Evolution's Secrets To Understanding Relationships - Dr Andrew Thomas

Dr Andrew Thomas is a senior lecturer of psychology at Swansea University whose research focuses on sex differences and relationship preferences from an evolutionary perspective. Evolution explains a large portion of why we like the things we like. Who we're attracted to, why we fall into and out of love, how our mental state affects our mating strategies. Therefore, if you are a human who ever intends on being in a relationship, this might be useful. Expect to learn the 5 evolutionary theories which explain much of human mating, whether ChatGPT can correctly predict what traits men and women like most in each other, how many previous sexual partners people say they want their current partner to have had, how open men & women in the West are to polyamorous relationships, how sexual arousal can ruin a faithful relationship and much more... Sponsors: Get 20% discount & free shipping on your Lawnmower 4.0 at https://manscaped.com/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get over 37% discount on all products site-wide from MyProtein at https://bit.ly/proteinwisdom (use code: MODERNWISDOM) Get 83% discount & 3 months free from Surfshark VPN at https://surfshark.deals/MODERNWISDOM (use code MODERNWISDOM) Extra Stuff: Follow Andrew on Twitter - https://twitter.com/DrThomasAG Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #evolution #dating #psychology - 00:00 Intro 01:20 Evolutionary Mismatch 10:18 Evolving Towards Making Small Errors Instead of Big Ones 17:33 Are Men as Picky as Women? 21:55 Is Promiscuity Heritable? 27:32 Humans Engage in Multiple Types of Sexual Strategies 36:49 The Different Levels of Sexual Harassment 46:55 Is Sexlessness in Young Men Caused by Poor Social Skills? 52:56 Attitudes in the West to Having Multiple Sexual Partners 1:04:21 How Many Previous Sexual Partners is Too Much? 1:14:52 What ChatGPT Gets Wrong About Mate Preferences 1:34:31 Where to Find Dr Thomas - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  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 going to 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.

• 0:30Chris Williamson?

  I absolutely love your writing and your Psychology Today articles are fantastic. Congratulations.

• 0:36Speaker 00

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

• 0:43Chris Williamson?

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

• 0:51Speaker 00

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

• 0:56Chris Williamson?

  Sure, absolutely.

• 0:57Speaker 00

  I'm sure that's the first.

• 0:59Chris Williamson?

  Complete win, as far as I'm concerned, and also the first openly Welsh person. We can definitely take that. You didn't used to identify as Welsh and now identify as something else. You're openly Welsh.

• 1:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, I don't think the identity politics has hit Welsh identity yet.

• 1:15Chris Williamson?

  It's coming for you soon, hold on tight. So you just wrote this great article explaining five evolutionary theories that everyone should know to understand how relationships work.

• 1:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:27Chris Williamson?

  Evolutionary mismatch, what's that?

• 1:30Speaker 00

  So evolutionary mismatch is this idea that our psychology evolved, 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 Stone Age brain.

• 1:55Speaker 00

  And yeah, it's something which in my, my teaching at Swansea, I try to apply that quite a bit to mating, because a lot of stuff that we have in the, in the modern environment is just something that,

• 2:08Speaker 00

  it makes more sense when you sort of figure out that your brain is trying to cope with it. Rather than being able to master it because it's such a novel, novel thing that it's not used to.

• 2:19Chris Williamson?

  What would be an example of that?

• 2:21Speaker 00

  So I think a really good, the best example of that is just sheer choice overload, right? So if you think about ancestral human populations, there's some debate over the number, but you know, Dunbar's number is like 150 people. Nowadays, we have access to almost limitless numbers of people. It leads to a lot more superficial relationships when, and I mean like friends and family. But also when you go online onto dating websites, it looks like there's this unlimited pool of potential options. And that leads to all sorts of crazy things like people having to use sort of one characteristic to narrow down the playing field.

• 3:03Speaker 00

  So dating, I think, has become a lot more univariate rather than multivariate. So historically, you'd meet up with someone, you see the whole person, you're taking their physical attractiveness. You're also taking other things about them. And nowadays, 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 that's it, they're off the radar. I always like to, it's really interesting, actually, some of the research that I've done with Peter Jonasson has actually shown how people then kind of compensate with that because we have, we're going to publish this stuff on height, but if you get the dating website data, it's really interesting. And you plot out what guys' heights are, you get this really weird distribution where it's a normal distribution

• 3:48Speaker 00

  until you hit five, 10, five, 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. And embarrassingly, I was one of those liars, right? So I met my wife on an online dating website. Now, I always tell people I'm six foot minus one. 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.

• 4:14Chris Williamson?

  Would your, would your partner have not seen you had you have put five 11?

• 4:18Speaker 00

  No.

• 4:19Chris Williamson?

  No way.

• 4:21Speaker 00

  Absolutely not, absolutely.

• 4:22Chris Williamson?

  You're a victory story. You're a victory story of this.

• 4:25Speaker 00

  So there we go. You know, so it's it's something that that people do. But it just kind of proves that that people have, and especially women. So Steve and I ran this study once that was a failed study. So we were go, we were using plenty of fish. And we, I know we're still talking about evolutionary mismatch. It doesn't feel like it, but we are. And we set up some fake profiles on plenty of fish with the idea that we were going to manipulate status and job role and see who got attention and who didn't. And we had to call off the experiment after a week because we balanced the profiles nicely. But the female profile, or the couple of female profiles got like a thousand messages in two days of guys going, hey, hey, hey, hey.

• 5:08Speaker 00

  Whereas the guys didn't get any messages at all. So we had no variance in the guys to be able to carry on the study with. And this was back in like, you know, probably 2009, 2010. And so, you know, women are getting inundated with with messages off of guys, quite superficial ones, playing, playing the sort of short term game. And so naturally, that means a narrowing down, a quick narrowing down of people using very superficial criteria. Now, from a mismatched match perspective, that's crazy, right? Because ancestrally, your options would be like two or three people in your village and maybe guys from neighboring villages. So the disparity is is massive.

• 5:52Chris Williamson?

  What people are doing is creating sometimes arbitrary, at least to their forebrain, it seems to make sense, rules that can help them to narrow down the degrees of choice that they have. If you only date within one particular race, if you only date within one particular education.

• 6:13Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 6:14Chris Williamson?

  If you date within one particular type of profession. Oh, I I just, I need to have a doctor. I think I saw the other day that female doctors, one in five female doctors also date another doctor or surgeon. Why? Why? Yeah, I mean, you've got a lot to bond over. But you would have presumed so all of these things could just be a. Cope for the evolutionary mismatch of having a significantly broader choice option. The same way as people elect to do intermittent fasting as a way to deal with the evolutionary mismatch of a prevalence of salty, sweet and sugary foods.

• 6:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, so there's exactly, so there's the narrowing down element. There's also like the archaic preferences because the preferences are functional, right? So having, having a partner who has some status and has some resources, that's, that's not a,

• 7:04Speaker 00

  you know, that, that's a functional thing. Where the mismatch comes in is that nowadays you don't necessarily need that. You know, your welfare and your, your, your flourishing doesn't depend for a lot of people, especially in Western societies with good social welfare programs. It doesn't, it doesn't depend on another person as much as it used to. But you can't just turn the preferences off. In the same way as you can't just turn jealousy off just because everyone's using contraception. You know, it's no longer, jealousy, some could argue is no longer functional now that we have contraception. But you can't just turn it off. But the narrowing thing, I mean, I think women get a bit of a hard time sometimes for the, for the, for the narrowing thing.

• 7:46Speaker 00

  Whereas for me, it's kind of just like a cognitive heuristic that people use whenever they've, they've got too much decision making to do. So, or too many decisions to make, you know, this is why people gravitate towards like ratings on Amazon to cut down decision making.

• 8:03Speaker 00

  Hell, you know, you go to a supermarket these days, go to a supermarket where you want to buy some baked beans. You go to the baked bean aisle where there's then 25 different varieties and you pause and you're like, oh, you know, what's the prices by the size? This is why I like shopping in Lidl's and Aldi. You want the baked beans they got there or you don't? It's a more simplified situation, you know? So we've got all of these different sort of very, very modern factors influencing our mating decisions, which is why my advice on the, on the blog is, is to maybe look to the past a little bit.

• 8:36Chris Williamson?

  What do you mean?

• 8:37Speaker 00

  So when I say look to the past, I mean, how were people starting relationships in the past? I mean, when you get up the graph showing how people meet one another, I show this to my students all the time. You know, it's the death of everything apart from, you know, meeting in clubs and meeting online. Meeting online is shot up. It's now something silly like sixty, seventy percent of people who get married are meeting online. The stuff that's fallen off, meeting through family, meeting through close friends, meeting through social groups, meeting through work. All of these things are dropping off and online's going up. Um, now the problem is all of those things that are dropping down involve other people that know you in some way.

• 9:19Speaker 00

  And so, you know, you're not meeting people with this anonymity. They can ghost, they can go away. If they go away, if they do something nasty to you, there's no social consequence. If your social lives aren't entwined in some way. Um, and sometimes the people who are around us, they know us best. Cause sometimes we think we know what we want when we don't know what we want. Or sometimes we think we know what's good for us when we don't know what's good for us. So, you know, sometimes I'm there like, you know, if you're really getting stuck, why don't you ask your friends to set you up with someone? Why don't you ask your parents what they think? Um, yeah, so that's kind of just, I'm not saying it's perfect. Um, but it could be something to try.

• 10:00Chris Williamson?

  It's certainly a untapped uh pool. Given that most people now are meeting their partners online. What that means is that any strategy which isn't meeting your partner online has a competitive advantage as a byproduct of that. Okay, next one, error management. What's that?

• 10:19Speaker 00

  So error management is this idea that for every choice you make, um, you can err in one of two ways. So you can either make a false positive or you can make a false negative. So a false positive is, you know, I see a small black thing in the corner of my eye. And I jump thinking it's a spider, but it's not a spider, right? So I've made that error. The other side of the the false negative is there's a spider there. I don't notice it, right? And let's just assume it's a nasty spider that could do me harm, not that we get many of those in the UK. So there's two different types of error for for decisions like that, but they come with different costs. So the cost of of seeing the what I think is a spider reacting a little bit and then realising I'm okay.

• 11:03Speaker 00

  What's that cost me? A little bit of cortisol and and, you know, sympathetic nervous system activation for a couple of seconds. Not much, right? But if I don't see the spider, and it's a poisonous one and it's creeping up, then the consequences could be could be more dire. So error management theory is this this idea that we evolve towards making the errors, which are least costly for us. So the reason why you get a lot of people who are quite reactive to such things is it's better to react to for for a little cost for that error than not react and have a big associated cost.

• 11:39Chris Williamson?

  How does that relate to dating?

• 11:41Speaker 00

  Probably the easiest one to relate it to is the sexual overperception bias. So what you actually find in guys is that they are more likely to perceive sexual interest from women when it's not there. So the cashier at the supermarket smiles and instead of them being friendly, it's, oh, she's into me. Yeah. And if you stop and think about like what the error is there, so the error is if I'm completely oblivious to that, then that's a missed sexual opportunity potentially. Yeah. Obviously, you've got to go and take some dates first and et cetera, et cetera. But if she's genuinely interested, you don't want to miss out on that opportunity because that's an opportunity to potentially reproduce.

• 12:24Speaker 00

  Whereas if you see it when it's not there and make an advance, and this is where it gets a little bit, you know, a little bit tough. From from a selfish perspective, the costs are quite limited, right? So I get a little bit of rejection. Yeah. So from an evolutionary perspective, that's not the end of the world. That's not to say, of course, there are knock on effects on the other person. Because, you know, if you harass someone, that's a bad thing. But it's this idea that, you know, so that the men may have evolved in the direction of overperceiving sexual interest just in case.

• 13:01Chris Williamson?

  How does female underperception bias tie in with error management theory?

• 13:06Speaker 00

  So that's, I mean, there's this classic distinction, isn't there, between men putting a greater emphasis on physical attractiveness and sexual access and women putting a greater emphasis on resources and status. And so the female equivalent is, the female equivalent actually is commitment, isn't it? It's commitment skeptic, skeptical commitment bias, I think, is the name. So it's when you're in, when you're courting someone, what men don't want to miss out on is the sexual access, what women don't want to miss out on is the commitment, according to the skeptical commitment bias. So women are more likely to make errors in

• 13:47Speaker 00

  judging commitment from men to be lower than it actually is. Because if women say, hey, I'm with this guy, I think he's committed to me and he isn't, big issue. Whereas if I'm with this guy and he is committed to me, but I'm a little bit skeptical about it, okay, I could make an error and hurt his feelings a little bit, maybe he doubles down and proves himself to me. But that error is less costly to me than the other way around.

• 14:16Chris Williamson?

  So this would be the woman playing hard to get, making a man wait longer before she texts back, perhaps committing to the man less quickly?

• 14:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, in the, in the sort of courting, I'm using courting as if, as if we're in Victorian. I like courting. Let's bring that, let's bring that back. So I've been thinking about Victorian mating this week for some strange reason. Yeah. So if we, if it's in that sort of setup of a relationship stage, yeah, but you also get the skeptical commitment bias within relationships as well. Because then it's almost like, it's even more damaging if your partner isn't committed to you and goes off and cheats and takes that commitment away. So.

• 15:02Chris Williamson?

  Parental investment.

• 15:04Speaker 00

  Oh, that's the next one. So parental investment is like the granddaddy of all theories, right? So for me, it's it's one of the key underpinning theories of my thesis. It's this

• 15:17Speaker 00

  theory that crosses species in general. So it's not just specific to humans. So it's the idea that the sex that invests the most is the one that's in demand. So it kind of sets up these market forces. And this really started with the Bateman principle. So that's actually looking at sex cells. So if you compare sex cells, you know, guys generate millions and millions and millions of sperm continuously on the hour, every hour, whereas women are born with all of the egg cells that they'll ever have, and they're larger, and they're fewer in number. So even at the sex cell level, it sets up this imbalance where guys are providing something that's quick and cheap, whereas women are providing something that's precious. And I'm saying men and women

• 15:58Speaker 00

  there, but of course mammals in general follow that pattern as well, which is why we tend to find sex differences in mammals and other species that are in kind of predictable directions with men, males doing the competing and females doing the choosing. Now, where humans are different, of course, is that you have something called obligatory parental investment. So there's the the stuff that you have to invest, which for most females isn't just the egg, it's the gestation, it's the weaning, you know, there's there's heavy obligatory investment, whereas males

• 16:36Speaker 00

  can generally have have sex and leave. So in most species, that's an option, unless you're a praying mantis or a spider or something. The difference, however, is that in humans,

• 16:52Speaker 00

  obligatory parental investment isn't just it. We are typical levels of parental investment are much higher from men. So men do, compared to other species, invest a lot in their offspring. And that's why the sex differences in humans are actually quite modest compared to other species. Like, if you go to a zoo and you look at gorillas and you, or you look at elephant seals, and you look at the marked massive degrees in physiology between males and females. You look at humans, it's, it's not as, as sharp. So even though there are sex differences there, because males invest so heavily in offspring, it actually redresses the balance a little bit, making our sex differences more moderate in size.

• 17:32Chris Williamson?

  Hmm, and parental investment presumably as well is why women are more choosy with how many people they have sex with, who they have sex with, the amount of work that their partner has to go through before they will do that.

• 17:45Speaker 00

  I think, and well, that's, that's a whole other story, I think, because I've, I've heard, I've heard that point be made before. But what's, what's missing with that is this sexual strategy, sexual strategies overlay of understanding the distinction between short term and long term. Because, you know, wi- women will really, really, really

• 18:07Speaker 00

  put the, uh, a- apply the standards to a short term mating partner, because what are they getting out of the arrangement? They're, they're getting the sex and potentially falling pregnant for someone who may not hang around. When it comes to long term mating, though, men are as choosy as women, right? So it's not the case that we go on dates where, uh, men get all dressed up in three piece suits and women go in their dressing gowns or whatever they feel comfortable in, right? So, so women make an effort as well as guys, and that's because they're two investors at the table, two potential investors.

• 18:43Speaker 00

  So, it, yeah, you've got to have that nuance about it as well. Within a long term setting, yeah, maybe there's a little bit more pickiness on women, but, but guys are picky, picky as well. If they're going to invest, you know, twenty, thirty years, bring up children with a person, then they want to know they're getting a good deal as well, right?

• 19:02Chris Williamson?

  When you talk about sexual strategies, are those the primary ones, short term mating, long term mating?

• 19:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, pretty much. So there's been, there has been some work trying to see whether there's a difference between your long term committed cohabiting marriage, long term strategy.

• 19:21Speaker 00

  So that's what well established your short term strategy, your one night stand, your friends with benefits, your promiscuity. There have been some studies that have tried to look at this middle ground. But every time they do it, it just seems to fall into into short term strategies. So it's like, oh, you've got a guy, a guy that you're with for now, but you never see it going anywhere in the in the future. So you you can see yourself being with them for the next three months, but not the next three years. Really, it it falls back into short term strategy. Um, the vast majority of the time. So I say, yes, I say you really have these these two constructs. You're either playing the short term game or the long term. They interact sometimes. So a lot of people are using a short term strategy with the idea that

• 20:03Speaker 00

  um, they want to transition that into a a a long term thing. Uh, so there's some uh, some overlap there. But broadly speaking, I I I see those those two strategies.

• 20:14Chris Williamson?

  That is the mate switching hypothesis, or at least it would be part of a female's plan toward mate switching. That it seems like a good portion of infidelity from women is done as a monkey branching strategy to move from one relationship to the next. This was moving from dual mating hypothesis to mate switching hypothesis.

• 20:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think you were talking about Alex, to Alex about that a couple of times ago. So I I I had a thought about that earlier on today. I can't remember what it was. Yeah, I I mean, traditionally,

• 20:54Speaker 00

  even outside of relationships, that's a tactic as well, right? So nowadays, it's much more common, have a short term relationship with someone first. And then if I really like them, transition that into a long term relationship. The thing about mate switching as well is that guys do it too. I think the difference, however, is when you consider, and this is one of the biggest psychological sex differences out there, which is is the the desire for casual sex, socio sexuality. So socio sexual desire has an effect size of point eight, something like that, which is quite large by psychological terms. So the difference is that when men are having, um, say, an affair. It may well be just to have sexual access and with no intention of moving past

• 21:38Speaker 00

  that. But women having lower socio-sexuality, it's more likely that if they cheat, it's probably to pursue long-term interests. It's not to say that men don't do it, but that's where I think that particular sort of observation has come from.

• 21:53Chris Williamson?

  Alex tweeted that promiscuity seems to be a little bit heritable. Does that suggest that socio-sexuality is also heritable?

• 22:03Speaker 00

  I haven't done a study on it myself, but I'm pretty sure it is. I'm pretty sure I read it. I mean, the basic starting point for heritability is point five anyway. So if you just guess point five for anything, you'll be right the vast majority of the time. But I'm pretty sure the socio-sexuality is heritable.

• 22:18Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's interesting. So the implication there would be if you are looking for a particularly committed partner, look at whether his father has got five wives continuously and...

• 22:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a very uncomfortable thing for some people, but you know, it always comes down to that thing. If you want to have intelligent kids, have sex with an intelligent person.

• 22:41Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, dude. I mean, Robert Plowman's been on the show and in Blueprint, he says, genetics isn't everything, but it's more than everything else put together. Like, the most important thing that you want to do if you want to have a successful, happy, flourishing child is pick the person that you have them with very carefully.

• 22:59Speaker 00

  Yeah. And the other one, I mean, that's the one part of it. And then the other part is, is the experiences they have outside of the family home. I mean, if you take juvenile misconduct, for example, and look at the sort of ace models behind that, it's like 50% heritable. And then it's like 35% influence outside of the home. In fact, I think it's like 40%. And it's a tiny slither in the home, which I always think is tragic because there's enough pressure on young mums these days of, oh, if you haven't bought the right toy, then your kid isn't going to develop the ability to see colour and know what crackling textures are. It's like, no, feed the kids, love the kids, they'll grow up fine. But get them good friends.

• 23:41Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. I mean, that's the, I think the, this is another Rob Henderson thing, that one of the best predictors of future wealth is not the wealth of your parents, but it's the average wealth of the postcode that you grow up in.

• 23:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. So you almost have this, it's almost kind of like a weird lily pad effect.

• 24:00Chris Williamson?

  It's like surrogacy, right?

• 24:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 24:02Chris Williamson?

  The next door neighbor's father that is a really cool musician, but your dad's lame. He's a rocket scientist, but he's sort of lame because he's the guy that tells me that I've got to go to bed at night. But John next door, John's dad, he's really cool because he plays the guitar and I want to learn to play the guitar. And dude, I think that there's a lot, I see it in my own life. I see the influences of the people that were around me, even into adulthood, man, like, you know, being a club promoter for so long and, and spending time partying and being around people and learning, you know, amazing insights around human nature, around networking, business launching, advertising, marketing, all of this stuff. But the social values that I had, the hierarchy of things that I prioritized were completely skewed to how they are now.

• 24:47Chris Williamson?

  And now I'm spending, like, I'm on the phone to David Buss for 90 minutes this morning, talking about stuff. And he's like telling me about, you know, his dog, his dog needs to come over because it needs to be petted. Like, I'm evidently going to have like a different value stack now. And you wonder, I always wondered about this, you know, at what point do, do our sort of values get locked in? And I'm kind of waiting, they certainly seem to be less fluid. They're less fluid than they were when I was 10 or 15 presumably. But the influence of the people around you is always going to be there. And I, I do think that that's something that I wish was in more parenting books.

• 25:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 25:23Chris Williamson?

  Behavioral genetics should be in more parenting books, although if you're, if you're reading a parenting book, reading about behavioral genetics, it's probably a little bit late. But also, what is the, you know, go to every, you want your kid to start boxing because you don't even to get beat up at school? Okay, go to every different boxing club and look at every kid that's in there.

• 25:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. It's like, when I go to a restaurant and I look at the wine list, I do that, that, that usual thing. If I don't pick the cheapest, I pick the second cheapest, right? I'm, I'm, I'm the sucker that they, they put the price up on the second cheapest bottle. But that's, that's what you want for any trait in your life, right? So you want to be surrounded by friends who are part of a wine list and you want to be second from the bottom. So you want a lot of your friends, if you want to be rich, you want a lot of your friends to be richer than you. If you wanna, you know, have, uh, make connections, you wanna surround yourself with people who are connected. Because you will learn from them and you will grow with them as long as you're liked being I. I think that's one thing that should go in parent parenting books that is it's very non PC.

• 26:25Speaker 00

  We don't have enough conversations about how it's important to be liked, not loved.

• 26:30Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 26:30Speaker 00

  But just liked, just tolerated, just like people, people are quite happy to be around you. Um, but I think the more you, the, the people you surround yourself with, absolutely. So it's so important, but it's not just a childhood thing.

• 26:42Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 26:42Speaker 00

  Through your whole life.

• 26:43Chris Williamson?

  That's one of Peterson's rules is, uh, don't allow your children to do anything that makes you hate them.

• 26:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 26:49Chris Williamson?

  And you want the child to walk into the room and for the parents in there to give them a big hug and pick them up and ask them how everything's been going in school. You don't want, because the kids will pick up on it if they're like, oh, God, Andrew's coming around again. I hope he doesn't bring that Power Ranger and, you know, draw on the walls.

• 27:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 27:08Chris Williamson?

  Me and you both.

• 27:09Speaker 00

  I was that guy.

• 27:10Chris Williamson?

  I was a very unlikable child, so we're.

• 27:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, no. And when I, when I read that in, uh, in Jordan's book, that, that was one of the, the slices of stuff that Jordan says that makes perfect sense to me before then talking about chaos and then I switch off a little bit.

• 27:25Chris Williamson?

  Got you.

• 27:26Speaker 00

  But that, that's like everyone, right? Everyone's a, no one's black and white. Everyone's a weird mixture of gray.

• 27:32Chris Williamson?

  Strategic pluralism.

• 27:34Speaker 00

  Yes, strategic plural. That's the last of the five, I think. So this is, um, so sexual strategies is about having long-term and short-term strategies, distinct, we call sets of psychological mechanisms. Strategic pluralism for me is how you navigate switching between those strategies. You know, some people are born wanting a husband or a wife and they'll do that. They'll have. A high school sweetheart who becomes the only person they'll ever sleep with and they'll have a million kids with them and and die in a rocking chair, age eighty, and good for them. So they're like hardcore long term. And then you have some people who'll never settle down because they can't think of anything worse than they just want to have fun and

• 28:18Speaker 00

  have as much sex as possible. I know plenty of those people as well. But not everyone has that sort of pure strategy lens. And this isn't something, by the way, that's just unique to humans. So a lot of animals, from squirrels to bears to all sorts of weird and wonderful things. Like, I think fifty percent of my my PhD thesis was animal studies on on strategies. Most people will flick. Most people will have a mixed strategy. I will apply short term and I'll apply long term. So strategic pluralism is about, well, when do you switch and why? So for example, if you are in a situation or an environment

• 28:57Speaker 00

  which is mildly dangerous, then you're probably going to move towards a long term mating because it's a safer environment to bring up a child having the support of another person. If you're in a really, really safe environment, one with a lot of social support, maybe good social welfare, then actually having that second partner, or having that other partner to bring up a child with, doesn't add benefits. And so then short term relationships are on the cards. What's super interesting about that, by the way, though, is that's like a U shaped curve. So you actually get some situations which are so dangerous that it's like, all bets are off. There's no point in having parental care because it's not

• 29:39Speaker 00

  going to make a difference. So actually, some of the most sort of terrible situations you can find people in, people just sort of go into end of the world, promiscuous mating mode.

• 29:52Chris Williamson?

  Wow, that's so interesting. Yeah, I um, was it, I think it was Armageddon, where there's that famous scene where where the the girl says, I don't want to die a virgin, and they like, cut to the dude that she's saying it to's face, and he's like, yes.

• 30:10Chris Williamson?

  Well, I mean, everyone's gonna die unless Bruce Willis can fix it. But yeah, it's, I mean, that stuff, I find that stuff almost, almost endlessly fascinating to think about how different mating strategies can be, can adjust to the local ecology. I remember the first time that I learned about the sex ratio hypothesis, and it made me think about humans like plants. You know, you put a plant in the corner of the room, and there's a bit of light in the top corner, and the plant responds to the local environment. Its ecology determines the way that it's going to behave. And, you know, sex ratio is just literally

• 30:52Chris Williamson?

  endlessly interesting. And I imagine that strategic pluralism and sex ratio kind of aren't exactly a million miles apart from each other.

• 31:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, so that would be an example of a cue. And we know that sex ratio cues, I think Arnaki did some, some work on this, sex ratio cues can temporarily change short term mating inclination. What's super interesting about it actually is that when you get down to smaller species like arthropods and stuff that are doing different mating strategies, because they have short generations, you can actually run the maths on what happens based on the strategies they're following. And you actually find that the different sexual strategies kind of balance out in terms of fitness in the long run. So the ones that are employing sort of more short term strategies versus long term strategies, you know, 10, 20 generations down the line, they're both representing an equal proportion

• 31:45Speaker 00

  of the gene pool. So they kind of have a way of balancing out, which is why we keep both of them in there.

• 31:52Chris Williamson?

  So they can both be successful. It's not like there's a single optimizing function here.

• 31:57Speaker 00

  No. I mean, some, some of it is context dependent, of course, but.

• 32:00Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Didn't you recently do a study that mediated short term mating desire amongst men based on their arousal?

• 32:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. So I yeah, so I did that with Wiseman recently, or Wiseman. That was really, really cool because it was one of those things where the effect was so reliable that and you just couldn't explain it away with trait variables. So it was like, yes, if you get guys horny, they then say, oh, I have a greater interest in short term mating. And that's one of those studies where like people reply to it and say, oh yeah, of course. Well, you've just done a study showing that water's wet. And I'm like, well, hang on a second. Okay. So yeah, it makes sense to you. But if you had someone who was very inclined towards long term mating. So say we had our Mr. High School Sweetheart thing.

• 32:55Speaker 00

  Wouldn't you expect him, if he was horny, to just think of his wife? And want sex and pursue sex with his wife? You know, if we're suspending what we know of from sort of folk psychology for a second, like that's a plausible. That's a plausible hypothesis, but that's not what happens, even he. So if even when you control for socio sexuality, when you control for dark triad. Sexual arousal leads to increase in short term mating interest. And I think that's really, really cool. It's cool for lots of different reasons. You can go talk about, you know, how that factors into harassment and all sorts. But just from a

• 33:35Speaker 00

  just from a having control of your own mating destiny perspective, like you're going to make different mating decisions based on whether you're horny or not. That's something you should know.

• 33:45Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 33:47Chris Williamson?

  What was, what was, I can't remember what it's something that rhymes. It's like ejacuate before you evaluate or something like that. That's just like a little piece of advice to guys before they perhaps consider going in. You know, they're in a long term relationship with a committed partner and one evening, maybe they bumped into some girl and he goes home and she finds him on Instagram and then messages him and stuff. And it's like, oh, should I, should I go around and go, well, you might just be horny. You might, you might be able to fix this a lot more easily than something that's a bit more of a permanent decision. But yeah, I mean, the, the insight of the reverse, what, what, what does it suggest to you then? That horniness increases short term mating. What does that say?

• 34:31Speaker 00

  In terms of what? Why would that be the case? Why would that be the case? Um, actually, I haven't really stepped back and thought about it from an adoption perspective. I've been thinking more about, see, the thing is, I've got this whole other arm of my research about sexual harassment that I'm doing at the moment, you see. And socio-sexuality turns out to be like a big, big predictor of sexual harassment behaviour. So I've kind of approached this from, from that perspective of if it's activating short-term mating, what implications might it have, uh, have for that? But I think it's a case of, it, oh, right, okay. Yeah, well, it comes, it comes down to mismatch. You can see the cogs actually turning in my head. Bro science it, Andrew.

• 35:16Speaker 00

  We're outside of the academia now, yeah. Why not? I should have brought a whiskey with me. Um, the thing is, because it's kind of like the voyeurism thing that I've done as well, right? Because I've done some work on voyeurism, because again, with socio-sexuality, that tends to predict voyeuristic tendencies, tends to be higher in men. Why? Well, generally speaking, if you're seeing something that's getting you sexually aroused, that's historically and ancestrally a pretty good indicator that some sex is to be had. You know, so there is no equivalent in the Stone Age, apart from perhaps a cave painting on a wall, of a pornographic video.

• 36:01Speaker 00

  I mean, I always, you know, I said this to the students the other day, it's like, it's, 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 that there, it's a giant sex cue, sex is about to happen, enough to arouse us. You know? So of course your psychology is going to 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.

• 36:48Chris Williamson?

  What, how are you tying this into sexual harassment? Do you think, should we have a, should we extend a particular amount of sympathy to men who have got highly heritable, they didn't choose it, socio-sexuality? And these are people whose over-perception bias is just running rampant?

• 37:12Speaker 00

  So, there's a couple of different flavours of sexual harassment, let's call it, right? So there are some guys out there who are just flat-out predators. I've met them, I've seen them in nightclubs, I've kicked them out of nightclubs because they go and they find the drunk woman and they're stone-cold sober and they hunt and they walk around and they pretend to dance with their friend and they try to isolate. Like, there are some proper predators out there. And that is one flavour of harassment and the really, really serious, serious stuff. You then also have harassment that, in my view, is born from misunderstanding.

• 37:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, so not guys going out of their way to cause harm and to cause pain. And one of the fundamental misunderstandings is that people apply what they want to the mind of the other person. So humans are really, really good at theory of mind. It's like one of the human superpowers that we really take for granted, being able to guess and put what other people think, put our mind in theirs, human superpower. But it has its limitations. And one of its limitations and one of the reasons that socio-sexuality is one of the biggest predictors of harassment is because if someone is playing the short-term mating game, they make an assumption that the other person is as well.

• 38:41Speaker 00

  So if you're playing a short, and this isn't just men, by the way, this is, this is women too. So women who have high socio-sexuality are going to assume, if they're heterosexual, that men too have high socio-sexuality. Of course, the statistics will show that there'll be more right in that guess than the other way around. And so if you're playing short-term strategy, short-term relationships are about sex. That is the main part of it. It's not like a long-term relationship. You strip away the courting process, you strip away the commitment, the getting to know a person. It's about having sex and it's about having sex as quickly as possible. And so those with high socio-sexuality, they're more likely

• 39:23Speaker 00

  to initiate physical contact, they're more likely to lead the conversation down a sexual route more quickly, and make no bones about it, some people are doing that because they know it'll make someone uncomfortable, but they're just playing the numbers game. But others are doing it because they genuinely just think the other person wants that and are causing clumsily causing harm, distress and upset.

• 39:48Chris Williamson?

  Are you familiar with this new performative, like, resistance to sex study that's just come out? So this was, I mean, William sent this to me, and this is the sort of thing where I, I talk about everything on my newsletter, right? Anything. I'm like, any study that's just come out, I'm ready to go. This is one that as of yet is a little bit too spicy. So I'll read you the abstract.

• 40:13Speaker 00

  Okay, okay.

• 40:13Chris Williamson?

  "We investigated whether women ever engage in token resistance to sex, saying no but meaning yes, and if they do, what their reasons are for doing so. A questionnaire administered to 610 undergraduate women asked whether they had ever engaged in token resistance, and if so, asked them to rate the importance of 26 possible reasons. We found that 39.3% of the women had engaged in token resistance on at least once. Their reasons fell into three categories: practical, inhibition-related, and manipulative reasons. Women's gender roles, attitudes, erotophobia, erotophilia, and other attitudes and beliefs varied as a function of their experience with token resistance, their sexual experience. We argue that, given today's sexual double standards, token resistance may be irrational behaviour. It could, however,

• 40:56Chris Williamson?

  have negative consequences, including discouraging honest communication, perpetuating restrictive gender stereotypes, and, if men learn to disregard women's refusals, increasing the incidence of rape."

• 41:08Speaker 00

  Okay, so now I know why our mutual Irish friend kept that from me, because he was probably trying to not hurt my feelings. Um, because my lab has done something similar and we haven't written it up yet. And actually, we found a similar thing with that forty percent number. Um, only we didn't go for the token sexual resistance route. We just played, went for the playing hard to get route. So, to what extent have people played hard to get? To what extent did they think other people play hard to get? Because that's part of it as well. Um, it does have a different flavour to it than sexual resistance, but the one thing um that we've picked up on is because we've also done some qualitative focus groups on it.

• 41:52Speaker 00

  It's something that doesn't happen at the start of a relationship. So it doesn't happen at that time zero. You're meeting someone for the first time, asking them out on the date. It happens a little while in that quarreting process, when you've been on a couple of dates and you're sort of like maybe trying to communicate that your big value is higher than it is, or you're starting to play games with someone that you're genuinely interested in. At that stage, you actually get a large proportion of, so the proportion of women saying that they've ever done that as a tactic and guys, because there's not really a sex difference there, is like seventy, eighty percent.

• 42:29Speaker 00

  And actually, um, if you ask women, uh, you know, if they met someone that they, you know, for the first time that they really liked, uh, what are the chances that they would use playing hard to get as a bit of a tactic? You know, you get like forty percent or something like that. But what's really, really interesting is that women overest, uh, sorry, women overestimate how often other women play that tactic. Um, and men actually underestimate how often women play that tactic, when I thought it was going to be the other way around.

• 43:03Chris Williamson?

  Me too, yeah.

• 43:04Speaker 00

  Um, but I guess the issue with it is because I think it is a natural part of flirting, playing, playing hard to get, feigning disinterest from both camps, from both males and females. But I think that if you're someone who is looking for a short-term relationship, so you're going to be more sex-focused anyway, and you think that you've noticed that women play hard to get sometimes, so obviously I'm talking about men here for a second. And you think that they're inclined to do it within the first thirty seconds of meeting them, that's the recipe for disaster.

• 43:43Chris Williamson?

  Because if they haven't actually objected within the first thirty seconds, your presumption is that any

• 43:51Speaker 00

  Maybe they are.

• 43:52Chris Williamson?

  It's performative as opposed to genuine reticence.

• 43:56Speaker 00

  Yeah. And so my lab's doing quite a bit at the moment with this sort of predictors of luck pushing to what extent, you know, you've asked someone once, they've already said no. Um, you know, the next day you see them again, if you were to ask them a second time, what do you think your chances are of that being successful? So we're doing some, some work on, on that at the moment. So that luck pushing that maybe I'll try again element. Cause when you do the, the male focus groups, there really is that, that, that thing of what if it doesn't harm, you may as well try again, cause you never know. So there's obviously some stuff to do there with educating around harm as well.

• 44:37Chris Williamson?

  Absolutely. I mean, all of this is mediated by being charming is the closest approximate word that I can find for it. And, and delivering whatever it is that you do, whether it's the cashier that smiles at you as she packs your bags, or whether it's the workmate that said no yesterday or whatever. I do think that this is the subject of John Berger's book, Make the First Move, which is really, really great and touches on sex ratios from a very sort of pro female perspective, where he says that, you know, for almost all of human history, women were told that the way to attract a guy was to treat him like you don't like him. Why men love bitches and, you know, fame, disinterest and all this

• 45:16Chris Williamson?

  sort of stuff. But in a post me too world, men are hypersensitized to being accused of being a creep or being overbearing. They absolutely do not want to be any of the, the issues. I think it's some huge majority of men would never consider approaching a woman in a bar, an acceptable thing to do for fear of coming across as creepy, even though eighty six percent of women still want a man to make the first move. And yet there's still a high proportion of women who have been made to feel creepy by guys when they've approached them. So you have all of these kind of intersecting challenges that you need to weave your way through.

• 45:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. And if you look at some of the work that Leif Kinnaird's done, or Apostolo's done, you know, one of the things that that people who are perpetually single report is that they're useless at flirting. Yeah, so they, i- i- if you take a flirting index and ask people, you know, how to rate themselves on it, they tend to do really because flirting is a skill and it's it's a skill that you have to learn. You have to learn how to read body language, how to read behind what people are saying, to be sensitive to the fact that actually we're not flirting and I need to go away. But unfortunately, it is a skill. It's something that you're not born with, and it's something that you certainly don't want your parents to teach you.

• 46:42Speaker 00

  And you have to kind of develop that. So I think we're now reaching the point where it's almost not okay to learn that skill. And that's a bit problematic, I think.

• 46:54Chris Williamson?

  I wonder whether part of the challenges that young guys under the age of thirty are struggling with, that's causing sexlessness, is downstream from straight up poor social skills to the point where their ability to flirt has just been tuned down, that it's not to do with, yep, the the increasing female achievement and the hypergamy and the men not being able to be up and across and the da da da da da. But also, maybe this generation of men are just worse flutters than any other generation before.

• 47:30Speaker 00

  I I absolutely think that. And I think, you know, go back thirty, forty, fifty years, that sort of stuff, you'd be taught by your older brother or by other positive male role models that you have. You know, there's this whole

• 47:48Speaker 00

  issue around.

• 47:50Speaker 00

  People like Andrew Tate and stuff at the moment where it's like, well, we've got this vacuum and these people are stepping into the vacuum and men are seeking them out. And you've got to think, well, well, what is causing that vacuum? What used to fill that that isn't anymore? And for me, it's strong male role models that are showing not toxic masculinity, but like good masculinity.

• 48:14Chris Williamson?

  Benevolent, yeah.

• 48:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, so it's it's your scout masters. You know, I'm I'm not hugely religious, but it's your church leaders, it's your religious leaders. You know, it's organizations like the Freemasons, it's.

• 48:27Chris Williamson?

  Sports teams, fathers, older brothers, uncles.

• 48:30Speaker 00

  Coaches, you know, good, good men who are able to to show you what being a good man means. And I think now we're just sort of just, I mean, I do it myself, you're just scrolling on your phone of an evening, doing nothing. That's not learning positive, how to contribute to society in a positive way. And young men, so I used to live, right? I used to live in the middle of a park, right? I used to rent a property in the middle of a park. So I used to see all of like the eight, nine, 10, 11, 12 year old kids and how they used to sort of run around in the park during the summertime. That sounds so creepy. I'm not like that, but anyway, the point is half, half the time they were destroying

• 49:14Speaker 00

  things and not the young girls, the young men are destroying things. They're throwing bottles, someone planted a tree, they ripped the tree out of the ground. And it's like, when you see these guys, it's it's almost like they have this yearning to control their environment with their hands in some way. To actually do something, to make some sort of mark. And it's like, if you don't give an opportunity to construct in some way, they'll just destruct.

• 49:44Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 49:45Speaker 00

  And I think that that's part of the problem as well, that you we we need stronger male role models who are helping young men, giving giving them some some way of building their status. Um, because that's a whole other argument as well of how do you build status? Because you have this really nice dichotomy in a lot of traditional societies between prestige and dominance. And I think these days, a lot of young men say, oh, it's dominance, dominance, dominance. That's how you build status. When actually prestige is is more of a sort of healthy way of building, um.

• 50:17Chris Williamson?

  It's more robust as well. It's more likeable. It's definitely going to be able to scale over time, because, you know, your dominance, if you continue to play that game, eventually is going to get you punched in the face, or thrown in jail, or something bad is going to happen. Prestige may end up with you being, people being jealous of you, but that's significantly better than the outcomes that you get from dominance. Yeah, I am, I'm playing around with this idea at the moment, and unfortunately, it it seems to not really be, uh, actually holding much weight, but we'll see as I continue to do more research. The male sedation hypothesis, which is, why have we not seen young male syndrome, given the incredibly high levels of sexlessness amongst young men? Very high levels of sexlessness, but not a, um, in-kind

• 51:01Chris Williamson?

  increase in the destructive antisocial behaviour that you would see amongst that particular cohort of guys. And my theory originally was that porn and video games are giving a titrated dose of reproductive cues and of status-seeking camaraderie, goal-oriented behaviour. But I'm yet to see any evidence that suggests that porn use turns down men's desire for real-world sex. David Lay couldn't find that. Um, he's, he he doesn't see any evidence for it. Uh, David Bus sent me an article earlier on this morning that also doesn't seem to show that sexual desire is mediated by porn. What what's your view on this?

• 51:46Speaker 00

  Every time I put porn in, it doesn't predict anything. Um, you know, and

• 51:50Chris Williamson?

  It was such a nice, it's the male sedation hypothesis. It's such a nice name, Andrew.

• 51:54Speaker 00

  It would be, yeah, it's, it's, it's a very nice, and I'm sure that there's some other way that we can find that men are being sedated.

• 52:01Chris Williamson?

  P hack it. Yes.

• 52:02Speaker 00

  But, um, no, every time we put porn use in, in like harassment stuff and that, it doesn't, it doesn't come up. I will tell you something interesting though. I'll tell you something interesting from the polygyny pre-print that we've got out now about that status, that status thing, the prestige and dominance. So socio-sexuality is positively associated with dominance, but negatively associated with prestige. So there seems to be something there about prestigious men being more inclined for a long-term relationship and dominance being more inclined for short-term relationships.

• 52:41Chris Williamson?

  That seems to make sense, but what's interesting is that it's going in the opposite direction. I can understand how dominant men would be higher in socio-sexuality, but if the, if the arrow is moving in the other direction, that's interesting. What was that attitudes of people in the West to multi-partner relationships? What is this?

• 53:02Speaker 00

  So that's a pre-print that I've got out now. It's a funny story. I'll be presenting that at HBAS, by the way.

• 53:07Chris Williamson?

  Hey, you and me both. Let's go.

• 53:09Speaker 00

  There we go. So I'm on this consensual non-monogamy panel, which is, is really interesting because it's, because I didn't set out for this study to be a consensual non-monogamy study. And then it's, it's under review with archives at the moment and it came back with three reviews, all saying we, we love the methods, we love the results, but we want you to completely rewrite the introduction from a consensual non-monogamy lens. So I was like, right, interesting. Let's crack on with that. So I pulled in Justin McGilsky and he's going to help me with that. Anyway, so this study was

• 53:48Speaker 00

  We live in the UK, and in the UK, you're not allowed to do polygamy of any kind. So you're not allowed to marry, a man can't marry several wives, a woman can't marry several men, it's called bigamy, it's still punishable by seven years in prison, by the way. So it's something that's socially sanctioned, and whereas you can have relationships like that, they're generally frowned upon, right? Which is really, really interesting, because, you know, if you look at fossil evidence and you look at our biology, it all points towards at least effective polygyny in humans in some way. So men having, a smaller number of men having access to more women, rather than everything

• 54:31Speaker 00

  being a monogamous pairing. And also, if you look at all hunter-gatherer societies, I think something like eighty-six percent of hunter-gatherer societies permit polygyny. Not everyone, tends to be the chief, and, you know, people who are very high status in those societies, but they're permitted in most cultures that are current or that we've previously known about that have fallen apart. So if, there's an argument to be made that maybe polygyny is something that's hung around as part of the human mating experience for some time. So we've run a study just basically to see, well, do you actually find a desire for polygyny

• 55:14Speaker 00

  in a population, i.e. the UK, where it's actually, you know, there's sanctions against it? Because if you can still find interest in that mating arrangement in a society where, you know, people aren't talking about it, you're not allowed to do it, well, maybe that's telling you that we've got a part of our evolved mating psychology is still there kind of in the background. So that's what we did, we basically asked a, well, two studies actually, a large sample of men and women about their polygynous interest, and polyandry, which is the multiple men to women.

• 55:51Chris Williamson?

  And what happened?

• 55:53Speaker 00

  Interesting stuff, really interesting stuff. So I've got the I've got the exact figures here because I haven't committed them to memory yet. So we did quite a few things in terms of like correlational profiles and comparing interest for polygynous relationships against, for example, just having an affair partners and stuff. But basically, what you find is a third of guys say that they would be open to a polygynous relationship. So a third of guys say, yes, I would like to have two long-term partners at the same time who know about each other, accept each other. They don't get to have sex with anyone else, just me. And a third of them

• 56:34Speaker 00

  are like, yes, I would be open to that. Women being part of that relationship, not so much, but one in 20 were saying, yes, I would be like a co-girlfriend or a co-wife. And then quite a bit of proportion, it's unsure. So about 20% of guys are unsure, 14% of women are unsure. So sometimes it's easier just to look at the no. So 50% of guys are like, definitely no. 80% of women are like, definitely no.

• 57:02Chris Williamson?

  Are you surprised at 50% of men saying definitely no, given male desire for sexual variety?

• 57:10Speaker 00

  I'm not surprised because of when you start looking into polygyny, just how difficult that is to juggle as a relationship. But also, remember, this is in a background where people are brought up to be told that this is wrong. So it's actually more the other way around. I'm surprised that you've got 50% of men who are saying either yes or uncertain. But what's really interesting is that you get that big sex difference in polygyny. So women are like, no, no, no, no, no. Guys are like, yeah, okay, I'd be open for it. But when you look at polyandry, the sexes respond pretty much the same, which is that about 10% of people say yes.

• 57:56Speaker 00

  About 10 to 20% of people say that are unsure, but most people are saying no. And there's not a big sex difference between men and women there. So the, the, um, there's a much more drive on the, the guy's side towards, uh, polygyny than women towards polyandry.

• 58:15Chris Williamson?

  But it's about the same number of men that would accept being part of a female's harem as women who would want a harem of men, around about 10%.

• 58:23Speaker 00

  That's a so much better way of putting it. I should have had you on the paper summarising stuff for me.

• 58:28Chris Williamson?

  Uh, as, as you may be aware, I'm actually giving a short 15 minute presentation at HPess this year, so.

• 58:34Speaker 00

  Really? I should go to that.

• 58:35Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, I can get you an invite, probably speak to me, I'll probably be able to sort you out.

• 58:41Chris Williamson?

  So interesting stuff there around stated and revealed preferences.

• 58:49Speaker 00

  Oh, absolutely, absolutely. Cause I actually, I, I put that in the paper, right? So there's a massive difference between like, would, would guys actually, like, once you've got the decision, there's, there's that whole, whole hot and cold reasoning element to it as well, right?

• 59:06Speaker 00

  Sorry, I interrupted.

• 59:07Chris Williamson?

  No, just that was it. It was just the stated and revealed preferences thing. I mean, you know, guys, I imagine that, actually do I? I was thinking about the fact that if a man was offered the, the multiple women in front of him, that it would, it would sound great. But I think that that really works best for short term mating. I think when you actually are faced with the stark thermodynamics of trying to have a household with two women who, as much as they say that they get on great and maybe in the bedroom, they're fantastic. I mean, we've had a lot of history of intrasexual competition between women poisoning each

• 59:48Chris Williamson?

  other's kids, poisoning each other, trying to push them down cliffs, you know, all manner of fuckery that's gone on. And it wouldn't surprise me if men.

• 1:00:00Chris Williamson?

  Maybe mediated by status?

• 1:00:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, oh, absolutely. And when we, um, when you look at the data in more traditional societies, you basically find that women are drawn towards polygyny only when the benefits they can get out of the polygynous marriage exceed what they could get out of a monogamous marriage. So if I've got a husband who can only invest five, um, all in me, or there's a husband here who can invest 20 in me and another person, well, then I'm getting 10 of the 20, which is more than the five. So there's a, there's a balance there of would I be, would I be better off on my own or part of, part of this thing into having my?

• 1:00:42Chris Williamson?

  Utilitarian calculation in that regard.

• 1:00:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, it is. And it's also, I mean, a lot of these societies tend to have a lot of control over women as well. So it's, it's like the, the way that women actually, uh, you know, if they have less, the way that they do things and gain access to things is a lot of the time through men, um, which is a shame, of course.

• 1:01:02Chris Williamson?

  I learned, I can't remember what I was listening to yesterday, but I learned about how the culture of Chinese feet tying.

• 1:01:11Speaker 00

  Oh, man, I hate that stuff. Have you seen the pictures?

• 1:01:14Chris Williamson?

  No, thankfully not. Not good.

• 1:01:16Speaker 00

  It's all, it's, well, uh, cultural, cultural relativism, cultural relativism, should we judge? Yeah, I'll judge. You see, they look like pig's trotters. It's awful. The, the toes get curled around. It's, oh.

• 1:01:30Chris Williamson?

  Isn't there a argument that the reason that that came about was due to Asian warlords that had huge harems of women and didn't want the women to be able to run away?

• 1:01:42Speaker 00

  I have absolutely no idea. I thought.

• 1:01:45Chris Williamson?

  I'll find the segment and I'll send it to you. Uh, but basically the argument, and the same was for female genital mutilation, that if women don't enjoy sex and or can't run away, that there is less chance of a, a very inherently unstable harem of like, yeah, an unsustainable number of women, uh.

• 1:02:04Chris Williamson?

  Crashing and burning around you because why would they sleep with the the hot guards, Kingsguard that works outside the door? Or why would they run away from this terrible situation if they either can't run or don't enjoy sex?

• 1:02:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's it's I mean, the Chinese foot binding thing, my understanding was that that was to do with like, small feet being more feminine and petite. The female genital mutilation, especially when you get like, there's a couple of stages to it. And when you get to like, the worst one, there's there's absolutely nowhere, nothing that you can, no way you can interpret that apart from male control. It's fucking disgusting. And what's really bad about that is a lot of the time, there's this sort of cultural attachment to it where it's other women pushing for it as well. So it almost like started as a male thing. And then it's like, then-

• 1:02:55Chris Williamson?

  What do you think's going on there? Intrasexual competition again?

• 1:02:58Speaker 00

  No, because it tends, it can sometimes be like mothers and stuff like that as well.

• 1:03:03Chris Williamson?

  Straight up cultural artefact-

• 1:03:04Speaker 00

  Straight up, like, oh, this is, you know, this is part of being a woman. And it's-

• 1:03:09Chris Williamson?

  Dude, I mean, I'm out in Austin, Texas at the moment. And the number of times that me and William will be sat around a dinner table, talking to a bunch of our lad mates, and the topic of foreskins will come up, because that's obviously our favourite conversation to have when we're sat-

• 1:03:23Speaker 00

  Of course, yes, yes. That's what men talk about.

• 1:03:25Chris Williamson?

  If it's beef jerky, we immediately want to talk about about foreskins. And

• 1:03:31Speaker 00

  Brilliant.

• 1:03:31Chris Williamson?

  That's exactly the same. When you hear secular, non-Jewish, you know, grew up in a totally secular household guys, who will say, yeah, my dad's circumcised, I'm circumcised, I'll be circumcising my son. Like, okay, why? That's interesting. Why? What's your reason?

• 1:03:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:03:48Chris Williamson?

  Well, it's just, you know, everyone's, that's how everyone's got it. I'm like, well-

• 1:03:52Speaker 00

  It's it's another level, though, Chris, the the female genital mutilation.

• 1:03:58Chris Williamson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:03:58Speaker 00

  It's it's really something else. To me, it's the equivalent of saying, am I gonna have some nails pulled out? Or am I gonna have my hand chopped off? With the nails being pulled out being the circumcision, it's really, yeah.

• 1:04:11Chris Williamson?

  Not good.

• 1:04:12Speaker 00

  It's it's not good. It's the type of thing which really makes my blood boil, if I'm honest, when I've read about it and stuff.

• 1:04:18Chris Williamson?

  Oh, well, we'll move on. How many-

• 1:04:20Speaker 00

  Hooray. Okay.

• 1:04:21Chris Williamson?

  How many previous sexual partners is too many?

• 1:04:27Speaker 00

  212.

• 1:04:30Speaker 00

  Oh, no, sorry. I thought you were asking me about my own personal preference. Right, so I did some work with Steve on this and you're going to really enjoy this because we've got a follow-up study that I'm just writing up at the moment. So we did this study in 2018, I think, 2017, 2018. It actually, so this is one of my claim to fame, this got written up in Playboy. So that's like, you know, oh, we've made it.

• 1:04:54Speaker 00

  So we basically said, you know, for a long-term partner, here's a person, they're generally attractive. How willing would you be to go on a date with them or entertain them as a long-term partner based on what people now call body count, but what we did the research was just how many sexual partners they've had. And you, I still remember walking into Steve's office and him having on the screen where he'd plotted up the data. It's got the nicest curve ever. And he was like, yeah, I'm writing this up. It's a lovely, lovely curve. And it basically peaks around about four, being like the optimal, three to four. What's really, really cool is it's not just a linear pattern. So it's not like three to four and then it just goes downhill. You get this little curve. So people are a bit wary about a virgin as well.

• 1:05:40Speaker 00

  It's still high. So being a virgin is, I think, equivalent to something like having 12 partners, something like that. Yeah, being, oh, no, it's less than that. It's seven to eight partners is the equivalent of kind of being a virgin.

• 1:05:53Chris Williamson?

  Is this male to female, female to male? Is there a sex difference here?

• 1:05:57Speaker 00

  This, it depends on, again, sexual strategy. So if you're just looking at a long-term relationship, the lines are so close together, you could squint and they look the same. Where you get the difference is for a short-term partner and then men's standards drop compared to women. But for a long, for a long-term partner, no, the nice sort of curve shape is about the same.

• 1:06:22Chris Williamson?

  How different is a woman's short-term and long-term curve?

• 1:06:27Speaker 00

  It's a little bit flatter. Um, so if they're looking for a short term relationship, whether someone has two partners or like 12 partners, it's pretty similar.

• 1:06:40Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 1:06:41Speaker 00

  It's pretty similar. So it flattens out a little bit. The curve is sort of less steep. Uh, but it's still much higher than guys.

• 1:06:48Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. What do you think that it says that having a a virgin or somebody with one partner is less desirable than somebody with three or four? Is this stated and revealed preferences again, or is there something else going on?

• 1:07:05Speaker 00

  I think that this is. So you've got to think it's all, it's a U shaped curve at the end of the day. And there's almost like you, you shape, uh, you shaped risks associated with it. So risks on either end. So the risk to having someone with zero sexual partners is that there might be a reason for it. There might be a reason that they're a virgin. So it could be that they're just not a good deal. It could be that they have low mate value. So it could be that you're actually oh, completely overestimating how good a catch this person is.

• 1:07:39Chris Williamson?

  It's a kind of pre-selection.

• 1:07:40Speaker 00

  Yeah. Once you enter into a relationship and you start investing, you don't want to be investing in someone who is not the best deal for you. On the other end, when you have people who have too many sexual partners, then you have things like sexually transmitted disease. If you want a long-term relationship, the chances of them maybe cheating on you or leaving is, is probably, is probably quite a bit higher. Um, and so there's risks all around, but the higher number, I believe, associated with different risks than the lower numbers. But interesting, I, I'm doing a follow-up study. So this one was in, uh, the Journal of Sex Research and it was just on a UK sample. Um, so I thought, right, how can we just like inject some steroids into this thing?

• 1:08:24Speaker 00

  So I've redone it, but we've done it with 10 countries. So UK, Poland, Norway, Japan, Brazil, all over the place. Yeah. Um, and not only are we now looking at numbers, but we're looking at when the numbers were. Because what I realized is that if you're asking people about 12 partners and they, they can make a judgment, but then if you were to say it's 12 partners and 11 of those have been in the last three months. That's very different to 11 of them were around about when that person was 18, 19 and 20. And then recently they've only had one or two. Do you see what I mean? Numbers the same, but if you were going to pick someone for a long term relationship.

• 1:09:09Speaker 00

  That's going to commit to you and you might get married to and have kids to. Which one are you going for? The someone who clearly was a bit sexually desirable in their youth and has calmed down a bit. Or someone who's actually pretty active now.

• 1:09:20Chris Williamson?

  They're on a tear at the moment.

• 1:09:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. So, um, yeah, so we've got that. I'm just plotting up the data at the moment.

• 1:09:27Chris Williamson?

  Isn't it interesting that some of the common men's advice on the internet, especially around pre-selection. You know, there's a big push at the moment for the polygyny thing that most girls will happily take a high value man. If, you know, he's sufficiently high value and she'll happily share him and so on and so forth. That doesn't seem to be borne out in this data, given the fact that men's preference for partners. Especially over the long term and women's doesn't diverge all that much.

• 1:10:02Speaker 00

  No.

• 1:10:02Chris Williamson?

  It doesn't seem like women see a high body count in a man as being a, a, some sort of pre-selection attractor.

• 1:10:12Speaker 00

  And there's, there's some work I'm doing, I keep saying this, I've got more studies than I have time to write them up. And I'm doing some work with Leif Canary at the moment about the sexual double standards. Because you, you almost have sexual double standards at a global level and a personal level. So the global level is like, or the societal level is what do you think society says?

• 1:10:36Speaker 00

  And that's when you sort of get narratives like, well, um, girls don't care about a guy's body count. But guys care about a girl's body count at the sort of societal level. But whenever you measure it at the personal level, so what an individual actually thinks. Very little evidence for the sexual double standard. So it's one of these things where we actually think it's a thing, but when you actually talk to someone. It turns out not really to be a thing.

• 1:11:04Chris Williamson?

  What do you think that says about our own sexuality and the way that we perceive other people's?

• 1:11:10Speaker 00

  I think that it's, it says that sometimes our mating theory of mine can be quite faulty. Um, I think that there's culture wars all over the shop, including between men and women these days. And I think it ends up in a place where the sexes become quite caricatured, especially based on maybe the most extreme examples. Um, so a- again, one of the most common one is that people will apply short-term mating psychology of men to men. So they will assume that the men who are only after short-term relationships and what they want.

• 1:11:51Speaker 00

  They will say all men are like that, even those who are looking for long-term relationships. Um, and I, I actually think a lot of suffering in, in the dating world comes from conflating short-term and long-term mating desires. So either you're after something long-term, um, but you're picking someone who's after something short-term. That causes a lot of, um, confusion or thinking that you want something long-term when you actually want something short-term. Uh, which I think is also quite interesting. The number of people I've met who say that they want to get married and have kids and settle down, but then you ask them what their mate preferences are and

• 1:12:33Speaker 00

  they just reel you off all of the short-term mating preferences and then of the long-term mating preferences. It's like, well, actually, it sounds like you just want a short-term partner because you don't care about kindness. You don't care about whether they want kids. You don't care about, um, uh, whether they can, they're good communicators or whether they can empathize well. You just care about, do they look good? Are they good in bed? Are they going to give me resources now? Um, so yeah, a lot of people are playing the short-term game when they think they're playing the long-term game.

• 1:13:03Chris Williamson?

  I wonder whether that would be, I wonder whether that would have a sex difference. I would imagine that given women not wanting to seem easy, not wanting to come across like they are not valuing their body in the same sort of way, that you may find that women will use, I'm after a long-term mate as perhaps even their own self-deception in order to perhaps pursue short-term mating goals.

• 1:13:35Speaker 00

  Um, I don't know.

• 1:13:37Chris Williamson?

  It's just, it's an interesting. So to round out that um optimal number of partners, was it almost exactly the same for men and women? It was about four?

• 1:13:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, I've got it here in front of me now about four. I mean, this was three to four. This is a few years ago, mine. So we're gonna see um the, we're gonna see the difference in the new study. I mean, one of the things I could, well, one of the things that we have done is we've looked at like four versus 12 versus 36. Um, and the distribution patterns, because we show people actual physical distribution patterns. So here's one that shows that it was recent.

• 1:14:16Speaker 00

  Distribute, the four obviously is still an optimal. There's no effective effective distribution for four, so it doesn't matter when people had partners. Four is like a nice, solid number. It's when you have the larger numbers, that's when it matters more of when, when did that happen? Is that something in your past or not?

• 1:14:37Speaker 00

  And once you actually send a load of those into the past, the difference between, say, four, 12 and 36 start to converge a little bit. So it gets to the point where the differences become minimal. So that's quite interesting. It adds that extra dimension.

• 1:14:51Chris Williamson?

  You conducted an experiment where you asked ChatGPT about, about mate preferences. Before we get into that, what mate preferences do people typically look for in a partner?

• 1:15:05Speaker 00

  So I, I love the, right, okay, so I'll give you the, the, the, the real answer. Everything, right? So if you give people a Likert scale one to nine and say, what's your ideal for humor, intelligence, physical attractiveness? Good financial prospects, creativity? They go nine, eight, eight, nine, nine, eight, nine. They just do the whole thing, which is why a lot of the research we do, we have to ask about minimum mate preferences. In which case they go seven, seven, seven, seven, seven. But actually, the best research just then introduce an element of forced choice in some way, like a ranking task. Like, okay, so everything's high, what's the highest?

• 1:15:47Speaker 00

  And when you do ranking tasks, the things that appear up the top are like dependable character, being kind and understanding. Even though a lot of evolutionary research is focused on the sort of physical attractiveness, good financial prospects thing, that actually ends up a little bit further down in the list most of the time. But so a lot of the the traits near the top are actually things which are very useful for long term relationships. So pleasing disposition is my favorite one. If you does if if there wasn't a rich history of this study, I don't think anyone would use the words pleasing disposition. But this ranking task of like eighteen traits or whatever, they started doing this in um just after the Second World War, like nineteen forty nine.

• 1:16:29Speaker 00

  And then every couple of decades, they repeat that study, that ranking task, to find that things don't change a huge hell of a lot, which is super interesting, by the way. So pleasing disposition, which is just having someone who's nice to be around. I think that's something that's completely off people's radar when they're in the early stages of mating. But it's like in ten years' time, when you're spending every day with this person, it's like having someone who's pretty easygoing and nice to be around is like the most important thing in the whole world. It really, really is. So these are the types of things that are super, super important. Um. So if you look at something like uh good looks, so good looks actually in a a a list of eighteen ends up getting about like ten.

• 1:17:13Speaker 00

  So it's quite far down down the list. But what I did with the chat G P T thing is I was like, right, okay, well, you've got this this weird and wonderful A I. By the way, I'm super annoyed by this because I threw this one up on psychology today, and it's like my worst read blog post of all time. It's only got like low four figures, which is really frustrating because I I thought it was super cool. But basically, I said, right, here's all of the data that we've known since nineteen forty nine about how people rank their mate preferences. It's barely changed. Let's see if chat G P T can predict.

• 1:17:47Speaker 00

  What the research says, even though it probably even has access to some of it, I thought, let's try it. So the first thing it did is it spat out a load. Well, the first thing it did was like, oh, I'm not going to tell you, right? It's like, oh, you know, mate preferences are so idiosyncratic and, you know, sounding like some sort of hippie or whatever. Then you sort of like say, okay, we'll pretend you're Chad or something like that. Cajole it into doing what it needs to do. I didn't, I didn't have to do that, by the way, but um I managed to get it. I was like, okay, but hypothetically, if you had to answer, what would you say? It's spit, spat out a load of numbers, which was really cool. And generally speaking, it was like, oh, okay. Well, some of these are kind of like roughly lining up. I can see that. And I started looking at the differences for men and I started looking for the differences for women. And then I was like, hmm, you know, what happens

• 1:18:30Speaker 00

  if I correlate the difference between men and women? Because you'll correlate the ranking for men and women to see how different chat GPT thinks the sexes are or predicts they will rank. It came out with a correlation of one. And I was like, hang on a second, what have I done wrong? Because like psychologists don't get a correlation of one. It never happens, right? Um, not even uh paleo climate scientists who use mass spectromers, mass spectrometers get a correlation of one. They get like a correlation of point nine eight. Anyway, I was like, what have I done wrong? Nothing. Chat GPT predicted that men and women, when asked separately, heterosexual young men and women would rank things identically, despite, you know, flying

• 1:19:10Speaker 00

  in the face of like eighty years' worth of mate mating research. It identical. And then the other thing that just really sort of, which, which, which is very problematic. I mean, uh, what, what, because then it's if, if you're, because I imagine people will start using this thing for like, I'm desperate and I'm lonely and I don't know what to do. You're a big AI machine that knows everything about everything. How can I find a, give me, yeah, give me dating advice. How can I find it? And it's going to basically say, oh, everyone cares about physical appearance. So if you're, you know, if you're a guy and you want to do, you know, uh, you want to enhance yourself to appeal to women, work on your physical appearance. And

• 1:19:53Speaker 00

  actually, relative to men, women care less about physical appearance and they care about Some other things more. So it could actually be misguiding people. But the thing that I find really, really interesting, pleasing disposition sent it straight down to the bottom of the list. So pleasing disposition has had an average rank since nineteen forty nine of four. So it's generally top four. Sometimes it's top three. Sorry, sometimes it's three, sometimes it's five. It's generally four, eighteen down the bottom. Right the way down the bottom. It doesn't matter how easy going or easy it is to live with your partner. Chat G P T thinks that is the worst thing since sliced bread.

• 1:20:28Chris Williamson?

  So did it get, did it feminize or masculinize the answers? Because it didn't realize that there were sex differences.

• 1:20:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:20:38Chris Williamson?

  Was it more correct for women's preferences or men's preferences?

• 1:20:41Speaker 00

  No, it was about, it was about equal.

• 1:20:43Chris Williamson?

  It was equally wrong for both.

• 1:20:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, it was equally wrong because it's basically split the difference. So I don't know whether there is something, some aspect of sex difference denialism in there. Uh, cause I have actually, I haven't blogged about it because ungrateful people will, uh, are just not reading my blog posts. So read my blog post and then maybe I'll write a follow up. But I've also done some stuff there asking for the dating advice, asking, you know, if you wanted to attract a short term partner. What should you do? If you want to attract a long term partner, what should you do? Asking from the perspective of a heterosexual young man and heterosexual young woman. Um, and the answers are, uh, predictably kind of like P C.

• 1:21:29Speaker 00

  So for short term, if you're like, oh, how do I attract a short term partner? It's like, I'll make sure that you have good communication about consent. And I'm there like.

• 1:21:42Speaker 00

  You're a couple of steps ahead. Like, that's important. Like, don't get me wrong. Like, it's important to have consent. But if you're telling some, you know, some, some guy who's regularly on four chan, who, you know. Can't remember the last time you went outside of a house to see a woman and your advice is ask for consent if you want a short term relationship. It's not going to bode well for that guy if he walks up to a cashier and says, can we have sex? Do I have your consent?

• 1:22:07Chris Williamson?

  Do I have your consent?

• 1:22:08Speaker 00

  That's the best way to find it.

• 1:22:09Chris Williamson?

  At least he asked for consent. So first off, I think the chat GPT thing is so interesting because it's a language learning model. So what I've stopped looking at chat GPT as, especially for the more sort of social inferences, like what you're talking about here, is less a benevolent deity and more like a cultural aggregator.

• 1:22:35Speaker 00

  Hmm, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. With with some slight bias built into the system because they were they were started giving it personality tests, right? Start giving it political orientation tests and then they were somehow able to go in and update it and make it more balanced. So there's definitely some some priors in here to be adjusted. But it certainly comes up with all of these warnings about that that's, you know, oh, you've got to be careful asking stuff about mating people or individuals and stuff like that. It's like, well, yeah, that's that's great, but that's not that's not excellent dating advice necessarily. You know, if you want, if you want to, like, good dating device advice is you haven't had a haircut or a shave in 15 years.

• 1:23:18Speaker 00

  Maybe if you do that, you will look a bit more presentable.

• 1:23:21Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, well, I think that the the aggregation of whatever the sort of cultural milieu at the moment is would include massive sex difference denial. It would include, you know, consent being one of the the foremost things. Again, coming from a very particular portion of the culture, a very particular group of people. What I am interested in, though, going back to the make preferences thing, what do you think it says? First off, that something so seemingly banal and forgotten about as pleasing disposition, something which can't be optimized for on online dating, and also something that is very rarely discussed when it comes to dating advice for men, but also kind of dating advice

• 1:24:06Chris Williamson?

  for women, you know, with the the advent of boss bitch leaning culture and independent woman and stuff like that.

• 1:24:13Chris Williamson?

  What do you think it says that that ranks so highly and yet isn't shown in advice? Again, is this, is that wrong? Is it wrong that people say they want a pleasing disposition? But it's, it's no use to them when it comes to the revealed preferences of attraction. And secondly, what does it mean that make preferences are so stable over time? How can it be the case that for the last 80 years, make preferences seem to have stayed the same?

• 1:24:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't say they'd stayed the same identically, but they're, they're enough. There's enough stability. They're, they're what I like to call, it's a term I've started threading on to my research. So canal, canalization, canalized, so likely to develop regardless of, of sort of social input. So a highly canalized preference like kindness means that no matter what developmental environment you drop someone into, a preference for kindness is likely to develop and emerge. You would need some pretty strong social engineering for that to not happen. So we're talking about things being canalized. So that was the, the, the second part of your question. I've forgotten what the first part was.

• 1:25:24Chris Williamson?

  Why is it that pleasant disposition is so highly rated? And yet isn't advised for online dating, isn't really something that you can communicate online, isn't given as, as advice for either men or women?

• 1:25:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:25:38Chris Williamson?

  Is it stated and revealed again? Does, does a pleasing disposition only work in a survey? And if you had a pleasing disposition, does it actually work to attract a mate?

• 1:25:46Speaker 00

  I think it, so I, I think it does. So I've got another, got another study that I'm writing up where I get all the time for this. I don't know. I'm, I'm upskilling in psychotherapy as well at the moment, which is eating about 20% of my time. So all of these papers will be coming out in 2030. Anyway, we did, we've run some data analysis, Steve and I on some dating, uh, speed dating data. One of the things that came out on it, because people think our speed dating, physical attractiveness, you know, the stuff that you can see immediately, you know, one of the biggest psychological predictors that came out of this study, um, it was political tolerance.

• 1:26:24Speaker 00

  Political tolerance was one of the biggest predictors of speed dating success. So being opposite someone who was easygoing when it came to politics. And I actually see this as kind of nested in a similar factor to pleasing disposition. So you've got someone who's quite agreeable, who's quite easygoing, who's going to listen to your opinions and not judge you. And these are super important things. And I think it's a tragedy that that we neglect talking about them and neglect

• 1:26:54Speaker 00

  sort of coaching people about them. And why would you? Why would you coach someone about pleasing disposition when the mating market is set up in such a way with the the first filter at the moment is physical attractiveness. Physical attractiveness is the first hurdle. And so you can't blame people for pouring all of their time and effort to get over that hurdle before they then reveal other aspects about themselves. But this is why I keep coming back to like my my biggest piece of advice is to do something like speed dating. Because if you do speed dating, you at least get a chance to be in front of someone holistically. So they get it maybe only eight minutes, but at least in that eight minutes, okay, they see your physical attractiveness. But then they have to sit there for seven more while you get a quick, quick attempt to show them how tremendously funny you are

• 1:27:39Speaker 00

  and witty and gentle and kind.

• 1:27:44Speaker 00

  So I always sort of recommend that. And plus, when people go to an event like that, a physical event, all parties have already invested something small in terms of their time. So, you know, the the advice isn't out there, but maybe we can change that, you and I towards pushing people to do some stuff that's more holistic than just swiping away on something that allows people to judge you based on one or two criteria.

• 1:28:06Chris Williamson?

  I'm a big proponent of doing CrossFit if you want to pull. Big proponent of CrossFit.

• 1:28:11Speaker 00

  If you want to pull your muscles, definitely.

• 1:28:13Chris Williamson?

  Also, you need to take, I mean, the CrossFit side of it is secondary, but everyone's wearing no clothes. Everyone's into the same sort of thing. Everyone does it eight times a week. There you go. That's CrossFit. CrossFit's a good, but I totally agree that. Don't need to hate the play, you can hate the game and the game at the moment is predicated on physical attraction first and foremost.

• 1:28:35Speaker 00

  And the point you just made there is actually a perfect one of pick your context. Pick, pick your context. If you want a long-term relationship, go to places where people aren't going there for a short-term relationship. If you're trying to find a marriage partner in the nightclub, you are then trying to find a needle in a haystack among people who are, who are open for short-term relationships. Do you know what I mean? Whereas if you go, you know, you want someone who, for a long-term relationship, go to a book club. Go to a book club where you'll meet someone who's nice and pleasant and intelligent and wants to talk about sort of intelligent things and you can get to know them and be their friend. There was that study that came out recently that showed something like, you know, a third

• 1:29:17Speaker 00

  of, of women were close friends with their long-term partners before entering into a relationship with them. And another further 20, they were somewhat friends with their future husbands in America.

• 1:29:33Chris Williamson?

  Circling the orbit in one form or another.

• 1:29:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. It's, so it's got me thinking a lot about this friend zone thing, right? So the friend zone is not necessarily a bad thing. There's, there's almost different segments of the friend zone. There's the friend, your friend, I'm getting to know you and you're still a possibility. And then there's the person I met on the bus who was smelly and I lump you with that. So, you know, I think people have popularized the friend zone to the point where it's bad to be a friend, when actually, go back 50, 60 years ago, that's how people were meeting each other for lifelong bonds. They were friends first and met each other through close friends.

• 1:30:09Chris Williamson?

  Did you see a video that was virally doing the rounds about three weeks ago and it was 1940s, 1950s Australian women being asked on the street, what traits do you want in a partner?

• 1:30:27Speaker 00

  No, no, I didn't. But as you said that, I was thinking of the other one of the same time in London with the, in the seventies, of the woman going and pinching the bottoms of the businessmen and asking whether it was okay. And I've also seen the Australian, the Australian one where they allowed women in pubs for the first time and they had all the grumpy old men saying that they, they didn't like that. But no, sorry, I haven't seen this one. Go on.

• 1:30:49Chris Williamson?

  I haven't seen the women in pubs thing either. The one, it's just the saying like, I can't do an Australian accent, but they say, you know, he must be nice. It would be, it would be lovely if he was, if he was, if he was, if he was nice and kind and respectful. And, and you think, well, fucking hell, like, how antiquated is this? And I wonder, again, how much of the espoused mating preferences that girls have, women especially, because it's mostly them that do the on-street interviews, right? Because it's, it's mostly male channels that are doing this. And they say, how much do you think that a guy should earn? And you get these sort of ridiculous answers from, from women, especially on college campuses.

• 1:31:31Chris Williamson?

  First off, they're being selected because they're like, fucking 18 and a half, right? Like, they don't know anything. So that's why they don't know what 100 grand is or 500 grand is. They're just picking a number out of the air. So what you're actually testing for isn't mate preferences. What you're testing for is how much they've absorbed and aggregated just rumor and cultural sentiment that they think is something that's good to say. And also, who, which self-respecting girl really is going to say, you know, like, 30 grand, 35 grand? Like, especially if they're around a group of girls who've all said 100. You don't want to be the friend that's like, oh yeah, I'll take the bloke that earns 30 grand, after all of your friends have said a lot. So I, yeah, I really do wonder how

• 1:32:15Chris Williamson?

  much of it is online dating, globalized sexual marketplace, the sort of dissolving of traditional sexual norms, all of that downstream, creating a situation in which it is much more popular to talk about the looks, the status, the resources. And yet, everybody knows that those things have zero predictive power when it comes to long-term relationship success or happiness. It's stuff like psychological stability, conscientiousness, secure attachment style.

• 1:32:46Speaker 00

  I mean, there's, there's a positive spin that you can put on that as well, Chris, which is, you know, to put my pink hat on for, for a second of, you know, everything getting better, which would be that perhaps back in the 1950s in Australia, there were a lot of men who were not very nice and kind. Maybe this i- in uh these days, it's more taken for granted that men who are in relationships are less likely to, you know, because I mean, don't get me wrong, like, you know, shit men still exist who do awful things. Let's, let's, let's, you know, put that as a preface. But I think if you look at all of the metrics of, of, you know, uh domestic violence and stuff, they are on a downward trajectory. When you look over time periods of like two, three hundred

• 1:33:31Speaker 00

  years, so maybe there is something, something there of kindness is a given now. So on to the next thing, who knows?

• 1:33:38Chris Williamson?

  Women don't have to necessarily state or optimize for this because there is less, uh there are fewer situations, it is less frequent that they would encounter a man who wouldn't be kind and gentle and so on and so forth. Uh I'd be very interested to know, it'd be very difficult for you to know.

• 1:33:56Speaker 00

  And more social support as well. So I think like women are more likely to talk about these sorts of things, you know, it's more um when you reach out for help, help tends to be there. Um again, I'm not, I'm not saying that this, this is a problem that's been solved or anything. There's people in, in, in terrible straits there, but when you're ta- when you're looking over the span of decades, when you're comparing what life was like for a woman in the Victorian era compared to 2023, it, it's a very different place.

• 1:34:30Chris Williamson?

  Andrew, let's leave it there, mate. I absolutely adore all of the stuff that you do. Where can people read your articles and keep up to date with your work?

• 1:34:38Speaker 00

  Oh, okay. So my Twitter is a good one. So that's at DrThomasAG. I also have at DatingDarwin, which is the one associated with my blog. So keep an eye out on those because we'll be advertising for a study. If you're listening and you happen to be an incel, we'll be advertising a study on there soon that we're running. And I also run a website called psychestudies.co.uk, which is a free directory where people can advertise the psychology studies that they're doing. So I thought I'd just give a quick shout out to that.

• 1:35:10Chris Williamson?

  Absolutely. Look, mate, I really appreciate your work. I will see you at HBS later on this year. And thank you very much for today.

• 1:35:18Speaker 02

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