12 Key Factors That Determine Your Attractiveness - Macken Murphy

Macken Murphy is an evolutionary biologist at Oxford University, a writer and a podcaster. No one has ever said they want to be less attractive. But what does attractive actually mean? What do humans like to look at in other humans, and why? Thankfully science has some insights to help you understand why you like what you like. Expect to learn the role of symmetry in attraction, why the most average faces are actually the most attractive ones, how important muscles, waist-to-hip ratio, tattoos, beards, eye colour, height and voice are, how to work out what is a stated and what is a revealed preference and much more… - 00:00 What Actually Makes an Attractive Face? 05:30 Why Masculine Faces Can Cause Concern for Women 13:56 The Different Signals of Make-Up & Tan 18:17 What Makes an Eye Attractive? 20:20 Why We Are So Drawn to Faces 26:28 Do Women Like Muscular Men? 31:34 Do Men Like Heavier Women? 42:11 Men’s Tastes Are Shaped by Social Ecology 46:10 Is There a Generally Attractive Waist to Hip Ratio? 54:27 What Role Does Height Play in Attraction? 1:02:12 What Happens When the Female is the Breadwinner 1:12:14 Worst Mating & Dating Myths 1:16:00 Are Women Really More Picky Than Men? 1:26:00 Discriminating Based on Hair Colour 1:30:59 Do Men Want Wider Age Gaps as They Age? 1:35:16 How Attractive Are Tattoos? 1:41:20 What You Need to Know About Stated v Revealed Preferences 1:51:37 The Counter-Signal of Saying ‘I Don’t Know’ 2:01:28 Where to Find Macken - 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/ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic here - https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom - 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.

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  Just be attractive, bro, is like the biggest meme in online dating at the moment. What actually makes an attractive face?

• 0:08Macken Murphy?

  Well, there's a couple of things that come up again and again in the literature. And then there's also a couple of things that I think men think are very attractive and are surprised when they find out that women don't actually necessarily care about it. Now, that's not to say, we'll, we'll get into the weeds, but that's, that's not to say that men are necessarily wrong to want to look like that, right? It's just that it's not the attractiveness component. So a couple of things that come up a lot are averageness, right? And that's mathematical averageness. So having a nose that is of average size, shape and placement. So some people think average and they're like, oh, normal. And it's like a person with a very average looking face, meaning a face that would be the result of a composite of many faces superimposed on each other. A person with that sort of face would look like a model, right?

• 0:52Macken Murphy?

  If you superimpose a set of faces, the face that results from it will be more attractive than any individual in that set. Right? And we can talk if you want. I know that you're interested in this sort of thing as to the possible evolutionary and also just social reasons why that might be the case. A quick two theories would be maybe average faces are easier to process, right? And the processing speed is pleasant. It's like, oh, there's nothing glaring here. And it's like, oh, I quite like looking at this. From an evolutionary perspective, it could be that the average four traits are the end result of sexual selection. Right? So we're putting the cart before the horse in the sense that the reason that the average nose is the average nose is because there's been so much historical selection on that shape.

• 1:34Chris Williamson?

  On non-average noses against.

• 1:36Macken Murphy?

  Against, against non-average noses. So the reason that it's the average is because noses that are too big get cut out. So it's really that there's some other reason why that size, shape and placement is attractive. And it's become the average over, because we are the end result of previous selection. So averageness comes up a lot. Another thing that comes up a lot is symmetry, right? Symmetry is definitely attractive, right? And it's attractive on its own. It also seems to correlate with other matrices of attractiveness.

• 2:06Macken Murphy?

  But symmetry comes out again and again and again. If the left side of your face looks a lot like the right side of your face, then you're likely more attractive than you would be if you didn't have that. And with both of these things, with averageness, with symmetry, there are plenty of individual cases where people have very non-average traits and are still stunning, right? Plenty of people are highly asymmetrical. I mean, some of our considered most gorgeous celebrities have, you know, very asymmetrical faces. But these traits do matter. Symmetry, the standard EVO explanation is that this is a signal of, let's say, robust, underlying developmental qualities, right? That they were able to withstand the insults of their environment, right? At the very least, you know that they don't

• 2:50Macken Murphy?

  have some horrible injury to one side of their face or something like that. They didn't have some horrible illness. And they don't have certain heritable genetic disorders, right? And this is something that we'll likely talk about more. Why do we care about beauty at all? And it's partially because beauty seems to be a signal of underlying qualities that matter more, such as health, right? So I'll note that the symmetry studies have mixed results in Western populations, right? So it's like, we know that symmetry is attractive, but there's a question of like, does it actually correlate with healthiness? And that's not always the case. But it is the case, at the very least, that, look, if you've had a, like, I've got a broken nose from boxing, right? That certainly made

• 3:33Macken Murphy?

  me less attractive than I would be if I had a straight one. What does that tell potential mates? It tells them that something, you know, for some reason I couldn't handle it, right? Something went wrong for me at some point, right?

• 3:44Macken Murphy?

  And, you know, certain heritable genetic disorders that presumably you wouldn't be excited to pass on to your offspring, if you, all else being equal, those also co-vary with high asymmetry. And so symmetry, like when you see a symmetrical face, it's like, hey, you know, hey ladies, I don't have those disorders and I don't have horrific facial trauma, right?

• 4:07Chris Williamson?

  Have you ever seen Soft White Underbelly, that YouTube channel?

• 4:10Macken Murphy?

  I hardly watch anything.

• 4:12Chris Williamson?

  Okay, well, it's a very big channel and he has a 50 million play interview with an inbred family. Highly recommend that you go and watch it.

• 4:22Macken Murphy?

  And one of the first things you'll notice when you see those people is that they have, well, I don't know about this family specifically because I haven't seen it, but they'll look, they'll look like something has gone awry.

• 4:32Chris Williamson?

  Highly asymmetric, highly non-typical.

• 4:35Macken Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 4:36Chris Williamson?

  Like, I mean, one of the guys, his eyes are very, very wide apart, uh, like, which, they may be the same distance apart from the center of his nose. Who knows? That might be symmetrical, but it breaks the rule of very non-average.

• 4:48Macken Murphy?

  And I've also heard, you know, I've heard doctors privately, you know, use the phrase funny looking kid, right? Meaning like, not to make fun of them at all, but like, okay, we don't see anything wrong, but like, for some reason, this kid looks strange. Maybe there's something deeper here that should be looked at. But that's, that's obviously anecdotal. I'm more of a data guy. It's, it's interesting when the, when the anecdotes align. Um, but symmetry and averageness come up with the caveat that, you know, some people hear that, uh, you know, this is a sign of health and think that I think that health should be attractive, let's say. I'm, I'm not in the should business at all. It's just cold, what is, what is not. Now, I want to talk, you asked about men, and so one thing

• 5:30Macken Murphy?

  that's interesting is that facial femininity in women, very attractive, very consistently.

• 5:35Chris Williamson?

  What's femininity in your world?

• 5:38Macken Murphy?

  Well, there's a few ways to measure it. Uh, but basically, one way of thinking about it is you take the average set of faces of women and the average set of faces of men, or the average set of, let's say males and females, right? In this specific case, because there, there are some differences between gender and sex. You take the average sets, you know, average faces of males and females, and there's different traits in those groups that are typical. And if someone is, has more of those typical traits for one group, they'd be more masculine looking, right? And sometimes, you know, there, there are other ways of looking at it. That's just one, right? And there are different researchers who have very strong opinions as to like what facial masculinity actually should be, right? Because some people say, well, you know, that's, that's, that's, that isn't, you know, a typical male face, but if you ask respondents, they all say it's masculine,

• 6:23Macken Murphy?

  right? So it's like, that is a masculine face, because who decides what's masculine and feminine? We do, right? So facial masculinity, though, is interesting. So facial femininity is very attractive to men. Men love stereotypically girly, womenly faces, right? They respond very heterosexual men responds to that quite strongly typically.

• 6:43Macken Murphy?

  Facial masculinity, despite all the GigaChad memes and things like that and what we think might be attractive. You know, some studies find that women prefer facial masculinity a little bit. Some find that they prefer facial femininity. Some finds no effect, right? The latest Oxford Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology and Romantic Relationships. That's, that's the latest review that I'm aware of, and they said, look, if anything, there's a slight preference for facial femininity in men as well, right? And that's a bit of a confusing result at first because it's like, well, facial masculinity. It's like that. There's so many things that are attractive about masculinity, you know, like facial masculinity predict predicts fighting ability, for instance, right?

• 7:24Macken Murphy?

  Um, it's, it's probably predicted by, you know, testosterone levels and things that are impressive signals in other contexts. So it's like, surely women love, you know, a GigaChad type face. Women love a super masculine face and some super masculine faces like Henry Cavill, for example, are very attractive to women. I'm not saying that it, that it's a huge disadvantage or something. It's just not all else being equal preferred. And one common idea that you'll see in the literature is the masculinity trade off hypothesis, right? So if you're mating as a woman, right? Think about this strategically. It's like, yes, there's all these perks that come with masculinity, but this is, you're picking a mate that you're probably going to have to co-parent with, right? You're going to have to raise children with them. And so maxing out on like the super alpha dude, right?

• 8:10Macken Murphy?

  Maybe for a one night stand, right? There's some indication for that, but if you're, you know, looking for hot guys for a long term relationship, a prettier boy is more appealing because that might, uh, that might co vary with traits that are, you know, less, less dastardly.

• 8:24Chris Williamson?

  That heavy brow ridge also means risky behavior also means he's probably going to sleep with my sister.

• 8:29Macken Murphy?

  Yeah, also means that he might lose his temper at you or your offspring and cause horrible damage. Also means that he might get murdered because he can't stop mouthing off.

• 8:39Chris Williamson?

  That's interesting that, um, it skews toward femininity, not just averageness in men. Whatever the, the midpoint between femininity and masculinity is.

• 8:49Chris Williamson?

  Has that been tested for short term versus long term, casual versus

• 8:55Macken Murphy?

  The masculinity?

• 8:56Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 8:56Macken Murphy?

  Thing. Yeah. So there's mixed results on that. And I'll also note that the masculinity trade off hypothesis is very much a hypothesis. Right? So, you know, it's tempting to, it's such a good story, right? It sounds so good. That in every paper on this sort of subject, someone's going to talk about the masculinity because it's a fun story to tell.

• 9:13Chris Williamson?

  I gotta, I gotta bring this up. Like, I didn't realize how fallible scientists were, especially those, even in evolutionary psychology, which is very rigorous.

• 9:21Macken Murphy?

  The queen of the sciences.

• 9:22Chris Williamson?

  It hasn't been the replication crisis or anything like that.

• 9:25Macken Murphy?

  Except with the ovulation studies, don't forget.

• 9:27Chris Williamson?

  Which we're going to get on to, but if you come up with a sufficiently compelling name, God, like the meme just runs away with it. So, yeah.

• 9:37Macken Murphy?

  And it's hard to get, it's hard to let go of the memes, but the masculinity trade off, I mean, you would predict, right? The kind of obvious thing would be, okay, they should prefer them for short term mating and prefer, you know, less masculine guys for long term mating. And there's some mixed results on that. I'm quite skeptical of that whole, I think that there needs to be kind of a second round, um, looking into that. It's not a particular area of interest for me, right? I know that there's some expert on facial masculinity who's like, no, it is true.

• 10:03Chris Williamson?

  Fuck you.

• 10:04Macken Murphy?

  But, um, yeah, exactly. But it's certainly interesting. I'll just note though, that there are some strange things that make the masculinity trade off hypothesis seem like it doesn't work. Like, for example, so what's the most, the most facially masculine ornament is the male beard, right? Women generally don't grow beards. Some do, obviously, but for the most part, that's facial masculinity 101 is big, bushy hair on the jaw. Right? And

• 10:36Macken Murphy?

  Kind of the worst possible result for the masculinity trade off hypothesis is that, you know, we don't see this, you know, short term mating, when they're, when, when I'm ovulating, I like the big, bushy beard. That doesn't come up. In fact, what you see is, um, Big bushy beard is preferred as like a potential co-parent, a potential dad, right? Which is the exact opposite of what you'd expect based on the masculinity trade-off hypothesis.

• 11:02Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 11:02Macken Murphy?

  Is like, he's got a big bushy beard, surely that's Mr. Short-term mating. But instead, it's like, hmm, you know, I'm not really too fussed about that, but he looks like he'd make a great dad.

• 11:12Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. How interesting. On average, do women prefer beards or not?

• 11:16Macken Murphy?

  Well, I spoke to the world's lea- well, I won't go as far as the world's leading expert, but I would say the guy to talk to about beards is Barnaby Dixon out in Australia, right? He's got relationships with our lab out there.

• 11:31Macken Murphy?

  And I spoke to him for a couple of hours about this and it's such a deep literature to get into. It's just deceptively, there's so much research on it and it's just, you think it's simple and then you get into it and you're like, this is one of the most complicated areas of psychological science is hair on our faces, right? So I did a podcast with him on species and it was very interesting. He said that you could probably, he's read every study on the subject and I'm not aware of any meta-analysis, but he said that you could probably draw a line right down the middle and have just as many studies finding that women prefer clean-shaven to bushy beards as you would find bushy beards over clean-shaven, right? So, and this is one of the annoying things about like being on TikTok is that I'll see like,

• 12:17Macken Murphy?

  it recommends me, you know, people who aren't necessarily in the field, but love the research. And they'll cite an individual study. I saw someone recently, I won't name them, but they have a huge following. And they were citing one of Barnaby Dixon's studies, finding that clean-shaven faces were not preferred to big bushy beards. And I was like, yeah, but if you knew about the context, it's like he's done several of these studies and it's gone both ways. What women do prefer is heavy stubble. That seems to be pretty consistent. If you show, yes, you're

• 12:47Chris Williamson?

  Have I dialed this in?

• 12:48Macken Murphy?

  Your looks maxing to a T.

• 12:50Chris Williamson?

  This is hair maxing, technically.

• 12:52Macken Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So you're

• 12:54Chris Williamson?

  Stubble maxing.

• 12:55Macken Murphy?

  Yeah. So I would say that, I would say that

• 12:59Macken Murphy?

  If you think about it, right, and this is partially insights from Barnaby Dixon and partially kind of the theoretical musings of Jeffrey Miller, right, in in this area. But if you think about it, like from a signaling perspective, maybe it does, maybe it makes sense in a modern context that heavy stubble is the best signal. Because on the one hand, it's like I'm signaling these masculine traits, like I can grow a big bushy beard, right? And you know, the beard does seem to, you know, add some facial contour, right? It's kind of a coincidence, but it's, but it is interesting just anecdotally that it follows the same contour line that makeup does on women, right? The hair grows thickest, you know, around the jaw and chin, which, you know, obviously having a nice jawline is is better than not. So you get some of that boost from the facial hair, right?

• 13:44Macken Murphy?

  But then you also show like, hey, I'm actually, you know, what is a, what does heavy stubble show? It's like I'm regularly maintaining this.

• 13:50Chris Williamson?

  Sufficiently refined.

• 13:51Macken Murphy?

  Yeah, so I have excess time, excess control, excess attentiveness.

• 13:55Chris Williamson?

  I was, I was thinking, I was thinking about the, my trip to Thailand, which I did a couple of years ago, and get that in you, go on. And I was, I was thinking about when I saw the girls behind the counter who make their faces lighter. So whereas I'm from Newcastle in the northeast of the UK, girls make themselves orange. What does that signal? It signals, look at all of the spare time I have. I can afford to go away on a holiday. I can go to Malia or Magaluf or Marbella or wherever, and I can catch a tan and lie by the pool because I have lots of spare time. I'm the sort of person that spends their time outside, I'm into fitness and health and all the rest of it. No one knows that it's come from a bottle and a makeup brand. The converse is true in Thailand because the indigent laborers that work in the fields get the tan the most.

• 14:39Chris Williamson?

  So they counter signal by saying, I don't ever go outside. Yeah, I have a white collar job, I'm inside. So I think that with the stubble, total bro science hat on here, but yes, it signals could grow a beard, chooses not to. Why? Well, most people that lead, especially now, and we'll get on to this, like cultural mediation, I suppose, which is interesting, but especially right now, many jobs.

• 15:06Chris Williamson?

  Many jobs where you have an overbearing boss may have an issue and there is this sort of vestige of you should be clean shaven when you go to work. My dad still has that. My dad gets clean shaven before he goes to work. That's just been ingrained in him as one of the things that you do. So it's kind of a bit of a counter signal. It's like the red snee- it's referred to as the red sneaker effect as well, that the more money that you earn, the more casually that you dress. You know, like the guy with seventeen letters after his name just says, just call me Jim. Whereas the dude that just-

• 15:34Macken Murphy?

  Just got his PhD.

• 15:35Chris Williamson?

  Precisely. Yeah, that's Doctor Mack and Murphy.

• 15:38Macken Murphy?

  I'd better be Mack and Murphy MSC than the parentheses OXON.

• 15:43Chris Williamson?

  What's that?

• 15:44Macken Murphy?

  Oh, so if you're, you know, a real snob, then you delineate the fact that your degree is from Oxford as opposed to other places. Yeah, I don't have any letters.

• 15:54Chris Williamson?

  So you're telling me that my international marketing masters and your Oxford, whatever it is, evolutionary fucking psychology degree are of equal footing? Is that what we're saying?

• 16:06Macken Murphy?

  It's the, so I actually-

• 16:07Chris Williamson?

  Let's take that as a yes. Thank you. That'll do.

• 16:10Macken Murphy?

  And it's actually worth noting because I'm often called, you know, an evolutionary psychologist and I, you know, it's true that I'm in, I'm a PhD student at the psychology department at the University of Melbourne, but at Boston University, I did biological anthropology. At Oxford, I did cognitive and evolutionary anthropology. And so I had to take a lot of evsite courses. I understand the field very well, but I also have some kind of just basic, there's just some basic theoretical qualms with some of the, not to get myself in trouble, but not even, not even qualms. Let's just say that I think that there are more flexible approaches, such as behavioral ecology, that can yield more insights. And what you're talking about right now with the, I mean, very good hypotheses,

• 16:55Macken Murphy?

  right? It's not, it's not my area, but those are, those are very good and would really fit in to the behavioral ecology literature of, okay, in a cultural socio-ecological context, where being tan signals that I'm, you know, that I'm working in the fields and I don't really want to signal that, then maybe lightning does make sense, right?

• 17:14Chris Williamson?

  That everything's culturally mediated here because we have the exact opposite.

• 17:18Macken Murphy?

  And ecologically mediated because presumably if you were up north where working in the fields doesn't make you tan, then it wouldn't matter as much, right?

• 17:24Chris Williamson?

  Very interesting.

• 17:25Macken Murphy?

  And a whole lot of women's beauty signaling. It's very interesting to me. That so much of women's beauty signaling seems to be signaling that they don't work, right? Carrying a handbag that is like, it's just, it's to have it, you're like a clutch, right? Just constantly holding something is very inconvenient. Long nails, right? It makes it, even using a keyboard is tough with those, you know, it's difficult.

• 17:48Macken Murphy?

  Having, you know, long kind of hair that gets in the way and dresses that you couldn't sprint in, it's interesting. And then men's clothing, I think this is maybe changing a little bit, and there's definitely some cultural contexts where this isn't true, but a lot of, a lot of male fashion, like good male fashion, is incredibly practical typically. If a, if a man starts, you know, having too many pockets even, he starts to look a little ridiculous.

• 18:15Chris Williamson?

  Cantal tilt, the internet is obsessed with it.

• 18:19Macken Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 18:20Chris Williamson?

  What does the literature say? Do I need to have hunter eyes or prey eyes?

• 18:24Macken Murphy?

  Well, I mean, it's, it's, I'm not aware of any specific literature on cantal tilt. I'm sure that there's someone who's, who's really dug into what makes an attractive eye. There, there are some things that clearly make an attractive eye, such as having, you know, very, a, what they call, I believe it's a limbo ring, I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly, the, the dark ring around the color, people respond to that. The light white, right? Having that really clear sclera, people seem to really respond to that. Both of those are probably accused to health, although that's, that's still, you know, it's a putative indicator, it's, it's still being looked at. Eye color, very interesting. Basically, if you run a survey in the West, you know, like what, what, what eye color is sexiest? A lot of people will, like, and generally you'll find that people say, oh, I love blue

• 19:08Macken Murphy?

  eyes, right? It doesn't really come out in studies that there are strong eye color preferences. There, there seems to be a frequency dependent selection effect. One of my old mentors, Alexandra Oul, she looked into this and it does seem that, you know, if you're the only blue eyed guy in the room, then you look better than if everyone has blue eyes, right? And if you're the only brown eyed guy in the room, you look better than if everyone has brown eyes and so on, but which might maintain eye color diversity. Cantal tilt is interesting. I am, so there, there, there's definitely a lot of literature that I'm aware of on eyes, but cantal tilt seems to be a bit of a meme. I'm sure that there's

• 19:47Macken Murphy?

  some, I'm sure that there's some research on this that I'm just not aware of, but anecdotally, people seem to respond to it and.

• 19:58Macken Murphy?

  That said, though, I've become kind of acutely aware of it. And there are plenty of, again, it's kind of like the averages and symmetry thing. There are plenty of famous actors who are, you know, considered gorgeous by women who have a negative cantle, who have a positive cantle tilt. So, or the reverse, whichever one's the bad one. They've got, they've got the, the kind of sloping eyes.

• 20:18Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Why are faces so important? So there are many ways to display your lack of genetic mutation, or your fitness, or your robustness from the environment thus far in your life. It seems like an awful lot of what we do is centered around the face. Why do we have a particular high degree of sensitivity and finesse and ability to discern when it comes to the face? Why is so much of what we do? Why is it not the hands? Why is it not the arms? Body shape, we'll get on to waist to hip ratio, all that stuff. Like, those things are important. But everybody knows that there's been a person who's maybe not been in the

• 21:02Chris Williamson?

  best shape ever, but just has a gorgeous face, guy or girl. And you're like, fuck, like, they're hot. Yeah. I mean, you know, they could do with hitting the gym, but they're hot.

• 21:12Macken Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's, that's interesting. I mean, I'm, I'm not sure that there's, that there's anything. I mean, we see that bodies become more important than faces for short term mating, and faces become more important than bodies for long term mating. And there's a huge, you know, I had a conversation with Tanya Reynolds about this. And it was, it was like, why, like, why would that be the case? Because as you say, both should be indicators of the same putative, you know, underlying fitness indicators. I think that one thing that I would like to bring to this episode and kind of leave people with in this context and in others, is it's typically thought, and I think that this is in some contexts, the right way to think about it. But it's typically thought that beauty is a component

• 21:55Macken Murphy?

  of your mate value. Right? So it's like, you've got your personality, you've got the, the things you do, you've got the resources, you've got your willingness to invest, da, da, da, da. And then beauty is one of the list of things that you bring to the table. But really, I think a better way to think of it is that beauty is, and this, I'm certainly not unique in thinking this way.

• 22:16Macken Murphy?

  Beauty is a shortcut signal of your mate value, right?

• 22:23Macken Murphy?

  And so with facial attractiveness, right? Well, one of the themes that's been coming up in every conversation we've had about this today is that it's signaling underlying qualities that are maybe more important. And the same thing with bodily attractiveness as well. And if you think about it, it's like some of the things that, some of the things that we do, it's like, you can say, you can feel hard done by, and I totally understand it, that it's like, why do people with, you know, why are more facially attractive people? Why are we thinking that we have better personalities? Da, da, da, da, da, that sort of thing. But to an extent, it's like, well, if two people walk into a room and one of them, you know, their hair is well styled, well groomed, right? They've got the perfectly manicured stubble, or they've got makeup that's been styled perfectly,

• 23:08Macken Murphy?

  and their outfits on point, and everything's just working. It's like, and then the other person comes in and they've literally put in no effort, they've got bad heads, or their makeup's a mess, or they're not, you know, doing the natural, their nails aren't trimmed, their clothing is shit, right? It's like, if you're looking at those two people, all else being equal, if you have to make a guess, like, who's going to be a better husband and father? Who's going to be a better wife and mother, right? The person who is willing to do these extra things in order to socially signal? The person who has the excess time and resources to devote to those things? I don't think it's that, I don't think it's, they're probably quite conscientious, right? That they're going to this effort.

• 23:45Chris Williamson?

  Reliable, orderly.

• 23:46Macken Murphy?

  Yeah, so I would say to the basic question of why, why do faces matter? It's the same reason bodies matter. It's the same reason that style matters. It's a signal of qualities that matter more to us. I mean, we think of beauty as this extremely shallow thing to care about. And to an extent, it is, fair enough. But to another extent, the reason that we care about beauty in the first place is because it often signals deeper things.

• 24:10Chris Williamson?

  Reliable signal. So it got me thinking there where you were talking about how specifically facial attractiveness and beauty is kind of an aggregate of a bunch of other things that contribute to that.

• 24:22Macken Murphy?

  Yeah, and there's still a lot of mystery there.

• 24:24Chris Williamson?

  In the same way as a bank account, especially for a man, is an aggregate of a number of other things that he does. And so he's having a good body for men and women, perhaps for slightly different reasons. For a man, it might be something like dominance, aggression, but it's also other things like. Reliability, oddliness, ability to overcompaign, that's kind of sexy. Agency, reliability, consistency, smarts, to be able to actually understand what they're doing. And as with everything, and I love the, I love the fact that we started with the averageness. Because fishery and runaway is basically what GigaChat is, right? It's just this inside, like the most muscular guy had the most muscular son, had the most muscular son,

• 25:07Chris Williamson?

  had the most muscular son, and then you end up with GigaChat. But what you actually look at is for most people, there are traits that are good in moderate doses. And if you overshoot them, the same thing goes for the woman who's dolled up. It's nice that someone puts effort in, that the outfit works with the hair, with the makeup, with the nails, with everything else. But if you come in and you're completely caked, well, it looks like you're trying too hard. It looks like you might be compensating for something. The same thing goes, the same thing goes for the man. Well, we want a little bit of muscularity, but the absolutely jacked out of his mind bodybuilder. Well, what does that signal? Maybe it signals some sort of inner insecurity. Maybe this guy's trying to compensate for something. Maybe he's only going to live for another 10 years. A whole host of, I'm very concerned about his state of his mental health, all of these different things.

• 25:52Chris Williamson?

  So the averageness that we're talking about with regards to the face composition, and I do love that idea of like just processing speed. It's like, yep, eyes, nose, mouth, yeah, that looks, all of the things are there.

• 26:03Macken Murphy?

  That took me 0.3 seconds, I didn't have to hesitate.

• 26:05Chris Williamson?

  Away you go, beautiful. And we can fall in love with people's imperfections in a way, but their imperfections, I'm going to guess, are almost always within a particular bound of this is average. But yeah, I like the fact that there's a Goldilocks zone for most of these things. Some people love real muscular guys and some people real love more sort of skinny guys.

• 26:26Macken Murphy?

  Yeah, but this is, so this is a very complicated conversation. And I think I want to be careful about, again, conflating mathematical averageness with trait averageness, right? So with muscularity, it's a little, we don't see this preference for average muscularity, right? So we see a preference for average facial size, shape, placement of traits, right? But with muscularity, it's more complicated. I mean,

• 26:51Chris Williamson?

  Do women like muscular men?

• 26:52Macken Murphy?

  Yes, yeah, yeah. I mean, there's some, some don't, right? But, but there, there's a variety of convergent. And so I'm not speaking, I'm not saying that like all women prefer muscles. And I'm also not saying, as you noted, that as muscular as possible is optimal, right? In this, and it's also possible that, you know, a certain degree of muscularity is sexy in some contexts, but not in all, right? Like the bodies that are popular in pornography might not actually look that great in real life, right? There's something about like the kind of super stimulus of like a super muscular lean dude.

• 27:27Macken Murphy?

  Or someone who's, you know, had their body done to an, to an extreme degree that might work on camera, but not, you know, in the real world. But in any case, muscularity, there was a recent meta-analysis that just got published on this. Or I believe it just got published, it might be, you know, still in the kind of public awaiting review sphere. But certainly, certainly the results are out. And they looked at kind of all the studies on predictors of mating success in all these different ways. And it just sort of is the case, right? In the sense that regardless of what people say is attractive and what isn't, men who are muscular have higher mating success than men who aren't, right? And men who are more bodily masculine in general seem to have higher mating success.

• 28:11Macken Murphy?

  And so there's a couple of different reasons why that might be. I mean, the first thought is pretty obvious. It's like, maybe guys with muscles are just sexier, right? And there are individual studies where it's like you show women a bunch of bodies and you're like, who's hottest in this crew? And it's like a guy who's more muscular than average and leaner than average, right? Not stage-ready bodybuilder, but certainly like, pretty high standard, right? There's other studies that don't show that. But there are other ways in which.

• 28:43Macken Murphy?

  There are other ways in which muscularity can help you to compete for mates without making you more attractive. So one route by which this could be the case, there was a really interesting study, which you might have already read, I'm sure one of your guests. David Putz? It might have been him. It was the frat boy study. So they studied a bunch of frat boys. I'll, I'll email this to you afterwards because you're gonna like reading it. They studied a bunch of frat boys and they had them rate each other on like who would roll who, basically like who, who would be the best fighter, who's the most intimidating, that sort of question. I can't remember the scale items they used. And then they had women rate the frat boys as like, yeah, yeah, how hot are these guys? Yep. And really weird result. How hot the women said the guys were didn't have, it

• 29:26Macken Murphy?

  wasn't a strong predictor of male mating success. Now mating success is very hard to measure. They made, they measured it by number of mates. So we'll, we'll talk about this more in a second. But at least in that study with those measurements, the intimidation factor was better, right? It was better than being hot. It was better to be scary than hot. And so one potential idea is that if you're a super jacked scary dude and you're talking to a girl at the bar, everyone else is like, all right, that's, that may as well be his wife. Like, I'm like, I'm not going anywhere near this situation. She's off limits. Whereas if you're a super scrawny guy who is, you know, is frail, maybe, maybe, maybe not. That's one idea. But another idea, and this is, I think, another likely hypothesis,

• 30:09Macken Murphy?

  frankly, is that, and this goes back to the masculine new trade off thing that we were talking about earlier, is that maybe the traits associated with accruing muscles are also the same traits associated with aggressive pursuit of short term mating, right? And so measuring mating success with number of mates in that case, right? They didn't look at how good looking were these girls? How intelligent were these women? How high mate value in general were these women, right? They didn't, they didn't look at that. It was literally just how many people have you slept with? Which, say what you will, I mean, that's an indicator of something. It's, but it might not be that much more of an indicator than you're not an incel, right? Because after that, it's like, if you're, if you're at least at the bare minimum level of attractiveness to engage in short term mating, and that's

• 30:54Macken Murphy?

  not a particularly low level, right? That is at least medium, surely, but.

• 31:00Macken Murphy?

  Once you're at that level, if you want to, in a modern mating market, you can have, you could have a one night stand every week. So it's like, it might not be that great of an indicator, but it is interesting.

• 31:11Chris Williamson?

  What about weight, BMI, body shape for women?

• 31:16Macken Murphy?

  Well, I'll note briefly on BMI for men, it is interesting. There was a, there was a dating app data set where it indicated that the best BMI to be as a man was about 27, right? And it's, it's just hard to know how to interpret that because 27 could mean like, oh, that dude is jacked.

• 31:31Chris Williamson?

  There's many ways to reach 27 BMI, but that's a, that's a flaw in BMI as a rule.

• 31:37Macken Murphy?

  Yeah. And that's kind of why I wanted to introduce that is that BMI is a great measurement of weight per height, because that's the only thing it is, right? It's not, it's not a great measurement of health. It certainly tells you something. It's not a great measure of muscularity. It certainly tells you something, but it is interesting. So, I mean, we're speaking in a Western context and this is, I just know that this is what's going to happen. I'm going to tell, I'm going to talk about the actual findings from the anthropological literature on attractive body shapes and BMI in women. And a bunch of people in the comments are going to talk about how I'm pandering to women and I'm a simp and I'm just trying to make people feel better.

• 32:17Chris Williamson?

  And you're among, you're among great company.

• 32:19Macken Murphy?

  Yeah, no, I know. I'm just, I'm just saying that upfront to take some steam out of that, you know, silly response.

• 32:24Chris Williamson?

  I, I don't know whether you saw, I got to interject. I don't know whether you saw that me, you, William Costello and Alexander Date Site got lumped into a new term. Did you see this? We were given a name.

• 32:36Macken Murphy?

  I don't even want to hear it. Tell me.

• 32:37Chris Williamson?

  So here's the problem. And if you want to create a name to like, bring people in and kind of mock them as, as someone, you can't make the name sound cool.

• 32:48Macken Murphy?

  What did they tell us?

• 32:49Chris Williamson?

  The intellectual manosphere.

• 32:51Macken Murphy?

  Oh no, oh no.

• 32:53Chris Williamson?

  We're part of the intellectual manosphere.

• 32:55Macken Murphy?

  Well, that you know what's

• 32:56Chris Williamson?

  Academic manosphere was also thrown around as well.

• 32:59Macken Murphy?

  Is that most of my, I can't really fit into that because most of my following is women. So that's, so I'm just, you have to take me out.

• 33:07Chris Williamson?

  Unfortunately, you're a part of it. You don't get to choose.

• 33:09Macken Murphy?

  Okay, the intellectual manosphere is, uh, yeah, what a, what a huge error to coin.

• 33:17Chris Williamson?

  What, to think that I'm intellectual and you're a part of the manosphere?

• 33:20Macken Murphy?

  It's, um, yeah, well, I, I think that you're not giving yourself enough credit. Um, I think that you're, you're clearly a very sharp guy who knows literature better than many, um, better than many master's students, frankly, but.

• 33:33Chris Williamson?

  Body shape, BMI.

• 33:33Macken Murphy?

  Body shape, BMI. Yeah. So this, this is, uh,

• 33:38Macken Murphy?

  in a Western context, quite low BMIs are attractive to men, right? I'm not denying that at all, right? Uh, for the most part in, in, and in an industrialized context generally, right? Among wealthy groups of people, right? Or historically wealthy where, where starvation isn't a problem. Yeah, there, there's, there's a lot of evidence that men prefer lighter body weights, right? But if you take a more broad view, it doesn't, this is not, and this is, this is going to get into some of the reservations I have about just jumping to evpsych as the tool to use. Cause people have come up with these evpsych theories for like, why women, why, why thinner women are, you know, a better choice?

• 34:18Macken Murphy?

  And then it's like, okay, well, we didn't evolve in like a modern Western media, uh, hyper wealthy, at least historically, unlimited food at the grocery store down the street situation, right? We evolved in a pretty, you know, probably unstable, probably relatively scarce environment, or can we at least say that? And so if you look at, you know, more traditional societies, oftentimes, oftentimes plumper is better, right? Where it's literally women with more body fat are considered sexier, right?

• 34:51Chris Williamson?

  Presumably up to a limit.

• 34:53Macken Murphy?

  Yeah, but you'd be shocked. I mean, if you look at, for example, uh, and this isn't, this isn't necessarily a more traditional society. It's just a society that historically has dealt with more resource scarcity than urban Japan. But if you look at, say, the South African Zulu, you'll consistently find BMIs of up to 38 being considered very attractive. And in, in the West, we'd be like, that is a, that's a very heavy person, right? Just frankly, right?

• 35:16Macken Murphy?

  So what's going on there? Well, one thing to notice first is that tons of women's evolved sexual signaling is conspicuous fat deposits, right? So we're the only primate that has year-round fat deposits on the breasts, right? For example, we have conspicuous fat deposits on the buttocks as well, especially in women, right? And on the hips, right? So fat, to an extent, in women is, clearly works as a sexual signal, right? There's something desirable there. And it seems that, right, in a, within, in a within cultures context, there's some evidence that, within cultures at least, people who are enduring more stress and scarcity tend

• 36:00Macken Murphy?

  to opt for heavier mates, right? Men tend to opt for heavier women. And those who are in a period of abundance, right, they've got lots of resources, tend to opt for relatively lighter mates. Another piece of evidence for this, right, can be found. So that's within cultures cross-sectionally. We can also see this evidence across time, right? For example, American Playboy centerfolds, right? They become heavier when the economy goes down and they become lighter when the economy goes up.

• 36:27Chris Williamson?

  You're kidding me.

• 36:27Macken Murphy?

  Yeah. Yeah, yeah, that's a real result. And I'll send you the PDF. Another...

• 36:32Chris Williamson?

  What's the, before you get into that, what's the proposed mechanism? What do you think's going on to make this...

• 36:38Macken Murphy?

  Oh, excuse me, I should have, I should have said upfront. Imagine you're in an environment where calories are either absent or unstable, right? So you're in a situation where it's like, I don't know, either I don't have food right now, or I don't know if I'm going to have food next month. Your brain is trying to determine who you should mate with. It's doing, it's doing calculations behind the scenes, saying who's mate value in this socio-ecological context is desirable. And so the theory, right, and this certainly isn't my theory, I'm not presenting it as such, but the theory from this tradition of research, the environmental security hypothesis...

• 37:20Macken Murphy?

  Proposes that, and there's convergent forms of evidence, which we'll discuss and already have discussed since, proposes that if you're in that situation, it's like, okay, well, who's going to be fertile if there's a famine? Or who's going to be fertile during a famine? Right? Who's going, who is able to obtain calories? Right? So women engage in tons of caloric acquisition in traditional environments, oftentimes more than the men, in fact, despite, you know, Western conceptions of this. And so, because they're doing, you know, they're, they're gathering tubers and to an extent engaged in hunting as well, but mostly gathering, right? Gathering fruits, nuts, berries, all the stereotypical things. And so you're looking around, you're in the situation where you're literally hungry, and it's like, who's, who's sexy right now? And then a woman who is clearly advertising that she can obtain calories, survive a famine,

• 38:04Macken Murphy?

  and stay fertile, right, during periods of scarcity, right? Because low body fat is associated with infertility after a point, right? It's, it's an incredible suppressant.

• 38:15Macken Murphy?

  Well, that, that woman is going to be more attractive than the woman who looks like, if anything goes wrong, she's going to die, right? Now, in a Western context, where you're not necessarily thinking that, right? Where that's, that's not an issue, well, then you might be concerned with things like status, right? Signaling that like you can afford to go to the gym, that sort of thing. Then you're going to be concerned with things like youth, right? Having, you know, youth and let's say null parity, right? The state of not having had kids yet, right? Which is signaled by an incredibly svelte body, right? And so maybe it makes sense in a resource abundant context to prefer that, but in a resource scarce context, which is where most of our evolved psychology occurred, we see, we see the, we see that heavier mates seem to be preferred.

• 39:00Macken Murphy?

  Now, the evidence for this, and I'll just recap very, very quickly. Within cultures, it seems that those who are, you know, on the, on the lower end of things, resources wise, tend to prefer heavier mates. Across time, right? It seems that the media that men consume of, you know, pornographic media, the women get heavier when things are going poorly economically, and they get lighter when things are going well. So that's across time, within cultures. Now, let's talk about within individuals. There's a very funny study where they literally, they showed up at the university dining hall, and it's a genius study, to be honest. And they're like, okay, you guys are about to have dinner, which of these, you know, what do you, what do you, what, what weight do you think is sexiest? What body type do you think is sexiest?

• 39:43Macken Murphy?

  And they found that before dinner, the men preferred heavier mates than after dinner. Right. So now we've got within persons evidence, within cultures evidence and across time evidence. And then we've got this very, you know, we talked about flashy theories that that do well. We've got a great story as well. So you were asking about BMI and its attractiveness in women. Yes, it's true that in, you know, a Western context and maybe broadly in an industrialized context, this is more attractive, but that doesn't mean that that's the default state of our species. And, you know, plenty of men prefer women with with more curvaceous figures. I mean, I honestly, I remember, um, I think, did you recently have Jordan Peterson on?

• 40:24Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 40:25Macken Murphy?

  I'm remembering correctly.

• 40:25Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 40:26Macken Murphy?

  I remember when he, you know, had the gall to tweet not attractive with the picture of the plus size model, who has a hip to waist ratio, a waist to hip ratio of like point seven, an incredibly feminine, symmetrical, average face. And it's like, maybe not to you, but to most men throughout history, that would be one of the highest mate value women that they'd ever encountered.

• 40:49Chris Williamson?

  If we entered a recession next week, then it might get a little bit more, she might be a little bit more attractive.

• 40:53Macken Murphy?

  Yeah, I mean, and I think that she, she, I mean, not speaking about any specific women, you know, that that's certainly not, it's not certainly not my style to talk, to comment on like specific women's bodies. But like, it was one of those glaring examples where it's like, okay, well, you know, Dr. Peterson, you're clearly not aware of this literature.

• 41:09Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. So a couple of interesting, first off, is there a name for this? Is it like the economic mediation of female BMI hypothesis?

• 41:17Macken Murphy?

  So I've heard it called the environmental security hypothesis. But, you know, the last, it started getting research on it about 20 years ago. Then, you know, it just, they just hit a few home runs and then it was like, okay, this seems to be true.

• 41:32Chris Williamson?

  All right.

• 41:33Macken Murphy?

  But again, it's, this is the difference between behavioral ecology and evolutionary psychology is that evolutionary psychology, if you read one of their literature reviews on thinness, you'll just read about how, you know, not, you know, I'm not trying to caricature anybody, but you'll often read stuff about just why thinness, our psychology evolved for thinness. And then if you read someone from a more behavioral ecology standpoint, it's like, well, in as much as we have a default state, it seems to be towards, you know, slightly heavier, right, than is current, but we don't really have a default state. It's flexible based on the environment. And, uh, and that's, yeah, I'd say that's, that's pretty tied up with a bow.

• 42:10Chris Williamson?

  So male preference for female body size over time as gauged by BMI has tends to it's malleable.

• 42:21Macken Murphy?

  It varies based on your socioecology and it varies on the individual level as well. Like if you're, if you grew up in a stressed, resource deprived environment, then yeah, you're probably going to prefer.

• 42:32Chris Williamson?

  Bigger women as you grow up.

• 42:33Macken Murphy?

  Yeah, probably.

• 42:34Chris Williamson?

  I wondered.

• 42:35Macken Murphy?

  That there's enough evidence to say that.

• 42:36Chris Williamson?

  That would be fascinating to see how long it imprints, just how malleable are you? Is there a period during your formative years, if you were in poverty during your teenage years?

• 42:44Macken Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 42:45Chris Williamson?

  Does that lock in a particular type? That would be fascinating to study.

• 42:49Macken Murphy?

  So this is why I love behavioral ecology, because they, they actually, they do something called the phenotypic gambit, where they say, you know, everyone else can handle the mechanisms. Well, we'll just figure out what's going on, what the relationships between variables are. And so they, you know, they, they come in like kind of cowboys and just get the relationships done and then leave the mechanisms. But it is interesting. It's like you could have a cultural adaptation where it's like cultures over time figure out, oh, you know, preferring lighter or heavier women makes a lot of sense, right? Or you could have individual level developmental mechanisms, right? Where it's like during development, your brain builds itself differently. And then you can also have these immediate cues. I mean, the hunger study where it's literally before versus after dinner.

• 43:33Macken Murphy?

  Come on, that's your brain, me within an hour, changing your mate preferences based on how hungry you are at the moment.

• 43:38Chris Williamson?

  Well, I mean, you know, two areas that I got fascinated by last year, Candace Blake's sexy selfies study, right? Which is women responding to the local socioeconomic environment by beautification and sort of posting photos with, I think she used like Instagram or something to kind of reverse.

• 43:56Macken Murphy?

  Yeah, so Twitter and Instagram, yeah.

• 43:59Chris Williamson?

  That was one, and then just all of the sex ratio stuff. Like we, like plants, respond to our local ecology. So you are, this is the first time I've even heard the word about behavioral ecology.

• 44:12Macken Murphy?

  Behavioral ecology.

• 44:13Chris Williamson?

  Behavioral ecology studies. It's the first time I've ever done it, but it seems to be blending two worlds that I'm pretty fascinated by. One being the more behavioral economics side, the Rory Sutherland's of the world. And the other being the evolutionary psychology, the David Buss's of the world.

• 44:27Macken Murphy?

  Yeah, so it's actually, it's, it's about as old as evolutionary psychology in terms of its application to humans. And what, okay, so.

• 44:38Macken Murphy?

  So Candace Blake is my supervisor, right? That's, that's my mentor. That's, and she is-

• 44:43Chris Williamson?

  Good chick, great hair, great studies.

• 44:45Macken Murphy?

  An incredibly smart woman who is one of the only people in the human evolutionary sciences who I agree with about everything, right? Like I, like it's, it's one of the reasons that I chose her as my supervisor when I was, you know, figuring out after Oxford, like who am I gonna do a PhD with is that we got on phone calls and it was like, oh my God, finally someone who-

• 45:05Chris Williamson?

  Did we just become best friends?

• 45:07Macken Murphy?

  Yeah. So it was like just agreement, agreement, agreement. And you've also spoken to Rob Brooks, who's my co-supervisor.

• 45:11Chris Williamson?

  Of course.

• 45:12Macken Murphy?

  So you're slowly making your way through my entire lab where we have that, we have probably the highest percentage of Chris Williamson appearances.

• 45:19Chris Williamson?

  That's not why, I mean, David Buss isn't far off. Williams been on, Buss has been on.

• 45:22Macken Murphy?

  Our lab's smaller. So that's why I said percentage.

• 45:25Chris Williamson?

  The highest saturation level.

• 45:27Macken Murphy?

  Yeah, highest saturation. There's only a few more that you need to hit.

• 45:29Chris Williamson?

  Who was the guy, who was the guy that did the body dysmorphic stuff? Aussie dude. Candace sent me him.

• 45:34Macken Murphy?

  Hmm.

• 45:35Chris Williamson?

  Fuck, he was on the show not long ago.

• 45:37Macken Murphy?

  Not Scott, Scott Griffiths.

• 45:38Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 45:39Macken Murphy?

  It was Scott Griffiths. You had him on as well.

• 45:41Chris Williamson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 45:41Macken Murphy?

  That's, I'm not even joking. That's, so I attend their weekly lab meetings, literally every week.

• 45:46Chris Williamson?

  Who was the dude?

• 45:47Macken Murphy?

  Every time they have it.

• 45:48Chris Williamson?

  Was Rob the guy that did video games?

• 45:51Macken Murphy?

  Uh, yeah. So he's, he's into some of the techie stuff, but he's a, he's a, he's a hardcore biologist.

• 45:55Chris Williamson?

  But he's the dude that did, uh, when a woman-

• 45:57Macken Murphy?

  Like cyber sex stuff.

• 45:58Chris Williamson?

  No, when a woman outperforms guys in Halo 3. Was that Rob? I think it was.

• 46:03Macken Murphy?

  Maybe. I'm not sure.

• 46:04Chris Williamson?

  Anyway, anyway, we're getting, we're getting, we're getting in the weeds.

• 46:06Macken Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 46:06Chris Williamson?

  But, um, so this is what I wanted to get to.

• 46:08Macken Murphy?

  Who knows who?

• 46:09Chris Williamson?

  Um, BMI, interesting for women, fluctuates over time. We respond to the local ecology. We respond

• 46:15Macken Murphy?

  Yep.

• 46:15Chris Williamson?

  across life within situations as well.

• 46:17Macken Murphy?

  Yes. Yeah.

• 46:18Chris Williamson?

  What about waist to hip ratio?

• 46:20Macken Murphy?

  Waist to hip ratio. Well, this is another one that's interesting, right? So I just spoke to Barnaby Dixon about it and I, I feel like I'm getting myself in trouble. I will make a note just about behavioral ecology.

• 46:29Chris Williamson?

  This is an audience that has had every evolutionary psychologist on that I've been able to find. They're educated, they're biased.

• 46:35Macken Murphy?

  No, but that's, but that's, that's, that's worse because I'm about to say another thing where, you know, maybe I'm pushing back against evsite and maybe and a lot of, and I will note that a lot of evolutionary psychologists do actually think about things more in a behavioral ecology way, like almost despite themselves.

• 46:48Chris Williamson?

  They just maybe don't attribute it to.

• 46:49Macken Murphy?

  Yeah. And so what behavioral ecology is, so evolutionary psychology, just historically, it is the intellectual child of cognitive psychology and evolutionary biology at that time in history. Right. And there's, and I would say that most evolutionary psychologists have been psychologists who learned biological stuff later. Right. Behavioral ecology is, we call it human behavioral ecology, but it's really just like behavioral ecology is a standard powerful tool for studying animals. And it's just reapplying the same tool, the same set of principles to humans. Right. So it's not really, it's, it's in some ways

• 47:30Macken Murphy?

  it's simpler, in some ways it's more complicated. Uh, and there, there, the fields can complement each other in a lot of ways. They certainly inform each other in a lot of ways. And there are some individual evolutionary psychologists who have done incredible work that is very consistent with behavioral ecology, like Dallian Wilson, the classic homicide studies with income inequality in Chicago. Fascinating and very, you know, behavioral ecology-esque. You want to talk about waste to hip ratio? And, and I want to say that I love evolutionary psychology. Uh, but if you open an evolutionary psychology textbook, you'll generally read that it's a universal preference that men like this very, you know.

• 48:07Chris Williamson?

  Not point six eight? Is that the positive ideal?

• 48:10Macken Murphy?

  About point seven. Yeah. Uh, so, so point six eight, sure. And it's interesting because we see that in, you know, westernized college students, you'll see an even more extreme, you know, closer to Kim Kardashian type ratio, right? But if you go to, and this is, you know, this is still kind of in its nascent stages. It's possible that this turns out not to be true. But there is this other idea that it's like, well, maybe in a, maybe in a super rich Western environment, that makes a lot of sense. Right. But I was speaking to Barnaby Dixon, right? Who's the beard guy who we mentioned earlier. And I just asked him about this. I was like, is there, is there anything on variation? Like, I know there's the BMI thing, but what about the, and this was, this was off podcast. I was

• 48:52Macken Murphy?

  like, what about the waste to hip ratio stuff? And he was saying that he has some. Indicative evidence that maybe in environments where women are doing more physical labor, that super wide hips, which makes it harder to run, harder to jog, harder to do athletics. I mean, if you look at like incredible female athletes, they often don't, you know, they often do have relatively masculinized bodies. Maybe a more masculine figure in women is preferred as well. So it's like the waist to hip ratio stuff, it makes sense why it's attractive, right? It's like it signals null parity, as we discussed, right? It becomes harder to maintain, you know, this Coca-Cola shape after you've had children, unfortunately, right? It become, it becomes more difficult as you age as well.

• 49:37Macken Murphy?

  And so it could be an honest signal to what we might call future reproductive potential, right? It also might be an honest signal to fertility, there's more mixed results on that.

• 49:45Chris Williamson?

  I've seen a lot of mixed results on waist to hip ratios association with fertility.

• 49:49Macken Murphy?

  I know.

• 49:49Chris Williamson?

  Basically like zero.

• 49:51Macken Murphy?

  Yeah, so some people are like, no, it is, it does associate, maybe it just doesn't associate in a modern context, but it is legit. And then, which is possible, right? And then there's other people who say, no, that's just a bad idea, right? But the, but it, but it is true that it's like women who are, you know, who have the most quote unquote, future reproductive potential and are fertile, right? Women in their early twenties, let's say, are generally going to have this, you know, crazy waist to hip ratio and it becomes harder to maintain after they've had more kids, harder to maintain after they've aged. So, so it does kind of make sense that it's like, okay, that's a signal. Again, it goes back to like signaling underlying qualities. It does make sense that that's, that that's kind of what, what happens there.

• 50:33Macken Murphy?

  But then if you think about it more broadly, again, just stepping back and, you know, plenty of evolutionary psychological accounts are just correct. And there's certainly a huge contingent of people who think that they're always compatible with behavioral ecology. But this would be an area where it's like, well,

• 50:49Macken Murphy?

  Maybe that's not representative of our ancestry, actually. Maybe there's actually, we have a more modest preference in contexts where, you know, women are working all day and you have to choose someone like what, I don't know.

• 51:00Chris Williamson?

  Well, I'm gonna guess, just to check, I'm gonna guess that the, um, wherever it was, West African, South African, uh, study that you looked at.

• 51:08Macken Murphy?

  I didn't look at the study, it was signed by me, yeah.

• 51:10Chris Williamson?

  Him, uh, but for, uh, thirty eight BMI was the one that was talking about.

• 51:15Macken Murphy?

  Oh, oh, yeah, the South African Zulu, yeah, yeah, that's, that's not him, yeah.

• 51:18Chris Williamson?

  Um, that I'm going to guess that those women aren't going to be shaped like a snowman. They're going to be shaped with probably an awful lot of fat deposits in the ass.

• 51:30Macken Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 51:31Chris Williamson?

  And really, really big boobs.

• 51:32Macken Murphy?

  Hmm.

• 51:33Chris Williamson?

  So even within that, I would be very interested to look at how does waist to hip ratio mediate that BMI? Because bigger girls that are bigger in the wrong areas can look less sexy than bigger girls that are bigger in other areas, right? In the same way as the dude, exactly as you said, a twenty eight BMI, like, is that a twenty seven BMI for a guy?

• 51:57Macken Murphy?

  Yeah, what does that mean?

• 51:58Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, is it all in the gut or is it all on the shoulders?

• 52:00Macken Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 52:01Chris Williamson?

  It's very different, you can move the, the body shape around.

• 52:05Macken Murphy?

  Yeah, I mean, that's, that's a very good point. Uh, and with that study, I'll note that it was, that, that it was up to thirty eight because you, you were asking the context of a limit, like, when does it, when is it, when, when's it become a problem? And that would be a very, you know, more extreme example, right? Um, but, you know, there, there are, there are some groups, actually, now that I'm thinking about it, where it was just basically, like, there, there are some groups historically where the heavier the bride is, the higher the bride price is.

• 52:34Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I've seen.

• 52:35Macken Murphy?

  Yeah, so it's like, it's this whole, this whole view, again, going back to the whole, like, not attractive thing, it's like, speak for yourself.

• 52:43Chris Williamson?

  Well, I mean, just to add on to that.

• 52:45Macken Murphy?

  But yeah, I agree with you that there's gonna be an inter, interaction with waist to hip ratio and the original, it's funny that you mention it, because the original evolutionary psychology studies on this, which were like, what's an attractive female body? They, they were using drawn figures, which isn't great, but they made a matrix of like heavier and curvier. And they were like, oh, the heavier doesn't seem to matter as long as they're curvy.

• 53:02Chris Williamson?

  Interesting.

• 53:02Macken Murphy?

  But that was, those are the originals.

• 53:03Chris Williamson?

  But that's what I would have predicted.

• 53:05Macken Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 53:05Chris Williamson?

  That, that the heavier can increase, you get, uh, how would you say, like, more?

• 53:12Chris Williamson?

  Leeway, there's more buffer with heavy as long as curvy is retained.

• 53:16Macken Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 53:16Chris Williamson?

  And the reverse wouldn't be true.

• 53:18Macken Murphy?

  And it's probably just, just so we're not only talking about this, because a lot of the things that you're saying are very likely true, but also so extrapolable to men in the sense that it's like BMI of 30 probably is still sexy. If you've got big shoulders, wide arms. But again, if you're shaped, if you've got super skinny arms, twig legs, and you've got, you know, just a huge pot belly, you know, and I know, I understand that some people are going to be listening to this and feeling, you know, self-conscious of that. There's other things you can do. It doesn't matter. But that's just a different 30.

• 53:52Chris Williamson?

  Everyone that listens to this podcast is jacked, so it's okay.

• 53:57Chris Williamson?

  So the interesting thing that I was thinking about there to just add on, you won't have seen this because you don't, you're not as terminally online as I am. Sports Illustrated just had to let like a shit ton of its staff go and Jordan retweeted his old tweet.

• 54:10Macken Murphy?

  Okay.

• 54:11Chris Williamson?

  Um, I, I think that he foresaw like a Cassandra complex type thing.

• 54:16Macken Murphy?

  If he said, if he said, if he, if, if, well, you know, actually I thought it was such a rude thing to say about a woman that I didn't, didn't fuck with it anyway, but you know.

• 54:26Chris Williamson?

  What role does height play in attracting men and women for men and women?

• 54:30Macken Murphy?

  Yeah, it's interesting. Well, I think that let's, let's get men out of the way. Let's, let's get the, you know, since.

• 54:37Chris Williamson?

  Just like the blue pilled cuck that you are, let's get men out of the way and get on to women. We're in good, we're in good company.

• 54:43Macken Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. No. The, well, this is, this is one of the things that I say where people are like, he's black pilled. And it's like, okay, that's, I'm, I'm so upset that that's the.

• 54:54Chris Williamson?

  If you can, if you can manage to thread the needle between all of the pills at once.

• 54:57Macken Murphy?

  Yes.

• 54:58Chris Williamson?

  If you can be bigoted and cooked in the same podcast, that means that you're doing something right.

• 55:03Macken Murphy?

  Sure.

• 55:04Chris Williamson?

  And you've managed to do both so far.

• 55:05Macken Murphy?

  So yeah, what a disaster. That's, um, yeah, so I'm, I'm upset as long as, you know,

• 55:10Chris Williamson?

  Everyone's upset with you.

• 55:11Macken Murphy?

  As long as extremists on both sides and, you know, reasonable people. So well, height, actually, I think that I don't think I'm going to say anything particularly surprising. Every inch that if you're a shorter guy, every inch that you add, and this is based on a couple of different data sets. I'm not just looking at one study here.

• 55:30Macken Murphy?

  It, you know, looking at things like just women's stated preferences, uh, women in speed dating studies, women in dating app swiping, right? Dating app filters as well as response to, you know, online ads for, you know, like I'm single, that kind of. So there's a bunch of different evidence that women like a very tall man who is not too very tall. Right? So if you graphed women's height preferences, it would look kind of like a candy cane, right? Where it's like, if you're, if you're very short and then adding a few inches really increases your attractiveness. Like the difference between being five, four and five, eight, that's a big deal. Right? That's, that's going from a bit of a problem to actually probably not that much of a problem.

• 56:15Macken Murphy?

  Then it starts to taper off around six foot one, right? So it's like you're getting every inch is sick. And then around six foot one, it starts to taper off, which is hilarious because, you know, the average height of American men, I think it's about five foot nine and on dating apps. I think it's about six foot one. I'll have to double check that, which is just ridiculous. Height inflation is such a disaster.

• 56:34Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 56:35Macken Murphy?

  I'm considering getting leg extensions just because.

• 56:37Chris Williamson?

  Heightflation and hoflation, the two, the two maladies of 2024.

• 56:41Macken Murphy?

  Yeah. So the, once you get to around six foot one, you start to get kind of diminishing returns per inch. And that seems to settle down around six foot three, six foot three to six foot five. There seems to be about, you know, even it doesn't seem like being maybe six foot five is, is better. Maybe it's not, but it doesn't seem to be that big of a deal, whether you're six foot three, six foot four, six foot five. Then around six foot six, six foot seven, six foot eight. That's when it's like, okay, this is definitely not optimal, right? This is not ideal, but again, it's like a candy cane. So it comes down, but you're still better off being like basketball player tall than being five foot 10. Right? And it's interesting because this this data converges with a very funny anecdotal experience. I know one of the only men ever to lie about his height on a dating app to

• 57:25Macken Murphy?

  make himself shorter. He's six foot six and he claims that he's six foot five because he's like six foot six just scares him away.

• 57:31Chris Williamson?

  Well, to be honest, like looking up, if you're a five foot six chick, like, what do you know about anything over six feet tall? You can't even reach six feet tall. Like, you don't know what's up there. You can't you can't get up there.

• 57:44Macken Murphy?

  Well, one thing that one thing that is interesting, though, is that it's not so a lot of people think, and this is the intuition, is like, they want a man who's taller than themselves. And it's like, they want a man who's taller than average. So it's not that they're looking up and saying, oh, that's that's a lot taller than me. It's that they're looking at you and looking at the guys around you and they're like, oh, he's the tallest one. That's all.

• 58:03Chris Williamson?

  All of my fucking friends in Austin are tall. Super annoying.

• 58:05Macken Murphy?

  Yeah. Well, you're you're quite tall. You're five ten. So he's a little taller than average.

• 58:10Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. So five, five, ten and a half, I think, technically, if I was if I was posting it on a Blackpill forum. But all of my friends, my housemate's six four. Another one of my friends is six four. Another one of my friends is six two. So.

• 58:22Macken Murphy?

  If I ever have to use a dating app, I'm six foot four. And I'm showing up in stilt.

• 58:27Chris Williamson?

  Fuck it. All right. So that's for men. Height. I saw, and I cited this a bunch, that the average preference and difference between men for women is 21 centimeters taller and women for men is 16 centimeters shorter. This holds, is this similar to any of the stuff you know?

• 58:47Macken Murphy?

  That's that. Yeah. So that that sounds about right.

• 58:49Chris Williamson?

  Got it right, baby. Fucking bro science for the win.

• 58:53Macken Murphy?

  Yeah, it's a I believe that was actually a speed dating study that you're referencing, if you're talking about the same one, where it was like, what height was optimal? And they interpret it as a ratio, right? Where men prefer somewhat shorter and women prefer significantly taller. Men's preferences are kind of more interesting than women's, but they're also so much lighter that it's almost not worth talking about them. But we can. It seems to be that men prefer women who are about average height, or maybe a moderate amount shorter than themselves. It's kind of unclear why. And I think that a combination of factors, it's a slight preference, but I would say that a combination of factors make it such that tall women, and I say this as

• 59:35Macken Murphy?

  someone who's dating, you know, absolutely lovely, very beautiful, but also very tall woman. Tall women, I think, have it hardest, just on the mating market from a height perspective.

• 59:45Chris Williamson?

  Why I called it the tall girl problem?

• 59:47Macken Murphy?

  Yeah, I heard you say that. Was that to Candace?

• 59:49Chris Williamson?

  Said it. I shell that theory. I've only come up with two cool names in all of evolutionary psychology, tall girl problem and male sedation hypothesis. But I'm shit at science, great at memeing. So I played toward my strengths.

• 1:00:02Macken Murphy?

  I'll have to talk to you afterwards and tell you some of the theories that I'm working on testing and.

• 1:00:07Chris Williamson?

  Tall girl problem is about socioeconomics, not about height.

• 1:00:10Macken Murphy?

  Yeah, I heard you talk about it in that context, but it works in terms of height because well, two things happen, right? One is that, and it might be similar to the socioeconomic situation, although one thing that's interesting, right? And it's worth kind of as a supplement to the modeling work. So Candace's modeling work, obviously a super cool study, very interesting. But then it's like, well, richer women are more married and less divorced, more educated women are more married and less divorced than less educated. And so it's like this whole kind of meme of like, oh, careful, you know, careful ladies, the richer you get, the harder it's going to be for you to date. It's like, okay, theory, fine, modeling, fine, practice, they're doing better than the rest of the women.

• 1:00:49Chris Williamson?

  I would be very interested to look at that longitudinally over the next 10 years.

• 1:00:53Macken Murphy?

  I think it's going to get even better for them. And the reason I think that is because what we're seeing in Europe is that women are becoming more and more willing to date hypogamously. So we're seeing much more of these patterns where women who are super educated are like, you know what, sexy plumber, sexy firefighter, let's, let's have it.

• 1:01:09Chris Williamson?

  Have you looked at the relationship outcomes for those relationships, longevity, satisfaction?

• 1:01:13Macken Murphy?

  Well, this is something we can talk about as well. I mean, in, in the West, we see that there's that these, you know, these relationships for the women make more. You know, maybe are more likely to have issues, but there's a real question of like, is that just, I mean, this would be my first gut reaction is it's like, well, they can, they feel they can leave.

• 1:01:32Chris Williamson?

  Well, I mean, look, so this is, I love the.

• 1:01:35Macken Murphy?

  Those are the two ideas, right? It's preferences or they feel they can leave.

• 1:01:38Chris Williamson?

  So I love the tall girl problem. I think that it explains an awful lot from, and the reason that I came up with it originally was I wanted to explain to educated and or wealthy women that were struggling to date that they weren't personally cursed, that their preference on average for men that are as wealthy or more and as educated or more means that it amounts to a diminishing return.

• 1:02:00Macken Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:00Chris Williamson?

  If you're standing atop your own hierarchy, it's very difficult to look at above and across the next one, especially when that one is slowly kind of.

• 1:02:07Macken Murphy?

  Yep.

• 1:02:07Chris Williamson?

  Sipping and sipping and sipping down.

• 1:02:09Macken Murphy?

  Yeah, because men are becoming less educated.

• 1:02:10Chris Williamson?

  Precisely correct.

• 1:02:11Macken Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:11Chris Williamson?

  Um, that being said, there's some pretty scary stuff that I'm sure that you've seen. Increases in domestic violence have been going up in line with the decrease in hypergamous dating. So that would suggest that perhaps men whose partners earn more than them, that they are concerned and no longer financial prisoners, may be resorting to a cost inflicting as opposed to a benefit affording mating strategy.

• 1:02:38Macken Murphy?

  That, yeah, I mean, that's, that's extremely depressing and that's, that's a horrible thing to hear. I'm not aware of that data. And this is.

• 1:02:44Chris Williamson?

  William Costello taught me about it.

• 1:02:45Macken Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:45Chris Williamson?

  You can, you can ask him about it at dinner tonight.

• 1:02:47Macken Murphy?

  Yeah. Yeah. So this is something, um, this is something that'll just kind of flag up front is that a lot of, especially just kind of internet characters are very willing to speak at length about subjects that they know incredibly little about. And, well, you, well, you know, quite a bit through talking to people and you're also, you know, this is kind of your role is that you're bringing on experts and then asking the questions that the.

• 1:03:13Chris Williamson?

  Make a career out of being the most stupid person in the room.

• 1:03:15Macken Murphy?

  That's one of, I, I wouldn't say that at all.

• 1:03:18Chris Williamson?

  The, the.

• 1:03:19Macken Murphy?

  You're being humble.

• 1:03:20Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:21Macken Murphy?

  But that's, that's why you're popular is that you have a knack for, as a smart guy, obtaining enough information to ask the questions that everyone's wondering, right?

• 1:03:32Macken Murphy?

  But there's, I'm not talking about you at all, but there's a real tendency of people who are on the internet to just, you know, pick out one finding here, one finding there, and then just speak at length as if they've got all the answers to the world's problems. And the truth is that like in academia, if you haven't spent a year reading about something, your knowledge is basically zero. Like that's like entry level is once you've been thinking, mulling over and reading the literature.

• 1:04:01Macken Murphy?

  The idea of getting straight up to speed on a subject, that's very, they're very unlikely to have the right context to decipher it. And so with a question like this, it's like, I'm not an expert in domestic violence. I'm not an expert in, you know, hypergamous versus hypogamous dating outcomes. And although, so, so, so even though I'm from a broad theoretical standpoint, as someone who looks at things from a behavioral ecology point of view, I'm very optimistic that our nature, our cultural norms will naturally change to accommodate shifts in gender equality.

• 1:04:37Chris Williamson?

  Just to interject there, do you think that women's preference for socioeconomically competent men is sufficiently malleable for that? To me, and I think to a lot of the guys, and to give the guys on the internet that are talking about this, they're due. If it was being spoken about in a less sort of cantankerous adversarial way, I think what they would try to say is something like, women's preference for socioeconomically successful men is so ingrained, it is such a fundamental part of their source code of attraction, I don't believe that it is something that they are going to be able to reprogram. And I would say that largely, like I'm in that camp too, to a degree, I would say that it is akin and

• 1:05:22Chris Williamson?

  equivalent to men's preference in terms of strength, men's preference for youth and fertility. I think that that is the equivalent. And fundamentally online, just again, to get meta for a second, this is the debate. The debate online typically is you have a preference, that preference is wrong. I have a preference. My preference is right. Your preference can be changed. My preference should not.

• 1:05:47Macken Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:48Chris Williamson?

  That's the way that the discussion online gets presented, but I think I think I'm right. I think that I speak. You know, my favorite place, and it's a shame that you're leaving this week because we could have done it on Saturday. Favorite place for dating and mating research, Soho House Pool in Austin.

• 1:06:03Macken Murphy?

  Okay.

• 1:06:04Chris Williamson?

  Soho House Pool, it's, you know, three and a half thousand dollars a year for a membership. So that like has a pretty good selection effect for the kind of people that go there. And I just sit by the pool and listen to the chicks talking and just wander over and say, hi girls, how are you? What about, talk to me about your current dating experiences. And they'll say, I, you know, I've got a degree. I do this thing. I work in marketing. I work in sales. I work in this thing. I mean, blah, blah, blah. But what's happening with with your dating life at the moment? I'm really, really struggling. Why are you struggling? What are the things that you? And a lot of the time they'll say, okay, how old are you? What's your income? What's your education level? And a lot of the time they're struggling to find men that they feel are at that level. So give me your thoughts on

• 1:06:46Chris Williamson?

  ability to nudge preference for hypergamy versus men's ability to nudge preference for youth and fertility.

• 1:06:54Macken Murphy?

  Yeah. And I'll note that the word hypergamy is kind of, it's just, it's the internet meme. So I'm happy to use it in this context, but I almost never hear it in academia. I mean, we, we might say hypergyny, right? But hypergummy, that's, that's about marriage typically, and it's also narrowly to like status, right? But we'll use it just in kind of a broad sense of, of mating up socioeconomically.

• 1:07:25Macken Murphy?

  You're asking, is it flexible?

• 1:07:27Chris Williamson?

  How malleable, how malleable is women's preference for socioeconomically as or more successful mates?

• 1:07:34Macken Murphy?

  Okay, flat answer, we'll see, right? Because the, the, the, the weather, there's no, for all the internet chit chat, and I think that a lot of the guys who are resistant to this, it's not actually about the mating, they don't care about the mating success of women. They, they give a fuck. Like, they don't care about women having trouble dating. What they care about is they don't want women to have as much resources as men. Right, that, that makes them uncomfortable, it threatens their status, their sense of manhood, et cetera. And they're masking that as like, oh, women, you'll have so much trouble dating if you get rich. Uh, but in reality, they just, they just hate to see women make money. Because, again, the flat reality is, is that women who are more educated, right? Are more married and less divorced than women who are less educated, right?

• 1:08:16Chris Williamson?

  Does the same, does the same thing hold for wealth, do you know?

• 1:08:19Macken Murphy?

  I'll have to check. The, although, uh, yeah, I think I, I, I'm pretty confident in saying that it would. The, but again, it's, it's not, it's not necessarily my area. In terms of how flexible it is, there is some indicative evidence that at an individual level, it's flexible, in the sense that women who have decided that they want to be the primary breadwinner, right? They tend to, in their mate selection, care about good dad qualities, right? And sexiness, right? Whereas, you know, how much money they make, that, that, that, that's not necessarily.

• 1:08:49Chris Williamson?

  That's interesting, because I've seen, I've got some data that I've been throwing around with David, uh, that suggests that women's preference for socioeconomic success over and above their own increases.

• 1:09:01Macken Murphy?

  As they, yes, this is intent to be the breadwinner, right? Not, not.

• 1:09:06Chris Williamson?

  But what's the determinant of that? What's the determinant of intent to be the breadwinner?

• 1:09:10Macken Murphy?

  Yeah, it's interesting.

• 1:09:11Chris Williamson?

  Like, is that going to be a switch that people, that girls flick? They're like, oh, and now I'm going to be the breadwinner, or wear my breadwinner t-shirt.

• 1:09:17Macken Murphy?

  Just that I'm, that I'm quite confident that humans can, I just think that humans are incredibly phenotypically plastic creatures.

• 1:09:26Chris Williamson?

  Well, this is the behavioral ecologist in you coming out, right?

• 1:09:28Macken Murphy?

  Yeah, it's just that, I mean, I see that, you know, you could look at all of human history 70 years ago and say, oh, women just will only marry men who are more educated. And then you look at the modern trends in Europe, and it's like, oh, seems to be changing. So I guess, I guess.

• 1:09:43Chris Williamson?

  Very interesting.

• 1:09:44Macken Murphy?

  And then also, it's like.

• 1:09:47Macken Murphy?

  I think that it's possible that we'll also see some shifts on the male side of things. I mean, there are plenty of cult, well, there are plenty of cultures where men actually do. I mean, it, the basic of sex difference, you're right. I'll just put a flag down here to say that it's true that across cultures, men have stronger beauty preferences and women have stronger resource preferences. But the fact that the degree of difference varies suggests that there is some potential for ecological malleability. And we're only now just entering into a phase where it's even possible to do the experiment. Like, we're doing the experiment and we'll, we'll see how it plays out.

• 1:10:25Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, for better or for worse.

• 1:10:26Macken Murphy?

  And I think that, I think that it probably, frankly, I think it probably will be for better. I think it's gonna be fine.

• 1:10:31Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, well, I mean, here's another thing that kind of doesn't get, doesn't get brought up an awful lot online. When you look at the increasing divorce rates, and yeah, I think hormonal birth control has an awful lot to answer for. I think that in many ways, it was a very dangerous piece of technology to throw around, although it also opened up an awful lot of opportunities for women. Nobody talks about the fact that the success of marriage success, i.e. lower divorce rates, et cetera, was very heavily in part due to the fact that women were financial prisoners of their husband. Like, if you don't have any resources and you don't have any education and you've got two kids or no kids or five kids, where are you gonna go?

• 1:11:10Macken Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:11Chris Williamson?

  Where are you gonna go?

• 1:11:11Macken Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:12Chris Williamson?

  You know, you are, you're literally a financial prisoner. One other thing, you were talking about like creators and stuff online, and this works for friends as well, but I'm playing with this idea. And I had a four, four questions that you can ask to gauge the honesty of other creators, but it also works for friends too. So, first question, when was the last time that you heard them change their mind on something? Second question, did they primarily identify out groups as a mode of bonding their in-group together? Number three, how often do they admit mistakes genuinely not performative publicly is an advantage? And number four, do they want to hear alternative points of view for reasons other than mocking them?

• 1:11:54Chris Williamson?

  That four-step process identifies pretty much like if

• 1:11:58Macken Murphy?

  All the bad actors, yeah.

• 1:11:59Chris Williamson?

  Correct. If you put the guys that I don't, I just don't enjoy their content or I don't want to be friends with them, that, all of those questions they answer in, in the negative. So, uh, yeah, it's very interesting. It's very, very, what, um, what myths? If you could clean house, what myths would you like to get rid of from the mating and dating world? What's been bastardized the most?

• 1:12:29Macken Murphy?

  Okay.

• 1:12:29Chris Williamson?

  In your opinion?

• 1:12:30Macken Murphy?

  All right. Well, the most meme one is definitely body count. This idea that, the idea that, you know, historical promiscuity is a predictor of bad outcomes in long-term relationships. That's pretty well validated by a bunch of studies. It's just that it shows the same.

• 1:12:45Chris Williamson?

  Buses, uh, uh, David's quoted a number of times, right?

• 1:12:49Macken Murphy?

  Yeah. So it, it, we see that the idea that it's like, yeah, if you're someone who loves casual sex and loves sleeping around, you're going to have a harder time. I, I don't think it takes a rocket scientist to figure out that, oh, that type of person is going to have a harder time in a monogamous lifelong marriage, right? If that's what they love doing, right? And, and that can be partially.

• 1:13:08Chris Williamson?

  Sexuality.

• 1:13:08Macken Murphy?

  Yeah, it's just socio sexuality. And that can partially be measured with, you know, the past sexual partners you have with the, you know, important caveat that there's a huge difference between, you know, an 18-year-old boy who's, you know, just showed up his freshman year of college and has somehow slept with 10 girls in the first week. And, you know, a 32-year-old man who's had, you know, a few failed relationships, a few, um, you know, flings and so on. And he's got to the same number over a longer time period in different contexts. But this idea that like body count is associated, quote unquote, body count, as, as the term is, is associated with negative relationship outcomes is true, right? At least with, based on the available evidence.

• 1:13:44Chris Williamson?

  The optimal number, it's about four. I think it's three for women and.

• 1:13:46Macken Murphy?

  In terms of people's preferences when they're mating.

• 1:13:48Chris Williamson?

  It's like a, it's a very, very long, spread out candy cane.

• 1:13:52Macken Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:13:52Chris Williamson?

  Like, I think the same zero is as desirable as like 12.

• 1:13:56Macken Murphy?

  Yeah, it's something like that. It's, it might even be less. It's like zero starts here and then it goes up for a second and then it plummets, right? So it's like between a few and several, uh, between a few and several is hot. And then after that, it's like, what are you doing? And before that, it's like, why haven't you done anything? But, but it's worth noting. So you asked about memes to destroy. It's like this idea that this is only important for women and that this, that this doesn't have any effect on men sleeping around, or it doesn't indicate anything about men's likely personalities. That it doesn't make much logical sense, right? They'll talk about these like pair bonding memes using studies on other animals that have nothing to do with humans. But it's like. We see the same effects in men, right? So men who have higher body counts and men who are more sociosexually unrestricted generally have all the same negative outcomes.

• 1:14:40Chris Williamson?

  But the difference is that a man who is sexually promiscuous is not seen as that's not seen as a negative outcome in the same way.

• 1:14:48Macken Murphy?

  Yeah, well, the in itself, it's not the cultural, the culture surrounding it. But there's you asked about memes to delete and it's like, look, I think that there's a great argument to be made that maybe sleeping around isn't great. Right? That I think that there's you can say it from a societal level. This might not be good for people. And you can say at an individual level, this might not be good for people. And you could write, you know, a great little essay that that makes all the right points. And I'd be like, well, you know, that that makes a lot of sense. But if you say only for women, well, then you just sound like you're a sexist, right? Because it's like all the same points you could make would be makeable about men. And all they have is these trite analogies about, you know, a key that opens many locks, da, da, da, da, da. And it's like, all right, look at the data. You're seeing the same effects in men and women, but you're only talking about women.

• 1:15:33Macken Murphy?

  And then also just from a societal perspective, it's not what I would call an exportable idea. Right? If you can't recommend, if you if you're making like a recommendation to people culturally and it's contradictory in its execution, it's not a good recommendation, right? To say, men have fun sleep around, women don't. It's like, the only way that's mathematically possible is if those men are sleeping with each other. And that doesn't seem to be what they're recommending.

• 1:15:53Chris Williamson?

  What's the truth about women being more picky or discriminatory than men when it comes to physical attributes, physical attractiveness?

• 1:16:10Macken Murphy?

  Oh, God. Okay. Well, this is a funny one.

• 1:16:15Chris Williamson?

  Didn't expect you were going to come on and have easy, simple questions.

• 1:16:19Macken Murphy?

  No, no, no. I thought I thought you were going to be a lot nicer to me. You've you've already gotten me in trouble a few times with everybody, but it's fine. This one's interesting because.

• 1:16:31Macken Murphy?

  All right. It is true that I would say that women are more selective like most, you know, this is a pattern that we see across most animals, right? That female animals are more selective and in as much as women overlaps with female mammal, then you're gonna, you're gonna see that effect. And so women do seem a little more selective about who they mate with. You, you've mentioned David Buss a couple of times, right? Those classic studies of like, walking up to someone on a university campus. I mean, you know, even if it's a really sexy guy going around like, hey, I want to go back to mine. Right. It's some ridiculous number of men say yes, and some tiny number of women do. Right. So women are, and there's multiple ways of measuring it. I know that's kind of a silly study, but it does seem that women are more selective in their mating.

• 1:17:15Macken Murphy?

  Right. And so, you know, you'll, it's not particularly surprising that women want a higher percentile, right, of the mating market than men do on a lot of traits. And good luck seems to be one of them in the sense that men, I would say that most men are attracted to most women, right? And most women are attracted to a subset of men, right? So there's a difference there. And this is going to bring in, you know, a real funny insight from Alexander, a mutual friend, which is like, well, what if, let's step back here. What if men just are less sexy than women, right? They're like, they're just the average, because there's no rule that the gender's average has to be equivalent. Right. Like, some people say, oh, it's illogical, it's delusion.

• 1:17:59Macken Murphy?

  And it's like, well, there's no rule, like men, the average man is taller than the average woman. There's no rule that the average man can't also be less hot than the average woman. And it's interesting.

• 1:18:10Chris Williamson?

  How would you, just a question here, I don't quite understand how you would compare female attractiveness or hotness to male attractiveness or hotness.

• 1:18:18Macken Murphy?

  So two ways you can do it, right? So the, but the basic thing, oh, the first basic thing to notice is that attractiveness is a perception. Right. So when we say that, when we're looking at a study and we say this face.

• 1:18:28Chris Williamson?

  The ruler determines the length.

• 1:18:29Macken Murphy?

  Well, to an extent, I mean, but, okay. So we can say empirically that apples taste better than cardboard. Because when we survey the humans who are the determinants of taste, the average human says the apple tastes better than the cardboard. Haven't run that study, but I'm pretty sure the p-value would be significant.

• 1:18:53Macken Murphy?

  With facial attractiveness and bodily attractiveness and all these things, it's measured the same way. It's just kind of the apples cardboard thing. It's like, yeah, it's like sure, you know, people have different tastes, but on average, right, there's so much overlap, right? It's like beauty is in the eye of the beholder, sure, but most beholders are seeing vaguely the same thing. And so there's nowhere really to go there. In terms of men being, is it possible that men are less attractive than women on average? It's like, well, if you ask women, right, to like, look at couples and say, who's hotter, the guy or the girl? They'll say, I think the girl is actually the hotter one more, right? But then if you ask men, the same thing happens, right? So men and women agree that women are hotter, right? And so it's like, by whose standard and whose opinion?

• 1:19:36Macken Murphy?

  Is there some like objective, you know, thing to notice there? Another thing that people struggle with is that there are some studies that indicate that women find most men less sexy than average. And some people are like, oh, that's a perceptual bias, right? It must be. And it's like, well, most men are less wealthy than average because some guys are super wealthy and most guys are moderately poor.

• 1:19:57Chris Williamson?

  Mean versus median.

• 1:19:58Macken Murphy?

  Yeah, exactly. So it's like, it's entirely possible that we're living in a world of kind of zeros and ones in a sense where it's like, most men are completely unfuckable, let's say, and then some small subset of guys are just gloriously attractive. And if that's the case, then yeah.

• 1:20:14Chris Williamson?

  Use the bell code.

• 1:20:15Macken Murphy?

  Yeah, then it's like, most guys are below average attractiveness. So yeah, it's so, so two things that are really important on this that I really just want to put into the conversation.

• 1:20:26Macken Murphy?

  Yes, women find a smaller subset of individual, women generally find a smaller subset of the opposite sex physically attractive than men do. But women also put a lower priority, as you said earlier, women also put a lower priority on looks in general, right? So it's like, good news, bad news, right? It's like, sorry, fellas, most of you probably aren't looking that good to women on first contact. Good news. That doesn't really matter that much compared to if you were a woman in that same state.

• 1:21:03Chris Williamson?

  There's many ways to win.

• 1:21:05Macken Murphy?

  Yes, and women are more willing to compromise on their beauty standards than men, it seems.

• 1:21:11Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, well, I mean, again, you know, this is where the black pill philosophy does come true to some degree. And I think that it's it's a a culture which is born out of men who see themselves as genetic dead ends. Right. They see themselves as completely unable to get a woman because they have fallen below a threshold that is impossible. LMS, right. But L is first, looks, money status. So they believe that they have fallen below a particular net. Now, there is an argument about where that net is. And it's like, if you're not above a six out of 10, six out of 10 as being often rated by other men, not by other women. But I've said this before, that

• 1:21:54Chris Williamson?

  a man's ability to change his mate value is significantly more malleable than a woman's.

• 1:21:59Macken Murphy?

  That's the conventional wisdom. I I I think that it's

• 1:22:03Chris Williamson?

  Well.

• 1:22:04Macken Murphy?

  Well, can I say something kind of just a little controversial is just the idea that women are might be working harder at it than they get credit for, right? So one quick example, one of the coolest studies of the past, certainly of of this decade, in my opinion. Marta Coles enormous 93 country study on something like 93,000 participants across the world, measured all of the things that they do to enhance their physical attractiveness and how much time they spend on it. And it's like all over the world with some variance, right? And we can talk about that because again, I'm very interested in how socioecology affects this sort of thing.

• 1:22:43Macken Murphy?

  But with some with some variance accounted for, women are spending much more time, significantly more time on their looks than men.

• 1:22:50Chris Williamson?

  Five times, three times, 10 times.

• 1:22:53Macken Murphy?

  About half an hour more per day, right? So it's like, so so a lot of So there's this idea, there's this idea that like men can do this idea, and this is accounting for everything.

• 1:23:03Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:23:03Macken Murphy?

  Right. So this is including the time in the gym. This is including the time you spent picking an outfit. This is including the time you spent on my fitness pal, figuring out like, you know, what are my macros for the day? All of it together, right? The time you spent doing your hair, etc., lining up the lovely heavy stubble to contour the face, whatever. All of that together, women are spending more time. So there's this conventional wisdom of like, oh, men can, men can do more than women to adjust their mate value. And it's like, maybe we're seeing a final product where women have already put in so much more work. It's like, imagine if, imagine how much harder it would be to compete as a man to like, upgrade yourself if every man except you suddenly spent an extra half hour a day on their looks. Like even if that was just gym time, it's like, oh my God, everyone's hotter and I'm less hot by comparison.

• 1:23:48Macken Murphy?

  So this idea that there's more runway for men, it's like, there might be, I would be more open to saying that in a modern Western economy, there's more routes, right? In the sense that it's like, okay, I'm not the hottest guy, but boy, I can, you know, I can, I can grind at computer science and become

• 1:24:04Chris Williamson?

  Funny, educated.

• 1:24:05Macken Murphy?

  Get a salary.

• 1:24:06Chris Williamson?

  That's yeah.

• 1:24:07Macken Murphy?

  Yeah, exactly. I can, I can, and maybe, maybe physically, you know, honestly, there's a huge, there's huge, we don't like to talk about it, but there is variance between individuals as to how much muscle you can put on. Right? There are people who just can't look a certain way. And it's like, hit the gym, bro. And it's like, well, they can hit it as much as they want, but they're still skinny. Right? And there's not a lot of sympathy for that because we like to think, you know, people who have muscles like to think like, oh, that, that it's just hard work, but a lot of us just vaguely are lucky, right? I know a lot of guys who are jacked who don't work that hard is all I'm saying.

• 1:24:34Chris Williamson?

  I have a couple of friends that are super responders to testosterone and they're just absolute like freaks. Yeah, complete hyper freaks.

• 1:24:41Macken Murphy?

  Yeah. And I also know guys who it's like, they've never done a bicep curl in their life and they've got like 16 inch arms just flat. And it's like, that's, you can, if you're starting with 12 inch arms. So anyway, I'm getting off track. But this idea, there's this kind of conventional wisdom of like, men, you have more kind of upward trajectory space through hard work. But then there's the other question of like, okay, well, women are already working really, really hard.

• 1:25:02Chris Williamson?

  The floor for women has, has been brought up by this weird cartel.

• 1:25:05Macken Murphy?

  By the fact that they're, that they're, yeah.

• 1:25:07Chris Williamson?

  Doing it.

• 1:25:07Macken Murphy?

  Where it's like, if you're like, think about just how much time it takes to get ready to go to work as a woman versus a man. It's like, if you've lived with a woman, then you know, it's like, oh, we're going out to dinner. I'm going to be, I'm going to be looking.

• 1:25:19Chris Williamson?

  Give me 45 minutes.

• 1:25:20Macken Murphy?

  Yeah, I'm going to be, I mean, yeah, if you're a man, it's like, I'm going to be looking my best in 15 minutes. Five minutes in the shower, five minutes on my hair, right? Maybe shaving my face and I'm out the door. Looking as good as I can look that day, right?

• 1:25:32Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:33Macken Murphy?

  For a woman to go from her zero to her 10 in terms of effort, it's like it's it often takes a lot of time because we have these cultural technologies that they that are used in our in our society, such as makeup, such as, you know, these additional hair products, etc. And so I think that, yeah, I think that there's a real question there. But I'm not but I'm not giving an answer. I'm kind of playing devil's advocate. I might agree with you, but that's certainly the conventional wisdom. So I'm probably being an idiot.

• 1:25:59Chris Williamson?

  Talk to me about discrimination around hair color.

• 1:26:02Macken Murphy?

  Discrimination around hair color. Well, you love evolutionary psychology. So I want to just give you the the basic EVO psych view, even though-

• 1:26:11Chris Williamson?

  Don't fucking throw me in with basic bitch. I'm a fledgling behavioral ecologist at the moment. I'm slowly this is my new cool thing. My new shiny toy is this area of research.

• 1:26:24Macken Murphy?

  Well, you've spoken to a lot of people who would, you know, maybe at a conference, maybe depending on the conference, say they're ev psych or behavioral, and that would certainly be me. Like, it just depends on who I'm talking to.

• 1:26:33Chris Williamson?

  It's a shorthand for like, I use evolutionary theory and think about humans.

• 1:26:36Macken Murphy?

  Yeah, exactly. And ev psych is the is still the queen in this equation.

• 1:26:42Chris Williamson?

  I spoke at H Best last year. Just wanted to drop that in.

• 1:26:45Macken Murphy?

  Wow. Well, well, wow. I think I might see you there this year if you're going.

• 1:26:48Chris Williamson?

  Symposium. There's a symposium. I hope your symposium is as good as my symposium.

• 1:26:52Macken Murphy?

  I don't even know if I'll get a symposium.

• 1:26:54Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, well, it's because you're a bitch.

• 1:26:56Macken Murphy?

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, it's because I'm weak. Yeah. So in any case, we'll have to we'll have to do a study design on your tall girl syndrome stuff and see how.

• 1:27:05Chris Williamson?

  God, don't do that.

• 1:27:06Macken Murphy?

  Well, it would be cool if some of these ideas got into the literature because it is-

• 1:27:10Chris Williamson?

  I got my first citation by David and William.

• 1:27:13Macken Murphy?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:27:14Chris Williamson?

  For the male sedation hypothesis.

• 1:27:17Macken Murphy?

  Oh, really?

• 1:27:18Chris Williamson?

  Actually, actually in a paper, actually being tested.

• 1:27:20Macken Murphy?

  Oh, my God, that's so cool. I mean, it's got a great name.

• 1:27:22Chris Williamson?

  Fucking great. Yeah, that's it, dude. I'm good at memeing. I'm not good at I'm not good at science. You do the science. Go do the science, fucking nerds. I'm going to come up with the name.

• 1:27:29Macken Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. What's funny is that the part of the reason ev psych has been so successful is because David Buss is amazing at memeing.

• 1:27:37Chris Williamson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:27:37Macken Murphy?

  People don't talk about it, but like, he has a knack. So much of the words that we've used in this conversation are actually terms coined by him. All these little like putting mate in front of everything, like all that little stuff. Like, that's mostly, if not his invention, then his promotion.

• 1:27:54Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. And everyone's downstream from like a Bussarian philosophy.

• 1:27:58Macken Murphy?

  Yeah, is that you can you can start sounding- Really sciency.

• 1:28:03Chris Williamson?

  Which is really what everyone wants.

• 1:28:05Macken Murphy?

  Yeah. And you can also, and also here's the other thing is that a lot of people who are in the scientific space, they coin terms, but they're terms that nobody can use because they don't make sense. I say the word mate preferences. Immediately you know exactly what I'm talking about. There's no confusion at all. Anyway, what were we, what were we trying to talk about?

• 1:28:21Chris Williamson?

  Discrimination about heckler.

• 1:28:22Macken Murphy?

  Okay, so, look, there's variation, right? And there's some studies show different effects, but the standard EVO theory is, is actually quite simple and seems to fit at least with folk wisdom, right? Which is that men will prefer, on average, all else being equal, relatively light hair colors, because hair darkens throughout life until it turns gray or white, right? And so lighter hair colors signal youth. And there's also some potential evidence that women's hair might darken during pregnancy as well. So we're going back to youth and nullah parity, right? Being signaled by relatively light hair. And in a Western context, this would be relatively light for our very diverse population where we have

• 1:29:04Macken Murphy?

  everyone from, you know, very Nordic people to, to just all sorts of people, right? So we have very light hair colors on that distribution. We see that, you know, a huge percentage of American women, there's one study where it was like 40% have experimented with lightening their hair, right? There's this effort, right? Where, where, where it's, it's trying to, it seems to an extent, respond to this male preference for lighter hair that might be downstream of an ancestral signal of youth and nullah parity.

• 1:29:35Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 1:29:36Macken Murphy?

  Yeah. Not, not fertility. And so the term nullah parity is the state of having not yet had children in biology.

• 1:29:42Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 1:29:42Macken Murphy?

  And the reason that that would be attractive is, and it's not attractive in all animals, but in our species where we're monogamous pair bonding theoretically.

• 1:29:50Chris Williamson?

  High MPI.

• 1:29:51Macken Murphy?

  Yeah. So theoretically, it's like you want to, this is, this is going to sound like a crazy term, but the optimal male mating strategy for humans is often, you know, if you're in, if you're in a evolutionarily informed psychology classroom, you'll hear people use this phrase, which I'm going to sound psycho for saying, but it's called monopolizing a woman's reproductive years, right? Where it's like. Like you're spending, you're trying to meet someone and then spend that, those 20 years with them, where you're able to reproduce with them the entire time. Uh, cause that's if, if, if everyone's pairing up monogamously, as is the case in most, um, human societies and cultures, then that's kind of where you'll end up at. Now, on the other end, kind of for the same reasons, women seem to prefer somewhat darker hair. The whole, uh, tall, dark and handsome thing that seems to, that seems to play out.

• 1:30:36Macken Murphy?

  We've, we've spoken a little bit about tall, just better fighters, you know, were able to defend themselves. But, um, dark seems to maybe come from a signal to age. There is some dispute of this, right? Some studies have found that men don't actually prefer lighter hair, but, uh, I'm, I'm very amenable to the idea that they do just because, and there might be some frequency effect, exposure effect. There's definitely a cultural effect, but that seems to be part of the story.

• 1:30:58Chris Williamson?

  What about age gaps?

• 1:30:59Macken Murphy?

  What about them?

• 1:31:00Chris Williamson?

  Well, do men actually lock in at 21 years old? Once they hit 21 and then just want 21 year olds for the rest of the time?

• 1:31:09Macken Murphy?

  No, in terms of physical attractiveness, there does seem to be, you know, a probable thing in the early twenties. But if you look at men's, you know, dating app filters, for example, they'll tend to filter out extremely young women. Once they get older, but they do want increasingly wide age gaps as they get older.

• 1:31:25Chris Williamson?

  Is that not just because that's what they think that they can get?

• 1:31:27Macken Murphy?

  Could be. Yeah, totally.

• 1:31:28Chris Williamson?

  Like I'm 45, but I also getting a 21 year old seems unrealistic and so you don't might be a bit icky. So like, yeah, let's put it at 27.

• 1:31:36Macken Murphy?

  Well, yeah, I so might be a bit icky is going to be, you know, that's, that's part of like, part of mate value is like, what does this mate signal to other people about me?

• 1:31:46Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 1:31:47Macken Murphy?

  So.

• 1:31:50Chris Williamson?

  Why would women prefer an older mate?

• 1:31:54Macken Murphy?

  Well, this is the thing is that in countries, so women have, we talk about women being more selective. The more selective party holds more power in terms of who gets together, right? That's how it is in business as well. The person who's more willing to walk away from the negotiating table and has more of the things that the other person wants. Anyway.

• 1:32:11Macken Murphy?

  I don't need to explain that. That's pretty simple. But in countries where women are free to choose, they tend to choose men who are slightly older, not super older. So we're talking like two to four years, right? And that seems to be reducing even now, where it's like age gaps are getting smaller and smaller. And it could be, again, like we talk about malleability, it's like, let's talk about malleability in a context where you're completely dependent on a man for his resources. Maybe a guy 13 years older is the best because he has more resources, right? But in a cultural context where you have your own money, right? It's like, I don't want the deteriorating sperm of this old man.

• 1:32:46Chris Williamson?

  Let me give you a counter example. In a society where you, on average, are outperforming socioeconomically the men who are around you at your age bracket.

• 1:32:56Macken Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:57Chris Williamson?

  One of the best predictors of wealth is age.

• 1:32:59Macken Murphy?

  Is age. And yet, we still see that women who have these options and have the freedom to choose, choose very small age gaps. And this is the thing is that if you ask men, what do you want? They tend to want pretty big age gaps pointing downward. But if you ask women, what do you want? They say, oh, I want, you know, a few years older, maybe. And then if you see what women actually do, what do they get? They get a few years older, maybe, right? And if you look at what they do on dating apps, right? They filter out much older men.

• 1:33:22Chris Williamson?

  Right, okay.

• 1:33:23Macken Murphy?

  Because, again, think about this, right? It's like, if you're, if you're... One very simple thing that really everyone in the audience should understand about sexual selection is that we're looking for indirect benefits and direct benefits. And if you focus too much on either of those, indirect benefits, that's who do you want to have your kids, right? Who do you want the offspring genetically to be with, right? And then, direct benefits, that's who do you want to raise your kids in a species like ours? But also, who do you want to take care of you, help you out, be compatible with you, et cetera, right? And if you focus too much on either of these, then you miss the entire picture. So, thinking, you know, about direct benefits, sure, older is better, right? From a direct benefits perspective, of course, you know, the older mate is going to have more money, more status, they're going to be able to take care of you better in a modern economy.

• 1:34:10Macken Murphy?

  But from an indirect benefits perspective, sperm equality declines every year, right? Men, the signals of quality, right? Those decline every year. You become the, all that facial attractiveness signaling, that goes away, right? Those signals of underlying genetic health, those go away, right? The muscularity, that goes away. So there's a real balance here where it's like in a, in a culture with very high gender inequality and where women don't have control of their own resources, maybe, or, and there's, you know, there's debate as to why this varies, but, but the fact of the matter, the underlying fact of the matter is that in cultures where women, you know, have their own resources and are free to choose their mates, they choose men who are slightly older than themselves. And that seems to be to get like a little bit of the direct benefits, but mostly maintain

• 1:34:55Macken Murphy?

  the indirect ones. And there might also be, to be a hundred percent fair, there might also be a direct benefit to having a mate your own age in the sense that they'll actually be around to raise your own kids. There's a reason that women generally aren't fawning over, you know, sixty year old men. It's like who, human children, they take a long time to take care of. That's not necessarily the best person to have around. Talk to me about tattoos. Uh, well, I mean, I, I wish someone had told me in high school, but, uh, it doesn't seem that women care about them very much. Uh, the, you know, women perceive tattooed men as more healthy, masculine, dominant, et cetera. Healthy? Yeah. And it might be just because it's like, he'd more likely be a gym bro, but the more, you know, evolutionarily coherent one, the one that's like really complicated is like,

• 1:35:40Macken Murphy?

  well, a tattoo is exposing yourself to a high infection risk. And it's like, I can, I can handle that. I don't, I don't necessarily think that's true, but it is interesting that, you know, there are some immune markers that are higher in men who are heavily tatted. Uh, so it is, and that could just be because it's like, if you go into a tattoo and it makes you really sick, you're probably not going to get another one. And so guys who are heavily tattooed, it's like bounces off them. But, you know, those are attractive traits and yet women don't seem to find tattoos more attractive than not. Uh, and so the question is like, and most of this is Polish data. It probably varies between societies and cultures and sociocologies. I bet it would definitely vary in Japan.

• 1:36:18Macken Murphy?

  Yeah, right. There's gonna be huge cultural context there, right? I mean, there are, there are some countries on earth where this amount of tattoos would make me look like some kind of criminal. But in Boston, it's totally chill.

• 1:36:29Chris Williamson?

  Wasn't allowed to go in the baths.

• 1:36:32Macken Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:33Chris Williamson?

  In Japan, when he went there, the public baths, you're given one pat.

• 1:36:38Macken Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:38Chris Williamson?

  Thing. And he's like, thigh, full, two full sleeves, like stuff on his back. And he's like, what the fuck am I gonna do with this? Like, he's two hundred and fifty pound guy, like, that's not gonna, it doesn't cover a nipple.

• 1:36:51Macken Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:52Chris Williamson?

  Uh, so yes. Women interpret men more healthy, more masculine.

• 1:36:58Macken Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:58Chris Williamson?

  More.

• 1:36:59Macken Murphy?

  More dominant.

• 1:37:00Chris Williamson?

  More dominant.

• 1:37:00Macken Murphy?

  But there's all these trade offs. It's like, cause you ask them, it's like, okay, do you think it's like digitally modified photos? Do you think the ones with tattoos are hotter than the ones without? And you talk to a couple thousand women about that. And the result was that it's like, yeah, he's healthier, probably more masculine, probably more dominant, probably. But he's not more attractive. And it's like, why? And it goes back to the masculinity trade off thing. This is actually kind of good evidence for it. Is that they're like, well, I don't think he's gonna be as good of a dad. I don't think he's gonna be as good of a husband.

• 1:37:26Chris Williamson?

  Tattoos, what about women with tattoos for men?

• 1:37:32Macken Murphy?

  Well, that's really interesting. And there's actually a cleaner story. So there was a fascinating French study, and it's one of the most ecologically valid studies. Really that I've ever read, not to over flatter it, but it's just usually when you do a study, right? You do it in a lab setting, or you do it digitally, or you do a survey, and you just don't know whether whether it's gonna translate, right? But what they did was they did real world human mating behavior, where they took a bunch of women. And they send them out to the beach in a bikini. And we're just like, read a book for hours. And we're gonna count how many men approach you.

• 1:38:13Macken Murphy?

  And every time a man approaches you, we're gonna have, you know, someone run up to be like, stop, we're doing a study to reset the timer. So it's not, you know, people thinking it's their boyfriend or whatever. Uh, I'm not sure why they did that method, but that's, that's what I assumed when I was reading the study. And sometimes they send these women out with fake tattoos on. And sometimes they send them out without. And they found that with fake tattoos on, women got approached substantially more, right? And they were like, huh, this goes against the lab studies that show that men say they don't like tattoos, right? So this is kind of an interesting little problem, right? What's going on here? And then they asked men on the same beach. It's like, you know, what do you think that girl, right? And they didn't find that the tattoos made them hotter, but they did,

• 1:38:58Macken Murphy?

  the men did say, I think that that woman would be more likely to say yes to a date with me. Right? So the anticipation was basically like, these women are more open to

• 1:39:06Chris Williamson?

  Sociosexually.

• 1:39:08Macken Murphy?

  Yeah, I mean, it might have been a sociosexual signal. They didn't measure that. But the idea, yeah, but it could be that. It could be that. And it could also

• 1:39:15Chris Williamson?

  Openness, openness on its own, openness to new experiences, like

• 1:39:18Macken Murphy?

  No, no, it wasn't openness, like psychological trait openness. It was literally like, I think that this person would be more willing. It was just the basic question of like, if someone walks up into her on the street, is she more likely to say fuck off or say yes? And they, they thought yes.

• 1:39:29Chris Williamson?

  Right. But the, the outcome that they're looking for is a sociosexual one.

• 1:39:32Macken Murphy?

  Potentially.

• 1:39:33Chris Williamson?

  Well, unless they're saying, hey, why don't we go for a coffee? I'd love to learn about your tattoos.

• 1:39:37Macken Murphy?

  Yeah. Well, here's the thing is that it's not all, I mean, it's interesting. It's not, it's, it's, they, they could easily be approaching to ask for a date. It's just, they don't want to get rejected. But, but it does highlight, it highlights two things. One is that not all beauty signaling is about signaling attractiveness. Right? So sometimes you don't want to look more beautiful. You want to signal underlying personality traits. Like, it's like, if you're,

• 1:40:02Macken Murphy?

  if you want to look, I don't know, if you like, like, it might make sense if you're, if you're a woman who's, who's interested in short term mating, maybe it would make sense to deck your body out in cool tattoos to be like, hey, I'm, you know, more, you know, I'm more socially liberal, probably. I'm more, you know, interested in risk taking. Yeah, more adventurous, et cetera. Yeah. So I think, I think that socio sexuality is totally fair, fair estimate. But the basic idea is like, it's not that tattoos make women more attractive. If anything, they make them less attractive. But it is a signal of like, as we say, like openness to going on a date with a guy that they've just met or whatever.

• 1:40:38Chris Williamson?

  Have you seen the studies on women wearing choker necklaces?

• 1:40:41Macken Murphy?

  Is this the same result?

• 1:40:43Chris Williamson?

  Pretty similar.

• 1:40:43Macken Murphy?

  Okay, cool. Interesting.

• 1:40:45Chris Williamson?

  Both men and women rate that woman as probably having had more. Partners previously.

• 1:40:52Macken Murphy?

  Well, with tattoos, we have the, it's interesting that you said socio sexuality because it's probably bang on now that I think of it. Cause there is some research indicating that people with tattoos have higher socio sexuality. I mean, there's gonna be outliers, of course, and there's gonna be people who don't fit that pattern, but yeah, maybe, you know, having tattoos is like, yeah. Not only do I have tattoos, I probably have casual sex and people learn that through, you know, cultural reinforcement and life experiences. And then when they're on the beach, they're like, oh, maybe this person would be more approachable.

• 1:41:20Chris Williamson?

  What is there to know about stated and revealed preferences when it comes to attraction?

• 1:41:25Macken Murphy?

  Oh, that's incredibly deep question. Well, you've been very interested in beauty today, and I think one place to start would be that people, if you ask them what matters most in a mate. I mean, the jury's still out, but if you ask people what matters most in a mate, they're generally not going to say looks. Right. They're going to say, I want someone who's honest, who's loyal, who's kind. These are the bus studies and other replication sense. Right?

• 1:41:55Macken Murphy?

  But then if you do an experiment, like a speed dating experiment, it's the hot person wins, right? If you do a vignette study where it's like photos and biographies, the hot people win generally at least past a certain threshold. And so there's this kind of tension there where it's like, okay, okay. So we've got all this data showing that people say that they care more about personality traits than looks. And then we've got all this data looking at what people do, and they seem to care more about looks than personality. One exception to this, which is interesting, is that interpartner correlations of attractiveness, right? Those tend to disappear, at least in one study, after nine months of knowing someone before the date. Meaning that I've phrased that terribly because I can, I can see the, the confusion.

• 1:42:39Macken Murphy?

  If a couple knew each other for nine months or more before they started dating, each partner's physical attractiveness does not predict the others, which is a strong signal that attractiveness, physical attractiveness was not a huge factor in their decision to date each other. Right? Cause in most couples, interpartner correlations of attractiveness are, you know, similar to self rating and other ratings of attractiveness. They're, they're pretty significant, right?

• 1:43:04Chris Williamson?

  What's the mechanism that you think's going on where this nine month window seems to change something?

• 1:43:08Macken Murphy?

  Personality. Accumulated information about personality pushing out physical attractiveness as a determinant of mating.

• 1:43:16Chris Williamson?

  But when you

• 1:43:17Macken Murphy?

  If I had to guess.

• 1:43:18Chris Williamson?

  But when you don't have enough time, you've met somebody a couple of times or whatever it is, you use much more easily accessible cues.

• 1:43:28Macken Murphy?

  Physical indicators of mate value.

• 1:43:29Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:30Macken Murphy?

  So, and this isn't, this isn't a particularly controversial way to think about beauty. The, you know, this is Steven and Ludo review article on this. They titled it, "Physical indicators of partner quality." Right? And that's their, they weren't using that only for beauty, but that's one way of saying beauty. Right? Is that you're looking for someone who is high mate value. And when you just meet them, you know, 95% of the information you have is their looks. And after nine months, 5% of the information you have, let's say, made up numbers, but let's say, is their looks. And so it doesn't factor into your decision as much. And so if you're, you know, if you meet someone at a bar, right? If you meet someone at a pub and you, the first interaction you have is securing a date, well, then you probably both met each other's looks thresholds. Right? That's kind of the only thing that makes sense. Right?

• 1:44:16Macken Murphy?

  But if you met someone as a coworker and you were working together for a few years and then after, you know, a blossoming friendship became something else, you're like, you know what, let's, let's actually get drinks this week. Right? How much did looks factor into that decision? Right? It's hard to say. And in this study, apparently not at all.

• 1:44:33Chris Williamson?

  Interesting.

• 1:44:34Macken Murphy?

  All right. So At least not measurably. Let's just say that.

• 1:44:36Chris Williamson?

  Keep digging deeper into the stated and revealed preferences thing because I think a lot of the time, it's kind of like the god of the gaps for people that want to make arguments before and against a lot of the theories. It's like, oh yeah, I mean, you know, people will say anything in surveys and my lived experience.

• 1:44:53Macken Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:44:54Chris Williamson?

  Is better. Says something else.

• 1:44:55Macken Murphy?

  Yeah. And, and there is, you know, as a, I mean, as someone who thinks about things from a behavioral ecology lens, even though, you know, the, the two studies I've done are both, you know, they're both very av psyche frankly, but I do think about issues pretty behavioral ecologically.

• 1:45:15Macken Murphy?

  And the first word of that is behavior. Right? Watching what people actually do. Right? Evolutionary psychologists really like looking at stated preferences. Right? The, the favorite tool of an evolutionary psychologist is a questionnaire. Right? And it's often been said.

• 1:45:30Macken Murphy?

  And then other scientists like economists and behavioral ecologists like looking at what people do. So there's stated preferences, what people say, and then there's revealed preferences, what people do. But my personal opinion is that you need to look at both, right? There's an old joke about economists. I'm going to butcher it because I'm not a funny person, but you go to an economist's funeral, right? And nobody's mourning because his revealed preference was to die. Right? It's like, what people do is constrained by the vicissitudes of life, right? The, the, the, the chance happenings and limitations of one's own position. And so when we see that, so sometimes it's, it's like, okay, well, I don't see a reasonable way where your decision was constrained. And so the

• 1:46:15Macken Murphy?

  fact that you chose to go on a date with the hottest guy at the speed dating event instead of the funniest guy tells me that you probably do care about hotness more.

• 1:46:23Chris Williamson?

  What's the, what's the use of stated preferences then?

• 1:46:26Macken Murphy?

  So here's a really good example.

• 1:46:28Chris Williamson?

  Against the divergence from revealed.

• 1:46:30Macken Murphy?

  Yeah. So let's talk, that's a great, great question. I'll give you a couple of examples where I think stated preferences become a factor. Men say they want larger age gaps than they get, right? And it makes sense where the constraint's coming from because women are the selectors typically, they select more at least, and they say that they want smaller age gaps, and then the smaller age gap happens. So it's like, that looks to me like dueling preferences, butted heads, and the woman's preference won out and she went with the younger guy.

• 1:46:58Chris Williamson?

  The man compromised.

• 1:46:58Macken Murphy?

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, the man might want a woman seven years younger, but he ends up with a woman three years younger. And then you ask the woman, and it's like, well, my, my stated preference is three years older, and that's what I got. And it's like, okay, that seems to be a case of dueling preferences. That makes perfect sense. Another one would be, and this is really interesting, is that we see in these stated preference studies that men don't care that much about ambition, about resources, you know, oh, she can have whatever career she wants, you know, I don't really care about her education. And then you look at what men actually do, and it's like you very, most educated men are with educated women, right? Most rich men are with women from the same socioeconomic background, even if that woman individually isn't making as much money, right? The same stratosphere, class-wise.

• 1:47:39Chris Williamson?

  This, just to interject, the, I saw Alexander's.

• 1:47:44Chris Williamson?

  Video, maybe a year, year and a bit ago. Uh, and he was talking about, do men trade wealth for looks? Do wealthy guys get with good looking women? And it actually seems that most partners pair off.

• 1:47:55Macken Murphy?

  Yeah, good looking people get with good looking people. Rich people get with rich people. And there are these, you know, status for resources trades or resources for looks trades. And these trades do seem to happen more men to women, right? But overall, it's like, if you just look around even, it's like, oh yeah. You know, people who have college degrees tend to date people with college degrees. People who are super hot tend to date people who are super hot. Now, that's a stated versus revealed preferences problem. Because you asked the guys, do you care? And they said, not really. And then you looked at what they did and they ended up seeming to care, right? And so now we've got a, a case where we kind of have to look at the whole picture. And I'm not saying that it's a closed question, like the age gaps one seems pretty straightforward to me. This would be an example of it being a little more complicated, right?

• 1:48:39Macken Murphy?

  So the age gaps one seems straightforward and the stated preferences are probably accurate direction. Just because of the totality of the evidence. And then the looks question, it seems to be the revealed preferences probably are more indicative. Looks probably do matter quite a bit, at least when you're getting to know somebody. And then for something like this now, now it's a little more tricky, isn't it? Because maybe men care more than they say, right? Um, I certainly don't relate to the idea of not caring, right? Like I feel, I, I might be biased because internally like, uh, you know, I've, I've obviously got quite a bit of education and I can't. At a personal level, I would rather, all else being equal, date a woman who's very educated, right? That would just, I can like, I like, so my, my girlfriend's a scientist, right?

• 1:49:24Macken Murphy?

  And so it's fantastic for me that when I'm having trouble, you know, sorting something out, I can talk to her about it. And she gives me, you know, coherent, helpful advice.

• 1:49:35Chris Williamson?

  Well, beyond, beyond just having a fucking research assistant.

• 1:49:39Macken Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:39Chris Williamson?

  You get to have sex with.

• 1:49:40Macken Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:40Chris Williamson?

  What you also have is somebody that understands your passion.

• 1:49:44Macken Murphy?

  Yes, exactly. Yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's not just, it has a utility beyond, uh, beyond just practicality. Where it's like, well, yeah, it's super helpful just in. Emotionally, in the sense that it's like, oh, this is someone who understands.

• 1:49:56Chris Williamson?

  She gets me.

• 1:49:57Macken Murphy?

  Yeah, exactly. So I think that there are probably a lot of men who, if you ask them on a pen and paper, and again, this is probably my bias. I think there are a lot of men who it's like they're educated, they're doctors, they're lawyers, whatever. And you say, do you care about a woman's education? And they say, no, I'll date anybody. And then in practice, they're on the date with a woman who doesn't have the same education with them and they're bored, right? Because they're not, they're just not interested.

• 1:50:17Chris Williamson?

  That's a specific subsection of men, though.

• 1:50:19Macken Murphy?

  Yeah, it is.

• 1:50:19Chris Williamson?

  It's a very specific subsection of men.

• 1:50:21Macken Murphy?

  So the other possibility, though, and I'm going to give full, this is totally possible, and maybe even more likely, is that men actually don't care that much about, you know, money and status and women and education. They actually don't, they're telling the truth when they say they don't give a shit. And it's not that they don't say that they don't give a shit. They say that it matters, it's just not top, it's just not, doesn't matter to them as much as it matters to women in these questionnaire studies. And then in the behavioral studies, there doesn't seem to be as much of a sex difference. At least according to some scholars. It's also possible that it's just exposure and opportunity. It's like if you're a male lawyer, right? You've spent the last eight years of your, you know, prime, you're getting educated around educated women. So it's like, who did you happen to date?

• 1:51:06Macken Murphy?

  Who did you happen to marry? Educated women, because those were the women that you happened to meet based on who is in your local environment. So I'm open to both possibilities. I think that if you really want to understand human mating, you don't want to say something as blunt as watch what they do, not what they say, right? Even though, for the most part, I am more interested in what people do than what they say. I think that if you really want to understand human mating behavior, you want to take a step back, relax, and say, okay, what do people want? What do they end up doing? And what's the most coherent explanation I can build based on the combination of those?

• 1:51:36Chris Williamson?

  Have you had a look at Gregory Clark's work?

• 1:51:38Macken Murphy?

  No.

• 1:51:38Chris Williamson?

  He is a

• 1:51:42Chris Williamson?

  demographer, I suppose. He has done a behavioral genetics background. He wrote a book called For Whom the Bell Curve Tolls, which is a fucking phenomenal title.

• 1:51:52Macken Murphy?

  Interesting.

• 1:51:53Chris Williamson?

  He has tracked.

• 1:51:54Macken Murphy?

  Although putting the phrase bell curve in a title should be, you know, that's a risky, risky move.

• 1:51:59Chris Williamson?

  He likes to, he likes to sort of glance off the bottom of certain things. I really appreciated the fact that, again, same as a Plomin, actually, a little bit more kind of like based.

• 1:52:08Macken Murphy?

  Have you had Plomin?

• 1:52:09Chris Williamson?

  I have, of course.

• 1:52:10Macken Murphy?

  What a smart guy.

• 1:52:11Chris Williamson?

  Phenomenal guy.

• 1:52:12Macken Murphy?

  And is a really sweet guy as well.

• 1:52:13Chris Williamson?

  Fucking super sweet, counter signal. I mean, dude, if you're going to do behavioral genetics. And be really accepted even slightly by the mainstream. You need to do the counter signaling thing, right? You need to be overly not pliable, but like kind of placid and so like gently, softly, softly. Well, I'm not saying that this predetermined, but it does predispose. And I'm not saying da, da, da, da, da, da. Like it's caveat, caveat, caveat. Paige Harden, right? You know, Paige wrote the genetic lottery.

• 1:52:41Macken Murphy?

  Okay.

• 1:52:41Chris Williamson?

  She's the only well-known, public-facing behavioral geneticist that's ardently from the left, as far as I'm aware.

• 1:52:48Macken Murphy?

  Is Plomin not, I think.

• 1:52:50Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, he doesn't bring his politics into it too much, but she's like outwardly like, and these are my, these are my politics. So fascinating. Gregory Clark, less so. Gregory, I'll send you the episode, tracked the social status of people via a very complex system of surnames in the UK for like 700 years. And he found that people's social status is genetically determined. That over time you may assortatively or unassortively make yourself out of your social class, either down or up. But give people enough time and their family phenotype is more important.

• 1:53:28Macken Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:28Chris Williamson?

  That's what they go back to, this sort of regression to your phenotypical mean. Does that make sense?

• 1:53:34Macken Murphy?

  I mean, it's fascinating. I will say though, that again, I'm going to have to kind of plant the, I haven't spent a year on it flag in the sense that it's like.

• 1:53:41Chris Williamson?

  I'll send you a podcast.

• 1:53:42Macken Murphy?

  Yeah, no, yeah. Well, here's the thing is that I've read, you know, I've read, I've read a couple of relevant books on behavioral genetics. I read Plomin's book. I spoke to Plomin for a few hours. I've read several articles on it, but I really am not a, I'm just not, and I understand the behavior genetics of infidelity quite a bit. But I just don't, I'm not an expert on, I'm just not an expert on it. I'm not going to pretend to be. And there's, you know, there's a lot of even academics who will come on shows like this and just be like. Experts on everything they're asked about. And it's like, well, I know that you're not an expert in everything.

• 1:54:20Chris Williamson?

  Science is lame, bro. Science is real.

• 1:54:21Macken Murphy?

  Bro, science is super fun.

• 1:54:22Chris Williamson?

  That's really, but dude, you know, I have this like rule that I stole from Douglas Murray, which is normalize saying, I don't have an opinion on that.

• 1:54:31Macken Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:31Chris Williamson?

  I don't know.

• 1:54:32Macken Murphy?

  Yeah, I've said that several times today.

• 1:54:33Chris Williamson?

  Like, that is, again, you know, when was the last time that your favorite content creator said that they don't know? Would be a fifth, a great fifth question to ask, like, just because you're great in behavioral ecology, infidelity, make preferences and attraction, doesn't mean that I should believe what you say about geopolitical strategies to fix a problem with the Middle East.

• 1:54:55Macken Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah, it's so based, so true. And I will, you know, one thing that I'm happy to, to, to be proud of is that on every single podcast I've ever done, I've said, I don't know more than once. There's never been a time where I've gone on a podcast and just gone through, yes, yes, yes, I know this, I know that. It's always, you know, at a point where I'm like, I haven't studied that.

• 1:55:17Chris Williamson?

  So there is, you know.

• 1:55:17Macken Murphy?

  And I've said that a few times this time.

• 1:55:19Chris Williamson?

  There is a degree, and you know, I think I'd probably say that I've had maybe second only to Ricardo Lopez. I've had more evolutionary psychologists on this podcast than pretty much anybody else. And what I do like are when that caveat comes in and you know, the boundaries of whatever somebody's talking about. But then they go, but let's have a bit of fun.

• 1:55:41Macken Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:42Chris Williamson?

  Let's have a bit of fun. Let's, let's, let's postulate about the mechanism, you could say. And it's like, look, we don't know what's going on here. Here's some cool ideas, because that's the fun bit.

• 1:55:51Macken Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:51Chris Williamson?

  The fun bit of evolutionary theory and presumably of behavioral ecology as well is going like, why does that happen? Well, given what I know about the way that humans work and given what we know about the environment that they're in, let's have a play with a couple of mechanisms. And that's, that for me is like, is the best stuff. I fell in love with this subject when I read The Moral Animal by Robert Wright. That book's from 1993, dude. And you can read it today. And there's some stuff in there where it's like, eh, like, that's just silly. It holds so much fucking water still now. Phenomenal read. It's one of my top five books of all time. Steve Stewart Williams, April Understood the Universe also in there. It's just brilliant.

• 1:56:33Chris Williamson?

  And I loved learning about evolutionary psychology first off, because it helped me to understand me.

• 1:56:41Macken Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:41Chris Williamson?

  Helped me understand why I am the way I am. What are the mechanisms that are driving me? Why do I feel that way about these things? Oh, this isn't some weird quirk of my psychology. This is like the source code that I'm built on. And this is a commonality. And this is what I'm trying to do a lot of with the show, which is look, if we open up the hood of our preferences, of our fears, of our dreams, of the ways that we think about ourselves, of our curses, of our competencies. If we do that, it makes you feel less alone and less personally cursed and less inside of your own head.

• 1:57:17Macken Murphy?

  Very wise and flattering words about evolutionary psychology. I'll weigh in mostly to agree. Evolutionary psychology was my first love in science. My closest mentors at Boston University were anthropologists, but they came, you know, like Carolyn Hodg, she was, she was one of my teachers, one of my professors, and she came straight from Santa Barbara, right? The Mecca of evpsych. And what I loved about evpsych was that while cultural anthropology and to an extent, other disciplines emphasize what makes us different, evolutionary psychology emphasizes what makes us all the same. They would call it the psychological unity of mankind, right? Our shared nature as a species.

• 1:58:02Macken Murphy?

  And I think that evolutionary psychology, while, you know, while I think that on some questions, there are better tools now after, you know, after learning more about the field, frankly, at Oxford and its alternatives. While my opinion has kind of shifted on it, I still maintain that they're right about so many things and that they're. Their big wins are some of the biggest in psychology ever. I mean, it's incredible that, uh, that, you know, Buss's original mate preferences stuff holds up, uh, what, nearly half a century later, and that you can still basically find the exact same, the exact same results by running the exact same study. I mean, you want to talk about a replication

• 1:58:46Macken Murphy?

  crisis, that's awesome. Uh, but again, for things like understanding the complex interplay between culture, environment, and nature to determine who we find sexy and who we don't, I've come to just think that, that evolutionary psychology is part of the picture.

• 1:59:05Chris Williamson?

  Necessary but not sufficient.

• 1:59:07Macken Murphy?

  Yeah, you also need, you also need a deep understanding of socioecology.

• 1:59:12Chris Williamson?

  Well, ultimately, you're not lucky.

• 1:59:14Macken Murphy?

  Which many, which many evolutionary psychologists have, of course. I mean, I'm not criticizing anyone.

• 1:59:19Chris Williamson?

  They know you're not.

• 1:59:19Macken Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:20Chris Williamson?

  The, um, human behavior isn't occurring inside of a Faraday cage.

• 1:59:24Macken Murphy?

  Hmm.

• 1:59:25Chris Williamson?

  Right? People are influenced by, we said it before, like two very obvious ones, uh, beautification, uh, in relation to local socioeconomic inequality and the sex ratio hypothesis, right? Two, just two effects that occur.

• 1:59:39Macken Murphy?

  Yeah, income inequality and sex ratio, fascinating.

• 1:59:42Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. And you're like, right, okay. And, and both of those are like, you know, pretty hardcore, at least, uh, every evolutionary psychologist will be familiar with.

• 1:59:50Macken Murphy?

  Yeah, exactly. And that's a huge, that's a brilliant point because that's very behavioral ecologically compatible. Like those two fields would not disagree.

• 1:59:58Chris Williamson?

  Yes. So you go, okay, well, in this, like, I need to do more work because this is literally the first time I've ever heard the words behavioral ecology put together. Maybe I've heard it like at some point before, but it's the first time I've heard it used properly. So I need to look into the field more. But

• 2:00:13Chris Williamson?

  the way that I could see.

• 2:00:16Chris Williamson?

  If you're right with the way that your field looks at the world, functionally, it will be better at predicting behavior.

• 2:00:23Macken Murphy?

  Yeah. So one, yeah. So there are cases where you test them against each other, like you could test them against each other.

• 2:00:28Chris Williamson?

  Whereas like this is what we should do. This is what humans should do. This is what their preferences are, but that's in a, you know, Petri dish, confined box, sandbox, Faraday cage. If you're not in this hermetically sealed lab, what happens? Well, you are intrinsically fused with the culture and with the presuppositions of what you think and your assumptions about yourself and about the world and about your place in the world and about what other people think of you. And so, perfect example of this, 20 years ago, every girl wanted a thigh gap. Now, it's like

• 2:01:08Macken Murphy?

  When the economy was great.

• 2:01:12Chris Williamson?

  Dude, I've really, really enjoyed this. I'm very glad that you've come through. We have, we have literally like five more episodes to do. And I look forward to finding some ungodly time for one of us when you get back to Australia to run this back again. But I'm really glad that you came through and stopped off in Austin. Where should people go? They want to keep up to date with everything that you do. You're massive on TikTok. You've got fantastic podcasts as well. Where should people go? They want to check out.

• 2:01:34Macken Murphy?

  Yeah, well, there's, I guess there are a few things that are worth flagging. The first, for my kind of social media presence, it would be good to just Google my name and follow it. And then in terms of the actual work I'm doing, so there's academic work, which I'm going to keep everyone abreast of. And then there's also some corporate work as well, frankly, where, you know, you've met Tim today. So we're working on an app called Coupli and you can go to just to flag this, right? Coupli.io/macken. If you're in a relationship, right, and you're looking to improve your relationships, this is an app where both partners download it and we're going to be bringing some of the science

• 2:02:16Macken Murphy?

  that we talked about today into the app to help improve couples and help them last longer.

• 2:02:22Chris Williamson?

  Dude, I appreciate you. You're awesome.

• 2:02:24Macken Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:24Chris Williamson?

  Your stuff's really, really good and I'm glad that we connected and I hope that you continue going and I hope that we have more conversations.

• 2:02:30Macken Murphy?

  Cheers. Thank you so much, Chris. Appreciate it.

• 2:02:32Speaker 02

  Mr. President, my company told me of the explosion on our rig.

• 2:02:35Speaker 03

  On October 2nd.

• 2:02:36Speaker 02

  Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all keep the blame on me.

• 2:02:41Speaker 03

  Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 2:02:49Speaker 04

  What would happen if I stopped going? You stop, you freeze in there, that's what.

• 2:02:53Speaker 03

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 2:02:56Speaker 04

  I'm not the first then.

• 2:02:57Speaker 03

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a minute without parent.