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

12:39Dr. Paul Eastwick: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?

12:51Dr. Laurie Santos: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, I'm going to see how much do you like the ambitious guys more than the unambitious guys.

13:39Dr. Laurie Santos:That's your revealed preference for ambition in an initial attraction context.

13:45Dr. Paul Eastwick:And so what do we find when we really give people actual humans to choose from?

13:48Dr. Laurie Santos: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 and 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.

14:23Dr. Paul Eastwick:Okay, so that's ambition. What about attractiveness?

14:25Dr. Laurie Santos: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.

15:03Dr. Paul Eastwick:So that was scientific alleged factoid number two that we're getting wrong. 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 does the science usually say and how is that wrong?

15:22Dr. Laurie Santos: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

16:00Dr. Paul Eastwick:and abilities and so the idea is like for a heterosexual woman there are these guys who are They're like super hot guys that you might want to have a one night stand with. Yeah. And then they're 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.

16:19Dr. Laurie Santos: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.

16:36Dr. Paul Eastwick: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.

16:43Dr. Laurie Santos: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.

17:17Dr. Paul Eastwick:So what does this third idea get right? And what is it really getting wrong about how real relationships work?

17:22Dr. Laurie Santos: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, you're more likely to get divorced or your marriage is going to be bad.

18:09Dr. Laurie Santos: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.

18:17Dr. Paul Eastwick:So it turns out that many, many science-y 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.

18:52Dr.

18:53Dr. Paul Eastwick: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.

19:09Dr. Laurie Santos: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 evolve the capacity to bond with each other. 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?

20:04Dr. Laurie Santos: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.

20:24Dr. Paul Eastwick: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.

20:31Dr. Laurie Santos: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. 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.

21:23Dr. Paul Eastwick:That's what happens when we think about our partners in these motivated ways. What happens when we think about alternatives?

21:28Dr. Laurie Santos: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.

22:07Dr. Laurie Santos:Were they thinking about somebody attractive or unattractive? 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.

22:38Dr. Paul Eastwick: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 the evidence say?

22:57Dr. Laurie Santos: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 got to explain it. We got to 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.

23:36Dr. Laurie Santos:And it turned out it did pretty badly. 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.

24:16Dr. Laurie Santos:But in large part, we're really reflecting the social milieu that we're in.

24:21Dr. Paul Eastwick: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.

24:31Dr. Laurie Santos: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 people, but not most people.

24:55Dr. Paul Eastwick:I want 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 has probably made worse. This idea that like, well, my partner has to be tall.

25:08Dr. Laurie Santos:Oh, gosh.

25:09Dr. Paul Eastwick:He has to really like podcasts, whatever.

25:11Dr. Laurie Santos:Imagine if he didn't like podcasts. What would you do?

25:14Dr. Paul Eastwick: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?

25:21Dr. Laurie Santos: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.

25:35Dr. Paul Eastwick: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?

25:53Dr. Laurie Santos: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 going to click especially well with whom. And she was able to predict absolutely nothing.

26:30Dr. Paul Eastwick:That's pretty depressing for big data.

26:32Dr. Laurie Santos:And I do want to 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 going to work very well together. This was the realization for me that we just have a broken idea about where compatibility comes from. And we got to radically reorient how we think about this.

26:56Dr. Paul Eastwick:And so your book provides that radical reorientation. You talk about compatibility as being a so-called creative chaos. What do you mean there?

27:04Dr. Laurie Santos: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 times.

27:48Dr. Laurie Santos:That's what I mean by created. We have to engage other people in series of interactions and kind of 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 going to find compatibility ahead of time.

28:11Dr. Paul Eastwick: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.

28:21Dr. Laurie Santos: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 and then we were able to keep building off of it over time?

29:09Dr. Laurie Santos:And the couples that are able to do that are the ones that are most likely to be able to find something together.

29:17Dr. Paul Eastwick: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.

29:47Dr. Paul Eastwick: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?

30:03Dr. Laurie Santos: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 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 and you share a bunch of facts and figures.

30:49Dr. Laurie Santos: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 gonna be around for a long time. So you are going to have other opportunities to interact. And maybe the luck doesn't happen on the first interaction. Maybe it happens on the eighth.

31:23Dr. Paul Eastwick: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.

31:37Dr. Laurie Santos: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. But if I were going to 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.

32:28Dr. Laurie Santos: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 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. 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?

33:06Dr. Laurie Santos: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.

33:21Dr. Paul Eastwick: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?

33:40Dr. Laurie Santos:That's my big hope. And, you know, it seems silly, but in retrospect, I mean, that's what we thought Tinder was going to do. we thought that the idea was like oh people are going to get together more spontaneously it's going to encourage more socialization among acquaintances and friends of friends and how great is this going to be and this is not what happened at all so socializing with people you only kind of 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.

34:21Dr. Laurie Santos: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 of supplementing the apps for people who are single.

35:09Dr. Paul Eastwick: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.

35:19Dr. Laurie Santos: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 is not one of my favorite tropes. But I just thought like, you know, the right pickup line is going to 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.

35:55Dr. Laurie Santos:I have absolutely been there. Luckily, socializing with other people is enjoyable in and of itself, even if it doesn't immediately lead to a romantic connection.

36:07Dr. Paul Eastwick: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?

36:15Dr. Laurie Santos:Yeah. I mean, this one's funny. 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 going to take advantage of him.

36:56Dr. Laurie Santos: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. For all the bad ideas online, this one might be close to that. 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.

37:37Dr. Laurie Santos:Not necessarily like you're going to date those friends, but those friends are going to introduce you to some other friends who then you're likely to get in a relationship with. So doing this whole like, no, you got to 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's not going to lead to success for most people.

38:03Dr. Paul Eastwick:It sounds like this new evolutionary science of relationships 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. Which can be hard, but it sounds like it's effective.

38:24Dr. Laurie Santos: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 just got to reestablish that lost art of hanging out and kind of seeing where the night takes us.

38:58Dr. Paul Eastwick:And the good news is all that is pretty happiness inducing, even if you don't get a romantic partner out of it.

39:03Dr. Laurie Santos: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 know, date that person, and 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.

39:41Dr. Laurie Santos:And once it really starts expanding in a major way, 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.

39:57Dr. Paul Eastwick: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.

40:29Dr. Paul Eastwick:You can email us at happinesslab at pushkin.fm or leave us a review to tell us what you liked. You can also sign up to learn more about the science of happiness and join my free newsletter on my website, drlarisantos.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.

41:09Dr. Paul Eastwick:Laurie Santos.

41:15Dr. Paul Eastwick:This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.