Evolution's Secrets To Understanding Relationships - Dr Andrew Thomas

If you think about how ludicrous it is that there's a 2D image in front of you that you can put your hand on, that you can look around the side of a monitor and it's clearly not real, but it's enough to trick our ancestral mating systems into thinking sex is about to happen, enough to arouse us. So, of course, your psychology is gonna be lined up with that. Sex is available, I am now aroused, I want the sex. I don't want to entertain a long-term relationship with an extended courting process before I have it.

I absolutely love your writing, man. Your Psychology Today articles are fantastic. Congratulations.

Oh, brilliant. And am, am I right in thinking, um, I'm the first Welsh person you've had on your show? I've heard that. That was the rumor.

Oh, that would be a very interesting start. I don't know. Um, sometimes people are, like, secret Welsh, secret Welshies, you know?

Yes, yeah. I'll have to just... Let's just transition that to a ruggedly handsome Welsh person.

Sure. Abs- yeah, ab-

I'm sure that's, that's a first.

Complete win, as far as I'm concerned.

Yep, absolutely.

And also the first openly Welsh person.

(laughs)

We can definitely take that. You didn't use to identify as Welsh and now identify as something else. You're openly Welsh.

Yeah, uh, y- (laughs) I don't think the identity politics has hit, uh, Welsh identity yet.

(laughs)

Uh, give it, give it a little bit longer, but... Mm.

(laughs) It's com- it's coming for you soon. Hold on tight. Uh, so you just wrote this great article explaining five evolutionary theories that everyone should know to understand how relationships work.

Yeah.

Evolutionary mismatch. What's that?

So, evolutionary mi- mismatch is this idea that, um, our psychology evolved, um, you know, and has remained relatively stable over the last 100,000 years. So, it's this idea that society has moved quicker than our biology has been able to cope with it. So, for most modern problems, we're approaching them with a, a s- a Stone Age brain. Um, and yeah, it's something which in my, uh, my teaching at Swansea, I try to apply that quite a bit to, to mating 'cause a lot of stuff that we have in the, in the modern environment is just something that, um, it makes more sense when you sort of figure out that your brain is trying to cope with it (laughs) rather than being able to master it because it's such a novel, novel thing that it's not used to.

What would be an example of that?

So, I think a really good... The, the best example of that is just sheer choice overload, right? So, if you think about, uh, ancestral human populations, there's some debate over the number, but, um, you know, Dunbar's number is, like, 150 people. Um, nowadays, we have access to almost limited- limitless numbers of people. Um, it leads to a lot more superficial relationships. Um, when... And I, and I mean like friends and family, uh, but also when you go online onto dating websites, it looks like there's this unlimited pool of potential options. Um, and that leads to all sorts of crazy things like, um, people having to use sort of one characteristic to narrow down the playing field. So, dating, I, I think, has become a lot more univariate rather than multivariate. So, historically, you'd meet up with someone and you see the whole person, you take in their physical attractiveness, you also take in other things about them. Um, and nowadays, p- we don't even get to that point where we can make a holistic judgment because we're doing things like, "Oh, they're not six foot, so, uh, that, that's it. They're off the radar." Um, I always like to... It, it's really interesting, actually, so some of, some of the research that I've done with, um, uh, Peter Jonassen has actually shown how people then kind of compensate with that because we have, we're, we're gonna publish this stuff on height, but if you get the, the dating website data, it's really interesting and you plot up what guys' heights are, you get this really weird distribution where it's a normal distribution until you hit 5'10", 5'11" and six foot, in which case it drops on all of those, and then suddenly you get this big influx of everyone saying they're six foot. Um, and embarrassingly, I was one of those liars, right? So, I met wi- my wife on an online dating website. Now, I always tell people I'm six foot minus one. Um, so I put that I was six foot on this dating website and that got me past the bar, and now I'm happily married, and if I-