Macken Murphy

speaker

521 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 6 Aug

Macken Murphy’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

Modern Wisdom · The New Science Of Female Attraction - Psychology Roundtable - #1133 · 6 Aug 2026 podcast

But basically what it finds is that it does not move in the way that you would expect from the social role theory perspective, where it's like, oh, when women have more money, they're going to start wanting young, gorgeous men, individual women who are rich.

That doesn't seem to happen.

However, there are some caveats there.

So what we did, we've got all this cross-sectional data.

Basically, you're hearing about correlational study, correlational study, correlational study until the cows come home.

And we said, well, we're testing causal relationships and we know what's happening correlationally.

And there's been critiques both from the evolutionary psychologists and from the social rule theorists about the correlational nature of these studies, depending on which ones they don't like, essentially.

And so we said, okay, well, we'll do an experiment.

And so we did a really complicated, unfortunately complicated, complexity is not a virtue, but it's just necessary for this sort of study design.

We did a 45 condition experiment that varied people's individual income and local gender economic inequality.

And then we tried to see how those variables would predict changes and make preferences.

So basically, participants were put inside of a virtual environment where their economics were different.

Now, I'm sure the timer has probably gone for five minutes.

I feel like I'm giving a massive speech here, but it is just a complicated background to review.

And what we found was actually something that was slightly inconsistent with the evocyte perspective, slightly inconsistent with the social role perspective, and actually most consistent with a perspective that's been common in behavioral ecology for a very long time, which is that people will adjust their mate preferences strategically based on what the environment incentivizes them to want.

And what we found is that when people are poor, as individuals they're poor, or as in the opposite sex is rich and their sex is disenfranchised, they upregulate their mate preferences for resources.

So this is true in ranked preferences, in rated preferences, and also in hypergamous preferences.

So desire to mate with someone who's richer than yourself.

And this goes for both men and women?

For both men and women, yes.

Showing 121–140 of 521 · page 7 of 27