Laramie Taylor
Description: Laramie Taylor is a Professor and the Department Chair of Communication at UC Davis. His research explores the ways in which media influences our lives in a social context, including relationships and the motives of fanship for fictional teams, athletes and celebrities. In this episode, we focus on the role of media in romantic relationships, how messaging influences our views on infidelity, our own perceived ranking within the dating pool, and the impact of dating apps. In addition, we delve into the intriguing realm of biological factors influencing mate selection. Professor Taylor provides valuable insights into the potential effects of hormonal birth control on women and how these alterations in preferences can have broader societal implications.
Websites: Laramie Taylor
Publications:
Material Abundance Messages and Women’s Partner Trait Preferences
Media Messages Depicting Partner Abundance Increase Intention to Commit Infidelity
Courses:
Show Notes:
0:00:02 Introduction and Background Story
0:02:55 Influence of Media on Relationships
0:05:23 Love: The Intersection of Attraction and Commitment
0:08:50 Using Existing Movie Trailers and Online Dating Data
0:11:30 The Power and Influence of Social Media
0:14:44 Media Influence on Tolerance of Cheating
0:18:02 Gender Ratios and Dating Apps
0:19:33 Gender Imbalance in Education and Immigration
0:22:52 Influence of Social Media on Mate Selection
0:24:23 Media's Influence on Relationship Dissolution
0:33:03 VR Tours for Pain Alleviation
0:36:07 Short-term vs Long-term Partners: Characteristics and Desires
0:37:47 Evolutionary Approach to Partner Selection
0:42:21 Facial Symmetry: Indicator of Overall Fitness
0:45:05 Negative Self-Talk and Objectification in Selfies
0:47:43 Impact of Advertisements on Men and Women
0:56:47 Short Term vs. Long Term Relationships Among Younger People
1:00:09 College as a Good Time to Find a Partner
Unedited AI Generated Transcript
Introduction and Background Story
Brent:
[0:02] Welcome, Professor Laramie-Taylor. Thank you for coming on.
Laramie :
[0:05] Thank you. I appreciate the chance to visit with you this morning.
Keller:
[0:09] We'd love to start off by hearing a little bit more about your story.
How did you get to Davis? What got you interested in psychology and in particular, in relationships?
Laramie :
[0:16] Yeah. So I used to be a high school English teacher.
After I graduated from college, that's what I did. So this would have been in the mid to late 1990s.
And I always appreciated that literature and things was more than just books, especially old books.
And so I'd have my students study magazines and newspapers and film and things like this.
And as time went on, it became clear that they were a lot more excited about TV in particular at the time and music than they were about anything else that we could, that I'd present tothem.
And I thought that seemed strange because of course music is just poetry and movies are just novels in a different format.
But the power of those different media just kept kind of asserting itself.
I'll tell you a funny story, dark story, a little bit funny story.
So I was teaching in a little town in central Minnesota where everybody knew everybody else. And I taught all the juniors. There was 150 of them total in the class or in the school.
And so everybody knew everybody else's business and prom was coming around and you knew who was going with whom.
[1:38] And my first class of the day, you know, homeroom class, there was a girl who was going with one of her guy friends. They'd been friends since they were like four, right?
And everybody knew they were friends and everybody knew that's why they were going.
And the Monday after prom, one of the other girls in class kind of leans out in front of everybody else, looks over at this other girl and is like, hey, you know, so and so, how's prom?
And she says, it was good. She says, so, did you do it?
And you know, you can't let that go as a high school teacher so I'm like, hey, inappropriate, first of all. And she's like, what?
That's what you do after prom. I said, who says that's what you do after prom?
And she just shakes her head, she says, Mr. Taylor, haven't you ever watched a movie?
And I started to think about the assumptions under there, right, that her idea about what it meant to go to prom had been shaped by the stories that she saw in the media.
And she recognized that that's where the stories were from, but she still allowed that to influence her, right?
She was comfortable saying, this is the way to learn about the world and about sexual and romantic relationships specifically.
Influence of Media on Relationships
[2:55] So I thought, I gotta figure out if this is a real thing. And so that's when I applied to graduate school and that ended up with me here at Davis.
Brent:
[3:07] Yeah, I think that's a really telling story because many things do end up shaping our worldview in ways that we either recognize or don't recognize.
And I think most people probably would say that, especially like high school.
So susceptible to those type of influences.
Laramie :
[3:22] Yeah. Well, I mean, the thing, the thing about sex and relationships is that they're, they're, they're what we call backstage behaviors.
We don't have the same opportunity to observe them that we do a lot of other kinds of behaviors, like ordinary social interactions. We see people engage in them all the time.
We see how people argue because we have parents.
We see how people work together because they're working in front of us.
But when it comes to sex and relationships, people do this privately.
And so we don't really know. Well, the media take that private stuff, that backstage stuff, and make it in front of the curtain.
They give us something to watch.
And so it's more salient maybe than other kinds of stuff in the media.
Brent:
[4:02] Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So, we have a big question to start off. What is love?
Laramie :
[4:09] Yeah, that's a huge question indeed.
So I've been thinking about this, and I think there's two answers, right?
The first answer is the more scientific answer, and these are consistent with each other, these two answers.
But the first answer is, love is the combination of the different psychophysiological responses that we have that are designed or selected for in order to promote our survival and ourreproduction, right?
So we feel we're programmed to feel love for another person so that we're motivated to mate.
We're programmed to feel love towards children so that we raise them up and and they're successful and we're programmed to feel these affinitive feelings towards other people so that wehave a community that will protect us and give us resources and make sure that we survive and our genes survive.
So it's, I mean, it's biochemical, right?
Love: The Intersection of Attraction and Commitment
[5:23] But I think love is also, you know, in sort of more practical terms, more humanistic terms, Love is the intersection of attraction, not necessarily physical attraction, but findingsomebody to be appealing and someone that you want to be around, and commitment.
So attraction and commitment together, that's what love is.
Means I want to be around you, and I'm willing to make a commitment to continue to be around you and whatever else.
Brent:
[5:54] Especially because you said commitment, is it a choice?
Laramie :
[5:59] That's a good question too.
Yeah, yeah, to a certain extent it is, especially romantic love.
Brent:
[6:09] Yeah.
Laramie :
[6:09] You know, we're definitely gonna feel strong things, those biochemical signals that sort of promote the affinity with other people, you know, that's, a lot of that's gonna be automatic.
But I definitely think when it comes to romantic love, there's a choice involved, where we decide to act on the feelings that we have and to make a commitment to, you know.
Prolong them, protract them, you know, make them continue. Yeah.
Brent:
[6:45] Yeah.
Keller:
[6:47] So, taking love as a motivating factor for joining many relationships.
Could you briefly describe your research with relationships and how you conduct that research?
Laramie :
[6:56] Yeah. So, you know, I research a lot of areas, but my research on sex and romance and things like that is principally experimental.
So I manipulate some set of media messages and then I show some people one version and other people the other version and I measure the outcomes.
[7:17] So for example, I might bring people into the lab and you see, you know, you watch five movie trailers.
And some people watch, you know, three, three of the trailers are the same for everybody, but the other two trailers, you know, some people see a version where there's, you know, two,two guys competing over the affection of one woman and other people see trailers where two women are competing over the affection of one man.
And then afterwards I ask them to, you know, make some choices about what kind of partner they're looking for or how, how confident they would be in a romantic, a potential romanticsituation, something like that, and then compare the differences.
So that's most of my research.
The other thing that I do is I look for situations where there's variation in social behavior anyway that leaves some kind of trace that I can study.
So if you go online, chat rooms and things are full of this kind of stuff.
And I've got a colleague that has data that she's gotten from online dating sites, that she has information about what information people post and how many responses they get and stufflike that.
Any of those circumstances where somebody else is just sort of leaving information about social relationships, we can gather and then kind of analyze that. So.
Brent:
[8:42] Before we get into some of the findings, I'm curious, do you make your own movie trailers?
Using Existing Movie Trailers and Online Dating Data
Laramie :
[8:50] No, so I'll make, I don't make movie trailers. We'll use existing movie trailers, but sometimes we'll manipulate them, like re-edit them.
I'll make, sometimes we'll use descriptions of movies, like we set up a fake website and make the claim that it focuses on upcoming movies that are still in production, and then we'll usestock photos and descriptions that we make up or that we will take existing romantic movies from 50 years ago, change the names and things and then nobody recognizes them. That'sinteresting.
Yeah, plus nobody's seen movies from, you know, 60, 50 years ago anyway.
Brent:
[9:32] Yeah.
Laramie :
[9:34] It did happen once that we used Sabrina.
Humphrey Bogart movie from a hundred years ago and then...
Brent:
[9:41] Your point was proven.
Laramie :
[9:42] Yeah. So we kind of changed the names around stuff and then it got remade with Harrison Ford and released while we were still doing dating.
So we're like, well, let's, we'll try something else.
Brent:
[9:54] Yeah. And then with the dating sites, do you get data from like the app provider or is it, that you, are they sitting through and scrolling through people's profiles and just writing stuffdown?
Laramie :
[10:09] Yeah, so Dr. Alexopoulos, the data said that, well, she's got two.
One of them is from a small dating app that just said, you know, we'd love some insight into what's happening. Oh, okay, yeah.
And so they shared data with her. It's anonymized, there's no names, and she doesn't see pictures.
But she knows like what kind of information is shared and what's coming in.
And then she has a bunch of Ashley Madison data, do you know?
Keller:
[10:37] No.
Laramie :
[10:38] So Ashley Madison is a cheating site.
Like that's how they- Oh, I think I've got it.
Yeah, so that's how they market it, right? If you wanna have an affair, sign up here and we'll help you find somebody else who wants to have an affair.
And they had a data breach four or five years ago where, yeah, yeah, with detailed names, dates, all this kind of stuff just was hacked and then made public.
And so Ashley Madison, the company, then sort of strategically shared some information with researchers.
We'll just give you this so that you stop using our totally identifiable data that we are gonna get sued for losing.
Brent:
[11:20] And then are you able to research the impact of social media specifically?
The Power and Influence of Social Media
Laramie :
[11:30] I mean, yes and no, right? So social media has become so pervasive now that it's hard to isolate, right?
And it's also hard to manipulate in the same way.
So part of the power of social media is that these messages are coming from or being endorsed by people that you actually know.
And so in a laboratory setting, If I create a fake social media account, I can do that. If I create fake content and present it to you, I can do that.
But it's not gonna come from someone you know or be endorsed by someone you know, and so it's gonna hit differently.
So the way we tend to do social media research is by asking people to imagine how you would feel if, or we just measure how they use social media generally Mm-hmm and and look fordifferent patterns of you know perception and attitudes and things based on that.
Brent:
[12:28] Oh very interesting.
Laramie :
[12:29] Yeah.
Keller:
[12:30] One more thing on social media, do you think it's been a net positive or a net negative in in relation to communication.
Laramie :
[12:36] Yeah. Wow.
I'm going to plead the fifth. I don't think, I don't think we know yet. Um, that's fair.
Brent:
[12:43] Yeah.
Laramie :
[12:44] And because the negatives are, are, are, are definitely strong and they're, and they're growing.
Brent:
[12:50] Yeah.
Laramie :
[12:51] Right. Um, as the sort of model for, for, for how social media functions and how it makes its money and how people use it change.
Um, yeah, the effects are changing too. I mean, I think it's great that I can, I keep in friends with, uh, in touch with friends from high school that we had totally lost contact.
And then Facebook became universal and suddenly we're, you know, I know about their kids, you know, I know how what's your name's hockey game went over the weekend, which Ithink is real. I mean, it's a real gift. Yeah.
Brent:
[13:24] Without a doubt. Yeah.
Keller:
[13:25] And then going into some of the research, how has media impacted our relationships? Yeah.
Laramie :
[13:31] It's so many ways in, in just so many ways.
So the relationships that we enter into, like how we choose our partners and how we feel about the partners we have are the result of a lot of dynamic factors within us and in theenvironment that we live in, the social environment and the real environment that we live in.
Media can change your perceptions about that environment in ways that are subtle and that we're often not aware of.
So when it's doing that, then it changes how we approach our relationships, how we think about the people around us.
And often in ways that we're not aware of, right? It's not always so, something that we're so conscious of the way my student was back in Minnesota.
Well, TV says to do it. And so that's what we should do, right?
Instead, it's little changes that we can't attribute to anything in particular.
We feel like they're natural or inevitable.
Media Influence on Tolerance of Cheating
[14:44] Some of the specific things that my research has found is that showing representations of cheating change how tolerant we are of cheating.
Because, you know, if everybody's doing it, then it's normal, right? So why would we particularly worry about it?
Or another interesting thing we found, we did an experiment where women listened to music that had cheating in it. And so much music, by the way, is about cheating.
Like so many popular songs.
Hip-hop songs, country songs especially, rock songs.
And what we found is that if we played women songs where cheating gets punished.
They actually became more tolerant of cheating. Meaning that when we said, okay, if your partner cheated on you, how likely would you be to forgive him and stay with him?
And they're more likely to stay if they hear the songs where the cheater gets punished.
Brent:
[15:51] Like the classic Kelly Carson.
Laramie :
[15:55] Pretty little souped up four-wheel drive. And there's even like just regret.
Like if the person is singing about cheating and like, oh, I feel bad.
I'm going to cheat anyway, but I feel bad.
Well, because they have the sense that cheaters are already punished.
So, if they already got punished by feeling bad, then I guess I don't need to punish them by leaving them.
Sort of a thing. That's right. Which is pretty strange. And then, you know, media changes the way that we see ourselves in terms of our value as romantic partners, and it changes the waywe see the, I don't know, the relationship or the dating market around us.
And, cause you know, we're making comparisons with what we've seen in the media and we're taking kind of our cues, like the cues that we used to get from our actual environment,right?
10,000 years ago, you decided who to mate with based on, you know, who's in the village and are the crops doing well?
And are my kids gonna survive if I have a kid right now?
And now it's based on all those same cues are still important to us at some subconscious level, but instead of getting them from reality, we're getting them from the media.
Brent:
[17:18] Could you speak more on, especially looking around and seeing like kind of the dating pool or the market and how that's been changed, especially with social media, the apps wherea new person is literally a swipe away at two clicks.
Laramie :
[17:34] Yeah. Well, I mean, and that's really interesting for…, Yeah. So it's, so for dating apps, it's a very peculiar thing.
Right. Because of course you can get that impression, but the reality is that in, in most dating apps, the gender balance is way off, right? It's super skewed.
Gender Ratios and Dating Apps
[18:02] It used to be that women dramatically outnumbered men on dating apps.
And now it's just the reverse. So if you go on like Tinder or one of the other geo-based, it's about four or five to one, right?
There's five times as many men as there are women. And yet when you sit down and look, you know, you're swiping, swiping, swiping, and it's woman after woman after woman afterwoman, because that's all you're getting shown.
And, you know, but of course what the general experience is, you know, you swipe, which way do you swipe? If you like them, you swipe right?
Brent:
[18:41] Yeah.
Laramie :
[18:42] Okay, so swipe and right, swipe and right, and then, you know, don't get any matches.
So guys will swipe right, I think it's four times as often, maybe five times as often as women on Tinder.
And it's really a function of, you know, of the real gender ratios, because they can be pickier, because there's lots more guys and there are girls on the app, so. Yeah.
Brent:
[19:09] Yeah.
Laramie :
[19:11] Yeah, the idea of, the whole idea of gender ratios is really very straightforward when it comes to the dating market.
If there's lots of potential partners, then you can raise your standards, because your own value gets elevated, right?
Gender Imbalance in Education and Immigration
Brent:
[19:33] From the like woman's perspective in this. Yeah.
Laramie :
[19:36] Well from from you know, whoever the target Person is.
Oh, so for for you and me if we're you know, if we're Well, okay, UC Davis good example.
They just released their their annual numbers Mm-hmm, so there's 42,000 students at UC Davis including graduate and professional students 60% are women. Mm-hmm, right?
So men are outnumbered about three to two, right?
And so, you know, assuming everybody, and that's not a fair assumption, but if we assume that everybody wants a partner and that the distribution of folks who have same sex attraction isabout the same on both sides, then, you know, it's good to be a guy.
Brent:
[20:23] You know?
Laramie :
[20:26] And we see that in other sort of real contexts as well, like in Alaska, where a lot of the immigration into the state is driven by temporary employment seeking, where principallymen go from the lower 48 up to Alaska to work, and it creates in a lot of cities this huge gender imbalance and there are consequences.
And China, where they had selective infanticide and things like this for years, there's this generation with, I don't remember the precise numbers, millions of what they call surplus men,you know, which means, you know, women's value in the dating market or the relationship market goes up because they're more scarce resource.
Brent:
[21:13] And then do you subscribe to the idea of like perceived mate value?
And could you maybe like go into some of what those things are?
Laramie :
[21:21] Yeah, no, so my perceived mate value is the value that I think I have on the like the dating market, right?
What am I worth?
In my research, the strongest predictor of that is how physically attractive I think I am.
Like the prettier I think I am, the higher I think my mate value is.
And that's true for men and women.
But obviously there's other stuff as well, right? So if I'm, you know, if I have more money or a nicer car or I'm smarter, I have more degrees, whatever else, that might all contribute to howvaluable I see myself in them in the in the mating market as well.
Brent:
[22:01] And then you're focusing on yourself so Does if I think I am the hottest guy in the world?
Laramie :
[22:09] I'm gonna be perceived as being hotter by other people Not not not necessarily, but you are gonna it's gonna change your behavior towards other people, right?
So if I think I'm the most valuable person in the mating market, then when I look at prospective partners is I'm only gonna approach partners that I think are matching me in value, right?
So assortative mating is really the process of figuring out what's my reproductive value or my relationship value and who has, how can I optimize my return, right?
So what's the best person I can get given my value, right?
And we're really good at figuring that out.
Influence of Social Media on Mate Selection
Brent:
[22:52] Really?
Laramie :
[22:53] Oh yeah.
Brent:
[22:54] Even now with social media, especially because you go online and you see all these different, like the most attractive people, the wealthiest people, and then you will look aroundthe real world and then you don't see those people.
And if your standards are the ones you see online, will we not become like more picky, more selective and our own ideas are skewed?
Laramie :
[23:17] We, we, we do. Um, and I think that, I think that hurts, But, you know, if you, so there's a bunch of research that was done about 10 years ago with speed dating. Have you heard ofspeed dating?
And they pretty much found, they could match people almost one-to-one. Like if they, you know, had like an objective panel ranked just a physical attractiveness of all the men and all thewomen involved, the matches that emerged were pretty much one-to-one.
The most attractive people matched each other at the last, second, third, fourth, fifth.
I mean, we're good at this, given a need to do it, right?
But things like you're talking about, like this set of expectations that we develop somewhere else are gonna have an impact on the way that we interact even after we're partnered.
So the number one predictor of infidelity is my perceived next best alternative.
Media's Influence on Relationship Dissolution
[24:23] And relationship dissolution too, right? That's why we break up, because I think I can do better.
Like if I think my next best alternative is better than my current partner, then I break up. Or I cheat.
And if my sense of what my available options are are being shaped by what's in the media, by the idealized bodies, and the wealth and all that kind of stuff, then yeah, yeah.
Keller:
[24:53] And has your research, kind of tying back to the infidelity piece, it looks at the shift in tolerance, but has it looked into shifts of action?
Has there been more acts of infidelity?
Laramie :
[25:03] So we can show an intention to commit infidelity, but the way we measure that is not through action.
I mean, we just ask, okay, if you had the chance, would you?
Right? And people will say yes, most people say no, but most people, I mean, most people aren't everybody, right, so there's always people like, yeah, take a shot, especially if I thoughtI'd get away with it.
Measuring acts of infidelity is problematic in a couple ways.
First, just as a researcher, before people leave the lab, if I've manipulated the way they feel, I have to be completely honest with them and say I manipulated the way you feel.
And usually that eliminates the effect. Like I can bring them back down.
Just ethically I have a responsibility to do that.
It would be pretty shady if I thought I was gonna get people to cheat and I send them out to cheat.
And I'm like, oh, that's, yeah, I don't really feel comfortable with that.
And then people lie, of course, about cheating. So, you know, when we ask people, have you been cheated on?
They say yes a lot more often than we say if we ask, have you cheated?
And in theory, those numbers should be the same, like over large numbers of people, right? So...
Brent:
[26:25] That's super interesting. Are there ways to mitigate how like receptive you are to these media influences?
Laramie :
[26:32] Definitely. Yeah. The more, you know, about the media, the more skeptical you are.
You know, if you, if you, if you're thinking about it carefully, if you're thinking about where media come from and, you know, I like this, this, this, this song that's on the radio aboutVictoria's Secret, have you heard this one?
Brent:
[26:54] I'm not sure.
Laramie :
[26:55] It's a funny little song. It's this woman who got famous on TikTok, making up little songs, and now she's got a song on the radio.
And she says, I wish somebody had told me when I was younger that not all bodies are the same, that Photoshop and all this stuff is manipulating me for somebody else's financial benefit.
She's a little more poetic than I am.
And she says, you know, I know Victoria's secret.
She was made up by a dude, which, you know, there's a guy in Ohio that founded Victoria's Secret.
So that kind of awareness that that promotes, that there are factors beyond reality that are shaping our media environment, help make us more skeptical and they help us resist.
One of the problems with that is that we use media for a reason, right?
We seek it out to be entertained, we seek it out to escape from reality, and none of that works as well if you're being skeptical all the time.
So if I wanna really escape, then I turn the skepticism down in my head, and that's great, but while my defenses are lowered, what other messages are getting in?
Brent:
[28:11] Is that really great to escape?
Laramie :
[28:13] Is media great for escape?
Brent:
[28:15] No, is it great that we use media to escape?
Laramie :
[28:18] You know, sometimes it is. You know, there was a great study that was done, this is all good stars, mid-90s, so forever ago, right?
Where they randomly recruited people in Italy, and then, so they had like 300 families, and they randomly picked half of them and took away their their TV for a month, right?
So, these families that just take away the TV.
And they were all families with two parents and at least two children.
And the assumption back then was that, you know, we take the TV out of the home, then everybody plays games and they read books, they get to know each other again, and you know,everything, all good things happen. Not even close.
Huge increase in familial stress and conflict and things like this because we use media strategically to escape and de-stress, to facilitate social interaction.
I mean, I'll tell you what, you don't get along with your parents for a while when you're in college. Go home, the thing you can still do is like watch the game with dad or mom or whoeverthe bigger fan is.
Or watch Jeopardy and kind of mutter the answers and show them how smart you are. And whatever your family's media use patterns are, there's something there that lets you be socialtogether while avoiding conflict.
So, yeah, escape can be great.
[29:41] We can do it way too much. You know, that's what I worry about with the TikToks and the Vines and all these super short instances of media content that basically train you to havea very short attention span.
And yeah, that's a different talk.
Brent:
[29:57] Yeah, there's a really scary graph I saw this morning where it showed between ages 13 to 17, the major social media platforms like TikTok, YouTube, Instagram and amount of timespent per and the categories were the biggest one for YouTube was like over 30, I think percent all the time, basically all the time.
And the whole graphic was scary and I can see if I can find a link and a way to show people after on like our website, but it was crazy.
Laramie :
[30:28] And that doesn't surprise me, you know, and I've got kids and so when I say that, You know what I'm saying?
Brent:
[30:33] Yeah.
Laramie :
[30:33] I see that, right? Yeah. kids that are, you know...
Sitting waiting for their parents to pick him up from you know from from after-school whatever and they're all on their phones And I was like, I remember being that kid.
Yeah before we had, you know smartphones and we were talking and and you know Getting to know people that we didn't know already and we were forming relationships and things anda lot of that's gone Yeah, it'd be cool to see like if they could prescribe what is the right amount of escapism in a day?
Yeah Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, that's an interesting question.
Brent:
[31:13] Because I think a lot of our issues are, we created so much input from all the technology that we need to escape.
Because part of this conversation, I'm thinking, oh, how long ago was it that we didn't need to escape like we have to escape now? Because the media is a good escape right now, becausewe're constantly overloaded, constantly under pressure, but that was self-inflicted.
Laramie :
[31:36] Yeah, that's deep. Although I gotta say, you know, so we started, we, I mean, not me, but researchers starting asking this question of why do you watch television, right? And whatare you getting out of it in the 1970s, right?
Before the internet, before home computers, before whatever, and even then people were saying to escape.
Yeah. So I think that a natural response to stress to stress is to not, sometimes to not deal with the stress, but just to escape from it and then be able to step back into a little healthier.
I'll tell you, I'll tell you some other cool research.
Again, not mine, but there's a good number of studies that find that you can use media to increase people's pain threshold.
Especially humorous media, but even high stress media, you can actually make them more sort of, I don't know, bulletproof a little bit.
Brent:
[32:33] What is high stress media?
Laramie :
[32:35] So something that's gonna make you feel anxious, like terror or suspense or stuff like that. Anything that gets your heart rate going also is gonna release some endorphins in you.
Or one of our other faculty on the floor, Jorge Pena has research that he looks at how using VR tours of art museums can help people with chronic pain.
VR Tours for Pain Alleviation
[33:03] And it's, you know, a big part of it's just escape.
You know, I'm gonna focus on something that isn't the thing that's causing me stress, which is in this case, physical pain.
I put my attention somewhere else and then the pain gets alleviated, so.
Brent:
[33:18] And I don't know if this question will go anywhere, but have people looked at the net benefit for escaping from the standpoint of, if you're constantly have an escape available.
And it does benefit you. But if you instead remove all escapes and you were forced to confront that problem that's causing you the stress, causing you whatever issues you may be having,would we be better off?
Laramie :
[33:48] Yeah, I don't think so. I think that's a complicated question too though.
Yeah. But that idea of escaping too much and even seeking entertainment and and distraction stuff too much. I think that's a real thing. Yeah, definitely.
Keller:
[34:05] And going back to the research a little bit, what are the biggest influences on our mate preference?
Laramie :
[34:10] Yeah, so that's the thing. It's a complicated web, right?
At the most fundamental level, all of those, well, not all, most of these things about mate preferences and selectivity are coming from an evolved drive to optimize our reproductivesuccess and the survival of our offspring, right?
[34:36] So there's two basic ways you can do that. You can mate lots of times with people who are gonna have genes that'll get passed on, or you can mate with fewer people who are gonnainvest highly in any potential offspring.
So even though we've divorced romance and dating and marriage and sex from reproduction, all those fundamental drivers are still there, right?
They're still part of what informs all the decisions that we make. And so.
The environmental cues and the reproductive opportunities and all that stuff matters together to make those decisions.
But I think the key for most of us is that sort of balance between our perceived mate value and trying to find the most valuable mate we can.
Right? Most attractive, most skilled, most resources, most whatever.
[35:45] Within whatever context we're in. And I think the most important context cues are the ones that suggest either a long-term strategy, right?
Invest in the partner, invest in potential offspring.
Or a short-term strategy, just get lots of attractive, strong partners.
Short-term vs Long-term Partners: Characteristics and Desires
[36:07] Yeah, so I think those are probably the two key things.
Brent:
[36:11] Could you speak more on the characteristic differences between the short-term partner and the long-term partner and what people are looking for?
Laramie :
[36:21] Yeah, so most of the research in this area has been done on women seeking male partners.
To a certain extent, the same kind of principles go the other way as well.
But, so if you wanna, I mean, imagine, right, 10,000 years ago, 50,000 years ago, when we're evolving, like the fine tuning on the species, right, when we're becoming who we are.
If you're in a resource-rich environment, and you wanna be reproductively successful, one way to do that is to get lots of attractive, strong partners so that your offspring will be attractiveand strong, right?
And then they will secure lots of partners, too, right? So Buss, the researcher Buss, refers to this as like a good genes strategy, right?
If I get enough, you know, if my partners are strong and beautiful and stuff like that, then my babies will be strong and beautiful and then they will be attractive to partners and get all thepartners and I will have lots and lots of grandkids and great grandkids, my genes continue.
And we talk about this as if it's a choice we're making, it's not about a choice, it's not about a conscious strategizing, It's how the genes.
Evolutionary Approach to Partner Selection
[37:47] Expression functions to drive behavior, which is then selected for evolutionarily.
And the other approach is about finding somebody that's gonna be committed and that's gonna stick around.
So even if you have fewer kids, they're gonna get the resources from not one parent, but two parents, and that's gonna persist.
So if you want that kind of person, then it's somebody who's gonna be nurturing, who's gonna be committed, who's gonna be like a high resource person who's gonna be able to earn lotsof money or bring back lots of pelts and mammoth meat or whatever you're looking for.
Yeah. So some of the research, including some of my research, we talk about cads and dads. You know, the dad is the nurturing one and the cat is kind of the bad boy, right?
And that's, those two, you know, choices are present in the cultural narratives around partners too, right?
When you think about the movies where there's two guys pursuing the same woman, isn't it usually one like nice guy?
Brent:
[38:54] Yeah.
Laramie :
[38:54] And one bad boy, and she likes the bad boy sometimes, but we know she's gonna end up with the nice guy, right?
That's how that works.
Keller:
[39:04] Is there research on like given, because it seems like there's an assumption that the CAD is more attractive from the reproductive end. Yeah.
Is the research on giving the same base ranking choices that are made?
Laramie :
[39:22] Yeah, so, yeah, this is complicated too. So you're saying like if the CAD and the data have the same physical attractiveness, where's the, what's the preference, right?
Keller:
[39:37] Yeah, yeah.
Laramie :
[39:39] I mean, it's about who you think is gonna pass on your genes, or who's more likely evolutionarily to pass on your genes with theirs, right?
And so things like assertiveness, aggression, things like that count as well, right?
So, you know, the dad might be, you know, The nurturing guy might be physically beautiful, but if he's just a nice guy, maybe he's not gonna secure as many mates and pass on the genesas effectively.
Brent:
[40:18] Have you ever thought about what would be the perfect balance?
If you could like make your man.
Laramie :
[40:23] Yeah. So, so, okay. This is, this is some weird.
So there's this research where they look at this strictly from a biological perspective, right?
Strictly biology where they measure women's like where they are in their reproductive cycle, and they look hormonally.
And when women are at their most fertile part of their cycle, they're more interested in short-term relationships and they're more interested in the bad boys, right?
And then when they're in other parts of the cycle, then they're more interested in the nurturing and stuff like that. Things like facial symmetry matter more when they're more fertile andthen that's less important when they're not.
So across the course of 28 days, there's variation in what women seek.
So I think, I think the perfect man, um, is one that can exhibit both sets of, uh, characteristics.
Um, so somebody who can be strong and nurturing, um, somebody who's, uh, physically attractive, but also, you know, has a, has a soft side, somebody who's going to be loyal, um, butcan, you know, beat his chest a little bit when that sounds terrible.
You know, we're wading into some bad gender stereotypes here.
Brent:
[41:47] And then when we're talking about attractiveness, why, like, how true is it about like certain physical features representing fertility or like the reason something is attractive isbecause it's going to represent some outcome?
Laramie :
[42:03] Yeah. I mean, only to a point, right? When you look at the tremendous variation in attractiveness standards across different cultures, it's clear that a lot of these things are culturallydetermined, right?
Facial Symmetry: Indicator of Overall Fitness
[42:21] Some of them less so, right? The sort of facial symmetry, bilateral symmetry seems to be a genuine indicator of overall fitness.
And it's weird because, you know.
If you do the test where you ask people to smell sweaty t-shirts, right? And you say, okay, which one do you like the smell of best?
Women consistently pick the ones worn by men who have greater facial symmetry, just based on the smell, right?
So at some fundamental level, I mean, infants show a preference for facial symmetry when they're three months old.
So there's some Some things that are very fundamental, like just they exhibit general overall fitness, and that's one of them.
[43:10] But things like, I've heard like the, oh, the red lips is to suggest reproductive whatever.
I don't buy any of that.
Now, with that said, things like broader hips, hourglass figure for women, things like that, So these are ancient aesthetic preferences, right?
The oldest art we have from humans are these little figurines, these little Venus figurines from Western Europe, tens of thousands of years old and exaggerated hips and breasts and things.I mean, they're, yeah.
Keller:
[43:51] And as your research looked into how social media has impacted our perceptions of our own body image and how that differs from men and women?
Laramie :
[44:00] Yeah, there's a lot of research on that now. Some of it mine, but there's probably been a hundred studies on this question in the last, just in the last couple of years.
And the, so my research has tended to focus on very specific kinds of media messages in social media, like Fitspiration, have you heard of this?
Brent:
[44:22] So this is a- Inspiring to be healthy, like Fit, healthy.
Laramie :
[44:24] So it's supposed to be, here's a little meme I made that's gonna inspire you to go to the gym and get strong and stuff.
But it turns out it's mostly images of very, very thin women in the gym, and it makes women who look at these images feel worse about their bodies, which is not a huge surprise.
The strongest evidence that we have right now is that it's, even more than the images that you see, it's what you do to yourself that's gonna hurt your body image.
So it's not so much I look at beautiful people, It's that I'm trying to post pictures of an idealized version of myself.
Negative Self-Talk and Objectification in Selfies
[45:06] And in doing so, I kind of objectify myself and criticize myself, you know?
You think about the people who are posting a selfie every day and how many pictures do they take before they have one that they're willing to post? You know?
And what are they saying inside their head to the other 29 pictures?
You know, I don't look good. I look fat in this one. I look funny. This makes my whatever.
All of that negative self-talk, that's what gets you the most.
And it gets men and women both.
Brent:
[45:38] So I had a really good analogy once about that negative self-talk and if you're a skier going down a hill Going through the trees Do you tell yourself don't hit the tree don't hit thetree don't hit the tree Or do you find that path of snow to get through it?
Yeah. Yeah, exactly I thought that was a really awesome metaphor, especially being somewhat of a skier.
Laramie :
[45:59] Yeah. Yeah. No taking selfies to for other people Very bad for you I don't recommend it at all.
Brent:
[46:08] Have you looked at the body image differences between men and women?
Laramie :
[46:13] Yeah, so my research is focused mostly on either or. Okay. But I'll tell you what the collective research is, right?
So, you know, men have higher self-regard or at least higher self-regard in almost every way than women, right?
Brent:
[46:27] So we've- Has that always been the case?
Laramie :
[46:29] Probably. Okay. Yeah, we just think very highly of ourselves or at least are more comfortable saying we think highly of ourselves.
Compared to women, even like attractiveness, if we say rate yourself on a scale one to 10, how attractive are you? Guy's much more likely to say nine than women.
Women at UC Davis usually say about seven to eight, that's kind of where they put themselves.
Men at UC Davis like eight and a half to 10, somewhere in there. Which, I don't know.
Where are we going with that? Oh yeah, so when it comes to susceptibility to media messages, women are the most vulnerable.
Or yeah, women across the board. And then gay men are actually very susceptible to negative body image results from viewing idealized bodies online.
Heterosexual men are the least influenced by it, but they are still influenced.
It takes a different form. I mean, heterosexual men are less worried about, well, and men in general, less worried about thinness than they are muscularity.
But it's still that case of there's some ideal body that I should be striving towards that I'm, you know, coming up short.
Impact of Advertisements on Men and Women
Keller:
[47:43] And kind of tying back into the research again, have you looked at how advertisements within media have impacted men and women?
Laramie :
[47:52] Yeah, advertisements are a trip because they are all about, I mean, they're unapologetic that they're trying to get us to focus on stuff more, right?
Stuff or services or whatever. So the focus is on inadequacy, right?
They have to convince us that we don't have what we need or what we should have or whatever.
And so any body of advertising is probably gonna produce some negative effects.
And the research is pretty consistent that exposure to advertisements results in an increased sense of materialism, like the sense that stuff is what's gonna make me happy.
And I think that's inherently problematic, right?
[48:41] Because stuff doesn't make you happy as it turns out. But my particular research in the area of advertisements and this question of the sort of mating market, the dating market,whatever, starts with this assumption that.
[49:03] In a resource-rich environment, women should be more likely to pursue a short-term mating strategy, right?
And you can imagine our ancestors 50,000 years ago, if I'm someplace where there's tons of food and there's tons of everything, I don't really need more resources from a long-termpartner to pass on my genes to raise my children. So I wondered if that was true.
And what I mostly found, so I created an experiment where I showed people different ads for similar products, but luxury products, ordinary consumer products, or just completely, youknow, no ads at all.
And it's exposure to the luxury ads that made a difference.
And the biggest difference is it makes women, at least in my experiment, more interested in men with traits like, you know, high earning potential, greater intelligence, things like that.
Like they wanted the things, or they saw it as like their partner choices, a way to get the luxury good.
Which is a little troubling, right? Yeah, yeah. I mean, especially when you think about how many ads we see, right?
Social media, every app on my phone, I think, well, not everyone.
Most of the apps on my phone have that banner ad across the bottom or whatever. Like all of them.
Brent:
[50:31] Yeah.
Laramie :
[50:32] And we're being sold something all the time.
Keller:
[50:34] Completely targeted. Yeah, yeah.
Laramie :
[50:35] They know how to get you.
Brent:
[50:38] And then, do you think we're acting on those, like, are we shifting our practices, especially in the last 10, 20 years?
Like, has there been data showing that we're cheating more than ever?
We are finding, like, we're only selecting like higher earning men or like these different things.
Laramie :
[51:01] So it's a little weirder than that, right? So if you look at the population level, we're actually having less sex starting later than we have in, like since we started tracking this stuff 50,60 years ago, right?
Kids are also doing less drugs than they used to, which like high school kids, which is interesting.
Brent:
[51:21] Do you count nicotine in that and vaping?
Laramie :
[51:23] So yeah, vaping brought this big spike, but nobody smokes anymore, which is a, I mean, not nobody, but yeah, just a step in the, small step in the right direction.
Yeah, so, but I think these things are related too, right? because it's not just.
So I'm thinking about the mating market and I'm thinking about my own value in it.
And this is an area where my estimation of my own worth is gonna have a direct impact on my behaviors, right?
So imagine you're at a party and you've been on the social media, you've been taking some selfies and you feel like your own mate value is not real high at the moment.
You walk in and because it's Davis, everybody there is beautiful.
And you look around and you think, okay, who should I hit on?
Who should I approach right now?
And you look at these attractive people of the sex you're interested in, and you think, oh yeah, I'm not good enough for that person.
As a consequence, you don't even approach them. Yeah, right?
And if you don't approach them, you don't form the relationship. And yeah, that's it.
Brent:
[52:45] So you're maybe extrapolating the idea that I think it's pretty well understood now that the younger generation is like the most anxious and depressed it's probably ever been andprobably feeling the worst about themselves than they probably ever have.
So now that's very much impacting the sexual relationships.
Laramie :
[53:05] I suspect so, yeah.
Brent:
[53:06] And then have you seen any of the data saying that overall people are having less sex and having it later in life, but there's like the select few that have way more sex earlier.
Like they're kind of like, there's one person, like the few that are hoarding all of it in a way.
Laramie :
[53:31] Yeah, I mean, if you think about it, If everybody's trying to get the most attractive partners possible.
Then, yeah, you could see how it could accumulate so that a very small number of people could have lots of partners and a lot of other people would have fewer.
And then we get into, you know, what are the different mating strategies available to women and men?
And one strategy for men is just have sex with lots and lots of people.
Like from a biological perspective, that was one way to pass on your genes pretty reliably.
Brent:
[54:06] Have you looked at birth control and how that's impacting women's behaviors?
Because now they don't have the risk of the nine month.
Laramie :
[54:16] Yeah, I have not. I've looked at the research and the interesting thing I think is it's less about that than it is about the actual hormonal changes that they're experiencing.
Because again, variation in the timing of the reproductive cycle, we know changes decisions that they're making about preferences, about long-term versus short-term.
Well, if you biologically tell their body that they're a little bit pregnant all the time, they're gonna make some different choices, right?
Birth control, on the hormonal level, is probably good for the dads as opposed to the cads because just the bad boy doesn't seem quite as important at that point.
That's very interesting. Yeah.
Keller:
[55:04] Like you've been talking about the two strategies, but growing up you're kind of only told about a longer term.
Way to date is that like when you're looking at data Do some people just take a short-term approach to dating for a long time?
Laramie :
[55:21] Some people never take anything else Yeah, so so the first time I measured What's called sociosexuality right how comfortable people feel with lots of relationships as opposed toone long-term committed relationship I use this this measure that's got like five or six questions.
And one of the questions is, of the people you know now, with how many would you like to have sex?
And you can see how that could reflect my general orientation.
Like for me, the answer is one, my spouse.
For some people, it's, well, these three attractive people.
I had one person write all of them. You know?
And yeah, so there's folks out there that that's just their orientation.
Because keep in mind, yes, we're given this cultural narrative from a lot of sources that you find somebody, you fall in love, you whatever.
But that's not the only cultural narrative, right? There's also, you know, there's lots of music about hooking up with lots of people.
There's lots of visuals on TV and models of that kind of thing in the media.
But these are just cultural messages, right? There's also the biological imperative, right? is what we've evolved to be ready to do so that our genes will be passed on.
Short Term vs. Long Term Relationships Among Younger People
Brent:
[56:47] Yeah, cause I kind of think after hearing that question, it's the older people are always telling you the longer term, but then I would argue majority of the messaging amongst theyounger people are like the short term that you get made fun of if you have the girlfriend or you're the girlfriend guy or the second someone breaks up with their partner, you can hear thisalmost every single time without fail, I wanna go have fun.
And what does fun mean? It means most like talk to as many people as possible, sleep around more often than not.
And I've always found it very interesting that the word choice of fun.
And it's so often correlated with those things. And it makes me wonder, like, do you know of any data to back up the number of partners, the short versus long-term relationship, if thosecorrelate to like overall perceived happiness?
Laramie :
[57:46] Yeah, um, not as cleanly as, as I would, as I would like, um, Well, let's see, so there's good evidence that within a committed relationship, more sex is associated with greaterrelationship satisfaction, life satisfaction, all this kind of thing.
We know that people in a committed romantic relationship, like a long-term committed relationship, live longer.
Right, they do better. And married people are happier than single people overall.
So there's evidence that suggests that the long-term strategy is the winner.
But with that said, I am 100% confident that there are lots of people out there that are having fun pursuing a short-term strategy as well.
Brent:
[58:38] I've always just questioned that how much is it, how genuine is the fun?
Laramie :
[58:43] Yeah, well, and here's the other interesting thing.
So when you look at now, it's gotten weird in the last 10 or 15 years, but when you look at the research from like the 60s and the 70s and the 80s and the 90s, the pattern was veryconsistent that in high school, men, boys, I mean in high school, wanted a long-term relationship.
They scored higher than the girls did on like desire for romance, commitment, all that stuff. The boys are leading the way in high school.
They want somebody, they want something stable.
And then they get to college and then something switches. And it's probably partly the market, right? Available alternatives.
But it's, you know, probably also a response to, you know, to cultural messages about what's important.
Yeah. So I think there's something very, very deep in the species that says the long-term mating strategy is a good idea. I mean, I think that's there.
Keller:
[59:44] Yeah. Kind of piggybacking off of that, is college a good time to find a partner?
Laramie :
[59:51] So, full disclosure, I got married when I was 22. My wife was 21.
We were in the middle of college and we've been married for a long time.
28 years. So for me, it worked out pretty well, actually.
College as a Good Time to Find a Partner
[1:00:09] There are reasons to think yes. Okay. Especially for guys, because again, you know, Davis, like I said to 60% women, that's pretty typical of the nation right now, right?
Women are going to college at a rate greater than men.
And so, you know, if you're a heterosexual guy in college right now, you're probably outnumbered at your college and that works in your favor.
[1:00:38] But here's the other thing. So it's very much the case that similarity between partners is a strong facilitator of relationship success.
And while you're in college, you're around a lot of other people that share your values, that share some of your goals, right? they're interested in education and all this kind of stuff.
And so, you know, and you're around a lot of other young people.
I mean, when's the next time in your life that you're gonna be around 40,000 other young people, people in your age group or your age cohort, even broadly?
How many bars would you have to go to when you're 30 working in a job in New York City before you encounter 40,000 people in your age group?
Yeah, I mean, it's insane. Yeah, but with that said, you know, be careful. Uh, you know, lots of, lots of.
You gotta make sure that things line up, right? The values and the goals and things. If those all line up, then yeah.
Brent:
[1:01:47] Do you know of any best strategies to evaluate whether or not those line up?
Laramie :
[1:01:53] Yeah, the challenge is you have to talk to them and not just look at your phone.
So, yeah, no, I think that's, you don't, have to talk to them in person. I think it's like 40%, 30 or 40% of marriages now start online.
And yeah, it's huge.
And they seem to be just as successful as marriages that start in person.
Brent:
[1:02:21] Even though overall we're getting divorce at a higher rate?
Laramie :
[1:02:26] We're not, right? We've been kind of stable since the 1970s, 80s, something in there, yeah.
Brent:
[1:02:32] We've come out around 50%.
Laramie :
[1:02:35] Yeah, and it's 50% of marriages. It's not 50% of people.
So like about a third of us get divorced, but then we get divorced more than once.
And so, yeah. So, I mean, your odds when you get married are actually pretty good.
Like they're better than 50-50 of your marriage remaining intact.
Yeah, the numbers are scary until you kind of dig into them a little bit.
And if you're, you know, if you guys are about 20, if you're already on your second or third marriage, then it's not going to get any better, you know.
Statistically speaking, but yeah.
Yeah. And I think sharing experiences where you do hard things together, that also seems to help.
Brent:
[1:03:21] About that, I just saw a recent stat on the likelihood of getting divorced if you start a business together is exponentially lower than if you didn't have a business together.
Laramie :
[1:03:34] Well, you're engaged in some stressful things that are going to make you talk to each other and rely on each other.
Brent:
[1:03:39] Yeah.
Laramie :
[1:03:41] So that seems like a good idea.
Brent:
[1:03:44] Do you have any other advice for people out there?
Laramie :
[1:03:50] Yeah, you know, so when we talk about ads, we said that one of the problems is they make you more materialistic.
They make you think that happiness comes from stuff.
Happiness comes from our relationships with other people. Romantic relationships, friendship relationships, family relationships, even relatively casual relationships can be a source ofjoy and fulfillment to us.
So the advice I give is cultivate the relationships, be kind, be honest, be charitable, give people a little grace, and do the things that you need to do in order to produce that sort of social gelthat holds us together and brings us happiness.
Brent:
[1:04:43] There we have it.
Keller:
[1:04:45] Thank you, Professor Taylor. It's been wonderful.
Laramie :
[1:04:47] Thank you. pleasure.