I am curious about all things measurable and observable in the world, no matter how taboo or less understood. In fact the more taboo, the less understood, the higher my interest in many cases.
One of the new frontiers of understanding is the way in which individuals make decisions about other people. This practice has been ongoing since the beginning of social human behaviour, and it still a very qualitative subject. The human mind relies on instinct and subconscious guidance for these kinds of judgements without full awareness of the algorithm used by their mind. For me I would like to understand these processes in more detail, and actively seek out reading material that explains the process in a measured way.
There are several scenarios in life in which we evaluate people for decisions we need to take on how much of our resources such as our time we will invest together with them or on their behalf.
1. The strangers we meet that may become friends, either at a bar, or a social gathering.
2. Our employers and as a correlary our employees (for hiring managers).
3. The merchants, service staff, and other paid employees that we interface as a customer
4. Government officials, judges, police, and figures of authority
5. Professors, teachers, and mentors
6. Family
7. Our potential sexually intimate partners
I feel that if one understands fully one of these specific relationships, one can start to understand the rest, because they all share the same basic mechanism of evaluating people. The outcomes of how we make decisions for each of these scenarios will have varying levels of impact on our lives, and the lives of others.
One day I had a conversation with a friend about how the real estate market works in Singapore, and they commented that a lot has to do with the net immigration rate, and that it boils down to a simple matter of changes over time of m2 and warm bodies. This was interesting to me for a few reasons
1. Singapore is not unique, a lot of cities around the world look at their real estate markets in a similar way.
2. Growth in other markets may also have a straightforward relationship with net immigration, particularly if it is then broken down by skill sets, industry, or other sub-categories of immigrant demographics
3. Immigration rates have other interesting political and economic implications for cities, and any improvements in understanding the underlying forces that drive immigration can provide valuable insight into the less understood world of macroeconomics and sources of growth for societies. "Foot voting" is the most powerful signal that we can send as either approval or disapproval for either a relationship, or a city.
Because of my interest in immigration, and due to the fact that I have been stuck in social situations where I am obliged to have chit chat with people, I have asked individuals many times the stories of how they came to arrive at a migration decision, and I find that two explanations always come up
1. Job
2. Lover
The following other three sometimes come up, but not as frequently or passionately.
3. Education
4. Family
5. Friends
6. Business investment opportunity
7. Something else specific to the city
Job, Education, and investment opportunities seem to be something that we have a lot of statistics on, and possible to measure and forecast future migration movements and assume that all the rest immeasurable forces are something like white noise and that all placed have equal pressures and magically cancel out without any net forces pointing in one direction or another.
While listening to actual stories though, it seemed like they fell into an interesting and familiar pattern that the final decision to go or stay hinged on some outcome relating to a lover. In some cases it seemed like the pressures may be from 1-7, but the thing that tips into action frequently originates from the Lover dimension, so maybe this area of people's life acts as a catalyst for action and drives major life decisions and affects entire economies, but it remains deeply buried in the world of the immesurable.
Is this irrational?
Just as a plant must balance its energy & protein resources between sometimes conflicting agendas of survival and reproduction, so humans must also do the same balancing act. No longer do most of us live as hunter gatherers where not being eaten by a lion or starving with no berries to eat are serious threats to survival, but reproductive success is a challenge that will never go away, no matter how advanved technologically our society gets, we will always feel the pressure of competition for optimizing our reproductive success. How we respond to the pressure is our choice, but the pressure will always be there. What does success look like? Two parts, successful children, and attractive sexual partners. By "attraction" there are many dimensions aside from physical, and it is the overal rating that drives our decisions.
What I find fascinating is how people balance this part of their life with the part that we are normally allowed to talk about with them.
How do we balance our agendas and resources for achieving success in work, investments, and career with achieving success in reproduction -- Family & Lovers? What influences how we shift our attention, and does it change over time and with context? Are there things we can do to control it at individual level and population levels?
My believe is that even more fundamental than time, the basic limited unit resource in the world is attention.
You can spend hours staring at a blank wall while your mind is on auto-pilot daydreaming in what psychologists call self-referential thought, which doesn't really do anything interesting, or you could be as attentive as an air-traffic controller in the middle of a thunderstorm. The difference is that although the time duration was the same, the level of attention committed was very different. We all know what it feels like to hit the limits of our attention, and the painful meaning of only being able to pay attention to one particular item at a time. So given this precious scarce resource called attention, it is interesting when I hear that it is normal for people to think about sex reguarly every day, and I wonder exactly to what extend this has on productivity at work, and as an extention macroeconomic observations of the boom & bust cycle. To what extend does it interfere? Is there a hidden boom & bust global reproduction effort index that is exactly and oppositely paired with the boom & bust of GDP growth?
So then what is in the black box of the process behind how people optimize their (conscious or subconscious) reproductive goals. How do they evaluate potential sexual partners, how do they raise their children, and how do they balance these activities with other parts of their lives.
To answer these questions one must start with some measurements, and few seem comfortable talking openly and honestly about how these processes REALLY work, as opposed to how we wish they would work. I don't mind to be the first to start, and hopefully there may be others that will feel the same interest as me, and share their views on what they see happening in the world of human reproduction. I also enjoy book recommendations and publications that touch on these topics.
As an example, here is my evaluation criteria for a relationship partner. I am very curious to see the equivalent from a female, and as critically honest as possible. Ideally it matches how they actually decide on past lovers, rather than how they would like to believe they would decide on future lovers.
I have given some thought into my own process and by design it is simple, objective and effective as possible, although I'm always open to improvements. I have summarized into seven basic dimensions -listed in the order of when I can determine them starting from the first encounter with the person, not necessarily in order of importance. To the left I have added a weighting factor, although in all honesty I really am not sure about the weighting factor 1 (high)-4 (low) as much as I am about the time taken for evaluation and the general category descriptions. I would also guess that weighting factors shift and change widely through life circumstances and over time.
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Dimensions of attraction
2 Physical attraction - 0-5 min
healthy, youthful, toned, smooth, big and enchanting eyes, I will not go into a lot of detail because I find that my pattern of physical attraction matches the average patterns in the wide body of literature on this topic.
3 Conversation chemistry - 1- 4 hrs
The kinds of people that would read this blog up to this point would normally get passing marks. This dimension is a combination of creativity and appreciation for pensive reflection, common shared experience, interest, and values help but are not a pre-requisite.
1 Sexual intimacy - 1-3 months
An important dimension of the relationship. Just as dancing is best when you don't look at your feet this one shines the most when it's not under a microscope. Often times the best partners are the ones that are completely secure with themselves. I am very suprised at how widely varying the outcomes can come in this dimension. The bedroom is a very mysterious place.
2 Patient ambition - 1-3 month
Where are you going? What are you doing? Why do you care? Have some purpose in life and passionate energy to live it to fufillment, but don't be hasty and miss the opportunities that only come from careful attention and tenacious perserverence. This dimension seems to be linked to 1. Locus of control (general confidence in life) 2. Aggressiveness & risk taking tendancies, which may have a genetic component. This dimension is often correlated with academic and professional suceess, as well as with qualities found in your parents.
2 Interest - 2-6 months
Figuring this out is what some call "The Game" an unfortunate but necessary evil. At some point later in a relationship when love has entered the picture this drops off along with the whole evaluating process altogether, but until that happens I do take into consideration whether the lover is willing to move to Timbuktu for me, or if they would rather I would move there and leave them behind :P. I stress that this dimension cannot be the only evaluation criteria, because it is inevitable that interest and approval will go through boom & bust, and it cannot be the only factor that holds a relationship together. Something about the other person must draw you to them other than the recursive property that they are also drawn to you.
3 Teamwork - 3-9 months
Who's running the show? Ideally it's a give and take and overall it should feel like a smooth dance. There is a tendancy for roles to fall into their natural gender specific positions although there are plenty of exceptions. So long as it feels comfortable and not strained or disengaged. I read an interesting article in "Blink" about a professor called Gottman who was able to predict with 95% accuracy whether a couple would stay together 15 years later. He analyzed how they behaved in a 15 minute window and found that from this 15 minute slot, he could characterize their relationship into two basic categories, contempt-defense, or mutual affirmation, and in the first, there is a repeating pattern of negative reinforcement, and in the second, there is a parttern of positive reinforcement. His theory is that these patterns are static, and largely do not change over the course of the relationship. To me this insight is profound, and may have very interesting consequences for the topic of relationships as a science.
3 Integrity - 6-12 months
Do you say what you mean and mean what you say? How honest are you with yourself and others, even those that are most distant from you, even those that could be considered your advisary? How carefully do you consider the global impact of your decisions, and not just how they affect you? Are your actions the same in public as they are when no one is watching? This one takes the longest to judge, if considered thoroughly, and is also the rarest quality to find at the mastery level. This is a quality I can always find room for improvement in-- for myself as well as in my peers. My feeling is that major decisions about breakups should consider this factor.
Davis and Goliath
6 years ago
