Science Speaks Series: Attraction and Relationships

Tahoe Center for Environmental Sciences

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5:30 pm - 7:30 am
March 23rd, 2023
291 Country Club Dr, Incline Village, NV 89451

Event description

Why are relationships so hard? One popular answer to this question comes from evolutionary psychology, a field that investigates mating relationships by drawing on ideas about humans’ ancestral past. The standard evolutionary narrative suggests that dating is hard because humans compete for relationship partners in a marketplace populated by “winners” and “losers”—the popular folks and the people that nobody wants. In this competitive market, relationships between men and women are inherently conflictual, and everyone is relentlessly on the lookout for a better mate.

However, if we start to probe the science underlying these claims, much of the popular narrative starts to crumble. Join Dr. Paul Eastwick as he upends what we think we know about how dating works and replaces it with a much more hopeful—and scientifically stronger—vision of relationships.

Paul Eastwick is a professor at the University of California, Davis, where he serves as the head of the Social-Personality Psychology program and the director of the Attraction and Relationships Research Laboratory. He has published more than 70 scientific articles on attraction and close relationships, and he has won numerous early career awards from several different scientific societies. He is one of the youngest scholars ever to serve as an associate editor of the journal Psychological Bulletin, which is the top-ranked psychological journal that is devoted to the review and synthesis of the literature for broad audiences. His research and writing have been featured in outlets ranging from the New York Times and Scientific American Mind to The Today Show and Aziz Ansari’s bestseller Modern Romance. He has also appeared on popular podcasts like Vox’s UnexplainableScience Vs.Here We AreDate/able, and The Art of Manliness.


Event details

Doors open at 5:30 p.m. Presentation begins at 6:00 p.m.

Admission is $10 and free for students with a student ID. Refreshments and a no-host bar will be available from 5:30 – 6 p.m. The lecture will begin at 6 p.m. in the UC Davis Tahoe Science Center at 291 Country Club Drive in Incline Village (between Tahoe Boulevard/SR 28 and Lakeshore Blvd.).

For more information call 775-881-7560, or visit http://tahoe.ucdavis.edu/events/.