Evolution's Secrets To Understanding Relationships - Dr Andrew Thomas - #601

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hello, friends. Welcome back to the show. My guest today is Dr. Andrew Thomas. He's a senior lecturer of psychology at Swansea University whose research focuses on sex differences and relationship preferences from an evolutionary perspective. Evolution explains a large portion of why we like the things we like, who we're attracted to, why we fall into and out of love, how our mental state affects our mating strategies. Therefore, if you are a human who ever intends on being in a relationship, this might be useful. Expect to learn the five evolutionary theories which explain much of human mating. Whether ChatGPT can correctly predict what traits men and women like most in each other, how many previous sexual partners people say they want in their current partner, how many men and women in the West are open to polyamorous relationships, how sexual arousal can ruin a faithful relationship, and much more. Some really cool cutting-edge evolutionary psychology stuff here. And Andrew is pumping out research and papers at a terrifying rate. I think you're going to absolutely love him. So yeah, get ready for this one. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Dr. Andrew Thomas.
I absolutely love your writing, ma'am. Your Psychology Today articles are fantastic. Congratulations.

**Andrew Thomas** (1:37)
Oh, brilliant. Am I right in thinking I'm the first Welsh person you've had on your show? I've heard that. That was the rumor.

**Chris Williamson** (1:44)
Oh, that would be a very interesting stat. I don't know. Sometimes people are like secret Welsh, secret Welshies, you know?

**Andrew Thomas** (1:52)
Yes, yeah. I'll have to just, let's just transition that to a ruggedly handsome Welsh person. I'm sure that's the first.

**Chris Williamson** (1:59)
A complete win as far as I'm concerned. And also the first openly Welsh person. We can definitely take that. You didn't used to identify as Welsh and now identify as something else. You're openly Welsh.

**Andrew Thomas** (2:10)
Yeah. I don't think the identity politics has hit Welsh identity yet.

**Chris Williamson** (2:17)
It's coming for you soon. Hold on tight. So you just wrote this great article explaining five evolutionary theories that everyone should know to understand how relationships work.

**Andrew Thomas** (2:28)
Yeah.

**Chris Williamson** (2:29)
Evolutionary mismatch. What's that?

**Andrew Thomas** (2:31)
So evolutionary mismatch is this idea that our psychology evolved and has remained relatively stable over the last 100,000 years. So it's this idea that society has moved quicker than our biology has been able to cope with it. So for most modern problems, we're approaching them with a Stone Age brain. And yeah, it's something which in my teaching at Swansea, I try to apply that quite a bit to mating, because a lot of stuff that we have in the modern environment is just something that it makes more sense when you sort of figure out that your brain is trying to cope with it rather than being able to master it, because it's such a novel thing that it's not used to.

**Chris Williamson** (3:21)
What would be an example of that?

**Andrew Thomas** (3:23)
I think the best example of that is just sheer choice overload. If you think about ancestral human populations, there's some debate over the number, but Dunbar's number is like 150 people. Nowadays we have access to almost limitless numbers of people. It leads to a lot more superficial relationships, and I mean like friends and family, but also when you go online onto dating websites, it looks like there's this unlimited pool of potential options. That leads to all sorts of crazy things like people having to use one characteristic to narrow down the playing field. Dating, I think, has become a lot more univariate rather than multivariate. Historically, you'd meet up with someone, you see the whole person, you're taking their physical attractiveness, you also take in other things about them. Nowadays, we don't even get to that point where we can make a holistic judgment, because we're doing things like, they're not six foot, so that's it, they're off the radar. I always like to, it's really interesting, actually, some of the research that I've done with Peter Jonesson has actually shown how people then compensate with that, because we're going to publish this stuff on height. But if you get the dating website data, it's really interesting and you plot up what guy's heights are, you get this really weird distribution where it's a normal distribution until you hit 5, 10, 5, 11, and 6 foot, in which case it drops on all of those and then suddenly you get this big influx of everyone saying they're 6 foot.
Embarrassingly, I was one of those liars. I met my wife on an online dating website. Now, I always tell people I'm 6 foot minus 1 I put that I was 6 foot on this dating website and that got me past the bar and now I'm happily married.