Mitsubishi Motors released a commercial in 2000 for its Eclipse that asked viewers: "Have you ever looked at someone and said, 'Check her out, she looks loyal?' Or, 'Whoa, look at the morals on that guy?'" After a pause, the commercial provided the answer most audience members were thinking: "No. Love at first sight is based on something else - sight!"
The ad's sentiment, though not a new idea, has been confirmed by new scientific evidence in a study on speed dating released last week.
The study, conducted by University of Pennsylvania professors Robert Kurzban and Jason Weeden, concluded that both males and females judged potential partners largely based on "physically observable attributes like attractiveness, Body Mass Index (BMI), height, and age," and gave little, if any, consideration to "harder-to-observe attributes such as education, religion, sociosexuality, having children, or desiring future children," according to an article in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior.
The study collected data from 10,526 participants in HurryDate speed-dating sessions in New York. Each session contained roughly 25 women and 25 men. Each were given three minutes of interaction with a member of the opposite sex, and afterward, participants decided which people they would be interested in seeing again.
Speed dating is a fad that has emerged mainly in cities with a number of for-profit companies. The HurryDate service offers one night of speed dating as an alternative to a series of 25 evening-long dinners, potentially with unlikeable people.
Previous psychological research had supported the "likes attract" hypothesis of partner selection. In the 1970s, studies by psychology professors at the universities of Minnesota, Toronto at Scarborough and Hawaii revealed that people generally prefer mates who are like them in "relevant dimensions," with similar values and preferences in other words, the article said.
Results from Kurzban's study indicate that people who tended to be thinner and more physically attractive were more selective in their choices, and "what was especially surprising was the tendency of women to judge based on physical characteristics as much as men," Kurzban said. This suggests that the criteria for selecting a mate are relatively "the same for everyone," Kurzban added.
The conclusions for this study indicate that "people tend to pick dating partners based on superficial cues" that are processed through a "first-pass filter," which allows people to make snap judgments, Kurzban said.
Though it's likely long-term compatibility factors would eventually triumph over instantaneous judgments, "it is still important to look at the first-pass filter," Kurzban said.
It doesn't matter how compatible two people may be in the long run if they can't overcome the initial judgment hurdle, he said, adding that there may be many potentially ideal couples that will never find each other because they can never get past the filter.
But HurryDate, which claims a four-minute conversation as the ideal time to form a concrete first impression, said its customers aren't expected to be "picking out baby names."
"We wanted to create an environment where it would be fun to date again, where everyone was single and there was a good chance of meeting someone," HurryDate's president, Adele Testani, said. The process is largely intuitive and assumes people know what they like when they see it, she added.
Students agree. "I can usually tell right away if a date is going to be good," said Lindsey Lankford, a freshman in the Kogod School of Business. "I'm definitely attracted more to [a guy's] personality. If he's a good person and we click, that's more important than looks.
"But looks help too," she added.
However, AU psychology professor Barry McCarthy said the study does not apply far beyond first-impression situations.
"Research on close relationships indicates [that] for long-term serious relationships, similarities in both background and personality factors predict successful relationships, not the first impressions promoted by speed dating," he said.
Kurzban and Weeden's research contradicts the established niche-based partner selection model. In terms of evolutionary psychology, their findings have changed the perception of what Kurzban refers to as the "mating market," a concept used to describe how living organisms choose a partner with whom to reproduce.
Partner selection "can now be viewed as being dominated by market forces instead of assortative patterns," he said.
It's unlikely people will change their dating habits significantly based on the research, Kurzban said. They may rely more heavily on intuition, he stated, but it is common for rationality to triumph.
