Not only that, it's a very specific form of "dating" (speed dating). Which means that not only do you have the small sample size, you have selection bias (these are people who aren't already in a relationship) and procedural bias (they're basing their judgments on what they can learn through speed dating - go fig!).

"Ask this scientician!"

A friend emailed me this article and my comment was that I'm sure there will soon be a follow up study entitled: Men All Agree on What Constitutes Physical Attractiveness and It's Basically Not You, Whatever You Are.

In other words, more bullshit research riddled with problems, designed to make reinforce societal norms.

I would subtitle this research: How I learned to stop worrying and love the patriarchy.

Oh how your study (and subsequent MSM reporting) are flawed - let me count the ways!

It's getting so I must pinch myself to avoid interupting total strangers when I overhear them say, "women just don't act like that" or "men deal with it differently." I just want to school them on their lame essentialism, but, so far, I've contained myself.

In other news, Water is Wet.

Seriously, aren't there some diseases we could be curing?

It's rarely, if ever, worth reading any mainstream report of any scientific study.

Taking a leaf out of the book of Ben Goldacre's Bad Science column, you can't trust most of the articles for a number of fundamental reasons.

* The outrageous stuff isn't even research. Formulae found for sexiest butt-wiggle or suchlike are invented from whole cloth by PR departments and pitched at the scientists whose names are ultimately tagged to the 'reports' in the resulting newspaper columns. There is something inherently wrong with the morals of the marketing departments who invent these things in the first place. At your most generous, we could say the scientists who agree to these fluff pieces are touchingly naive. In either case, newspapers shouldn't print this shit. It's not science; or journalism; it's just fiction.

* The next level down, I suppose, is the science which is interesting in its own right but completely misunderstood or misrepresented by the journalists who write about it. Time and again if you compare the actual academic paper to the popular write-up, the latter will take a tiny bit of meaningless speculation and turn it into the story, whereas the real findings are ignored. It's important to do studies into differences in colour vision between men and women because men have a much greater incidence of colour-blindness. To frame that in the press as women being evolved for spotting ripe fruit is picking the useless irrelevance from among it all.

* The last broad category seems to be the exciting news created from nothing. Nothing ever gets written about science that isn't a "revolution" or a "controversy". It's never just "interesting knowledge we have gained as a society". The best kind of controversy of course is the cause/cure for cancer (cf, Daily Mail) but there's so much more of that ilk. In reality it never is a cure for cancer: it's something interesting that happened once in a Petri dish and hasn't even been further verified. Let alone published in a journal.

Good science writers are as rare as perpetual motion machines (rather than the patents for them). Poor science articles in the popular press are legion. Reading them is a waste of time. Debunking them seems like a waste of time too. Getting angry at what they say is bad for the blood pressure.

A couple of thoughts:

First, on the whole "evolotionary psychology" angle - for most of recorded human history PEOPLE DID NOT DATE - their mates were selected for them by their families.

For most of the world, this is still the case - ever met anybody from India? or Egypt? or Afghanistan? or Northern Nigeria? or Cote d'Ivore? or Yemen? ect ect ect.

So, obviously, if you live in Jaipur, or Herat, or Aden, you do not select your mate, your parents do.

Our dating customs in America (and the similar customs that exist in Western Europe) are a relatively recent cultural invention - so how the hell could those customs be "evolved" if they are so unusual in the rest of the world?

Second, folks who go to speed dating represent a small subset of single people in America and Western Europe.

Perhaps a disproportionately high number of male speed daters are looking for a woman who they feel is physically attractive - and a similarly high proportion of female speed daters are looking for a man to pay their bills.

Finally, how do you define "attractive"?

I personally am most attracted to brown skinned Latinas and light skinned Black women who are short and full figured.

Many African American men also find these kind of women attractive (look at the models on the covers of Black oriented mens magazines to confirm this).

But, according to the beauty standards of White America (which are dominant in this country) those women are not considered attractive - an "attractive woman" is supposed to be White, blonde haired, skinny and have disproportionately large breasts.

So, who gets to define "attractive" here?

What is up with the bad science recently? Has our education gotten that bad that there are no controls?

"Good science writers are as rare as perpetual motion machines (rather than the patents for them). Poor science articles in the popular press are legion. Reading them is a waste of time. Debunking them seems like a waste of time too. Getting angry at what they say is bad for the blood pressure."

Ithika, with that kind of attitude, we'll ALWAYS be reading bad science articles?

Apparently, you've resigned yourself to thinking that coverage in the popular press will always distort scientific discoveries (and that those distortions will tend to be sexist ones).

You act like this is unchangable, and the best we can do is to ignore the bad mysoginyst coverage, to keep our blood pressure down!

Here's a better idea - how about ACTIVELY CHALLENGING those ideas - organizing letter writing campaigns, campaigns to flood switchboards ect.

How do you think our enemies on the far right deal with press coverage they don't like?

It works quite well for them - why can't we take a page out of their playbook???

Oh no Gregory, you mistake me. I am very much not of the lying-down-and-submitting persuasion (at least, on this topic).

I just think that the real source of most of these articles should be made very explicit in any discussion. It's pointless to spend our time discussing what someone said about what someone said (sic). Read the source (which, in this case is "being published this week" --- so it's not actually possible for us to verify it yet) and make a proper analysis of the matter, rather than attempting to debunk hearsay.

The difference between most of the science-related articles which I see on Feministing and my own view is that most take second or third-hand reports as accurate representations of the original science. My argument is that this is a very bad thing to do, since you're probably listening to idiots. It is my firm opinion that if you're writing about a study and you don't give a proper citation then you're doing something wrong. Newspapers hardly ever even give journal names or anything else to go on: independent verification my ass.

Recently the Independent appointed a sports writer as the health correspondent, with a predictable downturn in science reporting accuracy. This is not an extraordinary case. Why should we take their word to interpret abstruse science?

As for letter writing --- yes! I do, in fact. The (Glasgow) Herald has managed to find a fairly decent science writer; and I sent them a letter saying as much. It even got printed, and his column has been moved from the supplement to the main paper.

Positive action people! :-)

Actually I think this is a rather clever study!

ANN "Only 46 people were surveyed in the study. Give me a fucking break."

It's actually much more impressive than that. If I understand correctly, each participant interacted with 30 other individuals. That's 1380 different interactions they measured! That gives you tremendous power to examine how well different combinations of people work - they studied how one's own traits influenced who they were attracted to and who was attracted to them.

Initial attraction is a very important part of relationship formation but it is a very difficult phenomenon to study. Rather than relying on people's self-reports, this study actually directly measures the factors involved in initial attraction.

In fact, people's self-reported preferences correlate pretty weakly with their actual choices in speed dating contexts.

I couldn't find the paper mentioned in the article, but here is a similar one if people are interested:

Kurzban, R., & Weeden, J. (in press). Do advertised preferences predict the behavior of speed daters? Personal Relationships.

http://www.psych.upenn.edu/PLEEP/pdfs/in%20press%20Kurzban%20&%20Weeden%20PR.pdf

The number of interactions does not overcome the problem of sample size and the fact that the population is, emphatically, not representative of anything but... well.... the kind of people who would consider speed-dating. Perhaps it tells us a lot about people attracted to speed-dating? But don't try to tell me it says anything useful about men and women generally.

GREGORY: "First, on the whole "evolotionary psychology" angle - for most of recorded human history PEOPLE DID NOT DATE - their mates were selected for them by their families."

People choosing their own mates isn't simply a recent cultural invention. There is tremendous cross-cultural variability in the degree to which families vs. individuals choose mates.

Even in many societies where families choose mates, individuals often have a good deal of say in who their family selects for them. In fact, conflict between parent and offspring regarding mate choice, and how that is negotiated, is an issue of interest to anthropologists.

I showed this article to my boyfriend when I first read it a couple of days ago. CNN had totally dropped the "women only want money" angle and left it with "men only want hot chicks." We both rolled our eyes at both the small sample number and the fact that this whole thing was based on SPEED-DATING.

This study says absolutely nothing about how people choose long-term partners. It's about people forced by this speed-dating process to make a snap judgment about someone's potential as a mate. It also says nothing about how well these "couples" ended up getting along, or how long they stayed together.

Secondhandsally, I came to the same conclusion you did, and decided the point of the article was "If you are a woman not considered conventionally attractive, you might as well crawl under a rock and die, where you will surely die alone."

"This study says absolutely nothing about how people choose long-term partners.... It also says nothing about how well these "couples" ended up getting along, or how long they stayed together.
"

It's not supposed to. It's about what criteria we use in initial formations of attractions.

"It's about people forced by this speed-dating process to make a snap judgment about someone's potential as a mate."

Exactly - during brief interactions with members of the other sex, what factors influence our mating preferences?

""If you are a woman not considered conventionally attractive, you might as well crawl under a rock and die, where you will surely die alone."

Was that the conclusion? Or was it that, on average, men attend a bit more to attractiveness and women a bit more to cues of social status during brief interactions? Anyways, other larger speed dating studies find that both men and women place more importance on physical attractiveness in speed dating contexts.

"Perhaps it tells us a lot about people attracted to speed-dating?"

I could be wrong, but my memory of this study is that the participants were not people signed up for a speed dating service.

The researchers constructed a speed dating arena in the lab and then recruited people to participate in a study on dating. So I don't think the study is about "speed daters", but rather what initial judgments people make in short-term interactions with the other sex.

"But don't try to tell me it says anything useful about men and women generally."

It tells us something useful about men and women generally.

UCLAbodyimage, it's not cross-cultural though. I would put a bit more stock in it if the study were cross-cultural. But it still provides a bit of insight.

UCLAbodyimage, you have a background studying this stuff and I don't, so I'll defer. I'm just saying as a layperson that I didn't get much out of the article except to tell me what I already know, which is that in this society, I will be overwhelmingly judged on my appearance.

Just like to give a nod to Ithika foe mentioning Ben Goldacre's badscience.net, worth it purely for the proper way to deal with Gillian McKeith (grrr). If GREGORY had read it he might have understood the point of your post better.

The article itself isn' really worth much comment.