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By John Tierney, New York Times, April 9, 2007 By watching speed daters and online daters, social scientists have minutely calculated what turns people off (and activates their Flaw-O-Matics, the topic of my Romantic Revulsion in the New Century: Flaw-O-Matic 2.0 column). They've consistently found different levels of pickiness in men and women. When Robert Kurzban and Jaspon Weeden of the University of Pennsylvania studied more than 10,000 American customers of HurryDate - a company that gathers a couple of dozen people at a time for a round robin of three-minute speed dates - the psychologists found that, on average, a woman got a “yes” from about half the men she met (meaning that the guy would like to go out with her). But a man, on average, got the thumbs-up from only a third of the women. A study of speed daters in Germany showed that women were not only pickier than men but also more realistic about their own appeal in the dating market. Correctly divining that men put a premium on looks, the more attractive women set a higher bar for their partners than less attractive women did. But the German men set about the same bar for their partners no matter what they looked like themselves or how successful they were professionally. These German men apparently cast their nets as wide as possible to take advantage of what the researchers call the “low mate-choice costs” - the chance to ask out a lot of women without getting any embarrassing face-to-face rejections. (Speed daters mark their choices on a scorecard and are told later which partners were interested in them.) The researchers - Peter Todd of Indiana University; Lars Penke of Humboldt University in Berlin; Alison Lenton of the University of Edinburgh, and Barbara Fasolo of the London School of Economics. The overall pattern of results thus suggests that low mate choice costs lead men to satisfy their variety preference by indifferently choosing any woman who falls above a minimal condition threshold, while women stayed choosy and appeared to fine-tune social-comparison processes to the situation (meaning, in this context, that their mate-value sociometer mainly reflected their physical attractiveness), adjusting their mate choices accordingly. Continued How Don't I Love Thee, Page 2