Link to the full paper (at <i>Science Advances</i> no less): <a href="http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/advances/4/8/eaap9815.full.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/advances/4/8/eaap9815...</a><p>Fascinating stuff, and there is so much more to the paper than what the title suggests. Some highlights:<p>"The most popular individual in our four cities, a 30-year-old woman living in New York, received 1504 messages during the period of observation, equivalent to one message every 30 min, day and night, for the entire month."<p>"The average woman’s desirability drops from the time she is 18 until she is 60. For men, desirability peaks around 50 and then declines. In keeping with previous work, there is also a clear and consistent dependence on ethnicity, with Asian women and white men being the most desirable potential mates by our measures [...]"<p>"Desirability is associated with education most strongly for men, for whom more education is always more desirable. For women, an undergraduate degree is most desirable; postgraduate education is associated with decreased desirability among women."<p>"[...] A majority of both sexes tend to contact partners who are more desirable than themselves on average and hardly any users contact partners who are significantly less desirable. The curves are remarkably consistent across all four cities, with men and women on average sending messages to potential partners who are 26 and 23% further up the rankings than themselves, respectively."<p>"Both men and women tend to write substantially longer messages to more desirable partners, up to twice as long in some cases. The effect is larger for messages sent by women than by men, although there are exceptions. Among the groups we study, for instance, it is men in Seattle who have the most pronounced increase in message length. Of the cities studied, Seattle presents the most unfavorable dating climate for men, with as many as two men for every woman in some segments of the user population."<p>"[...] we see an interesting difference between women and men: the women show an increase in their use of positive words when communicating with more desirable partners, while the men show a decrease. The effect size is modest but is consistent across all four cities and statistically significant. [...] in all four cities, men experience slightly lower reply rates when they write more positively worded messages. Although our analysis can not reveal the underlying process that gives rise to these behaviors (for example, reinforcement learning), this result may offer a hint about why men tend to write somewhat less positive messages to more desirable partners."