Profs & Pints Napa: The (New) Science of Attraction

Profs and Pints Napa presents: “The (New) Science of Attraction,” on psychological research that’s upending assumptions about how we pick partners, with Paul W. Eastwick, professor of psychology at the University of California Davis and author of Bonded by Evolution: The New Science of Love and Connection.

[Tickets available only online, at https://www.ticketleap.events/tickets/profsandpints/napa-attraction .]

Over the past few decades, a buzzy new branch of science, evolutionary psychology, has spread a deeply flawed story about romantic relationships. Cloaking itself in the language of incontrovertible Darwinian fact, it has popularized the idea that our minds have been shaped by primal drives that pit the genders against each other. It has promoted the myth that men are wired to be promiscuous and the notions that wealth, status, and beauty are the ultimate aphrodisiacs.

It’s time to say goodbye to such thinking and embrace a more-evolved view of romance, argues Paul W. Eastwick, who co-hosts the Love Factually podcast and operates a UC-Davis research lab that studies attraction and relationships.

Come to Napa Yards for a talk by Dr. Eastwick that will give you a much more sophisticated understanding of matters of the heart.

Drawing from pathbreaking research—including original experiments from his own lab—he’ll offer the take that relationship success hinges on compatibility rather than finding someone who meets some universal ideal of a good partner.

He’ll show that while popularity factors into first impressions, its influence fades fast. When evaluating mutual friends and acquaintances they’ve known for months, single people barely agree in their ratings of who is or isn’t desirable as a dating partner.

Although men and women occasionally say they want different things out of romance, gender differences evaporate once we assess what men and women actually want. Attraction from ancestral times through the present is best depicted as a process of finding—and, often, creating—a compatible relationship.

Dr. Eastwick will show how the traits we often look for in a partner—personality, lifestyle, values, and humor—are poor predictors of compatibility. Instead, lasting attraction is built through the gradual forging of strong attachment bonds, through mundane moments in which people offer each other a “safe haven” and “secure base.”

Distilling evolutionary biology, anthropology, and psychology into accessible insights, he’ll explain why we so often choose dating strategies that make us miserable and how we can use a more evolved approach. (Advance tickets: $13.50 plus processing fees. Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Doors open at 5:30 and the talk begins at 6:30.)

Image: “Love Match,” by Jan van Beers (Wikimedia Commons).