LONELY hearts beware: looking for love at a speed-dating event may leave you feeling unlovable. In big groups, people judge on looks so much that the less stunning may as well forget their clever chat-up lines.
In primates and birds, the larger the group, the better the chance that non-dominant individuals have of being chosen as a mate. Alison Lenton at the University of Edinburgh, UK, and her team looked at whether this is true for people too.
Speed-daters race through a series of 鈥渕ini dates鈥� of about 5 minutes then invite whoever catches their fancy to get in touch again later. Lenton and her team studied 118 sessions with groups of between seven and 36 people, and found to their surprise that as the size of the group grew, the offers became skewed towards just a few individuals, while the least popular ended up with fewer or no offers (Animal Behaviour, ).
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So why do humans seem to differ from other animals? In smaller groups, says Lenton, people trade off different qualities in prospective mates 鈥� physical attractiveness for intelligence, for example. Faced with too much choice, however, we resort to crude approaches such as choosing solely on looks.
When we have to make a quick decision like this, we don鈥檛 have much else to go on 鈥� and that鈥檚 because of our largely monogamous nature, say the team. Monogamous species have fewer secondary sexual characteristics such as peacocks鈥� colourful tail feathers.
Does it matter? Not if what you鈥檙e looking for is a quick fling, says Lenton. Research suggests that we don鈥檛 look too hard for signs that a short-term partner is our ideal mate.
Psychologist David Perrett from the University of St Andrews, UK, cautions that the study did not look at follow-up meetings. 鈥淚t gets at the mechanics of speed-dating rather than of mate choice,鈥� he says.
