Quick. State your name, your life goals, your hobbies. An interesting fact about yourself. A joke that, in passing, shows just how witty and clever you are. Most importantly, make a good impression.
You have five minutes.
Go.
For as much pressure as some people experience during efforts to combine all their good qualities into a series of short conversations with strangers, the result might not be worth it.
According to a new study from British researchers, men and women who participate in speed-dating — events in which people are paired up for five-minute intervals before they move to the next set — are judged more on appearance when there are more couples participating in the event.
So when there are more speed daters, those who are less visually appealing will find fewer numbers at the end of the session.
Other studies about birds and primates have shown a correlation between how large a group is and how likely it is that those looking for mates will choose non-dominant animals.
Three researchers — Alison Lenton, Barbara Fasolo and Peter Todd — looked to speed-dating sessions to see if this same animal behavior applied to humans.
It did.
They studied data from more than 100 speed-dating sessions, according to the article, entitled “The relationship between number of potential mates and mating skew in humans.”
Each session had a group size of seven to 36 people, the study stated. If speed-daters like the person they have spent the last five minutes with, they will take note of who it was. If both speed-daters choose each other at the end of the session, they will receive the other’s contact information for a follow-up date.
Researchers noticed that, as group size increased, the number of men and women who were selected by their dates decreased. Although men and women extended many offers, those offers went mainly to a few select people.
And they had one thing in common — good looks.
The researchers project that smaller group sizes allow for people to take in and balance different qualities. Humans, they wrote, use different strategies to make choices when faced with large or small choice assortments.
When they have fewer choices, they will take time to analyze, for instance, whether a person’s musical taste is in tune with their own. This strategy factors in personality as well as physical features.
With more choices, the researchers concluded that humans switch from this type of compensatory strategy to “more frugal noncompensatory choice strategies that examine few cues and do not make trade-offs among conflicting ones.”
The study also takes into account online version of speed-dating — or rather, speed-choosing, in which users sort through thousands of potential mates before choosing one.
Those who use sites like eHarmony and Match.com, as well as social networking resources like the SpeedDate and Speed Dating 2.0 applications on Facebook, are more likely to use noncompensatory strategies, the article stated.