Peterson on Gender Differences and Societal Risks

yeah well i mean the the gender issue is really an interesting one because one of my professional domains of expertise is individual differences i'm i'm a personality psychologist and so i know the gender difference literature and it's it's a very solid literature

well first of all it's very solid it has a 30-year history once per psychologist got the personality models down so that would be the big five model all empirically derived straight statistics right brute force empiricism nobody had a theoretical axe to grind with the big

five except to say maybe there are human traits maybe they're encapsulated in language we can

whole ideology so very very neutral as far as ideologies go five traits emerge okay are there differences between the sexes turns out there are all right they're not massive although if you sum them across all the traits you can separate men and women with about 75 accuracy so

it's not trivial but you have to sum across all the traits then another question comes up well are those differences sociocultural or biological okay we can test that we'll go around the world we'll look at cultures we'll rank order them in terms of the gender

equality of their sociological policies we can do that with broad agreement from the right and the left then the hypothesis would be if gender differences decrease among more egalitarian societies then the gender differences are sociocultural or at least more

sociocultural that's exactly the opposite of what was found repeatedly that's pseudoscience it's like no that's mainstream psychology those papers have thousands of citations and right the average humanities paper has zero citations right and then the next most

common one has one three thousand that's an that's an unbelievable classic and

fact the fact emerges despite their ideological presuppositions okay so it's well known that the social sciences and the humanities have a have a left tilt and a lot of that's temperamental and the tilt has become more pronounced but as jonathan heidis pointed out there are

no conservatives among social personality or or or none to speak very few vanishingly few and if the field has a bias it is definitely and indisputably a left-wing bias okay so you have to fight that if you're if you're a scientist right even if you're

a left-wing scientist you have to fight that because you want to get to the facts it was these social scientists who generated the data that suggested that the gender differences not only were real but that were bigger in egalitarian societies they didn't do that to grind

their ideological acts because their ideological presupposition was no no you

women get more the same it's like nope they get more different oh hmm isn't that something and so then there's a corollary there which is all right you could still say and they're kind of pushing in this direction in scandinavia boys and girls are different

men and women are different it looks biological but because people are malleable you could push the sociocultural structure harder and harder to minimize the biological differences okay well first of all maybe and maybe not maybe you'd get a rebound

and they'd get even like the kids would rebel that could easily happen but let's say okay you could the problem with that is is that if you seed that much power to the state like you're basically giving the state the right to socialize your kids right it's like you you really

really you really want to do that i mean

so people aren't going to give up their children to the state and thank god for that well i mean this is one of the big questions that we were discussing earlier is that we were talking about the polarization and politics between right and left and obviously you're

you're a psychologist you're a philosopher but you've been dragged almost kicking and screaming into this political sphere because everything has been so politicized and so when you say when you cite social science statistics and they're scientifically based you're

called a racist you're called the sexist you're called the homophobe and you're called exactly so so why is it that so why do you think it is that so many folks on

fact are so willing to throw those out the window uh the minute that it becomes politically inconvenient well because imagine that cognitive systems or an interpretation of the world has levels they're axiomatic levels some fundamental presuppositions are more

fundamental than others and you could say well the leftists historically maybe because of their atheistic rationality are more on the side of science than say the fundamentalists of of any sort but when push comes to shove you find out how the axioms are are nested

there's deeper axioms underneath that which is that all hierarchies are based on power and all power plays are based on group identity tribal identity essentially and that the entire history of the world is nothing but a power play between between

these different identity groups it's like okay well if the science indicates that some of that's wrong then do you alter those beliefs or do you alter the science and the answer to that question is well it depends on how you've hierarchically arranged those if the

science is at the bottom then you alter your beliefs right if the scientific facts are the axiomatic substructure then you then you alter your beliefs if your beliefs are the axiomatic substructure then you alter the science well we've seen how that

plays out and one of the things i've tried to do so to speak is to diagnose the axiomatic structure it's like okay what's the what's the metaphysical presumption structure of the radical left well what it is is you're basically

warfare right and the warfare is arbitrary except in so far as it serves your group okay i don't buy any of that i think that's i think that's a route to certain disaster i think it's a degeneration into tribalism and that we will seriously pay for it not only because it

returns us to tribalism and tribes fight as the anthropological evidence for that is overwhelming right tribes fight it doesn't even matter if they're chimpanzee tribes even chimpanzee tribes fight so not only do you re regress to a tribalism but you also invalidate the

one proposition that's been able to help us arise above the tribal which is the idea that the individual should be sovereign and so i think the culture war is about what's the proper framework within which to view human identity and what's the relationship between the

individual and the group in relationship to that identity and the leftist answer is it's all group and it's all power it's like okay did you know that every like on this video creates one additional glorious leftist here don't ask me why that's

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