Eli Finkel has accomplished what many college students wish they could do– he has turned the study of dating into a career. This past November, he co-authored the paper “Implicit and explicit preferences for physical attractiveness in a romantic partner,” which highlights the importance of that initial spark when it comes to choosing your mate. The Weinberg Psychology professor sat down to discuss hot guys, boring computer games and the dating scene.

Excerpts:

The Current: What is the purpose of your most recent work?

Eli Finkel: Over the past four or five years, a former NU graduate and I have been trying to figure out whether people know what they want in a romantic partner. And we keep finding in study after study that the answer is no. Paul Eastwick (Weinberg ’09) developed this procedure for trying to tap people’s unconscious mate preferences for physical attractiveness. To what degree do you have a preference for hot guys versus to what degree do you not care that much?

The Current: How did you conduct the study?

EF: Try to imagine the most boring computer game in the world. What you have to do in this video game is hit the space bar every time a word flashes on the screen that is either a physical attractiveness word or some other word that you like as quickly as you can. Then you get another version of this task where you have to hit the space bar every time you see a physical attractiveness word or something that you dislike.

The Current: What are the implications of this work?

EF: We should be a little bit more modest about how we pursue mates. These unconscious preferences don’t correlate at all with conscious preferences. If you don’t know what your preferences are in the first place, how can you take a shopping list approach?

The Current: Where do you plan on taking this in the future?

EF: We’re about to publish a pretty ambitious paper about online dating. It’s a very long article that provides very specific analysis of the online dating industry, which is a million-dollar industry now. This article more or less grades the online dating industry, and some of the work I just discussed is really relevant there.

The Current: Do you think your work in general has any practical value for the average person?

EF: I think it does. There are a lot of people out there trying to understand how romantic attraction works, and there are relatively few scholars doing it. So far I haven’t gathered all of this stuff into a book for the general public, but it’s down the road. I’m looking forward to that.

The Current: Book in mind, do you have any knowledge you’d like to share with the college population?

EF: Go on dates. Don’t get into a shopping-list mentality before you go on a date figuring out who’s good enough for you and who isn’t. Figure (something) out about yourself. Learn about which people bring out the best in you rather than the worst in you. And if you’re not willing to ask people out, stop complaining about the dating scene.

-Simone Alicea