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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
It sounds like you and other mathematicians have figured out the secret to happiness with another person. So, fill us in!
Psychologists John Gottman and Catherine Swanson, and the mathematician James Murray [all from the University of Washington] looked at newlywed couples interacting for 15 minutes, and charted their body language and positive/negative reinforcement. They used techniques that are often used to analyze the stock market to help them analyze happiness and grumpiness. They found these negativity thresholds: Some people express their negativity as soon as they feel it, others hold it in and try to "empathize" for as long as possible with their mate. Gottman and the rest found that the couples that had a low negativity threshold, that expressed their negative feelings straightaway, had a better chance of success. They were still married six years later. The other couples, those who made more of an effort to empathize and stay quiet longer, were less successful. Most ended up divorced.
That's totally counterintuitive.
Yes. These days, there's a lot of talk about empathy: If your partner is doing something wrong, you should try to understand where they're coming from, you should look at their background, their childhood. The math I saw showed that this might actually be a bad approach. What works, according to the math, is when couples are quick to say, "You know, when you do that, that really gets on my nerves!" This coincided with what some psychologists have found: When couples have high standards and stick to them by complaining when things aren't going right, that might actually be a positive thing for the couple. It makes them strive towards these high standards. When members of the couple empathized and kept giving in, they lowered their standards.
Did you write this book to make mathematics more sexy, or to make sex more mathematical, more logical?
It saddens me that society has painted math in such a negative way. Many people miss out on the wonders of mathematics. This book just seemed like the sort of "Sex and the City" style way to try to bridge that gap, to make people realize that math can be fun. And I thought that the whole concept of math and sex, the pairing of the two, was just so funny!
I'm not much of a math person. Help me understand the mathematician's approach to understanding love and sex.
OK, ready? A mathematician would choose a subject -- like love -- and would start thinking, "I think there may be patterns that arise from this subject of love." We would then ask ourselves, "What are the key factors that go into love?" That's where we start by making an abstract move: We have to write the problem into abstract mathematical notations. For love, we might have two people. We might call these people X and Y. Then we would ask, "How are these two people going to interact?" We'd create sample equations with X and Y. For example, we might create one equation predicting that X and Y would fall in love, and then suddenly hate each other the next day. There are obvious patterns to human interaction, so we'd test equations to see what looks right what doesn't look right, what matches what we've observed in the real world and what doesn't. We might prepare an equation, plug in variables, and then say, "Hmmm, that equation may be mathematically correct, but the chance of that happening in the real world is highly unlikely." So we'd pick another equation.
We'd play with different equations and different mathematical analyses to tell us what people are doing in real relationships. In picking equations we'd come across patterns. We may start to see patterns that we may not have noticed otherwise. These patterns may show us things about relationships that we may not have seen or expected.
Like what?
In our love example, our mathematician might say, "People's emotions for each other will oscillate, then calm down in to a strong bond." If we want to take this even further, we may show our equations to psychologists for another opinion, and they may respond, "Well, that's exactly what we've observed!" Then we mathematicians will think to ourselves, "Clearly, we're on to something."
It sounds like, contrary to popular opinion, mathematics is not done in a vacuum. There's always an interplay between math and real life, between what mathematicians observe happening in the tangible world around them, and the patterns they create in the lab.
That's exactly right. People think that math is completely separate, but in my opinion, math is a form of expression. Math is just another way of making sense of the world, like dancing or writing.
So, in order to create order out of chaos, mathematicians assign people and their behaviors symbols, and try to create equations where behavior tends to be predictable?
Yes, and because we're using the abstract variables to try and understand these patterns, it helps us look at the patterns in a different way. It gives us a fresh understanding of how individual elements work together.
