How men judge a dating profile versus how women do

When you look at someone’s dating profile, how long do you spend looking at their photos? Do you quickly read (and judge) the written part of the profile? Do you pay close attention to what they have completed under occupation? (“CEO at self-employed” And graduated from the “school of hard knocks”? Let’s face it: you split the bill or pay for dinner yourself.)

A new study published earlier this summer in Archives of Sexual Behavior suggests that where your attention goes first may depend on your gender.

Researchers tracked eye movements to see how straight men and straight women evaluated online dating profiles.

In general, men tended to focus on physical attractiveness before taking anything else into account. (No surprise, given the amount of research that has shown that men are highly visual when it comes to choosing a mate.)

Women, meanwhile, took into account both attractiveness and resource potential.

“Regardless of how attractive the man was (high or low), women spent more time looking at men’s faces when resources were low than high,” said Amy Lykins, lead author of the study and associate professor of clinical psychology at the university . from New England to Maine.

While Lykins emphasized that the findings are open to interpretation and didn’t offer one himself, one possible reading is that women on dating apps can throw less affluent men a bone by examining their attractiveness more closely. (He may not make six figures, but he has a cute face…)

Men were especially interested in women’s faces, with one interesting exception: They spent some extra time on the profile if the woman had a well-paid or prestigious job, especially if she was rated as less attractive. So essentially, women were more generous to men with fewer resources when they were attractive, while men were more generous to less attractive women when they had more resources.

What was more important: a beautiful face or a body shaped in the gym? The researchers found that both men and women clock the face first. A total of 83% of gaze time was directed to the face, regardless of the other information presented.

“We expected this,” Lykins told HuffPost. “I’ve found this in other eye-tracking studies I’ve conducted, even when people were barely clothed and/or even naked. People are extremely interested in faces – even as newborns – and that applies to both men and women.”

Another difference that isn’t entirely surprising? In general, men reported greater interest in short-term relationships than in long-term relationships, and women reported greater interest in long-term relationships than in short-term relationships.

Lykins says there are some limitations to the study. For starters, none of the participants—twenty men and twenty women—identified as LGBTQ.

“It would be worthwhile to conduct a similar study among LGBT participants to see if the patterns hold,” she said.

She would also like to see research that looks at the behavior of older people, as all the participants in her study were college students between the ages of 18 and 27.

What Lykins found most interesting about her findings was that they showed that when it comes to online dating, we all pretty much make snap judgments.

“We now have evidence that we can see these kinds of patterns even in the first ten seconds when we look at dating profiles,” she said. “These judgments seem to be made very quickly.”

Given the popularity of dating apps like Hinge and Tinder – one in five adults under 30 say they met their current spouse or partner on a dating site or app, as do about a quarter of lesbian, gay or bisexual adults with a partner – social scientists are increasingly studying how people swipe on dating apps.

For example, a 2018 University of Michigan study found that people on dating apps tend to seek out partners who are a bit out of their league.

The singles in that study — about 200,000 heterosexual men and women in four cities — pursued those who were more similar to them in desirability, but they rarely dated.

“Our research suggests that people seek out partners who are slightly more attractive than they are. Women are slightly less ambitious than men,” Elizabeth Bruch, professor of sociology at the University of Michigan and lead author of the study, told HuffPost at the time.

Come on, ladies, it never hurts to shoot.