Cathy Newman and Jordan Petersen on C4 News

Hi ThisIsAStory

Yup, he’s a scientist. But he’s also been a practising clinical psychologist for 25 years, so it’s not like he’s all theory and no real world.

I do recommend his full lectures, because he’s a very good and entertaining lecturer and you learn a lot. Aside from lectures on personality – which is actual science (psychology) – he also does a lecture series on “Maps of Meaning” which is a much more idiosyncratic take on human cultural archetypes, which incorporates a psychology element, but also ancient culture, religious history and art. Fascinating but not really science. I’d go for the psychology first, as then the psychology references in Maps of Meaning will make more sense.

I certainly don’t agree with everything he says, but he’s always interesting, and you can see that he practices what he preaches. He really does seem to care about teaching and motivating his students. And you only have to listen to twenty minutes or so to see that the idea that he’s some kind of right wing political fanatic is ludicrous. Though I should offer a trigger warning for some folk : he does believe that sex is a real concept in biology.

Given how bad TV shows are these days, I’d be quite happy to watch one of his lectures instead. So as well as being a scientist, he’s an entertainer. But I’d say most of all, he’s an antidote to cynicism.

SonicBoomBoom :

“I am interested in exploring his thoughts more but I am very turned off by the idea of his YouTube videos due to the halfwit men who seem to be his fans.”

I recommend you look at his full length university lectures on personality on You Tube, and don’t bother with any of the comments at all. If you go for the short clips you’re liable to miss the context and also get some jerk interjecting his own take. Note that although his You Tube audience is 80% male, his psychology classes are 80% female, and also substantially minority. So you shouldn't assume he's pitching to a white male crowd.

“Women running companies, he says the evidence doesn't support it that conscientiousness, agreeableness and compassion are good traits for success of the company (something like that anyway)”

Not quite what he’s saying. He’s saying that intelligence and conscientiousness predict success in commercial life (and in academic life etc) and that there’s no difference between the sexes on these. Except –possibly – there may be a greater variance on intelligence for men than women. (More male geniuses and more male dopes.) The sex differences come on two different traits – agreeableness (of which compassion is a subset) and neuroticism (sensitivity to negative emotion.) Both of these are negatively correlated with success in commercial life, and both have a modest male – female difference (men less, women more.) This was one of the points CN misunderstood, or rather talked over without listening. Female disadvantage in the competitive business scrabble comes from agreeableness and neuroticism, not intelligence or conscientiousness.

Note that the stuff about high end jobs – it mostly being a small minority of men who are crazy enough to sacrifice everything else for their careers, with hardly any women being that crazy – hasn’t got anything to do with the gender pay gap discussed. Which was about sex differences in median pay, not mean pay.

On that, if CN had been listening, she would have discovered that his actual point was that there were lots of reasons for the gap, one of which was agreeableness. But that’s only a small factor. There are lots of other factors, including

• experience (see gaps for babies and a bigger female role in child rearing) for example the pay gap is much smaller for people in their twenties, before many women acquire their maternity disadvantages
• job choice (eg men do virtually all the dangerous outdoor jobs, and most of the jobs with unsocial hours)

So there’s lots of reasons for a pay gap. But of the 9% she quoted, after you’ve accounted for the other causes you’re only left with 1-2% for actual sex discrimination. Which is a bad thing, but also a rounding error.

Thanks Lee, I hadn't heard any other stuff from him so that's interesting. It reinforces my impression that he was speaking as a scientist - hypothesise, build evidence base, review and refute/ refine. And being wrong is useful information, but requires evidence.

But CN didn't seem to want the evidence to get in the way of her convictions and either couldn't or wouldn't understand the stats. Like the sex factor only explaining 1/20th of the pay differential and being A factor but not THE explanation.

Pricklyball said : “I suspect the Petersons of this world look at say, the preponderance of women in "caring" professions like nursing, and the dearth of women in STEM subjects, and say "well, we have an education system which allows women to go into STEM (equality of opportunity), so this just shows they don't want to (no equality of outcome, but for perfectly acceptable reasons)." Whereas I want to know how many of those girls were given dolls rather than lego technics, laughed at at school for showing an interest in maths, couldn't stand the sexism and sexual harrassment as the only girl in their GCSE computer coding classes...”

This is a perfectly reasonable hypothesis, but when confronted with evidence from different societies it struggles mightily. Peterson mentioned the Scandinavian paradox which is that those societies which have tried hardest and for longest to get rid of social and cultural sex biases, are the ones that have got the biggest occupational sex differences. Nobody expected this, nor desired it. The expectation was that because – it was assumed - it’s society/culture not biology that influences occupational sex disparity, as you level the socio-cultural playing field, the occupational sex disparity will diminish and eventually die. But it doesn’t, it gets bigger. The most obvious inference is that the basic assumption – that it doesn’t have anything to do with biology – is wrong. Get rid of socio-cultural sex bias and what you’re left with is biology.

Now you may have a different explanation. Fine. Offer it up. But the Scandinavian paradox disproves the original simpler theory that you are espousing – that it’s all down to dolls and lego. Cos when you give Swedish girls lego and Swedish boys dolls, the girls still want to be nurses and the boys still want to be engineers.

YippeeKiYayMelonFarmer asks :

“Does he argue that agreeableness is innate rather than socialisation? I didn't hear him make this argument during the interview clip I saw.”

Not in this clip. But if you go to Youtube and look up his university lectures on personality you’ll see that he hypothesises that greater agreeableness in women (on average) may be innate to some extent – an evolutionary adaptation to the female role in the mother-child dyad. Essentially :

1. agreeableness is (or at least includes) the tendency to feel that other people’s interests are equal in importance to, or even more important than, your own interests
2. females have always had the predominant role in caring for small infants
3. since human infants are extremely vulnerable (compared to infants of most other mammals) human mothers who don’t treat their infant’s interests as commensurate with their own interests are liable to have more children dying
4. hence more agreeable women are liable to leave more descendants (even if their agreeableness sometimes harms their own interests)
5. although human males do participate in child rearing to some extent, their role has always been much more limited, and kicks in more when the child has been weaned and is therefore less vulnerable and less dependant on the mother. Hence there's no reason for evolution to tilt male personality in the direction of agreeableness. So there are evolutionary reasons for differences between the sexes on agreeableness

1. evolution is not - or not yet - clever enough to switch female agreeableness on and off according to whether they're dealing with their infant or somebody else. An agreeable person tends to be generally agreeable.

He offers it as a hypothesis not as an established fact.

It was great fun, but a bit of a shame that there wasn't another 20 minutes of it. Cathy Newman had clearly run out of prepackaged talking points, and in another 20 minutes she'd have been forced to listen to his responses and engage with what he was actually saying rather than her inaccurate "so you're saying" summaries of what he was saying. She's obviously pretty smart and combative, and so a real conversation with her taken past her talking points would have been interesting. I disagree with the notion that she was out of her depth and that it was a train wreck. If it was a contest, sure, she would have been a long way second. But I'm not sure we should see it as a contest - it's an opportunity to learn something. I'm sure most viewers learned something, and I expect both participants learned something too. Cathy N will have learned something about interviewing smart people and Peterson will have learned something as an interviewee. If you look at old interviews he did a year ago, it's obvious that he's improved.

No he's not. But I wouldn't get into an argument with him.

Interesting Red. Except I think CN performed poorly because of her content.

Actually in the context, if it had just been tone and style, I'd have been even more disposed than normal to thinking 'typical - bloke is vocal / assertive etc and it's seen as authoritative, woman is labelled hysterical / shrill / stroppy etc'. But actually I don't think CN looked any of those things - and she's highly experienced and poised as an interviewer - I just thought she looked a bit intellectually limited.

Derren ....sod off autocorrect..

You make him sound like Dr Mesmer meets Darren Brown.

I find he reminds me mostly of my nan.

sonicboomboom

Most of his videos are just him giving lectures at his university

No. I'm saying that what he said will have had extra power to anyone it chimed with, regardless of whether it was right or wrong.

Its also very difficult to interview anyone who speaks like this. It makes most styles of interview look weak.

Unless you are familiar with it, you are going to look poor in comparison as a result. Even good interviewers who normally have good technique and come up well against difficult interviewees.

His low tone, anyone who speaks in a way that isn't similar look more combative. And it creates a frustration too, which manifests itself in heightening that effect.

I felt uncomfortable watching it. It wasn't from what was said by either party. It was from the way it was said.

My point is, who do you think would do a better job?

I doubt it was because Cathy Newman was poorly prepped. Its more that this guy is exceptional in provoking the response he wants from others around him.

I enjoyed the interview too. I am interested in exploring his thoughts more but I am very turned off by the idea of his YouTube videos due to the halfwit men who seem to be his fans.

Pay gap - I think he needs to dig a little deeper into himself.

Women running companies, he says the evidence doesn't support it that conscientiousness, agreeableness and compassion are good traits for success of the company (something like that anyway). I'd argue that he cannot make that judgement as there aren't enough women there yet. And when they do get the jobs it's usually following a massive fuck up (by a man) so it's not a like for like comparison.

Also, were there not studies that showed women look for long-term stable growth, whereas men want short term massive wins, and then they run before the house of cards falls down? So I guess it depends on what you consider success. It's no surprise which sex were the captains of industry in 2007-8.

I watched the full interview and thought she was a bit lost with him, he has very compelling and seemingly reasoned responses.

And actually I took away a few things from him - YES I am too agreeable at work. I went off googling him and watched a video where he said "organisations employ conscientious and agreeable middle aged women and exploit them with their over commitment and lack of complaint in doing more work than others"

I recognise that in myself. He does a lot of work with women to be less agreeable. It is a bit LeanIn but with something added, as in another video he talked about connecting with your cruel side, not being cruel but actually embracing the capacity to be cruel. On first glance this sounds horrific, but women are socialised to never look at their dark side and I'm interested in that.

He also said that the competitiveness in men to get to the top is essentially underwritten by physical violence and strength. Even in the corporate world, the underlying male vying is based on the possibility of a fight. Depressing but I agree. I probably call it cock waving at the moment, but I think that's too kind / agreeable as a description.

I'm trying to understand his position on feminism and 'natural hierarchies' not sure I've got it yet.

Interesting

So, can you give us one thing he was wrong about redtoothbrush? Or are you, like the interviewer, just throwing random stuff in?

Close you eyes and think of an American Televangelist.

Same shit. But for a MRA.

They were trying to get him to say something which they could edit down and make him look bad, he was wise to choose his words carefully. The interviewer kept misrepresitng what he said all the time... every other question was "so your saying this....(misquote). It was a ridiculous interview

I think CN let herself down by being utterly incapable of understanding basic statistics, misquoting him to set up a strawman she could argue with and oversimplifying.

I think JP came out well because he was calm (although clearly has controlled fury about libertarian threat to language in Canada) and corrected her misquotes clearly and simply. And also because he retained perspective to laugh gently at himself too.

I think CN is intelligent so not sure what was on with her prep/briefing. But I also think she was so sure her perspective is right that she failed to engage properly with him.

And agree with posters, I think he was often clearly describing evidence, population tendencies and social phenomena, not making a comment about what should occur. I actually thought I'd really enjoy working with him as a woman colleague.

He was definitely choosing words carefully, no doubt. No idea if that makes it nlp or what his motivation for doing so was.

I think he spoke slowly and deliberately because he was thinking carefully about what he was saying, the choice of words used- as interviewer was intentionally trying to misrepresent what he was saying at every turn.

red

That makes sense

I thought it was just me...or that there was something wrong with him

I found his arguments quite clear but willing to look into neuro linguistic speech patterns.

Erm, if I'm not mistaken this guy was using Neuro-linguistic programming speech patterns.

The method and pattern with which he spoke was not natural. Its deliberate. Its controlled. And its controlling.

Against that I am not surprised at anyone struggling to interview.

I got the impression watching the interview that she had been given a brief beforehand- being that she had to cause him to slip up and say something foolish. The means to this was by blatant twisiting of words, talking over him and putting words in his mouth.