Cathy Newman and Jordan Petersen on C4 News

[AssignedPuuurfectAtBirth]

Just on. He was saying that people are different due to ' agreeableness, women being more likely to be so; men less so, hence the gender gap

It's the first time I have ever seen Cathy Newman angry. And he was spluttering a bit, first time for him too, for me, I think.

Watch it on + 1

I agree with some of Petersen's views but he didn't come off at all well here

You make him sound like Dr Mesmer meets Darren Brown.

I find he reminds me mostly of my nan.

Derren ....sod off autocorrect..

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Only if the interviewer had an agenda to make his or her guest look bad. I find that Channel 4 adopt this style a lot - endless attempts at building strawmen with "so what you're saying is..." etc. There are no flies on Peterson, so it just didn't work out the way they planned.

I first heard him speak on Monday, and have been catching up with his lectures since. I totally agree with you Lee and find it a shame that people seem so desperate to fit him into their preconceived boxes of what they think he is without bothering to listen to him. Rather like CM

I found out about the Scandinavian occupation differences via the Logical Marcus Twitter account we've mentioned before. I was flabbergasted and I also think it's really interesting.

For me, feminism is about liberating women from patriarchy. It doesn't really matter to me whether, if we ever achieve that, it turns out that men and women really are different from one another, or whether we are the same.

So I don't feel threatened about some of these things that Petersen points out. I think they are quite exciting, actually!

For me, feminism is about liberating women from patriarchy. It doesn't really matter to me whether, if we ever achieve that, it turns out that men and women really are different from one another, or whether we are the same.

*So I don't feel threatened about some of these things that Petersen points out. I think they are quite exciting, actually!

Same. He said "equality of opportunity" (but not necessarily outcome). I agree with that. We DON'T have that opportunity now, and that is what I want.

(I think the measures of success of outcomes are too "male" at the moment though, eg valuing high risk, short term outcomes. I'd like to see success measured over the longer term before someone decides that women aren't as good at it)

"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."

more about that here: nordicparadox.se/

I think the measures of success of outcomes are too "male" at the moment

YES! Another thing about the Scandinavian research is that it shows women tend to favour working with people, while men tend to favour working with things. But society values the professions working with people (eg social work) as lesser - less money, less status too.

If it turns out that women are, by population average, different in some ways to men, the aim of feminism should be to force society to value those things more.

(And always remembering that population averages don't mean individuals. A 6ft 4in woman is still a woman, as is a woman who wants to work with things.)

Langcleg

Force society to value these things more

What do you mean by force?

Surely we can try and encourage society to value the roles that women traditionally fill more, but force? How? Do you mean pay them disproportionately more than they have traditionally received?

I mean campaign for, agitate for, base activism on.

LangCleg : “If it turns out that women are, by population average, different in some ways to men, the aim of feminism should be to force society to value those things more.”

The difficulty is how. And we need to start with how society currently values things. And it isn’t by a group of sinister middle aged men gathering together in a smoke filled room and agreeing “Haha – let’s arrange that secretaries get paid half what electrical power line repairers get paid. That’ll keep us chaps on top !”

These wages are set by the market. If power companies could find some way to get their power lines mended in the wind and rain by paying their men (because they are men) the same as they pay their women (eg secretaries) they’d do it in minus 20 seconds. Nobody has any interest in paying anyone any more than they have to. And correspondingly, if you need someone and they won’t work for you for less than £75,000 a year, you don’t say “Bah humbug, she’s a woman. I’m only going to offer £45,000 even if that means we don’t get her.”

So forcing society to value things in some way that you’d like better means departing from how the market values them. Now, of course, the market goes all over the place as things change. So once we get driverless trucks lots of reasonably well paid jobs that are currently done mostly by men will disappear. And the replacement jobs may be in offices where perhaps women have the advantage. So there’s no guarantee that the market will always pay jobs that men typically do more than jobs that women typically do. But if you want some deus ex machina to magically achieve this result without reference to the market, what is it ? And how are you going to use it without losing all the value of market price discovery ?

LeeMoore - I know! Not easy! Not to mention that many of those jobs working with people are public sector jobs, outside of natural markets (even when marketised under neoliberalism). And we know how public opinion hates public servants earning anything more than a pittance! Not trying to say it's easy. Nothing to do with dismantling patriarchy ever is, is it?!

I think that we are partly presuming a value system that I want to question, namely that money defines value.

One of the things I thought JP helpfully raised around the high 'value' jobs is that only a few men pursue and achieve those either and that depending on the time horizon over which you measure, this may or may not bring happiness or fulfilment and may come at quite high cost relationally etc.

If women are measuring value differently, why are we so sure that restrictive value to the monetisation of the outcome is sufficient? Or is that just a 'masculine' assessment of value?

Only just got around to viewing this.

CN completely fails to engage with Peterson’s argument. She manages to misrepresent or misunderstand almost everything he says. It reminds me a lot of the arguing on here.

You get the impression he was brought on as an easy target for Newman to knock down only to find that he did not take the bait and instead dictated the pace of the interview in a measured manner.

I guess that at least part of it is that she’s used to interviewing politicians who are often speaking complete shit, they know it, she knows it, we know it, but they’ve a party line to toe.

In this case, he’s a scientist and was talking about his own observations which is completely different.

ThisIsAStory : “One of the things I thought JP helpfully raised around the high 'value' jobs is that only a few men pursue and achieve those either and that depending on the time horizon over which you measure, this may or may not bring happiness or fulfilment and may come at quite high cost relationally etc”

JP isn’t an economist (though I don’t think he’s ignorant about it) but I suspect his answer would be psychological rather than economic. He’s very big (and IMHO pretty convincing) on the importance of dominance hierarchies (or if you prefer competence hierarchies.) Male social animals ALWAYS have a dominance hierarchy. In some animals being top of the male dominance hierarchy gives you preferential access to females, by force (eg elephant seals.) You chase the other guys away and the females don’t get a choice of who to mate with. In other animals, including humans, females get to choose who to mate with. And they tend to choose males who are equal in status or higher in status than themselves. So they watch the males battle it out in the male dominance hierarchy, and pick from the top. On average of course. So males at the top of the dominance hierarchy get lots more mating opportunities than males lower down. Thus Hollywood starlet Gretchen marries music producer Carl. Not mailman Alvin. On average. And if Gretchen cheats on Carl, she cheats with movie star Darren, not with grocery clerk Juan.

So human males get a mating reward for being higher in the dominance hierarchy. I believe that statistics bear out the theory – higher status males get more sexual partners than lower status males. So for a male, the reward for working like a maniac to become a partner in a law firm isn’t happiness, it’s nookie. And, for evolutionary purposes, more nookie with more females means more descendants.

But for women more nookie with more men does not mean more descendants. Hence there’s no real evolutionary driver to make women seek higher status. Which is why top women lawyers bail out of the top law firms when they hit 30 – what’s the point of the 80 hour work week ? Surely there must be more to life than this ? And there is. But not for the few guys who want to be No.1 lobster. (Note that the desire to be No.1 lobster doesn't have to involve any conscious calculation that it's going to net you more descendants. If being No.1 does help you net more descendants, then that desire is quite sufficient. After all, actual No.1 lobsters probably haven't studied evolutionary biology. They just fight to get to No.1, and the chicks fall in line.)

Thanks Lee. Economists are pretty terrible at measuring happiness too (hence the recent debate over 'wellbeing index' measurement rather than GDP for international comparison.

I can see JP's logic. I was more engaging at the social theory / feminism angle that if men and women are different, on average, in what they pursue, why do we still evaluate men as doing 'better' out of that because they earn more money, on average, over a lifetime and not consider that women have done 'better' on other scales.

In other words, if men, on average, succeed by spending more time at the office, why is the cliche only on the deathbed that it's understood to be less than all-fulfilling?