Find Hot People Blogs

By Lorianna De Giorgio

The old adage that variety is the spice of life falls on deaf ears when it comes to speed dating, a new study out of the U.K. attests.

In the March edition of the journal Biology Letters, researchers found that speed dating rarely leads to successful dating connections.

They found speed dating presents too many unnatural choices, leading people to avoid making decisions or, more often than not, leaving such an event single.

Marco Francesconi, a professor of economics at the University of Essex, and colleague Alison Lenton, a lecturer in the Department of Psychology at the University of Edinburgh, found that people can handle only so much variety before their decision-making skills break down.

“One of the reasons has to do with our limited ability to deal with ‘too much’ information,” Francesconi told the Star in an email interview. “There is a ‘bound’ on how much we can usefully process and take account into our decisions (whether they refer to our chocolate consumption or our mate choices).”

Beyond that bound, additional availability of chocolates, as well as of mates, becomes redundant if not deleterious to our propensity to choose, he said.

Francesconi and Linton came to their conclusions after analyzing decisions made by 1,870 male and 1,868 female participants in more than 80 commercially run speed-dating events. The singles reported their age, height, weight, education, occupation, religion and smoking habits.

At each event, participants met members of the opposite sex on three-minute dates. They reported their decisions within 48 hours.

As the number of options increased, the researchers found, the number of matches decreased. Men made more choices than women, but overall the majority of the participants left the speed-dating events single.

The authors concluded that too much variety leads to people putting off decisions.

“In contexts in which time is a limited resource, choice variety . . . is confusing and potentially detrimental to choice quality,” the authors write in the study Too much of a good thing? Variety is confusing in mate choice.

“The bounded rationality with which we process the information (about mates) we receive may have long roots into our evolutionary history, in which we have typically been exposed only to a limited number of potential partners,” Francesconi said.

“It may also have to do with the fact that we would usually look at some key characteristics which summarize well the nature of the partner (or the good) we intend to consider for a proposal (or a purchase).”

For example, people might pay attention only to observable traits such as age, and weight and use such traits to guide their decisions. But at a certain point their ability to put together all such pieces of information becomes weaker, leading to poor choices or no choices at all, he said.

Melissa Seifert, co-founder of Oakville-based speed-dating company Single in the City, which holds events in Toronto, disagrees.

“The more people you meet, the better chances you have of meeting somebody you’re interested in,” she said.

Each of her speed-dating events last four minutes and involves 20 to 25 people. Speed dating narrows the odds that you’ll meet a suitable match since the dater is able to meet like-minded, age-appropriate singles in a welcoming environment, Seifert said.

And unlike online dating, speed dating allows for immediate face-to-face communication to assess if there is at the very least a physical connection early on in the potential relationship.

“Speed dating is an individual thing,” said Seifert, who is a speed dating success story herself: She met her husband at an event a few years ago.