Speed-dating is nothing more than a beauty pageant that may leave you feeling unlovable – because it’s more about looks rather than personality, claim scientists.

Forget your pick-up routines, researchers have found that the bigger the group of potential mates to select from, the more likely individuals are to make a decision based on looks and sex appeal alone.

Scientists believe that this is because in large groups, the chooser’s mind blanks at the array of choices – so they revert to basic instincts – and thus make their decision based on simpler criteria.

In birds and primates, as the size of the group increases, non-dominant individuals have a greater chance of being chosen as a mate. However, Alison Lenton, at the University of Edinburgh, and her team examined whether this might be true for humans too.

Lenton and her team studied 118 speed-dating sessions, with groups ranging in size from seven to 36 people; in which speed-daters raced through a series of “mini dates” each of about five minutes, and then invited whoever caught their fancy to get in touch again later.

To their surprise, the researchers discovered that as the size of the group increased, the offers became skewed towards just a few daters, whilst the least popular individuals ended up with fewer or no offers.

The researchers found that in smaller groups, people trade off different qualities in prospective mates – physical attractiveness for intelligence, for example. But, when faced with too much choice, they resort to crude approaches such as choosing solely on looks.

The team said:

When we have to make a quick decision like this, we don’t have much else to go on – and that’s because of our largely monogamous nature. Monogamous species have fewer secondary sexual characteristics such as peacocks’ colourful tail feathers.

To the question of does this matter? Miss Lenton responded:

Not if what you’re looking for is a quick fling. Research suggests that we don’t look too hard for signs that a short-term partner is our ideal mate.

However, Psychologist David Perrett, from the University of St Andrews, criticised the study for not looking at follow-up meetings, and cautioned:

It gets at the mechanics of speed-dating rather than of mate choice.

The research was published in the journal Animal Behaviour, but some notes from a prior presentation about dating and choice, given by Lenton and colleagues, can be seen here.

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Posted by Jonathan in Anthropology, Psychology

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