Kim Mills: You know the stereotypes. Men are from Mars, women are from Venus. Love is a battlefield. And in the search for romance, there are natural winners and losers. Young, attractive women, and powerful, wealthy men will always hold the upper hand. These ideas permeate popular culture—and their proponents say that evolution itself made us this way. And who can argue with science?
But psychologists who study close relationships have found that this view of human partnering doesn’t accurately reflect what actually makes people fall in love or stay committed to their partners. Today we’re going to talk about the science of love and bonding. Are there real gender differences in what men and women are looking for in relationships or is that just a myth? What makes two people compatible and is it possible to predict which couples will make it? How have dating apps changed the landscape of love and relationships? And if you’re on the apps, how can you use them better?
Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I'm Kim Mills. My guest today is Dr. Paul Eastwick, a professor of psychology at the University of California Davis, where he leads the Attraction and Relationships Research Laboratory. His research looks at how people form romantic relationships and the psychological mechanisms that help romantic partners stay committed to each other. Last year, we spoke with him and his colleague, Dr. Eli Finkel, about their podcast, Love Factually, which analyzes romantic comedies through the lens of relationship science. Today, we're happy to have him back on Speaking of Psychology to talk about his own research on relationships and about his new book, Bonded By Evolution: The New Science of Love and Connection.
Dr. Eastwick, thank you for joining me today.
Paul Eastwick, PhD: Thank you so much for having me back, Kim.
Mills: You opened your book by describing what you call the evoscript. So start by telling us what is the evoscript? Why is it problematic for how we think about relationships?
Eastwick: Yeah. I think what I refer to as the evoscript, it refers to a set of assumptions about the way human mating works that supposedly reflect the pressures that existed in our deep ancestral past. And I think these ideas grew out of a reasonable scientific literature, but things have advanced a little bit in the last few decades. And we know now that these pillars of the science aren't quite what they used to be.
So the evoscript, as I describe it, has three components to it. One is the idea that mate value is central to the way that people approach relationships. To put it colloquially, there are 10s and 6s and 2s, and you better hope you're a 10 and it's better to be a 6 than a 2.
And the second pillar is the idea that men and women are really different in what they want out of romantic relationships, they pursue different things, they care about different things, et cetera. And the third pillar is this idea that people can strategically pursue short-term or long-term relationships and that people are good at different things—some people excel at flings and some people are really the kinds of people you'd want to settle down with. To me, the contemporary research on attraction and close relationships takes issue with all three of these ideas.
Mills: Well, let's talk about the differences, supposed differences in what men and women are looking for in relationships. If they're not different, what are they? Why do we think they're different?
Eastwick: Yeah. So I mean, this was really where I got started studying attraction. I was interested in these gender differences. And we had known for a long time that when you ask men and women about the attributes they want in a partner, for some traits you get reliable differences. So for example, if you ask men and women, how much do you care about an attribute like physical attractiveness? Men will say they care about it more than women. And when you ask men and women, how much do you care about an attribute like earning potential or ambition? Women will say they care about it more than men. These are very reliable differences in what men and women say they want in a partner.
But it occurred to us, I mean, nearly 20 years ago now, but it occurred to us that—what happens when people meet potential partners in real life? If the evolutionary perspective is correct that these gender differences reflect what really matters to people, what really drives their liking for potential partners, then we should see, for example, at a speed dating event that you see gender differences in the appeal of these traits as they are revealed by real potential partners that you're meeting.
So to give a concrete example, let's say that you're a woman and you're going speed dating and you're meeting a bunch of guys. And let's just, to make it easy, say that six of these guys are pretty ambitious and six of them are not. What I want to know as a relationships researcher is, okay, so do you find the ambitious guys more appealing than the unambitious guys? And if so, by how much? And we can put a number on that. We might call it like a 10% bump in how women in general feel about the ambitious guys relative to the unambitious guys. But the kicker here was that when you do this same thing with the genders flipped, it's the same story. That is, the ambitious women, they're liked about 10% more than the nonambitious women.
And we saw that time and time again with the various attributes we looked at. Yeah, attractiveness does provide a bump for people. It's useful early on to find somebody to be physically attractive, but it didn't matter whether men or women were making those judgements. And this was our first clue that there might be a big difference between what people say when they're circling traits on paper versus what actually appeals to them when they're meeting people face to face.
Mills: What about same-sex couples? I mean, how do they evaluate these same kinds of attributes?
Eastwick: Yeah, it's a great question. And the amount of data, speed dating data on same gender attractions, I mean, it's shockingly and embarrassingly small. When we did conduct an event for gay men, and I went back and looked at the appeal of these various attributes, and honestly, like the appeal of earning potential among the gay men, it looks like what you saw with the various mixed gender pairings. And same thing with the appeal of attractiveness too. It looked like what you saw with the mixed gender pairings. These are small samples. We need much bigger samples to know for sure. I mean, this is really a case where the amount of data we have on mixed gender couples unfortunately dwarfs what we have for same gender relationships. But my hunch is that stories will be similar for these kinds of abstract attributes that often afford some amount of motivated reasoning, right?
I mean, if you like somebody, if you think they're funny, you'll have a tendency to think they're more attractive and vice versa. So I think for these kinds of attributes, we're likely to see more similarities than differences.
Mills: Well, let's get back to the book because one of the main points that you make is that compatibility is the secret sauce that makes relationships work. And successful relationships are not necessarily about funding the best partner, but about finding the best partner for you. So let's talk about that. What's compatibility? What makes it so important?
Eastwick: Yeah. So here's the way I like to break down compatibility for people. This comes from the work of the great Dave Kenny and his social relations model. That's the official name for this way of thinking about judgments, but I'll try to break it down very simply here. If I say that I find somebody attractive, what Dave Kenny would say is that's not one judgment, it's three. And the three components of that judgment are: I might be a selective person or not. I might think everybody's hot, or maybe I think nobody's hot. That's a selectivity component. A second one that's going to end up mattering here is the consensus or the popularity component. Maybe this person that I'm making a judgment about, maybe everybody thinks that she's super hot, okay? That's popularity. And then the third component is what we call compatibility. And that is the part of my attraction judgment that is really about how I feel about this person specifically that isn't about my selectivity and isn't about her popularity.
And what you can do with the right kind of data is you can break it down and see, okay, here we got all these people making these attraction judgments. We've got a bunch of people at a party or at a speed dating event or what have you, making judgements about how much they like each other. And what you regularly see is that the biggest component of those three, you might think it's popularity—it actually turns out it's compatibility. So that's the biggest thing happening, right? Yeah, there is agreement about who's popular at first, but even more important than that is the spread around that agreement about whether somebody is an 8 or a 10, right? That somebody might be an 8—that's the average judgment that that person gets. But that means that some people think that they're a 10 and some people think that they're a 6. So that spread around somebody's popularity, that's where the compatibility component lies and it's very important for understanding how relationships take shape.
Mills: Do you have any sense of how long it takes to figure out whether you are compatible?
Eastwick: Yeah. I mean, this is the trick, right? Because if we could figure it out from moment one, and if we knew that, okay, I find you especially appealing and that's going to stick, boy, wouldn’t that be handy? But there are a couple of interesting wrinkles here. The first is that the power of that compatibility component, it actually grows over time as people get to know each other. And what I mean by that is that over time, people's opinions will start to diverge even more from that consensual average. So if originally, oh, everybody agrees you're like an 8, well, that means with time, now we got people who think you're a 4 and people who think you're a 5, right? We've got now spread all over the place. Now, some people like you more than when they first met you and other people like you less.
So that's what I mean by there's more compatibility there.
But the challenge here is that compatibility, especially early on, can be unstable. In other words, my impression of you is going to differ a lot more between the first time I meet you and the second time I meet you than it will between like, I don't know, the 1000th time I meet you and the 999th time I meet you, right? Those impressions aren't going to differ nearly as much. So I always recommend to people—zero in on compatibility, right? The people that you like especially highly, but also acknowledge that how you feel about somebody is probably going to change over the course of the first few interactions and that's okay. That's part of the process of figuring out like, is there compatibility here and is it likely to be stable and something that we can build off of?
Mills: Now, I know that you are not a matchmaker, but you do a lot of research involving speed dating and then you see how people react to each other. Is there any way to predict people's compatibility or can you look at their backgrounds and personality traits and similarities and use that information to make a prediction?
Eastwick: Yeah. If only it were that easy. And for a long time, these ideas have been bouncing around. Ten, 15 years ago, many of the online dating companies were claiming that they could do this. Take questionnaires about various people, check out your personality, your values, your attitudes, and bring the sensible matches together. As time has gone on, it has become more and more clear that this is extremely difficult and perhaps even impossible.
I'll describe one of the studies by my colleague, Dr. Samantha Joel. I think she's done some of the best work in this space. What she did is she ran machine learning studies where she took all sorts of data about people before they had ever met face to face, all that kind of information about their personality and their attitudes and their values and their preferences. And what machine learning can do is it can say, All right, if there are good matches in here, I'll find them. You, researcher, I don't need your ideas about who matches with whom. I'm just going to find the signal in the noise here. And it runs thousands and thousands of iterations. And what she found was that she could predict exactly 0% of the compatibility component at speed dating events. So in other words, there was no signal about who was going to be compatible with whom based on the information that people reported about themselves ahead of time. It had to emerge organically from the interactions between people once they had met face to face.
This was a big moment for me because it really shifted my understanding of, shifted my focus from trying to figure out like, okay, if the compatible couples, if they're not going to be found over here, well, maybe they're found over here, like surely there's a rhythm and a math to what makes people click or not. And I now think it's much more about what two people grow and build together rather than something preordained in their individual differences before they meet.
Mills: I'm wondering, I'm going to make an assumption here that you've looked at the work of the Gottmans who look at couples and they talk about how they can predict with something like 80% accuracy whether couples are going to last. I mean, do you find that as well?
Eastwick: Yeah. I mean, the way that I think about these ideas is that once you have a relationship in front of you, again, I'm trying to predict what's going on from before the beginning of time, before two people even meet in the first place. But once a couple has a relationship and it's off and running, you can absolutely look at the dynamics of that couple and say, This is trouble. These are not good conflict tactics. Or you can say like, Hey, these people know how to love and support each other. This seems pretty well. You could absolutely do that.
I would take issue with the term prediction to describe that. I would say you're kind of describing what's happening now and because what's happening now tends to predict what's happening tomorrow and what's happening tomorrow, that it's not a prediction exercise in the same way it would be to try to take people who are kind of all at the same level, like before relationships formed and then predict ultimately who's going to end up with whom.
So it's like a different way of talking about the process of prediction, but you can absolutely look at the dynamics of couples and say, This one looks good and this one looks like trouble.
Mills: Let me ask you this one. Is there really such a thing as love at first sight? I mean, I know we all want to believe that that's so, but maybe that's just something that happens in the movies, which I know is another interest of yours.
Eastwick: Yes. In fact, it happens in the movies shockingly frequently, but this is a tricky question to answer because a lot of people have the experience of falling for somebody right away, but I think that it's also common that people have the experience of having somebody grow on them over time. We've tried to come at this issue by getting people to chart the course of their relationships over a long period of time. We try to actually get them to go back to the beginning, back to when they first met the person, and we can see how did you feel about this person over the length of time that the relationship lasted. And so we can look at that first moment that people met and use that as a gauge of where this thing is going, right? Is it true that, oh, when people initially meet and fall for each other, that that's a good sign, or maybe it's a bad sign.
The reality is you see a huge spread at the beginning for how people feel. On average, most relationships that will go somewhere, the average one, I don't know, people feel kind of meh when they first meet, but that's the average. Underneath that average, yeah, there's like 20% of people who feel very positively about that person the first time they met them and indeed they went on to have a relationship with this person. There's about like 30 to 40% of people who are at the bottom of the scale who think when I first met you, I thought nothing of you whatsoever, but you grew on me over time. So both trajectories are possible and importantly, ultimately it kind of doesn't matter. The relationships of the people who initially felt a lightning bolt and the relationships of the people where it grew from basically nothing over time, they all kind of got to the same high place eventually.
So it's exciting when you catch lightning in a bottle like that, it's exciting when you feel that love at first sight gets you, but ultimately it's not that key. And I just always want to remind people very commonly people's impressions start from near rock bottom and grow to be something meaningful eventually.
Mills: Well, let's say that you're no longer just dating, that now you're in a committed relationship. So what does your research say about how to keep those relationship bonds strong and to keep the spark from going out?
Eastwick: Yeah. And this is tricky because look, the average relationship does get harder over time. People do become less satisfied over time on average. There are many couples who don't experience that decline over time. And unfortunately there are many couples who do. I like to point to a couple key features, which is certainly consistent with a lot of the approaches of researchers in decades past, like the Gottmans, et cetera.
I talk a lot about motivated reasoning. Motivated reasoning is a very important tool that people have for maintaining their relationships. Motivated reasoning is honestly important for doing anything hard. It's sometimes very useful to have rose-colored glasses, maybe about how you're doing and how things are going, because it inspires you to want to push further and to maybe generate something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. In the context of a close relationship, what that often means is acknowledging your partner's faults, but sort of putting them aside in the little box that says, Hey, everybody has faults like this. If I were with somebody else, they would have the same faults or even worse faults. Also, the things that my partner has going for her, those are things that not everybody has. These are little tricks that people have that help them to maintain their relationships when times are tough.
And finally, maybe the most important motivated reasoning trick of all, and I think this is relevant to some of the evolutionary narratives that we've gotten, is the motivation to what's called derogate alternative partners. In other words, when alternative partners become apparent, people have a really funny way of seeing those alternative partners as being less desirable than they actually are. That's a useful protective mechanism for a relationship, and this can also help to explain why ultimately if people match on say mate value or something like that, why that doesn't ultimately matter that much, why a relationship between an "8" and a "5" can be perfectly fine—because if other 8s are now approaching this 8 and trying to form a relationship with them, the 8 is using their derogation of alternative powers and seeing those potential suitors as not all that desirable.
So this is an important tool in the relationship toolkit that most people deploy most of the time.
Mills: Let's talk for a bit about dating apps. How have they changed the way that people form relationships and are they starting to lose their luster or are people still using them as much as they ever did?
Eastwick: Yeah. I mean, I hear tales that people are gravitating away from the apps. I don't know how good the data are exactly, but it certainly seems that the worm has turned on the dating app experience. But of course people are still using them and relationships are still forming that way. I think the apps have some value for people who have social networks that feel broken and stale, they can be useful ways of finding partners where you weren't going to be able to meet them otherwise. But I also think the apps reinforce a mode of dating that is really depressing for a lot of people.
The apps very much cater to the idea that there are 10s and 2s, right? Because in an app market, the winners are going to win big time. There's not a lot of room for compatibility when people are swiping. And what that means is that the people who are attractive get tons of swipes and the people who are in the lower part of the distribution don't get as many. That kind of unequal market, it's kind of a bummer. And actually, honestly, it doesn't work that great for anybody because if you're very desirable, you're sort of inundated with requests and if you're not that desirable, you kind of want to throw the thing in the sea. So that's, I think, one of the main problems with the apps.
It also, I think because of the inundation effect, it exaggerates and magnifies gender differences. One example of this has to do with some of the attributes we were talking about earlier. So yeah, when you're just swiping, it's very tempting to stay with the surface level attributes that you can assess easily and women will tend to swipe right on the tall guys or the guys who have good incomes. Are these going to be the guys that will ultimately make them happy face to face? Who knows? It's a total dart throw, but people do all this filtering with who they're looking for and ultimately I would argue it's a time waster at best and demoralizing at worst.
Mills: Is there a way to use them effectively?
Eastwick: I think there are a few ideas that I rather like. Look, if you're going to use the apps, try to not get so much in your head about what your type is, but at the same time, to the extent that you can give somebody more than just a 20-minute resume exchange over coffee, that's also a wise thing to be able to do. So it's like sample more broadly than you typically do, but also take the time to try to actually get to know somebody even better. I mean, I wish this were easier to do. Boy, I wish we could meet people without so much of the romantic pretense and the romantic pressure. Like what happened to meeting people and like, I don't think this person's for me, but I'd love to introduce them to this friend of mine. That's the social connective, these social muscles that I worry have atrophied that we aren't doing as much of. Let me introduce you to these other people.
This is a thing that exists, I wish it were more popular. Sometimes it's called a used date party, but the idea is like you go to this party and you bring a date, but the date is somebody you met through an app and the two of you didn't click. So they’re your date and you're going there to this party to meet other people who didn't click with their dates. I love ideas like this. We're encouraging face-to-face interaction. You sort of have this like weird wingman, but I don't know. It sounds kind of fun to me. So I like ideas like this. If you're going to use the apps, geez, let's find more creative ways of turning it into real social interaction out in the world.
Mills: In your book, you talk about how ideas from evolutionary psychology are not only harming people's understanding of relationships, they're leading to misogyny and other social harms. What goes wrong when people start to internalize these ideas?
Eastwick: Yeah. I mean, this has been one of the eye-opening things for me in the last decade. I'm a practicing psychologist, I conduct research, I debate things in the journals with evolutionary psychologists and all of that has been great, but it has been disturbing to see how that science has been warped and twisted online for these pretty nefarious ends. And that was actually part of the realization for why I wrote this book in the first place, because I realized that, Whoa, whoa, all these folks online, they're like drawing from this 1990s version of the science that they don't know how much things have changed over the last few decades.
The tricky thing when you're talking about evolutionary processes—something is evolved, something is biological, something is genetic—is that the everyday person hears the message, Oh, this thing will be harder to change. And sometimes that gets twisted into some pretty regressive stuff. And I think that's what's happened. So it's not that there was something wrong with the science per se. I mean, I do think the science was leading us to the wrong conclusions. I'm not blaming the science for what happened, but I do think now is the time for us to get a little bit more responsible about this because we scientists also sometimes accidentally convey these messages like, Oh, well, men's desire for sexual variety, it exists everywhere. It's survived all attempts to eradicate it. I guess there's not much we can do about it.
Scientists absolutely say that and people will absolutely take that and run with it even when—by the way, there's no evidence. I mean, please show me the study where we tried to change men's desire for sexual variety. There are none. We've not actually tried to do that. So don't tell me it can't be changed. This is not something we've attempted, but when you tell people that something has evolved, they just hear that it's hard to change. We need to be better at really communicating when is something hard to change and when is it easy to change and what can we do about it ultimately?
Mills: Given how much gender stereotypes have changed through the years, I mean, maybe not as much as some of us would like, but how has that had impacted dating practices in the current time where we are?
Eastwick: Yeah, it's interesting. The over time research is fascinating. I think some of the best work comes from sociologists. They tend to have really good data for how things have changed over time. And sometimes the real people out there in the world, they're the ones changing and the scientists are a little slow to catch up and the commentators certainly. But here's one example. There's a lot of hand-wringing today about the plight of men and boys and their educational prospects. I totally get this. This is indeed a challenge and it's going to be a tough problem to solve. But accompanying that, you get this insinuation that somehow men's poor education prospect is linked to the rise of singles or something. Women are kind of opting out of these guys and men are intimidated by these women who have better educations than them.
There's no evidence for this. The sociologists know this, and this has been a change that we have seen over the past several decades. For example, it used to be true that marriages were a little rockier when the woman earned more than the man. This changed in the '90s. Beginning in the 1990s, marriages that formed then, the woman earns more than the man, the man earns more than the woman, doesn't matter. So that gender difference has gone away. I fear commentators have not caught up to this. Same thing when we look at educational differences today. Woman's more educated than the man. Yeah, that's happening more these days. I mean, it's got to be. They're earning more degrees. Are these relationships in trouble? No, they're fine. So the panic that sometimes people express reflects these older ideas that are pretty dated. And sometimes the science advances and the people advance without us necessarily realizing it.
Mills: So a lot of our listeners I know are raising kids, particularly teens, and I'm wondering how we can guide young people to a healthier understanding of relationships when they're surrounded by these toxic ideas.
Eastwick: Yeah. I mean, I think the scariest thing for me is it's just the level of pessimism about relationships in general that I think varies from a who needs it to—almost like if you're heterosexual, it's like the other gender is this creature from another world that you can never begin to understand, much less form a close relationship with. I worry about this a lot. I worry about people who aren't able to form mixed gender friendships. I mean, that's a clear example that you see in the science that men and women who are heterosexual, if they have more friends of the other gender, they are more likely to form a relationship, usually because that's how they're meeting friends of friends or friends of friends of friends. So those kinds of interactions with people who are a little different than you tend to be helpful in a practical way and also in a way that expands your mind and expands your perspectives.
So if young people today aren't getting practice, spending time with people who aren't like them or people who aren't their gender, that's something that certainly concerns me. As for the online discourse, I mean, other than the mantra that online is not real life and you really have to get out there and meet and interact with people. I mean, anything that parents can do to encourage their kids to spend real time interacting with folks, I mean, it's so weird to be in the position as a parent these days of being like, Oh my gosh, will you please go hang out with people and get into trouble? Oh my gosh, stay out late, break curfew for the love of God. But I do think that that's where my advice tends to go these days.
Mills: So what are you studying now? What's next? What are the questions that you still want to answer?
Eastwick: Yeah. I mean, one of the things I'm really interested in these days is around this, how do people digest messages that have a biological or evolved flavor to them? What are the assumptions they make about findings like that? So we would tell people in these studies things like, Oh, people commit infidelity because it's biological and they evolved to do so because there are evolutionary advantages. Or we tell them that it's due to a motivational drive something psychological in them. So more of a nonexplanation explanation. And you see that people make these assumptions about automaticity, harder to control when you tell them that something is biological. So we want to figure out what are the kinds of phenomena where people are more likely to make those this thing is hard to change judgments and what is the kind of information that we could use? Oh, can we give people a biological explanation, but then also explain why this doesn't have implications for how hard something is to change or for how important it would be to design an intervention and see what that does too.
Because I really am becoming more and more concerned about how these findings are digested by people. I don't want anybody to stop using evolutionary perspectives. I love evolutionary perspectives. I have a different one than mainstream evolutionary psychology, but evolutionary perspectives are really, really important, but we’ve got to understand how the average person digests them and we got to be ready with a scientific answer when those interpretations go awry.
Mills: All right. Well, Dr. Eastwick, I want to thank you for joining me today. This has been really interesting. Thank you.
Eastwick: Thank you again so much for having me back.
Mills: You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website at speakingofpsychology.org or on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.If you like what you've heard, leave a review, follow us. If you have comments or ideas for future episodes, you can email us at speakingofpsychology@apa.org. Speaking of Psychology is produced by Lea Winerman.
Thank you for listening. For the American Psychological Association, I’m Kim Mills.
Paul Eastwick, PhD, is a professor of psychology at the University of California, Davis, where he studies how people initiate romantic relationships and the psychological mechanisms that help romantic partners to remain committed and attached.
