Positive Evolutionary Psychology - Glenn Geher - #439

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the show. My guest today is Glen Geher. He's Professor of Psychology and Founding Director of Evolutionary Studies at the State University of New York and an author. Ancestral lifestyles are a big trend at the moment, taking influence from our paleolithic past to inform how we eat, train and move in the modern world. But taking an ancestral approach to our psychological well-being is much rarer, and this is Glenn's work. What can insights about our past teach us about how to enjoy the present? Expect to learn why depression and anxiety might actually be useful, why understanding the reason for emotions reduces their power over you, why it's miraculous that the education system has worked at all, why men are twice as likely to die in early adulthood than women, the danger of technology through an evolutionary lens, and much more. It's my final few days in New York City, and then I am back to Austin this weekend, and the programming over the next couple of weeks is insane, so some huge guests, some really exciting episodes I'm looking forward to having, and also looking forward to not living out of a suitcase anymore, which has been the last fortnight of my life. So yes, enjoyed the trip, but looking forward to settling down into a somewhat normal routine for at least the next month. And now, please welcome Glen Geher. Glen Geher, welcome to the show.

**Glenn Geher** (1:43)
Hey, thanks so much for having me, Chris.

**Chris Williamson** (1:45)
Something that I think is really interesting is that there's been a paleo movement around food and training, but there hasn't really seemed to be an equivalent around psychology. There's no sort of paleo psychologists, or at least people that have taken that and tried to apply it to their own lives. I haven't seen many people walking around doing paleo psychology yet.

**Glenn Geher** (2:03)
Paleo psychology, that's a great phrase. I wish I would have come up with that myself. It's a really good question. When we talk about the paleo lifestyle or the paleo movement, most people are familiar with the dietary component of it. Honestly, as someone who teaches about evolution and the human experience, that is the most vivid and easiest example to get across to people. It makes sense, it matches data, people can see their own behavior and think about it. Just the idea of eating too much processed food leading to health problems is something that we all know. Then this really puts a scientific framework around it.
The paleo diet and the paleo solution related to exercise and nutrition, tons of sense and it's definitely a reasonably well-established movement at this point. But as you're talking about this broader concept of paleo psychology, which really is I think an interesting way of framing what I'm calling positive evolutionary psychology, using evolutionary psychology to help us lead better lives, to understand ourselves better, to lead better community lives, and to help advance the goals of our communities and so forth in positive kinds of ways. It turns out that the same reasoning that you can apply to the Paleo diet movement really can be applied to many issues regarding our emotional, social functioning as well. And I think that that's really very much untapped at this point. And I'm hoping to be part of, you know, maybe even just a small part, but part of the solution to sort of get people in a broader sense to think about how broadly applicable this evolutionary perspective is with all aspects of our lives.

**Chris Williamson** (4:03)
Is there something that's missing from positive psychology, which evolutionary psychology adds in? I know that for a long time, psychology was focused on all of the malignant parts and biases and how we mess up. And then positive psychology came along and said, well, we should probably try and actually improve people's lives as well. That would be a useful thing. But then I'm trying to work out what it is that's missing from positive psych that is added into by evolutionary psychology.

**Glenn Geher** (4:30)
Sure. It's a really good question.
And if you go back to the history of the two fields, evolutionary psychology and positive psychology, it's super interesting that they have, there's a lot of parallels. So they're both considered relatively new fields within psychology. They both started arguably in the 90s. In a lot of ways, positive psychology emerged when Martin Seligman became president of the American Psychological Association and really made a big call to behavioral scientists and practitioners, saying, exactly what you're talking about. Why can't we study the positive features of the human experience scientifically so that we can amplify the good and the positive, which I think is totally on board with that message and with a lot of the work that's been done.