Columbia professor Ray Fisman was interviewed by Hermes magazine about his research on speed dating. Some interesting observations relavent to behavioral decision making:

3. Does your study measure how well what people say they look for matches with what they actually look for?

Most of what I do is work on corruption in poor countries. If I want to know how much someone is paying in bribes, I’m not going to ask them, “How much did you pay in bribes last year?” I’m going to say, “The guy down the street from you, who looks pretty much like you, how much did he pay?” Similarly, in the speed-dating study we ask people, “What do you care about?” We also ask them, “The average man, what do you think he cares about?” But then we actually see how they behave in the game. And, not at all surprisingly, what they say the average man cares about lines up much more closely with what they actually reveal through their actions than what they claimed they cared about beforehand. In particular, everyone — both men and women — says they care less about physical attractiveness than the average.

4. Do you think speed-dating is more efficient than traditional search methods?

In some sense, it’s efficient: there are all these slice studies on how 10 seconds’ worth of observation is as predictive of your experience with a professor as a semester’s worth, and they’ve reduced it to 2 seconds and that’s just as good; and they’ve reduced it to just a photo and that’s pretty good, too. So you learn a lot in four minutes, perhaps as much in four minutes as you do in a much longer superficial interaction like, say, a date. So, this does meaningfully provide you with 20 rapid-fire dates, to the extent that we form as much of an impression in 4 minutes, or 10 seconds, as we do in 4 hours. The thing that’s left out of this neat decomposition of people into attributes, though, is actually learning to love someone. And that’s what I think is kind of missing. Focusing on people as a bundle of attributes almost makes people think about this decision in the wrong frame of mind.

5. Do you think people become unwilling to commit because of all the choices dating services enable?

Yes. And the way that you can make these choices — just the very fact that it’s set up in this way — distorts the way people choose. There was an article in the New York Times on a backlash against Internet dating, and I wonder to what degree that’s at least partly as a result of these sorts of realizations.

6. The results of your speed-dating studies, particularly with regard to intelligence and physical appearance, seem to reinforce gender stereotypes. Why do you think this is?

Well, they are stereotypes for a reason. However, it’s not as simple as, “I avoid all women who are ambitious or intelligent.” It’s about, “Intelligence and ambition is OK until it supersedes my own.” It’s also worth mentioning that these are average effects — there are surely men who do not have this property. I like to think I’m one of them: my significant other is definitely a lot smarter than I am. When her grandmother heard about me, she said, “I told your mother this, and now I’m going to tell you: never let a man think you’re smarter than he is. Men don’t like that.” Everyone laughed and thought this was so anachronistic, but it shows up in our data. Grandma’s views on dating aren’t so dated after all!

Read more: Dating Data: Economic Theory and the Search for a Mate

One of the running themes of Micromotives has been the examination of the myriad cognitive, perceptual, psychological, and social factors which interact to influence the quality of our decision making processes, especially those which are not captured in the traditional economic models of perfectly rational actors. We have a lot to learn from evolutionary psychologists, who point out that much of modern human behavior evolved between 500,000 and 100,000 years ago in our ancestral environment of the African savannas. Behaviors which made one more likely to survive in that environment (and thus procreate, spreading the genes for those behaviors further) do not necessarily equip us with the right tools for survival in today’s world. One common example is the strong desire humans have for sweet and fatty foods. This made sense thousands of years ago, when the majority of humans were locked in a daily struggle to find enough food to survive. Gorging on the fatty meat of a kill made sense when it wasn’t clear where your next meal would come from, nor could you refrigerate the “leftovers” and eat them tomorrow. Building up a calorie surplus in the form of an extra layer of fat was a strongly adaptive tendency. Yet today, especially here in America, where food is hyperabundant and relatively few are at risk of starvation, those same behaviors which served us well on the savannas now lead to obesity, heart disease, and higher mortality rates. The fundamental point is that while the process of evolution has produced some staggeringly complex and effective survival strategies in humans, it has not left us perfectly tuned for how the world works at this very moment; rather, it has tuned us for how the world has worked on average over a broad swath of the past. Biological evolution is a very slow process when viewed from the perspective of a human lifespan.

All of that serves as an introduction for an interesting new study appearing in the British Journal of Psychology which found that hungry men are more attracted to heavier women than those who are satiated.

In some societies where food is a limited resource, such as the South Pacific, higher body weights are revered. In others where food is abundant, such as the West, lower female body weights are preferred.

Evolutionary psychologists believe this is a survival preference. What you are looking for in a mate is the best chance of healthy offspring and in an environment where food is scarce, a heavier woman is deemed a safer bet for this.

What can be regarded as a normal and acceptable body size is also influenced by what we see, including advertising, and can change. For example, migrants from rural to urban societies show an increasing idealisation of thinner figures.

The bottom line from a Micromotives perspective? Even fleeting physiological factors (”is it just before lunch, or just after?”) can bias our thinking in significant ways.

Read more: Hunger dictates who men fancy

Via kottke

Regrettably, economists are not known for their good looks. What they are know for is the ability to rationally weigh competing alternatives in order to determine the best quantitative choice. So this new research from Daniel Hamermesh may come as somewhat of a surprise. Hamermesh analyzed elections of the American Economic Association to look for evidence of bias towards more attractive candidates for officer positions. He looked at data from 1966-2004, during which time all candidates had a small personal photo distributed with their bio prior to elections. Here’s what he found: among those judged to have above-average beauty (by a representative group of grad students), 54.8% won, while those with below-average beauty won only 45.2% of the time. Surprisingly, beauty did not seem to provide any advantage to female candidates, but was a significant factor for male candidates. This is likely due to the distinct gender advantage women already held in the elections — they were elected 74% of the time regardless of looks. This is an interesting addition to the existing body of research on beauty and the labor market, which I’ll review more of in due time.

Read more: Changing Looks and Changing “Discrimination”: The Beauty of Economists

Via Marginal Revolution