Hosts
Derek Thompson
Derek ThompsonAbout the episode
Psychology is hard, even when you’re just trying to understand what’s going on with one impossibly complex person. Romance psychology is particularly hard because you’re trying to understand what’s going on between two impossibly complex people. Eli Finkel is a professor of psychology at Northwestern University. Paul Eastwick is a professor at the University of California, Davis. Both are experts on the psychology of attraction, dating, and romance and hosts of the Love Factually podcast. Today, Derek asks: Does anybody actually have “a type”? Are we any good at predicting the sort of people we’ll fall in love with? Has online dating caused people to over-filter for attraction, even though initial attraction doesn’t determine long-term compatibility? How do modern, affluent folks’ incredibly high expectations of marriage affect satisfaction in long-term relationships?
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Summary
In the following excerpt, Derek talks to Paul Eastwick and Eli Finkel about their methods for studying the psychology of love.
Derek Thompson: I’m going to let you guys in on a little podcasting secret of mine, which is that whenever I identify any story that has a beginning, middle, and end, I always try to tell that story chronologically. And relationships have a natural arc. People have ideas about what they want from a relationship. Then they meet, then they start dating, then maybe they break up, then maybe comes marriage. And so we’re going to go through your work and this field of romance psychology in precisely that linear order, from meet-cute to matrimony. Does that sound OK?
Paul Eastwick: Yeah, sounds great.
Thompson: Excellent. First, in the spirit of romance, I am going to utter the sexiest five words in the English language: Can we talk methodology, fellas?
Eastwick: You got us.
Thompson: We had a show a few months ago with a social psychologist, Adam Mastroianni, about why psychology is such a difficult subject, and he made a couple points that I really want to carry over to this interview. The first was that psychology is really damn hard. You are dealing with subjects, that is to say, human beings, who lie constantly and, most importantly, lie to themselves. We don’t know what we want. We are exquisitely sensitive to our environment. You do one study in the lab, Paul, and it might not replicate in some low-income area, or you do some study, Eli, and it doesn’t replicate in Japan. So I want to start here. Paul, what makes the psychology of romance so hard?
Eastwick: There’s a couple of things. One thing is that now we’re talking about two minds rather than one, perceiving each other. Sometimes even more than that, if now we’re trying to figure out, “why is she going out with him, but not with me?” Now we’ve got three minds in the picture that we’re trying to disentangle. And now, add on top of that, we’ve got timelines to worry about. We’ve got, how do these things evolve and change over long periods of time? There are some branches of psychology that also have to deal with that first thing, and there are some branches of psychology that also have to deal with that second thing. But as relationship researchers, we are in the unique position of getting to deal with both of those challenges, always at the same time. It’s very exciting, but it can make for some tricky business when you’re trying to figure out how to conduct these studies.
Thompson: Eli, what is it exactly that makes these dynamics hard to study? The fact that there’s always a dyad, I suppose that’s the nerdy term for this.
Eli Finkel: Yes.
Thompson: We’re talking about ideas and feelings happening between two people rather than between two ears. And we’re also talking about things that evolve over time. So you’re not just studying someone’s opinion about, say, marketing in one moment. You’re studying people’s opinions within a dynamic relationship, [opinions] that are evolving over time. Just take me a little bit inside the lab here. How do you try to meet the challenges of more people and more hours in relationship psychology?
Finkel: Most fun question ever, for me. So think about this: If I wanted to know whether you are happy, I might study that in a bunch of different ways. I might look at how often you smile. I might look at your self-reports of how happy you are. There’s a bunch of things I could do. Now, let’s imagine that instead of wanting to find out whether you are happy, I want to find out whether you are attracted to Jenny. There’s actually three different questions embedded in there without us really noticing it. One is, to what degree do you tend to be attracted to people, let’s say, attracted to the women you meet, for example, right? To what degree do the people who meet Jenny tend to be attracted to her? And there’s a third question, which is, above and beyond your tendency to dig people and her tendency to be dug by the people she meets, is there something special about the two of you?
And then, yes, then you have the standard sorts of complexities we have everywhere else, which is, yes, but what about when it’s too hot outside? Or what about when you’re in Bangladesh rather than New York? But what’s fun is, how do you go about studying those things? So one of the things that Paul and I have done a lot of is we’ve studied these things by conducting our own speed-dating events. So we introduce you not just to one person that you might like, but in the events where men dated women, we also had some same-sex events, but in the events where men dated women, you would go out with 12 different women and 12 different women would go out with you.
And what’s cool about this, that you just can’t do if you’re interviewing individuals, is you can tell to what degree is Derek lusty for the ladies. To what degree did he like everybody he met versus nobody he met? And to what degree did the women of the event like you a lot? And then to what degree was there something special about the two of you? And those are the sorts of complicated methods to do these sorts of speed-dating things that you don’t have to do if you’re studying simpler sorts of social phenomena or psychological phenomena.
This excerpt has been edited and condensed.
Host: Derek Thompson
Guests: Eli Finkel and Paul Eastwick
Producer: Devon Baroldi