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

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

Oh, good. Oh, good.

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

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

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

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

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

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

How do you mean?

Gen- well, gender, right, is, uh, w- what we're doing is we're describing how some people are different from other people, right? In, in some ways it's like one of the easiest ones to latch onto in the mating domain, right? But it does function like other individual differences in that if men say something as a group that this appeals to them more than this other group, women, it requires some amount of individual predictive power, right, that the groups have to be telling us something different that's gonna then play out when we see what it is that they actually find appealing. So, it was really the gender differences that got me interested in this, uh, this, uh, accurate, uh, self-knowledge question in the first place.