Contributed by: ElyseRomano on Sunday, January 13 2013 @ 12:02 pm
Last modified on
We're told from a young age not to judge a book by its cover. And yet most days, we make snap judgments without a second thought about who we do and do not want to date.
We avoid eye contact in bars so we don't have to engage in conversation. We click through dating profiles online faster than if we were shopping for a pair of shoes. And we attend speed dating parties where the entire purpose of the event is to judge someone as quickly as possible.
It's clear that we judge books by their covers all the time. How we make those decisions, however, is less understood.
John O'Doherty, Jeff Cooper, Simon Dunne, and Teresa Furey, a team of researchers at the California Institute of Technology, have shed light on the subject of speed-dating decisions in a new paper called "Dorsomedial Prefrontal Cortex Mediates Rapid Evaluations Predicting the Outcome of Romantic Interactions."
The paper found that two factors are considered in speed-dating decision-making:
Each of these processes takes place in two distinct parts of the brain.
Seeing someone who is considered attractive (and therefore receives the most date requests) is associated with activity in a region of the brain called the paracingulate cortex. The paracingulate cortex is part of the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, or DMPFC, which is used in cognitive control and decision making.
In addition to physical attraction, which was taken into consideration consistently by all participants in the study, a person's likeablity was also found to be important. The rostromeidal prefrontal cortex (RMPFC) was also engaged in the speed-dating decision making-process, a part of the brain associated with consideration of other people's thoughts, comparisons of oneself to others, and perceptions of similarities with others. Choosing a partner, then, is based on both physical attraction and potential compatibility.
"Psychologists have known for some time that people can often make very rapid judgments about others based on limited information, such as appearance," says John O'Doherty. "However, very little has been known about how this might work in real social interactions with real consequences-such as when making decisions about whether to date someone or not."
The study, published in the November 7 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience, is one of the first to examine what happens in the brain when people make rapid-judgment decisions that carry real social consequences.