Because…people who look like that, want people who look like that…

Speed daters go for crowd-pleasing looks

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 "mini dates" 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, DOI: 10.1016/j.anbehav.2008.08.025).

So why do humans seem to differ from other animals? In smaller groups, says Lenton, people trade off different qualities in prospective mates – physical attractiveness for intelligence, for example. Faced with too much choice, however, we resort to crude approaches such as choosing solely on looks….

Now I know why good looking gay guys are always telling me I should just hit the bars more often to find a mate, and are utterly oblivious to the fact that it doesn’t work for anyone but them.

I know…I know…   It’s my fault for not being more handsome.  Oh…and getting old.  Shouldn’t have done that…