February 23, 2026 • 41 mins
Modern dating can feel like a marketplace. We’re told we all have a “mate value,” that some people are 9s and 10s, and that the laws of evolution determine who gets chosen — and who gets rejected. But what if we’ve misunderstood what evolutionary science actually says about love?
Dr. Laurie sits down with social psychologist Dr. Paul Eastwick, author of Bonded by Evolution: The New Science of Love and Connection, to challenge some of the most pervasive myths about attraction and compatibility. Do dating app algorithms actually know who's right for you? Are we really all placed in different "leagues"? If you’ve ever wondered whether love is destiny, biology, or something you can actually create, Dr. Eastwick offers a surprising new perspective.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
Bonded by Evolution: The New Science of Love and Connection
“The Pairing Game: A Classroom Demonstration of the Matching Phenomenon”
“Northwestern Speed-dating Study I”
“Northwestern Speed-dating Study II”
“The (Mental) Ties That Bind: Cognitive Structures That Predict Relationship Resilience”
“We’re Not That Choosy: Emerging Evidence of a Progression Bias in Romantic Relationships”
“Is Romantic Desire Predictable? Machine Learning Applied to Initial Romantic Attraction”
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. As William Shakespeare once said, the course of true
love never did run smooth, and one of the unsmoothest
parts of love is the initial attraction phase. You see
somebody across the way who looks kind of cute. But
will that person like you back? Will they think you're
(00:37):
hot enough, smart enough, successful enough. Sometimes the answer is yes,
cue all the hearts and fireworks. But at least some
of the time the answer is no. The person that
you're into isn't that into you.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
Relationships and attraction especially, there can be a lot of rejection.
It can be pretty demoralizing, and to some extent you
can't skip that part. But I think it really matters
why was I rejected in this instance.
Speaker 1 (01:02):
This is doctor Paul Eastwick, an expert on the psychology
of human mating.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
And there's a whole set of ideas out there that
suggests that you got rejected because you're a three out
of ten and you're just going to need to settle
for the other threes.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
Paul is referring to a set of ideas he calls
the evoscript, the notion that human attraction boils down to
the harsh laws of natural selection under the evoscript finding
the right partner is all about finding someone with good genes.
Some of us, those so called nines and tens out
there becausess a whole host of traits that signal those
good genes. The rest of us not so much.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
You have a certain set of attributes. They characterize who
you are and they determine what you're going to get
on the market. This is a set of ideas that
got very, very popular, but honestly it's not very inspiring.
You do kind of just wonder like what am I
doing wrong? What is wrong with me? And boy, it
makes the rejections hit that much harder.
Speaker 1 (02:03):
But Paul's joining me on the show today to share
some good news. His research has found that when it
comes to dating, many of these evoscript ideas simply don't
hold up. In fact, he's just published a new book
with a much more inspiring view on the evolutionary origins
of love. It's called Bonded by Evolution, The New Science
of Love and Connection.
Speaker 2 (02:22):
It's about a lot of the idea is that we
kind of get wrong about attraction and relationships and what
the science actually says about how relationships work.
Speaker 1 (02:31):
But what does the science say about how relationships actually
work well. Paul will tell us after these quick messages
from our sponsors. Social psychologist Paul Eastwick has long been
(02:55):
frustrated by what he's called the evoscript, the idea that
human mating can simply be boiled down to a set
of harsh evolutionary rules that govern who and what we
find attractive. And perhaps the most infamous evoscript notion in
popular called today is the concept of mate value. I
asked Paul to explain how the idea is usually understood.
Speaker 2 (03:15):
You're a collection of attributes, skills, and abilities, and it
can be a bunch of things. It can be your attractiveness,
of course, it can be your intelligence, anything that's going
to make you desirable to the other gender. If we're
assuming heterosexuality here, right, So for men, it might be
things like earning, potential and status. For women, it might
be things like youth. But all of these things factor
(03:37):
into your mate value, and your mate value should set
your standards. According to this worldview, you should be trying
to figure out where you sit in this hierarchy, because
you're probably going to be able to date somebody else
who's roughly at the same place that you are. I
think some of these ideas feel intuitive. If you think
(04:00):
about like popularity in a high school. There's this very
famous game that psychologists often play in their classes where
people wear numbers on their foreheads indicating their value. But
you don't know what your value is, and you're told
to go around and try to pair up with the
highest value partner you can get. And what you see
is that people who have low numbers they figure it
(04:22):
out pretty quickly because nobody wants to go near them.
Speaker 1 (04:24):
Because ideas, I'm walking around with a three, but I
can't see my three. I'm like, ooh, let me go
with the nine or the ten, And the nine or
ten is like no way runs.
Speaker 2 (04:31):
Away, right, absolutely not. And the two that you were
avoiding at first, well, eventually you settle for that guy
because it's about the best that you can do.
Speaker 1 (04:39):
I mean, this is the kind of thing we see
on the internet all the time. I know, there's like
a new meme going around that's like she's a nine,
but she choose with her mouth open, literally gives these
things a number.
Speaker 2 (04:49):
This is so pervasive on the internet. It's a little
bit wild.
Speaker 1 (04:52):
So why did we think this was true? Scientifically, I
know there's a phenomena that researchers looked at to say, oh,
maybe there is a mat value scientifically.
Speaker 2 (05:00):
Originally, this idea comes from two places. One is that
if you show people photographs or they meet strangers, there's
pretty good agreement about, let's say, how attractive somebody is.
It's not perfect, but it's certainly there. And the second
place we saw it is that if you look at
existing couples, if you look at couples who are together,
(05:23):
they're attractiveness level correlates. It's far from a perfect correlation,
but it's more than a coin flip. So there's a
real association there. And so people assumed, well, what that
means is that the market is the thing that's determining
largely who we're getting.
Speaker 1 (05:39):
But I think it also comes from the online dating landscape.
So talk about how like these apps really reinforce these ideas.
Speaker 2 (05:45):
When you look at online dating, When you look at
the apps, they do create a very unequal market when
all you've got is a photo and a brief description
to go with. Yeah, people are swiping quickly, and the
attractive people, the people with the high value attributes, Boy
do they earn a lot of likes, and if you
(06:06):
don't have those attributes, nobody is going to be wiping
right on you. And the problem there is that it
creates this very, very imbalanced market where there's a whole
bunch of people who really have no options.
Speaker 1 (06:20):
And in your book you talk about this new model
that folks have been pushing lately where like this make
values part of it, but not all of it. So
explain this model.
Speaker 2 (06:28):
Yeah, oh this is so key. I've got a shout
out Dave Kenny, who really came up with this idea originally.
But the idea works like this. Attraction is not one thing,
it's three and one of those three parts is what
we could call popularity. But it rests on the assumption
that we agree how desirable somebody is. There are two
other components. One we'd call selectivity. It's the idea that
(06:51):
some people are always open to forming a new relationship.
Other people are extremely selective. But I got to talk
about the third component. This third component is what we
call compatibility. It refers to what's going on above and
beyond how selective I generally am and how does desirable
you actually are, and refers to the unique connection between
(07:14):
the two of us, even in initial impressions, compatibility is
the biggest share of what's going on.
Speaker 1 (07:22):
One of the things I was shocked by was that
even this idea of the consensus part, like how much
we agree on the mat value if there is one,
that wasn't actually as high as people thought. Explain some
of the studies that showed that it's not as big
as we assume.
Speaker 2 (07:33):
There was this great study a little while ago that
tried to capture how much agreement and disagreement there was
when people were evaluating faces, right, how attractive do you
think these faces are? And what they found is that, yes,
there is agreement here, but also look at how much disagreement.
And the great stat in that study is that most
(07:55):
of the faces that these participants were evaluating, it was
like ninety six percent of them, somebody rated you in
the top half or in the bottom half. Okay, So
that means that only for four percent of the phases
did everybody agree that you're on the top half or
the bottom half. So that is mostly disagreement there.
Speaker 1 (08:17):
I mean, it's just that somebody thinks you're not half best.
Speaker 2 (08:19):
Yeah, exactly exactly. And if you are consentually popular. Not
everybody thinks that.
Speaker 1 (08:27):
Okay, So that's one problem with this mate value idea.
Another one is something you found when you look particularly
at the timing of romantic relationships. How does that challenge
this idea of mate value. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (08:37):
I mean, it's one thing if you're looking at photographs
and meeting strangers, but it's another thing entirely when you're
getting to know people over time. And I just got
to point out historically, this is where most relationships came from.
When we were evolving on the Savannah, we lived in
small groups with a lot of people that you were
going to know for a long period of time. You
weren't going to spend a lot of time meeting strangers.
(08:58):
So what happens when we actually get to know each other.
It turns out that compatibility component I was describing earlier,
it gets more and more important. There's more more of
that unique idiosyncrasy in how people feel about each other,
and the consensus component goes down, so we actually agree
less and less about how appealing someone is as we
(09:22):
get to know them over a period of weeks and months.
Speaker 1 (09:25):
That predicts is really interesting thing, which is that people
who might have been lucking out because they were really
high on the mate value than nines and tens. Well,
over a time, attractiveness gets less important.
Speaker 2 (09:34):
It seems like exactly, I like to think about summer camp.
I'm like from the East coast of the United States originally,
so you know, summer camp is in my DNA, And
if you imagine a bunch of heterosexual, mixed gender kids
going to summer camp, what's going to happen in June
is that the popular people, well, everybody will agree that
(09:54):
they're popular, and they'll have a lot of success. But
as all these folks get to know each other and
agreement goes down by the end of the summer, anything
can happen. Now it's like, well, the popular people, they're
not having the same success with everybody that they once had.
And the people who were consentially not so attractive at
the beginning, well, maybe now there's somebody who has really
(10:15):
taken a liking to them that they might not have
been able to successfully attract engim.
Speaker 1 (10:21):
So that's idea Number one that's wrong, that there's this
inherent built in may value.
Speaker 2 (10:25):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (10:26):
A second one that you've talked about is this idea
of gender differences and how we look for mates. There's
things that, especially in heterosexual couples, that women want, and
there's things that guys want. Yeah, what's the typical idea
and what is it getting wrong?
Speaker 2 (10:38):
I do think it's predicated on the idea that men
and women want really different things out of relationships, and
they're attracted to really different things. The classic studies in
this space ask men and women what kinds of attributes
they want in a romantic partner. So men are likely
(10:59):
to say that they care about attractiveness and a partner
more than women, and women are likely to say that
they care about things like earning potential in a partner
more than men. And when you give people rating scales
and you say rate these traits, how good are they?
You will reliably find those gender differences across many, many
(11:19):
countries throughout the world.
Speaker 1 (11:20):
This also seems to mirror the kind of thing we
see in pop culture. I know you and I are
children of the nineties, and I watched you know, model
Anna Nicole Smith, Mary, some very rich billionaire who himself
was not that attractive. It also seems to play out
in some icky ways in online spaces, in ways that
are really problematic.
Speaker 2 (11:37):
Yeah, so there's a whole trad wife culture online. Part
of the trad wife idea is that there's nothing wrong
with wanting to be a homemaker and a child caretaker.
And look, I get that people should get to make
their own choices, but that's not the only thing that's
in this ideology. What is very much in there is
your beauty will translate into his success. So you need
(12:03):
to be attractive, be appealing, be feminine in the traditional
sense of the word, so that you can land the
right kind of provider. I mean, some of these ideas
about the differences between men and women get supercharged online
and infused with a lot of nastiness. So not only
(12:25):
are women out to land the most successful man that
she can get, but if you're going to be like
a useful stepping stone to her along the way, I mean,
it creates a lot of competitive us versus them ideas
about what men and women are like, and really promotes
a lot of misogyny.
Speaker 1 (12:44):
So these original ideas about these gender differences were based
on these surveys, but new results have used a technique
that's not a survey. New results have used revealed preferences.
So what are revealed preferences and why are they better
than these surveys.
Speaker 2 (12:56):
So the concept of the revealed preference is that, look,
I'm not going to ask you what you think about
these attributes in the abstract, disconnected from any particular person.
I want to see how you react to an attribute
like earning potential as it is instantiated by specific other people.
(13:16):
And we would do this using speed dating designs. This
is just one way to do it, but I think
it's the easiest one for folks to grasp. So let's
say I send you to a speed dating event, and
you're going to meet a bunch of other men at
the speed dating event, some of whom are ambitious and
some of whom are not. So rather than asking you
how much do you want ambition and a partner, I'm
(13:38):
going to see how much do you like the ambitious
guys more than the unambitious guys. That's your revealed preference
for ambition in an initial attraction context.
Speaker 1 (13:50):
So what do we find when we really give people
actual humans to choose from?
Speaker 2 (13:53):
If you send women speed dating, they do like the
ambitious men a little bit more, not a lot more,
but a little bit more than the unambitious ones. The
fascinating thing is what happens when you do the same
thing with men. Again, Men say they care about ambition
and a partner less than women do, but not when
it comes to their revealed preferences. They like the ambitious
(14:17):
women a little bit more than the unambitious ones, But
the revealed preference for men and women for an attribute
like ambition is really exactly the same.
Speaker 1 (14:27):
Okay, so that's ambition. What about attractiveness?
Speaker 2 (14:30):
People's revealed preference for attractiveness at a speed dating event
is strong. They like the attractive people more than the
unattractive people. That's this consensus component that we talked about.
Men like the attractive women more than the unattractive women
on average, but women also like the attractive men more
than the unattractive men on average, and again their revealed
(14:52):
preference is the same. So this really cued us into
the possibility that whoa, maybe when we look at these
differences and what men and women say they want, they're
not translating into their experienced preferences when they're out there
meeting real life people.
Speaker 1 (15:08):
So that was scientist alleged FACTORID number two that were
getting wrong. Yeah, as gender differences, the third one is
about different kinds of relationships or the length of different
kinds of relationships. Evolutionary science has a lot to say
about who's good for a short term meat versus a
long term meat. What does the science usually say and
how is that wrong?
Speaker 2 (15:27):
This distinction is tricky because there's a tendency to think
that if you're like a long term specialist, people aren't
going to be attracted to you in a sexy way,
and maybe even more pernicious, if you're somebody who's pretty
sexy and you've had a few sexual partners in your past,
(15:48):
that you won't be as good in the long term
realm as if people reside on like a slider between
short term desirability and long term desirability, and you kind
of got to pick which one fits your skills and abilities.
Speaker 1 (16:05):
And so the idea is like for a heterosexual woman,
there are these guys who are like super hot guys
that you might want to have a one night stand with, yeah,
and then they're the very sensitive guys so you might
want to have a long term relationship with. But just
like the other ideas of mate value, there's a kind
of romantic destiny built in there. You're either going to
be a short term mate or a long term one.
Speaker 2 (16:24):
That's tough on both types of guys. So first of all,
the sexy one like he's not worth considering for a
long term relationship. But also these supposed long term guys,
they're like not appreciated at all for anything sexual. This
sounds terrible on both fronts.
Speaker 1 (16:41):
It also seems to be another thing that leads to
a lot of misogyny online. Explain how this third idea
gets picked up at all those spaces.
Speaker 2 (16:48):
So this got turned into a whole bunch of terms online.
I mean people have maybe heard the terms alpha and beta,
where alpha refers to the sexually desirable guy who supposedly
has all the sexual opportunities and the betas who kind
of weighed around for you know, maybe they try some
nice guy routines. They might try to gain a little
(17:10):
bit of status, a little bit of money, but that's
about the best that they can do, and they kind
of got to wait for the alpha guy to decide
which are the women that he wants, and you know
they'll pick up the rest.
Speaker 1 (17:22):
So what does this third idea get right and what
is it really getting wrong about how real relationships work?
Speaker 2 (17:27):
It gets one thing right, which is that attributes like
being sexy and confident are associated with having more sex partners,
with people being sexually interested in you, And it kind
of stops there. That's about it. Pretty Much everything else
(17:48):
about this idea is way off base, including and especially
the idea that something about a person's short term desirability
has anything to do at all with their long term desirability.
These ideas have been out there for a long time, like, oh,
if you have a longer sexual resume when you're younger,
(18:10):
you're more likely to get divorced or your marriage is
going to be bad. Your desirability as a short term
partner really has no bearing one way or the other
on how you're going to do in the long term.
Speaker 1 (18:22):
So it turns out that many many science y sounding
ideas about love and attraction that stuff that influencers online
often use to make sense of relationships, they just don't
match what the relationship science really shows. But humans are
the product of natural selection, So what does evolutionary science
really predict about relationships? Paul and I will tackle that
question when The Happiness Lab returns after the break. Doctor
(18:58):
Paul Eastwick's new book, Bonded by Evolution challenges the idea
that human attraction is based on the one dimensional concept
of mate value. Instead, Paul argues that attraction depends a
lot more on what he calls romantic compatibility, the factors
that allow two people to work together long term.
Speaker 2 (19:15):
So I think it's very important to realize that we
lived in small groups and you had to build what
sometimes anthropologists called pair bonds. You had to build a
bond with somebody else for the purpose of raising these
very helpless offspring. I mean human offspring take a long
time to raise to reproductive age, a very long time.
(19:38):
It's the better part of two decades before kids in
hunter gatherer contexts are able to bring in as many
calories as they consume, so they take a lot of work.
And this is presumably why humans evolve the capacity to
bond with each other in a bond. What matters a
(19:58):
lot more than like, oh, you're desirable, you have all
the right abilities and skills and traits and attributes. What
matters a lot more is do we work well together?
Are we coordinated? Scientists use terms like interdependence, right, what
is it like when we work together? Do things work smoothly?
Or are things pretty difficult? And we don't actually get
(20:20):
along that well. So I think these ideas form the
core of what we mean by compatibility and capture why
it's so important.
Speaker 1 (20:29):
We also seem to have all these psychological quirks that
help us build compatibility. Sometimes biases that are pretty give
me some examples of these.
Speaker 2 (20:36):
So, for example, on average and ongoing close relationships, people
feel very positively about their partners, and when somebody might
point out to them some of the shortcomings that their
partners might have, we're really good at compartmentalizing those shortcomings, right, like, yes,
she's a little bit messy, but I don't know. This
(20:58):
just kind of makes our home life exciting. And these
things are really important for maintaining that sense that your
relationship is valuable and you want to put in effort
to keep it going. As a relationship builds, people end
up doing this more and more. It's kind of a
core piece of what it means to form and maintain
(21:20):
a relationship is that you see your partner in the
best possible light and that you're motivated to keep the
relationship moving forward.
Speaker 1 (21:28):
That's what happens when we think about our partners in
these motivated ways. What happens when we think about alternatives.
Speaker 2 (21:33):
We worry a lot about alternative partners that they could
pull us away from the person that we're currently in
a relationship with, and alternatives can certainly do that. People
do sometimes have wandering eyes, but we have all of
these defense mechanisms built in that prevent us from even
noticing that potential romantic partners are right there waiting for us.
(21:57):
One of my favorite studies in this space looks at
the mental images that people in relationships make about possible
alternative partners. There are these neat techniques where you can
get a little picture on the screen of what they
were thinking of. Were they thinking about somebody attractive or unattractive?
And it turns out, if you're in a relationship, when
(22:18):
you imagine other potential partners, you literally imagine somebody who
is less attractive than what single people imagine in their heads.
So that's just one of an array of different effects
that demonstrate that people at a baseline level seem motivated
to keep alternative partners at bay as a way of
(22:40):
preserving their current relationship.
Speaker 1 (22:43):
So when it comes to relationships, compatibility matters a lot.
We have all these mechanisms once compatibility starts to keep
building it up, but that just raises a really important question,
which is where does compatibility come from. I think one
idea that most people have is that compatibility comes from
people who are like us. You like the people who
are like you. What does evidence say?
Speaker 2 (23:02):
It seems intuitive that we'd be especially attracted to others
who are similar to us, and this was one of
the big challenges we confronted. We documented that there was
all of this compatibility that you could see in attraction context.
It's even bigger if you look at ongoing acquaintances, friendships,
and close relationships. So we got to explain it. We
(23:24):
got to explain why these two people are compatible and
why other pairs are not. So we looked to see, well,
maybe it is about similarity. Let's calculate similarity across all
of these different dimensions, ask people about their deal breakers,
and see if we can account for compatibility that way,
And it turned out it did pretty badly. It was
surprising how poorly similarity fared at predicting compatibility. We tried
(23:49):
other forms of matching two like oh, ask people about
their deal breakers, and those didn't really go anywhere either.
I think part of The problem here is that because
of where we live, because of how we are sorted
into different social situations, were often surrounded by people who
(24:09):
are similar to us. We're surrounded by people who fit
our idea on average of you know, what we really
want somebody else to have, and so we end up
thinking we really care about these things, but in large
part we're really reflecting the social miliu that we're in.
Speaker 1 (24:26):
So it might look like I really want a partner
who's smart like me and a professor like me, but
in practice, at the university, the only people I'm ever
going to meet is a professor who's smart like me.
Speaker 2 (24:36):
That's right, and then you and that was somebody like that.
Oh look, similarity predicts attraction. Well, the challenge is that
with in your millu more versus less, similarity isn't mattering,
which means it can't explain why there's so much going
on with respect to compatibility in your social environment. Why
even in your social environment, you're really going to click
(24:58):
with a couple people but not most people.
Speaker 1 (25:00):
I want to pick on up on something else. You
just said this idea of deal breakers, because I think
this is another thing that people think in terms of compatibility.
I think this is something that the internet and online
dating is they made worse. This idea that like, well,
my partner has to be tall, oh gosh, he has
to really like podcasts whatever, and if he didn't like podcasts,
what would you do? Is like a major red flag, right.
(25:21):
But when we actually look at whether people's theories work,
do they work as well as people assume?
Speaker 2 (25:26):
No? I mean, we tried other forms of matching too,
like are you ultimately more attractive to people who fit
your idea of these deal break or qualities that you
just have to have? Well, that didn't work all that
well either.
Speaker 1 (25:40):
So this seems to be really damning for the way
that a lot of online tools really help us out.
I mean, I don't know what these algorithms are, but
apparently a lot of these matching services online have like,
you know, some sort of big machine learning that they're
using to figure out what my compatibility is. Are these
things just more bs than we think?
Speaker 2 (25:58):
Well? You know, it's funny because my colleague, doctor Samantha
Joel ran some studies like this not long ago, and
it was basically a perfect facsimile of what these online days,
apps and companies could be doing. I've got a trove
of information about you and a trove of information about
a bunch of other people. Things you report about yourself
(26:19):
ahead of time, trades, attributes, preferences, what have you. She
used the algorithms to try to match people up to
try to predict who's going to click especially well with whom,
and she was able to predict absolutely nothing.
Speaker 1 (26:35):
That's pretty depressing for big data.
Speaker 2 (26:37):
And I do want to be clear, like you repoor
things about yourself ahead of time. We can predict whether
you yourself are selective or you yourself are popular, but
it's the matching, right, I can't figure out who are
the pairs that are going to work very well together.
This was the realization for me that we just have
a broken idea about where compatibility comes from, and we
(26:58):
got to radically reorient how we think.
Speaker 1 (27:00):
About this, and so your book provides that radical reorientation.
You talk about compatibility as being a so called creative chaos.
Speaker 2 (27:08):
What do you mean there, Well, there's two components there.
The creative part is the idea that it's built, that
it's constructed. That a lot of what compatibility is and
where it comes from takes place in sequences of interactions
that unfold over time. We found that we really hit
(27:30):
it off at a party the other day, you know,
chatting about rom coms, for example, one of my favorite topics.
And so when I see you at the bar next time,
I might sit next to you and try to see
if I can spark up a similar conversation or taken
in a different direction to see if that's enjoyable too.
Now repeat that process a thousand times. That's what I
(27:53):
mean by created. We have to engage other people in
series of interactions and kind of see what it is
that we can bond over. And the number of things
that people can bond over, in principle is very, very long.
Ar I think that's why it's so hard to predict
who's going to find compatibility ahead of time.
Speaker 1 (28:16):
You've talked about this process as being one of growing
over time, which I think is a notion that we
have that relationships can strengthen over time. But I think
we forget that this temporal element is such a huge
part of it.
Speaker 2 (28:26):
It's a huge part of it, and it starts early. Now, look,
some of this is luck, and that's what I mean
by the chaotic component. Two. And when we watch the
speed dates that we conducted several years ago. Boy, it's
just people struggling to find things to connect over, and
sometimes they get lucky. They just hit on some weird,
(28:49):
random thing that they have in common and they kind
of spin it off from there. So it's not similarity
in the traditional sense, like oh, my personality needs to
match yours, or even you need to fit what I'm
looking for in a partner. It's much more about like,
did we just get a little bit lucky, a little
moment of serendipity where we hit on something and then
(29:10):
we were able to keep building off of it over time.
And the couples that are able to do that are
the ones that are most likely to be able to
find something together.
Speaker 1 (29:22):
So scientifically speaking, may value is out and the creative
chaos of compatibility is in. But how do you find
the right person to build that meaningful connection with. We'll
explore that question, along with the science of the friend
zone and Paul's optimism about Tinder when the Happiness Lab returns.
In a moment before the Break, social psychologist Paul Eastwick
(29:55):
explained that romantic compatibility often builds slowly over time, but
Paul's explanation also implies that we may be able to
fall in love with far more people than we think.
And if that's true, what does that mean for modern dating?
Speaker 2 (30:09):
If you take some of these ideas to the extreme,
I find it exciting, if not a little outlandish. What
I am suggesting to some extent is that boy, we
underestimate the extent to which we can be compatible with
a lot of different people. And I know anybody who
is using the apps right now might be tempted to
(30:31):
throw this podcast into the ocean, thinking what are you
talking about? Can I please tell you about the horrible
dates I've been on recently? And my answer to that
is that I think the apps are leading us astray
in a few ways. First of all, they really encourage
the resume date. Okay, the resume date where you sit
(30:51):
down and you share a bunch of facts and figures.
That is really not what I'm talking about. And another
problem is that on the apps we're expecting sparks very
very quickly. Keep in mind, in the environments that historically
people have found partners, you were getting to know these
(31:12):
people over time, kind of whether you wanted to or not.
You didn't have the option to bail after a bad
first impression, like this person was gonna be around for
a long time, so you were gonna have other opportunities
to interact, and maybe the luck doesn't happen on the
first interaction, maybe it happens on the eighth.
Speaker 1 (31:28):
It also seems like there's all kinds of other things
about online dating that maybe mess with this process of compatibility.
One big one seems to be just how many options
we have. Talk about how the choice overload might prevent
this compatibility development process from sticking.
Speaker 2 (31:41):
Yeah, I think this is part of the issue too.
It's just there's so many options out there and you
feel like you could be doing better, and I think
that makes it very tempting for people to bail quickly
or to just go on a lot of first dates.
If I were giving advice to people who are going
(32:02):
to keep using the apps, and I understand why people
are reluctant to totally ditch them, but if we're going
to give people advice, it would be look, try to
date from a larger pool of folks, Try to open
up the aperture a little bit for who you're willing
to consider, and be willing to give people a second
(32:25):
or a third chance, rather than bailing after a single
ten minute resume exchange over coffee. I think if people
do that, they might find themselves having a little bit
more fun meeting some more interesting outside the box people,
and might stand a better chance of finding something meaningful.
But my advice generally speaking is that look, if there's
(32:48):
something that grabs you about a particular person from what
you can tell online or by texting ahead of time,
it's perhaps worth checking out, even if the person doesn't
line up in a bunch of other ways. And I
think the part that I worry about the most is
ruling people out, maybe because I don't know, like they
don't have exactly the right level of it education or
(33:10):
what is this job exactly, And I'm not clear on
what this is, worrying about things like oh, what will
it be like when I introduce him or her to
my friends? I would just advise people, if there's something
interesting about this person, it's worth giving them an extra
shot just to know.
Speaker 1 (33:26):
You've also argued that we need to remember just how
much these apps are taking us away from the environment
in which we normally make these decisions. We're looking at
text and photos and our ancestors looked at real humans
in the real world. Are there any ways to move
the apps more in this direction of kind of dating
in a community based way.
Speaker 2 (33:45):
That's my big hope. And you know, it seems silly,
but in retrospect, I mean, that's what we thought Tinder
was going to do. We thought that the idea was like, Oh,
people are going to get together more spontaneously. It's going
to encourage more socialization among acquaintances and friends of friends
and how great is this going to be? And this
is not what happened at all. So socializing with people
(34:08):
you only kind to know, boy, has that become a
lost art? And I think for people who are single
and looking, it is worth redeveloping that muscle because in
many cases, this is how relationships have historically formed. This
is how our social minds organize other people. Right, Oh,
(34:32):
you know this person, let me introduce the two of you.
Here's something that you could chat about. These things are
often very, very helpful for people. And it means that
you don't need to be stunning or super confident or
an incredible conversationalist from moment one, because you're just kind
of hanging out with other people. I would love to
(34:52):
see more apps encouraging interactions like that. I'm not an
app developer, so I don't exactly know how that gets done.
But boy, you know, the intramural sports leagues for twenty somethings,
the cooking classes, all of these things I think can
be a really useful way of supplementing the apps for
(35:12):
people who are single.
Speaker 1 (35:14):
I was really struck by that. In your book, you
had this notion that if you could give your past
self some advice, it would be stop thinking about where
you go to meet someone to date and just be
around people period.
Speaker 2 (35:23):
Oh my gosh. I was like, well, I guess maybe
I'll like try to have some sparkling conversation with a stranger.
I mean, the movies kind of sell these ideas from
time to time. It is not one of my favorite tropes,
but I just thought, like, you know, the right pickup
line is gonna do it, And what I should have
been doing is just hanging out with friends and you
(35:44):
see where the night takes you and you meet a
few new interesting people. But these things take time, and
that can be a real bummer to hear. If you
feel like your networks are kind of stale and you're
single and there's really no prospects. I totally get it.
I have absolutely been there. Luckily, socializing with other people
(36:06):
is enjoyable in and of itself, even if it doesn't
and immediately lead to a romantic connection.
Speaker 1 (36:12):
You've also talked about how we got to get outside
this idea of the romantic connection period, that we might
need to embrace the friend zone. What do you mean there?
Speaker 2 (36:20):
Yeah, so I mean this one's funny. You know, the
friend zone comes from Friends, right, Originally it was from
the TV show Friends. It was about Ross and Rachel.
So I'll describe it with respect to Ross and Rachel.
At this early point in the show, Ross is trying
to avoid being in the friend zone. Right, Ross has
a thing for Rachel. Rachel doesn't really feel that way
(36:42):
about Ross. We all know where this ultimately goes, but
at this point in the show, Ross is in the
friend zone and this is considered dangerous. It's dangerous because
he might turn into this sort of sniveling nice guy
and she's gonna take advantage of him. And boy is
(37:02):
there a lot of advice online two men about how
you need to avoid this and being friends with women
is a trap because they will take advantage of you.
For all the bad ideas online, this one might be
close to that. There's a lot of bad ideas online,
but this is a really bad one. Men and women
can be friends just fine. It is very common for
men and women to have friendships where they don't experience
(37:25):
strong romantic attraction for each other, and in fact, for
both heterosexual men and women, they're ultimately more likely to
find romantic partners to the extent that their friend networks
have both men and women in them, not necessarily like
you're going to date those friends, but those friends are
(37:46):
going to introduce you to some other friends who then
you're likely to get in a relationship with. So doing
this whole like, no, you got to be friends with
people of the same gender and people of the other
gender are to try your pickup lines on, and that's
pretty much it. This is a disastrous approach and it's
not going to lead to success for most people.
Speaker 1 (38:07):
It sounds like this new evolutionary science of relationships is
much more hopeful, but it gives us a different kind
of work than we normally think of. It's not about
the really funny quip online and scrolling through millions of photos.
It's kind of like getting back out there into the
communities and evolutionary situations that we are normally in and
just being patient. It can be hard, but it sounds
(38:28):
like it's effective.
Speaker 2 (38:29):
I do think the patience is one of the hardest things.
And look, growing up, I was not the most patient person.
I'm probably not the most patient person now. It can
be really challenging to feel like you're just waiting around
for the right person to show up. But socializing is
very very important, spending time with friends, meeting new people,
(38:52):
and these things ultimately can be helpful for most people.
We just got to re establish that lost art of
hanging out and kind of seeing where the night.
Speaker 1 (39:02):
Takes us and the good news is all that is
pretty happiness inducing, even if you don't get a romantic partner.
Speaker 2 (39:07):
Out of it exactly. I mean, that was one of
the key insights that I had, was that like, but
wait a minute, I'm just enjoying myself hanging out with
these people I know, date that person, date that person
I don't know. Like, this is fun. I'm just going
to keep doing this. And this was at a point
in my life where I was single and I was
interested in dating people. But I stopped being so focused
(39:30):
on exactly where the prospects were, and things really started
to change after that point. And it's not because like, oh,
I developed these new special attributes and now I had
higher mate value. I just had this expanding social network.
And once it really starts expanding in a major way,
it's almost like it starts cascading and you're just meeting
(39:52):
all of these new people and new possibilities emerge. And
the apps aren't great at fostering that, but we can
still do it in the twenty first century. I'm pretty sure.
Speaker 1 (40:02):
Modern dating can make attraction feel like a marketplace, like
we're all walking around with mate value numbers imprinted on
our foreheads. But Paul's work shows that compatibility is something
we can build over time. If you're interested in learning
even more accurate ideas about the evolution of love, check
out Paul's book Bonded by Evolution, The New Science of
Love and Connection, which is available now. You can also
(40:22):
check out Paul's podcast Love Factually, where he breaks down
the latest relationship science with reviews of some of your
favorite rom coms. If you have thoughts about today's episode
and the science of love, we'd love to hear from you.
You can email us at Happiness Lab at Pushkin dot fm,
or leave us a review to tell us what you liked.
You can also sign up to learn more about the
science of happiness and join my free newsletter on my website,
(40:46):
Doctor Laurie Santos dot com. That's d R l A
U RI E S A N t O s dot com.
And if you've enjoyed these past few episodes on the
Science of Love, then you're in luck, because next week
we'll be revisiting some of our favorite episodes on the
Science of Love from the Happiness Lab archives, including one
of my favorite ever interviews with the OG pioneers of
(41:07):
modern relationship science.
Speaker 2 (41:09):
You don't want to
Speaker 1 (41:10):
Miss it, so be sure to come back next week
for the Happiness Lab with me Doctor Laurie Santos
Pushkin. As William Shakespeare once said, the course of true
love never did run smooth, and one of the unsmoothest
parts of love is the initial attraction phase. You see
somebody across the way who looks kind of cute. But
will that person like you back? Will they think you're
(00:37):
hot enough, smart enough, successful enough. Sometimes the answer is yes,
cue all the hearts and fireworks. But at least some
of the time the answer is no. The person that
you're into isn't that into you.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
Relationships and attraction especially, there can be a lot of rejection.
It can be pretty demoralizing, and to some extent you
can't skip that part. But I think it really matters
why was I rejected in this instance.
Speaker 1 (01:02):
This is doctor Paul Eastwick, an expert on the psychology
of human mating.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
And there's a whole set of ideas out there that
suggests that you got rejected because you're a three out
of ten and you're just going to need to settle
for the other threes.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
Paul is referring to a set of ideas he calls
the evoscript, the notion that human attraction boils down to
the harsh laws of natural selection under the evoscript finding
the right partner is all about finding someone with good genes.
Some of us, those so called nines and tens out
there becausess a whole host of traits that signal those
good genes. The rest of us not so much.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
You have a certain set of attributes. They characterize who
you are and they determine what you're going to get
on the market. This is a set of ideas that
got very, very popular, but honestly it's not very inspiring.
You do kind of just wonder like what am I
doing wrong? What is wrong with me? And boy, it
makes the rejections hit that much harder.
Speaker 1 (02:03):
But Paul's joining me on the show today to share
some good news. His research has found that when it
comes to dating, many of these evoscript ideas simply don't
hold up. In fact, he's just published a new book
with a much more inspiring view on the evolutionary origins
of love. It's called Bonded by Evolution, The New Science
of Love and Connection.
Speaker 2 (02:22):
It's about a lot of the idea is that we
kind of get wrong about attraction and relationships and what
the science actually says about how relationships work.
Speaker 1 (02:31):
But what does the science say about how relationships actually
work well. Paul will tell us after these quick messages
from our sponsors. Social psychologist Paul Eastwick has long been
(02:55):
frustrated by what he's called the evoscript, the idea that
human mating can simply be boiled down to a set
of harsh evolutionary rules that govern who and what we
find attractive. And perhaps the most infamous evoscript notion in
popular called today is the concept of mate value. I
asked Paul to explain how the idea is usually understood.
Speaker 2 (03:15):
You're a collection of attributes, skills, and abilities, and it
can be a bunch of things. It can be your attractiveness,
of course, it can be your intelligence, anything that's going
to make you desirable to the other gender. If we're
assuming heterosexuality here, right, So for men, it might be
things like earning, potential and status. For women, it might
be things like youth. But all of these things factor
(03:37):
into your mate value, and your mate value should set
your standards. According to this worldview, you should be trying
to figure out where you sit in this hierarchy, because
you're probably going to be able to date somebody else
who's roughly at the same place that you are. I
think some of these ideas feel intuitive. If you think
(04:00):
about like popularity in a high school. There's this very
famous game that psychologists often play in their classes where
people wear numbers on their foreheads indicating their value. But
you don't know what your value is, and you're told
to go around and try to pair up with the
highest value partner you can get. And what you see
is that people who have low numbers they figure it
(04:22):
out pretty quickly because nobody wants to go near them.
Speaker 1 (04:24):
Because ideas, I'm walking around with a three, but I
can't see my three. I'm like, ooh, let me go
with the nine or the ten, And the nine or
ten is like no way runs.
Speaker 2 (04:31):
Away, right, absolutely not. And the two that you were
avoiding at first, well, eventually you settle for that guy
because it's about the best that you can do.
Speaker 1 (04:39):
I mean, this is the kind of thing we see
on the internet all the time. I know, there's like
a new meme going around that's like she's a nine,
but she choose with her mouth open, literally gives these
things a number.
Speaker 2 (04:49):
This is so pervasive on the internet. It's a little
bit wild.
Speaker 1 (04:52):
So why did we think this was true? Scientifically, I
know there's a phenomena that researchers looked at to say, oh,
maybe there is a mat value scientifically.
Speaker 2 (05:00):
Originally, this idea comes from two places. One is that
if you show people photographs or they meet strangers, there's
pretty good agreement about, let's say, how attractive somebody is.
It's not perfect, but it's certainly there. And the second
place we saw it is that if you look at
existing couples, if you look at couples who are together,
(05:23):
they're attractiveness level correlates. It's far from a perfect correlation,
but it's more than a coin flip. So there's a
real association there. And so people assumed, well, what that
means is that the market is the thing that's determining
largely who we're getting.
Speaker 1 (05:39):
But I think it also comes from the online dating landscape.
So talk about how like these apps really reinforce these ideas.
Speaker 2 (05:45):
When you look at online dating, When you look at
the apps, they do create a very unequal market when
all you've got is a photo and a brief description
to go with. Yeah, people are swiping quickly, and the
attractive people, the people with the high value attributes, Boy
do they earn a lot of likes, and if you
(06:06):
don't have those attributes, nobody is going to be wiping
right on you. And the problem there is that it
creates this very, very imbalanced market where there's a whole
bunch of people who really have no options.
Speaker 1 (06:20):
And in your book you talk about this new model
that folks have been pushing lately where like this make
values part of it, but not all of it. So
explain this model.
Speaker 2 (06:28):
Yeah, oh this is so key. I've got a shout
out Dave Kenny, who really came up with this idea originally.
But the idea works like this. Attraction is not one thing,
it's three and one of those three parts is what
we could call popularity. But it rests on the assumption
that we agree how desirable somebody is. There are two
other components. One we'd call selectivity. It's the idea that
(06:51):
some people are always open to forming a new relationship.
Other people are extremely selective. But I got to talk
about the third component. This third component is what we
call compatibility. It refers to what's going on above and
beyond how selective I generally am and how does desirable
you actually are, and refers to the unique connection between
(07:14):
the two of us, even in initial impressions, compatibility is
the biggest share of what's going on.
Speaker 1 (07:22):
One of the things I was shocked by was that
even this idea of the consensus part, like how much
we agree on the mat value if there is one,
that wasn't actually as high as people thought. Explain some
of the studies that showed that it's not as big
as we assume.
Speaker 2 (07:33):
There was this great study a little while ago that
tried to capture how much agreement and disagreement there was
when people were evaluating faces, right, how attractive do you
think these faces are? And what they found is that, yes,
there is agreement here, but also look at how much disagreement.
And the great stat in that study is that most
(07:55):
of the faces that these participants were evaluating, it was
like ninety six percent of them, somebody rated you in
the top half or in the bottom half. Okay, So
that means that only for four percent of the phases
did everybody agree that you're on the top half or
the bottom half. So that is mostly disagreement there.
Speaker 1 (08:17):
I mean, it's just that somebody thinks you're not half best.
Speaker 2 (08:19):
Yeah, exactly exactly. And if you are consentually popular. Not
everybody thinks that.
Speaker 1 (08:27):
Okay, So that's one problem with this mate value idea.
Another one is something you found when you look particularly
at the timing of romantic relationships. How does that challenge
this idea of mate value. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (08:37):
I mean, it's one thing if you're looking at photographs
and meeting strangers, but it's another thing entirely when you're
getting to know people over time. And I just got
to point out historically, this is where most relationships came from.
When we were evolving on the Savannah, we lived in
small groups with a lot of people that you were
going to know for a long period of time. You
weren't going to spend a lot of time meeting strangers.
(08:58):
So what happens when we actually get to know each other.
It turns out that compatibility component I was describing earlier,
it gets more and more important. There's more more of
that unique idiosyncrasy in how people feel about each other,
and the consensus component goes down, so we actually agree
less and less about how appealing someone is as we
(09:22):
get to know them over a period of weeks and months.
Speaker 1 (09:25):
That predicts is really interesting thing, which is that people
who might have been lucking out because they were really
high on the mate value than nines and tens. Well,
over a time, attractiveness gets less important.
Speaker 2 (09:34):
It seems like exactly, I like to think about summer camp.
I'm like from the East coast of the United States originally,
so you know, summer camp is in my DNA, And
if you imagine a bunch of heterosexual, mixed gender kids
going to summer camp, what's going to happen in June
is that the popular people, well, everybody will agree that
(09:54):
they're popular, and they'll have a lot of success. But
as all these folks get to know each other and
agreement goes down by the end of the summer, anything
can happen. Now it's like, well, the popular people, they're
not having the same success with everybody that they once had.
And the people who were consentially not so attractive at
the beginning, well, maybe now there's somebody who has really
(10:15):
taken a liking to them that they might not have
been able to successfully attract engim.
Speaker 1 (10:21):
So that's idea Number one that's wrong, that there's this
inherent built in may value.
Speaker 2 (10:25):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (10:26):
A second one that you've talked about is this idea
of gender differences and how we look for mates. There's
things that, especially in heterosexual couples, that women want, and
there's things that guys want. Yeah, what's the typical idea
and what is it getting wrong?
Speaker 2 (10:38):
I do think it's predicated on the idea that men
and women want really different things out of relationships, and
they're attracted to really different things. The classic studies in
this space ask men and women what kinds of attributes
they want in a romantic partner. So men are likely
(10:59):
to say that they care about attractiveness and a partner
more than women, and women are likely to say that
they care about things like earning potential in a partner
more than men. And when you give people rating scales
and you say rate these traits, how good are they?
You will reliably find those gender differences across many, many
(11:19):
countries throughout the world.
Speaker 1 (11:20):
This also seems to mirror the kind of thing we
see in pop culture. I know you and I are
children of the nineties, and I watched you know, model
Anna Nicole Smith, Mary, some very rich billionaire who himself
was not that attractive. It also seems to play out
in some icky ways in online spaces, in ways that
are really problematic.
Speaker 2 (11:37):
Yeah, so there's a whole trad wife culture online. Part
of the trad wife idea is that there's nothing wrong
with wanting to be a homemaker and a child caretaker.
And look, I get that people should get to make
their own choices, but that's not the only thing that's
in this ideology. What is very much in there is
your beauty will translate into his success. So you need
(12:03):
to be attractive, be appealing, be feminine in the traditional
sense of the word, so that you can land the
right kind of provider. I mean, some of these ideas
about the differences between men and women get supercharged online
and infused with a lot of nastiness. So not only
(12:25):
are women out to land the most successful man that
she can get, but if you're going to be like
a useful stepping stone to her along the way, I mean,
it creates a lot of competitive us versus them ideas
about what men and women are like, and really promotes
a lot of misogyny.
Speaker 1 (12:44):
So these original ideas about these gender differences were based
on these surveys, but new results have used a technique
that's not a survey. New results have used revealed preferences.
So what are revealed preferences and why are they better
than these surveys.
Speaker 2 (12:56):
So the concept of the revealed preference is that, look,
I'm not going to ask you what you think about
these attributes in the abstract, disconnected from any particular person.
I want to see how you react to an attribute
like earning potential as it is instantiated by specific other people.
(13:16):
And we would do this using speed dating designs. This
is just one way to do it, but I think
it's the easiest one for folks to grasp. So let's
say I send you to a speed dating event, and
you're going to meet a bunch of other men at
the speed dating event, some of whom are ambitious and
some of whom are not. So rather than asking you
how much do you want ambition and a partner, I'm
(13:38):
going to see how much do you like the ambitious
guys more than the unambitious guys. That's your revealed preference
for ambition in an initial attraction context.
Speaker 1 (13:50):
So what do we find when we really give people
actual humans to choose from?
Speaker 2 (13:53):
If you send women speed dating, they do like the
ambitious men a little bit more, not a lot more,
but a little bit more than the unambitious ones. The
fascinating thing is what happens when you do the same
thing with men. Again, Men say they care about ambition
and a partner less than women do, but not when
it comes to their revealed preferences. They like the ambitious
(14:17):
women a little bit more than the unambitious ones, But
the revealed preference for men and women for an attribute
like ambition is really exactly the same.
Speaker 1 (14:27):
Okay, so that's ambition. What about attractiveness?
Speaker 2 (14:30):
People's revealed preference for attractiveness at a speed dating event
is strong. They like the attractive people more than the
unattractive people. That's this consensus component that we talked about.
Men like the attractive women more than the unattractive women
on average, but women also like the attractive men more
than the unattractive men on average, and again their revealed
(14:52):
preference is the same. So this really cued us into
the possibility that whoa, maybe when we look at these
differences and what men and women say they want, they're
not translating into their experienced preferences when they're out there
meeting real life people.
Speaker 1 (15:08):
So that was scientist alleged FACTORID number two that were
getting wrong. Yeah, as gender differences, the third one is
about different kinds of relationships or the length of different
kinds of relationships. Evolutionary science has a lot to say
about who's good for a short term meat versus a
long term meat. What does the science usually say and
how is that wrong?
Speaker 2 (15:27):
This distinction is tricky because there's a tendency to think
that if you're like a long term specialist, people aren't
going to be attracted to you in a sexy way,
and maybe even more pernicious, if you're somebody who's pretty
sexy and you've had a few sexual partners in your past,
(15:48):
that you won't be as good in the long term
realm as if people reside on like a slider between
short term desirability and long term desirability, and you kind
of got to pick which one fits your skills and abilities.
Speaker 1 (16:05):
And so the idea is like for a heterosexual woman,
there are these guys who are like super hot guys
that you might want to have a one night stand with, yeah,
and then they're the very sensitive guys so you might
want to have a long term relationship with. But just
like the other ideas of mate value, there's a kind
of romantic destiny built in there. You're either going to
be a short term mate or a long term one.
Speaker 2 (16:24):
That's tough on both types of guys. So first of all,
the sexy one like he's not worth considering for a
long term relationship. But also these supposed long term guys,
they're like not appreciated at all for anything sexual. This
sounds terrible on both fronts.
Speaker 1 (16:41):
It also seems to be another thing that leads to
a lot of misogyny online. Explain how this third idea
gets picked up at all those spaces.
Speaker 2 (16:48):
So this got turned into a whole bunch of terms online.
I mean people have maybe heard the terms alpha and beta,
where alpha refers to the sexually desirable guy who supposedly
has all the sexual opportunities and the betas who kind
of weighed around for you know, maybe they try some
nice guy routines. They might try to gain a little
(17:10):
bit of status, a little bit of money, but that's
about the best that they can do, and they kind
of got to wait for the alpha guy to decide
which are the women that he wants, and you know
they'll pick up the rest.
Speaker 1 (17:22):
So what does this third idea get right and what
is it really getting wrong about how real relationships work?
Speaker 2 (17:27):
It gets one thing right, which is that attributes like
being sexy and confident are associated with having more sex partners,
with people being sexually interested in you, And it kind
of stops there. That's about it. Pretty Much everything else
(17:48):
about this idea is way off base, including and especially
the idea that something about a person's short term desirability
has anything to do at all with their long term desirability.
These ideas have been out there for a long time, like, oh,
if you have a longer sexual resume when you're younger,
(18:10):
you're more likely to get divorced or your marriage is
going to be bad. Your desirability as a short term
partner really has no bearing one way or the other
on how you're going to do in the long term.
Speaker 1 (18:22):
So it turns out that many many science y sounding
ideas about love and attraction that stuff that influencers online
often use to make sense of relationships, they just don't
match what the relationship science really shows. But humans are
the product of natural selection, So what does evolutionary science
really predict about relationships? Paul and I will tackle that
question when The Happiness Lab returns after the break. Doctor
(18:58):
Paul Eastwick's new book, Bonded by Evolution challenges the idea
that human attraction is based on the one dimensional concept
of mate value. Instead, Paul argues that attraction depends a
lot more on what he calls romantic compatibility, the factors
that allow two people to work together long term.
Speaker 2 (19:15):
So I think it's very important to realize that we
lived in small groups and you had to build what
sometimes anthropologists called pair bonds. You had to build a
bond with somebody else for the purpose of raising these
very helpless offspring. I mean human offspring take a long
time to raise to reproductive age, a very long time.
(19:38):
It's the better part of two decades before kids in
hunter gatherer contexts are able to bring in as many
calories as they consume, so they take a lot of work.
And this is presumably why humans evolve the capacity to
bond with each other in a bond. What matters a
(19:58):
lot more than like, oh, you're desirable, you have all
the right abilities and skills and traits and attributes. What
matters a lot more is do we work well together?
Are we coordinated? Scientists use terms like interdependence, right, what
is it like when we work together? Do things work smoothly?
Or are things pretty difficult? And we don't actually get
(20:20):
along that well. So I think these ideas form the
core of what we mean by compatibility and capture why
it's so important.
Speaker 1 (20:29):
We also seem to have all these psychological quirks that
help us build compatibility. Sometimes biases that are pretty give
me some examples of these.
Speaker 2 (20:36):
So, for example, on average and ongoing close relationships, people
feel very positively about their partners, and when somebody might
point out to them some of the shortcomings that their
partners might have, we're really good at compartmentalizing those shortcomings, right, like, yes,
she's a little bit messy, but I don't know. This
(20:58):
just kind of makes our home life exciting. And these
things are really important for maintaining that sense that your
relationship is valuable and you want to put in effort
to keep it going. As a relationship builds, people end
up doing this more and more. It's kind of a
core piece of what it means to form and maintain
(21:20):
a relationship is that you see your partner in the
best possible light and that you're motivated to keep the
relationship moving forward.
Speaker 1 (21:28):
That's what happens when we think about our partners in
these motivated ways. What happens when we think about alternatives.
Speaker 2 (21:33):
We worry a lot about alternative partners that they could
pull us away from the person that we're currently in
a relationship with, and alternatives can certainly do that. People
do sometimes have wandering eyes, but we have all of
these defense mechanisms built in that prevent us from even
noticing that potential romantic partners are right there waiting for us.
(21:57):
One of my favorite studies in this space looks at
the mental images that people in relationships make about possible
alternative partners. There are these neat techniques where you can
get a little picture on the screen of what they
were thinking of. Were they thinking about somebody attractive or unattractive?
And it turns out, if you're in a relationship, when
(22:18):
you imagine other potential partners, you literally imagine somebody who
is less attractive than what single people imagine in their heads.
So that's just one of an array of different effects
that demonstrate that people at a baseline level seem motivated
to keep alternative partners at bay as a way of
(22:40):
preserving their current relationship.
Speaker 1 (22:43):
So when it comes to relationships, compatibility matters a lot.
We have all these mechanisms once compatibility starts to keep
building it up, but that just raises a really important question,
which is where does compatibility come from. I think one
idea that most people have is that compatibility comes from
people who are like us. You like the people who
are like you. What does evidence say?
Speaker 2 (23:02):
It seems intuitive that we'd be especially attracted to others
who are similar to us, and this was one of
the big challenges we confronted. We documented that there was
all of this compatibility that you could see in attraction context.
It's even bigger if you look at ongoing acquaintances, friendships,
and close relationships. So we got to explain it. We
(23:24):
got to explain why these two people are compatible and
why other pairs are not. So we looked to see, well,
maybe it is about similarity. Let's calculate similarity across all
of these different dimensions, ask people about their deal breakers,
and see if we can account for compatibility that way,
And it turned out it did pretty badly. It was
surprising how poorly similarity fared at predicting compatibility. We tried
(23:49):
other forms of matching two like oh, ask people about
their deal breakers, and those didn't really go anywhere either.
I think part of The problem here is that because
of where we live, because of how we are sorted
into different social situations, were often surrounded by people who
(24:09):
are similar to us. We're surrounded by people who fit
our idea on average of you know, what we really
want somebody else to have, and so we end up
thinking we really care about these things, but in large
part we're really reflecting the social miliu that we're in.
Speaker 1 (24:26):
So it might look like I really want a partner
who's smart like me and a professor like me, but
in practice, at the university, the only people I'm ever
going to meet is a professor who's smart like me.
Speaker 2 (24:36):
That's right, and then you and that was somebody like that.
Oh look, similarity predicts attraction. Well, the challenge is that
with in your millu more versus less, similarity isn't mattering,
which means it can't explain why there's so much going
on with respect to compatibility in your social environment. Why
even in your social environment, you're really going to click
(24:58):
with a couple people but not most people.
Speaker 1 (25:00):
I want to pick on up on something else. You
just said this idea of deal breakers, because I think
this is another thing that people think in terms of compatibility.
I think this is something that the internet and online
dating is they made worse. This idea that like, well,
my partner has to be tall, oh gosh, he has
to really like podcasts whatever, and if he didn't like podcasts,
what would you do? Is like a major red flag, right.
(25:21):
But when we actually look at whether people's theories work,
do they work as well as people assume?
Speaker 2 (25:26):
No? I mean, we tried other forms of matching too,
like are you ultimately more attractive to people who fit
your idea of these deal break or qualities that you
just have to have? Well, that didn't work all that
well either.
Speaker 1 (25:40):
So this seems to be really damning for the way
that a lot of online tools really help us out.
I mean, I don't know what these algorithms are, but
apparently a lot of these matching services online have like,
you know, some sort of big machine learning that they're
using to figure out what my compatibility is. Are these
things just more bs than we think?
Speaker 2 (25:58):
Well? You know, it's funny because my colleague, doctor Samantha
Joel ran some studies like this not long ago, and
it was basically a perfect facsimile of what these online days,
apps and companies could be doing. I've got a trove
of information about you and a trove of information about
a bunch of other people. Things you report about yourself
(26:19):
ahead of time, trades, attributes, preferences, what have you. She
used the algorithms to try to match people up to
try to predict who's going to click especially well with whom,
and she was able to predict absolutely nothing.
Speaker 1 (26:35):
That's pretty depressing for big data.
Speaker 2 (26:37):
And I do want to be clear, like you repoor
things about yourself ahead of time. We can predict whether
you yourself are selective or you yourself are popular, but
it's the matching, right, I can't figure out who are
the pairs that are going to work very well together.
This was the realization for me that we just have
a broken idea about where compatibility comes from, and we
(26:58):
got to radically reorient how we think.
Speaker 1 (27:00):
About this, and so your book provides that radical reorientation.
You talk about compatibility as being a so called creative chaos.
Speaker 2 (27:08):
What do you mean there, Well, there's two components there.
The creative part is the idea that it's built, that
it's constructed. That a lot of what compatibility is and
where it comes from takes place in sequences of interactions
that unfold over time. We found that we really hit
(27:30):
it off at a party the other day, you know,
chatting about rom coms, for example, one of my favorite topics.
And so when I see you at the bar next time,
I might sit next to you and try to see
if I can spark up a similar conversation or taken
in a different direction to see if that's enjoyable too.
Now repeat that process a thousand times. That's what I
(27:53):
mean by created. We have to engage other people in
series of interactions and kind of see what it is
that we can bond over. And the number of things
that people can bond over, in principle is very, very long.
Ar I think that's why it's so hard to predict
who's going to find compatibility ahead of time.
Speaker 1 (28:16):
You've talked about this process as being one of growing
over time, which I think is a notion that we
have that relationships can strengthen over time. But I think
we forget that this temporal element is such a huge
part of it.
Speaker 2 (28:26):
It's a huge part of it, and it starts early. Now, look,
some of this is luck, and that's what I mean
by the chaotic component. Two. And when we watch the
speed dates that we conducted several years ago. Boy, it's
just people struggling to find things to connect over, and
sometimes they get lucky. They just hit on some weird,
(28:49):
random thing that they have in common and they kind
of spin it off from there. So it's not similarity
in the traditional sense, like oh, my personality needs to
match yours, or even you need to fit what I'm
looking for in a partner. It's much more about like,
did we just get a little bit lucky, a little
moment of serendipity where we hit on something and then
(29:10):
we were able to keep building off of it over time.
And the couples that are able to do that are
the ones that are most likely to be able to
find something together.
Speaker 1 (29:22):
So scientifically speaking, may value is out and the creative
chaos of compatibility is in. But how do you find
the right person to build that meaningful connection with. We'll
explore that question, along with the science of the friend
zone and Paul's optimism about Tinder when the Happiness Lab returns.
In a moment before the Break, social psychologist Paul Eastwick
(29:55):
explained that romantic compatibility often builds slowly over time, but
Paul's explanation also implies that we may be able to
fall in love with far more people than we think.
And if that's true, what does that mean for modern dating?
Speaker 2 (30:09):
If you take some of these ideas to the extreme,
I find it exciting, if not a little outlandish. What
I am suggesting to some extent is that boy, we
underestimate the extent to which we can be compatible with
a lot of different people. And I know anybody who
is using the apps right now might be tempted to
(30:31):
throw this podcast into the ocean, thinking what are you
talking about? Can I please tell you about the horrible
dates I've been on recently? And my answer to that
is that I think the apps are leading us astray
in a few ways. First of all, they really encourage
the resume date. Okay, the resume date where you sit
(30:51):
down and you share a bunch of facts and figures.
That is really not what I'm talking about. And another
problem is that on the apps we're expecting sparks very
very quickly. Keep in mind, in the environments that historically
people have found partners, you were getting to know these
(31:12):
people over time, kind of whether you wanted to or not.
You didn't have the option to bail after a bad
first impression, like this person was gonna be around for
a long time, so you were gonna have other opportunities
to interact, and maybe the luck doesn't happen on the
first interaction, maybe it happens on the eighth.
Speaker 1 (31:28):
It also seems like there's all kinds of other things
about online dating that maybe mess with this process of compatibility.
One big one seems to be just how many options
we have. Talk about how the choice overload might prevent
this compatibility development process from sticking.
Speaker 2 (31:41):
Yeah, I think this is part of the issue too.
It's just there's so many options out there and you
feel like you could be doing better, and I think
that makes it very tempting for people to bail quickly
or to just go on a lot of first dates.
If I were giving advice to people who are going
(32:02):
to keep using the apps, and I understand why people
are reluctant to totally ditch them, but if we're going
to give people advice, it would be look, try to
date from a larger pool of folks, Try to open
up the aperture a little bit for who you're willing
to consider, and be willing to give people a second
(32:25):
or a third chance, rather than bailing after a single
ten minute resume exchange over coffee. I think if people
do that, they might find themselves having a little bit
more fun meeting some more interesting outside the box people,
and might stand a better chance of finding something meaningful.
But my advice generally speaking is that look, if there's
(32:48):
something that grabs you about a particular person from what
you can tell online or by texting ahead of time,
it's perhaps worth checking out, even if the person doesn't
line up in a bunch of other ways. And I
think the part that I worry about the most is
ruling people out, maybe because I don't know, like they
don't have exactly the right level of it education or
(33:10):
what is this job exactly, And I'm not clear on
what this is, worrying about things like oh, what will
it be like when I introduce him or her to
my friends? I would just advise people, if there's something
interesting about this person, it's worth giving them an extra
shot just to know.
Speaker 1 (33:26):
You've also argued that we need to remember just how
much these apps are taking us away from the environment
in which we normally make these decisions. We're looking at
text and photos and our ancestors looked at real humans
in the real world. Are there any ways to move
the apps more in this direction of kind of dating
in a community based way.
Speaker 2 (33:45):
That's my big hope. And you know, it seems silly,
but in retrospect, I mean, that's what we thought Tinder
was going to do. We thought that the idea was like, Oh,
people are going to get together more spontaneously. It's going
to encourage more socialization among acquaintances and friends of friends
and how great is this going to be? And this
is not what happened at all. So socializing with people
(34:08):
you only kind to know, boy, has that become a
lost art? And I think for people who are single
and looking, it is worth redeveloping that muscle because in
many cases, this is how relationships have historically formed. This
is how our social minds organize other people. Right, Oh,
(34:32):
you know this person, let me introduce the two of you.
Here's something that you could chat about. These things are
often very, very helpful for people. And it means that
you don't need to be stunning or super confident or
an incredible conversationalist from moment one, because you're just kind
of hanging out with other people. I would love to
(34:52):
see more apps encouraging interactions like that. I'm not an
app developer, so I don't exactly know how that gets done.
But boy, you know, the intramural sports leagues for twenty somethings,
the cooking classes, all of these things I think can
be a really useful way of supplementing the apps for
(35:12):
people who are single.
Speaker 1 (35:14):
I was really struck by that. In your book, you
had this notion that if you could give your past
self some advice, it would be stop thinking about where
you go to meet someone to date and just be
around people period.
Speaker 2 (35:23):
Oh my gosh. I was like, well, I guess maybe
I'll like try to have some sparkling conversation with a stranger.
I mean, the movies kind of sell these ideas from
time to time. It is not one of my favorite tropes,
but I just thought, like, you know, the right pickup
line is gonna do it, And what I should have
been doing is just hanging out with friends and you
(35:44):
see where the night takes you and you meet a
few new interesting people. But these things take time, and
that can be a real bummer to hear. If you
feel like your networks are kind of stale and you're
single and there's really no prospects. I totally get it.
I have absolutely been there. Luckily, socializing with other people
(36:06):
is enjoyable in and of itself, even if it doesn't
and immediately lead to a romantic connection.
Speaker 1 (36:12):
You've also talked about how we got to get outside
this idea of the romantic connection period, that we might
need to embrace the friend zone. What do you mean there?
Speaker 2 (36:20):
Yeah, so I mean this one's funny. You know, the
friend zone comes from Friends, right, Originally it was from
the TV show Friends. It was about Ross and Rachel.
So I'll describe it with respect to Ross and Rachel.
At this early point in the show, Ross is trying
to avoid being in the friend zone. Right, Ross has
a thing for Rachel. Rachel doesn't really feel that way
(36:42):
about Ross. We all know where this ultimately goes, but
at this point in the show, Ross is in the
friend zone and this is considered dangerous. It's dangerous because
he might turn into this sort of sniveling nice guy
and she's gonna take advantage of him. And boy is
(37:02):
there a lot of advice online two men about how
you need to avoid this and being friends with women
is a trap because they will take advantage of you.
For all the bad ideas online, this one might be
close to that. There's a lot of bad ideas online,
but this is a really bad one. Men and women
can be friends just fine. It is very common for
men and women to have friendships where they don't experience
(37:25):
strong romantic attraction for each other, and in fact, for
both heterosexual men and women, they're ultimately more likely to
find romantic partners to the extent that their friend networks
have both men and women in them, not necessarily like
you're going to date those friends, but those friends are
(37:46):
going to introduce you to some other friends who then
you're likely to get in a relationship with. So doing
this whole like, no, you got to be friends with
people of the same gender and people of the other
gender are to try your pickup lines on, and that's
pretty much it. This is a disastrous approach and it's
not going to lead to success for most people.
Speaker 1 (38:07):
It sounds like this new evolutionary science of relationships is
much more hopeful, but it gives us a different kind
of work than we normally think of. It's not about
the really funny quip online and scrolling through millions of photos.
It's kind of like getting back out there into the
communities and evolutionary situations that we are normally in and
just being patient. It can be hard, but it sounds
(38:28):
like it's effective.
Speaker 2 (38:29):
I do think the patience is one of the hardest things.
And look, growing up, I was not the most patient person.
I'm probably not the most patient person now. It can
be really challenging to feel like you're just waiting around
for the right person to show up. But socializing is
very very important, spending time with friends, meeting new people,
(38:52):
and these things ultimately can be helpful for most people.
We just got to re establish that lost art of
hanging out and kind of seeing where the night.
Speaker 1 (39:02):
Takes us and the good news is all that is
pretty happiness inducing, even if you don't get a romantic partner.
Speaker 2 (39:07):
Out of it exactly. I mean, that was one of
the key insights that I had, was that like, but
wait a minute, I'm just enjoying myself hanging out with
these people I know, date that person, date that person
I don't know. Like, this is fun. I'm just going
to keep doing this. And this was at a point
in my life where I was single and I was
interested in dating people. But I stopped being so focused
(39:30):
on exactly where the prospects were, and things really started
to change after that point. And it's not because like, oh,
I developed these new special attributes and now I had
higher mate value. I just had this expanding social network.
And once it really starts expanding in a major way,
it's almost like it starts cascading and you're just meeting
(39:52):
all of these new people and new possibilities emerge. And
the apps aren't great at fostering that, but we can
still do it in the twenty first century. I'm pretty sure.
Speaker 1 (40:02):
Modern dating can make attraction feel like a marketplace, like
we're all walking around with mate value numbers imprinted on
our foreheads. But Paul's work shows that compatibility is something
we can build over time. If you're interested in learning
even more accurate ideas about the evolution of love, check
out Paul's book Bonded by Evolution, The New Science of
Love and Connection, which is available now. You can also
(40:22):
check out Paul's podcast Love Factually, where he breaks down
the latest relationship science with reviews of some of your
favorite rom coms. If you have thoughts about today's episode
and the science of love, we'd love to hear from you.
You can email us at Happiness Lab at Pushkin dot fm,
or leave us a review to tell us what you liked.
You can also sign up to learn more about the
science of happiness and join my free newsletter on my website,
(40:46):
Doctor Laurie Santos dot com. That's d R l A
U RI E S A N t O s dot com.
And if you've enjoyed these past few episodes on the
Science of Love, then you're in luck, because next week
we'll be revisiting some of our favorite episodes on the
Science of Love from the Happiness Lab archives, including one
of my favorite ever interviews with the OG pioneers of
(41:07):
modern relationship science.
Speaker 2 (41:09):
You don't want to
Speaker 1 (41:10):
Miss it, so be sure to come back next week
for the Happiness Lab with me Doctor Laurie Santos
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