Science of Attraction, Compatibility & Romance | Dr. Paul Eastwick

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When you look at who gets the right swipes and who receives messages on the apps, it’s the most popular people. I mean, folks have claimed that it’s one of the most unequal markets in the world, but regular acquaintance is not nearly so dramatic. I don’t think the influence of attractiveness ever goes away, right? There’s always going to be an unlevel playing field to some extent, but the more that people spend time together getting to know each other, it reduces some of those market forces that give the desirable people all the advantages. Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science-based [music] tools for everyday life.

I’m Andrew Huberman and I’m a professor of neurobiology and opthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Paul Eastwick, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Davis. Today we discuss the science of attraction, mate selection, and relationships. And I promise you what you are going to hear will surprise you.

Paul’s research has discovered that much of what you’ve heard about how people select partners, date, form relationships, even break up or repartner is simply wrong. At least when you look at the actual data. For example, his data show that both men and women when given a choice select partners that are younger than them. Yes, you heard that right. It’s not just men.

Men and women equally select partners that are younger than them given the choice. His data also challenged the idea that financial status is more important to women when looking for male partners. Turns out that when men are looking for female partners, on average, financial status is as important as it is when women are looking for men. And somewhat less surprising, his work shows that indeed dating apps select for qualities that are not the ones that research shows builds lasting partnerships. But he also offers solutions to those that are using dating apps to try and find a partner.

Today’s discussion is not just about finding a partner. It’s also about what solidifies and maintains healthy relationships over time. Again, what the data say about that. Things like physical intimacy being among the very strongest predictors of relationship stability. As well as both partners feeling that no matter who else might be attractive to them, that their partner has unique qualities that no one else can match.

So whether you are in a relationship or not, looking for a relationship or not, today’s discussion gets into social bonding of all sorts and repeatedly throughout today’s episode both as it relates to single people looking for a partner, people who are already partnered, we talk about the importance of activities that are done with other people, could be other couples or other single people, etc. And that this is critical for those wanting to meet a partner and it turns out to be critical for maintaining a healthy long-term relationship. We’ll talk about what the data say about that. Super interesting. So today is not just about the real data of how people rate attractiveness, find partners, and the glue that keeps people happily together.

It’s about the real life data and the actions that anyone can take that help you build and sustain excellent romantic and other types of relationships. Before we begin, I’d like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is however part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, today’s episode does include sponsors. And now for my discussion with Dr.

Paul Eastwick. Dr. Paul Eastwick, welcome. >> Thank you so much for having me. A lot of theories out there, a lot of speculation about attraction, dating, romance, and relationships, which are separable things.

Of course, we’ll talk about all of them. But one of the semi-dominant themes in the public narrative and indeed on many podcasts is is kind of anchoring to evolutionary theory which to put it really coarsely sort of a market-based theory. You know people even say I married up or uh you know and people but quantitative measures on people they’re a six they’re a seven they’re a 10 in this but a four in that. You know, as a neuroscientist, I hear that and I immediately go to, and again, this is just purely theoretical. >> Oh, this sounds very limbic.

This is very much of like the hypothalamus. This is very much like the kind of thing that you might expect under conditions of like um low food availability, >> low mate availability, a lot of weapons and a few and very few laws, you know, to to regulate violence or something. Meaning men will will harm each other in order to get access to mates. women will um be deceptive. This is the whole idea.

And you step back and you go, well, that’s not the world we live in now. We have a forebrain. We can make choices. We can be strategic in the direction of benevolence. We can think about kindness.

And so to me, it seems we need a revision or at least a better understanding of what’s actually true in 2026 and forward. So, if you would, what are your thoughts about what is not true based on the data >> and perhaps what is true about this quote unquote evolutionary model of dating relationships and so on. The marketplace ideas, I think they definitely have their place and it deres from a a sensible evolutionary perspective like what you’re describing. I think it describes well what happens in initial attraction settings when people are really meeting for the first time. There’s this class demo that I do in my undergraduate classes.

A lot of people use this demo and what you do is you have a bunch of your students put a number on their foreheads and they sort of hold it up so that they can’t see it but other people can. and you tell the students your goal is to pair up with the highest value person that you can and you don’t know what your number is, but I’m going to count to five and then I want you all to stroll around the room and try to make mating offers to folks. And what you see is that the people who have been randomly assigned a low number, they start to panic because what happens is that nobody will talk to them. >> And this is random. uh you know otherwise it would be very unethical and also who would decide but >> but people don’t like it.

I mean if you get a low number >> it’s not an enjoyable experience >> and I think there is a parallel to what people are experiencing as they’re growing up or maybe even if they’re a little older and they’re going to a party and they haven’t met anybody there. So this is an analogy for how people internalize and you know act upon something that we call mate value and it’s it’s like what you describe. It’s supposedly linked to traits that reflect your core desiraability like maybe your physical attractiveness but it could be other related traits too. It could be things like the size of your bank account or your status. What we tend to see is that when people are meeting for the first time, this is um a reasonable faximile of how people behave.

But interesting things tend to happen when people get to know each other over a little bit more time. What then tends to happen is that that agreement that is required for that study to work. That study only works because you can read the numbers on people’s foreheads. But if I were to blur that number, we wouldn’t see as much pairing up. It wouldn’t be as sad and as difficult for the people with low numbers.

And in real life, that’s kind of what tends to happen. We stop agreeing about who the eights are and who the fives are. And people might on average say that you’re a six, but if I’ve gotten to know you over time, it means there’s a chance I think you’re a nine. There’s