Dating Isn't Trading Stocks
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We're here because your heightened awareness deserves heightened entertainment. The Last Show with David Cooper. People have described modern dating as a marketplace. You swipe, you rank people, you assign everybody objective mate value numbers, hoping for the best. But what if romance isn't like the stock market, just with perfume, cologne, and flirting? What if it's something else entirely? What if this marketplace notion is wrong? Well, that is what we're going to discuss here with psychology professor at UC Davis. Check out his book, Bonded by Evolution, The New Science of Love and Connection, wherever books are sold, that is available online. The man I'm with is Paul Eastwick. Paul, welcome to the show.
What does the marketplace metaphor get wrong about dating?
Thank you so much for having me back, David. I feel like I've seen so many reels on short form video platforms where people describe dating as a marketplace. There's apps that like this lingo in how you end up swiping on them. This metaphor is everywhere. OK, what does this metaphor get totally wrong about how humans pair up?
Yeah, I mean, I do think that to some extent the apps are making this metaphor more omnipresent and making dating harder for a lot of people. And in many ways, the metaphor feels real when you are swiping on the apps. Like if you're doing well, you know, you feel like your inbox is full and you feel like you're winning the marketplace. And if you're not doing well, you feel like a loser on the marketplace.
Yeah.
The point that I've been trying to make is that this is not inevitable. It does not have to be this way. And furthermore, this actually does a very bad job of mimicking the environment in which we evolved. It's very tempting to think, oh, there's something natural about having to compete for mates. And, you know, if you're a six, you settle for the other sixes. This actually, I think, is a pretty weak metaphor for thinking about the evolved nature of human attraction and relationship initiation.
And you can't explain why I've ended up partnered as a perfect zero using this model.
I think I can. I think I can do it.
But look, the number of notifications you get, the number of super swipes you have in your inbox, this idea that it's this linear scale, I think that's where it gets it wrong. Dating exists on many, many dimensions, doesn't it? Yes, exactly.
So look, When we look at how people behave when they're rating photographs and even when people are meeting other folks in person, there is some amount of agreement about who's desirable and who is not. Now, I think the average person probably overestimates this. the extent to which we agree about whether, for example, somebody's hot or not. So let's say that you and I, like we had this guy in front of us and we had to make a simple hot or not judgment about this guy. The odds that we're going to agree, that's about 65%. That's higher than 50-50. It's higher than random chance, but it's far from perfect. And what that means is that, look, there's some amount of room there for idiosyncrasy. You think some people are hot, and I don't think they're especially hot.
Leaving room for individual taste, that's kind of step one in this realization that the market metaphor only gets us so far.
Come on, there are some universals like Daniel Craig, James Bond era coming out of the water and the beach with that skimpy bathing suit.
How do dating apps influence our perceptions of attraction?
I mean, we all got to agree on that one.
Look, it's for me, but this is not for everybody. And that's the beauty of the thing.
Let's get a little bit into the science here. You're talking about how we evolved, you know, dating and more primitive, our primitive ancestors. It looked nothing like swiping left and right on the apps. What evidence do you have for how things were very different? And then how were things very different?
Yeah, so I want to take us back as best we can estimate what it was like when you were looking for a partner, I don't know, 50,000, 150,000, half a million years ago.
Good at killing spiders because we were in caves and spiders are in caves. You better be very good at killing spiders and maybe the occasional mammoth as well.
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