Alright. So, I've been thinking long and hard all the way through this course about how I end this course. What, what's the final lecture about? for quite a while there I was thinking it would be about death. [LAUGH] Somehow that seemed like an appropriate way to end a course. it turns out when I did some research on the psychology of death and research related to the psychology of death, there isn't a lot out there. I, I will do a side video on death. It's funny how just the term makes us kind of smile in discomfort. but yeah, I, I will make a side video about that, but I ultimately decided to take a much more positive approach to this. Our last formal lecture together instead talk about love. Get to be Dr Love, for you KISS fans [LAUGH] today. it, it turns out even the, the psychological research on, on love is relatively immature. there isn't a whole lot of it out there yet. but I, I can tell you a few things. and I can tell you a story that I recently was exposed to that still has my head kind of thinking. I'm still trying to figure out what to make of it. so, it won't necessarily be a conclusion about love, but it'll certainly be a thought provoker, I think. So with that, let's do it. Week 8, lecture 8, still kind of yeah. I, I'm going to post a sappy side dish video too, just kind of thanking you guys and, and all that kind of stuff, because it's really been a cool experience. But but I'll try not to be too sappy here, except to say that it's really odd, it's a surreal to think this will be the last time when I do this, for this course anyways. Will there be other MOOCs, I hope so. so, yeah, follow me on twitter at Steve Jordans, I will let you know [INAUDIBLE]. Alright, let's get to the business at hand and the business is love. Alright, where do we want to start? Well, first of all, when you do start looking at the psychology of love, you realize that first, that there's different kinds of love. and it's important to get the distinction between these different kinds of love. And in fact, Sternberg did this analysis whereby he asked people all about their perceptions of love and ultimately did a factor analysis on this questionnaire data that he acquired. And he ultimately came to these three terms: Intimacy, passion, commitment. All three of which he thought were linked to the concept of love, very important to the concept of love. But when combined in different ways suggested different kinds of love. you know, that, that kind of made sense to him. So, these are intimacy, passion, and commitment. And let's just kind of of talk about you know, a couple of these combinations. We can talk about, or we can talk about them in isolation too. Intimacy and isolation, kind of of interesting, kind of weird. So, no passion, no commitment. where might we see that? Well, one, one example that comes to mind for me is, is things like Internet chat rooms or something like that, where, where people can kind of hide behind anonymity. and what sometimes people report is they really enjoy those experiences because they can go and they can talk to another human being. So, so, intimacy, that concept means, you can share things about yourself that you don't, you know, intimate details that you wouldn't normally share. So, let's back up a little bit there. The idea is yes, we're all social beings, but we have this kind of push and pull. We have all our internal thoughts, feelings, emotions. but we live in a social world where only certain expressions are considered acceptable, really. So, many of the thoughts that go on in our minds, many of the things that we've done, or said. Many of the things that we would like to do if given full freedom, we can't do. We can't say, we can't talk about in public without others changing their view of us in a fundamental way that we're not comfortable with. Okay. So, instead what we sometimes do is share some of these things with certain other people, and that's what intimacy is about. Who are these people you share your secrets with? and anonymity allows somebody on an internet site for example, to maybe get into a deep intimate conversation with somebody. because they know that whatever's being said isn't being linked to them personally. The, the anonymous you know, label allows that expression that's much more unbridled, much more uninhibited. but of course, that's a sort of an artificial world where you're able to talk and speak from you know, behind a screen so to speak. In the real world, intimacy usually gets linked to at least one or the other of these. So, if we take intimacy and commitment, something that Sternberg called companionate love. A classic example of that would be your BFF. You know, your real best friend where the second F is critical, because the second F is the forever, the commitment, right? this is somebody that you can be intimate with. You can tell them you know, things that you don't tell everybody else. And you can feel pretty sure, hopefully if it's a good friend, that they will protect your secrets and they won't tell other people. the commitment, I mean you could imagine a very short term friendship, I guess. You could imagine meeting somebody somewhere, and, and you don't think you're ever going to talk to them again, and maybe you could have an intimate discussion with them. But more commonly, we have these friends that we think are going to be friends for a long time. When we need them they'll be there, when they need us we'll be there. That's the commitment part. And so, we link commitment with intimacy, and we have this companionate love. If you link intimacy with passion, now you have romantic love. Okay? So, if there is somebody you find really, really attractive on a sexual, on a physical level and you hook up with them, for lack of a better term, and share a lot of intimate details with them, that's considered romantic love. But you can do this in the absence of commitment, right? You, you, you could do this you know, we think of like a one night stand, but it doesn't necessarily even have to be a one night stand. It could be two people who get together romantically, intimately, but, but then sort of leads separate lives otherwise. and so, we would call this romantic love. let's just keeping going around as we talk about these things. So, if you have passion alone, if you're just passionate with someone with someone, but you're not sharing any intimate details, and you're not giving them any commitment, that's called infatuation, okay. And it's, it's just physical, sexual love. Sort of cold sexuality, if, if you will. that would be passion a lone. Let's do commitment alone and we'll do these final combinations. Commitment alone would be I, I, I think the example we imagine here is the example of potentially a couple who, maybe they were once intimate or maybe they were once passionate. or maybe they never were, but maybe these things have fallen away over time, that they've literally grown to be different people. Or perhaps they have children or, or some other shared interest or they just like the concept of being a couple. So, they have this commitment to each other, they will stay together, but they're really not sharing any intamacy, and they're not sharing any passion. so, this is sometimes called empty love. It's still considered love because it's got the commitment part. Okay? Kind of a, a, a bummer depressing concept I think, but there you have it. Passion and commitment, fatuous love. so, so, the idea here would be somebody that you're very physically drawn to and you have a commitment to, but you're lacking the intimacy. So, again, this is kind of a weird thing. So, so, you have you know, the sex, let's say and you have the commitment. We, [LAUGH] we will have sex for the next ten years, I promise, I'l be around. Something like that, I don't know. But, but that's all it is. It never gets into any deeper sense of sharing personal intimate details or anything like that, so, it's a very shallow, sexual dependable relationship. Okay? I don't know how many of these there are. Now, ultimately, did we do this one? Yeah, we did this one, yeah. This is the friendship. So, ultimately, it's, it's this one in the middle that we all aspire to. mixing all three of these things: intimacy, passion, and commitment. This is what Sternberg called consummate love. and this is the, the goal state, I think we all, you know, we all want someone we can be intimate with. And that we can share these details, that we can share with almost nobody else, but you know, that, that intimacy is critical. passion makes it fun, right. We want the passion there. and the commitment is really you know, the fact that we do things like get married. The whole notion of getting married is cementing that commitment, showing that commitment, that I will be here. That this is not just sorry, romantic love. That it's something more than romantic love. I will, it's a romantic love that will endure is the hope. Okay? So, you know, al, al, already now we see that there are these three alone. There are these three, two way combinations, and then we have in the middle of the combination of all three of these factors. is the ultimate love. So, this analysis kind of at least gives us a good sense of, what are we takling about when we're talking about love? Now, what I want to talk about when we talk about love is mostly the commitment side though with a little bit of intimacy. The passion will be there, but what I'm really curious about is how the commitment has, has come to be the way it has with humans. And I recently read something that, that I want to share because it really has been kind of bouncing around my brain since I read it. It was fascinating. So, there's a book about a fossil find called Lucy. The oldest humanoid fossil ever found, and, and it's relatively complete. There's a lot of parts to it that were found. enough so that they could build sort of ideas of what Lucy looked like. And there's a really fascinating aspect of Lucy that really had anthropologists and, and paleoanthropologists scratching their head, as, I, I say as I scratch my head, literally. So, before Lucy, people used to tell the following story, that humans began to walk upright because sort of three things were happening at the same time. The first was that their frontal lobes were evolving and becoming bigger and bigger and bigger. The second was they started to walk upright, and therefore started to use their hands. And especially given their new cognitive abilities of planning and figuring stuff out, they began using their hands to make tools. and so, this was the real emergence, theoretically of the powerful human species. The one that could actually you know, use weaponry and such. And so, the claim is these things kind of coevolved. Using tools, sh walking upright and developing our frontal lobes. That was the story that everybody believed as absolutely true until Lucy was discovered. Lucy threw a wrench into that. Why did she throw a wrench into that? Well, apparently, I, I don't know the stuff as well as anthropologists do, but if you look at her pelvic region and her hip bone, there's no doubt in anyone's mind that she walked upright. She's very short by the way. She's about three feet tall. a lot of people don't really want to think of her as as a you know, real homo species. Although generally she is accepted by, by very proto homo. So you know, very small, but she walked up right. Okay, cool. However, here's the other problem, from the skull remains and what they're able to reconstruct, they figure she did not have the frontal lobes that we expect. Upright walking, true/g, she walked fully upright, So, she walked fully upright, but did not have frontal lobe develop, developed. And there's no evidence of tool use at this time. And so, we have upright walking by itself. That suggests that it wasn't tool use that really drove humans to stand upright. It wasn't the fact that, hey, we have to free our hands to do stuff. Well, maybe it was freeing our hands, but it wasn't freeing our hands to create tools and to fight. What was it for then? Well, one of the at, at the end of the Lucy book, this mystery kind of hovers over the whole Lucy book. Which is a very book by a very good book by the way. Don Johanson wrote it. He's the dis, the person who discovered Lucy. At, at, near the end of the book, he describes that you know, this mystery's going on, and, and their research lab in, invites somebody named Owen Lovejoy to come and, and talk about his speculations about this. Why was Lucy walking upright? And his speculations map onto reproductive strategies in different animals. And so, many biologists will split animal species, well, split is not really fair because this is really a continuum. But they'll talk about the reproductive strategies of animals as falling along with continuum, where on one end you have what they call the r-strategy and the other the k. I have no idea what r and k I mean, I’m afraid. but the idea here is a typical r would be like a turtle or a shark. what they do. So, let’s think of the, the sea turtle. I don’t know if any of you guys have seen these documentaries where a sea turtle goes and makes a hole in the ground, at the beach somewhere, and then lays hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of eggs in there. There is a backup. Leaves, she's over there. That's it for, that's it for mommy, mommy is gone. Did my job. and then at some point, so, that's the parental care, very little. Okay? In the extreme cases very little, in fact none in the extreme cases. no parental care at all. what happens then if you watch any of these documentaries, well, at some point, all these little turtles start to hatch. And it's, it's either horrific or interesting, depending on your point of view, but they all start trekking their way towards the water. Now, as they do that, all of the birds have a field day. The, this is literally like a buffet time for them. They just swoop down, and they are just eating these turtles. They're grabbing them, they're eating them. so, of the hundreds of turtles that start, very few of them reach the water. Not very few, but you know, many are, are taken out before. So, mortality's high, that's what I'm getting at. Many of them are taken out before they hit the water. and then when they hit the water, there's usually a bunch of sharks waiting for them in the water. They know about these patterns too. And so, even fewer of them actually are able to get by all these predators and actually survive. So, that's the idea of the r strategy. Produce a ton of offspring, and then just leave them on their own. Yes, a whole whack of them will die, but enough of them might make it through all of this to to survive. Okay? Now, this is linked to a couple of other things. Usually small body size. not always. But usually small body size. because there's very little parental involvement, these animals have to mature very quickly. They're on their own at a very young age, so, they mature very quickly. reproduction tends to be very seldom in a lifetime, maybe just once. So, a turtle may just have one of these broods of eggs. I've seen some where it happens much more often than that. But, now, here's sort of a, well, a, a critical point, and especially here. Unstable, favored environment, unstable enough. That, that, that's a little extream to say it that way, but the notion is, because you have so many offspring, so much genetic variability that if the environment were to change in some sudden way. you know, let's say global warming really does kick in to the point where the earth climate changes very dramatically, and therefore water resources, and all these things change very rapidly. If your brood has a lot of genetic variability, then maybe some of them may be able to survive in this new environment. and those some of course will reproduce. and so, if you have hundreds and hundreds or thousands and thousands of offspring, you're very well poised to survive dramatic, unstable environments. because some of your offspring will fit. So, you've, you've got that kind of covered. this is why they tend to be the pioneer species, the earlier species. population size variable. I'm not, I'm not yeah. So, I guess it depends, you know, on the environment in any given time, how many of them there are, or, or are not. Alright. Versus a k-strategy. humans are an extreme, primates are an extreme on the k-strategy. We tend to have few offspring, typically one, occasionally twins, triplets, typically one. parental care, much more. Mortality, well, this is the sort of trade off. You as a parent are very invested in your children, and, and letting them grow. This tends to be more the case of large animals. And this maturity tends to be really late in these cases. I mean, think of a human. A human when, you know, when, 20 years old? When, when does a human fully mature? 25? You know, how many years, how long, how many years before a human could survive on their own? 12, 10, 11, 12? That's a lot of years. That's a lot of time. This ain't no sea turtle. All right. reproduction multiple times across a life span, favored environment: stable. If you're only having very few children, then a dramatic, and this is the point that Owen Lovejoy wanted to stress, a dramatic change in the environment could wipe you out. You, even you as a species. Now humans, there are so many of us that it's a different story, but imagine a small group of primates living in an area. If they are only producing 10 new children a year in their group, in their troop, then if something, some new disease or something hits, it's possible that it could get 'em all. And that makes these high case strategy animals very precarios. And that was Owen Lovejoy's point. and in fact he said, when you're a four legged primate, when you're not standing upright, you're particularly precarious, because you have a child as a mother, you have a child. you have to care for it, care for it, care for it. Eventually it can climb on your back, but you can only really have one kid on your back while you're going around and picking up stuff. And so, you have to wait for that child to get old enough to be on its own, and that takes a long time for these k-strategy animals. but you know, do you want to wait literally 2, 3, 4, 5 years before the female of the species can have another child. and if so, you know, not only do you have very few children at any given point, but, but the rate of new children is very slow. And so, Owen Lovejoy's point with all this, this will come to love; it really will. was that the reason primates started walking upright is because the females could carry more offspring. You could have an older offspring, that you're holding hands with, or in some way controlling, and you could have an infant at the same time. and so, you literally could, could increase the number of children that you could have at a o, over various points. And you know,, think about it now, you see fam, go to the zoo by the way, you see these families. And now a primate couple made, gett back to that. I'm calling humans primates now. A primate couple can have two, three, four, five, six. kind of crazy, youngish children you know, still dependent children at the same time. And that's what Lovejoy stressed. In order for this to work, to use your multiple hands to handle multiple children, you kind of needed to be a couple. Okay? A female cannot hunt and gather, and do other things while caring for all these children. She needs a male to assist, which brings on another interesting thing. So, let me hold that. So, so we have, in order for this approach to work, we need couples. Now, let's contrast that with a different biological thing that is really kind of strange, which is in terms of reproductive strategies of a different sort. For the vast majority of animals, reproduction works like this. Females go into heat once a year. When a female is in heat, every male thinks she's the hottest thing going, every male wants to have sex with her. When she's not in heat, none of the males are interested in her. Okay? So, it's, it's literally all or none. You literally have every male interested in you or none. and so, that is not a con, that's not conducive to love. That's not conducive to coupling, Right? It's conducive to, let's have sex and okay, that's great, thanks. Later, gone. and so, the claim is in order to get these coupling together, you needed males that were interested in a female for more than just mating. You needed some mechanism that would somehow bring a male and female together and keep them together, commitment. Right? Beyond the mating ritual and in fact, throughout a lifespan. maybe this is where things like intimacy come into play. passion as well, by the way. again, female humans are one of the few species, Dolphins are a different one. where females will have sexual interactions for reasons other than procreation. Okay. for most animals, it's only when they're in the heat, only for procreation period. Otherwise, the female is not sexually interested. but for humans females are sexually interested even when they're not ovulating. so, is that the passion part, to kind of keep the male interested a little bit? Was, was that also something that coevolved? So, Lovejoy's story is that a lot of these things, intimacy, so, have this social world. You have you know, these humade, humanoids who are living in big social clusters, maybe somehow the intimacy was, was important. maybe that passion going beyond heat cycles, as it were, was important. And so, he tells the story of, of that being the coevolution. It wasn't hands free to make tools to hunt, it was hands free to hold children. And that some women did that, somehow there was also this, this coevolution of intimacy, of passion that would hold the male into the picture. And that those couples that were able to form, we could call them proto-couples. Those first few that actually stayed together as a couple and raise children as a family, that there was a reproductive advantage to doing that. That they were able to have more children. and the children were more likely to survive. and those children of course would have inherited that tendency to couple for life. So, the claim is that is what drove the upright walking of human beings. Love, and that love is now critical to us for all of those reasons. And allows us to have this k-strategy and make it work. Allows to kind of you know, yes, yes, somehow not have many offspring, invest in them heavily, but still have more than you could if you did not walk upright. And, and that love was a critical thing for all that. Again, I'm still thinking all that through. right. So, so, these were the aspects I meant to highlight. Anyway, onwards. Alright, so, the notion then is that love really kind of combines a number of aspects. There's the passion, the physical. So, you know, I, I sometimes like to think about it this way when I think about it. Why is it that you, I mean, you yourself. Go walk on the street and, and go look around and say, of the people I'm, I'm seeing, who do I think I could be married to. You know, who do I think, if the circumstances were right, I could literally stay with. and, and be committed to. And you'll notice that you know, physical characteristics are important. And that's the first step. So, we talked about attraction, I did a lecture on attraction. There's a lot more of psychology of attraction. That's important. Right? There are physical things. But then once you get to know somebody, there are psychological aspects. And that's more of the intimacy. And these two seem to have to be in place before somebody will do that critical third step of commitment, full-out commitment. and so, there are some books highlighting the importance of intimacy. To go from the passion, the physical to the psychological. And the critical role that intimacy plays in order to bring you potentially to that next step of commitment and love. Alright? So. yes, I wanted to just highlight this respect. Remember I made fun of John Lennon in saying Aretha had it right. You don't need love, you need respect. Respect is also critical for love, absolutely critical. There's a fascinating little study, there's a book called Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell. he talks about all these little studies that suggest how, how quickly humans can pick up on certain things. And what one of the studies he talks about is a study on marriage, where a guy is able to look at a video of, of couples interacting and very quickly and with high accuracy tell you whether they are going to make it or not. Whether they are going to split up. And the classic thing shows they are not going to make it is what I'm showing you right here. this, this, this especially, condensending kind of look, rolling the eyes. When one person is saying something it's the other person is like whatever. Then they're doomed. Okay. This is a complete show of lack of respect. That person who's talking is just an idiot. I don't agree with a thing they're saying, whatever. Complete outward show of lack of respect. When respect drops, then commitment and everything that goes with it, passion, intimacy disappears. and so this is, this is the thing to watch out for. If you're in a relationship, don't treat your partner with disdain, not if you want to stay with them. because that's very dangerous. So, that's, this is a, a sort of fourth ingredient that holds those things together, is respect. And that's true of any relationship, friendship whatever. We have to hold respect. That's the critical truth/g. Alright. So, now check out more. Here's a full long talk on the psychology of love. Give you a little bit more stuff. I want to high, bring these these two. Psych of Attraction, okay again, that's the, that's the passionate part. It's a critical part of love. and I give you a taste of that, but there's a whole lot more. this is a fun video Darren Brown kind of doing some stuff with you so, check that out. body language, I, I want to stress this too. When we talk about respect and when we talk about well, to some extent passion and commitment, a lot of that is, is reflected in our body language, when we interact with the other person. Body language is critical. I, I wish we'd had a whole lecture on body language. may, maybe a side-dish on body language. but check that out that's really kind of cool. and now here's a couple, here's a, a general reading on the psychology of love and this is one that highligts some theory of love. so, again, check those out to tie it up. That's where we're going to stop with this beautiful nice green butterflies. By the way, it's summer solstice here, all you pagans, happy dancing around the fire enjoy. enjoy the solace. I, I, solstice, well, and the solace for that matter. I will post a few more side dish videos including a sappy one, but but this is it for the formal lectures. So, thank you so much for watching them all. those of you who did, I can't tell you how, how complimentary that is. I mean, that really just says a lot. So, I really appreciate it. I wish you the best of luck. I'm sure we'll see each other in MOOCland again. Stay in touch. Follow @SteveJordans and I'll let you know if, if I'm doing anything, giving talks in various areas or anything. And, and if I ever am, please come out, please introduce yourself. Alright, cool, I'm going to shut up now. Bye.
