Decoding Love

by Andrew Trees

  Of course, life is never so simple. There are numerous ways that the dowry game does not reflect real life, although it would be nice to lie on plush cushions, eat grapes, and wait for beautiful women to be brought to you. We are going to focus on the most important one: mutual choice. The dowry game assumes that you simply get to choose whichever woman (or man) you want. What it fails to recognize is that in our society, the women (and men) also exercise their own choice. They are perfectly free to look at your lazy, grape-eating ass and decide to marry that ruggedly handsome camel trader back in their hometown.

  Miller and Todd ran the game again with one hundred men and one hundred women, and they found that the more possible partners both sexes checked out, the lower the rate of people who ended up in a relationship. The reason was that people began setting their aspiration level too high. You may set your sights on a woman in the top 10 percent, but if you are in the bottom 25 percent, you are going to end up single. For people to find their way into a relationship, a new element needed to be added: people had to adjust their aspiration level based on the feedback they were getting. A great deal of math is involved, and Miller and Todd experimented with a number of scenarios on how to determine mate value. To put it in simple terms, if you use the twelve-bonk rule, your expectations are likely going to be too high.

  It is also important to remember that many aspects of dating are not susceptible to mathematical analysis. For instance, women would find it very useful to know the ratio of men who are likely to be loyal partners versus those who will cheat. Unfortunately, there is no definitive answer to this question, for the simple reason that the ratio will change depending on the social environment. The best strategy for men is mixed. In other words, depending on the context, it may make sense for a man to be faithful, or it may make sense to pursue opportunistic sex. Game theory itself predicts that players will cultivate unpredictability as a way to avoid being easily manipulated in the game.

  Worse, it is quite possible that the players might not even be aware of their own gamesmanship. Our old friend Trivers of the parental investment theory has called this “adaptive self-deception.” If you buy this theory—and anyone who has listened to a friend justify some completely preposterous course of action will—we are so good at deception that we often manage to deceive ourselves as well. This self-deception is incredibly useful to us from an evolutionary standpoint because successfully masking our intentions from ourselves makes it much more likely that we will also deceive those around us. You can see the benefit of this in a host of situations. Just think of a single man on the prowl for a one-night stand. He might meet a woman in a bar and immediately become convinced that she is the love of his life. He woos her intensely and is able to look her in the eye and tell her with great sincerity that he thinks she is far more than some easy sexual conquest for him. Because of this, he convinces her to spend the night with him. When he wakes up in the morning, he realizes that he was deceiving himself the entire time. In the cold light of day, he knows that he has no interest in a long-term relationship with the woman, but his self-deception has already served the purpose that evolution designed it to serve—to spread his genetic material.

  ENDGAME

  Although amusing to examine dating using economics and game theory, these approaches are limited by their failure to account for the irrationality that guides so much of our behavior, particularly when it comes to love. To see this, let’s play a game called How Much Would You Pay For a Dollar? I don’t think it takes a mathematical genius to determine that you should pay no more than ninety-nine cents. What if a wrinkle is added, though, and the second-highest bidder also has to pay his bid, even though he has lost the auction? Now, how much should you pay?

  That’s exactly the game that Martin Shubik, an economist, played a number of times with different groups of friends. As he wrote in his article, the game is ideally played under what might be called boisterous conditions: “A large crowd is desirable. Furthermore, experience has indicated that the best time is during a party when spirits are high and the propensity to calculate does not settle in until at least two bids have been made.” Shubik identified three crucial points in the game. The first was whether two people were willing to make a bid. The second crucial moment came at fifty cents when the people bidding realized that any higher bids meant that the auctioneer would make a profit. And the third crucial point was at one hundred cents when someone had, in effect, offered to give a dollar to get a dollar. At this point, his opponent would already be committed to pay his own bid and usually decided to bid $1.01. Even though he would be giving more than the dollar was worth, he would at least get the dollar and only lose one cent, rather than the value of his entire bid if he lost the auction. Once a player bid more than one dollar in order to receive one dollar, the bidding tended to escalate rapidly. Shubik kept track of the results and found that, on average, the dollar bill sold for $3.40. Since Shubik also kept the losing bid, he took in over six dollars and had to pay out only one dollar. Some of the games were even more extreme. One “winner” ended up paying twenty dollars for the dollar and only succeeded with that bid because his opponent ran out of money. On another occasion, a husband and wife bid against each other and were so upset by the experience that they went home in separate cabs.

  Since then, the same game has been run in a number of research labs with the same results. In one test, more than forty groups were studied, and in each and every case the group went over the one-dollar mark. Half the time the bidding only stopped when one of the players had offered all his money and couldn’t bid anymore. Researchers also found that people rarely learned from their mistakes and that even players who had already engaged in the game would usually still end up bidding more than a dollar. What makes this especially striking is that the item being bid for—one dollar—has a precise value. There can be no confusion about what it is worth. Even the slowest of players realizes that bidding more than a dollar to win a dollar makes no sense. When researchers tried to understand why people continued to bid, they found that it wasn’t an economic calculation but an emotional one. Sure, when players started the game, they said that they were bidding primarily to win money. As the bidding moved higher, though, they changed their answers and claimed that they were doing it to prove a point, making such obviously self-defeating remarks as, “I won’t be made a fool of.” Although all of us are probably snickering at the fool who paid twenty dollars, the evidence suggests that we would be equally foolish.

  Shubik’s game is not simply a parlor trick but offers an excellent way to look at the problem of escalation. You can find examples of it throughout the real world. For example, Lyndon Johnson’s rhetoric about the Vietnam War changed dramatically between 1964 and 1968. At first, Johnson emphasized democracy, freedom, and justice. Later, though, he spoke about national honor and avoiding the appearance of weakness, which as game theorist Laszlo Mero noted in his excellent discussion of the dollar auction from which this is drawn, “is strangely similar to the changes in motivation expressed in the dollar auction game.”

  This conundrum is even useful in understanding our everyday lives. If you have ever been in a hurry to get somewhere and were waiting for a bus, you have probably experienced a dollar auction situation. You may be debating whether or not to take a cab, and in fact if you walk to the bus stop and don’t see a bus, you may just hop in a cab. The longer you wait, though, the more likely you are to continue waiting because you feel as if you have already invested all that time in waiting for the bus. Although we don’t realize it, we engage in self-defeating dollar auctions all the time. Mero writes, “The principle of the dollar auction keeps many people in unsatisfying jobs and unhappy marriages.”

  What does all this have to do with dating? Quite a lot, actually. Take the animal kingdom. There are regularly situations when two males come into conflict over a female or a good mating territory. Some species fight, but others choose not to for a variety of reasons. For example, the
y may have particularly dangerous weapons, and a fight would possibly be fatal. In these cases, the animals often resort to something called “posing.” Basically, they stand there and eyeball each other to see who wants it more and is willing to wait longer. In other words, a classic dollar auction situation. How do they solve this? As we’ve already seen, humans are not very good at escaping dollar auctions. We tend to empty out our pockets and throw everything we can at winning the auction. According to the mathematicians, the animals should assign a value for whatever it is they are fighting over and then choose to pose for a random amount of time based on that number. For example, if one of the males decides that the female is worth twenty minutes of his time, he should pose for some random variation between, say, twelve minutes and twenty-eight minutes. If he wins, great. If not, he simply walks away when he reaches his limit. When actual animals in the wild were studied, it turned out that they followed precisely this logic. In other words, most animals act much more rationally in this sort of situation than one particular kind of animal, human beings.

  If we keep this in mind, it might help end a lot of suffering and misery for ourselves as daters, although it will mean that we have to give up some cherished romantic notions, which tend to land people in dollar-auction situations. For example, take the idea of unrequited love. The romantic story line tells us that a lover’s constancy and persistence will ultimately be rewarded when the beloved finally recognizes his or her worth, but that is exactly the kind of thinking that can lead to a dollar auction. The more time that passes, the more the lover insists that there must be some sort of reward for all of his or her effort. And being in a relationship is also no protection against fruitless dollar auctions. Once you have been with someone long enough, you may avoid breaking off a relationship, even if you find it unsatisfying, because of all the time you’ve already invested. In fact, it’s probably safe to say that anyone who has much dating experience has unwittingly found himself or herself in a dollar auction at some point. If I could leave you with only one piece of advice from this chapter, it would be to avoid dollar auctions when dating. If you can’t avoid them, at least determine the price you are willing to pay beforehand so you know when to get out. Easier said than done, but no one ever promised that love was easy.

  5

  The Dating Dance

  What I Learned About Dating from Hanging Out in Bars

  WE’VE FINALLY REACHED THE POINT WHERE THE RUBBER meets the road, that electric moment when someone catches your eye across a crowded room, and you know that you are going to spend the rest of your life together. At least, that’s what the romantic story line tells us. In truth, much as you would expect given the earlier chapters, you can do a remarkable number of things to enhance or detract from your appeal during your initial encounter with your Romeo or Juliet.

  Part of this chapter falls under a category that could be labeled “tricks” because it includes various methods to manipulate someone’s perception of you. I offer these “tricks” with a certain amount of hesitation. It’s not that I don’t think they will work—it’s that I think they might work too well. My intention throughout Decoding Love is to try to understand the secret springs of romantic attraction, not to provide a grab bag of techniques for getting what we want at other people’s expense. Just because the Machiavellian theory of the mind suggests that we have a tendency to deceive, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t struggle to rise above our baser instincts and embrace what James Madison called the better angels of our nature.

  LET ME HEAR YOUR BODY TALK

  With that said, let’s return to the crowded room and look at what happens on some enchanted evening. The first important point to realize is that only a small part of what you are communicating at any moment is coming from the actual words you are saying. There are three ways that we are constantly sending out messages to those around us: body language, tone of voice, and actual words. Of course, if you are explaining a dense mathematical problem, the vast bulk of your communication will be carried by your words, but most of our communication is not like that, especially when it comes to dating. In most casual conversations, what we say is the least important of the three aspects of communication. I have read varying estimates, but roughly speaking, the vast majority of our communication comes from body language and tone, while less than 10 percent of our communication is the words we speak. So, what you say is far less important than how you say it. In one study, college students were hooked up to a portable tape machine that recorded random samples of their conversations throughout the day. When the researchers analyzed the data, they found that even those small snippets were “saturated with unintentional messages.” We may not realize it, but in virtually all of our encounters, a vast sea of unspoken messages are passing back and forth, usually below our conscious notice.

  All of this is doubly true for the world of dating where almost everything is done through oblique signals, rather than direct conversation. If you don’t believe me, let’s imagine a few scenarios. What would happen if a guy went up to a woman and told her that he found her incredibly attractive and wanted to sleep with her? If he was Brad Pitt, that might work. For most of us, though, that sort of direct approach would be a disaster. Or think how men would respond to a woman whose first question was how much money they made? Part of the reason for this is that these approaches don’t pay the necessary lip service to the romantic story line, which drills into us the idea that there should be some deep, innate attraction that can’t be explained by superficial external factors like a salary. This controlling myth is why dating is all about sending and receiving indirect verbal and nonverbal messages. For example, if you are a man and want to show off your financial success, don’t brag about the size of your bank account. Show it off through your mastery of the wine list or some other realm that more subtly advertises your success. Indirect signaling is so important that the single easiest way to improve your romantic life is to become better at reading the signals that other people are sending out and better at controlling your own signals. This chapter will, I hope, help you figure out how to do that.

  If you don’t believe me, you simply need to look at a recent study of lap dancers by evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller and his assistant to see how our actions are drenched with messages of which we are completely unaware. It is safe to assume that a lap dancer is always going to try to appear as sexy and attractive as possible because doing so has a major effect on the tips she will receive. What Miller’s study found was that the amount of tips women received varied widely. And the variation wasn’t random. It was tied directly to the fertility cycle of the women. A menstruating lap dancer made on average thirty-five dollars an hour, and a woman who was neither ovulating nor menstruating averaged fifty dollars. During their fertile periods, though, lap dancers were like Bathsheba on ecstasy, averaging a whopping seventy dollars an hour, double the menstruating women. The researchers have speculated that men were responding to a variety of subtle cues, such as body odor and waist-to-hip ratio, but regardless of the cause, it is stunning evidence of the power of the unintentional signal.

  Most of the women reading this book are not lap dancers, but researchers have found that fertility has a number of similar effects on women in general. For example, men looked at pictures of the same women when they were ovulating and when they were not ovulating and rated them as more attractive during their ovulation. As with Miller’s study, researchers are not entirely sure why this is the case. They think that men are responding to subtle cues related to things like lip color, pupil dilation, and skin tone. A woman’s fertility cycle also appears to alter her behavior. For example, researchers have found that women dress more provocatively and wear more jewelry during ovulation. Another study revealed that ovulating women send out more signals to attract men than their nonovulating counterparts. Ovulation even appears to influence a woman’s voice. In a recent study, men and women listened to recordings of women’s voices at different periods i
n their fertility cycles, and researchers found that women at their peak fertility were judged to have the most attractive voices. So, it turns out that women who want to get pregnant are not the only ones who should keep track of their ovulation cycle. Any woman who wants to meet a man should do the same and, at the very least, try to schedule dates during her days of peak fertility. One other piece of advice if you are a lap dancer or just trying to meet someone: being on the pill comes with a cost. According to the study, lap dancers on the pill averaged only thirty-seven dollars an hour (hardly different from menstruating women), while women not on the pill averaged fifty-three dollars. With a difference that stark, you can be sure that the pill has a similar effect on the appeal of women in general.

  LADIES’ NIGHT

  Even if most of us aren’t lap dancers, virtually all of us have spent some time in the belly of the beast: the bar scene, which has been the site of far more research than you might imagine. That’s right. Even the humble bar is a site of scientific interest—seedbed of bad pickup lines, drunken one-night stands, and even the occasional long-term romance. But not as far removed from the earlier chapters in this book as you might imagine. Think all the way back to the section on the precious egg and the profligate sperm. The same logic still applies, which means, for all of you astute evolutionary psychologists out there, that women are far more in control in this arena than it might appear. So, you can jettison all those cultural stereotypes about men being the aggressors and women being their passive playthings. Because, according to the research, it’s ladies first or, as biologists have dubbed it, female proceptivity.