12 Key Factors That Determine Your Attractiveness - Macken Murphy

just be attractive bro is like the biggest meme in online dating at the moment what actually makes an attractive face well there's a couple things that come up again and again in the literature and then there's also a couple things that I think men think are very attractive and are surprised when they find out that women don't actually necessarily care about it now that that's not to say we we'll get into the weeds but that's that's not to say that men are necessarily wrong to want to look like that right it's just that it's not the attractiveness component so a couple things that come up a lot are averageness right and that's mathematical averageness so having a nose that is of average size shape and placement so some people think average and they're like oh normal and it's like a person with a very average looking face meaning a face that would be the result of a composite of many faces superimposed on each other a person with that sort of face would look like a model right if you superimpose a set of faces the face that results from it will be more attractive than any individual in that set right and we can talk if you want I know that you're interested in this sort of thing as to the possible evolutionary and also just social reasons why that might be the case a quick two theories would be maybe average faces are easier to process right and the processing speed is Pleasant it's like oh there's nothing glaring here and it's like oh I quite like looking at this from an evolutionary perspective it could be that the average for traits are the end result of sexual selection right so we're putting the cart before the horse in the sense that the reason that the average knows is the average a nose is because there's been so much historical selection on that shape non aage noses against non against non- aage noses so the reason that it's the average is because noses that are too big get cut out so it's really that there's some other reason why that size shape and placement is attractive and it's become the average over because we are the end result of previous selection so averageness comes up a lot another thing that comes up a lot of symmetry right uh symmetry is definitely attractive right and and it's attractive on its own it also seems to correlate with other matrices of attractiveness but symmetry comes out again and again again if the left side of your face looks a lot like the right side of your face then you're likely more attractive than you would be if you didn't have that and with both of these things with averageness with symmetry there there are plenty of individual cases where people have very non- aage traits and are still stunning right uh plenty of people are highly asymmetrical I mean some of our our considered most most gorgeous celebrities have you know very asymmetrical faces but these traits do matter symmetry the standard Evo explanation is that this is a signal of let's say robust underlying developmental qualities right that they were able to withstand the insults of their environment right at the very least you know that they don't have some horrible injury to one side of their face or something like that they didn't have some horrible illness and they don't have uh certain heritable genetic disorders right and this is something that we'll likely talk about more why why do we care about beauty at all and it's partially because Beauty seems to be a signal of underlying qualities that matter more such as health right so I'll note that the Symmetry Studies have mixed results in Western populations right so it's like we know that symmetry is attractive but there's a question of like does it actually correlate with healthiness and and that's not always the case but it it is the case at the very least that look if you've had a like I've got a broken nose from boxing right that that certainly made me less attractive than I would be if I had a straight one what does that tell potential mates it tells them that something you know for some reason I couldn't handle it right some something went wrong for me at some point right uh and you know certain heritable genetic disorders that presumably you wouldn't be excited to pass on to your Offspring if you l l being equal those also coary with high asymmetry and so symmetry like when you see a symmetrical face it's like hey you know hey ladies I don't have those disorders and um I don't have horrific facial trauma right have you ever seen soft white underbelly that YouTube channel I hardly watch anything okay well it's a very big Channel and he has a 50 million play Interview with an inbred family highly recommend that you go and watch it and one of the first things you'll notice when you see those people is that they have well I don't know about this family specifically cuz I haven't seen it but they'll they'll look like something has gone arai highly asymmetric highly non-typical yeah like I mean one of the guys's eyes are very very wide apart uh like which there may be the same distance apart from the center of his nose who knows that might be symmetrical but it breaks the rule of very non- aage and I've also heard you know I've heard doctors privately you know use the phrase funnyl looking kid right meaning like not to make fun of them at all but like okay we don't see anything wrong but like for some reason this kid look strange maybe there's something deeper here that should be looked at but that's that's obviously anecdotal I'm more of a data guy it's it's interesting when the when the anecdotes align um but Symmetry and averageness come up with the caveat that you know some people hear that you know this is a sign of health and think that I think that Health should be attractive let's say I'm I'm not in the should business at all it's just cold what is what is not now I want to talk you you asked about men and so one thing that's interesting is that facial femininity in women very attractive very consistently what's femininity in your world well there's a few ways to measure it uh but basically one way of thinking about it is you take the average head of faces of women and the average set of faces of men or the average set of let's say males and females right in this specific case because there there are some differences between gender and sex you take the average sets you know average faces of males and females and there's different traits in those groups that are typical and if someone is has more of those typical traits for one group they'd be more masculine looking right and sometimes you know there there are other ways of looking at it that that's just one right and and there are different researchers who have very strong opinions as to like what facial masculinity actually should be right because some people say well you know that's that's a that's that isn't you know a typical male face but if you ask respondents they all say it's masculine right so it's like that is a masculine face cuz who decides what's masculine and feminine we do right so fa masculinity though is interesting so facial femininity is very attractive to men men love stereotypically girly womenly faces right they respond very heterosexual men responds to that quite strongly typically facial masculinity despite all the gigachad memes and things like that and and what we think might be attractive you know some studies find that women prefer facial masculinity a little bit some find that they prefer facial femininity some find no effect right the L Oxford Handbook of evolutionary psychology and romantic relationships that's that's the latest review that I'm aware of and they said look if anything there's a slight preference for facial femininity in men as well right and that's a bit of a confusing result at first because it's like well facial masculinity it's like that there's so many things that are attractive about masculinity you know like facial masculinity predict predicts fighting ability for instance right um it's it's probably predicted by you know testosterone levels and things that are impressive signals in other contexts so it's like surely women love you know a gigachad type face women love a super masculine uh face and some super masculine faces like Henry caval for example are very attractive to women I'm not saying that it that it's a huge disadvantage or something it's just not all else being equal preferred and one common idea that you'll see in the literature is the masculinity trade-off hypothesis right so if you're maing as a woman right think about this strategically it's like yes there's all these perks that come with masculinity but this is is you're picking a mate that you're probably going to have to co-parent with right you're going to have to raise children with them and so maxing out on like the super Alpha dude right maybe for a one night stand right there's some indication for that but if you're you know looking for hot guys for a long-term relationship uh a prettier boy is more appealing because that might uh that might co-vary with traits that are you know less less dastardly let's say heavy brow Ridge also means risky Behavior also means he's probably going to sleep with my sister yeah also means that he might lose his temper at you or your Offspring and cause horrible damage also means that he might get murdered because he can't stop mouthing off that's interesting that um it's skews toward femininity not just averageness in men whatever the the midpoint between femininity and masculinity is has that been tested for short-term versus long-term uh casual versus the masculinity thing yeah so there's mixed results on that and I'll also note that the masculinity trade-off hypothesis is very much a hypothesis right so you know it's tempting to it's such a good story right it sounds so good that in every paper on this sort of subject someone's going to talk about the masculinity because it's a fun story to tell I got to I got to bring this up like I didn't realize how fallible scientists were especially those even in evolutionary psychology which is very rigorous it hasn't been replic scien it hasn't been the replication crisis or anything like that except with the ovulation studies don't forget which we're going to get on but if you come up with a sufficiently compelling name God like the meme just runs away with it so yeah and it's hard to get it's hard to let go of the memes but the masculinity trade-off I mean you would predict right the kind of obvious thing would be okay they should prefer them for short-term mating and prefer you know less masculine guys for long-term mating and there's some mixed results on that I'm quite skeptical of that whole I think that there needs to be kind of a second round um looking into that it's not a particular area of interest for me right I know that there's some expert on facial masculinity who's like no it is true but um yeah exactly but it it's certainly interesting I I'll just note though that there are some strange things that make the masculinity trade-off hypothesis seem like it doesn't work like for example so what's the most the most facially masculine ornament is the male beard right women generally don't grow beards some do obviously but for the most part that's facial masculinity 101 is Big bushy hair on the jaw right and kind of the worst possible result for the masculinity trade-off hypothesis is that you know we don't see this you know short-term mating when they're when when I'm ovulating I like the big bushy beard that doesn't come up in fact what you see is um big bushy beard is preferred as like a potential co-parent a potential dad right which is the exact opposite of what you'd based on the masculinity tradeoff hypothesis is like he's got a big bushy beard surely that's Mr short-term mating but instead it's like um you know not really too fussed about that but he looks like he'd make a great dad yeah how interesting well on average do women prefer beards or not well I spoke to the world's lead well I I won't go as far as the world's leading expert but I would say the guy to talk to about beards is barnabie Dixon out in Australia right he's got relationships with um with our lab out there and I spoke to him for a couple hours about this and it's it's it's such a deep literature to get into it's just deceptively there's so much research on it and it's just it's you think it's simple then you get into it and you're like this is one of the most complicated areas of psychological science is the hair on our faces right so I I did a podcast with him on on on species and it was very interesting he said that you could probably he's read every study on the subject and I'm not aware of any meta analysis but he said that you could probably draw a line right down the middle and have just as many studies finding that women prefer clean shaven to Bushy beards as you would find bushy beards Over clean shaven right so and this is one of the annoying things about like being on Tik Tok is that I'll see like a it recommends me you know people who aren't necessarily in the field but love the research and they'll cite an individual study I saw someone recently I won't name them but they have a huge following and they were one of Barnaby Dixon's studies finding that clean shaven faces were not preferred to Big bushy beards and I was like yeah but if you knew about the context it's like he's done several of these studies and it's gone both ways what women do prefer is heavy stubble that seems to be pretty consistent if you show yes you're dial your looks maxing to a te this is hair maxing technically yeah yeah yeah yeah Sox yeah so I would say that I would say that if you think about it right and this is partially insights from Barnaby Dixon and partially kind of the theoretical musings of Jeffrey Miller right in in this area but if you think about it like from a signaling perspective maybe it does maybe it makes sense in a modern context that heavy stubble is the best signal because on the one hand it's like I'm signaling these masculine traits like I can grow a big bushy beard right uh and and you know the beard does seem to you know add some facial Contour right it's kind of a coincidence but it's but it is interesting just anecdotally that it follows the same contour line that makeup does on women right uh the hair grows thickest you know around the jaw and Chin which you know obviously having a nice jawline is is better than not so you get some of that boost from the facial hair right but then you also show like hey I'm actually you know what is a what is heavy stubble show it's like I'm regularly maintaining this sufficiently refined yeah so I have excess time excess control excess attentiveness I I was thinking I was thinking about the my trip to Thailand which I did a couple of years ago and uh get that in go on um and I was I was thinking about when I saw the girls behind the counter who make their faces lighter so whereas I'm from Newcastle in the northeast of the UK girls make themselves orange yeah what does that signal it signals look at all of the spare time I have I can afford to go away on a holiday I can go to Malia or magalu or Marb or wherever and I can catch a tan and Lie by the pool because I have lots of spare time I'm the sort of person that spends their time outside to fitness and health and all the rest of it no one knows that it's come from a bottle and and a makeup bro the converse is true in Thailand because the Indigent laborers that work in the fields get the tan the most so they counter signal by saying I don't ever go outside yeah I have a white collar job I'm inside so I think that with the stubble total Bro Science hat on here but yes it signals could grow a beard chooses not to why well most people that lead especially now and we'll get onto this like cultural mediation I suppose which is interesting but especially right now many jobs many jobs where you have an overbearing boss may have an issue and there is this sort of vestage of you should be clean shaven when you go to work my dad still has that my dad gets clean shaven before he goes to work that's just being ingrained in him as one of the things that you do so it's kind of a bit of a counter signal it's like the red sneak it's referred to as the red sneaker effect as well that um the more money that you earn the more casually that you dress you know like the guy with 17 letters after his name just says just call me Jim whereas the dude that just PhD precisely yeah that's do Mack and Murphy I better be Mack and Murphy MSC and then the parenthesis Oxon that that oh so so if you're you know a real snob then you delineate the fact that your degree is from Oxford as opposed to other places yeah I I don't I don't have any letters have so you're telling me that my International marketing Masters and your Oxford whatever it is evolutionary psychology degree yeah are of equal footing is that what we're saying it's the um so I actually let's take that as a yes that'll do that'll do yeah and and my it's it's it's actually worth noting because because I'm often called you know an evolutionary psychologist and I you know it's true that I'm in I'm a PhD student at the psychology department at the University of Melbourne but at Boston University I did biological anthropology at Oxford I did cognitive and evolutionary anthropology and so I had to take a lot of Evite courses I understand the field very well but I also have some kind of just basic just some basic theoretical qualms with some of the not to get myself in trouble but not even not even qualms let's just say that I think that there there there are more flexible approaches such as behavioral ecology that can yield more insights and what you're talking about right now with the I I I mean very good hypotheses right it's not it's not my area but those are those are very good and would really fit in to the behavioral ecology literature of okay in a cultural socioecological context where being tan signals that I'm you know that I'm working in the fields and I don't really want to signal that then maybe lightning does make sense right that everything's culturally mediated here because we have the exact oppos and ecologically mediated because presumably if you were up north we working in the fields doesn't make you tan then matter it wouldn't matter as much right and a whole lot of women's Beauty signaling it's very interesting to me that so much of women's Beauty signaling seems to be signaling that they don't work right carrying a handbag that is like it's just it's to have your like a clutch right just constantly holding something is is very inconvenient long nails right it makes it even using a keyboard is tough with those you know it's difficult um having you know long kind of hair that gets in the way and dresses that you couldn't Sprint in uh it's interesting and then men's clothing I I think this is maybe changing a little bit and there's definitely some cultural contexts where this isn't true but a lot of a lot of male fashion like good male fashion is incredibly practical typically uh if a if a man starts you know having too many pockets even he starts to look a little ridiculous candle tilt the internet is obsessed with it yeah what does the literature say do I need to have Hunter eyes up pray well I mean it's it's I'm I'm not aware of any specific literature on candle tilt I'm sure there's someone who's who's really dug into what makes an attractive eye there there are some things that clearly make an attractive eye such as um having you know very a what they call I believe it's a limbo ring I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly the the dark ring around the color people respond to that the light white right having that really clear Scara uh people seem to really respond to that both of those are probably cues to health although that's that's still you know it's a putative indicator it's it's still being looked at eye color very interesting basically if you run a survey in the west and you're like what what what eye color is sexiest a lot of people will like and generally you'll find that people say oh I love blue eyes right it doesn't really come out in studies that there are strong eye color preferences uh there there seems to be a frequency dependent selection Effect one of my old mentors uh Alexandra o she looked into this and and it does seem that you know if you're the only blue-eyed guy in the room then you look better than if everyone has blue eyes right and if you're the only brown-eyed guy in the room you look better than if everyone has brown eyes and so on but which might maintain ey color diversity canl tilt is interesting I am so there there there's definitely a lot of literature that I'm aware of on eyes but canl tilt seems to be a bit of a meme I'm sure that there's some I'm sure that there's some research on this uh that I'm just not aware of but anecdotally people seem to respond to it and that said though I I've become kind of acutely aware of it and there are plenty of again it's kind of like the averag and symmetry thing there are plenty of famous actors who are you know considered gorgeous by women who have a negative canle who have a positive canle tilt so or um the reverse whichever one's the bad one they got they've got the the kind of um sloping eyes yeah why are faces so important so there are many ways to display your lack of genetic mutation or your Fitness or your robustness from the environment thus far in your life it seems like an awful lot of what we do is centered around the face why do we have a particular High degree of sensitivity and finesse uh and ability to discern when it comes to the face why is so much of what we do why is it not the hands why is it not the arms body shape we'll get on to waste of hip ratio all that stuff like those things are important but everybody knows that there's been a person who's maybe not been in the best shape ever but just has a gorgeous face guy or girl and you're like like they're hot yeah I mean you know they could do with hitting the gym but they're hot yeah yeah yeah that's that's interesting I mean I'm I'm not sure that there's that there's anything I mean we see that bodies become more important than faces for short-term mating and faces become more important than bodies for long-term mating and there's a huge you know I had a conversation with tany Reynolds about this and it it was like why like why would that be the case because as you say both should be indicators of the same putative um you know underlying Fitness indicators I think that one thing that I would like to bring to this episode and kind of leave people with in this context and in others is it's typically thought and I think that this is in some contexts the right way to think about it but it's typically thought that beauty is a component of your main value right so it's like you've got your personality you've got the the things you do you've got the resources you've got your willingness to invest da d d da and then beauty is one of the list of things that you bring to the table but really I think a better way to think of it is that beauty is and this I'm certainly not unique in thinking this way beauty is a shortcut signal of your M value right and so with facial attractiveness right one of the themes that's been coming up in every conversation we've had about this today is that it's signaling underlying qualities that are maybe more important and the same thing with bodily attractiveness as well and if you think about it it's like some of the things that some of the things that we do it's like you can say you can feel hard done by and I totally understand it that it's like why do people with you know why why are more facially attractive people why why are we thinking that we have better personalities da d d d that sort of thing but to an extent it's like well if two people walk into a room and one of them you know their hair is well styled well groomed right they've got the perfectly manicured stubble or they've got makeup that's been styled perfectly and their their outfit's on point and everything's just working it's like and then the other person comes in and they've literally put in no effort they've got bad heads they're they're or their makeup's a mess or they're they're they're not you know doing the natural their nails are aren't trimmed their clothing right it's like if you're looking at those two people all else being equal if you to make a guess like who's going to be a better husband and father who's going to be a better wife and mother right the person who is willing to do these extra things in order to socially signal the person who has the excess time and resources to devote to those things I don't think it's that I don't think it's they're probably quite conscientious right that they're that they're going to this effort reliable odly yeah so I would say to the basic question of why why do faces matter it's the same reason bodies matter it's the same reason that style matters it's a signal of qualities that matter more to us I mean we think of beauty as this extremely shallow thing to care about and to an extent it is fair enough but to another extent the reason that we care about beauty in the first place is because it often signals deeper reliable signal so it got me thinking there where you were talking about how uh specifically facial attractiveness and beauty is kind of an aggregate of a bunch of other things that contribute to that yeah and there's still a lot of mystery there in the same way as a bank account for especially for a man m is an aggregate of a number of other things that he does and so is having a good body for men and women perhaps for slightly different reasons for a man it might be something like uh dominance uh aggression but it's also other things like reliability orderliness ability to overcome pain that's kind of sexy agency uh uh reliability consistency smarts to be able to actually understand what they're doing and as with everything and I I love the I love the fact that we started with the averageness because fisherian runaway is basically what gigachad is right it's just this insan like the most muscular guy had the most muscular Sun had the most muscular Sun had the most muscular son and then you end up with gigachad but what you actually look at is for most people there are traits that are good in moderate Doses and if you overshoot them the same thing goes for the woman who's doed up it's nice that someone puts effort in that the outfit works with the hair with the makeup with the nails with everything else but if you come in you're completely caked well it looks like you're trying too hard looks like you might be compensating for something the same thing goes the same thing goes for the man well we want a little bit of muscularity but the absolutely jacked out of his mind bodybuilder well what does that signal maybe it signals some sort of inner insecurity maybe this guy's trying to compensate for something maybe he's only going to live for another 10 years a whole host I'm very concerned about his state of his mental health all of these different things so the averageness that we're talking about with regards to the face composition and I do love that idea of like just processing speed it's like yep eyes nose mouth yeah that looks all of the things are there that took me3 seconds I didn't have to hesitate away you go beautiful uh and we can fall in love with people's imperfections in a way but their imperfections I'm going to guess are almost always within a particular bound of this is average but yeah um I like the fact that there's a goldilock zone for most of these things some people love real muscular guys and some people real love more sort of skinny guys yeah but this is a so this is a very complicated conversation and I think I want to be careful about again conflating mathematical averageness with trait averageness right so with muscularity it's a little we don't see this preference for average muscularity right so we see a preference for average facial size shaped placement of traits right but with muscularity it's more complicated I mean do women like muscular men yes yeah yeah I mean there there some some don't right but but there there's a variety of convergent and so I'm not speaking I'm not saying that like all women prefer muscles and I'm also not saying as you noted that as muscular as possible is optimal right in this and it's also possible that you know a certain degree of muscularity is sexy in some context but not in all right like the bodies that are popular in pornography might not actually look that great in real life right there's something about like the kind of super stimulus of like a super muscular lean dude um or someone who's you know had their body done to to an extreme degree that might work on camera but not you know uh in the real world but in any case muscularity there was a recent meta analysis that just got published on this or I believe it just got published it might be you know still in the kind of public uh awaiting review sphere but certainly certainly the results are out uh and they looked at kind of all the studies on predictors of mating success in all these different ways and it just sort of is the case right in the sense that regardless of what people say is attractive and what isn't men who are muscular have higher mating success than men who aren't right and men who are more bodily masculine in general seem to have higher mating success and so there's a couple different reasons why that might be I mean the first thought is pretty obvious it's like maybe guys with muscles are just sexier right and there are individual studies where it's like you show women a bunch of bodies and you're like who's hottest in this crew and it's like a guy who's more muscular than average and leaner than average right not stage ready bodybuilder but certainly like pretty high standard right there's other studies that don't show that but there are other ways in which there are other ways in which muscularity can help you to compete for mates without making you more attractive so one route by which this could be the case there was a really interesting study which you might have already read I'm sure one of your guesses might have been him it was the frat boy study so they studied a bunch of frap boys I'll I'll email this to you afterwards cuz you're going to like reading it they studied a bunch of frap boys and they had them rate each other on like who would roll who basically like who who would be the best fighter who's the most intimidating that sort of question I can't remember the scale items they used and then they had women rate the frap boys as to like yeah yeah how hot are these guys Y and really weird result how hot the women said the guys were didn't have it wasn't a strong predictor of male mating success now mating success is very hard to measure they may they measured it by number of mates so we'll we'll talk about this more in a second but at least in that study with those measurements the intimidation Factor was better right it was better than being hot it was better to be scary than hot and so one potential idea is that if you're a super jacked scary dude and you're talking to a girl at the bar everyone else is like all right that's that may as well be his wife like I'm like I'm not going anywhere near this situation she's off limits uh whereas if you're a super scrawny guy who is you know frail maybe maybe maybe not that's one idea but another idea and this is I think another likely hypothesis frankly is that and this goes back to the masculinity trade-off thing that we were talking about earlier is that maybe the traits associated with AC crewing muscles are also the same traits associated with aggressive pursuit of short-term mating right and so measuring mating success with number of mates in that case right they didn't look at at how good-looking were these girls how intelligent were these women how high mate value in general were these women right they they didn't look at that it was literally just how many people have you slept with which say what you will I mean that's an indicator of something it's but it might not be that much more of an indicator then you're not an incel right because after that it's like if you're if you're at least at the bare minimum level of attractiveness to engage in short-term mating and that's not a particularly low level right that is at least medium surely but once you're at that level if you want to in a modern mating Market you can have you could have a one night stand every week so it's like it might not be that great of an indicator but it is interesting what about weight BMI body shape for women well I'll note briefly on BMI for men it is interesting there there was a there was a dating app data set where it indicated that the best BMI to be as man was about 27 right um and it's it's just hard to know how to inter interpret that because 27 could mean like oh that dude is jacked there's many ways to reach 27 BMI but that's a that's a flaw in BMI as a a rule yeah and that's kind of why I wanted to introduce that is that BMI is a great measurement of weight per height because that's the only thing it is right it's not a it's not a great measurement of Health it certainly tells you something it's not a great measure of muscularity it certainly tells you something but it is interesting so I mean we're speaking in a western context next and this is um I just know that this is what's going to happen I'm going to tell I'm going to talk about the actual findings from the anthropological literature on attractive body shapes and BMI and women and a bunch of people in the comments are going to talk about how I'm pandering to women and I'm a s and I'm just trying to make people feel better about you're you're among great company yeah no I know I'm just I'm just saying that up front to take some steam out of that you know Silly response I I don't know whether you saw I got to interject I don't know whether you saw the me you William Costello and Alexander dat site got lumped into a new term did you see this we were given a name I don't even want to hear it tell me so here's the problem and if you want to create a name to like bring people in and kind of mock them as as someone yeah you can't make the name sound cool what did they tell us the intellectual manosphere oh no oh no we're part of the intellectual manosphere academic manosphere was also stup about that is that most of my I can't really fit into that CU most of my following is women so that's so I'm just you have to take me out unfortunately you're a part of it you don't get to choose NE intellectual manosphere is uh yeah what a what a huge error to coin what to think that I'm intellectual and you're a part of the manere yeah it's um yeah well I I think that you're not giving yourself enough credit um I think that you're you're clearly a very sharp guy who knows literature better than many um better than many Master students frankly but body shape BMI body shape BMI yeah so the this this is in a western context quite low bmis are attractive to men right I'm not denying that at all right for the most part in in and in an industrialized context generally right among wealthy groups of people right or historically wealthy where where starvation isn't a problem yeah there there's there's a lot of evidence that men prefer lighter body weights right but if you take a more broad view it doesn't this is not and this is this is going to get into some of the reservations I have about just jumping to Evy as the tool to use because people have come up with these Evy theories for like why women why why thinner women are you know a better choice and then it's like okay well we didn't evolve in like a modern Western media uh hyper wealthy at least historically unlimited food at the grocery store down the street situation right we evolved in a pretty you know probably unstable probably relatively scarce environment or can we at least say that and so if you look at you know more traditional societies often times often times plumper is better right where it's literally women with more body fat are considered sexier right and presumably up to a limit yeah but you'd be shocked I mean if you look at for example uh and this isn't this isn't necessarily a more traditional Society it's just a society that historically has dealt with more resource scarcity than Urban Japan but if you look at say the South African Zulu you'll consistently find bmis of up to 38 being considered very attractive and and in the west we'd be like that is a that's a very heavy person right just frankly right so what what's going on there well one thing to notice first is that tons of women's tons of women's evolved sexual signaling is conspicuous fat deposits right so we're the only primate that has year round fat deposits on the breasts right for example we have conspic conspicuous fat deposits on the buttocks as well especially in women right and on the hips right so fat to an extent in women is clearly works as a sexual signal right there's something desirable there and it seems that right in a in a within in a within cultures context there's some evidence that within cultures at least people who are enduring more stress and scarcity tend to opt for heavier mates right men tend to opt for heavier women and those who are in a period of abundance right they they they've got lots of resource resources tend to opt for relatively lighter mates another piece of evidence for this right can be found so that's within cultures cross-sectionally we can also see this evidence across time right for example American Playboy colds right they become heavier when the economy goes down and they become lighter when the economy goes up kidding yeah yeah yeah that that that that's a real result and I'll send you the PDF another what's the before you get into that what's the proposed mechanism what do you think's going on to to make oh excuse me I should have I should have set up front imagine you're in an environment where calories are either absent or unstable right so you're in a situation where it's like I don't know either I don't have food right now or I don't know if I'm going to have food next month your brain is trying to determine who you should M with it's doing it's doing calculations behind the scenes saying who's Mate value in this socio eological context is desirable and so the theory right and this this certainly isn't my theory I'm I'm not presenting it as such but the theory from this tradition of research the the environmental security hypothesis proposes that and there's convergent forms of evidence which we'll discuss and already have discussed St any sent proposes that if you're in that situation it's like okay well who's going to be fertile if there's a famine or who's going to be fertile during a famine right who's going who is able to obtain calories right so women engage in tons of caloric acquisition in traditional environments often times more than the men in fact despite you know Western conceptions of this and so because they're doing you know they're they're Gathering tubers and to an extent engaged in hunting as well but mostly Gathering right Gathering fruits nuts berries all the stereotypical things and so you're looking around you're in the situation where you're literally hungry and it's like who who's who's sexy right now and then a woman who is clearly advertising that she can obtain calories survive a famine and stay fertile right during periods of scarcity right because low body fat is associated with infertility after a point right it's it's an incredible suppressant well that that woman is going to be more attractive than the woman who looks like if anything goes wrong she's going to die right now in a western context where you're not necessarily thinking that right where that that's not an issue well then you might be concerned with things like status right signaling that like you can afford to go to the gym that sort of thing then you're going to be concerned with things like youth right having you know Youth and let's say null apparity right the state of not having had kids yet right which is signaled by an incredibly spelt body right and so maybe it makes sense in a resource abundant context to prefer that but in a resource scarce context which is where most of our evolved psychology occurred we see we see the we see that heavier mates seem to be preferred now the evidence for this and I'll just recap very very quickly within cultures it seems that those who are you know on the on the lower end of things resources wise tend to prefer heavier mates across time right it seems that the media that men consume of you know pornographic media the women get heavier when things are going poorly economically and they get lighter when things are going well so that's across time within cultures now let's talk about within individuals there's a very funny study where they literally they showed up at the University dining hall and it's genius study to be honest and they're like okay you guys are about to have dinner which of these you know what what do you what what weight do you think is sexiest what body type do you think is sexiest and they found that before dinner the men preferred heavier mates than after dinner right so now we've got within person's evidence within cultures evidence and across time evidence and then we've got this very you know we talked about flashy theories that that do well we've got a great story as well uh so you were asking about BMI and its attractiveness in women yes it's true that in you know a a western context and maybe broadly in an industrialized context this this is more attractive but that doesn't mean that that's the default state of our species and you know plenty of men prefer women with uh with more curvaceous figures I mean I I honestly I remember um I think did you recently have Jordan Peterson on right I'm remembering correctly y I remember when he you know had the gal to tweet not attractive with the picture of the plus-size model who has a hip to waste r a waste a hip ratio of like 7 an incredibly feminine symmetrical average face and it's like maybe not to you but to most men throughout history that would be one of the highest mate value women that they'd ever encountered if we entered a recession next week then it might get a little bit more she might be a little bit more attractive to everybody and I think that she she all I mean not speaking about any specific spefic women you know that that's certainly not it's not certainly not my style to talk to comment on like specific women's bodies but like it was one of those glaring examples where it's like okay well you know Dr Peterson you're clearly not aware of this literature yeah so couple of interesting first off is there a name that this is it like the economic mediation of female BMI hypothesis so I've heard it called the environmental security hypothesis uh but you know the last it started getting research on it about 20 years ago then you know it just they just hit a few home runs and then it was like okay this seems to be true all right um but again it's this is the difference between behavioral ecology and evolutionary psychology is that evolutionary psychology if you read one of their literature reviews on thinness you'll just read about how you know not you know I'm not trying to character anybody but you'll often read stuff about just why thinness is our psychology evolved prefer thinness and then if you read someone from a more behavioral ecology standpoint it's like well in as much as we have a default state it seems to be towards you know slightly heavier right than is current um but we don't really have a default State it's flexible based on the environment and uh and that's yeah I'd say that's that's pretty tied up with a bow so male preference for female body size over time as uh gauged by BMI has tends to it's malleable it it varies based on your social e ecology and it varies on the individual level as well like if you're if you grew up in a stressed resource deprived environment then yeah you're probably going to prefer uh bigger women as you grow up yeah probably I wonder there's enough evidence so that would be fascinating to see how long it imprints just how malleable are you is there a period during your formative years if you were in poverty during your teenagers uh does that lock in particular type that would be fascinating to study so this is why I love behavioral ecology because they they actually they do something called the phenotypic Gambit where they say you know everyone else can handle the mechanisms will we'll just figure out what's going on what the relationships between variables are so they you know they they come in like kind of cowboys and just get the relationships done and then leave the mechanisms but it is interesting it's like you could have a cultural adaptation where it's like cultures over time figure out oh you know preferring lighter or heavier women makes a lot of sense right or you could have individual level developmental mechanisms right where it's like during development your brain builds itself differently and then you can also have these immediate cues I mean the hunger study where it's literally before versus after dinner come on that's your brain IM within an hour changing your mate preferences based on how hungry you are at the moment I me you know two uh areas that I got fascinated by last year Candice Blake sexy selfies study right which is women responding to the local socioeconomic environment by beautification and and sort of posting uh photos with I think she used like Instagram or something to kind of reverse engine Twitter and Instagram yeah um that was one and then just all of the sex ratio stuff like we like plants respond to our local ecology uh so you are this is the first time I've even heard the word about behavioral ecology behavioral ecology ecology studies the first time I've ever done it but it seems to be blending two worlds that I'm pretty fascinated by one being the more uh behavioral economics side the Rory Sutherlands of the world uh and the other being The evolutionary psychology the David bus of the world yeah so it's actually it's it's about as old as evolutionary psychology in terms of its application to humans and what okay so so Candace Blake is my supervisor right that's that's my mentor that's and and she is good chick great hair great studies an incredibly smart woman who is one of the only people in the human evolutionary Sciences who I agree with about everything right like I like it's it's one of the reasons that I chose her as my supervisor when I was you know figuring out after Oxford like who am I going to do a PhD with is that we got on phone calls and it was like oh my God finally someone who did we just become best friend yeah yeah yeah so it was like just agreement agreement agreement and you've also spoken to Rob Brooks who's my co-supervisor so you're slowly making your way through my entire lab where we have that we have probably the highest percentage of Chris Williamson appearances that's not why I mean David bus isn't far off William's been on bus has been on but our lab smaller so that's why I said percent High yeah highest saturation there's only a few more that you who was the guy who was the guy that did the body dysmorphia stuff Aussie dude Candice sent me him he was on the show not long ago not Scott Scott Griffith yes it was Scott Griffith oh you had him on as well oh yeah that's I'm not even joking that's so I attends their weekly lab meetings uh literally every week who was the dude was Rob was Rob the guy that did video games uh yeah so he's he's into some of the techy stuff but he's a he's a he's a hardcore biolog but he's the dude that did uh when no when a woman outperforms guys in Halo 3 was that Rob I think it was maybe I'm not sure that's anyway we're getting we get we're getting in the weeds but um so this is what I want you to get to who knows who um BMI interesting for women fluctuat over time we respond to the local ecology we respond across life within situations as well yes yeah what about waste to hip ratio waste to hip ratio well this is another one that's interesting right so I just spoke to barnby Dixon about it and I I feel like I'm getting myself in trouble I will make a note just about behavioral this is an audience that has had every evolutionary psychologist on that I have been able to find their educated that no no but that's but that's that's that's worse because I'm about to say another thing where you know maybe I'm pushing back against EV and maybe and a lot of and I will note that a lot of evolutionary psychologists do actually think about things more in a behavioral ecology way almost despite themselves maybe don't attribute it so what behavioral ecology is so evolutionary psychology just historically it is the intellectual child of cognitive psychology and evolutionary biology at that time in history right and there's and I would say that most evolutionary psychologists have been psychologists who learned biological stuff later right behavioral ecology is we call it human behavioral ecology but it's really just like behavioral ecology is a standard powerful tool for studying animals and it's just reapplying the same tool the same set of principles to humans right so it's not really it's it's in some ways it's simpler in some ways it's more complicated uh and the they're they're the fields can complement each other in a lot of ways they certainly inform each other in a lot of ways and there are some individual evolutionary psychologists who have done incredible work that is very consistent with behavioral ecology like Di and Wilson the classic homicide studies with income inequality in Chicago fascinating and very you know be behavioral you ask you want to ask about waste to hip ratio and and I want to say that I love evolutionary psychology uh but if you open an evolutionary psychology textbook you'll generally read that it's a universal preference that men like this very you know not 68 is that the positive s yeah so so 68 sure and it's interesting because we see that in you know westernized college students you'll see an even more extreme you know closer to Kim Kardashian type ratio right but if you to and this is you know this is still kind of in its nent stages it's possible that this turns out not to be true but there is this other idea that it's like well maybe in a maybe in a super rich Western environment that makes a lot of sense right but I was speaking to Barnaby Dixon right who's the beard guy who we mentioned earlier and I just asked him about this I was like is there is there anything on variation like I know there's the BMI thing but what about and this was this was off podcast I was like what about the waste to hip ratio stuff and he was saying that he has some indicative evidence that maybe in environments where women are doing more physical labor that super wide hips which makes it harder to run harder to jog harder to do athletics I mean if you look at like incredible female athletes they often don't you know they often do have relatively um masculinized bodies um maybe a more masculine figure in women is preferred as well so it's like the waste to hip ratio stuff it makes sense why it's attractive right it's like it signals n parity as we discussed right it becomes harder to maintain you know this Coca-Cola shape after you've had children unfortunately right it become it becomes more difficult as you age as well and so it could be an honest signal to what we might call Future reproductive potential right it also might be an honest signal to fertility there's more mixed results on that I've seen a lot of mixed results on WE to hip ratio association with fertility basically like zero yeah so some people are like no it is it does associate maybe it just doesn't associate modern context but it is legit and then which is possible right um and then there's other people who say no that's just a bad idea right but the but but it is true that it's like women who are you know who have the most quote unquote future reproductive potential and are fertile right um women in their early 20s let's say are generally going to have this you know crazy waste to hip ratio and it becomes harder to maintain after they've had more kids harder to maintain after theyve aged so so it does kind of make sense that it's like okay that's a signal again it goes back to like signaling underlying qualities um it does make sense that that's that that's kind of what what happens there but then if you think about it more broadly again just stepping back and you know plenty of evolutionary psychological accounts are just correct and there's certainly a huge contingent of people who think that they're always compatible with behavioral ecology but this would be an area where it's like well maybe that's not representative of our ancestry actually maybe there's actually we have a more modest preference in contexts where you know women are working all day and you have to choose someone like would I don't know I'm going to guess just I'm going to guess that the um whereever it was West African South African uh study that you looked at I didn't look at the study I was talking about me yeah him uh but for uh 38 BMI was the one I was talking about oh oh yeah the South African Zulu yeah yeah that that's not him yeah um that I'm going to guess that those women aren't going to be shaped like a snowman they're going be shaped with probably an awful lot of fat posits in the ass and really really big boobs um so even within that I would be very interested to look at how does waste to hip ratio mediate that BMI because bigger girls that are bigger in the wrong areas can look less sexy than bigger girls that are bigger in other areas right in the same way as the dude exactly as you said a 28 BMI like is that 27 BMI for a guy yeah is it all in the gut or is it all on the shoulders it's very different you can move the the body shape around yeah I mean that that's a very good point uh and with that study I'll note that it was that that it was up to 38 because you you were asking the context of a limit like when does it when is it a when when does it become a problem and that would be a very you know more extreme example right um but you know there there are there are some groups actually now that I'm thinking about it where it was just basically like there there are some groups historically where the heavier the bride is the higher the bride price yeah so it's like it's this whole this whole view again going back to the whole like not attractive thing it's like speak for yourself well I mean just to add on to that but yeah I agree with you that there's going to be an inter interaction with waste type ratio and the original it's funny that you mention it because the original evolutionary psychology studies on this which were like what's an attractive female body they they were using drawn figures which isn't great but they made a matrix of like heavier and curvier and they were like oh the heavier doesn't seem to matter as long as they're curvy interesting but those are the originals but that's what I would have predicted that that the heavier can incre you get uh how would you say like more leeway there's more buffer with heavy as long as curvy is retained yeah and the reverse wouldn't be true and it's probably just just so we're not only talking about this because a lot of the things that you're saying are very likely true but also so extrap to men in the sense that it's like BMI of 30 probably is still sexy if you've got big shoulders wide arms but again if you're shaped if you've got super skinny arms twig legs and you've got you know just a huge pot belly you know you know I understand that some people are going to be listening to this and feeling you know self-conscious of that there's other things you can do doesn't matter but that's just a different 30 everyone that listens to this podcast is jacked so it's okay um so the interesting thing that I was thinking about there to just add on you won't have seen this because you don't you're not as terminally online as I am uh Sports Illustrated just had to let like a ton of its staff go and Jordan retweeted His Old tweet okay um I I think that he foresaw like a Cassandra complex type thing around if he said if he said if he if if well you know actually I thought it was such a rude thing to say about a woman that I didn't didn't with it anyway but you know what role does height play in attracting men and women for men and women yeah it's interesting well I think that let's let's get men out of the way let's let's get the you know since just like the blue pilled cck that you are let's get men out of the way and get onto women we're in good we're in good company yeah yeah yeah no the well this is this is one of the things that I say where people are like he's blackpilled and it's like okay that's I'm I'm so upset that that's the if you can if you can manage to thread the needle between all of the pills at once yes if you can be bigoted and cooked in the same podcast that means that you're doing something right okay sure and you've managed to do both so far so yeah oh what a disaster that's um yeah so I'm I'm upset as long as you know everyone's upset with as long as extremists on both sides and you know reasonable people uh so well height actually I think that I don't think I'm going to say anything particularly surprising every inch that if you're a shorter guy every inch that you add and this is based on a couple of different data sets I'm not just just looking at one study here uh it you know looking at things like just women's stated preferences uh women in speed dating studies women in dating app swiping right dating app filters as well as response to you know online ads for you know like I'm single that kind of thing so there's a bunch of different evidence that women like a very tall man who is not too very tall right so if you graft women's height preferences it would look kind of like a candy cane right where it's like if you're if you're very short then adding a few inches really increases your attractiveness like the difference between being 5'4 and 5'8 that's a big deal right that's that's going from a bit of a problem to actually probably not that much of a problem then it starts to taper off around 6' one right so it's like you're getting every inch is sick and then around 6'1 it starts to taper off which is hilarious because you know the average height of American men I think it's about 5'9 and on dating apps I think it's about 6'1 I I'll have to double check that which is just ridiculous height inflation is such a disaster yeah I'm considering getting leg extensions just cuz not height flation and whole flation the two the two maladies of 2024 yeah so the once you get to around 6'1 you start to get kind of diminishing returns per inch and that seems to settle down around 6'3 6' 3 to 6'5 there seems to be about you know even it doesn't seem like being maybe 6'5 is is better maybe it's not but it doesn't seem to be that big of a deal whether you're 6'3 6'4 6' 5 then around 6' 6 6' 7 6'8 that's when it's like okay this is definitely not optimal right this is not ideal but again it's like a candy cane so it comes down but you're still better off being like basketball player tall than being 5' 10 right and it's interesting because this this data converges with a very funny anecdotal experience I know one of the only men ever to lie about his height on a dating app to make himself shorter uh he's 6' 6 and he claims that he's 6'5 cuz he's like 6' 6 just scares him away to be honest like looking up if you're a 5 foot 6 chick like what do you know about anything over 6 feet tall you can't even reach 6 feet tall like you don't know what's up there yeah you can't you can't get up there well one thing that one thing that is interesting though is that it's not so a lot of people think and this is the intuition is like they want a man who's taller than themselves and it's like they want a man who's taller than average so so it's not that they're looking up and saying oh that's that's a lot taller than me it's that they're looking at you and looking at the guys around you and they're like oh he's the tallest one that's all of my friends and Austin at all it's super annoying yeah well you're quite tall you're a little taller than average yeah so five 510 and a half I think technically if I was if I was posting it on a black pill Forum but all of my friends my housemate's 6'4 another one of my friends is 6'4 another one of my friends is 6'2 so if I ever have to use a dating app I'm 6'4 and I'm I'm showing up in stilt it um all right so that's for men height i' I saw and I've cited this a bunch that the average preference in diff difference between men for women is 21 cm taller and women for men is 16 cm shorter this hold is this similar to any of the stuff you know that's it that yes so that that sounds about right got it right baby bro signs for the win yeah it's a that I believe that was actually a speed dating study that you're referencing if you're talking about the same one where it was like what height was optimal and they interpret it as a ratio right where men prefer somewhat shorter and women prefer significantly taller men's preferences are are are kind of more interesting than women's but they're also so much slighter that it's almost not worth talking about them but we can uh it seems to be that men prefer women who are about average height or maybe a moderate amount shorter than themselves it's kind of unclear why and I think that a combination of factors a it's a slight preference but I would say that a combination of factors make it such that tall women and I say this as someone who's dating a you know absolutely lovely very beautiful but also very tall woman um tall women I think have it hardest just on the mating Market from a Hy perspective why I called it the tall girl problem yeah I heard you say that to was that to Candace actually said it I I sh that theory I've only come up with two cool names in all of evolutionary psychology tall girl problem and male hypothesis but I'm at science great at meing so I I played toward my strengths I'll have to talk to you afterwards and tell you some of the theories that I'm working on testing and um told problems about socioeconomics not about height yeah I heard you talk about it in that context but it works in terms of height because well two things happen right one is that and it might be similar to the socioeconomic situation although one thing that's interesting right and it's worth kind of as a supplement to the modeling work so Candace's modeling work obviously a super cool study very interesting but then it's like well richer women are more married and less divorced more educated women are more married and less divorced than less educated and so it's like this whole kind of meme of like oh care you know careful ladies the the Richer you get the harder it's going to be for you to date it's like okay Theory fine modeling fine practice they're doing better than the rest of the women I would be very interested to look at that longitudinally over the next 10 years I I think it's going to get even better for them and the reason I think that is because we're what we're seeing in Europe is that women are becoming more and more willing to date hypogamous so we're seeing much more of these patterns where women who are super educated are like you know what sexy plumber sexy firefighter let's let's have it have you looked at the relationship outcomes for those relationships longevity satisfaction well this is something we can talk about as well I mean in in the west we see that there's that these you know these relationships where the women make more you know maybe are more likely to have issues but there's a real question of like is that just I mean this would be my first gut reaction is it's like well they can they feel they can leave right well I mean look so this is um I I love the those are the two ideas right it's preferences or they feel they can leave so I love the tall girl problem I think that it explains an awful lot from and the reason that I came up with it originally was I wanted to explain to educated Andor wealthy women that were struggling to date that they weren't personally cursed that their preference on average for men that are as wealthy or more and as educated or more means that it amounts to a diminishing return if you're standing at top your on hierarchy it's very difficult to look above an across the next one especially when that one is slowly kind of sipping and sipping and sipping because men are becoming less educated precisely correct um that being said there's some pretty scary stuff that I'm sure that you've seen increases in domestic violence have been going up in line with the decrease in hypergamous dating so that would suggest that perhaps men whose Partners earn more than them that they are concerned and no longer Financial prisoners may be resorting to a cost inflicting as opposed to a benefit affording mating strategy that yeah I mean that's that's extremely depressing and uh that's that's a horrible thing to hear I'm not aware of that data and this is William costell taught me about it you can you can ask him about it dinner tonight yeah yeah so this is something um this is something that'll just kind of flag up front is that a lot of especially just kind of Internet character are very willing to speak at length about subjects that they know incredibly little about and and well well you know quite a bit through talking to people and you're also you know this is kind of your role is that you're bringing on Experts and then asking the questions that the make a career out of being the most stupid person in the room that's one of I I wouldn't say that at all the the whatever you're being humble but that's that's why you're popular is that you have a knack for as a smart guy obtaining enough information to ask the questions that everyone's wondering right but there's a but there's so I'm not talking about you at all but there's a real tendency of people who are on the internet to just you know pick out one finding here one finding there and then just speak at length as if they've got all the answers to the world's problems and the truth is that like an Academia if you haven't spent a year reading about something your knowledge is basically zero like you're that's that's like entry level is once you've been thinking mulling over and reading the literature um the the the idea of getting straight up to speed on a subject that that's very they're very unlikely to have the right context to decipher it and so with a question like this it's like I'm not an expert in domestic violence I'm not an expert in uh you know hypergamous versus hypogamous dating outcomes and although so so so I even though I'm from a broad theoretical standpoint as someone who looks at things from a behavioral ecology point of view I'm very optimistic that our nature our cultural norms will naturally change to accommodate shifts in gender equality just to interject that do you think that women's preference for socioeconomically competent men is sufficiently malleable for that to me and I think to a lot of the guys and to give the the the guys on the internet that are talking about this they you if it was being spoken about in a Le sort of cantankerous adversarial way I think what they would try to say is something like women's preference for socioeconomically successful men is so ingrained it is such a uh fundamental part of their source code of Attraction I don't believe that it is something that they are going to be able to reprogram and I would say that largely like I'm in that camp too to a degree um I would say that it is Akin and equivalent to men's preference in terms of strength men's preference for youth infertility I think that that is the equivalent and fundamentally online just again to get meta for a second this is the debate the debate online typically is you have a preference that preference is wrong I have a preference my preference is right your preference can be changed my preference should not yeah that's the way that the discussion online gets presented but I think I I think I'm right I think that I speak you know favorite place and it's a shame that you're leaving this week because we could have done it on Saturday favorite place for dating and mating research Soho House pool in Austin okay so house pool it's you know $35,000 a year for a membership so that like has a pretty good selection effect for the kind of people that go there and I just sit by the pool and listen to the chicks talking and just wander over and say hi girls how are you what yeah talk to me about your current dating experiences and they'll say I I've got a a degree I do this thing I work in marketing I work in sales I work in this thing I'm inan a blah blah blah like what's happening with with your dating life at the moment I'm really really struggling why are you struggling what are the things that you and a lot of the time they'll say okay how old are you what's your income what's your education level and a lot of the time they're struggling to find men that they feel are at that level so give me your thoughts on uh ability to nudge preference for hypogamy versus uh men's ability to nudge preference for youth INF fertility yeah and I'll note the word hypergamy is kind of it's it's just a it's the internet meme so I'm happy to use it in this context but I almost never hear it in Academia I mean we we we might we might say hyperon right but hypergamy that's that's about marriage typically and it's also narrowly to like status right uh but we'll use it just in kind of a broad sense of of mating up socioeconomically uh you're asking is it flexible how malleable how malleable is women's preference for socioeconomically as or more successful mes okay flat answer we'll see right because the the the weather there's no for all the internet chitchat uh and I think that a lot of the guys who are resistant to this it's not actually about the mating they don't care about the mating success of women they they give a like they don't care about women having trouble dating what they care about is they don't want women to have as much resources as men right that that makes them uncomfortable it threatens their status their sense of manhood Etc and they're masking that as like oh women you'll have so much trouble dating if you get rich um but in reality they just they just hate to see women make money because again the flat reality is is that women who are more educated right are more married and less divorced than women who are less educated right does the same does the same thing hold for wealth do you know I'll have to check the although I yeah I think I I I'm pretty confident in saying that it would the again it's it's not it's not necessarily my area in terms of how flexible it is there is some indicative evidence that at an individual level it's flexible in the sense that women who have decided that they want to be the primary bread winner right they tend to in their mate selection care about good dad qualities right and sexiness right whereas you know how much money they make that that that does that's not necessarily that's interesting because I've seen I've got some data that I've been throwing around with David uh that suggests that women's preference for socioeconomic success over and above their own increases as yes this is intent to be the bread winner right not right not but what's the determinant of that what's the determinant of intent to be the bread winner yeah it's interesting I mean is that going to be a switch that people that girls flick they're like oh and now I'm going to be the bread winner more just that I'm that I'm quite confident that humans can I just think that humans are incredibly phenotypically plastic creatures this is behavior eist in you coming out right yeah it's just that I mean I see that you know you could look at all of human history 70 years ago and say oh women just will only marry men who are more educated and then you look at the Modern Trends in Europe and it's like oh seems to be changing so I guess I guess very interesting and then also it's like I think that it's possible that we'll also see some shifts on the male side of things I mean there there are plenty of cult well there are plenty of cultures where men actually do I mean the basic sex difference you're right I'll just put a flag down here to say that it's true that across cultures men have stronger Beauty preferences and women have stronger resource preferences but the fact that the degree of difference varies suggests that there is some potential for ecological malleability and we're only now just entering into a phase where it's even possible to do the experiment like we're doing the experiment and we we'll see how plays out yeah For Better or For Worse and I think that I think that it probably frankly I think it probably will be for better I think it's going to be fine yeah well I mean here's another thing that kind of doesn't get doesn't get brought up an awful lot online when you look at the um increasing divorce rates and yeah I think hormonal birth control has an awful lot to answer for I think that in many ways it was a very dangerous piece of technology to throw around although it also opened up an awful lot of uh opportunities for women nobody talks about the fact that the success of marriage success I lower divorce rates Etc uh was very heavily in part due to the fact that women were Financial prisoners of their husband like if you don't have any resources and you don't have any education and you've got two kids or no kids or five kids where are you going to go yeah where are you going to go yeah you know you you're literally a financial prisoner one other thing you were talking about um like creators and stuff online and this works for friends as well but I'm playing with this idea and I had um a four four questions that you can ask to gauge the honesty of other creators but it also works for friends too so first question when was the last time that you heard them change their mind on something second question do they primarily identify outgroups as a mode of bonding their ingroup together number three how often do they admit mistakes genuinely not performatively publicly is an advantage and number four do they want to hear alternative points of view for reasons other than mocking them that for step process identifies pretty much like if all the Bad actors yeah correct if you put the guys that I don't I just don't enjoy their content or I don't want to be friends with them that all of those questions they answer in in the the negative so uh yeah it's very interesting it's very very what um what myths if you could clean house what myths would you like to get rid of from the mating and dating world what's been bastardized the most okay in your opinion all right well the most meme one is definitely body count this idea that the idea that you know historical promiscuity is a predictor of bad outcomes in long-term relationships that's pretty well validated by a bunch of studies it's just that it the same bus's uh uh David's quoted a number of times right yeah so it we see that the idea that it's like yeah if you're someone who loves casual and love sleeping around you're going to have a harder time I don't think it takes a rocket scientist to figure out that oh that type of person is going to have a harder time in a monogamous lifelong marriage right if that's what they love doing right and and that sociosexuality yeah it's just sociosexuality and that can partially be measured with you know the past sexual partners you have with the you know important caveat that there's a huge difference between you know an 18-year-old boy who's you know just showed up his freshman year of college and has somehow slept with 10 girls in the first week and you know a 32-year-old man who's had you know a few failed relationships a few um you know flings and so on and and has got to the same number over a longer time period in different contexts but this idea that like body count is associated or quote unquote body count as the term is is associated with negative relationship outcomes is true right at least with based on the available evidence the optimal number it's about four I think it's three for women and in terms of people's preferences when they're meting it's like a it's a very very long spread out candy cane like I think the same zero is as desirable is like 12 yeah it's something like that it's it might even be less it's like zero starts here and then it goes up for a second and then it plummets right so it's like between a few and several uh between a few and several is hot and then after that it's like what are you doing and before that it's like why haven't you done anything but but it's worth noting so you asked about memes to destroy it's like this idea that this is only important for women and that this that this doesn't have any effect on men sleeping around or it doesn't indicate anything about men's likely personalities that it doesn't make much logical sense right they'll talk about these like parir bonding memes using studies on other animals that have nothing to do with humans but it's like we see the same effects in men right so men who have higher body counts and men who are more socios sexually unrestricted generally have all the same negative outcomes but the difference is that a man who is sexually promiscuous is not seen as that that's not seen as a negative outcome in the same way yeah well the the in itself it's not the the cultural the culture surrounding it but there's you asked about memes to Delite and it's like look I think that there's a great argument to be made that maybe sleeping around isn't great right that I think that there's you can say it from a societal level this might not be good for people and you can say at an individual level this might not be good for people and you could write you know a a a great little essay that that makes all the right points and I'd be like well you know that that makes a lot of sense but if you say only for women well then you just sound like you're a sexist right because it's like all the same points you could make would be makeable about men and all they have is these trit and analogies about you know a key that opens many locks da D and it's like all right look at the data you're seeing the same effects in men and women but you're only talking about women then also just from a societal perspective it's not what I would call an exportable idea right if you can't recommend if you if you're making like a recommendation to people culturally and it's contradictory and its execution it's not a good recommendation right to say men have fun sleep around women don't it's like the only way that's mathematically possible is if those men are sleeping with each other and that doesn't seem to be what they're recommending what's the truth about women being more picky or discriminatory than men when it comes to physical attributes physical attractiveness oh God okay well this is a funny one you didn't expect I was you were going to come on and have easy simple question no no no I thought I thought you were going to be a lot nicer to me you've you've already gotten me in trouble a few times with everybody but it's fun this one's interesting because all right it is true that I would say that women are more selective like most you know this is a pattern that we see across most animals right that female animals are more selective and in as much as women overlaps with female mammal then you're going to you're going to see that effect and so women do seem a little more selective about who they made with you've mentioned David bus a couple times right those classic studies of like walking up to someone on a University campus I mean you know even if it's a really sexy guy going around like hey want to go back to mine right it's it's some ridiculous number of men say yes and some tiny number of women do right so women are and there's multiple ways of measuring it I know that's kind of a silly study but it does seem that women are more selective in their mating right and so you know you'll it's not particularly surprising that women want a higher percentile right of the mating Market than men do on a lot of traits and good look seems to be one of them in the sense that men I would say that most men are attracted to most women right and most women are attracted to a subset of men right so there's a difference there and this is going to bring in you know a real funny Insight from Alexander a mutual friend which is like well what if let's step back here what if men just are less sexy than women right like they just the average because there's no rule that the gend 's average has to be equivalent right like some people say oh it's a logical it's delusion it's like well there's no rule like men the average man is taller than the average woman there's no rule that the average man can't also be less hot than the average woman and it's interesting how would you just a question here I don't quite understand how you would compare female attractiveness or hotness to male attractiveness or hotess so two ways you can do it right so the but the basic thing oh the first basic thing to notice is that attractiveness is a perception right so when we say that when we're looking at a study and we say the ruler determines the length well well to an extent I mean but okay so we can say empirically that apples taste better than cardboard because when we survey the humans who are the determinants of taste the average human says the Apple tastes better than the cardboard haven't run that study but I I'm pretty sure the P value would be significant with facial attractiveness and bodily attractiveness and all these things it's measured the same way it's just kind of the Apple's cardboard thing it's like yeah it's like sure there you know people have different tastes but on average right there's so much overlap right it's like beauty is in the eye of of the beholder sure but most beholders are seeing vaguely the same thing and so there there's nowhere really to go there in terms of men being is it possible that men are less attractive than women on average it's like well if you ask women right to like look at couples and say who's harder the guy or the girl they'll say I think the girl is actually the hotter one more right but then if you ask men the same thing happens right so men and women agree that women are hotter right and so it's like by whose standard and whose opinion is there some like objective you know thing to notice there another thing that people struggle with is that there are some studies that indicate that women find most men less sexy than average and some people are like oh that's a perceptual bias right it must be and it's like well most men are less wealthy than average because some guys are super wealthy and most guys are you know moderately poor mean versus median yeah exactly so it's like it's entirely possible that we're living in a world of kind of zeros and ones in a sense where it's like most men are completely unfuckable let's say and then some small subset of guys are just gloriously attractive and if that's the case then yeah use the Bell Cod most guys are below average attractiveness so yeah it's so so two things that are really important on this that that I really just want to put into the conversation yes women find a smaller subset of individual women generally find a smaller subset of the opposite sex physically attractive than men do but women also put a lower priority as you said earlier women also put a lower priority on looks in general right so it's like good news bad news right it's like sorry fellas most of you probably aren't looking that good to women on First Contact good news that doesn't really matter that much compared to if you were a woman in that same state there's many ways to win yes and women are more willing to compromise on their beauty standards than men it seems yeah well I mean again you know this is where the black pill philosophy does come true to some degree and I think that it's it's a a culture which is born out of men who see themselves as genetic dead ends right they see is completely unable to get a woman because they have fallen below a threshold that is impossible LMS right but L is first looks money status so they believe that they've Fallen below a particular net now there is an argument about where that net is and it's like if you're not above a six out of 10 6 out of 10 as being often rated by other men not by other women uh but I've said this before that um a man's ability to change his mate value is significantly more malleable than a woman's that's the conventional wisdom I I I think that it's well well can I say something kind of just a little controversial is just the idea that women are might be working harder at it than they get credit for right so one quick example one of the coolest studies of the past certainly of of of this decade in my opinion uh Marta Coal's enormous 93 country study on something like 93,000 participants across the world measured all of the things that they do to enhance their physical attractiveness and how much time they spend on it and it's like all over the world with some variance right and we can talk about that because again I'm very interested in how socio ecology affects this sort of thing but with some with some variants accounted for women are spending much more time significantly more time on their looks than men five times three times 10 times about half an hour more day right so it's like so so a lot of so there's this idea's this idea that like men can do this idea and this is accounting for everything right so this is including the time in the gym this is including the time you spent picking an outfit this is including the time you spent on my fitness pan figuring out like oh you know what what are my macros for the day all of it together right the time you spent doing Your Hair Etc lining up the lovely heavy stubble to Contour the face whatever all of that together women are spending more time so there's this conventional wisdom of like oh men can men can do more than women to adjust their mate value and it's like maybe we're seeing a final product where women have already put in so much more work it's like imagine if imagine how much harder it would be to compete as a man to like upgrade yourself if every man accept you suddenly spent an extra half hour a day on their looks like even if that was just gym time it's like oh my God everyone's hotter and I'm less hot by comparison so this idea that there's more runway for men it's like there might be I I would be more open to saying that a modern West economy there's more routes right in the sense that it's like okay I'm not the hottest guy but boy I can you know I can I can grind at computer science and become educated yeah exactly I can I can and maybe maybe phys you know honestly there's a huge there's huge genetic we don't like to talk about it but there is variance between individuals as to how much muscle you can put on right there are people who just can't look a certain way and just like hit the gym bro and it's like well they can hit it as much as they want but they're still skinny right and there's not a lot of sympathy for that cuz we like to think you know people who have muscles like to think like oh that that it's just hard work but a lot of us just vaguely are lucky right I know a lot of guys who are jacked who don't work that hard is all I'm saying I have a couple of friends that are super responders to testosterone and they're just absolute like hyp yeah complete hyper freak yeah and I also know guys who it's like they've never done a bicep curl in their life and they've got like 16-inch arms just flat and it's like that's you could if you're starting with 12 in arm so anyway I'm getting off track but this idea there's this kind of conventional wisdom of like men you have more kind of upward trajectory space through hard work but then there's the other question of like okay well women are already working really the FLW for women has has been brought up by this weird they're all doing it where it's like if you're like think about just how much time it takes to get ready to go to work as a woman versus a man it's like if you've lived with a woman then you know it's like we're going out to dinner I'm going to be I'm going be looking give me 45 minutes I'm going to be yeah if you're a man it's like I'm going to be looking my best in 15 minutes 5 minutes in the Shower 5 minutes on my hair right maybe shaving my face and I'm out the door looking as good as I can look that day right for a woman to go from her zero to her 10 in terms of effort it's like it's it often takes a lot of time because we have these cultural technologies that they that that are used in our in our society such as makeup such as you know these additional hair products Etc and so I think that yeah I think that there's a real question there but I'm not but I'm not giving an answer it I'm kind of Playing devil's Advocate I I might agree with you but that's the certainly the conventional wisdom so I'm probably being an idiot talk to me about discrimination around hair color discrimination around hair color well you love evolutionary psychology so I want to just give you the the basic Evo pych view uh even though don't throw me in with basic I'm a fledgling behavioral ecologist at the moment I'm slowly this is my new cool thing my new shiny toy is this area of research spoken to a lot of people who would you know maybe at a conference maybe depending on the conference say they're Evy or behavioral and that would certainly be me like it just depends on who I'm talking to it's a short hand for like I use evolutionary theory and think about humans yeah exactly and Evy is the is still the queen in this equation I spoke at H best last year want to drop that oh wow well well well I think I might see you there this year if you're going Symposium was a symposium I hope your symposium's as good as my Symposium I I I don't even know if I'll get a Symposium yeah well it's cuz you're a yeah exactly yeah yeah yeah it's cuz I'm weak yeah yeah so in any case um we we'll we'll have to we'll have to do a study design on your tall girl syndrome stuff and see how God don't do that um well it would be cool if if some of these ideas got into the literature because it is I got my first citation by uh David and William oh my God uh for the male sedation hypothesis oh really actually actually in a paper actually being tested oh my God that's so cool I me it's got a great name that's it dude meing I'm not good I'm not good at sence you do the signs go do the signs nerds I'm going to come up with the name yeah yeah yeah yeah what's funny is that the part of the reason Evy has been so successful is because David bus is amazing at Ming oh yeah people don't talk about it but like he has a knack so much of the words that we've used in this conversation are actually terms coined by him all all these little like putting mate in front of everything like all that little stuff like that's mostly if not his invention then his promotion everyone's Downstream from like a basian philosophy yeah is that you can you can start sounding really sciency which is really what everyone wants yeah and you can also and also here's the other thing is that a lot of people who are in the scientific space they coin terms but they're terms that nobody can use because they don't make sense I say the word mate preferences immediately you know exactly what I'm talking about there's no confusion at all anyway what were we what were we trying to talk discrimination about haill okay so look there's variation right and some studies show different effects but the standard Evo theory is is actually quite simple and seems to fit at least with folk wisdom right which is that men will preferred on average all else being equal relatively light hair colors because hair darkens throughout life until it turns gray or white right and so lighter hair colors signal Youth and there's also some potential evidence that women's hair might darken during pregnancy as well so we're going back to Youth and null apparity right being signaled by relatively light hair and in a western context this would be relatively light for our very diverse population where we have everyone from you know very Nordic people to to um just all sorts of people right so we have very light hair colors on that distribution we see that you know a huge percentage of American women there's one study where was like 40% have experimented with lightening their hair right uh there's this effort right where where where it's it's trying to it seems to an extent uh respond to this male preference for lighter hair that might be Downstream of an ancestral signal of Youth and nullity yeah not not fertility so the term nulliparity is the state of having not yet had children in biology and the reason that that would be attractive is and it's not attractive in all animals but in our species where we're monogamous parir bonding theoretically High MPI yeah so theoretically it's like you want to this is this is going to sound like a crazy term but the optimal maale mating strategy for humans is often you know if you're in if you're in a evolutionarily informed psychology classroom you'll hear people use this phrase which I'm going to sound psycho for saying but it's called monopolizing a woman's reproductive years right uh where it's like you're spending you're trying to meet someone and then spend that those 20 years with them where you're able to reproduce with them the entire time cuz that's if if if everyone's pairing up monogamously as is the case in most um human societies and cultures then that's kind of where you'll end up at now on the other end kind of for the same reasons women seem to prefer somewhat darker hair the whole uh tall dark and handsome thing that seems to that seems to play out we' we've spoken a little bit about tall just better Fighters you know but are able to defend themselves but um dark seems to maybe come from a signal to age there is some dispute of this right some Studies have found that men don't actually prefer lighter hair but uh I'm I'm very amable to the idea that they do just and there might be some frequency effect exposure effect there's definitely a cultural effect but that seems to be part of the story what about age gaps what about them well do men actually lock in at 21 years old once they hit 21 and then just want 21 year olds for the rest of the time no in terms of physical attractiveness there does seem to be you know a probable thing in the early 20s but if you look at Men's you know dating out filters for example they'll tend to filter out extremely young women once they get older but they do want increasingly wide AG age gaps as they get older is that not just because that's what they think that they can get could be yeah totally like I'm 45 getting a 21 yearold seems unrealistic and might be a bit icky so like yeah let's put it 27 well yeah I so might be a bit icky is going to be you know that's that's part of like part of mate value is like what does this mate signal to other people about meate so why would women prefer an older mate well this is the thing is that in countries so women have we talked about women being more selective the more selective party holds more power in terms of who gets together right that's how it is in business as well the person who's more willing to walk away from the negotiating table and has more of the things that the other person wants anyway I don't need to explain that that that that's pretty simple but in countries where women are free to choose they tend to choose men who are slightly older not super older so we're talking like 2 to 4 years right and that seems to be reducing even now where it's like age gaps are getting smaller and smaller and it could be again like we talk about malleability it's like let's talk about malleability in a context where you're completely dependent on a man for his resources maybe a guy 13 years older is the best because he has more resources right but in a cultural context where you have your own money right it's like I don't want the deteriorating sperm let me let me give you a counter example in a society where you on average are outperforming socioeconomically the men who are around you at your age bracket yeah one of the best predictors of wealth is age is age and yet we still see that women who who have these options and have the freedom to choose choose very small age gaps and this is the thing is that if you ask men what do you want they tend to want pretty big age gaps pointing downward but if you ask women what do you want they say oh I want you know a few years older maybe and then if you see what women actually do what do they get they get a few years older maybe right and if you look at what they do on dating apps right they filter out much older men right okay because because again think about this right it's like if you're if you're one very simple thing that that that really everyone in the audience should understand about sexual selection is that we're looking for indirect benefits and direct benefits and if you focus too much on either of those indirect benefits that's who do you want to have your kids right who do you want The Offspring genetically to be with right and then direct benefits that's who do you want to raise your kids in species like ours but also who do you want to take care of you help you out be compatible with you Etc right and if you focus to much on either of these then you miss the entire picture so thinking you know about direct benefits sure older is better right from a direct benefits perspective of course you know the the older mate is going to have more money more status they're going to be able to take care of you better in a modern economy but from an indirect benefits perspective sperm de quality declines every year right men me the the signals of quality right those decline every year you become the all that facial attractiveness signaling that goes away right those signals of underlying genetic Health those go away right the muscularity that goes away so there's a real balance here where it's like in a in a culture with very high gender inequality and where women don't have control of their own resources maybe or and there's you know there's debate as to why this varies but but the fact of the matter the underlying fact of the matter is that in cultures where women you know have their own resources and are free to choose their mates they choose men who are slightly older than themselves and that seems to be to get like a little bit of the direct benefits but mostly maintain the indirect ones and there might also be to be 100% Fair there might also be a direct benefit to having a mate at your own age in the sense they'll actually be around to raise your own kids there's a reason that women generally aren't fawning over you know 60-year-old men it's like who human children they take a long time to take care of that's not necessarily uh the best person now around talk to me about tattoos uh well I mean I I wish someone had told me in high school but uh it doesn't seem that women care about them very much uh you know women perceive tattooed men as more healthy masculine dominant Etc healthy yeah and it might be just because it's like he's more likely to be a gy bro but the more you know evolutionarily coherent one the one that's like really complicated is like well a tattoo is exposing yourself to a high infection risk and it's like I can I can handle that I don't I don't necessarily think that's true but it is interesting that you know there are some immune markers that are higher in men who are heavily tatted uh so and that could just be because it's like if you go into a tattoo and it makes you really sick you're probably not going to get another one and so guys who are heavily tattooed it's like bounces off them but you know those are attractive traits and yet women don't seem to find tattoos more attractive than not uh and so the question is like and most of this is Polish data it probably varies between societies and cultures and soci ecologies bet it would definitely vary in Japan yeah right there's going to be huge cultural context there right I mean there are there are some countries on Earth where this amount of tattoos would make me look like some kind of criminal but Boston it's totally chill wasn't allowed to go uh in the baths yeah in Japan when he went there the public baths you you given one pack thing and he's like thigh full two full sleeves like stuff on his back and he's like the am I going to do with this like he's he's 250 pound guy like that's not going to doesn't cover a nipple um so yes women interpret men more healthy more masculine yeah more more dominant more dominant but there's all these trade-offs It's like because because you ask them it's like okay do you think it's like digitally modified photos do you think the ones with tattoos are hotter than the ones without and you talk to a couple thousand women about that and the result was that it's like yeah he's healthier probably more masculine probably more dominant probably but he's not more attractive and it's like why and it goes back to the masculinity trade-off thing this is actually kind of good evidence for it is that they're like well I don't think he's going to be as good of a dad I don't think he's going to be as good of a husband tattoos what about women with tattoos for men well that's really interesting and there's actually a cleaner story so there was a fascinating French study and it's one of the most ecologically valid studies really that I've ever read not to over flatter it but it's just usually when you do a study right you do it in a lab setting or you do it digitally or you a survey and you just don't know whether whether it's going to translate right but what they did was they did Real World human mating behavior where they took a bunch of woman and they sent him out to the beach in a bikini and we're just like read a book for hours and we're going to count how many men approach you and every time a man approaches you we're going to have you know someone run up to be like stop we're doing a study to reset the timer so it's not you know people thinking it's their boyfriend or whatever uh I'm not sure they did that method but that's that's what I assumed when I was reading the study and sometimes they sent these women out with fake tattoos on and sometimes they sent them out without and they found that with fake tattoos on women got approached substantially more right and they were like huh this goes against the lab studies that show that men say they don't like tattoos right so this is kind of an interesting little problem right what what's going on here and then they asked men on the same Beach it's like you know what do you think that girl right and they didn't find that the tattoos made them hotter but they did the men did say I think that that woman would be more likely to say yes to a date with me right so the anticipation was basically like these women are more open to soex yeah I mean it might have been sociosexual signal they didn't measure that but the idea would be yeah but it could be that it could be that and it could also openness openness on its own openness to new experiences like no no no it wasn't openness like psychological trait openness it was literally like I think that this person would be more willing it was just the basic question of like if someone walks up into her on the street is she more likely to say off or say yes and they they thought yes right but the the outcome that they're looking for is a sociosexual one potentially unless they're saying hey why don't we go for a coffee I'd love to learn about your tattoos yeah well here's the thing is that it's not all I mean it's interesting it's not it's it's they they could easily be approaching to ask for a date it's just they don't want to get rejected but but it does highlight it highlights two things one is that not all Beauty signaling is about signaling attractiveness right so sometimes you don't want to look more beautiful you want to Signal underlying personality traits like it's like if you're if you want to look I don't know if you like it like it might make sense if you're if you're a woman who's who's interested in shortterm mating maybe it would make sense to deck your body out in cool tattoos to be like hey I'm you know more you know I'm more socially liberal probably I'm more you know interested in RIS taking yeah more adventurous Etc yeah so I think I think that sociosexuality is totally fair fair estimate but the basic idea is like it's not that tattoos make women more attractive if anything they make them less attractive but it is a signal of like as we say like openness to going on a date with a guy that they've just met or whatever have you seen the studies on women wearing choker necklaces is this the same result pretty similar okay cool interesting uh both men and women rate that woman is probably having had more Partners previously um well with tattoos we have the it's interesting that you said sociosexuality because it's probably bang on now that I think of it because there is some research indicating that people with tattoos have higher sociosexuality I mean there's going to be outliers of course and there's going to be people who don't fit that pattern but yeah maybe you know having tattoos is like yeah not only do I have tattoos I probably have casual sex and people learn that through you know cultural reinforcement and life experiences and then when they're on the beach they're like oh maybe this person would be more approachable what is there to know about stated and revealed preference is when it comes to attraction oh that's an incredibly deep question well you've been very interested in Beauty today and I think one place to start would be that people if you ask them what matters most in a mate I mean the jur is still out but if you ask people what matters most in a mate they're generally not going to say looks right they're going to say I want someone who's honest who's loyal who's kind these are the bus studies and other replication since right but then if you do an experiment like a speed dating experiment it's the hot person wins right if you do a vignette study where it's like photos and biographies the hot people win generally at least past a certain threshold and so there's this kind of tension there where it's like Okay Okay so we've got all this data showing that people say that they care more about personality traits than looks and then we've got all this data looking at what people do and they seem to care more about looks than personality one exception to this which is interesting is that interpartner correlations of attractiveness right those tend to disappear at least in one study after 9 months of knowing someone before the date meaning that I've phrased that terribly because I can I can see the the confusion if a couple knew each other for 9 months or more before they started dating each partner's physical attractiveness does not predict the others which is a strong signal that attractiveness physical attractiveness was not a huge factor in their decision to date each other right CU in most couples interpartner correlations of attractiveness are you know similar to self rating and other ratings of attractiveness they're pretty significant right uh what's the mechanism that you think's going on where this nine-month window seems to change something personality accumulated information about personality pushing out physical attractiveness as a determinant of mating but when you but when you don't have enough time you're you've met some somebody a couple of times or whatever it is you use much more uh easily accessible cues which physical indicators of mate value so and this isn't this isn't a particularly controversial way to think about beauty the you know this Steven and Ludo review article on this they titled it physical indicators of partner quality right and that's their they weren't using that only for beauty but that's one way of saying Beauty right is that you're looking for someone who is high mate value and when you just meet them you know 95% of the information you have is their looks and after 9 months 5% of the information you have let's say made up numbers but let's say is their looks and so it doesn't factor into your decision as much and so if you're you know if you meet someone at a bar right if you meet someone at a pub and you the first interaction you have is securing a date well then you probably both met each other's looks thresholds right that's kind of the only thing that makes sense right but if you met someone as a cooworker and you were working together for a few years and then after you know a blossoming friendship became something else you're like you know what let's let's actually get drinks this week right how much did looks factor into that decision right it's hard to say and in this study apparently not at all interesting all right so at least not measurably let's just say that keep digging deeper into the stated and reveal preferences thing because I I think a lot of the time it's kind of like the god of the gaps for people that want to make arguments both for and against uh a lot of the the theories it's like oh yeah I mean you know people will say anything in surveys and my lived experience yeah yeah yeah better says something else yeah and and there is you know as a I mean as someone who thinks about things from a behavioral ecology lens even though you know the the two studies I've done are both you know they're both very ABY frankly but I I do think about issues pretty behavioral ecologically and the first word of that is behavior right watching what people actually do right evolutionary psychologists really like looking at state preferences right the the favorite tool of an evolutionary psychologist is a questionnaire right that's often been said and then other scientists like economists and behavioral ecologists like looking at what people do so there's stated preferences what people say and then there's revealed preferences what people do but my personal opinion is that you need to look at both right there's an old joke about economists I'm going to butcher it because I'm not a funny person but you go to an economist's funeral right and nobody's mourning because his revealed preference was to right it's like what people do is constrained by the vicissitudes of life right the the the the chance happenings and limitations of One's Own position and so when we see that so sometimes it's it's like okay well I don't see a reasonable way where your decision was constrained and so the fact that you chose to go on a date with the hottest guy at the speed dating event instead of the funniest guy tells me that you probably do care about hotness more what's the what's the use of stated preferences then other than to measure them against the Divergence from revealed yeah so let's talk that's that a great great question I'll give you a couple examples where I think stated preference has become a factor men say they want larger age gaps than they get right and it makes sense where the constraints coming from because women are the selectors typically they select more at least and they say that they want smaller age gaps and then the smaller age Gap happens so it's like looks to me like dueling preferences buted heads and the woman's preference went out and she went with compromis yeah exactly yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah the man might want a woman seven years younger but he ends up with a woman three years younger and then you ask the woman and it's like well my my state of preference is three years older and that's what I got and it's like okay that seems to be a case of dueling preferences that makes perfect sense another one would be and this is really interesting is that we see in these stated preference studies that men don't care that much about ambition about resources you know oh she can have whatever career she wants yeah I don't really care about her education and then you look at what men actually do and it's like you very most educated men are with educated women right most rich men are with women from the same socioeconomic background even if that woman individually isn't making as much money right the same Stratosphere classwise just just to interject that the I saw Alexander's video maybe a year year and a bit ago uh and he was talking about do men trade wealth for looks do wealthy guys get with good-looking women and it actually seems that most Partners pair off yeah good-look people get with good-looking people rich people get with rich people and there are these you know status for resources trades or resources for looks trades and these trades do seem to happen more men to women right but overall it's like if you just look around even it's like oh yeah you know people who have college degrees tend to date people who have college degrees people who are super hot tend to date people who are super hot now that's a stated versus revealed preferences problem because you ask the guys do you care and they said not really and then you looked at what they did and they ended up seeming to care right and so now we've got a a case where we kind of have to look at the whole picture and I'm not saying that it's a closed question like the age gaps one seems pretty straightforward to me this would be an example of it being a little more complicated right so the age gaps one seems straightforward and the state of preferences are probably accurate Direction Just because of the totality of the evidence and then the looks question it seems to be the revealed preferences probably are more indicative looks probably do matter quite a bit at least when you're getting to know somebody and then for something like this now now it's a little more tricky isn't it because maybe men care more than they say right um I certainly don't relate to the idea of not caring right like I feel I might be biased because internally like I you know I've I've obviously got quite a bit of education and I can't at a personal level I would rather all else being equal date a woman who's very educated right that would just I can like I like so my my girlfriend's a scientist right and so it's fantastic for me that when I'm having trouble you know sorting something out I can talk to her about it and she gives me you know coherent helpful advice well beyond beyond just having a research assistant you get to have sex with what you also have is somebody that understands your passion yes exactly yeah it's it's it's it's not just it has a utility Beyond uh Beyond just practicality where it's like well yeah super helpful just in emotionally in the sense that it's like okay this is someone who understands yeah exactly so I think that there are probably a lot of men who if you ask them on a pen and paper and again this is probably my bias I think there are a lot of men who it's like they're educated they're doctors they're lawyers whatever and you say do you care about a woman's education and they say no I'll date anybody and then in practice they're on the date with a woman who doesn't have the same education with them and they're bored right because they're not they're just not interested that's a specific subsection of men though yeah it is it's a very specific subsection of men so the the other possib though and I'm going to give full this is totally possible and maybe even more likely is that men actually don't care that much about you know money and status and women and education they actually don't they're they're they're telling the truth when they say they don't give a um and it's not that they don't say that they don't give a they say that it matters it's just not top it's just not doesn't matter to them as much as it matters to women in these questionnaire studies and then in the Behavioral Studies there doesn't seem to be as much of a sex difference at least According to some Scholars it's also possible that it's just exposure and opportunity it's like if you're a male lawyer right you spent the last eight years of your you know Prime you know getting educated around educated women so it's like who did you happen to date who did you happen to marry educated women because those are the women that you happen to meet based on who is in your local environment so I'm open to both possibilities I think that if you really want to understand human mating you don't want to say something as blunt as watch what they do not what they say right even though for the most part I I'm more interested in what people do than what they say I think that if you really want to understand T mating behavior you want to take a step back relax and say okay what do people want what do they end up doing and what's the most coherent explanation I can build based on the combination of those have you had a look at Gregory Clark's work no he is a demographer I suppose uh he has done behavioral genetics background he wrote a book called for whom the bell curve tolls which is a phenomenal title uh he has tracked although putting the phrase bell curve in a title should be you know that's that's a risky risky move he likes to he likes to sort of glance off the bottom of of certain things I I really appreciated the fact that again uh same as a pman actually a little bit more kind of like Bas have you had P of course what a smart guy phenomenal guy and is a really sweet guy as well super sweet counter signal I mean dude if you're going to do behavioral genetics and be really accepted even slightly by the mainstream you need to do the counter signaling thing right you need to be overly not pliable but like kind of placid and and so like gently softly softly well I'm not saying that this predetermines but it does predispose and I'm not saying like it's caveat caveat caveat uh Paige Harden right you know page uh wrote the genetic Lottery okay she's the only well-known public facing behavioral geneticist that's ardly from the left as far as I'm aware is plumber not I think yeah he doesn't bring his politics into it she outward are my politics so fascinating Gregory clar L Gregory I'll s you the episode tracked the social status of people via a very complex system of uh surnames in the UK for like 700 years and he found that people's social status is genetically determined that over time you may assortatively or un assortatively mate yourself out of your social class either down or up but give people enough time and their family phenotype is more important yeah that's what they go back to this sort of regression to your phenotypical mean does that make sense I mean it's fascinating I will say though that again I'm going to have to kind of plant the I haven't spent a year on it flag in the sense that it's like I'll send you a podcast that's the yeah no yeah well well here's the thing is that I've read you know I've read I've read a couple relevant books on Behavior genetics I read pl's book I spoke to plen for a few hours I I I've read several articles on it but I really am not a I'm just not and I understand the behavior genetics of infidelity quite a bit but I just don't I'm I'm not an expert on I'm just not an expert on it I'm not going to pretend to be and there's you know there's a lot of even academics who will come on shows like this and just be like experts on everything they're asked about and it's like well I know that you're not an expert in everything you're science is lame Bro Science is real that's that's really but dude you know I I have this like rule that I stole from Douglas Murray which is normalize saying I don't have an opinion on that I don't know yeah I've said that several times today like that is again you know when was the last time that your favorite content creator said that they don't know would be a fifth a great fifth question to ask like just because you're great in behavioral ecology infidelity make preferences and attraction doesn't mean that I should believe what you say about geopolitical strategies to fix a problem with the Middle East yeah yeah it's so based so true and I I will you know one thing that I'm happy to to to be proud of is that on every single podcast I've ever done I've said I don't know more than once there's never been a time where I've gone on a podcast and just gone through yes yes yes I know this I know that it's always you know at a point where I'm like I haven't studied that so there is you know and I've said that a few times this time there is a a degree and you know I I think I'd probably say that I've had maybe second only to Ricardo Lopez uh I've had more evolutionary psychologists on this podcast than pretty much anybody else and what I do like are when that caveat comes in and you know the boundaries of whatever somebody's talking about but then they go but let's have a bit of fun yeah let's have a bit of fun let's let's let's postulate about the mechanism you could say and it's like look we don't know what's going on here here's some cool ideas cuz that's the fun bit the fun bit of evolutionary theory and presumably of Behavioral ecology as well is going like why does that happen well given what I know about the way that humans work and given what we know about the environment that they're in let's have a play with a couple of mechanisms and that's that for me is like is the best stuff I fell in love with this subject when I read the moral Animal by Robert R that book's from 1993 dude and you can read it today and there's some stuff in there with like like that's just silly it holds so much water still now phenomenal read it's one of my top five books of all time Steve Stewart Williams um April the universe also in there it's just brilliant and um I loved learning about evolutionary psychology first off because it helped me to understand me yeah helped me understand why I am the way I am what are the mechanisms that are driving me why do I feel that way about these things oh this isn't some weird Quirk of my psychology this is like the source code that I'm built on and this is a commonality and this is what I'm trying to do a lot of with the show which is look if we open up the hood of our preferences of our fears of our dreams of the ways that we think about ourselves of our curses of our competencies if we do that it makes you feel less alone and less personally cursed and less inside of your own head very wise and flattering words about evolutionary psychology I'll weigh in mostly to agree evolutionary psychology was my first love in science my closest mentors at Boston University were anthropologists but they came you know like Carolyn hod shimian she was she was one of my teachers one of my professors and she came straight from Santa Barbara right the the the mecca of Evy and one what I loved about Evy was that while cultural anthropology and to an extent other disciplines emphasize what makes different evolutionary psychology emphasizes what makes us all all the same they would call it the psychological Unity of mankind right our shared nature as a species and I think that evolutionary psychology while you know while I think that on some questions there are better tools now after you know after learning more about the field frankly at Oxford and its Alternatives uh while my opinion is kind of shifted on it I still maintain that they're right about so many things and that their their big wins are some of the biggest in Psychology ever I mean it's incredible that uh that you know bus's original mate preferences stuff holds up uh what nearly half a century later and that you can still basically find the exact same the exact same results by running the exact same study I mean you want to talk about a replication crisis that's awesome uh but again for things like understanding the complex interplay between culture environment and nature to determine who we find sexy and who we don't I've come to just think that that evolutionary psychology is part of the picture and necessary but not sufficient yeah you also need you also need a deep understanding of socio ecology well ultimately you're not luy which many which many evolutionary psychologist have of course I mean I'm not criticizing anyone they know you're not yeah the um human behavior isn't occurring inside of a faraday cage right people are influenced by what we said it before like two very obvious ones are beautification uh in relation to local socioeconomic inequality and the sex ratio hypothesis right two just two effects that occur yeah income and equality and sex ratio fascinating yeah and you're like right okay and both of those are like you know pretty hardcore at least uh every evolutionary psychologist will be familiar with that yeah exactly and that's a huge that's a brilliant point because that's very behavioral e ecologically compatible like those two Fields would not disagree yes so you go okay well in this like I need to do more work because this is literally the first time I've ever heard the words behavioral ecology put together maybe I've heard it like at some point before it's the first time that I've heard it used properly so I need to look into the field more but the way that I could see if you're right with the way that your field looks at the world functionally it will be better at iting Behavior yeah so one yeah so there are cases where you test them against each other like you could test test them against each other whereas like this is what we should do this is what humans should do this is what their preferences are but that's in a you know petri dish confined box sandbox Faraday cage if you're not in this hermetically sealed lab what happens well you you are intrinsically fused with the culture and with the presuppositions of what you think and your assumptions about yourself and about the world and about your place in the world and about what other people think of you and perfect example of this 10 20 years ago every girl wanted a thigh gap now it's like when the when the economy was great dude I've really really enjoyed this I'm very glad that you've come through we have we have literally like five more episodes to do uh and I look forward to finding some ungodly time for one of us when you get back to Australia to run this back again but I'm really glad that you came through and stopped off in Austin where should people go they want to keep up to date with everything that you do you're massive on Tik Tok you you've got fantastic podcast as well where should people go they want to check out yeah well there's um I guess there there there are a few things that are worth uh flagging the first for for my kind of social media presence uh it would be good to just Google my name and follow it and then in terms of the actual work I'm doing so there there's academic work which I'm which I'm going to keep everyone of and then there's also some corporate work as well frankly where uh you know you've met Tim today um so we're working on an app called coule and you can go to just to flag flag this right um c.in if you're in a relationship right and you're looking to improve your relationships uh this is an app where both Partners download it and we're going to be bringing some of the science that we talked about today into the app to help uh improve couples and uh help them last longer yeah dude I appreciate you you're awesome yeah your stuff's really really good and I'm glad that we connected and I hope that you continue going and I hope that we have more conversations cheers thanks so much Chris appreciate it if you enjoyed that episode then press here for a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last few weeks and don't forget to subscribe