#474： The Surprises of Romantic Attraction
Episode Stats
Summary
According to the popular evolutionary theory of human attraction, people select romantic partners based on objective assessments of their mate value (the extent to which an individual possesses traits like good looks and status). But is that really all that s behind the way people pair up well? My guest, Dr. Paul Eastwick, has done a series of studies which add greater nuance to the mysteries of romantic attraction.
Transcript
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brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast according to the
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popular evolutionary theory of human attraction people select romantic partners based on objective
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assessments of what's called their mate value the extent to which an individual possesses traits
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like good looks and status but is that really all that's behind the way people pair up well my guest
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day has done a series of studies which add greater nuance to the mysteries of romantic attraction
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his name is paul eastwick he's professor of psychology at uc davis we begin our conversation
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unpacking the fact that there's sometimes a gap between the sexual romantic partners people say
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they prefer in the abstract and the partners they actually choose in real life we then turn to
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whether or not the popular idea that men value physical attractiveness more than women and that
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women value status and resources more than men is really true we also talk about how people's
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consensus over who is and isn't attractive changes over time and whether it's true that people of
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equal attractiveness generally end up together we enter a conversation discussing how these research
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based insights can be applied to the real world of dating and why if you're not brad pitt tom cruise
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carrie grant 1980s tom sellick and whatever famous handsome man you want if you're not any of those guys
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you may have better luck meeting people offline than online in an app some interesting insights in
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the show that lend credence the old adage that there's someone for everyone after the show's over
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check out our show notes at aom.is slash eastwick paul joins me now via clearcast.io
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paul eastwick welcome to the show thanks so much for having me so you are a professor of psychology
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and you've spent your career researching human attraction and what i think is interesting about
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your research is that it it goes a different direction from what the sort of the popular and
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accepted ideas that are out there about what makes humans attracted to one another so before we get to
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your research and how it adds to that theory what is he walk us through like what the popular and
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accepted theory of what make men and women attractive each other is but i guess it's based in evolutionary
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theory yeah so there's a lot of work out there that takes what i would call a trait based approach to
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understanding what makes men and women attractive and this is a very simple idea it's that we possess
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particular desirable qualities or we don't and the extent to which you have those desirable qualities
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is what makes you appealing in a mate and we can talk about things that you can see on the surface
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like physical attractiveness we can talk about status and resources we can also talk about traits like
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intelligence but the presumption here is that there is some sort of objective reality about a person and
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the extent to which they have those desirable traits and that a person's desirability as a mate or their
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mate value that's sort of often the term that's used can be sort of calculated based on the extent
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to which they possess those sorts of traits and and also the research has shown there's differences
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between the sexes on what's attractive and not attractive like men find certain things attractive
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in women but women find other traits attractive in men that's right so the the the calculus for mate
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value classically differs between men and women you know intelligence is very appealing to both men and
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women and a partner but when you ask men and women how much do you care about traits like attractiveness
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men will tend to rate it higher than women although women like it too you see the reverse for traits like
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resources right with women rating it higher than men but in general these findings sort of fit into this
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what i would call this trait based mate value sort of approach where the idea is that there's
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some sort of reality about the traits that you possess and your job if you're looking for a mate from this
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perspective is to size up whether or not somebody has these qualities and then to make your choice
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accordingly and it's also a very like market driven right approach to relationships right you have
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certain values and you kind of make trade-offs on what you have and what right other person has
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exactly exactly it is it and that's why it's you know evolutionary theory touches on these ideas but
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yeah it's based on these very classic market-based ideas about marriage this pervades sociology going
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you know back 70 years or more these these are very influential important ideas that have long
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pervaded how people think about the way relationships form and are maintained and how have evolutionary
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psychologists come to this conclusion that you know men find you know physical attractiveness
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more important than women find you know physical attractiveness in men like what are the what do
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the studies look like where they've come to this conclusion well it's interesting because humans can do this
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really funny thing which is you can put rating scales in front of us and we can fill them out with
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a pen or a pencil and what that means is that instead of you know if you were studying animals in the
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wild you'd have to set up these really complex designs and sort of oh see which of the mates you know
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the the females would pursue or you know see which mates the males would pursue but in humans you can
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sort of throw a scale in front of them and be done in 30 seconds and so much of the research supporting
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these sex differences tends to use that latter approach that is you ask men and women to rate
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physical attractiveness on a rating scale from you know one to ten how much do you like this trait
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and that's where you see men say they care about it more than women you see the reverse with things
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like status and resources so a lot of the research is pretty straightforward and questionnaire based
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along those lines it's sort of this you know neat thing you can get humans to do that you can't get
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other non-human animals to do so basically what these surveys ask is like what you would want in a
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like hypothetical potential mate not an actual mate correct right i mean you know they're asking people
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to think about what would you want an ideal mate to have and and people people can do this people you know
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when you give people questionnaires like that they're like they're not thinking i have never pondered such a
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thing before like people are definitely uh you know they can call to mind what their ideal partner looks
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like right but i i'd also argue that that requires a level of self-insight that is underappreciated that is
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we can we can ask whether or not people really know the extent to which attractiveness appeals to them
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and is that captured by a rating on a rating scale it's one of the questions that we've tried to pursue in our
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research so in addition to what this idea of you know trait based attraction there's this idea of a
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sort of mating that comes up that you know attractive people end up with other attractive people
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stat high status people end up with other high status people so there's that aspect to this trait
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based theory as well yes that's right and it is certainly true that you see assortative mating on
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many qualities qualities like attractiveness you know traits that people generally say they really like
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in a partner both men and women you know rate attractiveness quite highly and indeed the
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attractive men and the attractive women tend to pair up now that that association is far from perfect
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right so there are plenty of matched couples and plenty of mismatched couples out there too
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and so it's you know we need our explanations to be able to account for the existence of both the
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matches and the mismatches if you will so there's been mountains of research for the past 20 30 years
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that reinforce this idea that you know you they've done this across cultures too it doesn't matter
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whether you're in japan or america or england men tend to rate physical attractive attractiveness
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more important on the on their like list of wanted traits and women than women do and women put an emphasis
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on resources and status right so despite this this mountains of research that have that have shown this over
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and over again what led you to think that there was you know something else going on and how people
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decide who they pair up with so the you know we noticed that much of this research had sort of used
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these questionnaire type approaches where you're asking people what they're looking for the better
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studies would do something a little bit more clever they would say introduce you usually in the form of an
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online dating profile or something like that to a series of people who vary in attractiveness
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and then you could ask the question well does the attractiveness of you know these various people
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that you're looking at predict who you like who you choose and there were a few studies that that
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had conceptualized the appeal of attractiveness that way not my theory about how much attractiveness
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appeals to me but sort of this enacted preference something we actually call a functional preference
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right if you present me with a series of mates that vary in attractiveness to what extent am i likely to
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take the attractive ones relative to the unattractive ones that's like a more like live in the moment way
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of capturing the extent to which attractiveness appeals to me so there'd been a few studies out there that
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had used that sort of approach but almost none that had used that kind of approach with people actually
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meeting face to face and we thought well gee ancestrally certainly and even in the modern day
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for the lord you know for the most part people meet face to face before they start seeing you know where
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this thing is going and so we wanted to see what did people's functional preferences look like
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once these face to face meetings had taken place so tell me about a study that you did to look into
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that idea a bit more so one of the first studies that we conducted along these lines was a study with
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speed daters so we brought a number of men and women together who were single and looking to potentially
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date new people but these folks hadn't met each other before and these were heterosexual speed dating
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events so all of the men have a chance to meet all of the women and so you're meeting this array of people
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who are varying in attractiveness and then we look to see how much does attractiveness appeal to me as I go
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about selecting these people saying oh I'd like to meet you again and not you you know when rating how much I
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like these various people and sure enough physical attractiveness was a very strong predictor of the
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extent to which people liked their speed dating partners but that association the power of
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attractiveness was identical for men and women physical attractiveness as instantiated in these
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real people was just as powerful a predictor of initial attraction for men as it was for women there was no
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sex difference there whatsoever interesting so what do you think that says about the the theory that's out
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there that women prefer you know status and resources more you know that they look rate that higher than
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men do right is that's what's going on there then so it's interesting I mean you know one thing we've
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been trying to figure out is that it looks like there is some sort of self-insight gap that is plaguing
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people right people aren't totally off when you ask them sort of the kinds of qualities and attributes
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they like in general there's there's often a little bit of an association there especially when people
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are in very simple environments right so if I ask you how much do you like sweetness when it comes to
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your breakfast cereals you will actually give me an answer that reflects pretty good self-insight
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but as the domain gets more and more complicated and we when we get into the really complicated domain
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of romantic attraction people's insight just seems to fade and the kinds of qualities they think are
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really appealing to them when you ask them in the abstract end up having very little relation to what
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actually appeals to them in the moment so we we do think there is this self-insight gap there that and
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what that means is that when you ask people about the kinds of qualities that they care about in a
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partner you're getting a lot of other stuff in those reports that don't necessarily reflect
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strong self-insight right people might be reporting their sense of what desirable members of the opposite
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sex generally are like right as opposed to you know what are the traits that are really going to appeal to
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me specifically well another interesting thing about speed dating is that it's very like it's all about
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initial attraction it's like the idea in evolutionary theory is that women put emphasis on
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resources more than men because they're looking for a long-term companion is like does the the short
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duration of speed dating does that change things like how women evaluate or do you think just like
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no women actually put an emphasis on attraction more than they think they do that's a great question i
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think that you know and when we ran those first studies that was sort of the next question for us was
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okay is this limited to initial attraction maybe some of these sex differences start to emerge later
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and we actually conducted a very large-scale study a few years later it's called a meta-analysis and
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then a meta-analysis you just bring many different data sets together that can all address a similar
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question and so we had data from tens of thousands of participants that look across the full span of
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people's relationships so not just initial attraction but also what happens in dating relationships what
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happens in you know in in married relationships do you see these sex differences playing out now we can
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look at these same kinds of associations in these data sets so generally when women are married to
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men who have more versus fewer resources do they tend to be happier in those relationships and importantly
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if we ask the same question of men are men happier when they're in relationships with women who have
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status and resources are they happier so when we look at all of those effects and all of those
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associations across all of these data sets we end up seeing again no evidence for these sex differences
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so to go back to the status and resources example there's a small effect that people tend to be happier in
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their relationships when their partner has you know more status and more more resources it's not nearly
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as large as physical attractiveness and initial attraction but that effect is just as strong for
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men as it is for women which frankly we found a little mind-blowing right the idea that that men are a
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little bit happier in their relationships when their women have status and resources that was not intuitive to
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us going into this study but this was a pretty large swath of evidence that seemed to suggest that
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you know what there you know the the status resources effect when you look at at across data sets in this
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aggregated way you don't see much of a sex difference there okay so meta-analysis shows that you know men
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and women are actually there's not that much of a difference when you look at things at a broad broad view
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you also done some interesting research too that show that whether we find someone attractive or not
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depends on a lot on how long we've known them can you talk about that walk us through that research
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yes definitely so this goes back to this sort of classic trait based approach right i mean the reason
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we're asking questions about why we think physical attractiveness is more appealing to men or women
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same thing with status and resources is because classically the field has treated mating and mate
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selection in this trait based way right there's a reality that you possess that's determined by your traits
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and again my job as a mate selector is to assess those traits and then make my selections accordingly
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i think what that perspective misses at least with respect to humans is that part of the mate selection
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process in humans ancestrally wouldn't have been about finding the objectively best mate or even the
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objectively best mate that you could get given your own mate value it would be about this ephemeral
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thing called compatibility and that's because a lot of what mate selection was about in our ancestral past was
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about coordination and interdependence right so in order to raise these very costly offspring i have to
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essentially set up an effective coordinated system with you and not just you but also your family members
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and my family members right but the the pair bonding process and then what it takes to raise these costly
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offspring is not something that's just about your traits and my traits it's all it's also about how
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well we fit together and how well we work together and so another of the main mate selection tasks that
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people have to solve is this assessment of compatibility and that's a lot trickier than assessing whether or not
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somebody has desirable traits gotcha so this is you'd call it i guess you'd call it relational attributes
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yes right it's it's a way of thinking about the concept of mate value but in a relational way
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right the idea is simply that you know somebody might not have the most desirable traits in the
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world but because of the way we fit together this person has tremendous mate value for me specifically
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and i think that's a useful way of thinking about the compatibility concept now what it suggests
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is that you know when we all get together and rate each other's traits sure there's bound to be some
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agreement we're going to agree on who is attractive and who isn't but what's going on with the
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disagreements that we have is it just random error are we guessing or is there something systematic and
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important about those disagreements that also tell us something about the way mate selection works
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we're going to take a quick break for your word from our sponsors and now back to the show well walk
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us through the study you did with uh college students where they had you know you had them
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rate each other's attractiveness when they the first day of class and then done the same thing three
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months later right so that's exactly what we did so we had these students in a class they had just met
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each other and all of the opposite sex pairs in the class are rating each other in terms of their
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attractiveness but other you know traits classically related to mate selection things like intelligence
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things like status and what you see at the beginning of the academic semester is that there's pretty
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strong agreement there about who is attractive and who isn't now there's also a lot of idiosyncratic
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variants as well and in fact you can compare these things to each other mathematically and you see about
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as much consensus as you do idiosyncratic variability so there's a healthy amount of agreement about who's
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attractive and who isn't but also important real disagreement right i think this person is more
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attractive than you do right that doesn't mean that i'm right and you're wrong or vice versa that's
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legitimate disagreement there on top of the existing consensus but then we followed them up at the end of
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the semester and what we found at that point was that things had started to shift but it shifted in
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a way that's a little bit counterintuitive people's consensus about who was attractive in the class
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actually went down relative to the beginning of the semester and that idiosyncratic variability the
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disagreements you know sort of in parallel increased so in other words as i get to know you better we start agreeing
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less about whether or not you're attractive right the people who you know especially well start to agree less
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and less about how desirable you are and we think this is reflective of this idiosyncratic nature of the way mate value
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works as i get to know you better and better you make a joke that i think is particularly unfunny but
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somebody else thinks is quite funny that feeds into your attractiveness judgments of the person you know
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you you know make other remarks in class i i witness you doing something really nice for somebody but
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somebody else doesn't witness that that feeds into your attractiveness judgment so because when we form
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impressions of each other over time the meaning of those different behavioral nuggets can be interpreted
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so differently by the people who are observing you and sort of judging you and considering you as a
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potential mate that's what causes that consensus to decline and what causes this increase in idiosyncratic
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judgments of who's desirable and who's not that's really interesting so let's let's uh unpack some things
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here so when you when you did the initial evaluation there was there was a consensus not only on physical
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attractiveness but also things like you know character you know humor there was a consensus there as well
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right so we also ask people questions like if you were in a relationship with this person how good would
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the relationship be right again these people have not met for all that long and yet they're still reaching
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some consensus about judgments like that too it's not nearly as high as the consensus they reach when
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it comes to judgments of physical attractiveness but you know they are sort of looking at these folks
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around them saying like oh maybe being in a relationship with this person would be good uh you know this
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person they seem to have good character but you know people at the beginning they're drawing from
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stereotypes they're drawing from snap judgments as they sort of make these determinations i imagine like the
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halo effect is also going on like you know typically attractive if people are seen as you know more
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honest trustworthy high status etc etc exactly exactly i mean it's just you know some people at the
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beginning of the semester they've got this glow about them and that's what's sort of yeah producing
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the consensus on all of these sorts of judgments certainly okay and then as you went on you get to know
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people more and more that's when things started the consensus just basically went away completely
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yeah i mean for judgments of things like this person is going to be a good relationship partner
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i'd like to be in a relationship with this person the consensus went down on those measures
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substantially there's still a little bit there but it it definitely goes down over time
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we also ran a similar study among people who had known each other for a few years on average right so
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this is as if we're tapping into your network right if you're a heterosexual man we're tapping into your
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network of female friends and acquaintances right so if you think about those women in your life
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that your friends your acquaintances you know maybe there's an x in there what do these women think of
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you did they agree about how desirable you are as a partner about how attractive you are
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and those folks exhibited the least consensus out of anybody so the people who know you the best
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are the people who agree the least on what you are like when it comes to these romantic sorts of
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judgments and and that's another important caveat too because usually we think like well the longer
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the more somebody gets to know me the right people should agree on what i am really like there's a
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reality to who i am as a person and you know that's true for things like you know what your
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personality is like but when it comes to these romantic judgments the fact that we see this
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increasing disagreement as people get to know each other suggests to us that you know whatever the mate
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value truth is about a person seems to be quite ephemeral it seems to disappear the better you get to know
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somebody and you're left with these very idiosyncratic impressions that some person is really great for me
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and this person is really not so great for me so this can go back to uh we were talking about a sort
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of mating right so there's this idea that attractive people end up with attractive people but what this
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research suggests that the longer someone knows you you know they might initially not have found you
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physically attractive or attractive but they got to know you and you end up in a relationship with them
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right and so like you know you're less attractive than she is right so i guess that can sort of put
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a i don't know uh a wrench in this idea that you know equally attractive people always end up with each
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other right exactly and so that was you know as we conducted this research the assortative mating
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question loomed large because it suggested well okay if we all disagree about who's attractive and who's
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not then why is it that you see assortative mating out there in the world and so the way we resolve
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this is by thinking well okay when some relationships form they form relatively quickly after two people
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initially meet each other but other relationships people know each other for months or even years before
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they ultimately get together and what if that distinction that dimension explains where some of the
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variability on assortative mating comes from that is what if the people who get together quickly
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that's where you see the matches right because these people are largely operating based on consensus
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but the mismatches come as people get to know each other better over time that opens up the opportunity
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for you know maybe he or she is not the most attractive person on the planet but as you get to know
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him or her you start to see this person as being quite attractive that can then start to create
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some of those mismatches so there's a stereotype of like the more attractive women you know end up
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with the less attractive guy like the guy you know dates up whatever they talk about does it also work
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the other way around too like sometimes really attractive guys end up with women who would be objectively
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rated not as attractive yes so the the the the flip side of that definitely does happen but the the caveat
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that would what my guess is that if most of your listeners try to call to mind one example or the other it is
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going to be easier for them to call to mind the schlubby guy with the attractive woman but part of that is
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caused by the fact that on average women are more attractive than men so that's that's and that's
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that's a little wrinkle in there that that produces this and usually when we talk about assortative mating
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what we miss is that well actually in all of these relationships on average the woman is more
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attractive than the guy by about uh you know as a half of a standard deviation that's a pretty
00:27:54.980
reasonably sized effect and so that's an important component of this as well that women generally
00:28:03.700
tend to be rated as more attractive than men on average when you look at you know reasonably sized
00:28:09.920
swaths of of real life men and women well how do you think your research complements or doesn't
00:28:17.080
complement you know this evolutionary approach of human may be because like i mean a lot of people
00:28:21.840
have there's you know whole industries you know the pickup artist stuff that are based around
00:28:26.240
this evolutionary approach to human mating where you have to like you know they tell guys how to
00:28:31.220
increase their mate value on these specific traits what do you think your research does to that idea
00:28:37.520
out that that's out there yeah i mean you know i only know a little bit about sort of the the pickup
00:28:44.660
artist techniques and the pickup artist scene and certainly a lot of those techniques and tactics are
00:28:51.180
designed to be effective in initial attraction settings right where you're meeting people for
00:28:56.660
the first time and those are certainly settings where you know you're going to cue into these traits
00:29:03.780
that are very easy to pick up very quickly it takes some time to really get a sense of whether or not
00:29:10.080
you know there's something about like unique fit between us and often that's sort of not exactly what
00:29:15.540
the pickup artists are going for necessarily so sort of looking for the idiosync what makes you
00:29:21.540
idiosyncratically desirable to somebody else is you know probably some a technique that's going to be
00:29:27.860
more useful to people who are you know cultivating the possibility of forming relationships over a longer
00:29:34.180
period of time that being said i think it would be really interesting to sort of clearly hone and define
00:29:42.940
what these effective pickup tactics are and then train both male and female confederates to use these
00:29:52.600
tactics in initial attraction settings and see how effective they are now maybe they'll only be
00:29:57.560
effective for the men using these tactics and women who you know sort of you know dress with the fancy
00:30:03.980
hats and sort of use these clever lines maybe they won't be appealing but i don't know i'd like to see
00:30:10.380
the data i wonder if those sorts of tactics if women use them would also be pretty appealing and how
00:30:16.700
do you think your research complements the you know the more classic evolutionary approach to human
00:30:21.600
mating um you know i think in some ways it's very complementary right we aren't saying that people
00:30:29.240
don't care about traits like physical attractiveness of course they do but we're saying that the relative
00:30:35.800
amount of sort of consensus going for the popular person that there's a truth to how desirable you
00:30:42.240
are that that's true in some settings but not all settings relative to mate selection right in settings
00:30:49.160
where people get to know each other better you know people start whether they know it or not
00:30:54.520
making judgments that have this more idiosyncratic compatibility element to it i think with respect to some of
00:31:02.140
the sex differences in the appeal of attractiveness or the appeal of status resources you know i do think
00:31:08.520
our perspective is harder to reconcile with the evolutionary perspective on that front in the sense
00:31:14.680
that you know i i think when we look at people's impressions of real people when we look at how people
00:31:20.520
are actually acting in their relationships i think those sorts of studies get closer to tapping
00:31:26.180
the kinds of judgments that really would have mattered in a functional way when people were evolving
00:31:31.560
as opposed to what people circle on rating scales so you know i think some elements are that we
00:31:37.420
that we present are very complementary some are are more challenging and what do you think are some
00:31:42.120
like practical takeaways from this research from people who are in the dating game that's a good
00:31:47.120
question so i do think that there is a tendency to think about the the mating and dating as being about a game of
00:32:01.780
first impressions a game of you know how does it go when you meet somebody else do you sufficiently
00:32:08.320
impress them that they want to hook up with you or they want to give you their number etc
00:32:13.700
and another really important thing that we find in some of our research is that the vast majority of
00:32:22.120
relationships whether short-term or long-term do not form this way people's hookups and long-term
00:32:31.340
relationships are usually come out of their networks of friends and acquaintances that these you know as i
00:32:41.120
talked about before right people have networks of their heterosexual opposite sex individuals that
00:32:47.440
sort of float in and out of their lives and that's where most of these romantic experiences come from
00:32:54.360
so i think you know what's often hard for people let's say they move to a new city and their social
00:33:00.240
network is pretty thin it can get very frustrating to be out there dating and trying to meet new people and
00:33:07.120
not having a lot of success but in some ways the problem is that getting out there and meeting people on you know
00:33:13.520
with initial impressions is always a very tough way to go regardless of what kind of relationship you're looking
00:33:19.120
for it's the thinness of your social network that is often the real problem so if i were to give anybody advice
00:33:25.840
who's struggling with dating it's the the more efforts you can put into just sort of building your network
00:33:33.120
gradually building the people that you know and spend time with getting to meet new people without
00:33:38.560
immediate expectations of something becoming romantic or sexual right away that's ultimately
00:33:44.240
going to be a more fulfilling process right it's like diversify your portfolio and give it time to grow
00:33:50.860
and expand rather than you know like keep hitting the same bars over and over again i think it's likely to be a much more
00:33:58.320
fulfilling experience to do the former rather than the latter and what do you think your research says
00:34:03.200
about dating apps because these things like tinder they're all based on initial physical attraction
00:34:09.520
right you swipe right because you just see a picture of someone who's attractive or not right exactly and
00:34:14.640
and it is interesting how online dating has in some ways upended this sort of traditional way of forming
00:34:23.200
relationships where relationships where relationships again sexual hookups or long-term grow out of the
00:34:30.080
networks that people have and with online dating sites and with apps give certainly the sense that
00:34:38.080
there are all these options out there right as you're sort of looking at all the various possibilities
00:34:42.960
in front of you and you're swiping right and swiping left you get the sense that there are many possibilities
00:34:48.720
out there and people are often effective at leveraging these sorts of encounters into immediate
00:34:55.680
sexual hookups and things like that so there's nothing wrong with that and that's often a very
00:35:00.000
good way to go for people i think for people who get who are starting to get a little burned out
00:35:06.320
on the apps or feeling like oh my god i'm spending a lot of time in these again thinking about these apps as
00:35:12.800
ways of expanding your social network not you know solely a means of immediate sexual gratification
00:35:21.120
could also be very very useful that you know that is you might go on a tinder date with somebody and
00:35:28.080
it might just be okay but you did have this one interest in common and you start spending time with
00:35:33.920
the person and get to know some of their friends and your friends meet their friends and that starts to
00:35:38.880
snowball and expand that way so i think if we if we don't you know dichotomize our relationship so
00:35:47.520
much into you know that these are these are the people i have sex with these are my friends but we
00:35:51.920
sort of again think about a network of people that we know and we allow that network to grow and change
00:35:57.840
over time i think that ends up sort of giving people the the best possible options so yeah you
00:36:03.600
use the apps as a tool to increase your network not necessarily to get a romantic relationship
00:36:09.840
right i mean you can use it for that too but but again my sense from people that use these apps and
00:36:14.640
and i confess i have not done online dating in a very long time to well before there were the apps
00:36:21.440
but you know my sense is that people start to burn out right because they go on a lot of coffee dates
00:36:28.320
before they find somebody that they even remotely like and sometimes it's useful to find ways of
00:36:34.720
even turning those meh coffee dates into a win and again if we don't think about tinder and other apps
00:36:42.160
as a an immediate road just to to to a hookup that it's really more about expanding your social network
00:36:50.160
that i think tends to go better for people yeah we had uh kate julian the atlantic writer she wrote
00:36:56.160
that article about the sex recession on the and she yeah she talked about yeah people getting burnt
00:36:59.680
out and then also people just um not having any luck with the apps so you say you're a guy you're
00:37:04.000
not you know you know super physically attractive so they never they never get a match because you know
00:37:09.680
women just like swipe left on them and they found that okay if i just start dating in person i actually
00:37:14.640
have better luck there because i can people get to know that i'm funny and i'm charming and i'm kind
00:37:19.840
etc etc right right exactly i mean the the the apps do put many people at us as
00:37:25.840
at a substantial disadvantage all right so i mean so it sounds like the big takeaway here is
00:37:30.720
you know physical attractiveness those those play a role but there's much more nuance to
00:37:35.680
human relationships than what we think there is yeah i think that's i think that's right and that
00:37:43.040
the you know humans evolved in relatively small groups where we got to know each other over long
00:37:50.800
stretches of time and the possible mates that you were going to have over the course of your life
00:37:56.240
as a pretty small group and it's probably a group of people that you tended to know pretty well
00:38:01.360
and that's that is an evolved reality that's tough to reconcile with you know the fact that many young
00:38:09.440
people today are very mobile they move from place to place and they also uh you know often live in large
00:38:16.480
cities where there's vast swaths of people out there so i think to to create a community of people
00:38:24.800
is often the thing that that helps people as they negotiate the romantic landscape well paul it's been
00:38:30.320
a great conversation where can people go to learn more about your work they can go to my my website
00:38:35.680
it's paul eastwick.com very straightforward and there we have uh you know our publications and and links to
00:38:41.920
videos and things that explain the kind of work that we do yeah i love it you have all your like
00:38:46.240
pdfs your research and pdfs there which i really appreciate yeah uh so so thanks for being available
00:38:51.200
paul eastwick thanks so much your time it's been a pleasure yes thank you i've really enjoyed this
00:38:54.800
my guest there was paul eastwick he's a professor of psychology at uc davis you can find out all the
00:38:59.440
research he's done he's got them all in pdfs for free at his website paul eastwick.com go check that
00:39:04.800
out and also check out our show notes at aom.is eastwick where you can find links to resources
00:39:09.360
where you can delve deeper into this topic well that wraps up another edition of the aom podcast
00:39:25.680
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00:39:29.600
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00:39:49.520
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