Dating Data
For a couple of years, researchers (Ray Fisman, Sheena Iyengar, Itamar Simonson, and Emir Kamenica) ran a speed-dating experiment at a local bar just off the Columbia campus.
Subjects were asked to rate their partners’ intelligence, looks, and ambition after each meeting. Each event had between 10 and 20 daters of each gender, and in the course of the evening, every man met every woman and vice versa.
The researchers collected data on thousands of decisions made by more than 400 daters from Columbia University’s graduate and professional schools.
They found that men put significantly more weight on their assessment of a partner’s beauty, when choosing, than women did.
Intelligence ratings were more than twice as important in predicting women’s choices as men’s. Men tended to prefer women whom they rated as relatively smart and ambitious but they avoided women whom they perceived to be smarter and more ambitious than themselves.
When women were the ones choosing, the more intelligence and ambition the men had, the better.
Women of all races (white, black, East Asian, and Hispanic) revealed a strong preference for men of their own race. But a woman’s race had little effect on the men’s choices.
The researchers found no evidence of a white male preference for East Asian women. But did find that East Asian women did not discriminate against white men (only against black and Hispanic men). So the white man-Asian woman pairing was the most common form of interracial dating. Daters of both sexes from south of the Mason-Dixon Line revealed much stronger same-race preferences than Northern daters.