review system. They appear in fine journals, and so why would you call that junk science when they're actually part of the peer of view system. David Schmidt, who's another evolutionary psychologist that I admire. He has a wonderful article in this view of life on The article is

titled yes but in fact. So the idea is that says, oh, yes but some critique, But when more studies are done, it's oh yes bot and there's nothing but a series of yes butts in order to maintain this position that there's something junkie about evolutionary psychology. So in evolutionary psychology, there's a very very important baby in the bath water. And what David Buller was doing was I think he

was separating the baby in the bath water. And what we need to do is we need to recognize that most important schools have thought have a baby in addition to them bathwater. The idea that some important school of thought would arise and smart people would develop it and so on, and there'd be no baby whatsoever. Yeah, there's

an evolutionist named aj Kin. He was an ecological geneticist way back, and he has this quote that I have on my door, which is only the shallowest mind can believe that in a great controversy, one side is mere falling. So as we talk with each other, let's look for the baby and aggregate the babies and go out the badwaters.

It's good. So why don't we, in the remaining time we have here in this conversation then focus on some of these really great ideas in this volume that you two edited, because I think that these are examples of good science, of a good application of your perspectives. We can start with I like Duckworth's chapter, So Renee Duckworth.

She put forward this metaphor, the skeleton metaphor. You know that in order to be flexible, we need a skeleton, but a skeleton is inflexible, and so inflexibly go hand in hand. That's that's the most wonderful thing to say that in the book. And isn't that isn't that a wonderful the position of ideas, It's really wonderful, and it's dovetails with your immune system analogy as well. Can we talk about our chapter reconciling the tension between behavioral change

and stability. I'm really interested in this tension within my own field of personality psychology because at the highest level of the personality structure, we have plasticity and we have stability. Those are the big two that lie above the Big five. And you know, if we have too much stability, then we're not going to change and grow. But if we're always exploring growing, we lose a sense of like who we are, and you know, things can get very anxiety

written fast. So I was wondering if you coul talk a little about how you're both protective before we do that, let me just say, for the benefit of your audience,

the structure of the book is an innovative structure. What we did was we picked a number of major topics and for each of those topics, we commissioned authors from contextual behavioral science and authors from evolutionary science to at separate chapter, and then we had them read each other's chapters and they have a dialogue which was moderated by other Stephen myself, and then those dialogues appeared along with the two chapters that repeated for a number of different topics.

So I think that makes it a quite original and its organization and a lot of fun to read, basically because you're here first one side, then the other than the conversation. So now let's proceed to Rene's Oh yeah, agreed, Jack, very innovative. And you also say in your book that you didn't tell the authors what to write, and so all these kind of linkages and things just organically came together.

So I wanted to raise that point as well. We did it essentially as a kind of a grand task because we didn't know this could have really gone badly. As we say, here's a topic, very general topic. You write about it the way you want to write about from here, and by golly, these things overlap. Not in a way that me too is but actually there's a

dynamic kind of thing. You could see both sides. And you know this quote that David was talking about of really coming into this, I heard I was criticizing being mean and that I was talking about the psychometrician and favor geneticis a kind of a mean way. But it wasn't that that's wrong. It's just that there's additional ways

to look at it. And you know, I think what was neat about the skeletal metaphors that reminds you of this combination very much like the immune system example, and in different context, you take something like a concept that's very close to my heart, let's say psychological flexibility defined as emotional, cognitive openness, attentional flexibility, connection with your values.

It depends on how you measure it. But you can find things like emergency first responders, for example, who are who engage in emotionally suppressive behavior while they're you know, triaging, people who are you know, have massive energies in front

of them. And doesn't that make sense? I mean, would you want your first responder to be crying while they're trying to you know, pick who might be saved with a big auto accident, I'd say no. Go Now, working with them as individuals, I want them to go home and have an area to put their emotions that were there of horror and whatever. But in the situation, I want them to have that kind of intentional flexibility. It might even look like suppression. It might have looked like rigidity.

One of the things I worry about, however, and this will get me over into personality psychology and that earlier ran very easily is in order to detect the differences and importance of it, you have to look within the units you're looking at across time and situation, and in a way the worth methodology that really fits that, and so the whole idea of personality. Let's say you know, it looks like a rigid structure when you go across at one time, Big five, et cetera. Some of that's

built into our language systems. That's remember where Big five came from. We don't have time for that story, but you know it well and how much committed it was to language structures and even English in the way it was originally developed. But when you do that, there's a guy named Molinar at Penn State who's done that looking within individual cross time a whole bunch of people, and

often you don't see those consistencies. You don't see people who have, you know, this Big five attribute this personality in all situations behaving that way, or maybe even in most situations and times. So in order to really balance flexibility and structure, we've got to look at function, context and longitudinal development. And that's inside evolutionary thinking with EVO DEVO and you know some of the things where we really need to do that also in the behavioral science way.

But the point is well taken that it's not all flexibility, it's not all structure. It's both the manically across time to fit context. Well, that is what's distinctive about contextual behavioral science exactly, is it focuses so much on the context, and I think one personality psychologist that got it right was Walter Mischel. I believe I'm saying correctly and an evolutionary terms, what he was saying is is that what people have by way of temperament or personality that's unchanging

relatively unchanging, is a norm of reaction. And the norm of reaction basically specifies different phenotypes for different contexts. So the idea of an individual as a norm of reaction I think captures a stable element and a flexible element, a little bit like the skeleton as being needed for

a movement. Did you see the debates between Walter Michelle and by the way he passed away recently and seymour Epstein, those kind of calastic debates in the seventies on what that personality has a general component or a specific component. Then they quick reconciled it anyway. I found that really stimulating, those core debates, and I think seymour Epstein really was thinking about it, probably even in a better way than Walter. Well,

I think we have more to go on that. I think as we get into a more fine grain, multi dimension, multi level examination, we're going to have to go back and look at some of these classic concepts, and I see it over and over again, some things that we've

settled that they're structural. I'll give one that is actually very dangerous for the evolutionists, and it touches the behaviorist because Dickerenstein was even involved with it is the you know, the Bell curve kind of thing around the issue of intelligence. And I am not at all convinced that we know

which parts are fixed and stable. We're back to the same kind of thing having to do with behavior genetics I was talking about before, And because you can create extraordinary environments, and when extraordinary environments can be created in many different ways, and so you should never ever say this is it, because you don't know if you don't

know the range of things. So if you take let's say the uh, you know, the fixed patterns that are there in you know, the characterological traits that are shown maybe even at birth of a particular individual, Yes, but under extraordinary circumstances those can be different. And so you look at things you know, like you know, twin studies with schizophrenia or something, and you say, okay, well this

person developed schizophrenia. This one didn't there are identical twins. Yeah, but look at what happened to this person, and you begin to dive into, for example, the kind of life trajectories that can take a tendency of predisposition and turn it into a full kind of behavioral phenotype. I think we have to do the same thing with intelligence. I think we've gotten way too into only looking at the level of the collective and the behavior analysts over here.

I mean, just say a little bit of chest something, you know, we no four or is it five ranimized trials, so we can go in and with fluid intelligence the part that doesn't, you know, move. We're moving these things by five, six, eight nine, depending on the study points, and people don't yet believe it. And I'm not yet ready to let my hair on fire, and I don't

have any anyway, but I'm beginning to think. You know, the way they're doing it is by pushing fluency of relational learning, you know, the stuff coming out of relational frame theory, which is a very weird thing to do. Nobody's going to do that in education. You know, if I were you and you were me, what would I have if they were yesterday and yesterdayday, and I were you and you were me, what would I have? And you're never going to do that in a normal academic classroom.

It looks nuts, But if you understand the unit, you can create extraordinary environments that maybe maybe I'm not declaring when I'm just saying, and it possible, and there are some studies there, so this isn't crazy. So how much is the skeleton, how much is the soft tissue? Let's find out. And I think we're going to be one of my favorite examples of what was taken to be

a not quite a difference. It's the marshmallow test. And so the marshmallow test is supposed to be something that if the kid fails the marshmallow tests and that predicts life outcomes. Said, that study hasn't replicated recently. Well, the study I'm thinking of, and I don't remember the author, but what they did was they basically they built Yes, I think, so go ahead. No, No, this is more recent.

So it's a woman at the University of Rochester and what she observed in the field and an inner city neighborhood was a little girl was sitting on the on the stairs and someone gave her an ice cream cone, and before she got a first leg, someone else took away the ice cream cone, and so she had a ha moment, and she did a set of experiments in which she would do the marshmallow test, but in one condition she would build up trust with the little person

that established a trusting relationship versus not after you're first establishing a trusting relationship. Then the same kids that would fail the marshmallow passed it with ease. So what was stable was the trusting nature of their social environment. That's what didn't change. It wasn't their lack of flexibility as as an individual. There's a good example. I think of something that's environmental which is misinterpreted as something which is

a stable property of the individual. And you'd a great jump in because it's such a good point. I mean, even the skeleton example, the Evo Devo folks, if you have some early, early injury to your skeletal structure, you can often end up with a modification that allows you to work perfectly well, such an injury to your hip.

I mean, some of the Evo Devo work with the animals are set up so that they can adjust to injury, even to what's structural and consistent in such a way as to adjust to that and find a way to a four legged animal. Let's say I've had a severe injury to function pretty well with one limb that's injured.

And it's a metaphor for the fact of what point I was trying to make, which is that if you think in a nynamical system way, a multi dimensional, multi level, you should never turned it into tinker toys or billiard blocks. It's never a cartoon. And that doesn't mean everything is modifiable within the lifetime the individual doesn't mean that. But the you know, evolutionary science is the science of change

and stability emerging in the context of change. So it's a dialectic and you never should sort of draw a circle and say this is in this camp. No, it may be able to move. And when you start thinking now with application, you know, I started thinking, and you

raised a good point about social daring wisinism. But on the one hand, on the other hand, until there's an applied evolutionary psychology that tells the public that not only can this help you understand life, this view of life is a powerful one and help us as a human community change areas where we all know we need to change around, you know, issues like racism or stepping up to the challenge of climate change and things of that kind.

You need an applied evolution in science. And you know, you don't have to go too far when you get into a cartoon like evolutionary thinking of people making evolutionary appeals to things that if you step back and look at it, our gender biased or racist or classists or I mean and so. And you know, there are really good evolutionists there in the past, and even Darwin made a few mistakes and how we talked about the Maori

and things like that. So you know, I think we have to sort of step back and take where we are now in evolutionary thinking and really bring it into the life of the human community. Because the reason why people don't reject it when we step forward is I think people kind of go like, oh, that makes sense, and they've been for it. You know, Darwin's not going away. Evolution's not going away. Everybody knows that. Everybody who's thoughtful knows that. But it's only we only had one hundred

years or so to adjust to it. You know, we need some time, and we're starting to and I think when we finally get to the point where we can walk into a legislature and we can say, you know what, we can do something about that game. But you know, we could do something about those poor performances, and those are now appearing, and David's been a champion of it, and they're not cartoons. They say something that we there's a signal and noise that we can chase and maybe

make a difference. I'd like to I'd like to make sure to provide a capsule description of accept some commitment, therapy or training as a managing the evolutionary process, if I might and just good time. Well, it might have perfect, it might have better come earlier in the in the interview, but better late than never. So one fundamental insight about evolution is that what counts as adaptive in the evolutionary sense of the word often deviates from what counts as

adaptive in the normative sense of the word. Where we might like an a normative sense for us as individuals and as cultures is frequently different than what is adaptive in the evolutionary sense, and so many of our problems, many of what we regard as pathologies, are actually adaptive in the evolutionary sense of the word. So for example, being nice to your family members becomes nepotism, being nice to your friends becomes cronyism and corruption. At the individual level,

if I'm just avoiding anxiety attacks, that's adaptive. If I'm depressed and I don't make use of opportunities, that's adaptive. So so many things that we want to change the fact are what these evolutionary processes, whether they're modular involved in the past or whether they're reinforced in the present, are basically evolutionary processes taking us where we don't want

to go. And so what therapy is and what training is is managing the evolutionary process of evolutionary processes in order to align adaptations in the evolutionary sense of the word within the normative sense of the word. And when you look at what acceptance and commitment training does, it does exactly that. So here's my understanding of acceptance and

commitment training speaking in front of the master. So in the first place, and this could be done by individuals or groups, there's a focusing on what your true goals are, what do you really want to accomplish in your life? And so this in evolutionary terms, becomes the target of selection we have like artificial breeding. Basically we've chosen a target of selection which is our normative goal. Then we

focus on variation. And when people are in need of therapy or training, often it's because their behavioral repertoire has become fused around their various problems. There are not much variation there. And so what the therapeutic process does is it encourages flexibility that would be variation, and then to select what takes us towards our valued goals. Even if

some things won't change. So it might be that you won't get rid of your panic attack, let us say, but nevertheless, is there a way that you can work around it in order to achieve your valued goals? And so therefore there's a recognition of inflexibility, that there's some things that won't change or won't change easily, but nevertheless we still can change in the ways that matter most

to us. And so this is a just as a very short description of how we can envision the process of training or therapy as a managed evolutionary process at the individual level, or just as much at the level of groups and even large scale populations. If I can

build on that. You know, the act folk consciously have tried to do this, and then you know, have principles around variation and selection and retention, you know, building habits and context, building at tension and from a conscious point of view, and dimensions you know, being concerned about you know, your emotions, thoughts, and motivation, sense of self at such

a important dimensions and levels. Being concerned about yourself you know, physically and your health and sleep patterns and so forth, and socially your relationships, the groups you and those six variations, selection, retention in context at the right dimension and level is my kind of cheat sheet version of evolutionary thinking. And what when you get to that level and then you

look at behavior change. Part of the exciting thing I think for evolutionists if they see it, and for behavioral scientists, if they realize they've been doing it, is that we have all along been doing applied evolution science in the behavior change fields. And it's only because we haven't been thinking about that way that we failed to notice it. And I'm involved in a project right now that's an

attempt to prove that. And what we're doing is we're looking at every single study on psychological intervention ever done by every psychotherapy, every behavior change method that we can find and list that had a randomized trial, whether treatment is usual or a wait list, compared to your active intervention that claimed mediation, that claimed statistical tests of the functionally important pathways to change. And we've started out with

fifty five thousand studies. We're looking at everyone multiple times and we're down now to it looks like we have to score about a thousand studies. But important part of it is, though we're trying to do, is score it in terms of a system. We've published it in an article just came out to say we as Stefan Hoffman as team and myself at Boston University in behavior research

and therapy. It just came out or the some online version we're looking at just in the words of the people who brought this thing to the table, is that particular concept one that makes sense in terms of encouraging healthy variation, encouraging healthy context sensitivity, altering the selection criteria, you know, looking at levels of analysis and looking at the social context, et cetera, or the physical health context, or you know, putting in practices that would lead to

retention of games, and so far it looks like we can do it. It looks like we can take basically everything, say it this way, grandiose way, everything we know about the functionally important processes of change that have been seen in a randomized trial in the history of science from a psychological point of view, and score it all by evolutionary criteria in a pretty reliable way. And if you can do that, it means that thirty five thousand feet

we've been an evolutionists from the beginning. And part of me wants to say, of course, because exactly what scientific principles do is they explain in this broad scope but high precision way, what is already going on. I mean, you didn't have to know about the theory relativity for those principles to apply to what you're doing. They apply to what you're doing in the same way evolutionary principles at the level of any system that you're trying to change,

whether it's an individual or a group, a culture. You know, your body being a functioning better health and dealing with cancer ontom out of any system is going to alter the processes that explain how complex systems evolve. And so knowing that when we know that. Boy, are we going to do better at that? I would say, you think? I mean part of is what happens with principles is once you get beyond just techniques and you start seeing principles,

then you begin beIN to manage these processes. And managing evolutionary processes is what we've been doing in the behavioral sciences from the beginning, but we just didn't have a way of talking about it until a multidimensionality and multi level thinking got in there enough to give us a place at the table. Wow, you too, What a team? What a team? You know? I said this last time to you, Stephen, when you were on my podcast last time.

I said, you're this rare combination of sheer nerdiness plus a real humanity, a real true caring and compassion for the betterment of the world. And David, your research program throughout the years has been very pro social lens, the evolutionary lens, but the pro social aspects. So what a combination you two are. Can I end this chat today with a quote from you, Stephen that I just absolutely adore, and I just want to read it to the audience.

As scientists, I don't think we should be ashamed of saying that we're interested in developing knowledge that has a pro social impact. We want to play science in the high integrity way science should be played. But the purpose of playing the game that way is to develop knowledge that can be vetted against pro social criteria. It is entirely within our prerogative as human beings to say this is what we want to do with our careers and

lives with this wonderful tool called science. In an abstract sense, sciences values free, but in the lives of scientists and of the consumers of scientific knowledge is anything but. So thank you both for joining your superpowers together to increase knowledge in a way that will increase pro sociality in the world. That does. And by the way, our next book is called pro Social. We just finished it, so

we do yes with our colleague Paul Atkins. Yep, we got to just say, so that's our next book Social Oh wonderful. Well, I can't wait to read that one and devour that one as well. And there's a lot of topics obviously we couldn't cover today, but for listeners who want to dive into this grand synthesis for a wide range of things that we didn't talk about, like childhood development, for the development of empathy, for organizational development,

for understanding the evolutionary mismatch of physical and health. These are all just teasers I'm throwing out there. Definitely check out in their books. So thanks again guys for chatting with me today. Good every time. Thank you for having us, Thanks for listening to the Psychology Podcast. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you'd like to react in some way to something you heard, I encourage you to join in the discussion at thus Psychology podcast dot com. That's

the Psychology Podcast dot com. Also, please add a rating and review of the Psychology Podcast on iTunes. Thanks for being such a great supporter of the podcast, and tune in next time for more on the mind, Brain, behavior and creativity m