Science of Love: Conversation with Bumble CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd & Arthur Brooks | Global Conference

I'm a correspondent at NBC News, but I'm so excited about our panel today and this conversation. It's going to be such an interesting one. I am joined here on stage by Arthur C. Brooks, William Henry Bloomberg Professor of the Practice of Public Leadership at Harvard Kennedy School and the author of many books including the latest, The Meaning of Your Life. And I'm also joined by Whitney Wolfe Herd, founder and CEO at Bumble Inc. Thank you both for being here.

Good morning.

This is just so interesting because what we're really going to talk about today, as the title of this panel suggests, is the science of love, which you have just partnered on. A lot of new science that just got published yesterday in this fantastic white paper. But what's so interesting about it, really to go back to the beginning, Whitney, is to really invest in people finding love, connecting with each other, and importantly, as we're going to discuss, connecting in person means ultimately they're getting off your app, which is a little counterintuitive given what your business is. Take us back to what you identified as an issue that made you want to seek a partnership like this one.

How bad were you, quickly, were you seeing the problem of like dating app burnout?

Okay, so let's talk about the partnership. First, who called who? How'd this come to be?

And what did she say when she said she wanted to work together?

Well, when our teams actually started talking to each other, there was a natural affinity for it for exactly the reasons that Whitney was just talking about. So, in life, there's two big kinds of problems that we face. And it sounds like we're splitting hairs here, but we're not. There's complicated problems, which are based on facts and information and analysis and algorithms, and there's complex problems, which you'll never solve, you can only live with, and those are the things you care about the most. How to get the work with your GPS is a complicated problem. How to build a toaster is a complicated problem. How to stay married is a complex problem. Trust me, I've been married for 35 years, very, very complex. And so, the truth is, what we care about is the complex stuff that you can't solve ever. You can't solve it with an algorithm, and that's what tech has been getting wrong when we talk about the things that we care about the most. So, if we go back to social media in 2008, 2009, the promise was this is going to solve loneliness. But that's wrong because loneliness is a complex human problem, and social media is a complicated set of algorithms. When you're trying to solve a complex problem with complicated solutions, you make it worse. And that's the biggest problem with dating apps. When your metric is time in app, that's a complicated solution to a business problem. When it's falling in love and staying in love, that's the deep value of the complexity behind humanity, and that's how it's different. And when that became clear, then that's when we knew that this was the match that we needed to have. Now, how do you monetize it? How do you instantiate it? How do you build it into a product? That's the most exciting thing, and that's what we're working on today. That's what her team is working on.

So, you set out though to do — and you've revealed real new research when it comes to falling in love. Just tell me first about even setting out to do that, given what we all know, the books we've read of yours, to focus on what's happening in your brain when you're falling in love.

Yeah. So, my students are intensely interested in the science of falling in love for pretty obvious reasons. You know, you'd think everybody would, but the truth is I wasn't thinking about that in my 20s, which was a long time ago. In the 1980s, when I was in my 20s, I wasn't thinking about the science of falling in love because it just was what we did. That's all we cared about. It was just ordinary life. It's not ordinary life anymore, which means we need to make it more explicit and help people understand how to do it. And so when I talk about the neurochemical cascade of what's happening when you're falling in love, my students find it extremely useful. And I explain it in relatively non-technical ways because my students are not neuroscientists, they're business majors. I talk about it in the kind of way you would think about your brain as a business problem, as a matter of fact. Falling in love starts with attraction, obviously. And modern sort of politically correct society has said something stupid about attraction — that there's something wrong with attraction, something predatory about attraction. Wrong. That's one of the great things in life is attraction toward each other. And it involves estradiol and testosterone and all sorts of wonderful mysterious things in the psyche. That quickly turns into, when you're starting to be really attracted to somebody and you're falling in love, this sense of euphoria and anticipation. This is when neuromodulators get involved, mostly norepinephrine and dopamine. Where you know, a text — who cares? It's like, 'I think it's from her.' And then special value. It has special importance. A dumb text to read about that because I think we've all been there. When you see their name pop up and you're like — Yeah, well, I've never been there because there were no texts when I was falling in love. You know, 35 years ago. And that's when the dark part actually comes in because after a few weeks in this process, that's when serotonin levels tank. And low serotonin levels are usually implicated in clinical depression, which is why you take selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors like Prozac if you're depressed to increase serotonin in the synapse. But when it's low, that's when you ruminate in sadness or you ruminate on another person, which is the process of bonding. Part of falling in love is being depressed. It looks like clinical depression because there's activity in the ventral lateral prefrontal cortex that comes from low serotonin levels, which is by the way why when people are taking selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors — more serotonin in the synapse — people will report that it's harder to fall in love. It's harder to bond to another person. Not impossible. Still work. Take your meds, folks. But it's harder. And then last but not least, what you want to get to is the oxytocin zone. That's when you bond to each other as kin. The magic of marriage is that you adopt a stranger and make her your kin. It's the apex of both family and friendship is romantic love and that's when you bond to each other with this vasopressin and oxytocin and these neuropeptides. And so that's the process.

And what's so important though about that last point, and I know that you were super interested in this, Whitney, is that last piece that is what leads to that lifelong love happens in person. It has to be in person. It has to. Which means Bumble is still an incredibly interesting and major opportunity because if we stop meeting in person, Arthur, tell us what's going to happen. I mean, it's not going to be good.

It's not good. What you get is the first couple of steps and it gets truncated. And this is one of the reasons that apps where you're too long virtually, the relationships burn out or you wind up with the wrong person. You actually don't understand the nature of attraction or there's predation. There's predators at that particular point that are trying to make you feel deep attraction because what they want is lots of anonymous sexual activity, which does not lead to love.

Is that the dark from —

Well, I mean that's — this is one of the reasons that hookup apps, they're bait for —

Exactly. Quite exactly the opposite. The sociopathic males, they thrive on hookup apps for that particular reason because they truncate that whole process that I just talked about.

Even though like for women who have experienced that on these apps, reading the science behind like that is essentially like a personality type that's out there that exists is helpful. Like it's not you, it's them.

So, and share with the group. She said, 'How did you know you were in love with your now wife? What was it? What was that thing?' Because that thing cannot be simulated. It has to happen in real life. Can't be simulated on the app. Yeah, so Whitney and I talked about this because for a little bit of background, I'm married to a woman from Barcelona and we met in a neutral country, France. Actually, it's not neutral. It's anti-American. But my point being that when we met, she didn't speak a single word of English and I didn't speak a single word of Catalan or Spanish. So I did the only thing that one should do when somebody has no words in common — I asked her out. And she's so attractive to me. Whitney's like, 'How did you know?' And because relatively shortly thereafter, I actually quit my job in New York City and moved to Barcelona. I took a job as a musician in those days to work as a musician there. But the real reason is I was chasing this woman. I was going to learn the language. I was going to close the deal. 'How did you know?' And I said, 'I don't know. I don't know.' She smelled like cantaloupe on an August afternoon. I mean, what can I tell you? And okay, there's science behind the melon. All right, behind the cantaloupe. It's not the cantaloupe per se. The olfactory cortex in the brain senses your mate. That's why in person matters. When you're looking at a picture, it's just using the occipital lobe, the visual cortex of your brain. It's woefully insufficient. We smell the immunological profile of potential mates. There's a great study from the mid-1990s. You've all heard of it. It's the dirty t-shirt study where men on a college campus — because they are in all the experiments, undergraduates will do anything for 20 bucks. Trust me. Men wore t-shirts for 48 hours. Didn't take them off. Did sports, going to class, sleeping in them. And then they put the t-shirts in shoeboxes. And women who didn't know who they were sniffed the t-shirts and said, 'How hot are these guys?' And it turns out that the more immunologically different they were from each other, the hotter the women perceived the men to be. Why? Because your potential offspring have a better immunological profile from somebody who has different — what's called a major histocompatibility complex — and you get that from your olfactory cortex. It's not just about the August afternoon. It's that it's like, 'I don't know what it is, but we're going to have healthy kids.' And you can't get that on an app.

That would be a great Bumble bio.

Yeah, no kidding. I know. And look, technology, no joke. Bumble is actually working with ideas about voice. Because that's really, really important. Who knows within two or three years whether or not we can smell each other.

You just touched on one of the other things about your research that I think is super interesting for people who are on a dating app, and I would love to hear also how you can help the people who are using your app with things like their bios and pictures, which is that a lot of people are seeking sameness. But that actually is not the recipe for love.

It was not.

The kids, religion — there are a few non-negotiables that actually matter.

Just values congruence. That's what it comes down to — is the basis of values congruence is critically important. What are you truly looking for in a relationship? You basically know that. I mean, if you don't know that, then you need to do a lot more work before you get on Bumble. It's like what do you want? But that is kids, it's religion, it is marriage. You get the picture. What we don't know is actually what we want beyond that because we don't know ourselves very well. There's a ton of really interesting psychological experiments that show that people don't know themselves. You don't know what you're good at. You don't know what you're going to do. You don't know what you're going to say. If you're married, your spouse knows what you're going to say better than you know what you're going to say. And that's because the person is observing you and you're observing yourself with a huge number of biases. And so the result of it is you need to establish a basic level of values congruence and then find people who are really different than you. Nobody says, 'You know what I really want? I just want myself.' And that's not hot. It's not. If people say, 'I want somebody who completes me.' Somebody who completes you is axiomatically not you. Is different than you. Puzzle pieces that go together. They complete each other in this particular way. And you have a really hard time doing that. You wouldn't have been able to have curated your potential mate in the day. Because it depends on the people that you run across in church or at the club or that the matchmaker back in the shtetl is actually setting you up with. That's kind of the way that it worked. But now it's like, 'I want this. I want somebody who likes Austin, Texas. And I want somebody who eats sriracha. And I want somebody who votes for Democrats.' And it's like it's just so boring to date yourself.

Right.

Wasn't the stat in the white paper 45% of 18- to 25-year-old men have never asked a woman out?

Yeah. Yeah, that's right. And it's going up every school year. And a couple of things happened. One is the general disintermediation of relationships by tech. The second is COVID, of course. And so, Gen Z-ers who graduated from high school, went through college during the COVID experience — this is their formative years when they had no exposure to their potential mates. And the result is that they're weirdly formed. They don't know how to do it. I talk to men in their late 20s all the time who've literally never been on a date. It's like that's all I did in my 20s. That's all I wanted when I was in my 20s. That was my gig. That was my job. And so that lack of exposure is a really important thing. And Whitney's got this observation about sort of the future of this. This is quite I think quite subversive. Let's see if I get this right. That dating apps generally speaking — what they want to do is they want to substitute for the in-person components of mating. And the philosophy that Whitney and her team is bringing to Bumble is adding in more humanity into an algorithm, more human friction into the algorithm. In other words, more complexity into the complicated problem itself, which is by the way really inefficient. Right? When you get to a particular juncture and you throw away lots of potential mates and your best buddy actually is the one who says these are the five, trust me, I don't know why, they just are. It's a very very inefficient thing to do, but it's the old way. And it's the only way that this is ultimately I think going to succeed. 62% of relationships right now are starting on the apps, depending on what source you look at. And those that start on apps generally speaking are less satisfying than ones who don't. Which means that we're going in the direction where you're doing something more and more and more that brings you less and less and less happiness. There's got to be a way to solve it, and that's the purpose of this.

Oh yeah, completely. This is the whole idea of this is the mirror that is social media. This is what people actually use it for — as a mirror on themselves. And so other people can look at themselves. It's an intensely me-focused sort of the psychodrama of me me me me is one of the reasons that anxiety and depression are so high. The truth is that you will never be happy when you're looking at yourself. It's almost impossible for you to attain joy in your life by looking at yourself. And social media has turned everything inward in that particular way. And people have lost the ability to take interest in other people. They actually don't know how it's done. There will be dating coaches that will teach young men how to ask questions about women's lives. Which is weird when you think about it. It's like, 'Okay, ask her this. Ask her that. Okay, got it.' And I realize that we're dense, but there's a problem in our society where that skill has been beaten out of us. The work that Whitney's referring to — I have a colleague at HBS named Alison Wood Brooks. She's actually not related to me. We're both Brooks. I get her email all the time. And Alison has a book about how to talk to other people, and she found that the median — which is to say the average number of questions that a man asks a woman on a first date is zero. Zero questions. I suspect that 25 years ago that was not the case.

Oh, that is dark.

Yikes. I want to ask — I knew I was going to wish this was an hour. One more thing from the research that was really interesting to me because you gave a really good tip for flipping this on its head. Two attachment styles are on the rise and they're not good. And you want us to reframe anxious and avoidant.

Yeah, and this is another area. This is not my main area of research, but Bumble is working on this as well. The two pathologies in attachment — or romantic attachment, or parental attachment, or even friendship — are anxious and avoidant. And so avoidant attachment is where you hold people at arm's length. You've got better things going on. You don't want to go deep with anybody. Usually that's based on fear. And then the overt fear is anxiety where you're just freaking out when you're in particular relationships. And the truth is everybody's somewhat avoidant and everybody's somewhat anxious. If this is important to you, the whole point of a relationship is making it less so. And the point of my 35 years of marriage is I've gotten into the secure quadrant of non-anxious and non-avoidant. That's the goal. That's what you get a whole marriage to do that. But you got to get there sooner is the whole point. And when you're propelled and you're substituting for the in-person experience, you'll actually never get over those humps, which is another reason that Bumble's trying to get people out on dates fast.

That's a pretty good gig. And you know, there's one of the things that we talk about in business school, is that the greatest businesses have one thing in common. They have a lot of things that they do, and there's a lot of variation, different kinds of CEOs. The one thing that all great companies do is they focus on value that people want. Not intermediate KPIs, time in app, no. The ultimate value that people want. And if your value proposition is that happiness comes from love, a good life comes from loving and being loved, and the most intense, complex variety of that is romantic love, that's the value that you're trying to create. That's a winner.

And that's where we end this session, folks. That was exactly the message. It's all about love at the end of the day. That's happiness.

It is.

And you're the expert, so it's just so neat though that this research is going to turn into things that are going to be tangible for a Bumble user.

That's right. It's a really worthwhile thing to do. I'm really excited about the future.

Arthur and Whitney, thank you so much.

Thank you. So appreciate it.

And please stick around. There is incredible programming that's going to happen right here starting now.