Steve Stewart-Williams

speaker

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

Steve Stewart-Williams’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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

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

Exactly.

Not because they prefer shorter men.

So I don't think that's revealing a preference necessarily.

Well, first of all, let me say I think he's a great scholar.

I don't agree with him on this, but I do think he's a very good scholar.

He's worth taking seriously and reading his work.

So I think he seems to focus a lot on the two lines of evidence that don't show sex differences in mate preferences and exclude pretty much everything else.

So one thing he focuses on the speed dating data that he's personally done and often doesn't find the differences that you might expect.

I'm not sure if it's...

representative samples for a start, like a lot of the studies that he's done have been university students, all of whom are quite possibly, I mean, presumably do have pretty good career prospects.

So there's not going to be a huge amount of variance there necessarily.

In a speed dating context, you don't get to know somebody particularly well.

So their looks are going to be a large part of what shapes your assessment of them.

He points out that a lot of the data that evolutionary psychologists look at, dating app data, for instance, is evolutionarily novel.

It's not speed dating, it's an evolutionary novelty.

It's nothing like what happens in reality.

um but he's happy there because you don't find the differences that you expect to find um so he focuses on that and actually there is some um speed dating research that does show some of the standard differences um rob kersban i think did one study that did find it so it's mixed rather than showing no effect at all of the standard uh evolutionarily psychology predictive stuff um with the reveal preferences i think that um

Well, I don't know.

It's also, I'm a bit dubious about it, partly just because it goes against the 90% of other, or 95% of other research, including real world data that does find directions, effects in the direction you'd expect.

Like women are more likely than men to leave a guy who is unemployed, who becomes unemployed, or

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