Kirsten Michelle Cills
Hello, hello, and welcome to So Curious! I am Kirsten Michelle Cills.
The Bul Bey
And I am the Bul Bey. And we’re the hosts of this little fun series.
Kirsten Michelle Cills
So this is the newest project coming out of the Franklin Institute, which, if you don’t know, the Franklin Institute, is a science museum in Philadelphia. And in true Franklin Institute fashion, this series is dedicated to celebrating human sciences and technologies.
The Bul Bey
Yeah. For our last season, Human 2.0, we featured scientists, experts and researchers as they talked all about innovations in biotechnology. For this upcoming season, we’re taking things in a new direction.
Kirsten Michelle Cills
So welcome to So Curious! Season Two. This season is all about love, sex and relationships. My three favorite things.
The Bul Bey
You know what? Let’s kick things off by introducing ourselves, Kirsten.
Kirsten Michelle Cills
All right. Great idea. Hello, I am Kirsten. I am Philly’s token terminally ill stand-up comic.
Kirsten Michelle Cills
I have cystic fibrosis, which is a terminal lung disease. It’s genetic. People always think that it sounds really sad when they hear that I’m terminal. They’re always like, “oh, my God, you’re so brave. I can’t even imagine being terminal,” which is so weird to me because in the same way that you can’t imagine being terminal, I can’t imagine having to care about my credit score. You’re so brave.
Kirsten Michelle Cills
I am born and raised in the City of Brotherly Love. I have been working as an advocate for the cystic fibrosis foundation. I’ve been doing stand-up comedy for about six years, and I split my time between telling jokes and yelling, “Go, Birds!”, unprompted, any chance I get. This season’s topic is particularly important to me because between my career as a stand-up comedian and being raised by a mom who was a high school sex ed teacher, I love discussing all things sex, love and relationships. Now, who are you?
The Bul Bey
Hey, what’s up? My name is The Bul Bey. You could just call me Bey. I’m Philly’s one and only “The Bul Bey,” like, you’re not going to find anybody else with that name. I’m all over the socials and I make music. Maybe you can actually play a little bit right here…..[music]. I’m Philly based. I got some new music out this year. Please check it out. Tell them you support my life [laughter].
Kirsten Michelle Cills
So now that we have introduced ourselves, let’s introduce our season topic. So to break down our season topic, we are going to chat with the chief bioscientist of the Franklin Institute, Dr. Jayatri Das. Welcome to Season Two!
Dr. Jayatri Das
Hey, Kirsten. Hey, Bey. Good to be with you.
The Bul Bey
Hey. Hey.
Dr. Jayatri Das
So I’m to be talking about this with you guys. I love the fact that you bring comedy and music and some attitude and health to this, but I’m interested in hearing from you why you guys think science has a role in sex, love and relationships.
Kirsten Michelle Cills
Sex, love and relationships? From a science perspective, I mean, if you break them down, it really breaks down to anatomy, human biology, psychology, human connection. Yeah. I think it would almost be impossible to have a conversation about these things and not discuss science. Even if this were not a Franklin Institute podcast.
Dr. Jayatri Das
I love it! That’s what we’re here to do at the Franklin Institute, is help everybody understand why science matters to our everyday life. And like you mentioned, Kirsten, there’s a little bit of everything when you get to sex, love and relationships, and we’re going to tackle it all. But I’m a biologist, and so that’s kind of where I like to start. We are animals like other animals that are out there trying to make their way in the world and just survive. And so at a certain point, that’s just like that fundamental place where we’re starting from is that we build relationships with each other, that helps us survive. We reproduce, and, yeah, that involves sex, but also thinking about the fact that those relationships shape how our society works and also our health. And we’re going to talk about some of this stuff as we go through this season. So what are some questions that you guys have right off the bat when it comes to the science of love and relationships?
The Bul Bey
Can I get a date? No, it’s not a question. I have, I have solved that for myself!
Kirsten Michelle Cills
So I’m curious. What is happening chemically or biologically or whatever in our bodies when we fall in love? Because I do not know how to define love, but there’s got to be a science behind it.
Dr. Jayatri Das
Oh, that’s a good question, right? Because there is definitely a physiological component of how our bodies and brains react chemically and physically. But then how does that influence our broader idea of love?
The Bul Bey
Right? Why is a long walk on the beach so romantic? Why is that?
Kirsten Michelle Cills
Only if you’re on horseback.
The Bul Bey
Oh, wow. Have you done that on horseback?
Kirsten Michelle Cills
That’s the rule. No…[laughter].
The Bul Bey
In slow motion!
Kirsten Michelle Cills
Yeah.
Dr. Jayatri Das
I think one of the cool things is that we have these gut feelings about what relationships should be like, but we live in a world where technology is kind of changing that, too.
Kirsten Michelle Cills
What is it going to be like in 30 years? Like that show Black Mirror? Can we just find ways to not have to rely on other humans to fall in love or have sex?
Dr. Jayatri Das
I think one of the other things that fascinates me is the development of media has really shaped how we perceive relationships and thinking about how does that interact with the biological relationships that we have with each other and how do they influence each other? Like, how are we projecting science on to society? And then how is our social perception of relationships influencing the questions that we ask in science?
The Bul Bey
Yeah, I appreciate you bringing that up. There’s all kinds of phrasing that we throw around, like Bonnie and Clyde…
Kirsten Michelle Cills
The Jim to my Pam, the Ross to my Rachel…
The Bul Bey
C’mon now. That one was a little toxic!
Kirsten Michelle Cills
Yeah, more than a little! If you’re so in love with a couple or a person in a show or a movie or a book, that’s just what you’re looking for moving forward. You’re like, I just need someone to do this, shot for shot. I’ll just give them the script and they can just reenact it for me. That’s what I want.
The Bul Bey
Which is so wild, because if someone’s not behaving like a scripted character on screen and looking for that in your real life, interactions can be devastating sometimes.
Kirsten Michelle Cills
Okay, so we just talked through a whole bunch of questions and now I need some answers. So, Doctor Das, thank you so much for being here.
Dr. Jayatri Das
It’s been fun. I’m excited to hear all of the amazing guests we’re going to have on this season and look forward to being back.
Kirsten Michelle Cills
So in this season, we are going to be going on a journey to discover how humans love, how they date, how they use relationship technology. But for now, we’re going to start off with some behavioral biology that is going to take us deeper into the world of… You guessed it, frog sex! Our first guest is Dr. Alex Baugh. Dr. Alex Baugh is an associate professor of biology at Swarthmore College, where he teaches courses in animal behavior, endocrinology, and evolution. His current research is focused on understanding what drives individual differences in sexual behavior, especially mate choosiness. Alex primarily studies frogs. Dr. Alex Baugh, welcome to So Curious! If you were to explain what you do and your research to a five-year-old, or in this case, a comedian and a rapper, what would you say about it?
Dr. Alex Baugh
Yeah, that’s interesting because in your professions, creativity and improvisation is obviously so key. And I think about my research and how I would describe that to a kindergartner. It is the outcome of being curious about the natural world, looking for insight about the way the world works by watching it very carefully. And this is something that five-year-olds get. Humans at that age especially, are just natural, experimental people.
The Bul Bey
Can you explain what “sexual communication” means?
Dr. Alex Baugh
So, most of what you hear, see, and smell in animals, in the natural world, and in fact, even in plants, most of that is sexual communication. At the end of the day, Darwinian fitness cares about how many offspring you produce. That for sexually reproducing animals is now going to hinge on your success in finding a mate and producing offspring. And so much of what the natural world is all about is perpetuating that genetic lineage. And that comes down, in a lot of animals, to effectively communicating, getting the signal out there for what species you are, for what sex you are, for your sexual readiness, for any resources that you hold that might entice a chooser to choose you. And so that’s at the very center of biology. In fact, it’s really hard not to teach even a single lecture in biology and not have that framing — it’s so central to everything that lives. In most cases, this is typically one sex, often males, that are producing signals that emanate, typically, long-distance signals, to attract members of the opposite sex. And it is typically the case that that opposite sex is the female and that female is the chooser.
Dr. Alex Baugh
So we’ve got courters: those are most often males; and choosers: those are most often females. Those sexual signals, those are playing this really critical role in making that bond possible. So there’s just an enormous amount to study in that domain.
The Bul Bey
Can you talk about where you are? You are sitting in a “frog chamber?” What is that?
Kirsten Michelle Cills
What is a frog chamber? What goes on in the frog chamber?
The Bul Bey
Yeah, that sounds a little risky.
Dr. Alex Baugh
I’m sitting in what is kind of equivalent to a nice studio recording room. But this is not for humans, it’s for frogs. And this is a space that we think of as a predictable sound field. We can play back sound through speakers from outside of the chamber. We can control those sounds very carefully. And those speakers are now stand-ins for males. Then we put a reproductive female in the chamber and we ask her to tell us, what is your preference? What do you like? I’ll introduce you to the star of the show here.
The Bul Bey
What? We’re going to see a frog?
Dr. Alex Baugh
This is a pair of amplectant gray tree frogs, Hyla chrysoscelis. The male is on the back of the female here. I’m going to take the male off of the female’s back. I’m going to put him in a separate little bin with water.
Kirsten Michelle Cills
I had no idea there were frogs on deck. That’s so cool.
Dr. Alex Baugh
We’re going to see if he’ll give us an advertisement call here in a second. [frog croaking sound]
The Bul Bey
Wow, that was fire! That was pretty aggressive too.
Kirsten Michelle Cills
We are currently seeing well, it was the two frogs, and now the male frog is in his own body of water and that’s when he starts making those noises. Is that correct?
Dr. Alex Baugh
Yeah.
The Bul Bey
He just did it again!
Kirsten Michelle Cills
They were so tiny. Oh my gosh. Do you have a bunch of frogs with you right now?
Dr. Alex Baugh
We actually do. We’ve got, I think, 100 pairs of frogs from last night.
Kirsten Michelle Cills
And I know this is your business, so you’re just so used to it, but if I were in that room, I’d feel like, “I need to play with every frog.” That’s so cool that you’re just able to do this interview with all these frogs around you. How many career paths can say that, right?
Dr. Alex Baugh
Yeah, I think I’m in a rare case where this is what I get paid to do, right? Study frog sex and sexual hearing.
Kirsten Michelle Cills
Tell me what you did last night. I got to know.
Dr. Alex Baugh
It’s Minnesota. It’s the land of lakes. There’s swamps and lakes and ponds everywhere. And if you just step outside this time of year, in this case I was in a suburb of St. Paul, there’s a pond with 1000 plus frogs calling from around 09:00 p.m. ’til around 01:00 a.m. And they’re all doing their best to get a mate, and probably around 5% of them will.
Kirsten Michelle Cills
Wow.
The Bul Bey
Wow.
Kirsten Michelle Cills
That is low statistics. Wow. Yeah.
The Bul Bey
Frog chorus… Is this behavior that’s done in groups? Do we have frog choirs?
Dr. Alex Baugh
Great question. We use that language to describe it because phenomenologically, that’s exactly what it is. Males are not only gathering in the swamp together in dense aggregations and producing vocalizations and vocalizing in a way that is sensitive to the presence of others. Right. So a given male is going to up his game when he’s next to another hotshot, sexy male, and he’s going to minimize call overlap. They don’t want to be talking over each other because that makes it harder for any listeners, any females in the arena, to identify, localize, and then select one of those males. There is an emergent property here of a chorus, but at the end of the day they’re in competition with each other. But it is an interesting case study in biology where you’ve got individual males, in their own interest producing these costly vocalizations to attract females, but they’re gathering in groups to do it. And in fact, the larger the group that they’re in, of males, the better their likelihood of attracting a female. There’s a disproportionate increase in attracting females with larger choruses of males. So in a sense there is kind of a cooperative element there, even though they’re all acting in their own self-interest.
Kirsten Michelle Cills
Is there a human version of a frog course that we might be familiar with?
Dr. Alex Baugh
Well, this is the sexual marketplace for frogs, so I’m not sure what that sexual marketplace is for humans, but I think it’s online.
The Bul Bey
Okay.
Kirsten Michelle Cills
If I were to think about what would be the human equivalent of a frog chorus living in South Philadelphia where I live, I’m thinking like catcalling, people kind of yelling out of their cars, or yelling when you’re walking down the street.
The Bul Bey
Yeah, and I was thinking a bar.
Kirsten Michelle Cills
Yeah, or a bar! How do animals make decisions when it comes to mating? What is like the big sell?
Dr. Alex Baugh
For most animals on planet Earth, most males of most species never get to have sex. As humans, we’re very human-centric in our thinking and that strikes us as unusual. But this is the norm for most animals. And so the name of the game for males of most species is quantity over quality. It is, reproduce with as many mates as possible and leave the rearing of offspring and the gestation, et cetera, to the females. All the investment in the reproductive effort really is on the female side. And in frogs, and the reason why I’m sitting in a frog chamber and studying frogs and studying acoustic mate choice, is because it offers really an unparalleled opportunity to evaluate that question you just asked. Females in a lot of animals, especially frogs and toads, are the sex that gets to choose. They control 100% of the mate choice process. Males, like I said, they’ll accept any female, including females of other species. That’s the nature of the male equation. Females, on the other hand, are very picky. Right. They’re very choosy and their preferences are often very strong for certain features of a sexual communication signal: features that guarantee species identity, for example. The worst thing a female can do is select a male of another species.
The Bul Bey
Can animals make first impressions? And if so, are there similarities between that experience of encountering someone for the first time that humans have to animals?
Dr. Alex Baugh
In the case of frogs, I’m going to be frog-centric here, the first impression… it’s always a first impression, and this is another reason for studying them. They don’t have much of a short-term memory, maybe 45 seconds or a minute. And so every time the male calls [makes burrrrrr- sound], she’s processing that call, she’s counting the number of pulses in it, she’s listening for the intensity of it, for the different frequencies that are in i, to make sure it’s the right species, the right sex, that it’s an attractive male. But she quickly forgets. The female that has a very short time horizon for finding a mate, and the absence of finding a mate is going to forfeit her entire fitness, she’s going to drop those eggs one way or the other — with a male on her back, or without. Wow, that’s a huge fitness cost. This may be her only clutch of eggs in her lifetime. And so she does need to find a mate. And as that clock keeps ticking, she’s going to forfeit some of her preferences in order to just find a mate. That’s something that came out. This is frog research we’re talking about. But this really was inspired, I think, first by a famous country-western singer who wrote, “don’t all the girls get prettier at closing time?” We call this the closing time effect. And it’s true in humans, it’s true in frogs.
Kirsten Michelle Cills
Well, I think it’s interesting about you’re saying at a certain point the females have to settle because they are running out of time. Right. Because with humans it’s different. Right. The female frog can’t just like, freeze her eggs while she pursues her career. Right. That’s just not how it works.
The Bul Bey
Especially if you’re forgetting every 45 seconds!
Kirsten Michelle Cills
Right! How can you pursue a career if you keep forgetting? Right, yeah. It’s a real Finding Dory situation in that sense. I love it.
The Bul Bey
How does all this inform us?
Kirsten Michelle Cills
Yeah. And what can animals tell us about how sexual communication of humans has evolved?
Dr. Alex Baugh
It kind of goes back to a topic we touched earlier. In your careers, right, so creativity and expression, a lot of creative pursuits in humans center on novelty. If you’re just doing the same thing over and over and over again, you’re just not going to get much of an audience interested. And that’s true in animals, too. We see that mostly over evolutionary time. We see novelty and ingenuity and innovation generated through this process of biological evolution. And we can tap into the mind of a receiver, which is really the agent of selection here. In the case of the female frogs, it’s the female auditory system that has the preferences that it has, which then generates selection on certain male traits. Longer, louder, more frequent calls, in this case. But I would say that one of the lessons from the animal world is you do want to stand out. The male that is going to, over and over again, have more success than his peers, is going to be the male who shows up at the chorus pond every single night and tries his hardest. So showing up, rule number one. Rule number two, you need to stand out. You need to make that call louder and longer, and you need to be in the right place in the chorus, in the very center of the chorus where the competition is highest. So there are a few lessons there. I think novelty is worth thinking about though, right? I mean, this is something we’re so focused on as humans, is just being different. As Americans especially.
Kirsten Michelle Cills
It is so interesting how everything you’re saying is such an innately, universally human experience, but it goes so much further in nature.
The Bul Bey
I couldn’t agree more. Something I kind of got out of it in your last comments, Alex, was it seemed like what we can get from this is a stronger sense of empathy. We have to put ourselves in the receiver’s position.
Dr. Alex Baugh
I think understanding that it is the receiver, the chooser’, mind that at the end of the day is driving everything. It’s driving the evolution of the signals and it’s driving your potential at finding a mate and bonding. Yeah, I think your point about empathy is a really good one and taking a listener-centric perspective here and learning from the frogs is a worthwhile one. Because at the end of the day, when we’re talking about humans, we’re talking about social primates that bond for long periods of time, and that’s not the case for the frogs. Every night is a new potential mating opportunity, but for most humans, most of the time, those trysts are a little bit longer in duration. And the essence of intimacy is understanding your partner. And that means listening. And so if I can take one tip from the frogs and listening carefully to the frogs and impart it in my own personal life, my own human life, it’s listening carefully and understanding the people in your life because that’s a connection that will pay dividends for a lifetime.
Kirsten Michelle Cills
Wow.
The Bul Bey
Amazing. Thank you so much, Alex Baugh!
Kirsten Michelle Cills
Thank you. This has been so interesting.
The Bul Bey
Incredible, truly.
Kirsten Michelle Cills
Wow.
Dr. Alex Baugh
Of course. Yeah. It was great to chat with you guys.
The Bul Bey
Thanks so much to Alex.
The Bul Bey
Wow. Okay, so that was a lot. It makes me think how we make decisions about how we choose to date. Like, what things do we notice first, second, third, and all those different things. What things do we take into consideration?
Kirsten Michelle Cills
What are some factors for you when you choose who you’re going to date?
The Bul Bey
Well, certainly they need to have a choir, of course, of repetitive vocalized noises. Honestly, good conversation. That just answers the question earnestly and honestly. Good conversation is what I look for and decent, manners, I guess.
Kirsten Michelle Cills
Just decent manners.
The Bul Bey
I mean, if you fart, just say, Excuse me. That’s pretty much it.
Kirsten Michelle Cills
I like your standards, Bey.
The Bul Bey
What are some factors for you?
Kirsten Michelle Cills
Thank you for asking. So, let’s see. Obviously, like you said, yeah, if you’re not organizing a song for me, you can hit the road. But other than that, I would say… I’m a comedian. So obviously, if you can’t make me laugh, I’m bored just thinking about it. And obviously, if you happen to have a thing for girls on oxygen, like, that’s a plus, you know, not a requirement, but it always seems to work out well. And if they are an Eagles fan.
The Bul Bey
Go Birds.
Kirsten Michelle Cills
Yeah. Go Birds. Hear, hear.
The Bul Bey
Well, I think this leads us into our next segment: Body of Knowledge. For this segment, we are going to be bringing back Dr. Jayatri Das, our favorite bioscientist, to talk about popular ideas in the science world surrounding our first impressions of relationships. Welcome back, Jayatri.
Dr. Jayatri Das
Hey, Bey. Hey, Kirsten.
The Bul Bey
How are you?
Kirsten Michelle Cills
Can you share some insights from the world of science about first impressions?
Dr. Jayatri Das
I am going to turn the question around to you first. Because I want to ask you what are the kinds of things that you think you notice about other people when you just meet them for the first time?
The Bul Bey
Something that pops out to me is height. If someone’s like, extremely tall or short, that kind of pops out to me.
Dr. Jayatri Das
As a short person, I totally respect that.
The Bul Bey
Right.
Dr. Jayatri Das
Although I kind of feel like, you go above my eye level and everybody’s tall.
The Bul Bey
Yes. I think silhouette mostly is what I’m trying to get at. The silhouette of a person is something that kind of pops out. As you get closer and closer and closer, you start to get into the details. Eyes, nose, hair, clothing, how they dress. These are the things that I see. What about you, Kirsten?
Kirsten Michelle Cills
So is it also in terms of when we speak to them?
Dr. Jayatri Das
Sure, yeah.
Kirsten Michelle Cills
I always notice confidence. I notice if people make eye contact, if they’re playing with their hands, if they’re looking at me straight on. I notice people’s sense of humor. I notice vocabulary. I am a very word-oriented person, I’m gathering right now. I also am very insecure about my own teeth, so I love when I see people with perfect teeth. That’s one of the first things I notice physically.
Dr. Jayatri Das
I love the fact that both of you are so perceptive about slightly different things, but it’s such a human reaction to do that. And part of it is because when we’re interacting with the world around us, there’s so much information to process that our brains automatically jump to shortcuts. Right? This is just a way that our brain works. It’s not necessarily good or bad. It’s just the way it is, because it’s a way that we can immediately process things and people that we’re interacting with. And so when we think about it from an evolutionary point of view, it’s been helpful in our survival because we want to be able to look at somebody and know whether they are a friend or foe. But some of that takes a different twist in our modern society. Along with some of the characteristics that you mentioned, some of the obvious things that people notice — age, race, sex — these are things that are easy to spot visually and we can also think about how they lead to bias and prejudice and things like that. But they’re also quick cues to find commonalities with other people as well.
The Bul Bey
Are some of these impressions, like, subconscious like things you’re responding to that you are just not aware that maybe you have a sensitivity toward?
Dr. Jayatri Das
For sure. And one of the things that I found interesting as I was looking at some of the evidence behind this is that even things like religious beliefs, political affiliation and sexual orientation –these are things that are not quite as obvious as, say, age, race or sex. But there are still cues that come across in how we present ourselves that we can pick up on in some really more subtle ways.
The Bul Bey
Yeah, I think what I find interesting is sometimes I’ll get an impression of somebody without seeing them. They’re like, “Hey, my friend’s coming over. They’re from California.” And I already kind of like, start crafting…
Kirsten Michelle Cills
You picture Matthew McConaughey coming over immediately, right? Totally.
The Bul Bey
Yeah. But that happens a lot. Like you know, oh, “my friend is coming over, they’re really into anime.” And you just kind of start going to those cultural touchpoints of what that person might look like, talk like, walk like, all these different things. And I don’t necessarily conclude on whether or not I dislike them or like them, but I certainly get an impression based off of a word that somebody might say about them. A description, an adjective.
Dr. Jayatri Das
That’s a really good point that you bring up, Bay, because when we think about how we perceive each other, it’s a two way street. There’s the way that a person presents to the outside world but there’s also all of the experiences that we are bringing as the perceiver to make these kinds of assumptions and judgments based on the information that we look at.
Kirsten Michelle Cills
So I’m curious…from a science standpoint, Jayatri, I know something I had shared with Bey (off mic) was, because I’m always wearing Converse and my leather jacket at all times, people can usually tell I’m bisexual without me ever saying anything. And I don’t know where that comes from. People are always like, “you just have that bisexual energy, just aesthetically.” And so I’m curious, is there any science to back up gaydar?
Dr. Jayatri Das
There is something to it.
Kirsten Michelle Cills
)Is there gaydar? Actually?
Dr. Jayatri Das
Yeah, we’re going to come back to the black leather jacket. So I should preface some of the research around this by saying that a lot of it is done in laboratory conditions. And so there are a lot of questions about how these results actually translate to what it means for people living their lives. So with that caveat in mind, however, some of the experimental work that’s been done has been to kind of dissect some of these cues, Kirsten, that you bring up. So Nicholas Rule is a social psychologist at the University of Toronto who’s done a really nice analysis of the body of literature around this, and he categorizes the types of cues that we pick up for gaydar in these four categories: adornment, acoustics, actions, and appearance. So let’s break that down real quick.
The Bul Bey
Yeah, that sounds interesting.
Dr. Jayatri Das
So let’s start with adornment, because that’s where we get to your black leather jacket and the Converse.
Kirsten Michelle Cills
And my nose ring. Yeah. [laughter]
Dr. Jayatri Das
What’s the clothing? What are the symbols? How do we do our hair or use cosmetics? These are ways that we communicate, intentionally or unintentionally, information about our sexual orientation. When you think about acoustics, there are differences in speech patterns that are hard to kind of pin down what the precise acoustic parameters are there, but they are pretty reliably distinct, again, between heterosexual and homosexual. When we think about actions, it’s about body movement, walking style. This one was really fascinating to me because we actually have an exhibit about this at the Franklin Institute, not specifically around sexual orientation, but the fact that if you model how somebody walks using just points of light that represent all of the major joints on your body — so, like your knees, your elbows, your hips — you can tell from that body language, just from those points of light, that whether somebody is friendly or unfriendly, or whether somebody is happy or sad. And you can imagine this in your head, right? Well, it turns out that there is information, looking at that type of analysis, that can give you cues about whether somebody is gay or straight.
The Bul Bey
Wow. Mind blown. Mind blown. Successfully. Mind blown.
Dr. Jayatri Das
So that’s actions. And the last one is appearances. And while there are some theories about how hormone development might lead to differences in height or body structure, the richest area of information is the face. And what’s fascinating here is that people are more accurate than random when they are asked to look at a face and classify somebody as either gay or straight. And it doesn’t get any more accurate the longer you think about it. So it’s really that snap judgment that suggests, again, that there’s some sort of very automatic processing that we’re doing about people with just looking at a flash of their face.
Kirsten Michelle Cills
So it’s gut reaction. I like that, for sure.
Dr. Jayatri Das
Getting back to the caveat that I started out with, that these are very laboratory-based experiments, the other interesting thing is that a lot of these experiments are done as kind of a binary choice as gay or straight, homosexual or heterosexual. And those lines get blurred when you start looking at the spectrum of gender identity and sexuality in between. So there’s a lot that we don’t understand about how we’re processing these things. And I think it’s a really exciting area of research.
The Bul Bey
Which is why we’re having these conversations!
Kirsten Michelle Cills
Yeah, that is so exciting. Okay, so we’re going to switch gears to part two of Body of Knowledge, and we are going to take to the Internet. So we need to find out what are people asking Google about first impressions?
Kirsten Michelle Cills
So we typed in “my first impression of…(blank),” and Google autofilled it to,”my first impression of her was not good.”
Dr. Jayatri Das
Ouch.
Kirsten Michelle Cills
I know. I wonder if her first impression of him was good.
The Bul Bey
They seemed like they didn’t like each other. I’m just going to throw that out there. And moving on. We typed in, “what do first impressions…” And it autofilled, “say about you?” What do first impressions say about you?
Dr. Jayatri Das
Yeah, that kind of gets back to what we were talking about in terms of it being bi-directional, that there’s the choices — both conscious and subconscious, I guess — of the cues that you project. But it also depends on who’s getting that first impression of you.
The Bul Bey
I was going to say, is it like the first impression that you make that says something about you, or the first impression that is made about you that says something about you? I guess both. I don’t know.
Kirsten Michelle Cills
And then we searched just the word, “gaydar,” to see what Google would autofill. So we typed in “gaydar,” and it was autofilled to “gaydar for sale.” Is there anybody selling gaydar online? Facebook marketplace?
Dr. Jayatri Das
I feel like that’s one of these potential applications of technology that has some serious ethical considerations, that we should be thinking about. I don’t think it exists yet, but…
Kirsten Michelle Cills
Yeah, if you do have access to a gaydar machine, just please email emily@radio….I’m just kidding.
The Bul Bey
Yeah.
Kirsten Michelle Cills
Gaydar for sale. Who’s to say?
Dr. Jayatri Das
Well, what is interesting is that you tend to be more accurate and have a stronger memory for faces that match your own identity. So if you’re gay, then you’re better at recognizing faces of other people who are gay. If you’re straight, vice versa. If you are American, you’re better at recognizing other Americans. If you’re Spanish or Japanese, you’re better at recognizing people who are Spanish or Japanese.
Kirsten Michelle Cills
Yeah, that fully tracks. I fully agree with that.
Dr. Jayatri Das
So it shows us how these first impressions do help us find our community.
Kirsten Michelle Cills
So like an automatic kinship, almost.
Dr. Jayatri Das
Yeah, potentially.
The Bul Bey
Interesting.
The Bul Bey
Well, that was amazing. I really believe that that was amazing. Thanks so much to Jayatri and to Alex for being on our first episode for this season.
Kirsten Michelle Cills
We are so excited, genuinely, for all of these dope conversations that we have in store because they gonna rock.
The Bul Bey
We will be releasing episodes every Tuesday this summer, so subscribe to this channel to hear our episode next week, which is going to be all about AI.
Kirsten Michelle Cills
AI? Sex toys, storing your data, remembering your preferences?
The Bul Bey
Are instagram couples actually happy? Are they? I don’t know.
Kirsten Michelle Cills
This and more on next week’s episode.
Kirsten Michelle Cills
So Curious is presented by the Franklin Institute. And special thanks to the Franklin Institute producers Joy Montefusco and Dr. Jayatri Das. This podcast is produced by Radio Kismet. Radio Kismet is Philadelphia’s premiere podcast production studio. The managing producer is Emily Charish, the producer is Liliana Green. The lead audio engineer and editor is Christian Cedarlund. Head of operations is Christopher Plant. And the editors are Lauren DeLuca and Justin Berger. The science writer is Kira Vallette. And the graphic designer is Emma Sager. And I am Kirsten Michelle Cills.
The Bul Bey
And I’m The Bul Bey.
Kirsten Michelle Cills
Go Science! Go Birds! And we’ll see you next week.
