Today on Darwin Does Dating. Love may be blind but it stills sees quite well. Surely that's a contradiction? How we evolved to doublethink about our partners. A thread! [1/15]

When judging the qualities of our partner, people tend to see the best in them, thinking of them as smarter, sexier, and funnier than they really are. Relationship psychologists call this “mean level bias”. We see our partner through rose tinted glasses.🌹👓[2/15]

At the same time, people tend to have a really accurate view of the relative strengths and weaknesses of their partner. They’re able to recognize when they are stronger than they are funnier, smarter than patient, and so on. This is often called “tracking accuracy”. [3/15]

So, there’s an elephant in the room here🐘. People appear to both hold accurate and inaccurate views of their significant other. A bit reminiscent of Orwell’s “doublethink” in 1984 - the idea that people can learn to sit comfortably with contradiction in their heads. [4/15]

Dig deeper and we find that these two judgments appear to have different functions in relationships. Let’s start with mean-level bias. First of all, it’s quite variable, and much larger among those satisfied with their relationships (at least in the early stages). [5/15]