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Why Do Dating Apps Make Women Look Pickier?

Paul Eastwick says dating apps make women look much pickier than men, because the gap in who says yes is far larger online than when people meet face to face.

In speed dating, men said yes to a second date with about 50 percent of the women they met, and women said yes to about 35 percent of the men. Online, men are still about even, while women are at 95 percent no and only 5 percent yes. That gap would not appear if people met in person. The frustration some men feel, that women's standards are too high, comes from behavior on the apps. A rejection rate like that makes it easier to claim women want only the man with the most money or the corner office. Eastwick calls that reading unfortunately true, and says the apps are causing it. The toxic step is treating the pattern as a fact about women, or about feminism, rather than about the apps.

Raising your own traits and trying to out-compete other men does not predict how a relationship will go. Gaps in mate value do not predict the course of a relationship, and they do not predict a breakup.

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How Love Really Works ·

Hidden Brain

More from this episode

  1. What Does Evolutionary Psychology Claim About Mating?Paul Eastwick, a psychologist at the University of California, Davis, says the popular evolutionary account of mating, which he calls the evolutionary script…
  2. Why Does Agreement About Attractiveness Fade Over Time?Paul Eastwick says people largely agree on who is attractive in a photograph or at a first meeting with a stranger, and that agreement fades once they…
  3. Why Don't Dating Preferences Predict Who We Fall for?Paul Eastwick says the traits people name as what they want in a partner do a poor job of predicting whom they like once they meet face to face.
  4. Does Ambition Attract Men and Women Equally?Paul Eastwick says ambition attracts men and women about equally in the first minutes of a date.
  5. Why Can't Machine Learning Predict Romantic Compatibility?Paul Eastwick says studies with psychologist Samantha Joel tested whether compatibility at a first meeting can be predicted from what two people report about…
  6. How Do Couples Create Compatibility?Paul Eastwick, a psychologist at the University of California, Davis, says compatibility is tightly tied to history: the story two people share and how that…
  7. What's the Best Way to Meet Someone You'll Click With?Paul Eastwick says the way to meet someone you will click with is to keep up friendships and not cross people off from a description on paper.
  8. Why Do People Fall in Love With an Idea of Their Partner?Shankar Vedantam says people sometimes respond to an idea of a partner they created themselves.
  9. What Is Social Projection?Edward Lemay, a psychologist at the University of Maryland, says social projection is a bias where people assume others are more like them than they really are.
  10. What Is an Upward Comparison in a Relationship?Edward Lemay says an upward comparison is what happens when people measure their own relationship against one that looks better.
  11. Why Do People Project Current Feelings Onto a Relationship's Future?Edward Lemay says people project how they feel about a partner today onto the future of the relationship.
  12. Why Do World Beliefs Change How a Partner Looks?Edward Lemay says people use their beliefs about the world as a lens on a partner.

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