#1270 Paul Eastwick: Evolutionary Psychology Is Wrong About Mating

00:00 Ricardo Lopes: Hello everyone. Welcome to a new episode of The Dissenter. I'm your host, as always, Ricardo Lops, and today I'm joined again by Dr. Paul Eastwick. He's professor of psychology at the University of California, Davis. Uh, IN our previous conversation, we focused on his latest book, Bonded by Evolution, The News. OF love and connection. And today we're going to talk a little bit more about it, expand on some of the topics we explored in our last conversation, and also perhaps tackle a few that we left out. So Dr. Eastwick, welcome back to the show. It's always a pleasure to have you on.

00:36 Paul Eastwick: Yeah, I'm so excited to be back. Let's do it.

00:40 Ricardo Lopes: OK, so, uh, as my first question, I mean, last time we've already talked a little bit about what in your book you told the evil script, that is, I mean, the script that evolutionary psychologists tend to associate with, uh, dating, uh, human dating and mating. Uh, THERE'S three central pillars to it. I mean, the first one is that, uh, we have inherent mate value. The second one is. That men and women have historically achieved reproductive success through different avenues, and the third one is the distinction between short term and long term forms of human mating. I mean, would you like to tell us more about each of them and how do you tackle them and where do you think that perhaps they fail or come up short when it comes to understanding mating?

01:35 Paul Eastwick: Yeah, yeah, that's, let's take each one. One at a time. And I think what's useful to think about with respect to these three ideas is both, look, they're supported by certain elements of the science, science that that really came into form in the 1990s. Um, AND all three. I think we've shown in recent decades have had some real limitations. And one of the reasons I wrote the book was because these three ideas are very popular online and are actually the source of a great many misconceptions online about the way that relationships work. But let's start with the scientific component of this, and then maybe, maybe we'll get to some of the exaggerations of these ideas that exist online later. So the first one is about mate value, which refers to the idea that some people have traits or attributes that make them especially desirable as a romantic partner, and other people don't have those traits and attributes. I think when you look at the science, there's two good pieces of evidence for this idea. The first one. Is that people get feedback as they go through life, as they have rejection experiences. This is especially salient when we're young, and we internalize those rejection experiences in a way that makes us wary of future rejection and it changes how we set our sights. So if you're somebody that historically, maybe you would be rejected by a number of the people that you. Interested in dating, you would internalize something about your mate value, and that would shape how you see the world. This is very much a real thing that people experience. We internalize those negative moments that we have when we're trying to date. And a second good piece of evidence for this idea is that in general, on average, you see that couples, looking at existing couples, these couples sort. On desirable characteristics like physical attractiveness. And the reason that we think people sort on physical attractiveness is, is not because physically attractive people live near each other, right? We'd make that case for something like income or SES. This is who you meet, so this is who you end up marrying. But for something like physical attractiveness, we think it's a competitive process, such that when people are meeting each other, if you're super hot. Many people are gonna want to date you and that affords you a level of selectivity. And so, that means that on average, attractive people are gonna date other attractive people. So, when it comes to mate value, we can start with those two ideas. Those have been pretty central to evolutionary psychology for a long time. Um, I don't think those two ideas are wrong necessarily, but I also think there are some limitations.

04:37 Ricardo Lopes: OK, I, I mean, but about that first pillar then that you tackled there, let me just ask you this. I mean, uh, about the inherent mate value, uh, I mean, as because you were saying that as people go through life and they get rejected, they sort of internalize that there are these, they have these features that because that perhaps make them less appealing to members of the op. It's sex and so on, but do you think that that's simply something that people internalize just because through their own experiences accidentally they got rejected by people with particular traits, or that is there really an inherent mate value that that that person holds for Virtually everyone

05:31 Paul Eastwick: of. Yeah, so I think this is indeed the rub that a lot of what I'm describing here, it applies pretty well to first impression contexts, especially contexts where you're meeting strangers. I think that's where these things are the most salient. And so, right, if you really want to get a sense of your quote unquote mate value, like go to the club and start hitting on people and see how well you do, and that'll, that'll tell you something. But first impression contexts are critically, not the only way that people meet each other and furthermore, are evolutionarily kind of weird because we evolved in small groups. You know, maybe you knew another like 50 people in your group, that was who you spent time with, and that's all ages, all genders, etc. And there might be a couple of other groups nearby, but your whole social world is gonna be 150 people. So not many potential partners, but you do have the luxury of getting to know those folks over an extended period of time. So meeting strangers, not something we would have been doing commonly in our evolutionary past. So, do, do I think the evidence is good that made value matters in those contexts, but I think that's what people are internalizing. How do I come across on a first impression? That is different than how do I, how would I come across as a mate in general, how would I be with somebody if I'm in a long-term relationship with them? And one of the limitations of the science is that historically many of the studies were conducted in, I mean, with people like looking at photographs or maybe first impression settings. When you look at the studies that track how people feel about each other over time. You see a pretty dramatic waning in the importance of mate value, and where you really see this. Is that people stop agreeing over time about who the desirable and the undesirable people are. So yes, when people first meet you, they will arrive at a pretty strong, but actually far from perfect consensus about how physically attractive you are, about how charismatic you are, and how intelligent you are. But as folks get to know you over time. Their agreement about these different features of your desirability goes down. I think that's evidence that the importance of mate value wanes, that the presence, you know, the, the, the, the, the, uh, how critical that trait is to mating, uh, starts to die off as people get to know each other, and it's replaced by all of these idiosyncratic impressions that people have of each other.

08:27 Ricardo Lopes: And how about the second pillar? I mean that men and women have historically achieved reproductive success through different avenues and then of course from evolutionary psychologists who work on mating, there's these very common ideas about how, for example, uh, what men tend to pay more attention to in women has to do mostly with physical traits, with their appearance, with them, with neotenous, uh, facial characteristics with them. See, um, I mean, seeming young because that's, they're in their fertile period and so on and so forth. And when it comes to women, what they tend to prefer in men is basically them, uh, having access to resources, being successful, being ambitious. I mean, basically being able to provide, right? I mean that, that's in very simple terms, that's what we tend to hear. I mean, is that really the case?

09:26 Paul Eastwick: Yeah, so, you know, this is one of those cases where it really depends on the methods. And so, you know, through, through the 1990s into the early part of this century. What people tended to do when they attacked these questions is they tended to ask people, you know, things like, hey, how much do you desire attractiveness in a partner? How much do you desire status or earning potential in a partner? And when you ask questions like that, this was true in the last century and it's true in this century, you'll see gender differences. Men say they care about attractiveness more than women, and women say they care about earning potential and and status and ambition and other related characteristics more than men do. What we realized um a number of years ago is that that's just one way of capturing what people want in a partner, and I'd argue when you use those approaches, you're capturing what people say they want in a partner. If I wanted to capture what people actually want in a partner, I would design the study a little bit differently, and so we would look instead at, hey, let's say you're meeting a bunch of different people who vary in how attractive they are, who vary in their level of ambition. And I wanna see, well, which folks do you like more or less? I wanna see for you is ambition, for example, a strong predictor of who you like. I would call that a measure of actual liking for the trait of ambition when you're meeting people face to face. And what you tended to see, and, and this was, you know, we first saw this in speed dating, we've seen this in basically every design that we could come up with that. Yeah, you'd see that women indeed like the ambitious men a little bit more than the men who were not ambitious. But what you'd also see is that the men tended to like the ambitious women a little bit more than the not so ambitious women, and that the extent to which ambition appealed to women in that setting was just as strong as the extent to which it appealed to men. Um, WE'D see similar lack of gender differences when it comes to physical attractiveness, and you really see this across the board with, with most traits. The exceptions tend to be in the realm of like bodily features, um, which you sort of alluded to there. Um, I actually don't know if I've seen. It done uh with facial features, but certainly things like waist to hip ratio, a little bit of evidence with height, although, wow, that, that gender difference is smaller than you might think. You need a lot of people, if you, in your study, if you want to detect a significant gender difference in the actual appeal of height, but I, I do think it's there. Uh, BUT generally speaking, um, when, when you think about men's and women's preferences in this way, it's a lot more in the way of similarities than there are in differences. The differences are quite small.

12:29 Ricardo Lopes: OK, and but when it comes to speed dating, because I mean, I, I also think that speed dating in terms of study design is better than just self-reporting, but because it's that kind of context where it's very fast and basically you're reacting almost only to first. Impressions because you have very limited time. I mean, to what extent can that translate to a long term relationship success? I mean, the what people report as being the traits that they prefer in people they interact with in. Those kinds of settings, does that really translate to long term success, what they want in the long term?

13:16 Paul Eastwick: Yeah, this is a great question, because indeed we started with speed dating, but it was pretty clear from that point forward, like, well, wait, we have to test other kinds of designs too. So I'll, I'll talk about uh a few other different ways that we've approached this. One design. Um, WHERE you can test the same question is, you kind of get people to report on their crushes. So, we've done this with folks who are undergraduates, and every couple of weeks you check in with them and you say, have you met anybody recently that you're interested in? And then tell us about that person and you can. You know, get ratings of physical attractiveness of the people that they're into, etc. AND track over time, hey, do you remain interested in this person? Are you interested in forming a relationship with this person, etc. Um, IN those kinds of contexts, you can look at these gender differences in the same sort of way. It's the same thing, right? That, that equality like ambition, and that appeals to women a little bit and it appeals to men a little bit in their crushes. So that, so we're not beyond first impressions, um, but we're still not in the established relationship phase for the most part. You know, when you, when you survey people about their crushes, it's only like 15% turn into actual established committed relationships. But we can also start at the committed relationships phase and ask people instead questions like, uh, how happy are you in this relationship? Um, DO you want to remain committed to this relationship and look at how physical attractiveness and ambition predict those variables too. And once again, we don't see any evidence of gender differences. Whether it's my report of my partner's physical attractiveness, that matters, but it matters the same for men and women. And to get back to the mate value discussion. You can also look at like, you know, independent observers codings of my partner's physical attractiveness and look to see, does that predict my marital satisfaction? Does it matter that my partner is actually hot for whether I want to stay in that relationship? And the answer is no. It, it just really doesn't matter at all. The effects of independently coded attractiveness on a person's relationship satisfaction, it is basically zero for both men and for women, very small effects there. So, so across the board. No gender differences. You, you certainly see differences in like the overall magnitude of these effects. Consensually related physical attractiveness will predict how much somebody is liked on a first impression setting, not when they're in an established relationship, but these things are not gender differentiated in any reliable way.

16:07 Ricardo Lopes: How about um the third pillar and the distinction that many evolutionary psychologists established between short-term and long-term forms of mating and of, of course, they talk about how uh preference or how mate preferences, at least sometimes for men and women change depending on where they're pursuing shorter more. Long term mating and for example, in the case of women, they, they talk about how if they're doing shorter mating, then they prefer the sexier men. I mean, the men with the uh the better physical traits and the the bad boys and all of that. But if they're going long term. And they prefer the ones that from whom they expect more paternal investment, for example, and them being more nurturing and so on and so forth. So what do you make of

17:02 Paul Eastwick: that? Yeah, this one's interesting, and this one I think is, it's some of the confusion here is really about terminology, but I think there's um. There are other metaphors that are more helpful when it comes to this distinction. So, are some relationships short term and others are long term? Absolutely. But what I think sometimes happens is that people confuse a short term mating mindset with an initial attraction phase of a relationship. Because when you're talking about short term, long term as different modes of mating, like I can do this one or I can do that one. It implies a particular thing that I think is very wrong, which is that when I am short-term mating, I'm doing these attraction tactics, but when I'm long-term mating, I'm doing these other attraction tactics. I think the evidence for that is bad, that there really isn't any. It would imply things like. When I go to the club, I do certain things to show off and land partners, and those things would be less effective if I go to church, right? Where I would be more likely to find a long-term partner. There's no evidence for, for any of that. I think a cleaner distinction, and the one that is more consistent with the evidence, is that there's a distinction between initial attraction and getting to know somebody, and getting to know them a little better and having a first hookup experience, and then maybe forming a long-term relationship, that it's a sequence that can fall apart at any time. And so people who are interested in quote unquote short-term mating, what they're doing is they're spending a lot of time in that initial attraction phase, and maybe they break those things off intentionally, or maybe they're very popular and they capitalize on that popularity. That's all great and that makes sense. But it's very, very challenging and very, very rare for people to initiate a long-term relationship without going through that same initial attraction sequence. And the piece of data that I often point to that I think makes this case the most clearly. Is that look, I think there's a tendency to think that short-term relationships are about sexiness and long-term relationships are about stability. But a funny thing happens as people get to know each other, which is, as their interest in this person is increasing and as they have an initial sexual experience, it seems like if that sexual experience is good, they want it to be long term. If the sexual experience is like kind of meh. That's what they want to be short term. So I, I think about the short term, long-term distinction. It's like better to think about it is, I'm gonna maintain a short-term relationship if it's somebody like I just kind of like, but I don't see this going to any deeper. More, more meaningful places and a long-term relationship has the sexiness and the long-term potential. So it's more of a sequence rather than two independent modes of approaching relationships.

20:27 Ricardo Lopes: But if someone has that kind of mentality where they like to play the field, so to speak, and try to keep things casual because they're like, oh, OK, I don't really like commitment too much. I like to see how things go with different. People and then if I'm interested, I might commit to someone, uh things like that. Does that have any bearing on someone's long term relationship prospects or all

20:54 Paul Eastwick: right, yeah, yeah, it's a great question. So let me talk about two components here. One is, let's say what you were trying to do was suss out the characteristics of the players. Because you wanted to avoid ending up in a long-term relationship with them because they'd be bad long-term relationship partners. I don't know, maybe they'd cheat on you or maybe they would just make you miserable for whatever reason. So can we take features that are indicative of short-term mating prowess and show that those same features predict that if you get in a long-term relationship with these folks, it's gonna go badly for you? The answer is no. That all of the features that we can identify that indicate that somebody is attractive in the short term, they're pretty much irrelevant to their long-term desirability. So, uh, I mean, I already mentioned physical attractiveness, right? So that's, I think a prime example. It is related to initial attractiveness. It's just not related to long-term desirability. Um. Other uh qualities like include things like, you know, somebody who's like very confident and charismatic. Yeah, that predicts that they'll be initially attractive. That's not a bad sign in the long run, it's no sign in the long run, it's just uncorrelated with, you know, whether somebody is gonna make you a happy or an unhappy relationship partner. If one's question instead was, hey, I as a short-term mator. I would like to do things that make it so that as I'm like hooking up with a bunch of different people, um, I continue that lifestyle rather than end up in a long-term relationship. This is the version that I think is more plausible, that some people are capable of. Um, uh, PUTTING the brakes on things, they have mechanisms in place that limit their emotional attachment to people, and that allows them to, to keep having a short-term lifestyle. I, I think this is plausible. Although even this is going to be far from a foolproof approach, and that what often happens is that people are enjoying their short-term lifestyle, and then they meet somebody and oops, they clicked with them, and oops, they. Found themselves attaching to that person, and now they have a long-term relationship. So I think if you, if you spend enough time meeting and hooking up with enough people, there's a very good chance that you'll end up falling for some of them. But do I think that some people are capable of putting up a certain set of guard rails and walls that prevent that from happening? Yes, I do think that's plausible. And that's about as far as you can push the short-term, long-term distinction in my book.

23:46 Ricardo Lopes: Well, let me just say that earlier when you said that, oh, if you're looking to avoid the players because they might make your life miserable, and I think that we'll probably come back to this topic later, but I mean what I imagine that one of the ways they can make your life miserable is probably because many of those players might score higher than the general population in dark triad. BECAUSE I mean, people who score high on narcissism, psychopathy, Machiavellianism, many of them are impulsive and some of them are hypersexual and they like just playing people into having sexual relationships with them, but then because of those same traits, at least in the medium to long term, they make your life miserable.

24:37 Paul Eastwick: That is an excellent point, and. And what I'm gonna say next is, it does not really dispute that point, but it's like additional context for thinking about traits in all of these different relationship contexts. But generally speaking, it is far, far easier if you're using traits to identify who's attractive in initial attraction settings or who's a good short-term partner. Than it is to use traits to figure out who is gonna be a good partner in the long term. It's just a harder task. In other words, if all I had at my disposal was a set of traits about a whole bunch of people, and I just wanted to predict who was liked here, initial attraction, and who was liked here, long-term relationships. My models are going to do much, much better in the first context than the second, and this gets to some machine learning studies that my colleague Samantha Joel has done. And, and it's really interesting to look at because it, the, the study design is almost identical. It's just in one case, it's speed dating, using all the traits that people self-report to predict how desirable they are. And then you do it in long-term relationships, but it's the same thing. You're gonna take all the traits that people self-report and use that to predict how happy their partners are with them. And in one case, your models will account for like 25% of the variance, and in that second case, it's 5%. So it's a really big difference. So yeah, like long-term relationships, narcissism is not great. Emotional instability is not great, Machiavellianism, is not great, but it's a harder task long-term. And the reason why, and maybe we'll get into this a little bit more, is that because Long-term relationships are these constructed entities that what starts to matter more are your traits as I experience them with you, which can differ from what your traits are when you're with everybody else, which is generally what people are self-reporting. So, so that's the trickiness. So everything you said is correct, but there is a real limit to how much you can use traits to predict how desirable people are long term.

26:56 Ricardo Lopes: Right. How about research done on mate preferences on dating apps? I mean, because there's many criticisms of that kind of relationship. I mean I've heard criticisms from feminists, I've heard criticisms from sociologists, for example, I mean feminists, just to give an example, many times refer to the fact that, oh yeah, why would women er swipe. Right, most of the time if there's an inherent danger for them as women to go out on the street and meet a complete stranger that might even be tricking them or catfishing them or something like that. So I mean the 80/20 thing is just silly. It's just silly to think is realistic because of that. I mean that's just one kind of criticism, but what do you mean that?

27:51 Paul Eastwick: Yeah, I mean, I think, I think people who are studying dating apps for the sake of studying dating apps, uh, I think this is very valuable because people use dating apps and we need to understand what people are doing and the mental processes involved. Uh, I would be hard pressed to come up with a form of dating. And we're now we're talking about like, what are you doing when swiping? So we're not even concerned about what happens when you ultimately meet face to face. I'd be hard pressed to come up with a context that's Stranger, more unusual, more irrelevant to the way that we evolved. I mean, looking at pictures, having a, you know, 3 2nd impression of somebody before you swipe one way or the other, this is telling us how we approach these highly produced, um, highly unusual, very modern day stimuli, but I don't think it tells us much about our evolved architecture. And that's, and I think this is actually consistent. With the feminist criticism that you articulate, because we're not used to, I wouldn't say we're, we are used to it. We didn't evolve to be in a context where we were surrounded by this many strangers, and with this level of anonymity, yeah, it can feel very dangerous for a lot of people and maybe especially a lot of women. So, you bring a mindset to the dating apps that to me reflect our modern emphasis on hitting on strangers, trying to chat up strangers, trying to impress strangers, as opposed to the context that I think is more evolutionary relevance, which is how did you navigate small groups and the social networks within those groups. Those people should be less scary on average, not completely safe, of course. But far less scary because people know each other, there's accountability, and you're likely to have a lot of information about these people, and some of these folks are gonna appeal to you, and some of them are not. So, I think studying dating apps for the sake of studying dating apps is great. Studying them to, to uncover some truth about the human mating condition, I'm, I'm pretty skeptical.

30:03 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, so I want to address some worries that people have and that I also have about evolutionary psychology, how it is presented publicly, how it is presented on the internet specifically, and whether it might go associated with certain ideas that are not. Really that good. So do you think that ideas that stem from mainstream evolutionary psychology on mating, mate preferences and all of that might sometimes get amplified? I mean that even evolutionary psychologists themselves on the internet might amplify them and then Uh, and that's not their fault necessarily, but sometimes even the manosphere might pick up, might pick up on them and exaggerate them even further, and that might contribute, for example, to the beliefs that incels and other men who have little to no mating success for whatever reason that they are doomed and also the kind of misogynistic ideas that they tend to associate with women.

31:20 Paul Eastwick: I think that's all correct. I agree with you too, like, like this isn't unique to evolutionary psychology, exactly. There's all sorts of forms of science that when they reach the public, get spun out in various nasty or unfortunate ways. People who over extrapolate from various findings. I mean, you can find this in like the behavioral economic space. You can find this in the nutrition space. I mean, this happens a lot. You know, when I realized, you know, maybe 10 years ago, that this was happening, exactly what you described, with the branch of research that I knew, that was when my attitude started to change a little bit. Just in the sense that I realized like, oh wait a minute, like, I, I used to think it was mostly fine and fun for, you know, you publish in academic journals, you have these academic debates, and that's great. I wasn't so concerned about, oh, that people don't know. That the gender differences and mate preferences actually haven't held up all that well, and people don't know that mate value is really primarily about initial impression context, and its effect certainly is greatly reduced as people get to know each other, but when I realized that, like just how these ideas had inspired a virulent strain of misogyny, that that was what changed my approach to talking about some of this stuff. Um, A lot of the ideas in the manosphere, in cell culture, a lot of their ideas about evolutionary psychology are flat out incorrect, but look, sometimes they're channeling the science, they're just doing it in a crude way. Now, again, I think most of the ideas in this space are incorrect, that they, that they have specifically taken pieces of evolutionary psychology that have held up badly. And and that's really what I wanted to write about, what I wanted to emphasize is like a lot of these components haven't held up well and we've talked about them already. Um, BUT, but I also feel compelled to point out too, like, yeah, this is a natural risk that happens at the interface of science and, and public disclosure, and, and no branch of science that I'm aware of is exempt from this.

33:48 Ricardo Lopes: Right, and I mean what I'm trying also to point out is the fact that for example, I'm not going to name names here, but unfortunately it's not that uncommon for you to find, particularly on social media, well established evolutionary psychologists who work on mating even themselves using terms like High value man, high value woman, low value man, low value woman, uh, I mean the, the obsession, the obsession with hypergamy in the case of women and all of that and talking about, uh, for example, certain men as losers, certain women as the B word or the W word or something. So I, I, I mean, I find that really unfortunate because I mean, uh, uh, like you, I've been. I, I mean, very, I, I, I mean, I've distanced myself a lot when it comes to the evolutionary psychology of mating specifically. There are many other aspects of evolutionary psychology that I, that I find great and all of that. It's just mating itself that has been a lot. But, but, but then, I mean, it's really hard to deny that there are a few people. Out there with lots of following on social media who are evolutionary psychologists and push those kinds of ideas. I mean that's undeniable.

35:19 Paul Eastwick: Yeah, yeah, it's uh, it's not my favorite, my, you know, like my informal impression is that people loosen up online. They, they let those kinds of opinions fly. Uh, Especially to the extent that they're not so bound by the scientific rules and decorum anymore, if that makes any sense. So, once you've disengaged a bit from the scientific process, people, people tend to, uh, to let their true feelings fly online. And that, um, that is, I think, one of these unfortunate. Things that, that, that social media and other, you know, other similar platforms uh have, have put out there. So yeah, this is upsetting. I, I, I wanna point out to you that you, you, you will see evolutionary psychologists who I'll say like are like practicing researchers who are also out here saying like what, what the incels are saying is absolute garbage and isn't. Well supported. Dan Conroy Bee is one of them. He's written op-eds about this. So, so there's, there's a lot of people who are concerned about this as well. Um, BUT, but yes, what, what you're saying is also absolutely the case. And I think I even quote, uh, one or two of them in the book.

36:41 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, I mean, also because there are a few of them. I, I mean, of course this is, I think it's fair to say that it's a small number of people, but with a big, with big platforms who, who even also associate themselves with the man whore. Itself with anti-trends ideas, with far right ideas with eugenics, and I mean at a certain point it's just a complete mess and then to also associate the evolutionary psychology of mating with all of those ideas. Yeah, I think he's very, very

37:17 Paul Eastwick: dangerous. Yeah, well, now let me, let me point out two lighter versions of what you're talking about that I think apply more broadly because there is a real spectrum here. You, you're right that some people are out here waving the incel and the manosphere flag happily, you know, people who were, uh, scientists or former scientists. But, but, but here's a couple wrinkles here. I think a lot of people. Harbor incorrect ideas about evolution and particularly about the nature of biological determinism. My guess is you would get any evolutionary, any practicing evolutionary psychologist to come on here and say, I don't believe in biological determinism and. Uh, I would believe that person, that they don't think that, you know, that our genes lead necessarily to certain outcomes, OK? That, that, that applies to rarer genetic disorders where, you know, you have like one gene and then you have the disease, like cystic fibrosis. But, but for the most part, we know that's not how psychological traits work. But They will also say things like, well, because there's a an innate genetic evolved propensity for, uh, let's say men to be interested in casual sex. Therefore, it's hard to change. And what I think they don't realize is that that's just a lighter form of biological determinism. It's the same idea, just expressed in probabilistic terms, um. That idea that biological things are harder to change, that's like a human bias that we have. There's actually, there's no, you can't like declare that that's true across the board. I mean, it depends on the phenomenon, it depends on a million other things. There are many things that are purely learned, that are very, very hard to change. So knowing that something is evolved or not, does not mean it's hard to change and the inverse logic is also not true. So I think that's an example. Of some of the messages that we talk about and we accidentally reinforce some of these ideas. And I think, like progressives and liberals like me, that a lot of times the reason they don't like evolutionary psychology is because they think the same thing. They think that if, if I were to say, if I were to admit that this thing has evolved, that would mean that I that it can't be changed, and that sucks. I like, I don't want that to be true, but, but all of this is philosophically bankrupt. The, the idea that biological things mean harder to change. That you gotta, you gotta take each phenomenon on its merits. Can we change men's sexual desire for whether it's like young women or they're interested in casual sex? My guess is yes, I could count on one hand the number of studies that have tried to do this even. So, I, I think this is a case where our, it's like our philosophy of the thing is really impoverished and then we accidentally go out there and say dumb things.

40:32 Ricardo Lopes: No, you, you know, that aspect that you mentioned about the philosophical impoverishment, it's very interesting because it reminded me of the, um, the position that many people, I mean this is not just evolutionary psychologists, it's behavioral scientists more generally, but that are not very well philosophically informed, that very strong. Belief that they have of determinism against free will because I mean it's it's very convenient for them to, for free will to not exist at all because it makes their life and their predictions simpler.

41:11 Paul Eastwick: Yeah, I, I think that's right. And, and, you know, another important physic uh philosophical idea that's worth unpacking is this idea that as scientists, we are like these objective sages of truth and we are unbiased. Yeah. Um. And I, I also think we, we gotta discard that idea too. That what it means to be a scientist is you agree to play by a certain set of rules, and we learned a lot in the last decade about how our rules were screwed up, and a lot of the studies didn't mean what we think they mean. OK, but we're, we're all trying to understand the rules and that you agree when you play by the rules that the data are the data. Now, what you do. WITH those data, what are the findings you put more versus less weight on? How do you combine the pieces? What is the story that you tell that connects all the threads? Of course, that is informed by who you are as a person. That is informed by your life experiences, your attitudes, your preferences, your political leanings. Of course it is. So, do I think that the narrative that came out of F Psych in the 90s was informed by those practitioners and the way they saw the world? Of course, it was. And I'm not going to apologize that my philosophical worldview is different, but I have to work with the same pieces. I have to work with the same, uh, the same bits of data. We only fail as scientists when We, you know, just like forget to incorporate the various components. We, we have to all work with the same puzzle pieces here, but of course we're gonna assemble things differently. So, so this idea that like, oh, like, like, you know, we You know, the folks who are speaking to you the hard truths about biological determinism, like they're the real wise objective sages, and the rest of you are just coping, like, get out of town. We're all people here trying to assemble things using our own experiences and our own worldviews.

43:22 Ricardo Lopes: Mhm. OK, so allow me to be bold here. I'm going to present you with a hypothesis that I've been thinking about for the past 4 years. I mean, I, I'm not even sure if I would call it a hypothesis because I don't think it's probably, it's not even a proper scientific hypothesis. It's more of a strong intuition, but, and let me hear your thoughts. So do you think that perhaps And some of these evolutionary psychologists who promote the kinds of ideas about mating that you criticize and debunk in your book find them appealing. I mean that men tend to have these preferences, women tend to have those preferences, and all of that is, as you said, semi-deterministic. Do you think that behind that could be that they have some specific psychological traits that make those ideas appealing to them. Like, for example, they might score high on sociosexuality and perhaps they also might score high on dark triad traits, and then They like to, for example, they're interested, they are interested in uh sort of figuring out how the minds of men and women work to then sort of manipulate them into having relationships with them.

44:56 Paul Eastwick: Yeah, I, you know, I don't, I don't know, um, and I, it's, it's like I don't know enough of them personally. That I could make a confident judgment along these lines. But, but to speak to the broader phenomenon of research, I definitely think that's a thing. And, and look, I'll just turn the lens around on myself. Like one of the reasons. That I resisted the narrative of evolutionary psychology. What it was telling us about human mating in the 90s and in the 0s was that it didn't really fit with my experiences. That's not to say I didn't have rejection experiences. I absolutely I did. And that's not to say that I couldn't look around and see gender differences. I absolutely could. But on many of the components, I was like, I didn't feel the same kind of dog eat dog competitiveness, the ruthlessness between men and women that that I'd often see depicted there. I was more taken with ideas about attachment and pair bonding, because honestly, that was a lot of what I experienced as an older adolescent and as a young man. So, I think it's very plausible that the folks who constructed these earlier narratives had life experiences that led them to put the pieces together in that particular way. Um, SO, so that's like, I feel super comfortable saying that, and, and I think like, I, I, I find that point, um, uh, I think. Like I think we treat that point as more controversial than it needs to be. The scientists are humans and we, we are humans who agree to play by a certain set of rules, and those structures and those institutions are really, really important. And that's what separates science from just kind of garden variety dispensing advice. Uh, BUT, but we are definitely, definitely people who have had life experiences, we have traits and it shapes how we, how we do things.

47:08 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah. So, uh, I mean, let me ask you a different kind of question now. Uh, uh, I mean, when we have this very common idea and it is also propagated by, uh, evolutionary psychology when it comes to mating, that. I mean, we should learn about or know what men in general or women in general or the average man or the average woman wants in a partner. I mean, don't you think that perhaps a better question that people should ask themselves is, What does a man or woman that I want as a partner wants in a partner? Don't you think that would be a better,

47:52 Paul Eastwick: yeah, so like, like the, a specific, do you mean like a specific person that I'm interested in or a specific kind of person that I'm interested in?

48:00 Ricardo Lopes: Uh, I, I, I, I mean, OK, so perhaps I have this general idea of the traits that I tend to prefer in a partner, right? And then, I mean, it would be more useful to think, OK, so a person like that, what, what does, what does she tend to prefer in a partner?

48:20 Paul Eastwick: I like, so, um, yeah, where I definitely think you're onto something here is in the space of Like the experiences that we have with live human living and breathing members of our preferred gender, that those experiences are, and I think should be very important in shaping how we go about presenting ourselves, what we end up doing when we're interested in forming a relationship. Um, What I like to point to is the research on adolescence showing that the more these are heterosexual adolescents, OK, and the more, uh, other gender friends that they have, so the more if you're a man who's interested in dating women, the more women friends you have, the likelier you are in the coming 6 months, 12 years, the more likely you are to be dating somebody. And that same thing is true for women as well, right? So, mixed gender networks are good predictors over time of whether or not you will form a relationship. Uh, I think what you're articulating here is probably a big part of that, that what you're doing when you're spending time with mixed gender friends, like, yeah, sometimes you will end up forming a relationship with them, but what you're oftentimes doing is you're learning. It's like, if you're a guy, you're learning about what women like, and I, and I, and yes, in terms of traits, but boy, I think about it more in terms of specific behaviors. Like, maybe you get a little practice, I don't know, like listening. And, and if you don't listen well, your friends might correct you and give you some feedback that you're not doing it very well. And if these are friends that you're motivated to keep, then maybe you'll try a little harder next time. This is good, right? It is good. To get negative feedback and then to change our behavior so that we can become valuable, likable members of a group. I think that's often what's going on and why you see these network effects among adolescents. So, so, so yes, where I really like this idea is that, look, if you're spending time with people that you kind of like, and, and maybe you want to date some of them, but maybe you just think they're cool and fun to hang out with. By spending time with them, learning those norms, becoming valuable to that group, getting that feedback, internalizing it, what ends up happening is that probably these folks are gonna introduce you to some other similar like-minded folks, and that's where you're gonna hit it off. So I do think that process is probably very important, especially for younger folks.

51:15 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, what do you make of recent data from several countries, but particularly the US, that it apparently shows that younger people are losing their virginity later in life, going without sex? I mean, the percentage of people apparently that report that in the past year they haven't had sex at all. I mean, the percentage is going up apparently, and That are also not in relationships. I mean, what do you make of uh those kind of data, does that worry you or not?

51:52 Paul Eastwick: It, it certainly worries me. I think the, the devil is in the details for how this is happening, and, and look, this is, I mean, as you alluded to, yes, it's happening in the US, but it's happening in many places throughout the world, so we need to look broadly at what would be worldwide causes here. Um, It seems to me that the most likely thing that's happening is that people are delaying the developmental process of dating, forming relationships, having sex for the first time, and ultimately forming a long-term committed relationship. So if you, if you move the age window for when these things are happening, and, and that age window has actually been moving for a long time in some ways, I mean, the age of marriage has been going up and up and up, uh, for, you know, getting close to 100 years now. Um. So I think we're seeing that happening now with dating and sex too. Um So I can do a glass half full, glass half empty on this. I mean, the glass half full component is like, well, you know, I think young folks got the message that they need to work really hard and put their efforts into, you know, uh, building out their education, building out their careers, and so they're delaying forming relationships. Um, IF that means that eventually they'll do these things, then I see less reason to worry. But I can also very easily make the glass half empty case, which is that these folks just aren't going out in the way that they used to, and that what has actually happened is that socializing in person, which used to be kind of random, kind of chy, you don't really know who you're going to be spending time with. Sometimes you have bad experiences. But it's all been replaced by something more curated, something more electronic, something more online, and maybe those involve experiences with real people or sometimes maybe they don't involve experiences with real people. This part makes me nervous, and, and the stat that worries me the most is, is actually not the like, like rising age of first sex or even the lowering percentage of folks in relationships. The stat that worries me the most is when you ask high schoolers. How many times did you go out and hang out with friends this week that from when I was a kid, that number has dropped by 50%. That's concerning. That means that like high school kids aren't just like hanging out and spending time together socializing. Because I think the evidence is pretty consistent with the idea that most of what we learn about dating and relationship formation happens in casual networks with acquaintances and friends. I, I worry less about like, oh my God, these guys have never approached a woman at a bar. Approaching a woman at a bar is weird to get a relationship. People are good at that, go nuts. I, I support you. Many people will not be good at that. You don't have to do that, have friends instead. But if people aren't having friends, that's the part that really worries me.

55:22 Ricardo Lopes: OK, so perhaps the part that is even more worrying here would be loneliness.

55:29 Paul Eastwick: Yes, yes, exactly. If loneliness is tied to lack of in-person socializing, look, The internet and all of our devices, they do in some ways help us feel more connected. I get to text all the time with my 4 really good friends from high school. How awesome is that? That would not have existed. We would have been writing letters, you know, 40 years ago. What a pain. I love that this texting technology exists, but it is replacing in-person gatherings, especially among young folks who could be hanging out in person, but are instead. Uh, CHOOSING not to, uh, and especially if that is feeding into our, uh, crisis of loneliness, that's the big problem as I see it.

56:17 Ricardo Lopes: OK, so look, I, I don't know uh what are your thoughts on this, but I, I've been, I've been, I've been thinking for a while about er how this might be related, at least to a great extent to economics and our economic situation. And I'm going, I'm, I'm going to tell you why I think that and then I want to hear your thoughts. I mean, uh uh, I mean, the reason why I think this is that, I mean, of course it can just be a correlation. It can just be a coincidence, but I mean it's too important an event to just be a coincidence. It's, it's like um the, the 2010s after the 2008 economic crisis was when people started reporting feeling more and more lonely and those data about people not being in romantic relations. Res, not having close friends and all of that started becoming more and more worrying and all of that. I, I, I mean, I think that it has a lot to do with the fact that uh in uh um I mean one point would be the way we have organized our societies in the sense that there's more and more people living in cities and cities. I mean, unfortunately, there's less and less good spaces to meet people at least. Without, without having to spend any money, you know, just going out and meeting people without having to spend any money. And then also, I mean, another thing that I really think a lot about is how in the early 1990s, in the early 19990s, there was a big economic crash in Japan and the immediate, immediately, the, the, in the immediate aftermath was when. Uh, FERTILITY rates started dropping, romantic relationships started dropping, marriages and all of that. So I really do think that, uh, I mean, bad economic prospects really affect people's ability to think long term when it comes to forming romantic relationships, to marry, to have kids and all of that, just because, uh, I mean. The economic conditions are not there to do that. And, and also, and also, OK, so, uh, comment on that and then I, I'm going to add another point.

58:50 Paul Eastwick: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean, I think up and down the line you see these sorts of effects and, and Robert Putnam was on this, uh, you know, 25 years ago pointing out like, you know, these, these spaces where people could casually get together are going away, and you, you indeed see. When you look at like who's got close friends these days, it's declined since the 90s, but it's really declined among folks of lower SES. And so I, I definitely see all of these components as related, because if you don't have close friends, that means you're probably not hanging out with folks in person, and to my mind, that's the main engine of relationship formation, is spending time with people face to face. Um, IF, if folks are opting out of that, that is going to make it harder for many people. Can, uh, these sort of knock-on SES effects have, have consequences down the line too, right? People delaying marriage and delaying having kids until they feel like they're financially stable. Yes. Um, THE, the one that I worry about the least is I think the one that gets the most airtime, which is the concern that because men are now not measuring up to women in terms of their level of education, that those men don't seem like viable partners. Uh, LOOK, uh, you know, education and job prospects are good on average. They're good in men and they're good in women. I would very much like to help these men, but I would just like to start with the simpler solution of, let's get folks out there again. And in a lot of urban spaces, you're absolutely right. What you see when you go out are couples and groups of women, right? The, the, the groups of men. I, I don't know, I, this is maybe a little informal, but I don't get the sense that they're out there in the world, in the way that I remember 25 years ago. So that that's, that's where I would start intervening.

1:00:59 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, and then the other point that I wanted to bring, to bring up was, I mean, I also think that Uh, uh, we've been instilling too much, particularly into young men, these outdated ideas about traditional gender roles, and that's probably why many Gen Z men are turning more and more to the right and finding it harder to establish relationships with women, is that they just have this sort of, uh, what in this context are unrealistic expectations. EXPECTATIONS about being the main provider and about being able to provide uh by themselves, women with a home with kids and sustain all of that by themselves. I mean, I, I, I think that really hurts men also because that's unrealistic in the present context. And, and then that's also again, since people have been spending so much time at home, perhaps in part for the. Reasons that I mentioned before, I mean, they go online and then it gets even further reinforced by manosphere content on the internet, which is just pushed onto them because that's what the algorithm favors because it's the more outrageous content out there. So, you know, I think that all of that influences people, particularly young men, negatively.

1:02:31 Paul Eastwick: Yeah, no, I'm totally with you there. I think. A lot of men would probably be surprised to discover that some of the most uh appealing attributes that they can exhibit when they're actually meeting other women face to face would be things like, you know, I mean, yes, uh, it, it is helpful in initial attraction settings to be physically attractive, but you know what else is really good? Being responsive, just seeming dependable, being. Funny, being a good listener and being supportive and also learning how to celebrate somebody else's successes. These are things that you can practice in groups of friends and acquaintances. You don't have to have a romantic partner to be able to do these things. This is, this is why. Um, SPENDING time, you know, and, and this for, for adolescents, right, that like the older adolescents, I, I really hope that they're like, yeah, old man, we know this. I really hope that that's the case, and that I'm not telling you something that's new to you, but you got to spend time socializing with people of your preferred gender, and you gotta, you gotta take that feedback when you get it, and you gotta use that to grow and change. I absolutely did. I remember being 18 years old, hanging out in this group of like mixed gender friends, and sometimes the women in that group would let me have it for doing one thing or the other that was insensitive or stupid or kind of boneheaded or whatever. And you take that feedback and you grow from it, and it helps make you a better person, and ultimately helps you more, makes it so you're more likely to find relationships down the line. You, you, you gotta do this, you gotta do the work.

1:04:17 Ricardo Lopes: So since earlier we were talking about some of the negative ideas out there that people can associate evolutionary psychology with or some evolutionary psychologists even willingly associate themselves with. Do you think that another thing that There's a risk that evolutionary psychology might reinforce if we approach mating in the more, I mean, traditional kind of way that evolutionary psychology has approached it is that it can reinforce traditional gender roles.

1:04:57 Paul Eastwick: I think it can. I think it doesn't have to. And one of the aspects of evolutionary psychology that I think, you know, I can frame it as either an ongoing disappointment or as an opportunity for growth is like, where are the experiments where we're trying to change these things. Where are the experiments where we're trying to push around people's ideologies about like what's good in a partner or what makes you jealous or whether you're thinking about somebody in terms of casual sex or a long-term relationships. Um, IT, it's actually not a discipline that stresses those kind of, uh, like intervention-minded experimental manipulations. Um, THE, Um, ungenerous interpretation is the light biological determinism stuff that I was getting at earlier that, uh, we, but we kind of think it evolved, then hard to change, so why are we gonna try to be changing these things? That's an ungenerous interpretation, but it also just could be because, you know, that's like we haven't gotten around to it yet. I would like to see us get around to it. I mean, that's actually some of the studies that Uh, that I'm doing with some of my honor students these days is we're trying to understand like, well, OK, when people read about these biological explanations for things, um, why is it that they go to these more automatic explanations? And are there additional bits of context that we can give them? That help reduce that influence. So, I, I think, I think there, there, there are real opportunities here to, um, to, to be evolutionarily-minded scholars and progressive at the same time.

1:06:46 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, OK, so I mean just to wrap up the conversation because we've, you've already mentioned there are some things that particularly men can do to put themselves more out there and to interact with more women and to feel more comfortable interacting with women. And all of that. I mean, I, I have these two kinds of ideas and sometimes I even give them as advice and I would like to hear your thoughts on that. So the, the first one is that I tell them that they should try to, uh, if they like those kinds of activities, of course, I, I mean, they should try activities. Where there's lots of women there participating. I mean, if you're a nerd, if you're a nerd like me, go to a book club or something like

1:07:35 Paul Eastwick: that.

1:07:36 Ricardo Lopes: If, if you like sports, I mean, try yoga or try Pilates or something like that. I mean, because there's lots of women there. And the, and the other thing is, Uh, I mean, if you're really interested in trying to find a new partner and if you have female friends, I mean, just do the things that people used to do traditionally. Just go up to one of your girlfriends and ask her, uh, uh look, uh, I, I'm interested in interested in uh getting into. When your relationship, do you have any girlfriends that are available? Yeah, I mean, because, I mean, because they, they, if they have one, then it's already easier for you to get into contact with them because they're already giving you their stamp in a sense.

1:08:31 Paul Eastwick: That's right. That's right. I mean, I think that the. You know, the best wingman is a close friend, and maybe the best wingman of all, the number one wingman is gonna be somebody of your preferred gender, who can vouch for you. I think the, like, the, the direct connection route, like, do you have any friends, uh, look, that can be effective, um, but sometimes people are, are nervous about that because then they feel like they're playing too direct a role. There are like lighter versions of the thing that are just like, um, Uh, she's like, you should come to this party with me this weekend. There's gonna be like 8 other people there. I think 2 or 3 of them are single. I'll try to make sure I can facilitate you having a conversation with them. And then let it go from there. So they're not like, like you don't need, I mean, you can, I mean, if your friend's like, I'm gonna set you up, who do you want me to set you up with? Awesome. Take them up on that. But if they're not, there are, there's, there's lighter asks, right? There's like simple, hey, come with me to event X, Y, Z. I mean, what, what I would, what I would really do is like, You've got, you know, your guy, you got this woman who's a friend. The best thing she could do is like join an improv class with you, OK? Boy, that feels like a good bet, because you know what you do in improv classes, you like, you get very vulnerable, and you, you take the walls down. I mean, these things can be really conducive to forming relationships. Acting isn't your. You know, joined some silly intramural sports thing. I did kickball, you know, when, when I was in my 20s, and what a fascinating milieu of folks. It was like 200 people, maybe 80 of them would get together regularly at the bars afterwards. It was, kickball was really an excuse to like, get together in this big group and play, play drinking games. And people from all like different walks of life, different SES all getting along and getting to know each other over time. So having a wingman in a situation like that, where you're gonna meet people on repeated occasions, these seem like winning approaches to me.

1:10:51 Ricardo Lopes: OK, so, I, I mean, these two different pieces of advice, you think they're good.

1:10:56 Paul Eastwick: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. This is the, this is the direction to, uh, to be going, honing your pickup lines. I mean, if you enjoy that, again, go forward. But, but if you don't, there are other ways.

1:11:13 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, I just think that the pickup lines and the pickup artist kind of approach is very or tends to be very unsuccessful, and then what might happen is that you, it might get very discouraged. So

1:11:27 Paul Eastwick: yeah, I think, I think. Um, OR a lot of people, it's gonna make them, it's gonna make them, um, more angry, and it's not, uh, it's, it, it really is not the way we historically have, have spent time with people is by, uh, hitting on them randomly at bars.

1:11:44 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, and then I guess that if you get rejected 1000 times, which is, I mean, it's, it's very likely because you're basically approaching strangers on the street, then you go back home and you watch manosphere content and you're like, yeah, they're right. I mean women are all the same,

1:12:05 Paul Eastwick: right, right, like it's one thing. Like I don't want people to be like super afraid of rejection. I think you can be too afraid of rejection, and then you, you don't even go out at all. But I don't exactly want people getting inured to rejection either. Rejection is sometimes a healthy signal that there's something that you could be doing differently. So I think intentionally putting yourself in a situation where it's like, all right, I'm gonna get rejected 999 times for that one success. I don't, yeah, this is, this is, um, it feels, it feels like you're moneyballing something that doesn't need to be moneyballed.

1:12:44 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah. OK, great. So Dr. Eastwick, the book is again Bonded by Evolution The New Science of Love and Connection, and of course I will be also leaving a link to our first interview about it in the description. And just before we go, tell us again where people can find you and your work on the internet.

1:13:05 Paul Eastwick: Um, YEAH, you can find me online. I am the co-host of the Love Factory podcast with Eli Finkel. We talk about relationship science and evolutionary psychology in rom-coms and romantic films, and you can also follow me on Instagram at Paul Eastwick.

1:13:22 Ricardo Lopes: Great. So thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show again. It's always a great pleasure to talk with you and it's been fun.

1:13:30 Paul Eastwick: Yeah, you bet. Thanks so much for having me.

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