The randomness theory explains assortative mating variables as a mix of desirability and selection effect. To expand on Kaj’s comment and move away from the STEM/nerd stuff, let’s consider the obvious one of politics. Variables like intelligence, income, or education are part of broadly-agreed upon desirability, OK, fine, so they don’t constitute individually-predictive or dyadic factors beyond the net desirability—but how can we explain Republican vs Democrat that way? Half the population thinks Republicans are better, and the other half Democrats, no net there. Some of these studies will do political-related questions as extremely obvious to ask about, and you do see large correlations between spouse’s (pre-relationship) party affiliation in the US population, but still, the study nulls are null.
Does that mean the studies are wrong somehow? Well, maybe a little: range restriction is a problem here. (I would definitely like more diverse studies here, even if the extent of range restriction in them ironically emphasizes my overall point about selection effects, and doesn’t undermine my other points too much.*) But the population correlates are probably more wrong. Because you can’t click with someone you haven’t met! As the joke goes, “don’t marry for money—spend all your time with rich people & marry for love”; if you choose to spend time only with Republicans because you’re a Republican, you will, of course, only find the Republican you click with, and not the equally numerous Democrats you would have clicked with. (How could it be otherwise? What, would you exude a pheromone that only your Democrats counterparts smell from miles away and snuffle their way to your address to ask you out on a date?) This mere proximity manufactures a population correlate, even though there is no individual correlate—nothing intrinsic about being a Republican makes that person more likely to click with you. The speed-dating gets a null on Rep vs Dem because it forces each side to encounter the other side proportionately much, revealing the proportionately-much click. This is the unseen counterfactual.
So, if you spend all of your time hanging out with STEM nerds or EAers, or if you are a celebrity which spends all their time hanging out with celebrities, or if you are an academic who—hard to believe, I know—spends much of their time interacting with other academics… Some of that is the desirability (high SES etc), and then the default for the rest is just “those are the people you meet, so that’s where you meet the people you can click with”.
This is boring and trivial, but it does have the implication for optimizing dating that you should not try to use simple partisan affiliation per se as a screen because it will just produce false negatives, and throw out people you should’ve tried a date with.
* to argue that ‘range restriction means that these studies are irrelevant to criticisms of dating-checklists because their measures have no useful variation’, you’d have to show that the dating-checklists don’t suffer from the same problem as much or worse. Which given the overlap in subject matter and the relative diversity of ‘a bunch of semi-random students at an ordinary university shanghaied by the researchers’ vs ‘the guys I recruit online via Facebook’, is… implausible.
From personal anecdote it seems pretty clear to me people have idiosyncratic preferences orthogonal to general desirability that are real.
Even spending a lot of time with people that don’t fit those preferences does not make them attractive.
I do take your points about the state of the research.
The randomness theory explains assortative mating variables as a mix of desirability and selection effect. To expand on Kaj’s comment and move away from the STEM/nerd stuff, let’s consider the obvious one of politics. Variables like intelligence, income, or education are part of broadly-agreed upon desirability, OK, fine, so they don’t constitute individually-predictive or dyadic factors beyond the net desirability—but how can we explain Republican vs Democrat that way? Half the population thinks Republicans are better, and the other half Democrats, no net there. Some of these studies will do political-related questions as extremely obvious to ask about, and you do see large correlations between spouse’s (pre-relationship) party affiliation in the US population, but still, the study nulls are null.
Does that mean the studies are wrong somehow? Well, maybe a little: range restriction is a problem here. (I would definitely like more diverse studies here, even if the extent of range restriction in them ironically emphasizes my overall point about selection effects, and doesn’t undermine my other points too much.*) But the population correlates are probably more wrong. Because you can’t click with someone you haven’t met! As the joke goes, “don’t marry for money—spend all your time with rich people & marry for love”; if you choose to spend time only with Republicans because you’re a Republican, you will, of course, only find the Republican you click with, and not the equally numerous Democrats you would have clicked with. (How could it be otherwise? What, would you exude a pheromone that only your Democrats counterparts smell from miles away and snuffle their way to your address to ask you out on a date?) This mere proximity manufactures a population correlate, even though there is no individual correlate—nothing intrinsic about being a Republican makes that person more likely to click with you. The speed-dating gets a null on Rep vs Dem because it forces each side to encounter the other side proportionately much, revealing the proportionately-much click. This is the unseen counterfactual.
So, if you spend all of your time hanging out with STEM nerds or EAers, or if you are a celebrity which spends all their time hanging out with celebrities, or if you are an academic who—hard to believe, I know—spends much of their time interacting with other academics… Some of that is the desirability (high SES etc), and then the default for the rest is just “those are the people you meet, so that’s where you meet the people you can click with”.
This is boring and trivial, but it does have the implication for optimizing dating that you should not try to use simple partisan affiliation per se as a screen because it will just produce false negatives, and throw out people you should’ve tried a date with.
* to argue that ‘range restriction means that these studies are irrelevant to criticisms of dating-checklists because their measures have no useful variation’, you’d have to show that the dating-checklists don’t suffer from the same problem as much or worse. Which given the overlap in subject matter and the relative diversity of ‘a bunch of semi-random students at an ordinary university shanghaied by the researchers’ vs ‘the guys I recruit online via Facebook’, is… implausible.
From personal anecdote it seems pretty clear to me people have idiosyncratic preferences orthogonal to general desirability that are real. Even spending a lot of time with people that don’t fit those preferences does not make them attractive.
I do take your points about the state of the research.