42: Human Mating Intelligence

Glenn is a longtime friend and mentor, I would say, and officially he's the professor and chair of the Psychology department, as well as director of the Evolutionary Studies Program at the State University of New York and New Poulse. What else can I say about Glenn since I feel like this is the first interview. Glenn is a great guitarist in the band Questionable Authorities, which we'll put up a link on YouTube for and he also his life motto

is life is short, play hard. Welcome Glenn, Awesome, Thank you so much, Scott. It's great to be here. Yeah, what a life motto. You know. I'm all about the value of play, right, absolutely. Have you personally looked at the evolutionary basis of play it though, I've run into some of the stuff on that in Peter Gray's work.

You know, he studies education from an evolutionary perspective, and that's a huge focus of what he says our ancestors really were all about, particularly during childhood, you know, and that distinction between play and schooling and education really isn't so distinct when you look at how these things play out in pre Western eyes, the more natural kinds of societies. Yeah. No, I absolutely love that research. So your the trajectory of

your career is very interesting. You didn't necessarily start out as an evolutionary psychologist. You did work on social psychology with Jack Mayer, is that right? Yeah? And personality even personality yeah. Yeah. So what I really like and I think something that we connected our mutual interest in trying to like reconcile individual differences with more universal adaptations. Would you say that's been kind of a major theme of your research or if not, you know, what are some

other major themes? Yeah? I mean, I think that's absolutely right. You know, one of the great things about studying human psychology is that we can study human universals. So there's lots of things that people around the globe all do you know, we're bipedal, we stand, we're designed to walk. We have altricial children or offspring need a lot of attention. So we like babies, and we have nurturing kinds of tendencies. There's certain foods that people tend to like. There's certain

foods that people tend to despise. There's lots there's emotions that people recognize regardless of who's expressing them or what culture the person is from that who's expressing them. So there's lots of things that are universal about the human animal. And that's great. We're animals, right, you didn't get the memo? Oh shoot yeah, check your inbox. I thought we're above that. Nope, nope, all animals are different than I'd argue that none is above any of the others that are all just adapted

in their wrong way. Oh wow, that's so cool. So like it's not like we're above turtles. Absolutely not. Man, that's so cool. I love that. And then even within then the implication is even within humans, where we shouldn't like act as though like any of us are above anyone else, absolutely, man. I mean from the evolutionary perspective,

you know, all life comes from the same origins. You know, the origin story from the evolutionary perspective, i'd say, is just as as powerful and soulful and interesting as what you might find in any religion. You know, this idea that all organisms are highly interrelated to one another, all come from a common ancestor, and there's you know, all the great biological research points to the fact that all

life comes from a common ancestor. There's genetic overlap, not only obviously between humans, but between humans and other primates, but even between humans and grasshoppers and insects. There are certain specific genetic elements that are identical in humans, as you tend to find, and in lots of other kinds of life forms. So you know, it's a grand view. You know. Darwin had this phrase, there's grandeur in this view of life, and I absolutely agree with that perspective. Yeah,

me too. I really do think there's wonder. There's wonder in the world itself, even without going beyond it. So yeah, your research spans so many and integrates so many different threads trying to think of priorities. What to start with first? Perhaps the best thing to start with is this area of the mutual interest something called have you heard of mating intelligence? I think I've heard of that one. Scott so Glenn Gare coined the phrase mating intelligence, right, and

when did you do that? In two thousand and five? About two thousand and five. Yeah, I'd love to talk a little bit about the history of the construct of the idea. I'd be great. So when I was a graduate student at the University of New Hampshire back in the day, studying social psychology, I was working with Jack Mayer, who's the person who coined the term emotional intelligence and conducted a whole bunch of research on emotional abilities that people all have to some degree, that people vary on

from one another as well. When he caused this emotional intelligence, and so I did research on that. I was very fortunate to be working with him. I also worked with Becky Warner, who was a social psychologist studying lots of different things, but particularly the nature of intimate relationships. So I was fascinated by understanding the interpersonal or the intrapersonal processes like emotional processes that we bring to relationships and

just the nature of how people form relationships. This is kind of the interface of what we might call personality psychology and social psychology to some extent. Yeah, Glenn, you also integrated Freud things psychoanalytics stuff in one of your papers. What my papers did? That was my dissertation. I actually loved that paper. Yeah, thank you, Scutts. Can you talk a little bit about that paper in particular for sure dissertation?

And I'll tell you that actually that got me interested in the evolutionary perspective in working on that particular paper. So there's this idea, you know, when you're doing your dissertation in grad school, depending on your advisor and your situation, you can really study something that seems interesting to you or any question that really hasn't been fully addressed by

prior researchers. So someone studying relationships, I was interested in this question of the extent to which people's parents influence their partner choice. Right, So there's a sort of old voiding an idea of you know, you end up marrying someone who's just like your opposite sex parent. Is there any validity to this? And so it was pretty straightforward question.

I looked at the literature to see has anyone really study that in a systematic kind of way, and it hadn't really been studied in a very systematic We collected a bunch of data from people that were early in relationships, people in their twenty is a high proportion of them, where people who were engaged to be married, for instance, We asked them to fill out a whole battery of personality measures to describe themselves their parents, their same sex parents,

their opposite sex parent, their romantic partner, and their ideal romantic partner, and we essentially ran a whole bunch of advanceistics to sort of see where was their overlap and where was there not. We also had their actual opposite sex parent fill out their own measures, so we had that data, and then we had the parents of the opposite sex parent or of the romantic partner fill out their own data as well as much as we could. Wait. So not the grandparent correct, Okay, not the parent of

the parent. Not the parent of the parent, right, because that'd be weird if it went all the way back to like we it's like we don't marry our parents, but we actually marry our grandparents. That would be awesome. So what we married some of the looks like you should say, right, right. So what we found essentially was that people perceived similarity when it's not really there. So

that was kind of interesting. Wow, there was a lot more perceived similarity between people's partners and their parents than there was actual similarity. And people's ideal romantic partners were actually very similar to their perceptions of their parents, So very strong idealization bias going on. Is there a confound here in terms of we know, a sort of meeting, we tend to be attracted people who are similar to us,

and genetically we're similar to our parents. Is there a confound there and that like maybe what is we're really just you know, we're attracted to like there's like an overlap of things that are similar between us and our parents. And it's a really good point. Gosh, I haven't thought in this detail about my dissert decades, but I'll tell

you we thought carefully about that. And the fact what we did was we did what are called maybe there were hierarchical regression analyzes somethingwhere we partialed out self report ratings for exactly that purpose to see if the perceives smilarity between parents and partners was still there controlling for perceptions of the self and generally speaking, we did find that. So it's a good question and the effect sort of

was still there. Wow. So the short answers that we we do tend to is just marry people who are married in a relationships subset were married, a subset were college students and dating relationships. And then this was the fun part. We went to a bridal convention no way, Yeah, to collect data. So I was I was engaged to my beautiful wife Kathy at the time, and so we were kind of doing double dipping by going to this bridle convention in Manister, Hampshire and what is a bridal

convention by the way, man alive. I have a lot of ideas, but dude, you don't ever want to go to one of these. I mean it's like like a man imagine like this is like a giant convention center and then there's like a whole thing about It's like the dresses. You know, this is the dress you got to get, and then there's the cake person and it's the kind of thing. Well, at least this is my experience.

You're kind of like, all right, and you wanted to sort of keep on going, but maybe your fiance wanted to sort of stop and look over things in a lot of detail. So it was a little bit interesting, but we had a good time. And I you know, I got to approach people as a doctoral student at the University of New Hampshire saying please fill out my survey. And we got some data from those folks as well, and so what do you find from them? The same thing?

Pretty much? Yeah, pretty much the it kind of we went. We worked so hard to get the data from that particular sample and they were no different That sample didn't behave any any differently. Wow. So the punchline is we do there is an effecture more so than we realize. Yeah, yeah, because of course we want to evolutionary expect me to go and downplay that, right, we don't, you know, because there's not evolutionary value in marrying your actual mother, right.

So yeah, so interesting. Okay, So I know you weren't expecting to go all the way back there. Has it literally been decades, like multiple decades. I finished that my degree in ninety seven. I think that got published in two thousand and so you do the math man. We are getting older, Glenn. Yeah, holy count. Okay, so we can go move forward a little bit. So you moved on.

So that was your disstation work. And then at what point did you like discover maybe Darwin or like, like when we were you doing when you start come in contact with the devilsh psychology principle? Sure, yeah, I'd be glad to talk about that. So I was a college student at the University of Connecticut back in the day. That was also decades ago. Oh wow, so we're even going before school. Yeah, this is ancient. Well was your

major psychology? And like a lot of students, I thought I was going to be a therapist because I thought psychologists and therapists were synonymous, which, by the way, is what almost all incoming psychology students in college think. And I had a very it was a very strong undergraduate program. I had a great experience. I found out that there's a big scientific part to psychology and that's the part that I really fell in love with and wanted to pursue.

And at some point I had a class called animal behavior with a guy named Benjamin Sachs, renowned rat behavioral researcher, and this class killed it for me. Man, there was no other class I had which had this effect. He started the class by describing basic evolutionary principles, which hadn't even been touched in any of my other psychology classes.

And it was pretty straightforward. I mean, I like math, and I like to think reasonably logically, and so I kind of liked, you know, evolutionary principles and evolutionary theory makes sense, and so he kind of describes that. And then the next thing he does, he has some grad students will in a cage with these rats, and there's a male rat and a female rat, and he says, this is the very beginning of class. He just says, get a piece of paper and a pencil and just

write down observations. So, okay, so there I am twenty one years old or whatever, I mean, a bunch of other kids and we're looking at it and they're having mating related behaviors right for like a half hour, and you know, this is class. This is what we're doing. The male much bigger than the female. The female tries very hard to resist the male. She puts up her claws. So why do rats have claws like that? Essentially, tries to scratch him in the face and tries to keep

him off. Why didn't female humans evolve calls? Maybe they did? Oh, interesting, right, So we just take notes to so many interesting things involved in that set of behaviors and then we describe them to the professor and what the point of this was? He said, okay, and he wrote down on the board all the specific things that we had observed, and he described how every last bit of it could be understood from an evolutionary perspective. For instance, why are males bigger

than females. Well, if the females are constantly fighting the males off, and this, mind you, is when they've been given a shot so that they are at their body is essentially mimicking peak estris. So even at that point she is fighting off the male as hard as she can, the larger males are going to be more likely to be able to copulates. It's among rats, so why are the male rats so aggressive? The females are fending off

the males, So here's the adaptation. So for females to fend off males like that, and then the males what they end up doing is leading to an evolutionary process that leads to larger males because the smaller males would not succeed and would not successfully reproduce, So across generations,

this is going to lead to relatively large males. So this is what we'd call sexual dimorphism in this particular case, males being larger than females, and it was sort of one aspect of their mating behavior after another after another. He describes from an evolutionary perspective, and I was like, this is just fantastic. It made so much sense. A few years later, at the University of New Hampshire studying emotional intelligence and relationships in the PhD program studying human behavior,

and a guy named David Buss comes to visit. David Buss is a renowned evolutionary psychologist, so he's very tall. He's giant rights in all respects. So David comes and he gives a talk at UNH. He had just written a book that came out, The Evolution of Desire, and he talked about human relationship behavior the same way that Benjamin Sachs had talked about the rats. In that class I had taken a few years earlier as an undercap, and I was like, man, this makes so much sense,

you know. So I sort of kept that confluence of ideas in mind, and as I became a professor of my own writ and did my own research, I really sort of became very interested in continuing research that looked at human relationships and other aspects of human behavior from the evolutionary perspective. And then why did you coin meeting intelligence and then tell me what mating intelligence is? Sure, so years later I was doing I'm really passionate about research.

I've done a lot of research. I tend to bring students into my research as collaborators, which is one of the things that's made about my job and other people. You embraced me. Yeah, really, I'll always be appreciative of that. I'll never forget. Yeah, And in fact, I definitely want to talk about how you came in to the some point. But you know, so early on, when I was at here at Sunny Newpal's, I was doing a bunch of research,

working with a bunch of students. We were studying various aspects of human mating from an evolutionary perspective, and at some point I realized that what Jack Mayer had done with emotional intelligence needed to be done for the concept of mating. So in mating psychology to that point, it was a little bit unclear if there was any mating

psychology of individual differences. Right, So when you would read the stuff by people like David Buss, who, by the way, I have the utmost respect for, you would primarily focus on things that were human universals, so things that people like inmates. Generally speaking, people appreciate kindness and love in mates, generally speaking. Females appreciate things like markers of status and resource acquisition. Generally speaking, man appreciate markers of fertility, health,

and beauty. And you know, this has led this research, and this idea has led to a landslide of research. But at some point it occurred to me there wasn't any taking into account the fact that maybe some people are better at some of these things than our others, which is kind of the idea of like emotional intelligence, kind of said, you know, people have emotional skills, but

some people have extra special emotional skills. It occurred to me, why don't we look at the same thing with mating, with the idea that everyone has mating psychology, but some people might be particularly good at specialized domains psychology. Yes, anyway, you had this insight. This was the insight. Man. Wow, I just fascinated. Where are these incidents come from? Is it's sort of like all these different things you were exposed to all these years, and then like it just

subconsciously like connects. You're like you're wetting the bathtub or something and then well, Rica, I'll tell you I wasn't in the bathtub. But thing I think you know about me, Scott is I'm a long distance runner and for years, ever since maybe the mid nineties, I've run typically five four or five times a week. I've run eight marathons, and I just once I started being a long distance runner, I just you know, it's something that I feel like I absolutely have to do. And I do remember I

was on a morning run. It was in the winter, it was cold. I was with my dog Murphy at the time. I've never heard the story before. This is really exciting. You've never told this before. I've never told this story, and it was I remember it was like a five or six mile run that I was on and by the time I came back the whole time, I think that's what I do when when I'm out running, you know, I kind of think and I integrate and I come up with ideas and think about solutions to problems.

And I came back to the house one day, I took my dog inside and I sat down at the computer and I sat mating intelligence. And I remember I came up with a research project that I do market I came up with the idea for a book and started work on an edited proposing an edited volume. Were you planning on doing that with the Jeffrey Miller at that time or did that No, So I'll tell you, yeah,

so I did. I remember I came home and I had like, I was like, this is it, man, I'm going to make research on this and I'm going to work with my students and come up with a whole whole set of ideas. I'm going to do a book on this that has different scholars and edited book is one where you edit the book, but different experts in the field right chapters for the book. And I remember, I think I woke up my wife Kathy at the time, and I was like, Kat, I got this idea. You're

going to love it. I had this idea about meeting intelligence exactly. So and I'd say, so, you know, as a professor, that's the most amazing job in the world. I came into my office that day, I found some of my best students and I said, here's what we're doing, you know, and we just sat down and we just started designing these research studies. And we've probably published ten

studies on this topic since that time. Yeah, I remember you had already, like when I came into contact with you, you had worked on this large scale study on like error management theory, if I remember correctly, right right, right, all that. Yeah, I mean I think that was a great study. But this is the part where Scott enters, Oh yeah, so this is where like two thousand and five now or something was two thousand and five, jeez, and you came up with the theory. Wait what year

was this like running thing? Oh? I think that might have been two either two thousand and four or two thousand and five. I'm not this, sir Rika moment, right, because I when I came into the picture, I had heard about this edited volume that you were playing together from Mark Mark Brackett was one of the contributors, and I was like, this sounds like the coolest things and

slight spread. Oh my god. So from my perspective, this was great because I remember one day I was in my office and I get this email from some kids Scott Barry Kaufman. I don't know this person is, and it was a very well put together email and it was maybe about three paragraphs. We haven't saved at all. Oh, I'm sure I do. I'm sure I haven't said some you know. I read it and I was like, oh my god, this guy's like me. I mean it had this like you know, he had no problem reaching out

to someone he never met before. He had no problem saying, here's a great idea, I'd love to work with you on it. Here's who I am, Here's what I could bring to it. And I got to tell you, Scott Man, that was it. That was so effective. I read that and I'm like, then, I look, I'm like this kids again, his PhD at Yale and psychology. There's really nothing higher

than that. This guy must have what it takes. So I replied back, I think very shortly after, probably like within the hour, and I was like two minutes I said, So I'm like, I didn't say let's talk. I was like, let's do this. I didn't belete it. I couldn't belete it, you know, because every now and then you can tell by someone's communication. I'm like, this is someone I could work with for sure. So I remember you're at Yale, so I'm at in the Hudson Valley. We're about two

hours apart. I said, well, why don't we meet in Danbury, which is a town in Connecticut in the middle. And I remember, I think I was watching my daughter, Megan at the time. She was in kindergarten, so I came along to the meeting. I think brought Meg remember she had her kindergarten homework. Seriously, oh my god, I remember you had done so much research on how to publish

a book. Because I don't know if your reader's out there know this about you or not, but before you became an expert at publishing awesome books, you thought very hard about how I'll tell them my secrets. That's a good point, it man, And that was and it was exactly. You had done all the research that there was no way I was going to have time to do. And

I'm like, this is such a good match. Yah. Scott had done all this research on how to publish a book, and I had this great idea or this idea that Scott and I thought was great, and we started collaborating at that point. So at that point I asked Scott to contribute a chapter to my edited book, which I ultimately brought Jeffrey Miller on as co editor. So that pacific moment was Jeffrey not officially a co ownitor of

the book. Not at that particular point. I would say about let's say the project went from about two two thousand and four it was published, and I think two thousand and eight, by the way, that's how long these projects take. Yeah, I mean you've joined on about two thousand and six, about midway. Well, our book just came out in twenty thirteen, right, thirteen, right right in this meeting in Danbury in two thousand and five was step one. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I just was so excited that you responded and wanted to pursue this. So what happened is that we worked on a popular version of the book separate from your I just want to get credit separate from your edited book, right, And so your edited book, I think has made quite a contribution to the field of you know, a lot of people cite a lot of people. A lot of articles from there are really good. You have probably Marine Solvent's one of her last. It was her published work.

It was actually her last. In fact, she and I so I don't know if people know who Marino Sullivan was, but she was one of the greats. She was one of the great social psychologists. And when we met her, she was a little bit older, and she had published with Paul and maybe dozens of articles on the social psychology of emotion and deception. She was it, I mean,

Marino Sullivan was it. And she became very interested in how all the things she had studied her career related to the mating process near the end of her career, so she contributed a terrific chapter to our book, and she and I got along great. We had plans to do some studies together, actually, but she passed away prematurely soon after that book. But yeah, so that book was it was a really fun project. It has some very

interesting contributions. It's very scholarly. I mean, one of the only criticisms I tend to hear of it is that it's written across the chapters at are pretty high level. But that's you know, the point of that kind of book. And then so that was Mating Intelligence, published in two thousand and eight. And then so Scott and me we probably do a whole podcast on the history of our book together. But you know, we eventually published it with

Oxford University Press, which we were so pumped about. And if the first one's Mating Intelligence, then this book had to be idol Mating Intelligence Unleashed. And I gotta say, man, that's been that was your idea, the unleashed part in In fact, the publisher at some point said, that's kind Do you really want the word unleash in there? Remember my answers got like, well, hell yeah or something like that.

It's saying, well, I'll tell you that a lot of people find it really funny when I when I mentioned like, I'll say, like, I was in class the other day and I was, you know, because I'm teaching a class positive psychology, and I was like, you know, and there's a book that relates to some of the stuff I'm talking about. It's called Meeting Intelligence. And I said Unleashed and they found it really funny. Yeah, yeah, No, it's a great book title. It's a great book. If I

don't say so myself. Right, So for the rest of this podcast, I know that a lot of people, a lot of listeners are probably at this point like, Okay, I really don't care about you guys, Like what is me? Like? How can I use make intelligence in my own life to achieve my own mating goals? Not everyone? Maybe their goals are not just get laid. Maybe it's to have us God forbid, a meaningful relationship with someone that lasts

a long time and makes you feel both both fulfilled. Right, made intelligence construct is Do you think it's relevant to all these different levels of analysis? Gon? Yeah, I mean outcomes or goals. I think I think it definitely does. And I think that our book, even though it was designed as sort of a popular book and had kind of a witty title, one of the comments I get on our book is that it is chock full of data and chock full of research. So it's a pretty

intense book. Actually it gets at every I don't know about every aspect of the mating domain, but it's very I think it's pretty comprehensive. Yeah, And I think that gets at the idea for sure. We have many references. Do we have in the New York Post reporter. We had a thousand references in there, he says, the py reviewed version of the game or something, or the New York Times. Right, yeah, I think that's a confident. Yeah. Yeah,

So it's pretty income intense. But I think you know, what it comes down to is if you think about mating intelligence defined, and that was really how we started the book. As the set of cognitive processes that bear on the mating domain. You got a big canvas to work with, you know, because you have all the things related to presenting yourself in a mating context, how can

I attract a mate? All the things related to finding a good mate, which is a major issue from an evolutionary perspective, because if you're finding someone that you're going to ultimately reproduce with having that person help with the process and having offspring that are themselves able to effectively reproduce as evolutionarily critical. There's a lot of deception the

mating domain. Right. Oh, it turns out, Scott, there's research others see each other tons of it, you know, And so that's the whole thing too, Like there's a lot of research on people deceived in specific kinds of ways. So males tend to overemphasize their money, their assets, their status. There's a great study by another collaborator of ours, Dan Krueger, where he looked at credit card usage and by the way,

don't overrun your credit cards. There's a little lesson for the young males out there, but young men are most likely of different demographic groups to overrun their credit cards and run into debt. But what you do when you run into debt like that is you can present yourself as having more than you actually have. Right, so you can drive a nicer car than you can really afford, you can have nicer clothes than you can actually afford, and these things might be signals that show you have

a lot of resources. So there's something very deceptive about that, you know. But this kind of like it, kind of likes it paints the portrait as though, like women are superficial. Well do you think they're sitting at aculcost level they really care about things like that? I think I wouldn't necessarily put it that way. I think what I'd say is that across evolutionary time, women who ended up with men who had high access to resources were more successful

than other women. So there's kind of like an adaptation there. There's got to be an adaptation there. Very strong universal and femail desires and may are that women tend to care about the ability to acquire resources and the ability to demonstrate that one has resources. And this has been shown cross culture. Yeah, so David Boston and David Schmidt in particular have done extensive cross cultural studies documenting that.

So I'd say that if men over demonstrate sort of deceive how much they have, that sort of is playing into the sea ball tendency of females to sort of seek out markers of high resources. And maybe it'd be helpful to the listener to distinguish between distal and proximal causes. I find this is just over and over again a common point of contention for people who have criticism of the evlutionary psychology approach. So probably is good to just like get that out of there right now. Sure, Yeah,

I think that's a really important point. Knock get that out of there, get that out there, sorr out there. So, Yeah, anytime you have any behavior, there's always multiple causes of the behavior. One of the biggest mistakes I tend to among students and often even among academics, is when you hear someone argue this is the cause of the behavior, and this is not. In fact, every behavior has multiple causes,

and sometimes causes exist at different levels. So if we think about, for instance, why do the female rats try to fend off the males during the mating process? Right, Well, on one hand, the male coming toward her is an immediate stimulus that brings about this chain of behavior, So that's an immediat or what we might call approximate cause of the behavior. Additionally, there are hormones and physiological processes

that underlie that behavior as well. But from an ultimate perspective, we can also say, well, why did this ultimately evolve, which is often the same as asking what is adaptive about this behavior? How did it help the ancestors of this animal survive, animal reproduce? Right, so not necessarily adaptive to today? Correct? Okay, right, that's such a point of confusion.

I think that people, I think you're absolutely right. So we need to realize that a lot of times when evolutionary psychologists use the word adaptive, they are talking about something that would have helped our ancestors survive and reproduce. Under ancestral conditions. So there's all these like things in our current environment that we didn't have in our The

credit cards didn't exist. I don't think it makes the cavemen, but we have these things that kind of like activate some like deep seated drives and instincts in modern day forms. Is that okay way to put it? Yeah? I think that's a good way to put it. And there's things now that did not exist under anccestral conditions that might be what we call evolutionary mismatches, right, So cavemen right to put it sort of simply, cave men were not

able to if they had only thirty rocks. They were going to have a hard time showing someone that they had fifty rocks, right, because you know, they couldn't do that. But nowadays, if someone only has a salary of twenty thousand dollars but has some you know, some powerful credit cards, they can show themselves as someone who has a salary that's much higher than that. So we're able due to modern technologies which mismatch the technologies that our ancestors had.

People can deceive themselves in mating relevant ways, in ways that are not really evolutionarily natural. This is expanded or compounded by modern technologies, so things like Tender and okay, Cupid and things like that. When people are using electronic

media to engage in the mating domain, suddenly everything's different. Right, So you can totally edit your picture, you can edit your profile, you can write and rewrite things you can edit under ancestral conditions or even fifteen twenty years ago, when you just met someone in a mating relevant context, you look like what you look like, and you said what you said. You know. So there's a lot of

ways that modern technology. I'm not saying that they're bad, but i am saying that in a lot of ways they mismatch the kinds of conditions that existed under ancestral times. And I'll tell you probably one of the most intriguing examples of this has to do with women's cosmetics. So males, for various reasons, males, and how do you know how do you know about women's cosmetics? Oh, my wife gets cosmopolit magazine. Okay, right, but interesting when you think about cosmetics,

cosmetics is an enormous industry. The average woman has been in this country, I think spend several hundred dollars a month or some crazy amount on this stuff. The industry itself is billions and billions of dollars. What is the cosmetic industry? Right? So, what women do is with lipstick and anti wrinkle cream and hair coloring, they're presenting themselves physically in a way essentially that makes them look younger to match male's desires for relatively younger No. I mean

it's to really look young for an adult. So if they're eighty, it like, I make you look like forty sort of thing. I think it's really good cosmetics that could do that. So when you look at it, when you see what are women buying, it tells a very clear story. Right, lipstick makes lips look relatively full and robust. If you look at the lips of a relatively old woman, right, thin wrinkle cream you don't ever see get more wrinkle wrinkle cream. It's always a bit of your wrinkle wrinkle

cream to match the skin. That's more typical of women that are more likely to be in their fertile Oh, so there it is. There it is. It's the fertile thing. Okay, gotcha. When you go to the hair coloring aisle, you see stuff to make the hair look blonde, red brown. You don't tend to see a lot of gray hair color as an exact But that's interesting because gray among males is considered A lot of felos find that very Well, what's the difference there, right, Yeah, Well, well, males have

a very different situation because for females there's menopause. So females have a very discrete window in which they can reproduce, whereas males And it's kind of akey to think about, but males can effectively reproduce essentially into their old age, right. And then so because of that, it's there's less pressures on women to be particularly attracted to younger men as

there are pressures on men to be attracted relatively younger women. Okay, Okay, So all this stuff we're telling about, that's one aspect of meeting intelligence. I think that a key function, a key feature, I should say, of meeting intelligence is all these non physical aspects of humans that make us immensely sex scene attractive to each other. We differ from a ragutang's I think we say this in our book. We differ from our ragut tanks and turtles in that they

can't like sing love ballads to each other. Some birds can, but they can't really like write complex pros or do all sorts of things that are also attractive. Could you speak to some of the non physical aspects of meting intelligence that are attractive, and then what could people do to increase that aspect of them? Yeah? Absolutely so. One of the things about human mating intelligence is that there's an awful lot of cognitive processes that are mating relevant,

but that are indirectly mating relevant. The person who really uncovered this idea and elaborated on it was Jeffrey Miller at the University of New Mexico who came up with a really groundbreaking idea regarding sexual selection and humans related to the evolution of human creativity and intelligence. We essentially argued that each species has its own processes by which individuals will attract members of the opposite sex. A lot

of times these are incredibly species specific. Right, So, peacocks, the female looks for the bright the big bright tail. Right. If you and I walked around in Philadelphia with a big bright tail, I don't know if we'd get a lot of females looking at us. Right. Humans use behavior and markers of creativity and markers of intelligence to attract members of the opposite sex. So courtship includes an awful lot of displays of creativity. That's why. So if you

think about, like a lot of humans write poetry. Yeah, poetry is not adaptive. It's not going to help save you from a saber tooth tiger attack, but it might help you find a me. So if something is not helpful from a survival perspective, but it's still a species typical,

then it might be beneficial from a reproductive perspective. And all of the kinds of creativity that seem uniquely human but that don't seem to have a lot of immediate survival value may well be explicable in terms of them being sort of mechanisms of courtship and mechanisms of attempts

to attract mates. That's really good, Glen. I'm trying to think of other of like I want to get like if we can we get in to like really specific things like humor, like creativity, like even god formid intelligence. Do these things how do they play out like on a in our not evolutionary like in our day to day you know lives, You know how can we use these things to attract people? Are they? Are they attractive? First of all? Like, is creativity attractive? Yeah? I mean

these things definitely are. So there's a great study that Jeffrey Miller conducted with some of his students in New Mexico a while back, where they simply told their participants. There was a couple of rounds of participants and they told them the Martians are coming to Albuquerque. Here's pencil and paper dry. And what they found was that there was extraordinary variability in the quality of these strongs. They gave them a discreet amount of time, maybe ten minutes.

Some of these drawings were incredibly good. Some of them were medium. A lot of them are medium. Of them looked like a four year old. Well, how much did they control for artistic ability versus you know, creative generation? Right, I don't know. I'm not sure how these were rated. I think they were partly ultimately rated in addition to how high quality they were from the raiders, this is

another group of participants rated them. I think they also rated them in terms of how attractive they thought this person was, you know. And it was simple enough that people that drew stuff that was rated as higher quality were rated as probably more attractive. Probably the most clear

cut study along these lines. I guess there's a couple but ones conducted by Dan Nettle, who was in England, who studied mating relevant out wait, wait, did you tell us what the results were of the Miller study that the targets who drew the relatively high quality were rated as more attractive or more attractive? Where do people see their facial features at all? It was just don't think

they did. I think it was just a shot in the dark, and pretty similar to Dan Nettle's research, which is more in the field actual He studied actual poets, so this idea that poetry might have evolved because it is courtship relevant. What he argued was, then that probably means if you look at a bunch of male poets, the ones who are good poets are probably more likely to have more mating partners. And this is exactly what

he found. So there's definitely some research from different threads, different researchers, different aspects of creativity showing that there do seem to be some attractiveness relevant outcomes associated with high quality products of creativity. What about humor, Yeah, definitely the same with humor. In fact, I know someone who wrote a great book chapter on that's who, that's ater. Why could you say, like, why are some of these forms

of creativity attractive? Evolutionary humor is good because humor signals. You can signal a lot of things. So in attracting a mate, you're trying to present a lot of different things about yourself. You want to present yourself as smart, you want to present yourself as kind, you want to present yourself as emotionally stable, you want to present yourself as socially smart, socially sensitive, and through humor you can

actually do an awful lot of that. So you know, people have studied various kinds of humor, and there's definitely different different kinds of humor. So some people have are really good at mean humor. What's called me mean humor? That's what I'm calling. Oh okay, I for a second, you're saying meme, right, so other deprecating humor, right, something that sort of puts other people down. Okay, Yeah, some

people are good at that, right. There's something kind of funny about when people do that, but there's something kind of hurtful about that as well. There's also self deprecating humor, right, which might be just as fun, but it also has a signal of I'm not out to hurt other people. I'm not out to bring other people down. So the kind of humor that people use can be a very big signal about what kind of person that person is in a more general sense, and your effectiveness in using

humor is also a really important signal as well. And there's interactions there with social status. Those in high social status who self deprecating humor are considered very attractive, right right, and those low social status whose self deprecating humor are considered very unattractive, right right? Is that right? Am? I? Right? Yeah? I think that's the finding. And high status people who use other deprecating put other people down, that's not considered

very attractive either. So that's kind of goes against this myth of the alpha male. You know, maybe could talk about this alpha beta distinction. What does the meaning intelligence perspective bring to the table in terms of this idea do nice guys finish life? Yeah? So, I mean this is a part of our book that I think was really well elaborated in a chapter that you took the lead on the mating intelligence idea really focuses very much on individual differences in the nature of mating. Right, you

think about male mating strategies. You know, some guys are jerks, right, and then we all know people that like, Oh, I can't believe that guy has all these women that like him. You know, everyone knows he's a jerk. How could this be? Yeah, right, So we kind of have that phenomenon, And then we also wonder, you know, oh, this guy is such a nice guy. Too bad, he'll never get a girlfriend because he's too nice, you know. So this is like another

sort of stereotype that we might have. So when you actually look at the data, when you look at and there's tons of research on this particular question, it turns out that it's much more complex than that, and that depending on the situation, a guy who's giving off other deprecating kinds of signals, right, we might call this guy a jerk, or we might use other words for someone like that might be attractive to some women under some conditions,

you know, over demonstrating dominance, well, dominant, it's good to be with someone who's dominant because that person might dominate others in a social situation or in SoC circles. But there's cost associated with that as well. That person might flip costs on you, that person might be overly dominant on yourself. And then if there's someone who's like, you know, quote too nice, well there's also great things about that. Right, This is someone who's who's not gonna hurt others in

the social circle, not hurt hurt you. So there ends up being sort of costs and benefits to either of these very simple social strategies, right, And I think one of the things, and you could elaborate a little bit on this, Scott, but one of the things that the analysis essentially found was that men who have high status but that bring other people in and don't put others down and sort of try to build consensus, people that

are very good at that. Those are really people that are much more attractive than someone who's high status but puts other people down. Right, Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. It seems like one of the most attractive combinations, or the package is compassion and assertiveness right together as a package,

seems to be much much more attractive than dominance. You know, dominance being that aggressive kind of dominance when like you said, you know, they could be used against the partner, and partner showly doesn't want that, right, So it's almost like like leadership is very sexy and doing good in the world and giving your value set to the world. But if you're doing it to like dominate others, to just win, win, win, maybe outside the sports competition, that's not considered as attractive.

But yeah, obviously sports is considered very attractive, right, Yeah. But then even in sports, though, I mean, there's sports figures that we like more than others, that's right, That's right. Like there's some really gracious winners, and there are some some athletes like when he was on the court, you know, Michael Jordan just had an air about him like he was he was awesome. He was awome, you know. But he wasn't no offense to Dennis Rodman. But he wasn't

Dennis Rodman. You know, he wasn't making a mockery of things. He wasn't putting other people down, you know. So so even though it's even even in sports where the entire goals to just just to win, you know, we still see variability in people, in people that are leaders and that have the respect of sort of everyone for good reasons versus not so much. Absolutely absolutely good. I'm really glad we got you have to talk about that topic today.

So is there any other aspect of being intelligence? You know, we have time, I think for one more components to bring in. Either mating mechanism, which is one part of being intelligence, are called meeting mechanisms. There are things that are kind of universal, right, and things that we use like strategies we use to attract people, or the other end is mating displays, things that there's individual differences in that we you know, things we talked about humor, creativity,

the analogy of the Peacock's tale. Are there any mechanisms or displays you wanted to talk about for the rest of this podcast? Sure. I think one thing that we really focused on in the book that I think is a great takeaway message has to do with what we call life history strategy, which is a parallel concept with mating intelligence, something that I think relates very strongly to

mating intelligence. Life history strategy is essentially the differential tendency to live life as if you expect a relatively long, safe life, And for technical reasons, we call these people high k so people that are high K expect a long, safe life and a safe environment, or people that are low key, which essentially corresponds to people who, for good reasons, often expect their lives to be relatively short, expect their

environments to be relatively unsafe. And someone who's high end mating intelligence is pretty good at calibrating their life history strategy. Good thing about people in our society. You know, this wouldn't be everyone by any means, but we're pretty fortunate. In fact, i'd argue that we're extremely fortunate. I live five miles from here. I'm going to go home later. I got my small nuclear family. We're going to sit around by the fire. You know, no one's going to

come in and attack us. We got two dogs. Even if they did, you know, the dogs would help out. We have an incredibly safe life. Tomorrow, I'm going to go to work, hang out in the office. Nothing terrible is going to happen here. And you know, same thing.

So this is the environmental context for relatively high K strategy, right, And so I know, Scott, you have a similar Like most people listening to this podcast, would probably fit into an environmental situation that's relatively high K. Well, the adaptive I wouldn't Philadelphia, Glenn, I don't know about that. I guess it depends which part right, But I mean and

not everyone does. But when you live in an environment, in a background and have an upbringing that's a relatively high K kind of upbringing, the best mating strategy ends up being one that is conducive to few offspring that are taking care of very well. In our society, this usually corresponds to monogamy, monogamous situation, and this is usually in a high K environment, a really optimal kind of

mating strategy. So there's lots of different mating strategies, but this idea that males should be, you know, out for short term gains, that females should be on the lookout for that and only out for long term gains. Once you get into the world of high K everyone benefits from relatively long term mating strategies. And that's true for both males and females. And that's something that we discuss I think quite a bit in the book, and I think it's useful for at least the kinds of lives

that we're fortunate to live. I think it's a very useful perspective, so useful, and you know, and relate to that is the fact that there's so many similarities. Probably, I think we argue in a book there are more similarities between men and women, and there are differences, even though we can focus on those, some researchers exclusively focus on those differences. Doesn't mean that there are more differences

than similarities. Yeah, absolutely, I mean it's so easy for the mind to see differences, right, So, like if you go into your office in the morning and there's let's say, like there's a stapler in the middle of the one table that you know wasn't there before, right, I mean, that's how our mind works automatically, Like whoa the staple there? That's different? You know who put that there? What's going on? You know when you step back, your office is ninety

nine percent exactly what it looked like before. So our mind is sort of prone towards seeing differences. The same thing happens when we look at males and females, right, So instead of there's definitely differences between males and females physically and behaviorally, but those things stand out so much because the mind is so prone to seeing differences. When you step back the overlap, the behavioral psychological overlap between males and females is shows much more similarity than differences.

And I think that's particularly true in high k stable, fortunate kinds of environments, like the kinds that we tend to experience. Now. Yeah, and so it really looks like where the differences between that it's become most exaggerated is when it comes to the short term mating demean for biological read for real biological reasons and differences in investment

require to have a whole baby come to terms. So that seems to be the demean short to the short terms short fling world seems to be where these differences are exaggerated. Is that rightly? I thin David Busses made that point before. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean there's a whole plurality of mating strategies that are available to two people, and situations constrain them, you know, quite a bit, you know.

But there are male specific and female specific mating strategies that people tend to find, and short term mating strategies. I mean, there are some classic short term male strategies and some classic short term female strategies as well, and I think that we tend to see those and those are of interest. But I think there's a lot more to human mating than just short term male female difference, so I hope so yeah, So when we talk about

long term mating, you know, both males and females. You know, love, peace, you know not war is important, you know, passion, commitment, all these other things come into play. All these things make us who we are today as humans over the course of thousands and thousand years of evolution. Absolutely, Glenn, thank you so much for taking your time. I know you're very busy. Director of the Luci Studies program ahead

of the Department. Thank you so much, and also for just being just a great friend and mentor of mine. Hey man, anytime, Scott, It's always fun talking to you, my man. Thanks for listening to The Psychology Podcast with Doctor Scott Barry Kaufman. I hope you found this episode just to stop provoking and interesting as I did. If you'd like to read the show notes for this episode, or here are past episodes, you can go to the Psychology Podcast dot com.