2: Eli Finkel
Welcome to Episode 2, where I talk with Professor ELI FINKEL of Northwestern University about everything from the history and science of marriage, to the trade-offs underlying science's contemporary methodological growing pains.
Although you may recognize Eli from his many New York Times op-eds, you may not know that his book, THE ALL OR NOTHING MARRIAGE, is set to hit bookstores September 19th. You can get it for your Kindle, in hardcover, or even as an audiobook.
Many others have already heaped praise upon his book--among them folks like Aziz Ansari, Adam Grant, and my old friend and mentor John Gottman, so I won't say much except that one of its best attributes is how clearly you can hear Eli's voice in the text--a rarity in this hyper-edited genre (so a tip of the hat to Eli's editor, too). It really is essential reading if you want to understand modern marriage on any level--either abstractly as a scientific question or, concretely, as a guide to your own. When I spoke with Eli for CIRCLE OF WILLIS, he was in the midst of writing it, and I'm delighted to see it hit the bookshelves. Buy it, enjoy it.
* * * A NOTE ON THE CONTENT OF OUR CONVERSATION In many ways, my conversation with Eli hits the bullseye of what I was hoping to accomplish with this podcast, which is to capture the essence of the great conversations I've had over the years with colleagues as I visited other universities or attended conferences. We talk about his book and his research area, meander through some theoretical backcountry, confess some of our methodological sins, and ruminate together about the future of science. It's marvelous. And... I thought it might also be nice to have a few links to extended readings for those inclined to do so. So here are a few topics that might have left a few listeners scratching their heads. Maslow's hierarchy of needs, Nash equilibrium, Attachment Style Meta Analysis.
As always, remember that this podcast is brought to you by VQR and the Center for Media and Citizenship. Plus, we're a member of the TEEJ.FM podcast network. AND... The music of CIRCLE OF WILLIS was composed and performed by Tom Stauffer, Gene Ruley and their band THE NEW DRAKES. You can purchase this music at their Amazon page. Find out more at http://circleofwillispodcast.com This podcast is powered by Pinecast.
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Jim Coan
From VQR and the Center for Media and Citizenship. This is episode two of Circle of Willis, where I discuss the history and science of marriage with Eli Finkel of Northwestern University. So settle down everyone, maybe maybe sit and cling nervously to your special someone and have a listen.
Jim Coan
Hey, everyone, it's Jim Coan. This is my podcast Circle of Willis. Today, it's my great pleasure to introduce you to Eli Finkel, who is a professor at Northwestern University. Splitting his time there between the psychology department where he directs the relationships and motivation lab and and the famous Kellogg School of Management, where he holds an outstanding teaching professorship. Actually, owing to his his regular contributions to the New York Times op-ed page, you may know Eli already. But you may not know that he's published more than 130 peer reviewed scientific articles describing his original research. All of which was funded by places like the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. And you may not know that Eli has a new book out called the All or Nothing Marriage. Published by Dutton Press and available wherever you'd like to get your books. I have read this book, by the way, and I love it. When I talked with Eli, he was still in the midst of of writing this book, and I'm thrilled to see it hit the bookshelves. Which it will have done I think, by the time many of you hear this. It has to be said that there are a lot of books out there offering relationship advice. It's not one of the one of the reasons this is a book I think you can really trust is that is that Eli doesn't, he's not he's not whispering, you know, false promises here. In fact, I'd say he's pretty frank about the challenges of marriage in our time. And but that just that just means the hope and assistance he has to offer is grounded in a clear eyed view of both the hard work and the genuine pleasure that's there to be to be found in our closest romantic relationships. I'd say in this book, Eli also does a nice job of reminding us how important our friendships can be. And on that note, I definitely feel lucky because I can call Eli, a friend of mine. I first I first met Eli about about 10 years ago, 11 years ago. Something like that on the island of Crete. Believe it or not, in Greece. My friend David Sabara introduced us. We were all out to dinner someplace. I can't remember where. Somewhere in Crete. Rethymno. And we were hanging out. And I immediately realized that Eli was a guy I wanted to be around. He just had this look. This look that communicates sort of crackling intelligence on the one hand in a little edge, a little danger. And that sort of crossover where intelligence meets a little crazy. That's sort of my social comfort zone. So I wanted to be next to that guy and talk to him and you know, see what he was all about. And I wasn't disappointed. In fact, the only problem with Eli, and I encountered this problem with him almost right away, is that I can't really keep up with him. He's one of those guys who's always on the move. You know? You don't you don't see, you don't catch Eli Finkel just sort of just sort of hanging around. When I see him, I saw him one time in Amsterdam, for example. I was living in the Netherlands with my family for a sabbatical and Eli had come out for a conference. And we made some plans to meet up and he was like, yeah, so I'm giving two talks and I'm working on a paper while I'm here and I'm yeah, why don't you know what why don't you join me for my my 25 mile bike ride in the morning? And I'm going for a run later too, maybe. And we'll probably be out having a you know, a substantial and an exciting and enriching social life. You want to you want to do any of that? And I was like, yes, absolutely! I want to do all that stuff. But, but sadly I couldn't. And it wasn't because I had other obligations really either. The problem with me is that I have these I have limitations. You know? I have limitations of the mind and limitations of the body. I just have these limitations that place constraints on me that are that are unknown to individuals like Eli Finkel. He makes stuff happen at a level that most of us can only sort of fantasize about. And a lot of that stuff is obviously scholarship. He contributes really substantially to the to the empirical database we all share, of course. You know, findings on how relationships function, things like that, but he's also made tremendous contributions to psychological theory. From my perspective, he's been extremely integrative taking a taking a sort of bird's eye view of the larger empirical database that that does exist in helping us all with how to think about it. That I'm not alone I'm not alone in this in this conclusion. It's actually why Eli was was honored recently with a theoretical innovation prize from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. Now, one of my favorite personal examples of his theoretical contributions is something Eli calls transactive goal dynamics. Which describes the many ways that people share, negotiate, and pursue goals really together in an in kind of dynamic systems that sort of sort of resemble fully functioning organisms. I think this is I just I think this is a fascinating idea, among the many we discussed in the conversation you're about to hear. That said, if there's one problem with that conversation, it's that we didn't really get much into Eli's personal life, which is one of the things I like to do with these with these recordings. But but you know, from my perspective, that's only really a problem if I'm not going to have him back on, which I'm totally I'm totally going to have Eli Finkel back on the show. I mean, if he'll come back on I mean, if I can catch him, maybe during one of those moments when he's not not writing a major new review article, or running a marathon, or hosting a salon-like social experience, or something like that. And I don't know. I'm sure I'm sure he would try to talk me out of how awesome I think his life is. If he were here right right now But I think these things about him. I do. And I envy him a little bit. I envy him his his energy. And I envy him his intellect and his productivity. He's just an amazing person. So anyway, if I can find him during one of those little gaps in his schedule again, I'm going to bring him back and talk a little bit more with him about his life. But until then, we'll just have to just have to talk about his work and his ideas. A bunch of which are coming up right now. Friends, comrades, esteemed listeners. Here's Eli Finkel. How's it going, man?
Eli Finkel
Good. Good. It's good to see you.
Jim Coan
What's lighting your fire these days? What's really what's really doing it doing it for you? I mean, I don't really know exactly what to ask you about? Because they're they're like five things that I could discuss with you for an hour.
Eli Finkel
Yeah. I mean, yeah, that's right. There's been a lot of stuff that's been exciting. I have been, you know, I'm working on this book. I think I might have mentioned to you.
Jim Coan
Oh, yeah. What is this book?
Eli Finkel
The book is the idea of the all or nothing marriage. So how the institution has changed over time in the US that makes it so that the elite marriages appear to be better than the elite marriages of any previous era, but that the average marriage is sort of limping along.
Jim Coan
How do you know that? I mean, it's this, I tell you have that great climbing Mount Maslow paper, which I love. I tell everybody to read that paper. Is this sort of based on that?
Eli Finkel
Yeah, that's that's the idea. I mean, the answer of how we know that the truth is, we kind of don't so so here's what we know. The General Social Survey tells us that the proportion of marriage that reaches the highest level of satisfaction, the very happy definition, that's been falling about, again, not crisis level falling, but but linearly declining since the early 70s. And that's consistent with the idea that we might be asking more of the marriage not in not in all ways but, in these sort of self expressive ways. We're looking for the marriage to do these very intensive, high level things for us, help us discover our identity, live lives in accord with with what we discover, while we're simultaneously spending less time with our spouses. Doing things like intensive parenting and working longer. So....
Jim Coan
So working a lot with intensive parenting is causing us to spend less time with our spouses?
Eli Finkel
Less time alone with our spouses. Yes. Yeah, exactly. So...
Jim Coan
Good God.
Eli Finkel
The amount that we're parenting is interfering heavily with the amount of time that we get along with our spouse, and to the degree that we're looking to our spouse to help us really do these deep, difficult high level psychological tasks. I mean, it's not like it used to be where we look for our partners to help us, you know, sow the fields or or even even in the 1950s. Even things like cherishing each other.
Jim Coan
Or the 1970s even.
Eli Finkel
Yeah. Right for some of us. The even cherish and each other, you don't necessarily need this level of profound mutual insight into each other. You can cherish somebody who lives a life totally independent of yours, which is what we had in the separate spheres era.
Jim Coan
The separate spheres era. Yeah
Eli Finkel
Which is like everything before.
Jim Coan
1960s basicly.
Eli Finkel
Well, no, it's not everything before. I mean, it's basically the 1950s archetype. So it's what's known in the sort of history literature as the breadwinner, homemaker, love-based marriage. And that wasn't people think of that as traditional marriage because it happens to be the marriage that was shown around the time that TV came into existence. So we have Leave It to Beaver and Father Knows Best.
Jim Coan
But it was all very idealized pictures.
Eli Finkel
Yeah. And it's bizarre! It's not only idealized by historical standards. If you really want to talk about traditional marriage, it looks nothing like that whatsoever. It looks like a man and a woman and a farmhouse. And he doesn't go off and earn wage labor. They try to bring up enough food to feed their eight children, four of whom are gonna die anyway. And that is traditional marriage. So the idea of the separate spheres where the man goes off and works in the economic structure and the woman stays home and this sort of tender hearted place that was really new that really...
Jim Coan
So does that mean that before that the man was more involved with the day to day? What does that mean? I mean...
Eli Finkel
Because the man and the woman-
Jim Coan
And the women were both more involved in day to day goings, comings and goings of the household?
Eli Finkel
Yeah, I mean, the comings- there was no separation between the home and the place of economic production. The home was the place of economic production. There was no, there was no like, buy honey, we'll see you after work. She had her jobs. He had his jobs. They weren't the same jobs. I'm not saying that there were no sex differences in the specific jobs people did. She was more likely to attend the gardens. He did the more physically demanding tasks. But Stephanie Coontz, the I think outstanding historian of marriage says there weren't dual career couples. There was a single career that you needed both people to do and that neither one of them could have done independently.
Jim Coan
This seems to overlap substantially with your idea of transactive goal dynamics.
Eli Finkel
I think it does.
Jim Coan
I mean, this is it sounds almost like the definition of transactive goal dynamics. And the problem, the only problem I have with transactive gold dynamics is saying transactive goal dynamics.
Eli Finkel
Yeah, it's a brutal phrase.
Jim Coan
Yeah, it's brutal. So what do we do about that?
Eli Finkel
It's an homage to Dan Wagner and..
Jim Coan
Bless his heart.
Eli Finkel
Bless his heart right? And he, I mean, that's a lot of how I think about that theory is that it's basically a hybrid of Dan Wagner and Carol Rustbult. Who both are... my advisor and both luminaries, both of whom died young from very unfortunate illnesses. And so that was the bigger priority than coming up with like a catchier label. Will we regret it? I don't know.
Jim Coan
You know what it is? It's really descriptive, though too. I mean, if you attend to the meaning of any of the words in the phrase, it really, you know, pretty much they contain the whole theory.
Eli Finkel
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, yeah, we debated do we want some like transactive is just a complex word. And...
Jim Coan
I mean, I just say shared goals. Shared goals, but that doesn't, that leaves out the dynamic part that shared doesn't really deeply explain what's going on in the same sense that transactive does.
Eli Finkel
That's right. I mean, look, we have shared goals means something specific in the model, and they differ from, uh-oh, am I gonna remember the labels?
Jim Coan
Don't mess it up.
Eli Finkel
I know. I'm gonna mess it up in real time. So shared goals I think we defined as goals that we both have for the same target. So we both want me to lose weight. They differ from parallel goals, which are goals that we both have, but for different targets. Like I want you to lose weight, and you want me to lose weight, and the dynamics between those two things.
Jim Coan
Can they overlap?
Eli Finkel
Sure.
Jim Coan
So the shared goal is joint health. You know, our family health, and then the parallel goals being that
Eli Finkel
That's called a joint goal. Parallel, shared, and joint. Joint is yes, both of us joint goal is, I have it for you and me, and you have it for you and me, that's a joint goal. And in the model, these are all significant distinctions. And independent of all of this and cross cutting all of this is who's pursuing the goal? Yeah. So I might have a goal for you to lose weight. But that doesn't tell us anything about who's in charge. So I might have a goal for you to lose weight and therefore I start cooking more healthfully. Or I might have a goal for you to lose weight and get annoyed that you're not doing it. So where's the locus of responsibility for those things? So you'll see how like we needed very general terms.
Jim Coan
Yeah. And you did I think you hit it. I think you hit it. It's tough. Yeah, it's tough. It's those are the breaks?
Eli Finkel
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if we bring it back to the initial question of is there evidence for this all or nothing merit? So there's definitely evidence that the average marriage is declining a bit. But the problem is, for me, if I want to make a strong version of the argument is, the data don't exist, there is no study. And you can't even really cobble together a series of studies to say, let's look at some measure of elite marriage-ness something that says I'm spectacularly over the moon I can't even believe how fulfilled I am.
Jim Coan
What about what about, you know, Locke Wallace and the DAS and all of those kinds of, you know, measure marital quality?
Eli Finkel
So what we would this is a good point, because those are standardized measures. Maybe I could use these. So the idea would be I need a cut off. I would need to say the mean has been coming down over time, by the way, I don't, I think I'd have to conduct a cross temporal meta analysis. Which is reasonable, but I don't think anyone's done this yet.
Jim Coan
I don't think so.
Eli Finkel
To plot Locke Wallace, scale by date.
Jim Coan
Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
Eli Finkel
Date of study, which is actually a cool idea. And what I think you're suggesting, right, it is, and I think what you're suggesting is, is that, you know, and this is the sort of thing I've been hoping for and I hadn't thought it through. But yes, I think the model suggests that we should be seeing a decline in mean, Locke Wallace or other type of merit dyadic adjustment score. But that if you took a cut off near the top that you'd have more people more marriages that are deeply fulfilling, like at the very top and simultaneously decline in the average marriage bifurcation.
Jim Coan
He's sort of developing bimodal distribution in marriages. Interesting.
Eli Finkel
Well, the reason why... I mean, the argument is the reason why we should be able to achieve a better marriage than ever before is basic Maslow. He says, higher level need fulfillment, affords greater serenity, happiness, and richness of the inner life. Yeah, nobody in 1800 or even really 1950 was looking to the top of his hierarchy. No no wife in 1950s said...
Jim Coan
Right. That was pretty lofty stuff. Maybe humbled. You know traveling around the world, longing for South America.
Eli Finkel
Yes. And in fact, no. In fairness, you see that you sometimes see these things in beautiful love letters between poets. In the 1800s for example, but this isn't the norm. I mean, it really wasn't until humanistic psychology, like Maslow went mainstream, there was a human potential movement. Yeah. And this was Carl Rogers. Yeah. This is the kind of cultural revolution of the 60s that this stuff really starts to take off. And it's only then people are even looking to their marriage for those things.
Jim Coan
Really?
Eli Finkel
Yeah.
Jim Coan
Really?
Eli Finkel
Yeah. I think so.
Jim Coan
That's only when that's...
Eli Finkel
Do you think June is it June and Ward?
Jim Coan
June Cleaver?
Eli Finkel
Yeah. Do you think that they so, it's clear that they were looking to each other for affection and coparenting?
Jim Coan
Does Ward complete you? Right? Right. She'd just look at you with the dog head lean.
Eli Finkel
She would. She would cock her head and like, what are you even talking about?
Jim Coan
What do you even what does that mean?
Eli Finkel
That's right. That's right. And I think these days...
Jim Coan
I want to know whether Ward is getting a paycheck and whether Ward is you know...
Eli Finkel
Well they cared about love. And by the 1950s love was a really big deal. And a loveless marriage really, in the in the late 1800s, you see a loveless marriage becoming a deeply sad thing for people in the seven in 1700. Love was like a neat little perk that maybe you were lucky enough to get. But if, you know, would have been laughed out of your colonial Hamlet if you said, I'm not going to marry until I find someone I love. Or if you said, oh, I don't love him anymore. I'm going to leave the marriage that would have gotten mocked. But by the 1850s and after, and certainly into the 1950s a loveless marriage was a profoundly set - became a profoundly sad thing. And now we're seeing a new element on top of that a loveless marriage is still considered profoundly sad, unlike in 1700, but you're also seeing a marriage that fails to foster your personal growth and development is sad or that fails.
Jim Coan
So the realm of possible disappointments is expanding.
Eli Finkel
Yes, but that's precisely right. The realm of possible disappointment is is expanding. But alongside that issue is the realm of possible ways that marriage can thrill you is expanding. So those of us who are able to say, I'm looking to the to the top of Maslow's hierarchy, I want deep fulfillment, I want you to help me discover who I am and lead a life that affords the expression of those things will do that for each other. The people who do that, nobody tried that in the fifties. The couples that can do that should, this is just logic I don't have the data, but the logic is, they should be able to achieve a level of marital bliss that nobody had ever even tried to get before.
Jim Coan
Do you think that's really possible? I mean, so these couples are out there. I mean, of course, I'm one of them. And you're ine if them.
Eli Finkel
Yes, of course I love you, baby. No, that's right. I mean, so again, you and I have young kids. And we were touching on this earlier. I don't... so Maslow sometimes talked about people who have self actualized. And he was talking about and he said something I think he said something like 2% or something.
Jim Coan
Finding the Buddha or sort of like...
Eli Finkel
He did in his, some of his early work on this stuff, he plucked out like historical characters and talked about it and basically said, almost nobody really self actualizes. But elsewhere, the way he talks is, I think the the more sensible way to think about this stuff, which is we fluctuate on this stuff. Nobody, almost nobody lives a self actualized state and then just resides there.
Jim Coan
It's sort of like an emotion. It's sort of like, you know, people who imagine that you can be in a state of joy.
Eli Finkel
Right!
Jim Coan
Constantly.
Eli Finkel
Right!
Jim Coan
When which is just not reasonable.
Eli Finkel
No, you'd hedonically adapt for one thing. Yeah. Yeah. So but the striving is there. And it's real. And we have moments where we feel like we've had real self discoveries and then we leave a job and find a new job and say, oh, my goodness, like, this is really who I am. And this allows me to express the the particular, you know, Jim Coanian qualities about me, right? Not like everybody would like this job not not like that. Like there's some alignment between my idiosyncratic, what you might call core self qualities. I know these things get nebulous. And the life that I'm able to live. So the question is for the marriage, do I think that there are marriages where both partners are successful in loving each other? And by and large, are overall really helping them work through who am I, who are you, what are our priorities, what are our ideal selves? And now that we've really had some insights on those things, what can we do about our lives to increase the percentage of the time that we're acting in accord with them? Yeah, some people are really succeeding at that. My guess is that you might be one of them, despite the fact that you have two young children at home.
Jim Coan
It's possible. It's possible. When we did our first we did that hand holding study in 2006, that we selected people, we use the DAS, and we selected people on a dyadic adjustment scale. On a sub scale of that, there's like four sub scales. I can't remember what they all are right off top my head, but one of them is satisfaction. We selected people who were scored really high on that satisfaction sub scale. It was hard to do. We had to let go of a lot of people really easy to find people in the mid range or worse, but they're really high quality. But the thing that was amazing is that that was satisfaction. So then you add any other sub scales, and all of a sudden, there's all this variability in the overall score of this...
Eli Finkel
You mean in the subset of people that you kept.
Jim Coan
Yeah,
Eli Finkel
There's variability, interesting.
Jim Coan
Right? So according to the DAS, there's their satisfaction and quality.
Eli Finkel
Yeah...
Jim Coan
They are not synonymous.
Eli Finkel
Not synonymous.
Jim Coan
So then I start wondering what that means for your formulation. Is there an object- Is there an objective assessment?
Eli Finkel
No, I mean, I wouldn't want there to be. No, yeah, I mean, I would want it to be are you finding this marriage fulfilling? But fulfilling is a broader term than satisfaction, which is part of what you're saying. Yeah. Yeah. So I think it should be subjective. But that doesn't mean that just a, you know, hedonic valence measure would be sufficient. And in fact, these are things I haven't thought about. But in fact, now that I think about them, I think he hedonic valence isn't the main measure I would want if I were designing a 40 year longitudinal study that was backwards or a 500 year longitudinal study. The main measure... because, as Maslow argued, and I think he's right, these things are are often hard work. I mean, imagine that your spouse. Cat! Imagine that Cat, the photographer. Yeah. So imagine, I'm just making this up. But imagine that she's built herself a successful photography business, but that she has a an ache, like a yearning to, you know, not just make a good living doing photography, but to be an artist for the ages. And imagine this is in her. But meanwhile, you guys have two kids and she's somehow just never getting around to finding the three hours that she needs to like, look at a park bench in the right way. Um, and so I don't think it is an easy thing for you to facilitate that... the pursuit of that goal or the achievement of that goal. So sometimes it's going to be like, honey, I'm gonna I'll watch the kids and make sure you can do that. And that's complicated because you also have more goals. Right? But and that may well be sufficient is that that's all she needs. But a lot of us have bigger blocks than that. Right? Like she she might- I don't have any idea if this would- I don't know if this is her goal, or if she would have a block like this. But but it may well be that she needs an ass kick and that she needs it. Come on! Like, do you mean it or not? Like, is this a priority or not? Get off your ass. Because I've watched it for three years.
Jim Coan
I think it's absolutely right. And you know, I keep doing these social regulations studies, and it's all about social regulation of affect or emotion like soothing. And I I'm just have dropped the ball on this element that social regulation is so much bigger and broader than soothing. It's in every part of of the way in which a couple can interact.
Eli Finkel
Yeah, I mean, the question of like, what's the right DV is? Is tricky. And I agree, like, soothing is a really good one. It's like, it's...
Jim Coan
It's a nice.
Eli Finkel
It's beautiful. It's a really big deal. But I but I also agree with you that maybe we agree with each other here that soothing, doesn't get the photography done.
Eli Finkel
Yeah. Not always.
Eli Finkel
In fact, right? Not always. That's right. No, sometimes it may, that it's a safe base sort of process whereby once you feel soothed you go out on your own. But often, it's going to be a swift kick in the pants. And that's why coming back to this, what is the right measure of relationship quality? Feeling, you know, valence positivity, satisfaction, may not be the optimal benchmark of: is this the sort of marriage that is forcing us to do the level of hard introspective psychological and behavioral work to achieve things that if they were easy to achieve, we would have achieved them by now?
Jim Coan
You know, what it makes me wonder about is the is the Nash equilibrium? Yeah, you know about a Nash equilibrium?
Eli Finkel
Not well enough. I know what you mean.
Jim Coan
But the what you say, the idea is that, that your, whatever else is true, you found a solution that any movement in any direction
Eli Finkel
Makes it worse.
Jim Coan
Makes it worse.
Eli Finkel
Yeah. Yeah.
Jim Coan
I mean, it's maybe that's a that's a cynical way to look at it. I don't think it's cynical.
Jim Coan
No, I don't think so.
Jim Coan
So it's one way to try and operationalize what you're talking about without having to worry about pleasantness all the time.
Eli Finkel
No, that's right. I mean, we don't... our lives are too dynamic. They have too much flux in them to imagine a variation of a Nash equilibrium that sticks. Yeah, right? Like, then you there's like a new problem that you have at work, or you have a health diagnosis, or you start getting fat, right? I mean, like it's in that's what I think is so complicated. I mean, that's why I think most people probably aren't going to be able to achieve the expectations that they themselves are placing on the marriage. These specific, these unique, idiosyncratic psychological sorts of expectations. And they certainly won't be able to do it if they're like: okay, love you, honey bye. Mwah, right? Like it's gonna it's gonna take, and this is sort of like rich person characterization, but I think the sorts of things that are like, well, we saw a challenging matinee and we talked about it, right? And like, I think that is one mechanism that certainly like rich people with money and leisure time can do if they really want to challenge themselves to think deeply and try to understand each other. What the other mechanisms are, that are optimal? I'm not, I really don't have a strong intuition for that yet.
Jim Coan
So there's at least a subset somewhere like the unicorn of these very, very, very wonderful relationships. Yeah, maybe not, maybe the unicorn is oversaid. I don't want to be too flippant about it. But that, you know, we can probably agree that they're going to be a minority.
Eli Finkel
Yeah.
Jim Coan
And they're those relationships are as they are because they're responding to this increasing pressure's maybe to negative a word. This increasing cultural expectation for what the marriage can- what's it doing to everyone else?
Eli Finkel
I think it's again, I think it's on average hurting us a bit. I really I really care a lot that this doesn't get miscarried. I mean, I'm podcasts are great, because there's no editing.
Jim Coan
No, limit right? And that's right. Also, we can just you can just talk and talk. So...
Eli Finkel
That's right it's so it's not... it's usually with with other types of media. I don't want to be mischaracterized as saying marriage is in crisis. Marriage is not in crisis. In fact, marriage in the US, relative to say the rest of the Western world widely respected here. Most people want it even like strongly liberal people who can't even articulate why marriage still matters to them are eagerly walking down the aisle. So marriage is not in crisis. But the evidence is pretty clear at this point that the average marriage is kind of limping along. Now. Divorce rates, as you know, have been declining. Particularly among the well to do.
Jim Coan
Yep.
Eli Finkel
Among the college educated. It's dropped almost by half since about 1980. It's like, really the divorce rates have come down. But overall, if you collapse across socioeconomics, the divorce rate is still pretty high. And even among those marriages that are remaining intact, there has been some amount of decline in overall quality. And that's I think due to the two trends. One is the spouseification of our social lives. So the amount of time...
Jim Coan
I worry about this a lot.
Eli Finkel
Yeah, I mean, the data I don't know if you've seen them, but the data are stark. If you if you look say, there's good work that looks say at 1975 and then 2003. How much time do you spend without your spouse but with other intimate other...
Jim Coan
Other people that are...
Eli Finkel
friends and family.
Jim Coan
This is like sociological data?
Eli Finkel
Yeah, yeah. And it's dropped among people with children, it's dropped by half.
Jim Coan
Holy shit.
Eli Finkel
Yeah.
Jim Coan
Half?
Eli Finkel
It's, well, it's big. So the actual data point that I'm talking about there is hours per weekend day that you engage that you socialize with people, friends or family, without your spouse there. It's dropped from two hours, on average per weekend day to one hour, on average, per weekend among people with who have young children at home because of again, this intensive parenting that we're doing now. And among people who don't have young children at home, it's dropped from about two to about 1.4. But those are precipitous drops in a generation. Right, so we've really... Yeah, we've really spouseified our social network. Which is I think, one of the main reasons why the extent to which you have a satisfying marriage...
Jim Coan
Matters. So much.
Eli Finkel
Yeah, it matters more. And this these data exists to so if you look at it analytically, and you look at the association of you know, across all the studies that have been done. If you look at the association of earlier marital quality with change over time in personal well being psychological wellness. I forget self esteem, I think is lumped in here. You see that, that the effects are always positive. They were positive in the 70s and they're positive now such that people who have higher quality marriages tend to show better psychological trajectories over time. But the effect is almost twice as strong in the 21st century as it was in the 1970s. And I think part of the reason for that is the fact that we've spousified our lives so much. That it used to be that you've had a diverse portfolio of significant others and to a large degree, you don't now.
Jim Coan
Yeah you don't.Sso if you've got a good, you've got a awesome spouse...
Eli Finkel
Yeah.
Jim Coan
Then things are great.
Eli Finkel
Yeah.
Jim Coan
If your spouse is more on the not awesome side, or sorta awesome, right?
Eli Finkel
Yeah. I mean, I would characterize it...
Jim Coan
It's like a financial portfolio.
Eli Finkel
That's exactly right. And I would characterize it as a strong marriage. I mean, your spouse might be perfect for another person. Right? I mean, this is a dyadic...
Jim Coan
That's very good. That's very, I love... Yeah. Thank you. That's a much better way of looking at it.
Eli Finkel
Yeah. And that stuff dovetails with the expectation stuff. So the idea is not that we expect more. I mean, people expected their spouse to help them survive in 1800. Which is not a trivial ask.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
Eli Finkel
But the high level psychological and social needs that we expect the spouse to fulfill, to a large extent, independent of every other person in your relationship, like your spouse should uniquely fill these things. Yeah, that's just higher than ever. And that's why you see these increasingly strong relationship between the quality of the marriage and the overall quality of life.
Jim Coan
You know, what, I wonder, I wonder, I've been wondering that even before having this conversation, I've been thinking about individuals regulating other individuals.
Eli Finkel
Yeah.
Jim Coan
And what you're sort of the possibility that you're raising is that couples as a unit require a broader sort of concentric circle of social resources to regulate the couple.
Eli Finkel
Interesting.
Jim Coan
To sort of keep the couple functioning well. Because suppose that you have diversified. Suppose your spouse, there's some things that you're really disappointed about with your relationship. The way your dynamic, the way things things work. If you have diversified, you can take some of that heat off. You know, it's emotion regulatory work to bite your tongue when you know, if you're getting into that same old pattern again. Of fighting about something, you know? And you need help with that work. Right?
Eli Finkel
Yeah.
Jim Coan
So to the degree that you can derive that help from some of the other source. And that translates into how you behave with your spouse. You know, this regulatory social system seems potentially much broader.
Eli Finkel
Yeah, I mean, this is one thing that we've done, I think, without noticing it. Is in the language of goal systems theory. So this gets jargony, the marriage has become strongly multi final. And by that I mean, so if you take the goal case, multi final is the idea that a given means, say, walking to work serves multiple goals, say, getting exercise and enjoying the outdoors, right? So that's the idea of multi finality. You can do one thing that achieves multiple goals. It used to be to a larger extent that we had a more diverse social network and we could turn to people to do different sorts of things. To the degree that we've spousified our intimate social life, we're looking to our marriage, our spouse, to help us with a broad range of things that formerly probably would have been spread across a social network. And I wouldn't say that that's necessarily a bad thing. But I would say that it's not that likely that the spouse, that you're playing to your spouse is strength for all of those things. Right? So it may be that your spouse is is just like the best partner in the world if you want to go out and celebrate that, you know, you had a major achievement at work. But your spouse is pretty intolerant of your bitching about the person next door.
Jim Coan
They don't want to go with you to the new superhero movie, right? They want to see, you know, the French foreign film.
Eli Finkel
Yeah.
Jim Coan
And you know, and so who do you go to the superhero movie with?
Eli Finkel
Right. I think to a larger extent than in the past. You don't see it. You watch it on demand and you're home by yourself. Yeah.
Jim Coan
Wow.
Eli Finkel
Yeah.
Jim Coan
This is the whole Bowling Alone story a little bit too.
Eli Finkel
To some degree. It is. Yes. So, Robert Putnam, you know, bowling alone is the idea that in the second, really the last two thirds of the 20th century, we had a great decline in civic engagement.
Jim Coan
Right.
Eli Finkel
He wasn't so much interested in in intimate social networks. He was interested in things like joining school boards, the Elks Club, right? So yes, I would say that the ideas overlap.
Jim Coan
Those are sort of structures for creating this decentralized social, you know, fabric.
Eli Finkel
Right. I mean, what happened? We moved to the suburbs.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
Eli Finkel
And we increasingly and we took parenting far more seriously, particularly for men.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
Eli Finkel
And he blames television. I mean, Putnam, you don't get Putnam started on television. Right? Yeah. Get him on one of these podcasts.
Jim Coan
Stay away from him.
Eli Finkel
Yeah, asked him about you know, something else. So we, yeah, we did a bunch of things that reduced civic engagement. And I do agree with him that and I agree with your observation, that part of what I'm talking about is related to these decline in civic institutions. But those are independent from like, why aren't we like hanging out with our sister? I don't think he was talking about that. He was talking about like, civic institution.
Jim Coan
Yeah, this is really... I see what you mean. It's a little bit different. The focus is there. Why aren't we seeing our best friend? And the other thing that I worry, I wonder is contributing is so I guess the characterization I'm getting so far as this cultural shift, right?
Eli Finkel
That's right.
Jim Coan
But there's also things like, mobility that's increasing. So you know, I have moved since starting graduate school, you know, like four times, right? And every time there's another sort of iteration of forming good friendships. And that's tough.
Eli Finkel
So historically, so in the so, you know, here's the 30,000 foot view on, like human economic systems. There's basically been four throughout the course of our history. So starting with the hunter gatherers forever. Nobody cared about marriage. That was like, wasn't even really discussed. Then there was agriculture. So the last Ice Age ended about 11 or 13,000 years ago. And over that, in that, over that time, over the course of basically 10,000 years, society after society after society went from a nomadic hunter gatherer to agricultural.
Eli Finkel
Yeah.
Eli Finkel
It's then that even the earliest of these folks was able to extract a yield of up to 100 times as many calories per acre. And it's only then that people have any wealth, right? So then it's for the first time that it's that some members of society don't have to devote themselves full time to food production. And then once you have wealth, then you start to care about who marries home. Because there's this because of inheritance, basically. And they care a lot about the legitimacy. Like this was a huge deal. You know, what did it happen within marriage or outside of marriage?
Jim Coan
Because you have to figure out how where the resource goes.
Eli Finkel
Exactly. That's why it was so taboo to have a child outside of marriage. It was so shaming and we had words like bastard.
Eli Finkel
Yeah.
Eli Finkel
So it was only in that era that we that...
Jim Coan
I heard this link to sexuality too
Eli Finkel
How so?
Jim Coan
Sex, well sexuality, when economic constraints are high, that sexuality is become synonymous with contract.
Eli Finkel
Interesting.
Jim Coan
So it's not about recreation. Or at least, it's less about recreation. It's high risk.
Eli Finkel
That's right.
Jim Coan
And as you go up the resource ladder, sexuality becomes more recreational.
Eli Finkel
Interesting.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
Eli Finkel
You know, it certainly was true. I don't know the extent to which this overlaps with with your observations. I mean, it certainly was true say in courtly love, this was middle ages, but this was agricultural societies. That, you know, the elite of society certainly cared a lot about passion. I mean, the troubadours
Eli Finkel
Yeah
Eli Finkel
There were the, oh why am I forgetting. Anyway, there were a whole bunch of different groups that cared about romantic passion or cared about sexuality, but never with your wife. Seriously. By definition, it was like not something that you would ever do, right? That was not the point...
Jim Coan
Like your business partner,
Eli Finkel
No right. Your wife is your business partner, your husband was your business partner. These were things that were you know, contractual, and if anything was debasing to.
Jim Coan
To the covenant or the... Yeah,
Eli Finkel
Yeah. To treat like sex and passion as something that you would do in marriage, it was all by definition adulterous. And that was considered like the right way to do it. And it is our it is forgive your listeners may not like this, it is a little arbitrary. I mean, why have we linked this specific constellation of factors that have to happen within the marital bond. And some of them are almost inherently contradictory. So for example, we want our spouse, this is a lot of your work, right? We want our spouse to to be the place where we can go when we need soothing and care.
Jim Coan
Yes.
Eli Finkel
And who will help us regulate our emotions and make us feel safe, when we're anxious and so forth. But that's often not that hot, right? So you could have imagined that we would have built a different system. Something more like what the troubadours might have had, for example, where you have somebody who's really you're responsible for each other's emotional support, like you're each other's rock.
Jim Coan
Right.
Eli Finkel
And then you could imagine that there's somebody else who's like fiery and irresponsible, and like, just you have like, really hot sex with those people. And and that there wouldn't be some inherent contradiction or immorality to those views.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
Eli Finkel
These things are much more arbitrary than we want to admit. Um, but we link them and we care a lot.
Jim Coan
I think, first, that they are clearly arbitrary. I mean, well, I mean, maybe not totally, because you have these patterns, right? There are patterns. It's not like North America is where this happens. These kinds of patterns happen. You know, sex, and contract are linked a lot. Because sex makes babies probably. And but...
Eli Finkel
And can make bonding
Jim Coan
And can make bonding, right? Yeah, it makes it makes bonding. And you know, it's all... So it's not totally arbitrary. But it has the potential to be arbitrary. Where resources are sufficient. Probably.
Eli Finkel
Yeah. Arbitrary was the wrong word. It has taken on a moral rigidity that seems superfluous. And many ...
Jim Coan
Is it superfluous? Go ahead. Go.
Eli Finkel
Yeah, I mean many... I'm concerned about the default nature of the monogamy assumption, right? I'm alarmed that... So some people ask the question, is monogamy realistic? And they usually want to answer no. The question shouldn't be is monogamy realistic. Yes. It's realistic. You can do it if it's a priority. But that it's not trivial to do. So I think the question that I would have people ask on a unique basis that each couple can ask this of itself. Is monogamy sensible for us? Because it's treated as if like, oh, well, that's just the obvious default, we're going to do that. And then we start thinking about all the other things as if we haven't already made a big ask. But we have! So monogamy is great. I have nothing against it. Many people, in fact, maybe most people are probably best suited by having a monogamous marriage. I'm totally enthusiastic about it. But the fact that it's treated as if it's not going to be work. As if it's like, self evident as if it's anything other than impressive, right? It's treated as a default. Like, you haven't slept with anybody for five years, like there should be a celebration about that.
Jim Coan
So since human nature has come up, it seems, you know, people are always looking for this broad generalities about human behavior. And it's, as you know, very hard to find those because one of the most realistic generalities about human behavior is we have flexibility. We have this massive brains that afforded us this incredible range of behavioral flexibility. So then it seems to me that the questions change. It's not about are humans monogamous or not? It's under what conditions does monogamy make the most sense? And under what conditions does it not? And that's why I can't help myself anymore from always coming back to resources, budgeting, sort of goals that need to be met, what are the means to those goals? Yeah, all of these themes sort of function as sort of structural organizing principles for questions like, should there be... Are we are we monogamous?
Eli Finkel
Yeah, I mean, I have exactly the same the same reaction. So anytime that that, you know, a scientist gets gets on the radio, or an individual married person wants to think this through or have a discussion with her spouse about these things. It's not a it shouldn't be a good, bad, necessary evil sort of calculus. It should be: What are our priorities?
Jim Coan
Yeah.
Eli Finkel
And what resource investment is going to be required in order to achieve those things? And, what are we not prioritizing? What are we willing to say?
Jim Coan
What's the what's the trade off?
Eli Finkel
What- precisely. What is it that we're willing to say? Boy, I've asked a lot of this one relationship and I don't want to overburden it or be unrealistic, because that's likely to have costs on the quality of the relationship and the satisfaction that my spouse and I have in the marriage and the fulfillment that we have. So if people were serious about this, I think they would like make a list. What is it that's important to achieve in the marriage? And what am I actually asking of the marriage? I think they'll be shocked by actually what they're looking to their partner to do. I think they don't notice. And then there's a conversation that's like, all right. Well, realistically, if I'm really going to expect this person to be my primary or even sole source of emotional support and sexual fulfillment, and have this person who helps me discover who I am, and achieve my idea grow toward my ideal self. And like you go down this list of high level intensive psychological things. It's like, well, what's going to be required to do that? And then am I willing to invest those things.
Jim Coan
Are we willing to invest them? And also, let's be honest, there's also, you know, how do I understand myself? We're all individuals with cultural behavioral histories, and backgrounds, things have been sort of inculcated in the way, the way we view things.What hurts our feelings, or what makes us excited? They're gonna vary.
Eli Finkel
That's right.
Jim Coan
So what are we willing to- how are we willing to negotiate that as well?
Eli Finkel
That's right. I mean, this is one of my major concerns about one size fits all recommendations. By the way in the replicability crisis. Yeah. But But also...
Jim Coan
I know, I know.
Eli Finkel
Also applied to marriage as well. It's like, I couldn't write a book that that says, the seven secrets to a happy marriage unless that book were seven questions that you should pose to...
Jim Coan
Then that's what you should write.
Eli Finkel
Yeah, I mean, that will be part of my book is basically what are the questions that people need to think through? And on a case by person, by person or couple by couple basis, figure out their own answers to.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
Eli Finkel
There's not going to be the these like, well, here's the way you need to support people. For example, your work largely comes out of the attachment theory tradition.
Jim Coan
Although not- I mean, I didn't know that until later.
Eli Finkel
So inadvertently, well, let's say it this way, Phil and Mario were delighted. So and I view your when I discuss your work in class, and so forth, I talk about it as attachment work. In large part because it was it was I think, the first, certainly, I think the first neural work to get serious about the nature of the attachment bond. So not just individual differences and anxiety and avoidance, but the normative attachment system. Like, you know, anxiety triggers the attachment system and then can you find a safe haven?
Jim Coan
Yeah. Yeah.
Eli Finkel
Think about the way that people like to be supported, right? So I can imagine as a relationship researcher, or you you could imagine as a relationship to search or research or writing a book that says, here's how to sooth somebody who's experiencing anxiety.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
Eli Finkel
I suspect that I don't want to be treated in that way. Right?
Jim Coan
You said, you've said, I saw you at a conference. You said something rather provocative. Let's say you said like, if you're anxious, and someone tries to touch you, you're gonna say fuck off. ,
Jim Coan
Yeah, well maybe that was hyperbole. I mean let me say this. My wife has certainly learned and not because I've actually, you know, yelled at her or certainly...
Jim Coan
You're not actually going to say that.
Eli Finkel
No, but I'm going to feel it. Yeah. So that's the thing is, like, usually, like reasonable responses to things like, I had a bad day or I just stubbed my toe.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
Eli Finkel
Are things like, Oh, honey, I'm so sorry. Back rub. Kiss on the head. I- that is the last thing I want.
Jim Coan
So that would make make you like, well, anyway, I don't keep going.
Eli Finkel
Angry and like get out of my face. And again I don't want to make it sound like I'm a... maybe it is true that I'm a pathological case. But I doubt it. I think what I am is somebody who's generally securely attached, but has some avoidant leanings, and basically always has.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
Eli Finkel
And in my vulnerable moments, the single worst thing to do is do the oh baby. you know, like be tender and sweet to me. It basically... the best thing to do- I like your suprise. The best thing to do is give it two minutes.
Jim Coan
Just two?
Eli Finkel
It depends. I mean, if I've like hurt myself, it's probably less than two minutes. If I looked like I, you know, just bashed my head on something like, two minutes, it won't be hurting anymore. And I'll be totally back to myself.
Jim Coan
Because you... but here's the interesting part isit because you get this... because I have anger. Like I have anger problems. You know. And so for me, for me I was just just thinking about your example. If I when I hit my head or something, I'll have this surge of rage. And it's not that I don't like to be soothed so much is that I'm just a live wire at that moment.
Eli Finkel
Yeah, it's a little different for me.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
Eli Finkel
Again, to the degree that we have accurate introspection about these things. I think I suspect you're being accurate about yourself. And my best guess if I do the sort of armchair self psychoanalysis is, yes, I experienced some like, oh, that was upsetting and the pain hurts and now I'm kind of angry about the fact that I just bashed my head and I'm in pain. But that there is something unique on top of that, that is like, don't get near me when I'm vulnerable. Yeah, and by the way, to your listeners, no, I'm not advocating this as like the optimal lifestyle.
Jim Coan
And well, you know, but I think most people will able to get there. But I just have to tell you, it's sort of surprises me when I when... the construct of Eli Finkel that I have in my mind, emphasizes someone who's extremely flexible with affect. So other people's negative affect doesn't seem to me that it'd be that frightening to you.
Eli Finkel
Other people's negative affect.
Jim Coan
But even yours, it seems like well, I don't know, but maybe...
Eli Finkel
No, I think you have a more benign view of me than is true. Like if if I've had something that's, you know, a negative experience of work or I feel shame about something...
Jim Coan
Yeah.
Eli Finkel
I clam up. And again, the reason why we brought up this general topic is certainly not to psychoanalyze me or to advocate for this sort of clamming up approach. I think it's probably maladaptive. The reason why we're talking about it here is the cookie cutter solution to what to do when your husband is suffering, would fail in a rather spectacular fashion.
Jim Coan
With you.
Eli Finkel
With me and...
Jim Coan
With Jeff Simpson I would say roughly 25% of the population.
Eli Finkel
I think that's probably right. I mean, I am willing to say that if this applies to only me and that I'm a unique case, then your listenership shouldn't care. But I don't believe that. I don't believe that I have a completely warped psychological architecture. The fact is, these attachment dimensions, say anxiety and avoidance, the you know, a highly anxious person probably wants that soothing way longer than the average secure person wants it. And the average avoidant person wants everybody out of the room when feeling vulnerable. And so this is why there's no there's, I think, never going to be any guidebook that can tell you when you confront situation X, the optimal behavior is Y.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
Eli Finkel
There might be main effects. There might be like, this is better than like, you know, punching your partner in the face. Right? Like, I'm sure that's true. But I think there's but I think the main thing is going to be this highly, you know, sensitive to individual differences, sensitive to individual psychological idiosyncrasies, that weren't as crucial to marital wellness in 1800.
Jim Coan
Yeah, and the world was shittier then.
Eli Finkel
The world was way shittier.
Jim Coan
Way shittier.
Eli Finkel
We managed to feel oppressed nonetheless, though.
Jim Coan
Yeah, I know.
Eli Finkel
Heroically.
Jim Coan
Yeah, yeah, truly.
Eli Finkel
Yeah.
Jim Coan
Cool. Well, with that, that all makes a lot of sense to me. I mean, you know, my own work, I definitely think that I've neglected the individual differences.
Eli Finkel
You,ve looked at avoidance, right?
Jim Coan
You know, I did in the early sample. And now, although small... right now in the age that we are in, it is almost unpublishable. So there are 16 subjects with with a moderator.
Eli Finkel
No, you're right.
Jim Coan
Yeah, it's just not publishable.
Eli Finkel
But I agree with you.
Jim Coan
But But you know, the thing is, if I showed you or anyone the data, and I could.
Eli Finkel
Yeah.
Jim Coan
You would go that makes 100% sense and was predicted by at least two dozen people over the last three decades.
Eli Finkel
That's right. Yeah. That's right. So, I am worried about this, because relationships research is is vulnerable to this movement in the ways that, you and I have talked about previously. And neuroscience is vulnerable.
Jim Coan
Oh, yeah.
Eli Finkel
To this movement. Probably more than relationships research. Again, the issue for people who aren't paying attention to the replicability crisis...
Jim Coan
Reproducibility.
Eli Finkel
Reproducibility crisis roiling the sciences, is this rather abrupt change in what the standards are of how many subjects you need, and so forth. And very, very good reasons for those.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
Eli Finkel
But are we going to do those at the expense of the ability to conduct certain types of research that we can all look at and say that research has value. And if conclusions have to be slightly more tentative, then so be it.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
Eli Finkel
And that seems like the, again, a sophisticated adult mature way to think about trade offs. Is, is I think, that approach.
Jim Coan
Yeah, I love the trade offs view of these things. I love the trade offs view of most things. But also, one of the things that does bother me about the putative movement is a lack of empirical attention to the dictates, the new dictates. I mean, you know, we just for shits and giggles, in a way, my student and I, we have a study, nicely powered study, MRI study of how trait anxiety interacts with the hand holding effect. You know, it's and this is like, over 80 subjects. So we took that finding, and we made a prediction that we'd see that we would just we had the same data in the original 16 sample. So we said, well, we see it in the original sample. We do. So you know, so you see the same associations. It's still, this is statistically significant, but it's in 16 people that we went back in time to look at it so, you know. It's so so...
Eli Finkel
Well, no so this is one of the issues that has been alarming to me that I don't think has been discussed yet. I think this is what you're bringing up right? So, you have it in a large sample study.
Jim Coan
Yes.
Eli Finkel
So the question is should we be more convinced or less convinced of the effect now that you also have it in a second study that's got a small sample.
Jim Coan
Right.
Eli Finkel
And I think you and I have the intuition that, okay, so that second side of the older study is not definitive, because we now know enough about the problems of small samples that we don't want to draw strict conclusions. But I think both of us would feel comfortable saying that there is an increment in our confidence and...
Jim Coan
Confidence has been achieved.
Eli Finkel
So yeah, some nonzero amount of increased confidence in the effect, because it's been replicated. The irony is the statistical forensics procedures that people have been developing would draw exactly the opposite conclusion.
Jim Coan
That's why I raise it.
Eli Finkel
Right. And now I guess the argument would be if it were all preregistered, maybe...
Jim Coan
That would help.
Eli Finkel
Maybe there would have less concern about it. Although the statistical procedures are indifferent to pre registrations, right?
Jim Coan
That's right.
Eli Finkel
I don't know. I mean, if it turns out that you can't, or people like you can't do the sorts of research you've been doing over the last decade, or can only do one study every few years, because you need to...
Jim Coan
Cause you have to get 100 subjects to do an MRI.
Eli Finkel
FMRI machine and hell knows, you know, some of them are going to move.
Jim Coan
Yep.
Eli Finkel
And you're gonna have to throw out the data because they move their head.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
Eli Finkel
And so like, if that's the part that really terrifies me about the movement, there's all sorts of great things about it. But if it turns out that there's just, you know, in some senses, the very best, most convincing, most compelling work that we as a field know how to do gets replaced with a bunch of mechanical turk studies, because it's easy to get big samples. Like man, why aren't we talking more about that problem?
Jim Coan
Well, and also the problem of constrained methodological creativity.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
Jim Coan
You know, there there are.... Alan Kazdin wrote this amazing book in the I think, the 80s, that's in like, its fifth or sixth edition. It's just research methods and clinical psychology. It's the driest title in the world. But it's I highly recommend it, because it is stuffed with research designs that maximize causal inference with small samples interesting with with single samples, case study designs. You know, multiple baseline designs for very small rare diseases. You know, AB AB designs that we know, where you try to understand the mechanism by switching it on and switching it off and switching it on. There are so many options for for increasing sensitivity to real effects with small samples that if we restrict our solution to a sample size adjustment, it's this doesn't make any sense.
Eli Finkel
I suspect this would this would be an argument that would be palatable to people who are more activist in this space that then you and I are. There's been there has been a greater discussion, and I think in the last year or two, you've probably seen some of this that says increasing power, there's lots of ways to do that. It doesn't have to be big sample. And that's, I think the point you're making here. So that I think, is not going to be a third rail, like everyone will grant that, I think non defensively. It's other stuff like replicability is great and it's true that all is equal, the larger the sample size is the more replicable the effect is likely to be. But what are the other parameters that also matter? And under what circumstances are we willing to sacrifice this percentage of replicability of a given study for this level of innovation of creativity of methodological rigor of unique samplness?
Jim Coan
Yeah yeah yeah.
Eli Finkel
I mean, it's like, in fact, I-
Jim Coan
Unique sampleness.
Eli Finkel
Unique sampleness is gonna be the title of my... transactive goal dynamics, colon unique sampleness. I actually want to check out like I'm not enjoying being involved in the debates. I find a lot of it to be pretty unpleasant. But and I would be happy to check out as long as I can get a commitment from everybody that I feel like everybody should be willing to commit to. Which is, can we have a rule that says, anytime we want to propose a policy or even consider current practices, we must think about the reverberations for the other to sitarata, the other valued criteria of science.
Jim Coan
How does it fit into the ecosystem?
Eli Finkel
Yes. How does it fit into the ecosystem?
Jim Coan
Because there is an ecosystem view of this. And this is what you've really been talking about writing about beautifully is this. There's all... there's virtually always trade offs. There's there are competing interests in the in the canonical one is the external internal validity problem. You know, that this is just true.
Eli Finkel
That's right. And so if that happened, that there was just an increasing, I believe to be the right word of recognition.Of that fact I mean, that you can no longer write papers that say, science is in crisis, replicability, here are six things to do about the replicability problem. Like that it's now... yes, that's a great paper as long as it is accompanied by: these are the prices that we're going to pay for the changes that we want to make to increase replicability.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
Eli Finkel
If they're if they're thinking aloud about it, I don't really have a horse in the race about what the right trade offs are. I'm not knowledgeable enough and not that interested in figuring that stuff out. Let the methodologists do that. But just a recognition that all practices, including current practices in fairness...
Jim Coan
Yeah.
Eli Finkel
Have a set of trade offs embedded within them.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
Eli Finkel
And that it shouldn't be okay anymore. In 2011, it was probably fine. But it shouldn't be okay anymore to make recommendations about solving a specific problem for a specific desideratum of science, like for example, replicability without actually thinking through okay, well, that means we're going to run a lot fewer studies or that Jim Coan can't do fMRI studies anymore. Like, okay, these are costs and maybe, you know, and let's debate them. And maybe it's true that shutting down Jim Coans lab, or making you run one study every four years is a good trade off that the increased replicability is worth the loss yield of number of research questions people, like you get to ask. It may well be. I doubt it. But it may well be that that's good for science. And as long as people are engaging with that question, I'm out. I just want the engagement with that question to be the main topic in the field.
Jim Coan
Is it my imagination or it... I hate good old days kinds of points. But I think of Cook and Campbell.
Eli Finkel
Yeah.
Jim Coan
Even, what's the classic stats test? Coan and Coan, you know, that the trade offs language was all over the place. And when you when you talk about the list, you know. Remembering cooking Campbell, they go through all the threats to validity do and how to how to to cope with all the various threats to validity.
Eli Finkel
Yeah.
Jim Coan
And there's trade offs all over the place. And this is what makes it hard.
Eli Finkel
That's right. And certainly the the McGrath article that we've
Jim Coan
Yeah, right,
Eli Finkel
Referenced recently, the talks about internal and external validity, for example. I mean, look, in fairness to the sort of more activist side of the people in this discussion. None of those people really understood, P-hacking. I mean, I think none of us did.
Jim Coan
And I think that's right. Well, I think I definitely let it I certainly didn't have a word for it. And words are useful in that they consolidate a lot of conceptual thinking
Eli Finkel
It's worse than that for me. And I think probably for you for and for most of the field. Like, I didn't realize I never had the thought that you run until the end of the semester, and then you analyze the data, and if it's a P of less than point of five, you stop. And if it's a P of greater than point four, you stop. But if it's a point, oh, seven, or point one, six, you collect more data to see if it levels into a point of five or doesn't. Never did I- it was called getting more power. And never did I realize like, oh, but actually, you've already used up your point oh five, our error, the type one error that you're allowed when you ran the first analysis, and now you're playing like on house money, basically, when you do the additional hypothesis test. And same thing, even with outliers. Like I mean, I guess we kind of knew that it was shenanagin-y, the way we were, oh, it's point oh, seven. Oh, now I'm gonna think to look for an outlier. But it didn't occur to me before. So I mean, those are things that I think we didn't- and when we look for outliers, yes, it was oriented towards trying to get p less than point of five, but it was always with the belief that this is going to reveal, like there was truth. Yeah, there's a weirdo who's not the same population. So I think that they've done more than just...
Jim Coan
I agree. I agree. I agree that I agree. And also, just just these, you know, these methodological conversations are good to have. It's been, it's been heuristically valuable for that. For me, it was, it was the discovery in grad school of multilevel modeling.
Eli Finkel
Right.
Jim Coan
So as soon as I started the transition period, where I went from sort of running a standard ANOVA to more HLM kind of research, or data analysis. That's where we're, you know, I would face situations where, this way, it's significant. And that's what it's not.
Eli Finkel
The slopes vary or not.
Jim Coan
Or not! How do you model the random slopes? And that's what you know. Now, we just do, by the way, we just we know, we sort of figured it out. But there was that period of time where it's like...
Eli Finkel
Yeah, and we shenaniganed. We shenaniganed our way around point five. They're correct. But and we should have been better, and we didn't really realize that the shenanigans had consequences.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
Eli Finkel
And we're way better tuned in. But let me actually riff on that exact example of the then multilevel modeling came around and was well, I think it really came around a while before, but it was translated for relationships, research and psychologists. It's like, all of us just did it. So and the reason why I think that's relevant to this discussion is, sometimes I think some of the leaders of the movement feel like there's resistance to improving methods. But every time Dave Kenny tells me
Jim Coan
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Eli Finkel
Look, we discovered a new way to do it and it's this way. We just did it. It's never like we thought, oh, I don't know. I'm thinking maybe I won't do that. So it's not a resistance to change. This part bothers me. It's how convinced Are we that specific recommendations
Jim Coan
Are going to be from the useful.
Eli Finkel
Are actually good for science.
Jim Coan
Yeah, and I completely agree.
Eli Finkel
I know You and I agree, but I think this is something that I hope this podcast gets heard by, you know, zillions of people.
Jim Coan
I hope so too.
Eli Finkel
But but specifically about this. It's like, I am changing right away. Like, I know that I sometimes seem like I'm like putting up roadblocks to change. I have changed.
Jim Coan
Oh, yeah me too.
Eli Finkel
Hundreds of haters in the lab.
Jim Coan
We have its new grant. We're integrating it as much as we can, with the Open Science Framework. We're trying to put all the data online in a public public access. You know, it's all new. We never it never would occurred before that.
Eli Finkel
The sample sizes are bigger and the paying attention as you spit ball ideas with your students to make sure that you're like, you know, that you're not harking hypothesizing. I've changed all of these things. But that's but so they're wrong to detect resistance from me. They're right to detect resistance to policy.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
Eli Finkel
That's the major thing is we can't have policy level change. We're not ready. And so policy level changes that should apply to all scholars in all disciplines, I don't think we'll ever be ready for. But even at the level of okay, within relationships research with couples, I don't think we've thought through the trade offs yet.
Jim Coan
Yes.
Eli Finkel
The movement is five years old. We've made massive progress.
Jim Coan
Well, yeah. I mean, you're... the distinction between useful new tool useful new strategy that can help you do better science and policy that we're going to use to constrain your movement. Right? That's, that's all the difference in the world.
Eli Finkel
That's all the difference in the world. But the truth is policy that constrains your movement, I'm in favor of that, too, as long as I'm convinced that it in fact improves science.
Jim Coan
I'm not even sure. I mean, yes. I put in put in those terms. But even though politically, I'm a progressive, leftist, centralized government, scientifically, I'm totally libertarian, there's so much that we don't know about the creative process still. There's so much that we don't know about the generation of hypotheses the moments of insight that people have, looking at datasets that I would look at the same dataset and see, you know, the bottom of the ocean. I wouldn't see anything, right? We just don't understand that we're so... Really science, what I mean to say by that, to me is it's the old west. It's anything goes it's a it's a free for all hellscape on some level.
Eli Finkel
Yeah.
Jim Coan
Because it's that unknowable, the future. We don't we don't really know how...
Eli Finkel
I haven't thought through this. I mean, this is this is a, this is an interesting set of ideas. And I'm trying to think through. So everything you say, is, is sensible. And if you want to use non political language, it's the let many flowers bloom approach. And one other brief thing, Alison Ledgerwood, at UC Davis talks a lot about the start local approach.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
Eli Finkel
And to some degree, she's very, I think, simple. She's more activist, I think, in the movement than we are, but she's simpatico with this broad idea of one size fits all solutions. And top down policies are going to be destructive. So her take is you and your own lab, pay attention and in good faith, listen to the issues in the movement, when you find something convincing, change your practices, if you learn, oh, that didn't work in a sensible way for our lab not work as in point oh five work, but wasn't sensible for our lab, then do something different. And that this is the optimal strategy for here. Your point is, is interesting, because I'm wondering if there isn't a downstream implication for that. Of that science is arbitrary. I mean, it's interesting to think it's interesting to take seriously your idea and think through well, well, what does it actually mean? Does anything go?
Jim Coan
Yeah, I mean, it is, what I don't mean to say is that there aren't ways to improve the probability that we are doing- learning about things. I wouldn't say that at all. There's a whole giant click. I never would want to abandon the immense progress that we've all made methodologically, including the recommendations of the more activist folks that we're talking to right now. Never, never, ever, ever. The problem is, I don't know what someone's going to find out. Not in terms of content. But in terms of process. I don't know what someone's gonna figure out how to do a thing or how to... It's just there... I'm in favor of principles.
Eli Finkel
Yeah.
Jim Coan
Like, you know, publicly verifiable
Eli Finkel
Transparency.
Jim Coan
Of transparency. I'm not in favor of rules. It's, that's just my bias.
Eli Finkel
Yeah, I mean, transparency. In some ways. I don't wanna say sufficient, but I think transparent, greater transparency than we all had in 2011 would go a long way toward addressing...
Eli Finkel
Yeah.
Eli Finkel
Real problems that we had ignored.
Jim Coan
Yeah, I agree. Yeah. And most of the activist folks that I know, certainly Brian Nosek, makes that point all the time. That transparency is sort of like the ultimate virtue.
Eli Finkel
Yeah, and then readers can judge for themselves. Reviewers can judge for themselves as long as they have the information and they didn't get some some scrubbed prettified version of things. Then they can judge how convincing the evidence is and the reader once something's published, then she can judge.
Jim Coan
Dude, I didn't talk at all about your life. But this was fantastic.
Eli Finkel
Very fun. Sounds good, my friend. Thanks for the time.
Jim Coan
Okay, that's it everyone. Thanks to you. Thanks to Eli Finkel for a lively and informative chat. You are fun to talk to you, Mr. You make it easy. Can't wait to do that again. And as I've said before, if I can catch up with him, I'll ask him to come back soon. And we'll talk some more about his personal life. Folks the music on Circle of Willis is written by Tom Stouffer and Jean Ruli and performed by their band the New Drakes. For information about how to purchase this music check the about page at Circle of Willis podcast.com. And don't forget, that Circle of Willis is brought to you by VQR and the Center for Media and Citizenship at the University of Virginia. And that Circle of Willis is a member of the TEEJFM network. You can find more, find out more about that at teej.fm. All right, I'll see you all at episode three where where I talk with Lisa Diamond of the University of Utah about sexual identity. Both the science and her own personal story and hopefully she won't she won't get me into any trouble. Until then. See you all next time. Bye bye.