1 00:00:06,420 --> 00:00:10,506 My name is Eli Finkel, I'm a professor of psychology at Northwestern University. 2 00:00:10,506 --> 00:00:14,25 And I'll be presenting some research that has been spearheaded by Paul Eastwick, a 3 00:00:14,25 --> 00:00:17,340 former graduate student of mine who is now a professor at Texas, at University 4 00:00:17,340 --> 00:00:21,72 of Texas. And the title of the talk is the delusion 5 00:00:21,72 --> 00:00:24,830 of romantic self-insight. And I want to talk about how dating has 6 00:00:24,830 --> 00:00:28,2 changed in the Internet era, and in particular, I want to talk about online 7 00:00:28,2 --> 00:00:31,304 dating. One of the major assumptions of online 8 00:00:31,304 --> 00:00:35,180 dating is that we can look at profiles of potential romantic partners and discern 9 00:00:35,180 --> 00:00:40,260 from reading those profiles who is romantically compatible with us. 10 00:00:40,260 --> 00:00:43,677 So, if that's true, that we have insight into our preferences, and can tell who's 11 00:00:43,677 --> 00:00:46,941 compatible with us, then this is an outstanding way that we could go about 12 00:00:46,941 --> 00:00:52,250 selecting our romantic partner or at least reducing the size of the pool. 13 00:00:52,250 --> 00:00:56,2 But if it's not true that we have insight into our romantic preferences, then not 14 00:00:56,2 --> 00:00:59,586 only are we wasting a great deal of time by browsing all these profiles, but we 15 00:00:59,586 --> 00:01:02,890 are also limiting or ruling out people from the dating pool who might be 16 00:01:02,890 --> 00:01:08,700 especially compatible with us. And so, what I'll do today is talk about 17 00:01:08,700 --> 00:01:12,0 the degree to which we have accurate insight into our romantic preferences and 18 00:01:12,0 --> 00:01:15,710 this question boils down to two distinct questions. 19 00:01:15,710 --> 00:01:19,244 The, the first one is, are there sex differences in what people are looking 20 00:01:19,244 --> 00:01:23,577 for in a potential romantic partner? And, and the short answer to that is of 21 00:01:23,577 --> 00:01:26,336 course there are. Men are especially interested in looks, 22 00:01:26,336 --> 00:01:29,180 much more then women are. Women are especially interested in 23 00:01:29,180 --> 00:01:32,697 earning prospects, more then men are. Those are widely replicated sex 24 00:01:32,697 --> 00:01:34,943 differences. I want to probe a little deeper and find 25 00:01:34,943 --> 00:01:38,210 out whether those sex differences hold up when it really matters. 26 00:01:38,210 --> 00:01:41,420 And the second question I have doesn't involve sex differences. 27 00:01:41,420 --> 00:01:45,388 It says, we as individuals, to what degree do we have accurate insight into 28 00:01:45,388 --> 00:01:49,960 what it is that tends to inspire our romantic attraction? 29 00:01:49,960 --> 00:01:52,750 If we do have good insight, then browsing profiles is a great way to go about 30 00:01:52,750 --> 00:01:55,486 finding a partner. If we don't, then we really should 31 00:01:55,486 --> 00:01:58,216 probably meet face-to-face to get a chemistry check of who's compatible with 32 00:01:58,216 --> 00:02:01,871 us. Let's start by talking about sex 33 00:02:01,871 --> 00:02:04,644 differences. There are large sex differences in stated 34 00:02:04,644 --> 00:02:07,857 preferences, that is, if you ask people to what degree do you value a certain 35 00:02:07,857 --> 00:02:11,223 series of characteristics, many things men and women agree on, we all like warm 36 00:02:11,223 --> 00:02:16,445 partners kind partners, etcetera. But there are two massive sex differences 37 00:02:16,445 --> 00:02:19,504 that I mentioned earlier. The first is physical attractiveness, men 38 00:02:19,504 --> 00:02:22,452 like that more than women, the second is earning prospects, women like that more 39 00:02:22,452 --> 00:02:26,302 than men. But, before we conclude that these sex 40 00:02:26,302 --> 00:02:30,328 differences are totally universal, let's first examine a little bit about the 41 00:02:30,328 --> 00:02:36,120 research paradigms that people have used to try to establish those effects. 42 00:02:36,120 --> 00:02:39,288 One of the major research programs or research paradigms is to ask people about 43 00:02:39,288 --> 00:02:42,815 hypothetical partners. Specifically, ask them to what degree are 44 00:02:42,815 --> 00:02:45,875 you looking for somebody who posses characteristics like good earning 45 00:02:45,875 --> 00:02:50,196 prospects or a good earning potential. And you see the sex differences there, 46 00:02:50,196 --> 00:02:54,80 men want looks more than women do, women want earning prospects more than men do. 47 00:02:54,80 --> 00:02:56,870 A second paradigm as you look at the effects of physical attractiveness in 48 00:02:56,870 --> 00:03:00,596 people depicted in photographs. So when you're evaluating photographs, 49 00:03:00,596 --> 00:03:03,928 men are more inspired by the attractive, relative to the unattractive women more 50 00:03:03,928 --> 00:03:07,358 than, more than women are attracted to the, attractive versus the unattractive 51 00:03:07,358 --> 00:03:10,726 men. And the best research looks at personal 52 00:03:10,726 --> 00:03:13,606 ads or online dating profiles, and specifically, what we see in those is 53 00:03:13,606 --> 00:03:16,966 that men tend to advertise things about themselves oriented toward demonstrating 54 00:03:16,966 --> 00:03:19,990 their earning prospects, women tend to accentuate things related to their 55 00:03:19,990 --> 00:03:24,890 physical attractiveness. And when men and women respond to 56 00:03:24,890 --> 00:03:28,600 personal ads or online dating profiles, they tend to be differentially influenced 57 00:03:28,600 --> 00:03:33,140 in a way that's consistent with all those other sex differences. 58 00:03:33,140 --> 00:03:36,621 But I have a question, what about after men and women have actually met a 59 00:03:36,621 --> 00:03:41,130 significant other, a another person face-to-face, right? 60 00:03:41,130 --> 00:03:43,875 Do these sex differences that hold up so well in all those paradigms we've 61 00:03:43,875 --> 00:03:46,890 discussed already, continue to hold up once you've met an actual flesh and blood 62 00:03:46,890 --> 00:03:51,108 person? Well, one empirical approach, one method 63 00:03:51,108 --> 00:03:56,20 that we can use to start unpacking that question is speed dating. 64 00:03:56,20 --> 00:03:58,596 And so, Paul Eastwick and I at Northwestern University, ran a whole 65 00:03:58,596 --> 00:04:03,0 series of speed dating events. I, in fact, served as MC of these events. 66 00:04:03,0 --> 00:04:06,850 And the way speed dating works is, is these were heterosexual events we had 12 67 00:04:06,850 --> 00:04:11,416 men and 12 women attend each event. So if you're a man, you would go on a 68 00:04:11,416 --> 00:04:15,310 4-minute date with each woman and then the MC, I in this case, would blow a 69 00:04:15,310 --> 00:04:19,960 whistle and you would rotate to the next person. 70 00:04:19,960 --> 00:04:22,480 Alright, so the way it works is that all of the men went on 4-minute dates with 71 00:04:22,480 --> 00:04:25,40 all the women, all the women, of course, went on 4-minute dates with all of the 72 00:04:25,40 --> 00:04:29,140 men. And what we were able to do with this 73 00:04:29,140 --> 00:04:32,660 method is we were able to look at the degree to which physical attractiveness 74 00:04:32,660 --> 00:04:36,345 and earning prospects actually predict romantic attraction to flesh and blood 75 00:04:36,345 --> 00:04:41,480 partners you have met in person. And one of the things we wanted to do is 76 00:04:41,480 --> 00:04:44,200 establish from the very outset that are, that there was nothing strange about our 77 00:04:44,200 --> 00:04:48,204 sample of participants. So before they attended the speed dating 78 00:04:48,204 --> 00:04:51,825 event, they reported about a week earlier on their preferences, the standard, sorts 79 00:04:51,825 --> 00:04:56,323 of measures that people regularly use. To what degree are you interested in 80 00:04:56,323 --> 00:04:59,573 somebody, to what degree is it important to you that a potential partner is 81 00:04:59,573 --> 00:05:02,573 good-looking or has good earning prospects or is highly personable and 82 00:05:02,573 --> 00:05:07,116 kind and warm? And as you can see here in the graph men 83 00:05:07,116 --> 00:05:10,234 care more than women about physical attractiveness. 84 00:05:10,234 --> 00:05:13,430 Again, this is on the, the questionnaire that our speed daters completed the week 85 00:05:13,430 --> 00:05:17,770 before they attended the lab session, the speed, the speed dating even rather. 86 00:05:17,770 --> 00:05:20,524 Women cared more about earning prospects than men do. 87 00:05:20,524 --> 00:05:23,774 And men and woman, as has been shown in previous research, care about, equally 88 00:05:23,774 --> 00:05:26,900 about how warm and kind a potential partner is. 89 00:05:26,900 --> 00:05:30,300 So here we are replicating the, the same effects that everybody else replicates, 90 00:05:30,300 --> 00:05:33,110 except we wanted to do something different. 91 00:05:33,110 --> 00:05:36,192 We wanted to take these same people, who showed these standard sex differences, 92 00:05:36,192 --> 00:05:39,136 and then introduce them to flesh and blood partners through the speed dating 93 00:05:39,136 --> 00:05:42,107 event. And here, in this graph, you're going to 94 00:05:42,107 --> 00:05:46,140 see some different information. What you see on the y-axis is you see the 95 00:05:46,140 --> 00:05:51,110 correlation of, of, of an attribute, the physical attractiveness for example, with 96 00:05:51,110 --> 00:05:55,650 attraction, right? And so the idea should be that the more 97 00:05:55,650 --> 00:05:58,550 the higher the correlation that you're going to see here, means the more 98 00:05:58,550 --> 00:06:03,451 strongly that characteristic iInspires romantic attraction to the person. 99 00:06:03,451 --> 00:06:06,551 And what you can see is, here are the effects for physical attractiveness, 100 00:06:06,551 --> 00:06:10,260 correlation is in about the 0.4 range, but no sex difference. 101 00:06:10,260 --> 00:06:14,55 The degree to which romantic physical attractiveness inspires your romantic 102 00:06:14,55 --> 00:06:18,930 attraction is equally strong regardless of whether you're a man or a woman. 103 00:06:18,930 --> 00:06:21,850 Now, let's turn to earning prospects. Here, you can see that in general, 104 00:06:21,850 --> 00:06:24,775 earning prospects are a little bit less important in this sample than than 105 00:06:24,775 --> 00:06:27,475 physical attractiveness is, the correlations are in the, you know, 0.2 106 00:06:27,475 --> 00:06:31,142 range. But, what you can see is, once again, the 107 00:06:31,142 --> 00:06:34,390 correlations are equally strong for men and women. 108 00:06:34,390 --> 00:06:37,142 None of these correlations was anywhere close to statistic, statistically 109 00:06:37,142 --> 00:06:40,50 significant. And personable is also pretty attractive, 110 00:06:40,50 --> 00:06:43,100 somewhere in between physically attractive and earning prospects, and 111 00:06:43,100 --> 00:06:46,526 once again, no sex difference. Now, you might think, I hear you 112 00:06:46,526 --> 00:06:48,910 thinking, right, so come on that's just one study. 113 00:06:48,910 --> 00:06:52,188 This is a very surprising effect. Could it really be the case that men and 114 00:06:52,188 --> 00:06:55,337 women don't actually have different preferences for physical attractiveness 115 00:06:55,337 --> 00:06:59,130 or earning prospects once they meet a flesh and blood partner? 116 00:06:59,130 --> 00:07:02,378 So what we wanted to do is we, we wanted to conduct a meta-analysis, and 117 00:07:02,378 --> 00:07:05,850 specifically, what that means Is we track down every single published and 118 00:07:05,850 --> 00:07:09,546 unpublished article that has looked at people who have met face-to-face with a 119 00:07:09,546 --> 00:07:13,130 potential partner and reported on that partner how attracted they are or how 120 00:07:13,130 --> 00:07:18,740 satisfied they are. This also includes not only initial 121 00:07:18,740 --> 00:07:21,908 attraction, but also in your marriage, how satisfied are you and committed are 122 00:07:21,908 --> 00:07:25,847 you to the marriage, etcetera. But they have to report on a specific 123 00:07:25,847 --> 00:07:29,179 person they've met face-to-face, not on some hypothetical person who might be an 124 00:07:29,179 --> 00:07:32,918 ideal partner for them. The dependent variable that I was 125 00:07:32,918 --> 00:07:36,710 suggesting earlier is, is an amalgam, a combined sort of measure, right? 126 00:07:36,710 --> 00:07:40,238 So, in an initial attraction context, it's things like romantic liking, or 127 00:07:40,238 --> 00:07:44,312 attraction, or sexual desire. In marriage, for example, you'll see 128 00:07:44,312 --> 00:07:49,574 things like relationship satisfaction or how much you love your partner, etcetera. 129 00:07:49,574 --> 00:07:53,370 And study, the other criterion we needed to include studies in this meta-analysis, 130 00:07:53,370 --> 00:07:56,802 include articles in this meta-analysis, was that it had to have some measure of 131 00:07:56,802 --> 00:08:01,0 physical attractiveness, earning prospects, or both. 132 00:08:01,0 --> 00:08:03,510 And some of these measures are the participant's report. 133 00:08:03,510 --> 00:08:06,194 So if I'm reporting how attracted I am to you or how satisfied I am in our 134 00:08:06,194 --> 00:08:09,54 marriage, then it could be my report of how good-looking you are or my report of 135 00:08:09,54 --> 00:08:12,800 your earning prospects. It could be your report, so how 136 00:08:12,800 --> 00:08:15,652 good-looking do you think you are or how good, how promising you think your 137 00:08:15,652 --> 00:08:19,524 earning prospects are or it could be an objective assessment. 138 00:08:19,524 --> 00:08:22,710 For example a consensus rating of a photograph of you in terms of how 139 00:08:22,710 --> 00:08:27,880 attractive you are or a measure of how, what your actual income is, right? 140 00:08:27,880 --> 00:08:30,970 So we, we look at all of those different types of measures. 141 00:08:30,970 --> 00:08:34,574 Now, for physical attractiveness, we were able to find 73 articles with a total of 142 00:08:34,574 --> 00:08:38,344 28,000 participants. For earning prospects, we were able to 143 00:08:38,344 --> 00:08:41,844 track down 44 articles with about 46,000 participants. 144 00:08:41,844 --> 00:08:44,616 So, these are large samples, they really put us in a good position to test, is 145 00:08:44,616 --> 00:08:47,784 there a difference between men and women and their earning prospects and can we 146 00:08:47,784 --> 00:08:51,340 detect a statistically significant difference? 147 00:08:51,340 --> 00:08:54,60 We've got a lot of ability to do that in a sample this large. 148 00:08:54,60 --> 00:08:56,902 And what you see here, again, on the left side of this graph is physical 149 00:08:56,902 --> 00:09:00,234 attractiveness, on the right side, you see earning prospects and once again, you 150 00:09:00,234 --> 00:09:05,30 see nothing close to a statistically significant difference. 151 00:09:05,30 --> 00:09:07,872 So again, the take home message, not only from the speed dating work at 152 00:09:07,872 --> 00:09:11,106 Northwestern, but from the full corpus of evidence that exists anywhere in the 153 00:09:11,106 --> 00:09:15,50 world on this topic. That physical attractiveness, big 154 00:09:15,50 --> 00:09:18,250 correlate of how attractive you are to people, big correlate of how happy you 155 00:09:18,250 --> 00:09:22,660 are in your marriage, but not differentially for men and women. 156 00:09:22,660 --> 00:09:26,116 Earning prospects, a less significant predictor of initial attraction and 157 00:09:26,116 --> 00:09:31,0 satisfaction in your marriage, but once again, not different for men and women. 158 00:09:31,0 --> 00:09:33,70 Now, this raises a different set of questions, right? 159 00:09:33,70 --> 00:09:36,727 So the first set of questions were, well, are there really sex differences in these 160 00:09:36,727 --> 00:09:40,120 things that we assume to be sex differentiated? 161 00:09:40,120 --> 00:09:42,788 And the evidence now appears to be overwhelming that there are not sex 162 00:09:42,788 --> 00:09:47,110 differences in those mate preferences once you meet a flesh and blood partner. 163 00:09:47,110 --> 00:09:49,260 Now, the question is, well, what's going on? 164 00:09:49,260 --> 00:09:52,204 If those same people who reported a week ago that they really cared a lot about 165 00:09:52,204 --> 00:09:55,194 earning prospects and they cared less about physical attractiveness, then a 166 00:09:55,194 --> 00:09:58,276 week later meet a series of people in the flesh and blood, a series of speed dating 167 00:09:58,276 --> 00:10:02,871 partners, for example. And they don't show those sorts of sex 168 00:10:02,871 --> 00:10:05,815 differences that exhibited, that they exhibited a week earlier, there's an 169 00:10:05,815 --> 00:10:08,943 interesting question that emerges from that, which is do people really know what 170 00:10:08,943 --> 00:10:13,385 they want in the first place? And this harken, harkens back, of course, 171 00:10:13,385 --> 00:10:16,630 to the online dating question, the profile browsing question. 172 00:10:16,630 --> 00:10:20,595 So, ignoring sex differences, do people who believe they value a certain 173 00:10:20,595 --> 00:10:25,360 characteristic actually prize it more than other people do? 174 00:10:25,360 --> 00:10:28,777 And so, what we wanted to look at here is the, the correspondence between what you 175 00:10:28,777 --> 00:10:31,786 said you cared about in a romantic partner, a week ago, and the degree to 176 00:10:31,786 --> 00:10:35,50 which that characteristic actually inspires your attraction once you meet 177 00:10:35,50 --> 00:10:39,433 face-to-face. And, if you look here in the, in this 178 00:10:39,433 --> 00:10:42,835 first graph on the upper left, what you see is how physically attractive the 179 00:10:42,835 --> 00:10:48,480 partner is that you're rating. And this black line represents people 180 00:10:48,480 --> 00:10:52,8 who, who said that physical attractiveness was extremely important to 181 00:10:52,8 --> 00:10:54,660 them. So, you can imagine, people vary in the 182 00:10:54,660 --> 00:10:57,140 degree to which they say physical attractiveness is important, these are 183 00:10:57,140 --> 00:11:00,90 people who said, yes, it's extremely important to me. 184 00:11:00,90 --> 00:11:03,290 And not surprisingly, you see a strong positive correlation such that as the 185 00:11:03,290 --> 00:11:06,490 person you're rating goes from low attractiveness to high attractiveness, 186 00:11:06,490 --> 00:11:10,220 there on the x-axis. The amount of romantic attraction you 187 00:11:10,220 --> 00:11:12,890 experienced for the person goes up sharply. 188 00:11:12,890 --> 00:11:15,800 Now, this is crucial. If it's the case that people who say, I'm 189 00:11:15,800 --> 00:11:19,550 actually not that interested in romantic attraction, it doesn't actually matter 190 00:11:19,550 --> 00:11:22,950 I'm sorry, in physical attractiveness, that is, it doesn't actually matter that 191 00:11:22,950 --> 00:11:28,649 much to me, then you should be, see a weaker slope, maybe something like this. 192 00:11:28,649 --> 00:11:31,798 And what that slope would suggest, given that it's, that it's not parallel to the 193 00:11:31,798 --> 00:11:34,473 black slope. What you see here is, yes, of course, 194 00:11:34,473 --> 00:11:37,463 it's nice to be with somebody better looking than somebody worse looking, but 195 00:11:37,463 --> 00:11:40,545 the level of attraction is less strong of a predictor among people who say I don't 196 00:11:40,545 --> 00:11:45,968 care about physical attractiveness. But that's not what the data show. 197 00:11:45,968 --> 00:11:50,70 This is what the data show, an exactly parallel line. 198 00:11:50,70 --> 00:11:53,172 What that means is regardless of what you told us a week ago of the extent to which 199 00:11:53,172 --> 00:11:57,440 physical attractiveness is important to you in a mate. 200 00:11:57,440 --> 00:12:00,36 The degree to which you like the attractive people more than, more than 201 00:12:00,36 --> 00:12:03,762 the unattractive was the same. Everybody was about equally inspired by 202 00:12:03,762 --> 00:12:07,313 the, by the degree to which the person was attractive and their previous reports 203 00:12:07,313 --> 00:12:10,599 of how much they thought physical attractiveness would matter to them was 204 00:12:10,599 --> 00:12:14,340 irrelevant. How about earning prospects? 205 00:12:14,340 --> 00:12:18,81 Over here on the upper right, you can see that graph, and what do you see? 206 00:12:18,81 --> 00:12:20,388 Two parallel lines. People who say they care a lot about 207 00:12:20,388 --> 00:12:23,470 earning prospects, people who say they don't care much about earning prospects 208 00:12:23,470 --> 00:12:26,414 end up being equally inspired by the people with high relative to low earning 209 00:12:26,414 --> 00:12:29,906 prospects. Over here on the lower left, now we have 210 00:12:29,906 --> 00:12:33,410 personable, how warm and kind and friendly is the person? 211 00:12:33,410 --> 00:12:37,363 Once again, two parallel lines regardless of how personable you said you wanted 212 00:12:37,363 --> 00:12:40,962 your, how, how important it was for you that romantic partners are high in 213 00:12:40,962 --> 00:12:45,151 personability, was irrelevant to how much high versus low personable people matter 214 00:12:45,151 --> 00:12:48,77 to you. Now, is this a statistical artifact, or a 215 00:12:48,77 --> 00:12:51,933 statistical confound in our design? Is it the case maybe that people don't 216 00:12:51,933 --> 00:12:58,80 actually have any preferences for anything? 217 00:12:58,80 --> 00:13:01,986 Well, we want to suggest that the story is very complicated for mating, for a 218 00:13:01,986 --> 00:13:07,459 variety of reasons, one of which is, mates vary on a lot of dimensions. 219 00:13:07,459 --> 00:13:10,550 People are very complicated, much more complicated than say, a sofa. 220 00:13:10,550 --> 00:13:14,88 But also, the mate has to like you back and these things all factor into the 221 00:13:14,88 --> 00:13:17,130 evaluation. So we did a final little quirky study 222 00:13:17,130 --> 00:13:20,298 where, where what we wanted to do was see whether we could find evidence for this 223 00:13:20,298 --> 00:13:23,562 predictive validity hypothesis, for this hypothesis that, when you say you care 224 00:13:23,562 --> 00:13:26,490 about something, you actually are inspired by that thing and we looked at 225 00:13:26,490 --> 00:13:30,929 cereals. Specifically, we looked at the sugar 226 00:13:30,929 --> 00:13:34,164 content of cereals. People vary in the degree to which they 227 00:13:34,164 --> 00:13:39,300 say they're looking for sugar, they like sugary versus non-sugary cereals. 228 00:13:39,300 --> 00:13:42,600 And then what we did is we had them sample a range of different cereals and 229 00:13:42,600 --> 00:13:46,285 their report of those, of how much they like those cereals was quite different as 230 00:13:46,285 --> 00:13:51,420 a function of whether they really value sugary cereals or not. 231 00:13:51,420 --> 00:13:54,837 And specifically, the story is this, when people say they strongly value sugary 232 00:13:54,837 --> 00:13:59,90 cereals, the more sugar content in the cereal, the more they like it. 233 00:13:59,90 --> 00:14:01,508 If they say that they don't care that much about how much sugar is in cereal, 234 00:14:01,508 --> 00:14:04,820 then sugar content is irrelevant to how much they like the cereal. 235 00:14:04,820 --> 00:14:07,748 That is a totally self-evident silly point, but contrast the slide on the 236 00:14:07,748 --> 00:14:10,820 lower right to the other three slides, and you can see that there's something 237 00:14:10,820 --> 00:14:14,944 about the mating domain. We seem not to have insight into what it 238 00:14:14,944 --> 00:14:19,10 is that we like in the mating domain. What will inspire our attraction? 239 00:14:19,10 --> 00:14:22,159 Even though we a good sense of that in a simpler domain like cereal. 240 00:14:23,250 --> 00:14:26,288 These are college students at Northwestern, maybe upper social economic 241 00:14:26,288 --> 00:14:29,30 status on average. What about middle-aged people? 242 00:14:29,30 --> 00:14:31,567 And what about people who aren't reporting on initial attraction, but 243 00:14:31,567 --> 00:14:35,490 people who are actually involved in an established romantic relationship, right? 244 00:14:35,490 --> 00:14:38,416 Would you see the same sorts of patterns? Maybe, maybe our ideal preferences start, 245 00:14:38,416 --> 00:14:41,452 for a certain trait, start to be much more important once we're making marriage 246 00:14:41,452 --> 00:14:45,705 decisions for example. So here, we're looking at the distinction 247 00:14:45,705 --> 00:14:48,414 between, at the correspondence between what you say is important to you and 248 00:14:48,414 --> 00:14:51,540 what's actually important in a much older sample. 249 00:14:51,540 --> 00:14:55,552 Specifically, 500 participants and the average age of these participants was 41 250 00:14:55,552 --> 00:14:58,236 years old. The procedure was simple, people 251 00:14:58,236 --> 00:15:02,330 completed an online questionnaire, they were all romantically unattached. 252 00:15:02,330 --> 00:15:05,36 they were single at the time they reported on that they first started the 253 00:15:05,36 --> 00:15:07,760 study, and they reported their mate preferences. 254 00:15:07,760 --> 00:15:10,595 So, on a scale from 1 to 9, how much do you value earning prospects, how much do 255 00:15:10,595 --> 00:15:14,285 you value good looks, etcetera. And then, we let 2 and a half years pass 256 00:15:14,285 --> 00:15:17,164 and we followed up with the same 500 people again. 257 00:15:17,164 --> 00:15:19,804 And they reported on either a current partner, if they were involved in a 258 00:15:19,804 --> 00:15:22,752 relationship at this point, which many of them were or they reported on a desired 259 00:15:22,752 --> 00:15:25,744 partner, the person that they were most interested in, if they weren't currently 260 00:15:25,744 --> 00:15:31,275 involved with somebody. And then we accessed romantic interest. 261 00:15:31,275 --> 00:15:34,741 So how romantically attracted are you? How satisfied are you with this person, 262 00:15:34,741 --> 00:15:36,980 etcetera? Marriage intentions, to what degree would 263 00:15:36,980 --> 00:15:39,687 you like to marry this person? And marital status, because some of our 264 00:15:39,687 --> 00:15:43,270 people who were single when the study started were now engaged or married. 265 00:15:43,270 --> 00:15:45,830 And it turns out as you can see in this graph, which I won't, I won't present all 266 00:15:45,830 --> 00:15:48,600 the graphs, but this is illustrative, illustrative. 267 00:15:48,600 --> 00:15:51,760 So on the dimension of warmth, how much do you care about warmth? 268 00:15:51,760 --> 00:15:54,973 Turns out that people who say they care a great deal about warmth are equally 269 00:15:54,973 --> 00:15:58,186 inspired by how warm their current partner is than people who say they don't 270 00:15:58,186 --> 00:16:02,480 care that much about warmth. And here again, you have two exactly 271 00:16:02,480 --> 00:16:05,235 parallel lines just like I kept showing you repeatedly. 272 00:16:05,235 --> 00:16:08,511 Now, I won't show you all 21 of the, of the graphs, but they all basically look 273 00:16:08,511 --> 00:16:11,787 like this and not one of them showed different lines as a function of whether 274 00:16:11,787 --> 00:16:15,219 you strongly cared about the trade in question versus said you didn't care that 275 00:16:15,219 --> 00:16:21,490 much about the, the trade in question. So, let's revisit the two questions, are 276 00:16:21,490 --> 00:16:25,900 there in fact these sex differences that we all believe to be true? 277 00:16:25,900 --> 00:16:29,682 Is it true that men prefer physical attractiveness in a partner more then 278 00:16:29,682 --> 00:16:34,970 women do, that women prefer earning prospects in man more then men do? 279 00:16:34,970 --> 00:16:38,444 No, that is, yes, we have these theories that we care about those things. 280 00:16:38,444 --> 00:16:41,889 Those theories that we care about those things influence how we behave when it 281 00:16:41,889 --> 00:16:46,325 comes to online dating or personal ads. But once we have met somebody in the 282 00:16:46,325 --> 00:16:49,955 flesh and blood, there is no longer any sex difference in the degree to which and 283 00:16:49,955 --> 00:16:54,919 women care about earning prospects and physical attractiveness. 284 00:16:54,919 --> 00:16:59,780 Now, the second question is, do we really know what our romantic preferences are? 285 00:16:59,780 --> 00:17:03,66 That is, can we introspect, do we have self-insight and know what it is that 286 00:17:03,66 --> 00:17:07,584 really makes us attracted to people? And here, again, there appears to be no 287 00:17:07,584 --> 00:17:10,653 evidence that we do. across study after study after study and 288 00:17:10,653 --> 00:17:13,802 analysis after analysis after analysis, when we look at people who said, I care a 289 00:17:13,802 --> 00:17:17,92 great deal about this characteristic, and compared them to people who said, I don't 290 00:17:17,92 --> 00:17:21,263 really care that much about that characteristic. 291 00:17:21,263 --> 00:17:24,318 They were in fact equally inspired, equally attracted to people as a function 292 00:17:24,318 --> 00:17:27,608 of how much they had the characteristic in question, like physical attractiveness 293 00:17:27,608 --> 00:17:32,350 or warmth for example. And finally, I want to call, I want to 294 00:17:32,350 --> 00:17:36,310 come back to the way dating works in the modern era and ask, is it really sensible 295 00:17:36,310 --> 00:17:39,490 for us to decide or learn who is compatible with us on the basis of 296 00:17:39,490 --> 00:17:45,130 browsing people's profiles? And I want to suggest to you that the 297 00:17:45,130 --> 00:17:48,826 answer is, no, that browsing profiles or 20 seconds versus 20 minutes versus 20 298 00:17:48,826 --> 00:17:52,522 hours is not going to give you different insight into who's compatible with you 299 00:17:52,522 --> 00:17:56,106 and online dating is a very useful tool as a way to broaden the amount of people 300 00:17:56,106 --> 00:18:01,706 in your dating pool. But before you start ruling people out on 301 00:18:01,706 --> 00:18:04,698 the basis of their profile, remember, you might not know your preferences as much 302 00:18:04,698 --> 00:18:07,426 as you thought you did and you might be spending a whole lot of time browsing 303 00:18:07,426 --> 00:18:12,100 profiles that actually won't be informative to your mating life. 304 00:18:12,100 --> 00:18:17,950 What I encourage you to do is, sure, use online dating, use speed dating, and so 305 00:18:17,950 --> 00:18:24,800 forth, but get offline quickly for a quick chemistry check. 306 00:18:24,800 --> 00:18:31,513 That's the way you're going to learn whether there's romantic chemistry here.