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This column provides an insight into the views of the people behind the books and the psychology' Ourfirstinterview is with Robin Dunbar, one of the most respected of current evolutionary psychologists.

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ffmfogm ffiffp'?,&m$'obin Dunbar is Professor of Psychologyat the University of Liverpool. He is

currently involved in a variety of differentresearch projects, including the Lucy-to-Language project which is investigatinghow the early human brain evolved. A-levelstudents will know Robin best for hisresearch using lonely hearts advertisementsto investigate what tralts men and womenadvertise and seek in prospective partners.Many students base their coursework onthis research and, as Robin ruefullycomments, 'lf I charged a fee for it, I wouldbe incredibly rich!'

ln a nutshell, what do the lonely heartsads studies show?

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RD Lonely hearts ads provide us with avignette of what their advertisers arelooking for in a prospective mate. ln effect,they are the opening bid in the complexgame of poker that we usually call the'mating game'. lt is the bid that we makewhen we have a general idea of what thepunters out there might be expecting fromus and have in their turn to offer us, butwhen we do not yet know the specifics ofthe individuals.Courtship has been described as aprocess of negotiation with several decisionpoints, where we pause and ask ourselveswhether we want to allow the relationshipto develop to the next level of intimacy. ln

effect, lonely hearts ads give us the indi-vidual advertiser's opening bid before theyhave been forced to compromise on theirideals, after finding out who really is outthere in the market.

Why do you think this research appealsso much to students?RD Relationships are the beginning and theend of social life: they are what makes theworld go round - or at least the socialworld which is really where we spend mostof our time. I think we just have a deepfascination with trying to figure out whatthe rules of the game are. We are intriguedby what makes other people tick. That iswhy three-quarters of all the books sold

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each year are fiction - stories largely aboutrelationships between people - and mostofthe other quarter are biographies - justthe real-life equivalent.What would you identify as the majorlimitation of this research?RD The limitations arisefromthe questionsyou want to ask. We cannot, for example,say anything about success rates fordifferent kinds of ads because we do notsee the replies - never mind the happyoutcomes! Nor do they tell us about thecompromises that we all inevitably make aswe work through the long process of finallychoosing a partner. They are fine for whatthey are: a glimpse of our ideals at the startof the courtship Process.Some people have suggested that thesekinds of ads are confou nded by the fact thatwhat people say about themselves is mostlyuntrue. But in fact the evidence suggeststhat, so long as you read the signals right,most advertisers are there for the same

purpose - they do want to find a partner.This is not to say that they do not twist thetruth a little to make their case better thanit is, but part of the problem here lies withpeople reading into ads what they wouldlike to see in them. Our analyses suggestthat, in general, people know what works,and the risk of being shown up keeps usmore or less in line - or at least as in line aswe would normally be in face-to-facecontexts., Some more recent research, again usinglonely hearts ads, has found that men nowadvertise'caringness' rather than resources.How can you explain this in evolutionaryterms?RD The mating game is very dynamic; itchanges constantly in response to thecurrent social and economic environment' lfyou look at ads in less economically devel-oped countries, or ads from VictorianEngland (yes, they were going in great-grandma's time too!), you find that women

tend to emphasise wealth and status in themen they want to meet. You have to seethat in the context of family wealth (mainlyearned by men) having a huge impact onchildren's survival. ln modern Europe, thatburden of child rearing has been lifted by acombination of the facts that we are allmuch more wealthy as individuals and thatbetter healthcare has reduced infantmortality.With those worries removed, you wouldexpect women to shift their concerns toother areas like the purely social aspects ofthe family (men's ability to help build therelationship and their willingness to helpwith childcare and socialisation), since theseare now the areas that will have greatestimpact on their ability to rear offspringsuccessfully. And that is basically what wesee.:. i As our social world changes, are thereother selection traits that might bepredicted by evolutionarY theorY?RD lt is important to understand that theevolutionary perspective is not a differentkind of psychological theory from those thatalready exist. Rather, it is a meta-theory thatallows us to bring all the other existingapproaches underthe same roof. lt is not analternative. What it does is identify thecriteria that underpin our decisions in thelong run. From an evolutionary point ofview, that can only ever be one thing:leaving as many copies of your genes infuture generations as You can.

'':, Bubbly, dftracrivc blono(, zo, / 6', into pubs, clubs anol cosY cvcnings in sccks Malcfor caring, honcst rclationship. @ stsszo.i. stuart profcssional guy,30, n/s, Iikcs sport, socialising and cinema NLTM sliu,'; trrractvc femalc for fun, fricndship and uaybc morc' @ 7t+tto'',, hoool'looking, tall, Professional aalc, 50, hsol+, casY-going' cdring' no fics' sccks:aftrdctivc,happy,aolvcnfurousfcaalc30-lStosharclifc'sbiga^{venturc.@zgc+s'l'

\rown-cyco{ gtl,26, Iikcs kccPing fit, reading, s6i-fi fittats anol danctng NLTfuI fun ualc,r 2s-3s, for rclationship. (O 167ss3.The opening bid in the mating game

September 2005 R?

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From an evolutionary point of view, thisis not as straightforward as we mightsuppose. There is a well establishedphenomenon (originally based on studies ofbirds) called Lack's LaW which states thatyou do not maximise the number of grand-children you have if you spread yourself toothinly by pumping out as many babies asyou can. Having fewer babies may be evolu-tionarily more profitable. The reason this isimportant here is that it reminds us thatevolution (and indeed, everything inbiology) is context dependent. What is thebest thing to do depends on the balance ofcosts and benefits of a given situation, andthe situation changes constantly. There isno 'best thlng'in evolution, only the best ofa bad job. Like Alice in Wonderland, we areconstantly running just to stay in the game.Equally, there is no such thing asprogress in evolution: chance and circum-stance play an important role. So it becomesimpossible to predict where evolutionmight take us until we are right on the spotitself. We can look back and see how wecame to be where we are (what philoso-phers have called 'postdiction'as opposedto 'prediction'), but we can never say forsure where things will go in the future.ffm Ao-A A) Psychology Review

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Evolutionary explanations have beencriticised for being gender-biased (as anexplanation that exaggerates the differ-ences between men and women). Do youthink this is a fair criticism?RD Criticisms of this kind are invariablymade by people who do not really under-stand evolutionary theory and its applica-tion. ln reality, core theory in biology handsthe principal control of life to the females(which in mammals like ourselves, happensto be the sex that has the XX sex chromo-somes - though in some groups, like birds,the females are the ones with the XY chro-mosomes). That is why biologists some-times speak of the'redundant males'.Such explanations are also criticised forbeing determinist. Are they?Rm This is a common misunderstanding.The evolutionary approach is not about thegenetic determination of behaviour - notleast because nothing in real life is geneti-cally determined in this simple minded way.Rather, the evolutionary approach is aboutstrategic decision-making - the extent towhich issues of maximising fitness (howmany copies of our genes we leave behindus when we die) guide our choices in life.But that said, one of the big innovations in

animal evolution was the development of alarge brain, because big brains allowyou torespond more flexibly to circumstances andso remain in the game of Iife for longer. Ourlarge brains give us the option of bailing outof the evolutionary game if we choose to doso. This is not a problem: it is a free worldand you can choose what to do. You cannotduck the evolutionary consequences ofyourbehaviour, but you can choose to ignorethem.

Finally, if you were going to advertiseyoursell what would you write to guar-antee success?RP Women make much more complexdecisions about choosing partners thanmen do, so in some ways men are lucky.That means we have more dimensions toplay with. Wealth and status (two sides ofthe same coin, really) still carry a surprisingamount of weight; social skills are certainlyincreasingly important (that is what theterm CSOH - good sense of humour -tries to signal); but, surprisingly, so arethings like being tall. I would like to go forthe last, but I am not sure that I wouldcompete with the younger generation, whohave been growing taller by the decade. AndI am not rich or a pop star. So it is going tohave to be a sense of humour, lthink.Cara Flanagan has written many books forA-level students, including Nelson Thornes'Psychology Complete Compa nicn series forAO_A (A) AS and 42 exams with Mike Cardwell.Her series of books on research methods forAo_A (A), Edexcel and oCR were published byNelsonThornes in May, July and September2005.

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