Modern Wisdom - #528 - Kristina Durante - Can Women Have A Career And A Family?

Episode Date: September 19, 2022

Kristina Durante is a professor of marketing at Rutgers Business School and a social psychologist who studies the biology of decision-making and evolution of female psychology. For the first time in history, many women have the opportunity to pursue a career as their primary life path. But does this prohibit them from also having a family? Do women actually want to be mothers or was it their only option? Do women actually want careers or is it just a shiny new opportunity? Expect to learn if women have an impulse to actually have children or just to have sex, whether careers make women happy, whether the marriages of career women are more or less successful, whether women's ovulatory cycles change their preferences for badboy mates, what buying expensive bags and shoes signals and much more... Sponsors: Get over 37% discount on all products site-wide from MyProtein at https://bit.ly/proteinwisdom (use code: MODERNWISDOM) Get 15% discount on all VERSO’s products at https://ver.so/modernwisdom (use code: MW15) Get 15% discount on Craftd London’s jewellery at https://bit.ly/cdwisdom (use code MW15) Extra Stuff: Check out Kristina's website - https://kristinadurante.com/  Follow Kristina on Twitter - https://twitter.com/KristinaDurante  Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello everybody, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Christina Duranty. She's a professor of marketing at Rutgers Business School and a social psychologist who studies the biology of decision-making and evolution of female psychology. For the first time in history, many women have the opportunity to pursue a career as their primary life path. But does this prohibit them from also having a family? Do women actually want to be mothers or is it their only option? Do women actually want careers or is it just a shiny new opportunity? Expect to learn if women have an impulse to actually have children or just to have sex. Whether careers make women happy, whether the marriages of career women are more or less

successful, whether women's ovulatory cycles change their preferences for bad boy mates, what buying expensive bags and shoes, signals and much more. I very much appreciate Christina's input and viewpoint here. I like the fact that she is an advocate for women's wealth. I like the fact that she is aware of some of the challenges that have faced in family lives of women that are pursuing careers and in the career lives of women that want to have a family. I think that the elephants in the room that continues to kind of be ignored by mainstream messaging is that everybody needs to make trade-offs and sacrifices and in order to be able to get past these problems and not have them completely destroy you and come out of nowhere, you need to be aware of what the data suggests and, subjectively, the experiences of people that have already tried to do things you're trying to do. So, yes, very much appreciate the fact

that we've got an evolutionary psychologist coming at this from a different angle. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Christina Duranty. Christina Duranty, welcome to the show. Thanks so much, Chris. Thank you for having me. Did you see the Serena Williams article in Vogue? I did not. Oh, well, let me tell you about it. So her issue, the article is about the fact she's not 41.

She's still a top flight tennis player, and she's got one child, I think, Olympia, and is now, was aware that she would have a limited window, perhaps to have more children, so is having to leave the sport. She had some complications, medically, after the last child, perhaps slightly brought on by being an elite athlete. I don't know know the sort of stresses

that that puts your body under the kind of internal changes or external changes. And then there's a couple of sections here. So believe me, I never wanted to have to choose between tennis and the family she wrote. I don't think it's fair if I were a guy, I wouldn't be writing this because I'd be out there playing and winning while my wife was doing the physical

labor of expanding our family. I have to presume that she means the the physical labor of expanding our family. I have to presume that she means the literal physical labor of expanding the family. Maybe I'd be more of a Tom Brady if I had that opportunity. Williams wrote pointing that the football legend Brady 45 who has three children and played in the NFL for 22 seasons before announcing his retirement in February

before changing his mind and announcing that it would return for a 23rd season, just one month later. Ahead of her 41st birthday, Williams realized she had an arrow window to get pregnant again. I definitely don't want to be pregnant again as an athlete, she said, these days, if I have to choose

between building my tennis resume and building a family, I choose the latter. I thought that was very interesting. Yeah, that is interesting, especially since I think, Tom Brady's unretirement is causing discord in his own marriage from at least with the gossip is, right? But there's something to that women do often have to make a trade-off that men typically don't have to.

This is kind of a new thing with women being able to be the serenadeena Williams of the world, where the blanking on the name of CO of a company, and we kind of have to figure out, like, what are we going to excel at? Are we going to excel at our careers? Are we going to excel as a parent? Because it's really hard to do both very well at the same time.

And so, historically, that has sort of been the contract that we used to enter into through marriages. The mail works and the female stays at home and runs the household, which is a lot of work. And what I find really interesting is now that women have made tremendous strides into the workplace, they're finding themselves no better off in terms of household, you know, running of the household and things that they have to do to make, you know, the household run, all of that unpaid labor isn't going away it's it's still there and what we find through the

research is that women who working women actually do more housework than women who are stay at home moms what what's the statistics behind that how does that work? Well we just sort of get them to report how many hours a day they spend on various activities around the house and what I think is happening is that working women feel more guilt surrounding not doing what's typically thought of as helping around the house. And they're actually doing more. And more housework than that was done even in the 60s. Now that has a lot to do with kids too, because kids require a lot of parental involvement.

Now then I think was happening, certainly in the 50s and 60s with scheduling and all that kind of stuff. What scheduling? Well, now there's more parent involvement and you know, even play dates, you got to call it the other parent, you got to figure out, you know, who's volunteering for this and that and the other thing. And I think there's, you know, when kids are involved in so many extracurricular activities, rather than just letting them to go play six fall out in the street. Oh, okay. So this is perhaps a byproduct, not of helicopter parenting,

but of an overly observant parental style. Yeah, I think so. And I think that part of it is helicopter parenting that we're doing now more than we ever had before. We just kind of let our kids run around. And that's a whole nother topic, I guess, to talk about is, you know, how we manage our kids' lives now in a way that we never had, you know, before. Going back to what you said at the very beginning, it's a novel situation that we found ourselves

in where women can have the choice between being a carer or having a career. And I think it's the UK statistics say that more women are childless at 30 than not now in the UK. So 50.1% of women by 30 do not have children. So they are in the the bigger age bracket. I also saw Joyce Benenson's newest paper, quote, just off hand, half of all women in the world are married by 18. Half. Half of all women in the world are married by 18. Half. Half of all women in the world are married by the age of 18. Wow. So...

That blew my mind. Those two statistics side by side. Yeah. Absolutely took my head off. So some of those women are waiting that long. No. So what I think it is is that the childless at 30, 50.1% is exclusively, I want to say to the UK, I think it's the UK, there's definitely one in Wales.

My point being that even this is novel ancestrally, the choice between the two, and it is very much a weird phenomenon as well, Western-educated industrialized blah, blah. It's very much over our side, but on average, half of all women in the world are married by 18, evidently skewed by probably a lot of Africa, a lot of India, some kind of an atmosphere. That doesn't shock me as much, but I'd be interested to know, like, for the United States or other Western countries, it's got to be much. Oh, way later.

Way, way, way later. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. But, right, I mean, that's a mismatch, you know, ancestralally from what usually happens in terms of mating. And it's so interesting because usually there's this critical period when kids hit puberty and they become really interested in that's where like intersectional competition comes in and this is where you know and girls hit it

before boys hit it and you get a sense of like where do you sort of land on the mating market and it kind of solidifies so if you if you are a big nerd in high school you never lose that nerdiness I know because that's me I never lose it in my mind I'm you know a nerd know because that's me. I never lose it. In my mind, I'm a nerd. And so that's when you're supposed to be figuring out where you're going to go. And that's when all of the great magic happened in terms of mating, ancestry.

And now we have this period where we're just keeping, keep dating and keep dating and keep dating and keep dating. And, you know, and, and, you know, reproducing or not, and certainly a lot of women delay it. I mean, Serena Williams is a geriatric mother, you know, in terms of, you know, in today's terms too, but a lot, but she's not unlike a lot of women

who are delaying it. There's, you know, women do have a lot more options now, even though that trade-off still haunts us, because, you know, we can move up that corporate ladder, but as women move up the corporate ladder, that doesn't open up a whole new sea of men who are going to come home and shore up all of the duties on the home front, you know, whereas the reverse is true for men.

So women kind of find themselves in this dilemma where they're contributing a lot at home financially and they're contributing in a lot at home with unpaid labor. And that could be just because women don't want to relinquish, you know, some of the things to men men also tend to do more, I guess, what's a good within marriages, cause a lot of unpaid labor disputes that were never around before and discord and resentment and all that kind of stuff that bubbles up. Did you look at the fact that women who deny the fact that they're the primary breadwinner, even when they are one?

Yes, so in a survey of married couples where all of them were involved in a situation where the women was the breadwinner, over 60% said that that was not true. So, in a survey where we know this about people, people want to report in a socially desirable way. So that's a problem in most experiments that use surveys. But it was interesting because they were pre-selected, a sample of individuals where researchers knew that these were, you know, couples where the women, the woman, was the breadwinner and they didn't want to report it that That was actually the case so over 60% said that they were not that it was the man or that they were equal

Well culturally at the moment are we not seeing a lot of female empowerment? You can have it all be a boss bitch clap back, you know compete with the the men. More women, two to one, female to males, completing four U.S. college degrees by 2030, 1,111 pounds more earned by women between the ages of 21 and 29 in the UK. Like, it seems surprising to me that women would under report the fact that they had the primary bread winners when culturally, at least what the media perhaps says, this isn't necessarily emergent bottom up,

this is what's happening in terms of norms, but there does seem to be a pretty big push for women to become more masculine-ized in that way. Yeah, I mean, I guess it's so that's the haunting of sort of the traditional norms that still are not even though there is a lot of movement towards women, female empowerment, it's just really hard to give. So a lot of women still want a partner who is at their own level, so making as much as them or more. And they want a counterpart. And so I could see where, so the reflection of women not wanting to say,

yeah, I'm the breadwinner. Like, it is, it is the haunting of that, you know, sort of traditional values that we used to have. Like, they've been around for so long, we were we had this system of women having this obligatory investment in children and men going off to do other things. Women couldn't go off to war because then children would die. So with any genes that supported a penchant for waging war in women. Men were free to go to that because they weren't having the baby is. And that's something that we do know that was happening. Women were having the babies.

Men were not having the babies. And so all of our female ancestors going back in time, this is before birth control. And so if you were a woman and you were sexually active, you were probably a mother, most certainly. We didn't have the luxuries of outsourcing any care for most of human existence. All of the stuff that's happening in our modern world now is really new and our brains just haven't caught up. So we have a part of our brain that can say, you know, women empowerment and that's kind of, you know,

we kind of have to push the social norms forward and then, you know, we learn what we're valued and it can cause change. But, you know, this is the part of our brain that can think about this stuff intellectually is scaffolded on to deeper brain systems that have just been around for millions of years and it's a hard override sometimes. Do careers make women happy? Yes. I would say it also depends on the career. I would say it depends on the career. I would say it depends on the job. I think that women face more of that mating, not mating parenting, but sort of status driving parenting conflict. The career

family trade-off conflict, I think that women experience it more than men do. But when women are able to take time for themselves and pursue what they're passionate about, that increases their overall well-being. But women experience a lot of burnout, women experience a lot of stress because there are these demands on them. Well, someone needs to give birth to the child, right? Someone needs to do that.

The, the bit that kind of got me a little bit about Serena's discussion there, the bit that left a bit of a bad taste in my mouth was when she said about labor, doing the physical labor. It's like, look, like men can't get pregnant. That's, that is an issue that we have. I understand that there are some disparities. Men think about sex more than women. Should we say that the fact that women don't think about sex

as much as men do is an imbalance that needs to be corrected so that men can be made more happy in the world? I don't know. My point being that, especially for the first couple of years, I don't have kids, but I'm around some friends that do. And the dad is a spare part for the first two years. The mother is the one that has more of an innate sense about what the child needs. The mother is the one that the child seems to pine for a lot more. They're the ones that have a better bond. They're the ones that are able to deal with crying and nappy changes and care and they have this intuition, that is an imbalance between the capacities of men

and the capacities of women. I mean, Serena's worth several hundred million dollars. I'm sure that she can find a perfectly successful team of nannies that could come in and take over. But the fact that she might feel guilt around doing that isn't something I think that's been laid at her feet from vestigial, evolutionary oppression or some sort of ruling of pressure from men, I think that it is a byproduct of the fact that the way that we create babies is asymmetric with regards to what men and women do in terms of their investment.

Yeah, I think so too. So you're saying it's not an evolutionary vestige, but the biological factor, what they are. Yeah. And so, I mean, as Serena, you know, so all of these things putting so much burden on women and there's so many women who are just burnt out because of this trade off, but women of means do have the ability to outsource this even at the level of outsourcing through surrogacy who has the baby. A lot of women are doing this now, right? Is that what rich women do?

I think so, don't they? I don't know. That's part of it. She could do that if she wanted to do it, but she's already a mother. And for many women, once that switch gets turned on, there's so much biology that comes online that was never online before that has to do with an increase in nurturing and wanting to care for children.

So there's a caregiving mismatch between men and women and not mismatch, but maybe that's the wrong word for it. But it's just an imbalance. So moms are just more nurturing and in dance. And a lot of that has to do with once you have a baby, boy, do these hormones, the hormones are basically the puppeteers of our behavior. And once you have a baby, we have this whole suite

of hormones that come online and direct our mothering behavior. We see it across all of their species. I mean, for those of you who have seen, you know, animals become mothers, you could see, you know, a female who, you know, was, you know, aggressive and taking huge risks than that she has a baby and she might take risks to that baby, but, you know, she all of a sudden becomes like the most caring

and nurturing, you know, she all of a sudden becomes like the most caring and nurturing, you know, mom of air. And so men don't ever have, I mean, certainly things happen and there has been research showing that, you know, when men become fathers, their home Arnold profile changes too, but not to the level of what happens for women with prolactin and oxytocin and that sort of direct that, you of direct that caregiving. And I don't know how much that goes away because we still have, even after you have kids,

and they grow up, you're becoming a grandmother. I mean, that whole process where women can no longer reproduce, and the leading theory is that, then you're no longer reproducing because your daughters are starting to reproduce and you cannot help her if you want to. Grant mother hypothesis, right? Yeah, the grandmother hypothesis. And so, so I don't know that there was huge selection pressure for women to ever, you

know, lose that once they became mothers. And that's what go one step that, is there a natural impulse for women to want to have children at all? That is a really great question. And so, yeah, I think. Just to clarify the question, obviously, the point is women could want to have sex and a byproduct of having sex would be having children.

What we talked about here is that once you have a child there is a maternal cascade that gets flicked on and is very difficult to stop and not only continues through child number one, potentially two, three, four and so on, but then also continues you into grandmotherhood as well and all the rest of it. The point that I'm interested in is prior to having the child, is there an impulse to have children? So yes and no. So here, so women are complicated because we have two hormones when we're naturally cycling, say on birth control as a whole nother, ball wax. But so women have sex hormones. We have testosterone, but the primary one in women is, I shouldn't say primary one, because we have a significant amount of testosterone, but across the cycle, estrogen increases,

and then it dips down again, and then progesterone increases, and we're preparing our body every month for a pregnancy. And progesterone is more of a nurturing hormone that will increase progressively if the woman becomes pregnant within that cycle. And so I used to do a lot of work looking at women's behavior across the cycle.

And so when looking at desire to have a child, even things like would you get an abortion and really heavy questions that I tend to steer away from now, there's such hot buttons. But what we find is that when women are ovulating, so this is a time when estrogen has just increased and they're really interested, their sexual desires increased and what dips down is all the parenting stuff. They're not interested in children at all, when they're ovulating. Now, when that's finished and their body is preparing to potentially become pregnant, then that interest creeps up a little bit.

So to answer your question, before women have babies, are they more interested in having children than men? I bet you, if we just randomly sampled, we'd find a sex difference there. But because women kind of cycle in and out of high hormones that do two different things. One's mating and sex, one's parenting.

That, you know, it kind of depends. So yeah, you're right. We don't need an interest in children to get them. We just need an interest in sex. But once women become pregnant, that's when nature says, all right, time to do the caregiving, time to become more nurturing and want to do the nesting. And we set up for the baby. We become interested in watching, you know, bringing home baby.

And we wonder why our partners aren't interested in it. And they're not reading all the books that we want them to read because this is a big deal. So it's like, then it's a complete you know, share. So would you say perhaps that men and women diverge a lot more in their behavior and their predisposition upon the point at which women get pregnant? I imagine that that must cause a little bit of friction in in in marriages, especially where the man and woman perhaps were very similar for a long time. And then there is this big cascade of hormones

that gets released. I've also heard that toward the back end of pregnancy, that women can actually feel more turned off or even partially disgusted by the smell of their male partner and they're more attracted to the smell of their own kin. So their genetic lineage and this again is like, I'm very, very close. I'm to giving birth. I'm very, very vulnerable.

I need to be with someone that I know is no physical threat to me. There's also, I mean, you know, changes in hormones. When girls go on the pill versus come off the pill, there's apparently potential changes in attraction toward mates that one of the pieces of dating advice that I saw floating around on the internet is Before you marry a woman get her to come off the pill for six months to see if she still likes you and All of this stuff my point being like it's fascinating the hormonal profile of women is is absolutely fascinating And it's fascinating in a way that men I don't think are really ever going to understand Yeah, yeah, I I don't think so it is it to understand. Yeah, I don't think so.

It is really interesting. So your original question was, do women want children? Or something like this? And so all of the stuff before they become a mom, I think a lot of that is the sort of social values that we learn. I mean, it's just kind of like what you do, is get married and have a kid. And that's part of it too. And part of it probably is once a month,

we have this kind of hormones that come online that make us feel like I should probably have a family. And then it's a week of having higher sexual desire. And then it's... I heard that the behavior change across women's ovuatory cycle has come under quite a lot of fire and criticism recently. What's your thoughts on that? I know you've done a lot of work here. So I think that criticism comes from, you know, how do you, how are we calculating the cycle

and how are we estimating fertility? Because for a long time, that varied. It was almost like a varied by researcher. And so there was a lot of criticism about having such flexibility with how you calculate it means that you can just sort of figure out where your effect that you want to show sits in all of these different ways and maybe one of them works and you can publish a paper on it. So there was a big push to come to a consensus with how are we going to be estimating fertility. Well, the best way is to really just go in and measure day by day hormonal profiles. And as you clinically, and then figure that out, as opposed to having a researcher estimate

the cycles and so forth. But any time, so there's a lot of stereotypes that surround women and hormones. Women are hormonal, women, you know, don't make them cry. They shouldn't, you know, they shouldn't be, you know, holding political office because maybe they're going to be on their period and they're cranky and this and the other. And so because of those stereotypes, it's really difficult to study changes in women's behavior across the cycle because you do get, I've gotten personally a lot of pushback on looking at behavioral shifts related to shifts in hormones on items

that are issues that are pretty sensitive. So like political preference. Oh yeah, didn't you put something out that CNN had a problem with to do with Obama and voting yeah yeah yeah so so first of all men's hormones and influence all this stuff it was like christian you don't need to give another caveat right you're among friends here okay uh yes and you you know, that was... I should have been prepared for it.

I wasn't prepared for the pushback. So what had happened with that is I started seeing little shifts in my data in women's religiosity. So just general questions that we just had as part of, you know, general surveys that we would give women like, how much do you believe in God? And then it would like, there would be a dip at ovulation, like they believed less. You know, I'm like, that's so weird. And that's kind of how we started following up on it was looking at women's religious views. And they would loosen a little bit. So we're not talking like I'm a Devout Catholic and then I'm ovulating and now I'm an atheist. These are just like tiny shifts But we pick them up because it's the same woman serving his her own control throughout the cycle

And that has a lot of statistical power So even if you just become you know if you're answering on a scale one through nine and you're at an eight you come down to a seven That's gonna pick up as something something shifting inside of you and so from there, you come down to a seven, that's gonna pick up as something, something shifting inside of you. And so from there, as a young scholar, I was like, oh my God, this is probably having major implications for even political views, especially the social political views that have sort of, the sort of sexual undertones to them,

like wanting to control people's sexuality or a punish for different mating strategies and stuff like that. And so that's where I took it into looking at social political orientation and finding that it was kind of similar for single women at least in my data. And I thought, well well this is going to come into play and it just happened that you know obama was running against mit romney and they were both relatively attractive men so i could it was

kind of like a control for that because they're both tall and attractive and uh... and and i ran a survey and asked these social political questions and calculated the fertility. It was a cross-sectional so wherever a woman was on the day that I did this huge survey and I asked them to who they're gonna vote for. And we found that when single women were ovulating versus when they were not, this was they were more likely to, well, they became a lot more liberal

and more likely to vote for Obama, but the reverse was true for women who were in committed relationships. So they became a bit more conservative. And when they were ovulating? Yeah, when they were ovulating and more likely to vote for Mitt Romney. So again, ovulation, estrogen is sex hormone that's high and it's shifting

these, you know, views. And so there must be some underlying sexual strategy implication for what's going on. What do you think that is? Well, it's like, we really want our attitudes and our behaviors to be as aligned as possible. So if our behavior is one thing, our attitude is we're going to shift our attitude to match it. So, you know, for women in relationships, so the answer is, I don't really know for sure, but I think you're sort of going on. You're really interested in sex, more so at ovulation than any other time in the month.

And so when you're thinking a lot about sex, it's really hard to also think about God for many women. So, you know, so for single women, it's a little bit easier to understand because, you know, they're free to think about sex and have sex with the partner that they can optimize mate choice with. Women can't really optimize mate choice who are in marriages unless that is their partner and they're tend to become more conservative, I think, because that's the relationship that they're in is a mated relationship. Would there be potentially something around

wanting to control other women's sexual, like, inter-sexual competition for mates? But I would have thought that that would have been higher among the women that hadn't yet found a mate. I thought that they would have wanted to control the sexuality of other women more when they don't have a mate that's locked down than when they do. Yeah. That's, you know, That's an interesting question. One of the interpretations that we had for the women in

relationships was just that. It's punishing promiscuous women because you've kind of have a study stream of resources. You've got a partner and women who are single represent a threat to that. You're invested in the market more. Yeah, and so I think that, yeah, so they're like abortion, yes, same sex marriage. No, I mean, even though, so these things are tangentially related to sexual strategies, even like drug youth, you know, so drug youth, you know, they didn't want, you know, marijuana to be legalized, you know, these women in relationships. So I think it's trying to lock down the threat, the behavior, you just punish the behavior of all those women out there who are threats to what they have. Now, you know, and so, yeah, single women are, you know, are still

competitive, but I think that, you know that they're on the hunt for- Well, they've got less skin in the game, right? Yeah, they've got less skin in the game because if you lose a husband to one of these women, and yeah, I mean, we didn't look at it. It'd be interesting to look at it even outside of the cycle, and somebody might have looked at this, you know, so you kind of just align yourself with the values that are associated with your way of life and protecting that. Yeah, you want the world to give you more of what it is that you've got at the moment or what you think would enable you to move forward to the strategy.

Okay, so going back to the relative career dynamics within couples, men and women, Vincent Haranam, who you might be familiar with, he's been on the show before. He had some really interesting statistics. I just want to give you here around financial prospects and mate desirability and stuff. Women valued good financial prospects in a mate roughly twice as much as men did. This gender difference has not changed. In fact, in a 2014 Pew Research survey reported that 78% of unmarried women placed a high premium on finding a spouse with a steady job.

Only 48% of men shared this view. One study found that marriages where the wife out underhusband were 50% more likely to end in divorce. Another study also found that men who were not the primary breadwinner were more likely to use a reptile dysfunction meditation, medication, meditation relative to men that were. I've also seen statistics around women who are the primary breadwinner faking more orgasms, reporting less sexual satisfaction. So for all that it's well and good offering

women the opportunity to try and have it all to be able to do both, it seems like a zero sum game, at least in part, or a closer to zero sum game than a positive sum game. And this is the fundamental issue of trade-offs, right? You, having it all is not possible. Everybody has to make trade-offs. And it seems like if men help women, and that causes a relationship to be more likely to fail, what are we doing here? If men help women do what?

Do you have a job? To, to focus more on to their career if they push them across, but in so doing, they basically hamstring themselves to be on a ticking time clock. I've also seen William Costello was telling me that hypogamy, there is a little bit of data showing that hypogamy is reducing, but it's reducing directly proportionally in line with female infidelity, but not male infidelity.

So yeah, wild. Yeah. So, yes, this is a conundrum, but, you know, so many women, you know, so, it's a hard subject to talk about because I personally am a huge proponent of women building wealth because I think it equals freedom. And that brings a lot of value with it.

But yes, it does disturb partnerships. There's no way around that. So you're right, as women start earning more, Meredith Select satisfaction goes down for men and for women. And you know, as there's, you know, that's really interesting the data that you were talking about.

I know that we had dug some up for a paper that we were writing looking at. As women move up the corporate ladder, they're more likely to be come divorced, but that's not true for men. If women win political office, they're more likely to get divorced than the women counterparts who lost their political office. So, it's just like the more women gain status, the more discord happens in their marriage. And I guess that's no big shocker.

So how do you get around that? I mean, there are many relationships that you'd have to be like, you are the Michael Dell and you help your wife get, she's never gonna be at your level. So that's not gonna be a problem. It's more of this sort of like mid-manager level problems when you have dual couples that are fighting for, that's another thing, fighting for time for your career.

Yeah, well I mean, here's another element. Why do you think it is that women who earn a lot of money want a man that earns a lot of money? Well, so I think that's also a vestige that's very deeply seated in our brain, and it's hard to eradicate that. It almost, like you feel like so much power and value in being able to attract a man of high being able to, you know, attract a man of high status. Also, you have more in common with that person, or maybe you feel like you do,

or you feel like you're more attracted to those kind of men. That doesn't go away as a woman getting higher in status. And so, you know, I know that, you know, there's folks that say, oh, well, you know, women are going to have to start going for blue collar guys who just make a lot of money in their plumber. And again, we have that part of our brain that might be able to do a couple of gymnastics, mental gymnastics, and come to that. But it's really difficult. So that wanting someone who's your counterpart or even higher than you in status,

it's pretty down deep inside of our brain. And so can we overcome it? Yeah, how do we overcome it? I think like the most highest status men in the world are gonna have to start doing laundry and we're gonna have to see it. You know, and they're gonna have to start taking parental leave to take care of their kids

and we're gonna have to see it. You know, so what you're saying here is that the men that hold the highest status, that cascade down from there, the social norms, the other men follow, that tell us what is highly regarded, what is held in high status, need to be setting an example by doing things which affords men who are struggling to compete with their female mates earning education status potential, it allows them to be put on a pedestal for doing things that would have been typically more domestic. Right. So I think that may be a difficult ask. Yeah, I think it's a, I think it is. I think because you you're saying it's a difficult ask because men are going to want to do that stuff.

Especially the men at the top. Yeah, and if it is, it's a stage like George Cloise doing laundry today. For a photo walk. For a photo walk. People magazine. And then I don't know, maybe there needs to be that. Maybe companies can mandate their leadership team take family leave. So there are things that can happen, and yeah, I don't think men are going to be lining up for laundry or whatever,

but I could see that changing women. Yeah, so it's like, I can't get George Clooney, but I want someone who's like him and he's a guy who does laundry. So that's acceptable. And I'm still attracted to my mate who is going around doing this in my house. We are up against a serious God's eye coordination problem here, aren't we? I think, I mean, this is one of the fascinating things. I very much enjoy talking about the dynamics that underpin it. I very much get switched off when I hear people on the internet a lot of the time on Twitter saying that this is the way that the world should be.

And the reason that I do that is it sounds a lot like hypocrisy to me, because revealed and stated preferences are clashing up against each other face-first here. The only reason that Tom Holland and Zendaya made headlines, apart from the fact that they're both superstars, was that she's taller than him. And that was being used as, look, you see, short men shouldn't be so self-conscious about their height. You go, do you really think that short men aren't trying

to date Zendaya? Like, do you really think that that's the case? So my point being that when stated preferences get put out on the internet, they sound great in egalitarian. When revealed preferences come through, everybody's still trying to chase that. I mean, I'm sure that you've seen this Leonardo DiCaprio thing at the moment, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've seen so funny that grass.

Unbelievable, right? Okay, so I know that you've done research on bad boys. Women, why are women still chasing bad boys? Leonardo DiCaprio, John Mayer, and do women's preferences for bad boys change over time as they age? Oh, that's interesting. So yeah, when we say bad boy, I mean, that's like a, you know, a moniker that we use, I guess, to me, somebody who's really socially dominant and, you know, charismatic and,

you know, I always use George Clooney, but I know he's so dated because anybody I mentioned that too is like, he's really old now. And he's student, he's old. Well, who can I use? I don't know. But just sort of thinking about the classic, rubble without a cause type of a guy. I mean, like think about all the movies and the songs

and the metal bands. I mean, these guys are all the movies and the songs and the metal bands. I mean, these guys are sexy. But more than that, there's something evolutionarily put in there as well. There's something evolutionarily there. So social dominance was, it bought you a lot over the course of human history, and it bought you a lot of status. And if you were a risk taker, that bought you a lot. You were really good at protection.

You were really good at finding. So all of these are sort of like proxies for like estimations about how good you might be in terms of yes getting resources, but yes, and yes, your status. But if we talk about our most anciently evolved attraction systems, it's indirect genetic benefits. And then when you're talking about... What's that mean? That means genes.

So if this is the top dog guy, and if I have, I'm attracted to him. So we don't have to think, if I have a baby with him, my son's gonna have those genes. It's like, we don't really think. Yeah, but it's just like that increased attraction. Like, you are just programmed to optimize mate choice. And so that's why we find these like devil-make-hair guys. So now, you know, is it, is it as valuable in our, you know, nowadays? I don't know. That's a question I'm maybe we can talk about, but it certainly was. And Sastroly, these are the guys that were the first ones up on the hill when we needed a cocker, you know, nowadays, I don't know, that's a question I maybe we can talk about, but it certainly was.

And Sastroly, these are the guys that were the first ones up on the hill when we needed a conquer, you know, another group. But, you know, so, you know, and then, but these guys also don't make the best husbands in the world. So often women do have to make a trade-off between, you know, different features in a mate that they value. Didn't you find out though that women looked at bad boys and that they did think that they would be better fathers? Yeah, for them. So, yes. So, yeah, this is one of my favorite studies I ever ran

because we hired an actor and he was just amazing because he played both roles He presented he was a twin right yeah, yeah, he was like Herb at it and we had a Hollywood screenwriter right a bad boy and we had a Hollywood screener writer and a kind of a nerd a shy standoff just kind of guy and Yeah, you know When women were imagining, so they were talking to this guy,

thinking he was a prospective partner for them, like they might date. And so then when they're like thinking about themselves with this guy, they did when they were ovulating report that, oh my God, I totally seem doing my dishes and he'd probably be a great dad. And so it's like these rose colored glasses came on, especially when it came to partner skills. So it wasn't like, oh, yeah, when I'm ovulating, I think

he's going to be a better guitar player or a better piano player or a nicer to his grandma. It was like, you know, he's going to be a better partner for me. Overall. So yeah, so but that's that's what I'm sorry outside of ovulating would these women or other women not seeing the bad boys, the preferential Cara, would they have seen the nerd? So Then I'd have to I don't remember these so so so so it's like the stable guy We always kind of want those qualities at some level, but It was it wasn't like they were totally turned off by the bad guy or bad boy guy

at, you know, at lower fertility. Well, that's a dangerous element, right? Like this is where some of the redder colonnans of the internet find kernels of truth that they can latch onto that, you know, you use charisma and social dominance as a proxy for confidence, competence, conscientiousness, industriousness, all of the thing, you know, status resources blah, blah, blah. And it's pretty robust, which is a little bit of a difficult one, because again, revealed and stated preferences. I want the, but then I suppose these are stated preferences as well, right? So they are, but we also, we also videotaped their behaviors and, you know, nonverbal verbal, they were acting very differently, you know, with these flicking the hair and the

playing with the hair. And, you know, and so in the same session, they met with these set of twins. One twin was dirty, one twin was a bad boy. And that guy asked the same question. So for example, the nerdy guy would be like, so what are you doing for the holiday? Oh, me and my boyfriend are going to go to Las Vegas. Then the bad boy asked her what she's going to be doing for the holidays. She said, me and my friend are going to be going to Las Vegas.

So little tiny change. Oh my god. What happened are revealed because, you know, this is an indicator that there is increased attraction to this, you know, bad way type of guy. Same man. So you can't say like, oh, I want to say like, you know, dreamy and the other one is so ugly.

No, same guy controlled. It's his behavior came across as like, you know, go out with me, don't, I don't care, whatever. But if you go out with me, like you will write with your left hand if you're right-handed, that's how great it's gonna be, you know. So, all right, that's what's going on internally. What about the local ecology?

How do sex ratios change women's desire for career versus family? So I Looked it's a little bit and it was really stemming from like why was I such a nerd and in high school like why do women? you know I just wanted to understand like what makes women like into sort of lean in type of woman versus lean out type of a woman. And I wondered if, first of all, I wondered if how they did on the mating market when

they first hit puberty had anything to do with it. But then I found that one thing that disrupts the mating market is sex ratio. So when there's no men around, women become more competitive because there's just fewer partners out there for them, we know that. And one of the things that we looked into was do women prefer, which is their ambition change? So they were becoming more ambitious and they were desiring career over family. So that trade off, when we led women to believe that this is a college campus,

that there was just like so many more women around than there were men, then they were like, I wanna career. And not just any career, I want a career. Not just any career, I want to be in a leadership team, a corporate company. So that's not just, so we say that's stated preference, I guess, but we found this in demographic data too, which it's not an experiment. So when there's fewer men around, there's more women that are pilots and surgeons and lawyers and so that's great news because women can and want to do this job, but it has a lot to do with like what's going on in the mating environment.

Is there an argument, is there an argument to be made as well that there's nothing else for them to spend their time on with the men. So I might as well invest it into that, but if the right man came along, then the career might stop. Yeah. So the opposite of that is when there were just sort of like, you know, when there were a lot of men around and there were a lot of great options, then women wanted family. So it's sort of like, you know, your brain is kind of figuring out, like, what's going on in my environment? Is it good for, you know, mating? Is it not good?

And then sort of directing your behavior accordingly. And if it's a good time to strike, and you can get a really high quality partner, which is sort of the opposite was, we were leading them to believe that there were a lot of men on campus. Then it was like, oh, I'm going to do family. And so we started calling it Plane and Plan B. And I'm a plan, so there's something wrong with Plan B.

I'm a Plan B person because I was a nerd in high school because I couldn't get out of my own head about being a nerd ever. I was just like, career, career, career, career, career. And then I went back to my high school reunion and they're like, oh, okay. Oh yeah, Christina, you're always in the library. They're like, oh, who are you?

They didn't remember me, because I was always, I guess, in the library. But yeah, so I think that it changes with the mating market. The wildest thing that I see there is, the sector ratio hypothesis, when I first learned about that, it blew my mind. Then I learned about the changes in mating strategies or short term versus long term and women, the gatekeepers to sex, they're the

supply and men of the demand. So it's kind of them, I guess, that play by the rules that are going on. Men don't really have the rules. They're just go, go, go. But what you've got going on here is behavior influenced by the mating market, the local mating market, which isn't necessarily to do with mating. You would say your career as a woman is one of the things that is, as a man, you might be able to make the argument that your career choice is very much influenced by the mating market. But you want to, I would imagine that the reverse may be true that men also become more competitive for particular types of jobs in a place where there are fewer, fewer women. But the fact that you are influencing behavior, which doesn't directly relate to your mate

value, really, based on something which is to do with mating dynamics is absolutely insane. Yeah, well I think it's like we're so hardwired to figure out what's going on in the mating market that it just it trickles down to whatever the tools are to get your own resources like well I might have to get I might have to go out and you know figure out how I'm going to do this on my own. Or, you know, we really don't know. And it could be like, well, I'm going to go into these high-paying careers because maybe there's more men there. But we did have a lot of fun.

Oh my god, that is such an unpopular theory to go for. The reason that women want high-paying careers is because there's maybe some hot men in there. Yeah, I mean, so no. But, you know, we don't know. But so the leading theory is that, you know, you got to take care of yourself. And maximizing dependence. Yeah, and you know, running a household is really hard and it just is so much, it is so

much easier when there's another adult around. When you have someone that, you know, you can pool resources with, it's easier and it's more difficult because then you've got to manage the relationship. But I think that a lot of women, especially young women, that is really important. Am I going to find my soulmate, my ideal mate right now, or is that going to be really hard for me? Because if it is, then I've got to figure out in this world with these tools, how I'm going to support myself.

You did a ton of work around buying behavior, what consumer behavior, what women buy and why they do it and stuff. If someone has never thought about, I don't even know what you call it, gendered buying. If someone's never considered this, why do women buy the things that they buy? What is that to know here? Well, that's a really broad question. And so my first, I guess, series of studies that I looked at women's consumer behavior was looking at their consumer behavior across the ovulatory cycle because these fundamental motives that we have in life, mating, get status, have kids, protect yourself from disease, these are all fundamental motives.

And when women are ovulating, like we were talking about before, they're really interested. Their sexual desire goes up. I thought, well, if their sexual desire is up, maybe they want to look sexier. And so the first study I ever did was looking at women's clothing preferences across the ovulatory cycle. And we would find these really strong differences in what women would choose to wear for themselves out of their own closet or even just imagined in their head

or when they were shopping on a website. It was just, it was sexier. They wanted to look more fashionable. So they were spending more money and choosing more items that were sexy when they were ovulating and less so when they weren't. But all of these, I always call them tools

because that's what products are. It's like, what does evolutionary psychology have to do with what we buy? And it's like, there's so many products out there, most products out there, serve these fundamental motives that have deep evolutionary roots.

Even lipstick certainly wasn't around 10,000 years ago, but the motivation to buy is still a motivation that was around a long time ago and influenced by all of the factors that we're talking about. Like, who am I going to the club with? Who's in my social network? How do things look for me? Am I married? Am I single? All these things? And then we can predict how that might change women's consumption. But yeah, so we've got clothes. We've got all these different cosmetic procedures and skin care and everything. Do women wear different types of makeup throughout the ovulatory cycle?

Yeah, they wear more makeup when they're ovulating. And I think that's just, and I didn't run this study, but my colleagues did. And I think that's just a product of wanting to, you know, just feeling sexier, wanting to be more attractive, wanting to optimize me a choice, you know, just feeling sexier, wanting to be more attractive, you know, wanting to optimize made choice, you know, and, and, you know, being more focused on, on that. Is that mediated by whether they're in a relationship or not to single women do this more than married women? That's a good question.

And I don't know the answer to that because I don't remember from their data, but a lot of these differences, we don't, I know that I talked about a really big one with the politics, but for consumer consumption, I don't find differences even between heterosexual and lesbian women. They still are showing, you know, the greater interest in, you know, products that will make them look more attractive. What are the fundamental driving force of women's purchases then? Is it signals of youth and fertility

because it's like bags and heels and other things that I don't know what women buy, whatever that is. Yeah, so for many years, that was sort of the, and I guess it still is, is women's luxury consumption because women spend, you know, women spend more on luxury than men do, with the bags and the purses and the clothes and...

And it's... So, it was a conundrum, because men don't know the difference between... Louis... Louis or Alubitan, they don't know... difference between, you know, Lou, Lou, or, um, Alubitan, you know, they don't know, Alubitan from a JC Penny. Knife is knife at you at the moment. Yeah. Yeah.

Um, so what are, you know, so why are women, you know, buying luxury if it's not for men, you know, who might it be for? And so the original sort of past few papers that we had must be for intersectional competition purposes with other women. So they're signaling to other women, signaling something to other women. And it might just be their status to sort of show,

don't mess with me. I can get all the spare resources I've got. I could wreck you. Yeah, I mean, like an or investment from a partner. But, you know. Oh, sorry, could that be a sign of, this is how much my partner's invested in me, therefore you don't want to try and take him away from me

because he's just spent three grand on this handbag. Something like that. Yes, it could be that. Very interesting. It could just be, you know, luxury is associated with high status. And status buys you so much in life that we just, you know, kind of have, you know, we just go gaga for trying to get as much, you know, status and accolades and people clapping for us. That we can because it used to be so valuable, it was sometimes the difference between life

and death. And so buying luxury, the motivation might just be to associate with those people or associate yourself with the kind of people who can buy these things. And that's why I think all these luxury brands have like keychains and little like cheaper things that all the rest of us can buy to just feel a little bit like we're part of that group. We're often told about the importance of dominance hierarchy and status for men, state of seeking men, high status men are the most attractive ones.

What does status mean or how does it manifest for women? So I don't know that it's different for women, that it is for men. Although, I think it's the same in terms of a dominance hierarchy. I think it's still like, I have this, I won. And it works the same way. I always consider it the same in men and women and maybe it manifests differently. And it does in terms of maybe the consumer products

that are attracted to, but for or career striving, we did manipulate the mating market. And when men were gone, women were like, oh, yeah, I'm going to be a certain, it's like so when you kind of take men off the table, then women are free to express these preferences for following passions or jobs or whatever. And I find that really interesting because men and women really are have these curiosities that feed into career preferences and then women learn that there's a trade-off to be made.

Yes. Given the fact, just going back to what we talked about before, given the fact that the local ecology, the sex ratio between men and women heavily mediates what women want to do with regards to their career versus family. How do you work out which ones the set point? You mean which one is sort of the default? Yeah, which ones the natural, then you've got naturalistic fallacy, which ones the desirable,

what do you mean in terms of desirable, what are you optimizing for? Whose value judgment do you put on top of it? By point being, if it can be mediated so heavily by the local men, like, we don't know whether or not women that are going to go to their graves are going to be more satisfied with a lot of houses and no kids or the ones that have lots of kids but are scraping around for money or all of this stuff. Like it's just trying to work out what it is,

where we work out what it is that women want without the external influence of the environment. Is that even something that's possible to do? Yeah, I don't know. I mean, that's a really tricky question. I think they're emerging as more variance in things like we were talking about before, like women wanting to have kids.

Do they end up having kids? Do they not? Do they go into high paying careers? Do they not? So I don't know. I guess my answer is, like, you know, marriage is set up at highly benefits men. And I don't want to paint guess my answer is like, you know, marriage is set up at highly benefits men and, you know, I don't want to paint the picture of women being doomed,

but a lot of women do come up against this, you know, trade off. And, you know, some women are totally happy just moving forward and being focused on their careers. And some women, that's not for them, they're going to be, you know, more aligned with, you know with staying home and building a family and that gives them that sort of sense of value and accomplishment, just like it would be for another woman

working up the leadership team ladder. So I think there's a lot of individual differences there. I guess the commonality is that most women run up against this having to figure out the trade off. Yes, yes, that's a good point. The fact that the trade off is there no matter what for women, and given the fact that there are fewer femme cells than in cells, most women,

at some point will probably have the option to make this decision. But this is, as I was reading through some of your work, I kept on thinking about Barry Schwartz is the paradox of choice. Oh, yes. Yeah, because that has to play a huge part of this. For the people that don't know,

Barry Schwartz uses this really great example in his legendary TED talk where he talks about jeans. And he says, like, in the 70s, there was one type of jeans. And you'd go in, and it would be what's your way size, and you'd walk out with a pair of blue jeans. And now you go in, and it's, do you want skinny or boot coat, do you want the stone wash, do you want the black, do you want the stretch, do you want the whatever. And we would think that being utilitarian rational beings, giving people more options

would mean that they would be able to refine their choice more accurately to what they genuinely want versus what the market can offer them. But it turns out quite the opposite, that this decision fatigue, existential dread of denim choice that we're faced with causes us to regret the decisions that we didn't make and to vacillate about the decisions that we should make a lot more. And this is, I mean, the genie's not going back in the bottle with regards to women being in the workplace, educational attainment, equality, and so on and so forth. But there is an interesting question to be asked around whether or not this overall makes for a happier existence. The question basically is, is ignorance bliss? And no one's running, no politicians running on the, on the

policy of women, have you ever considered regressing back to the 1940s? Because it's very, I know that you might not be happy about the lack of money, but it would make your dating options a lot easier yeah yeah so there are many negatives about you know turning the clock back to the nineteen forties but there would be a lot of decisions that were made for you that you wouldn't have to you know worry about uh... but now eyes strongly believe that the abundance of choice has made us

so much more miserable than we ever have been. In fact, I have a paper called serendipity because we don't have a lot of that anymore because of the sort of saturation of choice. Because of the endless choices that we find in, you know, from consumer products to mates, it's just, you know, unlike you were saying, you know, even within category of consumer products, there's just so many, you know, different kinds of pairs of, you know, blue jeans that we could have, we could choose, and then, you know, the opportunity cost is so salient, and, you know, we're choosing wrong,

and then, you know, we deferred choices altogether, or, you know, other things, and we've choosing wrong, and then we defer choice altogether or other things. And we've actually looked at, so you think about dating apps, right? Where our brain is getting this signal that there's just so many people out there that could possibly be our partners. And even though they're in our phone or on our TV or wherever, our brain is at some level categorizing these people as part of our group. And you know, because no one came into your living space that was a few years ago who wasn't a part of your group. So it's potential. And so, you know, but you know, so there's just so many people out there. And so you choose one, you go on a date and, you know, you're thinking about that person versus all of the other ones that could be better out there, that you have really easy access to.

And it does something to satisfaction. So we tried our best, so I have a paper on Seren DeBittie, and it's all about consumer products, but we did try to do this with mating, where, you know, we gave people, you know, a choice of a partner partner and they picked a partner and then they kept seeing that partner over and over again. So it was like we were doing a saturation and we do this with consumer products all the time. We're eventually, you're like, oh my god, I love this cooking.

You're like a candy that cook again. And so eventually exposure decreases attraction, like the more and more you're seeing this person, sexual attraction. Did you see that most recent paper that came out about women's decline in sexual attraction occurring more quickly than men's? I did, I did.

And so, and my female colleagues are like, yes. So we knew this, and now we already knew this, but now there's some data behind it. And then the men were like, there's got to be moderators. And we're like, yeah, probably. But, you know, I think, you know, overall, there's a decline in, in marital satisfaction that just happens for men and women over time. As it does with like anything you, you know, see again and again and again, it's not going to have that magical spark, but we had two conditions, one in which it was set up

like a dating app where they were looking at a bunch of pictures, chose one person to talk to. Then we had another condition where they were just like, it was like what now a Netflix has because they caught on to it like random assignment. Here's your bait. Then those people were more satisfied over time even doing the different exposures than the ones that chose from a selection of mates. And we think is because their brain was on wow there's so many other out there like I chose this like you have endless supplies of candy.

You can only choose one kind and then you finally make your choice. It's really hard to choose. And it's okay, but I wonder what that one of them would have been like. You know, we're thinking about that. Whereas if you just sort of randomly come upon something, you like it more. It's like, you know, when a song comes randomly on the radio, you like it more than if it was something you chose from your playlist. That's interesting.

Okay, so I understand where the serendipity thing gets lost. I think when it comes to me, I'm the sort of person who, when I was a teenager, would obsess over the all the different features of all the Nokia phones, and I'd think about the one I was going to upgrade to for six months beforehand and stuff like that. And there's still elements of that in me.

One of the solutions that I've found to kind of get around that is to place an arbitrary constraint on how long I have to make the decision. So if I've got to choose between three different hotels, I'm going to Rome, I'm taking my mom to Rome in a couple of weeks' time, and I was just like, you've got 10 minutes, you have 10 minutes to choose.

And once the 10 minutes is up, that's it, you're done. So it actually did help a little bit. And I don't care. I don't think about the other hotels that I could have what a sugar got. I've got three or four different tabs open. That one, that one, that one, that one, that one, that one.

And done. But yeah, I mean, the fact that we having, I'm having to create this weird temporal mind prison in the desperate attempt to not feel choice anxiety is Is a strange one. All right, so thinking about one of the common tropes or headlines that you see online with regards to women purchasing decisions and stuff like that How right do you think it is to lay women's desire for focus on beauty and dieting and signals of fitness at the feet of capitalism. How, what do I think about making, you know,

how right is it to throw those? Yeah, to become, you know, a lot of the time the accusation is these big, big wigs sat in offices in New York City, designing marketing campaigns that do whatever. How right is that to to later the feat of capitalism? Well, I don't know. I don't know if it's it's it's right or wrong. I mean, I'm I mean, I'm an evolutionist. I call it is, but I'm in the marketing department. So I don't know. It can be totally off base at times. It totally depends. I think it changes with

how society is changing. Certainly, things are changing rapidly now, especially in the beauty industry. It's all more inclusive. It's not exactly what it was before. Victoria's secret took huge amount of online punishment for they're not keeping up with the times and being more inclusive, and they eventually had to get with it or die completely. And so that's really new, but I don't know, is it right or wrong? I guess consumers can be smart and make up their own minds and realize that there is always going to be someone behind the curtain that's trying to manipulate your preferences and you're purchasing.

I mean, that's sort of what the advertising and marketing industry is all about. If that's what you're getting at, like it's really hard to say it's right or wrong, but it's gonna continue because businesses are always invested in strengthening the bottom line, even if it means by creating an illusion for you in order for you to buy the product.

Looking at the different consumer purchases of men and women, were there any surprising purchases which were actually effective at attracting a mate? Oh, that's a really good question. We didn't measure the end result like this attract a partner because you bought this. I think some of my colleagues looked at men looking at women with expensive handbags. And that's where, and found that when we were like, men were like, wow, she's going to be a lot of maintenance.

So we didn't find that men were more attracted to women with designer handbags than they were with women with, you know, no handbag or lower class handbag or whatever. I've never really looked at outcomes of consumer purchases on dating, but I think this goes for men and women, people who pay attention to their attractiveness and try to clean themselves up and just be attentive to general overall hygiene. That that is going to be very helpful. Those products in attracting mates.

But again, the jury is still out on women's luxury purchases. Does that help? I don't know. Maybe aligning with high status groups does buy you something. But for men, you know, having these, you know, having a car that's, you know, like, was a Maserati or something, you know, that helps. You know, so because women are more interested in status when it comes to, you know, their partners than men are. There was an interesting study that I saw a tender to do

with right swipes on a guy, exactly the same guy, but they replaced the Nissan Altima with Alexis. And the guy, it was like a significant increase in the number of right swipes. But that being said, it's also a significant number of increase in right swipes. If you've got a dog versus if you've got a cat, a cat is actually below the control control and the dog is significantly above. So if you want is a dog in Alexa,

basically, and that's presumably maximum right swipes. Yeah, that's really interesting. Yeah, because a dog is masculine and a cat is feminine. That's how the man was interpreted. Yeah, also that I think women understand the fact that the dog requires care, that the cat is basically an independent creature. Right. Yes. He has to be more paternal. He has to be able to be conscientious industries reliable. How would you, this dog would be dead? Whereas the cat can be, you can be the worst cat owner in history and the cat will still be fine. Right. Yeah. That's really interesting. Yeah. so putting a man in a situation where he's, so, you know, it's like think about gender differences

and attraction for a woman walking on an airplane holding a baby versus a man walking on an airplane holding a baby. Like if you can do this real life experiment and I've seen it where, oh, oh, oh, everybody's happy that a man is carrying a baby. The woman's carrying the baby, everyone's fearful that it's going to cry. Not's fearful. It's going to cry.

Not another one. It's the next to me. And I think, you know, so I think that it's like, so this is another wanting to have it all. We don't want to have it all in our mate. We want our mate to be socially dominant. He's going to charge up that hell and be, you know, risk taker and, you know, fight everyone but us.

And then at home, you know, be, you know, real cute. Nice and agreeable. And I'll rest it. So I had a Logan Yuri Yuri who is Hinge's director of relationship science on the show. Oh, okay. And obviously she's got access to just so much fascinating data. She calls them an era of maximizers.

These people who want to maximize absolutely every different statistic that they can have with their partner. And when you've got mate match, it's strange, right? So you have a sortative mating, but you also have this, everyone wants to just pitch themselves a little bit beyond where it is that they are.

And when you combine that with the fact that one of the, in fact, it might be the single biggest predictor of extra marital sex is premarital sex, or extra marital partners is premarital partners, basically, the more people that you've slept with before you're partner, the more likely you are that you're going to cheat. Oh, interesting. Yeah, so before you're part of the more likely you are that you're going to cheat. Oh, interesting.

Yeah, so when you combine all of that together with a global sexual marketplace that is the most frictionless way to just browse all of the different types of genes that you would be potentially prepared to try on. Yeah. It's fascinating to think about how that is operating inside a brain that's used to coming in contact with 50 to 100 people and that's it and then you die. Now it's glow in your mind. Will Costello's got this theory around to do with his in-sell research where he said that you can achieve in a single day more rejection than a man would have achieved in his entire lifetime. Yeah.

And but the rejection hurts less, but it hurts less in the moment, but what's the cue that it's telling you is there's something that's it's keeping track. There's a little ticker. But one other thing I remember reading this ages ago, there was an interesting way to frame married couples purchasing choices. So when you have a married couple, you are pooling together your resources into a single bank, right, a single, a single block of cash. And then from that, each person draws out money. But the men and what they spend their money on and the

women and what they spend their money on seems to continue to be signals of fitness outside of the relationship. The man is buying the watch, which signals status prestige, the fast car, which means that if he was on Tinder, he would get more rights vibes. He'll certainly get more turn looks from the women that are on the street. The woman is still signaling fertility in youth. Maybe she's getting cosmetic procedures. Maybe she's buying expensive makeup and expensive beauty products and stuff like that. Is there not something really that kind of hilarious about the fact that both of these people have pulled their resources together to then separately spend them on things that signal make fitness? Yeah, that's really interesting. Then not surprising, I guess. These are, so we have these like,

you know, monogamous marriages, but it's not our mating system. So, it never goes away, like, you don't get married, and then you're completely dead from all these other, you know, the motivations that we have for people externally. In the work that I did with having, you know, a highly attractive bad boy type of guy, looking at women's choices of products across the cycle. Like I said, we didn't find differences between heterosexual and homosexual women. Homosexual women were still making themselves more attractive

when they were preparing to meet the bad boy. No way. Yes. And so. What do you think's going on there? It's just so deep seated that even someone who isn't sexually attracted to them with their current sexual identity.

Right. That's what I thought. I thought initially I was like, well, maybe it's because we just as women didn't have a lot of control over a meat choice. We had some control, right? But not as much as we have right now. So maybe it's that. But also what occurred to me is that attractive people

tend to be the people who are higher status and get favored and get the better jobs and get the better resources. And so maybe it's just a cue to look good so that this person likes you. You just currying favor through Haydl Effect, right? Yeah, so it could be that, although like I said, we didn't find that, you know, and these were ovulating, because they were ovulating, had a homosexual and then

I should say. So that's kind of, it was the, I thought that it was just like, this is the hormonal profile, but it's not directed to the target you would think, but it could still just have value if you're going to be meeting this person. I know that's not exactly what you meant by the pooling of the resources, and then people still spend it on those things. But, hey, aligning yourself with what's externally valued still reaps for words. So I, you know, I...

Oh, plus it's, it's, we're not, we are no longer stopping trying to attract our partner as well. Yes, that's true. It's, whatever you would say, like, intra marriage. Yeah, I guess that should have been my first thought. Like, yeah, you know, you still have to keep a...

The other half, happy. Yeah, and attracted. And presumably the cues, it's not like the cues change that much. Yeah, men's testosterone might go down a little bit, women a little bit more aggressive if they smell the newborn baby's head, but fundamentally we're still running on the same sort of programming. Right. Yeah.

How do you, I keep on having this conversation with people because I'm touching on a lot of evolutionary psychology at the moment because I'm fascinated by it and it's not going to stop, so sorry, but a lot of people that listen to a good bit of the stuff that comes out from the show mention that the more that they learn about evolutionary psychology, the less that they can see people as people. They don't see them as the architect of their own actions, they see them with less agency. How have you integrated your increasing understanding of the motives that drive human behavior without losing your mind?

Well, because we have a prefrontal cortex and I love it and I hate it at the same time. So it means that, you know, the hormones don't take over completely like they do in other animals where it's just so you become a robot and it's like you switch, you know, and I'm seeing that in my female dog, I think she was gonna get spayed. I put it off because she's in the middle of her cycle and she just totally changes all her behavior and she's just like middle of her cycle and she just totally changes all her behavior

and she's just like looking for, you know, you deserve behavior. So it's just so crazy and male. Well did you have a fun to pregnancy? No, no, she didn't. She just is a puppy and she went into heat before I thought she was going to and I want to let her complete the cycle before I spay her.

But I see the change in her behavior. And it's just like really automatic, like almost like an automaton. Like, you know, she is one thing the next another day. She's just like, can't wait to find a partner. You know, and that's all she's thinking about is, who can I, what meal dog can I get in front of? You know, and so as a basic level, it's that. Humans are so much more complex than that. But I was saying before, we still have the parts of our brains that we share with all mammals, even all organisms, if you go any deeper, reproduce.

So we like sacks, we like to rest, we like to eat all those kind of things. And then what makes us human is the part of our brain that we can intellectualize all this stuff. And I actually find it so much more helpful to my well-being to think about this. Research shows if you know the game is rigged in some way, and you know how it's rigged and how it's set up.

It just makes how you're getting through the day a lot easier. It certainly does for me. And it's not to say that we're sort of auto-atronic, like animals, but we kind of need the blueprint and to be like, oh, to sort of find these work-arounds. I feel this way because of this, because I'm just feeling really competitive with this person right now and that's probably because it's something I'm lacking in my life. We can do the back track of when we don't feel our best or so I don't see it as such

a sad story as maybe others do. I don't either. For me, the only way that you can transcend your programming is by understanding it. Absolutely. That's the first step. As much as I understood the pushback that I got for the one paper that I had on politics, my approach has always been like, let's try to understand things. So, replicate it, see if this is even a thing for sure, but don't say that it just can't be

because let's just not look at this anymore. It's certainly scared me away from looking at it anymore, but I still think that we're in the business of building knowledge and it has to be across the board knowledge, not like knowledge that's convenient and some that is feel good. It's just, this is life and I want to understand my life just like we understand the lives of other organisms and we don't put our opinions on them.

Yeah, that's the way that I feel. Robert Wright's, the moral animal, was the first thing I ever read about evolutionary psychology. And as I was reading through that, it was kind of like, I'd know, veils falling in front of my eyes. And every single time that I learned something else, and okay, well, the amount of satisfaction that I get from understanding why we are the way we are and the programming that we have. As far as I'm concerned, weigh, weigh outweighs any discomfort that I have to deal with for the fact that it's going to be, oh well, I'm going to have to understand that the reason

he's being aggressive is because of male parental uncertainty or whatever it is that he's causing somebody to act the way that they do. Yeah. I find it beautiful. I genuinely do. And the only way that you can transcend Yeah. It's, I found it beautiful. I genuinely do. And the only way that you can transcend it is by understanding it and being aware of it. So, but Chris.

Yeah, absolutely. Christina Duranty, ladies and gentlemen, if people want to keep up to date with the stuff that you do, why should they go? They can find me on Twitter at Christina Duranty. I'm also on Instagram at Christina underscore Duranty. And then Christina Duranty.com. Fantastic. Christina, I appreciate you. Thank you.

Thank you. you