In the animal kingdom, seducing a mate seems easy. Male peacocks flare up sexy feathers when they spot potential love. Spiders court with dead insects as gifts. For humans, expressing love in this simple way can be very tempting. But can we find the shortcut to the initial spark and the key to igniting the success of love? Scientists have made many explorations.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="2" > there are no shortcuts</h1>
Perhaps the answer to this question is brutal, but that hasn't stopped everyone from the ancient Greeks to modern psychologists and anthropologists from exploring. While neuroscientists have identified a behavior called the "attraction system," which seems to activate nerve cells in the brain to achieve the effect of releasing the pleasurable neurotransmitter dopamine when we like someone, they still don't understand why only a subset of partners produce such stimulating activity. For thousands of years, people have only been given vague clues when searching for the key to this indescribable charm.
Take the figure 1.618 as an example, which is also known as the golden ratio. This supposedly pleasant number has been on our minds since at least 300 BC. Mathematician Euclid proposed that if you divide a line segment into about 60/40 parts, then the ratio of the larger part to the whole line is equal to the ratio between these line segments. When applied to physical scales, the pattern is thought to produce beautiful results.
During the Renaissance, the most notable among artists and thinkers was Leonardo da Vinci, who applied this number of the golden ratio to painting. Modern proponents claim that our eyes are immediately drawn to faces that are 1.6 times longer than width and whose lower lip is 1.6 times fuller than its upper lip.
But after reviewing dozens of papers on the topic, the researchers behind a study published in the journal Perception in 1995 failed to draw any definitive conclusions about whether people associate this ratio with attractiveness — let alone whether it could help them catch a date.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="21" > heterosexual attraction and hip-to-leg ratio</h1>
Like many psychologies, research on the subject is rife with small sample sizes and inherent biases, which are also the drawbacks of studying the problem. Scientists have identified a general tendency toward facial symmetry over the decades, but that doesn't mean it's the only measure of attractiveness. A 2015 literature review noted that up to one in three people had facial asymmetry.
Beyond that, we think female sexy might be a moving target for her. A 1980 Psychological Report study showed that Miss America contestants and playboy models had gotten thinner over the past two years. A similar study in 2002 showed that there was never any consistent hip-to-waist ratio among the winners, rejecting the myth of the universally attractive waist, hip-to-leg ratio. A 2008 report noted that for twin men, having a beard is more attractive than shaving it clean.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="31" > how well you play the dating game</h1>
Although personal preferences vary, we care a lot about how we think it's "attractive" and what we define it into. In a 2005 study, it analyzed more than 10,000 people at the University of Pennsylvania in the United States, all of whom signed a fast-matching agreement in which participants had the opportunity to communicate online with multiple members of the opposite sex to decide whether they were a match for each other.
Potential matching decisions are based almost entirely on "physically observable attributes" (e.g., height, weight, age) for a second date. Personality is often referred to as something that breaks the dating, such as differences in religious beliefs or educational levels, and isn't as important as looks that one can immediately spot. Paul Eastwick, a psychology professor at the University of California, Davis, said, "When you first meet someone, physical attraction is important. “
A 2020 study published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relations showed that people can manipulate their "spousal worth" by striving to fight for it — they are more selective and have what they perceive to be fertility. In a series of online and face-to-face experiments, the researchers found that those who seemed more critical of their spouses developed more attraction than those who did not seem to be picky about their spouses.
But finding hot girls in society (and getting them to discover you) is only half the battle. What are your chances of actually falling in love with each other? That would be even more uncertain. These are all important questions that scientists must solve. "With the inability to send people on a large number of fully controlled dates, speed dating is the next best option. It gives scientists the opportunity to build a large group of singles to see if their team can predict how much a person likes other people overall, whether that person tends to be liked by others, and how likely two unique people are to be able to like each other.
In 2017, a scientist and colleagues in the United States asked participants to complete a questionnaire that measured more than 100 traits and preferences designed to figure out things like relationship style, relationship goals, basic personality attributes, and someone's own assessment of their own physical characteristics — before moving on to speed dating.
While these predictions can reliably predict which objects will be liked or generally liked, the results show that computers do not perform well in determining whether two people will particularly like each other. "Can we say why two people hit it off and others didn't? Of course not, because humans have minds, not robots.
When it comes to actual connections, each pair seems to depend almost entirely on not only the twists and turns of the physical connection, but also on conversation dynamics, mood, and other seemingly random factors. So to thoroughly understand the problem of attraction in love, we must find ways to study each relationship as our own valuable experience and research object.