Huge New Study Reveals What People Really Want In A Partner - Dr Paul Eastwick

your news study is one of the most interesting things that I think I've seen this year oh good oh good it also has maybe the highest number of authors that I've ever seen on a single Paper it a big it a big team yes so how well would you say people actually know what they want in a romantic partner um it depends so what people are very good at recognizing is that some attributes are very very desirable right so there's good agreement that traits like attractiveness and intelligent and considerate and honest that these are desirable things that we want romantic Partners to have and there's also a lot of agreement that we don't really want somebody who's disorganized and careless and we don't really want somebody who's anxious and easily upset so there's a lot of agreement and accurate self-knowledge that some attributes are more desirable than others and you can ask lots of interesting questions about why don't we want to be with anxious Partners right why don't we want to be with with Partners who are kind of a mess right and why do we want to be with Partners who are attractive and intelligent the trick though is when we expect people to have insight about what it is that they uniquely like what do they like that makes them different from other other people and that's the Insight challenge where we find H sometimes people do okay and sometimes not so much why is that an interesting Insight what is it that you like that other people don't like why is that an interesting question well I tell you the reason I got interest the way I came to that particular question was because of uh the work on gender differences so what do men and women want in a partner right and so this is research going back and it goes back I mean like 80 years at this point right I mean middle part of the 20th century when we started asking people this actually the sociologists at first were really interested in what attributes do uh men and women say they like and do we find these uh gender differences and you certainly do for attributes like attractiveness for attributes like earning potential right men will consistently say they like attractiveness more than women women will say they like earning potential more than men um so we were originally interested in whether we saw that those gender differences also played out when we looked at how those attributes predicted all sorts of Downstream consequences because that is an individual difference of sorts right how do you mean well gender right is what we're doing is we're describing how some people are different from other people right in some ways it's like one of the easiest ones to latch on to in The Mating domain right but it does function like other individual differences in that if men say something as a group that this appeals to them more than this other group women it requires some amount of individual predictive power right that the groups have to be telling us something different that's going to then play out when we see what it is that they actually find appealing so it was really the gender differences that got me interested in this uh this accurate uh self- knowledge question in the first place right so we have two things that are going on here one is what do people say that they look for yeah and the other is what do people actually want so we have stated and revealed preferences can you explain how you looked to sort of pull these two apart this is the internet especially online sort of mating discourse it's the favorite don't trust what people say watch what they do it's you know it's the death of every evolutionary psychology survey or self-report that's ever been done because it says well no no no it's that's what people want to say uh so talk to me about how you teased these two things apart and avoided sort of too much uh confabulation between the two you bet and this is this is a key distinction and they're yeah these terms get bandied around but I I'll tell you how I use the terms and and and I think this is a very helpful way to think about it so when we're talking about attributes um a stated preference for an attribute is usually done very simply here A bunch of attributes here are some rating scales tell us how much you would like these attributes in an ideal partner you can be more specific you can say ideal short-term partner you can say tonight sometimes we would do studies where we we'd say you know oh when you go speed dating how much you are you g to care about these attributes but all of those fit under the stated preference rubric it's you know I see this trait and how do I feel about it okay a revealed preference it's not sometimes people confuse it with like oh but what do you actually choose that's not actually exactly what it is a revealed preference is about what does the attribute predict for you okay so if you meet an array of people who vary in that attribute does that attribute help distinguish wish the people you liked from the people you didn't okay so if I send speed dating is a very helpful way to think about this even though you don't actually need speed dating to get revealed preferences but it's it's helpful I find because you can imagine meeting a set of 10 or 20 people and some are very attractive and some are a little attractive and some are not attractive at all and the extent to which you have a revealed preference for attractiveness is the extent to which attractiveness is a driver of the liking that you experience for these people now liking could be also be like a self-report scale liking could be a choice you make liking could be like H who do you take on dates right liking can be measured in a million different ways but it's some sort of Association some sort of predictive relationship between the attribute and some sort of evaluative experience that you have for a set of potential Partners what did you do to work out the I I understand how you can do stated preferences you just give people a report you say here's a list of 35 traits rank order them from one to 35 in terms of which one you think is most important how do you discover 10,000 people's revealed preferences right so there are a couple ways uh of doing it and we actually did it in two different ways in this paper um the main way that we did it and the is we just look at the revealed preference in the sample okay so in the whole sample of 10,000 people and I should probably explain briefly what we did in the study um we have a survey it's about 10,000 people from 43 different countries and some of them are in established relationships some of them are single and what they're doing is they're going to be reporting on somebody that they're like kind of interested in dating right but but they're not dating currently and they're completing a bunch of traits about these people right they're rating them on 35 different attributes we also have their ideals for those 35 attributes so we know how much they say their stated preferences for those attributes and we've got a dependent measure too of you know sort of how positively do you feel about this person right it's sort of sort of standard liking desire kinds of measures so what we can do is in the whole sample we can just look at okay when people felt that these Partners were let's say a good lover I'll use that example first um how positively did they feel about this person and it turned out that a good lover was the single strongest predictor of that dependent variable right so a good lover is a very strong predictor of feeling positively about a romantic partner right that that relationship was the strongest so we would say in this sample there is a very strong revealed preference for a good lover even though people ranked it something like 12th in terms of their stated preferences it was their number one revealed preference so so that's I think a helpful way of thinking about this distinction what is ideal partner preference matching I know that this is kind of a body of work just I feel like that's important to get it out there yeah right so the one of the questions we can ask in this literature I mean looking at the stated reveal it's all very interesting but sometimes we want to know okay if you are a person who says you like attributes XYZ do you like Partners more when they match rather than mismatch XYZ okay so if you say you're somebody who really wants somebody who's attractive and intelligent and funny you really don't care about attributes like are they religious and I successful you didn't care so much okay does the extent to which the partner matches those ideals those stated preferences that you have does that predict how positively you feel about this person and figuring out the right way to do that matching has been very complicated and it's actually taking taken the whole field like a decade to sort out how to do it because it turns out there's all sorts of complex stats and uh that go into creating that matching process um you know anybody who's ever played around with things like profile correlations or difference scores is going to be familiar with the many complexities that come into play when you try to do this but what we tried to do in this study was basically take all of the different approaches that are out there and say hey we're gonna we're going to do them all and we're going to show you how well these different matching approaches work to try to get at the question of whether people are happier more more desirous of Partners who match rather than mismatch their stated preferences and what did you find well what we found is that if you pull out that unique component okay and and again this was we really didn't know what we were going to find going in what that unique component was going to show because I'd seen studies where this component was basically zero um and uh and and other studies showed things that were a little bit larger than that so what we found was that when you pull out that unique component across all 35 traits we found real effects they're not huge it's like two three four% of the variance tops but it's there so a matching effect that is truly about how much you desire these attributes we've taken all of the what we call normative matching out of it we just look at that individual differences component so if you meet somebody who uniquely matches what you say you're looking for you'll experience more desire for that person it's not a huge effect but it but it is there we are able to detect it does that say that we have some degree of insight into what it is that we want in a partner yes with the major major caveat of when we're thinking about collapsing across 35 attributes so across that whole set we get a little something the challenge is what if you care about one attribute what if you have an a hypothesis about attractiveness or what if you have a hypothesis about intelligence or warmth what happens then and that's kind of where things start to fall apart why well those effects because there are there are other ways of looking at matching effects if you care about single attributes and isolation and this is a basic statistical interaction prediction so again for listeners who are familiar with these kinds of stats what you're talking about is if you're the kind of person who says you really care about attractiveness okay you rate that highly in an ideal partner that's your state preference we want to see whether um it matters that for again how much you're Desiring this person that you think that person is attractive so you should experience a stronger association between how attractive you feel someone is and how much you desire them if you say you care about attractiveness okay so that's the way we test that prediction these are statistical interactions and you do it for all the 35 traits and generally speaking those are tiny because this sample is so big we detect uh many of them are significant um although although many of them are not and actually sort of shockingly you know like attractiveness isn't um but some are and and some are are big enough to be notable actually the one that really stood out was religious so I would say tentatively like if you're the kind of person who says you want a religious partner there there may really be a matching component to that but for most of those attributes in isolation those effects are very very small I mean you need like thousands and thousands of people to be able to see them okay well I mean the least interesting part of that study is people were able to slightly predict the things that they want the most interesting part is what is it that people stated that didn't come out as the revealed so can you take us through where people really miss the mark and sort of what you think is going on with the motivation for those yeah so there are some fun discrepancies there that um that surprised us a little bit um we didn't uh you know I don't think we'd ever run a study where we had 35 different traits where we felt comfortable doing this kind of ranking approach where we take all the revealed preferences kind of stack them up and we take all of the stated preferences and stack those up and we sort of see where the matches and the mismatches are and so I mentioned one of the mismatches earlier which is that people really seem to have a strong revealed preference for a good lover even though that kind of ends up being about 12th uh in their uh in in their stated preferences overall um there are a few other interesting ones people um don't uh say they care that much about an attribute like smells good uh that kind of fits somewhere in the middle of the range they don't you know spontaneously think that sounds particularly appealing but it actually ends up being the fourth biggest thing overall uh in terms of uh in terms of what they feel their revealed preferences for it and then of course if some are if people are underestimating on some they're going to be overestimating on others and they overestimated on some things like uh oh uh like consider it a little bit uh other attributes you know that are um a little bit you know more on the on the warmer side uh people you know say that those attributes are very very important but then when you look at the revealed preferences they patient patient says number 10 and it actually comes in at number 18 which is interesting um what else have we got here the war the emotionally stable I think was another one that like you people say they really want somebody who's emotionally stable but in the end I mean it's it's positive but it's it's not as as strong as some other so so maybe you know people in the end are are okay with Partners who you know maybe have a what's this one going from 19 to six here sexy yeah sexy from 19 to six okay so this is interesting so actually with a lot of the attractiveness related traits people were underestimating those on average right sexy was one I think nice body was one and so to bring it back to the gender differences we can look separately for men and women at what state of preferences show and what their revealed preferences show and on the revealed preferences side um what you see is that men and women are really getting these attributes about the same okay attractiveness sexiness nice body those have the same revealed preferences for men and women and that that uh you know is that does that shock people in today's day and age it doesn't shock me because this is what we've been seeing for like 15 years when we look at speed dating or we look at ongoing relationships revealed preferences for things like attractiveness really don't show gender differences the stated preferences of course do and what we can show with this design is that what's happening here is that both men and women are underestimating how much they like attractiveness but women are like really underestimating so so the underestimation effect is bigger for women than it is for men right so so that's how they both end up at the same just to dig into that um men prioritized in revealed preferences Y and in stated preferences attractiveness mole yes uh uh they they the the men and the women prioriti Iz in terms of revealed preferences attractiveness equally right but on their stated side the men prioritize it more but the men are still underestimating right so the men are still too low relative to other traits in terms of how they rate the stated preferences compared to where the revealed preferences come in the the women are like way too low what else uh was interesting when it comes to the sex differences between men and women so we can also look at some earning relevant traits we've got things like ambitious and we've got things like a good job uh and we've got uh you know attributes in that space financially secure is another one and so those as stated preferences generally rank quite a bit lower but you see the gender differences that men that women say they care about these attributes more than men do once again on the revealed preferences side it's the same for men and women and again we've been seeing this for for 15 plus years now but again what's interesting here is now we can figure out well who's who's getting it wrong and this is a case where actually both men and women are getting it wrong just in opposite directions so women are in their stated preferences are overestimating a little bit how much they like those attributes and men are underestimating a little bit how much they like those attributes they aren't dramatic errors um but they're big enough and in opposite directions that it explains why you see a modest gender differences gender difference in what men and women say they want on those attributes and how they end up at the same place in terms of their revealed preferences why do you think it would be the case that women would overestimate how important a good job is in a partner I would have guessed the opposite I would have guessed that it's a stereotype about women they would have compensated for it they don't want to seem like a gold digging hoe so they're going to to counter signal against that and then they're going to be smacked in the face by the reality of being a you know safety and resource seeking person and uh but it doesn't seem to be the case yeah you know I I actually think there's some evidence that the gender difference and I think the overall preference for those kinds of attributes that they have uh gone down a little bit over time I could be wrong about that but I think that makes sense when you think about it in terms of you know as as women have uh entered the workforce in greater numbers and and you know entered more High Prestige jobs you're likely to find that at least in terms of stated preferences they're not thinking in the same way that they would have back in like the 50s like oh I need a partner who's going to really be making the money because I'm not going to be earning as well so I do think the stated preferences have come down in some sense but also think you're right that some of what is um affecting people's stated preferences are stereotypes and I mean that in the most neutral way possible just when you ask people to describe the attributes that another group has right they can do that and I think some of what men and women do when you ask them to describe their ideal partner is they start picking out attributes that members of the other gender have and that's the funny thing is that men and women know that men tend to earn more than women and and attractiveness works the other way so men and women know that women on average tend to be more attractive than men are so there are some of these uh I think stereotypes again in the most neutral way of using that term kind of infect the way people provide those stated preferences uh in the first place and that could be a source of some of these discrepancies between what people say they want and what they actually want yeah I'm sort of trying to work out what's a black pill and what's a white pill from uh from the study and I think it's really I think it's really interesting right because this is I'm going to guess the largest study ever done on stated versus revealed preferences for men and women CL okay one one of at least the most recent it's hot off the press so just for the people that are only listening will have had the the table up on screen for the people that are watching uh a good lover coming in at number one at number two loyal so um you know we have this big discrepancy in a good lover we have this big discrepancy in smells good and in in sexy so it seems like people wildly underestimate the importance of some more kind of slightly shallow physical characteristics that are to do with intimacy at least like physical intimacy but then when you look at the rest of the top 10 you've got loyal coming in at number two you've got honest understanding uh considerate uh supportive uh you know a lot of much sort of softer traits uh sympathetic and warm um you know these are so we have sort of two things going on at once like the red pill and the blue pill are both kind of right at the same time here you know you've got this vicious purple pill yeah it is it is a purple it is a purple pill um but it's it's this real blend it's this real blend of the two there is there is a sort of a a focus on both the immediate attractive sexiness and the softness too I think that's right and again what we're seeing here is that you know these are people's own judgments right so I'm making judgments about this person I know and whether I find them attractive and whether I think they're a good lover right so so we're we're really getting at an individual psychology about the kinds of traits that really co-vary very strongly with good feelings about that partner Desiring that partner and wanting to be with that partner um I there are other lessons and again I'm now drifting away from this study a little bit um with respect to okay but if I'm trying to attract somebody in the first place I think that's where um in many cases people can find the red pill pretty frustrating because if you feel like well I'm not attractive or I don't have these traits that make me seem like I'd be a good lover I'm at this major disadvantage um and my usual response to that is like look in a a setting where people are meeting for the first time that is true people reach consensus about attributes like attractiveness or being sexy being confident these matter in a first impression context but where the blue pill comes in a little bit is that it says but uh as people get to know each other if you're in a context that is going to create create some repeated interaction consensus on those kinds of attributes tends to go down so over time we start to disagree more and more about who's attractive and who's not so for somebody who's not conventionally attractive for somebody who doesn't go into the party and you know attract all the attention what it means is that there are other avenues for you but they have to be Avenues where you actually get to know people over time because some people's opinions will diverge what do you make of conventional and uncreative being ranked at number 35 what do you think that says about people yeah that's a great Point um uh people uh certainly like to feel some excitement right they they want to they want to feel like their partner is going to inspire them and and this is uh very true in today's day and age it has become more true over time that we want our partners to push us we want our partners to um help us like become closer to Ideal our ideal self I mean this is like a core idea in in close relationships research is that we take on attributes of our partners and we want to experience new things with our partners so somebody who is who is not terribly creative that that doesn't sound like a like a a recipe for a sort of a fulfilling you know uh growth infused relationship I wonder because it sort of trustworthy is one of the things that's in there and you think well trustworthy is kind of like it's tangential to that it's this sort of reliable predictable kind of way but it's you know this is exactly where the the devil's in the details of we want predictable but not too predictable I don't want I want them to be reliable but I don't want them to you know to be able to know what they're going to say every single time or have a boring conversation with them so it's this it's this sort of delicate balance between the two yeah right right and we like people who are who we find exciting right who are adventurous who are going to going to do new things with us um but we also don't want you know close relationships are by their nature um they're they're dangerous risky things and they're dangerous and risky things because you put yourself in a position to be taken advantage of right I mean that's it that's kind of the whole point is that you're establishing intimacy with somebody you are opening yourself up there are tremendous benefits both psychological and tangible that come with that but it is a risk of exploitation there is a risk of being rejected of being taken advantage of and so this is why I think things like loyal often end up uh uh you know pretty high on the list because people want those reassurances from somebody but they want the excitement too just excitement that isn't going to like uh you know mean that that ultimately you're going to reject me yeah not excitement I find you in bed with a different person kind of that's right that's that's a little too exciting I I totally didn't think about the fact that um people take on the traits of their partner I I the fact that I didn't think about it probably means that other people also didn't think about it um but yeah you you are going to absorb some of the traits of your partner so if they are anxious it's not just anybody that's ever been in the car any guy that's ever been in the car with with a very nervous uh co-passenger girlfriend and they they Panic about traffic and you're like I'm a cool driver you're making me panic like stop I'm just trying to do my thing here and you kind of absorb even if it's just for a brief moment but that's one of the reasons like if it's somebody who has an anxious disposition if it's somebody who uh the most literal way if it's someone who smells bad not only do you have to smell them but you probably smell bad too yeah right right you you you take it on yourself and this is um you know it's part of why this work is called um uh the sort of self-expansion and inclusion of the other and the self but one of the reasons that researchers think that uh initiating relationships can be so exciting is because of this self-expansion experience that you get when you're spending time with somebody new that you're really excited about because ultimately you're in you're introducing each other to new things new activities new interests new ways of seeing the world and uh and and it's all very invigorating and very exciting and part of the reason that you you don't need to sleep as much and you don't need to eat as much right it's all it's all very um uh self-expanding in that way how much do you think uh the ranking that people have given when it comes to their revealed preferences of particular traits is simply choosing to not have the absence of that trait so the selection of good lover being the selection of of not a bad lover the SE selection of smells good being the selection of doesn't smell bad what do you think about that that's a great question you know we have occasionally looked for those kinds of effects but it's very hard to tease apart with these kinds of data right but because what you might be seeing is that if I think somebody is like a one or a two or a three I am penalizing them exceptionally harshly and I'm not really differentiating between the five sixes and sevens okay um when we're doing studies like this where people are reporting on it's either somebody you're in a relationship with or somebody you're kind of into all of this um you know these differences that we see here are really happening in that upper end right because this is about differentiating somebody who I think is a seven on attractiveness from somebody who I think is a six but in context where you're meeting strangers and it's a maybe a broader set of possible people that you'd be meeting I I do think it's plausible that that people are sort of establishing some minimums and working up from there but like it it sounds like very clear and easy to to picture how that would work the stats end up being absurdly complicated yeah I imagine I imagine they are stats stats was actually one of only two uh subjects that I got a C in at GCSE level so I was uh I was early on bad at statistics yeah it's it's is tough thinking about the good lover one which is I think not only the starkest difference between stated and revealed but also then comes and ranks at number one what do you make of that do you just is it a um both as the the Gap and then as the fact that it is the revealed it's a good question I think that when people when you imagine somebody who's a good lover in the abstract that what people are probably thinking is um that's not gonna impact my day-to-day life very you know like what am what are we talking about we're talking about you know uh 30 minutes um you know every evening or you know you know 30 minutes every week if you've been in a relationship for a while but then in reality um somebody who's a good lover that that that idea incorporates a lot of other good things that relationships have right so it it uh also indicates things like they're sensitive they're giving they're caring right but they also like know what they're doing and they like care about whether you know whether you know my sexual experiences are good right so I think it's one of these attributes that when it's disembodied and abstract and dis connected from a particular person it sounds just kind of okay but when we think about our partner that way it sort of brings in all of these other components that really make a a you know a a sexual a romantic relationship what it is I imagined that's a really good point I imagine that smells good has a good body is sexy you know what what is it it's somebody that has a good body thing uh reliable disciplined uh has agency over their life they're motivated they can discomfort you know it's like this whole list of things that are Upstream from has a good body and I guess the same thing goes for smells good it means that they've probably got good personal hygiene and they take care of themselves and maybe they're considerate of others and so on and so forth you know another this is just occurring to me now and this would be an interesting thing to test is that when you ask people how much do you want these traits in an ideal partner they are mostly thinking about um you know who I want with me you know by my side doing the hard tasks of life but when they're thinking about a real person that they are in or want to be in a relationship with that these sexier more romantic um components come to the form more it's a bit more visceral yeah right because I'm thinking about this person and all the visceral things that they Inspire for good or for ill and so I think that's that's quite uh that that's another possible explanation for why we see some of those discrepancies were the stated or revealed preferences for shortterm or long-term relationships or both uh these were all we usually describe it as an ideal romantic partner which at least to me connotes something longterm um we didn't have we didn't ask about short-term ideals uh in this study really just you know because of time got you did you work out overall whether men or women were more accurate um that's a good question actually I don't think we did um but that's something we we could certainly dos simple stat should take too long right that shouldn't that shouldn't be too bad I my sense is that they're probably similar but I don't um but I didn't I didn't look at whether there's sort of overall mismatches there I mean certainly we saw with attractiveness women had it off more than men and for earning potential they were kind of similarly off um I wonder did you did you consider or would you consider doing a follow-up study to do the reversal how important do you think that the opposite sex thinks that trait is in you yeah that's an interesting thing and you know I mean there's some studies that have done that not at this kind of scale um but but people's ideas about what the other gender likes I think the evidence suggests it tracks pretty well what people say they like right but um we've never tried to look at what would the discrepancies be there right between my ideas about what you like and your revealed preferences for you know somebody actually because that's what's important and this is this is I think probably the most interesting element basically is it even worth talking about mate preferences if they don't actually reflect our revealed mate preferences like what we're both doing is we're both playing this game I I can predict what you say you're going to want but that's pointless like I'm not here to just play some lexical game the reason that we try and predict what other people want is to predict what they want not to predict what they say that they want right right I do agree that this is part of the challenge here and again it is true when we talk about that whole Suite of 35 traits that we can get some some action there mil away right right exactly um that that people do seem to have some self- insight but on the specific traits usually my my um uh bias as a researcher is that I'm usually much more interested in those associations what you you know we call reveal preferences here that I want to know how strongly does this attribute predict some DV that I care about I think it's I think what people's ideas about the attributes they like are also interesting but not because I'd want to use it strategically to like try to match it exactly I'd want to know what what their revealed preferences are and try to match that are you familiar with the keian beauty contest do you know what that is no uh no tell me okay keian beauty contest describes a beauty contest where judges are rewarded for selecting the most popular faces among all judges rather than those they may personally find the most attractive this idea is often applied in financial markets whereby investors could profit more by buying whichever stocks they think other investors will buy rather than the stocks that have fundamentally the best value because when other people buy a stock they bid the price up allowing an earlier investor to cash out with a profit regardless of whether the price increases are supported by its fundamentals so it's basically this world in which we are trying to predict what other people will predict as opposed to just predict what's going to happen in the real world and that's where when we get to um what do you think other people would look for in a partner that's what you're doing you're not just trying to think what do I think they want in a partner it's what do I think that they will say and then that gets in Social desirability that gets a lot of this sort of second third order thinking in it yeah that's really interesting and so you could imagine that somebody who's uh who's paying more attention to revealed preferences might be able to get a leg up in that kind of way that's an interesting idea yes what was some of the biggest unanswered questions that you had after the study their implications what it means for what people want at the moment so one of the uh questions that remains unanswered that I'm very interested in is you know in this study I'm a participant and I'm raiding this partner on these traits now that's very useful I mean again I'm a psychologist so I believe in subjectivity is really important and that if I want to understand my experience of why I like this person rather than that person it helps to have me rate those traits that tells me a lot and and and we get the revealed preferences from those kinds of ratings but if you were say a Matchmaker if you were an online dating company you wouldn't have data like that if what you were trying to do was predict who was going to like whom you would need people's self-reports on both sides right or I mean you know if we're just dreaming here you might have like you know independent coders you know rate people on their traits okay so what would we see for both revealed preferences and also that matching phenomenon if we're using both people's self-reports right so your self-reports of your traits and then my ideals and trying to match that way now it is a basic rule with this kind of data that when you move from my judgment of the trait to your judgment of the trait and you try to predict something that predictive relationship is GNA go down but we we have some wiggle room here it might go down but might still be useful might be the kind of thing that a Matchmaker could use to predict who you're going to like more or less it could also go down to basically zero so so that we don't really know yet there are there are practical ways that these data could prove useful uh or uh we kind of end up in the same place where where right now anybody who tells you that they have a matchmaking algorithm is probably just you know trying to sell you a secret sauce yeah I saw you tweet uh an article I think from the guardian that was quite critical about the effectiveness of uh online dating for finding soulmates uh a little bit of an assessment people's sort of ambient dissatisfaction with this stuff do you think that there is a way that your big data or Big Data like it could be folded into a dating service to make the matchmaking more accurate I think it's possible and that's what we what that's what we' need to see is if you can get a sample that's this large and you you have people on both sides before they actually meet each other maybe there is something you can do to predict good matches now I want to be clear about what I mean by good matches because if you have people's self-reports ahead of time there a few things that are very easy to do it's very easy to predict who's popular that isn't challenging if somebody tells you uh I tend to be popular with members of the gender that I'm interested in guess what they will be so those kinds of uh of of self- reports tend to have accurate Insight what is much much harder and we've never been able to do and I've never seen anybody else who's able to do it is to actually create that matching that that specific matching component or what I would usually call compatibility that it's not about your popularity it's really about the two of us fit together well that's the the sort of uh the the Holy Grail in this space yeah it's very interesting I know that you've done a a good amount of work about compatibility and sort of how people evaluate mates mate evaluation Theory and stuff like that yeah yeah it's um I guess the one the one question that I have or the the sort of main uh potential flaw that I see in the study is that when people have been doing their revealed preferences that is still mediated by their own biases right they're describing either a real or imagined partner and in that they are it has to go through the filtering which means that all of the muck of their cognitive makeup and their desirability and so on and so forth how do we not know that they're maneuvering and manipulating the revealed uh person uh Avatar uh through the their own psychology oh yeah it's a great point and you know that motivated reasoning is in many ways you again this is like one of the essential truths of close relationships is that people are very motivated to see their Partners in a positive light there are some experiments they're like 30 years old now but there are really great studies where you tell people things like hey you know good relationships have a lot of conflict and then people will be like oh yeah oh my my relationship has a lot of conflict yeah this is not usually something that people would be willing to say but when you tell them that actually it' be a good thing oh now they see the conflict in their relationships right now they're now they're willing to identify those moments people do that with traits too right so for a lot of these traits you know there's a good version and a bad version of the thing right we were kind of talking about this earlier but you know there's a good way of being sensitive right you're you're aware and seem to care that I'm feeling off today and you want to talk to me about it but there's another way of being sensitive it's like oh man this person is really touchy and so what people will do is that when they're in a relationship that they're happy with they'll think somebody is the good version rather than the bad version of an attribute like sensitive and so whenever we're getting people's own judgments it's always going to have that sort of muy self-report stuff in it and that's not that useful if your goal is to try to you know predict who's going to like whom before they have a chance to meet each other and engage in that motivated reasoning one way or the other there's a third stage that I would love to look at so um one of the bits of research that I've done with David bus was about the difference between uh what people will click on versus who they will click with and the fact that algorithms seem to have a very good predictive power of being ble to get you to swipe right on somebody but when it actually comes to long-term compatibility it the the predictive power is essentially zero right which presumably you've seen too so so we have the way that I'm kind of conceptualizing is we have three we have stated preferences then we have revealed preferences and then we have effective preferences for the long for the long term as well so I would love to to work out you said that you like this thing you ended up liking this thing yeah and what were the traits that ended up being effective over the long term as well and that would require it to be I don't know longitudinal or you to look at changes or like what do you wish that you could change in a partner if you could but that would be so cool because that would actually show not only what do people say they want what are people attracted to and then what is it that's got the best predictive power for Effectiveness long term yeah that's a great point and and one of the challenging things is that you know with any the way humans go about about initiating relationships is that you got to go through this staged process right so I got to be sufficiently appealing to somebody initially in a first impression in a second impression uh and uh and they sort of get to those later stages I think one of the challenges of modern dating is that as we have expected uh various online forms to be able to do the job for us us um it makes it a lot harder for some people who don't immediately convey a positive first impression to get to the later points where they their other attributes or just the opportunity for some compatibility to grow and emerge they like can't get to that stage well this is the emergence of the black pill right yeah right right right right but I think I think what the black pill misses um and I suppose we can pin this on the red pill too a little bit is that the answers in that space I mean correct me if you disagree but the answers in that space are mostly about boosting my attributes so that I don't get cut off at the early stage of the process right so that I'm appealing enough and look you lifting weights is great people should people should work out people should take care of themselves but I think that what gets missed is that the the thing that connects people and that gives them meeting opportunity ities is social connections social networks spending time with people spend time with people that you aren't going to hit on just for the sake of being around other people and being in those networks that grow in morph and change and you know I worry that we have like forgotten that we yeah this certainly a sort of treating dating like a petri dish and um you know humans are very bad at working out exponentials they're very bad at working out compounding uh but exponentials occur in social networks as well right you know if you start to add one person into your friend group into two people into four people into you know before you know it the number of different connections between everyone and then all of their connections outside of it are very difficult to predict I think this is you know I I texted um William Costello about this not long ago saying that I felt like uh my tumbling down the rabbit hole of evolutionary psychology has been so great at at read sort of helping me to understand how why humans are the way they are but when it comes to the mating research it's one thing that's fundamentally missed it's missed by The Red Pill it's missed by the black pill it's missed by it's missed by everybody and it's even missed by evolutionary psychology human behavioral ecology everybody misses it which is the phenomenological sense of falling in love with another person because it can't appear on a spreadsheet there is no way that we can describe it that we can measure it it's this sort of you know weird sense of fluttering of butterflies and all the rest and and and you know we can talk about she's trading her facundity for his resources and her youth for the mate value and you know in some form or another red pill black pill evolutionary psychology human behavioral ecology the full work social psychology everyone will come up with their own way to describe this and no one is talking about yeah but sometimes you just sort of fall in love with somebody and you have no idea why and what the [ __ ] going on there and I think that's that that's that's really the X Factor it really sort of throws a wrench into the works of all of our presumed Godlike predictive Powers it goes yeah that's out the window sorry right I think it is extremely chaotic right in the in the chaos theory sense of the term right that it really hinges on a set of interactions that can go in any of a wide variety of different directions and and once you fall in love with somebody you can pick out and I believe people when they say this when they say I fell in love with you because um because you're smart and that time you were really interested in what had gone wrong with my job and because my dog seems to love you and I believe people when they tell me that that that is why and there was no way that we were gonna flag those three things before you actually got together there was no way to know and that and I think it's um you know I'm I find it both inspiring but also kind of daunting disenchanting as a researcher yeah right it's like well then what the hell are we gonna do doing with my job yeah but but but I will say you know we're not alone in this space like personality researchers are are getting into this stuff right people are starting to take this like like idiosyncratic personality that the things that describe you can't be captured by scales that you just feed to everybody and and you know we're we're getting there I I think things are going to look different in in 10 20 years and are are going to look pretty creative you gave me an idea before when you were talking about uh the challenge that people have of getting past the first door right of sort of s getting someone to swipe right in them on on a dating app or getting a phone number or in a bar or you know just getting a second sentence out of somebody if they're trying to speak to them um I think that there's a lot of sympathy that gets given to people who don't even get a chance and that kind of makes sense it's like an archetype of the PO down on his luck guy that would make a great partner but isn't able to do it or whatever um but no one really ever talks about the reverse the person who might be really phenomenal making a Sparky conversation but just have like a completely uh objectionable like undal wable personality right or the you know the the emotional stability for instance I'm I'm going to guess if somebody is very low in emotional stability they can probably kid many people there may be lots of people listening that have been in relationships with people like this who have got past the front door got into a relationship everything seemed fine and they go oh there's like a jackeline Hyde Batman and a Bruce Wayne scenario going on here and um I I totally get it people can't get a date sympathy is needed how can we get these dudes to be more attractive how can we get these women to to you know be more more uh interesting when they're talking to people but there is a a whole other cohort of people that need mate retention tactics as opposed to sort of mate attraction tactics so there's a couple interesting things here first of all I think the the traits that you're describing that are probably most likely to show that pattern would be some of the more you know like narcissism and mo Moy bism like dark dark Triad stuff I think um actually the evidence on those traits being appealing at first is like a little mixed I think they're like a little bit Desir um but they certainly don't bode well um for people's long-term relationships and that's men and women yeah that's men and women yeah so those those uh those attributes aren't great but what's so interesting with things like emotional instability is like the thing is like those attributes you tend to come off badly at first and they're they're not great in the long run but what starts to happen is that again this gets into this like inclusion of the other and self kind of thing thing is that somebody who is anxious if they get in a relationship with somebody who helps bring their anxiety down maybe because they're super cool or just they make that person feel safe and comfortable you can get a person who's like look I am still an anxious person but I'm not anxious when I'm with my partner I'm not anxious when when I'm with these two friends it doesn't even have to be romantic and I think it it's not like a root to personality change necessarily but it is a root to uh arriving at a place where you can have a happy fulfilling relationship because you've found a way to tone down those traits at least within the context of that relationship how much do you think that the results you found both from a stated and revealed preferences standpoint how much do you think that they were always this way way how much do you think that these preferences have been subject to change across time and can you think of any stated or revealed preferences that might be more or less subject to change it's so interesting because I I think about this all the time with the earning potential uh you know differences or lack thereof in particular um you know I um I I uh you know I watch a lot of movies and um I recently was watching the 1950s version of uh a stars born um and in that version you know the the the main female character becomes a major success um and uh the man just absolutely falls apart right he cannot handle his partner being successful and it is very understood in that movie like very few men would be okay with this like this is absolutely imag culating that this is happening to him so there is part of me that thinks boy this has got to be a recent phenomenon right where men and women have the same revealed preferences for things like earning potential and then I read uh you know like Jane Austin and you know there like everybody's gold digging so I guess this is a long-winded way of saying I don't know I suspect there are cultural trends that push these things around but you know I wish I had the data for what people what people really wanted in uh in the 1800s or you know going back even further but I I my guess would be is that as long as there was variability right as long as there were rich women and poor women in the in you know in the Social Circle as long as there were um rich men and poor men that both men and women were going to gravitate toward the good stuff uh regardless of of which gender they are pursuing but that's just a guess yeah it's an interesting one I I wonder whether um increased globalization and increased inequality uh in that we can now see there's people who have obscene amounts of wealth that haven't that that aren't like Godlike creatures you know that isn't bestowed down or blessed he's not the king he's not he's not somebody that's Untouchable it's somebody that you can track their Journey you know wal rixson read 800 pages and you know musk one of the top richest guys in the world you know his story so I wonder you know Candice Blake did some really fantastic work about how um the proliferation of sexy selfies in areas of high income inequality so basically it seems like women self-objectify more where they can see both how high they could climb with the right partner and how low they may be able to fall essentially so I wonder whether in a world that is basically that tuned up to 11 everybody can see how high they can climb everybody can see how low they could fall um but then you throw the spanner in the works now which is female earning potential and female Financial Independence you know women out earned men in the 20s it's basically a motherhood tax the pay Gap is essentially just a motherhood tax now and title 9's been reversed two women for every one man completing a four-year us college degree you know from the metrics perspective from 50 years ago if you'd not if you'd crossed off the m and the F and not shown people what it was they would have said oh those are the guys and those are the girlss and you go oh it's actually the other way around switch right so yeah you think what does it mean that ancestrally it it should be the case that women would be more sensitive to the resource and Status uh capacity of their partner in a world where they are now potentially out earning their partner especially during the time when they're looking to find a mate Etc you know as you grow up a little bit older men's desire to be obsessive and and Conquer and do Mastery and stuff like that plus motherhood tax I think results in men on average earning and still is going to result in them earning more across their lifespan but it's a real sort of upside down world how much can we change our uh both stated and revealed preferences how much are we able to step in and consciously go oh turn this down or turn this up yeah it's a great question you know we've tried to do some uh amount of experimental manipulations of people's stated preferences it turns out it's pretty hard it's pretty hard to change in a deliberate way people's ideas about what they want we can do it with you know sort of these it's like these conditioning paradigms right where that you you get people to experience uh positive outcomes with particular attributes and you do it more or less in various conditions but all of these effects that we get they're useful for testing things in the lab but you know we're not changing whether people say they care about earning prospects in an enduring way um I but I do think it's important like when I think about the the the problems when it comes to you know gender relations today I think a lot of it because because we see these revealed preferences aren't so different I think a lot of it is that like our ideas and our expectations and those things can matter I mean we can get really mad when our when we feel like our expectations aren't going to be met or you know when we think the world should be working this way but it's working some other way so I'm encouraged at one level that well it seems like if we want a root for change here we just got to change you know the way people think about themselves the way people see themselves at the same time I also know that that any kind of lasting intervention is always a [Music] challenge so what have you learned about where positive feelings about our partners come from like what what does it mean to say that we have a positive uh sort of disposition toward our partners what what is that sense and where where does it come from I mean it's a deep question because in because in some ways it's the the thing we focus on the most I mean again I'm a I'm a close relationships uh researcher first and foremost and the main thing we study is how positively people feel about their partners and we think it's important because it's going to predict um break up and divorce it's going to predict the health outcomes right um but how exactly do you come to to look at a rating scale and say I'm at the top of this scale I'm kind of middling um I think a lot of times we think it comes from uh this General sense that you kind of lock in and you retrieve it the way you would retrieve the response to any other question like oh I think I'm extroverted but I also think that there are certain key major moments that happen for people in their relationships sometimes they're called turning points right and sometimes it can be a small thing like the one time that uh you know you made breakfast for yourself and not me and that can be a real turning point and I realize like wait do you do you even like actually care that I'm here um it can also be a very positive thing like the time that you skipped hanging out with your friends because I'd had a bad day and those moments too can also sort of push us in dramatic ways that that again are are kind of random like that same event could have happened to 10 other people and not had the same positive effect that it did on me um so I think it's some combination of those two things right like overall senses that we kind of lock in and retrieve easily but also these little moments that uh that that end up being very memorable and and other than that I don't really have a good sense of how people integrate those things do you think that it would be useful for people to become better predictors of their own uh revealed mate preferences I wonder whether in your big cohort the people who's stated and revealed had the smallest distance between the two are more reliably successful in relationships because they're better able to uh expedite finding partners that are like the ones that they want to be like that's a really interesting idea and we've I don't I don't even know if we've ever collected the data that would really give us the right way to look at it um we at some point had some data where we uh tried to get a sense of who knew like who was going to get an accurate sense of like how popular they are and there are a few speed dating studies to that effect but not about like oh basically basically if you had relationship satisfaction if you just got one more for the people in relationships well I guess even for the people that weren't in relationships you could have asked a question like uh how satisfied are you typically in your relationships uh and if you had somebody you would have been able to see quite easily is there is there a covariance between someone's ability to stated and revealed are accurate they seem to be a little bit higher I mean if it was lower uh that would just throw a compl in my hypothesis but um yeah that would be cool to find out yeah yeah that's a really interesting idea and the the the general idea of looking at um how satisfied you are with a whole Suite of relationships you know it it this is where like polyamory research really has uh a leg up on what basic close relationship researchers do is because they can in princip see how you are reacting across multiple partners and that has the potential for all kinds of fascinating insights because it suggest you know we might be able to see things like you know um I say that I really care about attractiveness but turns out that I'm the kind of person who's I'm happier with the partner that I think is less attractive right we would be able to see those kinds of differences in the way you are reacting to multiple partners at the same time so unfortunately those samples are pretty hard to but they can reveal a ton of insights Paul Eastwick ladies and gentlemen Paul I Love This research I'm fascinated to see what you do next where should people go they want to keep up to date with all of the stuff that you're doing uh that's a that's a great question you can follow me on Twitter uh at Paul Eastwick um and uh and yeah I'm gonna have a book coming out in about a year and a half uh it's GNA be a little ways off so uh so yeah you can look for me then but for right now bring you back on love to bring you back on on the that'd be great that'd be great hell yeah we did it man appreciate it thanks so much if you enjoyed that episode you will love a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last couple of months and it's available right here go on give them a watch