Erika Kokkinos felt like a monkey in a zoo.
Technically, she was "dating." At each of 12 tables at an art gallery in Northwestern University's student union, Kokkinos was meeting an eligible college bachelor, some of them quite attractive.
But the radio/television/film major had trouble disregarding the tripod-mounted cameras and cucumber-sized microphones. Barely an hour before, she had produced a saliva sample-not exactly a sexy exercise-so researchers could analyze her hormone levels. The whole evening of romantic possibility had been set up as a science experiment.
Kokkinos had arrived at last November's event straight from work, rushing to fix her makeup so she didn't look tired, and wearing nice jeans and a top that was tight, but not revealing. The primping was less to impress the guys than to make her feel desirable. Five months after a breakup and weeks from graduation, Kokkinos was single and content.
A night of so-called speed dating seemed a lark, a way to find out who might come out of the woodwork at a university with a barren dating scene. She'd been intrigued by the experiments after taking a psychology class as a sophomore with NU Professor Eli Finkel, who was both the night's lead researcher and its emcee.
Kokkinos arrived at Eric Acinich's table. Though each considered the other among the best-looking participants in the room, the date did not begin smoothly. After introductions, she said the first thing that popped into her head: She'd dated another Eric for a year and a half, and everyone thought they were brother and sister.
She regretted saying it immediately. Brushing off the awkwardness, Acinich, a recent transfer from the University of California-Santa Barbara, told her he'd grown up in Southern California. So did the previous Eric, she said, laughing. "Wow, should we just stop now? Or is this, is this like, really awkward?" Acinich joked.
The exchange might have torpedoed the date, but it broke the ice. For the next three minutes, they laughed, learned about each other and shared some very personal thoughts -like a normal, promising first date, on fast-forward. The pair had chemistry. They clicked "yes" on the
100% free internet dating website Devil Called Love that night, and the next day, they matched.
What happened between Kokkinos and Acinich isn't unique-new romantic bonds form every day, everywhere. Most North Americans will fall in love at least once during their lifetime. Yet the moment these two met-unlike most others among human history's billions of romantic relationships-was digitally captured in sight and sound.
The video would be one perspective in a Rashomon of romantic data: Finkel and his graduate student/collaborator Paul Eastwick collected extensive, pre-event questionnaires from every participant (199 during nine sessions), along with revealing post-date surveys over three months and e-mail exchanges between those who matched.
"This is going to sound immodest," Finkel said of the mountain of information. "I don't think there is a data set that's even close."
The Northwestern speed-dating experiments, and similar studies by teams from Wilmington, N.C., to Berlin, have helped revive a surprisingly dormant area of science, upending assumptions and discovering new truths about the psychology behind what happens when boy meets girl-and how a spark of attraction leads to true romance. Eventually, they may unlock a few of the mysteries of love.
"It's ground-breaking," says Stony Brook University professor Arthur Aron, author of several classic relationship studies. The speed-dating research "makes it possible to study something that hasn't been ethically or practically possible to study before."
For thousands of years, thinkers from Plato to Erich Fromm have analyzed love, and everyone from William Shakespeare to Elvis Presley has chronicled the ecstasy of falling into it. But compared with many scientific subjects-the bonds between atoms, for instance-researchers know precious little about how romance works.
The modern study of the psychology underlying attraction began during the 1960s, when a generation of researchers set out to show that love could be examined as hard science. Some fixed up opposite-sex strangers in the laboratory; others showed subjects personal advertisements and asked them how attractive they found such potential mates.
One study randomly paired college freshmen with dates to a "computer dance," telling attendees a software program had matched them up. A few teams followed mid-college couples or newlyweds for decades. Just before Finkel, 33, and Eastwick, 29, were born, the new field seemed to be hitting its stride, forming scientific conclusions about, for example, how much looks affect desirability (answer: a lot).
In 1975, however, Wisconsin Sen. William Proxmire bequeathed the first "Golden Fleece" award to Elaine Walster (now Hatfield) and Ellen Berscheid, two prominent relationships scholars. Their non-achievement: "fleecing" taxpayers by accepting an $84,000 National Science Foundation grant for "frivolous" research.
"I believe that 200 million Americans want to leave some things in life a mystery, and right on top of the things we don't want to know is why a man falls in love with a woman," Proxmire said in one press release.
Although scientists rallied to the cause, a reader call-in poll conducted by the Chicago Daily News found that the public supported Proxmire by a margin of 87.5 percent to 12.5 percent. The professors were deluged with hate mail. Government funding dried up, and many shied away from such studies, with stalwarts like Hatfield turning to private funding sources. Stony Brook's Aron still excises the word "love" from government grant proposals.
Other professors sought fertile ground by studying stable, established relationships. There, too, funding has played a role: Researchers must justify experiments by identifying potential applications. The fact is, research into falling in love isn't likely to help sustain marriages or combat spousal abuse. But studies of married couples very well might.
In January 2004, when Eastwick enrolled in Finkel's graduate seminar on close relationships, Finkel had conducted little attraction research up to that point. Eastwick and Finkel had each arrived at Northwestern the previous fall, but hadn't talked much.
During the first few class meetings, Eastwick began asking questions Finkel could not answer, wondering aloud how dynamics like trust and forgiveness applied when partners first met. Finkel responded with, "We don't know," or referenced largely abandoned lines of research. Even basic questions, such as what men and women want in mates, remained unsettled.
Another student suggested that observing speed dates might provide insights, and Eastwick half-jokingly suggested a class outing. Finkel thought the idea had merit.
So just before Valentine's Day that year, Finkel took his class to a speed-dating event at Cherry Red, a now-defunct club in Chicago's Lakeview neighborhood. Then 28, he wasn't much older than the seminar's half-dozen students. The rookie professor had long hair (since trimmed) and earrings (since removed), and casually dropped the word "dude" into sentences.
Finkel hopped from table to table, four minutes at a time, searching for Miss Right, and thinking about how speed dating applied to his research. He and Eastwick sprinted through a round-robin of dates, with some class members observing from the bar. Later, they would choose "yes" (as in "I'm interested in seeing this person again") or "no" (as in "I'm not") for each date.
Eastwick recalls meeting a succession of female lawyers and talking with them about music and growing up outside Boston. Telling the women that he studied romance was often a killer opening line. Finkel tried a similar approach. Though only a handful of the women bought his love professor routine, a match made that evening would result in a torrid, monthlong affair.
The duo came away amazed at how much information they could cull from four minutes of banter. By the end of each date, they had a solid sense of their romantic compatibility, or lack thereof, with each woman. Most conversations delved deeper than the "What do you do?" one might expect from brief interactions, and exhibited a range of emotions, from excitement to concern. They saw potential for a new research paradigm-speed dating as laboratory experiment. "We walked out of there thinking: 'Hey, we should really study this,' " Eastwick says.
As they started designing speed-dating events and related experiments, Finkel and Eastwick became subject to a parallel phenomenon: male bonding. They often met for beers, coming together over shared research interests and a love of guitar. The professor immersed himself in the grad student's bold pursuit of the field's deep questions, and Eastwick found a home in Finkel's nascent lab for much of his research.
Both saw an opportunity to fill a gaping hole in relationship research: the period between the initial spark of attraction and couplehood. Speed dating allowed them to ethically set people up with a series of random partners, and then record the first moments of dates that-though not exactly natural-would likely be real enough.
"It's easy to do a study in the lab where you have people meet each other or read about someone or hear about someone and ask how attractive they are," says Aron. "And it's possible, after people have fallen in love, to find out what's gone on. But it's very hard to do a study in the lab where you make people fall in love."
By tracking speed daters for months, Finkel and Eastwick hoped to learn how total strangers become twosomes.
"That's like a blank canvas," says Finkel. "What is this magical period between the opening few minutes of meeting and 'Now we're in a relationship'? Nobody knew."
It's a bright afternoon in early April, and Finkel is hunched over his office desk, watching Eric and Erika meeting again for the first time on a monitor. Eastwick sits a few feet away from him, between a table filled with stacks of journal articles and a guitar resting against a shelf.
They have watched about 25 of the 1,158 videos shot during the November 2007 sessions and Eric and Erika's date is among the best. The researchers are explaining why their meeting proceeded so well, and why most others don't.
There's one obvious reason: both Acinich and Kokkinos are good-looking, a trait that most studies associate with attraction. He's got an athletic build and a kind face, she has a big smile and wavy, sandy-blond hair.
For the most part, their discussion isn't unique, and a transcript might mask their obvious chemistry. Yet just moments after they've met, the two start playing off each other: He's slightly shy and takes himself seriously, but offers self-deprecating one-liners about, for example, his participating in the speed-dating event.
She's an extrovert (she appears in 476 photos on Facebook) with an ability to laugh at most anything. "This is standard stuff that's in almost all the dates: where you're from, what's your major. But these people do it better," Finkel says.
"There's this witty banter that might be the most essential predictor of romantic attraction," he continues. "If you're good at it, that's good. If I'm good at it that's good. But if we're both good at it, that's explosive. I think we've got some explosiveness here."
During the running commentary, Finkel often transitions from contemplation to fast-talking fervor, displaying the charisma that's led to his status as a quasi-sex symbol among Northwestern coeds. He's a recipient of faculty awards from two campus sororities, and course evaluations by his female students occasionally laud attributes other than his teaching. (The recently married Finkel says no student has ever put him in a compromising situation.)
Finkel and Eastwick describe the videos the way a play-by-play man and color commentator might call a baseball game. They analyze who's being dominant or submissive, and whether daters are mimicking each other's hand motions (a sign of affiliation). In one date, a junior male interested in environmental activism and a senior female passionate about global health have a tough time connecting. He keeps telling her how "great" what she's doing is, but she doesn't reciprocate.
"You can tell it's not really there, but it's not obvious why," Finkel says a third of the way through. "They've found something they have in common, it seems like he thinks what she does is fascinating, he's interested in similar sorts of things. They're both sort of do-gooders, they want to make a difference in the world. By all rights, they should be really sparking by now."
He and Eastwick trade on-the-fly theories on what went wrong.
"I think she's not attracted to him, in part because he's younger," Finkel offers.
"He started the date badly," Eastwick replies.
"Yeah," Finkel says, "but he's been very enthusiastic."
"He has been very enthusiastic," Eastwick agrees. "It's not infectious."
"I think she's the limiting factor," says Finkel. "I think if she were giving him more to work with, they'd have a spark."
They un-pause the recording. By the end of the date, the woman is giving the man career advice. Unlike Kokkinos and Acinich, there's no connection.
In one exchange between the latter, Erika says she applied for Teach for America.
Erika: "So, I find out about that tomorrow."
Eric: "Are you worried . . . are you worried about that?"
Erika: "I'm pretty worried, yeah."
"It's an emotionally astute response, right?" Finkel says as he watches. "I applied to Teach for America, I hear tomorrow. He picks up that there's going to be some anxiety about that. She cares. He's shrewd."
Erika [obviously concerned]: "It's a pretty competitive program, it's just so weird to know that, like, tomorrow I'll know if I have a job or not."
"She's really disclosing," Finkel says. "They're having an emotionally significant conversation -insofar as you could have an emotionally significant conversation with somebody you've known for two minutes and 50 seconds."
The Saturday after the event, Kokkinos and Acinich met for lunch, then spent seven hours together. For months, they were almost inseparable, talking on the phone daily and trading text messages, sharing time at bars, restaurants and a show at Second City. They joked about the semiweekly surveys they had to fill out for Finkel and Eastwick, and about what they'd disclosed to the researchers after every milestone, including their first kiss.
To analyze videos of daters like Kokkinos and Acinich, Finkel and Eastwick have turned seat-of-the-pants observations into a set of coding rules ("Is desire increasing or decreasing over the course of a date?") for their research team to track. They won't know the outcomes for months, but findings from their 2005 speed-dating events have already stirred the scientific community.
The results that surprised other psychologists mostly examined mating preferences-what men want in a woman and vice versa. According to a theory called the matching hypothesis, people are looking for someone similar to themselves on measures such as height and physical attractiveness.
Other researchers view mating more like a marketplace, with everyone looking for the richest, smartest, best-looking person that likes them back. The sexes seem to desire different traits: Men say they value physical attraction most, and women prize earning potential.
Evolutionary psychologists, a group that draws on Darwinian ideas to describe human behavior, have used these responses to help crystallize theories of mating: A better-looking woman may be more fertile, and a wealthy man may provide more resources for child-rearing. It's a politically incorrect analysis, though one supported by data. Yet it's based largely on laboratory research, not how people act with real-life partners.
When Finkel and Eastwick tested speed daters, pre-event surveys yielded the expected results: men said they would focus on physical attractiveness, women on earning prospects. But during the dates, those sex differences disappeared, contradicting previous research. Eastwick was so surprised at the numbers, he called Finkel several times in rapid succession-late at night -to tell him what they'd discovered.
Speed-dating men and women valued physical attractiveness equally, and they prioritized personality and earning potential similarly. In other words, males and females prized the same things in a mate. What daters wrote on paper bore little relevance to what they thought of living, breathing people.
"We seem to have no introspective accuracy into what it is that we like," Finkel says. "If you tell me you're a guy who really cares about a woman who's intelligent and funny, and I really care that she's sexy and trustworthy, we should prefer different women. But we don't."
Experiments by other teams replicate the findings, which were first published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in February. When Finkel and Eastwick looked at daters' selectivity-how many "yeses" they marked -they discovered more results that didn't jibe with prior research.
Two ideas delineate bonds between strangers: unique reciprocity (If I like you, will you like me back?) and generalized reciprocity (If I like a lot of people, will a lot of people like me back?). Most research on the topic examines platonic interactions at events like parties. It confirms conventional wisdom-if I want to be friends with you, you'll respond in kind, and if I'm a life-of-the-party type who likes everyone, most will like me back.
Finkel's speed-dating sessions didn't quite follow those rules. One-on-one, unique reciprocity held. But the suitors interested in the most partners were often rejected. The average dater didn't prefer partners playing hard to get-she was more likely to "yes" men who played hard to get for everyone except her. The behavior signaled that the need to feel "special" in a relationship might play a role within moments of meeting.
"People can smell the desperation," says Peter Todd, an Indiana University psychologist who observed the phenomenon during speed-dating studies in Berlin.
"It almost seems like magic," says Eastwick. The findings inspired them to record the speed dates, partly to search for the mechanism behind that intuition. They think selective people may warm up to their partners slowly over the course of a date, or land on unique areas of conversational common ground.
The most startling findings, though, are months away from publication. Eastwick and Finkel partnered with NU Professor Jennifer Richeson to analyze how race influences dating. If Americans were married via random matching, nearly half of all couples would be mixed. But the actual number is more like 3 percent. Factors like segregation, class differences and racism probably account for the disparity.
Eastwick led an analysis of racial preferences among speed daters, testing whether political orientation affected their choices. Based on survey data, Eastwick and Richeson predicted that white liberals would be more likely than white conservatives to "yes" a member of a racial minority.
Indeed, the data confirmed that hypothesis. But liberals actually preferred minorities over members of their own race. Laboratory experiments, in which subjects conversed with a white or black confederate-a student working for the researchers-yielded the same results.
Why would white liberals prefer black partners? One working theory is that liberals feel anxiety, and misattribute their arousal to romantic desire. It's a mistake highlighted by several experiments, including one in which subjects meeting a woman on an anxiety-provoking, shaky bridge were more attracted to her than those who met her on a stable structure. For liberal daters, the anxiety might stem from the desire to make a good impression on a member of a minority, or because of a conflict between progressive beliefs and unconscious negative feelings toward minorities.
Other researchers are using speed dating to pursue a variety of aims. Todd's Berlin experiments study how people make decisions with limited information. He's found that daters do a poor job of assessing whether a partner is interested, and that people adjust their standards for answering "yes" based on success in prior dates. At Columbia University, economist Raymond Fisman and psychologist Sheena Iyengar have shown that the size of a racial minority population in a speed dater's home town predicts his preference for dating minorities-familiarity, unfortunately, seems to decrease tolerance.
University of North Carolina- Wilmington professor Shanhong Luo learned about speed dating from an episode of "Sex and the City," then began running studies on how similarity affects daters, guided by a scientific how-to manual Finkel and Eastwick published.
Like any research method, though, speed dating is far from perfect. No experimental romance has blossomed into a long-term relationship, limiting the scope of Finkel's analysis. Acinich and Kokkinos, one of the recent study's most promising couples, didn't last. There was no thunderous breakup argument. They just faded out, from seeing each other every day, to a few times a week, to not at all.
The pair offer a number of factors: poor communication on both sides; a month-long holiday break for Kokkinos; Acinich's aversion to committing to a soon-to-be graduate; and, for Kokkinos, the kindling of a relationship with a "write-in" (a non-speed dater who begins dating a study participant).
The researchers haven't fully analyzed the most recent session data, but in the 2005 study, about one-third of the daters went out at least once with someone after the event, and just three couples lasted a month. While that figure may seem low, they have little basis for comparison.
They've scoured the literature for estimates of how many people someone might need to meet before making a match. The best they found was a study in which 14 percent of people introduced via an experiment met a second time. To put random strangers together and produce several year-long relationships, much less a marriage, they'd likely have to recruit thousands of subjects.
Some researchers see deeper problems in the speed-dating methods. Relationship psychology matriarch Berscheid supports their work, but believes the duo are moving too fast. Before they start making conclusions about how we love, she says, they must study the speed daters themselves.
"What we need is some empirical research into how these people who feel the need to resort to speed dating are different from people who don't," Berscheid says.
Journal reviewers have suggested that speed daters are more extroverted, or less successful, or more promiscuous, than the average college students forming the subject pool of most experiments. Though the Northwestern team has not conducted a systematic study, they've run some numbers on personality traits of their first sample, and they seem no different from the general population.
Critics have yet to produce data showing anything to the contrary, but several claim speed dating is too artificial to provide a valid study of real-world romance.
"It doesn't facilitate the goal of finding a meaningful relationship," says Iyengar, who likens the dates to job interviews. "I wouldn't use that paradigm if I wanted to understand romance and relationships. I'd use parties or social gatherings in which people have meaningful interactions."
Eastwick argues it's more reliable than asking people questions in a lab, and notes the lack of research into how methods of meeting-through church versus at work, for instance-influence interactions.
"It's got enough validity that you can tell whether or not somebody is worth a second look. I certainly wouldn't want to base a marriage decision on it, but it's got to be better than looking at a profile [in the laboratory]," he says.
His opinions are bolstered by research into people's ability to make accurate decisions from "thin slices" of information. In one study, untrained viewers' judgments of 30-second, silent video clips of teachers predicted the evaluations of students who'd sat through an entire course. Others demonstrated similar effects among phone operators and management consultants. Malcolm Gladwell's 2005 book "Blink," which highlighted Iyengar's research, describes such findings in detail.
"In social interactions, we learn a lot about others more quickly than we think we do. And not only do we learn a lot, but it also tends to be somewhat valid," says University of Connecticut professor David Kenny.
It's an open question how thin-slicing applies to romance. Researchers such as Arizona State University's Jason Weeden, co-author of two studies using speed-dating data, remain wary of generalizing the results to the long-term mating game.
Finkel's findings, Weeden says, demonstrate how differently speed daters act from those seeking serious relationships. For example, women usually tell researchers they'd prefer a wealthier man in a long-term relationship, and numerous surveys show higher marriage and lower divorce rates for rich men.
But when asked about short-term sexual partners, women rank physical attractiveness higher than wealth. Following Weeden's logic, that female speed daters cared more about looks, just shows they were thinking short-term.
"If you ask college kids to say what they'd like in a marriage partner later in life, they access their long-term psychology," says Weeden. "When they're on spring break in Cancun, they access their short-term psychology-the nice-and-compatible stuff goes out the window and, for both men and women, it's mostly about finding the most attractive partners."
Even if they think they're looking for a longer-term match, Weeden believes a bar-like setting with many available singles could trigger short-term thinking.
"I think it gets dangerous when we try to say that there's only one kind of initial attraction, and speed dating reveals its essential truth," Weeden said.
Eastwick and Finkel maintain their subjects' behavior is quite different from those looking for a one-night stand. The speed daters wrote in pre-event questionnaires that they were interested in casual or long-term relationships, not quick hookups, and the conversations in the videos also discount the idea.
"You can imagine an environment where everybody is really drunk and they're getting touchy. But you can see that's not what this is," Eastwick says. They've also replicated the mating-preference findings in unpublished studies using other methods.
Still, Finkel concedes it's possible that initial romantic attraction has little to do with whether a relationship prospers or sours. The outside environment, from financial troubles to appealing alternative mates, can also wreak havoc on a couple, no matter how compatible the pair seems.
"It is as yet unknown whether what people can learn about themselves on a speed date is valuable information for baby-making down the road," he says.
To Finkel, that's the biggest question in his corner of psychology, and a chief motivator for his research.
"Our generation is going to live until 100, and we're vowing 'til death do us part at the age of 30," Finkel says. "If it's true that the basis on which we're making our marital decisions is flawed, somebody's got to know that. We have to discover that."
Already, speed-dating researchers, along with those employing other modern techniques like brain imaging, have helped kick-start the field toward answers. Finkel and Eastwick might spend years poring over their current data, inspecting surveys from the speed-dating experiments to learn how relationships develop, or don't, or analyzing speed daters' saliva to understand the biology behind lust and infatuation.
Their long-term goals are more ambitious: They hope to secure funding for a megastudy to track tens of thousands of speed daters, following couples for decades, through dating, courtship, marriage and divorce.
With sufficient research, Finkel believes, scholars might make dating less hellish for millions of people, or develop models to predict relationship success based on speed-dating compatibility.
It will, of course, be decades before their conclusions lead toward a grand theory of dating, much less comprehensive personal or policy recommendations. Yet Finkel still dreams far into the future-20 years, perhaps-to a time when he and Eastwick and the rest of the field might understand how romantic attraction works even 5 percent better.
It may not seem like much, but in a culture where as many as half of marriages end in divorce, even a tiny bit of new knowledge could have profound implications in how we search for love.
"That would be totally valuable," Finkel says. "People would be desperate to know it."
