The Metropolis blog

Should apps give you dating advice? It's something we've though about at Metropolis. The app Coffee Meets Bagel , for example, gives you profile prompts and icebreaker questions. Hinge has canned prompts that help you reveal your personality and sense of humour. But is this a good idea? We think not. An "historical" precedent You may be familiar with the story of Cyrano de Bergerac, popularized by the movies Roxanne (with Steve Martin and Daryl Hannah) and Cyrano de Bergerac (with Gerard Depardieu). Cyrano is a charming and intelligent nobleman with a big nose. He's in love with the beautiful Roxanne, but doesn't have the courage to ask her out because of his looks. Christian, on the other hand, is good looking but dumb, and also fancies Roxanne. Cyrano is persuaded to write letters to Roxanne on Christian's behalf, and because of the letters she falls in love with Christian. Clearly this isn't going to end well. **Spoiler alert** It doesn't end...

What makes us sexually attracted to another person? The not-so-romantic answer is that it's the limbic system of our brains — the hypothalamus and amygdala — that calls the shots. This part of our brain is commonly — if inaccurately — known as the lizard brain , and lights up when we meet someone we find sexually desirable. However, our lizard brains have two inconvenient drawbacks. They doesn't listen First, our lizard brains don't pay attention to our conscious minds. The heart wants what the heart wants , and our conscious minds don't get a say in the matter. For example, consider a religious conservative who is born gay but believes that homosexuality is a sin that will send them to hell. They will desperately want to be straight. And a pedophile will surely know that acting on their desires will get them arrested. But their lizard brains don't care. They want what they want, and won't be told otherwise, consequences be damned. They don't explain their a...

Speed dating is one of the best ways to research human attraction, because it's based on revealed preferences rather than surveys, and everyone has a strong incentive to give truthful answers. If you'd like to do your own analysis of speed dating data, there's a freely-available  spreadsheet  from a Columbia University study, with the results of over 4000 dates. The dates occurred at events with (typically) 10 male and 10 female participants, who "dated" everyone of the opposite sex in quick succession. As well as the outcomes of the dates, the spreadsheet contains (somewhat patchy) demographic data, such as the age, undergraduate major, race, and some personality attributes of the participants. For an in-depth analysis of the data, have a look at this Kaggle notebook . A simple analysis There are lots of ways to analyze the data, but a simple hypothesis to test is: given the results of previous dates, can you predict how people will decide on the next date? So, a...