Mating with Daniel Conroy-Beam
2025-06-10 12:00:00.000 +00:00

So uh so David, do you want to just do one where it's just you? Sure. Okay. So this is taking to say I'm Dave Petrozowski, right? It would be weird if you said I'm Dave Petrozowski. But you could say we're your hosts, David Pencil. This is uh yeah, we're your host, David. Okay, I do that. Yeah, so all right, let's see. Three two one ten nine eight seven six five four three two one. So take one. David, good to see you. Good to see you too, Dave. We have our first guest today. We do. I'm very excited. Yeah, and a very, a very good guest. I think one of the most uh uh excellent top-notch thinkers in the field of evolutionary psychology right now, uh applying uh computational and mathematical methodology

to uh mate choice and how we choose our mates. Um absolutely fascinating work uh this guy is doing. Um we we get into all of it. We get into the origin of evolutionary psychology uh uh as a lens uh to understand through which to see human mating. Um we get into uh current issues in the study of mate choice, uh, and and what Dan's criticisms are of some of this research and and what his takes are on the various controversies. We cover a lot of ground. Yeah. And I like this because it's an example of uh people within EvSec actually thinking about and characterizing sort of how their own field is going. And Dan has just a great perspective on that. Uh super fun, um, super informative. And yeah, enjoy.

So Dan Conroy Beam, thanks for being with us today. Thanks for having me. Um, Dan is a neighbor down the hall and also uh where where we live. Um and but you know, I actually realized, Dan, in getting ready for this meeting, there's like a lot of questions I've never asked you. Um because we see each other all the time that I never think that's um but uh Dan, you are a professor at UC Santa Barbara. Um and uh you how long have you been at UC Santa Barbara? I came here in 2016. So what does that mean? Coming up on the years. We should celebrate the 10 year uh the 10 years. Um, and before that, you were at Austin working with David Buss. How did you um, and you don't have to answer this if you don't want to, we can talk about

something else immediately, but how did you um find uh David Buss and how did you get interested in Evpsych? Yeah. Uh you want the long version? You want the short version? Uh the the the extra long version, which whatever you want. Uh all the gory details. Yeah, yeah. Well, actually, we did like a really long version of ours. So that was like an entire episode. So yeah. Yeah, we like went into our childhoods. It got really good. It was a therapy. It was a therapy session. So I was born on a snowy day in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. No, uh it wasn't snowy because it was August. Um, uh yeah, I mean, so I I did both my my bachelor's and my PhD at the University of Texas, uh, which is where David Buss happens to work, or at least

you know, did by the time I was there. Um, so it was total freak accident luck stuff. Um I I never really had much of an idea of what I wanted to do with my life. Um, I didn't have like a good understanding of what careers existed in the world. Um I was always really biology was always my favorite subject in school. Uh and I was always like really into just nature and wildlife and just living things. Uh like as a kid, I would just like that was my thing as a kid, just like drawing different animals and I had a zoo books subscription. My mom had a zoo books subscription for me. Uh and I just like every month when that zoo books came in and you just had a magazine to learn about like different animals from around the world, that was like Christmas every

month. Um so like I knew that I liked biology, but I didn't really know that like you could be a biologist. And I don't know how it never occurred to me that like there were people whose job it was to generate this information that I was assuming. So I like the only thing I the only job I knew that was like connected to biology was just like something in medicine. Yeah. Um, so I just like I was like, I guess I want to do something related to that. I don't really know what. Um but I uh I remember, you know, I I started at UT as an undergrad. I was ostensibly pre-med, but like didn't just because I didn't know what else to be. Um I took a psych class, um, fully expecting to hate it, fully expecting like this is gonna be like, you know, Freud laying on couches

talking about your mother. Uh, is it gonna be stupid? I'm interested in science, I'm not interested in this, but it just like fit my schedule. It like fulfilled the GE. That's I was like, I'll just get this, it'll be easy. Uh, and it was taught by David Lewis, who was a grad student in David Buss's lab at the time, who was intro-psych. Um, it was over the summer, actually. Uh, and so he had like probably way too much latitude in how he taught the course. Uh, so he taught it very much from an evolutionary perspective. Um, and uh yeah, I did I just I I remember it was mind-blowing. First of all, that psychology is a science, that like you can study human thought and emotion and behavior scientifically was a revelation to me.

Uh, and then also the fact that you could take evolutionary theory, you could take this biological theory, uh, which I had independently already been really interested in. Um, you know, this was like There were a lot of stars that kind of aligned, I guess, maybe to like put me on this exact path. Because this was, you know, in Texas. Uh this is around the time. I don't know what the time what is the schedule for this. Um, this was around the time where um, you know, the the Texas Public School Board was revising standards for textbooks, which turns out to matter a lot for the whole country because Texas is such a big textbook market that like whatever the Texas public schools decide goes in the textbooks basically

dictates what goes in the textbooks for the whole country. And so there was some debate about how are we going to talk about evolution in, you know, Texas school textbooks. And so evolution was like very much in the air. There were a lot of like this was a sort of resurgence of the like scopes monkey trial stuff going on. There was a lot of discussion in Texas about, you know, do we teach the controversy or not? And so I was like reading a lot about like reading a lot of blogs at the time about like a lot of skeptic blogs about evolutionary theory. I'd like taken a red rhetoric class and I wrote it about like evolutionary theory, skepticism on evolutionary theory. Um, and you know, it had always again being interested in biology and wildlife, it had

always been evolution had always been super interesting to me. Um, so the idea that you could take this like embattled scientific theory and apply it to humans and apply it to human behavior, I was like, why this is so cool. Why didn't someone tell me about this before? Um I was super into it. I think David noticed I was super into it. Um, and you know, as you do when you're teaching a class, you're always on the lookout for like, you know, good research assistance. Uh so I think you know there's usually like, you know, two or three kids per class who are like really into it and really good students and genuinely curious, and everyone else just wants to get the grade and wants to know whether it's like gonna be on the test or not.

And you know, yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. But you were you were one of those, one of those two or three. Yeah, yeah. I I would say this is one of the first classes that I can remember being like really intrinsically motivated to do too. Like I just wanted to imbibe as much of this as possible. And I I think you know fortunately David just saw that and he's like, you know, I think you should maybe do more of this. You want to help me out with my research. Um so I got involved with David Lewis as a research assistant for him. Um, and you know, just really enjoyed doing that, spent a lot of my free time in the lab helping DL with all kinds of things. Um, you know, as you do starting with like grunt work, running participants, doing

literature reviews. Um, but you know, I think he just kept seeing that I kept being really interested in it and really invested in it. He kept giving me more and more to do. Um and then another, you know, another star that aligned um was UT at the time had this, I think it maybe still exists, but had this program uh for sort of getting undergraduates more connected in research. Um you know, kind of we have similar programs at UCSB, I guess, but it was uh unusually well funded. Um so DL and I signed up for this. It was like a mentorship program. And one of the perks was they funded the student to go to an academic conference. So after my freshman year of college, I got money to fly out to HBus in Fullerton.

So that HBUS was my very first academic conference. I had no idea what an academic conference was like. Um flew out there, um, attended that HBS. And that was like that, I remember especially it was just a mind-blowing experience, right? Like this whole conference halls full of people who are exactly as obsessed with this topic as I am. And you just get to sit there for three days, you know, nine to five, and just hear about all the cool cutting edge science that like everybody, all these people are doing. You get to hear about these like discoveries before anyone else. You're just like drowning in this like really cool topic for days. It was so exhilarating. It was so fun. It was so fun to meet a bunch of people.

Um and so I think that was like a real turning point. I was like, okay, like there's a career here. I really enjoy doing this. Like, I want to keep coming to this conference as much as I can. Um, so yeah, at that point I was like dead set on being an evolutionary psychologist. Um and uh, you know, I was already in the bus lab. I was already like learning about evolutionary psychology, primarily from David Lewis. But you know, I took David Buss's classes after that. I took as many classes as I could at UT that sort of like cobbled together like an F-Syc degree as much as I could. I switched majors immediately. I switched in the psych program as soon as I could. Um, but I minored in biology and I took as many like biostats psych

courses to like cobble together and like an as much of an evpsych degree as I could. Um, you know, it's probably not an accident that I fell into human mating being in the bus lab. I mean, I may may have fallen into it anyway, but that just seemed like the natural topic to study. Um and then, you know, ended up staying there for grad school, not Not necessarily intentionally, but that's just what ended up happening. And yeah, no, I'm here. Does anybody, when anybody ever interviews you, because I've seen you in several interviews, does anybody ever ask you how you got interested in mating? Or is that is that sort of a yeah, it's maybe a given. Right? I don't know. No, yeah. I don't know if that question has ever really come up.

Uh, how did you guys avoid getting interested in mating? Well, for a while, you know, till I turned 10 or something. Yeah, I don't know that I was ever not interested. It's sort of an intrinsically interesting topic. You know, anything related to to sex or death is sort of innately interesting to us, I think. And I think for me, for me, oh David, sorry, go ahead. No, no, go ahead. I was just gonna for me, like I think uh as a lot of people, like mating was especially like sort of a a gateway drug for Ev Psych too, where it was sort of, you know, as a seventeen, eighteen, nineteen year old, whatever, you're like, whoa, a science of this. Cause that's that was one of the other things that I found a bit disappointing about

psychology, as interested as I was, is that the topics were sort of reasoning, problem solving. And I was like, well, what about like jealousy or anger or mating or love or something like that? And so for me, that was like definitely um exciting. So yeah. Yeah. No, for me, I think, I mean, I st I I do think mating and I do try to keep up in developments and mating psychology as much as I can. Uh but uh for me, uh it wasn't that it didn't, you know, it didn't make sense or it wasn't insightful and interesting. It was almost that it made too much sense and it was too insightful. Like you know, like I'm like, Oh, I totally buy this. This makes so much sense. I love the connections with other animals, but like I want to move on to the more

mysterious things, like the like what what's going on with you know ideologies and sacred values like this weird stuff that's totally mysterious. I wanted to like I I wanted to be more ambitious and like tackle something that was really confusing. I don't know that's just my personality I guess you don't open the behavioral ethology textbook and see like you know political uh ideologies in the gazelles or red stack here. Right, exactly. It depends on what book you open. Um I for for the mating literature, Dan, um, is there um do you think that like it's been going on long enough that you could characterize sort of what its trajectory has been? Or like where where do you think the mating um stuff is at?

Or or maybe even like more broadly, like you know, of psych we talked a little bit about um people thinking of psych is just a just-so story. We talked a little bit about um um you know making design or software level claims we haven't really talked about like evolutionary game theory, you know, and I assume that the audience of this will be a combination of just sort of people who know a lot, maybe people who don't know a lot. One of the things I really like about your work um is uh is that you know you're bringing these different tools to bear um and uh and i'm wondering like things like modeling or game theory or selection pressure dynamics um you know could you talk a little bit either about like how you see those

um affecting the way we study things in ep or or mating more specifically That's that's two really big, really good questions. Um You know, uh it it's gonna be hard to characterize the trajectory of mating research in a way that's not like totally self-serving. Uh I mean uh please be self-serving, Dan. Please I mean I I can tell you sort of uh let me answer it this way, maybe to excuse how self-serving it's gonna necessarily be. Like I can tell you how I, you know, a direction I see that the work needs to go in, uh, a gap that I try to fill. Let me put it in there. Yeah, yeah. We're gonna do a thousand let a thousand flowers bloom, but what's the flowers that you think a couple that you you would like to pursue?

Yeah. So I I I think there's like um, I don't know. There's maybe like there's maybe like a couple phases I can see I could see dividing the history of like human mating research into perhaps. Um I think um you know obviously human mating is at the core of it what evolutionary psychology is, right? Like I think Don Simon's um evolution of human sexuality, you could consider the first F Psych text, uh depending on how you wanna, you know. I would I would argue that um the descent of man by Darwin is is the first F-sych text. But even that is also full of mating stress. Critique of pure reason I got you guys beaten. Uh I you know obviously strains of these ideas have been present in lots of places for a

lot of times, but I feel like the first time sort of modern adaptationist evolutionary psychology cohered in a single place, you know, I would unselfishly call evolution of human sexuality. Um was that was that before or after Adapted Mind? It was about ten years before adapted. Yeah, that was 778 or 79. Yeah. Oh wow. Okay. Oh yeah. All right. Then then you are correct. Yeah. Yeah. It was great. Dawn was instrumental in getting John and Lena here. And I think the, you know, the sort of UCSB, you know, uh collective, I think really is sort of like forged uh forged this uh this uh discipline um out of their collection of interests. Um so you know I I think you know that book was was obviously a you know

a turning point. Um and that really inspired people like Marco Wilson and Martin Daly. It also really inspired people like David Buss. Uh so I think there's like a that sort of first phase in between Dawn and David, where like the field was kind of coming together and sort of basic like evolutionary. Don was really sketching out like what are the basic evolutionary principles? And what are the basic facts of human evolution and human life history as we understand them at the time that are relevant for you know making predictions about human psychology in the in the domain of human mating. Uh, and then I think David Buss, a lot of people picked up and ran with that, but David Buss really like established a particular brand uh that was very

empirically successful and very popular. And so I think that maybe starts a kind of second phase of human mating research, which we may or may not still be in. Uh, because David, a lot of people don't know this, but David was trained originally as a personality psychologist. He was not, you know, obviously he wasn't an evolution trained as an evolutionary psychologist because there was no possible way to get trained as an evolutionary psychologist at that time. So he was trained as a personality psychologist. And his innovation, his first he got famous originally for personality we work. Like he got a job at Harvard on his personality stuff, uh and was really famous for developing this, you know, act nomination procedure for mapping what a personality

construct is, right? Rather than looking at the dictionary and having people rate all the words in a dictionary that describe a person and deriving your measures through factor analysis of dictionary terms. He just said, let's go to people and just ask them, you know, what are the things that an extroverted person does? And let's define the construct in terms of this like collection of behaviors that people associate with this. Um so he was already very used to developing scales and measures. Um he's used to doing these like large scale survey projects and he was interested in these evolutionary approaches that were emerging. He met Lita and John he was a faculty member when Lita and John were like undergrads at

Harvard, right? And you know they tell the story of like you know going to David's office as he was like just starting to write about this evolution stuff and telling him he was doing everything wrong. Um I once I once asked Lita what she said to David Buss during that, and I forgot what she said. We'll have to have Lita on. Um it sounded like it was very polite, actually, in the end. It sounded much worse more uh more salacious than it might have been. Yeah. Well, you know, you should maybe ask David for his version. That's true. Fair enough. Yeah, they may not have the same version, I don't remember. Um so I I think there was some exchange of ideas there. Um so David, I think, took this sort of very, you know,

measuring latent constructs sort of approach from personality psychology and sort of brought this together with you know the evolutionary insights that Don Simons was bringing. So he's saying, you know, okay, if we think drawing from sexual selection theory, there's reason to expect you know humans have these preferences, but some of them may be sex differentiated for these particular, you know, evolutionary historic reasons. Let's develop a questionnaire to measure preferences and see do we see the kinds of patterns one would expect that you know what kinds of things are popular, but most importantly, what sort of sex differences are there? Because that's going to be know, David's motivation at the time, also, uh, we have to

remember this is applying evolutionary theory to human behavior was extremely controversial. Um, and this is coming after the like sociobiology wars, which you know, David, Lita, and John were all exposed to firsthand at Harvard. Right. So I think in David's mind, I I I don't know, I don't want to speak to him too much. This is me sort of uh piecing together maybe a history, but you'd have to ask him. But I imagine part of just from knowing David and knowing the history, I imagine a big part of his goal here is not necessarily to map the map mating psychology per se, as much as to like provide a proof of concept that validate evolutionary approaches in the first place against all of this controversy.

Um so I think you know he gets a lot of flack for focusing a lot on sex differences and overemphasizing sex differences. And that's, I think, where this sort of I'll get into that, but I think that's you know what ends up defining this kind of phase of mating research. But I think that's because sex differences were like a really natural lever, right? Like if you want to prove to the world, show the world that like there's some value in this evolutionary theory stuff, this can make really strong predictions that no one else can, that you need this evolutionary theory stuff to do your psychology. Sex differences are a really easy, natural place to start. And so that's where he started, right? So that's where like bus 89 comes from is evolutionary theory makes this

really clear prediction that no other existing social psychological theories or preferences make, uh, which is there should be these cross culturally invariant sex differences on certain dimensions. So he took his personality psych know how. And you know, he actually borrowed I think a lot of people don't know this as well his his first preference questionnaire. He didn't come up with it. He actually just took it from a paper Hill 1945 or something like that. So it was a preference questionnaire that you know had been in use in the US at that time for some amount of use for 50 years. He basically just took Hill's questionnaire and administered it around the world with maybe some slight modifications.

I don't remember. Um and yeah, established that there are these cross-culturally universal sex differences, at least among, you know, thirty-seven relatively industrialized cultures. Yeah, it's it's interesting, um, just reflecting on the history of evolutionary psychology. And, you know, you make a very good point that if you want to start somewhere in applying evolution to human behavior and human psychology, sex differences makes the most sense. You know, the the predictions there are the clearest. You see parallels in other animal species. Um, there are really large effect sizes to be found there. You can look, you can do interesting cross-cultural work. Um so it's a it's a really meaty good place to start if you want to just prove to the world

that hey, this perspective works, it had it makes predictions and discoveries, the findings are solid. Um, look at what this field can do. But I can also imagine a downside to that, and that not only is you know the sex differences it's the easiest place to start, but it's also the most controversial and provocative and inflammatory place you could possibly start. And so I'm I'm imagining like what would evolutionary psychology be in the parallel universe where it didn't start with sex differences and it started with something else? Would would the field be completely different today? And I think there's a good case to be made that it probably would be very different. That starting with this, you know, uh inflammatory issue of sex differences sort of stamped

the field with this controversial edgelord reputation. And it attracted all of these people who wanted to be edgelords and wanted to study controversial things and study titillating topics. And it sort of provided this inertia for the field that in many ways is probably not a good thing. Um yes, the the predictions are solid, the findings are solid, uh, but I really wonder what evolutionary psychology would have been like if it started somewhere else. Say if it started with like group psychology, the stuff that Dave studies, or some or or you know, something else. I I'm curious what what your reaction to that is in terms of just the his the historical inertia of the field. I think that's exactly right.

And I I think that's uh not to criticize David or anything, right? I think his work is great. And I think he's done, you know, no one can um no one can deny David's like service to the field. And we're talking David, we have David Bus free David's format this conversation. Both David's here as well as David Bus. All of my work on mating mating has been really important since the eighties when I was when I was a some year old, a single digit year old. Yeah. It's true. I should be careful. Um but yeah, I no one can deny David Buss's you know service to the field. And you know, he's really he's done more than nearly anyone to like put the field on the map. Um but I do think there have been downsides to the particular approach that he chose.

Um and I I think um you know, there's there's several sort of founders of the field that you could identify, right? If we're talking about capital E, capital P evolutionary psychology per se, and not just all approaches to evolution behavior, you know, I think of like Lita Cosmodies, John Tuby, kind of together, Steve Pinker, Martin Daly, Margot Wilson, the people in that picture, right? Um, David Buss, Don Simons. Um and they I think they had sort of different approaches to this. And you can sort of see the lineage of their work. Because yeah, David David's David Buss has never been one to shy away from controversy, that's for sure. Uh and I don't think he's quite edge lowered. Um there are he's a very lovely man.

He definitely does not have this reputation. Uh we should have that reputation. Oh I mean No, no, he hasn't earned it. Yeah. Yeah. There are certainly some people who uh relish in controversy. David does not, uh, but David does not shy away from it either. Um and he's actually, yeah, I think he's actually he's he's a very savvy guy. I he wouldn't be where he was if he wasn't, you know, good at at navigating these kinds of topics. But I think, you know, like Lita Cosmanese and John Tube, they did kind of go the round that you were talking about, right? Like they wanted to prove evolutionary psychology as a as a useful discipline. And so they did go to something very, you know, pretty uncontroversial, very like

cooperation, right? It's very heartwarming, very positive. And you know, they they try to demonstrate that you can make useful predictions in this area that there should be something that we can all agree is a good thing and people should be minimally angry about. I did I don't know what's your sense, Dave, as a student of theirs. Like, you know, I see David, he started at Harvard, so that probably helped him. So did they, but he was like faculty at Harvard already. I think he was able to parlay that into a position at Michigan, maybe still riding off the personality fame. Like David had a massive advantage in already being a very successful personality psychologist. So he was able to do this very controversial stuff.

Um, just like using the last of his personality psych credit, like just burning all of that, and then he just got lucky that this F-Syc stuff took off in time before people hated him, basically, for doing that sort of stuff. Um, I don't know that he that you know, Lita and John have obviously been extremely successful and extremely influential, like in the long game played out, but I don't know that they had the like immediate success that David had for going with something that was more salacious and controversial. Yeah, I think I mean, so they I think the the group or the the cooperation thing, um, and I don't I don't know this for sure, but I think uh what I the the cooperation thing, you're right, is not as salacious immediately and it's sort of warm

and fuzzy. My understanding of what I do know is and what Lita has said is that um I don't know the how strategic using cooperation was. What I do know was what was strategic, and this is sort of not along the salacious dimension, but along the scientific dimension, which is I love about John and Lita um is uh is their thinking, well, reasoning is a bastion of sort of unitary assumptions, right? Like what I love about John Alita's work was it was an articulation of the assumptions that were such deep assumptions that they weren't even treated as assumptions. Um, right. Like I think that's that's what I really love about the work. And so it was strategic to say reasoning is something we're going to go after and

say, look, this idea that reasoning is content-independent, a unitary thing, that an evolutionary approach doesn't help you for thinking about reasoning. We're going to go after that. And so I think that was the idea. And then after there was an acceptance of that, people would say something like, Well, but emotions, you know, aren't going to, you know, so so it was just sort of following the um and what about this, what about that, and sort of following that. So I believe that was their um str strategy. Um so I think it was really at the level of the scientific claims and not about the reactions um of people per se. Yeah, well, I mean, um so I I to your point, David, I I think you've described a lot of the history exactly right, unfortunately.

Um, you know, I think the the sex difference and stuff, that was that was that 1989 behavioral and brain sciences paper, that was huge. That was yeah, you know, that was a big paper in you know, psychology period. Um, and that really planted a flag for this like evolutionary psychology stuff. You know, from there, David went on to he picked up some ideas again that trace themselves to Don Simons through Martin Daly and Margot Wilson on jealousy. Again, you know, looking at sex differences and jealousy as a really natural prediction, just showing we can make a prediction that no one else can and we can validate this around the world. And then, you know, Busin Schmidt ninety three, he went to mating strategy.

Again, you know, it's sort of picking up there's this like intuitive kind of dimension along which mating relationships vary between, you know, they called it short-term, long-term at the time. You know, these sort of like high commitment, monogamous romantic relationships, which seem to be somewhat human unique, versus these sort of like short-term, uncommitted sexual relationships. And David just like sicked his personality psychology training on that, and you know, developed some measures and made a bunch of sex different again, sex difference predictions about how these things should be sex differentiated, drawing on ideas, going back again to Simon's. Um, so that sort of set up this like holy trinity of mating research, right?

Like jealousy, preferences, mating strategy. Those are like big three constructs in mating psychology because of David Buss's early work and uh you know a huge amount of mating psychology research following that has been basically like pick one of those three or any combination they're in, you know, and then either, you know, show some kind of sex difference in it, you know, riff on it a little bit, like, you know, uh, you know, we want to demonstrate a sex difference in mating strategy either through people's attitudes or through people's behaviors or, you know, the kinds of things that they regret doing, you know, post hoc, right? Just like show, you know, come up with a new way to demonstrate the same sex difference in

the same dimension, but yeah, either in a new context or a new cultural context or with some kind of new measure. And so so much of the mating research for the last what has it been, 30 years has been just sort of rehashing through those same three constructs again and show a sex difference in some kind of slightly novel way that David Bus didn't technically already show in 1990. Um, and I think that's been bad. Uh I mean that has generated a lot of knowledge, generated like a really robust foundation for human mating psychology research, which I'm grateful for. Um, but I think, you know, my opinion is we've we've done it. We've exhausted. Yeah. Uh we know that now. We don't need any more papers on sex differences and mate preferences, despite being a

person who's published some of those recently. Uh I mean it is like a nice it's you can there's always money in the banana stand, right? Like you can always get another paper on on sex differences and mate preferences if you just need something. Um uh but yeah, I I I think that stuff has attracted a lot of people who, yeah, are not necessarily as interested in the science as they are in pissing people off. And I think that kind of work is just always easy to do. Right. And it it's just it's become it's it was so influential, it was so valuable that sex differences have kind of come to like dominate. Um kind of come to dominate the literature to the point where I think it's a very important thing.

Or or at the very least, the the public perception of the field. I don't know if it necessarily, you know, uh has a disproportionate number of researchers working on the topic. Maybe it does. But even beyond that, just the public perception of it, I feel like, is dominated by the sex differences research, even more than perhaps exists in reality. I think the public perception's about right. Really? You think so? I I think I think all there's people out there who are not doing sex differences research. Yeah. I think that's true. But I think a lot of the you know a lot of the human mating research has been studying sex differences in psychology, I think to the exclusion of studying the psychology itself.

So that's what I would like to see as like a third phase of human mating research. Like just getting back to, you know, I I the way I think of it is while Lita and John were playing this long game of like, you know, how do you really carefully, yeah, systematically pick a topic and just really systematically map the information processing design of that psychology, really systematically map the design of cooperation psychology, of emotion psychology, of group psychology. Um, that maybe doesn't get like as big of headlines as like you know, new universal sex difference, you know, men are men are, you know, new research finds that that men are uh uh men are all hussies and women are all you know chased or whatever.

Uh you know, that'll get you like fun headlines. Um, but it doesn't really tell you that much about how the psychology works. Um and I think human mating research maybe needs to get more back into that. Yeah, like let's return to some of the more Don Simon-y approach to of like, let's be really clear-eyed about what are the adaptive problems that humans would have recurrently faced in human mating in the in the mating domain. And especially like, yeah, I just I just feel like uh the old guard, I think, get very defensive about this kind of thing. Um, but sex differences are important. Don't get me wrong. Again, I've published sex differences papers, I don't know, recently within the last couple

of years, probably. I can't remember. Um, but I feel like a five year moratorium on sex differences papers would just like help the field. Like not ban it forever, but just like force people to be a little creative in finding other things to study. Right. I mean, the downside of of the complexity of the human mind and of human nature is that when you pick one part of it, it's easy to get carried away and think that that part of it represents the whole. Right. Like, yes, we can all agree men and women are different. They have different they have face different selection pressures throughout our evolutionary history. We can make specific predictions about how they're going to be different and we can, you

know, see parallels between those differences and the differences you see in other species facing similar selection pressures. Yes. agreed. But there's a huge but. There's so much more to the story than that simple starting point, right? Yes, men and women are different and they have different mating strategies, etc. But they are also more similar to one another relative to other animals than you know many animals uh in the animal kingdom. Um the degree of paternal investment in offspring is way higher uh in humans than you see in many other animals. Um the we without a doubt have a parabonding psychology. We without a doubt have substantial similarities between men and women in that parabonding

psychology. Uh and the sophistication with which we look for mates, with which we uh uh maintain relationships, look for alternative relationships, et cetera, is uh uh mind boggling. So there's just so much more to the story. Once you once you have this foundation, it's a good foundation to have, it's a good starting point. But yes, we need to move beyond this starting point and and drill into the complexity of what is going on with with human mating psychology beyond, you know, male, female sex uh sexual psychology. Yeah, agreed completely. And and I there's also you throw in the sort of like perverse incentives of academia where, you know, to get a job, to get tenure, you need a a sort of baseline level of productivity,

you need to be getting papers out the door on a pretty regular basis. And so I don't blame people, right? Like if you're a young human mating researcher, you know you need a certain number of papers to stay alive or make it to the next stage. Like, what are you gonna do? Are you gonna pick the easy topic that you know is gonna result in some kind of finding that someone is gonna publish somewhere, or are you gonna go on a limb and you know try to make a bold hypothesis about how something works that may or may not pan out. Um so you know it it's the safe sex differences is the safe pick. Uh yeah I mean you you seem to have escaped the gravitational pull of this process, at least in your in your research on you know mate preference integration, uh

desirability covariation. This stuff is not sex differentiated. And you can correct me if I'm wrong. The mate preference integration, this is exists in both men and women. Uh you we have these wide variety of of things that we're looking for in a partner, whether it be looks, kindness, uh shared culture, uh intelligence, whatever. Uh we have all of these desired preferences. We the mind needs some way to integrate them. And what you're after is how does it integrate them? Uh it's actually uh a a really tough question to answer. It's not obvious what the solution is. There are many candidate ways that the mind can integrate these preferences. Um so this is a clear aspect of our mating psychology that does not appear to have strong

sex differentiation. Um it's uh deeply computational. Um you cannot study this problem except in computational terms. How to integrate different preferences? Like I I don't see an alternative way of thinking about that topic. So it's intrinsically computational, intrinsically non-sex differentiated, and you went in this direction and you you're successful. You're at Santa Barbara professor, uh almost 10 years now. Uh how did you escape the gravitational pull? Well, I I don't know that I fully escaped it because along the way I've been publishing sex differences stuff too, right? Uh so my first paper was on sex differences and preferences. You know, we had a big replication paper in 20 whatever, 2016.

You know, so it it has been that has been old, reliable for me too, right? Like, um, but yeah, we've been doing that on the side of some more risky stuff that that has kind of just happened to pan out. Um which is, you know, a a strategy I I would recommend to my students. And I I try to try try to um to advise them through. Um so I mean where that stuff comes from is yeah, what I this is the self serving part, like what I would sincerely hope ends up becoming kind of like a third phase of human mating research. Um which is like this is a good, a good example of why focusing so much on sex differences really hurt us because there was this, you know, 20, 30 years of research on mate preferences, which is basically take a questionnaire that asks people, you know, what do

you want your ideal partner to look like? They just say, I want them to have these features, I don't want them to have those features. And then you know, you show there's a sex difference in how people respond to those some of those questions. You write the paper, you send it off, you call it a day. Uh and people were doing that for 20, 30 years. And people kind of forgot to ask, do those preferences actually get reflected in behavior? Like when you look at the partners people actually choose, do they really pursue those things? Uh And then they didn't entirely forget to do that. I mean, so there were some studies that tried to get at that with like hypothetical choice paradigms. You know, here's like two profiles.

Which profile do you choose? Or they they would look at things like personals ads. Do you see these sex differences reflected in the kinds of personals ads people post or or respond to? Um, you know, David had looked a little bit at uh David Buss had looked at a little bit at do people's actual chosen partners reflect the things that they say that they want? Although, you know, there's all kinds of methodological problems with that. You don't necessarily know just because your partner matches your preferences, you don't know necessarily that's because your preferences cause that choice versus you said you wanted those things because your partner had them. So there had been like a little bit of work throughout the years just sort of like as but

it was so it's sort of seen as just like a validation of the preferences. It wasn't seen as like a research topic in and of itself. Like, can we actually predict people's behavior on the basis of these abstract preferences they say they have? Uh, so that people were so interested in the sex differences they just kind of forgot about that more basic question. Until about the mid-2000s, there happened to be like a series of papers from as far as I'm aware, totally disconnected research groups that all use the same methodology to test this question. There was uh you know Peter Todd and colleagues in Germany, there's Rob Kurzban, uh, and then there was Paul Eastwick. Um, all around the same time, had the same thought we can use speed dating,

which was like you know, a popular new invention at the time, new ish invention at the time. You can use speed dating as like a natural experiment to test do people actually choose the partners that they say they want on these abstract preference questionnaires. So they would administer the same kinds of questionnaires that people are using for this preference research just before a speed dating event. So they'd have either they would arrange one or they would work with a company. You know, you'd have 10 to 20 people who all showed up, single people interested in being in a relationship, they all talk to each other in little five to 10 minute sessions. And then afterwards, they just say, Do you want to go on a date with that person?

Yes or no? And it's a perfect little, in theory, it's a perfect little mating experiment, right? You can see really quickly a lot of decisions that one person makes. And you can see, do they actually say, Yes, I want to date the person who has the features I just said I wanted on that abstract preference questionnaire? And from those initial studies, the answer seemed to be no. Uh, that people were not, by and large, you know, knowing what a person's preferences were before that speed dating event did not give you a lot of statistical power to predict the people they actually said yes to in that event. And that was kind of uh that that was a big moment in mating research too. Like that that is perplexing, right?

Yes. Um and and people took that in a lot of different directions, right? So I think the the sort of Kurzman interpretation was something between, you know, maybe you're not quite getting to know this person enough, maybe speed dating is activating more of a short-term mating context. And so your long-term preferences don't apply. Uh, I think at one point he speculated maybe, and he did have some evidence for this. Like maybe there are these sort of consensual preferences that matter, but these individual differences and preferences, maybe that's just noise. Um, and you would see that, like, you know, if you stratify the speed dating events by, for example, like age or professional status, you would see, you know, people went to the speed

dating events that sort of catered to their general desires. But then within those dates, within those events, you couldn't necessarily predict the specific person each person chose. So maybe there's some sort of like general preference for age or something like that. But like your is specifically doesn't matter. Is the idea there that it's not that mate preferences don't matter? It's that the ones that matter are a part of human nature and a part of human mating psychology, and the ones that individuals vary on, at least as we can judge based on their questionnaire responses, those don't matter. But that doesn't is that isn't to say that preferences in general don't matter. That's one interpretation.

Yeah. And I think that's something that Kurzman kind of floated. I don't know. I don't know if that's fair. He might disagree with, he would disagree with whatever I say because he's Kurzman. But uh, you know, that's may maybe one read I would put into his interpretation. You know, the the Todd and colleagues' interpretation was, you know, there is a preference in there somewhere that matters, but it's not what people are able to verbalize. Whatever people are verbalizing, that's just some sort of like weird, you know, ad hoc like folk theory of what they want. So it's not the preferences don't matter, it's that we're measuring them the wrong way. The measurements suck. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. And then the Eastwick interpretation was that preferences don't matter.

People don't know what they want. And he's really like come to a point where like he's really kind of arguing that like attraction might be fundamentally unpredictable. Um and and he would argue, he he also has kind of come around. I don't think he sees it this way, but I see it as him coming around at the sort of Curzbanian view. Um, where he argues like, in order to show that a preference matters, you need to show that the individual differences and preferences matter. So you need to show that, like, because you value age more than I do, because you value older partners more than I do, you choose older partners more often than I do. But if you show that like the average preference for older partners, if you show that on

average people have a preference for older partners, like he would count that as there not being a preference, which I think is bizarre. Because yeah, how would you measure that? Yeah, how would you get there otherwise? Uh yeah. I I think if you show that humans in general tend to choose older partners, you have shown that humans have a preference for older partners. And that's that's how we measure preferences in non-human animals, right? We show that in general prefer peacocks with more elaborate tails, right? We more elaborate training. I mean, my my intuition just hearing this is I uh maybe I'm wrong. You can correct me if I'm wrong. The most plausible one to me is just the measurement suck.

That, like, yeah, I would obviously expect preferences to matter um in shaping behavior, uh, but I don't think I know what my preferences are deep down. I don't think most people have access to that information. Um at least in any straightforward sense. You know, I uh when I'm attracted to someone, I know it when I see it, but I don't know that I can articulate what it is about that person that drew me to them. And maybe people just don't have conscious access to this. Or or if you do, like it's a restricted range thing too. It sounds like that was the other thing. So, like, you know, people, there's a there are studies of people s arguing, well, look, like using drugs doesn't affect life outcomes because their sample is college students.

You know, and that's a restricted range issue, right? You know, it's a sub it's a bias sample of everybody is high functioning enough to be in college. But if you looked across from homeless people to um to successful people and you looked at drug use, you would find a different result. So yeah. Yeah, totally. Yeah. And and normally he has made that argument in the context of the speed dating stuff, right? Like, especially in these like speed dating studies of college students, which a lot of these are, you know, yeah, it's not a random sample of humanity that's showing up to these speed dating events. It's yes. Again, especially for these college students, it's mostly other young, relatively wealthy,

relatively successful college students that you're picking among. And so yeah, there's just not a lot of restriction of range. So he he he did a study where they literally like they intentionally tried to expand the range of people in the speed dating events beyond just college students. Like they literally like intentionally went out and recruited like gas station attendants to participate alongside the college students. And they did see they did find evidence in that case that that preferences were more predictive when you increase the the types of people who are showing up to these events. But the point is you know this this was a huge uh puzzle, right? Um and I think there's now a a good handful of people who have been

weighing in on this sort of emerging debate on what actually predicts people's mate choice behavior and why do these speed dating studies come out the way that they do. And I I don't think a clear consensus I have my opinions, um, but I don't think a clear consensus has emerged and it's been really exciting. I and this is this is a much again as as much as I value obviously like I got into evolutionary psychology because of that sort of like second phase 90s era mating research. That I think this has been a much more interesting and productive direction than maybe what was happening in a lot of the like early 2000s. Uh and what it like, I think the field has like come to a point where, yeah, we can

now be asking serious questions about how the psychology of human mating work. How does it work? Um, and what sorts of predictions can we actually make? Um, you know, for my part, I think there's a lot of things going on. Uh I think speed dating just sucks as an institution. I mean there is some evidence that you know people do form relationships in speed dating events. So I don't think it's like totally worthless, but yeah, it's a really, really brief exposure to a person. I think when you know saying yes or no to someone at the end of a speed date is not really a mate choice. It's it's just like, yeah, I'd be willing to talk to that person more. And it's it's probably a pretty you're getting a pretty noisy snapshot of what that person

is like, and you're pretty you're making a pretty you know low commitment bid. Yeah. So I don't know that we should expect preferences to predict those choices all that much. Sure. And especially if you think from an evolutionary perspective, this is such an artificial context. Throughout our evolutionary history, we almost certainly would have had tons of exposure to the person to a person before attempting to form a romantic relationship with him. So this is just such a weird artificial context to study mating. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And this, I mean, this by the way is how I got into this work, right? So I was originally, I was interested in human mating. I was in grad school. I was thinking about doing totally different stuff.

And then all these papers came out. Paul Eastwick was at UT at the time. Uh, so I was having, you know, face-to-face interactions with him when he was saying, you know, these preferences don't matter. I also think like to be honest, I think there's there's part there's a bit of I there's a bit of ideology here um in that I think some of the people, I won't name names, but some of the people who are highly invested in this debate, um, I think they're very excited about these findings, especially these speed dating findings where preferences don't seem to predict choice very well because, you they have this sort of ideological opposition to evolutionary psychology as a discipline. And mate preferences have been, you know, one of the key success stories of evolutionary

psychology. So if you're able to show that these preferences don't predict choices, well, that, you know, that disproves evolutionary psychology, right? That takes a lot of the wind out of our sails. That undoes one of our major success stories. So I think there are people who are highly invested in demonstrating that preferences don't predict choice just because they want to undermine evolutionary psychology as a field. Um, and I I think that's that partly got me interested in this just because I was like annoyed as a partisan. Annoyed at these people trying to like take a pot shot at our field. Um and I also think it's it's just kind of like a really it is an annoying just kind of crappy rhetorical position because it's you know if you want to find a null result it's not

that hard to do right um yeah arguing for the null is is a really weak uh rhetorical position but I think just because evolutionary psychology is controversial enough for for reasons that we've earned in many ways. Yeah um I think there's a lot of people who are willing to tolerate kind of crappy arguments and crappy data in the surface of undermining this unlikable field. It's it's such a bizarre way to gratify yourself intellectually, because if that's correct, that the most biologically important decision we can make throughout our entire lifetimes is essentially random, if that's correct, that not only demolishes evolutionary psychology, that demolishes evolutionary theory, sexual selection, modern biology as we

know it. Like that is devastating to our understanding of reality itself. That that is not something to celebrate. That is something to say, like, holy shit, we really need to think twice before we advance this position. Like, shouldn't we be trying to evaluate the plausibility of our hypotheses in light of how consistent they are with existing knowledge before we go out and and argue for them? Right. Like it should have basic evolutionary plausibility, basic consistency with everything we know about how the world works. But yeah, I mean I th I think the people who feel this way probably don't see it that way. I think they see it as like I I probably I don't know I don't know what they think.

I can't get into their heads because I'm not them. But you know, I think they probably see it as like i evolutionary theory is still fine, but we're humans, right? We're smarter, we have free will and consciousness, and so we're freed from our genetic puppet strings. Yeah, it's so dumb. Yeah. So I mean so we have this really interesting result, which is that preferences don't appear to matter, at least when you measure them in speed dating contexts, and you ask people on questionnaires what they're looking for in a partner. We floated a number of solutions to the puzzle. Maybe the measurements suck. Maybe speed dating is weird. Maybe preferences don't actually matter, and we're just picking it random uh when it comes

to our most biologically important uh decision we can make. Um, or maybe it's it's human nature that matters, but individual variation doesn't matter as much. Maybe there are unseen forces at play. Maybe we don't have conscious awareness of our mate preferences. Out of all of these different possibilities, all these different buckets, where are you putting uh your vote in? What do you what do you what do you think is the most likely solution to this puzzle if there is one? I I think there's a bit of a lot of things going on. Um I think speed dating just sucks. Uh and I think you can partly see that there are other study designs. So, you know, there's been a couple of nice longitudinal papers that have come out in the

last couple of years. For example, from like Tanya Gerlock's group, Lars Penko's group, uh, where you know you measure someone's preferences when they're single. One of them actually comes out of one of these speed dating studies. They manage to go back like 15 years after one of these speed dating studies, get the original speed daters, follow up with them, and then you know, ask them well who are you with now uh and they were able to use their preferences from that speed dating study 15 years ago and use that to try to predict you know who do they end up with 15 years later. Interesting. And they do predict right so okay. Yeah yeah it's not you know it's not huge but there is a significant correlation between

what you were looking for in a partner you know I forget maybe I'm forgetting the details but it's something like 15 years ago and who you're actually with now. Um, and you can do that. They've also done that on like a shorter time scale, like a three-month time period. You know, I ask you what you're looking for now when you're single, come back with you three months later. Um, and your preferences from three months ago predict what your partner is like now. We haven't published this yet, but you know, Dave knows my student Carlos has just replicated this. Um, so preferences can predict future choices when you are looking at, and Lauren Campbell has a similar paper. Uh, when you're looking at sort of naturalistic real world choices that are not, you met

this person for five minutes, do you want to see them again? It's an actual real world mate choice out, you know, in free ranging humans. Um, their their preference, their response to these preference questionnaires do predict what their later partners look like. Um, I think a lot of the measurement in these preference uh these speed dating studies just sucks. This is, again, I think an artifact of being so focused on sex differences. And also, I think honestly, coming out of this personality psych tradition where, you know, you're only ever thinking about abstract latent variables, uh, but you're not necessarily thinking about like what does that latent variable mean in terms of an information processing variable in the mind.

So people have been studying preferences for a really long time, but have been really unclear on what a preference is supposed to be. And the result of that is if you look at the way people measure preferences across the literature, it's super heterogeneous. So some people, you know, two different people will say they're studying the same thing. They'll say they're doing the same, uh, they're replicating the same measure or uh methodology but if you look at how are you measuring preferences in one case it'll be something like well how important and a lot of the speed dating studies do this they'll ask the participants how important is physical attractiveness to you in a partner one to ten and then they'll ask you know how physically attractive is this partner you know, one to

10? And then they'll ask, does your answer to that importance question predict the physical attractiveness of the person that you chose? And that it feels kind of reasonable if you don't think about it too hard, but asking how important physical attractiveness is to you is not the same as asking how important or how attractive you want your partner to be. It could be very important to you that your partner is unattractive, right? Those are distinct things. Or it could just be that it's very important to me that my partner isn't a total uggo. Yeah. But once they're not a total ugly, like ever anything's fine, right? Yeah. Yeah. So there's lots of like implicit models of preference. Yeah. Yeah.

That you could have that different people seem to have that aren't translated out clearly to the measures. And so a lot of these papers are saying like we're finding that preferences aren't measuring choice. But then you look at well, how did you measure preferences? How did you measure choice? And it's all over the place. And it's not really like a theoretically motivated what should we expect the preference to look like and how should we expect that to lead out to a choice. So I think if you clean up the measurement a little bit, things look clearer. And then this is also how I got into that preference integration stuff, right? There's a major issue here too in that a lot of this work is strictly univariate.

So it's looking at what is your physical attractiveness preference? How attractive is the person that you chose, right? Yes. Um, but we know people have more than just one preference, right? Especially when you're looking at like a speed dating event, the most attractive person you only talk to 10 people. The most attractive person you talk to might have been a total asshole, right? They might have been an idiot. And you can only pick one person at the at the end of the day, right? And one person does not have one trait, they have many traits. Yeah, and you have to make a balancing consideration of all of their traits together. Do I like this whole bundle of traits uh uh enough for me to mate with this person?

It's not just, oh, they're they meet my attractiveness threshold, therefore I will mate with them. It's no, this person is a hugely complicated entity with all sorts of traits and costs and benefits. How am I going to evaluate this complicated uh bundle of costs and benefits? And that's what what you're interested in. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Um so yeah, my argument has been if you if you consider that sort of balancing act that people are doing, you probably see clearer correspondence between uh preferences and choice. And I think we have some evidence of that. And that's also been like a good way of shoeh I don't know. I don't know how successful I've been in this, but I I I've seen it as a good way of

shoehorning in this more adaptationist, you know, psychological design-oriented thinking into the mating psych literature in general, right? Like we need to stop with this sort of purely statistical approach where we're just predicting latent constructs from latent constructs and really ask hard questions about how do we think the mind works and let let those hypotheses about the design of the mind guide our predictions about people's behavior. And what is a plausible function that the mind evolved to perform? The mind did not evolve to pick uh dates at a speed dating uh event, right? Uh it evolved in a very different context. And the decision that the mind evolved to make from an evolutionary standpoint is not is

this person uh you know uh a six or above on my attractiveness meter, therefore I'm gonna mate with them. It's okay, I can only pick one person to rear offspring with, right? And they might be, you know, a bit uh more attractive than than usual, but a bit dumber than usual, or a bit nicer than usual, or you know, a bit you know younger than I'd like, or whatever. Like there are all these considerations to make, and that is the decision that is of evolutionary relevance. That is the decision that natural selection is going to be selecting for in uh in terms of making that decision uh well and effectively. It's not the decision of are they hot enough for me? It's is this a good choice for me to uh is this person a good choice for me to rear

offspring with cooperatively uh in a way that will uh increase my fitness in future generations? And that is a much more complicated decision to make than is this person hot enough? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's also uh I think we've neglected a lot of the people who've come at this, they're coming from sort of like social psych and cognitive psych perspectives on decision making, where you're normally studying a thing where you're the one only one making a decision, right? Like you're you're the decision you make is like what brand of laundry detergent do I buy, or what car do I buy, or like what I don't know, political party do I choose to support, or something like that. But these are very unilateral decisions.

Like you just get to pick what you want, but mating doesn't work that way, right? You're making the choice in the context of a mating market where you have to pick a partner and also be picked back by them. And so, you know, it might not be rational to pick a partner that you don't expect to pick you back as well. And so you have to consider, like especially in a speed dating event where you're getting immediate feedback from this person, uh, are they mutually interested in you? Right. There might be partners who in a different world maybe you would choose, but you know, by virtue of uh their preferences, you decide to go elsewhere. So you also need to consider the the broader, you know, social networks that people are

embedded in and the feedback systems that that happen in in mating market dynamics. Yeah. Yeah. And totally. A whole nother comp set of complications. The costs of pursuing a mate that's not going to reciprocate your affections, uh, the costs of being more into them than they are into you, or vice versa. Yeah, it's huge. I mean, so this brings us to another uh topic that you're interested in, which is your desirability as a mate. Um, so another potential solution to this puzzle of why uh mate preferences don't appear to matter is that um it takes two to tango and you need the other partner to reciprocate. Um and perhaps the biggest mate preference of all we have is that the mate has to be into

you too. That's probably the mother of all mate preferences, right? If they're not into you, then then the deal is off. Yeah. Yeah. Um so uh the problem is um, you know, if you are not a very desirable mate, then you're going to have a very limited pool of of mates to choose from, even if even if you really care about hotness as your number one criteria in a mate, well, the most of the hot people aren't out there aren't willing to mate with you, and you have to choose the hottest mate you can get. So even if I really want a 10, and I say that on a questionnaire, I really want to mate with a 10 and all the 10s reject me. Well and and you know a three is the is the hottest partner I can get, well, there's going

to be a really low correlation between my hotness preference and and the the mate I end up with. But that's not because it doesn't matter to me. You know, I still would probably prefer the three over the two over the one. It's that there are constraints in the in the mating market based on my desirability. Um so would you expect a greater correlation between preferences and outcomes among more desirable mates than among less desirable mates? And do you actually see that empirically? I would argue you would expect that. And we have evidence that that's true. We have evidence that's true around the world. I would argue, you know, that's a major reason to doubt uh the interpretations that people

have drawn of these feed dating studies. Uh, but that tends to fall on deaf ears. Um you know, I I I if I put my like tinfoil hat on, this is my like, this is the problem the the the problems we're seeing in mating psychology are just reflective of the broader problem with in psychology as a whole. Um, which uh, you know, Dave, you both heard me talk about this probably endlessly, but uh this is blog post uh from 2013. I think Denny Borsboom. Yeah, I just adore and he you know puts a name to this issue that I I hadn't heard before. I don't know if he came up with it or not, but you know, he says psychologists are stricken with theoretical amnesia, where like we just don't know what a scientific theory even looks

like, and we end up replacing scientific theories with statistical models. Like we we can't see the difference between a statistical model and a theoretical model. Uh, and that's so emblematic, I think, of what's happened in this mate choice literature, where you know, people are so the whole approach has just been, I'm going to set up this linear regression model. And if preferences predict choice, then I should be able, I have these data where I've collected people's preferences and I've collected the choices they've made. if preferences predict choice, then the preference should predict the choice in this linear regression model. And I do my linear regression model and I get a p-value greater than 0.05.

So therefore, preferences don't predict choice. And I think that makes a lot of sense if you don't think about it very hard. But then when you do this harder work of thinking about, well, what is the problem people are actually trying to solve? What is the problem selection has actually built us to solve? you think through like, how does the system have to work, right? What are the things, yeah, selection would design an organism to pay attention to? How would you integrate those all down into one decision value? How would you enter a market where you've got a certain amount of buying power, you have a limited number of options available to you, you've got to negotiate a match, given your preferences, your you know, your affordances, their preferences, their affordances?

You know, how is that going to cohere into this, you know, singular choice? I think when you think all of that through, when you build models of how all that has to work, you can see the predictions of that theoretical model are not necessarily one, you can see that linear regression model is a really impoverished picture of what's happening in the world. And it's like trivial to show this theoretical model can actually predict that you wouldn't find anything in that linear regression model, right? Like you, if you want to see what you're looking for, you need, you need a more complete theoretical model. Um, but I think psychologists are not capable of seeing the relevance of that theoretical model to making predictions.

They don't understand that like your predictions should come out of a theory. They shouldn't come out of a statistical model. And that's crazy. Yeah. And Dan, you're doing some of that in the computational agent based modeling work. Is that right? Yeah. I mean, I that's the point of the agent based models, right? The point of the agent based models is it's a representation of the theoretical model that allows you to you can parameterize it with data from real people and you can make predictions about how those real people will behave. And you can see, do their predictions line up with their real behavior? And sometimes the predictions are that yeah, they won't choose a partner that matches what

they said their preference was. That doesn't mean that they're not acting on their preference. And that I think is a really subtle idea that's hard to get across to people who are just used to looking at correlation tables. Right. And what are you thinking about in terms of so you're talking about the adaptive problem and underlying psychology? Um, you know, there's this, these, these backwards looking issues about why this result didn't happen. As you're going forward and thinking about what is the psychology? And I know you've talked a bit about, you know, like love, right? Um, or attraction. Um, have you either personally or in the lab or you know, thinking down the road, are there things that you're interested in tackling or that you've been thinking about uh sort of the

the system and how it works that we haven't been looking at yet uh yeah it's I mean we've been doing so much work on choice um you know I I don't know that like we're right about anything sure um I think we have some you know intriguing evidence I think we've contributed helpfully I hope to some of these debates and you know we have models of what kind of computational object are these preferences, which I think work okay. We have models of how these preferences are integrated, yeah, into like mate value estimates, which I think work okay. We have models of sort of the psychology of attraction. How do you integrate those mate value estimates and the kind of feedback you're getting from other people to guide who you actually pursue?

Those seem to work okay. Like um, I think they can be improved. Hopefully, there's there's more work to do, and hopefully we're like inspiring people to have more of those conversations. And I should say I'm not doing this work alone. Like I'm you know in dialogue with these people, Paul Eastwick, Tony Gerlock, Jordan Brandner, um, Norm Lee, Peter Todd. Like uh I think it's been a really productive debate among all of us. Um, and I think yeah, I I'm I'm I'm happy with a lot of the contribution contributions we've made so far. And I want to keep doing that, but yeah, I do I do want to push beyond choice increasingly um and and try to get some purchase on what happens after choice. Um how do people make decisions about you know how to behave toward their

relationship partner I mean the way you said it before David is exactly right like it's a it's a it's a it's a cooperative relationship it's just a cooperative relationship that's focused on reproduction rather than like food production or yes uh you know other kinds of things so uh you know how do people navigate this particular cooperative relationship how do you decide how do you decide how to behave your towards your partner how do you decide when to end a relationship when to pursue a different relationship Um, I'd really, really love to study that kind of stuff. Um, it feels like going out on a limb because I I I don't know that I have really clear ideas about how that psychology works.

Yeah. I mean, for my part, I'm shocked at the extent at how little integration there has been between cooperation research and mating research, given that a mateship is inherently a cooperative relationship, you would think that all of the lessons we learn from cooperation and game theory would apply naturally to mating. You know, not defecting in prisoners' dilemmas, you know, detecting cheaters, uh, you know, uh uh uh contributing when uh the benefits outweigh the costs, uh calculating, you know, are are they pulling their weight? Is this is this a fair division of resources? You know, all this stuff uh is the the warp and weft of our relationships from from date anyone who's been in a relationship knows that it is a constant cooperative, uh

endlessly varying, uh uh endlessly negotiated relationship. Um and there are things being traded, there are things being offered, uh uh things being threatened to uh uh be taken away or or you know all all this stuff comes to bear. So why hasn't cooperation uh been integrated with uh mating. And parenting too. And parent parenting, yeah, that's the big one. That's the whole reason why this this machinery exists in the first place is that you know these relationships ultimately exist so that we can parent together. Uh wha why is there so little research on parenting, which which is the whole point of this this relationship at the end of the day. Yeah. Yeah. I I think part of it is historical artifact, right?

As we've been talking about sort of David Buss and mating research went one way. You know, John T B and Lida Cosmities and Cooperation Research went another way. Yeah. David was very focused on this sort of like personality, psych just map these abstract latent constructs and map relationships between these constructs, but not really digging all that deep into the the psychological design. very emphasis, very heavy emphasis on sex differences rather than design. And so mating people very much go into that area and they don't necessarily read as much of the cooperation stuff. You know, Lita and John took cooperation in this very like cognitive science, very cognitive psychology, you know, map decision rules of cooperation.

Um, and so I think just different kinds of people end up being interested in the different topics and they they pick different questions. Um and I I think there is a lot to learn uh in mating psychology from cooperation research. And I've been really inspired by that, especially since coming to Santa Barbara, right? Like the best mate choice models we have are reciprocity models, and they look almost indistinguishable from the kinds of models you would use to model reciprocity and other kinds of cooperative exchanges. Uh so I think that's gonna be an obvious place to start. And I have, you know, a new grad student starting in the fall who's interested in these questions. So I'm really hoping I can, you know, he and I can, this is a good opportunity for both of

us maybe to dig into like how do we study relationships from this adaptationist perspective. Um I will say my impression, which is maybe ignorant, because again I'm a mating guy, I'm not a cooperation guy. Um but my impression is a lot of the cooperation literature is very focused on relatively, how do I say this, kind of like isolated cooperative dilemmas? Like how do you make choices in this cooperative scenario, but isn't as focused on relationships per se? Yeah. So it's like, you know, how do you have this? Uh and that's maybe not entirely fair, but like, how do you have like a sort of how do you navigate a repeated prisoner's dilemma kind of situation is maybe the closest you would get to like a relationship, but like a relationship is a bunch of different cooperative

dilemmas. Yes. Yes. All with the same person. And like there is something complicated about like playing multiple games with the same person across multiple different sorts of different resource types. And yes. What does the ledger look like when it's like, yeah, time spent parenting versus time spent, you know, foraging versus time spent on sex and stuff like that. Like it's yeah, it's it's a mindfuck. Uh and it it speaks again to this issue we've been bumping into, which is the clash between the complexity of reality and the crudeness of our methods. Yeah. Um and I think there's a theme too of the history. I've almost I've always thought about like there's like a provisional evps and evpsy proper, like pep and ep.

Um and it's and it's sort of it was this thing. Like I remember reading David's BBS paper, and I remember people being like, Well, this is great, but you need more data, right? And like really it was an incredible thing of that generation to to provide data And even for Alita and John's work, like the cheater detection work, the domain general versus domain specific thing. You know, that was the analog of the sex differences thing. But I oftentimes a lot of eager students will come in and they want to be like, well, I want to show something's domain specific. And I think like one of the things we're we're kind of the theme we're we're we're talking about is that this the the the third wave sort of or this of like

proper thing is, well, no, you just do a task analysis, right? It's like nobody's thought about, well, how do you model a family as a relationship or reciprocity thing? So there's no domain-specific or general argument to be made. It's that you've got to come up with this de nouveau. It's not a measure. It's not a personality survey. Um, it's not a waste and task. You're not reaffying the measure, you're actually going adaptive problem task analysis first. And you're exactly right, Dan. I think like the incentives, the perverse incentives, and this is what the Burzroom paper, too, is like if you don't have data, uh, and if you don't have a lot of papers with a lot of data, then it's really hard to be competitive.

And actually, what we're arguing is that you need, no, you need to like derive what you should be looking for with a task analysis. And, you know, and and how would you study that is down the road from what is it you should be looking for in the first place. So um so no, I think like that's that theme of going from sort of a task analysis adaptive problem first as opposed to reaffying the measures um or the arguments that were necessary to like make Evpsych uh even uh part of the discussion scientifically yeah yeah and I I mean it this connects something to something you were saying earlier David about like these sort of early conversations, the kinds of people that they attract to the field.

Um again, going back to Dawn, this is a quote that around here gets attributed to Dawn a lot, but I'm never actually sure what the source of this quote is. But he apparently would say that you can't understand what someone is saying unless you understand who they're arguing with. Um, and I think if you look back at a lot of the early F-Syc work, exactly like what you're just saying, Dave, There's part of it that is sketching out what adaptationism should look like. This is this is what the adaptationist program for studying psychology should be. But there's another part of it that is just, you know, applying that sort of stuff in the background, but really just trying to establish the validity of this approach.

And so a lot of these early founders picked these particular topics, yeah, like sex differences, like domain specificity, because they were like useful points of leverage for showing that this adaptationist program was useful. Um, and that was very successful in sort of like getting F-Sec in the door. But then I think when you have these newer generations who maybe aren't as familiar with who the interlocutors were at the time, they don't know who people were arguing with when they were proposing sex differences or proposing arguments about domain generality, domain specificity that they missed that, like, no, that was just supposed to be a useful wedge to like sneak in this adaptationist program stuff.

So, like, we're we're past that now, hopefully. Like enough people agree evolutionary psychology is a worthwhile thing to do. And so we need to, we need to give up on these like old dead debates. And we need to just apply this like adaptationist program that people, you know, put a lot of work into crafting and just apply it to the topics we want to study now. But I I think if if you weren't there for a lot of those conversations, it's it's easy to miss that that's what we're supposed to be doing now. Do you think that's happening, Dan? Like like applying adaptationism? I mean, do you think that that's effective or do you think um I don't. I don't know. I'm I'm I'm a little pessimistic. I don't know.

I think um I think there are a lot of people who are in the field now because they just like making people angry. Um so they they just like those arguments they just like those debates and so you know, they really just want to keep like banging the sex differences, pots and pans, and making as much noise as possible. Um, I I I don't know. Uh you know, Dave, you know we've been recently cleaning out the the physical CEP lab space, trying to prepare a move. And it's been a trip like going through uh just like 30 years of nothing that ever entered that room ever left it. So there's just 30 years of like F-Syc history in this physical space. We found like an old uh HBS program from like 1992 or something like that, and just like thumbing through the pages of that.

Like I think the quality of work is probably overall higher now than it was back then on a lot of dimensions. But I had the sense just from like a quick thumb through that there were a lot, there was much more diversity of topic in that older program. And there were a lot of people that were just like, I want to study this topic. Like here's my attempt at an adaptationist approach to that topic. And I feel like that doesn't happen as much at ACS these days. I think there's a there's a much higher percentage that's just like I'm just gonna riff off of this thing from the 90s. Um and many fewer people not none. I think there are there's some really good work out there that really makes me hopeful for

the future. But I I worry that the the percentage of like adaptationist approaches is decreasing over time. I don't know what your responses are on that. Adaptationist as compared to what? So for for for those who who don't know, we should d briefly define adaptationism as a kind of reverse engineering approach to uh the mind, um, where you try to th uh think about what a a plausible adaptive problem would have been for our ancestors and map out what a viable solution to that problem would be. And then you make predictions based on on your model of what uh that effective solution might look like very briefly. Um uh so adaptation is you you you have been bemoaning the decline of adaptationism.

Yeah yeah uh what what has been replacing it? What what is it what is the uh the foil to it? I I think um what it is is sort of like mainstream psychology with just a sort of twist of evolution. It's like yes yeah F Psych flavored LaCroix or something like that. That's a I buy that. It's a beautiful and hideous analogy at the same time. Yeah. It's you know, again, I I don't know. I I I don't want to shit talk people to you. Like, you know, people are doing their this is this is the place to do it, man. This is the place where all the shit gets out. It's just us three, man. It's just us three. It's just I love HBass. It's my favorite conference, you know, and and God bless anyone who's who's out there

trying to do evolutionary psychology. Um, and again, I think there are a lot of people out there really trying, but I I think there are people who, again, they're just either just trying to stir controversy, they're not really trying to eliminate how the mind works, they're just trying to say things that makes people that will make people angry. And then I think there are people who are kind of just like they're just applying the sort of same statistical theoretical amnesia from like mainstream social psych or cognitive psych or developmental psych or whatever, but towards questions that historically have been of interest to evolutionary psychologists, but not even questions, like topic areas.

They're taking a topic area that has been popular in evolutionary psychology and just doing mainstream psychology on it. And because it's a mating topic, it sort of gets classified as evolutionary psychology. But there's no task analysis. There's not really much consideration of like what is the specific adaptive problem that you're studying here? What's your evidence that this would have been a recurrent reproductive problem throughout human evolutionary history? Right. There's no consideration of like what is a what are the possible psychological designs that could actually have been good at solving this problem? And how do you know that they actually would have been good at solving this problem?

And then how do those psychological designs interact with the features of the modern environment that you think are relevant to generate behavior? It's just like, well, David Buss found this sex difference in preferences, but uh, you know, Tinder exists now. And so nobody has asked, do these preferences also manifest on Tinder? So we looked at people's Tinder choices and looked to see if the sex differences are there. There's a much higher volume of that kind of stuff and a much lower volume of like, you know, I'm I'm interested in, I don't know. I mean I won't name names, but like I remember specifically showing you, Dave, in that program uh some work of a person who I don't have a very high opinion of their current

watch. and I wasn't aware of like the kind of stuff that they were doing back when they were younger. Um, and I I remember looking at their abstract and thinking, holy crap, like this really good. They were really swinging for the fences, they were really trying to come up with a deep adaptationist theory of I don't even remember what the topic was. It might have been parenting. Like they're doing, you know, they were trying to do some serious evolutionary psychology at one time, and then I don't know, they got hit in the head with a coconut and now do uh really crazy stuff. Uh now they're a provocateur. You gotta watch it for those coconuts. Yeah. Um yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well that's depressing.

Um wha what are the parts of the field that give you hope to s you know, we're starting to wrap things up or drift in that direction. Be good to end on a high note. What are the the trends that you see as positive? Where do you see uh the hope? Yeah. I mean I I I think these discussions, like this this focus on this debate in the mate choice area has been really positive. I think that's pushed mating research in a much better direction than it was going. I don't think I said Brendan Zietz's name. Brendan Zieg has also been contributing to this literature in a really nice way. Yeah. So I think that stuff is positive. And just behavior behavioral genetics, just for people who aren't familiar, bringing

behavioral genetics analysis into uh uh conversation with the mating psychology literature, which I think is extremely useful. Yeah, yeah. Um, you know, I I I think cooperation stuff has always been going strong and that still goes strong. Um at HBest this last year, I thought HBest is last year was great. Uh I thought it was one of the best programs I can remember in a while. I don't know that I'm uh I don't know how popular of an opinion that is, but like in my opinion, I I thought this was an extremely strong program, maybe too small of a program, maybe a little too restrictive. Um uh but uh uh I thought the overall quality was really good. And I I was like really, really impressed with the stuff coming out of like the Paris

school. Uh oh, yeah. Paris school rules. Yeah. Um again, I think really inventive questions approached in a really just sober, um dedicated, adaptationist way. Um, I was so impressed with um a lot of the stuff coming out. Um again, either the like sort of Toulouse, the sort of new there seemed to be like a kind of new approach to cultural evolution that was cohering that like a lot of talks were, you know, Nicola Bamar and um uh Leo Fitucci and Singh and uh I think a new way of sort of bridging a sort of Santa Barbara style Boye kind of perspective on cultural evolution with a sort of UCLA boy Richardson Henrik style of thinking about cultural evolution. Um I I hope that coheres into its own sort of moot like

perspective soon, because I I was just hearing things across those talks that I hadn't quite heard as like commonalities and ways people were thinking about things yet. And I think that's that's super exciting. And I think that's going to be really good for yeah bridging a divide that I think has gotten too big and and too weird. Um totally. And such an understudied area too. Um, I remember so uh Tom Scott Phillips is another great scholar um who studies uh you know the game theory of communication, evolution of language. Uh and he recently I remember him remarking at how little work there was being done on communication at HBS. There's barely any work being done on communication, even though communication is basically

our superpower as a species. It's like the main thing we do as an animal if we spend most of our time. I mean, HBS is itself just a bunch of communication. And how little we know about communication is kind of mind-boggling. It should be at the front and center of what we're doing, and it's not there. Similarly, you know, you're talking about the Paris School, Hugo Mercier. It's a wonderful book, Not Born Yesterday, on our skepticism of information. You wouldn't expect us to be easily duped and easily exploited and manipulated. So we have a sophisticated information-seeking psychology that is sensitive to the costs of being manipulated and to people's competence and benevolence toward us. Fascinating stuff.

He also has a theory of reasoning where reasoning evolved in this social interactionist context where reasoning is not just this solitary thing that we do in our heads to arrive at wisdom, but something that uh uh occurs between people, that we we use reasoning to persuade other people and to justify our actions. Uh that stuff is awesome. And yet, as far as I'm aware, he's the only one working on reasoning. Um as far as I'm aware, him and a handful of other people are the only ones working on our skepticism toward communicated information and what that skeptical psychology should look like. And yet these are at the center of human existence, and we know barely anything about them. So, yeah, uh the lopsidedness of what we're focused on uh as as a research

community is kind of startling. Even within mate, I mean, I agree that mating should be, you know, front and center of of of you know studies of human nature. Mating is huge, it's one of the most important things going on in our lives. And yet even within mating, the parts of mating that we're focusing on are the are the least important parts of it. We're we're focusing on choice, right? Or attraction. The initial feelings of attraction you feel towards someone and not parenting, which is completely ignored, which is the whole purpose of of of mating, right? And yet we know nothing about parenting and we know tons of crappy stuff about attraction in a speed dating context. That's basically uh so the the lopsidedness of of what our

priorities are in terms of what to study is is startling. That said, the few people who are working on reasoning and communication and epistemic vigilance are our skepticism of information, those people are doing awesome work. It's really insightful, inspiring, beautiful work. Um, people doing work on emotions. Aaron Sell's work on anger is incredible. Uh he recently did a guest talk uh at at our lab at UCLA. Uh mind blowing stuff. Uh Dan Sneezer doing work on pride and shame and cross cultural regularity. That stuff's awesome. Uh so there is there is a lot of good stuff happening. I wish there were more of it, and I wish um the awesome stuff was growing. Uh but it is there. Jamie Krems and friendship.

Yeah. Yeah. Excellent stuff on friendship and how it's not just this dyadic uh uh reciprocity relationship, but a complex uh uh uh dynamic where you have to uh figure out whether you're more loyal to me than other people or you know what my relationship with you says about my relationships to other people and when and thinking about friendship networks, like that stuff is again this this clash between the complexity of reality and the simplicity of our methods. Um Jamie Krims is an excellent example of of looking at the actual complexity of friendship. Uh and we'll we'll talk to her on a on a on our next episode. I'm excited about that. Um but yeah, there is there are stars in in the darkness.

Dan, I have uh yeah, oh Dan, I have a question. Uh if you could wave a magic wand, uh how would you uh what would be different either about uh HBS or of psych or psychology? Oh man. Uh if I could wave a magic I mean, part of you know, we'll see if our symposium at HBiscets uh shopping this talk around that is partly like if I could wave a magic wand, I would I would yeah, force all psychologists to express their hypotheses in the form of a formal adaptationist model. Uh that you need to give a you know logico mathematical computational formalism for what you think is the relative relevant adaptive problem, and what you think are the designs that are you know reasonably good, improbably good at solving that problem.

Um and how do those uh psychological models make predictions about the kinds of behavior people will make? Uh so yeah, I think I would love it if not all people would agree with me, I guess, on this. You know, we do have to be mindful uh in these conversations that HBS is not just evolutionary psychology. So I think, you know, our anthropology colleagues, especially our behavioral ecology colleagues, have been studying a lot of these topics like parenting. Yes. Um that we've been neglecting. Totally. Uh I think they've been rightfully annoyed at us evolutionary psychologists for being, yeah, so obsessed with like sex and dating to the exclusion of, yeah, these these very big parts of human life as well.

Yeah, foraging. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I think it's not necessarily H best's problem as a whole, as much as it is as like the evolutionary psychologists have not been uh holding up their end of the bargain, maybe. Um so I do want to give credit to our anthropology friends for doing that. And I also, you know, so that's why part of me why I want to say like all submissions to HBAS need to be explicitly adaptationist. But like I think it's fine if the behavioral ecologists and maybe even the cultural evolutionists aren't. But at least maybe you should have to say what wing, what which of the three fields are you submitting in? And if you're submitting as an evolutionary psychologist, like you need to include a task

analysis in your submission. That's actually a beautiful idea. Um it's just just when you're filling out the form to submit a talk or symposium, there's just a s a section on task analysis, adaptive problem, and you have to and you have to input those, and that's the way you submit something. I think potentially very interesting idea. Um Yeah, might cut submissions a bit. That's true. Or it might force people to think in in terms of adaptationist you know frameworks. Yeah. Um, which might be a good thing. I don't know. Yeah. Do you think it's a lack of knowledge and that if we just provide the knowledge or force people to do it in their submission uploads but uh or is it are there perverse incentives

or structural things in the way too I think it's a bit of both. But yeah I I think the the structural issue here is the perverse incentives I think should not be understated, right? Like I think it's it's just y you need papers, man, and it's so easy to publish a six differences paper. Uh it's so hard to take a lot of time trying to build a a really precise model of some evolutionary system. Um so yeah, I I don't blame people, you know, especially these days when resources in academia are especially taxed. Like to just go especially, yeah. I mean I mean the the the line you said that has been haunting me is that a lot of the the worst F Psych is just like um just psychology with an evolutionary twist, like a like a

like a LaCroix with evolutionary flavoring. Uh and and I think you know part of that comes from the fact that, you know, we are psychologists, we have to get jobs in in psychology departments. A lot of people come into F Psych from psychology departments, and that has a way of thinking, a methodology behind it. And often it's the path of least resistance to just do psychology with an evolutionary twist. And that's the best way to get a job in a psychology department is to do things that are recognizable to other psychologists, but have this cool twist that, you know, sets you apart from other people. Um so Yeah, and I think I mean I think there's other, like obviously, there's like many good people in lots of areas of psychology who are trying to get away from what's

called effectology, right? And there's fortunately one of the things in the theory crisis literature is this idea. Um uh Iris von Rouge, I I I don't know how to say your last name, apologies, but you know, it talks about you can't just take a bunch of effects and like cobble them together like if you bunch like almost like a bunch of iron filings thrown into a magnetic field that it's all going to coalesce around a theory. Like that's not, if you look across the history of sciences, that's not effects, collecting effects is not um the way, the way things work. And so I do think um the the idea that you have to think about the underlying psychology and the design, whether or not people take an evolutionary approach or not, that you're

getting at the underlying the invariance you want is how the system works and what its function is. And I think I think people are aware of that. But yeah, I wonder, like even when I do task analyses here, like I've been I taught a grad course this fall. Um it's very much like, you know, there's a lot of uncertainty when you're doing a task analysis is very much a creative process of and it's sort of brainstorming. It's sort of, well, given what are all the sub problems entailed, you know, and just even not starving to death, what are all the systems, what are all the functions? And you can really see in students that there's a reluctance to not be wrong, to not say something that they don't have already have evidence for.

Um, and I think like that's a real problem because you know that we're talking about, and this is Borsboom's point, is that we need theory to derive what to look for in the first place. Like Dan, I think your work is some of the most lovely in terms of doing lots of methods to derive what to look for ahead of time. And I think we we've we've we've trained generations of students who don't feel like they're allowed to say what we should be looking for unless you already have data for it. And I think that sounds rigorous if you think about it for one second, but if you think about it for longer than one second, um it becomes looking under it's the person looking for their keys under the light where we're trivializing the things we're looking for

because we were only allowed to look for the things we already have data for. And I think that's a real um structural issue of we have to let a task analysis breathe and not request data from it right away, for example, is what I think. Yeah. And we need a a healthier respect for theory in general. Um not just more theory, because there's lots of crappy theories in psychology. I don't I don't mean to like any theory, like uh a respect for for what a good theory is. Um it's not a factor analysis. I mean, there's there's a place for organizing disparate findings, and that can be extremely useful. But many theories, it's again this you're not allowed to theorize unless you have data, and then it it's it's a uh it's a uh a a factor analysis.

Um It's not deductive. It's induction. It's just sort of here's what we have evidence for, and I will just characterize the common variable or latent variable underlying these effects. I think that kind of theorizing is allowed. Yeah, I I don't, again, I I genuinely don't think a lot of psychologists are aware of what a theory is. Um, a lot of what gets called theory in psychology, yeah, is either a factor analysis or yeah, it's like a string of empirical general generalizations, right? Like Murray at all 1975 found this, and Campbell et al. 1980 found that. And so, given those two observations, my hunch is you combine those two facts, you know, a third fact should be true. Or what we don't know what happens if you combine those two facts.

And so here's some possibilities. Um, but they're not none of these are yeah, descriptions of how you think the world works grounded in some sort of broader theoretical principle. It's just either these things correlate. And so here's yeah, here's the shared variance, or it's here's three things that people have found before. And so here's how they mash together. Yeah. Or or here's here's a an analogy to a the mind is a symphony and there can be dissonant notes. So there's cognitive dissonance, or you know, the mind is a hydraulic system and we need to let out steam, so there's venting, and you know, like these kinds of uh glib analogies also populate our our psychology in a troubling way, anyway.

I'll even take an analogy because an analogy is at least like makes it something has an internal logic, and if you follow that logic out, it makes predictions that could be right or wrong. But like a path model doesn't really. I know. Most most theories aren't even wrong. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Uh Dan, any question that we should have asked you? Uh that's a great question. I should have anticipated that question. Should we have asked you that very question? Is there any question we shouldn't have asked? Uh I don't know. Or do you have a question for us? This has been a great this has been a great uh been a great conversation. I don't know. Yeah, no, it's really nice to this is the thing. This is also, I mean, like, this is part of the reason I'm doing this too.

It's very selfish on my part too, because it's just like you really like day to day you just see people and you're like, I really respect people as scientists, present company excluded, but um but uh no no for real like I mean I like you guys I deeply respect you guys and uh and but then I you know we see each other and other things are going on and you don't get a chance to talk about you know, like what are you actually thinking about and thinking deeply. And it's one of the things I love about being a scientist is that the people you get to meet and and be with over time. And like both of you are a great example of like, you know, when I when I see you in person, it's like no time has changed or passed, you know, and it's just um and knowing

people who are sort of fellow travelers and getting to do it with people like you it's just a real pleasure so it's nice to be able to talk um not about like the mundane stuff but sort of about what you're thinking about it's one of the reasons I wanted to do this. Well I mean one question I can ask both of you this is something we I think the three of us have talked about informally but but maybe we can just sort of make it all mutual knowledge is like how do you think our field's stock is doing Are we on the rise? Are we are we flat? Are we going down? What's your impression? Interesting. Uh I have conflicting intuitions. On the one hand, I think it's undeniable that our stock has gone up in the past 30 years.

Um and you know, I think evolutionary psychology used to be incredibly controversial and disdained. It is now much more mainstream and accepted uh as as a valid perspective. It's much easier to get uh a publication accepted in a journal with an explicitly evolutionary approach than it used to be 30 years ago. Um you will get way fewer uh adverse reactions to bringing up evolutionary psych ideas. Um and you know the uh and I think uh in some ways the quality has increased. You know, we've we've gotten um new perspectives, new methodologies, um new ideas from cultural evolution, uh evolutionary game theory. Um so I think in some ways uh the work is getting better. Um it's slower than I'd like. You know, I I do think it's headed in the right direction.

it's it's like a fucking sloth. I want it to pick up the pace, you know. But maybe that's just an un maybe that's just how the world works, and you know, that's the best we can hope for is for things to slowly get better. Um, you know, if you look at progress in any other area of human life, it's it tends to be pretty slow. Um, so so maybe this is just uh as fast as we're gonna get, and we just gotta wait for the sloth to to make its way forward. Um part of me worries that maybe we're we're starting to decline a bit, that maybe we've we've um I don't know. The we're we're starting to go downhill and that the number of people with truly adaptationist ideas is starting to decline. Um I don't know.

That's that's a fear I have. What do you think? I agree that you know our stock has risen considerably. I mean, um, you know, I I became a student or I was interested in working with John Alita when I was coming up into things. And uh there are some people who read the psychological foundations of culture. Um, Rob Kurzman called it the uh standard social science straw man or something. Standard, you know, he was like, I don't think this is like true. The the um uh I really found that to be exactly the water I was swimming in as an undergrad. I mean, the the what was described as the SSSM in that chapter was my undergraduate education. So for me, um the there's been quite a change in uh in in our stock in that respect.

The the the degree to which people are just saying, oh, from an evolutionary perspective, and genuinely meaning like this is adding something, and it's not, there's no blink, there's no, you know, it's just sort of without you know, just in passing. Um, so I think the idea that evolution is useful, which is something that Lita famously talked about, how her cognition waste and stuff, uh, the reviewers were like, Well, you can't say that you got this idea from evolution. Lita would always say, you know, if I had the idea like in the shower, it would have been fine. The problem wasn't the theory, the problem wasn't the data, the problem wasn't the implications about the design of the mind, the problem was the source of the hypothesis.

Um, and it was a real, real uh stretch to publish something that was premised on this is where I got the idea for it from, which is exactly what you would think in a science where you would want theory, right? Um, and so I don't think it's an accident that the theory crisis exists because you know Lita, for example, and John went through that. Went through that. So I think that's very different. The idea, the general idea that evolutionary approaches are helpful and useful is well understood. My opinion is there's two things that are not going great. One is what we've characterized sort of as provisional of psych is um Is sort of largely what's understood and so uh as what evpsy is. So the idea of sort of, you know, there are certain things that evolutionary psychology can

tell you, but not everything is domain-specific, right? Not everything is a sex difference. Um, and so the what sort of gets understood as what evpsy is, is is some things. It applies to some things, but not everything. And and then people sort of have this map then of, well, you know, it's great, it's an overlayer approach, but it's not really relevant to what I study. If people understood adaptationism, if people understood task analysis, I think it would look very different in the way evolutionary psychology would be interfacing with the rest of psychology and where it is would be very different. The way I think about it is Ev PSYC is answering a question that isn't largely being asked, which is sort of, you know, what are the design features underlying a lot of these

phenomena? And I think unfortunately for Evpsych, if Ev PSYC had come along at a time where psychology was more asking questions about what's the underlying design features, then the relevance of the answer would have been clearer. And I think it's it's we're still fighting that battle. Um, that's outside of EvSec. But I do think people are generally okay with it. But I I do think, and in this is coming back to this other problem of sort of people being interested in controversy, I I appreciate and understand, and John Alita talked about this a lot. People felt like it was a real personal point of courage to be able to stand up and say, I take an evolutionary approach. And there were there were there was a lot of controversy, and there were a lot of

accusations about people being malicious for taking an evolutionary approach. Um, and even why Don Simons is was at UCSB apparently is because uh he was at Berkeley and there wasn't really it wasn't appreciated that he was applying evolutionary approaches to humans, so he he went down to Santa Barbara from Berkeley, which is why we're here Dan now, basically. Um but yeah, um but I do worry that collecting people who are interested in controversy does uh it leads to a dynamic where sometimes controversy is sort of uh coddled at the expense of good science. Um and and more to the point is I do believe we have earned social capital with respect to like other scientists. And I and I do appreciate that people have different

experiences, people have different political views, and people can feel really put upon and want to express um when they feel like things have been unfair or unjust. Um and and I I wouldn't question that or suggest they shouldn't be able to do that. But from an ideal perspective, one of the things I worry is when people talk about Evpsych being controversial, they're they're we're using up the social capital for things that are not about EV-psych. So one of the things like I I worry about is people who are attracted to Evpsy and who are saying, look, you know, uh, we're there's there's not enough diversity of viewpoints in psychology, they're not talking about the lack of adaptationism in psychology.

They're not talking about the lack of task analyses in psychology. And as an evolutionary psychologist, that's what I would have hoped that our social capital would have earned us, is that argument. And if uh and that's not to say other arguments should be excluded, but I think to the extent they are, that's the thing that I find really frustrating: is we're using up whatever social capital we had as a collective to make points that have nothing to do with evolutionary psychology or if they do, they're very indirect. Um and so that's my that's my two cents. Yeah. It's a tragedy of the commons situation where we have this common resource of our credibility as a field and people are are squandering it and not using it efficiently.

Um yeah. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I think I agree with with both of those perspectives. Well, um hopefully this uh is a little bit of light. Um Dan, it was uh it was a pleasure to to talk to you. And um um your your lab uh has a website, so people want to sort of keep up to date on your work, um, they should go there. Yeah, yeah. Danconraybeam.com. Okay. Computational Mate Choice Lab. Yeah, is that right? Yeah, yeah. Yep. Yep. Fantastic. Good. Well, well, Dan, thank you so much. It was a pleasure. And uh we'll um maybe we should we'll all get together at HBES when we see each other in in real life, as the kids say. That sounds great. Thanks, thanks so much for having me. This is a really great conversation.

Yeah, thanks. Yeah, Thanks for coming, man. Well, that about does it for this episode. Thank you for listening. Uh, if you like what you're hearing, please don't be shy. Leave us a kind review. Uh, spread the word on social media, uh, visit our Patreon page if you want to support us. Uh, and the plan is we're going to do this again next week, right, Dave? Yeah, that's right. David, um, we will do this once a week and and who knows? We'll just we'll just keep going. The sky's the limit. Yeah. So make sure you subscribe to this podcast so you get the next one. And uh we'll see you next week. Yeah. Enjoy your week and be kind to yourself this week.