May 14, 2018 9:03 pm

Has Technology Influenced Love? Find Out from Dr. Helen Fisher and Chuck Nice.

On this week’s episode of StarTalk All-Stars, we have the return of our love doctor. Biological anthropologist Dr. Helen Fisher is joined by comic co-host Chuck Nice to answer your fan-submitted Cosmic Queries on the influence of technology on love. For those unfamiliar with Helen, she is a Senior Research Fellow at the Kinsey Institute, a science advisor for Match.com, and an author, most recently of an Anatomy of Love: A Natural History of Mating, Marriage, and Why We Stray (Completely Revised and Updated with a New Introduction).

We live in a vastly different world than the world of our parents and grandparents before us, so it’s easy to say that technology has influenced love – but we want to know specifics! As Helen says in the episode, the art of courtship has changed more drastically in the last 100 years than in the last 2,000 years.

You’ll hear why Helen thinks the future will have an increase in stable marriages due to the societal extension of the “pre-commitment stage” happening right now – the stage where people get to know one another before committing to marriage. You’ll also hear why we’re seeing a change in the way we court one another, but that we will not see an overall change in the way we love.

Learn about dating apps and the prevalence of social media in modern relationships – including Helen and Chuck’s thoughts on emojis. Find out if technology adds to the “cognitive overload” or “paradox of choice” in the brain. You’ll discover more about the love and courtship rituals of animals and whether they differ drastically from human behavior.

One of my favorite parts of the episode was the discussion about a societal shift towards a matrilineal society, which is a society based on the female line of family. All that, plus, we look at the differences between paid dating sites and free ones and much more!

Please join us tomorrow night for “Is Technology Changing Love?” with Helen Fisher at 7pm ET right here on our website, as well as on our All-Stars channels on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, TuneIn, Google Play Music, and SoundCloud. And if you’re an All-Access subscriber, you can watch or listen to this episode ad-free at 7pm, too.

That’s it for now. Keep Looking Up!
–Ian Mullen