Modern Wisdom - #601 - Dr Andrew Thomas - Evolution's Secrets To Understanding Relationships

Episode Date: March 13, 2023

Dr Andrew Thomas is a senior lecturer of psychology at Swansea University whose research focuses on sex differences and relationship preferences from an evolutionary perspective. Evolution explains a large portion of why we like the things we like. Who we're attracted to, why we fall into and out of love, how our mental state affects our mating strategies. Therefore, if you are a human who ever intends on being in a relationship, this might be useful. Expect to learn the 5 evolutionary theories which explain much of human mating, whether ChatGPT can correctly predict what traits men and women like most in each other, how many previous sexual partners people say they want their current partner to have had, how open men & women in the West are to polyamorous relationships, how sexual arousal can ruin a faithful relationship and much more... Sponsors: Get 20% discount & free shipping on your Lawnmower 4.0 at https://manscaped.com/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get over 37% discount on all products site-wide from MyProtein at https://bit.ly/proteinwisdom (use code: MODERNWISDOM) Get 83% discount & 3 months free from Surfshark VPN at https://surfshark.deals/MODERNWISDOM (use code MODERNWISDOM) Extra Stuff: Follow Andrew on Twitter - https://twitter.com/DrThomasAG  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 friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Dr. Andrew Thomas, he's a senior lecturer of psychology at Swansea University whose research focuses on sex differences and relationship preferences from an evolutionary perspective. Evolution explains a large portion of why we like the things we like, who we're attracted to, why we fall into and out of love, how our mental state affects our mating strategies. Therefore, if you are a human who ever intends on being in a relationship, this might be useful.

Expect to learn the five evolutionary theories which explain much of human mating. Whether chat GPT can correctly predict what traits men and women like most in each other, how many previous sexual partners people say they want in their current partner, how many men and women in the West are open to polyamorous relationships, how sexual arousal can ruin a faithful relationship, and much more.

Some really cool cutting edge, evolutionary psychology stuff here, and Andrew is pumping out research and papers at a terrifying rate. I think you're going to absolutely love him. So yeah, get ready for this one. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Dr. Andrew Thomas. I absolutely love your writing and your psychology today articles are fantastic. Congratulations. Oh brilliant. Am I writing thinking I'm the first Welsh person you've had on your show? I've heard that.

That was the rumor. Oh, that would be a very interesting start. I don't know. Sometimes people are like secret Welsh, secret Welshies, you know? Yes, yeah. I'll have to just, let's just transition that to a Ruggedly handsome Welsh person. Sure, absolutely.

I'm sure that's the first. As far as I'm concerned. And also the first openly Welsh person, we can definitely take that. You didn't use to identify as Welsh and now identify as something else. You're openly Welsh. Yeah, I don't think the identity politics has hit Welsh identity yet. It's coming for you soon.

Hold on tight. So, you just wrote this great article explaining five evolutionary theories that everyone should know to understand how relationships work. Yeah. Evolutionary mismatch. What's that? So evolutionary mismatch is this idea that our psychology evolved, you know, and has remained relatively stable over the last 100,000 years. So it's this idea that society has moved quicker than our biology has been able to cope with it. So for most modern problems, we're approaching them with a Stone Age brain.

And yeah, it's something which in my teaching at Swansea, I try to apply that quite a bit to mating, because a lot of stuff that we have in the modern environment is just something that it makes more sense when you figure out that your brain is trying to cope with it rather than being able to master it because it's such a novel thing that it's not used to. What would be an example of that? So I think the best example of that is just

sheer choice overload. So if you think about ancestral human populations, there's some debate over the number, but Dunbar buzz number is like 150 people. Nowadays we have access to almost limitless numbers of people. It leads to a lot more superficial relationships limitless number of people. It leads to a lot more superficial relationships and I mean like friends and family, but also when you go online onto dating websites it looks like there's this unlimited pool of potential options. And that leads to all sorts of crazy things like people having to use sort of one characteristic to narrow down the playing field. So dating, I think, has become a lot more univariate rather than multi-variate. So historically, you'd meet up with somewhere and you see the whole person, you're taking

their physical attractiveness, you also take in other things about them. And nowadays, we don't even get to that point where we can make a holistic judgment because we're doing things like, oh, they're not six foot. So that's it, they're off the radar. I always like to, it's really interesting actually, some of the research that I've done with Peter Jonas and has actually shown how people then kind of compensate with that because we're gonna publish this stuff on height.

But if you get the dating website data, it's really interesting and you plot up what guys heights are. You get this really weird distribution where it's a normal distribution until you hit 5, 10, 5, 11, and 6 foot in which case it drops on all of those and then suddenly you get this big influx of everyone saying they're 6 foot. And embarrassingly I was one of those liars, right? So I met my wife on an online dating website. Now I always tell people I'm six foot minus one. So I put that I was six foot on this dating website and that got me past the bar and now I'm happily married.

Would your partner have not seen you had you have put 5'11? No. No way. Absolutely not. Absolutely. That was a great question. You're a victory story you're a victory so there we go You know so it's it's something that that people do but it just kind of proves that people have and especially women

So Stephen I ran this study once that was a failed study So we would go we we were using plenty of fish and we I know we're still talking about evolutionary mismatch It doesn't feel like it but we fish and we, I know we're still talking about a evolutionary mismatch, it doesn't feel like it, but we are. And we set up some fake profiles on plenty of fish with the idea that we were going to manipulate status and job role and see who got attention and who didn't. And we had to call off the experiment after a week because we balanced the profiles nicely, but the female profile or the

couple of female profiles got like a thousand messages in two days of guys going, hey, hey, hey, hey, whereas the guys didn't get any messages at all. So we had no variance in the guys to be able to carry on the study with. And this was back in like, you know, probably 2009, 2010. And so you know, women are getting inundated with messages off guys, quite superficial ones playing the sort of short-term game. And so you know, women are getting inundated with messages off guys, quite superficial ones playing the sort of short-term game. And so naturally, that means a narrowing down, a quick narrowing down of people using very superficial criteria. Now, from a mismatch perspective, that's crazy, right? Because, and sensally, your options would be like two or three people in your village and

maybe guys from neighboring villages. So the disparity is massive. What people are doing is creating sometimes arbitrary, at least to their four brain, it seems to make sense. Rules that can help them to narrow down the degrees of choice that they have. If you only date within one particular race, if you only date within one particular education,

if you date within one particular type of profession, oh, I just, I need to have a doctor. I think I saw the other day that female doctors, one in five female doctors also date another doctor or surgeon. Why? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, you've got a lot to bond over, but you would have presumed.

So all of these things could just be a cope for the evolutionary mismatch of having a significantly broader choice option. The same way as people elect to do intermittent fasting as a way to deal with the evolutionary mismatch of a prevalence of salty, sweet and sugary foods. Yeah, so there's exactly, so there's the narrowing down element. There's also like the archaic preferences because the preferences are functional, right? So having a partner who has some status and has some resources, That's not a functional thing. Where the mismatch comes in is that nowadays you don't necessarily need that. Your welfare

and your flourishing doesn't depend for a lot of people, especially in Western societies with good social welfare programs. It doesn't depend on another person as much as it used to, but you can't just turn the preferences off. In the same way, you can't just turn jealousy off just because everyone's using contraception. You know, it's no longer... jealousy, some could argue, is no longer functional. Now that we have contraception, you can't just turn it off.

But the nowering thing, I mean, I think women get a bit of a hard time sometimes for the nowering thing, I think women get a bit of a hard time sometimes for the nowering thing, whereas for me it's kind of just like a cognitive heuristic that people use whenever they've got too much decision making to do. So or too many decisions to make. This is why people gravitate towards ratings on Amazon to cut down decision making. Hell, you go to a supermarket these days, you go to a supermarket where you want to buy some baked beans.

You go to the baked bean aisle where there's then 25 different varieties and you pause and you're like, oh, you know, what's the price is by the size? This is why I like shopping in Lidl's and Aldi. You want the baked beans that they got there or you don't. It's a more simplified situation. So we've got all of these different sort of very, very modern factors influencing our mating decisions, which is why my advice on the blog is to maybe look to the past a little bit. What do you mean? So when I say look to the past,

I mean how were people starting relationships in the past? When you get up the graph showing how people meet one another, I show this to my students all the time, it's the death of everything apart from meeting in clubs and meeting online. Meeting online is a shot up, it's now something silly, like 60-70% of people who get married and meeting online, the stuff that's fallen off, meeting through family, meeting through close friends, meeting through social groups, meeting through work, all of these things are dropping off and online is going up. Now the problem is, all of those things that are dropping down involve other people that know you in some way

and so you're not meeting people with this anonymity, they can ghost, they can go away, if they do something nasty to you, there's no social consequence, if your social lives aren't entwined in some way and sometimes the people who are around us, they know us best because sometimes we think we know what we want, we don't know what we want, or sometimes we think we know what's good for us when we don't know what's good for us. So sometimes I'm like, you know, if you're really getting stuck, why don't you ask your friends to set you up with someone? Why don't you ask your parents what they think?

Yeah, so that's kind of just, I'm not saying it's perfect, but it could be something to try. It's certainly a untapped pool, given that most people now are meeting their partners online. What that means is that any strategy which isn't meeting your partner online has a competitive advantage as a byproduct of that. Okay, next one, error management, what's that? So error management is this idea

that for every choice you make, you can err in one of two ways. So you can either make a false positive or you can make a false negative. So a false positive is, I see a small black thing in the corner of my eye and I jump thinking it's a spider, but it's not a spider, right? So I've made that error.

The other side of the false negative is, there's a spider there, I don't notice it, right? So I've made that error. The other side of the false negative is there's a spider there, I don't notice it, right? And let's just assume it's a nasty spider that could do be harm, not that we get many of those in the UK. So there's two different types of error for decisions like that, but they come with different costs. So the cost of seeing what I think is a spider reacting a little bit and then realizing I'm okay.

What's that cost to be? A bit of cortisol and sympathetic nervous system activation for a couple of seconds? Not much, right? But if I don't see the spider and it's a poisonous one and it's creeping up, then the consequences could be more dire. So error management theory is this idea that we evolve towards making the errors, which are least costly for us. So the reason why you get a lot of people who are quite reactive to such things is it's better to react for a little cost of that error than not react and have a bigger

associated cost. How does that relate to dating? Probably the easiest one to relate it to is the sexual over-perception bias. So what you actually find in guys is that they are more likely to perceive sexual interest from women when it's not there. So the cashier of the supermarket smiles, and instead of them being friendly, it's her she's into me, yeah. And if you stop and think about like what the error is there, so the error is, if I'm completely oblivious to that, then that's a missexual opportunity potentially, yeah. Obviously you've got to go and take some dates first and et cetera, et cetera. But if she's genuinely interested, you don't want to miss out on that opportunity, because that's an opportunity to potentially reproduce.

Whereas if you see it when it's not there and make an advance, and this is where it gets a little bit tough, from a selfish perspective, the costs are quite limited, right? So I get a little bit of rejection, yeah? So from an evolutionary perspective, that's not the end of the world. That's not to say, of course, there aren't knock-on effects on the other person, because if you hire a harass someone, that's a bad thing. But it's this idea that the men may have evolved in the direction of over-perceiving sexual interest just in case. How does female under-perception bias

tie in with our management theory? So that's, I mean, there's this classic distinction isn't there between men prefer putting a greater emphasis on physical attractiveness and sexual access and women putting a greater emphasis on resources and status. And so the female equivalent is, the female equivalent actually is commitment, isn't it? It's commitment sceptical commitment bias, I think, is the name. So it's when you're in, when you're courting someone, what men don't want to miss out on

is the sexual access. Well, women don't want to miss out on is the commitment, according to the sceptical commitment bias. So women are more likely to make errors in judging commitment from men to be lower than it actually is. Because if women say, hey, I'm with this guy, I think he's committed to me. And he isn't. Big issue. Whereas if I'm with this guy and he is committed to me by a little bit skeptical about it, okay, I could make an error and hurt his feelings a little bit, maybe he doubles down and proves himself to me, but that error is less costly to me

than the other way around. So this would be the woman playing hard to get, making a man wait longer before she texts back, perhaps committing to the man less quickly. Yeah, in the sort of court, I'm using courting as if we're in Victorian, I like courting. Let's bring that back. So I've been thinking about Victorian mating this week for some strange reason. Yeah, so if it's in that sort of setup of a relationship stage, yeah, but you also get the skeptical commitment bias within relationships as well, because then it's almost like it's even more damaging if your partner isn't committed to

and goes off and cheats and takes that commitment away. So. Parental investment? Oh, that's that commitment away. Parental investment. Oh, that's the next one. So parental investment is like the grandaddy of all theories, right? So for me, it's one of the key and the pinning theories of my thesis. It's this theory that crosses species in general. So it's not just specific to humans. So it's the idea that the sex that invests the most is the one that's in demand. So it kind of sets up these market forces.

And this really started with the baked one principle, so that's actually looking at sex cells. So if you compare sex cells, you know, guys generate millions and millions and millions of spoon continuously on the hour every hour, whereas women are born with all of the egg cells that they'll ever have and they're larger and they're fewer in number. So even at the sex cell level, it sets up this imbalance where guys are providing something

that's quick and cheap, whereas women are providing something that's precious. And I've said men and women there, but of course mammals in general follow that pattern as well, which is why we tend to find sex differences in mammals and other species that are in kind of predictable directions with men, males doing the competing and females doing the choosing. Now where humans are different, of course, is that you have something called obligatory parental investment. So there's the stuff that you have to invest, which for most females isn't just the egg, it's the gestation, it's

the weaning, you know, there's heavy obligatory investment, whereas males can generally have sex and leave. So in most species, that's an option, and actually praying mantis or spider or something. The difference, however, is that in humans a obligatory parental investment isn't just it. We are typical levels of parental investment, are much higher from men. So men do, compared to other species, invest a lot in their offspring. And that's why the sex differences in humans are actually quite modest compared to other species.

Like if you go to a zoo and you look at gorillas or you look at elephant seals and you look at the marked massive degrees in physiology between males and females. You look at humans, it's not as sharp. So even though there are sex differences there because males invest so heavily in offspring, it actually redresses the balance a little bit, making our sex differences more moderate in size. And parental investment presumably as well is why women are more choosy with how many people they have sex with, who they have sex with, the amount of work that their partner has to go through before they will do that? I think, and well, that's a whole other story, I think, because I've heard that point

we made before, but what's missing with that is this sexual strategy, sexual strategies overlay of understanding the distinction between short term and long term. Because women will really, really, really apply the standards to a short term meeting partner. Because what are they getting out of the arrangement? They're getting the sex and potentially falling pregnant for someone who may not hang around. When it comes to long term meeting, though, men are as choosiest women, right?

So it's not the case that we go on dates where men get all dressed up in three-piece suits and women go in their dressing gowns and whatever they feel comfortable in, right? So women make an effort as well as guys and that's because they're two investors at the table, two potential investors. So yeah, you've got to have that nuance about it as well. Within a long-term setting,

yeah, maybe there's a little bit more pickiness on women, but guys are picking you as well. If they're going to invest 20, 30 years, bring up children with a person, then they want to know they're getting a good deal as well, right? When you talk about sexual strategies, are those the primary ones short term mating, long term mating? Yeah, pretty much so there's been, there has been some work trying to see whether there's a difference between your long term committed co-habiting marriage, long term strategy. So that's what, well established, short-term strategy, you're one nice stand, you're friends with benefits, you're promiscuity. There have been some studies that

have tried to look at this middle ground, but every time they do it, it just seems to fall into short-term strategies. So it's like, oh, you've got a guy that you're with for now, but you never see it going anywhere in the future. So you can see yourself being with them for the next three months, but not the next three years. Really, it falls back into short-term strategy. The vast majority of the time. So I say, yes, I say you really have these two constructs. You either play in a short-term game or the long-term.

They interact sometimes. So a lot of people are using a short-term strategy with the idea that they want to transition that into a long-term thing. So there's some overlap there, but broadly speaking, I see those two strategies. That is the mate-switching hypothesis, or at least it would be part of a female's plan toward mate-switching, that it seems like a good portion of infidelity from women is done as a monkey branching strategy to move from one relationship to the next. This was moving from dual mating hypothesis to mate switching hypothesis.

Yeah, I think you were talking about Alex, to Alex about that a couple of times ago. So I had a thought about that earlier on today. I can't remember what it was. Yeah, I mean, traditionally, even outside of relationships, that's tactic as well, right? So nowadays, it's much more common. Have a short term relationship with someone first,

and then if I really like them, transition that into a short term relationship with someone first, and then if I really like them, transition that into a long term relationship. The thing about mate switching as well is that guys do it too. I think the difference, however, is when you consider, and this is one of the biggest psychological differences out there, which is the desire for casual sex, social sexuality. So social sexual desire has an effect size of 0.8, something like that, which is quite large by psychological terms. So the difference is that when men are having, say,

an affair, it may well be just to have sexual access and with no intention of moving past that. But women having lower social sexuality, it's more likely that if they cheat, it's probably to pursue long-term interests. It's not to say that men don't do it, but that's where I think that particular sort of observation has come from. Alex tweeted that promiscuity seems to be a little bit heritable. Does that suggest that social sexuality is also heritable my i haven't done a study on it myself but i'm pretty sure it is i'm pretty sure i read it i mean the the

basic starting point for heritability is point five anyway so if you just guess point five for anything you'll be right in the most vast majority of the time but i'm pretty sure the social sexuality is heritable yeah that's interesting so the implication there would be if you are looking for a particularly committed partner, look at whether his father has got five wives continuously. Yeah, it's a very uncomfortable thing for some people, but you know, it always comes down to that if you want to have intelligent kids, have sex with an intelligent person. intelligent kids have sex with an intelligent person. Yeah, dude, Robert Plurman's been on the show and in Blueprint he says,

genetics isn't everything, but it's more than everything else put together. Like the most important thing that you want to do if you want to have a successful, happy, flourishing child is pick the person that you have them with very carefully. Yeah, and the other one, I mean, that's the one part of it, and then the other part is the experiences they have outside of the family home. I mean, if you take juvenile misconduct, for example, and look at the sort of ACE models behind that, it's like 50% heritable,

and then it's like 35% influence outside of the home. In fact, I think it's like 40% and it's a tiny slither in the home, which I always think is tragic because there's enough pressure on young moms these days of, or if you haven't bought the right toy, then your kid isn't going to develop the ability to see color and know what crackling textures are. It's like, no, feed the kids, love the kids,

they'll go find. Get them good friends. But get them good friends. Yeah, I mean, that's the, I think there's another Rob Henderson thing that one of the best predictors of future wealth is not the wealth of your parents, but it's the average wealth of the postcode that you grow up in. Yeah, yeah. So you almost have this, it's almost kind of like a weird lily part effect. It's like storyguicy, right? Yeah. The next door neighbor's father that is a really cool musician, but your dad's lame.

He's a rocket scientist, but he's sort of lame because he's the guy that tells me that I've got to go to bed at night. But John next door, John's dad, he's really cool because he plays the guitar and I want to learn to play the guitar. And dude, I think that there's a lot, I see it in my own life. I see the influences of the people that were around me, even into adulthood, man, like, you know, being a club promoter for so long

and spending time partying and being around people and learning amazing insights around human nature, around networking, business launching, and advertising marketing, all of this stuff. But the social values that I had, the hierarchy of things that I prioritized were completely skewed to how they are now. And now I'm spending, like, I'm on the phone to David Bus for 90 minutes this morning talking about stuff and he's like, tell me about,

you know, his dog needs to come over because it needs to be petted. Like, I'm evidently going to have like a different value stack now. And you wonder, I always wondered about this, you know, at what point do our sort of values get locked in? And I'm kind of waiting, there certainly seem to be less fluid, they're less fluid than they were when I was 10 or 15 presumably, but the influence of the people around you is always going to be there. And I do think that that's something

that I wish was in more parenting books. And yeah. Behavioral genetics wish was in more parenting books. Behavioral genetics should be in more parenting books, although if you're reading a parenting book reading about behavioral genetics, it's probably a little bit late. But also, what is the, you know, go to every, you want your kid to start boxing because you don't even get beat up school. Okay, go to every different boxing club and look at every kid that's in there. Yeah, yeah. beat up school, okay, go to every different boxing club and look at every kid that's in there.

Yeah, it's like when I go to a restaurant and I look at the wine list, I do that, that usual thing. If I don't pick the cheapest, I pick the second cheapest, right? I'm the sucker that they put the price up on the second cheapest. But that's what you want for any trait in your life, right? So you want to be surrounded by friends who are part of a wine list and you want to be second from the bottom. So you want a lot of your friends, if you want to be rich, you want a lot of your friends to be richer than you. If you want to, you know, have, uh, make connections,

you want to surround yourself with people who are connected. Because you will learn from them and you will grow with them as long as you're liked, being, I think that's one thing that should go in parenting, parenting books that is, it's very non-PC. We don't have enough conversations about how it's important to be liked. Not loved. Yep, but just liked, just tolerated, just like people, people are quite happy to be around you. But I think the more you, the people you surround yourself with, absolutely, so it's so important, but it's not just a childhood thing. Yeah. Through your whole life. That's one of Peterson's rules is,

don't allow your children to do anything that makes you hate them. And you want the child to walk into the room and for the parents in there to give them a big hug and pick them up and ask them how everything's been going in school, you don't want, because the kids will pick up on it. If they're like, oh God, Andrew's coming round again.

I hope he doesn't bring that power ranger. Oh no, he can be flashbacks. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I was a very unlikable child. So yeah, no, no, when I when I read that in Jordan's book that that was one of the the slices of stuff that Jordan says that makes perfect sense to me before then talking about chaos and then nice switch off a little bit But that that's like everyone right everyone's a no one's black and white everyone's a weird mixture of grey strategic pluralism Yes, strategic pull that's a last of the fire by think so this is So if sexual strategies is about having long term and and short-term strategies, distinct, we call

sets of psychological mechanisms. Strategic pluralism for me is how you navigate switching between those strategies. Some people are born wanting a husband or a wife, and they'll do that. They'll have a high school sweetheart who becomes the only person I'll ever sleep wife, and they'll do that. They'll have a high school sweetheart who becomes the only person I'll ever sleep with, and they'll have a million kids with them, and die in a rocking chair, age 80, and good for them.

So they're like hard, cool, long term. And then you have some people who will never settle down because they can't think of anything worse than they just want to have fun and have as much sex as possible. I know plenty of those people as well, but not everyone has that sort of pure strategy lens. And this isn't something, by the way, that's just unique to humans. So a lot of

animals, from squirrels to bears to all sorts of weird and wonderful things, like I think 50% of my PhD thesis was animal studies on strategies. Most people will flick. most people will have a mixed strategy. I will apply short-term and I'll apply long-term. So, strategic pluralism is about when do you switch and why? So, for example, if you are in a situation or an environment which is mildly dangerous, then you're probably going to move towards long-term mating because it's a safer environment to bring up a child having the support of another person. If you're in a really, really safe environment, one with a lot of social support, maybe good social welfare, then actually having that second partner, or having that other partner to bring

up a child with, doesn't add benefits. And so then short-term relationships are on the cards. What's super interesting about that, by the way, though, is that's like a U-shaped curve, so you actually get some situations which are so dangerous that it's like, all better off. There's no point in having parental care because it's not going to make a difference. So actually, some of the most sort of terrible situations you can find people in. People just sort of go into end of the world promiscuous mating mode. Wow, that's so interesting. Yeah, I was it, I think it was Armageddon, where there's that famous

scene where the girl says, I don't want to die a virgin, and they cut to the dude that she's saying it to his face, and he's like, yes. I mean, it's gonna die, and that's Bruce Willis can fix it. But yeah, it's, I mean, that's stuff. I find that stuff almost endlessly fascinating to think about how different mating strategies can be, can adjust to the local ecology. I remember the first time that I learned about the sex ratio hypothesis and it made me think about humans like plants. You know, you put a plant in the corner of

the room and there's a bit of light in the top corner and the plant responds to the local environment. It's ecology determines the way that it's going to behave. And, you know, sex ratio is just literally endlessly interesting. And I imagine that strategic pluralism and sex ratio kind of aren't exactly a million miles apart from each other. Yeah, that would be an example of a queue. And we know the sex ratio queues. I think Arnocchi did some work on this. Sex ratio cues can temporarily change short to mating inclination. What's super interesting about it actually is that when you get down to

smaller species like arthropods and stuff that are doing different mating strategies, because they have short generations, you can actually run the maths on what happens based on the strategies they're following. And you actually find that the different sexual strategies kind of balance out in terms of fitness in the long run. So the ones that are employing sort of more short term strategies versus long term strategies, you know, 10, 20 generations down the line,

they're both representing an equal proportion of the gene pool. So they kind of have a way of balancing out, which is why we keep both of them in there. So they can both be successful. It's not like there's a single optimizing function here. Now, I mean, some of it is context dependent of course, but yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Didn't you recently do a study that mediated short term mating desire amongst men based on their arousal? Yeah, yeah. So I did that with, um,

Wiseman recently, um, that was really, really cool because it was one of those things where the effect was so reliable and you just couldn't explain it away with trait variables. So it was like, yes, if you get Guy's horny, they then say, oh, I have a greater interest in short-term meeting. And that's one of those studies where people reply to it and say, oh, yeah, of course, well, you've just done a study showing the water's wet. And I'm like, well, hang on a second. Okay, so yeah, it makes sense to you, but if you had someone who was very inclined towards long term mating, so say we had our Mr.

high school sweetheart thing, wouldn't you expect him, if he was horny, to just think of his wife and pursue sex with his wife. You know, if we're suspending what we know from sort of folk psychology for a second, like that's a plausible, that's a plausible hypothesis, but that's not what happens, even he. So even when you control for social sexuality, when you control for dark triad,

sexual arousal leads to increase in short term mating interest. And I think that's really, really cool. It's cool for lots of different reasons. You can go talk about how that factors into harassment and all sorts. But just from having control over your own mating destiny perspective, you're going to make different, amazing decisions based on whether you're horny or not. That's something you should know. Yes.

What was, I can't remember what it's something that rhymes. It's like ejacuate before you evaluate or something like that. That's just like a little piece of advice to guys before they perhaps consider going in, you know, they're in a long-term relationship with a committed partner and one evening, maybe they've bumped into some girl and he goes home and she finds him on Instagram and then messages

him and stuff and it's like, oh, should I go around and go, well, you might just be horny. You might be able to fix this a lot more easily than something that's a bit more of a permanent decision. But yeah, I mean, the insight of the reverse, what does it suggest to you then the insight of the reverse. What does it suggest to you then that horniness increases short term mating? What does that say? In terms of what? Why would that be the case? Why would that be the case? I actually haven't really stepped back and thought about it from a adaption perspective. I've been thinking more about, see, the thing is, I've got this whole other arm of my research about sexual harassment that I'm doing at the moment, you see. And social sexuality turns out to be like a big, big predictor of sexual harassment behavior.

So I've kind of approached this from that perspective. If it's activating short term, or implications might have for that. But I think it's a case of, oh right, okay, yeah, well, it comes down to mismatch. You can see the cogs actually turning in my head. Broseye and Rue, yeah. That's why I should have brought a whiskey with me. The thing is, because it's kind of like the voyeurism thing that I've done as well, right?

Because I've done some work on voyeurism, because again, with social sexuality, that tends to predict voyeuristic tendencies, tends to be higher than men. Why? Well, generally speaking, if you're seeing something that's getting you sexually aroused, that's historically and ancestrally a pretty good indicator that some sex is to be had. You know, so there is no equivalent in the Stone Age apart from perhaps a cave painting on a wall of a pornographic video. I mean I was told, you know, I said this to the students the other day.

It's like, if you think about how ludicrous it is, that there's a 2D image in front of you that you can put your hand on, that you can look around the side of a monitor and it's clearly not real, but it's enough to trick our ancestral mating systems into thinking that it's a giant sex queue. Sex is about to happen, enough to arouse us.

So of course your psychology is going to be lined up with that. Sex is available. I am now aroused. I want the sex. I don't want to entertain a long-term relationship with an extended courting process before I have it. What, how are you tying this into sexual harassment? Do you think, should we extend a particular amount of sympathy to men who have got highly heritable, they didn't choose

it, sociosexuality, and these are people whose over-perception bias is just running rampant. So there's a couple of different flavors of sexual harassment, let's call it, right? So there are some guys out there who are just flat out predators. I've met them, I've seen them in nightclubs, I've kicked them out of nightclubs because they go and they find the drunk woman and their stone-called sober and they hunt and they walk around and they pretend to dance with their friend and they try to isolate. Like there are some proper predators out there. And that is one flavor of harassment and the really, really serious, serious stuff. You then also have harassment

that in my view is born from misunderstanding. Yeah, so not guys going out of their way to cause harm and to cause pain. And one of the fundamental misunderstandings is that people apply what they want to the mind of the other person. So humans are really, really good at theory of mind. It's like one of the human superpowers that we really take for granted.

Being able to guess and put what other people think, put our mind in theirs, human superpower. But it has its limitations. One of its limitations, and one of the reasons that social sexuality is one of the biggest predictors of harassment, is because if someone is playing the short term mating game, they make an assumption that the other person is as well. So if you're playing a short, and this isn't just men, by the way, this is women too. So women who have high social sexuality are going to assume, if they're

heterosexual, that men too have high social sexuality. Of course, the statistics will show that they'll be more right in that guess than the other way around. And so if you're playing short-term strategy, short-term relationships are about sex. That is the main part of it. It's not like a long-term relationship. You strip away the courting process. You strip away the commitment,

they're getting to know a person. It's about having sex, and it's about having sex as quickly as possible. And so those with high social sexuality, they're more likely to initiate physical contact, they're more likely to leave the conversation down a sexual route more quickly, and make no bones about it.

Some people are doing that because they know it will make someone uncomfortable, but they're just playing the numbers game. But others are doing it because they genuinely just think the other person wants that and are causing,umsily, causing harm to stress and upset. Are you familiar with this new performative resistance to sex study that's just come out?

So this was, I mean, William sent this to me and this is the sort of thing where I talk about everything on my newsletter, right? Anything. I'm like, any study that's just come out, I'm ready to go. This is one that, as of yet, is a little bit too spicy. So I'll read you the abstract. Okay. Okay. We investigated whether women ever engage in token resistance to sex, saying no, but meaning yes, and if they do what their reasons are for doing so. A questioner administered to 610 undergraduate women asked whether they had ever engaged in token resistance and if so asked them to rate the importance of 26 possible reasons. We found that 39.3% of the women had engaged in token resistance on at least once.

Their reasons fell into three categories, practical, inhibition-related and manipulative reasons. Women's gender roles attitudes, erotophobia, erotophilia, and other attitudes and beliefs vary as a function of their experience with token resistance, their sexual experience. We argue that given today's sexual double standard token resistance may be a rational behavior, it could however have negative consequences, including discouraging honest communication,

perpetuating restrictive gender stereotypes, and if men learn to disregard women's refusals, increasing the incidence of rape. Okay, so now I know my mutual Irish friend Ketap from you because he was probably trying to not hurt my feelings, because my lab has done something similar and we haven't written it up yet. And actually, we found a similar thing with that 40% number. Only we didn't go for the token sexual resistance route. We just played for the playing hard to get route.

So to what extent have people played hard to get, to what extent did they think other people play hard to get? Because that's part of it as well. It does have a different flavor to it than the sexual resistance, but the one thing that we've picked up on is because we've also done some qualitative focus groups on it, it's something that doesn't happen at the start of a relationship. So it doesn't happen at that time zero, you're meeting someone for the first time, asking them out on the day. It happens meeting someone for the first time, asking them out on the day. It happens a little while in that co-obiting process, when you've been on a couple of dates and you're sort of like maybe trying to communicate that your make value is higher than it is, or you're starting to play games with someone that you're genuinely interested

in. At that stage, you actually get a large proportion of, so the proportion of women saying that they've ever done that as a tactic and guys, because there's not really a sex difference there, is like 70-80%. And actually, if you ask women, if they met someone for the first time that they really liked, what are the chances that they would use playing hard to get? It's a bit of a tactic. You know, you get like 40% or something like that. But what's really really interesting is that women overestimate how often other women play that tactic. And men actually underestimate how often women play that tactic when I thought it was going to be the other way around.

Me too, yeah. But I guess the issue with it is because I think it is a natural part of flirting, playing hard to get, fainting this interest from both caps, from both males and females. But I think that if you're someone who is looking for a short-term relationship, so you're going to be more sex-focused anyway, and you've noticed that women play hard to get sometimes. So obviously I'm talking about many here for a second, and you think that they're inclined to do it within the first 30 seconds of meeting them. That's the recipe for disaster. Because if they haven't actually

objected within the first 30 seconds, your presumption is that any, maybe they are, it's performative, as opposed to genuine reticence. Yeah. And so my lab's doing quite a bit at the moment with this sort of predictors of luck pushing to what extent, you know, you've asked someone once they've already said no You know the next day you see them again If you were to ask them a second time what do you think your chances are of that being successful? So we're doing some work on that at the moment So that luck pushing that maybe I'll try again, element, because when you do the male focus groups, there really is that thing of,

well, if it doesn't harm, you may as well try again, because you never know. So there's obviously some stuff to do there with educating around harm as well. Absolutely. I mean, all of this is mediated by being charming as the closest approximate word that I can find for it.

And delivering whatever it is that you do, whether it's the cashier that smiles at you as she packs your bags or whether it's the workmate that said no yesterday or whatever, I do think that this is the subject of John Burgers book, Make the First Move, which is really, really great and touches on sex ratios from a very sort of pro-female perspective. Very says that, you know, for almost all of human history, women were told that the way to attract a guy was to treat him like you don't like him. Why men love bitches and, you know, fain this interest and all this sort of stuff, but in a post-MeToo world, men are hyper-sensitized to being accused of being a creep or being overbearing.

They absolutely do not want to be any of the issues. I think it's some huge majority of men would never consider approaching a woman in a bar an acceptable thing to do for fear of coming across as creepy, even though 86% of women still want a man to make the first move, and yet there's still a high proportion of women who have been made to feel creepy by guys when they've approached them. So you have all of these kind of intersecting challenges that you need to weave your way through. Yeah, absolutely.

And if you look at some of the work that they've conned and or Postolos done, you know, one of the things that people have perpetually single report is that they're useless at flirting Yeah, so they if you take a flirting index and ask people, you know how to rate themselves on it They tend to do really because flitting is a skill and it's it's a skill that you have to learn you have to learn how to Because flitting is a skill. And it's a skill that you have to learn. You have to learn how to read body language, how to read behind what people are saying, to be sensitive to the fact that actually we're not flitting and I need to go away.

But unfortunately, it is a skill. It's something that you're not born with. And it's something that you certainly don't want your parents to teach you. And you have to kind of develop that. So I think we're now reaching the point where it's almost not okay to learn that skill and that's a bit problematic, I think. I wonder whether part of the challenges that young guys under the age of 30 are struggling with that's causing sexlessness is downstream from straight up poor social skills to the point where their

ability to flirt has just been tuned down, that it's not to do with, yep, the increasing female achievement and the hypochemy and the men not being able to be up and across and the da da da da da da da. But also maybe this generation of men are just worse flirters than any other generation before. I absolutely think that. And I think, you know, go back 30, 40, 50 years, that sort of stuff you'd be taught by your older brother or by other positive male role models that you have. You know, there's this whole issue around people like Andrew Tate and stuff at the moment where it's like, well, we've got this vacuum and these people are stepping into the vacuum and men are seeking them out. And you've got to think, well, what is causing that vacuum? What

used to fill that, that isn't anymore? And for me, it's strong male role models that are showing not toxic masculinity, but like good masculinity using. Yeah. So it's just scout masters. I'm not hugely religious, but it's your church leaders, it's your religious leaders. You know, it's organizations like the Freemasons. It's sports teams, fathers, older brothers, uncles. Coaches, you know, good men who are able to show you what being a good man means. And I think now we're just sort of just, I mean, I do it myself. You're just scrolling on your phone of an evening, doing nothing.

That's not learning positive, how to contribute to society in a positive way. And young men, so I used to live, right? I used to live in the middle of a park, right? I used to rent a property in the middle of a park, so I used to see all of like the 8, 9, 10, 11, 12-year-old kids and how these did sort of run around in the park during the summertime. That sounds so creepy. I'm not like that, but anyway, the point is

half the time they were destroying things and not the young girls, the young men are destroying things. They're throwing bottles, someone planted a tree, they ripped a tree out of the ground. And it's like when you see these guys, it's almost like they have this yearning to control their environment with their hands in some way, to actually do something, to make some sort of mark. And it's like if you don't give an opportunity to construct

in some way, they'll just destruct. Yes. And I think that that's part of the problem as well, that we need stronger male role models who are helping young men, giving them some way of building their status. Because that's a whole other argument as well of how do you build status, because you have this really nice dichotomy in a lot of traditional societies between prestige and dominance. And I think these days a lot of young men see it, it's dominance, dominance, dominance. That's how you build status. When actually prestige is more of a sort of healthy way of building, um, building status.

More robust as well. It's more likeable. It's definitely going to be able to scale over time because, you know, your dominance, if you continue to play that game, eventually is going to get you punched in the face or thrown in jail or something bad is going to happen. Prestige may end up with you being people being jealous of you, but that's significantly better than the outcomes that you get from dominance. I'm playing around with this idea at the moment, and unfortunately, it seems to not really be actually holding much weight but we'll see as I continue to do more research, the male sedation hypothesis, which is why have we not seen young male syndrome given the incredibly high levels of sexlessness

amongst young men, very high levels of sexlessness but not a in kind increase in the destructive anti-social behaviour that you would see amongst that particular cohort of guys. And my theory originally was that porn and video games are giving a titrated dose of reproductive cues and of state of seeking, camaraderie, goal-oriented behavior, but I'm yet to see any evidence that suggests that porn use turns down men's desire for real world sex. David Lay couldn't find that. He doesn't see any evidence for it. David Busce sent me an article earlier on this morning that also doesn't seem to show that sexual desire is mediated by porn. What's your view on this? Every time I put porn in, it doesn't predict anything.

It's such a nice, it's the main situation. It's a nice, nice, nice, Andrew. It would be, yeah, it's a very nice, and I'm sure that there's some other way that we can find that men are being accitated. But now every time we put porn use in, in harassment stuff, and that it doesn't come way that we can find that men are being... He hacked it. He hacked it. Yes. But every time we put porn use in, in harassment stuff and that it doesn't come up, I will tell you something interesting though. I'll tell you something interesting from the polygene preprint that we've got out now

about that status thing, the prestige and dominance. So social sexuality is positively associated with dominance, but negatively associated with prestige. So, there seems to be something there about prestigious men being more inclined for a long-term relationship and dominance being more inclined for short-term relationship. That seems to make sense, but what's interesting is that it's going in the opposite direction. I can understand how dominant men would be higher in socio-sexuality, but if the arrow is moving in the other direction, that's interesting. What was that? Attitudes of people in the west to multi-partner relationships. Yeah, so that's a preprint that I've got out now,

to funny story, I'll be presenting that at HBES, by the way, because I'm on this. Hey, you and me both, let's go. So I'm on this consensual non-monogamy panel, which is really interesting, because I didn't set out for this study to be a consensual non-monogamy study. And then it's under review with archives at the moment.

And it came back with three reviews, all saying we love the methods, we love the results. But we want you to completely rewrite the introduction from a consensual non monogamy lens. So I was like, right, interesting. Let's crack on with that. So I pulled in Justin McGilcey, and he's going to help me with that. So I pulled in Justin McGill's key and he's going to help me with that.

Anyway, so this study was, we live in the UK, and in the UK, you're not allowed to do polygamy of any kind. So you're not allowed to marry, a man can't marry several wives, a woman can't marry several men. It's called bigamy. It's still punishable by seven years in prison, by the way. So it's something that's socially sanctioned. And whereas you can have relationships like that, they're generally frowned upon, right? Which is really, really interesting

because, you know, if you look at fossil evidence and you look at our biology, it all points towards at least effective polygyny in humans in some way. So men having a smaller number of men having access to more women rather than everything being a monogamous pairing. And also, if you look at all hunter gatherer societies, I think something like 86% of hunter gatherer societies permit polygamy.

Not everyone tends to be the chief and people are very high status in those societies, but they're permitted in most cultures, the current or that we've previously known about that have fallen apart. So if there's an argument to be made that maybe polygyny is something that's hung around as part of the human mating experience for some time. So we've run a study just basically to see, well, do you actually find a desire for polygamy

in a population i.e. the UK where it's actually, you know, this sanctions against it, because if you can still find interest in that mating arrangement in a society where people aren't talking about it, you're not allowed to do it, or maybe that's telling you that we've got a part of our evolved mating psychology is still there in the background. So that's what we did. We basically asked a reic, well, two studies actually, a large sample of men and women about their polygeneous interest and polyandry, which is the multiple

men to women. And what happened? Interesting stuff, really interesting stuff. So I've got the exact figures here because I haven't committed them to memory yet. So we did quite a few things in terms of like correlational profiles and comparing interest for polygeneous relationships against, for example, just having a fair partners and stuff. But basically what you find is a third of guys

say that they would be open to a polygeneous relationship. So a third of guys say, yes, I would like to have two long term partners at the same time Who know about each other accept each other? They don't get to have sex with anyone else just me A third of them are like, yes, I would be open to that Women being part of that relationship not so much about one in 20. We're saying yes I would be like a co-girlfriend or a co-wife. And then a quite a bit of proportion, it's unsure. So about 20 percent of guys are unsure, 14 percent of women are unsure. So sometimes it's easier just to look

at the nose. So 50 percent of guys are like definitely know, 80 percent of women are like definitely know. Are you surprised at 50% of men saying definitely know given male desire for sexual variety? I'm not surprised because of when you start looking into polygyny just how difficult that is to juggle as a relationship difficult that is to juggle as a relationship. But also, remember, this is in a background where people are brought up to be told that this is wrong. So it's actually more the other way around. I'm surprised that you've got 50% of men

who are saying either yes or or uncertain. But what's really interesting is that you get that big sex difference in polygamy. So women are like, no, no, no, guys are like, yeah, okay, I'd be open for it. But when you look at polyandry, the sexes respond pretty much the same, which is that about 10% of people say yes, about 10 to 20% of people say that are unsure, but most people are saying no. And there's not a big sex difference between men and women there. So there's a much more drive on the guy side towards periginy than women towards polyandry. But it's about the same number of men that would accept being part of a female's harem as women who would want a harem of men around about 10% on bail.

That's a so much better way of putting it. I should have had you on the paper summarizing stuff for me. As you may be aware, I'm actually giving a short 15 minute presentation at HPS this year. Really? I should go to that. Yeah, yeah. I can get you an invite. You speak to me. I'll probably be able to sort you out. So interesting stuff there around stated and revealed preferences. Oh, absolutely, absolutely. Because I actually, I put that in the paper, right? So there's a massive difference between like, would, would guys actually, like, once you've got the decision this, there's that whole whole hot and cold reasoning element to it as well, right? Sorry, I interrupted.

No, just that was it. It was just the stated and revealed preferences thing. I mean, you know, guys, I imagine that, actually do I, I was thinking about the fact that if a man was offered the multiple women in front of him, that it would sound great, but I think that that really works best for short term mating. I think when you actually are faced with

the stark thermodynamics of trying to have a household with two women who, as much as they say that they get on great and maybe in the bedroom, they're fantastic. I mean, we've had a lot of history of introsectual competition between women poisoning each other's kids, poisoning each other, trying to push them down cliffs, you know, all manner of fuckery that's gone on. And it wouldn't surprise me if men may be mediated by status? Yeah, I'll absolutely, and when you look at the data in more traditional societies, you basically find that women are drawn towards polygyny only when the benefits they can get out of the polygamous marriage exceed what they could get out of a monogamous marriage. So if I've got a husband who can only invest five, all in me,

or there's a husband here who can invest 20 in me and another person, well then I'm getting 10 of the 20 which is more than the five. So there's a balance there of would I be better off on my own or part of this thing into having my utilitarian calculation in that regard. Yeah, it is. And it's also, I mean, a lot of these societies tend to have a lot of control over women as well. So it's like the way that women actually, if they have less, the way that they do things

and gain access to things is a lot of time through men, which is a shame. I learned, I can't remember what I was listening to yesterday, but I learned about how the culture of Chinese feet tying. Oh man, I hate that stuff. Have you seen the pictures? No, thankfully not. Oh, it's well, cultural relative, cultural relative is, the cultural relativism,

should we judge? Yeah, I'll judge you see they look like pigstrotters it's awful that the toes get curled round it's a argument that the reason that that came about was due to Asian warlords that had huge harms of women and didn't want the women to be able to run away. I have absolutely no idea. I'll find the segment and I'll send it to you. But basically the argument and the same was for female genital mutilation that if women don't enjoy sex and or can't run away, that there is less chance of a very inherently unstable harm of like an unsustainable number of women crashing and burning around you because

why would they sleep with the hot guards, King's guard that works outside the door or why would they run away from this terrible situation if they either can't run or don't enjoy sex? Yeah, I mean, I, the Chinese for binding thing, my understanding was that that was to do with small feet being more feminine and petite. The female genital mutilation, especially when you get the couple of stages to it, and when you get to the worst one, there's absolutely no way you can interpret that apart from male control. It's fucking disgusting. And what's really bad about that is a lot of the time there's this sort of cultural attachment to it

where it's other women pushing for it as well. So it almost like started as a male thing and then it's like then. What do you think's going on there? Interest sexual competition again? No, because it tends, it can sometimes be like mothers and stuff like that as well. Just a random cultural artifact.

Straight up like, oh, this is, you know, this is part of being a woman and it's... I mean, I'm at in Austin, Texas at the moment and the number of times that me and William will be sat around to dinner table talking to a bunch of our lad mates and the topic of four skins will come up because that's obviously our favorite conversation to have when we're sat about. Of course, yes. Yes. Especially. That's what men talk about. If it's beef jerky, we immediately want to talk about about four skins. And that's exactly the same. When you hear secular, non-Jewish, grew up in a totally secular household guys who will say, yeah, my dad's circumcised, I'm circumcised, I'll be circumcising my son. Okay, why, that's interesting. Why, what's your reason?

Yeah. Well, it's just, you know, everyone's, that's how everyone's got it. I'm like, well, it's another level though, Chris, the female general mental mental installation. Oh yeah. It's really something else. It's, to me, it's the equivalent of saying,

am I gonna have some nails pulled out or am I gonna have my hand chopped off with the nails being pulled out, being the circumcision? It's really, yeah. Not good. It's not good. It's the type of thing which really makes my blood boil if I'm honest when I've read about it and stuff.

Now, I'll move on. How many? How many previous sexual partners is too many? 2012. Oh no, sorry. I thought you were asking me about my own personal preference. Right, so I did some work with Steve on this and you're going to really enjoy this because we've got a follow-up study that I'm just writing up at the moment.

So we did this study in 2018, I think, 2017-2018. It actually, so this is what my claim to fame, this got written up in playboy. So that's like, you know, oh, we've made it. So we basically said, you know, for a long term partner, here's a person, they're generally attractive, how willing would you be to go on a date with them or entertain them as a long-term partner based on what people now call body count but what we did the research was just how many sexual partners they've had. And you I still remember walking into Steve's office and him having on the screen where he'd plotted up the data, he's got the nicest curve ever and he was like yeah writing this up. He's a lovely, lovely curve. And it basically peaks at around about four being like the optimal, three to four.

What's really, really cool is it's not just a linear pattern. So it's not like three to four and then it just goes downhill. You get this little curve. So people are a bit wary about a virgin as well. It's still high. So being a virgin is I think equivalent to something like having 12 partners, something like that. Yeah, being of, oh no, it's less than that, 7 to 8 partners is the equivalent of kind of being a virgin. Is this male to female female to male? Is there

a sex difference here? It depends on, again, sexual strategy. So if you're just looking at a long-term relationship, the lines are so close together, you could squint and they look the same. Where you get the difference is for a short-term partner and then men's standards drop compared to women. But for a long-term partner, no, the, the nice sort of curve shape is about the same. How different is a woman's short term and long term curve? It's a little bit flatter. So if they're looking for a short term relationship, whether someone has two partners or like twelve partners, it's pretty similar. Right. It's pretty similar. So it flattens out a little bit. The curve is sort of less steep, but it's still much higher than guys. What do you think that it

says that having a virgin or somebody with one partner is less desirable than somebody with three or four? Is this stated in revealed preferences again or is there something else going on? I think that this is... So you've got to think it's a U-shape curve at the end of the day and there's almost like U-shape risks associated with risks on either end. So the risk to having someone with zero sexual partners is that there might be a reason for it. There might be a reason that they're a virgin.

So it could be that they're just not a good deal. It could be that they have low mate value. So it could be that you're actually completely overestimating how good a catch this person is. It's a kind of cool question. Yeah, once you enter into a relationship and you start investing, you don't want to be investing in someone who is not the best deal for you. On the other end, when you have people who have too many sexual partners, then you have things like sexually transmitted disease. If you want a long-term relationship, the chances of them

maybe cheating on your own leaving is probably quite a bit higher. And so there's risks all round, but the higher number I believe associated with different risks than the lower numbers. But interesting, I'm doing a follow-up study. So this one was in the Journal of Sex Research, and it was just on the UK sample. So I thought, right, how can we just like inject some steroids into this thing? So I've redone it, but we've done it with 10 countries. So UK Poland, Norway, Japan, Brazil, all over the place. And not only are we now looking at numbers, but we're looking at when the numbers were,

because what I realized is that if you're asking people about 12 partners, and they can make a judgment, but then if you were to say it's 12 partners, and 11 of those have been in the last three months, that's very different to 11 of them were around about when that person was 18, 19, and 20, and then recently they've only had one or two. Do you see what I mean? Numbers the same, but if you were going to pick someone for a long term relationship that's going to commit to you and you might get married to and have kids to, which one are you going for?

The someone who clearly was a bit sexually desirable in their youth and his calm down a bit or someone who's actually pretty active now. They're on a tear at the moment. Yeah, absolutely. So, yeah, so we've got that. I'm They're on a tear at the moment. Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, so we've got that. I'm just plotting up the data at the moment. Isn't it interesting that some of the common men's advice on the internet, especially around pre-selection,

there's a big push at the moment for the polygene thing that most girls will happily take a high-value man if he's sufficiently high-value man if, you know, he's sufficiently high-value and she'll happily share him and so on and so forth. That doesn't seem to be borne out in this data given the fact that men's preference for partners, especially over the long term, and women's, doesn't diverge all that much. It doesn't seem like women see a fight in a man as being a some sort of pre-selection attractor.

And there's some work I'm doing at the moment. I keep saying this, I've got more studies than I have time to write them up. But I'm doing some work with Lave Canare at the moment about the sexual double standards. Because you almost have sexual double standards at a moment about the sexual double standards. Because you almost have sexual double standards at a global level and a personal level, so the global level is like, or the societal level is, what do you think society says? And that's when you sort

of get narratives like, well, girls don't care about a guy's body count, but guys care about a girl's body count at the sort of societal level. But whenever you measure it at the personal level, so what an individual actually thinks, very little evidence for this actual double standard. So it's one of these things where we actually think it's a thing, but when you actually talk to someone, it turns out not really to be a thing. What do you think that says about our own sexuality in the way that we perceive other people's? I think that it's says that sometimes our mating theory of mine can be quite faulty. I think that there's culture wars all over the shop,

including between men and women these days. And I think it ends up in a place where the sexes become quite caricatured, especially based on maybe the most extreme examples. So again, one of the most common one is that people will apply short term mating psychology of men to men. So they will assume that the men who are only after short-term relationships and what they want, they will say all men are like that, even those who are looking for long-term relationships. And I actually think a lot of suffering in the dating world comes from conflating short-term

and long-term mating desires. So either you're after something long-term, but you're picking someone who's after something short-term, that causes a lot of confusion, or thinking that you want something long-term when you actually want something short- term, which I think is also quite interesting. The number of people I've met who say that they want to get married and have kids and settle down, but then you ask them what their make preferences are and they just reel you off all of the short term, mating preferences and then of the long term, mating preferences. It's like, well, actually, it sounds like you just want a short term partner,

because you don't care about kindness, you don't care about whether they want kids, you don't care about whether they can communicate or whether they can empathize well, you just care about do they look good, are they good in bed? Are they going to give me resources now? So yeah, a lot of people are playing the short-term game when they think they're playing the long-term game when they think they're playing the long-term game. I wonder whether that would be... I wonder whether that would have a sex difference.

I would imagine that given women not wanting to seem easy, not wanting to come across like they are not valuing their body in the same sort of way, that you may find that women will use I'm after a long term mate as perhaps even their own self deception in order to perhaps pursue short term mating goals. Um, I don't know. It's just, it's, it's an interesting. So to, to round out that, um, optimal number of partners, was it, yeah, yeah.

Obviously, exactly the same for men in women, it was about four. Yeah. Yeah, I've got it here in front of me now about four. I mean, this was three to four. This was a few years ago mine. So we're going to see the difference in the new study. I mean, one of the things I can pop.

Well, one of the things that we have done is we looked at like four versus 12 versus 36 and the distribution patterns, because we show people actual physical distribution patterns. So here's one that shows that it was recent. The four obviously is still an optimal. There's no effect of distribution for four, so it doesn't matter when people had partners, four is like a nice solid number. It's when you have the larger numbers, that's when it matters more of when, when did that happen? Is that something in your past or not? And once you actually send a load of those into the past, the difference between say four,

12 and 36 start to converge a little bit, so it gets to the past, the difference between say 412 and 36 start to converge a little bit. So it gets to the point where the difference is become minimal. So that's quite interesting, and that's that extra dimension. You conducted an experiment where you ask chat GPT about made preferences. Before we get into that, what made preferences do people typically look for in a partner? So I love the Right, okay, so I'll give you the the real answer everything

Right, so if you give people a like-it-scale one-to-nine and say what's your ideal for humor intelligence physical attractiveness? Good financial prospects, creativity, they go 9889, 9889, they just do the whole thing, which is why a lot of the research we do, we have to ask about minimum make preferences, in which case they go, 77777, but actually the best research just then introduced an element of forced choice in some way,

like a ranking task, like, okay, so everything's high, what's the highest? And when you do ranking tasks, the things that appear up the top are like dependable character, being kind and understanding, even though a lot of evolutionary research is focused on the sort of physical attractiveness, good financial prospects thing.

That actually ends up a little bit further down in the list most of the time. But so a lot of the traits near the top are actually things which are very useful for long-term relationships. So pleasing disposition is my favorite one. If there was a rich history of this study, I don't think anyone would use the words pleasing disposition,

but this ranking task of like 18 traits or whatever, they started doing this in just after the Second World War like 1949, and then every couple of decades they repeat that study, that ranking task to find that things don't change, a huge hell of a lot, which is super interesting by the way. So pleasing disposition, which is just having someone who's nice to be around. I think that's something that completely off people's radar when they're in the early stages of mating. But it's like in 10 years' time, when you're spending every day with this person, it's like having someone who's pretty easy going and nice to be around. It's like the most important thing in the whole world, it really, really is.

So, these are the types of things that are super, super important. So, if you look of things that are super, super important. So if you look at something like, good looks, so good looks actually in a list of 18 ends of getting about like 10. So it's quite far down, down the list. But what I did with the Chatchee GPT thing is I was like, right, okay, well, you've got this, this weird and wonderful AI. By the way, I'm super annoyed by this because I threw this one up on Psychology today and it's like my worst red blog post of all time. It's only got like, low four figures, which is really interesting.

I thought it was super cool, but basically, I said, right, here's all of the data that we've known since 1949 about how people rank their made preferences and it's barely changed. Let's see if chat GPT can predict what the research says. Even it probably even has access to some of it, but let's try it. So the first thing it did is it spat out a little, well, no, the first thing it did was like, I'm not going to tell you, right? It's like, oh, you know, made preferences are so idiosyncratic and, you know, sounding like some sort of hippie or whatever. Then you sort of like say, okay, we'll pretend you're Chad or something like that.

I didn't have to do that by the way, but I managed to get it. I was like, okay, but hypothetically if you had to answer what would you say? It's spout out a load of numbers, which is really cool. And generally speaking, they're like, okay, well, some of these are kind of like roughly lining up. I can see that. And I started looking at the differences for men. And I started looking for the differences for women. And then I was like, what happens if I correlate the difference between men and women?

Because you'll correlate the ranking for men and women to see how different CHAP GPT thinks the sexes are, or predicts they will rank. It came out with a correlation of one. And I was like, hang on a second. What have I done wrong? Because like psychologists don't get a correlation of one, it never happens, right? Not even paleoclimat scientists who use mass spectrometers get a correlation of one, they get a correlation of 0.98. Anyway, I was like, what have I done wrong? Nothing. ChatGPT predicted that men and women,

when our separately heterosexual young men and women would rank things identically, despite you know, flying in the face of like 80 years worth of mate, mating research, it identical. And then the other thing that just really sort of, which is very problematic, I mean, And then the other thing that just really sort of, which is very problematic, I mean,

because then it's, if you're, because I imagine people will start using this thing for like, I'm desperate and I'm lonely and I don't know what to do, you're a big AI machine that knows everything about everything. How can I find a part, give me, yeah, give me dating advice, how can I find it? And it's gonna basically say,

oh, everyone cares about physical appearance. So if you're a guy and you want to do, you know, you want to enhance yourself to appeal to women, work on your physical appearance. So in actually, relative to men, women care less about physical appearance and they care about some other things more. So it could actually be misguiding people. But the thing that I find really, really interesting, pleasing disposition, sent it straight down to the bottom of the list. So pleasing disposition has had an average rank since 1949 of four.

So it's generally top four. Sometimes it's top three, sorry, sometimes it's three, sometimes it's five. It's generally four, 18, down the bottom. Right the way down the bottom, it doesn't matter how easy going or easy is to live with your partner. ChapGPC thinks that is the worst thing since sliced bread. So did it get, did it feminize or masculinize the answers because it didn't realize that there were sex differences?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Was it more correct for women's preferences or men's preferences? No, it was about, it was about equal. It was equally wrong for both. It was equally wrong because it's basically split the difference. So I don't know whether there is something, some aspect of sex difference denialism in there, because I have actually haven't blogged about it because ungrateful people will, I'll just not reading my blog post.

So read my blog post and then maybe I'll write a follow up. But I've also done some stuff there asking for the dating advice, asking, you know, if you wanted to attract a short-term partner, what should you do? If you want to attract a long-term partner, what should you do? Asking from the perspective of a heterosexual, young man and heterosexual, young woman. And the answers are predictably kind of like PC. So for short term, if you're like, how do I attract a short term partner? It's like, I'll make sure that you have good communication about consent.

And I'm there like, ha ha ha ha ha. You're a couple of steps ahead. Like, that important, like don't get me wrong, like it's important to have consent. But if you're telling some guy who's regularly on 4chan who, you know, can't remember the last time he went outside of a house to see a woman and your advice is ask for consent if you want a short term relationship. It's not going to both well for that guy if he walks up to a cashier and says, can we have sex? Do I have your consent? Do I have your consent? Yeah, at least the best way to find it.

At least the ask for consent. So first off, I think the chat GPT thing is so interesting because it's a language learning model. So what I've stopped looking at chat GPT as, especially for the more sort of social inferences, like what you're talking about here, is less a benevolent deity and more like a cultural aggregator. Absolutely, yeah. With some slight bias built into the system because they were, they were, they were started giving a personality test, right? It started giving a political orientation test, and because they were they were they were starting giving a personality test right to start giving a political orientation test and

then they were somehow able to go in and updated and make it more balanced. So there's definitely some some priors in here to be adjusted but it certainly comes up with all of these warnings about that that's you know oh you've got to be careful asking stuff about meeting people are individuals and stuff like that. It's like well yeah that's that's, you know, oh, you've got to be careful asking stuff about meeting people or individuals and stuff like that. It's like, well, yeah, that's great, but that's not excellent dating advice necessarily. You know, if you want to, like good dating device

is you haven't had a haircut or a shave in 15 years, maybe if you do that, you will look a bit more presentable. Yeah, well, I think that the aggregation of whatever the sort of cultural milieu at the moment is would include massive sex difference denial. It would include consent being one of the former things. Again, coming from a very particular portion of the culture, a very particular group of people,

what I am interested in though, going back to the Make Preferences thing, what do you think it says first off, that something so seemingly banal and forgotten about as pleasing disposition, something which can't be optimized for and online dating, and also something that is very rarely discussed when it comes to dating advice for men, but also kind of

dating advice for women, you know, with the advent of Bospich, Lening culture and independent woman and stuff like that. What do you think it says that that ranks so highly and yet isn't shown in advice? Again, is this, is that wrong? Is it wrong that people say they want a pleasing disposition, but it's it's not used to them when it comes to the revealed preferences of attraction. And secondly, what does it mean that make preferences are so stable over time? How can it be the case that for the last 80 years, make preferences seem to have stayed the same? Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't say they'd stayed the same, identically, but they're enough, there's enough stability.

They're what I'd like to call, it's a term I've started threading onto my research, so canal, canalization canalyzed. So likely to develop regardless of sort of social input. So a highly canalized preference like kindness means that no matter what developmental environment you drop someone into, a preference for kindness is likely to develop and emerge. You would need some pretty strong social engineering for that to not happen. So we're talking about things being canalized. So that was the second part of your question.

I've forgotten what the first part was. Why is it that pleasant disposition is so highly rated and yet isn't advised for online dating, isn't really something that you can communicate online, isn't given as advised for either men or women? Yeah, is it stated and revealed again? Does a pleasing disposition only work in a survey and if you had a pleasing disposition, does it actually work to attract a mate?

I think it does. So I've got another study that I'm writing up where I get all the time for this. I don't know. I'm upskilling in the therapy as well at the moment, which is eating about 20% of my time. So all of these papers will be coming out in 2030. Anyway, we did, we run some data analysis, Steve and I on some dating, speed dating data. One of the things that came out on it, because people think our speed dating, physical attractiveness, you know, the stuff that you can see immediately. You know, one of the biggest psychological predictors that came out of this study, it was political tolerance. Political tolerance was one of the biggest predictors of speed dating success.

So being opposite someone who was easy going when it came to politics. And I actually see this as kind of nested in a similar factor to pleasing disposition. So you've got someone who's quite agreeable, who's quite easy going, who's going to listen to your opinions and not judge you. And these are super important things. And I think it's a tragedy that we neglect talking about them and neglect, sort of, coaching people about them. And why would you?

Why would you coach someone about pleasing disposition? When the mating market is set up in such a way with the first filter at the moment is physical attractiveness. Physical attractiveness is the first hurdle. And so you can't blame people for pouring all of their time and effort to get over that hurdle before they then reveal other aspects about themselves. But this is what I keep coming back to, like, my biggest piece of advice is to do something like speed dating, because if you do speed dating you at least get a chance to be in front of someone holistically. So they get it maybe only eight minutes, but at least in that eight minutes, okay, they see a physical attractiveness, but then they have to sit there for seven more while you

get a quick, quick attempt to show them how tremendously funny you are and witty and gentle and kind. So I always sort of recommend that. Plus, when people go to an event like that, a physical event, all parties have already invested something small in terms of their time. So, you know, the advice isn't out there, but maybe we can change that, you and I, towards pushing people to do some stuff that's more holistic than just swiping away on something that allows people to judge you based on one or two criteria. I'm a big proponent of doing CrossFit if you want to pull. Big proponent CrossFit is a thing.

If you want to pull your muscles, definitely. You need to take, I mean, the CrossFit side of it is secondary, but everyone's wearing no clothes, everyone's into the same sort of thing, everyone does it eight times a week, there you go, that's CrossFit, CrossFit's a good, but I totally agree that don't need to hate the play, you can hate the game, and the game at the moment is predicated on physical attraction first and foremost. And the point you just make there is actually a perfect one, pick your context. Pick your context, if you want a long-term relationship, go to places where people aren't going there for a short-term relationship.

If you're trying to find a marriage partner in the night club, you are then trying to find a needle in the haystack among people who are open for short-term relationships. Do you know what I mean? Whereas if you go, you know, you want someone who, for a long-term relationship, go to a book club. Go to a book club where you'll meet someone who's nice and pleasant and intelligent and wants to talk about sort of intelligent things. And you can get to know them and be their friend. There was that study that came out recently that showed something like, you know, a third of women were close friends with their long-term partners before entering into a relationship

with them. And through the 20, they were somewhat friends with their future husbands. And circling the orbit. Yeah. And once or another. Yeah, exactly. So it's got me thinking a lot about this friend zone thing, right? So the friend zone is not necessarily a bad thing. There's almost different segments of the friend zone. There's the friend, your friend I'm getting to know you and you're still a possibility. And then there's the person I met on the bus who was Mally and I lump you with that.

So I think people have popularized the friend zone to the point where it's bad to be a friend. When actually, go back 50, 60 years ago, that's how people were meeting each other for lifelong bonds. They were friends first and met each other through close friends. Did you see a video that was virally doing the rounds about three weeks ago and it was 1940s, 1950s Australian women being asked on the street, what traits do you want in a partner? No, no, I didn't, but as you said that, I was thinking of the other one of the same time in London in the 70s as the woman going and pinching the bottoms of the businessmen.

Oh, I'm asking whether it was okay. I've seen that one. And I've also seen the Australian one where they allowed women in pubs for the first time and they had all the grumpy old men saying that they didn't like that. But no, sorry, I haven't seen this one. I haven't seen the women in pubs thing either. It's just a saying, I can't do an Australian accent,

but they're saying, he must be nice. It would be lovely if he was nice and kind and respectful. And you think, well, fucking hell, how antiquated is this? If he was nice and kind and respectful, and you think, well, fucking hell, how antiquated is this? And I wonder, again, how much of the espoused mating preferences that girls have, women especially, because it's mostly them that do the on-street interviews, because it's mostly male channels that are doing this.

And they say, how much do you think that a guy should earn? And you get these sort of ridiculous answers from women, especially on college campuses. First off, they're being selected because they're like fucking 18 and a half, right? Like they don't know anything. So that's why they don't know what a hundred grand is or 500 grand is.

They're just picking a number out of the air. So what you're actually testing for isn't mate preferences. What you're testing for is how much they've absorbed and aggregated just rumor and cultural sentiment that they think is something that's good to say. And also, which self-respecting girl really is going to say, you know, like 30 grand, 35 grand, like especially if they're around a group of girls

who've all said 100, you don't wanna be the friend that's like, oh yeah, I'll take the bloke that earns 30 grand after all of your friends have said a lot. So, yeah, I really do wonder how much of it is online dating, globalized sexual marketplace, the sort of dissolving of traditional sexual norms, all of that downstream creating a situation in which it is much more popular to talk about the looks,

the status, the resources. And yet, everybody knows that those things have zero predictive power when it comes to long-term relationship success or happiness. It's stuff like psychological stability, conscientiousness, secure attachment style. I mean, there's a positive spin that you can put on that as well, Chris,

which is to put my pinker hat on for a second of everything getting better, which would be that perhaps back in the 1950s and Australia, there are a lot of men who were not very nice and kind. Maybe this in these days it's more taken for granted that men who are in relationships less likely to, you know, because I mean don't get me wrong, like, you know, shitbend still exists to do awful things. Let's put that at a preface. But I think if you look at all of the metrics of domestic violence and stuff, they are on a downward trajectory. When you look over time periods of like two,

three hundred years, so maybe there is something there of kindness is it given now so on to the next thing who knows? Women don't have to necessarily state or optimize for this because there are fewer situations, it is less frequent that they would encounter a man who wouldn't be kind and gentle and so on and so forth. I'd be very interested to know. It'd be very difficult for you to. And more social support as well. So I think women are more likely to talk about these sort of things. You know, it's more when you reach out for help, help tends to be there.

Again, I'm not saying that this is a problem that's been solved or anything there's people in terrible straits there. But what you're looking over the span of decades, when you're comparing what life was like for a woman in the Victorian era compared to 2023. It's a very different place. Andrew, let's leave it there mate. I absolutely adore all of the stuff that you do. Where can people read your articles and keep up to date with your work? Oh, okay. So my Twitter is a good ones. That's at Dr. Thomas A.G. I also have at Dating Darwin, which is the one associated with my blog. So if you keep an eye out on those because we'll be advertising for a study. If you're listening and you happen to be an in-sale,

we'll be advertising a study on there soon that we're running. And I also run a website called psychestudies.co.uk, which is a free directory where people can advertise the psychology studies that they're doing, so I thought I'd just give a quick shout out to them. Absolutely, look, I really appreciate your work. I will see you at HBS later on this year, and thank you very much for today. Excellent! Thanks, lot.