Participants were asked to distribute 100 points among 6 attributes, giving more points to those
attributes that were more important to them in a potential date. On average,
women weighted the attributes relatively evenly, with intelligence the most and ambition the least.
Men weighted attractive the most and ambition the least. Interestingly,
both genders thought the opposite gender would weight attractive more heavily and sincere and intelligent less.
Among these speed daters, lawyers seem to have the highest overall success rate.
Surprisingly enough, a majority of the lawyers are here just "for fun". What does that imply?
As for the different races, Asians and "Others"
have the lowest success rates.
In general, most people came to speed dating just to have fun or
meet new people. Nevertheless, that's not necessarily a bad thing
for people looking for love as those that came with the intention of getting a date or finding a serious
relationship have the highest success rates!
There were 17 total speed dating sessions beginning from October 2002 and ending on April 2004.
In each session, males rotated through the stations while females stayed stationary. Some sessions were
highly successful while in comparison, other waves were
total misses.
Looking at individual preferences, there does not seem to be a discernible pattern to how individuals
compare to others within their own speed dating session. While one person may value one trait higher than
others, it forces them to weight other traits less. However, looking at an individual's opinions about
themselves leads to some interesting results.
Individuals who attend speed dating events
tend to have high self esteem rarely rating themselves below 5.
People are also very forgiving of others, rarely rating others below
5 as well.
Also of note, is that individual's who receive no matches often rate themselves much higher than what
their fellow speed daters rated him or her. Take for example the
one person in session 10 who got no matches or the
only dater in session 11 who didn't get a match. Unlucky or unlikable?
Of course, the biggest question we are asking is, who got the most matches? And the winner is
female #524 of session 17, who successfully matched with 14 other
participants! What did she value the most? Intelligence! And what did other guys think of her? Most
liked her, though 1 rated her 0 for every trait, while another didn't believe in her sincerity or
ambition... I guess you getting 14 matches isn't ambitious enough.
