Dating & Relationships | Dan Ariely | Talks at Google

so thank you all for coming, my name is Logan ury. I help run a team at Google called irrational lab, where there's a behavioral economics unit and we work closely with Professor Dan Ariely, who was very lucky to have him with us today, and Dan Ariely is the James. B Duke, a professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke, founded the Advanced Hindsight Center there and is the author of three New York Times bestsellers, including Predictably Irrational, The Advantages of Rationality, and The Honest Truth About Dishonesty. so we're going to do about 35 minutes of questions between us and then we'll open it up to the audience so save your questions and Dan.

I wanted to start with a very simple question that someone in the audience asked me beforehand: what do women want? What do they say? they want what they really want and any other questions we can come back to that so based on your knowledge of human decision I will say one thing about this it seems like a booby trap going into this but I will say there are some really good results that show that what women want in terms of men actually changes throughout the menstrual cycle and there are times of the month when women crave more men who are metrosexual and the time of the month when they create men who appear more manly and you can decide, you can, you can guess when each one of them is, so that people in the audience take notes about it.

That's great, so based on your knowledge of human decision-making, how would you design the perfect date from initial messages to days? after the date, okay, there is a lot to say about an optimal date, so the first question we need to ask is what is the purpose of the date and is the date a starting point for something else or is this the end of the experience. Let's say we're thinking about a short-term relationship and we're just thinking about the first date of something that could potentially have a long life. One of the things we know is that the endgame is a big business, so we've done it.

There are many experiments on this, but the nicest experiment is an experiment on colonoscopy, so imagine you give people a colonoscopy and this is not something that people particularly enjoy, so that's not the analogy, but you have two types of colonoscopy and colonoscopy is one way. To give you the details, but colonoscopy, the unpleasant moment is when you go around the right bend, so imagine having a colonoscopy that lasts half an hour and then, for some people, you just leave the probe in the anus for just five more minutes, but don't make it painful, so for some people the experience is unpleasant and for others the experience in life the last five minutes just isn't that bad now it's not a good experience, no one says, "I'll give it a try." those five minutes." but it makes the average of everything else seem to go higher, which of those do you think people prefer?

They prefer thirty minutes of an unpleasant experience or 30 minutes of unpleasant experience plus five minutes of less unpleasant experience. They prefer the second. indication that the ending matters a lot and the final method matters a lot in all kinds of things think about dinner how we finish dinner we finish it with dessert when with something extra and how you would like to end the holiday you want to go in on a high note, no get home and wash everything and clean or get stuck in an airport, so I think I would start by thinking about the end of the

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experience, so that will be one thing and the second is that Really, unfortunately, our imagination is a often better than reality, so we think about something, almost everything, what the experience itself is better or what you can imagine it would be like.

We have a tendency to fill in the gaps and we fill in more of the gaps. -Optimistically speaking, we actually see this a lot in online

dating

, people read profiles of people in online dating and fill in the gaps and say, wow, this person likes music, they must love the type of music I like it, it's fantastic and then of course meeting for coffee and being disappointed so I would say the last moment is incredibly important and also leaving something to the imagination would be very useful so that's one thing , the second is how to get people to have it, so we talked.

About the ending, do you want the ending to be meaningful and do you want to leave something to the imagination for later? The other thing is the question: how can you make discussions meaningful? So we did this in an online dating setting and we got people this way MIT students, so it comes with all the qualifications of anyone here went to MIT, yeah, so you know, but the material, but anyway, this will be MIT is for college students who are dating on this side of the date and we just captured the text message between them there and how wonderful do you think the discussions were how meaningful they were terrible they were terrible right, they were asking things like what do you major in? and you know if you go to school and how many siblings you have like unbel, now you could say you know, that's what they really want to know what really makes the first date interesting, review each other's resume and exchange those details.

The other possibility is that we don't actually feel comfortable sharing intimate and useful details. about ourselves and what we gravitate toward is the lowest common denominator, so we did another version of this where we gave people 20 questions and told them look, you can't ask whatever you want, you have to choose between those. 20 questions and the others The person knew he could only choose from those 20 questions, so if we are on the first date and I start by saying Logan what your most interesting sexual fantasy is, it is a little difficult to start a discussion like that because it violates the rules about the conversations. when you expect people to start by saying where you went to school, how many, but in reality it's boring, useless stuff that doesn't promote the relationship in any way, so we gave people a list of questions and said these are the only ones. the questions you can ask and what happened, everyone benefited more from those questions, the people who asked the questions got answers that they were interested in and the people who answered the question, you know, it's much more interesting than saying, read my resume, so I think there is another question. how we create a rule for a date that during the date we agree beforehand not to exchange meaningless information how the tone is set how the rules for that approach are set there is a very good set of questions in psychology where Basically, I think I came up with a list of 36 questions and when they say that these 36 questions help people get to know each other, the questions themselves are not that crucial, what is crucial is what they leave out, so think of the date in terms of saying How do you do it? we make?

How do we make it meaningful? And then the last thing I would say is: What are you really trying to get out of a date? You're trying to get a glimpse of that person and part of that comes directly. Questioning and answering is a kind of interview process, but part of it comes from having people interact in the world. I imagine you could go on a date with someone in an empty room without knowing how much you would learn about that person versus if you went to a concert together and there were a lot of people around, vendors, noise, and unexpected things happen.

How much could they learn in a somewhat unmediated and unclear way? They would actually understand what that is in a much better way. So, it's important to also think about what is the environment that could maximize how much we are going to learn about that person. Thank you. So what about before and after dates? Is there any research that says people should play hard to get? The question my friends ask me all the time, yes, absolutely, playing catch up is a good recipe, so you know the term cognitive dissonance well, so the original research on cognitive dissonance was as follows: Festinger led people to a room. and he said please screw these bolts for an hour and people screw these bolts for an hour and then he said he paid some people a dollar for this very low, others $20 very high and then he basically tried to get them to recommend these tasks for other people now if you got $20 for this what do you say to yourself?

This was an incredibly boring task. They paid me a lot. Perfectly fine. What do you say you pay the door? If they paid you a dollar, you say they paid you a dollar for this. It was incredibly boring those things don't fit now can you change the fact that they paid you the dollar? No, that's a fact, so what do you do? You change your perception of how boring this idea of ​​cognitive dissonance is. It is uncomfortable for us to live with her. two ideas that don't fit, so you say they paid me a dollar, this was boring.

I don't like living with this dissonance, so let me think that these tasks are more interesting and now I feel like I'm more likely to recommend them to other people. So think of it the same way you go on a date and work hard for it. What do you tell yourself? You say this person. I am working very hard for it and this person is not worth it. It does not work. Also, the moment you work harder for someone for something, you can't change that fact, you change your mind and this person is actually worth more.

You have to explain to yourself why I tried so hard while they try so hard for so long. time and the only solution you have is to say that this person must be amazing, so you convince yourself that this person is amazing, so this is some kind of justification for playing how to get there now, there is probably a limit, but I think making things too easy. or not they're not worth it and there's other more recent kind of research on showing efforts mm-hmm, I'm sure you want to say something about this, so Michael Norton, a professor at Harvard Business School, did some research that shows how you like people see the search. results for a travel website, so you'd think I'd like to see them as quickly as possible, but I actually had a condition where you saw it instantly, you saw it with the progress bar, or you saw it with a progress bar that said : We're now looking at thousands of websites, including Orbitz, United, and American Airlines, and people actually preferred that third party because they thought the pricing algorithm was working harder for them, so we like it when things are harder, but we show effort, yes, so it's not just the difficult part but that.

We understand the effort that goes into it, so when you think about a relationship and you take two people in your relationship and you ask them out of 100% of the entire relationship how much work you do and how much work you do, these numbers never add up to less than 100, right, It's always more than 100 percent and why is because we see all the details of what we do. I take the trash, oh my gosh, this is a really complicated, time-consuming, 17-step process. my wife, she pays the bills, that has to be very simple and the lesson of this is that you really want to be more like kyuk in all aspects of your life, you want to go home to your partner and you want to say: "I'm looking for United I'm looking here are all the things I've done for a relationship today and it's not about lying or exaggerating but it's really about making an effort that you make clear to the other person and it also works for Roommates who I discovered recently, yes, something I've thought about for a long time.

Now we're in this era of Tinder and you use your phone, others seemingly limit an unlimited number of people and you think your soulmate is just one swipe, like that. that with what you know about the paradox of choice, how should we optimize happiness in this era of Tinder? Yeah, and it's not just the paradox of choice, it's basically like this, imagine two principles. The first is that weed. It always looks greener. when you're okay, let's take a step back when you get to know someone better, what are some of the first things you learn about that person that let you down in all kinds of ways?

So this is true, this is true in visual illusion, if you take photos of people and you blur them and make them blurry, everyone looks more attractive as you get deeper into the little details of life, you start to see wrinkles and it's true in visual perception and it is also true in life when you look at people in general. In terms, you only see the good things in them, by the way, this is not just about romantic attraction. You know, companies hire CEOs and they hire CEOs from outside the company, they often have high expectations of them, but when you look at the results, the results show. that they pay outside CEOs a lot more than insiders and perform worse, but when you look at an outsider it's very easy to say, "Oh my God, this person is right because you don't know the little details well, so if you look to someone you don't know very well, all the annoying little habits they have will be out of your reach and you will imagine that they all work fine, only what moves,you can see them. those details so imagine a world where when you look at other people they look greener or more glorious than when you know them in every detail and now you're in bed next to someone and you wake up I wake up in the morning and you say : "This is what I want for the rest of my life." When you have other options here and this is the Tinder on your phone, it's here and basically, on all those things, all those options look so wonderful. by the way, also in online dating or on Facebook, whatever it is, people only present their positive sides correctly, so you don't, so you have this biased idea that the external option, the set of external options, it looks like this.promising and now you wake up next to someone or have a small fight with someone and you think that with one click you could have a date with someone else now imagine that you have an apartment and you have a deal with the owner that the list is day by day and every morning you wake up and say: do I want to extend this lease or not and every day your landlord decides whether he wants to extend that lease or not, how much would you invest in the apartment? you would paint the walls, you would get flowers, you would fix the walls, you would do all kinds of things, of course, not because you always have one foot out and I think that's really the problem, it's not just about the existence of Tinder but about these ideas .

Also, the analogy is that you wake up next to your romantic partner every morning and say: should we do this for another day or should we stop now? The moment you think about the short-term horizon, or what you will invest in the relationship. much, much further down, there's actually some beautiful research by Dan Gilbert and Ebert that they got, they got college students to take a photography class and at the end of the two-week photography class they said, hey, you took a lot of pictures, pick one and we will send you this. a photo to England to be developed will be back here in two weeks that's all the other group said the same thing but they said look, we are going to send it to England and for two weeks you can come back, but during those two weeks you can change your mind, in fact even when the picture comes back you can change your mind ok the picture came back after two weeks of course they didn't actually ship to England but if they came back and then they say to you do you change your It doesn't matter no one changed his mind, but how much did people like your photos?

People who engaged with the photos loved the photo. Who kept saying yes all the time. I know I committed to the photo, but there are all kinds of other photos. Should I really? I changed my mind and so on, I actually liked them less, so what worries me is that when we are in a relationship but continually with one foot out and continually thinking about how the outside world is more tempting and more interesting etc. it's not actually a good recipe for investing in a relationship and the relationship gets better when you attack it's not a zero sum game it gets better when you invest in it and if you don't think you'll be there for long At that point the level of investment you get like is not that high so it's a big segue into something I want to talk about which is how you choose who to settle down with and maybe you can apply this to the secretary problem so my preference for you all should choose the Random, is the best for the experiment.

We haven't been able to do this experiment, yes, so you know the secretary's problem. The secretary problem is a classic problem in operation. research and the idea is that living without a secretary is difficult, those were the days when people had secretaries, but let's say that living without an assistant is difficult and every day you have less use for the day because you have to do more yourself and interviews people. and you interview people one a day as soon as they arrive there is no you can't interview them all at the same time and if you delay the hiring you suffer because you waste time in the hiring and you don't have a secretary in the middle but if you choose very early, someone who doesn't is great, you might be missing out on someone great in the future, and there's actually an optimal solution for that, because what you really want to do is try out secretaries for a while until you figure out the layout. quality of people in the world and then the moment you get to someone who meets that threshold, you have to adopt them because there are opportunity costs and the big idea of ​​the problem is opportunity cost, so what would you rather do?

Let's say your wife and you're trying to date a man and let's say men are on a scale between 0 and 10 and one day you meet someone who is eight and a half, you say yes or you say let me find someone else in and The problem with Secretary, there is something is that if you fire someone you will never be able to get them back well and you keep taking samples and what we see happening is that people don't take into account the opportunity cost, so what you need to think about The question is how much how much you enjoy life in the search process versus how much you enjoy life when you're dating.

Hopefully the date is better than it was without it, but assuming this is the case, there is also an opportunity cost cost that delays this. The three-year process also has a cost. People don't take cost into account, so you know there's an equation of how to solve it. I'm not sure people should follow this equation exactly, but I do. I think we need to be a little more aware of the opportunity cost and almost constant misery that being alone means for some people and how we take that into account as well. Also, I think, as I speak for all men, I think women.

I should just lower the standards a little, so speaking of lowering the standards, what is some of the best and worst dating advice you've ever heard? The best and worst dating advice could also be fair

relationships

, our marriage, which one of the not sure if it's a little advice, okay, here's some advice, I think ask your mother about the person you're with going out and Ennio and your best friends. You see when we fall in love with someone and we are in love, it is an amazing feeling and when we have this amazing feeling, we feel this strength and attraction and we think that this person is everything in our lives and we can't imagine that anything will ever be different.

The sad reality is that it is a wonderful feeling, it just doesn't last as long when the question is when. What comes in its place goes and the problem is that when you are in love with someone you are not really a good judge of the fact that that feeling will go away, right? You are sure that you will, you will stay with that feeling and I'm not sure this person has what it takes to look long term. Her mother is probably a better candidate for that because her mother actually sees the person without becoming infatuated.

If you think about what makes long-term compatibility not necessarily something you can understand when you're in love and there's a very sad result: people don't actually tell their friends what they think about the people they're dating. , so I will tell you a personal story. I have a friend and he was I dated someone and I heard they broke up and I met him and I said oh I'm so happy you broke up with this horrible woman she's just terrible thank God it's over and he says let's go We just got engaged and there are several. Options of the many things you can say at the intersection like this.

My choice was to say idiot and I said, haven't you talked to anyone? and tell one of your friends. Everyone h.naoto anyone. Well, we didn't talk for long. time, but no one told them, you know, it's actually really hard to tell your friends that you hate the person they're dating or that you think they're a really bad match, but it's your obligation as a friend, right, if you really you value your friendship, you have to, so I think I'll give more advice to your friends to be kind by measuring how much couples break up after having a survey and then thinking about it for a long time. terms compatibility, what does that actually mean, have any of you ever owned a canoeing gun?

So I'm a big proponent of the canoeing test as a relationship test oh no, and did you go canoeing? So this is what happens in a canoe and I'm not talking about canoeing on the lake, we're talking about fast water, it doesn't have to be very rough, but some kind of running water. Now when you're in a canoe, things happen, you hit a rock, you flip. On the wave you get to where things happen and the question is how much you blame the other person. There is something called fundamental attribution error in psychology. The fundamental attribution error is the idea that when bad things happen to us we think it is due to external events.

When bad things happen to other people we say that they are just clumsy, so if I sleep on a banana, you know, it's because you know that someone forgot that someone was careless, if someone else jumps, they are just careless at this moment, when we things happen outside. of our control when it's for us we tend to blame the world when it's for other people we blame them so it's a wonderful opportunity to basically simulate arguments just when you go down in the canoe bad things will happen it doesn't seem like it's your fault and now the question is how are they going to negotiate, are they going to blame each other?

They are going to collaborate on this. Are they going to take it in a friendly way? You have a lot of things to argue about, not many bad things happen to you, right? I mean, if you live in San Francisco, the most you can argue is that you know the Uber is a little late, so something tragic like that, but real life has a lot of it. a lot of terrible things you know a lot of terrible things happen outside of your control and the real question is how are you going to handle them and something like a canoeing test will be a speed up for this process so is there any kind of good river around here to try ?

Yes, some Groupon sales from 15 years ago. Yeah, so I wanted to go back to what you said about falling in love. How does that relate to arranged marriage? How does that compare to love versus arranged marriage? There is a very sad and interesting result. This is research in India comparing love marriages and arranged marriages and, of course, it is not a random assignment. It's not like you take two people and say, "Hey, you're an arranged marriage or a love marriage." but they generally look at relationship length and happiness and what they find, unsurprisingly, is which one starts out better: love marriages, well, laboratory marriages start out happy, arranged marriages start out worse, but what It happens over time, love marriages go down, arranged marriages go up. and they cross in year three so the new three days change and now there are many reasons for that so one thing in India if you live in an arranged marriage you don't just marry the particular person you marry . marrying into a family, but you also have an idea of ​​what your individual roles are, so by marrying into your family you have an idea of ​​what your roles are, there is a responsibility, etc., and therefore , things get better over time in love marriages.

It's actually very complicated and do you know there's a term lesbian, a deathbed, death? Better yes, keep going. I think there is a concept that has existed, right? Around the seventh year of a relationship in a lesbian couple, it does not exist. a lot of sexual activity and they call it lesbian death in bed, yes, and it's not so much at seven, but it happens early and the notion that there was an article and I think the American Sociology Review a couple of years ago this and the idea is that because the relationship is not as defined and because it is very much an equal relationship, it is about friendship, the romantic aspect of the relationship does not flourish as much as the friendship, but the others do not, and that It's actually a big mystery.

I think of you. You know we are moving to a different realm. Different types of

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, so you know we've had historically and hopefully we'll become as equal as possible. You know that there is more equality, more camaraderie of all kinds. of things, how can we achieve that, on the one hand, and not have the cost in terms of passion and romance, or on the other? I don't think we have a good answer for that, but it's certainly an issue that needs to be addressed. figure it out, so I know you've done some work with Ashley Madison, the site infamous for having an affair, do you think that's a solution?

How would she do it? What do you think of Ashley Madison? So, I'll tell you, I'll tell you what. The CEO of Ashley Madison told me when I did it like this, over the last few years we've been doing a little bit of research on this honesty, actually for many years we've been doing termination dishonesty, but we made a documentary on dishonesty. and not Biderman, who was the CEO of Ashley Madison before this happened and was one of the people we interviewed and actually had some interesting observations about a relationship and one of the things he said was that if women have problems in the relationship and they want to discuss it with someone who goes with their friends, what about themen?

How many men here have talked about relationship problems with their best friend? How many of you do it regularly? But it's not fair because very few people would raise their issue. hands when you ask a question like this on camera, but and in general, women are much less likely to have a tight social network when it comes to relationships, it's common for stereotypical men to not, you know, we talk about sports, right? But, talking about The relationship actually helps you change your relationship or improve things, talking about sports doesn't really help in that sense and what I know what Nan said was that when people have a partner externally, it is actually an opportunity for men to have discussions about the relationship and So now their hypothesis was that in some cases it helped their relationship.

We were never able to test that hypothesis, but it's something interesting to think about, and of course the solution doesn't have to be Affairs. The solution might be how we create a support network for men, since relationships are more complex than that. only for women but also for men. How do we create social networks for men where we can discuss those things and see each other better? I learned, so actually medicine, you know, men come together, you know the place, the slogan used to be at least life is short, have an adventure and in every zip code and in every country they were in, there are men who join and women who join and the The question is what is the ratio between men and women, so I'm just talking between countries.

Which do you think is better at predicting the ratio of men to women between countries, in what type of countries the number is more equal, and in which countries there are more men and fewer? Women, what correlates with what you would expect? It's a question of data, religion knows everyone's practices, so you think it's about the ratio of men and women in society, so when it's not an interesting time, what else do you say? What do you mean with? income levels make approximately the same more likely to have that's exactly right, then the income gap is there, which is why women are paid less than men by almost everyone around the world. same job, as this income gap is larger, there are more men and fewer women, and as the income gap is smaller, the percentage is closer, suggesting that women's demand for extramarital affairs is slowing down.

I mean, don't you think that when there's a big income gap in Sunda, men are just more wonderful, so women want to stay with You're not right anymore, it's probably the opposite, but it just means that something is holding back women. women in that sense and it is due to financial insecurity. Is there any region of the country where many young spies, particularly men or women, have been seen? So that was all over the world if we just look at the United States. The worst place in terms of the ratio of tall men and very few women is a Silicon Valley suburb, and I think this happens all over the United States. and the reason for that is I think it represents probably one of those cases where it's a suburb, the women don't have jobs, they're housewives, low income, the men work in Silicon Valley, they get paid very well, and the gap income is very high and that is the recipe Wow, so we had this discussion about dating in San Francisco, how many of you live in San Francisco?

Okay, so imagine a world where you have a hundred and one women. It is a map of there are one hundred and one women. and a hundred men and we do this experiment and we gave everyone ten dollars and we say that if at the end of the game you have money, you can keep it as long as you are paired with someone of the opposite sex, so if you are a man and women and you are paired , everyone keeps their money, if they are not matched, the money comes back to me, okay, that's rule number one and the second rule is that they can buy people, what does that mean?

So let's say Scot and Logan are together and I'm alone. Can I say Logan, you know I have $10, if I give you $1, would you leave Scotland and join me? The goal of the game is not to be nice to your partner, the goal is to make money, okay, that's the goal, so let's say you switch to me and then let's say Scott comes and tells you he'll offer you two dollars now, If you move in with Scott, it's not like an engagement ring, you can't keep my The dollar has to go, you give it back to me, so at every point, if you trade someone, you take what they gave you, but the money you you got before you have to return it, so now imagine the game. 101 women in total.

Women have a thousand. and ten dollars one hundred men in total the men have a thousand dollars as the game continues at the end of the game when no one changes anymore how much money do men have and how much money do women have? What do you think first? Of all, who has more money, men or women, not men, not then the result is that men end up with almost all the money, women end up with a hundred and one dollars and demand and up with everything, why then you have 100 men have one woman there is a woman alone what does she do she goes to a man and tells him that she will give you a dollar if you change the main switch now this other woman who is alone she goes with another man another man eventually all the men have eleven dollars and the women nine but there is still one woman without a partner so it continues and again the continuum continues until all the women have $1 because if there is a woman with $2 who is alone she gives that dollar to another person to exchange with her, so eventually and The good thing about this beautiful, interesting but depressing game is that you need a very small asymmetry in the market to create a tremendous asymmetry of power, so think about it, one hundred men, one hundred. a woman, a small level of asymmetry, what is the asymmetry in terms of power?

Incredible, men basically have all day, all power. Now think about places like San Francisco. Now you in San Francisco have many types of dating markets, right? But if you think about the heterosexual dating market and you ask what is the proportion of men, men and women or, if you are not politically correct, you could say what is the proportion of men who can be dated, what is the expression and regarding women and if the creation is such that there are fewer men then the power relationship changes dramatically Wow, that is depressing, yes, it seems that, according to your advice, we should not live in San Francisco or a suburb of Silicon Valley, we should all go canoeing with our partners, we should have arranged marriages and we.

By the way, the suburbs should be fine, but don't you mean you want to have an equal income? Well, then, the same income wherever you live and we should opt for the 35-minute colonoscopies, so with that in mind, let's open the topic. to the questions and Scott will take the microphone in the experiment that you described one hundred women, 101 women and 100 men, this assumes that there is perfect knowledge of the system, how does it work in imperfect knowledge systems, what is the most real real world? case, yes, when we do this experiment, by the way, I usually do it with my students on Valentine's Day, so I think I take my students and usually there is more than more than this number and there is never an equal number and it takes a little bit of time, but the market sorts itself, but of course at any time you know if you are alone and you see who else is there and you, the moment you are alone, ask to separate people and also in the real world.

Not everyone wants to divide the market, so every time there is friction, this effect will decrease, so if you have loyalty, if someone matches with someone and even if they could have someone better, they don't want to change this. it creates friction in the system, so every time this friction due to other reasons of loyalty or lack of information etc., the effect would be less, but it doesn't mean that it goes away, it would just be a less effect if I think about being predictable. irrational in the context of relationships. I immediately think that men are from Mars and women are from Venus.

You know, a lot of these paradigmatic problems of why we argue with each other is because we're trying to give the other person the kind of love and affection that they need. we need and we don't understand where they come from, we misinterpret what they say. I'm just curious if you have any comments on that General Ariel. I don't know how many of those tips there actually have been. You know, putting them into practice or if they are some kind of underlying psychological mechanisms that explain them more or because it still seems like something that is underestimated in relationships, yes, and I think the research on it is not being that good, but we know.

For example, people fight a lot over money and fighting over money is fighting over priorities in life and in some of those fights people don't really understand why they are fighting at that moment, understanding that this pair of shoes is not really about shoes. or that this beer is not about this beer, so how do you give people some freedom in some control and some joint goals? It's something we don't know. In fact, I'm very hopeful that we need some technological solutions for that right, so that people are going to be different and there is a question of what is the best way for couples to manage their money, for example, in a way that give them individual freedom without getting angry at the other person, but also some commonality in terms of their goals and I think there are all kinds of interesting ways to think about how we would design joint checking accounts and separate accounts and how much we would put into each of them. if we wanted people to at least not fight over money, so I think we have to recognize that they are There will be fights over all kinds of things and I'm not sure we can always explain every fight what it is about, but how do we prevent those And one of the most beautiful differences we know between men and women? you're actually on a date not a relationship so everyone knows what speed dating is all about and let's say there are 10 men and 10 women and they each talk to each other because they talk to one person for five minutes and then we play a bell to all men. they change, they talk to another person, another bell, they change and at the end they give you your list and say that of the 10 people I met, these are the four or five I want to meet for a second date, so imagine two speed dating events , one has 10 men and 10 women and the other has 20 men and 20 women now what happens with the number of people you say yes what happens with the number of people you say I want to meet them again I could have two models can you have one model, let's say that I'm going to choose the top three or the top of eight, they know what they know and then, of course, if they choose above eight when they go from ten to twenty, the expectation will be twice as many people over the threshold, so what?

Do you think it happens when people go from a small speed dating event to a big one? Do they choose? Do you have a day? Let's call it a budget approach where they have a top X or they have a threshold approach that says everyone has more than eight somewhere. in the middle, okay, so every time you listen to a talk think about the question before asking me about gender differences, so if there is a gender difference here too, men and women are very different, women basically They behave as if they have a budget, so when the group gets bigger, women just become more critical or more restrictive, they just say yes to like it, the threshold goes up and men say yes to the same thing, They have a threshold for everyone over eight, so your number basically doubles, so this is actually one of the biggest differences that we've documented in the quotes, sorry, at that point I have a question about the new Tinder world we all live in, so I think I totally agree with what you said before about what the mentality is like.

With having tinder and hinge as an option, whether you're into those apps or not, the grass is always greener, one foot in and one foot out. I think one argument for using apps is that there's more exposure to more people, so I'm not going to meet as many people in a bar as I would if I decided to swipe on the hinge, but I think what you just said about How it makes women so much more critical if they give you so many more options, don't you think? that in the context of hinge or tinder it is better to have more exposure to more people so that your chances are technically greater or you are infinitely more critical that it will not have a positive outcome in any way, yes, so what is the percentage of men What do you see in the tinder hinge that you are proposing to go have a coffee?

Personally, yes, it is minimal, no, what are we talking about, we are talking about, we are talking about ten percent, a fraction, two percent, two percent, more or less - and I'm not even asking, I'll say yes, pants, maybe I'll agree,but I'm probably not someone who proactively reaches out, so let's say you meet and see a thousand people on Tinder, which is probably like 30. minutes, how many of those do you think in a thousand, you say yes to 20, sure, yeah , yeah, maybe more, yeah, let's say 50 out of 4000, so that's half a percent, okay, so listen, so this, do you know how many do you think?

It's just that in online dating I haven't seen the results on tinder but in online dating people reject most people when you go speed dating people say yes to more than 20% of the people they meet it's shocking the 20 percent without me I mean, you're half-talking, why is that part of the problem? It's just that in these apps we don't describe people in a way that tells us anything about how to consume them. No, I don't, but generally there is something like what. Does it mean being with that person? Imagine that the way we describe food in restaurants is by describing it by its ingredients, you have these grams of protein and this amount of vitamin D and you know how much that would give you some idea about what the food is zero right now, so Now think about online dating, we describe people to you by their height, weight, religion, etc., how does that give you an idea of ​​what this person would be like if they went on a canoe trip?

In short, what happened is that you are very risk averse because the product description is so mediocre that you change your threshold in order to give people the feeling that the only thing that matters is the image. I think we are misclassifying a lot of people and you know we have the Indian experiment, but how many of you went to college in the US? How many of you? You became very good friends with some of the people you share a room with. Now think about this is the American version of arranged marriages. Nobody and nobody said, Oh, let's go through a six-month date and then put you in a room with someone.

It's kind of a random process, you know, maybe they notice some characteristics, but a lot of people report that they walked into a room with someone and eventually ended up loving that person. Now, if you met this person, would you predict him not so much? Here is an experiment. inside imagine we do it to you imagine I asked you for a list of 20 of your best friends and 20 people that you like so much and then I gave them these 40 people I asked them to fill out their online dating platform on any party.com and then I give you those 40 without the photo so you don't know exactly who it is, you don't know the name and then I say, hey, we have people here that we think you like and you have people that you would think You wouldn't like me that much How well do you think you'll be able to separate them?

It's awful. It's basically random. Think about your best friends. What would your bed have if you were dating online and you looked at their profile? it's about you, oh my god, I want to be friends with this person for 20 years, it's their height, eye color, BMI, I mean, what you know, it's kind of crazy, I actually think it's a good point to think about. on it on Google and why. Do we describe people this way in online dating because it's easy? It doesn't make sense from the perspective of predicting who you would like or dislike, but it's easy to do and it's easy to search for, but only because it's easy to do. "Search and doesn't mean it's the right mechanism, so I think we have this like we have district.

I want people to find love, it's a wonderful thing, right, we should promote it, but I think the companies that are doing it are taking tremendous shortcuts." I'm trying to think that they are easier than effective and that's a real shame, so what question would you ask that you think would actually be predictive? So I think you know I wouldn't really ask questions, so let's think about online dating. Is there what is the process of this is the selection process here of all the people that I don't like? I think it's okay. I mean, I think you could basically say here the people I would never like and I think I don't even need to show them to you to know that you don't like them, so we did a study where we said, look, dating is a very special thing.

Dating is actually going through a shared experience, and through this shared experience, you can do something like that. We did a speed dating event at a care home, this wasn't necessarily for sexual activity but you know we wanted people to meet each other, they just moved into everyone's house and the first time we did it was a failure, they were just sitting there, you know what you're talking about and then we asked them to bring significant objects from their life and the discussions were amazing and people engaged and shared experiences etc., if I were speed dating online.

Dating I would say I want to do something where people share an experience in a quick and efficient way so you don't have to travel a long distance and so on, but it will give you an idea of ​​what the other person is like. Would it be solving a puzzle together or listening to music together? I mean, it could be all kinds of things, but I think that's facing the moral dilemmas of you know what you do. I think all those things would be more. more effective than something like this, so I think we're a little bit confusing two things: the sorting mechanism that says there are too many people, let me focus on the group I care about, but when you say the group you care about is probably a group big you shouldn't rate it too much because you miss some really wonderful people and then we need a different procedure and there's an idea I had once and how many people here think you're not that good at doing first This impression is okay, some of us and the only thing What I'm understanding now is really training people who can go and pick up people at the bar.

Is not very different. Imagine if you had a dating website just for people who don't. Well, on first impression, you had a different procedure and you say you know what we are going to agree that meeting someone for coffee for 15 minutes is not really the solution, we are going to agree to meet three times over three weeks, we will not get there to a trial too soon and Let's try to create something where people really know the experience. I'm not recommending the dorm experience where you're stuck with someone for a semester, but let's do something where you actually commit to finding out something about someone for a while. than having these snap judgments with a horrible, not so good thinker, so you mentioned the Ashley Madison episode and then I read an article that said like 90 percent of the female accounts were actually fake and they were basically just employees of the company. that they were talking to men as a, I mean, it fits your conversation thesis, but I wonder if you think the trend still holds or is it just that they were doing all these female accounts that existed in rich countries because that's where men employees made them like this, so you know that we only looked at active accounts and had data to be able to separate them.

Our estimate of how many accounts were fake was very different from what other people had, but we looked at active accounts. accounts that I don't think people made up and we also had a geographic variation right, so we could tell you by zip code so we can tell you that you know Palo Alto is different than those Guttersons, that you know. Hello, we just like to know. if there is any place in um in relationship differences between similar regions where we like a more tropical climate where we have a wider exposure and when places are aware of the cold, the climate will have less exposure because it is the latter type of feeling that leaves the spaces to the imagination at least in that, you know, in the physical perspective, yeah, so the place that leaves the least amount of room for the imagination is called a manhunt.

I don't know if you've been to it, but it's really amazing. it's an incredible view so when when when we did this, we did a little bit of work so you know what's called job analysis. Job analysis is an analysis where I take all your individual characteristics, your height, your weight, your education, all kinds of things and do a regression. It depends on your salary and this is the type of research that is done to find out what the income gap is, it is true that men make more money for the same job holding everything else the same, so we did the same analysis for dating online and we said, let's look at it. and all your characteristics and let's find what makes you attractive in online dating and one of the things we found was that women really care tremendously about the height of men, so I'm five nine if I want to be as successful as someone who 510 in online dating How much more money would I have to earn per year?

What do you think is around 40? Now it's about 40. To be clear, you can ask that our women are really superficial and the answer is more or less yes and no. and partially the website of course makes women search narrow so if you search and say I want someone who is 510 you will never see someone who is a true love buck-59 right sometimes The search can take something that people have. a bias or is it a trend and they exaggerate it and but anyway women care a lot hello by the way men care a lot about BMI and how much with the woman with a BMI of 20 who says 21 how much more would you have to earn to To be as attractive as a woman who has a BMI of 20, we can't estimate it because men don't care how much money women make, so this guy called me from Manhunt and said, Look, they're like dating markets. coincidence or whatever confuses two things, there are some people who are in it for the long term and some people are in it for the short term and you said, let's look at the website that only focuses on the short term, so he gave me his password for for human hunting and it's amazing, it's an amazing website because they basically don't even show a picture of the whole body, there's BAE, it's kind of like that, there are cultural differences about what part you show and I think so. to do, but actually I think it's complex because it also shows something about what kind of relationship you want long term, short term, other things like that too, it's a good note to end on, yeah, so thank you all for coming and thank you. dan