Why Algorithms Can’t Predict Your Love Life with Dr. Paul Eastwick

Modern dating can feel like a marketplace. We’re told we all have a “mate value,” that some people are 9s and 10s, and that the laws of evolution determine who gets chosen — and who gets rejected. But what if we’ve misunderstood what evolutionary science actually says about love? Dr. Laurie sits down with social psychologist Dr. Paul Eastwick, author of Bonded by Evolution: The New Science of Love and Connection https://podcasts.apple.com/fr/podcast/bonded-by-evolution-how-attraction-really-works-paul/id1553279283?i=1000750432909&l=en-GB, to challenge some of the most pervasive myths about attraction and compatibility. Do dating app algorithms actually know who's right for you? Are we really all placed in different "leagues"? If you’ve ever wondered whether love is destiny, biology, or something you can actually create, Dr. Eastwick offers a surprising new perspective. Resources mentioned in this episode: Bonded by Evolution: The New Science of Love and Connection https://books.apple.com/us/audiobook/bonded-by-evolution-the-new-science-of-love/id1815733977 “The Pairing Game: A Classroom Demonstration of the Matching Phenomenon https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1999-13804-007” “Matching for Attractiveness in Romantic Partners and Same-Sex Friends: A Meta-Analysis and Theoretical Critique https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1989-01355-001” “The Social Relations Model https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/chapter/bookseries/abs/pii/S0065260108601446” “Once More: Is Beauty in the Eye of the Beholder? Relative contributions of private and shared taste to judgments of facial attractiveness https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16634665/” “Sex Differences in Mate Preferences Revisited: Do People Know What They Initially Desire in a Romantic Partner? https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18211175/” “Northwestern Speed-dating Study I https://dataverse.unc.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.15139/S3/HK7KZQ” “Northwestern Speed-dating Study II https://dataverse.unc.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.15139/S3/52MIJO” “The (Mental) Ties That Bind: Cognitive Structures That Predict Relationship Resilience https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1999-15054-010” “We’re Not That Choosy: Emerging Evidence of a Progression Bias in Romantic Relationships https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/10888683211025860” “Romantic Relationship Status Biases Memory of Faces of Attractive Opposite-Sex Others: Evidence from a Reverse-Correlation Paradigm https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0010027711001971” “Relationship Regulation in the Face of Eye Candy: a Motivated Cognition Framework for Understanding Responses to Attractive Alternatives https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2352250X15000603” “Perceived, not actual, similarity predicts initial attraction in a live romantic context: Evidence from the speed-dating paradigm https://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/eli-finkel/documents/InPress_TidwellEastwickFinkel_PersonalRelationships_000.pdf” “Is Romantic Desire Predictable? Machine Learning Applied to Initial Romantic Attraction https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28853645/” “Love Factually https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/love-factually/id1766543146” See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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

• 0:06Laurie Santos?

  Pushkin.

• 0:13Laurie Santos?

  As William Shakespeare once said, "The course of true love never did run smooth." And one of the un-smoothe-est parts of love is the initial attraction phase. You see somebody across the way who looks kinda cute, but will that person like you back? Will they think you're hot enough, smart enough, successful enough? Sometimes, the answer is yes. Cue all the hearts and fireworks. But at least some of the time, the answer is no. The person that you're into isn't that into you.

• 0:41Speaker 01

  Relationships, and attraction especially, there can be a lot of rejection. It can be pretty demoralizing. And to some extent, you can't skip that part, but I think it really matters, why was I rejected in this instance?

• 0:53Laurie Santos?

  This is Dr. Paul Eastwick, an expert on the psychology of human mating.

• 0:58Speaker 01

  And there's a whole set of ideas out there that suggest that you got rejected because you're a 3 out of 10. And you're just gonna need to settle for the other 3s.

• 1:10Laurie Santos?

  Paul is referring to a set of ideas he calls "the EVO script," the notion that human attraction boils down to the harsh laws of natural selection. Under the EVO script, finding the right partner is all about finding someone with good genes. Some of us, those so-called 9s and 10s out there, possess a whole host of traits that signal those good genes. The rest of us, not so much.

• 1:31Speaker 01

  You have a certain set of attributes. They characterize who you are and they determine what you're gonna get on the market. This is a set of ideas that got very, very popular, but honestly, it's not very inspiring. You do kinda just wonder, like, what am I doing wrong? What is wrong with me? And, boy, it makes the rejections hit that much harder.

• 1:54Laurie Santos?

  But Paul's joining me on the show today to share some good news. His research has found that when it comes to dating, many of these EVO script ideas simply don't hold up. In fact, he's just published a new book with a much more inspiring view on the evolutionary origins of love. It's called Bonded by Evolution: The New Science of Love and Connection.

• 2:13Speaker 01

  It's about a lot of the ideas that we kind of get wrong about attraction and relationships and what the science actually says about how relationships work.

• 2:22Laurie Santos?

  But what does the science say about how relationships actually work? Well, Paul will tell us after these quick messages from our sponsors.

• 2:36Laurie Santos?

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human. This episode is brought to you by Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab, hosted by the amazing Katie Milkman, behavioral scientist and author of the bestselling book How to Change. Choiceology is a show about the psychology and economics behind our decisions. Each episode shares the latest research in behavioral science and dives into themes like the power of self-control, shaping your mindset for success, navigating new beginnings, and why starting over can feel so hard. Katie talks to authors, athletes, Nobel laureates, and everyday people about why we make irrational choices and how to make better choices to help avoid costly mistakes.

• 3:19Laurie Santos?

  You'll learn about tools and strategies to help improve your decision making and a ton of other fantastic things about the mind. Listen and subscribe at schwab.com/podcast or find it wherever you listen to your shows.

• 3:33Speaker 02

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• 4:08Laurie Santos?

  Social psychologist Paul Eastwick has long been frustrated by what he's called "the EVO script," the idea that human mating can simply be boiled down to a set of harsh evolutionary rules that govern who and what we find attractive. And perhaps the most infamous EVO script notion in popular culture today is the concept of mate value. I asked Paul to explain how that idea is usually understood.

• 4:31Speaker 01

  You're a collection of attributes, skills and abilities. And it can be a bunch of things. It can be your attractiveness, of course. It can be your intelligence, anything that's going to make you desirable to the other gender, if we're assuming heterosexuality here, right? So for men, it might be things like earning potential and status. For women, it might be things like youth. But all of these things factor into your mate value. And your mate value should set your standards according to this worldview. You should be trying to figure out where you sit in this hierarchy because you're probably going to be able to date somebody else who's roughly at the same place that you are. I think some

• 5:13Speaker 01

  of these ideas feel intuitive if you think about like popularity in a high school. There's this very famous game that psychologists often play in their classes where people wear numbers on their foreheads indicating their value, but you don't know what your value is. And you're told to go around and try to pair up with the highest value partner you can get. And what you see is that people who have low numbers, they figure it out pretty quickly because nobody wants to go near them.

• 5:40Laurie Santos?

  Because ideas, "I'm walking around with a three, but I can't see my three." I'm like, "Ooh, let me go with the nine or the 10." And the nine or 10 is like, "No way," runs away from me.

• 5:47Speaker 01

  Right, absolutely not. And the two that you were avoiding at first, well, eventually you settle for that guy because it's about the best that you can do.

• 5:55Laurie Santos?

  I mean, this is the kind of thing we see on the internet all the time. I know there's like a new meme going around that's like, she's a nine, but she chews with her mouth open, literally giving these things a number.

• 6:05Speaker 01

  This is so pervasive on the internet. It's a little bit wild.

• 6:08Laurie Santos?

  And so why did we think this was true scientifically? I know there's a phenomenon that researchers looked at to say, oh, maybe there is a mate value.

• 6:15Speaker 01

  Scientifically, originally, this idea comes from two places. One is that if you show people photographs or they meet strangers, there's pretty good agreement about, let's say, how attractive somebody is. It's not perfect, but it's certainly there. And the second place we saw it is that if you look at existing couples, if you look at couples who are together, their attractiveness level correlates. It's far from a perfect correlation, but it's more than a coin flip. So there's a real association there. And so people assumed, well, what that means is that the market is the thing that's determining largely who we're getting.

• 6:55Laurie Santos?

  But I think it also comes from the online dating landscape. So talk about how like these apps really reinforce these ideas.

• 7:01Speaker 01

  When you look at online dating, when you look at the apps, they do create a very unequal market. When all you've got is a photo and a brief description to go with, yeah, people are swiping quickly and the attractive people, the people with the high value attributes, boy, do they earn a lot of likes. And if you don't have those attributes, nobody is going to be swiping right on you. And the problem there is that it creates this very, very imbalanced market where there's a whole bunch of people who really have no options.

• 7:36Laurie Santos?

  And in your book, you talk about this new model that folks have been pushing lately, where like this mate value is part of it, but not all of it. So explain this model.

• 7:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, oh, this is so key. I've got to shout out Dave Kenny, who really came up with this idea originally. But the idea works like this. Attraction is not one thing, it's three. And one of those three parts is what we could call popularity, but it rests on the assumption that we agree how desirable somebody is. There are two other components. One, we'd call selectivity. It's the idea that some people are always open to forming a new relationship. Other people are extremely selective. But I got to talk about the third component. This third component is what we call compatibility. It refers to what's going on above and beyond how selective I generally am and how

• 8:24Speaker 01

  desirable you actually are and refers to the unique connection between the two of us. Even in initial impressions, compatibility is the biggest share of what's going on.

• 8:37Laurie Santos?

  One of the things I was shocked by was that even this idea of the consensus part, like how much we agree on the mate value, if there is one, that wasn't actually as high as people thought. Explain some of the studies that showed that it's not as big as we assume.

• 8:49Speaker 01

  There was this great study a little while ago that tried to capture how much agreement and disagreement there was when people were evaluating faces, right? How attractive do you think these faces are? And what they found is that, yes, there is agreement here, but also look at how much disagreement. And the great stat in that study is that most of the faces that these participants were evaluating, it was like 96% of them, somebody rated you in the top half or in the bottom half. Okay? So that means that only for 4% of the faces did everybody agree that you're in the top half or the bottom half. So that is mostly disagreement there.

• 9:32Laurie Santos?

  I mean, is it just that somebody thinks you're not half bad?

• 9:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly, exactly. And if you are consensually popular, not everybody thinks that.

• 9:42Laurie Santos?

  Okay, so that's one problem with this mate value idea. Another one is something you found when you look particularly at the timing of romantic relationships. How does that challenge this idea of mate value?

• 9:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it's one thing if you're looking at photographs and meeting strangers, but it's another thing entirely when you're getting to know people over time. And I just got to point out, historically, this is where most relationships came from. When we were evolving on the savanna, we lived in small groups with a lot of people you were going to know for a long period of time. You weren't going to spend a lot of time meeting strangers. So what happens when we actually get to know each other? It turns out that compatibility component I was describing earlier, it gets more and more important. There's more of that unique idiosyncrasy in how people feel about each other. And the consensus component goes down. So we actually agree less and less about how appealing someone is

• 10:37Speaker 01

  as we get to know them over a period of weeks and months.

• 10:41Laurie Santos?

  That predicts this really interesting thing, which is that people who might have been lucking out because they were really high on the mate value than I was in tens. Over time, attractiveness gets less important, it seems like.

• 10:51Speaker 01

  Exactly. I like to think about summer camp. I'm like from the East Coast of the United States originally. So, you know, summer camp is in my DNA. And if you imagine a bunch of heterosexual, mixed gender kids going to a summer camp, what's going to happen in June is that the popular people, well, everybody will agree that they're popular and they'll have a lot of success. But as all these folks get to know each other and agreement goes down by the end of the summer, anything can happen. Now it's like, well, the popular people, they're not having the same success with everybody that they once had. And the people who were consensually not so attractive at the beginning, well, maybe now there's somebody who has really taken a liking to them

• 11:33Speaker 01

  that they might not have been able to successfully attract in June.

• 11:37Laurie Santos?

  So that's idea number one that's wrong, that there's this inherent built in mate value.

• 11:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:42Laurie Santos?

  A second one that you've talked about is this idea of gender differences and how we look for mates. There's things that, especially in heterosexual couples, that women want, and there's things that guys want.

• 11:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:51Laurie Santos?

  What's the typical idea and what is it getting wrong?

• 11:54Speaker 01

  I do think it's predicated on the idea that men and women want really different things out of relationships. And they're attracted to really different things. The classic studies in this space ask men and women what kinds of attributes they want in a romantic partner. So men are likely to say that they care about attractiveness in a partner more than women. And women are likely to say that they care about things like earning potential in a partner more than men. And when you give people rating scales and you say, rate these traits, how good are they? You will reliably find those gender differences across many, many countries throughout the world.

• 12:36Laurie Santos?

  This also seems to mirror the kind of thing we see in pop culture. I know you and I are children of the 90s and I watched, you know, model Anna Nicole Smith marry some very rich billionaire who himself was not that attractive. It also seems to play out in some icky ways in online spaces in ways that are really problematic.

• 12:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, so there's a whole trad wife culture online. Part of the trad wife idea is that there's nothing wrong with wanting to be a homemaker and a child caretaker. And look, I get that. People should get to make their own choices. But that's not the only thing that's in this ideology. What is very much in there is your beauty will translate into his success. So you need to be attractive, be appealing, be feminine, in the traditional sense of the word, so that you can land the right kind of provider. I mean, some of these ideas about the differences between men and women get supercharged online

• 13:37Speaker 01

  and infused with a lot of nastiness. So not only are women out to land the most successful man that she can get, but if you're going to be like a useful stepping stone to her along the way, I mean, it creates a lot of competitive us versus them ideas about what men and women are like and really promotes a lot of misogyny.

• 14:00Laurie Santos?

  And so these original ideas about these gender differences were based on these surveys. But New Results have used a technique that's not a survey. New Results have used revealed preferences. So what are revealed preferences and why are they better than these surveys?

• 14:12Speaker 01

  So the concept of the revealed preference is that, look, I'm not going to ask you what you think about these attributes in the abstract, disconnected from any particular person. I want to see how you react to an attribute like earning potential. As it is instantiated by specific other people. And we would do this using speed dating designs. This is just one way to do it, but I think it's the easiest one for folks to grasp. So let's say I send you to a speed dating event and you're going to meet a bunch of other men at this speed dating event, some of whom are ambitious and some of whom are not. So rather than asking you, how much do you want ambition in a partner?

• 14:54Speaker 01

  I'm going to see how much do you like the ambitious guys more than the unambitious guys? That's your revealed preference for ambition in an initial attraction context.

• 15:05Laurie Santos?

  And so what do we find when we really give people actual humans to choose from?

• 15:09Speaker 01

  If you send women speed dating, they do like the ambitious men a little bit more, not a lot more, but a little bit more than the unambitious ones. The fascinating thing is what happens when you do the same thing with men? Again, men say they care about ambition in a partner less than women do, but not when it comes to their revealed preferences. They like the ambitious women a little bit more than the unambitious ones. But the revealed preference for men and women for an attribute like ambition is really exactly the same.

• 15:43Laurie Santos?

  Okay, so that's ambition. What about attractiveness?

• 15:46Speaker 01

  People's revealed preference for attractiveness at a speed dating event is strong. They like the attractive people more than the unattractive people. That's this consensus component that we talked about. Men like the attractive women more than the unattractive women on average. But women also like the attractive men more than the unattractive men on average. And again, their revealed preference is the same. So this really cued us into the possibility that, whoa, maybe when we look at these differences and what men and women say they want, they're not translating into their experienced preferences when they're out there meeting real life people.

• 16:24Laurie Santos?

  So that was scientific alleged factoid number two that we're getting wrong.

• 16:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:28Laurie Santos?

  These gender differences. The third one is about different kinds of relationships or the length of different kinds of relationships. Evolutionary science has a lot to say about who's good. For a short term mate versus a long term mate. What is the science usually say and how is that wrong?

• 16:43Speaker 01

  This distinction is tricky because there's a tendency to think that if you're like a long term specialist, people aren't going to be attracted to you in a sexy way. And maybe even more pernicious. If you're somebody who's pretty sexy and you've had a few sexual partners in your past, that you won't be as good in the long term realm. As if people reside on like a slider between short term desirability and long term desirability. And you kind of got to pick which one fits your skills and abilities.

• 17:21Laurie Santos?

  And so the idea is like for a heterosexual woman, there are these guys who are the like super hot guys that you might want to have a one night stand with.

• 17:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:28Laurie Santos?

  And then they're the very sensitive guys who you might want to have a long term relationship with. But just like the other ideas of mate value, there's a kind of romantic destiny built in there. You're either going to be a short term mate or a long term one.

• 17:40Speaker 01

  That's tough on both types of guys. So first of all, the sexy one, like he's not worth considering for a long term relationship. But also these supposed long term guys, they're like not appreciated at all for anything sexual. This sounds terrible on both fronts.

• 17:57Laurie Santos?

  It also seems to be another thing that leads to a lot of misogyny online. Explain how this third idea gets picked up in online spaces.

• 18:04Speaker 01

  So this got turned into a whole bunch of terms online. I mean, people have maybe heard the terms alpha and beta, where alpha refers to the sexually desirable guy who supposedly has all the sexual opportunities. And the betas who kind of wait around for, you know, maybe they try some nice guy routines. They might try to gain a little bit of status, a little bit of money, but that's about the best that they can do. And they kind of got to wait for the alpha guy to decide which are the women that he wants. And you know, they'll pick up the rest.

• 18:37Laurie Santos?

  So what does this third idea get right? And what is it really getting wrong about how real relationships work?

• 18:43Speaker 01

  It gets one thing right, which is that attributes like being sexy and confident are associated with having more sex partners, with people being sexually interested in you. And it kind of stops there. That's about it. Pretty much everything else about this idea is way off base, including and especially the idea that something about a person's short-term desirability has anything to do at all with their long-term desirability. These ideas have been out there for a long time, like, oh, if you have a longer sexual resume when you're younger,

• 19:26Speaker 01

  you're more likely to get divorced or your marriage is going to be bad. Your desirability as a short-term partner really has no bearing one way or the other on how you're going to do in the long term.

• 19:38Laurie Santos?

  So it turns out that many, many sciency sounding ideas about love and attraction, that stuff that influencers online often use to make sense of relationships, they just don't match what the relationship science really shows. But humans are the product of natural selection. So what does evolutionary science really predict about relationships? Paul and I will tackle that question when the Happiness Lab returns after the break.

• 20:07Laurie Santos?

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• 22:59Laurie Santos?

  Dr. Paul Eastwick's new book, Bonded by Evolution, challenges the idea that human attraction is based on the one-dimensional concept of mate value. Instead, Paul argues that attraction depends a lot more on what he calls romantic compatibility, the factors that allow two people to work together long-term.

• 23:16Speaker 01

  So I think it's very important to realize that we lived in small groups and you had to build what sometimes anthropologists call pair bonds. You had to build a bond with somebody else for the purpose of raising these very helpless offspring. I mean, human offspring take a long time to raise to reproductive age, a very long time. It's the better part of two decades before kids in hunter-gatherer context are able to bring in as many calories as they consume. So they take a lot of work. And this is presumably why humans evolved the capacity to bond with each other.

• 23:57Speaker 01

  In a bond, what matters a lot more than like, oh, you're desirable, you have all the right abilities and skills and traits and attributes. What matters a lot more is do we work well together? Are we coordinated? Scientists use terms like interdependence, right? What is it like when we work together? Do things work smoothly or are things pretty difficult and we don't actually get along that well? So I think these ideas form the core of what we mean by compatibility and capture why it's so important.

• 24:31Laurie Santos?

  We also seem to have all these psychological quirks that help us build up compatibility. Sometimes biases that are pretty funny. Give me some examples of these.

• 24:37Speaker 01

  So, for example, on average in ongoing close relationships, people feel very positively about their partners. And when somebody might point out to them some of the shortcomings that their partners might have, we're really good at compartmentalizing those shortcomings, right? Like, yes, she's a little bit messy, but I don't know, this just kind of makes our home life exciting. And these things are really important for maintaining that sense that your relationship is valuable and you want to put in effort to keep it going. As a relationship builds, people end up doing this more and more.

• 25:17Speaker 01

  It's kind of a core piece of what it means to form and maintain a relationship is that you see your partner in the best possible light and that you're motivated to keep the relationship moving forward.

• 25:29Laurie Santos?

  That's what happens when we think about our partners in these motivated ways. What happens when we think about alternatives?

• 25:34Speaker 01

  We worry a lot about alternative partners, that they could pull us away from the person that we're currently in a relationship with. And alternatives can certainly do that. People do sometimes have wandering eyes, but we have all of these defense mechanisms built in that prevent us from even noticing that potential romantic partners are right there waiting for us. One of my favorite studies in this space looks at the mental images that people in relationships make about possible alternative partners. There are these neat techniques where you can get a literal picture on the screen of what they were thinking of. Were they thinking about somebody attractive or unattractive?

• 26:17Speaker 01

  And it turns out, if you're in a relationship, when you imagine other potential partners, you literally imagine somebody who is less attractive than what single people imagine in their heads. So that's just one of an array of different effects that demonstrate that people at a baseline level seem motivated to keep alternative partners at bay as a way of preserving their current relationship.

• 26:44Laurie Santos?

  So when it comes to relationships, compatibility matters a lot. We have all these mechanisms, once compatibility starts to keep building it up. But that just raises a really important question, which is, where does compatibility come from? I think one idea that most people have is that compatibility comes from people who are like us. You like the people who are like you. What does evidence say?

• 27:04Speaker 01

  It seems intuitive that we'd be especially attracted to others who are similar to us. And this was one of the big challenges we confronted. We documented that there was all of this compatibility that you could see in attraction context. It's even bigger if you look at ongoing acquaintances, friendships, and close relationships. So we gotta explain it. We gotta explain why these two people are compatible and why other pairs are not. So we looked to see, well, maybe it is about similarity. Let's calculate similarity across all of these different dimensions, ask people about their deal breakers, and see if we can account for compatibility that way. And it turned out, it did pretty badly.

• 27:45Speaker 01

  It was surprising how poorly similarity fared at predicting compatibility. We tried other forms of matching, too, like, oh, ask people about their deal breakers, and those didn't really go anywhere either. I think part of the problem here is that because of where we live, because of how we are sorted into different social situations, we're often surrounded by people who are similar to us. We're surrounded by people who fit our idea on average of, you know, what we really want somebody else to have. And so we end up thinking we really care about these things, but in large part, we're really reflecting the social milieu that we're in.

• 28:27Laurie Santos?

  So it might look like I really want a partner who's smart like me and a professor like me, but in practice at the university, the only people I'm ever going to meet is a professor who's smart like me.

• 28:38Speaker 01

  That's right. And then you end up with somebody like that. Oh, look, similarity predicts attraction. Well, the challenge is that within your milieu, more versus less similarity isn't mattering, which means it can't explain why there's so much going on with respect to compatibility in your social environment. Why even in your social environment, you're really going to click with a couple of people, but not most people.

• 29:02Laurie Santos?

  I wanted to pick on up on something else you just said, this idea of deal breakers, because I think this is another thing that people think in terms of compatibility. I think this is something that the internet and online dating is probably made worse. This idea that like, well, my partner has to be tall.

• 29:15Speaker 01

  Oh, gosh.

• 29:16Laurie Santos?

  He has to really like podcasts, whatever.

• 29:17Speaker 01

  Imagine if he didn't like podcasts, oh, what would you do?

• 29:21Laurie Santos?

  It's like a major red flag, right? But when we actually look at whether people's theories work, do they work as well as people assume?

• 29:28Speaker 01

  No, I mean, we tried other forms of matching too. Like, are you ultimately more attracted to people who fit your idea of these deal breaker qualities that you just have to have? Well, that didn't work all that well either.

• 29:41Laurie Santos?

  And so this seems to be really damning for the way that a lot of online tools really help us out. I mean, I don't know what these algorithms are, but apparently a lot of these matching services online have like, you know, some sort of big machine learning that they're using to figure out what my compatibility is. Are these things just more BS than we think?

• 29:59Speaker 01

  Well, you know, it's funny because my colleague, Dr. Samantha Joel, ran some studies like this not long ago. And it was basically a perfect facsimile of what these online dating apps and companies could be doing. I've got a trove of information about you and a trove of information about a bunch of other people. Things you report about yourself ahead of time, traits, attributes, preferences, what have you. She used the algorithms to try to match people up, to try to predict who's gonna click especially well with whom, and she was able to predict absolutely nothing.

• 30:36Laurie Santos?

  That's pretty depressing for big data.

• 30:38Speaker 01

  And I do wanna be clear, like, you report things about yourself ahead of time. We can predict whether you yourself are selective, or you yourself are popular, but it's the matching, right? I can't figure out who are the pairs that are gonna work very well together. This was the realization for me that we just have a broken idea about where compatibility comes from, and we gotta radically reorient how we think about this.

• 31:03Laurie Santos?

  And so your book provides that radical reorientation. You talk about compatibility as being a so-called creative chaos. What do you mean there?

• 31:10Speaker 01

  Well, there's two components there. The creative part is the idea that it's built, that it's constructed, that a lot of what compatibility is and where it comes from takes place in sequences of interactions that unfold over time. We found that we really hit it off at a party the other day, you know, chatting about rom-coms, for example, one of my favorite topics. And so, when I see you at the bar next time, I might sit next to you and try to see if I can spark up a similar conversation, or take it in a different direction to see if that's enjoyable too. Now, repeat that process a thousand

• 31:53Speaker 01

  times. That's what I mean by created. We have to engage other people in series of interactions and kinda see what it is that we can bond over. And the number of things that people can bond over in principle is very, very large. I think that's why it's so hard to predict who's gonna find compatibility ahead of time.

• 32:17Laurie Santos?

  You've talked about this process as being one of growing over time, which I think is a notion that we have, that relationships can strengthen over time. But I think we forget that this temporal element is such a huge part of it.

• 32:28Speaker 01

  It's a huge part of it, and it starts early. Now, look, some of this is luck, and that's what I mean by the chaotic component, too. And when we watch the speed dates that we conducted several years ago... Boy, it's just people struggling to find things to connect over. And sometimes they get lucky. They just hit on some weird, random thing that they have in common, and they kind of spin it off from there. So it's not similarity in the traditional sense, like, oh, my personality needs to match yours, or even you need to fit what I'm looking for in a partner. It's much more about like, did we just get a little bit lucky? A little moment of serendipity where we hit on something,

• 33:11Speaker 01

  and then we were able to keep building off of it over time. And the couples that are able to do that are the ones that are most likely to be able to find something together.

• 33:24Laurie Santos?

  So scientifically speaking, mate value is out, and the creative chaos of compatibility is in. But how do you find the right person to build that meaningful connection with? We'll explore that question, along with the science of the friend zone and Paul's optimism about Tinder, when the Happiness Lab returns in a moment.

• 33:47Laurie Santos?

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• 34:31Laurie Santos?

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• 35:15Laurie Santos?

  Amica is built for its customers and prioritizes you. It's the way insurance should be. Amica, we're your priority number one. Visit amica.com and get a quote today. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. There are plenty of reasons we put off getting support. And for a lot of people, cost is one of them. With BetterHelp, insurance options may now be available nationwide with an average copay for eligible members of just $23 per session. And while we're reconsidering old assumptions, maybe there are a few others worth questioning too. Women these days inherit a lot of unwritten rules. Be ambitious, but not too ambitious. Be there for everyone, but still make time for yourself.

• 35:57Laurie Santos?

  Have it all together, but don't look like you're trying too hard. I've been trying to unwrit the unwritten rule that I'm never allowed to say no, that it makes me a bad person. I've been trying to give myself the grace that I would give other people and to remember that no one has the bandwidth to do everything all the time. If you're trying to work through your own unwritten rules, therapy may be of help. If you've been waiting to start therapy, BetterHelp works with more than 125 health plan networks. And eligible members have an average copay of just $23 per session with insurance. Don't have insurance or live outside the US? You can still get 10% off your first month. Visit betterhelp.com/laurie to explore your payment options.

• 36:40Laurie Santos?

  That's better, H E L P, dot com slash Laurie.

• 36:50Laurie Santos?

  Before the break, social psychologist Paul Eastwick explained that romantic compatibility often builds slowly over time. But Paul's explanation also implies that we may be able to fall in love with far more people than we think. And if that's true, what does that mean for modern dating?

• 37:06Speaker 01

  I mean, if you take some of these ideas to the extreme, I find it exciting, if not a little outlandish. What I am suggesting to some extent is that, boy, we underestimate the extent to which we can be compatible with a lot of different people. And I know anybody who is using the apps right now might be tempted to throw this podcast into the ocean, thinking, what are you talking about? Can I please tell you about the horrible dates I've been on recently? And my answer to that is that I think that the apps are leading us astray in a few ways. First of all, they really encourage the resume date. Okay, the resume date where you sit down

• 37:50Speaker 01

  and you share a bunch of facts and figures. That is really not what I'm talking about. And another problem is that on the apps, we're expecting sparks very, very quickly. Keep in mind, in the environments that historically people have found partners, you were getting to know these people over time, kind of whether you wanted to or not. You didn't have the option to bail after a bad first impression. Like, this person was going to be around for a long time. So you were going to have other opportunities to interact. And maybe the luck doesn't happen on the first interaction. Maybe it happens on the eighth.

• 38:26Laurie Santos?

  It also seems like there's all kinds of other things about online dating that maybe mess with this process of compatibility. One big one seems to be just how many options we have. Talk about how the choice overload might prevent this compatibility development process from sticking.

• 38:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think this is part of the issue, too. It's just, there's so many options out there. And you feel like you could be doing better. And I think that makes it very tempting for people to bail quickly or to just go on a lot of first dates. If I were giving advice to people who are going to keep using the apps, and I understand why people are reluctant to totally ditch them.

• 39:07Speaker 01

  But if I were gonna give people advice, it would be, look, try to date from a larger pool of folks, try to open up the aperture a little bit for who you're willing to consider, and be willing to give people a second or a third chance, rather than bailing after a single 10-minute resume exchange over coffee. I think if people do that, they might find themselves having a little bit more fun, meeting some more interesting, outside-the-box people, and might stand a better chance of finding something meaningful. But my advice, generally speaking, is that, look, if there's something that grabs you about a particular

• 39:49Speaker 01

  person, from what you can tell online, or by texting ahead of time, it's perhaps worth checking out, even if the person doesn't line up in a bunch of other ways. And I think the part that I worry about the most is ruling people out, maybe because, I don't know, like, they don't have exactly the right level of education, or what is this job exactly? I'm not clear on what this is. Worrying about things like, oh, what will it be like when I introduce him or her to my friends? I would just advise people, if there's something interesting about this person, it's worth giving them an extra shot, just to know.

• 40:24Laurie Santos?

  You've also argued that we need to remember just how much these apps are taking us away from the environment in which we normally make these decisions. We're looking at text and photos, and our ancestors looked at real humans in the real world. Are there any ways to move the apps more in this direction of kind of dating in a community-based way?

• 40:43Speaker 01

  That's my big hope. And, you know, it seems silly, but in retrospect, I mean, that's what we thought Tinder was gonna do. We thought that the idea was like, oh, people are gonna get together more spontaneously. It's gonna encourage more socialization among acquaintances and friends of friends, and how great is this gonna be? And this is not what happened at all. So, socializing with people you only kinda know, boy, has that become a lost art. And I think for people who are single and looking, it is worth redeveloping that muscle. Because in many cases, this is how relationships have historically formed.

• 41:24Speaker 01

  This is how our social minds organize other people, right? Oh, you know, this person, let me introduce the two of you. Here's something that you could chat about. These things are often very, very helpful for people. And it means that you don't need to be stunning or super confident or an incredible conversationalist from moment one, because you're just kind of hanging out with other people. I would love to see more apps encouraging interactions like that. I'm not an app developer, so I don't exactly know how that gets done. But, boy, you know, the intramural sports leagues for 20-somethings, the cooking classes, all of these things, I think, can be a really useful way

• 42:08Speaker 01

  of supplementing the apps for people who are single.

• 42:11Laurie Santos?

  I was really struck by that in your book. You had this notion that if you could give your past self some advice, it would be stop thinking about where you go to meet someone to date and just be around people, period.

• 42:21Speaker 01

  Oh, my gosh, I was like, well, I guess maybe I'll like, try to have some sparkling conversation with a stranger. I mean, the movies kind of sell these ideas from time to time. It's not one of my favorite tropes. But I just thought like, you know, the right pickup line is gonna do it. And what I should have been doing is just hanging out with friends. And you see where the night takes you. And you meet a few new, interesting people. But these things take time. And that can be a real bummer to hear if you feel like your networks are kind of stale and you're single and there's really no prospects. I totally get it. I have absolutely been there. Luckily, socializing with other people is enjoyable in and of itself,

• 43:06Speaker 01

  even if it doesn't immediately lead to a romantic connection.

• 43:10Laurie Santos?

  You've also talked about how we got to get outside this idea of the romantic connection, period, that we might need to embrace the friend zone. What do you mean there?

• 43:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I mean, this one's funny. See, the friend zone comes from Friends, right? Originally, it was from the TV show Friends. It was about Ross and Rachel. So I'll describe it with respect to Ross and Rachel. At this early point in the show, Ross is trying to avoid Being in the friend zone, right? Ross has a thing for Rachel. Rachel doesn't really feel that way about Ross. We all know where this ultimately goes. But at this point in the show, Ross is in the friend zone, and this is considered dangerous. It's dangerous because he might turn into this sort of sniveling nice guy. And she's gonna take advantage of him.

• 43:59Speaker 01

  And boy, is there a lot of advice online to men about how you need to avoid this. And being friends with women is a trap because they will take advantage of you. Of all the bad ideas online, this one might be close to the dead. There's a lot of bad ideas online, but this is a really bad one. Men and women can be friends just fine. It is very common for men and women to have friendships where they don't experience strong romantic attraction for each other. And in fact, for both heterosexual men and women, they're ultimately more likely to find romantic partners to the extent that their friend networks have both men and women in them. Not necessarily like you're gonna date those friends,

• 44:43Speaker 01

  but those friends are gonna introduce you to some other friends who then you're likely to get in a relationship with. So doing this whole like, no, you gotta be friends with people of the same gender. And people of the other gender are to try your pickup lines on, and that's pretty much it. This is a disastrous approach and it is not gonna lead to success for most people.

• 45:05Laurie Santos?

  It sounds like this new evolutionary science of relationships is is much more hopeful. But it gives us a different kind of work than we normally think of. It's not about the really funny quip online and scrolling through millions of photos. It's kind of like getting back out there into the communities and evolutionary situations that we are normally in and just being patient. It can be hard, but it sounds like it's effective.

• 45:27Speaker 01

  I do think the patience is one of the hardest things. And look, growing up, I was not the most patient person. I'm probably not the most patient person now. It can be really challenging to feel like you're just waiting around for the right person to show up. But Socializing is very, very important. Spending time with friends, meeting new people. And these things ultimately can be helpful for most people. We've just got to reestablish that lost art of hanging out and kind of seeing where the night takes us.

• 46:01Laurie Santos?

  And the good news is all of that is pretty happiness inducing, even if you don't get a romantic partner out of it.

• 46:05Speaker 01

  Exactly. I mean, that was one of the key insights that I had was that like, but wait a minute. I'm just enjoying myself hanging out with these people. I don't date that person, date that person. I don't know, like this is fun. I'm just going to keep doing this. And this was at a point in my life where I was single and I was interested in dating people, but I stopped being so focused on exactly where the prospects were. And things really started to change after that point. And it's not because like, oh, I developed these new special attributes and now I had higher mate value. I just had this expanding social network. And once it really starts expanding in a major way,

• 46:47Speaker 01

  it's almost like it starts cascading and you're just meeting all of these new people and new possibilities emerge. And the apps aren't great at fostering that, but we can still do it in the 21st century, I'm pretty sure.

• 46:59Laurie Santos?

  Modern dating can make attraction feel like a marketplace, like we're all walking around with mate value numbers imprinted on our foreheads. But Paul's work shows that compatibility is something we can build over time. If you're interested in learning even more accurate ideas about the evolution of love, check out Paul's book, Bonded by Evolution: The New Science of Love and Connection, which is available now. You can also check out Paul's podcast, Love Factually, where he breaks down the latest relationship science with reviews of some of your favorite rom coms. If you have thoughts about today's episode and the science of love, we'd love to hear from you. You can email us at [email protected] or leave us a review to tell us what you liked. You can also sign up to learn more about the science of happiness

• 47:41Laurie Santos?

  and join my free newsletter on my website, drlaurisantos.com. That's D R L A U R I E S A N T O S dot com. And if you've enjoyed these past few episodes on the science of love, then you're in luck. Because next week, we'll be revisiting some of our favorite episodes on the science of love from the Happiness Lab archives, including one of my favorite ever interviews with the OG pioneers of modern relationship science. You don't want to miss it, so be sure to come back next week for the Happiness Lab with me, Dr. Laurie Santos.

• 48:18Speaker 03

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• 49:48Laurie Santos?

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• 50:16Speaker 05

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