3BI: The behavioral science of love
Welcome to my weekly 3BI newsletter sharing three insights from the worlds of psychology, decision-making, and behavioral change. Sign up here to have it delivered straight to your inbox.
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Happy Friday!
This week, we launched a new podcast with Logan Ury, the Director of Relationship Science at Hinge, about her new book, How to Not Die Alone (yes, an attention getting title!), which uses behavioral science principles to create a modern guide to finding love.
I really enjoyed reading Logan’s book, so in this week’s newsletter I’ll share three insights from it.
Our environment makes deciding hard
Our environment shapes much of our decision-making. Over time, our environments have generally gotten more complicated.
Religion, community, and social class dictated the lives of our ancestors. Expectations were clear, and personal decisions were few. Based on where and into what kind of family you were born, you knew, for example, that you’d work as a textile merchant, live in Bucharest, eat kosher food, and go to the synagogue. Or you’d work as a farmer, live on the outskirts of Shanghai, and eat livestock and crops from your land. When it came to finding a partner, the answer often came down to the dowry—who could offer the best acres of land or the largest caravan of camels.
Today all these decisions are up to us. Modern life is a path that we must chart on our own. Whereas our predecessors didn’t have to weigh where to live or what to do for a living, we make those choices now. That gives us incredible freedom to shape our identities—to pick Nashville over Atlanta, to choose whether to work as a meteorologist or a mathematician—but that freedom comes at the cost of certainty.
We enjoy unprecedented individual freedom in modern life, but that also means that the volume of complicated decisions we make is much higher. Instead of physical work all day, we need to make time for the gym to stay active. Instead of a pension, we contribute to a 401k. And instead of finding a partner through a small community, we have to find them ourselves in populous cities.
The Secretary Rule
Famed scientist Herbert Simon coined the terms maximizing and satisficing to document two primary models of decision-making.
Maximizing refers a decision-making process driven to find and select the best possible option. Optimization is the priority, and the decision process continues until the best possible choice is found, regardless of how long the search takes.
Satisficing, on the other hand, aims for a satisfactory or adequate result, rather than an optimal solution.
Basically, maximizers obsess over making the best possible choice, while satisficers set standards and don’t worry too much about something better being out there once they’re met. “Maximizers make good decisions and end up feeling bad about them. Satisficers make good decisions and end up feeling good,” as psychologist and author Barry Schwartz puts it.
Maximizing can make life tough, as the thought that there’s always a better option out there makes it hard to ever be satisfied. This is especially cruel in modern dating, when there’s always someone new a swipe away.
How to overcome maximizing tendencies? The Secretary Rule is a an interesting strategy:
Imagine you are hiring a secretary…There are a hundred possible candidates whom you must interview one by one. After each interview, you decide whether to hire that person or keep looking. If you reject a person, he’s gone. You can’t change your mind later and hire him.
How should you maximize your chances of picking the best candidate? You don’t want to decide too early in the process, because you might miss out on a strong candidate at the end of the line. But you don’t want to make it too far without choosing, because what if the final options aren’t very good? It turns out there’s a mathematically correct answer to this problem. You should interview 37 percent of the candidates and then pause. Identify the best person from this first group. Now you have a meaningful benchmark. After evaluating the first 37 percent, you should be prepared to hire the first candidate who is better than the standout from the first group.
The Secretary Rule is especially useful for those stuck in the dating game:
Instead of thinking about the total number of people you might date, consider how long you’re likely to actively look for a partner. Apply the rule of 37 percent to that time period. In the book Algorithms to Live By, authors Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths discuss a single man who wants to get married. “Assuming that his search would run from ages eighteen to forty, the 37% rule gave age 26.1 as the point at which to switch from looking to leaping.”
That means that by the age of 26.1, he should set a meaningful benchmark from his first 8.1 years of dating—that is, the single best person he’s dated thus far. He should then marry the next person he meets whom he likes more than that benchmark.
Commitment makes us happier
Another reason to fully commit to a choice is that it will make us happier about it in the long run.
Rationalization is our ability to convince ourselves we did the right thing. Imagine you buy an expensive winter coat that you can return within thirty days. You take it home and weigh its pros and cons. Even if you keep the coat, you can’t shake that list of cons in your head. But when you buy a coat on final sale, you immediately commit to liking it. You can’t return it, so why worry about its drawbacks? That’s the power of rationalization. Embrace it.
This works for dating, too. When you commit to someone, your brain will do its best to convince you it was a good decision. Satisficers inherently understand this idea—and benefit from it.
When stressing over a big decision, whether who to marry or what job to take, it’s comforting to remember that our brain will work hard to make us feel good about that choice once it’s made.
Other stuff
A great optical illusion. It might take a moment to see the alternative view…
Pandas enjoying a snow day at the Washington, DC zoo:
14 years ago, Prince performed his legendary Super Bowl halftime show. Read an oral history of how it went down.