The science of "hot or not"

The question has moved from a time-sink website to social science: Are you hot or not? And--a corollary--does this hotness (or not-hotness) affect your judgment about the hotness (or non-hotness) of others?

With me so far? A forthcoming article in the journal Psychology Review frames the issue this way: Do "less attractive people … delude themselves into thinking that the people they choose to date are more physically attractive than others perceive them to be"?

We're talking about the "settling" question. The article--by three behavioral economists with the help of the two young founders of the website hotornot.com--seeks to resolve a potential paradox in the psychology of dating. On the one hand, people seem to be hard-wired to think that they are better than they really are at most tasks and attributes. On the other, society enforces certain rigorous standards of beauty. (The authors say these standards are universal, but let's not open that Pandora's Box.) And most people own mirrors. So do we adjust our judgments of other people's attractiveness based on who is willing to go out with us?

To explore this question, the researchers-- the lead author is Leonard Lee, of Columbia Business School--analyzed the behavior of visitors to hotornot.com, in two different arenas. Most visitors simply give 1 to 10 "hotness" scores to the photographs posted by other visitors.* Sign up for the site's dating service, however, and post your picture, and you can reach out to the people you rate.

James Hong and Jim Young, co-founders of hotornot.com

The authors analyzed more than 2.5 million ratings and date requests to explore the relationship between hotness and behavior. (Caveats: hotornot.com attracts three times as many men as women; and the study looked only at heterosexual approaches.) As you might expect, the very highly rated people tended to accept dates only from other exemplars of hottitude. Meanwhile, the less attractive a member was--as judged by the crowd-- the more likely he or she was to accept a date request. (For every point a member went down on the 1-to-10 scale, odds went up 25 percent that they'd say yes to an offer.)

The universal goal, at any level of physical beauty, seemed to be to date someone just slightly better looking than oneself.

What the authors found "rather stunning" is that the ratings data showed that the not-so-hot members gave precisely the same ratings of other people as the hot members did. They were, in short, well aware the people they were accepting as dates were, by the standards of the site, not so hot.

People seem to make their peace with this. (In the jargon, they respond to the harsh reality of "assortative mating" with "hedonic adaptation.") In one of the more awkward invocations of a Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young song to come down the pike in a while, the authors conclude: "People find a way to love the ones they can be with."

*The article includes a deadpan theoretical discussion of whether scientists should accept "hotness" as a proxy for the more sober concept "attractiveness." The conclusion: yes.

Possibly Heartening Addendum: The authors supplemented the "Hot or Not?" study with a smaller, more anthropological report on behavior at a speed-dating event. It found that being hot seems to foster a preference for hotness in a mate above all other qualities. Meanwhile, the less physically blessed also credit things like intelligence and wit. So the dating game does have more than one dimension--if you venture beyond hotornot.com.