Modern Wisdom - #838 - Dr Paul Eastwick - What Do People Really Want In A Partner?

Episode Date: September 14, 2024

Dr Paul Eastwick is a psychologist, professor, and a researcher. What do people actually want in a partner compared to what they say they want? Paul is the lead author on largest study of its kind whi...ch was just released breaking down exactly this question. Expect to learn the #1 trait people actually look for in a partner, how well people know what they want, what Ideal Partner Preference-Matching is, the biases that affect mate evaluation, the sex differences in stated vs. revealed preferences, whether big data could improve dating app matching and much more… Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Get the Whoop 4.0 for free and get your first month for free at https://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) Get $350 off the Pod 4 Ultra at https://eightsleep.com/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours with your first box at https://drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: https://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: https://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: https://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - 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

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Starting point is 00:00:00 What's happening people? Welcome back to the show. My guest today is Dr. Paul Eastwick. He's a psychologist, professor and a researcher. What do people actually want in a partner compared to what they say they want? Paul is the lead author on one of the largest studies of its kind, which was just released, breaking down exactly this question. Expect to learn the number one trait people actually look for in a partner. How well people know what they want, what ideal partner preference matching is, the biases that affect mate evaluation, the sex differences in stated versus revealed preferences, whether big data could improve
Starting point is 00:00:36 dating app matching and much more. A lot of uncomfortable insights today as are very publicly acceptable proclamations about what we want, supposedly, in a partner, are ripped away from our eyes and the harsh reality comes in to smash us in the face. Really interesting, fascinating stuff. The study is massive and very impressive and pulls great. So I really hope that you enjoy this one. I've won Whoop for over four years now, since way before they were a partner on the show
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Starting point is 00:03:55 around the world. Head to www.drinklmnt.com modern wisdom to get a free sample pack of all eight flavors with any purchase. That's drink lmn.com slash modern wisdom. But now ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Dr. Paul Eastwick. Your new study is one of the most interesting things that I think I've seen this year. Oh good, oh good. It also has maybe the highest number of authors that I've ever seen on a single paper. It's a big, it was a big team. Yes. So how well would you say people actually know what they want in a romantic partner? Um, it depends.
Starting point is 00:04:57 So what people are very good at recognizing is that some attributes are very, very desirable, right? So there's good agreement that traits like attractiveness and intelligent and considerate and honest that these are desirable things that we want romantic partners to have. And there's also a lot of agreement that we don't really want somebody who's disorganized and careless and we don't really want somebody who's disorganized and careless, and we don't really want somebody who's anxious and easily upset. So there's a lot of agreement and accurate self-knowledge that some attributes are more desirable than others.
Starting point is 00:05:37 And you can ask lots of interesting questions about why don't we want to be with anxious partners, right? Why don't we want to be with partners who are kind of a mess, right? And why do we want to be with partners who are kind of a mess, right? And why do we want to be with partners who are attractive and intelligent? The trick though, is when we expect people to have insight about what it is that they uniquely like, what do they like that makes them different
Starting point is 00:06:01 from other people? And that's the insight challenge where we find, sometimes people do okay and sometimes not so much. Why is that an interesting insight? What is it that you like that other people don't like? Why is that an interesting question? Well, I'll tell you, the reason I got interested, the way I came to that particular question
Starting point is 00:06:23 was because of the work on gender differences. So what do men and women want in a partner, right? And so this is research going back and it goes back like 80 years at this point, right? I mean, middle part of the 20th century when we started asking people, it was actually the sociologists at first, were really interested in what attributes
Starting point is 00:06:46 do men and women say they like, and do we find these gender differences? And you certainly do for attributes like attractiveness, for attributes like earning potential, right? Men will consistently say they like attractiveness more than women. Women will say they like earning potential more than men. Women will say they like earning potential more than men.
Starting point is 00:07:10 So we were originally interested in whether we saw that those gender differences also played out when we looked at how those attributes predicted all sorts of downstream consequences, because that is an individual difference of sorts, right? How'd you mean? Well, gender, right, what we're doing is we're describing how some people are different from other people, right?
Starting point is 00:07:32 And in some ways it's like one of the easiest ones to latch onto in the mating domain, right? But it does function like other individual differences in that if men say something as a group that this appeals to them more than this other group women it requires some amount of individual predictive power right that the groups have to be telling us something different that's going to then play out when we see what it is that they actually find appealing so it was really the gender differences that got me interested in this accurate
Starting point is 00:08:09 self-knowledge question in the first place. Right, so we have two things that are going on here. One is what do people say that they look for? And the other is what do people actually want? So we have stated and revealed preferences. Can you explain how you looked to sort of pull these two apart? This is the internet, especially online sort of mating discourse. It's the favorite.
Starting point is 00:08:32 Don't trust what people say, watch what they do. You know, it's the death of every evolutionary psychology survey, a self report that's ever been done because it says, well, no, no, no, that's what people want to say. So talk to me about how you tease these two things apart and avoided sort of too much confabulation between the two. You bet. And this is a key distinction and they're yeah these terms get bandied around but I'll tell you how I use the terms and I think this is a very helpful way to think
Starting point is 00:09:02 about it. So when we're talking about attributes, a stated preference for an attribute is usually done very simply. Here are a bunch of attributes, here are some rating scales. Tell us how much you would like these attributes in an ideal partner. You can be more specific, you can say ideal short-term partner,
Starting point is 00:09:20 you can say tonight. Sometimes we would do studies where we'd say, oh, when you go speed dating, how much are you going to care about these attributes? But all of those fit under the stated preference rubric. It's you know, I see this trait, and how do I feel about it? Okay. A revealed preference. It's not sometimes people confuse it with like, Oh, but what do you actually choose? That's not actually exactly what it is.
Starting point is 00:09:45 A revealed preference is about what does the attribute predict for you? Okay? So if you meet an array of people who vary in that attribute, does that attribute help distinguish the people you liked from the people you didn't? So if I send, speed dating is a very helpful way to think about this,
Starting point is 00:10:10 even though you don't actually need speed dating to get revealed preferences, but it's helpful I find, because you can imagine meeting a set of 10 or 20 people, and some are very attractive, and some are a little attractive, and some are not attractive at all. And the extent to which you have a revealed preference for attractiveness is the extent to which attractiveness
Starting point is 00:10:32 is a driver of the liking that you experience for these people. Now, liking could be also be like a self-report scale, liking could be a choice you make, liking could be like, oh, who do you take on dates, right? Liking can be measured in a million different ways, but it's some sort of association, some sort of predictive relationship between the attribute and some sort of evaluative experience that you have for a set of potential partners.
Starting point is 00:10:59 What did you do to work out the, I understand how you can do stated preferences. You just give people a report. What did you do to work out the, I understand how you can do stated preferences. You just give people a report, you say here's a list of 35 traits, rank order them from one to 35 in terms of which one you think is most important. How do you discover 10,000 people's revealed preferences? Right, so there are a couple ways of doing it
Starting point is 00:11:22 and we actually did it in two different ways in this paper. The main way that we did it, and the is we just actually look at the revealed preference in the sample, okay? So in the whole sample of 10,000 people, and I should probably explain briefly what we did in the study. We have a survey, it's about 10,000 people
Starting point is 00:11:44 from 43 different countries. And some of them are in established relationships, some of them are single. And what they're doing is they're going to be reporting on somebody that they're like, kind of interested in dating, right, but but they're not dating currently. And they're completing a bunch of traits about these people, right, They're rating them on 35 different attributes. We also have their ideals for those 35 attributes, so we know how much they say, their stated preferences for those attributes.
Starting point is 00:12:15 And we've got a dependent measure, too, of, you know, sort of how positively do you feel about this person, right? It's sort of standard liking desire kinds of measures. So what we can do is in the whole sample, we can just look at, okay, when people felt that these partners were, let's say a good lover, I'll use that example first, how positively did they feel about this person?
Starting point is 00:12:42 And it turned out that a good lover was the single strongest predictor of that dependent variable, right? So a good lover is a very strong predictor of feeling positively about a romantic partner, right? That relationship was the strongest. So we would say in this sample, there is a very strong revealed preference
Starting point is 00:13:04 for a good lover, even though people ranked it something like 12th in terms of their stated preferences, it was their number one revealed preference. So that's, I think, a helpful way of thinking about this distinction. What is ideal partner preference matching? I know that this is kind of a body of work, just I feel like that's important to get it out there. Yeah, right. So one of the questions we can ask in this literature,
Starting point is 00:13:30 I mean, looking at the stated reveal, it's all very interesting, but sometimes we wanna know, okay, if you are a person who says you like attributes XYZ, do you like partners more when they match rather than mismatch XYZ? Okay, so if you say you're somebody who really wants somebody who's attractive and intelligent and funny,
Starting point is 00:13:53 you really don't care about attributes like, are they religious and successful? You don't care so much, okay. Does the extent to which the partner matches those ideals, those stated preferences that you have, does that predict how positively you feel about this person? And figuring out the right way to do that matching has been very complicated.
Starting point is 00:14:17 And it's actually taking the whole field like a decade to sort out how to do it. Because it turns out there's all sorts of complex stats and that go into creating that matching process. You know, anybody who's ever played around with things like profile correlations or different scores is going to be familiar with the many complexities that come into play when you try to do this. But what we tried to do in this study was basically take
Starting point is 00:14:46 all of the different approaches that are out there and say, hey, we're gonna do them all. And we're gonna show you how well these different matching approaches work to try to get at the question of whether people are happier, more desirous of partners who match rather than mismatch their stated preferences. And what did you find? Well, what we found is that if you pull out that
Starting point is 00:15:13 unique component, okay, and and again, this was we really didn't know what we were going to find going in what that unique component was going to show because I'd seen studies where this component was basically zero. And and other studies showed things that were a little bit larger than that. So what we found was that when you pull out that unique component across all 35 traits, we found real effects. They're not huge.
Starting point is 00:15:42 It's like two, three, 4% of the variance tops, but it's there. So a matching effect that is truly about how much you desire these attributes. We've taken all of that, what we call normative matching out of it. We just look at that individual differences component. So if you meet somebody who uniquely matches
Starting point is 00:16:00 what you say you're looking for, you'll experience more desire for that person. It's not a huge effect, but it is there. We are able to detect it. Does that say that we have some degree of insight into what it is that we want in a partner? Yes, with the major, major caveat of when we're thinking about collapsing across 35
Starting point is 00:16:25 attributes. So across that whole set, we get a little something. The challenge is, what if you care about one attribute? What if you have a hypothesis about attractiveness? Or what if you have a hypothesis about intelligence or warmth? What happens then? And that's kind of where things start to fall apart. Why?
Starting point is 00:16:49 Well, those effects, because there are other ways of looking at matching effects if you care about single attributes and isolation. This is a basic statistical interaction prediction. So again, for listeners who are familiar with these kinds of stats, what you're talking about is if you're the kind of person who says you really care about attractiveness, okay, you rate that highly and an ideal partner, that's your stated preference. We want to see whether it matters that for again, how much you're desiring this person,
Starting point is 00:17:22 that you think that person is attractive. So you should experience a stronger association between how attractive you feel someone is and how much you desire them. If you say you care about attractiveness, okay? So that's the way we test that prediction. These are statistical interactions and you do it for all the 35 traits. And generally speaking, those are tiny, because the sample is so big, we detect many of them are
Starting point is 00:17:50 significant. Although many of them are not and actually sort of shockingly, you know, like attractiveness isn't. But some are and some are big enough to be notable, actually, the one that really stood out was religious. So I would say tentatively, like, if you're the kind of person who says you want a religious partner, there may really be a matching component to that.
Starting point is 00:18:15 But for most of those attributes in isolation, those effects are very, very small. I mean, you need like thousands and thousands of people to be able to see them. Okay, well, I mean, you need like thousands and thousands of people to be able to see them. Okay. Well, I mean, the least interesting part of that study is people were able to slightly predict the things that they want. The most interesting part is what is it that people stated that didn't come out as the revealed. So can you take us through where
Starting point is 00:18:39 people really missed the mark and sort of what you think is going on with the motivation for those? Yeah, so there are some fun discrepancies there that surprised us a little bit. We didn't, you know, I don't think we'd ever run a study where we had 35 different traits, where we felt comfortable doing this kind of ranking approach, where we take all the revealed preferences, kind of stack them up, and we take all of the stated preferences and stack those up, and we sort of see where the matches and the mismatches are. And so I mentioned one of the mismatches earlier which is that people really seem to have a strong revealed preference for a good lover
Starting point is 00:19:14 even though that kind of ends up being about 12th in their stated preferences overall. in their stated preferences overall. There are a few other interesting ones. People don't say they care that much about an attribute like smells good. That kind of fits somewhere in the middle of the range. They don't, you know, spontaneously think that sounds particularly appealing, but it actually ends up being the fourth biggest thing overall in terms of what they feel,
Starting point is 00:19:47 their revealed preferences for it. And then of course, if some are, if people are underestimating on some, they're gonna be overestimating on others. And they overestimated on some things like, consider it a little bit, other attributes that are a little bit more Other attributes, you know, that are a little bit, you know, more on the on the warmer side. People, you know, say that those attributes are very, very
Starting point is 00:20:11 important. But then when you look at the revealed preferences, yeah, it seems like a patient, patient, patient number 10. And it comes in at number 18, which is interesting. What else have we got here? The warm, the emotionally stable, I think was another one that like, people say they really want somebody who's emotionally stable, but I mean, it's positive, but it's not as strong as some others.
Starting point is 00:20:37 So maybe people in the end are okay with partners who maybe have a- What's this one going from 19 to six here? Sexy? Yeah, right. Sexy from 19 to six. Okay, so partners who, you know, maybe have a. What's this one going from 19 to six here? Sexy? Yeah, right. Sexy from 19 to six. Okay, so this is interesting. So actually with a lot of the attractiveness related traits, people were underestimating those on average, right?
Starting point is 00:20:56 Sexy was one, I think nice body was one. And so to bring it back to the gender differences, we can look separately for men and women at what their stated preferences show and what their revealed preferences show. And on the revealed preferences side, what you see is that men and women are really getting these attributes about the same.
Starting point is 00:21:24 Okay, attractiveness, sexiness, nice body, are really getting these attributes about the same. Okay, attractiveness, sexiness, nice body, those have the same revealed preferences for men and women. And that, you know, does that shock people in today's day and age? It doesn't shock me because this is what we've been seeing for like 15 years when we look at speed dating or we look at ongoing relationships.
Starting point is 00:21:44 Revealed preferences for things like attractiveness really don't show gender differences. The stated preferences, of course, do. And what we can show with this design is that what's happening here is that both men and women are underestimating how much they like attractiveness, but women are, like, really underestimating how much they like attractiveness, but women are like really underestimating. So the underestimation effect is bigger for women than it is for men.
Starting point is 00:22:13 Right? So that's how they both end up at the same. Just to dig into that, men prioritized in revealed preferences and in stated preferences? Yeah. And in stated preferences? Yeah. Attractiveness more? Yes. The men and the women prioritize in terms of revealed preferences attractiveness equally. Right. But on their stated side, the men prioritize it more.
Starting point is 00:22:38 But the men are still underestimating. Right? So the men are still too low relative to other traits in terms of how they rate the stated preferences compared to where the revealed preferences come in. The women are like way too low. What else was interesting when it comes to the sex differences between men and women?
Starting point is 00:22:59 So we can also look at some earning relevant traits. We've got things like ambitious, and we've got things like a good job and we've got attributes in that space financially secure is another one. And so those as stated preferences generally rank quite a bit lower, but you see the gender differences that women say they care about these attributes more than men do. Once again, on the revealed preferences side, it's the same for men and women. And again, we've been seeing this for, for 15 plus years now. But again, what's interesting here is now we can figure out, well, who's, who's getting it wrong. And this is a case where actually both
Starting point is 00:23:42 men and women are getting it wrong, just in opposite directions. So women are in their stated preferences are overestimating a little bit, how much they like those attributes and men are underestimating a little bit, how much they like those attributes. They aren't dramatic errors, but they're big enough and in opposite directions
Starting point is 00:24:02 that it explains why you see a modest gender differences, gender difference in what men and women say they want on those attributes and how they end up at the same place in terms of their revealed preferences. Why do you think it would be the case that women would overestimate how important a good job is in a partner? I would have guessed the opposite.
Starting point is 00:24:21 I would have guessed that it's a stereotype about women. They would have compensated for it. They don't want to seem like a gold digging hole. So they're going to count a signal against that. And then they're going to be smacked in the face by the reality of being a safety and resource seeking person. But it doesn't seem to be the case. person and but it doesn't seem to be the case. Yeah, you know, I actually think there's some evidence that the gender difference and I think the overall preference for those kinds of attributes that they have gone down a little bit over time. I could be wrong about that but I think that makes sense when you think about it in terms of you know, as women have entered the workforce
Starting point is 00:25:08 in greater numbers and entered more high prestige jobs, you're likely to find that at least in terms of stated preferences, they're not thinking in the same way that they would have back in like the 50s, like, oh, I need a partner who's going to really be making the money because I'm not going to be earning as well. So I do think the stated preferences have come down in some sense. But I also think you're right that some of what is affecting people's stated preferences are stereotypes. And I mean that in the most neutral way possible, just when you ask people to describe the attributes
Starting point is 00:25:46 that another group has, right, they can do that. And I think some of what men and women do when you ask them to describe their ideal partner is they start picking out attributes that members of the other gender have. And that's the funny thing is that, well, men and women know that men tend to earn more than women and attractiveness works the other way.
Starting point is 00:26:09 So men and women know that women on average tend to be more attractive than men are. So there are some of these, I think, stereotypes, again, in the most neutral way of using that term, kind of infect the way people provide those stated preferences in the first place. And that could be a source of some of these discrepancies between what people say they
Starting point is 00:26:31 want and what they actually want. Yeah, I'm sort of trying to work out what's a black pill and what's a white pill from the study. And I think it's really interesting, right? Because this is, I'm going to guess guess the largest study ever done on stated versus revealed preferences for men and women. It's pretty close. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:26:50 Okay. One of, at least the most recent, it's hot off the press. So just for the people that are only listening, we'll have had the table up on screen for the people that are watching, a good lover coming in at number one, at number two, loyal. So, um, you know, we have this big discrepancy in a good lover. We have this big discrepancy in smells good and sexy.
Starting point is 00:27:09 So it seems like people wildly underestimate the importance of some more kind of slightly shallow physical characteristics that are to do with intimacy, at least like physical intimacy, but then when you look at the rest of the top 10, you've got loyal coming in at number two. You've got honest understanding, considerate, supportive, you know, a lot of much sort of softer traits, sympathetic and warm. You know, these are, so we have sort of two things going on at once.
Starting point is 00:27:41 Like the red pill and the blue pill are both kind of right at the same time here. You know, like the red pill and the blue pill are both kind of right at the same time here. You know, you've got this vicious. Purple pill. Yeah, it is a purple pill. But it's this real blend. It's this real blend of the two.
Starting point is 00:27:54 There is a sort of a focus on both the immediate, attractive sexiness and the softness too. I think that's right. And again, what we're seeing here is that, you know, these are people's own judgments, right? So I'm making judgments about this person I know and whether I find them attractive and whether I think they're a good lover, right?
Starting point is 00:28:14 So we're really getting at an individual psychology about the kinds of traits that really co-vary very strongly with good feelings about that partner, desiring that partner, and wanting to be with that partner. There are other lessons, and again, I'm now drifting away from this study a little bit, with respect to, okay, but if I'm trying to attract somebody
Starting point is 00:28:40 in the first place, I think that's where, in many cases, people can find the red pill pretty frustrating because if you feel like well I'm not attractive or I don't have these traits that make me seem like I'd be a good lover I'm at this major disadvantage. And my usual response to that is like, look, in a setting where people are meeting for the first time, that is true. People reach consensus about attributes like attractiveness or being sexy, being confident. These matter in a first impression context. But where the blue pill comes in a little bit is that it says, but as people get to know each other, if you're in a context that is gonna create some repeated interaction, consensus on those kinds of attributes tends to go
Starting point is 00:29:35 down. So over time we start to disagree more and more about who's attractive and who's not. So for somebody who's not conventionally attractive, for somebody who doesn't go into the party and attract all the attention, what it means is that there are other avenues for you, but they have to be avenues where you actually get to know people over time,
Starting point is 00:30:01 because some people's opinions will diverge. know people over time because some people's opinions will diverge. What do you make of conventional and uncreative being ranked at number 35? What do you think that says about people? Yeah, that's a great point. Um, uh, people, uh, certainly like to feel some excitement, right? They, they, they want to, they want wanna feel like their partner is gonna inspire them. And this is very true in today's day and age. It has become more true over time
Starting point is 00:30:35 that we want our partners to push us. We want our partners to help us like become closer to our ideal self. I mean, it's like a core idea in in close relationships research is that we take on attributes of our partners and we want to experience new things with our partners. So somebody who is who is not terribly creative that that doesn't sound like a like a a recipe for a sort of a fulfilling, you know, growth
Starting point is 00:31:07 infused relationship. I wonder because it's sort of trustworthy is one of the things that's in there. And you think what trustworthies kind of like it's tangential to that. It's this sort of reliable, predictable kind of way. But it's, you know, this is exactly where the devil's in the details of we want predictable, but not too predictive. I don't want all that. Exactly. But I want them to be reliable, but I don't want them to be, you know, to be able to know
Starting point is 00:31:27 what they're going to say every single time I have a boring conversation with them. So it's this, it's this sort of delicate balance between the two. Yeah, right, right. And we like people who are, who we find exciting, right? Who are adventurous, who are going to do new things with us. But we also don't want to, you know, close relationships are by their nature, they're dangerous, risky things.
Starting point is 00:31:50 And they're dangerous and risky things because you put yourself in a position to be taken advantage of, right? I mean, that's kind of the whole point is that you're establishing intimacy with somebody, you're opening yourself up. There are tremendous benefits, both psychological and tangible that come with that,
Starting point is 00:32:09 but it is a risk of exploitation. There is a risk of being rejected, of being taken advantage of. And so this is why I think things like loyal often end up pretty high on the list because people want those reassurances from somebody, but they want the excitement too. Just excitement that isn't gonna like, mean that ultimately you're gonna reject me.
Starting point is 00:32:33 Yeah, not excitement. I find you in bed with a different person kind of. That's right. That's a little too exciting. I totally didn't think about the fact that people take on the traits of their partner. The fact that I didn't think about it probably means that other people also didn't think about the fact that, um, people take on the traits of their partner. I, the fact that I didn't think about it probably means that other people also didn't think about it.
Starting point is 00:32:49 Sure. Sure. But you, you are going to absorb some of the traits of your partner. So if they are anxious, it's not just anybody that's ever been in the car. Any guy that's ever been in the car with a very nervous, uh, co-passenger girlfriend and they, they panic about traffic. And you're like, I'm a cool driver. You're making me panic.
Starting point is 00:33:10 I'm just trying to do my thing here. And you kind of absorb even if it's just for a brief moment. But that's one of the reasons. Like if it's somebody who has an anxious disposition, if it's somebody who, the most literal way, if it's someone who smells bad, not only do you have to smell them, but you probably smell bad too. Yeah, right, right. You take it on yourself. And this is, you know, it's part of why this work is called the sort of self-expansion and inclusion of the other and the self. But
Starting point is 00:33:37 one of the reasons that researchers think that initiating relationships can be so exciting is because of this self-expansion experience that you get when you're spending time with somebody new that you're really excited about because ultimately you're in you're introducing each other to new things new activities new interests new ways of seeing the world and uh and it's all very invigorating and very exciting. And part of the reason that you don't need to sleep as much and you don't need to eat as much, right? It's all very self-expanding in that way. How much do you think the ranking that people have given
Starting point is 00:34:18 when it comes to their revealed preferences of particular traits is simply choosing to not have the absence of that trait. So the selection of good lover being the selection of not a bad lover, the selection of smells good being the selection of doesn't smell bad. What do you think about that? That's a great question.
Starting point is 00:34:39 We have occasionally looked for those kinds of effects, but it's very hard to tease apart with these kinds of data, right? Because what you might be seeing is that if I think somebody is like a one or a two or a three, I am penalizing them exceptionally harshly, and I'm not really differentiating between the five, sixes and sevens, okay?
Starting point is 00:35:01 When we're doing studies like this, where people are reporting on, it's either somebody you're in a relationship with or somebody you're kind of into, all of this, you know, these differences that we see here are really happening in that upper end, right? Because this is about differentiating somebody who I think is a seven on attractiveness
Starting point is 00:35:22 from somebody who I think is a six. attractiveness from somebody who I think is a six. But in contexts where you're meeting strangers and it's maybe a broader set of possible people that you'd be meeting, I do think it's plausible that people are sort of establishing some minimums and working up from there. But like, it sounds like very clear and easy to picture how that would work. The stats end up being absurdly complicated. Yeah, I imagine. I imagine they
Starting point is 00:35:52 are the stats. Stats was actually one of only two subjects that I got a C in a GCSE level. So I was early onset bad at statistics. Yeah, it's tough. Thinking about the good lover one, which is I think not only the starkest difference between stated and revealed, but also then comes in ranks at number one. What do you make of that? Do you just, is it a, both as the gap and then as the fact
Starting point is 00:36:20 that it is the revealed? That's a good question. I think that when people, when you imagine somebody who's a good lover in the abstract, that what people are probably thinking is that's not gonna impact my day-to-day life very, you know, like, well, what are we talking about?
Starting point is 00:36:44 We're talking about, you know, 30 minutes, you know, every evening or, you know, 30 minutes every week if you've been in a relationship for a while. But then in reality, somebody who's a good lover, that that idea incorporates a lot of other good things that relationships have, right? So it also indicates things like they're sensitive, they're giving, they're caring, right? But they also like know what they're doing
Starting point is 00:37:18 and they like care about whether, you know, whether, you know, my sexual experiences are good, right? So I think it's one of these attributes that when it's disembodied and abstract and disconnected from a particular person, it sounds just kind of okay. But when we think about our partner that way, it sort of brings in all of these other components
Starting point is 00:37:40 that really make a sexual or romantic relationship what it is. I imagine that's a really good point. I imagine that smells good, has a good body, is sexy. You know, what is it? It's somebody that has a good body thing, reliable, disciplined, has agency over their life. They're motivated.
Starting point is 00:38:02 They can overcome discomfort. You know, it's like this whole list of things that are upstream from, has a good body. And I guess the same thing goes for smells good. It means that they've probably got good personal hygiene and they take care of themselves and maybe they're considerate of others and so on and so forth.
Starting point is 00:38:17 You know, another, this is just occurring to me now and this would be an interesting thing to test is that when you ask people, how much do you want these traits in an ideal partner, they are mostly thinking about, who I want with me by my side, doing the hard tasks of life. But when they're thinking about a real person
Starting point is 00:38:42 that they are in or wanna be in a relationship with, that these sexier, more romantic components come to the fore more. It's a bit more visceral. Yeah, right. Because I'm thinking about this person and all the visceral things that they inspire for good or for ill. And so I think that's quite, that's another possible explanation for why we see some of those discrepancies. Were the stated or revealed preferences for short term or long term relationships or both? These were all, we usually describe it as an ideal romantic partner, which at least to me connotes something long-term.
Starting point is 00:39:28 We didn't ask about short-term ideals in this study, really just because of time. Did you work out overall whether men or women were more accurate? That's a good question. Actually, I don't think we did. Um, but that's something we could, we could certainly do. I mean, you know, simple stat. Yeah, right. It shouldn't take too long. Right.
Starting point is 00:39:52 That shouldn't, that shouldn't be too bad. I, my sense is that they're probably similar, but I don't. Um, but I didn't, I didn't look at whether there's sort of overall mismatches there. I mean, certainly we saw with attractiveness, women had it off more than men, and for earning potential they were kind of similarly off. I wonder, did you consider or would you consider doing a follow-up study to do the reversal? How important do you think that the opposite sex thinks that trait is in you? Yeah, that's an interesting thing.
Starting point is 00:40:24 And you know, I mean, there's some studies that have done that, not at this kind of scale, but people's ideas about what the other gender likes, I think the evidence suggests it tracks pretty well what people say they like, right? But we've never tried to look at, well, what would the discrepancies be there, right? Between my ideas about what you like
Starting point is 00:40:45 and your revealed preferences for, you know, some of my gender. Yeah, what actually, because that's what's important. And this is, this is, I think, probably the most interesting element. Basically, is it even worth talking about mate preferences if they don't actually reflect our revealed mate preferences.
Starting point is 00:41:05 Like what we're both doing is we're both playing this game. I can predict what you say you're going to want, but that's pointless. Like I'm not here to just play some lexical game. The reason that we try and predict what other people want is to predict what they want, not to predict what they say that they want. Right, right.
Starting point is 00:41:21 I do agree that this is part of the challenge here. And again, it is true when we talk about that whole suite of 35 traits that we can get some action there. They're not miles away. Right, right, right. Exactly. That people do seem to have some self-insight. But on the specific traits, usually my bias as a researcher is that I'm usually much more interested in those associations, what we call reveal preferences here,
Starting point is 00:41:53 that I wanna know how strongly does this attribute predict some DV that I care about? I think people's ideas about the attributes they like are also interesting, but not because I'd want to use it strategically to like try to match it exactly. I'd want to know what what their revealed preferences are and try to match that. Are you familiar with the Keynesian beauty contest? Do you know what that is? Uh, no, tell me. Okay, Keynesian beauty contest describes a beauty contest where judges are rewarded for
Starting point is 00:42:27 selecting the most popular faces among all judges rather than those they may personally find the most attractive. This idea is often applied in financial markets whereby investors could profit more by buying whichever stocks they think other investors will buy rather than the stocks that have fundamentally the best value because when other people buy a stock, they bid the price up, allowing an earlier investor to cash out with a profit, regardless of whether the price increases are supported by its fundamentals. So it's basically this world in which we are trying to predict what other people
Starting point is 00:42:56 will predict as opposed to just predict what's going to happen in the real world. And that's where, when we get to what do you think other people would look for in a partner, that's what when we get to, what do you think other people would look for in a partner? That's what you're doing. You're not just trying to think, what do I think they want in a partner? It's what do I think that they will say? And then that gets in social desirability.
Starting point is 00:43:13 That gets a lot of this sort of second, third order thinking in it. Yeah, that's really interesting. And so you could imagine that somebody who's paying more attention to revealed preferences might be able to get a leg up in that kind of way. That's an interesting idea. Yes. What were some of the biggest unanswered questions that you had after the study? Their implications, what it means for what people want at the moment?
Starting point is 00:43:41 So one of the questions that remains unanswered that I'm very interested in is, you know, in this study, I'm a participant and I'm rating this partner on these traits. Now that's very useful. I mean, again, I'm a psychologist, so I believe in subjectivity is really important. And that if I want to understand my experience of why I like this person rather than that person, it helps to have me rate those traits. That tells me a lot and we get the revealed preferences from those kinds of ratings.
Starting point is 00:44:12 But if you were, say, a matchmaker, if you were an online dating company, you wouldn't have data like that if what you were trying to do was predict who was going to like whom. You would need people's self-reports on both sides, right? Or, I mean, you know, if we're just dreaming here, you might have like, you know, independent coders, you know, rate people on their traits, okay? So what would we see for both revealed preferences and also that matching phenomenon if we're using both people's self-reports, right? So your self-reports of your traits and then my ideals and trying to match that way.
Starting point is 00:44:58 Now it is a basic rule with this kind of data that when you move from my judgment of the trait to your judgment of the trait and you try to predict something that predictive relationship is going to go down. But we have some wiggle room here. It might go down, but might still be useful. It might be the kind of thing that a matchmaker could use to predict who you're going to like more or less. It could also go down to basically zero. So, so that we don't really know yet. There are, there are practical ways that these data could prove useful. Uh, or, uh, we kind of end up in the same place where we're right now.
Starting point is 00:45:40 Anybody who tells you that they have a matchmaking algorithm is probably just, you know, trying to sell you a secret sauce. Yeah, I saw you tweet an article, I think, from The Guardian that was quite critical about the effectiveness of online dating for finding soulmates. Yeah. A little bit of an assessment. People's sort of ambient dissatisfaction with this stuff. Do you think that there is a way that your big data or big data like it could be folded
Starting point is 00:46:04 into a dating service to make the matchmaking more accurate? Do you think that there is a way that your big data or big data like it could be folded into a dating service to make the matchmaking more accurate? I think it's possible and that's what we need to see is if you can get a sample that's this large and you have people on both sides before they actually meet each other, maybe there is something you can do to predict good matches. Now I want to be clear about what I mean by good matches because if you have people's self reports ahead of time, there are a few things that are very easy to do. It's very easy to predict who's popular. That isn't challenging. If somebody tells you, I tend to be popular with members of the gender that I'm interested in.
Starting point is 00:46:40 Guess what? They will be. So those kinds of I'm interested in, guess what, they will be. So those kinds of, of, of self reports tend to have accurate insight, what is much, much harder. And we've never been able to do, and I've never seen anybody else who's able to do it is to actually create that matching that that specific matching component or what I usually call compatibility, that it's not about your popularity. It's really about the two of us fit together well. That's the sort of the holy grail in this space. Yeah, it's very interesting. I know that you've done a good amount of work about compatibility
Starting point is 00:47:19 and sort of how people evaluate mate evaluation theory and stuff like that. evaluate mate, mate evaluation theory and stuff like that. Yeah. Yeah. It's, um, I guess the one, the one question that I have, or the sort of main potential flaw that I see in the study is that when people have been doing their revealed preferences, that is still mediated by their own biases, right? They're describing either a real or imagined partner. And in that they are, it has to go through the filtering,
Starting point is 00:47:46 which means that all of the muck of their cognitive makeup and their desirability and so on and so forth, how do we not know that they're maneuvering and manipulating the revealed person, avatar, through their own psychology? Oh yeah, it's a great point. And that motivated reasoning is in many ways, again, this is like one of the essential truths
Starting point is 00:48:12 of close relationships, is that people are very motivated to see their partners in a positive light. There are some experiments, like 30 years old now, but there are really great studies where you tell people things like, hey, you know, good relationships have a lot of conflict. And then people will be like, Oh, yeah, oh, my relationship has a lot of conflict. Yeah, this is not usually something that people would be willing to say.
Starting point is 00:48:34 But when you tell them that actually would be a good thing. Oh, now they see the conflict in their relationships. Right now they're now they're willing to identify those moments. Right? Now they're willing to identify those moments. People do that with traits too, right? So for a lot of these traits, you know, there's a good version and a bad version of the thing, right? We were kind of talking about this earlier, but you know, there's a good way of being sensitive, right? You're aware and seem to care that I'm feeling off today
Starting point is 00:49:02 and you want to talk to me about it. But there's another way of being sensitive. It's like, oh man, this person is really touchy. And so what people will do is that when they're in a relationship that they're happy with, they'll think somebody is the good version rather than the bad version of an attribute like sensitive. And so whenever we're getting people's own judgments,
Starting point is 00:49:23 it's always gonna have that sort of mucky self-report stuff in it. And that's not that useful if your goal is to try to, you know, predict who's gonna like whom before they have a chance to meet each other and engage in that motivated reasoning one way or the other. There's a third stage that I would love to look at. So, um, one of the bits of research that I've done with David Buss was about the difference between, uh, what people will click on versus who they will click with. And the fact that algorithms seem to have a very good predictive power of being able to get you to swipe right on somebody.
Starting point is 00:49:59 But when it actually comes to long-term compatibility, it, the predictive power is essentially zero, right? Which presumably you've seen too. That makes sense. Yeah. So, so we have the way that I'm kind of conceptualizing is we have three, we have stated preferences, then we have revealed preferences, and then we have effective preferences for the long, for the long term as well.
Starting point is 00:50:21 So I would love to, to work out, you said that you liked this thing, you ended up liking this thing, and what were the traits that ended up being effective over the long term as well? And that would require it to be, I don't know, longitudinal, or for you to look at changes, or like, what do you wish that you could change in a partner if you could?
Starting point is 00:50:41 But that would be so cool, because that would actually show not only what do people say they want, what do people are attracted to, and then what is it that's got the best predictive power for effectiveness long term. Yeah, that's a great point. And one of the challenging things is that, you know, with any, the way humans go about initiating relationships is that you got to go through this stage to process, right? So I got to be sufficiently appealing to somebody initially in a first impression and a second impression, and then sort of get to those later stages. I think one of the challenges of modern dating is that as we have expected various online forms to be able
Starting point is 00:51:28 to do the job for us, it makes it a lot harder for some people who don't immediately convey a positive first impression to get to the later points where they their other attributes or just the opportunity for some compatibility to grow and emerge, they can't get to that stage. Well, this is the emergence of the black pill, right? Yeah, right, right, right, right. But I think what the black pill misses,
Starting point is 00:51:56 and I suppose we can pin this on the red pill too a little bit, is that the answers in that space, I mean, correct me if you disagree, but the answers in that space are mostly about boosting my attributes so that I don't get cut off at the early stage of the process. Right. So that I'm appealing enough. And look, you're lifting weights is great. People should people should work out.
Starting point is 00:52:19 People should take care of themselves. But I think that what gets missed is that the thing that connects people and that gives them meeting opportunities is social connections, social networks, spending time with people, spend time with people that you aren't going to hit on just for the sake of being around other people and being in those networks that grow and morph and change. And, you know, I worry that we have like forgotten that.
Starting point is 00:52:50 It is certainly a sort of treating dating like a Petri dish. And humans are very bad at working out exponentials, they're very bad at working out compounding, but exponentials occur in social networks as well. If you start to add one person into your friend group, into two people, into four people, into, you know, before you know it,
Starting point is 00:53:09 the number of different connections between everyone and then all of their connections outside of it are very difficult to predict. I think this is, you know, I texted William Costello about this not long ago saying that I felt like my tumbling down the rabbit hole of evolutionary psychology has been so great at really sort of helping me to understand how, why humans are the way they are. But when it comes to the mating research, it's one thing that's fundamentally missed. It's
Starting point is 00:53:36 missed by the red pill. It's missed by the black pill. It's missed by, it's missed by everybody. And it's even missed by evolutionary psychology, human behavioral ecology. Everybody misses it, which is the phenomenological sense of falling in love with another person because it can't appear on a spreadsheet. There is no way that we can describe it, that we can measure it. It's this sort of, you know, weird sense of stuff, fluttering of butterflies and all the rest of it. Yeah, right.
Starting point is 00:54:01 And, and, and, you know, we can talk about she's trading her fecundity for his resources and her youth for the mate value. And in some form or another, red pill, black pill, evolutionary psychology, human behavioral ecology, the full work, social psychology, everyone will come up with their own way to describe this. And no one is talking about, yeah, but sometimes you just sort of fall in love
Starting point is 00:54:24 with somebody and you have no idea why and what the fuck's going on there. And I think that's, that's, that's really the X factor. It really sort of throws a wrench into the works of all of our presumed God-like predictive powers. It goes, yeah, that's out the window. Sorry. Right. I think it is extremely chaotic, right? In the chaos theory sense of the term, right? That it really hinges on a set of interactions that can go in any of a wide variety of different directions. And once you fall in love with somebody, you can pick out, and I believe people when they say this,
Starting point is 00:55:01 when they say, I fell in love with you because you're smart and that time you were really interested in what had gone wrong with my job and because my dog seems to love you. And I believe people when they tell me that, that is why, and there was no way that we were gonna flag those three things before you actually got together. There was no way to know.
Starting point is 00:55:29 And that, I think it's, you know, I find it both inspiring, but also kind of daunting. Like disenchanting as a researcher. Yeah, right. It's like, well, then what the hell are we gonna do? What am I doing with my job? Yeah, but I will say, you know, we're not alone in this space.
Starting point is 00:55:46 Like, personality researchers are getting into this stuff, right? People are starting to take this, like idiosyncratic personality, that the things that describe you can't be captured by scales that you just feed to everybody. And, you know, we're getting there.
Starting point is 00:56:03 I think things are gonna look different different in, in 10, 20 years and are going to look pretty creative. You gave me an idea before, when you were talking about, uh, the challenge that people have of getting past the first door, right? Of sort of getting someone to swipe, brighten them on a dating app or getting a phone number or in a bar, or, you know, just getting a second sentence out of somebody if they're trying
Starting point is 00:56:23 to speak to them. Um, I think that there's a second sentence out of somebody if they're trying to speak to them. Um, I think that there's a lot of sympathy that gets given to people who don't even get a chance. And that kind of makes sense. It's like an archetype of the poor down on his luck guy that would make a great partner, but isn't able to do it or whatever. Um, but no one really ever talks about the reverse, the person who might be really phenomenal
Starting point is 00:56:45 at making a sparky conversation, but just have like a completely objectionable, like, un-deal-with-able personality, right? Or the emotional stability, for instance. I'm going to guess if somebody is very low in emotional stability, they can probably kid many people. There may be lots of people listening that have been in relationships with people like this who have got past the
Starting point is 00:57:08 front door, got into a relationship, everything seemed fine. And they go, oh, there's like a Jekyll and Hyde, Batman and Bruce Wayne scenario going on here. And I totally get it. People can't get a date. Sympathy is needed. how can we get these dudes to be more attractive? How can we get these women to be more interesting when they're talking to people? But there is a whole other cohort of people that need mate retention tactics as opposed to sort of mate attraction tactics.
Starting point is 00:57:37 So there's a couple of interesting things here. First of all, I think the traits that you're describing that are probably most likely to show that pattern would be some of the more, you know, like narcissism and market market, like dark, dark triad stuff. I think, um, actually the evidence on those traits being appealing at first is like a little mix. I think they're like a little bit desired. Um, but they certainly don't bode well, um, for people's long-term relationships. And that's men and women.
Starting point is 00:58:06 Yeah, and that's men and women, yeah. So those attributes aren't great. But what's so interesting with things like emotional instability, the thing is those attributes, you tend to come off badly at first, and they're not great in the long run. But what starts to happen is that again this
Starting point is 00:58:26 gets into this like inclusion of the other and the self kind of thing is that somebody who is anxious if they get in a relationship with somebody who helps bring their anxiety down maybe because they're super cool or just they make that person feel safe and comfortable. You can get a person who's like, look, I am still an anxious person, but I'm not anxious when I'm with my partner. I'm not anxious when I'm with these two friends. It doesn't even have to be romantic.
Starting point is 00:58:58 And I think it's not like a route to personality change necessarily, but it is a route to arriving at a place where you can have a happy, fulfilling relationship because you've found a way to tone down those traits at least within the context of that relationship. How much do you think that the results you found both from a stated and revealed preferences standpoint, how much do you think that they were always this way? How much do you think that these preferences have been subject to change across time? And can you think of any stated or revealed preferences that might be more or less subject to change?
Starting point is 00:59:40 It's so interesting because I think about this all the time with the earning potential differences or lack thereof in particular. I watch a lot of movies and I recently was watching the 1950s version of A Star is Born. And in that version, you know, the main female character becomes a major success and the man just absolutely falls apart, right? He cannot handle his partner being successful.
Starting point is 01:00:21 And it is very understood in that movie, like very few men would be okay with this. Like this is absolutely emasculating that this is happening to him. So there is part of me that thinks, boy, this has gotta be a recent phenomenon, right? Where men and women have the same revealed preferences for things like earning potential.
Starting point is 01:00:42 And then I read, you know, like Jane Austen, and you know, they're like, everybody's gold digging. So I guess this is a long-winded way of saying, I don't know, I suspect there are cultural trends that push these things around, but you know, I wish I had the data for what people really wanted in the 1800s, or, you know, going back even further.
Starting point is 01:01:10 But I, my guess would be is that as long as there was variability, right? As long as there were rich women and poor women in the, you know, in the social circle, as long as there were rich men and poor men, that both men and women were gonna gravitate toward the good stuff, regardless of which gender they were pursuing.
Starting point is 01:01:29 But that's just a guess. Yeah, it's an interesting one. I wonder whether increased globalization and increased inequality in that we can now see, there's people who have obscene amounts of wealth that aren't like God-like creatures, you know, that isn't bestowed down or blessed. He's not the King.
Starting point is 01:01:51 He's not, he's not somebody that's untouchable. It's somebody that you can track their journey, you know, Walter Isaacson read 800 pages and you know, Elon Musk, one of the top richest guys in the world, you know, his story. So I wonder, you know, Candice Blake did some really fantastic work about how the proliferation of sexy selfies in areas of high income inequality. Oh, wow. So basically it seems like women self-objectify more
Starting point is 01:02:14 where they can see both how high they could climb with the right partner and how low they may be able to fall essentially. So I wonder whether in a world that is basically that tuned up to 11, everybody can see how high they can climb. Everybody could see how low they could fall. Um, but then you throw the spanner in the works now, which is female
Starting point is 01:02:34 learning potential and female financial independence, you know, women out earn men in the twenties. It's basically a motherhood tax. A pay gap is essentially just a motherhood tax now and title nine's has been reversed, two women for every one man, completing a four year US college degree. From the metrics perspective from 50 years ago, if you'd crossed off the M and the F and not shown people what it was, they would have said, oh, those are the guys and those are the girls.
Starting point is 01:03:00 And you go, no, it's actually the other way around. So yeah, you think, what does it mean that ancestrally, it should be the case that women would be more sensitive to the resource and status capacity of their partner in a world where they are now potentially out-earning their partner, especially during the time when they're looking to find a mate, et cetera. You know, as you grow up a little bit older,
Starting point is 01:03:23 men's desire to be obsessive and conquer and do mastery and stuff like that, plus motherhood tax, I think results in men on average earning and still is going to result in them earning more across their lifespan. But it's a real sort of upside down. Well, how much can we change our both stated and revealed preferences?
Starting point is 01:03:43 How much are we able to step in and consciously go, Oh, turn this down or turn this up? Yeah, it's a great question. You know, we've tried to do some amount of experimental manipulations of people's stated preferences. It turns out it's pretty hard. It's pretty hard to change in a deliberate way. People's ideas about what they want.
Starting point is 01:04:05 We can do it with, you know, sort of these, it's like these conditioning paradigms, right? Where you get people to experience positive outcomes with particular attributes, and you do it more or less in various conditions. But all of these effects that we get, they're useful for testing things in the lab. But, you know, we're not changing whether people say they care
Starting point is 01:04:28 about earning prospects in an enduring way. But I do think it's important. When I think about the problems when it comes to gender relations today, I think a lot of it, because we see these revealed preferences aren't so different, I think a lot of it because because we see these revealed preferences aren't so different. I think a lot of it is that like our ideas and our expectations and those things can matter. I mean we can get really mad when our when we feel like our expectations aren't gonna be met or you know when we
Starting point is 01:05:01 think the world should be working this way but it's working some other way. So I'm encouraged at one level that well it seems like if we want a route for change here, we just got to change the way people think about themselves, the way people see themselves. At the same time, I also know that any kind of lasting intervention is always a challenge. Mm. So what have you learned about where positive feelings about our partners come from? Like, what does it mean to say that we have a positive, sort of, disposition toward our partners?
Starting point is 01:05:39 What is that sense and where does it come from? I mean, it's a deep question because in some ways, it's the thing we focus on the most. I mean, again, I'm a close relationships researcher first and foremost, and the main thing we study is how positively people feel about their partners. And we think it's important because it's gonna predict break up and divorce.
Starting point is 01:06:04 It's gonna predict the health outcomes, right? But how exactly do you come to look at a rating scale and say, I'm at the top of this scale, or I'm kind of middling. I think a lot of times we think it comes from this general sense that you kind of lock in and you retrieve it the way you would retrieve the response to any other question like oh I think I'm extroverted but I also think that there are certain key major moments that happen for people in their relationships sometimes they're called like turning points, right?
Starting point is 01:06:45 And sometimes it can be a small thing, like the one time that, you know, you made breakfast for yourself and not me, and that can be a real turning point. And I realized like, wait, do you even like actually care that I'm here? It can also be a very positive thing, like the time that you skipped hanging out
Starting point is 01:07:02 with your friends, cause I'd had a bad day. And those moments too, can also sort of push us in dramatic ways that that again are kind of random, like that same event could have happened to 10 other people and not have the same positive effect that it did on me. So I think it's some combination of those two things, right? Like overall senses that we kind of lock in and retrieve easily, but also these little moments that end up being very memorable. And other than that, I don't really have a good sense
Starting point is 01:07:35 of how people integrate those things. Do you think that it would be useful for people to become better predictors of their own revealed make preferences. I wonder whether in your big cohort, the people who's stated and revealed had the smallest distance between the two are more reliably successful in relationships because they're better able to expedite finding partners that are like the ones that they want to be like? That's a really interesting idea.
Starting point is 01:08:09 And we've, I don't even know if we've ever collected the data that would really give us the right way to look at it. We at some point had some data where we tried to get a sense of who knew, like who was gonna get an accurate sense of like how popular they are. And there are a few speed dating studies to that effect, but not about like, oh, this at the end.
Starting point is 01:08:33 Basically, if you had relationship satisfaction, if you'd just got one more for the people in relationships, I guess even for the people that weren't in relationships, you could have asked a question like, how satisfied are you typically in your relationships? And if you had somebody you would have been able to see quite easily, is there, is there a covariance between someone's ability to stated and
Starting point is 01:08:56 revealed are accurate? They seem to be a little bit higher. I mean, if it was lower, uh, that would just throw a complex matter in my hypothesis. But, um, yeah, that would be cool to find out. Yeah, yeah, that's a really interesting idea. And the the general idea of looking at how satisfied you are with a whole suite of relationships, you know, it is, this is where like, polyamory research really has a leg up on what basic close relationship researchers do is because they can in principle see how you are reacting across multiple partners. And
Starting point is 01:09:32 that has the potential for all kinds of fascinating insights because it suggests, you know, we might be able to see things like, you know, I say that I really care about attractiveness, but it turns out that I'm the kind of person who's I'm happier with the partner that I really care about attractiveness, but it turns out that I'm the kind of person who's I'm happier with a partner that I think is less attractive, right? We would be able to see those kinds of differences in the way you are reacting to multiple partners at the same time.
Starting point is 01:09:55 So unfortunately, those samples are pretty hard to collect, but they can reveal a ton of insights. Paul Eastwick, ladies and gentlemen. Paul, I love this research. I'm fascinated to see what you do next. Where should people go? They wanna keep up to date with all of the stuff that you're doing.
Starting point is 01:10:10 That's a great question. You can follow me on Twitter, at Paul Eastwick. And yeah, I'm gonna have a book coming out in about a year and a half. It's gonna be a little ways off. So yeah, you can look for me then. But for right now, bring you back on. Love to bring you back on when the book. That'd be great.
Starting point is 01:10:28 That'd be great. Oh, yeah, we did it, man. Appreciate it. Thanks so much.

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