EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 30,283 words- 0:00 – 1:31
Intro
- ADAlex DatePsych
Something to consider about dating apps is that it's not a one-one ratio of men to women. There's about three men for every one woman. Imagine everyone on an app at any given moment just paired off one-to-one. Every man got one woman. About 66% of men would have no match, just from the ratio alone. Already the fact that there's a big, big sex disparity explains a lot of why there's this top percent of men that get most of the attention. (wind blows)
- CWChris Williamson
What's your background?
- ADAlex DatePsych
So, I have an undergraduate degree in psychology. I previously was doing a master's program in research and behavior and cognition, and now I'm in a second master's program in behavioral and, uh, cognitive neuroscience. So graduate student, should be entering a PhD program pretty soon. Not the qualifications of many of your guests who are the top, top tier of, of psychologists in the world, but working on it.
- CWChris Williamson
Why did you get interested in attractiveness and dating psychology?
- ADAlex DatePsych
So I think probably what first got me interested in attractiveness and dating psychology was just how important relationships have been throughout my own life, uh, throughout the trajectory of, of my life. I think they're very integral to the experiences of most people, uh, kind of a, a core part of, of life experiences that brings value to life, and that was something that was interesting. And then, in addition to that, uh, observing kind of subcultures online within the manosphere and that sort of a thing, the way that people perceive attractiveness and dating, a lot of discourse around that. So understanding those subcultures and everything also very interesting.
- 1:31 – 16:19
How to Approach Women Without Feeling Creepy
- ADAlex DatePsych
- CWChris Williamson
It's a fascinating time, man, to-
- ADAlex DatePsych
Oh, yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... consider the potential solutions that are being proposed, the challenges that everybody's facing. One of my favorite tweets that you've put out recently ... You do these fantastic tweet threads online that break down, go really, really deep into the original data, which nobody wants to look at, but apparently you do. Uh, half of single men report not approaching women out of the fear of being seen as creepy, and 82% of women reported experiencing creepy behavior sometimes, often, or constantly. And yet I saw in a different study that around 86% of women say that they want a man to make the first move. How do you square that circle?
- ADAlex DatePsych
Well, on a practical level, if men are afraid to approach, women find a great deal of approaches creepy, how do you reconcile that? Um, men have to approach and they're gonna be rejected and they're gonna be found creepy at least some of the time, right? There's, there's no other way to reconcile that, that at sometime it's going to happen. Something that surprised me when I posted that thread and, and that research, uh, uh, a surprisingly large number of people came out and they said, "You know, you should just never approach people in public, not at the bar, not at the gym, not on the street, not at school. You should just online date. That's it. We have apps for that now." A surprisingly large number of people basically only thought that apps were the only appropriate venue now for, for meeting people. But certainly that's not how most people meet, right? Uh, a recent survey by the Kinsey Institute, by Match ... Match hires the Kinsey Institute every year to do this big poll of singles, nationally representative, uh, poll of singles, and only about, uh, 10 to 20% are actually meeting through online dating. Similarly, the Pew results from this year that were just published about a week ago for 2002, about 10% of all Americans meet online dating, about 20% of people under 30. So still most people are meeting in, in public. A great deal of those are meeting through friends, maybe about 20 to 30%. So that's the way that a lot of people are meeting. Work, school, friends are a big chunk, and then of course, online is a big one, and social media is becoming a big one as, as well now, but, you know, at the end of the day, you have to approach and people will find you creepy. Not everyone is going to like you. And what can you do? As long as you're not violating any major social norms, it's okay to be rejected.
- CWChris Williamson
One thing that William Costello reminded me of last week was, it wasn't that long ago that people saw online dating as for kind of weirdos. "Oh my god, you've got an online dating profile. What, you can't meet people in the real world? How strange, how bizarre." It was like a sort of a, I don't know, a quirk or some sort of fetish or perversion.
- ADAlex DatePsych
Yeah, definitely. And certainly as, as a guy that's getting kind of older now, I was on OkCupid when it was new, before Tinder. I was on Plenty of Fish when it was very, very new and no one was on those. And that was the general perception of that was like, "Oh, this is kind of a weird thing to do." And now it's, it's become the norm. People almost don't even want to ... It l- you ... Certainly there's a cohort anyway of people that literally do not want to meet or approach in person, probably going out and approaching strangers at a bar would be entirely foreign to them. Because something I didn't mention ... Okay, so I said about 20% of people below age 30 meet in, in apps, but about another 20%, according to the, uh, recent Kinsey and Match results, uh, are meeting through, uh, social media. So that's another big way probably that people are meeting is, is through their friends on social media, that sort of thing, if it's Instagram or Twitter or Facebook, whatever the case may be.
- CWChris Williamson
That's interesting. So you're talk- you're saying that a whopping four out of five new relationships ... No, sorry, a whopping two out of five new relationships are starting through some sort of online medium.
- ADAlex DatePsych
Exactly. And when I saw the recent Pew results that were just published a week ago, I thought, I thought, "Oh, 20% seems low," because I recall results from last year's that said 40% meet online. And then just the same day, or maybe a day or two later, I saw the Kinsey, uh, statistics and I thought, "Oh, well here's another 20% in addition to that that report meeting through social media." So if you're asking, did you meet online in past results-
- CWChris Williamson
Yes.
- ADAlex DatePsych
... perhaps you had people responding that were meeting in apps and you had people responding that were meeting Instagram and Twitter and that sort of a thing, and that kind of gives you that, that 40%. But certainly online is, is the way s- people socialize now.
- CWChris Williamson
There's a, a, a bunch of contradictory data that I've seen about people that meet online having less success in long-term relationships, but also people who meet online getting married more quickly. Have you seen both of these things?
- ADAlex DatePsych
I have not. I have not. But certainly, there are personality differences between people who use apps at all to begin with, and between people who never do, right? So, that could be one thing that explains a lot of relationship outcomes. Certainly, as far as long-term relationship out- go, uh, long-term relationship outcomes, and also relationship outcomes as far as age of marriage, if it's an early marriage, if you get divorced. Those are all things that are influenced very heavily by individual differences in personality. And, there's a lot of perception that apps are used just for hookups, which doesn't seem to be the case. Most people who use apps, about 70%, report like seeking a monogamous relationship. But, at the same time, there have been studies on app use that say, okay, so apps are associated a little bit with people that might score higher in dark personality traits, like the dark triad. Those are gonna be people that have very unstable relationships as well, and also be more impulsive. So, that could explain why they might be getting married more quickly, more impulsivity, and also why their relationships are not lasting as long in the long term as well.
- CWChris Williamson
Ah, yeah. These things aren't mutually exclusive. They could both exist together.
- ADAlex DatePsych
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
One other thing that you put, to just round out this, uh, terrible situation of men not being able to approach women, and yet women still wanting men to approach them. Uh, it's worth adding that approaching women by itself didn't make the list of things that women consider to be creepy. Thus, there seems to be some disconnect between what women view as creepy, and men's fear of rejection or being creepy. Remembering that the very first part was, f- half of single men, I think it's 46%, report not approaching women out of the fear of being seen as creepy, and 86% of women reported experiencing creepy behavior, but, uh, men approaching women wasn't one of those behaviors that women, uh, s- class as being creepy, for the most part, and men see it as the case. So, this disconnect between what men view as, and what women actually perceive as. And then the final thing which I thought was such a great, uh, great piece of input, and David Buss talks about this in Men Behaving Badly, which is, there is a small cohort of men that do almost all of the really creepy behavior. It's serial offenders, you know, one man doing a thousand creepy things, not a thousand men doing one creepy thing each. It's not the men who follow women into the parking lot and refuse to accept no, that are afraid of approaching women. They aren't the ones that are afraid of, of being called creepy. So, if you are a man who is reticent about approaching a woman, the fact that you are reticent already selects you out of the group of men for whom the creepy behavior would have been accused.
- ADAlex DatePsych
Oh, yeah. Exactly. That's, I mean, that's a great point. Certainly, being approached politely is not one of the things that, that women typically find creepy. I think b- a lot of the time with things like TikTok, right? Certainly you've seen these recent, uh, videos at, at the gym of, of someone who looks in the direction of a woman and then it becomes this big online thing. Like, "Oh, he was looking at me creepy." I think those can fuel perceptions for men that even approaching a woman or interacting with a woman at all is kind of dangerous. Kind of these, these, you know, one out of a thousand anecdotes that, that appear on the internet and kind of fuel our popular perceptions in a way. But certainly asking women, "Is being approached in and of itself creepy?" As you said, they would say no. And at the same time, exactly as you said, the men who are creepy, the ones who really cross lines, are probably the ones that do not care. I- if they're doing that at all. Maybe they don't know, maybe they don't care, you know? So, being just a little bit conscious of being like pro-social and not crossing a line, it will take you very far, at least if your goal is to not appear creepy, right?
- CWChris Williamson
Yes, I totally agree. I was thinking about this. I actually w- went back downstairs from bed last night because I had something that came to my mind, which was that the Me Too movement sought to sanitize the creepy elements of men's behavior, and instead it sterilized all of it. It just completely destroyed the desire. I often tell this story about, uh, a few years ago, I was in London with a friend who is a big time YouTuber, lots and lots of followers, charismatic, outgoing, young guy, slap bang in the middle of gen Z, and I was bored of him and what he was talking about and I said, "Oh, there's a group of girls over the far side. Why don't we go and talk to them?" And he looked at me like I'd suggested that we go and kill the (bleep) member them and put them in a park. That he was ... I- I've been told that under absolutely no circumstances should I ever, ever go up to a girl in a bar. That that's, you know, accusatory, dangerous behavior. That that's me being a creep. Um, and yeah, I think Joey Swoll, who is the guy that you might have seen who's kind of doing God's work at the moment, uh, re-centering everyone's expectations around gym culture and whether you should approach girls in the gym or s- or not. I'm actually in talks with his manager about bringing him on the show, 'cause I really want to have a conversation with him about this. But, um, yeah, the, the reason that these videos about approaching girls in the gym are catching fire online is that they're so obviously egregious that everybody understands that this isn't something that's going wrong. That, like, for a guy, there is a threshold of staring that a guy can cross. A- absolutely. Like, you know, you can stare too much, but it's not the amount that we're being shown. And the reason that people are getting righteously angry is because it hasn't crossed that threshold. Everybody understands how to behave in a ... almost everybody understands about how to behave in a normal manner. The problem was Me Too tried to sanitize and instead it sterilized.
- ADAlex DatePsych
Exactly. As you said, most people know how to behave in a normal way. Certainly, if you look at pro-social behavior and antisocial behavior, just throughout the normal day of a person, the vast majority of their behavior will be pro-social or neutral. It won't be antisocial. Most people behave normally in a way that is getting along with other people, kind of not rocking the boat too much and, and pro-social, not upsetting other people deliberately or crossing, uh, moral bounds or, or, uh, that sort of a thing. So, certainly another thing about these videos that we see on TikTok, like you mentioned Joey Swoll, great guy, I love his videos, but...People post things on TikTok like this because it gets them clicks, right? It's a whole genre of, of controversial things that are deliberately designed to offend people, to shock people, and all of that. And, you know, there, there are these anecdotes. A lot of them are probably close to fictional in a way, you know. Did this woman even actually think that this man was staring or did she know in a very deliberate and kind of Machiavellian (laughs) way, like, "Hey, I can make this controversy and it's just gonna get viral, just because I, I can predict that." And it's gonna get the clicks and it doesn't matter if the attention is positive or negative. And certainly, you know, those enter people's minds and then they form this perception of, of negativity. The same as you said about, uh, the Me Too movement, you know, uh, as, as I mentioned, uh, a lot of relationships begin at work. That's been the way that, that it has been. Certainly work is also a place where people who are married, you know, it leads to affairs because you're spending all of the day with one person. And so if work or school or something like that becomes an environment where people are afraid to form these kind of connections and relationships, that can also contribute to, you know, what's been called the mating crisis, right? Or what's, uh, people being single or being lonely, like, "Hey, these are the only people I interact with. Maybe this person is interested in me, but I'm, you know, I don't wanna lose my job. I, you know, I don't wanna get kicked out of school." Or whatever the case may be. Even if it is appropriate, even if the interaction is pro-social and healthy and really should not be something that, that is stigmatized in that sense.
- CWChris Williamson
You're familiar with Poe's law, right?
- ADAlex DatePsych
Yeah. (laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
Which is you can't work out whether a joke is a joke or not. I think we need to meme into existence an equivalent which is for clickbait on the internet, that you don't know if the girl's gym TikTok video is actually her opinion or if what-
- ADAlex DatePsych
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... she's doing is farming for clicks and because you can't determine which is which... So we need to, uh, I'll let the comments try and come up with some suggestions for a cool law that kind of relates to Poe's law but isn't quite it. Uh, and yeah, dude, I mean, the, the, the stuff about, um, the workplace, I always r- remember the story about how Bill and Melinda Gates met. Do you know this one?
- ADAlex DatePsych
Mm-hmm. I don't. How? How?
- CWChris Williamson
So Melinda Gates was a receptionist working at Microsoft, I think, in the 1980s, and Bill had noticed her around the office, thought that she was really hot, and decided that he was going to call her on the internal company phone and ask what she was doing. He said, "I, I, it's Bill. I, I would be interested in taking you out." And she says, "Well, when are you thinking?" And he said, "How, how about three weeks tomorrow?" And she says, "Bill, I just don't think that you're sufficiently spontaneous for me. This isn't going to work." Puts the phone down. He rings back 30 minutes later and says, "How's this for spontaneous? You've got the rest of the afternoon off." So can you imagine the headline, "CEO founder of massive tech company rings receptionist to ask her out, then after she says no, rings back and forces her to leave the office to go out on a date with him"? Like, that's game over. That is completely game over. And yeah, the... Again, going from sanitized to sterilized, like, is that creepy behavior? She didn't say no. She said, "When would you like to go out?" And h- how can you tell the difference between was it, uh, flirtation, playfulness that she was doing to kind of do a little bit of a, like a jokey shit test type thing or was she genuinely rebuffing him? All of these nuances are exactly why having a hard and fast rule about you should never approach somebody in a bar or never approach somebody at work is going to end up with people having less sex and getting into fewer relationships.
- ADAlex DatePsych
Yeah. Certainly something like that in today's environment would be, uh, heavily criticized and stigmatized. Uh, and, you know, there's arguments against it that are legitimate and then there's, as we've been discussing, like, do we really want to cut off that, uh, that conduit or that avenue to form relationships completely in the workplace? Certainly Bill and Melinda Gates, I think at this point they're divorced, but they had a, a, uh, relationship that lasted for a very, very long time and presumably was a very, very good relationship for that period. You know, a relationship doesn't have to last forever to be functional or good. Sometimes relationships end for whatever reason. But, you know, in a different environment would that have even formed at all? And, and if that, uh, way to form relationships is completely cut off, what are the larger implications for singles in society as a whole, for children and marriage and that sort of thing, you know? Certainly population crisis and all of that.
- 16:19 – 22:32
What is Causing the Rise in Sexless Men?
- CWChris Williamson
What do you think is causing this rise in sexlessness amongst young men?
- ADAlex DatePsych
Okay. So this is something I've certainly talked about a, a great deal. Uh, I think there's actually very compelling evidence that a large amount of the variation in that is caused by a decrease in alcohol consumption. Uh, about 30% of the variance from a recent study that I read could be attributed to lower alcohol consumption. In the '90s, uh, certainly I'm old enough where I was coming of age in that era, people would go to parties very often, they would drink, they would have sex when they were drunk and that sort of thing, and alcohol contributed a great, great deal to casual sex. Young people are using much, much less alcohol. They're using drugs at lower rates as well. And in addition to that, people are extending, or I should say young people are extending their adolescence. There's many fewer young people, uh, between 17, 18, 19 who have jobs, who are getting driver's licenses, who are entering a school, particularly men in that case. Fewer entering university at that age. And so you have this extended adolescence. You have what has been a trend, I say alcohol, but it's actually a trend as far as lower risk aversion, because sex at that age, you know, with strangers, casual sex or forming relationships, it's linked to some degree of risk tolerance. It's, it's sort of a risky behavior. And certainly people were taught that, uh, in the past when it was more common. Like, "Hey, don't go out and have unprotected sex. Don't have sex with strangers. It's risky behavior." And now the youngest cohort of, of adults are kind of following that advice more and they're saying, "Hey, why is no one...... uh, having sex, why are people not forming these relationships and all of that. Another interesting thing, in the Pew results and in the recent Kinsey results as well, about half of people who are single, both men and women, report, m- and this is for individuals under the age of 30 as well, report not actually looking for a partner. So again, a great deal of the variance in singleness seems to be people who have dropped out, and is that because they really don't wanna date or they become frustrated with the dating market? You know, more research would need to be done to look into that specifically. But for whatever the case may be, a lot of that variance isn't people that are, like, out there really hustling trying to find a boyfriend or a girlfriend. They've given up, or, or they don't want to date or something like that. And if there's a generational shift in people who legitimately do not want to date the opposite sex or the same sex, whatever the case may be, uh, that's an interesting question and something that really needs to be examined a lot.
- CWChris Williamson
I wonder how much of that is stated and revealed preferences smashing up against each other. If, if somebody asks you, "Are you single?" "Yes, I am." "Why are you single?" "Uh, uh, because I want to be." That's a much more acceptable, publicly acceptable answer to give than, "I'm trying and continue to be rebuffed," or, "I can't find somebody that's attracted to me." Or, you know, for women especially, "I can't find somebody that I'm attracted to."
- ADAlex DatePsych
Sure.
- CWChris Williamson
That's a really, really difficult answer to give, I would imagine. Um, but yeah, I, I wonder how much the, um, degrading and the evaporating of hedonic kind of lairy behavior has contributed to this. I certainly remember my time at university, which was, you know, 15 years ago, and we would go out, drink heavily, go to lots of parties. You know, that, that was uni. Uni... The, the university part of university got in the way of partying. It was one long party that was interspersed every so often with exams that I had to remember the lectures that I didn't attend to try and continue to stay at university. But, um, the advent of smartphones means that we're all living in basically a panopticon, that at all times any m- drunken mistake that you make is captured and put on the internet, and you could potentially turn into a meme. If you are dating someone but not official, you're gonna get rumbled. There are fewer opportunities for people to kind of make up and break up because you've got to change your relationship status or delete their photos from Instagram. MGK and Megan Fox broke up yesterday or the day before, and she went and deleted all of her photos with him. And, you know, the... Everybody's relationships are a lot less private than they used to be, even the people for whom they want to try and keep them private, um, uh, the people that aren't, you know, movie stars or, or rock stars. So yeah, I, um, I think that that definitely contributes. A, uh, an overall trend of risk-taking behavior being diminished definitely seems like it makes sense.
- ADAlex DatePsych
Yes, and in, in a way, social media enables a sort of risk aversion that we have never seen in the past. If you wanted to interact with people in the past, you know, say in the '90s, you know, you go to a party where there's other people. You're gonna be drinking, and maybe at the end of the night, you and someone else who was drunk, you do something, and even if you regret it in the morning, whatever. But if most of your social interactions are with people online, you can carry out an entire relationship with someone online, a romantic relationship with feelings and that sort of thing, and never actually meet them, never have sex, and be very, very cautious with that person before you actually decide to meet in public. So there can be a long lead-up to actually meeting, which is certainly... And, uh, and having sex in that case or forming a relationship or whatever the case may be. That is very, very different from, you know, "I met someone in a bar and I got drunk and we went home at the end of the night." Those are very, very different situations. So I think in a sense, social media, being able to have, uh, social groups online, relationships online, most of your interactions and socialization online also puts kind of a layer of protection between you and the world that may not have existed in the past.
- CWChris Williamson
Yes, it's like a prophylactic against any kind of discomfort. And the same thing, it goes back up to what we were saying before, men being afraid of approaching women. They already had this, uh, dis- predisposition toward it in terms of rejection, and now it's been tuned up even more with not wanting to be canceled and have their name smeared on the internet. And then women also are increasingly concerned. The post Me Too era has definitely caused women to be more vigilant around men that misbehave. M- maybe that's meant that women are a lot more safe, but it's also meant that some women who aren't unsafe consider themselves to be unsafe. They are looking for problems where they're not, the kind of fire alarm hypothesis of negativity for, uh, for how humans have that negativity bias as well.
- 22:32 – 27:34
The Rising Standards of Women
- CWChris Williamson
What about women raising their standards, do you think that they've been doing that over the last few years?
- ADAlex DatePsych
I'm skeptical of that. Certainly, that's a very, very common narrative in the manosphere, particularly in relationship to online dating. The idea that, uh, people on apps have, particularly women, I should say, women on apps have access to this huge list of men a- and they can pick from the best ones at any given moment and that has raised standards. I think that's probably not the case. Uh, certainly there was a large study, uh, in about 2018 that looked at longitudinal data, uh, from before and after when Tinder was released and the rise of online dating. And it looked at Greek students, right, in students in fraternities. So kind of like the, the students that you would expect to be the most risk-taking, to be the most popular, to have the most sex, the jock/athletic Chads. And these guys only self-reported about, you know, one extra partner per year on average following Tinder. Another thing, uh, certainly we talk a lot about the self-reports and stuff with these sexual behaviors, but sexually transmitted diseases also did not rise in that timeframe. Whereas on the other hand where we do see a current rise in STDs is, is among a cohort that's actually much younger, about 15 and 16. So I'm not sure that it's really the case that exposure to, uh, more mate options has made women raise their standards in a sense. I think it might be the case though that, that... Well, I mean, it is the case apparently that many are just refusing to date. They're not...... enjoying what they see out there. And, and there's many things that might contribute to that. Certainly, questions like obesity could be one, you know, where you, there's, particularly in the United States, where you, you see a lot of people, uh, falling into the obesity acad- uh, epidemic. Perhaps mate value overall for men and women kind of has dropped. Fewer people are attracted to one another. And that could explain it as well, without actually having to be kind of a rise in standards, kind of a, a lowering of, of standards for individuals across the board, be it men and women in that case.
- CWChris Williamson
Would you fold into this the female overachievement in education and employment? Obviously, you don't need standards of women to rise if their level of achievement has gone up. It's not as if you need hypergamy to get any worse. If women start to sit further and further up the overall, both sexes, dominance or, uh, competence hierarchy, you end up with women having the tall girl problem, right, that they have fewer and fewer men that are up and across.
- ADAlex DatePsych
Exactly. And certainly, that's something that has been researched a lot and that they're looking more into recently, right? We're beginning to see more women, uh, graduating with under- undergraduate degrees. We're seeing women beginning to earn more than men across many fields and many areas. Uh, women outnumbering men in educational roles, having higher graduate degrees as well. And if it is the case that women prefer men who are high in status, right, hypergamy, the idea is that they want men that are high in status, but that means high in status relative to them in some sense. So, if women are more educated, if they're making more money, it's gonna be difficult to find someone who might be higher in status relative to them in that case. And this isn't an unreasonable expectation either. This isn't like a super high standard, like, "Hey, I have a master's degree and I have a job. I'd like someone else with a master's degree and a job." Well, if you get to about age 30 and you look at the married population, you know, about 70% of the population is in relationships at that point. And people who have advanced degrees, or say anyone that has a bachelor's degree, master's degree, and PhD, you're increasingly more likely to be married, both for men and women, as your level of education goes up. So, that pool, it gets smaller. And certainly, anyone that's not paired up by that point that actually has a really, really good job or, or a good decent job and that has some level of education, their dating pool for someone is going to be small, especially if they want someone who's a little bit higher in status than, than they are.
- CWChris Williamson
It's particularly brutal, I think, for women because if you've spent most of your 20s accumulating education and employment, you're now competing not only with all of the other women who have done the same thing, but you're also competing with a 20-year-old barista that, at Starbucks that still lives at home with her parents. Like, the bottom line is that men don't value education and employment prospects in their partners really at all. I think in order for a woman to achieve the same, uh, difference in mate value increase that a man does for a, I think it's a, a twofold increase from a man, the woman would need to have a thousandfold increase in her income in order to be able to make the same, uh, change in mate value 'cause guys just don't matter. And it might actually be a contraindication. You know, there's some evidence that William tweeted the other day that said, um, "Men in relationships with women where they are not the primary breadwinner are statistically more likely to use erectile dysfunction medication." So, there are actually some negative correlations going on here.
- 27:34 – 31:42
Does Being Single for a Long Time Impact Happiness?
- CWChris Williamson
Uh, how about being single for a long time impacting people's happiness? Have you had a look at this?
- ADAlex DatePsych
I, I have had a little bit, a look, uh, a look at this. So, certainly people who are single, happiness is something that's actually quite resilient. Uh, there's been a lot of research on long-term happiness and the way that it kind of pans out after adverse life events. Some classical research into happiness looked at people who experienced, uh, disabilities following accidents, and also people who went to prison. And so they've assessed these individuals, you know, self-reported happiness when they enter prison, following an accident immediately, and of course, happiness is very, very low. You go back and you talk to these people later, six months, a year later, and their happiness is about the same as the general population. So, people become very, very resilient as far as happiness is concerned over a long period of time. Whatever the case may be for someone's life, they tend to kind of adjust to it and it's the new norm. So, I'm not sure if long-term singleness, uh, directly impacts someone's happiness, but certainly on an intuitive level, you would think that it would. And if someone wants to be in a relationship because maybe they come to acceptance that it's not going to happen for them and, you know, they, they, uh, accept that and their happiness adjusts and they move on. But if someone is very, very focused on this, on this relationship goal and they're continually thwarted, that's an ongoing frustration that can, that can stay with them. And certainly, even if it didn't manifest as something that would show up if you gave someone a, a measure of happiness, it could certainly manifest in other areas of their life as some sort of discontent.
- CWChris Williamson
Are fewer people in relationships overall now? Have you got any data around that?
- ADAlex DatePsych
Well, overall in the population, so I looked at the General Social Survey statistics for 2001, so the most recent GSS is, is for 2001, and people in relationships, even in younger cohorts, have actually been pretty stable as far as that's concerned. Uh, typically, when you look at the youngest cohort, about 18 to 25, anywhere between 40 to 50 to 60%. In the recent Pew data now, it says 60% of men, and that was just from a few days ago, and that's actually pretty high. If you look back to about 1984, it was about 46% of men. So, in the youngest cohort, there's more single young men. It has been going up. But since about 2012-... it's been pretty, pretty stable, about 56% in 2012, if I remember correctly. It was 50-something. By the time you get to the 30s, though, that's an age group that has remained very, very stable. Most people form relationships and you have about 70% of people who are either married, in a committed relationship, and then the 30% who are not. So, long-term singleness actually seems to have remained pretty stable, but it has increased for the youngest cohort. It's always been pretty high for the youngest cohort, especially for young men, but it has, it has gone up.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, the increasing variability in, uh, male success, especially at young ages, is a reason that I think both of us agree that, um, some of the black pill and incel culture that young guys are, uh, attracted to is the sort of thing that they very well may just grow out of, that over time you're going to end up realizing, "Oh, hang on. Th- th- this was a poor period. Maybe I was, um, late to become socially unawkward. Maybe it took a while for me to grow into my looks, or grow into my confidence, or to accumulate enough- enough status, or money, or whatever." But over time, you end up at a place where you probably couldn't have predicted it when you were a good bit younger. And, um, it is an interesting consideration around how many of the trends that we see are just, um, frictionless communications of the internal thoughts that all young people used to have in the past, around women's fear of safety when they're too young and vulnerable and they don't actually know how to s- uh, um, put themselves into a situation where they can always be safe, or how to understand what actual boundaries are and what might be dangerous behavior and w- what might not be. Or with guys, about just how hopeless they are going to be in the mating market, or whether or not this is just a blip up to the age of 21, or something like that.
- 31:42 – 36:40
What It’s Like to Be in the Top 20% of Men on Dating Apps
- CWChris Williamson
Um, what about the top 20% of men on dating apps? Is it true that all of these Chads are being showered with attention and poaching all of the average attractiveness women?
- ADAlex DatePsych
Well, something to consider about dating apps, first off, is that it's not a one-one ratio of men to women, right? There's about three men for every one woman. So even if... Imagine everyone on an app at any given moment just paired off one to one. Every man got one woman. About 66% of men would have no match, just from the ratio alone. So, already the fact that there's a big, big sex disparity explains a lot of why this, there's this top percent of men that get most of the attention. So, certainly that's something that- that has been seen pretty consistently. Uh, another thing is actually, if you look at the ratio of likes for profiles, uh, from... This is from the book Dataclysm by Christian Rudder. He- he looked at this as far as a ratio, and certainly, uh, women get more likes. Women swipes or whatever the c- well, this was OkCupid, so I guess it was likes or even messages in that case, and I think that was from back in the days in OkCupid when you could just send a message to someone. At least that's... I think it was that long ago when- when that data was from. Certainly, I remember you d- you would just write someone a message. There was no match or preselection kind of thing. So, certainly women get more attention on these apps. There's fewer women. Men are less choosy, and men have this strategy where, you know, they will just swipe on literally everyone, throw out the big, big net, and see what fish are caught in that sense. Women are much, much more selective. There was a recent study as well that found kind of a shift in selectivity over time. The more women swipe, the more selective they become as well. So, the app has an acute effect in that sense on making women more selective. So there is kind of this select, uh, group of individuals on apps that it works for. At the same time, outside of that data, other papers and studies on Tinder show that about half, including the Pew, uh, recent data that was just released just a few days ago, they had an online dating, uh, survey as well. About half of people on these apps report being happy with them. About half of people report having gotten a date from them. So it's not the case that it's only 20% of people who ever get any action from an app, so to speak. I think another thing that people kind of misconstrue about that is they see this ratio of attention and they think, "Oh, these people are monopolizing all the women. They're- they're having all the sex with all those women." But certainly swipe data, or who goes on dates, or who gets messages is not the same as like, "Oh, these people are actually meeting up and having sex, or even going on dates for that matter." So...
- CWChris Williamson
What was that... What's that term that you talk... Is it the- the socio- socially select sexual few or something, that there's basically the people that are the most sociosexual just keep having sex with each other? What's that?
- ADAlex DatePsych
Exactly. So, this was a term that I first found I think in... When I began researching sexually transmitted diseases. They refer to the promiscuous 10%. And certainly, these are people that score very, very, very high in socio-sexuality. Socio-sexuality is a measure that indicates basically people's willingness to have sex with not s- well, strangers, have more casual sex. They're less sexually restricted, more willing to have sex in that sense. So, this promiscuous 10% in research on sexually transmitted diseases described, okay, we have this 10% of people who report having way more sex. This is both men and women. When they get tested for diseases, they report their sexual behavior, and they constitute a much larger percent of the population that's responsible for, you know, uh, the spread of these diseases, so to s- so to speak. And these are people largely having sex with one another. So, rather than the idea that there is 20% of men who are having sex with all of the women, because this is something that has never been shown in- in any of the data, and that's something that you would see in sexually transmitted disease statistics. People talk a lot about self-reports. If you look... Because certainly what do self-reports show? They show that about almost 50% of men and women in 2021, per the General Social Survey data, report no sexual partners. Another 20-30% or so report one. About 85 to 95% report having sex only in a monogamous relationship. So, as far as self-report data goes across...... any data set that you use, people report overwhelmingly being not especially promiscuous, and then you have that promiscuous 10% who makes up like, oh, yeah, between five and more people in a year, one partner per month, new, or something like that. And this is the same population, the same cohort that is responsible for, or I shouldn't say responsible for, but that when they go in to get tested, they constitute many positive tests for sexually transmitted diseases as well.
- CWChris Williamson
This is your way of splitting apart the revealed and stated preferences thing, right? Okay. So yes, I understand. I understand.
- 36:40 – 46:44
Are Attractive Women Having More or Less Sex?
- CWChris Williamson
What about attractive women? Are they the ones that are having a lot of sex? Are attractive women extra promiscuous with this dearth of globalized sexual marketplace and sheikhs on Instagram being able to message them to come out to Dubai?
- ADAlex DatePsych
Well, certainly the research seems to indicate the opposite, with m- the most attractive women actually indicating fewer partners, and women who are neither the least attractive nor the most attractive reporting more sexual partners. And that's something that is kind of in line with evolutionary theories for why that might be, right? Because if you're a very, very attractive woman... First, I guess some background here would be that women, there's a huge difference. One of the most well-replicated differences between men and women, given from evolutionary psychology as far as, you know, replication, replication crisis in psychology, something that's very, very well-replicated is very large differences in socio-sexuality between men and women. Men are very, very open to having a lot of sex, many partners, being promiscuous. Women, much, much, much less so. So given that basis, a very attractive woman physically has many, many more options. She can be more selective. A woman who is slightly less attractive, say medium attractiveness or something, she may actually need to use sex more to secure mates, to secure, uh, a partner or something like that. And in that sense, sex serves as sort of a function to secure a mate in that sense. And then people who are very, very low at the end of attractiveness, they may have difficulty finding a mate at all in that case. So that's probably how you get that middle range of female attractiveness that's associated with, uh, more sexual partners. Men, on the other hand, the most attractive men... Attractiveness is linear as far as predicting sexual partners for men, but it's also not a very, very strong correlation either.
- CWChris Williamson
What does incentivize f- uh, female short-term mating, then?
- ADAlex DatePsych
So certainly, uh, the paradigm for short-term mating, uh, would be the dual-mate hypothesis in evolutionary psychology. For a long time, this is what it has been until relatively recently, right? And the idea here was that men and women, but we'll talk about women specifically in this case, uh, have a dual strategy for selecting a mate. One strategy is looking for a long-term mate who can provide resources from a pair bond and raise a child basically, and the other is a short-term strategy. And that short-term strategy was very closely related to the ovulatory shift hypothesis, right? Because the idea is that, uh, when a woman is fertile, she looks for a man with good genes, you know, and gets pregnant by this man so that she can have the good genes, and then at the same time, have this long-term mate at the same time. So this was an idea that persisted for maybe a decade and a half in evolutionary psychology, and at this point now, evolutionary psychology has shifted very, very much away from that. They've said, you know, there actually isn't that much evidence for this dual-mate hypothesis. Something, uh, David Buss and Schmidt recently wrote in an article on sexual strategies theory, which is what I've just described, it's called sexual strategies theory, was that really the short-term mating strategy probably only applies to a very, very select few women, and those are gonna be women who score very, very high in socio-sexuality. If you look at, as I mentioned, uh, socio-sexuality, big sex differences. If you were to look at the two distributions, they're about, uh, one and a half standard deviations away from one another, if I remember correctly. So a lot of men and women don't even overlap at all as far as these socio-sexuality scores. So what would drive short-term mating in that case? Well, one of the big motives mentioned in the recent article by Buss and Schmidt would be money. And certainly that's not what a lot of people I think think about when they have this short-term mating discourse. They think, "Oh, they- they want a Chad who's hot," and everything, and all of that. But if money is a big one, you know, and you can see this in things like sex work, you can see this in things like the kind of, uh... Who- who is this recently? Leo- Leonardo DiCaprio, he finds very, very young women. Now, he was an attractive man before but he's getting very, very old. Do we believe that these women are interested in Leonardo DiCaprio because he is an attractive man or because he has many, many resources? So these are things that would incentivize short-term mate strategies. But more interesting than that perhaps is that the shift has gone from saying, "Ah, people have this, all women have this dualistic mating strategy, short-term and long-term" to saying, "Okay, there's actually a lot of overlap between short and long-term mate strategies, that short-term strategies may actually be kind of a springboard or a doorway into long-term mate strategies." A good example of this reported by David Buss in his research was that about 70-something percent of women who have affairs, they report, for example, being in love with their affair partner. And this has led to kind of this new paradigm in evolutionary psychology that's called the mate-switching hypothesis, which is that short-term mating is not something apart from long-term mating. It's not going out there to secure the good genes. It's looking for a new long-term mate. So this short-term mate, this playing the field outside might be like, "Okay, maybe my satisfaction with this mate has decreased but I don't wanna break up yet. I need some kind of security going into a new relationship, so I'm kind of exploring these short-term things to see if they become...... something larger or something longer in that sense.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, women monkey branching from one relationship to another. I, I, I found it so interesting the... Because the, the dual mating hypothesis was founded by Buss as well, right? Yeah. So David, David Buss comes up with this theory, then he kind of reassesses the data, recants his original, um, theory. And the problem is, it's kind of like the, the same thing when you have a, a newspaper article that accuses someone of someone, uh, something and then publishes a retraction a little bit further down the line, the issue that you've got is the retraction never gets as much, uh, exposure as the original accusation does. And now we are stuck in this sort of liminal space where the guys that did the study say that the study no longer holds water, and this original theory is still continuing to kind of plow ahead. Uh, I, I don't know... I, I, I, I can't really work out why it's the case that the dual mating hypothesis seems to keep moving when the guys that... It hasn't replicated either, right? When they tried to do this again.
- ADAlex DatePsych
Certainly. So something, yeah, that David Buss said in this recent paper, it's titled Sexual Strategies Theory 2021. I- it might be a book chapter in the new Oxford Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology, or it might just be a review. But, you know, he, he says, okay, so these aren't entirely contradictory. You can have short and long term strategies, but this mate switching seems to be much more, more common and this, you know, actual women pursuing short term strategies pretty rare. So that's something to consider. What hasn't replicated well... So one of the things, uh, that this was very, very heavily based on initially was it was called, you know, the dual mate hypothesis, but a longer title for this or a version of this would be The Dual Mate Hypothesis of Ovulatory Shifts. And the idea is that when women ovulate, when women are fertile, that's when they're especially attracted to men with good genes, right? And that's when they're more likely to cheat and all of that. So that's what specifically hasn't replicated very well. What we see instead is actually that women are pretty much attracted to the exact same type of men for long term and for short term relationships. The reassessment that Buss and Schmitt kind of made in this paper was like, okay, so good genes are not just physical either. Good genes include things like intelligence, they include things like prosocial behavior, they include the behaviors that would make someone stay with a partner and raise a child and provide resources and all of that. So why would none of those things be selected for in a short term mate? Why would it just be physical? That's one issue with that. We don't see the shift in actual preferences. That's big thing that has not replicated that I think undermined this a lot and kind of caused that shift away from it was, we don't see that women seek men who are more physically attractive when they're ovulating. They want physically attractive men all the time. And certain... That's something, you know, we talk about the black pill, they don't... they're not wrong about that. People like physically attractive people, they like facially attractive people, muscular men and that sort of thing. That's a real thing. So... And that's something that persists for both long term and short term. So we don't see that there. Another one, uh, that kind of hasn't replicated well that would have lended support to that as well was the good genes, uh, immunocompetence testosterone hypothesis and the idea is okay, so when women are ovulating, they're attracted to men who have very high testosterone, high testosterone signals good genes. Why is that? Because high testosterone causes a handicap in immunocompetence. To have high testosterone, you're actually lowering your immune system a little bit and that means that you have to be especially fit to have high testosterone. So none of that has really replicated very well. So many of these things that we think of as signaling good genes from an evolutionary standpoint, perhaps they don't. We don't see the switch in mate preferences for short term and long term as previously believed, and we see in actual behavior as well as reports that a lot of these short term relationships are kind of, as you said, they look more like monkey branching than they do a different strategy. They look like someone that wants to leave a particular... I should say someone, a woman that wants to leave a relationship and enter a new long term relationship. There's huge differences in socio-sexuality, huge sex differences in preferences for monogamous relationships as well. All of that kind of leads toward, okay, women probably are not engaging in a lot of short term mating. In, in a way it's almost like when people talk about women that way it's almost like they ascribe more male personality characteristics to women. It's almost like, "If I were a woman, that's what I would do."
- CWChris Williamson
Yes.
- ADAlex DatePsych
But that's just, you know, women are, are very different in a lot of these ways.
- CWChris Williamson
You've mentioned
- 46:44 – 58:12
What Guys Get Wrong About What Women Find Attractive
- CWChris Williamson
the black pill's relationship with attractiveness there, do you think that inceldom is all about looks?
- ADAlex DatePsych
Well, I think the, the most interesting thing that's going to happen I think in research on incels is when someone does a paper where they actually get a good sample of incel photos and get some attractiveness ratings. And then we can know to what extent, uh, looks are involved. I don't think looks are completely irrelevant. You know, there's a lot of people who are like, "Looks don't matter." Uh, they just have bad personalities and, and all of that. You can find some famous ones, you know, Elliott Rodger or something like that. This was a man who facially who, you know, he could have had a girlfriend. He, you know, he wasn't, uh, ugly in that sense but there's an intersection there where if people are not especially handsome and they have some personality issues, and when I say personality issues, I'm not saying bad people, but if they suffer from anxiety, which recent research on incels has shown, if they suffer from depression, uh, many, uh, self-report autism, they have official diagnoses of autism about twice the rate according to recent research by Brandon Sparks as well. You know, William Costello, he found that they suffer from depression and anxiety and that sort of thing. Those are things that can impact your relationship a lot, and if you have some of those things going on and you're not the most handsome guy, then you have this intersection that's gonna make forming a relationship really, really difficult.
- CWChris Williamson
What do you think guys get wrong about what women find attractive?
- ADAlex DatePsych
So, (sighs) okay. So I, I did a short, uh, study survey on, on the web about the Giga Chad. Uh, I took just one photo. Uh, most people, I think, will know the Giga Chad, this meme. I think he's a very handsome guy, but importantly, he's an extremely dimorphic guy, right? His face is extremely masculine, big chin, big, uh, brow ridge and everything. So it's ... He has an extremely dimorphic face, and he's also considered to be very handsome, at least in these kind of meme subcultures of the black pill. That's why he's called the Giga Chad, because he is kind of the archetype of the most attractive man. So I ran this across a large sample of men and women. Men overwhelmingly related h- or rated him as attractive. Women didn't. But at the same time, there was kind of i- uh, you know, it wasn't a distribution where most women, uh, uh... Well, I should've said that differently. Most women found him unattractive, but there were some women who found him pretty attractive. At the same time, most men thought he was attractive. So a lot of the time, men kind of get wrong what women like as far as the physical features of men. I wrote another long article reviewing, uh, the research in that on facial attractiveness and specifically facial dimorphism, masculine facial features. I think men think that very, very masculine facial features are attractive to women. Uh, usually it isn't the very most dimorphic faces that are the most attractive to women. If you think about a really dimorphic face, it's kind of like a gorilla in a sense. Uh, but it's probably not going to be the least dimorphic face, the least feminine. There's a lot of research on how averageness is attractive, and sometimes when I say that people think, "What do you mean? How can an average face? Certainly, a- average is not attractive." But average in this case means features that are not too extreme, that are symmetrical, that are not too extreme. So those are some things that predict, uh, facial attractiveness in, in any sense. For personality, and what I think men often get wrong, at least in kind of these manosphere subcultures, they tend to think that women enjoy, uh, antisocial behavior. They tend to think that women are very, very attracted to certain antisocial traits, which is typically not the norm. So if you look at something like the dark triad, for example, there is research that indicates that the dark triad is attractive to women. So the dark triad is this, uh, triad of traits that are antisocial: psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and narcissism. So looking at those individually, uh, some of those actually predict attractiveness better than others, primarily narcissism. And that might be because people who are narcissists pay more attention to their own appearance and because their behavior is very different. It seems like Machiavellianism doesn't actually predict this kind of attractiveness, not attractiveness as far as physical ratings nor mating success as well as the other two do. So those are certain things to consider.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, it is interesting about how the common held wisdom on the internet about what it is that women want. I had a Seth Stephens-Davidowitz on the show who wrote Everybody Lies and Don't Trust Your Gut. In Don't Trust Your Gut, he did a autistic data scientist's approach to optimizing his personal appearance, and he split tested... There's websites where you can do this now, but he actually, uh, back-ended this back in the day. Um, he grew a beard, put a photo of him with a beard up. "Should I get a beard? Should I have glasses? Should I have my hair short? Should I have my hair long? Should I wear this? Should I wear that?" And he basically split tested all of the different iterations of his appearance down to, "I should have a beard, wear glasses, blah, blah," this particular, like, collection of things. Uh, and he is now, by his own admission, in a relationship with a girl that he's punching out of his league with. And the reason that that happened, he said, and he has data to back this up, which is that you want to try and make people love or hate the, um, sort of look that you have going forward. You don't want to be everybody's just okay. You want to be some, some people absolutely go for you, and this, the same thing goes for personality as well, that he said his girlfriend, uh, maybe even now fiance, when they f- before they even got together was with her friends and talking about being single and they said, "So what are you into? What are you into? And what are you into?" And they turned to his future girlfriend, said, "What are you into?" And she says, "I just love nerds. I can't say what it is about it. I've just, I have such a, a soft spot for nerds, and that is the kind of guy that I find the most sexy." And sure enough, down the line comes Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, ex-data scientist at Google, and, like, literally the guy that's just done a, a spreadsheet to work out how he should look most attractive. There you go. There's your, there's your, your, your nerdy guy. Um, now certain corners of the internet would say, "Oh, well, you know, that's just her beta bucks on the way to an alpha fucks solution or whatever it is." I don't know. It, it, it seems to be unlikely to me because a lot of the time I've seen guys get into relationships with girls who really love funny men or really love artsy men, or really love athletic men, or really love whatever. It's not all pointing in this sort of unidimensional, one-directional way of up and across towards hypermasculinity. The higher your testosterone, you're always going to win. Like there's certain universals, symmetrical face, for instance. I've never heard anybody say, "You know what it is? I just love an unsymmetrical face." That's not something typically that I've heard. But there are far fewer universalities than I think people would find, and when it comes to guys and advice for guys in dating, I think becoming, uh, sticking to some of the absolute un, uh, undeniable rules and then going, "Okay, what am I? What am I really, really good at?" If you're really, really good at being the, the artsy guy with a hanging earring that can play the guitar, like yo, lean into being Mr. Guitar Player thing. Or if you're the super funny guy, you know, Pete Davidson's the route to go, whatever it might be. You can become more of what you are. And that to me seems like not only the smartest route to go down in terms of being effective with women, but it's also the route down which you're going to...... feel like less of a fraud. And this was something else that you've brought up with, which is this sort of, um, pickup artist to incel pipeline that you had tracked through some data. And I think one of the reasons that a lot of guys became disenchanted with the pickup artist community was that what they realized, even the ones that were successful, if you were successful at pickup, what it taught you was that the role that you played was all that women were attracted to. And the further that the role that you played was from the person that you genuinely are, you realized, "Oh my God, I am so inherently unlovable and deficient in myself. However, women are this game to be played, they're this adversary to be won, they're this competitor that I'm supposed to gain control over. And if I play the game right and use the correct series of neurolinguistic programming languages, I will be able to, you know, win this game." Uh, and for the people who did try pickup and it didn't work, either because they weren't able to do it correctly or because there was something about them that meant that they couldn't get it to work and no matter what they did, um, it was also disenchanting to them too. So pickup, to me, seemed like un-falsifiably disheartening approach to dating.
- ADAlex DatePsych
Certainly, certainly. So, what you mentioned about attractiveness, let me comment on that and then go to the, the pickup, 'cause there's, those are two interesting, interesting topics. So, a lot of research on facial attractiveness up to this point has looked at how much people agree on attractive faces. And when you look at interrater correlations across a whole group on attractiveness, they seem really, really high. You can get correlations between like 0.6 and 0.9 for facial attractiveness ratings, which makes it seem like, oh man, people really agree on what an attractive face is. And it's true, if you look at that metric. If you look within that metric, if you run an ICC correlation and you look at pair ratings, the correlation is much, much lower. It can be about 0.2 to 0.3 or so-
- CWChris Williamson
You're gonna have to explain what you're talking about here.
- ADAlex DatePsych
Certainly. So if you take a big, big group of people and you have them rate a face and you look at their ratings, then you'll get a correlation that seems very, very high, like most people agree on what an attractive face is. If you take two individual people out of that group at random and you look at their correlation, and then you take two more out of that group at random, and you look at their correlation, and then you compute that, you'll say, "Wow, people don't really agree at all. There's actually a lot of variation on an attractive face." There's a good paper, I think it's from 2016, maybe it's a little older, by a researcher named Honeycutt, and he plots it out on a plot. And he says, "Okay, so here are all the actual faces, and here's the highest rating and the lowest rating." And almost every face, regardless of how attractive it was, got a really high rating and a really low rating. I recently ran a survey, I have it up on the website now. I took faces from the Chicago Face Database, and I selected these faces, male and female faces, to be, uh, kind of below attractiveness. And about... All of these faces got about 25% of people that said, "Okay, that face is good enough, I would date it," even though they were all kind of unattractive faces, as far as pre-ratings went. The pre-ratings, highly correlated. Uh, the ratings that people gave, the participants, highly correlated within each other and to these pre-ratings. So people all kind of agreed on the attractiveness of these faces, even across different questions that I asked, like, "How attractive are these relative to the population? How attractive do you find them?" At the same time, if you go through all of these faces, every single one of these faces had people that's rated it, like, you know, a Likert scale, one through seven, seven most attractive. Every single face had at least someone who said it was a seven, a six, a five. So, there is a great deal of individual variation in attractive face. Even if most people agree that a face is unattractive, there's still gonna be a pretty large cohort that says, "You know, I actually kind of like that face."
- CWChris Williamson
Mm. So that would be maybe Seth, the unconventional dude that manages to bag a hottie because he's exactly what she's looking for. Okay, and then what about
- 58:12 – 1:08:09
The Origins of Inceldom
- CWChris Williamson
pickup to incel?
- ADAlex DatePsych
Great. So there was a cool paper from a few years back called, uh, I don't, I don't think the title was The Incel, PUA to Incel Pipeline, but that's basically what it described. It might have been called Mapping the Manosphere or something like that. So this used network analysis, and it looked at something like 52 forums that were red pill forums, MGTOW forums, manosphere forums, PUA on Reddit, and then it looked at some of the big, big, uh, forums online outside of Reddit as well. And it used content analysis to kind of identify users or identify the kind of discourse and content and track how those moved over time and as, as far as active users and active discussions and stuff. So a lot of the PUA and red pill forums, they declined. And then incel forums, boom, they appear on, on, on the timeline, and already they're beating everyone else. And they're looking at users that basically migrated from one to another, and you see a lot of cross-migration in the discourse from those early PUA forums to the later incel forums. And so the idea from that is kind of like, okay, a lot of people began in PUA communities and they moved into these incel communities. Similarly, a lot of people that began in these red pill communities, they now have a lot of overlap with the MGTOW communities, which MGTOW is of course men going their own way, men who do not want to date. Uh, kind of similar to incels, kind of not. So you see these communities that began kind of like as self-improvement and gaining advice from men, like, "Hey, you want to be with women and you want to date, and we're gonna give you, like, the tools for that." And maybe they didn't work, you know (laughs) because now all of the men have gone to these communities and said, "No, we're going our own way now. We don't wanna date," or, "Oh, we're just incels now." Either way.
- CWChris Williamson
Why do you think that this is the trajectory that seems to be happening?
- ADAlex DatePsych
So I think something that you said was that even if PUA is successful, it can be kind of dispiriting to people. So say you start PUA and you actually kind of have a little bit of success with it. There's, I think there's a question to be made is like, is this helping people form lasting romantic relationships or are these...... just kind of moving people into that promiscuous 10%, because this cohort, this promiscuous 10%, so to speak, this is associated with a lot of, um, personality issues, people that are very, very promiscuous, risk-taking. It's associated with things like higher scores and dark triad personality and all of that. And these are individuals that because they are so promiscuous, or not because, kind of as a correlate to that, they might not be forming long-term relationships. They might have a hard time forming those connections. If your sexual partners are very promiscuous, probably, you know, that's associated with more infidelity. So, something I noticed observing, uh, Red Pill forums and PUA forums, a lot of these people were like, "Oh, you know, someone cheated on me. Someone cheated on me. All of my girlfriends cheated on me." And at that point, I have to kind of wonder like, "Why- what kind of people are you selecting where, like, all of your girlfriends have cheated on you?" And then they end up, you know, the men that started early in that and end up later with these very cynical and jaded views, and it's like, okay, but your own experiences selecting people might have kind of shaped that trajectory for you in a sense. And then, at the same time, there are many men who probably entered those communities, PUA or something, and got no results at all, and I think those are a lot of the people that have gone to, uh, Black Pill communities. In fact, I think even one of the early incel forums was actually called PUA Hate, right? So these are pe-
- CWChris Williamson
It was, yes. I remember Wasn't it? Yeah.
- ADAlex DatePsych
Yes, yes.
- CWChris Williamson
And, and I only remind- remember that 'cause I was listening to your show with, uh, with Naama Kates t- today.
- ADAlex DatePsych
Correct. Correct.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, so certainly these were people that had experiences of, of PUA stuff and they thought, "Oh, this is, you know, not gonna work for me. It didn't work for me as a grift. I paid the money and maybe I didn't get the results that I wanted." And boom, they're going- I mean, you, you can see how that would be a Black Pill, right?
- ADAlex DatePsych
Oh, yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
You're telling me that the guy with the big furry hat and the massive sideburns mystery out of Neil Strauss's The Game, even he could get laid with his stupid hair and his flares and, oh, and now the real Social Dynamics, Tyler and Max and everybody else, they've come along and they're not... Not all of them were exactly, you know, the pinnacles of Giga Chad masculinity and it worked for them, and it hasn't worked for me. Therefore, I should find distaste with this. Yeah, I, um, I can completely see why that would cause people to cascade down from hope to, uh, increasing gradations of hopelessness.
- ADAlex DatePsych
Absolutely. And, and I think there's a personality trait that is closely associated with that, uh, which is resilience. So some people, they can get rejected a thousand times and it just brushes off of them, you know, like, like water off of a duck's back. They can get rejected over and over and over. They have very, very high resilience, and it doesn't affect them. If they get cheated on, they just move on to a new relationship. If they experience a divorce, they get married again. These are people that from their past experiences, they don't let it, uh, sit upon them in a sense. And other people, uh, you know, their girlfriend cheats on them, they're, they're in love when they're 18 and they break up with their first girlfriend and it just devastates them, and they never get over it again. So, kind of, very low resilience in that sense. And I think if someone is going from a position of very low resilience, say they go into PUA and they're like, "Okay, I want you to approach a thousand women." They go to the supermarket or the mall and they (laughs) approach a hundred women or whatever and they get rejected a hundred times, uh, that's going to shape the perception of someone with very low resilience very differently from someone who, who doesn't care.
- CWChris Williamson
Remember what we were talking about earlier on, which is that most people are... A, a non-insignificant cohort of people are not seeking relationships at the moment.
- ADAlex DatePsych
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
More people seem to be risk-averse. More people are spending more time online than ever before. When you combine all of this together, what you end up with are people who are less resilient having, to them, traumatic experiences that can sometimes be pre-selected due to their, them being the common denominator between all of the abusive, manipulative, cheating girlfriends or boyfriends or whatever it is that they do. Then the large cohort of people online who aren't disproving any of these theories in the real world see stories on Reddit that quite rightly garner tons and tons of upvotes because they're shocking. This- here's the guy who left for milk and came back and his wife was having sex with the neighbor and the dog at the same time, and she left him and took all of his money and now he's got Crohn's disease and, you know, he's living on the street and gluten intolerance and a club foot. Like they- all of these things have happened to this one guy. Oh my God. This is why all women are bitches, right? Like, all women are like that. One of the problems or one of the things that I see online, especially when it comes to trying to encourage guys to get into a long-term committed relationship, especially one that encourages marriage, is that they would say, "Why would I get into a relationship? Like, a woman's just gonna take all of my money and do this thing in any case." It's like, okay, did that happen to you? Or did you read one story or a small number of stories online that told you that this is something that's super, super common? Because dude, even the heads of the Red Pill movement, like even the most red pilly of Red Pill guys get into fucking long-term marriage relationships. Like Neil Strauss, the guy that wrote The Game, is now this completely renewed... Uh, Tucker Max, the guy that invented the entire genre of frat ire, lives 30 miles away from me at a ranch in fucking Dripping Springs, surrounded by... He's made a, a Waldorf school for his kids, and him and his wife have got four, and he spends his days practicing shooting guns and corralling and stuff. Oh, yeah, that's, that's really the, the, the future that he had planned for himself at the age of 25, wasn't it? No, of course not. Like, obviously not. Even the people that were previously supposed to be the figureheads of these entire movements have transcended and included their experience to now become family men, and yet there is still a very, very common distaste, reticence, bitterness, uh, toxicity toward that long-term dating thing. Again, this is obviously not for either of us to say that some guys haven't got themselves into relationships with women who have destroyed their lives, who were the Machiavellian manipulative, that he was perfectly fine and she took him for all that he was worth. Like, yep-... yep, that happens and to those guys, I have the absolute utmost sympathy. Um, but the fact that those stories are so egregious online and garner so much, like, attention is for precisely the reason that they feel so outrageous, that they are less representative of most normal relationships. And, yeah, I- I- I don't really know what the solution is for this because for as long as people will take their cues about what the mating market is like from the internet and don't disprove it in the real world due to their concern and lack of resilience or just general fear for any one of the myriad of reasons that we said, both men and women, women are going to believe that every man out there is a potential rapist, and men out there are going to believe that every woman is a spinster that wants to take him for 50% of his wealth.
- ADAlex DatePsych
Exactly, yeah. And something you mentioned that's very important, many of these are very, very young men. You said, "Have you experienced a divorce?" These are- some of these men are 18, 19, 20 years old. You know, have they even experienced a breakup at that point? They do not need to be worrying about someone taking their house if they don't even have a job and they don't have a house and they're living in the basement and that sort of a thing. Baby steps first. Worrying about forming a relationship, becoming resilient to deal with breakups because most relationships will end, you know. Everyone who gets into relationships experiences a bunch of breakups, you know, that's something that happens to everyone. And worry about the divorce down the line. So you have, you know, men going their way, MGTOW. If you are like 45 years old (laughs) and you've been through two divorces and you're MGTOW, I totally understand that. Like, maybe you- you are done with dating and that's kind of reasonable. If you're 18 years old and you've only had one girlfriend or never had a girlfriend, how have you sworn off women already? That's not reasonable.
- 1:08:09 – 1:16:03
Do Men Really Want to Cheat?
- ADAlex DatePsych
- CWChris Williamson
How much do you think guys actually want to cheat or sleep around outside of a relationship if they were able to do it safely?
- ADAlex DatePsych
I- I suspect it's actually pretty high. Uh, part of the reason I say that is because infidelity actually seems pretty high. Something about, uh, perhaps half of men report cheating in the past. If that's something that they would continue to do ongoing, uh, deliberately to seek it out is kind of another question. They may be, uh, kind of, if someone is put in that situation and the temptation is there and they think they're not gonna get caught, probably it's actually pretty high. That certainly seems to be something that's- that's one of- actually one of the consistently replicated things in evolutionary psychology is that men are much, much more likely to cheat than women.
- CWChris Williamson
Didn't you say that infidelity is heritable?
- ADAlex DatePsych
Yes, yes, certainly. So people that have... And that's another thing about personality and behavior, we typically... A lot of the time we think about heritability as if it only applies to physical features, but herita- you know, eye color and something like that, heritability applies to behavior. In behavioral genetics, there's something called the 50/0 rule, which is kind of the broad observation that about half of personality is heritable, and sometimes when people say personality, I think they don't also understand that it also means behavior, the way the personality is expressed. So people that have had parents who have cheated, they're more likely to be victims of infidelity and more likely to cheat. The same with something like divorce. People who have parents who have divorced, more likely to divorce. And so there's a question about heritability there, like, oh, is this because they learned those behaviors from the environment or because, uh, they... it's something genetic? And certainly the outcome in either sense is the same. You know, someone with that background, if the likelihood is higher, if it's caused by genetics or the environment, is perhaps immaterial as far as that outcome. The degree of heritability is usually estimated by twin studies, right? So twins that are raised and you can see how much that correlates based on a monozygotic or dizygotic twin. So that's kind of how these heritability estimates come about, but certainly many, many behaviors, yeah, and infidelity among those and divorce as well.
- CWChris Williamson
What about, uh, the consistency of somebody who's cheated before to cheat again?
- ADAlex DatePsych
Ah, okay. So perhaps not as high as we would think, that it's not ne- that a lot of people have actually... Well, I say a lot. I... Let's- let's say... I read a paper recently, I actually made a video on this, I think it was about 30% of women that reported having cheated in the past, but a second time and it was much, much lower. It wa- it was something like 30% of those women. So, a lot of people might cheat once and actually never do it again. Certainly is- there's that aphorism, you know, once a cheater, always a cheater. And someone who has cheated in the past probably does have a higher likelihood of cheating in the future, but it's certainly not something that guarantees a history of infidelity. If someone has never cheated, of course, you know, that would be, uh, the lowest risk for future infidelity.
- CWChris Williamson
What about the heritability of facial attractiveness? We spoke about that earlier on, and we're already on ha- heritability here.
- ADAlex DatePsych
Ah. So, uh, I don't know about the heritability of facial attractiveness specifically. Certainly, uh, it would be very high because it's a- it's a physical feature, and physical features are typically things we think of as very, very heritable. Something like height, for example, has a heritability of- of 0.8, and I imagine a lot of physical features are like that. The environmental effects on your physical appearance, uh, I guess it depends on an individual level what you're exposed to, if someone doesn't ever take care of their face or something like that, you know, certainly that, uh, can lower facial attractiveness over time, but in a lot of sense, uh, your face is kind of what you're born with.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, it's interesting because the- the sexy son hypothesis, which I learned from Costello as well, was a- a- a very interesting, uh, justification that one of the reasons that a woman would find a man attractive, and this is- this ties into pre-selection, which I- I'm aware has kind of also been decapitated with the replication crisis, but if other women find a man attractive, it's likely that his genes will produce sons that future women will also find attractive. So the, whatever, like, um, grandparent optimizer gene expression thing going on here where you say, "Okay, well...... if I have sex with that man and we have some sons together, we'll have sexy sons, and those sons will be able to reproduce more effectively.
- ADAlex DatePsych
Yeah. Y- you know, that's certainly something that you would expect, that traits that are attractive over time will be propagated more and they will continue to appear more. And you can get kind of a runaway of those traits as well. A very good example of that would be something like the peacock and the peacock tail, where originally the bird did not have this giant, giant tail but it was something that facilitated that sexual selection and over time grew and now you have this, this very beautiful bird, huge tail, even if it's a detriment in other ways. So, as far as if it's something that people deliberately think about, probably not. Like, "Oh, I need to find someone attractive so I'll have attractive kids." Maybe. It might be a consideration, but it's probably more like, "I like this person. I'm attracted to them in the moment."
- CWChris Williamson
Isn't there a species of deer or something that grew antlers that were so big that the entire species went extinct?
- ADAlex DatePsych
(laughs) That certainly could be, uh, the case. I think that might even be called Fisherian runaway, the idea that a, a trait is atr- uh, attractive and selected for in, to an extent that it eventually becomes detrimental. The peacock tail is, is kind of like that. It's large enough where you could say, "Okay, this bird might not be able to escape predators as well." So there, there's a trade-off there in some sense when, when these traits become very, very attractive. And it's, even height in human beings is kind of like that. Taller people suffer more risks as far as health is concerned. So you might ask like, "Hey, why is height being selected for?" Well, it's attractive subjectively for one, but also the detriment is perhaps not so high that, uh, that it's like killing people before they're able to reproduce.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, the trade-off between these two things... I'm pretty sure it was a, a type of deer or something that grew antlers that were so large that it couldn't support its own head, and yet sexual selection was preferencing these so much that Fisherian runaway had just brrup, it had, i- i- away it goes. Um, and it got to the stage (laughs) where all... They were so slow and so, uh, lumbering that they were just eaten by predators. Uh, and you're good. It's game over, which I thought was pretty hilarious. I remember reading... The first ever time that I learned about Fisherian runaway must have been before I even started the podcast like six years ago, and I was reading this article about Snapchat filters. Do you remember when the girls used to use Snapchat filters and they would make their eyes a little bigger and they would put those little dots on their cheeks? And hilariously, they would also put a mask, used to be a mask with like a bee, kind of like how we used in COVID, um, which is also pretty funny that girls were using that previously as a... I don't know. It was like cute because y- you only get to see their eyes, so I guess if you've only done half of your face's makeup that day, you can, you can get away with looking all right. Um, but also that as soon as COVID comes around, I bet that that filter went completely through the floor because nobody wanted to be associated with being the sort of person that would choose to wear a mask, especially not a virtual one. But yeah, this Fisherian runaway thing, you know, the big eyes, the rosy cheeks, blah, blah, uh, suggested that you could get to the stage where, um, if guys had an unbounded desire for female butts and boobs, that you might have, you know, these, um, scoliosis, like, having to wear a back brace. Uh, women, the only way that they could support these massive breasts and this ass is if they do, uh, that's what men want, and this runaway would occur as well. Um, one other thing that we've spoken about privately and
- 1:16:03 – 1:23:42
Decline in Sexual Desire over Length of Relationship
- CWChris Williamson
I was fascinated with and I really wanna dig into is this decline in sexual desire by relationship length in men versus women. So, this is men first and women second and this is the dis- decline in sexual desire by relationship length. So under one year, 13% men to 21.5% women. One to five years, 15.3% men, 28.5% women. Five to 15 years, 14.9% men to 39.8% women. So it's actually gone down a little, a little bit for men. And then 15 plus years, 16.1% for men to 40% for women. So it seems like women kind of top out within that 15-year age range and that men have still got a little bit more to go. Why do you think that this is the case? We would have presumed, you know, from first principles that a man's desire for sexual variety would have led him to be more, um, uh, libidinous and, and look to stray from his ever-aging wife. Uh, why is it the case that women's sexual desire seems to decline more quickly and higher during a relationship?
Episode duration: 1:30:22
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