Sex and Dating Apps | Rob Henderson | EP 193

I wonder if this has something to do with just sort of sociosexual orientation of whoever happens to be expanding the beliefs. So if you tend to be a person who's had your heart broken or had a lot of negative interactions, maybe you had the expectation of monogamy, and then you sort of have one too many negative experiences, then you may start to be very preoccupied with the issue of consent.

I think that's exactly what happens. I think that. So, you know, we talked about people being shielded from the consequences of their luxury beliefs, and they're shielded to some degree. But my suspicions are, is that the relationship between sex and emotional intimacy is a lot tighter than people want to presuppose when they insist that all forms of sexual expression are laudable. It's just not the case emotionally. Hello, everyone. I'm pleased today to be able to speak with Rob Henderson. He's a PhD student in evolutionary and Social Psychology and Gates Cambridge Scholar at the University of Cambridge. He received his Bachelor's degree in Science in Psychology from Yale and is a veteran of the US Air Force. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Quillette, among other outlets. He is currently writing a memoir tentatively titled Troubled A Memoir of Foster Care, Family and Social Class, to be published in late 2022 by Gallery Books, a division of Simon and Schuster. He is possibly best known for the idea of luxury beliefs, which is where I first came across him. First published in the New York Post in short form and then in longer form in Colette, thanks very much for agreeing to talk to me today. Rob, it's a pleasure to have you here.

It's great to be here, Dr. Petersen. Thank you.

No problem. So let's talk first of all about luxury beliefs and exactly what that means and how you came up with the idea and what the consequence of disseminating it has been.

Yes. So the luxury beliefs idea I define as ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class while often inflicting costs on the lower social classes. And I mean, there are multiple strands to this idea, but it originally started with my observations in undergrad at Yale. So as you said, currently I'm a grad student at Cambridge. Before this I was a student at Yale, but before that my life was a lot different. I grew up in foster homes in la. Later I was adopted into working class town in Northern California, served in the military. So I just had a completely different set of life experiences and background than many of my peers at this Ivy League university. And in that New York Post essay, the original Luxury Beliefs essay. I opened with this story of this conversation I had with a classmate of mine in undergrad. We're sort of talking about relationships and career. And she said to me, you know, I just think monogamy is outdated. I just think it's, you know, not really good for society. I think it's just this sort of old patriarchal way of thinking. And I'd heard things like this before, but this time I asked her, well, what do you plan to do? You know, what do you want to do with your own life and with your own relationship situation and so on in the future? And she herself said, well, I'd like to get married and settle down, have a family at some point, you know, sort of after my career takes off. And I asked her, well, what was your life like before that? How did you grow up? And essentially she had come from a very stable, intact, two parent family. And so this puzzled me because this was emblematic of so many of the opinions I'd heard in undergrad from my peers. They would say one thing, they would believe this one set of interesting or unusual beliefs that I'd never heard before from anyone else. But then they themselves had come from sort of more conventional upbringings and they themselves planned to have that kind of life, that sort of more stable, traditional family. I'd once heard someone put this way that a lot of sort of affluent people, they what is it? They walk the 50s and talk the 60s. And I wondered, what's going on here? And so I was an undergrad, I came across a series of papers, series of ideas, both from psychology and sociology. So these sort of sociological aspects. I drew this from Thorstein Veblen and Veblen's idea, he wrote the Theory of the Leisure Class in the late 19th century. And he basically said that the elites of his day, they broadcast their status with their material goods with expensive clothes, tuxedos, evening gowns. They take up these very expensive and time consuming hobbies like golf or beagling. And all of this is to basically indicate their high social position. And some people say this book was written sort of tongue in cheek. But I think there's a lot of truth to this. Now, if we fast forward to the modern day, I think there are two things going on with why it's not actually fashionable anymore to display your status with luxury goods, with material goods. Number one, I think it's become viewed as kind of gauche. If you walk around an Ivy League campus today, the students don't look like they don't have the ivy look of like the 1950s or 1960s. They kind of just look like regular college students, number one. And I mean, this is true pretty much anywhere. If you look at very wealthy people, and the famous example of this would be Mark Zuckerberg wearing cargo shorts and a hoodie. It's just not that cool anymore to wear clothes that indicate that you're high social status. The other thing is material goods have become more affordable. You know, even my sort of poor and working class friends back home, all of them have iPhones. You know, maybe they, of course, like their lives aren't as comfortable as my peers in college, but a lot of material goods have become so affordable that it's become harder to stand out in that way.

Yeah, you see that reflected, I think, to some degree in the decline in burglary. Material objects just aren't as worth as much as they were. And so they don't distinguish between people anymore.

It's not worth it anymore to steal things. That's the aspect of it that led me to think, okay, well, first of all, luxury goods are not being displayed as much by the upper class. But I still think, it still seems to me they care very much about social status. And this is where the psychology aspect of it comes in from. Researcher named Cameron Anderson at UC Berkeley, he's a psychologist who found, he and his colleagues found that basically the upper class cares the most about social status. They care the most about obtaining it, and they care the most about preserving it. Which at first I thought was a bit counterintuitive. I thought that perhaps the most downtrodden, the kind of people who are on the lowest rungs of society, would care the most about obtaining money and wealth and status. But that's actually not true. It's the people who are already at the top who care the most about it. And that's really what I saw at Yale too, where these people were very much. They were strivers, they were very interested in pursuing status.

Do you suppose that's a partial consequence of the fact that failure is perhaps more painful than success is rewarding? So once you have it, let's say you have high social status, you're very much inclined to keep it because the alternative would be. So I suppose in some sense unthinkable, so catastrophic for you?

Right. So this is the idea of almost like this prospect theory idea that when you have it, it hurts twice as much as obtaining it. I think there is something to this idea. I noticed there was a lot of anxiety among many of My peers, this feeling that they have to keep up, they have to constantly strive, they have to get onto the next goal. And I think what exacerbates this feeling is that they're surrounded by people just like them. It was a bit unlike my own experience. When I had got into undergrad, I thought, like, okay, so I'm okay. I got into college. Like, that was my goal. I never thought I was ever going to get into college. And so when I got there, I thought, like, oh, I'm okay. And then I saw that these people didn't feel okay that they had to get the next internship. They had to get into law school, they had to do this, they had to do that. And I think a lot of it is because they're around people. They've grown up around those kinds of people their entire life. And so there's this belief, like, it was inevitable, like they always had to do this. There was never a question of their success. Whereas for me, it wasn't like that. Yeah, well, all of this pressure.

When I taught in Boston at Harvard, I mean, one of the things I noticed was that the students there were, you know, they were pleased to be at Harvard. There was no doubt about that. But it was extremely competitive, implicitly. And I suppose that's part of the consequence of it being essentially based as much as it could be on. On competitive merit. And so it was also the case that many of these students had been outstanding where they had come from. They were class valedictorians and usually had at least one or two other major accomplishments under their belt. But then when they got to these intensely selected institutes, they were also, in some sense, average, instantly, and below average in many ways. Because, you know, no matter how smart you are, the probability that you're the smartest person in your class at Harvard is pretty damn low. And so the implicit level of competition was extremely high. And so that might also exacerbate the sort of tendencies that you're describing. And people tend to compare themselves to their immediate peers, not to the broader world.

Right. And this is part of why, I think is driving this. I make this point in the essay that they're Dunbar's number. The 150 closest people to them are 150 baby millionaires. And so if that's your social circle, then you feel this constant underlying tension to display your status in some way. And so my claim is that the affluence in large part, have reattached, or they sort of detached status to goods and reattached it to beliefs, and this was driven by my.