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The Brink Newsletter

A daily newsletter all about what goes on inside your head.

16/02/2023

Has data cracked the laws of attraction?

Valentine’s Day, the annual event which seems to do more for ending relationships than it does for keeping them together, is also the day where dating apps spend the most trying to convince you to sign up.

Which got me thinking: does the $4 billion online dating industry work? How do the algorithms behind these apps decide who’s a match, and is there some secret sauce in all that data that we can learn something from? So I went looking.

Mo’ Data Mo’ Problems

Trying to predict what variables shape our relationships is big business. Dating apps have spent millions developing their own algorithms to pair people up based on their preferences. Academia is interested in this stuff, too.

Thankfully, the biggest deep dive into these was carried out in 2020, where 43 long-term studies were gathered together in one mega study to find out how good things like demographics, sexual and physical preferences, values, etc. are at predicting whether you’ll get on with someone.

So can data reveal the secrets to who is the right romantic partner for us? No. Machines cannot work out or predict what factors would make people happy in a romantic relationship. But what they found can teach us a lot about what not to look for.

While AI failed at predicting who would be a good match, it was surprisingly good at working out what we desired. Some of the most common traits were:

- Someone tall if a man and short in a woman
- Someone of a desired race (even though most never admit it)
- Someone rich
- Someone in an enforcement profession like lawyer or firefighter if a man or creative if a woman
- Someone with a sexy name (no, seriously, it’s important apparently)
- And someone just like ourselves (people are 11.3 percent more likely to match with someone who shares their initials)

Dating Data Heartbreak

The fascinating, if sometimes disturbing, data from online dating sites tells us that single people predictably are drawn to certain qualities. But should they be drawn to these qualities? If you are like the average single dater—predictably clicking on people with the traits the scientists found are most desired—are you going about dating correctly? Or are you dating all wrong?

Among more than 11,000 long-term couples, research found that the traits listed below, in a mate, were among the least predictive of happiness with that mate.

-Race/ethnicity
- Religious affiliation
- Height
- Occupation
- Physical attractiveness
- Previous marital status
- Sexual tastes
- Similarity to oneself

Wait, what? Yes. The qualities that are most valued in the dating market, according to Big Data from online dating sites, almost perfectly overlaps with the list of traits in a partner that don’t correlate with long-term relationship happiness.

In summary: in the dating market, people compete ferociously for mates with qualities that do not increase one’s chances of romantic happiness.

But we can’t end this here can we? The amazing thing they found in the mega analysis was people who reported general feelings of happiness and contentment in their lives outside their relationships, tended to be happier inside them.

So much so that researchers found the answer to the below three questions was roughly four times more predictive of their relationship happiness than all the traits of their romantic partner combined.

“Were you satisfied with your life before you met your partner?”

“Were you free from depression before you met your partner?”

“Did you have a positive affect before you met your partner?”

Happy (late) Valentine’s Day.

09/02/2023

Why money erodes empathy

Scrooged 🤬

Money and empathy have never really been good friends. Charles Dickens made an entire career out of highlighting how an excess of money made people cruel, cold, and detached.

Which sounds right, but have you ever wondered why? Well, we did, so we went looking for answers.

More Money, Less Care 🤷

Turns out there are a lot of studies that look at how the pursuit and acquisition of power and wealth erode a sense of awareness about the people around us.

The Stanford Center for Educational Policy Analysis discovered that as your wealth increases, your exposure to the experiences of others from different backgrounds diminishes. By not spending as much time around people from diverse economic backgrounds, your need to understand their experiences goes down.

The Center for Disease Control saw the same thing from a health perspective. Wealthier people have fewer incidences of chronic health issues such as heart disease, diabetes, and stroke. They, on average, tend to spend less time around people who need care which, argues researchers, creates a distance that can quieten our sensitivity and awareness to suffering.

Indeed, another study found wealthy people literally pay less attention to people they walk by. The argument goes that as we become more independent, our need to intuit the needs of others goes down. Think of it as a muscle we no longer choose to exercise.

Which makes sense, but we were curious to understand what happened to those people that pursued all that money. Was there a price for that blissful ignorance? Oh yes.

The Aspiration Index 📈

In our searching, we found something called The Aspirations Index, created by the Center for Self-Determination Theory. This is a questionnaire designed to detect what motivates us. It’s a heady list that attempts to uncover where we place the most value, be it:

- Wealth

- Fame

- The intrinsic aspirations of meaningful relationships

- Personal growth

- Community contributions

Tim Kasser, one of the authors of the Index, looked at how the pursuit of wealth and fame caused rifts in our relationship with ourselves, which is then projected onto others.

In his book, I’ve listed it below, he found that when people placed a strong emphasis on consuming and buying, earning and spending, they become more likely to treat people like things, and relationships become more transactional, i.e. what are you going to do for me?

On top of that, valuing wealth, status and image can only be done by spending less time maintaining personal relationships and connection to others, two hallmarks of psychological health and high quality of life.

Materialistic values, says Kasser, leads people to “invest” less in their relationships and in their communities, which is characterised by, you guessed it, low empathy.

Interestingly, in Kasser’s book, these ideas turned up in toddlers, college students and adults from all over the world, but were more concentrated in societies that prized status over community.

The effects aren’t permanent 🫶

While this might all sound like doom and gloom, there is research that shows these effects aren’t set in stone.

A recent study showed how awareness of poverty increases the likelihood of a person offering help to a stranger. The experiment showed that high-income people were less likely to offer help to a stranger than low-income people. However, these results changed by something as simple as watching a video on childhood poverty.

In summary, sometimes we just need to remind ourselves of what’s really important :)

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