Speaking of Psychology - Using your mind to find love (SOP21)

Episode Date: February 25, 2015

There are few things in life so strongly tied to our overall happiness as a stable and happy marriage. In this episode, psychologist Ty Tashiro, PhD, gives advice and tips on how to use psychological science to find lasting love, showing us that using our heads, and not just our hearts, can lead to our happily ever after. APA is currently seeking proposals for APA 2020, click here to learn more https://convention.apa.org/proposals Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Looking for and successfully finding love is not easy for most people. Online dating has made it a little easier, but knowing what to look for in a partner is something many people still struggle with in the modern dating world. In this episode, we talk with psychologist Tai Tishiro, who gives advice and tips on how to use psychological science to find lasting love, showing us that using our heads and not just our hearts can lead to our happily ever after. I'm Audrey Hamilton, and this is soon. Speaking of psychology. Psychologist Ty Tishiro is an author and researcher who studies the psychology of relationships. Why some relationships last and others don't.

His work has been published in top-tier academic journals, including the American Psychological Association's flagship journal American Psychologist. He is also author of the book, The Science of Happily Ever After. Welcome, Dr. Tishiro. Thanks for having me. We're often told to follow our hearts when we're looking for love. Is that really the best advice, or is there a better way? way to go about it. Well, that's a great question. I don't think there's anything wrong with following

your heart. Love's primarily an emotional thing, and I think we can overthink it if we're not careful, so we don't want to kill the romance or kill the heart part of it with the head. But I do think that people could probably benefit from using their head just a little bit more when it comes to really one of the most important decisions they'll make, which is who they choose to be with for the rest of their life. Yeah. Can you talk about how their head needs to become involved? in finding the right person? Sure, yeah. Well, I think it's hard to get your head involved

when you're with a new person. When we fall in that passionate love, we have the butterflies in the stomach and your head spinning, it's really hard to be rational and measured about things and have good foresight. I think actually in-between relationships

is a great time. And there you have these windows of clarity where you can reflect upon what's worked or hasn't worked in previous relationships. And also set some goals or some strategy for what you want to do differently going forward. And that then kind of directs people's attention to traits that might be desirable that they usually don't go for or puts them on alert for traits that are not good for them that they've had in the past.

And this sort of leads into what you've talked about, the three wishes within when you're choosing someone to be with. Can you explain what you mean by that? Is there not one perfect person for everyone, that fairy tale romance? Well, it's hard to argue with fate. You never know what the evidence is against it, I guess. But I think there's probably more than one person for people. But a lot of the research shows that people want a lot of things, a lot of ideal traits or characteristics in a partner.

And that's great to have high aspirations. But I think that prioritizing the order in which or the importance of these traits would be a wise thing to do. Because there's some studies that find that people wish for everything, and then they end up getting very little of what's actually important to them in a romantic partner. So if people can have their top three prioritized, the good news is they have pretty good odds of getting those three traits in their romantic partner. Can you give us an example of what you're talking about? Sure.

Sure. Well, it could be personality characteristics like extroversion or agreeableness. It could be physical characteristics like being hot or being tall. And I'll give you an example of how that might work when you just do the math with it. So let's say there's someone who wants a man who's tall. And to him or her, that's someone who's six-foot or taller. Well, only 20% of men in the United States meet that criteria. So if there are a room of 100 eligible bachelors, that would mean 80 of those men would be disqualified at that point.

Now if this person wanted someone, let's say, with a college education, you'd lose about two-thirds of the remaining people. So now you're down really to just about four people after two wishes. So you can see after three wishes for traits, you really eliminate a lot of possibilities. So those are the odds behind why you just can't find the right person. Sure. Yeah, and it happens in real life where online dating is a great example, where people will set certain criteria with the mentality that it's a preference. But actually, you're just completely ruling someone out.

If you say that I don't want someone of this religious affiliation or this height or whatever else it might be, it actually cuts out a lot of people that might have had traits that you really want it. Do you encourage people to do the online dating, those websites, or, you know, what's your opinion on how those work? Well, I think it's great in the sense that it expands the pool dramatically. And there was just a study that came out last year. It was a really nice study of tens of thousands of singles,

seeing how they met their partner and what the long-term outcomes were. And online dating performed just as well as a lot of other traditional ways that we meet people, such as through family or friends or, you know, in-person at school or something like that. Is there a way to do it wrong, I guess, if you're, Like you say, if you're putting in too many requirements, so to speak, into the matching profiles that they have? Sure, I think that would be one way to really narrow your pools and how one of the major advantages of having a lot of people has been taken away from you.

Online dating is great, too, as far as data collection, because people can actually watch behavior. So instead of just asking on a self-report, what do you want, or who would you choose as a partner? They're able to say, hey, this is what people actually did when they were online. And there was a great thing just came out from OKCupid showing how much of the proportion of time people spent on profile pictures. And how strongly that correlated with people that they messaged. And it was really at a rate that was a little bit disheartening.

What about marriage? And we get away from the dating, we get on, we finally meet someone, we're happy. How can psychological research help determine what makes a lasting happy marriage? Not just a lasting marriage, a happy marriage. Happily and the ever after both. Right, exactly. Well, there's a lot of good data now, and we're lucky that there's these prospective studies that catch people before they ever met their partner sometimes, sometimes when they're dating, or sometimes when they're newlyweds, and follow them for seven, 10, 13 years, and we can see what early predictors were there that predicted who would be satisfied and stable in their relationships. So there's also good studies that show how to interact or how to resolve conflict.

in a marriage and I think that's very valuable of course but if you want to go back and get it right as early as possible you'd say choosing somebody with certain traits or characteristics which are strong predictors of long-term satisfaction stability would probably be the best way to go what sort of things can couples do to sort of enhance their chances of being happy ever after sure well one example we give and the science of happily ever after is personality traits. And personality is great because it's really how we just describe who people are. And so it's a nice, intuitive, native kind of thing that we can discern with a good amount of accuracy if we're not falling in love with somebody. So that's the trick. And the good news about that

is your friends and family are pretty good judges of personality traits of your partner. Or people they don't know that well, they can pick up on personality traits pretty accurately in a relatively short amount of time. And so you take something like agreeableness or kindness, for example, that's a great predictor of long-term stability and satisfaction. So you should give your partner a personality test before you. Ideally, if you could slip them one and get some, you know, it brings up another good point about strategic self-presentation. And so partners are on their best behavior early on. And that's one of the nice things about observer ratings is that people's personality does tend to come out, even though they're trying to strategically self-present.

And if you get an average or an aggregate of those observations, you can then use that with some of the knowledge we have to predict who would be a good partner on average and who wouldn't. What can people learn from failed relationships? As you said, you're in between your relationships, you're looking back, you know, why do people continue to make the same mistakes over and over again? Well, that was one of the first questions I had in grad school, actually. And so I was studying stress-related growth with Pat Frazier, and I thought, boy, these breakups and divorces are pretty stressful, and it's correlated with all kinds of psychopathology, like depression and anxiety disorders, substance use disorders. And most of the research on breakups has looked at some of those negative

outcomes. But there's a handful of studies that look at, well, what do people learn? Or what do people benefit from when they break up with somebody? And we found that every single person, in all these studies will say that they learn things or had certain growth or benefits from the breakup. The second question then is do they actually follow through then on these things? So if they say they're going to choose a better partner, let's say, for example, who's less neurotic, do they actually then choose somebody who's less neurotic in the next relationship? And I think the jury's still out as far as what the data is and what the findings will be about who experiences real growth versus people that maybe are just experiencing positive.

they think they've grown but actually won't engage in the behavior that's congruent with that. So you really have to stop and look at, consciously really look, not only look at why maybe it didn't work out with that person, but you have to, like you said, develop a strategy moving forward to find the next person that you think would be the workout, let's say. Exactly. So I think you can borrow from some of the behavioral therapy components and say, well, what would be a tangible or observable marker that I would know that I've actually

done a better job. I had a client who had a great kind of concrete example, and she said that she kept dating bass guitarists in bands. And this tend to be correlated with sensation-seeking, really high-sensation-seeking, which led to a lot of bad decisions. So, you know, one of her markers was, does he play bass guitar in a band?

If he did, then she said, well, then I haven't met my criteria. All right. Okay, well, Dr. Tashiro, this has been very very. Very interesting. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us. Well, thanks for having me on. For more information, please visit our website at speakingofpsychology.org. With the American Psychological Association, Speaking of Psychology, I'm Andrey Hamilton.