Since the dawn of time, man has wasted money and energy on confirming what we already know.
Icarus gave his life to teach us something we all suspected: humans cannot fly on their own. Isaac Newton spent a great deal of time proving that things fall. Behavioral psychologist John Watson is famous for creating "the law of effect," stipulating that responses which produce a pleasing state will be more likely to occur again and responses which produce a harmful effect will be avoided. Basically, Watson confirmed that you like good things and don't like bad things.
But perhaps my favorite example comes from a September 2007 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that discusses choices made by both men and women when participating in speed dating. Don't let the intimidating, academic title fool you, Peter Todd's article "Different Cognitive Processes Underlie Human Mate Choices and Mate Preferences" contains about as much shocking information as the fact that water is wet or that Duke football will not be winning the national championship this year.
Admittedly, Todd's study is beautifully simple. First, desperate, defeated, hopeless men and women-or as the researchers called them, "subjects"-had to list the qualities that were most important to them in potential mates. Then, participants were asked to rate the people they met while speed dating on seven criteria: physical attractiveness, present financial status, future financial status, social status, healthiness, desire for children and parenting qualities. Finally, Todd and his team of researchers merely compared what men and women said they were looking for in a significant other with who people actually chose to see again.
What did all of this funding, careful research and thorough statistical analysis reveal about human nature? Well, Todd quickly discovered that "both men and women's success at the events was mainly predicted by visible indicators of good physical condition." In a finding that surprised no one, it seems as if the most attractive daters were also those that garnered the most interest from the opposite sex.
Furthermore, the study consisted of four participants who chose not to see anyone again as well as five people who were chosen by no other participants for a second date. Todd found that those who opted for no second dates were one standard deviation above the mean in attractiveness ratings and the poor, lonely people who no one chose were more than one standard deviation below the average ratings in attractiveness.
In other words, serious scientific investigation exposed the truth that attractive people are picky while ugly people are largely ignored.
However, the one finding that Todd and his fellow researchers were most proud of was that "men show a consistently negative relationship between stated preferences and chosen attributes." The men in the study revealed "a rather poor match between verbally stated preferences for mate traits and the preferences they expressed through actual mate choices." To put it simply, there was a profound difference between what men said they want in a mate and what they actually chose.
To recap, Todd's study basically revealed three essential truths about dating and mate selection in general: attractiveness is very important, uglier people will have a difficult time getting dates and men lie when talking about women.
At this point, all readers should really be asking the same question: Why the hell did we need a scientific study to prove any of this? If you weren't already aware of the above truths, it's only because the rock you live under has no cable reception. Anyone who has been to a bar for more than 15 minutes-or even just gone to middle school-is completely aware of these facts. Every single one of us already has learned our own painful lessons about the harsh, unfair world that is dating. We don't need to read about it in some scholarly journal.
Yet, while I feel inclined to write off Todd's article as simply stating the obvious, part of me finds the study to be oddly unnerving. Sure, I already knew these things, but no one had ever explicitly proven them before. While we all make jokes about the ways in which men lie about women, we can now say that such a phenomenon is a proven scientific fact.
I think that something strange and unsettling happens when we cannot merely suspect that men will lie or that less attractive people will have more difficulty getting dates, but rather expect it. Todd may have just told us what we already knew, but he also confirmed our worst fears about other people.
I used to be able to question whether such practices actually existed. Now I can't deny them. In actuality, the most important thing Todd proved was that the truth hurts.
Jordan Axt is a Trinity junior. His column runs every other Friday.
Get The Chronicle straight to your inbox
Signup for our weekly newsletter. Cancel at any time.