Good Thing You're All Good Looking

From New Scientist - Good looking people do better at speed dating.

LONELY hearts beware: looking for love at a speed-dating event may leave you feeling unlovable. In big groups, people judge on looks so much that the less stunning may as well forget their clever chat-up lines.

In primates and birds, the larger the group, the better the chance that non-dominant individuals have of being chosen as a mate. Alison Lenton at the University of Edinburgh, UK, and her team looked at whether this is true for people too.

Speed-daters race through a series of "mini dates" of about 5 minutes then invite whoever catches their fancy to get in touch again later. Lenton and her team studied 118 sessions with groups of between seven and 36 people, and found to their surprise that as the size of the group grew, the offers became skewed towards just a few individuals, while the least popular ended up with fewer or no offers (Animal Behaviour, DOI: 10.1016/j.anbehav.2008.08.025).