One common Red Pill adage we like to toss around our dark corner of the internet is a fairly undeniable truth: You get the behavior you incentivize.
Unless a human is mentally ill, that human is going to behave in a manner that benefits him/herself, avoids consequences, and minimizes risk to the extent possible.
Incentives can take a variety of forms. If you do a thing and receive a payment, reward, or other type of good outcome, that’s an incentive. The absence of consequences is also a type of incentive. If I’m going to shoot you unless you hand your wallet to me right now, you handing me your wallet to avoid the consequence of death is a pretty strong incentive for your compliance.
Muddying this otherwise-clear issue, however, is the concept of risk and reward.
If I ask you to do a thing that takes 8 hours and there is a 0.1% chance that I will pay you 20 U.S. dollars if you do it, you would decline. The 99.9% risk of spending a full 8 hours of your time and walking away with nothing is large, and if you do end up with the good outcome, all you have is 20 dollars. However, if there was a 0.1% chance that I was going to pay you 100 million U.S. dollars for doing the thing, you’d probably do it. The chance of walking away with nothing is still 99.9%, but there is also a slim chance of a life-changing incentive.
Consequences work the same way. If there’s only a 0.1% chance that I’m going to shoot you if you don’t give me your wallet, maybe you like to live dangerously and will roll the dice against those odds. But if I’m a character in a Batman movie flipping a coin with your life on the line, whatever you have in your wallet right now probably isn’t worth a 50% chance of death.
Reduction of risk is therefore also a type of incentive. If you spend an extra hour really polishing off a work product to turn into your boss, receive no extra pay, but the chance that you’ll be the one who gets fired at the end of the year drops significantly, that might be worth the extra hour of your time.
We could play around with examples all day, but if you have at least a 5th grade education, I’m already beating a dead horse with this concept.
The above isn’t specifically a male or female issue. Both sexes follow these general guidelines, seeking to maximize incentive, minimize consequence, and minimize risk. However, if you throw the same sets of incentives, consequences, and risks at a mixed group of people, you’re going to see wildly different behaviors. The reason for this is twofold:
Different people prioritize different things. If you’re broke, money is a huge incentive, while if you’re rich, it isn’t as huge. If you believe the world will end imminently if people don’t stop driving cars, doing something dumb like throwing soup on valuable art to get attention may seem like a worthwhile risk, while if you don’t believe in that, you’re just getting yourself thrown in jail for fun. If you think a fetus is baby, you act differently than if you think it’s a lump of cells about to become medical waste. And so on.
Different people tolerate different amounts of risk. One person might be okay spending 4 years getting a college degree in a cutting-edge field even though there’s only a small chance of a high-paying job out the other end, while the other might think those 4 years are better spent getting a sensible degree to work in a stable field for a modest but nearly-guaranteed salary.
This means that in order for the adage “You get the behavior you incentivize” to be predictive for anybody, you have to know that person pretty well. You have to know what incentivizes them (or what consequences scare them), and their tolerance for risk.
Thinking about all of this from a Red Pill perspective, you’re just not going to be that intimately familiar with the personal priorities of most women you meet. No man has that kind of time. And if you do happen to know a woman that well, you’re probably good friends, which makes your chance of using this knowledge about her to have sex pretty much nil.
However, certain general guidelines tend to apply to most women.
Women prioritize comfort over ambition
Let’s say you have a job that pays you a commission. You receive 1000 monies for every work-thing you finish in a month. In an average month, you finish 3 work-things. If you really bust your ass, or if you have a good month where everything goes smoothly and nobody you interact with makes your work life more difficult, you can finish 4 work-things. If you really, really bust your ass, plus nothing goes wrong to slow you down, you might even finish 5, but that’s an exhausting amount of work that constrains your availability for most other things that month.
Most men in this situation, as well as most women, respond about the same. They work an average amount and finish 3 or 4 work-things per month. The soul-crushing extra work to push out one more work-thing in a month generally isn’t worth the small amount of extra income, unless someone is extremely strapped for cash this month.
But let’s say this year, your boss gets a lot of extra clients in the door who want to buy lots of work-things and times are wonderful, so now he can pay you 3000 monies for every work-thing you finish in a month.
A typical man in this situation is going to bust his ass and finish 4 or 5 work-things every month, because that’s a lot of extra money. He can buy nice things, upgrade his lifestyle, pay off debts, save up to retire early, travel more, or whatever the heck he wants with that extra money. The incentive is now worth the extra work, even if it’s pretty exhausting. Most men will choose ambition when incentivized to do so. (In many countries, there are some tax reasons to not overwork yourself because most governments are stupid and tax you more as a punishment for working hard and earning lots of money. But for most men, busting ass today and retiring a decade earlier is enough incentive to deal with that.)
Here’s where things get different. A typical woman in the same situation is going to work less, not more. Now that she’s getting 3000 monies per work-thing instead of 1000, she can barely show up to work, barely put in any effort, finish 1 work-thing a month, and make the same amount of money she was making when she was previously doing 3 work-things a month. Heck, if she works just slightly more and finishes 2 work-things, she’s making double the money while working less. She has now been incentivized to work less, and can spend more time doing social activities, hobbies, whatever. Most women will chose comfort when incentivized to do so.
Neither one of these routes is inherently better or worse. It’s a question of what each person prioritizes.
It’s worth noting that women prioritize comfort in themselves, not in men. If you have the opportunity to make crap-tons more money for your family and advance your lifestyle, but instead, you scale back your work hours so you’re making about the same mediocre amount of money and hanging out with the family all the time, you’re wife’s going to hate your guts and make all of that extra time you’re spending with the family suck.
Women have a very low tolerance for risk
Back in the dark times when we lived in the wilderness with sharp sticks and rocks and hungry predators kept trying to eat us, it would be really bad for the group if a bunch of women got eaten, because women are the ones who get pregnant and birth more people so the group doesn’t die off. So we tended to avoid sending women out into the wilds to hunt things. And the women were fine with that and enjoyed staying home learning to socialize, build consensus, compromise, and avoid conflicts, because pissing off other people in the group and getting murdered or exiled was also bad for them.
In more modern times, this practice has continued. Most women do not like investing heavily in something when there is a significant chance of loss, or a low chance of gain (which is essentially just a significant chance of loss of whatever she’s investing).
While avoiding spear-fights with hungry predators isn’t an issue today, women also tend to avoid things like spending an entire college semester taking a difficult course they know nothing about and might fail. This is in part why we see women gravitate toward fields of study that are mostly just repeats of or expansions on things they already learned growing up. Women have a tendency to be very cautious about undertaking something unfamiliar and difficult that has a decent chance of failure. If there’s a different, less uncertain route to walk off of a campus with a fancy paper rectangle and still get some kind of job, they’ll take that different route more often than not to avoid the risk.
This is also why we rarely see women negotiating for higher starting salaries, raises, or promotions (confrontations are risky), and why women love jobs with objective rubrics where they can simply perform the rubric tasks. Asking a female employee to take on an extra responsibility for a thing she is not skilled at and is uncertain how to do well is frequently greeted with a hearty “but that’s not my job”, which is a little confrontational but she can hide behind whatever rubric she was given.
Women, for the most part, can’t bear the thought of putting time into something and failing, or risking a tangible asset and losing, and tend to shy away from volatile investments, gambling, or other risky uses of money (unless it’s someone else’s money).
There’s a good bit of variability in this bullet point section. Everyone’s personal risk tolerance is different, and there are definitely some risk-taking women out there. But the overwhelming majority of women find risky choices stressful, not exciting.
Relationships look like an exception but are just a transfer of risk
Heterosexual women want to have sex with men, not with women. So a man who prioritizes comfort over ambition and is squeamish about risk (just like a woman) is typically pretty darn unattractive to most women. At least over time. Even if there’s an initial attraction, women get bored sick of guys like that eventually.
However, guys who are ambitious risk-takers, while attractive, are volatile. They are themselves a bit of a risk. A woman could have a sure thing dating a mild-mannered, stable, non-aggressive man, but given the choice, most women prefer the risky man.
This actually isn’t the higher-risk choice for a woman when you think about the roles of men and women in a relationship.
One of the primary reasons paired-off women can shy away from risk is the men in their life. If the man shoulders most of the risk in a relationship, big and small, the woman doesn’t even have to decide on a restaurant for dinner and be responsible if the food sucks. It’s all on her man. She can tie her rope to his wagon, nothing that goes wrong is her fault, and if the wagon crashes, she can just tie her rope to the next man’s wagon. So the risk that her risky man might fail isn’t that impactful. The bigger risk would be to miss out on him and end up with a risk-averse man.
If her man is squeamish about risk, constantly deferring to her decisions so that nothing is his fault, he’s on the fast track toward replacement. She doesn’t want to be the man who shoulders the risk for both of them.
Not All Women Are Like That
Everyone knows some badass ambitious women with good risk management skills. They exist. These general guidelines are the sort of thing you can assume is true unless proven otherwise, and will be actually true a good 70% of the time, but won’t be true 100% of the time. If you date enough women, you will absolutely come across a few girls for whom one or more of the above bullet points don’t seem to apply.
But another great take-away for you is: When given the choice, do the thing. Take the risk. Live a little. Not to attract women, but to avoid living like one.
