Did Evolutionary Psychology Get Dating All Wrong? - Dr Paul Eastwick - #1056

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
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We were talking before we got started. Many of the past guests that have been on my show and much of my education, I think, into the world of mating dynamics, understanding relationship science has been informed by an evolutionary perspective. I think it's fair to say that your new book takes somewhat of an opposing perspective to much of the evolutionary psychology position. Is that a fair assessment?

**Paul Eastwick** (0:55)
I think that's fair. I am not using the standard, like this is not a standard nature nurture thing. That's not where I'm coming from. I'm coming from a place of actually, there's a different way of talking about human nature, a different way of talking about the way that humans evolve to form relationships, that I think is missing out there and that's more or less why I wrote the book.

**Chris Williamson** (1:19)
What's your background? Because most people, when we talk about relationship science in the modern world, are going to be coming out of some kind of EP mating research lab. What are you?

**Paul Eastwick** (1:30)
Yeah. So I would say I'm a scholar of close relationships. There's a whole field, we call ourselves relationship science. We're largely in the social and personality psychological tradition, but there are threads that connect to things like clinical psychology, family studies, things like that. So we are informed by an evolutionary perspective too. It's just a different one. So for example, we talk about attachment perspectives a lot, and attachment has very deep evolutionary roots, going back to Bowlby and so forth. But it's just a little different from the standard evolutionary psychological perspective.

**Chris Williamson** (2:12)
That's interesting. Okay. So what is your problem with the classic Evo script as you see it?

**Paul Eastwick** (2:23)
Yeah. I think it overestimates a few things. It exaggerates some features of human mating. It's only in a few cases where I'm like, oh, it's totally off the mark. But I think there's a big emphasis on things like mate value, the idea that some people are more desirable than others. There's an emphasis on gender differences, like men and women are really, really different in the mating realm. I also think there's this emphasis on the short-term versus long-term mating distinction and some people are good at one or the other.
I think these ideas, we've got a lot of misconceptions to put it mildly about those three things. I think once we pick those things apart, we can put the pieces back together in a way that fits what I'd call the relationship science view, which is more about attachment, compatibility, and forming relationships through small networks.

**Chris Williamson** (3:25)
Okay. Yeah. I think a lot of conversations that I would have would be about short-term versus long-term.

**Paul Eastwick** (3:31)
Yeah.

**Chris Williamson** (3:31)
A lot would be related to sex differences, preferences. I think the world of EP a lot of the time is talking about this sex differences especially in terms of preferences for life, not just preferences in another partner. Yeah. I think that's fair. I guess right up top, the words mating market, probably one of the most ubiquitously used in all of the world of evolutionary psychology mating research.

**Paul Eastwick** (3:58)
Exactly right.

**Chris Williamson** (4:00)
What is your problem with the term mating market?

**Paul Eastwick** (4:04)
I think the mating market, it's a way of thinking about how humans form relationships, like it's a competition, right? And the competition follows from the idea that some people are really desirable, they've got lots of attributes that will make them very popular and they'll be great partners if you can get in a relationship with them.
I think this idea, it is true to some extent, but I think it's true in a more limited way than we realize. And specifically, I think it describes initial attraction markets among strangers pretty well. So that's a context where we can think about mating markets, like you're meeting people at a bar, you're going to a party and meeting people for the first time. And in those contexts, people are going to agree about who the other desirable people are, and it's going to feel competitive. It's going to feel like the tens get all the attention and the twos just kind of hang out over in the corner. But what we find through a lot of our research is that that period of time, that segment of what it's like to form a relationship is actually kind of short lived, especially if people are getting to know other people in groups over time. It's like become a little bit of a lost art. But when we conduct studies like that, we find that even though people tend to agree pretty strongly, who are the tens and who are the twos when they're first meeting, that tendency to agree actually fades over time, and that has really big implications for whether meeting feels competitive, whether it feels like a market.