#838 - Dr Paul Eastwick - What Do People Really Want In A Partner?

30:03What do you think about that? That's a great question. We have occasionally looked for those kinds of effects, but it's very hard to tease apart with these kinds of data, right? But because what you might be seeing is that if I think somebody is like a one or a two or a three I am penalizing them exceptionally harshly and I'm not really differentiating between the five sixes and sevens. Okay. When we're doing studies like this where people are reporting on it's either somebody you're in a relationship with or somebody you're kind of into all of this, you know, these differences that we see here are really happening in that upper end, right?

30:45Because this is about differentiating somebody who I think is a seven on a track from somebody who I think is a six. But in context where you're meeting strangers and it's maybe a broader set of possible people that you'd be meeting, I do think it's plausible that people are sort of establishing some minimums and working up from there. But like it sounds like very clear and easy to picture how that would work. The stats end up being absurdly complicated. Yeah, I imagine. I imagine that stats. Stats was actually one of only two subjects that I got a C in a GCSE level. So I was a early onset bad at statistics.

31:29Yeah, it's it's it's stuff. Thinking about the good lover one, which is, I think, not only the starkest difference between stated and revealed, but also then comes and ranks at number one. What do you make of that? Is it both as the gap and then as the fact that it is the revealed? That's a good question. I think that when people, when you imagine somebody who's a good lover in the abstract, that what people are probably thinking is that's not going to impact my day -to -day life. Like, what are we talking about? We're talking about 30 minutes every evening or 30 minutes every week if you've been in a relationship for a while.

32:23But then in reality, somebody who's a good lover, that that idea incorporates a lot of other good things that relationships have, right? So it also indicates things like they're sensitive, they're giving, they're caring, right? But they also know what they're doing and they care about whether, you know, whether, you know, my sexual experiences are good, right? So I think it's one of these attributes that when it's disembodied and abstract and disconnected from a particular person, it sounds just kind of okay. But when we think about our partner that way, it sort of brings in all of these other components that really make a sexual or romantic relationship what it is.

33:14I imagine that's a really good point. I imagine that smells good, has a good body, is sexy. you know, what is it? It's somebody that has a good body thing, reliable, disciplined, has agency over their life, they're motivated, they can have a kind of discomfort. You know, it's like this whole list of things that are upstream from has a good body. And I guess the same thing goes for smells good. It means that they've probably got a personal hygiene and they take care of themselves and maybe they're considerate of others, and so on and so forth. You know, another, this is just occurring to me now and this would be an interesting thing to test is that when you ask people how much do you want these traits in an ideal partner, they are mostly thinking about who I want with me, by my side, doing the hard tasks of life.

34:06But when they're thinking about a real person that they are in or want to be in a relationship with, that these sexier, more romantic, components come to the form more. It's a bit more visceral. Yeah, right, because I'm thinking about this person and all the visceral things that they inspire for good or for ill. And so I think that's quite, that's another possible explanation for why we see some of those discrepancies. Were the stated or revealed preferences for short term or long term relationships or both? These were all, we usually describe it as an ideal romantic partner, which at least to me connotes something long term.

34:56We didn't ask about short term ideals in this study, really just because of time. Got you. Did you work out overall whether men or women were more accurate? That's a good question. Actually, I don't think we did. But that's something we could certainly do. I mean, get a simple start. Yeah, right. That should take too long. Right, that shouldn't be too bad. My sense is that they're probably similar, but I don't, but I didn't look at whether there's sort of overall mismatch is there. I mean, certainly we saw with attractiveness when then had it off more than men and then for earning potential, they were kind of similarly off.

35:39I wonder, did you consider, or would you consider doing a follow -up study to do the reversal? How important do you think that the opposite sex thinks that trait is in you? Yeah, that's an interesting thing. And you know, I mean, there's some studies that have done that, not at this kind of scale. But people's ideas about what the other gender likes, I think the evidence suggests it tracks pretty well what people say they like, right? But we've never tried to look at what would the discrepancies be there, right? Between my ideas about what you like and your revealed preferences for, you know, some of my other...

36:16Yeah, because that's what's important and this is, this is I think probably the most interesting element. Basically, is it even worth talking about mate preferences if they don't actually reflect our revealed main preferences. Like what we're both doing is we're both playing this game. I can predict what you say you're going to want, but that's pointless. Like I'm not here to just play some lexical game. The reason that we try and predict what other people want is to predict what they want, not to predict what they say that they want. Right, right. I do agree that this is part of the challenge here.

36:52And again, it is true when we talk about that whole suite of 35 traits that we can get some action there. That's not right. Right, right, exactly. That people do seem to have some self -insight. But on the specific traits, usually my bias as a researcher is that I'm usually much more interested in those associations. What we know, what we call reveal preferences here, that I want to know how strongly does this attribute predict some DV that I care about. I think it's interesting. I think what people's ideas about the attributes they like are also interesting, but not because I'd want to use it strategically to like try to match it exactly.

37:39I want to know what their revealed preferences are and try to match that. Are you familiar with the Keynesian beauty contest? Do you know what that is? No, tell me. Okay. Keynesian beauty contest describes a beauty contest where judges are rewarded for selecting the most popular faces among all judges rather than those they may personally find the most attractive. This idea is often applied in financial markets whereby investors could profit more by buying whichever stocks they think other investors will buy, rather than the stocks that have fundamentally the best value, because when other people buy a stock they bid the price up, allowing an earlier investor to cash out with the profit regardless of whether the price increases are supported by its fundamentals.

38:19So it's basically this world in which we are trying to predict what other people will predict as opposed to just predict what's going to happen in the real world. And that's where when we get to what do you think other people would look for in a partner? That's what you're doing. You're not just trying to think what do I think they want in a partner? It's what do I think that they will say? And then that gets in social desirability that gets a lot of this sort of second third order thinking in it. Yeah, that's really interesting. And so you could imagine that somebody who's paying more attention to revealed preferences might be able to get a leg up in that kind of way.

38:56That's an interesting idea. Yes. What was some of the biggest unanswered questions that you had after the study? There are implications, what it means for what people want at the moment. So one of the questions that remains unanswered that I'm very interested in is, you know, in this study, I'm a participant and I'm rating this partner on these traits. Now that's very useful. I mean, again, I'm a psychologist, so I believe in subjectivity is really important and that if I want to understand my experience of why I like this person rather than that person, and it helps to have me rate those traits.

39:35That tells me a lot and we get the reveal preferences from those kinds of ratings. But if you were, say, I'm the matchmaker, if you were an online dating company, you wouldn't have data like that if what you were trying to do was predict who was going to like whom. You would need people's self -reports on both sides, right? I mean, you know, if we're just dreaming here, you might have like, you know, independent coders, you know, rate people on their traits, okay? So what would we see for both revealed preferences and also that matching phenomenon if we're using both people's self -reports, right?

40:19So you're a self -reports of your traits and then my ideals and trying to match that way. Now, it is a basic rule with this kind of data that when you move from my judgment of the trait to your judgment of the trait and you try to predict something, that predictive relationship is going to go down. But we have some wiggle room here. It might go down, but might still be useful. It might be the kind of thing that a matchmaker could use to predict who you're going to like more or less. It could also go down to basically zero. So, so that we don't really know yet. There are there are practical ways that these data could prove useful or we kind of end up in the same place where we're right now.

41:07Anybody who tells you that they have a matchmaking algorithm is probably just you know trying to sell you a secret sauce. Yeah, I saw you tweet an article I think from the Guardian that was quite critical about the effectiveness of online dating for finding soulmates. Yeah, a little bit of an assessment. People sort of ambient dissatisfaction with this stuff. Do you think that there is a way that your big data or big data like it could be folded into a dating service to make the matchmaking more accurate? I think it's possible. And that's what we need to see. And if you can get a sample that's this large and you have people on both sides before they actually meet each other, maybe there is something you can do to predict good matches.

41:50Now, I want to be clear about what I mean by good matches because if you have people's self -reports ahead of time, there are a few things that are very easy to do. It's very easy to predict who's popular. That isn't challenging. If somebody tells you, I tend to be popular with members of the gender that I'm interested in. Guess what? They will be. So, those kinds of self -reports tend to have accurate insight. What is much, much harder? And we've never been able to do it. And I've never seen anybody else who's able to do it is to actually create that matching that specific matching component or what I usually call compatibility.

42:30That it's not about your popularity. It's really about the two of us fit together well. That's the sort of the holy grail in this space. Yeah, it's very interesting. I know that you've done a good amount of work about compatibility and sort of how people evaluate mate evaluation theory and stuff like that. I guess the one question that I have on the sort of main potential flaw that I see in the study is that when people have been doing their revealed preferences that is still mediated by their own biases, right? They're describing either a real or imagined partner. And in that, they are, it has to go through the filtering, which means that all of the muck of their cognitive makeup and their desirability and so on and so forth.

43:20How do we not know that they're maneuvering and manipulating the revealed person avatar through their own psychology? Oh, yeah. It's a great point. And that motivated reasoning is in many ways, again, And this is like one of the essential truths of close relationships is that people are very motivated to see their partners in a positive light. There are some experiments, like 30 years old now, but there are really great studies where you tell people things like, hey, you know, good relationships have a lot of conflict and then people will be like, oh yeah, oh my, my relationship has a lot of conflict.

43:58Yeah, this is not usually something that people would be willing to say, but when you tell them that actually it'd be a good thing, Oh, now they see the conflict in their relationships. Now they're willing to identify those moments. People do that with traits too. Right? So for a lot of these traits, you know, there's a good version and a bad version of the thing. Right? We were kind of talking about this earlier, but you know, there's a good way of being sensitive, right? You're aware and seem to care that I'm feeling off today and you want to talk to me about it. But there's another way of being sensitive.

44:33with it's like, oh man, this person is really touchy. And so what people will do is that when they're in a relationship that they're happy with, they'll think somebody is the good version rather than the bad version of an attribute like sensitive. And so whenever we're getting people's own judgments, it's always going to have that sort of mucky self -report or stuff in it. And that's not that useful if your goal is to try to predict who's going to like whom before they have a chance to meet each other and engage in that motivated reasoning one way or the other. There's a third stage that I would love to look at.

45:14So one of the bits of research that I've done with David Bus was about the difference between what people will click on versus who they will click with. and the fact that algorithms seem to have a very good predictive power of being able to get you to swipe right on somebody, but when it actually comes to long -term compatibility, the predictive power is essentially zero, which presumably you've seen too. So the way that I'm kind of conceptualizing it is we have three, we have stated preferences, then we have revealed preferences, and then we have effective preferences for the long terms as well.

45:49So I would love to work out you said that you liked this thing you ended up liking this thing Yeah, and what would the traits that ended up being effective over the long term as well And that would require it to be I know longitudinal or for you to look at changes or like what do you wish that you could change in a partner If you could but that would be so cool because that would actually show not only what do people say they want what do people attracted to Yeah And then what is it that's got the best predictive power for effectiveness long time? Yeah, that's a great point. And one of the challenging things is that, you know, with any, with the way humans go about initiating relationships is that you got to go through this stage to process, right?

46:33So I got to be sufficiently appealing to somebody initially and a first impression and second impression and they sort of get to those later stages. I think one of the challenges of modern dating is that as we have expected various online forms to be able to do the job for us, it makes it a lot harder for some people who don't immediately convey a positive first impression to get to the later points where they're other attributes or just the opportunity for some compatibility to grow and emerge, they can't get to that stage. Well, this is the emergence of the Blackpill, right? Yeah, right, right, right.

47:20But I think what the Blackpill misses, and I'm supposed to be an epinus on the Redpill too a little bit, is that the answers in that space, I mean, correct me if you disagree, But the answers in that space are mostly about boosting my attributes so that I don't get cut off at the early stage of the process, right? So that I'm appealing enough and look, you're lifting weights is great. People should people should work out people should take care of themselves, but I think that what gets missed is that the thing that connects people and that gives the meaning opportunities is social connections, social networks, spending time with people.

48:03Spend time with people that you aren't going to hit on, just for the sake of being around other people and being in those networks that grow in morph and change. And, you know, I worry that we have like forgotten that. Well, this is... Yeah. It is certainly a sort of treating dating like a petri dish. And, you know, humans are very bad at working out exponentials, they're very bad at working out compounding. but exponentials occur in social networks as well. If you start to add one person into your friend group into two people, into four people, before you know it, the number of different connections between everyone and then all of their connections outside of it, very difficult to predict.

48:42I think this is, I texted William Castello about this not long ago, saying that I felt like my tumbling down the rabbit hole of evolutionary psychology has been so great really sort of helping me to understand how why humans are the way they are. But when it comes to the mating research, it's one thing that's fundamentally missed. It's missed by the red pill, it's missed by the black pill, it's missed by it. It's missed by everybody, and it's even missed by evolutionary psychology, human behavioral ecology. Everybody misses it, which is the phenomenal logical sense of falling in love with another person.

49:16Because it can't appear on a spreadsheet. There is no way that we can describe it, that we can measure it. It's this sort of, weird sense of fluttering of butterflies and all the rest of it. And we can talk about she's trading her for Kundity, for his resources and her youth for the mate value. And in some form or another, Red Pill, Black Pill, evolutionary psychology, human behavioral ecology, the full work, social psychology. Everyone will come up with their own way to describe this. And no one is talking about, yeah, but sometimes you just sort of fall in love with somebody and you have no idea why.

49:53and what the fuck's going on there. And I think that's really the X factor. It really sort of throws a wrench into the works of all of our presumed God -like predictive powers. It goes, yeah, that's out the window, sorry. Right. I think it is extremely chaotic, right? In the chaos theory sense of the term, right? That it really hinges on a set of interactions that can go in any of a wide variety of different directions. And once you fall in love with somebody, you can pick out. And I believe people when they say this, when they say, I fell in love with you because, because you're smart and that time you were really interested in what had gone wrong with my job and because my dog seems to love you.

50:42And I believe people when they tell me that, That is why and there was no way that we were going to like those three things before you actually got together. There was no way to know. And that, I think it's, you know, I find it both inspiring but also kind of daunting. But disenchanting is a researcher. Yeah, right. It's like, well, then what the hell are we going to do? What am I doing with my job? Yeah, but I will say, you know, we're not alone in this space. like personality researchers are getting into this stuff, right? People are starting to take this like idiosyncratic personality that the things that describe you can't be captured by scales that you just feed to everybody.

51:28And you know, we're getting there. I think things are going to look different in in 10, 20 years and are going to look pretty creative. You gave me an idea before when you were talking about the challenge that people have of getting past the first door, right, of sort of getting someone to swipe right in them on a dating app or getting a phone number or in a bar or, you know, just getting a second sentence out of somebody if they're trying to speak to them. I think that there's a lot of sympathy that gets given to people who don't even get a chance. And that kind of makes sense. It's like an archetype of the poor down on his luck guide that would make a great partner but isn't able to do it or whatever.

52:06But no one really ever talks about the reverse. The person who might be really phenomenal at making a sparky conversation, but just have like a completely objectionable, like undial -widdable personality, right? Or the emotional stability, for instance. I'm going to guess if somebody is very low in emotional stability, they can probably kid many people, there may be lots of people listening that have been in relationships with people like this, who have got past the front door, got into a relationship, everything seemed fine, and they go, oh, there's like a Jekyll and Hyde Batman and Bruce Wayne scenario going on here.

52:45And I totally get it. People can't get a date. Simpathy is needed. How can we get these dudes to be more attractive? How can we get these women to be more interesting when they're talking to people? But there is a whole other cohort of people that need mate retention tactics as opposed to sort of make attraction tactics. So there's a couple interesting things here. First of all, I think the traits that you're describing that are probably most likely to show that pattern would be some of the more, you know, like narcissism and monkey violence and like dark triad stuff. I think actually the evidence on those traits being appealing at first is like a little mix.

53:24I think they're like a little bit desired, but they certainly don't vote well for people's long -term relationships. And that's men and women. Yeah, and that's men and women. Yeah, so those attributes aren't great. But what's so interesting with things like emotional instability, like the thing is like those attributes you tend to come off badly at first and they're not great in the long run. But what starts to happen is that again, this gets into this like inclusion of the other and the self kind of thing. is that somebody who is anxious, if they get in a relationship with somebody who helps bring their anxiety down, maybe because they're super cool, or just they make that person feel safe and comfortable.

54:12You can get a person who's like, look, I am still an anxious person, but I'm not anxious when I'm with my partner. Not anxious when I'm with these two friends. It doesn't even have to be romantic. And I think it's not like a route to personality change necessarily, but it is a route to arriving at a place where you can have a happy fulfilling relationship because you've found a way to tone down those traits, at least within the context of that relationship. How much do you think that the results you found both from a stated and revealed preferences standpoint? How much do you think that they were always this way?

54:57How much do you think that these preferences have been subject to change across time? And can you think of any stated or revealed preferences that might be more or less subject to change? It's so interesting because I think about this all the time with the earning potential, differences or lack thereof in particular. I watched a lot of movies and I recently was watching the 1950s version of a star is born. And in that version, you know, the main female character becomes a major success and the man just absolutely falls apart, right? He cannot handle his partner being successful and it is very understood in that movie, like very few men would be okay with this.

55:54Like this is absolutely emasculating that this is happening to him. So there is part of me that thinks boy, this has got to be a recent phenomenon, right? where men and women have the same reveal preferences for things like earning potential. And then I read, you know, like Jane Austen, and you know, there, like everybody's gold digging. So I guess this is a long -winded way of saying, I don't know, I suspect there are cultural trends that push these things around. But, you know, I wish I had the data for what people really wanted in the 1800s or going back even further. But my guess would be is that as long as there was variability, as long as there were rich women and poor women in the social circle, as long as there were rich men and poor men that both men and women were gonna gravitate toward the good stuff regardless of which gender they are pursuing.

56:57But that's just a guess. Yeah, it's an interesting one. I wonder whether increased globalization and increased inequality in that we can now see. There's people who have obscene amounts of wealth that aren't like godlike creatures, you know, that isn't bestowed down or blessed. He's not the king. He's not somebody that's untouchable. It's somebody that you can track their journey, you know, World Rizaks and read 800 pages and you know Elon Musk, one of the top richest guys in the world, you know his story. So I wonder, you know, Candace Blake did some really fantastic work about how the proliferation of sexy selfies in areas of high income inequality.

57:38So basically it seems like women's self -objectify more where they can see both how high they could climb with the right partner and how low they may be able to fall. Essentially. So I wonder whether in a world that is basically that tuned up to 11. Everybody can see how high they could climb. Everybody could see how low they could fall. But then you throw the spanner in the works now, which is female learning potential and female financial independence. You know women out -earned men in the 20s. It's basically a motherhood tax. The pay gap is essentially just a motherhood tax now. And title 9 has been reversed to women and for every one man completely a four -year US college degree.

58:16You know, from the metrics perspective from 50 years ago, So if you'd not, if you'd crossed off the M and the F and not shown people what it was, they would have said, oh, those are the guys and those are the girls. And you go, it's actually the other way around. Right. Right. So yeah, you think what does it mean that, ancestrally, it should be the case that women would be more sensitive to the resource and status capacity of their partner in a world where they are now potentially out earning their partner, especially during the time when they're looking to find a mate, et cetera. You know, as you grow up a little bit older, men's desire to be obsessive and conquer and do mastery and stuff like that, plus motherhood tax, I think results in men on average earning and still is going to result in them earning more across their lifespan.

59:02But it's a real sort of upside down, well, how much can we change our both stated and revealed preferences? How much are we able to step in and consciously go, oh, turn this down? Yeah. Yeah. It's a great question. You know, we've trying to do some amount of experimental manipulations of people's stated preferences. It turns out it's pretty hard. It's pretty hard to change in a deliberate way people's ideas about what they want. We can do it with sort of these conditioning paradigms, where you get people to experience positive outcomes with particular attributes and you do it more or less in various conditions.

59:45But all of these effects that we get they're useful for testing things in the lab, but you know we're not changing whether people Say they care about earning prospects in an enduring way But I do think it's important like when I think about the the the problems when it comes to you know Gender relations today. I think a lot of it because because we see these revealed preferences aren't so different I think a lot of it is that our ideas and our expectations and those things can matter. I mean, we can get really mad when we feel like our expectations aren't going to be mad or when we think the world should be working this way but it's working some other way.

1:00:31So I'm encouraged at one level that, well, it seems like if we want a root for change here, we just got to change the way people think about themselves, the way people see themselves. at the same time, I also know that any kind of lasting intervention is always a challenge.

1:00:52So what have you learned about where positive feelings about our partners come from? Like what does it mean to say that we have a positive sort of disposition toward our partners? What is that sense and where does it come from? I mean, it's a deep question because in some ways, it's the thing we focus on the most. I mean, again, I'm a close relationship's researcher first and foremost. And the main thing we study is how positively people feel about their partners. And we think it's important because it's going to predict a break up in divorce. It's going to predict the health outcomes, right? right?

1:01:35But how exactly do you come to look at a rating scale and say, I'm at the top of this scale or I'm kind of middling? I think a lot of times we think it comes from this general sense that you kind of lock in and you retrieve it the way you would retrieve the response to any other question like, oh, I think I'm extroverted. But I also think that there are certain key major moments that happen for people in their relationships. Sometimes they're called turning points, right? And sometimes it can be a small thing like the one time that you made breakfast for yourself and not me. And that can be a real turning point and I realize like, wait, do you even actually care that I'm here?

1:02:26It can also be a very positive thing like the time that you skipped hanging out with your friends because I'd had a bad day. And those moments too can also sort of push us in dramatic ways that again are kind of random. Like that same event could have happened to 10 other people and not have the same positive effect that it did on me. So I think it's some combination of those two things, right? Like overall sense is that we kind of lock in and retrieves But also these little moments that end up being very memorable. And other than that, I don't really have a good sense about people integrate those things.

1:03:05Do you think that it would be useful for people to become better predictors of their own revealed make preferences? I wonder whether in your big cohort, the people who's stated and revealed have the smallest distance between the two are more reliably successful in relationships because they're better able to expedite finding partners that alike the ones that they want to be like. That's a really interesting idea and we've I don't even know if we've ever collected the data that would really give us the right way to look at it. We at some point had some data where we trying to get a sense of who knew like who was going to get an accurate sense of like how popular they are and there are a few speed dating studies to that effect but not about like oh if you basically if you had relationship satisfaction if you just got one more for the people in relationships you know I guess even for the people that weren't in relationships you could have asked a question like how satisfied are you typically in your relationships and if you had somebody you would have been able to see quite easily.

1:04:18Is there a covariance between some onesibility to stated and revealed, are accurate? They seem to be a little bit higher. I mean, if it was lower, that would just throw a complex amount of my hypothesis. But yeah, that would be cool to find out. Yeah, that's a really interesting idea. And the general idea of looking at how satisfied you are with a whole suite of relationships. You know, this is where like polyamory research really has a leg up on what basic close relationship researchers do is because they can in principle see how you are reacting across multiple partners. And that has the potential for all kinds of fascinating insights because it suggests, you know, we might be able to see things like, You know, I say that I really care about attractiveness, but it turns out that I'm the kind of person who's I'm happier with the partner that I think is less attractive, right?

1:05:15We would be able to see those kinds of differences in the way you are reacting to multiple partners at the same time. So unfortunately those samples are pretty hard to collect, but they can reveal a ton of insights. Paul Eastwick, ladies and gentlemen, Paul, I love this research and fascinated to see what you do next. Where should people go? They want to keep up to date with all of the stuff that you're doing. That's a great question. You can follow me on Twitter at Paul Eastwick. And yeah, I'm going to have a book coming out in about a year and a half. It's going to be a little ways off. So yeah, you can look for me then.

1:05:53But for right now, I'd like to bring you back on. I'd love to bring you back on when the book is done. That'd be great. That'd be great. Thank you so much. I get asked all the time for book suggestions. People want to get into reading fiction or nonfiction or real -life stories, and that's why I made a list of 100 of the most interesting and impactful books that I've ever read. These are the most life -changing reads that I've ever found in the descriptions about why I like them and links to go and buy them, and it's completely free. And you can get it right now by going to chriswillx .com slash books.

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