My name is Eli Finkel, I'm a professor of psychology at Northwestern University.
And I'll be presenting some research that has been spearheaded by Paul Eastwick, a
former graduate student of mine who is now a professor at Texas, at University
of Texas. And the title of the talk is the delusion
of romantic self-insight. And I want to talk about how dating has
changed in the Internet era, and in particular, I want to talk about online
dating. One of the major assumptions of online
dating is that we can look at profiles of potential romantic partners and discern
from reading those profiles who is romantically compatible with us.
So, if that's true, that we have insight into our preferences, and can tell who's
compatible with us, then this is an outstanding way that we could go about
selecting our romantic partner or at least reducing the size of the pool.
But if it's not true that we have insight into our romantic preferences, then not
only are we wasting a great deal of time by browsing all these profiles, but we
are also limiting or ruling out people from the dating pool who might be
especially compatible with us. And so, what I'll do today is talk about
the degree to which we have accurate insight into our romantic preferences and
this question boils down to two distinct questions.
The, the first one is, are there sex differences in what people are looking
for in a potential romantic partner? And, and the short answer to that is of
course there are. Men are especially interested in looks,
much more then women are. Women are especially interested in
earning prospects, more then men are. Those are widely replicated sex
differences. I want to probe a little deeper and find
out whether those sex differences hold up when it really matters.
And the second question I have doesn't involve sex differences.
It says, we as individuals, to what degree do we have accurate insight into
what it is that tends to inspire our romantic attraction?
If we do have good insight, then browsing profiles is a great way to go about
finding a partner. If we don't, then we really should
probably meet face-to-face to get a chemistry check of who's compatible with
us. Let's start by talking about sex
differences. There are large sex differences in stated
preferences, that is, if you ask people to what degree do you value a certain
series of characteristics, many things men and women agree on, we all like warm
partners kind partners, etcetera. But there are two massive sex differences
that I mentioned earlier. The first is physical attractiveness, men
like that more than women, the second is earning prospects, women like that more
than men. But, before we conclude that these sex
differences are totally universal, let's first examine a little bit about the
research paradigms that people have used to try to establish those effects.
One of the major research programs or research paradigms is to ask people about
hypothetical partners. Specifically, ask them to what degree are
you looking for somebody who posses characteristics like good earning
prospects or a good earning potential. And you see the sex differences there,
men want looks more than women do, women want earning prospects more than men do.
A second paradigm as you look at the effects of physical attractiveness in
people depicted in photographs. So when you're evaluating photographs,
men are more inspired by the attractive, relative to the unattractive women more
than, more than women are attracted to the, attractive versus the unattractive
men. And the best research looks at personal
ads or online dating profiles, and specifically, what we see in those is
that men tend to advertise things about themselves oriented toward demonstrating
their earning prospects, women tend to accentuate things related to their
physical attractiveness. And when men and women respond to
personal ads or online dating profiles, they tend to be differentially influenced
in a way that's consistent with all those other sex differences.
But I have a question, what about after men and women have actually met a
significant other, a another person face-to-face, right?
Do these sex differences that hold up so well in all those paradigms we've
discussed already, continue to hold up once you've met an actual flesh and blood
person? Well, one empirical approach, one method
that we can use to start unpacking that question is speed dating.
And so, Paul Eastwick and I at Northwestern University, ran a whole
series of speed dating events. I, in fact, served as MC of these events.
And the way speed dating works is, is these were heterosexual events we had 12
men and 12 women attend each event. So if you're a man, you would go on a
4-minute date with each woman and then the MC, I in this case, would blow a
whistle and you would rotate to the next person.
Alright, so the way it works is that all of the men went on 4-minute dates with
all the women, all the women, of course, went on 4-minute dates with all of the
men. And what we were able to do with this
method is we were able to look at the degree to which physical attractiveness
and earning prospects actually predict romantic attraction to flesh and blood
partners you have met in person. And one of the things we wanted to do is
establish from the very outset that are, that there was nothing strange about our
sample of participants. So before they attended the speed dating
event, they reported about a week earlier on their preferences, the standard, sorts
of measures that people regularly use. To what degree are you interested in
somebody, to what degree is it important to you that a potential partner is
good-looking or has good earning prospects or is highly personable and
kind and warm? And as you can see here in the graph men
care more than women about physical attractiveness.
Again, this is on the, the questionnaire that our speed daters completed the week
before they attended the lab session, the speed, the speed dating even rather.
Women cared more about earning prospects than men do.
And men and woman, as has been shown in previous research, care about, equally
about how warm and kind a potential partner is.
So here we are replicating the, the same effects that everybody else replicates,
except we wanted to do something different.
We wanted to take these same people, who showed these standard sex differences,
and then introduce them to flesh and blood partners through the speed dating
event. And here, in this graph, you're going to
see some different information. What you see on the y-axis is you see the
correlation of, of, of an attribute, the physical attractiveness for example, with
attraction, right? And so the idea should be that the more
the higher the correlation that you're going to see here, means the more
strongly that characteristic iInspires romantic attraction to the person.
And what you can see is, here are the effects for physical attractiveness,
correlation is in about the 0.4 range, but no sex difference.
The degree to which romantic physical attractiveness inspires your romantic
attraction is equally strong regardless of whether you're a man or a woman.
Now, let's turn to earning prospects. Here, you can see that in general,
earning prospects are a little bit less important in this sample than than
physical attractiveness is, the correlations are in the, you know, 0.2
range. But, what you can see is, once again, the
correlations are equally strong for men and women.
None of these correlations was anywhere close to statistic, statistically
significant. And personable is also pretty attractive,
somewhere in between physically attractive and earning prospects, and
once again, no sex difference. Now, you might think, I hear you
thinking, right, so come on that's just one study.
This is a very surprising effect. Could it really be the case that men and
women don't actually have different preferences for physical attractiveness
or earning prospects once they meet a flesh and blood partner?
So what we wanted to do is we, we wanted to conduct a meta-analysis, and
specifically, what that means Is we track down every single published and
unpublished article that has looked at people who have met face-to-face with a
potential partner and reported on that partner how attracted they are or how
satisfied they are. This also includes not only initial
attraction, but also in your marriage, how satisfied are you and committed are
you to the marriage, etcetera. But they have to report on a specific
person they've met face-to-face, not on some hypothetical person who might be an
ideal partner for them. The dependent variable that I was
suggesting earlier is, is an amalgam, a combined sort of measure, right?
So, in an initial attraction context, it's things like romantic liking, or
attraction, or sexual desire. In marriage, for example, you'll see
things like relationship satisfaction or how much you love your partner, etcetera.
And study, the other criterion we needed to include studies in this meta-analysis,
include articles in this meta-analysis, was that it had to have some measure of
physical attractiveness, earning prospects, or both.
And some of these measures are the participant's report.
So if I'm reporting how attracted I am to you or how satisfied I am in our
marriage, then it could be my report of how good-looking you are or my report of
your earning prospects. It could be your report, so how
good-looking do you think you are or how good, how promising you think your
earning prospects are or it could be an objective assessment.
For example a consensus rating of a photograph of you in terms of how
attractive you are or a measure of how, what your actual income is, right?
So we, we look at all of those different types of measures.
Now, for physical attractiveness, we were able to find 73 articles with a total of
28,000 participants. For earning prospects, we were able to
track down 44 articles with about 46,000 participants.
So, these are large samples, they really put us in a good position to test, is
there a difference between men and women and their earning prospects and can we
detect a statistically significant difference?
We've got a lot of ability to do that in a sample this large.
And what you see here, again, on the left side of this graph is physical
attractiveness, on the right side, you see earning prospects and once again, you
see nothing close to a statistically significant difference.
So again, the take home message, not only from the speed dating work at
Northwestern, but from the full corpus of evidence that exists anywhere in the
world on this topic. That physical attractiveness, big
correlate of how attractive you are to people, big correlate of how happy you
are in your marriage, but not differentially for men and women.
Earning prospects, a less significant predictor of initial attraction and
satisfaction in your marriage, but once again, not different for men and women.
Now, this raises a different set of questions, right?
So the first set of questions were, well, are there really sex differences in these
things that we assume to be sex differentiated?
And the evidence now appears to be overwhelming that there are not sex
differences in those mate preferences once you meet a flesh and blood partner.
Now, the question is, well, what's going on?
If those same people who reported a week ago that they really cared a lot about
earning prospects and they cared less about physical attractiveness, then a
week later meet a series of people in the flesh and blood, a series of speed dating
partners, for example. And they don't show those sorts of sex
differences that exhibited, that they exhibited a week earlier, there's an
interesting question that emerges from that, which is do people really know what
they want in the first place? And this harken, harkens back, of course,
to the online dating question, the profile browsing question.
So, ignoring sex differences, do people who believe they value a certain
characteristic actually prize it more than other people do?
And so, what we wanted to look at here is the, the correspondence between what you
said you cared about in a romantic partner, a week ago, and the degree to
which that characteristic actually inspires your attraction once you meet
face-to-face. And, if you look here in the, in this
first graph on the upper left, what you see is how physically attractive the
partner is that you're rating. And this black line represents people
who, who said that physical attractiveness was extremely important to
them. So, you can imagine, people vary in the
degree to which they say physical attractiveness is important, these are
people who said, yes, it's extremely important to me.
And not surprisingly, you see a strong positive correlation such that as the
person you're rating goes from low attractiveness to high attractiveness,
there on the x-axis. The amount of romantic attraction you
experienced for the person goes up sharply.
Now, this is crucial. If it's the case that people who say, I'm
actually not that interested in romantic attraction, it doesn't actually matter
I'm sorry, in physical attractiveness, that is, it doesn't actually matter that
much to me, then you should be, see a weaker slope, maybe something like this.
And what that slope would suggest, given that it's, that it's not parallel to the
black slope. What you see here is, yes, of course,
it's nice to be with somebody better looking than somebody worse looking, but
the level of attraction is less strong of a predictor among people who say I don't
care about physical attractiveness. But that's not what the data show.
This is what the data show, an exactly parallel line.
What that means is regardless of what you told us a week ago of the extent to which
physical attractiveness is important to you in a mate.
The degree to which you like the attractive people more than, more than
the unattractive was the same. Everybody was about equally inspired by
the, by the degree to which the person was attractive and their previous reports
of how much they thought physical attractiveness would matter to them was
irrelevant. How about earning prospects?
Over here on the upper right, you can see that graph, and what do you see?
Two parallel lines. People who say they care a lot about
earning prospects, people who say they don't care much about earning prospects
end up being equally inspired by the people with high relative to low earning
prospects. Over here on the lower left, now we have
personable, how warm and kind and friendly is the person?
Once again, two parallel lines regardless of how personable you said you wanted
your, how, how important it was for you that romantic partners are high in
personability, was irrelevant to how much high versus low personable people matter
to you. Now, is this a statistical artifact, or a
statistical confound in our design? Is it the case maybe that people don't
actually have any preferences for anything?
Well, we want to suggest that the story is very complicated for mating, for a
variety of reasons, one of which is, mates vary on a lot of dimensions.
People are very complicated, much more complicated than say, a sofa.
But also, the mate has to like you back and these things all factor into the
evaluation. So we did a final little quirky study
where, where what we wanted to do was see whether we could find evidence for this
predictive validity hypothesis, for this hypothesis that, when you say you care
about something, you actually are inspired by that thing and we looked at
cereals. Specifically, we looked at the sugar
content of cereals. People vary in the degree to which they
say they're looking for sugar, they like sugary versus non-sugary cereals.
And then what we did is we had them sample a range of different cereals and
their report of those, of how much they like those cereals was quite different as
a function of whether they really value sugary cereals or not.
And specifically, the story is this, when people say they strongly value sugary
cereals, the more sugar content in the cereal, the more they like it.
If they say that they don't care that much about how much sugar is in cereal,
then sugar content is irrelevant to how much they like the cereal.
That is a totally self-evident silly point, but contrast the slide on the
lower right to the other three slides, and you can see that there's something
about the mating domain. We seem not to have insight into what it
is that we like in the mating domain. What will inspire our attraction?
Even though we a good sense of that in a simpler domain like cereal.
These are college students at Northwestern, maybe upper social economic
status on average. What about middle-aged people?
And what about people who aren't reporting on initial attraction, but
people who are actually involved in an established romantic relationship, right?
Would you see the same sorts of patterns? Maybe, maybe our ideal preferences start,
for a certain trait, start to be much more important once we're making marriage
decisions for example. So here, we're looking at the distinction
between, at the correspondence between what you say is important to you and
what's actually important in a much older sample.
Specifically, 500 participants and the average age of these participants was 41
years old. The procedure was simple, people
completed an online questionnaire, they were all romantically unattached.
they were single at the time they reported on that they first started the
study, and they reported their mate preferences.
So, on a scale from 1 to 9, how much do you value earning prospects, how much do
you value good looks, etcetera. And then, we let 2 and a half years pass
and we followed up with the same 500 people again.
And they reported on either a current partner, if they were involved in a
relationship at this point, which many of them were or they reported on a desired
partner, the person that they were most interested in, if they weren't currently
involved with somebody. And then we accessed romantic interest.
So how romantically attracted are you? How satisfied are you with this person,
etcetera? Marriage intentions, to what degree would
you like to marry this person? And marital status, because some of our
people who were single when the study started were now engaged or married.
And it turns out as you can see in this graph, which I won't, I won't present all
the graphs, but this is illustrative, illustrative.
So on the dimension of warmth, how much do you care about warmth?
Turns out that people who say they care a great deal about warmth are equally
inspired by how warm their current partner is than people who say they don't
care that much about warmth. And here again, you have two exactly
parallel lines just like I kept showing you repeatedly.
Now, I won't show you all 21 of the, of the graphs, but they all basically look
like this and not one of them showed different lines as a function of whether
you strongly cared about the trade in question versus said you didn't care that
much about the, the trade in question. So, let's revisit the two questions, are
there in fact these sex differences that we all believe to be true?
Is it true that men prefer physical attractiveness in a partner more then
women do, that women prefer earning prospects in man more then men do?
No, that is, yes, we have these theories that we care about those things.
Those theories that we care about those things influence how we behave when it
comes to online dating or personal ads. But once we have met somebody in the
flesh and blood, there is no longer any sex difference in the degree to which and
women care about earning prospects and physical attractiveness.
Now, the second question is, do we really know what our romantic preferences are?
That is, can we introspect, do we have self-insight and know what it is that
really makes us attracted to people? And here, again, there appears to be no
evidence that we do. across study after study after study and
analysis after analysis after analysis, when we look at people who said, I care a
great deal about this characteristic, and compared them to people who said, I don't
really care that much about that characteristic.
They were in fact equally inspired, equally attracted to people as a function
of how much they had the characteristic in question, like physical attractiveness
or warmth for example. And finally, I want to call, I want to
come back to the way dating works in the modern era and ask, is it really sensible
for us to decide or learn who is compatible with us on the basis of
browsing people's profiles? And I want to suggest to you that the
answer is, no, that browsing profiles or 20 seconds versus 20 minutes versus 20
hours is not going to give you different insight into who's compatible with you
and online dating is a very useful tool as a way to broaden the amount of people
in your dating pool. But before you start ruling people out on
the basis of their profile, remember, you might not know your preferences as much
as you thought you did and you might be spending a whole lot of time browsing
profiles that actually won't be informative to your mating life.
What I encourage you to do is, sure, use online dating, use speed dating, and so
forth, but get offline quickly for a quick chemistry check.
That's the way you're going to learn whether there's romantic chemistry here.