Looks Do Matter - And You Can't Lie About It
How gallant: you’d rather date a woman for her brain than her bod. It’s easy to say you don’t care about the hottie factor when dating, but what you say and what you mean are often not the same.
A new methodology has been created to measure people’s split-second response to the opposite sex. New research from Northwestern University and Texas A&M measures the implicit preferences revealing the truth about attraction to hotties.
“People will readily tell you what they value in a romantic partner,” said Eli Finkel, associate professor of psychology at Northwestern and co-author. “But study after study shows that those preferences don’t predict whom daters are actually attracted to when they meet flesh-and-blood partners. Now we can get under the hood with this quirky methodology to see what people actually prefer in live-interaction settings.”
The findings raise lots of questions.
“If a person tells me, for example, that she doesn’t care about how attractive a guy is, our research suggests that her claim isn’t’ worth all that much,” Paul W. Eastwick, assistant professor psychology at Texas A&M University and lead author stated. “Instead, it would actually be more useful to measure her reaction times on this new task.”
The methodology is a little off the grid. Participants were asked to quickly sort synonyms of “physical attractiveness” with other words that they happen to like as they are flashed on a computer screen. Words such as tequila or motorcycles. People who perform well, have a strong implicit preference for a good looking partner.
The study reveals a disconnect between stated preferences and actual choices. Which should really surprise no one.