Lectures on Relationship Motivations

Lectures All right. We left off last Thursday talking about the important phenomenon of positive illusions, the motivation that people have to enhance their relationship, to enhance their partner, to feel like their relationship is a good one that they want to k...

Lectures All right. We left off last Thursday talking about the important phenomenon of positive illusions, the motivation that people have to enhance their relationship, to enhance their partner, to feel like their relationship is a good one that they want to keep and maintain over time. It's really important that people have this enhancement motivation because it's really hard to keep a relationship going. Unless you maintain the strong motivation to want to see your partner in the best light possible. Relationships inherently have interdependence. Relationships and that interdependence will inherently create some amount of conflict. Sometimes the things you want are not the things that your partner wants. Partners end up hurting each other intentionally or unintentionally, and these kinds of biases are a key component of what help people to maintain their relationship over time. But this is probably not the entire story, because if people only did these things, if they only ever compartmentalized their partners faults, if they only engaged in that pygnalian phenomenon or changed what it is that they wanted to align with their partners ideals. It runs against some of those intimacy ideas that we talked about several lectures ago. This idea that also when we're in a relationship, we want to be with somebody who really truly deeply gets us and understands us. That brings us to this motivation that I wouldn't necessarily call it antithetical to an enhancement motivation, but it's working in tension with it. Sometimes we call this motivation a verification motivation. This idea that we want to be able to understand our partners and we want to feel understood at the same time. If our partner treats us in a way that doesn't really match our self views, this in principle should be upsetting. We should feel not particularly well seen by our partners. There are reasons to want to understand the world accurately, not just to go around with rose colored glasses all the time. Because to the extent that we're able to understand what is really happening out in the world, we want to understand what our partner is going to do in a given situation. It enhances feelings of prediction and control. This is another really central social psychological phenomenon. Classic study done in the 1919 70s, researchers gave people in nursing home plants to take care of the ones that they gave the plants to, that feeling of having control and responsibility for something else actually was beneficial for those people. So that's It is this other key experience that people need to survive and thrive, this idea that they're able to predict what's going to happen, know what's going to happen. Feelings of uncertainty can be very upsetting and destabilizing. As I mentioned already, if we can understand accurately where our partner is coming from, that increase a sent of intimacy with them. Even if maybe that means we're not seeing them in the best light imaginable. I'm going to show you data from a study is a classic study that tries to understand how the match versus mismatch in self esteem and how people feel about their partners lines up with the intimacy that people experience. This was really a classic example that led people to say, well, maybe this verification motive is also especially key. We'll start here by graphing people who have high self esteem. So what we've got here on the y axis is intimacy. The extent to which these people feel close to and understood by their current romantic partners. For people who have high self esteem, they generally feel pretty good when they sense that their partner also thinks very highly of them. That's what it means that this line is sloping up into the right. So people with high self esteem who think that their partners don't think that much of them, they don't feel a lot of intimacy. People with high self esteem do feel a lot of intimacy when they feel like their partner thinks very highly of them. Again, this is the standard enhancement case that we're seeing right here, and we're seeing that it's true for people with high self esteem. But really the key test of the verification idea is, well, what if we pick out the people who actually don't think that highly of themselves. Because that's really the case that differentiates these two perspectives. The average person, and again, I've mentioned this before, but in the contemporary Western United States, most people go around having a pretty healthy self view. Most people think pretty highly of themselves. Yeah, then it shouldn't surprise us. If when we take a look at those people, they're doing a lot of self enhancing in their relationships. They think very highly of their partners, their partners think very highly of them. All of that totally makes sense because we're missing the people who maybe don't have a very high self view. The question is, for people who have lower self esteem, what's the pattern look like? Do these people also feel closer to their partners more intimacy when they think their partners think very highly of them? Or is their intimacy generated by their partners having a matching view? Of how they feel about themselves. It is that second story here. People who have low self esteem, who think that their partners think really wonderfully about them. They actually don't experience that much intimacy. It's the people who feel like, actually, my partner sees me in this shaky way that I see myself. That these people experience the most intimacy. That gold line there, that is not a self enhancement story. That's a verification story. These people when these people have to essentially choose between, do I want my partner to just think I'm awesome or do I want my partner to see me as I see myself? These folks seem to be going in that second direction. They want their partners to see them the way that they see themselves. This is one key piece of evidence in support of this verification idea, that it's not just about enhancement. This then led to a great deal of debate about which motive was the central one, which one was the most important. Can we figure out what are the circumstances under which one motive or the other is going to play a more prominent role. Probably the best way of bringing these two ideas together, the enhancement idea and the verification idea can be demonstrated in this very simple demo that I will ask you to do with some clicker questions. Here we go. Compared to other UC Davis students of the same year and sex as yourself, how would you rate yourself on the following characteristics? Athletic? Go ahead and rate how athletic you are. I'll stop at 30 seconds. Yeah. Well, the high self ese line in that prior graph, you see enhancement and verification working together because for those people, it means the same thing. But for the low self esteem people, they pull in different directions, and for them, it seemed like verification was key. Yeah. I guess I would say it's like it's like I recognize that you feel you have some flaws and some downsides. I guess that would be the fair way of thinking about it. I think in these studies it's not so like you completely suck. It's at that level. How athletic are you? Pretty good. It's a normal distribution more or less. Maybe shaded a little bit to the lower side, but that's okay. Some of you are very athletic, others not so much. Most of you are in the middle. Let's do this again. Let's do punctual. How punctual are you? Go ahead. It probably doesn't help I did this at the beginning of class. The ragl coming in. I'll stop at 25 seconds. No. Done this demo. Who's done this? Any hands? I think sometimes they do this in like social. What we got? It's still pretty normal distribution. Maybe now shaded a little bit higher. Some of you are like punctual. No, that's not me. Let's do one more. Let's do trustworthy. How trustworthy are you? Compared to other UC Davis students. Go ahead. I'll stop at 25 seconds. All right. How trustworthy? Let's see. Wait a minute. 95% of you are either average or above average. Trustworthiness. Okay. This is a classic motivated reasoning phenomenon. You all were very happy to create a nice normal distribution with those first two attributes I threw at you. But when I said trustworthy, your responses shifted up to feeling as though you were above average. What this exercise demonstrates is a key distinction between what we call global and specific attributes, ways of thinking about yourself or ways of thinking about a romantic partner. That essentially, People are going to do more enhancement, more motivated reasoning with things that fit in the global part of this framework rather than the specific part of this framework. If we're thinking about the sentiments that people have about a romantic partner, you start with this this most abstract and most global sense of how you feel about your partner, which then trickles down to more specific judgments. My partner is wonderful, my partner is the greatest, which then trickles down to these relatively abstract traits, my partners dependable, my partners supportive, my partner is talented. Now, these traits can be linked to more and more specific traits. But here, there's more flexibility about exactly what traits count in terms of supporting these broader attributes, and then it gets even more complicated when you get down into very specific behaviors. Because these behaviors may have specific links to some traits rather than others. The general idea behind this framework and why it's so useful is that the degree to which we tend to be biased, we tend to enhance versus our tendency to be accurate, our tendency to want to see the world the way it really is, really varies depending on which part of this hierarchy we're talking about. Because when we're up here toward the top part of this hierarchy, to what we would call the more global part of this hierarchy, that's where enhancement is really key. In the bottom part of this hierarchy, in the more specific part of this hierarchy, that's where we're likely to see more verification. It's very easy to acknowledge that your partner Maybe doesn't pay the bills on time, but your partner is dependable in other ways. Maybe your partner doesn't cook a great lasagna, but they are talented in other ways. That's really what this framework is trying to capture here. The degree of bias and accuracy varies depending where we are in that global versus specific hierarchy. Another way of thinking about this is that it both feels better and is easier. To maintain positive views. This is true whether it's about yourself or whether it's about a romantic partner at the upper rather than the lower levels of that hierarchy. That's why we saw more enhancement with an attribute like trustworthy, which sits higher in that hierarchy. Trustworthy has more meanings to it. There are many different ways in this world to be trustworthy. Relative to something like punctual or athletic. Punctual and athletic, have a more narrow range of behaviors that could support it. It doesn't feel all that bad to admit that you're not that athletic or not that punctual, but it feels really bad. It feels like something is very wrong to say you're not trustworthy, and that's because of where those attributes sit in the hierarchy. It's the same thing when we think about our romantic partners. There's two important findings that come out of this framework, when we think about how people think about their romantic partners. The first is that when you look at the extent to which people engage in this motivated biased reasoning about their partners, they do it more when we're asking questions at the global rather than the specific level. More enhancement, when we're asking about things like how trustworthy is your partner, then how athletic is your partner. People are pretty comfortable telling themselves, the researchers or even their partners themselves that you're not that athletic. Honestly, you're not that punctual. But people are much more likely to think that their partner is more, say, trustworthy or supportive than any reasonable benchmark would permit. The second key finding here is that engaging in both of these processes generally seems to be good for relationships. In other words, people are less likely to break up if they are enhancing at the top global levels of that hierarchy, but they're accurate at the lower levels of the hierarchy. Recognizing that your partner doesn't make a great lasagna, but that your partner does pay the bills on time, These things tend to be good for relationships. That's where it's good to be accurate, but it's good to enhance at the top part of the hierarchy. I think my partner is exceptionally trustworthy. I think my partner is exceptionally supportive, exceptionally responsive. This is one very useful way of thinking about how these two kinds of motivations go together. People have to maintain a grounding in the real world, it's easiest for them to do that when you're talking about the very specific behaviors and attributes that your partner does well or does badly. The things that really don't have tight implications to how good a person your partner is. When it comes to those kinds of attributes, that's where the enhancement part really ends up being key. Yes. Question. I thinking about. Yeah, that's interesting. The question is, do people do this even more when they're talking to other people about their romantic partner? I certainly think that I bet you would see at of specific accuracy when talking to other people because there seems to be a general motive to be able to to show that you're unbiased when talking to other observers about your partner, being able to admit, say what your partner doesn't do well, but also be able to talk about their successes. Whether people enhance even more when they're talking to other people, I don't know. That's a good question. Yes. Right. I guess I would say that with this last bullet here. To the extent that you're like my partner never does the dishes. Let's even say for the sake of argument, that's an underrestimate of how often your partner actually does the dishes. That lack of accuracy will be a for your relationship, but that would not be nearly as as saying, my partner is a terrible person or something like that. Underestimating in the top part of a hierarchy is going to be the part that's especially bad. That's essentially because even if you're underestimating a few specific behaviors at this lower level, there's still lots of other opportunities to be accurate. But at the level of the global sentiments, if those are underestimates, that's probably a bad sign. We've already talked quite a bit about the inevitability really of conflict in relationships. This inevitability stems from interdependence. It stems from the fact that in any kind of relationship, two people's interests and needs are not going to be perfectly aligned. You want to have partnerships, at least where you can figure out how to align what it is that you want in better ways rather than worse ways. It's important to work through those kinds of disagreements. But of course, there are many different ways that couples can go about managing conflict when it inevitably emerges. Broadly speaking, we can think about people's conflict approaches as fitting into these two buckets. The first is the honest communication model. Which is that according to this idea, well, what's really important in a relationship is to be able to openly express negative feelings and to deal with conflict directly. Many people indeed feel this is the right way to go about things or this is how they in fact do go about things. The adage of never go to bed angry would capture this general sentiment. This is very popular. Many people feel this way. But there's another also potentially reasonable strategy, and I'll cut to the conclusion and suggest like, actually, we're going to find out that both of these approaches have their merits in some ways. But this other strategy is that really the thing that's caustic in a relationship is to keep expressing negativity. To keep digging into those hard problems, especially if they might not be resolvable or these problems aren't within our control. Bringing up all of that negativity is a bad idea, and we should be selective and careful in how we address conflict. When we're tired when we're upset about other things, that's not a great time for us to be having difficult conversations. We should save those difficult conversations for when we can maybe handle it with a little bit less negativity. The adage of the morning is wiser than the night, we fit into that second bucket, which we might call the good management perspective. These two ideas are useful because you can imagine costs and benefits to both of them. It's not totally obvious on the surface, which one of these is correct. Highlights the usefulness of bringing a database approach to try to understand couple conflict and what are the different kinds of conflict strategies that tend to bode better or worse for couples outcomes. Now, when researchers started studying this topic, I was the 1970s and the people who tended to be, especially interested in relationship conflict, tended to be clinicians. These were folks who were researchers, but they also were very familiar with say, couples therapy treatments. They were trying to see if some of their insights could help address what was at that time the growing divorce rate, at least in the US. Yeah. The question is, is the point of good management to bury things or to save it until a better time? I think you can think about it this way. The idealized operation of the good management approach is that second thing. Let's save it and deal with it later. But what happens if you keep saving it and not dealing with it later, keep saving it not dealing with it later and not dealing with it. At the same time, we can make that exact same critique of the open communication model to. We can say, Oh, it's really important we talk about this. We've got to talk about this. We got to talk about this and the negativity spills over and becomes especially caustic. We don't want to get angry about it, but sometimes we do. There are these idealized ways of doing both forms, and yet there are ways that both forms can go badly. What these folks did, again, because they had clinical training, they said, well, what if we created these research designs that were not unlike what we saw when we bring in couples. We would establish these controlled settings. Bring couples into the lab. Now, they're not going to be talking with a therapist, but we're going to have them do the same thing where they're going to identify a problem that they have. One of the key insights early on was that it probably didn't really matter what it was that people were arguing about. It didn't really matter whether they were arguing about money or kids or in laws. Or stresses at work or what they do in their free time. The key thing was that they thought it was a problem and we wanted to see how they work to resolve the disagreement. Come in and have the fight, have the conflict right here in front of us, and we're going to learn something about the way that you approach conflict by watching you live here right here in this moment. As I just mentioned. This was the guiding assumption, that the topic itself is less central than how people talk about. What the researchers did is they coded all of these different kinds of behaviors that you would see. They put them into different classes and different categories. They use those different categories to try to predict important relationship outcomes like, were these the happy couples or the unhappy couples? Importantly, did these couples ultimately break up, or did they stay together? On the next slide, I'm going to show you a whole bunch of behaviors broken down by whether they tended to be positive predictors of outcomes like satisfaction and break up. Were these behaviors that tended to bode well for couples, or were these behaviors that tended to bode poorly for couples? Here were the things that they tended to see. The positive behaviors, the behaviors that predicted that things were going to go well for these couples, included things like identifying sources and boundaries of the problem. Being able to keep the problem contained to one specific thing, not let it spill out into something broader, something that attacks the other person's character, keeping the problem manageable. Suggesting a plan of action. Having a concrete way that we're going to deal with this, this was especially likely to be a good sign. Validating the partner's perspective. In any kind of conflict, this is exceptionally difficult to do. In any kind of conflict, it is very tempting to feel that our own subjective perspective is the correct one. If it were so easy to just change our perspective to be a different one, we probably would have already engaged in that transformation of motivation. These folks, again, they're talking about a conflict that's unresolved in their relationship, and yet it proves to be pretty effective to at least show that you can validate the other person's perspective, even if you don't totally agree with it. Finally, acknowledging improvement. This one, again, this can be very hard to do, especially in the face of conflict, but being able to note where things had gotten better, note where your partner had made changes in the past. How demoralizing is it if you feel like you're improving at something and your partner doesn't acknowledge it. That is not motivating for wanting to continue to resolve something. Being able to acknowledge improvement is exceptionally important. These were the things that tended to bode poorly, that when people engage in these behaviors in their relationships, these things were not a good sign. Blaming and criticism. The reason why this is going badly is because of something you're doing, and that's because you are fill in the blank X Y Z terrible person, you have these negative character attributes, and that's why this isn't working. Hostile questioning. Being a lawyer makes you feel smart if you trap your partner with a line of questioning. Good for you, but that tends to make your partner feel terrible. Might even make your partner feel especially defensive and not want to engage with you anymore. Hostile que, questioning somebody as if you were a lawyer. That's fun if you're getting a law degree, not a great idea in the context of relationships. Similarly, sarcasm tends to go over pretty badly, Diffusing responsibility, also tends to go badly. Finally, really making these global statements, making the problem about something that you always do or something that you never do. Again, that's the opposite of the identifying the sources and boundaries of the problem, letting it spill out into something that is due to a character trait about you that is always like this. Now, you may have heard this idea of a five to one heuristic. The famous researcher who's well known for doing a lot of this work is a guy named John Gtman. He's founded the Gottman Marriage Institute, one of the most famous marriage researchers. He often talks about the five to one heuristic and what that means is that for every five positive behaviors, You really need to think about it this way. For every one negative behavior that a couple engages in in one of these conflicts, there really have to be at least five positive behaviors, or else this couple is likely to slide into dissatisfaction. There's nothing actually magic about a five to one heuristic with these things. Here is what that is actually getting at that's useful is that the power of a negative behavior is in many ways much larger than the power of any given positive behavior. This is something you may have encountered in other psychology classes too. This idea that bad is stronger than good. Something that hurts lingers longer in the mind than something that feels good. This applies to couple conflicts as well. Saying one nasty thing isn't usually outweighed by them saying one nice thing. It might be more like five nice things or maybe even ten nice things to make up for the one nasty thing. That's really what this five to one heuristic is getting at. It's not an exact mat that that's what it takes to overcome negativity, but rather the idea that that is stronger than good when we're talking about what lingers in the mind and what affects our impressions of somebody or what makes us feel good about our relationships. Yes, question. Question about the distinction of the blame negative behavior. Yeah. Is that specifically criticism problem. Yes. Right. Right. What is the distinction between identifying sources and boundaries of the problem and criticism? And yet, this is the thing, and again, people are going to differ in any given context for whether they're going to feel like they're being criticized or you're just helping me to identify the sources and boundaries of the problem. And there's always going to be that interpretive element to it. So So there's no you can think of it in many ways as two sides of the same coin. But a general helpful way of thinking about it is that to the extent that the diagnosis or the plan of action is focused on your partner's traits and what they are typically like. That's probably going to be less helpful than focusing on the specific. Focusing on, well, you know, what I've noticed is that when x happens, like you're tired, specifically after interacting with your mother and you haven't eaten yet, then This tends to happen. How do we avert that particular situation as opposed to being like, you need to be more emotionally stable? Yeah. Right. This is an excellent question. The question is, when people are engaging in this conflict, they know they're being observed. They're doing these oververt actions. We can't really code what we can't see in these situations. Are we sure that some people aren't faking it or hiding things or are there things that we're missing? This is in fat in the early was going on. Was the impetus for developing a different approach to understanding relationship conflict that didn't just rely on what you could see or what a clinician could see, But was more conducted in a top down fashion. I you ever heard the terms top down or bottom up, it gets used in a variety of contexts. But in a way, if what we're doing is we're observing people, we're coding their behaviors and then we're building up a framework from that, that's a bottom up approach. What do we see? Let's use that to scaffold up to something? That's very useful. But sometimes it's worth having the framework already and then say, if I take this framework and I observe these couples, what can I see? What can I not see? Unless I use some different approaches to try to get at it. That's exactly what this EVLN approach is designed to do. It's designed to be a more comprehensive way of thinking about how couples handle conflict. Even if some of those different ways of handling conflict end up being pretty invisible at least from that external coding approach. We have to come up with different approaches like maybe ask people on confidential questionnaires, give them surveys that they complete every night or surveys that they complete after a fight to try to get a sense of what they're thinking. The EV LN stands for these four words here, exit voice, loyalty, neglect. This is a simple two by two framework or two dimensional framework, where one of the dimensions is a destructive constructive continuum. This is more or less tracking the positivity of those behaviors we saw earlier. But essentially, are we working to identify solutions and boundaries of the problem, or am I mostly interested in attacking you and your character? But then we've also got this active passive distinction. Many of the passive behaviors are exactly the things that are easy to miss in a session where you're we're bringing people in the lab coding people and say, now, please have a fight. A lot of the passive stuff will get missed. But let's walk through this here. We'll start with exit. This is the active destructive stuff. This basically captures almost everything that we saw on the previous slide in terms of those negative behaviors. Your any engaging in a abusive language with your partner, criticizing your partner, derogating your partner, many of those negative behaviors. Let's look. Let's now watch a eternal sunshine clip where you really see a lot of those negative behaviors come pretty fast and furious here. It's 3:00. I kind of sort of wreck your car. Driving drunk. It's pathetic. I was a little tipsy. Don't call me pathetic. Well, it is pathetic. It's fucking irresponsible. Could have killed somebody. I don't know. Maybe he did kill somebody. Should we turn on the news and see? Could I check the grill to see by il or small animals. Dov do. You're like an old lady or something. What do you like? A ino. A ino? Jesus. Are you from the 50s or something? A ino? Face it, Jolly. You're freaked out because I was out late without you. And in your little wormy brain, you're trying to figure out, did she fuck him one to night? Now, see, Clam? I assume you fucked on him one night. I know how you get people to like you. I'm sorry, ok? Clem, I didn't mean it, right? I cl the keys. I was just I wouldn't need him anymore. I was just angry or annoyed or something. I don't know. All right. That is a lot of those negative behaviors right there, right? On both sides, right? The criticism, the wormy little brain, isn't that how you get people to like you? All of these things are character assassinations that go way above and beyond the particular problem at hand. Okay. So These are active. We're able to see them plainly as we're watching this couple, and they're clearly very destructive. In this relationship or this iteration of their relationship, this is the last interaction that they have before they break up. Contrast this with voice, and these encompass most of the positive behaviors that we saw when we brought couples into the lab and had them interact. Things like attempts to improve conditions, suggesting solutions, altering problematic behavior, all these things fit in the voice category. This is on the active side again, like exit, but now we're on the constructive side of the scale. Most of the things that we missed when we were observing couples are taking place down here at the bottom, in the passive component, the passive side of this space. These are things that you won't see when you invite couples into lab, you got to figure out some other way of getting at these things. You got to ask couples to talk about what they're thinking about right after they've gone through a conflict. Give them assurances that, we're not going to share these responses with your partner and try to get them to disclose to you honestly what it is that's going through their mind. And you get stuff like this. Yes. Question. Yeah. Back to exit. Yeah. Yeah. The exit behaviors really do capture basically all of the things that you could see in the sessions with maybe one exception, which I'll get to when we get to neglect. But for the most part, the, the nasty overt things that couples do to each other are in this exit bucket. The voice tends to capture basically all the things in the positive bucket. Yeah. It is that what people do when they stay in an abusive relation because they think that things are going to get better? Possibly. Certainly the general belief that things are going to get better, maintaining faith would be something that would fit in the loyalty in the loyalty space? And not voicing it. But this is usually I think that example calls to mind sort of that sense of like somebody not having better options. If that's the kind of situation we're talking about, that really wouldn't fit as loyalty. But loyalty is typically going to be things like assuming that the partner had the best of intentions. You know, things like forgiving me, forgiving a partner for doing something somewhat unkind is often a process that goes on internally within the person who is giving the forgiveness, and might not even necessarily be explicitly stated. Yeah. Question. Doctor Yeah. Yeah, right. The question is, is there I love this person so much? I'm willing to stick it out component to the loyalty element. Yes, that is definitely in there. But I guess in some ways, one of the ways I think about loyalty that's especially helpful is that when your partner does a of things that bug you, You are often willing to let those things go. We don't bring up every little thing that we wish our partner had done differently. The act of letting those things go of not making a major case out of every small thing is in many ways what the loyalty idea is getting at. It's like, I know my partner has the best intentions. They don't always do things perfectly, but I don't need to make a major conflict out of this particular instance. Yes. Yes. The question is, are those internal components what makes it passive and yes. The idea is like much of this is going on in a way that isn't easily visible. It's not to say that people can't report on it. They certainly can, but much of it is not going to be oververt in the same way that exit and voice are. Yeah. The question is whether staying in an abusive relationship would be constructive, it's hard because remember this is about how people are handling conflict. If we're let's say it's an abusive relationship we've got two people in a relationship, and this person is criticizing this person all the time, being verbally abusive and this person is just engaging in a lot of loyalty and not really doing anything about it. So we would call that passive constructive, from the perspective of the relationship, those loyalty behaviors are helping to maintain the relationship. Whether that is a good idea for the long term health and well being of this person is a different question. We could say like, yes, it is constructive from the perspective of the relationship, even if we think, for this person's sake, they shouldn't be doing that. Then we've got the neglect component here. This is like I'm just not going to come home. I'm going to stay out and not come home. My partner is going to be there because then we're just going to get into it and I don't really want to get into it. I'll just engage in avoidance. I'm going to criticize them but on unrelated issues. You can see some of these things will leak out In those overt discussions, criticizing on unrelated issues. Sometimes withdrawal is something that you can see in those discussions. An argument can get really heated and then one partner you can see them give up. In many ways, that's a neglect example, where one partner is just throwing up their hands and saying, I just don't want to deal with this. It's not maintaining good faith, it's maintaining ill faith, but also not wanting to engage. Yeah. That's a good question. I mean, this is we're talking about independent relationships here, but yes, this could apply to many different kind of interdependent scenarios. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Okay. Great question. So you're fighting with your mom. Your mom won't stop until she wins, so you give up at some point. The question is, Where does it fit that's clearly on the passive side. But the question is, does it fit into the neglect of the loyalty side? It really depends on your mindset as you're giving up. If you're giving up, because again, maybe this is easier to think about if it's like your kid, I don't know how many of you have young kids, but sometimes like your kid is just being an abusive jerk and you just got to let it go. Be my kid feels like being an abusive jerk to me today. But you're not holding ill will about it. And that would put you on the loyalty side. But the neglect side would be like, I'm never going to win this. I don't want to engage with this person. I want to engage with them less in the future. That would start to push more toward the neglect side. It really is like the positive versus negative intentions in your mind and what you hope for that relationship for the future as you are disengaging. Yeah. Right. Yes. That's a good question. By the end, I think that's a fair reading that by the end what she is doing is she's saying, I'm done with this, and if we then assume she's not going to engage in any more fights on this topic, that fits well into the neglect category. Yeah. Yes, so are the different attachment styles associated with these different strategies? And so I think that what you probably see I'm not 100% certain of this, but this would be my guess is that avoidance is generally going to be associated with the passive approaches in particular. Because all of these things can be hard for somebody who is avoidant. Anything that is going to get into the open discussion of conflict is going to be tough for them. I don't think there's much evidence that avoidant people are just more negative in general, that doesn't push them to the left side more than the right side, but they are certainly going to be less likely to want to engage. I can imagine making the case that anxiously attached people are going to be more likely to want to engage. Maybe they're going to be more likely to want to be toward the top part of this graph rather than the bottom. But I'd imagine that what I'm describing here is more prominent for avoid and folks. Yeah. How does fight or flight enter into this? Yeah, I think you could map fight or flight onto the again, fight or flight implies that something is threatening, so we're already on the left side of this graph here. Now whether you decide to fight or is you fall in that space. I think that's a good parallel. We'll talk a little bit more about fighter flight when it comes to break up because it's this unusual case where what's activated for people is fight or flight, but there's really nothing to fight or run away from, and that causes all sorts of problems. Yes. Question. What Oh. It's freeze and fan. Yeah. Yeah. Fawing sounds a little bit like voice. But yeah, I'm not quite sure where freeze would go in this space. Yeah, I don't know if freeze and f maps onto it as cleanly. I have to think about that someone. Yeah. Yes. The question is, do different people exercise different ones with different people? Absolutely, people can have di The relationship itself is always going to be a more powerful predictor of what's going to happen next, who you are personally. Now, it can still be the case that some people really just love getting at it, and they're going to be in that active part of the space with more ships and somebody who is a little bit more avoidant. But generally speaking, with anything like this, the nature of the res itself and where that relationship finds itself is going to be more critical than who you generally are. It's one oh four. Let's stop for 5 minutes and we'll come back at one oh nine. All right. So it was Capricorn and As over here? Capricorn and Aries over here. Okay. Here we go. I look so there's one Okay. Bla lives by his wits. The goat plans out which socks he will wear the night before. We Capricorn finds peace, Blank finds boredom. Only the sure footed would attempt this rocky climb. It was. Very good. Nicely done. That was Capricorn. Question Yeah. Yeah. I was I I was time. But my question is, a lot of the Right. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah. So the question is about anxious attachment. Is there a tendency to a lot of those concerns. And I think that gets to sort of hearkens back to the the important good management versus honest communication distinction, which is that, hey, just bringing up every little event as something that has to be managed isn't necessarily a strategy that's going to work for everybody. If you've got somebody who's anxiously attached, but wants to get through every conflict, repair things, make sure it doesn't happen again. That doesn't work all that great for everybody and can end up being too much addressing of the conflict, even if the attempts are to not criticize, not be abusive, et cetera. That's a good point. Now, critically, and we saw this in that clip too, these behaviors come in patterns. We need to do more than just think about these behaviors in isolation. When you think about these behaviors as coming in patterns, this exposes a little bit more of part of the dangers of why it's so troubling to engage in those negative behaviors. Because not only is bad, stronger than good, not only is it the case that the negative behaviors loom larger in the mind than the positive behaviors, but you get these sequences of behaviors and the most prominent sequence that we see is something called negative reciprocity, which refers to the idea that Negative behavior begets more negative behavior. This should be reminiscent of some of the tit for tat stuff too. If I respond in a slightly hostile way to you, that will often trigger you to respond in a slightly more hostile way to me, so on and so forth until the negativity becomes this absorbing state, that it's very, very difficult to stop. People get into these places where it ends up being very difficult for them to snap out of that negative spiral. It requires a lot of presence to be able to put the brakes on that negative responding. A useful way of thinking about why negative reciprocity happens and why it happens so often is that you can think about as a failure of repairing the interaction, the inability of two people to repair where the interaction is. Again, this Again, illustrate why it's not so obvious where the openly addressing conflict versus good management style is better is that this is something that can just happen when people get into a discussion, it would be very difficult to stop. This is just one example of what repairing the interaction looks like. It sounds very easy to do in the cold light of day, but when you're in the moment, in the argument, it can be very hard to do this. You can imagine a conversation where one partner is saying something like stop interrupting me. You can argue that in and of itself, this is maybe a constructive thing, I'm not finished telling you what I need to tell you, but you can also imagine how there's some irritability implied in this statement. Now we get this distinction, these two different ways that somebody could go. This is the tit for tat logic. If I choose to interpret that statement negatively, I could then respond in the way that fosters negative reciprocity and say, well, I wouldn't have to if I could get a word in, or again, in the Tit for tat framework, choose the more cooperative option, the option where I don't defect. And say something like sorry, what were you saying. People often have these kinds of choice points in interactions where they can choose to escalate the negativity or they can choose to take it down a notch. The problem is that it's very, very tempting to escalate in many cases for many people. And that really becomes a problem because now you've got multiple negative behaviors that have all entered this sequence, and that is yet another contributor to why these negative behaviors can be so troubling because now you more than you've got to do 25 positive behaviors to make up for the five positive behaviors, to make up for the five negative behaviors you just engaged in. Now, you can also go too far in the other direction though, because there can also be situations where what happens is that one person is engaging in some attempts to constructively identify a problem and work toward a solution, but the other person just completely withdraws. This is another kind of pattern that we see that is in some ways the inverse problem, a complete failure to engage. In this case, what you see is that we've got one partner who's doing some demanding or criticizing or nagging of the partner, and the other partner responds by trying to disengage, trying to escape, essentially, trying to get away from the other partner. This is a particular pattern in relationships that is known to be gender differentiated, where women tend to be in the demanding role and men tend to be in the withdrawing role. Let's look at a video illustrating this particular style. Whereas the eternal sunshine clip, I think was also a good illustration of negative reciprocity, because the negativity is flying back and forth and escalating this next clip has a lot of negative behaviors, but we also see the demand withdrawal pattern. I'm gonna go do the dishes. Cool. I'll be nice if you help me. No problem. I'm a little bit late. I'm just go get the streets here for a little bit. Come on. I don't want to dm later. Let's just do now. Take fifte minutes. I am so exhausted. I just honestly want to relax for a little bit. If I could just sit here, let my food digest. And just try to enjoy. The quiet for a little bit. Get some. Get some. Get some. That's what happens. And we will clean the dishes tomorrow. You know, I don't like waking up to a dirty kitchen. Cars. I care. Alright, I care. I busted my ass all day, cleaning this house and then cooking that meal and I worked today. It would be nice if you said thank you and helped me with the dishes. Fine. I help you do the damn dishes. Oh, come on. You know what? Num. That's not what I want. You just said that you want me to help you do the dishes. I want you to want to do the dishes. Why would I want to do dishes? Why? See, that's my whole point. On partner, making demands of another partner, the other partner, trying to disengage, that can also lead to all sorts of conflicts, especially in cases where there are power differentials in the relationship or power differentials in who has the responsibility for doing the unpleasant thing. This is clearly a very gender differentiated case where For whatever reason in their relationship, the responsibilities of cooking and cleaning have fallen on her, he doesn't want to contribute, he would prefer to keep that imbalance the way that it is and that often creates this dynamic. This is in many ways why things like chore imbalances and other kinds of empower imbalances in relationships can be so challenging is that in the cases where the person who feels as though they're doing more, they're under benefited, if that it can be very difficult for them to achieve any kind of change in the status quo, any change in who does what? Because it begets this pattern. When you ask for change, when you're essentially asking your partner to do more, the partner can be very tempted to engage in this withdrawal of behavior. So in some ways, this is a mirror image of the negative reciprocity pattern, although it can lead to blow up conflicts in the same way when people get called on it like in this clip. But the question is, when there is potential for conflict, do the partners really get at each other in that negative reciprocity cycle, or does one partner try to disengage, which they're going to tend to want to do if it's a situation where they're actually the ones that are benefited by this situation and it would behoove them to not really change anything or not really address this problem. Yeah. Question. Data on LGBT couples for the demand withdraw pattern, I don't think so. There's not that much of that work on LGBT couples. Yeah, I don't know. Right. You might see it the same way, one thing that is clear about LGBT couples is that generally speaking, the imbalance in things like chores tend to be much less. To the extent that LGBT couples are already coming at their relationships in a way that doesn't have these highly prescriptive roles that have these power imbalances baked into it, that's probably less likely to create this situation. I would imagine that I don't know if it would affect negative reciprocity to the same extent, but that would be at least my prediction here. Yeah. Question. Yes. Yes, that's a good question. Because their power was really about the next best alternative relationship. This is a good point because I do think it's a different use of the word power here. Because I think if we were to put this the scene we just saw in that matrix framework, that you could pretty easily account for it as he actually has a more okay opinion with the place being messy than she does. But she is also very bothered by his not wanting to help. You could imagine charting it out in that way, but none of that really has to do with what their next best alternative relationship would be. It is a little bit different from that conception of power. The last thing here and then we'll get into a little bit of the violence lecture. The implications here for the honest communication versus good management ways of thinking about conflict are interesting. It's like we can't really say that one or the other of these approaches is better. If we're arguing for the honest communication approach, we'd say, well, look, Voice tends to be good. Again, it is possible to overdo it. But generally speaking, identifying boundaries of the problem tends to be a good thing, acknowledging improvement, validating your partner's perspective. We also see that on the flip side, that criticism all of those exit behaviors. Negative reciprocity, these things tend to be really bad. We can't just say that the important thing in a relationship is that you communicate honestly and openly because honestly and openly means you are saying nasty things to your partner and criticizing everything that they do, that might be open communication, but it's probably not going to be a good thing for your relationship. Then on the flip side, well, the loyalty behaviors, those do tend to be good. Forgiving and forgetting tends to be good for people in relationships. Letting the small things go tends to be good. Not everything has to be something that we hash out. Some things you can maintain faith in your partner's goodwill, and that's a perfectly good thing to do in relationships. But to the extent that what you're really doing, again, it's hard to know. Only you can know, are you avoiding interacting with your partner because you've forgiven them and it's not a big deal and you' happy to let it go or because you're trying to avoid problems. You're trying to avoid discussions, you'd rather not engage with your partner. Well, that's going to be bad on the whole. That's going to predict being less satisfied over time. This is the challenge is that if we think about that whole EVLN framework, If we think about honest communication is referring to the more active stuff at the top, and good management is referring to the passive stuff on the bottom. Again, active versus passive, that's a personal preference, but it's pretty clear you want to stay on the right side, the constructive side rather than the destructive side. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Which of these tends to be better? I would say it's a 50 50 coin flip more or less. Which of these tends to be better? Some couples might prefer to be more active and some couples might prefer to be more passive. But there are downsides to being too active and there are downsides to being too passive. That's one way of thinking about it. There is always the danger of slipping into the destructive side. It's really the destructive to be avoided rather making sure you say on the constructive side of these things. F. Let's do a few clicker questions here and then we'll go on to the violence lecture. What is not a way that people maintain positive illusions? A. People's partners can grow to meet their lofty expectations. B, people become good at predicting their partner's behaviors which prevents disappointment. People acknowledge their partner's limitations, but downplay their importance, or D, people's visions of their ideal partner shift to be more like their current partner over time. I'll stop at one. The answer here is B. B is true, but B is not a way that people maintain positive illusions. B is an illustration of the verification motivation. That's about being accurate. The other three are about maintaining positive ions. The other three fit in the enhancement bucket. The second one, this can be t. That's what we saw with the high low self esteem people, but that is not about positive ions. That's about verification, understanding who your partner really is. Which of the following is not true about different styles of handling conflict. A, negative reciprocity persists because it is hard to repair the interaction. B, couples who use a lot of neglect conflict behaviors are less likely to be satisfied than couples who use a lot of loyalty conflict behaviors. Couples who handle conflict with sarcasm and put downs fair poly because they cannot maintain a high ratio positive to negative exchanges, or D couples who validate each other tend to have problems that persist over time. I'll stop at 1 minute. Very good. D is not true. People who use validation tend to have better relationships and problems that they resolve. Last question. Marge is always trying to get Homer to expand his horizons. She has to go to the opera, the movies or out to eat. Homer in response hides tavern. This demonstrates A a volatile conflict style. B positive, that demand withdraw pattern or D negative reciprocity. I'll stop at 5 seconds. Very good. Excellent illustration of demand withdrawal. Okay. Let's talk about violence in relationships. In in about six slides, which is probably about ten to 15 minutes, I'm going to show a video clip of a man violently hitting a woman. If you don't want to see that, excuse yourself, totally fine. That'll be like 15 to 20 minutes. I'm going to get to that. But now let's talk about violence in relationships and the various challenges that people have had over many decades, trying to understand the nature of relationship violence, where it comes from and how best to address it. Classically, People understood violence and relationships actually from a different approach, a different perspective, that's different than the studies that we've been talking about here. These were usually not studies that were looking at couples, following them over time, bringing them into the lab, like you bring couples in the lab and you're going to have them engage in fights, but they're very, very rarely going to engage in any kind of violence in that kind of setting. How exactly do you get at it? The answer at first was, well, researchers would look at crime data, because there are many kinds of crimes that will classify this was an assault committed by a husband against his wife or a verbal argument between romantic partners. These things can end up in various police and crime databases. For a long time, what we knew about violence came from things like police data. You can have crime surveys. There are different kind of surveys that you can use to assess whether somebody has ever been convicted of a crime or accused of a crime. Also data from women's shelters. If you go to women's shelters and you talk to women who are trying to escape abusive situations, you can learn a lot about those kinds of relationships and the challenges that oftentimes social workers and other practitioners face, if they want to help women extract themselves from these kind of situations. In this classic research, There were a couple very clear conclusions. The first is that this phenomenon is pretty rare. Less than 1% of the population will have some encounter with the police that fits in this category, or less than 1% of women will end up needing a woman shelter. Not a lot of people end up reporting a lot of crimes in these crime surveys. The overall level, what we call the incidence rate of this violence is quite low. And the violence is overwhelmingly perpetrated by men. Men are about ten times as likely to be the perpetrators of violence in these situations as women. This was the status quo for a long time. Now there's important caveat here that's going to become important when we start getting into why we see violence and intimate relationships at all. The caveat is that in these kinds of surveys, if you're talking about police stat if you're talking about crimes, we see that men are more violent than women in general. If you just take the whole bucket of crimes of violence and all of the different kind of crimes that that term entails, men make up something like five sixths of that whole bucket. You generally see that men are committing more of the crimes of violence than women are, generally speaking. It's also an important caveat that usually when men are being accused of crimes of violence or convicted for crimes of violence, most of the time, This violence is directed at strangers. It's bar fights. It's other kinds of violent, it could be armed robbery, it could be other kinds of assaults, but usually it is not between people who know each other. That's where most of the violent crime is happening. What's also interesting is that again, I'm bringing this up now because it's all going to come back up later when we try to understand why do we see different kinds of violence in relationships? What you do see in couples a lot. Again, this can be reflected in police encounters, sometimes are things like verbal arguments. Sometimes neighbors call the police on each other because of a verbal altercation going on next door, that that might not have any oververt violence. Nobody threw a punch, nobody threw something. But what's also important is that verbal arguments are less likely to escalate. If you're talking about family relationships, the non close relationships. Another way of thinking about this is that if two people get in a heated verbal argument, If those people are family members, it's still pretty unlikely that somebody's going to hit somebody. If two strangers at a bar get a verbal argument, like somebody's getting punched. That's the distinction here. When do fights escalate? Fights can happen a lot between romantic parties. We've already talked about that. Interdependence is high. But when do fights escalate fights tend to escalate quite a bit between strangers. Nevertheless, what we see with crimes of violence is, again, it's more or less consistent with the sex differentiated idea that men are more at least physically aggressive than women are. But then we get this interesting wrinkle, which really complicated how people thought about violence and relationships for a long time. This is in the 1980s, early 90s. Again, because this whole topic intersects with things like social work, we want to try to help people. We want to help these women escape these situations. You start bringing in perspectives like sociologists and other family studies researchers. They have a different way of going about things. They don't just look at police data and crime data. They also do surveys. This is some of what they do very well. Many of these folks do random digit dialing, which at the time was a state of the art way to try to get a representative sample of what was in your population. So they felt pretty good about their ability to sample different households, for example. They developed a scale that they could just ask people, Hey, have you engaged in different kinds of violence, like, you thrown something at your partner, have you pushed or shoved them or slapped them? They've got different categories for different kinds of violence. But to be clear, the reason I show these things is because they're doing everything from they're assessing things all the way up through very serious forms of violence. They're capturing all of those things with this conflict tactic scale. Now again, instead of looking at police data or crime data, who's had to run in with the law, who's had to run in with shelters, they're engaging in these random surveys. And what do they find? They find a pretty different story. It's not 1%, it's way higher. It's more like ten to 15% of the population is doing this stuff, ten to 15% of couples, and it's not overwhelmingly male at all. It's 50 50. In fact, if anything, women are slightly more likely to do these things than men are. Okay. Totally different conclusions coming from this different set of researchers using different methods to try to attack this problem. They're trying to get at the same thing. We want to understand forms of violence in relationships, and yet we see something totally different. It's way more common than we thought and it's not overwhelmingly men that are perpetrating it. This led to a lot of, a lot of suggestions that maybe the problem was like the lack of men shelters and that was why we weren't seeing these men come out. Yes. Question. It's a good question. Are the women more likely in one category or the other, it's basically 50 50 in both categories. It's not that the women have an overwhelming advantage advantage, that they're overwhelmingly more likely to do the minor stuff, the men are more likely to do the major stuff. It's basically 50 50 for all of these things. Okay. So this is very complicated. Now, I think what sort of fits the impression that you're describing is there are depictions of movies and we'll watch one momentarily. The notebook is great in many ways. But if you watch the notebook or if you've seen it recently, they're hitting each other a lot in this movie. Yes, question. Right. The notebook takes place in the 19. Yeah. I think. The question is are there there generational prevalence effects? I don't think so. These numbers, these ten to 15% numbers, these have stayed pretty steady over time. I do think that media wise. You could make a case that there was we thought this stick was a little f in the past. I think people have become a little bit sensitive to these dynamics. Yes, if you do this same survey today, I can virtually guarantee you will find the same thing on both sides. If you look at police data, it'll be the 1% and overwhelmingly male. If you do a survey like this, it'll be ten to 15% and it'll be about 50 50. Yeah. Question. I mean, it's a good question. Is it that women started to feel more comfortable and that's what these people are picking up? But we don't think that's what it is because even today, if you look at run ins with police and things like that, it will still be overwhelmingly male and fairly. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Could be that people aren't being truthful in these situations. Now, that would mean at least with the ten to 15% that those numbers could be even higher than that. Be even this is way higher than what, what you try to estimate from the crime surveys. The crime surveys, you're looking at, I know that I've got this many people who live in the city. Here are the people that have had a run in with the police, so I'm guessing at how common this is. I think you're right that it could be even more common. Usually in these studies, they try to get both members of the couple reporting anonymously and confidentially. But you can certainly get disagreements. I think for many of these examples, they'll say, well, if one person tells me it happened, I'm going to assume it happened. Yeah. Question. Yeah. There are a few differences. The perspective they're coming from also, how they're collecting the data. So But some of the major differences are that with the crime data, it's usually emerging in crime survey. You got to go to some database and see who's had a run in with the law, who's using women's shelters, things like that. Here we're calling households. We're doing the equivalent of what survey or polling research would have looked like. We're trying to get a random sample of the population and just ask people. It's a different methodology and different databases. Yeah. Right. So the question that men get arrested more. And that is part of it. And I'll get to that in a second because that is s part of what's going on here. Here's some other things that people race and like, Well, does this explain it? It didn't seem like these did a good job. Maybe the violence by women is specifically about retaliation. Maybe that's why it seems like it's 50 50 because the women are responding second. But then we have studies that then look at who responds first or second and that doesn't seem to explain it. Also, if you can look at same gender relationships and it's the same story, ten to 15%. Again, it doesn't matter whether we're looking at gay men or lesbian women. It's there in both cases. People wondered, is this scale just nonsense? This conflict tactic scale, does it really mean anything? But it does all the things you'd expect the scale to do in that it's pretty consistent over time if you assess people at multiple points in time. It predicts the things you think it shod predict. People who say they have more violence in the relationships, they're more likely to break up, they're more likely to be. That all tracks. All right. The question is, if one person is in an abusive relationship that they can't leave, then how can it be that it predicts breakup? In fact, you are in some ways exactly getting at the problem, because e and we have this absolutely vitriolic debate for many years about what's going on here. But you're hitting the issue, which is that essential these are two totally different non overlapping populations. We have all we were at least at that time, calling the same thing. This is relationship violence. These are two completely different phenomena happening to completely different people. The archetype that you have in mind of a woman is being abused and cannot leave this relationship, that is the kind of person that is being captured in the way the first people approach their data collection, but not being captured by the people who do the second approach. This was the resolution was that we have two forms of intimate partner violence, that in many ways, have a lot of the same behaviors, but they have different meanings, and importantly, they are different populations of people, that you've got some people who are committing what's called two things. It can be called patriarchal terrorism or intimate terrorism. This is the archetype of the abused woman, much more likely to be male perpetrator, but rare That's one form that's captured in police, run ins, and crime data. But then you've got this other form that is called common couple violence, again, common because it's happening in ten to 15% of the population, not 1%. But this is the form of violence that's being picked up in the surveys. The idea here is that these populations are not participating in each other's surveys. A patriarchal terrorist is not picking up the phone to answer questions about how violent he's been. But similarly, many couples are doing violent things to each other and not having run ins with the law, not ending up in shelters, not actually really entering any of public database in any way shape or form. And yet the violence is still happening. Let's look at a couple examples here. I'll start with the common couple violence and then we'll do the patriarchal terrorism video. But the common couple violence video, I think is illustrative in a number of ways here. The intima terrorism. That night, something else changed. Neither of us wanted to make love. If this was all I was ever going to get at a big, was it enough for me? And then at 3:00 A.M. Somewhere between sleep and waking, I got my answer. Oh. D. Huh. Pu. Care. You right? No. Fuck Fuck. Oh, my God. Oh. What the hell was that? You knocked me out a bed. You didn't even know he was here. Well, I do now. Why don't you break my arm the next time? Sorry. Jesus. C. Alright, Sugar Ray. The bed's all yours. Where are you going? I sleep on the couch. Wait, will you just let me explain? Don't talk now. Bad to talk now. But I couldn't sleep. And at 4:00 A.M. I decided he couldn't sleep either. It's ice for your face. Yes, I can feel that. Okay, I know I've lost little of my power here, and I'm pretty sure that most women's magazines would say that what I just did was a very bad idea. But the thing is the other night wasn't just about the cigar. It never is. I hate that you look at other women. I hate that I don't have a key to your place. You've never spent the night at my place. You can't even make space for me in your bed. What I think is illustrative about that scene too is that it's a little uncomfortable, but also played for laughs a little bit. That I think is one of these cultural sensitivities that has changed a bit, but is indicative of the fact that this is a form of violence, a form of aggression and relationships that actually tends to be somewhat. Now I'll show you a video that I think illustrates the less common version. But you're really pushing my buttons. And the whole time you've been doing me like this, I've been too polite to point out that at any time I want to, I could kick this damn door to splinters. Okay, baby. Know what I can do. What I can do. To Alright. All right. Troops. Make me self at home. You brought your whole pack with you. None of these bozos got lies. They got to hang out with you. You're gonna love this, baby. You're gonna call up some of your friends who work in the saloon. With you and the bunch of us, we're gonna hit every joint in town. It's just gonna be great. I ain't calling up nobody. That's a man assured. And as sure as hell he ain't one of my You got somebody's s loves tinkle over you. You've been with another man. You've been with him tonight. Who is he? He superman. He flew out the window just as soon as you heard your coming. 'Cause you scared him so man. You think I have no feelings at all. If you're gonna slug me. Just go ahead and get it over with you sick best. There you go, lying about me again right in front of my friends. I have never hit a woman in my life. Is. You got down past it. You got Di. Maybe we're all here to have a good time. Yeah. I got to take a leak. And then he dies in the next scene. But to call, what I've just shown you are two videos of one person hitting another person. But to call those the same thing is a stretch to put it mildly. That was essentially the insight that people needed to make sense of all this. I was like, Yeah, those are two examples of people hitting each other, but they are not the same thing. We have intimate terrorism on the one hand, that was the second video and situational couple violence. That was the first video. Again, what I'm going to do here is recap the distinctions between these things and then we'll pause here for today. Again, intimate terrorism that the study of this topic grew out of an interest in feminist issues. We want to help these women. But the situational couple violence they wanted to do that too, but they also wanted to understand family conflict in general. These were people who were experts at families, right? The data came from different places, shelters, hospitals, police records, on the one hand, nationally representative surveys, on the other hand. The explanations are different too for where violence comes from. We'll talk about this when we reconvene next week. But with intimate terrorism, we explain that kind of violence with a very different kind of approach. We point to patriarchal institutions that give men the sense that they have a right to control what women do. This can explain why it's overwhelmingly gendered in that case. But that explanation doesn't work as well on the situational side because of the relative gender balance there. This tends to be cases where you've got conflicts that get out of hand. Or another way of thinking about it is there are some aggressive, hot headed people in the world, and many of them get in relationships, and many of them get in relationships with each other. When they have conflicts that get out of hand, things can be thrown, people get hit. As I mentioned, in terms of the gender breakdown, intimate terrorism is about almost 100% male, whereas situational couple violence tends to be pretty close to 50 50. Then other important components here are that in the intimate terrorism case, the violent tends to be pretty frequent and it escalates in intensity, and it escalates in frequency. The idea that it's really bad for a woman to stay in abusive relationship because it's probably going to happen again and it's going to be worse next time, that is a true description of intimate terrorism. But when you're using the conflict tactics survey and you're doing these nationally representative surveys, and you're looking at situational couple violence, it actually doesn't really increase in frequency. It tends actually not to be all that frequent. It depends on what your definition of frequent is. But what you'll often find with those surveys is that you might ask a couple known to engage in common couple violence. Hey, over the last six months, have there been any of these instances and you might get one? Again, that's far less frequent than what we see with intimate terrorism. It's not the case that with situational couple violence, that something like throwing something is going to escalate to using a gun. The escalation pattern that you see in intimate terrorism is not there for situational couple violence. All right. Let's pause here for today. We'll finish this up. We'll do break up on Tuesday as well as the review session. Big day next Tuesday. Yeah. Oh 13 All right. So when we left off on Tuesday, we were talking about these outcome matrices, the various balance of benefits and costs that people can experience in these different kind of situations depending on what they choose to do and what the partner chooses to do. I gave you this as an example of actor control where your choices affect your outcomes, and it actually really doesn't matter what the partner chooses to do. You fundamentally have control over your own outcomes. I mentioned that this was a little bit like the social relations model, and so that probably makes it obvious what's coming. I mentioned that the cleaning example doesn't really make a whole lot of sense, but a decision to attend class or skip class. That's a decision you make for you. What your partner does in that situation doesn't really have a whole lot of impact on you. Second form of control is called partner control. This is a situation where actually it doesn't really matter what you choose to do in a given situation. Your partner is entirely in control of your outcomes. What you do has essentially no impact on what your outcomes are going to be. Whereas active control, you were in full control of your outcomes, partner control, it is the partner who is fully in control of your outcomes. So if we look at a matrix that has that is entirely made up of partner control, it would look something like this. Now, notice where the fours and the negative fours are arranged. Now if your partner decides to clean, you get a four, regardless of what you do. If your partner doesn't clean, you get a negative four, again, regardless of what you do. You can see here, your choice really has no impact. It's entirely at your partner's discretion, what you're going to get out of this situation. Again, a clean don't clean example doesn't really quite make a whole lot of intuitive sense for something like this. Yes, question. I On the exam, there would you won't be drawing anything. Everything is still going to be multiple choice. You could get a picture of one of these and be asked to identify what's happening or you could be asked questions about it. We might also talk about it conceptually. I'm not going to ask you to do math or like that. There's not going to be any addition or subtraction that you'd be asked to do. It's possible you'll be looking at things like this. Again, clean, don't clean, that doesn't really make a lot of sense, but you can imagine something like h, you could give your partner a massage, your partner could give you a massage, assuming it's costless for you to give a massage to your partner, that's the thing you could do or not do. But your partner giving you the massage is going to be the thing that makes you feel better, and if your partner doesn't give you a massage, then your muscles continue to hurt. Your partner and their decision whether or not to give you a massage is the thing that provides you with good outcomes or not. This is another case, in this case, partner is entirely in control of your outcomes. Now, by the way, I should also note in the reading for this chapter, they give these things, I think slightly different names, but it's the same conceptual thing and on the exams, I'm going to use these terms because they're a little bit clearer. I think in the book, it's just the names of the types of control, I think are a little bit different. But we are talking about the same thing. There's a third form of control. Again, you can probably imagine what it looks like. How else might we arrange the fours and negative fours in this situation? Well, the other form, it's actually called joint control. Really what it pulls for is coordination, where we are in the matrix, that my best decision really does depend on what you do. It's going to require that we coordinate to some extent. If my partner is changing their behavior, that could really change what it is that I want to do. Yes, question. Right. Yeah. The question is that the numbers are on your side, and yes. So the situation is about control of outcomes for you. We're not really even thinking about the partners outcomes in this situation. It could be totally different. It could be the same. That's right. Joint control is really it's about making sure that we either end up in the same cell, or it could also be that we end up in different cells, but we'll get to that example momentarily. But it's easiest to understand with this idea that it's important that we end up in the same cells in the mat. Let me show you what that looks like. This is a situation with joint control. Here, what's important is that we both decide to do the same thing. It's either important. It's going to be good outcomes if we both clean or it's good outcomes if we both don't clean, but it's bad if we choose to do different things. Again, a clean don't clean example doesn't make a whole lot of sense for something like this. But you can think about the decision of something like, Well, where do we want to go to eat? If we have two choices about where to go to eat, we can go to Chipotle, we can go to Crapville, if we go to two different places, that doesn't work. We got to coordinate where we end up. I joint control, these refer to cases where coordination is key, and it's important that we end up in the same place. Now, You could also imagine versions of this where the numbers were flipped, such that it was important that we do different things. You're engaged in some group activity. One of you needs to take notes on the textbook, one of you needs to take notes on the lecture. That's also an example of joint control. It's just important that you do different things. If you both do the same thing, Oh, my gosh, you've duplicated the work. That's also a failure of You know, that's like ending up in the wrong cell of a joint control example. Joint control is all about coordination. It's either really important that we do the same thing like where do we go for lunch? Or it's really important that we do different things like when you divide up tasks on a group project, both are kind of joint control. We've got these three kinds of control. Now, I want to go back to the example that I started with. It was this one, where we can both decide to clean the house together, or we end up in this tense situation where I really would like to be the person who sits back and doesn't clean the house while you do all the work. That gives me the best outcome is the worst for you. It turns out you can and I will not ask you to do this on the exam. I'll show you this for your edification in case you appreciate it. You can actually figure out what is the level of actor control partner control and joint control in this matrix. It turns out this matrix has a little bit of actor control, a lot of partner control, and no joint control. That was what was here this whole time. Why is it a little bit of actor control? It's a little bit of actor control because let's just look at Betty's numbers. It's a little bit of actor control because Betty can clean the house or not clean the house. If she cleans the house, she's going to get a four or a negative four. The average there is zero. Or she can not clean the house, you get an eight or zero, average there is four. There's a four point difference on average if she chooses to do the nasty thing. The rewards in the matrix a bit to make the na choice. That's that negative four right there. Again, not going to ask you to do the math. The partner control is powerful. It's a partner control where Betty really wants Andy to do the nice thing. If Andy chooses to do the nice thing of cleaning the house, well, she's going to get a four or an eight, average there is six. If he does the nasty thing, she's either going to get a negative four or a zero, the average there is negative two. It's eight points better for her on average. If he does the nice thing, then if he does the nay thing. You can just trust me, there's no joint control in the situation. Okay. This particular arrangement. You have many different arrangements of rewards in these kinds of matrices. But this particular arrangement where there is a little bit of actor control that pushes you to do the mean thing and a lot of partner control that makes you really want the other person to do the nice thing. This actually has a name, and it's called the Prisoner's Dilemma. The prisoner's dilemma is one of many kinds of arrangements in these matrices, but it specifically refers to this arrangement, where the pull of the actor control and the partner control lead in different directions, and the partner control is especially powerful. Now, in the prisoner's dilemma, this if you've encountered this before, this example is all flipped around, such that now higher numbers are bad because it refers to years in prison. It's still the same basic idea. So the prisoner's dilemma, the idea is you've got two people who are being accused of a crime, I think we're supposed to imagine for the sake of argument that they have actually committed this crime, and they're being offered these deals by the prosecutors, if they defect on their partner, if they do the nasty thing to their partner, well, there's a possibility they will end up walking. If they cooperate with their partner, they continue to not talk to the police, then they're going to get some number of years in prison. But the thing is is that if they both cooperate with each other, sorry, if they both defect on each other, they're going to get three years in prison. That's what's going on here. If they end up both turning on each other, they get three years in prison. If they both stay quiet, they're only going to end up with one year in prison. But the scary thing is what your partner can do to you. If they turn on you and you stay quiet. Because if you think you're doing the nice thing, but your partner is doing the nasty thing to you, well, you're going to get four years in prison and they're going to walk. That's how the prisoner's dilemma is structured. It's a situation that makes people fear two of emotions very powerfully. This is the breakdown of how this particular matrix is structured, but it's the same thing where there's actor control where you're really being drawn to want to defect on your partner and there's partner control. You're very afraid of what your partner is going to do to you. It creates these two emotions. The emotions are both greed and fear. The greed comes from the actor control. The greed comes from the idea that if you do the nasty thing to your partner, you're going to get a better outcome on average than if you don't. The fear comes from the fact that your partner has an enormous amount of power over you, because your partner by choosing to defect on you can really put you in a bad situation. If your if Andy defects on Betty, she's going to end up with either four or three years in prison. Very bad news for Betty if Andy decides to if Andy decides to turn her in. If he cooperates, she's going to get one year or maybe even to get away Scott free. That's the fear. The fear is that your partner is going to do something nasty to you. The greed is that things are a little better for you if you turn on your partner. Okay. Any questions about the prisoner's dilemma? Now, one of the issues with the prisoner's dilemma is that, again, in the classic way that this is set up, you've these two people being accused of a crime. They're not allowed to talk to each other. Because if two people can talk to each other, promise to each other, we're going to cooperate. We're going to get the best joint outcomes for us. We'll both cooperate, we'll only get a year. The challenge, for example, if you're only playing this once, one time, what are you going to do and you can't talk to somebody about it? So we'll look in a second to see how people and actually computer programs try to solve this problem in a way that's best for everybody. But before we do that, let's do some clicker question. Imagine your partner engages in a behavior that is destructive to your relationship. According to the theory of transformation and motivation, which of the following scenarios is least likely to elicit a negative response from you? A, your motivation is Max Joint, you wait 2 minutes before responding to your partner's behavior. B, your motivation as Max joint, you wait 10 minutes before responding to your partner's behavior. S your motivation as Max Reel, you wait 2 minutes before responding to your partner's behavior or D your motivation as Max Reel, you wait 10 minutes before responding to your partner's behavior? I'll stop at 1 minute and 10 seconds. Very good. Max joint means you're taking both you and your partner's considerations into account and waiting more rather than less time also facilitates transformation of motivation. Makes