Modern WisdomThe New Science Of Female Attraction - Psychology Roundtable
CHAPTERS
- 0:00 – 3:14
Merch plug, then: what dance moves do women find attractive?
Chris opens with a quick merch announcement and pivots into a study using motion-capture avatars to test which male dance styles women rate as most attractive. The group jokes about “dad dancing,” boxing-like posture, and whether attractive dance cues are surprisingly feminine.
- •Merch drop and limited-time availability
- •Northumbria University study: head/neck/torso movement, rhythm variation, creative motion
- •Motion-capture avatars used to isolate movement quality
- •Discussion of “feminine” vs “masculine” dance cues
- •Humor around shadow boxing and performative masculinity
- 3:14 – 12:51
Does looksmaxxing give women the ick? Signals, secrecy, and the ‘natural’ illusion
Rob argues intense looksmaxxing can backfire because it signals vanity, narcissism, and short-term orientation—unless fame is doing the heavy lifting. The group explores why looksmaxxing communities advise secrecy and how “effort visibility” changes desirability.
- •Clavicular as a case study: attention may be fame-driven more than looks-driven
- •Looksmaxxing as a signal of narcissism/self-absorption/short-term mating
- •Why ‘don’t talk about looksmaxxing’ protects the signal and the competitive edge
- •Beautification arms race logic: if everyone improves, advantage disappears
- •Parallels to pickup artistry: inauthenticity/contrivance can create ‘ick’
- 12:51 – 16:52
The evolutionary psychology of the ‘ick’: disgust, competence cues, and sex differences
Steve introduces emerging research framing the ‘ick’ as a mate-choice mechanism tied to evolved disgust reactions and risk management. They unpack why women report the ick more often, and why seemingly trivial competence failures (driving, social moments) can abruptly reduce attraction.
- •Women’s higher choosiness predicts higher ‘ick’ sensitivity
- •‘Ick’ as disgust: behavioral immune system, moral/personality disgust
- •Competence/status cues as modern triggers (missed turn, joke that flops)
- •Risk asymmetry: men risk missing opportunities; women risk wrong partner
- •The ‘ick’ as subconscious/intuition-heavy judgment
- 16:52 – 25:23
Myth of the Chad: what the data says about who’s actually having sex
Rob challenges the popular story that a small minority of men are ‘stealing all the women’ by pointing to broader behavioral data. The group distinguishes app attention patterns from real-world sexual partner distributions and highlights assortative patterns among high sociosexual individuals.
- •Swipe/match concentration on apps vs actual sexual partner counts
- •Stability since ~2000: a minority have 3+ partners/year, but most report 0–1
- •Women show a parallel pattern: promiscuous minorities pair with each other
- •Social media/viral anecdotes amplify extreme experiences and distort perceptions
- •‘Dark matter’ of non-posting, non-app users: invisible normal dating lives
- 25:23 – 34:52
Is marriage ‘affirmative action for men’? Monogamy, polygyny, and serial monogamy
The conversation reframes monogamous marriage as a cultural mechanism that reduces mating inequality and limits polygyny. They debate humans’ ‘default’ mating system—monogamy vs constrained polygyny—and land on serial monogamy and individual differences as central.
- •Marriage as “sexual redistribution” / “sexual communism” framing
- •Why some women might still benefit from polygyny (access to high-status men)
- •Evidence that even with deregulation, most people still pair-bond
- •Serial monogamy: relationships form, dissolve, and reform across lifespan
- •Individual differences in sociosexuality shape strategies more than one ‘human norm’
- 34:52 – 44:18
How wealth and gender inequality shift resource preferences (PNAS experiment)
Macken explains a large experimental design manipulating perceived income and local gender economic inequality inside a simulated environment. The key result: resource preferences rise under scarcity or disadvantage, and this strategic adjustment appears in both sexes.
- •Longstanding debate: social role theory vs evolutionary explanations for mate preferences
- •45-condition experiment varying individual income and local inequality
- •Resource preferences increase when you’re poor or your sex is economically disadvantaged
- •Effects observed for both men and women (with nuance across measures)
- •Beauty and age preferences largely didn’t shift in the experiment (unexpected for age)
- 44:18 – 56:12
Abundance vs scarcity and beauty standards: hunger effects, fatness, status, and signals
They explore why preferences for body size vary across cultures and even shift slightly with hunger priming. Competing explanations include fertility/insurance logic, status signaling, and conscientiousness/impulse-control interpretations—plus the selection bias in studying modern hunter-gatherers.
- •Cross-cultural variation: higher BMI valued in scarcity contexts, thinness in affluent contexts
- •Experimental hunger studies show small, fast preference shifts (e.g., before vs after dining)
- •Fatness as ‘calorie bank account’ and fertility buffer in famine conditions
- •Thinness as youth/nulliparity signal in abundance contexts (debated)
- •Modern hunter-gatherer samples may be ecologically ‘pushed to the margins,’ skewing inference
- 56:12 – 1:03:25
Do high-earning women have higher standards? Absolute vs relative preferences and constraint
The group disentangles why rich women can appear to ‘date down’ while still preferring high-achieving partners: availability constraints at the top and generally higher standards across multiple dimensions. They emphasize the difference between absolute preferences and relative prioritization among many traits.
- •Top-earning women may partner with slightly lower earners due to limited pool (‘tall girl problem’)
- •Rich women often want more of everything (resources, looks, compatibility)
- •Absolute preference for resources can rise, while relative importance declines vs other traits
- •Perfectionism/high standards generalize across life domains, including mate choice
- •Debate framing: evo-psych predictions vs social-role interpretations and caveats
- 1:03:25 – 1:14:15
Can surveys measure sex differences? Stated vs revealed preferences and ‘skin in the game’ data
Macken tees up Paul Eastwick’s critique that survey sex differences don’t reliably predict attraction in contexts like speed dating. Steve counters with methodological issues and points to real-world outcomes; Chris introduces high-stakes matchmaking (Keeper AI) as a bridge between stated and revealed preferences.
- •Eastwick’s claim: speed dating and partner evaluations show smaller/no sex differences
- •Counterarguments: constrained contexts (students, low variance), novelty, selection effects
- •Survivorship bias in couple data can mask preferences after filtering has occurred
- •Keeper AI as high-incentive preference declaration: ‘stated with consequence’
- •Examples: willingness to ‘marry down’ differs strongly by sex across attributes
- 1:14:15 – 1:23:26
Dating apps and partner quality: dark triad users, height filters, and face vs height
They discuss whether dating app success selects for traits that are poor for long-term relationships, including dark triad tendencies among users. The conversation also examines evidence that facial attractiveness drives swiping far more than height—while acknowledging height filters can change the game.
- •Hypothesis: app skill may be orthogonal (or opposed) to being a good spouse
- •Evidence: Tinder users (college samples) score higher on dark triad traits
- •Why viral dating narratives overrepresent anomalies and dysfunction
- •Study claim: facial attractiveness ~12x more influential than height in swipe behavior
- •Height filters as a special case: preference expression vs app-mediated constraint
- 1:23:26 – 1:31:27
Why male beautification is exploding: gym culture, grooming, parenting, and competition
Macken argues men are shifting effort toward appearance and parenting as women’s economic independence rises, changing what’s rewarded in mate choice. The group also explores alternative explanations: fairness norms, class differences in parenting investment, and women signaling status to deter rivals rather than attract men.
- •Documented rise in male beautification since the 1990s; gym/weightlifting as major component
- •Men’s parenting time has increased dramatically (especially among educated men)
- •Mate preference convergence over the 1900s and behavioral convergence today
- •Handbags/engagement rings as potential rival deterrence and commitment signals
- •Male-to-male competition (‘mogging’) vs appealing to the female gaze
- 1:31:27 – 1:35:22
Formidability vs attractiveness (Buss study) and why ‘mogging’ can boost mating success
They revisit a famous finding: men judged as more formidable by other men later report more sexual partners, while women’s ratings of their sexual attractiveness didn’t predict partner counts. This becomes a lens for interpreting looksmaxxing culture as optimizing intimidation/status rather than pure mate appeal.
- •Buss-style design: men rated for fight ability by men; attractiveness rated by women; later partner counts
- •Formidability predicts mating outcomes better than women’s attractiveness ratings in that sample
- •Looksmaxxing may accidentally target formidability/status cues that matter in male hierarchy
- •Fame as psychological formidability that deters rivals and amplifies access
- •Male-to-male status games can drive behavior independent of sexual fulfillment
- 1:35:22 – 1:47:32
Female teacher sex scandals and the power of being desired: attention as a superstimulus
Rob offers a speculative framework: some predatory female teacher cases may be driven less by sex itself and more by uniquely intense sexual attention from inexperienced adolescent boys. The group connects this to broader sex differences in preferring desirability vs partner attractiveness, using a poll showing men and women often reverse priorities.
- •Why these stories go viral: rarity and anomaly (and attractiveness bias in headlines)
- •Hypothesis: adolescent male awe/novelty provides unusually potent sexual attention
- •Teacher-student dynamics: power asymmetry parallels motivations across sexes
- •Twitter poll: men prefer hot partner even if she’s not attracted; women prefer being desired
- •Link to broader theme: ‘being desired’ as a core driver of female arousal/attraction
- 1:47:32 – 2:03:34
Dangers of minimizing sex differences, mate switching updates, and ‘what counts as human nature’
Steve outlines practical harms of denying sex differences—misguided social engineering and missed medical/behavioral risk patterns—while also warning against overstating differences. The roundtable broadens into methodological philosophy: whether hunter-gatherers or affluent societies better reveal ‘human nature,’ and how culture can amplify or mask evolved nudges.
- •Minimizing differences can create new role pressures and policy errors
- •Health/medical example: sex-differentiated symptoms (e.g., heart attacks) and awareness gaps
- •Risk-tail argument: extreme aggression/sexual predation concentrated in male tails
- •Human nature as environment-interacting: scarcity vs abundance expression questions
- •Hunter-gatherer inconsistency vs WEIRD consistency in mate preference findings; folktales as auxiliary evidence
- 2:03:34 – 2:06:49
What lesbians and gay men find attractive, quick wrap-up, and the ‘hamster man’ outro
They briefly compare attraction patterns in gay men and lesbian women to illuminate sex-typical preference patterns beyond heterosexual dynamics. The episode ends with a playful detour into Macken’s childhood hamster obsession and the final plugs.
- •Gay men: strong emphasis on youth/looks as a cross-check on sex-typical preferences
- •Lesbian attraction discussed as less appearance-weighted than male patterns
- •Idea for comparative sex-toy preference research (straight vs lesbian)
- •Lighthearted ‘hamster man’ story and banter
- •Guest plugs and closing remarks
