Greetings, relationshipers.
Trace here, and I have been thinking.
What's your type?
It's a question that's kicked around a lot
in single-people circles, because humans
want to know who it is that you find
attractive-- whether that's for their general interest,
or to gauge that person's interest in them.
It's a legit question you've probably asked or answered
before--
tall or short, thin or thick, loud, reserved, big whatever,
small whatever.
Yet as much as you believe this describes your type,
science is here to say, nah.
No, probably not.
Don't make a swipe left joke.
OK.
Whew.
So rather than bumbling our way through the grind of this match
game over coffee and bagels, why don't you just say, OK Cupid,
show me some science?
Whew.
OK.
Dodged the bullet.
So hot today.
It's, like, 95 degrees in San Francisco,
and I have no air conditioning.
I have questions.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
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you know the drill.
When people used to ask me my type, for a long time--
because I'm cool and aloof--
I would say, like I want to know.
I don't know why I would say that.
It doesn't actually make any sense.
Of course I had a type.
Looking back, I think I believed I'd somehow
be cooler if I was like, nah, I'm open and accepting.
I'd be DTF-- friend anyone.
But in reality, I ended up going on dates
with people who were perfectly lovely,
but would never work long-term, or were downright toxic.
We all have types, and it's not a bad thing.
And, of course, neither is challenging ourselves
to go outside that type.
So for this video, we're going to do some little interesting
and fun.
Do me a favor.
Go to the comments and write out your type.
Include physical features, sure, but also
education and beliefs, personality traits,
and interests.
Don't go crazy, but do a few, and post it.
We'll come back to this at the end.
Also, you're going to get a free Audible deal at the end,
so stick around.
Real quick, though, before we get into this too much,
most of the studies we're about to discuss
do involve mainly heterosexual relationships.
That's not all relationships, and I really
hope that the social science community catches up
to LGBTQAI plus.
I am a cisgender straight male.
I am a certified sexual health peer educator.
So I'm going to do my best, but no one is perfect.
Except maybe [GARBLED].
Who can measure up to [GARBLED],, right?
OK.
So video time.
Have you ever broken up with someone
and thought, I am never dating someone like that again?
And next thing you know, you're out on the town,
you've got a few drinks, and you're right back
in the same pool with someone who
is basically the same person.
It's completely normal, and there's
a lot of social scientists out there trying to understand
why we do this to ourselves.
Even if you don't think you have a type-- like cool and aloof,
20-something Trace thought--
you do.
By type, I mean person you tend to be
drawn to in a romantic or lustful kind of way.
You have this type for a number of reasons,
which we're going to get into.
But though you might know your type,
science has not yet perfected their type-dar,
so they're studying it a lot.
Not as much as they should, but a lot.
For example, in 2017, the University of California Davis
published a trio of studies looking
at 1,000 heterosexual relationships who
self-reported data via social media and interviews.
They found that people tend to date people who
have similar levels of attractiveness--
i.e., physical qualities.
Sixes would date sixes, and nines would date nines.
I think we all know this.
It's the way it goes.
And they pointed out that, because people
are fairly bad at picking their partners with an understanding
of where the relationship might go,
even casual dating followed this trend to date
a similar level of attractiveness.
I assume this level-of-relationship heuristic
is just an easy rule to follow.
I am an attractive person.
I'm going to date other attractive people,
and my relationships will work better.
Whether that heuristic is good is completely up
to whether the relationship works.
But a huge determining factor they
found-- which is sort of like, no duh, once I tell you--
is where people live.
Even though you probably wrote in the comments about your type
that you like people who travel, or people
who are ambitious, or do X for a living, a lot of that
is determined by where you live.
People don't usually have a type that's
based on, say, a specific job or role
as much as they just pick people who live near them.
Places where a specific job or role is common
might make people qualified for something as their type,
but it's probably not the type.
Quick example.
When I lived in DC, there are a ton of lawyers.
It's not unexpected.
Some people believed their type included
people who were lawyers.
But it was probably more akin to ambition and intelligence
and other qualities encompassed by people who study law.
Commonly, people who moved to a new place do find a new type.
Education, religion, and intelligence all
fit with these local regional types,
whether that means your school or your town or your region.
If you control where people live or work in the scientific data,
then we humans, with all of our ideals,
we're not more or less likely to select partners
based on their education, intelligence, or religion--
which is crazy, right?
I bet many of you put some semblance of education,
intelligence, or religion on your list of things
that you care about in the type in the comments.
There are whole dating sites that
control for religion or career or education,
and they claim to be successful.
But when we look at the data, humans
don't seem to actually select successful partners based
on these traits.
This study was done over time as well, not just as a one-off,
making it a little stronger in generalizability.
But it was still self-reported.
Like I said earlier, we commonly define our type first
by physical features-- like tall women with blond highlights,
or short men who are athletic.
But personality is far more important.
We choose people based on our past experiences
with relationships.
Therapists say this is mainly related to our defenses.
For example, when you get angry, do you yell?
Maybe you'll pick a partner who yells also.
Of course, you could just as likely
pick a partner who submits to your yelling,
because we often pick people who complement our defenses.
It's completely and utterly individual,
which is why studying it can be really tough.
A June 2019 study from the University of Toronto
explorted our--
explorted?
[BEEP]
Use this opportunity to give myself
a good fanning, because wow, it is hot today in this house.
It's probably 85 right now.
Probably 85 degrees.
[BEEP]
A June 2019 study from the University of Toronto
explored our type even further, with the social psychologists
finding that, whatever you think your type is,
you really should just look in the mirror,
because your type is you.
Yeah.
They say it's probably better to just list qualities
you like about yourself.
Chances are, you actually like dating someone who is like you.
And they say that this is, quote,
"more than just a tendency to date
someone similar to yourself."
Instead, there is a high level of consistency
across a number of parameters, including "agreeableness,
conscientiousness, extroversion, neuroticism, and openness
to experiences," and are comforted by them rather than
off-put by them.
People like themselves and people who complement them.
Complement, with an E. The complement.
I mean, everyone likes to be complimented,
if you're feeling like it.
Whatever.
I'm waiting.
The researchers learned this not be via self-reports.
They didn't ask Jared what Jared thought of himself.
No, instead, they asked Jared's partners.
They got real-time results that weren't self-reported,
which are far more solid.
And though this is a relatively small sample
size of 332 people, the study was multi-year, often spanning
multiple relationships.
The third thing is, we tend to date people who
aren't just similar to us, but are also similar to each other.
Both of these studies looked at partner consistency
and found we are fairly consistent in selection,
in part because we don't always move house or change religions,
alter our personalities or education
levels in between partners.
We're also consistent because of our emotional and psychological
toolkit.
Let me explain what that means.
Throughout your life, you learn from friends, family,
caregivers, society, and your intimate partners
how to behave and act in certain situations.
Acting correctly was rewarded, and acting incorrectly
was punished or discouraged.
How you interpreted and internalized
those interactions affect your type.
But it also determines your toolkit.
If you have a lot of partners who,
say, are servers and bartenders, you
might have developed a toolkit that
helps you understand and work with people who maybe have
night shifts, enjoy drinking culture,
or have social personalities.
Maybe you've become more or less jealous because you've
experienced your partner being flirted with,
because maybe they're the gatekeeper of the local taps
and liquors that are so darn popular.
Again, it's individual, and your road is your own.
But generally speaking, if your new partner's personality
resembles your ex-partner's personality,
then it's less work for you to adjust your toolkit.
You can reuse the same tools from your previous relationship
or ships with the new one.
And that's not always good.
The reason we do this is because the human brain is really lazy.
Remember when people said learning
put wrinkles in your brain?
It's not actually true, but it's got a shade of truth.
Our synapses have to be re-forged
if we start to change our behaviors.
If you learn a new language or you start to work out,
your brain is going to change to accommodate.
In fact, no matter what you do to change your life,
your brain will change, too.
Keep that in mind when you see, X changes your brain headlines.
Even if you stop working out or stop going to school,
physical changes will happen in your brain
to keep things efficient.
Put simply, you trim out connections and grow new ones.
Your brain physically changes, which does use actual energy.
Because it takes effort to change our brains,
we can get trapped in these types because of our toolkits.
More examples would be people who love
to watch sports on weekends.
You don't want to change your toolkit, not just
because you like sports, but because it
would mean figuring out new things to do on weekends
and, ugh, that takes effort.
All of these can be part of your real type.
If you have the tools to work with these things,
you might gravitate toward someone that fits those.
The possibilities are literally endless.
So now that we all know more about our type,
go back to that comment that you wrote about the type
at the beginning.
Think about how we've controlled for all
of these different things.
Is the type similar in education or religion?
Are they similar in attractiveness level?
Let's say those cancel out.
What about traits that you both share?
Are you both extroverted or introverted,
conscientious or risky?
Do you both drink a lot, or a little?
Are you both religious, or no?
Do you have similar levels of education?
Are you from the same school, the same town, the same region?
Do enjoy the same activities?
All of those cancel out.
We're basically taking you out of your type.
The interesting thing to me is what
is left with it at the end.
If it's anything that is interesting-- if it's nothing,
that is also really interesting, because it tells you about you
and what you value in a partner.
It can help us better understand ourselves and our chosen
people.
Social sciences are sometimes given a lot of crap,
and that is deserved at times.
That's why I like to list the numbers of people in a study;
the number of months or years the study took, when it's
longitudinal; and sometimes details about the method,
because self-reported results aren't always as reliable.
But generally speaking, the more people
you have in a study, the longer its duration,
the better and more trustworthy that study might be.
This is because the more people you talk to, up to a point,
the closer you get to a sample of the general population,
the lesser your margin of error will be.
And of course, it also depends on the method
that they use to get those data, which is why I give you
all of that information, either in the links
or verbally in the video.
Designing the questions to be unbiased and clear is a skill.
Not everybody has that skill, and some actively
manipulate questions to get answers they want,
or better p-value or statistical significance.
This is a huge topic, actually.
We could do a whole video about this.
So let me know if that's something you're
interested in in the comments.
In the end, having a type makes sense,
because our brains are lazy.
We spent our life developing a set of tools
to deal with other people, and we
want to use those tools to find someone who lives
nearby and complements us.
It's a sense of security.
I know this person.
I get how they react to this or that.
And I can handle it.
This also applies with how you think, values you share,
activities you like, how you choose your spend your time,
and TV shows you enjoy.
Type is more than just physical features.
It's a lot of things, which makes
it very difficult to study--
and powerful, so powerful, when you get a good match.
For example, my partner and I were talking recently,
and I realized, completely without meaning to,
that had been a while since I've read a book where
the author is a woman.
So I went to Audible, and most recently, I
tucked into The Power by Naomi Alderman.
Highly recommended.
It's about a fictional future where
women develop the power to shoot static electricity
from their bodies.
And it's so powerful, and it shows
how the social structures and norms and roles our society
are built on or disrupted all around the world.
And again, it's only women who get the power.
I loved it because it's such an incredible way
to think about how we've chosen to put together our society,
and what can happen to change it.
Super cool.
Check it out.
Because you watch Uno Dose of Trace,
you can also get a 30-day free trial of Audible.
It supports the show as well.
Go to audible.com/trace or text TRACE to 500-500.
You'll get a whole month for free.
There's never been a better time to start listening on Audible.
Audible has the largest selection
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the selection has gotten even more custom,
with content made for members.
Audible-- the most inspiring minds, the most compelling
stories, and the best place to listen.
Again, go to audible.com/trace or text TRACE to 500-500.
There's a link on the screen and in the description.
And remember, it supports the show.
It's good for you and it's good for me.
Thanks.
I love the social sciences--
I chose to get a degree in them, after all-- because it
helps us understand ourselves.
In this case, it might help us understand
why we chose our partner, or what
we can do to choose a better partner in the future.
It could help us strengthen the bond
that we have with our current partner,
and help us understand ourselves so much better when it comes
to romance and relationships, which is awesome,
and something that is difficult to learn a lot about.
Thank you so much for watching.
This is all the patrons.
Thank you guys.
You guys are the nest!
Without you, I couldn't have gone to CERN in Geneva.
That video is coming out very soon, I promise.
I'm super excited.
I really appreciate you watching, sharing, liking,
commenting.
Every video is getting more views,
and we're gaining subscribers, and I love it.
Thanks again for watching.
I'm Trace.
I hope you learned something.
I know I did.
I'll see you in the future.