Next TERC Talk: Attraction and relationships

Join UC Davis Tahoe Environmental Research Center (TERC) for the next event on its 2023 Science Speaks presentation schedule. It will be held on March 23 at the TERC Center in Incline Village at 6 p.m.

Why are relationships so hard? One popular answer to this question comes from evolutionary psychology, a field that investigates mating relationships by drawing on ideas about humans’ ancestral past. The standard evolutionary narrative suggests that dating is hard because humans compete for relationship partners in a marketplace populated by “winners” and “losers”—the popular folks and the people that nobody wants. In this competitive market, relationships between men and women are inherently conflictual, and everyone is relentlessly on the lookout for a better mate.

However, if we start to probe the science underlying these claims, much of the popular narrative starts to crumble. Join Dr. Paul Eastwick as he upends what we think we know about how dating works and replaces it with a much more hopeful—and scientifically stronger—vision of relationships.

Paul Eastwick is a professor at the University of California, Davis, where he serves as the head of the Social-Personality Psychology program and the director of the Attraction and Relationships Research Laboratory. He has published more than 70 scientific articles on attraction and close relationships, and he has won numerous early career awards from several different scientific societies. He is one of the youngest scholars ever to serve as an associate editor of the journal Psychological Bulletin, which is the top-ranked psychological journal that is devoted to the review and synthesis of the literature for broad audiences. His research and writing have been featured in outlets ranging from the New York Times and Scientific American Mind to The Today Show and Aziz Ansari’s bestseller Modern Romance. He has also appeared on popular podcasts like Vox’s Unexplainable, Science Vs., Here We Are, Date/able, and The Art of Manliness.

Admission is $10 and free for students with a student ID. Refreshments and a no-host bar will be available from 5:30 p.m. - 6 p.m. The lecture will begin at 6 p.m. in the UC Davis Tahoe Science Center at 291 Country Club Drive in Incline Village (between Tahoe Boulevard/SR 28 and Lakeshore Blvd.).

For more information call 775-881-7560

Click HERE to register for this event or find out more at https://tahoe.ucdavis.edu/events.

Other scheduled events:

February 9: Why is a third of food wasted worldwide?, with Dr. Ned Spang, UC Davis Food Science and Technology (Tahoe Science Center, Incline Village)
March 23: Attraction and Relationships, with Dr. Paul Eastwick, UC Davis Attraction and Relationships Research Laboratory (Tahoe Science Center, Incline Village)
April 17 – 21: Science Expo at South Tahoe High School
April 27: Managing Water During California's Wild Changes in Climate, with Dr. Jeffrey Mount, UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences (Granlibakken Tahoe)
May 15 – 19: Science Expo at Incline High School
May 18: The Last Ice Area, with Dr. Warwick Vincent, Professor of Biology, Canada Research Chair in Aquatic Ecosystem Studies, Université Laval in Québec, Canada (Granlibakken Tahoe)
June 1: Psychedelics May Offer New Treatments for Depression, Related Disorders, with Dr. David Olson, UC Davis departments of Chemistry and Biochemistry and Molecular Medicine (Virtual Lecture)
June 13: A Lifetime of Science at Lake Tahoe, with Brant Allen, UC Davis TERC (Granlibakken Tahoe)
June 19 – 25: TERC Circumnavigation of Lake Tahoe
June dates TBD: Become a Lake Tahoe Expert Workshop (Tahoe Science Center, Incline Village)
July 20: State of the Lake, with Dr. Geoff Schladow, director, UC Davis TERC (Granlibakken Tahoe)
August 31: The High Sierra: A Love Story, with American science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson (Granlibakken Tahoe)

Doors open at 5:30 p.m. Presentation begins at 6:00 p.m.