Geoff MacDonald 🇨🇦

Couple on a weekend date at cute cafe

Money can’t buy love - but it might make us more open to it, according to a new study #UofT 💗 uoft.me/bJy

Post a GIF of who you wanted to be as a kid!

Why Do You Want a Romantic Relationship? Individual Differences in Motives for Romantic Relationship Pursuit - Geoff MacDonald, Serena Thapar, William S. Ryan, Joanne M. Chung, Elaine Hoan, Yoobin Par... Relationship science currently lacks a theoretical approach to capture the variety of motivations potentially underlying the pursuit of romantic relationships. ...

People who pursue romantic relationships because they genuinely want connection and intimacy—not because of pressure or insecurity—are more likely to end up in a relationship. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Good coverage of our paper on individual differences in motivations for dating.

New MacLab paper. Do people partner up to save on rent? Apparently not.

Norris Point, Newfoundland

Western Brook Pond, Newfoundland

Tablelands, Gros Morne National Park, Newfoundland

Dungeon Provincial Park, Bonavista, Newfoundland & Labrador

Cape Spear, Newfoundland.

St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrdor

Oh, thanks, and yes the MacLab is back...we've got a talk (me) and a symposium (my students) tomorrow, although no promises that it will be as much fun as that very lively crowd in Ottawa.

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Like, you came all this way, paid all this money, worked so hard on your talk. Why would you not want to assure that people can hear what you have to say?

The number of academic psychologists who fail the theory of mind test where being able to hear yourself does not mean the back of the room can hear you is remarkable. Please just use the microphone.

I try to leverage my high openness to experience by framing this as learning about body parts that young people don't even realize exist.

@elainehoan.bsky.social and I got a chance to write a more conversational piece about our gender and singlehood work for Psyche. psyche.co/ideas/is-bei...

I always wonder the same thing. In singlehood studies, there's claims for example about pushing back against narratives that you need a relationship to be happy, but if you look at Dennett & Girme (2024) the average participant disagrees that you need a relationship to be happy.

This is the best review I'm aware of, but it's all longitudinal associations not causal evidence per se. Fraley, R. C., & Roisman, G. I. (2019). The development of adult attachment styles: four lessons. Current opinion in psychology, 25, 26-30.

How the Thirteen Colonies Tried—and Failed—to Convince Canada to Side With Them During the American Revolution After peaceful attempts at alliance-building stalled, the Continental Army launched an ill-fated invasion of Quebec in June 1775

“Whether Canadians ever would have joined the American Revolution en masse is doubtful. But invading Quebec as a persuasive tactic ultimately backfired on the patriots.”

www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-...

People can want romantic relationships because they enjoy them or because they feel pressured into them. Our new paper uses Self-Determination Theory to measure motivations for relationships, to organize the literature on relationship desire, and predict who starts a relationship. shorturl.at/hP3o6

You can't really do mediation analyses with cross-sectional data. The paper's general idea is worth thinking about, but using data all collected at the same time to infer causal paths is a non-starter.

Singlehood among 20-30-year-olds is on the rise, but societal expectations to partner can undermine singlehood. Here are tips to support singlehood thriving. Ft. @gmacdonalduoft.bsky.social @a-fisher.bsky.social @bdennett.bsky.social @hannahdupuis.bsky.social, Yoobin Park, Elyakim Kislev and more!!

I have no data but I assume that's a big yes. I've been thinking lately that people's relationship even with themselves is way more transactional now...people used to have hobbies, now they have side hustles. People used to be people, now they are consumers. We've been thoroughly commodified.

Namwon, South Korea

Seoul 🇰🇷

Is it porn keeping men out of community, or is it the broader undermining of community that leads men to turn to porn as compensation? Maybe people prefer the porn narrative because it's more emotionally gratifying to blame the porn business than our own choices for structuring society.

Even the longitudinal study he cites is still the effects of people who choose to look at porn, not random assignment to viewing. There's a history of this in social psych - people thought violent video games caused violence, it turned out that more violent people are attracted to those games. 2/3

Honestly I find that piece weak. There are actually lots of porn researchers and the consensus is that porn doesn't constitute an addiction (look up Nicole Prause). The hardest part is separating out correlation from causation, and the piece doesn't seriously tackle this. 1/3