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What do you pay attention to most when looking at someone’s online dating profile? While some stare at their photos, others may judge the written portion or look closely at what they list as their occupation. A new study suggests that what grabs your attention first may depend on your gender.
Researchers monitored the eye movements of straight men and women as they checked out online dating profiles and found:
- In general, men tend to zoom in on physical attractiveness right away.
- They’re also mostly focused on women’s faces, with one exception. When women have a high-paying or prestigious job, guys tend to spend a little longer on their profile, especially if she’s rated as less attractive.
- Women are more likely to consider both attractiveness and resource potential.
- But they tend to spend more time looking at men’s faces when resources are low, like they’re throwing a bone to cute guys who don’t make a lot of money.
- So basically, men are more generous with less attractive women when they have more resources and women are more generous toward men with fewer resources when they’re attractive.
- Faces seem to be more important to both men and women than bodies, since both genders look at faces first 83% of the time.
- Another unsurprising difference? Overall, men are more interested in short-term relationships, while women are more interested in long-term relationships than short-term ones.
While the study had some limitations, including that none of the participants are LGBTQ and they were all between the ages of 18 and 27, study authors say the most interesting finding is that when it comes to online dating, everyone’s making snap judgments. “We now have evidence that we can see these kinds of patterns even in the first 10 seconds of looking at dating profiles,” explains lead researcher Amy Lykins. “These judgements seem to be made very quickly.”
Read the article at Huff Post