To find out, the scientists analyzed the messages they sent, picking up on some clear patterns.
The scientists found that men and women sent initial messages to potential partners who were more desirable than them – men went 26% higher on average, while the women aimed 23% higher.ĭid these users simply think they were more desirable than they actually were? Or did they know that they were seeking out relatively more attractive mates? The least desirable man and woman in each city had a score of 0 and the most desirable man and woman had a score of 1, with everyone else’s score lying at a decimal number in between. Then, to make their calculations, they essentially placed all the users on a scale of 0 to 1. (The most popular person in their data set was a 30-year-old woman in New York who received 1,504 messages, or about one message every half hour.)
It’s an iterative algorithm called PageRank, used by Google to rank websites in their search engine results.