Dr Paul Eastwick

And that has really big implications for whether mating feels competitive, whether it feels like a market.

Yeah, so let's think about it this way.

If you're meeting people for the first time, and let's just make this really simple.

You and me, we're going to evaluate a woman, and the question is hot or not.

We're just going to make simple binary judgments.

Mm-hmm.

We probably agree like 70, 75% of the time, okay, as opposed to 50-50 chance.

That's pretty good, okay?

That is where the sense comes from, that when people are meeting each other or I'm being evaluated, I mean, maybe people are just looking at my photo online and swiping left or right.

Mm-hmm.

That's where that sense comes from that there are tens and twos.

But a funny thing starts to happen as people meet each other multiple times.

And we've shown this in a variety of studies.

If you have us do that task again, after a little while, the agreement would go down to 65 percent and then 60 percent.

And if I do these studies among friends and acquaintances who've known each other for months or years, they're agreeing like 53% of the time about who's hot and who's not, about who you'd want to date and who you wouldn't want to date.

It's sort of shocking, but it makes sense when you realize a couple things.

Once we get to know people over time, what happens is that some people seem more appealing to us as we get to know them, right?

Maybe we learn like, oh, I didn't think much of them at first.

Then I realized they have a great sense of humor.

So everything about them becomes more appealing.