Who You Find Attractive Is Based on How Hot You Are | Dan Ariely | Big Think

Who You Find Attractive Is Based on How Hot You Are

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People who are very attractive care more about attractiveness in a mate, while unattractive people want a partner who is kind and has a good sense of humor.

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DAN ARIELY:

Dan Ariely is the James B Duke Professor of Psychology and Behavioral Economics at Duke University. He is the founder of The Center for Advanced Hindsight and co-founder of BEworks, which helps business leaders apply scientific thinking to their marketing and operational challenges. His books include Predictably Irrational and The Upside of Irrationality, both of which became New York Times best-sellers. as well as The Honest Truth about Dishonesty and his latest, Irrationally Yours.

Ariely publishes widely in the leading scholarly journals in economics, psychology, and business. His work has been featured in a variety of media including The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Business 2.0, Scientific American, Science and CNN.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: What is "assortative mating?"

Dan Ariely:  So "assortative mating" is the idea that if you took all men and you ranked them on how attractive they are, from the most attractive to the least attractive and you rated all women from the most attractive to the least attractive, and you can think about attractiveness as built, being built from lots of stuff—like it’s not just beauty, it could be beauty and intelligence and so on—but if you created this, it was mostly about beauty, but, you know, if you created that, it turns out that the most attractive would date the most attractive.  The middle attractive would basically date the middle, and the low would date the low.  Now, there could be slight deviations, but that’s what happened, and why?  Because if you’re at the top and you’re a guy, you can pick anybody you want, so you would pick a woman who’s in the top and if she’s at the top, she could pick anybody she wants, she would pick you.

So now the question is, what happens to people in the middle?  You know, most of us.  Or, what happens to people in the middle, how do we make sense of where we are in the social hierarchy?  And for me that thought actually became very kind of crucial and apparent when I got injured.  So here’s what happened: you grow up, and you have some kind of space in society and you know basically where you are and you know who would date you and who would not date you, who is kind of outside of your league, in general terms, and you know where you fit in the social hierarchy.  And I knew where I was in the social hierarchy, but one day I got badly injured.  And, you know, I couldn’t think about romantic stuff for a long time, but when I could, all of a sudden I started wondering about where do I fall now in the social hierarchy?  I was trying to think about, do I fall in the same place?  I’m kind of the same person inside, but I look much less attractive.  Right?  And would the women who would date me before would keep on dating me now?  And I said, "Why would they?  They have other options, right?  I’m not the only guy in the world."

So it was kind of a very difficult concept for me to think about where do I fall?  Like I fell differently on the social hierarchy, I basically lost my space all of the time and I was trying to understand how this social dance happened and how we find our place.  And I was really wondering about where would I find my own mate?  Where would I fit in this, in this scale? And there was a lot of personal complexities with it.  But eventually it led me to a study, and the study was really asking the question of how do we make sense of where we fit in the hierarchy?  And there are basically kind of multiple explanations, right?  You could say, you never adjust.  You never, if you're kind of in the middle range, or the low range and you only are, you have to date somebody else who is in the middle range, you never make peace with it.  You wake up every morning, you look at your partner across your shoulder and you say, "Well, that's the best I could do.  I really wanted more, sadly, you know, I have to admit my limitations, that's the most I could do."  That means you don't adapt.

It could be that you adapt.  It could be that, for example, if you're unattractive, you start looking at other features that are unattractive and see them as attractive.  You remember the story f...

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