“Not the Cat’s Meow? The Impact of Posing with Cats on Female Perceptions of Male Dateability” [by Lori Kogan and Shelly Volsche, published in Animals, vol. 10, no. 6, June 9, 2020, E1007] is a featured study in “Cats Research: Girls, and Men and Datability“, which is a featured article in the special Women (and Men) issue of […]
Ig Nobel Prize winner Dan Ariely muses on a tradeoff that comes with romantic dating: Dan Ariely often wonders at the simultaneous existence of reality and the illusions that come with and modify that reality. The 2008 Ig Nobel Prize for medicine was awarded to Dan Ariely, Rebecca L. Waber, Baba Shivof, and Ziv Carmon for demonstrating that high-priced fake […]
Can your teeth make people want to date you or hate you? And how is toothbrushing like voting? We brush up on research studies that ask these questions, in this week’s Improbable Research podcast. SUBSCRIBE on Play.it, iTunes, or Spotify to get a new episode every week, free. This week, Marc Abrahams discusses two teeth-centric studies, with dramatic readings from Harvard chemist Daniel Rosenberg. For more […]
There’s no need to imagine your reaction to reading about a study about people reacting to an imagined feminist dating partner. Simply read the following, then note down your actual reaction: “Power motivation as an influence on reaction to an imagined feminist dating partner,” Eugene M. Fodor, David P. Wick, and Nicole E. Conroy, Motivation […]
“Detecting human social meaning is a difficult task for automatic conversational understanding systems.” – explain a research team [pictured] based at Stanford University, who have investigated the viabilities of an automatic flirtation detector. “Our flirtation detection system uses prosodic, dialogue, and lexical features to detect a speaker’s intent to flirt with up to 71.5% accuracy […]
This week’s Learning-Quiz question: What, if anything, could the authors of this study possibly have hoped to learn from doing this study? The study is: “What is beautiful is good, even online: Correlations between photo attractiveness and text attractiveness in men’s online dating profiles“, Rebecca J. Brand, Abigail Bonatsos, Rebecca D’Orazio, Hilary DeShong, Computers in […]
Physicist Stephen Hawking boosted his fame and income by writing the following phrase at the end of his book A Brief History of Time: “If we discover a complete theory, it would be the ultimate triumph of reason – for then we should know the mind of God.” Evidence suggests that a company in Beverly Hills, […]
Vaguely in the tradition of the theatrical play “No Sex Please. We’re British” comes this monograph: “Dating constraints on the last British-Irish Ice Sheet: a map and database“, Hughes, A.L.C, Greenwood, S.L. and Clark, C.D., v2011, 2011, 156-183. 10.4113/jom.2011.1145.
The American Psychological Association has lots to say about the online dating industry, and is rushing to say it just as Valentine’s Day approaches: 1. A press release: PRESS RELEASE February 6, 2012 — For Immediate Release Grading The Online Dating Industry New Scientific Report Finds Some Positives, Many Areas for Improvement The report card […]
Nicholas Guéguen has published a new romantic study. Professor Guéguen, whose imaginative and persistent attempts to explore the mysteries of l’amour we have sometimes chronicled is perhaps best known for his monograph “Women’s Bust Size and Men’s Courtship Solicitation“, which is considered to be one of the classics of its genre. The new paper is: […]