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

1. 0:00 – 3:40

   Do People Know What They Want in a Partner?

   1. CWChris Williamson0:00

      Your new study is one of the most interesting things that I think I've seen this year.

   2. PEDr Paul Eastwick0:05

      Oh, good. Oh, good.

   3. CWChris Williamson0:06

      It also has maybe the highest number of authors that I've ever seen on a single paper.

   4. PEDr Paul Eastwick0:11

      (laughs) It was a big, it was a big team.

   5. CWChris Williamson0:13

      Yes. So, how well would you say people actually know what they want in a romantic partner?

   6. PEDr Paul Eastwick0:21

      Um, it depends. So, what people are very good at recognizing is that some attributes are very, very desirable, right? So, there's good agreement that traits like attractiveness and intelligent and considerate and honest, that these are desirable things that we want romantic partners to have, and there's also a lot of agreement that, hmm, we don't really want somebody who's disorganized and careless, and we don't really want somebody who's anxious and easily upset. So, there's a lot of agreement and accurate self-knowledge that some attributes are more desirable than others, and you can ask lots of interesting questions about, why don't we wanna be with anxious partners (laughs) , right? Why don't we wanna be with, with partners who are kind of a mess, right? And why do we want to be with partners who are attractive and intelligent? The trick, though, is when we expect people to have insight about what it is that they uniquely like, what do they like that makes them different from other people, and that's the insight challenge where we find, eh, sometimes people do okay, and sometimes not so much.

   7. CWChris Williamson1:38

      Why is that an interesting insight? What is it that you like that other people don't like? Why is that an interesting question?

   8. PEDr Paul Eastwick1:45

      Well, I'll tell you, the reason I got interest, the, the, the way I came to that particular question was because of, uh, the work on gender differences, so what do men and women want in a partner, right? And so this is research going back, and it goes back, I mean, like, 80 years at this point, right? I mean, middle part of the 20th century, when we started asking people, this was actually the sociologists at first, were really interested in what attributes do, uh, men and women say they like, and do we find these, uh, gender differences, and you certainly do for attributes like attractiveness, for attributes like earning potential, right? Men will consistently say they like attractiveness more than women. Women will say they like earning potential more than men. Um, so we were originally interested in whether we saw that those gender differences also played out when we looked at how those attributes predicted all sorts of downstream consequences, because that is an individual difference of sorts, right?

   9. CWChris Williamson2:51

      How do you mean?

   10. PEDr Paul Eastwick2:51

       Gen- well, gender, right, is, uh, w- what we're doing is we're describing how some people are different from other people, right? In, 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 gonna then play out when we see what it is that they actually find appealing. So, it was really the gender differences that got me interested in this, uh, this, uh, accurate, uh, self-knowledge question in the first place.

   11. CWChris Williamson3:39

       Right. So, we

2. 3:40 – 13:52

   Distinguishing Stated & Revealed Preferences

   1. CWChris Williamson3:40

      have two things that are going on here.

   2. PEDr Paul Eastwick3:42

      Yeah.

   3. CWChris Williamson3:42

      One is what do people say that they look for?

   4. PEDr Paul Eastwick3:45

      Yeah.

   5. CWChris Williamson3:46

      And the other is what do people actually want? So, we have stated and revealed preferences. Can you explain-

   6. PEDr Paul Eastwick3:52

      Yes.

   7. CWChris Williamson3:52

      ... how you looked to sort of pull these two apart? This is the internet, especially online sort of mating discourse. It's the favorite, don't trust what people say-

   8. PEDr Paul Eastwick4:01

      Right. (laughs)

   9. CWChris Williamson4:01

      ... watch what they do. It's this, you know-

   10. PEDr Paul Eastwick4:03

       Yeah.

   11. CWChris Williamson4:03

       ... it's the death of every evolutionary psychology survey or self-report that's ever been done because it says, "Well, no, no, no, it's that's what people want to say." Uh, so-

   12. PEDr Paul Eastwick4:11

       Yeah.

   13. CWChris Williamson4:11

       ... talk to me about how you teased these two things apart and avoided sort of too much, uh, uh, uh, confabulation between the two.

   14. PEDr Paul Eastwick4:18

       You bet, and this is, th- uh, this is a key distinction, and there, yeah, these terms get bandied around, but I'll, I'll tell you how I use the terms, and, and, and I think this is a very helpful way to think about it. So, when we're talking about attributes, um, a stated preference for an attribute is usually done very simply. Here are a bunch of attributes. Here are some rating scales. Tell us, uh, how much you would like these attributes in an ideal partner. You can be more specific. You can say ideal short-term partner. You can say tonight. (laughs) Sometimes we would do studies where we'd s- we'd say, you know, "Oh, w- when you go speed dating, how much are, are you gonna 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, it's not, uh, it's, uh, sometimes people confuse it with, like, "Oh, but what do you actually choose?" That's not actually exactly what it is. A revealed preference is about what does the attribute predict for you, okay? So, if you meet an array of people who vary in that attribute, does that attribute help distinguish the people you liked from the people you didn't? Okay? So, if I send y- uh, speed dating is a very helpful way to think about this, even though you don't actually need speed dating to get revealed preferences, but it's, it's helpful, I find, 'cause you can imagine meeting a set of 10 or 20 people, and some are very attractive, and some are a little attractive, and some are not attractive at all, and the extent to which you have a revealed preference for attractiveness is the extent to which attractiveness is a driver of the liking that you experience for these people.Now, liking could be- also be like a self-report scale. Liking could be a choice you make. Liking could be like, "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.

   15. CWChris Williamson6:27

       What did you do to work out the... I- I understand how you can do stated preferences. You just give people a report. You say, "Here's a list of 35 traits. Rank order them from one to 35 in terms of which-"

   16. PEDr Paul Eastwick6:39

       Right.

   17. CWChris Williamson6:39

       "... one you think is most important." How do you discover 10,000 people's revealed preferences?

   18. PEDr Paul Eastwick6:47

       Right. So there are a couple ways, uh, of doing it, and we actually did it in two different ways in this paper. Um, the main way that we did it, and- the- is- we just 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. Um, we have a survey. It's about 10,000 people from 43 different countries, and some of them are in established relationships. Some of them are single, and what they're doing is they're gonna be reporting on somebody that they're like kinda 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 a- a 35 different attributes. We also have their ideals for those 35 attributes, so we know how much they say, their stated preferences for those attributes, and we've got a dependent measure too of, you know, sort of how positively do you feel about this person, right? It's sort of- sort of standard liking, desire kinds of measures. So what we can do is, in the whole sample, we can just look at, okay, when people felt that these partners were, let's say, a good lover. I'll use that example first. Um, how positively did they feel about this person? And it turned out that a good lover was the single strongest predictor of that dependent variable, right? So a good lover is a very strong predictor of feeling positively about a romantic partner, right? That- that relationship was the strongest. So we would say, in this sample, there is a very strong revealed preference for a good lover, even though people ranked it, eh, something like 12th (laughs) in terms of their stated preferences. It was their number one revealed preference. So th- so that's, I think, a helpful way of thinking about this distinction.

   19. CWChris Williamson8:46

       What is ideal partner preference matching? I know that this is kind of a-

   20. PEDr Paul Eastwick8:50

       Mm-hmm.

   21. CWChris Williamson8:50

       ... a body of work. Just I feel like that's important to get it out there.

   22. PEDr Paul Eastwick8:53

       Yeah. Right. So the- one of the questions we can ask in this literature... I mean, looking at the stated reveal that... It's all very interesting, but sometimes we wanna know, okay, if you are a person who says you like attributes X, Y, Z, do you like partners more when they match rather than mismatch X, Y, Z? Okay? So if you say you're somebody who really wants somebody who's attractive and intelligent and funny and you really don't care about attributes like are they religious and, uh, 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, uh, very complicated, and it's actually taking- taken the whole field like a decade (laughs) to sort out how to do it, because it turns out there's all sorts of complex stats and, uh, that- that go into creating that matching process. Um, you know, anybody who's ever played around with things like profile correlations or different scores is gonna be familiar with the many complexities that come into play when you try to do this. But what we tried to do in this study was basically take all of the different approaches that are out there and say, "Hey, we're gonna- we're 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."

   23. CWChris Williamson10:35

       And what did you find?

   24. PEDr Paul Eastwick10:36

       Well, what we found is that if you pull out that unique component, okay? And- and again, this was- w- we really didn't know what we were gonna find going in, what that unique component was gonna show, 'cause I'd seen studies where this component was basically zero, um, and, uh, and- and other studies showed things that were a- 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. (laughs) It's like two, three, four percent of the variance tops, but it's there, so a matching effect that is truly about how much you desire these attributes. We've taken all of the what we call normative matching out of it. We just look at that individual differences component. So if you meet somebody who uniquely matches what you say you're looking for, you'll experience more desire for that person. It's not a huge effect, but it- but it is there. We are able to detect it.

   25. CWChris Williamson11:38

       Does that say that we have some degree of insight into what it is that we want in a partner?

   26. PEDr Paul Eastwick11:45

       Yes, with the major, major caveat of when we're thinking about collapsing across 35 attributes. So across that whole set, we get a little something. The challenge is, what if you care about one attribute? What if you have an- a hypothesis about attractiveness? Or what if you have a hypothesis about intelligence or warmth? What happens then? And that's kinda where things start to fall apart.

   27. CWChris Williamson12:16

       Why?

   28. PEDr Paul Eastwick12:17

       Well, those effects, because there are oth- there are other ways of looking at matching effects if you care about single attributes in isolation, and the- this is a basic statistical interaction prediction. So, again, for listeners who are familiar with these kinds of stats, what you're talking about is, if you're the kind of person who says you really care about attractiveness, okay, you rate that highly in an ideal partner, that's your stated preference, we wanna see whether, um, it matters that for, again, how much you're desiring this person, that you think that person is attractive. So you should experience a stronger association between how attractive you feel someone is and how much you desire them if you say you care about attractiveness. Okay, so that's the way we test that prediction. These are statistical interactions, and you do it for all the 35 traits, and generally speaking, those are tiny. Because the sample is so big, we detect, uh, many of them are significant, um, although, although many of them are not, and actually, sort of shockingly, th- you know, like, attractiveness isn't. (laughs) Um, but some are, and, and some are, are big enough to be notable. Actually, the one that really stood out was religious. So I would say tentatively, like, "If you're the kinda person who says you want a religious partner, there, there may really be a matching component to that." But for most of those attributes in isolation, those effects are very, very small. I mean, you need, like, thousands and thousands of people to be able to see them.

3. 13:52 – 18:21

   Biggest Discrepancies in Preferences

   1. PEDr Paul Eastwick13:52

   2. CWChris Williamson13:52

      Okay, well, I mean, (clears throat) the least interesting part of that study is people were able to slightly predict the things that they want.

   3. PEDr Paul Eastwick14:00

      Yeah.

   4. CWChris Williamson14:00

      The most interesting part is-

   5. PEDr Paul Eastwick14:01

      (laughs)

   6. CWChris Williamson14:01

      ... what is it that people-

   7. PEDr Paul Eastwick14:03

      Yeah, right.

   8. CWChris Williamson14:03

      ... stated that didn't come out as the revealed. So-

   9. PEDr Paul Eastwick14:05

      Yeah.

   10. CWChris Williamson14:05

       ... can you take us through where people really missed the mark and sort of what you think is going on with the motivation for those?

   11. PEDr Paul Eastwick14:12

       Yeah, so there are some fun discrepancies there that, um, that surprised us a little bit. Um, we didn't, uh, you know, I don't think we'd ever run a study where we had 35 different traits, where we felt comfortable doing this kinda ranking approach, where we take all the revealed preferences, kinda stack 'em 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 seemed to have a strong revealed preference for a good lover even though that kinda ends up being about 12th, uh, in their, uh, in, in their stated preferences overall. Um, there are a few other interesting ones. People, um, don't, uh, say they care that much about an attribute like smells good. Uh, that kinda fits somewhere in the middle of the range. They don't, you know, spontaneously think that sounds particularly appealing, but it actually ends up being the fourth-biggest thing overall, uh-

   12. CWChris Williamson15:11

       Wow.

   13. PEDr Paul Eastwick15:11

       ... in terms of, uh, in terms of, uh, what they feel, uh, ha- uh, 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 overestimate it on some things like, uh, oh, uh, like, considerate a little bit, uh, other attributes, you know, that are, um, a little bit, you know, more on the, on the warmer side. Uh, people, you know, say that those attributes are very, very important, but then when you look at the (laughs) revealed preferences, they weren't as strong.

   14. CWChris Williamson15:42

       Yeah, it seems like, uh, patient, patient, right?

   15. PEDr Paul Eastwick15:45

       Yeah, patient.

   16. CWChris Williamson15:45

       So it's number 10, and it-

   17. PEDr Paul Eastwick15:46

       Yeah.

   18. CWChris Williamson15:46

       ... actually comes in at number 18, which is interesting.

   19. PEDr Paul Eastwick15:49

       Yeah.

   20. CWChris Williamson15:49

       Um, what else have we got here that this...

   21. PEDr Paul Eastwick15:51

       The, the, the wa- uh, the emotionally stable I think was another one that, like, you, you know, people say they really want somebody who's emotionally stable but, eh, in the end, eh, I mean, it's pos- it's positive, but it's, it's not as, as strong as some others, so, (laughs) so maybe-

   22. CWChris Williamson16:05

       Yeah.

   23. PEDr Paul Eastwick16:06

       ... you know, people in the end are, are okay with partners who are, you know, maybe have a, a lo-

   24. CWChris Williamson16:09

       What's this one going from 19 to 6 here, sexy?

   25. PEDr Paul Eastwick16:12

       Yeah, right.

   26. CWChris Williamson16:13

       Sexy from-

   27. PEDr Paul Eastwick16:14

       Right.

   28. CWChris Williamson16:14

       ... 19 to 6.

   29. PEDr Paul Eastwick16:15

       Okay, so this is interesting. So actually, with a lot of the attractiveness-related traits, people were underestimating those on average, right? Sexy was one. I think nice body was one. And so to bring it back to the gender differences, we can look separately for men and women at what their stated preferences show and what their revealed preferences show, and on the revealed preferences side, um, what you see is that men and women are really getting these attributes about the same, okay? Attractiveness, sexiness, nice body, those have the same revealed preferences for men and women, and that, that, uh, you know, d- does, is that, does that shock people in today's day and age? I- it doesn't shock me because this is what we've been seeing for, like, 15 years when we look at speed dating or we look at ongoing relationships. Revealed preferences for things like attractiveness really don't show gender differences. The stated preferences, of course, do, and what we can show with this design is that what's happening here is that both men and women are underestimating how much they like attractiveness, but women are, like, really underestimating. (laughs) So, so the underestimation effect is bigger for women than it is for men, right? So, so that's how they both end up at the same place.

   30. CWChris Williamson17:43

       Just to dig into that-
4. 18:21 – 22:03

   Sex Differences in Preferences

   1. CWChris Williamson18:21

      else, uh, was interesting when it comes to the sex differences between men and women?

   2. PEDr Paul Eastwick18:27

      So, we can also look at some earning-relevant traits. We've got things like ambitious, and we've got things like a good job, uh, and we've got, um, uh, you know, attributes in that space. Financially secure is another one. And so those, as stated preferences, generally rank quite a bit lower, but you see the gender differences that men, that women say they care about these attributes more than men do. Once again, on the revealed preferences side, it's the same for men and women. And again, we've been seeing this for, for 15-plus years now. But again, what's interesting here is now we can figure out, well, who's, who's getting it wrong, and this is a case where actually both men and women are getting it wrong, just in opposite directions. So women are, in their stated preferences, are overestimating a little bit how much they like those attributes, and men are underestimating a little bit how much they like those attributes. They aren't dramatic errors, um, but they're big enough and in opposite directions that it explains why you see a modest gender differences, uh, 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.

   3. CWChris Williamson19:40

      Why do you think it would be the case that women would overestimate how important a good job is in a partner?

   4. PEDr Paul Eastwick19:47

      Yeah.

   5. CWChris Williamson19:47

      I would've guessed the opposite. I would've guessed that it's a stereotype about women. They would've compensated for it. They don't wanna seem like a gold-digging ho.

   6. PEDr Paul Eastwick19:57

      Yeah.

   7. CWChris Williamson19:57

      So, they're going to counter-signal against that, and then they're going to be smacked in the face by the reality of being a-

   8. PEDr Paul Eastwick20:05

      (laughs)

   9. CWChris Williamson20:05

      ... you know, safety and resource-seeking person. And a... but it doesn't seem to be the case.

   10. PEDr Paul Eastwick20:12

       Yeah, you know, I, I actually think there's some evidence that the gender difference, and I think the overall preference for those kinds of attributes, that they have, uh, gone down a little bit over time. I could be wrong about that. But I think that makes sense when you think about it in terms of, you know, as, as women have, uh, entered the workforce in greater numbers and, and, you know, entered more high-prestige jobs, you're likely to find that, at least in terms of stated preferences, they're not thinking in the same way that they would've back in like the '50s, like, "Oh, I need a partner who's going to really be making the money, because, uh, I'm not gonna 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, um, affecting people's stated preferences are stereotypes, and I mean that in the most neutral way possible. Just when you ask people to describe the attributes that another group has, right, they can do that. And I think some of what men and women do when you ask them to describe their ideal partner is they start picking out attributes that members of the other gender have, and that's the funny thing, is that, well, men and women know that men tend to earn more than women, and, and attractiveness works the other way. So, men and women know that women, on average, tend to be more attractive than men are. So, there are some of these, uh, I think, stereotypes, again, in the most neutral way of using that term, kind of infect the way people provide those stated preferences, uh, in the first place, and that, that could be a source of some of these discrepancies between what people say they want and what they actually want.

   11. CWChris Williamson22:01

       Yeah, I'm sort of trying to work

5. 22:03 – 31:32

   Black Pills & White Pills of the Study

   1. CWChris Williamson22:03

      out what's a black pill and what's a white pill from-

   2. PEDr Paul Eastwick22:06

      (laughs)

   3. CWChris Williamson22:07

      ... uh, from the study.

   4. PEDr Paul Eastwick22:07

      Yeah.

   5. CWChris Williamson22:07

      And I think it's really, I think it's really interesting, right? 'Cause this is, I'm gonna guess, the largest study ever done on stated versus revealed preferences for men and women, uh-

   6. PEDr Paul Eastwick22:16

      It's pretty close, yeah.

   7. CWChris Williamson22:17

      ... right? Okay. One, one of, at least the most recent.

   8. PEDr Paul Eastwick22:19

      Yeah, yeah.

   9. CWChris Williamson22:19

      It's hot off the press.

   10. PEDr Paul Eastwick22:20

       Yeah.

   11. CWChris Williamson22:21

       So, just for the people that are only listening, we'll have had the, 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, in, in, in sexy.

   12. PEDr Paul Eastwick22:37

       Yeah.

   13. CWChris Williamson22:37

       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.

   14. PEDr Paul Eastwick22:48

       Yeah.

   15. CWChris Williamson22:48

       But then when you look at the rest of the top 10, you've got loyal coming in at number two, you've got honest, understanding, uh, considerate, uh, supportive.

   16. PEDr Paul Eastwick22:58

       Yeah.

   17. CWChris Williamson22:59

       Uh, you know, a lot of much sort of softer traits.

   18. PEDr Paul Eastwick23:04

       Yeah.

   19. CWChris Williamson23:04

       Uh, sympathetic and warm. Um, you know, these are... So we have sort of two things going on at once. Like the red pill and the blue pill are both kind of right at the same time here.

   20. PEDr Paul Eastwick23:14

       Yeah.

   21. CWChris Williamson23:14

       You know, you've got this vicious play to it-

   22. PEDr Paul Eastwick23:16

       Purple pill. (laughs)

   23. CWChris Williamson23:17

       Yeah, it is-

   24. PEDr Paul Eastwick23:17

       (laughs)

   25. CWChris Williamson23:17

       It is a purple, it is a purple pill.

   26. PEDr Paul Eastwick23:19

       (laughs)

   27. CWChris Williamson23:19

       Um, but it, it's this real blend.

   28. PEDr Paul Eastwick23:21

       Yeah.

   29. CWChris Williamson23:21

       It's this real blend of the two. There is, there is a sort of, uh, uh, uh, a focus on both the immediate attractive sexiness and the softness too.

   30. PEDr Paul Eastwick23:29

       I think that's right, and again, what we're seeing here is that, you know, these are people's own judgments, right? So I'm making judgments about this person I know, and whether I find them attractive and whether I think they're a good lover, right? So, so we're, we're really getting at an individual psychology about the kinds of traits that really co-vary very strongly with good feelings about that partner, desiring that partner, and wanting to be with that partner. Um, uh, there are other lessons, and again, I'm now drifting away from this study a little bit, um, with respect to, okay, but if I'm trying to attract somebody in the first place, I think that's where, um, in many cases, people can find the red pill pretty frustrating, 'cause if you feel like, "Well, I'm not attractive," or, "I don't have these traits that make me seem like I'd be a good lover, I'm at this major disadvantage."Um, and my usual response to that is like, "Look, in a, a setting where people are meeting for the first time, that is true." (laughs) People reach consensus about attributes like attractiveness or being sexy, being confident. These matter in a first impression context. But where the blue pill comes in a little bit is that it says, but, uh, as people get to know each other, if you're in a context that is gonna create some repeated interaction, consensus on those kinds of attributes tends to go down. So over time, we start to disagree more and more about who's attractive and who's not. So for somebody who's not conventionally attractive, for somebody who doesn't go into the party and, you know, attract all the attention, what it means is that there are other avenues for you, but they have to be avenues where you actually get to know people over time because some people's opinions will diverge.
6. 31:32 – 38:59

   Why People Secretly Want a Good Lover

   1. CWChris Williamson31:32

      Thinking about the good lover one, which is, I think not only the starkest difference between stated and revealed, but also then comes and ranks at number one. What do you make of that? Do you just... Is, is it a, um... Uh, both as the, the gap and then as the fact that it is the revealed?

   2. PEDr Paul Eastwick31:50

      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, um, "That's not gonna impact my day-to-day life very..." You know, like, well, what am I... What are we talking about? We're, we're, we're talking about, you know, uh, 30 minutes, um, you know, e- e- every evening or, you know, like, (laughs) y- you know, 30 minutes every week, if you've been in a relationship for a while. But then in reality, um, somebody who's a good lover, that, that, that idea incorporates a lot of other good things that relationships have, right? So it, it, uh, also indicates things like they're sensitive, they're giving, they're caring, right? But they also, like, know what they're doing and they, like, care about whether, you know, whether, you know, my sexual experiences are good, right? So I think it's one of these attributes that when it's disembodied and abstract and disconnected from a particular person, it sounds just kinda okay. But when we think about our partner that way, it sort of brings in all of these other components that really make a, a, a, you know, a, a sexual or romantic relationship what it is.

   3. CWChris Williamson33:14

      I imagine, th- that's a really good point, I imagine that smells good, has a good body is sexy. You know, what, what, what is it? I- it's somebody... The has a good body thing, uh, reliable-

   4. PEDr Paul Eastwick33:24

      Yeah.

   5. CWChris Williamson33:24

      ... disciplined, uh, has agency over their own life.

   6. PEDr Paul Eastwick33:28

      Right.

   7. CWChris Williamson33:28

      They're motivated. They can overcome discomfort.

   8. PEDr Paul Eastwick33:31

      Sure, sure.

   9. CWChris Williamson33:31

      You know, it's like this whole list of things that are upstream from has a good body.

   10. PEDr Paul Eastwick33:36

       Yeah.

   11. CWChris Williamson33:36

       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.

   12. PEDr Paul Eastwick33:44

       You know, a- another... Uh, this is just occurring to me now, and this would be a f- an interesting thing to test, is that when you ask people, "How much do you want these traits in an ideal partner?" they are mostly thinking about, um, you know, who I want with me, you know, by my side, doing the hard tasks of life. But when they're thinking about a real person that they are in or wanna be in a relationship with, that these sexier, more romantic, um, uh, components come to the fore more.

   13. CWChris Williamson34:21

       It's a bit more visceral.

   14. PEDr Paul Eastwick34:23

       Yeah, right, because I'm thinking about this person and all the visceral things that they inspire, for good or for ill. And so I think that's, that's quite, uh, that that's another possible explanation for why we see some of those discrepancies.

   15. CWChris Williamson34:39

       Were the stated or revealed preferences for short-term or long-term relationships, or both?

   16. PEDr Paul Eastwick34:45

       Uh, these were all... We, we usually describe it as an ideal romantic partner, which, at least to me, connotes something long term. Um, we didn't have... We, we didn't ask about short-term ideals, uh, in this study, really just, you know, because of time.

   17. CWChris Williamson35:03

       Got you. Did you work out overall whether men or women were more accurate?

   18. PEDr Paul Eastwick35:10

       Um, that's a good question. Actually, I don't think we did. Um, but that's, uh, that's something we could, (laughs) we could certainly do. I mean, you know-

   19. CWChris Williamson35:18

       That seems like simple stats.

   20. PEDr Paul Eastwick35:18

       Yeah, right.

   21. CWChris Williamson35:19

       That shouldn't take too long.

   22. PEDr Paul Eastwick35:20

       Right, that shouldn't, that shouldn't be too bad. Uh, 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 kinda similarly off. Uh-

   23. CWChris Williamson35:39

       I wonder,-

   24. PEDr Paul Eastwick35:39

       Yeah.

   25. CWChris Williamson35:39

       ... did you, did you consider, or would you consider doing a followup study to do the reversal? How important do you think that the opposite sex thinks that trait is in you?

   26. PEDr Paul Eastwick35:50

       Yeah, that's an interesting thing. And, you know, I mean, there are some studies that have done that not at this kind of scale. Um, but, but people's, uh, ideas about what the other gender likes, I think the evidence suggests it tracks pretty well what people say they like, right? But, um, we've never tried to look at, well, what would the discrepancies be there, right?

   27. CWChris Williamson36:11

       Yeah.

   28. PEDr Paul Eastwick36:11

       Between my ideas about what you like and your revealed preferences for, you know, somebody of my gender.

   29. CWChris Williamson36:15

       Yeah, what actually they-

   30. PEDr Paul Eastwick36:16

       Yeah.
7. 38:59 – 42:42

   Unanswered Questions From the Study

   1. CWChris Williamson38:59

      of the biggest unanswered questions that you had after the study, their implications, what it means for what people want at the moment?

   2. PEDr Paul Eastwick39:08

      So one of the, uh, questions that remains unanswered that I'm very interested in is, you know, in this study, I'm a participant, and I'm 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 (laughs) and that if I wanna understand my experience of why I like this person rather than that person, it helps to have me rate those traits. That tells me a lot and- and- and we get the revealed preferences from those kinds of ratings. But if you were, say, a matchmaker, if you were an online dating company, y- y- you wouldn't have data like that. If what you were trying to do was predict who was going to like whom, you would need people's self-reports on both sides, right? Or, I mean, you know, if we're just dreaming here, you might have, like, you know, independent coders, you know, rate people on their traits, okay? So what would we see for both revealed preferences and also that matching phenomenon if we're using both people's self-reports, right? So your self-reports of your traits and then my ideals and trying to match that way. Now, it is a basic rule (laughs) 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 gonna go down. But we- we have some wiggle room here. It might go down, but might still be useful, might be the kinda thing that a matchmaker could use to predict who you're gonna 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 pl- (laughs) place where- where right now anybody who tells you that they have a matchmaking algorithm is probably just, you know, trying to sell you a secret sauce.

   3. CWChris Williamson41:13

      Yeah. I saw you tweet, uh, an article, I think from The Guardian, that was quite critical about the effectiveness of, uh, online dating for finding soulmates.

   4. PEDr Paul Eastwick41:22

      Yeah.

   5. CWChris Williamson41:22

      Uh, a- a little bit of an assessment, people's sort of ambient dissatisfaction with this stuff. Do you think that there is a way that your big data or big data like it could be folded into a dating service to make the matchmaking more accurate?

   6. PEDr Paul Eastwick41:36

      I think it's possible, and that's what we- what- that's what we need to see is in- if you can get a sample that's this large, and you- you have people on both sides before they actually meet each other, maybe there is something you can do to predict good matches. Now, I wanna 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. (laughs) That isn't challenging. If somebody tells you, "Uh, I tend to be popular with members of the gender that I'm interested in," guess what? They will be. (laughs) So those kinds of, uh, of- of self-reports tend to have accurate insight. What is much, much harder, and we've never been able to do, and I've never seen anybody else who's able to do it, is to actually create that...... matching that, that specific matching component, or what I u- usually call compatibility. That it's not about your popularity, it's really about the two of us fit together well. That's the, the sort of, uh, the holy grail in this space.

8. 42:42 – 48:18

   Biases in Selecting a Partner

   1. PEDr Paul Eastwick42:42

   2. CWChris Williamson42:42

      Yeah, it's very interesting. I know that you've done a, a, a good amount of work about compatibility and sort of how people evaluate mates, mate evaluation theory and stuff like that.

   3. PEDr Paul Eastwick42:50

      Yeah, yeah.

   4. CWChris Williamson42:51

      It's, um... (clears throat) I guess the one, the one question that I have or the, the sort of main, uh, potential flaw that I see in the study is that when people have been doing their revealed preferences, that is still mediated by their own biases, right?

   5. PEDr Paul Eastwick43:06

      Yes.

   6. CWChris Williamson43:06

      They're describing either a real or imagined partner, and in that they are... i- it has to go through the filtering which means that all of the muck of their cognitive makeup and their desirability and so on and so forth. How do we not know-

   7. PEDr Paul Eastwick43:21

      Yeah.

   8. CWChris Williamson43:21

      ... that they're maneuvering and manipulating the revealed, uh, person, uh-

   9. PEDr Paul Eastwick43:26

      Yeah.

   10. CWChris Williamson43:26

       ... a- avatar, uh, through their, uh, their own psychology?

   11. PEDr Paul Eastwick43:30

       Oh yeah. Uh, it's a great point, and, you know, that motivated reasoning is in many ways... A- again, this is like one of the (laughs) essential truths of close relationships is that people are very motivated to see their partners in a positive light. There are some experiments that are like 30 years old now, but they're 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. Yeah. Oh my, my relationship has a lot of conflict, yeah." This is not usually something that people would be willing to say, but when you tell them-

   12. CWChris Williamson44:03

       Mm-hmm.

   13. PEDr Paul Eastwick44:03

       ... that actually it'd be a good thing, oh, now they see the conflict in their (laughs) relationships.

   14. CWChris Williamson44:08

       (laughs)

   15. PEDr Paul Eastwick44:08

       Right? Now they're, now they're willing to identify those moments. People do that with traits too, right? So for a lot of these traits, you know, there's a good version and a bad version of the thing, right? We were kinda talking about this earlier, but, you know, there's a good way of being sensitive, right? You're, you're, uh, uh, aware and seem to care that I'm feeling off today and you wanna talk to me about it. But there's another way of being sensitive that's like, "Oh man, this person's really touchy." And so what people will do (laughs) 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 (laughs) of an attribute like sensitive. And so whenever we're getting people's own judgments, it's always gonna have that-

   16. CWChris Williamson44:53

       Mm-hmm.

   17. PEDr Paul Eastwick44:53

       ... sort of mucky self-report stuff in it, and that's not that useful if your goal is to try to, you know, pre- predict who's gonna like whom before they have a chance (laughs) to meet each other and engage in that motivated reasoning one way or the other.

   18. CWChris Williamson45:09

       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-

   19. PEDr Paul Eastwick45:23

       Mm-hmm.

   20. CWChris Williamson45:24

       ... that algorithms seem to have a very good predictive power of being able to get you to swipe right on somebody. But when it actually comes to long-term, uh, compatibility, it... the, the predictive power is essentially zero.

   21. PEDr Paul Eastwick45:35

       Yeah.

   22. CWChris Williamson45:35

       Right? Which I- uh, presumably you've seen too.

   23. PEDr Paul Eastwick45:37

       That makes sense, yeah.

   24. CWChris Williamson45:37

       So, so we have... The way that I'm kind of conceptualizing it is we have three. We have stated preferences, then we have revealed preferences, and then we have effective preferences for the long-

   25. PEDr Paul Eastwick45:48

       Hmm.

   26. CWChris Williamson45:48

       ... for the long term as well.

   27. PEDr Paul Eastwick45:49

       Yeah.

   28. CWChris Williamson45:49

       So I would love to, to work out... You said that you like this thing.

   29. PEDr Paul Eastwick45:53

       Yeah.

   30. CWChris Williamson45:53

       You ended up liking this thing.
9. 48:18 – 51:38

   The Unexplainable Sense of Falling in Love

   1. CWChris Williamson48:18

      certainly a, a sort of treating dating like a Petri dish.

   2. PEDr Paul Eastwick48:21

      Yeah.

   3. CWChris Williamson48:22

      And, um, you know, humans are very bad at working out exponentials, they're very bad at working out compounding. Uh, but exponentials occur in social networks as well, right?

   4. PEDr Paul Eastwick48:31

      Yeah.

   5. CWChris Williamson48:31

      You know, if you, uh, start to add one person into your friend group, into two people, into four people, into... You know, before you know it, the number of different connections between everyone and then all of their connections outside of it are very difficult to predict.

   6. PEDr Paul Eastwick48:42

      Right.

   7. CWChris Williamson48:42

      I think this is... You know, I, uh...I texted, um, William Costello about this not long ago, saying that I felt like, uh, my tumbling down the rabbit hole of evolutionary psychology has been so great at, at 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 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-

   8. PEDr Paul Eastwick49:16

      Hm. Yeah.

   9. CWChris Williamson49:16

      ... 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 s-, fluttering of butterflies and all the rest of it.

   10. PEDr Paul Eastwick49:28

       Yeah. Right.

   11. CWChris Williamson49:28

       And, and, and you know, we can talk about she's trading her fecundity for his-

   12. PEDr Paul Eastwick49:33

       (laughs)

   13. CWChris Williamson49:33

       ... resources and her youth for the mate value and, you know, they, i- in some form or another, red pill, black pill, evolutionary psychology, human behavioral ecology, the full works, social psychology, everyone will come up with their own way to describe this, and no one is talking about, "Yeah, but sometimes you just sort of fall in love with somebody and you have no idea why."

   14. PEDr Paul Eastwick49:53

       Yeah.

   15. CWChris Williamson49:53

       And what the fuck's going on there. And I think that's, that, that, that's really the, the, the X factor. It really sort of throws a wrench into the works of all of our presumed godlike predictive powers. It goes, "Yeah, that's out the window. Sorry."

   16. PEDr Paul Eastwick50:07

       Right. I think it is extremely chaotic, right, in the, in the chaos theory sense of the term, right? That it really hinges on a, a set of interactions that can go in any of a wide variety of different directions, and, and once you fall in love with somebody, you can pick out... And I believe people when they say this, when they say, "I fell in love with you because, um, because you're smart, and that time you were really interested in what had gone wrong with my job, and because my dog seems to love you." And I believe people when they tell me that-

   17. CWChris Williamson50:45

       (laughs)

   18. PEDr Paul Eastwick50:45

       ... that that is why, and there was no way that we were gonna-

   19. CWChris Williamson50:50

       (laughs)

   20. PEDr Paul Eastwick50:50

       ... flag those three things before you actually got together. There was-

   21. CWChris Williamson50:55

       Yeah.

   22. PEDr Paul Eastwick50:55

       ... no way to know. And that, and I, I think it's, um, you know, I, I'm, I find it both inspiring, but also kind of daunting.

   23. CWChris Williamson51:04

       Like, disenchanting as a researcher, I imagine.

   24. PEDr Paul Eastwick51:06

       Yeah. Right. It's like, "Well, then what the hell are we gonna do?" But-

   25. CWChris Williamson51:08

       What am I doing with my job?

   26. PEDr Paul Eastwick51:09

       Yeah. But, but, but I will say, you know, we're, we're not alone in this space. Like, personality researchers are, are getting into this stuff, right? People are starting to take this, like, like, idiosyncratic personality, the things that describe you can't be captured by scales that you just feed to everybody. And, and, you know, we're, w- w- we're getting there. I, I think things are gonna look different in, in 10, 20 years and are, are gonna look pretty creative.

   27. CWChris Williamson51:37

       You gave me an idea before

10. 51:38 – 54:45

    Traits of People Who Can’t Retain a Partner

    1. CWChris Williamson51:38

       when you were talking about, uh, the challenge that people have of getting past the first door, right? Of sort of, i- i- swi- getting someone to swipe right on them on, on a dating app or getting a phone number-

    2. PEDr Paul Eastwick51:48

       Yeah.

    3. CWChris Williamson51:48

       ... or in a bar, or you know, just getting a second sentence out of somebody if they're trying to speak to them. Um, I think that there's a lot of sympathy that gets given to people who don't even get a chance-

    4. PEDr Paul Eastwick51:58

       Yeah.

    5. CWChris Williamson51:59

       ... and that kinda 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-

    6. PEDr Paul Eastwick52:06

       Right.

    7. CWChris Williamson52:06

       ... or whatever. Um, but no one really ever talks about the reverse, the person who might be really phenomenal at making a sparky conversation, but just have, like, a completely, uh, objectionable, uh, like, undealwithable, uh, personality, right? Or the, you know, the, the emotional stability, for instance.

    8. PEDr Paul Eastwick52:25

       Yeah.

    9. CWChris Williamson52:25

       I'm go- I'm gonna guess if somebody is very low in emotional stability, they can probably kid many people, there may be lots of people listening that have been in relationships with people like this, who have got past the front door, got into a relationship, everything seemed fine, and they go, "Oh, there's like a Jekyll-and-Hyde, Batman-and-Bruce-Wayne scenario going on here." And, um, I, I totally get it. People can't get a date. Sympathy is needed. How can we get these dudes to be more attractive? How can we get these women to, to-

    10. PEDr Paul Eastwick52:54

        Yeah.

    11. CWChris Williamson52:54

        ... you know, be more, more, uh, interesting when they're talking to people? But, uh, there is a, a d- a whole other cohort of people that need mate retention tactics, as opposed to-

    12. PEDr Paul Eastwick53:03

        Yeah. Right.

    13. CWChris Williamson53:03

        ... sort of mate attraction tactics.

    14. PEDr Paul Eastwick53:05

        So, there's a couple interesting things here. First of all, I think the, the traits that you're describing that are probably most likely to show that pattern would be some of the more, you know, like narcissism and Machi- Machiavellianism, like dark, dark triad stuff. I think, um, a- actually, the, the evidence on those traits being appealing at first is, like, a little mixed. 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 would-

    15. CWChris Williamson53:32

        And that's men and women.

    16. PEDr Paul Eastwick53:33

        Yeah. And that's men and women. Yeah. So, those are, th- th- those, uh, those, uh, those attributes aren't great. But what's so interesting with things like emotional instability, like, the thing is, like, those attributes, you tend to come off badly at first, and they're, they're not great in the long run. But what starts to happen is that, again, this gets into this, like, inclusion of the other and self kinda thing, is that somebody who is anxious, if they get in a relationship with somebody who helps bring their anxiety down, maybe 'cause they're super cool (laughs) or just they make that person feel safe and comfortable, you can get a person who's like, "Look, I, I am still an anxious person, but I'm not anxious when I'm with my partner."

    17. CWChris Williamson54:20

        Mm-hmm.

    18. PEDr Paul Eastwick54:20

        "I'm not anxious when I'm, when I'm with these two friends." It doesn't even have to be romantic. And I think it, it's not like a route to personality change necessarily, but it is a route to, uh, arriving at a place where you can have a happy, fulfilling relationship because you've found a way to tone down those traits, at least within the context of that relationship.

11. 54:45 – 1:00:52

    Have Mate Preferences Changed Over Time?

    1. CWChris Williamson54:45

       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?

    2. PEDr Paul Eastwick55:07

       It's so interesting because I, I think about this all the time with the earning potential, uh, eh, you know, differences or lack thereof in particular. Um, you know, I, um, I, I, uh, (laughs) um, uh, you know, wa- I watch a lot of movies and, um, uh, recently was watching the 1950s version of, uh, A Star is Born. Um, and in that version, you know, the, the, the main female character becomes a major success, um, and, uh, the man just absolutely falls apart, right? He cannot handle-

    3. CWChris Williamson55:47

       Mm-hmm.

    4. PEDr Paul Eastwick55:47

       ... his partner being successful, and it is very understood in that movie, like, "Very few men would be okay with this." Like, "This is absolutely emasculating that this is happening to him." So there is part of me that thinks, "Boy, this has got to be a recent phenomenon, right? Where men and women have the same revealed preferences for things like earning potential." And then, I read, uh, you know, like Jane Austen (laughs) and, you know, they're, like, everybody's gold digging. (laughs) So I, 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.

    5. CWChris Williamson56:27

       Mm-hmm.

    6. PEDr Paul Eastwick56:28

       But, you know, I wish I had the data for what people (laughs) what people really wanted in, uh, in the 1800s or, you know, going back even further. But I th- I... My guess would be... is that as long as there was variability, right, as long as there were rich me- women and poor women in the... in (laughs) , you know, in the social circle, as long as there were, um, uh, rich men and poor men that both men and women were gonna gravitate toward the good stuff, uh, regardless of which gender they are pursuing. But that's just a guess.

    7. CWChris Williamson56:59

       Yeah, it's an interesting one. I, I wonder whether, um, increased globalization and increased inequality, uh, in that we can now see there's people who have obscene amounts of wealth-

    8. PEDr Paul Eastwick57:12

       Yeah.

    9. CWChris Williamson57:12

       ... that haven't... uh, that, that aren't, like godlike creatures, you know? That isn't bestowed ba- down or blessed. He's not the king. He's not-

    10. PEDr Paul Eastwick57:19

        Yeah.

    11. CWChris Williamson57:19

        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.

    12. PEDr Paul Eastwick57:29

        Yeah, right.

    13. CWChris Williamson57:29

        So I wonder, you know, uh, Candice Blake did some really fantastic work about how, um, the proliferation of sexy selfies in areas of high income inequality.

    14. PEDr Paul Eastwick57:38

        Oh, wow.

    15. CWChris Williamson57:38

        So basically, it seems like women self-objectify more where they can see both how high they could climb with the right partner and how low they may be able to fall, essentially.

    16. PEDr Paul Eastwick57:48

        Yeah.

    17. CWChris Williamson57:48

        So I wonder whether in a world that is basically that tuned up to 11-

    18. PEDr Paul Eastwick57:53

        Okay.

    19. CWChris Williamson57:53

        ... everybody can see how high they could climb, everybody could see how low they could fall. Um, but then you throw the spanner in the works now, which is female earning potential and female financial independence. You know, women outearn men in their-

    20. PEDr Paul Eastwick58:06

        Yeah.

    21. CWChris Williamson58:06

        ... 20s. Uh, it's basically a motherhood tax. The pay gap is, is essentially just a motherhood tax now and-

    22. PEDr Paul Eastwick58:11

        Yeah.

    23. CWChris Williamson58:11

        ... Title IX has been reversed, two women for every one man completing a four-year US college degree. You know, uh, from the metrics perspective from 50 years ago, if you'd not... if you'd s- crossed off the M and the F and not shown people what it was, they would have said, "Oh, tho- those are the guys and those are the girls." And you go, "No-

    24. PEDr Paul Eastwick58:27

        Right.

    25. CWChris Williamson58:27

        ... it's actually the other way around. It switched."

    26. PEDr Paul Eastwick58:29

        Right, right, right, right.

    27. CWChris Williamson58:29

        So yeah, you think, "What does it mean that ancestrally i- it should be the case i- i- th- that women would be more sensitive to the resource and status, uh, capacity of their partner in a world where they are now potentially outearning 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, men's desire to be obsessive and, and conquer and do mastery and stuff like that, plus motherhood tax, I think results in men on average earning... and still is going to result in them earning more across their lifespan.

    28. PEDr Paul Eastwick59:02

        Yeah, yeah.

    29. CWChris Williamson59:02

        But e- it's a real sort of upside-down world. How much can we change our, uh, both stated and revealed preferences? How much are we able to step in and consciously go, "Oh, turn this down or turn this up"?

    30. PEDr Paul Eastwick59:15

        Yeah, yeah. It's a great question. You know, we've tried to do some, uh, amount of experimental manipulations of people's stated preferences. I- it turns out it's pretty hard. (laughs) It's pretty hard to change, in a deliberate way, people's ideas about what they want. We can do it with, you know, sort of these... it's like these conditioning paradigms, right? Where the- you, you get people to experience, uh, positive outcomes with particular attributes, and you do it more or less in various conditions. But all of these effects that we get, they're useful for testing things in the lab, but, you know, we're not changing whether people say they care about earning prospects in an enduring way.
12. 1:00:52 – 1:05:29

    How We Actually Think About Our Partners

    1. CWChris Williamson1:00:52

       So what have you learned about where positive feelings about our partners come from?Like, what does, what does it mean to say that we have a positive, uh, sort of disposition toward our partners? Where, w- what is that sense and where, where does it come from?

    2. PEDr Paul Eastwick1:01:10

       I mean, it's a deep question because in s- because in some ways it's the, the thing we focus on the most. I mean, again, I'm a, I'm a close relationships, uh, researcher first and foremost, and the main thing we study is how positively people feel about their partners, and we think it's important because it's gonna predict, um, a breakup and divorce. It's gonna predict the health outcomes, right? Um, but how exactly do you come to (laughs) to look at a ratings scale and say, "I'm at the top of this scale," or, "I'm kinda middling"? Um, I think a lot of times we think it comes from, uh, a, this general sense that you kinda 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? And sometimes it can be a small thing, like the one time that, uh, you know, you made breakfast for yourself and not me. And that can be a real turning point and I realize, like, "Wait, do you, do you even, like, actually care that I'm here?" Um, it can also be a very positive thing, like the time that you skipped hanging out with your friends 'cause I'd had a bad day. And those moments too can also sort of push us in dramatic ways that, that again are, are kinda random. Like, that same event could've happened to 10 other people and not had the same positive effect that it did on me. Um, so I think it's some combination of those two things, right? Like, overall senses that we kinda lock in and retrieve easily, but also these little moments that, uh, that, that end up being very memorable. And, and other than that, I don't really (laughs) have a good sense of how people integrate those things.

    3. CWChris Williamson1:03:05

       Do you think that it would be useful for people to become better predictors of their own, uh-

    4. PEDr Paul Eastwick1:03:14

       Hmm.

    5. CWChris Williamson1:03:14

       ... revealed mate preferences? I wonder whether, i- in your big cohort, the people whose stated and revealed had the smallest distance between the two are more reliably successful in relationships because they're better able to, uh, expedite finding partners that are like the ones that they want to be like?

    6. PEDr Paul Eastwick1:03:34

       That's a really interesting idea, and we've... I don't e- I don't even know if we've ever collected the data. That would really give us the right way to look at it. Um, we at some point had some data where we, uh, tried to get a sense of who knew... L- 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 actually-"

    7. CWChris Williamson1:04:01

       If you had... Basically, basically if you had relationship satisfaction, if you just got one more for the people in relationships-

    8. PEDr Paul Eastwick1:04:07

       Yeah.

    9. CWChris Williamson1:04:07

       Well, I guess even for the people that weren't in relationships you could've asked a question like, uh, "How satisfied are you typically in your relationships?"

    10. PEDr Paul Eastwick1:04:14

        Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

    11. CWChris Williamson1:04:15

        Uh, th- uh, and if you had somebody, you would've s- been able to see quite easily, is there, is there a covariance between someone's ability to... Stated and revealed are accurate, they seem to be a little bit higher. I mean, if it was lower, uh, th- I'd v- that would just throw a complete spanner in my, in my-

    12. PEDr Paul Eastwick1:04:31

        Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. (laughs)

    13. CWChris Williamson1:04:31

        ... hypothesis. But, um, yeah, that would be cool to find out.

    14. PEDr Paul Eastwick1:04:34

        Yeah, yeah, that's a really interesting idea. And the, the, the general idea of, uh, looking at, um, how satisfied you are with a whole suite of relationships, you know, it, i- this is where, like, polyamory research really has, uh, a, a, a leg up on what basic (laughs) close relationship researchers do, is because they can in principle see how you are reacting across multiple partners, and that has the potential for all kinds of fascinating insights because it suggests, you know, w- we might be able to see things like, you know, um, I say that I really care about attractiveness but turns out that I'm the kinda person who's, um, happier with a partner that I think is less attractive, right? We, we would be able to see those kinds of differences in the way you are reacting to multiple partners at the same time. So, un- unfortunately those samples are, are pretty hard to collect, (laughs) but they can reveal a ton of insights.

13. 1:05:29 – 1:06:10

    Where to Find Paul

    1. PEDr Paul Eastwick1:05:29

    2. CWChris Williamson1:05:29

       Paul Eastwick, ladies and gentlemen. Paul, I love this research, I'm fascinated to see what you do next. Where should people go if they wanna keep up to date with all of the stuff that you're doing?

    3. PEDr Paul Eastwick1:05:38

       Uh, that's a, that's a great question. You can follow me on Twitter, uh, @PaulEastwick, um, and, uh, and yeah, I'm gonna, uh, have a book coming out in, uh, about a year and a half. Uh, it's gonna be a l- a little ways off, so, uh, so yeah, you can look for me then, but for right now Twitter's good.

    4. CWChris Williamson1:05:53

       Uh, we'll have to bring you back on, we'll have to bring you back on when the book comes out.

    5. PEDr Paul Eastwick1:05:56

       That'd be great, that'd be great.

    6. CWChris Williamson1:05:57

       Hell yeah. We did it, man. Appreciate you.

    7. PEDr Paul Eastwick1:05:59

       Thanks so much. (instrumental music plays)

    8. CWChris Williamson1:06:00

       If you enjoyed that episode, you will love a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last couple of months, and it's available right here. Go on, give 'em a watch.

Episode duration: 1:06:10