Joseph Henrich: prediction

Transcript context

…Right. There’s a lot of copying and mimicry amongst people who are prestigious . . . you’re prestigious, so I’ll mimic you. But what if a person who lacks prestige — there’s a phrase that I’ve come across recently called “damaged masculinity.” What would happen to those people in their little tribes or whatever, and what would that cause them potentially to do? One of the things that comes up in polygyny research: When you have high rates of polygyny, you get this group of low-status males. In order to increase their status, they have to take big risks. They go into a mindset where they’re willing to do anything that’ll allow them to hop up into the higher-status states. When you get really low-status males, you might get a lot more risk-taking, steep temporal discounting, a psychological shift that gives you a chance to possibly climb the status hierarchy because you could determine, “I’m not going anywhere unless I do something big in order to get into that higher status. ” I think there’s some evidence out there for that. Next question.…

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