The dating world has radically transformed over the last few decades. Combine advances in technology with radical changes in social roles and a rise in non-traditional relationships and sexual preferences, and you end up with a pretty confusing dating environment. Dr. Eli Finkel joins the Curiosity Podcast to discuss everything from one-night stands to Tinder to pickup artists – and everything in-between. Dr. Finkel is a social psychology professor who studies interpersonal attraction, marriage, conflict resolution, and more. He is the director of Northwestern University's Relationships and Motivation Lab and has published more than 130 scientific articles – primarily on relationships – as well as being a regular contributor to the Op-Ed page of The New York Times. More from Dr. Eli Finkel: Dr. Eli Finkel's website Is Romantic Desire Predictable? Machine Learning Applied to Initial Romantic Attraction (Study) Can technology bring us true love? Eli Finkel at TEDxNorthwesternU 2014 "Self and Relationships: Connecting Intrapersonal and Interpersonal Processes" "The All-or-Nothing Marriage: How the Best Marriages Work" Additional resources discussed: Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What It Means for Modern Relationships Four Fallacies of Pop Evolutionary Psychology How evolutionary psychology gets evolution wrong Ashley Madison Hack: All Fun and Puritanical Games Until Somebody Gets Dead "More than Two: A Practical Guide to Ethical Polyamory" "Polyamory and Jealousy: A More Than Two Essentials Guide" "Opening Up: A Guide to Creating and Sustaining Open Relationships" "The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists" Follow Curiosity Daily on your favorite podcast app to get smarter withCody Gough andAshley Hamer — for free! Still curious? Get exclusive science shows, nature documentaries, and more real-life entertainment on discovery+! Go to https://discoveryplus.com/curiosity to start your 7-day free trial. discovery+ is currently only available for US subscribers.
The dating world has radically transformed over the last few decades. Combine advances in technology with radical changes in social roles and a rise in non-traditional relationships and sexual preferences, and you end up with a pretty confusing dating environment. Dr. Eli Finkel joins the Curiosity Podcast to discuss everything from one-night stands to Tinder to pickup artists – and everything in-between.
Dr. Finkel is a social psychology professor who studies interpersonal attraction, marriage, conflict resolution, and more. He is the director of Northwestern University's Relationships and Motivation Lab and has published more than 130 scientific articles – primarily on relationships – as well as being a regular contributor to the Op-Ed page of The New York Times.
More from Dr. Eli Finkel:
Additional resources discussed:
Follow Curiosity Daily on your favorite podcast app to get smarter with Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer — for free! Still curious? Get exclusive science shows, nature documentaries, and more real-life entertainment on discovery+! Go to https://discoveryplus.com/curiosity to start your 7-day free trial. discovery+ is currently only available for US subscribers.
Full episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/the-past-present-and-future-of-dating
CODY GOUGH: I'm curious. Why is it so important to understand relationships and marriage?
ELI FINKEL: Well, there are lots of things that influence how happy we are with our lives, how fulfilled we are in our lives. Literally, number one just on average for most people, the single most significant predictor of your overall quality of life is the quality of your primary romantic relationship, your marriage, for example.
And you can imagine a world in which that weren't true. You can imagine a world in which really our friendships are really central. But it is not the world that we live in.
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CODY GOUGH: Hi, I'm Cody Gough from curiosity.com. Today, we're going to learn what people really want in today's dating world. Every week, we explore what we don't know because Curiosity makes you smarter. This is the Curiosity Podcast.
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You don't need me to tell you that the dating game has changed a lot over the last couple of decades. And, boy, has it gotten complicated? And whether you're single or not, have we got some insights for you?
Dr. Eli Finkel is a social psychology professor who studies interpersonal attraction, marriage, conflict resolution and more. He's the director of Northwestern University's Relationships and Motivation Lab. And this week, he joins me to discuss everything from the psychology of attraction to Tinder to pickup artists.
This episode is pretty family friendly as usual. But be aware that because we're talking about relationships, we will at least touch on some adult themes. But don't worry. We'll keep it PG-13.
ASHLEY HAMER: You can follow along with an interactive transcript of this episode on gretta.com That's g-r-e-t-t-a. Visit gretta.com/curiosity to share your favorite clips with your friends while you listen.
CODY GOUGH: I'm here with Dr. Eli Finkel, professor at Northwestern University in the psychology department.
ELI FINKEL: I'm 50% in the psychology department and 50% in the Kellogg School of Management, half and half.
CODY GOUGH: I didn't know you were allowed to do that.
ELI FINKEL: I pulled some strings.
CODY GOUGH: Did you?
ELI FINKEL: Yes.
CODY GOUGH: And I wanted to talk to you today because you are-- and what would you call yourself? A relationship expert?
ELI FINKEL: Yeah, I mean, I study relationships. Right, I study initial romantic attraction. I study how people navigate conflict and marriage. I mean, I don't think there's a better term than relationships expert. So I suppose that works.
CODY GOUGH: Do your students find dating terrifying?
ELI FINKEL: It's funny. I actually am around undergraduates all the time. And a survey like that would have been easy for me to do. I wish I had-- I'm about to start my 15th year at Northwestern. And I should have been asking college freshmen for the last 15 years, how much do you hook up, and how terrifying is it to date? I don't know of anybody who's actually done that research. People say that dating is passe, that it's really about hooking up.
CODY GOUGH: It's the hookup culture.
ELI FINKEL: It's the hookup culture. I wish I had-- I wish there existed better data on this. I mean, I was at Northwestern in the '90s, and I wouldn't say that we never went on dates. But I also wouldn't say that we never hooked up either.
And certainly, people are actually having less sex today, less sex, fewer sex partners than they did in the heyday of the countercultural revolution, what we could call the '60s or the early '70s. And so I don't actually know the extent to which there's like a free love sort of approach to dating by comparison to in the past. My sense is that there has been-- since the sexual revolution, since the-- what people say is the '60s is really like '65 to '75 basically.
And that in the '60s, there was a significant breaking of the shackles, breaking of these social rules. And people cut loose. And, I think, since then, it's ebbed and flowed. I mean, AIDS scared people a lot in the '80s. But by and large, people try to find a way to meet and connect. And it isn't always over a dinner and a movie. It could also be over a makeout session in a dorm room.
ASHLEY HAMER: Hey, Ashley here. Something that's sometimes forgotten in the talk about free love in the 1960s and '70s is that generation's attitudes towards same sex hookups. In 1973, the proportion of Americans who thought there was nothing wrong with sexual relations between two adults of the same sex was just 11%.
By 2014, that number climbed to 49%. It's even higher among millennials. As a result, while it's true that millennials have fewer sexual partners at their age than previous generations, the number of people overall who have had a same sex hookup has doubled since the '90s.
CODY GOUGH: Why are people having less sex?
ELI FINKEL: Honestly, the data exists to say that they have fewer sex partners. I think I forget the exact numbers. It's like half a partner per person. I don't know how you'd have sex with half a person. Actually, I guess, I could figure it out.
But the idea is that if you just plot just numbers, so these-- the evidence that exist is just like numbers, right? And if I had to speculate on that, I think, there was a period where free love-- right, I mean, we know about this-- that free love was very in. It was very cool. And you were considered square if you didn't have a free love sort of ethos.
And I'm sure that to the degree that there's a free love ethos, people are more likely to have more sex with more people. And so, I think, you see these sorts of things. So I certainly don't think it's that people today are just having like all sorts of sex with random strangers. Even when people are hooking up with people, they're almost never random strangers.
It's incredibly rare. We have this sense of a one night stand as being like you went off, and you found somebody you'd never met before. You had sex with that person or some type of sexual contact with that person. And then you never saw that again. That is exceedingly rare, right?
And it's exceedingly rare in college in particular. It's somebody that you kind of know from class and then maybe you have a hookup and so forth. And why is it a little bit less than the late 1960s? Probably because the political ethos of free love is less urgent today than it was then.
CODY GOUGH: I was in the dating world long enough to experience the joys of Tinder. And I say that with the most dripping sarcasm I possibly can. Tinder just seems like a numbers game. I would have coworkers-- a girl would wake up on a Monday morning, and she's got 85 matches or something.
Suddenly, you've got a catalog of people. That's a numbers game. Now, you've studied online dating. How are apps like Tinder and Bumble and whatever else is out there, how are these affecting dating?
ELI FINKEL: Oh, boy, I mean, I think it's fair to say that they've-- they've--
CODY GOUGH: Ruined it?
ELI FINKEL: No--
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
--'cause I was getting to an R. I was getting to an R word. I was going to say radically overhaul. No, I'm much more sanguine or optimistic about online dating than you are.
CODY GOUGH: Really?
ELI FINKEL: Yeah.
CODY GOUGH: Because you haven't done it.
ELI FINKEL: That's probably why, yeah. I was sort of off the market before the stuff got big. So I actually wrote an op-ed in the New York Times called In Defense of Tinder. And it had a very specific point, which was Tinder gets a bad reputation as being like-- I'm sorry. It has a reputation of being like a hookup app.
And the major point in the op-ed that I wrote is we have this sense that either you're interested in a long term relationship or you're interested in hooking up. And that these are two distinct strategies or approaches that people tend to adopt to dating. My sense is that that's wrong for almost all people almost all of the time.
And in fact, what happens is you go on a date, and you think that was fun. I'd go on another date. Or you think, nah, I'd rather not go on another date. But if somebody asked you at the end of that first date, you were like, that was kind of fun.
Do you want to like have sex with this person and then sort of go your own ways? And people might be like, yeah, that sounds kind of fun. Or they might say-- and if you said, well, what would happen if then you accidentally fell in love with the person, grew old, had grandkids together? How does that sound?
They'd be like, that sounds great too. And I think that's how dating works today. It's not that-- by and large, I don't want to say that there are no circumstances under which people are completely closed minded to a short term thing or completely only open minded to a short term thing. But by and large, people who think they only want a short term thing, keep accidentally marrying their--
This happened to me, right? I thought I was on a short term thing with my wife. And now, we're married and have kids. And it's terrific. And if you'd ask me how would I feel about marrying this girl, I would have said, boy, it doesn't seem likely. But if that happened, that'd be great.
And here I am. Whatever 13 years later and I would say, that's great. I'm delighted that it played out. But it certainly wasn't the plan when we went on a date. And so the thing to remember about online dating is it's a really online meeting, right?
Dating once you actually start doing it hasn't changed much. It's not like the human brain, the way-- the human dating architecture. The way we're actually built has changed, right? The things that we want out of dating are relatively similar to what people wanted a long time ago, certainly in the time that we've had the freedom to pursue what we want.
And so, yes, it's radically altered how we meet people. But I think once you started to date people, I don't think it's much different. One thing that you're right about is the numbers thing. So one thing that-- I actually think Tinder and especially Bumble fixed-- and it's the reason why Tinder finally broke through. Brief history here.
So match.com was really the first online dating site, right? 1995 people start accessing the internet. And like within minutes, match.com launches. They present themselves as like the supermarkets of love. This whole framework of just show up. And there's hundreds or thousands of people. Pick who's compatible with you.
Browse a profile and pick who's compatible. Then 2000 eHarmony comes along. They have a second framework for thinking about these things. And they pitch themselves as something more like the real estate agents of love.
So rather than saying, look at all the 3,000 people that you could pick. They say no, no, no. We have some wisdom and expertise. We're going to find somebody who's especially compatible with you.
And then, the third generation-- and really this is where we still are-- came with the second generation iPhone in the App Store, right? And now, you're walking around carrying basically the world's biggest singles bar in your pocket. And we used to call it mobile dating, and GPS-enabled dating, that might still be the best term for this stuff.
But what's interesting is that Grindr, which is the site that-- the main site that gay men use, took off right away. But there was no site that really worked for heterosexual relationships until Tinder in 2014. So Grindr was big from 2007 to 2008. Tinder starts getting huge in 2014.
There really isn't a big successful site before that. And the reason why, Tinder did a few things. One was it sort of gamified it with the swiping. And, I think, people for a while thought that was fun. I don't think people find that fun anymore.
Another thing that they did is is they linked it to your Facebook profile. So it was harder to fake your profile, not impossible but harder. But with regard to what we were just talking about, you can't contact a person on Tinder unless both of you have swiped right.
So to some degree, this solves the number of problems of earlier generations of online dating. If you're dating in the real world, you walk into a bar and you-- let's say you're a heterosexual man. You see a beautiful woman there. And you might be courageous enough that you might want to buy her a drink or say hello to her.
But you realize that she's flirting with four guys already. And you say, oh, well, that other person she's pretty cute too. Let's do that. Online dating doesn't have that. You can't tell how surrounded somebody is in an online dating context, which is a problem.
But Tinder and certainly Bumble in particular, they solve this problem because she can't be surrounded just because she has a hot photo on her profile page. She can't be surrounded by every man who might want to send a virtual poke, right? So she has to swipe right first.
And with Bumble as you know, the women have to reach out first. So, I think, to some degree they've solved this problem, this gender problem of-- in the online dating space, men are by and large the pursuers. Women are by and large the pursued. And that was something I disliked about online dating, but I think they've gotten better about solving that part.
CODY GOUGH: Haven't they created a new problem in the overabundance of availability of dates? I had coworkers, and they'd go on four dates a week. And then OK, second date with this person, third date with this person, first date with this person. And after a while, you realize that they're getting to third and fourth dates with people, and they're just dropping them off.
ELI FINKEL: Yeah.
CODY GOUGH: They just end up staying, you know what? I'm going to leave them alone.
ELI FINKEL: Why is that bad?
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
I mean, have you ever been through a period where you dated like three or four people in the same very narrow window of time?
CODY GOUGH: Yeah.
ELI FINKEL: It's not fun. I mean, I have done it. And I basically was like, this is kind of fun but really like tiring and expensive.
CODY GOUGH: Very time consuming.
ELI FINKEL: And time consuming, yes. So I actually think that's not rare. We're dudes, right? We're heterosexual dudes. We're supposed to want to like date and have sex with as many women as we can. And I can tell you that I've had a range of different life experiences.
I suspect many of your listeners also have say, for example, your male listeners-- and in principle, it might sound very fun to say, well, I went out with four women this week and had sex with all of them and how amazing is that. And in reality, that grows tiresome really fast for almost everybody, right?
And eventually, what you think is this is kind of fun and like, I have really good stories to tell. And I don't really regret that I've had these life experiences. But you know what would be nice? It's to have somebody that I really loved and really wanted to build a connection with over time and maybe one day make a family with.
And I don't think those are two different people. I don't think it's like, well, there's the people who for their whole life will want to sleep with four women a week, and the people who from the first minute will want to be in a committed relationship. We sort of tinker around with these things.
And by and large, the people who have gone through these sorts of wild periods eventually say you know what? It was fun but exhausting and expensive and time consuming and ultimately not that fulfilling. I don't want to sound moral about this. I'm not. If people are being honest and want to have four sex partners a week for the rest of their life, God bless. I'm not in a position to judge them. But I suspect that the vast majority of people will find that really disappointing in the long run.
CODY GOUGH: I find that online dating is so efficient now. But dating isn't efficient. Is anybody going to try and solve that problem?
ELI FINKEL: Well, what are you saying is inefficient about dating?
CODY GOUGH: Again, I can wake up with 60 Tinder matches in a weekend. Well, then I've got on Monday night meeting somebody at a bar. It's two hours, three hours, whatever. You could only fit so many dates into a week.
And you can fit a lot. I mean, you can go on 14 or 15 dates in a week if you're really ambitious, and you set time frames and things like that. But that's all your free time then. And that's the most you can do.
ELI FINKEL: I think a lot about-- given what I know about relationships, if I could build the world, what would it look like? How would it be better? This problem that you want solved I would not solve. I would not solve this problem of, can we make it more efficient to go on 14 dates in a week?
CODY GOUGH: Oh, I don't want it solved. I'm just saying that I feel like the technology has outpaced our ability to actually process it.
ELI FINKEL: I totally agree with this. So the technology has outpaced our ability to process it. I think that's probably a good thing, right? This is what I mean when I say, yes, the mechanisms of meeting potential romantic partners have been unbelievably overhauled in like two decades. I mean, radically, radically overhauled in two decades but our brains, our minds have not.
And I don't think we're on the verge of becoming a new species of human that has 63 ongoing relationships. By and large, most of us want a deep loving relationship. Yes, some of us might want too deep loving relationships. Or some of us might want a deep loving relationship that's open, and we're allowed to see some people on the side, what Dan Savage calls monogamish, for example. Another term?
CODY GOUGH: I think I've heard it maybe.
ELI FINKEL: Yeah. So Dan Savage is great. He's a sex and relationships columnist. And monogamous is like, yeah, there's one person. And by and large, you're monogamous with that person. But there's an understanding that there might be occasional slip-ups. And that that isn't the moral rupture that it's often presented as being.
That's one approach, one set of rules or norms that some people are adopting in their relationships. All of those things make sense to me, but I don't see any threat of humans becoming the sort of people who don't need long term committed loving relationships. That's who we are. That's been one of our major evolutionary adaptations.
You can contrast us, for example, with chimps and bonobos. So these are our closest genetic relatives. We diverged. Our lineage diverged about 6 million years ago from chimps and bonobos. They don't pair bond, that is, they don't create long term pair bonded relationships what we might call romantic love.
But starting around call it 2 million years ago, a few evolutionary forces come into play. One is we come down from the trees. We start walking on two legs rather than four. That requires a narrowing of the birth canal. And at the same time, our brains get frickin' huge, right?
And so how do you fit this really huge brain through this increasingly narrow birth canal? And the way that-- again, the way that most people think about how this worked is we developed a pair bond. That it was important now for the father also to play a role in child rearing.
And one of the ways that you get a father to play a role in child rearing relative to the way chimps and bonobos do it, for example, is to make him and her fall in love. The two parents fall in love with each other. And so we have really been built-- like deep in our DNA, we are built to pair bond, to fall in love.
And people will argue, are humans really monogamous? Are they really polyamorous? They're like all of the above. We have a very flexible psychological architecture, which is why some people are really best off in a consensually non-monogamous relationship.
And some people are best off in a monogamous relationship. But almost nobody is going to be better off having 16 different relatively casual sexual partners per month for the rest of time. It doesn't satisfy the psychology of the human organism.
ASHLEY HAMER: A lot of modern theories about human sexuality like the ones in the wildly popular book Sex at Dawn by Christopher Ryan rely on evolutionary psychology. That is a branch of psychology that uses ideas about evolution to make claims about human nature. Evo psych, as it's sometimes called, is pretty controversial.
That's because while we can use the fossil record to see how our ancestors bones changed over the millennia, brain structures don't leave any evidence behind. Without hard evidence, you're mostly left with assumptions. And it's pretty tricky to use assumptions about the psychology of our Stone Age great grandparents to figure out how our modern traits evolved.
CODY GOUGH: There's a little bit of contradiction there because you started by saying that we are basically genetically built to be monogamous, but then you--
ELI FINKEL: We're built to pair bond. If I said we're built to be a monogamous, I think, that's false.
CODY GOUGH: OK, [INAUDIBLE].
ELI FINKEL: We are built to pair bond. If we were built to be monogamous, then I don't think we'd be tempted to have extra monogamous sex. And let me just state as fact that humans are tempted to have extra pair bond sex. That is very few of us will go our entire lives in a 50 or 60 year long marriage and never think, man, it would be nice to have sex or have a romantic interlude with that person.
ASHLEY HAMER: A 2011 study published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior found that in the 1,000 heterosexual couples the researchers interviewed, one in five people had cheated on their spouse. But according to some, cheating isn't always the home wrecking event it's portrayed as being.
In 2015, when the users of infidelity site Ashley Madison were leaked, sex columnist Dan Savage had this to say, quote, "We hear about the infidelities that destroy marriages, the ones that lead to messy divorces. But we rarely hear about the infidelities that save marriages. Our skewed sample reinforces a ridiculously simplistic views on infidelity.
The outing of 37 million adulterers and wannabe adulterers all at once means we will soon be hearing different stories about different kinds of infidelities i.e. the kinds of infidelities that saved marriages, the kinds of infidelities that were mutually agreed to within marriages, the kinds of infidelities where there was no easily identifiable victim or the victimization was mutual," end quote.
ELI FINKEL: So there's no question that we have this fairly broad flexible mating system. And for many people, lifelong monogamy is going to be the most fulfilling way to go, right? But as many of the sort of advocates for polyamory argue, there are many people for whom that isn't going to be the optimal system, right?
That is even if you only care about the marriage-- like, let's say you don't care about my well-being, and you only care about how good the marriage is, you still might want to offer me the option of having extra relationships, extra sex with people outside the marriage because that's one of the things that if I can't have it, it would end up being a big source of conflict in the marriage.
And if I get the opportunity to do that, then it might, well, make the marriage better. Is that generally true of men or generally true of women? No, right? There's a broad flexible range of ways of doing these things. For my money, the two things I would say about monogamy is we sort of stipulate it. That's like you are going to be monogamous, of course.
Then what are the other things you're going to look for from your relationship? And that seems foolish to me. Right, it seems foolish to me to think we're just all going to be monogamous, of course. Like, on your wedding day, it's rare that people say things like, well, I'm going to be monogamous or maybe they do have something that's similar to that.
But they don't seem to think of it as something that's going to be a lot of work, a lot of effort. It's going to require a lot of resources. Maybe it requires that we don't eat the donut holes as often to make sure that our sex life is a little bit hot. Or maybe it's we don't go out to coffee with our ex-girlfriend.
There's all sorts of things that are going to go into making a relationship monogamous. And I think we under appreciate that. And I feel like when you think about what you want to ask of your marriage, you think about what you want to ask of your relationship. There's a broad range of things you can ask for.
And if monogamy is one of them, then God bless. That's a great one. I encourage lots and lots of people to ask for that. But don't treat it as the one that's given. And then you're really going to make an effort for these other ones, that's a big ask.
And I would say that don't make it as a casual ask as like an understood ask that isn't going to be something you're going to take seriously as something that requires investment because it is. And if that's something you really care about, then you should prioritize it in a very explicit deliberate way.
Is it true that everybody should prioritize that? Do I think that every relationship is best served by adopting that particular norm? No. I think there are probably a lot of relationships. I presume the minority of relationships.
But there are probably a lot of relationships that will be better served by some type of consensual non-monogamy agreement. That doesn't mean cheating or lying. That means consensual, mutually agreed upon understandings. By the way, those are risky things to do. So I don't want to present it to your listenership as if, oh, yeah, just try that out and see because it can be anguishing in ways that we can't predict. [INAUDIBLE]--
CODY GOUGH: And is this based on research?
ELI FINKEL: Yes.
ASHLEY HAMER: Because of how challenging non-monogamy can be in a monogamy centered culture, there are a lot of books on the topic for individuals and couples thinking about taking the plunge. A few popular ones are More Than Two by Franklin Veaux and Eve Richert and Opening Up by Tristan Taormino. You can find links to them in the show notes.
ELI FINKEL: Yeah, so the best study on this to date actually came out this year. There is no excellent research on this for the reason that there's not a lot of excellent research on a lot of great things. Remember me saying you can't be randomly assigned to a world where there is or isn't Tinder, right? You can't do that.
And you can't randomly assign people-- both for practical reasons but also for ethical reasons, you can't randomly assign people to be in monogamous versus consensually non-monogamous relationships, which means you can't draw causal conclusions about how that relationship type affects how good the relationship is, how happy people are in their lives.
But there's a lot of people pontificating at us that monogamy is the only way to do it. And if you're non-monogamous, you're not only bad, but you're going to be unhappy, and your marriage is going to fail. And there's a lot of people pontificating us that says, monogamy is totally unrealistic. If you want to have a good relationship, you need to be polyamorous or something like that.
And, I think, all the people doing that pontificating on either side of the issue are dramatically oversimplifying things. And the evidence that exists, the best study is a large study that came out this year by Terri Conley, a Michigan professor and her colleagues, where they looked at a large sample of all heterosexuals. So that is all people whose primary relationship is with someone of the other sex, men with women, women with men.
And some of those people have a monogamous norm. They say, we're not going to sleep with other people. That's just understood. And some people have a consensually non-monogamous norm. There are various forms.
One is polyamory where you might have long term relationships with other people. One might be called an open relationship where you're allowed to do what you do on your time and have casual flings. Anyway, you can compare that second group that is consensually non-monogamous and that first group that has a monogamous norm. And you can compare them.
And it turns out that when you look at how satisfying the relationship is, how much passion there is in the relationship, how much intimacy in the relationship, there is basically no difference, right? So all of the consensually non-monogamous people have a primary partner and have something in addition on the side or at least are allowed to. Those relationships are no better and no worse than the relationships of people who are monogamous or who are in a monogamous relationship anyway.
Now, there's all sorts of confounds in any study like this because people select into these sorts of relationship structures. There's all sorts of alternative explanations. But it is certainly a proof of concept that there's a broad range of ways that humans can relate, a broad range of rules about how we go about developing a meaningful a close relationship, a meaningful marriage. And people should have some amount of flexibility to determine what's best for them in their own marriage.
CODY GOUGH: You mentioned some of those pontifecators are painting with a very broad brush.
ELI FINKEL: Yeah.
CODY GOUGH: But isn't that what some research on online dating is doing? I mean, I've heard that men are from Mars and women are from Venus. Those are pretty broad brushes.
ELI FINKEL: Yes, men are from Earth. And women upon closer inspection are also from Earth.
CODY GOUGH: Really?
ELI FINKEL: It's true. It's a little known fact. I mean, I have very little-- this will get me in trouble with some of my colleagues-- I have very little patience for the-- what I perceive to be the exaggeration of sex differences. I'm not saying that there are no sex differences anywhere. To be sure, there are some sex differences.
By and large, women and men are very similar. They both want long term loving bonds. They both want sexual fulfillment. You talk about sort of receptivity to casual sex. Men report greater interest in casual sex that may well be true. But these are the exceptions rather than the rules. Men and women both want long term loving relationships. They both want sexual fulfillment.
CODY GOUGH: But isn't it a lot of research in the online dating world in what men want on Tinder, let's say, and what women want in Tinder? How is that different than saying that men are from Mars and women are from Venus and painting with a broad brush and saying, well, most men want this or most women like this?
ELI FINKEL: I am delighted that you asked me this. So it is true that there are sex differences in online dating. And some of them are very large. I think women are-- I think men are four times as likely to send a first contact email or whatever to a woman than women are to a man. So that is a huge difference.
We've done a bunch of research on the question of to what extent are men and women interested in certain qualities in a romantic partner. So there's huge effect that exists in the world, and it exists scientifically. And it's made its way out into the general public is that men care more about physical attractiveness than women do.
And women care more about earning prospects and ambition than men do. And it's not hard for people to come up with an instincts and intuitions that are consistent with that. But I'm telling you that we have done a massive amount of research on this in my lab up at Northwestern and in collaboration with Paul Eastwick elsewhere where we find that those effects disappear once you have met a flesh and blood partner.
So, for example, in one of our early studies, we did a speed dating study at Northwestern University. I was the MC of this event. And we brought in undergraduates. This is a real legitimate speed dating context. And we found what everybody else finds when we looked at the pretest questionnaire.
So 10 days before they came in for the session, they filled out a questionnaire, including things like to what degree do you want physical attractiveness in a partner? To what degree do you want earning prospects in a partner? We replicate the effect everybody finds. Right, so men want physical attractiveness more than women do. Women want better earning prospects more than men do. Now, these are self-reports.
CODY GOUGH: And neither are willing to admit it publicly?
ELI FINKEL: Well, yeah, I think they're less willing to admit it publicly. Both feel shallow, I think. But remember-- so these are private. They know that their reports are going to be confidential. There's reason to believe that they're, quote, "telling the truth." And this does mimic what we see with online dating.
So if you look at say first contact emails, for example, you find in fact that the extent to which a woman is attractive is more important in predicting how many contacts she gets than the extent to which a man is attractive-- by the way, there seems to be a superstar effect such that like the wicked hot guys, the John Snow's tush guys of the online dating world tend to be especially appealing if women are going to bother reaching out. It's like they're reaching out for somebody with John Snow's tush.
CODY GOUGH: So the guy is like physically like an 11.
ELI FINKEL: He's an 11, yeah.
CODY GOUGH: Then that will push that into [INAUDIBLE].
ELI FINKEL: That can push it over. But by and large, that's the exception rather than the rule. So you see these sorts of effects that-- we see them in our data, and we see them in online data. But in some sense, that's not really, in my view, the most interesting question.
The most interesting question is, OK, well, if men and women really do differ in terms of their preference for these qualities, then men should be happier when they go on a date with a hotter woman than women should be when they go on a date with a hotter man. Or men should be more maritally satisfied when their wife is hotter than a woman should be when her husband is hotter.
And that effect is zero. That sex difference effect is zero. So this first study, the speed dating study I started alluding to what we've showed with the exact same sample that showed the sex difference when they were doing their pretest 10 days before the actual speed dating event. Then they come to the speed dating event. Everybody meets 12 opposite sex people. We also had a same sex one. I'm holding that aside for now.
But everybody meets 12 opposite sex people. You rate those people-- how attractive are they? What are their earning prospects? How ambitious are they? You rate these exact same qualities that 10 days ago men had a preference relative to women for one. Women had a preference relative to men for the other.
And then you use those qualities to predict how romantically interested you are in a person. And it turns out that those effects completely-- those sex differences disappear. So, yes, indeed men tend to like hot women. And it turns out that when you really look at any data where people have actually met face to face, women also like hot men.
And women do indeed like ambitious and ambitious men with high earning prospects over like lazy slothful men who are moving in with their parents, in their parents' basement. And it turns out that men have the exact same magnitude preference for those sorts of qualities. That is everybody likes hot ambitious people over ugly lazy people.
But the extent to which men or women like one of those qualities over the other once they have met a flesh and blood person is zero. There are no sex differences any longer.
CODY GOUGH: So you just said all these qualifiers are essentially superficial and don't matter after, let's say, five minutes of meeting a person. But if you're on Tinder and you use one of these qualifiers--
ELI FINKEL: Oh it's terrible.
CODY GOUGH: --then you have to commit three or four hours to spending time with this person on a weeknight.
ELI FINKEL: This is actually why I like Tinder. So you know what's funny? I came at this-- when I first did my serious thinking about the online dating space, it was before Tinder got big. And I was wondering why isn't there a Grindr for heterosexual people? So I'm grateful to Tinder.
But let me just compare it to what I think is a reasonable comparison, which was what online dating was like before Tinder. So the way online dating was before Tinder there was-- I mentioned earlier-- there was like the supermarkets of love the way match.com used to be where they didn't claim to have an algorithm. They just said come and browse the profiles, everyone, and pick the one who's a good fit for you.
That was a problem. I call this online dating's first original sin. And the reason why that was a problem is because you can't tell from a profile who's compatible with you. Yes, you can tell whether a photo is hot or less hot and to the degree that the photo actually approximates what the person looks like.
You might be able to tell who's a little hotter or who's a little less hot. But that's not the relevant question. The relevant question is who's compatible with me that is a better fit for me than for my friend or something like that. You cannot tell from a profile.
We've done a bunch of studies like this in my lab at Northwestern where we rig things and people think-- you rig things so that a profile matches somebody's ideals. You know in advance what their ideals are and you rig it. And it turns out that they're much more interested in the people whose profiles match their ideals. That's not interesting.
Then you have them have a trivial interaction face to face. And suddenly, the extent to which they match their ideals is irrelevant because initial attraction is really about something that emerges as we meet people, as we-- what you want to be able to detect is rapport or like sexual chemistry, right? Where are you going to get that in a profile?
So that's their first original sin. The second original sin came with eHarmony. Right, the second generation of online dating says, we have the answers. You don't need to shop around. We know who's compatible with you. That would be fine in except their algorithms are all bunk, right?
There's nobody who's built a legitimate algorithm. So what are we left with? We're left with online dating can't do anything more than get you face to face with someone. And you indulge in pseudo millennial. Want to live in a world where like, anybody from the 1980s is going to play you the smallest possible violin when you say, oh, all these dates. I just have millions of people to date because that's actually solving a massive problem.
I agree with you that's creating a problem too of abundance of choice. But the idea that it's simple, that like if I want to go on a date tonight, it's not at all hard for me to go on a date tonight. That's never before existed in human history. And it is a tremendous privilege to have solved the-- I don't have anybody in my social network to date problem. That was a dominant problem in humanity up until literally the last decade or two.
So what's so great about Tinder relative to those first-- or Tinder and other mobile GPS type dating sites apps is that it doesn't pretend. Tinder doesn't say, look, browse the profiles. And therefore, when you get across a cup of coffee from someone, she's more likely to be compatible with you. That's bogus. You can't do it. You can't tell that from a two dimensional profile.
And they don't claim that they have some algorithm that's going to find you literally your soulmate. I mean, there are sites that literally tell you that their algorithm is going to find you your soulmate. And so I admire about Tinder that-- or in other sites. I'm not shilling for Tinder. I don't really care which site you use.
But I admire about these sites that they say, look, you're never going to tell who's compatible with you from a website. You're never going to be able to find an algorithm-- or at least there exists to date no algorithm that's even close to finding who's compatible with you. How are you going to find who's compatible with you?
You're going to sit across a cup of coffee, across a pint of beer, and you're going to have a conversation. And that conversation is going to allow you to get a sense of sexual chemistry, compatible senses of humor, things that you wouldn't be able to detect without meeting face to face.
And so for my money, these sites that don't even pretend that they have useful information on their site. You literally are looking for a few seconds and swiping right and swiping left. I do think those are unfortunate for people who don't take good photographs, right? Because I think those people are left out. I think that is a bad version of this relative to other ways of dating.
But I think that there is a significant upside, which is that you always have access to somebody that you can go on a date with. And what does it mean to go on a date? It means to try to assess compatibility, which is something that nobody has figured out how to do without you actually meeting face to face.
CODY GOUGH: So you talk about step one, step two, step three of online dating. What's the next step? What's step four? What comes after Tinder?
ELI FINKEL: That is a great question. I don't want to praise Tinder too much and say like, this is the end of dating history. I don't know that there is any system I can imagine that can do better than bringing you face to face with somebody and allowing you to assess whether you're compatible.
I mean, you may have seen I have a TEDx Talk where I speculate about what a plausible dating matchmaking algorithm might look like. And to do that, I borrow a blend of-- if the science of romantic attraction looks like this and if it's impossible to tell without any live interaction whether you're compatible with somebody, how can we leverage the technological developments we're seeing? I mean, every computer these days has like a webcam, right?
There's technological improvements that we can make to make things a little bit more efficient. Nobody's ever tested this. I have some idea for what it might look like. But if you ask me how optimistic I am that we'll be able to have a major improvement on you meet face to face and you figure it out, I'm not particularly optimistic. I think that the algorithm between your ears is likely to be better than anything that we're going to be able to develop in terms of figuring out who's going to be especially compatible with you.
CODY GOUGH: Do you know what that magic algorithm is?
ELI FINKEL: No, I don't. I mean, like I said, I have speculated. I believe that my speculation is the most promising thing that exists. I think that it is plausibly-- that if somebody ever were to implement it again, if people want to check it out, it's one of the videos on elifinkel.com on my website.
It is plausible that if some like technologically sophisticated guru wants to actually implement this, that it would work in the sense that it would increase by 4% the likelihood that you'd want to go on a second date with this person. It would increase by a third of a scale point from like a 4.3 to a 4.6 or 7 on how much attraction you feel.
Do I feel like I can promise you your soulmate? Anybody can promise you your soulmate. Or do I even feel like I can get a massive difference in how much initial attraction you have? I'm never going to be able to figure that out, and I don't think anybody else is either.
CODY GOUGH: I'm going to ask you a question you probably don't get asked a lot.
ELI FINKEL: I would happily go on a date with you.
CODY GOUGH: [LAUGHS] Thank you. Yes.
ELI FINKEL: Yeah.
CODY GOUGH: Finally, someone. Thank you for that. Do you ever look at research or writings of pickup artists?
ELI FINKEL: Yes.
CODY GOUGH: And what do you think?
ELI FINKEL: My views about-- so I've read The Game. The Game is, of course, Neil Strauss' famous or infamous 2005 book, which, I think, is called Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists or something like that. My feelings about those guys are ambivalent.
Let me start with the obvious. I think there's something very sleazy about the way they go about doing these things. There's something manipulative and deceptive in a way that I find unpleasant both from like a political moral perspective and also because like, what's the fun in manipulating people into bed?
I actually don't even get the logic of why you'd want to fake people out and manipulate them and dupe them into bed. So I have all sorts of issues with it. But that said, I was riveted by that book. That 2005 book was fascinating.
And one thing I admired about these guys is they are in some sense empiricists. Calling them scientists feels like an exaggeration because they're not rigorous enough about the way they test out various ideas about how dating works. But they are really empiricist. That is, they develop a hypothesis about what sorts of behaviors are likely to be effective with basically betting women.
And then, they go out, and they try to use these. And then they say, whoa, that was really effective. And I'm going to teach a bunch of people this. Or that one didn't work. I'm not going to do it.
And then they try to develop theories and understandings about human nature. And, I think, they're frequently wrong. I think they're sometimes right. But the empirical approach is something that I actually admire about what they do.
CODY GOUGH: I mean, you said that you don't like the manipulative aspects. Is all dating a little bit of trying to manipulate things? A girl is going to wear a certain perfume. Or a guy is going to wear a certain thing or put on his Tinder profile picture that he's really high status when maybe he only wears a business suit once every two years.
ELI FINKEL: Yes, you're totally right. It's an interesting question. Is it manipulative? The term that I think I would have preferred, although, I think your term is reasonable would have been self presentation. So it is true that in fact you try not to have weird bodily functions on a first date. Or you might dress in a way that conveys a certain sort of image.
And I'm happy to call that self-presentation, that is, you're behaving in a way to try to create a certain impression. I'm OK calling it manipulative. It's a little bit more complicated for me because you're trying to convey a certain sort of impression that presumably is linked to who you really are or at least the person you at least aspire to be.
It feels different to me from procedures that you might do that would say wound a woman self esteem to make her feel bad about herself to get you in bed, right? And that's literally the sort of stuff they do. So there's the neg, right?
CODY GOUGH: Yeah.
ELI FINKEL: So here's an example of what I find interesting about the neg. So for your listeners who have not, all six listeners of yours who have not read The Game--
CODY GOUGH: [LAUGHS]. It's a great book even for women to read, right?
ELI FINKEL: Yes, I cannot claim that you won't feel nauseated at times, but it is a-- I found it to be truly an interesting read. Yes, I can recommend reading it as an interesting social study. The idea of the neg is that you tease the woman. I may not remember the details, but you tease the woman in a way that lowers her self-esteem a little bit and makes it so that she's more eager for approval. So you might like mock the way she smiles or say, whoa, does your nose always move like that when you laugh or something-- something that makes her off kilter.
ASHLEY HAMER: I can't believe I'm doing this. But for a background on the neg, I'll quote Neil Strauss in The Game, quote, "If the target is attractive and used to men fawning all over her, the pickup artist must intrigue her by pretending to be unaffected by her charm. This is accomplished through the use of what he called a neg. Neither compliment nor insult, a neg is something in between, an accidental insult or backhanded compliment. The purpose of a neg is to lower a woman's self esteem while actively displaying a lack of interest in her by telling her she has lipstick on her teeth, for example, or offering her a piece of gum after she speaks," end quote.
ELI FINKEL: And what's interesting to me about that is not the idea that a neg might or might not work. Again, it's not rigorous science even, though, these guys are collecting data. What's interesting for me about that is the theory or the logic behind it.
Right, and the theory or the logic behind it if I remember correctly-- it's been a long time since I've read the book-- is that once you have made somebody's self-esteem drop, you make her more eager for some type of social approval, which then you can maybe provide. Again, if I bastardize it, Neil Strauss and Mystery-- I'm sorry that I got it wrong.
What was interesting to me about that-- and I consider doing an actual like-- it would have been an ambitious study. I considered doing a study on this-- is it seems to me that you don't need the mean part, right? So I think what-- if a neg works-- and I'm actually reasonably persuaded or at least it's plausible to me that it does-- it seems to me that what works about the neg isn't that you've wounded somebody's self-esteem but that you have created a social context in which you are identified as the authority, right?
You are the one who is in the role of evaluating the other person of, are you impressing me or not impressing me? And it seems to me that there are ways of doing that that aren't mean. You could call these manipulative too, by the way.
But something that like-- if somebody makes a good joke, you could imagine saying something like, look at you. Wow. You got a lot of good sense about you there. That was a great line, right? And that too my guess is that my instinct is that that would have the same effect of putting you in the role of somebody who gets to evaluate who gets to judge without doing this relatively mean thing of making somebody feel bad about herself.
CODY GOUGH: That makes a lot of sense. I've read the book I'm Not a Pickup Artist. The only reason I ask is because like you, I found it a fascinating read, and I get it. There's, again, like you mentioned, a lot of manipulation, a lot of negativity.
But it did seem to me that there was some, like you said, not science quite, but a kind of approach that was like, I wonder if any of this is on point. And you're a guy that studies relationships, so who better to ask if any of what they're talking about is actually accurate? And--
ELI FINKEL: Well, I mean, let me answer that in two ways. And I can do this one relatively quickly. The first answer to this question is nobody's run the proper studies to know. So these guys have interesting hypotheses. They go out and collect data in their own way, but do I consider that rigorous science? No.
But I do consider it empirical. I do consider them to be collecting evidence and to the degree that the report and the game at least approximates reality. And I can't know that. But to the degree that it approximates reality, it seems like there is some support for these ideas, some empirical support for these ideas.
But there's a second question, which is, if you're somebody who studies relationships for a living, which I do, did it seem plausible to me that some of these procedures could be effective? And the answer to that was yes. The answer to that was if your goal is to digit close, that is get a phone number or-- I forget what it is-- bedclothes or--
CODY GOUGH: I don't--
ELI FINKEL: I don't know. Get a woman into bed.
ASHLEY HAMER: [SIGHS] The most polite term for this is full clothes.
ELI FINKEL: Do I think that your odds are better doing this than whatever you were doing before you were trained by a pickup artist? Yeah, I do. But some of the explanations for those things aren't especially interesting, not least of which is to some degree it's a numbers game, right? And it's also a standards game, right?
So if your goal is to pick up somebody's phone number by the end of the night and you're going to be as audacious and shameless as possible, do I think you can pick up a woman's number by the end of the night through any number of different procedures? Of course. And do I think you have a chance of getting somebody in bed tonight, somebody with your good looks? I mean, there's no question about it.
CODY GOUGH: I did my hair today.
ELI FINKEL: Not everybody can see this, but I am witnessing a close up.
CODY GOUGH: I showered actually special for you.
ELI FINKEL: This is a step in the right direction. So, yeah, to some degree, this stuff isn't rocket science. But in fairness, their ideas about negging and the theory, the hypothesis about why these things might work, those things are interesting and, I think, worthy of testing to understand how the human psyche, the human mating psyche actually works.
CODY GOUGH: Thanks so much.
ELI FINKEL: I'm delighted. Thanks for having me.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah.
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I've got an extra credit question for you courtesy of the Curiosity app. So in 1974, computer scientist Martin Newell was looking for a way to make 3D computer graphics look more realistic. He had all these new algorithms, but he needed to render an object in 3D to test them.
And the usual reference objects like chess pieces or donuts just weren't complex enough. So here's your question. What household item did Newell use to test these new animation techniques? The answer, after this.
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ASHLEY HAMER: Have you ever been listening to the Curiosity Podcast and wanted to share a clip on Facebook or Twitter, well, here's some super exciting news. Now, you can thanks to gretta.com. That's g-r-e-t-t-a.
You can stream our podcast on gretta.com/curiosity. And their podcast player will follow along with a written transcript of each episode while you listen. When you hear a clip you want to share, just find it and click Share.
Gretta will build a video for you to share with your friends so you can help spread the word about our podcast. Again, that's gretta.com/curiosity. And drop us a line to let us know what you think of this super cool news service.
CODY GOUGH: So you've listened to the Curiosity Podcast, and you've downloaded our app, and you follow us on your favorite social networks, and you're still curious? Well, don't worry. We've got your back. You can sign up for our email list for exclusive content and bonus articles every week. Just head to curiosity.com/email, and we'll deliver.
If you ever have a question about anything we discuss on the Curiosity Podcast, then please email us your question at podcast@curiosity.com. You should be rewarded for your curiosity. So give us the opportunity to answer your questions. And who knows? We might feature it on our show next week. Again, our email address is podcast@curiosity.com. Don't be shy. We're always here to help.
And now, it's time for me to help explain today's extra credit answer. So what household item did Newell use to demonstrate his algorithms? Here's the answer. His plain white teapot. It had concave and convex surfaces. It could cast shadows on itself. It was immediately recognizable. And it wasn't too simple or too complicated.
So when it came to expanding horizons for new animation experiments, Newell's teapot became a beloved staple. Since Newell was studying at the University of Utah at the time, the item became known as the Utah teapot. And you can learn more about it and lots of other cool stuff on the Curiosity app for your Android or iOS device.
Oh, and did you notice that Dr. Finkel and I did not participate in a Curiosity challenge this week? We'll, keep an eye on our podcast feed for more from Dr. Eli Finkel because we did indeed do a challenge, and he has a lot more knowledge to drop on relationships if you can believe it.
Until then, I want to thank Ashley Hamer for dropping some knowledge on this episode. And I want to thank you for listening. For the Curiosity Podcast, I'm Cody Gough.
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