A study was done recently by economists and psychologists from Columbia University trying to answering the age-old dating question: “What, exactly, makes someone desirable?”. During the two year study, speed dating experiments were conducted to collect response by more than 400 daters.

Among the result of the study some “not-so-surprising” findings from the experiment typically include things such as:

- Male based their decision heavily on the physical appearance of their dates, while women based their decisions on the intelligence of their dates.
- Women who are more ambitious than their dates are considered less desirable.

These conclusions are fairly well known and intuitive. However, one of the most surprising results from the experiments indicates that women prefer their own race, while men just don’t care.

Also among the findings, it is found that “…East Asian women did not discriminate against white men (only against black and Hispanic men). As a result, the white man-Asian woman pairing was the most common form of interracial dating—but because of the women’s neutrality, not the men’s pronounced preference….”

Here’s the link to the full article.

An Economist Goes to a bar … and solves the mysteries of dating.

Althought some of the results seems interesting; I think the problem with this study is the experiment smaple size seems too small. The study deals with grad students from an east coast school, which might not be a good representative sample of the general female/male population across the country.