#775 - Daniel Cox - Why Are Young Men Becoming More Right Wing?

Unknown Speaker

What's happening, people? Welcome back to the show. My guest today is Daniel Cox. He's a researcher, pollster, and director of the survey center on American Life. Never before has the divide between left and right mirrored the split between men and women so closely.

Women are increasingly leaning to the left, while young men are skewing toward the right. Daniel is the original analyzer of this groundbreaking data and has a variety of explanations for exactly what we're seeing in the modern political world. Expect to learn why there is such an ideological divide between men and women, whether me, too had anything to do with this change, what roles abortion and lgbt campaigns play in this, whether conservative men are struggling to find a partner, the implications of the gender political divide on dating, and much more. I think this is one of the biggest stories for 2024. We're going into an election year in America, and generally people date and find friends within their political sphere, which means that as men and women move further apart, they are less likely to be able to get into relationships and less likely to become friends, which is tres not good.

Definitely suboptimal there. It's just a fascinating story. I think this is something that we should all be keeping our eyes on over the coming months, and hopefully something can be done to reverse it, because more divide is definitely not good. And I also appreciate that Daniel comes at this from a pretty impartial lens. He's analyzing the data and looking at potential explanations, but not really making a value judgment on it.

It's not like this is right or wrong for the individuals in there, but we can think about what might be more effective for a society at large. So lots to take away from today. I've become absolutely obsessed with legendary foods lately. They make the best protein sweets I've ever had. Their cinnamon protein, sweet roll, and strawberry protein pastry are literally like crack.

And each of the snacks are between 150 and 220 calories and have 20 grams of protein and two or less grams of sugar. Your average cinnamon roll is more than 400 calories and has 60 grams of sugar and almost zero protein. So you can switch out something that you want to have but feel guilty about for something that you still want to have but feel good about, and it helps you hit your protein target and it helps you keep your gains, and it's not going to spike your blood sugar and make you feel like crap. They are phenomenal, and I've been in love with them for so long. I absolutely adore the product.

I truly believe in the company and the fact that they're really transparent about their sourcing, how they're making their products, and why they're doing it. Right now you can get free shipping on all orders over $69 plus 10% off everything by going to eatlegendry.com modernwisdom and using the code modernwisdom at checkout. That's eatlegendary.com modernwisdom and Modern Wisdom a checkout this episode is brought to you by one of the greatest podcasts of all time, the Tim Ferriss show. Each episode, Tim deconstructs world class performance like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jamie Foxx, Jerry Seinfeld, LeBron James, and Naval Ravicant. In fact, his episode with Naval Ravicant is genuinely one of my favorite podcast episodes of all time.

Those two are absolute powerhouses and I highly recommend that you go and listen to it. This show was hugely influential in getting me into podcasting. He literally created the podcast that taught me how to release a podcast seven years ago before he even knew who I was and I couldn't recommend any other show more highly. Now is the perfect time to tune in because this year they have some huge plans in store. Right now you can find the Tim Ferriss show wherever you get your podcasts, and you can learn more about the podcast as well as five bullet Friday, Tim's fantastic newsletter with nearly 2 million weekly subscribers at Tim Dot blog that's Tim blog.

You might have seen that I recently went on tour in the UK, Ireland, Dubai, Canada and the US. And the entire time for a full month I didn't check a single bag in because hold luggage is a psyop meant to keep you poor and late. In fact, I never need to check bags anymore. Thanks to nomatic, they make the best, most functional, durable and innovative backpacks and luggage that I've ever found. The 20 litre travel pack and carry on classic are absolute game changers.

They're beautifully designed, not over engineered, and will literally last you a lifetime with their lifetime guarantee. Best of all, you can return or exchange any product within 30 days for any reason. So you can buy your new bag, try it for a month, and if you do not like it, they will give you your money back. Right now you can get a 20% discount and see everything that I use and recommend by going to nomatic.com modernwisdom and using the code MW 20 at checkout. That's nomatic.com modernwisdom and MW 20 at checkout.

But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Daniel Cox.

You are in the thick of it right now. That article that you wrote at the start of the year caused quite the ruckus. Yeah, it did. And it's funny because this is some research we've been doing for, you know, over a year, and often it just takes a single op ed and people start paying attention. How would you categorize the last couple of months for you and the sort of fallout?

Daniel Cox

Yeah, I mean, one of the really interesting things is people are debating just exactly the extent of the divide, the nature of it, what's going on. So you have a lot of pollsters like myself saying, hey, this is kind of unprecedented. What we're seeing young women becoming much more liberal. And demographically, we're seeing rapid changes when it comes to LGBTQ identity, growing education divides between young men and young women. So there's a lot of things that are emerging or new, and the political divide is just one of those things.

But there are the cold water throwers who, largely political scientists, who want to say, well, hold on. Let's wait till we can get some corroborating data. But the fact of the matter is, actually, there's a lot of crowbarring data already from a lot of really reliable sources that suggest that something is going on. And we can, I think, debate the margins around how extreme is the divide? How far apart are young men and young women and on what issues?

But I think we can safely say that something really big is happening. All right, so just how big is this ideological divide between young men and young women? What's happening? So, according to the Gallup data, which is some of the research that we've been using, we conduct our own surveys at the survey center on American Life. But we also look at a lot of different other polls from the Pew Research center and places like Gallup that have really long and reliable, trustworthy trends.

And so Gallup shows, beginning around 2014 2015, this emerging ideological divide, with young women becoming significantly more liberal. Around 42, 43% identify as liberal in the latest polls. And young men really haven't shifted all that much when it comes to their ideology. So there's anywhere from a twelve to 14 point gap between them now. Right.

Unknown Speaker

You've got. At no time in the past quarter century has there been such a rapid divergence between the views of young men and young women. Right. And as far as we know, this is something that will continue to shape the way these folks relate to each other in terms of their priorities when it comes to the politicians that they want to nominate and elect and the issues that they care about. One of the really significant divisions we see is actually over the issue of abortion.

Daniel Cox

And while both young men and young women tend to lean pretty significantly pro choice when it comes to the priorities of that issue, we did a poll in 2022, right before the midterm elections, and 61% of young women said that abortion was a critical priority for them, but it was only like, 30% of young men. So just in terms of what they care about and how much they care about it is really different. What is the age bracket for this? Because could this not just be the usual young people are more liberal effect? And we've got a bit of social media that's maybe kind of emphasizing or magnifying that and kind of that explains it?

Yeah, I think when it comes to this stuff, there's a lot that's going on and a lot that's pretty complicated. So I think the social media actually plays a really significant role in all this. But the other thing is, when it comes to the age gaps, one of the problems we have in polling is we're often talking about different age groups. So in the research that we do, we identify young people as 18 to 29, and we identify them young adults or young women or young men, but some polls will scoot that up to 18 to 34, which is, again, they're young. But also there's a pretty significant difference between comparing 18 to 34 and 18 to 29 in terms of life experience.

And economically, people are in just some different positions in their mid twenties versus their early thirties. And so we do have this problem. Sometimes we're talking past each other and different pollsters handling things a little bit differently, and then journalists, when they rush to cover this stuff, not to mention podcasters, they're trying to sort through a kind of confluence of different and sometimes contradictory information, and it can be challenging to sort through. So is this different than just young people becoming more liberal? Because young people have always been young people?

Unknown Speaker

Like, we have a regular supply of 15 year olds and 17 year olds and 20 year olds and such. But this is a marked difference from that. Yeah. No, absolutely. So if you.

Daniel Cox

We compared young people today versus young people a generation ago. So we're not comparing baby boomers and generation z. We're not comparing generational cohorts. We're actually looking at young people across time. Right.

Unknown Speaker

Do men and women live on different planets? Then they just see the world in very different ways. Mars and Venus, you mean? I think in one way, one of the things that's really challenging, and I think is contributing to this kind of gender antagonism that we're seeing is that so much of the interactions we're seeing among young men and young women is occurring online, on social media, on platforms, that it's really easy to be and to be dehumanized and to dehumanize people, to not proceed with a lot of caution or empathy, not to take people seriously. And so I think that's a significant problem.

Daniel Cox

One of the things that I wrote, uh, recently for this great organization called the American Institute for Boys and Men, which Richard Reeves runs, who's great, I'm a huge fan. And one of the things I wrote for them is the decline in dating, particularly among young men. We've seen a really precipitous decline in how often teenagers are dating, spending time having a boyfriend or girlfriend. And I think that's problematic in that you kind of learn how to engage with someone in really difficult and situations that require a lot of nuance, a lot of understanding. Again, a lot of empathy.

So successful relationships have all that and can be very fraught. And so it's helpful to have experiences earlier so that when you move into your twenties and you're out on your own, you have some experience to draw from. When you're trying to engage and trying to date and navigating really difficult call complex romantic situations. Why have young women moved to the left then? What's the driving forces here?

So I think there's some. There's not any one thing, of course, this is social science, so there's a number of factors that we might consider, but I think there's some obvious ones. When you look at just what's happening with the hash metoo movement, I think that was pretty significant. We conducted a bunch of in depth interviews among young women and young men after a dating survey that we conducted early last year. And one of the things we heard from these young women again and again was how formative that experience was growing up and sort of seeing this happen in real time, there, I think, was a source of, like, we're in this together, this idea of kind of shared or linked fate, that if this thing was happening to this person, it could happen to me, too.

Right? That's me too. So that would be felt like there was something of a commonality of interests and concerns there. I think that was pretty critical. And then for young men, what was really interesting is a lot of them said, well, this is not really about me.

This is about celebrities, or this is the kind of malevolent dudes out there who are kind of awful, and I have nothing to do with them. So as opposed to being kind of a structural concern, it became something that they kind of dismissed as something that has nothing to do with them. Yeah, I love the idea of linked fate. I never heard it before. You say two thirds of young women believe that in most or every way, what happens to women in the US will have a bearing on their own lives.

Unknown Speaker

It's this sort of like a. It's like inbuilt sort of tribalism, but it's more emotional than tribalism. Yeah, I mean, I think it's. It's kind of a recognition that there are structures in society or institutions that regardless of your race or ethnicity or religion or your geography, that you will have to navigate these things, that you are treated differently in american society because you're a woman. And I'm going to throw a lot of polling at you, but this one, I think is pretty interesting.

Daniel Cox

So Gallup tracked how women and men felt about the position of women in society. Were they satisfied with the way women were treated? And over the last 20 or so years, roughly similar numbers of men and women said that, yeah, they were basically satisfied with how women were being treated. And then around 2016, 2017, women just plummeted. So they were like 61%, 1617.

And then today they're in the mid forties. So they're far less happy today about the way women are being treated in american society, which is a significant disruption from the past. Despite the fact that you've got rising socioeconomic success for women, improvements in education, graduation from university, two women for every one man completing a four year us college degree, women earn eleven pounds more between the ages of 21 and 29, on average, than men do, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So it seems like that has to be, at least in part, something memetic or something sort of cultural, sort of like social psychology that's going on, because at least in many of the ways that you can frame the reality of their experience, it is improving. Yeah.

I think undoubtedly you can't look objectively at whether it's economic data or data about politics or just understand the way the culture has evolved and how we treat issues like sexual harassment and discrimination and not think that things are better for women than they were in the 1970s. But interestingly, some sociologists have actually looked at the way young women felt in the seventies versus today in terms of how much gender discrimination was a problem and how much they experienced it. And actually, women today feel like they have things worse. So some of this, I think, is about understanding of okay. What behavior do I categorize as sexual harassment, and how am I feeling about various types of these kind of infractions?

So if a male coworker asked me out three times, if he does it politely, politely, and respectfully, is that sexual harassment? How do we define those kinds of interactions? And I think in the past, a lot of that stuff was kind of dismissed. And again, some of it was not good. A lot of it was not good and roundly criticized and should have been changed a long time ago.

Unknown Speaker

Yeah, rightly so. But some of it is now we're sort of judging, I think, societally, as smaller infractions are sort of treated the same as really significant infractions and behavior. Yeah. Do you know what the Tocqueville paradox is? I've not heard it.

Cool idea. So as living standards in a society rise, people's expectations rise along with them. But when you start yourself off on that trajectory, the problem is reality has to, at some point, asymptote out like it can't continue to just get infinitely better, but your expectations can. And it's this sort of comparison between the two. Also, when you combine the Tocqueville paradox with concept.

Creepy, you know, the ever broadening of what might be considered to be racism or what might be considered to be sexism or what might be considered to be harassment. Again, not saying that these things don't exist, but I think that most sane people would agree that there has been a hypersensitization to things that previously probably wouldn't have even appeared on the radar. Maybe they should have done. But a lot of the things that were occurring before have been gotten rid of, and much of the stuff which is happening now seems to be, at the very least, magnifying small things into big things. Yeah.

Daniel Cox

And of course, I mean, I want to be very sensitive and careful about how we talk about this stuff, but I think that's absolutely right. And in terms of what we've seen, some conservative but feminists talk about this issue, and they say it's kind of stripping agency away from women to say, hey, we can't handle this or we don't know how to navigate these situations, or again, if the behavior is really bad, heinous, there should be legal, moral, ethical red lines for all that stuff, and there should be a zero tolerance policy. But I think a lot of this stuff falls in a gray er area. And so how we treat it culturally and socially is pretty important. Yeah.

Unknown Speaker

And it's open to debate as well, right? Yeah, no, absolutely. And a lot of this stuff is based on perception. So how did I perceive the interaction? How did I think this person was oriented towards me and what was their intent?

Daniel Cox

But the other thing, and I think this is something that is missed in all this discussion, which, again, I'm generally sympathetic to the fact that we aren't as nuanced when we talk about this stuff as we should be. But there's a rising rate of sexual harassment that's actually occurring online. So the Pew Research center looked at over like a five year period and found that a range of behaviors that young women are, were far more likely to be experienced some type of sexual harassment. And they defined a bunch of different types of behaviors. And so in that way, it is increasing.

Right. That is a difficult. That's a good point that I hadn't considered. That technology has enabled new types of sexual harassment. Unsolicited dick pics, people sending sort of rude, unwanted messages, stalking, harassment online, that sort of stuff.

Unknown Speaker

That's something that I hadn't considered. That being said, the toxic male gaze, if you look at somebody, if you look at a woman on the tube for longer than 5 seconds, that constitutes something that they should be concerned about. Workplace culture being incredibly sort of anti collaborative, I think. And what it feels like, you know, I'm not in an office, but what it feels like from at least friends that work there, their felt sense is that trepidation that they're in a lot of fear. And that is going to come across as kind of like cold to a lot of women, that they actually want to be able to collaborate with their male counterparts.

Some really interesting research that suggests that post me, two male supervisors were less likely to collaborate with female graduates because they were scared that something downstream from that was going to get them in trouble, even if they didn't have any intention of doing that. So I do think that we need to be careful about what we make people expect. One of the other quotes that I thought was really interesting, he said, look, this is from a 21 year old woman. Luckily, I had all that over social media to shape the way I look at dating and men. She said it allowed her to use other people's experiences to form a sense of putting a guard up.

A 20 year old woman offered a similar take that me too, empowered her to stand up for herself. I think it makes me less of a doormat. Again, female agency, taking control, independence, all that stuff. Very, very good. But it allowed her to use other people's experiences to form a sense of putting a guard up.

I'm not convinced that putting a guard up based on other people's experiences, especially if it's a guy glancing over in the gym or, you know, like some social media campaign that kind of maybe makes mountains out of molehills. I'm not convinced that that forms robust, psychologically healthy women. I think that that makes them hyper vigilant, scared of lots of men, always on edge, and that can't be good for them either. That's not the sort of environment I want for women to inhabit from other women. Yeah.

Daniel Cox

And I think one of the problems is, and we could talk about this a lot, is taking so many of our cues from social media. Right. Versus our own personal experience and the people that we know, because you'll often hear this kind of divergence where, in the research that we've done, women will say, yeah, you know, the men in my life, you know, siblings, cousins, friends, are all great, but I think overall, men are kind of terrible, and, well, where are you getting that perspective from? Because your real world experience is actually telling you a very different story. But, well, I'm seeing these terrible men online, and, well, what kind of, you know, what do you think the algorithm is doing?

Is it putting the kind of boring, polite, respectful men? I think they're overrepresented on social media. Of course not. It's like, the worst examples of all these different categories of offenses. The most egregious stories are always the ones that catch fire.

Unknown Speaker

And the problem is, if you spend most of your time and learn about the world through the Internet, you get a disproportionate view. You get a biased view toward crazy stories. You know, the guy leaves the house and comes back to find his wife in bed with the postman. Like, you know, that story catches fire because it's so. Oh, my God.

Like, could you believe that this thing happened? The same thing goes for. And it makes everybody model the behavior of others on the worst examples. Exactly. And there are folks out there, entrepreneurs, who actually are pushing this stuff, too.

Daniel Cox

So it's not just that the algorithm's finding this stuff, pushing it in front of you. There are people out there who. They built their business or their brand on doing this stuff. Yeah. There's also not enough female leadership in the eyes of women.

Well, I think on both sides. And one of the things that I've really tried to do is sort of say, well, we actually need more conversations and opportunities for young people to engage with one another. So one of the things I've been consistently concerned about is the decline in sociability among young people. So the pandemic was a real big hit. But even before then, we saw a really significant decline in just how often teenagers hung out with each other and maybe drank alcohol or smoked or whatever, but just kind of did something out beyond parental supervision on their own and, you know, behave like we would traditionally expect teenagers to behave and maybe get into some trouble, but also have opportunities to form bonds and engage with each other socially and learn from each other.

Unknown Speaker

Why is political socialization not in effect here? Why aren't republican parents giving birth to republican young women? Yeah. So this is something that we found in our data as well in a 2023 study. So we looked at, it was focused on Gen Z, but we also wanted to look at their formative experiences.

Daniel Cox

So what was the educational background of their parents? What was the religious background? What was the politics of their parents? And one of the things that we see that is consistent with a lot of political science research is that parental politics does influence the politics of children, particularly when there's consistency within the household. So when both parents and two parent households are Democrats or both are Republicans, they fairly effectively can pass on political values to the next generation.

There's lots of caveats, and there's a rich socialization literature that deals with all this and then talks about how this all works. But one of the things that we saw was that while republican parents tend to raise republican sons, they're far less likely to raise republican daughters. So only 44% of women raised by republican parents still identify as an adult, as a republican. And that's pretty significant because every other configuration that we looked at, we saw the political socialization was proceeding fairly consistently. And this was the kind of an anomalous case.

And for me, I speculate in the piece that I wrote about this, well, at least some of it has to do with Donald Trump. I think some of it has to do with the rise in LGBTQ identity that a lot of young women who. Who identify this way. And in large surveys, it's one in three young women. So it's.

Unknown Speaker

We're not that number, because I've seen that sort of banded around. Have you stress test that at all? You see it. And I think Gallup has numbers that are close to that. In our large national surveys that we can talk with ipsos, we see that number.

Daniel Cox

So I think there's another polling organization called PRI who has that number. So we've seen it pretty consistently asked a couple different ways. And so I think we have some confidence that at least what the questions are asking, do you identify as, you know, lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer, whatever that at least we are seeing positive increased identity from? But I think when it comes to what that means in terms of sexual behavior and sexual preferences, there's some separation there, and some folks, and I would count myself in this category, I think that at least there's some politics involved in all this. So if you look at, for instance, that the number of people who identify as bisexual, that is the fastest increasing category.

Bisexual. But if you look at the sexual preferences and behavior of people who identify as bisexual, there's. There's some distance there. There's some. Oh, so people identify as bisexual but still date heterosexually?

Mostly, yes, much more. Right. So that. So that there is. Where's that come from?

Unknown Speaker

Is that polling data as well? So, yeah, this is. This is polling data. And again, anything. There's some fluidity in all this.

Daniel Cox

We're talking about young people. So, again, things may change over time. Things take. Some things may change week to week sort out. Yeah.

And I think that that's right. That this generation has been given the space to kind of explore and find out, and that's. That's all good, but I think that it does mean that we need to exercise some caution when we're thinking about, whoa, okay, you know, there's one in three young women are LGBTQ. But what does that mean? And might that be subject to change at some point?

I think it might. An identification with the movement overall. But when the rubber meets the road, things don't change that much. Just to kind of round out what you were talking there, 44% of women raised by republican parents identify as republican, but 77% of women with democrat parents identify as Democrats. And you're right.

Unknown Speaker

Political socialization is a thing, but just your behavioral genetics gives a big predisposition here. You know, your political affiliation is, at least in part, genetically predisposed because you have certain values about the way that you see the world that are just, like, imbued into the mechanisms of your brain and so on and so forth. And then you layer on top the socialization piece. So to go, 44% of women raised by republican parents identify as republican themselves. So it's more likely for you to be a democrat female young girl with republican parents than for you to follow the political socialization of your family.

Plus the sort of genetic predisposition. Some of those folks are probably, like, politically independent, too. So it's not just republican Democrats, but, yeah. Yeah. I mean, the point still stands.

What role is abortion playing here? I think it's pretty huge. I know there's been, you know, I feel like there's a pendulum swinging in terms of one week, we say abortion is going to totally reconfigure the political landscape in the US with the overturn of Roe and the Dobbs decision the next week. Well, we're not seeing in this polling data and we're not seeing this huge jump in or spike in turnout among young women. And so I feel like it's vacillated in terms of how critical we think this is, both in the immediate political context and sort of longer term.

Daniel Cox

I tend to think that it's pretty crucial because it's occurring when it did. For this generation that is all predisposed to be very, very supportive. If you look a generation earlier among millennials, actually, they tended to be surprisingly conservative on abortion. And I don't think political scientists ever really sussed out why that was. Cause at the time, the millennial generation.

So you look back in the mid two thousands forward, and that generation was the most educated at that time, the least religious. There was a number of policy positions they were pretty liberal on, like gay marriage. And so you would think that this, the abortion issue, they would also be, tend to be pretty pro choice, but they were not. But that's not true for generation Z, the generation that's followed millennials. And for that generation, they're incredibly liberal on abortion.

So you combine a Supreme Court ruling that was not popular among that generation, an issue that's incredibly salient for young women and typically always is, and an issue that they tend to care a lot about. And then I think that, to me, suggests that moving ahead, it's going to be a pretty significant factor in orienting their politics and motivating them. You just mentioned higher education. It seems to be a trend that people who are more highly educated end up being more liberal. Is the increasing female participation in higher education contributing to this, too?

I think so. I am not one of those folks who believes that higher ed has a huge impact on the political trajectory of young people. I think there's a lot of self selection that goes into people who go to college. I think there's a lot of differences across different types of campuses. If you're going to a school in the south versus the northeast or the west, I mean, there's a lot of factors.

The other thing I thought I always kind of chuckle at is when people start saying, oh, professors are turning people into Marxists and atheists and the professors that I know so that we can't even get these kids to read a damn syllabus. And so, like, they think that they have, you know, all this power over the politics of their students. What I think what's going on there is probably that for a lot of these campuses, that the peer environment is exercising a pretty significant influence. And so your, your peers, politics, and then also the, the longer trajectory in terms of where you end up. So if you go to college, you're more likely to end up in a city, possibly a coastal city, and then among, you'll work in places with lots of other college educated folks.

And because of education polarization, we're seeing that you're more likely to be around people who share your centrist, life leaning political views. That's a really good point. I want to just sit in that for another moment because there is a big demonization about the structure of the universities overall. They're the ones that are woking the students and all of the rest of it. But when you consider that, I mean, I think back to my university educator.

Unknown Speaker

I did five years, two degrees, and I spent like 2% of my day in lectures. And most of the time that I was in lectures, I was talking to my friends in any case, and all the rest of the time, it was just the melting pot of the student community. So really, when you're pointing the finger, I think that a lot of it should be what happens when you get lots of young people with social media and trends in a cosmopolitan city that's probably coastal, at least. Maybe, maybe coastal, but big cosmopolitan city, what do they talk about and how do they, how does the discourse self reinforce? How can it sort of run away with itself?

That's, that's a fantastic point. That's a really, really interesting point. I hadn't thought of. Yeah. And then there's a reinforcing effect, right, too, with our polarized media environment in the United States.

Daniel Cox

Like, so you don't even have to leave your bubble. And so if you have your best friends and your immediate social group is all left leaning folks, they're citing opinion writers that are left leaning and MSNBC anchors. And so you can live quite happily in this bubble, both in your immediate environment and then your larger information environment, too. I wonder how conflicting this is for young women. I wonder if we know how the hypersensitivity that young women have to the trends of the social group around them, very, very tuned up.

Unknown Speaker

I don't imagine this is particularly enjoyable for young women to. Maybe they've got one opinion that sits outside. Maybe they're slightly different on the First Amendment, or maybe they're not too sure on immigration, or maybe they're not too sure on whatever, you know, anything else. I feel. I feel bad for them.

I feel bad for the fact that there is a huge sort of wave that's moving through. And I think anybody who, the purity spiral is very sort of pure, and anyone who doesn't adhere, it's going to feel uncomfortable. There'll be discordance. I imagine this probably doesn't make them psychologically feel all that sort of safe or robust or able to be open and honest and truly sort of speak their opinions. Yeah, well, I think too, right.

Daniel Cox

Like, we know in political science that having, being surrounded by people who share your political views is actually not great from a sort of larger political system perspective, because those folks tend to have more extreme attitudes. Right. Being constantly having your views affirmed by those around you, it's easier to demonize, it's easier to engage in kind of a tribal politics. So that's, you never get any counterpoints that are set in good faith. Right.

And I think the other thing, too, is, like, I don't think we properly appreciate that so much of this stuff is an evolution. Right? We kind of learn, we try out ideas, we try out language, and I think we ought to give space for that. So I think, like, one of the things, like, I'm not a huge believer in the cancel culture conversation. I think that in certain instances, yes, we have been too restrictive.

Certain institutions have played roles that I think are counterproductive in terms of having an honest, open debate. I think some of it's overblown. But I think there is one way that, I think the entire way we engage in political discourse in this country is problematic. And that is, like, we think that nothing will ever change and that people don't change in terms of their views on various issues. And, of course, that's not true.

And one of the quickest ways for you to change your opinion is I drop you in a different political context, and you'll change your views pretty quickly, or at least you will reflect on what you believe. Oh, these people, more deeply, they're not necessarily demonized. Right. And I think that's one of the problems when you get to the political influence of dating and relationships is you sort of say, well, I'm only going to date a Trump supporter, or I would never date a Trump supporter. I think one of the problems with social media and dating apps is it allows you to more effectively filter out things that you think you might not like, but we are pretty terrible judges on the things that we actually care about in many respects.

I tell this to my son when he's training his, his nose about food or dinner is like, you've never tried this. So you have no idea. And so the experiment and experience are actually a part of growing up. And I think to the extent that politics is part of that, we ought to give people space. We ought to give them some empathy and understanding when they're working through things.

And I think we're just so quick to judge and bash and it's really unfortunate. Yeah. Can you try and explain? So we've spoken about young women. I want to talk about young men, but how much is it young women moving to the left?

Unknown Speaker

And how much is it young men moving to the right? Is it equal amounts from wherever the set point is, or is it more left and men are a little bit more right? How would you categorize that? Yeah. So this is the hard part about this is it's not really clear what's going on in men.

Daniel Cox

There's sort of different stories and narratives emerging from different polls. So the same Gallup survey that I quoted earlier, with women becoming more liberal by about twelve to 14 points over the last, you know, seven, eight years, the men seem pretty flat in that in terms of their ideological disposition, a plurality are moderate. And yes, I think similar numbers are liberal and conservative. There's some sense that they are becoming a little bit more Republican or more just predisposed to support republican candidates. There's.

Unknown Speaker

Sorry, is that different to being conservative? Yeah. So political ideology and partisan affiliation are different. You know, the most of the way that survey research focuses on this and asks about this is that there's a Democrat, Republican, independent is your political affiliation. And there's, for ideology, there's conservative, moderate, liberal.

Daniel Cox

They are correlated. So if you're a liberal, you're likely to be Democrat. If you're conservative, you're likely lead Republican. But one of the challenges is that for this younger generation, they tend to have increasingly negative views of both parties. So even people who are quite liberal said to say, I don't like Biden, I don't like the Democrats.

And this is actually particularly true of young men. I think it's like close to four in ten view both political parties, the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, unfavorably. And so you have this weird thing, like there's more people identifying as independent even as the country is moving a little bit more to the left. So we're becoming more independent and slightly more liberal. And so it's complicated when we try to make sense of what's going on.

And I think too often we correlate those things, and it's actually, there's some daylight between them that we need to appreciate. That was one of the most interesting things that I learned in your article, which was young men are far less likely than women to say that any issue is personally important to them. It seems like if there was a checked out of politics like dimension to this, that would be the real skew for men. Yeah. And I think for a lot of men, I think this is kind of an orientation that has happened because of how rapidly some of the social norms and culture has changed.

And there's a real sense of dislocation, like, where do I fit what I'm told to be an ally? But how do I be an ally? Can I advocate for myself, even, or the things that I care about? And so you see this in a large number of young men, this political disaffection. I just, like.

I'm tuned out. I'm done with it. And I think one of the things we're seeing is that the republican party has actually probably done a little bit better job of reaching out and saying that they are concerned about the issues that young men are facing, whereas liberals and Democrats a little bit less so. And so we're perhaps seeing a little bit of polarization around just the way the parties are engaging on issues around gender. Right.

Unknown Speaker

Yeah, that makes sense. What about men's opinion on feminism and hash metoo and stuff like that? Is this, in part, could this be a reaction to them feeling like those have gone too far? Yeah. And I think you see this in the polling data.

Daniel Cox

So whether it's the Pew Research center showing a 20 point gap in support of the Me too movement between young men and young women. Young men are kind of divided, and young women are overwhelmingly supportive of me, too. And then in our data, we asked a question about whether people identify as a feminist. Young women largely likely to identify as feminist, but it's only, like, 40% of young men. So you do have a pretty significant gender gap.

And on the question of feminism, actually, the gender gap is largest among Gen Z than any other generation. So there's more disagreement about feminist identity and what feminism is than you see in older generations. Yeah. A 2022 survey by the Southern Poverty Law center found that 46% of Democrat men under 50 agreed that feminism has done more harm than good, and even more republican men agreed. So, you know, it's not like Democrat men and republican men are just one bundle of ideology.

Unknown Speaker

Like, people have different wings within that. But, you know, nearly 50% of Democrat men under 50 saying that they think that feminism's gone too far, I think, yeah, I can see why. If men do feel dislocated and displaced and uncertain about their position, and then they don't feel like they're being given the sympathy or the support that perhaps they would, that they're gonna start pointing the finger around. And then, as you know, we've seen, you know, various scholars have started looking into this. There's, in many ways, young men are struggling economically in education, and they have particular needs that are not being met.

Daniel Cox

They have problems that people aren't advocating for solutions. And so I think that plays into all this. And I think we're really, really bad at trying to hold these two different ideas in our hands at the same time, that there's been progress in terms of gender equality, but there's still plenty of places where women face structural disadvantages. And then there's increasingly problems that young men are facing that are unique to young men, that societally, we would be. Would be in our interest to try to address.

And both those things can be true, right? Yes, both those things can be true. Yes. An oft cited statistic that conveys the enduring absurdity of the gender gap is that until very recently, there were more CEO's named John than CEO's who were women. Across most industries, from politics to academia, men in american society still control more resources, earn higher wages, and enjoy more prestige.

Unknown Speaker

But few young men have any experience in the boardroom and in the classroom. It's their female peers who are crushing it. And Christine Ember wrote this phenomenal article last year where she said, young men feel like their problems are being dismissed out of hand as whining from a patriarchy that they no longer feel a part of. It's this sort of use of outlier male success, I think a lot of the time, that kind of legitimates some of the. What are you crying about?

Look at the number of CEO's, and it's like, yeah, but look at the number of men at the lower end of the distribution as well. They don't feel like they've got the same kind of sympathy. And again, like, what does this lead to? It just leads to this sort of finger pointing, this thing, tribal purity spiral. And the thing that came to mind when reading this part of your research was that it's like a zero sum view of gender equality on both sides.

Daniel Cox

Yeah. Which is increasingly where we're headed, right? That on either side, if you help women, you're hurting men. If you're helping men, you're not paying attention to the dude. I did an episode I must have done, I don't know, 40 episodes that are something along the lines of what's happening to young men.

Unknown Speaker

How are young men struggling? How male mental health, male loneliness, blah, blah, blah. I did one episode a couple of weeks ago. I've done many episodes about women, but I did one in particular. That was the first one in a little while with Freya India, this great writer, Jonathan Heights, a massive fan.

Phenomenal. Phenomenal writer. No author. I don't know her personally. I did an episode with her, and it was like, why are Gen Z women struggling so much?

And immediately, so many of the comments were to do with, oh, this is pandering. This is like, feminism's gone too far. It's men that are struggling. I'm like, dude, there is a library. And what it made me think was like, it's really easy to point the finger and say, look at how many benefits women are getting, and they're the ones that are doing well in education and employment, and the men are the guys that are being held behind and no one really cares.

It's like, yeah, and then as soon as you say, also, women are struggling. Also, there's a lot of problems that they're facing, especially when it comes to mental health, like Jesus Christ. And again, zero sum view of empathy, like, we can't have. If we give empathy to someone that isn't me or my tribe, then it's taking it away. And it's like all that that can lead to is dissatisfaction and people not being able to understand each other.

It's just going to make the situation worse. Yeah. And I think it's really interesting that you use the word tribal when we're talking about men and women, because I feel like we talk about tribal politics, we talk about race and religion. We talk about class, we talk about Republicans and Democrats, but typically, we don't talk about as much men and women inhabiting their oppositional tribes. But I think that's exactly what's happening.

Daniel Cox

Kind of abetted by social media and the lack of socialization. And I think that's going to be a pretty profound civilizational problem. Yes. How could you be wrong about this data? In what ways might you be wrong?

A million ways. I mean, in any work that we do, one of the things we try, and one of the first things, whenever I see some kind of interesting or seemingly anomalous finding is like, where is this corroborated? How can we see where this stacks up compared to what we know? And so looking at a lot of different trusted data sets, conducting high quality, reliable research ourselves is a priority for us and being transparent. So on our website, the survey center on american life, you can download all our data.

And one of the great things about that is it keeps you really honest if you think that people are going to be poking around your stuff. And so I think that is incredibly important sort of institutionally. But when it comes to where things might end up, I think there's. I'm writing a book on this topic, but I think the divide that I'm looking at, which is not just political but relational, I think this is solvable. So the trajectory that I currently am forecasting, that I'm seeing in this data may not wind up as bad as I may talk about.

Unknown Speaker

It may sort of come back into land in a bit more. 2024, right. We are seeing divisions over marriage, with young women saying that marriage benefits men more than women. So we're seeing declining interest in parenthood, plummeting rates of civic participation. And so all these things are kind of pointing in a negative direction.

Daniel Cox

Could change pretty significantly. One of the ways in which I was actually somewhat feeling rather positive about the pandemic, one of the only ways, and optimistic, is that I thought that it would, in this generation and among people, generally, kind of develop an appreciation for the importance of, of social ability. Right. The importance of hanging out and being with each other in community, whether it's a religious community, whether it's being part of membership organizations, whether it's just going to work out with friends or play board games. When that was taken away from us, I think a lot of people suffered in a lot of different ways.

And my hope would be that this generation, particularly the teenagers and young people who really suffered through it, we know those folks tend to suffer more than others, would develop an understanding of. We really need to prioritize this. We need to find spaces where we can spend time with each other. I think the verdict is still out on that one. I'm hoping that's what will happen, but I'm not 100% positive that it will.

Unknown Speaker

Rose Horowitz wrote an article titled, are Gen Z Men and women really drifting apart? The much theorized political rift has yet to show up in actual voting behavior. What's your thoughts on that? Well, she's wrong on that.

Daniel Cox

I talked to Rose for that article, and she's not the only one. So what's happened is there's a number of political scientists who've come out and sort of say, well, in these academic data sets, the general social survey, the American national election study, the congressional election study, don't see this stuff replicated. But point of fact, the only data set where you really don't see it, that you have a large enough sample is the CES. And in the rest of them, in the Pew research trend data, you see it in Gallup. You see it, there's monitoring the future data that folks have looked at.

And you see it in there. You even see it in incoming freshmen. The UCLA does an ongoing study and looks at the politics of incoming freshmen, and you see a growing gender divide there. So there's a lot of corroboration in terms of the data. And then you see it in exit poll data, right.

That there's, I think, like a twelve point gap in the voting behavior of young women and young men in exit polls. And you see it in voter file data as well. So I think it's, we should proceed cautiously. And I think that, I think what some of the political scientists objected to, which I think is absolutely valid, is to say, well, what do people mean when they're identifying as liberal? Does that mean that they're liberal and supportive of the progressive position on all these different issues from gun control to climate change to abortion?

Because point of fact, like young men today are significantly to the left of older men on a lot of those questions, particularly when it comes to race, because the generation is much more racially diverse, you do see them to the left relative to where young women are. I think there's still a lot of evidence that suggests that they're in a little bit different place. The other thing, too, that it's not just politics. You look at views of pornography. There's a really significant difference of where young men and young women are.

Young women. What do they say there? So we asked this question about whether there should be more restrictions placed on Internet pornography. There's like a 20 point gap in the view of young men and young women. Young women want it much more restricted.

Young men don't, not shockingly, I think. So there's a lot of those kind of cultural questions where you see these divides show up as well, and then, like concern about climate change, concern about gun control, young women, again show up much, much higher. Yeah. Gallup just did their own analysis as well. Right.

Unknown Speaker

I think I saw you. It was the same data, but they just published it finally. So like, I published it in 2022. Then I did this op ed earlier this year based on the subsec article, and then Gallup a couple weeks later published there. It's the same data, though, right?

Right. I understand. Yeah. And just to kind of round out the stress testing of your data here, how you said around about 2014 was when this really began to kick in. Yeah, 2014, 2015, depending on what data you're looking at.

Okay, so we're now at, you know, a decade, approaching a decade where this has been sort of trending. So this isn't the same kind of flash in the pan. For instance, for a while, quite a while, I was citing this stat. The number of men between 18 and 30 that report not having sex in the last year has tripled from 2008 to 2018, from 8% to 28%. And I was, like, trotting this stat out.

That was GSS data then. I didn't realize that new GSS data had come out twice. It come out once. And then the second one was what made me realize that the first one had come out and that trend had reversed. And I was like, right, okay.

Like that. And if you actually look at, it was such a sharp increase over such a short space of time that now plotted across enough time, it actually just looks like what happened here, maybe it was something to do with the way that this data was captured. Maybe it was something about 2018. I don't know. But that seems to have come back down now.

And actually, women switched over with men. I think 2019, 2020, women did perhaps hyper vigilance around, sort of like pathogen disgust response type thing around about the pandemic. That could have been a part of it. But it seems like the trend that you are talking about here is more robust longitudinally. Yeah.

Daniel Cox

And I think if you're, it's not just in response to, I think, specific events. When we look at posters, look at what kind of impact does a particular, even an important national event. So some of the protests over police shootings of african american men. Right. We sort of say, okay, how does this change attitudes towards police and policing?

You did see a significant impact of that, but then it dissipated pretty quickly. And so I think some of that is like, that almost always happens. Right. You know, for events to have really profound changes in our political trajectory, they have to be of a magnitude that we don't typically see. But what we're seeing, I think young women, is not just a reaction to the election of Donald Trump, to the Dobbs decision, or me, too.

I think it's partly demographic so you look at their educational attainment, significantly more educated than men. If we're seeing education polarization, we would expect that to show up in their politics. Rise of LGBTQ identity, again, that's increased over the last six, seven, eight years dramatically. And that group, LGBQ people, are much more liberal than people who identify as straight or heterosexual. So there are some demographic reasons to expect that we would see this growing division in politics.

Unknown Speaker

What's happening with race? So race is really challenging to get at in this cohort because simply in a lot of the survey data we have, we don't have large enough samples to break out. So in terms of your average survey of 1000 people, you have basically maybe 120 people who are black or african american. And so you can't do a lot in terms of the analysis. Now, some of the data we have is much larger, but still, you're pretty limited in what you can do.

Daniel Cox

But a lot of the divisions we're seeing cuts across racial categories. So we see between black men and black women pretty significantly different. In fact, I just published a piece that looked at the way there's been a really significant drop off in terms of democratic identity among black men but not black women. And this is, again, based on some of that Gallup data. So I think that makes sense in terms of, well, okay, look at the rates of religious participation among black Americans.

That has historically tied them to the Democratic Party. So more religious black Americans tended to be more democratic. So as we see, we're seeing black men drop out of church at much higher rates than black women.

We might expect this to have an impact on their downstream affiliation. What does this mean for the 2024 election cycle? That's probably the hardest thing to predict because I think despite the fact that we've seen this divergence, I think we're going to see some significant amount of support for young people. One of the challenges is that, I don't know if you've been tracking polls when it comes to the youth vote this year, but they've been all over the place. There's been some reliable polls that say Trump is up with young people, which would be an absolute, absolutely unprecedented shift, basically 20 points to what happened in 2020.

So I think we're going to see significant support for Biden among young people overall. I think it's going to be significantly higher among young women. I think that Biden campaign, they are ready, but I think they're going to continue to make abortion a really significant part of their campaign, outreach to young women. I don't know what they're going to do for young men. One of the things that I thought was pretty interesting, I don't know if you've ever had reason to go over to the Democrats webpage to check it out.

Well, I was there recently just to look at the groups that they, we're advocating for. Right. So these are the, they have, like, these are the groups that Democrats are fighting for. There's like 16 of them, I think, women, Native Americans, Hispanics, African Americans, other ethnic groups, rural people, urban people, women, Dallas. The, the one group that was missing men.

So it almost seems that it's such an oversight that it has to be intentional. I don't know. And so I think to the extent that we see this divide occurring, I think that the parties are going to play a role in orienting and reaching out to folks. And to the extent that the democratic party does not actively appeal to men, in particular young men, I think they're going to continue to slide. Right.

Unknown Speaker

Yeah, I wonder, one thing that you said earlier on was how formative. Me, too. And then I guess the me too. Of 2023, which was the abortion ruling, I wonder whether that is formative to young people during their life, but that if there wasn't a similar incident in six years time or whatever, that that's kind of baked into the system and that this is almost like a quite prolonged but a response to those kind of situations. And whether or not, without continuing to sustain that with more and more what is perceived as an egregious transgression of somebody's freedom or like an important cultural moment, I wonder whether, I wonder how much of what we're seeing is still the blast radius of some big events, and I wonder how much is more sort of deep rooted and deep seated, you know what I mean?

Daniel Cox

Yeah. And I've kind of struggled with this myself, and I think I've evolved in the way I think about it. Like, I think I, at one point I thought, you know, me, too, was seismic and generational. Now I tend to think that it just has a pretty significant blast radius, as you put in. So we'll see it among Gen Z, but we may not see it in Gen alpha or even younger gen Zers who just were not young enough to be paying attention to this stuff.

So there might be that cohort of like a six or seven year, eight year span of young women who came of age during that period who said it was really important and then not for folks coming after. What are the implications of this gender divide for the world of dating, it's hard to. I mean, in one way. So if we were talking about politics, um, I think it's a little bit overstated. You know, the Washington Post came out with an article sort of saying that the political divide and the, the salience of politics and dating could have significant repercussions because there are more.

There are many more conservative men than liberal women. So, like, there's a, there's a dating mismatch there. But I think, like, when you talk to people about dating, and we did a 30 in depth interviews among young people, it was a lot about, I just want someone who treats me well, you know, who is respectful, you know, the kind of things that you would expect people to say just in general, about the kind of relationships, platonic or romantic, that they were after. And politics didn't come up that often. Even the issue of abortion, which seems like there's of any issue that you.

That could be like a deal breaker of which there's not a lot of common ground to be found. A significant number of young women, even liberal young women, sort of said, like, well, it might make things difficult, but it was not an essential deal breaker for them. Wow. How much of that do you think is, as far as I'm aware, having a mismatch in values and something like abortion is a pretty strong sort of fundamental value about the way that you see the world. It's probably indicative of a lot of other things.

Unknown Speaker

More of a keystone than your view on economic policy, I would imagine. Like, more interpersonal. How much of that do you think is people wanting to give what sounds like a balanced answer to pollsters, but when it comes to actually dating someone, it may be something that they can't get past. Right. And I think any question, like we asked in that 2023 survey, a list of, I think, like, 20 items, like, would you be more or lessly or more or less likely to date someone who live with their parents, smoke cigarettes, like, all these different types of lifestyle, behavioral, sort of social, demographic background questions.

Daniel Cox

And so you're asking people to make these judgments without a real person standing there. And people tend to think very differently when they're thinking in the abstract versus. Is there a name for that? It's like white coat syndrome, I guess, in medicine. But is there an equivalent, like, observer effect?

Unknown Speaker

Is that. What would you call that? Yeah, I don't know if there's a technical term for in polling, but again, there's a challenge in trying to get people to. Well, first off, tell the truth, but secondly, know the truth. Right.

How well do we know and what. Their actual priorities are in terms of the qualities they want in a partner? It's incredibly difficult. And so, but I think, like, one of the things that's happening in online dating is that you can, you can pre sort all that stuff. I can sort of say, this is what I think I want.

Daniel Cox

And lo and behold, the algorithm can spit out a whole bunch of different matches for me. And for women, they can still find matches regardless of what kind of restrictions they put on. Men have a harder time in online dating. So I'm trying to work out whether or not the world of dating has become more or less political, because what you've just said there makes it sound like it's, well, maybe it's just someone that cares about me and is a normal, balanced human. But then on other sides, it's like 55% of young women would be less likely to date a Trump supporter.

Unknown Speaker

39 say the same about the possibility of dating a Republican. And 76% of young women with a college degree say they would be less inclined to date a Trump supporter. I'd rather die alone than date a conservative man, said one woman. Yeah, well, and I think this is where the politics and the personal get kind of fused. Trump is very effectively politicized all these things that weren't all that political.

Daniel Cox

I remember people before the pandemic, they were saying, what this country really needs is an external challenge that we can bring us together. Like 911, this horrific tragedy, an attack on american soil, that common humanity. Yeah. That we rallied around and even Democrats, you know, had, you mean like a global. A global pandemic.

Unknown Speaker

That didn't help at all. And of course, you know, that became immediately politicized. And Trump bears, you know, some responsibility there, but it certainly wasn't all him. And so I think, yeah, when it comes to trump, I think one of the things that we heard, we saw in the survey and heard from the people we interviewed was that it wasn't politics. Like, they didn't care about his, his economic plan.

Daniel Cox

They didn't really, you know, that was not the deal breaker issue for them. It was his treatment of people, particularly women, that I think leads them to. Be like, okay, well, like his personal. Yeah. The way that he comes across incredibly personally, incredibly negatively, and people who he thinks have wronged him, the language that he uses, he is, you know, you know, Adam sewer at the Atlantic said this famous article that the cruelty was the point, and he behaves absolutely cruelly to many people.

And I think for folks who say, wow, if someone really not just will vote for him, but really adores this guy. And there's lots of Americans who do. What does that say about how they might treat me or what I mean to them as a woman or those kinds of things. And we heard that a lot. We heard that a lot from the women who said that this would be a deal breaker for them.

So was not about policy. You could say he was kind about politics because Trump was president, he's a republican president. But I think a lot of it was his personal behavior, his decorum, you know, the stuff with the porn star, the infidelity. I mean, he just ticks so many boxes that I think a lot of women, they just, like, they found reprehensible. A potential solution that's been put forward for this is for women to trad fish or for men to woke fish, that there's basically a blue ocean if you date unassortatively in terms of your sex's typical direction of political orientation.

Yeah, well, I mean, and there's like a, you know, I'm learning about this all this kind of secondhand. I've been married for almost ten years now. But from what my younger research assistants will tell me when it comes to dating and stuff, that I read, that some conservative men will identify as moderate on their dating profile in order to get. To get dates from liberal women. Liberal women actually know this, so now they won't date moderates.

There's some amount of adjustment of the. Sites in a way, like, no, I'm gonna have to. I gotta move a little bit, the cursor a little bit more to the left, I guess. But it's not just men and women not being able to find partners, though. Young men are just checking out of dating altogether.

Unknown Speaker

Quite a lot. Have you got any idea what's causing that? So, yeah, it's not just dating. There's workforce stuff. I mean, that's not an area of primary focus for me.

Daniel Cox

But there's men who are just checking out kind of altogether. Video games, I think, are a common culprit there. I think when it comes to their economic ambitions, I think it's tough to know what the trajectory there is for them. What do they see as the goal? I think previous generation there was like, okay, you do this, this, this, and this.

But I think for young men today, I think there's just a lot of. They feel kind of adrift. And then. Have you looked at Nicholas Ebestadt's work? Yeah.

So he's AI and has done some great work. He's at the same organization that I'm, American Enterprise Institute. Right. Okay, so, yeah, yeah, so he's done some great work on that. And I think it's, yeah, it's absolutely right that when you sort of see your goals, sort of say, okay, I want a good job, good career, I want marriage, I want, you know, kids, a house, you know, with mortgage and all that, it can be hard to get that.

But then at least with those goals in mind, you can sort of say, okay, I know what I have to do. And I feel like those kind of North Star places, like orientation, is kind of missing now from young men in terms of what they're doing instead. Video games. I actually, I don't think a lot of people have thought about this yet in terms of the sort of the way it's going to impact relationship and dating. But like, the AI girlfriend thing is something that I've written about a bit and am concerned that similar to how pornography gives you an absolutely warped view of sex and sexual relationships, I think AI girlfriends and that kind of interactions is going to give young men an absolutely warped idea of any kind of relationships, whether platonic or romantic, there's never.

Unknown Speaker

Any disagreement that needs to be dealt with. Everything is all affirmation, affirmation, affirmation there to respond whenever, wherever. And I think it's going to be pretty popular because of that. We're seeing this increase in loneliness. We did a survey back in 2021 and we identified this, the friendship recession, quote unquote, which was afflicting men significantly more harshly than women.

Daniel Cox

And so a lot of this is something that could conceivably be a pretty significant problem because that's going to be attractive for folks who are saying, well, I have a hard time meeting people. My friends aren't really giving me the support that I want, and I can't find a partner. So, yeah, I'm going to turn back to screens, VR headsets, video games, AI girlfriends. Yeah. So a couple of insights I've learned from evolutionary psychology.

Unknown Speaker

Friends, one of the problems that you're going to encounter with AI girlfriends is that there is no prestige associated with having one. It's the same reason that people don't advertise how many OnlyFans creators they subscribe to or whatever, because selection is so much of the prestige that comes with being in a relationship. Not only was I able to get this person, but they chose me. Whereas if you've got the price of a cheeseburger per month and you can buy a VR girlfriend, the degree of prestige and status that's associated with that, I don't think that should be undercounted. I think that counts for an awful lot.

Like, deep down for men now, you might say, well, the same is true of having a real friendship, as opposed to one that's on the Internet. And look at how many people are spending all of their time on screens and social media. I don't disagree, but with for the people, and I think about this a lot. I'm not a gamer. I was like, I played Xbox a good bit, but I wasn't addicted or I didn't really use it all that much when I was younger, but I don't now.

And I think I don't fully account for just how compelling and compulsive that is, especially for young guys. I think the video games industry is worth more than the tv, movie, and music industries all combined together. Like, video games know more about human nature and human behavior and how to manipulate it and capture it than every other industry put together. So, yeah, even for the people listening, they're like, nah, video games, you know what? Fucking, like, playing a bit of cod on an evening, like, blah, blah, blah.

Daniel Cox

They've gotten good. My boys just got an Xbox. Their uncle got it, got it for them. So I have a five year old and a seven year old, and the games have gotten really, like, I have not played video games for years. I used to, but they've gotten real good.

I was playing Gears of War five before my wife made me uninstall it because they didn't want the boys coming across it because it's pretty violent. But, yeah, I mean, it's immersive. It's engaging. You can sit there for hours and hours and hours. And I think, yeah, there's, again, you can sort of laugh at, like, oh, video games.

And this should not be monopolizing people's time, but it clearly is. The amount of time that young people are spending on these things, young men, is growing and really significant. What's happening with life satisfaction? It's low among young adults, but it's always been kind of low, like, comparatively. Right?

So we tend to be happier as we go older. We have more friends when we're younger. But in terms of the kind of insecurities that we have, the way we think about our lives, I think that the way that we feel in our teens and early twenties, there's a lot of just life cycle stuff that we tend to grow out of now. We're in a different environment now with social media. So I think there's been scholars and researchers looking at the anxiety producing effects of social media, and it seems huge.

I've not looked at it a ton myself, but it seems like really, really important and it's focused on women. But I think men, too, suffer from this a little bit, too. For the third time in more than two decades, less than half of Americans say they are very satisfied with the way things are going in their personal lives. The 47% of us adults expressing high satisfaction with their lives has edged down three percentage points over the last year and is only one point higher than the 2011 record. Low for the trend.

Unknown Speaker

Not good. Yeah. And I think gallup recently did this whole multi country look at happiness and life satisfaction. And the really interesting thing to me was how huge the generation gap was. So at one point, there wasn't a huge difference between where older people were and younger people were.

Daniel Cox

But now I think United States has one of the largest generation gaps in terms of happiness and life satisfaction of any country. Yeah, yeah. But this slow life strategy that Gene Twenge's looked at, I know Jonathan Heights looked at it as well. This extended adolescence, as it's called. Young people getting their driver's licenses later, moving out of the house later, getting their first job later, starting dating later.

Unknown Speaker

I wonder how many of those things. It's a risk aversion. It's like generalized risk aversion against change and safety. Leaving the house. Scott Galloway got in trouble for basically saying that unless if you're still living at home with your parents, unless you're asleep, you shouldn't be in the house.

And people were. I second that as a parent of young boys, like, get out of the. House, go play, that might be a way for you to get a little bit of peace. But, yeah, I understand, personal motivations aside, that, no, it's independence and agency. Right?

Daniel Cox

You learn. Like, I was just talking with a colleague today. It's the importance of being bored to come up with your own games. Be imaginative, find ways to figure things out yourself so that you're not. I mean, I think this generation of parents, and I count myself as part of this problem, were kind of overly engaged.

I mean, the common terms of, like, helicopter parenting or snowplow parenting, I think is absolutely right, that we're doing too much for them and things that they should be doing themselves, we're not readily letting them do. And so they're not learning agency, they're not learning independence. I looked at this interesting thing about life satisfaction are highest amongst upper income, married and religious adults. A few groups have majority saying that they are very satisfied. This includes those with annual household incomes of $100,000 or more, married adults, those who attend religious services regularly, college graduates, Democrats, and those aged 55 or older.

Unknown Speaker

So you're like sort of threading the needle through, and I'm going to guess a number of those maybe. I don't know. But it wouldn't surprise me if married adults have high household income, if people who are earning a little bit more are more likely to be religious, all of these things will stack on top. Yeah, no, I think that's right. And we've done research on this, too, the class divide in religious participation.

Daniel Cox

So at one point, there wasn't a huge attendance difference between people who had a college degree and those without. So you go back 30, 40 years, pretty much the same. Everyone was attending at relatively high rates. Then over the next 2025 years, a significant gap emerged, with the non college folks attending at far less high rates than the folks who went to college. So it's the college educated folks are getting married, invested in the religious communities, engaged in community life.

And that has a multiplicative effect. Right. Like you are getting support systems across the different institutions. You are availing yourself of information of all these important things in life that is strongly correlated with happiness and contentment. Yeah.

Unknown Speaker

How do you sort of come to conceptualize everything that we've gone through today? Sort of. What's your view of the current state of things and the trajectory moving forward? So I'm a little bit of a resident pessimist. I cannot look at this data and think like, wow, what is happening?

Daniel Cox

Because we do a lot of surveys on a lot of different topics, from dating to religious demography to politics. We're doing a working class survey and we haven't talked about this, but I think that one of the really concerning things for me is trust and rather its precipitous decline. So if you look at young people today on a variety of different measures, but you just ask them, how much do you think people can be trusted? Theyre far lower, like 30 points lower than older Americans, whether they think people will take advantage of them. Again, theres a 30 or 40 point divide.

Most young people say that they do. And I dont want to be constantly pointing the finger at social media. But again, I think make some sense adaptively, right. If I'm engaging with strangers a lot, when people have access to my profile, they can message me. A lot of times I'm getting negative interactions online.

Of course, I should be a little bit suspicious. I'm not being socialized in my geographic community, where people know each other, where there's a lot of support, but I'm kind of in the Wild west, where I don't know people's motivations, I don't know what they're going to do. And so I think it pays to kind of be cautious and think the worst of people. And so I think that, to me, is a pretty significant difference in the way people are being raised today versus a generation before social media. That's that hyper vigilance again, right?

Unknown Speaker

I can't necessarily trust people. I don't know if they have best interests at heart. And the other thing, I can't remember who said it, but basically that the Internet has made psychopaths out of all of us. That it permits you to do things online that you would never do in person with basically no repercussions. And if you don't think that this is true, log into any first person shooter lobby and hear what people say to each other.

Like, just the things that people say. There's no way that you would dare say that, even face to face, let alone in a small village 100 years ago, where you knew everybody and reputation would get around, and you're held accountable for your actions and things like that. So what's the natural response? Natural response is this vigilance and certainty. I'm going to protect myself.

I'm never actually going to be emotionally open or vulnerable or invest in anybody else, because they might move on quite quickly. And I've had all of these bad experiences. Look at how terrible humans are. Humans overall were a scourge on the earth that probably contributes to the climate change. We don't need to worry about birth rate decline, because there's too many people on the planet in any case.

And humans are kind of a bit of a cancer. So, you know, it is the most, like, multi headed hydra head thing of all time. But when you actually zoom out enough, it does. The patterns and the shape start to make a little bit of sense. Things are moving in directions, and you can begin to see how each of the different contributing elements make stuff go toward that direction.

Daniel Cox

Yeah. If I could move up the chain and say, what is the thing up here that is going to be influencing everything downstream? I do think it comes down to this communitarian impulse that we've lost, that we're so obsessed with the way that we look, how we're being perceived. We're interested in our own career trajectory, our own professional success, the validation that we get from it, as opposed to, like, well, how much are you volunteering? You know, what kind of activities are you doing in furtherance of something or someone other than yourself?

How are we rewarding that culturally? And so I think, like, the fact that we don't have that impulse, we don't have that greater good ambition, and that we're seeing each other in the real world more often, that we're, you know, from Putnam on, we've known that we've been in kind of a civic decline. And I think we need to rebuild a lot of our institutions. We need to encourage young people not just to have amazing resumes, but actually be amazing people and support the people around them. So you're not checking boxes, but you're actually having real experiences with real people.

And there's value in, you know, hanging out and chasing your friends around with sticks. Right. There's value in that, right. I see ads for, like, russian math classes around my neighborhood. I live in a pretty nice part of DC.

And just like, well, yeah, you could do that, but I'd rather have, have my kids spend time with their friends just out in the neighborhood or out biking around. And I think some of that probably stems from this kind of competitive impulse, right. That we. I want my kids to get in really good schools. It's a competitive education environment.

If they make a mistake, they're going to fall off the ladder, and there's not a sort of safety net for them. So they just have to do everything. Right. And I think if we could get off that a little bit and refocus our attention and the way we spend our time towards furthering a broader interest, I think we'd be much better served by it. Daniel Cox, ladies and gentlemen.

Unknown Speaker

Daniel, I love your work. I think that the insights that you're able to bring, which kind of add a bit of statistical rigidity to the insights that people are seeing and sort of stuff that people feel, it's like, I've got this trend that I've noticed online a little bit, but it's there. It's there in front of you. You can almost sort of grab it. I really appreciate the work that you do.

Your sub stack's fantastic. Where should people go? They want to check out all the things you do on the Internet. So you can check out our website, survey center on american life, and then I write american storylines on substacks. So check it out.

Hell, yeah. Daniel, I appreciate you. Thank you. Thank you so much.

Daniel Cox

Thank you so much.

#775 - Daniel Cox - Why Are Young Men Becoming More Right Wing?

Primary Topic

Episode Summary

Main Takeaways

Episode Chapters

1: Introduction

2: Main Discussion

3: Implications

Actionable Advice

About This Episode

People

Guest Name(s):

Content Warnings:

Transcript